Anti-Creationism
jrosenhouse | July 26, 2010If you are in the mood for a little light reading, have a look at this account of Skip Evans, formerly of the National Center for Science Education, conversing with some of the local creationists in Madison, WI.
It's almost a shame that an apparently sincere and pretty decent guy like Kevin has fallen into the Answers in Genesis trap. He's been gullible enough to hitch his theological wagon to the complete and utter stupidity that is young earth creationism. He's been duped into believing, along with denying a staggering amount of legitimate science, that if all the animals alive today didn'…
jrosenhouse | March 9, 2010A little point to ponder from Jason Lisle, a young-Earth creationist with Answers in Genesis. This is from his book The Ultimate Proof of Creation:
Laws of logic pose a very serious problem for the evolutionist. Almost all evolutionists know they should be logical, and yet they have no basis for las of logic within their own professed worldview. The problem is particularly embarrassing for the materialistic atheist. A materialistic atheist does not believe in anything beyond the physical universe. In his view, all that exists is matter in motion. But of course laws of logic are not…
jrosenhouse | February 9, 2010Writing in the religious journal First Things University of Delaware physics professor Stephen Barr lays into the ID Movement. Here's the first paragraph:
It is time to take stock: What has the intelligent design movement achieved? As science, nothing. The goal of science is to increase our understanding of the natural world, and there is not a single phenomenon that we understand better today or are likely to understand better in the future through the efforts of ID theorists. If we are to look for ID achievements, then, it must be in the realm of natural theology. And there, I think, the…
jrosenhouse | January 12, 2010A well-deserved honor:
The National Academy of Sciences Council has selected Eugenie C. Scott to receive its most prestigious award, the Public Welfare Medal. Established in 1914, the medal is presented annually to honor extraordinary use of science for the public good. The Council chose Scott for championing the teaching of evolution in the United States and for providing leadership to the National Center for Science Education (NCSE).
Scott, a physical anthropologist by training, became the first executive director of the National Center for Science Education in 1987. Beginning with a loose…
jrosenhouse | November 11, 2009Remember that trip to the Creation Museum during the big paleontology conference this summer? Linda Vaccariello has a lengthy, and pretty good, article about it in the current issue of Cincinnati Magazine. Here's a nugget I liked:
Looking over the exhibits in the Dinosaur Den, we learn that the flood killed all the dinosaurs except for the ones on Noah's ark. “But their days were numbered,” the signage explains ominously. What happened? Here, the museum makes a rare admission of uncertainty. But it does present a tantalizing possibility: “Dragons could have been dinosaurs,” the sign says.…
jrosenhouse | November 10, 2009John Lynch has an important essay in the current issue of the Newsletter of the History of Science Society. I'm sure we are all familiar with creationist abuses of science and philosophy (not to mention their abuses of common decency and basic integrity), but their comparable abuses of history often fly under the radar. Mind you, the problem is not simply that creationists routinely get their facts wrong. It is that their whole approach to the subject is rather blinkered:
In short, anti-evolutionist historical scholarship accurately mirrors creationist scientific work in being directed…
jrosenhouse | November 2, 2009As a coda to the previous post, have a look at this post from Jerry Coyne. Since some of his blog posts have been at the center of the recent dust-ups about accommodationism, he elected to provide a clear statement of his views on this topic. He presents things in a list of six numbered points, five of which I agree with. Here's the one with which I disagree:
I think the National Center for Science Education and other scientific organizations should make no statements about the compatibility of science and religion. When they insist on this compatibility, they are engaging in theology.…
jrosenhouse | September 16, 2009For my Virginia readers, I have just learned that Judge John Jones, of Dover trial fame, will be speaking at Bridgewater College on Thursday, September 17. Bridgewater College? That's about twenty minutes from Harrisonburg! Looks like I have plans tomorrow night...
jrosenhouse | August 31, 2009If you're in the mood for some Darwin-related reading, have a look at these four offerings from the website of the NCSE. They are reviews of four recent books about Charles Darwin. I recommend especially the eloquent smackdown of The Darwin Myth: The Life and Lies of Charles Darwin by Discovery Institute flak Benjamin Wiker. Reviewer Sander Gliboff puts his finger on precisely why this was such a poor choice of title:
Using that “life and lies” formula in the subtitle of this anti-Darwin book was not a wise move by Discovery Institute Senior Fellow Benjamin Wiker. It invites unfavorable…
jrosenhouse | August 30, 2009My friends, there are certian times in your life when you are simply forced by events to reevaluate everything you believe and hold dear. For me, now is such a time. I have argued at length that the aggressive tone of the anti-religion books by Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens does not hurt the cause of promoting good science education. That position is no longer tenable, in light of events coming out of Sedalia, Missouri:
The shirts, which were designed to promote the band's fall program, are light gray and feature an image of a monkey progressing through stages and…
jrosenhouse | August 24, 2009Here's The Times of London planting a big wet kiss on Richard Dawkins in one of their lead editorials:
Thomas Henry Huxley, the great contemporary populariser of Charles Darwin's ideas, declared it his aim to "smite all humbugs, however big; to give a nobler tone to science; to set an example of abstinence from petty personal controversies, and of toleration for everything but lying".
That is a fair summary of Richard Dawkins's achievement in four decades of public advocacy of science and its methods. Professor Dawkins does not altogether avoid the use of invective in the controversies that…
jrosenhouse | August 20, 2009I am currently working my way through the book The Evolution Controversy in America, written by historian George Webb and published in 1994. I got a kick out of the following quote. It will help to know that the Reverend Ben M. Bogard was the pastor of a church in Little Rock, Arkansas in the 1920's. He was not too fond of evolution.
To assist in the initiative drive, Bogard organized the American Antievolution Association. This group solicited membership from all individuals except, “Negroes and persons of African descent, Atheists, Infidels, Agnostics, such persons as hold the theory…
jrosenhouse | August 2, 2009Probably not, but it's going to get one. I have just signed a contract with Oxford University Press for a book based on my experiences at creationist conferences. It's not going to be an easy book to write, but it should be a fun project.
The basic outline looks like this:
Section one will be based on my experiences at the Creation MegaConference at Liberty University in 2005. Section two will use the Darwin and Design conference I attended in Knoxville in 2007 to introduce ID. Generally speaking, the emphasis in these two sections will be on the scientific aspects of the issue.…
jrosenhouse | July 22, 2009An amusing comment from last night's Countdown. Guest host David Shuster was siting in for Keith Olbermann:
On this day in 1925, an anniversary of note if your name is Sam Brownback. High school biology teacher John T. Scopes was found guilty of breaking a Tennessee state law, teaching evolution. Scopes was fined 100 dollars for telling his students about Darwin. The conviction was later overturned.
Meanwhile, the GOP has since acknowledged that evolution as an important scientific theory, since they have evolved from Abraham Lincoln to Joe the Plumber. Wait, wrong direction!
Heh! I…
jrosenhouse | July 20, 2009Blogging will continue to be sporadic around here for a while longer while I struggle to finish up a few projects that for some reason aren't getting finished on their own. In the meantime you can have a look at two letters to the editor in response to the Meyer editorial on which I reported last week. The first comes from Owen Sholes, a professor of biology at Assumption College. The beginning and the end sum things up nicely:
IT'S TIME for the intelligent-design folks to pack up their revival tent and leave town. But here is Stephen C. Meyer using every kind of phony rhetoric to pretend…
jrosenhouse | July 16, 2009Alas, op-ed's as measured and intelligent as the one from Reiss and White are a comparative rarity in American newspapers. More often we get tripe like this, from ID supporter Stephen Meyer. He writes:
IN THE battle over how to teach evolution in public schools, Thomas Jefferson's demand for a “separation between church and state'” has been cited countless times. Many argue that the controversial alternative to Darwinian evolution, intelligent design, is an exclusively religious idea and therefore cannot be discussed under the Constitution. By invoking Jefferson's principle of separation,…
jrosenhouse | June 30, 2009Here's an interesting tidbit from a blogger for the Indianapolis Star:
Indiana Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Bennett hurriedly called this morning to be removed from the speakers list at an annual conference on Creationism after accidentally agreeing to speak, said Cam Savage, his spokesman.
The Creation Evidence Expo 2009 listed Bennett on the speakers list for its September conference in Indianapolis. (Speakers list here.) Other speakers include scientists and science teachers who advocate Creationism, the belief the world was created by God as described in the Bible, rather…
jrosenhouse | June 29, 2009Kenneth Chang of The New York Times has now weighed in with an article about the big trip to the Creation Museum. A couple of interesting tidbits:
Arnold I. Miller, a professor of geology at the University of Cincinnati and head of the meeting's organizing committee, suggested the trip. “Too often, academics tend to ignore what's going on around them,” Dr. Miller said. “I feel at least it would be valuable for my colleagues to become aware not only of how creationists are portraying their own message, but how they're portraying the paleontological message and the evolutionary message.”…
jrosenhouse | June 21, 2009Tomorrow I will be leaving for sunny Cincinnati, Ohio to participate in the 9th North American Paleontological Convention. On Thursday I, along with fellow Panda's Thumbers Art Hunt and Richard Hoppe, will be participating in a panel discussion on “Countering Creationism.” Of course, I will be sure to emphasize that the really important thing in countering creationism is to try to offend as many religious people as possible. Browsing through the program reveals that the two big Thursday talks before our panel are from Ken Miller and Eugenie Scott. Should be interesting!
Alas, I don't…
jrosenhouse | June 3, 2009Another little blogfracas has erupted on the subject of accommodtaionism between science and religion. Chris Mooney, channeling Barbara Forrest, reiterated the standard complaints against those of us who argue that science and religion generally, and evolution and Christianity in particular, are not compatible. The specific target of his ire was Jerry Coyne's recent, largely negative review of the current accommodationist books by Ken Miller and Karl Giberson. Coyne has replied in some detail to Mooney. Mooney has now posted two partial replies to Coyne here and here, and has promised…