More Rosenhouse

Posted on July 13, 2009 by Michael

I have had intense discussions with people about obscure points of the Buffyverse, but I don’t expect anyone who is not a Buffy fan to regard such discussions as interesting or important. The trouble is that many of the participants in this session made Christian theology sound like much the same thing. They had various personal reasons for accepting Christianity, but at no point provided any basis for their beliefs that could be recognized as evidence by those outside the community. Theology came off seeming like an in-house discussion among those who share a particular set of premises. Which would be fine if they forthrightly admitted that’s what theology is. The trouble comes when they act as if theology is actually giving us knowledge or understanding of something, or that it is a branch of human inquiry that deserves a place at the table alongside science. Give me some reason to think that Christian theology has any more basis in reality than does Buffy studies, and then I will start taking it seriously.

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Rosenhouse

Posted on July 13, 2009 by Michael

Very frustrating, but entirely typical for creationists. They have a single intuition, that functional systems do not evolve gradually by undirected processes. Virtually all of their scientific arguments are based on attaching poorly understood jargon to that intuition. They have no real understanding even of what the questions are, much less what to do to find answers.

Rosenhouse

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The same evidence

Posted on July 11, 2009 by Michael

We all have the same evidence in front of us. We just have different interpretations.

For instance, most scientists believe we think with our brains. But that’s merely one circumstantial interpretation. We can never know if we really think with our brains. Why not another organ?

I submit that we actually think with our kidneys. These amazing little machines are, at their core, a microcosm of humanity. We humans are always striving to become better and better people. We want to get rid of the parts of ourselves that are no good and better manage and improve the parts of ourselves which are beneficial. Kidneys do exactly this.

Our kidneys help to filter our blood, improving its quality and use. They also are key in getting rid of a lot of our waste – namely urine.

Humans are always thinking of how to gain in quality and discard internal waste. Our kidneys have long known just how to do this. It makes sense that our ability to think would be intricately linked to an organ which displays the very same attributes we constantly seek in our lives.

Right?

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How apt

Posted on June 28, 2009 by Michael

From Conservapedia:

Attention Canadian evolutionists! Conservapedia now nearly ranks in the Google top 10 for the very popular search “evolution” at Google Canada! The Conservapedia evolution article ranks #12 at Google Canada for the search evolution![8] The article appears to be rapidly gaining prominence on the Canadian internet. Will this creation science wildfire spread to the USA, UK, and beyond? Please stay tuned for further developments!

They got their analogy right. Well, partially. Creationism is very much like a wildfire, though it isn’t anywhere near science. It’s a destructive force for not only science, but good in the world.

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The need to challenge

Posted on June 13, 2009 by Michael

More and more, I find myself presenting specific evidence for evolution to creationists. I have done it on For the Sake of Science, and I do it with personal acquaintances. I get the same results from both areas. Creationists have no responses. They are satisfied with believing without evidence, something otherwise known as “faith”. Honestly, these people actually are willing to believe in their inane anti-evolution versions of religion, yet when you tell them that Tiktaalik rosae was predicted to exist in rock layers dating to about 375 million years ago, what do they have to say? They question motivations (atheists just hate god and want to do anything that pleases themselves), quote scripture, and completely gloss over evidence. I’ve never heard a creationist rebuttal to any individual fossil (except maybe to the overhyped account of “Ida” – though not to the non-overhyped account). These people believe in massive coincidence because, well, doing otherwise is inconvenient.

But there are exceptions. It is with pleasure that I present one now.

Why are you not providing reliable sources of information on your website such as the Genome project? What you’re website is basically saying is that every field of science in every country on the planet is wrong. That’s quite an assessment on your part. Instead of attempting to prove evolution wrong, why not attempt to put your money where your mouth is. Here’s a recent challenge. Do this, and you’ll become quite wealthy: Challenging the Discovery Institute to Discover.

This is from a man who saw an anti-evolution billboard while driving. He visited the attached website. Naturally, he found egregious abuses of science. He exchanged a few emails with one of the people running the site, but couldn’t get any decent responses. He experienced one of the most common interactions with creationists. These people aren’t interested in the truth.

The rant made me feel better to get those things off my chest. It’s difficult to communicate with people that haven’t taken the time to simply read at least a portion of the information that’s available, when they sit there arguing against material that they haven’t taken the time to learn anything about, simply rejecting it prior to ever having spent any time even looking at it.

Importantly, it wasn’t simply the terrible responses from creationists that turned this man from a Christian to a non-believer. While he says his “eyes have been opened by the exposure of deception and misrepresentation the creationist movement exposes itself to time and time again”, he also shows that he actually gives a damn about truth.

I continued researching and reading and watching documentary films in an attempt to erode my lack of knowledge on the immensity of Evolution. I had known of the topic all of my life, but not to the depth that I was now pursuing. Up to that point, I hadn’t really paid attention to the debate that was going on around the country regarding this topic. I had no idea that people were so passionately against this. Not because I lived in a cave mind you, but just simply do to the fact that I focused my life on other areas of interest. I was also disappointed as to how we as Americans were perceived outside of the United States on the matter of Evolution. The shear immensity of the problem boggles the mind.

While researching, I was amazed to learn what we as a species have discovered through our research and efforts. I was also amazed to discover how the scientific field of Evolution affected other fields of science and even spawned new fields, and how all of these fields became interlaced and supported one another. It was incredible.

After a year and a half of self-imposed and self-paced learning, along with conversations with family and friends (a whole other story), the gnawing memory of my discussion with Julie finally got to me. At this point, I was too far gone with the knowledge of my discoveries to let it sit idly any further.

(“Julie” runs the aforementioned creationist website and is the person he originally emailed.)

I love this. The guy heard some information, looked into it, then made sure he actually had some background so he could decide accurately for himself. Naturally, evolution won out for him. Truth has a funny way of doing this.

But isn’t this always the story? I’ve read so many blog entries and forum posts where atheists/agnostics describe how they heard something absurd from a tick-in-the-skin creationist and decided to check things out for themselves. My story is similar. At a dinner with a friend, his mother (a creationist), and a few of his mother’s church friends (also creationists), I heard the church friends claim Earth was created 6,000 years ago. Well, to be fair, they actually questioned amongst each other if the number they heard was 6,000 or 7,000. I quickly looked into the issue. They were off by more than a smidge.

I suppose I have these inane folks to thank for spurring me toward the absolute beauty that is science. I just wish more people would actually look into the stupid claims of ignorant creationists who hate, disavow, avoid, dismember, and spurn science in favor of their ugly, ugly beliefs. Actual evidence is a far better tool for revealing truth, and that is beauty.

Filed under: Atheism/Humanism, Creationism | Tagged: , , , | 1 Comment »

New Creationists

Posted on June 10, 2009 by Michael

The New Creationists Mission Statement

It is the objective of us, the New Creationists, to undermine not simply evolutionary theory, but science as a whole. It is this form of inquiry which has caused the greatest damage to our version of events. It must be destroyed at all costs.

The primary method for attaining our goal is Reaching a Middle Ground. This means that we are to seek, purely in the eye of the layman public, a position which appears on the surface to be a reasonable compromise. To be sure, we want to tell the world we embrace evolution. We also want to tell the world we embrace a Creator.

We want to hide Our Creator in the nearly impossible to understand gaps of reality. Quantum mechanics will often be our realm, but much more can work. As stated, our goal is Reaching a Middle Ground with the layman public. We need not answer to scientists. Indeed, they are the enemy. What we are to do is wrench the very fruits of these enemies from their empirical hands. We are to show gaps in the understanding of the cell. We are to discuss unknowns in molecular biology. We are to contort the flaws of physics, cosmology, and astronomy to assist our goals. It is in these places that Our Creator resides. If it’s science, it is imperfect. We shall exploit, even invent, imperfections. All is justified in our goal. Science deserves nothing but lip service; It is the enemy.

Our first step is to put forth an army of Christian scientists. They will not be the supporters of fringe creationism. They shall not espouse views which deny any modern science. However, they shall put atop all modern science a sense of confusion and remote possibility. That remote possibility shall be where Our Creator resides.

Our goals at this point will rely upon American idiosyncrasies. Tired of divisive politics, Americans seek a Middle Ground. They crave a sense of wishy-washy – it sounds fair. We shall marginalize the New Atheists with paint brushes of extremism. While they fully embrace science and all its evils, we shall embrace it only superficially – we shall not fall into the evil of the enemy. We shall appeal to the American sense of fair play. We are the New Creationists.

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Macro- and microevolution

Posted on June 5, 2009 by Michael

In a Facebook discussion, one friend described macroevolution as such.

Macroevolution is microevolution given enough time.

In response from a creationist friend (yes, I maintain them), he got this.

HA.

Here is a fuller explanation of the terms from yours truly. Enjoy.

[That person’s] explanation is apt. First, it addresses the terms to the extent that they probably deserve. No scientist uses them in any meaningful way, except when addressing the invalid issues of creationists. And that’s the truth: the terms are largely of creationist origin. They arose as a means to appear more reasonable to the public. Similarly, there is a strategy going around creationist organizations known as “strengths and weaknesses”. It seeks to make creationists seem more reasonable. In truth, we’re just seeing an extension of normal creationist coyness from the organized among the crowd (i.e., the Discovery Institute & friends).

But insofar as the terms mean anything, one is just a description of the other on another scale. Here’s why.

Evolution is a continuous process. At no single point in history can anyone point and say, yes, here is where species X began. Natural selection works gradually and cumulatively. It is simply a matter of convenience that we can separate species. All their ancestors are gone to say otherwise. In other words, a mother dinosaur only gives birth to daughter dinosaurs. But gradually, those dinosaurs change into something slightly different. Over wide expanses of time, those slight changes add up to big changes. This should be a hugely simple concept. Feathers, webbed feet, webbed arms, lighter frames. This all eventually add up to the evolution of birds. (Some scientists consider birds modern day dinosaurs, a somewhat trivial issue.) But at no point did a dinosaur lay an egg which hatched into an eagle. It took a huge number of small changes to lead that bird. That is what microevolution does over thousands and millions of years to produce macroevolutionary changes which can only be identified in hindsight, eons later.

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All it takes to refute something…

Posted on June 3, 2009 by Michael

…is for some journalist to say you did. According to the headline on that article, James Perloff refuted evolution at some half-baked meeting.

Perloff tried to draw parallels throughout history, attempting to connect individuals such as Andrew Carnegie, Karl Marx, Josef Stalin and Adolph Hitler with the teachings and rationales of Charles Darwin. He also told of his own life’s inner conflict, saying he was briefly turned into an atheist at a young age due to Darwin’s theory.

Perloff went on to say, “Survival of the fittest does not explain arrival of the fittest,” and that, “[the theory of] evolution is just speculation on the past and should not been seen as scientific fact.”

There you go. EVILution has been defeated. Good job, Perloff. Honestly. It should be clear to everyone. If someone can make bogus, tinsel thin connections between ideas and people Real America loathes, then the idea must be false. Just pretend that logical fallacies don’t exist and the argument is air-tight.

The event was held in front of a small gathering and was kicked off with a prayer along with the Pledge of Allegiance led by Harold Shurtleff of West Roxbury, regional field director for the John Birch Society.

I remember as a very young kid playing Street Fighter. When the levels got too hard or my older brother beat me a bunch of times in a row, I’d start up a game just by myself. I would have a Player 2 set up, but no one was controlling it. I’d just wail all my 32 bits on that character. It made me feel good. Does anyone get the feeling that conservatives have the same frustration? I mean, the exact same frustration – one born out of immaturity and a lack of rationale. These people are kicking and screaming their prayers and flag-based prayers all over the place because it makes them feel good. Of course, I was a child when I did it. What excuse do these people have? There are more examples.

Take Sean Hannity. He’s a huge idiot. (I heard him say in the middle of a broadcast, and I paraphrase, “…that isn’t an arrogant statement. America saved the world from Totalitarianism. It did this multiple times. The world has us to thank. That isn’t an arrogant statement.”) He refuses to refer to Obama as “President Obama” in virtually every instance. He insists on calling him “The Annointed One”, or “The One” for short. You can feel his anger and immature frustration. People very rarely identify whining correctly (they tend to conflate it with active disagreement). This is not one of those cases. Sean Hannity and the new breed of ultra-radical conservatives are big, fat whiners.

Conservapedia is another great example of a bunch of crybabies. Their page on evolution (which is just a page on creationism) has a section titled “Creation Scientists Tend to Win the Creation-Evolution Debates“. I kid you not. This is their version of 32-bit wailing. They absolutely cannot win. Rather than to accept reality, they set up these conversations in their own heads where they win every time. Sean Hannity does it. John McCain did it. Dubya definitely did it. This is the path of conservatives in America. Yell and whine and if that doesn’t work, beat the crap out of Blanka.

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Finally, a little victory

Posted on May 28, 2009 by Michael

Creationist dentists Don McLeroy’s confirmation failed. He’s apparently still on the school board, damaging education as much as he possibly can, but he is no longer the chairman.

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When faced with evidence

Posted on May 21, 2009 by Michael

I’ve noticed that when creationists are faced with direct evidence, they fold. They give up the specific argument for generalities and rhetoric. I am thinking of a couple of specific instances.

Back when I accepted an invitation to see a screening of Expelled, I presented a few specific arguments. The first one was in response to that entirely dumb creationist conflation: ‘Evolution says the world came from nothing, from some Big Bang’. Well, clearly, that is not true. Evolution is about how organisms change over time. It is not a theory within physics. Upon pointing this out, the creationist response was to move on to how people just want to reject God. They so badly want to have no responsibility that they’ll latch on to any old theory. (Remember, these are creationists, so “theory” here doesn’t mean the same as “scientific theory“.) They ignored the argument. They made a false claim. I countered it with a true statement. They surely continued believing in the falsehood, but rather than to present a counter-argument to support their continued belief, they folded.

This is yet another coy creationist tactic. These people have no real meat to their beliefs, so they just move from poorly fashioned concept to poorly fashioned concept, hoping to dazzle us with their ability to believe in spite of all the empirical evidence. It’s astounding.

There are over 700 comments on this blog. A little more than 120 are my own. Most of the remaining are from creationists. They’re more than willing to discuss the color of the bike shed, but when it comes to some real meat, they’re nowhere to be seen. There are two detailed posts sitting below this one which have no responses. None. Maybe my writing just isn’t popular enough to fill my blog space, I can buy that. But c’mon. No one wants to counter any points I’ve raised (via Jerry Coyne)? methinks no one can.

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