It’s a bit sad looking, but it really is an 8.2 meter long giant squid preserved in a tank at the Darwin Centre in London, with various other bottled specimens in the background…including some that were collected and labeled by Charlie Darwin himself.
There’s another billboard in Minnesota, asking if we’re missing a recent American president.
No.
I look forward to the day he dies, so I can plan a trip to Texas to piss on his grave. I much prefer the alternative billboards, but even they fail to my required standard of measured vitriol for this scumbag.
There is a poll to answer the question.
A billboard has appeared in Minnesota, showing a picture of George Bush and asking: ‘Missing me yet?’ Is it time to start feeling nostalgic about the Bush era?
31.3% Yes. We miss his firm resolve
68.7% No. You’re joking, right?
30% yes? Unbelievable. Bush was a catastrophe for our country, and several others.
We have a couple of unfortunate events happening.
One is the Creation Science Fair. I’ve been thinking for years that I ought to drop in on this event, and every year it rolls around and I find myself completely unable to do it. I can cope with adults who do stupid things — they are independent and presumably responsible, after all — but these are kids who are being lied to and led deeper into ignorance. It would be like going to a puppy-kicking party, and I’d just want to gather up all the victims and take them home with me.
The other event this weekend is a debate…a debate between a dimwitted dogmatic creationist and a minister in Owatonna. There can be no winner here: it’s a battle between a severely brain-damaged cretin and a blind man. The event is a byproduct of the Clergy Letter project/evolution weekend promotion, which seeks to get ministers around the country to preach science from the pulpit.
Did I ever mention how much I despise the clergy project?
I know they mean well, but I’ve read some of these sermons the participants preach, and they are uniformly awful. They say things like, “the rightful place of science is in church,” a sentiment I find horrifying. No, science does not need to be swaddled up in superstition and dogma. Ultimately, what this project looks like to me is an attempt to expand the domain of religion to encompass science, and that’s something I’m always going to oppose.
The ‘good’ guy in the Owatonna debate is John Weisenburger, a Lutheran pastor, who makes some semi-sensible comments.
My goal is to bring light to the fact that you don’t have to be a Christian and believe Genesis as the actual time span. That’s not why the Bible was written. It’s not a book that is set out to tell scientific facts — it sort of answers deeper questions related to why God created us.
So evolution is not a religious idea…so why is Weisenburger trying to appropriate it? Leave it alone. Keep it out of the churches. It’s kind of pointless, anyway, since in the Coming Atheist Paradise, people will be converting the churches into bowling alleys and art galleries, anyway.
But I also detest that claim that the Bible answers “deeper questions”. What are they? Zippy the Pinhead also answers “deeper questions,” but that doesn’t mean his answers are any good, after all. How do we evaluate the validity of answers the Bible comes up with? It seems to be an exceptionally unreliable document.
A conversation with Weisenburger might be weakly interesting as an exercise in challenging someone who is at least trying to think. His opponent, Brock Lee, is a Big Fat Creationist Idiot. He’s not just ignorant, he’s been flogged hard with a stupid stick. Brock Lee is the kind of nitwit who makes arguments like this:
Around November 19th of 2008, Brock Lee calculated the number of mutations that would be needed to randomly create the largest protein in the world (which, according to Ian Juby’s The Complete Creation Part 12, is 26,926 amino acids long). The calculations took about half an hour to complete, and revealed that the required mutation number is 3.41777×10^35031. That’s correct: 3 followed by 35031 zeros, or more precisely, 341777 followed by 35026 zeros. This is a massive number, and shows the incredible intricacy of the creation and the impossibility of evolution. In other words, before creating even the most complex protein, there would have to be more than 1×10^35000 calculations per second. To beat the point to death, or as Ian Juby says, to flog the fossil equines, Brock gave evolutionists 1 quadrillion times the amount of time that they claim for the universe. It is still more than 1 x10^34998 calculations per second. Evolution is impossible. To read more, click on the title above to go to an article entirely dedicated to this topic.
He’s quite proud of the fact that he calculated the value of 2026926, so proud that he has a whole page dedicated to explaining how he did basic arithmetic in a spreadsheet. He doesn’t even stop to think that maybe his whole premise is false: it assumes the entire protein was instantaneously assembled completely by the chance arrangement of a series of amino acids. It’s so bad, it’s not even wrong.
Speaking of not even wrong, here’s the way his mind works in that newspaper article:
To me this is not about creation versus evolution. Most people want to peg it as religion versus science. It’s not. First off, if you’re going to say it’s a religion that’s preventing science, evolution is the religion that’s preventing science, because you’ve got atheistic evolutionists who are saying ‘Well, all the science points to a God, but I don’t want to believe in that so I’ll believe the impossible instead.’
This debate is going to be insane.
I’m half-tempted to go just for the laughs.
It’s Charles Darwin’s birthday today, I hope you all have plans to celebrate. I think I’m going to just stay home and try to get over my bad case of toomuchtravelitis, and also…CRASH A POLL! Go get ’em, everyone.
Do you accept Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution?
Yes
(65%)
No
(35%)
I’m home again from Iowa, but there was a moment where I just about turned around. Coming up into Minnesota, there is a nice big billboard with the following message on it.
I did a double-take and thought about going back around to get a photo of it, but decided it wasn’t worth it, as there really wasn’t any place to pull over safely. That was a rather vile message, but then, this is Christianity we’re talking about, and this was on I-35, which seems to be a focus for religious insanity.
I’m sorry to inflict this on you, and it’s OK if you decide not to torture your brain watching it. This is Kary Mullis, Nobel prize winner for the discovery of PCR, giving a talk. It’s long and rambling, and at various points he endorses global warming denialism and HIV denialism, but somehow thinks maybe there is something to astrology. It’s a terrible, awful, embarrassingly bad talk from a prestigious kook. Mullis has one point of pride with me: when anyone asks me to name a book by a legitimate, successful scientist that demonstrates that even smart people can be awesomely stupid, Mullis’s Dancing in the Mind Field beats out even Collins’ Language of God.
There are funny moments in the video, but they’re mostly funny because they expose the inanity and hypocrisy of Mullis. For instance, he says that he will not take statins to control cholesterol because they might damage his brain…but anyone who knows Mullis’s history knows he’s been extraordinarily indulgent in mind-altering recreational pharmaceuticals.
Really, though, the only reason to listen to this mess is at the end, somewhere past the one hour mark, where he’s dealing with the Q&A, and two people, a student and a faculty member, actually have the guts to question him critically. Mullis can’t answer them; he basically makes an argument from authority, claiming that he’s been studying diseases since before the student was born, and even stooping to calling him a “little boy”. It got ugly there. Mullis not only is incapable of assembling a coherent thought, but turns surly when anyone does not fawn over him.
The student and the professor who are willing to argue with the credentialed buffoon are the only shining lights in this depressing spectacle. I’d ask for someone to tell me their names, except I’m a little concerned that calling out an idiotic Nobelist in public may have some repercussions. It ought to enhance their reputations, but you never know…especially among a faculty that thought it was a good idea to invite Mullis (he does have a reputation, and it’s not a good one) in the first place.
The over-sensitive English libel laws have he effect of suppressing valid and important criticism — sign the petition to have them changed!
I do feel a little embarrassed that the most active comment thread on all of scienceblogs is often the endless open thread on Pharyngula, which is about nothing at all but what you crazy people want to say…and that’s in spite of the fact that I keep closing the old thread and opening a new one. Anyway, here we go again.
So say something.
I have to say that my opinion of Iowa has gone up in my short visit here. Not only have Iowa Democrats beaten back an attempt by Republicans to outlaw gay marriage, but the University of Northern Iowa Freethinkers and Inquirers has organized a whole Darwin week of talks — lots of talks, and all that I saw were remarkably well attended. I’m sad to say I have to drive back today, because I’d really like to hear Hector Avalos’s talk tonight. If you’re in the area, you should check it out.
Also, if you’re near Cedar Rapids tomorrow night, you should go to the Flying Spaghetti Monster fundraiser for the A-Team, which I’m supposed to tell you is the most bad-ass atheist organization in all of Iowa. It’ll have endless quantities of spaghetti, cheap beer, and pirates, so you can’t go wrong there.
In an appalling act of bias, Judge Cherie Blair suspended the sentence of a man convicted of assaulting another and breaking his jaw because the assailant was a “religious man”. Apparently just being a member of a particular cult is sufficient to get your criminal penalties reduced by a few years in her court; the scales of justice aren’t quite fairly balanced for the godless.
At least we have AC Grayling on the case, who sharply points out the ethical bankruptcy of Blair’s position, and then turns around and also slaps around the people who defended Blair. I wouldn’t want to be Hugo Rifkind, who tried to make the tired argument that we need an objective source of morality, i.e. that vicious thug God, and gets dismissed with an excellent lesson in history and philosophy.
This is an awful advertisement for wherever Mr Rifkind studied philosophy. Either that or he was not paying attention in ‘week one’ when it appears (from what he says) his ethics course took place. And he certainly seems to have stopped thinking since then. Let me direct his attention to Socrates, Aristotle, the Stoics, Hume, Kant, and a few dozen others among the thinkers he ought to have come across in his studies, whose ethics are not premised on divine command or the existence of supernatural agencies, but proceed from consideration of what human beings, in this life in this world, owe each other in the way of respect, concern, trust, fairness and honesty. The rich deep tradition of humanistic ethics stemming from classical antiquity has a tendency to make much of what passes for morality in religion (‘give away all your possessions’, ‘take no thought for the morrow’, ‘women must cover their heads in church’) look merely silly or trivial – at least in regard to what is distinctive to the religion, and not part of wider ethics whether religious or non-religious. Indeed Mr Rifkind is somewhat overexposed in philosophical ignorance here, for he ought to know that what is of practical value in Christian ethics is an import from the late Hellenic and Roman schools, mainly Stoicism, in the fourth century CE and later, to supply the want of a livable ethics in a religion that, to begin with, imminently expected the end of the world and had no use for money, marriage, and other aspects of ordinary life. So as the centuries passed it had to look about for something more sensible, and of course found it in the classical pre-Christian tradition. And to put matters in summary terms: the Roman Stoic conception of good character knocks Mrs. Blair’s (and Mr Rifkind’s) into a cocked hat, where they belong.
