The Origin of Life

As mentioned in my previous post, I was browsing the RBT site and came across "outstanding essays" utter lunacy "by students" by sheep. I clicked on the two links that are roughly in my area of expertise and took a look.

Guess what, I only had to read the first two sentences of the first article to know that the author doesn't know jack about shit about anything at all. (Thanks to AronRa for that amazing line.)

The origin of life debate is at the heart of the Creation vs. Evolution debate.  Without a beginning of life, there is no need for any of the rest.

There's absolutely no need for any "Evolutionist" to explain the beginning of life. We know that life started somehow, be it through a God (not likely at all) or through a natural process. Once life started, evolution kicks in. There is absolutely no reason to bring Abiogenesis (the study of how life arose) into a "debate" about Evolution and Creationism.
Evolution is concerned with the diversity of life, Abiogenesis with the beginning of life.

Therefore, in this paper I will discuss both sides of this debate,...

If this guy gets anything right, I would be SERIOUSLY surprised.

In 1953 Stanley Miller and Harold Urey made history by making some of the chemical building blocks of life by passing an electric spark through some gasses they thought composed the Earth s primitive atmosphere. This caused quite an uproar in the scientific community because here was the answer to the origins of life!  Chance and time were all that they needed. 

Absolutely. You didn't need the laws of chemistry at all, chance is all you need. /sarcasm
It's absolutely incomprehensible how people still don't understand that "an element of chance" does not equal to "pure chance on the whole front".

This guy then goes on to "disprove" the Miller-Urey experiment without accounting for revisions of the experiment. He then quotes his professor Hugh Ross and Young Earth Creationist Lee Strobel (The "chemist" in the lab coat) on the problems of the "prebiotic soup", without mentioning any evidence disproving those two. Well obviously, who has ever seen a fair assessment by a creationist?

The worst is yet to come... Occam's razor. Wait, what?
Yep that's right, apparently an infinitely complex, all loving, all powerful, all knowing and eternal being called God that keeps an eye on everything, can manipulate the laws of the Universe as It sees fit and is worshipped by about 1/3rd of the population of exactly one world out of trillions is a simpler answer than "the laws of the Universe worked together to create simple life forms, which evolved gradually over a span of billions of years into all the forms that are currently present on earth".

I also love his definitions:

Scientific data is scientific data...

Truth is truth...

Water is water...

Profound insights right there.

He then goes on to talk about "Interpreting evidence", preaches at you for a while and then closes with a psalm. All very academic, I have to say.

Reason?

I'm fairly active on a few forums, one of them is this one. On that forum, a new member has just told us that atheism is a world-view. The "debate" (schooling) has been going on for 46 posts now and in his/her (him, for the sake of simplicity) last post he told us that he will attend an online course entitled "Creation vs. Evolution". Where, I hear you ask. Let's let him give the answer:

Also, I begin an online class by Reasons To Believe (www.reasons.org) on Monday, 24 Oct 2011, titled “Creation vs. Evolution,”...

Obviously I went to the site and looked  into it. Reasons To Believe (RTB) already sounds bad enough, but look at their mission statement. It's horrific! They aren't there to educate, they're there to "spread the Christian Gospel". Well already that doesn't look too well...

There's also nothing sincere in their beliefs, it's all a bunch of "we want to believe that, so nothing will ever change that.

In the next two posts I'm going to look at just exactly how ignorant they are at RTB.

The new idiocy

If any of my readers (for the moment that's nobody) has Facebook, you should have noticed that in the last few days a few... mathematical questions have popped up on Facebook.

I hope this link works... 70 + 10 x 2 + 1 = ?

If my readers are merely semi-literate, they'll know that the correct answer is... 91. Well of course it is. (Note: The above mathematical statement can also be expressed as "70 + (10 x 2) + 1 = X", because multiplication/division happens before addition/subtraction. So it's 70 + 20 + 1 = 91. BOMDAS bitches!!!)You'd have to be a moron not to know it.

And yet, one of my friends clicked on "161". Really? I mean, REALLY? I know the guy, he's really nice and knows a ton about history, but this is absolutely depressing.

He's not the only one, either. Out of approximatively 4,000 people answering the question, about 1,000 answered wrong. I guess that's not bad, it really could be worse. But in all honesty, I want it to be better! 75% answering correctly is NOT FUCKING ENOUGH for something that simple!

If I read the statistics correctly, there should be on the order of 85%+ high school enrolment in all developed countries. I would expect ALL of them to know basic maths.

I'm a teacher and I'll be sure to rant about education in later posts, but this is something I'd rant about even if I weren't a teacher. I also know that Facebook is not in any way representative of the population at large... well on the other hand, maybe it is. For now let's just remember one thing: A great number of people get through the system without even a basic education. It shouldn't be a surprise then that stupid people govern us.