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.

Dawkins’ online debate

Some good news: the online ‘debate’ between Dawkins and the religion editors of the Times can be read for free. It’s a terrible format: it’s just a chat window with people throwing questions at Dawkins, which he deftly slices out of the air with a samurai sword of reason. Here’s one of the more coherent questions the pro-faith gummi bears tossed at him, which will give you an idea of the quality of the interrogation.

I just interviewed David Wilkinson, principal of St John’s Durham and astrophysicist, and this is what he said (full interview at my Times blog Articles of Faith):
The science Stephen Hawking uses raises a number of questions which for many opens the door to the possibility of an existence of a creator and for many points to the existence of a creator.

‘One would be the the purpose of the universe. Although science might discover the mechanism, we are still left with the question of what is the purpose.

‘Second is where the laws of physics come from. Science subsumes the laws but we are still left with the question of where the laws come from.

‘Third is the intelligibility of the universe. It strikes me as interesting that Stephen Hawking can make it intelligible. Albert Einstein once said that the most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible. For many of us who are struck by the intelligibility of the physical laws, the explanation is that the creator is the force of rationality both for the universe and for our minds.

To summarize Dawkins’ three answers: Why even propose a cosmic purpose? That question isn’t answered by postulating a mysterious intelligent being, either. Why assume a godless universe would have to be unintelligible?

Stupid questions do not warrant our concern or need to answer. Questions that do not bring us closer to understanding are nothing but the posturings of people who substitute noise for reason.

Hawking can’t possibly be right until his results have been confirmed in an online poll

From the Guardian:

Is physicist Stephen Hawking right that physics, not God, created the universe?

81.3% Yes. I believe in gravity, not divinity
18.7% No. God: Hawking ‘not necessary’

Somebody show me the units of divinity, please, as well as a few measurements that show the goodness of fit to theory.

Oh, and show the formula, too.

Je n’avais pas besoin de cette hypothese-la

Laplace, Hawking, same difference. In a completely unsurprising move, Stephen Hawking has made it clear that we have no need for the god hypothesis.

Modern physics leaves no place for God in the creation of the Universe, Stephen Hawking has concluded. Just as Darwinism removed the need for a creator in the sphere of biology, Britain’s most eminent scientist argues that a new series of theories have rendered redundant the role of a creator for the Universe. In his forthcoming book, an extract from which is published exclusively in Eureka, published today with The Times, Professor Hawking sets out to answer the question: “Did the Universe need a creator?” The answer he gives is a resounding “no”. Far from being a once-in-a-million event that could only be accounted for by extraordinary serendipity or a divine hand, the Big Bang was an inevitable consequence of the laws of physics, Hawking says. “Because there is a law such as gravity, the Universe can and will create itself from nothing.

Cue condemnations and histrionics, stage left. Fulminations and denial, stage right.

Like it says, this is from an upcoming book, so I haven’t read it yet, and The Times seems to have moved everything behind a paywall, so I can’t even read the full article or any of the associated content, but the story itself sounds a bit banal. The theists have never offered a single credible, logical reason to incorporate a cosmic intelligence into the history of the universe, and it’s about time they were flatly rebuffed and told their contributions are unnecessary.

Besides the annoying paywall, though, I have to point out another nasty element of the reporting — they must really hate Richard Dawkins at The Times.

When it comes to religion, Stephen Hawking is the voice of reason. Not for him the polemical style that has propelled Richard Dawkins to the fore of national consciousness in the God debates. His argument is likely in the long term to be more dangerous to religion because it is more measured than The God Delusion.

The God Delusion was a calm and measured book, and Richard Dawkins’ talks are polite, rational events. Have these people even read the book? It looks to me as if they are trying to mollify their readers by setting up a Saint Hawking while reassuring everyone that they can still beat up on Devil Dawkins.

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?

Discovery Channel besieged

A gunman with an explosive device is holding hostages at the Discovery Channel building until they give him what he wants. What does he want? Well, he’s nuts, and his
page of demands is loading very slowly, so here’s what I was able to extract:

The Discovery Channel MUST broadcast to the world their commitment to save the planet and to do the following IMMEDIATELY:

1. The Discovery Channel and it’s affiliate channels MUST have daily television programs at prime time slots based on Daniel Quinn’s “My Ishmael” pages 207-212 where solutions to save the planet would be done in the same way as the Industrial Revolution was done, by people building on each other’s inventive ideas. Focus must be given on how people can live WITHOUT giving birth to more filthy human children since those new additions continue pollution and are pollution. A game show format contest would be in order. Perhaps also forums of leading scientists who understand and agree with the Malthus-Darwin science and the problem of human overpopulation. Do both. Do all until something WORKS and the natural world starts improving and human civilization building STOPS and is reversed! MAKE IT INTERESTING SO PEOPLE WATCH AND APPLY SOLUTIONS!!!!

2. All programs on Discovery Health-TLC must stop encouraging the birth of any more parasitic human infants and the false heroics behind those actions. In those programs’ places, programs encouraging human sterilization and infertility must be pushed. All former pro-birth programs must now push in the direction of stopping human birth, not encouraging it.

3. All programs promoting War and the technology behind those must cease. There is no sense in advertising weapons of mass-destruction anymore. Instead, talk about ways to disassemble civilization and concentrate the message in finding SOLUTIONS to solving global military mechanized conflict. Again, solutions solutions instead of just repeating the same old wars with newer weapons. Also, keep out the fraudulent peace movements. They are liars and fakes and had no real intention of ending the wars. ALL OF THEM ARE FAKE! On one hand, they claim they want the wars to end, on the other, they are demanding the human population increase. World War II had 2 Billion humans and after that war, the people decided that tripling the population would assure peace. WTF??? STUPIDITY! MORE HUMANS EQUALS MORE WAR!

4. Civilization must be exposed for the filth it is. That, and all its disgusting religious-cultural roots and greed. Broadcast this message until the pollution in the planet is reversed and the human population goes down! This is your obligation. If you think it isn’t, then get hell off the planet! Breathe Oil! It is the moral obligation of everyone living otherwise what good are they??

5. Immigration: Programs must be developed to find solutions to stopping ALL immigration pollution and the anchor baby filth that follows that. Find solutions to stopping it. Call for people in the world to develop solutions to stop it completely and permanently. Find solutions FOR these countries so they stop sending their breeding populations to the US and the world to seek jobs and therefore breed more unwanted pollution babies. FIND SOLUTIONS FOR THEM TO STOP THEIR HUMAN GROWTH AND THE EXPORTATION OF THAT DISGUSTING FILTH! (The first world is feeding the population growth of the Third World and those human families are going to where the food is! They must stop procreating new humans looking for nonexistant jobs!)

6. Find solutions for Global Warming, Automotive pollution, International Trade, factory pollution, and the whole blasted human economy. Find ways so that people don’t build more housing pollution which destroys the environment to make way for more human filth! Find solutions so that people stop breeding as well as stopping using Oil in order to REVERSE Global warming and the destruction of the planet!

7. Develop shows that mention the Malthusian sciences about how food production leads to the overpopulation of the Human race. Talk about Evolution. Talk about Malthus and Darwin until it sinks into the stupid people’s brains until they get it!!

8. Saving the Planet means saving what’s left of the non-human Wildlife by decreasing the Human population. That means stopping the human race from breeding any more disgusting human babies! You’re the media, you can reach enough people. It’s your resposibility because you reach so many minds!!!

9. Develop shows that will correct and dismantle the dangerous US world economy. Find solutions for their disasterous Ponzi-Casino economy before they take the world to another nuclear war.

10. Stop all shows glorifying human birthing on all your channels and on TLC. Stop Future Weapons shows or replace the dialogue condemning the people behind these developments so that the shows become exposes rather than advertisements of Arms sales and development!

11. You’re also going to find solutions for unemployment and housing. All these unemployed people makes me think the US is headed toward more war.

Humans are the most destructive, filthy, pollutive creatures around and are wrecking what’s left of the planet with their false morals and breeding culture.

For every human born, ACRES of wildlife forests must be turned into farmland in order to feed that new addition over the course of 60 to 100 YEARS of that new human’s lifespan! THIS IS AT THE EXPENSE OF THE FOREST CREATURES!!!! All human procreation and farming must cease!

It is the responsiblity of everyone to preserve the planet they live on by not breeding any more children who will continue their filthy practices. Children represent FUTURE catastrophic pollution whereas their parents are current pollution. NO MORE BABIES! Population growth is a real crisis. Even one child born in the US will use 30 to a thousand times more resources than a Third World child. It’s like a couple are having 30 babies even though it’s just one! If the US goes in this direction maybe other countries will too!

Also, war must be halted. Not because it’s morally wrong, but because of the catastrophic environmental damage modern weapons cause to other creatures. FIND SOLUTIONS JUST LIKE THE BOOK SAYS! Humans are supposed to be inventive. INVENT, DAMN YOU!!

The world needs TV shows that DEVELOP solutions to the problems that humans are causing, not stupify the people into destroying the world. Not encouraging them to breed more environmentally harmful humans.

Saving the environment and the remaning species diversity of the planet is now your mindset. Nothing is more important than saving them. The Lions, Tigers, Giraffes, Elephants, Froggies, Turtles, Apes, Raccoons, Beetles, Ants, Sharks, Bears, and, of course, the Squirrels.

The humans? The planet does not need humans.

You MUST KNOW the human population is behind all the pollution and problems in the world, and YET you encourage the exact opposite instead of discouraging human growth and procreation. Surely you MUST ALREADY KNOW this!

I want Discovery Communications to broadcast on their channels to the world their new program lineup and I want proof they are doing so. I want the new shows started by asking the public for inventive solution ideas to save the planet and the remaining wildlife on it.

These are the demands and sayings of Lee.

So, basically, he wants the Discovery Channel to yell loudly at people to fix human civilization until they correct all of the world’s environmental problems, and he wants everyone to stop having babies and eating food from farms.

I don’t think that threatening television personnel with death and asking them to scream as crazily as he does is going to help. Let’s just hope that this can be resolved without anyone getting hurt…and by “resolved”, I mean get James Lee into a mental hospital.

Just the fact that he thinks the channel of “American Loggers,” “Deadliest Catch,” “Dirty Jobs,” “Ghost Lab,” “Swamp Loggers,” “Pitchmen” and “Shark Week” will be his allies in his crusade to end the blight of humanity suggests there is something wrong in his head.

Time to revoke Disney’s ownership

Disney has always been aggressive about extending their copyright to the various Disney characters — they keep going to congress and getting more years tacked on. It’s clearly past due that we should revoke all that (come on, Ol’ Walt died when I was in 4th grade, and I don’t care if his cryogenically frozen head is occasionally revived to dispense marching orders and consume baby brain smoothies). As evidence, I present to you the latest atrocity from the Disney channel, “Disney Blam!” What they do is take classic old Disney cartoons from the 40s, 50s, and 60s and ‘update’ them by adding obnoxious voiceovers. The narrator yells out grating descriptions of what’s going on visually, shouts “BLAM!” too frequently, and adds slo-mo instant replay to scenes where characters get bonked on the head. Really. It has to be seen to be believed.

Don’t you feel dumber for having watched that? Or at least, that Disney Corp. thinks you’re an idiot?

Why, in my day, I remember when we could expect five year olds to be able to watch these with comprehension, without some jerk on the soundtrack pointing out “BLAM! He got hit in the head with an anvil!” It’s not as if these things were ever intellectually subtle, you know.

Stop the disease before it spreads to Tex Avery and Chuck Jones! The Idiocracy will have arrived when the media overlords decide that Roadrunner cartoons need a play-by-play for their audiences to appreciate them.

(via Jhonen Vasquez)

I don’t like the Manhattan mosque, but they’ve got the right — as long as I’ve got the right to point and laugh

I’ve been in a bit of a fog for the last few weeks, and am just now catching up on the noise about the so-called “Ground Zero Mosque”, and I have to say I’m a bit disappointed in Hitchens. He rightly points out that most of the opposition is base, stupid demagoguery and racism, but then he offers his own reasons why the construction is problematic. They are that Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, the man behind the building, holds odious and undemocratic views, and that encouraging Muslims leads to their attempts to impose their rather unpleasant moralistic views on their neighbors.

Which is all true. However, we have not made thinking ugly thoughts about creating a theocracy illegal — if we did, we ought to simply arrest the Imam for promoting undemocratic ideals. We don’t and we won’t, I hope, because then we’re voluntarily setting ourselves on the road to tyranny that they seem to want. Also, of course, if disseminating propaganda advocating a theocratic state were criminalized, practically every fundamentalist/evangelical Christian leader in the country would also have to be arrested. There’s much to be said for a plan that would scoop up Phil Johnson, Lou Engle, Pat Robertson, the hierarchy of the Catholic church, the leadership of the Discovery Institute, and every tinpot crank preaching a generic fundie gospel in a converted grocery store and throw them into prison…but again, we lose our democratic soul if we lose our tolerance for stupid ideas. If the Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf has done nothing that warrants any kind of criminal charges, you can’t simply use evidence of his unpleasant character and nasty dreams to justify civil punishment.

Also, you can’t use the possibility that once they’ve got their community center, local Muslims will start harrassing people who walk their dogs too close to the building as a reason to oppose it. That would be like suggesting that maybe if the work permit for a new Catholic church goes through, someday a priest might rape a little boy or girl inside, therefore it should not be built. Of course those things could happen, which is why there are laws about public access and the protection of minors, and those are what we ought to focus on enforcing.

Naturally, I dislike the idea of constructing religious buildings anywhere, since they are a colossal waste of community resources, typically represent unproductive holes in the tax base, and promote stupid thinking — but guess what? Those aren’t legal cause to interfere with people’s right to waste their time and money. Also, if we accept the privilege of individual autonomy and personal freedom, we don’t have moral cause to interfere.

I do like Hitchens’ conclusion, though: “Let us by all means make the ‘Ground Zero’ debate a test of tolerance. But this will be a one-way street unless it is to be a test of Muslim tolerance as well.” Which is exactly right: we stand back and make it an open example of the principle of liberty that they can build anything they want (within zoning laws), whether it is a mosque, a synagogue, a cathedral, a community center, or a retirement home for mentally ill clowns, but that that freedom does have reasonable community constraints that they are voluntarily accepting, and there’s no going back and saying after the fact that the ideology of their building occupants allows them to violate local laws.

Shouldn’t someone ask the Dakotans?

BigThink has been having a Month of Dangerous Ideas, in which each day they publish a pro and con for a provocative idea, like “Tax Fat People” or “Mandatory Bible Study” (promoted to make people more moral, believe it or not), from which you’d get the impression it was mainly a month of stupid ideas. There were a few interesting ones in the mix, though.

One that comes up now and then again is the idea of Pleistocene Rewilding, that we should remove people from a wide strip of the center of the country, from North Dakota down to Texas in the more elaborate versions of the plan, and actively work to repopulate it with megafauna resembling the pre-human distribution — bring over elephants and lions from Africa, and in more ambitious extremes, genetically re-engineer extinct species, reconstructing mammoths from elephant stock, for instance. I admit, it sounds very cool — I wouldn’t mind seeing great herds of bison and mammoth strolling near Morris, now and then, but ultimately it sounds like another stupid idea.

It falls apart for me on a couple of real problems. We can’t reconstruct species yet, and rebuilding a whole ecological network? Yeah, right. There’s always this focus on the big fragile animals, but if you want to rebuild the Pleistocene midwest, maybe the most important first step would be reconstructing the distribution of prairie grasses, which isn’t easy. We’ve got these things called “parks” which often have goals like preserving the flora and fauna of a region, and they struggle to do even that — we have regional parks here that take some pride in preserving patches of pre-farming prairie, and even that takes hard work and constant maintenance. And, of course, what Pleistocene Rewilding proposes is bringing in large stocks of what are basically alien species and turning them loose. That always works out well. Ask the Australians.

I have a better idea. Why not just set aside large continuous swathes of land in various biomes and declare them to be real wildernesses — we have national parks and wilderness areas now, we could just start right there and enforce stricter policies of non-exploitation for a few centuries — by not permitting grazing, mineral exploration, logging, and RVs to rip through, but instead taking seriously the idea of creating fallow land where nature works without human guidance. We do not, however, have even the political will to do that much in this country, so rewilding is even more of a fantasy.

Although I do confess that the dream of depopulating Texas does provide some political incentive. Until you realize the Texans would just be spread around more.