A couple of gems from AiG

Our silly little friends at Answers in Genesis have said a few more stupid things. Hey, why aren’t you surprised?

The first is predictable and ridiculous: they have discovered the PR about finding a function for the appendix. The creationists are so happy! It confirms that Darwin was wrong (although I showed that it does no such thing, and Darwin’s infallibility is not a point of dogma with us anyway), and they get to claim that it’s not a vestigial organ again, because there is evidence that it has some subtle function. Only it still is vestigial: functionality isn’t part of the definition.

They also don’t understand the paper, since, as I warned, creationists should run away entirely from it. Its conclusion of functionality is derived almost entirely from a phylogenetic analysis. This paper cannot be used to vindicate creationism in any way. But I’ll make another prediction: it will be cited repeatedly by creationists in the future, because how you arrive at a conclusion doesn’t matter to them — only that you get a result that fits their preconceptions.

The second matter AiG brings up is something of a sore point with me. They don’t like Dawkins’ recent article, “Creationists, Now They’re Coming for Your Children”. The nonsense in the AiG article is just more of the same ol’ babble, and I suspect it was written by Jason Lisle, because it simply repeats their mantra of ‘same evidence, different interpretations’. They take exception to Dawkins writing about the fact of evolution, which they dispute; they claim they use the same evidence to come up with their belief that the earth is 6000 years old. This is completely false. AiG relies on selectively using only a tiny fraction of the evidence, and ignoring everything that contradicts their preconceptions.

That’s not what galls me, though. That’s all AiG ever does. No, it’s that they don’t notice that their own website confirms Dawkins’ title: the creationists are coming for your children. You have to read Ken Ham’s blog for a truly appalling example.

The bulk of it is a letter from some visitors. I include the whole thing below: I was disgusted by it.

Thanks so much for a day we will cherish. We are the family from Ohio [who came with] with Marine, our French exchange student with us who had received Christ a year ago. She gives her permission for you to share with supporters about how awesome God works. I pray that the testimony I leave with you about Marine encourages you.

In the summer of 2006 my wife, Karen, was excited about an ad in the local newspaper. She wanted to host a French student for a one-month cultural exchange. I was not as excited. I put it to prayer, and God gave a peace in the matter. We contacted the agency and let them know of our interest. They provided the information on some students for us to choose from. We again took the matter to prayer.

Karen and I agreed not to tell each other who we believed ‘the one’ was until we both knew. We then sat down and revealed our choice. We both chose Marine, and it was reaffirmation from God to us. Karen contacted the agency just before the deadline. ‘I’m sorry,’ the woman said. ‘But we only have one student left to place . . . her name is Marine.’ We laughed–and knew it was meant to be.

Marine came as a 15 year old agnostic from Paris, France to rural Ohio. We had been praying that she’d see Christ in us and receive His salvation while with us. Saturday night came (her first week with us), and we shared that as a family, we go to church together. She responded, ‘No thank you.’ We prayed and my wife cried.

It probably wasn’t the most tactful thing to do, but the next morning we said, ‘O.K., we’re going to church together as a family today.’ She agreed. I guess we really didn’t give much of an opportunity for her not to agree.

The month went very well. Marine grew close to our family, and she grew fond of visiting church. She even bought a crucifix necklace, but hadn’t received Christ as her Savior. We fervently prayed for her and her family. Marine invited us to visit her family the next summer in Paris. The next summer we packed up the family and headed to Paris.

The week-long visit to Paris was almost up, and Saturday night came. Marine said, ‘I know tomorrow is Sunday and you go to church.’ I said, ‘No that’s o.k., maybe I can just share with you the information we brought for missionary friends of ours in France. (Our missionary friends live only 30 minutes from Marine, and we brought many French Bibles and some French gospel literature to leave.) What an opportunity to share the gospel! I had frequently read Ephesians 6:19-20 in preparation to have boldness to share.

The next day we shared the gospel. The seed had been planted with them.

Last summer Marine returned to America with her step-sister for another visit. We went to Washington D.C. and had a ball. Towards the end of the visit our church was having Vacation Bible School. Karen asked the girls if they would like to help with crafts, etc. (as she and our children would be there all week). The girls eagerly helped.

The week was based on the Creation Museum’s ‘Seven C’s of History’. The gospel was clearly given. By late in the week Marine said, ‘I have some questions for Pastor Drew.’ Thank God! We knew what this meant. Karen and I and our kids had been praying for the Holy Spirit to move. Marine received Christ after a thorough explanation and questions and answers. She came out and said in wonderful English, ‘My name is now in the Lamb’s Book of Life. We all busted out in tears. Praise God.

Her sister also trusted in Christ two days later. How awesome is our God? He is awesome!

Marine came back this summer to Ohio for two months. Yesterday we spent a wonderful day at the Creation Museum. As my wife and I were looking in the bookstore of the museum I smiled and said, ‘Isn’t this cool? God took Marine from being an agnostic to joyfully looking through this store with an armful of Christian books trying to decide which ones to get.’ God indeed is good.

May God bless you and the Creation Museum. God used His truth and AiG’s Seven C’s of History to change a life and bring Him glory.

–Scott, Ohio

Whoa.

I’ve done a little work with the American Field Service in my area, and we hosted a girl from Italy for a year. I am frankly horrified that someone would bring in an exchange student and slam them with religious proselytization; it’s a tough situation for these kids, who are isolated from familiar friends and family, who are often unfamiliar with the region and weak on the language — the goal of the foster family should be to provide a safe house for the student, not to prey upon their vulnerabilities.

Here’s the difference. They brought in an agnostic girl, and practically the first thing they do is put pressure on her to conform, praying over her and crying when she chooses not to go to church. Imagine yourself in that situation; it’s goddamned evil to do that to a young person. When our Italian daughter came to us, she told us she was Catholic, so we…wept and told her she was a gullible dupe? No. We showed her where the Catholic church was (just a few blocks down the street), and told her that when the weather was bad we’d help her get there.

That’s what decent people would do, anyway.

Consider this a warning to any European families planning to put their kids in one of the exchange programs (they really should be a good opportunity for everyone): screen the host parents carefully. You can express any preferences in writing, and you can legitimately demand that any host family take a hands-off attitude towards your child’s religious beliefs or lack thereof. AFS, at least, sets up independent advisors to the student who can field any concerns, and if your student finds themselves in a miserable situation, they can ask for a new host family.

The kind of behavior Scott from Ohio was engaged in is disgraceful, and is the kind of thing that can seriously damage exchange programs. I don’t know that I would have let my kids into an exchange program with some backward country where they were likely to get indoctrinated by lunatics, that’s for sure.

I’m embarrassed by the actions of my fellow Americans. I feel like telling everyone outside the US that maybe you should have second thoughts about participating in exchange programs with us.

But why would Dawkins want to win a copy of his own book?

Denyse O’Leary has a contest: provide a copy of the source code to Dawkins’ Weasel demo. The prizes are your choice of a copy of Dawkins’ new book, The Greatest Show on Earth, or Meyer’s creationist apologetic, Signature in the Cell. It must be like that television game show where you get to choose door #1 or door #2, and one door hides a free vacation in the Bahamas while the other hides a goat.

It’s a very silly contest because a) only Dawkins could win it, and he conjures up Bahamas-quality books all the time, and probably doesn’t want a copy of Stephen Meyer’s rank little goat, and b) the question has already been settled.

The issue that has the creationists so worked up is whether the program used ‘latching’ or not. That is, this is a simple program originally written in BASIC that starts with a random string of characters, and changes them randomly, retaining the randomized versions that most closely match an arbitrary search string (in this case, “METHINKS IT IS LIKE A WEASEL”). They are hung up on this claim that the program ‘cheated’ by protecting individual letters that matched the search string from further changes.

It doesn’t matter.

If the original program did commit such fudgery (and it clearly didn’t), it wouldn’t affect the state of evolutionary biology at all. It was a simple demonstration program to help teach a basic concept. Move on, people, move on.

This was also a very, very simple program. Anyone who can write even a simple program in any computer language can whip up a version of this program in hours, and if you have any significant programming skills, it will take you a few minutes. Try it with latching, try it without. Even without it, it works just fine in matching the search string in short order.

People have done just that, it really is trivial. Except, unfortunately, for the creationists at the Discovery Institute, who are still obsessed with and baffled by a short, elementary computer program written by a biologist in a short evening. It’s no wonder they’re stumped by a cell!

Oh, the martyrs of AiG!

I’ve really gotten under the skin of the frauds at Answers in Genesis — now Terry Mortenson is whining about my cruelty and lying frantically.

Last week I gave a lecture in the Creation Museum on “Millions of Years: Where Did the Idea Come From?” This is based on my PhD research. The next day the well-known (and self-proclaimed) atheist Dr. P.Z. Myers, a biology professor at the University of Minnesota-Morris, wrote a blog post about me with his usual caustic language. After labeling me a “crackpot,” he then proceeded to critique my lecture . . . without even hearing it (not very academic, is it?) . . . and to accuse me of being ignorant of historical truths that he explained to his readers. He also accused me and other creationists of believing things that neither I nor any other informed creationist believes.

No, I did not critique his lecture; I criticized his plainly stated premise, that our understanding of the age of the earth does not come from the evidence, but “comes from anti-Biblical worldviews (or philosophical assumptions) being imposed on the geological evidence”. Anyone could see that if they read the article, but once again AiG is afraid to link to me.

I’m not sure what specific things I’ve accused creationists of believing — most of my article was about the history of geology. However, he and his cronies at AiG do believe in something that is truly absurd: that the earth is only 6,000 years old. There’s not much I could add that is more damning than that.

Jason Lisle and the everlasting fallacy argument

I must have really stung those poor fellows at the Creation “Museum”. They’ve added a new article in the Jason Lisle ouevre which takes a few silly slaps at me, and also perpetuates the image of Lisle as the most boring pedant ever. As usual, his schtick is always the same: he accuses everyone else of committing horrible logical fallacies, therefore, God. This one made me laugh, though. The fallacy du jour is the question-begging epithet, in which someone uses leading or insulting language in addressing a claim to discredit it.

As an example, he uses a quote from me…and I freely admit to having a thoroughly dismissive attitude towards their awful little sideshow (there, again, is the epithet; I won’t shy away from it). Here’s the sentence Lisle uses.

“The Creation ‘Museum’ isn’t about science at all, but is entirely about a peculiar, quirky, very specific interpretation of the Bible.”

The author provided no support for this opinion; it is simply an emotional reaction. He also attempts to deride the Creation Museum by putting the word museum in quotes. His claim is nothing but a fallacious epithet. When people use sarcastic/sardonic statements in place of logic, they commit the fallacy of the question-begging epithet.

That’s not an emotional reaction! That’s a calm statement of fact, and Lisle could have disputed it, but he never will. He can’t. Instead, everything said about his belief system will be instantly slotted into one of his categories of fallacies, so he can ignore it — and ignoring it means he doesn’t have to defend anything by, for instance, saying anything about any credible science behind flood geology, or showing that the fundamentalist Christianity that Answers in Genesis promotes is mainstream, or is independent of a narrow interpretation of biblical literalism. What I wrote is actually entirely factual.

Another common trick of these con-men is to avoid letting anyone see anything in context. He quotes a sentence from me, but doesn’t link to the article. Why would he do that? Because that article quotes directly from the web and publications by Answers in Genesis that shows everything in their view is built around…interpretation of the bible! I even titled the article, Answers in Genesis is proudly Bible-based. Do they dispute that?

Of course they, and especially Jason Lisle, will not ever deal with the substance of an argument. They will instead whine that they’ve been called mean names and run away. That’s what they do.

OK, so far you’re saying this isn’t very funny. Lisle is a drab, boring writer with one rhetorical trick in his book that he plays over and over. Here’s the funny part, though.

They’re claiming that their critics are just noisy brutes who portray the noble creationists, servants of god, in rude and obnoxious terms. They, of course, are entirely above that. They would never, ever stoop to emotional, nasty comments about their opponents. Why, that would be a logical fallacy.

So they chose to illustrate their article with a cartoon. Of me, apparently.

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Hypocrisy is a bitch, isn’t it?

I am so stealing that cartoon, though.

Nice letter

A short letter in this week’s Science echoes a point I made in my last article: lying to students will not win them over to your cause. It’s what will eventually lead to the defeat of creationism, which prompts them to lie ever more in order to drown out that damning evidence.

I was always a mediocre student, especially in high school. I never really knew what I wanted to do, and nothing seemed to excite me. This changed in my senior year, when a creationist visited my biology class.

On that fateful day, all the science students were herded into the school auditorium, where we listened to a long and richly illustrated lecture describing literal creationism. We were informed that in an effort to “balance” our education, we would soon hear an equally long lecture on evolution. This, like many things I heard that day, turned out to be false. The evolution lecture never materialized. Remarkably, I graduated from senior biology having learned only about creationism.

School had finally gotten my full attention. I wanted to know what we were missing, and why. For the first time in my life, I willingly (eagerly even) picked up my textbook and studiously read it. With growing interest, I realized that evolution made an awful lot of sense, and that I was being hoodwinked by my biology class.

It’s hard to overestimate the appeal of rebelling against the system to a teenaged boy, and that day marked the beginning of my path to a career in evolutionary biology. We learned other things in science class that year, too–for example, that all actions have an opposite reaction. For at least one sulky teenager in the small town of Owen Sound, Ontario, it took a creationist to make him into an evolutionary biologist.

Keeling P (2009) Creationists Made Me Do It. Science 325(5943):945.

Yes, millions of years!

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That Answers in Genesis crackpot, Terry Mortenson, is speaking on “Millions of Years” at the Creation “Museum”. Those of us who visited that circus of charlatanry know that this is one of their obsessions — the idea that the earth is more than 6000 years old is one of the wrecking balls atheists use to destroy faith.

He’s right, of course. It’s a very useful tool. When fundamentalists tie their faith absolutely to a claim that is easily refuted, that contradicts the evidence, and that requires them to constantly escalate their denial and delusions in order to sustain their belief, it makes it really easy for atheists to demolish their religion. We don’t even need to attack religion in the classroom at all — we just calmly lay out the facts, let the students work out the conclusions, and sometimes…it’s epiphany time! They realize their pastor lied to them, or was just really ignorant, and suddenly their respect for Christian authority begins to crumble away.

It’s not the atheist’s fault, though. The lesson should be, “Don’t lie to your kids,” not “Silence the people who would reveal that you lied to your kids,” or worse, “Lie harder.”

This is not a lesson that Mortenson has learned. He is apparently planning to babble about revisionist history in his talk, claiming that the evidence for the age of the earth is the product of an atheist conspiracy among geologists.

To really understand what is wrong with belief in millions of years, we need to go back to the early 19th century and study the origin of this idea. This unique and interesting lecture, based on Dr. Mortenson’s PhD research, will clearly show that the idea was not the result of just letting the rocks and fossils “speak for themselves” but rather comes from anti-Biblical worldviews (or philosophical assumptions) being imposed on the geological evidence. The talk explains the key men who helped develop the idea of millions of years, one of the geologically competent Christians who opposed those theories, and the subsequent consequences of the church’s compromise with millions of years. Even non-Christians would find this lecture thought-provoking.

Hah! The only thought it would provoke in me is to wonder where they kept the straitjackets. Looney-tunes revisionist history is not thought-provoking in a good sense.

I actually spend a fair amount of lecture time on the early history of geology in my introductory biology course. One reason is that, if you talk to most people, you will discover this fallacious belief that evolution leapt fully-formed from the brain of Charles Darwin, and there’s an anachronistic idea that ideas about the age of the earth, which are built on independent evidence from geology and astronomy, are somehow rooted in biology. It’s not so! Darwin’s antecedents had already laid the foundations in working out that the earth was old, that life had undergone many transitions, and that maybe species were mutable. Evolution was an inevitable conclusion of the evidence; Darwin and Wallace were just the clever fellows who managed to pull the whole story together.

I find it very useful to give students a quick overview of 18th and 19th century geology before we talk about Darwin, since the creationists in the classroom usually have this image of Darwin as Satan who foisted a false belief on the world because he hated god (hey, sounds like Terry Mortenson!). It’s very useful to be able to show how views of the world evolved, not by ideology, but by the growth of a body of evidence.

Let’s begin with Robert Hooke (1635-1703). He dabbled brilliantly in many things, but one subject of particular interest was the origin of these curious fossils that people kept digging up, which were thought to be either creatures turned to stone by some miraculous process, or were the expression of an intrinsic nature of stone to mimic life. Hooke examined the details of fossils microscopically, and determined that they had once been alive, and also worked out how the transformation had occurred — by the perfusion of minerals into buried or immersed dead organisms. He also examined the distribution of fossils; finding fossilized clams on mountaintops, for instance, says something about the prior state of that environment.

Most of those Inland Places. . . are, or have been heretofore under the Water. . . the Waters have been forc’d away from the Parts formerly cover’d, and many of those surfaces are now raised above the level of the Water’s Surface many scores of Fathoms. It seems not improbable, that the tops of the highest and most considerable Mountains in the World have been under Water, and that they themselves most probably seem to have been the Effects of some very great Earthquake.

These conclusions were evidence-driven. Almost no one in the late 17th century would have been interested in opposing religion, so you can’t pin that heresy on Hooke. He is simply describing the natural world and finding certain conclusions inescapable, including some to which creationists today still can’t adjust — and note that he is writing this more than 300 years ago.

There have been many other Species of Creatures in former Ages, of which we can find none at present; and that ’tis not unlikely also but that there may be divers new kinds now, which have not been from the beginning.

And then there’s Baron Cuvier (1769-1832) and Alexandre Brongniart (1770-1847) who studied the rocks of the Paris Basin. There were many quarries situated around Paris that cut deep into the hills to provide building stone, and they gave these two the opportunity to look into the structure of the rocks. They identified five major layers, and by examining the fossils, worked out what kinds of animals and plants lived there when the layers were deposited. They found that layers with saltwater species were interleaved with layers containing freshwater species — Paris had been under the sea at least twice!

Cuvier was not an atheist. In fact, he was even adamant that the earth was relatively young, but in a way that contradicts what Answers in Genesis would tell you. He had worked out that there were different assemblages of animals in each layer, and proposed an explanation: a series of ages, each very different, with the most recent major catastrophe occurring five or six thousand years ago (to bring it in line with the literal interpretation of the Bible) and sweeping away prior forms to allow for the flourishing of human beings.

It is certain that we are now at least in the fourth succession of terrestrial animals. The age of reptiles was followed by that of the palaeotheres [primitive mammals], then the age of mammoths, mastodons, and megatheria. Finally we arrive at the age of the human species together with domestic animals. It is only in the deposits subsequent to the beginning of this age, in turf-bogs and alluvial deposits, that we find bones all of which belong to animals now existing…None of these remains belong either to the vast deposits of the great catastrophe or to those of the ages preceding that wonderful event.

If you want someone who was willing to assert that the earth was very, very old, we have to look to the Scottish geologist James Hutton (1726-1797), who was accused of atheism for his ideas, but they were backed up entirely by hard-earned evidence. He postulated that the geology we see was created by multiple cycles of sedimentary deposition, volcanic uplift, and erosion, and he mapped and documented complex unconformities and intrusions that demonstrated that the history of the earth was complex and required great time for the formation and distortion of rock. He also found that the evidence of the time was insufficient to even show the history of the beginning of the earth, which is why he closed his book, Theory of the Earth, with the famous line, “The result, therefore, of our present enquiry is, that we find no vestige of a beginning,—no prospect of an end.”

Again, his conclusion was dictated by the evidence, not some atheistic philosophy.

At the same time Cuvier and Brongniart were exploring the Paris Basin, William Smith (1769-1839) was walking all over England, building up his geological map. We know what his motivation was: it was economic. He worked in mines, and was eager to capitalize on the opportunities opened up by the Industrial Revolution. Railroad and canal cuts exposed the strata of English geology all over the place, and being able to assess good locations for coal mines was a profitable skill — much like petroleum geology now. Smith observed consistent features of geology, like the way rocks were layered, and what fossils were present in specific layers, and could see that a layer was a slice of time, and that each slice contained different animals (which led to his Principle of Faunal Succession). He worked out the first geological map of Britain on the basis of his surveying.

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There is a pattern to geology: we can see that the strata are not purely local phenomena, but part of formations that often extend continent-wide. These strata also have a predictable order that reflects the timing of their formation. These observations are not reconcilable with the simplistic dogma of the creationists.

Charles Lyell was also an important geologist, who was also very influential on Charles Darwin. He was not an atheist, but rather, a devout Christian, which caused him considerable discomfort since he was never able to accept the full implications of Darwin’s work. Lyell’s key dictum was that the present is the key to the past, that what you needed to do was work out mechanisms in action right now and use those to explain what must have happened in the past.

Darwin himself applied this principle to estimate a minimum age for the earth. He knew from published observations that a rapid rate of sedimentary deposition was 600 feet in 100,000 years; he also knew that the known strata in England had a depth of over 72,000 feet, which implied that the earth had to be at least 12 million years old.

It’s so widely accepted that even creationists use it — it’s the basis for their arguments that the ocean sediments and moon dust say the earth is young. Unfortunately, the way they accomplish that is by either using the wrong numbers for accumulation or ignoring the multiple processes that affect the rate.

It is simply ludicrous to claim that 18th or 18th century geologists bent their interpretation to fit some imaginary godless worldview — in general, the scholars of that period were more concerned with avoiding conflicts with religion, since the majority of them were doctrinaire church-going Christians themselves. What led them to the conclusion that the earth was millions, and then billions of years old was the evidence, not their ideology.

And now, of course, the evidence is even more overwhelming, and it’s mostly physics at its heart. Trying to salvage Bishop Ussher’s weird numerological and biblical 17th century chronology in the 21st century by invoking the incomplete understanding of 19th century scholars is exactly the kind of inanity we’ve come to expect from creationists.

Run away, Tom, run away!

Speaking of intellectual cowardice from creationists, we have another shining example: Pastor Tom Estes. You remember Pastor Tom; squirrelly fella who darted up to shake my hand at the Creation “Museum” before running away to hide behind the creationist staff, shrill commenter, proud owner of a very silly blog? Well, he has just declared his blog an atheist-free zone. All you annoying people who wouldn’t simply accept his patriarchal authority finally compelled him to restrict his readership, and you had to register to comment. Somebody was trying to register under my name (I suspect his troll-pal Shaun), too, so I’ve received a few snide emails from Pastor Tom crowing about how he wasn’t going to let me in.

Anyway, while atheists drive him insane (OK, insaner) and won’t be allowed to criticize him, he’s still ranting away about us. Here’s an example of his inadequate tirades.

This is why Biblically based logic and rationality will always work. It begins with God. It has a foundation that cannot be shaken. And before I get into that, let me explain how ridiculously simple the atheist logic is, when it comes to God. Atheists often say, “Well, if God created the universe, than who created God?” They actually believe this logic is sound enough to dismantle the argument that God created everything. But let me share with you a quote I found at EveryStudent.com, made by Aristotle:

there must be a reality that causes but is itself uncaused (or, a being that moves but is itself unmoved). Why? Because if there is an infinite regression of causes, then by definition the whole process could never begin.

Do you see what I’m saying? It’s all circular. If God was created, then someone had to create who created God, etc, etc, etc. And if that logic were true, nothing would exist.

Yes, Pastor Tom. We know. We knew it all along. That’s the point.

There has to be an uncaused starting point to the universe, or it’s an exercise in infinite regression (which it may be; it’s as good a proposition as saying it had a beginning). But let’s just assume that there was something that popped into existence without a causal agent behind it. Now the question is, what was that first something? I think it’s perfectly fine to suggest it was a singularity, that first tiny pinpoint of incipient mass and energy. We gain nothing from saying the first cause was a ‘god’, which is an undefined and inconsistent being of significant complexity with human-like qualities of intelligence, who then by mechanism unknown initiates the singularity. It’s an unnecessary complication, especially when one of your reasons for bringing it into the equation is that you can’t comprehend how matter and energy came into being, so you’re going to invoke magic and push the problem back onto a superman.

Pastor Tom completely misses the point of the argument. What he has to answer is why he thinks the first thing to exist has to be an Old Testament Patriarch with some cranky obsessions about fabrics, diet, and sex rather than a simple expanding sphere of hot space-time.