Dinosaurs and The Bible: A Creationist’s Fairy Tale

Much of the day is spent watching the Pennsylvania primary. The voting booths are now closed. And as of right now, Fox News and every other news channel known projects that Senator Hillary Clinton has won the primary election! More on this in a little bit.

UPDATE as of 9:11PM EST: CNN also project Hillary wins, too. By the amount of margin is yet to be tallied.

UPDATE as of 9:19 PM EST: Thus far, Hillary is leading Obama by having 53% of the votes while Obama has only 47% of the votes.

UPDATE as of 10:49 PM EST: Here an article from BBC news discussing details about Hillary’s primary win.

Hillary Clinton has beaten Democratic rival Barack Obama in a critical vote in the US state of Pennsylvania, according to partial results.

However, it is not yet clear how large her margin of victory will be. Analysts say she needs a big win to keep her campaign alive, but she disputes that.

Mr Obama had predicted he would lose but said he had made big progress in reducing Mrs Clinton’s initial lead.
With 56% of returns counted, Mrs Clinton leads Mr Obama by 54% to 46%.

More in the article.

Derec, one of the members of the Internet Infidels Discussion Forums, went and saw the movie today and just like what is predicted by people everywhere– the film sucks! Literally!

So I went and saw it today. No, I didn’t give Ben Stein any of my money - I bought a ticket to a different movie starting at the same time. There were about 25 people in the theater - for 7:30 showing on a Saturday in the Bible Belt it is not a tremendous success I would say.

It’s as bad as they say. People like Dembski were treated as mere interviewees despite the fact that Dembski worked closely with the project. At one point Ben Stein pretended he was unable to find Discovery Institute offices - because they were so small and he expected something the size of Pentagon he says. Pretty embarrassing.
Generally he created the impression he more or less stumbled across all these DI fellows he talked to. Lots of footage of Berlin Wall, and visits to Dachau and some Nazi camp where they killed disabled persons. Nothing original there - late D. James Kennedy and Ann Coulter already did that for that TV “documentary” on Darwin last year. Ben Stein interviewed Jonathan Wells who, even though he calls himself an IDist and works for DI, voiced pretty standard creationist positions about changes within. species vs. speciation - most IDists like Behe (conspicuously absent by the way, even though they did talk about the court cases) accepts at least some common descent between species. Ben Stein neglected to ask Wells about which he thought to be more preposterous: Darwinian evolution or the idea that HIV caused AIDS. I would like to hear the answer to that question.
Berlinski was especially annoying - slouching in his chair, arrogantly pronouncing that evolution is just a bunch of smoke because the idea of a species cannot be precisely and mathematically defined.

Oh, they did keep the “inner life of a cell” animation - I am curious how that will work out.

Hurry, hurry, hurry!! Step right up! Step right up and feast your eyes on the world’s foremost one time carnival To Hell with Expelled! Where every stinkin’ big-top size lie Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed propaganda film shamelessly promote gets fully exposed for who they really are! No pushing. No shoving. There’s room for all! The Admission’s free Come one! Come all and let’s have a ball!

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN! INTRODUCING TO HELL WITH EXPELLED BLOG CARNIVAL!!!!!!!!

*applause*

Thank you all for coming to this spectacular show

where the truth behind the film is exposed with a flow

and how worthy is it not for your popcorn and your cash

to be spend where projectors roll nothing but trash!

In our first performance, we shall marvel at these spectacular upcoming blockbuster films my sister site displays to give you all a better alternative to spend your wealth and popcorn on!

Now I bring you Blake Stacy! Observed as he exposes the producers’ hypocrisy in stealing an animated image and who’s accusing who of persecution!

Next, laugh and giggle at the clownish antics of the pirates as they sing, “Oh! Better Far To Live and Die (I am a Pirate King)” from Gilbert and Sullivan’s classic musical play The Pirates of Penzance!

Now, read about the review from Scientific American’s John Rennie!

“Another Review, This One in Scientific American

One of the first rules of science is this:

In order to replace a current theory which explains the facts with a new theory, the new theory must explain the facts better than the current theory.

The current Theory of Evolution explains the facts of evolution, and provides the framework for analyzing new facts as they are discovered. There is no reason at this point to replace the current theory except for one big bugaboo. The current Theory of Evolution has no part which appeals to a supernatural creator. It is satisfactorily independent of the need for a supernatural creator. So, the reason to try to remove this theory is to make room for the belief in a supernatural creator. This is in whole and in part the reason that Intelligent Design is proposed.

Okay, well, one can claim that the fossils are insufficient to demonstrate that evolution is natural process. One can claim that genetics are insufficient to point to common descent from a single bionesis. One can claim that the probabilities of common descent accounting for all of the forms of life present in the long past and in the current biosphere make the idea of natural selection so improbable as to be functionally impossible.

One can make those claims, but then one must address them factually and one can’t make a special pleading that the pathetic level of detail needed to demonstrate such claims is not the burden of the person making the claims. William Dembski has said this, in trying to make a case for the Design Inference. And this all leads me to John Rennie’s review of the movie Expelled; No Intelligence Allowed.”

Now off to Scienceblogs.com we go!

Where Greg Laden tells of a certain incident that acrobatically

raise the roof of the blogosphere with howls and laughs hysterically!

PZ Myers Gets Expelled Gains Sainthood!

Expelled! The Movie To Be Pulled From the Theatres Following Myers/Dawkins-Gate Screw-up!

And now the first handed account of the Expelled teleconference.

“We’re sick of being pushed around by the intelligentsia, although I’m one of the intelligentsia”. —Scientifically illiterate and arrogant fool Ben Stein

At 4pm today, I decided to waste an hour of my precious time to call in to Ben Stein’s teleconference on the Expelled theistard mockumentary.

It started out with IDiots yapping about how much publicity their s**** movie has been receiving recently (conveniently ignoring the fact that most of the recent publicity has been negative) and claiming that ‘Darwinism’ is a modern-day witch hunt. (No, evolutionary biology is NOT ‘Darwinism’). When was the last time you saw scientists burning the IDiots at the stake? As far as I know of, Michael Behe, for one, is a tenured professor at Lehigh. His publication record has been s**** since he went nutty, but he is still a tenured professor. The IDiots are obviously all about obfuscation, drama, lies and preaching to the choir. Epic fail.”

How’s this for a comparison?

Now Ken Perrott for your reading pleasure!

Expelled for supporting evolutionary science

The Darwinian behaviour of creationists

Expelled - no integrity exhibited

Expelled Bingo

Should Dawkins have been Expelled?

So what does Dawkins think of “Expelled”?

Expelled - the movies

Now here’s an (ahem!) “interesting” painting by Rob Wheatley. (Warning! Not for sensitive Christians!)

Better late than never! Here’s Blue Collar Scientist and Laelaps and their spectacular Exposure of how the film is oh, so bad that even the narrow-minded creationists look down on it.

First is a collection and excerpting of a dozen reviews of the movie
in the major press (glossy magazines, and big newspapers mostly):

http://bluecollarscientist.com/2008/04/18/some-expelled-reviews/

Second is a letter sent to me about the movie, which purports to show
that Expelled is anti-semitic and insulting to Holocaust victims and
survivors:

http://bluecollarscientist.com/2008/04/17/a-letter-about-the-anti-semitic-movie-expelled/

Third is a post about how Expelled is so extremist that it can’t even
win the endorsement of all creationist-minded Christians:

http://bluecollarscientist.com/2008/04/18/expelled-release-splits-christians/

From Laelaps: Ben Stein sez: It’s ok not to think.

And Now for the grand finale– An Entity and his collection of Expelled posts!

http://blog.darwincentral.org/2008/04/17/extras-extras/

Finding a group of authentic college kids too small, the producers of Expelled hired some extras to pretend to be students in a scene in the movie.

http://blog.darwincentral.org/2008/04/15/find-ben-steins-father/

Out of ten examples of vesicle transport animations linked to in a press release by Expelled, only one shares an uncanny resemblance to Expelled’s video.

http://blog.darwincentral.org/2008/03/25/ben-stein-expells-god/

This pic has gone viral, too bad we didn’t smack a “Darwin Central” logo on it! Hindsight is 20/20.

http://blog.darwincentral.org/2008/04/11/expelled-to-xvivo-up-yours/

Dembski opens mouth, inserts foot by saying that Expelled *meant* to copy the Harvard video, just not quite enough for it to be plagiarism. Oops.

http://blog.darwincentral.org/2008/03/01/charles-darwin-and-the-bicycle-riders/

More targeted at Discovery Institute than Expelled, but addresses the key theme of Expelled–the theory of evolution caused the Holocaust.

And that’s showbiz, folks! Enjoy! BTW: Be sure to put a banner link to this carnival on your site by copying (ctrl+c) and pasting (ctrl+v) on your blog and site!

Tonight at 8PM EST is the deadline for the carnival entires. Afterwards I won’t accept anymore entries. Tomorrow, at around 3PM EST, the carnival will commence and I will have all the entries posted for all to see how the IDists use the movie to spread stupid lies about evolution, Darwin, origins, history, and everything else in between.

In the meantime, The Panda’s Thumb has just posted a complete list of 24 main misconceptions and myths about evolution including myths about human evolution, bible inerrancy, morality, Darwin, and his legacy. Also, there are some new old documents and writings just added to The Complete Works of Charles Darwin, which now contains all of his unpublished manuscripts and documents that served as models for the creation of his most well known books such as the famous The Origin of Species and The Descent of Man.