We’ve looked at The Coral Ridge Hour before. The program seems to encapsulate fundiedom more than many other pray-TV shows, so we’ll probably examine a few more of them in the months ahead.

The Coral Ridge Hour stars now-wormfood D. James Kennedy (DJK), who was one of the more extreme fundies. He’s the guy who gave us Darwin’s Deadly Legacy, which blamed Nazism on Darwin. Just like L. Ron Hubbard is still writing books years after his death, DJK is still making TV shows. His ministry is taking old sermons and packaging them into new shows. The shows consist of a 15-minute DJK rerun, then a 10-minute newsmagazine-style exposé of some horrible affront to Christianity (usually atheism or evolution).

Fearfully and Wonderfully Made

The show opens with DJK’s daughter, Jennifer Kennedy Cassidy, who knows a cushy job sponging off of her father’s legacy when she sees one. She says:

[M]y dad realized early on that science had been hijacked by unproven atheistic philosophy. In this timely message, he shows how all of creation cries out the truth that in the beginning God created the heavens and the Earth.

We then cut to old footage of DJK. This sermon is called “Fearfully and Wonderfully Made”. He says he wants to tell us about a scientific discovery so monumental that it rivals all of the great discoveries of the past, yet almost nobody has heard of it! Suppression! It must be suppression! I’ll bet those evil atheistic scientists who run the liberal media are to blame! Thankfully, we have DJK to tell us the story:

But something happened on the way to the 20th century. And that is the entire scientific enterprise was hijacked in the middle of the 19th. Of course, I am referring to Darwin’s theory of evolution. And the whole scientific enterprise has been hijacked into a naturalistic or materialistic view of the world. “Naturalism” means there’s nothing in the universe but nature; there’s nothing supernatural. “Materialism” believes that there’s nothing in the world but matter.

He then tells us that some of the recent discoveries in molecular biology are astounding. He tells us that Michael Behe has made some amazing discoveries. He then parrots a bunch of Behe’s irreducible complexity nonsense. Therefore, molecular biology proves God’s existence!

Here’s a question for the Discovery Institute, Access Research Network, or any of those other “academic freedom fighters” out there: If “intelligent design” isn’t religious and isn’t creationism, then why is a religious guy (DJK) using it to “prove” creation?

Freedom to Impose Religion

After DJK’s forgettable sermon, they next show us a video report about Darwin’s thugs (the ACLU) and the Dover creationism trial.

Dr. Norman Geisler, author of Creation and the Courts, starts us off:

Evolution is the kingpin of atheism. If evolution is disproven, atheism is disproven, cuz they don’t have any other explanation.

According to Dr. Geisler, atheists apparently know that there is a god, but as long as they have evolution to cling to, they don’t have to admit that. It’s a good thing I have Dr. Geisler here to tell me what I believe.

Frank Manion (some shyster stooge from Pat Robertson’s anti-ACLU group called American Center for Law and Justice) says:

[The Dover school board] didn’t mandate the teaching of intelligent design in biology class. What they said was there are criticisms of evolution from a scientific standpoint, one of which is something called intelligent design…

BUZZZZZZ!!!! Loser!! Oh, Manion contradicts himself in the same sentence! What a moron! Intelligent Design isn’t science. It’s not even scientific! It’s entirely religious, with a thin veneer of scientific buzzwords painted on.

…and if you’d like to read more about this, there’s a book in the library that we have provided that you can read.

Yes, the book was Of Pandas and People a religious creationism book. God damn these people are stupid! I guess when they only talk among themselves, nobody notices. Does a town consisting entirely of morons have a village idiot?

Next, we get to listen to Dr. George Grant, author of Trial and Error: The American Civil Liberties Union and Its Impact on Your Family:

The ACLU has a stake in the argument over Darwinism, simply because the ACLU has a very distinctive religious and political agenda, rooted in a revolutionary worldview that comes from Darwinism. The whole intent of the ACLU is to change our society, to make it into something new, something that the old Christian foundations of America could never allow.

Cool! A secret agenda! I bet they’re all Freemasons, too!

Finally, they give us [M]Ann Coulter. As if this program didn’t lack enough credibility:

Einstein would not be allowed to teach in a school today, because he referred to God.

Two things are wrong with this sentence. The first is that old lie that Einstein was a theist, at least in the sense that fundies understand it. This has been debunked. Second, notice how [s]he’s implying that the mere belief in God is enough to disqualify somebody from teaching. That’s a massive persecution complex [s]he has there.

To have, you know, these hacks like Eugenie Scott come in and say “Oh that’s not real science. Unless you keep God out, it’s not real science.” It’s preposterous.

What’s preposterous is to have a hack like Ann Coulter pass judgment on Eugenie Scott’s credentials. That’s like Charlie the Hamster saying Luciano Pavarotti can’t sing.

There are a few crackpots out there who think we never went to the moon. I have identified two factors at play here. I call them the Technical Limit of Belief (TLB) and the Social Limit of Belief (SLB). When you cross both lines, you have a reality denier.

Getting to the moon was a tremendous technical hurdle. Some people think we weren’t up to the task. It’s beyond their comprehension that we humans were actually clever enough to surmount the massive scientific and engineering challenges. That’s the Technical Limit of Belief that their minds can’t cross.

You also have to remember that the moon landings were right around (slightly before, actually) the time of Watergate.

For you young saplings out there, you probably can’t comprehend just how demoralized the country was at that point. That also coincided with our humiliating defeat in Iraq Vietnam (sorry, I sometimes type the wrong synonym). Inflation was raging. There was an Arab oil embargo, so you couldn’t buy gas. Being an American at that point just didn’t have the same uplifting feeling that it did at the end of WWII or the 1950s. People had had all of the optimism and hope beaten out of them. In that climate, being able to do something amazing like going to the freakin’ moon!! might have seemed out of place when measured against all of the other failures that were the Nixon era.

It was very easy to believe in a government conspiracy. After all, Watergate was a real conspiracy, and it was a big one. Nothing was as it seemed back then. You couldn’t trust the government, so believing the government when it said we went to the moon was beyond the Social Limit of Belief for some people.

When you cross somebody’s TLB and SLB, you create a denier of reality.

Global Warming

But what about deniers of other realities? I’m guessing that in every case, you’ll find both a TLB and an SLB at work. Interestingly, as I look at some of these cases, it’s the Social Limit of Belief that’s driving the denialism, and they’re merely using their Technical Limit of Belief as the excuse.

Take global warming for example. There are at least two types of deniers here, with a fair amount of overlap. In one camp are the economic and political conservatives. They like things to remain the same, because they’ve benefitted financially or politically. If society changes its behavior to fight global warming, their gravy train is threatened. They have a stake in global warming not being true. That stake is their SLB. Also, it is mostly liberals who are campaigning for aggressive measures against global warming. This also puts off conservatives, so that’s a second SLB for them. I was in the audience when staunch libertarian Penn Jillette said that he doubted global warming because Al Gore claimed it was real. Penn announced to the world what his SLB is.

Another camp is the religious and social conservatives. I’ve been having difficulty figuring out why these people insist that global warming isn’t real. The only explanation I have is that if the liberals say it’s true, then it must be false! I think by conceding global warming, they will have to go along with the liberal programs to combat it. They can’t let the liberals have that power. They might use it to push their other agendas as well. So for these people, giving in to the liberals is their SLB.

For both camps, then, the TLB is a mere afterthought. The social ramifications of global warming being real are too awful to contemplate, so the science must be wrong. It has to be. They can’t cross that SLB, so they paint a TLB line on the ground and refuse to cross it.

Evolution

The evolution deniers are all in one camp. They’re religious ultra-conservatives. They believe that the Bible is true. They don’t want to live in a world that doesn’t fit that blueprint. They pretend that this is a Christian country founded upon the Ten Commandments. They pretend that morality is externally defined by a deity and handed down from on high. Living in a world where those things aren’t true is way too scary for them. That is their Social Limit of Belief. In order to make the SLB hold up, they decide that the science must be wrong. It doesn’t matter how much evidence you show them or how much you try to educate them. They cannot allow that information into their brain. They cannot cross that TLB, because that would make their SLB, and their whole safe worldview, collapse.

Woo Hoo!

What about believers of “woo”, or all of the crazy anti-science things like astrology, homeopathy, dowsing, ESP, etc.? There’s probably a variety of explanations here.

For some, poor scientific knowledge and critical thinking skills mean that their Technical Limit of Belief is very close indeed.

Other people make decisions intuitively or emotionally, and don’t consider the logical side of things so much. There is nothing wrong with this! That’s just the way their brains are wired. But the result is that their TLB will be fairly close. It’s not so much a limit of belief so much as a place they just don’t visit often.

On the social side of things, consider medical scams (such as anything that uses the word “detoxification”!). Some people have had bad experiences with real medicine. As a result, they’ll say things such as “doctors don’t know anything” or “everything is controlled by the drug companies”. They don’t like the medical establishment and refuse to go there. That’s their SLB.

Or for another example, think of the paranormal. Ghosts, angels, “spirit guides”, etc. are appealing to many folks. They like the idea of a world that has those things in it. You can’t debunk a ghost photograph to those people. They want ghostly realms to be real, so crossing into the skeptical realm isn’t a place they’re willing to go. That is their SLB.

Conclusion

I suspect that if we explore this idea further, we’ll find that in every case of reality denialism, there are both Technical and Social Limits of Belief. One might weigh heavier than the other, and in some cases one is just there as a convenient rationalization for the other, but I think that you will always find both.

If you want to combat a particular reality denialism, you need to identify both the Technical Limit of Belief and the Social Limit of Belief that are at play. Find out which is dominant and focus your tactics against that one. If both are equally responsible for the belief, then you need to have tactics to fight both.

I’m leaving for TAM 6 in a couple of days, so I won’t be able to post much this week. I’ll cheat by posting a couple of great videos.

The first one was recommended by Sarah. It’s called “Noah’s Ark and the Cheetah”. It’s made by DonExodus2, who has a lot of other great videos that you should check out. In this video, we see how the lack of genetic diversity in the cheetah disproves Noah’s Ark.

(YouTube page is here)

Next we have a video by one of my old favorites, cdk007. This one is the last of a five-part series called “Why Young-Earth Creationists Must Deny Gravity”. If you enjoy it, you should look up the other four.

(YouTube page is here)

The latest Cectic is out. Be sure to visit the Cectic website for the finest in science comics.

Creatards frequently like to drop by this site for a friendly chat. If you are inclined to extend the classic BoF hospitality to them, you might find yourself in a light discussion of trivial matters.

To assist in your enjoyment, the Watcher recently posted an article about debating tactics. It’s an excellent introduction that is worth reading. He also links to a good discussion of logical fallacies.

Phil Plait has a good writeup on some recent space news. He writes that the Murchison meteorite:

…which fell on Australia in 1969, has been found to contain purines and pyrimidines, which are crucial to a large number of biological molecules like DNA, RNA, and ATP….
…
Now the good part: scientists studying the Murchison meteorite have determined that the purines and pyrimidines — specifically, uracil and xanthine — have a non-terrestrial origin. In other words, the molecules in this meteorite, so crucial for life, were actually formed in outer space and fell to Earth.

Fundies like to yelp a lot that evolution doesn’t explain the origin of life. That’s right. We never claimed it did. The next time I hear that from a fundie, I’m going to reply “And Jesus didn’t invent popcorn!” That’s just as nonsensical of a statement.

The origin of life on Earth is an awfully good question, but we haven’t exactly figured out how it happened. Somehow, we had to go from the simple molecules that existed on the early Earth—such as carbon dioxide, methane, ammonia, etc.—and get to the more complex molecules that are part of living systems.

Some scientists think that environmental conditions on Earth were sufficient to turn the simple inorganic molecules into complex organic molecules. The most famous experiment to test this hypothesis was the Miller-Urey experiment. That experiment did change the inorganic starting material into organic compounds, including amino acids. You can read about the arguments for and against those results elsewhere, but similar experiments with different conditions have been run in the decades since. In many of these experiments, organic compounds were produced. These results indicate that the formation of organic molecules in the early days of Earth is a realistic and plausible hypothesis.

Another hypothesis is that the complex organic molecules formed elsewhere in the universe and rained down upon the Earth in a hail of meteors, asteroids, and comets. This idea is known as panspermia. The discovery of organic molecules in the Murchison meteorite shows that the panspermia hypothesis is also plausible.

It’s important to realize that this discovery does not prove panspermia. All it shows is that organic molecules can form elsewhere. So now we have two good hypotheses about the origin of life.

Not long ago, Conservapedia named their article on atheism as their article of the year. A YouTube user named Shane Killian has produced a video to examine that article and see just how good it really is:

(YouTube page is here)

In that video, he references an earlier video he made on Intelligent Design creationism. Here it is, for your enjoyment:

(YouTube page is here)

I know it can be hard sometimes to tell the difference between science and religion, so to help you figure it out, I present this easy study aid.

I found this over at the excellent but dormant Red State Rabbble. I had to overshrink the thing to make it fit within my margins. You can see the original version here.