The latest Carnival of the Godless is up over at Tangled Up in Blue Guy. There are a lot of good posts. I want to call your attention to three.

No More Mr. Nice Guy has a belated look at the War on Christmas, but he says it’s actually part of a larger War on Knowledge. He asks:

Could it be that the true believers dimly sense at some subconscious level that the elaborate and beautifully constructed edifice which is their religion is a house of cards built on quicksand?

KC at Bligbi makes some excellent points about why non-believers need to make some noise, in Speak Now, Speak Loudly, and Speak Often. She says:

We should speak now, because remaining silent allows the opposition think they’re unopposed.

We should speak loudly, because speaking softly allows the opposition to think we are unsure.

We should speak often, because while we may be few in number, we are not alone in our opposition to those who would prefer us to speak softly or remain silent.

Finally, in what I consider to be the best post of this carnival, Rastaban at Atheology covers Mike Huckabee’s recent theocratic statement, then he gives us a bit of history of the Godless Constitution. Read Huckabee and the U.S. Constitution. Also be sure to read the first comment on that article for a good balancing view.

When you’re done with those, check out the rest of the articles.

Update: I’ve been Bad Astronomered! Welcome to everyone coming here from Phil Plait’s site.

You’re probably aware that fundie clowndick Ben Stein has a forthcoming movie about the alleged “Darwinist” conspiracy to suppress science. I’m expecting the film to be something on the order of the infamous Fox TV Moon Hoax “documentary”, which was full of outright lies and deceptive editing. When it comes out, maybe we can compare the two and see which is worse.

Fundiecast Cybercast News Service has published an interview with Ben Stein. Let’s take a look.

Intelligent design theory…

Wow! They don’t waste any time. The very first phrase is a lie! Intelligent design creationism is not a theory. The American Heritage Dictionary has a good definition of “theory”.

A set of statements or principles devised to explain a group of facts or phenomena, especially one that has been repeatedly tested or is widely accepted and can be used to make predictions about natural phenomena.

As you can see, ID creationism fails on three counts:
1. It has not been repeatedly tested.
2. It is not widely accepted.
3. It can not be used to make predictions about natural phenomena.

Let’s get back to the Cybercast article:

[A] new movie, “Expelled” starring Ben Stein explores how an “elitist scientific establishment” is apparently muzzling and smearing scientists who publicly discuss ID.

There’s no question that anybody claiming that ID creationism is science is being laughed at — not only by scientists but just about anybody with even a remote understanding of science — but there is no vast conspiracy to muzzle anybody.

The First Amendment is under brutal attack in the scientific community, Ben Stein, a former presidential speechwriter-turned-actor and commentator, says in the film, which opens in theaters on Feb. 12.

Really? Now the First Amendment is “under brutal attack”. Actually, that part is true. The attack isn’t coming from scientists, though. It’s coming from crackpot organizations like the Discovery Institute and Access Research Network that are trying to get their religious dogma (ID creationism) taught in the schools.

In an exclusive interview with Cybercast News Service - with audio clips below - Stein contends that rigid Darwinists are silencing their critics in academia, which the film explores, and discusses how ID ideas are helping in cancer research and similar work.

Really? ID creationism cures cancer! Please, Ben Stein, tell us how!

Hello?

Bueller?

Bueller?

Apparently no one’s home. As is typical of creationist asshats, he makes wild claims and then never bothers to back them up.

Yet the ID research that could potentially produce medical breakthroughs, says Stein, is also being undermined by Darwinian scientists who don’t want ID research viewed as legitimate.

According to Ben Stein, there is cancer research being stifled by Darwinists because of some sort of philosophical agenda. I agree that would be bad. But apparently it’s OK to stifle stem cell research because fundies don’t like it. Yeah, Ben. Real consistent.

Now we get into the actual interview between Cybercast News Service (CNS) and Stein. In the interests of brevity, I will only excerpt parts of the longer answers. (You can go to the article to see that I’m not quote mining):

Stein: Science should always be in the business of attempting to disprove itself. Neo-Darwinian science is exactly in the opposite business of endlessly trying to rationalize itself - and reprove itself, you might say - reprove that it’s right without any kind of test.

Science is in the business of attempting to disprove itself. He is mischaracterizing modern biology, and not providing any support for his allegations. He also suffers from Kevin Wirth syndrome. He’s so fixated on Darwin that he has blinded himself to the advances in evolutionary theory that have happened since. No wonder he thinks evolution is outdated. He’s using a 150-year-old definition.

CNS: What sort of separation do you see or perhaps don’t see between creationism, on the one hand, and intelligent design?

Stein: I believe in God and God created the heavens and the earth and all the life on the earth. But what other people, who are intelligent design people, think, I could not characterize.

At least he’s honest about his own motivations. Apparently old Ben isn’t above mischaracterizing others on his own side, though. Intelligent design is creationism, just a different flavor.

CNS: …[N]eurosurgeon, Michael Egnor, and another scientist, Jon Wells, who indicate that given how the cells are put together, with eye toward intelligent design, and with the idea that animal cells have tiny turbines - or if viewed as tiny turbines - he was able to formulate a theory that said in the event these things malfunction and don’t properly shut down and could break apart, this is the first step on the way to cancer.…

First of all, that isn’t a theory. It’s a hypothesis. Second, intelligent design creationism is irrelevant here. Viewing the organelles inside the cell as turbines may be useful, but ID creationism is not needed. If proponents are lumping this into their pile of breakthroughs resulting from ID creationism, they’re just plain cheating.

CNS: …He doesn’t explicitly say ‘a cure for cancer,’…

Wait. Is this the great big scientific breakthrough in cancer research that these retards alluded to earlier? It’s not even connected to their “theory”!

Stein: [T]here is this big issue about RNA and DNA, and whether RNA and DNA can respond to changes in the world around them. I think we say it can respond to changes in the world around them and that neo-Darwinians say it can only do that by random chance…

Again, Stein shows his colossal non-grasp of science. Evolution isn’t random. The mutations are random, but they are acted upon by the environment.

Stein: …We say the cell may have the possibility of doing itself in an intelligent way that there may be some intelligence in the cell itself…. We believe there’s some possibility the cell could have an intelligence of its own.

Ben Stein thinks that the cells can intelligently respond to the environment and reprogram their DNA accordingly. That’s pretty far-fetched, but we should never rule anything out. If it’s true, and they’ve yet to provide any data that it is, the mechanism would be naturalistic. If it’s naturalistic, then it isn’t intelligent design!

Stein: I was just overwhelmed by the fact, at least as I am told, that Darwinists have never observed natural species being originated…

Lie.

Stein: There’s not even a clear definition of what a species is…

Another lie, although nature doesn’t fit into clean boxes. There are always things at the edges that don’t quite fit our definitions.

Stein: …and the Darwinists have no theory whatsoever about the origin of life, none whatsoever, except the most hazy, the kind of preposterous, New Age hypothesis.…

A completely irrelevant separate issue.

Stein: …And I think our theory that there is a creator strikes even some people, even Dawkins very possibly, as more likely than it all happened by total chance.

Now Stein even knows what Richard Dawkins thinks!

Stein: [Richard Dawkins’] idea that there is a complete rock solid consensus [in favor of evolution] is completely wrong.

And Ben Stein is clearly more qualified to make that assessment than Richard Dawkins.

CNS: Why do you think the very idea or suggestion of intelligent design is so antagonistic to scientists who claim they have evidence?

Stein: That’s a deep question.… One, if they are Darwinists and they owe their jobs to being Darwinists, they are not going to challenge the orthodoxy because that would challenge the whole basis of their jobs and their lives. So they are not going to challenge the ideology that has given them lush positions in real life.

Hey, Ben! Where are all of these Darwinists you’re always talking about? I’ve never met any.

Secondly, the whole point of science is to challenge itself. You made this unfounded claim before that there is some sort of conspiracy to retain a set of beliefs against all outside attacks. The only place I’ve seen that behavior is at the Discovery Institute.

Stein: Second thing, once people are locked into a way of thinking, they are unlikely to change.

OK. There is truth to that statement, but that refers to individuals. There are so many scientists out there looking at new things that there is no stagnation in science.

Stein: Third is, if they acknowledge the possibility of intelligent design and that intelligent design is God, then they may think God has moral expectations of them and they may be falling short of those moral expectations, and they may be worried about some sort of judgment upon them.

Holy crap! What a pile of holy crap! So Ben Stein knows that scientists cling to evolution, because they’re afraid of God’s judgment!

Stein: There is a very powerful Marxist establishment within the intelligentsia that does not allow questioning of its premises.

I give up. That’s so batshit crazy I can’t even respond to it.

Stein: [T]his to us - at least to me…- is a bit like the Civil Rights movement. You want to have freedom, where our goal is freedom. We want freedom. We want all our rights, not some of them, all our rights to free speech. We want them here in America, and we want them now.

Martin Luther King!!

Thurgood Marshall!!

Ben Stein??

Just in case any of you were still on the fence…
Just in case some of you didn’t get the memo…
Just in case you weren’t aware that Mike Huckabee is a Christofascist…
We have this video from MSNBC. It shows Mike Huckabee at a campaign stop on January 14:

(YouTube page is here.)

That’s right. He said we have to amend the U.S. Constitution to bring it into line with “God’s standards”. By the way, that “contemporary view” that he discards so dismissively is the view that has been enshrined in the Constitution for over 200 years. He wants to discard the very values upon which this country was built, in favor of his version of Sharia Biblical law.

The Carpetbagger Report has a good commentary on this video. Here’s an excerpt:

Huckabee whined at a recent debate that he, a former Baptist minister, gets more questions about religion than any of the other Republican presidential candidates. As he sees it, that’s unfair.

But Huckabee is, in more ways than one, terribly confused.

When we have an evangelical candidate publicly arguing that we should change the U.S. Constitution to bring it in line with his views of “God’s standards” — and then he criticizes his GOP rivals for disagreeing — we’re looking at a candidate who probably isn’t receiving enough questions about religion.
…
I don’t care how charming Huckabee is. It’s irrelevant whether he can be funny on The Colbert Report. Anyone who believes the U.S. Constitution is flawed because it insufficiently meets “God’s standards” is almost certainly living in the wrong country.

Huckabee is also making immigration one of his campaign issues. I think he does need to focus on immigration, but not on Mexico. Huckabee needs to look at Iran. Maybe they’ll let him immigrate.

We’ve had a few of these leave comments around here in the last few weeks.

I was researching creationism on the web and came across an article titled “Intelligent Design is Dead!” in the Vassar Alumnae Quarterly. It’s written by Vassar Professor of Biology Mark Schlessman. Here’s an extremely abbreviated version of the article:

[Y]ou don’t need extensive background to understand why, scientifically, intelligent design is dead. Significant and lasting scientific theories have two major parts. Biologist and college textbook author Scott Freeman calls them the pattern and process components. Pattern components summarize broad sets of observations about nature, and process components describe natural mechanisms that can account for the observations.
…
Evolution, the pattern component of Darwin’s theory, is a solid scientific fact. Natural selection is Darwin’s original process component.
…
Scientific theories also allow us to make testable predictions. Indeed, as new observations and experimental results that are consistent with their predictions accumulate, scientific ideas that start as hypotheses mature into theories.
…
Lastly, a scientific theory, no matter how well established, is subject to falsification. Good scientists should be able to imagine the kinds of evidence that would falsify a theory, or at the very least force a re-evaluation of its explanatory power.

In fact, that last paragraph is very important. We’ll come back to it in just a moment.

The creationists’ ultimate goal is to convert people to Christianity and to restructure society’s laws to parallel Biblical law. To accomplish this, they have a two-pronged approach. The first prong is to disprove evolution. The second prong is to convince people that ID creationism is a viable alternative of strong scientific validity.

In fact, they would be happy to just disprove evolution. If they can accomplish that, they don’t care much whether anybody believes in ID creationism. All that really matters is the end goal of more converts and a restructured society.

As long as real science has a theory that does not require God’s intervention, then they have a major barrier to accomplishing their ultimate goal. They must remove that barrier.

One of the many claims creationists make against the theory of evolution is that it can’t be falsified. That’s a ludicrous charge. Evolution is the core principle of biology. Everything else flows from it. Therefore, evolution is part of every testable claim in the life sciences. For example, long before the tools of modern genetics were developed, taxonomists had determined which species were closely related to each other. Along comes genetics. Evolutionary theory predicted that closely related species would share a lot of genetic material, while more distantly related species would share less. Scientists ran the tests, and the predictions were validated. That’s just one case where evolution could have been falsified. This is repeated constantly throughout the sciences. The results sometimes cause a fine tuning of existing theory, but nowhere have they invalidated major components of the theory. Evolution is being subjected to falsification tests every single day.

Now let’s return to the article and see why Schlessman says that Intelligent Design creationism is dead:

If intelligent design is truly a scientific theory, we should be able to identify its pattern and process components, use it to make testable predictions, and describe observations that would falsify it.

He then cites a couple of examples of Michael Behe’s so-called “irreducible complexity” and discredits them. He finishes this point with:

Suffice it to say that the broad set of observations that would constitute the pattern component of ID is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to find.

He then looks at process:

What about the process component of ID? There isn’t one. I have yet to read a description of the process through which the designing intelligence works. Testable predictions? Again, nothing. How can one make predictions without a process or mechanism to base the predictions on? Is ID falsifiable? To my mind the answer is no. That may seem a little strange, since I obviously don’t think that ID is a scientific theory. But that’s precisely my point. Scientifically, ID is dead.

He also mentions that it’s dead legally, thanks to Kitzmiller v. Dover.

Finally, Schlessman comes to the point depicted in the illustration above:

This brings me to the aspect of the intelligent design story that concerns me the most. The people behind ID believe that if you acknowledge the fact of evolution, your moral compass and your religious faith will be destroyed. That simply isn’t true. Yes, I have some scientist friends who are atheists, but I also know scientists who contribute to our understanding of evolution every working day and also seek out churches to attend wherever their scientific work takes them.

This is important on two counts. First, it shows that science and religion don’t have to be in conflict. It is only the Biblical literalists—mental throwbacks to the Dark Ages—who have a problem.

And that brings us to the second point. If we allow Intelligent Design creationism into the schools, besides weakening science education, we are violating the separation of church and state. We are making one specific flavor of Biblical literalism the official state church of the United States. That doesn’t just violate the rights of a minority, such as atheists or Hindus who don’t follow that religion. It violates the rights of the majority of Christians, who also don’t believe that particular flavor of Christianity.

That’s what the separation of church and state is all about. It not only protects the rights of a minority, it protects the rights of the majority.

Don’t flame me for this title. It’s actually the provocative title of an article by Andrew Tallman, a columnist for Townhall. Unlike most fundie articles that I shred, this one makes some good points as well as a few bad ones. Let’s examine it.

Have you ever wondered why Christians aren’t smarter? I mean, we have the only true religion, we have a Book which is responsible for all of Western Civilization, and we serve a God who can safely call Himself the supreme champion at every trivia contest. So why aren’t we smarter?

Amazingly, Tallman answers the question posed by his title at the very beginning of the article! Intelligence is a complex thing that’s hard to define, but one aspect of it that most experts agree upon is the ability to learn.

Tallman says “we have the only true religion“. Right there, he closed his mind tighter than Michelle Duggar’s vagina (Oh wait! That’s a counter-example! I mean tighter than Kevin Wirth clings to the term “Darwinism”.).

If you start out by saying you have the only true religion, then you have blocked out all information that even appears to contradict that. Considering the expanse of Christianity’s claims on knowledge (biology, cosmology, geology, etc.), you have walled off just about anything you could have learned.

Then you couple arrogance with inability to learn. Tallman says “we have a Book which is responsible for all of Western Civilization”. No, you don’t. It was undeniably a large (mostly negative) contributor to Western Civilization, but it isn’t the foundation of all of our laws or any other silly notion.

Tallman’s next paragraph is a good one, though:

God commands us very simply: Love Him with all our heart, and with all our soul, and with all our mind. Catch that last part … with all our mind. This means thinking is not optional for the Christian. Thinking, and thinking well, is a form of worship of God which is nothing short of obedience to His primary command. Hence, if we do not ”use the brain God gave you,” (my mom’s favorite rhetorical chastisement), we are sinning.

Here is a Christian leader urging his followers to think. So then why don’t they? My only guess is what I said above. Christianity’s claims on knowledge are so broad that there isn’t much left over to think about.

The only solution to this problem is for the Christians to actually start thinking about the stuff they’re not allowed to think about. Think about origins. Think about history. Think about philosophy. Their book isn’t complete. It doesn’t have all the answers. Why don’t they look beyond it?

The most pervasive myth about Christianity is that it is incompatible with intelligence.

This is what I believed before I became one, and it made me not want to be one. I say it is a myth both because nothing demands more thinking capacity than being a faithful Christian and also because our history is rich with intellectual giants.

It’s not that Christianity and intelligence are incompatible. It’s that only one can be active at a time.

I’ll concede his point about “nothing demands more thinking capacity than being a faithful Christian”. Have you seen some of the amazing mental calisthenics that Christian apologists go through to try to make the ludicrous claims of the Bible fit to known facts? Amazingly convoluted. That it’s a house of cards is irrelevant. You have to admire the ability!

I will also grant Tallman’s claim about Christianity being “rich with intellectual giants”. Most of the great scientists and philosophers of yore were Christians. Some were intellectual giants in spite of it. Imagine what they could have accomplished if they hadn’t been burdened by a mythological worldview.

Nonetheless, Christianity has a reputation as a religion for fools, and this is at least partially our own fault. By offering empty platitudes such as, “Well, you have to have faith,” when challenged with difficult questions, outsiders can be forgiven for forming the impression that what we really mean is, “Well,you have to be stupid.” This puts people in the painful situation of feeling like they have to choose between their mind and God. Also, it makes Christianity offensive to the smartest people in society, who tend to be culture’s greatest influencers. Thus, simply showing non-Christians that one can be both smart and faithful is a powerful form of evangelism.

I find that last sentence too hard to believe, but the rest of that paragraph is pretty accurate.

Tallman’s article is a refreshing change from most of the stuff I read over at Townhall. I only wish that the rest of the crop could be capable of making at least a few good points in their articles.

So why is it called “The Discovery Institute” if they’ve never discovered anything?