CMI furious that Christians are against YECism

I have probably mentioned before but I'm on the CMI (Creation Ministries International) mailing list, for shits and giggles. Through this I discovered today that they're really mad because "Homeschooling parents demand evolutionary textbooks". Good on them. I'm not so optimistic that this indicates in any way a strong trend away from creationism, as CMI seem to think it is, but at least it's a start.

I'm not going to link to the article, because CMI never link to anything they disagree with. Fuck them.

We Are Not So Smart

We Homo sapiens often like to champion ourselves as the most intelligent species. In fact by all known metrics of intelligence, we are. However as whole, our species doesn't act intelligent. Take Creationism for example. It is a sad indictment of the intelligence of our species when educated people who in other aspects of life are 'smart', yet still manage to accept something so vapid, so devoid of truth of which all evidence points to the contrary as true. This phenomena itself is clearly evidence of evolution. No intelligent creator would craft a brain that so easily deludes itself into believing things as stupid as creationism.

This doesn't mean I think all creationists are stupid though, they simply have a faulty brain. We all do. I once was a creationist because I was led to believe it as a child by adults who didn't know any better. When I learned more about it I rejected it, but for a number of years, I looked at the evidence and rejected it, opting instead for a position of faith. Some people may never end up giving up cretinous beliefs and it is sad to realise this. Humanity is not as smart as we delude ourselves to believe. Sometimes, some people are smart at some things, but in general, we are not so smart.

Why I Rarely Post About Creationism

For the few regular readers that I have, you may or may not have noticed that lately I very rarely post about creationism. The main reason for this is because the debate is well and truly over and it has been for a long, long time. Creationists (I include ID as a sub-category of creationism) should know this, and I'd wager that most professional creationists do realise it. People like Answers in Genesis, Creation Ministries International, Creation Science Evangelism, The Discovery Institute, Institute for Creation Research and any others you can think of are actively putting out information that they must know is false. They are after all the deceitful demagogues that I mentioned in my 'Two Types of Creationist' post back in 2010.

If on the odd chance they are really just willfully ignorant and delusional, what can we do about that? We can't go around locking them up or sending them into looney bins can we? The scientific battle is over, but the social war will never end. I hate to be so pessimistic, but I fear that as long as humanity is rife with shit-heads like the aforementioned creationist groups whose main goal is to undermine science with a religious agenda we will never stamp out the pestilence that is creationism.

We will never get rid of magical thinking, faulty reasoning and conspiratorial tendencies. These mis-firings of our thinking faculties are hard wired into humanity.

This is not to say that we do nothing, I still make efforts in my personal life to combat creationism. A few of the Christians that I know (that number dwindles by the year too) are still creationists. I don't try and force them to accept evolution, but I do try and convey to them how serious the evidence for evolution really is, within the context of an amicable conversation. I have a few books and online resources that I try to pass along to them, but they're rarely, if ever interested. There seems to be comfort in delusion. They're more content thinking wrong-headed beliefs are true than actually learning something new.

If there is some 'miracle' cure for the plague of creationism, I'd love to know about it but until then, I think I'll just carry on as I have been, pessimistic about the intellectual honesty of humankind, and continuing to learn new things myself every day.

Why the Christian God Would be Stupid if He Existed - Part 1

I decided to start a new post series. I hope you enjoy it.

Creation

There are many aspects of 'creation' that make me think if the Christian God did exist, he would have to be classified as an idiot. The first of these being evidence. If he had created everything, he left no evidence of his activity. Painters generally sign their paintings and manufacturers generally put their logo on their products but for some reason Yahweh felt no need to leave behind any trace. This puts us homo sapiens in a strange predicament, we live in a universe that appears to us as if there is no god, everything we observe happens as a result of unguided natural processes so if the Christian God existed and created everything he would be an idiot based on this alone.

The second aspect of 'creation' that would qualify any prospective creator as incompetent are the many examples of un-intelligent design, I'll list just a few here to demonstrate my point. We breathe through the same orifice we eat with. Our lower backs are poorly constructed for walking upright resulting in widespread back problems. The birth canal is not large enough for fully developed human babies to be born prematurely compared to other mammals, leaving the mother and the baby vulnerable. Many more examples can be found but 3 should suffice for my purposes.

Related to the other two facets is evolution. Evolution is quite possibly the most inefficient way in which a god could create life. Inefficiency isn't one of the attributes you hear Christians worshiping Yahweh for so I assume that was a mistake, which would make him stupid.

If the Christian God did in fact create everything as creationism describes he shot himself in the foot by making all the evidence point towards evolution, which would make him stupid, unless he really wanted to deceive humanity, which would make him malicious. So there you have it, by looking at 'creation' I conclude that if the Christian god existed, he would be stupid or malicious.

Part 2

More Evidence That Creationists Are Lying Sacks of Shit

Since I'm subscribed to CMI's newsletter I regularly get infuriating items in my inbox. This particular example from today is no exception. Some time ago, Creation Ministries International started a "Question Evolution" campaign to encourage Christians to reject science. They produced a small document with 15 questions for evolutionists to answer. Understandably, the questions were stupid, unbelievably so.

Here are the first 3

1. How did life with specifications for hundreds of proteins originate just by chemistry without intelligent design?
2. How did the DNA code originate? 
3. How could copying errors (mutations) create 3 billion letters of DNA instructions to change a microbe into a microbiologist? 

 Yes, the bolded code was part of the original. The questions demonstrate a complete ignorance of biological processes. Anyway, the 15 questions are not the focus of this post, their responses to so-called objections are what I really want to talk about.

In their newsletter, they claimed that "atheists have attempted to answer the points we raised ... But the answers fall short as we show in our rebuttal."

Here are the so-called-objections to their 15 questions.

Question 1:
Answer 1: Abiogenesis is not relevant to the discussion of evolution—it is a separate topic (this has been a very common claim).
Answer 2: Life/non-life isn’t a dichotomy. Rather, there are many examples of ‘proto-life’ such as viruses, prions, etc.
Answer 3: Some experiments show that the early earth’s atmosphere was optimal for life.

Really? No one pointed out to them that their question is a complete strawman? No scientist that works on abiogenesis would EVER say that the first 'life' was complex, and there is no way that it would have required hundreds of proteins. This just shows that CMI are not interested in honest science, but prefer to peddle blatant lies to their all too willing flock of sheep who gobble that bullshit up like it was chocolate mousse.

Question 2:
Answer 1: This is not an evolution question, because evolution starts with an already-reproducing organism.
Answer 2: Originally, life used RNA instead of DNA to encode information.
Answer 3: It is disingenuous to argue from the current DNA code, because the original code would have been much simpler.
Answer 4: The question of how the modern code emerged from these early predecessors is evolution itself. Random deviations in the nucleic acid structure would change the by-product produced, if the by-product was more efficient at replicating, it would overwhelm less efficient codes. This gradual change in the complexity of the underlying code is useful in explaining many aspects of biological theory. Such as why RNA is used as an intermediate between DNA and protein synthesis.
Answer 5: The words ‘code’ and ‘language’ are only metaphors when applied to the DNA code, and they have no reality outside our own mental constructs. In reality, the whole thing is dependent on chemical properties.
Answer 6: It is easy to create amino acids and the building blocks for RNA by running an electrical charge through mineral-rich water.

At least some of these touch on the key issue. Unsurprisingly they didn't really respond to any of them in any capacity with things like "Secular scientists refer to the nucleobases of DNA as ‘letters’, so it’s hardly original to us." This just ignores the metaphor criticism altogether. To answer 3 they say "This is most disingenuous. So many evolutionists have appealed to the common DNA code to “prove” common ancestry." This to me shows an intentional misunderstanding of the response, either that or they are absolutely brain-dead (which is a very real possibility!).

Question 3:
Answer 1: If only eight mutations per year were passed on for three billion years, that gives 3 gigabytes of information.
Answer 2: Computer models have shown how mutations can lead to large-scale change.
Answer 3: Using words such as ‘accidental’ and ‘mistakes’ is misleading and misses the point entirely.

As with the first question, the objections are relevant, but 2/3 miss the fundamental problem. CMI, and their fans do not understand what a mutation is, and they perpetuate the myth that all mutations are harmful and only remove information. They aren't interested in understanding what mutations really are and what they really do, just like they aren't interested in doing any actual science. All they are interested in doing is lying for Jesus. If they seriously wanted to try and answer objections to their idiotic questions, they would have responded to something like RationalWiki's article. Their actions speak louder than words, they find a handful of criticisms that while valid, don't cut to the heart of the issue. These issues are complex scientific issues and to understand an objection to the flawed misunderstandings that creationists have takes time. Creationists, the dishonest, disingenuous, ignorant lying sacks of shit that they are, simply do not want to put the effort in to learn real, honest science.

Here's a link to RationalWiki's article again, because it's good.

The End of Creationism?

I really wonder how long we’ll have to put up with creationism and creationists? Perhaps today is a good day to discuss this issue. It’s the 12th of September here, but as of writing it is still the 11th in the USA, the 10th anniversary of the most heinous terrorist act of this generation. Regardless of whether it was primarily motivated by religious zealotry or not (I’m not going to get into that debate), it certainly inspired a religious backlash, a resurgence of fervour for fundamentalist Christianity.

As you probably know, the “creation-evolution” debate is not scientific in nature, it is cultural. The issue isn’t happening in the lab, or between scientists, but in the public square. Creationists aim at children, and the scientifically illiterate. They target the easily bamboozled and those who won’t go and check their facts. Once their plague has infected someone it is very difficult to cure. Many even go through the motions of higher education, sometimes even in the scientific realm, and still come out a science-denying baboon. It has been said that the typical “Creation Scientist” has a doctorate in Chemistry, Computer Science or Engineering. Not to badmouth those fields at all, but they don’t exactly resemble biology. In the case of Engineering and Computer Science, they are fields that deal almost exclusively with man-made, purposefully designed objects. So it is easy to see where their misplaced expertise lies, take an understanding of synthetic codes and design, alongside a religious and ideological agenda (perhaps from childhood indoctrination) and you have a cookie-cutter [dis]”reputable” Creation Scientist.

I don’t think it is possible (or necessary) to try to get rid of religion as a whole, and it may even be a difficult task to tone down, or get rid of fundamentalism, especially when we periodically see “revivals” of it, like this past decade as a reaction to Islamic fundamentalism. If fundamentalism is to be done away with, it must come from within the religion. Christians have to take out their trash. Muslims have to take out their trash. It is up to the religious establishments to clean shop. Though influence from outside the fold does happen (I am one who left from outside influence), it simply cannot give the results that we wish it to. If moderate and liberal Christians want to curb fundamentalism, they have to up their game. I am more than happy, as are thousands of other “new atheists” to offer our criticisms, but we can only do so much.

Take home message: To moderate and liberal believers, your shit stinks, for both our sakes, flush it! Please!

Evolution is Cumulative

Say it with me: "Cumulative Evolution."

One of the most common objections you see around against evolution is the idea that “this couldn’t have evolved by chance!” It has been rebutted so often and in so many different mediums (journals, books, blogs, videos, etc.) that one would think that it need not be restated. However this flagrant misunderstanding is repeated on a daily basis by Creatards and IDiots. I didn’t realise that it was such a difficult concept to grasp!

Cumulative evolution doesn’t just apply to irreducible complexity style misunderstanding, but also to the borderline brain-dead objection you get from only the most uneducated imbeciles: “things only reproduce after their own kind”. Of course an offspring is related to its parents, no one is saying otherwise. In fact if an offspring was an entirely different species (ignoring hybrids) to its parents, evolution would be falsified! However, an offspring is not identical to either of its parents, and frequently contains genetic mutations — which are often silent (no change in phenotype) — that were not present in either of the parents. Mutation along with recombination, and selection pressures, or simply genetic drift leads to diversified populations over many generations. The absolute failure to grasp the implications of these mechanisms —possibly due to wilful ignorance or dishonesty — results in these idiotic objections being taken as something with credibility.

Analogies are often given to try and explain this basic principle of accumulation of mutations and my favourite one has always been the construction of a building. Obviously a building of any kind is too complex to just arrive in one single step in its final form. This is not how buildings are made though; they are built by a step by step process, one piece at a time. This is comparable to the evolution of a species; it does not differentiate itself from its ancestor species in a single step evolutionary event. The change is slow and cumulative, one or a small number of mutation(s) per generation. Evolution is not monkeys giving birth to humans. Evolution is not cats appearing randomly out of nowhere. Evolution is cumulative change. Period. Creationists would be doing themselves a favour if they decided to understand the subject that they claim to not believe in.

Never Again Will I Debate a Creationist

As of yesterday I've decided that I will no longer engage with Creationists on any science subject. I wasted several hours of my day yesterday in an online debate with a Creatard that I know through University. I'll give the outline of how it went down. This is going to be long, and if you're not interested in hearing about it I suggest you stop now.
-He made the initial post claiming that evolutionary thinking is a cult.
-I responded saying that it's an established scientific fact, and that you would encounter the same resistance if you went around questioning gravity or germ theory.
-He made some irrelevant points relating to the cult idea, then claimed that evolutionists never give evidence.
-I responded appropriately and compiled a short list of evidence (probably about 1.5 A4 pages worth).
-He admitted to not reading any of it and asked me to pick one example to discuss.
-After some deliberation we settled on discussing Endogenous Retroviruses (ERVs)

This is where it started

-He made a whole bunch of unsupported claims in an almost incoherent post, and then linked to two scientific papers he claimed backed up his assertions.
-I read the papers (which he hadn't done), and informed him that one of them wasn't actually about ERVs, the title of the paper specifically said 'ERV-like Elements'. Even if the paper had been about ordinary ERVs, the article did not support what he was saying. The other paper (which he only read the abstract of I think) was not understood by him. I tried to explain but he kept saying the same things.
-He came back making claims about what the articles had said, but they hadn't said those things.
-He then linked to an article about the discovery of ERVs, claiming that "ERV infections that are identical accross numerous species - which pretty much kills the idea of taxonomical classification using infections".
-When I called him out on using the word 'identical' when the article had talked about 'closely related' ERVs in different species and explained that the terms are not interchangeable, he went to a massive rant telling me I didn't understand ERVs. In this barely coherent rant he strawmanned the simple criticism against him into oblivion. It is difficult to explain just how misguided his grandstanding was.
-During his rant he referred back to his arguments that the first two articles had supposedly proved, then told me to concede the debate. His words: "conceed that ERV infections are *NOT* taxonomical constants Good on your for enterin the debate though! most people wont"

At this point I expressed my dissatisfaction with his incoherent replies, his arrogance, his strawmanning, his misappropriation of words and his condescension.

-I replied to his rant point for point (where there was one)
-He did not reply to what I had said but merely babbled some (again) barely coherent nonsense in which he used the same arguments as he had initially. Numerous times in his textual diarrhoea he insulted my intelligence, told me I was unscientific, biased and talking on a subject that I knew nothing about, which he said displayed "extreme arrogance".
-I once again responded to him point by point, explaining why his postings were incoherent, and where he had misused words like 'phylogeny', 'transcription', 'taxonomy'. I also explained how his arguments confused the evolution of the viruses with the evolution of the host, and their various phylogenies. I asked him for sources for his very specific claims (he gave numbers!). I finished by criticising his attitude again.
-He responded purely with insults, telling me to get a grip, that I'm a dick, that I got "spanked ideological", that I'm not smarter, that I'm biased and that I was being emotional. He had the courtesy to be mildly incoherent too.

At this point I was mad. I flamed him back and tried to explain why his tactics were so dishonest. I told him that he hadn't responded to a single one of my arguments, while I had responded point for point to every single one of his.

-He then comes back telling me that he gave me 59 comments worth of points to critique (hint: that was the total number of comments and half of them were mine). He then told me that it was my fault that I couldn't understand him half the time. He said that I made arguments that I hadn't actually made and told me I didn't understand the science behind ERVs. He then said he knows more about biology and that he would make me "look like a punk". What threw me over the edge and made me quit the discussion and vow to never discuss science with Creatards again was this:

"you have not made a single point. Tell me what you don't understand - and then we will try and move forward"

I simply responded with a good old "Fuck you" and left.

Oh the Stupidity, it HURTS!

While browsing random videos on YouTube, I came across what is perhaps the most retarded creationist video I've ever seen. I found myself staring at the video wide-eyed, frequently shouting "WHAT!?!?!?!" at the screen. The sheer insanity of it made me think that it was a Poe video, but upon investigation it seems legitimate. The video comes from a channel named ppsimmons. The content of the video requires no rebuttal, as anyone with a brain can easily see how utterly absurd the video is.

The video takes some clips from a documentary about evolution, and has written commentary over it. They attempt to criticise the documentary for using incorrect grammar, when in fact there was no mistake made. They criticise the visual representation of the same animal gradually evolving as if that's what evolution actually is. Basically, they're absolute fucking morons, here is the video.

Creationists and Lactose Intolerance

I was jokingly referred to a CMI article about lactose intolerance by a friend so I obligingly went to have a look at it. What I saw there just blew my mind. I had to read many lines several times saying to myself “WHAAAAAAAAAT?????” They would jump from accusing 'evolutionists' of equivocating selection and evolution while simultaneously parading their own blatant ignorance of the topic. A notable example of this is their idiotic assertion that if lactose intolerance was the original state (a misguided term to begin with evolutionary speaking) then being able to drink milk disproves evolution. It’s just so mind-numbingly stupid that I cannot fathom how they can function as human beings.

On top of that inanity, they go on to proudly state that lactose intolerance lines up perfectly with biblical creationism and not evolution. They say that the ability to drink milk as an adult is a negative mutation and correlates with ‘the Fall’. I've dealt with the issue of the fall before with parasitic organisms, and I can’t help but face-palm when I hear that argument.

Where it gets really awful is where they quote someone saying that this forced a change in thinking as if that was a bad thing, and claim that evolution had to make an about face. This shows so clearly that they simply just do not know what the fuck they’re talking about and they certainly do not understand how science works. We change our minds about things all the time, because we make predictions all the time, and when the observations do not match up exactly with the prediction, we adjust the theory to accommodate this new fact. This is a strength of the scientific method, not a weakness. We develop falsifiable theories that make predictions, completely the opposite of what creationists do. They make unfalsifiable claims or false claims that have no predictive value, or make predictions that have already been falsified. When the evidence doesn’t align with their doctrine, instead of adjusting that, they have to twist and distort the evidence, as they have done with this issue.

Mutations increase Genetic Information.

I really can’t understand the minds of creationists when they say things like “mutations only remove information” when it is clear they have no idea what mutations really are. There are several basic types of mutation, only one of which could really be said to 'remove' information (deletions), but even then, if the deletion causes a frame-shift then it has the potential to make a completely different protein (generally harmful, but a small chance for a beneficial mutation). The other mutation types either add, rearrange or replace DNA.

Not only does their claim parade their ignorance of how mutations actually manifest, they seem to ignore or overlook the fact that beneficial mutations, that allow organisms to perform functions that they previously could not do have been observed. Every time a bacteria develops a resistance to a particular drug, it is because its DNA mutated. It was not resistant to this drug before. This is something new. It is a new function, or an extension of a function the organism already possessed. Either way you look at it, it is an increase in functionality and 'information'.

Not only have we observed bacteria becoming resistant to antibiotics, we have observed other beneficial mutations in bacteria, such as in Richard Lenski's long-term evolution experiment, and in the case of Nylonase (an example of a beneficial frame-shift mutation). In both of these cases, the bacteria developed the ability to digest a new substance and use it for fuel that it previously was unable to digest. This is not a loss of information, it is an increase.

Not only do they deny this solid evidence, they have to invent bullshit about there being limits to the variation that can arise from mutation. There is no biochemical mechanism preventing an organism from accumulating mutations to the point that would be considered another species. In fact we have even observed speciation. The only thing we haven’t observed is a change from a major group of animals to another, and we can demonstrate quite clearly that this happened in the past. Through genetic analysis of similar species (and even distantly related species) we can determine approximately how long ago the common ancestor was between them, through the amount of genetic material they have in common.

Two Types of Creationist

There are two main types of creationist, but no doubt there are some outliers that don't fit within these categories.

Type One: The Ignorant Idiot

The best examples of this type of creationist are people like Ray Comfort, Kirk Cameron, NephilimFree etc. These people sincerely believe that the earth is 6,000 years old, that evolution is a myth, that scientists are part of an enormous atheistic conspiracy and that they are doing god's work. The best approach with people like this in my experience is to minimize the amount of condescending ridicule in your dialogue and to try and present facts and evidence as clearly and openly as possible. Take the time to explain how scientific theories are derived and how creationism is not scientific but is actually purely religious. When they try to preach the gospel to you in the middle of a discussion about science (as Ray Comfort loves to do), don't engage them on this issue, but bring the discussion back around to science. A lot of these types of people, despite years of indoctrination will eventually see reason, don't give up on them.

Type Two: The Deceitful Demagogue

Ok, Demagogue isn't really the right word to use here, but I wanted to continue the alliteration so...
These are the people who make money by pedalling creationist nonsense (or at least try to). They may or may not believe everything they teach but either way there is a lot of doublethink and cognitive dissonance either way. Many of these people have gone to great lengths to achieve qualifications in scientific disciplines, only to then go and work for propaganda-mills like AnswersinGenesis or Creation Ministries International. They publish magazines, build museums theme parks, produce films, arrange speaking tours and sell merchandise, all for profit. I haven't had any experience discussing anything with these people, nor have I seen any debates with any of them. They are heavily invested (perhaps both emotionally and financially) in their "ministry" and may never change their mind (in the public eye anyway). Type two creationists are entirely dependent on the existence of type one, because the ignorant religious masses are the ones who buy their magazines, videos, movies, go to their events and pay to go to their museums theme parks. If type one creationists fade into non-existence, then type two creationists will eventually follow once the money dries up.

Not Getting Through to the Propaganda Mill

I just thought I'd have a quick look at the AiG website to find something to write about. One article jumped out at me, it was called "Are They Teaching the Truth in Biology Class?".

The large majority of the article was about how scientific progress is made, and old ideas are sometimes overthrown by new ones. I'm not going to address this part as it was fairly innocuous.

What I really wanted to see was their latest and greatest arguments against evolution. What surprised me when I read it, is that they really didn't have a single argument against it, they just kept saying things like "[Evolution] is getting harder to defend." and "this view is getting more difficult to defend in a logically coherent fashion." They didn't present a single piece of evidence, or even try to construct an argument, they simply tried to explain the mechanisms evolution works by and claim that science is going to prove it wrong. I specifically remember at the beginning of the article they wrote that "Science has become somewhat of an idol in our culture." yet here they are waving science as a magic wand trying to claim that it will prove evolution wrong.

AnswersinGenesis are an absolute joke, as with all creationists, there is an enormous wealth of evidence for evolution, and it's available at a single click of a button, seriously, click here. If creationists wish to remain pig-ignorant it's their onus, but whenever they say something stupid I'll continue to call them morons, or if they're not telling the truth I'll call them liars.

Ussher

No, nothing to do with the singer.
I had always thought of the work of Bishop Ussher trying to add up the dates from the old testament to come up with a date for the creation of the world was a bit of a joke. It just seems so obviously wrong to me. Apparently the folks at CMI don't feel the same way. They're still promoting this 17th century hack-job of a history book.

Link

Anti-Evolution TV Documentary Review

Before watching the 'documentary' I wrote down a list of things that I expected they would say, and ticked them off as they were mentioned. I wrote down 14 preconceptions, and 13 of them were confirmed rather strongly, they included things like 'cyclical change' and 'limit to variation', 'mutations can not produce new information', 'rapid deposition', 'Darwin was racist' and so on.

The title screen had a voice over that was asking the question "does his (Darwin) science still make sense?" but beside that, the Creationist slant was mostly absent in the beginning. It wasn't too long into the film that they started saying that there is a debate over the age of the earth today, and the first hints of 'flood geology' started appearing, with references to drowning animals and rapid deposition of sediments to create fossils. There was a recurring theme  throughout that "as science progresses, intriguing new possibilities are emerging that run contrary to Darwin's understanding", they were constantly trying to undermine his achievements by saying that we shouldn't judge him by the standards of modern science.

They were obsessed to the point of fanaticism over the influence the geologist Charles Lyell had on Darwin, and attempted refutations of uniformitarianism probably account for at least 10% of the content. They were presenting Darwin as a dogmatic uniformitarianist, and that he was "convinced Lyell was right", while getting Young-Earth geologists to spout nonsensical propaganda about single floods carving out entire valleys with constant references to catastrophic geological events like earthquakes.

The first mention of creationism itself came probably about halfway through the film, when they were trying to discredit speciation. They said that natural selection was conceived of by a creationist, and had one of their lackeys say that "nature has been created to modify itself". They had more propaganda about Darwin himself, implying that he was indoctrinated into evolution by the work of his grandfather and into "deep time" and uniformitarianism by reading Lyell's books, often saying things like "he had preconceived ideas" and that "he was convinced" to give the impression that Darwin was stubborn and unwilling to accept evidence to the contrary. In fact they even specifically said that he had observed evidence that contradicted his theories, but as usual, this went completely uncited.

In the last segment they were really trying to hit home the creationist view, with a false emphasis on the 'debate' over evolution, having creationists say things like the human body has a "perfect design". They framed Darwin as having an agenda saying that he just wanted to remove the bible from science. They were emphasising the "bedrock of the truth of Genesis" and spent several minutes just attacking scientific naturalism, portraying it as dogmatic and unscientific, which is rather ironic, coming from religious creationists. They mentioned that "Darwin's book avoided ... the origin of life itself" and they never once mentioned a single piece of evidence for evolution, and never showed his work in a favourable light at all. They had creationists frequently making claims that there is no evidence for evolution, which made it apparent that this film was simply a propaganda piece. They ended with someone saying that "Darwins theory is not about science it is about god".

I give this film 0/10, they were trying to hide their creationist view at the start, and gradually introduced it over the course, and focussed much more on undermining Darwin's methodology and character than on presenting his work. This just goes to show that CMI and creationists in general are bunch of disingenuous liars.

Contorted Fossils Prove... Nothing.

In the CMI Newsletter that I received a few days ago they were mainly taking aim at Stephen Hawking's new book, they didn't really address anything he said, but merely attacked his character and motivation, while asserting that his ideas require 'faith'. Not really much of an argument against anything if you ask me.

Anyway, back on topic.
They linked to one of their recent articles called "Death Throes", the main idea in the article is that since many fossils are found in contorted positions, with the neck bent back, or with twisted limbs proves that all fossils were formed in a global flood.
Sorry, it proves nothing of the kind. It is worthy to note that the picture they used was quite possibly the most extreme example they could find, in fact since the picture they used was from wikipedia, I'll post it here too.

As you can see, the neck is bent back all the way so that the spine is starting to become detached, and the head is touching the lower back. I'm no palaeontologist, but I think it's safe to say that this creature died from a broken neck. This could have happened any number of ways I can think of three: from falling, in a landslide or in a flood. The creationist's method seems to be: finding an example of something that could possibly have been formed in a flood, attribute it to their flood-myth and then walk away with a smile declaring victory.

I thought that I would take the effort to look up this claim on the Talk Origins list of creationist claims, and I found it there.
This is what TalkOrigins has to say.

1. As carcasses dry, ligaments contract and distort the body (Weber 1980). Also, dead animals are often disturbed by scavengers and/or water currents before their remains become buried. This can account for the contorted positions.
   
2. Some fossils do form by rapid burial, but these indicate only local catastrophes, such as landslides of a river bank. 

 I thought it was quite interesting that the journal that they referenced refuting CMI's claim came from 1980. So this piece of creationist propaganda was refuted three decades ago, and is refutable by common people. I can't seem to think of a good justification for creationist lies.

Anti-Evolution TV Documentary

I was just looking through the TV listings for the week and saw something on the Christian TV channel 'Shine TV' called 'The Voyage That Shook the World', it's about Darwin's voyage on the HMS Beagle from (I assume) a cretinist perspective. I programmed it in to record on Thursday, so I'll sit there with a notebook and write down every lie and deception they make. I'll either make a blog post about it on Thursday or Friday.


UPDATE:

It turns out the 'Documentary' is sponsored by CMI. On the website for the film, their 'Digging Deeper' section gives a link to Creation.com. Also, CMI are showing the trailer for the film on their own website.

On top of that, 2/3 of all the reviews of the film on IMDB, are giving praise to the film and a 10-star-rating were submitted within a one-week period, the majority of them being submitted on the same day (26th August 2010) from either New Zealand or Australia. It is quite obvious that a Creationist or Church group made a concerted effort to sway the ratings of the film. Once I publish the review of the film on my blog, I encourage all of you to give your own review of it on IMDB, along with the 1-star rating it deserves for being a lying piece of creationist propaganda.

Comic: Evolution Debate

This comic encapsulates the dishonesty of creationists so well.

From UC Berkeley

Parasites and Creationism

I signed up for the Creation Ministries International email newsletter the other day, so I'll be checking out their latest and greatest arguments for a young earth all the time.
In the first email I received from them, the main article they linked to was about parasites and how they fit into creationism. I'll just go through this article and see what I can find.

Firstly they talk about how the flatworms of the genus Schistosoma have "a bizarre and complex life-cycle which defies an evolutionary explanation." So straight away we have an argument from incredulity.. Uhh I meant to say argument from complexity. They are basically saying "Look how complicated it all is! GOD DID IT!" which is quite frankly an awful argument. They can't conceive of an evolutionary mechanism, therefore in their mind, creationism automatically wins. Sorry, that isn't the way science works.

Their next play was predictable, they assert that "The straightforward, biblical answer is that these evils did not exist in the original creation." Parasites (and all other bad creatures) apparently didn't exist until after Adam and Steve sinned. With this argument they take aim at other Christians and theistic evolutionists who "accept the secular belief in millions of years", saying that since death and disease and parasites exist before sin in this view of the world, that Young Earth Creationism must be right! Oh boy, I've really picked a great article to pee on haven't I?

Next is the explanation for the origin of parasites, and it is comedic gold. I'm just going to quote them. My comments are in red, bold and underlined square brackets.

"Parasites must have been benign and beneficial in their original form. ... But when Adam and Eve sinned [HAH!], things began to go wrong. These once-harmless creatures degenerated [evolved?], and became parasitic and harmful ...

Perhaps some became parasitic as a result of mutations [evolved?]...

Other kinds of genetic change may have been involved too [evolution?]. For example, microbes can swap genes  [and evolve?]...

In many cases, however, the life-cycle of the parasite is so complex that new genetic information may have been needed [evolved?]. Mutations do not provide new genetic information [WRONG]; so the information may have been there from the beginning. However, it was in a ‘switched off’ mode before the Fall [HAH!], and was not ‘switched on’ until after the Fall. God could have included this genetic information because of his foreknowledge that Adam and Eve would disobey him. "

They're so clever that they're committing post hoc fallacies with events that never happened.

Finally, they mention Noah's Ark, and try to explain the existence of parasites in the context of it. They propose the typical creationist hyper-evolution post-flood. All parasites in their mind have evolved from a few different parasites into the millions of species of parasitic organisms we have today, in just 4000 years. It blows my mind how much cognitive dissonance there is in the mind of a Young Earth Creationist.

Gotta Give AiG Some Credit For This

I just logged into the Answers in Genesis website to see what nonsense they were peddling today and I came across this article about the creationist argument 'If humans evolved from apes, why are there still apes today'. To my surprise, AiG actually did a good job of explaining why this is a retarded argument, and why creationists should not use it.

Then I went back to their homepage and saw something about their creation 'museum' and I was suddenly brought back to reality. I can't really give them much credit for debunking something a child can understand (and probably debunk just as well).