Fire and Knowledge

[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.

In 1938, when pesticides were first introduced, farmers used roughly 50 million pounds of them and suffered about a 7 percent loss of their field crops. By comparison, in 2000 they used nearly a billion pounds of pesticides. Crop losses? Thirteen percent.

—Barbara Kingsolver, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life (HarperCollins: 2007), p. 165.

Just because Intelligent Design theorists cannot think of how nature could have created something through evolution, that does not mean that scientists will not be able to do so either. Intelligent Design is a remarkably uncreative theory that abandons the search for understanding at the very point where it is most needed. If Intelligent Design is really a science, then the burden is on its scientists to discover the mechanisms used by the Intelligent Designer. And if those mechanisms turn out to be natural forces, then no supernatural force is necessary, and they can simply change their name to evolutionary scientists and get to work.

—Michael Shermer, Why Darwin Matters: The Case Against Intelligent Design (Times Books, 2006), p. 80.