Recently in Bible as Science Category

Remember the movie “Expelled” which ‘argued’ how ID Creationists were somehow punished for their beliefs? I wonder what the producers of this movie think of this somewhat disturbing piece by Tom Willis in CSA (Creation Science Association for Mid-America)?

Tom Willis Wrote:

Everywhere the subject of origins is discussed, evolutionists routinely, yea, systematically, denounce creationists as some combination of stupid, ignorant, and… dangerous. If we recall there are two major methods men make momentous decisions: empirical and theoretical. I intend to show in a brief space that belief in evolution requires, at minimum, deep delusion allowing one to believe, or pretend to believe, in a manifestly impossible historical scenario. And it leads, both empirically and theoretically, to grotesquely harmful results in every society in which evolutionists are allowed to have a major influence, including our own.

And “Expelled” believes that ID Creationists face problems?

The Louisiana Coalition for Science has released a press release calling for the Senate to reject the creationist bill approved by the Louisiana House

New group stands up for sound science education in Louisiana

LA Coalition for Science decries House support for SB 733, calls for Senate to reject bill

Baton Rouge, LA, June 11, 2008 — In response to numerous attacks on science education in the Bayou State, concerned parents, teachers and scientists are getting organized. The new group — Louisiana Coalition for Science — calls upon the Senate to oppose SB 733, a bill which will open the door to creationism in public schools.

Spread the news.

Although “Expelled” has been receiving mostly negative reviews from the mainstream media and scientists, creationist organizations other than the Discovery Institute, AIG and ICR (both Young Earth Creationists) have remained cautiously silent. For instance, The Reasons To Believe (RTB) Scholars appeared to be suspicious about Expelled but refrained from any recommendations but now that they have seen a pre-release screening they have sent an email which can be found on the Calvin College ASA discussion list.

Dear RTB Chapter members,

With the impending release of “EXPELLED: No Intelligence Allowed” (April 18), the Reasons to Believe scholar team thought it best to prepare a statement of our position, a guide for answering questions from chapters, networks, and apologists. Keep in mind that the mission of RTB centers on reaching out to science-minded people with two purposes:

Michael Le Page at New Scientist discusses Evolution: 24 myths and misconceptions.

Shared misconceptions:

Everything is an adaptation produced by natural selection
Natural selection is the only means of evolution
Natural selection leads to ever-greater complexity
Evolution produces creatures perfectly adapted to their environment
Evolution always promotes the survival of species
It doesn’t matter if people do not understand evolution
“Survival of the fittest” justifies “everyone for themselves”
Evolution is limitlessly creative
Evolution cannot explain traits such as homosexuality
Creationism provides a coherent alternative to evolution

Read on for the much longer list of Creationist myths

We learn at the Discovery Institute Blog about a recent lecture tour in Spain by ID creationists

Over an eight day period last January, Physicians and Surgeons for Scientific Integrity (aka DoctorsDoubtingDarwin.com, a rapidly growing, 277-member, physician group from 17 countries) sponsored a lecture tour in Barcelona, Malaga, Madrid, Leon and Vigo. It was titled “Lo Que Darwin No Sabia,” or “What Darwin Didn’t Know.” Tom Woodward, Ph.D. (author of Doubts About Darwin and Darwin Strikes Back) and myself (author of What Darwin Didn’t Know and Billions of Missing Links) lectured on eight occasions to exceptionally large audiences. Santiago Escuain was our translator extraordinaire. Rich Akin, the CEO of PSSI, put in enormous hours into making this trip a huge success.

El Pais reports on the ‘successful’ Spain Tour of ‘Lo que Darwin no sabía’. Of course, the DI does admit later on that the success was limited.

The best I can say after reading and then rereading Mark Oppenheimer’s article, “The Turning of an Atheist,” in today’s New York Times Magazine ( http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/04/m[…]4Flew-t.html ) is that Antony Flew is not the man he once was and has been out of touch for some time. Readers of PT will recall his recent conversion to deism, which he based on the “teaching” of the old-earth creationist, Gerald Schroeder. Professor Flew recanted his acceptance of Schroeder but maintained his belief in a god - a deistic god, however, not a personal god, and certainly not the God of Christianity.

Now, according to Mr. Oppenheimer, Professor Flew acquiesced when Roy Abraham Varghese, an eastern-rite Catholic, ghost-wrote a book under Professor Flew’s name. Much of the manuscript was book-doctored by an evangelical pastor, Bob Hostetler. Though Professor Flew allegedly vetted the book, it is hard to know how much he truly approved of; he freely told Mr. Oppenheimer that he suffers from a form of aphasia and did not recognize the names of several philosophers mentioned in the book. Similarly, he could not recall conversations that took place in the last year or two and could not define certain words used frequently in the book. Professor Flew is 84 years old.

Mr. Oppenheimer makes a valiant attempt not to conclude that Professor Flew is being exploited, at least not deliberately. It is a noble effort, but it is hard to agree with him.

Although Behe has referred to Miller as an ‘intelligent design proponent’, Miller himself is on the record in many different forms that we should not conflate Miller’s faith with his scientific position.

On November 13^th, 2007 Nova will present Judgement Day: Intelligent Design on Trial” and as part of the experience, Nova is providing an excellent companion website. One of the features involves the perspective of various scientists on defining the concept of science

Miller has two segments in which he explains both the scientific method and religion and addresses what he considers some of the abuses of logic (“a gross mischaracterization to take a scientist in the past … and say that Newton worked based on a hypothesis of design)

On Isaac Newton Running time 1:34
Science vs. Religion Running time 2:29

Miller Wrote:

What Intelligent design pretends to do to be in the tradition in Newton, What intelligent design actually is, to be perfectly honest, is in the tradition of the middle ages where they stop investigation by saying we cannot answer this mystery it is the work of God “the designer”. This is a science stopper

So what has happened to Philip ‘the father of Intelligent Design’ Johnson? While some ID proponents have been arguing that ID has nothing in common with religion, Johnson seems to disagree. Since his stroke in 2001, Johnson’s public appearances seem to have been minimal and given his past statements, I am not surprised that ID is keeping Johnson out of the lime-light.

On UcD Tyke explains why the “confusion” by O’Reilly and Stein about the religious nature of ID is due to a fundamental entanglement with creationism. And while some effort is made to manage the message and pretend that ID makes no claims about the designer(s), ID proponents are very clear that the purpose of ID is to introduce the reality of God into the academic world.

Tyke Wrote:

This may be pessimistic, but I very much doubt ID will ever come close to disentangling itself from creationism and religion. By far the largest block of support for ID comes from the conservative Christian community, and they simply see no merit in pretending that they don’t necessarily mean God when they talk about an intelligent designer. In fact, many of them believe it to be disingenuous to do so.

Even Philip Johnson himself is quite open about his religious motives for supporting ID when talking about it on Christian radio shows. While his lawyerly choice of words may allow him to continue claiming that the science of ID is silent on who the creator is, there is no mistaking the message he is sending to the Christian faithful–that ID enables Biblical creationism as a scientific theory.

I finally got around to reading Paradigms on Pilgrimage, by Stephen J. Godfrey and Christopher R. Smith. Godfrey and Smith began their careers as young-earth creationists. Godfrey became a paleontologist, and Smith, a Baptist minister. Each underwent what they call a “pilgrimage” as the acquisition of compelling, new knowledge forced them to reevaluate their literalist religious belief. Both, however, remained devout Christians.

Godfrey is now Curator of Paleontology at the Calvert Marine Museum in Maryland. In the 1980’s, he enrolled in graduate school, where he studied vertebrate paleontology. One of his first jobs was to search for fossils in sedimentary rocks. These rocks are layered, so the deeper you dig, the older are the fossils you find. Godfrey was most impressed by fossilized footprints and other markings, known as trace fossils, left in the sandstone by earlier organisms. As a young-earth creationist, Godfrey had thought that the sedimentary rocks and the fossils within them had been laid down by the Flood. If that was so, then how could terrestrial vertebrates have left footprints in the sand (which was presumably under water)? Godfrey researched trace fossils and found that they appear at many levels in many sedimentary rock formations all around the world. He could not account for the appearance of trace fossils in rocks that had supposedly been left behind by a flood that killed all the animals that might have made the footprints. Godfrey also found cracked and fossilized mud flats, which he recognized immediately had been baked by the sun and could not have been deposited by a flood. The earth suddenly became much older than Godfrey had imagined.

I’ve been continuing to put some time into criticizing Michael Behe’s expert report on the creationist texts involved in the California Creationism Case. This is a slow process, partly because I’m also working on other projects and partly because it’s difficult to read the Bob Jones “Biology for Christian Schools” text without encountering a range of unpleasant side effects. I’ve been fighting the increased blood pressure and the nausea, and soldiering on. Along the way, I’ve encountered some real gems that I thought I’d share with you.

Today, I’m going to give you two quotes: one on Darwin, and one on sexually transmitted diseases. The two are connected only by the surreal nature of what’s being said. As you read them, please remember that this is material that’s being taught to high school students, and that the folks who are teaching this stuff are suing the University of California, because for some strange reason UC doesn’t think that people who have been taught this stuff have adequately completed an actual college preparatory class in biology. All quotes are taken from the most recent (3^rd) edition of the text. I’m transcribing by hand, so unless indicated otherwise, all typos are mine.

Read more (at The Questionable Authority, where comments can be left):

A blogger has an interesting report on the event that the Discovery Institute just held for teachers at Biola (Bible Institute of Los Angeles) University in order to promote their newest disguise for creationism, the textbook sneakily entitled “Explore Evolution.”

I’m sure it’s a just coincidence that the very first person to blog this event – this no-way-it’s-creationism-no-sirree event – did it from the Old Earth Creation Homeschool blog and works for the old-earth creationist ministry Reasons to Believe.

Anyway, here’s the interesting bit:

I was back in Ohio last week to celebrate my grandparents’ 60^th wedding anniversary. While I was in the area, a number of the PT regulars also met up south of Cincinnati to take our own tour of Answers in Genesis’ Creation Museum. (Wesley has a picture of the group here; I’ll also try to scan in another “official” picture tomorrow).

My brain still hurts. My thoughts on everything over at Aetiology (with photos, of course).

Few things are more ironic than young-earth creationist John Mark Reynolds (theologian at Biola, Discovery Institute fellow, leader in the ID movement) lecturing scientists about truth, stubborn facts, and having an “open philosophy of science.” If there’s an earthquake in LA today, it won’t be the tectonic plates shifting, it will be the simultaneous detonation of thousands of irony meters. How does the man get up in morning, when young-earth creationism is as hopelessly false on the empirical facts as anything ever has been in the whole history of science, and when the fundamentalist movement’s promotion of young-earth creationism is perhaps the biggest example of systematic fraud ever perpetrated on the American public? If you ever need an example of an ID advocate blathering lip service about “truth”, while shamelessly disregarding it in practice at the exact same time, here you go.

This may be a little “old hat” for many of you. After all, how many ways can I find to say, “Don’t try to get science from your Bible”? But with that risk let me direct you to An Evolutionary View of Kinds on Threads from Henry’s Web. Leave your comments there. This article is the result of reading some of Alvin Plantinga’s work on theistic science, a concept I find pretty dangerous.

Steve Jones, the award-winning geneticist and author, argued that suggesting that creationism and evolution be given equal weight in education was “rather like starting genetics lectures by discussing the theory that babies are brought by storks”.

Link

I mentioned yesterday that Mike had a post on the war on epidemiology. That might sound a bit strange–doesn’t have quite the ring to it as Chris’s book. But, never fear, epidemiology is indeed under attack–or, at least, it’s being redefined by young earth creationists.

In a pair of articles published in the esteemed journal, Creation Research Society Quarterly, Jeffrey Schragin has put forth his argument that “the Bible’s epidemiology is scientifically sound” and that the “Creation Health Model (CHM) offers a more comprehensive understanding of health and disease than standard molecules-to-man evolutionary theory.”

(Continued at Aetiology)

Fox News reports that Professor Paul Mirecki will be teaching a class on intelligent design.

The class, titled “Special Topics in Religion: Intelligent Design, Creationism and other Religious Mythologies” will be taught in the religious studies department of the university.

The satirical newspaper The Onion has an “Onion in History” feature whereby they present back issues with wild headlines about past events. This week’s “Onion in History” is an issue dated July 20, 1925, and contains a headline blaring, “SCOPE’S MONKEY TRIAL RAISES TROUBLING QUESTION: IS SCIENCE BEING TAUGHT IN OUR SCHOOLS?”

It contains a few amusing articles, but sometimes the reality of the situation is bad enough that it’s impossible to exaggerate. Below the fold, we’ll compare an excerpt from one of the “joke” articles with an actual report from the ongoing Creation Mega Conference.

PAX Television has a weekly show called Faith Under Fire, hosted by Lee Strobel, a “former investigative journalist for the Chicago Tribune turned apologist” according to a recent article that discusses Strobel’s pro-ID views.

On the episode for Saturday, June 4^th, one segment discusses the Bible Code:

“Secret codes. You saw them in National Treasure. You read about them in The Da Vinci Code. Is it possible that there are actually secret codes in the Bible! And if there is some kind of code in the Bible, why is it there? Two mathematicians debate the existence of Bible codes. Insurance actuarial consultant Ed Sherman, author of the Bible Code Bombshell, says he tried to disprove the code notion but ended up being convinced of its authenticity. Physicist Dr. Dave Thomas the author of Skeptical Odysseys and a member of the Committee for Scientific of Claims of the Paranormal, remains unconvinced.…”

If you’re curious as to how a Panda’s Thumb blogger does against Ed Sherman, tune in. If you miss it, the debate between Thomas and Sherman continues on the Web.

Richard Dawkins has penned another good article on evolution. Read through it and we’ll discuss it on the flipside.

Say hello to Falcarius utahensis.

This creature was becoming a herbivore (plant-eater), but fossils described in today’s Nature indicate his (or her) ancestors were most definitely carnivorous (meat-eaters).

The story can be read on-line here. Here’s the significant “bite”:

Caught in the act of evolution, the odd-looking, feathered dinosaur was becoming more vegetarian, moving away from its meat-eating ancestors.

It had the built-for-speed legs of meat-eaters, but was developing the bigger belly of plant-eaters. It had already lost the serrated teeth needed for tearing flesh. Those were replaced with the smaller, duller vegetarian variety.

‘I doubt seriously this animal could cut a steak with that mouth,’ said Utah state paleontologist James Kirkland, one of those who discovered the bones of the beast in east-central Utah.

This relates to the never-ending creationism saga in several ways, including one that shows an important distinction between Evolution and Creationism:

Creationists insist that, if creatures changed their eating habits in the past, it was from herbivores (before the Fall, when the Creation was Good) to carnivores (after the Fall, and the introduction of sin and death into the world).

I attended part of a talk by creationist John C. Bilello in Waterloo, Ontario recently. I’m not a biologist, but even with my amateur’s understanding of biology I could tell it was the usual nonsense, consisting of misinformation, misconceptions, and quote mining. Every argument he presented has been refuted dozens of times. Probably yet another refutation of this tired nonsense is pointless, but at least I can document Bilello’s presentation here.

Everyone check out “The Apocalypse Will Be Televised” by Gene Lyons at Harper’s Magazine. Lyons reviews the Left Behind series, a wildly popular set of novels that portray, in Tom Clancy style, the Rapture and Armageddon according to dispensationalist beliefs. The antichrist is the head of the U.N. and looks like Robert Redford, the jews must convert or die, that kind of thing. The novels are by prominent fundamentalist Tim LaHaye, who also helped found such notable organizations as the Moral Majority and the Institute for Creation Research (see the Who’s who of prophecy page on LaHaye).

It turns out that creationism is more closely tied to modern fundamentalist prophecy interpretation than I had previously appreciated. I’ll quote the most relevant passages from Lyons’ article.

Everyone’s favorite defender of the 10 Commandments, Roy Moore, has spoken out against evolution on MSNBC’s “Hardball.”

Those of us involved in the debate about evolution are often amazed at how little impact the enormous evidence for evolution has on anti-evolutionists. Each piece of positive evidence is treated in isolation and belittled, while every open question is treated as proof of the demise of evolution. Positive scientific evidence for special creation is absent, yet every perceived weakness of the theory of evolution is regarded as positive evidence for special creation. There is a reason for this, which will not come as a surprise to most readers of The Panda’s Thumb, but I want to say it again as part of the foundation for what I am about to write. The issue from the creationist point of view is really religious and not scientific, and this is true whether one is advocating young earth or old earth creationism, or even intelligent design. If we did not have a story of creation in the sacred literature of the dominant religious tradition in America, and if that story was not being taken as some sort of scientific evidence, the debate would not be between special creation and evolution, but rather would be between the dominant understanding of evolution and various modifications that might be made to it.

Further, the status of the evidence provided by the Bible is elevated above that of scientific evidence.