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Huckabee Shills for Expelled
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Here's Mike Huckabee promoting the new creationist film Expelled
He starts out by reiterating a theme of the film, that the issue is one of academic freedom and debate. But there's about as much of a legitimate debate between creationism and evolution as there is between the theory of gravity and intelligent falling.
Huckabee says that there's an ongoing accumulation of new evidence that god was somehow involved in either the origin or ongoing change of life on earth. Fact is, there is no such evidence. He's talking about inference from ignorance: If we don't currently know how it works, it must be the hand of god.
It's true that there are few solid theories about how life originated. I've blogged about this before. While bones fossilize reasonably well, strands of free-floating molecules and single cells don't. Especially if they're billions of years old. Scientists have some hypotheses about how self-replicating molecules might have originated (ala the "crystals" Huckabee mockingly references), but none of the ideas are solid.
But if you take an area of science where a phenomenon is not well-explained and then extrapolate the intervention of god, you're falling into two traps:
1) You're settling the answer, and keeping it from being explored further naturalistically. If we determine that god originated life, then why do we need to study it any further?
2) The "god explanation" can work equally well for any god or any other supernatural entity. For something like the origin of life, if I proposed that Zeus did it, this would be just as valid an explanation that Baal did it, or leprechauns, or unicorns, or faeries, or Allah, or an invisible purple elephant named Fred that only I can see. Each of those is as equally scientifically valid as the other, because the only "evidence" each explanation requires is that the phenomenon could not have come about via natural processes. At that point I can invoke any supernatural entity to explain the phenomenon, which is patently silly.
Anyway, I'm extremely glad this guy didn't get the Republican nomination.
He starts out by reiterating a theme of the film, that the issue is one of academic freedom and debate. But there's about as much of a legitimate debate between creationism and evolution as there is between the theory of gravity and intelligent falling.
Huckabee says that there's an ongoing accumulation of new evidence that god was somehow involved in either the origin or ongoing change of life on earth. Fact is, there is no such evidence. He's talking about inference from ignorance: If we don't currently know how it works, it must be the hand of god.
It's true that there are few solid theories about how life originated. I've blogged about this before. While bones fossilize reasonably well, strands of free-floating molecules and single cells don't. Especially if they're billions of years old. Scientists have some hypotheses about how self-replicating molecules might have originated (ala the "crystals" Huckabee mockingly references), but none of the ideas are solid.
But if you take an area of science where a phenomenon is not well-explained and then extrapolate the intervention of god, you're falling into two traps:
1) You're settling the answer, and keeping it from being explored further naturalistically. If we determine that god originated life, then why do we need to study it any further?
2) The "god explanation" can work equally well for any god or any other supernatural entity. For something like the origin of life, if I proposed that Zeus did it, this would be just as valid an explanation that Baal did it, or leprechauns, or unicorns, or faeries, or Allah, or an invisible purple elephant named Fred that only I can see. Each of those is as equally scientifically valid as the other, because the only "evidence" each explanation requires is that the phenomenon could not have come about via natural processes. At that point I can invoke any supernatural entity to explain the phenomenon, which is patently silly.
Anyway, I'm extremely glad this guy didn't get the Republican nomination.
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