To mark Darwin’s birthday, AM640 radio in Toronto had a quick discussion about evolution and creation between evangelical minister Ray Comfort (the atheists nightmare banana guy) and Scott Campbell, a member of the Centre for Inquiry.
Scott hammered it home, and really showed that Ray has no idea what evolution really is.
Why Ray Was Wrong
Ray constantly tried to tie evolution and “Darwinism” in with atheism, and they really don’t have anything to do with each other.
Thinks evolution produced species to species transitions
Says that evolutionist say that “nothing created everything”, which Scott points out is NOT the scientific position
His example of the heart forming again shows that he doesn’t even understand how evolution works, thinking that blood and the heart and vessels would all form separately, and how could one exist without the other
Ray spent time calling insulting Scott rather than proving his point
Ray said that “atheists don’t want moral accountability to God”, which is a non-sequitur
Why Scott Was Right
Supporting the scientific evidence of evolution is not the same as being an atheist; you CAN be a believer and support evolution
There is a myriad of scientific evidence
The myth of the “gaps”
Multiple transitional fossils
Points out that creationists beleive that the Bible is the word of God and that science HAS TO conform with it - this is really the best point to be made and show why creationists do what they do and don’t do real science
Creationsists use God as the answer to the gaps
When science says “I don’t know”, it’s an apportunity. When creationists say “I don’t know” that means that God did it.
Points out why the argument is bogus about a Ford truck has a creator because it exists so therefor must nature, such as the Watchmaker analogy
Humans have an incapcity to estimate odds, makes a great analogy about playing cards
Long legs and skittish behavior are recently evolved traits that allow fence lizards in the southeastern U.S. to co-exist with lethal and invasive fire ants, according to a new study.
Over the course of about 70 years, these fence lizards evolved to have longer legs to protect themselves from the fire ants, which would attack their under belly. The longer legs allow them to shrug the ants off.
Observable, verified evolution over the course of only 70 years. I thought that God created all creatues as is?
The drama over the potential inclusion of creationism or intelligent design in Texas biology curriculum is over for now as a coalition of six Democrats and two Republicans defeated an amendment that would have maintained discussion of evolution’s “weaknesses.”
Textbook publishers cater to the influential Texas market, so whether or not science books continued to kowtow to creationism is of great interest nationally—changes to Texas’ science curriculum will likely be echoed across the land. The exact issue was whether to re-incorporate the phrase “strengths and weaknesses” into the discussion of evolution in state biology curriculum. The loathsome Discovery Institute had it’s scaly hands all over this fail.
The big deal about referring to “weaknesses” in evolution is that there aren’t any. Creationists are trying to introduce controversy and suggest that gaps in evidence equal flaws in the theory. We’ve seen those gaps steadily filled in as knowledge and technology increase. There’s no reason to think knowledge won’t continue grow, unless of course the Discovery Institute has its way.
This is a vote on the science curriculum, not theology or philosophy. It’s certainly not an issue of free speech; I doubt high school kids have been doing research and uncovered a dramatic flaw that’s being suppressed by wily biology teachers. There are no “sides” to be on; within the realm of science this theory is the accepted one, due to overwhelming evidence, for the diversity of life.
Here are some of the reasons those who understand the process and results of science “believe” in evolution:
Tears of rage will probably run down your face when you watch this creationist liar indoctrinating children to reject evolution. How far from child abuse is it to permanently limit someone’s worldview, or leave them with a lifelong struggle with guilt and anxiety as they attempt to overcome the lies on which they were raised?
In antidote to that, let’s cleanse our palates with Aronra’s 10th Foundational Falsehood of Creationism, in which you will receive a blessedly fact-based account of phylogenetics, “the most compelling and overwhelming evidence of evolution and our place in nature.”
It doesn’t matter if you believe we were descended from the same ancestor as apes, because we were. It’s a concrete truth of biology. We are animals, primates in fact. This body of information is the reason evolution is taught in biology class, and creationism isn’t.
When Phil Plait, the Bad Astronomer, asks for something, you just have to help out. And yesterday the Bad Astronomer asked people who care about science, reason, and defeating creationist attacks on education to blog about the what’s going on in Texas.
The Texas State Board of Education is working on nominations for a six-member panel that will review proposed new science curriculum standards. Half of the nominees are anti-science creationists. Not just any creationists, but among them are the vice-mac daddy of them all: Stephen C. Meyer, VP of the loathsome Discovery Institute, who isn’t even from Texas. Texas Citizens for Science notes that
Texas has hundreds of highly-qualified professional scientists who could have served on the review panel.
These nominations are no coincidence. “Intelligent design advocates on the state board have been maneuvering for months to undermine the teaching of evolution in science classes,” according to the Houston Chronicle. TCS agrees:
It is unfortunate that some SBOE members have such a poor regard for the education of Texas science students that they must resort to pushing their own anti-evolutionist and Creationist religious ideologies into the science standards revision process. What the Texas SBOE is doing perfectly matches what the Kansas SBOE tried to do: force its anti-science ideology onto the students and teachers of our state’s public school system. All Texas citizens who care about education and wish to ensure that their children receive the best science education they can get in a world that requires scientific knowledge and technological skills should be appalled by the reprehensible actions of some of our State Board of Education members.
This one’s for you, Google: the Texas State Board of Education has a creationist agenda.
More odious, perhaps, is that Meyer’s interest in sitting on inter-state science education committees is about more than just pushing the Bible on innocent children. He’s the lead author of Exploring Evolution, a despicable scienceless Trojan horse intended to infiltrate elementary schools and release an attack of nonsense.
Discovery Institute fellows have been attempting to have their arguments against evolution incorporated into the US public school system. EE appears to be part of (that) strategy. In June, Louisiana became the first state to enact a law specifically enabling the use of supplemental materials for the critical evaluation of evolution; similar legislation has been introduced in several other states. EE appears to have been intelligently designed to be the sort of supplemental text that’s appropriate under the Louisiana legislation, and so it’s likely to be making an appearance in classrooms there. But EE may appear in other states, as the approval process for supplementary material is often far less strict than that governing textbooks.
[The above quote was from Ars Technica's excellent and thorough review of Exploring Evolution, "A biologist reviews an evolution textbook from the ID camp". The review explains in depth the core of the creationist argument against Darwin's tree of life, in favour of an orchard (ie the idea that not all life descended from the same source. Man, for instance, was put here by God on the sixth day). Read this if you were hoping Expelled was going to illuminate anything about the intelligent design position.]
So there, Bad Astronomer, another voice is added against the creationist ideologues. What they’re doing is embarrassing and ludicrous. Texas, if you don’t want to be ridiculed as backward hillbillies (or if you don’t want your children to become backward hillbillies), please make a lot of noise about this to your elected officials.
AronRa, a 46-year-old geoscience student and prolific video ranter, has created an excellent series about the “Foundational Falsehoods of Creationism”. He’s been working on these for about a year, and though he has to hang it up for now for an extremely busy semester, the first 13 (yes 13!) installments are fantastic. We look forward to his return and wish him well on exams. Let the debunking begin.
1st Foundational Falsehood of Creationism
My personal rant against one of foremost falsehoods of the creationism movement; the idea that accepting evolution is tantamount to declaring atheism, or that one need be creationist to be Christian.
2nd Foundational Falsehood of Creationism
Exploring the erroneous notion that the holy scriptures were written by God, rather than be subject to the errs of humanity.
Go, North Carolina State Department of Public Instruction, go. The school board of Brunswick County, NC, led by hillbillly Joel Fanti, petitioned the Board to allow creationism to be taught alongside evolution.
“The law says we can’t have Bibles in schools, but we can have evolution, of the atheists.” drawls Fanti.
The Brunswick County school system does offer a “Bible as Literature” course in high school, but that would be super boring, so nobody signed up for it and it was cancelled this year.
BONUS:Interactive map from Scientific American on state-by-state creationism controversies.
In his haste to secure the hockey mom slash feminist slash blue collar vote, John McCain seems to have picked himself a bonafide crackpot zealot. Salon reports today that the people who know Sarah Palin from back home are a lee-tle terrified of this religious “fundamentalist” potentially coming to power. They’d just like you to know that they know, because they know her, that Palin actually:
hoped to ban the Rev. Howard Bess’ book, Pastor, I Am Gay, because it portrayed homosexuals in a positive light
protested outside Dr. Susan Lemagie’s office in an effort to stop her from providing abortions
cites images of dinosaur fossils with embedded human footprints (does anyone have pictures of these?) as evidence that humans and dinosaurs coexisted, and that the earth is 7000 years old
believes Jesus will come back to earth in our lifetime.
Rev. Bess thinks the complexity and nuance of running a country is above the head of someone so attached to dogma and righteous conviction. “Like all religious fundamentalists — Christian, Jewish, Muslim — she is a dualist. They view life as an ongoing struggle to the finish between good and evil. Their mind-set is that you do not do business with evil — you destroy it.”
I hope the Expelled film crew can cobble together a reunion to cover the rest of this lawsuit…this is a textbook case of textbooks needing to contain facts in order for academia to accept their merit. Freaking kudos to the wise folks at UC for denying “credit to courses that rely largely or entirely on material stressing supernatural over historic or scientific explanations”. In accord with their mission to ‘transmit advanced knowledge’, they rightly reject people who’s educational foundation relies on texts that begin with such scary statements as “if (scientific) conclusions contradict the Word of God, the conclusions are wrong.”
The arrangement & rearrangement of this little sucker’s eyeballs have long been a straw at which creationists grasped, evidencing God or some other intelligence intentionally creating new forms. As usual, the gaps in the record are filled with diligent research, and we see that the form evolved naturally. As predicted.
The thing with the pursuit of truth is that it takes time. You have some info, you look for more, you put it all together. Religion provides instant answers (because they’re, you know, fabricated) and expects the same speed from science. It takes longer than that to find, analyze, and prove facts. I for one am very pleased to meet Mr. Transitional Flatfish.
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