Back when I was a creationist (I still shudder admitting that) I was a big fan of a man who called himself ‘Dr. Dino.’ Dr. Dino had a website with free videos, where he explained how evolution was false, how the geological column resulted from sediment settling out during Noah’s flood, and how the freemasons were a satanic cult that laid out the streets of Washington DC in the form of a pentagram. I thought the guy was a genius.

Turns out, Dr. Dino, whose real name is Kent Hovind, wasn’t a doctor at all. He got his degree from a Cracker Jack box known as Patriot University, and he was pretty much full of shit. The so called “Hovind Theory” of creation, which held that dinosaurs were just plain old lizards whose growth was unhampered by UV rays due to an imagined layer of ice that used to float around in the upper atmosphere, could be dismantled by a three minute visit to Talk Origins.

These days, Kent is doing time for tax evasion, but his son Eric has taken up the sword with his new website CreationMinute.com. It’s essentially a rehash of the same old tripe his dad was peddling, but now with fancier graphics + handsomer front man! It doesn’t hurt that Eric lacks his father’s demeanor of “at any moment I’m going to bolt screaming across the room to molest the nearest child.”

Anyway, go check out his idiotic website, and watch him talk about the Big Bang, throwing around the words “something” and “nothing” like he knows what they mean. Oh, and he recently posted a new video about the Grand Canyon. I love it when creatonists talk about the Grand Canyon. It’s always something to the effect of “hmm…isn’t the Grand Canyon strange? It seems to me that it’s evidence against the entire theory of geology and that the God of the Jews is real.”

If you do go, follow the link from Pharyngula, because PZ Myers is trying to win an iPod touch.

The first thing we notice about the world around us is that it’s self sustaining. Every observable effect has an observable cause: babies are born because eggs are fertilized; rain comes from clouds, which form from evaporated water; the sun rises and sets because the earth is spinning. These processes are no longer miracles because at no point do we need to assume an interventionist deity to explain them.

Not only does the world exist independently, but we don’t even expect god to intervene when we want him to. When I drop my toast, I don’t expect a little chariot of cherubim to intercept it before it hits the ground. I shouldn’t expect to wake up with straighter teeth if go to church enough. Alleged instances of god intervening on someone’s behalf can always just as easily be attributed to fortuitous chance. For example, he only cures diseases that might have gotten better anyway — he never heals amputees. If there is a god, he has apparently made the universe in such a way that it can exist independently, and without his continued tinkering.

This is why intelligent design is so unappealing to me. It admits that that natural systems are pretty much self contained, but at the same time, invokes a creator to explain certain special cases, like the bacterial flagellum, the bombardier beetle, or the blood clotting cascade. It’s inconsistent. I mean, if an omniscient, omnipontent god went to all this trouble to create a world that functioned without him, he could have accomplished it, right?

Presumably he could have, but creationists and design proponents seem to think we would be able to catch this guy with his finger in the pudding if we find examples of ‘irreducible complexity.’ These are places where conventional evolutionary explanations are purported to break down. One of their favorite examples is the bombardier beetle, an animal with a very strange defense mechanism. The beetle ejects two chemicals from its body to create a boiling hot spray that drives away predators. Design proponents say that since neither of the chemical components is of any use to the beetle without the other — the system could not be simplified and still be functional, hence irreducible complexity — this constitutes evidence for an all-in-one-go biological creation. Come on!

We have natural explanations for the hand, the eye, goosebumps, canine teeth, the spinal cord, mammary glands, feathers, flippers, egg laying, and camouflage, why wouldn’t evolution or physics explain a chemical reaction that happens on the back of a beetle?* If that were the case, we’d have to assume god stopped short of creating a pristine universe free of all supernatural influences, and just bitched out in a few places. This doesn’t really say much for god’s alleged omnipotence.

Imagine god, in the process of creation, working himself into a corner. “Shucks, I did all that work laying out the evidence for evolution — working in all of those details about common descent, features shared in lineages, the fossil record – but now I have to find a way for this bacterium to locomote. Oh well, they’ll never be able to see anything this small, so they won’t mind if I cheat a bit.” This is totally unsatisfying from both a scientific, and theological standpoint.

It makes no sense why god would make a clockwork this intricate, carefully avoiding leaving evidence of his agency, and then in handful of places, slip up or get lazy. However, a creationist/design proponent may come back with the old ‘god works in mysterious ways, that we may not understand.’ If they want to play it that way, then they should admit that they aren’t actually in the business of explaining things.

Personally, I think life is wondrous mainly because of things like the bacterial flagellum and the blood clotting cascade, which are so remarkably unlikely they must give you pause. That these seemingly irreducibly complex things have an explanation within the bounds of physics and evolution should be something to marvel at.

*Hint: It does.

I wish I could roll this out whenever I come across some creationist hater.

This is the kind of nonsense that really gets my goat:

But in reality, the scientific community is extremely bias [sic] on issues that bring to question the validity of evolution, which so much of their work is based off of.

To be perfectly honest, I am very biased: I would jump for joy if there were the slightest bit of evidence for creationism, because it is still on some level a deeply gratifying (albeit scientifically messy and uninteresting) prospect that the universe was designed by a creator fairy, and that I might get to meet him/her when I die.

The problem is, there really is no evidence. I was actually forced out of belief for exactly this reason. It was a hard realization to come to, but let me make it clear: I believe there is no creator because I have to; because I hold reason as a virtue, and in the interest of consistency, I have to apply it to every facet of my awareness.

So yes, I am naturally biased: biased in the favor of irrationality and wish-thinking. But the difference between a religious person and me is that they let their bias get the best of them.

h/t Pharyngula