I get email

I wondered what the creationists were doing after last night’s debate, when all the godless rationalists were partying down. They were composing a condescending letter to rationalize away their defeat!

Here’s what Ross Olson of the Twin Cities Creation Science Association sent me and Mark Borrello and Jerry Bergman this morning.

Thank you all

Thanks to you all for keeping the debate on a courteous intellectual level.

Obviously not all the questions were addressed but the event illustrated that it can be extremely valuable to do so.

Dr. Myers, you have a unique position, with your immensely popular blog, to change the whole complexion of the discussion. Remember how you treated Dr. Bergman on your blog?

On Monday, 16 November, I’m going to be doing a debate. I hate debates, but I’ve been dragged into this one. It’s being promoted by the local creationist loons and CASH, and I’d like to see a good turnout from the sensible, scientific, godless community. I’ll be arguing with a loud clown, Jerry Bergman, on “Should Intelligent Design Be Taught in the Schools?” I think you can guess which side I’m going to be on.

You can, by the power of example and occasional criticism of overzealous followers, turn the blog into an actual forum of ideas. It would be a great contribution to the intellectual world.

To be addressed is your claim that evolution adds information. That needs to be supported. Your closing remarks about evolutionary research into the beak changes of Darwin’s Finches need to be answered with the point that they are still finches and the changes cycle with changing environmental conditions. The only point at which the crowd got rowdy was with the mention of evolution’s influence on Hitler. Actually, that issue is not solved by shouting because there is a strong case that the desire to improve the race leads to eugenic and ethnic cleansing policies. Indeed, your claim that morality comes from our culture needs to answer the question, “What if my culture is the Mafia?” Other evolutionary apologists have candidly pointed out that the only morality that can come out of evolution is that I leave my genes, as many of them as possible, to the next generation. Also, a truly interactive academic blog would allow posting of the studies on the academic success of students exposed to both evolution and intelligent design. You have consistently claimed that those students who do not get pure evolution will fail, but without offering any experimental or observational data. And to claim that evidence against evolution does not represent evidence for intelligent design needs closer analysis. There is a logical dichotomy involved. Life either has a natural origin or not. If not, then the origin must come from outside natural mechanisms. You can claim that we just don’t know, but while waiting, need to entertain the possibility that there is a cause outside of nature. To say there can be no such thing is not a scientific statement or even a logical one but an a priori elimination of one whole field of inquiry. Your redefinition of vestigial organs as reduced function may get some traction but is not the way they were presented 100 years ago, but there is no doubt that “Junk DNA’ was clearly touted as evolutionary leftovers and delayed the search for function, which was predicted by Intelligent design.

Also, you have not only personally attacked Dr. Bergman, you have allowed your followers to misrepresent his qualifications by focusing on the institution granting one of his PhDs. Here is a CV:

M.P.H., Northwest Ohio Consortium for Public Health (Medical College of Ohio, Toledo, Ohio; University of Toledo, Toledo, Ohio; Bowling Green State University, Bowling Green, Ohio), 2001.
M.S. in biomedical science, Medical College of Ohio, Toledo, Ohio, 1999.
Ph.D. in human biology, Columbia Pacific University, San Rafael, California, 1992.
M.A. in social psychology, Bowling Green State University, Bowling Green, Ohio, 1986.
Ph.D. in measurement and evaluation, minor in psychology, Wayne State University, Detroit, Michigan, 1976.
M.Ed. in counseling and psychology, Wayne State University, Detroit, Michigan, 1971.
B.S., Wayne State University, Detroit, Michigan, 1970. Major area of study was sociology, biology, and psychology.
A.A. in Biology and Behavioral Science, Oakland Community College, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, 1967.

If your case is strong, students will be enriched by being allowed to see it interact with the opposition. And your call for punishment of those who reject the ruling paradigm conflicts with the view of science as growing and self correcting. How can purveyors of new ideas work hard to establish them if they are not allowed to do so? Thomas Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions pointed out that it is very difficult for those entrenched in the establishment to change and paradigm shifts come with generational revolutions by those whose life work and reputations are not tied to the current model.

Dr. Borrello, because you have participated in a debate with me, I know you are in favor of interactions and Dr. Bergman, I know you not only are in favor of dialogue but would be delighted to bring this to the next level. Because you have been willing to change in the past, you have demonstrated that data makes a difference to you and I dare say that you might even refine some of the arguments you made at the debate given the chance.

So, Dr. Myers, are you willing to take your debate persona and transplant it to the Blogosphere?

Ross Olson

Does he really think I treated Bergman’s ideas with less contempt in the debate than I do on the blog? Trust me, the reputation I have on the internet that I seem to rip off my enemies’ heads with my claws and slake my thirst at the spurting stump of their neck does not accord well with reality — I do the same thing here on the blog that I did last night, it’s just a little more obvious in person that there is a human being behind these words. Mr Olson really needs to face up to the fact that all that happened was that the paladin-for-hire he brought into my backyard to knock me off my high horse showed up in rusty armor, wielding a bladder-onna-stick, and got his ass kicked.

His long paragraph of creationist fallacies up there doesn’t save face for him, it merely makes him look ridiculous. I think I’ll take it apart later, but right now I’m trying to get caught up on other matters, and giving three talks over the course of this long weekend has left me a little fatigued. Have no fear, I’ll treat it appropriately, and my thirst will be slaked.

As for Bergman’s CV, it’s terrible. It’s a potted history of a dilettante striving for legitimacy with a random array of diplomas on his wall. I’m really unimpressed; I’m much more impressed with the single degree of a freshly-minted graduate student who has demonstrated some depth and fervor for an idea than that fuzzy flibbertigibbet’s list of hash.

And please don’t invoke Kuhn. Creationists are not the heralds of a coming paradigm shift; they are the rotting detritus of the old regime of unreason that has haunted the human race for far too long. There’s a difference between maintaining an open environment that encourages fresh new ideas to emerge and tolerating the sloppy housecleaning that allows moldy scum to flourish.

That Bergman-Myers debate

Well.

It was a strange event. Kittywhumpus and Greg Laden have good detailed breakdowns of the debate, so you can always read those for the audience perspective. As for me, I’ve learned that you can never prepare for a debate.

I tried. I had a focus — the topic, chosen by Bergman, was “Should Intelligent Design be taught in the schools” — and what I prepared for my side was a set of arguments on that point. I used my own experience teaching biology to lay down a few principles: to teach a subject as science, you need an explanatory mechanism or theory that provides a conceptual framework for understanding the data, and you need a body of evidence, real-world observations, measurements, and experiments that you incorporate as well as you can into the theory. I explained that Intelligent Design, in the estimation of scientists and by its proponents own admission, lacked both. Therefore, it didn’t belong in the science classroom. It is not enough for a science teacher to simply declare that “some people think an intelligent agent intervened at some point in the history of some species”, she needs specifics. She needs to be able to answer questions about how and when this intervention occurred, and how we know it. I explained that whenever IDists try to concretely define what they would teach in the classroom, it’s never about their theory or their evidence, because they have none, but that it’s always reduced to a laundry list of gripes about evolution…and I predicted that that’s all we’d hear from Bergman.

I thought it was a good argument, anyway. Too bad the other guy never addressed it.

Also, I read Bergman’s dreadful long book, Slaughter of the Dissidents. It’s entirely about how cruelly Intelligent Design creationists’ careers were cut short by a reactionary establishment that unfairly silences new ideas. It’s complete BS, but I prepared brief rebuttals of some of the major instances he wrote about, like the cases of Rodney LeVake and Carolyn Crocker and Guillermo Gonzalez and a few others, just in case. There was no just in case needed.

Fortunately, I’ve come off a couple of big science meetings, so I had at the tip of my brain several pro-science case studies, good examples of theory guiding science to produce productive information. This, also, was not needed.

There was a point in the debate where I did just throw a stack of my notes over my shoulder. They were pointless.

Bergman’s argument was bizarre and irrational. We got a long biographical introduction in which he described bouncing about from atheism to faith to a different faith, and how nobody liked him because he was an ideological pariah (I felt like mentioning that there might be other, more personal reasons people avoid the crazy person, but that would have been cruel). He made concessions and seemed to think I was right that ID lacks a strong theory, but that that wasn’t important — you don’t need theory. He teaches medical school, and he just teaches the facts.

There were two linchpins to his argument, neither of which addressed the topic at hand.

One is that he had scientifically proven that there were no such thing as vestigial organs, therefore evolution is false. How did he do this? By redefining “vestigial” to mean “having no function at all”, so all he had to do was demonstrate that it did or potentially did anything to make his case. One problem: that’s not the definition. Vestigial organs are those that are greatly reduced in one species relative to a homologous organ in another species. He kept returning to the appendix, like a dog to its vomit, all night long.

He did a lot of quirky redefinitions throughout the evening. Apparently, everything is religion, and he seemed to be on the verge of claiming that teaching science in the science classroom was a violation of the separation of church and state. He had this bizarre case of a teacher somewhere who was fired for posting the periodic table in his classroom. The periodic table was his religion, you see. I could not make sense of what he was saying, or understand how it related to the topic of the debate, and I asked for confirmable details and mentioned that I’d read his book, but didn’t remember that story anywhere in it…to which he replied that it was in volume II, and that the book was just the first in a 5-volume series. My brain briefly whited out at that revelation, and there was a moment or two in which, if I’d said anything, it would have been a chain of profanities. I kept my cool, never fear.

Oh, by the way, the periodic table is irreducibly complex. That’s also why the administration hated it.

That was his second key point: everything is irreducibly complex. He has this radical, dare I say insane, version of irreducible complexity in his head in which everything except sub-atomic particles are irreducibly complex. A carbon atom, for instance, has a specific number of protons, neutrons, and electrons, and if you change those, it is no longer a carbon atom, and therefore it fits Michael Behe’s definition of IC perfectly. Here’s Behe’s definition, if you need reminding.

By irreducibly complex I mean a single system composed of several well-matched, interacting parts that contribute to the basic function, wherein the removal of any one of the parts causes the system to effectively cease functioning. An irreducibly complex system cannot be produced directly (that is, by continuously improving the initial function, which continues to work by the same mechanism) by slight, successive modifications of a precursor system, because any precursor to an irreducibly complex system that is missing a part is by definition nonfunctional. An irreducibly complex biological system, if there is such a thing, would be a powerful challenge to Darwinian evolution.

Bergman claims that everything is IC. Which I suppose one could support with an exceptionally naive reading of the definition, in which case Behe’s argument that you need intelligent agents to create irreducibly complex systems is effectively refuted, since natural processes going on in the sun are producing irreducibly complex carbon right now. I expressed some incredulity at Bergman’s use of the term, and actually, horrendously, guiltily spent a moment defending Behe’s definition, which made me feel so dirty inside. I need a high colonic right now.

And that was it. That was his side of the debate. The only surprise left at the end was that yes, of course, Bergman puked out the “evolution leads to Hitler” argument, well past the time at which I could rip into that ugly lie. Talking to people afterwards, that seems to have been one of the most memorable moments, when Bergman briefly took off his cheerful loony yokel mask and revealed the ugly hater beneath.

Then we got a long parade of questions from both sides of the aisle (did I mention the joint was packed? It was one of the larger crowds I’ve had). Mark Borrello was a fabulous moderator — we didn’t work him too hard during the debate itself, since we both managed to hew fairly close to our allotted time slots, but he was an excellent enforcer in the Q&A, cutting short those long pronouncements we often get in these kinds of events. I did notice that he was practically choking himself after the Hitler bomb was dropped — as a historian of science himself, he would have been the perfect fellow to dismantle that nonsense, but then of course his neutrality as moderator would have been blown.

Afterwards, I joined a group from CASH and Minnesota Atheists to, I guess, celebrate. It was a total rout, I’m afraid. I have no idea what the creationists did.

And finally, we left the Twin Cities after midnight for the long drive home. I can tell I’m not going to be good for much of anything today.

(Oh, the inevitable question: yes, it was videotaped by the creationists. They said a DVD will be available. I don’t know when; somehow, I don’t think they’ll be in an enthusiastic rush to get this one out.)

Argument from ignorance, ignorance the size of Alaska

She has so much of it to spread around, too. Sarah Palin’s memoir reveals her unsurprising opinion about evolution.

Elsewhere in this volume, she talks about creationism, saying she “didn’t believe in the theory that human beings — thinking, loving beings — originated from fish that sprouted legs and crawled out of the sea” or from “monkeys who eventually swung down from the trees.” In everything that happens to her, from meeting Todd to her selection by Mr. McCain for the Republican ticket, she sees the hand of God: “My life is in His hands. I encourage readers to do what I did many years ago, invite Him in to take over.”

Unfortunately, about half the American electorate will think what she wrote is just ducky. Those words won’t dissuade very many voters at all, so don’t make the mistake of thinking this revelation will somehow cripple her campaign to become president of the US.

Oh, yeah…that debate

For those who were wondering, it’s still happening. 7:30pm tonight, at the North Star Ballroom in the St Paul Student Center, 2017 Buford Ave. S. The topic is “Should Intelligent Design be Taught in the Schools?”. I’ll be there. It’s going to be recorded. I’ll probably be available for conversation afterwards, briefly…I still have to drive all the way back to Morris tonight.

The infamous Skatje will also be in attendance.

Dang #@$%& computer

I was going to blog along with the talks today, but my note-taking computer, a little netpc, decided to turn up dead on arrival when I sat down to start listening — I had to take notes on paper. It felt medieval. There were a bunch of good talks and I’ll transcribe them later when I get a chance.

For now, I just have a brief moment before I head off to the next event, so I’ll leave you with a couple of Immensely Difficult Questions for Evolution that were just sent to me.

Q1. If humans evolved from monkeys, why are there not any other intelligent
beings that have evolved from other animals? Should we not see more
“intelligent beings” evolving from other species?

Q2. After centuries, we have yet to reproduce any artificial system that
simulates the functioning of the brain. Is it possible for such an complex
organ to have evolved from simpler organisms? how could this have been
possible?

Q1 is just a trivial variant of the “if we evolved from monkeys, why are there still monkeys” nonsense. We haven’t evolved more intelligent species because a) intelligence seems to be an unlikely destination for an evolving species, b) there is no particular reason any particular species ought to evolve intelligence rather than, say, a better immune system or adapt to a new diet or acquire more efficient camouflage, and c) any intelligent monkey-men will be either enslaved or slaughtered by the species currently occupying the intelligent-tool-user niche, i.e., us.

Q2 is also just a variant of the “it’s too complex to have evolved” argument. The human brain exists. We have evidence of predecessors with smaller brains. We can see that the brain forms by natural processes. We can see advantages to individuals in our lineage that are smarter. We can readily infer from the available evidence in anatomy, comparative biology, paleontology, molecular biology, and neuroscience that the simplest explanation, the one that requires the least invocation of mysterious, unidentified forces, is that the brain evolved. Anyone who wants to argue otherwise should provide concrete examples of other processes that could have played a role…and no, scientifically-inclined intelligent monkey-men who evolved 2 million years ago and used advanced biotechnological engineering to inflate the brains of their primitive tailless relatives is not a concrete example, unless you have real evidence of such creatures’ existence.

Oh, and vaporous cosmic deities doing likewise don’t count either, for the same reason.

What’s the opposite of education?

Plans are afoot to build a creation “science” education center in Henning, Minnesota — about two hours north of Morris. They plan to push the simple-minded literalist creationist claim that the earth is 6,000 years old and peddle the same BS that the Creation “Museum” does — it’s stark raving mad. These quotes tell the whole story:

The aim, Schultz said, is to provide families and young people with information they can use to respectfully question differing points of view they may encounter, like at school.

“What we’re finding is, many kids are subject to ridicule, lower grades, being laughed at, just because they lay forth different arguments and different interpretations of the same information,” Schultz said.

The Rev. George Sagissor, who is working to help create the learning center, said he ran into similar reactions when he attended the University of Minnesota-Morris in the 1960s.

He recalled one lecture when he said he politely raised his hand to ask a question from a creation standpoint and was asked to leave the class.

“We don’t get a chance to let our point of view be heard because we’re put down and we’re asked to shut up,” Sagissor said.

I am pleased to see that my university has a long tradition of dealing with nonsense appropriately. I’m sure that creations was polite in his questions, but I’d like to know more about the instructor’s response: I’m sure whoever he or she was was equally polite, and addressed the question in a proper way…and if the student was actually asked to leave, it was because he was being disruptive and a distraction.

Students should be subject to lower grades when they give wrong answers. Schultz is wrong, because creationists do not deal with the same information — they are selective, ignore all of the evidence that contradicts their claims, and give very, very bad arguments for their position. They invite ridicule; stupid is as stupid does, after all.

The claim of persecution is typical, too. Here they are, free to express their uninformed opinion, and even able to muster the money to build little echo chambers where they can babble about Flood Geology to each other, and they mistake the fact that real scientists are also free to point and laugh at the goofy superstitions of these wackaloons as evidence of oppression.

Ten Questions to Ask Your Biology Teacher About Intelligent Design

Why is it always 10 questions? Couldn’t they just ask one really good question? I’d prefer that to these flibbertigibbet deluges of piddling pointlessnesses that the creationists want to fling at us. I think it’s because they want to make sure no one spends too much time showing how silly each individual question is.

A few years ago, Jonathan Wells came up with his 10 questions to ask your biology teacher — they were largely drawn from his book, Icons of Evolution, and they were awful — they were only difficult to answer if you knew nothing of the science and accepted the dishonest pseudoscience Well presented as “scholarship”. NCSE has all the answers you need; I think they hoped to stump a few school teachers here and there by feeding students with a collection of questions the students wouldn’t understand, but that might hit a few gaps in the teacher’s knowledge.

Now Dembski and some guy named Sean McDowell have a new list of Ten Questions to Ask Your Biology Teacher About Intelligent Design. Once again, it’s mislead-and-confuse time.

1. Design Detection
If nature, or some aspect of it, is intelligently designed, how could we tell?

Design inferences in the past were largely informal and intuitive. Usually people knew it when they saw it. Intelligent design, by introducing specified complexity, makes the detection of design rigorous. Something is complex if it is hard to reproduce by chance and specified if it matches an independently given pattern (an example is the faces on Mt. Rushmore). Specified complexity gives a precise criterion for reliably inferring intelligence.

OK, so? Give me an independently specified pattern created by intelligent design to match against, say, a beetle. I can compare Lincoln’s face on Rushmore to photos, paintings, and death casts of the real person’s face, and can say that there’s sufficient similarity on all details to rule out the possibility that Rushmore is a natural accident. Where’s the design template for Odontolabis femoralis?

2. Looking for Design in Biology
Should biologists be encouraged to look for signs of intelligence in biological systems? Why or why not?

Scientists today look for signs of intelligence coming in many places, including from distant space (consider SETI, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence). Yet, many biologists regard it as illegitimate to look for signs of intelligence in biological systems. Why arbitrarily exclude design inferences from biology if we accept them for other scientific disciplines? It is an open question whether the apparent design in nature is real.

Nobody says you can’t look for signs of design in biological systems; so do it already, creationists! Of course, you have yet to explain where you’re going to find that independently given pattern that specifies Odontolabis femoralis. You haven’t even explained yet what artificial/design mechanisms were used in the construction of that beetle. The natural explanation has the advantage that it only postulates mechanisms that we’ve seen to operate; we don’t have to imagine a magical gene lathe operated by an invisible man.

I wouldn’t encourage a grad student to waste his time looking for design in biology because the concept is so vaguely defined and so malformed to be useless. Productive science is about getting results, and I don’t see any path given to generate useful data from this design hypothesis.

3. The Rules of Science
Who determines the rules of science? Are these rules written in stone? Is it mandatory that scientific explanations only appeal to matter and energy operating by unbroken natural laws (a principle known as methodological naturalism)?

The rules of science are not written in stone. They have been negotiated over many centuries as science (formerly called “natural philosophy”) has tried to understand the natural world. These rules have changed in the past and they will change in the future. Right now much of the scientific community is bewitched by a view of science called methodological naturalism, which says that science may only offer naturalistic explanations. Science seeks to understand nature. If intelligent causes operate in nature, then methodological naturalism must not be used to rule them out.

Who? Man, these guys have got intent and agency etched deep into their brain, don’t they?

The rules of science are entirely pragmatic — we do what works, defined as a process that produces explanations that allow us to push deeper and deeper into a problem. That’s all we care about. Show us a tool that actually generates new insights into biology, rather than recycling tired theological notions, and some scientist somewhere will use it. We’re still waiting for one.

I am amused by the use of the word ‘bewitched’ to categorize people who don’t invoke magical ad hoc explanations built around undetectable supernatural entities, however.

4. Biology’s Information Problem
How do we account for the complex information-rich patterns in biological systems? What is the source of that information?

The central problem for biology is information. Living things are not mere lumps of matter. Life is special, and what makes life special is the arrangement of its matter into very specific forms. In other words, what makes life special is information. Where did the information necessary for life come from? Where did the information necessary for the Cambrian explosion come from? How can a blind material process generate the novel information of biological systems? ID argues that such information has an intelligent source.

We know that chance and selection can generate information. This is not a problem at all.

ID can argue that Bozo the Clown put the information there. It doesn’t make it true.

5. Molecular Machines
Do any structures in the cell resemble machines designed by humans? How do we account for such structures?

The biological world is full of molecular machines that are strikingly similar to humanly made machines. In fact, they are more than similar. Just about every engineering principle that we employ in our own machines gets used at the molecular level, with this exception: the technology inside the cell vastly exceeds human technology. How, then, do biologists explain the origin of such structures? How can a blind material process generate the multiple coordinated changes needed to build a molecular machine? If we see a level of engineering inside the cell that far surpasses our own abilities, it is reasonable to conclude that these molecular machines are actually, and not merely apparently, designed.

No, the molecules in cells do not resemble human-made machines, except in the sense that they use the forces of physics and chemistry to do work. I notice that our own machines do not require supernatural forces to explain them; why should cellular machinery demand them?

Notice the sleight of hand there: they say we see a “level of engineering” in cells, therefore they are designed. They beg the question. Cells are not engineered. We have an alternative explanation, that they are evolved, which does not require conjuring up unknown forces.

6. Irreducible Complexity
What are irreducibly complex systems? Do such systems exist in biology? If so, are those systems evidence for design? If not, why not?

The biological world is full of functioning molecular systems that cannot be simplified without losing the system’s function. Take away parts and the system’s function cannot be recovered. Such systems are called irreducibly complex. How do evolutionary theorists propose to account for such systems? What detailed, testable, step-by-step proposals explain the emergence of irreducibly complex machines such as the flagellum? Given that intelligence is known to design such systems, it is a reasonable inference to conclude that they were designed.

“Irreducibly complex” systems exist in biology. The catch is that they can be easily generated by natural processes, and IC does not imply intent or design. We explain complex organelles like the flagellum by looking in the cell for related structures that show potential paths to the structure; we know of natural processes, like gene duplication, cooption and exaptation, and coevolution that can produce features that exhibit irreducible complexity in the final state.

That last sentence is a classic non sequitur. We know that human beings build penis-shaped objects; that does not imply that Bill Dembski’s penis is made of silicone and has an on-off switch, let alone that someone made it in an injection-molding machine.

7. Similar Structures
Human designers reuse designs that work well. Life forms also reuse certain structures (the camera eye, for example, appears in humans and octopuses). How well does this evidence support Darwinian evolution? Does it support intelligent design more strongly?

Evolutionary biologists attribute similar biological structures to either common descent or convergence. Structures are said to result from convergence if they evolved independently from distinct lines of organisms. Darwinian explanations of convergence strain credulity because they must account for how trial-and-error tinkering (natural selection acting on random variations) could produce strikingly similar structures in widely different organisms and environments. It’s one thing for evolution to explain similarity by common descent–the same structure is then just carried along in different lineages. It’s another to explain it as the result of blind tinkering that happened to hit on the same structure multiple times. Design proponents attribute such similar structures to common design (just as an engineer may use the same parts in different machines). If human designers frequently reuse successful designs, the designer of nature can surely do the same.

Camera eyes evolved independently multiple times because there are a limited number of ways to build an image-forming light-detection device. An eyeball with a light-sensitive sheet on the back (a retina) and a lens in front is a natural way to do it. When we look at the octopus and human eye, though, we also see a host of differences: the octopus eye has a more efficient retina that puts the light collectors at the front of the light path, and instead of channeling all the outputs from the photoreceptors into a single point that creates a blind spot, the output neurons project in a diffuse array out the back of the eyeball.

They also use different molecular pathways to generate a response — we have ciliary photoreceptors, they have rhabdomeric photoreceptors. Why, it looks as if both lineages have been carrying out blind tinkering to produce something functional, and the there are deep differences under the superficial similarities!

So, why didn’t the designer use similar eyeball modules in humans and octopuses? You don’t get to argue that the designer used the engineering principle of recycling similar modules in different lineages while ignoring the fact that there are substantial differences between those two kinds of eyes.

8. Fine-Tuning
The laws of physics are fine-tuned to allow life to exist. Since designers are capable of fine-tuning a system, can design be considered the best explanation for the universe?

Physicists agree that the constants of nature have a strange thing in common: they seem precisely calibrated for the existence of life. As Frederick Hoyle famously remarked, it appears that someone has “monkeyed” with physics. Naturalistic explanations that attempt to account for this eerie fine-tuning invariably introduce entities for which there is no independent evidence (for example, they invoke multiple worlds with which we have no physical way of interacting). The fine-tuning of the universe strongly suggests that it was intelligently designed.

Oh, please. I’d be more impressed if the constants of nature were not calibrated for the existence of life, and we were here anyway. Now that would be eerie. That the universe has laws that are consistent with our existence does not in any way imply that it was designed.

9. The Privileged Planet
The Earth seems ideally positioned in our galaxy for complex life to exist and for scientific discovery to advance. Does this privileged status of Earth indicate intelligent design? Why or why not?

Many factors had to come together on earth for human life to exist (chapter 9). We exist in just the right place in just the right type of galaxy at just the right cosmic moment. We orbit the right type of star at the right distance for life. The earth has large surrounding planets to protect us from comets, a moon to direct important life-permitting cycles, and an iron core that protects us from harmful radiation. Moreover, the earth has many features that facilitate scientific discovery, such as a moon that makes possible perfect eclipses. Humans seem ideally situated on the earth to make scientific discoveries. This suggests that a designer designed our place in the world so that we can understand the world’s design. Naturalism, by contrast, leaves it a complete mystery why we should be able to do science and gain insight into the underlying structure of the world.

Isn’t this the same concept as ‘problem’ 9? We belong to a scientific/technological society; it is unsurprising that we live on a world in which that is possible. Again, I’d be more baffled if the features of this planet conspired against scientific discovery, but we made them anyway.

10. The Origin of the Universe
The universe gives every indication of having a beginning. Since something cannot come from nothing, is it legitimate to conclude that a designer made the universe? If not, why not?

For most of world history, scientists believed the universe was eternal. With advances in our understanding of cosmology over the last forty years, however, scientists now recognize that the universe had a beginning and is finite in duration and size. In other words, the universe has not always been there. Since the universe had a beginning, why not conclude that it had a designer that brought it into existence? Since matter, space, and time themselves had a beginning, this would suggest that the universe had a non-physical, non-spatial, and non-temporal cause. A designer in the mold of the Christian God certainly fits the bill.

Question begging again? Is this the only trick they know?

How do you know that something cannot come from nothing? Here, take an hour, and a physicist will explain that you can get a universe from nothing. Physics is stranger than creationists can imagine, and it’s always irritating to see incompetent ignoramuses like Dembski and McDowell think they can bamboozle us by invoking a physics they don’t understand.

(I showed this video before, so it may be familiar to you.)

The Christian god was a god-man who had a distinct and transient anthropoid form. I don’t see how the origin of the universe in some kind of quantum foam points to a dead Hebrew rabbi.

Ho-hum. Another collection of bad questions that assume what they intend to demonstrate, and another uninteresting exercise in tired apologetics from the Discovery Institute con artists.

Correcting Ken Ham’s standard omission

I’m feeling a bit nauseous right now. I’m not sure whether I’m coming down with the flu, or whether it was merely the monthly arrival of answers update, the newsletter from Answers in Genesis, which is mainly a catalog selling garish lies.

Anyway, the reason I’m writing this instead of either puking into the ceramic shrine or tossing the rag into the trash is that Ken Ham has pulled his usual stunt of pulling a quote from some godless critic of his “museum” and wrapping a pious sermon around it, without attribution or linkage. In this case, the quote is from someone Ham refers to only as “a secular humanist” or “this secularist”, and here it is:

For me, the most frightening part was the children’s section. It was at this moment that I learned the deepest lesson of my visit to the Museum: It is in the minds and hearts of our children that the battle will be fought; and it is they who will suffer the most because of this.

Helpful fellow that I am, I will give the citation the neglectful fraud ‘forgot’ to make. The quote comes from Patrick of Ann Arbor, Michigan. Congratulations, Patrick! You know you’re doing good when the creationists start using your words in their fundraising!

Everyone should read the rest of his article on the Creation “Museum”, too — it’s the criticism Ken Ham doesn’t want anyone to see, after all.

Now I have to go throw this ugly mag away, and hope my symptoms disappear.

There’s logic, and then there’s creationist logic

This argument is a new one on me.

i-58d257a10578172b1dca2f09c7338304-middlefinger.jpeg

If you can’t read it, click on it to see a larger original. I can try to summarize it, though. The middle finger is the longest finger on the human hand, and da Vinci drew it in his famous figure of Vitruvian Man, which illustrates ideal proportions…therefore, the Big Bang didn’t happen.

I think that if you do a lot of drugs, that will make sense.

I like Jerry Coyne’s explanation better.