In which American superiority manifests itself!

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Ha ha, pathetic Canadians.

They’ve put up their own creation “museum”—just look at it. It’s feeble. It’s like someone took a cheap suburban ranch-style home and put a sign on it and started charging admission to come take a look at their knick-knack shelf. Ha!

We’re #1! Our brand new American creation “museum” is a hundred times larger, a hundred times more expensive, shinier, fancier, a thousand times … the attendance, … even … more … stupidity, with …

…

Awww, crap. The Canadians outdid us again.

Sam Brownback, defender of the faith

Sam Brownback has an op-ed in the NY Times today, in which he explains with much straining at gnats why he was one of the Republicans who did not believe in evolution. Short summary: he reveals his own misconceptions about the biology, and mainly pounds the drum on how important Faith and Religion and God are. It will be persuasive to people who are already convinced that God is the most important thing in the universe, right down to what they do in the privacy of their bedrooms, but it underscores my conviction that faith is the enemy, the source of many of our problems…such as the promotion of incompetent politicians to positions of power on the fuel of the ethereal Spirit.

Get ready. It’s a whole succession of reiterated platitudes about how important faith is, with no evidence that it actually is — we are, apparently, supposed to take that on faith.

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Salon sucks

Salon has just published their report on Ken Ham’s creation “museum”, by author Gordy Slack, who has just released a book on the Dover trial. I haven’t read the book, although it was on my list to pick up this summer. No more. This was an awful bit of dreck, and I don’t think I could stomach reading a whole book written this way.

It’s dead, credulous reporting. Slack simply blandly reports the contents of the “museum,” and doesn’t offer a single word of criticism, and doesn’t even try to evaluate the accuracy of the claims. The protesters outside the gates are briefly mentioned, but otherwise the article just calls the place “beautiful”, and the words of Ken Ham and Mark Looy and various gullible visitors are unquestioningly quoted to praise it all. Sure, dinosaurs and people lived together; all the predators lived on fruit and vegetables; all the geology on the planet was carved by a single great worldwide flood 4000 years ago. Read it, and you get the impression that having an edifice dedicated to the proposition that all of physics, chemistry, geology, astronomy, and biology are wrong is perfectly reasonable, and the weirdos are the geeks standing in the rain outside complaining.

I thought the New York Times article was bad…but Salon has sunk to new depths of insipidity. I’ve been a subscriber to Salon since they first started, but this settles it for me—I won’t be resubscribing. This article wasn’t even expressing the usual phony “balance”—it’s biased in favor of creationism all the way through.

For shame, Salon.

A suggestion for some diligent reporter out there

We’re seeing a lot of news about Ken Ham’s creationist lie, this so-called “museum” he has built out in Kentucky. What we’re not seeing from our media is any scrutiny of the finances behind the construction, or behind the evangelical boiler room called “Answers in Genesis”. Has any editor or reporter considered the possibility that there might be something juicier behind the story than “Preacher pretends church is a museum”? Is anyone—dare I say it—investigating this organization?

Their finances are a matter of public record. Everyone talks about how the museum cost $27 million to build, but the fact that their board of directors is sucking down over a million in salaries, benefits, and expenses is ignored. This is a profitable racket they’re running; I don’t think they’ve taken vows of poverty.

Other tidbits would include the seedy and rather acrimonious schism between Ham’s group here in America and the parent sister organization in Australia. Ham really is a kind of underhanded scoundrel and control freak, in addition to being a dishonest creationist fraud.

Anyway, if you want a good angle, stop treating this as a matter of a religious organization making a brave effort against the forces of godless science. It’s not. It’s an exceptionally lucrative business organization profiting off the ignorance of large numbers of people making a major push to increase their influence and income.

Why people believe in bad ideas

There is a must-read article at Edge by Paul Bloom and Deena Skolnick Weisberg—it’s an attempt to explain why people resist scientific knowledge that takes a psychological view of the phenomenon. The premise is that our brains have in-built simplifications and assumptions about how the world works that often conflict with how it really works—there is, for instance, an intuitive physics and a real physics that are not entirely in agreement, and that we bring our understanding into alignment with reality through education and experience. The naive assumptions of the young brain contribute to ideas like dualism and creationism. For example:

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Bomb the stone age back into the stone age!

Wilkins reveals that our good ol’ US military is planning to use a major fossil site as a bombing range. This is a brilliant move by the evangelicals who are exercising greater and greater dominance of the armed forces. The obvious result is that rare, one-of-a-kind fossils will be pulverized and lost forever—a direct and positive result.

Realistically, though, the bombs won’t destroy that many fossils. The real gain will come when persistent, pesky evolutionists insist on some future date on trying to find the heretical material testimonies against our Lord and Savior, and discover instead the surprising joys of unexploded munitions. Not only will they be unable to corrupt our children’s minds with their “facts” and “evidence” and “logic”, but they themselves will briefly learn the truth of our loving God and Creator in the instant before He flings them down into a fiery pit for an eternity of torment.

And, best of all, the atheistical Darwinists, knowing that their immortal souls face damnation and therefore cling in their cowardly fashion to life on this tainted, sin-filled, evil world, will be reluctant to even explore land that has been sown with the sacred deadly armaments of God’s Own Army. Win win win!

I think we need to take an extra step and sprinkle anthrax over every fossil bed we can find. Hey, you know what, this solves the problem of evil, too! God made those horrible, dangerous, death-dealing organisms so good Christians can use them to slaughter the heathen!

(Sorry, I’ve been reading too much Answers in Genesis in the last few days.)

Another crazy Pennsylvania school teacher

The delusional creationists are everywhere, and the funny thing is how many of them consider themselves brilliant, well-informed, and objective, when what you discover on examining their claims is that they are foolish, ignorant, and blinded by religious bias — and obviously, they don’t even know it. Take, for instance, this high school teacher who issued a debate challenge.

Ritter, 59, has taught chemistry and physics at Annville-Cleona High School since 1997.

Ritter says he has no religious motivations, and he was not arguing for intelligent design or creationism.

He said he was barely aware of the controversy about evolution and intelligent design in the Dover Area School District until the issue went before a federal judge in late 2005.

Hooray for high school science teachers, they can be terrific. Unfortunately, this one who has no religious motivations and doesn’t argue for ID creationism or plain old creationism, was arguing against evolution, calling it “bad science.” As for his lack of awareness of the Dover controversy…he’s from central Pennsylvania, about an hour’s drive from Dover. Shouldn’t that self-announcement of utter obliviousness be an immediate warning that either he’s rather unqualified to be discussing the issue, and/or he’s hiding his actual motivation?

I vote for both—he’s hiding his beliefs. Later in the article, he mentions a few of his reasons.

While he said he has no religious motivations, one of his criticisms of evolution is that it promotes atheism.

“When evolutionists say that a creator cannot exist, they are saying God cannot exist,” Ritter said.

I’m also voting for “obliviousness,” since you have to be a complete fool to trot those old claims out as arguments against evolution, while simultaneously trying to pretend you’re completely open on the question of religion. Oh, well, the good news is that he only teaches physics, so he doesn’t have much opportunity to mislead his students about biology. I hope.

(via Spanish Inquisitor, unexpectedly)

The Creation Museum

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This week, the creationist Ken Ham and his organization, Answers in Genesis, are practicing the Big Lie. They have spent tens of millions of dollars to create a glossy simulacrum of a museum, a slick imitation of a scientific enterprise veneered over long disproved religious fables, and they are gathering crowds and world-wide attention to the grand opening of their edifice of deceit. You can now take a photographic tour of the exhibits and see for yourself—it’s not science at all, but merely a series of Bible stories dolled up in dioramas.

The blogosphere is also giving them some attention — almost none of it favorable. What I’ve done here is collect recent reactions from all over to the Creation Museum, and compile them down into a link and a short and (I hope) representative extract. Browse through this long, long list, and when you find some quote that tickles your interest, follow the link to find the complete article. The National Center for Science Education has also compiled reactions from journalists, educators, scientists, and scientific organizations for yet more reading on the subject.

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