Disaster relief

Today we have three stories from the "I Swear I Am Not Making This Up" department, all of which revolve around various natural disasters.

In the first, we are featuring a repeat performance by Mark Taylor, the self-styled "Firefighter Prophet."  You may recall that Taylor was in Skeptophilia only two weeks ago, when he claimed that Satan's followers were using chemtrails to stop us from "tuning in to God's frequency."

This time, however, he's outdone himself, which is no mean feat given the fact that most of what he says sounds like he's spent too much time jumping on a pogo stick in a room with low ceilings.  Just two days ago, Taylor felt like he had to comment on the outbreak of tornadoes in the American Midwest, and tweeted the following:

Coincidence that Missouri was hit with Tornadoes right after they signed the abortion bill?  That same line of storms had Tornado warning in DC yesterday right before Trump gave ok for declass.  The enemy is trying to intimidate.  It won’t work, your [sic] a defeated enemy!  Victory!

So, Satan is sending tornadoes to intimidate the Christians (and also Donald Trump, who is about as Christian as Kim Jong-Un), and coincidentally sends tornadoes to places that already get lots of tornadoes, during the part of the year that's the peak season for tornadoes?  You know, intimidation-wise, I think Satan would be more advised to do something unexpected, like having a volcano erupt in downtown Omaha, or a blizzard in Miami, or a hurricane in Utah, or something.  Saying, "Fear my wrath!  I will make sure that what always happens to you continues to happen!" really lacks something, evil-wise.

[Image is in the Public Domain, courtesy of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration]

Next we have news out of Kentucky, where the "Ark Encounter" museum, designed to convince children that the mythological explanations of a bunch of illiterate Bronze-Age sheepherders somehow supersedes everything we know from modern science, has run into a legal snafu.  Apparently they are suing their insurance carriers because of refusal to pay out a claim...

... for damage from flooding.

I like to think of myself as a compassionate guy, but my exact reaction when I read this was:

HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA *gasp, snort, choke* HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA

So you need help covering the expenses of damage from a two-day rainstorm?  I thought this particular design was good for at least forty days and forty nights.  And besides, don't they call natural disasters like this "Acts of God?"

Seems a little presumptuous to expect compensation from something like that.

Or maybe, if you apply Mark Taylor's "logic" to this situation, it was just Satan trying to intimidate Ken Ham et al.  In which case Ham should just yell, "Your [sic] defeated, Satan!  Victory!" and call it good.

Last, we have an actual warning sent out by the Lawrence (Kansas) Police Department, that you should not try to stop a tornado by shooting at it.

Which you would think would be obvious.  After all, air is pretty impervious to bullets, and a tornado is basically just a big spinning blob of air.  Plus, there's the problem that since it's spinning really fast, if you shoot into it, you're likely to find that five seconds later, the tornado has flung the bullet right back at you.  After all, tornadoes are capable not only of massive devastation, but of whirling quite heavy objects up into the air, which is why if your house is hit by a tornado, it not only has to withstand the strength of the wind, but being hit by an airborne Buick.  Whipping a little thing like a bullet around, and hurling it right back at Bubba and his friends, would be child's play.

It's kind of amazing to me that anyone would have to make a point of telling people not to do this.  What's next?  "If you're trapped by a flood, beating the rising waters with a stick is not going to help."  "Do not attempt to stop a lava flow by spraying it with insecticide."  "You should seek medical help rather than trying to cure your diseases by drinking bleach."

Wait.  People actually did have to be warned about the last one.  Never mind.

You know, maybe I'm remembering incorrectly, but I do not recall bizarre stuff like this happening when I was a kid.  I'm thinking that once again we have evidence we're living in a giant computer simulation, but the aliens running it have gotten bored and/or drunk and now are just fucking with us:

"Let's see what happens if we make a narcissistic, nearly illiterate reality TV star lose the popular election, but win the presidency anyhow!" 

*aliens laugh maniacally and twiddle a few knobs* 

"Oh, hell yeah!  That was great!  How about, let's have people in England attempt to generate popular support for left-wing candidates by throwing milkshakes at politicians!" 

*aliens do tequila shots, more knob-twiddling, more laughter* 

*Ha!  Did you see Nigel Farage's face?  Oh, hey, I've got one.  Let's come up with a song that's super annoying, more annoying even than "Copacabana" and "The Piña Colada Song" put together.  Only we'll target it to kids, but we'll get everyone to play it because there'll be a really stupid video to go with it.  It'll be called "Baby Shark."  That and "do do do do do" will be about the only lyrics." 

*aliens fall off their chairs laughing*

Well, I suppose as long as someone is amused by how absurd humans are.  On the other hand, our species's reputation for idiotic behavior probably wouldn't be harmed any if Mark Taylor would just shut the hell up.

***********************************

In 1919, British mathematician Godfrey Hardy visited a young Indian man, Srinivasa Ramanujan, in his hospital room, and happened to remark offhand that he'd ridden in cab #1729.

"That's an interesting number," Ramanujan commented.

Hardy said, "Okay, and why is 1729 interesting?"

Ramanujan said, "Because it is the smallest number that is expressible by the sum of two integers cubed, two different ways."

After a moment of dumbfounded silence, Hardy said, "How do you know that?"

Ramanujan's response was that he just looked at the number, and it was obvious.

He was right, of course; 1729 is the sum of one cubed and twelve cubed, and also the sum of nine cubed and ten cubed.  (There are other such numbers that have been found since then, and because of this incident they were christened "taxicab numbers.")  What is most bizarre about this is that Ramanujan himself had no idea how he'd figured it out.  He wasn't simply a guy with a large repertoire of mathematical tricks; anyone can learn how to do quick mental math.  Ramanujan was something quite different.  He understood math intuitively, and on a deep level that completely defies explanation from what we know about how human brains work.

That's just one of nearly four thousand amazing discoveries he made in the field of mathematics, many of which opened hitherto-unexplored realms of knowledge.  If you want to read about one of the most amazing mathematical prodigies who's ever lived, The Man Who Knew Infinity by Thomas Kanigel is a must-read.  You'll come away with an appreciation for true genius -- and an awed awareness of how much we have yet to discover.

[Note: If you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds will go to support Skeptophilia!]

Quote miners

Quote mining is a particularly maddening way of misrepresenting a person's position.

This practice involves sifting through the writings of an opponent or opponents, and lifting quotes that, taken out of context, sound like they support the opposite viewpoint.  Here's a famous example, from Ken Ham's site Answers in Genesis, wherein he presents the following quote from Darwin's Origin of Species:

To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree.

Sounds like old Charlie was doubting his own theory to the point of throwing his hands up in despair, doesn't it?  But only if you stop there, and don't read the very next paragraph:

Yet reason tells me, that if numerous gradations from a perfect and complex eye to one very imperfect and simple, each grade being useful to its possessor, can be shown to exist… then the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection, though insuperable by our imagination, can hardly be considered real.

Much in the same vein, consider the crowing over a new analysis of paleontological evidence I saw on more than one anti-evolution website, accompanied by comments like "the evolutionists admit there's no way evolution can be correct!"  Here's the excerpted quotes:

How do the large-scale patterns we observe in evolution arise?  A new paper in the journal Evolution by researchers at Uppsala University and University of Leeds argues that many of them are a type of statistical artefact caused by our unavoidably recent viewpoint looking back into the past.  As a result, it might not be possible to draw any conclusions about what caused the enormous changes in diversity we see through time...   Because the resulting patterns are an inevitable feature of the sorts of groups available for us to study, Budd and Mann argue, it follows that we cannot perceive any particular cause of them: they simply arise from statistical fluctuation.

Well, one of the sites made the mistake of linking to the actual press release about the study, on Science Daily, so I went and read it for myself.   Needless to say, there's nothing about the study that calls into question evolutionary theory; what it's saying is that using available fossil evidence to estimate changes in the rate of evolution may not be accurate.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Ghedoghedo, Meganeura fossil, CC BY-SA 3.0]

But that's not how it's being cast.  The creationists are portraying this as the evolutionists waving a white flag and admitting that they've been wrong all along.  Which is disingenuous at best, and an outright lie at worst.

Quote mining -- and its statistical close cousin, cherry-picking -- smack of desperation, don't they?  It's almost as if they realize, deep down, that they have no legitimate, logical, evidence-based argument for their own stance, so they have to fall back on misrepresenting the opposing view.

The most frustrating part, though, is how confirmation bias enters into this.  Because my sense is that the people who are true believers never question whether the way the research is being portrayed is accurate.  I'd like to know how many of them, even when provided with a link, actually went and read the press release (much less the original, peer-reviewed paper).

I guess if you start out from the stance that your conclusion is true no matter what, you don't need to do any research, or (heaven forfend) reconsider your claim.

So that was my exercise in futility for the day.  And really, what Budd and Mann are doing is how science progresses; by people taking nothing for granted, questioning our base assumptions, asking the hard and controversial questions, and -- this is the most important part -- going where the evidence demands.

Which is the only honest way to approach understanding.

*****************************

This week's recommendation is a classic.

When I was a junior in college, I took a class called Seminar, which had a new focus/topic each semester.  That semester's course was a survey of the Book Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter.  Hofstadter does a masterful job of tying together three disparate realms -- number theory, the art of M. C. Escher, and the contrapuntal music of J. S. Bach.

It makes for a fascinating journey.  I'll warn you that the sections in the last third of the book that are about number theory and the work of mathematician Kurt Gödel get to be some rough going, and despite my pretty solid background in math, I found them a struggle to understand in places.  But the difficulties are well worth it.  Pick up a copy of what my classmates and I came to refer to lovingly as GEB, and fasten your seatbelt for a hell of a ride.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]

Flood rock of ages

I've tended to shy away from posting about creationists lately.

For one thing, I've said all I really intend to say on the subject, and it's extremely unlikely that either of us is going to change our mind significantly.  We come at knowledge from different angles, ones that really aren't reconcilable, so argument would be a complete waste of time.

For another, it's not like they've had a lot of new developments to contribute.  The bible doesn't change, sort of by definition, and any scientific discoveries are automatically ignored if they don't support young-earth creationism.  (Which, of course, is 99.9% of them.)

But every once in a while there's something that's so crazy, so off the deep end, that it almost seems like an inspired self-parody.  And I figure that anything that gives my readers a laugh, even if it's a rueful one, is worth writing about.

Which is why the article called "They Are Digging in the Wrong Place!" by Bodie Hodge that appeared over at Answers in Genesis is the topic of today's post.

It starts out in the usual fashion, that is, "you evolutionists sure are dumb."  He opens with a quote from the historical documentary Raiders of the Lost Ark, wherein a creepy Nazi guy ends up digging in the wrong place because he only had half of the inscription needed to decode where the Ark of the Covenant was buried.  Thus far, I was kind of yawning, because it seemed like it was more of the same-old, same-old.

But then he veers off into the aether with an argument that is as amusing as it is bizarre.

Um, Noah?  I think we might have a problem with the lions.

He explains that the big mistake we evolutionary biologists are making is that we're looking for fossils in the wrong place.  He correctly states that paleontologists look for proto-hominid fossils in strata dating from the Pleistocene and Pliocene Epochs, and for connections between dinosaurs and birds in strata dating from the Cretaceous Era and Paleocene Epoch.  So far, so good.  But then he said that this is wrong, because we're using the wrong timetable, and I'm not just talking about shortening everything up to fit in 6,000 years.

With no further ado, allow me to present Hodge's timetable of geological strata:

	Rock layer	Timeline
1	Recent	Post-Flood
2	Pleistocene	Post-Flood
3	Pliocene	Post-Flood
4	Miocene	Flood
5	Oligocene	Flood
6	Eocene	Flood
7	Paleocene	Flood
8	Cretaceous	Flood
9	Jurassic	Flood
10	Triassic	Flood
11	Permian	Flood
12	Pennsylvanian	Flood
13	Mississippian	Flood
14	Devonian	Flood
15	Silurian	Flood
16	Ordovician	Flood
17	Cambrian	Flood
18	Precambrian	Pre-Flood

And yes, he's saying what it looks like he's saying.  The Pre-Cambrian Era was before the Great Flood, so presumably dates from the time of Adam and Eve and company.  From the Pliocene on are strata formed after the Ark touched down on Mount Ararat and the wombats waddled their way from the Middle East back to Australia.

And everything else -- all other rock strata -- were formed in forty days during the Flood.

Hodge writes:

Biblical creationists presuppose the Bible’s truth and subsequently the true history of the earth—including Noah’s Flood.  Evolutionists have presuppositions too, albeit, false ones, but presuppositions nonetheless.  This is why when evolutionists look at Flood rock they unwittingly believe that the rock was actually laid down slowly and gradually over long ages.  I suggest they have been indoctrinated to believe such stories as gradual rock accumulation over millions of years which has never been observed or repeated.  Thus, the concept of millions of years is not in the realm of science but interpretation.

Yup, the creationists have presuppositions, all right.  They include the idea that the physicists, biologists, chemists, astronomers, and geologists -- who all agree on the Earth's age at about 4.5 billions years -- are wrong, and a bunch of illiterate Bronze-Age goat herders in a benighted desert east of the Mediterranean Sea are the only ones in the history of the world who got it right.

Okay, I know even commenting on this is a waste of time. Hodge is right about one thing (the only thing in the article that was within hailing distance of the truth, actually); we science-types have assumptions of our own.  Or, more accurately, one assumption, namely, that science works.  After that, we go where the data and evidence take us.

Which, trust me, is nowhere near "Flood Rock."

So I hope you got a good laugh out of Hodge's argument.  I did, too, although it did ring a bit hollow, as there are still people trying to shoehorn this nonsense into public school science curricula.  Which would mean that we have turned public schools into a place where students will find indoctrination into a mythological worldview instead of quality science education.

Talk about "digging in the wrong place."

Sinking the ark

I guess Ken Ham is finally seeing the handwriting on the wall with respect to "Ark Encounter," his $92 million temple to young-Earth creationism in Williamstown, Kentucky, given that the number of visits it's received during its first year is only about 60% of what he and his financial partners had predicted.

The Ark Encounter parking lot on a typical day

But if you thought that this realization was going to lead to some kind of epiphany on the part of Ham et al., vis-à-vis the fact that spending huge amounts of money to convince the general public that a rather perverse fairy story is science was not a great investment strategy, you are fated to be disappointed.  Because Ham doesn't blame himself for Ark Encounter's dismal performance.

He blames us atheists.  Of course.  Ham said:

Sadly, they are influencing business investors and others in such a negative way that they may prevent Grant County, Kentucky, from achieving the economic recovery that its officials and residents have been seeking.  Why so many lies and misinformation?  Simply because we are in a spiritual battle, and the intolerant secularists are so upset with such world-class attraction like the Ark (and Creation Museum) that publicly proclaim a Christian message.  They will resort to whatever tactics they deem necessary to try to malign the attractions.

No, Ken, honestly we see this as more of a "battle against anti-scientific bullshit," and I find the lack of interest the public is showing a welcome ray of sunlight in a year that has otherwise been pretty dismal.  And I'd love to claim responsibility for Ark Encounter's falling on its face, but I honestly think it's more that people deep down realize that the idea of a 600-year-old man and his family getting two of every kind of organism on Earth, including gorillas from Uganda and mountain lions from the Rocky Mountains, and keeping them all fed and happy on a boat whose dimensions would have (by one estimate I saw) given each creature 6.5 square millimeters of space to roam around in, followed by it raining enough to cover the whole Earth and then the water just kind of disappearing, is really fucking stupid.

But people like Ken Ham won't get within shouting distance of that as an answer, so they have to find something else to blame.  And if it's not the atheists, maybe it's... fake news:

Nowadays, it seems very few reporters in the secular media actually want to report facts regarding what they cover as news.  I’ve found that not only do these kinds of reporters generally do very poor or lazy research, they will actually make things up for their agenda purposes.

Yes, those evil reporters with their agenda purposes!  I'm quite sure that a reporter without an agenda purpose would have reported the above photograph as showing a completely full parking lot, much the way that if you looked at the photos of the less-than-impressive crowds at Donald Trump's inauguration just right, and tilted your head a little, he had the best-attended inauguration ceremony ever.

Keep in mind that all of this less-than-impressive performance was with a tremendous influx of public tax money.  Amazingly, legislators decided again and again to give their support to this project, despite the clear intent of the place to proselytize.  According to an analysis by the organization Church & State:

[Ark Encounter received] $18 million in state tax incentives to offset the cost of the park’s construction; a 75 percent property tax break over 30 years from the City of Williamstown (a town of about 3,000 near where the park will be located); an $11-million road upgrade in a rural area that would almost exclusively facilitate traffic going to and from the park; a $200,000 gift from the Grant County Industrial Development Authority to make sure the project stays in that county; 100 acres of reduced-price land and, finally $62 million municipal bond issue from Williamstown that Ham claims has kept the project from sinking.

If I lived in Kentucky, I would be raising hell over this.

Of course, there's a wryly funny side to the whole thing, and that's that Ham and his pals believe that the project was built because it was part of god's divine purpose and holy plan, and yet a few atheist bloggers, secular organizations, and reporters were apparently sufficient to thwart the Omnipotent Deity's intent.  Kind of calls into question god's ability to make stuff happen, doesn't it?  He's coming off more like one of the inept bad guys in an episode of Scooby Doo, whose plans to get rich off a haunted carnival came crashing down when Shaggy pulled off his mask.  I bet Yahweh is up there right now, scowling and muttering, "Ken and I would have gotten away with it, too, if it hadn't been for you crazy kids and your mangy mutt!"

Anyhow, my general feeling is that it couldn't have happened to a more deserving individual, and I wish him many more years of this kind of turnout.  Now we just need to make sure that this same load of nonsense doesn't end up in public school science curricula, in the guise of "religious freedom."

We may be winning this battle, but the war's far from over.

Ark afloat

So yesterday, Ken Ham's flagship project Ark Encounter opened with much fanfare, thus proving that it takes $102 million dollars and a crew of thousands six years to support the contention that a 500-year-old man and his three sons could do the same thing in a few weeks without power tools.

Ham, naturally, is delighted.  It hasn't been smooth sailing; he was plagued with funding problems and a lawsuit over discriminatory hiring practices when it was discovered that he was receiving tax breaks from the state of Kentucky while simultaneously requiring that anyone who worked there (including volunteers) had to be practicing Christians who believed in biblical inerrancy.  That he actually succeeded was something of -- dare I say it -- a miracle.

"Nobody’s ever attempted anything like this before," Ham said, in an interview with Forbes, "because God never has brought all of these kinds of people — literally thousands of people — together to make it happen, until now."

Not even once, four thousand years ago?  Really?  Wasn't that kind of your point?

"We are bold about the fact that we’re doing it because we’re Christians and we’re doing it for the Christian message," Ham said.  "But we’re not trying to force it on people.  What we want to do is challenge people to consider that what they’re seeing was true and feasible.  We want to get them to take the Bible seriously."

Ken Ham [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Because anyone with a shred of critical thinking ability would take seriously the conjecture that (1) there was enough rain to flood the entire Earth, followed by (2) all the water miraculously going somewhere ("away," presumably), followed by (3) all the sloths somehow ambling their way from Palestine back to the Amazon Rain Forest unaided.

And we won't even go into the mental gymnastics that it would take to believe that two of every animal species on Earth would fit on a 512-foot-long ship in the first place.

Ham is thrilled by the whole thing, as one might expect, but is not content to rest on his laurels.  He is -- according to Forbes -- planning on taking on as his next project building a full-size replica of the Tower of Babel, to commemorate another time that the God of Love decided to smite the shit out of his creations for getting uppity.  Apparently, though, Ham has to figure out how tall to build the thing, because that's never mentioned in the bible -- just that it was "tall enough to see heaven."

Which is pretty freakin' tall.  I bet he'll need an even bigger budget this time.

I'm happy to say, though, that for those of you who prefer to deal with reality, there is an exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City that has models of what scientists currently believe dinosaurs looked like (with no nonsense about trying to keep velociraptors on a boat for forty days and forty nights without their eating everything in sight).  And the current research is that many of them had... feathers.  Which kind of changes our perception of them, doesn't it?  No more scaly terrors, à la Jurassic Park; the current conception is more like a nightmarish cross between Godzilla and a chicken.  All of which, by the way, is borne out by the evidence, which includes fossilized feather imprints around dinosaur skeletons, not to mention actual feathers preserved in amber.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

So as counterintuitive as it is, the dinosaurs actually didn't go extinct.  We still have dinosaurs -- we just call 'em "birds."  Think about that next time you're feeding the chickadees.

Anyhow, if I'm going to blow some money on admission, I think I'm heading to New York rather than Lexington.  I don't have anything against fairy tales as long as they're labeled that way, and the fact that Ham et al. are trying to fool yet another generation of children into believing that Science is Evil and the Earth is 6,000 years old just grinds my gears.  Plus, I think just reading the labels on the displays would probably send my blood pressure through the roof, and heaven knows I don't need that.

A visit to the holy construction site

Is it just me, or is Ken Ham sounding a little... desperate these days?

I suppose it's understandable.  Just last year his discriminatory hiring practices lost him $18 million in tax write-offs for his Ark Encounter project, and that's gotta sting.  He's challenged the decision in court, but seems unlikely to win given that he has made a practice of only employing fundamentalist Christians like himself, and the project's website states right up front, "The purpose of the Ark Encounter is to point people to the only means of salvation from sin, the Lord Jesus Christ, who also is the only God-appointed way to escape eternal destruction."

So not much wiggle-room there.  And with the funds drying up, Ham has to start being a little creative with revenue-producing strategies, or the Ark is likely to founder on the rocks and sink.

Noah's Ark on Mount Ararat (Simon de Myle, 1570) [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

So now, Answers in Genesis, Ham's website, is promoting a new money-maker -- you can visit the site where the Ark Encounter is going to be for only $20 a head ($10 if you're a member of the Creation Museum).  Here's how it's described:

Visitors will have the thrill of witnessing firsthand the historic construction of Noah’s Ark, being built according to the biblical proportions described in Scripture. Our guests will safely observe the Ark from a viewing spot just outside the actual hard-hat area.  It will be their once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see an Ark being built, which will become the largest timber-frame building in the world... 

From this vantage point, Ark visitors will be able to watch the crews assemble the support towers this month, and over the next few months see the placement of lumber and timbers in sections called bents (or “ribs”) on the Ark foundation.

Who could resist that?  $20 a person to see a construction site!  People must be elbowing each other out of the way to be the first for a vacation opportunity like that.  Can't you just hear the conversation in the car?

"Daddy, when are we gonna get there?" 

"Soon, son.  Pretty excited, aren't you?" 

"Yeah!  I can't wait to see the concrete posts!  And the steel I-beams!  And piles of dirt!  This is gonna be the best vacation ever!  I'm so glad we cancelled our plans to go to Disneyland!"

*Dad grins at his son proudly* 

So, yeah.  Thrill-a-minute.  I bet they'll make nearly $20 off of this promotion.

You know, what gets me most about all of this is that Ham et al. are spending millions of dollars, employing a crew of hundreds of workers, and taking years to accomplish building an Ark in order to prove that a five-hundred-year-old man and his three sons did the same thing using only hand tools and the materials available in the Middle East in the Bronze Age, like "pitch" and "gopher wood."  Whatever the hell "gopher wood" is.  But you have to wonder if Noah ran into the same sorts of problems that Ham has:

"Hey!  I'll let you see the pile of lumber that we're building the Ark from if you'll give me twenty shekels!  Another ten and you can come visit the kangaroos we just brought back from Australia!  For only fifty, you can be a Gold Star Donor and have your name inscribed on one of the timbers!  For a hundred, I'll... hey, wait, where are you all going?  Get back here!  I mean it!...  I hope you like drowning!  Bastards!"

So that's the latest from the Forty Days And Forty Nights crowd.  The sad part is that there are a good many people with more money than sense who are backing the project, so I'm guessing that Ham will eventually build the thing and pronounce it a triumph for the biblical literalist viewpoint.  He certainly seems determined to keep going -- come hell or high water.

The loveliest of all was the unicorn

It is probably my own lack of tolerance, empathy, and compassion that makes me laugh out loud when I hear the "arguments" people use to support biblical literalism.

I mean, they can think what they want, right?  No amount of railing by the likes of me is going to rid the world of wacko counterfactual thinking, much as I'd like to live in my own fool's paradise in thinking I'm making a dent.  So why not just ignore 'em?

Of course, I can't, as you well know if you've been following this blog for very long.  The biblical literalists still have too powerful a voice in American politics to be dismissed as inconsequential.  It'd be nice if we were in a place where Bronze-Age mythology wasn't driving legislation and educational policy, but we're not there, yet.  That's why my laugh directed at two stories I ran across yesterday rings a little hollow.

In the first, we have Dr. Elizabeth Mitchell, who despite her summa cum laude bachelor's degree in chemistry and a medical doctorate from Vanderbilt, believes in unicorns because the bible says they exist.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Apparently, since the bible mentions unicorns, to disbelieve in them is to "demean god's word."  She cites Isaiah 34:7 ("And the unicorns shall come down with them, and the bullocks with the bulls; and their land shall be soaked with blood, and their dust made fat with fatness"), a passage that I not only find funny because of its mention of a nonexistent animal, but because of the phrase "fat with fatness."  I think this is a pretty cool use of language, and one that we should emulate.  We should say that a cow is not just big, it's "big with bigness."  The night henceforth will be described as "dark with darkness."  The ocean is "wet with wetness."

But I digress.

Mitchell says that the unicorn could have existed because there are other one-horned animals, such as the rhinoceros and the narwhal.  (Yes, I know that the narwhal's spike is a tooth, not a horn.  Mitchell doesn't let facts intrude on her explanation, and neither should you.)  Then she goes on to say that the unicorn could have been the aurochs, an extinct species of wild ox.

But oxen have two horns, you're probably thinking.  Mitchell says that this can be explained because if you look at an ox from the side, it looks like it has only one horn.  There's archaeological evidence of this, in carvings of oxen from the side "on Ashurnasirpal II’s palace relief and Esarhaddon’s stone prism," and lo, those carvings show oxen in profile with only one horn visible, as hath been revealed by Dr. Mitchell.

This ox also hath wings, which may be a problem for Dr. Mitchell's argument.  [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

You have to wonder how Dr. Mitchell would explain that the bible also says that bats are birds (Leviticus 11:13-19), that the Earth doesn't move (Psalms 93:1), and that in one place it says that men and women were created simultaneously (Genesis 1:27) and only a few verses later, it says that god made men first (Genesis 2:7).

I dunno.  Maybe the contradictions and inaccuracies look different if you look at them from the side.

The second story comes from our old friend Ken Ham of Answers in Genesis, who has his knickers in a twist over a resolution in Congress to consider February 12 as "Darwin Day."  Ham, of course, thinks this is a bad idea, and has given a countersuggestion; let's call February 12 "Darwin Was Wrong Day:"

Secularists are becoming increasingly aggressive and intolerant in promoting their anti-God philosophy.  Evolutionary ideas provide the foundation for this worldview because they seemingly allow mankind the ability to explain the existence of life and the universe without God.  As Christians, we need to be bold in proclaiming the truth of God’s Word to a hurting (groaning, Romans 8:22) world.  This year, on February 12, instead of celebrating Darwin’s anti-God religion, we can take this opportunity to show the world that Darwin’s ideas about our supposed evolutionary origins were wrong, and that God’s Word is true, from the very beginning.  Let’s make February 12 Darwin Was Wrong Day and point people to the truth of God’s Word.

Well, I'm not sure we secularists are "aggressive and intolerant" about evolution so much as we are "right."  To return to the point I began with, it's hard not to be intolerant when (1) you have mountains of evidence on your side, and (2) the people arguing against you are determined to have their views drive national policy.

A funny thing happens, though, when you put the Mitchell story and the Ham story together.  We have the former putting forth the loony view that all of the inaccuracies and contradictions in the bible can be resolved and explained (and the ones I mentioned are only scratching the surface), along with a demand that everyone believe that the bible is literally, word-for-word true anyhow (and should be used as a primary source in science classrooms).

It's to be hoped, however, that more and more people are realizing how impossible it is to reconcile the contradictions, and that therefore biblical literalism fails right at the starting gate.  Maybe that's why people like Mitchell and Ham are becoming more strident; they sense that they're losing ground.

Or maybe they're just "crazy with craziness."

Damned aliens!

I wonder sometimes how outrageous public figures have to become before people will stop following them.

Just last week, we had Rush Limbaugh claiming that the media coverage of the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 was a deliberate attempt to distract us from the problem of how President Obama is handling illegal immigrants.  "I don't want appear to be callous here, folks, but you talk about an opportunity to abandon the Obama news at the border?" Limbaugh said, in his radio show last Thursday. "And, no, I'm not suggesting anything other than how the media operates."

To which I have two responses:  (1) Trying to do anything at this point about your "appearing callous" is a bit of a lost cause.  (2)  Why haven't you lost your entire audience yet, you bloviating blob of blubber?

I had a similar reaction when I read yesterday about the latest pronouncement from Ken Ham.  Ham, the president of Answers in Genesis, is best known for having his ass handed to him in a debate with Bill Nye last year.  But that didn't stop him from moving forward with his project called "Ark Encounter" wherein he intends to build a life-sized model of Noah's Ark and demonstrate once and for all that there's no way it could have held pairs of every species on Earth.

Just a couple of days ago, however, Ham showed that he had not yet reached the nadir of his credibility, by offering up the opinion that we should give up the search for extraterrestrial life because any alien life out there is going to hell regardless.

Here's the direct quote, from an article he wrote over at AiG's website on Sunday:

I’m shocked at the countless hundreds of millions of dollars that have been spent over the years in the desperate and fruitless search for extraterrestrial life.  Life did not evolve but was specially created by God, as Genesis clearly teaches...   

Christians certainly shouldn’t expect alien life to be cropping up across the universe.  Now the Bible doesn’t say whether there is or is not animal or plant life in outer space. I certainly suspect not.  You see, the Bible makes it clear that Adam’s sin affected the whole universe.  This means that any aliens would also be affected by Adam’s sin, but because they are not Adam’s descendants, they can’t have salvation.  Jesus did not become the ‘GodKlingon’ or the ‘GodMartian’!  Only descendants of Adam can be saved.  God’s Son remains the ‘Godman’ as our Savior.

Once again, I have two responses:

(1)  You're spending millions of dollars to build a replica of Noah's Ark, and you have the balls to criticize NASA for wasting money?

(2)  So in your view, a loving and all-powerful god might have created intelligent extraterrestrial life, but in his infinite mercy, he's making certain that they are all tortured forever in the Lake of Fire for something some dude and his wife did here on Earth?

I don't know about you, but this makes his pronouncements on why we should all abandon science and become young-earth creationists seem lucid and rational.

So, my advice: shut up, Ken.  If your ignominious thrashing at the hands of Bill Nye wasn't humiliating enough, you're now becoming a laughingstock.  I'll end with a quote that has been variously attributed to Will Rogers and British politician Dennis Healey:

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.

Fair and balanced nonsense

I suppose by now that I should have expected something like this, but still, I was surprised when I heard that the creationists are now asking for airtime for their views, so that the media can be more "fair and balanced."

It's another jab at Neil deGrasse Tyson and Cosmos again, of course.  Tyson is, as I mentioned in a recent post, unabashedly supportive of the evolutionary model, as well he should be; if you accept the methods of science at all, the amount of evidence in favor of evolution (and the complete dearth of evidence for any other competing model) leaves you little room to escape.  But that doesn't stop people from disbelieving, and it certainly didn't stop folks like Ken Ham from squalling like mad when Tyson called creationists simply "wrong."

What I didn't expect, though, was that the creationists were going to turn things around and demand that they have equal air time for their views, in the interest of fairness.

The idea jumped into public media a couple of days ago when Danny Faulkner of Answers In Genesis and the Creation Museum appeared on The Janet Mefferd Show.  Mefferd opened the topic up by asking if Cosmos will "ever give a creationist any time," and Faulkner answered that "creationists aren’t even on the radar screen for them, they wouldn’t even consider us plausible at all."

Mefferd said in response that Tyson and the writers of Cosmos weren't playing fair.  "Boy, but when you have so many scientists who simply do not accept Darwinian evolution," she said, "it seems to me that that might be something to throw in there, you know, the old, 'some scientists say this, others disagree and think this,' but that’s not even allowed."  (To listen to an audio recording of the interview, go here.)

There are two problems, of increasing seriousness, with this statement.

First, would you care to name for me the "so many scientists" who do not accept evolution?  There might be a few non-biologists, perhaps.  Amongst biologists, I think you'd be hard pressed to find more than one or two serious doubters -- and I would argue that even those, if they indeed exist, inhabit some sort of fringe-y twilight zone of biological research.  I.e.: I suspect they're cranks, not serious researchers.  At this point in the game, a biologist doubting evolution would be a little like a chemist doubting the periodic table.

A second, and more troubling problem, is that Mefferd and Faulkner think science needs to be "fair."  Wherever did they get that idea?

Now, don't get me wrong; in many circumstances, fairness is a good thing.  I try to deal with my students fairly; I expect to be treated fairly in business; I expect politicians to engage in fair dealings.  In any kind of human social interactions, fairness forms a good base guideline for behavior.

But science... science isn't fair at all.

Why not?  Well, partly it's because the universe isn't fair either.  There is absolutely no reason why the universe has to behave in such a way as to make me happy.  On a simplistic level, I would love it if magic was possible, if there was life after death, if there were friendly aliens who paid us visits periodically (I'm thinking of the wonderful final scene in Star Trek: First Contact).  Hell, while I'm wishing, I wish I could fly.  But there is no reason to believe that just because I'd like something to be a certain way, that the universe must conform to my wishes.  And more to the point, if science finds out different -- e.g., if controlled studies show that my magic wand can not make my dog levitate -- then science isn't being unfair to me.

It's simply showing me how things are.

[image courtesy of photographer Des Colhoun and the Wikimedia Commons]

So in a way, I misstated the fact; it's not that science isn't fair, it's that it's kind of above considerations of fairness and unfairness.  It deals with what is demonstrably real, and leads our understanding where the evidence takes us.  If that's a different place than where we'd hoped to be, well... too bad, so sad.

And there is no reason in the world that any responsible media outlet should feel compelled to give the creationists equal time, any more than I should be encouraged to teach the Theory of Magical Dog Levitation in my science classes.  Creationism and Magical Dog Levitation are both supported by equal amounts of hard evidence (i.e., zero), and therefore to give time to either one wouldn't be fair, it would be idiotic.

But of course, the media is not controlled by what is scientifically sound, it's controlled by what gets viewers (and therefore, what gets sponsors and makes money).  Witness what has happened in the past few years to the This Really Has Nothing To Do With History Channel.  So I wouldn't be at all surprised if we see a series coming down the line called The Six Days of Creation.

At least I can feel some joy in the knowledge that whoever they'd get to narrate it wouldn't be nearly as badass as Neil deGrasse Tyson, because he seems to have cornered the market on badassery these days.

Nye vs. Ham, and the futility of debating creationists

Most of you probably heard that last month, Bill Nye made a short film called Creationism is Not Appropriate For Children, lambasting creationists for holding back the progress of science in America, and for brainwashing children:

Evolution is the fundamental idea in all of life science, in all of biology... it's very much analogous to trying to do geology without believing in tectonic plates.  You're just not going to get the right answer...  Once in a while, I get a person who says, "I don't believe in evolution."  And I say, "Why not?"  Your world just becomes fantastically complicated if you don't believe in evolution.  Here are these ancient dinosaur bones... here is radioactivity, here are distant stars that are just like our star except at a different point in their life cycle.  The idea of deep time, of billions of years, explains so much of the world around us.  If you ignore that, your world view just becomes crazy, it becomes untenable.  And I say to the grown-ups, if you want to deny evolution, if you want to live in your world that is inconsistent with everything we observe in the universe, that's fine.  But don't make your kids do it, because we need them.  We need scientifically literate voters and taxpayers in the future, we need engineers.

Well, of course the creationists weren't going to take that lying down.  First, Dr. David Menton and Dr. Georgia Purdom of Answers in Genesis crafted a video responding to Nye, claiming (without any apparent sense of irony) that Bill Nye doesn't understand science.  (If you watch their video, note that Purdom has a Ph.D. in molecular genetics, which I'm not sure isn't the thing about all this that appalls me the most.  How someone could achieve doctoral level work in molecular genetics without accepting evolution seems to me not just astonishing, but nearly impossible.)  Purdom explains that she teaches her young daughter about evolution "so that she can see the problems with it, which include a complete lack of a genetic mechanism which allows organisms to gain genetic information and go from simple to complex over time."

So far, other than Purdom's Ph.D., none of this is particularly surprising.  After all, we knew that Nye was a scientist, and we know that anyone working for Answers in Genesis has already decided that a Bronze-Age document written down in pieces three-thousand-odd years ago supersedes all of modern science.  But now, Ken Ham, CEO of Answers in Genesis, has jumped in... and (brace yourself for the shock) he also claims that Nye doesn't understand science:

Bill Nye has an agenda to teach children not to believe in God, to teach them that they came from evolutionary processes, that they came from slime over millions of years.  In fact, Bill Nye doesn't really understand science...  He says that we shouldn't teach children evolution, because we need engineers... What does engineering have to do with evolution?  Bill Nye wasn't a scientist, he studied mechanical engineering, and he worked for Boeing at one point.  I hope he didn't apply his evolutionary principles to any of Boeing's airplanes, because if he did I wouldn't want to fly on one.  I wouldn't want to fly on anything that was built by chance and random processes.  What does he think, that all the parts are just laid out on the runway, and they just come together or something?...  Bill Nye is implying that if we want to teach children creation, that it's really a form of abuse...  I'll tell you what is abuse, what is inappropriate for children, it's when you take generations of children, and teach them that they're just animals...  Who determines right and wrong?  You do.  Who determines good and bad?  You do.  What is marriage?  Whatever you want to make it.  It's people like Bill Nye who are actually damaging the kids.  Creationists are telling children that they're special, that they're made in the image of God, and giving them a basis for knowledge, that we can trust the laws of logic, that we can trust the laws of nature...  (Nye) doesn't teach children how to think critically, he doesn't teach them how to think about science, he wants to teach them what to think.  If evolution was true, it would be totally obvious to kids.  The way to convince kids about evolution is that you've got to do what Bill Nye the Humanist Guy wants to do.  You protect them from hearing anything about creation, you totally indoctrinate them, you brainwash them, you don't teach them to think critically at all.

And once again, my general reaction was: *yawn*.

But now, the people at Answers in Genesis have thrown down the gauntlet and challenged Nye to a debate.  Dr. Georgia Purdom, the aforementioned creationist molecular geneticist, stated in an interview in the Christian Post that a debate between Nye and Ham "could be held at a public university, using an impartial moderator.  I would think that someone as polished and charismatic as Mr. Nye would relish the opportunity to debate a creationist.  In addition, since Nye will soon be hosting a new science program, I would think he would like to see the publicity generated by his participation in a major public debate."

And here's where I sat up and took notice.

There is no way in the world Nye should accept this offer.  Evolutionists have nothing to gain by debating with creationists, and it has nothing whatsoever to do with being afraid we're going to lose.  (Note that this hasn't prevented me, more than once, from doing just that; in fact, I was once a panelist on a debate between young-earth creationists, intelligent-design proponents, and evolutionists.)  The reason that Nye would be a fool to accept this challenge is that it implies that there is something to debate -- that scientists and creationists actually accept the same ground rules, the same methods, the same standards for evidence.  When you start out from the standpoint of saying, "I believe what this book says because this book says it, it's the word of god," you have trumped any other argument right from the get-go.  You have abandoned the principles of scientific induction and the basis of logical argument.  A "debate" with you would be about as productive as a discussion between two people who are speaking mutually unintelligible languages.

It's easy enough to get needled by the arrogant certainty of the creationists, by their steadfast blindness to mountains of evidence that would be absolutely convincing in any other field.  It's tempting to think, "If I just present it a different way, they'll understand."  The fact is, any debate with creationists only serves to legitimize their views -- and to further convince the public that there is doubt in scientific circles that evolution occurs.  As such, Nye should respond to Purdom, Menton, and Ham with one of his characteristic little smiles, and say, "No, thanks.  But do let me know if you ever come to your senses.  Then we can talk."