The Questioning Librarian

If there is anything that I should have learned by now, Ken Ham will use any occasion to spew the nonsense of Answers in Genesis. And I mean ANY occasion. The death of Christopher Hitchens, noted public intellectual, journalist and atheist, is no exception at all. Of course, we should expect Ham and his kind to crow at the death of an atheist, one who thought young-earth creationism nonsense and didn't hesitate to say so either. Still, the very visible exhortations of glee from certain quarters is downright sickening to anyone with even a rudimentary sense of morality. I won't shed a tear when Ken Ham dies, but neither will I dance in the streets, as much as I find him an odious human being whose entire life has been dedicated to spreading lies. Though Ham himself says nothing, he introduces " Two Perspectives on the Passing of an Atheist " which contain much happiness at the death of Hitchens, including a statement that "Hitchens is no longer shaking a fist a...

Often I find that I'm overwhelmed by the sheer amount of output that the young-earth creationist organizations are capable of producing. I'm only one man, and even when I blogged more frequently I couldn't keep up with it. At most, I can deal with and dispense with a few articles from some of the major creationist organizations. This week I thought that I would take a different tack. Rather than focusing on a single article, I'm going to give a brief overview of some of the most recent articles coming out of Answers in Genesis, Creation Ministries and Creation Moments. Here we go... Creation Ministries International: (home of the supposed "Unanswerable Questions" for Evolutionists and of the Hovind clan) --Creation Ministries condemns the "framework hypothesis" as untenable in an article about history and pseudo-history. The framework hypothesis is one way of stating that Genesis 1-11 is literary rather than literal, and CMI won't stand for ...

A student wrote to Answers in Genesis for advice. What he got was the sophistry, bad-arguments and muddle-headed thinking that so characterizes that organization. The exchange is fine amusement, if one is in the mood to simply laugh at nonsense rather than feel the anger that often accompanies the attempts of the anti-science crowd to lie, distort and malign evolution. The student in question is afraid of majoring in science because of the "stigma" a young-earth creationist would get from the "Darwinist camp." Already, I'm saddened to see a student so interested in science have his enthusiasm tempered in the name of fundamentalist dogma. The authors of the article, two of the lesser lights of Answers in Genesis apparently, whom I've never heard of before, responded with a lengthy article, part advice and part delusion. They first recommend that this student consider attending one of the AiG-approved colleges where young-earth creationism is taught as scie...

One of the arguments that those defending evolution and good science continually have to fend off is the absurdity that is "irreducible complexity," the old argument of Paley that was dusted off and reinvigorated by Michael Behe. This argument has many manifestations, but at heart they are similar forms of the same basic idea. The young earth creationist points to something in nature, such as the bacterial flagellum, the blood-clotting system in humans or the human brain to give a few examples, and argue that it is too complex to be the product of evolution by natural selection. Therefore it must be, in the mind of the creationist, a fine example of design by a Creator of the young earth/ literal Genesis type. Within the last week or so two more of these so-called examples were brought to my attention by creationists eager to demonstrate that my acceptance of evolution is wrong, wrong, wrong. A few days ago, I was sent another one of those horrible Creation Moments daily pi...

After an inexcusably long absence, I've returned today to my occasional series highlighting those people and organizations whose stances are not only in contradiction to reality but are so counter-factual as to be absurd. However, becoming an "Enemy of Reason", joining the ranks of such notables as Ken Ham, Conservapedia and Creation Moments, requires more than just the average brand of crazy. Being listed as an "Enemy of Reason" requires holding and promoting positions that are hopelessly irrational. Congresswoman Bachmann meets both of these qualifications. Sometimes an Enemy of Reason is a one-issue person, someone who may otherwise be reasonable except on that one topic that, as soon as they open their mouth and talk about it, makes them seem crazy. Others are crazy on a number of different positions, and it is into this category that Bachmann falls. The first position Michele Bachmann holds is support for the unscientific notion of Intelligent Design, ...

Creationists of the Young-Earth variety often protest that they cannot take Genesis figuratively for some very good theological reasons. If Adam never literally at the apple, then why did Jesus die on the cross to remove the sin that Adam never incurred? If Christians shouldn't take Genesis literally (and many already don't), then what other parts of the Bible should be taken figuratively rather than literally? Creation Moments asserts that when God said to rest on the seventh day it is because of the six-day Creation event; when Moses was given the Ten Commandments, the command to rest on the sabbath day was made explicitly because of Genesis 1. The anonymous author asks, if Genesis is not to be taken literally, does that mean we don't take the Ten Commandments literally ? My own answer is that I don't much care what you decide to do about the Ten Commandments. What you decide about your personal faith is up to you, but when it comes to long-settled science, the on...

Yesterday I took the creationists to task for misrepresenting the science and statements of a number of prominent figures, from Karl Popper to Stephen Jay Gould, and I wanted to continue about the piece in question today. In the past, I and others (most notably authors like Donald Prothero and Ken Miller) have exposed as false the creationist assertion that, when it comes evolution one must choose between Christ or fallible Man and his opinions. This is the classic false dilemma; millions of people both accept Christianity and accept that evolution occurred. This fact can only be doubted by the fools at Creation Ministries International and Answers in Genesis where their interpretation is the only correct one, and everyone else is compromising. There is another aspect to this creationist assertion that I think is worth highlighting, for it exposes the Young-Earth Creationists as the hypocrites that they are. The same science that declares evolution to be true is the very same sci...

I always enjoy reading the Creation Moments daily propaganda, because, after all, the news some days is hardly entertainment enough. Thus I'm compelled to look elsewhere for a bit of humor, and the creationists are an unending wellspring of laughs. One of the newest, one that was forwarded to me, is no exception. " Faith: Christ or Man ?" the organization asks, repeating one of the favorite Young-Earth canards. Implied in this question is that you must choose; will you accept fundamentalist Christian faith or the feeble science of Man? Also implied is that the godless scientists have rejected Christ by arguing that evolution is true...and they are bold enough to say they have evidence for this "fairy tale" too! How scandalous! When it comes right down to it, in spite of their public statements, creationists have chosen "Man", just as they accuse scientists of having done. I will elaborate on this point in Part Two. For this post, suffice it to say th...

Just when I despaired finding good material to write on anymore, I was forwarded a slew of stupidity from Creation Moments. Say what you will about the Young-Earth Creationists (I was reminded to clarify which specific "kind" of creationists I'm arguing against), but in many ways they are remarkably consistent; they repeat the same objections over and over and over again. The forms may change, or, if you will, evolve, but at heart they are the same few objections expressed differently. One of the more recent Creation Moments, titled " The Archer Fish " is no exception to this idea. It's a classic "God of the Gaps" argument. The argument generally goes like this: Look at this object or feature in nature, in this case the ability of the archer fish to send a concentrated burst of water from its mouth to stun an insect and eat it. The young-earther then continues on to develop in detail how it is done (with the unstated assertion that it is very com...

You know, it's been so long since I've heard someone spew nonsense about evolution (it was last night when I watched the Michael Shermer vs. Kent Hovind debate on YouTube) that I was so happy that I wouldn't have to go a single day without it! Thanks again to Ann Coulter for entertaining us yet again with her wisdom about the "liberal religion" of evolution. It wasn't enough that her book Godless: The Church of Liberalism spent, by her own reckoning, a third of its time "debunking" evolution. No, since Rick Perry decided to tell us that Texas teaches creationism AND evolution (it doesn't, not legally anyway) and was immediately mocked, Coulter took up her pen of idiocy to enlighten the masses about evolution. First, Ann rants on World Net Daily (where else but that hotbed of anti-science thinking?) that evolution is the "flash mob" method of science  in which it is "belief" not evidence that matters. Read the article in ful...

There is a discussion going on right now in the science community about whether or not we should debate creationists: it is a debate within a debate, if you will. There are good arguments on both sides, but I have to think that we should debate creationists, and we should do it as often as we can stand it. Why do I think this? Last week, I saw that Michael Shermer posted a link to a story of a woman who argued this very point. As a former creationist, it was going to debates between Shermer and Kent Hovind that began to convince her of the legitimacy of evolution and of science. I too was once a creationist. Without ever having read anything about it, without it ever having been mentioned in class (I never heard a word about evolution in high school), I was ready to pounce at the merest mention of the topic as false and godless, two of the favorite creationist talking-points. I look back at this self in amazement, at how ignorant and proud of that ignorance I was, how I failed to ...

Creationists love to call evolutionary theory a "fairy tale" almost as much as they love demonizing it as an atheist plot dreamed up by Darwin to deny God. Encapsulated in that little insult is all the scorn and derision that they can muster; evolution is false, evolution is a quaint little "just-so" story that doesn't make any sense at all and certainly doesn't have any support except that thought up by, in the creationist worldview, a host of conspiratorial pseudo-scientists who are misinterpreting what is in fact clear evidence of creationism. They use the "fairy-tale" insult to attack real science while defending their own fairy-tale, the literal reading of the first few chapters of Genesis. Ray Comfort has a book along this line, and I had a creationist recently tell me that science and reason were on the side of creationism while evolution is a "fairy-tale." But evolution is no fairy tale, and creationists of all stripes need to l...

Over at Atheist Central, the blog of Ray Comfort, the esteemed defender of the Faith sees no evidence for evolution and accuses the "atheist believer in evolution" of asserting "mountains of evidence" when there is absolutely none...in his words, " not even a mole hill ." He writes that when the person he was responding to listed diverse fields of evidence (just the fields, mind you, not the evidence within each field) and put "etc." afterwards, it was an indication that "he believes there are even more mountains [of evidence], somewhere." Actually, having answered this question numerous times, it is an indication that the evidence is so massive that a simple, paragraph-length list is impossible. Entire books have been written dealing with the evidence for evolution, both overall and in a topic-specific treatment (like Donald Prothero's Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why it Matters  on the evidence from paleontology and geology...

Over at Creation Moments, the creationists continue doing what they've always done best; lying and distorting the reality of the world and science. They take the occasion of finding that pygmy hippos and early humans existed together on Cyprus to attack evolution. Creation Moments claims that "evolutionists" once thought that pygmy hippos and dwarf elephants arrived on the island 1.5 million years before humans did. Research (the citation is from a 1990 work) indicates that in fact humans existed there at the same time as the pygmy animals did. If they happened to read the title of the article in Science News that they cite, they will note that it says the research "pushes back colonization date." To put it simply, the dig in Cyprus uncovered that humans arrived on the island earlier than previously thought rather than denying the reality of the date of 1.5 million years. What do the creationists turn this into? The spin at Creation Moments is that while we...

Creation Ministries International is having a conference coming up this year in September. Called "Creation not Confusion", an ironic title if there ever was one, it will feature the notorious creationist Dr. Jonathan Sarfati, who answered Richard Dawkin's The Greatest Show on Earth with the resounding propaganda tract The Greatest Hoax on Earth. Sarfati is also the author of Evolution Refuted , which the website claims is the best-selling creationist book of all time (no one tell Ken Ham), though, save for the associated paycheck, that is a dubious honor. The other speaker, Gary Bates, is the current head of Creation Ministries International, and I have to admit that until today I'd never heard of him, but in fact, though the website offers nothing about his educational background, we may surmise that he does not have a PhD given the fact that creationists love nothing more than adding their letters after their name on a book (as Sarfati does). It is as though their...

One of the most common objections to evolution is that it is not science at all but a humanistic religion devoid of God. This objection is also one of the most foolish, the intellectual equivalent of making faces at one's opponent. This objection, like all the others, is completely without merit, save in the minds of those over at Answers in Genesis and all the like-minded creationist organizations. Ken Ham takes a full chapter out of his little book The Lie: Evolution to engage in this stupid, baseless accusation that " evolution is religion ." How is that supposed to work, I wonder? How can evolution, one of the most important scientific ideas in the history of man, endlessly proven with well-supported evidence, continually proven with new discoveries both in the lab and in the field, become a religion, founded on faith and belief rather than evidence? I suppose it must go something like this. Evolution is the foundation of a godless worldview in which man came from...

Over at Answers in Genesis, we lucky internet-users can read all of Ken Ham's book online, for free. Unfortunately, The Lie: Evolution  isn't exactly the material that most of us would choose to read, even if it was handed to us. Be that as it may, I was given a link to one of the chapters, called " The Root of the Problem ." As Ken would have it, the divide between evolution and creationism is based on worldviews...and in fact I have to agree with him, to a point. Trust me, I never thought that I'd be agreeing with Ken Ham...but here I am, saying that he's right about this. The problem is that creationists have a different worldview from those who accept science. But that is the only thing he has right; he doesn't even correctly identify which worldviews are at war. It isn't a question of whether your view of the world includes God or not that divides evolution from creation, because while few people who are creationists do not believe in God (this ...

Great news from Answers in Genesis; they're spreading the lies and stupidity of creationism to the Arab world, where, presumably, they should have their work cut out for them. While perhaps the message of Biblical creationism won't be particularly welcome to the devout, creationism is already well at home in many Arab or majority Muslim nations (after all, the only surveyed country that ranks lower than the U.S. in acceptance of evolution is Turkey). But, Ken laments, AiG can only do so much. While they can send Terry Mortenson, one of their speakers, to Egypt to talk about biblical creationism, they don't have the resources to send their emissaries everywhere, a fact for which I imagine that we should be grateful. However, he sees his organization, and their massive output of articles, books, DVD's, etc (some of which, including a website, are now available in Arabic), as a " reservoir" of resources for others to use in promoting creationism. Answers in Gene...

I was intrigued coming across a book called $20 Per Gallon: How the Inevitable Rise in the Price of Gasoline Will Change Our Lives for the Better in one of the bargain price book catalogs I peruse, and I thought since it was especially cheap I would give it a read. The idea of oil, beyond the woes at the pump, and how it underpins our lives is something that has interested me for about a year now since I read James Howard Kunstler's The Long Emergency . What I've been reading, even beyond Kunstler, showcases a planet that is reaching its natural resource limits, not just oil but also food, freshwater and energy in general. How we deal with this problem, that of increasing demand meeting natural resources that are most assuredly not increasing, will define how humanity persists into the future. Will we go forward with, as Kunstler calls it "the project of civilization" or will we fall back into some sort of dark age of unknown duration? At first, it was almost re...

If there is one thing the folks at Answers in Genesis do not like, aside from evidence, naturally, it is being mocked or having their positions laughed at. But they just make it so darn easy to stand back and laugh, long and uproariously, whenever they talk. This week, their opinion voiced by the estimable Dr. Elizabeth Mitchell, whom we've encountered before on this blog, AiG takes issue with the Doonesbury comic mocking the Louisiana Science Education Act , allowing the teaching of "evidence contrary to evolution" or "problems with evolution" or other such rot that has more basis in fundamentalist ideology than it does in evidence and science. Dr. Mitchell (a medical doctor, not a PhD scientist, I hasten to add), is furious that not only were they mocked but they claim that their positions are "distorted." The teacher in the comic "delivers a series of erroneous and misleading statements." For instance, the character claims creationists ...

Last week, I finished reading Curt Stager's amazing book Deep Future: The Next 100,000 Years of Life on Earth . It was a book that is certainly worth reading, but at first glance one might ask what good is a book like this, one that purports to look far into the future beyond not only our own lifetimes but those even of our grandchildren and great-grandchildren (and many generations beyond that too). Of course, none of us will be here to witness whether Stager's predictions are true, but we can be assured that they are not blind prognostications. Stager is a paleoclimatologist by trade, meaning he looks to the record of rocks, ice and lake-bottom deposits to determine what past climates were like, using this information to help us understand what might be coming based on our actions in the present. This book is one of evidence-based reasoning presenting a range of possibilities for our future on this planet, based on whether we take a moderate-emissions path or a high-emissions...

One of the favorite tactics of creationism is to engage in the "God of the Gaps" argument; if science can't explain something, then it must have been God/ the Intelligent Designer. Or, conversely, if one can poke enough holes in evolution then not only will it be destroyed but everyone will have no choice but to accept the creationist alternative. This tactic has evolved (pun intended) into the "irreducible complexity" argument of the Intelligent Design hucksters, most notably espoused by Michael Behe of Darwin's Black Box  and the 2005 Dover Intelligent Design trial. The argument goes that a number of observable features in nature are irreducibly complex, that is to say that if one part is removed then the whole system collapses. Thus the "irreducibly complex" feature could not possibly have evolved and is proof of the work of an Intelligent Designer (which may or may not be the God of the Bible; ID proponents are cagey on this, saying in public...

Over at Answers in Genesis, an anonymous article (I think it reasonable to assume that Ken Ham is the author, or even if it isn't it cites one of his articles and encapsulates views he has expressed elsewhere) decides that the people peddling creationism don't want to be called "young-earth creationists" anymore. The author states that to many, announcing yourself a young-earth creationist (or YEC) is like saying "I'm an anti-science mystic." Well, I couldn't have stated it better myself. Young earth creationists are the pinnacle of anti-science mystics, especially the ones taking an active, promotional role. Old earth creationists are slightly less so, and theistic evolutionists have it mostly right (though in speaking to several, some of the positions they hold are bizarre and anti-science as well). The strange world of Answers in Genesis, where it is more plausible to believe that a six hundred year old man brought two of every "kind...