Creationist lab research

Following hard on the heels of yesterday's post, wherein we looked at a creationist website and its unfortunate collection of misinterpreted and cherry-picked quotes in support, today we're going to examine the latest hijinks of the Adam-rode-a-dinosaur crowd.  Namely, a group of Dallas researchers who want to set out to prove "scientifically" that the biblical account is literally true.

The effort is headed up by Henry Morris III, who has 49 people on his payroll and an annual budget of seven million dollars and who is affiliated with the Institution for Creation Research.  And he apparently is earnest.  "Our attempt is to demonstrate that the Bible is accurate, not just religiously authoritative," Morris told reporters for the Dallas News.  "The rationale behind it is this: If God really does exist, he shouldn’t be lying to us.  And if he’s lying to us right off the bat in the book of Genesis, we’ve got some real problems."

Well, yeah, I can't argue with that.

But his staff members, of course, don't take that statement the same way as I do.  One of them, astrophysicist Jason Lisle, said, "I think everyone here is doing it because we believe in the message and we ultimately want people to be saved.  We want people to realize the Bible is trustworthy in matters of history and when it touches science.  And because you can trust it in those areas, you can trust it when it comes to how to inherit eternal life."

Which makes me scratch my head in puzzlement, mostly because I cannot conceive how you could be an astrophysicist and a biblical literalist at the same time.  Astrophysicists study objects that are unimaginably distant, some of them millions of light years away.  And if you believe that the universe and everything in it is only six thousand or so years old, then six thousand light years should be the furthest we can see -- because if there was anything more distant, its light wouldn't have reached us yet.

For reference, the Andromeda Galaxy, which you can easily see with binoculars on a clear night, is a bit over 2.5 million light years away.

Oh, wait, the speed of light might not be constant.  Or time might not be constant.  Or maybe god created the starlight already in transit.  Never mind.  (For a facepalm-worthy explanation of why stellar distances don't bother the creationists, go here.  Don't say I didn't warn you.)

So anyway, you have to wonder what these "scientists" -- and I use the word with some hesitation -- will come up with.  As I have commented before, when you assume your conclusion, magic happens.

But what places all of this nonsense in the realm of inadvertent comedy is a revelation broken over at the wonderful blog Why Evolution Is True, wherein we find out that an interview with the aforementioned Jason Lisle on the Dallas Morning News was green-screened in front of a fake lab and a whiteboard with a bunch of meaningless scribbles, including a bulleted list that says, and I quote, "Dino's, Ice, Rocket Man."  (Click the link to see the shot of the whiteboard; it's a hoot, and the site deserves your visit.)

So right from the get-go they're not exactly being honest about their "research," which should surprise no one.  There's no way you actually could do honest scientific research and come to these conclusions.  The evidence that the universe was created six thousand years ago is nonexistent -- making me curious about what they're doing with their seven million bucks annual budget other than paying their "scientists" to scribble random shit on the lab whiteboard.

Anyway, that's our news from the Genesis crowd.  I'm expecting the whole thing to fizzle, given the fact that there's pretty much nothing there to be studied.  On the other hand, expect a glowing report of success on the ICR's website to appear forthwith.  Given their history, they won't let a little thing like abject failure stop them.

Waving away the facts

I always get a kick out of the tactics-switching employed by science deniers when presented with hard data.

The young-earth creationists are an especially good example of this, because hard data supporting evolution abounds, and hard data supporting the conjecture that the Earth is 6,000 years old is basically non-existent.  So every time a new bit of evidence comes in that contradicts the Adam-and-Eve story or the Noah's Ark story, they have to engage in what a college professor of mine called "waving your arms around in the hopes that it will distract the person you're arguing with long enough that he forgets what the question was."

A good example is the recent discovery of relatively intact blood cells inside a 46-million-year-old fossilized mosquito, which the folks over at the Institute for Creation Research claim is evidence for a young Earth because we know that tissue can't last that long.  In fact, they claim (falsely), evolutionary biologists are ignoring "the protests of biochemists," implying that the biologists are stubbornly clinging to a model that the rest of science has discarded.

In no area has this hand-waving been more elaborate than in the world of the climate change denier.  First, of course, there were people who simply thought that the world wasn't warming.  Some people still don't, including noted climatologists Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, and Glenn Beck.  But as the data has poured in -- including the recent report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which stated, and I quote, "It is extremely likely that human influence has been the dominant cause of observed warming since the mid-20th century," and supported that statement with hundreds of pages of data -- the naysayers have had to tone down their rhetoric some.

This change, however, is far short of "sorry, we were wrong."  We still have nutjobs like Coulter, Limbaugh, and Beck, bloviating on Fox News and in The Blaze that the climate scientists are lying.  More interesting, though, are the ones who finally admit that the Earth is warming up -- but want it to be something other than carbon dioxide emissions that's causing it.

It's not the carbon, they say.  It's the sunspots.  Or an increase in solar output.  Or solar flares.  Or shifts in the jet stream.  Or, in a statement that should be recorded forever in the Annals of Wingnuttery, it could be... god.

I'm not making this last bit up.  In an interview on Reverend Kenneth Copeland's evangelical talk show Voices of Victory, rumored Texas senate candidate David Barton admitted that okay, the Earth might be getting warmer, but it's not because of carbon dioxide emissions, it's because god is smiting us for being naughty:

Floods are under the curse, tornadoes are under the curse, murderers, pedophiles.  Abortion was a seed to it that has grown into a murderous, bloody crop of child death. And it doesn't stop with abortion.

Whether that killing is through abortion or drugs or suicide or anything else, you open the door to the killing, it's got a lot of different manifestations.  But if you choose leaders who support killing, we've opened the door to all of it.

The Founding Fathers said, when does God judge nations?  Because he doesn't resurrect nations in the future.  He judges it right now.  There is no future for any nation.  When a nation does something bad, it gets judgement or it gets blessings right now in the present.  On the spot.  Which is why policies matter.  Because if you take a bad policy, you get judged for it on the spot.  If you take a good policy, you get blessed for it on the spot.

A door has been opened and we have said, 'You know, we embraced a wicked policy.'  Okay, then I'll take my hand of protection off your nation and whap, here comes storms like we've never seen before.  And here comes floods like we've never seen before.  And here comes the climate stuff that we can't explain.  All the hot times and all the cold times.  Too much rain and not enough rain.  And we're flooding over here and we've got droughts over here.

And today, we're saying, 'Oh, no, it's global warming.' No, we opened the door that lost God's protection over our environment and that's our choice.

So. Yeah. The climatologists "can't explain" it. The scientists have no idea what is going on. Instead, it's god going "whap."

I think what gets me about all of this is that so many Americans, listening to this nonsense, just seem to nod their heads and accept that what people like Barton are saying is true.  In my class, I see more teenagers bristling when I mention "climate change" than I do when I mention "evolution;" from what I've seen, the negative press on climate change has actually outpaced that on evolution.  (I'd like to think that this may be because the anti-science crowd has given up fighting evolution because they've recognized that it's a losing proposition, but that's probably premature.)

In any case, it's maddening.  But the data just keeps pouring in, such as the study just published yesterday in Science that concludes that the current rate of oceanic warming is greater than at any time during the previous 10,000 years.

Kind of hard to argue that one, isn't it?  Unless it's just god "whapping" us again.