Kent Hovind is still blogging…from jail!

His sentencing is on 19 January, he’s busy “saving” men (five so far!), and he has been without a pillow for 8 days. They play the TV too loud.

His fellow inmates are “starved for real affection.” This could get disturbing fast.

He has a list of reasons why God allowed him to be tossed in jail. One is to make him more like Jesus.

The insanity will go on.

Why is it that the funny stuff always breaks out when I’m away from the interwebs? The always looney DaveScot takes issue with the claim that the virgin birth of Jesus is biologically unlikely, and cobbles up a bizarre scenario to allow it. Why, I don’t know; is ID dependent on the chromosomal status of Jesus Christ, or something?

Anyway, DaveScot proposes that 1) meiosis was incomplete in one of Mary’s ova, producing an egg that contained 2N chromosomes; 2) this egg also bore a mutation that causes XX individuals to develop as phenotypically male; and 3) something then activated this egg to develop. Then he crows,

What I want to know now is whether ignorance or dishonesty explains why you’d quote someone who claims the virgin birth of Christ defies everything we know about mammalian reproduction.

His scenario has a number of problems. It won’t work. I don’t even need to touch on his mangling of the concept of diploidy, which Allen MacNeil dispenses with in the comments.

1. The resultant embryo would have a very high incidence of homozygosity. By suppressing the second meiotic division, he has generated an egg where all the pairs of chromosomes are the result of replication of a single DNA strand (less occurrence of recombination, which does ameliorate the problem.) This would unmask lethal recessives in Mary’s genotype. I suppose you could argue that Mary was picked by God for her amazingly complete lack of any deleterious alleles…

2. A second critical problem, though, is that the genes inherited from your mother and father have different patterns of imprinting. Genes in mammalian gametes are modified in different ways in males and females in order to suppress certain genes; all of Jesus’ genes would have a female imprinting pattern, and none with a male pattern, producing an imbalance in gene expression that is typically lethal. This can be overcome by experimental manipulations that mimic male imprinting by knocking out some of the genes, but it’s still problematic. Experiments that tinker with patterns of imprinting still start with zygotes containing nuclei from two different parents to avoid problem #1.

3. The end result of all this finagling is that Jesus was the highly improbable multiple mutant outcome of a cytological error, no divinity involved. That’s fine with me (does DaveScot really think that providing a natural explanation for a myth refutes my position?), but I don’t think it fits the expectations of the religious, and I sure don’t see how one absurdly unlikely chance occurrence would support the ID position in any way.

4. Watching DaveScot flail around with his barely-high-school understanding of meiosis and development is entertaining, but really, all it accomplishes is to diminish his credibility yet further, and it was already prostrate on the floor. I guess he felt the need to start digging to get it lower still.

Not content with exposing his ignorance of reproductive biology, DaveScot just had to end with a demonstration of his mastery of physics, as well.

So you see, Paul, matter and energy that we know about are only a small fraction of what makes the universe go ’round, so to speak. Who’s to say at this point in time that this huge amount of unknown “stuff” is incapable of organization that produces intelligence? Could God be lurking in the dark energy of the universe?

I wonder what Sean Carroll would think of this hypothesis that dark matter and dark energy constitute a giant intelligent entity that does genetic experiments on human females?

This is all just God of the Gaps guesswork, in which gods are tucked away in the empty spaces in our knowledge. In this case, those empty spaces are magnified by the inclusion of DaveScot’s personal ignorance…making his god a truly great god.

The cat who gave birth to a dog has failed her tests. All hope rests on their search for a lizard giving birth to a chicken now.

Some dirt is being unearthed in the tale of the biggest creationist group around, Answers in Genesis, led by Ken Ham. There were two branches of AiG, one in Australia and another in the US, and there’d been hints of a split between them—and now Jim Lippard has details. It’s looking ugly.

In short, it looks like this was a struggle over money and control, with the Australian group out-maneuvered by the U.S. group. If the information in these documents is accurate–and I am inclined to believe that it is–it shows that Ken Ham’s Answers in Genesis is as sleazy in its business dealings as it is in its misrepresentations of science.

It looks to me like Ken Ham is Kent Hovind’s smarter cousin…but that he’s just as corrupt and conniving.

Casey Luskin’s ignorance is well-known, and this recent essay stopped most of us cold at his Ford Pinto comparison. We should have kept going. Karmen plucks out another particularly stupid statement, one that’s even dumber than the Pinto remark:

The article called evolution a “simple” process. In our experience, does a “simple” process generate the type of vast complexity found throughout biology?

Luskin apparently thinks the answer is “no.” I think Karmen could teach him a few things about fractals to get him started, but it’s trivially true that yes, biology is all about the simple becoming complex through natural processes.

Five days ago, I wrote about a creationist letter that was published in Nature. At that time, there was a discussion going on in email with the gang at the Panda’s Thumb, and someone said we ought to get a pool going on how long it would take before the Intelligent Design creationists would use this to argue that their case was being seriously discussed in the pages of a major scientific journal. Four months was suggested; I said one week.

I should have put some money down on that.

It turns out one of the PhD alumni in biology from Moran’s school (University of Toronto), a respected scientist and pro-ID creationist recently had his letter published in the prestigious scientific journal Nature. This is news in itself that creationists and ID proponents are getting airtime now in scientific journals…

That was the unctuous clown, Sal Cordova, of course. It was four days before they were trumpeting this crank letter as a triumph for Intelligent Design creationism.

Casey Luskin has been posting a series of articles to argue with Carl Zimmer, and has finally posted his last attempt, which Zimmer has dealt with. We have a new catch phrase, thanks to Luskin, in reference to the shortcomings of the vertebrate eye:

Was the Ford Pinto, with all its imperfections revealed in crash tests, not designed?

You see, we’re not allowed to infer anything about the Designer from its handiwork in the natural world (that would be theology, after all), except perhaps when it’s necessary to speculate that life was designed by Ford to counter those annoying facts.

The Minneapolis Star Tribune published a very foolish editorial in their Faith and Values section, carping about that Dawkins fella and his atheistic Darwinism. It’s typical creationist dreck, I’m afraid. If you want just one good argument against religion, it’s that it seems to promote idiots to positions of leadership.

Richard Dawkins, author of the book “The God Delusion,” intends that religious readers of his book will be atheists when they finish it. Let’s put some of the statements he made in his Nov. 4 Star Tribune interview to the test.

Dawkins claims that evolutionary science “offers a brilliant and beautiful explanation of origins and existence.” But evolutionists assert that this universe and everything in it has come about by chance. There is no plan, no divine planner/creator — just random combinations of atoms. What’s brilliant about a random, unplanned process?

Oh, come on now. Evolution is not simply a random process. There are strong elements of chance throughout, and random events are certainly a dominant contributor to the patterns we see—every child, for instance, is partly the product of a chance combination of alleles and biasing developmental events—but natural selection is not random at all.

What is utterly brilliant about Darwin’s insight was that he saw how the combination of random variation and a selective filter could lead to the diversity and complexity of the world around us. I’m not surprised that Pastor Hellmann is baffled by the value biologists place on Darwin’s idea, because he clearly does not understand it.

Can such a random process actually work? Sir Fred Hoyle, noted English astronomer, studied the problem and concluded this: The probability of one cell coming into being by chance was the same as the probability that a tornado striking a junkyard would produce a fully functioning 747 jet airplane. In other words, the chance of it happening is virtually zero.

Fred Hoyle did not study the problem at all—as noted, he was an astronomer, neither a biologist nor a chemist, and he was speaking far, far outside his domain of expertise. It is correct that the probability of a cell coming into being by chance is prohibitively low, but what did I just say? Evolution is not simply a chance process. The Hoyle analogy does not apply, even if it is a staple of simple-minded creationist thinking.

What is beautiful about evolution? It requires a struggle in which the fit survive and the weak are trampled in the dust. Progress is made by almost endless generations of creatures living, struggling and dying. Where is there beauty in an every-organism-for-itself struggle? Even though the fit may survive a little longer, they are trapped in an existence without purpose or meaning. Such a dreary and hopeless spectacle can only be described as ugly.

This objection is hilarious.

Look at the world around you. There is death, competition, struggle for limited resources, predators killing prey, disease, brutality, and waste. This is the way the world is, and Darwin (or any competent observer) can see that. This situation did not suddenly emerge in 1859 when Darwin published his book. What’s beautiful about evolution is that it explains how complexity and diversity and even beauty can arise naturally out of such callous and uncaring processes.

Does it somehow make the death of a gazelle by slow strangulation while it’s being mauled and eaten alive more beautiful to imagine that this is done under the watchful, loving eye of an omnipotent supernatural being?

A world without religion

Dawkins asks us to imagine what a world without religion would look like. We don’t have to imagine it. We have seen it and the results were horrific.

Communism, based on atheism and evolution, was tried in the Soviet Union. Stalin, the Communist dictator, ordered the murders of about 30 million of his citizens during his ruthless rule. Those who escaped liquidation lived in a “workers’ paradise” of poverty and oppression.

About 100 years ago, evolution spawned two abhorrent social movements. Social Darwinism was used by some titans of industry to justify their predatory, ruthless business practices. Eugenics was a racist movement that some used to try to keep people they considered undesirable (the infirm, disabled, racial minorities) from reproducing. Hitler, an atheist and evolutionist, used that idea to justify purging his favored Aryan race of the disabled or weak, as well as killing millions of Jews and others he deemed undesirable.

Communism is not based on evolution. In fact, its principles are anti-evolutionary, proposing a pattern of progress by force of the people’s will; if you want a political philosophy that’s much more compatible with the ideas of evolution, I’m afraid it’s capitalism.

Hitler was a Catholic, not an atheist. One might argue that he wasn’t a very good Catholic, but he sure paid a lot of lip service to religion.

Eugenics did find its rationalizations in biology, but it was bad biology and was based on principles rooted more strongly in the selective breeding used in agriculture for millennia.

Similarly, Stalin used atheism to purge the power of the orthodox church in Russia, but I’m afraid he was a very poor sort of evolutionist. He promoted Lysenkoism.

Atheism and evolution are based on the philosophy (religion) of materialism. Materialism asserts that matter is all that exists and that there is no God. Since materialists begin by denying the existence of God, it’s no surprise that they don’t find God revealed anywhere.

I challenge Richard Dawkins to study the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, John and the book of Acts. Jesus invites all to come out of the hopelessness of the religion of atheism and live in his light and the salvation that he offers to all.

Robert Hellmann is pastor at St. Paul’s and Trinity Lutheran Churches in Montrose, MN.

Atheism is built on that philosophy, I’ll agree; evolution is not. Atheism is a natural consequence of understanding the power of purely material processes, though, so I have to agree that atheism is often a product of education and scientific training—but it isn’t as if you can’t believe in a deistic god and also practice good science.

And I’m sorry, but seeing a pastor, one who doesn’t understand science and has read nothing in the literature of biology, tell me that I need to read the Bible is unconvincing. I’ve read the gospels. I was brought up a Lutheran, just like Pastor Hellmann. I rejected the masturbatory cycle of reading the dogma of theologians because I opened my eyes and looked at the real world, and the rocks and trees and the milling multitudes of nature all cry out that the books of the religious are impoverished shadows of reality. Why sip from the recycled piss of Christianity when I can drink deep from the Pierian Spring?