Ken, partly it’s because you don’t allow comments at your blog. Open your blog up for discussion, you might learn something.
It ain’t that the majority is silent, it’s that the wackaloons are deaf. Ham seems confused. He thinks Myers is worried that God exists. Myers is worried that Ham is a wackaloon. Those two statements are quite different, and mutually exclusive independent. God’s existence doesn’t change the fact that Ham is a wackaloon, and God’s existence is not conditional on Ham’s being a wackaloon.
Ham is a creationist who spends millions of dollars annually lying to children. Ham, it would appear to a rational person, does not believe God exists, and so thinks there is no penalty to be paid for doing this. “Wackaloon” might be a gentle term.
But, should creationists be allowed into the Pentagon without a full body search? People who don’t think radiation works in predictable ways should be kept far, far away from nuclear weapons and those who play a role in triggering them, I think. What if they required a sanity test before allowing people into the Pentagon?
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
My earlier post urging readers to contact Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal to urge him to veto the latest creationist eruption the Louisiana Lege gave him, produced an interesting comment. A fellow named Wayne provided links to a presentation by some guy named Perry Marshall, in which Marshall flails vainly against evolution theory. The video is billed as one the Louisiana Coalition for Science “fears.” Wayne wants to know, should we keep children from seeing it?
Marshall apparently isn’t even an engineer, but instead designs ads for internet placement — at least one step removed from the usual joke about engineers as creationists. Of course, that doesn’t help any of his arguments.
Wayne linked to three YouTube presentations, about half of the presentation Marshall made at an unidentified church (there are five segments total, I gather). What you see is bad PowerPoint slides, with audio. Marshall suggests that evolution couldn’t get from the American pronghorn antelope to the African giraffe, but in classic creationist form, he doesn’t address the unique signs of evolution we find in giraffes (neck, vagus nerve, for example) nor in pronghorns (bred for speed to beat the American cheetah, which is now extinct, and thereby hangs a great tale of sleuthing by evolution).
Marshall’s presentation is insulting. To me as a historian, it’s astounding how he can’t accurately list sequences of events well known to history. The science errors he makes are errors any 7th-grade student might make — but he’s passing them off as valid criticism of evolution theory.
Here’s the first YouTube presentation, and below the fold, my response to Wayne.
These presentations are an omen. They are sent to us as a warning for what the Discovery Institute will try to sneak into classrooms if Jindal signs that bill into law — heck, they’ll try anyway, but we don’t have to drill holes in our kids’ heads to make it easier for con men and snake oil salesmen to get their fingers in there.
“Stop the World! I Want to Get Off!” won a Tony Award on Broadway in 1963. It was a musical play about a fellow who overreached. With book and lyrics by Leslie Bricuse and Anthony Newly, it spawned a string of hit popular songs: “What Kind of Fool Am I?” “Gonna Climb a Mountain,” “Once in a Lifetime,” and “Mumbo Jumbo” among them.
Oh, why not: Update, here’s Sammy Davis, Jr., singing “What Kind of Fool Am I?”:
How can one know that history and not think of it, when looking at the current Louisiana legislature? What kind of fools are they, indeed? Louisiana would like the world to stop, so they can get off.
Progress and science so much offend the Louisiana legislature that they have carved out what they hope is an exception so teachers can avoid hard science on issues like reproduction (cloning), evolution, and that pesky weather stuff that ransacked New Orleans, global warming. Sitting on Gov. Bobby Jindal’s desk right now is the enrolled version of S. B. 733, the misnamed “Science Education Act,” which gives teachers and local school districts the right to deviate from state curriculum and science texts in those three areas.
Why not the Big Bang and other cosmology? Why not gravity? Why not algebra? It may be that Louisiana’s preachers don’t know about those areas of science. Shhhhh! Don’t tell them!
A few observations.
First, having been slapped down by federal courts repeatedly when they’ve tried to introduce religion into science classes before, the legislature seems to have learned not to say much, in hopes that federal courts will have difficulty determining the religious intentions behind the bill. In 1987, in the case of Edwards v. Aguillard, federal courts didn’t even get to trial. They simply took the statements of the legislators as to their religious intentions.
This time around, the bill is being passed without debate at all.Legislators obviously hope that if they say nothing, they can’t be held responsible for anything. Better to keep your mouth closed and be thought a fool than to open it and remove all doubts — and obviously, there is hope among Louisiana creationists that federal courts won’t be able to use their closed-mouthedness as to evidence their foolishness. Well, they may want to consider that intelligent design has been ruled religious dogma by a federal court, already.
Second, the legislature’s learnings seem limited to bellicose speeches. The courts have repeatedly struck down Louisiana’s yearnings to teach creationism, both statewide, and repeatedly in the Tangipahoa Parish schools, which tried warning labels on textbooks and a variety of other methods, losing in court each time. It’s not just the ravings of the legislators that get up the dander of the courts. When the laws that come out of the ravings offend the Constitution, especially the First Amendment, the courts have struck them down. It’s not enough to just play at being non-offensive: The actions of the legislature must also not violate the Constitution. They appear not to have figured that one out. (More remedial con law courses coming up? Perhaps.)
The state should just let science be taught. Sneaking religion in does no good for the students, and it’s no secret that’s what they’re doing.
Third, the bill wasn’t drafted by people with much experience drafting legislation, running schools, or defending the Constitution. The bill could be used in some districts to teach nothing but evolution. It opens the door for anything a local school board decides might be science in three specific areas, cloning, evolution and global warming. Fruitcake groups like Ken Ham’s “Answers in Genesis” will rush to produce materials noting the accuracy of Hanna-Barbera’s “Flintstones.” Kids could be allowed to watch cartoons and call it science. In contrast, teachers who don’t understand the science in the first place will probably have few sources to turn to for good science information. Maybe one way to kill the law would be to point out that this thing opens the door wide for the theology of the Flying Spaghetti Monster (may his noodly appendage . . . well, you know).
State Board of Education chairman David Bradley of Beaumont told GOP delegates [at the Texas State Republican Convention] that the board was about to take up the science curriculum for public schools. He forecasted a fight over evolution vs. creationism.
Bradley said there are some on the board (he’s among them) that believe God created Man.
“There are others who think their ancestors were apes. That’s okay. But I’m going to vote the right way,” Bradley said.
Is there anything there that suggests Bradley wants good science in Texas textbooks and Texas classrooms?
“Our nation is at risk. The educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity. If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war. We have, in effect, been committing an act of unthinking, unilateral educational disarmament. History is not kind to idlers.”
25 years later, Commissar Don McLeroy is leading the tide of mediocrity, doing crippling things to our education system that the likes of Nikita Khruschev and Mao Ze Dong could only dream about.
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
Not only is ICR appealing their case on granting creationism degrees for science teachers (see preceding post), the State Board of Education is gearing up for another battle in Commissar Don McLeroy’s War on Education and War on Science (two wars for the price of one! He’ll campaign as a budget cutter next time . . .).
Texas’s Institute for Creation Research (ICR) is appealing the decision of the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board that denied ICR the power to grant graduate science degrees. According to the story in the Houston Chronicle, ICR plans to take the issue to court if THECB does not reverse itself.
Institute spokesman Lawrence Ford said the voluminous appeal — it is 755 pages long, including supporting documents — is based upon a claim of “viewpoint discrimination.”
The appeal described the board’s decision as “academic (and religious) bigotry masquerading as Texas Education Code ‘enforcement.’ ”
Board members and staff are accused of denying the request in April because the institute and its leaders believe the biblical version of the Earth’s creation is literally true.
Institute CEO Henry Morris III said last spring his school’s program includes information about evolution, although he and others affiliated with the school don’t accept the proof of evolution offered by mainstream scientists.
Board members and Higher Education Commissioner Raymund Paredes said they were concerned the degree would not equip graduates to teach science in Texas’ public schools.
The real issue, Stafford said Monday, is whether the institute’s course work — offered online and still available, although not accredited — fits the label of the proposed degree.
The disputed degree is a Master of Science in science education. “Either the curriculum or the label has to change,” Stafford said.
“That label has a particular meaning of preparing somebody as a science teacher.”
Paredes reiterated that in a May 21 letter to Morris. “It was determined that the designation of the degree and the content of the degree were not adequately aligned,” he wrote. “Approval would require either a change in the designation of the degree or a change in the content covered.”
The institute is not inclined to do either, Ford said.
Institute for Creation Research (I can’t find their set of documents as promised by the Houston Chronicle, other than this old press release — maybe you’ll have better luck; by the way, I think none of the pictures showing researchers or science in progress have any connection to ICR — just sayin’)
I’m often struck at how creationists, including advocates of intelligent design, cannot maintain an argument in favor of their perverse beliefs against science for more than about five minutes without descending into erroneous descriptions of science, or outright lies.
Joe Carter pens the very well-read Evangelical Outpost. He attends church regularly, I gather, considers himself a good Christian, and for all I know studies the Bible regularly and tithes. But he’s also an advocate of intelligent design. In 2007 he provoked a bit of a storm claiming that scientists were making the case for ID by advocating evolution (no, it doesn’t make much more sense in the longer argument). (See “The moral imperative against intelligent design,” and “. . . in which I defend the judiciary against barbaric assault.“)
Had the critics remained silent over the past decade, ID might possibly have moldered in obscurity. If they had given the theory the respect accorded to supernatural explanations like the “multiverse theory” it might even have faded from lack of support.
But instead the theory’s critics launched a irrational counter-offensive, forcing people into choosing sides. The problem with this approach is that the more the public learn about modern evolutionary theory, the more skeptical they become about it being an adequately robust explanation for the diversity of life on earth. For instance in Expelled, Michael Ruse and Richard Dawkins provide two explanations for how life probably began. Ruse says that we moved from the inorganic world to the world of the cell on the backs of crystals while Dawkins says that life on earth was most likely seeded by aliens from outer space.
When even Dawkins admits that intelligent agency is involved in creation of life on earth it isn’t difficult to see why other people think it is plausible.
Is there a claim in there that is not completely false? Is there one claim that is not demonstrably in error — or an outright lie?
What virus causes this rabid departure from truth-telling among creationists? For if it’s not a virus, it’s a moral failing of the faith, isn’t it? And knowing that, wouldn’t advocates of Christianity’s growth, like Joe Carter, take steps to hide their prevarications?
If you have an idea what the cause is, comments are open.
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
Some of my earliest and best biology professors were Mormons — Latter-day Saints, or LDS — and from them and a few others I learned that LDS beliefs not only do not cut against evolution, preaching against evolution is “false doctrine” in the faith, since there has never been a revelation against evolution to the LDS prophets.
But as we know from the Methodist and Presbyterian and Catholic and other examples, official church doctrine doesn’t prevent members of the churches from jettisoning their reason when they discuss evolution and demonstrate a failure to understand even the basics of the simple theory. Mormons aren’t immune there, either. Alas.
Here’s an LDS blog where the authors are trying to argue that “philosophically,” creationism should be taught alongside evolution, since it’s a “better” myth than science. Or something like that. All that high-falutin’ use of six-syllable words, e.g., epistemology, makes me think that the words don’t mean what the authors think they mean, especially when the authors then go on to make foolish claims based on something they think they’ve “proven” logically. My tolerance of six-syllable words has been reduced by dealing with actual laws, I think.
Or perhaps, as I suspect, they’re just trying to claim that pigs fly.
“Knowledge is the glory of God” is what I remember* one engraving over one entrance to the campus of Brigham Young University, except when the epistemology is found to be offensive, or something.
You might do well to check out these posts, and other resources:
Who would do such a dastardly thing? The communists and the Freemasons!
This interview is from last September, but so far it’s perfectly in line with what his PR flacks are saying since the sentencing: Video, selected transcripts.
The official spokesman for the many faces of Harun Yahya (Oktar’s pen name) says that the charges are unrelated to the creationism shtick. The Spanish version says Oktar was running a cult that involved recruiting young men by enticing them with young women.
How will the Discovery Institute spin this one?
With Turkey’s odd laws on press freedom and libel and slander, how can we really figure out what’s going on?
Raw Google translation of the Spanish version below the fold
A spokeswoman for his Science Research Foundation (BAV) confirmed to Reuters that Oktar had been sentenced but said the judge was influenced by political and religious pressure groups.
Oktar had been tried with 17 other defendants in an Istanbul court. The verdict and sentence came after a previous trial that began in 2000 after Oktar, along with 50 members of his foundation, was arrested in 1999.
In that court case, Oktar had been charged with using threats for personal benefit and creating an organization with the intent to commit a crime. The charges were dropped but another court picked them up resulting in the latest case.
Oktar planned to appeal the sentence, a BAV spokeswoman said. No further details were immediately available.
Oh, yeah — those political and religious pressure groups. And Oktar’s high dollar bullying of government authorities — what is that?
European, and Turkey, laws against political views may trouble one, justly. In a perfect world, there would be no need for such things, with good and true ideas having a good shot at winning in a fair fight. Oktar specializes in the sort of thuggery that makes a fight for ideas unfair. We might hope this latest action will simply help keep the playing field even, level and fair.
One of the affairs Ben Stein’s mockumentary covers is the Sternberg affair, in which a creationist bent the rules of the biology society whose journal he was editing to sneak into publication an article purporting to promote intelligent design. Stein claims the guy suffered persecution, though under cross examination in the Dover trial, no ID advocate could remember just what that persecution might be (creationists go quiet under oath . . . hmmm).
The mackarel by moonlight in that story (both shining and stinking at the same time) was a letter from the Office of Special Counsel which, while claiming to have found unspecified evidence of wrongdoing, said that OSC was the wrong agency to prosecute wrong-doers (OSC had an obligation to turn over any evidence of wrongdoing to the right agency, but Stein doesn’t mention that; there never was any evidence turned over to anyone).
Um, don’t look now, but the FBI raided the office of the OSC today, looking for evidence of wrongdoing. FBI and inspector general investigators appear to be looking into charges that the head of the office, Scott Bloch, retaliated against certain employees who, he suspected, had leaked information about political moves he had made in the legally non-political agency.
Jim Mitchell, communications director for the Office of the Special Counsel, in Washington on Tuesday. (New York Times caption). AP Photo by J. Scott Applewhite
Tom Gilson is a muck-a-muck with Campus Crusade for Christ, and though claiming he is Christian he has no compunction calling Charles Darwin an accessory to murder and otherwise promoting the canard that evolution caused Hitler to go nuts and murder millions.
Making the link to Hitler in an era when Godwin’s Law has a well-visited entry on Wikipedia imposes on one a duty to check the facts. Doesn’t faze Gilson: Damn the facts, full calumny ahead.
As one who does a lot of web-based debating against naturalistic (atheistic) evolution, I know I wouldn’t stand a chance if I weren’t studying what the best atheists and evolutionists have written, or without reading the most thoughtful Christian or ID-based responses.
The second protection against such an error is to know what we don’t know, and be willing to admit it. Evolution and ID involve specialized studies in paleontology, radiometric dating, geology, biochemistry, genetics, and more. Does ID challenge some of the prevailing wisdom in these fields? Yes. Can we read about these challenges on the web, or find a good, trustworthy book about them? Certainly! Will that make us qualified to “pronounce” on them? Well, no.
But that’s okay. We don’t all have to be experts. It will take many years (at least) for those who are to work out their differences. We can still know what we do know. We know that God created the heavens and the earth and all that lives in them. The details and the debates go far deeper than that. We should dive into these discussions only as deep as we’re prepared to swim—while at the same time always equipping ourselves to go to greater depths.
Excuse me, but I’d just come from another site that had the works of Hitler, discussing his own struggle — “mein kampf” in German. I noticed a few parallels, and I called attention to them, sorta hoping Gilson would blush and back away from the claims. Gilson’s stuff is mild, really. He’s got a tin ear for science and a very narrow view of history, it appears to me. Were he not so earnest in impugning others, I’d have just laughed it off completely. That’s what I expected him to do.
But no. He got huffy and banned me. Censorship, refusing to discuss with critics, are just tools Gilson has to use in his struggle against evolution. Only Tom Gilson can make wholly unsubstantiated claims in error against great men — no one else is allowed to question the Man Behind the Curtain.
If irony killed, there’d be no creationist left on Earth. If irony were science, creationism would win several Nobels a year. If irony were worth a pitcher of warm [spit], creationism would have a permanent hold on the vice presidency.
But irony is not a response. Ain’t it odd to hear these guys go on about their struggles, all the while they impugn the reputation of a good man like Charles Darwin, and all the time they have not got an iota of science to back up their position?
If this completely unsupportable claim is the best we can expect from creationists, isn’t it frightening that anyone gives them credence?
Gilson will see the links. Tom, if you come here, you’ll find someone who is willing to discuss with you your errors and why you should repent. Bet you won’t. Bet you can’t.
All Ben Stein would have had to say to support the Nazis back then is what he’s saying right now.
Shut up, Godwin.
Just because George W. Bush won’t be in office next year doesn’t mean we’ve dodged the bullet of a white Christian supremacist dictatorship. We are not out of the woods yet, my darlings. That a man, let alone a Jew, could, without shame, walk on the graves of Holocaust victims and claim the theory of evolution was at fault, let alone a man whose nationalism, social darwinism (which is not Darwinism, by the way), anti-intellectualism, and disregard for the truth are beyond doubt – it’s like some ghastly executioner’s joke. If the message of Expelled weren’t being taken seriously by a religio-political movement that has already caused two presidential elections to end in disaster, it would be merely obnoxious. Instead, it’s chilling.
Can he sink any lower? Never underestimate the depths of degradation a Ben Stein might sound. My money’s on Ben Stein to be the first human being to reach the Earth’s core.
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
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Retired teacher of law, economics, history, AP government, psychology and science. Former speechwriter, press guy and legislative aide in U.S. Senate. Former Department of Education. Former airline real estate, telecom towers, Big 6 (that old!) consultant. Lab and field research in air pollution control.
My blog, Millard Fillmore's Bathtub, is a continuing experiment to test how to use blogs to improve and speed up learning processes for students, perhaps by making some of the courses actually interesting. It is a blog for teachers, to see if we can use blogs. It is for people interested in social studies and social studies education, to see if we can learn to get it right. It's a blog for science fans, to promote good science and good science policy. It's a blog for people interested in good government and how to achieve it.
BS in Mass Communication, University of Utah
Graduate study in Rhetoric and Speech Communication, University of Arizona
JD from the National Law Center, George Washington University
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