There were well over 200 skeptics, and we caused a back-up at the “museum”. Despite the lines, the crowds, and the outright misleading information, people seemed to be having a good time. We were surrounded by people who were of similar ideas and thoughts on science and religion. Ironically, it was here in a place of religion over science that many of us felt as if we belonged. It is no secret that skeptics are a marked minority, for now. Many student and community groups have trouble breaking 50 members, many of whom are never really active. To be immersed in such a large crowd was a shock. Everywhere I looked, I saw the black and white SSA sticker. We didn’t have to make noise or rattle the cage or cause a stink; our mere presence was enough to get the message across loud and clear.

I would like to state that I’m not knocking the work that many like PZ do. Until skeptics are acknowledged as part of society, attention is necessary, even if it’s bad attention. We can’t let people pretend that we aren’t here. This wasn’t the case August 7th. The need to get attention was no longer needed, which left more room to be respectful and polite. I saw many skeptics quiet their snickers and move aside to let the families on vacation look at the exhibits. I know many would say they shouldn’t have to do that. Those people are right. They don’t. But they did. And although that might have meant they missed the chance to try to convert someone, they did something that is by far more important. The skeptics showed respect to the believers. They proved that we aren’t evil, rude, immoral hooligans; they proved that even when we hold the majority we still respect the minority.

PZ Myers is amazing at what he does. He can bring a small news story to the front of the internet is less than a day. Anything posted to his blog is circulated within minutes. His controversies bring attention to the skeptical movement. He even admits he loves causing so much outrage. There is no question that his tactics are needed at this point in time and, unfortunately, for some time to come.

I find it mildly amusing that the “bad cop” of the movement made so many “good cops” simply by visiting some obscure place in Petersburg, Kentucky. Bad attention is better than no attention, and can obviously have positive effects. Just remember that you also need enough good attention to balance it all out.

“For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse.” —Romans 1:20

Creationists often claim that the ‘beauty of creation’ tells us something about the nature of their god; and that we atheists are ‘without excuse’ for not believing in god after looking at the world around us. The closet creationists, the IDists, also claim that such wonderful design in the universe is proof of a designer, which to them is the Christian god.

Now, let us take a look at a beautiful organism that must have been created by god. The evidence for special creation of this organism is so convincing that I am seriously doubting my acceptance of evolution.

This wonderful organism, Cymothoa exigua, simply must have been created by a loving creator! This cute little tongue-eating isopod causes degeneration of the tongue of its host fish, the rose snapper, Lutjanus guttatus, and it then attaches to the remaining tongue stub and floor of the fish’s mouth by hook-like pereopods. In this position the isopod acts as a replacement to the fish’s missing tongue, and in a marvel of god’s sheer ingenuity, gets the first opportunity to devour incoming meals.

Praise god for creating such a wonderful organism! Through this, we see that god loves parasites, is sadistic, might have been on pot, should not be messed around with, and…oh…according to Christians, must be worshiped. If you don’t worship this sadistic god, he will damn you to hell, and considering his amazing creations such as the above, this is a threat that we should seriously consider! Praise the Lord! Praise the Lord for being a loving and sadistic god at the same time! Praise the Lord for giving us such awesome creatures that helps us marvel at the beauty of his creation!

Praise our Father in heaven, the loving Creator of gruesome organisms! Amen.

Case in point: The Expelled DVD.

Okay, the fact that Expelled is a pile of dishonest claptrap is old news. The drama by the IDists after getting epically humiliated countless times over the movie is also old news. Nothing could make Expelled even more of a failure, right?

Wrong, of course. When it comes to the IDists, nothing is too absurd or too unbelievable. Are you ready for the latest cringe-worthy truckload of FAIL regarding the Expelled movie? Get ready for it now….

The person who wrote the promotional blurb for the cover of the Expelled DVD is Ben Stein himself.

“I love this film!” –Ben Stein

Let that sink in for a bit, folks.

Ben Stein wrote the cover blurb for his own movie. Ben Stein wrote the cover blurb for his own movie. Ben Stein wrote the cover blurb for his own movie. Ben Stein wrote the cover blurb for his own movie. Ben Stein wrote the cover blurb for his own movie.

Can it get any more pathetic than that?

It seems like good old Stein couldn’t even get some church leader to promote his terrible movie, and he had to resort to the usual self-praising games just like his compatriot William Dembski, who wrote positive reviews of his own book at Amazon under different names.

Those IDists are like a train wreck that has greatly surpassed the point of being funny, but somehow we can’t seem to stop watching and cringing.

Oh, the failure! Oh, the comedy! Will it ever stop?

In an act that completely stunned those of us who are familiar with the often-intentional deceptive tactics that the creationists employ for Jesus to promote their dogma, (in)famous YouTube creationist VenomFangX apologized for filing false DMCA claims against another user.

For those who need an introduction, VenomFangX is a particularly clueless creationist who insists on clogging up YouTube with insanity that ranges from the idea that evolution is a tool of Satan to fawning screeds of Kent Hovind-worship. Despite being repeatedly called out for his outrageous and blatantly false claims, VenomFangX has adamantly refused to admit that his claims are all made out of hot air.

The story took a turn for the funny when VenomFang X decided that he did not like the series “Why Do People Laugh at Creationists?” made by another user, Thunderf00t. He proceeded to file false DMCA notices against Thunderf00t in an attempt at censorship. Thunderf00t decided that it was time to teach our creationist a lesson, and obtained proof that VenomFangX deliberately committed perjury in the process of filing the claims. Instead of suing the living daylights out of VenomFangX and having his account permabanned from YouTube, Thunderf00t decided to make a public example out of VenomFangX by making him – gasp – apologize and admit that he was lying all along.

Click here to watch VenomFangX getting owned.

Apparently, his devotion to Jesus did not stop VenomFangX from lying. Oh, the irony of it all!

00:42 – Ben Stein brings up the example of Dr. Richard Sternberg, who didn’t “tow the party line” and agreed to publish an article by IDer Stephen Meyer. Sternberg was subsequently forced to resign.

According to the Biological Society of Washington which had to bear the shame of that particular article being in their publication, Sternberg did not follow conventional procedure when deciding to publish the article, which was to have a board consisting of councilors, former and current presidents, and officers. But knowing that the Meyer article would not survive the rigors of peer review, Sternberg decided to personally fast-track the article to publication.

04:05 – Stein challenges Michael Shermer, using the moniker of “academic freedom” to contest that Stephen Meyer and Sternberg should have been allowed to publish their article without incident, and says that IDers are being persecuted.

I’ve already argued that Sternberg basically fell on his sword to look like a martyr.

05:11 – Dr. Caroline Crocker got fired from George Mason University for simply mentioning – not promoting – intelligent design. She is now blacklisted and is a persecuted individual.

Yes. She wasn’t promoting intelligent design. I’m sure some non-partisan independent source like… oh say the Washington Post will back her up…. right? The fact is that Crocker was pushing intelligent design in the classroom, and anything short of screaming at the top of your lungs “GOD DID IT” would be considered “neutral” in the eyes of Ben Stein.

“[...] this highly trained biologist wanted students to know what she herself deeply believed: that the scientific establishment was perpetrating fraud, hunting down critics of evolution to ruin them and disguising an atheistic view of life in the garb of science.”

She even resorts to Godwin’s Rule during the very lecture TO HER STUDENTS. No wonder she was disciplined; This was indoctrination and even if she wasn’t playing the victim card and crying “persecution!”, George Mason was completely justified in what it was doing.

“The students sat stunned. But Crocker was not done. From this ill-conceived theory, she concluded, much harm had arisen. Nazi Germany had taken Darwin’s ideas about natural selection, the credo that only the fittest survive, and followed it to its extreme conclusions — anti-Semitism, eugenics and death camps. ‘What happened in Germany in World War II was based on science, that some genes and some people should be killed,’ Crocker said quietly. ‘My grandfather had a genetic problem and was put in the hospital and killed.’”

06:35 – Neurosurgeon Michael Egnor asserts that doctors do not need to study evolution, and the Darwinists went on the attack, pressing him to retire or resign.

Right. The study of evolutionary biology in doctorates varies… and within that range is little or none at all. In any case, we’ve already shown in the case of Richard Sternberg how ID’ers love to play the victim card… and since Egnor still retains his post and cannot substantiate any of his claims, he’s probably just pissed off at a few bloggers.

07:20 – Professor Marks of Baylor University was forced by academia to shut down his research and return grant money for links to the intelligent design movement.

First of all, Marks is a professor of electrical engineering, not evolutionary biology – just to make things clear. And Baylor University did offer to keep the site hosted on the university as long as Marks changed the title from “Evolutionary Informatics Lab” to something less deceiving and if he disassociated the site from being affiliated with the university; even this evangelical magazine lauded Baylor’s compromise. But Marks, determined to be a martyr, refused, and the site is now hosted on non-university servers.

08:53 – Guillermo Gonzalez of Iowa State University was denied tenure because he claimed in his book the Privileged Planet that the universe had an intelligent designer. All this despite his “stellar research record” – no pun intended.

[If there are any astronomy majors who would like to add to this, please e-mail Edger]

“By assessing the elements that compose our planet, they argue, we can tell that it was designed for multicellular organic life. The presence of carbon, oxygen and water in the right proportions makes it possible for organic life to exist; and this combination of minerals and chemical elements exists only on Earth. [...] our planet is exquisitely fit not only to support life, but also to give us the best view of the universe, as if Earth were designed both for life and for scientific discovery.”

So not only organisms now, but the Earth itself? So no chance through naturalistic properties a planet in the Goldilocks Zone and of the right size could have formed in the Sun’s accretion disc? And I suppose that stars are incapable of generating heavier elements that are later expelled via a supernova or that the proportion of chemical elements can change on this planet or on other planets has changed over these billions of years to one of more or less accommodation towards multicellular life? This guy deserves to get laughed out of the scientific community, not just potentially reprimanded.

By the way, there is a video version of The Privileged Planet on Google Video narrated by none other than John Rhys-Davies, AKA Gimli and Treebeard of Lord of the Rings. And just when I thought I couldn’t lose any more respect for him after his appearance in the Sci-Fi Channel Original Movie “Chupacabra: Dark Seas” -

Yes, it’s El Chupacabra. On a fracking cruise liner. It’s that bad.

15:02 – Discovery Institute President Bruce Chapman claims that the notion of ID masquerading as religion is a “red herring” and that the Discovery Institute relies on scientific evidence and has persons of all religions, “including agnostics”. Intelligent Design is simply the study of patterns in nature that are best explained by an intelligent creator.

I suppose posting the image of your organization’s former logo won’t exactly help -

20:17 – As Newtonian Physics has been supplanted as well, Darwinism is an obsolete 19th century theory that is falling apart in the face of new evidence.

On the contrary, Classical Darwinism was based on very flawed Lamarckian principles that basically assert that if a physical adaptation confers an advantage, an organism’s offspring will have that adaptation enlarged or lengthened. This of course is ridiculous and was supplanted as the “engine” of natural selection by genetic mutations caused by environmental hazards and errors by the cell’s DNA polymerases. This mechanism is far more plausible than Lamarck’s, and only serves to strengthen the Theory of Evolution.

21:50 – Dr. Stephen Meyer states that it’s his job as a scientist to stop “one hand from clapping” and challenge the conventional theory of Darwinism. He claims that for every shred of evidence supporting Darwinism, there is a counterargument that supports ID.

That’s like saying that we should give the flat-earth “theory” equal time too… because the round-earthers have been monopolizing the science world, you know.

22:54 – Jonathan Wells claims that Darwinists are distorting the evidence and are “harming science”.

I wonder which group is going “hm, this looks too complex to undergo gradual genetic mutations, so I’m not going to attempt to try to find out how” and ignoring the scientific method.

25:15 – Mathematician David Berlinski claims that evolution is so vague about so many things that it cannot fit mathematical models like other theories and points to the vague definition of “species” as one of Darwinism’s fallacies.

There have been debates over the definition of species that lie well outside the realm of Darwinism; in fact, there are at least ELEVEN different ways to define and differentiate a species, and evolution directly involves only one of them. A straw-man argument… although this vagueness can allow for inter-species breeding, which can be a huge source of genetic variation which only works more to the detriment of ID/Creationism.

27:04 – Darwin was arrogant in titling his book “The Origin of Species” rather than “The Origin of Man”, and presumed to know more than he could prove.

A low-blow character attack that I wouldn’t put past this movie – not to mention that Darwin observed finches and not humans. No matter Darwin’s supposed arrogance, scientists are allowed to make bold hypotheses IF they are grounded in reality, but the latter element would be missing from the Creationist’s mind.

28:13 – Ben Stein incredulously points to a “Darwinist” documentary film that states that “perhaps the chemicals in the early Earth’s atmosphere were jump started by lightning”

Nonspontaneous, or thermodynamically unfavorable reactions such as the formation of the various compounds in the Miller-Urey Experiment (see below) NEED energy to work. Lightning is a perfectly good source, and Stein’s incredulousness stems from his own ignorance.

28:45 – The Miller-Urey experiment, where a chemical composition believed to mimic that of the early Earth’s atmosphere and catalyzed with lightning, failed to produce life.

A visual representation of the Miller-Urey Experiment

This is such a common straw man argument used by many ID’ers/Creationists. The objective of the Miller-Urey Experiment was NOT to create life, but to see if a simulation of Earth’s early atmosphere consisting of simply inorganic compounds along with an energy source (lightning) could generate organic compounds. It was NOT a failure, and in fact after just one week, amino acids along with sugars, lipids, and nucleic acid precursors formed. It is impossible to have this happen in today’s atmosphere because oxygen turns the atmosphere from neutral to reducing – of course, oxygen was nonexistent due to the lack of photosynthetic organisms on the early Earth.

The many simple organic molecules formed by the Miller-Urey Experiment in just a week

More to come… the entire movie is approximately 90 minutes long.

He triumphantly posts:

Blue: Intelligent Design
Red: Darwinian Evolution
Orange: Scientific Creationism
Green: Theological Evolution

Any questions?

Yeah, DaveScot. Because, you know, your average Googler would use the term ‘Darwinian Evolution’ when looking up information on evolutionary biology.

Good to know.Looking at the graph, we see ID getting lots of attention in 2005 at the time that the Dover trial was talking place and when the IDists were whining about being trounced in court. However, notice that there apparently has been hardly any interest in ID before Dover, and still hardly any after the dust from Dover settled. For all the books the IDists have been writing, for all the propaganda they have been spewing, for all their bleating over Expelled – people are simply not paying attention. Yes, the scientific community already knew long ago that ID was a crock, but apparently nobody else has been paying attention either. Funny how DaveScot chooses not to mention this (which would have been plainly obvious by even a cursory glance at the graph), don’t you think?

Now, let us use Google Trends to get a graph for people searching for ‘evolution’, which would obviously be the choice for someone looking for information about – gasp – evolution. To be fair, I will also use ‘creationism’ instead of ’scientific creationism’. We get this:

Ouch. That must hurt for DaveScot who just a moment ago was arrogantly asking for questions. When asked why he used the term ‘Darwinian evolution’ instead of just ‘evolution’, he responded:

ID doesn’t dispute all “evolution”. It disputes Darwinian evolution.

Just…wow. Despite the fact that the IDists have never been able to come up with an actual answer to what ID actually is and despite the fact that they have never been able to agree on what part of ‘evolution’ they actually accept (Behe accepts common descent and human evolution, Dembski does not, etc.), DaveScot is now fudging and shifting the goalposts again in an effort to have his cake and eat it too. What makes this whole situation even more hilarious is that based on the very graph that he posted, most people not only do not buy into the ID nonsense, they do not even seem to care! The IDists have failed at convincing the scientific community to give their unscientific dogma the time of the day and they have apparently not made much headway in the court of public opinion as well, even with all this fudging and hedging.

I am really curious as to what ‘evolution’ the IDists accept. The Lamarackian version?

He continues:

When I say Darwinian evolution I mean the term writ large accounting for the entire history of life on earth. Do I really need to tediously qualify it at every mention? I don’t think so. Most of the subscribers and audience here recognize by now that micro-evolution by chance & necessity is not being disputed. We don’t dispute facts. We dispute theory.

Uh…what? ID does not accept evolution that accounts for the history of life on earth but accepts micro-evolution, which somehow does not qualify as ‘Darwinian evolution’? Why wouldn’t micro-evolution qualify as being ‘Darwinian’, but somehow explaining the history of life counts as ‘Darwinian’ evolution? What is the imaginary barrier separating the two? At this point, we can safely say that DaveScot does not have a clue and is making it up and fudging even more in an effort to blunder along.

Maybe, DaveScot, it is time for you and the rest of your ID propagandists to stop failing. Just…stop.

Creationists also claim that evolution is somehow weakened by the fact that scientists often disagree on the classification of hominid fossils, failing to realize that in evolutionary theory, one would expect to find the fossils hard to classify, and that if the fossils could easily be placed into clear-cut categories, it would lend credence the creationist story instead.

Ed Brayton has a post up where he includes the following chart (by Jim Foley) that shows several of the major hominid specimens and how the major creationist writers classify them:

If the fossils are easily classified into ‘ape’ and ‘human’ categories, why do creationists disagree so much on how to classify them? If the lines dividing the fossils into neatly packaged categories are indeed as clear as they would like you to believe, why can’t the leading lights of ’scientific creationism’ see those lines and agree on them? Don’t the creationists realize that, contrary to their pet story, the difficulty of classifying the hominid fossils is due to the fact that the fossils are intermediates and not all-ape or all-human as they like to claim? Again, the confusion and disagreements are simply what we would expect if the evolutionary explanation, and not the creationist one, were true.

Without even realizing it, the creationists have made our point for us yet again. If only the ’scientific creationists’ were open-minded and scientific enough to fully comprehend the implications of this, they would realize that their creation myth has more holes than a porous sponge and decide to join the rest of us in reality.

As much as I love you all to death for making it clear why good science education is an absolute necessity, I have recently come across one of the most irritating straw man arguments I have heard from you, namely the misconception that evolution is atheism. I know that although not all of you think that this is the case, a lot of you do – enough to make me decide to write this quick note.

The simple fact is that you creationists need to understand that the theory of evolution has nothing to do with atheism or even religion for that matter. Failing to understand this makes us skeptical people want to smash our heads on our desks in frustration, and I don’t think that you want to be responsible for any injury sustained by another human being, do you? I have noticed that whenever I pose a seemingly simple question to you creationists along the lines of “Where in the theory of evolution does it say that there is no god?”, most of you start fumbling, fudging, preaching or quoting from the Bible. This does not help your cause, creationists. This makes you look really ignorant. Just so you know.

I’ll set it straight once and for all: The scientific theory of evolution is not atheism. Understanding the theory does not require atheism. The theory of evolution is silent on the issue of the existence of an active deity, and it is no different from the other scientific theories in that it does not make any claims about anyone’s pet religious ideas. The debate on the existence of an active deity is not a part of the scientific theory of evolution. Evolutionists do not bring God into the facts supporting evolution; rather, it is usually creationists who start the old straw man about evolution actually being ‘atheism’.

One creationist went as far as to tell me that evolution is atheistic because the theory of evolution does not mention that god was involved in the evolutionary process. However, this notion is false because the theory of evolution does not make a claim one way or another about the existence of a deity, and although the theory of evolution does not say that a supernatural deity directed the evolutionary process, it does not say that there is no active deity. The theological arguments about the existence of an active deity/personal god is not included in the study of origins simply because it is not science and because there is no evidence for the existence for such a deity directing the development of life.

Creationists, if you want to make a convincing argument that evolution equates to atheism because god is not mentioned in the theory of evolution, why don’t you claim that meteorology also equates to atheism because the meteorologists do not say that god is involved in directing wind patterns?

You insist on mentioning god and pushing your fundamentalist religious beliefs into everything, yet you creationists are the ones who claim that evolutionists are attacking religion. You are the ones viewing creationism as your religion, so perhaps you are merely projecting when you whine about how evolution is an ‘atheistic religion’.

So, get on with it, creationists. Either rage at those darned evil meteorologists for not mentioning how your god controls weather patterns, or stop hitting on biologists for not mentioning god when describing the scientific theory of evolution. It would make you look less ignorant, and less ignorance is something that would be good for all of us.

Love,

Shalini

However, most of the Jesusland maps arrogantly assume all of Canada is a bastion of social democracy and progressive liberal policies. I’m here to make the case that Alberta deserves a place with the big boys of evangelism and right-wing politics.

For those who don’t know, Alberta is a province (it’s like really big state, like Texas) in Western Canada, which has about 3.5 million people (about 10% of Canada’s population), two major cities (Calgary and Edmonton – both roughly a million people) and the second busiest highway in Canada (ref) connecting the two cities. There are several universities (U of Calgary, Lethbridge, Alberta, and Athabasca U), and a bunch of tech schools and colleges. Being still in Canada, we have public healthcare and gun laws. Also, Alberta (surprisingly) reported the second highest non-religious rate (after very liberal British Columbia) in the last census (ref).

Southern and rural Alberta however, features some of the largest Mormon concentrations in Canada, as well as large Baptist and Evangelical seminaries. Many of the conservative religions are growing fast in Alberta, while the traditionally liberal churches are dropping steadily. Those who reported “Apostolic”, “Born-again Christian” and “Evangelical” as their brand of Christian increased in number by 1.5 times since the past census.

In Cochrane, a small town outside of Calgary, there are 19 (active) churches for just over 14,000 residents. Cochrane also features one of Canada’s largest Baptist Seminaries. And to top it off at least one public school science teacher in Cochrane hangs posters in his class with slogans like “Be a somebody, God doesn’t make nobodies”, and answers questions on the creation of the asteroid belt with “some people believe God did it.”

This is a good point to let you know in grade six in this province, you learn “Sky Science” instead of astronomy. Reading this outline you think it may as well be astrology:

In science, our grade six class will be studying Sky Science. In the grade six curriculum for Sky Science students are expected to observe, describe, and interpret the movement of objects in the sky; and identify pattern and order in these movements. Students will explore a web page with previewed sites listed. It is with these sites students will create a database for each of The Planets. Students will also complete research on The Explorers – Space Travel and Celestial Bodies.

I realize that this isn’t enough to warrant Jesusland inclusion, so let me tell you more.

Our province didn’t vote for our current (super-)majority conservative government. 40% of people voted, and of them 53% actually voted conservative (note that’s about 21% of the population who voted for the government), yet the Conservatives now have 72 of 83 seats here. See George W. Bush and his Republican team are amateurs at stealing an election compared to our “Progressive” Conservatives. Oh, and in the last federal election we voted 60% Conservative, yet they swept every riding in the province. Now the media doesn’t even think a seat change is possible here.

But wait, there’s more. This is a government with the power to pass anything without worrying about debate, yet they still go behind closed doors and pass things like a raise in private school funding from 60% to 70%. I should also note, that many of our private charter schools funded by this are religious schools that discriminate against students and staff who won’t sign statements of faith. Further, we also retain a (publicly-funded) Catholic school board.

And if you’re worried about prayer in school, we’ve actually legislated that it’s allowed! Our provincial laws allow for “religious and patriotic instruction” and if you don’t want to participate you have to bring in a note (from your parents, because young’uns in this province can’t think for themselves) and then sit in the hall. And this isn’t just a wacky law that no one follows, it’s used to allow for the Lord’s Prayer to be said in a public school in Stettler (Eastern rural Alberta).

But even better, is if you take a short drive from Stettler you can find Canada’s first permanent creation museum. Quite the affront to one of the greatest excavations of dinosaur bones and most impressive museums in the world.

Luckily, a new Centre for Inquiry community (yes, we do spell Centre with an RE in Canada) in Calgary and is part of a larger movement to help combat this lunacy, but it’s only a start. So until the rationalists win, or I get run out of this province.

It is potentially arguable though, that we don’t have any transitional Earths between yesterday and today, and so the theory of the Earth still existing remains just that. It seems equally likely that the Earth was destroyed yesterday, but then instantly recreated by God an intelligent external agent this morning in the exact state that it would be had the Earth not been destroyed.

In fact, both the “theory” of the Earth still existing and the instant re-creation are equally valid, so both ought to be taught with equal time in our public schools. Otherwise we are denying our children access to the best science available.

In fact, I would wager that the idea of external re-creation is being dogmatically kept out of our schools and academic institutions by established Big Science. We must expose the ivory tower frauds for what they are. Support the Theory of External Re-Creation!