It has been a dodgy couple of days for news about my part of England.
Yesterday I watched with pride as my hometown football team – Wigan Athletic – scored three goals in the first half against Blackburn. This then turned to horror as they conceded three, with my pride eventually recovering after they pulled a couple back for a scrappy 5-3 victory (first in thirteen games).
Then (via PZ) I find out that the same type of creationist nonsense that we’re forced to waste time and effort fighting in the U.S. is rearing its empty head in England, and in Lancashire no less! As the Observer reports
The AH Trust, a charity set up last year by a group of businessmen alarmed by the direction in which they see society heading, has identified a number of potential sites in the north west of England to build the £3.5m Christian theme park.
The trust claims it already has a number of rich backers who are keen to invest in the project, which will boast two interactive cinemas, a cafeteria, six shops and a television recording studio, allowing it to produce its own Christian-themed films and documentaries.
Oh the horror! What is going on in my home country? And this isn’t just a place to churn out rip-offs of The Passion of the Christ; they have other issues
‘The church in this country is in crisis and many church leaders living in Australia, America and Canada have openly proclaimed that God has left the church in England,’ the trust states on its website.
‘Evolution has falsely become the foundation of our society and we need the television studio to advocate Genesis across this land in order to remove this falsehood, which presently is destroying the church foundation.’
It just brings tears to my eyes. But I’ll end on a note of pride. Even better than Wigan breaking their losing streak at football is to read this about your hometown
The theme park’s anti-evolution bias and its emphasis on Genesis has raised eyebrows among planning officials, according to Jones, who originally wanted to build the park at the site of an old B&Q store but was refused permission by the council.
‘Wigan council slammed the door in our faces. You mention the C [Christian] word, and people don’t want to know,’
It just warms your heart doesn’t it?
December 16th, 2007 at 9:48 am
In the last sentence, I would think that “the C word” is Creation, not Christian. I wonder if the reporter checked on that or just assumed.
December 16th, 2007 at 11:45 am
Why is it that these creationist groups have so much trouble with the unvarnished truth? If you take a look at their Testimonials page, there appears to be an impressive list of British companies–Boots, B&Q, BAA, Thomas Cook, BAE, etc.
Wow, not a bad list from a company that appears to have no money. But here’s one of those “testimonials”:
Calling that a testimonial is a joke. There is no doubt that this is a quote from a rejection letter. They were turned down flat. Most of the other so-called testimonials are almost as bad. They are playing fast and loose with the truth and obviously, they have been taking lessons from their American counterparts.
If you take a look at their annual report (from http://www.ahtrust.net/ ) then you will see that this company is a joke. They have no funding, no backing, no coherent plan, and they’re are woefully out of touch with the sentiments of the British public on religion and moral issues. They haven’t even been able to replace the three trustees who resigned from their board over a year ago.
From the Observer:
In other words, they have no backers.
December 16th, 2007 at 11:54 am
The “C word” usually stands for something else. Were they trying to be ironic?
December 16th, 2007 at 12:00 pm
Ugh – their “Make a Donation” page isn’t even secure. If you enter your credit card details, it would be sent in the clear over the Internet. What a joke.
December 16th, 2007 at 12:14 pm
I like this endorsement:
For a moment I thought one of the trustees, Peter Jones, was the guy from BBC’s Drangon’s Den. Luckily, that’s not the case. Otherwise the would have some money.
December 16th, 2007 at 3:04 pm
These people refuse to go away. They lose in court, in the sphere of public opinion but they still linger almost one hundred years later =/
What can you do. People will believe what they want to believe. That applies across the gamut to creationists, wacky conspiracy theorists, some of the hardcore eco or anti abortion nuts, Jihadists etc
December 16th, 2007 at 4:19 pm
Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum.
December 16th, 2007 at 5:45 pm
Indeed.
December 16th, 2007 at 6:52 pm
I’ll forgive Wigan for beating Blackburn Rovers when they slam the door in the face of these people.
December 17th, 2007 at 11:42 am
It’s the Principle of Darwinian Irony:
Religious folk have more children than secular folk.
So they will gradually outnumber you and overwhelm you, thus proving their own superiority by the only measure that Darwinians respect, namely differential reproductive success.
Life just ain’t fair sometimes.
December 17th, 2007 at 4:01 pm
Aren’t we fighting a losing battle ? you will never win over the hearts of the religious. They are convinced they are right and there is nothing we can do to change their minds, in most cases anyway
December 17th, 2007 at 4:25 pm
Hey, I have a similar feelings of horror–our hometown football team just blew the state championship game (44 to 3) and those da@mn scientific types want to put a uranium separation plant in next door despite ten years of citizen opposition lead by our local churches. Well, you can never win over the hearts of those bomb-building physicists–they are convinced they are right and there is nothing we can do to change their minds, in most cases, anyway.*
*My apologies for the doubtful syntax of this last sentence, but I should also point out it didn’t originate with me.
December 17th, 2007 at 4:32 pm
Honorable Eldest Son of 12Quarts just informed me that Pb is the wrong element for one who is snarky about syntax, so any of the rest of you commenting on the topic will be merely duplicative, and not nearly as embarrassing.
December 17th, 2007 at 5:07 pm
What’s wrong with a nuclear separation plant? It’s not like they’re not careful about the radiation, you know.
December 17th, 2007 at 5:42 pm
The only reason any council would turn owt like this down, is because they are afraid of upsetting other religious groups. Religion has never really been about god; it’s about control, control of people and their minds and let face it who needs religion when you have the BBC. Religion is a tool just like string theory is; you can use it to do something, but it says absolutely nothing about the real world!
Maybe they should make a Pie theme park in Wigan at least that would make sense.
Personally I believe in creationism… self-creationism, all you have to do is reach the kitchen and cook yourself into existence and there is no laws of physics that says I can’t.
God is something that exists if I want him to exist and he belongs to me, because it is me! It’s my thoughts, my vision, my creation and absolutely nothing to do with religion! Religions take advantage of the natural instinct of human beings and it makes a complete mockery of the history of mankind!
Qubit
December 17th, 2007 at 5:47 pm
It’s curious that Creationists tend to be more prominent in the US and socialists barely get a look in (so it seems, broadly speaking, to me as a foreign observer), whereas in the UK it’s the other way round – hordes of guilt-ridden middle class voters who seem to think that enduring ever higher taxes is good for their souls, despite the futile failures of nearly all the government’s grand projects, whereas creationists are almost nowhere to be seen.
Or at least it’s been that way until now. Let’s hope to God creationists don’t gain ground here in the UK, and that Yanks go on being sensible enough to keep socialism at arm’s length, or we’ll both end up being lumbered by both!
December 17th, 2007 at 6:31 pm
andy.s, and anyone else who has had similar thoughts, I highly recommend the movie Idiocracy (IMDB link) which takes your point to its comedic limit. It’s a rather insightful bit of social commentary hiding behind a veneer of silly jokes.
Plus it has maybe the best sci-fi production design ever. Really. Not the general look – I mean specifically the billboards, the ad campaigns and company logos that are constantly visible in the background. Brilliant, hilarious and rather sad all at the same time.
December 18th, 2007 at 6:34 am
“Wigan council” What is this thing ? Something lkie Wiccan council ?
December 18th, 2007 at 7:49 am
Yes Serg – their constant chanting and incantations ensure the consistent quality of meat and potato pies.
December 18th, 2007 at 2:02 pm
Qubit #15
“Religions take advantage of the natural instinct of human beings and it makes a complete mockery of the history of mankind!”
How true.
Human consciousness and the process of perceiving, break the symmetry of space-time. For thousands of years, not until Einstein, human consciousness never unified space and time into a single reality. Instead, space and time formed a complex issue, in many ways analogous to a complex number in which space forms the real component and time the imaginary one.
In its primitive form, consciousness had only a spatial focus that was outwardly directed. Only those entities that were focused outwardly, focused beyond their own spatial extent would survive in a hostile environment. Time and self had no significance to these primitive entities. As these entities subdued their spatial environments, hostility decreased over time and as a result, their consciousness continued to evolve in a more hospitable environment. With the external threat mitigated, these entities acquired an appendage of self-consciousness. In this acquisition of self-consciousness, time emerged and gained more significance. As time passed, the self-conscious entities extended their spatial extent by absorbing other entities that had not yet acquired the same level of self-consciousness. The rise of self-consciousness is probably the source of all religious beliefs in human history. The emergence of a bipolar worldview, a paradigm that incorporates both an objective and subjective perspective is identifiable in many ancient religious and philosophical writings.
December 18th, 2007 at 8:53 pm
Perhaps you can start a thread about the composite image created showing the jet from a supermassive black hole hitting the “visible” edge of a companion galaxy.
I wondering if the deflection of the jet through this interaction confirms or disproves theories about a dark matter shell surrounding and extending far beyond the visible edge of every galaxy, which is intended to explain the high speed of stars at the edges of galaxies.
December 18th, 2007 at 9:37 pm
Somewhat off-topic, but worth noting: See this nicely balanced essay by Dennis Overbye, using Paul Davies’ recent op-ed as a point of departure.
December 19th, 2007 at 5:18 am
Yesterday, there was a news article that a new species of giant rat had been discovered in Indonesia. New species of animals are discovered on a regular basis. Based solely on what we observe, how do we know that these new species are not spontaneously appearing because of some unknown process we haven’t thought of yet?
We have yet to observe a gradual transition of one species begetting another, to support the theory of evolution. We often observe new species in places we have been before and have not previously observed these newly discovered species.
And so far, all of the observed evidence used to support evolution theory, is just evidence of adaptation through natural selection, which isn’t really evolution if it can’t be shown to actually cause a new species to begin while the original species continues on unchanged.
Also, the fossil record would tend to support the spontaneous appearance of new species, as the record lacks any gradual transition samples from one species to the next.
December 19th, 2007 at 8:03 am
Mike, adaptation through natural selection is precisely what people mean by evolution. I refer you to http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/ for a discussion of this.
December 19th, 2007 at 10:57 am
LOL – I watched the documentary on the PA fight over teaching intelligent design in classrooms alongside evolution.
The documentary did show interesting points about complex structures within organisms, taking on totally new functions with only slight changes to the structures. Of course, we don’t see what corresponding changes to the DNA were required, so we have no idea the likelyhood of all those DNA changes occurring at once to produce these more complex structures.
The supposed coup de grace, was the discovery that humans have a single chromosome that appears to be the merging of two chromosomes, which would explain how our suspected progenators, the apes, have 48 chromosomes, while we have only 47. What they didn’t explain, is if / how the first human with 47 chromosome, was supposed to reproduce with the concurrent apes, who have 48 chromosomes. Wouldn’t you have to have a mating pair of humans with 47 chromosomes, to produce viable offspring? Also, it was my understanding that it was necessary to have around 30 or 60 diverse breeding pairs to maintain an isolated population, so wouldn’t you have to have 30 to 60 humans with 47 chromosomes show up simultaneously?
December 19th, 2007 at 4:03 pm
I think saying that “certain types of people” are never going to change their mind no matter what you say sets a bad precedent, or at least the wrong attitude about the situation. Intelligent discussion always matters and if you care about your society and the rest of humanity you should always make a polite effort with everyone. How many of the people involved in that theme park group have children, do you think? How many of those children when they are fully adult with families of their own do you think will still be impressing creationism on their own children? Some of them? Probably, but certainly some, if not most, of them will not be, because they will grow up around peers who don’t, go to college around peers who don’t, and generally come to understand that their parents where a bit backwards in their thinking, and just move on with it. Progress.
I myself, I know that I cannot disprove an afterlife or god, and that is enough for me to have a small residue of faith in both of them.
There was an interview I saw a while ago with a conservative American politician, and he was saying that he would not accept God did not play a part in the creation of humans, and the person interviewing him sort of missed the point on the carefully worded lingo the politician was trying to use. He was in effect, at the time, saying that if science proved to him that the big bang was the beginning of life in the universe, that he would accept that God created the big bang, or some variant of that. That in my mind, coming from a conservative politician who typically plays to the religious right in America, is also progression.
Another point of view that I like to keep is that as a race, people like the organization for this theme park, do serve a purpose in progression. Perhaps there is an unseen pace to our development culturally that we do in fact need in order for the whole of humanity to keep it’s sanity and resist the bad habits associated with mob mentality, which is still our biggest flaw by far, one that every group of people, no matter what their beliefs, indulges in far to often.
Summary, everybody has faith, just in different things. I think that most people of science have faith that humanity will overcome it’s own flaws and we’ll make it to a Utopian society stretching across the stars one day, and that’s sort of in common with people who remain very religious and somewhat backward, whether we admit it or not.
December 20th, 2007 at 12:08 am
The late Carl Sagan once did a Cosmos episode about Japanese crabs. Some of the crabs had a shell that looked like a caricature of a Ninja warrior’s face. The Japanese fishermen had a legend about an ancient battle where the losers were run into the sea, where they became crabs.
Carl Sagan explained it as artificial selection. For hundreds of years, the fishermen had been throwing any crab that resembled a Ninja, back into the sea. Sagan proclaimed this as proof that evolution is true.
I don’t see proof of evolution. What I see is proof that you can make a crab look different through artificial selection. You could breed crabs until you have every mathematical possibility for a face on a crab shell, and all you will ever get are crabs. You will never get a new species of animal that is a different species from a crab.
Evolution is supposed to be small and gradual changes over time, but Darwin didn’t know about chromosomes or that different species have different numbers of chromosomes. So even if a 48 chromosome simian had a mutation that caused two pairs of chromosomes to fuse together into one pair, giving rise to a new species of humanoid with 46 pairs of chromosomes, this would have to occur all at once in one generation. This is not “small and gradual” but “sudden and abrupt.”
Organisms make slight changes from one generation to the next in order to adapt to changes in the environment, and Darwin observed this and concluded that all forms of life branched off from a common ancestor. Knowing what we know now about chromosomes, we surely must see that the changes from one species to another must be abrupt, not slow and gradual. We have never observed or found any evidence of a “slow and gradual” change from one species to another, but in a world that has been thoroughly explored over and over, we keep finding new, previously undiscovered species on a regular and periodic basis. In the fossil record, new species appear suddenly as well.
Those who stick with Darwin’s theory and atheism are just as bad as those who want to teach “magic god creationism” in a theme park. What’s wrong with teaching students that we just haven’t completely figured everything out yet?
December 20th, 2007 at 12:16 am
Teaching that we haven’t figured everything out yet is an integral part of science. I have no idea why you think atheism has anything to do with that. To suggest that this means teaching about ID is, however, crazy. There are many places you can read about evolution and learn enough to understand why evolution is accepted by all credible scientists.
December 21st, 2007 at 9:30 am
Evolution within a single universe is on thing, evolution across a multiverse is quite another. David Deutsch, in his 1997 book entitled “The Fabric of Reality” explores this latter case. Evolution and ID (if we mean Intelligent Design) are both high level explanations of emergent phenomena. They seek to explain how high-level simplicity can emerge from low-level complexity. David argues that combining a multiverse interpretation of quantum mechanics, with a theory of evolution, a theory of knowledge, and a theory of computation will offer a Theory of Everything (TOE). The evidence is still out. His idea, however, does make life significant to the cosmos and this might indicate he is on the right track. An atheistic view of nature appears contented with human consciousness having no benefit while a theistic view prefers to portray human consciousness as one of the defining attributes of nature. This is clear when a theist has God say “Let us make man in our image.” As I mentioned in another thread, the difference between atheism and theism might be an issue between objective and subjective aspects of human consciousness. The subjective aspect of human consciousness is ultimately the locus of our theistic nature. In all likelihood, atheism is correct in stipulating no objective reality to god but the theistic view will only vanish when the subjective aspect of human consciousness also vanishes. If the subjective aspect of consciousness is continuing to evolve and adapt to a multiverse scenario it will never go away and therefore neither will theism.
December 28th, 2007 at 2:26 am
Mark,
Just noticed that as of YOUR post, the CV left margins (or texts) are slowly translating towards each other, obscuring the first few words of each paragraph. Thought you’d wanna know.
Jimbo
December 28th, 2007 at 1:16 pm
Jimbo, that is a problem with certain versions of Internet Explorer that we’ve never been able to solve. It doesn’t appear to happen with other browsers.
December 26th, 2008 at 12:11 pm
At least, Mark, you can be proud that your home country chose a truly enlightened figure to give a televised address to the nation in response to the Queen’s Christmas message.
December 26th, 2008 at 1:30 pm
Not really the country that chose this.
December 26th, 2008 at 6:38 pm
Belizean, I thought you and Ahmadinejad are in agreement over the issue of Gay Marriage?