Radio reminder

This week on Atheists Talk radio, Hector Avalos is going to tell us how to fight ID and win, and Scott Lohman will be talking about secular humanism. Tune in at 9am Central, or if you’re elsewhere…

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Brunswick school district: the patient may be getting better

The Brunswick school district, AKA Dover’s dumber little brother, is still struggling with the creationists trying to smuggle creationism into the science classroom. The latest report, though, suggests that the pro-science side is being aggressive in fighting back, and the pro-ignorance side is backing off due to pocketbook pragmatism — a costly court case could hurt them badly.

I thought this comment was revealing.

District 2 Republican Catherine Cooke, who presents herself as an active parent and therefore insider in the county school system, said she knows creationism is not to be taught as science, but she’s not against the topic being explored in some form.

“There’s a lot of scientific proof for creation,” Cooke said, without elaborating on that proof. “It’s not one-sided.”

Wow, Ms Cooke: a contradiction — she knows it’s not to be taught as science, but she thinks it is scientific — and a falsehood — there is no scientific evidence for creation. It actually is that one-sided.

I also liked the subtle dig in the reporter’s description, “without elaborating on that proof.” Of course she didn’t, she can’t. I’ve sat down with a lot of these people who claim there is science behind creationism, and when I ask them to get specific and tell me what some of it is, they suddenly get the look of a poleaxed rabbit and start stammering the names of creationist authorities who told them so, at best.

Everything you need to know about ID

It’s a wonder that these people know how to tie their own shoes. I was sent a link to Perry Marshall’s Intelligent Evolution Quick Guide, and it is certainly a fine example of the kind of reasoning that allows creationism to thrive. It’s a short guide, but it goes on for over a page, when the essential syllogism that defines ID is actually presented in three all-encompassing lines.

  1. DNA is not just a molecule – it is a coding system with a language & alphabet, and contains a message

  2. All languages, codes and messages come from a mind

  3. Therefore DNA was designed by a Mind

As I’m sure all of you sensible readers can immediately detect, his first premise is a deeply flawed analogy and his second is simply undemonstrated and entirely false, so his “therefore” is unwarranted. Three lines, three errors: a perfect representation of creationist thought.

I give to you the cockroach. It contains DNA, and it copies it and propagates it to the next generation of cockroaches, yet is it even aware of its DNA? Does it use its tiny little cockroach mind to construct a complex molecule? No. Mindless chemistry does it. There is no thought behind the synthesis and modification of the DNA molecule at all, yet it is true that it carries out complex activities with the aid of other molecules in the cytoplasm…but without the assistance of any intelligent beings at all.

Similarly, I give you the creationist. They contain DNA, and a large brain as well, but they don’t use that brain at all in producing progeny. After a little embarrassed tickle and grunt, mindless chemistry takes over in fertilization and development, and 9 months later, another mind emerges from one of their unencephalized wombs. We can trace the origins of that DNA back and back and back, and at no point in its history does it seem to be produced by conscious design, and the farther back we look, the less available potential there was for intelligent intervention. Bacteria are even less clever than cockroaches, you know.

If you want to understand our history and our evolution, the first concept you have to be able to grasp is that natural processes produce all the complexity and diversity of extant life without the guiding hand of any external agents. Once you’ve realized that, it becomes apparent that we can work backwards through our ancestry without invoking magic or cosmic helpers — that Intelligent Design creationism is a superfluous hypothesis that can be dismissed in the absence of any corroborating evidence.

This poll cannot stand

Oh, come now. Are they just taunting me, waving a bit of succulent red meat before and begging me to bite? Should topics such as creationism or intelligent design be taught in public schools alongside the theory of evolution? 85% say yes. I cannot believe that 85% of the population are that stupid, although it is being hosted on the American Patriarchy News Network, which would tend to bias the sample downward.


Gah. This came out garbled before, and you would not believe how long it took to get in and fix it. The scienceblogs server is rapidly becoming intolerable…which, of course, is exactly what the DOS bastards want.

Short takes from the mailbag

I get tons of news tips all the time, and I can’t use them all — so here’s a quick dump of a few items from the let’s-laugh-at-religion file.