Meeting 12: Thursday Dec 7th

I know next week is the last week of classes, and that this is the first of two reading days, but I really want to meet one last time before the semester is over. Will this day work out for people? I want to go ahead and plan on it, knowing some people won't be able to come. Some people will, because they won't have an exam until Monday the 11th (at the earliest).

So...Let's plan to meet Thursday, Dec. 7, 7 PM, CLB 414.

Dixie County Lawsuit media coverage

Because The Alligator's website underwent a great deal of revision, the old links to the article covering my interview on H&C and the related editorial are dead, and the archives are not yet working that far back. According to the editors, it may be a very long time for the pages to be updated. Thus, I decided to use my cached version of the page (thank you Google Desktop) to paste the text of these articles into posts here, so that interested readers can follow the story. Also, I have updated the list of media related to the whole Dixie County debacle as it has unfolded.

Here is the article, then the editorial:

Student debates on Fox
By BRITTANY DAVIS
posted Thursday, November 30, 2006 1:00 a.m.
http://www.alligator.org/pt2/061130atheist.php

"Do you love the Lord?" locals asked strangers who visited the Dixie County Courthouse on Wednesday.

Daniel Morgan drove about an hour west of Gainesville to Cross City, the seat of Dixie County, to argue against the courthouse's six-ton monument bearing the Ten Commandments on a segment of the Fox News program "Hannity & Colmes."

Morgan, a UF chemistry graduate student who is president of UF's Atheist, Agnostic and Freethinking Student Association at UF, said Fox News called him at 1:30 p.m. Wednesday and asked him to come to the debate.

When introducing the segment, Hannity accused him of coming to Cross City to find someone who would sue the city over the monument. Morgan said that he hadn't and that he had never been to Dixie County before he was invited by Fox News.

He said he was thrilled to be invited.

"They offered me a ride, and I said I didn't need one because I was afraid he would get someone else to go (who didn't need a ride)," he said.

Morgan, who speaks with a Southern drawl, comes from Richlands, Va., a town of about 4,000 people.

His opponent was former county attorney Joey Lander. Lander is one of two lawyers in Cross City, a town of about 1,775 people and at least 20 churches.

Lander said the community supports the monument and the media is making an issue out of nothing.

The $20,000 monument, which also bears the phrase "Love God and keep his commandments," was given to the city by a private donor.

"It's already there, and it's not meant to coerce or endorse any particular religion," Lander said.

Lander is half-owner of the daily newspaper, which he said had only received calls in support of the monument. The one complaint the newspaper received was an editorial from a Gainesville resident.

Each man had about two minutes to present his interpretation of the First Amendment and the legal and philosophical implications of the monument before the satellite link was disrupted and the interview came to an early end.

Morgan argued that legal precedent demonstrated that a religious monument on government property is unconstitutional.

A crowd of 20 people gathered before the event, and many argued in favor of the importance of Jesus and the monument to their community.

The group was irked by the presence of Morgan and the Fox News cameramen.

One member of the group yelled, "This atheist is coming down here to take away our Ten Commandments!"

Copyright © 1996–2007 Alligator Online and Campus Communications.

Now the editorial:

Next, we pass a godless-in-a-good-way LAUREL to UF's own Daniel Morgan, who ventured into the lion's den - Fox News Channel - to argue against a Ten Commandments monument in a Dixie County courthouse this week. Morgan appeared on "Hannity & Colmes" opposite a local attorney, who apparently fears a rash of graven images, false gods and ass-coveting if the six-ton Decalogue is removed.

He's not the only one. Locals greeted the UF student with outright hostility - one shouted, "This atheist is coming down here to take away our Ten Commandments!" as if Morgan planned to rip the monument in two with his superhuman atheist strength. Which is absurd. He only uses his powers to fight crime.

Besides, the really important parts of the Ten Commandments - thou shalt not kill, for instance - are already enshrined in American law. And in every other kind of law, for that matter. As for the other stuff? Keeping the Sabbath holy and all that? We say the Christians' real beef is with the National Football League, not the justice system.

And here is a media roundup on the whole affair (for LTE's, "con" means the person writing is against the 10C monument & "pro" means they approve of it):

1. Gainesville Sun -- 11/28/06


2. Dixie County Advocate -- 11/30/06


3. Alligator -- 11/30/06


4. Alligator -- 12/1/06 (editorial)


5. FFRF Press Release -- 12/1/06


6. Gainesville Sun -- 12/02/06


7. 3 Letters to the Editor at the Sun -- pro, pro, con (12/2/06)


8. Dixie County Advocate -- 12/7/06


9. 2 More Letters to the Editor at the Sun -- pro (12/12/06), con (12/17/06)


10. St. Petersburg Times -- 1/3/07


11. St. Petersburg Times (LTE) -- con, 1/13/07 (4th letter down; response to 1/3/07 article)


12. Gainesville Sun -- 2/7/07


13. ACLU News Release -- 2/7/07
    


14. Reuters (Miami) -- 2/7/07


15. Gainesville Sun -- 2/8/07


16. St. Petersburg Times -- 2/8/07


17. Alligator (LTE): -- con, 2/9/07, (see text here)


18. Dixie County Advocate -- 2/15/07


19. Orlando Sentinel -- 2/17/07


20. Gainesville Sun (LTE) -- pro, 2/17/07


21. Dixie County Advocate (LTE) -- con, 2/24/07


22. Liberty Counsel -- 3/8/07


23. CNS News -- 3/12/07


24. Florida Humanists Association -- 4/9/07, (also here and here)


25. atheism.about.com -- 4/27/07, Austin Cline


26. Dixie County Advocate -- 9/27/07, Issue 40, Page 18


27. Dixie County Advocate blog -- 6/11/08, linked to my YouTube video

other media (blogs):

1. KipEsquire -- 11/28/06


2. Florida Progressive Coalition -- 4/4/07


3. John Pieret -- 4/15/07


4. Prof. Friedman -- 8/14/08

I'll update after I find more information on the case status.
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Technorati tags: Gator Freethought

My Interview on Hannity & Colmes re the Decalogue

*Here is a continuously-updated list of the news coverage of this story from 11/06 to the present*

Here is the video on YouTube:

I wanted to point out a couple of things about the interview for clarification.

1. I was contacted by FoxNews and asked if I would be willing to do this segment. I was not involved in any way with this story before, or besides, this small interview.
   
2. I am not a lawyer, although they pitted me against one and tacitly framed me that way.
3. The name of our group was mangled by Sean. It's the "Atheist, Agnostic and Freethinking Student Association" at UF. Oh well...
   
4. I have never been to Dixie County (map) before last night. I have never spoken with anyone from Dixie County about the issue before last night. Thus, I am not "actively soliciting" any lawsuits. However, I would like to see someone from the area with the courage to challenge this illegal action on the part of the Dixie County Board of Commissioners.
5. Sean said it was different than AL, and more "in keeping with" the KY and TX cases, although the KY and AL cases are almost identical here, and the judges ruled those displays unconstiutional, and had them removed. As I pointed out, the TX case involved multiple other monuments, and so it functioned in a true historic/sentimental way and not in the way this monument functions here -- as an endorsement.
   
6. The Establishment Clause is best understood by the Lemon Test. This situation fails the test on obvious grounds, and by recent precedents in Alabama (Roy Moore case fell into the same district as ours -- the 11th Federal District -- and so the precedent here is unequivocal), Kentucky and Texas. For more background, see AL, KY and TX.
7. I got in the little quip, "It'd make it illegal..." when Joey defended that the monument wouldn't make the community worse. It might've been hard to hear because all 3 of us were talking.
   
8. Keeping the government religion-neutral is not "anti-religion".
9. The 10 Commandments are unequivocally a religious endorsement of the Judeo-Christian worldview. Tell me what secular purpose the first four commandments serve? How are they consonant with our principles of democracy and freedom of religion? What about the name of YHWH in commandment 3? If the left tablet was gone, and the inscription at the bottom, there would be no controversy whatsoever, I am willing to bet.
   
10. How would you feel if they put up a monument to Islam, or to Buddha?
    
11. Read this to for clear logical arguments against this sort of endorsement of religion (10 Commandments displays).
12. I have no legal standing, nor real problem with generic "God" references, and while I wish the government would stay completely God-neutral, I would happily settle for it being religion-neutral. I would never bring a suit to remove "In God We Trust" or "Under God", although I disagree with the motives of putting them on our currency after the Civil War, and in our pledge during the Red Scare, respectively. Our Founders chose a secular motto for a good reason -- e pluribus unum.
13. I really think that the sorts of people who want these affronts to judicial authority imposed are weak in their faith. They require the imprimatur of the government to help them believe. Although their believing ancestors were able to multiply and grow amidst various pagan and secular and extra-Christian governments throughout history, modern "born-agains" are apparently unable to comprehend why that is. They are also typically the types who are ignorant of the serious religious outcry against the secular Constitution, when it was written. I'm glad that our Founders had more brains, courage, and faith than these weak-kneed Evangelicals.
    
14. The minutes of the Jan 19 meeting of the Board contains the following damning paraphrase/summaries, indicating they expect and are "bold" enough to do this despite the legality:

    Commissioner Driggers had a call from a resident who would like to see the Ten Commandments on the steps of the Courthouse. He wanted to know if the Board is bold enough to do this.
    
    All members agreed that they would like to see this accomplished.
    
    Attorney Lander stated that he will defend any law suits for free.
    
    Motion by Commissioner Land, seconded by Commissioner Valentine and carried to go ahead with having the Ten Commandments placed on the front of the courthouse steps.

15. Although Joey Lander may be willing to defend the case for free, the county is certainly going to have to pay the legal fees of the ACLU or whomever takes the case. That sort of absurdity is a slap in the face to anyone who wants to use religion (and resources) for good. Rather than the county being able to use those funds to give back to their constitutents, they will piss them away on this religio-political nonsense. This sort of thing touches on the question I asked a while back -- what is the real agenda of the RR, versus Evangelicals generally?
    
16. Read the Alligator article and the Gainesville Sun article for more.
    
17. I'm sure this is the end of my involvement. I won't be commenting much more, aside from replies to comments here and at other sites about me or the interview. I've already gotten a lot of feedback from friends and family. Some positive, some negative.
    
18. I really enjoyed the short segment, but I strongly recommend to everyone that they do more reading and less Primetime "infotainment-type" TV news watching. You never get the details, the understanding of the legal issues, etc., from sound bytes and talking points. Also, if you ever do something like this, go in prepared with quips and sound bytes, and expect to be misrepresented by those who strongly disagree with you (Sean Hannity).
    

See here for more clarification. Feel free to email me. Thanks for reading :)
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Technorati tags: God, Religion

Rolling Stone article "Hell on Campus": campus preachers

I mentioned in part 1 of my post on UF campus preachers that one of these guys (Bro. Jed) was featured in Rolling Stone on March 27, 1986, in their special campus issue (issue #471 -- Bruce Willis on the cover), which had articles about politics and religion on campus from pp. 75-100. I took the time to go and get the, and you can view all of it here.

The title of the article was "Hell on Campus", and it was written by David Handelman, starting on p.86. At the time, Bro. Jed's group was named "The Destroyers", and this was written when he and his wife had just recently had Evangeline, their first (they now have 5 daughters).

After a trip to the UF Music Library, some time on a microfilm reader, and some time at a copier and scanner, I present to you all six pages of the article as .JPG files. You will want to view these with some program which allows you to zoom in and out with a magnification lens. The text of the pages was tiny, and I did my best to enlarge it, but the microfilm format is quite limited.

I may try to work with these some more, because they are large files (5.2M total), but I've already put in more time on this than I should've. [why am I enamored with campus preachers?] You can visit the index to download them and save each page if you like.

index

1. page 1
2. page 2
3. page 3
4. page 4
5. page 5
6. page 6

If you have any trouble downloading, opening or viewing the files, please leave a comment.

The article was both sad and hilarious at the same time. I will comment on it more fully in part 2 of the campus preacher review series, but for now, I will say that it appears that Radical Bill lied about being mentioned in the article -- it was entirely based in California, and Florida was mentioned only for background as to how Jed and Cindy met (which Bill told the truth about).
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Technorati tags: God, Religion

No Meeting 12 ... Yet

There is not yet a scheduled speaker for our next meeting, and this week is the holiday, so I figure 2 weeks from now we'll meet again.

http://aasauf.blogspot.com/2006/02/meetings.html

If you have any people you want to hear, and you want me to set them up to speak, please let me know.
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Technorati tags: AAFSA

Alligator News Coverage of Joey Johnsen

The Alligator finally decided to cover Joey Johnsen with a front-page story on Friday. See our previous article on him, and a column by Todd Portnowitz from way back in September.

They did supply me with one thing I didn't yet know -- he did in fact graduate from UPenn.
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Technorati tags: God, Religion

UF Campus Preachers: A Review - Part 1

Read all articles on UF's campus preachers here. I have lots of relevant images here.

If you've been a Gator long, you've probably come through Turlington Plaza and seen Joey Johnsen^[1], Michael Siemer, Tom Short, or Frank Zaccaro** (picture index below)-- our keynote campus preachers. But, you probably don't know their names, or much about the phenomenon of campus preaching generally. Allow me to enlighten you...or dirty your brain up a bit, depending on your perspective.

**UPDATE: Part 2 is now available (1/15/07)**

To begin, I have had a very interesting convergence of events that I want to share with you, and I'm seriously considering submitting an article to the Alligator, or some freethought mags and newspapers. The other day, I randomly met "Radical Bill", aka William H. Abney, as I was arguing with Tom Short^[2]. Bill came up and Tom actually knew him by name, although Bill is obviously a homeless man. The reason, I later came to find out, is that Bill is infamous for his antics involving campus preachers. Bill seemed to know the arguments of creationism well, and he thoroughly mocked Tom for believing "Bronze Age sheepherders" and Bill really stole the show for a few minutes. Tom went for a low blow, saying something about how Bill was poor, and Bill remarked back that the VA gave him money every month, and that he chose to live how he lives and is happy that way.

I never thought I'd randomly run into Bill only a few days later (perhaps a week ago) on the Plaza of the Americas. I ended up sitting in the grass with him and smoking a cigar and chatting for at least an hour. We talked politics and religion and he told me something of his life. He told me about the Danny Rolling years, and he told me about the Gainesville church fires in the early '90s, about his trips to Alaska, about things he'd seen and done. I really enjoyed meeting him.

It just so happens that Bill made it into the Florida Oral History General Collections as entry UF 302 on p.258. He was always involved in campus politics and demonstrations, and was apparently the archetype-antagonist of campus preachers on UF in his day. Who happens to have gotten his start here at UF, and met his wife here, facilitated by Radical Bill?

None other than "Brother Jed", humbly self-proclaimed the "foremost campus preacher" in the US; henceforth known as BJ (snicker). Bill told me that he introduced Jed to his wife Cindy Lasseter, and that she was quite "the disco whore" in her day, rarely sober, ever ready to shag, and certainly unholy. He told me that this chick and he were stoners and used to laugh at and mock the campus preachers, but that she had developed a crush on BJ, and asked Bill to introduce them. At the time, I had no idea who this BJ fellow was, and I thought that Bill might've been joshing me. It turns out he told the truth.

BJ is a rarity among his peers. He has his own Wikipedia article. He has written Who Will Rise Up?, which details his life and ministry. He also has an FAQ from an alt.usenet group made by people he's "touched" with his life's work. BJ is one of the first major traveling campus preachers, and probably has more nationwide name-recognition than any other. He also appears to have founded a "school" to train up others to follow in his footsteps. It appears that we have him to ultimately thank for training/inspiring at least two of our other campus preachers -- Frank Zaccaro and Tom Short. Unfortunately, I haven't gotten to meet BJ yet, although he stars in the gallery of campus preacher pics compiled by past AASA members at UF, and I suspect he'll return some time.

BJ made it into Rolling Stone on March 27, 1986, in their special campus issue (issue #471 -- Bruce Willis on the cover), which had articles about politics and religion on campus from pp. 75-100. The title of his article was "Hell on Campus", by David Handelman. Radical Bill claims he was quoted in the article, and I have submitted an Illiad request to get a copy of the article. After seeing that Bill told the truth about Cindy (read the story she confirmed here, in Who Will Rise Up?, see section 7 -- "From Disco Queen to Gospel Preacher"), I suspect he's telling the truth about being quoted in the article. I'll have more details on that in part 2.^[3]

Youtube has numerous videos starring BJ; they have numerous videos of general campus preachers, as well. By far, the funniest video I saw of BJ and Frank Zaccaro (download the .flv HERE) involved a tirade about sex at the U of Oregon that went on and on about how lesboes use dildoes on each other and boys masturbate too much, which causes them to have premature ejaculation. He also promised that if the girls wanted a good orgasm, they should get a good Christian boy who doesn't masturbate and look at porn so much. Not exactly your typical Sunday sermon material, but certainly hilarious.

A blogger posted this video after the visit on May 31, 2006, one that made the newspaper front page there. Some Mizzou students have multiple videos of the same sort of nonsense on their campus, and student comments, dating from last fall's visit. An AAFSA member tells me that Jed practically camps out at Mizzou, and this seems quite reasonable, since he lives so close (near Columbia, MO).

His apprentice/companion Frank Zaccaro is the guy in the video (and here on-campus, hopefully it gets washed once in a while) with the "TRUST JESUS" T-shirt, and usually has this huge sign on a stick attached to a belt that he wears around his waist that says "YOU MAKE ME SICK" and lists: "Rebellious Women, Atheists, Abortionists...Wiccans" [the typical list]. One of the funniest comments on it is that he reviles, "The Cult of the Effeminate Intellect," which, he explained to me, meant "hippy-like 'God is all love' and mushy crap like that." I just thought he was a local, but no! I was talking to him on Tuesday (11/14/06), and I had no idea he was with Jed, or I would've asked him more questions.

One of the most interesting things about these guys, and their apparent organization, is the fact that other Christians probably revile them just as much, if not more, than many of us nonbelievers.

Many times I use the Turlington Plaza webcam to see if these guys are out there. It is obvious when they are, and have a large crowd, but sometimes they don't. A really good question that often comes up is -- why do I bother arguing with these guys?

1. I love to argue
2. They spew nonsense too often unchallenged
3. Some people will believe half of the crap they say without someone out there to make them back up their off-the-wall claims. Some of these claims include faulty statistics about gay people or atheists, or non sequiturs about science, eg Tom Short about evolution and Hitler etc.
4. I love to argue
5. They are quite entertaining
6. I love to get in "zingers" when they expose themselves -- like when they are condemning lust or sex or porn -- most recently, the best one I got off [no pun intended] was in the middle of Tom Short's railing against hypocrisy, which ensued after an argument with a liberal Christian he condemned, and during a pause for breath I asked, "When was the last time you looked at porn?" He paused, said, "It's been a while," stuttered, tried to get back on topic, and I said, "How long ago?" Tom stammered something about, "Well sometimes things pop up on your screen..." Zing!]
7. Garbage and lies being forceably pushed on / screamed at people as they peaceably go about their business is wrong; I counter it.
   
8. I know lots of people in their crowds want to challenge them, but are too shy or are afraid they don't know enough about the Bible, my boldness encourages others to join in the fray.
   

There are some really good suggestions out there for how to best deal with these guys. I really liked what the kids in the U of Oregon vid did -- they sang the Star-Spangled Banner to drown out the nonsense. It's a fun and non-confrontational way to show them their message of hate and ignorance is unwanted, and it discourages them a bit. Perhaps next time if a few people out there with me will join in, we can try this approach. Also, I advocate the approach outlined in this Mencken quote:

The liberation of the human mind has never been furthered by such learned dunderheads; it has been furthered by gay fellows who heaved dead cats into sanctuaries and then went roistering down the highways of the world, proving to all men that doubt, after all, was safe--that the god in the sanctuary was finite in his power, and hence a fraud. One horse-laugh is worth ten thousand syllogisms. It is not only more effective; it is also vastly more intelligent. —H. L. Mencken, Prejudices (fourth series)

I just joined a Facebook group protesting the Turlington preachers. You should, too!

Stay tuned for part 2, with more good stuff to come.

[1] I thought it fair to mention that some people are now defending Joey in the Alligator. His defense/dislike ratio is still pretty small, though.

[2] I believed I was the only blogger with articles on Tom at UF, but I was wrong -- the events of last fall, including the arrest of Christine Miller's dad, (see more on her here and here, and a letter from her dad on the situation here) got Tom in the blogosphere before me.

[3] Part 2 of this review will include anything I find interesting in this Rolling Stone article, phone interview details with Ruben Israel, an associate of BJ's; and possibly interviews with Frank Zaccaro and Brother Jed, if they respond to my emails as Ruben did.

Picture index:

1. Joey Johnsen (email)
   



2. Michael Siemer (email) (on the right with Moses/Elijah-beard, also see this pic from here)



3. Tom Short (email)



4. Frank Zaccaro (email)



5. Brother Jed (email) (gotta love that leather vest)

**It turns out that Frank's last name is not Warner, as I first thought from his email addy, but Zaccaro.

Read all articles on UF's campus preachers here. I have lots of relevant images here.
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Technorati tags: God, Religion

Responding to ID -- A Review of Their Positive Arguments with Rebuttals

Intro: I simply want to lay out a fair representation of the positive case for intelligent design (ID) in this article, and examine why the case has been ruled a failure by the greater scientific community. Because ID is so vague, eg defined by the Discovery Institute as,

The theory of intelligent design holds that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection.

Therefore, making an argument for such a claim is going to be difficult from the outset. "Some features"? "An intelligent cause"? We see the vagueness of the definition come back to haunt ID advocates in their inability to put forth convincing arguments which line up with "this is best explained by an intelligent cause" versus "random mutation/natural selection". For example, some of ID's cosmological arguments in The Privileged Planet (largely the anthropic principle) do not [obviously] fit this criterion.

And thus lot of what passes for "arguments" coming from ID/Creationism (IDC) these days against biology is simple: find some part of evolution that people don't know a lot about and say, "How do you explain X?!" This argument from ignorance is common among laypeople, because they don't know enough about the science to make positive arguments for the claims of IDC. Therefore, a great deal of the "noise" and political theatre of IDC is just critiques of evolution. As Judge Jones eloquently pointed out, there is a false dichotomy between showing someone else's explanation isn't good and proving your own case [not granting that the former has been done in the case of IDC]. Just because you do the former doesn't mean you've done the latter -- established evidence for IDC. I would call these critiques and arguments from ignorance negative in character, because they do not purport to demonstrate the truth of IDC.

However, there are some positive arguments for IDC, and they will be the focus of this review. I am going to go through and list the positive arguments (that I'm aware of), and link to strong rebuttals/refutations of those arguments.

Almost everyone already knows the basic arguments of IDC: "design detection" (DD) and "irreducible complexity" (IC). Generalized arguments, though very useful in philosophy, don't work in science. You have to pick particular examples (data) and use these to demonstrate your argument works. Until then, you haven't yet crossed the threshold of science. I'll pick back up on this at the bottom.

Responses to the claims IC are abundant, and here are layman-friendly resources to familarize onesself with the mechanisms by which scientists explain complexity and apparent IC: exaptation/cooption, scaffolding, gene duplications, etc:
1) Prof. PZ Myers' Powerpoint presentation, see slides 29-50
2) Prof. Dave Ussery's paper delineating the four different RM/NS pathways to complexity
3) Don Lindsay, How Can Evolution Cause Irreducibly Complex Systems?

Two particular systems are touted as crucial examples of IC: i) the blood-clotting cascade (BCC)/immune response; ii) the flagellum.

i) The IC arguments for IDC are the brain-child of Prof. Michael Behe, a biochemist at Lehigh U. The BCC arguments can be found throughout IDC websites. One of the most well-informed responders to these arguments is Andrea Bottaro. Last year, as more evidence came in that transposons were involved in the human immune response, Dr. Bottaro put together the pieces and completely refuted the claim of IC as it applies to BCC. How did Prof. Behe respond? By moving the goalposts -- not in any way denying the evidence, but demanding a mutation-by-mutation account of the pathways involved. Thus, he undercuts his own argument by rendering the burden of proof unattainable by any scientific pursuit.

Also see Matt Inlay's article on the supposed IC of the BCC. Matt rigorously examines different branches of the tree of life to demonstrate the fallacious nature of the claim by evidencing the reducible nature of the immune response.

The single best place for you to start in looking at IC as it relates to the immune response is here.

These technical papers, as well as others that can be accessed via this long bibliography on the subject, here, here, and peer-reviewed literature like this Nature review and via searches on PubMed and other scientific databases, decisively defeat the claim of IC as it relates to BCC or the immune response. Again, the very important thing to do is focus in on the specific systems that are being examined, and claimed as evidence, and force the burden of proof upon the claimant. In the cases of IC, these claims have been refuted by the research of biologists and biochemists, which have always shown evidence of cooption and homology of these systems -- completely undercutting the identification of IC.

ii) The evolution of the flagellum is probably the keystone argument of IC. IDC proponents use this system because they feel it is best compared to a "machine", is most difficult to reduce, and is the strongest evidence for intelligent design in biology. One of the most comprehensive resources on this argument is from a continually-updated paper written by NCSE staffer Nick Matzke. Another resource is the PandasThumb section here on flagellum evolution.

In addition, Nick Matzke got a peer-reviewed paper published in Nature Reviews which unequivocally demonstrated, for the first time, that of the 42 proteins involved in the flagellar system of a particular bacterium, all but 2 of them had known homologs! This research involves doing BLAST-type searches in the genome of the bacterium being considered, and showing that the raw evidence of co-optation/exaptation is abundant -- there is no good reason to suppose that all 42 of these components originally had the function that they now do. See also Matzke's reader background page.

Moving on to the second prong of the "case for design" involves taking on those claims that design has been "detected" via mathematical research in IC or other biological systems.

iii) Design detection is the specialty area of William Dembski. Dembski took the "No Free Lunch" (NFL) theorems developed by David Wolpert and others (background with citations) and attempted to use these mathematical constructs to argue a few different things. One of his arguments was the the NFLs showed that evolutionary RM/NS would theoretically not be successful in the development of complexity. Although we can find numerous responses and refutations of this claim (here, here, here , here and see references here -- Wein 2002a,b; Shallit 2002; Rosenhouse 2002; Perakh 2001a, 2002a, 2002b, 2003; Young 2002; Orr 2002; Van Till 2002), I think it best to turn to the person who actually developed the NFL theorems in order to take Dembski to task for misrepresenting them and their implications. Wolpert almost immediately refuted Dembski's claims, and it took a few years before Dembski further tweaked his claims:

[David H. Wolpert] The values of the factors arising in the NFL theorems are never properly specified in his analysis. More generally, no consideration is given to whether some of the free lunches in the geometry of induction might be more relevant than the NFL theorems (e.g., those free lunches concerning "head-to-head minimax" distinctions that concern pairs of algorithms considered together rather than single algorithms considered in isolation).

Indeed, throughout there is a marked elision of the formal details of the biological processes under consideration. Perhaps the most glaring example of this is that neo-Darwinian evolution of ecosystems does not involve a set of genomes all searching the same, fixed fitness function, the situation considered by the NFL theorems. Rather it is a co-evolutionary process. Roughly speaking, as each genome changes from one generation to the next, it modifies the surfaces that the other genomes are searching. And recent results indicate that NFL results do not hold in co-evolution. [emphasis mine]

It may well be that there is a major mystery underlying the performance of some search processes that one might impute to the historical transformations of ecosystems. But Dembski has not established this, not by a long shot.

Dembski refined his arguments and published (2003) a response which attempted to show that even in co-evolutionary processes, that the NFL theorems do still hold. A great deal of the problem with Dembski's work is that it is all on his own website and books, and none of it in peer-reviewed literature. That means that mathematical laymen (like me and most of you) are often going to miss the subtleties in Dembski's articles that peer-review would immediately weed out. The most basic mistakes and differences between arguments by Wolpert and Dembski will be caught by other professional mathematicians and fixed in the MSS before publication. This keeps the "certitude" factor on the IDC side to a minimum, because while Wolpert's arguments are accepted by the mathematical community, which immediately lends substantial credibility to them, and evidences Wolpert's authority, none of this can be said for Dembski. An argument from silence may then be made that Dembski's work cannot clear the bar of legitimacy. Why else would he not want it published academically, if it is valid?

Dembski may possibly complain that he can't get his work published due to discrimination, but this complaint makes little sense: Behe has published work since he published his Darwin's Black Box, and Dembski's work, being mathematical in nature, need not even address the question of evolution directly. Therefore, if any case can be made about anti-creationist bias, it would be much more likely for Behe's work to be "censored", [as they love to claim (without evidence)] due to its intrinsically anti-evolutionary content, versus Dembski's abstract math. Dembski's work may or may not apply to biological systems. Behe's is directly about biology. Therefore, which is more likely to be "censored" by anti-creationist bias, and so does Dembski have any excuse for not publishing his work in a respected academic format?

Conversely, Wolpert has recently published, via peer-reviewed literature, about the co-evolution which accurately models biological systems:

Abstract: Recent work on the foundational underpinnings of black-box optimization has begun to uncover a rich mathematical structure. In particular, it is now known that an inner product between the optimization algorithm and the distribution of optimization problems likely to be encountered fixes the distribution over likely performances in running that algorithm. One ramification of this is the "No Free Lunch" (NFL) theorems, which state that any two algorithms are equivalent when their performance is averaged across all possible problems. This highlights the need for exploiting problem-specific knowledge to achieve better than random performance. In this paper, we present a general framework covering most optimization scenarios. In addition to the optimization scenarios addressed in the NFL results, this framework covers multiarmed bandit problems and evolution of multiple coevolving players. As a particular instance of the latter, it covers "self-play" problems. In these problems, the set of players work together to produce a champion, who then engages one or more antagonists in a subsequent multiplayer game. In contrast to the traditional optimization case where the NFL results hold, we show that in self-play there are free lunches: in coevolution some algorithms have better performance than other algorithms, averaged across all possible problems. However, in the typical coevolutionary scenarios encountered in biology, where there is no champion, the NFL theorems still hold.

Dembski has seized on this last sentence as evidence that he is right. It isn't true. Note that the problem here is still that the NFL theorems are about "algorithms averaged across all possible problems".

It is thus hardly convincing to say that the specific ecological "fitness landscapes", or "search space", is not beautifully searched by RM/NS versus a blind search. Simply put, in order to model biological systems properly, the algorithm itself would have to be altered such that it was not specific-target-directed [multiple positive adaptations are possible], such that each "score" improved the algorithm [the scope of the organism's ability to adapt further], and such that each "score" altered the competitiveness of the landscape [the domain in which fitness is evaluated, here, the ecosystem, which coevolves with the players]. This is the true nature of biological co-evolution -- as organisms adapt, the machinery by which they acquire adaptations itself adapts (consider that increasing surface area for sunlight is useless to animals, but not to plants), and the environment around them is full of other "game players", co-evolving just like them. This is, so far as I am able to tell, the definition of an "open algorithm" during the permutations. This is not what Wolpert has even considered at this point.

Dembski has not modeled a system in this way as of now. Thus, in the shortest way to respond to the "postive case" Dembski has laid forth, it is simply a strawman representation of biological evolution. Modeling real evolution in simple mathematical terms is probably one of the most daunting and complicated of tasks. The NFL theorems do not take into account an algorithm that itself adapts with increased fitness of the player, and changes the landscape with each successful target. Wolpert explained this in his earliest response to Dembski, and published his findings that take this into account w.r.t. NFL theorems. This intrinsic flaw is continually overlooked and undermines the positive case for design completely.

To his credit, Dembski's formalistic abilities are not in question. That is, his ability to evaluate a given model, and perform the correct analysis, is A-ok. The problem is the relevance and correlation of this model to anything resembling reality. "Let the reader judge," as Dembski says in response.

The real problem here is that Dembski has never addressed the most substantial critiques of his work. As Mark Perakh points out in this extensively referenced article (a good place to start for an overview of the status of Dembski's claims:

When encountering critique of his work, Dembski is selective in choosing when to reply to his critics and when to ignore their critique. His preferred targets for replies are those critics who do not boast comparable long lists of formal credentials – this enables him to contemptuously dismiss the critical comments by pointing to the alleged lack of qualification of his opponents while avoiding answering the essence of their critical remarks. (See, for example, Dembski’s replies to some of his opponents [3]) This type of behavior provides certain hints at Dembski’s overriding quest for winning debate at anycost rather than striving to arrive at the truth. For example, in his book No Free Lunch [4] Dembski devoted many pages to a misuse of Wolpert and Macready’s No Free Lunch (NFL) theorems [5]. (Some early critique of Dembski’s interpretation of the NFL theorems appeared already in [6 a, b]. A detailed analysis of Dembski’s misuse of the NFL theorems is given, in particular, in [6 c].)

Dembski’s faulty interpretation of the NFL theorems was strongly criticized by Richard Wein [7] and by David Wolpert, the originator of these theorems [2]. Dembski spared no effort in rebutting Wein’s critique, devoting to it two lengthy essays. [3] However, he did not utter a single word in regard to Wolpert’s critique. It is not hard to see why. Wein, as Dembski points out, has only a bachelor’s degree in statistics – and Dembski uses this irrelevant factoid to deflect Wein’s well substantiated criticism. He does not, though, really answer the essence of Wein’s comments and resorts instead to ad hominem remarks and a contemptuous tone. He can’t do the same with Wolpert who enjoys a sterling reputation as a brilliant mathematician and who is obviously much superior to Dembski in the understanding of the NFL theorems of which he is a coauthor.

Dembski pretends that Wolpert’s critique does not exist.

Dembski has behaved similarly in a number of other situations. For example, the extensive index in his latest book The Design Revolution: Answering the Toughest Questions About Intelligent Design [8] completely omits the names of most of the prominent critics of Dembski’s ideas.

We don’t see in that index the following names:
Rich Baldwin, Eli Chiprout, Taner Edis, Ellery Eels, Branden Fitelson, Philip Kitcher, Peter Milne, Massimo Pigliucci, Del Ratzsch, Jeff Shallit, Niall Shanks, Jordan H. Sobel, Jason Rosenhouse, Christopher Stephenson, Richard Wein, and Matt Young.

All these writers have analyzed in detail Dembski’s literary output and demonstrated multiple errors, fallacious concepts and inconsistencies which are a trademark of his prolific production. (I have not mentioned myself in this list although I have extensively criticized Dembski both in web postings [9] and in print [10]; he never uttered a single word in response to my critique, while it is known for fact that he is familiar with my critique; the above list shows that I am in good company.)

Thomas D. Schneider, another strong critic of Dembski’s ideas, is mentioned in the index of [8] but the extent of the reference is as follows:

"Evolutionary biologists regularly claim to obtain specified complexity for free or from scratch. (Richard Dawkins and Thomas Schneider are some of the worst offenders in this regard.)"

Contrary to the subtitle of Dembski’s book [8], this reference can hardly be construed as an answer to Schneider’s questions. Essentially, all the listed writers have asked Dembski a number of questions regarding his concepts. The absence of any replies to the listed authors makes the title of Dembski’s new book [8], sound like a parody. It should have properly been titled The Design Revolution: Answering the Toughest Questions About Intelligent Design. Of course we already know that Dembski is a stubborn purveyor of half-baked ideas [10]. Is he also of the opinion that selectivity in choosing when to respond to opponents and when to pretend they do not exist is compatible with intellectual honesty? [edit: Check out the article for the references: http://www.talkdesign.org/people/mperakh/perakh_ddq.pdf]

Welsley R. Elsberry has an impressive set of links (left sidebar) on Dembski's work and its ramifications. Mark Chu-Carroll has an entire section examining some of Dembski's work, Richard Wein has written extensively about the problems with it, also TalkDesign, as does TalkOrigins, on the NFL and his work in information detection, for more reading. Another awesome resource is the PandasThumb IDC archive. Furthermore, this post at the PT lays out some good refs on the background arguments of Dembski involving complexity via RM/NS:

1. Peter Schuster, How does complexity arise in evolution? Complexity, 2:22-30 (1996)
2. Christoph Adami, Charles Ofria, and Travis C. Collier Evolution of biological complexity, PNAS | April 25, 2000 | vol. 97 | no. 9 | 4463-4468
3. Lenski RE, Ofria C, Pennock RT, and Adami C, The Evolutionary Origin of Complex Features Nature, 423:139-144 (2003).
4. Tom Schneider, Rebuttal to William A. Dembski’s Posting and to His Book “No Free Lunch”
5. Tom Schneider ev: Evolution of Biological Information Nucleic Acids Res, 28:14, 2794-2799, 2000

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As we discussed at our freethought group's 11/9 meeting, there are actually some good philosophical arguments in ID. Teleological and anthropic principle-type arguments certainly aren't invalid, although the veracity of their premises is, of course, crucial. However, they simply aren't science, or scientific arguments, without meeting some pretty strict criteria, and without going through the process of peer review, experiment, and eventual scientific consensus. As of now, they are completely philosophical in nature. That only means that ID still has to pass the standard hurdles before including itself into the scientific community as a valid idea to teach in science classes.

As Prof. Joe Meert pointed out at that night's meeting, Einstein didn't take out ads in newspapers asking people to write their congressional representatives to get relativity included in high school curricula. Einstein didn't try to get a relativity-sympathetic school board voted in, and include his ideas in high school textbooks. Einstein wanted legitimacy among his scientific peers and to establish his ideas via empiricism and the method of science, and then, he knew, getting into textbooks would follow. Those sorts of political tactics by IDCists are what undermines their claim to legitimacy in the scientific community. They want their philosophical verbiage smuggled into science classrooms since they can't get a single scientific argument going for them.

Conclusion: irreducible complexity fails as a critique against evolution, as the proposed systems have viable, published explanations for their evolution; and Dembski's work in design detection fails as it is a critique against quasi-evolution -- a strawman, which does not even intersect with the robust work done by geneticists and computer scientists in mathematically modeling evolutionary theory.

The good philosophical ideas intrinsic within teleological arguments is lost amidst the "culture war" that IDC's are waging against evolution and materialism, in their own words. Hopefully, once the dust settles, and cooler heads prevail, some of their ideas can be incorporated into places that they belong (history, philosophy, etc.), and continue to be excluded from the science classroom until they become scientific...hopefully.

**UPDATE (2/9/07): See Ken Miller's Youtube presentation on the errors and problems with ID arguments**
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Technorati tags: Intelligent Design, Evolution, Creationism

UF Campus Preacher Joey Johnsen

I've written a few times about Joey Johnsen, as he just keeps popping up in UF campus news. Joey was at the Wharton Business school at UPenn, and should've graduated in '05. I'm pretty sure he said he did finish, but I'm not positive [*Update: this article says yes, he did graduate*].

I mean, the guy looks harmless, even nice. How could he stir up so much anger?

At any rate, today (11/15) he was the lambasted (again) in the editorial cartoon for his preaching antics, as well as two letters to the editor: Sermons don't spread Christian message by Paul Moore, and UF preacher harasses captive audience by Fei Long. Paul had written in a letter published last Wednesday (11/8) on the same topic: Preacher needlessly attacks Krishnas.

Basically, Joey goes out and stands beside the Hare Krishna lunch table in a public square and preaches very loudly. The Krishnas have a huge line every day, and people are forced to stand for at least 5-10 mins in one place, so he's quite the opportunistic parasite. This has caused a bit of a recent ruckus with his mentions in the Alligator op-eds.

My recent interactions with him included private correspondences and a column I sent in to the Alligator. As I said in my post about our correspondence, Joey is not new at campus evangelism. He did a lot of it while he was at UPenn as an undergrad, in their business program. He was involved in CCC (at least, their Fall retreats) and started a campus ministry called "Frontline" in which people would go, unsolicited and unwanted (in most cases), to dorm rooms to "witness" to others (my facts from article "On the Battlefield for Our Lord: Joe Johnsen Serves in Frontline", May 10, 2004).

I wonder how the Christians would feel if I went to some place where they were peacefully going about their business and loudly read relevant portions of Friedrich Nietzsche and Freud, calling believers in God "sickly" (Thus Spoke Zarathustra) and telling them religion is a psychosocial delusion (Freud). I'm sure they wouldn't be happy about it. But, tu quoque -- two wrongs don't make a right, I certainly don't have the same motive as Joey does -- hellfire, and I'm above that sort of nonsense.
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Technorati tags: God, Religion

Prof. Witmer on Unchained Radio

Prof. Witmer's talk on Christian Presuppositionalism (.pdf of talk) caught the attention of Gene Cook, who runs "Unchained Radio", a Christian radio show that promotes this quasi-philosophy. They invited Prof. Witmer to call in on their "atheist hour" they have every week, and he graciously obliged. Download the .mp3 and listen for yourself.

I'll be printing up a partial transcript to highlight the best parts of the dialogue, and will link back to it here.
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Technorati tags: AAFSA

Tom Short at UF: A Summary

As I wrote earlier, Tom Short was on UF campus for three days participating in public preaching in Turlington Plaza. I wanted to briefly review some of his major arguments, and some of the discussions I had with him.

Preliminary Observations:

1. Tom is a really good public speaker. One consistent observation was that Tom was good at controlling the conversations. He used the presumption of authority, along with his physical location at the center of the crowd, to cut people off when he wanted, get the attention when he wanted, and use at least 85% of the time for his own responses/preaching. I was told a few times that I needed to "let him talk", when in fact he spent no less than 85% of his time in the plaza talking, and in fact he had no claim to authority in that plaza. I am not (typically) a rude person, but Tom did well at making it seem "rude" to not just give him the ability to control the conversation.
2. His manner was not offensive, per se. His doctrines, of course, are another story.
3. He was extremely dependent upon argumentum ad ignorantium when appealing to the truth of Christianity, in his attempts to undercut naturalism generally.
   
4. From (3), he often resorted to the false dichotomy: if not science/materialism/atheism, then Christianity.
5. He seemed to have a rather poor grasp of the philosophy of science -- he didn't understand why the scientific method proceeds under the assumption of naturalism. He said this is a bias. He's right. But that's the difference between science and non-science. I tried to explain that there is no way to incorporate supernaturalism into the scientific method.
6. When asked hard questions, Tom would fall back to analogies and anecdotes, as a good public speaker, I think he was using these to give himself time to gather his thoughts and also take away some of the "edge" of the question.
7. Tom engaged skeptics, but the skeptics there only asked him a few good questions. One of the better questions involved the problem of free will and determinism as it relates to prophecy and omniscience. Tom completely changed the subject and seemed not to get the philosophical implications of the question at all.
8. A Muslim young man had lots of questions and plugs for Islam that were interesting, and kept some perspective outside of the "Christianity or atheism" false dichotomy.
   

Some highlights:

• I got into a short conversation with Tom about the question of whether Jesus and the Father had two different wills. I asked him this question point-blank, and he refused to answer yes/no. I asked him the question as he was arguing that Jesus always submitted to the will of the father, and that the Garden of Gethsemane was a good passage to refer to for this. I simply pointed to the absurdity of claiming that God can have different minds and different wills. I pointed out that we would all agree that something cannot logically be called "the same" if two of its representations have different properties: say, one object, the word "GATOR" being represented as orange in one instance and blue in another. We would recognize the orange GATOR as one particular, and the blue GATOR as different one. This is a deep metaphysical topic, but those who heard the basics of my outline probably got the problem: that if Jesus and the Father are the same God, we cannot say that they have different minds or wills.
  
• I spent a lot longer trying to explain the problem of the earliest manuscripts (MSS) of Mark, how the earliest version of the resurrection story in the earliest gospel showed much less detail than the later interpolated one. I tried to explain that when it comes to MSS, we use the earliest version to establish additions and interpolations. He made a terrible analogy about people who keep getting new information about a football game as it comes in, and how this is adding to the veracity of the overall account. The problem here is that 40 years or so had already passed at the time that Mark was completed. The story, up until that point, had been passed along by oral tradition only. How could "new information" come about? It is much, much, much more likely that the original story will get distorted with time than that somehow, a 40-year-old story has new information come in from new (reliable) sources. The difference in his analogy and my point is that MSS are supposed to be reliable copies of some original. If we have evidence, such as the pericope adulterae, and the longer Markan ending, that these MSS had been tampered with, why would we assume that our own oldest copies were not themselves interpolated? Our oldest (complete) MSS are from the 4th century. Knowing that things were already interpolated, when the story had been (supposedly-faithfully unrefined) and supposedly-faithfully copied for about 300 years, leads, by inference, to skepticism that these oldest copies can be reliably attributed to the originals. This argument didn't go well out there, because it is a subtle and serious argument that required more attention to the detail of what I was saying than he got. He either didn't get it on purpose, or because I wasn't articulate enough. His analogies were very poor.
  
• Tom loved the argument from design. He threw pocket change on the ground to establish inference of random processes, then lined up the pennies (stealing an example from Cressy Morrison) to show inference of design. First, I will just give some references for rebuttals to this argument: i) infidels.org; ii) skepdic.com; iii) Francois Tremblay. Along with the general refutations of this argument, I would also point to another sort of argument: the argument from evil design. Besides evil design, there is also the argument from maladaptive/poor design to consider.
  
• Another point in the argument from design that I made was that we are justified in claiming "design" for those processes that we understand, via induction and science. We are not justified in claiming "design" because of ignorance.
  
• Generally, Tom mischaracterized order/disorder. This is very very common among creationists. They do not understand the huge amount of disorder in the universe, relative to the order that occurs on the local scale. They do not understand that order on earth comes from the huge expense of work done by the sun's energy. They think that any order = design. They royally equivocate on the 2nd Law of Thermo.
  
• Tom went on for a while about pornography in a discussion with a liberal Christian. He chastised the young man pretty harshly when the young man said, "I don't think it's wrong b/c it doesn't hurt anyone." Tom went on and on for a while, citing verses about lust, etc. Then Tom moved on to talk about hypocrisy among Christians, and said something like, "I wouldn't tell you not to do something that I myself do." At this point, there was a quiet moment, and I injected (with perfect timing and tone): "Do you look at porn, Tom?" He was a little taken aback. He said, "No!" Then went on to say, "sometimes things pop up on your screen when you're doing a search...and you're tempted..." It seemed a rather poor justification and the opposite of his long spiel about unconditional repentance and admission of wrongdoing. People in the crowd saw this and gave quiet protests to his attempt to wiggle out of the contradiction I'd caught him in. I asked him how long it had been, and he wouldn't get specific: "a while".
• The most dramatic point I saw in my 3 days was when a young man, a skeptic, got in Tom's face and yelled at him not to malign science. This was during Tom's tortured attempt to try to argue that science is bad because it doesn't say "God might've done it." The young man was very angry, and I strongly disagreed with his outburst. It actually had me worried for a moment that the young man was going to assault Tom. He really got in his face and yelled. I booed at him.
  
• This led to a young man in the audience who had a question for myself and another skeptic (a different guy than the angry one) regarding science that Tom allowed (awful big of him, since it was a public square and free speech zone). The young man (with a large cast on his leg from a recent knee surgery) threw out the classic creationist canard, the PRATT: "Evolution is just a theory. Theories are just beliefs." I and the other skeptic kept interrupting each other in correcting this fallacy, but I don't know how effective it was, because too many people don't know the difference in the colloquial usage of the word, "theory" and the scientific usage.
  
• From that conversation, the other young skeptic was trying to explain cosmology a little, and I have no doubt that he knows some physics, but he was a poor public speaker, and the crowd lost a lot of interest. Tom saw this, and of course got their attention with more theatrics (jumping out of his chair and walking around briskly to recapture the audience). The young man never said: "The evidence for the Big Bang is in the red-shift of galaxies and the cosmic background radiation, as well as alignment with the equations of general relativity." This is what would've been best. He also failed to explain that some of the initial conditions of the Big Bang have been recreated in labs. I think not connecting the theories to the evidence and experiments is the largest failure in trying to convince people that belief in these theories is justified. Just describing the theory, rather than the evidence that supports it and the way it has been subjected to falsification, never helps.
  
• The second most dramatic point I saw was my involvement in the Hitler question, when he refused to read my quotes, or to allow me to have the papers back to read them myself, as I explained earlier.

Tom Short is a nice guy, aside from his beliefs. I look forward to his next visit to campus, and I'm going to come primed with some good sound bytes regarding his favorite lines of argument -- design, incredulity towards scientific claims about evolution and cosmology, obfuscating what science is and how it works, and some solid sources regarding biblical scholarship and the historico-critical method. They will have to be sound bytes, though, as he is quite good at controlling the conversation.

I also hope to have a few people from our freethought group out there, besides the few I did see. I really think it is necessary to counter misinformation on evolution and creationism on a regular basis, because scientists have been largely isolated in ivory towers, leaving these people to inculcate doubt and falsehoods into the public. Also, it is nice to philosophize on topics like this, and intellectually-stimulating. A nice-sized "peanut gallery" could keep him on his toes a lot more than one or two people -- we all have different areas of expertise and strengths in arguing different topics.

What I want more than that, though, is a formal debate, in which question-begging and topic-changing, as well as equivocation, can be called out and clearly demonstrated during the response period (which I really didn't have much of). I'm working on setting one up at our campus.
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Technorati tags: Gator Freethought

Tom Short on Hitler and evolution

Tom Short has been at the UF campus preaching for the last three days. It appears that Gator Christian Life and Cru brought him down. I have been out all three days, making a point to try to spend at least an hour or two out there. I have a lot to report about our exchanges, but first I wanted to briefly highlight something that happened yesterday.

He said that evolutionary theory was basically to blame for Hitler's genocide of the Jews. Immediately, I'm thinking of Luther's anti-Semitic theology, the influence of Christianity in general on Hitler, and the is-ought problem regarding science and morality.

I also am thinking of the fact that Hitler did not believe that all humans shared a common ancestor, or descended from apes. He believed that God made the Aryan race specially, and that Jews were "corrupting" the bloodline. I told Tom this, and told him I could show it to him from Mein Kampf and in some other quotes. He said, "okay, do it." I said, "You will really let me read them?" He said, "Yes, go get the book and I'll let you..." I turned to go to Library West and realized three things: 1) I played racquetball Wed night and left my student ID in my racquetball bag, all the way out in my car; 2) Caesar (my dog) had a vet appt at 5PM and it was already 4PM; 3) I could spend 45 minutes, easily, finding the books (multiple volumes) in Library West (if it wasn't checked out) standing in line, and then trying to flip through and find the passages of interest.

Therefore, since I had reviewed this subject some time back, and knew where some source quotes were with citations, I came to my office (near Turlington), got the quotes (four pages of them) and came back with a printout.

In front of a crowd of about 50-60 people, he completely wussed out.

He refused to read them. He said that this printout wasn't the book, and that I might have taken them out of context. He then skipped the first four quotes (see bottom of post) and refused to read those, opting for some rambling speech Hitler gave on how he was following the Creed of the Catholic Church. I said, "Fine, if you won't read them, I will," and reached for the printouts. He literally pulled back and would not let me have them. A lot of people in the crowd booed. I don't think many people there were fooled by his refusal to read what I told him Hitler had said.

He wussed out because I showed him he was wrong. He was more interested in maintaining his commitment to the belief that evolution = Hitler than commitment to what is true. He did promise, though, to respond to my information on his website. We'll keep him accountable and honest.**(as of 7/17/07, he still hasn't posted anything about it)

The whole issue for me is to curtail the equivocation of evolution with political, religious or any other unscientific ideology, because these falsehoods generate a great deal of heat, and no light whatsoever. Association of any thing X with Hitler is a wonderful way to get people angry towards X, but it still doesn't answer the question of whether X is, in fact, true.

In light of all this, sent the following email to Tom:

Tom,

Daniel here, the guy who you had lots of "discussion" with ;-)

Do you really think that Darwin personally, or evolutionary theory generally, is somehow to blame for Nazism? Hardly so. Drawing moral extrapolations from natural observations is itself moving away from science. Science is only the statement of how things are, not how things ought to be, or how human beings should relate to one another. (I point this out, despite the fact that even if the Nazis [or anyone] tried to use a scientific theory to justify themselves, they would be committing Moore's Naturalistic Fallacy in so doing, and most people recognize this.)

David Hume was a philosopher who developed this argument (before Darwin's day) in some detail. He called it the "is-ought problem". He pointed out that statements of fact do not lead to moral conclusions, without a moral premise somewhere involved in the mix. Science never offers a moral premise, of any kind. People do find them, within religion especially.

Did you know that it has been very well argued and evidenced that Hitler adopted much of his Anti-Semitic views directly from Luther?

Now, to be fair to Luther, nearly all contemporary Catholics hated Jews too. (also see wiki Anti-Semitism). What, did you really think that the Nazis were atheists? Oh, you could only wish so.

I only wanted to clarify my thoughts on Hitler and creationism. I am not interested in extended general debates about all sorts of topics, or e-preaching, or anything like that. You don't have to feel obligated to reply, obviously.

The reason I had all of those quotes handy, with citations already in place for 95% of them, is because this issue (about Hitler and creationism) is one with which I am rather familiar. A few months ago, when D. James Kennedy aired his propaganda piece on the subject, I read up on it, and posted a few items to my blog.

The quotes that I had were mostly from this source:
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2006/08/list_of_hitler_quotes_he_was_q.php

And also from this source:
http://scienceblogs.com/dispatches/2006/08/hitler_the_creationist.php

Now, the first four quotes I wanted you to read were from this last source. I did not have the time, nor interest, to explain all of this to you out there in the plaza at Turlington. I couldn't explain to you how I knew, beforehand, so much about this topic, nor how I had so many quotes from Hitler's works on his beliefs and their founding within the Christian religion and God's purpose for the Aryan race.

Ed did not source these last four quotes, but I took the time to do it myself tonight. They are all, indeed, from Hitler, and 3/4 are from Mein Kampf, as I said. The easiest way for you to verify their authenticity is to pull up the electronic version of the text and do a CTRL-F "find" of some key words to jump to the passages in question. One e-version of Mein Kampf is here.

I must admit, though, that the last one below is not from his book, but from a speech he gave. I did not want to get bogged down in the details, and I am sorry if you feel I misled you about that. They are still his words, and they still evidence what I was arguing:

The point I felt was most important was to show you that Hitler did not believe that the Jews and Aryans were of the same lineage. The crux of evolution is common ancestry, and so Hitler rejected evolution for humans. I will admit that Hitler did agree that some other animals and plants do evolve, but he flatly rejected a natural explanation for human beings. He believed God made man, in God's own image, specially creating human beings.

If you didn't know this, Hitler hired a crack team of anthropologists, archaeologists, etc., to try to find any evidence of the Aryan race that he wrote about (see the fifth quote below). The fifth quote gives one of the most clear indications of his views -- a weird mishmash of Biblical creationism (belief that the races were not of one ancestry, but specially created, and that these races were separated from each other until recent times, and of "unmixed" blood) and his own lunatic views.

Tom, I do not blame Christianity any more than I blame anyone else for Hitler. I hold people responsible for what they do, because this is a cause-effect relationship upon which our sense of justice is derived. You think that Hitler twisted Christianity, fine. I don't just think that Hitler "twisted" evolution/eugenics -- there is nothing within a description of how life changes and evolves that is prescriptive about humans should act! This is no ought within evolutionary theory, or any scientific theory. He believed he ought to purify an imaginary race. He believed the Bible supported this lunacy. He twisted both science and religion.

Consider also that natural selection is not the same thing as artificial selection. Evolution simply describes the process of natural selection, saying, "This is how Nature is..." without saying, "This is how Nature ought to be..." Hitler decided to take steps to genocide, which is artificial selection, and has nothing to do with evolutionary theory. That is, unless you think there are moral claims you can make about whether I should breed Saint Bernards or a new type of dog breed, and whether one is more morally correct than the other...(an absurd idea, yes?).

In much the same way, you argued that atheism was responsible for the massive killings of the 20th C at the hands of people like Stalin, Lenin, Pol Pot, etc. Fascist communist dictators used communism as a sort of para-religion. Evolution had little to nothing to do with their philosophy. The State is like The Church. People were controlled through propaganda to believe that free markets do not work, and that communism was best for them. These fascists murdered anyone who challenged their power. They were indeed evil men, just as some men have been throughout history. The fact that they lived in a time period when technology allowed mass murder doesn't mean that other historical figures wouldn't have done the same thing if they could've to retain control...from Babylon to Nero. These men were delusional, just as Hitler was. Communism and genocide do not follow from science, Tom. Those are moral and political judgments that are completely independent from anything resembling science.

Do you really not see that?

Please don't continue to misrepresent scientific theories as though they come attached with moral claims. I look forward to your delving into this issue and posting something about it on your website. I will keep checking up on it. I hope you do not continue to preach that evolution provides some sort of rationale for Hitler's actions in the meantime.

Likewise, I would not be intellectually honest in claiming that Christianity is to blame for Hitler either.

Human beings always find justification for their actions, whether within religious doctrines or in validation via scientific accuracy. I think (hope) you are an honest man, and so you will consider all of this with careful thought before bringing up this subject again.

Preaching your God need not be debased by appealing to such confusion and obfuscation of science and morality.

With warm regards,
Daniel

Now, here are those quotations, with sourcing:

____

1) Everybody who has the right kind of feeling for his country is solemnly bound, each within his own denomination, to see to it that he is not constantly talking about the Will of God merely from the lips but that in actual fact he fulfils the Will of God and does not allow God's handiwork to be debased. For it was by the Will of God that men were made of a certain bodily shape, were given their natures and their faculties. Whoever destroys His work wages war against God's Creation and God's Will.

[Adolf Hitler, "Mein Kampf", Vol. 2, Chapter 10, The Mask of Federalism]
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2) And, further, they ought to be brought to realize that it is their bounden duty to give to the Almighty Creator beings such as He himself made to His own image.

[Adolf Hitler, "Mein Kampf", Vol. 2, Chapter 2, The State]
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3) Walking about in the garden of Nature, most men have the self-conceit to think that they know everything; yet almost all are blind to one of the outstanding principles that Nature employs in her work. This principle may be called the inner isolation which characterizes each and every living species on this earth.

Even a superficial glance is sufficient to show that all the innumerable forms in which the life-urge of Nature manifests itself are subject to a fundamental law--one may call it an iron law of Nature--which compels the various species to keep within the definite limits of their own life-forms when propagating and multiplying their kind. Each animal mates only with one of its own species. The titmouse cohabits only with the titmouse, the finch with the finch, the stork with the stork, the field-mouse with the field-mouse, the house-mouse with the house-mouse, the wolf with the she-wolf, etc.

[Adolf Hitler, "Mein Kampf", Vol. 1, Chapter XI, Race and People]
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4) From where do we get the right to believe, that from the very beginning Man was not what he is today? Looking at Nature tells us that in the realm of plants and animals changes and developments happen. But nowhere inside a kind shows such a development as the breadth of the jump, as Man must supposedly have made, if he has developed from an ape-like state to what he is today.

==
*** [Daniel's edit:The above English translation is from Hitler's /Tischgespraeche/ for the night of the 25th to 26th 1942:

'Woher nehmen wir das Recht zu glauben, der Mensch sei nicht von Uranfaengen das gewesen , was er heute ist? Der Blick in die Natur zeigt uns, dass im Bereich der Pflanzen und Tiere Veraenderungen und Weiterbildungen vorkommen. Aber nirgends zeigt sich innherhalb einer Gattung eine Entwicklung von der Weite des Sprungs, den der Mensch gemacht haben muesste, sollte er sich aus einem affenartigen Zustand zu dem, was er ist, fortgebildet haben.'

A translation Hitler's words, as recorded by Stephen Carr:

'From where do we get the right to believe that man was not from the very beginning what he is today.
A glance in Nature shows us , that changes and developments happen in the realm of plants and animals. But nowhere do we see inside a kind, a development of the size of the leap that Man must have made, if he supposedly has advanced from an ape-like condition to what he is' (now)

http://stevencarrwork.blogspot.com/2006/08/hitler-creationist.html

'Die zehn Gebote sind Ordnungsgesetze, die absolut lobenswert sind.'] ***

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5) It was not by mere chance that the first forms of civilization arose
there where the Aryan came into contact with inferior races, subjugated
them and forced them to obey his command. The members of the inferior
race became the first mechanical tools in the service of a growing
civilization.

Thereby the way was clearly indicated which the Aryan had to follow. As
a conqueror, he subjugated inferior races and turned their physical
powers into organized channels under his own leadership, forcing them to
follow his will and purpose. By imposing on them a useful, though hard,
manner of employing their powers he not only spared the lives of those
whom he had conquered but probably made their lives easier than these
had been in the former state of so-called 'freedom'. While he ruthlessly
maintained his position as their master, he not only remained master but
he also maintained and advanced civilization. For this depended
exclusively on his inborn abilities and, therefore, on the preservation
of the Aryan race as such. As soon, however, as his subject began to
rise and approach the level of their conqueror, a phase of which
ascension was probably the use of his language, the barriers that had
distinguished master from servant broke down. The Aryan neglected to
maintain his own racial stock unmixed and therewith lost the right to
live in the paradise which he himself had created. He became submerged
in the racial mixture and gradually lost his cultural creativeness,
until he finally grew, not only mentally but also physically, more like
the aborigines whom he had subjected rather than his own ancestors. For
some time he could continue to live on the capital of that culture which
still remained; but a condition of fossilization soon set in and he sank
into oblivion.

That is how cultures and empires decline and yield their places to new
formations.

[Adolf Hitler, "Mein Kampf", Vol. 1, Chapter XI, Race and People]

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6) Steven Carr has another piece of interest that he translated:
==
And in the entry for 27 February 1942 , Hitler says 'Das, was der Mensch von dem Tier voraushat, der veilleicht wunderbarste Beweis fuer die Ueberlegenheit des Menschen ist, dass er begriffen hat, dass es eine Schoepferkraft geben muss.'

Man braucht nur durch ein Teleskop oder durch ein Mikroskop zu sehen: Da erkennt man, dass der Mensch die Faehigkeit hat, diese Gesetze zu begreifen.

Da muss man aber doch demuetig werden. Wird diese Schoepferkraft mt einem Fetisch identifiziert, dann bricht die Gottesvorstellung zusammen, wenn der Fetsich versagt.
==

If this creative power is identified with an idol, then the picture of God will collapse, once the idol fails.

Man has only to look through a telescope or a microscope: Man then recognises, that mankind has the capability to comprehend these laws.

But man must be humble.

[http://stevencarrwork.blogspot.com/2006/08/sill-more-on-hitler-creationist.html]
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Tom had promised that he would have a response to this on his website within a week. It is now July 17th, 2007, and as yet, nothing.

**PS: See this TO article on Hitler and Darwin**
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