I am infested with the fleas of a thousand camels. One unfortunate side-effect of this trip to Ireland and the UK is that I have publicly engaged with Muslim creationists — there’s a bit of a dearth of them in Morris, Minnesota, and the few Muslims I have met there are there for the university, and are educated and intelligent — but now I’m on their radar, and my inbox has a new, exotic stench to it. Here is a sample.

Dear Dr. Myers,

In your recent exchange with Hamza you asserted that Quran contain no specifics when it comes to science. I will let you be the judge:
[The disbelievers are] like darknesses within an unfathomable sea which is covered by waves, above which are waves, above which are clouds – layers of darknesses, one above another. When one stretches out his hand, he can hardly see it. And he to whom Allah has not granted light – for him there is no light. [24:40]

In the underlined statements, this verse explicitly refers to two physical features of oceans:
“mawjun min fawqihi mawj” – which literally means “waves, above which are waves”
and “dhulumâtun ba’duha fawqa bad” – which literally means “darknesses, one above the other”

The first phrase affirms that the oceans contain a layer of internal waves beneath the surface waves, just as the surface waves lie beneath the clouds. The second phrase further describes these consecutive layers as progressive layers of darknesses.

Internal waves in the ocean were first discovered by John Scott Russell in the 18th century. These waves are completely invisible and imperceptible at the surface, but deep down in the ocean they are massive, with amplitudes ranging up to 100 metres and width of 1km. This explains the first Qur’anic phrase in the verse.

In terms of the description of darkness, the darkness of the Ocean is first perceptible at 200m below surface level and by the time you reach 1km there is no light at all. However, why does the Qur’an connect this description of darkness with internal waves in the ocean? What have internal waves got to do with the darkness of ocean? Modern science didn’t have a good answer for this… until:
http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2010/p…aves-0428.html

“The key insight described in this research is that pairs of these boundaries behave like giant interferometers: When encountering boundaries between layers that have different density gradients, internal waves undergo the same kinds of reflections and strengthening or weakening effects as light waves in an optical interferometer. As a result, these layers selectively transmit or block waves of specific wavelengths.”

This explains how the progressive darkness in the ocean is linked to the internal waves. Evidently, there is no way any human being could have known this 1400 years ago. The Qur’an is the revelation of the All-Knowing Creator and Sustainer of the Universe.

[First, let’s get something clear: the two sentences cited are not about the physical and hydrodynamic properties of oceans; it is about the ignorance of unbelievers, and the writer has used a simile to poetically intensify the magnitude of the subject. OK? It really is a dead giveaway that someone isn’t reading a poem right when they obliviously ignore the actual theme of the passage to go haring off after a word and digging up oceanography press releases when they read “seas”. When people read Homer, do they see “wine dark sea” and go nuts trying to determine the optical properties of the Mediterranean? (Well, yeah, they do…and they’re missing the point.)

Secondly, the cited science reference (what? You think I wouldn’t read it?) isn’t about why the sea is dark: we know why that is, it’s about light scattering and being absorbed by particles suspended in it. What the paper describes is a method to study the arrangement of layers in the ocean using measurements of subtle shifts in wavelengths caused by boundary effects. So not only did you misread your own damned book, you’re misreading the scientific source you’re citing to bolster your claim.–pzm]

Here is another verse from the Qur’an:

So whoever Allah wants to guide – He expands his breast to [contain] Islam; and whoever He wants to misguide – He makes his breast tight and constricted as though he were climbing into the sky. Thus does Allah place defilement upon those who do not believe. [6:125]

How did a Bedouin 1400 years ago desert know how we breathe? I will let you infer what this says about pressure.

[How stupid are Bedouins? So stupid that they didn’t notice that their chests expand and contract when they breathe.

And again: it’s a freaking metaphor for accepting an idea, not a survey of respiratory physiology.]

In the end you are rejecting since you want evidence on your terms (emperical, falsifiable, etc.). The Qur’an respond to this as well.

And they say, “We will not believe you until you break open for us from the ground a spring.

Or [until] you have a garden of palm tress and grapes and make rivers gush forth within them in force [and abundance]

Or you make the heaven fall upon us in fragments as you have claimed or you bring Allah and the angels before [us]

Or you have a house of gold or you ascend into the sky. And [even then], we will not believe in your ascension until you bring down to us a book we may read.” Say, “Exalted is my Lord! Was I ever but a human messenger?”

I’m supposed to be surprised that a fraudulent old prophet writes down in his phony holy book an admonition to not expect evidence to back up his claims? “Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain! I am the Great and Powerful Oz!”–pzm]

For your own sake, I ask you to think about Islam, and do not allow your reputation or money be the barrier to accepting the truth.

If you could but see when they are made to stand before the Fire and will say, “Oh, would that we could be returned [to life on earth] and not deny the signs of our Lord and be among the believers.”

But what they concealed before has [now] appeared to them. And even if they were returned, they would return to that which they were forbidden; and indeed, they are liars.[6:27-28]

[So predictable: if the claims are implausible and the story is incredible, close with a threat of Hell. That’ll clinch it. Not. –pzm]

Jamal

Those are not specifics about science, revealing the presence of divine revelation in the mind of Mohammed. Those are poetical allusions which have been mined by deranged apologists for evidence (odd, isn’t it, that the believers scrabble so desperately for something their holy book dismisses) that their prophet was something special. The feebleness of their post hoc rationalizes persuade me otherwise.

Hey, why not emphasize instead the lovely language of the book? Oh, that’s right: because nobody doubts that the human mind is capable of generating art.

Can you bear more blithering Muslims? I showed you that partial clip from my encounter the other day, but you missed the first chunk. I had gone outside to get some fresh air and take a look around Dublin, when I got ambushed by a trio of Muslims with a camera, and the crowd just gradually developed and surrounded me, with some of them taking pictures (hi, Rebecca!). This is the recording from the Muslims themselves.

Some of my favorite weird pseudo-philosophical babble were his claims that he had evidence, but that it was “conceptual evidence”, and imbedded in one long spewage was this claim, that “occam’s razor must be uncaused, therefore it must be eternal”. I was frequently bemused as he started regurgitating long strings of rapid-fire memorized arguments.

Another interesting moment is when they deny that the Quran contains the story of the great flood, when AronRa brings it up. Either they were lying or they don’t know their own holy book: see Sura 11.

Near the end of the clip, they have a fellow named Rashid asking a question of Maryam Namazie after her “hate-filled” talk. Strangely, they don’t show any bit of her talk, and they don’t bother to record her answer…probably because she slapped him down hard. You catch a bit of the audience laughing, too, because his arguments were so ridiculous.

Then at the very end, they had briefly snagged Richard Dawkins, who patiently explained his position, but was clearly a bit exasperated with that babbling ninny. He takes the opportunity of an interruption by a certain someone^* to walk away and do something more interesting.

^*It’s Rorschach!

A couple of years ago, a student, Matthew LaClair, exposed his teacher, David Paszkiewicz, as an evangelical creationist who was using a public school classroom as a pulpit. He did this by the simple expedient of bringing a hidden voice recorder into the room and catching Paszkiewicz preaching instead of teaching (the recording is on the web).

Now a documentary has been made about LaClair and Paszkiewicz.

The movie is going to be shown on Sunday, June 12 at 2 p.m. at the New York Ethical Culture Society at 2 West 64th Street in New York — I wish I could go. There’s also going to be a Q&A with both LaClair and Paszkiewicz in attendance. I’ve met Matt LaClair, who seems like a sensible, rational person; what I’ve seen of Paszkiewicz is that he’s a close-minded, rather dim Dominionist bigot. There could be an interesting clash.

Someone smuggle a recorder into the event!

It’s a fitting end to the movie that got me expelled, and whose PR I rudely interrupted. The company is no more.

Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed — the 2008 creationist propaganda movie fronted by Ben Stein — is scheduled to be auctioned, lock, stock, and barrel, pursuant to the bankruptcy proceeding of Premise Media Holdings LP.

I suspect no one is surprised.

Or, bashing our heads against a brick wall.

(via Skepchick)

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.

[Read more…]

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.