creationism
pharyngula | June 28, 2012I see that Aron Ra is wrestling with a presuppositionalist. Presuppositionalists are incredibly obnoxious debaters, and right now, it's the most common tactic creationists use to defend their nonsense, thanks to Answers in Genesis, which has been pushing it hard.
We agree that presuppositional apologetics is the ultimate biblical approach to apologetics. The common accusation that the presuppositionalist uses circular reasoning is actually true. In fact, everyone uses some degree of circular reasoning when defending his ultimate standard (though not everyone realizes this fact). Yet if used…
oracknows | June 27, 2012And now for something completely different.
Except that it isn't really. I say that it isn't really different because, although this post will seem to be about politics, in reality it will be about a common topic on this blog: Anti-science. And where is this anti-science? Sadly, it's in the platform of a major party of one of the largest states in the country. It also meshes with the anti-science inherent in a lot of so-called "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM) and all comes together in one place: The proposed 2012 Platform of the Republican Party of Texas. It's all there, as you…
pharyngula | June 26, 2012Harun Yahya has a youtube channel, and it is surreal. He sponsors these panels of attractive young women with grossly overdone makeup — is he catering to his interpretation of how Western women are supposed to look? I don't know, it's just weird — and they talk about science in stilted, broken English for an hour. And when I say "talk about", I mean "recite facts poorly", as if they've memorized a script. Here's one of them; you won't be able to listen to the whole thing, it's just too agonizing.
I skipped around a bit to catch the tone. They talk about the pituitary, for instance, and how it…
gregladen | June 26, 2012Matt Lowry, whom I hope to be seeing in a couple of weeks, has written an article on his blog and republished on the JREF web site, called Is It Time To Call Creationists’ Bluff And Push For “Teaching All Views”?
The idea is this. There has been a recent change in strategy among creationists (which, I'm sorry, but I may have started a few years back for which I apologize). Instead of pushing creationism per se, they push "academic freedom" which doubles as a way to repress the teaching about climate change, evolution, and other inconvenient science, and a way to introduce whatever other "…
pharyngula | June 23, 2012That creationist rascal Kenwal Hamza is up to his tricks again: he's convinced the state of Kentucky to invest millions of dollars in his planned theme park, Koran Kountry.
The controversial park is the creation of Answers in Koran, LLC, who seek to bring visitors to the “family-friendly attraction that celebrates the truth of the Koran, and the power of the global jihadist movement to liberate Muslims from the oppression of the infidels and Jews. We also have roller coasters.”
The $300 million park, built on top of a reclaimed surface mining site in Muhlenberg County, was constructed with…
pharyngula | June 20, 2012Oh, boy — Bobby Jindal's new program to open up state funds to support all kinds of random nonsense in schools is going to have some interesting (that is, horrifying) effects. They are going to be throwing money at A Beka Books and Bob Jones University texts, and Accelerated Christian Education. What kinds of things will Louisiana kids be learning?
Science Proves Homosexuality is a Learned Behavior The Second Law of Thermodynamics Disproves Evolution No Transitional Fossils Exist Humans and Dinosaurs CoExisted Evolution Has Been Disproved A Japanese Whaling Boat Found a Dinosaur Solar Fusion…
pharyngula | June 20, 2012I've noticed this before, and I'm sure many of you have, too: you can often take creationist comments, especially when they're lengthy, run them through a google search, and discover that the were lifted wholly from some other source. If you read the creationist literature for any length of time, it really begins to sound all alike, because what they'll often do is cobble together their treatises by lifting whole paragraphs and pages from previous creationist tracts. It's the kind of thing where, if they did it as a student in my class, they'd get an automatic fail, especially since they…
gregladen | June 20, 2012Kopplin launched his anti-creationist effort while still in high school, and eventually gathered 55,000 signatures on a petition, enlisted the support of 78 Nobel laureates, and testified State Senate hearings.
He is also responsible for Hurricane Katrina. How cool is that?
Here's his talk:
Those are peacocks in the background, right?
gregladen | June 20, 2012The Rocks Don't Lie: A Geologist Investigates Noah's Flood by David Montgomery is new book on the Noachian flood. It is by a real life geologist and is not a creationist book. Might be a good gift for your annoying creationist relative.
Here is a write-up from the publisher:
In Tibet, geologist David R. Montgomery heard a local story about a great flood that bore a striking similarity to Noah’s Flood. Intrigued, Montgomery began investigating the world’s flood stories and—drawing from historic works by theologians, natural philosophers, and scientists—discovered the counterintuitive role…
pharyngula | June 17, 2012
And they know it. Ken Ham has started a new billboard campaign for the creation "museum", with a variety of different designs, all featuring prehistoric* creatures as draws to get kids and family to attend. Here are some examples:
Notice what's smart about them? They're focused, featuring an element that they clearly know is a key draw, dinosaurs; they're eye-catching; they're professionally designed and have thematic unity; and the Creation "Museum" knows that good marketing is a way to get people to come in to their propaganda mill. You know they invested a good chunk of money in this…
jrosenhouse | June 13, 2012You know that long-running Gallup poll about evolution and creationism, the one that has consistently shown that support for creationism has been in the mid forties for the last thirty years or so? Well, the latest numbers are out, and they are not good news. The creationism number, which was at an all-time low of 40% two years ago, is now all the way up to 46%. Theistic evolution is down from 38% to 32%, while atheism went from 16% to 15%. That six percentage point jump for creationism and corresponding drop for theistic evolution could well be a blip in the data, but it is significant…
pharyngula | June 12, 2012Both Andrew Sullivan and Kevin Drum are wrong, but I think Drum is infuriatingly wrong.
They're arguing over a statistic, the observation that about 46% of Americans believe the earth is 6000 years old and that a god created human beings complete and perfect as they are ex nihilo. Andrew Sullivan sees this as a consequence of the divisiveness of American politics, that they're using it as a signifier for red vs. blue.
I'm not sure how many of the 46 percent actually believe the story of 10,000 years ago. Surely some of them know it's less empirically supported than Bigfoot. My fear is that…
gregladen | June 5, 2012A talk by Genie Scott of the NCSE:
__________________Photo of Darwin Statute by KevinZim
sa smith | May 16, 2012La Sierra University April 2011--
L. Lee Grismer, a field biologist at La Sierra University in Riverside, is gaga over a new species of forest gecko from Southeast Asia that he will present in the scientific journal Zootaxa in three months.
...
Grismer will test his hypothesis that the forest lizard is closely related to another new species he discovered last June. He will isolate the forest gecko's DNA and compare it to that of a similar reptile he tracked down in a cave at the Malaysia-Thailand border.
"We're still in the age of discovery," said Grismer, who is credited with detecting more…
pharyngula | May 4, 2012As regulars here may know, I've been getting crank email from John A. Davison for many years now. Until recently, he was sending me his tirades almost every day — and they were just piling up in my spam folder. He was remarkably persistent.
Here is his very last email to me, fished up out of that spam folder, from 26 March.
Stuart "mad dog" Campbell
So the heir apparent to Pee Zee Myers has finally joined that degenerate pig by pretending that WE do not exist. You are in great company. The question you should be asking yourself is - why am I the only one treating Davison with naked contempt?…
pharyngula | April 27, 2012It's always amusing to see creationists try to explain why Charles Darwin was wrong, especially when they make up lists of reasons "Darwin's theory of evolution does not hold up to scientific scrutiny." These are always people who wouldn't know what scientific scrutiny was if it knocked them immobile with a carefully measured dose of Conus snail toxin, strapped them to an operating table, and pumped high-intensity Science directly into their brains with a laser. As I often wish I could do.
Anyway, some ignorant jebus-lover hacked together a list of 10 "mistakes" that Darwin made. Strangely,…
gregladen | April 27, 2012The attention of the Two Little Cousins and Huxley the Baby was easily diverted to the back of the house while Cousin Randy slipped out the front door into the cold dark night wearing the red suit and fake beard, carrying a bag of toys and a strap of sleigh bells. Suddenly, Cousin Chris exclaimed that she heard ringing sounds, and this made everyone stop talking and listen, theatrically. Sure enough, there was the sound of bells from somewhere outside! The two little cousins had a good idea what this meant; Huxley the Baby did not. Then, Grandpa exclaimed that he thought an animal had…
gregladen | April 25, 2012Here is a way you can support the Life Science teachers in your local school. Give them a poster or a hat or a T-shirt or a book or something. I'll tell you why in a moment.
First, you have to find the teachers and start up a relationship with them. I have various relationships with various teachers around the Twin Cities area, but strangely enough my efforts to strike up a relationship with the Life Science teachers at Coon Rapids has led to nothing. The school is very close to my house. I go by it every day to do one thing or another. But when I've emailed the staff there I've never…
tfk | April 25, 2012A couple weeks ago, the second creationist bill of the "academic freedom" generation became law. You'd think Casey Luskin, who seems to be the ringleader of the clowns pushing these bills, would be thrilled. But all he can seem to do is find reasons to be upset.
First he was angry that Tennessee Governor Bill Haslam let the bill become law, but did so without signing it. Haslam's statement refusing to sign the bill observed that, by the defenders' own argument, the bill was essentially powerless, while there are ways in which it could make things worse. Noting that laws ought to "bring…
tfk | April 22, 2012[Attention Conservation Notice: About 3,500 words on the factual, scientific, and philosophical problems of a paper which was surely not intended to be taken seriously as science or philosophy. Nick Matzke comes at it from a different angle at The Panda's Thumb, and more briefly.]
Evolutionary geneticist Jerry Coyne has an article coming out in the journal Evolution, in which he demonstrates yet again why excellence in one field does not guarantee competence in any other field. The paper aims to do several things: to advance an argument about why evolution is so controversial in US political…