Michael Behe's illogical arguments for intelligent [sick] design theory are such an embarrassment that Lehigh University has placed a disclaimer on their Department of Biological Sciences website:
"The sole dissenter from this position, Prof. Michael Behe, is a well-known proponent of "intelligent design." While we respect Prof. Behe's right to express his views, they are his alone and are in no way endorsed by the department. It is our collective position that intelligent design has no basis in science, has not been tested experimentally, and should not be regarded as scientific."
One can only imagine that if Behe had not already had tenure when he began publishing religious pseudoscience, then the university would have sent him packing to knock on the doors of that infamous junk tank, the misnamed Discovery Institute.
In The New Republic, Professor Jerry Coyne has published a good critique of Behe's retreat from disproven "irreducible complexity" into attributing mutations to God's intervention. The Edge of Evolution: The Search for the Limits of Darwinism is Behe's feeble attempt to conjure up creationist pseudoscience for credulous dummies.
Behe Retreats
Myths Revered and Myths Exposed
Two very different museum exhibits have hit the news recently (5/26/07).First the bad news: "Creation Museum juxtaposes dinosaurs, Noah's Ark"
This monument to stupidity in Petersburg, Kentucky was erected under the direction of Ken Ham. He's the expatriate Queenslander who founded the oxymoronically-titled Answers in Genesis ministry. Ham's "non-profit" organization came up with $27 million to build a 60,000-square-foot museum devoted to biblical literacy and creation mythology.
Says Ham, "The Bible doesn't talk about fossils, but it gives you a basis for understanding why there are fossils around the world."Understanding? Ham is not interested in understanding, Ham is interested in promoting nonsensical insistence that Genesis is not allegorical. Of course the Bible doesn't mention fossils – the ancient tribesmen of Israel who invented the Genesis-creation-myth knew nothing of fossils.
"Christians across this nation see this place as a rallying point," Ham said. They "recognize that we live in a culture that no longer believes the Bible is true."
Misleading! Only some Christians are so deluded that they believe that the Bible is literal, though I suppose that religious dogmatists are spread across America. The museum is actually a rallying point only for those Christians who are so ignorant as to insist upon Special Creation. The only good news is Ham's admission that most of the "culture" no longer takes the Bible literally.
Ham said the museum received three gifts topping $1 million, which only goes to demonstrate that the deluded may become rich. On the other hand, perhaps chimpanzees have funded this inanity in order to divorce themselves from the deluded amongst their cousins.
Ham has filled the museum not with dioramas but with lie-oramas, displays that lie about paleontology. The dinosaurs disappeared some 65 million years ago, when the only evidence of mammalian ancestors comprised tiny insectivores. Hominids did not evolve until the Miocene.
Why dinosaurs in such an exhibit? Children love dinosaurs, and if you wish to inculcate creation myths into another generation you must con the kiddies.
To demonstrate that two can play at the game of deceptive imagery, I have created the Ham-headed-dinosaur to illustrate "Different Views of Dinosaurs".
Some good news is that Ham's lie-oramas have excited well-deserved criticism and that protests are planned.
The other exhibit deals with the phenomenon of myth building in a realistic way:
Dragons and other mythic creatures featured in NYC museum exhibit
"What's going on? Has one of the pre-eminent science museums in the world made a find that would show these creatures are real? No, no, the exhibit actually looks at how people have come up with all kinds of myths and stories to account for things they didn't understand.
The exhibit shows how cultures around the world came up with such strange, mysterious creatures. Dragons, for instance, can be found both in the East and West, although they're considerably more benevolent in Chinese culture than they are in Europe. "
That's more like it – display that consititutes an acknowledment that ignorance promoted fantasy.
More mutterings about the stupidity that is creationism:
ɷ Creationism only flourishes amidst Ignorance
ɷ un-designed intelligences
ɷ Judge Jones Rules
ɷ The Wedge Document
Un-Designed Intelligences
In my opinion, the concept quoted below warrants lower case and reaction to the concept ought to evoke UPPER case refutations.
"Objectivity results from the use of the scientific method without philosophic or religious assumptions in seeking answers to the question: Where do we come from?"
So far, so good. This is the whole point of scientific investigation as embodied in numerous branches of empirical and experimental investigation. The trouble is that the writer is not really interested in learning where we come from, rather he or she is interested only in promulgating an older-than- two-thousand-years creation myth.
Of course, the above quote would not have evoked mimbling if subsequent statements were not contradictory:
"We promote the scientific evidence of 'intelligent [sick] design' because proper consideration of that evidence is necessary to achieve not only scientific objectivity but also constitutional neutrality."
There is no scientific evidence that points directly and incontrovertibly to the operation of an "intelligence" behind the evolution of biological complexity. Creationists choose to interpret the physical evidence as sign of the operation of a deity, just as the creators of other creation myths have done.
However, mainstream science involves not merely collection of data, it also demands that acceptable inferences be made from the data toward expert-scrutinized scientific hypotheses, theories, and laws that reasonably explain physical mechanisms. Most creationists appear to be ignorant of the content and the process of science. Merely discussing science, as I am here, does not constitute science.
Science, by definition, can only investigate the physical, and scientists can only speculate about the natural world in light of physical principles. The purpose of science is the elucidation of mechanisms that operate in the physical world, so legitimate science speculates neither on the supernatural nor on the existence or nonexistence of purported deities.
This said, unbiased, scientific understanding objectively points away from the existence of a supernatural intelligent designer toward mechanisms that select blindly for inherently successful mechanisms. If this were not the case, Christian literalists would not attack scientific understanding of the origins of life and the evolution of biological complexity, instead they would espouse mainstream science.
Further, "neutrality" behooves a lack of bias, a lack of ulterior motive or hidden agenda. No matter what their duplicitious protestations may be, those who promote the concept of "intelligent" design do have an agenda that is unrelated to scientific objectivity – they wish to promote creationism and their right-wing social agenda by pushing thinly disguised religion into the science classroom. It is a credit to many American parents, educators, and judges that the invidious inroads of ‘intelligent [sick] design' propagandists are being overthrown.
It has been my unhappy observation that few people know more than a smattering of scientific facts and even fewer understand scientific principles. However, many reasonable thinking Christians are not so closed-minded as to deny the expertise of scientists in order to protect their emotional need for a belief in a deity. Recognition of biological evolution does not preclude personal religious belief. Religionists, however, exhibit not only different sectarian beliefs they also exhibit different degrees of obtuseness.
Agnostic vs Atheist
"It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone to believe anything upon insufficient evidence”
~ W. K. Clifford (1879)
Those of religious bent and the fantasy prone choose to believe what they choose to believe. Such individuals seem to select whatever opinion provides most emotional appeal without regard to logic or empirical evidence.
Religious types come in various levels of dogmatism and subscribe to different human-invented creeds. Most are theists, whereas others believe in equally nutty nonsense like the so-called "Science of Mind" that has zip to do with science.
Creationists of various ilks deny our close relationship (more than 98% shared DNA) with the chimpanzee in order to protect their illusion of Special Creation.
Technically, an agnostic holds that the existence or nonexistence of a supernatural deity is unknowable. While this is philosophically rigorous, what is the point of copping out by leaving room for the indeterminable supernatural?
As soon as a supposed supernatural entity has interacted with the physical, then that purported supernatural agent has entered the realm of the physical and has abandoned supernatural status. Those religions that include creation myths necessarily make a claim that the formerly-supernatural has interfered with the physical. This creation-interaction must, by definition, reduce, or elevate, the supernatural to the physical. Goodbye special supernatural status.
Agnosticism can take the position that the possibility that whatever claimed teapot or deity actually exists is vanishingly small, but agnosticism allows some wiggle room for the vanishingly remote possibility that any particular candidate-claim has validity.
Whereas agnosticism carefully perches on the fence, atheism expresses more certainty than to say, "we just can't know". The small "a" atheist simply says, "I don't believe that God exists", wheras a capital "A" Atheist is certain that, "God does not exist." Philosophical purism aside, all the evidence indicates that the God of the Bible does not exist.
Christians, my prime targets in this expose-stupidity campaign, hold that their supposed Creator did indeed interfere in the physical up until 2,000 years ago, since which time God appears to have understandably grown bored with Christians. Of course, Christians keep this conditionally-loving God on hand for their supposed afterlife, aka death.
Bertrand Russell was a famous debunker of religious nonsense and said in Is There a God?, “If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes. But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is an intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense. If, however, the existence of such a teapot were affirmed in ancient books, taught as the sacred truth every Sunday, and instilled into the minds of children at school, hesitation to believe in its existence would become a mark of eccentricity and entitle the doubter to the attentions of the psychiatrist in an enlightened age or of the Inquisitor in an earlier time.”
Russell, as ever, makes a good point. Any fantasist can concoct any fanciful story, padded with a layer of non-falsifiable protection, and can insist that the story is accurate by virtue of the glitch that it cannot be disproven. Such a claim, of course, commits the logical error of argumentum ad ignorantiam. If the claim was first made in antiquity, it is imbued with an undeserved veneer of credibility.
The invention of supposed prophecies did not, of course, end with Jesus. Supposed prophets have been popping up with dismaying regularity since Jesus' preachings.
The problem for creationists, particularly for YECs, is that Genesis does make falsifiable physical claims that do stand disproven by science. Somewhere along the way, some creationist has comprehended enough science to realize this major problem and the era of Misleading Pseudoscience for Dummies was ushered in. The fact is, creationists promulgate ignorance and falsehoods in support of what they mistakenly call "Truth". YECs lie about the actual age of the Earth, while believers in pseudointellectual intelligent [sick] design theory accept the actual age of the Earth, but lie about the identity of the supposed-designer, and distort science ranging from cosmology to evolutionary biology.
Considering the ubiquity of invented religions, evolution clearly has not expanded our intellectual capacities to a sufficient degree for humans to justifiably designate our species as "sapiens".
YEC Yack
Rather than merely editorialize the fact that creationists hold unfounded opinions and make illogical arguments, here are comments on some snippets of their views:
C1: "I would like to meet the "scientist" that can PROVE that evolution is true and not a theory."
Of course this writer would not really like to meet any such scientist because creationists display absolutely no desire to understand reality.
Symptomatic of their black-and-white thinking, creationists love to make challenges demanding proof. Biological evolution is a demonstrable fact upon which theories of evolution are based. The evidence for biological evolution has been pronounced as "overwhelming" by credible experts in the field. Facts can be empirically demonstrated, but no scientific theory, or any other inference based on induction can be proven, though hypotheses and theories and claimed-to-be-facts can be disproven. The writer goes on:
C1: "That of course is impossible since no one was living millions and billions of years ago, and I mean NO ONE and NOTHING."
This is patently untrue! There is abundant evidence that life existed on this planet several billion years ago.
C1: "There are plenty of Creation Scientists that can show proof as to why the earth can only be 6000 years old(give or take a couple of hundred years)."
There are NO creation scientists because creationisms is religion and not science, so "creation scientist" is an oxymoron. The statement is completely untrue. Falsifying details and publishing unfounded attacks on scientific facts does not constitute science. No matter what an individual's educational background, fallacious argumentum ad verecundiam pronouncements that run counter to the facts and to the knowledge of credible experts in a field are without any value as science.
The mythical YEC figure of 6,000 years is based on Bishop Usher's Bible-based estimate. Science has categorically demonstrated that the Bible is incorrect in its depiction of dates–in effect, disproven.
C1: "Carbon dating and other dating methods that the scientific community has relied on for so long now are proving to be very inacurate and more and more evidence keeps popping up to prove thousands of years instead of millions or even billions of years."
No scientist claims that carbon dating can be applied to dates earlier than 70,000 years ago. Other radioactive isotopes with longer half-lives are employed in obtaining the older estimates, which are always reported with the range of error indicated. Creationists are typically woefully ignorant of actual science, preferring as they do to parrot the pseudoscientific falsifications on junk tanks such as AiG. The planet is approximately 4.7 billion years old, no matter how many times ill-informed and biased YECs claim that Usher's date is accurate.
C1: "When is the "scientific" community going to take its head out of their "evolutionary ooz" and realize that CREATION IS SCIENCE!"
Shouting does not help this writer's ridiculous argument. Science is based on application of empirical scientific methodology, creationism is religion based on an ill-founded assumption of Biblical literacy. Creationists have attempted to hijack science in order to strengthen their received, preconceived notions of Biblical inerrancy. They will never succeed in convincing any but the already-deluded because scientific methods have disproven the Biblical statements that relate to scientific areas. The Bible is an allegorical creation myth followed by pseudohistorical moral fable.
C1: "God was the originator of science and created everything we see, and plenty of things that we don't even know exist yet."
Creationists seem to believe that whatever nonsense they make up about their supposed God will hold true simply because they say so. Such thinking is totally in keeping with the emotionality, obstinate ignorance, and illogic of their arguments. If God originated science, then the Bible is the received Misleading Pseudoscience for Dummies text, and God scores a Z- in science.
C1: "I can't imagine holding onto the idea that we evolved from some "ooz" of some of some sort and that's all we are, an accident, and there is no purpose to our lives. I think that's very sad."
That says it all. The writer, for highly emotional reasons of his or her own cannot imagine how life could have arisen from chemicals and then evolved. This is a failure of comprehension, a failure of logic, and deliberate ignorance of established facts. A sense of purpose is a psychological phenomenon. If the writer cannot sense some purpose to his or her life without being the product of Special Creation, then that, in addition to manifest and obstinate ignorance about reality, is very sad indeed.
Here's another creationist stating YEC beliefs:
C2: "YEC does not say that God created all animal life, for example, in the state it is in today. YEC does not deny that some biological evolution occurs. YEC believes that change does occur (what they believe actually requires it) but YEC believes that change can only happen within a created kind."
Because there is so much evidence for continuing biological evolution (covered by the creationist buzzword microevolution) creationists see nothing to be gained in denying that, for example, bacteria can acquire antibiotic resistance. Creationists do not perceive currently occurring genetic change as a threat because they are obsessed with denying the distant past (biopoiesis and macroevolution) in order create that gap into which they insert the man-invented notion of Special Creation.
The reference to design pays homage to intelligent [sick] design theory, which is merely creationism in disguise.
C2: "Naturalistic secular science begins and ends with the unfounded assumption that the material is all that exists, that God does not exist, etc., etc."
Of course science studies the natural world – scientific method can only be applied to the physical, observable, tangible, and measurable. However, that is the only thing in which C2 is correct. It is not necessarily an unfounded assumption to believe that the material is all that exists, even though scientists concede the physical may not inhere all of existence. Only the material is accessible to the scientific method. The question of existence beyond the physical belongs to speculative philosophy and theology. Science is religion-neutral and does not assume that God does not exist. Scientists may privately believe that there is no deity, particularly in view of the fact that science provides far better explanations than "God brought it about by a miracle." However, scientific method can only be religion neutral. C2 is merely using the creationist buzzword "secular" to attempt to place all scientists in the infidel camp in an association fallacy.
C2: "(Creationism) is not about religion; it is about the Truth."
This is an utter falsehood. Of course creationism is about religion. Creationists and others of religious persuasion make a claim of "Truth" for their beliefs, but they have no good evidential, logical foundation for doing so. This is the reason that the terms "faith" and "belief" are more accurately applied to religious beliefs.
C2: ". . . God, who Jesus is, life after death, but those are all tied to this issue."
If creationism is about God and Jesus, then C2 has just revealed him or herself to have lied when saying that creationism is not religion.
C2: "True, one can be a Christian and not believe in a six day creation, but such a person is not really being consistent in their beliefs. If Genesis is open to such liberal interpretation as some give it, then why not do the same to the resurrection account of Jesus? If there was no literal Adam and Eve that literally disobeyed God (sinned), then there is no need for a Savior."
Yup. This is the underlying reason for dogmatic insistence on Biblical literalism, these black-and-white thinkers are aware that their rigid beliefs will not allow for any latitude. It's no accident that Genesis depicts knowledge as the enemy. Knowledge does not make us sinners, but religious beliefs cannot survive full critical scrutiny.
"Genesis is foundational to the Christian faith, and it is true."
Genesis is an allegorical creation myth that is clung to by particularly reality-ignorant Christians. Genesis is disproven.
"The Bible says that those that do not want to see the Truth will be blinded to it."
Since the Bible was written by men this statement remains accurate concerning the human foible of denial. The fact is that the actual truth is not what creationists credulously take to be "the Truth".
C2: "Those that want to cling to the religion of evolution will always find a way to make it seem right in their eyes."
Poor, fuddled C2 is totally muddled as to what is science and what is religion. Biological evolution is a fact, the modern synthesis of evolution represents the best current scientific explanation of the observable facts. Evolution is not religion in C2's earlier definition, where it is labelled as secular science.
Creationists are typically so illogical that they do not even realize that they are making self-contradictory statements in an attempt to justify emotional beliefs. I suspect that because these individuals desperately want and need to believe that they are the salvation-selected products of Special Creation they become easy prey for any falsehood or illogical argument that appears to support their indoctrinated beliefs. (Let's be honest and call a stupid argument a stupid argument.) The stupid arguments work to support creationists' emotional beliefs, so creationists ignorantly fail to detect the illogic.
The sentence would have been accurate if it had been written as, "Those that want to cling to the religion of creationism will always find a way to make it seem right in their eyes."
No matter how passionately an illogical ignorant argument is made, that argument remains utterly without validity. YEC vehemence is really tantamount to bragging about exhibiting stupidity. It is not surprising that many Christians hold YECs in contempt.
I believe that YEC and ID appeal to those who have a cognitive disorder in that they have not attained an internal desire for logic. Further, most creationists of my acquaintance also appear to lack mastery of many operations of logic.
Piaget's "genetic epistemological" research into the developmental acquisition of cognitive schemas did not proceed beyond the achievement of formal operations by about age eleven. However, beyond the logical schema acquired in childhood, not all individuals attain the full repetoir of logical operations necessary for critical thinking. The worldviews of many adults exhibit considerable philosophical tension, and many adults display internally inconsistent, illogical, emotional reasoning fraught with many of the errors found in fallacious arguments. Religious beliefs, in general, force illogical inconsistencies into the thinking process.
Creationists' arguments on religion are highly emotional, their arguments concerning science are falsehoods, their arguments about morality are rigid and bigoted, their views on politics are usually greed-motivated, hubris-filled, and doggedly unperceptive.