In this clip, Michael Ruse says that Creationism/Evolution is really just one piece of the larger culture war – the fight over society’s views of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’. I don’t think that’s entirely accurate, although I do think the culture war is certainly a part of the Creationism/Evolution “debate”. And, Creationists often like to argue from consequences (e.g. if everyone believes in evolution, then they’ll behave like Nazis; they won’t believe in God or morality; etc).
Hearing him reminded me of stuff in Ken Ham’s book “Evolution: The Lie” (1987). Ken Ham is the president of Answers In Genesis, the major young-earth creationist group in the world. If you want to get a feel for how popular these guys are, I recommend comparing their alexa stats against, say, Panda’s Thumb, Discovery Institute, and Uncommon Descent:
It’s amazing the level of stupidity they get away with while still managing to stay relevant and popular. (Personally, I think this says something about humanity’s willingness to accept any stupid argument as long as it promotes and supports their pre-existing beliefs, which is rather sad.)
Here’s some of Ken Ham’s wonderful arguments against evolution. You’d think I was making this stuff up, but I’m not.
First, the front and back of the book. Note the implication here: Evolution is the lie in the same way that eating the apple in the garden of Eden was a lie given to us by Satan.
Most of the book is written text, but it’s punctuated with cartoons illustrating his ideas. I’m going to stick to the cartoons – they’ll give you a pretty quick understanding of what his arguments are, and they are heavy on the “cultural consequences”. Maybe you can play a game called “spot that logical fallacy” at home.
Chapter 1 – Christianity is Under Attack
Chapter 2 – Evolution is Religion
Chapter 3 – Creationism is Religion
Ooh – look at all the badies up there on the stage. They’ve banned one religion (Christianity) and replaced it with another religion in the schools.
Chapter 4 – The Root of the Problem
Chapter 5 – Crumbling Foundations
Argument: If a literal interpretation of Genesis is undermined, then Christianity is undermined.
And if Christianity is undermined, then all kinds of bad things – like homosexuality – are okay. Uh oh. Remember homophobes: you won’t be able to condemn homosexuality unless you stick with Creationism. (Does this smell like the culture war, yet?)
This comic actually reminds me of my friend Chris. When he came out as gay, his dad tried to argue that homosexuality is wrong – using the Bible to back him up. My friend wasn’t very impressed – since his dad never went to church with the rest of the family. But, the Bible suddenly turns into “the good book” as soon as you want to condemn something as evil.
Chapter 6 – Genesis Does Matter
Only the Bible literal interpretation of Genesis provides a moral foundation for wearing clothing. Without the Bible, nudists aren’t doing anything wrong.
Chapter 8 – The Evils of Evolution
I thought I’d leave in the text at the bottom – it’s the next section which claims Male Chauvanism is really based on Evolution, and the Bible has nothing to do with it. There are other sections linking Evolution with: Nazism, Racism, Drugs, Abortion, and Social Darwinist Business models. (Hmm, I wonder if the producers of “Expelled” read this book as research for their movie.)
Here’s an excerpt from the section on Drugs:
Many people would not think of evolution as being in any way related to the taking of drugs. However, the following letter of testimony from a man in Western Australia shows clearly this relationship …
My naive belief in evolution had three important practical consequences:
1. It strongly encouraged me to look to drugs as an ultimate course of comfort and creativity.
The balloons above the “Evolution” castle read: Euthanasia, Divorce, Homosexuality, Pornography, Abortion, and Racism.
Update: I just discovered that Answers In Genesis lets you read the book on their website. Unfortunately, it seems that they’ve removed the cartoons. Here’s something else to check out: the Amazon page for “The Lie: Evolution”. About 50% of the voters gave it 5 stars. Sit back and marvel at the people writing comments in defense of the book.
Funny thing about the moral relativism argument. It was moral absolutism that caused people to fly airplanes into office buildings a few years ago.
Oh right. They had the “wrong” morality.
Actually BaldApe, the only other large group supporting teaching creationism in tax supported schools, besides fundamentalist christians, today is fundamentalist Moslems. It sorta puts Osama bin Laden and James Dobson on the same page, doesn’t it?
Wonder what IDers would say if Huegens Mission discovers missing link (between nonliving/ living material) on one of Saturn’s moons. Material in the process of making itself into living material, hmmm. That would be funny, wouldn’t it?
Concerning stupidity: Einstein once said that both the universe and human stupidity were unlimited, although he wasn’t really sure about the universe…
[...] We are portrayed as hedonists: [...]
Not Asimov. They have smeared Asimov’s good name. On the other hand, some of the drawings are inaccurate. The Evolution sub should be attacking a small hole ridden boat.
Tiny Frog wrote: “Sit back and marvel at the people writing comments in defense of the book.”
I did exactly that. And I wondered — are they naturally THAT stupid or do they have to work at it?
I concluded that they have to work at it. Let’s look at their morning schedule:
8AM Get out of bed, pray to Jesus, hit yourself in the head with a sledge hammer 6 times, pray, and get ready for work.
9AM Arrive at work.
9:01AM Wet your pants.
9:02AM Go back home to get a shower and a change.
9:38AM Arrive at work.
9:39AM Accidentally drink the liquid paper.
9:44AM Accidentally flush your car keys down the toilet.
12PM It’s your lunch break and the vending machine wont give you your chips and you shake it until it falls over on top of you.
—– I really feel for these people it’s gotta be a lot of hard work to be that stupid.
Holy Crepe!
Back in the 90′s, I visited my brother and we had supper at his pastor’s house. The pastor had this very book on his coffee table! I specifically remember the cartoon of Carl Sagan and Isaac Asimov on stage. I thought that the book was absurd because I had read fiction by both authors and admired them both. This was during a time when I was still a religious fundie mental.
It ain’t that they are ‘that stupid’ as i use to think they were. I’ve changed my opinion based on various observations of Xians and others.
It Is FEAR that makes them that stupid. Even after the gaining of knowledge (genisus) the woman was trying to think the male was a worthless pile. And who was the 1st intelligent being??? Hint Not Eve & adam never got his brain engaged —- ever!!!! Once thinking woman got males to think and eventually evolve into MEN, things started getting interesting. And you all can see that real MEN are still located on the end of the bell curve.
Ham is right though about the ‘false teachers’ it just he is incapable of seeing what the mirror shows!!!
Whenever some overzealous “religionist” tries to smugly claim that they have “the” Truth(tm) or “absolute” truth/morality, as opposed to all other kinds of knowledge which are merely (they claim) “relative”, I like to point out that I’ll accept the notion that their religion gives them “the” or “absolute” truth/morality just as soon as they and all the other religious sects in the world can agree on what “the” absolute truth/morality might be…
Indeed, “religious truth” is often more “relative” than other kinds, because it’s derived relative to which deity you accept the existence of, which holy book you choose to follow, which interpretations you accept, which passages you emphasize over others, which holy man’s pronouncements you adhere to, etc.
Scientists may disagree on certain points too, of course, but compared to religious differences the scientific disagreements are relatively few and minor, while the amount of consensus on core aspects is impressively broad, deep, and accepted by the overwhelming majority. That’s because unlike religious tenets, the principles of science are testable against reality, and thus any disagreements are *resolvable* in ways that most reasonable people will accept. In a real sense they’re more absolute than the religious “absolutes”, because they either work when tested against reality or they don’t.
At least a lot of nontheist morality systems are based on features of reality (like game theory, utility, etc.) which is if anything more absolute and/or objective than basing it on one holy book disagreeing with another one.