Creationist offers bad reason to deny reality

Raw Story: Creationist author Terry Mortenson doesn’t understand how an atheist like Bill Nye “the Science Guy” can find joy in scientific discoveries.

Following the debate between Nye and Creation Museum founder Ken Ham on Tuesday night, Mortenson sat down with Creation Today co-hosts Eric Hovind and Paul Taylor to discuss the event.

“I was kind of intrigued by one of Bill’s last comments about the joy of discovery, but I thought, what is the joy of realizing that I came from pond scum as a result of an explosion and that eventually I’m going to die and I won’t be here, I won’t remember that I ever lived, nobody else will ever remember,” Mortenson said. “What is the joy of that? It is purposeless, as Richard Dawkins and William Provine and others have said.”

“There is no purpose,” he continued. “There is no morality. All you have in evolution in is what is is. It’s the survival of the fittest and if I’m stronger than you and I’m a lion and you’re a gazelle, sorry, you’re my lunch. And if I’m Hitler and you’re a Jew, sorry, you’re lunch. And if I am outside the body and you’re in the mother’s womb, and I don’t want you, sorry, you’re lunch.”

“There is no basis of morality or purpose, and Bill is stealing from the Christian worldview to find joy in discovery when there is no purpose or meaning to it.”

We can dismiss a lot of this as non-argument. Just because I’m aware of my mortality doesn’t mean I’m incapable of joy. And how does the knowledge that you’re descended from less complex life forms somehow give you free reign to abandon morality and eat babies? It makes no logical sense.

But put aside all the hyperbole and consider the actual, underlying argument: that Mortensen finds evolution unsettling, so he chooses not to believe it. Further, since evolutionary theory is so disturbing, Mortensen argues that it cannot be true. I find the existence of things like Two and a Half Men and Lite Beer a nightmarish indictment of American tastes — but that doesn’t mean it’s logical to conclude that they don’t exist. It just means that there are facts out there that I’d rather not be true. Sucks to be me, but I have to accept it.

And this comes up so often that we can easily say it’s a cornerstone of the creationist pseudo-science; “I find it too disturbing, therefore it can’t exist.” This isn’t logic, this is wishful thinking. In fact, this is the very definition of wishful thinking. The fact that they think this is a compelling argument shows that logic is a completely foreign concept to creationists.

When your reasoning is this flawed, the odds that your argument is solid are slim to none.

Choosing Ignorance

One of my favorite openings for one of my posts was written in July, 2007. That post, titled "Monument to BS Works Out Pretty Much the Way You'd Expect," was a post about the opening of the Creation Museum.

Just outside of Cincinnati -- in Petersburg, Kentucky -- stands a 60,000 square foot, $27 million monument to gullibility, fanaticism, and the ability to believe the stupidest damned things despite all evidence to the contrary. Answers in Genesis's Creation Museum features exhibits showing humans co-existing with dinosaurs, offers 'proof' that there was once a global flood, and warns us not to judge Cain for marrying his sister.

Yeah, it's that nuts.

Why revisit a museum that has an exhibit of a triceratops wearing a saddle and tells people that dinosaurs were packed into a 450X75X45 ark? Because today is the 200th birthday of Charles Darwin. The good news is that more people believe in evolution than this stuff, the bad news is that neither belief holds a majority. According to Gallup, fully 25% of Americans believe that creationism offers a better explanation of all the species that populate the planet than evolution. Put more simply, a quarter of Americans believe that it's all explained by magic, as opposed to a complex scientific system that actually works in the real world -- evolutionary biology is an applied science. It's like disbelieving in math, despite the fact that people use it constantly to come to working answers. If it works, if it generates results, it's obviously true... [CLICK TO READ FULL POST]

Reason #1 Why McCain Chose Palin

#2 is the PUMAs, #1 is that she's Mike Huckabee in drag. Creationist, an extremist on abortion, she's exactly what the nuts wish McCain was.

Exhibit A; James Dobson, head nut and a man who said he wouldn't vote for McCain "under any circumstances," is now voting McCain:

clipped from www.time-blog.com The announcement by the head of Focus On The Family, an influential Colorado-based ministry, came Friday afternoon at a conservative outreach meeting in Minneapolis, which had been organized by the McCain campaign. "If flip-flopping is a sin, then I am a sinner," Dobson told the group, according to a first-person account of the address, which was confirmed by Dobson's office. The announcement comes just hours after McCain picked Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate. Palin has been widely cheered by conservative activists for her pro-life views and conservative governance record.

Griper Blade: Fighting for Freedom from Reality

In a ruling certain not to rock the legal and educational worlds, a federal court in Los Angeles ruled yesterday that you can't force universities to pretend that BS is true. In terms of common sense, the ruling -- Association of Christian Schools International et al. v. Roman Stearns et al -- wasn't much of a stumper. But there are people who think you get to choose what's true for you -- as if the universe were a series of multiple choice questions with no wrong answers -- and those people aren't pleased.

The perpetually panic-stricken WorldNetDaily kicks things off by completely misrepresenting just about every fact in the case:

Arguments were heard today in a federal district court case to determine whether a state university system can dictate that private Christian schools in the state teach their college prep courses from exclusively secular, Bible- and God-free textbooks.

As WND reported earlier, the University of California system adopted a policy last year that basic science, history, and literature textbooks by major Christian book publishers wouldn't qualify for core admissions requirements because of the inclusion of Christian perspectives.

Robert Tyler, who is representing Calvary Chapel Christian School and five students in the case against the University of California, told WND that the university's discriminatory policy creates an ultimatum for Christian schools. "If you want courses to be approved in private education, so your students are qualified to attend (UC) institutions, you must teach from a secular point of view," he said.

This is typical of the strategy of whiny victimhood that the religious right has been reduced to these days. The truth is that the textbooks in question managed to accomplish the seemingly oxymoronic task of teaching ignorance...

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Griper Blade: Continuing the War on Science

Huckabee claims his creationism won't affect education. But that's not the only worry we should have

There are some things we take as an article of faith. I'm not speaking of my own atheist self; but of the majority of people in the world. I suppose there's no real harm in believing something there's no evidence for, but I'd argue that there's a real problem with believing in something despite all evidence to the contrary. The former is faith, while the latter is delusion. Which brings us the popular delusion of creationism and its alter-ego, intelligent design.

I've had people ask why "both theories" shouldn't be taught in schools. I always have the same answer -- there aren't two theories. Creationism is just a hypothesis -- there's absolutely no evidence in its favor. In fact, the evidence we have points away from creationism, not toward it.

At this point, I'm usually pointed to a bunch of crap that "proves" evolution isn't true. The problem here is that even if they were able to completely disprove evolution, they really haven't done anything to prove creationism -- logic doesn't work that way. If one person argues that 2+2 equals 3 and another thinks it's 5, proving that 2+2 is not equal to 3 doesn't automatically prove it's 5. And that's all that the evidence "for" creationism consists of -- arguments against evolution. The entire foundation of "creation science" is based on a logical fallacy.

Creationism requires that you "unlearn" logic. It means you cast critical thinking aside and embrace that delusion I spoke of earlier. It's not hard to see how this banishment of reason from someone's mind would handicap their thinking in other areas. Not surprisingly, GOP presidential candidate Mike Huckabee doesn't get that...

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Griper Blade: Monument to BS Works Out Pretty Much the Way You'd Expect

Just outside of Cincinnati -- in Petersburg, Kentucky -- stands a 60,000 square foot, $27 million monument to gullibility, fanaticism, and the ability to believe the stupidest damned things despite all evidence to the contrary. Answers in Genesis's Creation Museum features exhibits showing humans co-existing with dinosaurs, offers 'proof' that there was once a global flood, and warns us not to judge Cain for marrying his sister.

Yeah, it's that nuts.

It turns out that a literal interpretation of the biblical book of Genesis looks more like The Flintstones than anything you'll see on The Discovery Channel. We're told that dinosaurs were on Noah's Ark, despite the fact that a global flood would be a really good way to explain why they're extinct. The Bible itself offers plenty of evidence against this -- mostly in the way the ark couldn't possibly be big enough for dinosaurs, let alone all the species on Earth...

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