Part Four of my analysis of Premier Christian Media’s screening and debate of Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed examines the film’s claim that Darwin’s theory directly inspired Hitler and 20th century eugenics.
The final quarter of the film makes the outrageous allegation that Darwin’s work directly inspired Hitler and eugenics. The host, Ben Stein, visits Darwin’s former home of Down House in Kent and his memorial at the London Natural History Museum. He visits the Dachau concentration camp and Hadamar Clinic where he interviews the tour guide Uta George and Richard Weikart, Discovery Institute research fellow and author of From Darwin to Hitler.
I haven’t read Weikart’s book, but I listened to this lecture and was distinctly underwhelmed by the tenuous links made between the ancient idea of eugenics and Darwin’s theory. Darwinism describes a scientific process for which there is ample evidence. Whether we like its moral implication is irrelevant and Weikart is guilty of the naturalistic fallacy; confusing “what is” with “what ought to be”. Weikart’s arguments rely heavily on some disgraceful quote-mining of Darwin’s work, more of which below.
Weikart also ignores a wealth of other social, economic and indeed religious factors that resulted in the rise of Nazism. For excellent refutations of his thesis, I came across his radio debate against atheist Professor of Religious Studies at Iowa State University, Hector Avalos, as well as Avalos’ extensive blog posts on Debunking Christianity here and here.
Towards the end of Expelled, Stein reads out the following passage which is often quoted by creationists from The Descent of Man, first published in 1871:
With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated. We civilised men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination. We build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed and the sick, thus the weak members of civilised societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. Hardly anyone is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.
However, the passage in full shows that Darwin was deeply compassionate to the handicapped and was not in favour of any euthanasia programme:
With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated; and those that survive commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health. We civilised men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination; we build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed, and the sick; we institute poor-laws; and our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of every one to the last moment. There is reason to believe that vaccination has preserved thousands, who from a weak constitution would formerly have succumbed to small-pox. Thus the weak members of civilised societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly any one is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.
The aid which we feel impelled to give to the helpless is mainly an incidental result of the instinct of sympathy, which was originally acquired as part of the social instincts, but subsequently rendered, in the manner previously indicated, more tender and more widely diffused. Nor could we check our sympathy, if so urged by hard reason, without deterioration in the noblest part of our nature. The surgeon may harden himself whilst performing an operation, for he knows that he is acting for the good of his patient; but if we were intentionally to neglect the weak and helpless, it could only be for a contingent benefit, with a certain and great present evil.
There are several other passages from Darwin that creationists mine in their attempts to show that he was immoral, but reveal quite the opposite when read in their true context. In the post-screening debate (at 43 minutes on the podcast) I asked the panel a question that drew their attention to this distortion, adding that while Darwin was about as racist as anyone else in Victorian England, he was a passionate abolitionist of the slave trade. Surprisingly, my comments drew nods of agreement from Steve Fuller. I also added that I have read Hitler’s Mein Kampf for myself. It contains not one reference of Darwin, evolution or natural selection, but talks rather a lot about his faith in Heaven and the Almighty as well as his theological hero, Martin Luther.
Alastair Noble made noises about how Darwin influenced Stalin. This claim is straight off the Answers in Genesis website and was repeated by David Robertson in our second debate on Premier’s Unbelievable? last year. The truth is that Stalin rejected Darwinism in favour of Lamarckism which lead to Lysenko’s insane programme to grow giant vegetables and deliver multiple harvests in one year, leading to the starvation of millions:
Mendeleyev’s “periodic system of elements” clearly shows how very important in the history of nature is the emergence of qualitative changes out of quantitative changes. The same thing is shown in biology by the theory of neo-Lamarckism, to which neo-Darwinism is yielding place.
– Stalin 1906, 304
Steve Fuller replied that Mein Kampf discussed “selection”. However, Hitler was referring to artificial selection which humans have known about for centuries. Dog breeding and pigeon fancying have more responsibility for Hitler than On the Origin of the Species.
There is widespread confusion over Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection and “Social Darwinism”, which was coined by the Protestant anthropologist Herbert Spencer, who also came up with the term “survival of the fittest”. Although still tarring Darwin’s good name, Hitler’s ethic is better described as “Social Darwinist”.
Irritatingly, many respectable scientists and historians have linked Darwin to Nazi Germany. Sir Arthur Keith is often quoted by creationists as writing in Evolution & Ethics (1946) that Hitler was an evolutionist and was trying to create Darwin’s utopia based on the principles of eugenics, though Keith never showed which parts of Origins inspired Hitler. Laurence Rees’ otherwise excellent study of the Final Solution, Auschwitz, was tarnished somewhat with the assertion that the Nazis’ ideology was “expressly Darwinian”, again without citing any primary sources in support.
The full original title of On the Origin of Species is infamously “Or the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life”. Again, creationists have argued that this is clear evidence that Darwin was in favour of a brutal struggle for survival where the strong would crush the weak. However, as Richard Dawkins explained following the film’s release in an “Open Letter to a victim of Ben Stein’s lying propaganda”:
Darwin was using the word “race” in a very different sense from ours. It is totally clear, if you read past the title to the book itself, that a “favoured race” meant something like “that set of individuals who possess a certain favoured genetic mutation” (although Darwin would not have used that language because he did not have our modern concept of a genetic mutation).
The Anti-Defamation League, an American Jewish pressure group dedicated to fighting anti-Semitism, issued the following statement against Expelled which is the first and last word against anyone claiming that Darwinism is in any way a link to eugenics or Social Darwinism:
The film Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed misappropriates the Holocaust and its imagery as a part of its political effort to discredit the scientific community which rejects so-called intelligent design theory.
Hitler did not need Darwin to devise his heinous plan to exterminate the Jewish people and Darwin and evolutionary theory cannot explain Hitler’s genocidal madness.
Using the Holocaust in order to tarnish those who promote the theory of evolution is outrageous and trivializes the complex factors that led to the mass extermination of European Jewry.
Steve Fuller also argued that people who support the teaching of evolution also support abortion and euthanasia on the grounds that it will lead to a better version of humanity. Again, I found this claim deeply offensive. I have recently written that I am pro-choice on the grounds that the alternative is worse. Abortion should be the last option. Prevention is better than cure. The answer is increased access to contraception and education as to its proper use. I am not in favour of abortion because it is a quick and convenient method of wiping out Down’s Syndrome.
I can think of no better way to end these posts than with this compilation by YouTube auteur, Thunderf00t, that features Stein on a Christian TV network shortly after Expelled’s release making the appalling claim that “science leads to killing people”, juxtaposed with his own delusional fantasies about America needing to start World War Three in order to protect itself against Iran and North Korea.
What a vile little man. I sincerely hope that his career is dead now … and that the rest of his life will be spent eking out speaking fees at Christian fundamentalist conventions, before audiences who will cheer him while dreaming of the day the Jews are exterminated or converted, bringing on Armageddon.
Right on, brother.
Now, a “call to arms” (in the strictly metaphorical, non-jihadist sense of the term) to all atheists, rationalists, humanists, secularists and everyone else who cares about truth in science and a proper education of school children which is free from religious dogma and presupposition: Let’s go to work.
Part Three of my analysis of Premier Christian Media’s screening and debate of Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed examines whether Intelligent Design has any genuine merit.
The film never sets out a definition of Intelligent Design. The host, Ben Stein, makes noises about how teaching it to school children might be like teaching them the alternative theory of history that the Holocaust never happened, which is not what he wants. But he fails to explain why ID is any more viable than Flat Earthery.
The closest the film comes to genuine science is some CGI sequences (which were were the subject of an unsuccessful copyright action by XVIVO having been lifted from the Harvard University DVD, The Inner Life of the Cell!) showing the mindboggling complexity of the cellular “machinery” at work. OK, what does that prove? That molecular biology is enormously complex. Cells wouldn’t always have been like that; they had to evolve from scratch the same as the larger organisms they comprise.
Atheist evolutionary biologist and blogwit par excellence P Z Myers explained during his lecture at the American Atheist International Conference 2009 (which I posted in my castigation of William Dembski’s Unbelievable? debate against Lewis Wolpert), that IDers and creationists falsely claim that Victorian scientists knew nothing about the inner workings of the cell: the sheer mind boggling complexity of the cell is a relatively recent discovery. IDers are adamant that it will just take a few more years for the rest of the scientific community to catch up with their way of thinking and evolutionary theory as we know it will be no more. As Myers pithily explained, “Dembski said that the bottom would fall out of Darwinism within five years… seven years ago!”
In the post-screening debate, former schools inspector and lay Christian preacher, Alastair Noble, speaking in favour of ID was a thoroughly unpleasant character, shouting down the evolutionist members of the panel and making cheap, erm, “jokes”, which played well with the clap-happy God squadders in the audience. I can understand why evolutionists refuse to share a platform with creationists after witnessing Noble’s attempts to put off the other members of the panel.
It really does worry me that people like Noble overtaken by their religious prejudices may ensure that junk-science will be taught to school children in the near future. Steve Fuller, who at least had the courage to admit that the school board in the 2005 Kitzmiller -v- Dover District PA “Intelligent Design trial” which he testified as an expert witness for the Intelligent Design side, were using ID to get creationism into the science classroom by the backdoor. They were really creationists who didn’t believe in ID; they just saw it as a convenient tool. I’m certain that Noble sees it that way as well.
Noble kept insisting (loudly) that only Intelligent Design could account for abiogenesis since the only known source of new information was an external designer. Intelligent Design, like the fine-tuning of the universe argument is simply Paley’s watchmaker analogy wrapped up in scientific jargon, usually ending with a whole lotta zeros after a decimal point. It explains nothing since it only leads to another stage back in the infinite regress and only begs the question of who designed the designer. It is a classic case of arguing by over-extended analogy. The very language of Intelligent Design screams “argument from personal incredulity”. Phrases like “irreducible complexity” are an inadvertent code for, “it’s too complex, we can’t understand it, therefore God did it”.
David Hume refuted the design argument 250 years ago on the grounds that we are taking our knowledge of how things for which we have direct personal experience are created, such as houses and watches, and applying this experience for things that we have no such equivalent personal experience, such as eyes and universes.
Intelligent Design is also fatally flawed in that it declares by fiat that a powerful but invisible designer is the only escape from staggering complexity and improbability. What ID proponents singularly fail to answer is what is the complexity and probability of such a designer itself, let alone being responsible for the natural phenomena we see around us. Surely this designer would have to be even more complex if it has the power to create all the things with which it is credited. Therefore its existence would have to be even more improbable than the objects and organisms it is supposed to have created.
While Sue Blackmore was giving her opening statement, a heckler in the audience asked why no “skeletons” had been found to verify evolution. I felt like bashing my head on the desk in front of me. Clearly, there are certain memes in creationist circles that simply will not go away no matter how often they are refuted. Such as:
If humans are descent from apes, why are there still gorillas and monkeys alive today?
Why have no transitional fossils been found?
Why don’t we see apes giving birth to humans?
Evolution is just a theory.
Darwin inspired Hitler!
The fourth and final post of my analysis examines whether the last point has any credibility.
Part Two of my analysis of Premier Christian Media’s screening and debate of Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed examines whether “Big Science” is suppressing the theory of Intelligent Design.
The film presents six ID proponents who claim that they lost their jobs and/ or university tenure for entertaining thoughts that involved an intelligent creator due to the evil atheistic evolutionary science elite. However, this is a mere smoke and mirrors ploy by the ID crowd. Scratching below the propaganda shows that the supposedly expelled scientists either did not loss their positions at all, or lost them for legitimate reasons.
Expelled alleges that Richard Sternberg lost his position at the Smithsonian Institute and the National Institute of Health at the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NIH) after publishing a paper by Dr Stephen C Meyer of the Discovery Institute which mentioned Intelligent Design as a possible explanation of the origins of life on Earth in the peer-reviewed journal, Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington. Stein says that Sternberg was “terrorised” and his life was “nearly ruined” following the incident that probed deeply into his religious views.
Nevertheless, this article from Skeptic magazine, as well as Sternberg’s page on Expelled Exposed, shows that Sternberg had in fact deliberately by-passed the publication process of the PBSW and went behind the backs of his colleagues by sneaking in Meyer’s shoddy paper which had previously been reviewed by scientists and had its claims firmly rejected.
Sternberg was in fact an unpaid associate – not an employee – at the Smithosian Institution (as opposed to “Institute”; Expelled doesn’t even get the names correct of those it libels!). After the Meyer incident, Sternberg remained an employee of NIH and his unpaid position at the Smithsonian was extended in 2006, although he has not shown up there in years. At no time was any aspect of his pay or working conditions at NIH affected. He was never even disciplined for legitimate violations of PBSW or Smithsonian policy. It is difficult to see how his life “was nearly ruined” when nothing serious happened to him.
This is a typical creationist tactic: to give the false impression that evolutionary scientists are dogmatically opposed to new ideas. The film sets up a false impression of two opposing viewpoints, when in fact there are many, many differing interpretations of the evidence. Just witness the heated disagreements between Richard Dawkins and Stephen Jay Gould over whether evolution happened gradually or in fits and starts.
During debate following the first screening Susan Blackmore, psychologist, atheist and expert on Meme Theory reminisced about when she was convinced that paranormal forces were real following her own “out of body” experience. She pursued the possibility obsessively in the face of her detractors, but had to accept that her experience was neurologically induced after many painful years of facing the evidence, or indeed the lack of evidence.
Keith Fox, a theistic evolutionary biologist from Southampton University also hauled the film up on its bogus portrayal of science as atheistic and that many devout Christians have no trouble reconciling their faith with Darwin.
Contrary to the impression of theists, scientists do not religiously adhere to Darwinian evolution. If you demanded fifty grand from the editor of Nature to pay for a peer-reviewed paper that falsified evolution or amended it significantly, he would probably give it to you in used twenties. Physicist Victor Stenger summed it up best during his debate against Christian apologist William Lane Craig in 2003:
Most scientists share my view. Are we being too sceptical? Are we being dogmatically unwilling to entertain the possibility of a personal creator God? I don’t think so.
There are many examples in the history of science that demonstrate its willingness accept ideas that challenge conventional wisdom. But the data must require it. In the early twentieth century the theories of relativity and quantum mechanics revolutionised some our most basic concepts about the nature of reality.
I think most scientists would be thrilled if evidence were founded for previously undetected materials and forces. Think of all the funding opportunities that would open up. I would come out of retirement.
But even if that were to happen, I doubt that the world that was then being uncovered would bear any resemblance to the fantasies from the childhood of humanity that constitute traditional religious belief.
Amen.
For further edification regarding the true stories behind the other five “expelled”, see the following pages on Expelled Exposed:
Guillermo Gonzalez: The Discovery Institute co-author of The Privileged Planet didn’t have such a stellar career after all and his output in recent years fell short of the tough requirements for tenure at American Universities.
Caroline Crocker: Never mind “mentioning” Intelligent Design in one of her classes, Crocker received multiple complaints from students at George Mason University for teaching demonstrably false creationist material. But she was never even fired for clear breaches of academic and contractual obligations and there is no evidence that she was “blacklisted” from other institutions.
Robert Marks: Robert Marks’ “Evolutionary Informatics Laboratory” website – touting intelligent design – was originally hosted on a Baylor University server. Concerned that the material on the website misleadingly suggested a connection between the intelligent design material and Baylor, administrators temporarily shut the website down while discussing the issue with Marks and his lawyer. Baylor was willing to continue hosting the website subject to a number of conditions (including the inclusion of a disclaimer and the removal of the misleading term “laboratory”), but Marks and Baylor were unable to come to terms. The site is currently hosted by a third-party provider.
Pamela Winnick: No evidence was presented in Expelled that Winnick was blacklisted as a journalist, and there’s evidence to the contrary. She may have been criticised for her shoddy journalism or for advocating bad science – Jeffrey Shallit describes her book as “not a fair, reliable, or objective look at the battles between science and religion,” for example – but it is insupportable and absurd to characterise such criticism as blacklisting.
Michael Egnor: The Alliance for Science, a citizen’s group in Virginia, sponsored an essay contest for high school students on the topic “Why I would want my doctor to have studied evolution”, to highlight the important role of evolution in the medical sciences. Egnor posted an essay on an intelligent design blog in response, claiming that evolution was irrelevant to medicine. This was more a statement of Egnor’s ignorance about evolution than a reflection on evolution’s place in medicine.
The next post will ask whether Intelligent Design has any genuine merit as a scientific theory.
manicstreetpreacher is dismayed to announce the arrival in the UK of the Intelligent Design racket.
As previewed, a few weeks ago, I attended the first screening and debate by Premier Christian Media of the Intelligent Design propaganda piece Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed at Imperial College London on 27 February 2010. Accompanying me were a friend who happens to be a secondary school science teacher and Evil Burnee, Paul S Jenkins, who has also posted a write-up of the event.
The Saturday, 20 March 2010 edition of Premier Christian Radio’s Unbelievable? airs the first post-screening debates and broadcasts extracts. Speaking for ID was Dr Alastair Noble, former schools inspector and lay Christian preacher Steve Fuller, Professor of sociology at the University of Warwick. Speaking against ID were Keith Fox,Professor ofBiology at Southampton Universityand Chair of Christians in Scienceand Susan Blackmore, Visiting Professor of Psychology & Memetics, University of Plymouth.
My question to the panel about Expelled’s claim that Darwin’s ideas influenced Hitler’s ideology is at 43 minutes on the podcast.
The second post-screening debate can be downloaded from the Unbelievable?features page. The speakers were Dr Alastair Noble and Dr Vij Sodera, Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons advocating Intelligent Design and Prof Keith Fox, Biology, Southampton University and Dr Thomas Dixon, History of Science, Queen Mary London University who advocate Darwinian evolution.
My treatment of the film and debate will be divided in four separate posts:
Expelled overview – The remainder of this post will give some general thoughts about the film and post-screening debate.
Conspiracy? Cover-up? Expulsion? – Are atheistic evolutionary scientists aka “Big Science” deliberately suppressing a fledgling theory that has genuine merit?
Arguing from ignorance – This post answers whether ID is a credible scientific theory in the resoundingly negative.
From Darwin to Hitler? – My fourth and final post counters Expelled’s claim that there is a link between Origins and Dachau.
Film review
Judging by the laughter and applause from the audience, the screening was attended mainly by religious believers. In my personal experience, religious people will laugh and applaud anything and there was a depressing level of laughter and applause for this piece of creationist trash.
At 90 odd minutes, it’s not overly long. But at least half the running time is taken up by constant cuts to other images as if to help the audience understand the points being made: Western gunfights, people being beaten up and, most insultingly, images of concentration camps and the Berlin Wall, which Richard Dawkins dubbed a “Lord Privy Seal” (LPS). These grew extremely tedious before the halfway mark.
In the post-screening debate, American-born Warwick University sociologist, Steve Fuller, tried to justify the LPS as being no different to a Michael Moore film. Faint praise indeed. But since, Fuller then went on to take a cheap shot at David Attenborough as having such a clear evolution bias he was ruining TV science programming, I don’t hold the man’s opinion in a very high regard.
There was also the utterly ham-fisted presentation of atheist scientists and commentators. Dan Dennett, P Z Myers, Christopher Hitchens (who has one line) and Peter Atkins came off reasonably well. However, Michael Shermer and Michael Ruse’s interviews were butchered in a manner that would embarrass YouTube’s cassetteboy.
For example, Ruse attempts to explain that one of the theories of the origins of life is the theory proposed by the Scottish chemist, Graham Cairns-Smith, that organic life was preceded by a strange and intriguing world of replicating patterns on the surfaces of crystals in inorganic clays. This cuts to a voiceover of the film’s host, Ben Stein, incredulously asking whether we have abandoned science fact and have strayed into science fiction, and there is an irritating LPS of a wild-eyed fortune teller exclaiming, “Crystals!” As with all creationist debates, the object of the exercise is not to prove anything scientific whatsoever, but to discredit the evolutionary scientist in front of the cameras.
Similarly, when a representative from one of the academic institutions is interviewed trying to explain why one of the “expelled” lost their position, Stein colours the mood against him in narration by saying, “We couldn’t get him away from his script”.
Richard Dawkins’ interview is the worst. He is made up to look like a mad scientist with his normally neat hair looking like Doc Brown from Back to the Future. While Stein is stepping out of his black cab en route to the interview, Dawkins is shown being powdered by the film’s production team (Dawkins’ web and recording guru, Josh Timonen wrote afterwards that Dawkins never wears make up for public appearances) and is then made to wait as Stein turns up late. He is shot in dim light. In his appearances before the main interview he is accompanied by ominous music. Sadly, there is worse to come.
After Dawkins reads out the (in)famous passage at the start of Chapter 2 of The God Delusion (“The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all of fiction…”), Stein asks him if that’s what he really thinks of God. Dawkins gives a suspiciously curtailed, “Yep”. I wonder what they left on the cutting room floor.
Dawkins then attempts to explain the circumstances he would consider an intelligent designer being responsible for the creation of life on Earth. In an attempt to give ID its best hypothetical shot, Dawkins answers that it could have been an extra-terrestrial intelligence, but of course we would then have to ask where that intelligence came from and so on; the infinite regress would continue until an evolution-type natural process explained how the first alien intelligent designer arose.
Naturally, the interview is cut so as to make Dawkins look as stupid as possible; as if he is seriously suggesting that an alien spaceship landed on Earth and planted the first seed of life. Stein says in narration that Dawkins is bending over backwards to avoid bringing God into the equation: he would rather it be little green men than the Almighty.
Dawkins gave the true story behind the interview at his address to the American Atheists Conference 2009, the relevant extract of which is below. For the video, the scene from the film itself is replaced by dialogue cards so as not to risk a copyright action from the producers.
For about two-thirds of the film, Expelled maintains a straight face that ID is a scientific proposition and a credible alternative to evolution. However, for the last 10 minutes, the curtain is well and truly raised to reveal the film’s true agenda to the sound of The Killers’ gospel-tinged “All These Things That I’ve Done”: to bring God into science classrooms so we can all praise him for his wondrous creation. Permit me just this one LPS:
Following the debate, Expelled’s UK DVD distributer, Mark Haville (who incidentally has posted a 5 star review of the Expelled DVD on Amazon UK without stating his interest!), of NPN Videos read out a prepared statement which hinted at a campaign in the coming weeks and months to lobby and legislate in order to bring Intelligent Design to the fore. May [Spinoza’s] God have mercy on us all.
In the meantime, I can only recommend sites like Expelled Exposed, which was set up by Eugenie Scott of the American National Center for Science Education to refute the film’s claims and protect the reputations of the people and institutions misrepresented in the film. There are also plenty of “alternative versions” knocking around the torrent pages with voiceover narrations and subtitles correcting the lies.
The next post examines whether there is any truth behind Expelled’s claim that “Big Science” is unjustly suppressing ID.
manicstreetpreacher gears up for attending his next live debate on religion.
Next weekend I will be attending Premier Christian Media’s screening of the loathsome piece of creationist propaganda, Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. Details are as follows:
Saturday, 27 February 2010, 2:30pm
Sir Alexander Fleming Lecture Theatre
Imperial College London
South Kensington Campus
Exhibition Road
London
SW7 2AZ
There are discussion threads on the Premier Christian Community Unbelievable?group page and forum where sceptics have vented their anger. I have actually witnessed this piece of trash before (praise be for torrent downloads!) and it’s not exactly an experience that I am looking forward to repeating…
Entire websites have been dedicated to deriding the film and refuting its bogus claims in relation to scientists losing their jobs over supporting Intelligent Design over Darwinism as well as its ridiculous assertion that Darwin was a direct influence in Hitler’s Germany. Eugenie Scott’s Expelled Exposed is probably the best I have come across.
There have even been alternative versions produced by sceptics with subtitles and/or voice over narration correcting the film!
Following the film’s release, some of the atheistic scientists claimed that they had been duped into giving interviews for a film called “Crossroads” which was to be a examination of the clash between science and religion and then had their interviews edited in such a way that would make YouTube’s cassetteboy raise an eyebrow.
What a shoddy, second-rate piece of work. A favourite joke among the film-making community is the ‘Lord Privy Seal’. Amateurs and novices in the making of documentaries can’t resist illustrating every significant word in the commentary by cutting to a picture of it. The Lord Privy Seal is an antiquated title in Britain’s heraldic tradition. The joke imagines a low-grade film director who illustrates it by cutting to a picture of a Lord, then a privy, and then a seal. Mathis’ film is positively barking with Lord Privy Seals. We get an otherwise pointless cut to Nikita Krushchev hammering the table (to illustrate something like ‘emotional outburst’). There are similarly clunking and artless cuts to a guillotine, fist fights, and above all to the Berlin Wall and Nazi gas chambers and concentration camps.
Ben Stein came to my office to interview me about what I was told was a film about “the intersection of science and religion” called Crossroads (yet another deception). I knew something was afoot when his first question to me was on whether or not I think someone should be fired for expressing dissenting views. I pressed Stein for specifics: Who is being fired for what, when and where? In my experience, people are usually fired for reasons having to do with budgetary constraints, incompetence or not fulfilling the terms of a contract. Stein finally asked my opinion on people being fired for endorsing intelligent design. I replied that I know of no instance where such a firing has happened.
In a dreadful PR gaffe by Expelled’s producers, P Z Myers was “expelled” from the premier of the film whose end credits thank him for his participation!
I went to attend a screening of the creationist propaganda movie, Expelled, a few minutes ago. Well, I tried … but I was Expelled! It was kind of weird – I was standing in line, hadn’t even gotten to the point where I had to sign in and show ID, and a policeman pulled me out of line and told me I could not go in. I asked why, of course, and he said that a producer of the film had specifically instructed him that I was not to be allowed to attend. The officer also told me that if I tried to go in, I would be arrested. I assured him that I wasn’t going to cause any trouble.
Dawkins and Myers recorded this conversation immediately after the film’s premier, to which Dawkins successfully gained access.
Dawkins’ website and videotaping guru, Josh Timonen, spliced together this wonderful parody which plays upon Expelled’s bogus editing of presenter Ben Stein’s interview with Dawkins at the end of the film.
Post-screening debate
This is the main reason I am going and should make for good blog fodder. I have one or two awkward questions prepared to make the ID supporters sweat, although I’m not giving them away before the event!
Speaking in favour of ID areProf Steve Fuller and Dr Alastair Noble.
I am particularly looking forward to hearing what Alastair Noble has to say. The former Inspector of Schools recently posted an essay on The Guardian Comment is Free arguing that “Intelligent Design should not excluded [sic] from the study of origins” and that he was “disturbed that proposals for science education are based on near-complete ignorance of intelligent design.” The commenters on the original post ripped it to shreds as did those over at RichardDawkins.net. Evil Burnee Paul S Jenkins denounced it as “creationist twaddle”:
I am disturbed that a former science teacher and schools inspector should propose the teaching of non-science in a science class. “Near-complete ignorance” is pretty much the most anyone can know about intelligent design, because there’s nothing there. And scientific truth is not a matter of public popularity – even if every last British citizen thought creationism was true, that would not make it so.
Steve Fuller is an interesting character. Born in America, he now lectures in sociology at the University of Warwick this side of the pond. He claims to be a secularist but with “sympathies” towards Christian ideology. Fuller notoriously upped sticks to Dover, Pennsylvania to testify on behalf of the Intelligent Design side in the Kitzmiller –v- Dover District P A “Intelligent Design” trial in 2005 without telling his university. When parents and students found out what he was up to, the university was inundated with angry letters and emails demanding that Fuller not be allowed anywhere near the students!
Be sure to read Fuller’s hilarious exchanges with British atheist philosopher A C Grayling over Grayling’s damning review of Fuller’s Dissent Over Descent. Grayling’s counter-reply to Fuller’s indignant response to his review contained this all-time classic which I have quoted myself on at least one occasion:
Steve Fuller complains, as do all authors whose books are panned, that I did not read his book properly (or at all). Alas, I did.
I’m looking forward to seeing Susan Blackmore. I haven’t read any of her books yet, but I know she is strongly opposed to religion and pseudo-science. In her debate against Christian theologian Alister McGrath at Bristol University in 2007 she gives some insightful comments regarding her journey from earnest believer in the paranormal to die-hard sceptic. Her book on the topic is In Search of the Light: The Adventures of a Parapsychologist. I referenced her work on UFO encounters in my write-up of Prof Chris French’s lecture for The Merseyside Skeptics Society last year.
I also found this interesting talk on memes that Blackmore gave at TED a few years ago.
I’m also seeing Blackmore this Monday (22 February 2010) giving a lecture on “Are religions dangerous memes?” at Plymouth University. It may well get an epic MSP blog post of its own if it’s good!
Second screening and debate
Due to overwhelming demand, Premier have organised a second screening and debate of the film immediately after the first. At the time of publication, there were tickets still going. The details are as follows:
Saturday, 27 February 2010, 6:30pm
Sir Alexander Fleming Lecture Theatre
Imperial College London
South Kensington Campus
Exhibition Road
London
SW7 2AZ
Guest speakers include Dr Alastair Noble (Former Inspector of Schools) and Dr Vij Sodera (Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons) who advocate Intelligent Design and Prof Keith Fox (Biology, Southampton University) and Dr Thomas Dixon (History of Science, Queen Mary London University) who advocate Darwinian Evolution.
I was sorely tempted to book in for round two, but I will have to pass since I will be accompanied by a non-militant atheist blogger friend who will no doubt be diverted by the call of the pub after round one. And Fuller and Noble are the two I’m really after…
Fuller rambles on about how ID deserves to be given a fair hearing as an “alternative theory” without ever explaining why it is any more credible than Flying Spaghetti Monsterism. He plays the sympathy card by portraying the IDers in the Dover trial as the underdogs struggling against the well-funded evil empire of evolutionary biology. OK, why don’t you join the fight of those brave Flat Earthers desperately attempting to have their “alternative theory” of the shape of the globe taught to the little darlings?
Meyer can’t mention the title of his new piece of ID propaganda, Signature in the Cell, enough. Canadian computer science professor Jeffrey Shallit skilfully deals with Myers’ “bogus information theory” as well as the “dishonesty factor”. Akins is his usual gleeful belligerent-bordering-on-sheer-rude self!
I wound up ID proponent William Dembski whose blog Uncommon Descent posted tworesponses to my piece deriding his debate against atheist embryologist Lewis Wolpert. See also my counter-response to Dembski’s accusations of being a member of the Rat Pack and Darwin not quite getting the “complexities” of the cell.
I’ll come clean and admit that I have read little if any original Intelligent Design material. Much of my knowledge of ID has come from reading it second or third hand from atheist scientists. NOVA’s documentary on the Kitzmiller –v- Dover P A “Intelligent Design” trial is well worth seeing.
Nevertheless, I listened with interest to all of Justin’s shows with an open mind and was decidedly underwhelmed by the ID proponents. I simply could not see a separate line of scientific reasoning emerge. All they were attempting to do was to pick holes in Darwinism and fill the gaps with ID, which of course explains nothing because you only put the explanation back another stage since you then have to ask how that from that intelligence arose and so on.
A depressing feature of the creationist movement is to distort scientific facts and misrepresent the true views of evolutionary scientists. In this sense, I found Intelligent Design to be very similar. It is creationism at the level of the cell, or as one commenter on Premier Christian Community eloquently put it: godofthegapswrappedupinaminoacids.
This may not be the question that I’ll ask the ID supporters on the debate panel, but since the screening and debate of Expelled is being held in a venue named after Sir Alexander Fleming, the discoverer of penicillin and a truly brilliant man whose work has saved the lives of countless millions and contributed immeasurably to the advancement of science, would humanity really be any worse off if the Intelligent Design movement disappeared tomorrow?
manicstreetpreacher just needs to clear something up.
ID proponent William Dembski continues to give me a free readership on his Uncommon Common Descent blog by attacking my post on his appearance on Premier Christian Radio’s Unbelievable? (700 views and counting! 😮 ). Firstly, Denyse O’ Leary vilified me for my take on the importance (or lack!) of probabilities in biology. Now, Dembski himself has posted a response denying that Darwin knew about the complexities of the cell, accusing your humble servant of “re-writing history”:
A blogger who goes by “Manic Street Preacher” sent me three unsolicited emails about his reaction to the debate, which was not positive…
I finally had a look at what this blogger wrote. I can’t say I was impressed with the argumentation or erudition, but I do have to credit him for chutzpah…
I don’t mean to be argumentative, but the insides of the cells depicted here do look to me like blobs. But qualitative interpretations like this aside, the fact is that Darwin had no conception of molecular biology or the intricate nano-engineering that Michael Behe, for instance, describes in the cell. Moreover, it’s straightforward to examine the actual history of the scientific understanding of the cell to realize that the cell in Darwin’s time was conceived as simple, indeed so simple that it could spontaneously generate. Jonathan Wells and I describe some of this in HOW TO BE AN INTELLECTUALLY FULFILLED ATHEIST.
But perhaps the easiest way to see that “Manic Street Preacher” is blowing smoke is to do a search on “Bathybius Haeckelii” – slime dredged up from the ocean floor thought to be the primordial living matter. This proved to be a big embarrassment to Huxley and Haeckel. The details here are unimportant. What is important is that biologist of Huxley’s and Haeckel’s stature thought that life could be so simple as to be the result of this slime.
“Manic Street Preacher” reminds me of Joey Bishop in the movie A GUIDE FOR THE MARRIED MAN [IMDB]. Bishop, caught in flagrante delictu with another woman by his wife, denies all wrong doing (and, if he were a Darwinist, would accuse his wife of infidelity). Eventually, the wife, suitably cowed, accepts the denials and agrees that nothing happened. Well, here at UD we don’t let Darwinists get away with such nonsense. Darwin and his contemporaries didn’t have a clue about the complexity of the cell. History bears this out, Darwinian revisionism notwithstanding.
Aside from being somewhat bemused at being compared to a member of the Rat Pack and an email spammer, I have two retorts to this. Firstly, Dembski ought to have scrolled down to the comments section, where he would have seen that I had linked to this page on zoologist and theistic evolutionist Wesley R Elsberry’s blog which contains excellent references both to creationist and IDiots’ claims that Darwin knew nothing about that complexity of the cell:
Antievolutionists make lots of claims about Charles Darwin, seeking to impeach the authority of someone born 199 years ago today. Given that science moves on and leaves no one’s ideas untouched, one would think that they would stick to negative claims that would stand up to some scrutiny. Again and again, though, we find that they continue to espouse negative claims that are just plain silly, at least to those with even the slightest familiarity with the actual record that Darwin left.
[A] common antievolution claim about Darwin, simply put, [is] that Darwin considered the contents of cells to be “black boxes”, comprised of a simple or homogeneous protoplasm. This is expressed in similar ways by a number of antievolutionists. The following is just a sampling of the available instances.
Scientists use the term “black box” for a system whose inner workings are unknown. To Charles Darwin and his contemporaries, the living cell was a black box because its fundamental mechanisms were completely obscure. We now know that, far from being formed from a kind of simple, uniform protoplasm (as many nineteenth-century scientists believed), every living cell contains many ultrasophisticated molecular machines.
There were other things that Darwin did not know. For example, Darwin assumed that the cell was like a primitive blob of protoplasm that could easily evolve new biological functions. As Behe explains, “To Darwin, then, as to every other scientist of the time, the cell was a black box… The question of how life works was not one that Darwin or his contemporaries could answer.”
To be fair to Darwin, he proposed his theory when scientists knew next to nothing about biochemistry. Living things were “black boxes,” their inside workings a mystery. The cell itself was thought to be nothing more than a blob of jellylike protoplasm. It was easy to draw large-scale scenarios about fins gradually turning into legs, or legs into wings, since no one had a clue how limbs and organs work from the inside. As Behe writes, it is as though we asked how a stereo system is made and someone answered, “by plugging a set of speakers into an amplifier and adding a CD player, radio receiver, and tape deck.”
That’s pretty rich, that “be fair to Darwin” phrase. As Jeffrey Shallit, Professor of Computer Science at University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, commenting on Stephen Meyer’s recent book, Signature in the Cell points out, “This claim has been repeated again and again by creationists, but it is not true. Fergodsake, the nucleus was discovered in 1833.”
Elsberry continues with the opinions of Jay Richards:
In addition, biochemists and biologists have discovered a microscopic world of mesmerizing complexity belying the simple blobs of protoplasm that Darwin imagined.
Elsberry frames matters bluntly:
Antievolutionists don’t go looking at the primary sources to come up with these nuggets; one of them creates a “magic bullet”, and the rest pass it around like a game of “telephone”, sometimes resulting in a garbled mess. As Casey Luskin’s contribution here indicates, the likely source of the BS in this case is Michael Behe.
Why call it BS? Because anybody can disconfirm the claim in seconds with a modern Internet search, and only moderately longer using the past technology scholars have long relied upon for substantiating claims about prior work.
One finds there Darwin’s work on pangenesis, his hypothesis that there existed small particles that he called gemmules, each of which contained the heritable information for some particular trait, and which would combine, somehow, into the gametes. His continued advocacy of this wrong idea was a major failing on his part, but along the way we can see that even though Darwin was wrong about gemmules, he did hold an antithetical view to the claim that everything was simple at the most basic levels of life’s organization:
Notwithstanding the astounding complexity of the processes implied by this hypothesis of pangenesis, yet it seems to me to comprehend the several leading facts better than any other view. On this hypothesis we may fancifully look at each animal and plant as being compounded of many beings, in the same manner as a tree or coral is compounded of many similar beings; but in neither case have these so-called beings had a separate existence. Each of these beings, or parts, is supposed to be capable of throwing off gemmules, which whilst within the organism are capable of self-increase, and which can be separately developed at the part or organ whence they were derived, and can be united, as in the case of hybrids, with other gemmules into a single germ or bud, which reproduces the complete parent form. On this view, each organic being may be looked at as a little universe, formed of a host of different self-propagating organisms, almost as numerous as the stars in heaven, and as minute as they are immense.
Darwin clearly understood the complexity of the cell in this paper:
As, however, a cell is a complex structure, with its investing membrane, nucleus, and nucleolus, a gemmule, as Mr G H Lewes has remarked in his interesting discussion on this subject (Fortnightly Review, Nov. 1, 1868, p. 508), must, perhaps, be a compound one, so as to reproduce all the parts.
Two papers by Darwin published in 1882 demonstrate Darwin’s readiness to experiment in resolving sub-cellular processes, using chemistry and microscopy to aid in the work.
These papers in the primary literature demonstrate vividly that Charles Darwin not only was aware that protoplasm was not homogeneous, but was at the end of his life working toward elucidating exactly what differences within cells existed. As Wesley concludes:
The antievolution “magic bullet” intended to dismiss Darwin is a dud. Sub-cellular structure elucidation was another part of science in which Darwin was an active participant. Darwin’s own preferred hypothesis of heredity, though now discredited, presumed the sort of immense complexity at small scales that antievolutionists falsely claim Darwin had no “imagination” for. Many antievolutionists have willingly participated in passing along this falsehood and urging changes in public school curriculum policy based, in part, on their false and ignorant claims. I find it significant that I have yet to encounter any instance of an antievolution advocate pointing out the actual facts of the case and remonstrating with their colleagues, even though the disconfirming evidence is easy to locate and describe. I can only conclude that antievolutionists in general have no concern for the truth nor for fact-checking even the simplest of their claims. Trusting antievolutionists to help guide policy and form curricula for public schools would be malfeasance, plain and simple…
Secondly, the charge that Darwin did not know anything about the inner workings of the cell is purely an academic point and I corrected Dembski mainly to preserve Darwin’s reputation and correct him on this bogus canard that he and his ilk keep trotting out. There was a great deal that Darwin did not know about and/or where he was plain wrong. Dembski is correct in pointing out that he had no idea about genetic mutations, DNA and molecular biology. However, his theory has been revised, updated and indeed strengthened by the subsequent 150 years of scientific research, experimentation and peer-review by scientists who have had far greater knowledge and far more advanced technology at their disposal.
This is the science that has rid the world of smallpox and flown us to the moon. Even if Dembski and Behe had their way and people accepted that there was an extraterrestrial intelligence behind the complexity we see in nature, even if the unthinkable happened and the designer actually revealed himself in the middle of an international event with the entire world watching and told us directly to be nice to each other, nothing whatsoever would change about the way we do science. We could not even confront the designer and ask him to repair what he makes, like Roy Batty in Ridley Scott’s 1982 sci-fi classic Blade Runner.
We would still have to search for cures to cancer and AIDS as well as updating our vaccinations against constantly evolving viruses (funny how you never hear creationists and IDers shout about the wonderful design of these particular organisms!). Creationism and Intelligent Design contribute nothing to the advancement of science and medicine. If an IDer has ever won the Nobel Prize, they must have hidden it from the judges. If the Discovery Institute is leading the way in the fight against deadly diseases, they are keeping it awfully quiet. Instead, they are concerned with preserving ancient myths in the vain hope that adhering to such beliefs sometimes makes people behave better, as the opening paragraph of the DI’s “Wedge Strategy” document (download PDF) well attests:
The proposition that humans beings are created in the image of God is one of the bedrock principles on which Western civilization was built. Its influence can be detected in most, if not all, of the West’s greatest achievements, including representative democracy, human rights, free enterprise and progress in arts and science.
One piece of scripture that has stuck with this manic street preaching heretic is something St Paul said: “When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things. For now we see through a glass, darkly.” (1 Corinthians 13: 12 – 13).
Non-scientist manicstreetpreacher presents his case against “Intelligent Design Theory” following William Dembski’s debate against Lewis Wolpert – Unbelievable?, Premier Christian Radio, 2 January 2009.
Lewis Wolpert (whose discussions with Russell Cowburn I reviewed here) sounded rather irate in last Saturday’s edition of Premier Christian Radio’s Unbelievable? and frankly, who can blame him? The South African born atheist embryologist and author of Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast was in conversation with William Demski, American fundamentalist Christian who is also a leading proponent of “Intelligent Design” and author of The Design Inference and No Free Lunch.
I won’t give a blow my blow account of the debate itself, but there are a few points which Dembski needs to be hauled up on (no doubt for the umpteenth time which will not make the slightest difference, but it’s the principle that matters!).
Firstly, “complexity” and “improbability” appear to be Demski’s favourite words in the English language, which of course make him no different than all other creationists or people who argue from design. Apparently, the complexity that we see in biology is just so incredibly complex, that there comes a point when the zeros after the decimal point become too many and we can infer that it was The Thing That Made The Things For Which There Is No Known Maker.
So what if it’s all enormously complex and improbable? I have heard it said that the probability of the first self-replicating carbon based cell arising on Earth is greater than the number of atoms in the known universe. Fine. What the hell, let’s say that it’s TWICE the number of atoms in the known universe. It’s no use ruling out natural events on the arbitrary notion of low probability. You have to compare it with the probability of the alternative you contend is more likely. What’s the probability that the laws of nature are violated? What’s the probability that an invisible and undetectable designer – natural or supernatural – created it? I’ve never heard a creationist or “design theorist” answer these questions and Dembski disappointed me yet again. Perhaps the improbability of design is even greater, and what data does Dembski have to make the calculation? None I would say, because there is no evidence of a designer whatsoever.
This reasoning also fails on the basis that low probability events happen all the time. If you crunch the numbers in relation to your own birth (i.e. the probability that a particular sperm united with a particular egg multiplied by the probability that your parents met and repeated the calculation back until the beginning of time), you will get a fantastically low probability. Theistic evolutionary scientist Francisco Ayala reinforced the point during his recent debate against Christian apologist William Lane Craig on whether Intelligent Design was a viable alternative to evolution. Ayala remarked that there’s no need to argue against Dembski and Co, because their very existence on this Earth is so mind-bendingly improbable that they were never born!
For the Bairnsfather view of Dembski’s thinking, I can do no better than the introduction to P Z Myers’ lecture at the AAI Conference 2009. Dembski, Behe, Simmons etc.: “Here is biology. It’s very complex. Incredibly, unbelievably complex in fact. Complexity, complexity, complexity, complexity, complexity, complexity… DESIGN!!!!!!”
Brilliant!
Secondly, Dembski repeated the common straw man that scientists in Darwin’s day knew nothing about the inner workings of the cell, and thought that they were mere “blobs of protoplasm”. Well, Dembski should take a look this drawing out, which was made by Darwin himself:
See, they show the inner workings of the cell and clearly show its complexity. Scientists in Darwin’s time, in fact, had quite a good understanding of what cells were, and they were not simply “blobs of protoplasm”. This is yet another creationist hoax which is easily debunked.
Shame on you, Billy!
Third and finally, some ID theorists out there may resent my description of Demski as a “fundamentalist Christian” or think that this has nothing to do with his “science”. However, they may wish to know that Dembski teaches at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, Fort Worth, Texas. Below are a series of extracts from assignments and exam papers that are set for students which came to my attention after a thread was posted on RichardDawkins.net.
Make your best argument against theistic evolution. In other words, if you were in a debate situation and had to argue against theistic evolution, how would you do it?
Lay out your own view of the relation between science and theology. Are they in conflict or consonance? Should they be compartmentalized? Do they support each other? Is it important to harmonize them? Etc.
Have advances in the natural sciences over the last 40 years made it easier or harder to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist? Explain.
Trace the connections between Darwinian evolution, eugenics, abortion, infanticide, and euthanasia. Why are materialists so ready to embrace these as a package deal? What view of humanity and reality is required to resist them?
You are the Templeton Foundation’s new program director and are charged with overseeing its programs and directing its funds. Sketch out a 20-year plan for defeating scientific materialism and the evolutionary worldview it has fostered if you had $50,000,000 per year in current value to do so. What sorts of programs would you institute? How would you spend the money?
You just learned that your nephew or niece is going off to study theology at a liberal seminary. You suspect the place is teeming with “Homer Wilsons,” i.e., professors intent on eroding any real faith of the seminary students. Write a letter to your nephew or niece outlining the pitfalls that they are likely to face and how they should protect their faith from eroding.
According to Richard Dawkins, faith is believing in the absence of evident [sic]. By contrast, Nancy Pearcey argues that the attempt to remove Christian faith from the realm of knowledge and evidence has led to Christianity’s cultural captivity. Make the case that Christian faith is a matter not of subjective opinion but of objective knowledge.
No amputees are recorded as having been healed in the New Testament (i.e., no one with a missing limb is said to have grown back the limb in response to a prayer by Jesus or one of the Apostles). Indeed, throughout Church history it appears that no such miracle has occurred (if you know of a wellconfirmed [sic] case, please cite it). Atheists therefore argue that if miracles really happened and gave evidence of God, God would have performed a healing like growing back the limb of an amputee. Do atheists have a point here? How do you maintain that miracles are real in the face of such criticism?
For more academic travesties on a par with Liberty University’s natural history museum labelling dinosaur fossils as being 3,000 years old, including online debate forum postings comprising a substantial proportion of students’ final grades (!), click here:
AP410 This is the undegrad [sic] course. You have three things to do: (1) take the final exam (worth 40% of your grade); (2) write a 3,000-word essay on the theological significance of intelligent design (worth 40% of your grade); (3) provide at least 10 posts defending ID that you’ve made on “hostile” websites, the posts totalling 2,000 words, along with the URLs (i.e., web links) to each post (worth 20% of your grade).
AP510 This is the masters course. You have four things to do: (1) take the final exam (worth 30% of your grade); (2) write a 1,500 to 2,000-word critical review of Francis Collins’s The Language of God – for instructions, see below (20% of your grade); (3) write a 3,000-word essay on the theological significance of intelligent design (worth 30% of your grade); (4) provide at least 10 posts defending ID that you’ve made on “hostile” websites, the posts totalling 3,000 words, along with the URLs (i.e., web links) to each post (worth 20% of your grade).
Aside from this, Wolpert correctly pointed out that Dembski’s reasoning is a mere language game. Even if the designer was eventually discovered and observed, this would not change the way Dembski carries out his science one iota. The man hasn’t proved anything and never will. Even if Darwin’s theory is completely wrong, even if the evolution of Homo sapiens we observe today is more improbable than the number of atoms in a billion universes that is still not evidence for either design or a designer.
The Intelligent Design movement is nothing more than racket and a Wedge Strategy (download PDF) to bring creationism into school science classrooms by the back door. As a wise man has observed of late, it may be designed but there’s nothing intelligent about it.
Wolpert’s main line of attack is there is absolutely no evidence for God and he doesn’t seem to have done very much since raising Jesus from the dead over two millennia ago. I have to agree with him here: people get all choked up every time a baby falls out of a window and is saved by the soft roof of a passing car – they remain oddly silent at all the ditches that are full of dead babies when no one did a thing. I thought that Cowburn’s objections that Wolpert and the rest of the world’s non-believers ought to believe what was written down 2,000 years ago and it is irrational and unreasonable to expect God to appear in to each and every one of us were very weak.
As Thomas Paine argued in The Age of Reason (First Part, Section 1 – 2), we are perfectly entitled to reject Moses’ account of meeting God atop of Mount Sinai (if such a place even exists; no geographer has ever been able to identify the biblical Sinai from the true geographical location!) then I am perfectly entitled to reject his account, because to me it is hearsay and not direct revelation:
No one will deny or dispute the power of the Almighty to make such a communication, if he pleases. But admitting, for the sake of a case, that something has been revealed to a certain person, and not revealed to any other person, it is revelation to that person only. When he tells it to a second person, a second to a third, a third to a fourth, and so on, it ceases to be a revelation to all those persons. It is revelation to the first person only, and hearsay to every other, and consequently they are not obliged to believe it.
It is a contradiction in terms and ideas, to call anything a revelation that comes to us at second-hand, either verbally or in writing. Revelation is necessarily limited to the first communication – after this, it is only an account of something which that person says was a revelation made to him; and though he may find himself obliged to believe it, it cannot be incumbent on me to believe it in the same manner; for it was not a revelation made to me, and I have only his word for it that it was made to him.
When Moses told the children of Israel that he received the two tables of the commandments from the hands of God, they were not obliged to believe him, because they had no other authority for it than his telling them so; and I have no other authority for it than some historian telling me so. The commandments carry no internal evidence of divinity with them; they contain some good moral precepts, such as any man qualified to be a lawgiver, or a legislator, could produce himself, without having recourse to supernatural intervention.
When I am told that the Koran was written in Heaven and brought to Mahomet by an angel, the account comes too near the same kind of hearsay evidence and second-hand authority as the former. I did not see the angel myself, and, therefore, I have a right not to believe it.
Cowburn should also read my disgracefully unscholarly piece about Richard Bauckham’s erm, “arguments” in Jesus and the Eyewitnesses for my full thoughts. That quote at the end from Sam Harris about how the evidence for Christianity would still not be good enough even if we had multiple contemporary eyewitness accounts empties all “scholarly” discourses about the reliability of oral tradition from direct observers and who-first-started-to-believe-what-when.
Of course, the atheist will always complain about the hiddenness of God. Why can’t God just reveal himself in the middle of the World Cup final when most of the humans on the planet will be watching and put the matter beyond doubt rather than appearing to stupefied illiterates in remote parts of Middle East in the pre-scientific past? If you can’t believe what you read last week in The Sunday Times, then fail to understand Cowburn’s scepticism when confronted with a collection of disjointed and contradictory documents from the ancient past.
And I’m still waiting for a convincing response to Christopher Hitchens’ 94,000 – 98,000 Year Wait Gambit as to the Almighty being rather tardy and allowing of a great deal of suffering and death before finally deciding to step in with an offer of salvation:
Perhaps Cowburn can now supply it.
Finally, I would recommend that Cowburn investigates the work of Victor Stenger, American cosmologist, atheist and author of Has Science Found God? and God, The Failed Hypothesis who debunks the idea that “whatever begins to exist has a cause” as the kind of common sense logic that tells us that the Earth is flat. Particles produced by nuclear decay come into existence without a cause. The universe was like a subatomic particle at the time of the Big Bang, so this example could well apply to the beginning of the universe.
Stenger also debunks the fine-tuning argument that carbon-based life in the universe cannot have come about naturally because it was too “improbable”. Firstly, virtually all every day events are “improbable” when you state them a priori and then crunch the numbers, such as a person’s very existence in this world. And secondly, what is the probability that this universe is the result of a divine design? It could be even lower than the naturalistic alternative. What data do we have in order to make the calculation? Not very much, it would appear.
I have recently posted my own analysis of Stenger’s debate against William Lane Craig at the University of Hawaii in 2003, as well as the transcript of Stenger’s three main speeches, which provides further comment and elaboration.
UPDATE: 26/12/2009
I emailed this piece to Lewis Wolpert and Russell Cowburn for their comments. “Lewy” replied saying that he liked the piece and hoped that I liked his theory about the origins of human religious behaviour. I realise now that the piece neglects somewhat Lewis’ book on religion! Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast is less a polemic against the untruths of and crimes of religious faith, but an explanation of why Homo sapiens practise religion if there is no God. I replied to Lewis that such theories come ten-a-penny, but his is as good as some and better than most.
Essentially, Lewis thinks that religious behaviour is an extension of humans’ interpretation of “cause and effect”, such as shaking a tree to make its fruit fall off and using tools to make other objects. The offshoot of this is that we see agency and patterns in practically everything, even whether no such invisible guiding hand (i.e. God!) exists. Lewis says that animals show the seeds of this behaviour to a very limited extent. They know that shaking a tree will get the fruit down, but aren’t intelligent enough to use tools.
However, a few days after posting my original piece I came across this article on the BBC News website which says that certain groups of chimpanzees in the Nimba Mountains of Guinea, Africa, are now using both stone and wooden cleavers, as well as stone anvils, to process Treculia fruits:
The apes are not simply cracking into the Treculia to get to otherwise unobtainable food, say researchers.
Instead, they are actively chopping up the food into more manageable portions.
I emailed the article to Lewis, saying that they’ll be worshipping the sun and sacrificing their cubs to ensure it rises every morning in no time! Lewis replied that the chimps are beginning to learn how to use tools, but it is very limited. Perhaps there won’t be any Blessed Virgin Marys and weeping statutes for a while after all.
For more on the evolution of religious faith, I would strongly recommend watching or listening to J Anderson “Andy” Thomson’s superb lecture at the American Atheists 2009 conference and Thomson and R Elizabeth Cornwell’s paper, “The Evolution of Religion”.
Finally, I have often been asked what evidence that I as an atheist would accept for the existence of God. Up until now, I have jumped in with both feet and then made a bit of a fool of myself. This is partly due to theists always being able to re-invent their God to conform to the empirical data and then accusing me of merely citing reasons not to believe in God.
However, I thought that Lewis’ example of having his departed wife returned to him was a wonderfully moving example of possible evidence for the supernatural that would make a sceptic reassess his or her non-belief. While I have not lost anyone close to me up to now in my life, I might just use that one in future when I am asked the question again.
manicstreetpreacher finally has his answer as to what one of America’s top Christian apologists has to say about the butchery of the Old Testament.
Is the good loved by the gods because it is good, or is it good because it is loved by the gods?
– Plato
Earlier this year, I reported on the Craig/Hitchens debate at Biola University. I had been wondering about Craig’s views on evolution for a while, but during the debate he finally revealed that he did not accept Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection. According to Craig’s “science” based on John Barrow and Frank Tipler’s The Anthropic Cosmological Principle, evolution was so “improbable” (surely Craig’s favourite word in the English language) that the sun would have burned out long before Homo sapiens could have evolved.
Craig has stiffened his position in the last couple of years. During his 2007 debate in London against embryologist Lewis Wolpert, author of Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast, Craig stated that he “neither believed nor disbelieved” in evolution, but had reservations over it on the grounds of improbability.
In the Hitchens debate, however, Craig rubbished evolution completely. I suppose it was the only way he could overthrow Hitchens’ “98,000 Year Wait Gambit” that in order to believe Christianity in the light of what we now know about the origins of the human race, you have to believe that Homo sapiens crawled painfully on their hands and knees for tens of thousands of years with low life expectancy and massive infant mortality with God watching with folded arms before finally intervening with a human sacrifice in a very remote part of the Middle East, the news of which still hasn’t permeated large parts of the civilised world.
As I wrote at the time, even to me as a non-scientist this was “a load of anthropic bunkum”. Richard Dawkins convincingly argues that the Anthropic Principle is similar to evolution: it is an alternative to the design explanation. We on Earth just happen to be lucky that our planet possesses the right “Goldilocks qualities” of being “just right” for life to emerge. After all, physical parameters ought to be irrelevant to an omnipotent God; he could have designed us to survive in a cold, hard vacuum if he wanted.
In addition, Craig appears totally ignorant of the fact that evolution is about small steps producing gradual, but ultimately massive change over very long periods of time. Improbable, my foot! Far from Craig “following the evidence wherever it leads” as he is so proud of saying, he is massaging the scientific evidence to ensure that his fantasy of the universe being designed with him in mind can remain in tact.
My other great Craig-curio was what he thought of the atrocities of the Old Testament. Craig teaches at Talbot School of Theology at Biola University where I understand that the students are taught that the Bible is free from error in all its words. I’ve always wondered what Craig made of the God-ordered massacres of the Old Testament, however, in the debates I have seen up until now; he has always cordoned off that topic.
I was mildly disappointed that Hitchens did not tear Craig in half like he usually does at the lectern. Craig smugly declared himself the victor of that clash. However, as good as it would have been to see Hitchens wipe the floor with his opponent he showed Craig as a right-wing fundamentalist. It was almost like watching Ted Haggard or Pat Robertson adopt the guise of a “serious scholar” as Craig harped on about the Gospels’ promise of eternal life as embodied in the resurrection of Jesus.
Continuing this gradual breaking down of Craig’s shell, I recently came across this audio clip of Craig on YouTube replying to The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation author Sam Harris (homepage / The Reason Project) and his objections to the barbarism of the Old Testament:
You will note that Craig says that rather than being an argument against the existence of God, the violence in the Old Testament that was apparently mandated by God is a question of whether the Bible is inerrant. It is open to debate as to whether the Israelites correctly interpreted the word of God in slaughtering all those poor Canaanites.
However, Craig well and truly lets his veil slip by stating that the Israelites were carrying out the will of God in dispensing with his enemies after emerging from 400 years in Egyptian captivity! Craig admitted that their acts would have been immoral but for the fact that they were ordered by God. The acts of murder and genocide became moral because God had ordered them.
Craig even admits that God has the right to end the lives of everyone on Earth this second if he so chooses. Talk about self-imposed slavery!
I couldn’t believe my ears and wanted further proof that this really was Craig’s view. After all, this is a man who argues that objective moral values such as the wrongness of rape and torturing a child can only come from God and therefore the existence of objective morality is an argument for the existence of God. As Craig puts it:
If God does not exist, objective moral values do not exist;
Objective moral values do exist;
Therefore, God exists.
Seeking further evidence, I came across this article on Craig’s ironically titled website, Reasonable Faith, written in response to a couple of email questions on the violence of the Old Testament and discovered that it just keeps on getting worse.
For your shock, if not your consideration:
[T]he problem isn’t that God ended the Canaanites’ lives. The problem is that He commanded the Israeli soldiers to end them. Isn’t that like commanding someone to commit murder? No, it’s not. Rather, since our moral duties are determined by God’s commands, it is commanding someone to do something which, in the absence of a divine command, would have been murder. The act was morally obligatory for the Israeli soldiers in virtue of God’s command, even though, had they undertaken it on their on initiative, it would have been wrong.
God can do anything. Even make genocide morally right:
On divine command theory, then, God has the right to command an act, which, in the absence of a divine command, would have been sin, but which is now morally obligatory in virtue of that command. [My emphasis]
This segment clearly demonstrates that Craig knows that murder, rape and torture are wrong independently of any divine command. But he says that they can be morally right if ordered by God as per Plato’s Euthyphro Dilemma quoted at the head of this article.
Do you see what Craig has done there? He has totally undermined his own argument that without God there can be no objective morality!
Craig goes on to explain that the destruction of unclean races by a super-race favoured by God is a virtuous thing (three guesses who tried to put that one into practice in the last century?):
By setting such strong, harsh dichotomies God taught Israel that any assimilation to pagan idolatry is intolerable. It was His way of preserving Israel’s spiritual health and posterity. God knew that if these Canaanite children were allowed to live, they would spell the undoing of Israel. The killing of the Canaanite children not only served to prevent assimilation to Canaanite identity but also served as a shattering, tangible illustration of Israel’s being set exclusively apart for God.
The murder of children is all fine and dandy as long as we think that God wants it. It was for their own good and they’ve actually gone to a better place:
Moreover, if we believe, as I do, that God’s grace is extended to those who die in infancy or as small children, the death of these children was actually their salvation. We are so wedded to an earthly, naturalistic perspective that we forget that those who die are happy to quit this earth for heaven’s incomparable joy. Therefore, God does these children no wrong in taking their lives.
But please spare a thought for those poor child murderers:
So whom does God wrong in commanding the destruction of the Canaanites? Not the Canaanite adults, for they were corrupt and deserving of judgement. Not the children, for they inherit eternal life. So who is wronged? Ironically, I think the most difficult part of this whole debate is the apparent wrong done to the Israeli soldiers themselves. Can you imagine what it would be like to have to break into some house and kill a terrified woman and her children? The brutalizing effect on these Israeli soldiers is disturbing.
Someone please pass me a bucket. I’m about to blow chunks over all this moral relativism:
But then, again, we’re thinking of this from a Christianized, Western standpoint. For people in the ancient world, life was already brutal. Violence and war were a fact of life for people living in the ancient Near East. Evidence of this fact is that the people who told these stories apparently thought nothing of what the Israeli soldiers were commanded to do (especially if these are founding legends of the nation). No one was wringing his hands over the soldiers’ having to kill the Canaanites; those who did so were national heroes.
It always brings a smile to my lips when apologists claim that God can be the only source of objective morality, yet when a sceptic pulls out a nasty passage from the Good Book, they go all relativist on you and say things like, “Well ok, but things were a lot different back then. Genocide, rape and slavery were the norm…”
No, genocide, rape and slavery were not morally right, even for people living 3,000 years ago. Perhaps books like Leviticus and Deuteronomy were the Universal Declaration on Human Rights of their day when simply compiling a short list of reasons to kill your enemies was an improvement over the general barbarity of the time. But values such as self-sacrifice, charity and love were still admired while murder and rape were reviled.
If we are unable to say that it was morally wrong of Moses to issue an order to his troops, as Thomas Paine put it in The Age of Reason, “to butcher the boys, massacre the mothers and debauch the daughters,” (Numbers 31: 13 – 18) then conversely, we cannot say that him leading the Children of Israel out of slavery in Egypt was morally right either!
Craig’s response continues by contending that Osama bin Laden has it soooooo wrong:
Now how does all this relate to Islamic jihad? Islam sees violence as a means of propagating the Muslim faith. Islam divides the world into two camps: the dar al-Islam (House of Submission) and the dar al-harb (House of War). The former are those lands which have been brought into submission to Islam; the latter are those nations which have not yet been brought into submission. This is how Islam actually views the world!
No, Dr Craig, those nineteen pious men who showed your pious nation the social benefits of this level of blind faith on 11 September 2001 were not trying to convert anybody that day. They were exacting what they saw as retribution from their god for America’s decadence and moral depravity. Rather like the Israelites exterminating the Canaanites in fact. If you are in any doubt as to this, perhaps you should take a look at this clip from two men whom you worryingly resemble:
Craig’s final conjecture can only be settled once and for all by force of arms:
By contrast, the conquest of Canaan represented God’s just judgement upon those peoples. The purpose was not at all to get them to convert to Judaism! War was not being used as an instrument of propagating the Jewish faith. Moreover, the slaughter of the Canaanites represented an unusual historical circumstance, not a regular means of behavior.
The problem with Islam, then, is not that it has got the wrong moral theory; it’s that it has got the wrong God. If the Muslim thinks that our moral duties are constituted by God’s commands, then I agree with him. But Muslims and Christians differ radically over God’s nature. Christians believe that God is all-loving, while Muslims believe that God loves only Muslims. Allah has no love for unbelievers and sinners. Therefore, they can be killed indiscriminately. Moreover, in Islam God’s omnipotence trumps everything, even His own nature. He is therefore utterly arbitrary in His dealing with mankind. By contrast Christians hold that God’s holy and loving nature determines what He commands.
The question, then, is not whose moral theory is correct, but which is the true God?
Why don’t you and the Muslims settle it once and for all by stepping outside, Dr Craig? This has clearly been the approach of certain Jewish rabbis in the upper quarters of the Israeli Defence Forces which continue to this day, not least during Israel’s military strikes against the Palestinians at the start of 2009. As Hitchens reported in March this year:
I remember being in Israel in 1986 when the chief army “chaplain” in the occupied territories, Rabbi Shmuel Derlich, issued his troops a 1,000-word pastoral letter enjoining them to apply the biblical commandment to exterminate the Amalekites as “the enemies of Israel.” Nobody has recently encountered any Amalekites, so the chief educational officer of the Israeli Defense Forces asked Rabbi Derlich whether he would care to define his terms and say whom he meant. Rather evasively – if rather alarmingly – the man of God replied, “Germans.” There are no Germans in Judaea and Samaria or, indeed, in the Old Testament, so the rabbi’s exhortation to slay all Germans as well as quite probably all Palestinians was referred to the Judge Advocate General’s Office. Forty military rabbis publicly came to Derlich’s support, and the rather spineless conclusion of the JAG was that he had committed no legal offense but should perhaps refrain in the future from making political statements on the army’s behalf…
Now, it’s common to hear people say [that violent passages in the Bible are] not intended to be “taken literally.” One also often hears the excuse that some wicked things are done “in the name of” religion, as if the wicked things were somehow the result of a misinterpretation. But the nationalist rabbis who prepare Israeli soldiers for their mission seem to think that this book might be the word of God, in which case the only misinterpretation would be the failure to take it literally. (I hate to break it to you, but the people who think that God’s will is revealed in scripture are known as “religious.” Those who do not think so must try to find another name for themselves.)
Possibly you remember Dr Baruch Goldstein, the man who in February 1994 unslung his weapon and killed more than two dozen worshippers at the mosque in Hebron. He had been a physician in the Israeli army and had first attracted attention by saying that he would refuse to treat non-Jews on the Sabbath. Now read Ethan Bronner’s report in the March 22 New York Times about the preachments of the Israeli army’s latest chief rabbi, a West Bank settler named Avichai Rontzski who also holds the rank of brigadier general. He has “said that the main reason for a Jewish doctor to treat a non-Jew on the Sabbath … is to avoid exposing Diaspora Jews to hatred.” Those of us who follow these things recognize that statement as one of the leading indicators of a truly determined racist and fundamentalist. Yet it comes not this time in the garb of a homicidal lone-wolf nut bag but in the full uniform and accoutrement of a general and a high priest… The latest news, according to Bronner, is that the Israeli Defense Ministry has felt compelled to reprimand Rontzski for “a rabbinal edict against showing the enemy mercy” that was distributed in booklet form to men and women in uniform (see Numbers 31: 13 – 18).
At least Craig is correct when he says at one point in the article that many Old Testament scholars are sceptical that the conquest of Canaan was an actual historical event, but that’s hardly the point. The Bible is supposed to be a document containing timeless social and moral codes while portraying the actions of people we ought to admire. In this exercise, it fails miserably. As he and Hitchens discussed in their Biola debate, Dostoyevsky in The Brothers Karamazov wonders whether “without God, all things are possible.” But as Hitchens argued, surely the corollary is true: that with God, all things are thinkable as well.
If one of the world’s foremost Christian apologists can issue such a grotesque defence of Yahweh that contradicts all of his own arguments for the divine source of human morality at a stroke, then it is unsurprising that PhD graduates in the 21st century will fly aeroplanes into buildings believing that they are morally right to do so and will be rewarded by God in the afterlife.
I don’t say that all religious people are mad, bad or sad per se, but they very often can be when it comes to their religious beliefs. As the Nobel Laureate physicist Steven Weinberg famously once said, “With or without religion, good people will do good things and bad people will do bad things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.”
William Lane Craig is living proof of this.
UPDATE 06/04/2010:
Since publishing this piece, I have come across a podcast on this topic as part of the “Reasonable Faith: Conversations with Dr William Lane Craig” series that Craig’s website produces if you can bear it. Lukeprog over at Common Sense Atheism has posted an excellent discussion.
I have also found this comment by Richard Dawkins posted on the debate forum of his website:
One of our commenters on another thread, stevencarrwork, posted a link to this article by the American theologian and Christian apologist William Lane Craig. I read it and found it so dumbfoundingly, staggeringly awful that I wanted to post it again. It is a stunning example of the theological mind at work. And remember, this is NOT an ‘extremist’, ‘fundamentalist’, ‘picking on the worst case’ example. My understanding is that William Lane Craig is a widely respected apologist for the Christian religion. Read his article and rub your eyes to make sure you are not having a bad dream.
manicstreetpreacher 
Premier Christian Media’s screening of ‘Expelled’: From Darwin to Hitler?
21/03/2010Part Four of my analysis of Premier Christian Media’s screening and debate of Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed examines the film’s claim that Darwin’s theory directly inspired Hitler and 20th century eugenics.
The final quarter of the film makes the outrageous allegation that Darwin’s work directly inspired Hitler and eugenics. The host, Ben Stein, visits Darwin’s former home of Down House in Kent and his memorial at the London Natural History Museum. He visits the Dachau concentration camp and Hadamar Clinic where he interviews the tour guide Uta George and Richard Weikart, Discovery Institute research fellow and author of From Darwin to Hitler.
I haven’t read Weikart’s book, but I listened to this lecture and was distinctly underwhelmed by the tenuous links made between the ancient idea of eugenics and Darwin’s theory. Darwinism describes a scientific process for which there is ample evidence. Whether we like its moral implication is irrelevant and Weikart is guilty of the naturalistic fallacy; confusing “what is” with “what ought to be”. Weikart’s arguments rely heavily on some disgraceful quote-mining of Darwin’s work, more of which below.
Weikart also ignores a wealth of other social, economic and indeed religious factors that resulted in the rise of Nazism. For excellent refutations of his thesis, I came across his radio debate against atheist Professor of Religious Studies at Iowa State University, Hector Avalos, as well as Avalos’ extensive blog posts on Debunking Christianity here and here.
Towards the end of Expelled, Stein reads out the following passage which is often quoted by creationists from The Descent of Man, first published in 1871:
However, the passage in full shows that Darwin was deeply compassionate to the handicapped and was not in favour of any euthanasia programme:
There are several other passages from Darwin that creationists mine in their attempts to show that he was immoral, but reveal quite the opposite when read in their true context. In the post-screening debate (at 43 minutes on the podcast) I asked the panel a question that drew their attention to this distortion, adding that while Darwin was about as racist as anyone else in Victorian England, he was a passionate abolitionist of the slave trade. Surprisingly, my comments drew nods of agreement from Steve Fuller. I also added that I have read Hitler’s Mein Kampf for myself. It contains not one reference of Darwin, evolution or natural selection, but talks rather a lot about his faith in Heaven and the Almighty as well as his theological hero, Martin Luther.
Alastair Noble made noises about how Darwin influenced Stalin. This claim is straight off the Answers in Genesis website and was repeated by David Robertson in our second debate on Premier’s Unbelievable? last year. The truth is that Stalin rejected Darwinism in favour of Lamarckism which lead to Lysenko’s insane programme to grow giant vegetables and deliver multiple harvests in one year, leading to the starvation of millions:
Steve Fuller replied that Mein Kampf discussed “selection”. However, Hitler was referring to artificial selection which humans have known about for centuries. Dog breeding and pigeon fancying have more responsibility for Hitler than On the Origin of the Species.
There is widespread confusion over Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection and “Social Darwinism”, which was coined by the Protestant anthropologist Herbert Spencer, who also came up with the term “survival of the fittest”. Although still tarring Darwin’s good name, Hitler’s ethic is better described as “Social Darwinist”.
Irritatingly, many respectable scientists and historians have linked Darwin to Nazi Germany. Sir Arthur Keith is often quoted by creationists as writing in Evolution & Ethics (1946) that Hitler was an evolutionist and was trying to create Darwin’s utopia based on the principles of eugenics, though Keith never showed which parts of Origins inspired Hitler. Laurence Rees’ otherwise excellent study of the Final Solution, Auschwitz, was tarnished somewhat with the assertion that the Nazis’ ideology was “expressly Darwinian”, again without citing any primary sources in support.
The full original title of On the Origin of Species is infamously “Or the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life”. Again, creationists have argued that this is clear evidence that Darwin was in favour of a brutal struggle for survival where the strong would crush the weak. However, as Richard Dawkins explained following the film’s release in an “Open Letter to a victim of Ben Stein’s lying propaganda”:
The Anti-Defamation League, an American Jewish pressure group dedicated to fighting anti-Semitism, issued the following statement against Expelled which is the first and last word against anyone claiming that Darwinism is in any way a link to eugenics or Social Darwinism:
Steve Fuller also argued that people who support the teaching of evolution also support abortion and euthanasia on the grounds that it will lead to a better version of humanity. Again, I found this claim deeply offensive. I have recently written that I am pro-choice on the grounds that the alternative is worse. Abortion should be the last option. Prevention is better than cure. The answer is increased access to contraception and education as to its proper use. I am not in favour of abortion because it is a quick and convenient method of wiping out Down’s Syndrome.
I can think of no better way to end these posts than with this compilation by YouTube auteur, Thunderf00t, that features Stein on a Christian TV network shortly after Expelled’s release making the appalling claim that “science leads to killing people”, juxtaposed with his own delusional fantasies about America needing to start World War Three in order to protect itself against Iran and North Korea.
P Z Myers couldn’t have phrased it any better:
Right on, brother.
Now, a “call to arms” (in the strictly metaphorical, non-jihadist sense of the term) to all atheists, rationalists, humanists, secularists and everyone else who cares about truth in science and a proper education of school children which is free from religious dogma and presupposition: Let’s go to work.
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