Some of you old-timers may recall the days of yore when creationists would show up and make their sad little arguments in the comments here, and get thrashed around rudely until they squealed. Maybe you wonder where they went. Maybe you wish you had more opportunities to bash your head against a brick wall. Well, I can tell you: they’re on YouTube. The comments sections there are so much friendlier to fools.

I have an example for you, from one of my videos. Let’s see if you can figure out who is the creationist, and which one is me.

Is the space shuttle an example of intelligent design ?
Well a single living cell encompasses far more integrated functional complexity….so much so that after 150 years and billion dollar labs we still haven’t reverse engineered a single cell, much less duplicated even a single one of its proteins abinitio.

Thats intelligent design.

I could have gone after the low-hanging fruit of his bad examples and mentioned Craig Venter’s minimal synthetic cell, or maybe, you know, insulin, but I tried to get to the core of his logic. It was a painful exercise in head-butting.

If there is one stupid argument that I could get out of the heads of creationists, it’s this one.

The argument is whether organisms were produced by design or by natural processes. We have natural processes that generate complexity, no design needed, so complexity is not a factor in discriminating between the two hypotheses. You want to know whether A or B is the cause for an orange being orange, and both A and B are capable of producing orange pigments, then announcing that the object being examined is orange in color does not allow you to say whether it whether it was produced by A or B. Do you even understand that elementary logic?

But there’s always the dull, dumb yokels who proudly declare “duh, the space shuttle is complicated, and it’s designed, therefore because cells are complicated, they are designed.” THIS IS NOT A VALID ARGUMENT.

But you guys keep trotting it out. I’m embarrassed for you.

PZ Myers
“The argument is whether organisms were produced by design or by natural processes. We have natural processes that generate complexity, no design needed, so complexity is not a factor in discriminating between the two hypotheses. ”

Thats a straw-man PZ.
I said “integrated functional complexity” not merely complexity.
Living organisms and space shuttles are analogous in that both are machines requiring well defined integrated functional complexity to utilize an external energy source to preform their mechanical function.

“You want to know whether A or B is the cause for an orange being orange, and both A and B are capable of producing orange pigments, then announcing that the object being examined is orange in color does not
allow you to say whether it whether it was produced by A or B. Do you even understand that elementary logic?”

Circular reasoning.
Pigmentation is a property of a functionally complex thing you are trying to say arrived by random chance.

You don’t get it. Adding more words doesn’t change the problem.

The space shuttle has “integrated functional complexity”, and is designed.

Organisms have “integrated functional complexity”, and are evolved.

You don’t get to use “integrated functional complexity” as a criterion for distinguishing designed from evolved.

“You don’t get it. Adding more words doesn’t change the problem.”

If ” I don’t get it “, explain it with logic rather than insults.

_

“The space shuttle has “integrated functional complexity”, and is designed.”

That’s correct.

_

“Organisms have “integrated functional complexity”, and are evolved.”

That’s what you need to justify with blind chance.

_

You don’t get to use “integrated functional complexity” as a criterion for distinguishing designed from evolved.

I am not, I am stating “integrated functional complexity is indeed a property of design, not natural process based on repeated observation.

If you can show an example of a system of integrated functional complexity, a unique property of machines produced by natural process, then I can take you seriously.

The question is whether “integrated functional complexity” is solely a product of design. You cannot demonstrate it by merely noting the existence of “integrated functional complexity”.

You are stating “integrated functional complexity is a property of design”. That’s the point in contention. The existence of “integrated functional complexity” (which, I note you haven’t even defined) is not sufficient evidence for its origin.

But if there’s anything I know about creationists, it’s that you won’t be able to comprehend the circularity of your claim and will just keep going around and around.

And that’s where I gave up. If any of you want to practice educating the uneducable, you know where to find them now.

I skipped off to the big city yesterday (allowing a TERF to flood the comments, sorry — he has been dealt with now) to hear Jim G. Helton speak on the new directions American Atheists is going to take. Well, maybe. He’s AA’s Kentucky State Director, so I’m not sure how well his goals are shared with the national leadership, but I like his plan. I left hoping his ideas would be translated into real action, but at the same time, “hope” is an unfamiliar emotion when dealing with organized atheism, and I’ve been disappointed more than a few times.

Here’s the gist of his talk. He put up a slide of “Atheist Issues”, the stuff we’re all familiar with and that has nearly 100% support from atheist organizations.

• Government Prayer
• Bibles
• 10 Commandments
• Crosses
• Religious Funding
• Religious Exemptions
• Creationism

If you’re like me, you recognize these as standard separation of church and state concerns, and maybe, if you’re like me, you automatically assume that the government should not be promoting sectarian religious views. This is kind of a core set of ideas for atheism in general, but it’s often stuff that has to be handled by lawyers. It’s good to have lawyers on your side, but it’s not really stuff I can get directly involved in, other than donating money to pay lawyers and making pissed-off comments.

And then he asked, “Are these atheist issues?”

• Dying with Dignity
• Sex Education
• LGBT
• Abortion
• Women’s Rights
• Science & History
• Racial Justice

He asked this of possibly the most sympathetic audience he could find: Minnesota Atheists are so socially justicey at all times for all of history that the entire membership enthusiastically agreed that all of those were important atheist issues. I certainly think they are, and have been saying so for over a decade (not that anyone listens).

Then he gave his rationale for why all these issues ought to be on the agenda of an atheist organization. When you get down to it, most of the opposition to all of them is religiously motivated — if religion vanished tomorrow, so would creationism, and all of those Bible in the schools bills, and the opposition to all those other issues would be greatly attenuated. There’s no doubting that religion is a major contributor to the world of bad ideas plaguing us.

I like the direction he’s going, but I fear he’s too optimistic. I know that if I could snap my fingers in a kind of atheist Thanos-gambit and selectively make every religious person on the planet crumble into dust (it would be far more than half, I’m afraid), I’m confident that all the items on his first list would immediately disappear as well. Poof, easy.

But the items on the second list? Not so fast. A lot of their opponents would vanish, as would much of their financial base, but unfortunately, there are a lot of fanatical atheists who oppose LGBT and women’s rights, for instance. Those TERFs that have been making bad, incoherent arguments against transgender rights here on the blog in the last few weeks…near as I can tell, they’ve all been skeptics and atheists. Go browse the atheist channels on YouTube, and you’ll find a sordid mass of knee-jerk misogynists thriving there. The alt-right is full of people whose racists beliefs rest on a religious conviction that they are objectively, factually, scientifically correct. Stephen Fry and Richard Dawkins just declared at CSICON that the people who support those issues are extremists who belong to the regressive left.

The space between the two lists above is precisely where the fault line that has created the Deep Rifts in the atheist movement lies. You can’t just claim that the division is between the religious and the non-religious, because there is no shortage of atheists who will fight tooth and nail against all the issues on the second list. These aren’t purely atheist issues, even if Jim Helton and Minnesota Atheists and PZ Myers are consistently aligned in favor of them. If and when American Atheists adopts that list as an important component of their organization’s activism, there will be howls of protest.

Are they prepared for that? I don’t know. Helton’s personal enthusiasm is great, but I have my cynical, pessimistic doubts.

I asked one question and didn’t get a solid answer. American Atheist’s national convention is in April in Cincinnati, Helton’s own backyard. For years I’ve seen them chase the elusive celebrity atheist to headline their events, often without regard for their other views. I can sympathize with why they do it — a celebrity headliner is great for improving attendance. But are they going to continue to lust after the kind of celebrity atheist who labels people who promote the items in that second list as “extremists” and the “regressive left”? He skirted the question, because speakers for that event haven’t been lined up yet.

I fear, though, that the planners for that conference would be eager to sign up one of the usual Big Name Atheists — a Dawkins or a Harris, for instance, or a Stephen Fry — and would commit to them in a flash, no matter that their views often contradict the values in that hopeful list. The problem is that the celebrity atheists all turn out to be such assholes.

One glimmer of hope: part of his proposed strategy is to make deeper alliances with organization like Planned Parenthood or the LGBTQ community, in part because they’re a new member pool, but also because there are smart, talented people among them who could be great speakers at atheist events. I think that’s an important idea, not the least because a lot of those people would be alienated by the kinds of racist, misogynistic ideas that way too many atheist big shots like to endorse, and maybe atheist organizations would stop drooling at the idea of bringing in yet another popular cis-het white man who wants to pander to nothing but their fellow cis-het white men.

My tentative take-away from the talk: I like the direction he’s going, hope he succeeds, but am afraid he’s a little naive about the forces within atheism that are going to make life difficult for him. I can already predict all the complaints he’s going to get, because I’ve been getting them for years.

It’s no secret that I am greatly disillusioned with organized atheism — it usually seems to organize around the idea of the status quo minus churches, and not much else. It leaves a great big gap where ethics and equality and social justice ought to be, all in the name of not alienating the unctuous asshats…and there are a lot of those in atheism. So I’ve just stayed away, which is very depressing, because I still think the core truth that there are no gods is important.

Tomorrow, Sunday at 2:00, Minnesota Atheists (which is a good group, one of the exceptions that is strongly committed to social justice activism) is hosting Jim Helton of American Atheists, one of the big orgs that has burned us all fairly recently, and he promises that things are changing. Here’s the topic for the day:

What is an “atheist issue”? American Atheists redefines what that is. They challenge the status quo. In doing so, they lay out a plan to fight for equality and the true separation of religion and government. If you are not happy with the way things are, then the time is now to make a change.
Jim G. Helton, the National Field Organizer for American Atheists, will be visiting freethought groups in Minnesota over the course of four days in mid-October to bring us up-to-date on what American Atheists is doing, how they can help us, and how we can help them.

That’s a bit vague, but August Berkshire, who is one of the good guys, vouches for him. He is correct that I am “not happy with the way things are”, but I don’t know if he’s referring to the way atheism is, or if he’s talking generically about the rising power of evangelical Christianity. Do I really want to get my hopes up and attend? I’m thinking about it. AA has the power to change a lot, I’ve just been disappointed so many times before.