The Questioning Librarian

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...