Just watched the trailer for that ‘documentary’. Oh dear. Oh dear, oh dear. I was very nearly tempted to engage with the delusional comments of Christians on the YouTube page when sense got the better of me.
Wonderful. From the man who brought you “The banana – the atheist’s nightmare”. I can’t wait to see his new movie. Quote mining could reach previously untapped depths.
Isn’t it ironic – even infuriating if you have a short temper – that the anti-evolutionists are advocating for “evidence?” Evidence relates to reason and logic, not wishy-washy distortions of what you THINK you understand. Reason and logic are NOT the realm of religion, as they are the opposite of faith. Turning a blind eye when this evidence is presented is very typical of the mind-blocking religious thought process. Who was it who said “If religion would listen to reason there would be no religion!” Bravo, author!
The manufacture of todays humanity
Explained by theories of complete insanity
Millions of years of evolution so selective
Or an intervention, the result is defective
Suspect the smart species remained in a tree.
Sometimes, I utterly despair at the willful ignorance of my fellow human beings, that seem (ironically) hell bent on dragging us backwards, socially, morally, intellectually and scientifically.
They never seem to appreciate that for God to have created us, they’d need proof/evidence, that God exists – or else their theory falls down.
It’s now over a thousand years, since JC was meant to have returned & settled all this once and for all.
If he existed, but wasn’t coming – you’d think he’d have the good manners to let his faithful know…would it kill him to drop someone an email?
Undeluded – it was a comment from the fictional character ‘House’ (an atheist) from the tv program of the same name, this has also been quoted by Richard Dawkins who didn’t realise where he’d got it from either.
Undeluded & A. Theist, I saw that episode and if memory serves the quote was “Rational arguments don’t usually work on religious people, otherwise there would be no religious people”.
There was another episode with a nun having mental health issues; the nun who accompanied her to the hospital told House “Sister Augustine believes things that are obviously not real”, to which House replied “I thought that was a basic requirement for the job”.
Why are people like Roy Comfort and Ken Ham in the USA? Because in their home counties, they would be on the fringe. In the USA, there are millions of easy marks for their nonsense. In the USA religious immigrant religious con-men can become millionaires.
Curious how creationists seem to give their videos titles which reflect their own mental reasoning ability=
‘lights out’ [and no one at home’]
‘no intelligence allowed’
QED
What the creationists seem unable to grasp is that even if flws were found with the theory of evolution it would only mean that a new or updated theory would be required to explain the facts upon which evolution is based
it would not prove ‘god’
they also assume they have got the bible right- but creationists are clearly wrong about science – so why is it assumed they are any more right about what the bible actually says ?
I don’t know how Ray Comfort (great name for a guy peddling feel good nonsense) gets the attention he gets. I understand that he has a following of ignorant people, but how does he manage to interview real scientists? It’s a puzzle.
their evol vs god video supplies interveiws with people who could not supply certainty about evolution
but how many interveiws which did supply that knowledge
ended up on the cutting room floor?
I am so glad you are prepared to spend your time arguing with these numpties so I don’t have to. Evolution will take its course and sort them out as it has sorted out the weak of mind and body before.
I have had a email debate over a few weeks with Ray. I read his books and watched his vids.
The Author has captured him perfectly. My question to him was “Why have you never bothered to learn about evolution? Would not studying it be an opportunity to strengthen your faith?
He Replied ” OK, so let me know how everything came out of nothing, and then I will look into it”
If anyone would like the records of this let me know. I will retrieve them from my currently dead computer.
“If there is no God and we are just primates, then there’s no ultimate right and wrong. Anything goes as long as it gets society’s smile.”
This is what gets me more than anything. The above may or may not be true; if there is no god, things might not be as nice as I’d like them to be. So what? Truth is not in any way influenced by how we’d like things to be.
By the way, I think Comfort is far from an idiot. He’s made loads of money by pampering to the untenable beliefs of millions. Strikes me as quite a clever thing to do, and I wish I could think of a way to do the same 🙂
“….and I wish I could think of a way to do the same” Me too, Marky, but this thing called a conscience keeps getting in the way 😉
From the linked article: “[Comfort’s ‘idea’ is that] top evolutionary scientists cannot convincingly support their theory, and instead rely heavily on unfounded assumptions”
The punchline writes itself.
And: “Today, atheists are pushing Darwin’s little theory and it has opened the floodgates to abortion, fornication, pornography, homosexuality and adultery.”
I don’t quite see the link, but if we take Comfort’s premise as correct, then his pushing of creationism leads to unwanted children, denial, repression of sexuality, ignorance, unhappy-but-undissolvable marriages………
BL, it matters not one bit. If it’s a parody, it’s a humourless and opaque one, and so is taken seriously by his victims, with the same effect whether he’s sincere or not.
If it is a parody, it’s success is in making him money, not in making the creationists think about what they’re claiming. In fact it becomes not a parody, but an imitation for the purpose of getting in on the money making act.
Of course it’s easy to use the “oh he’s not really one of us, we don’t REALLY believe that stuff” defence, but it’s pretty transparent that those people who espouse creationism DO believe it, even if Comfort is parodying them.
@AoS, I don’t think my conscience is too much of a limiting factor. If these people are stupid enough to believe this guff, I’m quite happy to give them what they want and make a few quid out of it.
I don’t think you have to believe a story in order to sell it.
“By the way, I think Comfort is far from an idiot”
Or, more accurately, I think Comfort is never far from an idiot, but that’s just the company he keeps.
Marky, I’ve just never had a taste for shooting fish in barrels.
Is anyone without a religious agenda partisan on the issue of evolution?
Meaning; I personally don’t give a toss *what* we descended from, or with *whom* I share DNA/a common ancestor, or *which* earlier species kindly left behind fossil records.
I go where the science leads. If knowing how viruses (virii?) develop and adapt will help (intelligently) design better vaccines, let’s sic some ET on that! If there is a hybrid form of wheat that will prevent mass starvation, or a breed of cat that is hypoallergenic, then great, I loves me some of that sweet, sweet ET to solve these problems.
I didn’t approach accepting scientifically-supported facts by going to Darwin’s old neighbourhood, set up a camp, and wave a flag with a chimp head on it and then vociferously defend his *outdated and improved-upon* theories to become a supporter of ET. The evidence supports, leads to, allows for useful inventions, via ET.
Religious folks who are also ET-deniers seem to think that it’s so easy to disprove scientific facts with decades of research behind them with a bumper-sticker sized statement. It’s projection, really: they are only revealing how easy it was for them to have been fooled into their beliefs, where a man holding a banana a certain angle can get them to swallow anything.
“Remember that all this brainwashing and propaganda etc., is not by any means expected to reach any intelligent corners. It isn’t expected to convince anybody that has any sense. If they can get ten per cent, that’s good. That’s the aim of propaganda, to get ten per cent. They’re not even trying to convince people who have a grain of sense.”
I bought Steve Jones’ book Almost Like A Whale from a charity shop yesterday. I couldn’t resist it after seeing the sub-title The Origin of Species Updated, basically a re-write of Darwin in a modern vernacular (so no excuse for those who find formal Victorian English tiresome to read – and here I confess that I found On the Origin.. heavy going, so I can see why it would appear to be almost a foreign language to anybody not used to that particular literary style) and written with the benefit of the knowledge we have that Darwin didn’t have. Sounds like it might be a good read, in other words.
Anyway, just reading through the introduction I came across this, which seems to sum up the likes of Comfort and is ilk in one short sentence:
Today, his [Darwin] theory that they undergo modification [….] is accepted by everyone (or by everyone not determined to disbelieve it).
And that pretty much sums them up; it isn’t that they don’t or can’t understand this simplest of ideas, it’s simply that, just like children sticking their fingers in their ears and singing ‘La la la la I’m not listening la la la’, they actively don’t want to, which wouldn’t be a problem if they kept their willful ignorance to themselves rather than insisting that the rest of the world join them in their delusions.
talking of crocoduck
the concept seems to suggest that to creationists, evolution is a form of ‘werewolf’ like shape shift within a single animal
and that a ‘transitional’ fossil is one of an animal that has died during such a shapeshifting
this concept of evolution asa sort of shapeshift within a single organsism is quite commonly seem in popular sci-fi
for example the doc who episode ‘evolution of the daleks’
several star trek episodes and also in judge dredd/2000 AD comic
so you cant really blame the creationists for this weird idea about evolution when the same idea seems to be present in popular culture
showing that a proffessor who’s job is the ‘public perception of science’ is likely facing an uphill struggle
@The James Christ Story says:
>>Sometimes, I utterly despair at the willful ignorance of my fellow human beings, that seem (ironically) hell bent on dragging us backwards, socially, morally, intellectually and scientifically.
It’s my blood kin that forward this stuff around and include me on the mailing list. It’s even harder to deal with when it’s this close to home.
WS wrote: “so you cant really blame the creationists for this weird idea about evolution when the same idea seems to be present in popular culture”
Oh I think you can. Most people (sadly maybe not most thinking about it), are capable of telling fiction from fact, and anyway, before someone tries to “educate” others with some fact, that have an absolute responsibility to verify that fact. So yes, they can be blamed.
That said, I do have a small sympathy with them, in that their overall concept does have intuition on its side. Their problem is that they accept intuition as evidence or even proof.
ws and MW – Not helped by that dreadful movie “Evolution” with David Duchovny, though having an X-Files star should have been a clue as to how realistic it was.
If you ever want to piss off a group of Christians, ask them to explain the trinity to you. 90% of them will profess modalism, which mainstream christianity will tell you is apostacy. If you ask the other 10% if god the father and the holy spirit dwelt in the body of christ also, or if it was christ only, a whole new fight will ensue. It’s even better because most of the scripture used to say Jesus is God becomes circular the moment you admit the entire ‘godhead’ dwelt in the body of christ. On average, about 1% will actually know what they believe.
Wonderful, again. and my J&M t-shirt has arrived last week too (tho cafepress dont half drown u with follow-up emails) anyway; an earlier answer to evolution from the always-awesome Jack T Chick 🙂 http://www.chick.com/reading/tracts/0055/0055_01.asp
@xenuislove, thats the kind of thing that worries me somewhat. Because I’m not a scientist involved in the field, I don’t have the knowledge to refute what Chick has to say, and in fact on the face of it a lot makes sense, so I understand very clearly why so many people fall for it.
I take some comfort from the style in which it’s presented, which looks disingenuous (though creationists could say that about J&M I suppose), and by the fact that even if they were to show that the theory of evolution by natural selection were untrue, they’d be no closer to showing any evidence for god, but I do find myself thinking “hmm, I wonder if they DO have a point?” some days.
So (question for everyone), given the scientific language many creationists use, and the fact that to an unbiased reader, their writings can sometimes make as much sense as anyone else’s do, how does a layman get to the truth without relying in faith in either god or the scientists? For example, how does a reasonably intelligent non-expert get past Aardpiggy’s arguments here, by which I mean how do I KNOW I’m not making equally unfounded assertions in favour of evolution if I refute what’s said?: http://www.amazon.com/review/R3SWFLPZUFPXB9
MarkyWarky says:
by which I mean how do I KNOW I’m not making equally unfounded assertions in favour of evolution if I refute what’s said
the only sure way to know is to back the assertions with verifiable evidence
[whether evidence will ever satisfy creationists type ‘minds’ is another matter]
But that’s my point: how does a non-scientist tell the lies from the truth, other than by choosing to trust (have faith in) one side or the other? Basically I want to work out how one avoids being guilty of what the creationists accuse us of; taking things on faith. There always comes a point where I’m taking someone’s word for something that someone else says is a lie, because I don’t have the tools or knowledge to find out for myself.
Here’s an example. On the page linked to, aadpiggy states that “However be aware that these evolved birds are still finches. They have not evolved into any other bird, let alone a completely different animal like a lizard or an aardvark.”, or in other words, speciation has never been observed. OK so I Google “observed speciation”, and find lots of people saying its been observed, but only week examples/explanations.
I’m NOT arguing against evolution, just kind of pointing out that from a layman’s point of view, the “debate” isn’t quite as clear cut as we might think, because the evidence for evolution can appear/be made to appear doubtful, to that layman. I think we have to recognise that the creationists are perhaps doing a better job of PR than the scientists are?
“NOT arguing against evolution, just kind of pointing out that from a layman’s point of view, the “debate” isn’t quite as clear cut as we might think, because the evidence for evolution can appear/be made to appear doubtful, to that layman”
I think that the problem is there’s an issue with judging just how long these things take. We rattle off periods of time in millions of years but it’s very difficult for a person to conceptualise just how long these time spans that evolution requires are. Bill Bryson had a go in his book, imagining a time machine at IIRC 1 second per year. So around a half hour to the crucifixion but dead of old age before seeing a dinosaur.
Marky, as IanB says, the issue is time, we can only observe those species now alive, plus a few scraps from the fossil record, so whilst it’s pretty easy to see how a bird’s beak may change over a few thousands of years because we can all (or most) get a vague concept of such a timespan, it’s perhaps not so easy to conceptualise billions of years.
Creationists will never understand evolution without first understanding that man had been scrawling on cave wall for maybe 30 000 years before they think the earth was made, and that even that seemingly long timespan is but a blink in geological time. What they demand is proof that all of the change we see happened in the last 6000 years; that a chimp gave birth to a human; a fish egg hatched a lizard, etc. and they aren’t going to get that. There are, of course, living examples of what they will insist on calling ‘transitional’ species (nonsensical because evolution never stops: we are all ‘transitional’ species), the best example being the platypus, which is an egg-laying mammal (or a milk producing, furry reptile); then there’s the ‘vestigals’, the plethora of animals whose skeletons tell of their ancestry. There are snakes with tiny limb bones, whales with tarsels and carpels but no hands or feet to put them in, so to speak, and you’ve only to look at the skull structure of a Ken Ham or a Matt Dawson to see the simian influence. But none of that satisfies them because it is what we would call ‘evidence’, and what they call a ‘Test Of Faith’ – which is why it’s absolutely useless to debate creationists; if the evidence doesn’t fit their argument (and lets face it, if it’s real evidence, it doesn’t) then they can simply discount it as a run-of-the-mill TOF or, in other words, a bog-standard GodDidIt.
For those who actually want to understand the subject; although he has stained his copybook somewhat of late, I still think that there are no better books for the layman as Dawkins’ Climbing Mount Improbable and The Greatest Show On Earth.
And don’t forget, the people asking the questions of the type in that big daddy cartooon don’t want to know the truth, they just want others to believe their bullshit; sometimes, the very best response isn’t an appeal to reason, it’s simply to laugh long and hard in their faces,.
Hi MarkyWarky. “Because I’m not a scientist involved in the field, I don’t have the knowledge to refute what Chick has to say, and in fact on the face of it a lot makes sense, so I understand very clearly why so many people fall for it”. Reality is often more complicated 🙂
NB chick.com is Jack’s own site, with tracts and fundi-creationist outreach. http://www.monsterwax.com/chick.html is a fan site for Jack’s art. Many people appreciate Chick as a great underground artist – like Crumb – but do not follow his worldview: chickcomics.com is a site for them (and me!). BTW don’t forget rock’n’roll is the devils music (literally… http://www.chick.com/reading/tracts/0034/0034_01.asp ) another classic! “Its all over. Everythings ashes. Bobby died of AIDS, Jim OD’d and Don is into vampirism”
xenuislove, please tell me that site is an elaborate Poe, because….well…Lew Siffer? Really? I suppose the king of R&R was really called Evil S. Presley.
And people actually fall for that nonsense.
Creationism; a world view for people who don’t want to think too much!
I think about the only good thing with that quote is that it invites a Godwin’s Law reply in the first six words thus handily invalidating the rest of it.
I have a problem with people who thinks evolution as a religion. Evolution is a theory built on found evidence, you don’t have faith on evolution in the same way you don’t have faith on Newton’s laws!!
sweetpityfulmercy: Comfort’s challenge there is a more radical version of a common fallacy, that if Darwinism can’t explain abiogenesis (how unlife first became life) it must be wrong. Of course, Darwinism only claims to explain some things that happen after life (with heredity) comes into being.
fenchurch: The Latin word virus has no known plural (it’s a mass noun) and is anomalous in form, an o-stem neuter that looks like a masculine. Whatever its plural ought to be (vira or viri or perhaps virora), I definitely don’t buy virii, which would be the plural of virius. How about letting virus be the plural?
Jesus & Mo (the characters) are absurd, blinkered, and oddly very sweet. J&M (the cartoon) is brilliant: sharp, delicious, irresistible. Salman Rushdie
Jesus and Mo cartoons are wonderfully funny and true. Richard Dawkins
Jesus and Mo make the world a better place, bless their little hearts. Ophelia Benson
In a world defined by outrage and offence and liberal spinelessness, Jesus and Mo is a treasure, whose value we should never fail to recognize. Read them. Laugh. And think. Kenan Malik
The brilliant, celebrated, freaking hilarious atheist comic strip ... Greta Christina
...rays of sanity in a befuddled world. Keri Hulme
The liveliest depictions of Muhammad currently available... Malise Ruthven
J & Mo is the funniest and most consistently thought-provoking cartoon strip on the Net. In a saner world, it would run in a major newspaper. Nelson Jones, Heresy Corner
Consistently amusing, frequently thought-provoking and often heart-warming. New Humanist
Jesus & Mo is one of the most wonderful things on the internet.. JT Eberhard
Wittily captures much of the absurdity of religious apologetics. Mano Singham
I love jesusandmo.net cartoons - witty and sharp! Katha Pollitt
Often hilarious, frequently wry, these cartoons do what all the best cartoons do: they tell the truth through humour. Terry Sanderson, NSS President
...a wonderfully acid British cartoonist... Nick Cohen
I love the scrappy mockery of Jesus and Mo. Freedom of speech
includes the freedom to mock any person, any thing, any activity, and
any belief -- and J&M stands up for this unflinchingly Richard Stallman
...empowering, important and deeply progressive, not to mention hilarious... Council of Ex-Muslims
December 3, 2005
Just watched the trailer for that ‘documentary’. Oh dear. Oh dear, oh dear. I was very nearly tempted to engage with the delusional comments of Christians on the YouTube page when sense got the better of me.
Fantasic Author, brilliant one. Clever Barmaid and totally non-thinking boys.
Wonderful. From the man who brought you “The banana – the atheist’s nightmare”. I can’t wait to see his new movie. Quote mining could reach previously untapped depths.
Just joined, very interesting perspective. Oh, and I am a Darwinian.
@HaggisForBrains:
Heh, I forgot he’d called the video that.
Can’t these people be declared clinically insane? Much as I’d miss this weekly comic, I mean, really…
” Every person interviewed believes in evolution…and they are the ones who show that evolution is a fairytale for grownups.” Okay then.
Isn’t it ironic – even infuriating if you have a short temper – that the anti-evolutionists are advocating for “evidence?” Evidence relates to reason and logic, not wishy-washy distortions of what you THINK you understand. Reason and logic are NOT the realm of religion, as they are the opposite of faith. Turning a blind eye when this evidence is presented is very typical of the mind-blocking religious thought process. Who was it who said “If religion would listen to reason there would be no religion!” Bravo, author!
The manufacture of todays humanity
Explained by theories of complete insanity
Millions of years of evolution so selective
Or an intervention, the result is defective
Suspect the smart species remained in a tree.
Author: Excellent work! But I think it’s ‘hierarchies’.
Sometimes, I utterly despair at the willful ignorance of my fellow human beings, that seem (ironically) hell bent on dragging us backwards, socially, morally, intellectually and scientifically.
They never seem to appreciate that for God to have created us, they’d need proof/evidence, that God exists – or else their theory falls down.
It’s now over a thousand years, since JC was meant to have returned & settled all this once and for all.
If he existed, but wasn’t coming – you’d think he’d have the good manners to let his faithful know…would it kill him to drop someone an email?
Thank you, @SpellCheck.
Undeluded – it was a comment from the fictional character ‘House’ (an atheist) from the tv program of the same name, this has also been quoted by Richard Dawkins who didn’t realise where he’d got it from either.
Even so, the quote stands on its own merits
PZ has already commented on this, I can’t access the video, but he seems a little pissed off.
http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2013/07/02/lie-harder-little-man/
Undeluded & A. Theist, I saw that episode and if memory serves the quote was “Rational arguments don’t usually work on religious people, otherwise there would be no religious people”.
There was another episode with a nun having mental health issues; the nun who accompanied her to the hospital told House “Sister Augustine believes things that are obviously not real”, to which House replied “I thought that was a basic requirement for the job”.
Why are people like Roy Comfort and Ken Ham in the USA? Because in their home counties, they would be on the fringe. In the USA, there are millions of easy marks for their nonsense. In the USA religious immigrant religious con-men can become millionaires.
Curious how creationists seem to give their videos titles which reflect their own mental reasoning ability=
‘lights out’ [and no one at home’]
‘no intelligence allowed’
QED
What the creationists seem unable to grasp is that even if flws were found with the theory of evolution it would only mean that a new or updated theory would be required to explain the facts upon which evolution is based
it would not prove ‘god’
they also assume they have got the bible right- but creationists are clearly wrong about science – so why is it assumed they are any more right about what the bible actually says ?
I don’t know how Ray Comfort (great name for a guy peddling feel good nonsense) gets the attention he gets. I understand that he has a following of ignorant people, but how does he manage to interview real scientists? It’s a puzzle.
third comment
their evol vs god video supplies interveiws with people who could not supply certainty about evolution
but how many interveiws which did supply that knowledge
ended up on the cutting room floor?
Hahahahahahaha! Very good! Actually, were it not for fundamentalists, this would be a humorless world indeed.
I am so glad you are prepared to spend your time arguing with these numpties so I don’t have to. Evolution will take its course and sort them out as it has sorted out the weak of mind and body before.
I have had a email debate over a few weeks with Ray. I read his books and watched his vids.
The Author has captured him perfectly. My question to him was “Why have you never bothered to learn about evolution? Would not studying it be an opportunity to strengthen your faith?
He Replied ” OK, so let me know how everything came out of nothing, and then I will look into it”
If anyone would like the records of this let me know. I will retrieve them from my currently dead computer.
“If there is no God and we are just primates, then there’s no ultimate right and wrong. Anything goes as long as it gets society’s smile.”
This is what gets me more than anything. The above may or may not be true; if there is no god, things might not be as nice as I’d like them to be. So what? Truth is not in any way influenced by how we’d like things to be.
By the way, I think Comfort is far from an idiot. He’s made loads of money by pampering to the untenable beliefs of millions. Strikes me as quite a clever thing to do, and I wish I could think of a way to do the same 🙂
“….and I wish I could think of a way to do the same” Me too, Marky, but this thing called a conscience keeps getting in the way 😉
From the linked article: “[Comfort’s ‘idea’ is that] top evolutionary scientists cannot convincingly support their theory, and instead rely heavily on unfounded assumptions”
The punchline writes itself.
And: “Today, atheists are pushing Darwin’s little theory and it has opened the floodgates to abortion, fornication, pornography, homosexuality and adultery.”
I don’t quite see the link, but if we take Comfort’s premise as correct, then his pushing of creationism leads to unwanted children, denial, repression of sexuality, ignorance, unhappy-but-undissolvable marriages………
“By the way, I think Comfort is far from an idiot”
Another explaination for his succes is that he is well-adapted to his society of morons
Poe’s law
BL, you’re not seriously suggesting Comfort’s nonsense is a Poe, are you?
BL, it matters not one bit. If it’s a parody, it’s a humourless and opaque one, and so is taken seriously by his victims, with the same effect whether he’s sincere or not.
If it is a parody, it’s success is in making him money, not in making the creationists think about what they’re claiming. In fact it becomes not a parody, but an imitation for the purpose of getting in on the money making act.
Of course it’s easy to use the “oh he’s not really one of us, we don’t REALLY believe that stuff” defence, but it’s pretty transparent that those people who espouse creationism DO believe it, even if Comfort is parodying them.
@AoS, I don’t think my conscience is too much of a limiting factor. If these people are stupid enough to believe this guff, I’m quite happy to give them what they want and make a few quid out of it.
I don’t think you have to believe a story in order to sell it.
The only evidence he has against evolution is himself. His own existence counts as evidence for a dumb god with a bad sense of humour.
It’s a shame that the rampant nonsense of Ray “Crocoduck” Comfort gets any air-time at all.
“By the way, I think Comfort is far from an idiot”
Or, more accurately, I think Comfort is never far from an idiot, but that’s just the company he keeps.
Marky, I’ve just never had a taste for shooting fish in barrels.
Is anyone without a religious agenda partisan on the issue of evolution?
Meaning; I personally don’t give a toss *what* we descended from, or with *whom* I share DNA/a common ancestor, or *which* earlier species kindly left behind fossil records.
I go where the science leads. If knowing how viruses (virii?) develop and adapt will help (intelligently) design better vaccines, let’s sic some ET on that! If there is a hybrid form of wheat that will prevent mass starvation, or a breed of cat that is hypoallergenic, then great, I loves me some of that sweet, sweet ET to solve these problems.
I didn’t approach accepting scientifically-supported facts by going to Darwin’s old neighbourhood, set up a camp, and wave a flag with a chimp head on it and then vociferously defend his *outdated and improved-upon* theories to become a supporter of ET. The evidence supports, leads to, allows for useful inventions, via ET.
Religious folks who are also ET-deniers seem to think that it’s so easy to disprove scientific facts with decades of research behind them with a bumper-sticker sized statement. It’s projection, really: they are only revealing how easy it was for them to have been fooled into their beliefs, where a man holding a banana a certain angle can get them to swallow anything.
Does holding the banana away from you
Nothing to do with evolution, sorry, and you may have all seen it before but I liked this enough to share:
http://media.tumblr.com/2e9b9ac085ae1142e345c4a7b25a5a9f/tumblr_inline_mpbf0syMqY1qz4rgp.jpg
“Remember that all this brainwashing and propaganda etc., is not by any means expected to reach any intelligent corners. It isn’t expected to convince anybody that has any sense. If they can get ten per cent, that’s good. That’s the aim of propaganda, to get ten per cent. They’re not even trying to convince people who have a grain of sense.”
William Burroughs, ‘Headpress’ interview 2003
I bought Steve Jones’ book Almost Like A Whale from a charity shop yesterday. I couldn’t resist it after seeing the sub-title The Origin of Species Updated, basically a re-write of Darwin in a modern vernacular (so no excuse for those who find formal Victorian English tiresome to read – and here I confess that I found On the Origin.. heavy going, so I can see why it would appear to be almost a foreign language to anybody not used to that particular literary style) and written with the benefit of the knowledge we have that Darwin didn’t have. Sounds like it might be a good read, in other words.
Anyway, just reading through the introduction I came across this, which seems to sum up the likes of Comfort and is ilk in one short sentence:
And that pretty much sums them up; it isn’t that they don’t or can’t understand this simplest of ideas, it’s simply that, just like children sticking their fingers in their ears and singing ‘La la la la I’m not listening la la la’, they actively don’t want to, which wouldn’t be a problem if they kept their willful ignorance to themselves rather than insisting that the rest of the world join them in their delusions.
Oh, almost forgot; Beggars Belief, I hadn’t seen that before. Love it. Thanks.
Dan says:
July 4, 2013 at 7:12 pm
It’s a shame that the rampant nonsense of Ray “Crocoduck” Comfort gets any air-time at all.
eh no
to be fair to them
it is
Ray ‘banana’ Comfort
it is Kirk Cameron who is “Crocoduck”
talking of crocoduck
the concept seems to suggest that to creationists, evolution is a form of ‘werewolf’ like shape shift within a single animal
and that a ‘transitional’ fossil is one of an animal that has died during such a shapeshifting
this concept of evolution asa sort of shapeshift within a single organsism is quite commonly seem in popular sci-fi
for example the doc who episode ‘evolution of the daleks’
several star trek episodes and also in judge dredd/2000 AD comic
so you cant really blame the creationists for this weird idea about evolution when the same idea seems to be present in popular culture
showing that a proffessor who’s job is the ‘public perception of science’ is likely facing an uphill struggle
@The James Christ Story says:
>>Sometimes, I utterly despair at the willful ignorance of my fellow human beings, that seem (ironically) hell bent on dragging us backwards, socially, morally, intellectually and scientifically.
It’s my blood kin that forward this stuff around and include me on the mailing list. It’s even harder to deal with when it’s this close to home.
WS wrote: “so you cant really blame the creationists for this weird idea about evolution when the same idea seems to be present in popular culture”
Oh I think you can. Most people (sadly maybe not most thinking about it), are capable of telling fiction from fact, and anyway, before someone tries to “educate” others with some fact, that have an absolute responsibility to verify that fact. So yes, they can be blamed.
That said, I do have a small sympathy with them, in that their overall concept does have intuition on its side. Their problem is that they accept intuition as evidence or even proof.
“Another explanation for his success is that he is well-adapted to his society of morons.”
You get evolution!
ws and MW – Not helped by that dreadful movie “Evolution” with David Duchovny, though having an X-Files star should have been a clue as to how realistic it was.
Fenchurch:
Does holding the banana away from you… what, exactly? Don’t leave us on tenterhooks!
If you ever want to piss off a group of Christians, ask them to explain the trinity to you. 90% of them will profess modalism, which mainstream christianity will tell you is apostacy. If you ask the other 10% if god the father and the holy spirit dwelt in the body of christ also, or if it was christ only, a whole new fight will ensue. It’s even better because most of the scripture used to say Jesus is God becomes circular the moment you admit the entire ‘godhead’ dwelt in the body of christ. On average, about 1% will actually know what they believe.
Just as you say, it isn’t that most religious people don’t listen, i.e. they may, but they they just don’t HEAR.
Wonderful, again. and my J&M t-shirt has arrived last week too (tho cafepress dont half drown u with follow-up emails) anyway; an earlier answer to evolution from the always-awesome Jack T Chick 🙂
http://www.chick.com/reading/tracts/0055/0055_01.asp
@xenuislove, thats the kind of thing that worries me somewhat. Because I’m not a scientist involved in the field, I don’t have the knowledge to refute what Chick has to say, and in fact on the face of it a lot makes sense, so I understand very clearly why so many people fall for it.
I take some comfort from the style in which it’s presented, which looks disingenuous (though creationists could say that about J&M I suppose), and by the fact that even if they were to show that the theory of evolution by natural selection were untrue, they’d be no closer to showing any evidence for god, but I do find myself thinking “hmm, I wonder if they DO have a point?” some days.
So (question for everyone), given the scientific language many creationists use, and the fact that to an unbiased reader, their writings can sometimes make as much sense as anyone else’s do, how does a layman get to the truth without relying in faith in either god or the scientists? For example, how does a reasonably intelligent non-expert get past Aardpiggy’s arguments here, by which I mean how do I KNOW I’m not making equally unfounded assertions in favour of evolution if I refute what’s said?: http://www.amazon.com/review/R3SWFLPZUFPXB9
MarkyWarky says
Most people (sadly maybe not most thinking about it), are capable of telling fiction from fact,
problem for and with the creationists is that they seem to have a differing conceptual understanding of those two terms
MarkyWarky says:
and in fact on the face of it a lot makes sense, so I understand very clearly why so many people fall for it.
given that the big daddy tract contains deliberate lies and misrepresentations it is not surprising some people fall for it
MarkyWarky says:
by which I mean how do I KNOW I’m not making equally unfounded assertions in favour of evolution if I refute what’s said
the only sure way to know is to back the assertions with verifiable evidence
[whether evidence will ever satisfy creationists type ‘minds’ is another matter]
another way to distinguish scientific assertions from those proposed by creationists is to assess the chain of logic contained in them
a scientific arguement/assertion will run
theory- method – results – conclusion
a creationist assertion will go
conclusion – theory -results
@WS, Re “Given that……”.
But that’s my point: how does a non-scientist tell the lies from the truth, other than by choosing to trust (have faith in) one side or the other? Basically I want to work out how one avoids being guilty of what the creationists accuse us of; taking things on faith. There always comes a point where I’m taking someone’s word for something that someone else says is a lie, because I don’t have the tools or knowledge to find out for myself.
Here’s an example. On the page linked to, aadpiggy states that “However be aware that these evolved birds are still finches. They have not evolved into any other bird, let alone a completely different animal like a lizard or an aardvark.”, or in other words, speciation has never been observed. OK so I Google “observed speciation”, and find lots of people saying its been observed, but only week examples/explanations.
I’m NOT arguing against evolution, just kind of pointing out that from a layman’s point of view, the “debate” isn’t quite as clear cut as we might think, because the evidence for evolution can appear/be made to appear doubtful, to that layman. I think we have to recognise that the creationists are perhaps doing a better job of PR than the scientists are?
“NOT arguing against evolution, just kind of pointing out that from a layman’s point of view, the “debate” isn’t quite as clear cut as we might think, because the evidence for evolution can appear/be made to appear doubtful, to that layman”
I think that the problem is there’s an issue with judging just how long these things take. We rattle off periods of time in millions of years but it’s very difficult for a person to conceptualise just how long these time spans that evolution requires are. Bill Bryson had a go in his book, imagining a time machine at IIRC 1 second per year. So around a half hour to the crucifixion but dead of old age before seeing a dinosaur.
Marky, as IanB says, the issue is time, we can only observe those species now alive, plus a few scraps from the fossil record, so whilst it’s pretty easy to see how a bird’s beak may change over a few thousands of years because we can all (or most) get a vague concept of such a timespan, it’s perhaps not so easy to conceptualise billions of years.
Creationists will never understand evolution without first understanding that man had been scrawling on cave wall for maybe 30 000 years before they think the earth was made, and that even that seemingly long timespan is but a blink in geological time. What they demand is proof that all of the change we see happened in the last 6000 years; that a chimp gave birth to a human; a fish egg hatched a lizard, etc. and they aren’t going to get that. There are, of course, living examples of what they will insist on calling ‘transitional’ species (nonsensical because evolution never stops: we are all ‘transitional’ species), the best example being the platypus, which is an egg-laying mammal (or a milk producing, furry reptile); then there’s the ‘vestigals’, the plethora of animals whose skeletons tell of their ancestry. There are snakes with tiny limb bones, whales with tarsels and carpels but no hands or feet to put them in, so to speak, and you’ve only to look at the skull structure of a Ken Ham or a Matt Dawson to see the simian influence. But none of that satisfies them because it is what we would call ‘evidence’, and what they call a ‘Test Of Faith’ – which is why it’s absolutely useless to debate creationists; if the evidence doesn’t fit their argument (and lets face it, if it’s real evidence, it doesn’t) then they can simply discount it as a run-of-the-mill TOF or, in other words, a bog-standard GodDidIt.
For those who actually want to understand the subject; although he has stained his copybook somewhat of late, I still think that there are no better books for the layman as Dawkins’ Climbing Mount Improbable and The Greatest Show On Earth.
And don’t forget, the people asking the questions of the type in that big daddy cartooon don’t want to know the truth, they just want others to believe their bullshit; sometimes, the very best response isn’t an appeal to reason, it’s simply to laugh long and hard in their faces,.
Hi MarkyWarky. “Because I’m not a scientist involved in the field, I don’t have the knowledge to refute what Chick has to say, and in fact on the face of it a lot makes sense, so I understand very clearly why so many people fall for it”. Reality is often more complicated 🙂
For analysis and a specific rebuttal – perhaps lacking a GSOH – see the “The Jack T. Chick Museum of Fine Art” at http://monsterwax.tripod.com/bigdaddytwo.html
NB chick.com is Jack’s own site, with tracts and fundi-creationist outreach. http://www.monsterwax.com/chick.html is a fan site for Jack’s art. Many people appreciate Chick as a great underground artist – like Crumb – but do not follow his worldview: chickcomics.com is a site for them (and me!). BTW don’t forget rock’n’roll is the devils music (literally… http://www.chick.com/reading/tracts/0034/0034_01.asp ) another classic! “Its all over. Everythings ashes. Bobby died of AIDS, Jim OD’d and Don is into vampirism”
xenuislove, please tell me that site is an elaborate Poe, because….well…Lew Siffer? Really? I suppose the king of R&R was really called Evil S. Presley.
And people actually fall for that nonsense.
Creationism; a world view for people who don’t want to think too much!
I think about the only good thing with that quote is that it invites a Godwin’s Law reply in the first six words thus handily invalidating the rest of it.
I have a problem with people who thinks evolution as a religion. Evolution is a theory built on found evidence, you don’t have faith on evolution in the same way you don’t have faith on Newton’s laws!!
sweetpityfulmercy: Comfort’s challenge there is a more radical version of a common fallacy, that if Darwinism can’t explain abiogenesis (how unlife first became life) it must be wrong. Of course, Darwinism only claims to explain some things that happen after life (with heredity) comes into being.
fenchurch: The Latin word virus has no known plural (it’s a mass noun) and is anomalous in form, an o-stem neuter that looks like a masculine. Whatever its plural ought to be (vira or viri or perhaps virora), I definitely don’t buy virii, which would be the plural of virius. How about letting virus be the plural?