As you all know, 2009 is the 150th aniversary of Darwin’s Origin. And our favourite popularizer of piglet rape is working to counter the inevitable evilutionist push.
No surprises here.
What does surprise me is that Ken Ham thinks that natural selection is not evolution.
What does that whackaloon think is?
Yesterday I wrote a bit about the 9/11 Truth movement, and how its been shown to basically be quackery. But today I want to issue a bit more of a warning, one that extends beyone 9/11 conspiracies and covers all types of non-scientific fields.
And that warning is that believing in this stuff is dangerous. It is dangerous to your wallet, it is dangerous to your intelligence, it is dangerous to your friends and family, and it is most of all dangerous to society.
Continue reading The Danger of Conspiracies and Pseudo-Science
We were all annoyed at Expelled. Mark Mathis, producer, lied to get interviews, they mispreresented themselves, and overall played dirty.
We all want to see Religulous. Bill Maher looks scathing and hilarious.
However, it seems Maher has more in common with Mathis then we might like to admit.
I have always known American conservative right-wing journals existed. I also always new they were biased. But I had never even imagined that something like American Daily existed.
I should also say that I am fairly certain this is not a parody site.
As you can see from the screenshot they feature a lot of crazy right away. You have a bunch of alternative medicine ads and links (they don’t limit their customers to the hippy-left), some global warming denialism links, an ad for a gun rights conference, Ronald Regan quotes, a made up fact about a supposed on-coming ice age, and fear-mongering about Islam. And we haven’t even gotten to the article yet.
The article that brought me to this site (through search engines) is entitled “Sneaking Intelligent Design into Schools,” and I’m not sure whether they mean that’s what they’re doing, and they’re proud of it, or if it’s just catchy sounding to them.
Bobby Jindal, who may well be the next Ronald Reagan, has cruised through the Louisiana Legislature a new law which will allow schools in Louisiana to use the best materials available in teaching children about such hot topics for Leftists as Darwinian evolution and global warming. The ACLU and other predictable enemies of religion have already begun hissing at the new statute, warning that any attempt to introduce – gasp! – the Bible into public education will be met with a legal blitzkrieg.
That’s just the first paragraph. I don’t think I can actually stomach deconstructing the entire article, or even this paragraph.
I will talk a little about Bobby Jindal though. Jindal got an Bachelor’s in honours biology and public policy before getting a masters in political science. He is the youngest current govenor, and governs Louisiana. He is also the first (East) Indian governor. There was speculation for a time that Jindal may become the running mate to John McCain for the Republican presidential nomination, but that has since passed.
The good things about Jindal:
The not-so-good things about Jindal (from a left-leaning view):
Perhaps he is the next Ronald Regan, or worse.
If you’ve noticed my tone for Perry Marshall’s emails they’ve gone from neutral (I hope) to outright frustrated. (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4)
However, in this last email (titleless) he finally credits most of his ideas with the [fill-in your own anti-creationist adjective here], Hugh Ross. Ross is (shamefully) a Canadian-born Old Earth Creationist and astronomer who started “Reasons to Believe.”
Marshall talks about how he listened to a talk from Ross from 1994 and was inspired. After that he advertises listening to Ross (or himself, I’m not clear) speak further on the topic (since the complete idea wasn’t given away in five emails). He then claims that it’s amazing that Ross’ “theory” (I’m not sure of what, that God exists and evolution is a damning lie?) is still “New Scientific Evidence” even though it’s “11 years old” (I guess Marshall hasn’t updated his email in a while). Well I got news for you Perry, quantum mechanics and general relativity are still relatively “new” sciences. If you want “old” science you have to look at Newton’s laws of motion, or Boyle’s Law.
I’ll leave Marhsall and his “proofs” with this quote from the end of his last email:
One of the hallmarks of a successful scientific model is that it holds up for years and even decades, even while scholars debate it. I’ve been following Dr. Ross and his work, and virtually every fact he discusses here has been further strengthened and validated by all the physics and astronomy discoveries in the years since.
Two installments left to go, this time we meet the bold title: “If you can read this sentence, I can prove to you that God exists.” (Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3)
This time Marshall goes for the information argument. He starts off by talking about how the email he sent is information and contains a message, and then gets to the crux of his argument:
Messages, languages, and coded information ONLY come from a mind. A mind that agrees on an alphabet and a meaning of words and sentences. A mind that expresses both desire and intent.
He then blathers on and shows his cards as an Old-Earth Creationist. Big Bang theory is okay for him, but this evolution thing is just too hard to grasp. I’m not going to do him the credit by quoting him any more on this post (I’ll make all the emails available).
His entire insistence through this email is that “information” cannot come about naturally.
Guess what Perry? It can.
After that Marshall plugs his website a bunch (I won’t, go back to Part 1 if you want to find a link), and some audio lectures he’s done on this tripe.
I am not giving this topic any more of my time since I already have discussed methods for the creation of information. If requested I will articulate them out in a future post however.
We return to the “proof” of god by Perry Marshall to an email etitled “Why the Big Bang was the most precisely planned event in all of history.” (Part 1 and Part 2)
Now we get interesting. In this installment, Marshall pushes the fine-tuning ideas, saying:
If the universe had expanded a little faster, the matter would have sprayed out into space like fine mist from a water bottle – so fast that a gazillion particles of dust would speed into infinity and never even form a single star.
If the universe had expanded just a little slower, the material would have dribbled out like big drops of water, then collapsed back where it came from by the force of gravity.
A little too fast, and you get a meaningless spray of fine dust. A little too slow, and the whole
universe collapses back into one big black hole.The surprising thing is just how narrow the difference is. To strike the perfect balance between too fast and too slow, the force, something that physicists call “the Dark Energy Term” had to be accurate to one part in ten with 120 zeros.
Yesterday, I began a review of Perry Marshall’s Cosmic Fingerprints emails. Today I look at part 2: “Bird Droppings on my Telescope.”
In this email, Marshall defends Big Bang Cosmology (which is nice, compared to some YECs). He starts with the story of the discovery of the cosmic microwave background, one of the greatest discoveries of the past century.
Unfortunately, Marshall continues speaking. He grabs a couple interviews with Robert Wilson (co-discoverer of the CMB):
Robert Wilson was asked by journalist Fred Heeren if the Big Bang indicated a creator.
Wilson said, “Certainly there was something that set it all off. Certainly, if you are religious, I can’t think of a better theory of the origin of the universe to match with Genesis.”
Which is likely the good PR thing to say when cornered by an interviewer. Scientists are known for being a bit sheepish with discussing religion, mainly since people who grant funding might look less favourably on someone who actively attacked the religious (especially forty years ago).
Almost a month ago now I signed up to receive a set of emails from Perry Marshall entitled “cosmic fingerprints.” These emails promised to prove god’s existence. Unfortunately, they failed.
The first email was entitled “Einstein’s Big Blunder.” Not exactly a sellar of a title to me – there’s enough relativity denialists out there already. But this isn’t what the email was about. This one is more about using big bang cosmology to set up for the First Cause argument.
He begins by screwing up basic history:
100 years ago, Albert Einstein published three papers that rocked the world. These papers proved the existence of the atom, introduced the theory of relativity, and described quantum mechanics.
One for three. First, the papers demonstrated the photoelectric effect (and that therefore light was a particle or photon), special relativity (general relativity was described later) and Brownian motion (that matter was made up of subatomic particles, the atom was first postulated by the Greeks and discovered by Rutherford and a combination of people described quantum mechanics, namely Bohr, Heisenberg and Shrodinger).
A rocky start, but Marshall continues:
His equations for relativity indicated that the universe was expanding. This bothered him, because if it was expanding, it must have had a beginning and a beginner. Since neither of these appealed to him, Einstein introduced a ‘fudge factor’ that ensured a ‘steady state’ universe, one that had no beginning or end. [emphasis added]
Some theists argue that big-G God used DNA as a programming language to code life. And since (some of the creationists go here) information cannot be created naturally and spontaneously (it can), God must have programmed all life in its near current form.
So my question is, if God is the “ultimate” programmer of everything, how come he didn’t leave comments in his code (I’m talking about in DNA itself, or at least biblical explanations as to what certain genes are)? How come he made lots of useless code? Is He so pissed at us as to want to prevent us from accessing our own programming? Are we not “allowed” to “play god”?
That was just a quick thought though.