Does Creation science have any convincing arguments?

Oxford Skeptics in the Pub hosted Peter Harrison this week.  He is based at St Andrews University (of which I am a graduate) so it was fun to have a chat with him.  His talk was about creationism.  As it said on the SITP site:

It’s easy to make fun of many creationist claims, but what are their strongest arguments?

Creationism often takes a lot of flak for the kind of wild claims made by hoards of ALL-CAPS creationists on blogs and YouTube comments. But of all the claims and arguments made by creationists, which are the most impressive? Do they pose a threat to creationism-denying scientific fields? Forget the usual tired canards. Peter has spent a year collaborating with top creationist organisations and groups to collate and bring to you their most powerful arguments yet…

So, I hear you asking whether any of the arguments were convincing.  He had asked them about both their evidence for creationism and in four of the five cases for evidence that the world is young (6000 to 10,000 years old).  The fifth organisation promotes old-earth crationism so it was not relevant in their case.

The organisations that he had challenged included Answers in Genesis and The Discovery Institute.  It seems that they have now ceased to cooperate with him after he shared his conclusions with them.  They didn't even appear to have used their best lines of evidence even while they were talking, but then again who is the best judge of that?

One thing did surprise me.  In his discussions with the 'Discoveroids', he had used the term 'creationist'.  I happen to listen to their podcast, ID The Future (which I decline to link to, as I have no desire to increase their Google ranking) on a regular basis.  They usually make a point that The Discovery Institute is there to promote 'Intelligent Design', and not creationism.  They say that there is a difference, although I have some doubts about that.

All in all, it was an entertaining evening with a great speaker.  It was only the second time that he has given that talk.  I hope he will get chance to use it many more times.

Teaching the other controversy

People preach about 'teaching the controversy' in the debate about evolution, as if Intelligent Design were science.  Maybe there are questions about evolution by natural selection, but it is certain that Intelligent Design is not an alternative answer.

They like to teach the controversy and claim that the arguments of 'neo-darwinists' don't hold up to scrutiny.

Well does that matter or not?  ID's proponents claim that it is a science but does that hold up to scrutiny?  They claim that they start from the data.  That's nice, but science starts from the hypothesis and uses data from the real world to see whether it supports the science - not the other way round.

And although they deny it, Intelligent Design requires an Intelligent Designer, and we are being impolite if we ask Christians who that designer might have been.

So let's start from the data again - and ask what data shows that God (obviously the pseudonymous intelligent being who designed everything) exists.  Is there any data?  I doubt it.  After all, faith is more powerful than data.

Then we can move on to the real science again.

Perspectives on the Cambrian Explosion

I must have been listening to too much pro-ID propaganda!  (I have!)  The proponents of Intelligent Design put up a superb, almost-convincing, smoke-screen and one of their favourite topics is 'The Cambrian Explosion' and that Darwin himself had recognised this as a problem.  They claim that the increased rate of evolution in that period of a few tens of millions of years, about half a billion years ago, shows evidence of the presence of an intelligent designer.  This seems to be based on a claim that information cannot be created except by intelligence.  More on that topic soon! 

Of course sometimes they take that trouble to pretend that this is not a religious claim!  Honestly it isn't.  You can believe everything they say, including this claim.

Reading the Wikipdia article about The Cambrian Explosion this evening, I was reminded that conventional science is by no means short of ways to explain the phenomenon, including:

• 'Large' animals of diverse types did exist before, and the evidence for them is growing steadily (in spite of the claims of ID's proponents)
• There are some special layers called lagerstätten, which preserved soft body parts unusually well, and several of these were in the Cambrian period
• Evolution was faster than 'normal' but not by more than a factor of ten or so, and there were other periods when 'explosions' happened, including the Devonian and Cretaceous
• A sudden increase in the amount of calcium in the oceans might have been significant for the innovative production of bony body parts
• The end of a previous ice age might also have mattered a lot.

All in all, the presence of an intelligent designer is not the only plausible explanation, and not even the most probable, for various reasons:

• How long did this particular intelligent designer live, as the Cambrian explosion lasted for tens of millions of years? 
• If it lived for that long, does that imply that it was God after all, or was it a family of shorter lived designers?
• If it was God, why was he so busy for that short period before leaving things to themselves for 500 million years?  Only after that time did he complete his perfect world, where he created original sin and all the other bad things.
• If it was God, how did he evolve anyway?  If you can't explain this then the problem has only been deferred, not solved.

Case for God not proven! I also note that I and D are the first two letters of an uncomplimentary five letter word.

Small note:  Obviously when Meyer's new book 'Darwin's Doubt' is released (at an exorbitant price from here, but only delivered within USA) we will learn the answers to all our doubts.  In the meantime we still have the opportunity to listen to the whining voice of Casey Luskin on the Discovery Institute's podcast ID The Future telling us that he has read it and that it explains everything beautifully.

Adam Rutherford at Oxford Skeptics

The speaker at Oxford Skeptics in the Pub this week was one of the best yet.  Adam Rutherford engaged an audience of about 60, speaking on the subject of 'Creation'.   The event was held in a new location, the St Aldate's Tavern.  A good choice, I must say!

When I say that he engaged the audience, he used wit and wisdom to answer questions and challenges in the most interesting round-about ways, and yet still managed to give a satisfactory answer.

There is no point trying to give an account of the talk that he gave.  I will just note a few of the things that I found surprising.

• The family tree of Charles II of Spain, the last of the Hapsburgs, with all its inter-generational loops.
• The Murchison meteorite, which contains traces of one of the four letters of the genetic code - one that we find it difficult to synthesise here on Earth.  (And yet the hypothesis of panspermia was rejected as non-scientific.  Apparently it is a nice idea but there is no evidence for it.)
• That the Miller-Urey experiment was actually more successful than originally thought.  In fact, it produced all 20 essential amino acids - many more than there were able to identify at the time.
• A definition of life - "Life is the opposite of decay"
• GM cress which detects land mines by changing colour - and yet is not on the market due to an intellectual property dispute.

These and a few others were the highlights of the evening.  Congratulations to Heather for finding such a good speaker.

A great evening out!  If you get chance to see him you should take it.

Small note: Boo to Martin Robbins for trying to be more than an 'ordinary member' of the audience.  He wasn't a very interesting speaker when he was supposed to be the speaker, and he wasn't much better as a member of the audience.

Discovery Institute's latest 'divine comedy'

It is not unusual for The Discovery Institute's podcast, ID the Future to be filled with pseudo-scientific nonsense (in the style that I mentioned a couple of days ago).  I loyally listen to laugh and to learn the arguments that the  neo-Creationists like to use (and what creative pejorative terms they propagate to describe real scientists).  The latest episode doesn't feature the always-offended voice of Casey Luskin who is the regular host, but it takes the form of an audio adaptation of a short novel called I, Charles Darwin by Nickell John Romjue.  You can read more about it here.

Judging by what we have heard in the first episode (which you can find here) it will be surprising if many people actually bother to listen to the whole of it, unless like me they do it to giggle at it!

In this risible novel Darwin finds himself resurrected and returned to present day London, where he has a wallet filled (and constantly re-filled) with magical pound notes!  Yes, notes!  And these notes are not mentioned just once but several times, so it isn't an error.  See the comment at the end if this doesn't seem strange to you!

We get all the usual time-travel nonsense about how surprised Darwin is to see the way we dress and travel, mixed in with a load of pseudo-scientific propaganda.   We have been told that he can make himself visible and invisible at will.  He has the memories of his previous life plus the instructions that he received from whoever sent him back to earth.  Presumably this was 'the intelligent designer' herself, but of course her identity is still being kept secret from us - just as it is in real life.

The unlikely and illogical tale is wrapped in a literary style that must be aimed at a pre-teenager.  The prose makes the Harry Potter novels (which I greatly enjoyed) seem to be written in quite advanced English.

Why would the Discoveroids lower their standards to this level, I wonder.  It must be another feeble attempt to corrupt the minds of the young!

Can't wait for the next exciting episode!

Small note: Pound notes have not been in use for nearly two decades and you would not be able to spend them in today's Britain, whether magical or not.  Since 1984, our lowest denomination in paper currency is the £5 note.

The surprising origins of YEC - 'The Genesis Flood'

Young Earth Creationism (YEC) is a surprisingly recent phenomenon!  Yes - I know that some of the old arguments are based on the work of Archbishop James Ussher, but Ussher's ridiculous literal calculation had gone out of favour long ago.  Christianity had settled into an acceptance that science had the answers to some of the questions about the universe and his claim about the creation happening 'on the night preceding Sunday 23rd October, 4004 BC(E)' is risible for many reasons.  Presumably that was 'the night' in Greenwich Mean time?  But GMT was not a concept that had been formulated at the time.  Perhaps it was in Local Time at Armagh in Northern Ireland - or perhaps during 'the night' somewhere more holy - like Mecca or Jerusalem?  Anyway, how could there have been a night preceding the creation? 

But all that changed in 1961 when a book called "The Genesis Flood" was published.  Interestingly, the original publishers, Moody Press, pulled out when they found out about the actual contents, but the company that stepped in, Reformed Publishing Company, found itself very fortunate!  They sold 200,000 copies over the next 25 years, and started a powerful movement in some otherwise civilise and rational countries..

The authors, John C. Whitcomb and Henry M. Morris set the cat among the pigeons, and they are widely blamed for re-starting the YEC movement.  Fundamentalist home-schoolers refer to this 'scholarly work' in order to justify to their children that their claims are true - which of course they are not.  How can the children be protected from such lies though?

One of the worries of the original publishers was that the accepted (but still bonkers) traditions of Day Age Creationism and Gap Theory Creationism were threatened.  Indeed they should have been worried because neither of those points of view remain as prevalent as they used to be, especially outside USA.

So where does that leave us?  The rational scientific world has been downgraded especially in USA, and people who believe in science when they board a plane lose their faith in it when it comes to estimating the age of the Earth.

So now we are stuck with the pseudo-scientific claims of people like 'The Discovery Institute' who propagate YEC and Intelligent Design.  Thank goodness that some people keep an eye on their activities and report what they are up to!

Why didn't God just start again?

Some people claim that God was planning to start again at various points in the Old Testament, but that something persuaded him not to do the job properly.  The flood was a fiasco and the whole story of Sodom and Gomorra would frankly not have achieved enough.

But all of that was much too late wasn't it?  He had let things go too far.  And yet, omniscient and omni-benevolent God had seen what had happened in the Garden to Eden when there were only two people there.  Obviously he new what was going to happen as history progressed, and that he would end up 'having to' send billions of people to hell for eternal torment.  (Why he still had to do this just because to the irresistable power of 'original sin' anyway is a separate mystery.)

Yet all of that suffering could have been easily avoided if he had just wiped out his (presumably) first attempt, including Adam and Eve and had another try where he didn't put that powerful tree within reach of his favorite creatures.  Surely that course of action would have been for the greater good.

It's not as if it had taken him billions of years to do the whole creation job after all.  Another six days of work and he could have rested again, secure in knowledge that fairness had been well served.

But no - instead of that much of the population of the world lives in dread of hell. 

Surely that is evidence enough or substantial underachievement!

Small note:  Yes I know that not all Christians believe in the literal truth of Genesis!

ID - not even a theory

Creationists dress up their wacky beliefs in a variety of ways.  'Intelligent Design' (ID) is one that has been quite popular in recent years, but in USA it was clearly recognised in the Kitzmiller vs Dover trial that is not a legitimate science.  In the findings of the court you can read:

After a searching review of the record and applicable caselaw, we find that while ID arguments may be true, a proposition on which the Court takes no position, ID is not science.

Nevertheless, ID is still heralded by supposedly 'respected' organisations like the Discovery Institute, (deliberately not linked from here as it might make them feel more important).  But even they are going to have to change terminology just as they changed the name of their Center for Science and Culture from its original name of Center for Renewal of Science and Culture (CRSC).  The word 'renewal' in that context must have give the game away!

Just listen to their podcast, 'ID The Future', a few times to hear what I mean.  You will find it a good way to exercise your skills at spotting logical fallacies in seemingly reasonable arguments and exorcise any credibility that you might lend to their point of view.

Intelligent Design. Not even a theory!

ID is not a theory.  It is not even worthy of the name hypothesis!  It is not science, but merely another form of religious dogma dressed up as some sort of science to confuse the gullible.  It is a blanket non-explanation which only leads to regression to the further question of 'who designed the designer?'

Watch out for the next incarnation of creationism and be ready to treat it in the same way.  There are already signs of the way it might go.   We hear whining about how ID is ignored by the scientific press, and claims of discrimination against their pet ideas. We hear them asking for the teaching of the (non-existent) controversy.  I think we can tell that they are developing a new approach to replace the tired idea of Intelligent Design - although they will continue to promote the ID smokescreen in parallel.

Another blog, The Sensuous Curmudgeon, seems to share my amusement and my desire to ridicule the work of the Discovery Institute.  Have a look at this entertaining article for the New Theory of Improvident Design.

Stenger 1 : God 0

Today I am continuing (and completing) my commentary on contents of Victor Stenger's challenging but excellent book The Fallacy of Fine Tuning.  You can find the first two posts here and here.  He referred to the list of 34 quantities that he plans to refute.  (You can see them at this link.)

You might be surprised that the universe's ability to support life may have been affected by the way that stars produce carbon in just the right quantities.  Carbon atoms are produced by combining the particles from the nuclei of three helium atoms.  This is done in the nuclear furnaces of the stars, but therein lies a problem.  Two helium-4 nuclei might collide and fuse to create a beryllium-8 nucleus quite often but it is very unlikely indeed that three heliums will collide at exactly the same moment to make carbon-12 in one step.  In fact the process goes in two steps, with the second step being the fusion of beryllium and helium ions to make carbon.

The problem is that beryllium-8 is VERY unstable, (lasting for only for a thousand million millionth of a second), so it is surprising that it lasts long enough to combine with another helium.  The fine tuners claim that the existence of a particular excited state of carbon makes the reaction very much easier because of a phenomenon known as a resonance, and physicists agree.  However, they say that the energy of this resonance has to be exactly the value that we find, or else it will not work.  There is no need to understand the details because Stenger explains that it is not true to claim that the numbers have to be so accurately defined.  Going through detailed mathematical explanations he shows that the energy of the excited carbon could have been anywhere in quite a wide range - including the value that is observed.

One of the interesting aspects of the whole saga is that carbon combines further with helium, and that in doing so it creates oxygen-16, which is also critical for life of the form that we know.  It is just as well that this reaction doesn't happen too easily or there would be no carbon left.  But this brings us to another point.

Who can say that in an alternate universe with different physical constants it might not be possible for life to be based on a different chemistry.   The claim that it can only be based on the chemistry that we have in our universe is sometimes known as carbon chauvinism!   Life might flourish with a different form of tuning. 

I should also say that Stenger took care not to rely on the concept of a multiverse in order to refute fine tuning arguments.  He managed it quite well enough by using evidence from the one universe that we know about.

I'm not going to cover any of the other interesting aspects of the book in any detail here, but he mentions the poor arguments using probability, and spends a lot of time on the first instants of the universe.  Fine tuners often take a sample sentence from Steven Hawking's book, A Brief History of Time out of context, rather than reading the full explanation about how it would lead inevitably to much of the claimed fine tuning of the universe's expansion rate.  

Stenger also mentions the good reasons for some of the other fine tuning claims, such as why we should not expect there to be different numbers of protons and electrons (to a very high accuracy). 

In conclusion I would say that he covered the subject very thoroughly, sometimes using more mathematics than I wanted to see, but that it is easy to get a lot out of the book without a full understanding of the maths.

As he points out, in order to refute claims of fine tuning arguments he does not actually have to give any reasons for his claims, but only to show that a wide range of parameters could lead to a universe that supports life.

I think he succeeds!

Stenger 1 : God 0!

Exposing finely tuned fallacies

Yesterday I started to describe the contents of Victor Stenger's challenging book The Fallacy of Fine Tuning and referred to the list of 34 quantities that he plans to refute.  (You can see them at this link.)

Stenger starts out with several excellent lines of reasoning.

First he points out that all the models produced by physicists are man-made and that they do not necessarily claim to contain any ultimate truths about the universe.  They are just the best efforts available at the moment to explain the observations that are made by experimentalists, and the best test of their value is to see whether they are able to predict things that have not been tested yet.  All the best theories can claim to do this, and the ones that are shown to be wrong are not forgotten but generally they are discarded when better models are developed which approximate to reality a bit better.

All today's physics models are based on principles that are used throughout the science.  He spends some time explaining that conservation of momentum, angular momentum (or spin) and electrical charge are three of the underlying assumptions in physics.  He spend several pages show in mathematics how the special relativity can be applied a lower speeds, deriving familiar classical physics from the more complex models of the last century.  He also describes how physics requires that the same answer is reached, whatever the point of view of the observer.

I did mention that his reasoning gets complicated didn't I?  Still - with a little persistence I succeeded in skipping over the mathematics and got back to the words without feeling too depressed at my own inadequacy and I think you could do the same if you are equally allergic to maths.

Stenger then goes on to explain that many of the 'fine tuned' quantities are not independent of each other.  Proponents of claims of 'fine tuning' seem to think that they can vary one quantity but leave all the others unchanged, even though they might be co-dependent.

Then he describes some of the quantities that are defined arbitrarily on the basis of the scales of units that we have chosen.  As such, if we preferred to make the units for the constants simpler, we could set some of them arbitrarily to a value of 1.  For example, physics will still work as well if you set the speed of light to be 1, the Gravitational Constant to be 1 and Planck's Constant to be 1. If you do this, the answers you get by solving the equations will not be in units that we recognise, but they will still be correct and meaningful.

He further points out that gravity is not a real force in the same sense that a centrifugal force is not real.  It is useful to use it to describe the way the universe works from one point of view, but it is an emergent property of the distortion of space time rather that a force of the same type as magnetism or electro-static forces.  Then he moves on to attack one of the favorite fallacies of many scientific writers, who claim that gravity is a very weak force compared with electrostatics.  He does it like this.

'Fine tuners' take the example of a hydrogen atom to prove their point.  They say that the gravitational attraction between a proton and an electron is negligible compared with the force arising from their electrical charge.  For some reason they suggest that all natural forces really ought to be of comparable magnitude if they were the result of a natural origin, but in fact they are different by 39 orders of magnitude.  (Heaven alone knows why they think this!)

Stenger argues that they have no justification for choosing a system containing a proton and an electron.  A proton is not even a fundamental particle, after all.  He suggests that these particles have not been chosen arbitrarily but just to prove a fallacy, and that if you used a quantity known as the Planck mass as your starting point the whole argument would fall apart.  He argues that the Planck mass is the only non-arbitrary unit of mass.  Whether that is a reasonable claim or not, it does at least undermine the assertion that gravity is a weak force.

Next time you fall over, try telling yourself how weak gravity is!

So you see, the whole topic of fine tuning is a battle of words and equations.  There will be one more post on the subject soon.

Fine tuning explained . . . or is it?

I have been saving a book for holiday reading, and looking forward to understanding all about "The Fallacy of Fine Tuning".  I have always admired Victor Stenger's explanations of scientific (mainly physical) concepts.  To me, he generally uses accessible words and methods that I can learn from.  And so, having thoroughly enjoyed reading God: The Failed Hypothesis a few months ago I approached this book with some enthusiasm.

The Fallacy of Fine-Tuning by Victor Stenger

What I found was not at all what I expected.

Of course the topic is going to be complicated.  The basis is the claim by many religious apologists that the universe is fine tuned for human life.  Great debaters such as William Lane Craig use this rhetorical device to convince believers that their beliefs are firmly based in science.

One of the web sites referenced in the book is Evidence for God by Rich Deem.  Stenger refers to Deem's claims quite often.  In particular, the page of Evidence for the Fine Tuning of the Universe contains some of the outrageously plausible sounding rationale for the argument for fine tuning.  Deem lists 34 physical quantities that he claims to be critically tuned to allow life to exist.  (Craig sometimes claims that there are 50, but since he fails to list them at all we can tell with greater certainty than usual that he is talking out of his a**e!) 

Victor Stenger's job in the book is to convince us that these claims are only rhetoric and that they have no foundation in science at all.  He uses a mixture of logical reasoning in words, and fairly complex mathematical physics

In a couple of posts over the next few days (probably tomorrow and Monday) you will have to draw your own conclusion about whether he succeeded.  What I will say just now is that this book is absolutely not for the faint hearted!  Even though I have a degree in physics I found some parts of it incredibly challenging.  That is probably because I never was a very good physicist, and my maths is not nearly good enough. The book definitely fails the 'two equation test'.

However, all is not lost.  All the equations are neatly surrounded by boxes which allow the non-mathematician to skip over the mathematical reasoning and move on to the explanations.

So don't let the appearance put you off.  Read on.

Creationist makes nearly ALL the common mistakes

If you would like to practise spotting almost all the common mistakes that creationists make when the are speaking about evolution, I recommend you to listen skeptically to an episode of the Discovery Institute's podcast, ID The Future.  On 11th June 2012** there was an interview interview with Dr Ben Carson who kindly provided a lesson in the recitation of persistently regurgitated and easily answered bunkum.

The show notes give some background:


On this episode of ID the Future, host David Boze speaks with Dr. Ben Carson, renowned paediatric neurosurgeon and Darwin doubter. Dr. Carson was recently invited to deliver the commencement speech at Emory University. Unfortunately, upon uncovering his non-allegiance to Darwinian ideology, 500 faculty members and students alike signed a letter in protest of his welcome. Listen in to hear Dr. Carson discuss this ill treatment and why his acute knowledge of the brain has led him to reject Darwinism. Dr. Ben Carson is the Director of the Division of Paediatric Neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins. An internationally renowned physician, Dr. Carson has authored over 100 neurosurgical publications, along with three best-selling books, and has been awarded 38 honorary doctorate degrees and dozens of national merit citations. 


Dr Carson might indeed be a renowned neurosurgeon and in that capacity he has my admiration.  However, I think he should also now become renowned for his misunderstanding of the Theory of Evolution, which he pejoratively refers to as 'Darwinism'.

To take a few of them with my comments in small text:

• Darwinians are so closed minded.  Yes that's always an argument that convinces people.
• In the history of science, people have come up with some 'pretty outlandish things' that have turned out to be wrong.  True but only the evidence will tell us whether evolution is one of them.  I wouldn't put money on it myself.
• Evolution does not explain the origin of life.  That's true, and well spotted!  his is classic error number one.  It is just as relevant to say that the Theory of Gravitation does not explain the origin of life either.  Evolution doesn't claim to be able to do that.
• How does anything come out of nothing and how does life evolve from non-life.  Just saying that we don't yet know makes the existence of a designer no more likely.  For example - we do know about self-replicating proteins, called prions, that are not alive themselves but they do replicate.
• Although 'fully accepting the concept of natural selection' he thinks that it is taking it a little bit too far to claim that it is the foundational pillar of proof that evolution occurs.  Yes - and what does that mean?  This is not an unusual claim.  I think it means that they don't think natural selection goes as far as speciation, so one wonders what use it is after all..
• Evolutionists [not Darwinists in this case] look at similarities between life forms and infer that they are related, but wouldn't a designer use the same designs if they were successful?  He then uses an analogy - and all analogies are wrong - different models of cars from the same manufacturer share common components.  He says that they have not evolved from each other - which is clearly not true anyway.
• The human genome is a complex sophisticated coding mechanism.   He then makes an analogy to computer programming with 4 digits instead of 2, which he claims is twice as complex.  In fact it is 4!/2! = 12 times more complex - but hey!  What is a factor of six between friends?  It still explains nothing about the need for a designer - this is the argument from personal incredulity.  [The 4! symbology indicates a factorial = 4x3x2x1]
• Complexity of the brain is amazing.  To say that it came about randomly doesn't make sense.  Shades of Michael Behe's 747 from a junkyard here - often rebutted.  Randomness is involved, but it is absolutely not the key to natural selection.  Survival is the key.
• Apparently there are no intermediate species.  No-one has ever found them.  Actually ALL species are intermediate, including our own.  See this Dawkins video for a lovely explanation.
• A single neuron in the human brain can process 50K interactions per second.  If true, that's a very impressive thing that evolution has developed isn't it.
• His message to the young scientists in his field is to 'be wise'.  [i.e. don't tell them until you get tenure?]  Is this just 'lying for Jesus'? He was rather careful not to go as far as actually recommending this though.

All in all this interview is remarkable, even compared with the Discovery Institute's usual fair.  The God of the Gaps argument/fallacy is thinly disguised, but visible to anyone who looks at it.

** Beware that the Discovery Institute tends to recycle its podcasts, so you might have heard this a few times before if you enjoy the masochistic experience of listening to ID The future.  It is good practise!

Darwin's Heretic - an exercise in logical fallacy

The Intelligent Design (ID) community has pushed the boat out and made an entertaining little movie which they think will help to promote their cause.  In actual fact it simply demonstrates rather well why their claims have been largely ignored by the real scientific community.  Some of the descriptions of evolution are presented by Michael Flannery, who might be a professor of something from the University of Alabama, Birmingham, but not the sort of professor who understands the very basics of evolution. (see below)**  He says (at 07:50):

" . . . and quite frankly the origin of life isn't explained by it . . ."

This is true. But as Luciferadi so nicely put it in the comments on one of my posts a few days ago:

"I put some water in the freezer and it turned into ice. Can evolution explain that? I threw my copy of Existentialism For Dummies into the air and it fell back to earth. Can evolution explain that?"

Darwin's Heretic can be seen below or via Youtube.  It is a strange little tale about Alfred Russel Wallace, the co-founder of the Theory of Evolution.  Their claim that he was a 'Victorian Indiana Jones' seems to be intended to support their assertion that it matters that he didn't believe that evolution applied to humans.

Alfred Russel Wallace - 'Darwin's Heretic?'

Without acknowledging that the term 'Intelligent Design' has only been in common use for less than two decades, they claim that Wallace 'believed in Intelligent Design'.  Apparently he claimed that the origin of conscious life could never be explained by natural selection.  The fact that even he believed this is supposed to prove something. 

Have a look at their efforts and spot any logical fallacies.  It should be child's play.  Proof by analogy is one of them!

There you are.  We draw an analogy to something. prove something about the analogous situation, and then assert that this proves something

Darwin was apparently aghast. An emphatic 'NO' was written in the margin of his copy of Wallace's paper.  I'm fairly aghast that the Discovery Institute puts out a video like this one.

Of course, Darwin was quite right to react like that, and Darwin Day is as good a day as any other to ridicule pseudo-scientific stuff about ID.

Small note:  Even the argument from authority that they use to justify the conclusions of the movie cannot be applied to Michael Flannery! 
** A little research suggests that Flannery's specialist area is/was pharmacy, that he is now director of a library, and that his three most recent publications as first author were not exactly in relevant topics for him to be considered an expert in evolution:
'That Which is Above is Like That Which is Below': the Persistence of the Hermetic Tradition in Science and the Case of Alfred Russel Wallace
The English Physician 
Well Satisfied With My Position: The Civil War Journal of Spencer Bonsall  

Poe's Law in action!

This is the best example yet of Poe's Law in action on Something Surprising. I honestly can't tell whether the barely literate ramblings left yesterday on an earlier post, "Evolution video - Jack Szostak", are meant seriously or not. However I thought it was worth posting them here for your amusement.

micro evolution exists macro evolution not so as different species can not mate to produce new spices such as Ligons(lion and tigers)which are already from a closely realated species) it is very hard for them to reproduce but when they have they are sterile and cannot reprduce and create a new species if macro evolution is correct there would be new species being constantly created but it is the exact opposite slowly more and more spiecs are being extint & lowering in numbers.

evolution leads to death. do u not think that there is more to our existance than that?

As for the homolgous structures that just shows that thier are similarites between species which for he show that they have been created by the same creater, you see this in the was electrons revolve around in atoms and teh way the world revolves around the sun.

with stratography and rock layers they date them by using circular reasoning: the rocks are dated by the fossil layers in the rock and the fossils are dated by the rock layers and they do find fossil in "incorrect layers" they have also found human hand and footprints in these layers. they are also tree remains that stand upright that go through these "billions" of years old rock layers which fill in for noahs flood as when you have different types of dirt in a jar with water and you shake it it settles down in layers.

A for dating methods scientists have dated new objects and have been given absolutley reductious dates and did you know it doesnt take hundreds of years for objects to become pertriefied sneakers have been pertrified as well as a buch of other objects.

just think a couple of hundred years ago australia was not even discoverd and this back a nother couple of hundred and another humas history does not really go back very far at all.

Thats just some food for thought. I recomend that you do some research on the other side of the argument aswell :)

and are you going to deny my uncle being healed of cancer when he was 60 on his death bead looking as pale and sickly riddled with tumours all through his body. We all prayed for him and God healed him and he passed the tumours and now he looks heathy as anything and doctors are amazed at his medical records. can evolution explain that.

My un-named critic has actually suggested that I should do some reading about the 'other side of the argument', as if it actually appears that I have not done that already.  Its not worth refuting the creationist babble that they have accepted uncritically, asking them when Australia was discovered, nor pointing out in more detail that they haven't understood the difference between petrification (which is worthy of another post soon) and fossilisation.

As for the fortunate uncle, how could I possibly deny that he has been healed?   Spontaneous remissions occur about 1 time in 10,000 cases, and this must have been one of them.  I won't try to explain it with evolution, nor do I need to, but I certainly wouldn't explain it with prayer either.

By coincidence or not, another post soon after the above pointed to this image.

Interestingly one of the examples used in that parody of evolution, Nebraska Man, was more of a creationist hoax.  Read about it on Rosa Rubicondior's blog.

Teach the controversy - but teach it from the pulpit!

Those of us who follow the argument about the teaching of evolution in schools realise that there is an ongoing battle around the world.  In USA the Intelligent Design (ID) movement uses rhetorical skills to push forward the idea of 'Teaching the Controversy'.

Teach all the controversies (source)

It seems that, in a recent poll, 80% of American adults agreed that schools should 'teach the controversy' about evolution.  That seems like a large figure, but of course it has not been revealed to us what the actual questions were, or how they were led to that choice.  Were they asked whether they knew that there really is NO controversy about it?  On the one side you have the overwhelming weight of evidence from every major science, all fitting together like a giant perfectly interlocking jigsaw puzzle - albeit with quite a lot of pieces still missing and a few that do not yet fit.  On the other hand you have the 'revelation' and imaginings of deluded individuals - some of whom have chosen to make a career out of being controversial.**

You might consider the following admission to be tantamount to confessing to self-harm, but I actually listen to the podcast ID the Future, which is published by The Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture in Seattle.  The Discovery Institute is named after the ship HMS Discovery in which George Vancouver  first explored the Puget Sound in 1792.  But on the basis of their work we find that their 'discoveries' do not come from real science.  There is no danger that true hypotheses are generated and tested by their researchers.  In a sense the establishment ought to be called 'The Revelation Institute'.  To give an idea of their true aims, in 2005, a federal court ruled that the Discovery Institute pursues "demonstrably religious, cultural, and legal missions"

Back to ID the Future!  Yes - I find the listening experience rather irritating (and you can try it out here if you feel strong enough) but at least I have become familiar with the arguments that the ID movement promotes.  Listening to 'whining, whingeing, wet and wittering' regular presenter Casey Luskin is almost a physically painful experience.  (Just listen to an episode to hear what I mean.)  Not long ago he was talking about the shameful entry on Wikipedia for an organisation described as being "associated with the Discovery Institute".  Rather than correct the error the speakers spent an eternity complaining about it.  (Maybe someone should explain to them what a wiki is!)

To give you a flavour of ID The Future, one of their recent podcasts was actively encouraging biological scientists to withhold their critical views of evolution (or Darwinism as they pejoratively refer to it).  But they were only to keep quiet until they have got tenure in a university.  Then they can 'safely' nail their true colours to the mast of the Discovery Institute and claim that the whole of biological science is tainted . . . and that God did it all!  (Oh yes - we should add that it was their god - not any other random deity from the pantheon.)

This is a perfect example of the technique of 'lying for Jesus'.  It also tells a lot about the integrity of the people giving this advice - presumably 'good christians' - that they would publicly speak out about this disingenuous campaign.  This is Christian taqiyya!  It would tell even more if a scientist actually followed their advice, and once in a while you hear sob stories about people being rejected from academic institutions for doing exactly that.

On this week's episode, 4w's Luskin claimed that "We are perfectly comfortable with students learning about views that we disagree with". 

Let's test that theory then.  Would he be happy to teach the controversy from the pulpit in the same 'fair and open' way that they would like to use to promote ID mumbo-jumbo in schools?  For example, let's look at some:

• the actual evidence for evolution (as mentioned above)
• the counter evidence to claims about the biblical flood
• the evidence of the actual life of Jesus (for which there is pitifully little - all of it being from a single collection of biased writings)
• the evidence that there was no such place as Nazareth in the first century
• and that 'Darwinism' is not the same as 'the theory of evolution' and it has nothing to say about the origin of life - but only about how it developed.

The list is more or less endless.

I think I'm all for the idea of teaching the controversy as long as we are talking about real controversies.  I suspect we might not agree about where it should be taught.


**Small note:  Might I be accused of making a successful blog out of being controversial?  Maybe.  I'll let you know my conclusion when it really is successful!

I'm a Creation Agnostic too

Have you ever noticed how some people just need to believe something about everything.  There are no areas of knowledge where they are content to know that they don't know.

Of course, as with everything in the world there is a spectrum of people.  It is often said that the world is made up of people of two types - namely those who divide people into two types and those who do not.  I am in the latter category.  I observe a spectrum of people from those who question very little and accept a lot, through to those who question a lot and accept very little.  Questioning and accepting are 'orthogonal' quantities in my opinion.  In other words, some people neither question nor accept, whereas others do both with vigour.

Now, I put myself fairly firmly into the more questioning but less accepting corner of this two dimensional diagram, but I notice that there are certain areas where I feel that I neither know the answer, nor ever will.  The fact that I don't know how the universe was created does slightly interest me but it doesn't bother me unduly.  As I mentioned on 5th August this year, I am a Multiverse Agnostic.  There might be other universes, but by definition I will never know whether there are or not.  Even if the maths describing such a situation is beautiful and convincing it doesn't make it true in any real sense.

I just don't know.

And the same line of reasoning applies to the creation of the universe.  Who knows whether it began with a big bang.  Maybe it was a big bounce.  Or maybe it never began at all and has always been there.  There are scientific (or at least semi-scientific) theories that describe all of these options and each theory has its followers.

I am a proponent of none of the theories for several reasons.  Why do I not ally myself with any of the theories?  Its easy.  Even with a degree in physics I simply don't understand any of them well enough to be able to choose.  I do like the idea that there are some things that are not known to us.  Indeed there are some things that probably can never be known - and that is fine with me.

On the other hand I have noticed that certain religious apologists just 'know' that the universe came into being because a god put it there.  In fact they 'know' that it was their particular favourite god.  Somehow they can ignore reasonable doubts.

• If their god did create the universe, who created their god (as of course all things are said to have a cause).  This infinite regress makes you question all the premises associated with the argument for a Creator.
• If indeed the (I mean our) universe was created by their god, and it was created specifically for mankind, why would it have to be so complicated?  The universe is unimaginably vast, and mankind has such a tiny, puny and dangerously insecure presence.
• An even if those two arguments are accepted unquestioningly, what makes you think that this god would alter the physical laws according the the desires and prayers of just one tiny person in this unimaginably vast universe.

All in all, claims that the universe was created by a Creator are even less satisfactory to me than my ignorance of the actual mechanism.  I'm as certain as can be that invoking an Old Testament or Qu'ran style Creator god is not an explanation that I find credible or useful. 


Claims that science requires belief in itself and that it must start from unproven assumptions are, in my opinion, merely an example of desperation and the need to rationalise the irrational.  As Kenny Wyland wrote in the comments of the recent post A life without belief is possible - if not preferable! :


"Ah, but the part that I think you, and many other theists, miss is that actual science combats this problem. A single scientist _absolutely_ has a pre-conceived idea and attempts to prove that idea exists. They research, they experiment and then publish their findings... which are then VERIFIED by other scientists who do not have the same initial bias that scientist had.

That's why it doesn't take faith to believe scientific findings, because knowledge gleaned through science strips away individual biases and relies upon independent verification. The scientific community may run with a reasonable hypothesis for a short period of time, in order to experiment with it and verify, but if the community cannot produce verifiable and reliable information then it eventually discards the notion until additional evidence is introduced. "


The scientific process is imperfect, but at least it is self-correcting, whereas the religious approach has no such virtues.  Let's face it.  A creator god has no right to a place in the mind of any truly rational thinker.

A life without belief is possible - if not preferable!

A few days ago, on the post 'Long live the legacy of Hitch' one of my most regular and popular commentators, @Hilary, wrote a paragraph.  As you know - I like to engage with the topics that people leave as comments, and this one is worthy of further inspection because it gets to the very heart of the difference between those who have faith and those who do not because the faithful simply find it impossible to believe that a life without belief is possible.


Y'know I was thinking, it takes a real lot of faith to be an atheist. When looking all around at the complexity of life and all created things whether animate or not, it must be very difficult not to come to the obvious conclusion that there is in fact a Creator, a Grand Designer, and to go against the grain so to speak, to imagine that actually, all of it happened by mere improbable chance, and not just mere improbable but where the improbability is ridiculously as improbable as to make it pretty much a certainty that such a thing is impossible, then to carry on believing so in the face of abundant evidence to the contrary is nothing short of amazing faith, based on so little as to render it greater by far than the faith needed to believe in a Creator God, or in Jesus Christ for which evidence abounds. So well done all you atheists for having so much faith in so very very little. 


I wondered first of all, which logical fallacies could be found in this paragraph.  I think I only recognise one of them, namely the 'argument from personal incredulity' although several times over.

We are faced yet again with the suggestion that there is abundant evidence for the existence of god, and as usual no actual details about what form this evidence takes.  This is one of the most common claims for god which many atheists find frustrating.

From our perspective there is abundant evidence for the lack of existence of a god, but it is just had to find the final clinching argument to prove it.

Returning to Hilary's comments, we can easily dismiss the idea that atheism is a belief at all.  Atheism is in fact a very specific 'lack of belief' in a very specific type of god.  Atheists have all sorts of personal beliefs, but the one that we must share in order to wear the name 'atheist' is that we do not believe in a god who intervenes in the universe to change physical laws in order to answer prayers.

For this viewpoint there really is abundant evidence, as whenever studies of the effectiveness of prayer have been conducted it seems that God goes on strike - or worse than that it can actually be bad for people to know that they are being prayed for.  (See this link - not part of the evidence in itself, but at least it is a friendly description of that evidence.  Alternatively here is a Wikipedia article.)

Aside from that, the very suggestion that all the 'evidence' of design and beauty leads to any one specific god is utterly illogical.  It is only a matter of upbringing which leads most people to the god that they worship.

As we often say, all religious people are atheists too, but it is just that those of us who admit to being atheists take it one god further.

Irreducible complexity explained with a mousetrap

This nice short video explains one of the faults in the concept of irreducible complexity - a concept used by creationists to 'explain' why evolution doesn't work.



The idea that the mousetrap is no use with any single one of its parts missing is examined.  Creationists often use the mousetrap as an example of a machine that must have been designed as a complete machine - not evolved from a simpler machine.  Of course it was designed that way!  Its a machine!

This is an analogy of course, and as I explained recently, analogies are useful teaching aids but they do not really explain anything about the truth.

However, extending this particular analogy as a tool for real learning, the truth is that a mousetrap-like device has other uses. 

Evolution cares little for intentions and cares a lot about opportunity.  The mousetrap idea explains perfectly how seemingly impossible features arise from one useful feature which accidentally becomes useful in another way.

Hoisted by your own petard?

The entropy of the soul?

One of the standard pseudo-scientific arguments against evolution is that order can not come from chaos.  Well - of course this is not true as I described in a post a few months ago, Order from Chaos.  It is indeed true that the entropy of a closed system like the entire universe increases whenever any process occurs, but the entropy of an open system like the earth, which receives all its energy from the Sun, can rise or fall by 'exporting' its entropy.

But just for the moment let us set that aside and evaluate the argument that entropy forbids the production of order from chaos.  Inspired by a post from one of my more outspoken friends, Rosa Rubicondior, in What is Life, I wondered about the entropy of the soul and left a comment to that effect.

You neglected to mention the moment when the soul is injected into certain special life-forms, and whether the soul increases or decreases entropy.

I would argue that the introduction of a soul would decrease entropy so much more than the simpler soul-less forms of life, giving their bodies a non-random purpose in life, that all the creationist arguments about entropy become nonsense.

(Oh no - they were nonsense already! Entropy only increases in closed systems and the earth is not closed because the sun supplies the energy that is needed to reverse entropy locally.) 

 Any comments from you creationists and pseudo-physicists out there?

Small note - thanks to this site for the image

By far most scholars . . .

"By far, most biblical scholars hold that the historical account of the life of Jesus is true."  I have often been told this when I have questioned the evidence for the historicity of Jesus.

I actually question whether there is sufficient historical evidence for the claim that he lived and died in the way described in the New Testament and have written about some of my reasons before (here and here).  But I am assured that there are over 20,000 fragments of documents that consistently describe the story.

I rather doubt this statement - although not the number as much as the claimed consistency.  After all, even the documents that are most plainly visible to scholars and non-scholars alike - namely the gospels - are not mutually consistent.  As an example you can see a recent post by Rosa Rubicondior about the way that the story of the resurrection is treated in the four gospels - Jesus is risen and pigs can fly!

Similarly Dan Barker of FFRF long ago issued a challenge to anyone who can give an account of the Easter story that is consistent with all four gospels, and nobody has succeeded in meeting that challenge.  And if people are not even able to make sense of what is surely the most important part of the story, surely we have the right to ask how likely the rest of the story is to be true.

But still most biblical scholars agree!

I'm curious that the people who use this argument sometimes fail to realise the inconsistency in their own reasoning.

After all, by far the majority of biologists are completely confident of the evidence for the literal truth of the theory of evolution.

Somehow the argument is not so powerful in this direction if you happen to be a creationist.  Why not?