So I’ve been blocked by the Answers in Genesis Facebook page. They’ve deleted my comments and those of the people who had responded to my comments (their fans), without warning or explanation. Not that I don’t know why they did it; censorship is the go-to tool of those who don’t have an argument, so they use what power they have to try and make the inconvenient questions—or answers—go away.
In this case they had posted a link to an article on their website with the tagline:
Atheists believe that religion should be kept out of public places. But what if atheistic humanism is a religion, too?
Now I generally don’t get involved in theist vs. atheist debates online and I had no intent in doing so in my response to this tagline. All I did was state that I thought most atheists did not believe “that religion should be kept out of public places”, just out of governmental institutions like public schools and courtrooms etc.
There was a little back and forth with some of the faithful, however I participated in no name calling or insult slinging. My harshest comment was probably when I suggested—after essentially being told that if I didn’t like their interpretation of church/state separation that I should move to a communist country, which is funny given that I am an anticommunist—that if they didn’t like living in a pluralistic liberal (small L) constitutional democratic republic where the rights of everyone were protected, they were free to leave.
There was that and I believe I referred to one of my interlocutors caricature of evolution as “ludicrous” or something similar. That was about it, that is all it took for the ban hammer to come down.
Mom found some caterpillars munching on flowers in her back yard today. At first I thought they might be larvae of the mothManduca quinquemaculata,AKA the “five-spotted hawkmoth” the AKA the “Tomato Hornworm”:
However my mother said she had looked those up and that these caterpillars were different. After looking them up myself I agree they do look a little different, but not much. I’ll be tagging my friend Don—alepidopterist—to see what he thinks they might be (perhaps a closely related species?).
There were a number of individuals ranging in size and coloration. There were these two individuals that were about 1.5 to 2 inches long (fingers for scale):
Here is a close up of one of the smaller larva. Note the shed skin on the stem below and to the rear of the caterpillar.
Then there were these two larger larvae (2.5 inches or so). Note the slight difference in coloration between the two:
Then there was the beefiest cater-critter of them all. About 3 inches in length and rather radically different in coloration. Different species or do they change coloration as they molt? Again I’ll be deferring to my freind Don on this one.
My mother is going to attempt to rear them to adulthood, so perhaps I will have an update with some pictures of the adults in future.
Update: My friend Don got back to me and said the following (with a caution that these are not the group of moths in which he specializes:
“Looks like a white-lined sphinx moth larva. Hyles lineata. They feed on a variety of plants, and with this year’s rain should be all over. I’ve seen the larvae by the thousands at places like Anza Borrego State Park. The adults come to blacklights in most places around here.”
Looking at pictures of H. lineata this appears to my non-person eyes to be correct;
Several weeks back I get an email from Phil Calderone, a member of one of the local atheist/agnostic/freethought groups (I.E.A.A.), asking if I would like to act as a fill in on a (then) upcoming “believers vs. non-believers” panel discussion on the subject of micro vs. macroevolution. Apparently, one of the persons originally invited was not going to be able to participate and he needed a fill in and was pointed towards me byDr. Brad Hughes, who many years ago I had helped (along with others) prepare for a debate with “Dr.”Kent Hovind.
After some trepidation—due to having never done any public speaking before—I agreed to participate as long as it was understood that I was unlettered and neither a paleontologist or biologist but rather a mere amateur naturalist who has had a bit of experience in the creation/evolution debate.
The format of the discussion was meant to be a relatively informal back and forth between four people with two on each side. One the “believers” side there was a gentleman named Kelly Clemensen, of something called theAreopagus Project, andDr. Paul GiemofLoma Linda University (see also Giem’s web pagehere). On the non-believers side was myself and Phil Calderone who was to moderate but had to fill in the second non-believers chair for another person who couldn’t make it.
I will not go into any more description of the event as it was recorded on video and you can watch the proceedings for yourself below. However, truth and honesty before all I will be addressing at least two places where I know I screwed up in the discussion below the video.
Please feel free to point out any other mistakes I made, or address the many points made by the creationists that went unaddressed by either Phil or me during the discussion. I know there are whole bunches of things that our opponents said that was missed or deserved more in depth dissection.
Now that you have, hopefully, watched the video there are two places that I realized I messed up pretty much right after the debate. One was minor memory failure, misattribution about punctuated equilibrium. The other was a more significant—at least in my opinion—point were I brought up a group of fossil organisms that was really something of a red-herring—though I committed the fallacy out of partial ignorance—and should have known better from other statements I myself had made at other points in the same discussion!
Despite a flood of challenges since the publication of The Origin of Species in 1859 by Charles Darwin and more than 150 years of unprecedented scientific efforts in the history of mankind to prove otherwise, the evidence examined in nature tooled with unprecedented technology continues to be compatible with the Genesis record written by Moses…
…Evolution, once a theory in crisis, is now in crisis without even a cohesive unifying theory.
Biological evolution exists only as a philosophy, not a science.
For a long list of creationists predicting the death of evolution see this following:
Guliuzza: Shouldn’t students be skeptical when they’re told that evolutionists can simply look at folds in embryos and see gill slits? The truth is that these are only folds of tissue in the pharynx region of vertebrates during the pharyngula stage of development. For mammals, birds, and reptiles, they never develop into a structure that is in any way like fish gills.
I wrote that this statement was not true as would be known to anyone who had cracked an embryology textbook and asked if Dr. Guliuzza (the author of the article) was therefore incompetent in this area or if he was being deliberately misleading. Further I provided a link to my blog post on the subject of “gill slits” so that anyone interested could look at the evidence for themselves.
I also corrected one of their other commenters on what Thomas Huxley and Charles Lyell’s professions and religious perspectives were. I also noted to the commenter that all science, not just evolutionary biology, leaves God and other supernatural agents out of its explanations.
I used no harsh language, I did not call anyone any names and I engaged in no mockery (unless you count my pointed question about Guliuzza competency/honesty) and yet the end result was that my link and all my comments have been deleted and I am apparently now blocked from commenting on ICR’s FB page.
I’ll leave the reader to decide what this says about ICR and the robustness of their scholarship.
Playing Chess with Pigeons 