Reader William pointed out this video in another thread; it’s a creationist going after Bill Nye’s pro-evolution video that has caused so much ruckus. The scary thing is that the guy in the video, Dr. Timothy R. Jennings, is president-elect of the Tennesee Pyschiatric Association—and a preacher. He’s clearly a young-earth creationist. Good Lord, people (and shrinks) of Tennessee: how did this guy get into that position?
Note his assertion that there is no evidence to support evolution: he needs my book!
I love this part:
Geneticists known that with every generation hundreds to thousands of new damaging mutations enter the human genome. This means the human genome is slowly deteriorating. This is consistent with the second law of thermodynamics which state that without energy put into a system, it will decay. This is exactly what the bible documents as the declining human lifespan and recorded in scripture, perfectly matches the biological decay curve. There has never been one genetic mutation, which actually advanced a species. Every genetic mutation ever documented causes the species to deteriorate. All documentable mutations loose genetic information and slowly degrade life. As scripture says, “dying you will die.”
Yes, but damaging mutations can be weeded out by natural selection. And as for no “genetic mutations that advance a species,” he’s apparently forgotten about lactose-tolerance mutations in pastoral human populations, antibiotic resistance mutations in bacteria, insecticide-resistant mutations in insects, mutations for black wing color in the peppered moth, mutations for tolerance of heavy metals in many plants, the Pitx and Eda mutations in stickleback fish, and so on and so on. . . . Here he’s either ignorant or lying.
And listen to the way that he describes natural selection as “experience altering gene expression through epigenetic modification.” He’s really describing natural selection, but uses such different words that it’s hard to recognize.
I can’t believe that anybody trusts their mental health to a guy who spouts this stuff!
Indeed, in order to power such a system, we’d need a gigantic nuclear furnace, a massive ball of incandescent gas, and it’d probably have to be high overhead. Crazy talk, I know.
b&
Something like a star, but closer, right?
and day and night …
I do wish creationists would sod off talking about the second law ….
It’s all explained in the Defender’s (Creationist) KJV Bible by Henry Morris which is no longer available from Amazon.
Unfortunately, I have a family member, an accountant, who swears it must be true because it’s a footnote in the KJV Bible.
I don’t know. Every time they open their mouths about the second law they are converting someone who knows better to atheism. That’s what happened to me.
In (public non-religious) college one of my engineering professors went to the same church as I did. He was a smart guy and I looked up to him, so I was really happy to go to a class he was teaching at the church about reasons to believe. I was having my doubts about my religion but I thought that the presence of smart guys like this must mean it is based on something. I was stunned to hear him trot out the 2nd law trope. Stunned not only because I knew it was wrong but because I knew he must have known it was wrong too. He was in my field, he had to have studied thermodynamics as much as I had. It was an eye opening moment, a real Emperor Has No Clothes moment. If that was the best this smart guy could do, trot out something he must have known was false, then truly, religion was based on nothing. By the end of that year I realized I just didn’t believe my religion any more.
So I say, let them invoke thermodynamics loudly and often.
Very interesting! Thanks for sharing.
As Jerry says, ‘lying for Jesus’.
Truly frightening! I am befuddled by the Tennessee (two s’s) Pyschiatric Association having him president-elect.
Perhaps he is the least worst of the lot. It is TN after all.
Yes, really.
1. My first reaction was, “It’s just Tennessee, do they even know what mental health is?
2. Then I thought, naw, that can’t be it. It must be…well who knows then?
Having known virtually nothing about any of the candidates in many elections in my scientific association (and thus, consciously choosing not to cast a vote), I don’t read too much into the election. It was probably based on nothing much more than name recognition in this association, and probably does not represent the true opinion of more than a small minority of this association’s members (most of which likely abstained or forgot to vote).
If they re-elect him after he puts out a statement like this, then its time to really worry.
Thermodynamics and entropy not consistent with evolution you claim? It is if you actually understand it.
Science, how does it work?
Then refrigerators, snow flakes, crystal growth, organism development, brain function and planetary systems can’t possibly exist because it wouldn’t be “consistent with the second law of thermodynamics”.
In reality, all we need to make heat machines cool, grow or learn things is to provide an energy source. Thank the Sun!
In the case of gravitational assembly, it is a bit trickier, because despite Jennings it lowers local entropy spontaneously. Such a system is radiating heat energy to the universe and therefore fulfilling the 2nd law in the end. Or we wouldn’t have the Sun in the first place.
Oops, misplaced my comment. Here I intended to respond to the reference:
Careful, because Baez is mostly a mathematician. He is a groovy teacher, I ‘ll give him that.
The population model is sound, and Dawkins uses a similar bayesian learning model without the math IIRC. But the connection to entropy is not.
Information “entropy” (IE) shares a superficial analogous form with thermodynamical entropy which inspired Shannon to suggest it. But its units is not the same, and it is erroneous to think of entropy as “disorder” as IE forces you to.
For example, it was recently found that the high entropy states of highly confined systems are the more ordered. Think balls in boxes, and perhaps cellular systems – it is easier to pack variants of ordered states into these systems.
The thermodynamical macrostate measure of entropy is defined without reference to disorder, and so is the modern statistical physics microstate measure. (Cf Mandl, “Statistical physics”.)
Rather, I would say that the disconnect shows how little evolution is dependent on understanding thermodynamics outside of chemistry, or in other words not at all.
Here is the reference:
“But crowded tightly, the particles began forming crystal structures like atoms do — even though they couldn’t make bonds. These ordered crystals had to be the high-entropy arrangements, too.
Glotzer explains that this isn’t really disorder creating order — entropy needs its image updated. Instead, she describes it as a measure of possibilities.”
I guess I should define TD and SP entropy.
The TD version is that entropy is a measure of deviation from reversibility. It is loosely a description of energy dissipation, but not always due to the more precise SP description. Compare Newton and GR gravity.
The SP version is that entropy is a measure of the availability of energy states – how many microstates can a system reside in at a given energy?
An analogy comes out of Q = TdS. If equilibrium is minimizing energy (W = Q), it is also maximizing entropy at a given temperature. If minimizing energy is for the system to find a lowest energy state, maximizing entropy is to acquire more energy states to choose from.
This is what happens in a phase space, since it is harder to go from many possible states (a larger volume) to fewer (a smaller volume) as time passes. (I.e. what are the odds?)
Thanks for all your responses. Just learning about all this myself.
He’s lying. And maliciously willfully ignorant. It’s what Christians do, apparently.
Either the link to him as “resident elect” with the P excluded from the link is a slip of the link or WEIT is testing our powers of observation. Hoping it’s the latter. My mind could use the work. ‘resident elect’ seems fitting.
Either way, the “…people (and shrinks) of Tennessee: how did this guy get into that position?” should be intuitively obvious. Do you think an evolutionist psychiatrist would have a shot?
Incredible. I won’t want to see this guy for a hang nail.
I wouldn’t want to see any of the people who voted for him.
Maybe he was appointed. A psychiatrist in Tennessee could be at risk.
WTF??? God dissipated a black hole to create the solar system 6-10 thousand years ago in universe he created billions of years ago? That’s a new one to me. Interesting mixture of OEC/YEC doctrines that I have never heard before.
Also I am pretty sure that he doesn’t understand the 2nd law at all. And no order without intelligent intervention? Does he think God personally intervenes to make those pretty frost crystals on the hood of his car?
In answer to your question, Yes he does think god personally intervenes. He’s a Godist after all
It is safe to say that in order to be a YEC you have to shuck all of physics out the window. What they do is the usual cherrypicking of “suitable” solutions – light is light speed, except that it grows “tired” over cosmological distances et cetera.
There is another extension of Jennings ‘logic’ that he should consider: If his god entity dissipated a black hole at the centre of the Milky Way 6kBP, then bearing in mind that all of the other distant galaxies with observed black holes at their centre are millions – billions of light years away, the same could have happened there, too (otherwise, what is Jennigs’ logic for his god entity having put them there), and we just haven’t been able to observe it yet. In which case, we aren’t unique, after all. We can’t prove that his god entity didn’t use the leftover rubble of a black hole to build the Solar System and, by the same token, he can’t prove that his god entity didn’t do it elsewhere, too.
I learned to ignore the arguments of the pious; after all, they believe faith is a virtue.
+1
And worse, that blind faith is a greater virtue.
The absolute worst thing of this kind I have ever seen!!
That is some very impressive shit right there. It takes true dedication to be so wrong about every single point. If there were a wrongness meter, it would need to be rebuilt after this.
One of the things that is most disgusting to me about this whole religiously inspired willful ignorance problem (or should that be willful ignorance inspired religion problem?) is that people like this guy are held in high regard by a large number of people. I mean, these people gobble that stuff right up as often as they can get it, and then they want to accuse us of being deceitful, stupid, evil, what? The irony is to dense to bear. I need a drink.
Yes, it’s jaw-dropping to behold.
I actually sometimes get almost squeamish watching otherwise normal intelligent people start reasoning like this when the subject gets close to their religion. Especially YECs. There is the uncomfortable feeling of watching someone with something akin to brain damage trying to reason. Like how some tumors reduce the ability to recognize faces or names but leave other areas of cognition untouched – religious belief seems to manifest in a similar type of damage to reasoning – reasoning about anything that the person perceives to be relevant to their religious belief is just mangled.
Yuck.
Vaal
I wish I could have explained it that well. I often feel exactly that way in those types of encounters. A curious mix of embarrassment and pity, and maybe a few other things as well.
Remember crazy people don’t know their crazy — according to scripture.
Physician, heal thyself!!
I love how Creationists always talk about “damaging mutations” without even giving a context for what “damaging” means. A mutation that is “damaging” in one environment might be beneficial in another. This simple concept is entirely lost on them because they have no clue how evolution works.
The idea that Creationists have for “mutations” is akin to Hollywood-style mutations that almost universally have (plot-driven) negative connotations.
In our household there are two damaging mutations:
– George Clooney (my wife’s)
– Meryl Streep (mine)
Website for ComeAndReason Ministries …
In the Media Centre > Blogs section of the site a concerned reader asks http://comeandreason.com/index.php/media-center/blog-menu/250-does-sexual-arousal-outside-marriage-damage-the-brain
Here’s part of Jennings’ reply where he displays his firm grasp of scientification
[sorry that’s my made-up-word-of-the-day]:
There are many more little bloglets on the site, but this was the one that amused me
Bad link sorry ~ try again…
Does Sexual Arousal Outside Marriage Damage the Brain?
Jennings, please put that “free will” down! You can hurt your patients.
That sounds just like astrology or phrenology with some different terms thrown in. I find it highly improbable that this guy believes his own crap. He is a carny, nothing more.
Actually, they usually DO believe it, because they were not paying attention in biology class. I know a mechanical engineer who told me the most absurd things about what he believed about mutations and varieties of chickens, etc. After a one-hr. discussion with him (my jaw dropping the whole time), it was clear he didn’t understand a thing about meiosis. He is a good Catholic.
My veterinarian once chewed me out for mentioning evolution. He is a strict creationist and bible-thumper ( of course, I’d go to someone else if I could, but we don’t always get much of a choice in remote rural locations).
You could be right of course, but I am not sure if you understood that I was referring to the blog post excerpt authored by the good doctor that Michael Fisher provided, not the video in the OP.
That blog post excerpt doesn’t sound like misunderstanding. It sounds like he just made it up as a scam to make money off of suckers, like the countless self help gurus out there that all have their unique insight to what your problems really are. If he does believe it he must be really good at self delusion because ignorance could not account for it.
Regardless of whether he believes his own drivel or not, I think giving this guy a license to practice is dangerously irresponsible.
I don’t believe it ! Comments enabled !
As a psychiatrist, his job is to help you tune out those strange voices in your head. As a Christian, one extra voice should still be acceptable. I wonder how he tells them apart.
Clozaril.
Jennings is kind of funny. What’s not so funny if you need a heart transplantation and such a kind of guy happens to be your surgeon.
http://web.archive.org/web/20070203145324/http://www.curedisease.com/Perspectives/vol_2_1990/BabyFae.html
Have to say that I love this stuff. “Daylight is the best antiseptic.” For human history magical ideologies have held sway by hiding mainly and so transparency is a radical change in human culture.
If nothing else, skeptical work is drawing the men, it is is overwhelmingly MA white-skinned men, into the open and giving them a chance to speak — for all to hear.
As we know any professional designation is not evidence of probity. “Prominent psychiatrist and creationist” is an oxymoron.
I wouldn’t refer a patient to someone like this.
He got everything he said about evolution wildly wrong. His understanding is worse than the average high schoolers. He’s either ignorant, lying, crazy, or all three.
Maybe he’s the acid test. If someone agrees to treatment by him they squirrel them off to a real psychiatrist.
This is most similar to Lamarkism. Inheritance of acquired characteristics.
And even there he gets it wrong. The epigenetic modification phrase is gratuitous bafflegab that has nothing to do with natural selection.
This is shocking ignorance from someone who supposedly has an MD.
This is high school level biology and available to anyone with an internet connection.
Guy’s a quack.
Good lord, he’s Pres of the TN association. Whew!
“Why not!?” lol too funny.
So:
1. He is lying repeatedly
2. He is delusional
Sweet jesus — I can’t make any sense of this.
rofl, rofl…”god dissipated a black hole…” Why not!?
OK, I vote for delusional. Why not!?
Yep, barking mad.
‘he needs my book!
Sorry, no, he needs a brain first.
“There has NEVER been one genetic mutation, which actually advanced a species. EVERY genetic mutation EVER documented causes the species to deteriorate.”(enphasis mine)
So, if I show him a single example of beneficial mutation, will he shut the hell up?
http://www.gate.net/~rwms/EvoMutations.html
“God dissipated a black hole and the light from the rest of the galaxy was now seen. God used the matter at the core of the black hole, which God had created billions of years in the past to create the Earth, sun, moon, and the stars of our solar system, Mercury, Venus, and Mars. Thus, terraforming planet Earth occurred 6 to 10 thousand years ago, but the universe and the rock from which Earth was built was created billions of years ago.”
I wonder if the majority of young earth creationists can agree with this crazy scenario.
However, if God created the universe from nothing 14 billion years ago, why did he have to rearrange already existent material in order to create the solar system? Seems like post hoc, propter hoc rationalization to me.
Also, the old material solution to the “apparent” old age of the earth doesn’t resolve the problem posed by stratigraphy.
And what on earth are “the stars of our solar system”? That doesn’t make any sense!
Any other fallacies you are willing to find?
*emphasis
No. He’s a creationist and as such is not interested in facts or evidence. Seriously, it is impossible for him to have not seen mountains of facts that contradict his lunatic ravings and support evolution by natural selection (not to mention his equally insane “cosmology”).
Three things.
1) As a psychiatrist, according to Ken Ham, he’s not qualified to speak on this topic: http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2012/09/04/ken-ham-responds-to-bill-nyes-anti-creationism-video/
2) Jennings is talking about closed systems and the Earth is not a closed system, losing energy and matter to space and gaining energy and matter from space and the Sun. Moreover, the Earth is a set of interconnected open systems feeding into and feeding off each other.
3) Jennings also makes a number of crass (or perhaps deliberate, in order to support his arguments, which we have seen before from his like) errors about the content of the Bible. Too many to go into, so I’ll just highlight one: “Genesis doesn’t describe the creation of the Universe, but the creation of the Solar System….”.
But Genesis 16-17 state “… he made the stars also. And God set them in the firmament of the heaven …”
It’s only a small step from this to “legitimate rape” and then making up your own facts altogether. Oy vey!
(emphasis mine)
Compared to the blithering nonsense about mutations, entropy and thermodynamics, this particular chunk of demographic skullduggery pales into near-insignificance. But it exudes its own tauroscatological miasma, hence it needs distinct flagging.
Actually, in the USA, in the last century average lifespans have increased 30 years. That is a lot. And it is thanks to modern science and medicine.
He should lose his license to practice psychiatry. Though he probably won’t because ‘real’ psychiatrists who know better don’t have the balls to publicly condemn such nonsense. The Saga continues….
I’m telling you, it’s everything that’s wrong with psychology today (the erroneous conflation of compassion with Jebus).
I suppose he missed the courses on Freud, B.F. Skinner, and Albert Ellis.
Just ask Tamas Pataki.
In Australia, psychology is secular, and it is largely in the US as well. CBT has been the mainstream, and Jebus is a fringe notion. Even those who speak of the dreaded word ‘spiritual’, know that it is beyond any religious dogma. I wonder how their association will take to his stance which is well beyond his psychiatric expertise?
Practicing psychotherapy with the community mental health population in Nashville tends to debase the lens.
As I’ve repeatedly remarked, I need to renew my international passport.
Is the Tennessee Psychiatric Association a real professional organization or just a creationist lobby group made to look official? I can not find any information about them on the internet, not even a website!
http://www.tpaonline.org/
He seems to run his own branch:
http://tmschattanooga.com/
Oh oh!
The Tennessee Psychiatric Association has a facebook page that gives 202 Hazelwood Dr, 37075-4842 Hendersonville, TN as its physical address
That address is also a private home
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2U0A6mHEUNE (see transcript – there are 37 comments as well, which I’m about to read)
He doesn’t sound like a YEC or orthodox fundamentalist, literalist Christian to me. But he’s certainly a creationist of some sort – and a science denier.
“Geneticists known that with every generation hundreds to thousands of new damaging mutations enter the human genome. This means the human genome is slowly deteriorating. This is consistent with the second law of thermodynamics which state that without energy put into a system, it will decay. This is exactly what the bible documents as the declining human lifespan and recorded in scripture, perfectly matches the biological decay curve. There has never been one genetic mutation, which actually advanced a species. Every genetic mutation ever documented causes the species to deteriorate. All documentable mutations loose genetic information and slowly degrade life.” I believe this to be tosh. Rather TOPICAL as it happens: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-19202141
“Genesis doesn’t describe the creation of the universe, but the creation of the solar system.” But it refers to STARS as well as two ‘lights’.
“This indicates that intelligent life was already in existence in the universe when the Earth was created and Genesis 1 describes the Earth as a deep, dark, empty void in which no light existed.” That doesn’t sound very biblical – unless he is referring solely to ‘angels’.
“What is being described is a black hole in the Milky Way galaxy, so that on day 1, God said “let there be light,” God dissipated a black hole and the light from the rest of the galaxy was now seen. God used the matter at the core of the black hole, which God had created billions of years in the past to create the Earth, sun, moon, and the stars of our solar system, Mercury, Venus, and Mars. Thus, terraforming planet Earth occurred 6 to 10 thousand years ago, but the universe and the rock from which Earth was built was created billions of years ago.” I have only one word for that – GOSH.
“Darwin’s famous finches, purported to have adapted different beaks through genetic mutation from environmental pressure over millions of years, have been proven to have no genetic mutation, but instead, epigenetic modification occurring within 1 to 2 generations, just as the bible teaches.” WHERE exactly does the Bible teach THAT?!
Mr Jennings appears to have a background in psychology.
Have opened a thread here: http://forums.bcseweb.org.uk/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=3086&p=41031#p41031
Ken Ham and other YECs will probably be appalled by Jenning’s wrong pseudo-science.
Sorry – meant to emphasis the word ‘WRONG’.
Dr. Timothy Jennings is quite proud of his inattention to the study of medicine during his residency. This his blurb for his book on Amazon:
It is probably a good thing this clown went into psychiatry. Can you imagine a neurosurgeon telling you he spent twice as long brainwashing himself in biblical study than he spent learning surgical technique? Now, about that brain tumor…
And undoubtedly came to the wrong conclusion.
Being raised in toxic fundie xian cults can seriously damage people mentally.
The lucky and intelligent ones can spend years working their way out of it. The less fortunate become creationists and internet trolls.
PS Or look what the Catholic church has been doing to children for centuries, the notorious church of supposedly virgin pedophile priests.
Excessive religiosity can be a sign of mental illness.
I’m just going to say it. Sometimes people go into psychiatry or psychology because they are wondering or trying to deal with their own mental strangeness. For example, James Holmes, the Aurora Colorado Batman shooter was in a Ph.D. in a neurobiology program and clearly had some sort of probably genetic mental problems.
I’m not going to say Jennings is one of them because I haven’t looked too hard at his nonsense and don’t know him at all. But it is a serious possibility.
Love it Love it!!!
the earth has old rocks because gawd created it 10,000 years ago, out of bits he had lying around, that happened to be billions of years old… apparently to amuse some angels in the cheap seats…..this is great stuff.
It is amazing. Why does he think the rocks are old if, as he must, he rejects all the evidence about the age of fossils? Very bizarre.
Ah – maybe we are a second creation! god smashed up the old one when in a mood.
Pshaw – psychiatry is no science anyway.
Agreed ~ human distress medicalised & warranted through their clownshoe DSM. In cahoots with the pharmaceutical industry. Sick [so to speak].
unfortunately, your false and simplistic claims don’t account for how my husband is helped with his bipolar II by those same pharmaceuticals and psychiatry. If he had not had them, he would be long dead. The woo nonsense spread by people like you failed him immensely.
I’m glad for you & him Vel & you’re right about Bipolar II treatment ~ I guess if it were not for Cade we might still be using ECT ~ kicking-the-TV-set-science.
I’m pleased that the APA’s decided in 1973 to exclude homosexuality from the DSM-II’s definition of sexual deviance.
Here’s another story which lays out my current concerns [I’m not supporting psychologists either BTW]:- DSM-5
I don’t see a blanket condemnation of the mental health profession there. I see a specific criticism of the DSM — and I happen to agree with that criticism — and a point that psychiatrists are in league with a billion-dollar for-profit industry that is incentivized to sell more medication than people really need and hence incentivizes doctors (including psychiatrists) to do the same.
It’s great that your husband found solutions that work for him. But it’s really irrelevant to anything Michael Fisher said. Some drugs help some problems. Talking to sympathetic people who’ve studied mental pathology for years seems like it would have a few benefits as well. Nothing surprising there.
Just because a field has done a few good things doesn’t exempt it from criticism, and considering the civic and moral power wielded by mental health professionals in our society I think it’s our duty to maintain robust criticism. Don’t take it personally — the criticism has nothing to do with your husband.
I do take it personally when someone says “human distress medicalised & warranted through their clownshoe DSM. In cahoots with the pharmaceutical industry. Sick [so to speak].” as a response to another post “psychiatry is no science anyway” with no exceptions mentioned at all, that seems to be exactly a blanket accusation, no matter if you deign to see it nor not. Of course a good result doesn’t excempt anything from criticism. However, a good result, and thousands of them, do show that such claims of some conspiracy including all pharma and all psychiatrists, is ridiculous. What I even find more annoying than such pretentions that such things are real is that people who seem to dislike pharma and psych have no better alternatives they can offer.
It is breathtaking. To sit there and say with a straight face that there is no evidence for evolution (a bald-faced lie), followed by castigating the reality-based community for believing something with no evidence… where is the evidence for creationism? And the most frightening thing is that he almost certainly actually believes this tripe.
No, actually, there is a more frightening thing: people like this are allowed to breed.
OK, to balance things a bit out, here we have a Dutch orthodox-protestant politician ánd professor economy at Erasmus University Rotterdam:
http://www.trouw.nl/tr/nl/11364/Verkiezingen-2012/article/detail/3312143/2012/09/06/Uiteindelijk-regeert-God-en-zorgt-hij-ervoor-dat-alles-goed-komt.dhtml
“What if creation happened 6000 years ago and scientists arrived one second later? How old would they think Adam was? The scientist thinks 34, 35 years. And a stone lying there is according to that same scientist millions of years old. But God just created the whole thing.”
Balance of error!
This is Last Thursday, a very old idea. ““What if creation happened 6000 years ago” or 6 hours ago?
God created the universe this Thursday, with people and their memories, looking 13.7 billion years old.
Enjoy your week. God creates a new universe every Thursday and ours is new and will last until next Thursday.
FWIW, Last Thursdayism has a problem. Such a god is an arbitrary monster not worth worshipping, a trickster and liar. Even most fundie xian morons reject it on that basis.
Just had a look at the counter-arguments of the author of the video.
Statement: “I’m not clear on why Dr. Jennings accepts radiological dating for rocks but not for fossils. The same dating techniques that tell us the Earth’s rocks are billions of years old also tell us that life has been on the planet for billions of years.”
Rebuttal: “Fossils are only found in sedimentary rock. What are sedimentary rocks made of? Eroded particles of the basement granites and mantel magmas. And how old did Jennings’ theory say they were? Life on earth for billions of years? Not according to evolutionary theory. Try a couple 100 million, 1/10th your statement.”
Last time I checked, science textbooks said life has been around for at least 3 billion years.
Oldest fossils are about 3.4 billion years old.
Do your homework.
Statement: “Apparently those who argue for god doesn’t have to provide any evidence at all for any of their claims.”
Rebuttal: “And is not that the nature, character, and realm of the spiritual? If the unseen spiritual world around you exists by evidence that billions of humans espouse the concept, does that mean it doesn’t exist because it’s unprovable in the physical world?”
Back to 950 AD. The vast majority of people agree that the sun revolves around the earth. They cannot be wrong. Or are they?
I mean, argumentum ad populum? Seriously? Since when popularity or consensus devoid of proof equals validity?
I can play this game, too. Since 1,1 billion people in the world are irreligious and consider supernatural realms to be illusions, and their number is costantly increasing in recent years, they cannot be wrong.
Let alone the fact that “I believe there is a spiritual realm, an so do many people” doesn’t answer “provide evidence for your claims about this weird cosmology”. Expecially since there are a lot of people that believe in a spiritual realm but consider these speculations rubbish.
I spent 6 years working as a psychologist in Tennesse some years ago. I was at a large clinic and psychiatric hospital and had interactions with a number of psychiatrists. They were, as a group, awful. I’m not at all surprised that a guy like this could end up as the president of the “club”. None of the staff I worked with trusted them or considered them anything more than a necessary nuisance since they held the keys to the medication programs. Scary indeed.
I love the constant repeating mantra of “Evolution has no evidence to support it.”
Riiiiiiight. Except for all that EVIDENCE, you mean?
Denying it’s existence doesn’t make it go away. That only works for imaginary bearded men in the sky.
I think, for them, it’s a little like one of their other mantras: “If you want something and pray hard enough and God wants you to have it, God will ALLWAYS answer your prayers!”
“If we say it often enough, maybe God will make it go away!”
So true. I love how, no matter what, the results of prayers only ever serve to strengthen their blind faith.
Get what you prayed for: “The good Lord answered my prayers.”
Don’t get what you prayed for: “The good Lord works in mysterious ways.”
Never “God completely screwed me over for no reason. Maybe it happened just because it could and there is no God.”
Never that. Ever.
That is ludicrous, my own initial investigations in to HapMap’s CEU population showed many areas under selection in Homo sapiens.
Not an MD. A DO. Dr of osteopathic medicine. Almost the same but have classes where they learn”manipulation”. schools of osteopathic medicine are largely attended by those who could not get into medical school. Some DOs are great, but some…..
Always look for the degree, if someone calls themselves “dr.” not that an MD is any guarantee either.
It would be nice if Dr. Coyne could do a short response video about just some of the evidence for evolution, such as the biogeographical distribution of species…
Prof. Coyne how do you do it? How do you keep at it? You have my gratitude, respect, admiration and even adoration for what you do to just cut truth out and fillet it on the grill every day for simps to get a good whiff and follow the scent to a proper repast. Damn! Thanks!
The arrogance of ignorance personified.
To quote Penn Gillette, “Sweet evil Jesus!”
It is incredibly clear that this guy has not even a passing familiarity with the work of Peter and Rosemary Grant, or indeed any modern evolutionary biology at all. The only novel thing he said, that I haven’t read elsewhere in creationist “literature’ was that insanity about the blackholes.
But pretty much the whole rant was filled to the brim with the typical canards, likening evolutionary processes to chaotic random happenings, lying about mutation. He seems to not understand that biology does acknowledge a design process. That this guy holds any office higher than garbage collector is a minor national disgrace.