Ron Numbers, another tool of the religious establishment

The definitive book on the history of the creationism movement is The Creationists(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll) by Ron Numbers (and I have to remember to get a copy of the new expanded edition). Numbers has an interview in Salon which starts off well, but as it goes on, my respect for the guy starts sinking, sinking, sinking. He’s another hamster on the exercise wheel, spinning around the same old ineffective arguments that get us nowhere, and he can’t even follow through on his own chain of logic.

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Impending Major Developments in Pseudoscience!

Bill Dembski has posted a list of three pathetic predictions for Intelligent Design: that there will be two books published by the usual suspects (Behe, and Wells and Dembski) and that there will be a ‘research center’ at some unspecified university. Whoop-de-doo. For a major, groundbreaking, revolutionary new scientific paradigm, as they like to think of it, that’s nothing—when they crow about their triumphs, all they can do is mention a few PR efforts, and they’re so paltry that you could count them on the fingers of one partially maimed hand? John Lynch mocks their feeble vision, and offers a few suggestions for trivial additions which we know they will not produce.

After you’re done laughing at that silliness, here’s some more: Howard Smith is looking for the ethical imperative in cosmology and the kabbalah…it’s another respectable scientist suspending his credulity to build a pseudo-scientific link between reality and the fantasies of medieval mystics. It’s going to be very interesting when the Christian IDists like Dembski finally rout the entire mainstream scientific community with a couple of books and a church-sponsored room at a bible college, and then they have to turn and deal with the non-Christian heretics.

How can they screw up this badly?

Why is it that I, nasty ol’ atheist who is completely ignorant of theology and religious history, can see the parallels in the execution of Hussein, but our theocracy-sympathizing leaders bumble along, failing to see the damning errors of their position? Glenn Greenwald’s post on the ineptitude of the lynching is chilling.

One participant described the meeting this way: “The Iraqis seemed quite frustrated, saying, ‘Who is going to execute him, anyway, you or us?’ The Americans replied by saying that obviously, it was the Iraqis who would carry out the hanging. So the Iraqis said, ‘This is our problem and we will handle the consequences. If there is any damage done, it is we who will be damaged, not you.'”

You know, foreign occupying power, powerful religious group agitating for the execution of a hated, charismatic competitor, promises of who will bear the guilt for the deed, metaphorical washing of the hands…jebus, if I know what a counterproductive PR disaster that was for the Pharisees and the Romans, what’s the matter with the American leadership in Iraq? Don’t they read the bibles they thump? Add to that that they’ve apparently done the execution at a time when it is “religiously unacceptable”, and we’ve got a situation that makes Pontius Pilate look good.

I know. They must all be hardcore atheists over there.

The new geo-historical curriculum

We’ve got conflicting chronologies: a young earth history that is virtually all relatively recent human history, and a scientifically accurate one that encompasses 4.5 billion years of geological and biological change. How to reconcile them? Well, if we just divide everything in geology and biology by about a million and splice it together with modern history, we get this vastly entertaining timeline. Here’s a sample:

  • A.D. 1066: William the Conqueror invades England by walking through northern France.
  • A.D. 1215: Mega Fauna force King John to sign Magna Carta
  • A.D. 1304: Plate armor introduced ; Velociraptor hunted to extinction.
  • A.D. 1324 T.Rex becomes most popular Mongol Barbecue item after Golden Horde discovers gunpowder.
  • A.D. 1384: Dante describes Medieval Warm period in Inferno, his account of a field trip to the core-mantle boundary.
  • A.D. 1444: Flowering plants appear; War of the Roses commences.
  • A.D. 1484: Leonardo da Vinci designs Archaeopteryx.
  • A.D. 1492: Panama’s rise from sea thwarts Columbus’s discovery of Japan.
  • A.D. 1522: Sneak asteroid attack by Hernan Cortez smashes Aztec Empire

My namesake is also in it, and there are some interesting echoes in there.

  • A.D. 70: Paul, formerly Saul the Tarsier, develops opposable thumb and writes Epistle to the Cephalopods.

But of course! That’s the first thing he would do.

It all makes so much sense—and think of the money the schools could save by combining earth science and history into one class!

The Thorist’s Reply

Somebody warn Dawkins about his analogy!

Athorism is enjoying a certain vogue right now. Can there be a productive conversation between Valhallans and athorists?

Naïve literalists apart, sophisticated thoreologians long ago ceased believing in the material substance of Thor’s mighty hammer. But the spiritual essence of hammeriness remains a thunderingly enlightened relevation, and hammerological faith retains its special place in the eschatology of neo-Valhallism, while enjoying a productive conversation with the scientific theory of thunder in its non-overlapping magisterium.

Militant athorists are their own worst enemy. Ignorant of the finer points of thoreology, they really should desist from their strident and intolerant strawmandering, and treat Thor-faith with the uniquely protected respect it has always received in the past. In any case, they are doomed to failure. People need Thor, and nothing will ever remove him from the culture. What are you going to put in his place?

I’ve been tempted to use it myself, but it has great dangers, as you can find graphically illustrated on this page.

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At least the audience of commenters at Newsweek is split between cheering rationalists and bewildered Christians, with no axes in play yet. Now if he presented this idea in Kearny, on the other hand…

Science and the National Park Service: a festering problem

The declining scientific content expressed by the National Park Service has been an issue for years; the latest complaints (that I wrote about, and that Wesley Elsberry has now brought up) are just recent flareups of awareness. The National Park Service seems determined to strip out anything intellectually challenging from the experiences in their parks — the ideal seems to be Chevy Chase’s reaction from the movie Vacation (if you don’t know what I mean, here’s a short homage). Pete Dunkelberg has brought a letter in Science from 28 October 2005 to my attention — it accuses the Park Service of dumbing down the interpretive material and turning it into a purely aesthetic experience.

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How normal is Kearny?

Maybe it’s a bad, bad idea for a community to have an open-access electronic bulletin board, because it sure is a great tool for exposing the ugly underbelly of the group. Kearny, NJ has had its moment of fame, with the story of the history teacher babbling nonsense to his class, and
Jim Lippard has found some troubling stuff on the Kearny bulletin board. Paul LaClair, the father of the young man who recorded his teacher’s rambling BS, posted a
review and complaint about the community’s failure to support good teaching, and what’s bothersome are the replies. A few are supportive, but some are still defending the history teacher’s poor instruction, and worse, there are some comments that verge on being death threats.

It’s depressing to read if you have any optimism about people at all: the stupidity on display is shocking. Maybe we just have to hope that Kearny, NJ is some kind of magic dumb-magnet that sucks in mobs of the mindless, leaving the rest of the country much smarter. I fear, though, that it might actually be representative.

It’s not enough to be just an anti-creationist

I am not going to praise John Derbyshire; some people seem to be impressed because he has penned a dismissal of the ID creationists, but jebus, that ought to be the absolute rock bottom minimum we should expect from rationalists. That he can clear a hurdle set one inch above the ground does not impress me in the slightest.

Furthermore, he couldn’t spit it out without saying something stupid.

As it turned out, Judge Jones is a conservative in the right way, the best way: he respects the law, and the plain rules of evidence.

Think about that. Respect for law and evidence is not a property exclusive or intrinsic to conservatives. Does he think liberals believe in violating the law and ignoring the evidence (don’t bother to answer; he probably does.) I’m not dazzled by a wingnut who manages to see the obvious but is still burdened with the usual far right nonsense.

(via Millard Fillmore’s Bathtub)