Ray Comfort’s new video, Evolution vs. God, will be available for free in a few weeks. You can download it now for $20. I went ahead and did so and it was fantastic. He had a fabulous presentation of the law and the Gospel. And he tied countless scientists, including PZ Myers, in knots. Myers and Richard Dawkins are in full personal attack mode and, oddly enough, helping draw attention to the movie. So thanks for that, guys!
Tag Archives: pz myers
The “noviewers” are back, attacking Darwin’s Doubt without reading it
I won a contest by coining a phrase over at Uncommon Descent a couple years ago: Noviewer — Someone who writes a review on something he hasn’t read or seen. Apparently some people haven’t evolved enough to realize how it impacts their credibility when they lie to support their worldview.
Looks like the noviewers are out in force with the release of Stephen Meyer’s Darwin’s Doubt: The Explosive Origin of Animal Life and the Case for Intelligent Design. There are lots of 1 star reviews at Amazon already and the content makes it obvious that they haven’t read it. These close-minded people really, really don’t like to hear alternate views or to let others have the opportunity to hear them. I wish Amazon required reviewers to pass a brief quiz before posting about controversial books.
Here’s an example of a noviewer:
Over at Evolution News & Views, Casey Luskin asks, could P. Z. Myers even possibly have read Steve Meyer’s Darwin’s Doubt before writing a long essay trashing it?:
Now, Darwin’s Doubt runs to 413 pages, excluding endnotes and bibliography. Neither the book’s publisher, HarperOne, nor its author sent Matzke a prepublication review copy. Did Matzke in fact read its 400+ pages and then write his 9400+ word response — roughly 30 double-spaced pages — in little more than a day?
Perhaps, but a more likely hypothesis is that he wrote the lion’s share of the review before the book was released based upon what he presumed it would say. A reviewer who did receive a prepublication copy, University of Pittsburgh physicist David Snoke, writes:
A caution: this is a tome that took me two weeks to go through in evening reading, and I am familiar with the field. Like the classic tome Gödel, Escher, Bach, it simply can’t be gone through quickly. I was struck that the week it was released, within one day of shipping, there were already hostile reviews up on Amazon. Simply impossible that they could have read this book in one night.
I’ve started Darwin’s Doubt and it is amazing so far. The preface alone is worth the money. It is interesting how the critics of Meyer’s last book so thoroughly miss his points. Perhaps it is because they don’t actually take the time to read them?
Also see Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design by Stephen C. Meyer.
Roundup
The Mess of the Message: Denying Christ On The Printed Page — I’ve written before about serious problems with The Message, but this post added a host of new and serious issues. Also note how it removes a reference to homosexuality and inserts a “green” passage. Friendly reminder: It isn’t a Bible. In many places it is the opposite of the Bible.
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People have lost their minds. Remember that these are educators coming up with these things.
Boy Suspended Just for SAYING the Word Gun
Campus bans guns, tells people to nod at attackers
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The Affordable Care Act — and by affordable, we mean more expensive — They were caught lying. Again. Although we didn’t have to wait until now to know it.
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COULD A CHRISTIAN BAKER WHO REFUSED TO MAKE WEDDING CAKE FOR A GAY COUPLE REALLY GO TO JAIL? — Why don’t they try this with Muslim bakers?
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This is bizarre “tolerance” of Liberals:
- It is bad to judge. [What they claim Conservatives do and what they themselves do non-stop.]
- It is good to judge others for judging. [What Liberals do.]
- It is very bad to judge others for their hypocrisy of judging others for judging. [What Liberals don’t like for us to point out.]
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While Denying Tea Party, IRS Grants Tax-Exempt Status to Radical Leftists and Terrorists
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Ergun Caner Cover-Up — This is such a sad case. The guy was caught lying over and over and too many Christian leaders, churches and schools looked the other way or helped him cover his tracks. The documentation is very thorough, even though he is working hard to cover it up. If the guy had repented it would be different, but he shows no remorse.
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Profiles in Countermoonbattery: Ondray Harris — here’s a great guy who quit when he was told not to hire any conservatives or whites. We need more courage like that. Oh, and he’s black.
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The Contempt of PZ Myers — He really, really opposes schools that teach critical thinking.
None of the above keeps PZ from frothing at the mouth that: “There is no controversy!” Evolution happened…get over it. Really, PZ, “no controversy”? Guess PZ’s been too busy ranting and raving about ID and “Creationism” to keep up with what is actually happening in his own field of biology. Let’s see, can anyone name one aspect of evolution and its supposed mechanisms that isn’t hotly debated and controversial even among evolutionary biologists? Pick one – common descent, natural selection, gene transfer, phylogentics, gene duplication, genetic drift, mutation, etc etc – not one single supposed driving engine of evolution is uncontroversial within evolutionary biology itself. It continually amazes me that every single aspect of Darwinian evolution is hotly debated and controversial, yet the Darwinian faithful, like PZ pound their fists on their desks yelling “evolution is a fact, Fact, FACT!” What is telling, is how rabidly PZ and others of his ilk want to keep students in public schools from ever knowing about or even hearing about such controversies.
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Master Sergeant Punished for Serving Chick-fil-A at Party
DOMA is the law of the land, but the rogue Obama Regime refuses to enforce it.
A year later, the Master Sergeant is still bogged down in a legal battle. The lesson is passed down from Obama through the military as clearly as it is through the IRS: do not say, do, or even think anything that a liberal might not like, or you will suffer consequences.
A few more examples:
One service member received a severe reprimand for expressing his faith’s religious position about homosexuality in a personal religious blog.
A chaplain was relieved of his command over a military chapel because he could not allow same-sex weddings to take place in the chapel.
And a chaplain who asked senior military officers whether religious liberty would be protected in the wake of the repeal of the law against open homosexual behavior in the military was told to “get in line” or resign.
The world has seen other governments that forcibly repressed Christianity. But not even the Soviet Union attempted to impose reverence for sexual perversion. It wasn’t sufficiently morally depraved.
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The “Brights” outsmart themselves again
Apparently this “Belief in Evolution Versus National Wealth” graph is supposed to prove that the lack of widespread support for Darwinian evolution in the U.S. is directly tied to our per capita GDP. I saw this at a site that worships secularism plus another site that thought the graph was “brilliant.” Then I Googled it and realized that it got virtual high-five’s at a bunch of atheist sites, including those of Richard Dawkins and PZ Myers.
Carefully consider what it shows, then let’s see what it proves. I think you’ll see a triple-fail of cherry-picking data points that (allegedly) support your cause, a confusion of correlation vs. causation and an ironic misreading of the results.
Here’s what the graph really proves: That people predisposed to cheer on Darwinian evolution (or their pet topic) will be quick to grab something that seems to prove their point. That is something we should all be wary of.
First, think of some of the Middle Eastern countries left off the list. They have roughly zero belief in evolution and high GDP per capita. That’s odd how the graph’s author forgot those, eh? Deliberately ignoring key data points is cheating.
Next, the graph shows that the author and those who revel in his work were not taught the distinction between causation and correlation. Just because the U.S. has a lower percentage of belief in evolution doesn’t mean that is what drove our GDP per person (did I really have to just type that?!).
You could draw endless conclusions to prove your points playing this game. Here’s a freebie: Compare belief in Darwinian evolution to which country has the most military power, then draw a graph. Wow, the skeptics of Darwinian evolution must be right! We’re the most powerful, and by Darwinian definition we are the most fit!
Finally, it isn’t like the U.S. trails the pack. We’re #2 after Norway, and I doubt that many people think the only reason Norway is better is because of their evolutionary beliefs. If anything, you should draw the conclusion that we are better off because we don’t drink the Darwinian Kool-Aid.
What a train wreck of bad thinking! It seriously fails on three levels but was all the rage on many Darwinian sites.
If the author of the graphs and its supporters came from the same environment, then perhaps that would be reason to mock that educational model. Darwinian dogma has dominated public schools, government, media and entertainment in the U.S. for decades, yet it still hasn’t convinced us. So those entities have all failed and/or we just have better critical thinking skills to analyze important topics like this.
Sort of like how we understand the difference between causation and correlation.
It is a sad sort of irony: They think they are more logical, but they do things like this over and over. Remember, these are the same type of folks pushing the global climate change hoax.
There is one important take away from this graph: The remarkably high percentage of “Brights” who reflexively and uncritically trumpeted it as evidence for their view. This helps me understand why they are so passionate about their other “scientific” claims.
P.S. If you want some more real science and logic see this post on the cosmological argument.
Atheist on atheist violence
OK, not violence, but a little smack-talk where a fellow atheist Oxford don takes Richard Dawkins to task for being scared to debate William Lane Craig. Via New vid uses authentic clips to taunt Richard Dawkins for refusing to debate William Lane Craig | Uncommon Descent.
Watch and enjoy.
Hey, I won the Uncommon Descent contest!
Via Uncommon Descent Contest: What do we call people who refuse to read books they are attacking? The idea was to come up with a pithy term for critics of Intelligent Design who slam books without reading them. It isn’t just your random Amazon reviewer, either. Even leading Darwnists do it, although to PZ Myers’ sort-of credit, he threatened to read one of the books — so take that!
The second award offer in the recent contest, a copy of Don Johnson’s Probability’s Nature and Nature’s Probability, asks “What do you call a guy who reviews/trashes a book without reading it?”
It goes to homerj1 at 3 for
The review is a noview and the reviewer is a noviewer.
This won because it can be used effortlessly in a sentence, as in:
Prof. Retro Darwin’s noview of biochemist Michael Behe’s latest …
Rev. Darwin Santa, noviewer of Steve Meyer’s …
Recently, Dimbo Darwin, science writer, noviewed Bill Dembski’s latest …
Ease of use is important. And dropping the pretense of reading makes for more honest communication: He didn’t read it because he wouldn’t like it and wouldn’t learn anything from it, plus he can find an audience who wants to hear from him for precisely that reason. Don’t forget how many people out there know they are “for science” because they believe any nonsense talked in Darwin’s name.
While I’m glad to have won and to have a tiny part in ID slang history, I thought “re-skewer” or “hypocritic” would win. But I’m keeping the book.
This is a two-way street, of course. We shouldn’t give 5 stars on Amazon to pro-Christian books if we haven’t read them.
P.S. I suspect that most of those who gave 1 start to Ann Coulter’s new book are noviewers as well.
Noviewers, not reviewers
Uncommon Descent has a contest where they ask, “Why do people refuse to read books they are attacking?” It is about critics of Intelligent Design who don’t even read books before trashing them. (To PZ Myers’ sort-of credit, he threatened to read one of the books — so take that!)
Here are the questions and my suggestions, which already concede that the ID-critic community not only permits such behavior but seems to encourage it (all in the name of science, eh?):
1. Why would a scientist or scholar actually volunteer to do it?
Assuming original sin is too broad, I’ll go with one of these:
A. He loves his worldview more than his integrity.
B. He hasn’t evolved enough to have intellectual honesty.
2. What do you call a guy who reviews/trashes a book without reading it?
The review is a noview and the reviewer is a noviewer.
Roundup
From the shadenfreude department, some Darwinian on Darwinian verbal violence – aka, PZ Myers reaps what he sowed.
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Ten resources to help you defend the resurrection of Jesus as history
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If Canada’s Bill C-389 passes, transgenderism will be taught in kindergarten – coming soon to a country near you. This is the logical consequence of turning sexual preferences into civil rights. It is child abuse to teach kindergarteners that they aren’t “really” boys or girls. These people should be in jail.
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New study links father absence to increased bullying – so when people want to reduce bullying in schools across the board – instead of just protecting their favored students – remind them how important stable one man / one woman families are.
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The top three books that helped change me from a mindless, irrational Darwinist into an ID proponent
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War and killing – excellent overview of the biblical view
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Union Fights to Force You into Obamacre While Getting Waivers for Itself – one more reason to dislike unions and Obamacare. Unions fought hard to make you pay for this but are opting out themselves. If it is such a swell program, why aren’t they excited to be in it? If they don’t like it, why did they lobby for it? This is politics at its worst.
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EPA Issues First Waiver For New Greenhouse Gas Regulations – shockingly, it goes to a major Obama supporter and a recipient of major government spending. Where are the Halliburton haters now?
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Another thing you won’t get from the mainstream media: How The CDC Coverup Now Turns to Bureaucratic Panic when they were caught hiding abortion data.
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More Assaults From the Supporters of the Homosexual Agenda – be sure to eat more chicken (at Chik-Fil-A, a restaurant with excellent governance that treats its employees well).
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‘House of Horrors’ abortionist made over $1.8 million/year, now claims to be broke — apparently abortion pays pretty well for those selfless heroes.
According to the grand jury report, a search of Gosnell’s Philadelphia home uncovered $240,000 in cash and a gun hidden in a filing cabinet in his 12-year-old daughter’s bedroom. Other than that, his income appears to be unaccounted for except for his assets and real estate investments. “The money’s unaccounted for,” District Attorney Joanne Pescatore told the Inquirer. “The only thing we know about is the money taken out of the house.”
According to the Inquirer report, Gosnell and his wife own seventeen properties, a motorboat, a Dodge Durango, a Ford F-150 pickup truck and a Ford Expedition.
Despite these assets, Gosnell now claims to be broke . . .
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Interview with atheist PZ Myers: Pure self-parody
See Evolution News & Views: New Atheist Atheology for Michael Egnor’s interview with and commentary about New Atheist PZ Myers. As the Wintry Knight noted,
First, I should say that if you don’t know who P.Z. Myers is, you should know that he is an incredibly arrogant and vulgar internet atheist. He is very popular on the Internet with atheists because of his foaming-at-the-mouth, howling-at-the-moon ranting against intelligent design, theism in general and Christianity in particular.
Anyway, Myers is interviewed by Michael Egnor, a neurosurgeon and professor of pediatrics, who appeared in the movie “Expelled”. He asks P.Z. Myers questions about the New Atheism, then comments on Myers’ answers.
Here’s a sample:
7) Does Moral Law exist in itself, or is it an artifact of nature (natural selection, etc.)
Myers’ answer: It doesn’t.
My answer: Of course objective Moral Law exists. It exists in itself, and we all know that it does. The risible New Atheist assertion that the Moral Law is merely a product of evolution, like earwax, is so far removed from genuine insight that it’s difficult to satirize, let alone defend. Moral Law doesn’t exist? Then why is Richard Dawkins suing fellow New Atheist Josh Timonen — who ran Dawkins’ online store — for embezzling hundreds of thousands of dollars? If Moral Law isn’t an objective reality, what right has Dawkins to sue Timonen for merely struggling to survive? If Moral Law is merely an opinion, how can one man’s moral opinion (“it’s ok for me to take Richard Dawkins’ money”) be objectively wrong whereas another man’s opinion (“it’s right for me — Richard Dawkins — to keep my own money”) is objectively right? If the Moral Law doesn’t exist in itself, then all moral opinions are subjective and relative (that’s what “doesn’t exist in itself” means). Torturing babies? Carrying out the Final Solution for a pesky religious group? I think it’s wrong, but who am I to say what’s right for you?
To assert that it’s wrong or right for someone else to do anything is to assert that Moral Law has objective existence independent of individual men. To assert the moral rightness of Moral Relativism is to deny Moral Relativism.
The classical theist understanding of Moral Law is that it is an aspect of Natural Law, which is the manifestation of Divine Law in the natural world. Men have natural ends; human life is teleological. Our natural end is to know and love God, and obedience to Moral Law is part of the path to that end.
New Atheist denial of the objective existence of Moral Law is incoherent self-contradictory gibberish. If you want to know whether P.Z. Myers thinks that Moral Law has objective existence, steal something from him.
Myers can’t go three sentences without making a moral claim, but he denies objective morality. His whole worldview is a farce. If he really believed it then he’d “know” that Christians have no choice but to say and act as we do. After all, if the universe is purely materialistic then the molecules in motion would be the cause of everything. Nothing immaterial could exist.
Myers is a Romans 1 poster boy (and 1 Corinthians 3 as well).
Romans 1:18-20 The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of men who suppress the truth by their wickedness, since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse.
1 Corinthians 3:19–21 For the wisdom of this world is folly with God. For it is written, “He catches the wise in their craftiness,” and again, “The Lord knows the thoughts of the wise, that they are futile.” So let no one boast in men.
The conclusion of the link is nice:
New Atheism is an intellectual and moral vacuum. It’s all sneer, mockery, self-contradiction, and juvenilia. New Atheists aren’t defenders of “science and reason.” The inverse is true. They misrepresent science and reason for ideological ends. New Atheists have no answers to the fundamental questions of man. They don’t even have coherent attempts to answer the questions. They don’t understand the profound insights of classical theism. Most New Atheists don’t even understand the questions. And their nihilistic atheist superstition denies even the most basic imperatives of Moral Law.
This is the reason for the raging clash between atheists who are accomodationists and atheists who are confrontationalists. The accomodationists are just as clueless metaphysically, but they know a “framing” nightmare when they see it. Nihilistic Luddites like Myers and Dawkins and Coyne are exposing New Atheism for the intellectual fraud that it is.
Not that I have any problem with that.
Roundup
Why do blacks give 90% support to pro-choice politicians? Margaret Sanger, Planned Parenthood founder, was buddies with the KKK and aggressively sought to reduce the black population. But you can totally trust Planned Parenthood today — er, uh, except for their serial statutory rape cover-ups and their destruction of blacks at a rate three times that of whites . . .
We should hire three or four colored ministers, preferably with social-service backgrounds, and with engaging personalities. The most successful educational approach to the Negro is through a religious appeal. We don’t want the word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population. and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members.
Margaret Sanger’s December 19, 1939 letter to Dr. Clarence Gamble, 255 Adams Street, Milton, Massachusetts.
PP still uses “religious” leaders as useful idiots in advancing their culture of promiscuity and death.
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Safe School Czar Kevin Jennings Hasn’t Been Fired Yet? — Nope. (Hat tip: The Other McCain)
This isn’t a gay/straight issue. It’s a *creepy, pervvy, cultural Marxist who recommends hardcore kiddie porn to school aged kids being put in charge of “Safe Schools” by Obama and their creepy defenders (Media Mutters)* issue.
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How PBS uses your tax dollars to distort the evidence for evolution — they use selective images to imply that the appearance of similar embryonic shapes at a point in time somehow prove macro-evolution. They should be de-funded for this and many other reasons. If their supporters can’t keep them afloat without taxing those who oppose them then they should die off — you know, that survival of the fittest thing. Funny how the evolutionists once again aren’t living consistently with their worldview.
What viewers may not know—and PBS does not tell them—is that the interactive exercise shows embryos midway through development. The earliest stages are systematically omitted.
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Ann Coulter on airline security
An alien from the planet “Not Politically Correct” would have surveyed the situation after 9/11 and said: “You are at war with an enemy without uniforms, without morals, without a country and without a leader — but the one advantage you have is they all look alike. … What? … What did I say?”
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A great response to the canard that people who leave their spouses to pursue same-sex relationships are “brave”
- There’s nothing brave about marrying a woman when you know you prefer men.
- There’s nothing brave about being unfaithful to her with men.
- There’s nothing brave about taking solemn vows that you know you’re not likely to be able to keep.
- There’s nothing brave about telling your teammates when you know that if any of them express disapproval, warn you of the serious health consequences or even crack a joke they’ll be visited by the police and accused of a hate crime.
- There’s nothing brave about breaking your wife’s heart.
- There’s nothing brave about saying you’ve always been in love with her and are still in love with her when you plainly don’t understand what it means.
- There’s nothing brave about putting ‘the way I want to live my life’ above everybody else’s hurt.
- There’s nothing brave about treating sex as if it’s the most powerful thing in life that cannot be resisted and somehow justifies whatever you want to do.
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PZ Myers is predictably confused about morality. Again. As with many postmoderns and atheists he insists there is no universal morality but can’t go three sentences without making moral claims. In this case, he can’t even finish a single sentence without contradicting himself.
In the absence of a god-given absolute morality, all that matters is how we treat one another in this one life we have. What flows naturally to me is not brutality, which requires an absence of awareness of the suffering of others, but recognition of the fact that my fellow human beings really are my equals: we’re all going to die, we only have these few brief decades of life, and who am I to deny someone else the same opportunities I’ve been given?
Who “gave” PZ those opportunities? Things don’t give things, persons give things. And of course, he is pro-abortion. What a wonderful way to “treat one another in this one life we have.”
Eternity Matters 