On Saturday, 24 September, I'm going to be speaking to the Minnesota Atheists, 1:30-2:30, at the Roseville Public Library (2180 Hamline Ave. N., Roseville, MN). The announced title is "Unintelligent Design", but we came up with that a while back, when I was still a bit vague on what I was going to talk about. A better title now would be "Biology as a superior historical narrative"—I'm planning to tell some stories from evolutionary genetics, in the context of whether religion and science conflict (short answer: yes. And science is right.)

Just to irritate me, though…I mentioned the wacky religious component of my little town. A local church is bringing in some bozo named Brian Young of the Creation Instruction Association to give a talk on, you guessed it, their idiotic version of history. He's a young earth creationist who wanders the country babbling this kind of nonsense:

First and foremost, we believe in the Triune God; the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as the Creator of the universe and Savior of all who believe in Christ. We believe in a literal 6 day, 24 hour creation and an earth only a few thousand years old is vital to Christianity (not salvation). We believe that science accurately supports what is clearly stated in Scripture and we accept these Scriptures as the inerrant Word of God.

I was salivating at the idea of going to this, and it wasn't because they were serving lunch. Look at this guy's poster (pdf)—he's going to talk about carbon dating, cave men in the bible, and dinosaurs living concurrently with humans. This is classic, old-style clueless creationism, and I really wanted a good afternoon's laugh, even if they are charging admission (creationism is a real racket, I tell you).

Then I saw the date: Saturday, 24 September, 10-2. Bastards. They scheduled it for the day I'm going off to talk to a bunch of atheists, sensible people who already know better. If any Morris people are going, let me know and I'll loan you my precious copy of The Counter-Creationism Handbook ^{(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll)}. I won't even object if you bring it back with a few dents and bloodstains.

I mentioned that I was brought up Lutheran. The church I used to attend, though, was a low-key, reasonable sort of thing, like something you'd find at Lake Wobegon. They read the Bible and sponsored missionaries in Africa and had a Sunday School where we'd memorize verses and tell stories on a felt board, and yeah, we'd memorize the catechism and learn church doctrine. They never said a word about science, though—that just wasn't their schtick, and I'd have left the church even sooner if they'd started foaming at the mouth over empirically false gobbledygook about the way the world works. This speaker is being sponsored by Zion Lutheran Church of Morris. I admit to feeling a little regret at seeing my former sect degraded to this level of ignorant imbecility.