Not Bad For A Deaf Guy.

One of the most uplifting and best pieces ever written. Only Lemmy could make it better and then perhaps dear old Ludwig van could hear it.

Shame the last few seconds are missing. Lets not spoil it though with silly theistic arguments form beauty.

Sad News

My Gran died last night. She was born in 1916, and although she had been physically deteriorating for a few years, she was still mentally sharp until a few weeks ago when she had a stroke. We are all saddened by it. We were expecting it, and I think this gave us time to prepare (something I don't think the false hope of prayer would do). There is also relief that it was not a prolonged affair for her. Right now, I am filling myself with happy memories of her, which is not difficult as she was always kind and did not have a bad bone in her body. I usually have some rolls and bacon with brown sauce for breakfast on a Saturday. Strangely, it has always been something that reminds me of my Gran. When I was a kid and we visited my Gran and Granddad, she always gave us bacon rolls with brown sauce – cooked on my granddad’s camping stove because I liked that. I also think of her whenever I have a bowl of Heinz tomato soup – whenever I was off school with the flu or some other scabby child disease, she would often look after me when my parents were at work and give me tomato soup. I think it’s the feeling of being cared for by her that I associate with these foods.

I feel particularly sad for my mum and dad as they were very close to her. She always called my Dad the son she never had. I also feel sad that she will never get to see my sister’s first child, who is due in a few weeks. That would have meant so much to her (and my sister). I don’t really think it has sunk into any of us yet, but it has impressed upon me that life is valuable and that we should live it to the full. There is no time to waste what we have, and my Gran wouldn’t want any of us moping about. She would definately tell us off for that.

The First Cause

Theist argument:

Premise 1: All things that exist have a cause.

Premise2: God does not have a cause.

Conclusion: God is the first cause.


However, we have two contradictory premises here. Premise 1 is also on shaky ground. Where is the evidence that everything needs a cause? Then we have the Casimir effect where particles can just spontaneously come into existence.

Premise 2 is equally shaky. Just defining something does not impart it with existence of a particular set of values; for example square circles are pink. Square circles cannot exist, and therefore can not be pink. Why should defining god make him any more real?

So, lets re write that argument and keep it logically consistent.

Premise 1: All things that exist have a cause.

Premise2: God does not have a cause.

Conclusion: Therefore God does not exist.

The theist now has to abandon this argument, or concede that God does not exist (If he wants to maintain consistency).

The Beginnings Of An Old Earth Model

There have been many attempts to date the age of the Earth. At one extreme Aristotle believed that it was of infinite age, whereas at the other, the modern day young earth creationists claim the earth to be only a few thousand years old. Probably the most famous estimate being that of Bishop James Ussher, who not only came up with a number of years, but also the day and time of “creation”: Sunday 23 October 4004 BCE; just after tea time. He reached this figure by adding up the genealogies of the bible. I have always wondered how he managed to reach that figure as the genealogies of Jesus (found in Matthew 1 and Luke 3) are irreconcilably contradictory, with Luke also adding an additional 15 generations.
A major problem here though, is that it assumes the bible must be true. If the bible is not true, then the foundation of that figure is swept away in a flood of biblical proportions. Proper independent means show this age to be laughably false. Current estimates are that the earth is around 4.5 billion years old. This means that the creationists are out by a mere 4 499 993 996 years. The order of magnitude of this error is equivalent to thinking the distance from New York to Los Angeles is only 28 feet.

James Hutton was one of the first to realise that it takes a long time to erode mountains and form new rocks. Perhaps one of his most significant discoveries was the angular unconformity at Siccar point on the Berwickshire coast. An unconformity is a junction between rock depositions that has a significant temporal gap between the layers. An angular unconformity is one where the underlying (older) rocks are tilted at an angle and overlaid with younger more horizontal sediments. In the case of Siccar point, the older Silurian rocks (boxed in red in figure 1a) have been turned on their side by massive tectonic movements. This formed a mountain range as the ancient Iapetus ocean closed, resulting in Scotland and England joining together.

Figure 1a

Older upturned rocks in foreground and on right. Near horizontal younger rocks in distance and on left. In both cases, erosion has exposed the beding planes.

As the Silurian mountains near Siccar eroded and formed the younger Devonian sandstones (boxed in blue above) that now lie on top of the upturned older strata (chunks of the older Silurian rocks can still be seen in the sandstone matrix (See Figure 2)). Hutton reasoned that this would take more than a few thousand years and this work began to challenge the authority of the bible and earned Hutton the title of “father of geology”.

Figure 2

Sediments on the floor of the Iapetus ocean become rocks. These are buckled and turned on their sides as the ocean close, forming fold mountains. These mountains erode and become covered in younger sediments, forming the unconformity.

A Very Bad Case For Design

Creationists have a lovely way of shooting themselves in the foot by taking the worst possible example to try and justify their case. This recent comment (found here) exemplifies this beautifully

“To know something and to assume to know something is different. Example, one lives alone and he/she goes home and just saw that dinner table is served with all kinds of fruits and food. Now I am thinking and conclude that somebody prepared all the food and served it. But Steve and Dawkins ASSUME that all the food came up there by chance and Luck. This world with their related seasons which act like a servant is a very big food stale where we eat all the food according to the our body needs. Vitamin C or D etc. Who created human beings created the soil where all food fruits and veggies can grow and who created the soil, created the sunlight and rain that all cooperate with each other to serve us.”


Here is the real problem (other than the obvious misunderstanding of evolution and the absurd analogy): Our ancestors once made vitamin C for themselves. They did not need to ingest it. We lack a functional gene for an enzyme called L-gulonolactone oxidase. This forms the last step in the production of ascorbate (vitamin C) from glucose. We do however contain a pseudogene for this enzyme, which does not function because of acquired mutations. This presents a problem for the creationist.

The problem is that design requires being made to fulfil a purpose. Creationism boils down to an organism must be designed because it fulfils a purpose and all its parts are created to fit together to perform that purpose (that and a lack of imagination). So, here we have something that has no purpose and its only reasonable explanation is that it was present in a functional form in our ancestors (it probably became inactive about 40 million years ago).

Reductionism is a common theme in biology. If we don’t need a gene, there is no selective advantage in keeping it. There may even be a slight energetic advantage in losing it. Genes are lost through random mutations, and there are many examples of this occurring. It is not just the L-gulonolactone oxidase gene that we have lost; mice and humans have about 200 “genes” for a family of olfactory (scent) genes called the V1r family. Mice have about 160 functional ones. Humans have only 5! Whales and dolphins have no functional members. The non functional ones have become fossilised in our genome; they are slowly decaying. Gene loss is seen at an extreme level in parasites, as their hosts provide much of what they need for them. The record holder is Mycobacterium leprae; it has about 1600 functional genes and approximately 1100 decaying fossil genes.

It is not just genes that are lost, but structural features too. Examples include the toes of horses that can be seen gradually disappearing in successive rock layers, our appendix and the limbs of proto-snakes (Figure 1).

An interesting recently described example of this is the eyes of blind cave fish. It was found that functional eyes could be restored by interbreeding populations isolated in different caves. This is important. The fact that they have been isolated from each other means that the blindness evolved independently in the different populations. The fact that cross breeding some populations restored sight in the offspring means that different genes are responsible for the blindness in different populations of the same species – surely design would mean this should not be possible – as the perfect designer would chose the one way to make these fish blind – unless of course he wanted to make it look like evolution – just like chromosome 2.

One final point on vitamin C: inerrant biblical literalists believe that all animals were intended to eat plants and fruit (genesis 1:29-30). However, these foods contain vitamin C, so our ancestors would not need genes to synthesise it.

As one can see below, the teeth of Carcharocles megalodon are beautifully designed to peel grapes (sarcasm in case creationists are reading).

Father Ted

Thanks to Topov the Monkey (you big bollocks) for reminding me of this. It contains the classic line "That's nearly as mad as that thing you told me about the loaves and fishes! "

Enjoy!