Wisdom...

The best documentary ever made

Anyone who seriously thinks that Creationism should be taught in schools or that evolution is in some way unscientific should watch this documentary. It weighs in at three hours long but it is so information dense it should be classed as a work of art.

Was Darwin wrong?

The media gets it right again…

Interesting…

This would be a world beater if politicians could ever be convinced to fund it.

http://www.reactionengines.co.uk/skylon.html

Climate change denialists

You personally may believe that no evidence exists for it but just about every serious climatologist on the planet disagrees with you,

somehow you seem to think that taking a good proportion of the carbon that has been locked up in the earth's crust over the course of millions of years of geological time as coal, oil and natural gas

and then releasing it into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide over the space of a couple of centuries

whilst at the same time deforesting vast areas of the planet which soak up this carbon dioxide locking up the carbon and releasing the oxygen back into the atmosphere,

will have absolutely no effect whatsoever?

Dare to Know–Dawkins & Hitchens

Global Warming is a Hoax!

Just thought I’d repost this image as a climate change sceptic blog I regularly read posted it earlier today with the disclaimer conveniently unreadable. Oh if only dishonesty were a virtue.

And our survey says…

“Earth facing a mini-ice age!”

Is this the right answer? Our survey says…

So the media (shockingly) have been butchering science reporting in their usual manner. Let's see what the scientists actually said when compared to what the Daily Mail reported.

Star Trek?

Apparently, anti-matter has now been trapped for 16 minutes.

Story here.

I'm sure that this should be relevant in some way shape or form to life as we know it, but I'm unable to work out how. So to put it bluntly, they've got hold of some anti-hydrogen, in order to work out the differences between anti-hydrogen and hydrogen.

Clifford Surko, a physicist at the University of California said that it would be a "huge advance in terms of understanding why we live in a world of matter". I couldn't really give a toss, but I really do feel like this information should be life-changing. Are we soon going to be producing matter-anti-matter reactors?

Oh, wait, NASA are trying to design one here.

I like this guy!

The wise sage returns

Aron Ra issues an interesting challenge to creationists.

Formed in 5 Minutes!

Falsifying Phylogeny Part 5

The latest instalment in the Falsifying Phylogeny series from ubergalactic super genius Aron Ra (who almost certainly deserves a legends article).

The Future is Crazy

The new emerging technology on the minds of businessmen around the world is something that has been a long long time coming. In today's world however and necessity being the mother of invention it was inevitable that it would arrive on supermarket shelves before much longer.

So we're all getting annoyed by now with the impossible spider web of wires and power lines for gadgets and electrical devices that now pervasively intrudes our lives. Probably most people hadn't even really thought about it and just generally accept it as a given but when you really think about it, it is deeply annoying having to untangle a labyrinth of wires that have gotten hopelessly mangled together somehow. And somewhat predictably a solution now exists. If I was going to be technically correct about this I would have to say that a solution has existed since the dawn of electricity - Nikola Telsa (Legend) came up with it and it was a LOT more advanced 100 years ago than it is now. Unfortunately the crazy bastard never bothered to write down how he did it so it had to be reinvented 120 years later at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Wireless electricity is the future. Without a doubt it has to be the future. I could point out the massive potential problems with this new invention such as the fact that 30% of the energy gets wasted when electricity is transported through the air - adding a massive energy burden to our already troublingly overburdened civilisation. Or the fact that electromagnetic radiation travelling through the air is likely to increase the amount of radiation a person is exposed to during their lifetime and consequently increase cancer rates accordingly. But you know what - fuck it, it's cool. And therefore we should definitely have this new toy. Just imagine a world where your phone charges itself and you don't have to plug things in for them to work. Imagine no more, it's here already.

The new technology works on the principle of near-field resonant magnetic induction. Basically two electromagnets resonate at the same frequency and power is transferred wirelessly from one to the other. Interestingly enough this is exactly how Tesla said it worked shortly before he was branded a lunatic and ostracised by the scientific community. The efficiently rates claimed - 98% of power is successfully transferred. How the proximity to the power source alters this ratio I'm unsure of for now. Some of the new technologies require the charging object to be right next to the inductive power source, some allow it to work at a distance although the efficiency is obviously further decreased the further away from the power source the inductive object is.

So what does it all mean? It means the future is going to look like Minority Report. See the video below demonstrating ecoupling technology combined with electroluminescent materials to know why.

Alternative Energy?

Comfort Vs The Atheist Experience

This would seem to be an interesting debate since whichever side you lean towards seems to think their side won the debate. I really can’t see how anyone in their right mind could consider this debate to have been a victory for Comfort though, Christians really need to put forward some better apologists than this.

Alternative Nuclear Energy

In my last article I expressed doubts over the viability of nuclear energy to provide a stop gap measure in securing us a future with safe energy. Maybe I was too hasty. Nuclear technology exists which does provide a viable and 'safe' alternative. I use the word safe cautiously here because make no mistake this shit will still melt your skin off and cause you to puke and shit yourself to death if you come in contact with it. But this is the case with nuclear energy anyway. The main difference with the alternative source of nuclear energy - Molten Salt Reactors is that they're unlikely to explode and ejaculate copious amounts of toxic shit into the atmosphere. And this would seem to be kind of an important advantage.

Molten Salt Reactors rely on a different principle to modern nuclear reactors in that the fuel's already molten so that in itself precludes the possibility of a meltdown. But they have another advantage - they don't have to use transuranic elements such as Uranium or Plutonium for fuel. MSRs can use Thorium as part of their fuel cycle and the advantage of using this is it doesn't spontaneously fission - it needs a catalyst. So when you switch the damn thing off you don't need to wait several months for it to actually be off, it's off. The fail-safe mechanism in these reactors is one that doesn't need to be controlled by humans. If the reactor gets too hot, a plug in the base of the core melts and the molten fuel leaves the containment vessel and drops into a holding area. Once the molten fuel is separated from the catalyst - fission ceases. Essentially the reactors save themselves. These reactors also operate at normal atmospheric pressure which eliminates the possibility of a pressure explosion such as at Chernobyl or very nearly at Fukushima.

Add to this other advantages such as the fact these reactors can be used to burn up long lived radioactive waste and in themselves produce dramatically less radioactive waste (between 10 - 10,000 times less). The fact that Thorium is cheaper and far more abundant than Uranium then it would really seem to be a no brainer to use these instead. Unfortunately the technology isn't quite ready for practical application. The reason this technology wasn't developed in the first place is because it didn't provide us with an easy way to kill several hundred million people in the space of a few hours which is obviously a capability which we as a species simply couldn't live without. Traditional reactor design led the way because as a by-product it enabled the development of nuclear weapons. Using a Thorium fuel cycle makes it difficult to develop nuclear weapons because as well as them not being produced in sufficient quantities, it's difficult to chemically separate the generated isotopes of Uranium. It's still possible of course but wouldn't be an economically sound way of building an atom bomb. There are also good technical reasons why U-233 has never been used in atom bombs. And Plutonium production – forget it.

So maybe if the nuclear industry really wants a renaissance, they should follow China’s lead in developing this technology. Perhaps people would be more amenable to having an energy source that doesn’t cause total pandemonium when it goes wrong. It won’t be astronomically expensive to develop either. Just a thought. 

The Death of a Nuclear Future?

We were once promised faithfully that it would never happen again yet for some reason, quarter of a century later here we are up the same creek without a paddle. What events do I refer to? Chernobyl of course and its new baby brother – Fukushima Dai-ichi.

The facts coming out of Japan have so far been scarce from the initial denial of any kind of meltdown to the gradual admission of a partial meltdown to the admission of a partial meltdown in three reactors, to the admission they have no ability to cool the fuel whatsoever. This much was already obvious long before they admitted it for several reasons - the detection of radiometric caesium and iodine in the atmosphere indicated that radioactive material had escaped the containment vessel. The explosions were also a dead give away - the presence of hydrogen alone indicated that the zirconium casing around the fuel rods had begun to melt because they had to be hot enough to strip oxygen atoms from the steam inside the reactor through dissociation. This is what caused the hydrogen build-up in the upper part of the reactor building leading to the subsequent explosions. Initially TEPCO chose to lie about these things, either that or worse – they didn’t have a clue. One thing is so far certain – we aren’t being told the whole story. And as with all nuclear accidents it will likely take an age before we finally know the truth.

The media have in recent days been criticized for showing ‘disproportionate coverage’ of the disaster unfolding at Fukushima Dai-ichi. Especially amidst the backdrop of a humanitarian tragedy that totally eclipses it in scale. I disagree with that consensus. People across the world have been deeply worried that this could be a repeat of Chernobyl and the world in general has been spooked by the very thought of the prospect. Indeed in recent days its ghost has come back to haunt us once more. The Chernobyl disaster was ultimately a hundred times worse than the recent Earthquake in Japan. It wasn’t just a disaster either, it was a nightmare. Let's be fair about this as well - nightmare isn't even a strong enough word to describe that event. For as long as the human race exists, people will continue to pay the price for that disaster and even after we’re long gone – nature will continue to pay that price in our absence. Even though Chernobyl can only be directly connected to the deaths of 31 people due to the initial criticality event, the consequences were catastrophic. Vast tracts of land across the Ukraine and Belarus were rendered uninhabitable. Hundreds of thousands of people had to be forcibly relocated. Cities across the Ukraine and Belarus were reduced to ghost towns. Radioactive fallout contaminated land across most of Europe and the northern hemisphere. But it continues to get worse. Of the 800,000 liquidators sent into to clean up the disaster, around 100,000 are now dead with another 100,000 permanently disabled. The fallout has been responsible for innumerable health problems in the affected populations and not just from cancers, from intestinal problems, circulation problems, respiratory problems, endocrine problems and autoimmune diseases. Many of the people suffering will ultimately die from exposure to the fallout, numbers now estimated to be over a million people since 1986. The economic cost of the disaster alone is in the realm of at least several hundred billion dollars. Then we have the the massive number of birth defects and stillborn children. The deep psychological scarring of its victims. The 200,000 women forced to have abortions. The farmland deemed unfit to grow produce. The mass slaughter of irradiated livestock. The pollution of the water table in affected areas. The list just goes on and on and on. The accident at Chernobyl didn’t just kill people, it destroyed their souls.

So 25 years later had we really learned anything. It turns out not. The entire world was gearing up for a nuclear renaissance, the horrors of Chernobyl having faded sufficiently from the public consciousness. With the threat of global warming, our dependence on middle-eastern oil imports, safe nuclear power was supposed to be our salvation and now the dream lies in ruins. Governments were convinced that nuclear energy was somehow now safer than it had been in that much simpler time only a generation ago. Then all of a sudden events in Japan threw a massive spanner into the works. Now granted it was on the part of the Japanese an act of extreme stupidity to not only build one of these reactors on seismically active ground but also near a stretch of coastline guaranteed to be hit by tsunamis. Their hubris and faith in technology has bitten them hard. But it was a faith shared by the rest of the world. We have been repeatedly assured by our governments over the years that it could never happen again, that reactor design in the west is much safer, that meltdowns cannot happen now. That is correct apparently, until they do. So now the pro-nuclear lobby has naturally got to change its tune a little and point out that in Britain we’re not on a fault line. That’s correct so therefore it’s safe, I mean it’s not like there are any other threats to our country that would see a nuclear reactor as being a good target now is it? Not like terrorism for instance.

One of the reasons this accident has the world on edge is because it is so reminiscent of Chernobyl. The parallels are obvious. Granted I doubt the radiological release from the plant will be anything close but the rest of it has the same modus operandi. The evacuations, the radiation warnings, the exclusion zone, the explosions, the fires, the panic, even the pictures of the damaged reactor buildings look the same. The initial surge in radiation was detected hundreds of miles away from the Fukushima site, similarly the first clue that the Soviet Union had a serious nuclear problem came from Sweden. After the Chernobyl accident, the Soviet authorities went into a state of denial. Currently the Japanese authorities are in a state of denial. Initially the Soviet government lied about the seriousness of the Chernobyl incident, the Japanese authorities are currently lying about the seriousness of the Fukushima incident. I think I may be doing the Japanese a disservice here though, they are dealing with the problem a hundred times better than the Soviet Union dealt with Chernobyl. The Japanese at least admitted they had a serious problem and began evacuating straight away unlike the Soviets who tried at first to make-believe that nothing was wrong. That’s not to pour scorn on the bravery of the Soviets who originally dealt with Chernobyl, each one of them tried to rectify the situation knowing with absolute certainty they were going to die. In the same vain and before the eyes of the world the faceless Fukushima 50 has been used to personify the disaster in Japan – giving us a real life fairy-tale to believe in as they embark on a suicide mission to fight their own nuclear nightmare against insurmountable odds. That sounds sickeningly pretentious but I like it, it’s poetic. These men took on the mission to cool the reactors knowing full well it could mean their lives and in doing so they have won the admiration of the world.

Ultimately the problem with nuclear energy is it's a lethally toxic technology. It wasn’t developed as a technology of peace, it was developed as a weapon of war that has since been adapted for peaceful purposes. In so doing so we created our own metaphorical Frankenstein and when this stuff goes wrong it goes very badly wrong – people will pay the price… forever. We’re kind of like children playing with fire and every now again we will get burnt. In order for us to fully utilise this technology we should really need to be assured that it's 100% safe but as the events at Fukushima illustrate, no matter how many safety measures, false assurances and propaganda we are given, there is no such thing. Pro-nuclear activists will nevertheless continue to insist this technology is safe. Let me give them a clue, it isn't and it never will be. The spin they’ve tried to put on this event has been interesting – spin like ‘things are under control’ and ‘the radiation is not a threat’. The problem I have here is do they seriously believe that anyone will ever believe that explosions and fires anywhere near the vicinity of a nuclear reactor is an acceptable state of affairs? The question as to whether this technology is safe has already been answered, it was answered at Windscale, it was answered at Three Mile Island, it was answered at Chernobyl and now it has been answered at Fukushima. But this isn’t the question that really needs to be asked is it? Because surely by now we know the answer. The question here isn't a question of whether we should use nuclear energy as it is a question of whether it's worth the price we could potentially pay. Without nuclear we can likely kiss goodbye to the electronic utopia we've built for ourselves because there simply isn’t another alternative. Our technological civilisation is built on a thirst for energy that can’t be quenched any other way. Renewable energy will never cover the void and oil as well as not lasting forever comes mainly from countries we simply cannot trust. The latter comes with massive environmental problems of its own. People could I suppose sacrifice the luxuries but no government on Earth is going to make that call and I can’t see the world turning back to candlelight somehow so regardless of the political fallout from Fukushima, nuclear is here to stay. As an added bonus we’ll get plenty of reassurance from governments that they’ve run numerous tests on our reactors and that nothing can possibly go wrong with them. Which is obviously quite comforting until you realise that man made disasters don’t occur because of what we thought of, they occur mainly because of what we didn’t think of. If we get away with one calamity every twenty years which seems to be the going rate, we may only be due two more before more practical power sources are developed. As to where and when those calamities strike we leave that to chance.

This incident has at the very least highlighted the desperate need for openness, honesty and transparency in the wake of a nuclear accident. The public need to know exactly where they stand so they can make informed decisions. This obviously can’t happen if a private company is trying to protect its own financial interests. Perhaps the IAEA will reach some sort of agreement about this in the coming months. If the nuclear beast is here to stay, we deserve the right to know when we’ve got to run away from it. My own preference would be this... invest heavily in nuclear fusion. No matter how expensive it is, ultimately it buys us an alternative. Convincing people that it’s safe is going to be tricky given how tarnished the word nuclear has become but sooner or later we really need to crack this problem because a safe sustainable future depends on it. For the size of the economic hit the world would have to take if we ever had to evacuate a city the size of Tokyo, this seems to me to be a more acceptable gamble. For the cost of one Chernobyl, we could have had a limitless clean environmentally friendly energy source. But alas it’s not like humans to exercise that kind of foresight.

The Heroes of Atheism

I really must congratulate these people – I mean they have singlehandedly done more damage to Christianity than people like Dawkins or Hitchens could ever dream of. Of whom do I speak? The so called creation ‘scientists’ – prominent names amongst them being people like Kent Hovind, John Mackay, Jonathan Sarfarti, Ray Comfort, Kirk Cameron, Ken Ham, William Dembski, Michael Behe, Harun Yahya et al. Granted the last man on this list is a Muslim creationist but interestingly enough Christians who normally have no special love of Muslims seem to be bosom buddies when it comes to creationism. I’ve decided to throw his name into the mix because Christian creationists will happily throw their lot in with him despite him being a criminal, hypocrite and otherwise a lunatic. More on him in a minute.

Firstly the problem with this entire debate is it’s entirely built upon not one but a string of faulty logical premises – the main one being the false dichotomy. A long time ago a man named Charles Darwin proposed the idea that organisms change over time. There was sufficient evidence for this idea to take hold 150 years ago. Since this time every single discovery in the field of biology has corroborated this proposal hence why it was elevated from hypothesis to theory. Now as it stands it’s a very strong theory and a good explanation of what we see in the natural world and allows us to make testable predictions in biology. But despite this the creationist assertion is that its plain wrong but they still haven’t managed to disprove it and I genuinely take issue with this. Because if you’re going to assert that something is completely wrong and you’re so sure of that fact then surely it should be a relatively simple task to prove it wrong. Creationists continually assert that evolution can’t be disproved as if it were some kind of religion but this is a lie and here’s why:

Science has to be falsifiable by design – it’s the rules. There are large a number of ways evolution could be falsified, for example you could find one of the following (From rationalwiki):

• Find something that defies classification in Linnaean taxonomy e.g. chlorophyll in an animal cell wall.
• Show that mutations do not occur.
• Show that although mutations do occur, that they’re not passed down through the generations.
• Show that although mutations are passed down through generations, they do not produce the sort of phenotypic changes that drive natural selection.
• Show that selection or environmental pressures do not favour the reproductive success of better adapted individuals.
• Darwin pointed out in his own work "If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down. But I can find out no such case."
• Or a favourite of rationalists these days – dig up a bunny rabbit from Precambrian rock.

If creationism were true then all of the above challenges should have been met – very easily met which evidently isn’t the case. Instead what we get is the God of the gaps argument whereby creationists find something that science doesn’t yet know and then infer that it must imply some kind of supernaturalism. I don’t personally have a problem with this argument but I would like to point out that so far in everything we’ve learned about science and the way the world works, magic has never turned out to be an explanation for anything whatsoever. And as an added bonus it opens you up to ridicule when science does find that piece of the puzzle.

So let me clear up why this is a false dichotomy. Creationists attack evolution with an almost religious fervour as if discrediting evolution would somehow vindicate creationism by default. The time and resources creationists have now spent on doing this is simply amazing given that even if they could somehow discredit evolution and the big bang theory and they would have to discredit both which in itself is no mean feat, it wouldn’t automatically vindicate creationism by default as they imagine. Why? Because creationism simply doesn’t fit with any observable facts about reality. So the only way creationists can now make a case is through twisting the facts to fit the premise and this involves dishonesty, not only that but it involves a LOT of dishonesty. And this is where my above heroes come in because each one of them can be shown to not only be liars but in some cases (John Mackay and Kent Hovind) just plain fucking nuts. The consequences of it are this - many creationists eventually realise they’re being duped by these people thanks largely to the incessant efforts of complete bastards like myself. But instead of merely rejecting creationism, they end up rejecting Christianity altogether and I think the reason is simple. If Christians are as they claim to be more virtuous and honest because of their faith then what remains of that faith when you realise that someone you respected and believed to be a person of great integrity as a defender of that faith is actually a habitual liar and charlatan? The revelation tends to shake people’s faith often resulting in a complete rejection of religion.

Anyway on to the heroes. One of the favourite arguments these people use is called quotemining. This involves quoting their opposition out of context so as to completely distort the meaning of what that person originally said. This is so pervasive in creationism that there are websites entirely dedicated to putting these quotes back into their original context. All the men mentioned are incessantly guilty of this. But I’m not just talking about misrepresenting people’s positions here; I’m talking about flat out lies where the person has to know they’re lying. Kent Hovind for example has met more fictional evolution professors than anyone else alive. He’s also the authority on not correcting his mistakes; for instance when it’s pointed out that he’s using faulty research or things that have been proven incorrect he knowingly continues to use that material at his seminars. But it’s worse than that, he comes up with hypotheses which are easily flattened but gain a foothold in the creationist community who are ignorant of the science involved and repeated ad nauseum. An example of this would be when he stated that the singularity responsible for cosmic expansion was originally a spinning disc (which it wasn’t) and that it had some bearing on the orbital mechanics of the solar system (which it doesn’t). All this came from the man misreading one science textbook on the solar nebulae hypothesis which of course has nothing whatsoever to do with big bang cosmology. He continued to use this argument in his seminars right up until his unfortunate incarceration on 58 counts of failing to render unto Caesar what was Caesars. He also repeatedly denies that established science works at all e.g. radioactive carbon dating. John Mackay is similarly guilty of this sort of thing; that is when he’s not accusing people of witchcraft or sleeping with the dead any road.

Ray Comfort is also man who is similarly spectacular at brazen breaches of the 9^th commandment. For instance he wrote a 50 page libellous introduction to the origin of species and then distributed 50,000 copies (including his foreword) of that book on college and university campuses. We know this introduction at least libellous because he tried to present Darwin as a fanatical racist and as the primary motivation for the Third Reich’s fanatical eugenics programme and subsequent genocide. All of the accusations he presented can of course be easily disproven. Darwin for instance was one of the most egalitarian men in what was at the time one of the most ethnocentric societies in the world. This is borne out in the considerable body of work he left behind – there is nothing in any work ever written by Charles Darwin to suggest he was a racist, exactly the opposite in fact – he was an early proponent of racial equality. Hitler on the other hand would seem to have been a Roman Catholic creationist which is borne out in the considerable number of quotes attributed to him – oh and a casual read of Mein Kampf also adds considerable weight to this idea. But seriously it wouldn’t matter if Hitler had quoted Darwin on every third line of Mein Kampf because it would still invoke the logical fallacy of argument from adverse consequences i.e. this is what evolution caused someone to do therefore it’s wrong. The same line of reasoning could be applied to atomic theory – arguing that that’s wrong because it led to the deaths of tens of thousands of people at Hiroshima – it’s a senseless argument. The whole introduction that comfort wrote has been dissected in detail and it’s pure unadulterated bullshit from start to finish – it’s one of the most dishonest pieces of literature in existence.

In the film Expelled – Ben Stein attempted the same feat – that of invoking evolution as Hitler’s inspiration for the holocaust. It is simply unbelievable the lengths these people will go to defend their ‘sacred truth’. The fact of the matter here is that you would have to seriously misunderstand evolutionary theory in its entirety for it to ever lead to any kind of genocide at all. Why? Because limiting the amount of genetic variety in a gene pool is detrimental to the overall population of that organism – evolution 101.

In the Kitzmiller Vs. Dover trial (2006) which was pretty much the seminal evolution vs creationism court case, Michael Behe repeatedly lied under oath. He had previously stated that there was no evidence that the immune system could have evolved. Upon being presented with 58 peer reviewed papers and several books on exactly that subject he employed another creationist debate tactic known as moving the goal posts. Basically what he did is he began to redefine what he would accept as evidence in the process setting an impossible standard of what he would accept. See the video below on this.

And finally a little bit on Harun Yahya. Creationists love him – I even know of a certain creationist blog not too far away from here that references his work occasionally. And why not – he’s the champion of creationism for the Muslim world. If you’re a creationist you need this guy’s input. Want the kicker? Not only is he a holocaust denier but he’s also a criminal. I mean this guy fights dirty when it comes to creationism and we’re talking censorship of the Internet (in Turkey), extortion, blackmail, libel, embezzlement and drug offences (I don’t personally have a problem with this but it does kind of imply hypocrisy if he believes the Quran is inerrant). But I guess there’s nothing quite like fair and honest dialogue if you are promoting ‘the truth’.

So what do I make of all this? These people KNOW they are lying but they do it anyway. They peddle their propaganda because it’s a good way to make money and their indoctrinated sheep will gladly acquiesce. I think hypocrisy like this is one of the most destructive forces in the entire Christian religion, I would say most destructive but then I’d be ignoring Catholicism and some of its adherents’ rather interesting take on sexual ethics. 

Why creationists chose to pick a fight with evolution I don’t know but one thing I do know is it was a mistake - a massive one. The opening salvos were declared by creationists in Darwin’s time and creationists started a war that they’ve been slowly losing ever since. The problem I have with it is and this should be important to Christians is that it has given secularists the perfect platform on which to attack Christianity itself. In the age of the Internet this battle has become even more pronounced especially in light of the so called great YouTube war between Rationalists and Christians which has seen this debate go nuclear. Christians largely lost this war and YouTube now carries scientific videos that address almost every single objection to evolution creationists have ever dreamed up. The same cannot be said of creationism because the posters of creationist videos normally end up either taking their videos down or comment censor them heavily. Censorship does kind of imply that you’ve got something to hide or that some kind of dishonesty is involved.

Quite why they chose to continue this war I don’t know because it is seriously damaging Christianity in a way that no secularist ever could. I personally don’t have a problem with Christians destroying their religion, I mean I would personally prefer it if people were atheists because it’s far easier to reason with non-religious people. That said if I were a Christian, I would be mightily pissed that there were a group of people busy destroying my religion. But what do I care I’ll happily continue this argument forever and a day, debunking creationism has been likened by some observers to an Internet sport, it’s like shooting fish in a barrel most of time.

Random Englishman presented me with this argument – that scientists who are part of the evolution system are afraid to speak out against it and just go with the flow. I’ve had more chance to think about this one and it’s not quite right. This simply isn’t how the system works. You don’t look for facts to support a preconceived conclusion, you first find the facts and then ask what conclusions you can draw from them. If facts come to light that flatly contradict a scientific theorem then you would still have to submit them for peer review. Other people then analyse your work and decide if it has merit and if the conclusions drawn are correct it has ramifications throughout the scientific world and you gain recognition for your work. The objections to any particular piece of work can’t be a gut feeling or because a reviewer disagrees with the conclusions drawn, it must be proven that piece of work is incorrect. It is perhaps the ultimate system of honesty and integrity because the process of peer review by design seeks truth and prevents misinformation. That is why we have a first world technological civilisation with things like computers, cars and space shuttles – because this system for discovering how things work is monumentally successful. Things like evolutionary THEORY, atomic THEORY and the THEORY of relativity have real world implications because the science works!

“Of course science knows it doesn’t know everything. Otherwise it would stop.” – Dara O’Brien.

Finally a video of a Christian scientist I respect – Ken Miller who interestingly enough testified against Intelligent Design in the Kitzmiller Vs Dover case.