creationism
gregladen | February 13, 2014Not work safe especially if you work in a church:
2+2=5. Slap. Oh sorry.
This blog does not endorse all of the methods used in this video. But this blog did ROFLMAO.
Hat tip Bunny.
pharyngula | February 8, 2014Man, Todd Friel is painful to listen to — so many grating rhetorical tics. Can someone tell me where this weird habit of carefully voicing every vowel and adding extra vowels to the ends of words come from? When he calls Bill Nye unreasonable and lying, it comes out UN-REEE-ZUN-A-BULL-AH and LIE-ING-UH. It makes him irritating to listen to before I even think about the content.
Here, you can suffer too.
If you don't want to listen — and I don't blame you — I'll give you instead his two stupid arguments against Bill Nye's points in the recent creation debate. They are focused entirely on the…
gregladen | February 5, 2014Bill Nye "The Science Guy" went to the Creation Museum to debate "is creation a viable model of origins in today's modern scientific era?" After the debate, Bill Nye came to the Last Word to discuss his faceoff with the founder of the Creation Museum, Ken Ham.
Nye said he accepted the debate challenge because the spread of creationism "frightens" him. "I don't think I'm going to win Mr. Ham over any more than Mr. Ham thinks he's going to win me over," Nye said. "Instead, I want to show people that this belief is still among us. It finds its way onto school boards in the United States."
Ham,…
gregladen | February 5, 2014In the Spring of 2010, evangelical Bible scholar Bruce Waltke, in speaking about the overwhelming evidence for evolution, said “To deny that reality will make us a cult, some odd group that is not really interacting with the real world.”
In response to this, Ken Ham, president of Kentucky’s Creation Museum, commented, “What he is saying ultimately undermines the authority of God’s word.”
Both statements seem to be true. (I don’t think you necessarily need to have faith in a god to accept the basic logic of Ham’s statement.) Also, that’s really all you need to know about young earth…
gregladen | February 4, 2014See the link?
It is pretty obvious to me.
It seems that terrorists who are really serious, reasonably numerous, presumably well funded, and certainly experienced have threatened to attack the Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia (both of them). The fallback plan, it is assumed, is that they can't attack Sochi so they pick some other random locations, maybe in Russia, maybe not, and attack them. (That is the part about terrorists being cowards, I assume.)
The Russians have security that is probably second to none in the world, or at least on par with the countries that have a lot of…
pharyngula | February 3, 2014Larry Moran has been given a quiz to test our comprehension of Intelligent Design creationism. Unfortunately, it was composed by someone who doesn't understand ID creationism but merely wants everyone to regurgitate their propaganda, so it's a major mess, and you can also tell that the person writing it was smugly thinking they were laying some real traps to catch us out in our ignorance.
Larry has posted his answers. I've put mine below the fold (I sorta subtly disagree with him on #2). If you want to take a stab at it untainted by our answers, here's the original quiz, untainted by logic or…
pharyngula | January 27, 2014This is a map of all the American schools that are officially teaching creationism with the full permission of the state educational system, either through voucher programs or state laws that allow nonsense to be taught (Louisiana and Tennessee stand out as gangrenous spots, don't they?).
Tax Funded Creationism
It minimizes the problem. Minnesota looks pure and clean, but that's because our laws expressly forbid teaching creationism here…but that doesn't mean that it isn't snuck under the table. About a quarter of our teachers give instruction in creationism without state endorsement.
pharyngula | January 22, 2014Apparently, Martin Cothran believes that there is no life elsewhere in the universe, and that this unimaginably vast emptiness is evidence that a god created us. I don't understand the logic, but then I don't understand most of his weird leaps in this post on how life on other planets is like believing in the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
First, there is the naive scientific oversimplification.
We are told by many New Atheist scientists in particular (who like to mark their territory) that a belief can only be scientific if it is falsifiable. This is their demarcation criterion of choice and they…
gregladen | January 9, 2014As you know, Bill Nye has agreed to engage in a debate about evolution with Ken Ham at the Kentucky Creation Museum. You may also know that I suggested that this debate was a bad idea, not so much because it is Bill Nye doing it (he’s a great spokesperson for science and science education) but because the whole idea of a debate is questionable for a number of reasons (discussed here).
Bill recently made a few comments on the debate on CNN.
Here, I’d like to list a handful of the points I’d make if I was doing this debate.
It is not necessary or even possible to argue against “creationism…
gregladen | January 9, 2014Bill Nye on CNN:
I think Bill is going to make excellent points in this debate. I don't think changing creationists minds is the point, as Bill Nye says. I also like Nye asking about the sincerity of the creationist point of view. I wish him the best of luck.
And not just luck, but Science-Power. Because we're right and they're wrong.
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A rollicking adventure through the rift valley and rain forests of Central Africa in search of the elusive diminutive ape known locally as Sungudogo.
More on science education HERE.
Also, check out my novella,…
gregladen | January 2, 2014Word on the street is that Bill Nye is going to debate Ken Hamm at the Creationism "Museum" on February 4th. This is a bad idea for several reasons.
First, Bill Nye is not really an expert on evolution and is actually not that experienced in debates. Being really really pro science and science education isn't enough. When they went in after Osama Bin Laden (my errand distant cousin) they did not send people who are really really against terrorism. They sent in Seal Team Six with a huge amount of support such as Army Rangers and such and even that was risky.
Second, there isn't a debate so…
gregladen | September 29, 2013I've been a guest or interviewer on Minnesota Atheist Talk radio a number of times. I never talk about atheism because I'm nothing close to an expert on that or related issues (though I do have a chapter in a book about it, here!). And, of course, I'm very involved, professionally, in certain church-state separation issues (like this and this). But on Atheist Talk Radio I mainly engage in either science (lately climate change science but also evolution) or the afore mentioned church-state separation issues vis-a-vis the evolution-creationism "debate."
Anyway, I've been meaning to finally…
gregladen | September 28, 2013From the Minneapolis City Pages:
The New Ulm Actors Community Theater has decided to cancel its planned production of "Inherit the Wind" thanks to pressure from local evangelicals who object to the way the play portrays the evolution/creationism debate.
And from the New Ulm Journal:
NEW ULM - The New Ulm Actors Community Theatre's production of "Inherent the Wind" was canceled last week due to cast dropouts stemming from objections by Martin Luther College professors and local WELS members over the play's depiction of the evolution/creationism debate.
A typical day in New Ulm, Minnesota.…
gregladen | September 10, 2013This just in to the newsroom...
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
ZACK KOPPLIN FILES PUBLIC RECORDS LAWSUIT AGAINST SUPERINTENDENT JOHN WHITE
September 10, 2013
Re: Zachary S. (“Zack”) Kopplin, Citizen versus John White, in his Official Capacity as Superintendent of the Department of Education, a Department of the Executive Branch of the State of Louisiana
Baton Rouge, Louisiana—On Monday, September 9, 2013, education activist Zack Kopplin filed suit against Louisiana Superintendent John White and the Department of Education in order to compel White to release a series of public records concerning the…
pharyngula | September 5, 2013You are a cruel readership. One of you — I won't name names to protect the guilty — told me to go listen to this radio program out of Colorado Springs called "Generations With Vision", by some guy named Kevin Swanson, and in particular to an episode called The Secular Hold is Slipping. He's a very cheerful, confident fellow, and I listened to several minutes of him lying blithely and loudly. It was…painful. It was a happy idiot gloatingly making stuff up to make himself feel good.
Here's their summary of the episode.
It’s getting harder and harder to “shut up” the little boy in the Emperor’s…
pharyngula | September 4, 2013I got a strange phone call today, from a fellow who was very polite, so I was polite in return, but it was weird — he kept asking me strange questions about the energy involved in breaking up supercontinents, and how much water could be stored under a supercontinent (which had me suspicious right there), and he was also complaining about how none of the geologists anywhere ever seemed to study this stuff. I told him repeatedly that what he needed to do was talk to a geophysicist, which I wasn't, and that I really couldn't help him. He had a few very basic question about plate tectonics that I…
pharyngula | August 15, 2013OK, that's not saying much. Lots smarter. Here she takes apart his stupid video.
pharyngula | July 31, 2013My upcoming visit to Houston to join Aron and others in protesting Texas creationism is smoking all kinds of interesting characters out of the woodwork. Meet Dr. David Shormann (the "Dr." must be his first name, he sure flings the title about), who has apparently been a person of some influence in shaping the Texas Board of Education policy. He's also a flaming young earth creationist who has drunk deeply of the Answers in Genesis kool-aid, and is very, very angry at the vicious, intolerant atheists who are coming to his city to argue against his nonsense.
The freethoughts activists are…
pharyngula | July 27, 2013Dealing with various creationists, you quickly begin to recognize the different popular flavors out there.
The Intelligent Design creationists believe in argument from pseudoscientific assertion; "No natural process can produce complex specified information, other than Design," they will thunder at you, and point to books by people with Ph.D.s and try to tell you they are scientific. They aren't. Their central premise is false, and trivially so.
Followers of Eric Hovind I find are the most repellently ignorant of the bunch. They love that presuppositional apologetics wankery: presuppose god…
pharyngula | June 25, 2013Gang, don't try this at home. I'm a trained professional, so I can get away with it, although I do face extreme risk of brain damage.
I am reading two books at once. OK, that part isn't too scary, I'm actually just alternating between the two — an hour with one at lunch time, an hour or two with another before bed. I trust you all are able to do this, no problem.
It's the pairing that is the killer. In one corner, I'm reading the marvelously detailed, juicy, thought-provoking The Cambrian Explosion: The Construction of Animal Biodiversity by the highly regarded scientists, Erwin and Valentine…