The Questioning Librarian

Or at least that is what it would seem given a recent post by Mr. Craig, famed debater and apologist for Christianity. No one doubts that he is an able debater, but this line of reasoning by him makes me question not just his morality but his sanity. In a post responding to a question about God and the infamous genocides (yes, they were genocides, by any definition) of the Old Testament, Craig defends the senseless slaughter of men, women, children (and occasionally animals, just to prove they were serious). Craig asserts that critics believe the following; if God truly issued the commands to massacre the inhabitants of Canaan, which He certainly did, then God cannot be moral at all and thus the entire foundation is undermined. This doesn't deter the Great Debater, however, and he defines the moral argument to defend the concept of God. 1. If God does not exist, objective moral values do not exist. 2. Objective moral values do exist. 3. Therefore, God exists. Such are his three ...

There is just no correcting some people who refuse outright to accept evolution. Today's "Creation Moment" extols the ability of some to make music, and they assert that, were evolution true, there would be no reason to have musical ability. "Even evolutionists appear to be puzzled by this [musical ability development." Well, this is one evolutionist who doesn't stand stunned before the fact of humanity's musical ability. Obviously the anonymous author of this post (found here:  http://www.creationmoments.com/radio/transcripts/musical-memory ) has not the least bit of knowledge about evolution in that he ascribes to evolution a kind of forward thinking and planning that it does not have ("they would have no reason to do so"). Evolution is not God, it is not some self-aware entity outside the natural world that chooses and plans. The author later reverts back and seems to be unable to understand why "mindless evolution" would even be...

Yesterday I finished reading Charles L. Mee's White Robe, Black Robe , a duel biography of Pope Leo X and Martin Luther from birth up until Leo's death in December 1521. It was a fascinating study, and well worth reading for anyone interested in either man, or understanding the causes of the Reformation. The beginnings of the Reformation are not only about Luther, who struggled for years and years with feelings of guilt over his perceived sins (though it is hard to think just what a man in a monastery could do that was so terrible), but it is also about Leo, the man who lead the Church at the time. Leo ultimately failed in dealing with Luther, but he never knew it, and when he died in late 1521 Luther was far from his mind. The Diet of Worms was over, Luther was in hiding and in the pope's mind he had been effectively dealt with. Mee does an excellent job in playing up aspects of both men's cultures that prevented them from being able to understand each other. How cou...

It's no secret that Earth Day is one of the very few holidays that I actually like, in no small part because Corporate America hasn't really figured out a way to commercialize it to no end (don't worry, I'm assured that they're working on it). For one day, we are asked to look at the world around us, see the very real environmental problems, and do something about it. But of course, one day isn't enough, not by a long shot. If we are to make a difference, we must begin to fundamentally change the way we view ourselves and our relationship to the Earth. For too long have we considered ourselves separate from nature, outside and above it, given dominion to do as we wish. Many are now beginning to realize that this cannot be so, that as humans we are inextricably linked to nature and what we do to it will eventually affect us. The days of easy energy and endless productivity of goods, all done while raping the environment, are coming to an end because they must, ...

There is no satisfying the creationists, it seems, nor making them see reason and logic, for these are apparently concepts with which they are unfamiliar. http://www.answersingenesis.org/get-answers/features/never-assume?utm_source=homepage&utm_medium=banner&utm_campaign=neverAssume First of all, they employ the familiar tactic of conflating evolutionists with atheists, when this is demonstrably not true. I refuse to argue it any more, but they hope that it comes to be perceived as true if they repeat it enough. Jason Lisle argues that in using reason and logic you assume the existence of God because He created reason and logic. This shows exactly that Lisle has no grasp of the concept, as he's just demonstrated the idea of circular reasoning. The author also makes the false assertion that evolutionists believe in absolute moral standards that should not exist in a world supposedly created by chance. Certainly a roomful of "evolutionists" wouldn't agre...

New Zealand ambient composer Rhian Sheehan is one of my personal favorites. His body of work is prodigious, and he's composed for numerous soundtracks and his own releases. My only regret is that all his events are, naturally, in New Zealand and Australia. Something relaxing for the day; sit back and enjoy...

It seems likely now that at least some dinosaurs were able to hunt at night. Several paleontologists have developed a model based on a number of factors, including the scleral ring, a bone that reinforces the eye in a number of birds and reptiles. Taking into account evolutionary relationships, this model was tested on living animals species and was demonstrated to be accurate; given that knowledge it was then applied to extinct animals, whose habits are, rather understandably, harder to figure out. http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/notrocketscience/2011/04/14/dinosaurs-around-the-clock-or-how-we-know-velociraptor-hunted-by-night/ It seems that, like modern animals, the predators largely hunted at night. This new information, exciting and fascinating new information, is a demonstration that, while we know so much more than we once did about the dinosaurs, there always remains work to be done. While many seem to think that the great age of learning about dinosaurs belonged to Marsh ...

I thought that I had heard enough hair-brained schemes through that purveyor of nonsense, the random email, to last me a lifetime. As if it wasn't bad enough getting emails telling you to boycott a certain gas company in hopes that they will lower their prices and have the others follow, as if Facebook users saying "Don't buy gas for a day," to hurt the gas companies wasn't utterly stupid enough (there is no other term to describe it), now we have the best advice on lowering gas prices. Ever. From Donald Trump, no less. The Donald seems to think that all we have to do is just "tell" OPEC to lower prices, and they'll do it. But this makes no sense, you say. Ah, but The Donald is here to remind us that it just takes the right messenger, something we all should have learned from The Godfather . His point is that Obama is the wrong messenger, and I assume he wants us to believe that it is he  who would make a good messenger. But if the special pleading...

You know, sometimes in life it is far too easy to take the myopic view, one in which you are unable to look past your own problems to see the greater picture. It is easy to slide into a sad state, pitying oneself and raging against the unfairness of it all, though at this point I'm so cynical that one would think that I am beyond pointless questions of "fairness", a very trite notion with no basis at all in reality. It is too easy to stop looking past one's own problems to take in the world around them, to slide into a gloom so pervasive that all else is blocked out. When that state of mind happens to describe myself, this video helps. One's own problems surely seem tiny in comparison to the vastness and grandeur of the Universe as science has begun to reveal. It is rather difficult to be sad about a minute problem when you realize the sheer scale of things. Enjoy. "The Known Universe" by the American Museum of Natural History

David Barton thinks slavery in the United States was alright. Or at least if it wasn't ok, this wasn't because slavery in itself is immoral, it is because the Southerners didn't conform more strictly to "biblical slavery," the rules and guidelines for slave-owning as laid out in the Bible. http://www.politicususa.com/en/david-barton%E2%80%99s-plan-for-biblical-slavery-for-america In fairness, the original article embedded in the link was not written by the uber-revisionist Barton, known for being a favorite of the far Right because he tells them the history that they want to hear, all patriotism and light with none of the flaws, but by Stephen McDowell. However, the article has remained on Barton's website since 2003, so one may reasonably assume that Barton endorses this viewpoint. This is an attempt to "rehabilitate" the Founding Fathers that goes beyond any reason. The author believes that many dismiss the Founders entirely because they espo...

Well, I suppose it's actually a darling little toddler at this point, but in reality this new field of "biology" (at least in the creationist mindset), was stillborn from the beginning. http://www.answersingenesis.org/articles/am/v3/n4/bara-what Baraminology attempts to present a biblical classification of species based on the original "kinds", thus assuming microevolution in the years since the original "creation." The author, Dr. Todd Charles Wood, asserts that he uses "sophisticated mathematical formulas" to determine the original kinds that Adam would have named. He believes that these formulas, whatever they are, have led him to a categorization close to that of the so-called original. Funny, it looks like science, sounds like science, but alas, it is not science! This purported "new field" is nothing but creationist apologetics wrapped up in the guise and rhetoric of science. It is a distortion, meaningless talk that is ...

What's most amusing about creationists is not the "big lie" approach that they often take, but the approach to propaganda that mingles some aspects of truth freely with lies. So it is with the "Creation Moment" extolling evidence for a tropical arctic as proof of the veracity of "Biblical geology." http://www.creationmoments.com/radio/transcripts/tropical-arctic The act of mixing truth with lies also makes them more dangerous than they normally are, for they can come off as educated and reasonable when they cite mainstream sources of information rather than any publication from among the collective back-patting of creationist circles. There really was  a tropical arctic, and in fact during the age of dinosaurs and the early age of mammals the earth was truly much hotter than it is today, what geologist Donald Prothero referred to as the "Greenhouse of the Dinosaurs." The article asserts that this means that earth's temperature was m...

I have a friend who routinely sends me emails from an organization that calls itself "Creation Moments." Each one begins with a Bible verse and ends with a prayer. I don't have a problem with that so much as I do the creationist nonsense that comes in between the two. Take, for example, a newer posting which I have retrieved from their website. http://www.creationmoments.com/radio/transcripts/simple-math-hard-questions In "Simple Math, Hard Questions," the anonymous author seems to cleverly "prove" that even operating under the uniformitarianist thinking of modern geology, the earth cannot be nearly as old as it is claimed to be. However good his math may be (and for the first example he doesn't provide the numbers for replication here), the thinking behind it is faulty at best. This person purports to say that given the volume of the continents and the constant rate of erosion, it should take 14 million years for everything to erode to sea lev...

Well, another satisfied customer of the Answers in Genesis propaganda wagon, dedicated to an unrelenting assault upon science until there are no educated, critical thinkers left to criticize the drivel that daily emanates from that mad sect.  http://yfrog.com/hscg9sgj If the link doesn't work, do let me know, but in short this is a screenshot of a comment posted on Ken Ham's page, provided to me by Daniel Jonas (thanks for keeping me informed on AiG antics). The woman credits Ham for the following statement made by her child. In church, he noted that no one in the child's program, when asked what they wanted to be when they grew up, wanted to be a scientist. "Is it because they are mostly liars?" the child asked. Thanks,  Ken, for discrediting the validity of ALL science in your quest to discredit the good science of evolution. Hopefully the child will come to some semblance of reason, but childhood indoctrination is a hard thing to break. Oh, and one more thi...

A little throwback this morning, I think. I've been working on a paper for my anthropology class, holding up certain aspects of the Flood geology "hypothesis" (and even that is being far too generous), and one of the sources I found that I thought would be useful is an older book called The Deluge Story in Stone . I picked it up as it purported to be a history of the idea of Flood geology, and indeed it was. But unfortunately it was written by creationists, so their agenda in penning this book (the author is Byron C. Nelson, first published in 1927, if you wanted to know) is in propagating the idea. Once I realized that the man writing the introduction to the newly-republished edition was none other than the late Henry Morris, grandfather of Flood geology's modern incarnation, everything went downhill from there. I believe the main point of what little I managed to read was the following; Flood geology, or the idea that the entire geologic column can be explained ...

And all of humanity suffered because of it. I finally finished reading Miranda Carter's work, George, Nicholas and Wilhelm: Three Royal Cousins and the Road to World War I, after having read it off and on since I bought it right after Thanksgiving. I read many books in between reading this one, finding it easy to take a break and go on to something else. That isn't to say that it wasn't a good book, but it was densely written, with copious amounts of details that are probably more than the average reader wanted to know. But you can't finish this book without the feeling that you've learned quite a lot and that you better understand the tangled roots that led to the tragedy of the First World War, one of the most unnecessary conflicts in all of human history. In an era marked by the hand of Queen Victoria, who erroneously believed that good relations between the royal families of Europe would bring peace, the three royal cousins, George V of England, Wilhelm II of ...

There is a rather odd little article from Answers in Genesis that tries to have it both ways; a literal creation but one that was created "ageless." http://www.answersingenesis.org/articles/am/v3/n4/mature-age The universe does not "look old" but is "mature" instead. Because, according to Ham, all of the dating techniques used in conventional science are wrong, they cannot be trusted to give an accurate reading of the past as they are "fallible." He asserts that creation scientists have "proven" repeatedly that the dating techniques are inaccurate. To this I would respond that, if "creation scientists", an oxymoron if there ever was one, had proof or truly good reason to assert that the dating techniques were wrong, then get it published in a reputable science journal rather than engaging in the collective back-scratching of Young-Earth Creationist publications. Science is a self-correcting mechanism; if a hypothesis or th...