Recently in Creationism Category

A favorite creationist mantra these days, and one you especially hear from young earthers, is that creationists and scientists both have the same facts, they just look at them differently. To laypeople that may sound reasonable. The handful of guys at Answers in Genesis look at the Grand Canyon and say it was formed by a flood about 4400 years ago when God got all pissed off at humans. The 24,000 members of the Geological Society of America (and virtually every member of the literally dozens of geological organizations listed at their web site*) look at the Grand Canyon and say it was formed over millions of years by natural processes that continue today.

Same facts; different conclusions. Some of us laypeople often hear these two positions and see them as equally valid positions on either side of a debate. But some of us scratch the surface, and it doesn’t take a very deep scratch to see a significant difference. Scientists do science and creationists don’t.

Oh no! It’s Granville Sewell again. At Uncommon Descent he has posted his 2^nd law of thermodynamics argument against evolution, yet again. I have twice pointed out that (here and here) that, if true, it would prove that plants can’t grow.

Is Sewell’s argument unanswerable? No, because long before I made those posts, Sewell’s argument had been thoroughly demolished by Jason Rosenhouse and by Mark Perakh. Game over, even if you don’t know that plants can grow.

But Granville Sewell’s argument over at Uncommon Descent is unanswerable. At least there … because he has the comments turned off.

Mt. Vernon, Ohio, as most PT readers know, has been the site of three years of legal maneuvering over John Freshwater. As a consequence of that, several creationists are running for school board here. There are three vacancies with six candidates, including two incumbents who voted to terminate Freshwater. One candidate is Steve Kelly, an official with the local Salvation Army.

Kelly is obviously a creationist. In an email response to a questioner, he wrote

I do not believe that the opening chapters of the book of Genesis belong in a science classroom. I do, however, believe that there is considerable scientific evidence that challenges the assumptions of the old-earth/evolutionary model. There is also significant scientific evidence for which the theory of an intelligent designer seems to fit the evidence better than random chance over a lengthy period of time. (I will be happy to cite some examples if you so desire.)

Our students deserve to have all theories of the origin of the world and species presented, along with evidence for and against each theory. (Quotes from religious texts do not constitute “evidence”.) All presentations should be consistent with the Scientific Method. Students can then decide for themselves which evidence seems more convincing. This is teaching our children to be independent thinkers rather than just absorbers of official dogma.

That said, the School Board has no right to abridge or abrogate any curricular requirements set by the State of Ohio. Where requirements exist, I will , if elected, follow the law.

That last sentence is all well and good, but the preceding two paragraphs are real problematic. So another person pressed Kelly about those “examples.” In response Kelly wrote

Here is a link to a page at Conservapedia.com. While I do not necessarily endorse everything on that website, this is a helpful compilation of counterexamples to an old earth. See all of the references at the bottom of the page for source material. > > http://www.conservapedia.com/Counte[…]an_Old_Earth

Gack! So I was forced to respond to Kelly’s claim in an open letter first published on Facebook (Parts 2-4 are in the comments to Part 1: Facebook posting limits and formatting regularly defeats me). I’ll reproduce that open letter below the fold with very light editing to correct a couple of typos and more substantial editing to correct an error.

This is a report by Gaythia Weis, a member of the board of Colorado Citizens for Science, about the enlightened position taken by Aims Community College, Greeley, Colorado, when confronted with a talk by a creationist and, more specifically, concern about the publicity for that talk. The talk, which was sponsored by a recognized student organization, was originally and incorrectly advertised as if it were a college-sponsored event. Briefly, Aims (and Ms. Weis) recognized that the speaker had a legal right to speak, but the college wisely dissociated itself from the speech. In short, according to Ms. Weis, the college administration “got it.” Herewith, Ms. Weis’s essay:

I’d like to encourage other Panda’s Thumb readers to tune up their eyes and ears and be watchful for the following sort of situation, in which creationists are apparently trying to insert their views into our public community college education system. Besides protecting the teaching of science, we need to be mindful of our constitutional rights to freedom of speech and religion. Still, a firm line can be drawn between the rights of a student group to meet on campus, and the presentation of that group’s views as if the viewpoint is supported by the public institution itself. The following example shows how a small bit of constructive intervention can have positive effects.

Kelly Kohls, the nutritionist and school board member in Springboro, Ohio, who advocated teaching creationism in that district, has revised her position. She now says that she

…wants parents of students in public schools to have options if they want their children to learn about theories like intelligent design.

and that

… parents should have the choice of using state funds to send their children to other schools if they want to learn about creationism and intelligent design.

A potential route, she thinks, is school vouchers, where state money is paid to parents to send their children to private, often sectarian, schools.

Read more in the Dayton Daily News. One parent quoted there has exactly the right idea:

Tina Gangl, who has a daughter in Springboro elementary school and a son at the nearby Catholic Bishop Fenwick High School, said public schools should not teach religion.

“We need to educate our children about science,” Gangl said, “If I want to teach my religion to my kids I’ll send them to a religious school. There is no place for it in public school.”

A reader, Dan Phelps, tells me, “Looks like the ‘fiscal conservative’ school board member is going to cost his district a lot of money.” See here, and stay tuned to a local newspaper near you.

… because then I could go to Minicon 46 and attend this bit of programming:

Creation Museum Slideshow - 8:30 PM Saturday
John Scalzi shares photos and stories from his visit to “the very best monument to an enormous load of horseshit that you could possibly ever hope to see.” Hilarity ensues.
John Scalzi, Rob Callahan moderating

Here’s Scalzi’s original report on the visit. One memorable extract:

Here’s how to understand the Creation Museum:

Imagine, if you will, a load of horseshit. And we’re not talking just your average load of horseshit; no, we’re talking colossal load of horsehit. An epic load of horseshit. The kind of load of horseshit that has accreted over decades and has developed its own sort of ecosystem, from the flyblown chunks at the perimeter, down into the heated and decomposing center, generating explosive levels of methane as bacteria feast merrily on vintage, liquified crap. This is a Herculean load of horseshit, friends, the likes of which has not been seen since the days of Augeas.

…

And this is, in sum, the Creation Museum. $27 million has purchased the very best monument to an enormous load of horseshit that you could possibly ever hope to see.

Just so.

Hat tip to Scalzi his own self

I had the displeasure of personally experiencing Kan Ham’s vitriol, applied to scientists at the time, way back in 1995, when he brought his creation seminar to Albuquerque. Time has passed, but Ham is still dispensing the vitriol. What’s changed is that now, he’s railing against his fellow Creationists!

The Lexington (Ky.) Herald-Leader reported on March 24^th that

Ken Ham, the man behind the Creation Museum and the future Ark Encounter amusement park, has been disinvited from a homeschool convention in Cincinnati next week because he made “ungodly, and mean-spirited” comments about another speaker, according to the convention’s organizers.

Ham also will be excluded from future conventions, according to a statement by Brennan Dean of Great Homeschool Conventions.

“The board believes that Ken’s public criticism of the convention itself and other speakers at our convention require him to surrender the spiritual privilege of addressing our homeschool audience,” Dean said in the statement.

…

At issue are criticisms by Ham of Peter Enns of the Biologos Foundation, who has said the fall of Adam and Eve can be construed as a symbolic story of Israel’s beginnings, rather than a literal description of human beginnings.

On his blog and in other statements, Ham takes issue with this view and Enns’ homeschool curriculum.

“In fact,” Ham wrote in a recent blog post, “what he teaches about Genesis is not just compromising Genesis with evolution, it is outright liberal theology that totally undermines the authority of the Word of God.” …

On the Web: Answers in Genesis Explains the Rift

Discuss.

According to NCSE, in honor of Darwin Day, 2011, the documentary movie Kansas vs. Darwin is available free on the web through March 14 – that is, for the 30 days following Darwin’s birthday.

Thanks to Karen Spivey for the tip!

A high-school student’s activity spearheading a grass-roots movement to repeal Louisiana’s inaptly named Louisiana Science Education Act is “a profile in (evolutionary) courage,” according to Michael Zimmerman, writing in the Huffington Post.

According to Professor Zimmerman, the student, Zack Kopplin, has already succeeded in influencing the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education to adopt a new biology textbook, in the face of opposition from the powerful Louisiana Family Forum. More recently, State Senator Karen Carter Peterson announced her intention to introduce legislation repealing the LSEA, which promotes the use of “supplemental materials” in the classroom. Supplemental materials is a code term for literature that promotes creationism and attacks evolution.

Wesley Elsberry reported briefly on Mr. Kopplin’s campaign here. Please do not rehash that discussion on this thread.

Instead, please help make sure that Professor Zimmerman’s article gets the widest possible readership.

A few weeks ago I blogged on the Denisovans, a new group of human relatives discovered through genetic analysis of two bones from Denisova in Siberia (Reich et al. 2010, Nature 468:1053). Fascinatingly, the Denisovans seem to have made about a 5% contribution to the genome of living Melanesians.

I mentioned that this new discovery did not seem compatible with a young-earth creationist framework, and awaited with interest a creationist explanation of the findings. Answers In Genesis (AIG) has now commented on the Denisovans. No explanation, merely a one-sentence handwaving solution:

Answers in Genesis Wrote:

But the most interesting twist (from the evolutionary perspective) is that modern humans from New Guinea have Denisovan DNA. While an evolutionary perspective interprets this as meaning that Guineans’ ancestors “interbred” with Denisovans, a biblical perspective interprets this as simply meaning that the descendants of one of the people groups leaving Babel eventually settled in what is now New Guinea.

It’s not clear what this even means. After all, their ‘biblical perspective’ had exactly the same interpretation (that the descendants of a group leaving Babel settled in New Guinea) even before we knew about the Denisovan genetic contribution. This ‘explanation’ fails to address a key point: how did the Denisovan genes get into Melanesians, if not by interbreeding with Denisovans?

And the above scenario doesn’t resolve any of the other problems with a young-earth framework.

Georgia Purdom is a functionary–a “scientist”–at Ken Ham’s Answers in Genesis. She has a Ph.D. in molecular genetics from the Ohio State University and was for a time on the faculty at Mt. Vernon Nazarene University in Ohio. (Interestingly, she left MVNU after 6 years, about the time when tenure decisions are made in most institutions. I know nothing specific, but it’s always fun to speculate.) In a recent blog post commenting on the Freshwater affair she wrote this:

I teach Sunday school for first through third grade, and over the next few weeks we’ll be discussing dinosaurs, radiometric dating methods, natural selection, and mutations. I teach them that what they learn in public school in regard to historical science concerning these ideas is not the truth.

That’s child abuse of a very high order, worse even than Freshwater’s because the children are so much younger. Those kids are screwed.

In 1981 Kenneth Miller and YEC Henry Morris (founder of the Institute for Creation Research) debated whether “… the theory of evolution is superior to the theory of special creation as an explanation for all the scientific evidence related to origins.” Greg Laden has videos of it, as does NCSE’s Youtube channel (audio is from a tape of the debate with visuals added by NCSE staffer Steve Newton), and now NCSE has posted a transcript of the audio here.

Question for commenters: What arguments, if any, do contemporary ID proponents offer that Morris does not? (When commenting on specifics from the debate please give a video number (of four) and an approximate time in the video or transcript so others can locate it,)

The Mount Vernon News reported today that the probate court in Licking County, Ohio, has approved the terms of the settlement of Doe v. Mt. Vernon BOE, et al.. The sole remaining defendant had been John Freshwater, the Board having settled more than a year ago. According to the News’ story, the settlement terms give the Dennis family $25,000 in attorney fees and $150,000 each to Jenifer and Stephen Dennis as well as $150,000 in an annuity for Zachary, all of it from the Board’s insurance company (Freshwater was sued as an employee of the Board).

The only remaining proceeding still to be finished is the referee’s recommendation based on the administrative hearing, with Board action on the recommendation to follow. The referee reportedly hopes to finish his recommendation by the end of 2010.

Marcus Ross is a young-earth creationist who was recently awarded a Ph.D. in vertebrate paleontology by the University of Rhode Island. He now teaches at Liberty University, which (IIRC, according to the acknowledgments in his dissertation) partly supported his doctoral work. Ross claims that he can both be a YEC, using his credential to bolster his teaching of Flood geology, and also work honestly in the framework of orthodox geology simply by switching “paradigms” according to (audience) context.

Ross presents work at standard geological conferences, and Joe Meert, a geologist at the University of Florida and a long-time creationism watcher, recently attended a presentation by Ross on correlating Cretaceous ammonite fossils in order to more firmly date the mosasaur fossils that were the topic of his dissertation research.

At the end of the presentation Meert asked Ross how he squared his YEC beliefs with a presentation that dated fossils to millions of years ago. According to Meert, Ross answered, “My talk had nothing to do with a global flood or a 6000 year old earth so your question is irrelevant.” When Meert pressed, Ross replied (Meert’s paraphrase)

Ok, for everyone in the audience who doesn’t know it, yes I am a young earth creationist who believes the Earth is 6000 years old and a global flood took place. However, I am not speaking as a young earth creationist here. When I speak at young earth creationist meetings I use a different framework than when I speak at the Geological Society of America meeting.

What struck me was Meert’s comment that several people felt sorry for Ross for being pushed to acknowledge his YEC beliefs and wondered why Meert was so harsh with him. Meert’s response is perfect:

Marcus Ross is just one of many two-faced creationists and I’m going to call them out on this hypocrisy any chance I get.

Read Meert’s whole post as well as Meert’s earlier post on Ross. I hope the student he mentions who went on a field trip led by Ross and two other YEC geologists does a guest post on it.

I have not seen the new movie, “Waiting for Superman,” but I have read a handful of articles about it, most notably those I detail in the Appendix, and I strongly suspect that it is a puff piece that blames the teachers for the supposed failure of the American education system and recommends charter schools as a panacea. Speaking of puff pieces and charter schools reminded me that one of our faithful readers directed me to this very amateurish article in the Fort Collins Coloradoan. The article reads like advertising copy for the Liberty Common School, a charter school in Fort Collins, Colorado. As nearly as I can tell, most charter schools are in effect private schools operated with public funds; the Liberty Common School is a private religious school operated with public funds.

I do not want to discuss charter schools in general, but I will discuss Liberty Common’s science policy, which reads like a Compendium of Creationist Canards. Under the heading, Principles for Teaching Science, they write,

According to a short article in the Orlando Sentinel, a textbook publisher has agreed to remove 2 pages that include creationist material from editions of a high school textbook sold in Florida. Apparently, the textbook contains a box, or sidebar, that makes a number of errors and also states some incorrect creationist claims (please excuse me if that phrase is redundant). I do not know the history, but it looks as though Joe Wolf, the president of Florida Citizens for Science, alerted the Florida Department of Education, which in turn took action. The National Center for Science Education reports,

I consider myself pretty well-educated about creationism, and of course I know it’s all silly, but I pride myself on usually being able to understand what argument the creationists are trying to make, even when they are doing it poorly. But I need help with this one.

Via the Discovery Institute Blog/Misinformation Service, I came across this post from Hunter, which is his Monday post. I also read Hunter’s Sunday post and got confused.

Starting on Sunday, we have: Cornelius Hunter, Sunday, July 25, 2010, speaking about shared errors in pseudogenes:

This claim, that such shared errors indicate, or demonstrate, or reveal common ancestry, is the result of an implicit truth claim which does not, and cannot, come from science. It is the claim that evolution and only evolution can explain such evidences. It is the equivalent of what is known as an IF-AND-ONLY-IF claim.

Science makes IF-THEN statements (if evolution is true, then species with recent common ancestors should have similarities between them). IF-AND-ONLY-IF statements (if and only if evolution is true, then species with recent common ancestors should have similarities between them) cannot be known from science. [italics original]

OK, so here he’s saying, I guess, that science can only make if-then statements, and test hypotheses on that basis. Science cannot formally say that X is the ONLY possible explanation of Y, because, I suppose, there always might be some other explanation out there.

I’ve said in several venues that should the theocrats win, the next day blood will flow down the aisles and under the pews (one hopes only metaphorically, though that’s by no means guaranteed). We see that metaphor scenario playing out in a number of venues in contemporary Christianity. Ken Ham rails against theistic evolution, arguing that its acceptance of an old earth/universe erodes the authority of scripture, and now Albert Mohler, President of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary (William Dembski’s former employer), all but accuses Francis Collins’ BioLogos Forum of apostasy (or so Darrell Falk interprets it) on much the same grounds, while endorsing the venerable appearance of age notion to account for the data of physics, geology, paleontology, and evolutionary biology.

More below the fold

Via Phil Plait

The Institute for Creation Research, which in 2007 moved from California to Texas, has been seeking accreditation in Texas to award a Master’s degree in science education. In 2008 the Texas Higher Education Coordination Board denied ICR’s request for accreditation, and ICR brought federal suit. The National Center for Science Education now reports that ICR’s request to temporarily award the degree while seeking permanent accreditation has been turned down by the court.

ICR’s graduate school is currently accredited by TRACS, the Transnational Association of Christian Colleges and Schools, which IIRC was originally founded by a group including Henry Morris, also the founder of ICR, to provide a cloak of faux respectability for institutions like ICR. As NCSE notes, TRACS

… requires candidate institutions to affirm a list of Biblical Foundations, including “the divine work of non-evolutionary creation including persons in God’s image.”

See here for more (pdf), especially pp20ff on “Biblical Foundations”. TRACS is not recognized by Texas as an accrediting agency.

In the ruling denying ICR temporary permission to award the degree, the court wrote

“It appears that although the Court has twice required Plaintiff to re-plead and set forth a short and plain statement of the relief requested, Plaintiff is entirely unable to file a complaint which is not overly verbose, disjointed, incoherent, maundering, and full of irrelevant information” (p. 12).

Kind of like most of their stuff, hm? It puts me in mind of R. Kelly Hamilton’s style in the Freshwater hearing: Toss everything into the pot and hope that something is edible.