How Creationists Lie To Us - 9

Chapter 8 - The Speed Of Light.

Chapter 8 of Dr Paul D. Ackerman's creationist book, It's A Young World After All is a mercifully short and simple chapter. It's also easy to dismiss. In fact, it's so easily dismissed that even a psychologist with no science training could have done so had he wished.

It does illustrate quite nicely though a couple of the techniques creationist 'scientists', that is creationists who write books about science, use on their customers. It's probably worth recalling here how creationists who wish to have their work published by the Institute For Creation Research (ICR), which is the source of much of the 'science' behind such creationist websites as Answersingenesis.org and Creationministries International, are required to take an annual oath which means in effect that they will only ever reach a conclusion which supports a literal interpretation of the Christian Bible and especially the account of Creation in Genesis.

Ackerman describes this as the "most amazing clock of all". Apparently, he believes the speed of light (c) is changing. Supposedly, when his god created the universe in just six days, the value of c was almost infinite. This explains why object in the universe look like they are billions of light years away and yet their light, which would take billions of years to reach us, can be seen. Clearly, the light we see must have started out billions of years ago and not the 6000 or so years creationism requires us to believe the universe has existed for.

Now, the velocity of light in a vacuum is a universal constant. It does not matter how fast you are travelling relative to the source of light it will always be the same. The reason for that is that the faster you travel the slower time gets (and also the more massive you become). At the sort of speeds we are used to this effect is too small to be noticed but it can make a difference when it comes to things like space travel and satellites. A geostationary satellite like those used for communications and in particular GeoPositioning Systems (GPS) on which satellite navigations depends, are travelling considerably faster through space-time than is the surface of Earth over which they are 'stationary' so a small but important time correction needs to be applied to allow for relativity.

So, where on Earth does Dr Paul D. Ackerman, PhD, get this idea that c is getting slower from?

You might have guessed it. He gets it from another creationist 'scientist' of course. He gets it from Barry Setterfield, an Australian creationist. Setterfield based his notion on historical measurements for the speed of light starting in 1667 (sic) and working up to the 1960s. Of course, we are expected not to question the validity of measurements of light travelling at 186,000 miles per second in 1667 with the limited technology at their disposal.

So, plotting some of these data points on a graph and drawing a line through them extrapolated back until it curved up to infinity, Setterfield concluded that this proved that the Bible was true after all. The curve became infinite at about 4300 BCE.

There was a slight flaw in the science, though. As exposed in Talkorigins.org, had Setterfield plotted the rest of the data points he had available, he would have produced a plot whose best fit would have shown the speed of light increasing not slowing down, though allowing for a margin or error, a straight line, with increasing variability about the mean as they went back in time could have been plotted through them. So, his maths should have told him the startling fact that we weren't very good at measuring the speed of light in those days. Instead, by starting out with the answer he wanted, then selecting the data which best fitted it, he dutifully produced the conclusion required by the ICR.

Later, Setterfield was to claim that recent measurements had shown the value of c had reached its minimum in the 1960s and was now stable, so handily making it impossible to validate his claim, since any future measurement would produce a flat line. I wonder what the chances of that happening at just the right time were. Just the ticket, eh? A nice claim which is impossible to falsify. How absolutely er... creationist!

And what an amazing coincidence too that the 'speed of light' happened to stabilize just at the time when our technology became sensitive enough to measure it accurately!

The site, Dealing With Creationism In Astronomy also looks at this piece of creative creation 'science'.

Now isn't that an interesting example of how creation 'science' works? One 'scientist' comes up with the required answer and another 'scientist' presents that as authoritative. It's then left to the unfortunate customer who is probably singularly ill-equipped to question it, to check its validity and satisfy him or herself that it's good science. But then most customers for this stuff are just looking for something to confirm their existing bias and just want the reassurance than 'scientists' agree with them. Nice work if you can get it.

As for Dr Paul D. Ackerman, PhD., he seems to have merely accepted this bad science with no attempt to check it or to question its validity. It shows what he wants it to show, or, more likely, it shows what he knows his customers want it to show, so in the book it goes.

Earth during 'Creation Week'?

Had Ackerman, or Setterfield for that matter, been real physicist, or had they checked with any of them or had their work peer-reviewed by some, they would have been told that had c been infinite at day one, Earth would have melted during 'creation week' as a result of the very rapid rate of radioactive decay, and there would have been 417 days in a year when Jesus was born. I'm sure someone would have noticed that the calendar was 52 days too short then and that years have been getting noticeably shorter during recent historic times.

Ackerman posed an interesting question in Chapter 3:

Now the tables have turned, and the believer can throw the challenge back by saying, "If the universe was created as long ago as the evolutionists claim, why does it look so young? God is surely not a deceiver."

And if it doesn't look so young, just who is the deceiver?

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How Creationists Lie To Us - 8

We're now half-way through the treasure-trove of creationist bad science called It's A Young World After All By Dr Paul D. Ackerman, PhD., an assistant professor of psychology with no history of research in any science subject, no peer-reviewed science papers to his name, no record of having presented any papers to an audience of professional scientists and indeed no recognised higher qualifications in any science subject. Dr Ackerman never-the-less feels competent to assure his readers that science has got it all wrong.

This blog deals with Chapter 7. Just another seven tedious chapters to go...

7 - The Vast Beyond.

Here he lays his cards on the table:

As a biblical creationist, I believe that God created the heavens and earth out of nothing (i.e., not out of any preexisting matter) a few thousand years ago. ... If the seven days of the creation week described in the first chapter of Genesis are understood as regular twenty-four-hour days, the figure of six thousand years then applies to the whole of creation.

To many, the idea of a recent creation by the Word of God is an incredible concept. Agreed, the concept is incredible. However, in the area of ultimate origins, all the alternatives are incredible. Consider, for example, the dominant evolutionist scenario for the beginning: the Big Bang.

According to the Big Bang concept all the matter of the universe—all of reality—was once compressed into a tiny ball. For some reason the tiny ball became unstable, exploded, and turned into stars, planets, strawberries, cockroaches, Good Humor wagons, committees, and this book.

A great portion of the resources and brainpower of modern science is being poured into an effort to make this materialist scenario sound plausible. The attempt has been monumental and the results impressive, but the conflicting hard data are mounting up, and it is time for people to begin pointing out that "the emperor has no clothes." The view that the present physical universe somehow created itself and is billions of years old is contradicted by the growing weight of powerful physical evidence. The creation is not billions of years old; it is quite young.

Of course this is nothing more that the Kalâm Cosmological Argument (KCA) in disguise, but what's interesting here is how Ackerman sets his readers up with a straw man argument in his grossly over-simplified and frankly wrong definition of the Big Bang Theory and then presents his own 'A Magic Man Magicked It Out Of Nothing By Magic' notion as a more reasonable alternative. There is not, and there never will be, any attempt to explain how this magic works to make everything out of nothing nor where the magic man came from and what it was made of, and yet creationists continually demand science provide detailed proof of every minutiae of a scientific theory.

"You have to prove beyond any possible shadow of a doubt everything about your theory or my evidence-free notion wins!" This is of course nothing more that an abdication of responsibility and a triumph of intellectual and moral cowardice on the part of creationists. You can bet your house that if creationists had even the slightest scrap of real, authenticated, definitive evidence for their particular god which came anywhere close to the standard of proof they demand of science, we would never hear the last of it.

False Dichotomy. If this isn't a plane it must be a peanut-butter sandwich.

What he is trying here is the classic Creationist tactic of the False Dichotomy Fallacy and it depends entirely on the parochial ignorance of his target market for its success. His readers are expected to assume without question that, if he can cast doubt on science, the only reasonable alternative on offer is the locally popular god which just happens to be the one he is pushing. What he doesn't say, and what his readers are expected not to know, is that precisely the same argument can be used for any other hypothetical god or any other crack-pot notion you can dream up and to which you can simply assign responsibility for everything. The fact that the KCA was devised by medieval Islamic theologians to support their version of a god is simply ignored.

Let's move on to the specifics:

Consider, for example, the dominant evolutionist scenario for the beginning: the Big Bang. According to the Big Bang concept all the matter of the universe—all of reality—was once compressed into a tiny ball.

The Big Bang Theory of course is nothing to do with the Theory of Evolution By Natural Selection (TOE). The TOE would still apply even if you could show that the universe has always existed or that it was built by a construction firm. The TOE is an explanation of the biological fact of evolution on Earth just as the Theory of Gravity is an explanation of the fact that there is an attractive force between bodies related to their mass.

But that error aside, if indeed it was an error, the gross distortion of Big Bang (BB) cosmology here is disgraceful. No serious cosmologist of theoretical physicist would claim that all the matter in the universe was once compressed into a ball. The BB explains how matter was created. It does not claim it was all there to begin with.

The basic concept is actually quite easy to follow. As Einstein showed, matter is energy and energy is matter. At its lowest level energy consists of four fundamental forces: weak and strong nuclear force; electromagnetic force, and gravity. All observation confirm that the gravitational energy in the universe is equal to the sum of the other three forces, so, if gravity is regarded as the opposite of the other three forces, the sum total of energy in the universe is zero. The universe is, in total energy terms, literally nothing. It's like borrowing from a bank. You have money, the bank has an asset in the form of your debt, but you have money to spend. No wealth was created in that transaction.

And where is the evidence for all this? As with all science, the evidence can come from making predictions from the theory and testing them:

One of the predictions made by the BB Theory is that there will be a particular ratio of light elements in the universe. Guess what? The observation matches that prediction exactly.

One of the early criticisms of the BB was that there should still be traces of the initial heat and there was none. Except there was. When the microwave background radiation was detected, by accident as it turned out, by Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson and for which they were awarded the 1978 Nobel Prize for Physics, it turned out to be exactly as the BB Theory predicted, if the universe is as old as BB cosmologists say and has been expanding at the rate the red-shift suggests.

This has been discussed at length in a recent book by a real scientist Professor Lawrence M Krauss, A Universe From Nothing. It has also been the subject of a book by Professor Stephen Hawking, The Grand Design.

Lawrence Krauss' book also deals at length with the origin of 'dark energy' and 'dark matter' which leads me on to the last of Ackerman's attempts at the false dichotomy fallacy: the clustering of galaxies and his half-baked analogy with helium-filled balloons.

Quite simply, galaxies do not fly apart because they have gravitational mass holding them together. We know this because we can see them er... not flying apart. Incidentally, they would fly apart if they had insufficient gravitational mass, not because they behave like helium-filled balloons in Earth's atmosphere, but because of the speed of rotation of galaxies. As Relativity tells us, moving objects travel in a straight line through curved space and space is curved by mass, so, to appear to be moving in an orbital motion, they must be moving through a gravity field sufficient to hold them in that orbit.

Dr Ackerman's helium-filled balloons tended to disperse because their movement in Earth's locally chaotic atmosphere was also chaotic. Basic physics tells us that in the absence of energy to overcome it, entropy means loss of order. They tended to move away from one another because there are more ways in which they can do that than there are ways in which they can move towards one another and none of them had sufficient mass to produce a gravity field which would prevent it - which a few moments thought would have told him, is also why they floated upwards.

Once again, Ackerman has, either wilfully or through ignorance of the subject on which he so confidently expounds, got his basic science badly wrong, and so, inadvertently or by design, produced another misleading chapter which would have been laughed at by any decent scientific peer-review process.

Lastly, and so far the only subject raised by Ackerman for which science does not yet have a complete answer, is the question of the 'Dog Star' Sirius and the evidence from ancient history that it had a distinct red tinge, whereas today it is blue-white. This question is discussed here. Ackerman, as we've come to expect now, get's his science muddled and presents only one hypothesis to account for this apparent change as though it were the only one. Firstly, he 'forgets' to mention that Sirius is actually a binary star, that is, two stars in stable orbit around each other. Sirius B (beta) is one of them and is, as he says, a white dwarf.

From the Wikipedia article:

The possibility that stellar evolution of either Sirius A or Sirius B could be responsible for this discrepancy has been rejected by astronomers on the grounds that the timescale of thousands of years is too short and that there is no sign of the nebulosity in the system that would be expected had such a change taken place. An interaction with a third star, to date undiscovered, has also been proposed as a possibility for a red appearance. Alternative explanations are either that the description as red is a poetic metaphor for ill fortune, or that the dramatic scintillations of the star when it was observed rising left the viewer with the impression that it was red. To the naked eye, it often appears to be flashing with red, white and blue hues when near the horizon.

So, as Ackerman could easily have found out had he tried, there are several alternative hypotheses to account for the apparent change in Sirius' hue as seen from Earth. None of them is entirely satisfactory. Quite simply, we do not yet know and we are not even certain that there was a change, though that seems probably.

And so here we have an example of Dr Ackerman trying the familiar old creationist fall-back, the God Of The Gaps Fallacy. The reader is expected to assume that if there is something science has not yet discovered or answered in the minutest detail, the only possible explanation is that the locally popular god did it. Note also the uncritical acceptance as true the evidence that Sirius really did once appear red. Strange that Ackerman seems so ill-disposed to accept science which doesn't agree with his theology, when a completely different set of impossibly high standards of evidence are called into play, eh?

We could, of course, fill all these gaps with the equally preposterous and evidence-free notion that it was caused by a celestial peanut butter sandwich with equal logical validity and intellectual honesty. As a technique it appeals only to those who like to pretend that their ignorant superstition somehow trumps science and learning and gives them a greater understanding of reality than those who study it. It is nothing more than an excuse for intellectual indolence and it goes hand-in-hand with cultural arrogance and parochial ignorance.

I wonder how many scientific discoveries Dr Paul D. Ackerman, PhD. can think of which were made by a scientist sitting back in smug self-satisfaction and declaring that it must have been a god that did it. In fact, it was only when we stopped thinking like that that science began to make any real progress.

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Why You Can't Refute Evolution With Science.

Darwinian Evolution is probably the best supported of any scientific theory. Not only has it survived virtually intact as science has progressed in the intervening years since Wallace and Darwin first published their theory in 1859, but it has been strengthened by many discoveries undreamed of by them.

It came into a world which was assumed to be some 6000 years old in a Universe believed to the same age and to consist of Earth, the moon, the sun and planets and a few thousand stars. There was no known biological method by which the necessary information could be passed on from parent to offspring; there was no known agent which could change to produce the observable variability on which natural selection acts.

We did not know about Mendel's Laws of Inheritance; we did not know about genes or DNA or even about how male and female gametes unite to form a new individual in sexual reproduction.

Related land animals and plants appeared to be distributed in different continents and islands with no obvious ways in which they could have got there. We knew nothing of plate tectonics.

We knew nothing of protein structure or immunology or how enzymes worked. Biochemistry was in its infancy. We knew nothing of the genetic control of embryological development.

How Creationists Lie To Us - 7

Continuing a chapter by chapter look at the creationist book, It's A Young World After All by assistant professor of psychology (and definitely not a research scientist) Dr Paul D. Ackerman, PhD.

Chapter 6 - Is the Sun Shrinking?

True to form, Ackerman seems to have developed amnesia and forgotten all the science of the intervening years - or maybe he's just never learnt it - and starts off with:

"Around the turn of the century, the famous scientist Lord Kelvin created difficulties for evolutionists by presenting a number of powerful arguments against the long ages needed by their theory. In a widely heralded debate with the famous evolutionist Thomas Huxley, Lord Kelvin tore the evolutionists' position to shreds with simple and straightforward physical arguments that the earth and solar system were not old enough for life to have arisen by Darwin's proposed evolutionary process. Among Lord Kelvin's arguments on the age issue was the time factor for the sun's survival based upon Helmholtz's accepted model of gravitational collapse. Lord Kelvin had the theory of evolution on the ropes and had seemingly dealt the knockout blow."

Totally irrelevant of course because, as we now know, Kelvin's calculation of the age of the sun was based on the assumption that its heat was produced by a combustion process and/or gravitational collapse. Kelvin knew nothing of nuclear reactions and in particular nuclear fusion reactions when he did his sums. Nor did Kelvin know anything of Relativity and how mass and energy are one and the same thing, as Einstein showed. Having got the science wrong, not surprisingly he got the wrong answer. It's basically the same error as Ackerman himself made in Chapter 4 when he compared a hot celestial body with a burning cigar, assuming they were the same thing. Kelvin of course did not have the benefit of a further 100 years of science as Ackerman did, so his mistake is quite understandable.

Of course, one way to look at this is that, when physics seemed to disagree with Darwinian evolution, it was Darwinian evolution which turned out to be correct and the physicists who had to revise their theories.

You might be surprised to see a 115 year-old theory being waved as though it were current science, especially one which was falsified 82 years ago, but we are dealing with a creationist writing books for a credulous, mostly ignorant and decidedly gullible market. Isn't it strange how keen creationists are to use a scientific theory, not matter how dubious, out of date, or long-abandoned the theory is, if they think it supports them in their attack on scientific theories? No double standards there, obviously.

To make matters worse for himself, our intrepid psychologist ploughs on undeterred by mere facts. He grudgingly acknowledges that Hans Bethe introduced the idea of nuclear fusion in 1930 but only to dismiss it on the grounds that the neutrinos it should produce have not been 'captured'. In full chortle he declares:

From a creationist point of view, the results of the neutrino-capture experiments are very exciting, for they indicate that the thermonuclear-fusion theory of solar radiation may be entirely wrong. The sun is not emitting the necessary neutrinos. (My emphasis)

So, it looks like Kelvin was right then, eh?

Oops! What's this we find tucked away at the foot of the page?

More recently, scientists associated with the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory in Canada report that the long-sought missing neutrinos, discussed at the beginning of this chapter, have now been found.

Wow! So physics has made a prediction and the prediction has been confirmed! This is generally taken to indicate that the theory is a fairy close approximation to the truth. So that's Ackerman's argument disposed of then.

What any self-respecting scientist would do when his claims have been refuted with this standard of evidence would be to publicly withdraw it and, when it's been published in a book, either withdraw the book from sale or publish a new edition correcting the error. Not so a creation 'scientist' it seems.

Having tried to use a falsified theory to support his evidence-free notion that earth is only a few thousand years old because pre-wheel Bronze Age nomadic pastoralists thought is was, he then tries to present another theory as having been falsified, only to find it's now been confirmed. What is especially amusing and revealing here is how eager Ackerman was to claim the absence of evidence (in this case the absence of neutrinos) refuted the nuclear fusion theory. I wonder if he is so keen to use the absence of any evidence for his creator god to refute the theory that it exists? Any bets?

When it comes to a contest between science and theology one can only pity the poor theologians.

And what does Ackerman do having had his evidence destroyed? Instead of withdrawing the book, or even putting a correction at the top of the page, Ackerman tucks it away at the bottom. I wonder how many of his readers bother to actually read that far?

To quote one Dr Paul D. Ackerman:

One characteristic common to all people is the tendency to notice and accept information that supports their own beliefs, values, biases, and so on.

Well quite. But no point in wasting a good market when there's good money to be made in supplying information which supports the beliefs, values and biases of credulous creationists, for the mere consideration of personal integrity and self-respect, eh?

It's not until we manage to get about two-thirds of the way through the chapter though that we actually get to the point the chapter heading suggests is the main point:

Is the Sun Shrinking?

Major newspapers across the country bannered this headline: "The Sun Is Shrinking." The March 1980 Associated Press news story by Kevin McKean reported the results of research studies by solar specialist Jack Eddy of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and the National Center for Atmospheric Research and mathematician Aram Boornazian. Through examination of records kept by the British Royal Observatory since 1750, Eddy and Boornazian concluded that the sun appears to be shrinking at a rate of about one-tenth of a percent per century.

I'll not go into this in detail because I could come no where near to refuting it so comprehensively as does Mark C. Chu-Carroll in an article entitled Shrinking Sun (Part 1). His conclusion is:

So, is the sun shrinking? According to all of the data we have, examined carefully with good math, the answer is almost certainly not. There's some noise in the data that makes it less than 100% certain, but I wouldn't recommend gambling against it. When you add in the other data we have, such as the shape and stability of the orbits of the planets in the solar system, the geological records of earth, and the correlation between known solar patterns and geological records, it becomes absolutely certain that while there may be some variation in the size of the sun, it's nothing like the constant linear decrease in size required by the creationist argument.

So, I wonder what else Dr Paul D. Ackerman, PhD. will reveal about the sorry state of creation 'science' in Chapter 7.

You know, I'm beginning to wonder if the creation industry needs to use a psychologist to write about science because few self-respecting real scientists would destroy their credibility by coming up with the answers required by the publishers of this stuff.

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How Creationists Lie To Us - 6

Number 5 in a series looking at the treasure trove of creationist fallacies and astoundingly bad 'science' called It's A Young World After All, written by assistant professor of psychology, Dr Paul D. Ackerman, PhD. (Yes I know I've called it number 6. That's because I had already written How Creationists Lie To Us about another piece of creationist deception.)

Dr Paul D. Ackerman, PhD. has never presented a paper on biology, cosmology or physics to an audience of professional scientists nor has he ever published a peer-reviewed paper on any of these subjects.

Here I look at Chapter 5. If nothing else, it shows the danger of relying on a single source for your information and accepting it uncritically if it agrees with your desired conclusion.

Chapter 5 - Pour Me A Rock.

Ackerman's 'argument' is that:

Recent-creationists also believe the impact craters were formed early in the moon's existence, but they believe that this was only a few thousand years ago. Thus we have two opposing views about the same phenomenon. Most scientists believe the craters to be at least three billion years old, while a few believe them to be only a few thousand. Is there a way to test and see which view is correct?

Geophysicist and astronomer Harold Slusher of the University of Texas at El Paso, along with Glenn Morton and Richard Mandock, have worked on this problem and discovered a simple and seemingly decisive solution. They have done so by considering the flow rates (viscosity) of the lunar rock material that forms the moon craters. If the moon were covered with water, impact craters would last only a few seconds. If it were made of honey, craters would last just a bit longer. Since the moon is covered with rock, impact craters last a much longer time, but how long depends upon the kind of rock and its viscosity or rate of flow.

The rocks brought back from the moon by our Apollo astronauts have been carefully studied and found to be virtually identical with a kind of earth rock called basalt. The discovery that the moon's surface is made up of basalt-type rock rules out the possibility that lunar craters are more than a few thousand years old! The viscosity or flow-rate value used by scientists is on the order of a hundred million times too low (the higher the value, the slower the flow rate) for the craters to have lasted three or four billion years. Even if the lunar surface were made of granite, the viscosity value of that granite would be ten million times too low to hold the crater shape for three billion years. If the lunar surface were made of the same rock material as the earth's mantle, the viscosity value would be too low by a factor of one hundred thousand.

Hmm... Well, you have to admit that would be something of a problem for scientists who think the earth is 4.5 billion years old!

If only it were true!

Unfortunately Ackerman seems unaware that the 'research' upon which his entire argument is based is fatally flawed. As you can read here:

In a paper published in a young-Earth journal (Creation Research Society Quarterly, v.20, pp.105-108 (Sept 1983)), former young-Earth advocate Glenn R. Morton attempted to calculate the time it would take for lunar craters to be erased by the slow flow of rock.

The central parameter in the calculation is the viscosity of the rock (its resistance to flow). As a rock's temperature approaches its melting point, its viscosity becomes low enough (although still a trillion trillion times higher than that of honey) for some flow to be observed over long time periods. This phenomenon allows, for example, convection in the Earth's mantle, which is crucial to Plate Tectonics, and in turn to many geophysical processes.

Viscous flow can also be observed in many other solids, from glass to Silly Putty, but always at temperatures that are rather close to the melting point of the solid. Morton attempted to apply this process to rocks on the surface of the Moon. However, by failing to understand viscosity's extreme dependence on temperature, he grossly underestimated the viscosities of lunar rocks. Morton assumed that the viscosity of the Moon's surface rocks would be comparable to the highest measured rock viscosities (those of Earth's mantle). However, since a rock's viscosity increases exponentially as its temperature falls (and the Earth's mantle is very hot while the Moon is very cold), the viscosities of moon rocks are exponentially higher than the viscosities in Earth's mantle.

In fact, moon rock viscosities are so high that they are practically infinite, meaning that no flow will occur (i.e., rocks are more likely to break or fracture than to flow). Since the flow of rock is basically impossible at the temperatures that exist on the Moon's surface, there will be no relaxation of lunar craters, and thus no problem with the age of the Moon.

So, if only these scientists had done the job properly they would have shown that the moon isn't young; it's er... old. Makes you wonder how they got it passed the peer-review process.

But what's this? Former young-Earth advocate Glenn R. Morton?

Yep! The creation scientist (did Ackerman just forget to mention that the 'science' he relied on was carried out by young-Earth creationists?) Glenn R. Morton deconverted from young-Earth creationism when he realised there was no data supporting it and all the data points to an Earth as old as real scientists accept. You can read about his change of mind in his article entitled Why I Left Young-Earth Creationism.

There was no peer-review process of course. So long as it reached the 'right' conclusion and it conformed with the Creationists' Oath to never reach a conclusion that doesn't support a literal interpretation of Genesis from the Christian Bible, it was accepted.

Ackerman has fallen into the trap of believing your own propaganda. It must be a bit disconcerting to find that the scientist whom you've just relied on for your argument doesn't believe it himself.

No, don't laugh. It's not nice.

Instead, read Dr Ackerman's confident conclusion:

Thus the physical evidence is loud and clear to the effect that the craters of the moon cannot be as old as evolutionists claim. In fact, the data indicate that the craters must be only a few thousand years old.

Hmm... as loud and clear as total silence in an unlit coal cellar, eh?

Now you can laugh.

"Oh what a tangled web we weave,
When first we practise to deceive!"
- Sir Walter Scott.

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How Creationists Lie To Us - 5

Chapter 4 of Dr Paul D. Ackerman's creationist book, It's A Young World After All, is yet another fine example of how creation 'scientists' mislead their customers with frankly bad science.

Once again I'll leave it to the reader to decide if this is deliberate or merely a consequence of Ackerman's ignorance of the subject upon which he confidently expounds. Should we expect an assistant professor of psychology to know any more about biology and cosmology than this? Would we expect an author to research the subject before he puts pen to paper and writes what is passed off as an authoritative book of science?

It's not at all unusual for the creation 'science' industry to put up someone with a title like 'doctor' or with PhD after his name as an expert scientist, even though the doctorate may have nothing to do with the discipline in which he is being presented as an expert. Simply posing as a scientist is quite sufficient for the creation 'science' industry and it customers it seems.

Enough of that. Now for Chapter 4.

Chapter 4 - Of Smoldering Embers.

Ackerman sets the scene with:

Imagine that you are hiking in a remote wilderness area seldom visited by man. You are making your way through winding forest trails to a secluded cabin owned by a friend back in the city. He has volunteered his cabin as a much-needed vacation spot, assuring you that it is locked up securely and has not been occupied since his last visit over a year ago. You arrive at the cabin, unlock the door, and enter. Although the cabin appears totally empty, on the table in front of you is an ashtray containing a lighted cigar, and the fireplace reveals still-smoldering remnants of an earlier fire.

The simplest and most logical assessment of this situation would be to conclude that your friend is quite mistaken about no one living in his cabin. Someone has most certainly been here, and quite recently at that.

Okay so far. You'd obviously need to be a little slow on the uptake to think a cigar could burn for over a year, unless it was a really big cigar.

Io

Having so set us up, he continues:

Do you remember the news coverage of the two Jupiter explorations by our Voyager space probes in 1979? Among the spectacular scenes of the planet and accompanying satellites was a most amazing sight—a volcano erupting on one of the moons of Jupiter, Io, at the very moment one of the Voyager's television cameras was trained on the satellite during the fly-by. Why was this event the cause of such excitement on the part of the NASA scientists? In their view the moons of Jupiter were formed at the same time as the planet itself and are about 4.5 billion years old. Small bodies such as this particular satellite would be expected to lose the interior heat and dynamism that produces volcanic activity relatively quickly and thus would be expected to have long since become cold and inactive. The occurrence of a volcano, however, tells us that the object is still hot and geologically active in its interior.

After explaining that this was initially a problem for science, and of course neglecting to explain that it is a problem no longer, he delivers what is supposed to be his killer, knock-down argument (worth emphasising, this, because of what it shows of the nature of creation 'science' and the technique used to fool the gullible and ignorant):

How can a moon of Jupiter be so old and still so hot and active? How can a cigar burn for a year? The problem is the same, and so is the solution, however unthinkable to evolutionist scientists. Maybe Io, just like the smoldering cigar, is not so old after all.

But is it the same problem?

A burning cigar is a combustion process requiring fuel (the cigar), air (or more specifically, oxygen) and heat. Chemically, it's a process of destructive oxidation of organic matter. Once lit, the process of oxidation becomes self-sustaining when the exothermic reaction produces enough heat to keep it going. So long as there is fuel (cigar) left and a supply of oxygen the combustion will continue. When the fuel or oxygen is used up, or the reaction fails to produce enough heat to sustain itself, the process stops. The fuel will have been turned into gasses, smoke and ash or into a partly burned cigar.

The processes involved in generating geothermal heat such as in earth's core or, in this case in Io orbiting Jupiter, is not a combustion process. The problem is emphatically not the same one, to say otherwise is, not to put too fine a point on it, a lie. Whether this lie is deliberate or the result of ignorance I'll leave to you to decide. Ackerman seem not to be entirely ignorant of some of the science involved though, because earlier he had said:

Scientists have puzzled over the problem posed by the geologically active Io and have offered some possible solutions, the most favored of which is some form of gravitational "pumping" by Jupiter and its other moons"

only to wave it aside without further ado.

The crass, schoolboy howler of assuming a celestial body such as Io is hot because it is burning is almost beyond parody. If Ackerman expected his readers to fall for it then maybe that tells us something of his regard for them and their credulous naivety.

But, even if we forgive Ackerman this blunder and enter his fantasy world in which celestial bodies actually burn like cigars, there still remains one more failure of basic joined-up thinking. In fact it's so blindingly obvious you've probably got there ahead of me. If Io is still burning because it was set on fire during some recent creation event, why isn't our moon also still burning? Why have Mars and Venus 'gone out'? Why did creation 'scientists' need proper scientists to go to Jupiter to find this 'smoldering ember'?

Looks like Dr Ackerman's evidence has just vanished in a puff of cigar smoke!

Ackerman's second schoolboy howler is of course, trying to move from the particular to the general. The fact that Io is different should have been a clue. Io is different because it's situation is unique in the solar system. To draw any fundamental conclusions from it is fundamentally unscientific. It would be like trying to draw a fundamental conclusion about all creation 'scientists' based on an examination of Dr Paul D. Ackerman's writing. Not only invalid but a disservice to other creation 'scientists' who are probably perfectly capable of discrediting themselves.

Ackerman raises a couple of other points in this chapter which can also be quickly and easily debunked.

Short-lived U-236 and Th-230 isotopes found in lunar materials are taken as testimony for youth. If the moon were of great age, the short-lived isotopes would have long since decayed and thus be presently absent. Yet they are not absent, they are in relative abundance. Thus, according to this method, the age of the moon should be spoken of in terms of thousands of years, not millions or billions."

This is a good example of how creation 'scientists' take a truism and either deliberately or through ignorance draw a false conclusion from it. It works especially well on ignorant people over-eager to take whatever one of their 'scientists' says on faith and who lack the necessary critical thinking skills or motivation to see through the subterfuge.

It is perfectly true to say that there should be no trace of the original 'primordial' supply of these isotopes after 4.5 billion years. However, like the janitor's dust in the preceding chapter, they are being continually replaced. Both Thorium 230 and Uranium 236 are produced by the natural radioactive decay of Uranium 238 and the half-life of U-238 is just under 4.5 billion years. U-236 and Th-230 are both of recent origin and are continually replaced. Hence, they are not evidence of a young earth. (See this article on EvoWiki for details)

Saturn's Rings

The last claim made in this chapter concerns Saturn's rings. Ackerman says:

The same situation pertains to our discoveries about the rings of Saturn. Scientists were totally flabbergasted by the appearance of turbulence and instability in these rings. Rings that have stayed in place for 4.5 billion years should be in a very stable condition. Signs of instability and bizarre temporary physical conditions are extremely perplexing and seem to violate known and fully confirmed basic laws of physics. If, on the other hand, the rings are only a few thousand years old, there is no difficulty with known physical laws—just as a cigar that smolders for three or four minutes presents no contradictions to known physical laws.

You can read about Saturn and it's rings here. Maybe we should just credit Ackerman with complete ignorance of chaos theory and have done with it. There is, of course, no problem at all with finding emergent order in chaos. In fact, it would be astonishing if we did not do so. His point here is the equivalent of claiming earth's weather system should be entirely ordered and free from turbulence and chaos. We know the weather is chaotic and hard to forecast with much certainty and yet we can see structures like tornadoes, hurricanes, cyclones, clouds and cloud patterns, jet streams, etc emerging from it.

A Hurricane emerging from the chaos of Earth's weather system.

Here is a good article debunking Ackerman's claim. I'll just give one quote from it:

The Voyager visits to Saturn in 1980 and 1981 discovered amongst other things, the shepherd satellites embedded in the ring system (similar satellites were also found by Voyager at Uranus). Those satellites confine the much smaller ring particles, extending the possible dynamic lifetime of Saturn's rings much farther back than 100 million years, probably as far back as the 4.5 billion year age of the solar system.

What this chapter does illustrate is the crying need for peer review of these books to avoid these crass 'errors' getting into print. It's probably not too hard to work out why creation 'science' books are never peer reviewed. Words like 'balderdash', 'rubbish', 'the author appears to be ignorant of his subject - reject', etc, must be disheartening and would reduce the stock of merchandise for sale to virtually zero.

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How Creationists Lie To Us - 4

Dr Paul D. Ackerman's creationist book,It's A Young World After All, is turning out to be a real little goldmine of examples of creationists' fallacies and how creationists, either through ignorance or deliberation, mislead and misinform their credulous customers.

I've dealt with the first two chapter in earlier blogs here and here. Today I'll look at Chapter 3. It's probably worth reminding ourselves again that Dr Paul D. Ackerman is not a research scientist and has never published peer-reviewed papers on biology, physics or cosmology. He is an assistant professor of psychology. His field of expertise is the human mind and how it can be manipulated.

Chapter 3 - The Solar Janitor.

Apparently feeling very please with himself for his 'brilliant' first two chapters where he inadvertently proved that earth is very old and showed us how creation 'scientists' misrepresent the science, Ackerman ploughs on with his clock theme. Here he uses the little-known Poynting-Robertson effect and, as we've come to expect now, misrepresents the science. Again, the reason for this - ignorance or deliberation - is left for the reader to judge.

Here he is in full flight:

In the past, when almost all scientists believed that evolution was true, they had no choice on the age issue. A dedicated evolutionist cannot be open-minded on this question, because evolution absolutely requires vast amounts of time. Thus, for evolutionist scientists the question has never really been "How old is the universe?" but rather "How is the universe old?" Since they "knew" it was old, clocks had to be found and interpreted according to this "known" antiquity.

Ackerman correctly states that It turns out that the slowing effect of Poynting-Robertson is directly related to the mass of the object being considered. He uses the analogy of a 'janitor' sweeping up dust and reasons that we could tell the time from the amount of dust remaining if we knew when the janitor started work. Yes indeed we could - if only the dust wasn't constantly being replaced.

Radiation from the Sun (S) and thermal radiation from a particle seen
(a) from an observer moving with the particle and
(b) from an observer at rest with respect to the Sun.

Briefly, the Poynting-Robertson (P-R) effect is the tendency of particles orbiting the sun to have a slowly decaying orbit and so spiral into the sun. It is due to the fact that photons radiate directly outwards from the sun but, because of their motion in orbit, particles strike them at a slight angle, so they exert a slight drag. In terms of quantum mechanics, a photon absorbed by a particle gives the particle a slight increase in mass so, to conserve angular momentum, the particle needs to move into a lower orbit.

Photons of course travel at the velocity of light - 186,000 miles per second - and have almost zero mass. A particle in orbit travels very much more slowly than this - in the order of thousands of miles an hour, so the P-R effect is most noticeable for very small particles and varies greatly depending on the particle's velocity. The P-R effect also diminishes the further away from the sun you get. Particles of a few microns in diameter (that is, having a radius of a few millionths of a meter) take a few thousand years to decay from as far away as earth is from the sun to evaporation point.

However, the P-R effect is not the only influence on the orbit of particles like meteors. Radiation pressure also impinges on the orbit of small particles and is much greater than the P-R effect. Particles of about half a micron are actually pushed away from the sun.

Image of comet Holmes from the 3.6-meter Canada-France-Hawaii telescope on Mauna Kea showing the large expanding dust coma. On the left, a 'raw' image is shown, in which the brightness reflects the distribution of dust in the coma of the comet (the nucleus is in the bright, point-like region to the upper left of center). On the right is shown the same image after application of the Laplacian spatial filter, to emphasize fine structures. The white/black circular objects are background stars enhanced by the Laplacian filter.

Ackerman is also assuming that all orbiting dust particles were present at the creation of the universe, so his 'clock' was started at that point in time. We know, of course, that this is simply not true. Particles can be 'placed' in orbit in at least two other ways. They can be knocked off the surface of bodies like the moon and Mars by impact of large meteors and, much more importantly, they can also be deposited by comets. In fact most people will be familiar with the periodic meteor showers when earth's orbit passes through the remains of a comet 'tail'. Each comet will deposit a new batch of dust particles of varying size and shape every time it comes in close enough to the sun to produce a 'tail'. That is precisely what the 'tail' is. For those few people who don't know what comets are, here is an article about them.

Ackerman either doesn't know this or hopes you won't. If you did know it - and now you do - you would know that Ackerman's P-R 'clock' is being continually re-set. It's as though someone is adding more sand to the top of the egg-timer.

It is hard to credit Ackerman with ignorance on the matter of cometary re-seeding however, because he gives the game away somewhat with:

When the earth passes through one of these meteor streams, it produces the popular spectacle of a meteor shower. Of relevance to the issue of time and Poynting-Robertson is that individual chunks of material in a meteor stream vary greatly in mass. Some chunks are small, some large, and some in between. Whipple calculated that over time the various pieces of material in a given stream would be sorted out according to size by the Poynting-Robertson effect. Initially all sizes of debris would be jumbled together in the stream. But, as time went by, the smaller objects would be pulled more quickly toward the sun, with the larger objects lagging behind. After a while the meteor stream would be nicely and neatly sorted. Furthermore, the degree of the sorting and the amount of separation between objects of different sizes would provide a clock for measuring the age of the meteor stream.

Using careful photographic techniques to examine meteors burning up in the earth's atmosphere during a number of meteor showers, Whipple and his research team found no dispersion whatsoever in any of the meteor streams studied. Whipple concluded that the meteor streams studied must be quite recent in their origin.

Absolutely correct. Meteor streams are quite recent in their origins. The P-R effect will have dealt with the dust from very much earlier ones. People can sometimes see them being formed with the naked eye and astronomers with telescopes frequently do. No one claims they are as old as the solar system. Unfortunately, Ackerman seems to have chosen yet another clock which doesn't work.

Even a blind watchmaker could probably do better than this.

Ignorance or a wilful attempt at deception? The choice is yours.

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How Creationists Lie To Us - 3

Well, in an earlier blog today I wondered if it would be worth reading any more of Dr Paul D. Ackerman's on-line creationist book It's A Young World After All. I'm pleased to say it was, if for no other reason than it's given me material for another blog exposing creation 'science' and how creation 'scientists' mislead their target readership either from ignorance of the subject upon which they pretend to be expertly commenting, or by deliberation. I'll leave the readers to make up their own minds.

It might be worth recapping at this point that Dr Paul D. Ackerman is not an academic scientist at all but an assistant professor of psychology. This may shed some light on his book.

Let's look at the second chapter which is mercifully very short.

Chapter 2 - "Fossil" Meteorites

Almost laughably, given that he shot himself in the foot in his first chapter on moon dust, as I explained in my earlier blog, and ended up producing evidence for an old earth, not a young one, when he admitted the error in the data, he never-the-less starts Chapter 2 with

There is another impressive timepiece that works on exactly the same principle as the cosmic-dust clock and thus provides an important verification of a recent creation.

And, just as with his moon dust nonsense, of course, it also does nothing of the sort. The problem here though is he just doesn't know enough about the subject - geology - and so lays another egg and in so doing, draws attention to an outstanding example of the straw man fallacy and an illustration of how creation 'scientists' make liberal use of this intellectually dishonest device.

Firstly he introduces us to the idea of meteorites by explaining that they are:

...tiny cosmic-dust particles but with larger chunks of space material

and that

On a clear night these meteors are often visible as they streak across the sky. Most often such meteors are fairly small and completely burn up and disintegrate in the atmosphere before reaching the ground. However, some of them are able to survive long enough to reach the earth's surface, where they impact with tremendous force. Such bodies are then called meteorites, and they are recognizable not so much by their appearance but most importantly by their high nickel content.

Ackerman very cleverly introduced the notion of the rain gauge and how it could, if rainfall was absolutely constant, be used as a sort of clock if we know exactly the amount of rain which falls in every unit of time.

He then compares meteorites with raindrops and concludes that geological strata should act like a sort of rain gauge clock, so, by counting the number of meteorites in every unit of the geological column we should be able to tell the age of the earth. He asserts, without apparently seeing the need to justify it, that:

With the passage of vast amounts of evolutionary time, these accumulating meteorites would be incorporated into the geologic column, and there should be many of them contained in the rock layers today. Paleontologists and other scientists doing research in the geologic rock layers should frequently encounter meteorites.

One wonders if he actually knows what the land surface area of earth is, and just how many meteorites reach it in any given year.

Apart from this obvious piece of wishful thinking, if that's all it was, there are also three essential pieces of information missing:

1. He does not tell us how many meteorites on average each year we should expect to find per unit area of the earth's surface. Does he not know? How good would his rain gauge clock be if you didn't know the rate of rainfall and whether it is constant or not?
2. He neglects to mention that earth recycles it's surface over a very log geological time scale by subduction of the ocean floor at the edges of tectonic plates, volcanic action, mountain building and ice, water and wind erosion which moves the surface of the land masses eventually into the oceanic basins where it is eventually subducted into the underlying magma - the equivalent of his rain gauge clock having a leak.
3. He neglects to mention that the geological column is not built up at a constant rate over the surface of the earth - the equivalent of his rain gauge clock randomly changing shape.

Whether he neglects to mention these things through ignorance of them or because he doesn't want his readers to know about them, I'll leave you to decide.

Ackerman then concludes with an outstanding example of the straw man fallacy:

The evolution model predicts a high number of meteorites, which should turn up fairly often in geological research.

Except that it doesn't of course. Ackerman has merely set up a preposterously infantile strawman 'theory' of his own creation to throw his stones at. What he calls the 'evolution model' includes the science of plate tectonics, of land-mass formation, of a variable-rate accumulation of the geological column and constant erosion and recycling of the surface. He either doesn't know it, or he wants you to ignore all of that and believe his absurd version of the science.

He then says:

Recent-creationists, by contrast, expect a very small number of meteorites in the geologic column.

So why not tell us how many exactly and give us the results of the experiments which were designed to falsify this prediction? This is the classic creationist tactic of setting up a ludicrous and easily dismantled strawman parody of the real science and presenting his preferred notion as the only reasonable alternative. And of course, no results of any experiments which he just wants you to assume have been carried out and validate his notion.

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How Creationists Lie To Us - 2

Surface of the moon showing the first footprints

If you have a few minutes to spare it's always worth going to www.creationism.org to see what creationists are comforting themselves with these days or selling to their credulous customers.

For example, I just found their on-line version of a Creationist book by one Dr Paul D. Ackerman entitled It's A Young World After All. This book is cited by creationism.org as evidence that dinosaurs could not have gone extinct 65 million years ago but instead co-existed with humans until very recently.

Turning excitedly to this book to see this 'evidence' I found:

Chapter 1 - Moon Dust And The Question of Time

The most famous argument that creationists have raised for a recent creation has to do with the amount of dust on the moon's surface—the so-called moon-dust evidence.... A grasp of the moon-dust argument will not only provide the basis for a suspicion that things may not be so old after all, but will also prepare the reader to more readily understand the more technical evidences and arguments to follow.

So, the first paragraph of Chapter 1 sets the scene...

Pots And Kettles

Lord Carey, Former Archbishop of Canterbury

An article in today's Guardian Lord Carey is a bigger problem for British Christians than any secularist, by M.J. Robbins, prompted me to read the report on Lord Carey's whinge about Christian 'persecution' in Britain in yesterday's Daily Telegraph (a right-wing newspaper which used to be regarded as little more that the house journal of the Conservative Party).

Lord Carey, former Archbishop of Canterbury and senior cleric of the Anglican 'Communion', sits by right in the unelected senior house of the bicameral British Parliament, as do several other bishops of the Anglican Church, of which the British Head Of State is also titular head. [Correction: Carey now sits in the HOL as an unelected Life Peer, not as a 'Lord Spiritual'. A life peerage is normally given to a former bishop on retirement.]

The British Head of State must, by law, be a baptised Anglican Christian and may not marry a Roman Catholic. English and Welsh marriage laws are based on Christianity and marriage in a Christian Church is recognised as a legal marriage, unlike marriage by the traditions and rites of many other religions. Our state-run schools are legally obliged to have a period of collective worship of "Wholly or mainly of a broadly Christian nature". The 'coronation' of our head of state takes place in an Anglican Cathedral and is a Christian ceremony in which the Archbishop of Canterbury ceremonially 'anoints' the monarch with sacred oil and the 'laying on of hands'. The monarch is required to take a Christian oath.

The UK parliament starts each daily session with Christian prayers and the law was recently changed to empower local authorities in England and Wales to include prayers in the order of business. This change was made by an Anglican Christian government minister without reference to the elected parliament when a court found that a local authority had exceeded its powers when it included prayers on the council meeting agenda. Non-believers who refuse to attend these prayers can now be recorded as 'late' for the meeting and these periods of 'lateness' can be published without explaining that the only agenda item missed was the prayers.

Apparently, in Lord Carey's view, "Christians are being 'persecuted' by courts and 'driven underground' in the same way that homosexuals once were" and, Lord Carey says, "worshippers are being 'vilified' by the state, treated as 'bigots' and sacked simply for expressing their beliefs."

What he neglects to say is that 'expressing their beliefs' means vilifying homosexuals and/or denying them the right to goods and services or otherwise persecuting them. It means making it difficult or uncomfortable to work alongside them as they express their bigotry or seek to deny non-Christians the same entitlement to fair treatment in provision of public services as Christians. He also neglects to say that when homosexuality was an offence and homosexuals were persecuted and driven underground, this was with the enthusiastic endorsement of the established church and that it was Carey's predecessors who led the vigorous opposition to it being decriminalised.

Carey complains that "in 'case after case' British courts have failed to protect Christian values." By this he means that British courts have upheld the principle that even Christians have to obey the law. In a give-away statement he says, "Courts in Britain have consistently applied equality law to discriminate against Christians". This is true of course. Equality means everyone is equal; that Christians are not entitled to special privilege and dispensation from the need to treat everyone equally even when they aren't Christians and even when they don't accept Christian dogma or concede to Christians the right to dictate their behaviour and legislate against them.

It might have escaped Carey's notice but British courts also discriminate against other criminals and deny the right of discontented youths to riot and loot shops; of dangerous drivers to drive dangerously; of sadists to hurt people for fun and of bank robbers to rob banks with impunity. As a civilised country, Britain has a system of laws and legal enforcement to constrain and deter antisocial behaviour and to apply appropriate sanctions to people who transgress them. Our legal system is based on the idea of equality before the law.

What Carey is complaining about is that even Christians who get paid to conduct civil marriages should be required to provide them for everyone; that Christians who get paid to arrange adoptions should provide the service equally to everyone; that Christians who run boarding houses and hotels should not discriminate against those who disagree with them.

Carey goes on to say "It affects the moral and ethical compass of the United Kingdom. Christians are excluded from many sectors of employment simply because of their beliefs; beliefs which are not contrary to the public good."

And of course what Carey is claiming here is the right for Christians to determine 'the public good'. Not our elected parliament; not our government which is accountable to our parliament; not the people themselves through their elected representatives and not the courts of law. Carey wants this power reserved for Christians and to deny them the right to dictate 'the public good' to us is discriminating against their right to tell us what to do and to decide what is good for us!

I hope he's right about the moral compass. A 'moral compass' which points back to the brutal, misogynistic Bronze Age needs 'affecting'. It needs re-focussing and, if it can't be, it's needs binning altogether. As increasingly secular Europe rejects the primitive bigotry of Christianity so we are changing our laws in favour of more civilised humanist ones. Christians are not entitled to dispensation from obeying the law. We rightly no longer stone people to death for blasphemy or burn them for heresy. We no longer kill people for having extra-marital sex or wearing mixed-fibre clothing; we no longer require attendance at church on Sunday or have compulsory tithes and we no longer expect to be ruled and governed by Christian clerics.

We have civilised and democratised our society despite the opposition of Christian Churches and we will continue so to do. The church needs to recognise that it's days are done; that it can no longer demand privilege and be allowed to operate outside the law.

Christians are more than welcome to share our secular society with us provided they comply with our civilised standards of behaviour. They are going to have to get used to the idea that they are no longer in charge and they are not even a majority; that membership of their dwindling little mutual support society is no longer a short-cut to the power and privilege they would like to reserve for themselves.

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Take Away The God You First Thought Of.

Hey! I can almost see a wood through these trees!

Here's a neat little trick. It's just like the one religious apologists often play on their audience:

Think of a number, any number. Don't tell me.... (Keep it small to make it easy for yourself in a moment)

Double it.

Now add 10 to the answer.

Now halve the result.

And take away the number you first thought of.

Now, you're probably wondering how I know the result was 5. (If it's not, go back and check your math because you've made a mistake.)

You see the trick here is to be in control of your thoughts. I told you what to think and what to do, so I controlled your conclusion. In fact I started with the answer and worked back from there.

When religious apologists and theologians try to construct a seemingly logical argument for their particular god - any god, it works for them all - they start off with the conclusion that their god exists and work backwards from there.

They then construct an argument about, say, the origin of the universe, or life on earth, or human morals, or the laws of physics - almost anything will do but if it's something really hard which only people who've bothered to learn about will understand, so much the better because that makes it easier to bamboozle you - and include their god in the explanation.

Then they tell you this is the only way to explain whatever it is, and, because their explanation has their god in it, it must prove their god exists. It's called circular reasoning - a logical fallacy - but apologists normally use these tricks.

But, as dear old William of Occam explained, unless a step adds anything essential to an argument it should be pared away with his trusty razor, because the chances are that the least complicated argument is the one most likely to be true. So, fitting a god somewhere in an explanation simply because you want it to be there adds nothing to the explanation and just complicates it unnecessarily. In fact, it adds an almost infinitely complicated step and turns what may well have been a perfectly satisfactory, uncomplicated one into an infinitely complex one.

Of course, religious apologists and theologians dance around the fact that any explanation with a god in it needs to explain the god - what it does, how it did it, where it came from and, most importantly, why the explanation won't work without it.

There's the explanation. It has my god in it. QED. My god exists (and if you can't understand my very clever argument, you're too stupid to - isn't that right very clever audience? [Applause]). Copies of my books are available in the foyer.

Nice work if you can get it.

Of course, their explanation is no different in principle from drawing a picture of a god on a piece of paper and then telling you the picture proves the god exists. But you'd never fall for that one would you... unless the 'picture' is drawn in words in a book.

If only they would take away the god they first thought of they, and you, would see that the answer is zero. They haven't proved a god exists; they've only proved they can fit a god into their explanation... and fool people with it.

By the way, if you're still wondering how I knew what you were thinking, the answer is always half the number you told them to add halfway through the trick. What they start with is irrelevant. I didn't know what you were thinking. I made you think what I was thinking. I could just have told you to divide 10 by 2 but you'd have seen through that trick. See if you can spot these tricks the next time you see a religious apologist fleecing his victims earning his living by helping believers cope with the cognitive dissonance reality keeps causing.

Do you want to buy a bridge? I have a photograph of it to prove it's mine.

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Religion: An Abdication Of Moral Responsibility.

Artist's impression - Australopithecus africanus with child

Jose Garcia and Joannes-Boyau

Artist's impression Australopithecus africanus

Zdenek Burian/Getty Images

Why are the religious right so keen to persuade us that morality comes from gods?

I've already written in Xeno's Religious Paradox about how this notion is simply untenable and leads to conclusions not supported by reality. The plain fact of the matter is that human morality is more of an argument against gods than it is for them.

Let's go back to the plains of East Africa to the early childhood of mankind; to a time when our ancestors had moved out of the forests (or maybe due to climate change, the forests had moved away from our ancestors).

Suspended By Twitter

A holding blog to act as a central point for Atheists whose accounts have been suspended by Twitter.

Keep in touch. Be informed.

Use the comment section for messages.

Come And Watch David Barton Lying For Jesus

When you know you need to lie for your faith, you know your faith is a lie.

Here's an example of someone using people's ignorance both of the Bible and of the American Constitution in order to lay claim to the Constitution for the Christian right and so subvert the very Constitution he claims to be Christian.

David Barton makes two very precise and specific claims which we can check.

• "Article 3 Section 1 (The Treason Clause) - a direct quote out of the Bible" (but he gives no Bible reference).
• "Article 2 - the President has to be a native born - that is Deuteronomy 17:15 verbatim".

Let's check:

Why Should I Not Be An Atheist?

Okay, here's your big chance. Tell me why I should not be an Atheist.

You see, I'm an Atheist because I have no reason not to be. Atheism is simply the default state in the absence of any reason to believe in a god. From the time at the age of nine, when I realised there was no more reason to believe in the locally popular god than there was to believe in any other god, I realised I had no reason to believe in the locally popular god either. Being an Atheist wasn't a conscious decision; being an Atheist is simply the consequence of not having any reason not to be one.

Now, you can change all that. All you have to do is to tell me what it is that convinces you that there is a god and what convinces you that it is your particular god. This has to be something I can verify for myself so don't just expect me to take your word for it. I never took the word of my parent's, my grandfather, my uncles and aunts, the local vicar, the headmaster of my school, my close Muslim friend, my Christian fundamentalist work colleague or of my devoutly Catholic assistant when I was a departmental manager, so I won't take your word for it either.

Just a few things to remember, though:

Memories Of The Alhambra

The second in a series looking at some of my favourite music and showing how they represent a hybridization of different cultures resulting in a thing of great beauty.

Here I look at a wonderful piece of classical Spanish music written in 1896 for the guitar by Francisco Tárrega called Recuerdos de la Alhambra (Memories of the Alhambra). This, more than any other piece of music, is the one I want played at the celebration of my life after it has ended and my body have been suitably recycled.

This music was inspired by the Moorish Alhambra Palace in Grenada, Spain. If you have never been there, go. It is one of the world's most beautiful and tranquil places, spoiled only slightly by a lumpen and ugly Christian building plonked triumphantly in the middle of the gardens by the conquering Catholic King Carlos V as a act of pure vandalism.