Fundamentalists, Creationists And Islamic Extremists Share the Same "Philosophy"

Religious fundamentalists and authoritarian creationists frequently need a scapegoat to scare the public with, though it changes over the years--hippies or Jewish communists or blacks marrying whites--anyway, this decade it's gays and scientists. Perhaps the most over-the-top of the fundamentalists' recent anti-science slanders involves comparing the theory of evolution, or just science in general, or the fake "materialism" bogeyman, to...Islamic terrorism.

Yeah, that's right. Hard to believe they'd go there, but yeah they went there.

Some background: fundamentalists and creationists claim that the only reason why scientists would believe in evolution or global warming or "Earth goes around the sun" theory, is because 99.99% of scientists adhere to a secret religion called "materialism." This word is not coherently defined, but as near as I can figure out, you're a materialist if you think scientists have solved some scientific problems in the past, and might solve more in the future. Shocking, eh? This causes fundamentalists to say hilarious things about basic science, but it's just part of a calculated economic and political agenda.

Now to see how over-the-top ridiculous and nonsensical this has gotten, let's consider a recent anti-science scare piece by Rebecca Bynum in NER. Bynum begins by making a number of coffee-spittingly ridiculous errors about basic, basic science, such as, that scientists cannot explain electricity. We have to suffer through her absurd set-up, until she gets to the chase, metaphorically speaking. Here comes the money shot, the one most important claim that Bynum really needs to pound home.

Islam is, in essence, an extremely materialistic religion with many similarities to secular materialism: both remove human dignity and envision man as a slave. [Source.]

How logically incoherent can you be? Now Muslims, who believe in Abraham's God, Jesus' virgin birth and eternal Paradise, are supposed to be "materialists"!?

Now Bynum knows she has no evidence to back that up, and she knows it makes no sense. And we know she knows, because of the way she sneaks her dick (metaphorically speaking) into the popcorn box when she thinks no one's looking. In other words, in the above quote, she's lying.

But she figures her audience will grab onto it. And she might be right: probably her audience will grab whatever she sneaks into the popcorn box.

Bynum has to lie here, because Islamic terrorists, in their own words, say that they share the anti-materialism and anti-secular government values of Christian fundamentalist authoritarians, as we'll see in a moment.

But now, let's go back to the days immediately after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.

You show your true character when you're in a crisis: how do fundamentalists act in a terrorist crisis? Man up? Sacrifice for the good of the country? Nah. Let's angle for advantage!

By Sept. 13, Jerry Falwell and his friend Pat 'blood diamond miner' Robertson explained on TV who was responsible for the Islamic terrorist attacks on the USA:

God continues to lift the curtain and allow the enemies of America to give us probably what we deserve... I really believe that the pagans and the abortionists and the feminists and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way... I point the finger in their face and say you helped this happen.

By Dec. 1, 2001, the creationists at the Institute for Creation Research (founded by Henry Morris, see below) would add science to the list of those equated with Islamic terrorists:

Only 13 days after the act of terrorism [Sept.11] on New York, Public Broadcasting Stations delivered a different, but another event of grave importance that was witnessed by millions of Americans—a [TV] special entitled "Evolution." PBS...televised one of the boldest assaults yet upon both our public schools with the millions of innocent school children and the foundational worldview on which our nation was built. [Source: Institute for Creation Research]

Whoa Whoa Whoa. Whoa. Let's stop a second. First, he says a TV documentary about evolution is similar to the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Also, broadcasting a documentary on TV is "assaulting" schoolchildren. Um hmm. And next, a TV show about evolution is attacking "the foundational worldview on which our nation was built."

This idiot has not read any of the writings of the Founding Fathers of the United States. Jefferson described our separation of church and state as "a nation arises which vindicates to itself the freedom of religious opinion, and it's eternal divorce from the civil authority." [Jefferson to James Smith, 12/8/1822]

Our Founding Fathers did believe in reason and using your damn brain and not trusting infallible religious authorities. Also, the main authors of our founding documents didn't believe in the Christian Trinity or the incarnation of Christ. But if you do, fine, your business. Either way, fundamentalism and hystericalism existed in their time, and it scared them to death. We'll get back to the Founders later.

But now, back to creationist thumbsuckers equating evolution and the terrorist attacks of 9/11:

These two "assaults" have similar histories and goals. The public was unaware of the deliberate preparation that was schemed over the past few years leading up to these events.

Dramatic music: DA DA DA DUM!!

And while the public now understands from President Bush that, "We're at War" with militant Islamics around the world, they don't have a clue that America is being attacked from within through its public schools by a militant religious movement of philosophical naturalists (i.e., atheists) under the guise of secular Darwinism. Both desire to alter the life and thinking of our nation...

"Evolution" is PBS's assault that's coming to your children's classroom—not soon but now... These evangelists in turn proselytize millions of victims in taxpayer-supported schools who can't protect themselves and whose parents don't understand that a vicious religious war for the mind has been declared on America from within.

[Source: Institute for Creation Research. Emphasis mine.]

Uh, why is this guy writing crap on the Internet if he's not himself out to alter the life and thinking of our nation? If you want to keep our thinking the same, throw out your computer, please.

Meanwhile, back on Round Earth, what really motivates Islamic terrorists? Religion, maybe? Hey, how about instead of listening to super-chauvinist anti-scientists, how about if we ask a real terrorist?

Here's an Islamic terrorist who bombed the World Trade Center in 1993:

...in a prison interview, Mahmud Abouhalima, convicted in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, stated that his war isn't against Christians but U.S. "secularists" who are exporting their way of life to the Muslim world....living in America allowed him "to understand what the hell is going on in the United States and in Europe about secularism of people, you know, who have no religion." He said the United States would be better off with a Christian government because "at least it would have morals."

...In his interviews...Abouhalima made it clear that his Islamic brothers have no fight with Christianity. He said the holy war is caused by the U.S. government supporting "enemies of Islam," such as the state of Israel...

...Abouhalima was asked what he thought of all those secular people walking around the streets of Cairo and New York, while he sat in federal prison for trying to blow up the World Trade Center. He called them lost people, nonbelievers who lacked the "soul of religion." Then he said: "They're just like moving dead bodies."

[Source: San Francisco Chronicle, 9/23/2001. Emphasis mine.]

In their own words, Islamic terrorists make it clear that they want to kill us, not because they share "secularism" or "materialism", but because they hate "materialism" and "secularism." They hate science, reason, freedom, equality and pluralism just as much as American religious fundamentalists do.

Note the similarity in language: the Islamic terrorist compares people with different beliefs to people without spirit, people already dead-- a common theme in US fundamentalist political statements.

But Islamic extremism has not evolved independently of US fundamentalist creationism: on the contrary, prominent US creationists have traveled abroad to meet Islamic extremists and do everything they can to fan the flames of Islamic hatred for science and secular government.

In Turkey, a NATO ally of the United States, the traditionally secular government is far more vulnerable than here, and religious extremism much more dangerous.

The father of modern creationism, Henry Morris, founder of the Institute for Creation Research (ICR) (which compared evolution to terrorism in the 2001 quote above), and his lieutenant Duane Gish, former vice-president of ICR, visited Turkey in the 90's and participated in a creationist conference in Istanbul.

In Turkey an Islamic extremist group dedicated to fighting evolutionary theory, the Science Research Foundation (called BAV in Turkish), was formed by Harun Yahya (aka Adnan Oktar), and many US creationist attended BAV conferences in Turkey in 1998. [Source.]

The ICR bragged about their connections with the Turks in their newsletter [Impact, Dec. 1999].

US creationists hate secular government and science so much that, to them, anything, anything is better than the separation of church and state--they have done everything they can to inflame Islamic extremism and helped destabilize a ally of the US-- and have helped to put Turkish scientists in danger.

Morris originally went to Turkey to find Noah's Ark. At that he failed, but he and his US colleagues succeeded in crushing the free speech of Turkish scientists.

[Update: One former member of the BAV describes how the cult got their dogma by copying it directly from US creationists like the ICR:

For every [Harun Yahya] book, they will take a few key sources written by Christian creationist authors, mostly from the US. They plagiarize the chapters and paragraphs that agree with their creationist approach. Then they add the photos, a few ayat from the Koran, and sometimes a bit of a commentary. None of the ideas belong to [Adnan] Oktar. [ Source.]

The BAV went on to push a campaign of massive legal intimidation against evolutionary scientists, and Harun Yahya's cult used female sex slaves to gain influence over wealthy and powerful people.]

In 2005, when the state of Kansas was rewriting its science education standards to make them anti-evolution, a member of the BAV, Mustafa Akyol, testified to the school board. The Kansas City paper, The Pitch, dug up some background on the BAV's attacks on Turkish scientists:

...beginning in 1998, BAV spearheaded an effort to attack Turkish academics who taught Darwinian theory. Professors there say they were harassed and threatened, and some of them were slandered in fliers that labeled them "Maoists" for teaching evolution. In 1999, six of the professors won a civil court case against BAV for defamation and were awarded $4,000 each.

But seven years after BAV's offensive began, says Istanbul University forensics professor Umit Sayin (one of the slandered faculty members), the battle is over.
"There is no fight against the creationists now. They have won the war," Sayin tells the Pitch from his home in Istanbul. "...Today, it's impossible to motivate [any scientists]. They're afraid they'll be attacked by the radical Islamists and the BAV."

...The Turkish government, he adds, refuses to take an interest, tacitly encouraging the ongoing effort against scientists. ...As a result of the BAV campaign and other efforts to denounce evolution, he adds, most members of Turkey's parliament today not only discount evolution but consider it a hoax. "Now creationism is in [high school] biology books," Sayin says. "Evolution is presented [by BAV] as a conspiracy of the Jewish and American imperialists to promote new world order and fascist motives ... and the majority of the people believe it."

...Sayin says that creationism in Turkey got key support in the 1980s and 1990s from American creationist organizations, and [Turkish-born physicist Taner] Edis points out that BAV's [Harun] Yahya books resemble the same sorts of works put out by California's Institute for Creation Research. Except in Yahya's books, it's Allah that's doing the creating.

[Source: The Pitch, Kansas City. May 05, 2005.]

So you just substitute Yahweh <--> Allah, or vice versa, and you get US creationism <--> Islamic extremism. The logic, the arguments, the anti-science, the slanders are all the same: evolution is a conspiracy; evolutionary scientists are fascists; scientists are called atheists, Maoists, etc. There is no difference between BAV's language and the quote from American creationists above.

[Update: Adnan Oktar, aka Harun Yahya, formed a religious cult centered on the BAV and its creationist anti-Darwinian crusade. The BAV launched hundreds of legal actions against scientists, critics and former defectors from their organization. News websites in were blocked in Turkey. Wordpress.com in its entirety--all its blogs--were blocked in Turkey in 2007 because some bloggers reported Yahya and the BAV's actions. In 2008, they got all of Google Groups, and then Richard Dawkins' website blocked entirely in Turkey. The creationist cult employed women as sex slaves to recruit new members, and as "wives" for the leader. Adnan Oktar/Yahya was eventually sentenced to three years for founding a criminal organization.

One former BAV member said: "We had something to please everybody: Ataturk [nationalism], namaz (prayer), creationism and, if need be, cocaine.”

So perhaps one difference between Islamic and American anti-evolutionists is the sex-and-drug cults. But then... insert Ted Haggard joke here. ]

Akyol from the BAV has emphasized the similarities between Islam and the US anti-evolution Intelligent Design movement, specifically the Discovery Institute:

Muslims should also note the great similarity between the arguments of the Intelligent Design Movement and Islamic sources. Hundreds of verses in the Qur’an call people to examine the natural world and see in it the evidence of God...

What Intelligent Design theorists like [Michael] Behe or [William] Dembski do today is to refine the same argument with the findings of modern science. In short, Intelligent Design is not alien to Islam. It is very much our cause, and we should do everything we can to support it. [Source.]

And what did Mustafa Akyol tell the anti-evolution school board in Kansas when he testified in 2005?

Muslims think that the West is a completely materialistic civilization that has turned its back on God... Since America is the leading country within the whole of Western civilization, it attracts much of this distaste. Unfortunately, that is one of the factors that create a breeding ground for radical Islam. [Source.]

Note his language, his attack on "materialism." By materialism here, he does not mean greed, consumerism or capitalism, which are all mandatory according to Christian fundamentalists. He means science, evolution and the separation of church and state.

Translation: We Americans must get rid of reason and the separation of church and state, or his co-religionists will kill us. Abandon American values, or you die.

And now, a pop quiz. Here are two quotes on the same topic: "secularism" and liberal professors in universities.

Two quotes: which is American fundamentalist, which is Islamic extremist?

A. There are "thirty to forty thousand" left wing professors who are "termites that have worked into the woodwork of our academic society and it’s appalling... These guys are out and out communists, they are radicals, they are, you know, some of them killers, and they are propagandists of the first order... you don’t want your child to be brainwashed by these radicals, you just don’t want it to happen. Not only brainwashed but beat up, they beat these people up, cower them into submission. AGGGH."

B. "Today, students should shout at the president and ask why liberal and secular university lecturers are present in the universities."

The answer is at the bottom of this post.

Recall that the ICR creationists, friends of Turkish creationists who assisted in founding the BAV, above said evolution was an assault on "the foundational worldview on which our nation was built."

Howabout, instead of listening to them, we actually ask our Founding Fathers about the worldview on which our nation was built?

Here's John Adams, second US President:

The United States of America have exhibited, perhaps, the first example of governments erected on the simple principles of nature; and if men are now sufficiently enlightened to disabuse themselves of artifice, imposture, hypocrisy, and superstition, they will consider this event as an era in their history...

It will never be pretended that any persons employed in that service [making the US government] had interviews with the gods, or were in any degree under the influence of Heaven... it will forever be acknowledged that these governments were contrived merely by the use of reason and the senses.

[John Adams, "A Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America" (1787-88)]

Well guess what Johnny, it is "pretended" now! 24 hours a day every day at Fox News and the Christian Broadcasting Network!

So if evolution agrees with "reason and the senses", and does not pretend it "had interviews with the gods", how does it undermine the values our country was built on?

(And if the time ever comes that evolution no longer agrees with "reason and the senses", then OK, off it goes.)

If the US fundamentalists on the school board in Kansas in 2005 had had any spine, any backbone, they would've listened to Mustafa Akyol's testimony above; and told him that if his co-religionists can't control their violent impulses, they have to change. Not us.

We have problems, true. But this country was built on reason and science, pluralism and tolerance, and the separation of church and state, the "eternal divorce from the civil authority" Jefferson wrote about. And they would've told Akyol and the BAV to go back to their country and, rather than fighting and slandering secular government and science and the use of reason, they should defend these things and tell their more violent co-religionists to change or f*** off.

But no...it's Western scientists who are assaulting our schoolkids, huh? American creationists... anti-science, encouraging extremism, and cowardly when confronted with it.

---

And now... the answer to our "quote quiz" above. The less hysterical quote (B) is from Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, president of Iran, who like Pat Robertson was calling for a purge of liberal and secular teachers from the Iran's universities, encouraging students to employ Iranian Islamic revolution-style radicalism. [Source.]

Of course, the more hysterical quote (A) is from American fundamentalist Pat Robertson [video.] He also describes the "thirty or forty thousand" left-wing professors as "racists, murderers, sexual deviants and supporters of Al-Qaeda-- and they could be teaching your kids!" This is in reference to a book, America’s 101 Worst Professors, which lists no murderers at all, and no professor who beats anyone up. Among the dangerous profs listed in book was a professor of Peace Studies at a pacifist Quaker school. One real radical and asshole, Ward Churchill, has since been fired.

What is the Fundamentalist War Against "Materialism" Really About?

Nowadays it is virtually universal among right wing authoritarians, creationists and Intelligent Design proponents to say that there is a religion called "materialism" that is supposedly adhered to by all scientists that believe in evolution (which is to say, 99.99% of scientists.) They can't argue about the evidence for theories like evolution, global warming or whatever it is that makes life less cushy for their leadership. So they basically pull a 'tu quoque': "That's just your religion!"

Right wing fundamentalists blame this alleged religion "materialism" for inspiring fascism and its opposite, communism, global warming and its opposite, global cooling, racism and its opposite one-worldism, atheism and its opposites, satanism and Islam (yeah, those too) and several other mutually exclusive philosophies.

In my previous post I described how right wing authoritarians make coffee-spittingly funny errors (or outright lies) about the most basic science as part of their fake war against this so-called "Materialism".

Now let's ask: when right wing authoritarians say that the great threat nowadays is "materialism", what do they mean by "materialism"? They will tell you that it's atheism, or the belief that matter is all that exists. However, they're not being honest; even their terminology is fake. Let's try to figure out what this campaign is really promoting.

Since Rebecca Bynum wrote this article describing how "materialism" supposedly diminishes the value of human beings, let's try and figure out what that really means.

Here comes the money shot! This next quote is the whole reason why Bynum wrote her article. In this statement, Bynum knows she's being dishonest, so she tries to sneak it past us like a shoplifting teenager with a Sony Playstation under her sweater:

Islam is, in essence, an extremely materialistic religion with many similarities to secular materialism: both remove human dignity and envision man as a slave. [Source.]

Excuse me young lady, what do have under your sweater!? Oh, we see what you did there! An equation of "secular materialism" with Islamic terrorism! Now Bynum knows this statement is logically incoherent, and she knows she has no facts to back it up.

Nevertheless, note that she is now defining "materialism" so that it includes Muslims, who believe in Abraham's God, Jesus' virgin birth and eternal Paradise. OK...now tell me again what do right wing authoritarians mean when they say "materialism", anyway?

(Back on round Earth, Muslim extremists and terrorists in their own words say they hate "materialism" and "secularism" with the same fervor as Christian fundamentalists, and directly copy the language and arguments of US Christian fundamentalists (just substitute Yahweh-->Allah). This point is important enough that I'll detail it in a later blog post.)

But, to underscore that the war against fake "materialism" is not really against the belief that matter is all that exists, consider what fundamentalists say about the many scientists who believe in evolution and in God--famous ones include Ken Miller, Harold Varmus, Francis Collins (head of the NIH), and whole organizations like the American Scientific Affiliation.

Right wing anti-science authoritarians hate evolutionists who believe in God even more than they hate the atheists. Collins' pro-evolution faith tank, BioLogos, is a target at the anti-evolution website Uncommon Descent.

And the Creation Society of Mid-America (CSAMA), led by Tom 'death camp' Willis, tell us that evolutionists must be denied the right to vote and violently expelled from society, especially if they believe in God:

...in a sane society, evolutionists should not be allowed to vote, or influence laws or people in any way! They should, perhaps, make bricks to earn enough to eat.

...the theistic evolutionist must look squarely at us and declare "I believe in God, but the Bible, real empirical and theoretical science are all wrong..." This is even worse than the atheists. Historically, those who claim belief in God, but elevate human opinion or tradition over the Bible, have always performed as badly any atheist. If you had any say, would you allow such a person to influence, in any way, what citizens ought, by law, to do?

...The arrogance displayed by the evolutionist class is totally unwarrented [sic]. The facts warrent [sic] the violent expulsion of all evolutionists from civilized society. I am quite serious...

[Source: Should Evolutionists Be Allowed to Vote? CSAMA Newsletter Volume 25(4) July-Aug, 2008. Emphasis mine.]

Consciously mimicking Hitler, Willis and CSAMA now say that all evolutionists, whether they believe in God or not, can live as long as their slave labor is productive in creationists' death camps: "Labor camps...their life should continue only as long as they can support themselves in the camps."

Let's be clear: this is not about atheism. They use science as a scapegoat in a political, materialist agenda of their own. If you believe in God, it is not enough to get you protection from right wing authoritarians and corporatist fundamentalists.

So if the right wing Christian (and Muslim) fake campaigns against "materialism" aren't really against the belief that matter is all that exists--then what are they about?

People who are pro-science (not necessarily scientists, nor atheists) tend to judge people by consistent standards: Do they make obviously, factually false statements? Are their predictions always wrong? Do they support mass killing or prejudice? What leaders do they put in power? Have they been held accountable for past false statements or false prophecies or outright crimes?

This cannot be tolerated. If judged by consistent standards, right wing fundamentalist leaders would simply be revealed as cruel, heartless bigots and calculating defenders of corporate plutocracy. So, to rationalize their cruelest agendas and most dishonest statements, right wing fundamentalist leaders require a unique right, exclusive to them, to invoke their "infallible" authority-- their "absolute authority", as creationist Ken Ham (of Answers in Genesis fame) calls the purple robe he endlessly wraps himself in.

So fundamentalist leaders have two political, material objectives here: preserve their own infallible "absolute authority", a tool they use to inoculate themselves and to enable big corporations and the rich to escape accountability for whatever they steal or whatever damage they cause-- to distract your attention away from what the powerful and rich have been up to ('Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!')

So fundamentalists launched a marketing campaign in the material world with materialist objectives, and they call it "anti-materialism"!

That takes chutzpah.

Tom 'creationist Nazi' Willis is clear about his real priorities: "God the Father and Jesus are both capitalists."

He considers all public schools to be the first, number one form of what he calls "Antichrist/Socialism". Considering that Thomas Jefferson founded the public education movement in the USA, and James Madison promoted it, this would make the US Declaration of Independence a Satanic document.

Evolutionists gravitate to employment positions where knowledge, truth, character, logic, etc., are not needed, typically education and media. Antichrist/Socialists convinced most "modern" societies that the first activity that required state ownership and operation (socialism) was education, insuring incompetents had safe havens and that most children were raised by people who owe their income to socialism and had jobs where their religion was endorsed by the state.
[Source: CSAMA Newsletter, Volume 25(5) Sept-Oct, 2008. Emphasis mine.]

The abolition of public schools is CSAMA's number one goal, even ahead of death camps. 'Screw you, poor kids/Antichrists! Ghetto trash/Antichrists don't need to read!'

At the Intelligent Design website Uncommon Descent, Denyse O'Leary explains her deep hatred for "materialism": "If this is a culture war, I plead innocent for starting it. It was started by entrenched tax burdens."

Don't worry O'Leary, your tax burden will be lighter after the Creation Society of Mid-America gets rid of public schools for ghetto trash/Antichrists.

They say that their "worldview" and their "metaphysics" are essential, not just to their morality, but to any conceivable system of morality. Therefore, "materialism" supposedly leads to amorality.

But what the hell are their values? What values follow from their "worldview"?

If you do simple Google searches on creationist web sites (AIG or CMI), you find countless screeds against enemies and bogeymen and scapegoats that are way outside their supposed purview--the gays, premarital sex, Muslims, the scientists.

But nothing, nothing about rich corporations that commit crimes, or fraud, or engage in de facto pyramid schemes, or sell defective products that kill people.

Nothing about Enron, WorldCom, Lehman Brothers, Countrywide Financial, nothing. Nobody rich. Ever.

As long as you believe in Christ, you can enrich yourself in any way possible, both with taxpayers' money through the Office of Faith-Based Initiatives, or with African blood diamonds, or any which way you can get your hands on it, like Pat Robertson does.

I only found one--one--reference to corporate malfeasance among the anti-evolution, anti-science fundamentalists: Chuck Colson, convicted felon. Colson was part of the Watergate conspiracy, and said he was "valuable to the President ... because I was willing ... to be ruthless in getting things done."

In the 1970's, Colson encouraged vandalism and terrorism for Nixon. He proposed firebombing the Brookings Institution and stealing their documents, and was given the job of arranging the murder of peace protesters.

When it comes to anti-evolution, he is in favor of free speech:

I suggest you ignore the forces that would stifle all dissent, and take a look at [Michael] Behe’s book The Edge of Evolution. Even if you do not agree with everything in it, as I do not, you do not need to follow the Darwinist line that everything you disagree with must be squashed. Dare to think for yourself. You just might learn what the Darwinists and the anti-theists do not want you to know. [Source: The Christian Post. Emphasis mine.]

This is a little different from his behavior in the 1970's, when Colson was given the job of arranging Teamster thugs to murder peace protesters. From the Nixon tapes:

Haldeman: Colson’s gonna…do it with the Teamsters.

Nixon: They’ve got guys who’ll go in and knock their heads off.

Haldeman: Sure. Murderers... They’re gonna beat the [expletive deleted] out of some of those people. And, uh, and hope they really hurt’em.

[Source: The Family by Jeff Sharlet, p. 231. Emphasis mine.]

When it comes to people protesting for peace, he'll hire paid killers. But when it comes to anti-science, Mr. Free Thought complains about "the Darwinist line that everything you disagree with must be squashed."

Now let's see what Mr. Free Thought says about moral values for corporations, in this case, Enron. Again, this is the only reference to corporate malfeasance I can find among the anti-evolutionists:

...Has value-free post-modernity -- the fruit of modern secularism -- undermined the moral foundation essential for democratic capitalism?

...Now mind you, Enron's leaders were the best and the brightest, pillars of the community. Enron's chairman, Kenneth Lay, boasted he hired only graduates of the top business schools.

What Enron's collapse exposes is the glaring failure of these business schools. Ethics, you see, historically rests on absolute truth, which our top schools have systematically assaulted for four decades. And business school graduates leave the schools, as I discovered when I lectured at Harvard Business School ten years ago, without a clue about ethics.

But the Enron debacle does offer a good chance for Christians to contend for the Biblical worldview in the economic marketplace. The Scriptures endorse concepts like private property, contract rights, and the discharge of debts -- all essential to free markets...

...The lesson of history, which our neighbors need to understand, is that capitalism is healthy only when subject to moral restraints derived ultimately from religious truth. [Source. Emphasis mine.]

Notice that Colson is blaming Enron's malfeasance on "secularism". Our schools are to blame, he implies, for not being right wing enough. Our business schools--which (along with economics departments) are the only part of modern universities dominated by right wing professors. But for Colson, the solution to problems caused by right wing values is... more extreme right wing values.

I got a couple questions about this:

First, what "moral constraints" was Colson subject to when he wanted to engage in terrorism, theft and murder in the 1970's?

Second, how'd that project of using the Enron collapse to contend for Biblical morality in the marketplace turn out?

Not very well, apparently, considering what happened in September 2008. Or, maybe that was the kind of success they wanted after all.

A few people got rich from the destruction of the economy, after all. So, success, by the standards of right wing fundamentalists.

Anyway, Colson gets lots of money from you and me and other US taxpayers through the Office of Faith-Based intitiatives. We pay for his fame and self-aggrandizement.

Thanks to this US taxpayer-funded fame, the Templeton Foundation gave him their $1 million prize.

Compare the anti-scientists' near-complete silence regarding corporate malfeasance, against their deafening screeches about gay sex.

Creationist Jonathan Sarfati, pro-infanticide genocidalist asshole of Creation Ministries International, calls gays "homonazis", "sodomofascists" and the "Gay-stapo" in this post.

No corporation, no rich person, ever has been, or ever will be compared by fundamentalists to the Nazis, no matter how many people they impoverish, no matter how many pension funds are destroyed.

Sarfati calls the gays "the Gay-stapo" because he wishes to compound the murder of a young gay man, Matthew Shepard, by slandering him after he is dead these many years:

How precious can you get? Homosexuals are now a politically protected victim group, about which it is verboten to say anything negative. And certain homonazis want Christians punished if they quote from the Bible against homosexual behavior...

...the vile murder of the 21-year-old homosexual Matthew Shepard by young thugs he had propositioned was front page news as an alleged anti-gay ‘hate crime’, and blamed on conservative Christians...

(Actually, six years after the murder, the media finally researched the case properly and found that Shepard’s killers were motivated by money and drugs, while the savagery was fueled by methamphetamine abuse not anti-gay hate.)

[Source: Creation Ministries International. Emphasis mine.]

Whenever Sarfati writes "Actually, reasearchers found...", you should sure as hell double-check his sources. He's wrong, of course. Shepard did not proposition his killers, according to police detectives who handled the case.

Note Sarfati's logic: he does trust the murderers when they said at trial that a gay attacked them sexually-- the murderers being the only source of that story. But then Sarfati does not trust the murderers when in 1999 they said that Shepard did not proposition them. And again Sarfati does not trust the murderers when they said under oath at the 1998 trial that they killed him because he was gay. But then, Sarfati is back to trusting the murderers again when in 2004 they change their story and say they didn't hate gays after all. Is there any logic to this? For Sarfati, sure, asshole logic: he believes anything and everything that makes gays look perverted, and makes Christians look like the real oppressed class.

Yes, even after gay people get murdered, are dead and presumably can do no harm to fundamentalists, Sarfati has to lie about them and slander them to compound the crime.

But corporations get a free pass, even after they destroy our financial system and drive the economy into the ground.

No matter what they call it, what the right wing authoritarians push here is a marketing campaign with materialist motives, and they call it anti-materialism.

Your Science Makes Jesus Cry: Right Wingers and the Campaign Against "Materialism"

Rebecca Bynum recently wrote an article in NER which serves as a typically hilarious example of the anti-science attack line favored nowadays by the religious right: the threat of so-called "materialism." This attack line, now universally promoted among anti-science right wingers, creationists, Intelligent Design proponents and mystics, claims there is a religion of "materialism" adhered to by all scientists who believe in evolution (which is to say, 99.99% of scientists).

All the anti-science right wingers who attack "materialism" do so by issuing coffee-spittingly ridiculous falsehoods about the most basic scientific facts, as we'll see in a moment.

What is this "materialism" anyway? If you ask them, right wing authoritarians usually say it is atheism, or the belief that matter is all that exists. But that is not what they're really opposing. After all, the people doing the attacking--right wing authoritarians and fundamentalists-- are using it in a campaign to promote their own materialist political agenda: expanding their religious leaders' "infallible" authority, and enlarging the rights of the rich and powerful to acquire material wealth and never be held accountable for the damage caused when they suck that wealth from the poor and middle class.

It takes guts for fundamentalist leaders, like Pat 'blood diamond miner' Robertson, to accuse pro-science people of "materialism", when their own defense of plutocracy and lack of accountability for rich corporations is itself a political, a material--indeed, a materialist--act.

We'll see in more detail in my next blog post, the terminology used by right wing authoritarians is not honest; this is not about atheism or anti-atheism, nor does it have anything to do with "matter is all that exists." Their terminology is dishonest.

And their "science" is hilarious. To this campaign they have attached a grab bag of howlingly funny falsehoods about the simplest, most basic scientific facts...as we'll see in a moment.

All fundamentalist campaigns need something to scare you with--it used to be abolitionists; or free blacks; or Catholics; or Freemasons; or Jews; or communists; or Jewish communists.

Sigh... OK, who's the scapegoat this time?

The latest materialist campaign by right wing fundamentalists uses science as its scapegoat. Well, fundamentalists used to be against blacks marrying whites. That's progress I guess.

Most scientists think scientific problems can be solved. (If they didn't, they would get jobs that pay actual money.) But this worries fundamentalist leaders like Pat Robertson and Ken Ham, because they know that the solvability of real problems, by the use of reason, and by demanding evidence for statements, undermines fundamentalist leaders' divinely infallible authority, and their demand to never be held accountable for their misdeeds.

Thus, logically, you might think that by attacking "materialism", right wing authoritarians are only attacking the belief that science could solve some unsolved problems in the future.

Wrong. That would be minimalist, but these people want the whole enchilada. When they really want to inflame your hatred, right wing authoritarians tell you that science has never solved any problems in the past.

If you say that scientists have ever solved a problem--found the causes behind any effect, cured any diseases, invented any technologies--solved any problem, even a simple problem from a hundred years ago--then you are the Darwinian thought police, a mad scientist out to enslave mankind. "Moo hoo hoo ha ha ha ha!!"

Of course there really are mysteries that science has not yet solved or just partially solved (dark energy, dark matter, abiogenesis, reconciliation of gravity and quantum mechanics, etc.)

But weirdly, fundamentalists have almost no interest in real scientific problems that really are unsolved. Instead, the "anti-materialist" campaign, for some weird reason I don't understand, is fixated on coffee-spittingly ridiculous, false claims--saying that very basic scientific problems that were solved many decades or centuries ago, are still unsolved; and scientists today don't know a damn thing about anything anywhere.

No let's see some examples of Bynum's ridiculous science errors. First Bynum says that scientists "...cannot tell us what electricity is..."

ARRGH! Scientists don't even know what electricity is now? It's electrons moving through matter in response to an electrostatic field, bitches!!

The year is 2010 fer crissakes! The electron was identified by J.J. Thomson in 1897!

When I was a physics TA there was one class called "Physics for Blondes" that was intended for cheerleaders and humanities majors--but even in that class, even the very stupidest students knew what electricity is!

Bynum: "Scientists observe the elliptical movements of the planets and the mathematical precision of the orbits of electrons around the atomic proton, and postulate the existence of forces to explain these motions, but they cannot tell us what these forces actually are."

ARRGH! They're momentum transfers mediated by the exchange of virtual particles of integral spin as described by quantum field theory, bitches!!

Bynum also says science "can no more predict that one hydrogen and two oxygen atoms combined would create water..."

Quantum electrodynamical simulations reproduce the formation of oxygen-hydrogen molecular bonds, bitches!!

And now, Bill O'Reilly. In this video, Bellow Reilly tells Richard Dawkins that scientists cannot explain why "the tides come in, the tides go out, the sun goes up, the sun goes down."

Oh it's the tides now!? The tides are due to the gravitational attraction of the moon, bitches!!

I could understand if they said things like "Scientists don't know what dark energy is," which at least would be true.

But for some weird reason I don't understand, right wing authoritarians have a bizarre compulsion to lie about problems solved many decades or centuries ago! I mean, scientists don't know what electricity is? Scientists don't know how oxygen and hydrogen combine? Scientists don't know why tides follow the moon? WTF is this, is this some kind of weird OCD compulsion to lie about science that you can't control, like when OCD people wash their hands over and over and over? WTF is wrong with you people!?

I understand you're terrified about teen sex and gay sex. But why are you saying scientists don't know why the sun rises!? Angular momentum conservation of a spinning planet, bitches!!

Now more coffee-spittingly ridiculous science from anti-evolutionists: Phillip Johnson, the founder of the pro-Intelligent Design faith tank the Discovery Institute, made the accusation that scientists believe in a "materialist" religion central to his anti-evolution campaign. This ad hominem attack is basically his whole argument, and he tries to avoid talking about scientific evidence-- which is convenient because lawyer Johnson has shown himself ignorant about science and not even curious about it.

Johnson and his anti-evolution acolyte, Jonathan Wells, insisted in 1991 that AIDS is not caused by HIV.

Say it with me now: Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome is caused by HIV... bitches.

In 1999, Johnson gave a talk at D. James Kennedy's convention, "Reclaiming America for Christ" (like it ever belonged to him in the first place), where Johnson gave a talk to help make Kennedy's super-chauvinist Dominionist audience dumber and more obedient:

In every textbook for the past several decades the prime illustration of the power of natural selection has been the Peppered Moth population in central England... It doesn't show the creation of anything. Nothing new enters. There's light and dark moths at the beginning and at the end. And that's it. That's the most powerful demonstration of what natural selection has actually been seen to do.

Why, then, is this taken as evidence of natural selection's vast creative power? The experiment is so trivial that it's almost an anticlimax. It's also not honest; it's actually a scam. It's now well known in the scientific world, and has been in the major journals, that the moths don't even sit on tree trunks. Yet there are pictures in all the textbooks of these moths on tree trunks. In order to make the pictures, the scientists actually glued the moths to the tree trunks. I am not kidding. [Source. Emphasis mine.]

Johnson is not kidding; he's lying. Johnson and his acolyte, Jonathan Wells, have a weird OCD compulsion to lie about the damn moths not sitting on the damn tree trunks. Majerus' book Melanism even came out in 1998 with photos showing moths in the wild, not glued sitting on the damn tree trunks. Can Johnson and Wells not understand simple pie charts showing that moths are sitting on the damn tree trunks?

Why, why do they have to lie about this minor point? Do moths really scare right-wingers so goddamn much?

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They're frigging moths fer crissakes! My two-year-old isn't even afraid of moths, you mottephobic bitches!!

And in 2004, Jonathan Wells, asshole, continued his winning streak by saying cancer is not caused by genetic mutations.

And now... Enter the Mr. Blackwell of anti-evolutionists, philosopher David Berlinski (also a fellow at Johnson's Discovery Institute), who in 1996 disproved evolution with a series of "Why is the sky blue Daddy?" type questions.

Says Berlinski, scientists have absolutely no idea "Why [is there] echolocation in the bats but not the buzzards?"

Gee, that's a tough one. Do ya think it might be because bats live in the dark, and buzzards don't, bitches?

Furthermore, Berlinski tells us, those dumb scientists can never solve the profound mystery of "[Why are there] Pouches among the possums but not the penguins?"

Uh...maybe because penguins do have a pocket to keep their chicks warm, bitches!!

And the philosopher continues: scientists will never, never be able to figure out "Why is the Pitcher plant carnivorous, but not the thorn bush?"

Even the guy who sells me tomato seeds knows the answer to that one...

Because carnivorous plants grow in poor soil and can only get nutrients from eating insects, bitches!!

[Source: David Berlinski, The Deniable Darwin. Commentary, June 1996.]

And when you think it can't get worse...

Some influential creationists say that the Earth does not even spin...no, Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton et al. were in the materialist conspiracy. The Bible is clear: Earth can't move. So they conclude that the Sun and all planets, stars and galaxies spin around the Earth every 24 hours.

The State of Kansas' School Board in 1999 wanted to rewrite their state's science education standards to make them anti-evolution. When you wanna fight evolutionists, who you gonna call? Creationist Nazis! Yes, the State of Kansas called in Tom Willis to write their state's science standards. [Source: Washington Post, 8/12/1999.]

The Creation Society of Mid-America, led by Tom 'death camp for scientists' Willis, teaches that evolution is a hoax, and the Sun goes around the Earth, and if you think otherwise, it's the death camp for you.

The Bible strongly states that the earth can be shaken, but does not move at all (Ps 93:1). But the sun does move (e.g., Joshua 10:12-14) and does so in a circuit (Psalm 19:1-6). Some will argue “that is only your interpretation.” My response is simply, “It is not an interpretation at all, it is what the words say...”

...Now, what does the evidence say? In the last segment, we suggested that all experiments to demonstrate that the earth moves at all have failed. All seem to indicate the earth does not move at all. There is much evidence that the earth is young and cannot possibly be millions, much less billions of years old... While it is much more difficult to prove how quickly the earth was formed, there is, in fact hard evidence that it must have formed quickly because it could not have formed slowly...
[Source: CSAMA Newsletter, Vol. 17(2), Mar/Apr 2000]

How influential are geocentric anti-evolutionists? Two Georgia State Representative sent out a letter to fellow lawmakers revealing the "indisputable" scientific evidence that proves the evolution "hoax" and Copernican astronomy are both part of an ancient Jewish Kabbalist conspiracy; of course Isaac Newton and his theory were part of the conspiracy. The lawmakers' letter read:

Indisputable evidence — long hidden but now available to everyone — demonstrates conclusively that so-called ‘secular evolution science’ is the Big-Bang 15-billion-year alternate ‘creation scenario’ of the Pharisee Religion. This scenario is derived concept-for-concept from Rabbinic writings in the mystic ‘holy book’ Kabbala dating back at least two millennia.

The Texas lawmakers apologized for offending Jews, but not for offending reason. One of them, Ben Bridges, when asked if he really believed that evolution is a Jewish conspiracy and that the Earth doesn't really move, replied, "I agree with it more than I would the Big Bang Theory or the Darwin Theory. I am convinced that rather than risk teaching a lie why teach anything?"

Ridiculous anti-science is a very old tradition. Here's Martin Luther, Protestant theologian, who, like Willis above, points out accurately that the Bible says the Earth can't move (it does say that) so the Sun must go around the Earth:

People gave ear to an upstart astrologer [Copernicus] who strove to show that the earth revolves, not the heavens or the firmament, the sun and the moon... This fool wishes to reverse the entire science of astronomy; but sacred Scripture tells us that Joshua commanded the sun to stand still, and not the earth.
[Martin Luther, Table Talk]

Luther made many statements of this sort, for example, that Christians must believe that there are oceans below the Earth and above the sky, because the Bible says so (Genesis Chapter 1 does say that.)

Here's Luther intertwining his anti-science and his psychotic anti-Semitic hatred:

No person has yet been born, or will ever be born, who can grasp or comprehend how foliage can sprout from wood or a tree, or how grass can grow forth from stone or earth, or how any creature can be begotten. Yet these filthy, blind, hardened liars [Jews] presume to fathom and to know what is happening outside and beyond the creature in God's hidden, incomprehensible, inscrutable, and eternal essence... [The Jews] call our faith idolatrous, which is to reproach and defame God himself as an idol.
[Source: Martin Luther, On the Jews and Their Lies, Part XII]

Oh, Marty McHitler thinks no one can ever explain how any creature is begotten eh?

Well...uh...the sperm cell attaches to the egg and their membranes fuse in a CD9-mediated interaction causing insertion of sperm nucleus followed by increasing calcium ion concentration and intracellular pH which triggers an increase in oocyte protein synthesis producing fusion of egg and sperm pronuclei thus forming the diploid zygote nucleus and initiating embryogenesis consisting of gastrulation, neurulation, and body plan partitioning controlled by homeobox gene kits...

Bitches!!

Your science makes Jesus cry, and he thought Adam and Eve were real.

The right wing anti-"materialist" campaign is inspired by them asking themselves one question:

WSWJLA?

"What science would Jesus lie about?"

Let's be clear: right wing authoritarians do not really mean what they say when they oppose "materialism."

This is not about atheism. Right wing authoritarians use science as a scapegoat in a political campaign centered on a lack of accountability of their leaders, and the materialist enrichment of their corporate overlords.

A point we will demonstrate more forcefully in my next blog post.

Cornelius Hunter's Logic: Intelligent Design Can Disprove "Obama Is President" Theory

The Intelligent Design proponent and Discovery Institute (DI) Fellow Cornelius Hunter has a post at his blog where he argues that evolution disproven because is not parsimonious--that is, because the evolutionary pathways leading to complex organisms are complex. Hunter has a slogan, endlessly repeated: "Religion drives science and it matters", which is quite a "tu quoque" argument coming from a guy who works for a faith tank like the DI. This is like the Klan cutting off all accusations that they're racist by starting out by saying: 'If you don't like us, you're racist against white people.' Not that Hunter is a racist, of course, but the point is, right-wingers definitely understand how to launch a preemptive strike by first accusing others (without evidence) of what they themselves (with evidence) are manifestly guilty of.

So Hunter's post claims that evolution is disproven because, in
this research paper, the authors used genetic comparisons to construct our best model of the tree of descent for the first placental mammals, and found it involved hybridization events very early in the history of mammals.

Hybridization? Says Cornelius Hunter. That disproves "Darwinism"!

Uh huh...

I have recently heard an absurd "origin theory" about the president of the United States-- that the US President is neither black nor white, but both at the same time!

A HYBRIDIZATION theory!? Hybridization never happens in the real world!

The US population is 1.7% multiracial, so the odds of this "Half-Black President" origin theory are 58.8 to 1!

But it gets worse! The "Obama origin theory" furthermore claims that he was born in Hawaii in 1959!

Now Hawaii is 43rd among US states in population, and the odds against the President being born in a state the size of Hawaii are 239 to 1!

And, given that the president must be at least 35 and less than say 90 or so, the odds against him being born in 1959 are 65 to 1!

So the combined odds against this dogmatic atheist "origin story" are now 916,375 to 1!

Clearly, the only reason why anyone would believe this "Obama is President" story is a metaphysical precommitment to atheism.

But it gets worse! They say he's "American", but they also say his father was from KENYA! How many people have Kenyan fathers?

Epicycles upon Epicycles!

And their "origin theory" furthermore claims he grew up in Indonesia!

Most Americans don't even have a passport! The odds against this unparsimonious origin theory are now millions to one.

Another falsified prediction of the dogmatic "Obama is President" thought police!

Religion drives the "Obama is President" theory, and it matters.

Don't pay any attention to the vast number of successful predictions of the atheist "Obama is President" theory, like that birth announcement printed in Honolulu newspapers in 1959, or the photos of him with his white grandma.

Why should a vast number of successful predictions matter!?

Luckily, Mr. Hunter has a more parsimonious theory about the origin of our president, right? A more parsimonious theory that makes testable predictions that are both more specific and different from the accepted theory...You do, right, Mr. Hunter?

The current theory hurts my brain. So please keep yours simple, Mr. Hunter.

Such as for example, that all the relevant authorities are lying to us.

...And have faked their incomparably vaster number of successful predictions.

...And have tricked us into thinking that their many "falsified predictions" are really successful predictions, or relevant to other topics altogether.

Hunter has on his website a long list of what he calls "failed predictions" of Darwinism. I scanned it: mostly successful predictions of Darwinism, or observations that make Darwinism more probable (for example, the genetic code is more tolerant to mutations than you would expect at random, thus minimizing deleterious mutations and making constructive mutations more likely), or stuff that's irrelevant as far as Darwin is concerned.

Hey Hunter: It's Wednesday and it's raining. Please add that to your list of "failed predictions of Darwinism"; it is as good as anything else on there.

In his current post Hunter basically says that the historical pathways by which complex organisms (in this case, the first placental mammals) evolved are too complex. This is in reference to a research paper that tries to reconstruct the origin of the first placental mammals by genetic analysis.

The authors are trying to figure out which large groups of placental mammals were the first to split off from the other placental mammals. Was the first outlier Afrotheria (elephants, elephant shrews, sea cows and such)? Or was the first group to branch off Xenarthra (South American anteaters, armadillos, tree sloths, extinct ground sloths and such)?

The authors (Churakov et al.) write: "These findings provide significant support for a “soft” polytomy of the major mammalian clades." A "clade" is a bunch of species with a single common ancestor, that is, all branches that grow upward from a single node, i.e. up from one progenitor branch. A "soft polytomy" means that it appears that more than one branch split off at one time from the common ancestor, as far as we can tell, but there's not enough phylogenetic data (yet) to say. So we can't tell if the ancestors of elephants or of sloths were the first to bid good-bye to the other placental mammals, or if they both split off at the same time. (Of course the ancestors of marsupials, like kangaroos, branched off before that.)

The authors write:

Ancestral successive hybridization events and/or incomplete lineage sorting associated with short speciation intervals are viable explanations for the mosaic retroposon insertion patterns of recent placental mammals and for the futile search for a clear root dichotomy.

Hunter concludes this is not parsimonious enough-- compared to what, I don't know.

Evolutionists think nothing of these sorts of explanations and repeatedly use them when needed. But elaborate explanations can always be contrived in order to explain observations. Why should we believe they are true? As with heliocentrism, evolution erects so many "epicycles" in order to fit the data. Religion drives science and it matters.

Now, if evidence of hybridization disproves evolution, then Barack Obama's mere existence disproves evolution.

Hey, all scientists agree, the most parsimonious theory that fits the data, is the best. We'd like the universal tree of descent to be as simple as possible, while fitting the data. But hybridization happens. It's not the norm, but you've got to expect it sometimes. Organisms mate with outliers. It happens.

Also, my kid's existence disproves evolution too, by Cornelius Hunter's logic. Because my kid's a hybrid, indeed, so his birth disproves evolution. Right?

Hunter and his Intelligent Design colleagues don't have a parsimonious theory, nor a parsimonious theory that fits the data, nor a theory that is not parsimonious and fits the data. Nor do his colleagues have one, single, successful, distinct prediction that has not already been falsified (like Behe's irreducible complexities which have always been reducible.) Now that matters.

Religion drives Hunter's assertion that all evidences that make Darwinian evolution more probable, are "unsuccessful predictions" of "Darwinism." And it matters...nah it doesn't. I don't care if he believes in the blue peacock of Yazidism.

Does religion drive scientific failure? I don't care.

Intelligent Design Mysticism and The Rape of Information Theory

Now that Stephen Meyer has published the most mystical book since the Necronomicon—his Intelligent Design tome Signature in the Cell—we’re in for another tsunami of creationists raping information theory. Creationists and IDists like Meyer have noticed that there’s information in DNA, you’re shocked I know, and they mystically intuit that only intelligent beings can create information. Therefore all living things are intelligently designed. By whom? When the Discovery Instituters want taxpayers to buy their textbooks, they’re a bit vague on who he is—“identity a secret, but it rhymes with Todd” (as Steve Mirsky says [1].)

Creationists and IDists know in their gut that only intelligence can make “information”, in the same sense that only leprechauns can make shoes, and only elves can make cookies full of hydrogenated vegetable oil…er… Elfen magic!

Let’s not confuse this info-mysticism with the real branch of mathematics called information theory. To distinguish them, mathematician Jeff Shallit calls the mystic quantity “creationist information” [2], but here I’m going to call it info shminfo—an occult, intangible, unmeasurable, undefinable, bedazzled, polka-dotted (oh why not?) something or other.

In contrast, real information (the sciencey kind) has a precise mathematical definintion and can be computed [3]. IDists like Stephen Meyer et al. lift the jargon of information theory while often contradicting its mathematical properties (when convenient).

ID proponents are equivalent to New Ager mystics who lift scientific jargon to sell a functionless product: like the New Age salesmen who say their crystals emit ‘vibrations’, and their psychic powers are due to ‘electromagnetic fields’, and that Sedona, Arizona has ‘energy vortexes’, ooga booga.

To see how ridiculous info-mysticism has gotten, here’s a video of a preacher, Peanut Butter Man, claiming that he has disproven evolution with some info shminfo and a jar of peanut butter [4].



According to the Reverend Skippy (real name Chuck Missler), evolution is disproven because peanut butter does not turn into a living organism, unless “some information [is] added to it.” Uh, has he actually read the list of ingredients for peanut butter? It’s full of preservatives to prevent anything from living in it. Considering what they put in peanut butter, we’re lucky we can eat it and remain alive.

Did you know? No creationist and no IDist has ever measured the info shminfo in any gene, or any protein, or in any genetic sequence from any genome.

Consider any gene—say, the gene for b hemoglobin in blood. A single mutation (A to T) can confer resistance to malaria, but can also give you sickle cell anemia (if you’re homozygous for it.) Creationists generally say that after this mutation happens, the info shminfo has decreased. How the hell do they know? They can’t measure the info shminfo in normal hemoglobin; how would they know if it’s a tiny bit more or less after the mutation? And by how much? You can’t weasel out by saying, “Sickle cell is a disease,” since that A to T mutation helps prevent malaria, which is also a disease.

And if hypothetically the info shminfo really did decrease, why can’t a random T to A mutation do it backwards, and increase the info shminfo back to where it was before?

If you use different equations (to measure info shminfo) before and after the mutation, it’s accounting fraud. If you use no equation, you’re raping information theory. The Discovery Institute, Werner Gitt, Tom Willis and Carl Wieland et al. have no equations to measure info shminfo; but they all dishonestly imply they do, to fool lay audiences.

Even though creationists can’t measure how much info shminfo there is in anything, nevertheless they know for sure there’s less now than there was last week. They call this mystic mood the “law of conservation of information,” which at least sounds scientific, like ‘harmonic convergence.’

Creationists insist their ‘conservation law’ is proven because scientists can’t produce a counter-example: a situation in which creationists feel that the amount of info shminfo has increased because of a natural process. Thus, creationists demand that scientists build a machine to disprove their feelings. Which are mostly nihilism and pessimism, as far as I can tell. I suggest listening to a Carpenters CD.

Meanwhile back on round Earth…real information theory is a branch of mathematics founded by Claude Shannon in 1948 [3]. It’s genuinely useful in a lot of different fields, most famously electrical engineering; but it’s also useful in bioinformatics (theoretical molecular biology.) Shannon defined an equation for the mutual information between two properties. ‘Mutual information’ means that, when two properties (X and Y) are statistically correlated, then whatever knowledge you have about a property (X) will reduce your uncertainty about the other property, Y.

By Shannon’s definition, natural non-random processes, including natural selection, create information. The size of a footprint has information about the size of a foot. The air frozen in tiny bubbles in arctic ice has information about ancient climates. They’re correlated. They have information. Nature did it. Done.

Creationists assert that info shminfo has properties that sometimes are similar to, and other times opposite to, Shannon’s information, depending on what’s convenient for creationists at the moment. To put it politely and respectfully, creationists like Werner Gitt, Carl Wieland and Stephen Meyer dug up Shannon’s grave and skull-raped him. They just lift Shannon’s jargon so they can feed like hagfish up the ass of his authority.

Shannon’s information is always about something. What is info shminfo even about, anyway? Creationists can’t answer even the simplest questions about it.

Because of vague definitions, creationists move their goal posts when confronted with experimental [5] and theoretical evidence [6] of natural processes increasing complexity or information (objectively defined).

Consider Werner Gitt (widely respected by creationists like Answers in Genesis and CMI), who wows the nonscientist audiences he talks to by telling them his mystic intuitions are “theorems”, and by using lots of self-invented hyperpolymultisyllabificationizing [7]. This Gitt defines “information” as “meaning”, and defines “meaning” as the thing that only intelligences can create. So since DNA obviously has lots of info shminfo, it must have lots of “meaning” and thus was made by God. This proves creationist DTHT (Dirt-to-Human Transition Theory).

This Gitt admits explicitly that his info shminfo cannot be mathematically formulated, in a fascinating exchange with Jason Rosenhouse (read it, it’s great) [9]. Although Gitt cannot measure how much “meaning” is in any gene, he still asserts as a universal law that mutations of the Darwinian type can only decrease meaning. (What units would “meaning” be measured in anyway? Meanits?)

This Gitt backs up his laws of information by saying: no scientist has ever provided a counter-example! Sure. Suppose I say there’s a ‘universal pizza law’ which says that, at the moment a pizza is removed from an oven, its ‘epistemology’ is a maximum, and thereafter only decreases. But I haven’t told you what ‘epistemology’ means here, and I didn’t tell you how to measure it. Anyway, my universal pizza law is proven, see, because you can’t present a counter-example where the epistemology in a pizza goes back up—can you?

Back on round Earth, Shannon made it clear that information and meaning were different. Shannon’s equations could measure information, but he was clear he could not measure meaning.

Now enter the Intelligent Design faith tank, the Discovery Institute [10]. DI theorist William Dembski described a quantity he called “complex specified information” (CSI) in books like No Free Lunch. It has been re-defined more than once since them, and nowadays is almost always called “specified complexity.”

In his DI colleague Meyer’s new book, Signature in the Cell, Meyer states without evidence that info shminfo necessarily requires intelligence to create it:

…both common experience and experimental evidence affirms intelligent design as a necessary condition (and cause) of information... [Meyer, SitC [11], p. 343. Boldface mine.]

How the hell did he arrive at that? The Oracle at the Temple of Delphi used to sniff ethylene gas from a seismic crack before uttering her prophecies...which was a more rigorous derivation than Meyer’s.

How exactly would you calculate how much info shminfo is in a real system? Does a human-built wooden dam have info shminfo, but a beaver-built wooden dam has none?

If you had an equation (they don’t), and if a system changed via a natural process, you would need to apply the same equation both before and after the change to measure the difference.

OK, now IDists will complain that in this 2005 paper [12], Bill Dembski vaguely describes how you might make an equation by which CSI could be computed—if you first turn the object is into a string of data bits, somehow or other. But no one has ever derived that equations; and no one has ever applied the suggested method to any gene or protein or anything biological. In that paper Dembski actually only computes a number for the “specified complexity” of one, very simple example (the bit string “1111111111”). He possibly showed that that particular bit string is non-random—but he could not show that even that simple string must be produced by intelligent beings. Could be made by a woodpecker too.

There’s no way of knowing if the equations he suggests (he doesn’t actually derive them) could be applied to biological systems, or if they really would distinguish random from non-random, or artificial stuff from natural stuff, because no one’s ever tried it. But the whole mystic authority of ID rests on such untested hand-waving.

In practice the DI has never used those equations to compute the CSI in any gene or any protein. They’ve never even computed the CSI to distinguish a caveman’s stone tool from a sharp rock made by geological forces—although they constantly, constantly, keep repeating that they really could do it if they wanted to!

Now that we’re done with math, let the mystic reading of goat entrails begin! Stephen Meyer, it’s time to don your feathered headdress!

In Meyer’s book Signature in the Cell, he claims to have “experimental evidence” that info shminfo always comes from intelligence. And the goat entrails are speaking to him…yes…yesss… My God! DNA has info shminfo too! This changes everything!

With just as much authority, my “experimental evidence” taking peyote in the desert told me that the Turtle Totem was my Spirit Guide.

Here’s the whole dishonest strategy by which Meyer et al. concoct their “experimental evidence.” First, note that CSI used to be an “information.” Later it was called a “complexity.” They changed it. Anyway, this year it’s a complexity.

Now the DI says some complexity is “specified”, and some is “not specified”, although exactly what the term “specified” means is… unspecified. If you really read their stuff, you find that both their “specification” and their “complexity” are defined in multiple ways, which allows IDists to cheat by moving their goal posts after Darwin’s football has flown through.

But let’s stick with “specification” for the moment, which by itself is enough to turn “specified complexity” into an occult quantity to be mystically divined. The DI intuits the CSI in objects from only two categories:

1. Stuff that’s obviously artificial, non-random created by humans (e.g. Mount Rushmore, Mona Lisa). The goat entrails say…It’s specified!


2. The output of simple natural, totally random processes (e.g. flipping a coin, rolling dice). It may be complex, but…the goat entrails say…it’s never specified!

Thus, Meyer divines that no natural process makes anything that is both “complex” and “specified.”

Now a scientist or sensible person would object that they neglected the all-important third category: non-random natural processes (like crystallization, magnetization, formation of stalactites, convection cells etc.) that produce highly ordered, low-probability objects. These processes do make objects that are “complex” by the DI’s own definition of “complex.”

(Note the DI’s definition is not the standard definition of complexity—by “complex” they mean low probability of arrangement of parts, if they were thrown together totally randomly.)

Since non-random natural processes like crystallization, magnetization, etc. make “complex” things (by the DI’s own definition), then in principle maybe evolution could also make “complex” things, like, say, the proteins in blood. (After all, evolution involves mutations that are random, and natural selection that is non-random.)

But category three is verboten! For natural non-random processes, the oracles of Intelligent Design put on the Urim and Thummim and perform arcane rituals like the French guy in Raiders of the Lost Ark. They thus divine that all such objects (crystals, snowflakes, etc.) are “not specified,” ooga booga.

In short, they cheat. To see an explicit example of Discovery Institute cheating, in this great thread [13] at the ISCID (staffed by the fellows of the DI), a poster called Gedanken systematically destroys the foundations of “specified complexity.” When the stone heads on Easter Island are claimed to have specified complexity, our friend “Gedanken” asks: what exactly is the “specification” for stone faces?

DI creationist Paul Nelson replies “The specification is the anatomical form of Homo sapiens.” Nelson follows this with 30 pages of equations describing the anatomical form of Homo sapiens. Nah I’m kidding, he just pulled it out his ass.

But wait: “Gedanken” cites counter-examples of natural rocks that look like human faces, like New Hamphire’s Old Man of the Mountain, the face on Mars, etc. Does this show CSI from natural processes?

No, Nelson revs up his goal posts: “…the human-like features of the pattern [Old Man of the Mountain] disappear at nearly all angles other than the one shown in the photograph above.” The IDists invoke mystic authority to move their goal posts and exclude test cases that contradict their “laws of information.” (Of course, plenty of real anamorphic artworks are artistically-designed to be recognizable only when viewed from a certain angle, like this cool pavement art, but that’s another story.)

What research did ID proponents do to arrive at these standards? The same research methods as the high priest of Nuku Hiva, so well described by Herman Melville in Typee. The priest, Kolory, of this gorgeous island must have been the Discovery Institute’s first Research Fellow. Pioneering the cutting-edge ID research techniques, this priest

…very often carried about with him what seemed to me the half of a broken war-club. It was swathed round with ragged bits of white tappa, and the upper part, which was intended to represent a human head, was embellished with a strip of scarlet cloth…In fact, this funny little image was the 'crack' god of the island…its name was Moa Artua… [W]ith the chiefs disposed in a circle around him, [Kolory] commences his ceremony.

In the first place he gives Moa Artua an affectionate hug…and, finally, whispers something in his ear; the rest of the company listening eagerly for a reply. But the baby-god is deaf or dumb--perhaps both, for never a word does he utter…and Kolory, seemingly losing his temper, fetches him a box over the head…and laying him in a state of nudity in a little trough, covers him from sight. At this proceeding all present loudly applaud and signify their approval by uttering the adjective 'motarkee' with violent emphasis…After a few moments Kolory brings forth his doll again, and…he once more speaks to it aloud.

The whole company hereupon show the greatest interest; while the priest holding Moa Artua to his ear interprets to them what he pretends the god is confidentially communicating to him. Some items of intelligence appear to tickle all present amazingly…Whether the priest honestly interpreted what he believed the divinity said to him, or whether he was not all the while guilty of a vile humbug, I shall not presume to decide. [14]

I shall. The Discovery Institute is guilty of a vile humbug. The arrogance with which the Kolorys of Intelligent Design claim their mystic authority, without doing any calculations, is breathtaking. It’s vividly on display in Meyer’s recent book:

Experience shows that large amounts of specified complexity or information (especially codes and languages) invariably originate from an intelligent source -- from a mind or personal agent. [SitC, p. 343 [11]. Boldface mine.]

Invariably, Meyer? Yes, because ID advocates invariably cheat; and they invariably move their goal posts after Darwin’s football flies through. They are invariably biased, and invariably exclude natural processes which would increase info shminfo—that is, which would if they would just give us one equation and stick to it!

Notice above that Meyer now adds the caveat that only intelligence can create “large amounts” of info shminfo. No definition of “large amounts” here. Sigh. OK, if natural processes can create small amounts of info shminfo, then how much could they create in, let’s say, 5 million organisms evolving for 500 million years?

Also, Meyer now says that only an intelligent mind can make “specified complexity or information.” Oh, which is it this time? Is he now also including “unspecified” information along with the specified kind?

The Discovery Institute now has so many vaguely defined rules that they’re not just moving their goals posts—they’re moving the end zone, the referees, the Astroturf, the field markings, and the chick who sings the National Anthem.

Mathematician Jeff Shallit showed that Meyer’s mystical info shminfo does not have the properties of any real mathematical quantity [2].

In Meyer’s infamous 2004 paper published in the PBSW [15], he speaks of how the CSI of animal species vastly increased during the so-called “Cambrian explosion”, 540 million years ago. He gives us no CSI calculations for any fossils from the Cambrian era, nor for any fossils from before the Cambrian. (By the way, Dembski defined CSI as something that an object either has or it doesn’t. Yes or no. First Meyer cites Dembski’s authority on CSI…and then Meyer contradicts Dembski and describes CSI as something he knows some organisms have more of than others.)

Meyer writes, “..without functional criteria to guide a search through the space of possible sequences, random variation is probabilistically doomed.”

“Probabilistically doomed”? Did he calculate that? Nah, he got it the same way Professor Trelawney did when she told Harry Potter he too was “doomed”: by reading tea leaves.

All claimed “laws of conservation of information” rely on circular logic, although creationists bury the circularity in different ways. Werner Gitt buries the circularity in his assumption that all information has “meaning” and that only intelligence can make “meaning.”

The DI buries their circular logic by classifying all results of natural processes as “unspecified.” (Their probability calculation is bull too, but that’s another story.)

Next, IDists are forced to divide their info shminfo into different mystical sub-types. In the example I cited above—the human-built wooden dam vs. the beaver dam—IDists would say ‘the human-built dam has info shminfo that was recently created by human intelligence. But the beaver-built dam has old info shminfo that was smuggled into the beavers when God created beavers.’ I’m serious. That is really what IDists say: some info shminfo is smuggled in somehow, though they can’t distinguish the old smuggled kind from the new non-smuggled kind (“active info shminfo”).

But, on this basis, when scientists observe information appearing in evolutionary processes, Dembski says the scientists “smuggled” it in, so Dembski accuses them of research fraud [16,17]. This is no different from Cotton Mather, the first American Intelligent Design proponent and dogged opponent of “materialism”, who supported the admission of spectral evidence into witch trials.

Besides the “smuggled” and “active” info shminfo, IDists also believe in “apparent info shminfo” and “actual info shminfo.”

You see, a problem for ID is that there are a lot of computer programs that simulate Darwinian mutation and natural selection, in order to solve incredibly hard problems that no human engineer can solve. They produce the Darwinian design of even “irreducibly complex” systems that no engineer could have anticipated [19].

Darwin is kicking ID’s ass, so Dembski simply says that all Darwinian-evolved designs have “apparent info shminfo”, whereas human-made designs have “actual info shminfo.” Sure, they may look exactly the same, but they’re missing an intangible and undetectable something! And, Dembski also believes that if you take his photograph, you can steal his soul!

Here, Dembski is redefining “complexity” when convenient for him. He actually defines the designs produced by evolutionary algorithms, no matter how complicated they are, as having zero complexity by definition! [20] See Elsberry’s demolition of Dembski’s moving goal posts [21].

OK, now the ‘Motarkee!’ crowd will want to know: how does the information get into the genome? Randomly generated mutations are non-randomly recorded—only advantageous changes get duplicated in the next generation, while deleterious changes are selected out and don’t get duplicated.

Creationists object to this by saying “it’s impossible for a randomly generated mutation to produce information! Randomness is not information!” Doesn’t matter if the new gene sequence started out as random or not. The proportion of occurrence of that change is non-random, because natural selection non-randomly duplicates the advantageous changes.

I’ll put this in terms the right wing can understand: natural selection only records good news and forgets bad news—like the Fox News Channel when a Republican is president. Even if good news occurs at random intervals, the proportion of it that gets broadcast is non-randomly distributed.

By Shannon’s definition, statistical correlation is mutual information. Natural selection produces an ever-increasing correlation between the proportion of a mutant allele in the population, and how advantageous that mutation is. For more, you can read Tom Schneider’s 2000 paper about the Evolution of Biological Information [6].

Maybe you can claim natural selection cannot produce enough information to make X amount of complexity in organisms in Y amount of time. OK, fine. Then do a calculation with X and Y in it, and we can argue about your calculation. But this can’t even start until you first pick one equation and stick to it!

If creationists would just pick one damn equation for info shminfo and stick to it, scientists could always find a counter-example that increases that stuff.

“Motarkee! Motarkee!"



References

1. The Trials of Life. By Steve Mirsky. Scientific American, December 2005. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=the-trials-of-life.

2. Stephen Meyer’s Bogus Information Theory by Jeffrey Shallit. http://recursed.blogspot.com/2009/10/stephen-meyers-bogus-information-theory.html.

3. Shannon, C.E. (1948), "A Mathematical Theory of Communication", Bell System Technical Journal, 27, pp. 379–423 & 623–656, July & October, 1948. http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/ms/what/shannonday/shannon1948.pdf.

4. YouTube: In Defense of the Peanut Butter Man. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vH5mBtc74lo.

5. TalkOrigins: Index to Creationist Claims CB102 http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CB/CB102.html.

6. Schneider, T. D., 2000. Evolution of biological information. Nucleic Acids Research 28(14): 2794-2799. http://www-lecb.ncifcrf.gov/~toms/paper/ev/.

7. Information, science and biology. by Werner Gitt. First published: TJ (now Journal of Creation) 10(2):181–187. August 1996. http://www.answersingenesis.org/tj/v10/i2/information.asp.

8. Monty Python’s Flying Circus, Episode 21: The Git Sketch. Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KsoH5I88WDA. Transcript: http://www.ibras.dk/montypython/episode21.htm#7

9. Panda’s Thumb: Report on the 2005 Creation Mega Conference, Part Five. By Jason Rosenhouse. http://pandasthumb.org/archives/2005/07/report-on-the-2-4.html.

10. The Wedge Document, Discovery Institute Center for Renewal of Science and Culture, 1998. http://www.antievolution.org/features/wedge.pdf.

11. Stephen Meyer, Signature in the Cell, 2009. Harper One.

12. Specification: The Pattern That Signifies Intelligence. By William A. Dembski. 2005, version 1.22. http://www.designinference.com/documents/2005.06.Specification.pdf.

13. ISCID, http://www.iscid.org/boards/ubb-get_topic-f-6-t-000411-p-2.html.

14. Herman Melville, Typee, 1846, Ch. 24.

15. Stephen C. Meyer. Intelligent Design: The Origin of Biological Information and the Higher Taxonomic Categories. Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington. May 18, 2007. http://www.discovery.org/a/2177.

16. Thomas D. Schneider, 2001 June 6. Rebuttal to William A. Dembski's Posting and to His Book "No Free Lunch". http://www.ccrnp.ncifcrf.gov/~toms/paper/ev/dembski/.

17. Thomas D. Schneider, 2001 June 7. Effect of Ties on the Evolution of Information by the Ev program http://www.ccrnp.ncifcrf.gov/~toms/paper/ev/dembski/claimtest.html.

18. Panda’s Thumb: Unacknowledged Errors in “Unacknowledged Costs.” By Wesley R. Elsberry. October 9, 2007. http://pandasthumb.org/archives/2007/10/unacknowledged.html.

19. TalkOrigins Archive: Genetic Algorithms and Evolutionary Computation. By Adam Marczyk. 2004. http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/genalg/genalg.html.

20. Why Evolutionary Algorithms Cannot Generate Specified Complexity. By William Dembski. Appeared as Metaviews 152 (www.meta-list.org). 1999/11/1. http://www.discovery.org/a/10.

21. TalkReason: What does "Intelligent Agency by Proxy" Do for the Design Inference? By Wesley R. Elsberry. Posted May 6, 2002. http://www.talkreason.org/PrinterFriendly.cfm?article=/articles/wre_id_proxy.cfm.