Fire and Knowledge

I wrote an essay a couple years ago about why I was no longer a young-earth creationist. I finally decided it was time to publish it, and it went up today on the First Things Evangel blog: “Why I’m Not a Creationist (Anymore).”

By any rational measure, this world belongs to microbes. They were mastering the subtleties of evolution three billion years before the first multicellular organism appeared. They continue to evolve and adapt in a tiny fraction of the time it takes us to reproduce once. They flourish in polar ice caps, in boiling water, and amid radioactive waste. We exist only because some of them find us useful. Ninety percent of the cells in our bodies are bacteria. The entirety of human evolution has taken place in an environment saturated with microbes, and humans are so firmly adapted to the routine of sheltering allies and rebuffing enemies that the removal of either can devastate our defense systems.

—Nathanael Johnson, “The Revolution Will Not Be Pasteurized“

[I]gnorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, and not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science.

—Charles Darwin, as quoted in Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World (Ballantine Books: 1995), p. 266.

I’m glad Ken Miller, a popular Christian scientist and author, has finally weighed in on the movie Expelled. His verdict? He didn’t like it, of course. That’s right, because he’s part of the godless Nazi-like free-speech-restricting racist scientific establishment.

PZ Myers responds to four bad arguments against evolution. I wish I would have read something like this in high school — it would have saved me from many stupid debates.

This is almost unbelievable, except it’s Ben Stein and associated with that Expelled movie, so it’s not quite so unbelievable:

Stein (speaking about the Holocaust): …that was horrifying beyond words, and that’s where science — in my opinion, this is just an opinion — that’s where science leads you.

Crouch: That’s right.

Stein: … Love of God and compassion and empathy leads you to a very glorious place, and science leads you to killing people.

Crouch: Good word, good word.

It’s almost like he doesn’t know any religious history. Even in this century, over 800 million people have died due to religious conflict.

(via Friendly Atheist)

Michael Shermer has written a good review of the movie Expelled. He’s very good at debunking conspiracy theories, and this film is pretty much a conspiracy theory targeted to evangelical Christians with little scientific education. Shermer goes over their various deceptions and debunks their main thesis (that anyone who believes in intelligent design is “expelled”) and their claim that Darwin caused the holocaust.

An ancient fossil of a snake has been found with two hind legs. We’ve known that snakes used to have legs for a while now (most Pythons, for instance, have vestigial pelvises), but it’s always interesting when more evidence is found.