The message of Easter must have been 'sink the boot into atheists'

This Easter a bunch of god-botherers in Australia have decided they needed to get out all that angst and tizzy they built up while the Global Atheist Convention was in Melbourne. Besides, there was all that child-raping-coverup stuff they needed to distract people from, and blood-libelling the poor old Jews every time you have a bit of trouble is out of fashion now.

So the atheists have copped some of the vile crap we're used to seeing from the crazy christian rump. And tha Australian media have done their usual sterling job of reporting these things in a balanced, reasonable way (i.e. very badly indeed - that last was supposedly the "balancing" article describing the atheist response, but largely consists of far more theist quotes).

Yesterday I pointed out to my partner that as galling as it was, it was actually kind of good for us, because the more reasonable believers who have come to know a few atheists and discovered we just aren't the baby-eating nihilists we have been painted as will only be driven away even faster by this sort of rhetoric - it will hasten the demise of religion among the broader community, and become ever harder to claim any kind of moral authority when all that comes out of their mouths is hatred and lies.

If the Nielsen poll I pointed to late last year is accurate, and we combine with some information from the last census, the two largest religious denominations in Australia have recently become outnumbered by those that can't say they believe in god (20% and 26% for Anglicans and Catholics, compared with 30% who don't state a belief in god - and most of those - 24% are explicitly atheistic, choosing the option "don't believe in god".)

If anything, I expect these sort of attacks to become even more common for a while. And of course, the smaller the religions denominations become, the more radical the remainder must be, so I also expect it to get nastier.

Bruce at Thinker's Podium has a pretty good discussion and an interesting take from a somewhat similar perspective.

Barry Duke's article in the Freethinker is also worth looking at.

Happy Easter! Don't forget Jesus died so you could hate atheists!

Darwin vs the crocoduck

A bit of fun. I do love schadenfreude.

Kirk Cameron on O'Reilly:

"Darwin said in order to prove evolution [...] you gotta be able to prove [...] one animal transitioning into another. And all through the fossil record and life, we don't find one of these - a crocoduck."

(original here)

So did Darwin say that? Well, no. In fact, he specifically debunks the notion.

Darwin, Origin of Species, Chapter IX:

"... it should always be borne in mind what sort of intermediate forms must, on my theory, have formerly existed. I have found it difficult, when looking at any two species, to avoid picturing to myself forms directly intermediate between them. But this is a wholly false view; we should always look for forms intermediate between each species and a common but unknown progenitor; and the progenitor will generally have differed in some respects from all its modified descendants."
(emphasis in the original)

Nothing more needs to be said. Darwin completely debunked Cameron and Comfort 150 years before they even thought of it. When you're pwnt by a guy that's been dead for about a century, you're too stupid to argue with. Just quote what Darwin actually said, and you're done.

[But just in case a creationist wanders by and is too dumb to just read Darwin, it's kind of like this. If I find you and your cousin and I'm looking for an intermediate form to see if you're related, I won't find a direct intermediate (a 50-50 mix of you and your cousin, or even worse, a Frankenstein's monster of components of both of you, like Cameron's crocoduck). The intermediate form is your nearest common ancestor -- your grandparents. Your grandparents will have characteristics different from both of you, and will not be directly intermediate. Not exactly like that, of course, the analogy is imperfect. But it's really not that complicated.]


The only possible conclusions are that they never read Darwin, or they did and they're deliberately lying. Either way, we end up with creationist lies. As usual.

To paraphrase Haldane, God must have an inordinate fondness for lying creationists, since he made so many of them.

Government in SF - a failure of imagination?

(Within this post, I'm going to take the stance that SF stands for "speculative fiction" rather than science fiction. My main reason is that SF these days rarely contains much actual "sciency" stuff, and the category has become so broad that the term "science fiction" is not even vaguely true of most of it. It is also possible that it serves my argument. )

I've long had a problem with how government is represented in SF, particularly film and television, but it also happens in written SF - that the governments almost always seem to be of only two very narrow types:
(i) near-absolute monarchy (though possibly called an emperor or something, often also with a noble class);
(ii) US-style presidential democracy.

I have no doubt that in many stories, these are plausible models. However, I simply cannot fathom why so many writers assume that if it's not the first, it must be the second. Sometimes the US political system is reproduced to an astonishing level of detail, including a near duplicate constitution and everything.

According to wikipedia:
- there are 123 democratic countries
- there are 72 parliamentary democracies
- in addition, there are a large number of "hybrid" models (particularly in Eastern Europe)

That is, a US-style democracy is by far in the minority. On earth, parliamentary-style democracies are the rule. Yet in SF, they're almost unheard of.

So why in visual-media SF (the majority of whose writers are from the US), if you don't have some form of monarchy or monarchy analogue, will it be (apart from a very few exceptions), a US-clone democracy, often down to its boot-buckles? Is this a failure of imagination? Are US film and TV writers largely unable to imagine anything else? Are they unaware of anything else? Or do they imagine that a US audience won't accept anything else (and everyone else will, presumably)? If it's the last, that, too, is a failure of imagination - I certainly don't believe US fans of SF are that unimaginative and unwilling to think about different ideas.

Obviously, people tend to write about what they're familiar with, but if you only ever write about only what's in your back yard, your fiction hardly deserves the name "speculative".

Come on, people, have a look at the world around you. Try a different model for government once in a while!

God of the non-gaps

Evolved and Rational's latest post is another delightful snark, with which I am nevertheless going to take issue.

Perhaps uncharacteristically, Evolved is being far too kind this time, I'm afraid.

She says: "Behe's theology is one where god resides in the gaps of human knowledge [...] his criteria for detecting design is merely what has not been explained by science at the time. "

I think the first part of that quote is what Behe was aiming for. Unfortunately, he missed - Behe's examples of gaps, his cases of "irreducible complexity", his examples of non-evolution, are wrong.

On HIV, Behe was wrong. He was thoroughly spanked by erv (erv is now at scienceblogs), pursued at Panda's Thumb (e.g. ), and eventually forced to admit that he was wrong. A sucky admission, but still, he finally noticed he'd been pwned.
On the bacterial flagellum, Behe was wrong. Epically wrong.
On the immune system and much else besides, Behe was wrong

These are just examples, there are lots of others.

I'm not aware of a single instance where Behe managed to pick an actual legitimate gap.

[It's not like it's hard. As the cryptotheist evolution-denialists are so fond of pointing out, just like building a drystone wall, every time a gap is filled in, there are more (but much tinier) gaps around it - so these days there are plenty of little gaps to go around, if you have even the slightest clue about where to look. Of course the big problem for the cryptotheist is that to actually find the genuine gaps you have to know enough science to be able to read a few papers - that is, to display a basic competence one might expect from a beginning science postgrad.]

While trying to construct a God-of-the-gaps (a trivial exercise for even the barely competent), Behe - doubtless inspired by God - constructed a God-of-the-non-gaps, a God-of-the-reducibly-complex, a God-of-the-already-explained-by-science.

Behe's work is a masterpiece of epic fail. Perhaps God is trying to tell you something, Michael. Like how much you suck at science. (As Abbie pointed out, you also suck at Google.)

(I won't even bother with Dembski. His work is more incompetent, contentless and pathetic than that of Behe. And he's an unrepentant - and incompetent - thief. Why pussyfoot about, let's just go the whole hog. Dembski just generally sucks.)