Help Doctors Without Borders in a BlogTV Marathon

You want to help save the world, right? Well, perhaps you can't be Superman, but you can help with the many good charitable and recovery groups. And one of the great ones is Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), or Doctors Without Borders. It's a great emergency relief group that is efficient, goes where they are needed including the worst places in the world, and is completely secular. The people involved put their lives at risk to provide medical care to those that have had their lives turned upside down by natural disaster or ongoing civil war.

And you can help them raise money this weekend. For what I think is the third time in a row, many of the big names in YouTube and atheism/humanism will be running a BlogTV marathon for 24 hours trying to raise money for MSF. They have direct donations which is tallied up, and there is an e-Bay auction of various items, from books to signed photographs to a stay at a southwestern ranch. Here is one item up for auction:



The MSF charity marathon is being run, once again, by the excellent DPR Jones of Great Britain, who also tends to run the Magic Sandwich Show. Over the years, his work has earned over $100,000 for MSF, and he has gotten excellent guests, both big names on YouTube such as AronRa and Potholer54, but also Eugene Scott, Lawrence Krauss, A.C. Grayling, and Neil deGrasse Tyson.

The events begin on Saturday, Sept 8th at 4 PM Greenwich Mean Time (11 AM Eastern Standard). And it will all be here.


dprjones- Broadcast your self LIVE

So donate. Do it! You can do it here or here or here. And again, there is the auction with over 100 items up for bidding.



Donations will stop being taken through the marathon later on the 9th, but some of the auction items will go on longer. And you better bid on those things, because I have; try bidding and you force me to give more.

And while I mention giving for a good cause, also consider the Light the Night walks starting this September. This is another secular charity cause, trying to raise $1 million for research on cancer. If you hate cancer, and if you are secular (or not), get to know these walkers and help them or donate. Help work with another great organization, Foundation Beyond Belief. There is also a matching program; every dollar donated up to $500,000 will be matched; that means $500,000 donated will equal $1,000,000. And it fights cancer. You don't like cancer, do ya?

So much good to do. So little time. But if you have the money to spare, please help out these awesome organizations that really do git er done.

Are Creationists Liars?

Update: this post is now also featured at Skepticblogs.

Over the weekend, I was chatting with a good friend of mine, and he brought up the very interesting biographical story of Mary Schweitzer who started as a Young Earth Creationist (YEC) as a child, but because of interest in science became an influential paleontologist, showing how dinosaurs were likely warm-blooded and the ancestors to modern birds (which means when you eat chicken, you are eating a dinosaur!). I also added the interesting tangent that YECs have tried to use Schweitzer's work on blood cells found in dino bones as proof of a young earth (or at least that fossils are not millions of years old), my friends had heard of as well. But this then got into the conversation of misinformation and if creationists are liars or simply misinformed.

Now, I definitely think that the vast majority of average folks that believe in YEC are not dishonest, nor do they think what facts they have are lies. They are two things: suffering confirmation bias (only hearing that which reinforces their beliefs) and misinformation (perhaps even propaganda). That will cause many people to truly and honestly think the science is on their side. It just has the irony factor that science can explain to a large degree why they don't believe the science (something articulated in Chris Mooney's The Republican Brain).

However, I think it better to focus on the people that make the claims to support creationism, from the creation scientists of old to the modern Intelligent Design proponents. Are they all liars? Some? Just a few bad apples?

In the opinion of one person that has dealt with creationists a lot, YouTube user (and now blogger) Aronra in his Foundational Falsehoods of Creationism along with subsequent videos tries to make the case that creationist proponents actively try to pull the wool over people's eyes either for ideological or monetary reasons (or both). He even argues that biochemist Michael Behe, best known for defending irreducible complexity as evidence against evolution, was at least intellectually dishonest in his testimony at the Dover, Pennsylvania trial on Intelligent Design.

However, I won't simply post the opinions of others, no matter how well-founded. Let's consider this from two points: the prior probability that creationism is advanced by dishonesty, and examples of it in action.

First, how likely is it that good, Christian leaders could promote things that are positively false yet peddled as absolute truth? Isn't there a significant disconnect between defending a system of morality and violating the 9th commandment?  Well, that is something that can be overcome with a bit of rationalization, and not much really. In the minds of YEC leaders, evolution is not simply a scientific theory, it is a force trying to undermine the whole of society. As is seen in this illustration from creationist literature, evolution supports Nazism, abortion, sexual perversion, racism, radical feminists, and more things seen as terrible. And Creation "Science" is the remedy, or so it seems. So whatever tool it takes to take down evolution is given great moral weight. Such a precedent can be seen in the Church historian Eusebius, who advocated (from the idea in Plato) it is sometimes necessary to use a lie for medicinal purposes, sort of speak. In another context, there is pseudo-historian David Barton who is now too widely considered a liar to be publishable by anyone with a reputation (which is why he has gone to Glen Beck). He really was a liar for Jesus, making up quotes and making claims such as the Founding Fathers had settled the evolution vs. creationism issue back in the day... even though they were most all dead before Charles Darwin could even read, let alone publish his Origin of Species.

Moreover, there is the point to consider of how a position such as YEC can survive when it was been falsified since the early 19th century. How can a position be supported by educated people, given the information resources of modern times, when each and every claim said to be indicative of a young earth and against common decent are not only proved false, but even nicely sorted against the claims? There are no facts one can point to that actually indicate the earth is less than 10,000 years old, while there are a significant number in favor of an earth million and billions of years old. Can someone, let alone numerous people research a topic and get their facts wrong time and again without intellectual dishonesty?

The problem becomes all the worse considering that many YEC organizations proudly put up their statements of faith. For example, Answers in Genesis (AiG) has a Statement of Faith that includes the following:

By definition, no apparent, perceived or claimed evidence in any field, including history and chronology, can be valid if it contradicts the scriptural record.

(And no, this is not the only example.) Such a statement indicates that from the start, no evidence can go against what is already believed. If you already "know" the "answer", then the research becomes farcical. And while scientists can indeed fall into cognitive traps and fail to see evidence that undoes their own pet theories, they don't make statements in advance of what the evidence must be.

So, initially we can see that there are potential motivators for being dishonest for the sake of taking down evolution. But what about actual cases where this happens? Let's start early in history.

If we look to the beginning of the fight against Darwin's theory, we ought to consider Sir Richard Owen, a brilliant anatomist and founder of the British Museum and the coiner of the word "dinosaur." However, he was a staunch opponent of Darwin and a supporter of a theological interpretation of life's past rather than the mechanistic account of Darwin and his bulldog Huxley. And so it seems that Owen invented the claim that a brain structure (the hippocampus minor) was only possessed by humans and not other primates, thus undercutting common ancestry. But investigations by others showed Owen to be wrong, and considering Owen's prowess in anatomy, it becomes hard to believe he could make such a mistake. There was Huxley's book written for those unexposed to advanced anatomy that these structures were indeed in both humans as well as monkeys, so the feature was rather obvious to all observers (including scientists such as Charles Lyell). That Owen evaded this, along with creating inaccurate drawings to hide other features of primate brains, had to further claim that the hippocampus minor was not only missing in lower primates and "idiot" further indicates his stubbornness to the obvious, and having been caught he finally admitted that the structure was in other primate brains (though with caveats), all indicates he was protecting other interests. This is detailed in the book Owen's Ape and Darwin's Bulldog and this rather good Wikipedia page on the subject. Also, this video:

In addition, Owen tried to discredit the usefulness of Archaeopteryx (discovered in 1861) as a transition between reptiles and bird by comparing the fossil to pterosaurs rather than dinosaurs. Again, hardly an innocent mistake since Owen had been the definer of dinosaurs, so this made it easy for Huxley to expose him again. (Obviously there wasn't much love between these men.) Owen also was not a terribly moral man who squished those that got in his way, wrote letters in the third person to papers attacking his enemies and praising himself, and was also accused of plagiarism.

So, it seems in the case of Owen, he was willing to present falsehoods in order to advance his career and attack evolution, and he was widely considered towards the end of his life to have been a dishonest man. But he is hardly the only case to present. If we move on to the Scope Monkey Trial of 1925, we can see another case there it was seen as useful to take a position believed to be false in order to attack evolution. Here we had a titan of American politics, William Jennings Bryan, fighting for Christ and society against the great agnostic Clarence Darrow (though they were in fact friends and Darrow helped Bryan in his bids for the presidency). Now, an interesting fact that the movie and stage performance of the trial, Inherit the Wind, doesn't properly represent is that Bryan was not a YEC, but instead he did not disagree with the geologists. However, when on the stand, he did try to argue for a young earth, citing the "research" of George McReady Price, the effective founder of Young Earth Creationism. Price was not a geologist or trained scientist, and also on the stand Bryan admitted the antiquity of the earth (see The Creationists, pp. 58, 89, 116-7). So again, we have a person willing to use research that was not only outside of the scientific mainstream but even at odds with his own beliefs, all for the sake of fighting Darwinism because of its perceived moral issues. Not unlike that seen in the illustration above: using "science" that supports creationism to stop some other evil.

However, these figures are long dead and do not promote things today, obviously. What about living proponents of creationism? As another case example, consider Duane Gish, a founding figure in creation "science" and a trained biochemist. So he ought to know basic biology and chemistry. As one of his famous cases against natural selection and the piecemeal origins of biological systems, he pointed to the bombardier beetle, a bug that can squirt a boiling liquid at predators for protection. Gish claimed that the chemicals in the liquid used by the beetle, hydrogen peroxide and hydroquinone, explode without an inhibitor; thus, the beetle could not have existed without the inhibitor, giving nothing for nature to select, thus meaning the creature had to be formed the way it was, otherwise Kaboom! But what happens if you do mix these chemicals together? Actually, no boom. At all. You can test this yourself with store-bought supplies.

Now, Gish made this claim in a book from 1977. In 1978, he was informed of this, and though he still thought it impossible for the beetle to have evolved, he agreed that the chemical combo was not explosive. And yet, in 1980, he still made the same argument. He should have known better before making the argument (he was a chemist), and he admitted to knowing better two years before making the same claim again. And to this day, it is still made by creationists without fixing the errors (though elsewhere they do agree the description is wrong). So we have here another example of dishonesty and knowingly so.

But we still haven't gotten to perhaps the grand-daddy of the disingenuous, "Dr." Kent Hovind. As you may have noticed, I don't think him a doctor because his degree is fake, a printing from a diploma mill called Patriot Bible University (which is just this trailer house in Colorado), so his title is fake. Hovind is also currently in prison for tax fraud, so he is indeed a convicted liar. Other acts of being disingenuous include his $250,000 prize for any evidence of evolution which, upon inspection, can only be won by showing it is impossible in any way that God could have caused the evidence to be the way it appears. He also uses his own made-up definitions of evolution to further evade ever getting the evidence for the theory that biologists actually talk about.

But as an example of creating a falsehood to advance creationism over evolution, perhaps the best example is his case of a supposed conversation with a Berkeley professor while on an airplane. He never gives a name or department for this professor, and the professor's description of the Big Bang is amazingly wrong. In fact, it appears to have been manufactures by Hovind using elementary/middle school science text books (start viewing from 3:30).

If you watched, you would notice that even Hovind's slides show that he was mixing nebula collapse for star formation and the Big Bang, which he then uses for his angular momentum argument against the Big Bang. He is clearly off his rocker and is using an encounter that could not have happened unless such a person knew nothing of cosmology yet talked exactly like a children's textbook. A collection of Hovind's lies can be found using the wayback machine here. I should also include that Hovind's ministry, Creation Science Evangelism, filed many false DMCA take-down notices of videos critical of his seminars, claiming copyright infringement even though on his lectures and on his website he states none of his stuff of copyrighted to help spread it around. Perhaps then it is no wonder that he is in jail for tax fraud and trying to disguise transactions that would have tipped off the feds. However, it is unfortunate that his son, Eric, has continued in his father's line of work, selling the same bunk, just with better graphics.

And now for one last example: taken from the Dover trial about Intelligent Design (ID). In particular, consider two of the figures on the Dover school board, William (Bill) Buckingham and Alan Bonsell. These guys, and others, wanted to get straight-out creationism taught in the schools, even though it had been clearly found to be illegal by the Supreme Court in the 1987 case of Edwards v. Aguillard. So they searched for an alternative to avoid the legal issue using ID. Part of that process was the inclusion of a textbook called Of Pandas and People. After the school board had agreed to including ID, the books appeared out of nowhere, apparently, at the school for use in the library. Sixty copies, in fact. Buckingham and Bonsell both claimed in their sworn deposition that they had no idea where the books came from.

But that was a bald-faced lie. In fact, Buckingham had gotten up in front of his church to ask for donations to buy these textbooks. He then gave a check for the books to Bonsell, who gave it to his father, who then bought the books. That is a pretty amazing lie, and told under oath no less. When the judge got wind of this, he took over the interrogation of the witness and put Bonsell up for perjury charges; Judge Jones said that the two men repeatedly lied.

Here then we have a super-clear case of lying, under oath even, in order to get creationism into the classrooms.

Now, this post has already gotten long, but it is hardly complete. I haven't considered the ever-present use of quote-mining in creationist literature, especially against Darwin and Stephen Jay Gould, or the dishonest editing of Dawkins or the propaganda film Expelled which tries to say evolutionary scientists are really Nazis. I haven't touched the geologists like Andrew Snelling who gets a PhD in the subject and writes papers, but thinks all his work is false and promotes YEC to whomever he can. And I haven't talked about ID which tries to hide what it is as subterfuge, avoiding legal barriers to teaching creationism while not providing anything that can get into peer-review (and they don't even try). Heck, documentation shows that they really have the goal of doing all that they can to destroy "Darwinism" to make way for Christian scientific approaches (see the Wedge document). The blog site The Panda's Thumb has also been tracking the falsehoods and dishonest for many years now. There is a massive industry of pseudo-science, and it truly looks like it cannot be advanced honestly.

Creationism is certainly advanced by ignorance of the facts. However, there does appear to be a significant factor of dis-ingenuousness on the part of proponents. And those that were actively listening to these false prophets do feel they were lied to after they realize how wrong they were. But still, nearly half the US buys into YEC teachings.

How best to combat this? You tell me!

Big Shift for the Catholic Church

Just in the news is that the Pope says it is morally justified to use condoms. Now, it isn't for just anything, but only for stopping the spread of diseases like AIDS. This is remarkable since in the past the Catholic Church would not support condom use in sub-Saharan Africa which has been enveloped by HIV.

The example given by the Pope is a male prostitute trying to reduce the spread of infections, and this is something the vicar for Christ on Earth has said previously, so the shift isn't that radical. This means that the rash of American bishops that attacked the Obama Administration for making them have to provide birth control via insurance for non-Catholic employees are not out of line with Vatican policy. No excommunications are going to happen on that front any time soon.

Nonetheless, it may be a sign that the old institution will get on with the rest of the modern world and not have to have every act of sex have to produce at least one child. It also means that, hopefully, the Church won't keep saying that condoms make the AIDS epidemic worse.

What do you call someone who lies? Ray Comfort

As many know, notorious Ray "Banana Man" Comfort has come out with his version of Darwin's classic Origin of Species since it is in public domain after 150 years of existence. The primary advertised difference between most versions of the book and Comfort's is the inclusion of an introduction that tries to say that "Darwinism" is a false religion, and all of the creationist canards that have become familiar to those that read the works or talk to those that are believers in creationism, especially the young earth variety (YEC for short). By calling Darwin a racist, a misogynist, and the philosophical influence to Nazi Germany and the Holocaust, Comfort's introduction is both a long ad hominem as well as scientifically dubious.

Previously I had written on the subject of Nazism and Darwinian evolution in response to the movie Expelled. I noted that Darwin's book had been banned in Germany, that Hitler was himself not an atheist or "Darwinist", but instead a Catholic creationist. In other words, Comfort is absolutely wrong about the connection between Darwin and Hitler, and it is painful to keep hearing that Hitler was an atheist and "evolutionist" when it is so demonstrably wrong.

But I have learned something else that is quite upsetting to any critical mind. Comfort has said that he wants his readers to read past his introduction and read Darwin's book, which Comfort had made easy for the reader. However, as I had suspected, it is an abridged work. So when Comfort claims that there is no evidence for evolution, he is correct because he edited out the evidence! This has been noted by Eugenie Scott: chapters about biogeography, one of the strongest pieces of evidence in Darwin's day and today for common decent with modification, as well as chapters on embryology, morphology, and classification, are missing, as well as Darwin answering some of the objections to his theory, such as concerning transitional forms. Scott does not say if Darwin's response to the evolution of the eye is intact, but part of that passage is a favorite for creationist quote-mines, including Ray Comfort (see Nothing Created Everything, p. 18). One can view Comfort's book online, and the part about the eye evolving in Darwin's book is intact; however, in the introduction Comfort does a massive quote-mining operation (from a physicist, no less) to "prove" the eye could not have evolved (which the author does not say, but instead says the eye evolved!) rather than, say, read about the evolution of the eye in Dawkins' Climbing Mount Improbable (1996), Land's and Nilsson's Animal Eyes (2002), or more recently in Science a paper by Fernald and Russel (2006). The 1994 paper by Nilsson and Pleger showing a pessimistic calculation that the eye could have evolved in a few million years (in ~364,ooo generations). See an nicely condensed version of these results here and here.

What Comfort has tried to do is leave Darwin's thesis with the appearance of a few hundred pages of speculation, when in reality he came up with this theory of natural selection and published on it 20 years later all the time in between collecting more evidence. Darwin also delayed publication due to his fears of religious upheaval, but nonetheless Darwin also continued to reinforce his ideas with evidence from a diverse number of fields. By editing out these chapters, as well as being behind the times on the evidence for evolution (by, say, 150 years), Comfort shows himself to be not simply ignorant, but a deceiver. Selectively removing some of the most important chapters from Darwin's book cannot be accounted for except by conscious dishonesty. After all, one should not say "look at the evidence" and then hide it away to "prove" there is no evidence.

Ray, that is why you were awarded by the Golden Crocoduck this year.



And here is a bit more from another intellectually honest YouTuber:



So Ray, what do you call someone who lies? Did I hear "A liar"?

Pick, Choose, Lose

You almost certainly have heard the retort to those that claim we need to do away with religion and religious morality that without that pillar of religion we could not possibly know what is moral and immoral. Somehow, after so many years, after so many philosophers have ponders this subject, somehow so many talk-show hosts, theologians, and regular people think that this is a proper retort. They may know that at some level it does not prove that some god exists, but it gives them the justification to believe. I wish to demonstrate the intrinsic error in the thinking of such persons and thus show the argument is self-refuting.
Firstly, a question: "Has anyone heard of the Euthyphro dilemma?" In one dialog of Plato 2400 years ago, our interlocutor demonstrated the absurdity of morality coming from a divine source. "Is the pious loved by the gods because it is pious, or is it pious because it is loved by the gods?" Similarly: "Is the good loved by the god(s) because it is good, or is it good because it is loved by the god(s)?" All of the attempts to try to get past this dilemma are based on attempts to make the definition of god malleable enough to make good and god one in the same. This does nothing because by defining god as good, the term good then loses its meaning; an action is called good only because it is what god did; if he had done something else, that would have been good as well. Of course, should I do the same, somehow I may be charged with a crime. Hence, the action must have a level of goodness to it even if not done by any gods. Aquinas' sophistry is no rescue.
Further, within the moral context of religion, we are truly doomed. Take religious belief X and religious belief Y. According to the X religious moralist, the things deemed good and evil by the deity of X are in fact good and evil; similarly is the case for the Y religious moralist. We know from experience that certain religions will have different moral precepts, otherwise what distinguishes them are inconsequential. Judaism does not allow the eating of pork; Jainism does not allow harm to come to even the smallest creature; the Mezo-American religions of the past had human sacrifice; homosexuality is taboo in many belief systems; etc. Within this context then, how does a moral sanction in X and another in Y work with each other? What I mean is this: in X, some moral precept will be different from that in Y; in fact, X may call something in Y immoral. He says this because of X. Y does not accept this because of the precepts of Y, and Y may even charge X with similar statements of immorality. An example of this can be the case of homosexuality. Some churches today say it is sin; others are not claiming it is sin or wrong at all, even though they read the same holy book. Further, by condemning homosexuality, the latter church could claim the former church was acting immorally because of how they treated homosexuals and make them feel guilty unnecessarily. Both churches can make opposite claims, both claim that they are being moral, and claim the other is being immoral.
A certain word should come to mind here: relativism. That is what we have here with this situation of different religions. And it is ironic because the theist claims morality from god to ensure that it is absolute and not relative. And it is not always just about minor issues of what you can eat or how long your hair should be. We also have to deal with the oppression of half of the population because of their estrogen levels; countless holy wars have been issued based on revelation and textual clairvoyance; the nether-reaches of people are hacked away at; who you can commune with is limited; the examples are without end. And you would be hard-pressed to find agreement on these issues even within the larger spheres of any many religion. The Christians cannot agree about apostolic tradition or homosexuality or contraception, for example. And the things that almost all people would call evil has happened in the name of these theologies.
Now, one often hears the retort that we just need to weed out the bad theologies and leave the good ones. And how are we supposed to know what theologies are good and bad if what is good and bad is based on theology? The statement supposes that that person has the superior belief simply by the fiats of that belief. And the same statement could be made by Pope Urban II who preached for the First Crusade. From a religious morality, one cannot claim another religion is better than another without invoking some sort of absolutism, but that runs contrary to the very nature of religious morality--it is relativistic. This or that is good based on this or that theology.
Within the religious paradigm, one cannot claim that another religion is bad or immoral without becoming ridiculous. X and Y are in conflict, so how does another person, P, decide which is the one with the better morality? How can P say that Y is being immoral or X is? There are three choice: decide X is true; decide Y is true; decide that there is something other that X or Y to judge by them. Taking the first two options is without merit because it is a decision not based on morality because you are choosing that morality. The choice hence relative and meaningless to the person that chooses in an opposite case. To claim anything in X or Y is good or bad requires something to supersede both, and hence a morality must exist that is not based on any of these theologies. One may try and suppose a higher theology, but that only leads to an infinite regression.
And so we have secular ethics, being it utilitarianism of Kant's categorical imperative or something else, including our ethical instincts. It is the only thing that can possibly supersede the religious bickering and say that some theology did cause evils. The religious person cannot do that without contradicting themselves. If they claim that religions is the source of morality, but say some religions is immoral, then religions is a source for immorality; any religion can make the same statements, so they all contradict each other, all fall into relativism, and often violence ensues. Religious ethics causes only absolute relativism, the most dangerous ethical precept of all.
Can't all of these pundits on the radio or TV not see the contradiction in their statements, in saying religions does cause evils, but claim religions are causing evils within the religious context? All they can say is that the believe something is immoral from their perception of their theologian, which cannot cross over into another religion, perhaps not even another sect. In the case of sects based on the same holy book, one could claim that someone has a theology that is not based on that book, and so their morals coming from that sect are not true; however, it seems that such arguments of who has the correct interpretation are not going to be settled in any point in the future. The Pope has confirmed all non-Catholics are not "real" Christians; Shia and Sunni Muslims certainly do not agree about Ali and the imams; there are plenty of permutations of Judaism; Buddhism can be atheistic; sectarianism is without end. The relativism of interpretation is much the same as that relativism of morals--and worse is that it is absolute.
One cannot escape this problem. If one claims that someone is evil in the name of religion, they first have to demonstrate how it is good; but that religion was not chosen based on its goodness but on the sense of what that person already thought was good, meaning that that sense of morality must have existed before he chose; otherwise, the choice was ad hoc and carries no real weight. If morality is not relative, it must exist beyond the religious fray. Otherwise, we cannot say one religion is good and another is not.
As for most people, they should realize this, since they are not taking all that they have in their holy books to heart. Most people pick and choose what is right and wrong in their books. That choice cannot be made within the confines of that religion. If the book says "murder all infidels", you cannot within that same religious sphere of morality say that that is not a moral statement, even if it contradicts another passage, such as "don't kill, EVER". And how are those choices even made? Intrinsic understandings of what is good without the book. And fortunately, most people do not take every word of their holy books are strong as the next. Otherwise, we would be in the days of the Inquisition all over again. If you say the Inquisition was an immoral institution, that statement cannot be within religion.
Face it: you are moral because of some other factor--you know that acting morally is favorable in most cases. Why else would morality be called "good"? So, I ask that we realize that the basis of morals on religious leaders. Even Jesus was supposed to have said "Why do you call be good?" (Mark 10:18).