PZ Myers Comes to Purdue

The local Non-Theist Society had PZ Myers as a guest speaker today at CL 50. If you are not familiar with him he runs a very popular blog called Pharyngula and is a professor of biology. His talk was entitled A Few Things I’ve Learned from Creationists. Due to flight delays the talk started about 20 minutes late but no one seemed to mind. The basic structure of his talk was outlining several attributes he ascribes to Creationists, all of them highly negative, such as disingenuous. He would then go on to explain how creationists fit this description and how many of the ideas they try to push have been flat out proven wrong. While, on the surface this may look like a fairly arrogant way to prove a point, it actually was not that bad and fairly funny at many points. Initially I did not know what to expect as I am not familiar enough with his blog to know exactly what kind positions he holds. To my relief he did not do what I have seen many other atheists do, that is take all theists, mainly Christians, throw them all in a predefined box and proceed to rip it apart. His talk seemed to only focus on those Creationists who are attempting to make a mockery of science. He did not toss the rest of us in with them. I also enjoyed his sense of humor which was very light if a little blunt. Overall I thought it was a very interesting talk, his biology examples were really neat since I understand very little of that material being an engineer, and was well worth attending.