Tag Archives: creationism

What I’m Reading, January 8, 2015

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Bafflingly hyperbolic, PZ Myers, Pharyngula, January 4, 2015

As for the claim that creationists will be terrified by this discovery…excuse me, but I have to go off somewhere and laugh for ten minutes or so.

Creationists don’t understand thermodynamics. Heck, they don’t understand basic logic. You think an obscure bit of theory by some brilliant wonk, written up in journals they’ll never read? My dog, man, I’ve still got creationists asking me, “If man evolved from monkeys, why are there still monkeys?” and you think they’re going to be stunned into silence by a technical paper in a physics journal on entropy, heat dissipation, and molecular self-organization? Look at England’s paper — it’s got math in it. The only thing that’s going to terrify the religious right is the prospect of reading the thing.

I Am Trying Not to Hate and Fear Men, Laura Bogart, AlterNet, January 1, 2015 Continue reading →

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What I’m Reading, May 5, 2014

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Paul T. [CC BY 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/)], via FlickrCreationists’ Neil deGrasse Tyson hysteria reaches fever pitch, Dan Arel, Salon, May 2, 2014

Not surprisingly AiG’s own Danny Faulkner, an astronomer by degree, but not in practice claims that if stars are being formed today that we do not need science to explain how because God has the ability to make such things happen on his own.

This kind of thinking is what stunts scientific growth in the US and around the world. Faulkner and those like him aren’t looking for natural answers to the amazing universe we inhabit and simply credit anything and everything to God. When science does make a massive discovery that happens to through a wrench in their faith based beliefs, they simply reject the science.

Saudi Arabia Clueless About Human Rights, Ed Brayton, Dispatches from the Culture War, May 1, 2014 Continue reading →

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How Creationists Are Like Wooderson

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A Facebook post demonstrating one person’s misunderstanding of how science works got me thinking about how people who favor religious faith over scientific evidence differ from the rest of us.

I admit its a matter of faith in God for me. evidence just seems so slippery and of no significance, because of interpretations and lack of knowledge of what actually happened in the beginning.

I realized that this sort of religious viewpoint channels Wooderson to a remarkable degree. That would be the character made iconic by Matthew McConaughey in Richard Linklater’s 1993 film Dazed and Confused, responsible for such pearls of wisdom as “You just gotta keep livin’ man, L-I-V-I-N.” And of course, “All right, all right, all right.” His most famous quote, of course, is this one: Continue reading →

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Ignorance vs. Stupidity

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I prefer to think that most people who espouse creationist ideas are just lacking in a solid understanding of science, and continue to receive misinformation—as opposed to lacking in actual intelligence. In other words, I prefer the word “ignorant,” which while pejorative, still has its valid uses, to “stupid,” which is little more than an insult.

It’s getting harder and harder to tell which is which these days, though.

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Many Ways to Answer Creationists’ Questions

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By Pelf at en.wikipedia [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Yup. All the way down.

You may or may not have heard about the debate last week between Bill Nye (a/k/a the Science Guy) and Ken Ham (a/k/a [bleep]) regarding evolution and creationism. Well, it was sort of a debate and it was sort of on that topic. From what I’ve read, Nye took the opportunity to make an impassioned and eloquent plea for science education, while Ham tried to focus on how evolution can’t prove how life began (no one ever said it could.) I don’t know if anyone had their minds changed, but I do appreciate that Bill Nye is out there fighting the good fight. Ham was going to claim this as a win no matter what happened.

An interesting thing happened after the debate, though. A BuzzFeed staffer asked creationists in the audience to write down questions, comments, etc., which he published as a listicle entitled “22 Messages From Creationists To People Who Believe In Evolution.”

I admit that the questions/comments mostly just annoyed me, because it’s the same thing again and again, e.g. “Are you scared of a Divine Creator?” Luckily, it’s not even remotely up to me to respond to these questions. The responses people have written have ranged from the derisive to the snarky to the earnestly helpful. I’ll start with that last category.

Phil Plait, of Bad Astronomy fame, took the time to answer all 22 questions on Slate, treating the questions, and the questioners, with respect and dignity: Continue reading →

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