Rock wars

Because clearly the news hasn't been surreal enough lately, today we have: an Australian geologist is suing the U. S. National Parks Service because they denied him the right to remove thirty pounds of rocks from the Grand Canyon in an attempt to prove that the biblical account of the Great Flood is true.

The geologist -- although how in the hell you'd get a Ph.D. in geology and somehow still be a young-Earth creationist is beyond my comprehension -- is named Andrew Snelling.  Snelling is a bit of a frequent flier here at Skeptophilia; regular readers may recall that he's the guy who (among other things) claimed that Beowulf shows that dinosaurs coexisted with humans and that an Allosaurus skeleton proves the six-day creation story.

So Snelling is a bit of a Johnny One-Note with respect to scientific inquiry; if it doesn't have something to do with the Book of Genesis, he's not interested.  And now he wants to show that the Grand Canyon was formed during the Great Flood, and is convinced that if he can only get his hands on some rocks, he'll be able to show that to the world.

"It’s one thing to debate the science, but to deny access to the data not based on the quality of a proposal or the nature of the inquiry, but on what you might do with it is an abuse of government power," said Snelling's lawyer, Gary McCaleb of the Alliance Defending Freedom.  Which is a little disingenuous; no one "debates the science," because people like Snelling aren't arguing from a scientific stance.  When you thump the cover of a bible and say, "I don't care if this was written by a bunch of superstitious Bronze-Age sheep herders, every word of it is true, regardless of any evidence to the contrary," you are not engaging in science, you are engaging in circular reasoning.  And once you're there, no scientific argument in the world is going to convince you otherwise.

Snelling, of course, doesn't give a rat's ass about any of that.  All he wants is any kind of evidence that seems to support his belief.  Candida Moss over at The Daily Beast said it well:

Dr. Snelling... is looking for evidence of a Flood, not evidence of mass extermination; and he is looking for evidence of excess water on the earth caused by rain, not the underground or heavenly pools of primordial waters that caused the flooding.  This kind of research is not just bad science; it’s also predicated on poor reading comprehension.

Because, says Moss, even the biblical account of the Flood is rife with internal contradictions, so the idea that it's literally true is literally... impossible:

Sure, the animals did go onto the Ark “by twosies twosies.”  God tells Noah to assemble a pair of each kind of animal, but then a couple of verses later he tells Noah to bring seven pairs of the “clean” kinds of animal and one pair of the “unclean” kinds of animals.  That doesn’t rhyme at all, but it’s important because at the conclusion of the story, just before the rainbow, Noah goes and sacrifices a number of the clean animals to God.  And, if Noah didn’t have seven pairs of animals, he would have saved all those species only to engage in an ad hoc mass extinction project. 

The Flood does last for “forty days and nights.”  But it also lasts for 150 days and nights.  And while the Flood is caused by rain, it is also caused by the opening of primordial floodgates positioned above and beneath the earth.  Not only is this confusing, it does mean that scientific efforts to prove the historicity of the Flood should also have to explain where all of the water above and below the earth is.  And, for this purpose, an underground reservoir probably isn’t going to cut it with one’s fellow scientists. 

All of these inconsistencies make for pretty difficult reading, which is why Christian tradition has plumped for a streamlined version that cherrypicks certain details.

Then, there's the problem that there is exactly zero evidence of a giant flood and a mass extinction.  You'd think there'd be some evidence of this -- a sedimentary rock layer at the same depth, all over the world, with millions of fossils of a wide variety of organisms.  Including, presumably, humans, since one of the cheery aspects of this supposedly edifying story is that the all-loving god drowned every human on Earth, including infants, for some unspecified "wickedness," leaving only the family of a 600-year-old man from whom all of us are presumably descended over and over and over again, thus adding rampant incest into the mix.

Interesting that this is one of the most commonly-told tales in children's Sunday school classes, isn't it?

Anyhow.  My inclination would be to give Snelling his rocks and tell him to go away and have fun playing with them.  He's not going to be able to prove anything with them that any reputable scientist would accept, nor will he find anything out from them that could change his own mind (further indicating that what Snelling is engaging in is not science).  I know it's against National Park Service rules to let anyone take away anything from the park, but consider the upside: it'd keep Snelling and his cronies quiet for a while.  And I think that's well worth bending the rules for.

An obituary for facts

Of all of the things to be appalled about over the last few days -- and there is a wide selection to choose from, something for everyone -- nothing chilled me like the announcement by White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer that the crowds attending Donald Trump's inauguration set a record.

"This was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration, period," Spicer said.  "That's what you guys should be writing and covering."

Which, of course, is blatantly and demonstrably false.

Then, when Trump spokesperson Kellyanne Conway was asked about Spicer's claim on NBC's Meet the Press, she said that it wasn't a lie -- that Spicer had simply given the public "alternative facts."

On the face of it, this may seem like a small matter -- the people who are in charge of presenting Donald Trump's public face to the media stretching the truth to assuage the new president's ego.  But think about it.  What Spicer and Conway are saying is, "Facts don't matter.  Accurate reporting doesn't matter.  All that matters is believing what you're told."

And even more terrifying is that Trump's followers, by and large, did believe what Spicer and Conway said.  "I don't believe one damned thing that comes from the crooked, bought-and-sold mainstream media," one person posted on Facebook.

"The liberal press will do anything to disparage our president," said another.  "No lie is too big or too small as long as it casts him in a hateful light."

This last one is the same person who posted the following photograph:

And I've already seen the following three times, with a caption of "Finally allowed back in the White House:"

We're being consistently steered away from respecting facts and evidence toward ideology, belief, confirmation bias, and a cult of personality -- an approach far more consistent with North Korea than with the United States, where Dear Leader is the center of near-worship on the basis of everything from his flawless statesmanship to his golf game.

But that's the direction we're heading.  Unsurprising, then, that governmental positions are being filled with people who have the same attitude-- predominantly climate change deniers (Tom Price, Rex Tillerson, and Scott Pruitt) and young-Earth creationists (Betsy DeVos, Ben Carson, Jeff Sessions, and Vice-President Mike Pence himself).  None of these views are based on logic, rationality, or fact; they're either blind, doctrinaire belief in the face of evidence, or confirmation bias to accept a claim because it's politically or economically expedient.

What blows my mind is how far this ignore-the-facts approach can take you.  If you believe that the crowds at Trump's inauguration were yuuuge, then that's what they were, photographs (or any other evidence) be damned.  If you think the Earth is 6,000 years old, none of the mountains of evidence showing this to be untrue will convince you -- but you will swallow that Beowulf was an "eyewitness account of dinosaurs showing that they coexisted with humans," as was just claimed this week by Answers in Genesis spokesperson and "scientist" Andrew Snelling.

And once you believe that facts and evidence don't matter, it's apparently a small step to believing that a thin-skinned, narcissistic egomaniac who is a serial adulterer and (by his own admission) guilty of sexual assault could be the anointed one of god.

As George Orwell put it in 1984, "The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears.  It was their final, most essential command."

We've got a rough road ahead.  I'm cheered by the numbers of people who turned out for the Women's Marches Against Trump -- literally millions of people came out for what were almost entirely peaceful demonstrations against what this administration stands for.  But we've got our work cut out for us.  We have elected and appointed officials, and (apparently) a significant slice of the voting public, who have written the obituary for a fact-based understanding of the world, in favor of "alternative facts" that fit the way they wish things were.  And I'm at a loss for how to approach this.  Because once you've decided that anything other than evidence is the best guide to determining the truth, I have no idea how you could be convinced that you were wrong about any belief you might hold.

Heaven knows I'm not infallible myself, but I do have one thing going for me; if you think I'm wrong, show me the evidence.  I might not like it, but faced with the facts, I'll have no recourse but to say, "Huh.  I guess I was wrong, then."  But if the media lies 100% of the time (except when they say something you happen to have already believed), when your favorite political figure has no flaws and was elevated to the position by god himself, when the hard evidence itself is suspect -- you have erected an impenetrable wall around yourself, locking yourself in with nothing but your ideology for company.

And a nation full of people like that might be the most dangerous thing in the world.

Ebenezer's shame

Coming right on the heels of yesterday's post, wherein I mused over the question of whether the woo-woos are actually just kidding, and are seeing how outlandish their claims can become before we skeptics catch on, we have a story today that makes me ask the same question about the creationists.

It will probably come as no great shock that the latest bizarre salvo from the biblical literalists has come from none other than Ken Ham, whose trouncing by Bill Nye the Science Guy in a debate that brought to mind the phrase "having a battle of wits with an unarmed man" seems not to have dampened his convictions.  Now, according to a story that I first saw in (of all places) the Pakistan Daily Times, Ham is claiming that an extraordinarily well-preserved Allosaurus specimen is concrete proof of the biblical creation story.

Yes, I know that Ham et al. believe that everything is proof of the biblical creation story.  But does it seem to you that deliberately choosing a 150 million year old fossil as proof of their mythology is a little... crazy?  They're on shaky enough ground with all of the "look at the pretty butterflies and fascinating fish, god musta did it" stuff that the Creation Museum excels at; why would they deliberately pick a Jurassic-era dinosaur?

[image courtesy of photographer Andy Tang and the Wikimedia Commons]

And it's not like it came cheap, either.  According to Ham's own site, Answers in Genesis, the Creation Museum shelled out $1.5 million for the privilege of displaying something that conclusively disproves their entire raison d'être.  Not that that's the way they put it, of course.  Ham was quoted in the article as saying that the allosaurus skeleton "fulfills a dream I’ve had for quite some time. For decades I’ve walked through many leading secular museums, like the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C., and have seen their impressive dinosaur skeletons.  But they were used for evolution.  Now we have one of that class, and it will help us defend the book of Genesis and expose the scientific problems with evolution."

I read that entire passage with the following expression on my face:

But it only got worse from there, because then Michael Peroutka weighed in.  Peroutka is the guy who sold Ham the skeleton, and he said that the allosaurus "is a testimony to the creative power of God in designing dinosaurs, and that it also lends evidence to the truth of a worldwide catastrophic flooding of the earth in Noah’s time."  Dr. Andrew Snelling, the Creation Museum's staff geologist, said that "Ebenezer" (as they're calling the allosaurus) "most likely died in Noah’s Flood, over 4,300 years ago.  In fleeing the rising waters... Ebenezer was swept away in a debris flow and buried rapidly under massive amounts of sediment, preserving many of its bones," adding that the whole story "will be published in AiG’s peer-reviewed Answers Research Journal."

I think that this was the point that I said, "... wait a minute."  "Peer-reviewed?"  By whom?  By other bible-toting, science-ignoring creationists?  I suppose, to be fair, that's what "peer" means in this context, as in telling a kindergartner that he needs to "interact with his peers" even though they are peers mainly in the sense that they aren't reliably avoiding wetting their pants on a daily basis.

Yet the AiG people do have scientists.  There is the aforementioned Andrew Snelling, who has a Ph.D. in applied geology from the University of Sydney.  Even more mystifying is Georgia Purdom, whose Ph.D. in molecular biology has not stopped her from making bafflingly wacky statements like "From the creation perspective, all bacteria were created 'good,'" presumably only becoming evil pathogens after the Fall of Adam.

And this, I have to admit, is the point when I am overtaken by incredulity.  How could people become sufficiently knowledgeable in geology and molecular biology (respectively) to receive doctorates, and simultaneously hold the belief that the entire universe is 6,000 years old?  And, furthermore, the belief that the science itself supports that view?  The whole thing is a little like my pursuing a medical degree while claiming that diagnosis and treatment should be based on the "Four Humors" model of human health. "I'm sorry, Mrs. Finkwhistle, but your stomach pains are clearly caused by an imbalance between your phlegm and black bile.  We're going to fix it by cutting your arm to let some blood out."

The sad fact, of course, is that like our crop circle "astronomologer" in yesterday's post, these people are serious.  So as much as I'd like to think that Ham and Co. are playing some kind of elaborate prank, not only on us skeptics but upon their tens of thousands of followers in the United States and elsewhere, it appears that they're sincere.  Hard though it is to fathom, they will now have a $1.5 million allosaurus skeleton with which to make their point to the gullible public.  And I can't help but think that Ebenezer the allosaurus would be ashamed if he knew his bones were being used for such a purpose.