Another Moron Speaks His "Mind"

Another Creationist letter to the editor popped up on my Google newsfeed just now. It's pretty funny stuff, or it would be if it weren't symptomatic of what's happening to my country. It would've been funny as a bit on the Colbert Report, I suppose. The fact that it's real, that it isn't parody, makes it depressing.

What happened to America? How did our culture get infested with maggots like this? Something happened here; something went wrong and is still going wrong, and so we get people like Lyle Bloomfield of Elgin, Illinois who feel perfectly justified in voicing the most ignorant, foolish opinions to the public — because no matter how utterly stupid the voice, it can find supporters amid the rubble of America's intellectual ruin. I'm sure it helps when newspapers like The Daily Herald provide a forum to air these sorts of mental aberrations.

Evolution isn't really scientific, either

I have read some letters questioning Lisa Szatkowski's beating a dead horse in her Sept. 17 letter because she does advocate the teaching of creationism in the public schools. The Supreme Court has repeatedly stated this would be unconstitutional and illegal.

But I wonder what the Supreme Court would have said about teaching evolution had they been informed of the conspiracy to hide the facts that contradict previous beliefs concerning the evolution of mankind.

Let's start here, then. The Supreme Court didn't rule that Creationism couldn't be taught in schools because it was scientifically incorrect. It did so because teaching theology as fact in public schools violates the Constitutional separation of church and state. The ruling had nothing to do with the honesty of scientific inquiry. The Supreme Court doesn't rule on the use or misuse of scientific theories.

As far as these allegations of scientific cover-ups that we hear from Creationists, anti-vaccinationists, Holocaust deniers, UFO enthusiasts and ghost chasers, it's simply amazing that scientists ever get around to publishing anything at all. With all the studies that get published in the course of a given month, I can only surmise that people like Bloomfield envision every scientific journal on the planet as a work of fiction. It's astounding how prolific the production of this fiction has become and how scientists manage to make it all mutually supportive. Surely that would take great heaps of communications dating back over the last couple of centuries, and clearly Bloomfield and his fellow crackpots have been able to lay their hands on that evidence. Why, they must have reams of letters that have been sent between evolutionary biologists, astrophysicists and paleontologists over the years that clearly demonstrate this vast, international, centuries-old conspiracy to hush up all this evidence that contradicts biological evolutionary theory!

Well, OK, they must have dozens of such communiques, then.

What, not even a single one? Pathetic.

I refer the reader to the NBC documentary "The Mysterious Origin of Man."

This document revels evidence that any findings not fitting scientists' previous patterns have been systematically concealed.

I have to admit never having heard of this documentary, I thus did what most sane people do; I Googled it.

As it turns out, Bloomfield is referring to a documentary that last aired in 1996! It was narrated by Charlton Heston and the "scientists" included in the show were a bunch of crackpots without so much as a degree in the appropriate field. It was such an egregiously inaccurate and utterly irresponsible bunch of garbage that it has earned a permanent place in the annals of idiocy. The so-called documentary has been thoroughly and utterly debunked long since.

So this Bloomfield nutjob is referring to something he remembers seeing on television more than a decade ago and which included such noteworthy scientists as David Childress, a man who made his living writing books about everything from crystal-powered levitation devices to Hollow Earth rubbish. Surely, Bloomfield must be onto something worthwhile here!

The Supreme Court has ignored the fact that there are two sides of the coin. I suggest the reader read "Scientific Creation," copyrighted in 1974. The writers and their consultants, all scientists, number an impressive 13. All are professors at universities, all are educated people and all prescribe to creationism.

Wow, 13 people wrote something called "Scientific Creation" in 1974. That surely says something important. Yes, 13 is a truly impressive number, particularly for those among us who can't quite count to 20. Nonetheless, I can't find this piece, written more than three decades ago by Bloomfield's unnamed 13 scientists. I suspect most of them are now deceased, and if Bloomfield were actually inhabiting the same planet as the rest of us the thought that there have been numerous advances in all scientific fields since then. I suspect that even if one were to find Bloomfield "Scientific Creation" of 1974, it would look particularly ludicrous in the light of progress since then. Small example here: we couldn't do a thing with DNA in 1974. We knew it existed, but there wasn't anything like current technology to allow us to analyze a particular slice of genetic material.

I'm beginning to suspect that Lyle Bloomfield suffered some sort of oxygen deprivation sometime around 1996, but let's continue.

have heard it said "Evolution is time-tested." How can it be when evolutionists claim that it happened over millions of years? They can't have it both ways.

Ummmmmm... what? Something that happened over millions of years can't be time-tested? Evolutionary biology isn't millions of years old? This bit of rhetorical questioning seems to provide evidence for my Bloomfield-Oxygen Deprivation hypothesis.

Early scientists trusted that the missing link between ape and man would eventually turn up in future diggings.

Quite the opposite is happening. For decades, diggers have been uncovering human skulls, artifacts and stone tools dating back to the age of dinosaurs. No way do these fit Darwin's theory that all forms of life developed from earlier forms through a series of physical changes.

I see. So, according to Lyle Bloomfield, anthropologists are dead-set on hiding evidence supporting the existence of Fred Flintstone from the general public!

How early are these "early scientists," exactly? "Diggers" have been uncovering stone tools dating back to the time of the dinosaurs? Where... in Bloomfield's sock drawer?

Of course, the facts are nothing like this. I would throw out some point-by-point examples here, but if you aren't aware of them already, you probably haven't bothered reading this far and are already off to implore some deity to hurl lightning bolts at my CPU.

Evolution is not a science. It is based upon a belief : "The origin of life belongs in the category 'at least once phenomenon.' However improbable we regard this event, given enough time it will almost certainly happen at least once."

A phenomenon is something observed that can be explained scientifically, such as gravity. The "at least once" phenomenon can neither be observed nor explained. In fact, it is the product of an active imagination.

Ah, well this is a novel approach! It seems that Bloomfield isn't arguing just against evolution, he's arguing that life doesn't exist at all! Why, it all makes sense now. The existence of life is so improbably that it clearly couldn't have happened, and I have only been imaging that some crackpot from Elgin, IL ever wrote a letter to a newspaper in the first place. I made the whole thing up and lied to you about it, which doesn't matter anyway since you don't exist either. Since neither I nor you could possibly have ever existed, why are you wasting your imaginary time reading that non-existent blog entry? Why don't you go outside in the hallucinatory sunshine and throw the ball around with the dog you invented in your own unreal head?

Interesting that Bloomfield doesn't include things like invisible, omnipotent sky-gods poofing life into existence in this strange category of "at least once phenomena." Then again, we shouldn't expect much from a fellow who doesn't exist in the first place.

This is why I make the observation that evolution has feet of clay.

So why is it taught in schools? You tell me. But as long as it is taught, then certainly creationism should be taught also, so students may have an opportunity to choose one or the other.

And once again, the Supreme Court ruling wasn't about factuality; teaching Creationism violates separation of church and state because it would turn public schools into centers of religious indoctrination, and that's exactly what Bloomfield wants. More than this, though, it's absolutely wrong. There's no evidence for it and all the evidence in the world against it, at least by any standard by which we could scientifically consider something to be evidence. Teaching it in schools makes every bit as much sense as teaching that the sun orbits the earth or that the citizens of Atlantis road through the sky using crystal-powered levitation machines. Sound ridiculous? Bloomfield has already cited a "scientist" who promulgated exactly such views as one of the standards by which he reached his conclusion that evolutionary theory isn't valid, so why shouldn't he want such things to be taught to children?

But as long as our Supreme Court continues to ban the teaching of creationism, and as long as we have people that are no smarter than a fifth-grader, the theory of evolution will continue to be taught and consumed.

Yes, this means a lot coming from a guy who just a few sentences ago asserted that scientists are covering up the discovery of the leash with which Fred Flintstone walked his pet dinosaur and who pushes discredited decade-old TV shows and forgotten mid-1970's articles written by forgotten, and no doubt discredited, authors as evidence against scientific theory.

As long as we have people in this society who haven't gotten a fifth grade education, this society will continue to decay. Lyle Bloomfield points this out clearly and sadly, and he isn't close to being alone. After all, he's no worse off intellectually than any number of politicians, TV talkshow hosts, and authors, all of whom manage to earn a living precisely because there are still real dinosaurs like Bloomfield among us.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to go take a quick drive in my imaginary car to pick up a pack of phantasmagorical cigarettes with which to satisfy my non-existent craving for nicotine.

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