The Ten Questions

1. How reliable is the source of the claim?
2. Does the source make similar claims?
3. Have the claims been verified by somebody else?
4. Does this fit with the way the world works?
5. Has anyone tried to disprove the claim?
6. Where does the preponderance of evidence point?
7. Is the claimant playing by the rules of science?
8. Is the claimant providing positive evidence?
9. Does the new theory account for as many phenomena as the old theory?
10. Are personal beliefs driving the claim?

Credits

This is the first video by RDFTV.
Presented by The Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science
Directed by Josh Timonen
Produced by Maureen Norton
Animation by Pew 36 Animation Studios
Music by Neal Acree
Post Production Sound by Sound Satisfaction
Supervising Sound Editor/Re-Recording Mixer: Gary J. Coppola, C.A.S.
Sound Editor: Ben Rauscher
Production Assistant: Graham Immel
Copyright © 2009 Upper Branch Productions, Inc.

WATCH the video on abc.net.au

I think it is a well done show, fair and balanced, so to speak, but I do find the premise rather interesting in as much as they purport to be studying “us” like we’re some mysterious species recently discovered on a remote island. From the voice over: “What do they believe? And are they all the same?” Picture David Attenborough hanging from a cliff face, “and here, if you look closely, you’ll see amongst the vast forest of believers the rare spotted atheist, whose diet remains a mystery but whose mating habits produce far fewer offspring than believers, and so they nest precariously on face cliffs such as this one so as not to be devoured by their carnivorous neighbors…”

Here’s the show summary:

Compass talks to atheists of different stripes.Eminent philosopher John Gray; science writer and editor of Skeptic magazine Michael Shermer; historian and writer Inga Clendinnen and Australia’s best known atheist Phillip Adams, all explore the philosophical and practical consequences of being an atheist.

How does their atheism shape their attitudes to science and the big questions of our time such as war and global warming? Is conflict between atheists and believers inevitable and necessary? Or, is this debate generating more heat than light?

Genesis Revisited

I happened upon this delightful video based on the Coda entitled “Genesis Revisited,” from my book, Why Darwin Matters, which I explained in the book: “To convey the logical absurdity of trying to squeeze the round peg of science into the square hole of religion, I penned the following scientific revision of the Genesis creation story. It is not intended as a sacrilege of the poetic beauty of Genesis; rather, it is a mere extension of what the creationists have already done to Genesis in their insistence that it be read not as mythic saga but as scientific prose. If Genesis were written in the language of modern science, it would read something like this.”

The voice is in this video is a computer generated voice called “Daniel” from RealSpeak

Genesis Revisited: A Scientific Creation Story
by Michael Shermer

In the beginning — specifically on October 23, 4004 B.C., at noon — out of quantum foam fluctuation God created the Big Bang, followed by cosmological inflation and an expanding universe. And darkness was upon the face of the deep, so He commanded hydrogen atoms (which He created from Quarks) to fuse and become helium atoms and in the process release energy in the form of light. And the light maker he called the sun, and the process He called fusion. And He saw the light was good because now He could see what He was doing, so He created Earth. And the evening and the morning were the first day.

And God said, Let there be lots of fusion light makers in the sky. Some of these fusion makers He grouped into collections He called galaxies, and these appeared to be millions and even billions of light years from Earth, which would mean that they were created before the first creation in 4004 B.C. This was confusing, so God created tired light, and the creation story was preserved. And created He many wondrous splendors such as Red Giants, White Dwarfs, Quasars, Pulsars, Supernova, Worm Holes, and even Black Holes out of which nothing can escape. But since God cannot be constrained by nothing, He created Hawking radiation through which information can escape from Black Holes. This made God even more tired than tired light, and the evening and the morning were the second day.

And God said, Let the waters under the heavens be gathered together unto one place, and let the continents drift apart by plate tectonics. He decreed sea floor spreading would create zones of emergence, and He caused subduction zones to build mountains and cause earthquakes. In weak points in the crust God created volcanic islands, where the next day He would place organisms that were similar to but different from their relatives on the continents, so that still later created creatures called humans would mistake them for evolved descendants created by adaptive radiation. And the evening and the morning were the third day. And God saw that the land was barren, so He created animals bearing their own kind, declaring Thou shalt not evolve into new species, and thy equilibrium shall not be punctuated. And God placed into the rocks, fossils that appeared older than 4004 B.C. that were similar to but different from living creatures. And the sequence resembled descent with modification. And the evening and morning were the fourth day.

And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creatures that hath life, the fishes. And God created great whales whose skeletal structure and physiology were homologous with the land mammals he would create later that day. God then brought forth abundantly all creatures, great and small, declaring that microevolution was permitted, but not macroevolution. And God said, “Natura non facit saltum” — Nature shall not make leaps. And the evening and morning were the fifth day.

And God created the pongidids and hominids with 98 percent genetic similarity, naming two of them Adam and Eve. In the book in which God explained how He did all this, in one chapter He said he created Adam and Eve together out of the dust at the same time, but in another chapter He said He created Adam first, then later created Eve out of one of Adam’s ribs. This caused confusion in the valley of the shadow of doubt, so God created theologians to sort it out.

And in the ground placed He in abundance teeth, jaws, skulls, and pelvises of transitional fossils from pre-Adamite creatures. One chosen as his special creation He named Lucy, who could walk upright like a human but had a small brain like an ape. And God realized this too was confusing, so he created paleoanthropologists to figure it out.

Just as He was finishing up the loose ends of the creation God realized that Adam’s immediate descendants would not understand inflationary cosmology, global general relativity, quantum mechanics, astrophysics, biochemistry, paleontology, and evolutionary biology, so he created creation myths. But there were so many creation stories throughout the world God realized this too was confusing, so created He anthropologists and mythologists.

By now the valley of the shadow of doubt was overrunneth with skepticism, so God became angry, so angry that God lost His temper and cursed the first humans, telling them to go forth and multiply themselves (but not in those words). But the humans took God literally and now there are six billion of them. And the evening and morning were the sixth day.

By now God was tired, so He proclaimed, “Thank me its Friday,” and He made the weekend.
It was a good idea.

During the tsunami of bicentennial celebrations of Charles Darwin’s 200th birthday in February, I visited the fringes of evolutionary skepticism to better understand how one of science’s grandest theories could still be doubted.

Noah’s Ark Zoo Farm in Bristol, England, is run by a kindly gentlemen named Anthony Bush, who insisted that I not confuse him with those “loony American creationists” who think that Earth is only 6,000 years old. “How old do you think it is?” I queried. “Oh, I’ve worked it out to be around 100,000 years old, with Adam and Eve at around 21,000 years old.” (At an order of magnitude difference that makes Mr. Bush only five zeros shy of reality.)

What about, I pressed on, all the geologic evidence for a much older Earth? All those strata of, say, sandstone — loose sand compressed into solid rock over immense periods? Those strata are laid down every season, like tree rings, Bush explained. Interesting analogy, given that we can see trees growing from year to year, but where can we find sand being annually compressed into stone?

At the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Ky., I learned that Earth was created in 4004 B.C., about the same time that the Mesopotamians invented beer (“That’s on the secular timeline,” I was told). Dioramas feature children frolicking among vegetarian dinosaurs, including a T. rex and Utahraptor, whose daggerlike teeth and claws, it was noted, were used for cracking open coconuts before the Fall. But then the snake tempted Eve, who in turn charmed Adam into tasting the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil — after which dinosaurs became meat eaters, humans became sinners and Noah gathered the animals into the Ark (also rendered into a dioramic drama complete with screaming left-behinders on soon-to-be swamped rocks).

My tour ended with an interview with Georgia Purdom, an accommodating and bright woman (Ph.D. in molecular genetics from Ohio State University) who explained that the worldview you hold (biblical versus secular) determines how you interpret the data.

I countered by pointing out that Francis Collins, former head of the Human Genome Project, is a born-again evangelical Christian who fully accepts evolution. In his book The Language of God (Free Press, 2007), Collins describes ancient repetitive elements (AREs) in DNA that arise from “jumping genes” that copy and insert themselves in other locations in the genome, usually without any function. When you align sections of human and mouse genomes, the AREs are in the same location. “Unless one is willing to take the position that God has placed these decapitated AREs in these precise positions to confuse and mislead us,” he asserts, “the conclusion of a common ancestor for humans and mice is virtually inescapable.”

Collins is wrong, Purdom stated, because “he does not accept the biblical history in Genesis, so he’s beginning with his ideas about what happened in the past rather than what God said happened in the past, so he’s interpreting that data in light of that starting point.”

Shoehorning science into scripture was also painfully on display at the University of North Florida, where I debated founder and chief biblical cosmologist of Reasons to Believe Hugh Ross, an Old Earth Creationist who thinks that the biblical authors describe the expanding universe in such passages as Job 9:8, where God “stretched out the heavens,” and Isaiah 40:22, where God “stretcheth out the heavens as a curtain, and spreadeth them out as a tent to dwell in.” The key word in Hebrew is natah, which means “spread out,” like a blanket or a tent, and is a metaphor for the dome or canopy of the sky and fixed stars that formed the basis of the cosmology of the ancient Hebrews, derived from the earlier Babylonian cosmology during the Jewish captivity in Mesopotamia.

In my opinion, Ross employs the hindsight bias when he digs through the scriptures in search of passages that vaguely resemble current scientific findings. Had cosmologists discovered that we live in a closed universe that will eventually collapse, then it seems to me that Job 9:7 would work well by confirming God “commandeth the sun, and it riseth not; and sealeth up the stars.”

Seek and ye shall find.

Last night, April 28, 2009, I debated Hugh Ross and Fuz Rana from Reasons to Believe (RTB), an evangelical Christian organization whose mission it is to give people “reasons to believe” beyond the usual faith-based reasons. In this case, it is to scour the annals of scientific discovery in search of findings that seem to gel well with biblical passages; and even if they don’t seem to fit, these gentlemen are adroit at massaging both the research and the scriptures such that in the end they will fit come hell or high water.

I blogged about my previous debate with the RTB boys before, so I won’t repeat their arguments and my rebuttals here, but this was most definitely a larger venue and audience — the basketball arena at the University of Texas at Austin with over 3,000 in attendance — so I made sure that my presentation was especially poignant and lively (first and foremost, I believe, a public speaker must be interesting, have something to say, and say it in a manner that gets people to pay attention and remember). For example, I nailed Ross right off the bat on his claim that the RTB “day-age” model of creation is correct when he said that the use of the Hebrew word “yom” in Genesis means “epoch” (and therefore no matter what scientists discover about the age of the origins of life, the Earth, and the universe, they can say “see, our model predicted that correctly”).

No, sorry gentlemen, yom means “day,” as in, well, a day, a 24-hour day. Yom Kippur, for example, is the “Day of Atonement”. Yom Kippur is, in fact, the 10th and final day of the Ten Days of Repentance that begin with Rosh Hashanah. Yom Kippur does not mean the “Age of Atonement,” the “Epoch of Atonement,” the “Geological Age of Atonement,” or the “Cosmological Constant of Atonement.” As I pointed this out I could see Mssrs. Ross and Rana scrambling through their Bibles and other works of reference they had on the table with them, but they never did respond so I presume that they have conceded the point.

I also made the general point that their RTB creation models are based on postdictions, whereas science depends on prediction. That is, the RTB models start with what we already know about nature, then search for biblical passages to match them, then predict that we’ll find more of the same. This is exactly what the Nostradamians do, as when they “predicted” 9/11 … after it happened! Sorry gentlemen, that’s not a prediction; that’s a postdiction. For RTB to be science, they must make predictions about things we do not already know!

Ross claims that the Bible — and only the Bible — has a creation story to match that of modern cosmology; that is, the creation of the universe out of nothing, that the earth was without form and void, etc. That’s not true, and I provided several examples from the ancient Mesopotamians and the ancient Egyptians. But I also found this one that I added to the collection, from the Tao-te Ching 25, 6th century B.C.E.:

There was something undifferentiated
and yet complete,
which existed before heaven and earth.
Soundless and formless,
it depends on nothing and does not change.
It operates everywhere
and is free from danger.
It may be considered
the mother of the universe.
I do not know its name; I call it Tao.

At one point in my presentation I pointed out the supreme irony of an atheist having to explain to theists how to properly read the Bible. The book of Job, for example, is about suffering and the problem of evil and why bad things happen to good people. It is not a book of cosmology. Further, I noted that Bible scholars of all stripes (most of whom are deeply religious) agree that the Bible is an edited volume written by many authors over a long span of time. This helps explain why, for example, in one passage Noah is instructed to take two of every kind of animal on the Ark, and in another passage he is instructed to take 7 of each kind. One version has the flood lasting 40 days and 40 nights, another passage says 150 days. In one passage Noah sends out a raven to find land. In another passage he sends a dove. And on and on. By adopting the methods of Reasons to Believe, you are forced to dismiss all of this scholarship and miss the real meaning of the Bible. The Bible is about how people should get along with one another and about morality and ethics and meaning. By trying to make the Bible fit the current estimates of the Hubble constant (to pick just one among many examples), me thinks you are missing the point of the book, and thus (in your world view) you are missing God’s message.

Is that supreme irony, or what?

In a form of what I call “Literary Patternicity” (patternicity is the tendency to find meaningful patterns in meaningless noise), in the following passage from the great poet John Donne, it would appear that he anticipated the discovery of the double helix as the basis of life and reproduction:

Our eye-beams twisted, and did thread
Our eyes upon one double string;
So to intergraft our hands, as yet
Was all the means to make us one,
And pictures in our eyes to get
Was all our propagation.

Wow, incredible, how could John Donne have anticipated the discovery by Crick and Watson centuries later? But more importantly, my point in this exercise in literary patternicity is that you will miss the beauty and power of Donne’s poetry if you try to read into it modern scientific discoveries.

I closed with a set of challenges to Ross and Rana, asking them to tell us, from their scriptural readings, the answers to the following unknowns in science:

1. Did Neanderthals have symbolic language, and what caused their extinction?
2. Is RNA the precursor to DNA, and what came first, cells or self-replicating molecules?
3. Did eukaryotic cells come from prokaryotic cells?
4. When did ID/God intervene in the history of life — never, occasionally, always?
5. Why doesn’t God heal amputees?
6. If it turns out that your testable RTB models are refuted, will you give up your belief in Jesus as your savior?

Interestingly, although Ross said that if his RTB models were refuted he would give up his belief in both God and Jesus, there erupted in the audience a loud chorus of “no” voices, which made my point beautifully: this is not, never was, and never will be about science, because no scientific evidence would ever dissuade believers from their belief. Why? Because such beliefs are not based on science in the first place.

Q.E.D.

Unbeknownst to me, in attendance (among the 900+ students and teachers) was famed “expelled” creationist Caroline Crocker, featured in the Ben Stein film Expelled as having been, well, expelled for simply mentioning Intelligent Design in her college course on cell biology at George Mason University. (You can read about what really happened to Crocker here: http://www.skeptic.com/eskeptic/08-04-23.html). I would like to comment on her review of my talk, which you can read in full here:

http://www.arn.org/blogs/index.php/2/2009/04/04/how_disappointing

Crocker says she was “disappointed” in my talk primarily because I discussed religion and especially because I used humor. In my experience, I find that humorlessness is a trait endemic to quacks and pseudoscientists, who take themselves and their unproven ideas far too seriously. Even so, my sequence of editorial cartoons about creationists, along with the string of images of the iconic Time-Life book foldout of the linear sequence of human evolution from apes to us, both serve a larger purpose, which I telegraphed for people like Crocker who missed the point nonetheless: the evolution-creation controversy remains a lively cultural debate that must be addressed (and thus, Caroline, this is why I discussed religion), and the “ladder of progress” lineal descent is wrong (and Steve Gould devoted his life to debunking it and promoting in its stead the “richly branching bush” of evolution) and has led to a standard myth promulgated by creationists along these lines: “If humans came from apes, why are there still apes around?” (I even had a cartoon of this exact question from the B.C. cartoonist Johnny Hart, who is a creationist—Answers-in-Genesis features him here: http://www.answersingenesis.org/creation/v19/i1/hart.asp). The answer is simple: we didn’t come from apes; apes and humans came from a common ancestor 6-7 million years ago.

Crocker also upbraids me for an oversimplified characterization of ID thusly (in a non-cartoon slide):

1. X looks designed
2. I can’t think how X was designed naturally
3. Therefore X was designed supernaturally. (God of the gaps.)

Well, Caroline, this may well be a characterization of how IDers argue, but it is true nevertheless. All of the arguments of IDers really do reduce to this simple syllogism, whether X represents the wing, the eye, DNA, or the bacterial flagellum. It all comes down to an argument from personal incredulity along these lines: “Because I, Caroline Crocker, cannot think of how the wing (or eye, DNA, or flagellum) could have evolved naturally, it must have been designed supernaturally.”

But I didn’t just end my discussion of ID with that single slide (although I could have and made the point in full), I devoted about a third of my slides to specific arguments made by William Dembski, Michael Behe, Stephen Meyer, Paul Nelson, and the other ID leading lights. I know because I’ve debated them all and so I just used a facsimile of their slides to illustrate what they argue, then I presented the rebuttals provided by scientists in this debate over the past decade, such that in the end there is nothing left of substance to ID (UCSD filmed my talk and I gave them my powerpoint slides to drop into the video for clear presentation, and they will have that up on their web page soon).

Crocker also whines: “Then Dr. Shermer came to the question that children always ask, ‘Well, if God made everything, who made God?’” Well, if it is such a childish question, it should be easy to answer, no? No. For IDers like Crocker, finding an unanswerable X is the end of the search. For scientists, X is just the beginning of the search. I made this point about dark energy and dark matter: these are just words—linguistic placeholders—until cosmologists figure out what they are and how they operate in the natural world. Analogously, saying that “an Intelligent Designer” did it is not an answer for a scientist; it is just a linguistic placeholder until a natural cause can be found.

I punctuated this point with “Shermer’s Last Law” (“any sufficiently advanced extra-terrestrial intelligence is indistinguishable from God”), as a rebuttal to William Dembski’s statement that IDers make no claims about who or what the designer is (to avoid using the “G” word), and that ID could even be an alien intelligence. My initial response to Dembski is “baloney” (well, that’s the nice word for what I would actually say in private). Dembski doesn’t think that ID is ET, and neither does anyone else, so why make the argument? The answer is the 1st amendment of the U.S. Constitution. But my actual answer is that the most we could ever hope to find in search of a top-down intelligent designer of life (who is not an actual omniscient, omnipotent deity) is an ET capable of genetic engineering, cellular construction, and the technological capability of creating life, which any ETI more advanced than us by, say, 500 to 5000 years (following Ray Kurzweil’s logic of the coming singularity) will surely be capable of doing.

Finally, I did not (or did not mean) to say that every last proponent of ID is a Christian (exceptions provided by Crocker include Ben Stein, Anthony Flew, David Berlinski, and Steve Fuller), only that most of them are, most notably ID’s founding fathers: William Dembski, Michael Behe, Stephen Meyer, Paul Nelson, and Phillip Johnson. But don’t take my word for it. Here are their own words:

“Thus, in its relation to Christianity, intelligent design should be viewed as a ground-clearing operation that gets rid of the intellectual rubbish that for generations has kept Christianity from receiving serious consideration.” —William Dembski, “Intelligent Design’s Contribution to the Debate over Evolution: A Reply to Henry Morris,” 2005

On February 6, 2000, Dembski told the National Religious Broadcasters at their annual conference in Anaheim, California: “Intelligent Design opens the whole possibility of us being created in the image of a benevolent God…. The job of apologetics is to clear the ground, to clear obstacles that prevent people from coming to the knowledge of Christ. … And if there’s anything that I think has blocked the growth of Christ as the free reign of the Spirit and people accepting the Scripture and Jesus Christ, it is the Darwinian naturalistic view.”
(Quoted in: Benen, Steve. 2000. “Science Test.” Church & State, July/August, online at http://www.au.org/churchstate/cs7002.htm.)

In a feature article in the Christian magazine Touchstone, Dembski was even more succinct: “Intelligent design is just the Logos theology of John’s Gospel restated in the idiom of information theory.”
(Dembski, William. 1999. “Signs of Intelligence: A Primer on the discernment of Intelligent Design.” Touchstone, p. 84.)

“Christians in the twentieth century have been playing defense. They’ve been fighting a defensive war to defend what they have, to defend as much of it as they can. It never turns the tide. What we’re trying to do is something entirely different. We’re trying to go into enemy territory, their very center, and blow up the ammunition dump. What is their ammunition dump in this metaphor? It is their version of creation.”
(Phillip Johnson, quoted in Benen, Steve. 2000. “Science Test.” Church & State, July/August, online: http://www.au.org/churchstate/cs7002.htm>.)

Johnson was even blunter in 1996: “This isn’t really, and never has been, a debate about science…. It’s about religion and philosophy.”
(Quoted in Jay Grelen, Jay. 1996. “Witnesses for the Prosecution.” World, November 30, online at: http://www.worldmag.com/world/issue/11-30-96/national_2.asp.)

“Johnson calls his movement ‘The Wedge.’ The objective, he said, is to convince people that Darwinism is inherently atheistic, thus shifting the debate from creationism vs. evolution to the existence of God vs. the non-existence of God. From there people are introduced to ‘the truth’ of the Bible and then ‘the question of sin’ and finally ‘introduced to Jesus.’”
—Description of Phillip Johnson’s Wedge Program, “Missionary Man.” Church & State magazine, 1999

Q.E.D. This is all about religion and thus should be handled on this level.

Two Gibbons on Noah’s Ark, bearing no resemblance whatsoever to humans.

Evolution and Creationism in England

During the first week of February, 2009, on the occasion of Charles Darwin’s 200th birthday celebrations at various locals around England (including his birthplace city of Shrewsbury — see photo montage below), my hosts Andrew Kelly (a science writer who authored a gorgeous coffee-table book entitled Darwin: For the Love of Science) and Bruce Hood (a University of Bristol cognitive psychologist and author of the forthcoming book Supersense), arranged for a visit to Noah’s Ark Zoo Farm in Bristol, run by a kindly creationist gentleman named Anthony Bush. (Yes, in addition to being a zoo for the public to tour, it is a working farm.)

The Manifest of Noah’s Ark, according to its modern day purser, Anthony Bush.

Bush’s warmth and good cheer were appreciated on this blistering cold snowy day, one of the worst witnessed in the UK in decades. As we started our tour Mr. Bush made it clear to me that he did not to be confused with those “loonie American creationists” who think that the earth is only 6,000 years old. No, no, the Earth is much older than that, he proclaimed. “How old do you think it is?” I queried. “Oh, I’ve worked it out to be around 100,000 years old, with Adam and Eve at around 21,000 years old.” No, indeed, there was no confusing Mr. Bush with those nutty American creationists! And what was happening between those two time spans? If I understood Mr. Bush correctly, he believes that between the creation at 100,000 years ago and Adam and Eve 21,000 years ago, there was the pre-Adamite period during which the dinosaurs roamed.

The author and Mr. Anthony Bush, the curator and administrator of Noah’s Ark Zoo Farm, discuss the differences between apes and humans.

What about all the geological evidence for a much older Earth, I pressed on? All those strata of, say, sandstone, which was once loose sand compressed into solid rock over immense periods of time — how could that possibly happen over thousands instead of millions of years? Those strata are laid down every season, like tree-rings, he explained. Interesting analogy, since we can see trees growing from year to year, but where on earth can we see sand being compressed into stone each year?

Noah’s Ark captain, Anthony Bush, explains to Michael Shermer the recolonization theory, which holds that the modern geographic distribution of species around the globe today all happened after the flood destroyed all life on earth (even the fish drowned?) and Noah released the animal pairs to go forth and multiply.

Noah’s Ark Zoo Farm features educational posters for British school children to read on their tour, including this one showing the lineage of Adam and Eve.

The conversation turned most passionate for Mr. Bush when we arrived at the primate cages, featuring marmosets and gibbons. Standing next to a poster display of the differences between apes and humans (implying that humans are not apes, which we are), Mr. Bush seemed particularly interested (obsessed really) in the sexual differences between us, insisting that humans are the only primates that copulate in the missionary position (he waxed poetic about how the angle of the vagina and the slant of the penis are perfectly positioned for proper penetration (say that three times!) for producing the orgasm, which God created to keep us together in pair bonds (he offered no explanation for why women get multiples and men only one, and I wasn’t about to ask). He added that we are the only primate to have orgasms. I told him about bonobos, whom Frans deWaal describes as a very sexual primate indeed, including copulating in the missionary position and apparently experiencing orgasms (and if not then they sure seem to be having as good a time as we do during sex). Mr. Bush offered no acknowledgement of this fact, but after more sex talk along these lines I finally said something like “you sure are into sex,” to which he responded “what do you expect, I’m a man?” To which I rejoined: “yes, well, Darwinism explains that nicely, thank you.”

The author in front of Darwin's birthplace

If you want to read more about the Noah’s Ark Zoo Farm, go to: http://www.noahsarkzoofarm.co.uk/

I haven’t any idea how influential Anthony Bush’s Noah’s Ark Zoo Farm is on the school children who are taken there on field trips, but I was most disturbed by the results of a survey just released there (the “Rescuing Darwin Survey” conducted by the polling agency ComRes on behalf of the Theos thinktank) that was given to me by my hosts to prepare me for my talk on evolution and creationism, indicating that half of British adults do not believe in evolution, with at least 22 percent preferring creationism or intelligent design as an explanation for how the world came about. In fact, according to this survey, only 25 percent of Britons said that they believe Darwin’s theory of evolution is “definitely true,” while another quarter reported that they think it is “probably true.” These results mirror those found in most surveys of American’s attitudes about evolution, although ours are slightly worse. In England, according to this recent survey, fully half of the 2,060 people questioned were either strongly opposed to the theory of evolution, or confused about it. There are even some Young Earth Creationists in the UK, as the survey found that around 10 percent of Britons believe that God created the world some time in the last 10,000 years.

The author in front of Darwin's school

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In this age of supposed scientific enlightenment, many people still believe in mind reading, past-life regression theory, New Age hokum, and alien abduction. A no-holds-barred assault on popular superstitions and prejudices, with more than 80,000 copies in print, Why People Believe Weird Things debunks these nonsensical claims and explores the very human reasons people find otherworldly phenomena, conspiracy theories, and cults so appealing. In an entirely new chapter, “Why Smart People Believe in Weird Things,” Michael Shermer takes on science luminaries like physicist Frank Tippler and others, who hide their spiritual beliefs behind the trappings of science.

Shermer, science historian and true crusader, also reveals the more dangerous side of such illogical thinking, including Holocaust denial, the recovered-memory movement, the satanic ritual abuse scare, and other modern crazes. Why People Believe Weird Things is an eye-opening resource for the most gullible among us and those who want to protect them.

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Evolution happened, and the theory describing it is one of the most well founded in all of science. Then why do half of all Americans reject it? There are religious reasons, such as the fear of atheism and the perceived loss of ultimate meaning; there are psychological reasons, such as the ego-deflating realization that we are mere animals; and there are political reasons, such as the equation of evolution with moral relativism on the right, and the connection of evolution to eugenics and social Darwinism on the left.

In Why Darwin Matters, historian of science and bestselling author Michael Shermer defuses these fears by examining what evolution really is, how we know it happened, and how to test it. Shermer then discusses what science is through a brief history of the evolution-creation controversy from the Scopes “Monkey” trial of 1925, through the U.S. Supreme Court case of 1987, to the ongoing trials today, demonstrating clearly how and why creationism and Intelligent Design theory are not science. Dr. Shermer also builds a powerful case for evolution as the scientific theory that most closely parallels the Christian model of human nature and the conservative model of free market economics.

The most common reason people give for why they believe in God is the good design of the world and the life in it. The question is: who or what is the designer? Why Darwin Matters examines the difference between supernatural design (creationism) v. natural design (evolution) and how evolution can explain complex design.

Dr. Shermer was once an evangelical Christian and a creationist, and is now one of the best-known public intellectuals defending evolutionary theory, so Why Darwin Matters provides readers with an insiders’ guide to the evolution-creation debate, in which he shows why creationism and Intelligent Design are not only bad science, they are bad theology, and why science should be embraced by people of all beliefs.

I have come to the conclusion that what’s fair is fair, and that the creationists have a good point. After all, isn’t education all about hearing both sides of an issue? And they are correct, no one was there to witness the creation, so any ideas about who or what caused the creation can only be speculative theories and therefore never provable.

Therefore, I am certain that Ministers, Priests, Rabbis, and religious leaders of all sects will be pleased to read the following disclaimer to their respective congregations every Sunday morning, or before any sermon delivered:

Good morning ladies and gentlemen, God bless and welcome to [fill in the name of your church, temple, mosque, or center of worship here].
This morning we are going to talk about the creation of the universe and the origins of life on Earth. According to the Bible, Genesis 1:1–3: “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.”

Now, it is important for us to understand that no one was actually present at the creation so we don’t really know what happened. Genesis 1:1–3 is only a theory, and as such cannot be treated as fact. And it is only fair that I share with you that there are other theories of the creation.

For example, some Sumerians and Babylonians, Gilbert Islanders, Koreans, and Greeks believed that the world was created from the parts of a slain monster; some Zuni Indians, Cook Islanders, and Tahitians have a theory that the world was created by the interaction of primordial parents; and some Japanese, Samoan, Persian, Chinese, and Hindu have a theory that the world was generated from an egg.” And, of course, there is that dogma being foisted upon us by the liberal media and intelligentsia, the theory of evolution.

As for the origins of human life, that is spelled out in Genesis 1:27: “God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.” Of course, not only was no one present to witness this act — except for Adam and Eve after they were created — I should point out that this theory has a counter theory in Genesis 2:7, where “the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.” In this theory Adam is all alone without a mate, so in Genesis 2:21–22 “the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and he slept; and he took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh instead thereof; And the rib, which the Lord God had taken from man, made he a woman, and brought her unto the man.”

Since everyone here was blessed by the almighty with a brain that thinks, I will allow you to decide which theory is the correct theory of the creation of humans, Genesis 1 or Genesis 2. Weigh the evidence and decide for yourselves. You be the judge.

Oh, there is one other minor detail. Adam and Eve begat Cain and Abel, and as you all know Cain — as firstborns are wont to do to their laterborn siblings who compete for the limited parental resources — slew him. That left Adam, Eve, and Cain as the only humans on the entire Earth. But in Genesis 4:17 we read that “Cain knew his wife; and she conceived, and bare Enoch.” Now, I don’t mean to burden you with more of the liberal media’s fascination with smut and porn, but I think as created beings endowed with intelligence and critical thinking skills blessed to us by the good Lord, it might be reasonable to ask just who it was that Cain “knew.” Unless Adam was himself blessed with both types of reproductive organs, or Cain was capable of parthenogenesis, then we are left with the theory that Cain “knew” his mother. But that’s just a theory, and as we all know, theories are just wild guesses and should not be taken seriously.

This opinion editorial was first published here.