Below are Christian taunts to atheist Penn Jillette concerning a debate challenge. Penn Jillette has been contacted via Twitter, YouTube and email.

“He’s watching. trust me. Most Atheists are obsessed with the TRUTH, they just don’t [...]]]> Currently featured on the front page of Conservapaedia is the following short article:

Christian taunts to atheist Penn Jillette

Below are Christian taunts to atheist Penn Jillette concerning a debate challenge. Penn Jillette has been contacted via Twitter, YouTube and email.

“He’s watching. trust me. Most Atheists are obsessed with the TRUTH, they just don’t like it.”

“Come on Penn, you even WANT people to debate because our opinions on the existence of God are too important to keep private!”

Who could this bold, confident creationist challenger called “shockofgod” with over 18,000 YouTube subscribers be? Interest piqued, I clicked on over to watch his video challenge:

If you don’t want to waste your time viewing the video (and I wouldn’t blame you), his thesis is that the viewership of Brights website–where Penn Jillette is listed as being an “Enthusiastic Bright”–is in decline and it will take a miracle to turn it around. (In reality, after one good month last year, views of the the-brights.net has been flat, but that’s not the main purpose of this post.)

For some unknown reason, “shockofgod” selects Penn Jillette out of all the main supporters of the Brights website to challenge to a debate over evolution. He could have selected, you know, an actual evolutionist like Richard Dawkins to challenge, but whatever.

Looking through the comments, I saw that someone had pointed out the obvious–that there is no reason to assume that Penn Jillette even knows about the challenge. “Shockofgod” replies that he has sent Jillette an email and posted a comment on his YouTube channel, so that he must be aware of the challenge by now.

So I thought I would post my own comment on the video, pointing out that Jillette, as a public figure who undoubtedly gets hundreds of emails a day,  is highly unlikely to be personally monitoring his email or YouTube comments, so there is no reason to assume he knows of the challenge. I also pointed out that a decline in the viewing figures of a minor atheist website like “The Brights” (an effort that not all atheists agreed with in the first place, including myself), is hardly a good proxy for the fortunes of atheism in America. Certainly the current demographic trends would indicate that non-belief has a bright future here in America.

When I clicked the “Post” button, the message came back that the comment would be moderated. This is actually quite typical of creationist and religious web sites, who tend not to like being challenged, but I was willing to wait. An hour or so later, I got a couple of emails from YouTube saying that someone had posted a comment on my channel and on my one remaining video. It was “shockofgod”:

Why isn’t Penn Jillete debating me you guys scared? He knows about my challenge go ask him he is here on youtube. Why are atheists such cowards? Tell me why?

and

Proof atheism is madness Shockawenow . n e t

He spammed me! I clicked back to his video to find my comment, and surprise, surprise, it was nowhere to be seen. A further comment brought no response at all.

So this (anonymous) conservative Christian, who claims to be so boldly challenging a prominent atheist to a debate can’t even bring himself to allow a mildly critical comment on to his own YouTube video.

Par for the course, I guess. Just like Conservapaedia, who has trumpted information about his inconsequential challenge on at least three of its pages, he all bark and no bite.

Perhaps if you’ve never studied [...]]]> After a passable first attempt, and a merely “bleah” follow-up (a typical misrepresentation of what scientists claim about the Big Bang), Eric Hovind really hits rock bottom (pun intended) when it comes to his third “Creation Minute” video.  See if you can spot the howler:

Perhaps if you’ve never studied high school geography you might have missed it, but Hovind’s questioning of how the Colorado River could have flowed uphill for millions of years to carve out the Grand Canyon demonstrates a profound (and wanton) ignorance of proven geological processes.

One of the first things you learn in high school about our home planet is that the Earth’s crust is always on the move.  The theory of plate tectonics—the notion that the Earth’s crust is made up of a number of individual plates that drift around and bump up against each other—was one of the triumphs of the geological sciences of the early 20th century.  Today, in this age of satellite monitoring, it is trivially easy to show that many parts of the world—most notably the Himalayas, the Alps, and the Andes—are rising as the tectonic plates they rest upon are being thrust upwards by the neighboring plates which are pushing underneath, like placing a lever below a large rock to lift it up.

This is almost certainly what happened to the Colorado Plateau before the formation of the Grand Canyon.  There is ample geological evidence to show that the Colorado River (or a predecessor) carved out the canyon as the landmass around it rose due to pressure being exerted from neighboring tectonic plates slipping below it.  Studies of canyon’s route across the plateau show that the river’s flow and direction was directly influenced by nature of the upthrust of the land going on around it.

Of course, it has taken many hundreds of person years of scientific research, and many thousands of published papers to build a good picture of how the Grand Canyon was formed, and even now some questions over the details remain.  But then Hovind comes along that dismisses all of that with a wave of the hand and cries “Inconceivable!” as he fobs people off with an argument from incredulity. 

If pressed, no doubt he will spout the usual unsupported and unresearched creationist claims about rapid deposition and erosion during the Great Flood, but that is no more than using a toothpick to attack the Himalaya-sized mountain range of scientific evidence arranged against him.  It’s worth remember that analogy when you next heard a creationist calling for an equal hearing in the science classroom.  The disparity in supporting scientific evidence between the two sides simply cannot be overstated.

Now they’re back, in full [...]]]> Last year, the Institute for Creation Research (ICR) applied to have its “Master of Science” program officially recognized in Texas but was rejected by the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board (THECB) which oversees all applications, who found that whatever it is the ICR Graduate School is teaching, it ain’t science.

Now they’re back, in full whine mode, and with a law suit claiming that their academic freedom and their constitutional right to free speech have been violated.  Not surprisingly their press release is laughable, and full of lies and distortions.

Dr. Raymund Paredes, in his official capacity as Texas Commissioner of Higher Education, has assumed and officially favored his personal viewpoint that the Big Bang was an “astonishing event” that “was initiated some 14 billion years ago,” and imposed that personally-held belief on a private school. No eyewitness or forensic evidence was presented by Dr. Paredes last April to support his assumption; he relied only on his ardent belief in this theory that is professed by some scientists, but not all.

It’s just laughable that any scientist would even suggest that “eyewitness or forensic evidence” is required before a scientific theory can be considered to be more than an “assumption,” but it is an objection frequently raised by creationists in the form of the question “If you weren’t there to witness it, then how do you know?” often followed by “God was there, and told us exactly what happened.”  Naturally, this begs the return question: “So, were you there when God told us what happened?”

And, as it happens, we do have very good eyewitness and forensic evidence going all the way back to just after the Big Bang, from instruments like the Hubble Space Telescope and the Cosmic Background Explorer.  But, of course, the ICR conveniently rejects telescopic observations as reliable evidence, despite having failed hopelessly in their attempts to produce a coherent alternative that explains how we can see galaxies that are 13 billion light years away from Earth.

As a result, college-level science education in Texas is now muzzled by Texas governmental censorship, a situation that interferes with both academic freedom, the right of a school to teach any subject from its own institutional viewpoint; and interstate commerce, the right of a school outside Texas to recruit and teach Texas residents.

Nonsense.  Nobody is muzzling college-level science education.  The ICR is free to teach whatever they want as science—even the theory that the Sun and Moon are moved around by angels, or that hurricanes are God’s belches, if they want.  What they can’t do is teach their creationist nonsense in a science course and have it recognized by the State of Texas as an accredited Master of Science program.

Of course, the controversy is not unique to ICR’s graduate school. Scientists and professors who are Christians, and even non-Christian academics, continue to face persecution from science censors. Ben Stein’s Expelled documentary in 2008 clearly demonstrated that even highly-qualified scientists in secular institutions are facing various forms of expulsion simply because they question “recognized” Darwinian beliefs and the tenets of evolutionary science.

And we all know what a load of hyped up nonsense that movie turned out to be.

THECB Commissioner Raymund Paredes insists that the 27-year-old Master of Science program at ICRGS cannot possibly be “science” because its professors hold a biblical Christian viewpoint about the origin of the universe and the origin of life on earth. Call it something other than science, he and his board members suggested, and ICR can move its school to Texas.

Paredes is exactly right.  The ICR doesn’t practice science because it cannot accept any scientific finding that contradicts their literal interpretation of the Bible.  When you use the scientific method to make a discovery, you don’t do what the ICR does and go running to Bible to find out if you’re on the right track.  That is not science.

I still remember from my boyhood the days of racial segregation in America, and walking past public bathroom doors labeled “Men,” “Women,” and “Colored.” Discrimination was ugly then, and discrimination is just as ugly today.

Oh boy.  How unbelievably crass to compare their imagined affront with the century-long struggle of African Americans to acheive equal rights in this country.  Pathetic.

ICRGS is now the victim of academic (and religious) viewpoint discrimination in the Lone Star State. And because this government-mandated viewpoint ban is now enforced against the content of ICR’s school catalog within the state, this viewpoint discrimination includes censorship-stifling freedom of the press.

Again, their academic freedoms have not been discriminated against.  They are allowed to teach what they want, where they want, how they want, and they can call all of it science until they’re blue in the face.  What they can’t do is force the State of Texas to redefine science so that it matches the ICR’s definition, nor that they force the THECB to grant official recognition to a Master of Science program that doesn’t teach real science.

I predict that, even in a state as conservative as Texas, this law suit isn’t going anywhere, and for that, I will be thankful.