Improvement

Nailed It!

Cthulhu Demands...

...that you teach the controversy.

Note To Creationists: The Game Is Afoot

I'm glad to see science taking the offensive here; it's long overdue.



No more playing around. When the science guild is confronted by this nonsense, don't defend: attack their alleged "science," and then drill into their philosophy. Get average Americans to see that they start with the answers and work backwards, and we start with the data and push forwards. And any rhetoric the creationists want to use to make it seem like science is atheistic, remind them of this:

Any time they want to make a testable claim of their god, scientists are waiting to get the Nobel Prize. So who's game?

The Timeline Of Intelligent Design

Ahura Mazda dammit

Yowza, Clyde Squid, perhaps we can call on the superpowers of David Hume to make Mr. Warren stop thinking he's a rational being- Rick seems easily swayed by buncombe. BTW, does God use the Batphone to talk to him, or what?

From LGF:

The Rick Warren Experience

Fox News is promoting Rick Warren like crazy tonight.

It’s all part of the big cleanup.

Rick Warren’s not a progressive Jerry Falwell. Really. He’s not. Pay no attention to those men behind the curtain.

God talks to Rick every day. And God told Rick that evolution stinks.

Do you believe Creation happened in the way Genesis describes it?

WARREN: If you’re asking me do I believe in evolution, the answer is no, I don’t. I believe that God, at a moment, created man. I do believe Genesis is literal, but I do also know metaphorical terms are used. Did God come down and blow in man’s nose? If you believe in God, you don’t have a problem accepting miracles. So if God wants to do it that way, it’s fine with me.

HARRIS: I’m doing my Ph.D. in neuroscience; I’m very close to the literature on evolutionary biology. And the basic point is that evolution by natural selection is random genetic mutation over millions of years in the context of environmental pressure that selects for fitness.

WARREN: Who’s doing the selecting?

HARRIS: The environment. You don’t have to invoke an intelligent designer to explain the complexity we see.

WARREN: Sam makes all kinds of assertions based on his presuppositions. I’m willing to admit my presuppositions: there are clues to God. I talk to God every day. He talks to me.

Another Transitional Fossil Is Not Found

Creationists always say that no transitional fossils have been discovered. Well, another one hasn't been discovered.This fossil is a transitional whale species. Superstitious creationist twats will argue that it is neither. Of course, if your mind is not polluted by nonsense, the find is fascinating.

"The Genius Of Charles Darwin" And Dawkins

The BBC recently aired a program called "The Genius of Charles Darwin." I hope it makes it over here, at least in DVD form. But as one should expect, even in the UK believers cried foul and whined.

Here's one ignorant grievance, published in the TimesOnline:

But most believers are not creationists. Some are scientists. They reckon that an omnipotent being capable of giving humans free will is equally capable of setting a cosmic ball rolling - Big Bang, abiogenesis, all that - and letting it proceed through eons of evolution, selection and struggle. One of the oddest aspects of Dawkins's TV programme, rich in antelope-mauling and gobbly snakes, was his emotional implication that, gee, Nature is too cruel to have been invented by God! A wet, mawkish, bunny-hugging argument.

Can you believe that crass stupidity comes not from Alabama, but from the UK?

Dawkins has replied to this bilge, and his response touches on a previous post on this blog.

I expect it’s true that the few believers Libby Purves meets over canapés are not creationists. But “most believers”? Most believers in Bradford? The Scottish Highlands? Pakistan? Indonesia? The Arab world? South America? Indeed, North America? Polls suggest that more than 40 per cent of the British population are creationists. For the subset who call themselves believers, the figure must be considerably more than 50 per cent. Please don’t say “most people”, when what you really mean is Islington and Hampstead Garden Suburb.

I once heard a radio host and creationist say that Dawkins really gets on his nerves. I bet. Theologic excuses are no match for the unintentionally hilarious wit of well-reasoned arguments/sarcasm.

An Eye Isn't Just An Eye

When creationists argue that a complex eye couldn't have just evolved, scientists ask, "Which eye?"

This review of squid eye evolution drives the point home; our eyes are not physically or biochemically similar, yet they are functionally so. It's a great read. Creationists only excuse this data, rather than explaining how Mr. Jesus chose to be so non-redundantly redundantly stupid.

Today's Worst Person In The World!

Yes, Ben Stein did say that science leads to killing people...on TBN! What a douche nozzle.

It's A Comic All Right

This new Chick tract is so bad it's hilarious!


Ok, all Chick tracts can all be described as such. But this one takes the taco.


Hooray for superstitious dumdums! Magic Jesus rules!

Religion is not just stupid, it's child abuse.

"A Blood Libel On Western Civilization"

When talking about the creationists to people who don’t follow these controversies closely, I have found that the hardest thing to get across is the shifty, low-cunning aspect of the whole modern creationist enterprise.

I haven't posted anything on the creationist Expelled movie, mostly because the whole thing bores me really. The movie presents no new arguments (no surprise); and that creationists can be a bunch of deceitful, amoral hypocrites is century-old, arguably millennia-old, news.

However, I gleefully post this link to John Derbyshire's deliciously vicious National Review...uh, review..of the movie, since it's a conservative harshly criticizing the movie. It's unique so far of all of the reviews I've read, as Derbyshire points out that Ben Stein is betraying the Western Civilization Stein seems to think scientists (ie, liberals) are destroying. Best part (emphasis mine):

And now here is Ben Stein, sneering and scoffing at Darwin, a man who spent decades observing and pondering the natural world — that world Stein glimpses through the window of his automobile now and then, when he’s not chattering into his cell phone. Stein claims to be doing it in the name of an alternative theory of the origin of species: Yet no such alternative theory has ever been presented, nor is one presented in the movie, nor even hinted at. There is only a gaggle of fools and fraudsters, gaping and pointing like Apaches on seeing their first locomotive: “Look! It moves! There must be a ghost inside making it move!”

All of the arguments made in Expelled are debunked here, should you want to take a look. I find it telling that my local theater only showed it for a week. Bring it home, Derbyshire...

Which other of our civilizational achievements would you like to sneer at? What else from what Waugh called “the work of centuries” would you like to “abandon … for sentimental qualms”? You call yourself a conservative? Feugh!

When Will Republicans Learn That The Religious Right Is Not That Powerful?

It can be a good thing when your state, in this case Kentucky, elects a Democratic governor. Especially when the Republican incumbent:

1. is a huge supporter of creationism, and of the laughable "Creationist Museum" built in his own state.
2. tried to get support by displaying Yahweh's top ten no-no's in the state capitol.
3. tried to get votes by "smearing the queer," namely doing robo-calls stating that his opponent would turn Kentucky into San Francisco (the horrors) by supporting gay causes.

Good riddance, asshole.

Just stay with it.

glumbert - The Atheist Delusion

Which Of My Two Alma Maters Hosts A Creationist Website Sponsored By A Professor In The Computer Science Department?

Wrong. How embarrassing.

Fight Fire With...Unicorns?

A group has started a campaign to put up a billboard near the odious Creation Museum in Kentucky advertising the Unicorn Museum. I celebrate and condone their snarkiness. Perhaps Tom Cruise might join in?

Cant...Make...It...Fit...

Original site here.

Embrace The Inconvenience

Michael Behe, the biochemist who started the whole Intelligent Design thing with his book Darwin's Black Box, has a new book out. In it, he uses mathematical models to show how "Darwinism" can't produce certain biomolecular binding sites.

Several early reviews trash his mathematics and poorly reasoned premises, as to be expected. But this argument threw me for a loop: the "designer," who/whatever that is, specifically made malaria. Yeah. The argument atheists have been throwing up for decades, he embraces.

How do you worship such a beast? Creators of biogenic plagues are not looked kindly upon by modern history; deliberate spreaders of them are the villains of much science fiction. Behe's argument is not only logically vapid, it reaches a conclusion that is totally anti-theistic.

Brilliant! Good show, old man!

Bible Dinosaurs Live In The Jungle

Creationist Debate Update Part 3: The Evolution Of A Pepsi Can

An attendant of the Comfort/Cameron vs. RRS debate has a rough breakdown of the event here.

Comfort used his "can" argument, which is so absurd that it bears repeating. Basically, it says that it is improbable for the big bang to have formed a Pepsi can. Therefore, the can was designed. Since humans are more complex than Pepsi cans, they are designed as well. And design=designer.

There are several major problems with this argument:

1. Cans do not replicate. Humans do. When I look at a can, I know it came from a factory (from experience). When I look at a human, I know that it came from a union of a sperm and egg. Analogizing randomly mutating replicators to cans is like comparing apples and...cans. Whenever creationists pull this kind of argument out, I simply shrug. It's one that wouldn't pass muster in a junior high debate team match, and it's been refuted so many times that all defenders of science are exhausted repeating the obvious: life produces offspring genetically different from itself, cans/watches/747's/cars do not.
2. Design does not equal designer. Cans are the product of a design process, not a "designer." No one person designs any can you may find. It's the result of countless marketers, fabricators, chemical and metallurgical engineers, and government public health officials. To say that any can has a single "designer" is obviously ridiculous, and the analogy to this design process would raise some uncomfortable propositions for evangelicals (ex, how do you know we were designed by a single designer and not by committee? Wouldn't the latter, given all of our flaws, make more sense?). Evolution is a design process as well: species change due to survival and reproductive advantages that naturally arise among genetically different offspring. Again, the analogy is so piss-poor, so egregiously illogical, one wonders how its proponents can get through the day without their brain leaking out of their nose.
3. The argument that evolutionary theory states that complex life arose through a random, spontaneous event is a blatant straw man argument. Simple life took billions of years to develop, and it did so through a series of chemical processes. And that's not evolutionary theory. Once it did develop, it took off, and species have changed dramatically over the span of life on earth. The only explanation for these changes is evolutionary theory. Comfort's "can" argument dishonestly implies that scientists believe that complex species rose from a primordial soup randomly out of the blue. I can't help but point out that people like Mr. Comfort believe that a pro-Semitic space genie created a human male from dust and a human female from a human male rib! To believe life arose spontaneously without evoking a magical sky-daddy would be difficult, but evoking magic makes it no less absurd. Perhaps Mr. Comfort should read what scientists understand about how life arose, and then how it evolved after that, before he starts telling other people how ridiculous science's explanation is.
   

There may be other flaws as well, but 3 is enough to bury any proposition. The big question now is: how do we teach people to detect and reject poor logic?