November 25, 2004

• Hm, I was just looking at that the other day. Was it linked in a comment somewhere? It's a very disturbing website. Oh yes.
• These people are morons.
• These people aren't morons. They simply don't understand the ideas and rules that bound sound science. I've learnt that fighting with creationists is about as useful as bashing my head into the desk infront of me. Creationists base their everything they believe in on a philosophy. It's ideas, they believe in ideas. Science on the otherhand follows the scientific method. We create theories that can be repeated and tested. You can't test a creationists theories, and when you do they say whatever you used to disprove them is absolute crap. For example there's a giant debate on the age of the earth. Geologists age the earth with Sr/Rb and Sm/Nd. We find the oldest rocks to be around 4.1 Ga (billion years ago). Creationists don't accept that number because they claim flaws in the whole radioactive isotope dating system. I could go on but I realize that is post is already getting long. Creationists aren't morons, they're simply ignorant and unwilling to learn the methods we geologists use to do our work. That said now I'm late for my Structural Geology lab...
• Creationists aren't morons, they're simply ignorant hee. hee. hee.
• .
• So, how is it that creationalists manage to study geology without putting their religious beliefs into question? I cant see teaching geology without reference to talking about the length of time involved in the earth being made to be what it is today.
• One creationist who is not a moron is John Morris, the ICR's president. Neither is he ignorant of science. He is a clever, amoral liar, who evidently believes that bearing false witness is justified to increase the number of young earth creationists. Consider this article of his, in which he argues that the existence of carbon 14 in the atmosphere proves that the earth is less than 30,000 years old. He actually says that new C14 is made in the upper atmosphere by cosmic rays hitting nitrogen atoms, but then ends by claiming that if the earth were older than 30k years, there would be no C14 left. Actually, forgetting to cover his tracks like that is fairly moronic. If only he were that ingenuous all the time.
• I still think they're morons.
• alcarilinque, you would be amazed at the contortions they get themselves into. As long as they only have to explain away one thing at a time, they can think up some story or other which is good enough to satisfy an uncritical mind. It's quite good fun to get them to reconcile all the stories into a coherent whole - with biblical justifications, of course. Just remember - the speed of light used to be a whole lot faster. Putting a much higher value for the speed of light into the relevant equation decreases radioactive half lives, so radioactive decay used to be quicker, making things look far older than they 'really' are. I didn't make that up. Moron or storytelling genius?
• alcarilinque: Also bear in mind that many creationists are young earth creationists. The Catholic Church does not insist the universe is only 6000 years old, and neither do mainstream flavours of Judaism. The whole young earth creationist position isn't even based off of anything written literally in the Bible - it's all guesswork based on lengths of generations and the idea that all recorded history between creation and Christ is present in the Bible. Which doesn't explain China. Still, if you do run into a Christian creationist, you could ask them which of the creation myths in Genesis they believe is literally true.
• I usually ask fundoids how God measured a day before he made the sun & moon, which he made on the fourth day. This has always produced lots of interesting answers.
• (an aside: I taught high school music in Santee, CA for two years, where the ICR is located. Three clowns from the megachurch that sponsors the ICR were elected to the school board just before I was hired, and went nuts demoting administrators and otherwise being assholes. Fun times. Santee is a weird town... one of my best friends, who grew up there, call it "Santucky."
• alcarilinque... That's actually a really good question. From my experience (which has been 4 years at the UofA), profs are pretty touchy about the subject. However it's normally only a problem for first year classes. By the time you're doing igneous petrology, the class has been weeded out. I only know of one real "creationist" left in my classes. I actually respect the kid too, he doesn't agree that the world is 4 billion years old, but he knows what to write on the exams. He's just trying to get a geology degree so he can work in the oil patch. Ask him about his beliefs and he'll say that when you're studying well logs, the age of the earth isn't important. And he's pretty much right. Once you get past the age of the earth, there's a hell of a lot of interesting stuff to learn about. Most of my classes start with the old disclaimer "I don't care what you think, just be able to reproduce what I say". Again, it's a pretty touchy subject, but lucky for us there aren't any students who stand up and agrue with the profs. But that's just been my experience. Ask a geology prof about creationism and I bet most of them just shy away. If you don't have anything nice to say it's better to just pay lip service to them and wait for them to go away. It's better to be more professional than them, when they come looking for a fight they end up getting a geologist who isn't willing to fight with them. You believe whatever you want. I believe in science. Therein lays the differences, take them or leave them.
• The problem, tempest, is that the feeling isn't reciprocal. Young Earth creationists are, collectively, part of movements who most certainly aren't interested in letting you be guided by reason if they can help it.
• "aren't interested in letting you be guided by reason" And this is why they don't get invited to conferences, don't get published in reputable journals and aren't considered part of the scientific community. Logic is a earth-scientists best-friend (right next to occam's razor), as long as young earth creationists continue to shun logic like a calcutta whore, I will continue to group them in with tin-foil hat fringe groups.
• I usually ask fundoids how God measured a day before he made the sun & moon, which he made on the fourth day. This has always produced lots of interesting answers. What are you, a trial lawyer?
• "how is it that creationalists manage to study geology without putting their religious beliefs into question?" Doublethink. Seriously. The same way they can enjoy electricity from a coal plant (or a nuclear power plant) without believing in the Carboniferous era or nuclear physics findings on radioactive decay. If absolutely forced to confront contradictions, they first come up with the equivalent of epicycles: explanations that kind of hang together but which outrageously violate Occam's razor (and may themselves be inconsistent). Then they get huffy, and either forgive you or fight you - but they never, ever change their minds. They're not unique in that, of course.
• I don't get it... their faculty list has people who got real degrees from real universities. How can these people stand being around a place like this?
• Sure, tempest, but the way to do an end-run around that is to, say, knobble teaching actual science in classrooms. Or cripple certain forms of research. Or even bar it outright. Any of that sounding familiar?
• If absolutely forced to confront contradictions, they first come up with the equivalent of epicycles: explanations that kind of hang together but which outrageously violate Occam's razor (and may themselves be inconsistent). In my experience, the phrase "second law of thermodynamics" gets indiscriminately tossed around in these exchanges.
• Mmmm. "ACCREDITATION The Institute for Creation Research Graduate School is accredited by the Transnational Association of Christian Colleges and Schools (TRACS), an agency which itself is recognized and approved by the U.S. Department of Education." Am I wrong, or can anyone get "accredited" in the US? Doesn't that just mean the Dept of Education knows of them? Isn't there some other term that real schools in the US use? And isn't that how US diploma mills get by, by misleading people about what "accreditation" means?
• Depressed science monkeys might be cheered up by Pandas, by the way.
• I usually ask fundoids how God measured a day before he made the sun & moon, which he made on the fourth day. This has always produced lots of interesting answers. My friend tells me that was St Augustine's argument, when he wrote against a literal interpretation of Genesis.
• Crippling what is taught in the classroom (I'm assuming you meant high school and such) is funny because real universities aren't going to let you in if you don't have the knowledge needed to be an useful member of the university. Let the creationists push their agenda. Let them ban evolution from the classroom. That means the kids who question bible literal teachings will be the kids that go out and look for alternative answers to their questions. Ultimately those will be the ones that universities actually want. If they want to cripple research they'll only be crippling research around them. They don't control the whole world. Example: Just because the American government is against stem cell research doesn't mean that stem cell research isn't going to happen. It just means that the best minds in stem cell research move to the UK, or somewhere else. There's a whole big wide world outside their safety bubble. I'm willing to move if I can keep doing the research that interests me.
• St Augustine was an interesting fellow, & no moron, from what I have read. I hadn't known that particular fact tho, thankyou, jb.
• Huh. All that time and money to try and prove that the bible is true. As a former church-goer (forced in my teens), I learned that one is simply supposed to take the bible on faith, and not worry about "proving" it. What I don't get is why these fundamentalists feel the need to use scientific language at all. Do they think that there are "fence sitters" out there whom they will convince? Most religious types I've met couldn't care less about science. But I suppose the folks who run this school think it makes them look more "legit" in the eyes of some people.
• What I don't get is why these fundamentalists feel the need to use scientific language at all. If creationism is accepted as science it must be taught in science class as well as or instead of evolution. If it isn't, it belongs - if anywhere - in a religious studies class.
• If creationism is not confirmed as a science, then Christianity becomes just another religion. The only way to differentiate the religion and give it more legitimacy than the others is to make it a scientific fact, rather than just a faith-based religion.

• They don't control the whole world. Example: Just because the American government is against stem cell research doesn't mean that stem cell research isn't going to happen.

  No. It means the US government gets together with sundry Islamic governments, client states, and the like, and tries to push through international bans on it. And, as it happens, the people who control the most effective army and largest nuclear arsenal in the world do have an ability to emphasise their opinions, no matter how absurd, unfair, or wrong-headed they may be.
• dreadnought: faculty? feh. the head of the ICR "biology" program might have a Ph.D. from harvard, but the last paper he had published (according to his CV) was in 1977. that goes a long way towards telling you how good his science is. and from looking at the course descriptions, looks like every "biology" course in the masters program is set up something like "these are the lies evolutionary biologists tell and how to answer them when they say you're full of shit". essentially a few semesters of evolutionary straw men to knock down with your trusty bible, while looking at real data and pretending it means something other than what it looks like (the "speciation" course for example exclusively uses computer modeling? hell, i've seen computers modeling my character killing evil goblins in a dungeon. you can make computers model anything you want.)