Biology textbook calls creationism myth; father wants honesty banned

Posted on April 11, 2010 by Michael

An honors textbook being used at Farragut High School in Knoxville, Tennessee refers to creationism as such:

Creationism: the biblical myth that the universe was created by the Judeo-Christian God in 7 days.

That’s a pretty fair definition. The only possible problem could be that there are a number of other creationist myths. Check that – the only possible legitimate problem. Creationists, of course, will have other issues.

[Father of a Farragut High School student, Kurt] Zimmermann said the use of the word “myth” could “mislead, belittle and discourage students in believing in creationism and pointedly calls the Bible a myth.”

I would hope so. The Bible has no evidence for anything not trivial, nevermind creationism. Why would anyone want to believe in a haphazard, internally inconsistent piece of violent rubbish that has no connection to reality? It involves magic, talking snakes, incorrectly describes the Universe, and for some strange reason has some tyrant claiming to be three individuals while he’s really one and one aspect of his personality disorder is that of a Jew zombie. It’s ridiculous.

Next.

Filed under: Creationism | Tagged: , , , | 4 Comments »

I think he hit them all

Posted on March 25, 2010 by Michael

Dominic Speirs is a quack supporter. He’s been busy in the comments defending the greedy, immoral, scummy snake oil salesman Andreas Moritz, but he decided to branch out to Darwin.

Darwin didnt even believe his theory of evolution. And the word ‘evolution’ and ’survival of the fittest’ didnt turn up in his books until the 4th edition of origin of the species. (And both theorys were lifted from another man)
Darwin was influenced by his parents who were members of the Lunar Secret society. The Lunar’s agenda at that time was “to destroy in the mind of man the belief in god”. He was more easily convinced about the lack of a god/spirit by the death of his daughter.

But ultimatley he was a man of God/spirituality and by the end of his life believed firmly in God or some higher force which permeates the universe.

If this guy wasn’t in Andreas Moritz’s Facebook woo group, I might have to declare Poe’s Law. Not only does he trot out a mass of creationist misconceptions that have been addressed who-knows-how-many-times, but he gets the constant misspellings in there, too – it looks like he hit all the requirements of being a creationist. I’m thinking this sort of thing should become the gold standard for noting when a blog is starting to take off: once the egregiously cliche creationists start popping up, the blog is on its way.

But this always raises a question for me: how do people get this crazy? PZ Myers talks about Reality Rejection Syndrome.

It isn’t just creationism; those beliefs have a surprisingly high correlation with denial of climate change, denial of HIV’s role in AIDS, anti-vax nonsense, rejection of the Big Bang, dualism, etc., etc., etc. At the root of these problems is discomfort with modernity and change, resentment of authority, anti-intellectualism, and of course, goddamned religion, which is little more than a rationalization for maintaining barbarous medieval values. So, yeah, face the facts: creationism isn’t just a weird reaction to bad science instruction and those annoying godless liberal college professors — it’s just one symptom of a deep-seated mental derangement.

That seems to describe Speirs pretty well. He’s not simply into woo and silly creationist beliefs (read: lies); he despises all that is founded in science and modernity. He’s like a Republican without the nasty social libertarian streak (as he has thus far indicated; the night is young).

Mr. Jay Gatsby offers a similar analysis:

Instead, fundamentalist American movements seek to redefine and protect their culture in an age of mass culture and state-based morality creation. Especially after WWII the state’s role in the creation of the ideals of morality has expanded at a planetary rate. Fundamentalist groups, knowingly or not, reject this principle and use religion as a cultural basis.

The religious ideals on which Speirs rests are likely either Christianity or New Age, amorphous woo. The first is likely just based upon 1) statistics and 2) the fact that he embraces the crazy. But I lean towards the latter because these woo fans don’t like to be pinned down; they reside in vagueness. As MJG puts it,

What is most curious about fundamentalist groups is their lack of clear definition. Fundamentalist identity is not based on what is. Instead, the groups define themselves against the “other;” what is “not” takes precedent over what “is.”

This describes no group better than the generic woo-worshipers. As one said to me in an email,

I bet your spirit guides are really hopeing you will knock this off so you can just get on with your life.

“Spirit guides” is so vague, it would be impossible to mount a coherent argument against it/them. I don’t mean to indicate that religions are rational or anything – they aren’t – but the more learned followers of mass religion are able to at least mount a case for their crazy beliefs (however weak the case may be). The woo supporters aren’t even interested in doing that; their interests rest in rejecting what’s popular and embracing a minority…nothingness.

Filed under: Creationism, Pure bullshit | Tagged: , , , , , , | 2 Comments »

We’re Christian…we should be allowed to be disruptive!

Posted on February 16, 2010 by Michael

Pissant little parents in North Carolina, great abusers of the minds of children, have decided having their kids harass the science teacher is an okay thing to do.

A middle-school teacher in Wake County may be fired after she and her friends made caustic remarks on a Facebook page about her students, the South and Christianity.

Melissa Hussain, an eighth-grade science teacher at West Lake Middle School in Apex, was suspended with pay Friday while investigators review her case, according to Greg Thomas, a Wake schools spokesman. The suspension came after some of Hussain’s students and their parents objected to comments on her Facebook page, many of them revolving around her interaction with her Christian students.

Basically the kids were putting pictures of Jesus on her desk, reading their Bibles during class, and randomly breaking out into Jesus-song. They were asking irrelevant questions about God while learning about simple biology (because their parents evidently don’t want them to be prepared for Bio 101 in college). And, of course, the parents believe it is all okay because disruption is acceptable when it’s done under the guise of religion.

“She doesn’t have to be a professing Christian to be in the classroom,” [parent Annette Balint said. “But she can’t go the other way and not allow God to be mentioned.”

This tune would change pretty quickly if these were Muslim children trying to disrupt class.

This is clearly all just a blatant attempt to taunt the teacher. She has a right to post whatever she pleases on her Facebook page. In fact, what she posted was entirely reasonable.

Hussain wrote on the social-networking site that it was a “hate crime” that students anonymously left a Bible on her desk, and she told how she “was able to shame” her students over the incident. Her Facebook page included comments from friends about “ignorant Southern rednecks,” and one commenter suggested Hussain retaliate by bringing a Dale Earnhardt Jr. poster to class with a swastika drawn on the NASCAR driver’s forehead.

Take note. Hussain said it was a hate crime and that she was able to shame her students. I think she’s going a little over the top with the term “hate crime” – it’s blatant harassment and completely inappropriate and irresponsible of the parents, but not a crime – but it’s good that she was able to shame the students. They were acting out and misbehaving. How many times has a student not been made an example for doing that?

Also take note that the most ‘egregious’ comments came from her friends. Ignoring for a moment that the comments are entirely accurate, Hussain can hardly be blamed for the thoughts of her friends. And let’s take a moment and look at one of these thoughts: it was suggested she bring a Dale Earnhardt Jr. poster to class and draw a swastika on it. That puts things in perfect perspective: it would be inappropriate harassment if she actually did that. In fact, it would probably be a fireable action. But her students are doing the same thing. They’re needlessly taunting and harassing their teacher (at the request of their ignorant, science-hating, creationist, redneck parents). Since they’re only students and can’t be fired, they should at least be given detentions and, if the behavior continues, suspensions.

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Beating a creationist

Posted on February 14, 2010 by Michael

It seems that every time a creationist opens his mouth it gets shut up – not because THERE’S A BIG CRAZY CONSPIRACY!, but because creationists hate evidence, hate facts, and hate reality. Get a bunch of creationists together to make a crappy movie and the smackdowns get even better.

The latest Intelligent Design film, called ‘Darwin’s Dilemma’, attempts to examine a problem that vexed poor Charles Darwin in 1859 – the puzzle of what we now call the ‘Cambrian explosion’. As an Oxford palaeontologist who has been working on this problem since 1966, I have been asked for my opinion on the veracity of its claims. Below are outlined some of what I take to be its more laughable misunderstandings.

1. The film makes a familiar mistake. There is a misplaced fixation upon beasts of the Burgess Shale. So antiquated is this view that the screenplay for this film could have been written by teachers in 1954, or even by Mack Sennett at Keystone studios in 1912, just after the Burgess Shale biota was first reported by Walcott. It needs to be remembered that the Burgess Shale appears far too late in the fossil record to tell us much about emergence of animals. Modern data shows that the explosion of modern phyla was beginning by about 545 Ma ago, with forms like Cloudina and Sabellidites. Since the Burgess Shale is a mere 505 Ma old, this gives us palaeontologists some 40 million years to play with. What a gift!

2. A rich fossil record of early animal remains has been discovered from near the end of the Ediacaran period at about 545 Ma to the appearance of calcified trilobites and echinoderms in the Chengjiang biota, some 520 Ma ago. This transitional period, variously known as the Tommotian or Fortunian Stage, contains examples of transitional forms. For example, Halkieria and Maikhanella are probable stem group ‘molluscs’ with multi-element shells; Eccentrotheca and Camenella are taken to be stem group ‘brachiopods’ with multi-element shells. Dozens of scientists have been writing about these materials in recent years. Some 20 million years of evolution has thereby been ignored. Or censored.

3. The first great mass extinction took place about 520 million years ago, during the Botomian and Toyonian Stages – well before the Burgess Shale. A rich diversity of reef building animals disappeared forever. These included archaeocyathan sponges and many small shelly fossils. But there is no mention of this. Did the film producers suffer amnesia at this point in the story? Or did that great prankster – the Intelligent Designer – make some big mistakes? If so, why call Her intelligent?

4. The film makes another common mistake. When Darwin referred to the need for many small steps in evolution, he did not say whether these steps had to be either fast or slow. Small steps can be made very quickly indeed – as with virus evolution today.

5. The film appears to have been shot within the walls of Cambridge University UK, with interviews taking place in the Sedgwick Museum, or around colleges such as St John’s and King’s College. Some think they perceive some blue highlights around the faces here, suggesting blue-screen shots in which the Cambridge settings have been imposed later. Whether real or false, this gives to the film a wholly spurious authority; rhe impression of a forgery.

For those interested, some of these evolutionary developments can be followed in my recent book on Darwin’s Dilemma, called Darwin’s Lost World (OUP, 2009), which takes the reader back from the Burgess Shale to the earliest multicellular organisms. Research into this fascinating interval remains wide open and is only just beginning. The Cambrian explosion was a real and entirely natural event, as was the wave of extinctions that followed. What a wonderful world!

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It’s never quite articulated

Posted on January 9, 2010 by Michael

You’ve got your younger Earth creationists and then the old Earth creationists. The YECs have their story laid out pretty clearly. Humans and everything else came into existence 6,000 years ago with no evolution. Okay, got it. Stupid, but I’ve got it. But what I don’t get is the OECs. What dates do they propose for the introduction of animals? When did humans first appear? We certainly haven’t been around 4 billion years. Not 3 billion. Not 10 million. It’s more like 100,000. But how do these crazies match up all the evidence? What was walking around 100,000 years ago? Was it human? How about 40,000 years ago? Human? If not, then what? If so, then why did God wait another 37,000 years to start getting chatty?

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It's never quite articulated

Posted on January 9, 2010 by Michael

You’ve got your younger Earth creationists and then the old Earth creationists. The YECs have their story laid out pretty clear. Humans and everything else came into existence 6,000 years ago with no evolution. Okay, got it. Stupid, but I’ve got it. But what I don’t get is the OECs. What dates do they propose for the introduction of animals? When did humans first appear? We certainly haven’t been around 4 billion years. Not 3 billion. Not 10 million. It’s more like 100,000. But how do these crazies match up all the evidence? What was walking around 100,000 years ago? Was it human? How about 40,000 years ago? Human? If not, then what? If so, then why did God wait another 37,000 years to start getting chatty?

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False equivalence and just not getting it

Posted on December 29, 2009 by Michael

Jeff Gaither is a blathering moron who contradicts himself, doesn’t have an iota of science straight in his head, and has no intelligent offerings for the world.

The truth is the big-bang theory and the theory of evolution are every bit as groundless as the idea of divine creation.

Upon reading this I suspected Gaither would go into that old game of false equivalence that creationists love: “We both have the same facts, just different interpretations!” The problem with that is that “different interpretations” means a lot. For instance, instant creation is a plainly stupid interpretation of any fact(s). Evolution by natural selection, however, is the greatest interpretation of anything since man had such reasoning abilities. But Gaither takes a slightly different approach. Rather than saying we all have different interpretations, he says we all have equally bad interpretations. Still false equivalence.

However, the big-bang theory does not explain a darned thing about the origins of the universe. It claims that originally all the matter in the universe was condensed into a single point. But, so what? Where did the point come from? Where did all the matter come from?

So what? So what? So it offers the framework and logical underpinnings by which physics views everything it does. Just as evolution is essential to a proper understanding of biology or atomic theory is necessary for any chemist to know, the Big Bang is a key piece of any physicist’s knowledge.

Take careful note, though, of Gaither’s point that the Big Bang does not explain the origin of the singularity which started everything.

Many scientific-types like to pretend the big-bang theory is logically superior to the idea of divine creation. But, really, it is less satisfactory, because it offers no explanation, not even a supernatural one, for the origin of things.

Sort of like how the MLB rulebook is not satisfactory. Sure, it explains everything it purports to explain, but does it tell us of the origin of baseball in the first place? And what of the Universe itself? What does Major League Baseball have to say of that? HUH?!

Evolution is another issue on which many rationalistic muckity-mucks like to look down on the spiritually minded. Evolution, as the entire world knows, states life began in the “primordial soup” of early earth, and through natural selection those early cells and amoebas evolved into trees, platypuses and people.

Evolution says no such thing. It states that life evolved from a common ancestor. How that original population of ancestors came to be is a separate question. Thank you, creationist canard #14.

Where did that first cell come from? How did life begin? The answer usually given is, “Uhh, lightning struck the ocean, and that created life.”

Take a moment to let this sink in. It’s silly on its face, but it doesn’t especially add to the stupidity already present – he covered that by already mentioned primordial soup in an inappropriate context. Soaked it in yet? Okay, good. Now read on.

But since when does lightning create life? If a woman goes outside in a thunderstorm and is struck by lightning, does she become pregnant? No, she dies. The function of lightning is to electrocute, not impregnate.

B-b-b-but how is this immense knowledge of electricity satisfying at all?! It doesn’t say ANYTHING of origins!

Science has never been able to answer the question satisfactorily of how life began. Once one accepts life began, evolution is a fine and completely satisfactory theory. But from whence came the first cell?

Haha, hang on a moment. A second ago evolution was the stuff of “muckity-mucks”. Now it’s all fine and actually “completely satisfying“?

The big-bang theory and the theory of evolution are very similar in the way they operate. They begin their explanation immediately after some incomprehensible phenomenon, carry that initial state to the present, and claim to have given the end-all and be-all on a fundamental question.

He just doesn’t get it. The Big Bang starts 13.7 billion years ago. Evolution, as far as Earth is concerned, starts about 3.9 billion years ago. Neither theory purports to explain any more.

If you corner a scientist and ask him where the cosmic point of the big-bang theory came from, or how life originated, he will be forced to admit, “I don’t know.” And if scientists don’t know, all their research and all their great theories are basically nullified.

Oh, wow. I had no idea that hundreds of years of research was invalid. I bet no scientist knew this either. Good thing Jeff Gaither has cleared the whole issue up. Maybe next he can tell MLB that because they cannot explain the origins of bats (bats, trees, marine plant life, bacteria, BUT THEN WHAT, BUG SELIG?!), that all their work is null and void.

Science must admit the universe and life originated in circumstances we cannot explain

Check.

and if they cannot explain how the universe came about, then how is their stance in any way superior to religionists who found their creation-doctrine on God?

Empirical evidence which supports everything science and specific theories purport to explain?

True, we cannot understand an eternal, omniscient God; but we can’t understand the Big Bang or evolution, either.

No, no. Jeff Gaither cannot understand any of these things.

The big-bang theory implies that at the moment of creation, the Universe was so dense the current laws of physics had no meaning. I’d like to expand this proposition, and state at the beginning of the universe, the laws of logic had no meaning.

That isn’t an expansion. It’s essentially a repetition of what has already been said. If no law of physics existed, then nothing which is derived from them existed either. There’s no need to say as much – especially when you’re a jackass with little to no understanding of basic scientific concepts.

And how is it that Gaither is willing to reject the Big Bang, but embrace a beginning to the Universe?

Indeed, it is possible to prove this. There could have been no “beginning of time,” since the notion of “beginning” presupposes time.

It presupposes no such thing. The beginning of time marks the moment when the Universe began expanding. Space and time are one. Maybe Gaither is just a big static state guy, I don’t know. He may want to revisit the scientific literature of the past 100 years or so if that’s the case.

But I guess he wants to re-institute “the laws of logic” since he rejects a beginning to the Universe.

But if the universe has always existed, then there must have been infinity of time before I was born, and since infinity of time would take forever, I should never have been born at all.

First of all, the Universe has not always existed, so shut the hell up. Second, shouldn’t Gaither also think “infinity of time” presupposes time in his demented world?

Okay, so a beginning of time must be wrong because Gaither thinks that presupposes time in the first place. He’s wrong, but that’s his position. But an infinite Universe must be wrong because he would never have been born. This is densely stupid.

Since the laws of logic don’t apply to creation, there’s no reason to suppose there is any unique truth about universal origins. The scientists are right, and the creationists are right too. These respective sides need to acknowledge the equal validity of their respective positions and leave each other in peace. There’s no point in arguing about something we can’t understand.

Methinks the lack of understanding is characteristic of only one party here.

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Hilarious creationists

Posted on December 25, 2009 by Michael

This comes from a silly creationist site that has no authority on anything to do with science or common sense.

There is no scientific evidence that a species can change the number of chromosomes within the DNA. The chromosome count within each species is fixed. This is the reason a male from one species cannot mate successfully with a female of another species.

There is specific evidence for this occurring. Currently Darren Wong is painstakingly going through each creationist claim from that site piece by piece. He has yet to get to this bit, but I will leave it up to him since he’s willing to go into such enormous detail on everything. (Though for the time being, here is one version of what he’s going to say.)

What I want to address here is the last sentence in the above quote. I mean, really? This creationist thinks the reason a male from one species is prevented from reproducing with a female from another has to do with chromosome count? Really? So then I should expect an orangutan to be able to reproduce with a hedgehog since they both have 48 chromosomes?

Filed under: Creationism | Tagged: , , , , , | 55 Comments »

Mystery Science Theater 3000 message to creationist "researchers"

Posted on December 16, 2009 by Michael

Filed under: Creationism, Humor | Tagged: , , , | Leave a comment »

Mystery Science Theater 3000 message to creationist “researchers”

Posted on December 16, 2009 by Michael

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