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

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.

To all creationists who think they know math.

You don't.
The next time somebody tries to claim that life is impossible by natural means and then quotes some absurd made-up probability, the indisputable fact is that you don't have a clue what you're talking about.

I recently saw a little letter-to-the-editor in a local free paper that used the crazy numbers mode of argument about the question of teaching creationism in schools.  Here's the letter.

Evolution is a doctrine built entirely on crazy speculation, and the only reason they have it in school is because scientists want to say that God is not science.  Yet, in order to teach kids to hate Jesus as much as the scientists do, they have to pose an impossibility.  The probability of life forming on its own by natural means is an astronomically small probability of 1 in 10 to the 700-billionth power.  That is equivalent to winning the lottery jackpot 100 billion times in a row consecutively.  That's just the straight math, plain and simple.  You can't argue with numbers.  And we teach this impossibility to kids as science?  Instead of the one truth in the lord, our God?  It's high time we stop this foolishness and show our kids the real truths of life and avoid driving our nation further into hellfire.

That was utterly classic.
I especially love that attitude of how you can't argue with numbers.  It's a common one, and one that lies in this sense we have that numbers are absolute and immutable and there is nothing we can say to deny their value.  When we see raw statistics, everything looks so solid that it seems like an undeniable fact.  Well, it doesn't work that way.  Part of good academic process is not just the numbers you get, but how you get them.  The method used by creationists, which largely involves forcible extraction from the place where the sun never shines is not admissible by any standards of rigor.

What follows after the jump is my response to the author of the previous letter.

Fideism lives on in WLC

Among the sea of Christian apologists out there, William Lane Craig probably stands as one of the most annoyingly loquacious of the bunch.  His primary approach is basically one of taking particularly low-grade and pathetic apologetics without a shred of rigor and then wrapping them in a veneer of sophisticated language and elocution, giving the appearance that the argument is stronger than it actually is.  His favorite argument, the Kalam Cosmological Argument, is nothing more than a variant on the "First Mover" argument which has a lengthy history going back far before Judeo-Christian traditions, though most people in the West might be familiar with it in the form put forth by Aquinas...  5 times...  The naive version of it contains the premise that "whatever exists has a cause", and the easy weak point here is that in order to say God exists, you have to include the fact that God has a cause, else your premise of causality is not axiomatic.  Trying to make an exception for your god constitutes a special pleading fallacy.  The Kalam argument as put forth by WLC uses a different play on words by stating that premise as "whatever begins to exist has a cause."  By including the assertion that "God is eternal", you can claim that there was no beginning to God's existence.  Of course, you're still left with the fact that the "eternal" nature of the posited god is merely a blind assertion and not something you can take as an axiom.  So on what basis can you say that your god is eternal?

Well, in the video above, Mr. William Lane Craig gives his answer for how he knows about the nature of his god.

In many debates, he likes to feign an acceptance of scientific principles and its rigorous approach involving physical evidence and well-reasoned logical conclusions based on that evidence.  Yet, in feigning to do so, he always demonstrates a bold hypocrisy in holding anything he wants to believe up to the same level of scrutiny, which he hides either by the smoke and mirrors of his windbaggery, or by outright lies which are difficult to expose without information readily on hand.  Here, he shows his hand as a flat-out fideist.

Fideism is the epistemological approach which argues that at least a certain range of truths can be found by faith, and that where faith reveals something, it is superior to evidence.  His main point here is that if you have doubts, the problem is that you need to trust your faith.  He believes in the Bible and the Christian faith because he feels the emotional experience that the Bible and his church leaders have told him to look for in order to strengthen their belief.  It is a classic case of circular reasoning, but by not mentioning the sources, he covers up that failure.

Even aside from the fallacious thinking on that level, there's a blatant disregard for objectivity in his assertion.  In his own words, the so-called witness of the holy spirit "in his heart" provides a "self-authenticating means of knowing that Christianity is true wholly apart from the evidence."  In other words, even if the evidence in reality were to disagree with his preconceived notions, he doesn't have any need to re-evaluate his faith because the feeling "in his heart" proves the truth of Christianity absolutely.  What he's actually saying is that if reality disagrees with your faith in Jesus, it's reality that's wrong.  This is an easy cop-out away from rationality because he's providing a mechanism by which objective evaluation of the truth value of any religious claim is devalued in favor of deciding ahead of time that it is true because you believe it because you believe it because you believe it.  You get to conclude what is true ahead of time, and from that point on, it is not open to discussion.

William Lane Craig...  you make me physically ill.