Tinfoil Tuesday 🧪 Sci Man Dan addresses Young Earth Creationist pseudoscience on evolution.
Showing posts with label Young Earth Creationism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Young Earth Creationism. Show all posts
Tinfoil Tuesday 🧪 Sci Man Dan addresses Young Earth Creationist pseudoscience on dinosaurs and chickens.
It’s been a while since we’ve talked about how the Creationists at Ark Encounter are still desperately trying to convince people they do real “science.” (Usually, the conversations revolve around their low attendance.)
But Ken Ham still hasn’t changed his rhetoric; he’s still mad that reality contradicts his mythology. That’s why he’s now lashing out at local newspapers for saying as much.
To make sense of it, we can just look to his latest video, where he makes a series of mistakes, purposely or not, to convince his gullible followers that the mainstream media is against them.
He wants to argue that good journalists should be objective, which, in his view, means not taking a position on what counts as science. So he brings up an example of a newspaper that got it right and one that got it wrong.
The one that did it right? The Northern Kentucky Tribune, which posted a brief article about how Ark Encounter was “celebrating its 10th anniversary.” Except it’s not an article at all.
To make sense of it, we can just look to his latest video, where he makes a series of mistakes, purposely or not, to convince his gullible followers that the mainstream media is against them.
He wants to argue that good journalists should be objective, which, in his view, means not taking a position on what counts as science. So he brings up an example of a newspaper that got it right and one that got it wrong.
The one that did it right? The Northern Kentucky Tribune, which posted a brief article about how Ark Encounter was “celebrating its 10th anniversary.” Except it’s not an article at all.
Continue @ Friendly Atheist.
Tinfoil Tuesday 🧪 Sci Man Dan addresses Young Earth Creationist pseudoscience on the age of the earth.
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| Captain Cassidy |
YouTube offered me a Ken Ham short video the other day, which demonstrates that I have completely confused its algorithm. In it, the serial grifter and ur-liar-for-Jesus offers his thoughts about why evangelicals “lost Gen Z.” Let’s go over his video and see if he’s right. Then let’s see where the blame really rests.
A quick introduction to Ken Ham and Creationism🔴
Ken Ham leads a Young-Earth Creationist group called Answers in Genesis. As the label implies, he erroneously believes that his god conjured everything in the universe into existence about six thousand years ago. (I’m sure that was quite a surprise to the civilizations around back then.) Other kinds of Creationism exist, some of which come much closer to the Earth’s real age of 4.5 billion years and the universe’s real age of 10-20 billion years, but here we speak only of Young-Earth Creationism.
Creationism is a relatively new doctrinal stance that arose in the 1970s-1980s thanks to an American law professor named Phillip E. Johnson. It had the marvelous good fortune of gaining popular awareness at a time when American evangelicals were undergoing a massive shift into the hardline fundamentalist-fused culture warriors we know today.
Ken Ham leads a Young-Earth Creationist group called Answers in Genesis. As the label implies, he erroneously believes that his god conjured everything in the universe into existence about six thousand years ago. (I’m sure that was quite a surprise to the civilizations around back then.) Other kinds of Creationism exist, some of which come much closer to the Earth’s real age of 4.5 billion years and the universe’s real age of 10-20 billion years, but here we speak only of Young-Earth Creationism.
Creationism is a relatively new doctrinal stance that arose in the 1970s-1980s thanks to an American law professor named Phillip E. Johnson. It had the marvelous good fortune of gaining popular awareness at a time when American evangelicals were undergoing a massive shift into the hardline fundamentalist-fused culture warriors we know today.
Continue reading @ Only Sky.
Brian Greene, Sean Carroll, Jim Al Kalili, Stephen Hawking, Brian Cox, Richard Dawkins, Steven Pinker, Bill Nye are some of the better-known figures in the science world that have bubbled to the surface. I read and listen to popular science as my grasp of anything beyond that is limited. Even when popularised, my understanding of science remains at best rudimentary. Reading Brian Greene’s The Elegant Universe, for me at any rate, was a considerable challenge.
When the conflict between general relativity and quantum mechanics is discussed, followed by the increasing utilisation of String Theory in a bid to marry the two and thus create a unifying whole in the field of physics, I get only bits of it. Still, the snippets that fall my way are immensely rewarding in terms of both causing and scratching the itch of intellectual curiosity.
Ultimately I find a physicalist explanation of the universe and the world we live in, immensely satisfying. If there is a non-physicalist force at play, there is no one alive who knows what it is. It remains in the domain of unicornology, with which there is no overlapping magesteria. Nor does there seem any need for it, the laws of physics, chemistry and biology manage to survive and function without any prodding from some magical entity. There are plenty who know their Bible, Koran, Torah, Puranas but that just means they know about a book that explains nothing about the origins of our universe or the evolution of our species. The bible is no more persuasive in explaining the origins of the universe and life within it than a book on King Arthur and Merlyn the Wizard. They are in general just myths, with the holy books being specific myths of creation.
Society would be a much poorer place without its myths and its fiction. The sheer pleasure to be derived from novels demonstrates the usefulness of storytelling. People are no more expected to believe novels than they are holy books, even if there is a value to be derived from them. A read of writers like the late Helder Camara show how religion can inspire love. Conversely, in the hands of many evangelical Christians it gives rise to a theology of hate. In the words of HL Mencken, Evangelical Christianity . . . is founded upon hate, as the Christianity of Christ was founded upon love.
There is a striking book by Ronald L Numbers, which I am still dipping in and out of, The Creationists, in which the history of Young Earth Creationism is set out in forensic detail. The obstinate idiocy of its adherents is such that perhaps Young Earth Cretinism is a more apt term to describe it. A quick dive, not even a deep one, into its intellectually fecund pages soon reveals the shallow depths of creationism. To draw on the witticism of a friend, creationists know as much about a Creator as a cat does about its father.
Science to Young Earth Creationists is like garlic to a vampire. The Hosanna in the Highest men scale no intellectual heights, their pinnacle a molehill beside the Everest of science. They love the biblical god for his wickedness, being singularly unable to demonstrate any good that the boss of the desert gang is supposed to have done. A Jesus capable of love would drive them to distraction. Give us Trump, they would shout, if offered the chance to save one of the crucified. In the Old Testament tyrant they can find a Supreme being who gives the stamp of approval to their own hatreds. They scream persecution when denied the ability to have theological bafflegab taught as fact, a science on a par with the other sciences, impervious to science being in the words of Brian Cox, the enemy of certainty.
When the conflict between general relativity and quantum mechanics is discussed, followed by the increasing utilisation of String Theory in a bid to marry the two and thus create a unifying whole in the field of physics, I get only bits of it. Still, the snippets that fall my way are immensely rewarding in terms of both causing and scratching the itch of intellectual curiosity.
Ultimately I find a physicalist explanation of the universe and the world we live in, immensely satisfying. If there is a non-physicalist force at play, there is no one alive who knows what it is. It remains in the domain of unicornology, with which there is no overlapping magesteria. Nor does there seem any need for it, the laws of physics, chemistry and biology manage to survive and function without any prodding from some magical entity. There are plenty who know their Bible, Koran, Torah, Puranas but that just means they know about a book that explains nothing about the origins of our universe or the evolution of our species. The bible is no more persuasive in explaining the origins of the universe and life within it than a book on King Arthur and Merlyn the Wizard. They are in general just myths, with the holy books being specific myths of creation.
Society would be a much poorer place without its myths and its fiction. The sheer pleasure to be derived from novels demonstrates the usefulness of storytelling. People are no more expected to believe novels than they are holy books, even if there is a value to be derived from them. A read of writers like the late Helder Camara show how religion can inspire love. Conversely, in the hands of many evangelical Christians it gives rise to a theology of hate. In the words of HL Mencken, Evangelical Christianity . . . is founded upon hate, as the Christianity of Christ was founded upon love.
There is a striking book by Ronald L Numbers, which I am still dipping in and out of, The Creationists, in which the history of Young Earth Creationism is set out in forensic detail. The obstinate idiocy of its adherents is such that perhaps Young Earth Cretinism is a more apt term to describe it. A quick dive, not even a deep one, into its intellectually fecund pages soon reveals the shallow depths of creationism. To draw on the witticism of a friend, creationists know as much about a Creator as a cat does about its father.
Science to Young Earth Creationists is like garlic to a vampire. The Hosanna in the Highest men scale no intellectual heights, their pinnacle a molehill beside the Everest of science. They love the biblical god for his wickedness, being singularly unable to demonstrate any good that the boss of the desert gang is supposed to have done. A Jesus capable of love would drive them to distraction. Give us Trump, they would shout, if offered the chance to save one of the crucified. In the Old Testament tyrant they can find a Supreme being who gives the stamp of approval to their own hatreds. They scream persecution when denied the ability to have theological bafflegab taught as fact, a science on a par with the other sciences, impervious to science being in the words of Brian Cox, the enemy of certainty.
On this I find myself at one with Isaac Azimov:
Imagine the people who believe such things and who are not ashamed to ignore, totally, all the patient findings of thinking minds through all the centuries since the Bible was written. And it is these ignorant people, the most uneducated, the most unimaginative, the most unthinking among us, who would make themselves the guides and leaders of us all; who would force their feeble and childish beliefs on us; who would invade our schools and libraries and homes. I personally resent it bitterly.
August 5th, 2020, the geophysicist known for Morton’s Demon, Glenn R. Morton, passed away.
In this article, one of many, Glenn explains how his experience in petroleum geology caused him to leave young earth creationism to become an old earth creationist.
For years I struggled to understand how the geological data I worked with everyday could fit into a Biblical perspective. Being a physics major in college I had no geology courses. Thus, as a young Christian, when I was presented with the view that Christians must believe in a young-earth and global flood, I went along willingly. I knew there were problems, but thought I would solve them.
When I graduated from college with a physics degree, physicists were unemployable since NASA had just laid a bunch of them off. I did graduate work in philosophy and then decided to leave school to support my growing family. Even after a year, physicists were still unemployable. After six months of looking, I finally found work as a geophysicist working for a seismic company. Within a year, I was processing seismic data for Atlantic Richfield.
For years I struggled to understand how the geological data I worked with everyday could fit into a Biblical perspective. Being a physics major in college I had no geology courses. Thus, as a young Christian, when I was presented with the view that Christians must believe in a young-earth and global flood, I went along willingly. I knew there were problems, but thought I would solve them.
When I graduated from college with a physics degree, physicists were unemployable since NASA had just laid a bunch of them off. I did graduate work in philosophy and then decided to leave school to support my growing family. Even after a year, physicists were still unemployable. After six months of looking, I finally found work as a geophysicist working for a seismic company. Within a year, I was processing seismic data for Atlantic Richfield.
Continue reading @ Peaceful Science.
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