Creation and Science Chronicle

Intelligent Design Proponents Appointed to Texas Board of Education

October 16, 2008 Comments Off

3 evolution critics on advisory panel
by Terrence Stutz
The Dallas Morning News, p. 3.
October 16, 2008

Social conservatives on the State Board of Education have appointed three evolution critics to a six-member committee that will review proposed curriculum standards for science courses in Texas schools.

Two of the appointees are authors of a book that questions many of the tenets of Charles Darwin’s theory of how humans and other life forms evolved. One of them, Stephen Meyer, is also vice president of the Discovery Institute, a Seattle-based group that promotes an explanation of the origin of life similar to creationism. The other author is Ralph Seelke, a biology professor at the University of Wisconsin-Superior.

Also on the panel is Baylor University chemistry professor Charles Garner, who, like the other two, signed the Discovery Institute’s “Dissent from Darwinism” statement that sharply questions key aspects of the theory of evolution.

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Ohio Colleges Mobilize To Celebrate Darwin

October 15, 2008 Comments Off

Colleges celebrate Darwin in yearlong slate of events
by Kevin Mayhood
The Columbus Dispatch, October 15, 2008
p. B3

Throughout Ohio, people can sup on primordial soup and listen to the strings of evolution as part of a celebration of Charles Darwin, a former divinity student who shook the world when he published his theory of evolution.

Darwin’s 200th birthday would be Feb. 12, and his On the Origin of Species will turn 150 on Nov. 24, 2009.

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Cincinnati will host the North American Paleontological Convention in June, partly so that paleontologists can tour the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Ky.

Answers in Genesis Creation Museum Still In News

October 13, 2008 Comments Off

The Northern Kentucky based Answers in Genesis Creation Museum continues to draw both crowds and publicity. The following article by Dylan Lovan (Associated Press) appeared in several papers across the United States: Miami Herald Sunday, The Anniston Star, Los Angeles Times, Salt Lake Tribune, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Pittsburgh Post Gazette, Winston-Salem Journal, Boston Herald, San Diego Union Tribune, and dozens of other media outlets.

Of course, the release of Bill Maher’s docudrama, Religulous, and subsequent media PR blitz, have added to the Creation Museum’s media exposure for October.

A year later, Creation Museum still claims big crowds
by Dylan T. Lovan
The Detroit News, p. C1 and C3.
13 Oct 2008

The museum exhibits are taken from the Old Testament, but the special effects are pureHollywood: a stateof-the-art planetarium, animatronics and a massive model of Noah’s Ark, all intended to explain the origins of the universe from a biblical viewpoint.

The Creation Museum, which teaches life’s beginnings through a literal interpretation of the Bible, is claiming attendance figures that would make it an unexpectedly strong draw less than a year and a half after it debuted. More than a half-million people have toured the Petersburg, Ky., attraction since its May 2007 opening, museum officials say.

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UK Tabloid, The Mail, Pokes At Creation Museum

September 9, 2008 Comments Off

In what started out as a travel article on Louisville, Kentucky and Cincinnati, Ohio for the UK tabloid, The Mail, writer Chris Coplans ends with a ‘hit’ piece on the Answers in Genesis Creation Museum. Excerpted below are some of his comments on his visit to the Creation Museum.

Stung like a bee by the Louisville Lip
by Chris Coplans
The Mail on Sunday (UK), September 7, 2008
p. 32-33

On my way back to the airport in Kentucky I made one last stop at God’s answer to Disneyworld, the Creation Museum.

Worried about being stereotyped as Stone Age, Bible-bashing hillbillies, Kentuckians have been reluctant to embrace their newest attraction. Not so the thousands of biblical literalists who make a pilgrimage from all over America to visit God’s own theme park.

ThE state-of-the-art 70,000 sq ft museum is just one exit away from the airport and presents itself as a ‘walk through history’, although it struck me as a walk through fantasy land. For just under £13, you can learn how God made the universe in six days, where the dinosaurs lived on Noah’s Ark and, most bizarrely, how Darwin was responsible for the Holocaust.

I was greeted outside the main building by a large, apparently harmless dinosaur. It turns out the likes of Steven Spielberg and 99 per cent of scientists have been giving dinosaurs an undeservedly bad Press.

One exhibit shows a young child happily frolicking with a couple of peace-loving, vegan dinosaurs, even though they had been extinct for 60 million years before humans came along. The Creation Museum, like Hollywood, doesn’t let science get in the way of a good story.

The museum is packed with hordes of jumbo-sized evangelical Christians, waddling around with their offspring, apparently defying the deadly sin of gluttony. Had Noah let them aboard, their excess weight would have sunk the Ark.

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Medical “Ethicist” Attacks V-P Candidate Sarah Palin

September 9, 2008 Comments Off

Palin’s creationism stance would impede progress
by Arthur Caplan
Philadelphia Inquirer, September 7, 2008
p. C6 (Editorial)

Teaching biblical inerrancy as science in the schools would endanger the ability of the U.S. to compete in the world of technological advances

There has been no end of reaction to Sen. John McCain’s selection of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his vice presidential pick. After the initial “Sarah who?” response from those in the other 49 states, some commentators have decided it was brilliant to place a dynamic young woman at McCain’s side.

Despite Palin’s boisterous coming-out speech at the Republican convention, I think McCain has actually thrown away any chance he had of being elected because the selection of Palin puts an issue on the table that McCain may find exceedingly uncomfortable to have to wrestle with over the next two months.

*Arthur Caplan is chairman of the medical-ethics department at the University of Pennsylvania.

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Even Atheists Get No Respect!

August 27, 2008 Comments Off

It’s no wonder evangelical atheists need to shout so loud
by Barry Cooper
Calgary Herald (Canada), August 27, 2008
p. A16 (editorial)

The shining example of free thinking said to characterize the French Enlightenment was Voltaire. In the face of dogmatic clerics, both Protestant and Catholic, he urged reasonable people everywhere to “crush the infamous thing.”

His argument was as obvious then as it is today: organized religion not only divides humanity into believers and infidels, it authorizes the former, with a beatific smile, to extinguish the latter. Often religion claims to be doing so for the good of the infidel.

That Voltaire had Christianity in mind is indicated by a rather more vulgar expression from his pen: “the people will not be free until the last king is strangled in the guts of the last priest.”

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Seattle Atheist Buys Billboard Space

August 27, 2008 Comments Off

Touting freedom of “no religion”
by Janet I. Tu (Seattle Times religion reporter)
Seattle Times, August 27, 2008
p. B1

A Redmond man paid for the sign in Seattle to get people thinking. It’s drawn support here, unlike similar signs in other cities.

Putting up a billboard saying “Imagine No Religion” at the base of Capitol Hill, in the heart of not too-churchgoing Seattle, is a bit like preaching to the choir. So to speak.

Mike Christensen knows this. But he’s OK with it.

When he paid for the sign about a month ago in support of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, his goal never was to change people’s minds. It was to get people thinking and talking. And maybe, just maybe, get a few more members for the foundation, which fights for the separation of church and state. Mission accomplished. The 14-foot-by-48-foot billboard, on Denny Way near Stewart Street, has brought in five new members and about 20 prospective ones, according to the Wisconsin-based Freedom From Religion Foundation: www.ffrf.org foundation.

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Pileated Woodpeckers Invade Backyard!

August 25, 2008 Comments Off

Earlier this summer my wife and I were treated to the sight of these two young male pileated woodpeckers circling the base of a tree in our backyard. We watched for about 15 minutes as they circled back and forth with an occasional display of outstretched wings! We’ve now seen the six species of woodpeckers in our part of the country: hairy, downy, red-belly, yellow-shafted flicker, yellow belly sapsucker, and these pileated youngsters.