Astroturfing the scientific databases: spamming the lobster eye

The Encyclopedia of Life is a cool tool which is a sort of wikification of taxonomy — it allows a large number of contributors to add descriptions of species with the goal of eventually documenting all 1.8 million known species in a single searchable source. Look at the page for my experimental animal, Danio rerio; lots of information in a standard format with links and references. Thumbs up!

However, there’s a problem here: the sources. To organize that much data, a large mob of contributors are needed, and that means some fairly open policies to allow contributors have been instituted, and that in turn means that there will be parasites on they system. And a reader sent me an example of a doozy.

Take a look at the page for the order Decapoda. It has an oddly random article on the reflecting superposition eyes of lobsters up top.

A lobster’s eye works on a principle of reflection rather than that of refraction…The most outstanding characteristic of the lobster eye is its surface, which is composed of numerous squares…these squares are positioned most precisely.

It’s OK — it seems to be a rough and unhelpful paraphrase of a section of Michael Land’s wonderfully informative book, Animal Eyes, and it’s correct as far as it goes — lobster eyes do have an array of mirrored light guides that are square in section. The surprise is at the end, where it names the author: Harun Yahya. That’s right, the Turkish creationist. This is taken straight from one of his creationist ravings, where he discusses some amazing detail of biology and concludes that it couldn’t possibly have evolved because he, a wealthy playboy and former mental patient and convicted criminal now representing himself as the Islamic source of creation science, could not imagine it so.

How did Harun Yahya become a source on EoL?

The page links to its source and holder of the copyright on the article: it’s the Biomimicry Institute, an entirely credible educational source, with a specific page, the Ask Nature reference, which is, again, an open source resource with multiple contributors. And yes, there’s Harun Yahya stuffing articles in there.

I did a google search on a few of the phrases in the text, and whoa — it’s everywhere. Harun Yahya’s organization has been dumping this same bit of text, and others, in various of their own websites and also in just about any legitimate source that allows them to open an account and create public content, including Ask Nature and EoL. It has also been picked up by numerous creationist sites as well, all echoing the same unwarranted conclusion: this eye works really well, therefore it couldn’t have evolved.

Try googling for information on lobster eyes. It’s a mess. There are a few credible sources that appear on the first page, like Wikipedia, but for the most part it’s a smear of creationist sites.

I know, this is a truism: don’t trust the Net of Lies, learn to vet your sources, watch out for anything on the net. But it looks to me like the Turkish creationists have been waging a successful astroturf campaign to infiltrate sources that we would normally regard as pretty good, and are thereby corrupting sources even more. It also allows them to pass casual review because their articles are very widely sourced.

I hope the editors of various scientific web sites that allow open submissions will take a look at their collections, and purge them of anything from Harun Yahya. He is not a scientific source, he has absolutely no background in the sciences, and he mangles the information to serve his ideological goals. What he’s doing here is using repetition to make his name widely known, and parasitizing on the good name of some websites to falsely elevate his reputation. There’s a hobo on the train, people, and he’s pretending he’s a railroad executive.

Just in case you are wondering about those lobster eyes, they actually are extremely interesting, using reflecting mirrors instead of refracting lenses to focus light on photoreceptors. It’s not hard to see how they would work: to focus incoming light on a photoreceptor surface, we need to bend light to a target, and refraction or reflection can do the job.

Here’s Mike Land’s summary diagram of the process (and, incidentally, Animal Eyes is an excellent survey of the diversity of biological optics):

i-85911739de924305fffbd6eff8c87e59-lobstereye.jpeg

I don’t see how you can argue that the one on the right is evidence of creation, any more than the one on the left. Both take advantage of ordinary physical properties to focus an image on a retina.

The interesting phenomenon is the transition: the eye on the left is almost certainly the ancestral state, since some crustaceans have both kinds of eyes, and also they may have the refracting eye on the left in the early stages of development, and it then transforms into the mirrored eye…and we don’t have good evolutionary examples of the historical transition. That the eye can switch between two forms during development at least implies that no magic is necessary, though, so this may be an open question but it is not a question that requires the invention of a supernatural designer to answer.

How about the Irish Minister of State with special responsibility for pseudoscience?

This is John J. May. He has written a creationist book.

He’s a barmy, ignorant crank. I read the sample pages, and his big argument is from pregnancy and development (!) — he’s looked at it, superficially, and come away from it all dazzled at how complicated it all is, and that’s the entirety of his argument: it’s all too complicated.

Some people look at nature, marvel, and say that no one can comprehend it, therefore it must be magic. Other people look at nature, marvel, and say, “I think I can figure out how that works.” May is in the first category.

So, just another random kook on the internet with a self-published book promoting his own ignorance…with one odd twist. He’s having a launch party, and the big man doing the introductions is Conor Lenihan, the Irish Minister of State with special responsibility for Science, Technology, Innovation and Natural Resources.

Lenihan doesn’t seem to have any actual qualifications in science. I think he needs a change of title.

By the way, you can write to Lenihan and let him know what you think. Be nice — laughing at his foolishness will be more effective than snarling at him. It might be especially effective to write to the Irish Times or the Independent and let them know there is a local politician doing something stupid, which is always good entertainment.

I guess we were effective. Lenihan has withdrawn from the book launch.

Will the real Catholic please stand up?

Nominally, the Catholic church has no beef with evolution — they’ve got their own official twisted logic in which God did some invisible indetectable hocus-pocus somewhere in the documented evidence of evolution. Sometimes, though, that seems as thin and neglected as church doctrine on contraception. Here’s an article on catholic.org that is pure unadulterated creationism, flatly denying the facts of human evolution because it contradicts the Magisterium of the Church on original sin and our exclusive descent from Adam and Eve.

It’s unclear how this particular site is associated with the official Catholic church, but one thing should be clear: practicing Catholics seem to ignore official papal decrees fairly routinely, and there are a lot of creationist Catholics.

The other thing of note in this particular article is the blatant quote-mining going on. One mention is of this strange Jesuit I first heard of on the Larry King interview of Stephen Hawking, Robert Spitzer — this article makes him sound like he’s anti-evolution, and he actually is, but it’s in that waffling pettifogging traditional Catholic way of accepting the evidence but imagining a lot of god-diddling in the background.

What made me sit up and notice, though, is that in the opening paragraph, it cites John Tyler Bonner as a prominent scientist who questions evolution. Whoa. JT Bonner is the guy who got me excited about developmental biology when I was an undergraduate and picked up a copy of his On Development: The Biology of Form at the UW bookstore. He was a prominent supporter of evolution and against creationism in the 1960s. He wrote The Evolution of Complexity by Means of Natural Selection, The Evolution of Culture in Animals, Life Cycles: Reflections of an Evolutionary Biologist, and First Signals: The Evolution of Multicellular Development. And now they’re insinuating that he’s on the side of the creationists.

How stupid do they think their readers are?

I get email

It’s an unfortunate fact of google life that links to my criticisms of Kent Hovind pop up quite high in google listings, so I’m always getting these letters from pissed-off creationists who are shocked, shocked, shocked that there they are, innocently searching for information on their hero, when Pharyngula rises up and dares to criticize the great bible-thumping convicted tax cheat.

In addition to the usual incoherence and refusal to offer any scientific support for their position, these letters are usually marked by a rather sniffy attitude of offended sensibilities and surprise that web pages criticizing creationism actually exist. It must be scary to step outside the church.

Here’s the latest. I’ve put my impressions in red.

To whom this may concern; [this was sent to my personal email account; does he think a committee lives here?]

I had a look at your web site today and frankly can’t figure out [count me unsurprised] just what all

the uproar is concerning “scientists” such as yourself feeling that you have to
spend so much effort [it’s easy, I assure you] trying [trying?] to discredit Kent Hovind [he’s a convicted felon and phony with an unaccredited degree] and/or others in his field
the way that you do! If indeed he is the ignorant individual [yep] that you attempt to

[don’t ask me why he inserted these odd random line breaks]

portray him as, “writing like a fourth grader” [excuse me, that would be “second grader“] as you say, then why should you
waste such valuable research time slandering him? [it takes very little time to dismantle Hovind; why are you wasting your valuable time writing to me?]

My guess is, as I have watched this whole rairoading [he was convicted, and his own testimony and behavior indicted him] of him and his
organization

[mystery line breaks!]

come about, that individuals and groups for that matter with your particular
mind-set are either scared to death [he’s a worm, not a snake] of the debate [there is no debate] between creationism [bullshit] and
Darwinian evolution [science. We win!], or that you simply do not have the intellectual cahonas [??? Do you mean “cojones”?] to
engage creationists such as Mr. Hovind in any real truth [he has none to share]– revealing discourse
concerning the subject.

What are you afraid of? [ebola, senility, and bad clams]

I find it quite revealing indeed that when the “non-believers” in the world
bash Christians as a bunch of prudish [QFT], bible thumping [QFT], homophobic [QFT], hate
mongering [QFT] flat earthers [QFT] that nobody really seems to care [it’s the banality of a pedestrian truth]; in fact it has become
something of a national pass-time [???] it would seem. But!!!!! [are you wearing your underpants on your head?], suggest for a moment
that the so-called [what other scientific community is there?] scientific community has at the very least bought into a
theory that has been highly questionable at best since it’s inception [nope—enthusiastically embraced by the scientifically literate at its inception, and become more and more strungly supported since], and the
mobs are ready to light torches and take up their pitchforks! [personally, I prefer a cyber-pistol]

With all due respect [dishonest again], I find your tactic of attacking Mr. Hovind [I think it’s entirely appropriate to criticize tax cheats and creationists—why should he be exempt?], and on such
ridiculous grounds as his doctoral dissertation no less [it’s true, his dissertation was rather ridiculous], quite an immature
stretch to say the least [given that “Dr” Dino calls himself a degreed scientist on the basis of that thesis, examining its quality is entirely reasonable]. This is exactly the kind of thing [what? that we examine scholarly claims?] that tells me that
not all scientists are anywhere near to being the “rational thinkers” [I question the ability of Hovind fans to recognize such] that we’re

[another line break interlude]

always being reminded of in this God hating society [I wish] that we are living in.

Get some backbone about yourself sir and take a look at ALL the evidence [curious fact: these cranks are always telling me I missed some key evidence, but they never quite get to the point of telling me what it is], not
just the convenient parts as you and yours are so quick to accuse creationists
of doing. [instead of whining, you could have actually cited some evidence…but I think these jokers know I’ll joyfully tear their ‘facts’ apart]

Sincerely, W.C. Revere [email says “William McKinney”, but signs it “W.C. Revere”. Don’t play games, please.]

I get these fairly regularly. There’s some odd combination of oblivious hero-worship and total cluelessness about the internet in Kent Hovind fans that sparks a need to rage at me. I don’t reply, but I do feel like sending them links to Fark or /b/ just to wake them up a little more to the medium they’re using.

I get to start teaching again this week!

Oh, boy, it’s been a while. I was out for the first few lectures (which I am grateful to my colleagues for covering), so in my introductory biology class I get to plunge straight in to Darwin, Darwin’s finches, and Sean Carroll’s The Making of the Fittest. No preludes, baby, I’m diving right in.

And then I stumble across CreationConversations, which is kind of like the Ask A Biologist website, if it were staffed by idiots. People write in, and the gang there, which seems to be mostly junior league suck-ups to Ken Ham and Answers in Genesis, tries to answer from the Biblical perspective. It’s simply sad and pitiful. Here’s an example of the kinds of questions they get:

I am starting ninth grade biology. I know that we will be learning about evolution. I’ve been doing a lot of reading and have a very solid belief in creation. I was wondering how I should go about talking to my friends and other students about creation and the lie of evolution in and out of the classroom. I’ve tried talking a few times about it with my closest friends and it is sad to see that their beliefs are so firmly rooted in evolution that they have never questioned it. I fear not only for my friends but for my generation seeing as they have been taught nothing but evolution for their entire life. Many of them don’t even believe in God. How can I show not only my friends, but other students, that evolution is wrong?

First of all, I’d have to tell this student he’s living in the paranoid fantasy land of most Christians: it’s highly unlikely, unless he’s at a very good school, that he will be confronted with much evolutionary theory, and the odds that his faith will be challenged at all is vanishingly small. In fact, if he’s perturbed at all, all he has to do is squeak something about Jesus and the teacher will probably run away as fast as possible — not because they’re afraid of your stupid questions, but because obnoxious evangelical parents can make the teacher’s professional life a seething hell.

Also, most of his peers will not have been exposed to much evolution at all, but if they go to church, they’ve probably gotten mega-doses of creationism. There will be no persecution. His biggest disappointment will be that he won’t get to be a martyr.

College, of course, will be an entirely different matter.

The answers he gets at the site are amazing for their semi-delusional thinking: most are entirely confident that they’ve got buckets of apologetics and evidence, and they’re mainly warning the poor kid to go easy on the defenseless evolutionists. They so rarely face serious opposition in the schools that they fantasize that the pile of crap on their site actually has some weight to it; but really, creationists rely completely on cultural intimidation to cow their opposition.

Here’s one representative answer they give:

‘

My counsel is to check your attitude when you decide to confront an issue in class. Be sure that you are humble and respectful of others’ feelings. No one, especially a teacher, likes to look the fool in front of their peers or their students. Since the science controversy is firmly rooted in worldviews, when you begin to deconstruct their presuppositions, they can get defensive. It is far better to sow seeds of doubt and let an issue go, than to argue your point to a crushing conclusion. You may win battles that way, but lose the war, so to speak.

As Justin suggested, be the best possible student you can be. Learn the expected answers, but continually analyze the fallacies and presuppositions purveyed in class. A ninth grade biology course is a survey course, so you will be given a lot of generalizations. Don’t be arrogant or belittling when you decide to question one of these ideas. Look for the underlying truths in what you are learning. You will discover that, unless your teacher or the textbook author(s) are on a mission to convert students to evolution, you probably won’t even discuss it except tangentially in most of the topics.

Awww, how sweet. What this fellow is unaware of is that this poor student has nothing to be arrogant about — if he actually met a teacher who was able and willing to confront his misconceptions, he’d be hung out to dry. The answer also reflects a common creationist myth: the Big Daddy fable, in which the gentle, polite Christian boy humiliates the hysterical, dishonest Evilutionist professor by calmly refuting every piece of evidence brought up in the classroom.

It never happens.

In my experience, the reverse is true. The poor kid gets flustered and his story falls apart in a few moments’ conversation, and he looks like a total dork — I don’t enjoy these situations at all, because then I have to struggle to keep him from abject humiliation while explaining how thoroughly wrong he is. That’s the nasty part of these pro-creation sites that they don’t talk about: they are cheerfully encouraging students to have a false sense of competence, and then shooing them off into the lion’s den to be publicly mauled, while the cowards back at CreationConversations, who are the ones I really would enjoy eviscerating in the classroom, are taking it easy with their back-patting congregations of equally ignorant kooks, lying their asses off to children.

Oh, well. The good news is that students come out of our biology classes here at UMM well-prepared to shred the frauds of creationism.

ICR surrenders in one battle

The Institute for Creation Research had been trying to get approval from the state of Texas to offer graduate degrees in science education — they failed. Now they have actually publicly admitted defeat, which is gratifying to see.

So we won’t be seeing a wave of teachers with master’s degrees in science ed and absolutely no science training emerging from the state. Instead, though, they’ll be offering this:

Replacing it, apparently, is the ICR’s School of Biblical Apologetics, which offers a Master of Christian Education degree; Creation Research is one of four minors. The ICR explains, “Due to the nature of ICR’s School of Biblical Apologetics — a predominantly religious education school — it is exempt from licensing by the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board. Likewise, ICR’s School of Biblical Apologetics is legally exempt from being required to be accredited by any secular or ecumenical or other type of accrediting association.”

This isn’t a problem. Their lunacy will be clearly and accurately labeled, and that’s all we should care about.

That didn’t take long

Already, deranged Discovery Institute shill David Klinghoffer is blaming the hostage-taking nut James Lee’s actions on Darwinism.

Witness the recent examples of Holocaust Memorial Museum shooter James von Brunn, Columbine High School shooter Eric Harris, Jokela High School shooter Pekka Eric Auvinen. Historical figures who drew inspiration, if indirectly, from Darwinian theory include Charles Manson, Mao Tse-tung, Joseph Stalin, Josef Mengele, and of course Adolf Hitler. I’ve written about this many times before and received much abuse for it, not least when I took up the theme on the Huffington Post. (An editor advised me they will not let me do that again.)

Yes, Lee was apparently an atheist, and he attributed the need for his actions to a badly mangled version of Darwinism (although, really, a strict Darwinian fanatic probably wouldn’t rush to commit a violent act that could only end with him dead or incarcerated, and also wouldn’t be ranting about ending reproduction for his own species. I’d expect a truly fervent Darwinian to be avoiding risks and expending a great deal of effort in courtship, or at least frantically making lots of donations to the local sperm or ovum bank.) Yes, we can make lists of atheists or people who have fulminated superficially about Darwin who have done evil crimes. So? We can also make lists of Christians who have committed evil.

But let us be clear about a few things about godless Darwinians:

  • They don’t make claims that believing in Darwin will make you a good person.

  • They don’t make claims that taking courses in Darwinism will clear up your mental health issues.

  • Certified Darwinian counselors do not have free parking privileges so they can rush to the sick and dying to soothe them with a little doctrine in population genetics.

  • There is no Darwinist creed that justifies and encourages slaughtering creationists.

  • There are no Darwinist elites laying down fatwas against Discovery Channel executives, not even for Ghost Lab or Bear Grylls.

  • They do not seek salvation in the mixed bag of pop sci programming on a cable television station. Jamie and Adam are not our prophets, even if Mythbusters is pretty good, mostly.

  • There is no grassroots collection of Darwinist supporters lurking in the remote urban wilderness who would have sheltered James Lee while he was on the lam.

  • There was no supportive mob of god-hatin’ Darwin lovers converging on the Discovery Building to chant in support of James Lee.

  • There will be no surly academic Darwinists who will grumble “no comment” at reporters while gathering with the faithful to praise their heroic martyr, James Lee, in the privacy of their communes and revival meetings.

  • They all pretty much think James Lee was a mentally ill doofus who got everything wrong — at best a subject of pity.

  • There will be no conspiracy theories that James Lee was a good man set up by the Christian majority.

  • They will not be telling each other that James Lee will receive his reward for his righteous actions in Darwinist Paradise.

  • If he’d lived, James Lee would not have been given free legal help by the Society for the Study of Evolution, nor would they have hidden his crimes and helped him relocate to another regional chapter, which would not have been told about his violent proclivities.

  • There will be no secretive James Lee Society set up to work for reduced fertility and angrier television documentaries in his name.

  • No one will be writing generous op-eds in which James Lee is praised as a misguided figure with his heart in the right place, in the bosom of scientific thinking.

  • James von Brunn, Eric Harris, Pekka Eric Auvinen, and not even Manson, Mao, Stalin, Mengele, or Hitler are praised in any biology textbooks. James Lee will not, either.

  • An occasional lone nut spouting idiosyncratic visions of Darwinism does not change the fact that we have the scientific evidence on our side.

  • James Lee does not have a constituency, nor does he have any representatives working for his goals in congress.

  • James Lee did not increase his inclusive fitness.

I’m sorry, Mr Krazypants Klinghoffer, but there’s basically no way anyone can argue that James Lee was representative of any significant subgroup of evolutionary biologists, fans of Darwin, or freethinkers; he’s a sad, lonely outlier whose weird collection of confused ideas were a product of his isolation and mental illness, not any substantial strand of evolutionary theory.

Oh, and Hitler did not derive his ideas from Darwin: his primary intellectual antecedent would have been Houston Stewart Chamberlain, who detested anything to do with that Darwin fellow’s theory. You’ve had this explained to you often enough, that Hitler was if anything nominally Catholic, bizarrely pagan, and his ideas had nothing to do with science or with atheism, but you don’t care, I know. Is it any surprise that you’re considered too obtuse even for the Huffington Post?

Intelligent Gestation Theory

In case you’ve been wondering what was going to come after Intelligent Design, here’s a similar hypothesis I stumbled across, Intelligent Gestation Theory.

Hello fellow Christians and Atheists,

My name is Erik Lumberjack. I’m founder and chief scientist of the
recently formed Intelligent Gestation Institute. Our goal is apply
insights gained from Intelligent Design to combat the current Theory
of Pregnancy, i.e., that humans develop gradually from a sperm and
egg. Our FAQs below provide more details.

Thank you and best regards, Eric Lumberjack

OPEN LETTER TO KANSAS SCHOOL BOARD

Thank you for teaching Intelligent Design alongside the Theory of
Evolution. Our children deserve to hear multiple viewpoints.
I’m concerned, though, that only one Theory of Pregnancy is currently
being taught.

Namely, that humans develop in gradual stages from an initial sperm
and egg. First looking like a salmon, and then a lizard, and only
after long and slow development finally resembling a human.

As founder and chief scientist of the Intelligent Gestation
Institute,
I request that equal time be given to Intelligent Gestation, an
alternative approach that is gaining increasing support within the
scientific community.

These are key points regarding Intelligent Gestation for your
reference.

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

Question: Then why does the mother’s stomach get bigger?
Answer: Scientific studies have shown that it’s impossible for human
breasts alone to hold the amount of milk required to nurture infants.
That’s why the body gradually prepares by storing milk in the
mothers’
stomach. Scientific evidence of this can be seen by observing cows.

Question: But sonograms show pictures of developing infants, don’t
they?
Answer: Experiments have shown that ultrasound equipment creates
sound
waves that cause milk to curdle. So medical staff are creating these
images, and then the very same staff are interpreting the images that
they themselves created. This can hardly be called scientific.

Question: Then where do babies come from?
Answer: Let’s not base conclusions on anecdotes, but look at the case
for which we have the most recorded evidence. When the key figure of
human history was born, textual research has shown that he was
begotten as son when a dove descended from the heavens. More than
2,000 original texts agree on this point, many of them dating back to
several years from the original event, when eye witnesses were still
living. In addition to this, the past 2,000 years of historical
observation have also taught us where babies come from. The stork —
which the genome project has just recently proven to be of the same
ovarian family, genus and phyla as the dove. The probability of this
coincidence occurring by chance alone has been calculated at less
than
1 over a number so large that it is greater than the number of
subatomic particles in the entire state of Arkansas.

Question: Is Intelligent Gestation faith based?
Answer: No. Unlike the Theory of Pregnancy, it is based on observable
and testable scientific fact.

Please contact us if you would like more details, or free samples of
the textbooks that we are preparing for your school use.

Thank you, and best regards,

Erik Lumberjack

Founder and Chief Scientist
Intelligent Gestation Institute

Web site: https://sites.google.com/site/intelligentgestationinstitute/
Alternate site: http://www.intelligent-gestation.com
Contact info: erik.lumberj…@gmail.com

FAQ FOR SCIENTISTS

Question: But why does the mother’s stomach get smaller immediately
after childbirth?
Answer: When the infant arrives, the milk transfers from the mother’s
stomach to the mother’s breasts in preparation for breast feeding.
How
else could a mother feed her child? We challenge scientists to
provide
us with one example where a mother has breast fed her child from her
stomach.

Question: But I’ve seen photos of children being born directly from
their mothers.
Answer: Photos can be retouched. But more importantly, why are you
looking down there?

Question: Delivery rooms are sealed off. How could a stork or dove
get
in?
Answer: Ships are made of reinforced steel, but mice have entered
them
for centuries. We challenge scientists to produce one example of a
ship without a mouse.

Question: I’ve been in delivery rooms and never seen a stork or dove.
Answer: Absence of evidence of stork is not evidence of absence of
stork. We don’t notice mice either, but one day we open our
refrigerator door and notice the cheese is missing. The result speaks
for itself.

Question: But I’ve seen an egg cell divide in science class after
being joined by a sperm.
Answer: Imagine that you’re an egg and a sperm collides with you at
the equivalent of 2,000 kilometers per hour. You would divide as
well.

Question: Does this mean that you’re not opposed to stem cell
research?
Answer: We are not opposed, but our scientists don’t expect viable
medical applications. Any experiments done on stem cells would surely
only be applicable to similar plants with similar stems.

Question: Why is the Intelligent Gestation Institute speaking out at
this time?
Answer: If our children are taught in school that humans develop in
their mothers’ wombs from something that looks like a catfish, and
then a gecko, and then a reces monkey, and finally a human, it’s not
a
small step for them to believe later on that man evolved from ape.
This reduces humans to something purely physical and degrades our
worth as spiritual beings. If our children believe they descended
from
heaven, they will try to act heavenly. But how will our children act
if they are taught they come from come? How will they be encouraged
to
act morally? To be honest, our scientists are disappointed that the
Intelligent Design community has thrown in the towel so readily on
this very important issue.

Question: Would you be willing to debate Richard Dawkins on this
issue?
Answer: It would look good on his resume, but we’re not so sure about
ours. We would consider such an opportunity, but must take care not
to
elevate his theories to appear to have the achieved the status of
true
science.

Question: What are the academic qualifications of the scientists at
your institute? We’ve been told that your chief research scientist
has
a B.Sc. degree from the Livestock University of Kentucky with a major
in roast beef and a minor in mashed potatoes.
Answer: That is completely unfounded and we’re disappointed that the
secular press has stooped to using add homily arguments to try to
discredit us.

Question: In summary, is there any decisive evidence that you can
give
us?
Answer: It basically comes down to this. Which is more likely, that
we
developed in our mothers’ wombs through an unimaginably large number
of intermediate stages and then due to purely physical forces and
blind chance ended up as human beings that are fine tuned to an order
of magnitude of 10 to the 1,000th power, or that we’re a bundle from
heaven? Occam’s razor makes the answer more than obvious. Let me give
an example. Let’s say you’re walking on a beach and find a baby
wrapped in a blanket on the sand. Which is more likely, that an
intelligent being left the baby there, or that someone came on the
beach? People that make extraordinary claims must provide
extraordinary evidence to support those claims. The burden of proof
lies with them, not us. Our Institute is prepared to offer $100,000
to
anyone who will pop a nut on national TV and form something as
intricate as the human eye from sperm. And anyways, if humans
developed in their mothers’ wombs from something that looked like a
catfish, how come you don’t see catfish walking among us today and
giving interviews on TV?

I get email invitations

Isn’t this sweet? It’s a polite invitation from Pastor Dale in Ohio, which was also sent to a lot of other skeptics/atheists. It’s so polite and open-minded!

Greetings. I want to let you know about an upcoming project, and I invite any of you or your consumers to participate. I realize your viewpoint is drastically different from ours, but I firmly believe that we all stand to gain from honest open discussion with those who see the world differently from us, and that spending all our time with those of like mind creates intellectual inbreeding. We make no demands of participants except that all treat each other with civility. Thank-you for your consideration.

—–
On October 10, 2010 (2:00 PM Eastern/ GMT-5), Rev. Dr. Joel Heck of Concordia University, Austin will give a one hour presentation on the Book of Genesis, followed by a question and answer session. While the host congregation will be Shepherd of the Ridge Lutheran Church in North Ridgeville, OH, Dr. Heck will give his presentation from Austin via streaming Internet video. We will, in turn, broadcast this presentation live via our website, shepherdoftheridge.org. Anyone anywhere in the world with a broadband internet connection can watch live. We will also allow viewers to comment and ask questions via our chat boxes. The presentation will be recorded for those unable to watch live.

Following the event, we will begin an ongoing indepth study of Genesis. The discussion will take place on multiple levels and locations. We will meet live to discuss it in person on Sunday evenings at 7 PM (Eastern) at Shepherd of the Ridge Lutheran Church. The conversation will be streamed live, so anyone unable to be present can watch and join in the discussion via chat, Twitter, or Facebook. Those unable to watch live can either watch the recorded class or listen online via podcast or just read the questions online and discuss the questions in the comments section. We will also have forums to discuss tangential topics like the age of the earth, archaeology, and more.

Anyone interested is welcome to attend or participate in any way, regardless of beliefs, background, or location.

Get more information and sign up at http://shepherdoftheridge.org/bible_study/genesis for updates.

What a nice invitation. You’d almost think they were going to discuss the origin of the world seriously. But, you know, you can’t trust Christians who promise an “indepth study of Genesis”, because behind the polite and friendly mask of the happy reverend is the brain of a drooling idiot. I looked up Dr Joel Heck. He’s…unimpressive.

The first thing you should know about Heck is that he is a signatory to Answers in Genesis’ Affirmations and Denials Essential to a Consistent Christian (Biblical) Worldview. That is a marvellous document. You owe it to yourself to browse through it, just to see how deep into crazy our opposition is nestled. Most of it is general creationist assertions (There are no transitional fossils! The creation was in exactly 6 24 hour days! There was a global flood! Etc.) but my two favorite sections are the more general ones that lay out rules that are fundamentally anti-science, because they deny the possibility of any source of knowledge other than the Christian Bible. Remember these when some AiG young earth creationist tells you that they love science, as Ken Ham has done.

3. We affirm that the final guide to the interpretation of Scripture is Scripture itself. Scripture must be compared with Scripture to obtain the correct interpretation of a particular text, and clear Scriptures must be used to interpret ambiguous texts, not vice versa. We affirm that the special revelation of infallible and inerrant Scripture must be used to correctly interpret the general revelation of the cursed Creation.
We deny that uninspired sources of truth-claims (i.e., history, archeology, science, etc.) can be used to interpret the Scriptures to mean something other than the meaning obtained by classical historical-grammatical exegesis. We further deny the view, commonly used to evade the implications or the authority of Biblical teaching, that Biblical truth and scientific truth must remain totally exclusive from each other and that science could never agree with the Bible.

4. We affirm that no apparent, perceived, or claimed evidence in any field, including history, archeology and science, can be considered valid if it contradicts the Scriptural record. We also affirm that the evidence from such fields of inquiry is always subject to interpretation by fallible people who do not possess all information.
We deny that scientific “evidence” used to “prove” millions of years is objective fact and not heavily influenced by naturalistic presuppositions.

Section 3 is clear: the only source of knowledge about Scripture is Scripture, and science and history that uses any other source of information cannot validly cross-check the Biblical accounts. Section 4 declares that any history or science that does not agree with Scripture is wrong. But at the same time, notice that at the end of Section 3, they announce that they deny that science and the Bible could ever disagree. Why? Because True Science always agrees with the Bible.

It’s a perfect closed loop. They have closed their eyes to the universe around them, and declared the Bible to be the Pole Star of all knowledge, perfect and consistent and uncontradicted by reality by definition. It’s actually extremely creepy to anyone not indoctrinated into their dogma.

So, does anyone expect the Shepherd of the Ridge discussion to be enlightening or interesting in anything other than a psychopathological way? You shouldn’t. It’s going to be a nightmare of ignorant people insisting that non-Biblical information may not contaminate their thinking. And I don’t give a damn how polite their invitation to the skeptical community was.

But wait…so far this is all guilt by association. Maybe Joel Heck got hoodwinked into signing AiG’s stupid document, and he’s really going to make a less exclusive, rational argument.

No, sorry. One of Heck’s lectures has been recorded, and I listened to part of it before the inanity became too overwhelming. He argues for a strictly literal interpretation of the book of Genesis, and his ‘logic’ is perfectly consistent with the Affirmations above. Here are two of the arguments I heard him make:

  1. In parts of the New Testament, the authors clearly announce when a story being told is an allegory or parable. Nowhere in Genesis does the author say, “This is an allegorical account of creation”, therefore, it is literally true.

    That should leave you flabbergasted for a bit. Think about it. I have noticed that neither Banks’ Consider Phlebas nor Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings nor Melville’s Moby Dick include declarations in the text that the stories are fictional tales, therefore, we should seriously consider the possiblity of shape-shifting Balrogs on an epic quest to hunt down a space-whale.

    That’s the kind of logic we’re working with here: the bloody literal-minded smallness of a ‘scholar’ who needs blinking neon lights in the text to figure out the damned obvious.

  2. His other argument was another familiar one from the young earth creationist crowd: if the story of Genesis isn’t literally true, than other parts of the Bible that refer to it collapse into falsehood, too.

    Sin entered the world with the fall of Adam…If evolution is true…then you have death long before you have the first human being, and that makes Paul’s statement in Romans false.

    Well, yes. If it is an article of your faith that nothing died before 6,000 years ago, and someone finds a bone from an animal that died 7,000 years ago, then your belief has been falsified, and all inferences from your failed premise are called into question. The fact that you really, really like that inference that you’ll go to Jesusland after you die is simply not a factor in determining the truth status of the Jesusland assertion.

    But don’t forget the AiG escape clause! The bone can’t be 7,000 years old because that would contradict the Bible, therefore all such uncomfortably disagreeable evidence should be discarded.

I might listen in on the freakish conversation in October, but I doubt that I’ll be able to last long — listening to Heck’s horrible recorded lecture inspired simultaneous somnolence and rage, which is a weird combination not to be courted often. Also, the AiG declaration is extremely limiting, not at all open to discourse about real ideas or evidence, so I can’t imagine what they could actually talk about — I’d be curious to see how the audience manages it.

Some readers here may be familiar with the grad school journal club tradition, where every week a paper is subject to critical examination, and people come prepared with other sources to either savage or reinforce the lessons of the experiments. Do not expect that at Shepherd of the Ridge. Expect the antithesis of that. I admit to some curiosity about what the opposite of a scientific discussion would look like, and here’s an opportunity.

And of course it will be very polite and not rude at all. Some will consider that a virtue to make the whole exercise worthwhile.

A sociologist visits the Creation “Museum”

Bernadette Barton provides an interesting perspective on Ken Ham’s wretched little palace of ignorance. The Creation “Museum” is not a happy place.

Particularly nerve-wracking were signs warning that guests could be asked to leave the premises at any time. The group’s reservation confirmation also noted that museum staff reserved the right to kick the group off the property if they were not honest about the “purpose of [the] visit.”

Because of these messages, Barton said, the students felt they might accidentally reveal themselves as nonbelievers and be asked to leave. This pressure is a form of “compulsory Christianity” that is common in a region known for its fundamentalism, Barton said. People who don’t ascribe to fundamentalism often report the need to hide their thoughts for fear of being judged or snubbed.

At one point, Barton reported in her paper, a guard with a dog circled a student pointedly twice without saying anything. When he left, a museum patron approached the student and said, “The reason he did that is because of the way you’re dressed. We know you’re not religious; you just don’t fit in.” (The student was wearing leggings and a long shirt, Barton writes.)

The pressures were particularly tough for gay members of the group, thanks to exhibits discussing the sinfulness of homosexuality and same-sex marriage. A lesbian couple became paranoid about being near or touching one another, afraid they would be “found out,” Barton writes. This “self-policing” is a common occurrence in same-sex relationships in the Bible Belt, Barton said.

I felt it when I was there. I didn’t fit in, either, and having guards with dogs wandering about isn’t exactly welcoming. I suppose if you were a fundamentalist Christian with a finely honed persecution complex, you might appreciate visiting an armed camp where conformity is enforced, but it really wasn’t my favorite atmosphere.

The article does get the creationist’s side of the story.

The signs and warnings, he said, are because people will occasionally come to the museum to hand out anti-Creationist materials, disturbing other visitors.

“We know that the nature of the subject is controversial,” Lisle said in a telephone interview. “It’s just one of the things that we have to deal with in a fallen world.”

Lisle defended the anti-gay messages in the museum as part of the museum’s goal to stay true to Biblical teachings.

Funny, isn’t it…creationists come to real museums all the time, hand out their literature, even lead tour groups through and babble stupidly against the message of the exhibits, and no one patrols the place with police dogs to suppress the free expression of dissent. I wonder why?