Did T-Rex Cuddle With Adam & Eve?

What do you think of when I say the word "museum"? School groups of bored kids shuffling from one exhibit to another? Fossils? Rocks? Your grandma's house?

How about dinosaurs living in the Garden of Eden?

No? Neither do I. A museum is a place of learning, where geeky scientists attempt to cause a little bit of scientific learning to absorb into the brains of a typically uninformed public by making what they think will be compelling displays of scientific data or artifacts.

I was amused the other day when a friend of mine (Thanks, PeaceFrogs!) sent me the following link that interviews the founders of the Creation Museum in Kentucky while it was being built back in '06:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wzjjxi7f0Oc

If you believe what the Creation "Museum" is telling us, you would believe that the world is only 6,000 years old, that dinosaurs coexisted with Adam and Eve in the Garden, and that dinosaurs climbed onto Noah's Ark two-by-two along with lambs and crickets and lions and tigers and bears (oh my!) and they all lived happily and non-carnivorously for 40 days and 40 nights with Noah's soon-to-be incestuous family. Funny, I don't remember reading about dinosaurs in Genesis!

Oh, sweet T-Rex, if only you could cuddle with me at night and keep me warm like you did Adam and Eve in their innocent, Platonic beds!

To teach these "lessons", they use animatronic dinosaurs playing alongside happy little animatronic children dressed in caveman garb and a giant T-Rex tromping through the Garden of Eden.

Yes, and though the Creation "Museum" hides in a shroud of scientific inquiry, like the Intelligent Design mumbo-jumbo they espouse, nary there will you find reference to any peer-reviewed papers in any journals of geology, biology, or ecology. But for the low low price of $19.95 per adult ticket, you, too, can enter the "museum" and partake of such scientific activities as a tour that highlights "God's judgment of the Tower of Babel" or a seminar entitled "Security for faith-based organizations".

Here's a rather amusing interview conducted with the director of the museum and a bona fide scientist: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HajP5pE4BE0.

Wow. Just goes to show that no amount of evidence from tens of thousands of published scientific articles each year will change the irrational mind of zealots. So I have to ask what's really on display at the Creation "Museum" – the supposed "evidence" that dinos laid down with the lions and the lambs, or the white-bread, wide-eyed fundamentalists who cheerfully enter the "special-effects theater complete with misty sea breezes and rumbling seats" and swallow the Bible as literal fact, then file off to the gift store to buy more propaganda illustrating how us evil, godless scientists are lying to them with devil-inspired scientific inquiry.

I wonder how they would react to "museums" inspired by other creation myths, such as that of Hindu or Greek mythology. Would T-Rex be shown hatching out of the creation egg with Brahma? Would velociraptors be depicted strutting around on Olympus with Zeus and Epimetheus? How preposterous would that be? It is no less preposterous to me than the Creation Museum's version.

But, hey, who am I to rain on their holy theme park? Praise Jesus and pass the tickets!


Image ruthlessly adapted from HERE and HERE.

Nudging The Wall Of Dogma

Brothers and Sisters, I come before you now to report that one of our congregation, the reverend Dr. Francis Collins, Director of the National Human Genome Institute, has testified of his love of the Lord. Ye-es!

http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/04/03/collins.commentary/index.html

Do you see the light? I sa-id, Do you see the light, brother?Back in the Dark Ages, when Europe languished under the yolk of the Catholic church, and all science was faith-based, the few scientists and doctors allowed to study their profession were forced to have as their driving force NOT the pursuit of the unknown interactions of their environment, but the search for God in the workings of life. I think of Roger Bacon, searching for holiness in the refraction of light in rainbows, for instance. There’s a reason why it was called the Dark Ages. What we didn’t know was explained away as the workings of God, not to be explored without consent from the Church. Long before that, even before the prototypical Greek enlightenment, were tribal beliefs, still found in the dark jungles and vast savannas of the world, where all the unknown was explained with magic and mysterious gods.

Now the director of the human genome project has fallen into the same holy trap.

Collins’ goal, in his letter to CNN, was to profess his belief in Christianity, his theological exploration that led him there, and that scientists can pursue their science just fine and rationally, thank you, while still believing in God and faith. He elaborates by suggesting that science is correct in its analysis of the world, including evolution, but that the source of the world’s complexity, and even the source of the first evolutionary steps of life, is not a random event or process but the hand of God. That somehow it all fits into a celestial plan.

We’ve heard this before. It’s called Intelligent Design.

As I’ve mentioned in a previous post, Intelligent Design is nothing more than Creationism cloaked in pseudo-scientific babble. There is nothing testable about it, and that makes it untenable for serious scientific scrutiny. Worse, it is a cop-out no different from the alchemical stumblings of the Dark Ages and tribal worship. Yes, my flock, let us fall to our knees at our lab benches and pray, for we must be on the cusp of finding God at the edge of the unknown.

Scientists can believe whatever they wish when they walk around on the streets, go home, or attend church. There is comfort in thinking that some paternal hand is guiding the seeming chaotic nature of our world. But when you walk through the lab door, check your faith at the coat rack. The danger here is obvious. When you start believing that the truth you are searching for is one taken on faith, you start overlooking data and pursuing the wrong path. In fact, like the alchemists of the Dark Ages, it blinds you to progress until it stops you altogether. At some point further experimentation runs against the walls of dogma and becomes blasphemy. Think here about Galileo and his run-in with the inquisition. As science has progressed, every hundred years or so that wall of dogma gets pushed back a little further, such that we can now accept that the Earth revolves around the sun, for instance, or that species change their morphology and DNA from generation to generation, mediated by natural selection, to slowly form a new species. Though Creationists argue against evolution, even the Vatican admits the evidence for it has substance. Now neoconservatives like Collins have pushed the wall of dogma back further, once again, to the dim envelope of science, and said that THERE, at the base of all evolutionary beginnings, or at the moment of the Big Bang, we can know the finger of God.

Eventually science will open those doors, too, and find only godless, rational data and a fractal-like, ever-expanding set of questions to be explored. There will always be conservatives there, too, pointing the finger down those dark hallways and saying that God is just down the next corridor.

And how will Collins’ belief structure change his role in analyzing the human genome? Who knows? Will he steer his lab rats away from exploring the function of human embryonic stem cells, for instance? Will he attempt to find the finger of god in those moments of genetic divergence hidden in our DNA, overlooking some crucial factor that would shed light on natural speciation? If any data goes against the prevailing neoconservative agenda, will he have an open mind enough to question those beliefs, or will the data be shelved, ignored, or buried?

HERE is an excellent and funny schematic demonstrating the difference between science and faith (from Wellington Grey’s blog).

Thump your Bible as you please, Dr. Collins. Just don’t bring it in the lab.

Can I get an Amen?

Clueless Conservatives and Geology

When you go to one of our nation's breathtaking National Parks with your family, you get a chance to see nature in action. No, I'm not talking about the raccoons attacking the dumpster at the public campground, or the squirrels begging for your chips. I'm talking about those amazing vistas that make you stop and think about the wonder and mystery of their creation, or the little things, like that endangered flower or mossy stream, that you could stare at for hours and never be able to comprehend the incredible complexity of it. Such awesome sights could make even me start to believe in some greater power at the root of it all (if I were slightly delirious from fever – being an atheist).

Take, for instance, our majestic Grand Canyon. We're all familiar with its fantastic, multicolored rock formations and nearly unfathomable depth. Geologists have studied this natural wonder since the late 1860's and tell us that it was formed by erosive action of the Colorado River over the past 5 to 6 million years, and that the rock formations are between 2 and 2.5 billion years old. Given that Earth has been calculated to be about 4.5 billion years old, that makes portions of this natural phenomenon half as old as our world. Since most of these geologists have studied their field and the Canyon most of their adult lives, I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt.

Now, if you were to go into the Grand Canyon's interpretive center and try to buy a book on the Canyon's geologic formation, wouldn't you expect that book to be scientifically accurate according to the expert opinions of geologists? And if you had geological questions about the age of the Canyon, wouldn't you want the rangers to give you a straight answer? Unfortunately, neither of these assumptions are true.

Three years ago, the National Park Service approved the sale of a Creationist book entitled "Grand Canyon: A Different View" in the Canyon's book stores and museums. This book, sold alongside legitimate science texts (such as this one), argues a literalist interpretation of the Bible, that the world is less than 10,000 years old, and that the Canyon was formed by Noah's flood. Park officials, scientists, and academics were appalled and called for the government to remove the book. After all, an interpretive center is a place of scientific learning, not a library or common book store. They must be held to a higher level of accuracy. Yet three years later the book is still on the shelves.

Story:
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2006_12/010493.php


also here:
http://www.peer.org/news/news_id.php?row_id=801

Now the Bush administration has stepped its extremist fundamentalism up a notch, requiring that, when asked about the geologic age of the Canyon, park interpreters must say "no comment."

No comment?! About the primary scientific aspect of the Grand Canyon?! Pardon me while I bash my head into a wall until all common reason and scientific learning leaves me and I become a vegetable. Then, and only then, will this seem to make sense to me.

As I've commented before (here and here), it is appalling to me as a scientist how the neoconservatives who run this country have waged a war against science and reason. There is no room for Faith in Science, for therein lies ignorance and bias. Legitimate scientific study is a slow, meticulous, peer-reviewed process that leaves little room for error. Nothing is taken on faith, and no amount of silly pseudoscientific drivel or Biblical accounting can make up for shoddy reason and ignorance. The book in question did not go through that process.

The Bible has some wonderful allegories and wisdoms for how we should live (and a large share of violence and horror that people tend to gloss over). But the priests, monks and apostles who wrote it between 1900 and 3800 years ago could not have known the incredibly rich tapestry of knowledge Science has accumulated since then, not counting the ignorance of the Dark Ages (when, by the way, the Catholic Church controlled Europe and science was considered evil). In terms of understanding the physical world around us, today's college freshman science major is far wiser than these supposed wise men were.

I call for the National Park Service to remove that book from their shelves immediately and put it where it belongs: Sunday School.

Clueless Conservatives and Evolution

Ah, Creationism! That myth-based view of the creation of the world, wholly untestable and without reason. Who besides those irreligious, heathen scientists could possibly argue against the divine! Why, a poll conducted last year found that 42% of Americans believed in a Creationist view, while only 26% took the view of Evolution (yes, brothers and sisters, pronounce it "Evil-ution"). You know the prevailing Creationist belief, right? It goes like this:

In the beginning, Nareau walked alone in the oppressive darkness of Te-Po-ma-Te-Maki ("the Darkness of the Embrace") and from a mussel shell he created the world. Then from sand and water he created two beings: Na Atibu and Nei Teuke, man and woman. They created the sun and the moon from Nareau's eyes, the stars from his brain and from his flesh and bones they made the islands and trees. From the union of those first two beings came forth the other gods. Nareau still appears on earth, as a spider.

Oh, I'm sorry, were you expecting the Christian creation myth? My apologies. I thought you would first think of the ancient Kiribati creation myth, like I do. But really, can you disprove it any more than the Christian myth? Is this Micronesian story of Nareau and his children really any less silly than the thought of a god creating the cosmos and Earth from nothing, or of a little garden where lived a man made from clay and a woman made from one of the man's ribs, then they were kicked out because they were convinced by a snake to eat an apple, then they somehow parented the entire world?

The same poll found that 18% of Americans believe in evolution that is, somehow, guided by an intelligent force (namely, the Christian god, whose rather unimaginative name is "God"). Thus, we have "Intelligent Design". Rationally, though, Intelligent Design is no different from outright Creationism, since neither can be tested using the scientific method. You cannot prove the existence of an intelligent creator any more than you can a god. And who created the creator? The leading advocate of Intelligent Design is the Discovery Institute, a politically-created organization with obvious neoconservative ideologies, whose main purpose seems to be to convince the general public that scientists are debating Evolution versus Intelligent Design and that this debate should be extended to our school children, when in fact you would be hard-pressed to find any scientists who buy into the Intelligent Design mumbo jumbo, and teaching this in public schools violates the separation of church and state. Recently, the Discovery Institute has funded another institute, the Biologic Institute, whose purpose is to try to skew scientific reasoning toward their wholly unscientific assertions by pursuing actual bench science. Sorry, but saying there is empirical evidence for a creator is no more plausible than saying a priest is a scientist simply because he puts on a lab coat.

Every year there are thousands of scientific studies that reaffirm the principles of natural selection which are at the heart of Evolution. It is so widely embraced by biology that it has progressed beyond a scientific "theory" to, in my mind and the mind of many others, a scientific "law." There are many researchers who have dedicated their entire lives to understanding Evolution. Yet those 42% of Americans who distrust the theory, the vast majority of whom never actually learned anything about it from an approved science text, are unwilling to listen to the biological professionals. Do they likewise disbelieve physicists about quantum mechanics? Or mathematicians about fractal geometry? Or astronomers about solar formation? Are they proficient enough in these areas to question them? I'm not, except for Evolution. If they aren't willing or able to educate themselves, then I suggest they defer to those who do.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to go worship Nareau by placing a shell by a block of coral and calling forth my guardian spirits….