Trick or tract

Halloween is this Thursday, so you know what that means: pumpkin decorations and skeletons and ghosts everywhere, candy of all kinds for sale in the stores, people excitedly coming up with creative costumes for parties and trick-or-treating, and the extremely religious telling people that indulging in any of the above will doom them for all eternity.

This time the harbinger of fire and brimstone is none other than Ken Ham, who runs Answers in Genesis and is most famous for "Ark Encounter," a museum (to use the term loosely) in Grant County, Kentucky that has as its mission convincing people that a book documenting the beliefs of a handful of Bronze-Age sheep herders is the best resource we have for understanding science.  According to Ham, here's the way it all went down:

• The Earth is only about six thousand years old.  Any evidence to the contrary is either flat wrong or was put there by Satan to fuck with us.
• In a matter of a few weeks, Noah built a boat capable of holding two of each of the nine-million-odd species on Earth, using only hand tools and materials he could find in the desert.   [Nota bene: The Ark Encounter itself, supposed to be a modernized replica of the Ark, took several years and a few million dollars to finish.  And that was using huge work crews equipped with power tools.]
• The dinosaurs died because they missed getting aboard the Ark.  Oh, and before the Fall of Man, the dinosaurs were all peaceful herbivores.  T. rex, apparently, used his Big Nasty Pointy Teeth to munch on carrots.
• It rained enough to cover the entire land surface area of the planet, and after forty days all the water just kind of went away, presumably down a big drain in the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean or something.
• Afterwards, the kangaroos, dingoes, and wombats hopped, skulked, and waddled their way back to Australia unaided, conveniently leaving behind no traces of their thousand-mile journey.

But other than that, it makes complete sense.

Looks to me like there's an issue here with the lions.  Maybe they're gay lions, I dunno.  But even though I applaud them for coming out of the closet, it would still be problematic with respect to rebuilding the lion population, post-Flood.

So anyway, we're already on shaky ground, reality-wise, with Ken Ham weighing in on pretty much anything.  That didn't stop him from giving the devout some suggestions on how to deal with the upcoming Day of Evil.  "One way you can make the most of this once-a-year opportunity is by giving gospel tracts to children and/or their parents," Ham said.

Yeah, that'll make you popular in your neighborhood.

He also recommended buying (from his online store -- of course) some "million-dollar bills" printed with a picture of a T. rex on one side and a picture of the Ark on the other, with edifying messages such as:

• Have you ever lied, stolen or used God’s name in vain?  If so, you’ve broken God’s law.  The penalty for your crimes against God is death and eternal hell because God is holy and just.
• If you have engaged in lust, this is the same as committing adultery.  God sees you as guilty of sin.  The penalty of sin is death and eternity in hell.
• We broke God's law, but Jesus paid our fine.  Proving He satisfied God's justice, He rose from the dead.  Now God as Judge can legally dismiss our case!

Now wait a moment.  "Legally?"  What does that even mean in this context?  Isn't the whole point of the Bible that God can pretty much do whatever he damn well pleases, and we humans just have to suck it up and deal?  Seems like if God wanted to forgive us, he would have just done it, and not gone through the whole nasty crucifixion business.  So that "Jesus paid our fine" thing has never made a scrap of sense to me.  It's kind of like if your brother pissed your dad off, and your dad spanked you.  Then he says to your brother, "You're forgiven now."  When you understandably object to all of this, your dad says, "Well, I had to spank someone, right?"

In any case, I wouldn't throw away your bags full of Snickers bars and replace them with gospel tracts.  For one thing, it seems like a good way to get your house egged.  Second, warning trick-or-treaters about the dangers of lust seems to me to be targeting the wrong audience, even if you think lustful thoughts are evil, which I don't because that would mean that 99% of humanity is destined for eternal hellfire.

So have fun with your costumes and scary decorations and whatnot.  Honestly, it seems a lot more sensible than all the stuff Ken Ham is trying to get you to believe.  And that's even if you account for the gay lion couple.

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

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a really cool one: Andrew H. Knoll's Life on a Young Planet: The First Three Billion Years of Evolution on Earth.

Knoll starts out with an objection to the fact that most books on prehistoric life focus on the big, flashy, charismatic megafauna popular in children's books -- dinosaurs such as Brachiosaurus, Allosaurus, and Quetzalcoatlus, and impressive mammals like Baluchitherium and Brontops.  As fascinating as those are, Knoll points out that this approach misses a huge part of evolutionary history -- so he set out to chronicle the parts that are often overlooked or relegated to a few quick sentences.  His entire book looks at the Pre-Cambrian Period, which encompasses 7/8 of Earth's history, and ends with the Cambrian Explosion, the event that generated nearly all the animal body plans we currently have, and which is still (very) incompletely understood.

Knoll's book is fun reading, requires no particular scientific background, and will be eye-opening for almost everyone who reads it.  So prepare yourself to dive into a time period that's gone largely ignored since such matters were considered -- the first three billion years.

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

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!]

Odd eulogies for a great mind

The Earth lost one of its most brilliant minds last week -- British physicist Stephen Hawking, who expanded our understanding of everything from black holes to the Big Bang.

Hawking's death also attracted attention for another reason, which is that he was an outspoken atheist.  In an interview in 2014, Hawking said:

Before we understand science, it is natural to believe that God created the universe.  But now science offers a more convincing explanation. What I meant by "we would know the mind of God" is, we would know everything that God would know, if there were a God, which there isn’t.  I’m an atheist.

As far as death and the afterlife, he was equally unequivocal, something made more interesting still because of his fight against the depredations of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.  You'd think that if anyone would have engaged in some wishful thinking about the possibility of life after death, it would be a man who was confronted daily with evidence of his own mortality.  But Hawking said, "There is no heaven or afterlife for broken-down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark."

And of course, the spokespeople for the God of Love and Mercy didn't even wait until the poor man's body was cool to start crowing about how he was currently roasting in hell.  I must admit that two people who are frequent fliers here at Skeptophilia -- Franklin Graham and Ken Ham -- at least had fairly measured and compassionate responses.  Graham, who is best known for his fiery vitriol and anti LGBTQ stance -- said the following:

I wish I could have asked Mr. Hawking who he thought designed the human brain.  The designers at HP, Apple, Dell, or Lenovo have developed amazing computers, but none come even close to the amazing capabilities of the human mind.  Who do you think designed the human brain?  The Master Designer — God Himself.  I wish Stephen Hawking could have seen the simple truth that God is the Creator of the universe he loved to study and everything in it.

Ham wrote the following:

A reminder death comes to all. Doesn't matter how famous or not in this world, all will die and face the God who created us and stepped into history in the person of Jesus Christ, to die and be raised to offer a free gift of salvation to all who receive it.

Which, considering some of their statements on other issues, is actually pretty mild.

But the response from other quarters wasn't even that measured.  The site Catholics Online claimed that Hawking had experience a deathbed conversion, similar to the (also false) claims made about Christopher Hitchens when he died in 2016:

Before he died, Stiph [sic] Hawkins [sic] who did not believe in God requested to visit the Vatican.  “Now l believe” was the only statement he made after the Holy Father blessed him.

Well, that may have happened to "Stiph Hawkins," but it sure as hell didn't happen to Stephen Hawking.

But that was far from the most outlandish claim made upon Professor Hawking's death.  That award has to go to Mike Shoesmith, of the conservative Christian PNN Network, who said that Hawking's amazing beat-the-odds lifespan after his ALS diagnosis was because Satan wanted to keep him alive long enough to fight against the message of Billy Graham:

So, in 1942, that is when Billy Graham’s ministry really takes off, and who do you think was born in 1942?  Stephen Hawking.  Stephen Hawking comes from a long line of atheists — his father and all these people — so I believe the devil said, "OK, this guy was just born and I’m going to use this guy. This guy is already primed to accept my message that there is no God. He is already primed for it, he is going to be awash, immersed in atheism all his years as a child, I’m going to take over this guy’s life." 

I believe Stephen Hawking was kept alive by demonic forces.  I believe that it was the demonic realm that kept this man alive as a virtual vegetable his entire life just so he could spread this message that there is no God.

Then when Billy Graham died a couple of weeks ago, I guess Satan just said, "Okay, I'm done with you," and let Hawking die as well.

Me, I'm kind of appalled that there are people who would try to score points off any person's death, much less an august personage such as Professor Hawking.  The whole thing gives lie to their claim of being on the moral high ground by comparison to us ungodly heathen slobs.  Be that as it may, I'd rather remember Stephen Hawking for his brilliance, his contributions to our understanding of the universe, his modesty, and his sense of humor.  As evidence of the last-mentioned, I direct you to this compilation of Hawking's amazing comedic chops, and encourage you to put aside all the people who are using his life and death for their own purposes and have a good laugh with one of the greatest minds humanity has ever produced.  I suspect that Hawking would really prefer our sending him on his way with a smile rather than a eulogy of pious platitudes in any case.

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.

Subversion, suppression, and dissent

Of all the worrisome trends I'm seeing in the world in general, and the United States in particular -- and there are a lot to choose from -- what has me the most freaked out is the move toward intolerance of dissent and suppression of free speech.

Let's see what we have, just in the past week:

• The Justice Department prosecuted journalist Desiree Fairooz for laughing at a particularly absurd thing Attorney General Jeff Sessions said during his confirmation hearing.  Fairooz was found guilty and is now facing a possible one-year prison term.  For laughing.
• The FCC has launched an investigation of Stephen Colbert for his acerbic comments about President Donald Trump, which included a statement that "the only thing Donald Trump's mouth is good for is being Vladimir Putin's cock-holster."  Colbert is likely to be fined for obscenity.
• Across the Atlantic, Stephen Fry is under investigation by Irish authorities on charges of blasphemy -- which yes, is still a punishable offense in Ireland.  Fry was being interviewed, and was asked by the interviewer what he would say to God if he had the chance.  (Fry is a prominent and outspoken atheist.)  Fry responded, "I’d say ‘Bone cancer in children, what’s that about?’  How dare you create a world in which there is such misery that is not our fault.  It’s not right.  It’s utterly, utterly evil.  Why should I respect a capricious, mean-minded, stupid god who creates a world which is so full of injustice and pain?"  A complaint was lodged against Fry, and if convicted he could face a fine of €25,000.
• In Saudi Arabia, yet another atheist has been sentenced to death simply for being open about his beliefs.  Unless the courts intervene -- and it is unlikely that they will do so, given that Saudi King Abdullah declared atheists to be terrorists three years ago -- some time in the next few weeks Ahmad Al-Shamri is likely to be taken out into Deera Square in Riyadh, forced to his knees, and publicly beheaded with a sword.  Despite this, the Saudis are still our staunch allies, and (with no apparent awareness of irony) are members of the United Nations Human Rights Council.

And that's just in the last week.  The trend is increasingly toward jailing (or worse) anyone who speaks up, anyone who holds unpopular opinions, and (especially) anyone who ridicules the people in power.  As Voltaire put it, "To learn who is actually in power, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize."

At the same time, there is a huge push by the people who are on top to consolidate that power -- in part, by giving the impression that because there is dissent, they are the persecuted ones.  Here are a few recent examples of that:

• Ken Ham, the science-denying founder of Answers in Genesis and the driving force behind the "Ark Encounter" theme park, got his knickers in a twist over the demand by American Atheists spokesperson Amanda Knief that a bench with a plaque saying "Men who will not be governed by God will be governed by tyrants" be removed from government property.  But replacing it with a plain old secular bench?  That, to Ham, is a direct slap in the face to Christians everywhere.  "Atheists don't want freedom of religion," Ham snarled.  "They want freedom from Christianity.  They want their religion only in public... Atheists, like many against free speech, are intolerant & bullying people with their religion to remove Christian symbols...  I encourage people to educate the public that atheism is a religion, an anti-God intolerant religion out to impose their religion on culture."
• Lizette Franklin, of Kinross, Scotland, has launched a campaign against UK discount store Poundland for a promotion called "OMG," that puts the acronym on signs for price reductions.  Poundland says it stands for "Oh my goodness," but Franklin isn't buying it, and is trying to get Christians to boycott the store.  "To me it expresses the name of the Lord and can be taken as disrespectful," Franklin said.  "If it was to mean 'Oh My Goodness' they should have written it out...  I am an absolute fan of the store.  But when I saw this I was really in shock.  It was as if the name of the Lord has been made fun of and disrespected all over the store.  It is as if the name of the Lord was being used in vain to promote prices and this is revolting to say the least.  This is disrespectful to us as Christians and should be removed at once."
• State Representative Rick Saccone of Pennsylvania, who recently announced a bid for the U.S. Senate, has said that he was motivated to run for office because "God has set out a plan for us.  He wants godly men and women in all aspects of life.  He wants people who will rule with the fear of God in them to rule over us.  And if they don’t, then the evil side will take over and the government will control and run over the good people and so they have to stand up, that’s just part of it.  If you don’t have good people in government, then you’ll have bad people in government—and when bad people are reigning over us, the people will not be happy."  You may recall Saccone as the fellow who in 2012 sponsored a bill, which was ultimately (and fortunately) unsuccessful, to call that year "The National Year of the Bible" and to have "In God We Trust" posted prominently in all public schools.  Because, apparently, having it on our currency is simply not enough.

And so forth.  The general sense is that just being free to believe what you want is not sufficient; the symbols and slogans of that belief have to be everywhere, both private and public, or "religious freedom" is being trampled on.  Free speech is also great -- as long as that free speech doesn't criticize or ridicule the dominant paradigm.

There can be no challenge to the hegemony of the ones in power.

This, however, is the ideology of fascism.  If you can't criticize the government, if examining ideas is characterized as blasphemy, if (especially) the people in charge are convinced that they are ruling because it's the will of God -- you've taken a dangerous step toward totalitarianism.

We who believe in actual free speech can't let ourselves be cowed.  It's time to take some chances and risk vocal dissent.  We can't let the people running the governments in the world think that just because they can silence someone's voice, they've won.  

I'll end with a quote from George R. R. Martin, who put the words in the mouth of his iconic character Tyrion Lannister.  "If you tear out a man's tongue, you are not proving him wrong.  You are only showing the world that you fear what he might say."

Locking yourself into error

I got in a rather interesting -- well, I suppose you could call it a "discussion" -- with a Trump supporter yesterday.

It came about because of recent posts here at Skeptophilia that have been pretty critical of the president, his appointees, and their decisions.  After a few minutes of the usual greetings and pleasantries ("You're a liberal lackey who sucks up what the lying mainstream media says without question!", stuff like that), I asked her what to me is the only pertinent question in such situations:

"What would it take to convince you that you are wrong?"

"I'm not wrong," she said.

"That's not what I asked," I responded.  "I asked what would it take to convince you that you are wrong.  About Donald Trump.  Or about anything."

"What would it take to convince you?" she shot back.

"Facts and evidence that my opinion was in error.  Or at least a good logical argument."

"People like you would never believe it anyway.  You're swallowing the lies from the media.  Thank God Donald Trump was elected despite people like you and your friends in the MSM."

"And you still haven't answered my question."

At that point, she terminated the conversation and blocked me.

Couple that with a second comment from a different person -- one I elected not to respond to, because eventually I do learn not to take the bait -- saying that of course I have a liberal bias "since I get my information from CNN," and you can see that the fan mail just keeps rolling in.

Of course, the question I asked the first individual isn't original to me; it was the single most pivotal moment in the never-to-be-forgotten debate between Ken Ham and Bill Nye over the theory of evolution in February of 2014, in which the moderator asked each man what, if anything, would change his mind.  Nye said:

We would need just one piece of evidence.  We would need the fossil that swam from one layer to another.  We would need evidence that the universe is not expanding.  We would need evidence that the stars appear to be far away but are not.  We would need evidence that rock layers could somehow form in just 4,000 years…  We would need evidence that somehow you can reset atomic clocks and keep neutrons from becoming protons.  Bring on any of those things and you would change me immediately.

Ham, on the other hand, gave a long, rambling response that can be summed up as "Nothing would change my mind.  No evidence, no logic, nothing."

The whole thing dovetails perfectly with a paper released just two days ago in the journal Political Psychology.  Entitled "Science Curiosity and Political Psychology," by Dan M. Kahan, Asheley Landrum, Katie Carpenter, Laura Helft, and Kathleen Hall Jamieson, the paper looks at the connection between scientific curiosity and a willingness to consider information that runs counter to one's own political biases and preconceived notions.  The authors write:

[S]ubjects high in science curiosity display a marked preference for surprising information—that is, information contrary to their expectations about the current state of the best available evidence—even when that evidence disappoints rather than gratifies their political predispositions.  This is in marked contrast, too, to the usual style of information-search associated with [politically-motivated reasoning], in which partisans avoid predisposition-threatening in favor of predisposition-affirming evidence. 

Together these two forms of evidence paint a picture—a flattering one indeed—of individuals of high science curiosity. In this view, individuals who have an appetite to be surprised by scientific information—who find it pleasurable to discover that the world does not work as they expected—do not turn this feature of their personality off when they engage political information but rather indulge it in that setting as well, exposing themselves more readily to information that defies their expectations about facts on contested issues.  The result is that these citizens, unlike their less curious counterparts, react more open-mindedly and respond more uniformly across the political spectrum to the best available evidence.

And maybe that's what's at the heart of all this.  I've always thought that the opposite of curiosity is fear -- those of us who are scientifically curious (and I will engage in a bit of self-congratulation and include myself in this group) tend to be less afraid about being found to be wrong, and more concerned with making sure we have all our facts straight.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

So I'll reiterate my question, aimed not only toward Trump supporters, but to everyone: what would it take to convince you that you are wrong?  About your political beliefs, religious beliefs, moral stances, anything?  It's a question we should keep in the forefront of our minds all the time.

Because once you answer that question with a defiant "nothing could convince me," you have effectively locked yourself into whatever errors you may have made, and insulated yourself from facts, logic, evidence -- and the truth.

Dinosaurs, the Flood, and attempted murder

I have some friends who are currently trying to kill me.

At least, that's the only interpretation I can put on the fact that their Christmas gift to me was a copy of Dinosaurs for Kids by Ken Ham.  According to the back, amongst other things, we can learn from this book "the truth behind museum exhibits and flawed evolutionary timelines."

So my conclusion is that these friends were hoping that I would read this book and have an aneurysm, or possibly burst into flames.  Or both simultaneously.

But I'm pleased to say that their nefarious little plot did not succeed, which is why I'm here today to tell you about it, and to quote for you a paragraph from the final page of the book, to wit:

Follow the Truth!  While the Bible helps us to understand how and when dinosaurs lived, and even why they died, the Bible doesn't give us highly descriptive details about each and every one.  It gives us the big picture of history so we can develop a general understanding of these creatures.  Then we can use observational science to help us fill in some of the details and increase our understanding -- all the while knowing that nothing in real science can or will contradict God's Holy Word.

In other words, we can accept everything that science says about anything unless it tells us something different than what we want to hear.

But I decided to write about this today in Skeptophilia not only to celebrate my escaping a near brush with death, but because Ken Ham and dinosaurs are in the news for a different reason. Apparently Ham is pissed off at The Washington Post because they claimed that he thinks that dinosaurs were wiped out by the Great Flood.  So he dealt with this the way any reasonable, intelligent adult would; he posted a snarky comment about it on Twitter.

"Hey @washingtonpost," Ken tweeted, "we at @ArkEncounter have NEVER said Dinosaurs were wiped out during Flood-get your facts right!"

In fact he went on to elaborate that the dinosaurs didn't die in the Great Flood; they actually made it onto the Ark along with two (or seven, depending on which biblical account you believe) of each of the six billion-odd species on Earth, where they lived in cages until the waters magically went somewhere and Noah let them all go on the side of Mount Ararat, and became extinct afterwards because of other stuff, possibly because humans liked the taste of T. rex steaks too much.

Because that's ever so much more believable.

Just remember, children: Velociraptors used those nasty claws to peel oranges.

Note some other interesting features about the above illustration.  First, the Deinonychus appears to be levitating.  Maybe the Law of Gravity was also optional in the Garden of Eden.  Second, isn't it funny how Adam and Eve are always shown as naked, but there with strategically placed bushes to hide their naughty bits?

Like in the following photograph of foreplay with a voyeur dinosaur:

And the following, in which the lamb is clearly thinking, "Dude.  Find a different animal to block the view of your penis next time."

Implying all of the naked fun we could be having if the whole Apple Incident hadn't intervened.  But, after all, this is the kind of lunacy we've come to expect from Ken Ham et al., who think that a miscopied and mistranslated bunch of archaic manuscripts written by some Bronze-Age sheep herders are the best tool we have for understanding biology and interpreting human behavior.

So that's our dip in the deep end for today.  Me, I'm going to go have a second cup of coffee, and plot revenge against the friends who gave me the dinosaur book.  I think I'm going to have to work pretty hard to come up with anything near as clever, and that's assuming that reading Ham's book doesn't have some kind of delayed reaction side effects.  If you see a headline in tomorrow's news that says, "Upstate NY Man Bursts Into Flame, Dies," you'll know what happened.

Accidentally correct

One of the most wonderful moments in Douglas Adams's The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy occurs when Ford Prefect and Arthur Dent fire up the Infinite Improbability Drive, which allows a spaceship to pass through all points in space simultaneously.  Unfortunately, it has as a side effect altering the likelihood of every event in the vicinity of the ship.  As their ship is being zipped along, Arthur comes in with an alarmed look on his face.

"'Ford!' he said, 'there's an infinite number of monkeys outside who want to talk to us about this script for Hamlet they've worked out.'"

It's a standard way to explain the likelihood of extremely unlikely occurrences over long periods of time -- that something that exists at a very low probability (like monkeys randomly pounding keys on a typewriter and writing out the script to Hamlet) will eventually happen if you wait long enough.  It's like the random motion ("Brownian motion") of molecules, due to their thermal energy.  It's possible that all of them will, by chance, move in the same direction at the same time, and your cup of coffee will jump up off the table.  But as my long-ago thermodynamics professor said, "It is, however, extremely unlikely."

This all comes up because something that was incredibly unlikely just happened a couple of days ago.  Fasten your seatbelts and hold down your coffee cups:

Ken Ham said something that was scientifically correct.

Okay, he said it for the wrong reason, but he still was right, which kind of blew me away.  He was being asked about racism, and not only did he give the right general response ("racism bad") he said, "The answer to racism is believing the true history of humans in Genesis (as confirmed by science): we're all one race — not different races.  When politicians and media talk about 'races' of humans, they are actually fueling racism there's only one race, the human race...  There are no truly black or white people — all are basically brown (pigment melanin) — but differing shades because of genetic variability."

Which, if you leave out the "true history in Genesis as confirmed by science" part, is actually pretty much correct.  The things we lump together as "race" -- physical features such as skin color, eye color, hair color and texture, and so on -- are actually not very good indicators of degree of relatedness between different human ethnic groups.  Geneticist Richard Lewontin writes:

It is clear that our perception of relatively large differences between human races and subgroups, as compared to the variation within these groups, is indeed a biased perception and that, based on randomly chosen genetic differences, human races and populations are remarkably similar to each other, with the largest part by far of human variation being accounted for by the differences between individuals... 

Since such racial classification is now seen to be of virtually no genetic or taxonomic significance... no justification can be offered for its continuance.

Now, to be sure, race and ethnicity have a great deal of cultural significance.  But its biological significance is nil.  As my college genetics professor, Dr. Lemmon, put it, "There is more human genetic variability in one hundred-square-mile area of Tanzania than there is between a typical Englishman and a typical Japanese man."

Which makes sense, of course, given that East Africa is where the human race evolved.  It's unsurprising that we still see tremendous diversity there.  Add that to the suggestion (well supported by evidence) that Homo sapiens went through a major genetic bottleneck about 74,000 years ago -- some researchers believe that the survivors may have numbered less than 2,000 individuals -- and a lot of the diversity (and lack thereof) has a fairly natural explanation.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

It also makes claims about racial superiority/inferiority seem kind of idiotic, doesn't it?

So Ham is right, although for entirely wrong reasons.  He's correct that traits such as skin color are very variable; but the idea that the genetic variability just kinda happened is ridiculous.  There's a big difference in selective pressure on the genes that control melanin production if you live in (for example) Kenya as compared to living in northern Finland.  In Kenya, the main driver is protecting the skin from harsh sunlight, and thus higher melanin production; in Finland, it's UV-mediated vitamin D synthesis, and thus lower melanin production.

In other words, natural selection and evolution.

Anyhow, I found it remarkably like Adams's infinite monkeys when I read Ham's statement, given that most of the rest of what he believes has no scientific basis whatsoever, even on the level of general gist.  But, to look at it a different way: as my dad used to say, even a stopped clock is right twice a day.

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.

Ham salad

When I was young and foolish, I went through a period of messing around with Tarot cards.  They were cool-looking, and the book I got that explained their meanings was steeped with arcane and mystical terminology.  The whole thing seemed ancient and magical and terribly attractive.  The fact that I was still living at home, in a staunchly religious Roman Catholic family which disapproved of anything smacking of witchcraft, only gave it that much more of a frisson.

So yes, True Confessions time:  At one point in my life, I experimented with woo-woo-ism.  But don't worry, I didn't inhale.

What eventually pulled the plug on all of it was that when I talked about it with my friends, I started sounding ridiculous to myself.  I had to explain (when I was doing a Tarot reading for someone) that I was selecting a card to represent them based on their gender and appearance, and that this would establish a psychic connection between them and 78 pieces of glossy card stock with weird designs that I'd bought for ten bucks in a local bookstore.  And in the back of my mind was this constant mantra of, "How the fuck could that actually work?"  I was able to shout the voice down for a while, but sooner or later, I had to admit that Tarot cards were nothing more than a pretty fiction, and any accurate readings I did could be attributed to a combination of chance, my prior knowledge of the person being "read," and dart-thrower's bias.

The reason this all comes up is that the experience of having a sense that what you're saying is ridiculous is, apparently, not universal.  Some folks are able to spout utter bullshit and never flinch, never question it, never bat an eye at saying things that are so off the rails that you'd think it'd be immediately apparent.

Which brings us, as you might predict, to Ken Ham.

Those of us who expected Ken Ham to fade into well-deserved obscurity after basically having his ass handed to him in the debate with Bill Nye were fated to be disappointed.  He's still in full swing, still overseeing the building of the Ark Encounter Project, using a team of thousands of builders, architects, electricians, and plumbers in order to convince all of us that a 600-year-old man and his three sons did the same thing in a few weeks using only hand tools.

But of course, the evolutionary biologists aren't sitting still, either, and a lot of the creationists seem to sense that they're losing ground.  Recent polls have established conclusively that both church attendance and overall religiosity in the United States are on the decline.  As you might expect, this puts people like Ken Ham on the defensive, and when a couple of weeks ago there was a lot of publicity surrounding Darwin's birthday, he went on a word-salad rant.

He was interviewed on the radio show "Crosstalk," hosted by Jim Schneider, on VCY America radio ("VCY" stands for "Voice of Christian Youth.)  He had a lot to say, and he was not pulling any punches:

There is no such thing as separation of church and state.  The First Amendment doesn’t even have that first terminology in it, you know.  The Establishment Clause is about the state not establishing a church, but the state has established a church, it’s the Church of Evolution with Darwin as the high priest, if you like, and a lot of these teachers and professors as priests in this religion of evolution that they’re imposing through the schools.

Except for the following problem, of course.

But Ken never lets a little thing like evidence get in his way:

What we’ve got to understand is molecules-to-man evolution, that’s not observational science, that’s a belief, that’s a story that people made up to try to explain how life arose.  Christians have an account of origins in the Bible that God has given us.

Because that, apparently, is observational science.  Thus the extensive use of the bible in college chemistry and physics classes.

Ham continues:

The study of genetics, geology and biology confirms the Bible’s account of creation and the flood and the Tower of Babel, it does not confirm molecules-to-man evolution.  Molecules-to-man evolution is a fairy tale.

So let's see; you believe that after the kangaroos left the Ark, they hopped all the way back to Australia (presumably hitching a ride on the back of a friendly whale to cross the Gulf of Carpentaria), and you call evolutionary biology a fairy tale?

But he's not done yet:

There’s no evidence for evolution, so it’s not even a theory, it’s actually a belief, it’s someone’s belief, it’s a blind faith belief and there is no evidence for evolution. 

You don’t observe evolution.  When you look in the glass cases in museums, you don’t see evolution, you see fossils, you see creatures that live on the earth.  Evolution is pasted on the glass case, not in the glass case.  It’s man’s interpretation, man’s belief, man’s religion.

Which brings me back to an observation by Richard Dawkins, that you could get rid of every fossil ever discovered on the Earth, and the evidence for evolution would still be overwhelming.  So Ken Ham is half right; evolution isn't a theory any more.

It's a fact.

The truth is, evolution has been observed over and over again -- not just its results (genetic and morphological changes in populations), but the process of change itself.  (I wrote a post a while back on some observed examples of evolution, if you're curious about finding out more.)  But the problem is, none of that matters.  Ken has decided what he wants to be true, and after that, all he does is stick his fingers in his ears and go, "la la la la la la la, not listening."

But it does bring up the question of why it never seems to occur to him that what he's saying is nonsense.  He's articulate enough that I would imagine he has a decent IQ; so it's not that we're talking about someone who is simply incapable of understanding.  Yet he goes on and on, spouting complete bullshit, and that little switch never seems to flip -- the one that for most of us triggers the thought, "Wait a second.  That can't be right."

So I simply don't get it.  I can comprehend the desire a person might have for the universe to work a particular way.  I've been there.  In a minor way with my aforementioned dalliance with Tarot cards; in a much deeper and more devastating way when I was battling with myself over the truth of Christianity.  But in the end, I was forced where logic and evidence led me, whether I wanted to be or not.

For Ken, though, this never seems to happen.  However, I have to wonder if occasionally, in the wee hours, he wakes up and thinks, "Genesis says that night and day happened before the Sun was created.  How's that possible?"  But I guess he just takes a deep breath, remembers the White Queen's dictum of believing six impossible things before breakfast, rolls over, and goes back to sleep.

Sharing the misery

I guess it was too much to hope for that the opponents of marriage equality would say, "Oh.  I guess it's the law of the land now, and we lost.   Bummer."  And disappear gracefully.

Things are never that easy, are they?  The dire threats of what's gonna happen to us, now that we've allowed LGBT people to have the same rights that the rest of us have always had and completely take for granted, are already ringing from the rafters.

First we had the ever-grim Franklin Graham, informing us that now that the Supreme Court has legalized same-sex marriage nationwide, there's gonna be hell to pay:

I’m disappointed because the government is recognizing sin.  This court is endorsing sin.  That’s what homosexuality is – a sin against god...  Arrogantly disregarding God’s authority always has serious consequences.  Our nation will not like what’s at the end of this rainbow...  The President had the White House lit up in rainbow colors to celebrate the Supreme Court ruling on same-sex marriage.  This is outrageous—a real slap in the face to the millions of Americans who do not support same-sex marriage and whose voice is being ignored.

Graham wasn't the only one who keyed in on the whole rainbow thing.  Over at Answers in Genesis, Ken Ham took a moment away from building a new Ark to make the following cheery assessment:

The president did not invent the rainbow; God invented it, and He put the rainbow in the sky as a special reminder related to Noah’s Flood.  God had sent the global Flood in Noah’s time as a judgment because of man’s wickedness in rebelling against the Creator...  (T)he rainbow was set up by God as a sign to remind us that there will never again be a global Flood as a judgment.  But one day there will be another global judgment—the final judgment—and it will be by fire...  (W)e need to take back the rainbow and worship the One who invented the rainbow, and every time we see it be reminded of its true message.

Which brings up a point I've never understood.  How does the whole Flood thing lead anyone to think that Yahweh of the Old Testament is worthy of worship?  It's more the action of a genocidal maniac, in my opinion -- killing everyone and everything, infants and children included, because of some perceived wickedness that couldn't be fixed any other way.

Oh, but rainbows!  There are rainbows, so it's all okay!

Isn't this a little like saying, "Hey, dude!  I know I drowned your family and pets and livestock and all, but look, here's a pretty rainbow in the sky as my promise I won't do it again!"  *glowers*  "At least not that way.  I might still start a fire and burn them all alive.  But if you bow down and worship me exactly the right way, I might let you slide, this time."

Doesn't that make you want to shout hallelujah at god's infinite goodness?

But no one demonstrated quite so clearly the truth of the old definition of Puritanism as "the desperate fear that somewhere, people are enjoying themselves" as Wayne Allyn Root.  Root, you may recall, is the one who said that the only way that Obamacare was upheld by the Supreme Court is that the president blackmailed Justice Roberts.  And now, Root has made a rather bizarre pronouncement -- that same-sex marriage is wrong, because marriage isn't about happiness:

Marriage is the most difficult thing in the world.  I’m talking to you as someone who has been married 24 years, marriage is so difficult that if you do not go to church every Sunday and your whole life isn’t built on a bedrock faith in God and you don’t have kids and your whole life isn’t built around those kids and none of that’s in place and you’re married, the odds of you staying married are close to zero.  Divorces will now triple.  Gays will never stay married.  They just bought themselves the biggest bunch of unhappiness and legal bills that they could ever imagine.

"Go ahead, LGBT people," Root seems to be saying.  "I hope you're satisfied.  Now you get to be just as miserable as the rest of us."

You have to wonder what his wife thought when she read this, don't you?

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Besides just being ridiculous, his statement is actually exactly the opposite of the fact.  The highest divorce rates aren't among atheists.  The highest divorce rate of any of the main religious affiliations is the Baptists, at 29%.  (Atheists are at 21%, tying the virulently anti-divorce Catholics.)  Regionally the highly religious Southeast and Midwest have the highest numbers of divorces, with Tennessee, Alabama, Arkansas, and Oklahoma topping the list.  

Kind of funny, when the bible is even more unequivocal about divorce being sinful than it is about homosexuality.  Consider Luke 16:18: "Anyone who divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery, and whoever marries a woman divorced from her husband commits adultery."  And adultery, recall, was punishable by being stoned to death.

And yet, the ultra-religious aren't pressuring the courts to make divorce illegal.  Funny thing, that.

So anyway, I'm sure we haven't heard the last of this.  We'll be revisiting it frequently, not only when individual clerks of court refuse to issue marriage licenses to LGBT couples (something that has already started) but every time there is a natural disaster, at which point we'll hear all about how it's "god's wrath."

I wonder what god will pick as a symbol this time that he still loves us even though he's willing to smite the shit out of us at the drop of a hat?  After all, he's already used rainbows.  Maybe flowers, you think?  Flowers are nice.  "I'm sorry you deserved being beaten to a pulp," he'll say.  "Here, have a dozen roses.  All better now?"

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."