The Missionary… keepin’ it real.

Congratulations, Texas. It’s a step in the right direction, though you’ve still got a long way to go.

The accuracy of the depiction of Intelligent Design is amazing… and amusing!

Here’s the article from the AHA.

(click the image for the full comic)

Sadly, they get far too little support from the general population of their state, at least according to a University of Texas/Texas Tribune poll. 51% of Texans surveyed disagree with the statement that humans developed from earlier species. 22% say that they believe life existed in its present form since the beginning of time. Almost a third (a third!) believe that humans and dinosaurs lived at the same time… or, as A Simple Prop says, a third of Texans apparently think The Flintstones is a documentary.

That a horrifyingly large number of people who blatantly reject scientific facts in favor of ancient mythology.

Perhaps that’s not fair. Perhaps they aren’t rejecting facts. Perhaps they are ignorant of the facts. Perhaps they’ve never spent the time to do any actual research (apart from reading the bible, which doesn’t really count). Perhaps they’ve just been taught that the bible is all they need to know and so haven’t been exposed to the actual facts.

So perhaps it’s not an arrogant rejection of facts. Perhaps it’s just an ignorance of facts. However, I would wager that the ignorance is, in most cases, suffused with a strong bunker mentality built of bibles and hallelujahs… a nearly impenetrable wall designed to keep out any reality that contradicts the bronze and iron age dogma so prevalent in Texas.

However, arrogance or ignorance, it’s a disgrace that people who reject reality have any influence whatsoever in the education of our children and the running of our government. It’s bad enough when the influence is on a local level, but when that influence is able to reach every corner of our country, as it is with Texas education standards and textbooks, it approaches a level of crippling absurdity that threatens to flush our country’s intellectual integrity into the sewers.

…if it hasn’t been flushed already.

Orac explains…

[...] for a debate to be an intellectually useful exercise, there have to be two reasonable points of view being argued, points of view that have evidence to support them. The evidence doesn’t have to be of equal quantity and quality on each side, of course, but it should at least be somewhere in the same ball park–or on the same planet.

He goes on to say that denialists crave the respect that real science receives and desperately want to be taken seriously by people in relevant fields of study. Being put on the same stage or the same screen as genuine, respected scientists and scholars gives them exactly what they want, so it’s best to just avoid the debate in the first place. Richard Dawkins has taken the same position for the same reasons, refusing to debate creationists.

In his article, he quotes Lipstadt’s listing of a number of tactics that I see all the time from denialists and it’s disheartening to see them, especially when otherwise intelligent people fall into the denialist sewer and veritably flaunt their ignorance and misinformation as though they are spreading enlightenment to the huddled masses. “We need to educate people,” they claim, while deliberately spreading misinformation. “People need to hear the truth,” they say, while making certifiably false claims. “People are just falling prey to the mainstream media,” they cry, while basing their own claims on religious and political ideologies rather than facts.

Regarding the denailist tactics, Orac says [emphasis mine]…

[...] there is a commonality among cranks in the types of fallacious arguments and twisting of data that they engage in. Being a “denialist” is not a matter of what is being argued, but how it is being argued. It’s about bad reasoning, bad science, cherry picking data, and misrepresenting sources to support a preexisting agenda.

Which is why in a debate they are so damned hard to pin down. Like Jello.

Indeed.

I’ll bet Ken Ham has answers for all those questions, though.

I’ll also bet his answers are nonsense.

We live on an mind-bogglingly tiny speck of dust.

Carl Sagan was much more eloquent than I, of course. His words in 1996 (from Wikipedia)…

Look again at that dot. That’s here, that’s home, that’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.

A very small stage, indeed.