Creationists are stupid Sunday [The More You Know]

Saying Creationists are stupid is like saying the sky is blue and water is wet, and arguing with Creationists is like arguing with helmet wearing retards and not really worth your time– but they just keep asking for it. They say they’ve got science but they don’t, they say they want kids to learn intelligent design in schools and then say there’s a “conspiracy” to keep it out of science classrooms. Well if by conspiracy, you mean science teachers who want to teach science and not have to also teach a warped version of an ancient Middle Eastern philosophy.

So… sigh… here they are again, just asking for it. Everyone used to love Ben Stein. He was hilarious in Ferris Bueller and his game show on Comedy Central wasn’t that bad. And I knew he’s been an outspoken die-hard conservative for years, I had no idea until recently he was a Creationist as well. The odd thing is that Ben Stein isn’t stupid– at least not all the time. So when he released his movie Expelled, a documentary on the “oppression” of intelligent design in schools, he’s just asking to be ridiculed as a fucking idiot for the rest of his sad, sad days.

So Ben Stein showed up on conservative Christian talk shows (you know, the kind no one sees except the Jesus freaks that buy the videos at their local Jesus store) and talked up his movie and about how the scientific community doesn’t want a real debate blah blah blah. Well, really it only takes someone with half of a knowledge of high school level science to debunk this shit, but here goes, video 1 of 2. End rant.

Video 2: Peanut Butter is an Atheist’s worst nightmare.

The gist: This is one of many, many cases of Creationists taking some principle or idea about the origin and evolution of life, simplifies it to the point of idiocy and then attempts to use that to “disprove” evolution. In this case, the idea is that “science” claims that light + heat + matter (of any sort apparently) = life from non-life. They are also calling into question the idea that they claim that life can never come from non-life.

Why this is incredibly fucking stupid: First off, the idea that life cannot come from non-life is a notion that was proven to be stupid hundreds of years ago. Yes, life doesn’t spontaneously happen just because light strikes peanut butter, or because lightning strikes a mud puddle, but life can be created out of a slow and meticulous process of amino acid chains coming together and building more and more complexity. However this is a process that can take millions and billions of years and a very specific set of circumstances. Creationists are trying to argue to the lowest common denominator that since you don’t have legged fish popping out of your peanut butter that evolution is crap. And people say “yeah I’ve never seen a legged fish walking out of a jar of peanut butter, so evolution must be false”… and the cycle of stupidity continues.

As a related argument, Creationists often like to cite the Law of Entropy– that systems break down and become less complex over time, not more complex and that evolution flies in the face of that. Again, this is using a very simplified notion of the Law of Entropy. The law still stands that given enough time, all systems will break down eventually– it’s basically the idea that everything will eventually die or come to an end. Life will eventually come to an end– all life will most likely end at some point. It will probably be zillions upon zillions of years. Cities are built up to be incredibly complex but will eventually crumble… planets and stars grow in amazing complexity but eventually crumble, galaxies grow with into systems of billions of stars but will eventually fall apart. The Law of Entropy does not state that things should start out of the gate incredibly complex and wither progressively over time or obviously the entire universe wouldn’t exist, but simply that all things must end eventually.

Enough of that, here’s the video:

Video 3: A banana is an Atheist’s worst nightmare.

The gist: Ray Comfort and Kirk Cameron argue that because a banana is yummy to eat and easy for a human hand to hold and peel that this is undeniable proof of God.

The reason this is fucking stupid: There are wild bananas and domesticated bananas. Wild bananas are small, brown, tough, a pain in the ass to eat and aren’t all that great. Domesticated bananas, the kind we love to get at the grocery store were transformed by millenia of careful human cultivation to be yummy and easy to eat. The fact that apparently God didn’t want us to eat bananas and we defied his will by using our clever agricultural practices is ignored. This is also the idea that because square peg fits in square hole therefore GOD or something. Did God make coconuts difficult to eat just to piss us off? What about penises? Penises are the perfect shape to fit in an asshole. Does that mean by the same logic that God is down with sodomy? This can go on and on and on. You’ve probably seen this video and already know how stupid it is, but here it is again in case you want to gouge your eyes out later on.