RationalWiki has a point by point critique of the Expelled “Leader’s Guide”. I wasn’t aware of the RationalWiki or their article until after I had written mine, so any similarities are due to great minds thinking alike. :)
Category Archives: Intelligent design
Expelled’s intelligent design theory – this IS your daddy’s creationism (Part II)
Part 2 of 2 (click here for part 1)
L.G.Modern high-speed supercomputers have now used large-scale number crunching to calculate the eons of time and probabilities that are required to develop a cell through chance and mutation. The result? The odds are essentially zero, no matter how many millions or billions of years pass. (p.6)
I flat out call bullshit on this one. I want to see references. First I doubt the claim that anyone has wasted the time on a supercomputer. Second I am unaware of anyone arguing that the first cell developed simply through “chance and mutation”. No one knows the process by which the first cell formed, therefore no probabilities can be attached its likelihood.
Expelled’s intelligent design theory – this IS your daddy’s creationism (Part I)
While doing research for an earlier post I ran across a document called a “Leader’s Guide” on one of the official Expelled web-sites. This little bit of propaganda which was created “to assist you with promoting the issues surrounding the film Expelled“. It is filled to the brim with rhetoric, misinformation, out of context quotations, and half-truths that have been staples in antievolutionist literature, since long before the latest version, “intelligent design” evolved from its parent species “creation science” in the late 1980’s. To demonstrate the evolutionary link between these ideologies I will often follow quotes from the Guide (in blue for clarity) with quotes from pre-ID movement, “creation science” sources making identical, or nearly identical, statements.
The “creation science” material I am referencing is mostly from well known young Earth creationists dated prior to 1991, the year Phillip Johnson published Darwin On Trial, which is often said to have launched the ID movement. The use of pre-1991 material ensures that there was no chance of backwards contamination from ID creationists back to “creation science” advocates. Something common in later YEC literature.
Sorry for the absence
I have been working on a lengthy two part post on an Expelled related subject and unlike creationists l try and do my homework before I publish something, which takes time. I should have it ready by tonight (April 21). Sorry for the delay, and thank you for your patience.
Comb jellies and sponges and creationists, oh my!
Denyse O’Leary of Post-Darwinist is giddy over some evidence reported in the latest issue of Nature that the lineage leading to living comb jellies may have diverged from common ancestors of later animal life before that of the lineage leading to living sponges. She believes that this is somehow problematic for evolutionary theory since it was previously thought based on their morphology that sponges would have diverged earlier.
Scientific American reviews Expelled Flunked
Scientific American has put up a special section on it’s web site dealing with Expelled, including two new reviews. One by Michael Shermer of the Skeptics Society, and the other by Scientific American’s editor in chief, John Rennie. They also have a couple pod-casts on Expelled to check out. So go check it out…
And via The Austringer we find that even Fox News is panning this flic:
After seeing a new non-fiction film starring Comedy Central’s Ben Stein, you may not only be able to win his money, but also his career.
It goes down hill from there. See: “Ben Stien: Win His Career” for the rest.
Remember the NCSE has set up…
…for all your exposing Expelled needs.
McDonald’s + the gays = we are all going to die!
As Ed Brayton reported the other day on Dispatches from the Culture Wars, the “conservatives” over at Worldnutdaily have been “throwing a fit” because one of McDonald’s executives (Richard Ellis, vice president of communications) was elected to the board of the National Gay and Lesbian Chamber of Commerce, and because McDonald’s is a corporate partner with the NGLCC. Oh the horror!
But “throwing a fit” is not a strong enough term for what is going on over at Pro-Existence the blog of Rick and Nancy Pearcey (Nancy is one of the top brass in the intelligent design crowd). Here is Rick’s “measured” reaction to McDonald’s actions:
Expelled promoters just can’t stop lying
My colleague John M. Lynch over at Stranger Fruit recounts in several posts what happened after he signed up to see a screening of Expelled in Tempe AZ.
First he received an e-mail notifying him that the scheduled time for the screening had been changed to start an hour earlier. But promoters screwed up and the e-mail had been sent to him as a CC (carbon copy). This meant that he got a list of all the e-mail addresses to which the message had been sent (“boughtbythecross,” “homeschoolma,” and “covenant-dad.” etc.).
He then received an e-mail saying that the screening had been canceled. However this e-mail was not CCed to “covenant-dad” etc., like the previous one, and this led him to suspect that they might be trying to screen him out, so to speak, and were actually going to hold the screening as re-scheduled.
Turns out his suspicions were well founded. One of his compadres, Ken McKnight, decided to call the theater ahead of time and ask if the film was still to be shown at the re-scheduled time.
I just called the Arizona Mills Harkins theater and said that I had heard that the private screening of Expelled had been moved from 7:00 to 6:00 (I didn’t mention that I had been emailed that the showing was canceled). The person I spoke to confirmed that the movie is showing today at 6:00. Clearly the promoters are somehow screening the attendees and then sending out cancellation notices to the “undesirables.”
Wasn’t there something about not lying in the Intelligent Designer’s book? I guess it was “thou shalt not lie”, except to people who might be critical of your film.
John has all the gory detail on his blog (see links above). There are two accounts of the screening that was, then wasn’t, but then really was after all, from people who attended the “canceled” screening. One from Brad and another from Ken McKnight. Check’em out.
Responding to questions about “Darwinism” and intelligent design creationism
I’m moving this up from the comments on an earlier post as I think it will take more that a comment to respond to.
A commenter, Josh Caleb, says that he has “a few honest questions“. I am going to answer him as if that were true even though I am now somewhat suspect that it isn’t due to his having cited trueorigins.org, an antievolution knockoff of talkorigins.org, and because of several of his comments left in response to others.
So it’s true, Darwin is to blame…
John Wilkins has dared to do what none of us in the evolution defenders camp has had the courage to do. He has faced the TRUTH and systematically documented some of the horrors visited upon world Jewry at the hands of Darwin and his followers from 38CE to the present.
Wilkins you monstrous bastard! How can I live with myself now that I have gazed upon this soul scorching truth about Darwin laid out so irrefutably?
[Shuffles away from computer sobbing.]
Via Pharyngula
Playing Chess with Pigeons 