Wednesday, March 10, 2010

Dimwits, Denial and Dementia

Einstein's theory of General Relativity has undergone a hundred years of testing and once again its predictions of the way mass interacts everywhere in the Universe has won out over a competing hypothesis that attempted to dismiss the idea of Dark Matter and Dark energy that seems so contrived and ugly but steadfastly resists debunking. Science is about constant questioning and constant refinement of measurements, and so it will continue to be tested and mankind will continue to try to work out a unified theory of how the universe operates on the very large and very small scales -- perhaps forever.

Likewise, the Theory of Evolution has survived all challenges and has steadily explained more and more about how life changes over time through naturally occurring processes and algorithms. The gigantic amount of new geological data argues irrefutably for our planet being billions of years old. In fact, these sciences may be much better understood and documented than the physics we all tend to accept, yet one set of theories has been under attack by people who deny all the data and pretend that it's a hoax perpetrated by scientists for unknown reasons that probably have to do with invisible sentient entities in dubious battle.

Of course quantum mechanics and relativistic theories of space-time, matter, energy and gravity are much harder to comprehend and to demonstrate to the vast majority of people but you don't see anyone building museums and amusement parks or wasting their time lobbying school boards in favor of a Jerusalem centered universe or insisting on the presence of a "firmament" or an invisible kingdom full of invisible but powerful creatures so close to us that one could build a tower and like Jack with his beanstalk, walk right in. The Bible affirms this world view and certain desperate people insist that the Bible proves a 6000 year old universe even though Einstein and the geologists can prove otherwise beyond the shadow of a sane doubt. I imagine a fifth grader could explain to you how few stars would be in the sky in a 6000 year old universe or why a million years of ocean bed lies at the top of the Himalayas.

Confusing isn't it? But then you'd expect the actions of the confused to be that way and you'd expect the people whose lives are filled with the pain of confusion and the ignominy of stupidity to act with anger against a world view that defies their ability to understand. And so they do.

Any fool can think he's putting himself on a par with Ed Witten, not by disproving his math or offering better solutions that M theory, but simply by denying, by insisting without evidence that it's all a hoax. For the idiot, it's like being born again, only this time with a brain. I deny, therefore I'm smart.

Every year, students from Liberty University, a fake educational institution run by deranged liars for the Bible make a trip to Washington to look at a watered down for public consumption display of evidence for the origin of species - and scoff and snicker like George Bush at the Louvre. With wild and wanton ignorance of geology and all the accurate methods we have to date fossils, minerals and rock strata,

Lauren Dunn, 19, a second-year biology student at Ding-Dong Liberty University opined of an early mammilian fossil:

"210 million years, that's arbitrary. They put that time to make up for what they don't know."
She knows only what her mentors teach: irrefutable proof is nothing and if mathematics argues with legend, mathematics is a hoax.

Now here's the lesson in evolution: there is no known mechanism weeding out the genes for such defective brains in our species and in fact they tend to breed and to succeed better at reckless breeding than our Newtons and Einsteins and Feynmans and in ages past they would kill such people and still wish they could. My question is this, will it be our whole species that will look at the rubble of civilization while gnawing on bones and picking lice or will it only be Americans?

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