creationism
gregladen | November 19, 2012I can't believe we still have to cover this. We know how old the Earth is. The science on this is pretty darn good. It is 4.54 billion years old plus or minus about 1%.
Florida Senator Marco Rubio does not know how old the earth is. Here is what he says about it:
I'm not a scientist, man. I can tell you what recorded history says, I can tell you what the Bible says, but I think that's a dispute amongst theologians and I think it has nothing to do with the gross domestic product or economic growth of the United States. I think the age of the universe has zero to do with how our economy is…
tfk | November 19, 2012After their thrashing in the 2012 elections, Republicans are casting about for a new standardbearer, and Marco Rubio is a leading candidate for that post. One consequence of that attention is this GQ interview with Rubio, which includes this awesome exchange:
GQ: How old do you think the Earth is?
Marco Rubio: I'm not a scientist, man. I can tell you what recorded history says, I can tell you what the Bible says,but I think that's a dispute amongst theologians and I think it has nothing to do with the gross domestic product or economic growth of the United States. I think the age of the…
pharyngula | November 18, 2012One creationist claim that's commonly laughed at is this idea that 8 people could build a great big boat, big enough to hold all the 'kinds' of animals, and that those same 8 people were an adequate work force to maintain all those beasts for a year in a confined space on a storm-tossed ark. So the creationists have created a whole pseudoscientific field called baraminology which tries to survey all of taxonomy and throw 99% of it out, so they can reduce the necessary number of animals packed into the boat. Literally, that's all it's really about: inventing new taxonomies with the specific…
gregladen | November 5, 2012This is an interview at Atheists Talk (TV), an update on the war on science, and a rare opportunity to see me wearing a suit.
The first few seconds are sound free; do not adjust your television set.
I mentioned the NCSE, here's their web site.
Here's a couple of books related to the topic:
Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens our Future by Chris Mooney and Sheril
Fool Me Twice: Fighting the Assault on Science in America by Shawn Otto
Something on crying babies and vaccination is here, and something on milk allergy is here.
Minnesota Atheists YouTube channel is…
gregladen | November 4, 2012The Jet Propulsion Laboratory at NASA fired him for performance reasons.
Ars Technica's John Timmer has the story:
Coppedge had worked on the Cassini mission to Saturn, starting as a contractor in 1996, and later becoming a full-time employee. But one of the projects he pursued on his own time was the promotion of intelligent design, the notion that the Universe and, most prominently, life itself, is too orderly to have come about without a designer. (Like many others in that movement, Coppedge is a self-identified evangelical Christian.)\
In 2009, he apparently got a bit aggressive about…
illconsidered | October 23, 2012Just thinking about a previous look at Roy Spencer:
We believe Earth and its ecosystems—created by God’s intelligent design and infinite power and sustained by His faithful providence —are robust, resilient, self-regulating, and self-correcting, admirably suited for human flourishing, and displaying His glory. Earth’s climate system is no exception.
in the context of this recent post of his that finishes with this similarly fact-free gem:
It’s time for the 99% to start supporting the 1% a little better, because in the end it is the 1% who enables the 99% to maximize their standard of living…
denialism | October 18, 2012
Every once in a while Everything is Terrible has a fun denialism-overlap as they show some ad for a terrible piece of quackery, or in this case a great cut of Ken Ham speaking nonsense to a group of very unfortunate children. This is child abuse. Not the creationism bit, but the embarrassingly-shoddy job he does presenting his evidence which seems to consist of poorly-drawn cartoons of men standing next to dinosaurs and an overhead projector.
pharyngula | October 13, 2012Some poor young girl, deeply miseducated and misled, wrote into a newspaper with a letter trying to denounce homosexuality with a bad historical and biological argument. She's only 14, and her brain has already been poisoned by the cranks and liars in her own family…it's very sad. Here's the letter — I will say, it's a very creative argument that would be far more entertaining if it weren't wrong in every particular.
I've transcribed it below. I couldn't help myself, though, and had to, um, annotate it a bit.
Homosexuality, including same sex marriage, is not an enlightened idea [But…
gregladen | October 11, 2012The juxtaposition of Nobel Prize season and the revelation of High Octane Crazy in the Republican Party in regards to science is examined by Rachel Maddow:
Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
gregladen | October 7, 2012Watch the following video without reading any context. Listen to what the guy says. Note that he says that evolution and embryology are lies from hell. Note that he claims that these lies have one purpose: To keep us from knowing that we need a savior. Note that he claims that the earth was create in 6 literal days about 9,000 years ago (why not 6,000 is a topic of another post some time, perhaps). Note that he claims that the Bible teaches us how we run our lives, our families and our churches, but most importantly, note that this man is saying that the bible, which he takes absolutely…
pharyngula | September 27, 2012Oh, boy. Jonathan Wells explains why some of us reject the outrageous interpretations made from the ENCODE work claiming 80%+ functionality of the genome. It was really an effort to get past this sentence.
Some historical context might help.
Bwahahahahaha! First sentence, he makes a joke. Wells is a creationist clown notorious for his tortured abuse of the history of science. He doesn't have a merely whiggish view of history — it's more of a Burke&Hareish perspective, where if History isn't conveniently dead to permit him to commit ghoulish atrocities on it, he's willing to take a cosh…
gregladen | September 25, 2012I did this thing:
Minneapolis News and Weather KMSP FOX 9
A few notes:
Ross Olsen is a retired physician who is a principle player in our local Young Earth creationist group, which produces the local creation science fair (this search will get you most of my posts on that).
When I said second amendment I meant first amendment. But maybe I was really thinking about ... oh, never mind.
My intent was not to debate Evolution, although Ross clearly had a different idea in mind. Ross was asked to this discussion by the producers after they (the producers) contacted me to talk about Bill Nye's…
pharyngula | September 20, 2012Sometimes they are polite requests, but they smell fishy.
My dad is a christian who says he would be willing to read a book on evolution that includes a comprehensive list of dig sites and photos of transitional forms. Can you recommend something?
I replied. I was not kind.
He's lying to you.
Lying, lying, lying.
He's setting you up with preconditions so he can reject it outright. "Comprehensive list of dig sites" makes no sense at all: there are paleontological digs of fossils all over the world, in just about every state of the country. What does he want, a map of the planet?
There…
illconsidered | September 12, 2012I honestly think that while belief in creationism is the antithesis of scientific thought, it is still possible to be a good scientist and a creationist at the same time. This is for two main reasons. Firstly, creationism is a term that covers a wide spectrum of beliefs, from literal 6000 year old earth bible thumping denial of evolution to a more nuanced kind of mysticism that believes somewhere beneath the deep layers of complex and wonderful natural processes exists an unexplainable and supernatural foundation.
There is no practical difference between investigating how deeply "God's"…
gregladen | September 4, 2012This is a response to Critiquing the “Critique” and the “Critique of the Critique” of Bill Nye’s Video at UrbanAstro.org. In that post, FURYGuitar addresses both Critiquing the Critique of Bill Nye’s Video by me and Bill Nye’s “Don’t Teach Creationism…” Video Dissected by Business Communication Expert in which scientist and marketing expert Marc Kuchner writes in a guest blog for Scientific American Blogs an interview with communication expert Patrick Donadio.
The background is that Bill Nye made a video called Creationism is Not Appropriate for Children that some viewed as controversial…
gregladen | September 2, 2012Marc Kuchner has an interesting post at Scientific American called Bill Nye’s “Don’t Teach Creationism…” Video Dissected by Business Communication Expert in which … well, you can guess what it is about from the title. To refresh your memory, here is Bill Nye’s video, which I had posted earlier on this blog. The video made my friend Marc cringe, who was “…pretty sure that the video would do nothing for those who don’t believe in evolution but turn them away.” This prompted Marc to ask Patric Donadio, an MBA and speaking coach to review it.
While I found several of Patric Donadio’s comments to…
pharyngula | August 28, 2012Do you remember Terry Hurlbut? Of course not. He's another boring creationist whose schtick is to claim that creationists really are scientists — after all, Isaac Newton was a creationist. He also maintains something called the "Creationist Hall of Fame" which lists a lot of legitimate pre-Darwin thinkers and 20th century crackpots. His "Hall of Fame" is just a website, but he dreams big: he wants to put up a real building with…what? I don't know. Printouts of his articles?
Anyway, the semi-interesting thing he wants to do is build that edifice to idiocy somewhere near the Creation "Museum".…
gregladen | August 27, 2012I am looking forward to the construction of the meatspace version of the currently on-line only "Creation Science Hall of Fame" on vacant land on Interstate 75 between the Creation Museum and the Ark Park.
Someday this section of Northern Kentucky will be a veritable Miracle Mile of Creationism Related Facilities. It is about this time this industry got some competition. We know that the Invisible Hand of the Free Market is like god and makes everything better. What could possibly go wrong?
Here's the story from the Courier-Journal
Hat Tip: Joe
tfk | August 17, 2012The excellent Slacktivist notes, once more, that Ken Ham’s biblical exegesis is just as sound as his science. But there's a twist. He writes, "For decades I’ve been having this argument:"
YOUNG-EARTH CREATIONIST: The Bible clearly says that God created the universe in six days, 6,000 years ago.
ME: No, actually, it doesn’t. [Insert everything I've ever written or said about the Bible for the past 25 years.]
YEC: Does too.
That argument was exhausting and depressing. But the new variation of it is even more so:
YEC: The Bible clearly says that God created the universe in six days, 6,000 years…