Or, bashing our heads against a brick wall.
(via Skepchick)
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
Since I’m lazy and occupied, I’ll just link to Rorshach’s account of the last day of the event.
I’ll just say…Maryam Namazie was awesome. I am so glad she was the last speaker of the weekend, because if she’d gone first, the rest of us would have had to sit quietly and simply refer everyone to her. She made a fierce, impassioned, reasoned criticism of Islamism and it’s degradation of humanity — she was wonderfully clear and humane.
I also got into a brief argument with Hamza Andreas Tzortzis, the Muslim creationist. Picture the unholy progeny of a union between Ken Ham and William Lane Craig, brought up in a Muslim household, and you’ve got this guy: he simultaneously pushes a reactionary creationism that is as stupid and shallow as the worst of the Biblical literalists, and he sprinkles it all with longwinded philosophical bafflegab every time he gets confronted with a challenge. His main theme (besides engaging in a remarkably evasive gish gallop) was a rejection of empiricism — every time I asked him for evidence…bleeargh, philosophical boilerplate vomited all over the place.
And of course, in complete contradiction of his emphasis on why my empirical evidence was irrelevant, he kept insisting that he had evidence from the precision and accuracy of the Quran that Mohammed (pbuh) must have had a divine revelation to know all these amazing scientific phenomena, like detailed knowledge of embryology, which was bunk. I tried to explain that the ‘science’ in the Quran was nothing but warmed over rehashes of dimly understood Hippocrates, Aristotle, and Galen, and Tzortzis and his claque took an astonishing tack to address that: they repeatedly and with great hyperbole emphasized that Mohammed was abysmally ignorant and entirely isolated from the entirety of Western culture, having no encounters via trade or with doctors who might have given him hints of the common understanding of science of the time.
They put me in the uncomfortable position of having to argue that the Arabian culture of Mohammed’s time could not possibly be as troglodytic and benighted as they wanted it to be. There was no point, of course: they’d already declared that evidence didn’t matter.
Oh boy oh boy oh boy oh boy. This is wonderful news, happy happy joy joy, gosha’mighty, I’m wiggling in my chair like a tickled puppy. What has made me so happy, you might ask?
A week from today I’m going to be speaking at the Crystal Palace in Glasgow, Scotland. I’ll be talking about the developmental evidence for evolution, and it should be great fun.
But that’s not the exciting news.
Glasgow has its very own Centre for Intelligent Design, and a fine collection of know-nothings it is. And they are being encouraged to attend my talk! So maybe there will be a contingent of critics present — and they can’t be as dumb as Rabbi Moshe Averick, can they? Yeah, they probably can be.
But that’s not the thrilling news, either.
The fun part is that the nitwits at Uncommon Descent have posted 10 + 1 Questions For Professor Myers, and are urging the Scottish creationists to show up and confront me with their stumpers.
And they’re SCREAMINGLY STUPID!
I read them with increasing disbelief: every single one of them was trivial and inane, and do nothing but reveal the ignorance and arrogance of the questioner. Every single one. Every one is built around some bizarre creationist misconception, too.
Please please please please please please, O Creationists, show up and ask me these questions. Pick any of them. Pick the one you are absolutely certain will make me squirt hot tears of frustration and despair right there on the stage. I’m begging you. Give me the opportunity to give you a public spanking. Oh, happy monkey, I will be delirious with joy if you try to make me suffer with these questions. They’re like a gift, a gift of idiocy.
Now I’m not going to answer them here just yet — I want to give the creationists a chance to slam me with ’em first. But I’ll post the answers next week, after they’ve taken their shot. If they do. I’m afraid they’ll be too cowardly to announce themselves in public like that.
Just so you can see them without going to that cloaca of creationism, Uncommon Descent, I’ve also posted the full set of questions below the fold. Go ahead and try to answer them if you’d like, but really, all of the answers to everyone of them was already tripping off my brain as I read them.
Hey, and show up in Glasgow. I can tell already it’s going to be a blast.
The Creation “Museum” is 4 years old, and co-founder Mark Looy was interviewed.
“The number-one comment we get, whether it’s from a Christian or a non-Christian, is that this place exceeded their expectations,” he reports. “The quality of the exhibits, the special effects theatre, the state-of-the-art planetarium, the animatronics dinosaurs — this is a museum unlike any other in the world.”
Mark Looy (Answers in Genesis)But the museum is not just unique because it rejects evolution and proclaims creationism, says Looy, who notes it also “presents the history of the Bible in a fun and entertaining way.” Non-Christians have toured the museum, including one group that consisted of 285 atheists. That, says the spokesman, is one reason why the facility is designed to be evangelistic.
I would agree that it is a “museum” unlike any other, because it isn’t one. It’s disneyfied fundamentalism, and it’s more like a Hell House than a museum. But he noticed our visit from 2009, and misrepresented us: it did not exceed our expectations, unless you mean we expected some bullshit, and we received a mountain of bullshit and lies and paranoia and craziness.
Sure, it’s evangelistic. Everyone I know who visited that heap were further convinced that these loons are nuts. So it’s doing a fine job of evangelizing for atheism.
Johan Huibers, the owner of a construction company in the Netherlands, is way ahead of Ken Ham. He has actually begun construction of a replica of Noah’s Ark, and his even floats—although he accomplishes that by cheating, building his ark as a wooden superstructure on top of an array of bolted-together steel barges.
The revealing factoid about this crank, though, is this:
Actually, this ark is not the first that Mr. Huibers has built. He first began dreaming of an ark in 1992, shortly after a heavy storm lashed the coastal region north of Amsterdam where he lives. His wife, Bianca, a police officer, opposed the idea.
“She said no, but by 2004 I had built a smaller ark, 225 feet long, to sail through the Dutch canals,” he said. It became a minor sensation. He charged adult visitors $7 to board it.
“More than 600,000 people came, in about three years,” he said. He said he made about $3.5 million, enough to clear a profit of $1.2 million.
Crazy pays, and there is a sucker born every minute.
Rabbi Moshe Averick asks, “Seriously, Aren’t Atheists Embarrassed by P.Z. Myers?“
Seriously, aren’t you? What’s the matter with you people?
What prompts his outrage is his discovery of a lecture I gave some time back on the complexity argument from intelligent design creationists. He is appalled at my total lack of logic! Unfortunately for him, his misconceptions arise because he makes some unwarranted leaps about what I was saying.
He specifically objects to the fact that I showed a slide of a wall of driftwood at a beach, and that I explained that it had accumulated by chance and the properties of wind and water along the shoreline…and then I stated that it was very, very complex. And it is! Rabbi Averick is deeply incensed by this. I think you’ll spot his logical error in the second sentence of this paragraph from the rabbi’s rant:
To be honest, when I saw this lecture for the first time, I thought Myers was joking. A pile of driftwood as being analogous to the “complexity” of a living cell?! Myers is arguing that since a “complex” and “complicated” pile of driftwood can accumulate through an undirected natural process, so can a living cell. I guess if by “complexity” you mean a chaotic collection of junk, then I would have to agree; a large pile of driftwood is certainly “complex.” In any case, no self-respecting ID theorist would ever use the term “complexity.” The terms that are always used are “functional complexity” or “specified complexity.” In other words, complexity that achieves some pre-determined goal, complexity that clearly functions towards a specific purpose. The argument is that “functional complexity” and “specified complexity” clearly are the result of intelligent intervention. A pile of driftwood is immediately recognizable for exactly what it is; a random, disorganized, purposeless collection of…well, driftwood! To describe this argument as flawed logic would be misleading; we first would have to dignify it by labeling it as some form of logic in the first place. It is not flawed logic, it is simply ridiculous.
Nowhere in that talk do I claim that a pile of driftwood is analogous to a cell. I think there’s a rather huge difference between a cell and a pile of debris; one replicates and is therefore subject to iterative natural selection, and the other doesn’t. I was making a different point. I have been giving a similar talk lately, and in that I have added another slide that might help clarify the logic he’s missing. I show this:
Recognize it? It’s only one of the most well known corporate logos in the world, the Nike swoosh. It’s very, very simple, and it’s also most definitely designed. No getting around it; a graphic designer sat down and designed that simple swooshing logo.
Is it clearer now? We have complicated things that are not designed, and we have simple things that are designed. We also have complicated things that are designed, and simple things that are not. The message you should take away from these examples is that complexity and design are independent properties of an object. One does not imply the other. You cannot determine whether something was designed by looking at whether it is complicated or not.
Yet as we see just about every time some clueless creationist, like Rabbi Averick, starts bellowing about design, we see the same blithe assumption: they look at a cell, they say “gosh, O Lord, it’s really, really complicated”, and then they start blithering about how it must have been designed. The two are not connected!
Also familiar, I’m afraid, is the usual indignant waffling about it being “specified complexity”. I have read Dembski, who uses the term. I have read Meyer, who practically spews the phrase out on every single page of his book, Signature in the Cell. I have never seen it operationally defined.
I had to read Meyer’s godawful book twice, because I couldn’t believe he failed to do something so fundamental; the second time I was looking carefully for any discussion of what “specified complexity” means, or how to measure it. Here is the closest he comes:
The term specified complexity is, therefore, a synonym for specified information or information content.
Oh, yes. That is so helpful. He equates complexity with information content, but the mystery word here is “specified” — how do we determine that? None of these clowns has a clue.
Forget about the complexity part; that’s irrelevant, and has nothing to do with whether something is designed. The problematic issue is whether something, complex or simple, was specified — which, alas, is a modifier for which you can freely substitute “designed” in all of the creationist literature, which means that all they are arguing is that designed things are designed.
To which I ask, “How do you know that is specified, or designed?”
To which they reply, “Because it’s awesomely complicated.”
Go back to line 1. Repeat endlessly.
I’ve had people ask me this in all seriousness, but I haven’t seen a real sign yet with this message:
There is a church with this name and logo in Richmond, VA, and the sign doesn’t match any of the standard church sign generator designs, so I think it’s real.
I know I shouldn’t be surprised, but to see such idiocy clearly captured in the wild is impressive.
Ken Ham is currently hawking his new book, Already Compromised, in which he whines about the way universities — even many bible colleges — don’t take the Old Testament absolutely literally. This leads, of course, to students actually examining evidence and arguments outside the Bible, which inevitably leads to…atheism.
He preaches no compromise and accepting every single gosh-darned letter of the Bible in the plainest possible sense. This leads to logic like this at the Creation “Museum”.
In Genesis 6:19-20, the Bible says that two of every sort of land vertebrate (seven of the “clean” animals) were brought by God to the Ark. Therefore, dinosaurs (land vertebrates) were represented on the Ark.
Well now, suddenly, the creationist gang behind the Ark Park have seen the virtues of compromise. They’ve done a few studies and have found, oh horrors, that wingnut craziness might scare away a few suckers customers for their giant Kentucky boondoggle, so they’re thinking about leaving the dinosaurs off the ark.
So if Ark Encounter is in danger of straying from Answers and Genesis’ literal interpretation of the Bible, a burning question must be asked: Will there still be dinosaurs on the Ark?
“(We’re) not positive,” Zovath explains. “The fact that it gets so much publicity is probably a good reason to consider having (dinosaurs) on the Ark, because people write about it. Just like in the Creation Museum, we get so much press and so much publicity and so much interest in the lobby where the dinosaurs and the kids are playing together. People get interested in it, and they want to know more about it, so that could be a strong reason to include that in the Ark itself. Again, we’ve got an awful lot of exhibits, and it’s a pretty complex project, really large, as you can imagine, so we’re kind of concentrating on the big chunks and then working our way down to the specific details of each exhibit.”
I am shocked, shocked I tell you, that Answers in Genesis is all about sucking maximum moolah out of the believers’ pockets. I am also shocked that Ken Ham will be joining the rest of us heathens in Hell. I’m a nice guy, though, so I’ll let him come to our orgies of the damned as long as he promises not to be a debbie downer.
Larry Moran has a copy of the hideous Mr Wells’ new creationist book on junk DNA, and he’s going to be taking it apart chapter by chapter. Chapter 1 and Chapter 2 are already up — it looks like it’s a rather lightweight and superficial book, so I expect the Moran buzzsaw to shred it up fast.
The comments are a weird mix: the always informed and interesting Joe Felsenstein shows up, but there are some ranty clueless IDiots as well. Don’t clutter it up more unless you’ve got something intelligent to say.
I’m seeing that I can pretty much dismiss Wells’ bad book as worthless, so I’m in no hurry to pick up a copy for myself now. I probably will anyway, at some point, simply because Wells is a magnet for stupid arguments that I’ll hear regurgitated many times over.
The number one most common excuse I have been seeing for Harold Camping’s failure, both before and after yesterday, is that he can’t possibly forecast the time of the Rapture because Jesus said no one can know. You know what? That’s the same stupid reliance on the authority of the Bible that led to Camping’s prophecy. We know the Bible is inaccurate and error-filled, so you can’t use its supposed inerrancy to disprove any interpretation of its contents.
In the same category, but amplifed to even greater heights of inanity is this, the most hilarious argument for Camping being wrong that I’ve seen anywhere, and wouldn’t you know it, it’s on Ken Ham’s facebook page. Ham tut-tutted over the prediction of the date, and one of his readers commented on how to know the world wouldn’t end this year:
Did you notice that he based his prediction in part on the time being exactly 7,000 years after Noah’s flood? What? He must not have visited the Creation Museum (or read his bible) or he would know the earth is only around 6,013 years old or thereabouts!
Give that man a prize for the biggest creationist fallacy I’ve seen this week.
