Shorter Ken Ham Supporters: Magnets, How Do They Work? [View all]

[phantom power]

photo essay from Juggalo Nation....

I was skeptical about the Bill Nye/Ken Ham debate because I tend to fall on the side of believing that debating things that are fact just gives credence to lies. Also, the fact that the Christian right is obsessed with debating—seriously, Christian right homeschooling is completely absorbed with teaching kids how to debate—suggests to me that they’ve determined that a debate is a good format for elevating lies so that they seem truer. I’ve never had a more secular conservative offer to “debate” me, but you get those offers from Christian conservatives all the time. I suspect the main reason they love it is because the debate format leaves little to no room for fact-checking, and most audience members, especially conservatives, struggle to tell the difference between an argument and an assertion. (Indeed, that’s why one of my favorite games on Twitter is asking conservatives to explain what the latest talking point they’ve been fed by Fox News means. They can never do. I can usually do a better job of it, and I don’t even believe it.) The debate format is good if the audience understands these limitations, but, in my experience, Christian conservatives love it because they understand the audience doesn’t understand these limitations. Therefore, the only good one I’ve ever watched was one put on by a philosophy department at a university, mainly because it was clear the creationist was out of his league with a group of philosophy and science students who can very well tell the difference between evidence, argument, and assertion. I have zero doubt, therefore, that the price of injecting Bill Nye’s common sense explanations of scientific facts was that Christian conservatives walked away feeling validated in their lunacy.

But Matt Stopera of Buzzfeed really managed to extract an unvarnished good from the whole thing, which is to use the occasion to expose the self-satisfied intellectual incuriosity of the right. He asked the Ham supporters at the debate to write little notes to the reality-based world, telling us what they think we need to hear. It was a great project, because the contrast between their self-satisfaction and their idiocy is just so horrible it turns around and becomes wonderful again. It reminded me of nothing more than the Insane Clown Posse’s infamous demand that magnets are a miracle because no one knows how they work. Indeed, many of the “questions” that the creationists seem to think were slam dunk gotchas are just as easily resolved by a Google search as the question of magnet magic.