William Lane Craig and the problem of pain

Kitties experience pain and suffering, which turns out to be a theological problem. If a god introduced pain and death into the world because wicked ol’ Eve was disobedient, why is god punishing innocent animals? It seems like a bit of a rotten move to afflict the obedient along with the disobedient — shouldn’t god have just stricken humanity with the wages of sin (or better yet, just womankind)?

William Lane Craig has an answer. His answer involves simply waving the problem away — animals don’t really feel pain — and he drags in science to prop up his claim. Basically, Craig is playing the creationist gambit of abusing the authority of science falsely to support his peculiar theology.

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Oh, those wacky Catholics

It’s happening in Minnesota again. The church is peddling nonsense, and people are believing it. Catholic congregants are finding corpses hidden inside the church. Oh, wait…not corpses. Crackers.

In recent weeks, parishioners at St. Elizabeth Ann Seton Church in Hastings have approached their pastor, Rev. Jim Perkl, “heartbroken and with tears in their eyes,” he says.

The cause of such sadness? The discovery of communion hosts found between the pages of about 30 hymnals in the pews. Catholics believe the communion wafer becomes the actual body of Jesus once it’s consecrated during mass.

Thank you, priestly abusers, for once again finding a way to wring pain out of your parishioners lives, all over little pieces of bread. This behavior is childish and ridiculous.

Although it’s unknown whether these wafers were consecrated, the incident has led Perkl and the Twin Cities Archdiocese to wonder: Is the church doing enough to emphasize the sacredness of the host?

The church is doing too much. It’s not sacred, it’s a CRACKER.

Somebody is just a little bit out of touch

The pastor of the Crystal Cathedral, Robert Schuller, has a wife, Arvella. Arvella is sick! She has pneumonia.

I’m so sorry. I wish her well and hope she gets better soon.

The Schullers have done something quite common: since she’s not feeling well, they asked the community to help prepare meals for the family. This is a very traditional thing to do, and one of the nicer parts of religion — it’s quite OK for someone to ask for help, and people are happy to pitch in.

What grates, though, is the email sent to explain how to deliver the meals. Don’t come by the house, oh no.

…they would appreciate meals over the next three to four weeks. They are to be sent to the church in order to be transported to Arvella. The limo drivers could pick up the dinners or meet in the Tower Lobby around 4:30 p.m.

‘Please, we need charity, just hand it to our limo drivers’? America is in deep economic trouble, and we’ve been bled dry by income inequity: the Schullers are perfectly emblematic of the attitudes of the 1%, oblivious, privileged, arrogant, and demanding more. And they do this while their church is failing into bankruptcy.

Lunatics on campus

The UMTC Campus Atheists, Skeptics, and Humanists has been busy. They recently had an event to mock homeopathy, and it has been written up in the campus newspaper. Unfortunately, they’ve smoked out the local kooks: the comments on the article are embarrassing. Look at this:

I am a whole hearted aficionado of homeopathy, discovered in the late 1700s by German physician Samuel Hahnemann. In the 1800s and early 1900s, homeopathy was widely practiced in the United States. There were many practitioners, medical schools, conventions all over the USA. It is such a successful method of treatment, doctors had a hard time making a living, and so eventually the American Medical Association succeeded in quashing it. It took me many years of trying to figure it out on my own before I finally came across a book by Dr. Don Hamilton about using homeopathy to treat illness in cats and dogs which helped me begin to understand how to choose the right homeopathic drugs and cure illnesses. It strikes me as silly that skeptics get so enraged by a medical art that so many doctors have spent their lives working on and that has so many documented successes. Glad to hear the University of Minnesota is helping patients discover true healing.

It doesn’t work. It doesn’t even make sense. I’m just going to let xkcd handle it.

There are also a couple of letters from our wretched Center for Spirituality and Healing in there. Strangely, they disavow any support for homeopathy. I don’t understand how I can then take a quick look at the CSH faculty and find that at least three — Jacob Mirman, Paula Jelinek, and Karen Lawson are homeopaths. Weird. It’s almost like lying is easy for quacks.

Feel free to leave comments on the MN Daily site. Our students, faculty, and staff clearly need some remedial instruction.

One other event is coming up, a debate. Aaargh. Between Dan Barker (Yay!) and …Hamza Andreas Tzortzis, the wacky deluded Muslim fanatic, on “Is Atheism or Islam more rational?” It’s taking place in Smith Hall, room 100, on Thursday, 3 November at 8:00.

I have a feeling it’s going to be ghastly. I may have to go, just to watch the foolishness explode. Also to catch any more silly claims about Islamic embryology.

MRAs are almost as hilarious as creationists

I swear, it’s the same oblivious stupidity, just expressed in a different domain, and I deal with enough inanity trying to cope with creationionism — I should probably avoid this stuff lest I suffer an overdose. But Manboobz hurts me again, and I can’t turn my eyes away. This is a real revelation about how these guys think:

[W]hen most men pass the age of 30-35, they begin to awaken from this biochemical “dream” and what do they awaken beside? What do married men look forward to the next 30-50 years of their lives? Sleeping with a living corpse, which continues to torture and destroy them day by day? Looking forward to the time when the woman undergoes the process of metamorphosis, into a completely insane mummy (menopause and post menopause)?

Pussy is indeed way overrated and if younger men could get a shot of “anti-testosterone” for a few weeks, they could see through the eyes of men who are 40+; without the haze of hormones, you cannot believe how much farther you can see! It’s the difference between seeing the horizon through LA style smog and seeing the horizon from a high mountain in the Rockies.

Guys, you’re doing it wrong. I don’t think your wives are the insane ones, it’s you.

If you’re doing it right, the relationship gets stronger and the sex gets better the older you get; while I might well be willing to trade in my sputtering 50+ year old body for a 20 year old model, I would not ever want to exchange the kind of sex I get at 50+ for the kind I got at 20 (which was great, don’t get me wrong, but experience in these matters really does improve everything). People who look at their spouses as hostile occupiers are just weird, sick, and deprived individuals; I simply don’t get it.

I also like my testosterone, thank you very much. If those wackos were serious, there really is an easy fix: a do-it-yourself orchidectomy. Just think, a little knife work, and his vision will be so clear it’ll be like sitting on board the space telescope.

Ick, Easterbrook.

I should probably rotate the objects of my ire more often. Way back in the days before Scienceblogs, a couple of my common targets were people I rarely talk about anymore, like George Gilder, or Gregg Easterbrook. Easterbrook is a pretentious sports writer and creationist who hates godless books and movies, who somehow managed to land commissions with Slate and Wired as a science writer (this is comparable to me getting hired to be a sports writer — Armageddon is nigh if that ever happens).

I am very pleased to see, though, that someone else shares my contempt for the guy: Tom Levenson can be provoked to peevishness by an Easterbrook column. Easterbrook’s not just bad at science, he sucks at writing. What does this mean?

A Cosmic Thought: Last week researchers announced they had found, in a South African cave, evidence of painting 100,000 years ago. The previous oldest evidence of painting was from 60,000 years in the past; the famous Lascaux cave paintings in France were made about 17,000 years ago. The latest find, in South Africa, shows both that our ancestors were experimenting with iron oxides to make permanent paint 50 millennia in the past: all that time ago, they painted inside caves, seeming to hope their work would last long enough to be seen by distant descendants.

Each time telescopes improve, the universe is revealed to be larger, older and grander. Each time anthropology makes an advance, the human experiment is shown to be older and more complex than thought. Who can say where the cosmic enterprise may be headed?

Hey! I’m talking about that really cool discovery of a 100,000 year old pigment set in New Orleans this coming weekend! It really is a nifty story that shows people have been doing art for about as long as they’ve been Homo sapiens.

But I haven’t a clue what Easterbrook is talking about. I think the cave art was painted for the people of that time, and they don’t seem to have been doing it for posterity, or Gregg Easterbrook; I’m also baffled by the odd implication of a prediction of greater, older complexity of human culture far back in the past. People 100,000 years ago were fully anatomically human; I think everyone expects that their would have been cultures existing coincident with our evolution.

Let’s not even get started on his math confusion that 100,000 years = 50 millennia.

I do wish someone could explain to me how that hack continues to publish.

Give the presents back, Ken

Ken Ham claims to have turned 60 years old yesterday. I don’t believe him. For one thing, I wasn’t there, and for another, if we apply the same magnitude of error to his age that he does to the age of the universe, he’s actually less then 15 minutes old. And I’m sorry, Kenny, you don’t get presents for being 15 minutes old. You get a spank, a couple of shots, and an Apgar score, nothing more.

Brace yourselves, world ending today

Nah, not really. This is supposed to be the last day of our existence, according to Harold Camping, but not even the Christians believe him, and they’re pretty kooky.

Rocky Mountain, N.C.’s Glenn Lee Hill, a retired pastor of Meadowbrook Christian Church, has told The Christian Post, “The late night comics tend to make fun of Christians anyway and when this happens it gives them an opportunity to mock us.”

Hill fervently refutes Camping’s latest rapture claim that “the end is going to come very, very quietly, probably within the next month. It will happen by October 21.”

According to the retired minister, “That is an erroneous prophecy, I don’t believe the world is about to end. Jesus has provided the choice for people to live forever.”

That’s from a Christian news site which then concludes on this note.

Fifty-eight percent of white evangelical Christians say Christ will return to earth by the year 2050, by far the highest percentage in any religious group, according to the survey.

By the year 2050, 23 percent of Americans believe that Christ will definitely return, and 18 percent more believe he will probably have returned to earth by that date.

It seems to me that if you’re one of those evangelical Christians, you’re just as insane as Harold Camping. The only difference is that you believe the Bible verse that says no one can prophesy the date, and Camping is skeptical.

Here’s what happens when you reconcile religion with “science”

You get mad raving nonsense.

In my opinion, Adam and Eve were born with a small organ attached to their appendix tube. An organ that produced stem cells which kept their perfect human body perpetually healthy and forever the equivalent age of thirty years old. In my opinion, this now missing human organ is the Tree Of Life depicted in the Bible’s book of Genesis; an organ that grew from a now missing 24th human chromosome in the human genome. To ‘take fruit’ from the Tree Of Life is to live forever… immortality.

As most of us know, Adam and Eve contaminated themselves by eating the forbidden fruit (cells) from the Tree Of The Knowledge Of Good And Bad. The forbidden fruit (cells) was the ingestion of cells, chromosomes, genes and DNA found in the flesh of mammals. This destroyed the 24th chromosome in Adam and Eve’s reproductive cells (sperm and egg), and also destroyed the Tree Of Life organ attached to their appendix tube. With the 24th chromosome gone from Adam’s sperm cells, and the 24th chromosome gone from Eve’s egg cells, hereditary immortality could not be passed on to their offspring, and hence, to all human beings thereafter. To ‘take fruit’ from the Tree Of The Knowledge Of Good And Bad is to positively die… mortality.

Most of us also know that God took a rib from Adam in order to build Eve. The rib was taken before Eve came into existence. The rib was taken before any kind of contamination to the human genome. The rib was human flesh, blood and bone; human cells, chromosomes, genes and DNA. The rib was made of human cells that have the 24th human chromosome that produces the Tree Of Life organ attached to the appendix tube. Adam’s rib cells are immortal human cells with 48 chromosomes (24 pairs), rather than our present 46 chromosomes (23 pairs).

My theories will also show you that Jesus was born from an uncontaminated rib cell. Jesus was born with a 24th pair of human chromosomes in his body cells, which produced the Tree Of Life organ attached to his appendix tube. Adam and Eve were born immortal (to begin with). Jesus was born immortal. My theories will show you that all human beings are destined to become immortal, after the ‘first’ death.

  • An opinion is not a sound foundation for a scientific hypothesis—or even a pseudoscientific one. Show me evidence.

  • There is no evidence of a magical small organ ever being attached to the end of the appendix.

  • We already produce small numbers of stem cells throughout life. They don’t confer immortality, nor is there any reason to expect they would.

  • A large collection of pluri- or toti-potent stem cells might have some advantages in enhancing regeneration. They’d have the disadvantage of also being a source of cancers.

  • Chromosomes don’t map to organs. Organs don’t grow from chromosomes.

  • Other apes do have 24 pairs of chromosomes. They aren’t immortal.

  • Eating fruit, or even magic fruit made of mammalian flesh, won’t selectively destroy a chromosome. And if it did, it wouldn’t have the mild consequence of knocking out an organ.

  • Where did Jesus’ mother get that uncontaminated rib cell?

  • 48 chromosome Jesus just confirms my hypothesis that Jesus was a chimpanzee. You can’t prove I’m wrong!

He goes on for many pages of absurd speculation. Did you know that when Doubting Thomas was poking around in Jesus’ wound, he was actually inspecting his appendicular organ?

(via Adam Rutherford)