Creationists lose in Florida

Hahahaha! You can also read the full story in the Tampa Tribune.

What happened? You can start with the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

The satirical religious Web site asserts that an omnipotent, airborne clump of spaghetti intelligently designed all life with the deft touch of its "noodly appendage." Adherents call themselves Pastafarians. They deluged Polk school board members with e-mail demanding equal time for Flying Spaghetti Monsterism's version of intelligent design.

"They've made us the laughingstock of the world," said Margaret Lofton, a school board member who supports intelligent design. She dismissed the e-mail as ridiculous and insulting.

Hooray for Pastafarians! Where nonsense parades as sense, strip the emperor's clothes.

Behe's semantic acrobatics

At the Dover trial and in every interview I have read or heard with Michael Behe, I am consistently taken by his ability to twist himself into a pretzel of verbiage. On the one hand, he believes in a God who imbues us with non-mechanical ultimate purpose but then turns around and uses mechanical and technological metaphors - "little trucks and buses" - to describe the biochemical operations of our biology or end up defining science in such a way that would allow astrology to be considered a science. Poor guy. He chronically muddies the waters so that he can't tell up from down.

Now he's done a blurb for Cardinal Christoph Schönborn's new book, Chance or Purpose? Creation, Evolution and a Rational Faith. I have no idea if the book is any good (I doubt it), but going by Behe's blurb, I am going to say that I'm intrigued because I'm confused.

Behe wrote,

Science cannot speak of ultimate purpose, and scientists who do so are outside of their authority. In Chance or Purpose? Cardinal Schönborn shows that the data of biology, when properly examined by reason and philosophy, strongly point to a purposeful world.

—MICHAEL BEHE, Professor of Biochemistry, Lehigh University, Pennsylvania and author of Darwin's Black Box

Read that one more time. See that? Let me make it obvious:

Science cannot speak of ultimate purpose [but] Cardinal Schönborn shows that the data of biology, when properly examined by reason and philosophy, strongly point to a purposeful world.

One more...

Science cannot speak of ultimate purpose [but] the data of biology strongly point to a purposeful world.

AAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!

So it's the job of a priest to tell us what the meaning of biology is even though science can't speak of ultimate purposes. That is absolutely stupid and twisted double-speak. And hasn't it been Behe who has tried to give us ultimate purpose by showing us the "purposeful arrangement of parts?" This guy needs an editor for his brain.

At least the book has a cool cover with Golden Mean images:

It's okay not to know

Perusing through the various and sundry articles of the last couple of weeks, I came across "Laws of Nature, Source Unknown" by Dennis Overbye in the New York Times. It brought to mind my post from yesterday on how creationists overlay our ignorance with what only seems like an answer. Because we don't know why water freezes into hexagonal crystals we are to infer that God did it. Ultimately, that's a non-answer too because it doesn't explain anything at all. In fact, it's a curiosity killer.

Overbye concludes

When I was young and still had all my brain cells I was a bridge fan, and one hand I once read about in the newspaper bridge column has stuck with me as a good metaphor for the plight of the scientist, or of the citizen cosmologist. The winning bidder had overbid his hand. When the dummy cards were laid, he realized that his only chance of making his contract was if his opponents’ cards were distributed just so.

He could have played defensively, to minimize his losses. Instead he played as if the cards were where they had to be. And he won.

We don’t know, and might never know, if science has overbid its hand. When in doubt, confronted with the complexities of the world, scientists have no choice but to play their cards as if they can win, as if the universe is indeed comprehensible. That is what they have been doing for more than 2,000 years, and they are still winning.

It is with at least the hundreds of years of evidence since the scientific revolution that we have come to trust the scientific method. It is for this reason that I continue to do so and readily, if sometimes uncomfortably, admit, "We don't know." As David Gross is quoted in the article, “I have more confidence in the methods of science, based on the amazing record of science and its ability over the centuries to answer unanswerable questions, than I do in the methods of faith (what are they?).”

May we all have such obituaries

How would you react if your words and actions were in some way responsible for someone's death? What if, through your power as a writer, you had convinced someone to fight for a cause to which you had "grown coarsened and sickened by [its] degeneration[?]" The war in Iraq has now taken over 3,800 American soldiers' lives.

It is with this no uncertain knowledge that Christopher Hitchens wrote A Death in the Family for Vanity Fair. It is a heart-wrenching travel through the Hitchens' conscience for having been one of the people who persuaded Mark Daily to join the military to fight in Iraq. Daily was killed in January by an I.E.D. The article pays tribute to Daily and his family and
shows us that we pay, each of us, for the lives spent pursuing our common future.

I was having an oppressively normal morning a few months ago, flicking through the banality of quotidian e-mail traffic, when I idly clicked on a message from a friend headed "Seen This?" The attached item turned out to be a very well-written story by Teresa Watanabe of the Los Angeles Times. It described the death, in Mosul, Iraq, of a young soldier from Irvine, California, named Mark Jennings Daily, and the unusual degree of emotion that his community was undergoing as a consequence. The emotion derived from a very moving statement that the boy had left behind, stating his reasons for having become a volunteer and bravely facing the prospect that his words might have to be read posthumously. In a way, the story was almost too perfect: this handsome lad had been born on the Fourth of July, was a registered Democrat and self-described agnostic, a U.C.L.A. honors graduate, and during his college days had fairly decided reservations about the war in Iraq. I read on, and actually printed the story out, and was turning a page when I saw the following:

"Somewhere along the way, he changed his mind. His family says there was no epiphany. Writings by author and columnist Christopher Hitchens on the moral case for war deeply influenced him … "

So it begins. Read on.
---

Standing

Men and women stand amidst mosque, squalor, ordinance, the din and numb of the occupation.

All have sweat above their lips they lick while they moved through Mosul,

Blisters on their feet aggravated by sand that gets into everything from boot to eye to Apache rotor;

Small ticks at the corners of their smiles that made their noses move one way or another;

Particular turns of phrase and the cocking of their heads that they started mimicking from their fathers when they were teenagers long after they stomped around on their dad's feet, pretending to be big;

Letters stained with hope from their girlfriends in Illinois drinking beer in fields, in Pennsylvania watching Spiderman in dark living rooms seated on stacks of pillows, or in South Carolina fretting through the night ensnared by the certain uncertainty of death's proximity to their beloved.

Each tear streams down the face of each of us,

Our Mississippi or Allegheny,

Our Tigris and Euphrates,

Carrying our beliefs for those men and women standing for something that may rest on nothing.

History and the study of belief

There's a great article up by Van A. Harvey over at the Council for Secular Humanism tilted Religious Belief and the Logic of Historical Inquiry. Those interested in the emergence of the "historical-critical method" and how post-modernism has actually aided in the toxic inerrantist interpretations of the Bible will probably like it.

It was inevitable that the methods of critical historical inquiry would be applied to the Jewish and Christian Scrip­tures and that there should emerge what was shorthandedly called "the historical-critical method." This was not so much a single method but a series of questions that could only be answered by using critical historical thinking.

* When, by whom, and for what purposes were the texts written?
* What sources did the authors use? What do the texts tell us about the self-understanding of the community that preserved them?
* To what extent are the historical narratives in the texts reliable and constitute historical knowledge?

Just raising these questions threatened, naturally, those Jews and Christians who believed the Bible to be divinely in­spired and, therefore, historically inerrant. And, since the answers to those questions contradicted traditional answers, the fundamentalists in these religions attacked what they called "the higher criticism." The Roman Catholic Church es­tablished a Biblical Commission to assure that no Roman Cath­olic scholar would advance any historical conclusion incompatible with church doctrine. But it was not long before liberal Protestant and even some Roman Catholic scholars saw that it was futile to resist the new biblical scholarship, and so they appropriated it, with some even arguing that it placed genuine Christian faith on a sounder historical footing. Lay conservative Christians clung to the traditional view of inspired Scrip­tures, but historical-critical studies of the New Testa­ment became the standard components in the curriculum of the most prestigious theological seminaries and university-based departments of religion. This more or less remained the situation until the past half-century. But there has suddenly emerged a new set of challenges to the critical historical inquiry of religious texts. These challenges come not from fundamentalists and evangelicals but from academics and intellectuals of various sorts. Partly under the influence of new philosophical and hermeneutic theories loosely grouped under the unimaginative rubric of "postmodernism," there has been a backlash against the historical-critical method

I am regularly reminded when I read the anything-goes kind of relativism in po-mo nonsense that, all epistemologies being equal, the methods of science, art, and religion are equivalent. It's the kind of intellectual acrobatics that enables the likes of Phillip Johnson to argue with a modicum of respectability. He can stand before a crowd, quote Richard Rortey, blather on about different "creation narratives," and pretend that what he has to say is relevant. As Harvey states it,

These various philosophies and hermeneutical theories have now emboldened religious conservatives and apologists to claim that their interpretations are as intellectually legitimate as those of the historical critic. Everyone has his or her own interpretations, the argument goes.

Not surprisingly, the solipsistic left following Thomas Kuhn (mentioned in the article), so bent on undermining the stability of texts and narratives, turned its pens to religion and science, declared them equally in/valid. The world is relative. The findings of science are mere shades cast from the lights of social lights.

That is toxic bullshit. You show me a relativist at 30,000 feet, in an fMRI, or taking biaxin and I'll show you a hypocrite.

Finally Harvey makes a fine point that bears quoting in full here, and it is a version of the kind of over-tolerance that religious people expect to have extended to their religious views.

But, when Christian apologists eager to defend the uniqueness of the Christian perspective use the term presupposition, they generally refer to something specific, like supernatural intervention in history. In the former case, the force of the word presupposition is quite different from that when it is used by the historical relativist. In this case, the Christian is not using the term to refer to a set of general assumptions that apply across the board of history but, rather, to exempt one narrow stretch of history from all those general assumptions that historians of various stripes use in their historical inquiries. The religious apologist is using the term to justify the suspension of all those assumptions we normally use when interpreting our experience and those of others. The point is that the alleged sacred events are so unique that no normal presuppositions apply.

There is on a cultural level an expected suspension of all those assumptions when we even discuss religion with one another and certainly in public. That people hold the beliefs that they do about the nature and order of the universe may well be there own business, but when they choose to act on those beliefs in the public sphere, they have entered into a much larger conversation, one where they need to supply us with the evidence, the proof in the pudding. It is precisely this free-ride card in too much conversation that needs to end and that our normal presuppositions must apply.

More on ScienceDebate2008

Two scientists who are also representatives, Vern Ehlers, R-MI and Rush Holt, D-NJ, on opposite sides of the aisle have banded together to promote ScienceDebate2008. As I've been saying for the whole existence of this blog, we need to move forward with leaders who show some competence with science and technology. This means understanding not just one's ethical intuitions, but the facts and findings and processes of science and technology and their implications for the future of the U.S. and the world.

NEW YORK - A Republican and a Democratic member of the United States Congress, who are each also scientists, are leading an effort to push for a presidential debate on science and technology policy.

Congressman Vern Ehlers, R-MI, and congressman Rush Holt, D-NJ, have agreed to co-chair the non-partisan initiative, called ScienceDebate2008.com, whose signers also include fourteen Nobel laureates, several university presidents, other congresspersons of both parties, the president of the Academy of Evangelical Scientists and Ethicists, and the heads of several of America’s major science organizations, including the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

“Advancing science and technology lie at the center of a very large number of the policy issues facing our nation and the world - issues that profoundly affect our national and economic security as science and technology continue to transform our lives,” the two said in a joint statement. “No matter one's political stripe, these issues pose some of the most important pragmatic policy challenges the next president will face.”

Read more at ScienceDebate2008.

Judge Jones article at Jewish Light Online

Check out the here at JewishLight.com. He spoke largely on judicial independence.

Jones said, "It is alarming to me that the public is being fed this kind of misinformation about the role of the judiciary. Judges should not rule on the basis of who their political benefactors were or are, but on the basis of the law." He added that the increased vitriolic attacks on judges for their rulings, such as when former Rep. Tom DeLay of Texas threatened to "hold federal judges accountable for their rulings" could have a chilling effect.

Jones added that many judges at various levels in the case of Terri Schiavo ruled on the basis of family law, rather than the political approach taken by the U.S. Senate which intervened to make it a federal case. "State courts usuallly decide family law cases. After Terri Schiavo died after her feeding tube was removed, Tom DeLay issued his warning that judges would be held accountable for their rulings."

Thank you Judge Jones for defending science and the Constitution.

Flakey arguments from creationists

Microscopic Masterpieces: Discovering Design in Snow Crystals over at the Institute for Creative Creation Nonsense Researchis a masterpiece of mistaking the regular processes of nature and covering them with divine intent.

The article takes us on a very brief tour, from Kepler to today, of the how water arranges in varying hexagonal patterns at different temperatures. There is no shortage for us to wonder at about water. After all, without it we would die.

But the conclusion is very odd:

Science always asks the questions of how and why. But in this case an even more basic question comes into play--how can order be explained in the context of a random, chaotic universe? In other words, if we don't believe in a Creator God, the universe should not be ordered. Where is this structure coming from?

The notion that our belief in a Creator God has any bearing on the matter is rather odd. Beyond that, why shouldn't a universe without a Creator God be totally random? Why should it necessarily be anything but that which it is?

"Where is this structure coming from?" begs the question. Before actually determining that there is an intelligent creator of the universe, it has assumed its existence and its character. Though the inference seems reasonable that there might be an intelligent creator behind the universe, there is no evidence provided by snowflakes that there is an ordered God behind the universe. The problem is that the universe isn't "random and chaotic" alone. Creationists indulge rather heavily in stating universal chaos in one breath and then flipping it over to incredible order on the other. Let's state the obvious: matter arranges itself according to the laws of physic. Why shouldn't water form into hexagonal crystals? There is no reason. Victor Stenger points out, "[M]odern cosmology provides several naturalistic scenarios by which the universe began as an uncaused quantum event violated no laws of physics." What else should we expect the universe to do? Be in total chaos and generated from principles that no longer hold in its order? If it were in total chaos, it would not exist and neither would we. If it were more ordered, we wouldn't exist either. Simply stated: it is what it is. If there is something outside of it and beyond it, we have no verifiable knowledge of it at all.

Apparently, the mundane qualities of the universe make the knock-down argument case for a God as follows:

Because we observe order and design in the universe, as exemplified by the six-cornered snowflake, doesn't this demand a Creator who supplies this order and design? Kepler basically concluded this when he proposed his term "formative faculty." That is, a basic tendency was built into the very atoms and molecules of our world to produce this order. The characteristics of the oxygen and hydrogen atoms were designed by God to combine in ways that produce the hexagonal close pack pattern and form the six-cornered snowflake. Unlike linear molecules like carbon dioxide, the water molecule is asymmetric. It is that asymmetry that favors the hexagonal arrangement.

Let's think about 244plutonium, which occurs in nature in very small amounts, by saying,

Because we observe disorder and chaos in the universe, as exemplified by the six crystal phases of plutonium "between room temperature and its melting point" and its tendency to "catch fire spontaneously in the presence of water vapor", doesn't this demand a Creator who supplies this disorder and chaos? Bernstein has basically concluded this when he proposed that the idea that we understand plutonium is "the most dangerous idea." That is, a basic tendency was built into the very atomic structure of our world to produce this potential nuclear holocaust.

There are at least three problems with arguments about a universe ordered perfectly made for humanity.

First, they assume a perfect order or idea of perfection that requires a God. Because there is a lot of a priori thinking, it mandates saying that even though we've explained a great deal of phenomena, that which we don't understand (like why ice crystals freeze in hexagonal shapes or, even if they'd rather not think about it, plutonium's total unpredictability) gets attributed to God. Name that logical fallacy. 3...2...1...God of the gaps, a.k.a. the argument from ignorance. We don't why it does this so God must have done it. Why not Thor? The ancestors? Bast? Zeus? The great Juju spirit?

Second, it assumes that the universe was in fact made for us. This seems a very odd belief considering that we...I don't know...can't live in basically the whole universe. We can't live on or in most of the earth.

Third, it's not a parsimonious explanation of the facts because it piles unnecessary material on top of plausible explanations and ignorance and violates Occam's Razor.

I can't agree more that the universe is something to be gawked at in marvel. That snowflakes forms are endlessly mutable around a basic pattern is indeed striking. But that obviously mindless physical processes contain intelligence is to strain even a naif's credibility.

Robotech + Iron Maiden = Victory

Ron Paul is an anti-evolutionist too

It's not a theological question dude. It's scientific and your silent creator has nothing to say about it. This notion of proof is inappropriate - that's a mathematical concept. We're talking evidence. Tons on one side - evolution - and none on the other - the case for theistic evolution or creationism.
Ron Paul shows that he hasn't a firm grasp on the word theory as it relates to science. As defined by the Oxford English Dictionary, a theory is "[a] scheme or system of ideas or statements held as an explanation or account of a group of facts or phenomena; a hypothesis that has been confirmed or established by observation or experiment, and is propounded or accepted as accounting for the known facts; a statement of what are held to be the general laws, principles, or causes of something known or observed." The modern theory of evolution accounts for huge numbers of facts - biogeography, the fossil record, the radiation of species, morphology, embryology, genetic relatedness and distance between species. It makes predictions that pan out and does so consistently.
So it's good to know that we've had four presidential candidates who have publicly avowed their ignorance. Two down. Two to go.

For some nice dishes from Dispatches from the Culture Wars on Paul's anti-evolutionism go here, for his Confederate beliefs go here and his adoring fans in the Neo-Nazi movement see here.
This is not to say, before the Ron Paul acolytes try to crucify me, that I am calling Ron Paul a Nazi sympathizer. But his ultra-pro Tenth Amendment stand inevitably crushes the Fourteenth Amendment. I don't buy it.
What is it with Texas?

Could Texas say "No!" to the master's degree in magical thinking?

It's looking a shred more likely given "Faith-based science:
State recognition of a creationist institute's degree would undermine science teacher credentials" in the Houston Chronicle.

Visitors to the Institute for Creation Research Web page can quickly deduce that the organization, founded in California and recently transplanted to Dallas, is a Christian group dedicated to spreading the doctrine of divine creation of the world and challenging the teaching of evolution as fact in public schools.

An advisory committee to the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board recommends that the group be allowed to confer master's degrees in science education for teacher candidates. This indefensible action would be the equivalent of allowing an institute of faith-healers to issue advanced medical degrees. It would devalue the credentials of all science teachers and misrepresent to the public the capabilities of teachers with questionable diplomas.

The institute's statement of purpose leaves no doubt about its mission. According to its founders, it was formed "to equip believers with evidences of the Bible's accuracy and authority through scientific research, educational programs, and media presentations, all conducted within a thoroughly biblical framework."

It's a degree in anti-scientific blindness. As I've said repeatedly, a public school is no place for religious indoctrination. I'm really hoping that the Lone Star state wakes up from the Levitical hopes of Don McElroy and his cabal and veers off of the track of creationist propaganda.
But judging by these irrelevant or bogus claims by some Texans in the Star-Telegram, who knows what might happen? When these kinds of hearsay and conjecture still exist...

Darwin's evolution is unacceptable because it doesn't, and can't, present indisputable evidence. That missing evidence -- transitional fossils -- was merely assumed. Is this science?
The idea that random mutations can add up to a new species is beginning to haunt Darwinists when confronted with the facts of DNA.

...what are we to do other than declare that they are full of it and keep moving forward. These views on the fossil record were abandoned within 10 years of the release of The Origin of Species because the fossil record is clear and has been reinforced ever since. And the facts of DNA are doing precisely the opposite of what this reader says. Every geneticist can show this.
Seriously, when you think about it, if we are so special and made in the image of God, then why are we made of the exact same stuff as every other living thing? Does that mean God builds himself with DNA?
Of course there isn't any real answer to that because it's a bogus question. And those who would try to answer it seriously in a science class need to find new employment. It's a non-question.

Dawkins on Canadian TV

...and...

The D.I. attacks claims are a century out of date

John West of the Disco Institute has written an op-ed on Tampa Bay Online. It's a set of more or less hack arguments to prop up the validity of religion in the public sphere and its role as an equal to science.
To be clear, while many of religion's claims have little factual or logical validity in politics, just because a view is religious doesn't mean it is senseless. Nor does its religious origin give it validity. Should a religious position be ethically, philosophically, historically, and factually coherent and correct, its validity shouldn't be discounted. However, its religious content, as such, means little. I needn't say more.
But John West wants us all to pay attention to Lawrence Krauss's op-ed in the Wall Street Journal and beware of the atheistic scientists out there. West writes,

In an essay published in the Wall Street Journal earlier this month, physicist Lawrence Krauss faulted presidential candidates for not discussing their scientific views more fully. According to Krauss, "almost all of the major challenges we will face as a nation in this new century have a scientific or technological basis," and the next president will need to act as an "educator in chief" on science issues.

This is without a doubt quite true. The ways in which science and technology (which is the practical extension of science but not science itself) have already shaped our world have been breathtaking, terrifying, and beautiful. The scientific change of the last fifty or sixty years easily outstrips the achievements of the previous 250 and, all told, those 300 or so have been a warp engine compared to all of the previous human technological, scientific, and mathematical developments. The next fifty years, we should expect based on logical inferences and inductions, will be faster and more explosive. Leaders will need to step up to plate with some kind of strong background in science to make informed and ethical decisions on issues of information technology, bioethics, medicine, space travel, energy consumption and development, and environmental protection and use. The more informed our leader is, the better off we are. In this regard Krauss is right and we hope for a ScienceDebate2008.
Moving on West says,

Increasingly, self-proclaimed defenders of science have tried to turn "science" into an ideological weapon to attack any questioning by religious believers of the "consensus view" of scientific elites on embryonic stem-cell research, global warming, Darwinian evolution, and similar issues.

Really? People who justifiably believe that science answers questions about the natural world are defending science from utter nonsense? Note the use of the frame on stem-cell research? He writes "embryonic" when the reality of the situation is that the stem-cells cultivated from blastocysts which are less elaborate than a volvox. They are colonies of undifferentiated cells that are not embryos. They lack any sense of pain or organs and the entire argument built upon their humanity is one of potential which falls apart on its face. Surely every sperm and egg is full of potential and yet they die by the billions every week. Nature is profligate. To paraphrase Sam Harris here, when you scrape the skin from your nose or kill a fly, you commit a veritable holocaust.
Scientists recognize that this is not life in any way that we would term it as human and move on accordingly. They are not wantonly committing or even advocating late-term or even early-term abortions. It's all canards by the Christian right to control our behavior according to anachronistic readings of the myths of shepherds and their Roman descendants.
Regarding global warming and Darwinian evolution I just really wonder what Christianity as defined by West and the DI might really have to say about either how the earth's climate is changing or how life has emerged on planet earth. Nothing important. Too much of the Christian right denies climate change to be taken seriously by anybody who has studied the topic and going by folks at the World Net Daily they've taken to "holy spirit discernment" to inform them of what the earth really does. Ya' know observation and climate modeling doesn't mean shit when one third of the Trinity tells you that he'll provide for you for all of eternity.
Evolution? Nothing. To quote the Fugs, "Less than nothing." Endless arguments from ignorance propped up on straw men. Fancy and contentless terms like irreducible complexity or specified complexity or specified complex information explained through the explanatory filter.
And what is the explanation?
Intelligence did this?
Can we know anything about why God...err...the creator...err...intelligence designed...err...created life? No.
Can we know the character of God...err...the creator...err...the intelligence? No.
Can we know the mechanism by which of God...err...the creator...err...the intelligence created...err...designed life? No.
So we can't ask those questions scientifically? No.
It's simply inappropriate for religious people to claim that evolution hasn't occurred unless they have the evidence to do it and a better explanation. They have neither.
That's not science. That's ignorance.
Moving on, West decides to us a brilliant non-sequitur.

This attempt to suppress dissenting views in discussions of science and public policy is fueled by the anti-religious orientation of the majority of America's elite scientists. Nearly 95 percent of biologists who are members of the National Academy of Sciences, for example, identify themselves as atheists or agnostics.
The anti-religious fervor of leading scientists was on clear display last year at a conference on science and religion at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies. According to one participant quoted by the New York Times, "with a few notable exceptions, the viewpoints at the conference have run the gamut from A to B. Should we bash religion with a crowbar or only with a baseball bat?"

Let's take this one thing at a time. Yes, the majority of NAS members are atheists or agnostics. Fine.
It does not follow that the majority of those scientists are anti-religion or anti-Christian.
It certainly does not follow that a majority of the NAS members attended the Beyond Belief 2006 conference. In fact, we can find statements in the same article West cites to show that there are people who may not be believers but are nonetheless tolerant of the views of religious people. For example, Lawrence Krauss:

Lawrence M. Krauss, a physicist at Case Western Reserve University known for his staunch opposition to teaching creationism, found himself in the unfamiliar role of playing the moderate. "I think we need to respect people's philosophical notions unless those notions are wrong," he said.
The Earth isn't 6,000 years old,'' he said. "The Kennewick man was not a Umatilla Indian." But whether there really is some kind of supernatural being -- Dr. Krauss said he was a nonbeliever -- is a question unanswerable by theology, philosophy or even science. "Science does not make it impossible to believe in God," Dr. Krauss insisted. "We should recognize that fact and live with it and stop being so pompous about it."

Moving on we see that even Richard Dawkins was somewhat chastened by the likes of Krauss and Tyson:

Dr. Tyson put it more gently. ''Persuasion isn't always 'Here are the facts -- you're an idiot or you are not,' '' he said. ''I worry that your methods'' -- he turned toward Dr. Dawkins -- ''how articulately barbed you can be, end up simply being ineffective, when you have much more power of influence.''
Chastened for a millisecond, Dr. Dawkins replied, ''I gratefully accept the rebuke.''
In the end it was Dr. Tyson's celebration of discovery that stole the show. Scientists may scoff at people who fall back on explanations involving an intelligent designer, he said, but history shows that ''the most brilliant people who ever walked this earth were doing the same thing.'' When Isaac Newton's ''Principia Mathematica'' failed to account for the stability of the solar system -- why the planets tugging at one another's orbits have not collapsed into the Sun -- Newton proposed that propping up the mathematical mobile was ''an intelligent and powerful being.''

But in the end we had LaPlace saying to Napoleon that he didn't need God in his explanation of the solar system. Even Newton used the god of the gaps. The entire ID argument operates on that argument and it's transparent.
But what really gets me going is West's tried and true method of joining Darwinists to eugenecists:

During the early decades of the 20th century, America's leading evolutionary biologists at institutions such as Harvard, Princeton, and Columbia promoted eugenics and forced sterilization. Traditionalist Catholics and evangelicals were among the handful of voices challenging the validity of the eugenics crusade at a time when scientific dissenters were scant.
Scientists have their blind spots just as much as any religious believer. If they genuinely want more discussion over science and public policy, they could start by inviting religious believers to join the conversation.

But I'd like to know where these eugenecists are now. At the Beyond Belief conference were their calls for a new race of Ubermensch? Having watched all of the available footage I sure didn't hear it or see it.
Nowhere in the NAS annals or on the pages of Science or Nature are there calls for the formation of superior races by scientists.
Surely West is right that we need to have serious oversight by public interests and factions as science moves forward. Science is not itself a necessarily ethical enterprise as eugenics or the legacy of the Manhattan Project and Edward Teller shows. But use relevant examples. Stop dusting off eugenics as a pertinent example. It's dead.
We should also note that more importantly than the science that was being done was the a priori assumptions of scientists in the matter of eugenics. The white Christian was the most intelligent and evolved being on the planet. Everything else was used to prove that point. That a priori position is much more akin to that held by contemporary ID/Creationists who hold a position of "theistic realism" that states that God is objectively real and detectable through the modern findings of science, especially biology." This a priori position is not so far from the Stalinist doctrines that dusted off Lamarck to prop up Lysenkoism because of a preconceived ideology. In each of these cases, the results are rather tragic though clearly some have led to millions more deaths than others. But in each case the assumptions have obscured the actual evidence.
So I invited religious people to enter the conversation about science. But they need to have something to say with some bearing on the matters at hand. If they don't, then they need to get out of the way or understand what counts as evidence in the reality-based world and not in Biblical la-la land.

The top 3 Democratic candidates on Climate Change

I just want to put out there that I have become close to being of a single-voter issue at this point and it's not the illegal war in Iraq, the war on terror, taxes, health care, abortion, or education. I am an environmental voter and I see the future in terms of how effectively we engage with the biosphere and use natural resources. Therefore, I have compiled the list of the candidates' websites on the environment and climate change as related to CO2 and other greenhouse emissions. I have included what I think are important points of detail or lack thereof.

Barack Obama website:
I am an Obama supporter for his combination of pragmatic progressive policy and desire for change. His overall goal is to get us on track to an 80% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, a cap-and-trade system, gutting oil subsidies, heavy technological investment, supporting and expanding green buildings especially at the government, a smart grid, and extensive incentives for resource use reduction. My main beef with his program is his belief in ethanol's effectiveness. Corn is not the answer. He is, however, a midwest senator looking for new ways to get profits for his state of Illinois.
Here's a spot from an October 8 speech:

We can't be afraid to stand up to the oil and auto industry when the future of our economy is at stake. When we let these companies off the hook; when we tell them they don't have to build fuel-efficient cars or transition to renewable fuels, it may boost their short-term profits, but it is killing their long-term chances for survival and threatening too many American jobs. The global market is already moving away from fossil fuels. The question is not if a renewable energy economy will thrive in the future, it's where. And if we want that place to be the United States of America, we can't afford to wait any longer.

Most of all, we cannot afford more of the same timid politics when the future of our planet is at stake. Global warming is not a someday problem, it is now. In a state like New Hampshire, the ski industry is facing shorter seasons and losing jobs. We are already breaking records with the intensity of our storms, the number of forest fires, the periods of drought. By 2050 famine could force more than 250 million from their homes - famine that will increase the chances of war and strife in many of the world's weakest states. The polar ice caps are now melting faster than science had ever predicted. And if we do nothing, sea levels will rise high enough to swallow large portions of every coastal city and town.

This is not the future I want for my daughters. It's not the future any of us want for our children. And if we act now and we act boldly, it doesn't have to be. But if we wait; if we let campaign promises and State of the Union pledges go unanswered for yet another year; if we let the same broken politics that's held us back for decades win one more time, we will lose another chance to save our planet. And we might not get many more.

What I admire most about Obama is that he isn't afraid of science and the real cost to human beings and the rest of the biosphere in all of this. There is little, if any candy coating on this. And he appeals to the spirit of American ingenuity that got us to the moon. Plus, when the guy is on when he speaks, he is f***ing on!

---
Hillary Clinton's website and at Presidential Candidates Forum on Global Warming and Energy Security:
She and Obama both pose a $50 billion Strategic Energy Fund and an %80 reduction in emissions by 2050. She is a strong proponent of "green collar" jobs and raising fuel efficiency standards to 55 mpg by 2030. In broad strokes, she and Obama's plans are very similar.

When we talk about what we need to do at the federal level, and what I want to do as president, deal with our twin problems of improving our energy system by becoming more independent, therefore, more secure and more efficient. It is also a way we will approach global warming, which will begin to deal with greenhouse gas emissions. Both of those efforts will have an impact on the quality of the environment and begin to reduce some of the damage that is done by the power plants far away from here that drop acid rain and other kinds of pollutants onto you as it does the Adirondacks and the Hudson River in New York. I've done a lot of work on that. So this is an interrelated issue, and I think it's important that we consider it in that way. Because all too often we talk about energy, we have a kind of stovepipe discussion about that. Then we talk about global warming or climate change and we talk about that. And then I also like to talk about the health impact from the environment because I think that's another issue that has to be related. So what I want to do in 20 minutes or so and then get to your questions is talk a little bit about what I'd like to do to address all these issues. And some of it has to come from the federal government, but some of it has to be this partnership that you are so clearly pursuing at the state and local level. But then we also have to address what we can do as individuals. In our homes, and our businesses, our driving habits, and everything else, because we have to have a united front in order to address energy and global warming and environmental health.

I really appreciate the interrelatedness of her argument. Rather Rachel Carson of her.
---
John Edwards websiteand at the Presidential Candidates Forum on Global Warming:
This quotation does him justice:

First, I will cut carbon welfare subsidies for oil companies to raise money that will be invested in renewable fuels like wind, solar, biofuels, and turbo charging our energy efficiency technology. Second, I'll spark a new era of innovation and competition by modernizing our electricity grids. New, smart grids will let entrepreneurs create renewable energy and then to sell it back into the grid. They will also be safer, more efficient, and more reliable. Third, I will seed innovation by giving low-interest loans to homeowners and small businesses for new technologies like solar, hot water, and electric systems. These systems are expensive, as all of you know, up front, but they pay off for families in the long run, particularly when excess power can be sold to their neighbors. Fourth, I'll create a new market for energy efficiency. Right now, utilities profit from selling electricity, but have absolutely no incentive to help their customers use less energy.

What I like most about Edwards is that he really opposes the coal industry as it stands and says that we shouldn't build more coal plants until we are sequestering carbon. Money can be taken from a $30 billion cap-and-trade system and reinvested in those areas that will suffer economically from our weening ourselves off of dirty coal.

Plagiarism warrants expulsion

It's a funny thing that the IDtiotic movie EXPELLED! has that title. It would seem that William Dembski has actually done something that warrants expulsion.
Check it. Last month some folks discovered that Dembski had been using a video on cell biology that was produced by Harvard.
Here is the Harvard video "The Inner Life of the Cell":

Here is Dembski making up a bunch of stuff in front of an audience about irreducible complexity and then a voice over that uses terms like "UPS labels" to describe biochemical signals and "nanomotors" all to wow the audience into believing that their bodies are so complex that they could not have evolved.


Dembski gives no credit whatsoever for this. See this Panda's Thumb entry and this post at Austringer on it. Allegedly, there have been multiple Discovery fellows who have used the video and provided their own voiceovers. It would be one thing if they had dug it up on YouTube, but that's not the case.
Over at ERV SA Smith has a post up on this nonsense and it ain't pretty. After backtracking and bawling victim along about their oppression at the hands of Darwinists, it would appear that they had actually used the video in its original format, from its original source at Harvard. Then, when they were caught plagiarizing, they lied and said that they didn't. There's some other great bits at ERV.
Certainly, if Dembski were in any of the classes I teach at Penn State he'd have an academic integrity infraction brought against him that would warrant failing the class or being expelled.
He's a liar. Plain and simple.

Press reporters on climate change

There's a petition up to get the press to ask candidates about climate change solutions. I tend not to watch the Sunday talking head shows because they can be a bit insipid. But because so many people watch it and the word needs to get out, let's push Stephanopolous, Russert, Blitzer and the gang to get some info out of these people.
Obama will answer for sure. He proposes a pragmatic cap and trade system on emissions and raising the CAFE standards.
Sign on please.

End of semester pleasure

Just a quick note on the end of my first semester as a graduate student in SSED at Penn State. I earned A-'s in my Anthropology class and Educational Psychology class and A's in Political Science and Philosophy of Education courses. I'm pleased because I have a blend of "remedial" coursework that I have to make up for because I didn't take them as an undergraduate. So there are courses that I have to take with undergrads and end up being an old guy in the class who can be a bit of a know-it-all. Not surprising though because I've been teaching for almost 9 years (4 as a t.a. and 4 1/2 as a lecturer).
Next semester I have some history, economics, and geography.

Merry X-mas

What makes us human?

Anthropologists have been long said that those things that differentiate us from other apes are the degrees of our language use, tool use, tool-making, our social systems, and of course our morphology. Over at the Oxford University Press blog, Aaron Fuller, an M.D. and evolutionary biologist writes that our spines are at the center of what makes us human.

It’s easy enough for anyone to tell the difference between a human and an ape today, but how easy would it have been six million years ago, around the time of the split between the lineage of modern humans and the lineage of the chimpanzees. If you were to see the common ancestor would you think “human” or would you think “ape?”

Over the past 50 years there has been an understanding in the scientific community that the common ancestor would look somewhat like a knuckle-walking chimpanzee and that the various descendant lineages on the human side would more or less gradually begin to stand upright and walk bipedally on two legs. The common ancestor was a lowly quadrupedal ape, but our direct predecessors then gloriously stood upright on their two legs and eventually strode their way across the border between animality and humanity.

For many years, there was no solid fossil evidence to support this understanding. Now we have dozens of relevant fossils but they all seem to show that this scenario is wrong. In fact, the common ancestor may well have looked much more like a human than like an ape.

It seems too that Fuller's research on morhphogenes could be refueling the punctuated equilibrium vs. gradualist debate but also bringing it to common ground as well.

Within biology there has been an epic intellectual debate that has persisted unabated across the 148 years of our post-Darwinian era. Is all of evolution painted out in gradual shifts of small details or are there sometimes sudden transforming events in which new kinds of animals arise? This debate carried Stephen Jay Gould onto the front cover of Newsweek in 1982 and lay behind decades of conflict between Gould and Ernst Mayr. Most recently, the rising primacy of morphogenetics has made Sean Carroll one of the leading voices in evolutionary theory (The Making of the Fittest, From DNA to Diversity) putting him at the opposite end of the biological spectrum from devout traditional gradualists such as Richard Dawkins (The Selfish Gene ).
Is Darwinian gradualism best suited for fine tuning little details such as the shape of the beaks of finches, or is it so powerful that all change in biology are always an accumulation of a large number of small gradual alterations? Goethe was the first to point out striking evidence that animals and plants were assembled from repeating elements. Geoffroy suggested a fundamental similarity between insect segments and vertebrae – an outrageous idea that more or less ruined him academically, but an idea we now know to be not only true, but extremely fundamental to understanding change in animal form. Today we call these biological modules and their proper study is through Modularity Theory (Modularity in Development and Evolution – Univ. of Chicago Press 2004).

This definitely something to watch. "What makes us human?" and "What does it mean to us to be human?" are two of the coolest questions we have.

Master's degrees in magical education

The Dallas Morning News has a story about the Institute for Creative Creation Nonsense Research getting clearance for a Master's Degree in Science Education in Texas. As if the press coming out of that state weren't absurd enough following the resignation of Christine Comer, the former science director of the Texas Mis-Education Agency, and the attempts to "teach the noncontroversy" they allege exists in science. There is no controversy except among religious zealots who refuse to accept reality, actual rules of evidence, uniformity in nature, and exalt magic and mystery above actual material findings that explain phenomena.

And here to make sure that we can have the Christian madrassas instituted in Texas is the ICR:

The nonprofit Institute for Creation Research in Dallas wants to train future science teachers in Texas and elsewhere using an online curriculum. A state advisory group gave its approval Friday; now the final say rests with the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board, which will consider the request next month.
The institute's proposal comes amid a fierce debate over how to teach evolution – the theory that humans and other species evolved from lower forms of life – in Texas public schools.

I really hope that Texas doesn't clear this. It has probably already incurred the wrath of a host of scientists, science educators, and educators in Texas and across the nation. I'll be sending them a note for sure.
And to be clear, the use of the word "lower" is incorrect. Modern biology isn't about a hierarchy of life. It's an ever-branching tree that radiates out from the original ancestor. Hierarchy on the tree of life is anthrocentric.

"Our students are given both sides," said Dr. Nason, who has a doctorate in curriculum and instruction from Texas A&M University. "They need to know both sides, and they can draw their own conclusion."
...
According to the school's Web site, it offers typical education classes, teaching such fundamentals as how to use lab equipment, the Internet and PowerPoint in the classroom. But it also offers a class called "Advanced studies in creationism."
And the course Web page for "Curriculum design in science" gives this scenario: "The school board has asked you to serve on a committee that is examining grades 6-12 science goals. ... Both evolutionist and creationist teachers serve on the curriculum committee. How will you convince them to include creation science as well as evolution in the new scope and sequence?"

And what exactly are these "Advanced studies in creationism?" I'm really interested to see the content. Maybe it's these thoroughly demolished "studies" on the vapor canopy that they propose surrounded the Antediluvian earth? What are its conclusions?

Surface temperatures were most strongly affected by changes in the solar constant. A 50% reduction in the solar constant reduced the surface temperature under the canopy from 335K to 240K. The albedo, solar zenith angle, and cirrus cloud thickness also produced strong effects on surface temperature. However, none of the effects was so dramatic that the concern over limitations on water content in the canopy by hot surface temperatures was eliminated. If all five parameters were introduced into the model simultaneously such that the surface temperature was minimized, it is estimated that the water content of the canopy could possibly be raised to as much as 1.0 meter. This is less than 10% of the water content suggested by Dillow (1982). Unfortunately, this amount of water in a canopy would not contribute significantly to the waters of the Genesis Flood or produce significant pressure and density effects. However, it would produce large differences in temperature, atmospheric stability, cloud formation, and precipitation from that experienced today.
Although this result is disappointing for advocates of a vapor canopy, the story may not yet be complete. It is possible that the high albedo produced at the top of a cloud layer in the canopy may reduce the flux of radiation into the canopy and atmosphere greatly reducing the heating. This effect was not included in the simulations of this paper. The albedo changes modeled were only due to those effects at the surface of the earth.

They screw with the solar constant based on an alleged controversy in science. They say:

If the sun was 40% cooler earlier in its history, causing the earth to be covered with ice, how is it possible for the earth to be covered with liquid water today with no evidence of full ice coverage? Either the nuclear model of the sun is wrong or the earth's gaseous composition was different in the past. I will not attempt to resolve this conflict here, but will only use this controversy to support varying the solar constant between 50% and 200% of its current value.

This is a very strange thing to do. First, there is no evidence in the earth's geology of a global flood that would prompt us to believe that a vapor canopy ever existed. The fossil record shows no signs of the kind of global upheaval we would expect to find. There certainly were extinctions (we are in the sixth one now) but none that happened at the unimaginable speed proposed by Biblical literalists.
Second, there is no cultural record of a catastrophe on the order of magnitude suggested. Following these non-existent records are a lack of global civilizational wipeouts that would have occurred. It seems that ancient China, Egypt, India, Southeast Asia, and the American and Mezzo-American civilizations survived this alleged deluge.
Third, there is no radiation of species out from the supposed Mt. Ararat that would have shown the flood.
So this entire line of research on a so-called vapor canopy rests on an a priori belief in the flood that has no basis in material reality but on a myth plagiarized from various other Mesopotamian and Babylonian myths. All of the counter-studies done on vapor canopies show that they are death traps and shams. (There are more of those.)
They are physical impossibilities. And one can dress them up in all kinds of goofy flim-flam and sciencey-sounding pseudoscience, but the facts of the matter are that there isn't any evidence that the thing actually existed. This fantasy and science fiction at its worst. Too bad people actually believe in it and can now do "advanced studies" in it. Just get a degree in writing science fiction. You'll get more education out of it. Surely better science.
And it's really too bad that Texas might consider the adoption of faith-based ignorance into credentialed higher education. It won't be easy though. As Eugenie Scott says in the article, "There's a huge gulf between what the ICR is doing and what they're doing at legitimate institutions like ... [the University of Texas] or Baylor." No kidding. There are people doing science. And there are people making stuff up to fit their preconceived notions. Work and garbage.
Later on they let the cat out of the bag on why the late director, Henry Morris, wanted to move to Dallas.

The institute's founder, Dr. Morris, who was an engineer by training, died last year. His son Henry Morris III is the institute's chief executive officer. He told The Dallas Morning News last year that the institute moved to Dallas because "it's in the Central time zone, with a good airport." But he also noted that Dallas is a "strong Christian center" that would support teaching from a creationist perspective.

It will be easier to set up the Christo-madrassas in a state where religious zealots are trying to straitjacket real science by pairing it with the ancient occultism and wish-thinking. While we're at it, let's start teaching people about bodily humors and the ether theory of light. Those all make sense. There's a controversy there.

Huckster and Biblical law

According to the CATO Institute's blog, the Huckster has been hanging with not just Biblical literalists, but Reconstructionists who want to throw the world into the bronze age again.

The ICR doesn't practice science.

There is no polite way to say this. The Institute for Creative Creation Nonsense Research has never done scientific research that could pass muster. At least they propose potentially justifiable hypotheses like, "The earth is approximately 6,000 years old." Unlike the ID folks, they've got something to test. The problem is that they have nothing positive to show for it. Zero. It is what Phillip Kitcher has called "dead science," that was nearly universally abandoned by the serious scientific community after Lyell lost to Darwin. Following the modern synthesis, there has been nothing significant proposed by creationists to forward the scientific enterprise.
So how could a faith-tank like the ICR really have nothing to say that's relevant on the subject?
First, let's consider a standard definition of science as that shown in the Oxford English Dictionary:

In modern use, often treated as synonymous with ‘Natural and Physical Science’, and thus restricted to those branches of study that relate to the phenomena of the material universe and their laws, sometimes with implied exclusion of pure mathematics. This is now the dominant sense in ordinary use.

Science, then, is an activity that probes the natural world to discern what happens in nature. It uses the hypethetico-deductive method that is methodologically natural to determine how nature works. This has been true for at least 400 years. Even the great theists like Newton, Copernicus, and Galileo used nature to describe nature and used nature to understand what they believed was God's Book of Nature. However imbued with God they believed nature to be, they ultimately knew that they could only use nature to explain nature's machinations.
This is not the stance of the ICR. They say

The Institute for Creation Research equips believers with evidences of the Bible’s accuracy and authority through scientific research, educational programs, and media presentations, all conducted within a thoroughly biblical framework.

Right from the get go they have an a priori fallacy going into their work: belief in the Bible's accuracy is placed at the beginning of it all and all subsequent research is used to hold that up. This is an instant flag for anyone who knows about science at all. You can't set out to prove something. As Lawrence Krauss loves to say, science might not always be good at telling what's right but it's really good at telling what's wrong. This comes from falsifiability as written on by Karl Popper in Conjectures and Refutations. In order to test its predictions, science needs to jeopardize its positions in such a way that attempts to refute the hypothesis at hand.

2) Confirmations should count only if they are the result of risky predictions; that is to say if unenlightened by the theory in question, we should have expected an event which was uncompatible with the theory - an event which would have refuted the theory.
...
4) A theory which is not refutable by any conceivable event is non-scientific[.]
5) Every genuine test of a theory is an attempt to falsify it or refute it[.]

The ICR is completely guilty of looking only for confirmations, never looking for refutations, and never trying to falsify their positions because they go into every scientific enterprise with an anti-scientific mindset.
For example, their reading of the fossil record begins by assuming that the earth is about 6,000 years old give or take a few. We'll take Duane Gish as an example. He has been a prolific anti-scientist for over 40 years and is a senior contributor to the ICR. His most famous contribution is Evolution. The fossils say no! He, like his descendants Stephen Meyer and Johnathan Wells love to go after the Cambrian Explosion. If by explosion, you'll accept over 15-20 million years, then we can agree on an explosion of organic diversity.
But what Gish does is to say that there are no transitional fossils from the single-celled organisms to the multi-cellular at all and that this undeniably disproves evolution. The problem is that he has made an unreasonable demand on one hand and ignored huge amounts of evidence on the other. By claiming that there have to be perfect transitional fossils for all of the organisms of the Cambrian explosion is totally unreasonable. As rich in fossils as the Burgess Shale might be, they can't hold everything. Even the traces of single-celled organisms from over 3 billion years ago are not ubiquitous. We expect that given the forces of tectonics, geological metamorphosis, and sedimentation, that many species are lost in the fossil record. However, the broad strokes are there and there in a way that Gish chose to ignore.
He has chosen the Cambrian explosion because of the rapidity of the emergence of forms. However, this ignores the "complex" fossils that precede the Cambrian and move through it in some sexy transitions. Notably, chordates emerged from worms as notochords, gained heads, then paired fins and vertebrae, then fusiform bodies and scales. The broad strokes of worm to fish begin before, move through, and follow the Cambrian period.
This could go on ad nauseam of course. The flood geology is garbage. The notions of irreducible complexity that the creationists came up with before Behe did are junk (see my entry from earlier today). Biogeography. Genetics.
This has all been shown to the ICR by scientists well-versed in their fields, publishing in journals, presenting at conferences, replicating one another's work, and trying to beat one another out for the best explanation available. But the ICR doesn't care. They hang onto old stories written by ancient people and mistakenly assume that a beautiful myth explains the formation of the universe. But the ICR practices dead science. They are left trying to defend a myth about a capricious creator who can't get what he wants so he lashes out at his own kids.
Whatever the ICR's story is, it's not science. It's an unjeopardizable faith incapable of making a prediction about the natural world. However many jeopardizable claims they make and have refuted by the scientific method, they maintain their pointless faith in the scientific truth in the Bible.

Addendum: As a sidenote, I'd encourage the interested to read Scientists Confront Intelligent Design and Creationism though the info above wasn't taken from it.

Huckabee the uniter?

I think not. The culture warrior? I think so.
Over at Mother Jones they have a good piece by their Washington Bureau chief, David Corn. In "Mike Huckabee: Playing Both Sides of the Pulpit" Corn writes,

So what to do about a culture that breeds kid killers? Faith is more important than policy or politics, Huckabee argued. The "Judeo-Christian religion," he wrote, states "that faith counteracts the destructive effects of sinful actions and activities." That's what you would expect a religious-minded person to believe. But Huckabee went further and declared that nonbelievers tend to be evildoers:

Men who have rejected God and do not walk in faith are more often than not immoral, impure, and improvident (Gal. 5:19-21). They are prone to extreme and destructive behavior, indulging in perverse vices and dissipating sensuality (1 Cor. 6:9-10). And they—along with their families and loved ones—are thus driven over the brink of destruction (Prov. 23:21).

Huckabee is certainly entitled to his religious beliefs and his own view of human nature. He is free to think that nonbelievers cannot be trusted. But should Huckabee be allowed to play both sides of the pulpit? Kids Who Kill presented a black-and-white perspective: environmentalists, homosexuals, civil libertarians, supporters of social programs, advocates of workplace equality, and nonbelievers are on the dark side and allied with the forces of decline; people who believe in the Bible are the decent Americans. In 1998, Huckabee was claiming a religion-oriented cultural war was under way in the United States and he was happy to be a warrior for his side. Now he says he wants to bring together a "polarized" society. His 1998 book—full of unforgiving rhetoric—indicates that Huckabee is more comfortable creating divides than bridging them.

I love the immorality about unbelievers. Even though we continually see the highest rates of STDs, teen pregnancy, and imprisonment among believers. Non-believers and secular people are vastly underrepresented in prisons. And those gays! They are so violent and prone to evil-doing! The environmentalism thing is baffling. So-called deep ecology has Christian roots. Huckabee's rants are straight from the Dobson/Falwell/Kennedy playbook.

And they said they have a positive scientific theory

Over in the Discovery Institute Media Complaints Division they have more sour grapes up about the NOVA special. The crux of their complaint is that Judgement Day correctly stated that evidence “unequivocally supports the theory of evolution by natural selection.” It does. All available evidence supports it from the fossil record to biogeography to morphology to evolutionary developmental biology to genetics to morphology.
So what do they say are evolution's failures?

According to the website, some of Darwin’s failed predictions include:
• The failure of evolutionary biology to provide detailed evolutionary explanations for the origin of complex biochemical features.
• The failure of the fossil record to provide support for Darwinian evolution.
• The failure of molecular biology to provide evidence for universal common descent.
• The failure of genetics and chemistry to explain the origin of the genetic code.
• The failure of developmental biology to explain why vertebrate embryos diverge from the beginning of development.

So the failure of evolution comes in what it hasn't explained yet. Some of these are patent lies: evolution very well explains the origin of complex features, the fossil record, the evidence of common descent in the genome, the evidence of common descent via embryology and evo-devo.
Would these people make up their minds about the fossil record and common descent? Behe hasn't a problem with it. Get it together.
That we haven't created a prebiotic soup isn't evidence that chemistry and evolution are a failure. It's evidence that it hasn't happened yet. It might never happen. But to say that because we don't know the exact combination for the original replicator that we should abandon evolution falls on the bullseye of the stupid dartboard with something as inane as "Because we don't have a perfect theory of gravity, we should abandon heliocentrism." It's a total non sequitur. That's what I come to expect from creationists though. Sloppy thinking and excuses. The whole spiel above is nothing more than an argument from ignorance: "Evolution hasn't figured this out so there is no way that it can be figured out," or "I can't understand it so it must not be true." This logical fallacy translates into a contrived dualism: "Because we think evolution is wrong, it must be God."
Right. So the answer is, I don't know how it happened so God did it." It's a god of the gaps argument. It's a science and inquiry stopper. It does nothing to answer how. Nothing.
Huh. I thought that's what science was about. How did/does that happen?
And just to take an example for the biochemical novelty: Read Ken Miller's testimony from the Dover trial on the bacterial flagellum and the Type Three Secretory System (TTSS) or Nick Matzke's article on the flagellum. How about Doolittle and Zhaxbayeva's "Evolution: reducible complexity -- the case for bacterial flagella" from Curr Biol. 2007 Jul 3;17(13):R510-2 whose abstract reads:

A recent paper, which will surely figure centrally in the debate between evolutionists and Intelligent Design creationists, proposes a (perhaps too simple) scheme for the evolution of bacterial flagella.

Also, Kutschera and Niklas "Photosynthesis research on yellowtops: Macroevolution in progress found in Theory Biosci. 2007 Apr;125(2):81-92. Epub 2006 Jul 18:

We conclude that the Flaveria species complex provides a robust model system for the study of the transition from C(3) to C(4) photosynthesis, which is arguably a macroevolutionary event. We conclude with comments relevant to the current Intelligent Design debate.

Clearly, for a macroevolutionary event to occur, we need those biochemical steps to take place.
Another good example comes from Dr. Zuckerandl of Stanford. In "Intelligent design and biological complexity" in Gene. 2006 Dec 30;385:2-18, he writes:

In the course of a critical review, it is pointed out that the spectacle of nature's spontaneous tinkering with the structures and performances of informational macromolecules and with interactive connections among these molecules suggests that intelligence and design are absent from evolution. Nor is intelligent design required for explaining biological complexity, which can increase spontaneously as a byproduct of combinatorial intermolecular gambles and of the restoration of molecular damage wrought by mutations. One of the possible molecular pathways to spontaneous evolutionary increases in complexity is described.

The literature is rife with this stuff. I just want to add that a PubMed search that I performed today using the keywords "intelligent design" yielded 86 hits. My initial perusal shows that intelligent design in these cases can also mean intelligent experimental design (which you hope scientists achieve). A few of the hits are cataloged conference proceedings. But the majority of the PubMed articles are critical of intelligent design in no uncertain terms from scientists, philosophers, doctors, and educators.
"Irreducible complexity" gets 18 items several of which are about the health care system itself. "Creationism" gets 85 hits 6 of which overlap with the "intelligent design" search. None are laudatory.
On the other hand, "evolutionary biology" gets 6234 items. "Evolutionary development" gets 7406 items. Evolution gets 207,918 hits. These are the published works of peer-reviewed science for the last 130 years. The earliest record is Turner's "Some General Observations on the Placenta, with especial reference to the Theory of Evolution" from the October 1876 Journal of Anatomy and Physiology.
It blows me away that one of the most successful theories in all of science is treated as if it were a hackneyed ploy by a bunch of clowns. The reality of the situation is that tens of thousands of the most intelligent and systematically organized men and women who have ever lived on our planet have culled forth and found millions of pieces of evidence that support it. Since the modern synthesis and the discovery of DNA, we have an uninterrupted expansion of the evolutionary description of life.
Intelligent design creationism and young earth creationism have offered no such comprehensive and integrated explanation. They rely on revelations and their feelings to prop up their beliefs of special creation and the alleged capricious whimsy to tell us how life on earth has come to be the way it is. Basically, they have assumed everything, cried because they've explained nothing, and tried to bully the rest of us into accepting nonsense for sense.

The Huckabee Christmas Commercial Redux

What's the real message?

Righto. For someone so concerned with the afterlife he sure is concerned with worldly power.

NCSE has their 2007 Reports up.

Check it out here.
Best source for the attacks on evolution education.

The scientific revolution from a revision of a revision of dead science biology textbook. Nope.

Over at Uncommon Descent they are bitching about the reviews of the update to Of Pandas and People euphemistically titled Design of Life. Put in the religious fiction part of your local bookstore if you see it because the next scientific revolution might come from a revision of revision of an anti-science textbook.
At UC they are trying to say that the reviews are all of this type:

The following 1-star review, posted 8 hours ago, illustrates the Darwinists’ level of discourse at Amazon:

By E. Duran (San Jose, CA USA) - See all my reviews
I just finished reading this book without vomiting. I had to go back and read Darwin’s “Origin of Species” again to remove the bad taste out of my mouth.

This is the whole review, unedited and unabridged. Even more pathetic is that “44 of 50 people found the following review [i.e., Duran’s review] helpful.” (As of 4:10pm CST, 20Dec07)

Nonetheless...here are the first paragraphs of several reviews that defy the UC folks
...by Peter Irons...

First, I have read this book, so I feel qualified to say that it is basically propaganda for "intelligent design," published by a Christian outfit, the Foundation for Thought and Ethics...

...then...

This book's entire foundation is flawed. ID's argument regarding irreducible complexity in biological systems falls flat, time and again, whenever the details of the system are looked into...

...and...

Mindless drivel from the Discovery Institute. The book contains debunked creationist propaganda designed to please those who are to intellectually stunted to be able to understand the difference between science and magic.

..then...

I will confess that I have not yet finished reading this book. Being interested in paleoanthropology and paleontology I first turned to the sections in the book relevant to those fields. Given the hype built up for Dembski and Wells critique of the reptile/mammal transition and their critique the relationship between artiodactyls and whales I was hoping for a very thorough discussion of both those issues. To my disappointment, their critique displayed no knowledge of either subject. Their knowledge of the relevant paleontological finds is laughable.

...and on and on.
So the book has elicited the kind of responses from scientists that you should expect when you write a sequel to a dead science book. But there is quite little about vomit all things considered. Can't wait to get my hands on it. Vomit free too!!!

An early review of EXPELLED! It flunks.

There is a review by Colorado Confidential up of the new ID propaganda film, EXPELLED! A whole lot of self-aggrandizing martyrdom and not a shred of science. No definition of evolution or intelligent design even though the movie is about the contrived controversy between them. Way to make sure that we're on the same page.
Here's a tasty excerpt:

There are so many topics picked up, misrepresented and abandoned unresolved by "Expelled" that it is impossible to deal with them all. But they are typical of the intellectual dishonesty of the creationist-Intelligent Design cabal that wants to have this bankrupt hypothesis taught in the public schools.

For instance, the assumption by IDers is that if neo-Darwinian evolution can be shown to be largely incorrect, ID and creationism triumph. But this isn't so. There are other hypotheses besides design or God or Darwin that could replace it, if they were supported by the evidence. The trouble is that only evolution is so supported. "Expelled" doesn't try to build up a coherent alternative theory. It simply bashes evolution.

The confusion about the definition of ID is apparent throughout the movie. "Expelled" ridicules a hypothesis proposed some years ago called "panspermia." This conjecture - for which, I hasten to add, there is zero direct evidence (just like ID) -- is that life on earth was originated elsewhere in the galaxy and was planted here, either delivered by alien visitors or remotely somehow. "Expelled," and the audience I saw it with, found this idea laugh-out-loud funny. But think about it. This is exactly ID's hypothesis: Some superintelligence planted life on earth. IDers prefer that the "intelligence" be the God of Abraham, but there's nothing in the hypothesis to rule out visitors from another galaxy.

Didn't the filmmakers notice that Michael Behe said that aliens could be responsible for the design in the universe?

Possible candidates for the role of designer include: the God of Christianity; an angel--fallen or not; Plato's demi-urge; some mystical new age force; space aliens from Alpha Centauri; time travelers; or some utterly unknown intelligent being. Of course, some of these possibilities may seem more plausible than others based on information from fields other than science. Nonetheless, as regards the identity of the designer, modern ID theory happily echoes Isaac Newton's phrase hypothesis non fingo. (Michael Behe, "The Modern Intelligent Design Hypothesis," Philosophia Christi, Series 2, Vol. 3, No. 1 (2001), pg. 165)

So they've made fun of their most highly scientifically credentialed representative. That's what sloppy thinking will do for you.

The woes of liberalism: The New Atheists?

Over at The New Republic there's a new article, Atheism's Wrong Turn by Damon Linker. It is a combination of good intellectual history, a strong defense of liberalism, and a huge waste of words. It gets close to setting up a straw man of the New Atheists and fighting mightily against them in the Matrix of Linker's invention.
Starting near the beginning:

That's because "the new atheism" is not particularly new. It belongs to an intellectual genealogy stretching back hundreds of years, to a moment when atheist thought split into two traditions: one primarily concerned with the dispassionate pursuit of truth, the other driven by a visceral contempt for the personal faith of others.
Today's bellicose atheists are part of the second tradition. And it is not surprising that they have found a sizeable audience for their contemporary repackaging of centuries-old ideas. To liberals frightened by the faith-based conservatism of George Bush or the theistic fanaticism of Osama bin Laden--or both--the feisty language of Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, and Hitchens sounds refreshing, apt, and bold. But the intellectual lineage to which these authors belong should in fact give liberals pause. Among other problems, it isn't a liberal tradition at all.

What a gross overgeneralization. The problem here is that it seems that Linker has taken the most brazen and rather nasty statements by Hitchen from God Is Not Great and tried to apply them to the authors equally. I get a big kick out Hitch because he calls foul and bullshit that's great for the choir and unabashedly offensive otherwise. He's the atheist's Tito. "He's a son of a bitch. But he's our son of a bitch."
One of the problems with lumping Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, and Hitchens together is that they hold a range of beliefs about religion. They all agree theism amounts to sloppy thinking. They are, however, each liberals. A little bit of research on Linker's part would have discovered this. Dawkins is one of the signatories and main proponents, along with Peter Singer, of the Great Ape Project [Read his excerpt from the book of the same name.] Hitchens is a civil libertarian who was once a communist though he has moved from that position. It would be a mistake though to blithely declare him some sort of conservative. Dennett's notions of education - especially religious education - place him quite close to John Dewey. More on that later. Sam Harris has repeatedly stated in public that he is a liberal. But he finds it frustrating that religious moderates, that majority of believers, is so focused on being tolerant that they tolerate absolutely toxic and divisive forms of religiosity, faiths that thrive on intolerance, and let them get away with highway robbery.

There have of course been exceptions to this American consensus. On the one hand, a handful of authors have embraced versions of liberal atheism. Pragmatist philosopher Sidney Hook, for example, placed himself firmly in the Socratic tradition in a 1950 essay for Partisan Review. While acknowledging that, "as a set of cognitive beliefs, religious doctrines constitute a speculative hypothesis of an extremely low order of probability," Hook nonetheless conceded that, for many, faith in God served as "a source of innocent joy, a way of overcoming cosmic loneliness." As long as these comforting religious views were "conceived in personal terms" and did not take "authoritarian institutional form," Hook maintained, they should "fall in an area of choice in which rational criticism may be suspended."

This is all well and good but it's totally irrelevant. What Linker fails to see in much in his state of false consciousness is. Those people who choose to follow such a faith as Hook, were they both in the majority and controlling the public discussion of faith and religiosity, we atheists and agnostics wouldn't be criticizing the world's "faithheads" the way that we are. Who is running the religious conversation in the country right now? Bishop Spong and John Haught or is it Rick Warren, James Dobson, John Hagee and Mike Huckabee? The latter.
Linker's attacks on the New Atheists show the blindness of many religious moderates. They don't want to rock the boat. Religious quackery has become the status quo. Enough already.

Consider, for example, the sloppiness displayed by all of the authors in discussing their political aims. Do they seek to defend the secular politics favored by the American Constitutional framers? Or do they have the much more radical goal of producing a secular society--a society in which the American people, as a whole and individually, have abandoned religion?

We would like a secular society. Of course we do. But every one of the authors also believes in an ecumenical government that respects the inalienable rights of individuals to practice their faiths with their families in the privacies of their own homes and with their congregations. It is in the nature of civil discourse to exercise the rights of the First Amendment.
Once again, I think that Linker would do well to actually read Hitchens' repeated defenses of the U.S. Constitution. While he is an avowed anti-theist, he at no point has ever called for the eradication of the religious. Oddly, in a recently made video of the "four horsemen" chatting, Hitchens shocked the other three by saying that he didn't want religion to go away. The other three were dumbfounded. All agreed though that it is impossible to eradicate religion. Why?
Religiosity appears to be hard-wired into us. There are too many articles and books on the subject, not least of which are Dennett's Breaking the Spell or Dawkins' God Delusion. Look at the work of Scott Atran or Malinowski. Religion isn't going away and there is no program on the part of any atheists I have read - New Atheist or Secular Humanist - that call for the eradication of all religion and certainly no religious people.
Sam Harris wrote an article for John Brockman's What Is Your Dangerous Idea? called "Science Must Destroy Religion." It may shock Linker and other apologists that the destruction is conversational and social.

To win this war of ideas, scientists and other rational people will need to find new ways of talking about ethics and spiritual experience. The distinction between science and religion is not a matter of excluding our ethical intuitions and non-ordinary states of consciousness from our conversation about the world; it is a matter of our being rigorous about what is reasonable to conclude on their basis. We must find ways of meeting our emotional needs that do not require the abject embrace of the preposterous. We must learn to invoke the power of ritual and to mark those transitions in every human life that demand profundity — birth, marriage, death, etc. — without lying to ourselves about the nature of reality.
I am hopeful that the necessary transformation in our thinking will come about as our scientific understanding of ourselves matures. When we find reliable ways to make human beings more loving, less fearful, and genuinely enraptured by the fact of our appearance in the cosmos, we will have no need for divisive religious myths. Only then will the practice of raising our children to believe that they are Christian, Jewish, Muslim, or Hindu be broadly recognized as the ludicrous obscenity that it is. And only then will we stand a chance of healing the deepest and most dangerous fractures in our world.

No Endlösung (Final Solution) there. In all cases we hope for a society of not only toleration, but respect and I should hope hospitality. Toxic religions make this nearly impossible.
Enlightened moderates like Chris Hedges recognize this. In American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America he illuminates the problem of what he calls "The War on Truth." Hedges is the son of a minister and holds a rather luminous, if fuzzy belief in God. He is a man of profound compassion for those who suffer most in the religious and tribal wars across the globe. We can all agree Hedges is a liberal. He has debated Sam Harris.
But he does not shy away from calling the spade a spade. In the midst of a scathing critique of the Answers In Genesis Creation Museum, he writes

The museum illustrates the [creationist] movement's marriage of primitive intolerance with the modern tools of technology, mass communication, sophticated fund-raising and political organization. Totalitarian systems usually start as propagandistic movements that ostensibly teach people to "believe what they want," but that opening gambit is a ruse. This insistence on the primacy of personal opinion regardless of facts destabilizes and destroys the primacy of all facts. This process ultimately leads to the big lie. Facts are useful only if they bolster the message.

Got that? Who should tolerate "the big lie?" You? Me? Linker? I should tolerate the Left Behind series on the interest of tolerance and civility? Books that are loaded with exhortations of the butchery of millions for the prurient interests of toxic-faithed zealots? I should think that it's dandy that John Hagee lobbies congress to invade Iran to bring about the Battle of Armageddon so that he can be raptured up to heaven and watch happily as non-believers writhe in tribulation in the end-game Superbowl of divine and profane warfare not even Tolkien could have described? Bullshit. Utter bullshit.
It amazes me that the real threats to civil society, those who would legally hijack our political system and turn it into a fascist state aren't aired out in the media for fear that we might offend them. Why don't we do it? Because it's a matter of faith and we can't criticize that. Linker only provides more evidence that he is for the status quo and not against calling foul on the Christo-fascists among us.

It is with this enmity, this furious certainty, that our ideological atheists lapse most fully into illiberalism. Politically speaking, liberalism takes no position on theological questions. One can be a liberal and a believer (as were Martin Luther King Jr., Reinhold Niebuhr, and countless others in the American past and present) or a liberal and an unbeliever (as were Hook, Richard Rorty, and a significantly smaller number of Americans over the years). This is in part because liberalism is a philosophy of government, not a philosophy of man--or God. But it is also because modern liberalism derives, at its deepest level, from ancient liberalism--from the classical virtue of liberality, which meant generosity and openness. To be liberal in the classical sense is to accept intellectual variety--and the social complexity that goes with it--as the ineradicable condition of a free society.

We couldn't agree more that we need a free society. This is just a straw man. How's it working out hacking that thing to bits?

The last thing America needs is a war of attrition between two mutually exclusive, absolute systems of belief. Yet this is precisely what the new atheists appear to crave. The task for the rest of us--committed to neither dogmatic faith nor dogmatic doubt--is to make certain that combatants on both sides of the theological divide fail to get their destructive way. And thereby to ensure that liberalism prevails.

So in order for liberalism to prevail it must become so tolerant in conversation of retarded, noxious, genocidal beliefs that it allows those beliefs to fester? Beliefs become actions. And many of those actions are undermining the foundations of our republic. We won't have it.
There are things about the New Atheism that we can say fairly clearly. It is, on some level, quite intolerant. Sam Harris has repeatedly stated that we should be conversationally intolerant of absurd and unsubstantiated ideas, "calling a spade a spade." This should not be incompatible with liberalism. Liberalism must defend the common person's integrity to believe what they wish so that we can live in and un/believe in peace.
Linker is right to defend liberalism for it stands up for people. It stands for dignity. The New Atheists see too much religion as being a threat to free and civil society. We may hope that you stop believing the myths of the past, but we respect your right to hold those beliefs. What we cannot stand for are those ideologies - religious or secular - that demand true faith and the lockstep of belief. When the liberal religious moderate stands up to the religious bullies all around us - those who claim to own women's bodies, who claim to know what is best for a blastocyst, who deny the findings of science on climate change, the age of the universe, or the theory of evolution, who claim that the U.S. is a nation destined to be the earthly agent of Jesus - then we can back off. Stand for a real civil society.

Think with your brain. It's your only choice.

I've received a letter that you can read here. It's from Sean, a nice deeply faithful protestant Christian who has been sending me the materials about the International House of Prayer (IHOP). There are two things I will respond to.
First, Sean writes:

I've said this before and yet you still do not hear. Think with your heart as well as your head. The default argument always given when someone objects to evolution is "you don't understand it". Come on, it's been around long enough to be understood. There are plenty who have learned about it in middle school, high school and college and have rejected it. I was just speaking with such a person recently: she majored in biology, was subjected to Dawkins' "The Selfish Gene", the whole gamut. She rejects evolution because the facts don't support it. This debate is like the debate about the existence of Moses, et al...it's all about interpretation of the past, a recent interpretation at that. A lot of the things that are now in dispute were not in dispute throughout history, namely the existence of key figures in scripture, God's role in this universe, and even just the existence of God.

Strictly speaking, thinking with your heart is impossible. It is the organ that causes blood to flow through your cardiovascular system. So I will take it that he wants me to think emotionally. He wants me to feel.
I do every day. We all do. Every day I play with my son and revel in how much joy he and I bring one another. Each day I indulge in the love of my wife. I tell my father I love him. I listen to the amazing music of Josquin, Miles Davis, Sibelius, and Cynic. Outside it is snowing. Gorgeous.
What Sean doesn't know is that I am a composer too. I have written dozens of song, pieces for solo instruments, electronics, chamber music, film music for a short and a documentary, and music for Baroque orchestra. As such, I am quite in touch with "revelation" through art. How else to feel the experience of the flash of inspiration but as some sort of revelation that sweeps me up with its elan?

Intoxicating.

Magical.

It's also real and true.

And entirely subjective. Its truth claims reside entirely within the emotional and imaginative complex of my neural architecture and can't serve as a guide for the explicate order of the universe. When I listen to the Josquin Despres' four-part motet De profundis clamavi I am regularly moved to tears. It is a piece for me to listen to in the dark, alone, enrapt the sound of the Hilliard Ensemble plaintively calling out from the depths of our human experience, hoping as the Psalmist did, that we can escape despair. In that moment, there is great truth in the recognition of the loneliness of being a finite human mammal who will die and do injustice to himself and others along the way. Perhaps there is some reprieve. Out of the depths we do cry.
Is this a way to understand the universe? Surely not. The rapturous love that I feel in the presence of such music, the glee of my son bouncing on my lap, the ecstasy of making love with my wife, the rush of descending a butt-behind-the-seat descent on my mountain bike, and the sometimes crushing despair and loneliness that comes with living are all essential to being a healthy human but they explain nothing about the mechanisms of how life came to be on earth.
So when my honorable friend says to use heart and mind - to feel and think - he makes two errors. The first is to fight with a straw man. The second is to apply feelings where they don't really belong.
He uses the example of evolution as I am so fond of its explanatory prowess. He says that a friend of his went through the whole bit and was just unconvinced because of the lack of evidence aligning. My first question is to wonder whether she is a theist and to what degree? The second though is to ask her to explain each of these categories from a non-evolutionary standpoint in a way that is consistent and supported by the evidence:
1. The ancient date of the earth from tens of thousands of samples using disparate and corroborative methods of dating from tree rings, Carbon dating, ice core sampling, stratigraphy, K-Ar dating, and more.
2. The radiation of the fossil record from single-celled organisms to the modern cornucopia of animal, plant, protozoan, fungi, etc.
3. The remnants of ancestry in our embryonic development.
4. The genetic relatedness of the entire tree of life. Why does everything contain the same basic chemical blueprint for its living programming? If humans are made in God's image, why are they made of the same stuff that every other living thing is?
5. Biogeography: why do living organisms in isolated places like islands seem so alike to those animals on the mainland that are closest to them?
6. Why the common five-digit morphology in mammals?
7. Why are there different animals filling the exact same niche in different locations? Why a wolf AND a marsupial wolf?
8. Why are there vestigial hips in whales?
9. Why would whales live in an environment that can kill them so easily; i.e. why live in the water when you breathe air?
10. How does variation occur in human populations?
All of these questions are answered quite well by the modern synthesis of evolution and the associated sciences of paleontology, biology, anthropology, geology, and genetics. The answer is so simple. Given the 3.6 billion years that life has existed on the earth, the nonrandom process of natural selection acting on random mutations (and other genetic occurrences) has formed each of those the panoply of life throughout earth's history. There are literally millions of pieces of evidence holding it up that have NOTHING to do with our wishes or desires. They are facts of nature free of revelation and subjectivity.
For more on those categories see Jerry Coyne's "The Faith That Dare Not Speak Its Name" at Edge. It's a nice primer that answers some of those questions in layman's terms.
The end of Sean's above quotation is rather irrelevant.

This debate is like the debate about the existence of Moses, et al...it's all about interpretation of the past, a recent interpretation at that. A lot of the things that are now in dispute were not in dispute throughout history, namely the existence of key figures in scripture, God's role in this universe, and even just the existence of God.

This will sound flippant but so what? The more we learn about the past from the cultivation of independent lines of inquiry whose evidence aligns to support a given interpretation of events - whether the Battle of Thermopoli, building the Great Wall of China, Beethoven writing the Eroica, or the Cambrian "Explosion" - the more we can come to a justified belief or group of beliefs about something. Or we might have to declare that we can only hold tentative beliefs about a subject or declare ignorance. Just because most people believed "X" throughout history doesn't make it true. That's an argument from tradition and an argument from the majority. Christians in the middle ages believed that Jews couldn't reproduce without the blood of young Christian women. The vast majority of slave owners believed that the Bible sanctions slavery (it does). That doesn't mean they were right. The majority of people believed that the earth was flat, that sun went around the earth, the earth was the center of the universe, that there are pantheons of gods, that women shouldn't be granted the equal rights, that women can be witches, the evil eye, that all diseases (mental or bodily) are caused by demons and not germs, that smoking is good for you, and that stars aren't balls of fusing elements but were angels or other supernatural entities hung in the sky. All of those aren't true.
Just because we have intuitions about things isn't evidence of the veracity of those intuitions. It's evidence that we have those intuitions and should see how accurate and/or probable they are. Sometimes we are right. Sometimes not. The scientific method helps us do that and do it across the spectrum of experience. It deals with reality very well with the explicate order and explaining how it works. In an ultimate sense, whether or not the majority agrees with it or not doesn't prove its rectitude or accuracy. Only its accuracy can do that.

My second point:

These same scoffers believe that everything has continued as it has since the beginning of the universe (i.e. uniformitarianism - 'the present is the key to the past').

You can call me a scoffer until the end of my life then. You accept uniform nature every day. The sun has come up every day and you expect it will tomorrow. The car you drive operates according to the laws of nature and that so long as things are in proper working order you won't be vaporized by your car upon starting it. There has never been a day recorded in history that gravity ceased for 10 minutes. Is it so unreasonable to suspect that before recorded human history or in places where there was no recorded history that the same laws of nature were active? It is an act of induction on our part based on 100% of human experience. The only time we supposed to suspend these rules of logic and reason is when we approach the cherished myths contained in certain holy books whether the Bible, the Quran, or the Bhagivad Gita. But to allow this suspension of disbelief is to open the world up to utter nonsense and explanations that are irrelevant (and therefore non-explanatory) or dangerous.
There is no polite way to say this. But when someone says that they don't accept uniformitarianism, they are a hypocrite.
I am not going to respond to Sean's many Bible verse quotations. He has put the cart before the horse and assumed that the Bible is true in its entirety. There are millions of other Christians who believe the exact same thing (Mike Huckabee included) and I doubt that my picking apart the Bible itself is going to do much good. Muslims prop up their "predictions" from the Quran and so do the John Frum cargo cultists of the South Pacific do. And saying that 2 Peter is scientific because it predicts things about the human heart is meaningless. So does Virgil's Aeneid or Homer's Odyssey and Iliad. They aren't predictions. They're observations.
So I will think with my brain because it's the only choice I have. In the short time I have to spend on this resplendent planet of endless discoveries, I will feel the fullness of life and time and use my powers of logic and reason to understand how things work. To not use my evolved intelligence in such a way would be to act in ignorance.

Jesus in Iowa

The ecclesiastical one-upsmanship in the GOP race has just gotten to a whole new level. Mike Huckabee has just released one of the most absurd ads in all of political history by dividing the country into who's a real Christian and who isn't. It's all about religion now and the Christianization of the American political process.
I'm glad someone did it. Just show us where you stand and we can judge it. The American electorate is going to go for a proto-theocracy or it isn't. My bet is that it won't. The more that evangelicals try to shove their particular version of their holy book and its requisite dogma on us the more annoyed and antagonistic many people will become.
Huckabee said that he was perplexed by someone asking him whether he "believed" in the theory of evolution, saying that he wasn't being interviewed to be an 8th-grade science teacher. Is he running for pastor-in-chief? No. So all of this pious grandstanding should be irrelevant. But it's not.
We are getting a glimpse of what kind of governing goals this man has. To quote Jon Robin Baitz at Huffington Post, we are seeing the signals of what's actually important to this man.

"At this time of year", Huckabee says, looking into the camera, "it only matters that we celebrate the birth of Christ." No it doesn't. What matters is figuring out how not to blow up the entire Middle East as we plan our (SLOW, RESPONSIBLE) egress from Iraq.

Jesus.
Salvation.
"Family values."
This is a man who would have railed against Judge Jones III's ruling in the Dover case, supported the ousting of Christine Comer from the Texas Education Agency as the science director, and endorsed the bizarro-world definition of science in Kansas. He would oppose stem-cell research. Anti-choice strictures because of amorphous notions about God knowing you before you were born (forget for a moment that there were centuries of church-endorsed infanticide). Culturally-sanctioned homophobia. The man thought that AIDS sufferers should be quarantined.
When we have a receding economy, are stuck in the quagmire of Iraq, are becoming increasingly racially and economically stratified, and are losing credibility the world over, we don't need a would-be theocrat in office who lies about having a theology degree.
When Morris Fiorina questions whether or not the is a culture war, the answer is "Yes." Sorry Moe.
So bring it on Mike. Let's see your piety in public and your posturing.

Texas is eating more and more of its own...well...you know.

Over at NCSE they have a story up about the former science director for the Texas Education Agency who decided to promote good science by alerting fellow science educators that someone invested in...I don't know...science was coming nearby: one Barbara Forrest a philosopher of science and education.

Over two weeks after it was first reported that Christine Comer was forced to resign from her post at the Texas Education Agency, apparently because she forwarded a brief e-mail announcing a lecture on "intelligent design" by Barbara Forrest, the state's newspapers continue to provide a steady stream of news and commentary. And groups with a stake in the integrity of science education in Texas continue to voice their concern. As the Austin American-Statesman (December 14, 2007) observed in its latest story, "The controversy over Comer�s departure put the agency�s scientific credibility at risk at a time when Texas is trying to attract star researchers and scientists for a growing biomedical and biotech industry, and just before the State Board of Education begins developing new science standards next month."

Comer herself appeared on NPR's "Science Friday" on December 7, 2007, relating her story to the show's host, Ira Flatow. After receiving the e-mail announcing Forrest's talk, she said, "you know, I had a half minute and I said, gee, this is really interesting. And then, I looked up the credential on my computer, I Googled Barbara Forrest and I said, oh my goodness, this is quite a credential[ed] speaker. And then I thought to myself -- you know, I'm telling my biology teachers almost on a weekly basis, teach the curriculum, teach the evolution curriculum because it's part of the state-mandated curriculum. And now, I should be -- you know, I should be walking the talk here, and I -- there's nothing wrong with this e-mail, of course." Less than two hours later, a colleague was calling for her termination, and in the following week, she was effectively forced to resign.

But see, when you dig into what people really really really think about the matter it comes to religion and faith. Like this ignoramus:

The TEA's commissioner Robert Scott was interviewed by the Dallas Morning News (December 9, 2007). He denied that Comer was forced to resign just for forwarding the e-mail announcing Forrest's talk, alluding to "other factors" that he was not able to discuss. Asked, "Was her advocacy of evolution over creationism an element in her dismissal?" he replied, "She wasn't advocating for evolution. But she may have given the impression that ... we were taking a position as an agency -� not as an individual but as an agency -- on a matter." Asked, "Why shouldn't the agency advocate the science of evolution? Texas students are required to study it," he replied, "you can be in favor of a science without bashing people's faith, too. I don't know all the facts, but I think that may be the real issue here." He did not explain how Comer's behavior was supposed to constitute faith-bashing.

So this isn't about the science of the matter. It's about your delusions of specialness because the Bible says you were made in God's image and the ENTIRE BODY of science says that's very unlikely. Sorry. Get out of the way and sign up for some science classes. Maybe one that Comer would teach:

For her part, Comer told the Morning News, "Any science teacher worth their salt that has any background in biology will tell you there is no controversy" over the scientific status of evolution. That, she said, was her approach during her tenure at the TEA, where she frequently responded to questions about evolution education in Texas: "We have teachers afraid to teach it, parents who don't want it taught and parents who do want it taught. It comes from all different angles." She added, "For all the years I was there, I would always say the teaching of evolution is part of our science curriculum. It's not just a good idea; it's the law." But now she is not optimistic about the future of science education in Texas, lamenting, "The way things are being done these days I don't think rational minds have a chance."

So the DI wants ignorance taught at the behest of Egnor(ance)

Michael Egnor at the Discovery Institute wants us to bow to the ignorance of Florida mothers who are totally ignorant about evolution so that their religious worldviews can be upheld by school districts who wouldn't want to teach the scientific method or anything. I mean really why hold up reality, uniform nature, or the hypothetico-deductive method? Who even really believed that natural phenomena have natural causes? Right?
So when a numbnuts like Egnor (a surgeon who believe that evolution has little to do with biology) says that we "include teaching students that some aspects of Darwin’s theory can be questioned scientifically" then maybe he should pay attention to how evolution is taught in schools. See...it's science. It's all tentative. Unlike religious nonsense that refuses to engage in a battle of ideas about its veracity, it has to be tested every day.
And guess what? It does better than all of the nonsense that religion pawns on a gullible populace.
So where there are reasonable differences of fact, induction, deduction, and inference, we are happy to disagree or agree or fight about the data. But when scientifically illiterate mothers in Florida try to assert their authority in public matters because they don't know squat about either evolution or the scientific method, it's not only annoying. It's disruptive.
Regarding a mom in Florida:

Kendall, whose message is that evolution shouldn't be taught to the exclusion of other ideas, told the Gradebook she was disappointed with the State Board's approach on this subject: "It appears to me they don't want public input."
...

The Gradebook caught up with board member Linda Taylor, who had so far been silent on the topic of the standards, and found her generally supportive of the "choices" philosophy, so long as it falls within what the state can do legally.

Taylor "With the evolution, there's a bigger topic called theories of origin. I think kids should have the opportunity to compare different theories," Taylor (left) said. "If we are focused on evolution I am OK with that. But they should at least know there are other theories out there and that they could themselves compare them or that they be presented to them."

It's a shame that students can escape reality because of their parents' wish-thinking but so it goes. At this time I reluctantly allow for the freedom of ignorant people to remain that way in the interest of their own sovereignty. But this notion of theory is the tried and true semantic misunderstanding of theory in science and theory in the colloquial. Theories in science are unifying explanations that have been created because of a vast amount of observation and testing that has supported the theory. In the colloquial sense a theory is a hunch.
Evolution is no mere hunch.
It's one of the most fecund and robust theories in modern science.

The Hobbit!!!

As a premiere LOTR nerd who arranged the line parties for the LOTR trilogy, I have to sign on to say "F*** YES!!!!"
Check it theonering.net

December 18, 2007

ACADEMY AWARD-WINNER PETER JACKSON AND NEW LINE CINEMA JOIN WITH MGM TO PRODUCE “THE HOBBIT,” EAGERLY-ANTICIPATED FANTASY ADVENTURE EPIC

NEW LINE AND MGM TO CO-PRODUCE AND SHARE WORLDWIDE DISTRIBUTION RIGHTS

PETER JACKSON AND FRAN WALSH TO EXECUTIVE PRODUCE TWO FILMS BASED ON “THE HOBBIT”

Los Angeles, CA (Tuesday, December 18, 2007) Academy Award-winning filmmaker Peter Jackson; Harry Sloan, Chairman and CEO, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc. (MGM); Bob Shaye and Michael Lynne, Co-Chairmen and Co-CEOs of New Line Cinema have jointly announced today that they have entered into the following series of agreements:

* MGM and New Line will co-finance and co-distribute two films, “The Hobbit” and a sequel to “The Hobbit.” New Line will distribute in North America and MGM will distribute internationally.

* Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh will serve as Executive Producers of two films based on “The Hobbit.” New Line will manage the production of the films, which will be shot simultaneously.

NAS to release new materials on teaching evolution

Because we still have so many wingnuts opposing the teaching and research of the most fecund of all theories in biology, evolution, the National Academy of Sciences has to make a release about it. Really, it's sad that we have to have this kind of reminder that reality is real and that the logic of experience, observation, testing, and the whole enterprise of the scientific method is necessary. It really shows how prone to absurdities the U.S. is. For all of our beliefs in our exceptionalism, we make the most arrogant claims against reality I could imagine. Get over it. We are all connected by what Richard Dawkins has euphemistically termed the "River out of Eden."

Science, Evolution, and Creationism

This completely updated edition of the landmark booklet Science and Creationism is written for anyone who wants to learn more about the science of evolution. It provides a succinct overview of the many recent advances from the fossil record, molecular biology, and a new field known as evolutionary-developmental biology that have yielded important, new, and overwhelming evidence for evolution. It makes clear that the study of evolution remains one of the most active, robust, and far-reaching fields in all of modern science.

However, controversies about teaching evolution continue in the United States. Recently some opponents of evolution have supported introducing a form of creationism known as "intelligent design" into public school science classes or have argued that science teachers should encourage "critical thinking" by discussing "controversies" surrounding evolution.

This book provides clear explanations and intriguing examples that emphasize the strength of the science of evolution and the lack of scientific controversy surrounding whether evolution has and is continuing to occur. It is an excellent resource for understanding how evolution is central to many other areas of science and why evolution and not creationism should be taught in the science classroom.

More on the International House of Prayer

So the IHOP (not the International House of Pancakes) has a posting of numerous of miracles that can only be attributable, so their expounders say, to the healing power of God. This is highly doubtful. Why?
Because they are all more easily explained by natural causes or contain little enough information to warrant more investigation.
We are fond of Occam's Razor which states that "plurality should not be posited without necessity." Find the most parsimonious example. So, for example, when Napoleon asked LaPlace where the Creator was in all of his writings on the universe, LaPlace replied that he had no need for that hypothesis. Why? Because it doesn't aid the explanation of the motion of the planets through space and so on. Those who are ignorant of the facts of a single or set of phenomena (as most of us will be on most phenomena) can always chalk something up to God because it is beyond our comprehension. Claiming that something is a miracle explains exactly zero about what has actually happened to the materials involved in the phenomena.
Does this hold true for the majority of these supposed miracles? Going through the whole list here isn't worth my time or yours, but suffice it to say tat there is nothing in any of them that contains any convincing evidence that a supernatural force was at work much less that the healing supernatural force behind it was Jesus.
In all of them we might ask a question that extends from David Hume in An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding:

There must...be a uniform experience against every miraculous event, otherwise the event would not merit that appellation.

Does the supposed miracle violate the uniform experience of the universe? I'm afraid that in every circumstance in the above link, that we could spin examples and explanations that work as well or better than "God did it."

For example, the first entry states that a woman with a 3% chance of getting pregnant got pregnant. 3% is better than 0%. It's not as if she didn't have her ovaries and somehow managed to get pregnant. That would be a miracle.

Various people had pains in their backs and limbs and found that after praying and communion that they could work with less pain. I am happy for them. Has anyone done any follow-up on these people? Is not in some cases a relaxing ritual of meditation and so on physiologically good for limb pain? If these people are relaxing, as some of them allege happened to them, then that sounds physiological.

I have had tendinitis and fascitis. They are not fun. Guess what? They rather suddenly go away after weeks or months of pain for no reason that I can observe from outside the tissue of my own body. This is a rather universal experience.

All of these assuredly have material explanations. To guess that God did it is to say that you don't understand what happened. None of these contains anything that is remotely compelling as evidence of miracles. In every double-blind study that medical scientists have done, there has been no positive correlation between prayer and healing that exceeds chance.
For example, Herbert Benson et al. conducted research published in the American Heart Journal in April 2006 ("Study of the Therapeutic Effects of Intercessory Prayer (STEP) in cardiac bypass patients: A multicenter randomized trial of uncertainty and certainty of receiving intercessory prayer"). Patients at six U.S. hospitals were randomly assigned to one of three groups: 604 received intercessory prayer after being informed that they may or may not receive prayer; 597 did not receive intercessory prayer (also after being informed that they may or may not receive prayer); and 601 received intercessory prayer after being informed they would receive prayer. Starting the night before coronary artery bypass graft (CABG) surgery, the patients received intercessory prayer. The primary outcome was presence of any complication within 30 days of CABG. Secondary outcomes were any major event and mortality. The results indicate no effect from prayer. In the two groups uncertain about receiving intercessory prayer, complications occurred in 52% (315/604) of patients who received intercessory prayer versus 51% (304/597) of those who did not. Complications occurred in 59% (352/601) of patients certain of receiving intercessory prayer compared with the 52% (315/604) of those uncertain of receiving intercessory prayer. Major events and 30-day mortality were similar across the three groups (see AHJ Online for the abstract).
All of that said, if someone were "miraculously" healed, it would still not show that it was Jesus vs. Krishna vs. Yahweh vs. Allah vs. John Frum vs. the Flying Spaghetti Monster vs. Bast vs. Thor vs. Russell's Teapot vs. the Fifth Element vs. the Ancestors vs. Tezcatlipoca vs. the angel Moroni. Each of these deities or powers has been ascribed abilities that are exclusive to them. True believers of each of these faiths believe they only their deity or power can do the healing. In the realm of human experience then on the macro-level suggests that the exclusive claims of each faith negate one another.
All alleged miracles appear to be selective wish thinking and communal reinforcement, reading testimonies with a mammoth confirmation bias - people wanting to believe something so they do.
As Hume said, "A wise man, therefore, proportions his belief to the evidence." I will gladly accept that prayer could work if there were independently-confirmed and corroborated evidence from multiple lines of investigation. Then there would have to be evidence of actual violations of the laws of nature occurred on behalf of the people who were affected and that those violations be attributable to a specific supernatural deity. But there isn't at this time. None.
What would seal the deal for me would be the spontaneous healing of an amputee. Show me Jesus spontaneously regenerating a limb on a boy who has lost his legs to a landmine in Cambodia or Afghanistan and I'll be much more likely to get on board. Based on the combined inductions of more than 300 years of scientific revolution and Enlightenment methods, it's not going to happen.
I'll close with this with an excerpt from an older post:

1. Pope John Paul II's adoration of the Virgin Mary was dramatically demonstrated in 1981 when Mehmet Ali Agca tried to assassinate him in Rome. As we all know, he survived. He said Our Lady of Fatima (not just the Virgin Mary but the Virgin of Fatima). He said, "A maternal hand guided the bullet." My question is, "Why didn't she just stop the gun from going off in the first place?" Or, "Why not show Agca that compassion is better than aggression."
There is simply no evidence for her guiding hand. Agca missed.

2. Consider the following website:
http://www.whydoesgodhateamputees.com/
"How can we decide, conclusively, whether God is real or imaginary?
Since we are intelligent human beings living in the 21st century, we should take the time to look at some data. That is what we are doing when we ask, "Why won't God heal amputees?"
If you are an intelligent human being, and if you want to understand the true nature of God, you owe it to yourself to ask, "Why won't God heal amputees?"

3. Finally, I'll leave you with a quotation by Epicurus:
"Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?"

Hitchens blasts Huckabee

Thank you Hitch. "This Is Not a Test: It's perfectly reasonable to reject a candidate because of his religious views."
Huckabee, Romney, Brownback, and Bush have all worn their faiths on their sleeves and made pronouncement as stupid as Romney's that a president should be a person of faith and that freedom needs religion. Garbage. Tell that to the woman in Saudi Arabia who was sentenced to how many lashes for being gang-raped or the British woman who had to be extradited from Sudan for allowing her students to name a teddy bear Mohammed or the girls in the U.S. who live in fear of their husbands and don't work because the Bible has unequivovally placed men at the front of the house. Faith is to freedom what ten foot hurdles are to tracks.
Hitchens says

Just before this gets completely out of hand and becomes a mantralike repetition, let us please recall what the careful phrases of Article VI of the U.S. Constitution actually and very carefully and deliberately say:
The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the Members of the several State Legislatures, and all executive and judicial Officers, both of the United States and of the several States, shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution; but no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.

They've loved it when they are praised as men of faith but then they try to call foul when they are criticized for it and accuse the secularists of using a litmus test. Do you want us to judge you by your faith or not?

However, what Article VI does not do, and was never intended to do, is deny me the right to say, as loudly as I may choose, that I will on no account vote for a smirking hick like Mike Huckabee, who is an unusually stupid primate but who does not have the elementary intelligence to recognize the fact that this is what he is. My right to say and believe that is already guaranteed to me by the First Amendment. And the right of Huckabee to win the election and fill the White House with morons like himself is unaffected by my expression of an opinion.

Open letter to the fundamentalists

First, the entire opening of your post assumes that I we agree that God is real and that I am reacting to a father who exists. My reactions are not to the Bible (in this case) but the the espoused beliefs of human beings and their subsequent actions. I will not and no citizen in a representatice democratic republic should submit to the alleged statements of a supposed extra-dimensional authority who won't daily speak for himself. So you've put the cart before the horse.
Second, your analogy of my childishness is itself fallacious because children can't be reasoned with because the pre-frontal lobes aren't formed and their abilities to reason are poor. They don't weigh evidence. I weigh evidence as do other reasonable people. You provide the evidence for the existence of an alleged transcendant all-powerful, all-good, all-just, all knowing superbeing from multiple lines of evidence in addition to the Bible and I'm all ears. If you haven't anything new to add to the spetum of the last 7000 years of nation states then don't bother.
So on that note it seems patently ridiculous that you should accuse me of arrogating myself against God when you can't even establish its existence. Isn't it rather the opposite that you are being arrogant that I believe you and other Christians who make outstanding claims about the nature of the universe and then expect me to accept them when you have no evidence for them to show me other than the washed-up myths the newest of which are over 1900 years old?
I'm glad you don't claim to understand the Trinity. That's because it's logically incomprehensible. However, the human genome is comprehensible and we can test it and observe it. That's because, unlike the Trinity, it's real.
Because I don't know how you define "perfect" I can’t respond to your belief in God's perfect universe.
No, there are no findings in modern science that confirm the scientific truth of the Bible. Only creationists with the a priori assumption that the Bible is literally true believe that. And you can't actually believe that the Bible is literally true anyway because then you'd believe that Pi=3.
It's also amusing to me that you accuse me of blaming God for things and telling me to grow up. I haven't ever blamed God for anything. Why would I blame something that probably doesn't exist outside of human brains? That would be silly. God didn’t mess up my proverbial bedroom. His followers do.
You say that you wrestle with the problem of evil – theodicy. Good. You should. We all should. And you haven’t really answered the question here about why evil exists if there is an all-loving God in the world except for the canard that we have free will. Why make beings in your own image then who you have apparently designed to live in bliss with you forever and then demand that they remain ignorant and punish them with death and pain just because they didn’t do what you wanted them to do? Why not explain it to them and offer them more chances or take the fruit away? God must have known that they were going to be curious and temptable right? So circumscribe their access to things or live with the consequences. Really, it just sounds like non-communicative and bad parenting.
Isn’t it convenient that you can just state that the predictions in the Bible are true without providing any solid evidence? More a priori reasoning.
I’ll spare you the entire modern canon of science that corroborates evolution in all of its predictions. I wouldn’t want you to have to think too hard.
Telling me to pray about something does not encourage me to do it. If I don't believe in the magical sky god then I am not going to pray to it. Stop putting the cart before the horse and prove that this being exists without using an argument from authority, an argument from revelation, or an argument from tradition. And don't mistake my passion and anger for abject dismissal. At every turn I am able, I will apply both temperance and rationality. But some arguments are bad and insulting.
Yours truly,
PDB

Dinosaur tracts?

I didn't stumble on this cartoon as I searched around the other day, but someone left it in the comments and I can't resist. I can. But I won't.

AAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!
When I see something like this, I am simply blown away by the stupidity at every level.
First, the pun is terrible.
Second, every animal on earth apparently lacks a soul and therefore doesn't go to heaven so why would they worship Jesus?
Third, what kind of remotely literate person would be led to becoming a Christian because of dinosaurs? Anyone knowledgeable about paleontology, evolution, and natural history who also hasn't been brainwashed by bronze-aged nincompoopery won't fall into this moronathon. Only children and those with the brains of children will go for it. In fact, a recent Science article "Childhood Origins of Adult Resistance to Science" (abstract only), Bloom and Weisberg found:

Resistance to certain scientific ideas derives in large part from assumptions and biases that can be demonstrated experimentally in young children and that may persist into adulthood. In particular, both adults and children resist acquiring scientific information that clashes with common-sense intuitions about the physical and psychological domains. Additionally, when learning information from other people, both adults and children are sensitive to the trustworthiness of the source of that information. Resistance to science, then, is particularly exaggerated in societies where nonscientific ideologies have the advantages of being both grounded in common sense and transmitted by trustworthy sources.

The most prevalent ideology in the United States that does that is the pernicious and virulent strains of Protestant fundamentalism. It uses seeming common sense (the argument from/to design) and trustworthy sources (either the minister/pastor, the media and church network with whom he associates, and the Bible). Science threatens the fundamental assumptions of the shepherd and his flock, the cultural power of the church, and the personal power of the pastor. It refuses to accept the argument from authority, revelation, or tradition and demands evidence and the abandonment of childish fantasies and even common-sense explanations.
These cartoons are evocations of childishness. They are geared toward those who refuse to grow up personally, intellectually, and morally. In short: they are pathetic.

"40 Days and 40 Nights" is a Revelation

40 Days and 40 Nights: Darwin, Intelligent Design, God, OxyContin, and Other Oddities on Trial in Pennsylvania
by Matthew Chapam


Matthew Chapman’s 40 Days and 40 Nights: Darwin, Intelligent Design, God, OxyContin, and Other Oddities on Trial in Pennsylvania uses cutting wit, sensitivity, and intelligent analysis to introduce the reader to the human side of the Kitzmiller v. Dover School Board trial of 2005. Readers looking for a funky take on current events will surely enjoy 40 Days and 40 Nights.
Chapman is Charles Darwin’s great-great grandson and a high school dropout. As a teenager, he moved to the United States where he became something of a vagabond, who landed in the film business. He is also a journalist and an author of a previous book on the 1925 Scopes trial. He has a fondness for science and evolution in particular; but as he is more of a cultural critic and irreverent wordsmith who has more flare than force, 40 Days and 40 Nights welcomes the reader into the trial’s life and the lives its major players rather than the scientific and theological arguments. We get, on almost every page, a sense of how the American culture war plays out in the homes and churches of Middle America.
The trial pitted eleven parents against the Dover School Board who had adopted a policy that disparaged the theory of evolution and encouraged students to learn about creationism’s newest permutation, intelligent design. The trial ended in Judge John E. Jones III’s ruling that the intelligent design policy violated the First Amendment’s establishment clause, that intelligent design is not science, and that thenceforth it would be illegal for public schools to teach it in the Middle District of Pennsylvania.
The book faithfully follows the trial’s trajectory from its genesis as a seemingly innocuous statement by a school board to the trial’s aftermath. Each witness gets her or his page-time and Chapman does his best to do each justice though his fondness for some comes across. His descriptions of the plaintiffs, their lawyers, expert witnesses, and advocates show genuine warmth, briefly showcasing aspects of their physical appearances and their characters. Chapman, an avowed atheist, thought that Catholic theologian John Haught had “the most beautiful mind in the whole trial…He could talk flawlessly for several minutes at a stretch, neither fast nor slow, and with the utmost courtesy.” The defense got the same treatment. Expert witness Michael Behe was “a Catholic father of nine, was bearded, vague, and tweed jacketed” for whom Chapman expressed fondness and Behe apparently enjoyed as well, telling a local newspaper that Chapman was “a friendly fellow.”
But Chapman’s genuine distaste for several people on the defense’s side eliminates any sense of Chapman’s righteous indignation. The lawyers of the Thomas More Law Center who worked pro bono for the defendants come across as rather pathetic and often neglected by their leader, Richard Thompson, whose bullish courtroom style came across as rather ham-handed and imprecise. Former school board member Heather Geesey and Sheila Harkin are painted as twittering know-nothings while Alan Bonsell, former president of the school board comes across as likeable and clean as a whistle by his friends but a smarmy huckster by his opponents.
William Buckingham, the board’s former curriculum director receives the most interesting portrait. Buckingham’s outlandish statements did more to land the Dover School District in its morass than any other. The media reported on several occasions statements that inevitably showed the school board’s religious intent, including overt endorsements of creationism, saying that the United States is a Christian nation, and that “2,000 years ago a man died on a Cross, can't someone stand up for Him?” Opponents made Buckingham into something of a demon and H.L Mencken, the reporter who covered the Scopes Trial would have indulged in a barrage of clever cuts on Buckingham. But Chapman comes to understand Buckingham’s humanity – a man whose personal life was pockmarked by some personal tragedies who, for all of his breathtakingly inane bluster, made him that much more of a person and not just the simple-minded would-be theocrat he might seem.
Biblical allusions color the book. Its title actually refers to the trial’s length as observed on the trial’s last day by defense attorney Patrick Gillen. Chapman structure 40 Days and 40 Nights on the two halves of the trial – plaintiffs first and then the defense. Because of the trial’s religious rancor, But the two halves create an Old and New Testament. The first half is titled “In the Beginning” and the first chapter is “Genesis”; the second half is “The New Testament of Science” and begins with “The Man from Bethlehem” (referring to the defense’s expert witness Michael Behe) and ending with “Revelation.”
My one reservation about the book comes from its occasionally too-quick approach to some of the trial’s technical philosophical or scientific details. Some of the most dynamic material came from plaintiffs’ witnesses Robert Pennock and Kevin Padian. Their testimony could be intellectually challenging: Pennock’s responses sometimes moved unnecessarily toward philosophical jargon and Padian’s into some rather elaborate explanations of the fossil record. But Chapman avoids the details more than some readers might like. Perhaps he expected that people so interested could read the transcripts themselves or review the substantial literature in the popular controversy between intelligent design creationism and science.
As someone who attended the trial’s last day and read every transcript as they became available, I found 40 Days and 40 Nights both entertaining and informative. No doubt because of Chapman’s film experience it reads more quickly than typical documentary non-fiction. In the book’s final chapter, Chapman takes a long view from the trial and its legacy and makes a call for a new Enlightenment. Pick up the book and heed the call.

Put away your party hats

Whitehouse spokeswoman Dana Perino shut the door on reason yesterday. The Bali Roadmap is essentially gutted for now. The Guardian reports, "The US does have serious concerns. Negotiations must [now] proceed on the view that the problem of climate change cannot be adequately addressed through commitments for emissions cuts by developed countries alone." That may be the case, but where is the lion's share of energy consumption and its corresponding fuel use? Hmmmm.

That should clear it up for us. Solar Energy International states that the U.S. uses 26% of the world's energy, 15 times the global average per person, and we use the second most amount of energy per capita. Compare that to the so-called developing world which, all told, uses 30% of the world's energy. According to the International Energy Annual the United States used 100.691 quadrillion (that's 15 zeros!) Btu and the consumption of 2,326.4 million tons of oil in 2006.
The foot-dragging of the world's energy-eating juggernaut is unacceptable and to say that a group of "developing" nations need to be guided more is kind of like a millionaire in a New York penthouse saying that he wants to make sure that all of the poor families in Compton and in the bayous of Mississippi are paying their taxes before he does. The more we drag, the more accelerated will be glacial and ice cap melting...

...and the sooner we might see the kinds of scenarios put forward in An Inconvenient Truth like New York City flooding...

...in a manner not dissimilar from New Orleans:

I've looked at some other blogs including the Natural Resource Defense Council and DotEarth and they are still on yesterday's news.
I'm thinking I'm calling Arlen Specter, Bob Casey, John Peterson, and getting my local borough to agree to the Bali Roadmap.

Science Debate 2008!

A group of scientists and intellectuals including Lawrence Krauss, Matthew Chapman, some Nobel Laureates, at least one member of the House of Representatives, the Center for Inquiry, and others are calling for Science Debate 2008:

Given the many urgent scientific and technological challenges facing America and the rest of the world, the increasing need for accurate scientific information in political decision making, and the vital role scientific innovation plays in spurring economic growth and competitiveness, we call for a public debate in which the U.S. presidential candidates share their views on the issues of The Environment, Health and Medicine, and Science and Technology Policy.

Do you really want Mike Huckabee to be the president? A man who believes that the following:

"It's scientifically impossible for the bumblebee to fly. But the bumblebee, being unaware of these scientific facts, flies anyway."

That's not true. Bumblebees fly. Therefore, it's not a scientific fact that it's impossible. Obviously, the opposite is true. In fact, this contrivance of creationist propaganda was demolished several years ago by a Cornell researcher. Here is "[a]n animated (if your browser supports it) excerpt from [a] two-dimensional computer simulation of a hovering dragonfly's wing reveal[ing] the vortices of swirling air that keep the insect aloft. The figure-8 motion of the wing (shown in white, with the leading edge toward the Y axis) has produced clockwise (blue) as well as counterclockwise (red) vortices."

The bumblebee, like the dragonfly and many other insects, creates vortices that hold it aloft. They aren't like fixed-wing aircraft. Previously, creationists believed that God must have imbued the bumblebee with some incredible chutzpah ability that allowed them to violate the laws of physics. Nope. We just didn't get it. There goes the god of the gaps again.
See, Huckabee was one of the three Republican candidates who said that they don't "believe" in the theory of evolution. One of them, Sam Brownback, has dropped out of the race. Thank goodness.
I don't know about you, but I want a scientifically literate person in the Oval Office. The absolute illiteracy of the Bush administration and its steadfast adherence to wish-thinking and belief in a guiding divine providence has led us into utter confusion. They've denied global warming and climate change. They've gagged scientists at NASA, the EPA, and NOAA regarding global warming all the while playing to the pockets of the oil and coal industries. Bush publicly claimed that the jury is still out on evolution and that we should "teach both sides" on the contrived controversy over whether ID creationism is science. They've screwed around with stem-cell research and formed ideological blocks to prevent Terry Schiavo from dying humanely no matter what the doctors closest to the matter had to say.
Let's make a move to becoming a reality-based country.

"Leave it to the rest of us. Please get out of the way."

"Biosphere to U.S.!!! My house is getting hotter, flooding, cracking, and sinking!!!"

Kevin Conrad, who represented Papua New Guinea at the Bali accords, said to the U.S. delegate Paula Dobriansky, "We ask for your leadership. We seek your leadership. But if for some reason you're not willing to lead. Leave it to the rest of us. Please get out of the way." Instead of getting out of the way, she got on board.
There are a lot of stories out on the U.S. signing up for the "Bali Action Plan" .
The L.A. Times reports:

"At long last, the warnings from the world's leading scientists are no longer being totally ignored by the Bush administration," said Rep. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.), chairman of the House Select Committee for Energy Independence and Global Warming. "When every other world leader is calling for action, not even this administration can refuse to listen."
The unanimous approval of the document by thousands of delegates meeting on the Indonesian island of Bali now sets the "road map" for two years of negotiations to create a formal climate treaty to succeed the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which expires in 2012. The next phase of talks is scheduled to begin in April and, ideally, conclude in Copenhagen in late 2009.

The next U.S. administration is locked into the roadmap. After years of denialism, it took the sheer force of...I don't know...the WHOLE WORLD to batter us into doing this. A couple of weeks ago, as all the Bali talks warmed up (no pun intended) there protests the world over.

We can hope that we've left behind the major denialists who have slowed us down. Massive change needs to be effected, requiring shifts in the structures of our energy, transportation, production, and agriculture infrastructures if we want to avoid resource wars, mass migrations, famine, pestilence, and further mass extinctions.
Some, like Paul C. Davies, think we're too late anyway - our lack of political will has caused our floundering. Agreed. There is a lot of ugliness yet to occur. The IPCC wants to bring global emissions down from 28 billion metric tons a year to 14 billion metric tons by the middle of the century. That's a tall order. China produces 4.341, the U.S. 2.142, and India .791 billion metric tons of CO2 a year from just their coal plants. In theory we can eliminate about 7% of the global emmissions by converting the U.S.'s coal plants to sustainable wind, solar, hydrogen, or nuclear (which I am not so keen on given that we understand plutonium so poorly...see Jeremy Bernstein's entry, "That We Understand Plutonium," in What is Your Dangerous Idea). The effort there, on the societal and governmental level is going to be greater than almost any other act of will and ingenuity in the U.S. history. It will be greater than the space race. The only comparison I can think of is the mobilization of the whole U.S. to transform industry and infrastructure leading up to and following World War II.
And it will be very difficult. Looking at the graph below, you can see that the U.S. increased its emissions from 1990-2005 as did many many other countries like Turkey, Spain, and even the oft-cited utopia of Norway. But Sweden, the EC, Finland, and even Russia, have reduced their emissions.

The carrots provided to the public need to be many. Tax incentives to consumers and producers to use renewable sources of energy. Tax write-offs for those whose houses come in well under the projected electricity use for their house size. Cash incentives for electric cars, hybrids, and fuel-cell vehicles. The government is going to have to set up larger scholarship funds and grants for Green schools and increased pushes in the natural sciences and engineering. Education is going to have to change greatly in this country. We're looking at a revolution.

Shamed into signing the Bali accord

About f***ing time. Check the NPR story.

December 15, 2007 · A new climate deal finally came to life today in Bali and in an extraordinarily dramatic fashion. The talks were supposed to end Friday, but spilled deep into Saturday. First, it seemed India would poison the deal, then it seemed the United States was going to kill it.

But the United States changed paths, and the result is a document called the Bali Roadmap, which includes measures for preserving tropical rainforests and helping poor countries adapt to a green economy. It is supposed to guide the world to a new climate treaty over the next two years, taking up where the Kyoto treaty leaves off.

It took more than 10 days to get close to agreement in Bali. Schisms, as usual, appeared between the United States and a more aggressively green Europe. And just as those divisions were patched up, a bigger problem arose between the developed and the developing world.

Great Cthulhu lies dreaming...but for how long?

Happy holidays! When the stars are right, the great old ones will rise...perhaps...this holiday season?

Christians making non-predictions

In a recent email with a reader I proposed the following question, “For example, you claim that God is spontaneous: by what mechanism might we be able to observe this alleged creative spontaneity?”
This was the response:

There is very good evidence for the Lord's spontaneity in a number of places, the most prominent to me right now is the International House of Prayer in Kansas City (www.ihop.org). The idea for IHOP came through prophetic revelation, and actual signs and wonders. One of the most notable is "May's Surprise Comet" (http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1983S&T....66...26M). After searching online, that is all I can find about it; you might be able to find more. Scientists didn't know about this comet until it was already passing by us (hence the name), but it was prophesied to arrive in order to confirm some specific words the Lord gave to the leadership at IHOP. So, a viable way to observe the mechanism of His spontaneity in this case is by first looking into this claim. There are other examples from IHOP as well, very specific ones. To list them all out here is beyond my memory capabilities but I do have their 12 CD set in which Mike Bickle (IHOP founder) describes their beginnings.

So I’ve done a little bit of searching into IHOP and found that their “predictions” are pretty shabby. For example, like most Biblical prophecy Dominionist/Dispensationalist material, they have either incredibly vague predictions built on “End Times” prophecies or sufficiently vague past prophecies that could have been fulfilled by any number of things.
I’ll take the May’s Surprise Comet spiel and then a piece from Egypt: End-Time Prototype for Mercy, Discipline and Glory.

First, the “May’s Surprise Comet.” Is there a record of the prediction, made in print or in public that states that the “Surprise Comet” would be observed by human instruments within a few hours of when the comet was already observed? If this man has such incredible powers of discernment, then why didn’t he have a solid prediction of comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 whacking into Jupiter? Why doesn’t he use his powers of prophecy to find the tens of thousands of missing children in the U.S. or predict a cure for leukemia? HIV? Chrone’s Disease? Diabetes? A way for amputees to regrow limbs? Or the 15-digit number I am about to write down?
What do comets have to do with religion anyway? How does the prediction (however bogus it might be) of a comet justify totally separate truth claims about a hierarchical authority of moral power in the universe and its alleged extra-universal realms? In essence, this is like saying that because astronomers are able to accurately predict the position and arrival time of the Cassini space probe into the electromagnetic field of Saturn, to within hours, that we should be reciprocal altruists. It’s called a non sequitur. Apples and oranges.
Sadly, I can find no evidence on the internet about Bickle’s prediction of the May Surprise Comet. Lacking any solid evidence, I suspend real judgment on the matter and will assume that there isn’t any. As Carl Sagan said, "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence

Second, Egypt: End-Time…. This document is rife with a lot of non-predictive predictions. The document forms a cut-and-paste conglomeration of quotations from around the Bible, from Isaiah to Thessalonians, in an attempt to state how Egypt will be treated when the “End Times” arrive. Essentially, it’s a big quote-mining exercise.
I don’t want to quote-mine either, so I will address only two points. First, we should all note that there is not a single predicted date in the whole thing. For my email friend this is quite convenient because he can say that “God is spontaneous. He can act on his own capricious whims.” The problem with saying that God is spontaneous and provides us with accurate predictions is that you are speaking out of both sides of your mouth with equal weight.
It’s a lot like saying that “God condemns homosexuals,” with utmost certainty of the mind of God and then saying about why thousands of African children die of Cholera every year that “God works in mysterious ways.” Could you be more opaque? Do you know the wishes or not? Is God clear or not? I think not. Even this document on Egypt uses a fantastically fuzzy method.

III. Interpreting End-Time prophecies: the law of double reference
A. We encourage all to use the literal method of interpretation (grammatical-historical) which understands the Scripture in its most natural, customary and plain sense way (i.e., face value). We must look for the meaning of a passage which the author intended that his audience receive.
B. Scriptural prophecies concerning Israel and the nations often have two fulfillments (referred to as the law of double reference). First, they have a partial fulfillment in history. Second, is another more complete fulfillment at the end-of-the-age.
C. Moses foretold of a coming military invasion against Israel (Deut. 28:47-52) and of the Lord scattering Israel across the nations (Deut. 28:64). This was fulfilled in part three times, including the Assyria invasion (722 BC), the Babylonian invasion (606-586 BC) and then by the army of the Roman Empire (70 AD). The most devastating fulfillment of this prophecy will be at the hands of the Antichrist who will be far stronger than these other nations.

How impressive that Moses could predict that a nation would face military trouble. You can say about almost any nation-state in history. Someone could have written, “The Aztec empire will go to war and many of its people will be forced from their homes in a great cleavage.” No kidding. Nations beset with hostile neighbors go to war and they lose sometimes. It’s not impressive. [On a side note, Moses’ actual existence in history is totally suspect as well…have you noticed that the Pentateuch shifts perspectives and can’t decide in which order things ought to go?]
The “law of double reference” is as follows from Biblical Research:

V. The fifth law of interpretation is THE LAW OF DOUBLE REFERENCE
A. The Law of Double Reference is the principle of associating similar or related ideas which are usually separated from one another by long period of times, and which are blended into a single picture like the blending of pictures by a stereopticon.

So it’s a fancy way of saying that if two disparate events in the Bible might be able to be linked, you should link them for the convenience of your argument. Essentially, you can generate meanings from nonsense and put together ideas that were never intended to be put together and make no sense when you put them together except that you’ve got a “law” of interpretation invented by a bunch of seriously partial people that gives hamhanded credulity the air of scientific respectability. These are LAWS. And don’t forget that you get a “stereopticon” view of this.
Please. It’s a post hoc collage of wish-thinking that’s so fuzzy that you can patch any number of things into it. The predictive power of this IHOP group is about as good as Sylvia Browne’s or Rosemary Altea’s – just more psychic quackery with emotional appeal.
If this were science, we would demand that these methods be thrown out because they don't work. But I guess that when you want to prop up fantasies, you can use some fantasiacal methods.

Here is the outrage

Over at Dissident Voice, John Blair has written a call to arms for those who want to see real advancements made on climate change. We Should Be Outraged says:

Gandhi once professed, “We must focus on responsibilities, not rights.” In our free society we believe it’s our right to waste. No one is going to tell us what we can consume or how much; but is it really a right to waste? What is our personal and corporate responsibility for that?

We do know it is not our right to harm others by our actions and we have passed plenty of laws to enforce that. Murder, assault and battery are all crimes against others.

No one has the right to kill or hurt another human being gratuitously, but that is exactly global warming’s outcome. Millions of people will become refugees due to its ravages. More will die or see their livelihoods stripped as global climate excess destroys the carbon based economy and creates global uncertainty for our future.

Climate change from the carbon economy is, as I've posted earlier, the ultimate "tragedy of the commons" in the making, what David Orr writes about as a social trap. It is, along with nuclear proliferation and the globalization of religious fundamentalism, the greatest threat to our species.
Already, it is the greatest threat to all species. We are already in the midst of the sixth great extinction event on the planet Earth.
In 1995, Richard Leaky explained

"It's the next annihilation of vast numbers of species. It is happening now, and we, the human race, are its cause," explains Dr. Richard Leakey, the world's most famous paleoanthropologist. Every year, between 17,000 and 100,000 species vanish from our planet, he says. "For the sake of argument, let's assume the number is 50,000 a year. Whatever way you look at it, we're destroying the Earth at a rate comparable with the impact of a giant asteroid slamming into the planet, or even a shower of vast heavenly bodies." The statistics he has assembled are staggering. Fifty per cent of the Earth's species will have vanished inside the next 100 years; mankind is using almost half the energy available to sustain life on the planet, and this figure will only grow as our population leaps from 5.7 billion to ten billion inside the next half-century. Such a dramatic and overwhelming mass extinction threatens the entire complex fabric of life on Earth, including the species responsible for it: Homo sapiens.

That was twelve years ago. This is from last year's Independent:

Scientists estimate that 12 per cent of all birds, 23 per cent of mammals, a quarter of conifers, a third of amphibians and more than half of all palm trees are threatened with imminent extinction. Climate change alone could lead to the further extinction of between 15 and 37 per cent of all species by the end of the century, the scientists say: "Because biodiversity loss is essentially irreversible, it poses serious threats to sustainable development and the quality of life of future generations."

This is a total disaster. It's as though we are standing in the footprints of dinosaurs and refuse to understand what befell them. We see the asteroid hurtling at us, an asteroid of our own making, but we stand dumbfounded by our own conveniences to act.
We need to lobby government in no uncertain terms to act now and call for changes that appear to be unreasonable to move the ball down the field. It is an ethical imperative.

The "breathtaking inanity" of creationist cartoons

Creationism has some silly bits. They argue from ignorance, enforce bronze-age stupidity onto the masses that they pawn as science, get Ben Stein to star in their movies, and get into the most dishonest and elaborate pseudo-intellectual gymnastics to justify a priori nonsense about Gods. They even have cartoons. Boy do they suck!

...or...

...or...

At least make some relevant observations folks.

More reactions to Romney's nonsense

Mainstream media has heard the voices of intelligence and we atheists have a piece in the Times by Eduardo Porter telling Romney that faith and freedom are most certainly not necessary bedmates:

As I watched Mitt Romney tie himself into a constitutional knot as he argued that religion should provide a guide for public policy but not be used to choose a president, it made me suspect that all the candidates in the race — Republican and Democratic — must believe that I lack some essential virtue.
I’m an atheist. When people trot out the well-worn John Adams quote, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people,” I can’t help feeling squeezed out of the polity. Mr. Romney was trying to sound ecumenical. But speeches like his confirm the impossibility for an atheist to be elected to national office in this country. Any atheist with political ambitions would have to drop the atheism first.

Read on here

Today is full of destructive lunacy.

I don't even know where to begin today so it'll just be arbitrary.
First, in Texas, a group called Texans for Better Science has emerged. They are so aptly named...if you are into newspeak. Check them outhere. They, of course, propose that

Open Minds Teach Both Sides
Teach Strengths & Weaknesses of Evolution.

Ugh. Let's go to their churches and teach the strengths and weakness of Christianity. We'll do multiple critiques from Hindu, Buddhist, Muslim, and Atheist viewpoints. It'll be great.

Then in Ohio, where ID got its ass kicked (finally!) at the state level, there's a wingnut who wants creationism taught in school there because his daughter is being taught about the big bang and evolution. Check it here.
Look at this:

The parent, a Frank Piper, whose daughter is a PV Middle School fifth-grader, is concerned because the district is teaching the “big bang theory” of the creation of the universe and not presenting students with alternatives to Darwin’s theory of evolution. Creationism, which posits that life is too complex to be explained by evolution alone, and its place in public school curricula, has been a highly debated issue in Ohio and elsewhere for several years.

...and...

Piper said his daughter is a straight A student and failed her test on the “big bang theory” because she didn’t understand it.

“We’re Christians,” he said. “I couldn’t even help her because I don’t understand it.”

Way to show how faith can make you stupid. He showed it. Religion actually impedes their understanding of simple concepts.

Next, a really great global warming denial article by a guy who knows it's all a fake because the holy spirit tells him so. It's all a hoax at WorldNetDaily.

If any one should be prepared by their faith, their worldview, their belief in Scripture and their gift of Holy Spirit discernment to see through the deception of the global warming alarmists, it is the Christian.

Sadly, however, many of those proclaiming themselves as believers have been seduced by the worldly spirit of deception on what has become one of the defining issues of our time.

As if that weren't insanity enough, check this zinger out:

While few can argue with the biblical mandate to be good stewards of the planet, the "Evangelical Climate Initiative" calls for both individual action and immediate government action to curtail carbon dioxide emissions. This despite the fact that man-caused carbon dioxide emissions represent only an infinitesimally small percentage of CO2 present in the atmosphere. This despite the fact that there is no evidence carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere cause global warming. And this despite God's promise in Genesis 8:22 that He alone controls the world's temperature and climate, not man: "While the earth remaineth, seedtime and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease."

Then I guess you need to reconsider your beliefs man. Because we have no evidence of God changing the global climate and millions of pieces of independent evidence all confirming that humans are changing the temperature on earth. This is exactly the kind of stupid belief that hurts us all. It's destructive lunacy. When we say that some people are literally blinded by their faith, this is what we mean.

And finally, we jave some brilliant scapegoating of atheists by some people at Uncommon Descent, the bulwark on the internet of IDiocy. The lead poster, Barry A posts

Do Dawkins and Dennett Incite to Hatred?
BarryA

I live in Arvada, Colorado, and for many years I attended the church associated with the YWAM shooting on Sunday. Earlier this year I befriended two of the young men going through the training program there, one from New Zealand and the other from England. I am numb with sorrow, and my prayers go up for the families of the victims.

The media is reporting that Matthew Murray posted the following on the web: ”I’m coming for EVERYONE soon and I WILL be armed to the @#%$ teeth and I WILL shoot to kill. …God, I can’t wait till I can kill you people. Feel no remorse, no sense of shame, I don’t care if I live or die in the shoot-out. All I want to do is kill and injure as many of you … as I can especially Christians who are to blame for most of the problems in the world.”

Look at the last part of that quote closely. One wonders if Murray has been reading Dawkins or Dennett. By blaming the world’s ills on religious people do Dawkins and Dennett incite to hatred and make it more likely that tragedies of this sort can occur? I don’t know, but it is an interesting question.

I had predicted that someone would make this accusation about the killer in Colorado.
Dispatches from the Culture Wars has a good post about it. The best reply there comes from Dave S:

You know, its really a shame how that vast powerful Atheist juggernaut manages to oppress that tiny Christian minority, bravely struggling on against overwhealming odds. Maybe one day they will allowed to worship in the open, and call their places of worship a "church". Maybe one day politicians will bravely announce that they too are Christian. Dare to dream, one day there may even be an openly Christian President or at least a Presidential candidate that will stand up against evolution. How grand would that be? Until that day, Christians will just have to muddle along, trying to be the sole objective force of good against the vast hordes of atheist Commie baby-eaters, with their evil authors apparently capable of causing people to murder just by the written word, against the helpless will of God.

I'm just saying.

And I'm saying it too. The world's got some harmed and hurt people who feel hopeless, rejected, and that their only option is violence. What they need is psychological help and support and accusations of atheism don't do much here.
If you care to read about the shooter's thoughts, then you can go here and here. And some of it reads as though he was beaten as a kid in an authoritarian Christian household:

The curriculum Murray decried in his postings was developed by evangelist Bill Gothard as part of The Institute in Basic Life Principles. The Bible-based curriculum is contained in "Wisdom Booklets" — 3,000 pages of instruction that "views academic subjects through the grid of Scripture," according to the institute's website.

Murray mentions Gothard by name in a later post. "Me, I remember the beatings and the fighting and yelling and insane rules and all the Bill Gothard (expletive) and then trancing out . (expletive) . I'm still tranced out."

Ignoring science because it's profitable.

More news on how the United States government via the Bush administration denies science and refuses to sign on the mandatory greenhouse gas emissions and fight global warming. The New York Times carries two stories today, here and here. The first story lets us know that the U.S. administration won't join the European Union to fight climate change no matter the facts:

“Logic requires that we listen to the science,” said Stavros Dimas, the European Union’s environment commissioner. “I would expect others to follow that logic.”

The Bush administration opposes including hard targets at this stage in the talks. Other countries, including Japan and Canada, are beginning to side with the United States on the need for any new climate agreements to include meaningful steps by fast-growing countries like China and India. And calls for concrete limits have consistently been refused by those nations.

“We don’t think it’s prudent or reasonable to start off with some set of numbers,” Harlan Watson, the United States’ chief negotiator on climate change, said here on Monday, in the last public statement from the American delegation. “That’s what the negotiations are going to be for.”

I'll say it's prudent to follow over 30 years of accumulated research and I'm not really concerned with the prisoner's dilemma with India and China. We should change how we do business because it is the humanely and environmentally ethical/moral thing to do. If we do it, others are more likely to follow the precedent. I don't mean to imply a slippery slope, but as long as we pillage the commons we make it ok for others to pillage the commons.
When Watson says it isn't prudent to start off with a set of numbers, it's garbage. Like the ID folks and the various other creationists, they've contrived a controversy to carry on their true belief in a sham - that the fuel-driven carbon-based growth economy can grow on carbon forever. It can't.
The Bush administration concocted another summit to "discuss" climate change. The L.A. Times has reported that Bush and co. have tried to get other big economy nations to come to an alternative summit in Hawaii. Hmmm. Methinks it's going over like a lead balloon.

Critics have charged that the Hawaii meeting represents an effort by the U.S. to control the agenda and force the adoption of voluntary emissions standards rather than the mandatory caps that could have resulted from a U.N.-sponsored convocation.

James Connaughton, chairman of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, told reporters that the EU's insistence on targets was "itself a blocking effort."

But former Vice President Al Gore, addressing the Bali delegates, said the lack of firm targets in the road map should not be a deal breaker. Accusing the U.S. delegation of "obstructing progress" on the climate talks, he said efforts should proceed with the expectation that a change in administration in Washington will bring a change in position.

"Over the next two years, the United States is going to be somewhere it is not now," he said. "I must tell you candidly that I cannot promise that the person who is elected will have the position I expect they will have. But I can tell you I believe it is quite likely."

I wouldn't call the EU a blocker. They're telling the U.S. it's full of shit and rightly so. Real progress means getting in line to change and the U.S. is dragging its feet. For goodness sake, we can't get barely reasonable CAFE (fuel efficiency) standards covered in the second story from the Times.

The bill, which passed the House and is pending in the Senate, requires automakers to meet a fleet average of 35 miles per gallon by 2020, but does not specify which government agency should enforce the new rule.

It's going to be so much better when we have a Democratic president in office in 13 months.

America's Theocratic Politboro

My article has gone up at Rational Atheist. Read America's Theocratic Politburo. Enjoy.

Why Sam Harris matters

Check it:

Articles by Sam Harris

Functional Neuroimaging of Belief, Disbelief, and Uncertainty

Sam Harris
Sameer A. Sheth, MD, PhD
Mark S. Cohen, PhD

Objective: The difference between believing and disbelieving a proposition is one of the most potent regulators of human behavior and emotion. When we accept a statement as true, it becomes the basis for further thought and action; rejected as false, it remains a string of words. The purpose of this study was to differentiate belief, disbelief, and uncertainty at the level of the brain.

Why ID doesn't matter.

Find me a relatavist in a plane at 35,000 feet and I'll name you a hypocrite.
Let's see why science matters and ID is bulls***. Lawrence Krauss has just written this in a post advocating a debate on science among the new presidential candidates.

Even if the American public is not currently focused on these concerns, decisions made by the next U.S. president on issues such as climate change, energy research, stem cells and nuclear proliferation will have a global impact. We owe it to the next generation to take ownership of these issues now. In spite of the ambivalence reflected in some polls, there is a popular understanding that science and technology will be essential to meet the challenges we face as a society. When reports began to surface warning that the avian flu might become a threat to humans, for example, everyone from the president down called for studies to determine how quickly the virus might mutate from birds to human beings. No one suggested that "intelligent design," for example, could provide answers.

What's that about the edges of evolution? OH! We use evolution to understand our world. Its edges are temporal while ID's were demolished by David Hume 250 years ago and then attempted in an elegant resurrection with Paley in 1802 that evolved into dead science.

Dualists, Creationists, and Scientific Denialists

There must be something really romantic about denying the findings of science. To take the new movie EXPELLED! as an example, we find that the ID folks have managed to romanticize the image of the IDiot to seem as though they are really just rebels holding onto a powerful and rugged individualism that George Thorogood would admire as he helps them oppose those collectivist Darwinians imposing their neo-Lysenkoism on the really sciencey ones among us!
But it's really a sham. ID is essentially an argument from ignorance. "We can't imagine how that could have come about by the proposed mechanisms. It can't work." I haven't really been able to understand how people think in more than three dimensions, but that doesn't mean that some people don't. I have a friendly acquaintance in the Penn State Math Department whose made a sculpture that gives a fourth dimension illusion.

I don't know how he conceived of that at all and it does seem almost like wizardry to me but that doesn't mean it came from God.
Dualists - those who hold forth that the mind is somehow separate from the brain - are in a similar camp. They argue their incredulity regarding the mind and brain. They hold some version the Cartesian Theater wherein some non-substantive version of yourself resides in the structure of the brain though somehow not dependent on the brain.

It is, at base, a way for theists and other supernaturalists wed to the idea of the afterlife or special creation to hold out for the soul. They make the same kind of argument as the creationist/IDiots. "We can't imagine how the brain could do that. So there must be a soul." So it's an argument from ignorance, it moves the goalposts so that science always has to come with more evidence (that is forever insufficient for them), and a false conclusion based on a false choice of current science with its tentative explanations or the transcendental soul which doesn't actually explain anything. More than likely, the mind is what the brain does and Francis Crick's "astonishing hypothesis" is true. We have no souls.
Stephen Novella has written a few good posts about this recently. Check them out here and here and an older post here.

The O'Leary Delusion

Sometimes I am simply blown away by the insipidness of some ID folks and Denyse O'Leary regularly takes the cake.
Over at her blog, Telic Thoughts she's written a response to the New York Times editorial from a few days ago that rightly castigates the Texas (mis)Education Agency (TEA) for its pressure on its former head of science education, Chris Comer (written about here).
After babbling about the spin in the article, O'Leary writes:

The agency should remain neutral on the issue of intellligent design. Why? Because it lies outside what should be the real focus of science educators namely, furthering the education of students in Texas. There is no point to devoting time and resources to a struggle against intelligent design. Taxpayers are not funding that. Educational curriculums are not threatened. Anti-IDism should be done on one's own time and not at the expense of the government.

There is no struggle between science and religion in public schools. But it is a useful propaganda ploy to pretend such a struggle exists. Indeed Texas does require the teaching of evolution. That curriculum is not threatened; hysteria notwithstanding.

I guess that O'Leary hasn't been paying attention to how Don McElroy got into power in the TEA and has been steadily ratcheting up his anti-science measures under the guise of Phillip Johnson's "big tent" to get I.D. and creationism into the schools. Consider the following:

A member of the board for the last eight years, McLeroy was recently described by the Dallas Morning News (July 18, 2007) as "aligned with social conservative groups known for their strong stands on evolution, sexual abstinence and other heated topics covered in textbooks" and as "[o]ne of four board members who voted against current high school biology books because of their failure to list weaknesses in the theory of evolution." Discussing that vote in his 2005 talk, McLeroy lamented that the other board members were not swayed by "all the arguments made by all the intelligent design group, all the creationist intelligent design people," adding, "It was only the four really conservative, orthodox Christians on the board [who] were willing to stand up to the textbooks and say they don’t present the weaknesses of evolution. Amazing."

As if that isn't a nasty enough accusation you can just go to the talk and read the transcript for yourself. He said in his conclusion:

OK, thank you. Everybody has made some really good comments. I’d like to make one final observation just from my experience and the Texas State Board of Education. Is, we weren’t about to convince any scientists, but we couldn’t convince fellow board members that these books should have evidence. And the more I look back on it, I believe if we would have challenged the naturalistic assumptions that nature is all there is with our fellow board members and challenged these people that were talking about it, a little bit – that brought up testimony – possibly we would have gotten a few more votes because a lot of these dear friends of mine on the State Board of Education are good, strong Christians that are active in Young Life and other activities – but they were able to totally not even worry about the fact that evolution’s assumption that nature is all there is is in total conflict with the way they live there life. So in that respect, it might also be effective. But one reason I brought this up is because in all the contemporary skirmishes today it is not even mentioned. It’s just not brought up. And I think you will bring religion and I like the statement that it brings in their religion. You know, so I said, well let’s bring it in there. They bring it in. They bring in all these pastors. It’s amazing. All these people who get up here and talk about it.

My summary is, uh, here are my points. We are not opposing un-intelligent people. They’re very smart, highly intellectual and very fine people. But they’ve been blinded from the truth. They’re living in this Matrix world. They do not claim Yahweh is God. They basically think they have made themselves. So we need to be prepared. We need to be smart. We need to train our minds.

What was that O'Leary about there being no conflict between religion and science? McElroy is the new head of the TEA and he is using his position to attack evolution and promote IDC and then the agency he heads essentially pressures the head of science to resign?
This is O'Leary at her most Orwellian pretending that science and religion aren't involved in the culture war and that faith doesn't correlate with ignorance and other societal ills.

Brief reply to Mitt Romney

This is from an email I received replying to a Romney assertion.

"Freedom requires religion just as religion requires freedom," Romney said from the stage of the George H.W. Bush Library and Museum's conference center.

I want Romney to tell that to some Muslims in Sudan who threatened to kill a woman for allowing her students to name a teddy bear Mohamed or the Saudi woman who was lashed repeatedly and imprisoned for being gang-raped. Really free people.
The rebuttal:

Try this: "Freedom requires freethought. Free minds ensure free nations."

I do have some bones of contention actually

A reader sent me an interesting response to an earlier post and agreed that I could post his email here. First, let me say that I won't post the whole thing and will represent his views as accurately as I can.
We debated a bit about whether evolution is a world view (I quoted Dan Dennett's "universal acid" metaphor which is short of a world view), he honed in on the fossil record and death as follows:

There are plenty of perfectly reasonable explanations for the fossils we have unearthed that have nothing to do with evolution. You can find many of them in Bones of Contention by Marvin Lubenow. No, his book is not the only place to find non-evolutionary interpretations...it's just that he's done years of research and has collected the most pertinent information together for all to review. Yes, I read the review of the book on talkorigins, though I don't agree with the viewpoints of the site. You can find the review [here]:
As for the colliding of the worldviews (evolution and Christianity), consider this quote:

'The "Survival of the fittest" has a flip side. It is the death of the less fit. For evolution to proceed, it is as essential that the less fit die as it is that the more fit survive. If the unfit survived indefinitely, they would continue to "infect" the fit with their less fit genes. The result is that the more fit genes would be diluted and compromised by the less fit genes, and evolution could not take place.
'The concept of evolution demands death. Death is thus as natural to evolution as it is foreign to biblical creation. The Bible teaches that death is a "foreigner," a condition superimposed upon humans and nature after creation. Death is an enemy, Christ has conquered it, and He will eventually destroy it. These respective attitudes toward death reveal how many light-years separate the concept of evolution from biblical creationism.'

The quote is also from Lubenow's book. It's true.

Just so that we're clear, Darwin didn't use the terms "survival of the fittest" because he preferred natural selection. He and Wallace didn't see eye to eye on that one but so it goes.
It is true in some sense that natural selection is differential and separates the weaker less fit organisms from the more fit organisms by limiting their reproduction. Nature is, as Tennyson observed, "red in tooth and claw." It is cold and uncaring to all of life's desire to propagate. As sapient and sentient beings, nature frustrates our desires constantly and part of that frustration is death. All of life dies. It is part of the cycle of life and has been observed in all of recorded history for thousands and thousands of years. Death was an obvious part of life before writing. There is no way to have one without the other. Look around.
This business of the less fit "infecting" the more fit with their genes is a bit ridiculous. It invidiously seeks to put intent into a mind of nature where there is none at all. There is only a differentially selective process at work that affects the ability of genes, their phenotypes, organisms, and possibly even those organisms' groups to successfully reproduce. Using a term like "infect" also makes the implied intent something that seems to be moving toward perfection. This would be to totally misunderstand evolution as it is a rather myopic non-teleological process.
So evolution is opposed to a form of Biblical creationism that says that death is a "foreigner," a nemesis we might ask...Satan? There is little to refute if one of your tenets is that death is a foreigner which seems to imply that it is alien to the natural world and therefore unnatural. That seems a bit odd given that all beings have always died. No organism - from a protozoa or bacteria to the mighty redwood or blue whale - lives forever. They have all died. In fact, at the species level, over 99% of all species are extinct which evolution would expect given that we have a 4+ billion year old earth and life descending with modification for 3+ billion years.
But if you want to hold onto tenets as unsubstantiated as a 6,500 year old earth that at one point was free of death, then have at it. Know, though, that the whole of reputable science stands opposed to you.

The Atlas of Creation at the U.S. Government

Apparently, the Secretary of Commerce received a copy of Harun Yahya's Atlas of Creation (please don't buy it) and had put it on display. It's an absolutely gorgeously illustrated book full of lies and misdirection about evolution and creationism. It says,

"This book provides the reader with not only such information as what fossils are and where and how they are found, but also a closer examination of a variety of fossil specimens, millions of years old, that are still able to declare, “We never underwent evolution; we were created.” The fossils discussed and illustrated in this book are just a few examples of the hundreds of millions of specimens that prove the fact of Creation. And even these few are enough to prove that the theory of evolution is a major hoax and deception in the history of science."

It even blames 9/11, all terrorism, and fascism on Charles Darwin. People will pile anything on Darwin.
Ken Silverstein at Harper's posted "Commerce Department: Creationism book display a decorating error, not an endorsement":

I reported yesterday about my surprise upon learning that The Atlas of Creation, which offers an Islamic version of creationism and blames Charles Darwin for the 9/11 attacks, was prominently on display in the waiting room to Secretary of the Commerce Carlos Gutierrez’s office. I had queried Commerce about this, but only heard back now. Richard Mills, an agency spokesman, said in an email: “Apparently like thousands of others, the Department received an unsolicited gift, which was mistakenly displayed in a reception area. We regret this mistake occurred and have removed the book.”

Phew! The book has been sent to thousands of academics in the United States and Europe. My father-in-law got one because it was sent to the Penn State Department of Anthropology.

No more progress on climate change in the U.S.

From The New York Times:

BALI, Indonesia (AP) -- The United States will come up with its own plan to cut global-warming gases by mid-2008, and won't commit to mandatory caps at the U.N. climate conference here, the chief U.S. negotiator said Saturday.

''We're not ready to do that here,'' said Harlan Watson, the State Department's senior climate negotiator and special representative. ''We're working on that, what our domestic contribution would be, and again we expect that sometime before the end of the Major Economies process.''

This reminds me of the woman I had dinner with last spring who said that she wasn't ready to believe that humans and dinosaurs didn't live together. It's an incredible slap in the face, yet again, to the whole planet, human and non-human.
When the Bush administration made the crack a few years ago about "the reality-based community," some of us thought that we wouldn't really need to defend reality. After 7 years of Orwellian chatter, reality's grip on policy has been eroded even further than when Clinton refused to sign on to Kyoto. Now we have a president who has a Clear Skies initiative that might as well be called Darkened Skies, supports teaching intelligent design in schools, and thinks that he has a commission from God to act in capricious and monomaniacal ways despite the Constitution.
I think that the E.U. and other forward-thinking nations need to start punishing the U.S. with trade restrictions. At this point, we have to be compelled to move.

Skepticism might be the work of the Devil

I've just been perusing the Gallup Brain looking at polls on religion and found a fun tidbit from a May 5-7 2006 poll (subscription required). I haven't looked at the sample size for this question but it's pretty amusing.

Which of the following comes closer to your view about books or movies that raise doubts about Jesus Christ or the Bible – [ROTATED: they are a reflection of the human nature of some people to be skeptical about religion, (or) they are the work of the Devil trying to destroy people's religious beliefs, whether the authors are aware of it or not]?
Human nature to be skeptical about religion: 72%
Work of the devil to destroy people's beliefs: 19%
No opinion: 9%

How can you not have an opinion about that? Come on now.
I'm glad that it's only 19% of people who think that skepticism about religion is the work of the devil but that it's that many people is pretty terrifying. Oh! For the heady days of the Dark Ages. I can't wait to be burned at the stake for being a non-believer who probably needs to sacrifice Christian virgin and drink their blood and other fluids so that I can impregnate my wife.

The I.D.iocracy in Texas

There are a few more updates on the Texas Education Agency's theocratic actions. The Austin American Statesman has released this chilling article.

Agency spokeswoman Debbie Ratcliffe said that reminders to be unbiased are not unusual before curriculum reviews and that staffers' computer slide presentations have been looked at in advance since this summer to ensure that they were consistent.

She said charges of misconduct against Comer were prompted by a lack of professionalism and not by politics associated with the hiring of a former Bush administration employee as Comer's boss or the appointment of a self-avowed creationist to chair the State Board of Education.

Ratcliffe said that although there are no written rules defining what agency employees can say regarding evolution, creationism or intelligent design, employees in the curriculum department were verbally warned recently to be careful when dealing with issues that might come up as part of the state's upcoming curriculum adoption process.

"An employee shouldn't say something that's contrary to the curriculum, and they shouldn't look like they are siding with one camp over another," Ratcliffe said. "It's no secret that there are political differences on the State Board of Education. ... And employees have to be able to work with all the members in a fair way without the perception that they are siding with one group or another. That's why it's important for us to be neutral on issues and just to say what the policy is and not to create it ourselves."

Neutrality? This isn't neutrality. It's the further politicization of science. It's more of the Republican War on Science. It's a witch hunt during which the armies of the night form a lockstep position before their theocratic politboro to propagate in the masses the message of "theistic realism." It's Christian Lysenkoism in the making. Hail to the leader!
These people hate science! Hate it! Why? Because it threatens their beliefs about themselves which threatens the validity of their communities. I'd be scared if I held untenable beliefs too that the vast majority of modern science - the most powerful predictive and descriptive tool for the natural world we have - cannot in any way corroborate and often says is nonsense. If your Weltanschauung (world view) is essentially a house of cards, you have a lot of fighting to do to keep it up.
They deceive themselves. They deceive others. They try to directly legislate their religious beliefs at the total expense of the First Amendment. Have they heard of Kitzmiller v. Dover or McLean v. Arkansas? It would serve them well to learn about the separation of church and state while they try to "teach the controversy."
Guess not. Judge Jones found in Kitzmiller that ID isn't science, but is religion:

The proper application of both the endorsement and Lemon tests to the facts of this case makes it abundantly clear that the Board's ID Policy violates the Establishment Clause. In making this determination, we have addressed the seminal question of whether ID is science. We have concluded that it is not, and moreover that ID cannot uncouple itself from its creationist, and thus religious, antecedents.

Judge Overton found in McLean that the "balanced treatment" of so-called "scientific creationism" with evolution is a sham and mere religion:

The application and content of First Amendment principles are not determined by public opinion polls or by a majority vote. Whether the proponents of Act 590 constitute the majority or the minority is quite irrelevant under a constitutional system of government. No group, no matter how large or small, may use the organs of government, of which the public schools are the most conspicuous and influential, to foist its religious beliefs on others.

And just in case you think the TEA isn't embarking on this stupid journey:

McLeroy said that although he is a creationist, he doesn't necessarily think creationism should be taught in schools. Rather, he said, he supports current curriculum standards that say students should "analyze, review and critique scientific explanations, including hypotheses and theories, as to their strengths and weaknesses."
McLeroy said he would support changes that further spell out what evolution's strengths and weaknesses are.

There are the new keywords: strengths and weaknesses. McElroy wants to "teach the controversy. Hopefully some of the more literate folks in the big state will fight the creation of the new Christian madrassa system.

Steven Schafersman, president of Texas Citizens for Science, said he plans to fight to get the "strengths and weaknesses" language removed from the state's curriculum standards.
The group is one of several that have questioned why state employees need to remain neutral on the subject.
"This 'teach the controversy' and 'weaknesses of evolution' is nothing more than an attempt to distort and disparage what really is one of the most highly corroborated explanations in science," Schafersman said.

Of other news on this, check the New York Times this piece from a few days ago and their editorial as well, "Evolution and Texas". They said,

It was especially disturbing that the agency accused Ms. Comer — by forwarding the e-mail message — of taking a position on “a subject on which the agency must remain neutral.” Surely the agency should not remain neutral on the central struggle between science and religion in the public schools. It should take a stand in favor of evolution as a central theory in modern biology. Texas’s own education standards require the teaching of evolution.
Those standards are scheduled to be reviewed next year. Ms. Comer’s dismissal and comments in favor of intelligent design by the chairman of the state board of education do not augur well for that review. We can only hope that adherents of a sound science education can save Texas from a retreat into the darker ages.

Exactly right. How is a science educator to remain neutral about the central tenet of biology? It's like asking lawyer to remain neutral on common law. Pointless.

Michael Behe and Guillermo Gonzalez: Your ships are sinking

Just so that everyone can see it. These are Michael Behe's and Guillermo Gonzalez's publication records in the scientific literature. Notice that Behe wrote Darwin's Black Box and fell out of the loop. And what happened to Gonzalez and his ill-fated quest to show that the anthropic principle and the galactic habitable zone are sure signs of the intelligent designer via The Privileged Planet? (Forget for a moment that nearly 100% of the known universe is NOT HABITABLE TO HUMANS and therefore...I don't know...LETHAL...you'd think that we'd be able to live everywhere if we were created in the image of the most powerful being that could possibly exist. UGH!) Gonzalez killed his astro career. Not as badly as Behe. At least Behe already had tenure though and can still bilk the system.
But really...faith doesn't equal ignorance. Pay no attention to the wizard behind the curtain.

Hitchens' "Portable Atheist"

The Portable Atheist

,
edited by Christopher Hitchens, is about to be released. Here's a recent MSNBC interview about it.

About Texas...

The woman in charge of science standards has been dismissed. Ms. Comer resigned after considerable pressure for offering some of her colleagues the opportunity to attend and an anti-ID lecture by Barbara Forrest (see below), something on which the TEA has said that we should remain "neutral." So forwarding an email about a topic related to biology isn't neutral? Huh? I thought science thought that spinning multiple hypotheses was a good idea?
Unless they threaten ID.
Check out Forrest's response and write to the TEA about this nonsense.

Statement Regarding Texas Education Agency’s Termination of
Chris Comer, Texas Director of Science

Barbara Forrest, Ph.D.
Co-author with Paul R. Gross of Creationism’s Trojan Horse: The Wedge of Intelligent Design
& Expert witness for plaintiffs in Kitzmiller et al. v. Dover Area School District

December 5, 2007

In forcing Chris Comer to resign as Texas Director of Science, the Texas Education
Agency has confirmed in a most public, unfortunate way the central point of my Austin
presentation, “Inside Creationism’s Trojan Horse,” the mere announcement of which TEA used
as an excuse to terminate her: the intelligent design (ID) creationist movement is about politics,
religion, and power. If anyone had any doubts about how mean-spirited ID politics is, this
episode should erase them. Texas school children depend on the adults at the TEA to protect the
quality of their education. For the last nine years at the TEA, after twenty-seven years as a
science teacher, Ms. Comer was doing her part, and she got fired for doing it. The children are
ultimately the losers.

The fact that this current episode has happened in Texas is not at all surprising given
Texas Board of Education chair and ID supporter Dr. Don McLeroy’s statements in a 2005 pro-
ID lecture at Grace Bible Church:

Creationists have been making these design arguments, but the birth of the intelligent
design movement probably did start at SMU [Southern Methodist University, site of the
ID movement’s first conference], [in] 1992. It was here that [Phillip Johnson] and
Michael Behe, Stephen Meyer, and William Dembski, debated with . . . influential
Darwinists the proposition that neo-Darwinism [depends] on a prior commitment to
naturalism. Johnson . . . states, ‘Once it becomes clear that Darwinism rests on a
dogmatic philosophy rather than on the weight of the evidence, the way will be opened
for dissenting opinions [i.e., intelligent design creationism] to get a fair hearing.’ They
hadn’t got there yet. We don’t have a fair hearing yet. But, we gotta keep working on it.
This is not something that happens overnight.
(The transcript and the audio recording of McLeroy’s speech are available here:
http://www.tfn.org/publiceducation/textbooks/mcleroy/index.php)

With Ms. Comer’s termination, the process of gaining that hearing appears to have advanced
quite a bit.

The rationale given by TEA employee Monica Martinez, who wrote the memo
recommending Ms. Comer’s termination, is not credible. Ms. Martinez contends that “Ms.
Comer’s email implies endorsement of the speaker and implies that TEA endorses the speaker’s
position on a subject on which the agency must remain neutral.” First, Ms. Comer’s merely
passing along an “FYI” about a public lecture implies nothing of the sort. (For the text of the
announcement from the National Center for Science Education that she sent, see
http://www.ncseweb.org/resources/news/2007/TX/950_texas_education_official_force_11_29_2
2
007.asp.) But that point notwithstanding, since my Austin talk was about the intelligent design
creationist movement, one wonders why TEA would even want to remain “neutral” concerning
the ID movement’s goal of undermining the integrity of science education in the very public
schools that TEA should be protecting from that movement’s efforts.

Ms. Martinez continued, “Thus, sending this e-mail compromises the agency’s role in the
TEKS revision process by creating the perception that TEA has a biased position on a subject
directly related to the science education TEKS.” But why would the TEA be concerned about
being biased in favor of teaching children the truth about science? The TEA’s proper role is to
ensure the quality and integrity of what is taught in Texas science classes. My Austin
presentation was most certainly not a threat to that role, but in fact highly supportive of it. I
presented the truth about ID as established by years of scholarly research. Has the process of
administering the public education system in Texas become so politicized that even the truth is a
threat to people’s jobs? One can only conclude that it has.

Ultimately, the TEA’s firing of Chris Comer is a by-product of the relentless promotion
of ID for more than a decade by creationists at the Discovery Institute. In the wake of court
decisions ruling that it is unconstitutional to teach creationism in the public schools, ID
creationists, a significant number of whose central figures live in Texas, launched the effort that
they formalized in their 1998 “Wedge Strategy” document, which outlines their twenty-year plan
to “wedge” ID into the cultural and educational mainstream. (See
http://www.antievolution.org/features/wedge.html.) First Kansas, then Ohio, and most recently
Dover, Pennsylvania, have experienced firsthand the attacks on their school systems that were
produced, either directly or indirectly, by the Discovery Institute’s campaign, as stated in that
document, “to see [intelligent] design theory permeate our religious, cultural, moral and political
life.”

In 2003, Discovery Institute creationists tried, unsuccessfully, to influence the adoption
of Texas biology textbooks. Texans should now prepare themselves for an attempt by the same
people (and/or newly recruited supporters) to influence the upcoming review of state science
standards. In order to be ready, the good citizens of Texas who value their public schools and the
U. S. Constitution must familiarize themselves with the ID code terms they are likely to hear, all
of which signal the ID movement’s attack on the teaching of evolution. ID supporters will
declare that they certainly do not favor eliminating evolution or teaching intelligent design, but
rather that they simply want children to hear “both sides” of the “controversy” and to learn to
“critically analyze” evolutionary theory, so that they can understand the “strengths and
weaknesses” of evolution, and all of this will be for the sake of “fairness” and “academic
freedom.” (For an explanation of these ID code terms, see my article, “Understanding the
Intelligent Design Creationist Movement: Its True Nature and Goals,” pp. 19-22, at
http://www.centerforinquiry.net/uploads/attachments/intelligent-design.pdf.)

In fact, some members of the Texas Board of Education seem to have already mastered
the Discovery Institute’s code language. Dr. McLeroy recently stated that “Anything taught in
science has to have consensus in the science community — and intelligent design does not.”
(Dallas Morning News, August 23, 2007,
http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/news/texassouthwest/stories/082407dntexevoluti
3
on.36418e1.html) He added, however, that he was dissatisfied with the fact that current biology
textbooks don’t cover the “weaknesses” of the theory of evolution. His reference to the
“weaknesses” of evolution is creationist code talk. Board vice chairman David Bradley also
avowed that he would not support the teaching of ID in science classes. However, Mr. Bradley
also appears to know the terminology: “I do want to make sure the next group of textbooks
includes the strengths and weaknesses of evolution.” (Dallas Morning News, August 23, 2007)

Dr. McLeroy and Mr. Bradley are overlooking the fact that evolutionary theory has
survived one hundred fifty years of scientific scrutiny for its “strengths and weaknesses,”
whereas ID could not survive even six weeks of legal and scientific scrutiny in a Pennsylvania
courtroom. Stephen Meyer and William Dembski, who, according to Dr. McLeroy’s lecture, are
seeking a “fair hearing” for ID, were given a chance to present their best pro-ID arguments in
that very courtroom. They just didn’t show up. (See Barbara Forrest, “The ‘Vise Strategy’
Undone: Kitzmiller et al. v. Dover Area School District,” at
http://www.csicop.org/intelligentdesignwatch/kitzmiller.html.)

Dr. McLeroy’s 2005 ID church lecture is much more instructive than his more recent
comments to the Dallas Morning News. In this lecture, he declared himself to be in the “big tent”
of intelligent design: “Whether you’re a progressive creationist, recent creationist, young earth,
old earth, it’s all in the tent of intelligent design. . . . And that’s one thing that I really enjoyed
about our group is that we’ve put that all in the big tent, we’re all working together.” (This “big
tent” is the political alliance that ID leader Phillip Johnson has tried to forge among the
creationists with whom Dr. McLeroy has enjoyed working.)

McLeroy then professed his wonderment that during the 2003 textbook adoption process,
“all the arguments” by “all the creationist intelligent design people” speaking before the Board of
Education (among whom he specifically named “our good friend Walter Bradley,” a Texas
resident and long-time Discovery Institute fellow) were not taken seriously by “my fellow board
members who . . . were not impressed by any of this. . . . Amazing.” McLeroy was further
amazed that “all the arguments are dismissed like this here is a subversive, secret attempt to
force religion into science.” Now, why on earth would anyone draw that conclusion? Amazing.

The incident now involving Ms. Comer exemplifies perfectly the reason my co-author
Paul R. Gross and I felt that our book, Creationism’s Trojan Horse: The Wedge of Intelligent
Design, had to be written. (www.creationismstrojanhorse.com) By forcing Ms. Comer to resign,
the TEA seems to have confirmed our contention that the ID creationist movement—a religious
movement with absolutely no standing in the scientific world—is being advanced by means of
power politics. In December 2005, Judge John E. Jones III validated our contention that ID is
creationism, thus a religious belief, when he ruled in Kitzmiller et al. v. Dover Area School
District (http://www.pamd.uscourts.gov/kitzmiller/kitzmiller_342.pdf) that the teaching of ID in
public school science classes is unconstitutional. Judge Jones recognized that ID has nothing
whatsoever to do with science; its proponents are merely using public education—the public
education of other people’s children—as the vehicle for their plan to undermine the teaching of
evolution.

4
The one thing that should not be forgotten in this episode is that Ms. Comer herself has
been injured, and Texas children have lost a valuable advocate for quality science education. I
regret deeply that the TEA chose to use my work as an excuse to hurt Ms. Comer. Even more, I
am incensed by it. However, what happened to her may be just the tip of the iceberg. This
country has reached a sorry state of affairs when one of the largest, most prominent departments
of education in the country fires a public servant for doing her job. But while I regret that the
information I related in my presentation in Austin and in my book has been confirmed in such a
sad way, my co-author and I have every intention of continuing our efforts as scholars and
citizens to inform the American people about the threat that the intelligent design creationist
movement continues to pose to public education and to the constitutional separation of church
and state.

Barbara Forrest
December 5, 2007

And the U.S still won't sign Kyoto

The administrations of our "glorious" nation need to step up. We are ten years behind...more than ten years behind the climate change consensus because we are the fuel-addicted nation. Kyoto is still too radical. Not the only one considering the rises of China and India, but still, the BIG one.
Over at DotEarth he's posted a blog on the travesty. He has found that sadly the U.S. is the only "industrialized nation" to have not ratified the Kyoto Protocol. He thought that Liechtestein was left with us to bask in our religiously draped ignorance. But no. They ratified it in 2004!

To the Editor:

In his blog “The United States and Liechtenstein – Odd Pair Out” (December 3) posted on your website’s “Dot Earth,” Andrew Revkin states that with Australia’s announcement of its intentions to ratify the Kyoto Protocol, Liechtenstein and the United States would be “the only industrialized countries not bound by the pioneering, but troubled, pact which took legal force in 2005…” In addition, Mike Nizza’s report “The U.S. Military’s Energy Saving Efforts” (December 3), posted on your website’s “The Lede,” includes a quote from Barry Brook, professor of climate studies at Adelaide University that “’[The U.S.] is now the only country who won’t ratify Kyoto – except for Liechtenstein that is.’”

Please be informed that Liechtenstein ratified the Kyoto Protocol on Climate Change on December 3, 2004, and it entered into force in Liechtenstein on March 3, 2005.

Liechtenstein has traditionally always been very committed to protecting the environment. In addition to the Kyoto Protocol, Liechtenstein has ratified the UN Convention on Climate Change, the Convention on Biological Diversity, and the Vienna Convention for the Protection of the Ozone Layer and the Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer. Liechtenstein is also member to additional regional environmental agreements including the Alpine Convention.

I would urge your readers and especially your writers to visit www.liechtenstein.li

So we're left out there ignoring good science because of oil interests, credit interests, and the religious wingnuts who think the end of the earth is a gift from Jesus.

"You're a fundamentalist!" says the Po-Mo Man.

Heard this charge before? Think of the reviews for The God Delusion, Harris's End of Faith, and Hitchens' God is Not Great and the "fleas" that pester them. These volleys back and forth are the natural skirmishes in a "culture war." We should expect them. What I am tired of is the allegation by some that we, the "New Atheists," are fundamentalists.
First, so that you know I'm not setting up a straw man, let me get some examples.

From the the blog 7leper:

Not unlike the religious simpletons he claims to disdain, Dawkins sees the world in terms of a battle of Good vs. Evil, cloaked here as Science vs. Religion.

From The Huffington Post’s R.J. Eskow:

The fundamentalist atheists are an active and highly vocal subset of atheists who object to a great many things, not the least of which is being described as 'fundamentalist atheists.' But here's why I still think it's the right term:
They're dogmatic. Their movement is based on a piece of dogma which can't be challenged without enraging them. It's sociological and historical in nature, not theological, and can be summed up as follows:
"Humans would be better off if religion in all forms was eradicated."

Eskow continues in that vain saying that not only are we dogmatic, but we are also unwilling to entertain new evidence or new research because we assume the answer (religion is bad) and therefore put the cart before the horse; we are “intolerant;” we are “elitist;” we are “authoritarian” about the use of the scientific method; we lack a sense of “the mysterious and beautiful.” Seen any straw men lately? So those are a good set of charges brought against us by a writer from one of the most popular liberal blogs and newsposts on the web. I get their daily updates.
But it’s loaded with errors. I will peruse a three sets of definitions of fundamentalism, characterize them in a way that should seem colloquially acceptable, and then knock it back to show how the term is misapplied. Finally, having done that, I will refute Eskow’s other charges.
Here's how the OED (subscription required) defines fundamentalism:

a. A religious movement, which orig. became active among various Protestant bodies in the United States after the war of 1914-1918, based on strict adherence to certain tenets (e.g. the literal inerrancy of Scripture) held to be fundamental to the Christian faith; the beliefs of this movement; opp. liberalism and modernism.
b. In other religions, esp. Islam, a similarly strict adherence to ancient or fundamental doctrines, with no concessions to modern developments in thought or customs.

So funda{sm}mentalist, an adherent of fundamentalism; also, an economic or political doctrinaire. Also attrib. or as adj., and transf.

Dictionary.com:

1. (sometimes initial capital letter) a movement in American Protestantism that arose in the early part of the 20th century in reaction to modernism and that stresses the infallibility of the Bible not only in matters of faith and morals but also as a literal historical record, holding as essential to Christian faith belief in such doctrines as the creation of the world, the virgin birth, physical resurrection, atonement by the sacrificial death of Christ, and the Second Coming.
2. the beliefs held by those in this movement.
3. strict adherence to any set of basic ideas or principles: the fundamentalism of the extreme conservatives.

The American Heritage Dictionary:

1. A usually religious movement or point of view characterized by a return to fundamental principles, by rigid adherence to those principles, and often by intolerance of other views and opposition to secularism.
2.
1. often Fundamentalism An organized, militant Evangelical movement originating in the United States in the late 19th and early 20th century in opposition to Protestant Liberalism and secularism, insisting on the inerrancy of Scripture.
2. Adherence to the theology of this movement.

There are five aspects that operate in these definitions.
First, all of the definitions show that fundamentalism is, at its root, defined as a Protestant idea. It does spring from a late-19th and early 20th-century Protestant movement in the U.S. that had as its manifesto, the 1909 tract The Fundamentals which maintained ideas about beliefs. Second, these beliefs a) stress infallibility of the Bible and b) oppose other more secular principles/belief systems such as modernism or liberalism. Third, there is an element of “return” to something from before, marking it as essentially conservative. Fourth, we can move the rigidity of the second statement to include other religious belief such as Islam so that we can now think of Islamic fundamentalists who hold a literal interpretation of the Koran and think infidels necessarily should have their hands and feet cut off. Fifth, and least common among these definitions, is the possibility of a secular fundamentalism in politics or economics.
It seems that the American Heritage Dictionary’s first definition could be easily expanded to encompass the whole by removing its tail “and opposition to secularism.”:

1. A usually religious movement or point of view characterized by a return to fundamental principles, by rigid adherence to those principles, and often by intolerance of other views.

By removing the end, we leave the gist of the word intact and allow for secular fundamentalist belief.
Here is why I don’t think that most atheists are fundamentalists and why I don’t think that Ayer, Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, Hitchens, Grayling, Kurtz, Russell, Smith, Stenger, Tabash, or I am a fundamentalist.
At the heart of fundamentalism is a total unwillingness to revise one’s position in the light of new evidence. There is a foregone conclusion going into fundamentalist belief: God and other supernatural beings exist. Most atheists I know, and all of the atheists I’ve listed above, came to the conclusion that the supernatural is incredibly improbable. Based on the rules of evidence we use to guide us through historical inquiry, legal trials, logic, and/or scientific research we find no positive material evidence for the existence of the supernatural.
Here we might be charged with a kind of scientific dogmatism. Tell that to a court of law conducting a murder trial or to those of us who opposed the invasion of Iraq based on faulty allegations regarding uranium yellowcake, faked analysis of aluminum tubes used for rockets and not centrifuges, faked reports about mobile WMD labs, and so on. If you want me to fly in a contraption you’ve built, we better see that it can do it. If you say a malady is caused by a demon, he says a pathogen, she says a genetic malady, and I say it’s psychosomatic, what should we do? Take it on faith that it’s a demon? Of course not. Should I jut believe that X loves me because they say so? Probably not. Their actions will pan that out.
In many things, we can be rigid. Evidence matters and, as Carl Sagan said, “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” God and the supernatural are surely such things. And if they are as ubiquitous as we are led to believe by many, then there should be abundant evidence. But there isn’t. I’m ok saying that I don’t know if angels, demons, God, gods, etc. exist. I am also more than comfortable to say that believing at this time that such entities exist is kind of ridiculous given that there is no positive evidence that such things actually exist outside of the following three sets of arguments:
1. Revelation: Coming to believe through a subjective “flash” or series of such events that something exists or some proposition is true or real. Subjective realizations are so prone to flaws that they need to be corroborated by evidence. I can have a vision that mankind was created by the Flying Spaghetti Monster’s noodly appendage or that tooth decay is caused by illicit sexual desires. The visions’ intensities and my subsequent passions about their experiences have no claim on their veracity other than that I myself have had such visions. Other visions might be true such as when Archimedes had his “Eureka!” moment and he had the brilliant flash of insight. But there’s a reason for that…
2. Authority: Believing that something is true or real because someone in a position of authority has said so. There are too many instances of authorities either deliberately misleading people – Gulf of Tonkin, invasion of Iraq, Jim Jones – or making errors – John Edwards voted to invade Iraq and Einstein said that quantum theory was junk…both were wrong. Their authority shouldn’t carry much weight. Of course, being social creatures with a fondness for hierarchies, this is hard to enforce.
3. Tradition: Tradition is also hard to undo because we are social animals who develop socially inertial comfort. But is circumcision good because it’s been around for a long time? That marriage is between a man and a woman because that is how it has always been? Should we believe that the earth is flat or that the earth was created in six days because Christian tradition says so? No. Who cares how it has always been if the way it’s always been that way doesn’t work well or is factually false.
Any of these can be used as compelling rhetoric but they can’t stand alone or even all three together if they are factually false. A great pair of examples of all three working together to make for incredible nonsense are both Scientology (thanks L. Ron Hubbard, your revelations, and your Church of Scientology and its dogmas) or Mormonism (thank you Joseph Smith, your revelations, and your church’s dogmas). Both have no positive evidence working for their veracity.
So I can take the charge that I am dogmatic if that means that in matters of utility and practicality that evidence and logic matter most. Where religion touches on those areas, I will always question what its reasoning is. Where religious claims come up regarding the nature of the universe, I want the evidence. It’s quite simple.
This does mean that while I am personally tolerant of people believing things for which there is no evidence, that I am quite intolerant of action based on those beliefs. If you believe that pre-marital sex is a sin and that abstinence-only education is the key to solving the problems of pre-marital sex, then I want to see evidence that positively shows that your program will solve the problems we associate with it, namely juvenile pregnancies, pregnancies by the poor, increased abortion rates, and increased STD infections. Ironically we find the opposite. This is a problem.
It is incumbent upon me to call a spade a spade and be both politically and conversationally intolerant of such views. Note though that I don’t mean that you have no right to those views or to fight for those views. But believing that contraception is a sin in sub-Saharan Africa should be such an embarrassing thing to believe that people should find it untenable when it causes genocide by negligence.
I am able to have my mind opened and am glad to list examples in replies, but suffice it to say that my attitudes and opinions on issues related to industrial agriculture, compulsory education, and human and animal rights have changed in the last year. But all of these took evidence to move me.
I think that Dawkins said this very well in a rebuttal to his critics:

You’re as much a fundamentalist as those you criticise.

No, please, do not mistake passion, which can change its mind, for fundamentalism, which never will. Passion for passion, an evangelical Christian and I may be evenly matched. But we are not equally fundamentalist. The true scientist, however passionately he may “believe”, in evolution for example, knows exactly what would change his mind: evidence! The fundamentalist knows that nothing will.

As for some of the other charges:
1. Authoritarianism: Nonsense. Science and skepticism are at their heart anti-authoritarian. The scientific method demands that we spin multiple hypotheses, look down varying lines of evidence, demands attempts at disproof, not getting wed to an idea simply because it is yours, and of course, being willing to throw out old ideas and practices when better ones come along. It is both democratic because it needs many views and reviews to separate wheat from chaff and it is a meritocracy where ideas supported by evidence win the day, even if that takes decades. Authoritarian systems can handle no such scrutiny. Authoritarian systems are necessarily opaque.
Einstein wrote, as both Jew and scientist, that “[t]hose who today rage against the ideals of reason and individual freedom and who seek by brutal force to bring about a vapid state-slavery are justified in perceiving us as their implacable enemies. History has imposed on us a difficult struggle; but so long as we remain devoted servants of truth, justice, and freedom, we will not only persist as the oldest of living peoples, but will also continue as before to achieve, through productive labor, works that contribute to the ennoblement of humanity.”
2. Elitism: This is false and true but ultimately a non sequitur that also sets up a false choice based on social judgments. Science, as a method of inquiry, is not beyond the average person the same way that playing football isn’t beyond the average person. Some people will have a greater proclivity for science than others and so form the elite of the scientific community. The same is true of almost every single endeavor from football to music. Does that somehow disqualify it from being good or correct? Of course not. The overwhelming majority of people who love NFL football would be shredded if they played against the Baltimore Ravens with their Saturday pick-up team. It would be ugly. But that doesn’t take away from the beauty, excitement, or entertainment of the game. The same is true of science. Its veracity isn’t dependent on its social quality – it’s dependent on its rigorous methods and analysis.
3. We lack a sense of beauty and mystery: Bullshit. Just speaking for me, my wife, my best friend Jon, all of the people I have ever heard on Point of Inquiry, and all of the atheist authors and thinkers I mentioned above, we certainly marvel in beauty and mystery whether it is that we glean from observing the universe or enjoying literature. Hitchens loves the pictures from the Hubble telescope and he’s a literary critic. Dawkins has his “river out of Eden” and was featured on Desert Island Discs (or its British equivalent) and would take Bach’s St. Matthew’s Passion (it’s religious! OH NO!). Have you heard Stephen Pinker talk about language and play with the Declaration of Independence so that it contains no metaphors? How cool is that? Verdi and Vaughn Williams were atheists. Phillip Pullman has no sense of wonder in The Golden Compass and Kurt Vonnegut too. I’m a composer. Stephen Jay Gould used gorgeous metaphors to write about evolution. Come on. This is the most absurd straw man I’ve encountered. We love art, music, movies, poetry, and the unknown. It’s ok for us to say, “I don’t know.”
Got that? It’s ok to say “I don’t know.” Maybe one day we will. Maybe not. It’s ok. Knowledge is tentative and conditional. Where the fundamentalist must have her/his desires met and her/his doctrines fulfilled because of the certainty of their beliefs, most of us atheists recognize the fragility of our knowledge and our beliefs, and act accordingly. We will wait for the evidence to come in to move us along.

How climate change perception has evolved

Over at Climate Ethics they have an interesting post regarding how we have perceived and do perceive climate change and global warming. Three Eras of Climate Change and the Emergence of Concern for Global Justice by Saleem Huq and Camilla Toumlin of International Institute for Environment and Development.
They state that the first stage began in 1988 with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) first convention and report and ended around 2000 following the last big push to change policy and behavior via the Kyoto Protocol in 1997. During this time, the problem was seen as an environmental problem. The second phase began in roughly 2001 and the formulation of the Marrakech Accords. This time began to see global warming and climate change largely as a threat to development and poorer countries ability to adapt to potentially dramatic climate change.
I am most interested in the third phase which is where they allege we are now. I have a couple of excerpts and some brief responses.

While the characterization of the previous two eras, as described above, will be widely accepted by many, the third era is more contested. This era was sparked with the publication of the Stern Review in late 2006 (carried out for the UK Treasury,) and the IPCC’s fourth assessment report in April of 2007. Both reports demonstrate that climate event change is already happening. While it may not be possible to attribute a single climate change event such as hurricane Katrina which struck New Orleans in 2005 to human-induced climate change, the accumulation of evidence of major climate-related occurrences is a very strong signal that human-induced climate change is already happening. Examples include glacial ice melt in Greenland, heat waves in Europe, droughts in Africa, floods in Asia and hurricanes in the Caribbean. The cost of adopting low-carbon technologies are now recognized as insignificant in comparison to the risks of massive and catastrophic climate changes if we do nothing.

I'd like this to be a bit more graphic. The Natural Resources Defense Council has posted this site regarding Arctic ice melting. The Arctic is warming twice as fast as the rest of the earth resulting in the effect pictured below showing contemporary summer ice caps and the 1979 ice cap boundary.

Remember also that the ice cap cracked in half in 2000. The results, well shown in Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth, will result in massive migration from low-lying coastal cities that will disproportionately affect the poorest people in the poorest countries.
This is an ethical issue as Climate Ethics says:

A shift is happening in the way climate change is perceived from just an environmental issue, or even an environmental and development issue, to one of global justice or more correctly global injustice. One group of people (namely those that consume the most, particularly in wealthier countries) have caused the problem, and another group in people (namely poor people, especially in poorer countries) will suffer the brunt of the adverse consequences in the near term.
Thus, the issue goes beyond mitigation alone, though mitigation is urgent to prevent even greater and more catastrophic problems in fifty years time. And it goes beyond adaptation, such as helping people prepare for the unavoidable impacts in the next few decades. A major challenge now is to find ways to compensate people for the damage that has already been done.

The wealthy countries of the world who have incurred the problem, most notably the United States and Western Europe, though India and China are certainly joining in in spades, need to come together immediately to formulate ways to compensate those who are going to suffer the most. The so-called "devloped" nations need to develop their ideas and create ethical solutions to the social traps that have created the emerging climate crisis.
On a side note, I hate to say "developed" because it brings up lots of unintentional prejudicial notions that essentially make the people of the so-called Third World into savage objects and not people with their own dignity. It is a grave error of the west to arrogate itself that way. The "undeveloped" or "underdeveloped" people of the "Third World" didn't land us in this problem. Myopic technocrats, free marketers, militarists, and politicians using effective advertising - read: propaganda - have landed all species in this nest. It's deeply self-deceiving to use terms like "developed" in this context because we haven't brought foresight with our technologies.
Huq and Toumlin end:

The new characterization of the climate change problem binds every single person on the planet together, as each human has a “carbon footprint” which is contributing to the problem, although the size of individual footprints varies by many orders of magnitude. Everyone has a responsibility to reduce their emissions commensurate with their footprint, while seeking to offset what cannot be reduced. The germ of the solution to climate change must grow from each individual taking responsibility not only to reduce their own individual impacts but also to urge leaders to choose policies and actions that will enable a stable and just planet.

It's true that we are going to have to pressure policy changes. But as Barack Obama has stated repeatedly, the choices that the American public (and other wealthy nations too) will have to face are not convenient. They will oppose convenience.
They are the postmodern (another gross term) R's:
REDUCE.
REUSE.
RECYCLE.
The age of the unrestrained growth economy is coming to an end unless we want the looming crisis to become an unmitigated disaster.

Islamic creationism is at least as stupid as Christian creatonism

I've been getting some annoying spam from an Islamic Creationist. Here is a sample:

dear [____],
what i write is nonmuslim scientists comments christians or any other religion cant come up with scientists who are in different religion and agreeing in SCIENTIFIC facts mentioned in the bible or any other book

Honestly, I'm not quite sure what that means. I won't try.

so if any one have a rational explaination how mohamed knew that and knew more than these scientists (in another word specialized ) then iam (sic) all ears but if he hadnt then why you turn a way from the truth.
you see one of hundred of signs mentioned in quran and if you really rational i can present to you what any rational person will accept becasue this is from your creator your lord[.]

The evidence that he has posed is that one of the surahs contains a "perfect" description of embryonic development. It's bogus. Here is the surah:

S. 39: He makes you in the wombs of your mothers, in stages, one after another, in three veils of darkness.

And what exactly are these three veils? Could Mohamed elaborate? What are the mechanisms of change from one to the next? What are the mechanisms that cause the change from stage to stage? What is the hormonal interaction between the mother and the zygote? The level of detail is so pathetic that William Dembski might find it compelling.
I would be really impressed if a 7th century illiterate brigand could have explained those things in detail and predicted their mechanisms. But we know that he couldn't.
Next:

O people i have evidence and you will be judged and we are not created for no purpose so give yourself a chance and dont make experiencing a deviated religion to be a barrier of knowing where is the truth

let me show you the challenges of your creator

002.023 And if you are in doubt about what We have sent down upon Our Servant [Muúammad], then produce a surah the like thereof and call upon your witnesses other than Allah , if you should be truthful

What follows is, of course, a rambling bunch of quotations from the Quran.
But how about just some Shakespeare who elegantly sculpts the trappings of power (so interestingly craved by Mohamed and his enslaved followers):

Then everything includes itself in power,
Power into will, will into appetite;
And appetite, an universal wolf,
So doubly seconded with will; and power,
Must make perforce universal prey,
And last eat up itself.

...or Tennyson's "Ulysses"...

Though much is taken, much abides; and though
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

...or even the Song of Songs from the Bible with its delicious eroticism...

8 If thou know not, O thou fairest among women, go thy way forth by the footsteps of the flock and feed thy kids, beside the shepherds' tents.
9 I have compared thee, O my love, to a steed in Pharaoh's chariots.
10 Thy cheeks are comely with circlets, thy neck with beads.
11 We will make thee circlets of gold with studs of silver.
12 While the king sat at his table, my spikenard sent forth its fragrance.
13 My beloved is unto me as a bag of myrrh, that lieth betwixt my breasts.
14 My beloved is unto me as a cluster of henna in the vineyards of En-gedi.
15 Behold, thou art fair, my love; behold, thou art fair; thine eyes are as doves.
16 Behold, thou art fair, my beloved, yea, pleasant; also our couch is leafy.
17 The beams of our houses are cedars, and our panels are cypresses.

I think we can assume that the Quran hasn't cornered the market on poetic perfection.
Additionally, the Quran provides NO evidence that Allah actually exists. It's more bogus hateful prophecy from an iron age illiterate brigand whose Surahs are plagiarisms of plagiarisms of myths built on tribal nonsense.

Faith = Ignorance

New polling supports old polls that religious faith correlates heavily with ignorance. Some other bloggers, including PZ Myers, have gotten on this too.
Over and over again atheists have been chastised for inventing straw men of religion. "You are only dealing with the fundamentalists," the culturally myopic say. "That group is such a tiny minority that you aren't dealing with reality. You atheists have about as much theological imagination as five year olds." They've leveled it at Dawkins, Harris, Hitchens, Dennett, Grayling, Myers, and the rest of us. They call us shrill and fundamentalist ourselves.
"Religion does great things for people," they say. I concede that community is a great thing and that religions promote community, though generally into tribal factions that kill each other if left unregulated by principles of liberty and inalienable intersubjectively shared views on rights. But the amount of enforced ignorance, intellectual violence, mutual intolerance, authoritarian, anti-woman, and anti-democratic spew that a huge number of U.S. citizens have to swallow in order to belong to communities is garbage.
Those who who call us atheists fundamentalists need to explain away these numbers:

The poll of 2,455 U.S. adults from Nov 7 to 13 found that 82 percent of those surveyed believed in God, a figure unchanged since the question was asked in 2005.
It further found that 79 percent believed in miracles, 75 percent in heaven, while 72 percent believed that Jesus is God or the Son of God. Belief in hell and the devil was expressed by 62 percent.

That's a big fat sample.
So most U.S. citizens believe that some divine force violates the laws of the universe; they believe that an extra-universal place exist that we will be magically transported to upon our deaths to live in bliss forever, basking in the glory of an unsubstantiated God (unless we are unrepentant); they believe a man whose existence is uncorroborated by any contemporary source is both the son of a being whose existence is in unsubstantiated and is that being at the same time as well as being a disembodied spirit of that being too; they believe in lesser divine beings who are unsubstantiated but are nonetheless agents in the material world. All of these beliefs have no mechanism to explain them. All of them lack independent confirmation. All of them rest on revelation, tradition, and authority, none of which actually explain anything.
Next,

Darwin's theory of evolution met a far more skeptical audience which might surprise some outsiders as the United States is renowned for its excellence in scientific research.
Only 42 percent of those surveyed said they believed in Darwin's theory which largely informs how biology and related sciences are approached. While often referred to as evolution it is in fact the 19th century British intellectual's theory of "natural selection."

Big shock there. Faith, that anti-virtue that abhors reason and literacy, begets ignorance of the most powerful explanation of the development of the biotic world over time. The Christians and Muslims who fight against evolution tooth and nail can't resist the powerful urge to live in a blissful wish. You were specially created by the most powerful being in the universe who had you in mind from the very beginning and wants you to have a special relationship with him that he always intended you to have because he knew you before you were born because you were made in His image. He wants you to know that he loves you as he loves himself. Of course, it is a servile relationship where he is the master and you are the servant, essentially enslaved to a celestial dictatorship no different from the cults of personality used by Hitler, Stalin, the Ayatollah Khomeini, Kim Jung Il, or Saddam Hussein. Don't actually question the mind behind the curtain, just love him and obey. Look! Listen! Kneel! Pray!

What is perhaps surprising is that substantial minorities in America apparently believe in ghosts, UFOs, witches, astrology and reincarnation.
The survey, which has a sampling error of plus or minus two percent, found that 35 percent of the respondents believed in UFOs and 31 percent in witches.
More born-again Christians -- a term which usually refers to evangelical Protestants who place great emphasis on the conversion experience -- believed in witches at 37 percent than mainline Protestants or Catholics, both at 32 percent.

Why should this be surprising at all? When you believe in one set of nonsense with no evidence behind it why stop there? Why not believe in vampires or sorcery? Many a Christian will laugh at the "primitives" of Papua New Guinea, the Kalahari, or the Amazon for holding animistic beliefs. What is really so different about these beliefs other than the dogmas and traditions that have been erected around them?
As I wrote in the New York Times a couple of years ago in response to an article about creationist trips down the Grand Canyon:

To the Editor:
It is unsurprising to me that the ''intelligent design'' movement has brought about a resurgence in activity (at least perceived activity) among creationists. Their views are so fundamentally antiscientific that it's a wonder they believe in them.
You report that Tom Vail, who leads Canyon Ministries trips down the Colorado River, suggests that the Grand Canyon is only 4,500 years old -- an idea easily debunked by any competent geologist.
If we allow this anti-reasoning into our classrooms as the creationists and intelligent design proponents hope to do, precedent would demand that courtrooms allow supernatural explanations of culpability, including demons, angels, ghosts, goblins, trolls, vampires and aliens.
By denying the methods of testing in science, the creationists also deny the burden of proof in the rule of law. Our country can suffer no such attack.

Reason is an inoculation to faith. Science and logic are the most powerful tools reason has. When science is applied to the questions of faith in a rigorous fashion, faith begins to wither. Our most cherished beliefs rest upon our own senses of specialness. But just because we believe in our specialness (an is in this case), doesn't mean that it follows that we are cosmically special. What we want isn't what ought to be.
Of course we desire to be cosmically special. Our sentience and sapience resist our senescence. We hope beyond reason that we can somehow transcend our mortality and our finite existences. Faced with the absurdity of the fact that we are just tiny biotic specks in an enormous universe, we seek consolation. Science takes a lot of that away and evolution in particular, acting as a "universal acid" (see Dennett's Darwin's Dangerous Idea), eats through our most cherished notions. Because we lack any positive evidence for the existence of a loving creator, evolution overwhelmingly implies that we were not specially created by a loving God who had us in mind when s/he or it created the universe. Instead, we came about by a gradual 3.6 billion year process of descent with modification through replication of various kinds, mutation (and other randomizing factors), and natural selection that has resulted in a species known as homo sapiens that will also one day no longer exist on planet earth.

We will either go extinct or evolve, very gradually, into a species that will no longer be recognizable as homo sapiens. We are not cosmically special and exempt from the rules and laws of the universe.
That isn't to say that we aren't special. My son and my wife are the most beautiful things in the world to me and I hold them as dearly to myself as I think it is humanly possible to do. My own existence is enough to fill my sense of me with meaning as I wade through, swim in, and ride upon the great river of life. But I understand, at least partially, my finite existence and am as unfooled as I can be by my own egocentric and anthropocentric desires. I'm sure that your existence, as tenuous as it might be, is full of things that propel you to act every day. Can you do it without wish-thinking? Because wish-thinking and its religious embodiment take a tremendous toll on us.
The above numbers also correlate overwhelmingly with some other ugly trends (see this this older post). Where we see higher levels of evolution denial and religious observance, we also find abstinence-only education, higher STD infection rates, higher rates of teen pregnancy, lower literacy rates, and higher poverty. Religion does incredible violence to individuals and communities because it mandates that people believe in stupid things for bad reasons when there are perfectly good things to accept or believe in that are overwhelmingly supported by available evidence.
Once again, if you think that we are fighting with straw men, then pony up with some evidence to back it up. Stop defending "belief in belief" as Dennett calls it in Breaking the Spell. Stop sticking your head in the ground and look over the grasses. There are lions and hyenas on our savanna. Faith is not a virtue.

Failed conversion attempts: Part Deux

A few days ago I posted the first installment of a young woman's attempt to convert me. I had stopped at the Commonplace Coffehouse, a Christian kid hangout that seems to be in some way affiliated with the Lord of Life or Sovereign Grace Church. I like the place. Nice people. Good service. Good coffee politics. Good group of folks. We just disagree fundamentally on whether the universe is run by an iron age carpenter or not, whether said carpenter even existed as reported in the Bible, whether that carpenter could have been an incarnate divine being, and all that. Nonsense to me. Saving explanation of humanity to them.
I'm not going to go into a long conversation style again because I don't want to misrepresent the young woman's statements. The memory isn't fresh enough to do her justice. Suffice it to say, that two broad topics came up for her.
1. God acts out of justice and righteousness.
2. The sacrifice of Jesus on the cross was meant to save us.
Combined with the earlier so-called skepticism of evolution, I had stepped right into a really standard conversion attempt.
---
Point 1. God acts out of justice and righteousness.
This is propaganda. One need only look to the bloodbaths of the Old Testament to find this statement, at the very least, questionable. Genesis, Exodus, Samuel 1, Judges, Joshua, and so on are books that sanction genocide. When Pol Pot, Stalin, Hitler, or the Hutus went into a land and killed everything that breathes, we call that genocide. Why am I or any one else supposed to change their standards because an alleged God said to do it? The authority to command us has to be built on good evidence to do so.

Point 2. The sacrifice of Jesus on the cross was meant to save us.
The supposed vicarious redemption of humanity by Jesus presents at least two problems. The first is that people can do things for you that you don't want them to, wouldn't ask them to do, and would try to dissuade them from doing, and you are still beholden to them no matter your feelings on the matter. As a matter of alleged free will that modern Christianity offers, this is deeply problematic. We had no say in the (alleged) crucifixion of Jesus. It was an utterly barbaric act, morally reprehensible in every way, and only confounded by the fact that it is an simultaneous act of filicide, suicide, and homicide. I don't presume to believe that people should die in barbaric ways at the hands of others to help the plight of billions of unborn people. And it doesn't work which goes to the second part of my objection.
Scapegoating is good? The doctrine of vicarious redemption through the slaughter of another being to absolve you of your guilt accomplishes nothing other than possibly placating the guilt one might have. If I accidentally damage your house, some reparations are in order. If I deliberately burn your house down, then some kind of punishment is in order. In general, we live within a tit for tat world that ought to be...very much ought to be moderated by mercy.
If I burn down your house and then kill a couple of goats, have I been served and served you justice? Of course not. The recompense is totally unequal and inappropriate. I should have to rebuild your house and compensate you, at least, for the time that you have lost at work. Killing more beings isn't going to help alleviate my guilt. Perhaps, if we live in an agrarian/pastoral society, giving you my livestock might be a solid form of recompense. But simply killing them would be at least shortsighted.
Perhaps if we kill them and eat them? That makes a little bit more sense, but only if we are giving it directly to those we have wronged. Ah. But here we see Jesus being tricky. We are invited to eat him. We are invited to cannibalize an innocent man insane enough to try to convince us that his divine nature needs to be eaten to save us from ourselves. Perhaps to a few of his buddies, that would make some sort of cannibalistic sense. But to the observer who has seen the historical failure of Jesus to return as a superhero and absolve all of the faithful and so on, we see this as an act of thoughtless barbarism that falsely ameliorates guilt.