Category Creationism

Disco ‘Tute Fails Some More

The latest new project by the Disco Tute’s Center for
the Renewal of Science and Culture is
faithandevolution.org.

Evidently the new creationists are feeling threatened not only by their
traditional enemy, outspoken atheists like Richard Dawkins and PZ Myers,
but by people like Ken Miller and Francis Collins, who are not only
outspoken devout theists, but are also respected biologists who aren’t
shy about pointing out that ID is a load of dingo’s kidneys.

The
“About” page says:

According to noted biologist Richard Dawkins, Darwinian evolution makes it possible to become an intellectually fulfilled atheist. According to Francis Collins, former head of the Human Genome Project, evolution is perfectly compatible with his Christian faith. Who is right? And why does it matter? This website is designed to help you find out.

Which leads me to wonder whether they’re being disingenuous as usual, or
whether they’re so stupid as to miss the point that Dawkins’s and
Collins’s views don’t conflict with each other?

Positive Atheism gives a
fuller version
of Dawkins’s “intellectually fulfilled atheist” quotation:

An atheist before Darwin could have said, following Hume:
“I have no explanation for complex biological design. All I know is that
God isn’t a good explanation, so we must wait and hope that somebody
comes up with a better one.” I can’t help feeling that such a position,
though logically sound, would have left one feeling pretty unsatisfied,
and that although atheism might have been logically tenable
before Darwin, Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled
atheist.

— Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker, page 6

I think that’s pretty clear: you can be an atheist without
understanding how life evolves. But the theory of evolution answers one
nagging question.

I don’t have a similar quotation summarizing Collins’s views, but
judging by the jacket blurb of The Language of God, it
seems clear that he’s able to reconcile Christianity with evolution.

It seems pretty clear to me that the two are orthogonal to each other.
If you’re an atheist, science can help answer questions; if you’re a
Christian and like being one, that doesn’t mean you have to reject
science. Understanding evolution allows you to go either way.
So the DI’s site is setting up a conflict where none exists.

Stupid, ignorant, or deceptive? Hm, tough choice.

(Update, May 29: Fixed thinko.)

Typical Evasion

Back in the stone age, when I was a student, there was this thing
called Usenet, which had a newsgroup called talk.origins, where
creationists and evolution proponents argued.

I saw a pattern emerge: the evolution side had a number of people who
produced data to back up their claims, like experimental results,
pictures of fossils, and so forth. The creationism side, on the other
hand, seemed to have a surfeit of people providing excuses why the
evolutionists were wrong, and why creationism couldn’t be tested the
way the evolutionists said.

For all the IDists’
protests
that ID isn’t just Creationism 2.0, it seems they haven’t changed
their MO all that much.

Case in point:
PZ
forwarded a video
that challenged creationists to come up with a gene that doesn’t have
evolutionary precursors.

The
response
at UD is entirely dismissive:

So, has Myers indeed stumbled upon a true significant challenge for ID? Or, has he simply stumbled, as he so often does, over his own misconceptions and metaphysics? I vote for the latter.

There are a lot more words in that post, but they all boil down to:
no, ID can’t be tested that way. No, we’re not going to tell you how
to test ID, and we sure as hell aren’t going to perform any
experiments of our own. But you should still take us seriously because we say so.

ID FAQ 2

Barry Arrington’s
ID FAQ question 2
isn’t much better than
question 1.

2] No Real Scientists Take Intelligent Design Seriously

Yes, they do. For simple instance, in telecommunications work, we start by distinguishing the intelligent signal from the naturally occurring noise that tends to garble it.

One obvious problem with this is that in telecommunications, we know
what signal is (whatever the customer wants to send) and what noise is
(anything that changes the signal between the sender and the
recipient).

The existence of a signal is not in doubt: people pay telecoms good
money to send it, and get upset when their signals aren’t sent
reliably. We also know that people exist, and what sorts of signals
they tend to send (speech, email, streaming audio and video, etc.),
when, and why.

“Noise”, in telecommunications and signal processing, is by definition
anything that changes the original signal at the receiver. If I call
my mom on the phone and say “Hello” but she hears static crackling,
that’s noise. If I say “hello” but she hears “oh hell”, that’s noise.
But if I call a friend and send a series of high-pitched shrieks with
my acoustic modem, but he gets a Vivaldi concerto, that’s still noise:
I’m paying the phone company good money to send high-pitched shrieks,
dammit, and that’s what I want to arrive at the other end.

The
cdesign proponentsists
(hey, there’s another good example of information being garbled), on
the other hand, want to use a recieved message (the human genome, or
bacterial flagella, or mousetraps, or whatever) to try to infer the
existence of an original signal, a designer. At the same time, since
they don’t want to admit that the designer is the God of the Bible,
they play coy and refuse to ascribe any properties to the designer.

I’ve seen a variant of the telecommunications analogy, in which IDists
pointed to archeologists trying to figure out whether a given rock was
used as a tool by prehistoric humans, or was broken and scratched by
natural (non-human) processes. But again, this is exactly backward:
archeologists not only can assume that humans existed 10,000 years
ago, but know a lot about their probable motivations (food, sex,
companionship, worship, etc.) and their limitations (any hypothesis
that involves people having three arms, for instance, is going to get
shot down pretty quickly).

IDists have none of that. They’re trying to prove magic, so they have
to use this sort of smoke and mirrors.

Some Good News From ID-Land

Bill Dembski
reports:

Judge Jones gets multiple honorary degrees, Ben Stein has his withdrawn

That’s referring to the fact that Ben Stein, the game show host who
recently narrated a movie blaming the Holocaust on evolution, was
invited to be a commencement speaker at the University of Vermont, but
when it was brought to the president’s attention what an anti-science
twatcicle Stein is,
“Stein withdrew from the ceremony“.

(The word “withdrew” makes it sound as though it was Stein’s idea. I
imagine this withdrawal is about as voluntary as when a cabinet
secretary or Wall Street CEO is caught snorting blow off the ass of an
underage Thai hooker while dressed in latex and leather, and promptly
offers his resignation.)

Next, Barry Arrington proposes a
draft
for an FAQ question on ID:

1] ID is “not science”

Leaving aside the fact that that’s not a question, Arrington’s answer
is a marvel of empty fluff with a superficial semblance of substance
that rivals that of Twinkies. It basically boils down to “ID is too
science! Is too, is too!”, but he uses a page of text to say it.

He starts with an
argument from authority
(William Dembski says it, so it must be true), and ends with a list of
features that scientific research has that ID doesn’t.

And in the middle, he whines about how unfair it is that the mean ol’
scientific establishment has excluded supernatural explanations a
priori.

It’s been said before, but it bears repeating: the mean ol’ scientific
establishment did not reject
non-materialistic/non-naturalistic/supernatural/magic explanations a
priori. It rejected them a posteriori. For centuries now,
natural explanations have been pitted against supernatural ones in
explaining various phenomena, from rainfall to the formation of
fossils to embryonic development. And natural explanations have always
won out, in the sense of being more in line with observable reality
and making useful predictions about future observations.

Of the thousands of times they’ve been tried, supernatural
explanations have never worked. From there, it’s a small step to the
conclusion that supernatural explanations don’t work.

And that is why scientists reject explanations that involve magic. Not
because of a hard-headed pre-commitment to naturalism, but simply
because magic never works.

Irreducible Complexity Still Not Disproven… Wait, What?

The story so far:

Back in 1996, when Intelligent Design was in its infancy (and pretty
much indistinguishable from today’s Intelligent Design), Michael Behe
defined an irreducibly complex system as:

composed of several well-matched, interacting parts that
contribute to the basic function, wherein the removal of any one of
the parts causes the system to effectively cease
functioning.

Recently, the Disco Tute
presented the bicycle
as an example of an irreducibly complex system, on the grounds that if
you remove one of the wheels, it doesn’t work anymore.

Carl Zimmer
responded
with a video of someone riding a bicycle with only one wheel. So
presumably bicycles aren’t irreducibly complex after all.

Now DonaldM at Uncommon Blithering
presents
this bizarre counterargument:

if you look closely at the photo you’ll notice it isn’t
just the front wheel that’s missing from this bicycle, but the entire
front wheel assmembly, including the handle bars and wheel
frame.

So, um, I guess the point is that if you remove exactly one part from
an IC system, it doesn’t work, but you can remove a whole bunch of
parts from an IC system, and it still works. Wait, what?

Elsewhere in the same post, Donald asks:

Perhaps the good Dr. Z would be so kind as to provide a
bibliography listing all the peer reviewed scientific research studies
that provide the detailed, testable (and potentially falsifiable)
biological models for any of the IC systems that Mike Behe
described in his ground breaking book Darwin’s Black
Box.

Might I suggest that Donald start with the articles and books about
blood clotting and the human immune system that were literally piled
up in front of Behe on the witness stand at the Dover trial? There’s a
good boy.

I’d like to remind him that “nuh-uh” is not a rebuttal.

Exploiting Personal Tragedy to Advance Ideology

You may have heard of the tragedy of Jesse Kilgore, the college
sophomore who commited suicide after, as
WingNut Daily reported,
reading The God Delusion and having a crisis of faith.

Now, just when you thought the Disco Tute couldn’t sink any lower,
they’ve produced a
melodramatic episode
of their Intelligent Design the Future podcast about this
(the “melo” part is literal: the whole ten-minute episode is
underscored with soft minor-key acoustic guitar and piano music, so
that it sounds like a cross between a eulogy and a soap opera). It
presents the same story that the WND article does: that Kilgore was a
good Christian kid who went off to a secular college, where a
professor either assigned, or challenged him to read The God
Delusion. After Kilgore went out to the woods and committed
suicide, his father found the book under his son’s bed, with a
bookmark on the last page.

The narrative is that Jesse Kilgore killed himself because he read
Dawkins’s book and lost both his faith and his will to live. Yes, it’s
as bad as I make it sound. If you thought the WND article was sleazy,
this is worse.

Now, I don’t know why Jesse Kilgore decided to end his life. No one
life can be summarized in an article and a ten-minute show. I’m sure
there was a lot more to him than we’ve seen. For all I know, he got a
girl pregnant and couldn’t live with that. He didn’t leave a suicide
note, so we’ll probably never know for sure. All we have is
speculation, mostly by grieving friends and relatives.

With that out of the way, the ID the Future show is a treasure trove
of wingnut tropes: we’ve got Good Kid vs. Bad College; Brainwashing
Professor; Reading Opposing Ideas Will Poison You; and many more. For
a group that keeps insisting that they’re not creationists, they seem
to have borrowed an awful lot of ideas from
Big Daddy.

There’s the assertion that Jesse felt alone because he was one of the
only Christians on campus. The school that he was attending,
SUNY Jefferson Community College,
is in northern New York state (unless, of course, both WND and IDtF
got it wrong, which is not something that can be excluded). I can’t
imagine any college campus in North America where most of the
population isn’t Christian.

Then there’s the notion that the nameless biology professor was using
his authority to tell students what to believe. From what little I’ve
seen of religious homeschooling techniques, I suspect that this is
projection: these people teach their kids that “these are the facts,
and they’re true because I said so”, and can’t imagine teachers
leading students to conclusions by showing them the evidence. And in
my experience, the latter is far more common on college campuses than
the former.

PZ Myers put it best (paraphrased from memory): “We don’t teach
students that the sky is blue. We teach them how to go outside and
look up. And yeah, if they come from an environment where they were
told that the sky is green, that’s likely to cause problems.”

And, of course, there’s the elephant in the room: Jesse killed himself
after reading The God Delusion, therefore he did so
because of it. Classic
post hoc ergo propter hoc.

The subtext, of course, is that learning is dangerous. So don’t go
getting any ideas about going to college and exposing yourself to
foreign ideas.

In fact, this theme is repeated several times: Jesse is said to have
been a fervent debater and defender of The Faith; he went to a secular
school because he wanted to challenge himself; everyone was sure he
could withstand anything secular academia could throw at him.
Throughout the piece, foreign ideas are talked about in the same terms
one would describe a disease.

Well, I’m sorry, but if your ideas can’t survive contact with reality,
they’re not worth holding on to. I’d say the lying taint-pustules at
the DI should be ashamed of themselves for promulgating such crap, if
I thought they could feel shame.

Me? Pissed? Oh, just a tad.

(See also
Ed Brayton’s post
at Dispatches from the Culture Wars.)

(Update, Dec. 19, 18:49: Oh, lookee! I beat that hack, O’Leary, to this story.)

Commentary Track for Expelled

Shane Killians has
released
a subtitle track for Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed
that aims to correct a lot of the errors and lies in the movie. So if
someone bought the DVD and wants you to watch it, you can add
subtitles so your
friend/relative/smizmar
can get a real-time rebuttal to the claims presented on screen.

The link above includes instructions for getting the subtitles to
display in some popular media players. In addition, I think MPlayer
should automatically pick up the .srt file (dunno about the
.ssa one).

You’ll also need to buy/rent/rip/bittorrent/teleport a video file of the movie, but you’re on your own for
that.

Unselfconscious Statement O’ the Day

Found at Dembski’s House of Evolution Denialism:

Uncommon Descent has been debunking anthropogenic global warming since the website began 3.5 years ago. We have a keen nose for bogus science here, folks.

Good thing there’s now a Micro Center in town, ‘cos I need a new keyboard.

Caribou Barbie, Flintstones Barbie

K-Lo at NRO
relays
a bit from the Katie Couric/Sarah Palin interview:

Couric: And when it comes to establishing your world view, I was curious, what newspapers and magazines did you regularly read before you were tapped for this to stay informed and to understand the world?

Palin: I've read most of them, again with a great appreciation for the press, for the media.

Couric: What, specifically?

Palin: Um, all of them, any of them that have been in front of me all these years.

Couric: Can you name a few?

Palin: I have a vast variety of sources where we get our news, too. Alaska isn't a foreign country, where it's kind of suggested, "wow, how could you keep in touch with what the rest of Washington, D.C., may be thinking when you live up there in Alaska?" Believe me, Alaska is like a microcosm of America.

I can understand a politician trying to dodge a question like “Did you
have sex with that person?”, “What happened to the missing funds?”,
“What’s your plan for getting us out of this mess?” and the like.

But “Which newspapers were you reading two months ago?”?! FFSMS,
woman, even if you’re a terminally oblivious clothhead who pays no
attention to anything in the news that isn’t about you, you can still
make up something plausible: “Well, I get the Wasilla Journal and
Juneau Times delivered at home [if true; subscription lists can be
checked], but I also subscribe to the NY Times, WaPo, and dozen other
news sources in my RSS reader. And of course I’m always adding Google
News alerts.” See? Simple, plausible, and hard to disprove.

Dinosaurs and humans coexisting
But speaking of newspapers, the LA Times
passes on
the story of a Wasilla resident who asked Palin about her religious
beliefs:

Palin told him that “dinosaurs and humans walked the
Earth at the same time,” Munger said. When he asked her about
prehistoric fossils and tracks dating back millions of years, Palin
said “she had seen pictures of human footprints inside the
tracks,”

It sounds like she’s talking about the
Paluxy River tracks,
about which young-earth creationist organization Answers In Genesis
wrote:

Some prominent creationist promoters of these tracks
have long since withdrawn their support. Some of the allegedly human
tracks may be artifacts of erosion of dinosaur tracks obscuring the
claw marks. There is a need for properly documented research on the
tracks before we would use them to argue the coexistence of humans and
dinosaurs.

Caribou Flintstones Barbie: more ignorant than AiG. That’s impressive.

Front-Loading: I Do Not Think It Means What You Think

One of the ID creationists’ favorite words is “front-loading”. From
context, I gather that it means that the output of an algorithm is
inherent in the algorithm itself. In other words, if you write a
detailed program that calculates the square root of 16, then that’s
just a long-winded way of having it print “4”. You could have saved
yourself a lot of time by just having it print “4” in the first place.

Front-loading comes up in two arguments: 1) evolutionary algorithms do
not demonstrate that evolution works, because the solution is hidden
in the code, and 2) the fact that complex organs exist is evidence of
the unfolding of God’s an unspecified intelligent
designer’s plan; the appearance of limbs and organs in the fossil
record is part of the unfolding of God’s the
designer’s plan and was front-loaded at creation some
unspecified point in the distant past.

Read More