Creationists make some crazy claims about fossils — Ken Ham, for instance, is adamant that T. rex was a vegetarian before the Fall. So let’s all laugh together.
Those fun-loving folks at Answers in Genesis have been revealing some of their spectacular plans for the Ark Encounter theme park. Would you believe that one of them is a ride celebrating the ten plagues of Egypt?
Oh, yeah, come on down! Nothing says fun like blood, boils, gnats, cholera, and dead children!
It was true in the Creation “Museum”, and it’s going to be true in this theme park: these creationists worship death and suffering.
Texas, you are a wonder. You don’t have any protections against workplace discrimination on the basis of sex or gender — that might hurt bidness, you know — but you’re considering a bill to protect creationists from discrimination.
Sec.A51.979.A A PROHIBITION OF DISCRIMINATION BASED ON RESEARCH RELATED TO INTELLIGENT DESIGN. An institution of higher education may not discriminate against or penalize in any manner, especially with regard to employment or academic support, a faculty member or student based on the faculty member’s or student’s conduct of research relating to the theory of intelligent design or other alternate theories of the origination and development of organisms.
I understand how discrimination rules work in employment: for instance, when we’re looking at job applications, we have to justify every rejection as well as our acceptance of the person we want to hire; when we develop a list of candidates we want to interview, it’s sent off to the administration for review. If we said we wanted to do phone interviews of six candidates, and all of them were men, they’d look at the applicant pool and tell us if we were somehow biased against women.
I’m wondering, though, how this one will work. Will a Texas biology program have to send their list to an administration that will scrutinize them and tell them they need to include more creationists in their interviews?
I would also like to see what kind of creationist “research” these faculty and students are thought to be doing. Sitting around reading a Bible isn’t science.
A while back, I had a guest post here by Amy Peters; in it, she described taking her son to the zoo and being awed and choking up at the similarities between us and chimpanzees — it’s a nice moment of transcendance, when a person sees a deeper connection.
One of the creationist dim-bulbs at Answers in Genesis, Georgia Purdom, read that story (by the way, it’s kind of sweet that the creationists so regularly read Pharyngula — Hi, Georgia! Hi, Ken!) and took away a very different message, one that reflects a tiresome reflexive trope among those of very little brain, and also shows that for all that religious talk of a mystical beyond and senses beyond the mundane, believers have no poetry in their souls. Ms Purdom’s take on the story? “Mother Teaches Four-year-old That Humans Are Animals”. Her response is also a complete non sequitur.
How sad! I’m choked up, too, but not for the same reason. I wonder what this mother would think if her son grew up and murdered someone. I’m sure she would be horrified. But if the Bible isn’t true and humans are animals, then she wouldn’t have a basis for saying what her son did was wrong, because after all, he’s just an animal, and morality doesn’t apply to animals.
Huh? What? How does looking into a chimpanzee’s eyes lead to a comparison with her son growing up to be a murderer? There’s nothing in a chimp’s demeanor that invites a similarity with the pathology of murder — if it’s just the low brow and the hairy face, then Ms Purdom must get a fright every time she goes into the office and sees Ken Ham. If Peters had looked at a peacock, would Purdom be sad about how her child would grow up to be a Vegas chorine? If she’d spotted a parasitic fungus, would Purdom be enraptured because the kid might grow up to one day work for Answers in Genesis? There is no connection here.
I’m always astounded, too, at how a group of pseudoscientists can have such a petty, miserable view of life. “Just an animal” is a phrase a biologist can only use ironically; show me a worm, and I’ll tell you how grand and majestic a creature it is. It does not diminish us to appreciate the beauty of our fellow travelers down the long road of evolution.
And I’ve got news for Ms Purdom: the majority of people on this planet do not accept the ‘truth’ of the Bible, and morality is not restricted to Christians. Those people who have gone a step further and rejected all holy books, and those people who have recognized the truth found in nature and see our relationship to all of life, are not less moral than the small mob of prospering frauds, liars, and incompetents in a particularly backwards corner of Kentucky. Her whole argument is bogus.
Amy Peters herself has responded to Purdom, and Tantalus Prime has chimed in, too. One amusing thing about it all: Purdom’s article only contains links to Bible verses and the AiG store, and has not one link to anything anyone she opposes has written. Way to go!
Ken Ham really hates those weasely Christians who accept the phrase “millions of years” more than he does us atheists, I think. He really gets worked up over Biologos, but I only got as far as this paragraph:
If there was not one man Adam and one woman Eve, and a literal event of the one man Adam taking the fruit in rebellion and thus bringing sin and death into world, then one may as well throw the rest of the Bible away. It would mean what God wrote through Paul in 1 Corinthians 15 and Romans 5 for instance is plain wrong. If we are not all descendants of one man who sinned, then who are we, and why are we sinners?
Well, yes. You might as well throw the Bible away, Kenny boy, and it is wrong.
It really is that simple. Why can’t you see it?
Ham also has some highly twisted logic.
“The reason the age is such an important issue is, from a secular perspective, if you don’t have millions of years, you can’t postulate evolution,” Ham explains. “Think about it: if you believe in a young earth as we do — 6,000 years on the basis of adding up all the dates in the Bible — evolution is impossible. It can’t happen.”
To the creationists, what is true is whatever they want to be true, and they’re so limited in intelligence that they project onto us their attitudes: we don’t say the earth is ancient because we want it to be so in order for evolution to work, but because that is what the evidence tells us.
Why do you torture me so? For the past week, the number one request in my mailbox hasn’t been this nonsense about bacteria in meteorites, it’s been people asking me to address Rabbi Adam Jacobs’ stupid article on the Huffington Post.
I have a problem with that. I despise the Huffington Post and the fact that some liberals who ought to know better take it seriously as a leftist voice, instead of the lowbrow, pandering, honking noise of stupidity that it is. And in particular, I cannot support Arianna Huffington’s contempt for labor and her privileged pretentiousness. So I cannot link to her site any more at all.
Fortunately, I can link to Jerry Coyne instead, who takes the silly rabbi apart. I’ll only mention one item that jumped out at me.
His whole piece is a complaint that science has failed to explain the origin of life, and that we don’t have a complete step-by-step description of every process that generated the first replicator over four billion years ago.
One might suppose that in the six or so decades since the discovery of the DNA molecule by Watson and Crick during which researchers have been investigating the origin of life they might have come up with some pretty solid leads to explain it.
We’ve only had a few decades of steady progress, and already he’s demanding the moon? I notice that the rabbi has had a few millennia during which his ancestors have claimed an intimate and special relationship with an omniscient super-being, and all they have to show for it is “god did it.” You would think that with all that privileged access, there would have been some tiny fragment of scientific utility somewhere in their holy book, but no, nothing.
If we’re going to start comparing lacunae, let’s start with thermodynamics. We’ve got detailed, complete mathematical descriptions of a fundamental mechanism that drives all of biology; the Torah’s got nothin’. The believers have got a dissipated invisible vapor with not reasonable support; we’ve got Ludwig Boltzmann.
We win. Argument over.
Fuck off, rabbi.
It’s too bad, too, since I would have learned weeks ago who our ascended master was.
It’s Stephen Hawking, of course: “Most of you know who Stephen Hawking is, right? He talks through a computer and that makes him even more bizarre. People sit with their mouths open, taking it all in like this is the gospel from the ascended master. That’s demonic!“
It’s also a surprise to learn that creationists are also trying to build a ‘life’-sized copy of Noah’s Ark in the Pacific Northwest. This is the first I’ve heard of that…anyone know anything more?
This is a local reminder: we’re gathering at the Morris Public Library today at 3pm to discuss the lies of our recent creationist visitor. All are welcome, if you want to try to defend him, please do…just be aware that there will be a group of intelligent, well-educated UMM students present who will add you to the menu. But hey, we were brave enough to show up for the Mortenson follies, are you brave enough to step into the lion’s den?
Jerry Bergman is a fairly typical creationist: he’s a loon, and he’s dishonest. I debated him once to an utterly ineffectual conclusion, and it was like having an argument with a rabid squirrel — he makes no sense, he splutters out nutty fragments of angry rhetoric, and he’s ultimately of no consequence whatsoever. But he still has an audience, and he’s still out giving invited talks at churches all over the country. Next week, Bergman will be speaking in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and we’ve got a preview of what he’s going to say on the — duh duh DUHHH — Dark Side of Charles Darwin.
Part 1:
• Charles Darwin’s major goal in developing his theory was religious, he wanted to “murder” god (his words).
• He was active in “converting” all he could to his theory of origins.
• Darwin plagiarized most of his major ideas.
• Darwin was a racist of the worst kind and believed the lower races (the blacks) would go extinct.
• Darwin was opposed to helping the sick, but realized this idea would not go over well.
• Charles felt a wife was better than a dog (really!).
• He was severely mentally and physically ill, likely an agoraphobic.
• As a young man he was sadistic and loved to kill animals with anything he had: guns, sticks, even hammers!Part 2:
• It is well known and well recognized that evolution is the doorway to Atheism.
• About 98 % of leading life scientists are Atheist.
• A major reason given to become an Atheist was evolution.
• The whole point of the evolution creation account is to demolish the theistic creation account.
• It takes more faith to be an Atheist than a Creationist.
• Dr. Bergman will cover the Atheist creation story as developed by Hawking and others to document this.
• Orthodox Evolution is defined as from nothing to everything purely by chance, time, and the outworking of natural law (which also originated by chance, time and natural law).
That first part is just incredibly poorly done, ahistorical, lying character assassination, and is totally irrelevant to the science. Even if Bergman were right and Darwin had been a diseased psychotic squirrel-murderer (Bergman does take that personally) with delusions of being Hitler, we wouldn’t care — the theory of evolution stands or falls on the quality of the current evidence, not the character of its founder.
Bergman’s sleazy attack on a Victorian gentleman’s character says more about Bergman than Darwin. Take that first claim, for instance. It’s a complete lie. Here’s what Darwin actually wrote about “murder”:
At last gleams of light have come, & I am almost convinced (quite contrary to opinion I started with) that species are not (it is like confessing a murder) immutable.
I think, if you have a basic grasp of the English language, you’ll recognize that in that passage Darwin is explaining that he felt guilty about arriving at a conclusion opposed by the clergy…not that he had the intent of founding a religion to kill god.
The rest is nonsense of equivalent stupidity. But I’m sure he will be well-received by the creationists of Milwaukee, who share Bergman’s derangement. I hope there are no hunters in his audience, though, who might be a little cranky about calling their interest in guns and hunting “sadistic”.
People keep asking me this question after the creationist event here in town — Mortenson spoke about how creationism is so much more egalitarian than evolution, and how the Bible talks about these wonderful things people did in the book of Genesis, like Cain going out and founding a whole city, by himself! At a time when the world population was 4, however, that doesn’t seem like a great accomplishment. Anyway, some people thought that far, realized that in the creationist conception of an entire world population arising from two people only, there was an obvious problem in the second generation.
Have no fear, the creationists already have an answer, as I explained before. Cain had sex with his sisters. The creationists are even proud of this explanation, and you can buy it on a postcard in their cheesy gift shop, which does make one wonder about their clientele a little bit.
The exhibit goes on to explain how this was OK, because Adam and Eve were perfect and carried no deleterious alleles that might have caused trouble when homozygous. They also chew us nonbelievers out for finding their stories a bit objectionable.
Since God is the One who defined marriage in the first place, God’s Word is the only standard for defining proper marriage. People who do not accept the Bible as their absolute authority have no basis for condemning someone like Cain marrying his sister.
And people who do not understand population genetics have no basis for arguing that a species can survive a population bottleneck of two.
