I wonder if the FSM is Danish?

I am put to shame—the flying spaghetti monster gets far more entertaining hate mail than I do.

I learned this from an account in USA Today about the FSM, which also has this beautiful jewel of a quote:

“It’s too bad that they’ll get attention for this sort of drivel when we have a robust scientific research program that the media doesn’t seem to want to write much about,” Discovery Institute spokesman Robert Crowther said in an e-mail interview.

A “robust scientific research program”? Hee hee…I had no idea they had such comedians at the DI.

Francis Beckwith and the cold, cruel realities of tenure

Way back in the dim and distant past, like two years ago, there was a bit of a disturbance in the blogosphere, a minor contretemps after a certain Harvard law student, Lawrence VanDyke, published a “book note” in the Harvard Law Review. It was rank creationist nonsense, a work of pathetic scholarship, and it got publicly shredded by Brian Leiter, and I also got in the act. The book reviewed was an apologia for Intelligent Design by Francis Beckwith. In a later amusing twist, NRO published a defense of VanDyke and Beckwith by an anonymous “Texas free-lance writer”, who it was later discovered was Beckwith’s grad student, Hunter Baker. It’s all tortuous ancient history now, of course, and no one but those few of us involved in the dustup remember it.

What brings it all back is the news that Francis Beckwith has been denied tenure at Baylor. Hunter Baker hasn’t learned his lesson, and has written an overwrought defense, again in a pathetically semi-anonymous way, as “Graduate Student X”.

I have two things to say about it all.

One is to offer my personal sympathy to Francis Beckwith. Tenure is a brutal, evil machine that puts everyone through a hellish torture, and often spits out the deserving and rewards the undeserving. Do not ever judge someone by whether they have got tenure or not—it’s too arbitrary for that, and often represents a kind of insubstantial and subjective matching or mismatching between a person and an institution. So on a personal level, I wish Beckwith well and hope he and his family move on to a satisfying position elsewhere.

The second is that although it is nearly impossible to speculate on what’s going on in tenure committees—he could have been denied tenure on the whim of some old fart with a grudge—it’s hard to imagine that the politics of Intelligent Design did not play some small part in it. Beckwith tied his fortunes to those of the Discovery Institute and the ID movement, and at the very least we can say that that was not enough to salvage his tenure at Baylor. In fact, given that he has a respectable publication record and seems to be a personable fellow, it’s hard to avoid the speculation that they might have wanted to steer Baylor away from the disaster of Intelligent Design. A solid record of publishing large quantities of something that is being shown to be utter crap is not helpful to one’s tenure chances.

Is that a legitimate reason to deny someone tenure? Sure.

Nelson’s game

Sometimes, I feel very sorry for Paul Nelson. He’s one of the few creationists who actually tries to engage his critics, and I think there’s a very good reason for that: when creationists try to emerge from the hothouse environment of their “think-tanks” and institutions of ignorance, when they stand before audiences that weren’t bussed in from the local fundamentalist church, they tend to get bopped hard. There is a good reason for that, of course —it’s because they say such remarkably silly things. The exceptional thing about Nelson is that he keeps on saying such silly things.

And he’s done it again, in an article full of misconceptions and half-truths about how science works. It’s a sincere attempt to express his beliefs, I will grant him that, but dang if it isn’t astoundingly wrong from top to bottom. Jason Rosenhouse has already flensed it once, so I’m left with little but a few bones to crack, but hey, that’s fun, too.

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Dembski’s cover is blown

There was a “debate” between Michael Shermer and William Dembski at the University of Kentucky. I’m not a fan of these pseudo-debates—they’re really just a pair of presentations, where the creationist can leech off the other guy’s reputation—and I don’t think Shermer is the best guy to defend biology, but this one seems to have had an interesting result.

Then came the question and answer session. The most striking thing was that every single question was for Dembski. People came prepared. They brought typed-up questions, asking him why he had been dismissed as an expert witness from Dover, why the Discovery Institute would not let Eugenie C. Scott use long excerpts of their material, why ID proponents don%u2019t publish or provide data, how the Discovery Institute can be taken seriously as an objective research organization when it had published a document in 1999 stating that it wanted to combat secularism (to which Demski pointed out the many pro-atheist comments made by people like Gould and Dawkins). Although Demski handled himself well, he seemed somewhat nonplussed. Meanwhile Shermer made a few rebuttals mixed with jokes.

Don’t knock the idea of getting the public informed. This is what we need: more intelligent, prepared citizens who are willing to confront these frauds and make them uncomfortable. Dembski is going to find himself increasingly isolated, I hope, and is going to find himself giving his lectures solely to sympathetic church-group audiences.

God hates squid

From the comments, here’s something bizarre: creationists (at least the ones at Answers in Genesis) have defined life…and it excludes squid! I have yet another reason to reject the Bible, in this case for disrespecting perfectly wonderful invertebrates.

Many scientists make the distinction that vertebrates have hemoglobin,
hence red blood, and invertebrates contain other oxygen transporting
proteins, like hemocyanins, and do not have red blood. As far as
we’ve researched at this time, all vertebrates have hemoglobin and
invertebrates do not, though there may be exceptions we are not aware
of.

So, animals that contain hemoglobin (vertebrates) and therefore have
red blood can be considered “living” and animals that contain
hemocyanin, or other proteins (invertebrates) and therefore have blue
(pink/violet or brown) blood can be considered “nonliving”. This is
further supported by Scripture since the Hebrew for “blood” (dawm)
is derived from the Hebrew for “red” (aw-dam). And with Genesis
1:20-22 and Leviticus 11:10, there is a distinction between
“living” creatures and “swarming/moving” creatures that teem in
the waters. So the logical conclusion can be made that a “living”
creature is one that contains red blood.

There’s much more, but it’s all masturbiblation, picking at words and extracting far more significance from them than is warranted, all to determine that squid actually aren’t alive*. There’s hairsplitting in Genesis, and a silly exegesis of the dietary rules in Leviticus.

What I’d really love to see now, though, is the rhetorical squirming they’d go through when it’s pointed out that human embryos do not develop red blood cells until about the 5th week of development, and therefore the early embryo, by their own definition, is not living. Heh.

One bit of good news: this definition greatly simplifies the project to create an army of death-ray-wielding undead squid-men.

Ben Domenech: creationist

Let us continue our Ben Domenech bashing. He’s got this somewhat high profile gig at the Washington Post, and one has to wonder what his qualifications are. I think we can rule out “intelligence.”

GWW made an interesting discovery: he’s a creationist. I don’t understand why the Right is constantly elevating these ignoramuses; there must still be a few conservatives who read this site (I can’t possibly have driven you all away)…aren’t you embarrassed by this kind of thing?

For instance, here’s some dumb-as-a-post reasoning:

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Archbishop of Canterbury, anti-creationist

Lots of people have been emailing me the story that the Archbishop of Canterbury backs evolution. I have to confess to mixed feelings.

On the one hand, it’s good to have a religious authority figure coming down on the side of sense. I applaud the sentiment of his statements, and hope they have some positive influence.

On the other hand, I don’t give a flying firkin what the Archbishop of Canterbury thinks, and would question his authority to even make such a pronouncement. If people are going to accept things because someone who wears a funny hat on Sunday says so, where are they going to learn the critical thinking to question when said funny-hat wearer announces that crackers magically turn into meat or that an omnipotent invisible super-being is very fussy about where you put your penis? I simply do not recognize the foundation for his authority.

To be honest, I much prefer stories where religious people in ornate garments say crazy stupid things, because I want to see their authority diminished. I will be very worried when the Mormon elders, Desmond Tutu, the president of American Atheists, the Pope, a voudoun priestess, the Dalai Lama, JZ Knight, the Archbishop of Canterbury, some dessicated ascetic hermit from North Africa, the Raelians, Pat Robertson, the Unitarians, etc., all get together and announce that they are going to simply acknowledge and accept the scientific and natural explanations for the origin and evolution of life and stop meddling in the materialist issues to focus exclusively on the purely ‘spiritual’ life of their flocks. If that day comes, I won’t have any looney religious ideas to complain about, and there goes half the outrage that drives me to write. And I will also fear that the kooks and frauds are simply consolidating their power in claims beyond anyone’s power to test.

I have those suspicions of the Archbishop of Canterbury, too—I think he’s just trying to make sure his authority is based on ideas not subject to empirical testing.

Hovind in Dover

Kent Hovind has been giving his creation “science” seminars in Dover, and it’s a fairly revolting situation. He’s glib, he’s amusing, he’s popular, and he’s lying constantly. David Neiwert discusses his roots as a “right-wing extremist with a penchant for promoting anti-Semitic conspiracy theories”.

The sad thing about the accounts are the little kids who are getting suckered by this shameless fraud.