My contribution to "theistic science"

A few recent things I've read, from an advocate of presuppositionalism, from philosopher Evan Fales, and from a book by neurologist V. S. Ramachandran, combined to lead me to propose an experimental test of the claim that atheists don't really exist--that we all believe in God, but have a second-order self-deceptive belief that we don't believe in God. Unfortunately, I don't think the test is likely to work (I haven't noticed myself believing in God while riding as a passenger in a car watching the landscape go by), but this illustrates the kind of empirical work that could be done by those who claim to advocate "theistic science."

It seems to me the real self-deception is on the part of those who claim to advocate theistic science but not even make any attempt to do it.

The Collected Works of George Deutsch

George Deutsch is a 24-year-old Texas A&M University graduate in journalism (class of 2003) who was appointed by the White House to the press office of NASA headquarters after his stint as an intern working in the "war room" of the Bush 2004 reelection campaign. He has gotten some well-deserved press lately for the fact that, despite having no science background, he apparently has had the authority to tell senior scientists at NASA such as Dr. James Hansen what they can and cannot say to the press.

In October 2005, he told a NASA contractor working on an educational website about Einstein for middle-school students that he must add the word "theory" after every occurrence of the phrase "Big Bang," because the Big Bang "is not proven fact; it is opinion. [...] It is not NASA's place, nor should it be to make a declaration such as this about the existence of the universe that discounts intelligent design by a creator. [...] This is more than a science issue, it is a religious issue. And I would hate to think that young people would only be getting one-half of this debate from NASA. That would mean we had failed to educate the very people who rely on us for factual information the most." As others have noted, Deutsch not only doesn't understand what the word "theory" means, his knowledge of theology seems pretty weak--the Big Bang is commonly used as an argument for the existence of God (e.g., William Lane Craig's version of the kalam cosmological argument, which has as a premise that the universe has a finite past).

World O'Crap has dug up some of Mr. Deutsch's past work at the Texas A&M Battalion, which includes this comment on the Laci Peterson murder:

Still, the defense's main theory -- that a Satanic cult killed Laci -- is actually quite credible. Several impartial witnesses have reported seeing a van adorned with satanic symbols and a man with "666" tattooed on his arm in front of the Peterson home in late December.

The American public seems to dismiss this theory as ridiculous, but Satanic killings didn't seem so ridiculous in the 1980s, when Richard Ramirez -- The Night Stalker -- made California his personal hunting ground. Ramirez, who sat in court with a pentagram etched in his palm and often said "Hail Satan," adds a very real face to the idea of Satanism. Try convincing the families of his victims that Satanic cults don't exist.

And this one on connections between Iraq and al Qaeda:

The ties between al-Qaida and Iraq are clear. So clear, in fact, that there is so much circumstantial evidence linking Iraq and al-Qaida that it would be hard for an informed person not to at least suspect Saddam's regime of having a hand in the attacks.

[...]

Cheney went on to mention evidence of a Czech intelligence report, which has yet to be confirmed or denied, that asserts that Sept. 11 hijacker Muhammad Atta met with senior Iraqi officials in Prague just weeks before the attacks.

And this one on Rumsfeld and torture:

"Unfounded Accusations"

There is simply no proof to support claims that Rumsfeld orchestrated an elaborate plan to interrogate prisoners through torture and humiliation - such an assertion is laughable.

[...]

[I]t is absurd to think that the secretary of defense for the strongest nation in the free world would encourage torturous interrogation tactics in a war his nation was winning and at the possible expense of his political career. Even more absurd is that his well-thought and "highly secretive" plan would involve unskilled military reservists being ordered to pose for staged photographs with nude Iraqi prisoners.

NASA should fire this incompetent boob.

UPDATE (7 February 2006): Turns out Deutsch isn't a college graduate--although scheduled to graduate in 2003, he left Texas A&M University in 2003 without a degree.

Eugenie Scott gives the Robert S. Dietz memorial lecture

Genie Scott of the NCSE gave a talk on "Creationism and Evolution: Current Perspectives" to a standing-room-only audience of several hundred at the ASU Physical Sciences building. This crowd came out to see her despite the fact that Jared Diamond was speaking at ASU at the same time, about his book Collapse.

The lecture began with a few words about Bob Dietz, who was a strong supporter of evolution and critic of creationism, and showed a few slides of him and his book, Creation/Evolution Satiricon: Creationism Bashed.

Genie gave an overview of creation science, comparing and contrasting it with evolution. She pointed out the logical flaw of the "two model approach" in assuming that evolution and creation are the only two possibilities and that falsifying evolution is all that's needed to prove creationism.

There followed a discussion of the Paluxy river mantracks, and how Glen Kuban's work led even the Institute for Creation Research to stop using them as evidence that humans and dinosaurs lived together. She talked briefly about some problems with the ark story and the misidentification of geological features as fossilized arks (another example which creationists themselves have refuted).

Genie described the NCSE Grand Canyon raft trips, pointing out how they teach both the evolution and creationist sides of the story, while the ICR raft trip only teaches the creationist version. She put up a photo of Steve Austin and his book Grand Canyon, Monument to Catastrophe, along with a photo of "Stone Cold" Steve Austin, pointing out that they should not be confused, even though the creationist Steve Austin does work on cold stone. (This reference worked well with the young audience--my expectation was for a comparison photo of Lee Majors as the "Six Million Dollar Man" as the joke.) She spent some time describing how the Grand Canyon is composed of thousands of layers of sediment which the creationists claim to have been laid down through repeated walls of water and sediment precipitation. This set the stage for Austin's claims about the canyons around Mt. St. Helens, where a 30' deep ditch was cut by water in seven days--thirty feet of unconsolidated ash and loose sediment doesn't compare to four thousand feet of individual layers of shales, limestones, sandstones, etc.

Since the event was at ASU, home of the Institute of Human Origins, she mentioned Donald Johanson tiring of correcting bogus creationist claims about Lucy's knee joint.

She then turned to intelligent design, or "creationism light," which she described as consisting of only a single philosophical claim--that you can detect the evidence of things that are designed and are the products of intelligence, and in particular the product of a divine designer. ID has proposed two concepts for identifying design, Behe's irreducible complexity and Dembski's design inference. She described the Discovery Institute and the Wedge Document, and pointed out that there are many criticisms of Behe's irreducible complexity and Dembski's complex specified information on the web. The structure of the ID arguments, she argued, is the same as that of creation science--that evolution can't do it, therefore it must be intelligent design. Michael Behe's favored example of the bacterial flagellum was shown in an animated slide, and Genie pointed out that they like to use examples of complex systems where we haven't yet developed full explanations, but they ignore other examples of apparently "irreducibly complex" systems where we do have full explanations, like the evolution of the mammalian ear (which she proceeded to illustrate).

She gave a history of the intelligent design movement and its roots in creationism--covering the 1981 McLean v. Arkansas decision, Jon Buell's formation of the Foundation for Thought and Ethics, and the publications of Thaxton, Bradley, and Olsen's Mystery of Life's Origin and Of Pandas and People. She described the science of the latter as awful, giving as an example its treatment of genetic distances between organisms based on cytochrome c, a demonstration that the authors don't understand evolution (a topic discussed in the Dover case).

Wesley Elsberry's work on word counts of "creationis[t/m]" vs. "intelligent design" in the sequence of manuscripts that became Of Pandas and People was graphically depicted, showing the former dropping to zero and the latter increasing to the level of the former in 1987, after the creationists lost at the U.S. Supreme Court in Edwards v. Aguillard.

She briefly commented on William Dembski's draft of version three of Of Pandas and People, which used "sudden emergence" instead of "intelligent design," and about the Discovery Institute's move to a "teach the controversy" position which it has held for a few years, and its model policy for school boards to teach the "strengths and weaknesses" of evolution adopted by the Grantsburg, Wisconsin school board in December 2004.

She listed seven states that have introduced anti-evolution legislation this year (Alabama, Indiana, Michigan, Missouri, Mississippi, Oklahoma, and Utah), promoting books critical of intelligent design and creationism (including Young and Edis' Why Intelligent Design Fails, Pennock's Intelligent Design Creationism and Its Critics, Forrest and Gross's Creationism's Trojan Horse, Miller's Finding Darwin's God, Shanks' God, the Devil, and Darwin, Isaak's Counter-Creationism Handbook, and her own Evolution vs. Creationism, which she was pleased to announce had just been reviewed in the New York Times Book Review. She showed a screen shot of Amazon.com listing her book with a sales rank of #284, though she noted this is an hour-by-hour rank and she had to wait until late on Sunday night to get the shot.

In closing, Genie noted that Bob Dietz was a real scientific iconoclast who advocated views that were outside of the mainstream when he initiated them--that seafloor spreading occurs and is evidence of continental drift, that moon craters are asteroid impacts not volcanoes, that shatter cones are evidence of meteoritic impacts. He didn't respond to criticism by starting a policy institute, hiring a PR firm, and lobbying to have his theories taught in public schools--he responded by doing scientific work, by doing research, by writing and presenting papers. That's the work that needs to be done to get things taught in public school science classes.

Afterward, there was a small reception outside the auditorium, and Genie was swamped with people asking questions for quite some time. I was surprised that there were no obvious creationists or intelligent design advocates--those who were present (I'm sure there were some there) kept their views to themselves.

Tom Toles cartoon criticized by all six members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff

This Tom Toles cartoon in the Washington Post has resulted in a complaint letter from all six members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Amazing helicopter photos of Mexico City

What an amazing city. The Ixtapaluca low-income housing projects (one photo at left) look like a suburban nightmare out of a video game, but these purport to be actual photos taken from a helicopter. (Thanks to BLDGBLOG.)

Sasquatch DNA sample tested

Apparently, Sasquatch is a bipedal bison.

Danish Mohammed cartoons reprinted in France and Norway--and Lebanon

The Danish cartoons of Mohammed have been reprinted in both Norway and France (and may be seen at the link at left). These cartoons have led to hostages being taken, death threats against the cartoonists, and the withdrawal of ambassadors to Denmark by Libya and Saudi Arabia. The reprinting has led to further Muslim outrage, apologies from the publishers, and some firings. Norway has given a state apology and made noises about restricting freedom of speech regarding anti-religious statements. France and Denmark have refused to make state apologies and have defended freedom of speech. The EU and UN have come out against freedom of speech, which are good reasons to oppose UN control of the Internet.

By the way, here are some other cartoons about Mohammed and Islam (thanks to Einzige for the reference).

UPDATE: A magazine in Lebanon, Shihan, has reprinted the cartoons, and in an article with the subheading "World's Muslims, be logical," Jihad Momani (a pseudonym?) asks, “Which one do you think damages Islam more? These cartoons or the scene of a suicide bomber who blows himself up outside a wedding ceremony in Amman, or the kidnappers that slaughters their victims before the cameras?” (Hat tip: Catallarchy, which I inexplicably failed to credit for their posting which first led me to this subject.)

Financial freedom

My parents loaned me a set of 13 CDs by a Christian financial counselor named Dave Ramsey, which I listened to in my car over the last several weeks. The CDs are audio recordings of Ramsey's course of lectures that he calls "Financial Peace University."

I wasn't quite sure what to expect, but I was pleasantly surprised--there were occasional references to God and Bible verses, but they were relatively few and tended to be ones that gave sensible advice. It was only the last CD, on charitable giving, which emphasized tithing to a church over other forms of charitable giving, that I found more objectionable than sound. (There were also two bonus CDs, one with samples from Ramsey's radio show, in which I agreed with virtually all of the advice he gave to listeners, and another giving his personal testimony and a "come to Jesus" call that I gave up listening to after about the first 15 minutes.)

The first 12 CDs I give pretty high marks to. Each CD covered a single topic:
1. "Super Savers": how to save money, build an emergency fund, the value of cash purchases.
2. "Cash Flow Planning": how to budget.
3. "Relating With Money": how to communicate about money in a relationship and with your children.
4. "Buying Only Big, Big Bargains": how to find good deals and negotiate on price.
5. "Dumping Debt Part 1": facts about credit cards and how to get out of debt.
6. "Dumping Debt Part 2": more on that subject.
7. "Understanding Investments": some basic information about stocks, bonds, and mutual funds.
8. "Understanding Insurance": some basic information about insurance offerings and which ones are a ripoff.
9. "Retirement & College Planning": 401Ks, Roth 401Ks, IRAs, SEPs, Coverdell ESAs, etc.
10. "Buyer Beware": understanding some marketing and sales tactics and how to avoid being pressured by them.
11. "Real Estate & Mortgages": some basics about buying and selling a home, types of mortgages (apparently recorded before the recent popularity of some more creative mortgages), and refinancing.
12. "Careers & Extra Jobs": how to find a job you love, when it makes sense to seek extra income to get out of a problem.
13. "Collection Practices & Credit Bureaus": some basics on collections, how to clean up your credit report, how to get out of bad debt messes when you can't afford to pay all your bills.

Some of the basic messages of Ramsey's plan are to start by building an emergency savings of $1,000, cut up all your credit cards and budget every dollar of income, get all non-mortgage debt paid off, build up savings of 3-6 months of expenses, and start investing 15% of annual gross income in mutual funds (maximizing tax-preferred options). He's very anti-credit card and anti-debt. I agree with the latter (except for a mortgage); the former I don't personally agree with for myself, but I think it's good advice for anyone who doesn't have the discipline to be a credit card "freeloader" (pay off all credit card balances monthly).

He also advises never buying a house with anything but a 15-year fixed rate mortgage, and never with a monthly payment greater than 25% of your monthly take-home pay, never spending more than 20% of your annual income on cars (and always paying cash, never going into debt--and that means buying used).

The average household has about $10,000 in credit card debt, lots of people have been buying their homes with interest-only adjustable rate mortgages where they can barely afford the interest-only payments (or even just the negative amortization option), and many people have been pulling equity out of their homes to pay for consumer goods, and buying homes with interest-only adjustable rate mortgages (some with negative amortization options), and these people are heading for disaster. Ramsey's advice is pretty sound.

UPDATE (January 23, 2007): The Simple Dollar has a good summary of Dave Ramsey's program.

Western Union discontinues telegrams

After 145 years in the business, Western Union discontinued sending telegrams on January 27.

The story behind the Wedge Strategy becoming public

The Seattle Weekly has published a story on the Discovery Institute, including original scans of the "Wedge Strategy" and the story of how it was leaked to the Internet by Matt Duss and Tim Rhodes. More at Pharyngula, including the Wedge in PDF.

I found this paragraph interesting, considering how much the Discovery Institute spends on PR:

Seattle Weekly began making inquiries for this story in mid-2005, but neither Chapman nor any Discovery Institute fellow has been willing to be interviewed. A last attempt to elicit comment, e-mailed to spokesperson Rob Crowther on Jan. 4, elicited the following: "With the start of the new year all of the Fellows and staff are quite busy and their schedules are completely full. I think you'll find more than enough information on our website that you are welcome to quote from. If you want to submit questions in writing, I'd be happy to pass those along and see if anyone has time to respond, but I can't make any guarantees." A number of questions were submitted; none was answered.