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Atheism Defined (Just for Fun)

I don’t know the actual origination of this quote.  Its been on T-shirts and such.  If anyone knows the actual source, please let us know.  Meanwhile, enjoy! (Atheists: its okay to laugh at yourselves, too!) ATHEISM: The belief that there was nothing & nothing happened to nothing & then nothing magically exploded for no reason, creating everything & then a bunch of everything magically rearranged itself for no reason what so ever into self-replicating bits which then turned into dinosaurs. Makes Perfect Sense.

Dissing a pro-ID author without reading his book — will Sal do a Nick Matzke imitation?

Here is one pro-ID author I’m not endorsing without even reading his book: Lou Barreto who wrote the pro-ID book Who is this Alien?. Recently, Nick Matzke has been getting criticism for dissing pro-ID books he’s not even read. See: Nick Matzke Book Burner. To his credit, Nick’s at least read some of the material by the ID authors he disses. But I think I might do Nick one better, I’m going to diss a pro-ID author and his book without reading his book. Why? See what Barreto wrote about me: THE CRITICS OF INTELLIGENT DESIGN Article: By Lou Barreto It seems like the critics of Intelligent Design, such as Sal Cordova and others, will never acknowledge the concepts of Read More ›

Student of pseudo science Glenn Branch fights students of real science

Now that Eugenie Scott is retiring Director of the NCSE, I nominate Elizabeth Liddle as Eugenie’s replacement. But in the meantime the NCSE might have to count on their Deputy Director Glenn Branch to fill in until they find Eugenie’s replacement. In paging through the NCSE website, I found something that made me chuckle. Glenn is a student of pseudo-science! Glenn Branch is Deputy Director of NCSE. Formerly a graduate student in philosophy at UCLA, where he won prizes both for scholarship and teaching, he is conversant with the philosophical debates surrounding creationism and “intelligent design”; he is also a long-time student of pseudo-science So what does this student of pseudo science do? He tries to thwart the advancement of Read More ›

The Law of Large Numbers vs. KeithS, Eigenstate and my other TSZ critics

I went through a great deal of trouble to contest the idiosyncratic claim of a critic at TheSkepticalZone who said: if you have 500 flips of a fair coin that all come up heads, given your qualification (“fair coin”), that is outcome is perfectly consistent with fair coins, Comment in The Skeptical Zone This critic (who goes by the handle “Eigenstate”) would probably keep singing the same tune if we were dealing with 500,000,000 fair coins. I said this was wrong, and KeithS disagreed and demanded I make a retraction. See his comments here in SSDD: a 22 sigma event is consistent with the physics of fair coins?. I insisted the expectation value of 50% heads has to be respected, Read More ›

Space Shuttle Denying Darwinists (SSDD)

SSDD is an acronym for “Same Stuff Different Day”. In debate with Darwinists, it’s always the same stuff, different day. SSDD can be also an acronym for Space Shuttle Denying Darwinists — that is to say Darwinists that are so against ID that they will even deny that Space Shuttles are intelligently designed. Such people suffer from SSDD syndrome. There is no remedy for their philosophical malady. Over at ARN the following exchange happened which I summarize: Sal: Is a man-made design an example of intelligent design? Alan Fox: NO!!! Sal: Given what you said, is the Space Shuttle an example of intelligent design? How about GMOs? Alan Fox: Nothing is an example of intelligent design unless you want to Read More ›

Saturday Fun – 7 Weird Jobs in Science

The Fox News website recently ran this story on the 7 Weirdest Jobs in Science.  To this list I would add an eighth – Evolutionary Biologist (EB).  To be an EB these days, not only does one have to explain away large bits of contrary data, but also believe that the mass amounts of complex specified information observed throughout biological systems is easily explained by the blind, purposeless forces of matter and energy interacting over eons of time through chance and/or necessity. Given the choice of being an EB or one of the 7 other Science careers mentioned, I’d opt to be a Scatologist.  At least the crap they talk about is real!

Evolutionary Prediction About Humans

A visual artist and a Ph.D. in computational genomics have gotten together to predict what we mere human mortals will look like in, say, 100,000 years. Given the prediction, I for one am glad I won’t be around to see it actually happen. The current design appeals to me much more. But maybe others will feel differently.

The Contempt of PZ Myers

Our old friend PZ Myers holds school boards in utter contempt. In a recent blog post at his widely followed Pharyngula blog site, he takes contemptuous pot shots at the Springboro, OH School Board for having the audacity to even consider a “critical thinking” policy in the curriculum. The Springboro Community City School District is considering a so-called “critical thinking” policy that would require teachers to explore “all sides” of controversial issues. The proposed policy change would direct teachers to discuss creation science or intelligent design when teaching about the theory of evolution. <a href=”http://www.rawstory.com/rs/201…..-proposal/ Full story here. PZ can’t restrain his contempt: Please. There is no controversy here. Evolution happened, teach it. The best argument that one student provided Read More ›

NCSE affirms evolutionism is no longer the core of science education

I think the NCSE got tired of defending Darwinism. I guess the Discovery Institute promoting ID and the creationists promoting creationism was bad enough, but when mainstream scientists began to join the anti-Darwin fray, it was too much. So what did the NCSE do? They found something to replace Darwinism as the central core of science education. See for yourself what this new core of science education is here. 🙂 NOTES This post was filed under humor. Don’t take it too seriously, but I think there is a grain of truth to what I said. UPDATE since this is a humor post, I’ve decided to make this UD’s first official OPEN THREAD. Have at it guys, but keep it civil Read More ›

Peer Reviewed Paper: Neo-Darwinism falsified

HT: Nullasullus Evolutionary theory itself is already in a state of flux… all the central assumptions of the Modern Synthesis (often also called Neo-Darwinism) have been disproven Denis Noble Physiology is rocking the foundations of evolutionary biology Nice to hear the truth for a change. The paper drew on the work of James Shapiro (who by the way had co-authored a paper with Discovery Institute Fellow, Richard Sternberg here). Jerry Coyne has a dislike of Shapiro’s writings: I hate to give attention to my Chicago colleague James Shapiro’s bizarre ideas about evolution, which he publishes weekly on HuffPo rather than in peer-reviewed journals. His Big Idea is that natural selection has not only been overemphasized in evolution, but appears to Read More ›

What qualifies as science in the wonderful world of Disney

The scientific enterprise entails: 1. observation 2. hypothesis 3. testing Consider this passage from the class text of an introductory cosmology class I took once upon a time: galaxies farther than 4300 megaparsecs from us are currently moving away from us at speeds greater than that of light. Cosmological innocents sometimes exclaim, “Gosh! Doesn’t this violate the law that massive objects can’t travel faster than the speed of light?” Actually, it doesn’t. The speed limit that states that massive objects must travel with v < c relative to each other is one of the results of special relativity, and refers to the relative motion of objects within a static space. In the context of general relativity, there is no objection Read More ›

PZ Myers defends ID-Friendly University Course!

Jerry Coyne has infiltrated a heretofore secret ID operation at Ball State University. Since the secret is now out and in the hands of the Darwinists, I may as well report on it. Ball State University, in Muncie, Indiana, is a public university (i.e., part of the state university system). … The course is taught by Eric Hedin, an assistant professor at Ball State’s Department of Physics and Astronomy. In one of its guises it’s an “honors” course, “Inquiries in the Physical Sciences,” which fulfills the science requirement for students as part of the University Core Curriculum: Science Course at Ball State University Look at the ID sympathetic bibliography: Bibliography of the Syllabus Coyne sounds the battle cry: This has Read More ›

The Theistic Geologist

Three geologists stand at the foot of Mt. Rushmore. The first geologist says, “This mountain depicts perfectly the faces of four US presidents, it must be the work of a master sculptor.” The second says, “You are a geologist, you should know that all mountains were created by natural forces, such as volcanos and plate movements, the details were then sculpted by erosion from water and wind. How could you possibly think this was the work of an intelligent sculptor? Only a person completely ignorant of geophysics could think those faces were designed.” The third geologist says to himself, “I don’t want to be seen as ignorant, but the faces in this mountain sure do look like they were designed.” Read More ›

That’s exactly what we predicted

Here’s a good one, over at Evolution News: http://www.evolutionnews.org/2012/09/in_debate_brita_1064521.html Dawkins, 2009: DNA… it’s full of junk… which is just as Darwinism predicted… how embarrassing for those creationists who say it shouldn’t be! Dawkins, 2012: DNA… it’s not full of junk… which is just as Darwinism predicted… nothing for the creationists to take advantage of here, move along! Those of us who doubt Dawkins’ rationality find this response to a new discovery to be exactly what our prior theories predicted. 🙂

Examples of Darwinist “Free” Thought Blogging

There is never ending drama over at Darwinist Ed Brayton’s “Free” Thought Blogs (FTB). We have the example of Greg Laden (affectionately known as Greg bin Laden by some), describing how he intends to terrorize a US Army soldier: Think about that. You f–king sh-t. Now, get forever out of my life. Do not turn back. You do not deserve to even know the people you’ve insulted in that idiotic post you wrote. Don’t ever, ever find yourself in my presence or think you deserve to breath the air that I, and Jen, and Stephanie, and Gret and Ophelia and PZ and the rest of us breath, because you do not. If you do make that apology it better be Read More ›