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First, we were mentioned in the Secular Student Alliance online newsletter.  It’s just a reposting of articles that have appeared on this website.

Second, we were mentioned by World, in the cover story of their upcoming issue.  The cover story is about the “Daniel of the Year”, which is some sort of yearly award.  The recipient of the 2009 Daniel of the Year is not Ray Comfort, but Stephen Meyer, the director of the Discovery Institute.  It appears that Ray Comfort got an honorable mention.  I am quoted as saying that we would never burn Ray Comfort’s books.

I do not feel I was misrepresented, and I understand that there are space constraints, but I still find it disappointing that that’s all I got in.  I am also disappointed in the article itself, since I think by all rights Ray Comfort should be considered an embarrassment to Christians.  I would certainly find him embarrassing if he were on my side.  In any case, here is the full statement I sent to World magazine.

The change in date was not surprising, since Ray Comfort is not exactly known for his honesty.  What was more surprising was that Ray Comfort and Kirk Cameron made personal appearances at UCLA.  Ray Comfort made quite a spectacle where he would yell questions at people as his own crowd would cheer him on.  He was clearly most interested in evangelizing, and any arguments about science or facts were secondary to him.

I would not say that we organized a “protest”.  We were simply going to hand out counter-flyers made by the NCSE (National Center for Science Education) along with a few pro-evolution materials, including free t-shirts.  Kirk Cameron had a silly fear of book burnings, but we would never do anything of the sort.  The change of date did not greatly affect our plans, though due to logistical problems, it meant that Ray Comfort would not get a free t-shirt.

At one point, Ray Comfort asked one of our group members to heckle him.  She replied, “You only want hecklers for the show.”  He proved her right by saying, “No, it’s for the documentary.”  It seems that Ray Comfort really does want the attention, which makes his change in date puzzling.  Perhaps he only wanted it to appear as if he needed to take drastic measures to avoid imaginary protests.

TMZ: Kirk Cameron — Mauled by a Bruin in Darwin Fight

Huffington Post: Kirk Cameron Confronted Over Evolution (VIDEO)

Here’s the video:

UPDATE: A commenter on Pharyngula by the name of “Dorkman” was kind enough to transcribe this video.

Here’s what happened. We knew for a long time that Ray Comfort was planning to distribute the books on the 19th of November. But on the morning of the 18th, I woke up and read this: Ray has a change in plans. Ray Comfort announced the morning of that he was coming in a day early! So we had to change our plans too. The original plan was to have volunteers hand out counter-flyers and bookmarks from the NCSE, while simultaneously holding a table on Bruin Walk where we would offer free t-shirts, stickers, and discussions. But given the sudden switch, we were just going to hand out counter-flyers and bookmarks.

I had classes all day, so I actually didn’t get to see most of it myself. But I had a one-hour break. During my break, I found that Ray Comfort and Kirk Cameron had shown up on Bruin Walk personally. How flattering! I thought they were planning to go to Berkeley. I didn’t ever get to speak with Ray Comfort, but I did get to speak with Kirk Cameron.

Kirk Cameron and me (on the edge in green)

Kirk Cameron expressed a bit of disappointment that there weren’t more people protesting them. So asked him why they changed the day. Apparently, they were afraid of huge protests and book burnings. Apparently Dawkins had suggested one time burning the books. Silly Dawkins! I told Kirk that his expectations were silly. Really it was just our group and these bookmarks. I don’t understand how they, on the one hand, want to get lots of attention, but on the other hand, want to avoid attention by switching the day at the last minute. Kirk Cameron was unable to clarify this for me.

He was also unable to satisfactorily explain why they had originally removed four chapters from the book. Apparently, including all the chapters would be too expensive and make it too daunting to read. He basically said they were waiting for people to call them out on the missing chapters. I told him that he should have foreseen that people would think it’s dishonest to remove chapters.

Ray Comfort had actually chosen a really terrible day to distribute books, because the entire campus was thinking about the UC Regents’ proposed mid-year tuition fee hike. There was a huge student protest on the 18th, with more than 500 demonstrators and fourteen arrests, but they were against the UC Regents on the other side of campus. In fact, if they had stuck to the 19th, they might have seen an even bigger demonstration against the UC Regents with about 2,000 protesters. I’ve been told that the reason the demonstration on the 19th was bigger is because that’s when they were originally planning to vote on the fee hike. They were busing people over from other campuses and everything. However, they rescheduled it to the 18th, supposedly to avoid the big protest.

I told Kirk Cameron that the way they rescheduled the book distribution drew a very unfortunate parallel between them and the UC Regents. In retrospect, I don’t think Kirk Cameron had any idea what I was talking about, since I’m not sure they were even aware of what was going on on campus. Also in retrospect, if there is a parallel between Ray Comfort and the UC Regents, it’s probably the Regents who come out looking worse, not the other way around.

I also asked Kirk Cameron if they would be distributing books again on the 19th as originally planned. He said they would. But he lied. I didn’t see them anywhere the next day. Too bad, we were distributing the free t-shirts that day, and he might have gotten one. Now we ran out. Oh well.

Ray Comfort soon stood on a soapbox and gathered a crowd around a mini stage that had been chalked on the ground. He asked people to come up to “home plate” so he could have an “open discussion” with them. This open discussion involved Ray Comfort yelling questions at them while his own crowd cheered at him. He asked “Have you ever lied in your life? … What do you call a person who lies? … Have you ever stolen anything in your life?” I think the idea is that we’re all liars, thieves, and adulterers, and we need Jesus to save us. Unfortunate implication: it’s okay to lie if, like Ray Comfort, you’ve accepted Jesus’ forgiveness. If you’re familiar with Ray Comfort, you know that this whole routine is the one bullet in Ray Comfort’s toy gun; he has to collect it back every time he shoots because he has no other bullets.

That whole spectacle made it clear that Ray Comfort was more concerned about evangelism than about evolution, whereas our group cares more about how stupidly anti-evolution he is. When he asked each person on home plate, “Are you an atheist?” I wanted to ask him “Are you a Young Earth Creationist?” but I’ve been told that if I were actually up there, he wouldn’t have given me a chance to ask any questions.

I had to go to class, so I’m not sure what else happened. However, I note with some amusement that Ray Comfort offered to pay the printing costs for the bookmarks. Ray Comfort, we are not the Secular Student Alliance (though we are affiliated), we are the Bruin Alliance of Skeptics and Secularists. Furthermore, I don’t know how much the bookmarks cost because they were created and paid for by the National Center for Science Education. I don’t know about the NCSE, but our group would happily accept any donations. Our treasurer would get a kick out of that.

I think the idea is to make up what he lacks in honesty with generosity. And make no mistake, Ray Comfort can be very generous. I’ve heard that he once visited the Atheists, Agnostics, and Rationalists at UC Irvine, and paid for their entire dinner. On the other hand, he seems to be less generous with his fellow Creationists. Though Creationists across the country were distributing his books for free, I heard that many of the distributors themselves had to buy them off of Ray Comfort.

(Cross-posted on my blog)

Quote:6. Schriften weltanschaulichen und lebenskundlichen Charakters, deren Inhalt die falsche naturwissenschaftliche Aufklaerung eines primitiven Darwinismus und Monismus ist (Haeckel).

Translation:

Quote:6. Writings of world natured and living-oriented nature, whose content is of false scientific enlightenment through primitive Darwinism and Monism.

Well, some of my friends actually debated the Banana man himself, while I was late and had to make do with some guy who I think was Latino and claimed to have served in Iraq, not that he looked particularly fit. While he was preaching, he made the statement that is paraphrased as “Without God, there is no reason to live a good life”. Enough being enough, I made my way to the box opposing from him in the circle of the public.

“Sir!” I begin, “That is out of line! You are wrong”

He calls me rude, but I persist, gesturing. As he quiets, I quote Marcus Aurelius, messing it up a bit, but here is the correct quote:

Live a good life. If there are gods and they are just, then they will not care how devout you have been, but will welcome you based on the virtues you have lived by. If there are gods, but unjust, then you should not want to worship them. If there are no gods, then you will be gone, but will have lived a noble life that will live on in the memories of your loved ones.

The crowd cheered, but then the creationist attempts character assassination, asking if I’ve ever lied then trying to call me a liar (someone answered his question with “Christian” to “What do we call those who lie?”), etc,. I call it out – and I get the hypothetical of “If you were at God’s feet”, etc, at which I concede that if God was in front of me, I would accept judgement and bow down, but only under extreme and exact conditions. He then devolves back into proselytizing and professes how much he cares for me. At that point, I am weirded out again, but looks like he is tired too, so someone else takes the boxes away and it ends.

On the upside, my club and I passed out many fliers from the NCSE on “Why Ray Comfort is Wrong”.

Busy day – I even got Origin of Species, Corrupted Edition with me.

Me with the Corrupted Edition

On the issues, Jindal fits the ideal for the Christian conservative – he is against abortion in all cases including rape, is opposed to embryonic stem cell research, and has a 100% lifetime rating from the National Right to Life Committee – so it is very likely that he earnestly believes what he is saying rather than trying to pander. On the other hand, being a convert from Hinduism to Christianity, brown-skinned, and having the legal name “Piyush Jindal” may push away some on the far right. In any case, an interesting dynamic…

31:22 – A cell could not have been the result of Darwinian evolution because it is a machine of at least 250 perfectly ordered proteins, each of which has to work to maintain a lifeform. Therefore there must be an intelligent design to make something this ordered and precise.

That’s assuming that proteins have all-or-nothing function, which is COMPLETELY false. There are countless mutants of even just one protein and different mutants of different proteins have different catalytic efficiencies. Most mutations don’t even have an effect on fitness, and are silent due to the degeneracy of the genetic code (multiple codons encode for the same protein). And different cellular structures can be analogous but not homologous, meaning that they have different evolutionary bases but the same function, just as with the flagella of the archaea, bacteria, and eukaryotes – demonstrating that there are multiple pathways to adaptations that essentially do the same thing.

Furthermore, the longer back a protein’s lineage is, the more conserved (unlikely to change over time) it is since said protein has undergone selective pressure and any new non-silent mutations would be even more likely to be catastrophic to function. This can lead to some very inefficient proteins, such as Ribulose-1,5-bisphosphate carboxylase (Rubisco), which has enzymatic activity of only 4 molecules per second (most enzymes have activities of hundreds or thousands per second) but is critical for the carbon fixation cycle. If everything were so intricate and intelligently designed, Rubisco would be far more efficient and not have to consist of 40% of total proteins in the cell NOR would it be sensitive to something as simple as oxygen.

Rubisco. If it were intelligently designed, God must really have been on something.

Life can loosely be defined as a structure that is capable of metabolism, can self-replicate, and can regulate its own environment. There is strong circumstantial evidence that all three can occur individually even through very simple, immediate phenomenon; lipids, which were created by the Miller-Urey Experiment, can spontaneously form into micelles given a certain concentration of lipids (the Critical Micelle Concentation). These micelles are enclosed structures capable of forming a basis of a micro environment.

Abiogenesis Goes Far Beyond “Lightning Striking a Mud Puddle” – Thomas Cech’s Experiments

Nobel Laureate Thomas Cech showed through a fragment assay where he stripped away various portions of the bacterial ribosome that if 95% of all proteins were stripped away, the ribosome would still be capable of peptidyl transferase activity. He also found that the protein did not exist around the active sites of the ribosome. Through this and various other experiments, Cech demonstrated that RNA functions as both an encoder and a catalyst (a catalyzing RNA is referred to as a ribozyme).

Cech further demonstrated that such an RNA molecule can be relatively simple and can form through a variety of pathways. Cech sequenced random RNA sequences and found that out of a total of 10^85 possible molecules with just 172 bases, around one per 10^15 molecules was capable of some peptidyl transferase activity. Thus there are 10^70 different molecules with different bases capable of PT activity – and just for those molecules with 172 bases! Thus, one does not need a intricately and intelligently designed ribozyme to perform seemingly advanced metabolic activities – random polymerization and then selective pressure for those molecules best able to self-replicate will suffice.

39:31 – Ben fawns over Capital Hill town idiot Congressman Mark Souder (R-IN), who has proposed a bill preserving “academic freedom” at the Smithsonian in response to Sternberg’s “persecution”. This is just one of many examples of “The Academy”, a shadowy organization dedicated to eliminating God from the science lab.

Congressman Souder’s admits that he is from a district where the Democrats need to be conservatives to survive and the Republicans are even more far to the right. Belief in the literal truth of the Bible hardly makes him some sort of nonpartisan arbiter in the Evolution-ID debate. Oh, and parroting the Expelled movie ON his house website doesn’t really help.

41:29 – The National Center for Science Education is at the forefront of keeping Darwinism in power. They are one of many watchdog organizations, along with that demonic ACLU, which is in cahoots with The Academy.

And there are numerous watchdog organizations that do exactly the opposite. To imply some sort of liberal conspiracy theory is one of the many disingenuous claims this movie makes.

James Dobson, chairman of Focus on the Family and more guilty of spamming peoples’ e-mails than half of Nigeria

43:35 – Darwinism turns goodly, God-fearing Christians into Atheists! Just look at Richard Dawkins and PZ Myers! Beware!

(See 57:22 for more)

Although the percentage of Americans who believe evolution stand at an appallingly low 40% (only several percentage points above hardcore creationism), almost 80% of Americans consider themselves Christians… meaning that even if we assume that everyone in the remaining 20% believed in evolution, 50% of evolutionists would have to be Christians. I’m sure that they are Christians In Name Only, because they probably belong to some liberal church that supports gay marriage or is maybe just a front group for *gulp* humanism.

44:18 – Ben uses the example of the Abrams Report on MSNBC (now Verdict w/ Dan Abrams), who absolutely dismantled a lawyer from the Thomas More Law Foundation representing the defendants of the Dover School District Trial to show that the media is firmly in the hands of Big Science.

Kudos to Dan Abrams; he called out the IDers for what they really are – closest creationists. And while Abrams, Keith Olbermann, and maybe even Chris Matthews on MSNBC lean to the left, there have always been more conservative pundits on cable TV. Right-wingers Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, and Glenn Beck all gave the Expelled movie itself glowing reviews. I also have yet to see an unabashedly far-left organization that masquerades itself as “News”, just as FOX News does for the right.

45:41- Pamela Winnick “refused to take sides” in an article on the evolution-ID debate. But the Darwinists still persecuted her because she refused to show enough deference to evolution.

This is actually one area where Ben Stein gets it partially right. Winnick’s original article does try to set a neutral tone between the evolution-ID debate… although it does make the false assumption that ID is a serious theory that needs to be debated. But Stein gives no examples of how she was “persecuted”. And now Pamela Winnick cannot be considered a non-partisan journalist – her new book “Science’s War Against Religion“.

46:36 – Darwinism has infiltrated the courts in a last-ditch attempt to stop Intelligent Design. Representing the vanguard of the effort is the ACLU.

A court is a forum where all the evidence for or against Intelligent Design and/or the Theory of Evolution can be debated, discussed, and refuted. Oh wait, I forgot you don’t have any evidence – maybe that’s why you’re so afraid of the judicial system.

49:44 - Darwinists have given up on defending their own theory, and have simply resorted to attacking their opponent (religion and intelligent design) like a dirty politician.

On the contrary, this film and the IDers do the very same thing you’re decrying, and I have the liveblog to prove it.

53:12 – There have been plenty of religious people who are also scientists like Isaac Newton and Galileo. Darwinists don’t have a monopoly on good science.

No one said they did except the film, which is just used to build up a persecution complex. Francis Collins is a relatively conservative evangelical Christian and a very accomplished scientist who worked on the Human Genome Project – but the difference between him and the ID people is that the ID people use religion to manipulate science despite the overwhelming evidence.

57:22 – PZ Myers was not only converted to atheism through Darwinism, but now also actively seeks to marginalize religion, bring it down, and make it irrelevant in the public sphere.

Just one in a long line of fear-baiting arguments that this film makes. There are plenty of religious people who believe in the Theory of Evolution; even the Catholic Church and the very conservative Pope Benedict XVI’s doctrine (while not altogether rational) claim the theory as valid and leave it up to the (real) scientists.

Furthermore, Stein is insinuating that atheists are out to overthrow Christianity or something, which is completely false. This is to suggest that atheists are one monolithic force that is “out to get religion”, whereas in reality atheists are just as diverse in world view as the various Christian, Jewish, Muslim or other religious denominations. There are atheists like myself who are more or less content with keeping the separation between Church and State, and more radical atheists who seek actively to challenge the views of religious people just as Christian evangelicals do the same to nonbelievers.

The EVIL ATHEIST CONSPIRACY is coming! Watch out, or you may become one of “Them”.

There is also no conflict between religion and the Theory of Evolution as long as one sees The Bible and other holy books as a damned (pardon my language) allegory rather than word-for-word truths – as many moderate and liberal Christians have… not to mention that France during the Enlightenment experienced an upsurge of atheism up to a point in time where even the famous Cathedral of Notre Dame ceased to be a religious institution for a time – all of this before Darwin was aboard the HMS Beagle.

Finally, the context of the question posed to PZ Myers is also severely lacking – if you were to ask an evangelical Christian what would be their ideal world, it would almost certainly be a monotonous one where there might not be homosexuality and every single individual were an evangelical Christian who adhered to the same brand of Christianity and was “saved”. It was obvious that PZ Myers would say that he preferred a world where scientific research would marginalize in all aspects of life.

Here is Part II and Part III of my grand exercise in poor time management.

00:42 – Ben Stein brings up the example of Dr. Richard Sternberg, who didn’t “tow the party line” and agreed to publish an article by IDer Stephen Meyer. Sternberg was subsequently forced to resign.

According to the Biological Society of Washington which had to bear the shame of that particular article being in their publication, Sternberg did not follow conventional procedure when deciding to publish the article, which was to have a board consisting of councilors, former and current presidents, and officers. But knowing that the Meyer article would not survive the rigors of peer review, Sternberg decided to personally fast-track the article to publication.

04:05 – Stein challenges Michael Shermer, using the moniker of “academic freedom” to contest that Stephen Meyer and Sternberg should have been allowed to publish their article without incident, and says that IDers are being persecuted.

I’ve already argued that Sternberg basically fell on his sword to look like a martyr.

05:11 – Dr. Caroline Crocker got fired from George Mason University for simply mentioning – not promoting – intelligent design. She is now blacklisted and is a persecuted individual.

Yes. She wasn’t promoting intelligent design. I’m sure some non-partisan independent source like… oh say the Washington Post will back her up…. right? The fact is that Crocker was pushing intelligent design in the classroom, and anything short of screaming at the top of your lungs “GOD DID IT” would be considered “neutral” in the eyes of Ben Stein.

“[...] this highly trained biologist wanted students to know what she herself deeply believed: that the scientific establishment was perpetrating fraud, hunting down critics of evolution to ruin them and disguising an atheistic view of life in the garb of science.”

She even resorts to Godwin’s Rule during the very lecture TO HER STUDENTS. No wonder she was disciplined; This was indoctrination and even if she wasn’t playing the victim card and crying “persecution!”, George Mason was completely justified in what it was doing. -

“The students sat stunned. But Crocker was not done. From this ill-conceived theory, she concluded, much harm had arisen. Nazi Germany had taken Darwin’s ideas about natural selection, the credo that only the fittest survive, and followed it to its extreme conclusions — anti-Semitism, eugenics and death camps. ‘What happened in Germany in World War II was based on science, that some genes and some people should be killed,’ Crocker said quietly. ‘My grandfather had a genetic problem and was put in the hospital and killed.’”

06:35 – Neurosurgeon Michael Egnor asserts that doctors do not need to study evolution, and the Darwinists went on the attack, pressing him to retire or resign.

Right. The study of evolutionary biology in doctorates varies… and within that range is little or none at all. In any case, we’ve already shown in the case of Richard Sternberg how IDers love to play the victim card… and since Egnor still retains his post and cannot substantiate any of his claims, he’s probably just pissed off at a few bloggers.

07:20 – Professor Marks of Baylor University was forced by academia to shut down his research and return grant money for links to the intelligent design movement.

First of all, Marks is a professor of electrical engineering, not evolutionary biology – just to make things clear. And Baylor University did offer to keep the site hosted on the university as long as Marks changed the title from “Evolutionary Informatics Lab” to something less deceiving and if he disassociated the site from being affiliated with the university; even this evangelical magazine lauded Baylor’s compromise. But Marks, determined to be a martyr, refused, and the site is now hosted on non-university servers.

08:53 – Guillermo Gonzalez of Iowa State University was denied tenure because he claimed in his book the Privileged Planet that the universe had an intelligent designer. All this despite his “stellar research record” – no pun intended.

[If there are any astronomy majors who would like to add to this, please e-mail me at robinrzhang@gmail.com - you can probably refute this better than I can]

“By assessing the elements that compose our planet, they argue, we can tell that it was designed for multicellular organic life. The presence of carbon, oxygen and water in the right proportions makes it possible for organic life to exist; and this combination of minerals and chemical elements exists only on Earth. [...] our planet is exquisitely fit not only to support life, but also to give us the best view of the universe, as if Earth were designed both for life and for scientific discovery.”

So not only organisms now, but the Earth itself? So no chance through naturalistic properties a planet in the Goldilocks Zone and of the right size could have formed in the Sun’s accretion disc? And I suppose that stars are incapable of generating heavier elements that are later expelled via a supernova or that the proportion of chemical elements can change on this planet or on other planets has changed over these billions of years to one of more or less accommodation towards multicellular life? This guy deserves to get laughed out of the scientific community, not just potentially reprimanded.

By the way, there is a video version of The Privileged Planet on Google Video narrated by none other than John Rhys-Davies, AKA Gimli and Treebeard of Lord of the Rings. And just when I thought I couldn’t lose any more respected for him after his appearance in the Sci-Fi Channel Original Movie “Chupacabra: Dark Seas” -

Yes, it’s El Chupacabra. On a fucking cruise liner. It’s that bad.

15:02 – Discovery Institute President Bruce Chapman claims that the notion of ID masquerading as religion is a “red herring” and that the Discovery Institute relies on scientific evidence and has persons of all religions, “including agnostics”. Intelligent Design is simply the study of patterns in nature that are best explained by an intelligent creator.

I suppose posting the image of your organization’s former logo won’t exactly help -

20:17 – As Newtonian Physics has been supplanted as well, Darwinism is an obsolete 19th century theory that is falling apart in the face of new evidence.

On the contrary, Classical Darwinism was based on very flawed Lamarckian principles that basically assert that if a physical adaptation confers an advantage, an organism’s offspring will have that adaptation enlarged or lengthened. This of course is ridiculous and was supplanted as the “engine” of natural selection by genetic mutations caused by environmental hazards and errors by the cell’s DNA polymerases. This mechanism is far more plausible than Lamarck’s, and only serves to strengthen the Theory of Evolution.

21:50 – Dr. Stephen Meyer states that it’s his job as a scientist to stop “one hand from clapping” and challenge the conventional theory of Darwinism. He claims that for every shred of evidence supporting Darwinism, there is a counterargument that supports ID.

That’s like saying that we should give the flat-earth “theory” equal time too… because the round-earthers have been monopolizing the science world, you know.

22:54 – Jonathan Wells claims that Darwinists are distorting the evidence and are “harming science”.

I wonder which group is going “hm, this looks too complex to undergo gradual genetic mutations, so I’m not going to attempt to try to find out how” and ignoring the scientific method.

25:15 – Mathematician David Berlinski claims that evolution is so vague about so many things that it cannot fit mathematical models like other theories and points to the vague definition of “species” as one of Darwinism’s fallacies.

There have been debates over the definition of species that lie well outside the realm of Darwinism; in fact, there are at least ELEVEN different ways to define and differentiate a species, and evolution directly involves only one of them. A straw-man argument… although this vagueness can allow for inter-species breeding can be a huge source of genetic variation which only works more to the detriment of ID/Creationism.

27:04 – Darwin was arrogant in titling his book “The Origin of Species” rather than “The Origin of Man”, and presumed to know more than he could prove.

A low-blow character attack that I wouldn’t put past this movie – not to mention that Darwin observed finches and not humans. No matter Darwin’s supposed arrogance, scientists are allowed to make bold hypotheses IF they are grounded in reality, but the latter element would be missing from the Creationist’s mind.

28:13 – Ben Stein incredulously points to a “Darwinist” documentary film that states that “perhaps the chemicals in the early Earth’s atmosphere were jump started by lightning”

Nonspontaneous, or thermodynamically unfavorable reactions such as the formation of the various compounds in the Miller-Urey Experiment (see below) NEED energy to work. Lightning is a perfectly good source, and Stein’s incredulousness stems from his own ignorance.

28:45 – The Miller-Urey experiment, where a chemical composition believed to mimic that of the early Earth’s atmosphere and catalyzed with lightning, failed to produce life.

A visual representation of the Miller-Urey Experiment

This is such a common straw man argument used by many IDers/Creationists. The objective of the Miller-Urey Experiment was NOT to create life, but to see if a simulation of Earth’s early atmosphere consisting of simply inorganic compounds along with an energy source (lightning) could generate organic compounds. It was NOT a failure, and in fact after just one week, amino acids along with sugars, lipids, and nucleic acid precursors formed. It is impossible to have this happen in today’s atmosphere because oxygen turns the atmosphere from neutral to reducing – of course, oxygen was nonexistent due to the lack of photosynthetic organisms on the early Earth.

The many simple organic molecules formed by the Miller-Urey Experiment in just a week

29:35 – Ben Stein mocks Michael Ruse’s hypothesis that “life was jumpstarted on the backs of crystals”, stating that he would not bet Ben Stein’s Money on it (haha).

First of all, Michael Ruse is a philosopher of science, not a scientist. To imply that he is some sort of paragon of the Darwinist research scientist who is always up-to-date and completely knowledgeable about evolution, as Ben Stein strongly implies, is both disingenuous and intellectually lazy. But back to the argument – at first it looks inane and I admit I was bemused by his claims of “evolution jumpstarting on the backs of crystals”. However, while Ruse described his claim inartfully and the film probably took him out of context, he does actually make a valid point.

According to this article, reordering of liquid crystals into different mesophases can induce changes in embryonic development. Some biologists have even proposed that the protoplasm and contained mesophiles are the base determiner for metabolic activity while others have argued that a living system is simply a collection of mesophiles wrapped around by a membrane. If this is what Michael Ruse was referring to, the aforementioned evidence shown by various researchers and the implications it has on genetics possibly on a molecular level makes his claim much more auditable than “Ok, God did it”.

00:42 – Ben Stein brings up the example of Dr. Richard Sternberg, who didn’t “tow the party line” and agreed to publish an article by IDer Stephen Meyer. Sternberg was subsequently forced to resign.

04:05 – Stein challenges Michael Shermer, using the moniker of “academic freedom” to contest that Stephen Meyer and Sternberg should have been allowed to publish their article without incident, and says that IDer are being persecuted.

05:11 – Dr. Caroline Crocker got fired from George Mason University for simply mentioning – not promoting – intelligent design. She is now blacklisted and is a persecuted individual.

06:35 – Neurosurgeon Michael Egbert asserts that doctors do not need to study evolution, and the Darwinists went on the attack, pressing him to retire or resign.

07:20 – Professor Marsh of Baylor University was forced by academia to shut down his research and return grant money for links to the intelligent design movement.

08:53 – Guillermo Gonzalez of Iowa State University was denied tenure because he claimed in his book the Privileged Planet that the universe had an intelligent designer. All this despite his “stellar research record” – no pun intended.

10:56 – GODWIN’S LAW #1 Far more to come!

15:02 – Discovery Institute President Bruce Chapman claims that the notion of ID masquerading as religion is a “red herring” and that the Discovery Institute relies on scientific evidence and has persons of all religions, “including agnostics”. Intelligent Design is simply the study of patterns in nature that are best explained by an intelligent creator

20:17 – As Newtonian Physics has been supplanted as well, Darwinism is an obsolete 19th century theory that is falling apart in the face of new evidence.

21:50 – Dr. Stephen Meyer states that it’s his job as a scientist to stop “one hand from clapping” and challenge the conventional theory of Darwinism. He claims that for every shred of evidence supporting Darwinism, there is a counterargument that supports ID.

22:54 – Jonathan Wells claims that Darwinists are distorting the evidence and are “harming science”.

25:15 – Mathematician David Berlinski claims that evolution is so vague about so many things that it cannot fit mathematical models like other theories and points to the vague definition of “species” as one of Darwinism’s fallacies.

27:04 – Darwin was arrogant in titling his book “The Origin of Species” rather than “The Origin of Man”, and presumed to know more than he could prove.

28:13 – Ben Stein incredulously points to a “Darwinist” documentary film that states that “perhaps the chemicals in the early Earth’s atmosphere were jump started by lightning”

28:45 – The Miller-Urey experiment, where a chemical composition believed to mimic that of the early Earth’s atmosphere and catalyzed with lightning, failed to produce life.

29:35 – Ben Stein mocks Michael Bruce’s hypothesis that “life was jumpstarted on the backs of crystals”, stating that he would not bet Ben Stein’s Money on it (haha).

31:22 – A cell could not have been the result of Darwinian evolution because it is a machine of at least 250 perfectly ordered proteins, each of which has to work to maintain a lifeform. Therefore there must be an intelligent design to make something this ordered and precise.

35:16 – 3D CGI animation of cell metabolism ripped off from Harvard (which is now suing) and “enhanced” with whoosing noises to maintain the attention of Ben’s hickish audience.

39:02 – Communism!

39:31 – Ben fawns over Capital Hill town idiot Congressman Mark Souder (R-IN), who has proposed a bill preserving “academic freedom” at the Smithsonian in response to Sternberg’s “persecution”. This is just one of many examples of “The Academy”, a shadowy organization dedicated to eliminating God from the science lab.

41:29 – The National Center for Science Education is at the forefront of keeping Darwinism in power. They are one of many watchdog organizations, along with that demonic ACLU, which is in cahoots with The Academy.

43:35 – Darwinism turns goodly, God-fearing Christians into Atheists! Just look at Richard Dawkins and PZ Myers! Beware!

44:18 – Ben uses the example of the Abrams Report on MSNBC (now Verdict w/ Dan Abrams), who absolutely dismantled a lawyer from the Thomas More Law Foundation representing the defendants of the Dover School District Trial to show that the media is firmly in the hands of Big Science.

45:41- Pamela Winnick “refused to take sides” in an article on the evolution-ID debate. But the Darwinists still persecuted her because she refused to show enough deference to evolution.

46:36 – Darwinism has infiltrated the courts in a last-ditch attempt to stop Intelligent Design. Representing the vanguard of the effort is the ACLU.

49:44 - Darwinists have given up on defending their own theory, and have simply resorted to attacking their opponent (religion and intelligent design) like a dirty politician.

53:12 – There have been plenty of religious people who are also scientists like Isaac Newton and Galileo. Darwinists don’t have a monopoly on good science.

57:22 – PZ Myers was not only converted to atheism through Darwinism, but now also actively seeks to marginalize religion, bring it down, and make it irrelevant in the public sphere.

1:00:52 – Hitler’s views on superior races mirrors Darwin’s own theories, and a necessary pre-requisite to Nazism was Darwinism. At the time, many eugenicists used Darwin’s theory to justify the slaughter of Jews, Slavs, and infirms en masse.

1:04:03 – Ben Stein visits a German concentration camp and learns from the museum curator that the mass murderers used Darwin to justify their actions.

1:06:28 - Ben meets with Richard Weikart, author of From Darwin to Hitler, who further emphasizes the link of eugenicists to both the Nazi Regime and Charles Darwin. Oh yeah, and Margaret Sanger and the abortionists (ie Planned Parenthood) are actually closet eugenicists and were in on the action as well through forced sterilization.

1:11:32 – Some professor (name is not spoken) claims that Darwinism dehumanizes people and allows abortions and euthanasia to happen.

1:13:21 – Stein quotes from Darwin’s book The Descent of Man, and seems to make the claim that Darwin was for weeding out those “undesirables” in society just like Hitler and the Nazis after him.

1:15:57 - Intelligent Design is not a science issue; It’s a freedom of speech issue and it’s disturbing that America are persecuting these people when it’s supposed to be the freest country in the world. The Founding Fathers would be rolling in their graves.

1:22:41 – Ben Stein confronts Richard Dawkins over whether there’s a 99% chance or a 49% chance that God doesn’t exist.

1:25:27 – Richard Dawkins doesn’t know how the first self-replicating molecule (life) came to be. How could the exemplar of Darwinism not know? Surely Intelligent Design has won…

1:25:55 – Dawkins claims that an advanced civilization evolved through Darwinism and then could have “seeded” this planet with life. Dawkins is only against God as an intelligent designer.

1:28:33 – In a speech, Stein says that “America is all about freedom”, and that the freedom to impose intelligent design as a legitimate theory in the scientific community is an essential right of the people!

1:28:53 – Stein basically mirrors his own staged speech with Reagan’s memorable speech at the Berlin Wall.

1:30:38 – The audience of handpicked, paid volunteers spontaneously gives a standing ovation. Cause despite having all the charisma of Lt. Reginald Barclay from Star Trek:TNG, his speech was so awe-inspiring.

1:30:58 - Join me in the fight against big science!

1:31:15 – Fin.

——-

All in all, the directing quality (never mind the content) was on par with Uwe Boll and perhaps even worse than this; Stein resorted to using staid black and white movie clips to try to illustrate his point, but it just came off as propagandistic and disingenuous. In any case, going back to my previous post, here’s how the drinking teams scored:

1ST PLACE: Team Academic Freedom – 00:00 to 15:02, 39:31 to 57:22, 1:15:57 to 1:22:41, 1:28:33 to 1:31:15 = 35:35 total

2ND PLACE: Team Lightning-Hitting-A-Pond – 15:02 to 39:02, 1:22:41 to 1:28:33 = 28:52 total

3RD PLACE: Team Liberal/Communist Conspiracy – 41:29 to 1:00:52, 1:06:28 to 1:13:21 = 26:26 total

4TH PLACE: Team Hitler – 1:00:52 to 1:15:57 = 15:05 total

Yeah, I was disappointed that Team Hitler lost too.