Milwaukee Evolution League

Florida Shows New Creationist Attack Strategy

2011-04-16T09:41:00.000-07:00

Creationists have been on the retreat for many years. Once upon a time, public school districts insisted that Genesis be taught as history, causing religious indoctrination to be foisted upon children whose parents might object. Naturally, the courts struck that down. Not long after that, the approach changed. "Scientific Creationism" became the vogue new flavor, and this made its attempt at getting into the public school science classroom. Again, the courts saw through the ruse and struck it down. More recently, Intelligent Design made its appearance, watering down creationism even further, with the hope of inserting itself into public school science classes and casting doubt upon evolution that way. In Dover, PA, this was again seen for the ruse it was, and struck down.

Now, Florida, and Tennessee, are both illustrating the next two phases of creationist back-door tactics. In Tennessee, they've introduced legislation requiring the "strengths and weaknesses" of evolution to be taught, while in Florida, they're using the even further watered-down standard of requiring "critical analysis" of evolution.

This illustrates several things: First, it's clear that creationism, as a movement, exists for one thing, and that's to indoctrinate public school kids. Science became the major emphasis of schools after 1957, when Sputnik forced the U.S. to emphasize science education. The Space Race was on! Seemingly in response to this, James Woodmorappe and Henry Morris published 'The Genesis Flood,' the book that arguably launched the modern creationist movement as we know it today. Then, Murray v. Curlett won the case for removing prayer, and with it religious favoritism, from public school classrooms 1963. Madalyn Murray O'Hare loudly boasted that she "Kicked God out of public schools," as if one could kick God, of all people, if he even exists, out of anywhere. "Scientific Creationism" gained major strengths as a popular movement afterwards.

In short, if public school kids had not been targeted by science, there wouldn't be much of a creationist movement today. It would be the backwater nonsense promulgated almost exclusively by Seventh-Day Adventists and Jehovah's Witnesses, just as it was prior to 1957.

Second: This recent set of events in Florida and Tennessee illustrate just how subtle creationism has to get in order to try and sneak its way in. "Strengths and Weaknesses" sounds fair, until you realize that the point is for certain teachers being able to wrongly claim that the veracity of evolution has weaknesses. "Critical analysis" sounds good, except the critical analysis is meant to be aimed at evolutionary evidences alone. The critical analysis of the Bible - which rules out biblical literalism, and with it creationism, to begin with, is not discussed. (How can it be within a science classroom?)

So it's all about the kids, folks. No, not the kids of creationists. They're already free to indoctrinate whatever they want upon them, in their homes, Sunday schools, and Bible camps. No, the children they want to indoctrinate are those who belong to other parents. They want to evangelize not only their own kids, but yours as well. And they don't want your permission.

Today, we're having a second "Sputnik moment," and its even more important than the first. In the 1980's, computers were emphasized in education, because we recognized that if America wasn't adequately prepared to compete on a global market with information technology, we would falter. But we dropped the ball, and India picked it up and scored their touchdown. Those jobs which were supposed to sustain us, went to them. Now, the new technology revolution involves medical technology, DNA, and the ability to engineer cells and tissues.

Only public schools which emphasize quality biological science will be able to prepare our children for this new economic boom. Children who deny evolution will not be able to adequately understand the workings of biological systems and will be unable to compete in a global marketplace of designer DNA and home-grown organs for transplant.

These are important reasons for emphasizing evolution now. We can meet the demands of tomorrow, but we can't do it by teaching crap science, and then hoping our colleges and universities can clean up the mess.

Eric

Ronald Numbers

2011-03-27T21:46:00.000-07:00

I recently attended the Madison Science Pub to hear the speaker, Mr. Ronald Numbers. He's the author of Creationists: From Scientific Creationism To Intelligent Design, which is the definitive book of the history of creationism in the United States. (Highly recommended.) I learned two important things from his talk. One, he happens to be a professor at the University of Wisconsin, which means I'm going to have to try and take one of his courses sometime. And two, creationism is expanding worldwide.

The late Stephen Jay Gould was once asked about creationism, and, according to Numbers, replied that it was a primarily American phenomenon, confined mostly to the southern states, and would never catch on in countries abroad.

That prediction proves that brilliance is no guarantee against being dead wrong.

Today, creationism has taken strong root overseas, primarily in the pan-Arab world, and is surprisingly strong in Europe. We secularists, who once bragged about how enlightened and secular Europe was in comparison to the United States can no longer be quite so smug. According to Numbers, those who doubt evolution has risen to a shocking 40% in Great Britain, fueled by a conservative revival and an influx of Muslim immigrants. Islamic immigration is a pan-European phenomenon as well, with cultural clashes taking place in France, Germany, Holland, The Netherlands, and even the Scandanavian triad.

Meanwhile, creationist arguments which have been so effective in the U.S. have been picked up and echoed by Muslims in the East. Turkey is now the most hostile country to evolution in the entire world. Islamic fundamentalism feeds off of creationist doctrine, fanning the flames of religious extremism to white-hot temperatures in the Arab world.

And now I hear on the news of potential revolution in Syria.

This is damned serious, folks. What happened in Tunisia last January has erupted into a pan-Arabian revolt against all dictators. They want democracy. Good for them. But democracy creates dangerous opportunities for radical fundamentalists to rob people of freedom. Hell, the U.S. has been ample proof of that!

So, folks, it's time to stop handling creationists with kid gloves. In order for democratic freedom to stabilize in the Arab world, fundamentalism must be toned down.

And that means creationists in every country, especially this one, had better shut up! Human freedom depends on it! So if you just happen to be a creationist...

Back the fuck off!

Eric

Ken Ham: Expelled!

2011-03-25T05:08:00.000-07:00

Thanks to P.Z. Myers and his blog, Pharyngula, for bringing to light an interesting recent occurrence. Apparently, a group of young-earth-creationists who hold conventions for home-schooling children have disinvited Ken Ham from their upcoming convention and all subsequent conventions thereafter. Ken apparently made defamatory comments regarding their material and questioned the salvation of some of them. This was too much, even for these guys. The actual letter they sent to Answers In Genesis follows:

After much prayer and deliberation over the weekend, Great Homeschool Convention's Advisory Board has unanimously decided to disinvite Ken and AIG from all future conventions, including the Cincinnati convention next week. The Board believes this to be the Lord's will for our convention and searched the Scriptures for the mind of the Lord and the leadership of the Holy Spirit before arriving at this decision. The Board believes that Ken's public criticism of the convention itself and other speakers at our convention require him to surrender the spiritual privilege of addressing our homeschool audience.Please know that our Board is 100% young earth and we largely share AIG's perspective from a scientific standpoint. That is why Ken was originally invited and treated so graciously and extremely generously in Memphis and Greenville (far beyond what we do for other speakers or their ministries). Our expression of sacrifice and extraordinary kindness towards Ken and AIG has been returned to us and our attendees with Ken publicly attacking our conventions and other speakers. Our Board believes Ken's comments to be unnecessary, ungodly, and mean-spirited statements that are divisive at best and defamatory at worst.

One of the core values of our convention is that we believe that good people c an disagree and still be good people. We believe that Christians do not need to personally question the integrity, the intelligence, or the salvation of other Christians when debating Biblical issues. Ken has obviously felt led to publicly attack our conventions and a number of our speakers. We believe that what Ken has said and done is unChristian and sinful. A number of attendees are demanding explanations from our board and we must respond to them.

We believe that Dr. Ham is very intelligent and deliberate and that he decided that publicly slandering our conventions and defaming a number of our speakers is what he wanted to do. Whereas Ken chooses to conduct himself in a way that we believe to be unscriptural, we cannot countenance that spirit as we believe it would not honor the Savior whom we serve.

A public statement will be prepared for distribution at the convention explaining our Board's decision. Anyone who inquires regarding Dr. Ham or AIG will be referred to that statement. We have no intention to defame or publicly slander Dr. Ham, the Creation Museum, or the work of AIG. Our Board would respectfully request that Dr. Ham and AIG prayerfully consider doing the same. Our Board takes seriously the admonition of Jesus in John 13:35, "By this shall all men know that ye are My disciples, if ye have love one to another."

Sincerely,

Brennan Dean
Great Homeschool Conventions, Inc.

Wow. What else can one say to something like that?

Here's what: Creationists love to insist that evolution leads to immoral behavior. It seems that creationism is certainly no guard against immorally attacking fellow Christians, either.

Eric

Grand Canyon - A Different View?

2010-06-17T22:15:00.000-07:00

My, how hard creationists work to make sure that visitors to the Grand Canyon believe that Noah's flood could have done it. In a book written by Steven Austin (not the "Stone Cold" WWE wrestler) titled "Grand Canyon: A Different View," the idea is profferred that a massive flood event could have both laid down the sediments and then rapidly carved them afterwards due to a damming event. In short, it took a lot of water over a little time, as opposed to a little water over a lot of time.

Now, I've known for some time about the holes in this idea. Desert footprints in the Coconino sandstones, for example. Or travertine deposits in the Tapeats sandstone from an extinct and buried riverbed which had been carving its own canyon prior to being buried by new sediments from an advancing sea. But I've just come back from a fantastic road trip with my dad, and it seems that the holes in the creationist idea are even more gaping than I'd originally thought.

You see, the Grand Canyon is only part of the story. The layers which comprise the Grand Canyon are part of the overall Colorado Plateau, and these layers correlate to each other, making any creationist attempt to explain the Grand Canyon being carved by a breached dam from a now-extinct lake being left over from Noah's deluge a half-assed attempt, at best. It's like blaming one kid for all the graffiti in Chicago -- it's just too simple an explanation to be true.

Here's what I saw on my trip: The uppermost layers of the Grand Canyon, the Kaibab limestone, make up the lowermost layers of Zion National Park in Utah, whose towering canyon peaks are a sight to behold! Furthermore, the uppermost sandstone layers of Zion national park's mountain-peaks comprise the lowermost layers of Bryce Canyon National Park, also in Utah. These three make up what's known as the Grand Staircase (even though an area in the center of these three has been recently dubbed Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument). That means that any "breached dam" creationists propose has to not only carve out the Grand Canyon, but also carve out Zion canyon, and somehow erode Bryce Canyon in a way which leaves hundreds and hundreds of hudoos (a hudoo being a towering chimney composed of eroding sedimentary layers, with larger tops than bottoms). Any rushing water would topple any column structures of Bryce Canyon, even if it were part of the creationists' bogus breached dam area, which it isn't, and even if Zion canyon weren't too far to the West to get carved out by said dam, which it is.

And there's more. Precambrian schist which is contemporaneous with the Vishnu shist at the bottom of Grand Canyon can be seen in Durango, Colorado, located on the Durango-Silverton rail line. Clearly visible from the tourist train is the layers of shist, and a v-shaped area where a river once carved out a channel before the whole area became embedded with sediment once again. Now, this layer would long predate any flooding event proposed by a Noachian hypothesis, so it again makes for a proper headache for biblical literalists. And these layers are also contemporaneous with the Black Canyon of the Gunnison, whose half-mile high cliff walls are composed entirely of pre-Cambrian schists. There's simply no way this ultra-hard canyon rock could have been laid down by Noah's flood, just as it is equally impossible that such ultra-hard rock could have eroded such a massive canyon in less than 6,000 years.

So the next time some creationist tries to spin-doctor Grand Canyon, ask him, what about Zion? What about Bryce Canyon? And what about the Black Canyon of the Gunnison? How do those fit Noah's flood.

Chances are, he'll not know. Not only because he hasn't confronted the question before, but because these geologic features don't fit his absurd world-view at all.

Eric.

MadScience, and John Baumgardner

2010-04-27T15:46:00.000-07:00

Well, as it turns out, I was unable to attend John Baumgardner's talk in Whitewater. These days, I'm working for MadScience, doing science demonstrations for kids, and there was a schedule conflict. Lucky for him, since I don't think he has an adequate response for my question about why he didn't use quartz crystal as a control for his R.A.T.E. experiment.

Dr. John Baumgardner coming to town

2010-04-08T21:19:00.000-07:00

Well, no sooner do I publish a blog which is critical of Dr. John Baumgardner than he decides to show up here in Wisconsin. He's speaking at the University of Wisconsin in Whitewater, 3:00PM on April 15th, Hyland Hall, room 1000. I have every intention of going there to hear him speak, and asking him face-to-face why he didn't use a quartz crystal in his evaluation of radio-carbon-neutral samples such as coal and diamond. I'll let you know what he says.

Eric

R.A.T.E. and Carbon-14 Dating

2010-03-31T13:26:00.000-07:00

In the first RATE book (Volume 1), it was formally decided that any research into carbon-14 dating should not be done as it was not as relevant to the overall aim of researching radioisotopes with long half-lives. However, with a highly successful fundraising campaign, they apparently had a change of heart before the second book was to be published. Carbon-14 became a priority once again, and they did a research project on it that was probably the most interesting out of them all.

John Baumgardner did the presentation paper on 14C. To research the effectiveness of radiocarbon as a geologic clock, he turned to one of creationism’s oldest tricks: dating zero-sum samples. This is a tactic with a long tradition, going back to the 1960’s and 70’s, when recently deceased mollusks would be sent to laboratories to be carbon-dated, and they were found to be 2,000 years old, or more, in radiocarbon years.(1) (Isaac, 2005) Penguins or other Arctic/Antarctic creatures would sometimes also be used, ignoring the fact that ice is a repository for Carbon-12. For this test, however, a different kind of zero-sum was used. Instead of recently deceased samples, Baumgardner looked to the other end of the timeline, and dated extremely old samples. Coal, in fact.

It sounds absurdly simple: Do a radiocarbon date on a lump of coal, and because it’s so old, there should be virtually no 14C present. But the idea of doing a 14C date on a sample which should be completely radiocarbon-dead is not new. Creationists had claimed 14C trace-amount discrepancies inside coal and oil ever since at least the early 1970’s. (Whitelaw, 1970) But it had been noticed by other, more secular, scientists that trace amounts of radiocarbon were to be found in samples which are clearly far older than 50,000 years, even after the development of more accurate equipment, such as acceleration mass spectrometry, or AMS. Baumgardner has no end of fun in citing these sources in the opening sections of his paper. For example, he cites an article published by German scientists at the University of Kiel, stating how a barrier of 40,000 years could not be breached in dating the shells of foraminifera in sea-floor core samples due to apparent 14C contamination whose origin could not be determined. (Nadeau, et al., 2001) Another article cited openly states how “contamination” (Baumgardner’s quotation marks, not mine) is named as the cause of inaccuracy beyond the 40-50 thousand year mark. (Bird, et al., 1999). He even lists an exhaustive table detailing major scientific journals and the results of their radiocarbon measurements on samples deemed to be older than 100,000 years.

At this point, Baumgardner has successfully made his case, and no experiments really need to be done. But these cited sources do not simply establish the awareness among geochronologists of the problem. They also establish that the RATE team was well aware of this type of phenomenon, and saw an opportunity to use it.

For this study, samples of coal were obtained form the U.S. Department of Energy Coal Sample Bank maintained at Pennsylvania State University. These had previously been collected in 180kg quantities from recently exposed areas of active mines, placed in 115 liter steel drums, and then were purged with argon. The samples were then processed into representative 300g samples with .085mm particle size, and sealed under argon in foil multi-laminate bags. Ten out of 33 available coal samples were selected. These were then taken to “one of the world’s best AMS laboratories.” Baumgardner does not say which one, tacitly implying that there may be some legal consequences if it were named. The samples were combusted into CO2 and then converted to acetylene using a lithium carbide synthesis process. The acetylene was then dissociated in a high voltage AC electrical discharge to produce a circular disk of graphite on spherical aluminum pellets, which were to be the “targets” of the AMS system. Each target was then analyzed on 16 different spots as a variance check to help reduce any potential contamination of the sample. Four measurements were then done on each of the ten samples, with a standard background of 0.077±0.005 pMC (that’s percent of modern carbon) applied.

The results? Not surprisingly, trace amounts of 14C were found. In pMC the results ranged from 0.163 to 0.492. Faint traces, to be sure, but traces nevertheless.

So, Baumgardner showed that this discrepancy was much more than academic references to the scientific literature. It really was there. But the RATE team wasn’t quite done beating this dead horse just yet. Not content with their results on coal, they included another set of samples even more devoid of original radiocarbon – diamond!

About 50mg of sub-millimeter diamond chips were cut from a diamond obtained from the Kimberley district in South Africa. The sample had been shattered using a sapphire mortar and pestle. The diamond chips were then included with the ten coal samples sent to the unnamed AMS laboratory. These proved to be a challenge for the lab, since it had never before attempted to oxidize diamond. However, they were eventually successful, even though the results took considerably longer.

And those results? There were traces of 14C detected as well. This time, results on six measurements ranged from 0.1 to 0.15, ±.03, but no standard background correction was applied this time. These results, Baumgardner tells us, are statistically equivalent with the values given by the coal – approximately 0.12 pMC, or roughly the equivalent of 55,700 years. This, he says, confirms the accelerated decay model. Clearly, the reason these coals and diamonds are still showing some minute traces of age is because they aren’t the millions of years they are purported to be. Rather, they stem from the catastrophic geotectonic events surrounding the Flood event, with much of the coal stemming from the buried organic material which resulted.

The anomaly in 14C radiometric dating that Baumgardner helps unveil is interesting. But the conclusions he draws from them are questionable. The implication is that the 55,000 RCY produced in these 14C measurements somehow actually indicate a real age of something around 6,000. But Baumgardner cites the wrong sort of evidence for this. Were his scenario true, the accelerated decay, which he and every other RATE researcher seems to have decided took place during the Flood, and not the Creation Week, would have happened about 4,400 years ago – the time Biblical scholars have calculated that Noah’s flood happened. That means that 14C dating should show a consistent half-life pattern on all samples between modern-day and 4,400 years ago, but then suddenly leap into absurdly old ages on anything older than that. In other words, charcoal from, say, a Phonecian campfire, dated by other methods to be 5,000 years old, would yield a radiocarbon date of over 50,000 years! Baumgardner, however, cites nothing like this. Also, the trace amount of 14C does not quite fit the revised timeline of accelerated decay. As Baumgardner himself notes, any value of alpha decay large enough to produce 500 million years worth of decay in 87Rb with a half life of 48.8 billion years would entirely wipe out any and all 14C that might have been present before such an event occurred. In other words, coal and diamond should be radiocarbon dead anyway! His response?

"An important issue then arises as to how an episode of accelerated decay during the Flood might have affected a short half-life isotope like 14C. The surprising levels of 14C in fossil material from organisms that were alive before the cataclysm suggests that perhaps only a modest amount of accelerated 14C decay took place during the cataclysm itself, an amount insufficient to eliminate the 14C that existed in these organisms prior to the cataclysm. Accordingly, we here offer the tentative hypothesis that, whatever the physics was describing the decay acceleration, it did not operate in so simple a manner as to reduce temporarily the effective half-lives of all radioisotopes by the same factor." (Vardiman, et al., 2005:620)

The solution, it seems, is more fantastic than the puzzle!

Some procedural problems are noteworthy in Baumgardner’s work. For example, he doesn’t include the standard background of 0.077±0.005 pMC in his results for the diamond chips. Why did he do this? He fails to say, but one can surmise he did so in order to present results that looked more similar to his results on coal. Also, if a true test for contamination were intended, Baumgardner could have suggested a test be run upon a sample that is not only radiocarbon-dead, but outright carbon-devoid. Quartz would be an ideal choice, both because its structure is silicon dioxide, containing no carbon whatsoever, and because silicon has many properties which are similar to carbon, allowing a sample to be better prepared for the AMS. If, using quartz, some trace amount of 14C were detected, we would know the results were due to sample contamination from some outside source. This would have been a good control for Baumgardner’s experiments, and would have made his work a genuine bit of science instead of a deliberately planned foregone conclusion.

One thing bears noting: The RATE team does point out a legitimate anomaly in 14C dating techniques. Trace amounts of radiocarbon simply shouldn’t be present in coal or diamond. So how did it get there? The lack of information to be found on this matter seems to indicate that scientists have yet to adequately address this problem. But a likely answer, which is consistent with everything we already know, is that it’s simply a matter of trace amounts being detectable in anything, if the instruments are sensitive enough. Carbon 12 makes up 98.9% of all carbon, with Carbon-13 making up 1.1% The percentage taken up by Carbon-14 is already a trace element at today’s levels, only a million-millionth, or 10-8 %! The fact that we can do any radiometric dating at all with such tiny amounts is remarkable. The sources for the trace amounts of 14C could come from literally anywhere – the sweat of a coal miner’s brow, the oils secreted by fingers handling the sample without gloves, or even the CO2 exhaled by a nearby scientist. But even with painstaking precautions, the 14C seems to find a way into the AMS every time. It would be worthwhile to find out why.

Perhaps the most important lesson the RATE team has taught us, is that we oughtn’t be quite so smug. Even a blind squirrel may find a nut, and a legitimate criticism can come from any source, no matter how misguided. If nothing else, creationists force us to go over the data one more time, and that’s always a good thing.

(1) This was due, of course, to the reservoir effect, in which mollusks or certain benthics get the carbon in their shells from radiocarbon-dead source material, such as dissolved limestone.

R.A.T.E. and Fission Tracks

2010-03-31T13:11:00.000-07:00

One might be tempted to say that of all the RATE team’s projects, the one dealing with radiohalos was the weakest. But the one dealing with fission tracks is equally poor, if not outright worse. Andrew Snelling again takes point on this project, and an objective reading will safely conclude that his work is again profoundly rickety, at best. A thorough recount will therefore neither be needed nor given here. Only a brief overview is needed.

Now, to clarify some things, it would help to give a crash-course in fission-track dating. The idea is that after a crystal forms, radio-decay will emit particles out of and through the solid crystal. This has the effect of "scoring" or "scratching" the crystalline structure at the atomic level, because the mass of the emitted particle slices through the surrounding atoms. This leaves a track, much the same way that a bicycle tire leaves a track through gravel. If acid is added to the crystal surface, the tiny atomic tracks can be widened, because with each successive layer of atoms removed by the acid, the "groove" becomes deeper. Eventually, one can see these tracks with a high enough resolution microscope, and then be able to count them. From this, one can make an estimate as to the age of the crystal, dating from the time it initially hardened.

To conduct his study, Snelling selected samples from a few locations, including the Cambrian Muav and Tapeats tuffs from the western Grand Canyon (which he ascribes to being “early Flood”), Jurassic Morrison Formation tuff beds in southeastern Utah (“middle Flood”), and the Miocene Peach Springs Tuff, southeastern California (“post Flood”). The fission track ages of the zircon grains in these samples was determined by Action Laboratories in Ontario using the external detector method and a zeta calibration factor. The fission track dating estimates were the same as the ages determined using U-Pb isotope measurements, and a thermal resetting event in the Grand Canyon samples corresponded precisely with the onset of the Laramide uplift of the Colorado Plateau. These results clearly indicated that more than 500 million years worth of radioisotope decay has taken place (“at today’s rates”), yet Snelling concludes that this is evidence for the same sort of accelerated nuclear decay that has been cited in the other RATE research papers.

There is nothing in Snelling’s evaluation of fission tracks that would, by itself, cause one to conclude that millions of years worth of radioactive decay had taken place. In other words, nothing indicates accelerated decay. To make that case, he calls upon independent verification of such a conclusion from other sources. And which sources does he cite? Why, you guessed it! The same work by Humphreys, Austin, and himself, as cited in earlier on this blog! (He also cites one other reference by Baumgardener, which will be dealt with shortly.) He simply researches the fission tracks, obtains dates reasonably consistent with old-earth geology, and then claims they support a young earth anyway. Not only does the Emperor have no clothes, but the clothes have no Emperor, either.

Even more fatal to his interpretation is the annealing of the fission tracks in the Grand Canyon samples, caused by the same geologic events responsible for the Kaibab upwarp. Snelling claims that it was accelerated decay which heated the zircons enough to erase the fission tracks and reset the radioisotope clock. But this same accelerated decay is also purportedly responsible for more than fifty million years of fission tracking since that point. So there is an inherent contradiction in his version of events. Either the accelerated decay would have heated the zircons enough to all but completely wipe out any fission tracks, or the accelerated decay did not take place within the past 50 million years – more than enough to disprove his 6,000-year creationist paradigm anyway. To reconcile this problem, Snelling again invokes the obligatory “rapid cooling” event, for which he has no evidence.

R.A.T.E. and Nuclear Decay Theory

2010-03-31T13:03:00.000-07:00

The R.A.T.E. team's research project to “conduct a literature search for evidence and models of accelerated nuclear decay and adapt to a creationist worldview if appropriate” fell to Eugene F. Chaffin. He describes his approach:

"In this chapter we will advance the hypothesis that the coupling constants for the strong and possibly the weak force are actually not constants but variables. We shall point out many instances in the scientific literature where physicists have considered this as a real possibility." (Vardiman et al., 2005:526)

And, Dr. Chaffin does precisely that. There are, in fact many working scientists who have openly considered the possibility of whether or not the coupling constants of atomic nuclei were always as they are now. However, the context in which these speculations have been made have been regarding the conditions shortly after the “Big Bang,” or in singularities such as black holes. Chaffin finds lots of fun references in the scientific literature, though, citing everyone from Edward Witten in relation to string theory (or “M” theory, as it’s now called), to Stephen Hawking. He discussed everything from Kaluza-Klein theory to Calabi-Yau shapes. He left very few stones unturned in terms of modern quantum mechanics.

So how did he do? Did he point out any instances in which accelerated decay had been observed? No. Did he suggest any mechanism by which the Fermi coupling constants might shift? No. If the strong or weak forces had shifted, did he suggest when? No. Did he suggest any means by which accelerated decay might be detectable? Ah! Here he was just a little bit successful!

Chaffin suggests that one means of detecting accelerated decay involves double β-decay. This rare type of decay occurs when two electrons are emitted in the same decay, (not just two β-decays in succession). The only useful isotope for which the half-life for double β-decay has been directly measured is 82Se. So, Chaffin suggests, it is possible to use this to see if accelerated decay is indicated. If the Fermi constant (GF) is changing, then the half-life for double β-decay should change relative to that for ordinary β-decay. Hence, he suggests, what is needed is a suite of samples for which 82Se and its decay product 82Kr have been measured, and also some other measurements such as K/Ar or Rb/Sr.

To be completely honest, the logic behind this is somewhat lost on me. I don’t know enough about quantum mechanics to be able to say that the Fermi constant would be seen as shifting if the half life of double β-decay changes or not. However, it is a pure research proposal which goes to learning more about the precise nature of the atom. With continued experiments along these lines going on every day, particularly at the recently repaired Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Europe, such an experiment may accidentally yield a glimmer of insight into such physics. As such, I’m in favor of Dr. Chaffin’s proposal. A good suggestion is a good suggestion, regardless of whether the person doing the suggesting might possibly be a complete crackpot with an axe to grind.

Would this sort of experiment find any confirmation for the creationist viewpoint? I strongly suspect not. In fact, if it is shown that the Fermi equation is “shiftable,” then it would have to have shifted after the onset of the existence of planet Earth, and I highly doubt that is the case. I agree with the other scientists quoted, that the “shift” would have occurred close to the point of the “Big Bang,” or perhaps within black holes.

All in all, Chaffin’s research project achieved very little in terms of advancing his agenda. But it made for some damned interesting reading!

R.A.T.E. and Radiohalos

2010-03-22T05:40:00.000-07:00

Well, it's been another long stretch in posting anything to this blog, and I was wondering what should go on next. But to my surprise, I've realized that I'd forgotten to publish the other findings behind the R.A.T.E. team that I'd researched. So, in the interest of being thorough, here's the stuff I meant to put on this blog last year:

According to the R.A.T.E. team's second volume, Andrew A. Snelling tackled the problem of radiohalos, a subject which somehow keeps coming up in spite of repeated refutations. (Baillieul, 2005; Isaac, 2005) it bears noting, before we explore Snelling’s actual treatise, how the initial research proposal was phrased. The research was to, “resolve the question if Po halos are special evidence for the created rocks only or could they also occur in Flood rocks.” This, of course, is a false dichotomy. In other words, the possibility that polonium halos are evidence for neither Creation nor Flood, is not even considered.
Snelling begins with a radical shift in tactics. In the past, it had been argued, chiefly by Gentry, that polonium halos were evidence of in situ Creation. (Gentry, 1986) But Snelling destroys this argument forever. In the very opening sentence of his chapter, he states:

"The ubiquitous presence of 238U and 210Po, 214Po, and 218Po radiohalos in the same biotite flakes within granitic plutons formed during the Flood falsifies the hypothesis that all granites and Po radiohalos were created, but testifies to the simultaneous formation of these radiohalos." (Vardiman, et al., 2005:101)

In other words, Snelling has admitted the critics of Robert Gentry were right! The radiohalos don’t prove Creation. It was pointed out (in an earlier post) how Gentry worked closely with the RATE team, and so it stands to good reason that this means he endorses this new viewpoint. But, according to Snelling, these radiohalos do indicate that all such halos formed at the same time, and that they formed during Noah’s Flood. Why ever should that matter? What’s Snelling driving at?
Essentially, Snelling says that during the Flood event, rapid alpha decay occurred, causing uranium-238 to produce amounts of radon-222. This same Flood event caused some hydrothermic transporting of the radon within fissures of the biotite to other areas of the crystal, where it then decayed into polonium, leaving a halo.
This re-interpretation of polonium halos has some advantages. It acknowledges transport of radon through the biotite, which critics of Gentry’s work have always been quick to point out. It also acknowledges that the polonium halos should be along the same fissures as the uranium-containing grains. But right away it also runs into some problems. Here are a few of the major ones:
Snelling gives no particular reason why one should choose his model over the existing one, and leaves open some rather gaping holes. For example, even though he might be right about hydration within fissures of biotite, if there were something which accelerated alpha decay, then it would affect such decay in both 238U and 222Rn. The half-life for radon is a little less than four days (3.8, in fact), so if four billion years’ worth of alpha decay for 238U took place within one year (being generous to the 40 days and 40 nights of Noah’s Flood), then the half-life of radon’s alpha decay would have been reduced to a mere fraction of a millisecond (.08208 milliseconds, to be precise) – far too quick for transport to have taken place to form any separate Po halos. Also, choosing the Flood as the Biblical event which marked rapid decay rates is somewhat arbitrary. Why not some other point, such as when Egypt was struck with the ninth plague of darkness? Or perhaps the moment when the sun was purportedly halted in mid-sky while the Israelites slaughtered the Amalekites? Perhaps the parting of the Red Sea was caused by a rapid-decay event which vaporized the water? Snelling is biased in favor of Noah’s Flood only for reasons of theological continuity. But the biggest problem is one that was alluded to earlier. Any such rapid alpha decay would generate fantastic amounts of heat. Yet if biotite is heated much higher than 150° C, the halos become annealed and disappear! What mechanism does Snelling propose dissipated so much heat that Po halos were able to form in newly crystallized biotite? Amazingly, he doesn’t! He merely states that hydrothermal fluids might move and dissipate some of the heat from plutonic granites, but “an additional, as yet unknown mechanism would have been needed to remove the heat generated by the accelerated radioisotope decay.”
The above quote points to an Appendix C at the end of the chapter to deal with the problem further. There is a very special quote there which illustrates fully the failings of the creationist mindset on this matter:

…All creationist models of young earth history have serious problems with heat disposal, because there is simply too much geological work that has to be done in too short a time. Of course, the perception that there is a problem with disposal of heat is based on our present understanding and observations of heat production from radioactive decay and of heat flow, which are then applied using uniformitarian assumptions to geological processes in the past. But if geological processes have not been uniform in their rate and operation in the past, the uniformitarian assumption to project the present back into the past does not apply. In a nutshell, the perception that there is a heat problem is based solely on our understanding of these processes in the present, our ignorance of what actually happened during the catastrophic upheaval of the Flood year, and the Scriptural restriction to young earth modeling. (Vardiman, et al., 2005:184)

There is a logical fallacy known as ‘appeal to ignorance.’ One simply can’t find a better example of such than this.

Early Life...

2010-02-02T00:17:00.000-08:00

It's been awhile since I've posted to the M.E.L. blog. Mostly, I've been blogging on the Sacred Cow Wursthaus, and anyone interested in more of what I have to say should go there. I've even taken to re-posting some of my info from this blog over to the other one. Still, as someone who is back in college studying biology, I occasionally come across good material which completely blasts creationist nonsense. And I came across some last semester. Here's what I've learned.

It's been claimed by some creationists, particularly the "intelligent design" variety, that early life couldn't have formed because of a tautological impossibility regarding biochemistry. Protein needs DNA to form, while DNA needs protein to form. Since one needs the other, its irreduceably comples. Some intelligent agent agent had to have gotten the process started.

Here's why that's false: First, protein doesn't need DNA to form. Specified protein chains do require DNA, but proteins, consisting of chains of amino acids, do form spontaneously, usually in only a few linkages. But complex protein chains can also come about by high-velocity impacts. Take a bunch of primordial soup laced with amino acids, place it inside a cylinder, and smash the contents sharply with a piston, and you can get complex amino acid chains. This is significant because the early Earth was constantly bombarded with comets and asteroids!

But there's more. It has been observed for quite some time that RNA can form spontaneously, and so many scientists are working to discover just how an RNA world could evolve into a DNA world. We might not have the answer yet, but we do know one thing: RNA folds up upon itself just like protein does!

Here's how protein works: It's like beads on a chain. Some beads attract, others repel. This makes the beads fold up in certain ways to make little micro-machines, which move one way and then another in response to ATP getting converted to ADP. This machinery pretty much runs all life on the chemical level. But if you have no protein beads, you have no machine, right?

Wrong! RNA is comprised of bead-like components. Smaller, and flimsier, but RNA does fold up. This means that RNA can make all the components needed to produce protein. In fact, RNA is still the primary means of making protein from DNA, using t-RNA and ribosomes!

So, relax, creationists. You don't have a case on this one.

Eric

R.A.T.E., and Isochron Discordance

2009-04-26T17:25:00.000-07:00

Isochron Discordance:
The principal investigator of discordance in isochron dating was Dr. Steven A. Austin. (If you get a chance, look him up. His abysmal track record is amazing!) The basic idea is rather simple: Measure samples from a single rock or homogenous rock unit, and develop isochrones using multiple geochronometers, such as K-Ar or Pb-Pb. Each method should then agree with the others on the age of the rock. Austin himself says in the introduction:

"Do conventional radioisotope dating methods when applied to a single rock or rock unit give concordant ages? Specifically, do the K-Ar, Rb-Sr, Sm-Nd, and Pb-Pb radioisotope pairs each give the same age, within the uncertainties allowed using radioisotope dating, for a single rock or rock unit? If concordant ages were obtained for a single rock or cogenetic suite of rocks using different radioisotope pairs, these would bee impressive evidence for the consistency of radioisotope dating and be an affirmation of the assumptions underlying these dating methods. However, if discordant ages were obtained, then some qualifications would need to be applied to the assumptions undergirding these dating methods."

Austin claims that isochron discordance has not been thoroughly described and explained. As a result, he proposes a classification system of various kinds of discordance among varying kinds of isochrons:
Category one discordance – a cogenetic suite of rocks with two or more discordant whole-rock isochron ages.
Category two discordance – a cogenetic suite of rocks that generates a whole-rock isochron age older than the associated mineral isochron ages from specific rocks.
Category three discordance – two or more discordant mineral isochron ages from the same rock.
Category four discordance – a cogenetic suite of rocks that generates a whole-rock isochron age younger than the associated mineral isochron ages.
It should be readily apparent, even to the layperson, what Austin is attempting to do here. Certain radioisotope dating methods are fine for certain kinds of rocks, and inappropriate for other types of rocks. Austin intends to juxtapose the appropriate dating technique with the inappropriate one and claim that there is too much discrepancy for any of the dating methods to be reliable. Also, Austin telescopes his intentions with his classification system. No one needs to develop such a set of classifications unless he is anticipating that he will have need of them. In other words, he’s already drawn the conclusion.
Also, note the sheer hubris of the proposal. Throughout geology, all over the world, radiometric dates have been showing themselves to be concordant with each other for decades. To be sure, not always, and sometimes not perfectly, but they do match up. And when they don’t, they usually do so in a way which teaches us something about the metamorphic history of the rock. And here comes this one, lone researcher who feels that by finding a few discordant examples that he will have unhorsed the entire thing. Now, that, my friends, is one seriously heavy set of brass balls!
For his study, Austin selected two Precambrian rock sites for collection and analysis. The first was a lower Precambrian metamorphic rock unit from the southeastern Beartooth Mountains of Wyoming, taken from a road-cut in that region. The second was the upper Precambrian diabase sill at Bass Rapids in the central Grand Canyon (Hotauta Canyon area, about 2/3 of a mile east of Shinumo Creek, amidst the Hakatai Shale). For the Beartooth sample, a single multi-kilogram andesitic amphibolite was collected. The road cut it was taken from was on U.S. highway 212, west of Beartooth Pass, 1.3 km east-northeast of Long Lake. At the Grand Canyon, eleven rock samples were taken at Bass Rapids on the north bank of the Colorado River at mile 107.6 to 108.0, a location where the diabase sill is nearly 100m thick in places. These eleven were chosen, “to represent the overall petrographic variability within the complete thickness of the sill” (Austin, et al., 2005). (This will be revisited later.) Eight of the samples were from the lower approximately 85m of the sill. The other three were from the 6m thick granophyre at the top of the sill.
The samples were prepared and tested. K-Ar analysis was performed by Geochron Laboratories, Cambridge, MA, as well as Activation Laboratories, Ancaster, Canada. Rb-Sr, Sm-Nd, and Pb-Pb analyses were performed on whole-rocks and mineral separates using a Finnigan-MAT 6-collector solid source mass spectrometer at the University of Colorado.
The results? The Beartooth sample contained various minerals, including plagioclase quartz, biotite and hornblende. The ages yielded by K-Ar dating, for the whole rock, plagioclase, biotite and hornblende respectively, were 2011 Ma, 1520 Ma, 2403 Ma, and 2620 Ma. The plagioclase quartz had far less 40Ar, but also had the lowest 36Ar, consistent with the Argon loss model. The biotite had the most 40K and 40Ar, but an isochron plot was not drawn up for it. The Rb-Sr method, using the whole rock, plus five minerals, yielded an isochron which dated the rock to be 2515±110 Ma. Sm-Nd gave an isochron age of 2886±190 Ma. And finally, Pb-Pb gave an isochron age of 2689.4±8.6 Ma. So the results were concordant with Rb-Sr, Sm-Nd, and Pb-Pb. Not perfectly, but the error margins do overlap. K-Ar, however, was another matter. Even accounting for Argon loss, most of the dates produced were too young. The one exception was the hornblende, which produced a date which matched the other results rather well.
The Bass Rapids results were somewhat different. K-Ar dates were a complete mess, with ages ranging everywhere from 656 Ma to 1053 Ma. For the other dating methods, Austin shows us the results of two of his eleven samples, labeled DI-13 and DI-15. The DI-13 sample yielded a mineral isochron age of 1060±24 Ma, while DI-15 yielded an age of 1075±34 Ma. For Sm-Nd, a whole rock analysis using all eleven samples yielded an isochron age of 1379±140 Ma, which matched very well with the eight diabase samples, but the three samples taken from the granophyre were widely scattered. This, Austin suggests, is suggestive of contamination of feldspar from the overlying hornfels wall rock, incorporating less radiogenic Nd. A mineral isochron analysis of DI-13 yielded the exact same age of 1379±140 Ma. Whole rock Pb-Pb analysis gave an isochron age of 1250±130 Ma, and this is the same as the mineral analysis age achieved on sample DI-13 as well.
So what are we to make of all this? Clearly, the dates do not all agree, and Austin thinks he knows why. He notes that the α-decay isotopes consistently showed an age much older than the β-decay isotopes, and he believes that this indicates that α-decay took place much faster in the past, and that this is the cause of the discrepancy.
So where did Austin go wrong? Well, there are a number of areas. First and foremost is his methodology in collecting the samples. One simply cannot help but notice that Austin himself did the sampling. A great degree of variation can be achieved by selecting samples that look non-homogenous while claiming that they are homogenous on paper. To make it a single-blind test, some other geologist should have collected the samples to prevent any bias regarding which samples were selected, and have been told only that a true age of the collected sample was desired (i.e. avoid any xenoliths and phenocrysts). Second, the rocks selected were hardly the ideal kinds of rocks for K-Ar or Rb-Sr dating. The road-cut along highway 212 had probably been there for some time, allowing plenty of water to have access to the rock sample collected there. Now, water leeching is a major component of error for Rb-Sr dating, as is surface outgassing for K-Ar. We were only told that the rock taken from along that highway was “multi-kilogram.” How multi? Was it thick and round, or long and flat? Based on his results, I would be willing to guess long and flat is more likely. Further fishy sampling can be seen in the initial proposal, which stated that the sample collected would be a “flood gabbro” from the Grand Canyon. This, of course, means Noah’s flood. This is specious in and of itself, because no creationist has ever definitively stated which geologic formations mark the onset of The Flood, and Austin makes no effort to resolve that issue. And while technically one can do such dates on any volcanic rock, gabbro isn’t the best choice. Potassium-bearing minerals are best for K-Ar dating, and a gabbro, or in this case, a diabase, contains few such minerals. Also, the diabase bifurcates the Hakatai shale – a porous rock. This again makes water a factor in the Rb-Sr dates, to say nothing of exposure to the occasionally wet, eroding environment of the Grand Canyon itself. Third, the Grand Canyon samples were taken from a very wide area of exposed sill – nearly half a kilometer long, and nearly 100 meters thick! A very nice picture illustrates where Austin collected his samples – vertically. But he does not show horizontally where he collected them! Might that be because he gathered them over the entire length of the exposed sill? Over such a large area, there is little guarantee that the rock samples are of the same radiogenic age, or even the same volcanic event. Remember earlier when Austin was quoted, saying that his eleven samples were chosen “to represent the overall petrographic variability within the complete thickness of the sill.” But if you’re doing radiometric dating, you don’t want variability! You want homogeneity! This alone is enough to invalidate his results.
Given the millions of potential erroneous samples one could choose from, one could always find something which will yield the kind of errant radiometric date desired. I’m surprised Austin’s results weren’t more discordant! One can only assume he couldn’t resist the temptation to tag the Grand Canyon as containing creationist evidence.
The end of Austin’s chapter in RATE’s second book is devoted to answering back those who would point to certain factors involved in the radiometric dating process. He addresses mineral inheritance, slow cooling, and post-magmatic loss of Sr, after which there isn’t much of his argument left, though champions of creationism will see this honesty as something which bolsters his conclusions rather than weakens them (oh, brilliant politics!). Here’s what he has to say about Strontium loss:

"If we accept the Pb-Pb and Sm-Nd whole rock and mineral isochrons as true ages, then the Rb-Sr isochrons would be interpreted as significantly altered with a specific bias to give significantly younger but spurious ages. We need to imagine some type of Sr loss process that removed significant 87Sr and/or added significant 87Rb over geologic time. Less likely, but also making Rb-Sr ages much younger, would be addition of Rb, a process not considered further here (Vardiman, et al, 2005)."

Note how artfully he plays it! He acknowledges the possibility of Strontium loss, then acts like Rubinium would also need to be added in order to make the likelihood of such a thing seem nearly impossible. The truth of course is that these are trace elements, and only a little Strontium need be removed to achieve a massively discordant date!
Of all the RATE team’s research projects, Austin’s is the most insidious, the most difficult to follow, the one most deeply buried in technicalia. As a result, it will likely hold more weight among creationists than the others, and for many years to come, sadly.

R.A.T.E. and Helium Diffusion

2009-04-26T17:01:00.000-07:00

Okay, as I am currently engaged in a course in Geochronology, and my final paper covers the ridiculous claims of R.A.T.E., the ICR/CRS joint effort to assault the iron gates of radiometric dating, I thought I would post what I am researching as a means of helping others understand the craziness of this particular "research team." My contribution for the benefit of all.

This will be in several installments, as I complete my own research on each.

Helium Diffusion:
The experiment into rates of helium diffusion was conducted primarily by Dr. Russell Humphreys. He worked closely on the project with another man who is a bit of an icon among creationist circles, none other than Dr. Robert Gentry. It was Gentry who first proposed the idea that radiohalos found in mica might indicate a creation in situ of a parentless daughter radioisotope, polonium, thus showing the rocks were created, not metamorphosed. His ideas were not taken seriously, even after he published a book detailing his ideas, and a promised second volume which would go into greater detail never surfaced. His second volume, it seems, found itself via collaboration with the RATE team.
Although Humphreys’ initial proposal dealt with He diffusion in biotite, the focus was later shifted to zircons, where alpha decay could be more accurately determined in order to quantify exactly how much helium had been produced. The zircon samples he used came from core samples, taken from varying depths of a drilling site at Fenton Hill, just west of the volcanic Valles Caldera in the Jemez Mountains near Los Alamos, New Mexico.[1] Temperature readings were taken at each core sample at varying depths, so that a correlation could be drawn between how much helium had been retained at each temperature. Some of the samples were provided by the Los Alamos National Laboratory to the Zodiac Minerals and Manufacturing Co. – a small mining company which acted as a liaison between for the more secular labs and the RATE team.[2] Other samples were from Robert Gentry’s own sample collection, as he had previously used samples from that site in his earlier work on polonium halos.[3]
The amount of lead daughter product in the zircons was measured, and because the paths of decay from uranium and thorium to lead generate an average of 7.7 helium atoms per each lead atom produced, he used this to estimate the amount of helium generated, which he called Q0. He then determined the amount of helium which had been retained in the sample zircons, sending them to the Activation Laboratories in Ontario, Canada. The rates of He diffusion at various increasing temperatures, D, was measured, and the total amount of He retained, Q, was determined.
When this was plotted out, it was found that the amount of He retained was significantly higher than what might be expected, given the rates of diffusion. There was about 1.5 billion years worth of accumulated lead daughter product in the zircon, but over that span of time, according to what Humphreys calls the Uniformitarian model,[4] the amount of helium left inside the zircon should now be much lower – on the order of 100,000 times less! What could the explanation be?
According to Humphreys, there can be only one explanation. Clearly, at some point in the past, the rate of radiogenic decay was much faster, or accelerated. This rapid rate of decay caused a large amount of He to be trapped within the zircon within a relatively short amount of time. Since then, the rate has slowed and He has been diffusing, but it has only had roughly 4,000 – 6,000 years in which to do so. This is why so much He yet remains inside the crystal.
So what’s wrong with this picture? Dr. Kevin Henke, a geologist at the University of Kentucky, points out three obvious problems.[5] First off is the measured rates of diffusion. Humphreys had the zircons’ diffusion rate measured in a vacuum with increasing temperatures. But this would not mirror the conditions of heat and pressure found at Fenton Hill, where the rocks were beneath tons of rock, surrounded by the pressure of other minerals. Second, the samples came from a region near the Valles Caldera, a volcanic region known to harbor amounts of extraneous helium. In particular, Humphreys should have tested for contaminants of 3He and 4He. Thirdly, his estimates of the amount of initial uranium may have been wrong, based in part on the observations and notations made in Robert Gentry’s earlier work. This means that his estimates of his “creation timescale” may be too small by as much as one complete order of magnitude.
The fact that helium diffusion rates are much faster in a vacuum are enough to categorize Humphrey’s results as inaccurate. Scientists such as MacDougal and Harrison[6], as well as Dalrymple and Lanphere[7] have long since shown that diffusion of noble gases in silicate minerals may decrease by as much as 3-6 orders of magnitude at a given temperature if the studies are done under pressure as opposed to in a vacuum. And while Robert Gentry’s earlier work gave Humphreys access to a number of readily available samples to work with, he might have been better off choosing a fresh site – one which critics would not be able to point out such an obvious source of contaminating helium as a nearby volcano. All in all, some rather sloppy work.

[1] The site had been drilled in the 1970’s as a potential source of geothermal energy.
[2] A go-between was clearly needed since some scientists might rightly have grave concerns over giving samples to a known creationist group with a declared agenda.
[3] That meant the samples were collected in 1982. The zircons in the biotites he’d collected were relatively untouched.
[4] Even though the term, Uniformitarian, is almost never used anymore.
[5] http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/helium/zircons.html
[6] McDougall, I. and T. M. Harrison, 1999, Geochronology and Thermochronology by the 40Ar/39Ar Method, Oxford University Press, New York.
[7] Dalrymple, G.B. and M.A. Lanphere, 1969, Potassium-argon Dating: Principles, Techniques and Applications to Geochronology, W.H. Freeman and Co., San Francisco.

Wisconsin Citizens for Science

2009-04-26T16:57:00.000-07:00

Wisconsin now has a new group to help lead the charge against pseudoscience in Dairyland. The Wisconsin Citizens for Science. Yours truly is a member, and it promises to be a much needed outlet for those who truly care about our children's education.

Back To School!

2008-12-15T13:49:00.000-08:00

Greetings, everybody!

Well, I've finally done it. I've left my accounting career this past summer to get my butt back in school. I finally had to face it: While I'm good with numbers, accounting just isn't my thing. My first love has always been science. So it's time for a career change. I'm studying for a biological sciences degree, with the intention of becoming a science teacher.

So, I'm back to posting on this blog page. It's been awhile, I know. I'll be able to post more interesting blogs than ever before, as I learn first hand why some of the most widely-publicized evidences for creationism are complete horseshit. Oh, I have my theological reasons stemming from the Bible, and those are paramount, but the scientific evidence is equally damning. You'll get the juiciest tidbits of my daily lessons, here.

This past fall, I've already had an outstanding time. I took a History of Life course which covered the paleontological evidences for the evolution of life. Wow! What a blast to learn the names of so many key fossils which help to index the geologic column! I also took a basic geology course (Yawn! Easy A.) and a Meteorology course, in which I came face to face with the issue of global warming. No definitive conclusions were offered, but it was emphasized that global warming is a scientific debate, not a political one.

Now, this Spring semester, it gets even better. I'm re-taking a chemistry course (which I didn't do well in this last semester, I'm afraid), but I'm also taking two more outstanding courses. I am taking Anatomy/Physiology with none other than Andrew Petto, who is active with the National Center for Science Education, and who was recommended to me by Eugenie Scott (who is delighted I'm back in school, by the way). Dr. Petto will likely become my BioSci advisor during my tenure at UWM. But the other course is even more fun. Geochronology! An entire course in radiometric dating and other methods of determining the age of rocks! I couldn't be happier if I were at the Playboy Mansion with a truckload of condoms!

So stay tuned! Because I'm back!

Creation Museum Report

2007-11-13T22:21:00.000-08:00

Okay, guys, this particular blog was just too funny. It comes from the "Whatever" blog of John Scalzi, which isn't a creation-bashing website per se, but still worthwhile. I've reproduced it here, but I recommend that you visit the original posting at this address: http://scalzi.com/whatever/?p=121 Hope you like it as much as I did!

*********

Yes, finally, ladies and gentlemen, I present you with your Creation Museum report! Thank you for your patience. Our report today has two parts: The first part is a photographic tour, with all the snarktasticness you’ve been no doubt hoping for. Click on the first picture and cruise on through. It’s long — 101 pictures — but, hey, you guys paid top dollar, so I don’t want to skimp. The second part, a think piece, if you will, is directly below. It’s no less snarky (as you will soon discover), but also somewhat more thoughtful. Enjoy.

ON THE CREATION MUSEUM
By John Scalzi

Here’s how to understand the Creation Museum:
Imagine, if you will, a load of horseshit. And we’re not talking just your average load of horseshit; no, we’re talking colossal load of horsehit. An epic load of horseshit. The kind of load of horseshit that has accreted over decades and has developed its own sort of ecosystem, from the flyblown chunks at the perimeter, down into the heated and decomposing center, generating explosive levels of methane as bacteria feast merrily on vintage, liquified crap. This is a Herculean load of horseshit, friends, the likes of which has not been seen since the days of Augeas.

And you look at it and you say, “Wow, what a load of horseshit.”
But then there’s this guy. And this guy loves this load of horseshit. Why? Well, really, who knows? What possesses someone to love a load of horseshit? It’s beyond your understanding and possibly you don’t actually want to know, even if you could know; maybe it’s one of those “on that path lies madness” things. But love it he does, and he’s not the only one; the admiration for this particular load of horseshit exists, unaccountably, far and wide. There are advocates for this load of horseshit.

And so this guy who loves this load of horseshit decides that he’s going to do something; he’s going to give it a home. And not just any home, because as this is no ordinary load of horseshit, so must its home be no ordinary repository for horseshit. And so the fellow builds a temple for his load of horseshit. The finest architects scope this temple’s dimensions; the most excellent builders hoist columns around the load of horseshit and cap them with a cunning and elegant dome; and every surface of the temple is clad in fine-grained Italian marble by the most competent masons in a three-state radius. The load of horseshit is surrounded by comfortable seats, the better for people to gaze upon it; docents are hired to expertly describe its history and features; multimedia events are designed to explain its superior nature, relative not only to other loads of horseshit which may compete in loadosity or horseshittery, but to other, completely unrelated things which may or may not be loads of anything, much less loads of horseshit.

The guy who built the temple, satisfied that it truly represents his beloved load of horseshit in the best possible light, then opens the temple to the public, to attract not only the already-established horseshit enthusiasts, but possibly to entice new people to come and gaze on the horseshit, and to, well, who knows, admire its moundyness, or the way it piles just so, to nod in appreciation of the rationalizations for its excellence or to clap in delight and take pictures when an escaping swell of methane causes the load of horseshit to sigh a moist and pungent sigh.
When all of this is done, the fellow turns to you and asks you what you think of it all now, now that this gorgeous edifice has been raised in glory and the masses cluster in celebration.
And you say, “Well, that’s all very nice. But it’s still just an enormous load of horseshit.”

And this is, in sum, the Creation Museum. $27 million has purchased the very best monument to an enormous load of horseshit that you could possibly ever hope to see. I enjoyed my visit, admired the craft with which the whole thing was put together, and was never once convinced that what I was seeing celebrated was anything more or less than horseshit. Popular horseshit? Undoubtedly. Horseshit hallowed by tradition and consecrated by time? Just so. Horseshit of the finest possible quality? I would not argue the point. And yet, even so: Horseshit. Complete horseshit. Utter horseshit. Total horseshit. Horseshit, horseshit, horseshit, horseshit. I pity the people who swallow it whole.

***
So that is the key to understanding the Creation Museum. But what is the enormous load of horseshit that sits, squat yet moundy, at its very center? It’s simple: That the Bible is the literal and inerrant Word of God. If the Creation Museum doesn’t have that, it doesn’t have anything. So what it does — and very cleverly — is to position the Word of God as a non-threatening and accommodating given right from the start.

In the first room of the Creation Museum tour there’s a display of two paleontologists unearthing a raptor skeleton. One of them, a rather avuncular fellow, explains that he and the other paleontologist are both doing the same work, but that they start off from different premises: He starts off from the Bible and the other fellow (who does not get to comment, naturally) starts off from “man’s reason,” and really, that’s the only difference between them: “different starting points, same facts,” is the mantra for the first portion of the museum.
The rhetoricians in the crowd will already see how a card has been palmed here. The Museum is casually trying to establish an equivalence between science and creationism by accrediting them both as legitimate “starting points” for any discussion of biology, geology and cosmology. This would cause any scientist worth his or her salt to have a positively cinematic spit take, because it’s horseshit, but if you don’t know any better (say, if you’ve been fed a line of crap your whole life along the lines of “science is just another religion”) it sounds perfectly reasonable. And so if you buy that, then the next room, filled with large posters that offer on equal footing the creationist and scientific takes on the creation of the universe and evolution, seems perfectly reasonable, too: Heck, we can both have our theories! They’re both okay.

The problem with this is that creationism isn’t a theory, it’s an assertion, to wit: The entire universe was created in six days, the days are 24-hour days, the layout for the creation and for the early history of the planet and humanity is in the first chapter of Genesis and it is exactly right. Everything has to be made to conform to these assertions, which is why creationist attempts at science are generally so damn comical and refutable. This is also why the “different starting points, same facts” mantra is laughably false on its face — creationism has to have different facts to explain the world. It’s a little idiotic to establish as a “fact” that both science and creationism acknowledge, say, that apes exist, but to paper over the difference in the set of “facts” that explain how the apes got here, or to imply that a creationist assertion (apes created on the fifth day) is logically or systematically equivalent to decades of rigorous scientific process in the exploration of evolution.

But none of this is immediately obvious stuff and certainly the Creation Museum isn’t going to go out of its way to point it out; quite the opposite, in fact, since everything relies on the audience swallowing that whopping load of horseshit right up front. Thus the avuncular fake paleontologist at the start of the tour, looking all squinty and trustworthy and setting forth his load of utter horseshit in a tone of calm sincerity. Why wouldn’t you believe him? He’s a scientist, after all. Once you buy the initial premise, the rest comes easy, or, well, easier, anyway.

***
Let me say this much: I have to admit admiration for the pure balls-out, high-octane creationism that’s on offer here. Not for the Creation Museum that mamby-pamby weak sauce known as “Intelligent Design,” which tries to slip God by as some random designer, who just sort of got the ball rolling by accident. Screw that, pal: The Creation Museum’s God is hands on! He made every one of those animals from the damn mud and he did it no earlier than 4004 BC, or thereabouts. It’s all there in the book, son, all you have to do is look. Indeed, every single thing on display in the Creation Museum is either caused by or a consequence of exactly three things:

1. The six-day creation;
2. Adam eating from the tree of life;
3. Noah’s flood.

Really, that’s it. That’s the Holy Trinity of explanations and rationalizations. And thus we learn fascinating things. Did you know, for example, that Adam is responsible not only for the fall of man, but also for the creation of venom? It didn’t exist in the Garden of Eden, because, well. Why would it? Weeds? Adam’s fault. Carnivorous animals (and, one assumes, the occasional carnivorous plant)? Adam again. Entropy? You guessed it: Adam. Think about that, won’t you; eat one piece of fruit and suddenly you’re responsible for the inevitable heat death of the universe. God’s kind of mean.

The interplay of this Holy Trinity of explanations comes to its full realization when the Creation Museum considers what really are its main draw: Dinosaurs. Are dinosaurs 65 million years old? As if — the Earth is just six thousand years old, pal! Dinosaurs were in the garden of Eden — and vegetarians, at least until the fall, so thanks there, Adam. They were still around as late as the mid-third millenium BC; they were hanging with the Sumerians and the Egyptians (or, well, could have). All those fossils? Laid down by the Noah’s Flood, my friends. Which is not to say there weren’t dinosaurs on the Ark. No, the Bible says all kinds of land animals were on the boat, and dinosaurs are a subset of “all kinds.” They were there, scaring the crap out of the mammals, probably. Why did they die off after the flood? Well, who can say. Once the flood’s done, the Creation Museum doesn’t seem to care too much about what comes next; we’re in historical times then, you see, and that’s all Exodus through Deuteronomy, ie., someone else’s problem.
But seriously, the ability to just come out and put on a placard that the Jurassic era is temporally contiguous with the Fifth Dynasty of the Old Kingdom of Egypt — well, there’s a word for that, and that word is chutzpah. Because, look, that’s something you really have to sell if you want anyone to buy it. It’s one thing to say to people that God directly created the dinosaurs and that they lived in the Garden of Eden. It’s another thing to suggest they lived long enough to harass the Minoans, and do it with a straight face. It’s horseshit, pure and simple, but that’s not to suggest I can’t admire the hucksterism.

***
I’m quite clearly immune to the ideological charms of the Creation Museum, but then, I never was the prime audience for the place. How were other people grokking the museum the day I was there? Honestly, it’s hard to say. The place was certainly crowded; I and the friends I went with had to wait in line an hour and a half to get into the place (there’s a bottleneck in the middle of the museum in the form of a short film about the six days of creation). No one I could see was getting sloppy over the place; people just more or less shuffled through each room, looked at the displays, read the placards and moved on. My friends occasionally heard someone say “oh, come on,” when one of the placards tested their credulity (there’s apparently only so much of “T-Rexes were vegetarian” propaganda any one person should be obliged to take), but for my part I just noticed people looking, reading and moving on.

There have to be people who believe this horseshit unreservedly, but I suspect that perhaps the majority of the visitors I saw were Christians who may not buy into the whole “six days” thing, but are curious to see how it’s being presented. To be clear, the “horseshit” I’ve been speaking of is not Christianity, it’s creationism, which to my mind is a teleological quirk substantially unrelated to the grace one can achieve through Jesus Christ. Now, the Creation Museum rather emphatically argues that a literal reading of the Bible is essential for true Christianity — it’s got a whole red-lit section that suggests the ills of society are directly related to folks deciding that maybe some parts of the Bible are, you know, metaphorical – but that’s just more horseshit, of a slightly different flavor. There are lots of Christians who clearly don’t need to twist their brain like a pretzel to get around the idea that the universe is billions of years old and that we’ve evolved from earlier forms. For those folks, the Creation Museum is probably about culture, to the extent any installation largely created by someone who previously worked for Universal Studios can be about culture.

At the very least, this is high-quality stuff on the level of production. There are lots of things here that are cheesy, but there’s not much that’s chintzy; you can see where the $27 million went. Whether this will all age well will be an interesting question, although I don’t plan on returning in five years to find out. Here and now, it’s all pretty damn slick, and I think that in itself may be a draw for mainstream Christians. Christian culture has only recently ramped itself up into being something other than a wan and denatured version of pop culture (this is evidenced in part by the fact that many evangelical Christian teens now dress as badly as the rest of their peers), and this is another high-production-value offering for this particular lifestyle choice.

Will these folks find the arguments they find at the Creation Museum convincing? Again, you got me. I certainly hope not, but more to the point I would hope that these folks don’t come away feeling that their love of Christ obliges them to swallow heaping mounds of horseshit from people who are phobic about metaphor. I really don’t think Jesus would care if you think that you and a monkey have a common ancestor; I think he would care more that you think you and your neighbor have a common weal.

What about non-Christians? I can’t imagine that anyone who wasn’t strongly religious or already inclined to agree with creationist ideas would be converted by this place. Between blaming Adam for everything from poisons to sweating and T-Rexes eating coconuts and a particularly memorable placard explaining why in early Biblical times it was perfectly fine to have sex with your close relatives, it’s just way too over the top.

***
Indeed, it’s over the top enough that I never could actually get angry with the place. Not that I was planning to; I admit to dreading coming to the place, but that’s primarily because I thought it would bore and annoy me, not make me angry. In fact, I was never bored, and was genuinely annoyed only by the “paleontologist” at the start of the walk-through. The rest of the time I enjoyed it as I suspect anyone who is not some stripe of creationist could enjoy it: As camp. At some point — specifically the part where the Scopes Monkey Trial was presented as the end of decent Christian civilization as we know it — I just started chuckling my way through. By the time I got to the Dinosaur Den, with its placards full of patent misinformation about how soft tissue fossilization strongly suggested a massive, worldwide flood, I was a little loopy. It was just so ridiculous.

And I’m happy about that. In the end, the Creation Museum is one of those things that I suspect will comfort those who absolutely believe in creationism, amuse those who absolutely don’t, and be a interesting way to spend a day to lots of people somewhere in the middle. It’s not a front in the culture war, as much as I think it would like to be; it’s designed too much like an amusement for that.

It is what it is: An attractive and diverting repository for a massive load of horseshit. And, well, let’s be realists: That load of horseshit’s not going away anytime soon. Might as put it somewhere that it’s out of everyone else’s way. The Creation Museum manages that well enough.

Creation Museum in the Wisconsin Dells?!?

2007-10-21T21:53:00.000-07:00

Unbelievable. First, creationists build a multi-million dollar museum in northern Kentucky. Now, some guy named Bill Mielke is making designs on opening one in the tourist haven of the Wisconsin Dells -- right in the middle of gorgeous rock formations far older than his measly 6,000-year world view permits.

It makes me wonder, it really does. Bass-ackward museums are nothing new. Many a road tourist has been taken aback by museums dedicated to the denial of the Nazi holocaust, or the preservation of the legacy of Senator Joseph McCarthey. Ostensibly, the purpose of such museums is to inform the public. To "get the word out" as it were. But upon reflection, I'm convinced that's not the real purpose. The real purpose is to bolster confidence in their own position.

Consider the people who tend to visit such museums. The vast majority of them are not curiosity seekers with an open mind. No, most of them are dyed-in-the-wool cronies who already accept the bogus museum's premise. Most of the visitors at the Kentucky-Fried Creationist Museum, for example, will be fellow creationists. They will gladly pay the money for admission -- not because they want to be convinced, but because they want to have their existing opinions reinforced. Is it really a museum, therefore? Or is it just another ongoing creation seminar with permanent displays? Clearly, it's the latter.

Yet there does seem to be a certain legitimacy behind having a museum completely dedicated to one's position. Many, many people will say to themselves, "Well, there must be something to it. People wouldn't build an entire museum if it were all a bunch of crap, now would they?" Ah, but they would indeed! History has shown us plenty of examples where people have built spectacular structures dedicated to crap. For instance, few buildings are as lush or beautiful as the Mormon Tabernacle. It is a spectacular piece of archetecture, gorgeous in its structure, towering in its majesty, and fantastically expensive! The Mormon faith is one of the biggest and most obvious frauds ever concocted. Yet there it sits! An entire temple built upon the dream of a bad liar. Again, few palatial estates are so impressive as the one enjoyed by Hollywood elites belonging to the cult of Scientology. Yet its many acres of well-tended gardens is an ever lasting tribute to the crap imagined by a phenomenally bad science fiction writer, L. Ron Hubbard. What about the phenomenon of crowds flocking to see "weeping statues" of Jesus or Mary? What about the museum of UFO encounters in downtown Roswell, New Mexico? For those who think that people wouldn't build an entire museum if it were all a bunch of crap, guess again! People would indeed build a museum -- and do so much more besides -- all for the sake of a lie. They've done it before. They'll do it again. Creationists may feel pretty good that they finally have an impressively sized museum all their own, but they'd be wise not to get too damned smug about it!

And now someone wants to build another one in the Wisconsin Dells. Well, here's my advice to Mr. Bill Mielke: Dude, you say you're building it to convince us; those of us who accept evolution. But it's not about us. It's about you! It's about making you feel more secure in your faith. If you really believed, if you truly had faith, no amount of scientific evidence to the contrary could shake you. Instead, you are shaken by the contrary evidence, so much so that you try to hide it, convince yourself that it isn't really there, and desire to build museums which feature what you think is supporting evidence. But by doing that, you've given the game away. You've admitted that physical evidence is a better than spiritual evidence for building a world-view. But, of course, you don't have physical evidence. If you did, you wouldn't need faith anymore! So keep your faith, and stop fooling yourself that its based on physical evidence, because it's not. Society already has too many people trying to sell snake oil without you adding to the overload of flim-flam.

Someone should make a museum about that!

Eric

Hovind's Blog

2007-03-14T13:41:00.000-07:00

Well, I stand corrected. Hovind's web site may have no links to his blog, but the blog still exists, and I found it once again. Naturally, "Dr. Dino" has been blogging fairly regularly on the inside, having nothing better to do than that, and teach inmates math and theology. There are many such blogs, but I've pasted my favorite one below. It illustrates just how shaken he is, and how much he was soul-searching, while at the same time still being in utter disconnectedness as to the truth of his position, and how he got there. Enjoy!

Sixty to Zero in One Second Flat…Then Back to Eighty!

As many people who follow our ministry know, on November 2, 2006, a two week trial ended in my wife and I being found guilty of three basic charges related to IRS laws. I am currently in jail awaiting sentencing on January 19th. Below are several points of interest on which I am reflecting:
1) Our attorneys say that there were several key events that must be appealed. Pray that this case will be overturned on appeal.
2) I’m doing rather well considering the circumstances. So far six men have been saved. I have Bible studies three to four times each day with some of the men. Many of the men here are black and most are here for drug related charges. Some of the men, white and black, are loud, vulgar, and play the TV full blast most of the day. Every cop, judge, lawyer, and politician needs to spend a week locked up before they take office. It changes your outlook on many things.
3) I finally got a pillow after only eight days and requests! I am about ready for a new pair of socks next!
4) Dr. David Gibbs, Jr. preached a great sermon nearly thirty years ago about Pastor John Bunyan in England refusing to take a license to preach and spending thirteen years in the Bedford jail for it. While he was there, he wrote a classic, “Pilgrim’s Progress.” David Gibbs, III, his son, who testified against us during the trial, testified that all church ministries should contract with the government by becoming 501 (c) (3). Being 501 (c) (3) is taking a government license to have a church ministry. The second law of thermodynamics applies to things other than matter.
5) I think I have pushed hard for seventeen years spreading creation and if God is done using me in that ministry, I am OK with that. However, I am asking God for this to be reversed and grant me forty more years of preaching His Word out of jail. Even though I am not out preaching, there are still many thousands creation tapes and DVD’s circling the globe and winning souls. Everyone can help us by continuing to get and circulate the creation materials. The ministry is still going with Eric out preaching in my place. Dinosaur Adventure Land is still open at this time with the winter park hours of Thursday through Saturday, and our dedicated staff keeps working on new tools to win souls. Subtitling the seminar in about fifteen languages is one project in the works.
6) Being here gives me a much better appreciation for many Bible characters who suffered for doing right. Abel, Joseph in Egypt, John on the Isle of Patmos, Job, Daniel, Jeremiah, Shadrach, Peter, Paul, and Stephen, just to name a few, and millions of other Christians in the last 2000 years. Acts and Foxes book of Martyrs take on new life for me, as does the story of Corrie ten Boom and Alexander Solzenitzen’s work. The book of Acts records over 50 instances of God’s people being arrested, tried, beatened, or jailed. And that is just the book of Acts!
7) If the case is not reversed, I face anywhere from parole to 7 to 12 years. I am meeting people here that I would probably never had met, had I not been sent here. I yearn for my freedom and family. Paul’s letters written from jail will mean much more to me now. Reading them shows us that nearly everyone forsook him, and most of his needs for physical comfort were ignored. He asked that people “remember my bonds”, yet we don’t know if any ever did. One of the men in here told me that he has been here for eleven months, and has never had a visitor. Our office has a list of men that you could minister to as a pen pal. I will encourage everyone to get a prisoner pen-pal and donate the creation videos to their local prisons. We have donated many hundreds over the years and have seen many saved. This experience will change me for the good forever.
8) I have also been teaching basic math to many of the men. They love it, and are eager to learn. The appalling failure of our education system is evident in here. Even hardened drug dealers react with glee when they finally understand the concepts of calculating the number of yards of concrete needed for their driveway.
9) It seems that most are starved for real affection and a father’s love and approval. One man, with over thirty tatoos, was excited when I made him a bookmarker. I drew his name in such a way that each letter is 1/8″ wide and 8″ long. It can only be read by tipping the paper and looking down the lines. I told him that you have to look at life from God’s perspective to make any sense out of it. They all loved it!
10) When I compare my time in jail to the Apostle Paul’s time, I am forced to realize that I have so much for which to be thankful. I have not been beaten. I have hot and cold water. I have three meals a day. I have clean clothes two times each week. I have climate controlled and sanitary conditions. I have a sink and toilet. I have a phone and can call out to my family sometimes. I have people in here that are saved and supportive. I have people outside that love me and are praying for me. I can look out a window. I have an unlimited supply of sanitary water. (Well, chlorinated, fluorinated, city water.) I am not facing beatings in the middle of the night. I am not facing execution. I have access to medical care. I do not sleep on a bug infested pile of straw, nor a rock. I am not chained to a wall or floor, or a Roman soldier. I have a Bible and reading material. I can receive 2 visits per week. I have a pencil and paper, and can send letters that will get to them in a few days. I am blessed, spoiled, and honored to be a child of God.

Why Did God Allow This? Maybe God wants me…….
1) To receive punishment for my sin.
2) To use me in an area in the jail that needed salt. (Matt. 5:13)
3) To let me be prepared for a new phase of ministry and this is boot camp.
4) To be humbled by God.
5) To allow God to see how fellow Christians react. He is gathering evidence for their day of reckoning. The same is true for me.
6) To give me time off to reflect, refresh, recharge, and renew my Bible study and prayer time.
7) To let me see the anguish my grandkids, who love me dearly, are going through, so that I would be more compassionate with kids to whom I preach, or that are visiting DAL, many of whom have similar experiences with jailed loved ones.
8) To show me how much can be done with so little. These men can make all sorts of things like water heaters from toothbrushes, and tatoo guns from ink pens. Most Christians are wasteful of God’s resources.
9) To give me a better appreciation for our veterans who slept in swamps and other squalid conditions for my freedom. I will hug POW’s from now on.
10) To give me a renewed appreciation for missionaries who leave family and comforts to spread God’s word.
11) To bring my thought, prayers, and concerns into action by inspiring me to visit those in the hospitals who never get visitors.
12) To let me see first hand and up close, the results of sin, drugs, and alcohol in a man’s life.
13) To let me see men pace back and forth like caged lions. Truly the wicked are like the troubled sea that cannot rest. Isaiah 55:20
14) To let me see why God’s law, which is perfect, converting the soul, authorizes: beatings, four times restitution, and execution for crimes, but never imprisonment. Certainly there are Roman and Egyptian prisons mentioned in the Bible, but none were authorized by God. This system costs everyone in many ways, and does little good and much harm.
15) To give me a taste of what awaits in the tribulation. The “state” control in that time will be overpowering.
16) To allow me to experience the joy of holding hands in a prayer circle with nine or ten men on fire for Jesus while facing severe sentences.
17) To make me order my priorities better. I cannot ever let my family fail, while I build a ministry.
18) To make me more like Jesus, the man of sorrows and acquainted with grief.
19) To show that God is beginning to take His children out as the tribulation nears. Isaiah 57:1

What Can Be Done?
1. Many of you have called or written to ask if you can write letters on our behalf. We have learned that you can do this. Letters can be sent to CSE, who will give them all to the attorneys. The letters should be addressed “To The Court”, and may reference such things as our character, our Christian beliefs, and how the CSE ministry has impacted your life and ministry. These letters must be received by December 9th.
2. Keep praying and winning souls.
3. Listen for the trumpet!

Remember my bonds,Kent Hovind

Hovind's Web, and Spiders

2007-03-14T12:53:00.000-07:00

I went back to Kent Hovind's web site at www.drdino.com, just to see what on earth the shattered remnants of his ministry was up to these days. Interestingly, the blog which used to be on the website is conspicuously missing, and any reference to Hovind's plight, erased. In point of fact, it was never highlighted much to begin with, and you always had to look very hard to see anything regarding it, but now, there's nothing to find. His son, Eric Hovind, is still giving talks, but at a far less brisk pace than his father did. One has to wonder if this is the end for Hovind's ministry altogether.

Still, I can't help but kick a bad man when he's down. I guess it's the impish prankster side of me. His website does still feature articles from time to time, and one of them illustrated spiders. The title of the article was, "Things that make evolutionists look silly: Spiders," and talked at length about, what else, spiders' marvelous complexity.

Now, I'll admit, spiders, like many other things about our world, are marvelously complex. They're intricately colored, highly adapted, spin several different types of web (often all at the same time), and execute amazing feats of endurance, jumping, and acrobatics. All that is true and good, as pointed out by the article's author (who was not, I believe, Hovind). But spiders are, every single one of them, carnivores, perfectly suited for hunting and killing insect prey. What sort of role could spiders possibly have played in a world predating the Fall of Adam & Eve in the presumed Garden of Eden?

According to the fundie-set, animals did not turn carnivore until after the Fall, and this only because it was a perversion of sin and Satan. But if so, what did spiders eat back then, exactly? It's hard to imagine spiders even existing in a Garden of Eden, much less subsisting on a diet of fruits or plants. And if they had a diet of that sort, what would be the purpose of a web? All the arguments about how amazing Spiders' silk is totally ignores the purpose that it serves: namely, to be spun into a web-net to trap and kill wayward bugs. Would such silk have any reason or purpose if spiders weren't carnivores?

The author of that article on Hovind's site, whoever it was, didn't think things through very well. Spiders make sense in an evolutionary world, red in tooth and claw. They make no sense in a Creationist world, where God is red in tooth and claw, either through direct commission, or through creating a Satan capable of doing such perversion. Certainly God let Satan do his very worst, and for that, he is to be held accountable.

So here's to spiders! Useful to us chiefly for two things: defeating creationists, and getting radioactive so that they can bite us and imbue us with superpowers!

Eric

Ten Years For "Dr. Dino"

2007-02-19T10:40:00.000-08:00

10 years for 'Dr. Dino'
(Pensacola News-Journal Jan 19th, 2007)

Michael Stewart mstewart@pnj.com

Pensacola evangelist Kent Hovind was sentenced Friday afternoon to 10 years in prison on charges of tax fraud.

After a lengthy sentencing hearing that last 5 1/2 hours, U.S. District Judge Casey Rodgers ordered Hovind also:
-- Pay $640,000 in restitution to the Internal Revenue Service.
-- Pay the prosecution’s court costs of $7,078.
-- Serve three years parole once he is released from prison.

Hovind’s wife, Jo Hovind, also was scheduled to be sentenced. Rodgers postponed her sentencing until March 1 to allow her defense attorney an opportunity to argue possible discrepancies in sentencing guidelines. Prior to his sentencing, a tearful Kent Hovind, also known as "Dr. Dino" asked for the court’s leniency.

“If it’s just money the IRS wants, there are thousands of people out there who will help pay the money they want so I can go back out there and preach,” Hovind said.

Hovind, founder of Creation Science Evangelism and Dinosaur Adventure Land in Pensacola, was found guilty in November of 58 federal counts, including failure to pay $845,000 in employee-related taxes. He faced a maximum of 288 years in prison.

Jo Hovind was charged and convicted in 44 of the counts involving evading bank-reporting requirements and faces a maximum of 225 years in prison. Kent Hovind, who is incarcerated in the Escambia County Jail, will be assigned to a prison by the Bureau of Prisons. Rodgers recommended Kent Hovind be sent to the prison at Saufley Field in Pensacola so he will be close to his family.

It will be up to the Bureau of Prisons, however, to make that determination.

Hovind's Blog...

2006-11-07T06:35:00.000-08:00

This from Kent Hovind's blog at www.drdino.com:

Creation Science Evangelism is the Lord’s work.
49 Comments

This is a ministry founded eighteen years ago and mentored into its current form by Dr. Hovind. Kent and Jo have been used of our Lord to make this pivotal creation ministry what it is today, giving their entire lives, and home to spreading the Gospel and the truths of creation. As you know, Dr. Hovind has been on the road over half of the year most years.

But as this is written Kent E. Hovind is sitting in jail. We do not know the Lord’s purpose in this, but we know that our Lord is in charge.

Yesterday a federal court decided that Dr. Hovind was guilty of non-withholding of taxes. This is being appealed. Jo Hovind was also charged and convicted in the same trial as the signer of checks. She was freed on bond and was able to come back home last night. Sentencing for both Kent and Jo Hovind is scheduled for January 19, 2007.

Some of the greatest persons in history have suffered time in prison. We are in shock, but we know that our Creator can use even the worst of events towards His Kingdom’s glory. We at CSE request your fervent prayers.

Romans 8:28 “And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to [his] purpose.”

This Says It All

2006-11-05T13:44:00.000-08:00

I recently received an e-mail newsletter from Answers In Genesis which blasts the Intelligent Design movement. Why? Because it is merely Deism, and not Christianity! Evolutionists have been making that point for decades, but to hear it come directly from AIG is truly telling. Here is what they sent me:

Q: Is recognizing design “enough”?

A: “Enough for what?” you might ask. The Intelligent Design Movement teaches that design in nature points to a designer, but it doesn’t say who the intelligent designer is, and it is compatible with millions of years and evolution. So is belief in intelligent design enough to be saved?
Intelligent design may seem very appealing at first because it brings up some good arguments against the idea that life arose by natural processes. But sadly, the ID movement has little or nothing to do with the Bible.

Believing in design alone doesn’t tell us why there’s death and suffering in the world … or that we all need to be saved. It’s only through God’s Word that we can understand the bad news that Adam’s sin brought—death—and the good news that Jesus Christ, our Redeemer, brought—eternal life with Him.

While Romans 1 tells us that we can know there’s a God through His creation (and that’s an important first step), to understand who that God is and to know His nature and what life is all about, we need to believe and understand God’s Word.

Christian College Pres: "Pay Taxes!"

2006-10-20T12:37:00.000-07:00

Christian College leader says taxes are part of religion
Hovind argues God's workers are exempt
mailto:AngelaFail@PensacolaNewsJournal.com

A local Christian leader on Thursday testified against Pensacola evangelist Kent Hovind, explaining the Bible does not condone tax evasion.

Rebekah Horton, Pensacola Christian College's longtime senior vice president, took the stand during the second day of testimony at the federal trial.

Hovind, who calls himself "Dr. Dino," faces 58 charges. He is accused of evading $473,818 in federal income, Social Security and Medicare employee taxes at his Creation Science Evangelism Ministry, which includes Dinosaur Adventure Land on North Palafox Street, a creationist theme park dedicated to debunking evolution.

His wife, Jo, also is on trial, accused of contributing to the fraud by making 45 bank transactions in a little more than a year in an effort to make the money untraceable.

Hovind believes he and his employees work for God, are paid by God and therefore aren't subject to taxation.

But Horton said whether Hovind works for God is irrelevant and the Bible does not exempt anyone from paying taxes.

"We know the Scriptures do not promote (tax evasion)," she said. "It's against Scripture teaching."

Horton first heard of Hovind's beliefs about taxes in the mid 1990s.

A woman gave Horton a videotape. The woman received it when she worked for Hovind.

The video featured another evangelist advocating tax evasion, Horton said. The woman told Horton of Hovind's philosophy on paying his employees.

"She said, 'You were giving a gift with your work, and they were giving a gift back to you,' " Horton said.

Horton said her first concern was that the woman was breaking the law. Horton also testified she was concerned about Pensacola Christian College students who worked at Hovind's ministry.

"The day could come when you're going to be in trouble," she told the woman. "Because Mr. Hovind is going to be in trouble."

Horton believed it was the college's duty to report the misleading doctrine. Administration called the Internal Revenue Service and gave the tape to officials, she said.

"I didn't want to see innocent people get led astray," she said.Pensacola Christian College then decided its students no longer were permitted to work with Creation Science Evangelism, Horton said.

Hovind sent her a letter, she said, and then visited her office.

On her desk, she kept note cards of Bible verses that contradicted Hovind's stance on taxes, including Romans 13, which discusses submission to authority and 1 Peter, Chapter 2, which refers to "submission to rulers and masters," she said.

"I didn't get into a debate with him," she said. "I just continued to refer to these verses."

Horton said she had "no ill feelings" toward Hovind. She just doesn't agree with him on the tax issue.

Defense attorney Alan Richey asked Horton if she had trouble with Hovind on other issues.

"It's not my place to judge him," she said.

The trial is scheduled to continue today at 8:30 a.m. before U.S. District Judge Casey Rodgers. It is expected to take at least two weeks to complete.

Hovind Trial Hears From Employees

2006-10-20T12:28:00.000-07:00

Workers testify in 'Dr. Dino' trial
Amy Sowder@PensacolaNewsJournal.com

Two people who worked for a Pensacola evangelist testified Wednesday in federal court that they didn't consider where they worked to be a church.

Evangelist Kent "Dr. Dino" Hovind is accused of failing to pay $473,818 in federal income, Social Security and Medicare taxes for employees of his Creation Science Ministry between March 31, 2001, and Jan. 31, 2004.

Hovind has claimed he didn't have to pay the taxes because his employees were "volunteers," "missionaries" or "ministers" and his business was a ministry.

His wife, Jo Hovind, also is on trial, accused of contributing to the fraud by making 45 bank transactions in a little more than a year in an effort to make the money untraceable.

Hovind owns Dinosaur Adventure Land on North Palafox Street, a creationist theme park dedicated to debunking evolution.

The trial is being heard by U.S. District Judge Casey Rodgers and is expected to take at least two weeks to complete.

Alan Richey is Kent Hovind's defense attorney, and Michelle Heldmyer is the prosecutor. They used government documents, letters and recorded phone conversations on Wednesday to question four witnesses.

Brian Popp, Hovind's employee for at least eight years, testified that he preferred to be paid in cash and that Hovind said that was the preference of the other employees.

"He said if it was up to him, he'd prefer to pay us all with checks," Popp said.

Popp said Hovind told him about the bank's requirement to report transactions over $10,000 and said it was "not safe to carry large sums of cash."

He also testified employees had a certain "paranoia" about Hovind's run-ins with the IRS, although workers were under the impression Hovind was "on the offensive rather than the defensive."

Popp testified that Hovind warned employees not to accept mail addressed to "KENT HOVIND." He said Hovind told the workers the government created a corporation in his "all-caps name." Hovind said if he accepted the mail, he would be accepting the responsibilities associated with that corporation, Popp testified.

Heldmyer asked Popp to read from ministry memos that referred to the workers as "employees" and included rules about timeliness, payroll, vacation days and salaries.

Richey pointed out the ministerial aspects of the memo, including references to Scripture and "helping to promote Christ."

Popp said the memos didn't always paint a clear picture of the inner workings of the ministry.

"There was sometimes a difference between memos and how we'd actually operate," he said.

Although Popp considered himself a minister at the time of his employment, he said Hovind's ministry isn't a church.

"It wasn't what I had become accustomed to be a church," he said.

Diane P. Cooksey, who was a sales representative for the ministry from January 2003 to June 2005, testified she was expected to pay her own taxes.

"He explained what his belief was, right up front in the interview, that I would pay my own taxes," she testified.

She received her hourly wage of $10 in a weekly paycheck, she punched a time clock, had 10 paid vacation days and considered herself an employee, not a missionary as a few others called themselves, she said.

Cooksey testified she never received a W-2 or 1099 tax form for the money she made.

"I didn't see it as a church, personally," she said, adding that on occasion, materials were given for free to missionaries and prisons.

After the Dinosaur Adventure Land was raided on April 2004, Kent Hovind required his employees to sign nondisclosure agreements if they wanted to keep their jobs, she said.

"I was uncomfortable signing it, I guess, because of not having a full understanding," Cooksey said.

M.C. Powe, an IRS officer who investigates people who have unpaid tax returns or unpaid tax liabilities, testified she first attempted to collect taxes from the Hovinds in 1996.

Kent Hovind was not home at the time, so she gave his wife a summons and taxpayer rights brochure.

Powe said she then received a letter from Hovind that stated: "... this summons indicates that you assume I am a 'taxpayer' per the IRS code."

Hovind denied in the letter that he was a tax protester, saying instead he was a steward over the property of the Lord, she testified.

Powe said Hovind never showed up at the appointed time and she returned to the home. When she learned Kent Hovind wasn't home again, she informed Jo Hovind that their vehicles would be seized.

"Because he traveled around a lot, I thought he would move his assets beyond our reach," she said.

Hovind tried several bullying tactics against her, Powe testified. A recording that Hovind made of a phone conversation was then played. In the phone conversation, Hovind tried to make an appointment with Powe by 10 a.m. that day. When Powe said she couldn't meet him because she had a staff meeting, Hovind threatened to sue her, which he did.

"Dr. Hovind sued me three times, maybe more," Powe testified. "It just seemed to be something he did often."

She testified that the cases were dismissed.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Benjamin Beard, who handled Hovind's bankruptcy, filed after his vehicles were seized by the IRS, testified that Hovind opted for the Chapter 13 "wage-earner plan," available only to those who have a regular source of income.

In his bankruptcy forms, Hovind wrote that he had no form of income, that he rejected his Social Security number and that his employer was God, Beard testified.

"That gives you a warning sign," Beard said.

Staff writer Angela Fail contributed to this report.

Kent Hovind is in T-R-O-U-B-L-E

2006-10-18T12:38:00.000-07:00

Evangelist's trial begins
Dinosaur Adventure Land owner, wife face 58 counts of tax fraud
Angela Fail@PensacolaNewsJournal.com

Defense attorneys said it's a case of a Pensacola couple's ignorance of the law and their religious beliefs.

A federal prosecutor said it's a case of a couple refusing to pay payroll taxes for their employees.

Opening statements began Tuesday in the trial of Pensacola evangelist Kent Hovind and his wife, Jo. Between them, the Hovinds are charged with 58 counts of tax fraud involving their Creation Science Ministry. The ministry includes Dinosaur Adventure Land on North Palafox Street, a creationist theme park dedicated to debunking evolution.

Twelve jurors and two alternates were selected Tuesday to hear the case that could take two weeks. The trial is expected to continue at 8:30 a.m. today before U.S. District Judge Casey Rodgers.Prosecutor Michelle Heldmeyer said Hovind, also known as "Dr. Dino," failed to pay about $470,000 in federal income, Social Security and Medicare taxes for his ministry employees between March 31, 2001, and Jan. 31, 2004.

She said Jo Hovind contributed to the fraud by withdrawing thousands of dollars in cash from the ministry's bank account so the money could not be traced. She made 45 transactions in a little more than a year, sometimes taking out as much as $9,500 at a time. Banks are required to report cash withdrawals that exceed $10,000.

"The Hovinds ran a business," Heldmeyer told the jury. "All employers are required to contribute to those systems."

Both Kent and Jo Hovind pleaded not guilty in July.

Defense attorney Alan Richey said Hovind was unaware of the laws he was charged with breaking. He said no one from the Internal Revenue Service ever notified Hovind he was breaking the law.

"The government, the IRS, has taken its time trying to find a way to come after Mr. Hovind," he said.

Heldmeyer said from 1999 to March 2004, the Hovinds took in more than $5 million. Their income came from amusement-park profits and merchandise -- books, audiotapes and videotapes -- they sold on site and through phone and online orders, she said. About half the money went to employees.

Those employees either were salaried or were paid hourly wages. They worked set hours. They signed up for vacations and sick leave.

But rather than accepting his responsibility as an employer, Hovind hid behind terminology, Heldmeyer said.

He called his employees "volunteers," "missionaries" or "ministers," she said. Wages were referred to as "gifts" or "love offerings."

Employees then became responsible for paying Hovind's portion of the income tax, she said.And though the Hovinds refer to their business as a ministry, it's not affiliated with a church, she said."It's not a church," she said. "

But that doesn't matter, because a church still has to pay payroll tax."

Hovind attempted to manipulate funds from the start of his ministry, she said.

In 1996, he filed for bankruptcy, a move Heldmeyer said Hovind designed to prevent the IRS from collecting taxes.

The IRS later determined Hovind filed under an "evil purpose," Heldmeyer said.

She called Hovind a "very loud and vocal tax protester," recalling a number of lawsuits he filed against the IRS over the past decade. Each was deemed frivolous and was thrown out, she said.

And on April 13, 2004, when IRS officials issued a search warrant for Hovind's property, he resisted."

It was a very difficult day," she said.Richey and Jerold Barringer, Jo Hovind's attorney, told a different story.

Richey said IRS agents stepped outside their authority that day, interrogating employees and confiscating records and money."

For the government, it's OK if they're extreme," he said.

He called Hovind a literalist who takes every word of the Bible as truth.

Barringer said the Hovinds have specific religious beliefs that should be respected."

Mr. Hovind believes what the Bible says," he said. "

Most Christians do, as well.

"He said when Hovind traveled the country sometimes 250 days out of the year, Jo Hovind served as a "housewife" who was "simply helping people in the office.""

"The government is flinging a lot of mud, trying to make him look dirty," Richey said. "And his wife -- a piano teacher of 20 years -- they're trying to make her look dirty, too."

Taking It to the Farms

2006-10-18T11:36:00.000-07:00

Back in August I completed my second big road-trip, on my way to visiting all major creationist museums and most of the minor ones. I came away convinced of something which has become lost in our modern-day perspective, and that is simply how vitally important it is to be able to breach the disonnect between urban and countryside mentality.

Let's look through a wide-angle lens for a moment: Major cities are hubs for secular thinking, made necessary due to a need for respect for all different walks of life, diverse religious and non-religious views, skin colors and ancestral nationalities. Everywhere media outlets of all sorts super-saturate people with ideas, issues, and debates. It's a wonderful free-for-all exchange of brainwaves! Is it any wonder that the old, outmoded superstitions of religion have a hard time surviving here?

Now look at the American countryside. Small homes, small communities, even smaller leaders, and everywhere, everywhere, is the standard of Christianity, of Jesus Christ, of Southern Baptists and Pentecostals. There isn't much media here. The small-town folk have no time to listen to talk radio during a non-existing commute to work, and don't see the point in wasting their money on cable television -- if they can even get it. If they can, they often glue their eyes onto the Trinity Broadcasting Network. Free exchange of ideas? That's for shake-the-boat radicals! Is it any wonder so many city-slickers refer to these areas as "flyover states?"

One of the most beautiful areas I visited was the Ozark mountain region of Northern Arkansas. Paradise! Except for one thing: People seem to think it's latter-day Israel.

I went there looking for a creation museum. And I found it, all right. But it was neatly nestled inside of what I can only describe as a Christian Disneyworld. "The Great Passion Play," it was called -- an exhibition which shows itself many times weekly inside an ampitheater built right into the side of one of the Ozark mountains. Around the theater, an entire industry of shops, rides, childrens' areas, and exhibits. There was a Christian History museum, a Bible museum, and, finally, a creation museum. And overlooking it all, a large statue called "Christ of the Ozarks," reminiscent of the large statue of Jesus overlooking Rio De Janeiro -- except this one is far, far uglier.

For brevity, I'll ignore how ridiculous the creation museum itself was. (It took only 20 steps to go through the entire structure! And the most substantive disply featured the creationist joke-argument of 'Piltdown Man!') Instead, I'll focus on the question it brought home to me: Why is it that rural America is so Christian? Why do cities "get it," and townships don't?

The question was made even more weighty before that point when, for the first time in my life, I actually toured the grounds of Oral Roberts University, exactly one day before I'd reached Arkansas. Talk about sheer arrogant avarice! Perfectly manicured grounds amidst towering skyscrapers housing "Full Gospel Business." Expensive bronze statues adorned even more expensive gardens, and cathedrals which were ornate than the Champs-Elysees. There were marble -- marble, mind you! -- fountains with flames amidst them, huge dormitory complexes, and a rather welcome-looking baseball stadium. All for God. And in the middle of it all, the much-described "prayer tower." A structure which resembles a high, narrow, radio-telescope, stretching high into the air -- almost as if flipping nature the bird.

So why is the city so different? Why is the countryside of modern-day-Rome still languishing in the Dark Ages?

The answer, I think, has to do with a common occurrence in American history which forever scarred -- er, I mean, changed -- the country. That common event, was the campmeeting. Structured weekly, made into a major event which drew farmers out of their fields and into large tents, campmeetings once featured the best in entertainment ninteenth century America had to offer. It gave people good memories. It gave them religion. And the present-day result of this is that religion is now so deeply ingrained in America's skin that it has become a tatoo -- a permanent mark that cannot be removed.

Well, almost. If traveling evangelists could rub it in, traveling debunkers can rub it out. We need to take evolution to the Farm!

But is it justifiable to evangelize in the name of stamping out fundamentalism? Probably not. But one hardly needs justification if one is invited. Just let it slip that you're willing to debate them, anytime, anywhere, and they'll beg you to come out to their church or Sunday school, just so they can crucify you in effigy. It's a dirty job, but somebody's got to do it.

Only a specialist in this sort of thing should even try it. I may be just that sort of specialist, being a theologian and not a scientist. But am I up to it?

Let's find out. Bring it on, creationists!

Intelligent Design Petition in Oshkosh!

2006-08-07T06:00:00.000-07:00

Recently, a woman in Oshkosh named Sandra Gade has circulated a petition to have evidence against evolution taught alongside evidence in favor of evolution. This means, of course, that it's finally happened -- the purpose for which the Milwaukee Evolution League was put together has finally surfaced. Someone in Southeastern Wisconsin has finally come out of the shadows to insist that evolution is wrong, and that tax money should support the lie that there is doubt surrounding it. It is time to stop this faith-based initiative before it confuses and befuddles more people. See her website at www.tellall.org. And be ready. M.E.L. is about to spring into action!

"Bushcronium"

2006-06-09T12:59:00.000-07:00

This sent to me by Carol Smith of the Southeastern Wisconsin Freethinkers. Sorry, but I totally laughed my Ashcroft when I read it:

A major research institution (specializing in Intelligent Design) has just announced discovery of the heaviest element yet known to science. The new element has been named Bushcronium. Bushcronium has one neutron, 12assistant neutrons, 75 deputy neutrons, and 224 assistant deputy neutrons, giving it an atomic mass of 311. (ed. note 1+12+75+224 = 312 ???) These 311particles are held together by forces called morons, which are surrounded by vast quantities of lepton-like particles called peons. Since Bushcronium has no electrons, it is inert. However, it can be detected as it impedes every reaction with which it comes into contact. A minute amount of Bushcronium causes one reaction to take over four days to complete, when it would normally take less than a second. Bushcronium has a normal half-life of multiples of four years but it does not decay. Instead, it undergoes a reorganization in which a portion of the assistant neutrons and deputy neutrons exchange places. In fact, Bushcronium's mass will actually increase over time, since each reorganization will cause more morons to become neutrons, which in turn forms isodopes.

This characteristic of moron-promotion leads some scientists to believe that Bushcronium is formed whenever morons reach a certain quantity in concentration. This hypothetical quantity is referred to as Critical Morass. When catalyzed with money, Bushcronium activates FoxNewsium, an elementwhich radiates orders of magnitude and also generates energy (albeit as incoherent noise), since it has half as many peons, but twice as many morons.

Stanford Medicine Emphasises Evolution

2006-06-09T12:56:00.000-07:00

STANFORD MEDICINE: "THE EVOLUTIONARY WAR"

"The Evolutionary War" is the theme of the summer 2006 issue of Stanford Medicine. Unsurprisingly, the magazine emphasizes evolution and medicine. "Darwin in medical school" discusses the efforts, led by Randolph Nesse of the University of Michigan, to incorporate evolution in medical school curricula. "Evolution offers a broad framework on which you can organize and understand all kinds of facts and principles," Nesse comments. "It ties together medical education instead of leaving it hanging as 50,000 discrete facts. "As good as it gets?" discusses attempts to control human evolution, from the "laughable and alarming" eugenics movement of the 1920s to the uncertain and controversial prospects of germline modification.

Religious issues are addressed, too: William Newsome, a professor of neurobiology at Stanford, explains how he, as a serious Christian and respected scientist, balances science and faith; the Reverend Scotty McLennan, a chaplain at Stanford, praises the decision in Kitzmiller v. Dover and objects to "intelligent design' as "actually sacrilegious or irreverent or demeaning of creation"; and former president and Nobel laureate Jimmy Carter discusses religious fundamentalism, evolution, and the threat of theocracy with Stanford Medicine's editor Paul Costello, who himself urged the medical community to become involved in defending evolution in a December 2005 op-ed in Virtual Mentor, the on-line ethics journal of the American Medical Association.

The cover story, "Darwin lives: Scientists battle the forces of intelligent design," reviews the current spate of antievolution activity and focuses on scientists who have publicly defended the teaching of evolution in the public schools, including Greg Clark, Herb Kroemer, Phil Plait, and Marshall Berman (who "may be the ideal role model for activists scientists everywhere"). "You could say that scientists are finally getting religion," NCSE's executive director Eugenie C. Scott is quoted as joking. Scott herself was the subject of a humorous essay by Joel Stein: "This is a woman who is spending her life informing people about scientific discoveries made 147 years ago ... It's as if she spends her time trying to convince people that multiplication totally works."

Wisconsin Anti-Creation Bill Dies

2006-05-19T11:11:00.000-07:00

WISCONSIN ANTICREATIONISM BILL DIES

(News-release courtesy of the NCSE.)

Assembly Bill 1143 died in the Wisconsin State Assembly on May 4, 2006, the last day of the last general-business floorperiod. Announced at a press conference on March 7 and introduced and referred to the House Committee on Education on March 21, AB 1143 would have, if enacted, directed the school board to "ensure that any material presented as science within the school curriculum complies with all of the following: (1) The material is testable as a scientific hypothesis and describes only natural processes. (2) The material is consistent with any description or definition of science adopted by the National Academy of Sciences."

Although neither creation science nor "intelligent design" was explicitly mentioned in the bill itself, they appeared to be its primary targets. Its main sponsor, state representative Terese Berceau (D-District 76), told the Madison Capital Times (February 7, 2006) that her bill was intended to counteract recent attempts to undermine evolution education around the country and within the state, and Michael Cox and Alan Attie, both professors of biochemistry at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, reportedly applauded the prospect of preventing any incursion of the "intelligent design" movement in Wisconsin. In a recent article in the Journal of Clinical Investigation (May 2006), a number of AB 1143's supporters, including Attie, Berceau, Cox, the philosopher of science Elliott Sober, and the historian of creationism Ronald L. Numbers, explain the origin of the bill -- ultimately prompted by a protracted controversy over evolution education in Grantsburg, Wisconsin -- and its objectives. In addition, the article reviews the history of the antievolution movement from Epperson to Kitzmiller, describes and refutes a few common misrepresentations used by the proponents of "intelligent design," and suggests a number of ways for scientists to defend the teaching of evolution.

The DaVinci Code: Why Are Catholics Mad?

2006-05-17T12:02:00.000-07:00

Well, the movie version of Dan Brown's novel, The DaVinci Code, is finally about to hit the movie theaters. I plan on being one of the millions who stand in ghastly long lines waiting to see the film. But as it nears, the Catholic Church is screaming bloody murder about how ridiculously false its claims are. Some groups are even calling on Catholics to boycott the film.

Now, I'll admit that the premise of the story is a bit far-fetched: a quest for the Holy Grail, no less. But the book's plot is based on the idea of concealing a dark truth so damaging to the Catholic faith that it could destroy it forever. The secret? That Jesus and Mary Magdalene were actually married and had kids! If true, that would put a damper on Jesus being the true Son of God, wouldn't it? But stating that this would destroy the Catholic Church is, in my mind, going a bit too far. Catholic doctrine said that the Ptolemaic solar system, with the Earth at its center, was the Biblically correct version. It was wrong, as Galileo tried to show. Catholic doctrine said it was okay for certain sins to be absolved if large enough monetary contributions were given to the Church. That was also wrong, as Luther tried to show. Again, Catholic doctrine said that Adam & Eve were literal, historical people. Again, they were wrong (and here's the connection with this blog) as Darwin tried to show.

According to the DaVinci Code, the Catholic Church would pay any amount of money to make sure that the secred of Jesus marriage and fatherhood remained a secret. But this is ridiculous. If Galileo, Luther, and Darwin didn't destroy Catholicism, nothing will! Least of all, Mary Magdalene having Jesus' kids! Theologians would just find a rationalization to divorce Jesus' divinity from that of his earthly progeny, and leave it at that. The Catholic Church would go on, as it always does. It found a way to dodge Luther's schism. It found a way to re-define the solar system without losing too much face. It found a way to declare evolution as not being in conflict with Church doctrine. In more recent times, it found a way to face the crisis of pedophile priests without self-destructing. Put frankly, the Catholic Church is the Rocky Balboa of religion, taking blow after blow to the face from a clearly superior opponent, and yet NOT GOING DOWN! How it does this is a complete mystery, as they make stupid mistake after stupid mistake.

And their stupid mistake this time? Why, they are protesting the DaVinci Code! If enough protesting takes place, the conspiracy theorists will take this as a confirmation that there might actually be something TO the contentions that the story makes! But, I suspect, even this will not be enough to do Catholicism in.

Another recent newsworthy item has been the flap over the recent South Park episode which lampoons the ridiculous beliefs of Scientology. I saw the episode (ain't the internet great?) and it's as brilliant as scientology is stupid. But it just goes to show: There is no belief system so dumb that someone, somewhere WON'T believe it! Perhaps that's why the DaVinci Code frightens people so much. The only thing more deadly to a phony religious belief system than the truth, is ANOTHER belief system which is far sexier!

Eric

Kitzmiller Judge Makes Time Magazine

2006-05-05T15:12:00.000-07:00

KITZMILLER JUDGE AMONG TIME'S 100

Judge John E. Jones III, who presided over the Kitzmiller v. Dover trial in which teaching "intelligent design" in the public schools was ruled to be unconstitutional, was named one of Time magazine's "Time 100: The People Who Shape Our World." In the May 8, 2006, issue of the magazine, the science journalist Matt Ridley contributes a brief essay describing the significance of Jones's decision: "In a rebuke to the proponents of intelligent design, Jones called the phrase 'a mere relabeling of creationism,' intended to get around the 1987 judicial ban on teaching creationism as science in public schools, and a 'breathtaking inanity' that fails the test as science. He castigated its proponents and said Dover's students, parents and teachers 'deserved better than to be dragged into this legal maelstrom.'" Ridley adds, "Perhaps now, after Jones, people will accept that if they want to teach children about God, they should do so in church, not in science classes." Judge Jones told the Harrisburg Patriot-News (May 2, 2006) that although he was gratified by the honor, "This will pass, and I will be back to the more mundane things." What pleases him most, the Patriot-News reported, was the influence that the Kitzmiller decision is having in other school districts.

Christian Coalition In Trouble

2006-04-19T07:27:00.000-07:00

Well, word is out. The Christian Coalition, that monstrous remnant of what used to be called the Moral Majority, is in financial trouble. Over 2 million dollars in debt, and harrangued on all sides by lawsuits from creditors, it would appear that the largest religiously-motivated political action committee is finally dying. Ralph Reed, it's silver-tongued former advocate, has fled from it. State-run chapters are ceceeding, declaring themselves as independent organizations, as they once were, in many cases. And Pat Robertson, its founder, continues to make one political gaff after another, embarrassing both himself and the religion he still stubbornly tries to advocate. In short, the "Sleeping Giant" is dying in its sleep. And while it may not be respectful to rejoice at the downfall of any religious organization, much less this one, one can't help but wonder: Could the creationism it supports be going with it?

In all honesty, I think not quite yet. In the second Presidential term of Republican control of the Congress and the White House -- something which has brought unprecedented control over government affairs by the RRR ,the radical religious right -- fundamentalists are finally feeling their grip on society's coattails beginning to slip. Their Christian music industry has been taken over by mega-corporations, their young people are wising up, and their ranks are greying and dying off. While political conservatism remains strong -- as well it should for tax-cutting purposes -- fundamenalist conservatism is poised behind a leaky dyke. Eventually, common sense will help rural America grow up along with the cities which house the Universities. But, in the meantime, even if the dragon of the Christian Coalition succeeds in chewing its own head off, it will grow a new head like the mythical hydra, ready to stuff fundamentalism, and creationism, down America's throat once more.

The good news for us is that this newly regrown head will be smaller, with less teeth. And the one which follows that one will be smaller, and more toothless still. Eventually, creationism and its fundamentalist support will be a voodoo-like, toothless, shrunken head; an oddity on the shelf of American history. Until then, let's prepare ourselves for, "Christian Coalition II: The Sequel," and make sure it does not go as unchallenged as its predecessor.

Eric

Islamic Creationism, and Hope

2006-03-28T09:20:00.000-08:00

I just received a forwarded link to a website where Muslims now trumpet the anti-evolution propaganda.

http://www.harunyahya.com/

I'd find this website funny, except that Muslims won't. As if things weren't bad enough in the Islamic world! Now, the culture that needs the social and democratic freedoms which come with secularization is doing its best to have scientific reasoning, the heart and soul of secular culture and human freedom, undermined.

How many times have freedoms in our own country been trumped by religion? Didn't the Comstock laws of the late 1800's try to ban Walt Whitman's 'Leaves of Grass?' Didn't the Catholic Church get laws banning contraception on the books? And that's just in America! Imagine what Islamic extremism could do! If evolution is successfully smeared to the point where few acknowledge it, I fear for the survival of our species.

Fortunately, there is hope. My friend Mike Morrison, the lead guitar player in the band I sing in (the band which, I'm sad to say, occupies much of my time in preventing me from doing more for M.E.L. and this blog site), pointed something out to me which is profound. If you have faith, he says, you shouldn't have to denounce scientific evidence. All the science in the world shouldn't be able to shake you. You'd believe it, and that's that. But because creationists attack the scientific evidence, it betrays how insecure they are in their beliefs! Deep down, they recognize that science trumps them. So they fight to change that, and in so doing, send a very distinct message: "Our faith is weak!"

So, let them be weak, and I'll call them on it. It's that thought which gives me hope.

Thanks, Mike!

Eric

Tax Returns Going to Creationist Groups?

2006-03-16T11:50:00.000-08:00

Okay, I just have to vent about something.

Yesterday, I received a postcard-sized fundraising pamphalet from Answers In Genesis. It pictured a typical tax return form, and the caption read, "How will YOU spend it?"

Now, I didn't bother to read the rest, as it sickened me. But I've got to admit, it's a tactically brilliant move by AIG, and it goes without saying that a whole lot of yahoos are going to give generously as a result of this mailing. That means that a lot of people who don't deserve it are going to get wealthier, and a lot of people who worked hard for that money are going to be blissfully poorer. It made me wonder, though. What right do they have to nag people who have been patiently waiting all year for this important financial break in their lives? Why should they be guilt-tripped into donating part of their tax refund to a tax exempt organization which tries to hijack public funds and/or resources? Come to think of it, why should a portion the money that their free government gave back be relegated to a religious organization whose sole purpose is to violate American religious freedom?

Oh yes, it happens every year. You anticipate your additional check, and dozens of crediters and charities tap you on the shoulder, and with their open hands oustretched, utter a large "Ahem!" In a free society, you can't prevent this, any more than you can prevent fools from spending their money foolishly. But the mere presence of the creationist hand so outstretched simply makes me want to smack that hand with a ruler as hard as I possibly can!

Eric

Finishing Off Tom Phillips

2006-03-16T10:46:00.000-08:00

Yes, it's been awhile since I've posted. But it's long overdue. Time to mop up the Tom Phillips rant I began months ago, and then I'll get to my next post about an odd piece of mail I received.

**The fossil record disproves evolution. If the first life form changed into another, higher form by gradual gene changes, and so on down the line, accounting for all life then, quoting Darwin, "the number of intermediate and transitional links, between all living and extinct species, must have been inconceivably great."
**The whole world would be awash in the remains of "infinitely numerous connecting links." It isn't. Darwin conceded that fact, calling it "the most obvious and serious objection" against his theory. He attests the "sudden appearance" of species, complete and distinct, in the fossil record - just as if God created all life individually.**

Lack of fossils was certainly a concern -- back in Darwin's day. Since then we have indeed been buried in infinitely numerous connecting links, and the creationist response is to deny that they exist. They call Archaeopteryx everything from a fraud to a genuine bird which isn't a connecting link. They ignore the transitional forms between reptiles and mammals, such as cynodonts. They deny the clear fossil ancestry that can be drawn which shows how cats, dogs, bears, hyenas, and weasels can all be traced back to a common ancestor. They pretend that the bones of transitional forms between land mammals and whales aren't truly transitional, and insist that the bones showing clear ancestry from wolf-like land predators are too fragmentory - displaying blissful ignorance of how the inner parts of skulls act as a biological fingerprint. They think that the fossil ancestry of horses doesn't count somehow. The list goes on and on.

**Evolution is scientifically preposterous. Laws of probability are real scientific laws.**

And your understanding of those laws make you such a great scientist. Oh, that's right, you're NOT a scientist!

**Our DNA is unique because the odds of another person having our exact DNA are so remote we can dismiss that possibility altogether. Likewise with evolution.
**Nobel laureate Francis Crick calculated nature's chances of producing one small protein: 1 in 10 to the 260th power. Crick reminds us there are only 10 to the 80th power (1 followed by 80 zeros) atoms in the whole universe; he concludes even the elementary components of life "cannot have arisen by pure chance."**

Except life didn't begin with one small protein, did it? Protein is a chain made of amino acids, which formed beforehand. Complex and simple proteins are END products of evolution. So Phillips is not even comparing apples to oranges -- he's comparing apples to cinderblocks.

**Mathematician Emile Borel states an event will never happen when the odds are less than 1 in 10 to the 50th power.
**Sir Fred Hoyle, mathematician and astronomer, calculated nature's chances of producing the 2,000 enzymes found in life: 1 in 10 to the 40,000th power. He states: "The Darwinian theory of evolution is shown to be plainly wrong" and concludes, "Life cannot have had a random beginning . . . but must have come from a cosmic intelligence."
**Nobel laureate Ernst Chain said, "To postulate that the development and survival of the fittest is entirely a consequence of chance mutations seems to me a hypothesis based on no evidence and irreconcilable with the facts."**

Emile Borel was right, Fred Hoyle was spectacularly wrong. What Hoyle did was calculate, not the 2,000 enzymes known, but the odds of one enzyme with 200 amino acids forming by chance. There are 20 known amino acids, so any combination of them would have a probability of 1 in 20, times 1 in 20, times 1 in 20, and so forth, 200 times. This produces a spectacularly huge number, probably greater than the number of atoms in the universe! Since a simple enzyme has roughly 400 amino acids, Hoyle maintained that no enzyme could have formed by chance, and evolution was therefore wrong.

The problem? Enzymes didn't form by chance! They too, are the END products of evolution. Speculating an enzyme could have formed spontaneously by chance is as ridiculous as speculating that a holstein cow could have formed sponteneously by chance! Hoyle's calculation is therefore as useless as it is irrelevant. What was/is needed is a calculation of the odds of an enzyme forming from an earlier ancestor, and to do that, we need to know what that ancestor was, and how it might have changed. That calculation is currently pending.

**Albert Einstein said, "I want to know how God created this world." Einstein knew the universe didn't happen by chance.**

And why, pray tell, didn't the brilliant Einstein knowingly declare that God made the universe in six days?

**Atheism and evolution are dead. Science destroyed them.**

Just like science destroyed the notion of the parting of the Red Sea? Or destroyed the literal interpretation of a man named Jonah living inside the belly of a big fish for three days with no food, water, or oxygen, and not dying? No, science did not destroy either atheism or evolution. Science did destroy fundamentalism, even though the sociological forces which continue to prop it up are proving formidable -- though slowly eroding. And it is agnosticism, not atheism, which is endorsed by evolution. Get that straight.

**Those claiming evolution is scientific must demonstrate that life can come from non-life by purely material processes and that one life form can turn into another, higher form.
**Science demands it. Put up or shut up.**

True, science hasn't made life forming in a test-tube yet. When it does, you'll deny it just as you deny Archaeopteryx. But science also demands you prove how a man can rise from the dead after being crucified, and how this transaction can somehow legally translate into absolution without it being two wrongs making a right.

Your turn: Put up or shut up.

Eric

News from the NCSE

2006-02-27T14:55:00.000-08:00

Dear Friends of NCSE,

Antievolution legislation surfaces in Maryland, while in Mississippi, one antievolution bill is dead but another was passed by the Senate. Meanwhile, the Dover Area School Board agrees to pay over $1 million in legal fees and expenses from Kitzmiller v. Dover. The Entomological Society of America adopted a strong resolution on evolution education (and condemning "intelligent design"). And on the CSICOP website, Robert Camp debunks the "teach the controversy" slogan empirically.

ANTIEVOLUTION LEGISLATION IN MARYLAND

House Bill 1531 (PDF), introduced in the Maryland House of Delegates on February 16, 2006, would, if enacted, establish the "Teachers Academic Freedom Act" and the "Faculty Academic Freedom Act" in order to "expressly protect the right of teachers identified by the United States Supreme Court in Edwards v. Aguillard ... to present scientific critiques of prevailing scientific theories; and [to] expressly protect the right of students to hold a position on any views." The bill's sole sponsor is Emmett C. Burns, Jr. (D-District 10); after its first reading, the bill was assigned to the House Rules and Executive Nominations committee.

HB 1531 would provide that teachers in Maryland's public schools and faculty members in Maryland's public institutions of higher education "shall have the affirmative right and freedom to present scientific information to [sic] the full range of scientific views in any curricula or course of learning"; the phrase "the full range of scientific views" is evidently taken from the so-called Santorum language, which was in fact stripped from the federal No Child Left Behind act. A subsequent provision repeats the phrase "the full range of scientific views," while adding, "including intelligent design."

A number of provisions attempt to immunize the bill from the charge that it would allow the teaching of religious doctrines and discredited science: the bill forbids instructors to "stress any particular denomination, sectarian, or religious doctrine or belief" while providing "supporting evidence on the theory of intelligent design," for example, and insists that it is not to be construed as protecting the teaching of "a view that lacks published or empirical or observational support." HB 1531 resembles two antievolution bills introduced in the Alabama legislature in 2006, although it treats K-12 teachers and college instructors separately.

For the text of HB 1531 (PDF),
http://mlis.state.md.us/2006rs/bills/hb/hb1531f.pdf

UPDATE ON MISSISSIPPI ANTIEVOLUTION BILLS

One of the two antievolution bills introduced in the Mississippi legislature in 2005 died in committee, but the other passed through the Senate and is now under consideration by the House Committee on Education. House Bill 953, which would have authorized "the teaching of 'creationism' or 'intelligent design' in the public schools" and moreover required it "[i]f the school's curricuilum requires the teaching of evolution," is listed on the legislature's website as having died in committee on January 31, 2006.

Senate Bill 2427, however, is still alive. If enacted, the bill would ensure that "[n]o local school board, school superintendent or school principal shall prohibit a public school classroom teacher from discussing and answering questions from individual students on the issue of flaws or problems which may exist in Charles Darwin's Theory of Evolution and the existence of other theories of evolution, including, but not limited to, the Intelligent Design explanation of the origin of life." SB 2427 was introduced in the Senate on January 10, 2006, and referred to the Committee on Education, which passed it on January 31. The Senate passed the bill on February 6, and it was then transmitted to the House of Representatives, where it was referred to the Committee on Education. During its stay in the Senate, it acquired ten further sponsors: Senators Terry W. Brown, Terry C. Burton, Videt Carmichael, Eugenie S. Clark, Doug Davis, Merle Flowers, Gary Jackson, Tom King, Stacey Pickering, and Richard White.

"INTELLIGENT DESIGN" COSTS DOVER OVER $1,000,000

On February 21, 2006, the Dover Area School Board voted, unanimously with one absention, to pay $1,000,011 in legal fees and damages resulting from the verdict in Kitzmiller v. Dover. The eleven plaintiffs -- local parents who challenged the constitutionality of the Dover Area School Board's policy of requiring students to be taught about "intelligent design" and "gaps/problems" with evolution -- will receive a token $1 each, while the remainder will reimburse the fees and expenses of their legal team.

According to documents filed with the court, the legal team's fees and expenses actually total $2,067,226, but Pepper Hamilton LLP, the private law firm that devoted substantial resources to the case pro bono, agreed to charge only for its expenses. Eric Rothschild of Pepper Hamilton told the York Dispatch (February 22, 2006) that his firm was willing to compromise in recognition of the limited resources of the district and of the change in the school board's composition after the November 2005 election.

In addition to Pepper Hamilton, the plaintiffs' legal team included the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania, Americans United for Separation of Church and State, and the National Center for Science Education. NCSE consulted pro bono and thus receives no portion of the fees and expenses. The defendants in the case were represented without charge by the Thomas More Law Center, a Michigan-based religious law firm that bills itself as "The Sword and Shield for People of Faith."

Richard Katskee, assistant legal director for Americans United, told the Dispatch (February 23, 2006), "Any board thinking of trying to do what the Dover board did is going to have to look for a bill in excess of $2 million," adding, "I think $2 million is a lot to explain to taxpayers for a lawsuit that should never be fought." The school board was offered the opportunity to rescind its policy -- and to avoid paying legal fees -- immediately after the lawsuit was filed in 2004, but it declined.

Some Creationist News: Henry Morris Passes On...

2006-02-27T14:18:00.000-08:00

Here is a newsbit recently released by the Intitute for Creation Research.

After a series of recent minor strokes, Dr. Henry Morris, founder and president of ICR passed away on Saturday, February 25, at about 6:30 p.m. He was 87 years old.

Henry Morris is considered by many to be the founding father or the modern-day creation movement. In addition to the over 60 books on "creation science" he authored over the years, he was the co-author of "The Genesis Flood," the 1960's book which started it all -- reviving a doctrine of a literal six-day event, roughly 6,000 years ago, which had all but been entirely relegated to backwater cults such as Seventh-Day Adventism at that time. He also authored the New Defenders Study Bible, which inserted his own commentary into the mouth of God, and was a pioneer in "Arkeology," or, the search for the remains of Noah's Ark upon the mountain known as Agri Dagi -- or, 'Mount Ararat,' in Eastern Turkey.

Although it is inappropriate to rejoice in the death of an ideological opponent, no matter how controvertial or damaging his or her ideas may be, we should reflect on whether or not the passing of this creationist patriarch signals the decline of this movement, or whether the damage he caused is only just beginning. It is a sad event when anyone passes, but it is all the more sadder when we contemplate that his entire life's work must inevitably be undone someday. I therefore hope everyone will join me in whishing nothing but the best toward Henry Morris' family. Their grief must be truly unbearable, faith notwithstanding.

Eric

An Interesting and Scary Poll

2006-01-02T13:14:00.000-08:00

Here's some information that's reasonably shocking, courtesy of the online Campus Inquirer, published by the Center for Inquiry.

New Scripts Howard/Ohio University Poll Shows Half of U.S. Adults Want ID Taught

The survey of 1005 Americans found that 54% of respondents believe humans and the universe were created in their present form by God in 6 days, 24% believe in evolution, 16% believe that God guided evolution, and 6% were undecided.Regarding the teaching of Evolution, 69% of respondents agreed that most scientists believe in evolution so it should be taught in Science classes. %20 do not believe evolution should be taught in science classes and 11% were undecided.Finally, 50% of respondents agreed with President Bush that Intelligent Design should be taught alongside Evolution, while 37% disagreed and 13% were undecided.

Fossils, Fossils, Fossils!

2006-01-02T10:20:00.000-08:00

Here we go again with more of Tom Phillips' nonsense:

**"The fossil record disproves evolution. If the first life form changed into another, higher form by gradual gene changes, and so on down the line, accounting for all life then, quoting Darwin, 'the number of intermediate and transitional links, between all living and extinct species, must have been inconceivably great.' The whole world would be awash in the remains of 'infinitely numerous connecting links.' It isn't. Darwin conceded that fact, calling it 'the most obvious and serious objection' against his theory. He attests the 'sudden appearance' of species, complete and distinct, in the fossil record - just as if God created all life individually."**

Darwin was correct that it was a serious objection -- back in his day. Since then, so many fossils cataloging the history of evolution have been unearthed that they are hard to catalog. The world is indeed "awash in the remains of infinitely numerous connecting links," and we've known this for quite some time. The only defense for the creationist to this is to deny that these are at all transitional fossils, and for the sheep of the flock, this rationale suffices. But that creates a fatal problem for the creationist view: If the miriads of fossils are, none of them, transitional, then why is it that 98% of the species on the planet have gone extinct? Could all that massive variety have been wiped out in Noah's flood? It seems utterly preposterous, and that's only because it is. When that 98% shows a pattern of progressive evolutionary history (and it does), one has to wonder why anybody would use Mr. Phillips' argument regarding fossils.

So why did life appear so suddenly? Why did the "Cambrian explosion" take place? We now know that the life forms which seemed to appear suddenly were not absent prior to the Cambrian period, but they were too small to be initially noticed -- they were microfossils. Then, the Earth became gripped in a massive ice-age which prevented life from creeping far onto land. In fact, it was probably the glaciers of this period which planed off the "Great Unconformity" in the Grand Canyon. (See "Grand Canyon's Great Unconformity," posted on November 9, 2005.) Meanwhile, life continued to evolve in the periphery, growing significantly larger, and only slightly more complex. As the ice age ended, this life came inland, and many more fossils became possible. The "explosion" of fossils had taken place. Oh, and the fossils all lacked key modern forms -- chiefly among them, mammals, which includes Man. Just how does that mesh with Genesis?

Eric

More Fun With Tom Phillips

2006-01-02T09:19:00.000-08:00

Here's some more debunking of the man whose Journal Sentinal editorial recycled the same-old garbage arguments:

**"Evolution also asserts one life form can change into another, higher form - something also never observed and thus unscientific. Instead, we always observe exactly what Genesis states numerous times: Life reproduces 'according to its kind,' i.e., cats beget cats, crickets beget crickets, etc. They never change into something else. "**

Honestly, does this really need to be debunked? Of course one life form cannot change into another. I cannot change into a bird anymore than a tortoise can change into a hare. That would be transmogrification -- not evolution. So how the hell is that even relevant? But the offspring of an animal can change slightly, and this often takes place. If the change is positive, it sticks around for generations afterward. If the change is negative, it dies off. As countless generations go by, the little changes add up. Eventually, something which was an ancestral cat evolves into something which is definitely not a cat, although it may retain some cat-like qualities. This is how evolution works. It is never "one animal changing into another" as the ignorant so mischaracterize it.

**"With microbiology, we understand why. All life contains DNA, a genetic blueprint containing information. But purely material processes cannot create information, which originates only from a 'mind.' Evolution proceeds via chance, the antithesis of information."**

Of course purely material processes can create information! Saying otherwise displays a lack of understanding of how information works. Information requires a recording mechanism, and something capable of reading it. That's it. Tectonic activity rifts a new faultline, essentially drawing or recording a "line" in the earth. Rain and snow "read" this line, and a new canyon begins to form. Yes, recording and reading information really can be that simple! The first analog recording devices invented by humans had a metal wire drawn across an electromagnetic loop to read and record differences in magnetic polarity in the metal. Today's tape-recorders work on the same principle. But this type of analog recording is happening every day as the oceanic sea-floor splits and spreads apart. As the magma along the rift cools, it records the magnetic polarity of the planet, just like a tape recorder. Information! As sediment collects on an ocean bottom, it creates a record of the kinds of life which get buried, creating a kind of analog recording. Information again! In fact, reading that information in the rocks helps confirm the truth of evolutionary change! Information is being recorded in nature everywhere. And DNA is only one small example.

**"The DNA in simple bacteria has several million specifications; man's has several billion.The DNA molecule, the most complex structure we know and unquestionably the most efficient copying device, with self-correcting processes, prevents one life form from 'changing' into another. We are all copies of a copy of a copy, etc., going back to the very first human parents.Genesis 3:20 says Eve was 'the mother of all the living.' Science proved we are descendents of one woman, whose genes are carried by all mankind. Even evolutionists accept the finding that all humans descended from a relatively recent woman whom scientists have taken to calling Eve, based on the DNA in our mitochondria, the cell's powerhouse. Mitochondrial DNA comes unmixed, only from the mother."**

Both evolution and six-day creation posit that there was a common ancestor for us all. So what? If science confirms this, it bolsters neither viewpoint, right? The point becomes utterly moot.

But DNA is not the most efficient copying device, nor is its self-correcting process perfect. We are not 'copies of a copy of a copy, etc.' Only half of one's DNA is copied from parent to child. In every case, one half of the DNA genetic structure is lost, while the two halves from each parent are "zipped" together. Sometimes, there is a mutation in that process, and then the self-correcting mechanisms work to reinforce the mistake rather than correct it.

Honestly, this is pretty basic stuff. How could anybody ignore these facts unless they deliberately blinded themselves to it in order to reinforce a religious worldview?

Eric

Wisconsin Gets An "F" In Evolutionary Teaching

2006-01-02T08:44:00.000-08:00

In the news, the Fordham Institute has issued its evaluation of science standards for each state in the U.S. on December 7, 2005. Top states received a 3, bottom states received a 1, or worse, a zero. Wisconsin got a zero. Here's how the scoring shook out nationwide:

Receiving a grade of 3: CA, DE, GA, IL, IN, KS*, MD, MA, MI, MO, NJ, NM,NY, OH, PA, RI, SC, TN, VT, VA, WA
Receiving a grade of 2: AZ, DC, LA, MN, NV, OR, UT
Receiving a grade of 1: CO, HI, NE, NC, ND, SD, TX, WV, WY
Receiving a grade of 0: AL, AK, AR, CT, FL, ID, ME, MS, MT, NH, OK, WI

Some special notes: Iowa has no state science standards. And there is an asterisk to note for the Kansas science standards. Once again, school board members with a dearth of science understanding reversed guidelines in teaching evolution, making Kansas into a national joke. This shifts its overall grade from 3 to a 0.

Eric

Debunking Tom Phillips, #1

2005-12-23T09:40:00.000-08:00

**"Spontaneous generation," disproved long ago, has never been observed. Instead, we always observe that life comes from previous life - and, as Scripture teaches, ultimately from an ever-living God.**

Mr. Phillips is right when he says that "spontaneous generation" was disproved long ago. In a classic experiment done by Francesco Redi in 1668, it was showed that maggots do not spontaneously generate inside rotting meat left out in the open. Taking three containers, he put meat inside each one. Then, he sealed the first one, overlaid the second with cheezecloth, and left the third open. In the second and third containers, flies became attracted to the meat, and later, maggots appeared. The maggots were upon the meat in the third container, but on the second container, where flies couldn't get past the cheezecloth, the maggots only appeared on top of the cloth itself. In this way, it was shown that maggots came from the eggs of flies, and did not spontaneously generate from within dead meat.

So, is evolution a kind of belief in "spontaneous generation?" Is saying the DNA molecule came about through natural processes the same thing as believing that maggots spontaneously appear inside meat? The answer is no. Why? Because the dawn of life was hardly spontaneous! DNA came about after a long, arduous evolutionary process. It didn't happen overnight. Life cannot come from non-life, that's true. But life CAN come from proto-life! And proto-life can come from proto-proto-life! And proto-proto-life can come from non-living organic molecules!

Scientists have been able to observe the spontaneous formation of proto-life and proto-proto-life inside the laboratory for decades. That's how they know, with certainty, that it's not only possible, but highly probable. Oh, they haven't yet been able to make "life in a jar," that's true, but they're tantilizingly close. All, not some, of the nucleotides, amino acids, and basic molecular building blocks have been seen to be capable of forming in nature - and easily! We've seen them go from simple molecules, to complex ones; from complex molecules to nucleotides; from nucleotides to RNA, and from RNA to DNA. We've learned how cell-walls formed, and we've recently discovered how all the nucleotides became "left-handed" in their chirality. (A later post will deal with that.) All we need is the final puzzle piece that will teach us the exact history of how it all came about. In the meantime, we've amassed enough knowledge to prove that no divine hand was behind it.

Eric

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Editorial Throws Gauntlet!

2005-12-22T11:16:00.000-08:00

There are many among the political right-wing who insist that the "mainstream media" is biased in favor of liberalism. And while it's true that most major television and print media does have a slightly left-of-center disposition, that's only because it is necessary to affront commonly held ideas in order to improve ratings and subscription sales. But for those who think that the media is clearly on the left, as opposed to very centrist and only slightly left (which is clearly the case), I offer you this recent editorial from yesterday's Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Any news outlet which could publish something this radically right-wing cannot be called "liberal-biased." Factor in the monopoly that extremist conservative-bias has over talk radio and Fox News and we find that there's a bias in favor of right-wing politics in the "mainstream media."

But all this is a rant. The editorial follows below. And the next series of blogs posted here will debunk all of the ridiculous statements this religiously-motivated spin-doctor makes. I encourage all to write in to the Journal Sentinel to show this poor man just what science means.

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Science debunks evolution
By TOM PHILLIPS
Posted: Dec. 21, 2005

There has been much propaganda regarding intelligent design.

In truth, creation/design is the scientific position; evolution is unscientific. By definition, science is based upon what we observe in the physical world and logical inference from what we observe.
While microevolution, which is change within a species, is observed and scientific, macroevolution, which is what "evolution" customarily means, is not. It asserts life somehow arose from non-life by chance.

Such "spontaneous generation," disproved long ago, has never been observed. Instead, we always observe that life comes from previous life - and, as Scripture teaches, ultimately from an ever-living God.

Evolution also asserts one life form can change into another, higher form - something also never observed and thus unscientific. Instead, we always observe exactly what Genesis states numerous times: Life reproduces "according to its kind," i.e., cats beget cats, crickets beget crickets, etc. They never change into something else. With microbiology, we understand why.
All life contains DNA, a genetic blueprint containing information. But purely material processes cannot create information, which originates only from a "mind." Evolution proceeds via chance, the antithesis of information. The DNA in simple bacteria has several million specifications; man's has several billion.

The DNA molecule, the most complex structure we know and unquestionably the most efficient copying device, with self-correcting processes, prevents one life form from "changing" into another. We are all copies of a copy of a copy, etc., going back to the very first human parents.
Genesis 3:20 says Eve was "the mother of all the living." Science proved we are descendents of one woman, whose genes are carried by all mankind. Even evolutionists accept the finding that all humans descended from a relatively recent woman whom scientists have taken to calling Eve, based on the DNA in our mitochondria, the cell's powerhouse. Mitochondrial DNA comes unmixed, only from the mother.

The fossil record disproves evolution. If the first life form changed into another, higher form by gradual gene changes, and so on down the line, accounting for all life then, quoting Darwin, "the number of intermediate and transitional links, between all living and extinct species, must have been inconceivably great."

The whole world would be awash in the remains of "infinitely numerous connecting links." It isn't. Darwin conceded that fact, calling it "the most obvious and serious objection" against his theory. He attests the "sudden appearance" of species, complete and distinct, in the fossil record - just as if God created all life individually.

Evolution is scientifically preposterous. Laws of probability are real scientific laws. Our DNA is unique because the odds of another person having our exact DNA are so remote we can dismiss that possibility altogether. Likewise with evolution.
Nobel laureate Francis Crick calculated nature's chances of producing one small protein: 1 in 10 to the 260th power. Crick reminds us there are only 10 to the 80th power (1 followed by 80 zeros) atoms in the whole universe; he concludes even the elementary components of life "cannot have arisen by pure chance."

Mathematician Emile Borel states an event will never happen when the odds are less than 1 in 10 to the 50th power.

Sir Fred Hoyle, mathematician and astronomer, calculated nature's chances of producing the 2,000 enzymes found in life: 1 in 10 to the 40,000th power. He states: "The Darwinian theory of evolution is shown to be plainly wrong" and concludes, "Life cannot have had a random beginning . . . but must have come from a cosmic intelligence."
Nobel laureate Ernst Chain said, "To postulate that the development and survival of the fittest is entirely a consequence of chance mutations seems to me a hypothesis based on no evidence and irreconcilable with the facts."

Albert Einstein said, "I want to know how God created this world." Einstein knew the universe didn't happen by chance.

Atheism and evolution are dead. Science destroyed them. Those claiming evolution is scientific must demonstrate that life can come from non-life by purely material processes and that one life form can turn into another, higher form.

Science demands it. Put up or shut up.

Tom Phillips of Milwaukee is director of Catholics Serving the Lord.

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Okay, Tom. You asked for it. And this blog will give it to you!

Eric

Landmark Court Ruling In Dover, PA

2005-12-21T06:21:00.000-08:00

Once again, creationism has been challenged in court. And once again, it has lost. Here is the lowdown from the National Center for Science Education:

-----
A special evolution education update to bring you the news from Harrisburg. The decision in Kitzmiller v. Dover was issued, and the plaintiffs triumphed. In his 139-page decision, Judge John E. Jones III concluded, "The proper application of both the endorsement and Lemon tests to the facts of this case makes it abundantly clear that the Board's ID [Intelligent Design] Policy violates the Establishment Clause. In making this determination, we have addressed the seminal question of whether ID is science. We have concluded that it is not, and moreover that ID cannot uncouple itself from its creationist, and thus religious, antecedents."

The Associated Press reports (December 20, 2005) that Pepper Hamilton's Eric Rothschild, the lead attorney for the families who challenged theDover Area School Board's "intelligent design" policy, described the ruling as "a real vindication for the parents who had the courage to stand up and say there was something wrong in their school district." NCSE agrees, and congratulates the plaintiffs and their lawyers from Pepper Hamilton, the ACLU of Pennsylvania, and Americans United for Separation of Church and State, for their well-deserved victory.

And what do the creationists say?

"The Dover decision is an attempt by an activist federal judge to stop the spread of a scientific idea and even to prevent criticism of Darwinian evolution through government-imposed censorship rather than open debate, and it won't work," said Dr. John West, Associate Director of the Center for Science and Culture at Discovery Institute.

Judge Jones anticipated this response in advance, and pointed out that his court has had a long, distinguished track record of not being an activist court. Not only is this the case, but his appointment was part of the conservative movement to shift the Federal Court system to the right.

Judge John E. Jones III commenced his service as a United States District Judge on August 2, 2002, and was appointed to his current position by none other than President George W. Bush in February, 2002, and was unanimously confirmed by the Republican-controlled United States Senate on July 30, 2002.

In other words, a conservative judge, appointed by a conservative president and a conservative congress, has ruled against Intelligent Design.

So stick that in your pipe and smoke it!

Eric

Grantsburg, WI, One Year Later...

2005-12-20T11:36:00.000-08:00

Back on December 6, 2004, the School Board in Grantsburg, WI voted to permit theories of origin other than evolution to be taught in its science curriculum. Ken Bahr, who was then the president of the Creation Science Society of Milwaukee, commented in the "Take Five" column of the Miluwakee Journal Sentinel on Dec. 9th of that year. I thought it would be a good idea to examine where we've come since then, and to take a look at what Ken told reporters one year ago.

When asked, "What's the biggest change you've seen?" Ken responded that the creationist movement had grown. He pointed out how the CSSM went from 40 or 50 members to 150 members, and from 400 mailings to 900. Is that a lot? Well, to put things into perspective, 390,000 people in Britain purport themselves to be "Jedi" in their religion. True, Britain is more populous, but not much bigger than Wisconsin in terms of land-mass. Ken should realize that with a spiking population worldwide, even the tiniest mosquito of crazy-idea-laden minority can experience tremendous growth. (M.E.L. now has a membership of equal size and no budget!)

When asked for examples of how the Bible confirms science, he pointed out the verse that says that the Earth "hangs on nothing" and that life is in the blood. Now, these are shirt-tail examples at best, and could be discerned by common sense with a non-scientific mind. He leaves out talking snakes, global floods, and dead people coming back to life.

When asked about what's new since the 1925 Scopes' Trial, Ken said that the movement was no longer questioning whether evolution should be taught in schools, but merely saying that alternatives should be taught alongside it. Now, that may sound fair at first, but let's apply that logic to other subjects. Shall we teach alternatives to mathmatics, such as numerology? How about alternatives to astronomy, such as astrology? (What's your sign, man?) Maybe we can offer video games as an alternative to phys. ed.? Offering bunk as an "alternative" is not being fair and balanced, nor is it being "fair and hearing both sides" to hand the microphone over to the loony-tunes of the world. If there is another side to be heard, scientifically, then we should teach both sides, yes. But from a scientific standpoint, there is no controversy. Evolution stands alone.

Ken was asked what CSSM's goal is. He answered, "We don't say you have to teach creation in the public school. That's not our point. The point is, we should be allowed to discuss the difficulties in the evolutionary hypothesis and allow students to hear them." In other words, the goal is to go to public schools and muddy the water. Oh, he phrases it in a politically correct manner, but that's what he means. Should this be allowed? Or should competent science teachers be allowed to do their job uninhibited? I'm for the latter.

The reporter pointed out to Ken that a lot of scientists spoke out and signed letters opposing the Grantsburg School Board's decision. Ken replied that he could provide "a whole list of professors who are for alternative views of origins being taught." But such lists have been debunked before. These professors often teach at private, Christian schools. Moreover, since Ken probably meant to say 'scientists,' those individuals with scientific credentials are nearly always from the applied sciences: engineers, medical doctors, oil-prospecting geologists, computer technicians, even dentists. Never are there true research scientists whose work has to be evaluated by another scientist rather than a CEO who only got as far as "Geology 101; Rocks for Jocks."

So Ken wants lists? Here's a list: Project Steve, provided by the National Center for Science Education. It's now over 600, and is comprised only of scientists named Steve who endorse evolution. (Stephano or Stephanie would qualify.) Contrast this with the lists Ken referred to, which seldom reach 200, have few representatives of earth or life science, and who have many names which are deceased. When you figure that "Steves" comprise only about 1% of the names out there, we find quite an endorsement of evolution.

Here's another list: In response to the Grantsburg mishap, 10,000 Christian clergymembers signed letters in opposition to the School Board's decision! The board reversed its decision quickly when all the publicity hit, but it's good to know so many Christians refuse to let creationists pull the wool over their eyes.

Eric

March of the Penguins

2005-12-09T09:47:00.000-08:00

Not long ago, my niece celebrated her 2nd birthday. (She's in that extremely cute phase.) One of the presents she got was a book featuring March of the Penguins, which was the surprise sleeper-hit documentary of emperor penguins in the Antarctic. (My niece loves books. She can't read yet, but she loves turning pages. Keeps her occupied for hours!)

Curious about it, I Netflixed the movie and watched it. It's quite good! But it got me thinking. Penguins don't fit very well into a creationist context, do they? They're so well adapted to the unbelievably harsh polar environment, and yet we know from core-drilling that Antarctica was once a lush rainforest.

Now, creationists explain this away by saying that Antarctica was green and lush before the Fall of Adam, and afterward, with Sin in the world, the region went cold. But does that really work? The answer is no. If Antarctica went suddenly cold, could penguins have become suddenly well adapted to living there at the same time? The idea is absurd. The opposite idea could be that penguins were perfectly designed for cold weather living at the beginning. But that makes no sense either, since nothing "perfectly designed" would include animals freezing and suffering in such harshly cold temperatures.

And this is just the beginning. What about Noah's flood? Did the penguins have to migrate all the way to the Ark and all the way back again? One creationist hypothisis is that continental drift happened suddenly as the flood waters gushed forth from the deep recesses of the Earth. If so, Antarctica would have been lush and green, then suddenly drifted during the Flood event. But that doesn't fit either, because then nothing would have survived on Antarctica, let alone penguins.

There is only one thing which explains the presence of penguins on Antarctica. Slow, creeping continental drift over millions of years. Slowly, the birds on that continent would have become better adapted to cold-weather living, until they could survive the harshest environment known. Slowly, all but the best adapted animals would be wiped out. Survival would be harsh, but would happen. Penguins show that Darwin was right.

So let's hear it for the penguin, the new champion of evolutionary fact. And let's hear it for March of the Penguins. It's success at the box office and DVD sales hails the day when creationism will be a curious footnote in history.

Eric

The Pope and Intelligent Design

2005-12-02T10:22:00.000-08:00

Pope John Paul II was amicable toward evolution, though not outright conciliatory. On a number of occasions, he said that accepting evolution was not contrary to Catholic teaching, thus setting a precedent for Catholicism which will help it survive well into the 21st Century.

But while his successor, Pope Benedict XVI, does not overrule his late boss, he does seem determined to do evolution in by siding with the "wedge" strategy of the Discovery Institute, and backing the "Intelligent Design" argument.

Saying that the universe was made by an "intelligent project," he quoted St. Basil the Great, saying that some people are "fooled by the atheism that they carry inside of them, imagine a universe free of direction and order, as if at the mercy of chance."

"How many of these people are there today?" the Pope went on. "These people, fooled by atheism, believe and try to demonstrate that it's scientific to think that everything is free of direction and order."

Well, the Pope is an intelligent man, but reckless in his biased reasoning. Let's start with the assumption of an "intelligent agent" which so many people insist on. If I were to say that the Sun shines because there is a giant firedragon within its core, and that it did not burn solely by nuclear fusion, you would think me daft -- and you would be right. Why? Because I would have presented no evidence for the existence of a fanciful firedragon. No evidence means that I cannot cite it as a cause.

Now let's apply that to an intelligent designer. Is there any evidence for such a thing? Interestingly, the amount of evidence in favor of such a designer is exactly equal to the amount of evidence against it: Exactly zero! With no evidence for or against any such designer, can we cite such a fanciful thing as a scientific explanation? The answer is no. To be scientific, we must first find conclusive evidence (as opposed to the zero evidence we have) that such a designer is even there. Until then, "intelligent design" is as unscientific as firedragons inside the sun.

That handles one side of Pope Benedict's myopic statement. But are scientists "fooled by atheism," as he attests? Clearly not, as the overwhelming number of evolutionary scientists who are also devout Christians attests. There are also many more agnostics who fully embrace evolution. Darwin's idea did many things, but one thing it didn't do was endorse a lack of belief in God.

Yet evolution does imply a natural universe -- one where nothing divine influences the regular laws of physics. What does that say about God? Well, three things:

1. There is a God, but He doesn't care to show Himself, and is consequently apathetic to our worship or praise of Him.
2. There is a God, but is too weak to manifest himself in a way which we can observe, making him too impotent to be the God of lore we are all used to.
3. There is no God after all.

Well, all three possibilities are contrary to Catholicism, so it's understandable why Pope Benedict would want to oppose evolutionary science. Yet there is one more possibility: That the universe is a kind of preuve de merite, a test of worthiness. If we are able to figure out the permutations of string theory (or "M" theory, as it's now called), and if we are able to find the underlying equation which governs everything in the universe, we will have achieved the level of intellectual maturity necessary for God to finally reveal Himself via that equation, or by some other means. In other words, God isn't absent, he's just waiting for us to grow up through science -- waiting for us to become smart enough to see Him behind all the stardust which makes the universe go. If so, Pope Benedict, the Discovery Institute, and the Creationist movement are all hindering Man's path to God. They are, in a real sense, unwitting agents of His antithesis, which we can only call Satan. Now isn't that an intriguing notion?

Of course, these are not things I truly believe, nor are they something you the reader should accept. But they are interesting ideas. Will we find God by solving the universe through science? To be honest, I don't know. But it would make one hell of a scientific experiment!

Eric

Mount St. Helens and the Grand Canyon

2005-11-30T15:52:00.000-08:00

Creationists have long pointed to the volcanic blast of Mt. St. Helens as evidence for creationism. They saw how rapidly melted snowcaps and pyroclastic ash carved a large canyon which looked like the Grand Canyon in miniature, very rapidly. Naturally, they pointed to it and said, "That's it! The Grand Canyon after Noah's flood happened just like that!"

Dr. Alan Gishlick (pictured here, about to jump from the moss-covered central spring of beautiful Elves' Chasm, located inside Grand Canyon National Park) actually went to Mount St. Helens to visit the "Mini Grand Canyon" to see what it looked like. What he found disappointed him. Instead of sharply carved canyon walls, he found a canyon which had quickly eroded into smooth-flowing hillsides with sedimentary layers all but invisible. So much for that creationist argument!

This really shouldn't surprise anyone. The canyon which was carved by the St. Helens blast in 1980 cut into material which was not very hard. Most of it was volcanic ash which had been laid down in previous eruptions long before 1980. Oh, when it was first eroded, it's sharply defined sedimentary layers must have looked impressive. But had you taken a rock hammer to them, the hammer would have gone "thud" because the sediments were soft and crumbly. Now, take that same hammer to the Grand Canyon's uppermost layers, and it will go "chink!" That's because the Grand Canyon is carved a mile deep into solid rock!

The notion that a single flood could have 1. laid down the sediments 2. compacted them into rock within 100 days, then 3. Carved away 900 cubic miles of material with receeding floodwater in a single gush... Well, that just strains credulity way past the breaking point.

Eric

Redwall Limestone Has Intriguing Fossils

2005-11-29T15:22:00.000-08:00

Among the most amazing rock formations in the Grand Canyon is Redwall Cavern. Carved from flowing floodwaters over thousands of years, its massive expanse can leave you awestruck when standing inside it. (And a little fearful. It's very easy to picture that huge amount of rock suddenly falling down on your head!) The first western explorers to visit this cave felt it could seat 50,000 people.

Now, the redwall limestone really isn't red. It's stained red from the minerals which wash over it from above. But it is one of the thickest sediment deposits in the Canyon. Perhaps the thickest. Yet this limestone is one of the most fossil-rich layers within the grand canyon, and all of the fossils are marine organisms. That seems to indicate that the sediments were deposited in a marine environment. But the marine creatures which are fossilized are often extremely fragile creatures, such as cryazoids and bryozoans. Creatures like this disarticulate rapidly after death. The fact that they are fossilized intact indicates that they were buried rapidly. So rapidly, in fact, that the creatures were still alive when they were buried. Creationists insist that the best explanation for this is that they were buried by a massive flood, such as Noah's flood.

But not so fast. There are better explanations which are selectively ruled out by the creationist mind-set. The possibility that a hurricaine occasionally swept through and buried these creatures rapidly, is not considered. Also not given consideration is that the occasional Tsunami hit what was then a much more northerly American coastline. Given that there is proof of everglade (Hermit Shale) and even desert (Coconino Sandstone) sediment deposits in layers far above the redwall, these possibilities make far more sense than the Noah's flood scenario. But they are never mentioned in videos which peddle creationism to the masses. After all, to admit that better explanations exist is to give away the game.

Eric

Christian broadcaster disagrees with "six days."

2005-11-29T13:11:00.000-08:00

Well, I just received my regular e-mail newsletter forwarded to me from Answers In Genesis ministries. In it, they tackle a question. Did a popular Christian broadcaster really say that a six-day creation didn't pass the "smell test?"

A.I.G. confirms that this did, in fact, happen. They go on to say that they are no longer surprised by the fact that many Christians have "compromised" their interpretation of scripture. But the actual broadcaster who disavowed six-day creationism on the air was not named in the newsletter.

I immediately combed through internet search engines, trying to find out which broadcaster it was, and what exactly he'd said, but I came up empty. While people of science should take heart that Christians everywhere are succumbing to common sense regarding creationist claims, I'm still left wondering: Which broadcaster was it? Does anybody out there know? Please respond to this blog if you know, or if you think you know. I'd very much like to find out.

But regardless of who it was, this broadcaster did nothing else but repeat what William Jennings Bryan did on the witness stand during the infamous 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial in Dayton, TN. Bryan took the stand, and openly stated to Clarence Darrow that he didn't feel that a "day" in Genesis 1 or 2 necessarily meant a literal, 24-hour day. The crowd gasped, as they knew Bryan had just given the whole game up. (For more, read "Summer of the Gods," by Edward J. Larson.)

Eric

Where did all that material go?

2005-11-23T08:10:00.000-08:00

The Grand Canyon is 277 miles long, 4 to 18 miles wide, and at least a mile deep. Some 900 cubic miles of space could fit inside the canyon. Yet we do not find 900 cubic miles of sediment in the delta of the Colorado River where it empties in the Gulf of California. Where did all that eroded material go?

The creationist explanation is that the material was washed out to the deep sea when the cataclysmic "breached dam" burst forth as the waters from Noah's Flood were receding. But there is another explanation which fits far better. The missing material was moved away by tectonic activity.

But first, let's overview some things. There already is a large amount of sedimentary material in the Gulf of California from the Colorado River. Also, most of the rock in the Grand Canyon is composed of limestone, dolomite, or or shale, which are materials which erode by being dissolved in the water and not precipitating out into a river delta. Still, despite these factors, there should be a lot more sediment where the Colorado empties out. Where did it all go? Why, it's San Andreas' fault as to where it went!

The San Andreas Fault runs along Mexico's western border, goes up through Baja, and into southern California. It is sliding to the northwest at a steady rate of a couple inches per year. And (get this) it runs directly beneath the Colorado River's delta in the Bay of California! That's right, as sediment gets dumped into the bay, the San Andreas Fault is carrying the sediment to the northwest. It's very much like someone dumping sand onto a moving conveyor belt. If one examines the land to the Northwest of the Colorado's river delta, one sees that the sediments have indeed been deposited along the moving faultline in the past, and today much of the landmass of Baja and other parts of Southeastern California are comprised of that sediment.

Which begs the question: If the Noah's flood model is true, why is there such convincing evidence of slow, million-year tectonic activity found in the Colorado River sediments?

Answer: Because the flood model is wrong.

Eric

Nautiloids and the Canyon

2005-11-22T12:59:00.000-08:00

Not too far down past the famous Redwall Cavern (a photo of which will be shown in a later posting) lies the tributary cleft known as Nautiloid Canyon. It is aptly named, because there are clearly visible fossils of nautiloids all over the canyon floor. And what are nautiloids? They are squid-like creatures with long, cone-shaped shells. A photo of one is shown here, illustrated by Professor Steve-Steve, the panda. The water helps show the outline of where the fossil is. (Note also to the picture's lower left. You'll see that Dr. Alan Gishlick has silver-painted toenails!)

Steve Austin (stone cold?) of the Institute for Creation Research notes that the nautiloid fossils are, more or less, pointed in a uniform direction. This, he says, indicates that the fossils were laid down in a moving current of water. It's almost as if the cone-shaped bodies acted like weather-vanes, indicating the direction of flow.

First, what has this observation got to do with evolution or creationism? The answer is, absolutely nothing! Austin maintains that evidence of a current being present bolsters the argument that the Grand Canyon's sedimentary layers were laid down by a moving flood and not a stationary ocean. But Oceans have currents too. Even if the nautiloids do show a directional flow (which they only barely do), so what? The Canyon's layers were put down by stationary pools, slow accumulations, as well as the occasional catastrophe.

Eric

Kent Hovind to Visit Milwaukee

2005-11-18T14:48:00.000-08:00

Well, he's coming. Kent Hovind, the hero of the creationist movement. Ring all the bells and blow all the whistles. The always entertaining, talented, clever, naive, deluded tax-evader will be giving a presentation right here at UWM. Here's the details:

"Creation vs. Evolution... which has more merit?"
Presentation by Kent E. Hovind
Tuesday, December 6th, 2005. 6:30 p.m.
Bolton Hall, Room 150.

He's looking for a debate partner. I'm willing, but have neither the time nor the equipment to take him on this time. Oh, I'll debate him sooner or later, but perhaps I should tackle a different question. Since none of the professors are willing to debate this clown, we should ask, should university professors debate the creationists when they challenge? Is turning down such a challenge tantamount to conceding the truth of creationism?

Richard Dawkins was once challenged to a debate by creationist Duane Gish. Intrigued with the prospect, Dawkins contacted his old friend, paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, for advice. Stephen was adamant. "Don't do it!" he told him. As soon as you share time with a creationist onstage, he said, you lend legitimacy to the position. It won't matter what's said, all that the faithful flock will see is "their man" sharing the stage with a real scientist. This bolsters their view that they have a legitimate gripe with evolution -- and that's the wrong message!

Most creationist debaters are very much like Kent Hovind; slick, silver-tongued devils who could sell refrigerators to Eskimos. They can't reason well, but they can sure give one hell of an entertaining speech! And it is this which appeals to their mass of followers. By contrast, most professional scientists and university professors never even participated in their high school forensics teams when they were kids. Oh, they're smart, and they can give a reasonably good lecture, sometimes without putting people to sleep, but they aren't advocates. They'd make lousy lawyers. Creationists exploit this tendency well. Whenever a creationist tries to tempt a faculty member of a university into debating with him, the answer should always be a firm, "No!" It seems the faculty of UWM has gotten that message.

That having been said, creationism does need to be sternly opposed by faculty and teachers at all levels. Refusing to do public debates does not mean those with the scientific expertise should bury their heads in the sand like ostriches whenever creationism rears its ugly head. They should learn all they can about creationism, and debunk it publicly whenever possible. Dawkins has led by example, in this regard.

So what about public debates? Should they never happen on campus at all? I'm of the opinion that they should. But just as creationists use professional public speakers to argue their points, evolutionists should do the same. Someone who's entertaining, funny, eloquent, and utterly debasing and irrevrent to the other's points should be the only debater creationists ever see. Such people are few and far between, but I'm hoping to become one of them, someday.

Eric

Grand Canyon: Travertine Exposes Creationist Travesty

2005-11-18T13:53:00.000-08:00

Travertine. What is it? Basically, it's calcium carbonate CaCO3, the same stuff which makes up stalactites and stalagmites in caves. But unlike either of those, travertine forms exclusively in the beds of rivers, streams, and springs. It contains traces of biological and mineral deposits which often give it interesting patterns and colors, making it an ideal rock for exotic jewelry. On the third day of the NCSE's rafting trip through the Canyon this summer, we trekked up the Little Colorado river to jump into the warm, mild rapids and let them suck us through and spit us out. That was FUN! In the photo, you can see Eugenie Scott being pulled through, feet-first. Better than a rollercoaster. But in the warmer water of the Little Colorado, we could see travertine actually forming along the river's bottom. In fact, it's the travertine which makes the turquoise color of the river in the picture.

Travertine is also found in many places along the walls of the Grand Canyon -- above the line of the Great Unconformity.

That's right, folks deposits of rivers, located right in the middle of sediments which creationists maintain were laid down during Noah's flood.

Many times before we'd even reached the Little Colorado, our boatmen pointed out areas in the Canyon walls where large, white blotches were clearly visible. "There's more travertine over there," they would say.

Now, how did this travertine get there? Did the Great Flood get put on hold, while Noah put the Ark in a designated parking spot, allowing the layers of the canyon, mid-way along in their deposition, to erode into rivers, which cut paths allowing deposits of travertine to form several dozen yards deep, after which the flood resumed it's normal globe-covering wateriness? Of course not! The very idea is absurd, both from a scientific and a theological viewpoint. No, these travertine deposits got there because many different geologic events went into the Grand Canyon. Sometimes, the environment was covered with water. Other times, it was bone-dry, and the erosion of rain formed thousand-year-old rivers with travertine forming in them. Other times, as we have already seen, the environment was an outright desert. And yet other times still, it's true, the occasional flood passed by. But none of the many floods which helped make the Grand Canyon what it is today was Noah's flood. And it really did take millions of years as a fact of geologic history.

Eric

A Clever Cartoon

2005-11-18T12:29:00.000-08:00

Here's a nice editorial cartoon which appeared in the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel on Sunday, Nov. 13th. Thought you all would like it.

Creationism and the Coconino Footprints

2005-11-17T14:59:00.000-08:00

The Coconino Sandstone is a layer of sediment roughly 1/5th of the way down into the Grand Canyon's chasm. It is unique among the layers because of its criss-crossed pattern, which indicates that it was layed down in alternating currents, probably by wind. Indeed, the cross-bedding strongly suggests sand dunes and a desert environment. There are even fossilized footprints where quadraped reptiles once walked across the sand. The upper-left photo shows some of these.

Naturally, creationists don't like this at all. They contend that the Grand Canyon's layers were put there, all of them, by the massive floodwaters during the time of Noah -- or at least, all the layers above the Great Unconformity. So finding evidence of a desert right in one of the upper-middle layers trumps their argument. Did the floodwaters dry out long enough to make a vast desert in North America while the Ark paused somewhere before the flood resumed once again? Not only would this be ridiculous, it would be contrary to the Bible! So they contend, very strongly, that the Coconino sandstones were layed down in water, and not in dry desert wind.

But the biggest problem for them for a long time were the footprints. How could an animal be walking around, leaving tracks, right in the middle of Noah's flood? For that matter, if the flood wiped out every living thing, why were there any creatures alive to leave tracks at all? It seemed their case was lost. But then, it was given new hope by an enterprising researcher named Leonard Brand. He tried reproducing the Coconino tracks in a watery environment using various kinds of quadrapeds. With a great deal of trial-and-error work, he managed to produce a good replica of them using a shallow watery environment with a light current. The creature which was able to make the tracks, was a salamander.

Now, the creationists were able to turn the argument around! They claimed the salamander tracks were a confirmation, rather than a debunking, of the flood model. The salamanders were still alive because, well, they were salamanders! Aquatic, or at least, amphibious creatures for whom a great deal of water would pose few problems.

Well, no. Time to rain on this parade. Mr. Brand's research was clever, but it attempted to confirm a preset conclusion, and stumbled upon one possible alternate scenario rather than truncated an existing one. But further evidence indicates that Brand simply didn't finish his homework. There are more tracks in the Coconino sandstones besides mere quadrapeds. There are numerous other tracks of what are clearly desert-dwelling insects. Scorpions, spiders, centipedes, and beetles are all well represented in the sandstone. Even snake trails can be found.

Clearly, these were desert creatures, not aquatic ones. Any global flood would certainly have wiped them out before they could leave footprints midway through the sedimentary layers, and their small insect and arachnid bodies would be far too light to leave tracks on wet sand, in any case. Furthermore, since no non-desert creatures are found, we can safely conclude that this was a desert environment. The dunes were deposited by dry wind, not water currents, and the tracks were made under a hot sun rather than in the midst of a global flood. These fossilized tracks thoroughly disprove the idea that the Grand Canyon's layers were deposited by Noah's flood.

Of course, we won't go into the subject of whether or not a God who commits mass-genocide against an entire planetary population is at all a just and loving one...

Eric

Erosion in the Grand Canyon

2005-11-16T13:37:00.000-08:00

Creationists say that there's just no way such a little river as the Colorado River could have carved a canyon so very large. They insist that instead of a little water and a lot of time, the Canyon formed from a lot of water and a little time. But the fact is, neither of these polar opposites is the case. Rather, the Canyon formed with a LOT of water over a LOT of time.

One almost needs to have rafted the Grand Canyon to appreciate just how mighty the Colorado truly is. It's not just another waterway! It carries enough water through it to provide power to all of Las Vegas via Hoover Dam. It provides enough water to meet much of the potable water needs of Los Angeles, CA. This ain't no stream, folks! It's a fairly consistent gusher with a lot of power behind it.

But not only that, the river is rich in highly abrasive sediment. As one travels the river, the sediments can be so thick that you can't put your hand more than a couple of inches below the surface of the water before it can't be seen. When rafting the river, boatmen often put their canned beverages in a drop bag and throw it over the side in order to keep them cool. (In fact, the Colorado is deep enough to be quite frigid year-round, even in the hot Arizona sun!) But the sediments erode everything, including the beverage cans. If you leave your beverage in the river for too long, the abrasion of the river will strip the paint right off the can! In the upper-left photo, Dr. Charlie Webb of Colorado Springs, CO illustrates this point quite clearly. If the paint is completely removed, rafters are left with the dilemma of trying to tell the difference between a can of Coca Cola and a can of beer! With erosion like that going on in the space of only several hours, imagine what millions of years could do! Perhaps the wonder of the Canyon is that it isn't significantly deeper. In fact, it probably would be much deeper, if a series of volcanoes along the North Rim hadn't dumped hot magma right into the middle of it about 15 million years ago.

That answers how the river cut such a deep canyon, but why is the canyon so wide? Could a river, no matter how mighty, have cut so wide a chasm when so comparatively narrow?

The answer is yes, for a number of reasons. First, canyons don't erode from the top-down. They erode from the bottom up. And when enough rock has eroded beneath, a rockfall from above ensues. This results in minor to major damming, forming new rapids or waterfalls, which erode very rapidly (thousands of years). Once level, the river cuts at a much slower rate. Also, occasional floods do occur with unusually large rainfalls on given years. During such periods, the river becomes much wider, erosion takes place much more rapidly, and more radical change takes place. It's wrong to look at the dry-season summertime Colorado River and say that such a "small" river couldn't have cut so wide a canyon.

Carrie Sager, daughter of Genie Scott, got to see this first hand on day three of the trip. During a heavy rainfall, a washed-off boulder fell and hit a side wall resulting in a large chunk of canyon getting knocked off into the river. It made a fantastic splash, and we all heard it, believe me! But Carrie was an actual eyewitness. What a story she got to tell!

It's very easy to accept that erosion made something so huge when you can actually see the rock widening right in front of your eyes.

Eric

Sometimes, you just gotta laugh...

2005-11-14T17:24:00.000-08:00

Answers In Genesis (AIG) has just sent out its monthly newsletter, packed with propaganda. I just received a copy. In this issue, they try to tackle the difficult dilemma of explaining how a just and loving God could have allowed a disaster like Hurricane Katrina. From a creationist perspective, of course.

Ken Ham quotes from Nancy Gibbs, a writer for Time magazine online. According to the online article being quoted, Nancy interviews many religious leaders as to God's reasoning behind such a disaster as Katrina. An ultraconservative rabbi says Katrina is punishment for U.S. support of the Israeli pullout in Gaza. Louis Farrakhan calls Katrina judgment for the Iraq war. The Christian Civic Group of Maine notes that the hurricane hit just as a gay-rights festival was about to get underway. The consensus, notes Gibbs, is that Katrina was punishment for sin. The lack of consensus is just which sin it precisely was.

Enter Ken Ham's explanation. He also agrees that such mass death is punishment for sin, but says that the confusion as to which sin responsible stems from a lack of understanding of Genesis 1 through 11. According to Ken, the sin responsible is the original sin of eating the fruit of the tree in the Garden of Eden - an act which brought death and destruction to everyone. It is this sin, rather than the others, which should be blamed for the death and destruction which Katrina eventually brought. To Ken, Katrina is just one of the many consequences of "The Fall." A cutesy cartoon near Ken's article illustrates the pointing of many fingers at each other over Katrina, then at God, then finally at ourselves for our sinful natures. "It's our fault," the caption reads.

What's interesting is that normally, conservative Christians hate any "blame the victim" mentality. Yet here it is, spoken as though they were siding with the caracaturization of the liberals they purportedly despise. Ken doesn't touch on the irrationality of children being held responsible for the crimes of parents, to say nothing of grandparents or ancient ancestors. He doesn't point out that if humans were created by God, and Satan was created by God, that God is ultimately responsible for evil anyway. Blaming Satan doesn't work. Blaming Adam doesn't work. Both these puppets have their strings pulled by someone higher up, according to the Bible. "It is an occasion for atheists to remind believers of the flaws in the case for a benevolent God," Ken quotes from Gibbs' article. He lampoons this point, but comes up with exactly zero evidence against it.

So, we have to laugh. Not because it's funny. In fact, the fundamentalist outlook is rather glum. No, we laugh because Ken passes the buck, not realizing that he's given away his last dollar. He highlights the fallacy of creationism in flourescent yellow, and calls it an argument against evolution.

Perhaps the real proof of the lack of God's existence should be that no just God would let someone as ridiculous as Ken Ham into a position of leadership.

Eric

Grand Canyon Says: Many Floods, Not Just One

2005-11-13T07:15:00.000-08:00

Creationists love pointing to the Grand Canyon, saying that it shows evidence of massive flooding. But the dirty little secret they won't tell you is that it shows evidence of not one flood, but many floods.

In the upper-left photo, Dr. Genie Scott illustrates one piece of evidence of multiple flood events. The photo was taken on a hike through North Canyon, one of the tributary canyons along the Colorado River. This would put these rock layers in the mid-Supai group, probably the Manakacha Formation. At her shoulders, is a layer of sandstone which is pretty smooth and clean. It looks rather solid. But at her waist is a layer beneath which is pockmarked and rough. It doesn't look smooth at all. That's because this particular layer once had small invertebrates feeding and digging into the sandy, muddy bottom, looking for food. Later, they were suddenly buried. In geologic terms this is what's called a bioturbated rock layer.

Now, here's where it gets interesting. Above Genie's head is another bioturbated layer, followed by another smooth layer, followed by another bioturbated one, and so forth. Below Genie's feet, is another smooth layer, followed by another bioturbated one, followed by another smooth one, et cetera. So, if the Canyon layers were layed down in a great cataclysm, why did things get calm long enough for little critters to come in and start feeding, then get buried, then get calm again, then have little feeders come in again.... Doesn't this cycle indicate a shallow sea with the occasional hurricane burying things? Doesn't that make more sense than a global flood?

The Canyon is pretty unambiguous about what happened to form it. Many, many floods once passed over those rocks. Not one big one. Many hurricanes, many freezings, many dryings. There will be more on this in later postings, but one big event didn't make the rock formations in that Canyon. To insist so is just plain silly.

Eric

To Pat: Enough Is Enough!

2005-11-11T09:21:00.000-08:00

Sometimes, you just have to throw up your hands and say, "this stupidity has gone on long enough."

Pat Robertson, addressing the people of Dover, Pennsylvania during a broadcast of his '700 Club' program, told them to not be surprised if a disaster struck their town because they had "Voted out God."

Of course, what those residents had really done is vote out school board members who favored 'Intelligent Design.'

"I'd like to say to the good citizens of Dover: if there is a disaster in your area, don't turn to God, you just rejected Him from your city," he told them. "And don't wonder why He hasn't helped you when problems begin, if they begin. I'm not saying they will, but if they do, just remember, you just voted God out of your city. And if that's the case, don't ask for His help because he might not be there."

So much for omnipresent.

As a secularist, it makes me happy that people like Pat Robertson continue to make fools of themselves. Yet somehow, someway, people continue to follow them. Pat won't change. He's too headstrong and set in his ways. But what about his followers? Why are they persistently clinging to the words of this dimented madman? Why do they accept the same creationist crap he does? Is the need for feeling like a valued member of a community really that important?

Because if it is, the humanists would love to make them feel welcome -- and at least they won't tell them to march in lockstep!

Eric

Grand Canyon's Great Unconformity

2005-11-09T15:15:00.000-08:00

Well, I've just gotten my hands on the latest newsletter from the Midwest Creation Fellowship. In it, they list the winners of their 2005 essay contest for junior and senior high school children. The winner? Beth Conway of Alliance, OH. And her essay was about, you guessed it, the Grand Canyon.

Essentially, she argues that one of the best evidences of the Genesis Flood comes from the Great Unconformity. This is a very visible line where angled sedimentary layers suddenly meet perfectly horizontal sedimentary layers. It looks almost as if someone took a kilometer-sized power sander and leveled off everything before more deposits were layed down on top. A picture of the unconformity is shown here, situated behind the portable commode we used while on the NCSE rafting trip. (This way we could contemplate the wonders of nature while, well, answering the call of nature.)

Beth Conway thinks that since the Great Unconformity was caused by the rushing waters of Noah's flood planing off rugged mountainous edges, before the currents settled down and layed down new sediments. But even the biggest amount of rushing water wouldn't level things off in such a perfect way. Waves pounding into a shallow oestuary could level off any jagged edges, but that wouldn't fit perfectly either, plus it would take millions of years, and that doesn't fit the creation model very well. What could have leveled the angled mountaintops before they were buried? What could have caused this pattern?

The best explanation seems to be that it was a glacier which did this. Only a glacier can plane off rugged, jagged mountaintops with such level precision. A massive enough glacier can literally bulldoze over rock, leveling off everything in its path. Also, the rock immediately below the unconformity dates to about 825 million years, while the rock immediately above it dates to about 570 million years, thus making a 255 million year gap in time between the two. Precisely during that gap in time, we know from other geologic evidence that the world was virtually covered in glaciers in the largest ice age the planet had ever seen. It makes perfect sense that a glacier planed off the angled, mountainous layers over 250 million years, before the earth warmed, oceans rose, and sedimentary deposits began to accumulate once again. Certainly, this makes much more sense than claiming that a global flood did it.

Eric

The Importance of Getting Involved

2005-11-09T14:00:00.000-08:00

Just last month, the interim president of Cornell University, Hunter R. Rawlings, did something radical. During his "State of the University" address, he actually spent most of the time blasting the movement which supports "Intelligent Design," and passionately urging all academics to get involved in their local communities to help put a stop to it. Was he right to do this? Has creationism, and "ID" gotten to the point where university presidents need to make it a top priority?

The answer, I strongly feel, is yes, absolutely! While ID has lost in a court case in Dover, PA, it may only be a reprieve as the case gets appealed to a higher court. Meanwhile, in Kansas, the school board has made the same gaff which made the state a national and international laughingstock back in 2000. Just yesterday, the board voted science education standards which declare that basic Darwinian theory has been challenged in recent years by fossil evidence and molecular biology - a blatant lie. On top of this, our well-meaning and affable President Bush confirmed yet again that he is a dolt by stating that he felt "both sides" should be taught in the science classroom.

Clearly, this is no time for our university scientists to remain locked inside their ivory towers. It's time to underscore the truth: Evolution is a fact of history. Deal with it.

Eric

Welcome!

2005-11-08T18:56:00.000-08:00

This post is a repeat, but it bears repeating.

Welcome to the Milwaukee Evolution League's new blog site. Here, I'll be able to get information to everyone on a more regular basis than I have done in the past. With my crazy schedule, juggling two jobs, singing in a band, and trying to slip a social life in between, this will enable me to keep everyone informed -- at least during my odd lunch-break. Oh, there will still be actual physical meetings, but for now, enjoy our new forum!

If you have any questions you would like answered; some creationist claim you don't know the answer to or are having a hard time researching, don't hesitate to post a question for me to answer! That's the primary reason this forum will exist. Take full advantage of my expertise in this issue. It'll save you lots of time.Eric

Grand Canyon Information

2005-11-08T18:45:00.000-08:00

Beginning today, I will begin recounting what I learned during my Grand Canyon rafting trip with the National Center for Science Education. I'll post images as often as I can, even though pictures can't do justice to the immense beauty the canyon offers. Stay tuned!

Entertaining Creationists Argue Back

2005-11-08T09:22:00.000-08:00

There are times I truly enjoy debating with creationists. One such example is when I stumbled across James Holding's critique of my book, Creationism: The Bible Says No! (The title of which is a play off of another book by Duane Gish, called 'Evolution: The Fossils Say No!')

I've included Mr. Holding's web-posting as one of my permanent links in the right hand column, not only because I found it so entertaining, but also because I want as many people to read it as possible to see just how fascinating it is when my proven points get underscored.

You don't really need a copy of my book to see where the flaws in Holding's arguments are, (though perhaps it might help). Essentially, I argue against biblical literalism, which is the cornerstone of creationism, by citing numerous scriptures which are irreconcilably contradictory or false. Holding answers these contradictions by accusing me of interpreting scripture according to a strict, fundamentalist, literalist view using modern, rather than ancient, standards of interpretation.

Guess what? Guilty as charged! I do indeed do exactly that. But that's because that's what creationists do as well! I was only using the standards of interpretation which were predetermined by evolution's opponents. Holding, however, holds to the Chicago Statement of Inerrancy, which says:

"We deny that it is proper to evaluate Scripture according to standards of truth and error that are alien to its usage or purpose. We further deny that inerrancy is negated by Biblical phenomena such as a lack of modern technical precision, irregularities of grammar or spelling, observational descriptions of nature, the reporting of falsehoods, the use of hyperbole and round numbers, the topical arrangement of metrical, variant selections of material in parallel accounts, or the use of free citations."

I'll admit it, I hadn't heard of the "Chicago Statement" until I read Holding's article. But I had certainly heard that particular argument many times before. (Really, who really knows or cares that some ecclesiastical magisteria stamped a label on it?) What's interesting about it is that, if one accepts it fully, then one has to apply ancient standards of interpretation, which means that the original, primitive author(s) of Genesis regarded Adam and Eve as literal history simply because they did not, in that era, make a distiction between literal history and mythology. This means that the proper interpretation of Genesis 1 and 2 is that it is metaphor, not fact.

Holding's position may, just may, smooth over most Bible contradictions by seeing them as the shortcomings of the ancient mind, or mind-set. But the price of this view is the lack of necessity on insisting that Adam and Eve were literal people. All that is required to be a Christian is to accept that humanity, at some point in its evolutionary past, went astray from God. Maybe that's why there are so many evolutionary scientists who are also Christian.

Perhaps his misunderstanding of my views can best be summarized in a statement he made at the end in reference to my citing of the mathematical contradiction regarding Solomon's gold from Ophir:

"Incredibly the only answer Hildeman knows for things like, "Did Solomon get 420 or 450 talents of gold from Ophir?" is stuff like, "It was two separate trips." [165] Huh? (And he even has one half of this problem listed as being in 2 Corinthians!) This one (and others, such as the age of Baasha [172]) is one of the simplest, easily attributed to copyist error, but Hildeman doesn't even mention or apparently know that this is an answer! If this is what Hildeman learned at Bible college, maybe it isn't all his fault that he is so badly educated!"

Of course it occurred to me that it could be attributed to a copyist error. In fact, that was exactly my point. A copyist's ERROR. Meaning that errors in the Bible are a scientific fact! And if errors in the Bible are a fact, then why do creationists even bother? (I guess I'm not so poorly educated after all.)

Do follow up on the links. Have fun reading them!

Eric

Do Many Scientists Question or Reject Evolution?

2005-11-07T14:05:00.000-08:00

Creationists often claim that many scientists question or reject evolution. Is it true?
Well, “many” is an ambiguous term. Ten or twenty people, for instance, could be thought of as “many.”
There is no evidence that suggests that there are “many” creationist scientists out there. The claim is made based on the increasing number of seemingly qualified recruits to the creationist movement. Yet these new recruits are still really only a scattered few. Of those, the vast majority of them do not deal in fields where evolutionary expertise is required. Of those few left who do deal with evolutionary fields (such as genetics or geology) the track records are dubious, at best.
According to a 1997 Gallup poll, creationists comprise about 600,000 out of the approximately 13 million people in scientific professions. That’s well below 5%. (4.615%, to be precise.) But that includes professions like computer scientists, engineers, and the like—people with nothing to do with either life-science or earth-science. If one restricts the numbers to the 480,000 scientists who work in fields related to evolution (according to Newsweek magazine, June 29, 1987, p. 23), namely the aforementioned life and earth sciences, only about 700 are creationists. 700. That’s it! (A literal ‘700 Club?’) Percentage-wise that’s .14583%, or significantly less than TWO-TENTHS of a percent! And that’s just in hyper-religious America. If one looks at the percentage of creationists outside the U.S. (which is almost none), the number falls to well below one tenth of a percent!
Clearly, the “theory in crisis” is creationism.
The National Center for Science Education has something which is known as “Project Steve,” in which scientists named Steve sign on as supporters of evolution. The project is named after the late Steven Jay Gould, and some notable scientists, including Stephen Hawking, have signed on board. As of 11/7/2005, the list stands at 630 scientists, and is growing! When one considers that about only 1% of the world’s population is named Steve, and that this percentage applies to the scientific population as well, one realizes that SIGNIFICANTLY LESS than 1% of evolutionary scientists have signed on to a list which nearly equals (90%) the approximate TOTAL number of creationists (700, remember?) in the U.S.!

Eric

2005-11-01T09:29:00.000-08:00

Is evolution an atheist doctrine?

Many creationists believe so. But this claim is empirically false. Many Christians and members of other religions embrace evolution, demonstrably proving evolution is not atheistic. Pope John Paul II has openly embraced evolution. The Rev. Bennett J. Sims, Episcopal Bishop of Atlanta, endorses evolution. The biologist Sir Ronald Fisher was an Anglican. President Jimmy Carter, a devout Baptist, has supported evolution. Many religious organizations have given their support for evolution in the National Center for Science Education’s publication, Voices for Evolution, including the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (USA), The General Convention Of The Episcopal Church, The Lexington Alliance Of Religious Leaders, The Lutheran World Federation, The Roman Catholic Church, The United Methodist Church, and the United Presbyterian Church In The U.S.A.

A stubborn creationist might say that all of these people and organizations are just being inconsistent in their thinking. But it is certainly not more consistent to say that a talking serpent is a literal fact of history.

Courtesy: NCSE, Voices for Evolution: Statements from religious organizations.

Eric

2005-10-28T14:23:00.000-07:00

Welcome!

Welcome to the Milwaukee Evolution League's new blog site. Here, I'll be able to get information to everyone on a more regular basis than I have done in the past. With my crazy schedule, juggling two jobs, singing in a band, and trying to slip a social life in between, this will enable me to keep everyone informed -- at least during my odd lunch-break. Oh, there will still be actual physical meetings, but for now, enjoy our new forum!

If you have any questions you would like answered; some creationist claim you don't know the answer to or are having a hard time researching, don't hesitate to post a question for me to answer! That's the primary reason this forum will exist. Take full advantage of my expertise in this issue. It'll save you lots of time.

Eric

2005-10-28T14:17:00.000-07:00

An outstanding article in the most recent issue of the Skeptical Inquirer outlines why scientists get so angry when dealing with ID proponents. Much of it has to do with quote mining. Take the article’s citation of this quote, featured on the blog of one William Dembski, one of ID’s hottest champions:

“The challenge that here confronts evolution is not isolated but pervasive, and comes up most flagrantly in what’s called the Cambrian Explosion. In a very brief window of time during the geological period known as the Cambrian, virtually all the basic animal types appeared suddenly in the fossil record with no trace of evolutionary ancestors. The Cambrian explosion so flies in the face of evolution that paleontologist Peter Ward wrote, ‘If ever there was evidence suggesting Divine Creation, surely the Precambrian and Cambrian transition, known from numerous localities across the face of the earth, is it.’ Note that Ward is not a creationist.”

In actuality, Ward was describing the viewpoint during the time of Darwin’s contemporaries and shortly thereafter. He was not expressing his own opinion. The quote itself comes from his book ‘On Methuselah’s Trail,’ and is found on page 29. Further along, however, on pages 35 and 36, we find Ward’s real opinion:

“Until almost 1950 the absence of metazoan fossils older than Cambrian age continued to puzzle evolutionists and earth historians alike. Other than the remains of single-celled creatures and the matlike stromatolites, it did indeed look as if larger creatures had arisen with a swiftness that made a mockery of Darwin’s theory of evolution. This notion was finally put to rest, however, by the discovery of the Ediacarian and Vendian fossil faunas of latest Precambrian age.
“Intensive searching of strata immediately underlying the well-known basal Cambrian deposits in the years between 1950 and 1980 showed that the larger skeletonized fossils (such as the trilobites and brachiopods) that supposedly appeared so suddenly were in fact preceeded by skeletonized forms so small as to be easily overlooked by the pioneering geologists.”

This clearly shows Ward’s pro-evolutionary, anti-design stance. It’s an important example of why quotes from scientists ought not be trusted when they come from the mouth of a creationist. But more importantly, it highlights the presence of the micro-fossils of the Ediacarian and Vendian eras. It’s important to note that Cambrian fossils did not “appear suddenly” so much as they simply had grown big enough for the human eye to easily spot them in the rocks.

Of course, a creationist opinion from a famous scientist no more disproves evolution than an atheist opinion from a presiding Pope disproves Christianity. The only authority figure in science is reality itself. But creationists cannot think that way. For them, a quote from the Bible can settle a matter. So they try to do the same thing by quoting what they perceive to be scientific “scripture” back at scientists. Sooner or later, they’ll have to understand that this simply does not work.

Eric