Darwinius Masillae: Seriously Overblown

Everyone's already heard all about Darwinius Masillae the 47 million year old primate fossil. While I agree with scientists that the find is incredible, particularly in its age and completeness, I have to agree with PZ Myers on this one. Incredible as the find may be, its not a missing link, and there really aren't any missing links. We already know pretty clearly that evolution happened. Its obvious when looking at even partial evidence. This find doesn't make or break the ToE, it simply adds to the growing list of transitional forms that creationists pretend don't exist.

I've said it before, but I'm no scientist. I simply find this subject fascinating, mostly due to the denialism and the recalcitrant idiocy of the fundy camp. Frankly though, I get far too frustrated with "teh stoopid". I mean, working on these people and trying to get them to understand that their claims about science and whatnot are wrong and ludicrous is completely a waste of time. They don't understand because they don't want to. We make concessions regarding the fact that we don't claim to have absolute knowledge god doesn't exist etc, and they will always twist it around into a claim of something its not. The cognitive dissonance is so harsh it hurts. So, I'm not sure I'll be dealing directly with the tools on their own blogs anymore, but that doesn't mean I'm done here.

Creationist Tool "Venomfangx" Stopped for Fraud

So, apparently the avid Youtube creationist VenomfangX has managed to get himself into some serious trouble. I think its terribly appropriate considering this guy pretty much idolized Kent Hovind. Amusingly enough, his website was also taken off line, get this -by his parents-

I'll admit I have not really watched any of his garbage all the way through, but just what snippets were posted by Thunderf00t on his videos. Still, I'm more than pleased to see this little fraud get shut down, even if he has already started a new channel.

Source: Rationalwiki

god is not Great Chapter 6: Arguments from Design

Chapter six addresses one of the most common issues that causes division between theists and atheists. This should of course be clarified that it is mostly Young Earth Creationists who tend to make this a problem. The arguments from design, of course, state that certain levels of complexity in the universe, be it in the form of the living cell, a star, an eye, or the fact that conditions in the universe are conducive to life.

These ideas are compelling to some, but do not tend to convince most skeptics, and as Hitchens shows, if somewhat inexpertly, the science does not require the assumption of design. After some anecdotes Hitchens gets to his point starting with the eye, which has long been inaccurately described by YEC's as nearly impossible to have evolved. This is, as Hitchens argues, patently absurd due merely to the obvious evolution that we see in eyes, from planarian eyespots all the way to the most advanced eyes in vertibrates.

In this very section, though, I have to commend Hitchens somewhat as he uses a common creationist quotemine that creationists use against evolution's proponents and turns it around on them exposing it as a fraud:

"To suppose that the eye, with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree."

He continues the quote thusly:

"When it was first said that the sun stood still and the world turned round, the common sense of mankind declared the doctrine false; but the old saying of Vox populi, vox Dei, as every philosopher knows, cannot be trusted in science. Reason tells me, that if numerous gradations from a simple and imperfect eye to one complex and perfect can be shown to exist, each grade being useful to its possessor, as is certain the case; if further, the eye ever varies and the variations be inherited, as is likewise certainly the case; and if such variations should be useful to any animal under changing conditions of life, then the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection, should not be considered as subversive of the theory."

It is a common quotemine at this point, and one most atheists know pretty much on sight. But I would argue it is good to have it exposed as mining Darwin is such a common tactic, and was used even as recently as Ben Stein's documentary Expelled in particularly bad taste to link evolution with the Holocaust.

But Hitchens makes further arguments against the design hypothesis by noting how if we are designed it was by a very poor designer, using the eye again as an example citing it is in fact upside down and backwards, which seems quite inefficient.

Something he does later in the chapter is point out a favorite fallacious argument of Ray Comfort, which he seems to think trumps any belief against creation:

"Do you know of any building that didn't have a builder
Do you know of any painting that didn't have a painter?
Do you know of any car that didn't have a maker?
If you answered YES for anyof the above, give details."

Hitchens doesn't go the way I would have here, and instead of exposing the fallacy of comparing things we know were created with something that we have no proof was created he opts to explain that even if something is created it still follows evolution. He uses the examples of aircraft technology evolving gradually through trial and error. I'm not sure I like this example, particularly as at this very same time he declares that "speculation about who designed us to be designers becomes as fruitless and irrelevant as the question of who designed that designer."

He spends much of the rest of the chapter simply discussion the evolutionary theory of those such as Stephen Jay Gould. A bit of discussion of the Cambrian explosion as well as explaining the capriciousness of evolution, including its lack of pointed direction.

All in all, the chapter was interesting and informative, but did suffer from Hitchens' lack of being a scientist, and a tendancy to branch off into tangents.

god is not Great Chapter 5: The Metaphysical Claims of Religion are False

Chapter 5 opens with a particularly poignant set of quotes from religious authorities including Aquinas, Ignatius Loyola, and Martin Luther, as well as a brief part of a poem by W.H. Auden. The interesting part about these quotes is their focus on demeaning, or demonizing of reason in comparison to scripture or God.

Hitchens uses these quotes to create a segway into discussion of the roots of metaphysics from a religious standpoint. Hitchens believes, as do many (myself included) that the roots of religion come from early man's inability to explain the world around him. That cosmology and ontology, including creation stories, are simply the result of a great fabrication to come up with the best explanation possible while being completely unable to comprehend the scale of the natural world. Because of the level of understanding we now hold of the world around us, Hithcens speculates that no attempt to bring faith and science to a amiable working relationship is doomed from the outset.

He preempts the usual objection of all the scientists of history, (and today) who are theists, by making sure we understand as a reader that someone like Newton being a brilliant scientist did not make him infallible, and that he was in fact a mystic and alchemist along with being a brilliant scientist.

Indeed, this is in fact a common fallacy that creationists love to bring up more than any other group using Newton and Darwin as examples. They will often point out the theistic beliefs of Newton, or target Darwin as a racist because of the full title of The Origin of Species. It's a twisted appeal to authority that has never really worked except on the dimmest of skeptics. Attacking the attitudes and such of someone says nothing about the accuracy of their science. James Watson, a mapper of the dna molecule is notoriously a racist, but that doesn't make the DNA not a double helix. So it is with Darwin and evolution.

It seems the primary conclusion of Hitchens here that humanity has outgrown the need for a religious cosmology; we now know enough about our universe to be fairly certain that there did not need to be a creator.

This was a short chapter, but I'll close with Hitchens's response to Tertullian's "Credibile est, quia ineptum est,"(I believe it because it is absurd) as I think it one of the best ways I have ever heard faith criticized, and summed up very succinctly. A passage that I believe most theists would agree with, until the second you apply it to their beliefs:

"It is impossible to quarrel seriously with such a view. If one must have faith in order to believe something, or believe in something, then the likelihood of that something having any truth, or value is considerably diminished."

Absurdities in Genesis:

This is a comic that is listed under "kids" at Answers in Genesis. This site is already infamous among pretty much everyone who does not believe in a literal biblical creation story, and even more in Atheist circles.

This is obviously a particularly flammable straw man representation of any atheist. No atheist who knows his subject would ever argue like this for various reasons I will only go into on this entry if asked. What I really wanted to note was the placement of bigotry in a section marked "kids."

Christians complain all the time that atheists mock their beliefs, misrepresent their arguments etc. This complaint is commonly mirrored from the atheist side, and for good reason both sides are often right here. This kind of misrepresentation though, is exactly why people like Richard Dawkins consider youth religious indoctrination to be child abuse. They are teaching through comics not only a bad argument, but by teaching this bad argument are encouraging the children who read it that Atheists are in fact stupid.

Now, I know we have our comics, and groups, and blogs targeting Christianity, and they almost invariably say we don't understand real Christianity, regardless of the fact that many of us do. The same goes in reverse again, but when you're advertising to children your preconceived bigotries there is a problem. How different is that from a comic saying, say, Christians eat babies, which was then given away in pamphlets to children at a muslim sponsored event? People would be outraged. It would be a scandal. Is it any wonder there is so much bad blood when we train our children from a young age to misrepresent another's position or think of some views as stupid for absurd reasons?

It is one thing for an adult to an audience of adults to reason out why their faith is right or wrong rationally (admittedly i have yet to find any rational explanation for theism), and another entirely to warp their minds in the formative stages. And this goes to both Theists and Atheists.

Let's let our children learn to reason and experience, and then decide for themselves. I have no delusion that this will change anyone's mind, but still, had to say it.

Theory>Hypothesis

For the love of the FSM, Intelligent design is a hypothesis, not a theory. Don't give them that kind of credibility.

edit: I have been put in my place. Hypothesis -is- still too good. I will now change my opinion to "wackaloon attempt to subvert the establishment clause" instead of hypothesis.