No ‘debate’ on evolution

Scientific theory versus conjecture

Scientific theory versus conjecture

Herein lies one of the many problems with scientist Bill Nye deciding to debate the disingenuous supreme leader of creationist sophistry Ken Ham: As I anticipated last year shortly after the debate, fruitless exercises like this with creationists, who have no interest in examining or considering any real evidence, serve no purpose and only legitimizes the fairy tales, such that a guy like Brandon Pettenger, a high school scientist teacher from Arroyo Grande (Calif.) High School, can point to the exchange between Nye and Ham and surmise that there must be a “debate” surrounding evolution and creationism after all. If there wasn’t a debate, why would a high-profile scientist like Nye even bother?

To his detriment, Nye did agree and go through with the debate, so it’s a fair question. In any case, Pettenger, who admits to being a Christian, showed the Nye-Ham debate to his students as a way to present “both sides of the argument,” as he said in this defense, after being called out by the Richard Dawkins Foundation and the Freedom From Religion Foundation:

I understand that you might be worried I am teaching religion in a public school science class which is not the case. There is debate within the scientific community about how to answer the question where did life come from (italics mine). I feel it would be a disservice to my students not to present both sides of the argument. We are investigating the main theories that are presented in this debate and the evidence used to support those claims. I am very clear beforehand that I am a Christian but I am trying to present the scientific evidence. It is up to each student to decide for themselves which side they believe based on the evidence. I will be asking each student to write an argumentative essay stating their position in the debate and to support their position with scientific evidence. I am trying to give students tools to use in their essays.

As Hemant Mehta points out, of course, the question of our origin from simpler forms only has one legitimate side, which is the scientific theory of evolution by natural selection. All other “theories,” including creationism and intelligent design and all other origin tales from religion, are just that — theories in the most laymen-esque, conjectural sense of the word.

Pettenger can ask his students to write essays and support their positions all they want to, but if any of them happen to agree with Ham, the teacher will be waiting a long, long time for that “scientific evidence,” since none exists.

Debunking theistic evolution

A common misconception floating about among Christians is that scientists, freethinkers and others “believe” in evolution the same way they believe in God or divine providence, and sometimes we slip into the misleading language in this way to describe our perception that evolution is a real process. Of course, this misunderstanding is essentially based on skewed semantics, as the word, “believe,” can be used to mean both something that a person takes on faith and a disputed piece of information that a person chooses to accept against the alternatives. But as Keith Blanchard said here, evolution is not disputed:

Theistic-Evolution

Theistic evolution

Evolution is nothing more than a fairly simple way of understanding what is unquestionably happening. You don’t believe in it — you either understand it or you don’t. But pretending evolution is a matter of faith can be a clever way to hijack the conversation, and pit it in a false duality against religion. And that’s how we end up with people decrying evolution, even as they eat their strawberries and pet their dogs, because they’ve been led to believe faith can only be held in one or the other.

Thus, instead of saying we believe or even accept evolution, perhaps we should speak about it with as much certainty of fact as we do gravity and the planet’s rotation around the sun, for when believers decry evolution, they make themselves look as ridiculous as if they had suddenly claimed the world is flat. While I agree with Blanchard that a person can, and many do, recognize evolution as fact and simply reconcile it with their faith — notice how the reach of faith always, always recedes behind science — they must do so at the expense of the Bible’s validity. Liberal Christians, such as Francis Collins, reconcile evolution and the Bible by claiming that God was behind the whole plan of creation and guided evolution to ultimately culminate in human beings. Basically, since Genesis does not provide an exact time frame for the process of creation, a “day” in the Bible could be virtually any amount of time.

But there are at least two problems with this theory. OK, three. First, although the Bible attempts to provide years and time periods for “historical” people and events, no attempt, as I’ve said, is made to do this in the creation story. One would think that an important event like the creation of man would have warranted a basic timeline so the Bible’s later readers could know about when the species began. Certainly, providing this information in detail would not have been out of the purview of an all-knowing god.

Second, as the image above points out, evolution is riddled with “errors” in design (Here’s just a few). Presumably a god who was in control of the process would have been able and willing to streamline the process and “guide” evolution more efficiently without the flaws, which leads to the next point. More than 98 percent of all species that ever existed, including early humans, are now extinct. An all-loving God would have had to watch eons and eons of misery and death before our little blip of time came around. Sure, some Christians will argue that millions of years for God is nothing, but while God might be able to fluidly transport himself through space and time, he still orchestrated a plan that includes 98 percent more death and destruction than life. So although some Christians do regard the accepted science of evolution as true, they still have logical mountains to climb if they are to reconcile evolution with the notion of all-loving, all-powerful god.

Obama speaks candidly on climate change

Although he should have been talking about climate change five years ago, it’s good to see Obama siding with science and advocating for a price on carbon. Better late than never. Here’s a preview from Tom Friedman’s interview on Showtime:

I particularly liked Friedman’s example about climate change deniers in Congress consulting the 97 percent of doctors who may diagnose their children, but on climate change, they want to consult the other 3 percent minority. This, I have found also, applies to religion, but instead, the percentages are more like 99-to-1, as Christians and other believers, despite 99 percent of scientists being in agreement about evolution and the inadequacy of creationism to explain our world, they still trust the dissenting 1 percent, and without any evidence all the while.

No, I did not watch the Bill Nye/Ken Ham debate, nor do I care to

For the same reason Richard Dawkins doesn’t debate creationists, I could care less about watching the recent debate between Bill Nye and obscurantist Ken Ham. In my view, Nye made a mistake in agreeing to debate Ham, and he might as well have been debating someone on the merits of “faith healing.” The cause of science and skepticism has little to gain from this exercise, and giving Ham a debate platform to propagate his long-since discredited and discarded views suggest — to the rest of the world — that they have not, in fact, been discarded. And to anyone with a farthing knowledge of basic biology, they have.

In fact, the only way Nye might have been justified in debating Ham was if he was able to so fully and comprehensively “defeat” Ham that we would henceforth here nothing more from creationists. But creationism has managed to survive 155 years after Darwin laid it to waste because of credulous, willfully ignorant sheep. For Nye to think that he could change that overnight either smacks of arrogance or wishful thinking.

Credit: @MacLToons

Credit: @MacLToons

Kirk Cameron: Perpetual floater

A friend of mine, who ironically happens to be a nonbeliever, recently interviewed Christian apologist and charlatan Kirk Cameron for The Mountaineer newspaper in Haywood County, N.C. Cameron is going to be appearing in Franklin, N.C., to promote his anti-gay program, “Love Worth Fighting For.”

In the story, Cameron describes how he came to be a Christian and now calls himself a “recovering atheist,” according to the story:

As a teenager, Cameron starred as the goofy and loveable Mike Seaver on the sitcom “Growing Pains” from 1985-1992 alongside Alan Thicke and Leonardo DiCaprio. But it was his on-screen girlfriend Chelsea Noble that perhaps influenced his life for years to come.

Noble and Cameron have been married now for more than 20 years and have six children. In an interview with The Mountaineer, Cameron said he had labeled himself as a “recovering atheist,” as his Christian faith developed when he was older.

“I lost my faith in atheism when I was 18,” he said. “I had a personal shift in my life that made a big difference (meeting Noble) and I’m thankful for God giving me a new direction to move in.

This account of how he became a Christian just screams someone who has never had a single independent thought in his life. He developed a relationship with his on-screen girlfriend, and he “converted” to her religion at 18 years old. I put “converted” in quotes because I doubt very seriously that he was ever a strong atheist to begin with, possibly someone who had never given much thought to religion, but certainly not an atheist who purposefully rejected religion. He simply became a Christian because he liked her and adopted her worldview. What a weak-kneed, lazy approach to such an important question. I wonder what it’s like to just float through life and to make up your mind at such a young age to follow something blindly for no other reason than another human being claimed it was true.

I once followed Christianity without giving it much thought as a teenager and young man, obviously, but here’s the difference: Unlike Cameron, I didn’t make a choice to follow Christianity. It was all I knew, and like many, no other options existed at the time. Such is the stultifying life in evangelical America. It was only when I discovered a larger world through my own studies and an examination of the evidence that I made a conscious decision to reject religion, a conscious decision to reject faith, not embrace it.

On the upcoming Bill Nye-Ken Ham debate

Apparently, the nonbelieving community is in an uproar over Bill Nye agreeing to debate creationist kook job Ken Ham. I don’t think Nye does himself any favors by agreeing to this, and it’ll be mostly theater in any case, with Ham trotting out his tired and long-since debunked refrain on creationist “theory,” and Nye futilely making the case from science to someone who doesn’t respect the scientific method in the first place. It seems to me that debating someone who has long since thrown reason, if he ever had it in the first place, out the door partially legitimizes an argument that doesn’t deserve an ounce of respect or consideration in the first place.

Dawkins takes on a creationist

The wheels start to come off for this guy at about the 25 minute mark. He keeps referring to Bible scholars and experts yet can’t name any, and he offers no serious arguments — there are none — against evolution by natural selection, although he claims to have an omniscient god on his side.