Happy Birthday, World!

According to James Ussher, the world was created on October 23, 4004 BC.

So happy 6012th birthday, world!

Dinosaur Adventure Land Closed

This is old news, but alert reader Fez points out that Kent Hovind’s Backyard Swing-Set Of Delusion, Dinosaur Adventure Land, has closed its doors.

dinosaur adventure land

Our ability to minister as a creation theme park here in Pensacola, Florida has been recently impeded. On Thursday, July 28, 2009, a federal judge gave the United States Government permission to seize ministry property as a substitute for payment of fines (not tax related) imposed upon our founder, Dr. Kent Hovind. While we are trying to raise funds, if we fail to meet the Government’s requirements, we will have to forfeit the property. This would mean a temporary disappearance of Dinosaur Adventure Land. For information on how you can get involved, please visit:
http://www.drdino.com/legal.


If they’re “trying to raise funds”, why not raid the account in which Hovind kept the money for his $250,000 challenge. Because that money totally exists and everything, because a True Christian™ like Hovind wouldn’t lie, would he?

Awww! They Hurt Bill’s Feelings!

The Center for Inquiry is holding a blasphemy contest on the occasion of blasphemy day. So put your thinking caps on and come up with something that fits on a T-shirt, and also, in another time or place, would also get you arrested or killed for wearing said T-shirt.

What’s more amusing is that this contest has hurt Bill Dembski’s feelings and those of his sycophant, Denyse O’Leary.

He writes:

You’ve got to wonder what an organization that touts itself for critical thinking is thinking when it sponsors a BLASPHEMY CONTEST:

Um… how about an organization that believes that all ideas are worth examining critically, including the idea that there might not be any gods, or that even if there are, they might not be all they’re cracked up to be?

And then he gives up all right to complain about people misrepresenting IDC:

Since Darwin is their god, it would be interesting to submit to this contest true statements about Darwin’s less than divine attributes.

Besides the delicious schadenfreude, there’s also the irony that the commenters, by engaging in the usual fatwa envy, are most likely blaspheming Islam.

Okay, now get cracking on those contest entries! Remember: not blaspheming makes baby Jesus cry, and Buddha crave a cheeseburger.

Too bad the entries have to be text. Otherwise, I’d submit a photo of a statue of Mohammed made out of bacon.

The “You’re Both Equally Wrong” Fallacy

Adam Weishaupt left a
comment
in another thread, and I’m conceited enough to think my reply is worth
reposting.

You know you will never agree, right?
This discussion can be likened with this: Imagine that there are only two people left in the world. One of them can only speak chinese, and the other can only speak arabic. No matter how much they talk with each other they will never understand each other. That is simply because they do not understand each others language. It is really the same with atheists vs christians or creationists vs evolutionists; the evolutionists leave out the possibility of the existence of God, so they can not understand the “language” of the Christians. On the other hand, the Christians leave out the possibility of the “non-existence” of God, so they can not understand the language of the atheists. Still, atheists try to prove their theories using their own language, and the same goes for the Christians.

You seem to be wrong on just about every point.

For starters, even using your analogy, I think you underestimate people’s ability to understand each other. A Chinese speaker and an Arabic speaker trapped on a desert island would, I’m sure, quickly work out some way of understanding each other.

the evolutionists leave out the possibility of the existence of God, so they can not understand the “language” of the Christians.

This is manifestly untrue. Kenneth Miller, the author of Finding Darwin’s God is an evolutionary biologist, the author of one of the standard High School textbooks in biology, was a witness at the Dover trial for the pro-evolution side, and is also a devout Christian.

Francis Collins, Obama’s choice to head the NIH, used to be the head of the Human Genome Project, is by all accounts a very good scientist, has said that even if there weren’t a single fossil, the DNA evidence alone would be sufficient proof of evolution, is also an evangelical Christian, and quite a vocal one. In fact, his book The Language of God is subtitled A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief.

Hell, even in the ID camp, Michael Behe accepts common descent of humans with all other living creatures. I know this because I he told me personally when I sent him email about it.

It isn’t hard to find evolutionary biologists who are also Christians. You need to look around a bit more.

the evolutionists leave out the possibility of the existence of God

As shown above, this is patently untrue. And even if you meant to write “atheist” instead of “evolutionist”, you’d still be wrong. Read The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins, who is both an evolutionary biologist and a vocal atheist. In this book, which is all about atheism, he spends several pages making it quite clear that he does not exclude the possibility of a god’s existence.

I can’t think of a single atheist, either among the famous published writers or my friends and acquaintances, who categorically excludes the possibility that there might be a god out there.

You should also google “deconversion story” and read some people’s accounts of how and why they left their particular religion. You’ll find that in many, probably most cases, deconversion doesn’t happen overnight. It’s a long process that takes years. Often people give up each bit of faith only after a struggle.

Furthermore, most atheists, at least in the US, were raised religious and grew out of it. Many remember being believers quite well, so it’s not a question of never having thought the way a believer does.

On the other hand, the Christians leave out the possibility of the “non-existence” of God

Again, this is manifestly untrue. Every church I’ve ever seen has programs to help backsliders, help people strengthen their faith, ceremonies to help those who have stumbled in the faith to rejoin the flock, and the like. What does it mean to have “weak faith”, if not to admit the possibility that the god they were taught about doesn’t exist? In fact, the very existence of such programs and ceremonies tells me that even believers find it hard to believe in gods; that they want to believe, but often can’t manage to do so. After all, plumbers don’t have retreats to relearn to believe in water. Bankers don’t go to seminars to strengthen their belief in money. Yet theists apparently require these sorts of thing.

Or perhaps you’re saying that you, personally, are unwilling to admit even the possibility that there might not be any gods. That just means you’re closed-minded. You may want to work on that. It’s not a virtue.

(Thanks to
Eamon Knight
for the
title.)

Bill Dembski Gets A Paper Published

Huh. Looks like Bill Dembski got a paper published in IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man and Cybernetics, Part A: Systems and Humans, Volume 39 Issue 5, Sept. 2009.

I haven’t had a chance to read this yet, but here’s the abstract:

Abstract—Conservation of information theorems indicate that any search algorithm performs, on average, as well as random search without replacement unless it takes advantage of problem-specific information about the search target or the search-space structure. Combinatorics shows that even a mod- erately sized search requires problem-specific information to be successful. Computers, despite their speed in performing queries, are completely inadequate for resolving even moderately sized search problems without accurate information to guide them. We propose three measures to characterize the information required for successful search: 1) endogenous information, which measures the difficulty of finding a target using random search; 2) ex- ogenous information, which measures the difficulty that remains in finding a target once a search takes advantage of problem- specific information; and 3) active information, which, as the differ- ence between endogenous and exogenous information, measures the contribution of problem-specific information for successfully finding a target. This paper develops a methodology based on these information measures to gauge the effectiveness with which problem-specific information facilitates successful search. It then applies this methodology to various search tools widely used in evolutionary search.

From a quick glance, it looks like he’s still on his No Free Lunch Theorem kick. In the conclusion, the authors write:

To have integrity, search algorithms, particularly computer simulations of evolutionary search, should explicitly state as follows: 1) a numerical mea- sure of the difficulty of the problem to be solved, i.e., the endogenous information, and 2) a numerical measure of the amount of problem-specific information resident in the search algorithm, i.e., the active information.

which to me sounds like they think that people who use evolutionary algorithms are cheating by using a search method that performs well given the problem at hand.

In any case, I’m sure this paper will be bandied about as a sterling example of the research cdesign proponentsists are doing.

Update, Aug. 21: Mark Chu-Carroll has weighed in on this paper, and pretty much confirms my suspicion: at the core of the paper is a moderately-interesting idea — that it’s possible to quantify the amount of information in a search algorithm, i.e., how much it knows about the search space in order to produce quick results — along with some fluff that allows him to brag that he got a “peer-reviewed pro-ID article in mainstream […] literature“.

Kent Hovind on The Colbert Report

Kent Hovind gets a mention on Colbert’s “Yahweh Or No Way” segment (fast forward to 0:39 if you’re impatient):

The Colbert Report Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Yahweh or No Way – Dinosaur Adventure Land & Black Market Kidneys
www.colbertnation.com
http://media.mtvnservices.com/mgid:cms:item:comedycentral.com:240802
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor Meryl Streep

(Via Atheist Media.)

CreoZerg Rush!

For those who, like me, didn’t manage to make it to Ken Ham’s
Creation Hebrew Mythology “Museum”
for the
Student Secular Alliance‘s
Zerg rush,
you can read the raw twit log
here.

Some of the highlights are collected at
Attempts at Rational Behavior,
but I’m sure that more will follow.

I’m not sure who first twote that “Adam sinned so I could enjoy bacon”, but now I want that on a tee-shirt.

Local 12, a news station in Cincinnati, has a
brief story
about this, with nothing of real interest.

The MSM is obviously engaged in a coverup, since Google News doesn’t
show any reports of hundreds of baby-eating atheists raping and
looting their way through the Kentucky countryside. And Cephalopod
Überhauptmeister PZ Myers is
in on the conspiracy.

Update: 17:04: PixelFish’s LOLCreashun and Dino Haiku.

Who Says You Can’t Teach an Old Dog New Tricks?

If you don’t recognize the name John A. Davison, see here for the backstory. Basically, he has a history of not understanding the difference between posts and comments, and of starting blogs with one post and hundreds of comments.

So you understand why I was surprised to see that his new blog has a whole seven posts. Seven!

Then I realized that each post is about one topic, and the older ones have hundreds of comments.

In other words, he’s still confused. But this time, he’s confusing posts with categories.

But that’s okay. I guess I’ll be laughing out of the other side of my mouth when his lone paper on the Prescribed Evolutionary Hypothesis overturns 150 years of biological research.

PZ@GMU

Here’s the video of a talk PZ Myers gave at George Mason University last year, at an event organized by the GMU Rational Response Squad.

http://www.youtube.com/p/2CE5C13A27FEE16C&hl=en&fs=1

It’s possible that you might be able to catch a glimpse of me there.

(HT Shelley.)

Win Ben Stein’s Argument

Remember Expelled, the wretched movie starring Ben Stein
in which he argued that science — and evolution in particular
— causes things like the Holocaust?

Now, at BeliefNet, David Klinghoffer has an
article
in which he insinuates the same claim about von Brunn, the guy who
recently walked into the Holocaust museum downtown and started
shooting.

[Quoting von Brunn]:

[T]o the astonishment of the world, Chancellor Adolph Hitler, who emphasized genetics and the homogeneity of the Aryan race, led Germany to an amazing spiritual and economic recovery.

No, he doesn’t cite Darwin by name in the part of his book that’s
readable online — the first 6 of 12 chapters. But do you get the
general drift? And you want to tell me that ideas don’t have
consequences?

Must we go over this again? For one thing, an idea is not responsible
for those who believe in it. For another, Klinghoffer isn’t making an
argument against the truth of evolutionary ideas, only
against their usefulness.

For another thing, the reference to “genetics” is as connected to
evolution as it is to animal husbandry, an art that’s been around for
thousands of years. Von Brunn’s screeds against miscegenation are
rooted in ideas much, much older than Darwin: plain old-fashioned
racism, the idea that people outside of one’s clan/nation/whatever are
worse, and contact with them is a Bad Thing.

And finally, “is” does not imply “ought”. Science, the search for
explanations about how the physical universe works, can tell you that
if you do X, then Y will result. The question of whether Y
ought to happen is a separate one.

It’s true that if one were to kill people with certain alleles, that
the relative frequency of those alleles would decrease in the
population. But science does not answer the question, “Should
we go around killing people with genes we don’t like?”, any more than
the scientific fact that a person falling out of a 10th story window
onto pavement will die implies that one should go around
pushing people out of windows.

In
a follow-up post,
Klinghoffer asks,

If in his crazed manifesto he had somehow found support for his thinking not in evolution but in intelligent design, do you think we would have heard nothing about it from the media as in fact we’ve heard nothing (except from me) about his evolutionary thoughts? What if he had based his hate explicitly on Biblical literalist creationism? Or on Roman Catholicism? Or Evangelical Protestantism? Or Orthodox Judaism? Would that similarly have been hushed up?

Klinghoffer himself talks about “the role of evolutionary doctrine,
however distorted, in his rationale for racism”. So right off the bat,
we’re not talking about sound arguments one way or another. So yeah,
if von Brunn had said something like “The pope told me that Jews
killed God’s prophet Muhammad, so their descendants should be killed
for that”, then it would be unfair to blame his actions on
Catholicism.

However, we can contrast this with the case of George Tiller’s murder,
where a plausible rationale runs like this: “Abortion is murder.
Tiller performs abortions. Therefore, Tiller is a murderer. Killing
Tiller would prevent him from performing abortions. Therefore, one
murder would prevent countless others. Therefore, Tiller should be
killed.”

And indeed there’s been a lot of discussion about whether (or how
much) the “pro-life” movement is to blame for Tiller’s death.

But really, there’s a better way to answer Klinghoffer’s question: get
a representative sample of killers, find out how many of them use ID
or creationism or Catholicism or whatever to rationalize their
murders, and see how much attention the media paid to it.

I must give Klinghoffer points for condemning von Brunn as a sick
whackjob, which is more than I can say for the fucks at Stormfront.
When last looked, on the day of the shooting (I haven’t gone back
because I had to clean myself off with bleach and my eyes and
intestines are still burning), the general reaction was “He shouldn’t
have done that, because it’ll be incredibly bad PR for us.” Even the
pro-lifers had the decency to jump on George Tiller’s murderer with
“Dude! You don’t go around killing people!”