Stupid creationism bullshit

Back in 1998 I had my first experience with forum trolls. I was bored as hell at work and I found the MSN science and technology forum. Some people were arguing about evolution, I had just finished my first year at UCSB so I jumped on in.

The arguments were just amazing. They would say things like "Well, that argument just doesn't hold up. You look funny flat on your face like that." or "WHY do you all want to prove that we descended from a monkey scratching his butt?" or "You have all forgotten that Jesus died for your sins."

I would post an article about microbiology or something what would present an evolutionary path for something that was thought to be "irreducibly complex". One guy even said "this article doesn't even have the word 'irreducible' in it! How can it be evidence against intelligent design?" Then I realized that I was a person educated in science talking to a bunch of uppity morons that probably couldn't name a single chemical element. So I stopped posting on that ish.

Wikipedia's featured article today is Intelligent design, and the article is pretty good. It really shows that ID isn't a scientific theory and folks are crazy for believing it to be so.

But the ID folks won't let it drop, for several reasons:

First and foremost is the fact that the theory of evolution, more so that most other dominant theories, really tests the faith of anyone that takes the Bible in some type of literal sense. It reminds Christians that there's a whole ton of stuff in the world that goes against the archaic verses of "how God made the world".

Second is their confusion of worldviews and theories supported by evidence. Everyone has a unique worldview, given to them by their intellect and experiences. Depending on the quality of one's intellect and experiences, worldviews can vary quite a bit, not only in their understanding and ability to predict phenomena, but also the tenacity of the worldview.

Someone that has lived in the desert their whole life and does not believe that tree exist in groups like forests has poor quality experience- many random sights from around the globe would shatter this person's worldview on trees. By the same token, a simpleton who has been convinced that there is no such place as Los Angeles would readily change his worldview upon getting off the plane in Burbank.

Both of these examples are extreme, most worldviews are better informed by their intellect and experiences and/or don't typically encounter such contradictory information (most desert dwellers are aware of non-desert regions and who would convince a retard there's no LA?). In addition most worldviews have defenses in the event that experience or intellect fails or is biased somehow. This usually comes in the form of some sort of education, be it farming, schooling or herding. By repeating the same technique over and over the worldview is tempered and strengthened. If a goat dropped dead before the average herder's eyes, he would assume sickness, not a gunshot, this is called skepticism, because the observer has seen enough of the world to reject phenomena for which he doesn't see any evidence. By the same token, if the herder was told the goat was killed by a radioactive matieral under the ground, the herder's worldview defenses wouldn't allow him to agree, this is called faith, or that the observer has a set of phenomena in his worldview that are fairly rigid- i.e. goats die from sickness, guns and falling off things, not invisible beams from the earth.

There is obviously a tight connection between skepticism and faith, they are similar methods for rejecting evidence. The big difference is that skepticism allows for the consideration of contrary evidence. Suggesting the goat died from a gunshot would cause the herder to look for a wound, because he is skeptic about gunshots. Suggesting radiation poisoning would not cause him to move to a different location, because he can take it on faith there's no such thing as radioactive material.

Evolution threatens the Creationism worldview, and in a fairly unique way. By its nature, science is particularly vulnerable to skepticism. Science was designed this way on purpose so that in the event a biased or faith-based worldview was put forth, the skeptics would not agree until the bias was removed. This leads to its own problems in science of course, the high barrier of the paradigm shift. This occurs when a biased worldview slips through the cracks and is accepted while a non-biased worldview is rejected, when the scienticists think they are only being skeptic when in fact they are acting on faith in their theory. While this occurs with frequency in the scientific community, it certainly occurs more often everywhere else where people aren't even thinking about faith v. skepticism.

So, obviously, science is skepticism-rich and religion is faith-rich. They both have aspects of both, but are leaning in one way or another. What's important to realize here is that it is often ambiguous who is being skeptic and who is being faithful- why reject a large amount of evidence contradictory to your worldview? Because the evidence is either weaker than your own, or does not seem to apply to the phenomenon in question. Both of these reasons for rejecting evidence are heavily subject to interpretation- hence often times both sides accuse the other side of taking their worldview on faith.

My favorite part of this whole thing is that Creationists think they can create a worldview that is based on skepticism that also proves the existence of God and disproves evolution. Science is skeptic, so you have to provide ample evidence to prove phenomena that could or could not be biased. Religion is faithful, so you just have to provide a worldview and then it's up to external phenomena to sound more accurate in order to disprove the Religious point. They think they can take their worldview, based on the bible, and show that many of the phenomena that compose it cannot be refuted by mere skepticism, and that many of the phenomena that compose evolutionary theory should be taken skeptically.

Functioning in a faith-based worldview, the creationists have a very biased source as their evidence, the Judeochristian Bible. As a result they could never be skeptic about the Bible, which is a shame because it is clearly very anthrocentric and biased toward the human condition. As a result they can't take any good evidence on faith that doesn't jive directly with the Bible. Out of all the scientific disciplines, evolution seems to contradict the Biblical worldview the most, so it's natural they would attack it, because there is no ambiguity in the Bible for them.
And one final thing about that jackass Michael Behe's "mousetrap" irreducible complexity argument. He says that something such as the mousetrap could not have evolved because the loss of a single component would render the device useless, hence it was designed. This may be true, but this evidence does nto apply to evolution. Evolution does not function by adding features, but rather by changing existing features and removing others. The scaffolding argument is the best way to demonstrate this. A building is irreducibly complex after the scaffolding is removed, but completely reducible until that point. So complex structures that seem to have no precursors likely evolved in the presence of a facilitating phenomenon.