Creationism

The situation: A school wants to take 6th and 7th graders to a Fossil Discovery Center to attend a Rocks and Mineral Festival.

The problem: Those awful people are going to tell little Johnny – oh heavens! – that rocks are old!

From I bet that kid is popular in class at the Fail Blog: It's a simple field trip permission slip defaced by a barely-literate parent who thinks a Mineral Festival needs to begin and end with Jesus. The scrawl reads:

Note: Just to let you it is not that we don’t believe in things like that, it is just misleading when you talk about it being billions of years old, when we all know that the world is only about 6,000 years old. So why would I pay so that you can misslead my children, your world is just a revolving(?), ours has a start and an end. God created the world. He created animals and man all in the same week. It was also Adam who named all the animals, they will do the essay 'Rock and Minerals' but it might not be 5 pages long, and about billions of years, it will be according to the Bible.

(Hmm, is this from the United States? Hmm, do we even need to ask?)

We can laugh at the idiot parent, but what's being done to the poor kid is just sad.

It's not just the exploding human appendix. "Intelligent design" is full of idiot engineering when it comes to biology (to say nothing of the broader stage of world-destroying asteroids and supervolcanos and all that).

See an excellent catalog of in excelsis 'Doh!' at Some More of God's Greatest Mistakes. You'll find all your old favorites – Useless cave dweller eyes! Defective human retinas! Male nipples! – along with new reasons to be wonder whether the Seven Days of Creation were in fact a week-long bender.

If Adolf Hitler was an atheist, as some argumentative religious loons keep insisting, he was the oddest atheist ever: a member of the Roman Catholic church who wouldn't shut up about his self-proclaimed role in doing God's holy work.

Hitler was a Christian (if one of a particularly warped nature) and a man of faith even beyond the borders of religion. That's so obvious and well-known that you have to wonder why True Believers keep bringing up "Hitler the atheist" when the claim backfires on them every time. Yet what's pointed out far less frequently (although it's not the least surprising) is that Hitler the Christian was also Hitler the flaming Creationist. Readeth thou more

Don't laugh – it's every bit as good as the rest of the evidence for Young Earth Creationism.

Via Eat Liver. 

Sex abuse rife in other religions, says Vatican

Dang it, another "Death of Darwinism" prediction has up and fizzled. In Death of "molecular Darwinism" imminent! I noted ID luminary William Dembski's prognostication:

In the next five years, molecular Darwinism — the idea that Darwinian processes can produce complex molecular structures at the subcellular level — will be dead. When that happens, evolutionary biology will experience a crisis of confidence because evolutionary biology hinges on the evolution of the right molecules. 

That grim portent came from the July/August 2004 issue of Touchstone magazine, and even allowing a generous deadline of the end of August, 2009, the five-year clock has run out while "molecular Darwinism" is still dancing a merry jig. (Come on, Doctor Dembski, when you give a patient a fixed time to live, at least have the decency to kill him off if he persists in surviving!)

Are there more prophecies to track? Dembski still has the meter running on a 10-year claim for the "Taliban-style collapse of Darwinism"; let's check on that in 2014. But what else do we have? Readeth thou more

Tiny T. rex fossil discovery startles scientists. Therefore, God!

Okay, I don't know why I'm posting this. Just because any new dinosaur discovery is always cool news. But also, I can't help but wonder about the implications of statements like the following. From one of the scientists who announced discovery of the human-sized, presumed ancestor of the famous T Rex:

"The most interesting and important thing about this new fossil is that It is completely unexpected... It's becoming harder and harder to find fossils like this that totally throw us for a curve."

A perfectly innocuous comment. But how long do we have before a Ray Comfort, or other human-sized Creationist slug, seizes upon this instance of "unexpected" as an inadvertent admission that evolutionary theory can't actually make predictions? Just wait and see.

Sure, the "atheists discredited" prediction didn't come to pass by its deadline of February this year. But fear not, for the faithful have another chance at prophetic jackpot waiting in the heavenly wings. 

I stumbled across another prediction over at The Panda's Thumb, via a 2004 post on Pharyngula. This one comes from famed Intelligent Design (née Creationism) proponent William A. Dembski, in a Touchstone Magazine interview: 

Touchstone: Where is the ID movement going in the next ten years?  What new issues will it be exploring, and what new challenges will it be offering Darwinism?

Dembski: In the next five years, molecular Darwinism — the idea that Darwinian processes can produce complex molecular structures at the subcellular level — will be dead. When that happens, evolutionary biology will experience a crisis of confidence because evolutionary biology hinges on the evolution of the right molecules. I therefore foresee a Taliban-style collapse of Darwinism in the next ten years. Intelligent design will of course profit greatly from this. For ID to win the day, however, will require talented new researchers able to move this research program forward, showing how intelligent design provides better insights into biological systems than the dying Darwinian paradigm.

– (Anonymous (Touchstone Magazine), (July/August 2004).  “The Measure of Design: A conversation about the past, present & future of Darwinism and Design.”  Touchstone, 17(6), pp. 60-65.)

A little background for those not up on their devotional readings: Readeth thou more

Intelligent Design is warmed-over creationism says PZ Myers, and of course he's right. Once again, a nutcase is claiming "Creationism and Intelligent Design are two completely different ways of looking at the world" – when the only difference is that proponents of the latter try to make Creationist mush palatable by invoking science-y words and by being careful not to say "God" when outsiders are listening.

But alas, they keep making their private whispers public. Read the Pharyngula article for a great run-down of Intelligent Design proponents caught in the act of admitting that their Magic Designer is none other than the Abrahamic god of Bronze-Age Middle Eastern cults. It's good to keep these instances in mind, as we'll continue to hear public protests of "God? Who said God?" from the IDists.

My own take on the matter? Intelligent Design is Creationism with flame decals. Nothing more.