The Copernican lie

I have been living a lie.  I have just realized that I have been indoctrinated by the evil sciences into believing the baseless claim that the Earth rotates about its axis and revolves around the Sun.

But thanks to the Fair Education Foundation, Inc, the truth has been revealed to me.  I now know such seeminly obvious facts such as that the Earth is the center of the universe and at a fixed point just as god intended. 

I now now that stars are not suns light years away but simply fixed points of light in the sky.  I can eschew such evils as 'occult mathematics' and the 'Kabbalist evolutionary mythology'. 

I no longer have to rely on tools of Satan such as the telescope and computer models.  Apparently the website uses a god approved computer though, I'll have to look into where I can find one of these holy relics.

I can see how every lie of science from psychology to evolution to quantum physics to modern cosmology rests upon the the fact-less claims of a heliocentric solar system model.  As soon as this lie is removed, the whole houses of cards collapses around us and we are left with the only truth.  The truth that a magic man in the sky waved his wand and poofed everything into existence because a book written by a bunch of desert nomads written ages ago tells us so.

All this was shown to me thanks to the ramblings of someone who created a website back in 1997 and refuses to update the design of the webpage despite still writing it to this day.  So in between the confused looks and having to wipe away the blood streaming from my eyes I was able to learn god's truth. 

I'm still not entirely sure what these 'obvious facts' are that the author is so certain of.  I know it has something to do with the bible and more crazy then you can shake a straight jacket at.  The author jumps from point to point so quickly that I never had chance to comprehend one set of ramblings before he moves on to the next

I do know that he is in a Ph.D. program for "Advanced International Studies" somewhere.  This apparently gives him the necessary education to see through the lies of science, NASA and the modern education system.  Why he thinks being in a doctorate program is a good thing when he believes that the education system is nothing more than a brainwashing system based upon 'Copernican lies' I have yet to discern.

I do know that he hates NASA.  From the moon landing 'hoax' to the evil instrument that is the Kepler Telescope, he foams at the mouth at the mere mention of any of them.  He goes on quite a bit about how telecopes cannot possible work and that they are nothing more than the tools of satan.

For satan, you see, is the source of science.  At least non-bible based science, whatever this may be.  satan is everywhere and he hates the truth of the bible.  Apparently it is like sun light to vampires to him.  He hisses and runs away cursing you in the way befitting a cartoon villain.

But now with the facts in hand (I think), I can begin to combat scienceless science and openly tout the true bible based science.  I now know that all I have to do is open a bible and just read what it says and stop thinking there.  That if I question further I am being mislead by satan and my soul will burn forever because god loves me.  I hope that my suffering through horrible page design and rambling crazy has enabled me to save your soul and shine the light of the Truth (TM) upon you.

Earth History, A New (crazy) Approach

I have to admit, I love crazy. I don't know why I do as so often the kind of crazy I encounter is the stupid kind. Creationists, 2012ers, conspiracy nuts, they each have their own form of idiocy that gets me yelling at my computer while laughing at the same time. I'm not sure exactly how this works, but it does. Sometimes an especially egregious one will get me in a foul mood. Yet so often I am to busy laughing and wanting to share it with others for it to irritate me too much. Recently I was sent a link by Misa Akane. She is often on the look out for things that I may rant about and I owe her quite a bit for that (so check out her two blogs I have linked as a thank you).

What was found this time was A New Approach To Earth History. At first I was sure it was just another creationist website, but upon reading it, it proves itself to be a lot more...confused. More confused than your average creationist? Well yes, as this group tries to use science to back up their crazy and just fail in new and unexpected ways.

What seems to be the core of their believe is that the Earth has a natural desire to create that is inherent to it. That complexity has emerged from the Earth and life itself's desire to become more. At this point it sounds like someone's stoned musing on existence and they really don't get much better than that. Much of their argument runs like this (everything is copied and pasted so any typos within the quotes are their's):

Does the Earth have a natural origin? Does nature have a creative power of its own, capable of producing things incomparably more complex than human intelligence and technology can engineer? Can human life be reduced to the properties of lifeless atoms, contrary to our sense of being distinct from the world?

In recent decades it has become difficult to ask these questions in an open-ended way. Scientific institutions permit only one view of reality: the one that believes in self-creation.

Nonetheless ‘life’ is something different from molecules: it involves consciousness. Although bacteria and plants use the same DNA language as other organisms, they are not life in the sense that animals are. Our own experience as conscious beings tells us that there is more to reality than can be accounted for by molecules, however complex their organisation.

This is the first three paragraphs of the body from their introduction page. The second paragraph already shows that these are people who believe that science is about holding to a belief no matter what. So immediately we know we are dealing with people who found science too hard and instead of taking time to grasp it decided it was just orthodoxy (someone get these people a dictionary please).

Right after that is the idea that we somehow 'know' there is more to life than physics and chemistry. Once again showing that such people really are terribly afraid of the reductionist viewpoint. I don't know why as realizing that I'm an amalgamate of particles working together for a time, particles that were formed in the hearts or after-math of stars. To me this is poetry, this is a kind of beauty that makes me terribly sad that such people cannot and/or refuse to grasp.

When they get to evolution they showed a kind of confusion that was new even to me. They start out by stating:

The cataclysm is also the key to understanding the many examples of evolution in the fossil record. After the bombardment the planet was in constant flux. Species had to colonise sea and land afresh, diversifying as they did so into many new species. Bacteria appeared first because they were the most prolific of colonisers and were essential to the re-establishment of food chains. Other organisms gained a foothold as environments stabilised: first mosses and lichens, then fast-growing marsh plants, then trees and, about the same time, a huge diversity of land animals – millipedes, insects, mites and spiders, reptiles, and in due course dinosaurs and mammals. Viewed thus, the mystery of so many obviously unrelated organisms appearing in rapid succession begins to make sense.

The cataclysm, sounds like a bad movie Hollywood is just dying to make. Instead of having a link to explain this idea, they show an image from the journal Nature. They don't actually reference the journal or any articles within it (couldn't be because it would utterly contradict what they are stating, could it?), they just show the image as apparently they expect that to be all the evidence their readers will need. I actually recognized the cover of this particular issue as one that referenced the Giant Impact Hypothesis for the formation of Luna and Earth's axial tilt. For those of you unfamiliar with it, the Giant Impact Hypothesis is the leading concept for how our moon was formed, it involves the proto-Earth's collision with another planetoid, named Theia, which, after hitting at an oblique angle (and the blow-off coming in for another impact), enough debris was tossed into orbit to coalesce into Luna.

But according to this site, it was more some sort of cleansing thing that obliterated an already developed ecosystem forcing life to 'reboot' and that is why all life is interconnected. ...Right, because that makes perfect sense and so less convoluted then our current understanding. Also apparently when this 'cataclysm' occurred, Luna was already formed and it left multiple scars on our satellite. I have absolutely no idea what they are talking about here. Is this some sort of half-assed explanation for the myriad craters on Luna's surface?

It continues on in the evolution part by describing it as having two definitions:

‘Evolution’ has two meanings – one, the well established fact that most species originate from other species, the other, the presumption that all species are related and originated aeons ago from lifeless chemicals.

It had to happen eventually. Once again, people confuse evolution with abiogenesis. Granted, the current evidence does show how 'lifeless chemicals'...whatever that is supposed to mean, can have evolutionary selective pressures. But this does not mean it is a separate form of evolution, just evolution on a different level. A wonderful example of this is selective pressure amongst RNA, especially when bits of 'parasitic' genetic material are present. The site wrongly claims that there is no evidence for such events despite us observing it.

They then give examples of evolution that are 'miracles':

* lizards evolving into snakes
* feathered birds evolving into penguins
* land-dwelling quadrupeds evolving into whales and dolphins.

These are all ‘miracles’ of evolution because they could not have happened haphazardly.

When I first read this, the first thing that came to mind was "wait, penguins don't have feathers?". I know that is the least glaring thing to pick out on but I think my mind was doing so to protect itself from the massive stupid. At this point it is starting to look like they are moving out of stoned hippy territory and into the Intelligent Design camp.

There is so much more I would want to explore on their site, things like "Before the Cataclysm", "The Mystery of the Cnidarians" and the strangely out of place "Genesis 6-11 and other texts". Unfortunately their site seems to need a lot of work as so many of the links don't work. Perhaps I'll be able to have a follow up if they get their crazy in order. Until then I will only be able to speculate if they incorporate traditional creationism into their beliefs or if they are going to say it is their version of creationism...thing, that is right. There was one other link that did work, and that was one to their 'updated' geological time scale.

This new time scale is shown alongside a somewhat misleading one that is closer to the actual time scale. I say it is misleading in that if one is not actually familar with the science (like this site's intended readers), the actual one would look like most of life popped out of nowhere and lived together, when in fact the only reason for that is the fact that multicellular life has only been around for about 1 billion years with the first simple animals arising approximately 600 million years ago. With an age of the Earth around 4.55 billion, this is a long time to go without 'complex' life. The site states that a new time-line is necessary because:

One of the most puzzling aspects of the fossil record is the way evolution appears to accelerate as one approaches the present. As shown in the first column, for the first 4 billion years little happens. Then in the final 250 million years species diversification increase dramatically, as exemplified by the history of the flowering plants, ferns, beetles, teleost fish, birds, reptiles, mammals and amphibians (see also the two diversity graphs in this section). Part of the explanation is that radioisotope dates inflate true time. In the beginning rates of radioactive decay were much higher, decreasing exponentially towards the present day. Re-calibrated on this basis, true time might have proportions more like those shown on the right. The shortest time division, the Quaternary, would then be the longest, complex animal life would begin to appear soon after the catalysm at the base of the sequence, and man would appear about two-thirds of the way through rather than near the end.

What is with creationists of all tropes hating on radioactive decay? It seems to be a nigh-universal disdain amongst these people. Is it because it is one of the most damning bits of evidence against their views? Is it because so few actually understand it so that they can get away with telling people that physics is all wrong and they know what 'really' happened?

As I mentioned their geologic time scale is all kinds of screwy, so much so that I absolutely have to put the image of it up here. It is comedic gold and would be a terrible loss to have it potentially lost with the rest of their site. So I leave you with this last bit of crazy, enjoy!

The problem of pain

The human body is one of the greatest examples of how evolution has a policy of just good enough. Evolution does not care directly about the comfort of the organism, only that it is able to reproduce successfully. After that point, after the reproductive age has passed, we, as individuals, are expendable as far as evolution is concerned. If we still lived as our ancient ancestors did, if we 'broke down' to a certain point, we almost certainly would die, often without passing on our genes. Granted our social nature (which has greatly increased our species survivability) would often have the group care for a disabled individual, but their reproductive status was reduced as well. They would often become evolutionary dead ends. But since evolution only cares about survivability of the species, errors still come up. Most of these are more annoyances then life threatening (usually), lower back pain, common headaches, most kidney stones and a myriad other things that pester our species constantly.

Now these and many other reasons are some of the best examples of why the idea of humans being created or even having our evolution guided is utterly absurd. But there is one other reason that is often barely touched upon or ignored all together. This is the concept of pain.

Now pain makes perfect sense from an evolutionary standpoint. It tells us to avoid actions that harm us. It is natures way of telling us to stop being a moron and get our hand out of the fire. But when looked at from the standpoint of creation or theistic evolution quite a few problems start to arise.

The first is the simple fact that pain hurts. Now this seems like an absurd statement, but consider it for a moment. A caring deity could make the signal be one that simply told us that we were being stupid and to stop it. It could be nothing more then an over riding urge to stop the current action. If such an entity did create us, it would not have to have stooped to tormenting us with such an unpleasant stimuli (unless you are coming from the standpoint of the Abrahamic deity(s) who seemed to delight in torturing us pesky humans).

The next reason is the wonderful effect of chronic pain. Evolutionarily this can be described, more or less, as shit happens. Mistakes in the genetic code or in that giant tangled mess known as the central nervous system explain it perfectly. But when the idea of creation or guided evolution comes in, you are faced with a whole new set of problems. The first is the obvious one of why. Why make a person suffer needlessly over an extended period of time. A suffering that in absolutely no way benefits the individual. I'm sure some theists would say that suffering makes a person stronger. Now if this were true, then about half of chronic pain suffers would not have depression as a co morbidity (in almost all cases, as a direct result of the chronic pain and not vice versa).

Chronic pain suffers would also not have a suicide rate of two to three times that of those who suffer from depression (about five times that of average individuals, although these statistics may be larger as only a select few studies have been made from very limited data pools).

On top of all this, those who suffer chronic pain would not have to endure an increase in their pain level over time. Despite the common held belief that, over time, a person can learn to block out the pain, the opposite begins to happen. The neural pathways the pain signal travels along transform from a backwaters road into a superhighway. Any time a set of neurons are fired frequently, the pathway is reinforced. The neural inhibition levels decrease (the synapse between neurons fires off the second neuron only once a threshold of neuro-transmitters is reached, this inhibition level is decreased as the pathway is used more frequently). So while an individual may be able to 'function' with levels of pain that most would not be able to stand over time, at the same time the level of pain the person endures increases. This also weakens the persons ability to tolerate the pain and is seen as a sharp decrease in pain tolerance compared to the rising levels before this peak is reached.

This concept is completely incompatible with the concept of any deity save one fueled by pure malice or utter indifference to the universe around it. But such indifference is no different then having no deity at all as it to requires the known evolutionary explanations. While the one spurred on but such hatred is both a horrific idea and one that does not fit the facts. For it seems rather absurd that such an entity would happen to use just the evolutionary paths that would be expected had it not existed in the first place. Either direction you are left with one logical conclusion, there is no deity that intercedes in the affairs of the universe, which as I said, is no different then no deity at all.

My encounter with a creationist

First off, I would like to apologize for my utter lack of posts lately. I have a very bad habit of starting a project and letting myself slack off. I have also had a great deal of my time lately consumed by a musical I am in. However, I recently had an event occur that spurred me to attempt to breath this blog back to life. I was invited to sit in on a presentation by a creationist and debate him.

This man claimed to have believed in evolution until he was presented with a creationist argument upon which he decided to devote his life to spreading the word. Now for those freethinkers out there that have heard this line before, I'm sure you soon found out that such claims are dubious at best (to be clear, I am not claiming that this person was lying). The caricature of evolution he presented was almost laughable if not for the fact that many people have and will buy it.

Before he started his presentation, we agreed that I would be able to interject any counter argument or corrections as they appeared, so I did not try and derail him or blind side him with questions. In fact he was told about me a week in advance so he knew I would be there and openly questioning him.

Some of the erroneous data he presented were things like evolution creates no new information, evolution can not explain morality, irreducible complexity and many more of the typical talking points. In fact it sounded like anything put out by the Discovery Institute. Although one bit of misinformation that he put forth was one I hadn't heard before and I found quite confusing. Apparently he believed that the continents were formed before the oceans. Where he heard this, I have no idea as it is quite well known that the continents formed later. He also did not shy away from the famous creationist tactic of quote mining, which I called out much to his chagrin.

Each time an erroneous bit was presented I not only corrected it but explained why it was incorrect. I brought with me a few things for this such as a basic Cetacean evolutionary lineage, the workings and types of radiometric dating techniques and the book Your Inner Fish by Neil Shubin for its great diagrams on embryology.

The way he countered any of my points can be summed up rather easily. It came down to either mocking the concept (I can't possibly see how such an absurd notion could ever be believed) or just ignoring it entirely. I was always respectful and never came to anger (although I did ask him quite a few times to stop talking over me and allow me to finish my point). I found him to be quite irritating for both his terrible inaccurate 'argument' and for what came down to essential blatant disrespect.

Although despite this, I had multiple people come up to me afterward who were quite interested in my points and showed interest in having me explain more to them at a future date, so it was not a complete lose. If I get just one person who was there interested in evolution, I will be quite proud.