Archive for July, 2008
Abusing Calvin
The false evolution debate is one thing I have a hard time ignoring. I call it “false” because there really is no debate: evolution happened. Yet there are people out there that continue to make a lot of noise and push a disturbing pseudo-scientific religious agenda in order to protect their theologically and intellectually bankrupt world views. The depth of their misunderstanding of both science and religion is often staggering to me. They truly don’t understand either and make some of the most stunning logical errors I’ve ever seen.
But now it’s gone too far. I was raised in a Christian Reformed Church by loving parents and a supportive community. I then attended Calvin College, named for one of the key figures in the denomination’s theological history, John Calvin. So old Johnny has some significance in my history. Earlier this week I noticed that the morons at Answers in Genesis have cited the book art in Calvin’s commentary on Genesis as proof that man walked the earth with dinosaurs (they didn’t). That’s right, they claim an ornate drawing as scientific proof to contradict the massive amounts of hard evidence in the fossil record. The author is clearly delusional.
I can’t understand how a person could write about dragons without understanding that they have been a part of mythic lore for centuries? How could he be so ignorant of the mundane explanation for their appearance (storytellers often create bigger scarier versions of real things we’re already scared of as villains)? And how could assert that a lovely drawing is anything more than it is? All this does is show ignorance.
Calvin was a smart guy trying to answer difficult theological questions. Leave him out of your shallow, ignorant, lazy ravings.
TAM6: Reflections
Alright, it’s been far too long since my last TAM6 post, and I never wrapped things up. I really enjoyed my time in Vegas, although I didn’t meet as many people as I had hoped. I chatted with quite a few, but never really connected with them. I also found that the “lunatic fringe” exists among skeptics just as with any other group. Every once in a while I’d run into people that were a little too certain that they had it all figured out and that skepticism and science were the only way to view the world, “damn the rest.” That’s just silly and condescending. The majority, however, were fun and smart people.
The speakers were pretty much what I expected: the famous people had their message together and presented well (although I got the feeling Shermer was presenting an early draft). The rest either did a decent job or failed catastrophically. Seriously, people: show up with the right version of your slides, and resist the urge to stand there and read them to the audience word-for-word.
At this point I’d call myself 50/50 for going next year. I really loved some of the content, and was left flat by other parts of it. Frankly, the core work of Mr. Randi himself has become a bit boring to me. I don’t care as much about debunking “woo-woo” nonsense like astrology, ghosts, or faith healing (though the Sylvia Browne write-up that came after TAM6 is fairly brilliant). I get much more jazzed and happy about actual progressive science and discovery than I do about using science to battle people who are fundamentally unscientific; it’s a nearly pointless and always frustrating argument. I may look for another conference to go to that is more “pure science”, but we’ll see.