If you’ve ever been curious about the intelligent design of language, here’s a new one for you: Edenics.
Here you will discover that ALL human words contain forms of the Edenic roots within them. These proto-Semitic or early Biblical Hebrew words were programmed into our common ancestors, Adam and Eve, before the language dispersion, or babble at the Tower of Babel — which kickstarted multi-national human history.
Oh, joy. They’re after all of our sciences.
A weird anti-evolution crank seems to be ramping up his efforts around the blogosphere recently: C. David Parsons has been leaving comments at Florida Citizens for Science, and Wesley Elsberry directly addresses his “conflict driven” views. Parsons has apparently been trying to raise his profile because he has a new book out, and he wants creationists to buy it.
It’s being put out by Tate Publishing, which seems to be a vanity press dedicated specifically to bilking Christian authors. If you have $40 and a complete lack of sense, you too can be the proud owner of The Quest for Right: The Adventure of a Lifetime, although I think you can tell from the title that it’s not going to be well-written. If you need a further clue, the author lists his qualifications on the cover: “Biblical Scholar and Scientist Extraordinaire.” I wonder if that’s anything like a super-scientist?
Anyway, you can browse through the table of contents and a sample excerpt. It’s bizarre. C. David Parsons is a young-earth creationist and biblical literalist; he doesn’t like those Christians who try to shoe-horn dinosaurs into the bible. I suspect he’s alienated a lot of his potential audience right there. He also has some peculiar notions about the origins of the earth.
Unveils the fundamental truth, based on the scientific record of creation, that the earth accreted from a watery nebula; the great surging mass of water and chemicals had no particular shape and covered thousands of square miles of interstellar space.
The “watery nebula” is probably an invention to rationalize the flood myth, but I’m afraid I don’t have any of the details. I also suspect some profound innumeracy: shouldn’t we be concerned about cubic miles in a volume of space, and “thousands of square miles” doesn’t sound like much—the earth formed out of a sheet of water a hundred miles on a side?
The book looks to be full of ranting against a conspiracy out to bury the truth, variously called a “scientific council” and the “league of scientists”. I wish. Wouldn’t it be cool to be a Super-Scientist in the League of Scientists?
I’m afraid, though, that most of his book isn’t for me. He doesn’t seem to say much about biology or evolution, but instead focuses the bulk of his complaints on — and this will thrill some of the readers here — physics. He doesn’t like quantum mechanics. He dedicates a whole chapter to debunking the photoelectric effect — photons aren’t real. Heck, this guy is going right down to the basics: he rejects Rutherford and Bohr, wants nothing to do with electrons, and wants us to know that God is doing it all.
The backbone of obstructionism is electronic interpretation, the tenet that all physical, chemical, and biological processes result from a change in the electronic structure of the atom which, in turn, can be deciphered through the orderly application of mathematics as outlined in quantum mechanics. The philosophy rejects any divine intervention. Scientific obstructionism is judged on these specifics: electronic interpretation and quantum mechanics. Conversely, the view of separatists that God is both responsible for and rules all the phenomena of the universe will stand or fall when the facts are applied. The view, however, is not tested by the definition of science, as determined by the court, but by the weightier principle of verifiable truths.
You’ve got to appreciate an honest kook. He knows that, in order to support biblical creationism, it’s not enough to critique biology — you’ve got to get right down to the roots and revise all of physics, chemistry, geology, and astronomy to take down the perfidious lies of the League of Scientists.
I’m dying here, people. It’s spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spammity, spam, spam, spam. I get up every morning and get to spend a half hour cleaning up the crap that accumulates every night, and have to invest more time at intervals during the day purging it. On top of that, as many of you know, the spam filters we have here are garbage. That’s a little unfair — I’m sure they’re keeping out 99% or more of the spam — but it’s the perception we all have. Certain commenters are routinely singled out for exclusion by the filters for mysterious reasons; some combination of adjacent letters in their username seems to trip the spam filters, maybe, except that when I examine the filter results I don’t see any indication of that happening. Other times spammers with comments full of random links get through; legitimate commenters with no links, no profanity, no commercial pitches get held up. It looks entirely arbitrary, and it’s driving me nuts.
I blame Movable Type. Of all the blogware I’ve worked with, it’s approach to handling spam is primitive and inept — it’s almost as if they’ve made a deal with the spammers to keep their prevention leaky and ineffective…or it may just be that the popularity of MT means the spammers work harder to punch holes in it.
Anyway, I appeal to the tech experts out there: is there a good, solid, comprehensive set of tools for MT that actually work at keeping spam at bay? Are there any plug-ins that can improve comment handling in general?
If this keeps up, I may have to switch back to using TypeKey registration to comment, which was an annoying nuisance and caused a lot of new problems to crop up last time I did it (and also makes me wonder if the incompetence of MT’s spam handling is an intentional ploy to drive people to TypeKey). But it may be necessary, since I really don’t have that much free time to play janitor on the comments.
Let’s start the new year on a wishful note — here’s hoping we have a wonderful 2008 with a sweet song from Israel KamakawiwoÊ»ole.
If you’d prefer the classic version, here’s Judy Garland and Sarah Vaughan. I had to go with Iz, though, just because tropical islands and ukeleles are about as un-Morris-like as you can get.
I’m saying it a few hours early because when the clock ticks over to midnight I expect you all to be snogging or otherwise partying away, unless you’re one of those sensible types who doesn’t think having to get a new calendar is anything to celebrate, so you’re off to bed for a good night’s rest.
Here at Chez Myers, we shall be taking a middle road with a quiet evening capped with our traditional root beer floats. Whatever your happy choice of the day, have a good 2008.
Yikes. More Florida school boards — in St Lucie, Palm Beach, and Martin counties — are infested with creationists. Florida Citizens for Science is maintaining a watch list.
So…have you checked your local school board? Do you have creationists biding their time, waiting to corrupt your schools?
It’s those poor creation scientists.
I’ve been slacking off on Pharyngula lately — I’ve had a week to relax and get caught up on a few other things. Here, though, are a few links to ridiculous religiosity that have been piling up in the mailbox.
Cockroaches are God’s wrath. And did you know Jesus had a roach problem?
Vera Ivie knows what GW Bush’s problem is: we haven’t been praying hard enough for him. Get on your knees now!
You know what would help Christianity’s image problem? If all the ministers were clowns. Oh, wait…they already are. Never mind.
Pope Ratzi has a chief exorcist (which implies a lot of little assistant exorcists, too…), and he has declared Harry Potter to be satan. Good Catholics seem to have a real problem distinguishing reality from fantasy, don’t they?
In a related news item, the Pope has set up exorcism squads to fight satanism, which is synonymous with godlessness. I’d be looking forward to a visit from strange people in red robes and funny hats, but this is from the Daily Mail, and it’s illustrated with a picture from the movie, The Exorcist, so this is of dubious provenance.
Revere looks at Christianity Today‘s tally of the most important events of the year. Most of them weren’t that important.
Somebody might have hurt a pro-lifer in some tussle at a protest somewhere. There doesn’t seem to be any trustworthy account anywhere of this unfortunate (if genuine) event, but that won’t stop the right-wingers from shrieking about it. In other news, Cthulhu has risen from the dark depths…you won’t find any newspaper or police accounts of this, but trust me.
I must confess: I’ve always identified with Gomez.
That friend to the Discovery Institute and creationist advisor to the Vatican, Cardinal Schönborn, has a new book out, titled Chance or Purpose?. I haven’t read it, but Michael Behe has, and Zeno finds a particularly delicious Behe blurb:
Science cannot speak of ultimate purpose, and scientists who do so are outside of their authority. In Chance or Purpose? Cardinal Schöborn shows that the data of biology, when properly examined by reason and philosophy, strongly point to a purposeful world.
Why should science be incapable of addressing the questions of an ultimate purpose? I hear this all the time: science can’t give us meaning, science can’t explain love, science can’t do this or that. It’s usually said by some clueless git who has his own ideological axe to grind, and wants everyone to line up in support of his or her own dictated decrees about the truth, which are usually obtained by revelation (i.e., whim) or dogma, and which are challenged by a process that actually tries to examine reality in search of a truth. And those ideologies, such as Catholicism, have no legitimate claim for better understanding than any other traditional nonsense.
I say otherwise. We have no other, better tool. If we’re going to discover an ultimate purpose, it will be through the process of studying our universe — through science. The only thing these putative other ways of knowing affect our reach is by impeding us.
As Zeno notes, Behe’s quote is beautifully self-contradicting. He starts by declaring that science can’t tell us anything about our purpose, and then he goes on to immediately declare that the data of biology lead to an understanding of purpose. Behe is an incredibly muddled thinker — he’s got the background that values science, but at the same time he’s bogged down in these peculiar presuppositions that make a mess of his brain.
The data of biology do not point to purpose, but to a history of accidents shaped by short-term utility to replicators. Schönborn is unqualified to assess it — he’s a blithering theologian — and both Schönborn and Behe are blinded to the overwhelming dominance of chance in our biology by their ideological predispositions.
