It’s Getting Hard to Tell the Creationists and the Onion Apart
Remember this article from The Onion?:
DESPERATE VEGETARIANS DECLARE COWS PLANTS
LAS VEGAS — At its annual national conference Saturday, the American Association of Vegans and Vegetarians released results of a detailed in-house study determining that the common beef cow is actually a plant, 100 percent fit for vegetarian consumption.
“Contrary to what was previously thought, the cow is not a higher form of animal life, capable of thinking and feeling pain,” announced AAVV spokeswoman Denise Chalmers to the large crowd. “Rather, we have found it to be a harmless, non-sentient form of plant life, utterly incapable of experiencing the slightest pain or simplest thought.”
Chalmers then passed around a large tray of dripping red meat, which the vegetarians in attendance ravenously devoured, feverishly licking the bloody juice from their fingers.
Compare that to this bit of masturbiblation (also this one), which shows that squid aren’t alive. I can only assume that future episodes will prove that up is down, black is white, and that the Babel Fish is definitive proof of the nonexistence of God.
The YECs with their insistence on a particularly stupid interpretation of Genesis, have a problem:
‘However the absence of death would pose just as much a problem for three 24-hour days as it would for three billion years. Many species of life cannot survive for even three hours without food, and the ingestion of food requires at least the death of plants’
(OEC Hugh Ross, quoted in AIG).
If they hadn’t committed themselves to a particularly stupid interpretation of the Genesis myth, they wouldn’t have this problem. But they did, so they do. Pretzel logic to the rescue! Let’s redefine “life” so that it means something entirely different, and damn the consequences!
According to the Usenet article, only vertebrates with red blood are alive. The AIG article is fuzzier, but says that fish, reptiles, amphibians, birds, mammals, and humans are alive, while plants and single-celled life forms aren’t. And lots of gray areas outside of that (squid, bumblebees, mushrooms, ants, etc.).
Unfortunately, as PZ Myirz points out, there are consequences to this redefinition:
What I’d really love to see now, though, is the rhetorical squirming they’d go through when it’s pointed out that human embryos do not develop red blood cells until about the 5th week of development, and therefore the early embryo, by their own definition, is not living.
The other thing to note is, you may have noticed that creationists like to ignore the vast tracts of well-documented evolution we have evidence for, and prefer to change the subject to that of abiogenesis: “If evolution is true, where did the first living beings come from, then?”
But by redefining “life”, they’ve moved the goalposts — in the wrong direction. If “alive” really means “red-blooded terrestrial vertebrate”, then we can ignore abiogenesis, the RNA world, the evolution of cellular membranes, the evolution of multicellularity, and basically just skip 3 billion years forward and start with Sarcopterygii, early fish whose descendants crawled onto land and became, among other things, us.
Way to score an own goal, guys. And no, I’m not laughing at you; I’m laughing… er… Hey, look! Over there! A comet!