Naomi Oreskes – Why we should trust scientists

Excellent video by historian of science Naomi Oreskes on how scientists actually work, and why we should believe the scientific consensus. The executive summary of the latter? Organised scepticism.

Special creationist is courteously corrected by anthropology professor

There's an amusing scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark where Indiana Jones, after being confronted by an expert swordsman, shrugs, shoots the man, and walks away. Never bring a knife to a gun fight. Special creationists constantly make the intellectual version of this mistake, thinking that the Chick tract Big Daddy, in which a young college student manages to intellectually destroy his atheist science professor with a few shopworn cliches happens in real life. It doesn't. What happens is more like this:

Needless to say, it is impossible to know whether any young Christadelphian has been corrected in a similar fashion unless he or she relates this story publicly, though a similar version has happened where a John Hellawell antievolution lecture was comprehensively refuted by visiting guests from the BSCE. Unfortunately, our community is priming the next generation for similar scenes by positively reviewing pseudoscientific literature such as Wilfred Alleyne's extended argument from personal incredulity which was reviewed positively and uncritically in The Testimony, and telling them that:

It could be put to many uses: use it for preparing talks on creation; students will find resources to argue the case for creation in a reasoned and well-informed way; 

The brute reality is that any young believer using those arguments is going to suffer the fate of the brash student who thought she could destroy a seasoned professional such as Tim White. We are setting up the next generation for failure by advocating fundamentalism and pseudoscience, and when they lose faith, the blame will life firmly on the YECs and extreme literalists in our community.

Understanding creationism: An insider’s guide by a former young-Earth creationist - 5

Part 5 of David MacMillan's series on understanding the YEC mindset is up at Panda's Thumb. This time, he's looking at the YEC belief that evolutionary theory was proposed specifically to eliminate God, and how this leads on to a flawed understanding of geology and biology by YECs:

Because of this misconception, creationists rarely understand the actual history of how geology, paleontology, and biology built upon each other to provide us with our understanding of the world. Mainstream geology emerged significantly ahead of Darwin’s work; many early geologists were Christians. Studying the distribution of rock layers around the globe allowed geologists to construct a complete geologic column and begin appreciating the incredible amount of time the column represents. Moreover, the regular progression of extinct species fossilized throughout the geologic column had been well-catalogued. 

However, creationism requires that the development of evolutionary theory be ad hoc, driven by presupposition rather than by observation. As a result, they often assert that the geologic column doesn’t actually exist: that it’s cobbled together from bits and pieces around the world and that the layers aren’t actually consistent. It is true that there are few places in the world where all layers of the column (the Hadean and Archean and Proterozoic and Cambrian and Devonian and Permian and Triassic and Cretaceous and Paleocene and Miocene and Pleistocene and Holocene) are visible simultaneously, but this fact does not prevent geologists from identifying them. The layers of the geologic column are identified relative to each other using clear and consistent markers which function the same way no matter where you are in the world. Constructing and identifying the components of the geologic column is not the random guesswork creationism makes it out to be.

Full article is here.

The crank's guide to overturning the scholarly consensus

Source: Exploring Our Matrix

The UK bans the teaching of creationism as science in all publicly funded schools

Excellent news indeed. Via i09

Back in 2012, the UK government banned all future free schools from teaching creationism as science, requiring them to teach natural selection. At the time, however, it didn't extend those requirement to academies, nor did the changes apply to existing free schools. The new verbiage changes this, precluding all public-funded schools — present or future — from teaching creationism as evidence-based theory. 

The new church academies clauses require that "pupils are taught about the theory of evolution, and prevent academy trusts from teaching 'creationism' as scientific fact." And by "creationism" they mean:

[A]ny doctrine or theory which holds that natural biological processes cannot account for the history, diversity, and complexity of life on earth and therefore rejects the scientific theory of evolution. The parties acknowledge that creationism, in this sense, is rejected by most mainstream churches and religious traditions, including the major providers of state funded schools such as the [Anglican] [Catholic] Churches, as well as the scientific community. It does not accord with the scientific consensus or the very large body of established scientific evidence; nor does it accurately and consistently employ the scientific method, and as such it should not be presented to pupils at the Academy as a scientific theory.

And in regards to protecting religious beliefs, the clauses acknowledge that the funding agreement does...

...not prevent discussion of beliefs about the origins of the Earth and living things, such as creationism, in Religious Education, as long as it is not presented as a valid alternative to established scientific theory.

Seems fair and reasonable to me.

Indeed it does. A good church-run school would teach science in its science classes, and teach a theology of creationism in its RE classes, and point out that Genesis is ancient cosmology, not modern science. It would also show why YEC - and special creationism in general - is poor science and even worse theology. Now if only the US would get the message.

More Reasons for Belief

The book More Reasons is now available from Lulu. Edited by Dr Thomas Gaston, a Christadelphian with a professional interest in early Christian theology, it serves as a companion to the earlier book Reasons. Via the publisher's blurb:

In many respects the case for faith has never been stronger. The discoveries of modern physics have provided strong indication that there is an intelligence behind the universe. A renaissance in Christian philosophy has provided robust and respected defences against traditional challenges to theism. Scholars find they can no longer justify the hasty dismissal of the biblical text as either legendary or outdated. And yet despite these positive changes, religious believers find their sincere convictions dismissed as ill-founded and irrational. In this book, a number of authors bring together their various expertise and experience to continue laying out reasons for believing in God, Jesus and the Bible. Arguments are drawn from areas such as the fact of human rationality and religious experience, the divine character of the Bible, and intelligent design. These arguments provide additional support for faith in the modern world.

Definitely looks interesting. The book website is here.

Understanding creationism: An insider’s guide by a former young-Earth creationist - 4

Former YEC David MacMillan's fourth instalment in his series on how YECs mishandle the evidence for evolution is up at Panda's Thumb. The subject? Transitional fossils:

Young-earth creationists believe that all life, living and fossil, can be grouped into a series of families – they call them baramins, a made-up Hebrew word for “created kinds” – which all existed together at the same time from the very beginning. They use this completely artificial understanding of our planet’s biosphere in generating their concept of a “missing link”: in order for something to be a “true” transitional form under their model, it would have to be something halfway between two separate created “kinds”. Because they automatically assign every species to a particular created kind and only to that created kind, their “transitional form” is something that could never exist. 

The usual parodies of evolutionary transitional fossils, like Ray Comfort’s infamous crocoduck, are openly tongue-in-cheek. But because creationists see all animals as belonging to individual, immutable kinds, they represent evolution as “change from one ‘kind’ to another” claiming that evolution predicts we should see transitions between their “created kinds”: for example, a fossil that is midway between a dog and a cat. Just as with living species, all fossil species are placed within strict “created kinds”, allowing creationists to maintain the illusion that nothing is ever “in-between”. 

This characterization is a complete misunderstanding of what evolution actually predicts. No one expects one existing species to evolve into another. The “kinds” alleged by creationism simply do not exist in the evolutionary model; there is no line between one family and another that a transitional form needs to straddle. 

What creationists don’t recognize is that the theory of evolution does not predict “transitional” fossils at all – at least, not in the way creationists expect. Evolutionary theory does not predict that there will be “normal” fossils most of the time, while chimaera-like “transitional” fossils will appear tucked in-between. Evolution has no general prediction about a unique class of transitional fossils. Instead, evolution makes predictions about the specific morphology, age, and location of the individual fossils it expects to discover. It bases these individual predictions on other specific fossils that have already been discovered.When morphology and a variety of other factors indicate that one particular species is the distant ancestor of another particular species, evolutionary principles can be used to predict the attributes of one or more intermediate species.

If science denialists could grasp one thing - that evolution is not a ladder but a tree - then much of the confusion over transitional fossils would abate. Full article here.

Source