Answers in Peter Gabriel

A “hip” new video has been released by the fine creationist folks over at Answers in Genesis. It's a pretty lame piece, using breakneck pacing and repetition to try and hammer a few simple untruths into the viewer. The usual set of timeworn objections to evolution are trotted out, reworded so as to seem fresh: there is no known, observable process that adds new information to an organism's genetic code, and life has never been seen to arise from non-life. AiG thinks these claims are deadly attack dogs that will leave evolution in tatters, but they're closer to being a pair of toothless old chihuahuas barely able to drag themselves across the linoleum - PZ Myers euthanizes them here. But one thing that I think is important to note is the tightly bound, almost positivist model of science that AiG slips into the video. Check out the 00:35-00:47 mark:

Here they say evolution is “quite honestly in great opposition to science, that is, observational science, the kind of science we can test and repeat and use our five sense to understand.” It seems they've spilled quite a bit of internet ink trying to show that “operational” science and “origin” science are two different types of practice entirely. If something is not a finding of a repeatable, controlled experiment then it isn't operational science but rather this new animal, “origins” science, in which it's kosher (!) to cite a book of myths in lieu actual evidence. “Origins” science is, of course, not any science worthy of the name, and they only make breathing room for it by confining “operational” (which they also call "normal”) science to physics-style experimentation.

This comes down to yet another attempt by Christians to narrow science's definition (“experimental verification only!”), trying to securely fence it in so it can't escape to threaten Biblical truths which have already been presupposed to be true. This is a ridiculous notion that would exclude astronomy, paleontology, geology, history and the social sciences from being scientific. This same overly-narrow view of science is a problem with some positivist defenders of science, too. But it's important to realize that it's been a longtime aim of the religious to make sure that we don't take a realist view of science, one that sees it as the broad and flexible practice of using reason and evidence to investigate external reality.

After all, if we admit that, then the claim that a man came back to life after being executed in first century Palestine becomes open for empirical investigation, in other words open for a scientific historical investigation...and we can guess how badly that would turn out for Christianity!

Rick Perry's Circus

Recently watched a segment on this week's Rachel Maddow Show that was jam-packed with clips from the various evangelical ministers that are slated to speak at Texas governor Rick Perry's upcoming day of prayer and fasting. The guv's holy orgasmatron will be held at the Reliant Stadium, which will be just finishing up the July run of Ringling Bros. Circus. Perry better take care not to ruin his expensive ostrich-upper cowboy boots by stepping in leftover elephant shit. But enough about the fickle governor, who has in the last year moved from subtly supporting Texas secession to hoping to nab the Republican presidential nomination- the real spectacle at the event will be the all-star lineup of evangelical firebrands that Perry hopes will pray away America's problems.

Some choice clips are here in the Maddow piece, including C. Peter Wagner explaining that Japan has suffered recent disasters because the Japanese emperor has been having naughty nightime encounters with the Sun Goddess Amaterasu Omikami. (Oops, sorry, remember that she's not really a goddess- she's a demonic creature of Satan, despite what the Japanese themselves might say about the matter. Gotta remember to reject other religion’s claims while defending one’s own indefensible notions!)



It’ll be very interesting to see what the national response to Perry’s event will be. Might be a good barometer of the extent to which the US evangelical community has been drawn even further to the right and how much more brazen they might become in publicly making their groundless theological declarations.

Unfortunately Maddow’s piece doesn’t deal much with my personal favorite member of Perry’s crew, the rotund and authoritarian John Hagee. Hagee, a staunch supporter of extreme right-wing politics in both the US and Israel, was a fixture of my life a few years ago- I would come home from work, pop on Trinity Broadcast Network just as his show was beginning, and alternate between laughing and crying as I listened to him while cooking dinner. Hagee authors a constant stream of End Times-related media intended to whip naïve heartland Christians into a reactionary frenzy with titles like “Financial Armageddon” and “Can America Survive? Ten prophetic signs that we are the terminal generation.”(These in addition to endless financial self-help and, humorously, diet books).

Lately, he’s glommed on to the fashionable myth of America’s "debt crisis” and has been including it as a new addition to his usual End Times death-instinct fantasies. The idea that we must “slash spending” or something bad might happen to the US is easily exposed as a longtime and very thinly disguised tactic to destroy social democratic(ish) programs like Social Security and Medicare. So, it looks like the fiscally “conservative” (read: rapacious) business class has found a new way to dupe the socially “conservative” (read: Christian) working class into serving their interests: tie the lies about the national debt crisis to End Times apocalypticism.

W.C. Craig is honest about theology (at least)

William Lane Craig is a theologian and christian philosopher who is well known for his intellectual defenses of Christianity and many debates with atheists. His pompous and oily delivery calls to my mind PZ Myers' line about the “used-car salesmen of the soul”, though I'm sure Craig hopes his paternalistic tone will remind believers that they are the flock and he their intellectual shepherd. Craig most often presents himself as a moderate interested only in reasonably justifying his Christian dogma, and it's true he has turned in some command performances remaining cool under fire from atheist debate partners. However, despite his attempt to maintain his moderate rep, he's a fellow at the anti-evolution Discovery Institute which is in turn funded by a web of extreme rightwing business and political figures. Not very savory. Oh yes, he also penned a charming article devoted to justifying genocide!

What's astonishing about Craig is that he quite nakedly admits that all his pretensions to reasonable debate, to exchange of views, and to finding the truth is all worth about as much as a pelican in the Gulf of Mexico. This video, for instance:



Truly amazing, he's saying here that no matter what evidence against Christianity shows up (or, in our world, already exists) he will never change his belief in the God of revealed scripture. I can certainly list evidence that would cause me to change my conclusions about theism. This should be the case whenever we come to a reasoned conclusion on anything; it simply shows we weighed evidence and made our decision with respect to that evidence. Sadly, as the video shows, Craig can't pass this test of counterfactuals. He can “know that Christianity is true wholly apart from the evidence” and “if, in some historically contingent circumstance, the evidence that I have available to me should turn against Christianity I don't think that that controverts the witness of the Holy Spirit.”

This means, of course, that no debate of Craig's is ever really a debate, and no position of his been reached by careful weighing of evidence and use of reason (even though he's quite happy to lie suggest that this isn't the case). He should immediately take down his website “Reasonable Faith” or at least change its grossly unwarranted name. Still, nothing too surprising here. The great Nietzsche scholar Walter Kaufmann summed up Craig and his ilk in his description of theology:

“Theology is also a comprehensive, rigorous, and systematic avoidance, by means of exegesis, of letting one’s Yes be Yes, and one’s No, No.”