If This is How You Question Darwin...

After the Bill Nye-Ken Ham debate that showed just how clearly Ham has no hope of ever being considered scientifically-minded to any degree, there's been a lot of stressing the point.  All over the web, there's a lot of harping about the most important moments of the debate, and most of all, the Q&A where Bill gives examples of evidence that would change his position, while Ken Ham says flatly that nothing would ever change his mind.  The biggest thing about this is that it completely shatters Ham's contention that science is closed-minded and locked on to philosophical naturalism, while simultaneously showing that it is he who is indisputably closed-minded.  It's amazing how clear-cut he makes it for us.

Well, not long afterwards, HBO aired a documentary that featured Ham as well as plenty more incredibly closed-minded people who think...  uuhhh...  well, maybe "think" is the wrong word...  approach reality with the same fractured intellectual modality as Ken Ham and his ilk.  Doing the rounds through the atheist blogosphere are clips from the film, specifically of die-hard creationists and fideists who make even Chuck Missler (Mr. "Comets-aren't-made-of-ice-because-ice-cubes-don't-form-a-tail!") look almost sane.

See the video on Gawker for yourself, and read my thoughts below the jump --
http://gawker.com/watch-creationists-talking-about-creationism-1520841986

Bill Nye vs Ken Ham : Post-Debate Review

So I, like many of you out there in the atheist blogosphere, watched the big debate between Bill Nye the Science Guy and Answers in Genesis' Ken Ham.  Going into it, I was expecting not too much from Bill and pretty much the same old same old from Ken Ham.  Mainly why I wasn't expecting much from Bill had not to do with his scientific understanding (which is quite considerable), but because of tactical practices that are part of the process of formal debate. The problem with the practice of debate with its rules put in force is that it is less about what is true and more about who argues well, and how you lay traps and keep someone from really being able to make the actual point.  Simultaneously, if you can get someone into a trap, you never have to actually make a point of your own or provide any real reason for your position.  This is why people like Duane Gish or William Lane Craig are generally successful in debates.

WLC likes to strawman and lie about his opponent's positions and lie about science.  The lies about science are obscure enough that it would take some serious effort or existing knowledge of a subject in order to uncover them.  The lies about the opponent's position are designed to rouse ire and goad the opponent into wasting time reprimanding WLC for his crime.  Gish, on the other hand, takes the tactic of rapid-fire switching between subtopics, ensuring that people can only really respond to a fraction of the questions posed (note that because creationists set up this false dichotomy, they assume that if a given question isn't adequately answered by their adversary, they win by default).  This latter is the primary tactic that Ken Ham used in his opening statement.  From there on, it was a lot of the usual fallacies of "historical science vs. experimental science" and a lot of "you weren't there" and "the Bible is automatically true" bullcrap.  The most cringeworthy example of this for me was during the Q&A where Bill was asked about the origin of matter, and in Ham's response to Bill's answer, he said "there's a book out there that actually tells us where matter came from."  Ugh...  right, the book says so, therefore it's the right answer.  He did it again with the "where did consciousness come from" question as well.  I really felt like wringing Ken Ham's neck right there.

Dialogues With Hopeless Delusional Idiots ep. 1 epilogue

Before I continue with the primary content of this little series, I wanted to include some particularly hilarious responses I got from the first one.  Since the Google+ feed of comments/responses is directly visible at the original posting, I'm more or less not including anything from there.  Instead, I'm including some of the direct messages I get here and there (such as on Facebook, where anybody can message anybody).  Some of them are truly amazing, and I feel it is only right to include them so that everybody gets a good laugh.  Note that I'm only including the responses from delusional idiots in order to keep up with the theme of the series. I will say that I got a lot more positive responses than ones from crazed religious morons, but there is clearly a great deal more entertainment value in reveling in the inane stupidity borne of faith the world over.

So without further ado, I submit to you some truly magnificent morons.

Proof of Hopeless Idiocy

I'm rarely ever shocked by anything Pat Robertson says.  I mean, the guy has a long history of being a delusional idiot, misogynistic, anti-gay, anti-science, anti-reality living monument of utterly criminal disgrace to all of humanity.  So when he comes out and claims that Haitians made a pact with the devil which caused their Mega-earthquake, or secular ideals caused Sandy and so on...  it's pretty much on par with all he ever says.

Then he floored me with this one. 

What is it with Republicans and Women??!?

I have to admit that I am still facepalming from Michele Bachmann's insane claim during the GOP debates in which she made up some baloney tale about some girl receiving the HPV vaccine and it apparently caused mental retardation (as if that's actually possible).  But at the very least, nobody backed her on that one.  Then Todd Akin comes out with his claim that "legitimate" cases of raped women can't result in pregnancy, and therefore, there's no need to offer abortions for rape victims.  I especially love his use of the word "legitimate", something which I doubt many people actually mistook to mean he felt there was some sort of contextual justification for rape.  No, he was pretty clearly trying to imply that women lie about being raped and use that to get abortions.

Of course there are people who lie about being victims of crimes.  Any crime, and rape is no exception.  But to assume that it's the rule rather than the exception is something that takes an inordinate degree of stupidity and forceful rejection of reality that I can't even begin to enumerate.  The reality is that most rapes don't even go reported, and the rate of pregnancy is ~5%.  This is about 1/4 the rate of pregnancy for couples when they're actually trying to get pregnant.  The reason for the lower proportion is quite simple -- couples actually trying to get pregnant are also paying attention to things like ovulation cycles and so on, which simply does not fall under the attention of a rapist.  It's the sort of religion-guided universal disdain for women that leads to the sort of assumption that given the opportunity, any woman will deliberately play the victim in order to shirk responsibility.  This is funny, considering that 100% of religious fundamentalists play the victim whenever they feel the need to rob others of their equality of rights.

But it gets even crazier than that.  There were plenty of GOP figureheads who saw the backlash and distanced themselves from him -- yes, for the first time, the opposition actually argued back with *facts* rather than just talk of cruelty or play other games.  However, because Akin addressed a point that is pretty much on the core of the right-wing platform (unlike Michele Bachmann with her anti-vaccine garbage), it was inevitable that there would be support for his idiotic claims.  And boy, what support.

My Simple Question to YECs

The Young-Earth Creationists (YECs) out there have tried a number of modes of arguments, and the latest of these appears to be the presuppositional apologetics.  It seems, at least, that they accept that it's beyond the realm of possibility for them to attempt to play the science angle and have a hope of holding a candle to anyone reasonably well-versed in science.  There is simply no way, with science, to show that the universe was created on October 23, 4004 BC.  They accept now that people with brains will always be prepared to show them that they will never have the capacity ever to be right on that.  So instead, the approach is to say that facts don't matter, and the universe is less than 10,000 years old because la-la-la-la-la-I'm-not-listening!  La-la-la-la-la-facts-are-inventions-of-Satan!  Nur-nurny-nur-nur!

There's the general pattern where YECs always try and play games with atheists, and always try and redefine words.  In general, the Sye Ten Bruggencates and Ken Hams of the world take the approach of redefining the word "truth" to mean "whatever agrees with the Bible."  It's necessarily wrong in every way, but it's so aggravatingly, inexcusably, earth-shatteringly opposed to all semblance of reason and logic that it is impossible for people with functioning brain cells not to respond with explosive rage at the unbounded stupidity and anti-knowledge that is laid out before them.

As such, the discussion often trends down the path of pointing fingers at the content of the creationists' beliefs.  For instance, the "does the Bible condone slavery?" (which it unarguably does) type of arguments.  It's easy to do this because of the fact that literalists always like to act as if their scripture is without flaw, and that is something which is easily refuted without exception.  Of course, because you're dealing with YECs, getting them to admit to things which are factually true is a lost cause.

I think there are different ways of approaching the YEC problem.

The Inherent Dishonesty of Creationist Debate

Ever since the 2012 Reason Rally, there have been a number of videos popping up both from Youtube atheists like Thunderf00t and AronRa as well as from the subhuman creationist black holes of infinitely dense stupidity like Ray Comfort and his ilk.  As a rule, they all tended to be about the same, where the creationist leads into a systematic circle of gaps for sensible doubt, and argue that all such gaps indisputably prove god.  Presuppositional apologetics were among the things strut out proudly as if they had any measure of validity, and a number of atheists caught in this web engaged in rather futile struggles to try and break out of the ineffable circularity of creationist thinking in order to draw a line.

Well, regardless of how easily one notices the fact that all creationists are indisputable failures at thinking, it is difficult to look at the way people with brains actually managed in those situations.  Part of it is that the way creationists operate is that anything that is too vague, anything that is unclear, is by definition the space where "God" resides.  So as long as you can be loose with your language, God exists.    The argument from ignorance is the way all things are proven.  Anything that could hypothetically be possible is necessarily true so long as your opposition doesn't deny the hypothetical possibility (on account of actually being intellectually honest).  The other thing is that by being as brainless as they are, it is particularly frustrating for people like myself who have such a low threshold for stupid.  Especially since we're necessarily dealing with a stupid which is opposed to listening.  So at some point or other, it's hard not to get annoyed to the point of just telling the creationists, "get the f**k out of my sight, you intransigent filth."

Which is pretty much what they're looking for.  It's nothing more than a game of provocation for them.  And that's because creationism is foundationally dishonest in every way.

Learning Could Hurt Too Many Feelings

Often times, liberals are associated with following the sort of namby-pamby consideration for "feelings" that creates the shift from using the word "cow" to using the term "Bovine-American."  We're not just supposed to be the guys who think socialism is awesome, but we also think the laws should outlaw the use of insulting language like "Chinese" in place of "Asian"...  as if that isn't technically disregarding the differentiation between multiple distinct cultures...  oh, well.  Strangely, liberal as I may lean, I'm not one of them.

Now I'm not about to say that we should forgo foul language, but that there's a line to be drawn.  There's a difference between using the N-word when referring to black people, and saying that creationism is idiotic.  A key difference here is that in one case, you're talking about people, and in another, you're talking about an idea.  Ideas don't have feelings to be hurt in the first place, and like all liberals, I do care about fairness.  The thing is that a lot of people presume that fair treatment of all ideas means they all get equal "time" and an equal "voice" in discourse...  hence why creationist fountainheads like the so-called Discovery Institute can work in lobbying for "academic freedom" bollocks.  Well, it doesn't quite work that way.  First of all, we can't just take ideas willy-nilly.  We need to be able to differentiate between fact and opinion, at the very least.  More importantly, treating ideas fairly doesn't mean open season for all ideas -- it means putting all ideas under equal scrutiny and upheld to the same intellectual standards.

Well, the fact that people who hold ideas on faith tend to hold them emotionally and without serious thought means it creates an avenue for people to say their feelings are hurt...  as if that puts the scrutiny off limits.  People who do this define "fairness" as whatever-works-out-in-my-own-benefit.  "We can be intolerant of gays, but it's unfair for people to rebuke our intolerance...  How dare you be so cruel to speak ill of our ignorant asshattery!"  I don't buy into this kind of crap.  Bad ideas deserve to be rebuked because they're bad ideas.  If it hurts your feelings because you hold bad ideas dearly on personal faith...  well, tough luck.  You held a bad idea.  Deal with it.

Tennessee Puts a Stop to Science

So the anti-science bill went through and passed in the Tennessee state legislature, and now the Governor of Tennessee (Bill Haslam) has announced that he's basically sure to sign it into law.  Though there is pressure from people who have functioning brains to urge him to veto, it's not really all that likely that he would, or even that it will end there.  And thus will end science in Tennessee public schools.  It's almost that the same state that held the infamous Scopes Trial should also come full circle and now bring creationism and religious horseshit back into the schools.

I'm sure it's easy to make light of the situation since it doesn't cover a whole lot, but that's exactly the reason why it's so subversive.  Much as with SOPA which had very little detail and very vague language -- which in turn made it open to be a lot more dangerous and destructive than was probably designed.  The other thing is that the opportunity to let creationism or anti-vaccine or climate change denialism into the science classroom is there, but it's only really a risk if there is a significant population in the state who would actually lean that way.  If this same law was passed in...  say, Japan, it would probably not even raise a blip...  because anti-science thinking isn't that strong a movement in Japan.

But this is Tennessee...  a "Red" state...  I don't think I need to finish that sentence for people to see that there's a problem.

More CTMU Nonsense...

It has been a while since I've posted something here, and that is the price of academia combined with illness.  But I probably would have gotten over said illness sooner if I hadn't worked through every day of it without much if any sleep (including the weekends).

I spent the better part of the month until recently doing something that creationists don't do -- working on actual academic literature.  Granted, my field is not among the hard sciences, but the work we were doing was pretty darn interesting.  I can't really go into detail on the subject matter because we barely hit the submission deadline and it's still in review as I write this, and the work here is due to be patented by my employer.  Nonetheless, the first author is an intern I co-mentored over the summer who will also be using this work as part of his doctoral dissertation.  I spent most of the time adapting and generalizing his quite specific work to other applications and running countless simulations which became test results for the paper itself.  It's in the nature of these types of jobs that you also find bugs and issues as you go along, and Murphy's Law dictates that these things always seem to come up late in the game.  So as I was fixing all these issues and then re-running and re-generating datasets, everything just came down to the wire after endless nights without sleep.  I remember all the other times I had to go through this sort of thing, and it's always been the same story...  except I was an undergrad the last time.

Anyway, that means that in addition to not having any time to work on the blog, I haven't had much time to work on the book, and I only managed to solve some problems with my personal research because it just happened to come up in the course of testing some hypotheses (ooh! another thing creationists don't do).  I also haven't had any time to continue reading through Chris Langan's bullcrap.  What I've managed to get through so far seems to lead down the path of a sort of divine solipsism...  incredibly stupid, and inherently unprovable.  At the very least, I did want to respond to a defender of the idea who posted in the comments on my prior CTMU post.  As his response was very long, I figured I'd put my reply in an actual blog post.

Chris Langan's "theory"

Pretty much every person out there who tries to support creationism on some claimant scientific and/or logical basis have one thing in common -- all of them lie, distort, and make a mockery of reality in order to get the job done.  I've had a number of whirls at the joke that is William Demsbski, and I allude quite a bit to core failures he makes in the nonsense he publishes when I did my post about creationists and their screwy ideas about math.  Well, recently, someone pointed me to this fellow named Chris Langan.  I'd never heard of the guy until then, and I really didn't care.  Among the reasons given as to why I should consider taking what this guy says seriously is because his IQ has been tested as being around 195-210...  Ummm...  okay.

Well, I tried looking up what I could about the fellow, and actual examples were pretty sparse.  I did find a rather dismal performance on 1 vs 100...  a show I had never even seen prior to this, but whatever.  It's not really fair to judge someone's intellect based on knowledge of trivia, as it is called 'trivia' for a reason.  But I think it is also worth mentioning that even if I am to take his intellectual capacity at face value, that doesn't really serve in any way to validate anything he has to say.  So already, the fact that the man's work was suggested to me on the basis of what can effectively be called an invocation of the argument from authority fallacy does not bode well.

Anyway, the so-called "theory" I was pointed to and suggested to read (by someone who had not read a word of it himself, of course) was something that Langan calls his "Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe" or CTMU.  To be honest, I've yet to completely read through this work, as even a small section reveals massive wrongness within.  I guess I can probably agree with the theists on one thing, though : This work may well be the very best that theists can offer.

... and it's still eminently moronic.

Are they really that stupid?

About a year ago, I came across an example page out of a "Christian Science" textbook.  To be exact, it was a textbook published by Bob Jones University expressly for use by Christian homeschooling parents.  This particular page scan was actually a margin note/caption about the nature of electricity.  Here, you can see the actual scan from BJU's great and wonderful 4th-grade level "science" textbook.

There are just so many things wrong with that... where do I begin?  Oh yeah!  About the same place I begin with Bill O'Reilly's insane argument that the tides are an unexplained phenomena!

The Pitfalls of Rosy Retrospection

Among the few perks of working in films is that you occasionally get to see a handful of them for free, albeit in your office and not at a movie theater with popcorn and soda.  Recently, I got to watch Woody Allen's latest little doozy titled "Midnight in Paris."  Though the film is indeed set in Paris, and the key events are tied to the daily stroke of midnight, that's about the only extent to which the title really tells you anything about the story.  Besides the lovely jabs at Tea Party Republicans, there is a much more fundamental point being made and it is addressing a fallacy that definitely applies pretty well across the political spectrum.  It is one that I deal with a lot because it is also well-underlined in a lot of religious dogma as well.  It's the fantasy that there existed any sort of golden age in the past.


In the movie itself, there exists in the protagonist's mind, a fantasy about the 1920s as a golden age of literature, art, and cultural development.  It only becomes apparent later on in the film the extent to which it was a fantasy.  Although it is easy to point fingers at conservatives who feign to miss the "good ol' days", we all have a tendency to look back at things in a different light in retrospection.

Indeed, there were times past which were comparatively more fertile in some particular way for some particular thing, but that is not the same as saying that those were better times.  But when you look at the past through rose-colored glasses, you aren't going to see every color in the scene...  there never were any good ol' days.

Earn a PhD in TV Astrophysics!

There are a lot of great educational programs on TV these days. Everybody is aware of the kids' stuff like Sesame Street and Mr. Rogers et al., though when I was a kid, I particularly enjoyed shows like The Mechanical Universe. This show, for those who don't remember it, was structured to include segments of CalTech's 100-level Physics lectures, but mainly trended down mathematical derivations and a lot of the history leading up to how many "laws" of physics were discovered. When we're all grown up, though, it's easy to look back on it and see it as rather elementary... though seeing some of Jim Blinn's animations of visual derivations of Maxwell's equations, or inverting space-time diagrams even today is striking in its implied significance. Though, that's hardly the reason why I'm now working in the same field as Jim Blinn is. Interestingly enough, that work was done in an era when anything and everything was brand new, and though the majority of new developments nowadays are very incremental in their value and hardly revolutionary in any sense, what he did back then is fundamental enough to be considered pretty elementary today.

Leaving aside the crazy and death-sentence-earning assholery of Ray Comfort, Ken Ham, et al, when you take what the average person knows about evolution, quantum mechanics, astrophysics, biochemistry, and so on... it's most likely to be the kind of stuff they picked up watching random stuff on The Discovery Channel. There is nothing all too wrong with this, but it does beg the question of how closely people really listen. While many of the people who appear on such programs whether it's on Discovery, History, PBS, Science Channel, whatever, are all very capable and skilled scholars in their fields (History Channel's disgusting pandering to cryptozoologists and Ancient Aliens believers notwithstanding), the shows are still pretty much made for the layman or novice in science. What they tell you is more or less true, but not really a complete or thorough picture of how scientists in their respective fields actually understand the pertaining material.

The dark lining to this rainbow is that it makes it easy to make some simple misunderstandings, which ultimately present in the form of burning stupidity.

Worldnuttery on Film once again.

After having read WorldNet Daily's reviews of Kung Fu Panda 2 and X-Men:First Class, I was interested in seeing how they would handle a film like Rise of the Planet of the Apes.  Considering that the problem they had with KFP2 was that it was basically too "Chinese", what with it being set in China, and all...  X-Men, of course, has, at its core, the very idea of genetic mutation leading to beneficial results, and that rings too deeply of "evolution", which flies in the face of all creationists.  So here comes a film which is a sort of prequel to original Planet of the Apes series titled 'Rise of the Planet of the Apes.'

The WorldNut reviewer, Drew Zahn, had surprisingly few complaints, but it came down to one core Biblical failing.  There's no tree from which chimpanzee Adam and Eve can eat nor were they ever really tempted by Satan.  Therefore, the movie is entirely wrong because the apes grow violent without the need for a fall from grace.

Yep.  That's it.

Go get yourself some cancer!

I was recently reminded of an old argument I once came across in a discussion with a Young Earth Creationist.  It came up in the course of a discussion on the League of Reason forums regarding stupid things we've heard from creationists.  All the way from the public humiliation of Michele Bachmann arguing that global warming is fake because CO2 is natural or Bill O'Reilly "proving" that God is real by asserting that sunrise and sunset are things scientists have yet to explain...  to the neighborhood creotard who admonishes that Darwinian evolution can't explain rainbows.

What came up in the thread was someone who mentioned a New-Age Deepak Chopra type arguing with him that cancer is beneficial.  Before you think that I or the person who posted that entry into the thread happen to be straw-manning said quantum-consciousness-woo-woo-nutbar, the actual quote began with the statement in bold that cancer is beneficial.  Here's the original quote from the email from one ZelatorUK --

Cancer is beneficial, if we did not have cancer we would not live as long. When telomeres run out cells have 2 choices, suicide or bypass the procees and get immortality (Cancer). If all the cells chose suicide there would be a massive hole and chain reaction because other nearby cells would have to reproduce faster and end up losing a lot of lifespan. Do some research, cancer is a natural process designed to prolong the survival of the system, sometimes it looks like its bad.

The person who received that was apparently attempting to actually teach the zealot a thing or two about genetics, mutations, etc. and got this little gem in the middle of a longer response.  The nature of our New Age-y woo-woo believer, though, was to connect that Deepak Chopra idea of consciousness being intrinsic in every cell in our bodies, and somehow that includes cancerous tissue which is apparently conscious and makes the "intelligent" decision to become cancer.  That's a completely different tack to it than what I had come across, but in response, I mentioned my experience with a Young Earth Creationist who argued about cancer being a good thing.

If only Ancient China was a Christian Nation

It isn't often that I look through WorldNet Daily, since reading it probably lowers your IQ by a few points each time.  This time, I ran across it for its review of the film, Kung Fu Panda 2.  Being one of the crew members, I can't help but be curious.  Being an atheist, anti-theist, and someone who knows the kinds of immeasurably concentrated stupidity that WND cannot help but spew out, being the fountainhead of creationist crockery that they are...  I really can't help but be curious how they're going to play this one.

For a few sentences, I thought I might be disappointed, as it started to look like a serious movie review.  The reviewer, Drew Zahn, offered a very valid criticism of the film in that the Furious Five's role is still relatively small (at least Jackie Chan got to speak a little this time), with Po and Tigress taking control of the show.  He also offers praise of the visuals, the humor, and the typical feel-good ending that all family-friendly films apparently must have.

Then came this little gem in the segueway of his review (emphasis added) --

The movie's messages likewise offer promise, but stray from the truth down some heavily New Age paths.

Oh, boy...  the truth...  and here we go.