Deluded, Psychotic Creationist, Henry Morris III is Dead

A Prominent Creationist Has Died. His Legacy? A Young Earth Planetarium.

Via Hemant Mehta

Yesterday, a prominent Creationist died.

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Dr. Henry M. Morris III was the CEO of the Institute for Creation Research (ICR), a multi-million dollar enterprise with dozens of staffers that never produced any credible research. A few years ago, ICR made news by building a planetarium. I repeat: A planetarium… dedicated to showing how the universe was only a few thousand years old.

Morris and his organization are the lesser known counterparts to Ken Ham and Answers in Genesis, but even then, they always had plenty of money to try and dissuade students from accepting science.

But what’s especially odd about his obituary on ICR’s website is the first paragraph:

It is with heavy hearts that the Institute for Creation Research announces the homegoing of our CEO, Dr. Henry M. Morris III. He went to be with his Lord on December 12, 2020.

Nothing about that wording is unusual for a Christian website… except there’s no mention of the cause of death. Weird omission.

It’s especially weird because they included it earlier in the day, as evidenced by a screen capture, only to delete it later on.

It is with heavy hearts that the Institute for Creation Research announces the homegoing of our CEO, Dr. Henry M. Morris III. He went to be with his Lord on December 12, 2020, after a brief illness with COVID-19.

There’s nothing shameful about that… unless Morris was a COVID-denier, which he didn’t appear to be, at least not publicly. That said, ICR is hosting a number of in-person events early next year before a vaccine will be widely available. They also held a one-year anniversary celebration at the ICR Discovery Center back in September. The place is closed for the time being, but it’s not clear how Morris may have contracted the virus, if that was indeed the issue.

(Screenshot via ICR. Thanks to Curt for the link)

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Catholic Fanatic Rick Santorum Wants to Ban Science from Schools

Rick Santorum: ‘Science Should Get Out of Politics’

The Republican Party’s total war on science

Rick Santorum is infamous as one of the most determined religious fanatics in US politics, an activist who believes Christian [he’s Catholic] creationism should be taught to all American children in science classes, and a persistent Republican advocate for injecting fundamentalist Christian religion into the political process at every level.

Speaking at the University of Northern Iowa today, Santorum uncorked a real howler, with no apparent recognition of its intense irony. Santorum said the problem with American politics is too much science.

Discussing controversial classroom subjects such as evolution and global warming, Santorum said he has suggested that “science should get out of politics” and he is opposed to teaching that provides a “politically correct perspective.”

Topped off with a helping of homophobic hatred masked as religious victimhood:

Regarding education and the legalization of same-sex marriage, Santorum said he is concerned that schools will be forced to teach that all forms of sexual activity are normal, healthy and good behavior. He said that would be “counter to the belief structure of many people who have students attending those schools” and they would have little grounds to object.

 

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Crazy Catholic Fascist Rick Santorum Yearns for Dark Ages

Santorum Calls For Public Schools To Teach Creationism

The Republican Party’s endless war on reality

By Charles Johnson

Here we go again with the right wing’s bizarre obsession with evolution. For more than a century religious conservatives have been waging a war of denial against reality itself, and there’s no sign of a cease fire yet.

Rick Santorum has long been known as one of the GOP’s most overt and unabashed creationists, and here he is speaking to the editorial board of the Nashua Telegraph, urging that Christian creationism be taught in public school science classes as an “alternative” to the scientific facts of evolution.

Argh. This is the anti-science face of the Republican Party, and Santorum is not the only presidential candidate with these Dark Ages views. In fact, the majority of the current candidates are creationists — and according to recent Gallup polls, the majority of Republican voters. They keep trying to force their ignorant beliefs into American schools despite the numerous Supreme Court rulings against them, and this election season they’re more determined than ever.

 

  Santorum: There are many on the left and in the scientific community, so to speak, who are afraid of that discussion because oh my goodness you might mention the word, God-forbid, “God” in the classroom, or “Creator,” or that there may be some things that are inexplainable by nature where there may be, where it’s better explained by a Creator, of course we can’t have that discussion. It’s very interesting that you have a situation that science will only allow things in the classroom that are consistent with a non-Creator idea of how we got here, as if somehow or another that’s scientific. Well maybe the science points to the fact that maybe science doesn’t explain all these things. And if it does point to that, why don’t you pursue that? But you can’t because it’s not science, but if science is pointing you there how can you say it’s not science? It’s worth the debate.

Michele Bachmann’s Claim That Natural Disasters Were a Warning From God

A quick and entertaining reminder of the type of uncivilized, unsophisticated, irrational, superstitious and anti-science lunatics – typified by Michele Bachmann – that are presently fronting the GOP.

Stephen Colbert Explains Michele Bachmann’s Claim That Natural Disasters Were a Warning From God [VIDEO]

By: Don Deane  |

Comedy Central

On ‘The Colbert Report’ last night, Stephen Colbert gave a tongue-in-cheek explanation of Michele Bachmann’s recent comment that Hurricane Irene and the East coast earthquake were warnings from God to politicians.

Last week, Bachmann said both natural disasters were God’s way of telling politicians to cut spending and fix the budget deficit. Later, she downplayed the comment by first saying it was a joke, then by calling it a “metaphor.”

Colbert felt compelled to explain further. “In this metaphor, God represents the American people, politicians  represent themselves and the hurricane represents the earthquake,” he said. “And Bachmann herself is a simile, because she is like or as  someone who makes sense.”

[via AOL TV]

Ann Coulter – Basking In Her Own (Self-Confessed) Ignorance of Science

More Coulter Stupidity on Evolution

by Ed Brayton

Not content to show her complete ignorance of evolutionary biology once, Ann Coulter doubles down with yet another screed that would get her flunked by a competent high school science teacher. She begins with this unintentionally amusing statement:

More people know the precepts of kabala than know the basic elements of Darwinism.

And then she proves it by displaying her own ignorance of the subject.

Darwin’s theory was that a process of random mutation, sex and death, allowing the “fittest” to survive and reproduce, and the less fit to die without reproducing, would, over the course of billions of years, produce millions of species out of inert, primordial goo.The vast majority of mutations are deleterious to the organism, so if the mutations were really random, then for every mutation that was desirable, there ought to be a staggering number that are undesirable.

Actually, most mutations are neutral. Coulter, and all of us, have hundreds of mutations in our DNA at the very least, and the overwhelming majority of the time they affect us hardly at all. In some cases, they cause serious disease. And in other cases they can aid in survival. This is not even remotely controversial. We see it happen in both the lab and the wild literally every day.

If we sequence a genome and compare it to earlier versions of the same genome, we can identify the specific mutations. Richard Lenski has done exactly that with a population of bacteria, which are particularly useful for such experiments because they reproduce so quickly. Not only can we see the specific mutations and their effects, we can watch a particular trait evolve over time as new mutations pile up on top of the old ones and create new pathways and new molecular structures.

We also ought to find a colossal number of transitional organisms in the fossil record – for example, a squirrel on its way to becoming a bat, or a bear becoming a whale. (Those are actual Darwinian claims.)But that’s not what the fossil record shows. We don’t have fossils for any intermediate creatures in the process of evolving into something better. This is why the late Stephen Jay Gould of Harvard referred to the absence of transitional fossils as the “trade secret” of paleontology. (Lots of real scientific theories have “secrets.”)

Ah, another dishonest quote mine. This one irritated Gould himself, who addressed the question head on when he wrote:

Since we proposed punctuated equilibria to explain trends, it is infuriating to be quoted again and again by creationists — whether though design or stupidity, I do not know — as admitting that the fossil record includes no transitional forms. Transitional forms are generally lacking at the species level, but they are abundant between larger groups. The punctuations occur at the level of species; directional trends (on the staircase model) are rife at the higher level of transitions within major groups.

And indeed they are. In fact, Gould himself wrote a good deal about one of the transitions that Coulter questions, the evolution of whales from land mammals (not from bears but from Artiodactyls). Paleontologists have now found numerous transitional forms from land mammals to modern whales and they form a fairly complete series. Gould wrote in 1994:

“If you had given me a blank piece of paper and a blank check, I could not have drawn you a theoretical intermediate any better or more convincing than Ambulocetus. Those dogmatists who by verbal trickery can make white black, and black white, will never be convinced of anything, but Ambulocetus is the very animal that they proclaimed impossible in theory.”

Coulter continues:

If you get your news from the American news media, it will come as a surprise to learn that when Darwin first published “On the Origin of Species” in 1859, his most virulent opponents were not fundamentalist Christians, but paleontologists.

Another lie. It’s certainly true that there were scientific critics of Darwin’s theory, but the primary opposition came from the church. Thus, the famous debate between Huxley and Bishop Wilberforce. What Coulter conveniently leaves out is that Darwin’s theory gained very rapid acceptance among scientists quite quickly because it explained such a wide range of data extremely well. And that continues to this day. Coulter doesn’t know any of this because she is as ignorant of the scientific literature on evolution as I am of auto mechanics. Unlike her, however, I don’t go around declaring that all auto mechanics don’t know a thing about how to fix a car or that the internal combustion engine couldn’t possibly work.

But things have only gotten worse for Darwin.Thirty years ago (before it was illegal to question Darwinism), Dr. David Raup, a geologist at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, said that despite the vast expansion of the fossil record: “The situation hasn’t changed much.”

To the contrary, fossil discoveries since Darwin’s time have forced paleontologists to take back evidence of evolution. “Some of the classic cases of Darwinian change in the fossil record,” Raup said, “such as the evolution of the horse in North America, have had to be discarded or modified as a result of more detailed information.”

Another dishonest quote mine. What a shock that new evidence would alter explanations. This is, of course, one of the great strengths of science — and one of the great weaknesses of religion. More detailed information should modify our explanations, and in science they do.

The rest is more of the same, rote regurgitation of long-discredited creationist arguments. Ironically, the very man she quoted in her last ignorant diatribe on the subject, Michael Behe, accepts common descent and agrees that the fossil record clearly supports it. He just gives God a divine assist at the molecular level.

Related articles

• More Coulter Stupidity on Evolution [Dispatches from the Creation Wars] (scienceblogs.com)
• Not like a worm? (scienceblogs.com)
• More Coulter (theness.com)
• Not like a worm? (freethoughtblogs.com)

Evolution is a Jewish Conspiracy

Evolution is a Jewish conspiracy

by PZ Myers

The essay starts off stupidly enough.

In 1867 Karl Marx dedicated DasKapital to Charles Darwin.

Actually, no, he didn’t. It’s a fairly common lie in creationist circles, though, just like the others sprinkled throughout the story.

Modern creation science is led by an array of top-flight Ph.D. scientists, including biochemists, paleontologists, astronomers and geologists. It presents a formidable battery of evidence now knocking hundreds of holes in traditional evolutionary arguments. As never before, scientific creationism debunks the contrived “evidence” that evolutionary theory has fed on since Darwin.

No, it isn’t. Creation science is led by a gang of ignorant clods who can’t read a paper without mangling it.

But OK, so far this is just your standard modus operandi for creationists. The really weird stuff is shouted out in the title: JEWISH SUPREMACISTS USE EVOLUTION TO CORRUPT MANKIND. Did you know that evolution is a Jewish conspiracy to corrupt Western civilization?

Why doesn’t the scientific community abandon Darwin’s failed hypotheses? Simple: The Jewish-dominated media and educational establishment are determined that, like unconditional support of Israel, Holocaust mythology, hate laws, and “civil rights” favoritism, there will be no end to the relentless force-feeding of evolution. Belief in evolution is a prerequisite for Jewish supremacism‘s new-world order.

Yet anti-Zionist leadership on the right remains oblivious to the fact that evolution is the largest, ugliest, most aggressive tentacle of the Jewish revolutionary octopus. Anti-Zionists are often evolutionists, claiming that Jews evolved in a way that makes them inherently degenerate, subversive, and corruptive. They make the most Luciferian, dehumanizing fable ever invented by pseudo-science into a pillar of their thinking!

The Reverend Ted Pike is kind of obsessed with Jews. They’re behind everything.

You see, the degenerate Jews promote evolution, which led the Nazis to kill Jews, and we must organize resistance to the Jewish agenda and the Judaic threat, and we absolutely must support Israel without question. Every paragraph drips with anti-semitic bigotry, but at the same time he rants against the wicked anti-Zionists.

I’ve seen this often in fundamentalist Christians. Jews aren’t really people; they’re just props in the script of their eschatology. We have to keep them around because the True Final Solution is for Jesus to exterminate most of them and convert the survivors, and if we jump the gun and kill them all now, why, that would invalidate the Bible, which would be wicked.

The problem we face today originates in Jewish rebellion to Christ. It is primarily a moral issue which cannot be addressed by dehumanizing Jews or violence. It must be met with reason and persuasion, even love. The Bible presents Jewish apostasy as part of a long-range scenario that will ultimately result in anti-Christ world rule but also redemption of a remnant of Jews out of great tribulation at Christ’s second coming. The problem of Jewish supremacism ultimately is Christ’s problem, to be resolved by Him, not military or persecutive measures.

This is why Adolf Hitler and the Nazis must be damned. Not because they killed people, but because they lead us into “anti-biblical, evolutionary, racist errors”. We must support Israel because it’s a kind of holding pen for the Jews, where they will be annihilated in Armageddon, and you’re a bad, bad person if you begin the slaughter prematurely.

Despite the fact that I don’t have any evidence of any Jewish background in my lineage, I do have to cop to being an ugly evolutionary tentacle, and there are most certainly Jews in my readership. Does it make you feel all warm and happy and safe to peek into the minds of some of the most ardent Christian supporters of Israel?

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IVF Nobel Prize: Vatican vs. Science

The Vatican has a long and sordid history of putting religious ideology ahead of basic science — which is to say, ahead of reality. Nowhere is this most evident than perhaps in questions of biology and the latest expression of the Vatican’s hostility towards reality is their opposition to the awarding of the Nobel Prize in physiology/medicine to Robert Edwards, the pioneer of in vitro fertilization (IVF).

After hearing the news of the Nobel award, Monsignor Ignacio Cartasco. the Vatican’s spokesman on bioethics, told Italy’s Ansa news agency on Tuesday that the decision to honour Edwards was “completely out of order”. He Is responsible for the 1arge number of freezers filled with embryos In the world”, of which most will probably “end up abandoned or dead”, Cartasco said.

Source: New Scientist, October 9, 2010

By this logic, I suppose the Vatican should condemn the factories which produce tissues and hand lotion — after all, consider all the poor sperm which have denied any sort of chance at fertilizing an egg because of the widespread, unrestricted availability of tissues and lotion to young males. It’s a holocaust that dwarfs all other holocausts and no one is protesting it!