Anti-Creationism
jrosenhouse | June 29, 2007The only thing left was the big planetarium show. I managed to hook up with my posse on line, and together we went inside. Alas, we ended up sitting in the front row. This meant that even when we took advantage of the tilt back feature of the chairs, it was difficult to see some of what was going on.
Having visited the Hayden Planetarium in New York, this one looked a bit cheesy. The domed ceiling was a bit lower than you would normally expect for a show of this kind. On the other hand, the presentation itself certainly had a professional feel to it.
The show was called “The Created…
jrosenhouse | June 28, 2007There was one final movie to be viewed. This one dealt with dinosaurs and dragons. I think the point was that dragon legends have their origin in the experiences people had interacting with dinosaurs. If this is correct, then all those secular geologists who say people and dinosaurs were separated in time by some sixty-five million years don't know what they are talking about. Let's take a look.
We begin with a dramatic voiceover recounting the familiar myth of Saint George and the dragon. There are many versions of the story, and the location changes depending on the particular version…
jrosenhouse | June 27, 2007Ken Miller has now published his review of Behe's latest. He did an excellent job. I think he really nailed some of Behe's more egregious mathematical errors:
Behe, incredibly, thinks he has determined the odds of a mutation "of the same complexity" occurring in the human line. He hasn't. What he has actually done is to determine the odds of these two exact mutations occurring simultaneously at precisely the same position in exactly the same gene in a single individual. He then leads his unsuspecting readers to believe that this spurious calculation is a hard and fast statistical barrier…
jrosenhouse | June 26, 2007Let us now ponder more closely a few of the specific exhibits at the big museum.
One surprising item in the exhibits is the blunt contempt for human reason. We are constantly told that apostasy begins when human reason is elevated above God's word. Placards on the walls contrast the conclusions of human reason (evolution, millions of years, people are the products of chance) to the vastly better conclusions of starting with God's word (creation, young Earth, God loves us). This strikes me as a bit of a blunder on their part. They are effectively conceding that evolution is a reasonable…
jrosenhouse | June 25, 2007You might also enjoy having a look at Professor Steve Steve's account of his trip to the Creation Museum. Many pictures.
jrosenhouse | June 25, 2007After leaving the theater it was time to enter the museum proper. The nice fellow at the door scanned the barcode on my ticket to verify that I wasn't trying to sneak in. He advised me that I should allow at least two hours to see all the exhibits, then invited me to go on in.
The museum is laid out like a long, twisting path. Visitors are moved through various sections, organized around the “Seven C's” of history. Those would be Creation, Corruption, Catastrophe, Confusion, Christ, Cross and Consummation. To which I add an eighth C: Clever!
Two things struck me soon after entering. The…
jrosenhouse | June 23, 2007Along with the rest of my crew, I entered the theater. Not just any theater, mind you, but a special effects theater. This meant that at certain points during the film your seat would vibrate ominously and a small spritz of water would shoot out from the seat in front of you. More on that later.
The film was Men in White, a light-hearted romp in which Satan's minion's, i.e. scientists and college professors, receive their comeuppance from a couple of well-informed, clear-thinking, super-cool angels, named Michael and Gabriel. It was the familiar creationist story -- the one where they're…
jrosenhouse | June 22, 2007Due to some conflicts between MapQuest's directions and my map of Kentucky, I was nervous during the final leg of my drive to The Creation Museum. After all those hours of driving, the only thing that would have been worse than actually having to walk through that pathetic monument to human ignorance and credulity would have been not getting to see it at all. I needn't have worried, however. There were clear signs to the museum along I-275.
Those signs eventually led me into a field in the middle of nowhere. The entrance bore a nondescript sign in front of a large metal gate fitting for…
jrosenhouse | June 21, 2007A new ID book, a new selection of yummy delicious quote mines. Michael Behe's The Edge of Evolution (EoE) offers quite the smorgasbord
I'm not surprised that Jerry Coyne would have such a visceral negative reaction to anything Michael Behe writes. He was the victim of one of the more egregious ID quote-mines of recent memory. In Darwin's Black Box (DBB), Behe quotes Coyne as follows:
Jerry Coyne, of the Department of Ecology and Evolution at the University of Chicago, arrives at an unexpected verdict:
We conclude -- unexpectedly -- that there is little evidence for the neo-Darwinian…
jrosenhouse | June 15, 2007So after writing that last post and fretting that Coyne had provided the ID bloggers with ample fodder for demonstrating the intemperance of their critics, I decided to look around to see if any of the ID blogs had responded. And sure enough, William Dembski has already weighed in on the subject.
The title of his entry: “Jerry Coyne -- The Herman Munster of Evolutionary Theory.”
And just below the headline are side-by-side photographs of Coyne and the 1960's television character. That's right -- his lead point, his main argument, the thing he fancied so clever he just needed to put it on…
jrosenhouse | June 15, 2007Ronald Reagan famously defined the eleventh commandment to be, “Thou shalt not criticize a fellow Republican.” I'm a big fan of the spirit, if not the substance, of that statement. Generally speaking, I try to avoid criticizing my own side. The way I see it, there are dozens of bloggable items that come across my desk every day, and I can only write about a tiny fraction of them. So why should I waste time on some obscure commentator or blogger who defends something I believe in with somethng less than complete rigor? There are plenty of other bloggers on the other side perfectly happy…
jrosenhouse | June 15, 2007This past Wednesday I saw Michael Behe's talk at the Washington D.C. offices of the Discovery Institute. The talk, alas, was staggeringly dull, and I frequently found my attention wandering. Unlike Thomas Woodward, who was lying through his teeth at almost every turn and plainly knew next to nothng about science, Behe confined things pretty much to biochemistry. It was all malaria this and binding sites that.
So I won't give him the full treatment the way I did with Woodward. If I did it would basically look like just a straight summary of his book, and you can get that from any of a…
jrosenhouse | June 10, 2007Woodward closed by gushing about Ralph Seelke, who is a biologist at the University of Wisconsin, Superior. His web page carries a large disclaimer that his views do not represent the views of the university. That's never a good sign. The site also has various pro-ID articles and links. He mentions three of his favorite books: Reason in the Balance and Darwin on Trial, both by Phillip Johnson, and The Creator and the Cosmos by Hugh Ross. Get the idea?
Woodward was very excited about Seelke's work on tryptophan, which he described as an experimental test of evolution. It was a bright…
jrosenhouse | June 10, 2007We left off with Woodward about to launch into his favorite talking points. Let's have a look.
Number One: Haeckel's Embryos. Woodward spent a few minutes gushing about how Icons of Evolution author Jonathan Wells represented a “great success story” of ID. He referred everyone to an essay over at the DI (which I refuse to link to) in which he responded to all of his critics, at least according to Woodward.
He gave the familiar patter about how Haeckel's inaccurate embryo drawings are nonetheless used routinely in textbooks right up to the present day. The most interesting element here…
jrosenhouse | June 7, 2007As so often happens, this write-up requires more space than I expected it to when I sat down to begin writing it. I had intended this to be the last part of my write-up on Woodward's presentation, but, having written steadily for the last two hours and seeing no end in sight, it is clear to me that I will need at least one more installment after this. So I apologize for not getting to either of the teasers I mentioned at the end of part one. They are coming, I promise.
In Part One of this report, we discussed Woodward's blatant misrperesentation of some remarks by Niall Shanks in his book…
jrosenhouse | June 6, 2007Thomas Woodward, author of the new book Darwin Strikes Back: Defending the Science of Intelliigent Design turned up at the Washington D.C. offices of the Discovery Intstitute last night. Since it's alays nice to have an excuse to hang out in the big city, I decided to check it out. There's rather a lot to report, so I'll break it up into two pieces.
According to the bio read at the start of his talk, Woodward holds a PhD from the University of South Florida in the rhetoric of science. He is a professor at Trinity College in Florida, where he teaches history of science, communication, and…
jrosenhouse | June 4, 2007Meanwhile, writing in The New York Times, Senator Sam Brownback clarifies his views on evolution. Recall that Brownback was one of three Republican candidates to admit to rejecting evolution in a recent debate. He writes:
The premise behind the question seems to be that if one does not unhesitatingly assert belief in evolution, then one must necessarily believe that God created the world and everything in it in six 24-hour days. But limiting this question to a stark choice between evolution and creationism does a disservice to the complexity of the interaction between science, faith and…
jrosenhouse | June 4, 2007Meanwhile, the reviews of Michael Behe's new book The Edge of Evolution are starting to appear. Michael Ruse weighs in with a short review for The Globe and Mail. His verdict:
Although I am a hard-line Darwinian evolutionist and loathe and detest IDT, I have a grudging admiration for Darwin's Black Box. It's wrong through and through, but has a certain style - it is a brilliantly written piece of advocacy, powerful because (generally) it seems so modest.
I am afraid, though, that The Edge of Evolution is a bit of a sad sack. Nothing very much new, old arguments repeated, opposition ignored…
jrosenhouse | May 28, 2007Tonight's edition of The O'Reilly Factor featured a discussion of the brand new creation museum outside Cincinnati. Guest host John Kasich was sitting in for Bill O'Reilly. Representing darkness and ignorance was creationist impresario Ken Ham, president of Answers in Genesis. On the side of sunshine and puppies was Case Western physics professor Lawrence Krauss. Here's how it went down:
KASICH: In the back of the book segment tonight, the twenty-seven million dollar creation museum opens today in Kentucky. The museum is designed to convince visitors that the Biblical story of life on…
jrosenhouse | May 23, 2007The New York Times gives us sneak peek at the big Creation Museum opening in Kentucky this weekend:
The entrance gates here are topped with metallic Stegosauruses. The grounds include a giant tyrannosaur standing amid the trees, and a stone-lined lobby sports varied sauropods. It could be like any other natural history museum, luring families with the promise of immense fossils and dinosaur adventures.
But step a little farther into the entrance hall, and you come upon a pastoral scene undreamt of by any natural history museum. Two prehistoric children play near a burbling waterfall,…