A reader sent in a link to this video. It’s our old friends Ray Comfort and Kirk Cameron, the creationists that have names sounding suspiciously like adult entertainers. I’ve mentioned them before as making on the worst evolution videos I’ve ever seen. This clip’s much shorter, though just as bad.

While I do find them extremely funny, deep down they really sadden me. This level of scholarship aint what we’re called to as Christians. Any person on the street can say, “Ok Ray, what about the pineapple or coconut? Where’s their pull tab?” And they know this. It’s all a game of showmanship. They’re not concerned with actually making good arguments. At the end of the day, they’re concerned with making arguments they know will go over with their audience.

They also fail to understand the most basic aspects of science, namely that it does not attempt to proclaim the underlying meaning of everything. While one could try to explain that to them, I fear it would be every creationist’s worst nightmare.

… as the famous line from Monty Python goes.

Though I’ve recently felt close. I survived a test on Monday, with another one this afternoon.

In addition, tonight I start a 5 week series in the university class at church on the evolution / religion issue, and I’ve been spending a lot of time getting that prepared.

Here’s how the schedule looks to be shaping up.

• Week 1 — What is Science (briefly), natural selection, sexual selection.
• Week 2 — Large scale evolutionary change, the fossil record, genetics, biogeography, human evolution.
• Week 3 — early Genesis, nature of science, nature of religion, history of the church’s response to the theory of evolution.
• Week 4 — Christian frameworks for interfacing with science and religion — youth earth creationists, old earth creationists, intelligent design creationists, and evolutionary creationists.
• Week 5 — discussion. You can bet I’ll come prepared with plenty of open-ended questions in case the audience needs some prompting.

Not to leave you without something to look at though, I’ve put up some pictures of an outing a couple of weeks ago to a local ranch, where my university’s biology department hosts an annual Bioblitz, identifying every species regardless of taxa they possibly can.

I managed to get one picture in particular that I just really like.

Another highlight of the weekend was this Hoary Bat, a species I had previously only seen in pictures. They are arguably the most beautiful of bats found in the U.S.

More from me if I survive today.

Newsweek carried a depressing article this morning. It seem that if parents are tired of God’s little angels, they can send them off to creation camp for the summer. And naturally for those so inclined, there’s an atheist camp for the little tikes too.

Now I know this shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise to me. I imagine there’s a summer camp for just about every demographic imaginable, including vegan black angus cattle ranching children. But it’s downright depressing and for a couple of reasons.

First, it just deepens the divide that much further. Apparently before the kids are even ready to fight about it, there parents are stirring the pot. I understand (and strongly support) teaching your kids values as they grow up. But creation camp? Why don’t we just start making the villains in two year old’s stories field biologists.

Secondly, if you’re indoctrinating your kid in this way from a young age, it’s going to be a very painful process for both you and them when they start asking questions. For example, one of the organizations mentioned in the article also offers a dinosaur dig.

Experience a paleontology dig in a protected setting. You’ll participate in uncovering several dinosaur skeletons. Along with working in the hands–on dig, you’ll learn about flood geology, the Biotic Message Theory, and visit local natural wonders!

Ah, a protected setting! Thank God. Those paleontologists are terrifying people.

Let me suggest something to these parents. If they think exposing their children to dinosaurs is going to convince them that we live in a world 6,000 years old, they may not have thought this out to its logical conclusion. These camps set the stage for a very painful process for any kid smart enough to read a few books and ask a few questions.

This is pain and misery — both for the kid and the family — that’s unnecessary.

And finally, I have one other objection to Christian summer camps. I think that many times, they take the euphoria that comes with sleep deprivation and turn it into the power of God. It’s a tough call. I’m not against having a bunch of Christian kids get together for a fun experience. But God does not exist (nor work most powerfully) only on summer vacations. And I think kids would do quite well to learn this message, starting from their parents.

The big news today is that Kent Hovind, one of the most prominent young earth creationists, has been arrested on 58 federal counts, including evasion of taxes and making threats against investigators. He also allegedly payed his employees with cash while calling them “missionaries” to avoid taxes, and made repeated withdrawls under the $10,000 limit to avoid reporting the transactions. His wife was arrested too, with 44 charges filed against her. The Pensacola News Journal provides the details.

Hovind represents the absolute worst of Christian objectors to evolutionary theory. Long before the federal charges came, even before the state closed down his Dinosaur Adventure Land for lack of a building permit, he’s been lying his way through every argument he makes.

While the pessimist in me doubts it, I really wish this would serve for a wake up call to the many Christians who will accept arguments they want to hear, and ignore the reliability or integrity of the source.

My wife’s searching for a job right now as a teacher. She came across a position at a private school1 which said they used the A BEKA curriculum. Having never heard of this before, she googled it to quickly find the answer. She realized this might not be the job for her though, when she saw their biology textbook.

The title is Biology God’s Living Creation. Okay, I theologically agree with that statement, though it’s unsuitable as the title of a public school textbook. But once we read what the book’s about, things get a little weird. It seems the book teaches biology, without biology’s most important theory.

If you’re going to read the blurb about the book, you probably need an interpreter to understand what it all means. Someone versed in science and Christian lines of thought. Fortunately, I am just such a man.

So here’s the information on the book, with nice footnotes to explain what it all means.

Biology God’s Living Creation

Thoroughly Christian in perspective and tone.2
Truly nonevolutionary in philosophy, spirit, and sequence of study.3

Pedagogically superior for tenth through twelfth grade students
Begins with the familiar, tangible4 things of nature. Ties abstract concepts5 to concrete examples6.

Thoughtfully designed7 to aid student learning and teacher preparation
* Lists key concepts at the head of each chapter.8
* Includes study objectives for each chapter section to involve students as active learners and help them prepare for class.
* Includes a set of TransVision® overlays of the human body to show at a glance the anatomical relationships of the body’s systems.9

Scholarly10, accurate, and up-to-date11 in content and organization12
Reflects the latest advances in man’s understanding13 of living things without neglecting a foundation in the basics.14

Support Materials
* Teacher Guide #55255 (includes curriculum15)
* Teaching Transparencies (50/set) #64157
* Field and Laboratory Manual16 #59811
* Teacher Edition, Field and Laboratory Manual #59838
* Video Lab17 Demonstrations (24 labs, 545 minutes) #64203
* Student Test Book #55263
* Teacher Key #55271
* Student Quiz Book #55298
* Teacher Key #55301
* Science in Action18 #58769

On a post about dinosaur and human footprints occuring together, someone named Ray stopped by and left what may be the first true creationist comment I’ve seen on my blog. It’s worth reading what he wrote and reflecting on it.

Interesting discussion. The photographic evidence published on the web of various sites around the world of dino and human prints apparently together are of varying quality, though some are pretty startling. If that’s all they had it would not be so much, but I’ve seen a lot on ancient dino paintings on cave and rock walls - some in North America, ancient dino ceramic and terra cotta sculptures from Aztec and Mayan age cultures, and ancient Peruvian textiles with dinos embroidered on them. Plus the point that the word ‘dinosaur’ was not coined until 1841 when they started digging them up as fossils - before then they were usually called dragons. On the historical face of it, it is true that there are dragons in the histories of every culture, so it is hard to say they were merely mythical, though sometimes they exaggerate, like saying they could talk. Most of the accounts are presented as soberly recorded events. Chinese dragons, your English knight rides out on his horse to fight the dragon, Spanish dragons, the Vikings fought dragons, they are in the Greek and Roman histories. So, purportedly, commonly known until modern times. They say the body style of a dragon is the long neck, long tail, big bulbous body - it’s a stylized dinosaur. One site, genesispark.org has a lot of photos of dinos on ancient art, pottery, engravings and textiles.

Now I don’t want to be mean here to Ray. After all, he civilly left his comment, and I appreciate that. But he’s walking out on a limb that can’t support his weight. The idea that humans and dinosaurs co-existed, and that evidence of this exists in the form of human/dinosaur footprints, is a completely unsubstantiated claim. One can read all about it from people who’ve poured in time to carefully examine these claims. It’s easy enough to read material on both sides of the “debate” and see where the consensus lies, if one is truly interested. There’s no conspiracy, no scientists trying to surpress evidence. The consensus among mainstream scientists (and by all means, one can be liberal with the term mainstream) is universal. There isn’t a shred of evidence that dinosaurs and humans coexisted.

As for the idea that all cultures having dragons provides solid evidence for the existance of dragons, by that line of reasoning ghosts must exist too. All cultures report them after all.

Mermaids are also a near certainty with their near universal origins amoung many different cultures.

Chupacabras become a very interesting case. While the whole story can be traced back to Puerto Rica circa 1992, as some have noted gargoyles of medeval Europe also look like Chupacabras, so they must have been around much earlier.

We might even have to rethink Leprechaun’s.

Ray’s standard of proving that dinosaurs and humans coexisted — namely drawing weak inferences from the mythology of past cultures — is simply not the way science works.

As for the site Ray pointed to, I don’t know whether to laugh at the claims it makes or feel sorry if one truly hinges their faith on this kind of material. I would encourage Ray to simply strive for the truth. Read everything he can find, look into people’s credentials, and weigh the support on both sides when something is in dispute.

This goes not only for dinosaur / human footprints, but more importantly and more broadly for science in general. When people claim that evolution is a theory with weak support in the scientific community, go see what scientists think. When someone claims alternative theories for the time and way that people first entered North America, go see what the debate is all about. (Here you’ll find a that there is not universal agreement and that new theories and new evidence are being evaluated. It’s a perfect example of science in action).

If we recognize all truth as God’s truth, we don’t need to jump through endless hoops on fire to try and claim with a straight face that the dinosaurs and humans walked the earth together. Rather we can appreciate the efforts that anyone makes, theist or not, to contribute to our knowledge of the world around us.

Someone stopped by and left a comment on a post I wrote about creationist Ken Ham. Since I’m going to write a response, I thought giving it some visibility would be nice rather than replying in the comments and having no one see it.

One thing that caught my interest in this post was your mention of the claims that are made by the young earth creationists of human and dinosaur footprints appearing together. If this was found and verified in the fossil record, would that have any influence on your beliefs?

OK, about Ken Ham, I’m not a huge Ken Ham fan, but I hear him occasionally on the radio when I’m driving. I have developed a certain amount of respect for him as a Christian who is fighting for what he thinks is right against a huge amount of criticism. I would truly be suprised if he was doing this just for the money as you are alluding to. I do not believe that he is intentionally deceiving people. You may think he is ignorant and clueless, but do you really think he’s a con artisit? OK, just had to get that off my chest.

I’ll reply below the fold. Read the rest of this entry »

A reader sent a link to just the kind of story that’s good for a few laughs.

[Robert] Sungenis is a geocentrist. He contends the sun orbits the Earth instead of vice versa. He says physics and the Bible show that the vastness of space revolves around us; that we’re at the center of everything, on a planet that does not rotate.

He has just completed a 1,000-page tome, “Galileo Was Wrong,” which he hopes will persuade readers to “give Scripture its due place, and show that science is not all it’s cracked up to be.”

1,000 pages? I don’t know if any astronomers will be rushing to read the book and refute it.

I think the story is noteworthy for its parallels to the antievolution movement of creationists (including intelligent design creationists).

1) In his mind, his theory cannot be “disproved”. He offered a $1,000 dollar prize for anyone that proves the earth is not at the center of the universe. Because our understanding of the earth’s position is based on theories which best explain the known data, he simply refuses to accept the most logical conclusions on the earth’s position. The same is true of evolution and a vast array of other scientific theories. They explain the data better than anything else, and they’ve been put to the test many times.

2) Scientists completely rejected Mr. Sungenis’s conclusions. In fact, those mean spirited arrogant scientists don’t even want to talk about it!

“What works? Science works. Geocentrism doesn’t. End of story,” [physicist Lawrence] Krauss said. “I’ve learned over time that it’s hard to convince people who believe otherwise, independent of evidence.”

Like the antievolution movement, all it would take is a large group of angry Christians who insist that heliocentrism just can’t be true. The physicist above then becomes arrogant for his refusal to discuss the evidence. Christians could call it heliocentric dogma and sneer their lip when they say the phrase.

3) Like the antievolution movement, he comes up with good analogies that substitute for science. Here’s my favorite.

You want to travel from Washington, D.C., to San Francisco. If the Earth is turning, why not just hover in a helicopter? Wait a few hours above the East Coast and eventually the West Coast will be underneath you.

The article quotes a scientist who mentions why this analogy is completely wrong, but for a person that wants geocentrism to be true, I’m sure analogies like these are all that’s needed.

4) Most tellingly of all is the revelation of what motivates Robert Sungenis to make his claims about the earth against the prevailing scientific view.

If you see the Earth as just a humdrum planet among stars circling in a vast universe, then we’re not significant, we’re just part of a crowd,” Sungenis said. “But if you believe everything revolves around Earth, it gives another picture — of purpose, a meaning of life.

His words could just have easily come from the antievolution movement. They’re virtually identical. An assertion that a scientific theory strips humans of dignity and meaning. Three hundred years ago, the church put to rest its objections to heliocentricism. I wonder if it will take us another 150 years to stop fighting evolution. Perhaps some never will.

At the end of the day though, despite all the protests to the contrary, objections to either of these theories (heliocentricism and evolution) do not come from looking at the evidence and seeking a better way to explain what we see. They come from those on the fringe of science who believe that a theory must be discarded because it does not fit with their religious understandings of the world.

I came across a video of Kirk Cameron (yes, that Kirk Cameron) and Ray Comfort. Together, they produce videos and run a distasteful evangelical website called The Way of the Master, which sounds suspicously like a bad Kung Fu movie.

Now I’m not trying to succumb to hyperbole, but the video just might be the worst video on evolution I’ve ever seen. It is both humerously bad, but more than that, it’s deceitful, filled with outright lies.

Their idea of showing evolution to be a weak and unfounded theory is to go out and interview people on the street who support the theory, but aren’t educated in it. They splice up the clips to make people look their dumbest and with a straight face present these people as representative of anyone who would accept evolution. As Ed Brayton puts it,

This is a bit like going to an art school and asking them how the internal combustion engine works, edit it down to all the responses where people say things about it based on ignorance, and then saying, “See, it should be obvious that the internal combustion engine is impossible.”

The video only gets worse when they attempt to prove that humans couldn’t have evolved from apes by taking an orangutang to a restaurant and showing that he can’t order off a menu or behave logically. Then they call airlines to see if they can buy a ticket for the ape, and triumphantly declare evolution as impossible when the airlines refuse to sell them a ticket.

But my blood boils when they start telling 100%, verifiable, absolute lies.

Lucy? They tell us that all experts agree she was a 3 foot chimpanzee. An absolute lie. If by expert they mean anthropoligists who study these things, then they can’t find a single person who believes this, much less the entire field of anthropology.

Neanderthals? A old man with arthritis. A complete fallacy.

They quoted Sir Arthur Keith, a British anthropologist as saying in a forward to the 100th anniversary of On the Origin of Species:

Evolution is unproved and unprovable. We believe it only because the only alternative is special creation which is unthinkable.

The whole thing’s a lie, a quote the man never said. He died four years prior to the 100 year anniversary of The Origin.

Perhaps I am dangerously naive and idealistic. I could have sworn that Christians were supposed to be people who actually cared about the truth. If these people need to make a video that advocates for a literal reading of Genesis, a young earth, etc, then they should do it honestly. They should honestly say that they believe in a literal reading of Genesis as a matter of faith.

The logical consequence of that of course is saying that our evidence for an old universe, old earth, and evolution are not trustworthy — that the evidence itself is something built into the fabric of life giving the appearance as something it’s not. I would clearly disagree with that position and speak out against it, but at the very least it is an honest proclamation of their faith.

As is it now, these people are contemptible. There’s no dancing around what they’ve done. When 30 seconds of googling can demonstrate that they’re lying, they have not put forth even the most basic of efforts to care about the truth.

In the video, they ask people if they’ve ever broken any of the 10 commandments. It’s their beautiful way of telling people they deserve death and should burn in hell, unless of course they renounce evolution and come to know Jesus Christ as Kirk and Ray assuredly sell him.

For people who like using the Bible as their code of ethics, they should know precisely what the Christian position on lying is.

Don’t do it.

(and a hattip is due Ed Brayton, from whom I found the video)

Here’s a great story I didn’t have time to blog about when it broke earlier this month. One of the more famous and notorious of the young earth creationists is back in trouble with the law. Kent Hovind’s theme park, Dinosaur Adventure Land, “Where Dinosaurs and the Bible Meet,” is in danger of being torn down by the state.

Hovind is screaming religious persecution, as he did when he refused to pay taxes and the IRS raided his house. (You see, taxes aren’t a part of his religious beliefs).

The new flap over his theme park is occuring because no one obtained a building permit from the county.

Members of Hovind’s organization found county officials quite unsympathetic to their plight. County Commisioner Mike Whitehead has the quote of the day:

Scripture also says ‘Render unto Caesar what Caesar demands.’ And right now, Caesar demands a building permit.