The Discovery Institute is in major damage control mode right now. They have a page called “3 Myths About the Dover Intelligent Design Trial”. It allegedly refutes three myths that occurred during the trial and portrayed by Nova on its recent broadcast. Actually, its job is to create three myths.

Their lies begin even before they get to the three supposed myths. Their introduction states:

The program features the usual cast of characters: anti-ID activist Eugenie Scott, Darwinist Ken Miller, and apparently Judge Jones himself (currently on his second annual self-congratulatory globe-trotting tour — be sure to catch him on your local NPR station and Air America).

This is one of the crudest lies I’ve seen them make. They’re portraying Judge Jones as some sort of extremist leftist liberal wacko. Judge Jones is a Republican, who was appointed to the federal bench by fundie heart-throb George W Bush, upon the recommendation of fundie idol and slang-word inspiration then-Senator Rick Santorum.

The program will attempt to show that intelligent design is creationism and therefore more religion than science. Like the misleading “Evolution” miniseries PBS produced in 2001, this is an attempt to stifle scientific inquiry and censor science by making talking and researching about intelligent design out of bounds.

It has nothing to do with stifling scientific inquiry or censoring science. It’s about only teaching science in science classrooms. The fundies are welcome, even encouraged, to do all the research they want on ID creationism. If they ever get any evidence that meets the standards of science, then we’ll be happy to include it in the classroom.

Myth #1: There are no peer-reviewed scientific papers supporting intelligent design.
Judge Jones said that ID “…has not generated peer-reviewed publications.”

FACT: Judge Jones is simply wrong. Discovery Institute submitted an amicus brief to Judge Jones that documented various peer-reviewed publications, which he accepted into evidence. This is a fact-based question which is hard to get wrong. The fact is that there are peer-reviewed papers supporting intelligent design. [emphasis in original]

THE REAL FACTS: It may be hard to get wrong, but the Discovery Institute managed to do it! I am not aware of any peer-reviewed publications supporting ID creationism. The few articles published by creationists don’t mention the creationism. They are just about some small aspect that happens to be consistent with both real scientific theory and ID creationism. They need to publish something that only supports ID creationism and contradicts established scientific theory. They haven’t, because they don’t have anything.

Myth #2: Intelligent design is not scientific because it isn’t testable.
Judge Jones said, “…nor has ID been the subject of testing and research.”

FACT: For two days during the trial biologist and flagellum expert Dr. Scott Minnich presented slides from his own mutagenesis experiments performed in his lab at the University of Idaho. In his experiments, he knocked out every flagellar gene, one by one, and found that the flagellum is irreducibly complex. These tests were given to Judge Jones, but apparently he ignored them. [emphasis in original]

THE REAL FACTS: They aren’t going to get ID creationism accepted as science by giving their results to a judge. They have to give them to a peer-reviewed journal! Until it passes that test, it isn’t science, and the judge should ignore it!

Myth #3: Intelligent design is the same as creationism.
Judge Jones said that ID is “a mere re-labeling of creationism.”

FACT: Creationism typically starts with a religious text and tries to see how the findings of science can be reconciled to it. ID starts with the empirical evidence of nature and seeks to ascertain what inferences can be drawn from that evidence. Unlike creationism, the scientific theory of intelligent design does not claim that modern biology can identify whether the intelligent cause detected through science is supernatural. [emphasis in original]

THE REAL FACTS: ID creationism started with the Bible. Then they looked for a way to disguise it so they could sneak it into the schools. That’s the true history of ID creationism. Once they dreamed up their stealth tactic, they worked backward from “the empirical evidence of nature” to see how they could get back to their creation myth.

They also create another myth in the above paragraph. They state:

…the scientific theory of intelligent design…

That is clearly a lie. ID creationism does not meet the definition of “theory”. They’re making up their own definition here. Their own boy, Michael Behe, admitted on the witness stand that his definition of “theory” was so loose that it could include astrology as a “scientific theory”!

I was going to say “Nice try, Discovery Institute!”, but I can’t. Their web page is a very poor and ineffective attempt to cover up their total defeat in Dover.

Don’t forget to watch Nova tonight on PBS.

This is actually more of a chapter review than a book review. When I heard that the fundies were in a snit over the upcoming movie, I thought I would read the book first, especially since the movie has had a lot of the offensive content removed.

The books in this trilogy (His Dark Materials) have received mixed reviews, even from non-fundies. Some people are quite enamored of them; other people complain that the plots are muddled. I knew going in that it would be a crapshoot whether I enjoyed them.

Well, I guess I crapped out. I gave up about two pages into chapter 3. I know that’s not a fair trial. That’s just all I could stand.

Let me say up front that the problem is just as likely to be me as it is the book. I don’t normally read fantasy, so maybe the book just didn’t speak to me. I also have a mild reading disorder, which makes reading a bit of an effort. If a book is compelling, I can overcome the hindrance. But if a book doesn’t engage me, the effort of reading just doesn’t pay off.

So what did I think of what I read? Not much, I’m afraid. I found my mind wandering midway through chapter 2. I even gave up at that point, but I forced myself to pick up the book again and continue. Maybe it was just getting off to a slow start. I had to give it a fair chance. Then in chapter 3, it immediately wandered off into some sort of boring background material. Well, you can’t afford to go into a background side trip if you haven’t already hooked the reader with a compelling story. Giving up at this point wasn’t intentional. I just found my mind wandering and not caring one whit about what the author was telling me. I chucked the book across the room and went off to check my email. (Chucking bad books across the room is good therapy. You should try it.)

Carnival of the Godless #79 is now up over at Aardvarchaeology. I’ve read all the articles, and two of them especially stand out.

Go check out “Why I Am an Optimist” by Franklin.

The second article of high interest is “Blind Trust for Religious Belief” by Stefan Monsaureus at Polypyloctomy. He talks about the problem of politicians trying to suck up to the superstitious. He also has his Guidelines for the Secular Voter. Here’s the abbreviated version:

• Absent a compelling and reasonable proposition of public harm, politicians should not be permitted to impose their morality in situations where the supposed “sin” is without victim.
• Asking a candidate about their religious affiliation is fair game, provided such questions are couched in terms related to specific policy decisions.
• While opinions colored by a religious framework are to be expected, and even tolerated, decisions based only on faith are anathema to rationality.
• Belief in an afterlife is detrimental to life on this planet. Similarly, apocalyptic theology and long-term environmental concern or enlightened foreign policy are incompatible.
• It may be best not to get too exercised about expressions of civil religion, and reserve our ire and leftist indignation for more substantive cases involving the imposition of faith or dogma.
• No morality based solely on ancient scripture or religious dogma may be imposed on others.

Go on over to Polypyloctomy and read about those in greater depth. Then head on over to the Carnival of the Godless #79 and check out some of the other great articles.

John Wilkins over at Evolving Thoughts has an interesting article called “Explaining religion 4 - Wolves and gods”. It looks at wolf behavior and uses it to try to gain insight into human behavior.

We all know that wolf packs resolve themselves into hierarchies, with an alpha wolf on top. Human societies do this too, but it is a much more complex interaction. It’s not a simple hierarchy with us. Wilkins goes into that briefly. I was more interested in his comments on how social status explains religion:

Gods are basically higher status humans. Submission to a deity serves to place one in a social dominance hierarchy (within which, like dogs in a human family, we can mutually compete for status). Having a shared alpha male or female means that we are now part of a large-scale pack, and can compete for the resources and mutual aid of that pack. And if wolves and humans are similar in their social organisation, then that effectively means that a god is the alpha wolf, too.

That’s why the dyslexic motto of the United States is “In Dog We Trust”. We should get around to fixing that one of these days. Just because some early court clerk reversed a couple of letters, we’ve been stuck with the wrong motto. It’s time to put the letters in the correct order. At least dogs are real.

Wilkins continues:

Now social dominance is, I believe, the crucial coordinating factor of human social organisation…. And moreover, it is, I believe, the crucial explanation of religious behaviour.

Societies have always structured themselves in a hierarchy. Sometimes the structure is more obvious than at other times, but there is always a structure. Religion was one way of accomplishing this. The god is the alpha wolf. Everyone else falls into some sort of hierarchy below that. The king claimed to rule by divine right, so he’s second in command. When the king died:

But how to bolster the king’s heir’s claims to high status? One way is to use the gods. Either the dead king is now a god…, in which case the oversight of the father supports the son, or the son (and dead father) are descendants of other gods.

That’s a great lie, if you can make it stick. In superstitious societies, that was very easy.

A recent study has shown that religious belief correlates with social conformity and prosocial behaviour (Sharif and Norenzayan 2007); in short, if god is watching you, or you think god is watching you, you will tend not to defect in social interactions. This will also play into social dominance. If you think the dead king or his ancestors are watching you constantly, you are less likely to defect from alliances with the king’s deputies. In short, religion explains how cross-ethnicity and cross-class social structures can arise.

The fear of divine wrath is quite powerful, so that force probably explains how societies managed to become as large as they did.

Wilkins concludes with:

So gods are high status individuals that we pay allegiance to indirectly, by way of those who are themselves subordinate to a god or gods. This acts to maintain social order and simplify the age-old question posed by the Mikado, to whom should we defer?

It also explains, as I’ve said before, why we have a national prayer that schoolchildren are compelled to recite every day:

I pledge allegiance to … one nation under God….

I recently rented Marjoe. (You can buy it from Powell’s via this link, but I actually recommend just renting it from somewhere instead.) It’s a fascinating documentary, but overall it drags. They could have conveyed everything in half the time, and it would have been a more effective film.

The movie came out in 1972 and won the Oscar for best documentary, if you can believe it. That tells more about the state of documentary filmmaking in the early 1970s than it does about the quality of this film.

Don’t get the impression that I hated the movie. I actually recommend it, but only slightly, and only to those who want to get a deep look at the ’70s tent-revival circuit. I don’t know if any of that cultural phenomenon still exists today. I suspect it has been completely supplanted by TV preachers and megachurches.

The documentary profiles Marjoe Gortner, who got his start in life as the world’s youngest fundie preacher, at age 4. His father was a tent preacher, which explains how Marjoe ended up with the same career so early in life. His name was actually coined by his parents as a contraction of “Mary” and “Joseph”.

In addition to telling Marjoe’s backstory, the film follows Gortner on his farewell tour as a traveling tent preacher. He wants to get out of the business, so he wants to leave with a little cash in his pocket. The film’s tagline is “You Keep the Faith…Marjoe Keeps the Money”. With a tagline like that, you’d expect the film to be a hard-hitting exposé on the tent-revival scene. It tries to be, but that part of the film never really succeeds.

The scenes of Marjoe’s early career, such as performing a wedding when he’s very young (age seven or so?) are truly bizarre.

One of the more interesting things I derived from the film was its in-depth portrayals of Pentecostal holy rollerism. Previously, I had never seen anything more than very brief scenes of such behavior, which I’ve always had a hard time comprehending. This film shows long (ten minutes or more) sections of their services. Although many scenes like this are what make the film drag, the length of these scenes finally allowed me to grasp a bit of what’s going on with these people.

The sermon slowly builds in intensity. The preacher is slowly whipping them up. Since everybody is jammed together in the same tent, they’re feeding off of each other’s energy, which reinforces their own rising rapture in a positive-feedback loop. Just like an energetic speaker can incite a crowd to riot, the preacher is inciting this crowd into a fundie frenzy. Then people start falling over and babbling incoherently. This is what they call “speaking in tongues”. It’s what I call epilepsy, and you have to prevent them from swallowing their tongues.

Anyway, as each person falls over and starts writhing orgasmically on the floor, that just increases the energy in the room and gives more people permission to flop around like a landed fish. Pretty soon, the whole place is doing it.

Churchgoing always seemed like a waste of time to me. A few people seem to need it, but most people don’t (since most people don’t attend church regularly). So what drives somebody to ruin a perfectly good day off by going to church? I can’t answer that for most people, but I think I now understand why Holy Rollers do. When people enter the tongue-gibbering phase, they’re apparently in an altered state of consciousness. There must be a flood of endorphins being released at that moment. They must be flying pretty high (in fact, many describe it as “gettin’ high on the lawd!”). If that’s true, then they’re getting a physical reward for attending church. Just like Pavlov’s dogs come running when they hear the food bell, Pentecostals come running when they hear the church bell. They both know they’re about to be physically pleasured.

Here’s an excerpt of the film that I found on YouTube:

(YouTube page is here.)