Ray Comfort plagiarised his creationist introduction to ‘On the Origin of species’ from ‘A Brief History of Charles Darwin’ by Dr. Stan Guffey

Kirk Cameron, Ken Ham & Ray Comfort

Ray Comfort and his side-kick Kirk Cameron recently published a heavily edited version of Charles Darwin’s ‘On the origin of species’ which contained an introduction that accused Darwin of fathering Naziism.

AIGBusted has done some digging into Comfort and Cameron’s creationist screed and discovered some considerable evidence of plagiarism.

Read more: aigbusted.blogspot.com

If the Universe is only 14 billion years old, how can we see objects that are now 47 billion light years away?

Taken from http://www.astro.ucla.edu/~wright/cosmology_faq.html

When talking about the distance of a moving object, we mean the spatial separation NOW, with the positions of both objects specified at the current time. In an expanding Universe this distance NOW is larger than the speed of light times the light travel time due to the increase of separations between objects as the Universe expands. This is not due to any change in the units of space and time, but just caused by things being farther apart now than they used to be.

What is the distance NOW to the most distant thing we can see? Let’s take the age of the Universe to be 14 billion years. In that time light travels 14 billion light years, and some people stop here. But the distance has grown since the light traveled. The average time when the light was traveling was 7 billion years ago. For the critical density case, the scale factor for the Universe goes like the 2/3 power of the time since the Big Bang, so the Universe has grown by a factor of 22/3 = 1.59 since the midpoint of the light’s trip. But the size of the Universe changes continuously, so we should divide the light’s trip into short intervals. First take two intervals: 7 billion years at an average time 10.5 billion years after the Big Bang, which gives 7 billion light years that have grown by a factor of 1/(0.75)2/3 = 1.21, plus another 7 billion light years at an average time 3.5 billion years after the Big Bang, which has grown by a factor of 42/3 = 2.52. Thus with 1 interval we got 1.59*14 = 22.3 billion light years, while with two intervals we get 7*(1.21+2.52) = 26.1 billion light years. With 8192 intervals we get 41 billion light years. In the limit of very many time intervals we get 42 billion light years. With calculus this whole paragraph reduces to this.

Another way of seeing this is to consider a photon and a galaxy 42 billion light years away from us now, 14 billion years after the Big Bang. The distance of this photon satisfies D = 3ct. If we wait for 0.1 billion years, the Universe will grow by a factor of (14.1/14)2/3 = 1.0048, so the galaxy will be 1.0048*42 = 42.2 billion light years away. But the light will have traveled 0.1 billion light years further than the galaxy because it moves at the speed of light relative to the matter in its vicinity and will thus be at D = 42.3 billion light years, so D = 3ct is still satisfied.

If the Universe does not have the critical density then the distance is different, and for the low densities that are more likely the distance NOW to the most distant object we can see is bigger than 3 times the speed of light times the age of the Universe. The current best fit model which has an accelerating expansion gives a maximum distance we can see of 47 billion light years.

This man has spent the last 20 years telling tax-free lies for Jesus

AronRa hits the nail on the head yet again

I’ve written before about Ida, the 47 million year old fossil, which the news media were fascinated with calling, “The Missing Link”, even though that term is a Victorian age misnomer, coined by creationists who didn’t understand what Darwinian Natural Selection is all about. Nothing has changed.

Yet again AronRa, the YouTube user who consistently delivers clip after clip of well researched, well explained science, has managed to sum it all up in this short clip, which tells us more about the true importance of the discovery in 5 minutes, than the entire BBC “special”, which aired the week of Ida’s announcement to the world did, in well over 30 minutes–which still didn’t actually telling us anything worth knowing at all.

http://howgoodisthat.wordpress.com/2009/05/20/ida-is-not-the-missing-link/

http://howgoodisthat.wordpress.com/2009/05/27/bbc-the-link-documentary-on-fossil-ida/

The connection between Christianity and global-warming deniers

[NOTE: I originally sent this to Jim as an email, because I felt like it needed an outlet but, since I blog for business reasons, couldn't really give it a home on my blogs. I was interested to see what How good is that? readers would have to say on the subject.

Jim, however, invited me to just post it as a guest blog. So that's what I've done, with some minimal editing.

I'm looking forward to comments!]

Someone I met online – mostly because I couldn’t stop myself from commenting on dumb things he said, like “Religion is good because it’s the reason I don’t cheat on my wife with the cute 18-year-old I saw on the street today…” (I find these kinds of pro-religion arguments really, really distasteful) posted a link today.

Basically this is an article which supposedly analyzes a NASA study which supposedly proves that global warming is NOT caused by man, and is in fact a natural phenomenon.

He was really excited about this (he posted with a comment like “Finally, some reason! This proves that global warming doesn’t exist!”).
But then I noticed:

- Everyone who commented positively on his post (on Facebook) is a Christian

- Everyone who was like “Are you kidding? This study is a joke”(on Facebook) is an atheist

- There was a huge debate within the comments of the article itself which was actually much more informative than the article (I recommend reading the comments)

- The debate in the comments following the article sounded REMARKABLY like debates between atheists and Christians! The same “I read a study that proves…” and “So-and-so was totally discredited…” and ultimately the global warming deniers sound JUST LIKE Christians (“Oh, you liberals are always believing in science, when we all know that science is usually wrong…”)

So I have come to the conclusion that there is a direct correlation between Christianity and global warming denial – and I wonder why that is.

The problem is that I don’t know enough about global warming – and the nuances of who’s making money off of it and who’s not (the guy on Facebook asserted that Al Gore is just a big con artist because he’s making all kinds of money off emission taxes and whatnot, for example) – or the science behind it to discuss it intelligently. Intuitively, global warming makes sense to me, and the reading I have done (mostly about animal or reptile populations being affected) seem to make a compelling case, but having worked in marketing for 15+ years I’m more aware than most people that you can spin ‘data’ any bloody way you want.

So I asked the guy for some links to articles about it.  He, of course, sent me links to (a) Christian, US media and (b) blogs by Christian Americans.

I said they were too biased; I’d like a link to a non-US publication with at least some pretense to objectivity, such as The Economist. He came back with a big rant about how The Economist was “totally biased”; I sighed, said I’d only suggested it (and that I’m perfectly well aware that all media is biased, consciously or sub-consciously, but mainstream publications such as The Economist at least try to hold themselves to a higher journalistic standard than Bob the Blogger) and repeated my comment that I’d be happy with any link to any mainstream publication from any country, so long as it was non-American and not just some random blog.

You can guess the outcome:  No links to any articles.  Because no one outside the Bible Belt is asserting that Al Gore is a crook who’s lying about global warming in order to line his own pockets

FOLLOW-UP: After I wrote this little email rant, I went back to Facebook and pointed out to my correspondent that, ultimately, he seemed to be trying to make a ‘rational’ case for something that in fact was a ‘belief’.

Surprisingly, he admitted it was true: that based on the information he’d assimilated, it was his ‘opinion’ that global warming wasn’t real.

Interestingly, this puts us RIGHT BACK to where we were in my comment about ‘faith’: Why do some people go out of their way to have ‘faith’ in ideas when EVERY BIT OF EVIDENCE is pointing in the other direction?

I’ve since given this a lot of thought, and I still don’t have a good answer for why Christian Republicans tend to be the ones denying global warming (they call it AGW – Anti-Global-Warming).  Is it that Christian Republicans tend to be the ones who own all the oil (all the anti-evolution nutjobs on Twitter seem to be from Texas)?  Is it that Christians – the ones who believe the Bible is literal truth – think that the entire globe, like animals, is here to be exploited as much as possible, since ‘God gave us dominion’ over it all?   Is it that they want an excuse to hate Democrats, and Al Gore gives them a convenient excuse?  Or is it simply that Christians have gotten in the habit of decrying all ’science’ that ‘liberals’ seem to believe in, and this is just a knee-jerk reaction?

I don’t know.  Maybe you do.

BBC ‘The Link’ Documentary on Fossil Ida

Having seen ‘The Link’ documentary on the BBC last night, about the fossil Ida, I’m surprised there aren’t a lot more creationists out there than there already are. If that is the best film the best brains can make on what is, whichever way you slice it, a milestone in palaeontology, archaeology, anthropology and a human understanding of our ancestral history, we’re doomed.

It was dumbed down and scant on the facts. Plenty of artistic interpretations and fancy computer modelling, but little by way of actual explanations. Based upon the available evidence, though I’m sure it was, it wasn’t explained in the film how we know what we know. It was exactly the kind of thin on the detail story telling which fuels the imagination of those who are already predisposed to fairy-tales to submit that there are two equally valid sides to the creation story, when we know that there is only one which carries any real weight of evidence.

There’s no wonder that there is such a poor understanding of scientific methodological processes among the general public, when it would appear the world’s largest broadcaster can’t make a film about perhaps the most important artefact to be discovered in a generation, which even attempts to explain this in the context of basic taxonomy, for example; or why we already knew many years before Ida that natural selection is a water tight description of how humans evolved.

Read more here