TL:DR

Well you got me. I talked about your post on another internet forum, and some comments expressed equal confusion, some were mad that I brought the subject up as if to suggest it was a negative revelation, and some thought it wasn't real.

To be honest, I did have an inkling it was fake, but I believed it because I respect you. Now that's not me sticking my nose where it doesn't belong. I'm simply saying that I respect your opinions and your criticisms. When you post articles on your site for us to read, you're asking for us to consider them respectfully and even question our own judgments.

Irony seems to have trouble translating to the page.

The information you posted in the Creationist article is information that some people completely believe. So in a world of many possible beliefs, it's hard to see the irony.

It sounds pessimistic even as I ask it, but did you prepare this blog entry BEFORE you posted the article, in preparation for the firestorm? I got the satire immediately - the bit about a 600-year old Noah was the dead giveaway, even though it's what Young Earth Creationists literally believe. But I've been expecting this blog, in which you had to explain it to the rest of the world, for days. But it's too bad that it has to exist at all.

Ebert: The entry was only written today, after it became obvious that a majority of readers took it at face value, and I was being described as a Creationist or a mental case. I guess that means the original tem succeeded beyond my wildest dreams.

I recently received a political forward, obviously biased and twisted, with a note at the bottom saying certain sites you could verify the data at. Well, the data was completely made up and didn't come from those sources; but the message continues to spread; apparently citing some sites as sources makes people more credible.

A moderately good point (made often---though perhaps not vociferously enough---in many circles). However, it smacks a bit of the "gry" joker in one of my favorite XKCD comics: http://xkcd.com/169/

Bravo, Mr. Ebert, for the wise and poignant lesson of critical thinking. You did the smartest thing: you taught us a lesson through application rather than merely through abstraction. For the record, I admit that I fell for it, though I was one of the ones who felt your site was hacked. I read others' guesses on this and simply assumed it. I was wrong, and it shames me to say it because I've always read your commentaries (not merely your movie reviews) with supreme interest and focus.

I'll not allow myself to do that again.

Sincerely,
Peter Z.

I'm just afraid that we've transformed this culture, collapsed it down to a xylophone shape, and nobody has the time, the inclination, the temperament, even the desire to see what lives within those folds.

Let's wipe away ALL the invisible quotation marks (god, to be part of the 'irony' generation, and to have no taste for the stuff, such have been my days) and state something obvious: your TV critic did not recognize the line from HAMLET, and it doesn't matter, because 10,000 of his readers won't either, and will think its funny that the critic makes a goofy of those "elitist" words... the fact that it is indeed from the greatest written work of western culture (500 years and still at the top of the pops!) would not sway them if they knew. Because they believe that they are righteous, these Invaders, these "new people" who have no time for details, no interest in ambiguity, and can only afford to take everything at face value as they hurtle down their highways. All things pander to this new uni-mind, and I say again, they brim with what must be righteousness.

I could say this to a 25 year old. I could say, "You know 'Hamlet', that play that they shoved down your throat in 10th grade? It's actually a riveting piece of writing that you will see yourself in, throughout, feel your living in, perhaps more than in any other written thing you would be able to find."

They would say, "How could someone who lived that long ago possibly write something that relates to my life?"

And I could say, "Some things never change."

And they would say, "But i live in the modern era. 2008 isn't about moping and worrying! It's about being positive! One love!"

And I would say, "There can be much positive in a dour work of art. Much you can learn about empathy and soul."

And they would say, "I've got enough drama in my own life. Have you seen those gas prices? I don't need this Hamlet business."

And at that point I would walk away defeated, because I realize this is probably the same person who can't relate to 'Under The Boardwalk' by The Drifters either, because it's 40 years old - and what could someone in the early 60's possibly know about living such a fantastic life in such a fantastic age as we do?

And I might mutter, "Forty years don't mean much in terms of human evolution. Maybe you also won't read a fortune cookie if it comes to the table too long after the check, because what could someone in the back of the restaurant five minutes ago possibly know about you, your life, your troubles, your fabulous friends, in this amazing NOW?"

Now, I might agree about the cookie in general, but if there's one disease that has this culture in its grasp, it's utter, yawning apathy... and not just apathy about the big game or the big election, but about the human condition. This may be a failing of the school system, or just a failing of our attention spans, but nobody took my generation by the hand and led them to Kurosawa or Pete Seeger... and good, because what could Kurosawa or Pete Seeger or Edith Wharton possibly know about what it's like to be a human being in this so fabulous, super-speedy 2008?

We've finally reached the future! "This is our time!", the dispassionate shout, "and we choose not to notice all the interesting ways humans can be different than each other, in conversation, in art, none of that! 'Satire'? Oh, I'm so sick of satire! Every time I don't like a movie and someone tells me I didn't get it because it was satire, I just want to slap him in his smug face!"

And so back to that list of useless dead people, who have no possible idea about the amazing human adventure of 2008,and could offer no possible comfort from beyond the grave. Everything is miniature, and everything is fast, and if death carried you away before this wonderful age of all-inclusive cultural ignorance (why actually learn about it when they can just install Wikipedia into my phone?), they you lose, sucker!

And they fall away: Buster Keaton, S.J. Perelman, Kafka, Christ... what could those knuckle-draggers ever know about faster and faster, smaller and smaller? What, are they gonna help me figure out what do when my friend Tony does that one thing I don't like? Puh-leeeezze!

Thank you, Mr. Ebert. (no, there are no quotation marks around this post, I promise)

Roger, this is so poignant. You've expertly summed up a major problem that afflicts us today - even if you stumbled into it by being overtly misunderstood. I think it has something to do with the impersonal interactions we have via the internet. Even the most sarcastic digs are bound to be taken at face value by someone either because they (a) don't have a nose for sarcasm or (b) will themselves to credulity for the sake of an argument (that may not yet have begun). Besides, nobody wants to put blatant "winks" on their sarcasm. In person a little shrug goes a long way. I'd love to say that this posting will actually change some things, but obviously that's unlikely. Maybe we just need a referee in charge of the internet. But then when would he get to have any ambiguity? Or any fun, for that matter?

wonderful... an excellent, but strangely played game. It's easy for me to say now that I didn't believe it - luckily, on Reddit, several comments pointed out other articles written by Ebert that defused the recent post.

But an interesting experiment - we HAVE become too sensitive to our environment, taking things at face value. Why don't we question things?

I think, one reason, might be that it's become so easy to wallow in your own opinions. You can easily find other people like you on the Internet, and only read websites that publish the content that you want to read. We rarely encounter people from the other side of the tracks and are unable to see them for what they say.

I didn't read the article as straight satire, nor did I read it as your own personal beliefs. It was just a simple outline and explanation of what exactly creationists believe and what is repeated in churches across the country. I told my mom at dinner tonight to read it because she didn't get the Sarah Palin dinosaur joke on SNL last night. She had no idea that creationism had become so embraced (accepted as truth) and detailed (convoluted).

I thought the irony was pretty obvious. Our sense of irony is dulled in an age when we have a vice presidential candidate with ... oh sorry, forgot the no politics rule. But let's face it, there is a lot of irony about the person I won't mention.

Actually, Roger, there are Creationists that believe God created the world in stages of evolution, so what you thought to be ironic ("Evolution is God's intelligent design") was not necessarily so. Knowing your Darwinian tendencies (not to mention Adaptation being the latest Great Movie) I didn't, however, believe you could seriously have become a Creationist. I am a Creationist, and while I'm not sure I would applaud you for posting such an article (since it essentially serves the same purpose as an article against Creationism)I do hope that perhaps you learned something from the writing of it.

I thought the irony was pretty obvious. Our sense of irony is dulled in an age when we have a vice presidential candidate with ... oh sorry, forgot the no politics rule. But let's face it, there is a lot of irony about the person I won't mention.

The thing about irony is that it assumes that everyone else is already in on the joke. In order for the joke to work, in other words, the first assumption has to be that you don't mean what you're saying. And the problem with that assumption is that there are people out there who honestly *do* believe what you're saying. I did get the point of your article, but that's because (i) I'm familiar with the rest of your writing and (ii) I don't trust anybody anyway, so I was already primed to doubt what you were saying.

Point being, it's harder to see the invisible quotation marks when you've seen the same thing said by so many people who weren't using them. As a tool to convey humour and drama, I'm right behind irony and satire all the way; however, I'm not sure how much of a purpose they serve as a tool for debate, and suspect that their use adds an extra alienating level of meaning and simply serves to preach to the already-converted.

To be fair, this may be because I used to work in a customer service position. Not that the company was in any way perfect, but frequently I found myself on the phone with people who genuinely, *genuinely* did not understand why a 30-day money-back guarantee did not guarantee them their money back on a product that they'd purchased five years ago. After several months of this... okay, years' worth of months... I could feel my own senses of irony -- both my ability to use and to perceive it -- diminishing. After dealing with people incapable of dealing with irony for so long, I was becoming incapable of irony myself. (Or, to put it another way, I was adapting to my environment.)

Allow me a moment to take an example here from recent memory.

A few years back, there was a large outpouring of outrage over a website. The subject of the site? The Bonsai Kitty. Yes, someone created web page on how to create your very own bonsai kitty. Despite being clearly (and cleverly) satirical in nature, the animal-rights activists were up in arms over it. Anyone who went to the site would have seen that it was hardly serious in nature, but for some that satire went zipping past without connecting. They honestly believed that this was serious, the credulity dropping by the side of the information superhighway.

The concept of satire requires the ability to see that the artist/actor/web designer is clearly grinning behind a mask. Be it Spitting Image (and their laser sharp skewering of the world at that time) or the works of Will Rogers, the key is being able to see behind the mask at what they're looking at, and why they see it differently. But I think today satire is something that is falling by the wayside, and the ability to do something satirical in nature more difficult. It is troubling when satire is being viewed as insulting (which it is by its very nature) and people are unwilling to accept the humor inherent in it.

Maybe it's because I'm a long-time reader, but I though the irony was pretty obvious. Our sense of irony is dulled in an age when a vice presidential candidate from ... oh sorry, forgot the no politics rule. But let's face it, she is pretty ironic. Or he.

I had a feeling the article was an example of Poe's Law, because I knew you'd expressed your support for science many times in the past. And there were passages in the piece that could only have been satirical.

As a rock-solid pro-science evolution supporter, I think you've done a service here. Because you've reminded us how easily we can overreact, just like anyone else. As rationalists, it's important not to get too complacent...especially with yourself!

But I will say, in a brief defense, that if there was an overreaction by a lot of science bloggers and like-minded people, well, it can only be a reflection of the dismay we all feel at seeing proper science education not merely undermined but deliberately torn to shreds by religious ideologues and promoters of pseudoscience and those with a pure hatred of knowledge itself, who sneer at you as "elitist" if you display even a hint of that thar highfalutin book-larnin'. This election year, the GOP has chosen as a vice-presidential candidate a woman who thinks the earth is 6000 years old and that the founding fathers wrote the Pledge of Allegiance.

As America loses a whole generation of young minds that might otherwise have opened up new frontiers in scientific discovery, our nation will fall farther and farther behind. We're currently dependent on foreign powers for our energy. Next, will it be medicine? Or any other kind of life-sustaining advance that only science can bring us? Because over here, we've forgotten how to learn, only how to obey authority and memorize dogma with no regard to how true or false it may be?

So yeah. Any apparent promotion of antiscience by a respected prominent figure, and we might get a little jerky in the knee. Good on you to spoof us out of our malaise.

My instincts told me that it was satirical, but I was still a little confused. With all your references to evolution and Darwinism in your reviews of X-Men and just about every movie with some sort of creature or monster that you couldn't be a creationist. I also thought the thing about the moose was a dead giveaway (Personally, I thought it was a reference to a certain current public figure who will go unmentioned at this time). The only question I had was, "Why?" I was trying to find a context for it, but I couldn't.
This led me to have some doubts about whether or not it was satirical. I was also worried that others might not spot the "invisible quotation marks" as you put it. The very first sentence says that should be "discussed in schools as an alternative to the theory of evolution". I know that thousands of jaws dropped at that one.
I think people will come to realize that it was satire, especially now that you've cleared things up a little. But, I think the absence of context caused a lot of the confusion.

Actually, Roger, there are Creationists that believe God created the world in stages of evolution, so what you thought to be ironic ("Evolution is God's intelligent design") was not necessarily so. Knowing your Darwinian tendencies (not to mention Adaptation being the latest Great Movie) I didn't, however, believe you could seriously have become a Creationist. I am a Creationist, and while I'm not sure I would applaud you for posting such an article (since it essentially serves the same purpose as an article against Creationism)I do hope that perhaps you learned something from the writing of it.

Actually, Roger, there are Creationists that believe God created the world in stages of evolution, so what you thought to be ironic ("Evolution is God's intelligent design") was not necessarily so. Knowing your Darwinian tendencies (not to mention Adaptation being the latest Great Movie) I didn't, however, believe you could seriously have become a Creationist. I am a Creationist, and while I'm not sure I would applaud you for posting such an article (since it essentially serves the same purpose as an article against Creationism)I do hope that perhaps you learned something from the writing of it.

Having read enough of your reviews and other writings to know your stance regarding creationism and science, I knew the Q&A wasn't supposed to be taken seriously, but I was puzzled why it appeared without any sort of context - though now I can see that would have defeated the purpose of this experiment entirely.

The problem with satire in the vein of certain-minded groups such as creationists is that the parody often becomes indistinguishable from the works of those who honestly believe what they are espousing.

That aside, I think part of the problem is that in the course of trying to be an ironic generation, we (Generation X onwards) have forgotten, or never bothered to learn, what irony actually is.

Have you ever seen someone hold their hand up in the middle of your exaggerated story to say "I just wanna make sure... you're joking, right?" I think (or would hope) that that was what the majority of those replies intended to determine.

I completely agree that it is a problem that we've reached a point where we even need to stop the conversation to verify that satire is in fact satire. But I think that problem is a result of the many times when we've stopped a conversation and found out that the person wasn't joking. It's like the spread of the aliens in Invasion of the Body Snatchers... We don't know who has been compromised. We're looking out for your well being.

It's a different time for young people. The country seems to be becoming more religulous.

Granted I did not send you one of those said emails. But the fact that I have to say that indicates how easy it is to think I'm one of "them".

In some cases, I suspect irony is being overlooked deliberately rather than mistakenly.

For instance, in your case, it makes a more interesting story that will drive more hits and more comments to say that Ebert gave "two thumbs down to evolution" than to give a considered reading of your original essay and decide that it might have a touch of irony about it.

Similarly, I know politics is banned here but the only conclusion I can make about the whole "lipstick on a pig" controversy is that many people deliberately chose to take Obama's statement literally in order to score political points.

Mr. Ebert,

As always, my hat off to you. Or at least my hair, descending in formal shagginess. I DID catch your ruse, but I think you're hit the nail right on the head. I'm 28, part of this weird generation that is not quite X and not quite Facebook. I believe fully that something strange has happened to our sense of perspective. Irony has much to do with it. Ask so many young people what and who they like, and it occupies some strange place between irony and straight-facedness. The Janeane Garofalo X-ers ahead of me could always know what they believed even as they sneered at you. And the lions of the 70s definitely felt a deep angst. But now, the line between sincerity, irony, and anything else has become a nasty bilge of undifferentiated and boring fun.

A very brilliant man died last week (on my birthday actually). His name was David Foster Wallace. He warned us very strongly about this very thing.

Listen, this is a fun one for you...

Cars in Heaven... (this works with any object, my favorite is cars). Oh... I don't have answers for these.

Q: Do they have cars in heaven?
Q: If not, why not? Wouldn't they help to get around?
Q: If so... what kind?
Q: Did God have to wait for humans to invent them before they got them?
Q: What kind of cars do they have? Would they all be luxury cars? Or would some people have Camrys and Volvos?
Q: If God had cars before us... did he teach us how to make them?
Q: What do they run on? Is there enough gas in heaven or are they electric?
Q: If they run on gas, will we run the risk of deteriorating the atmosphere of heaven and undoing the creation of the universe?

Ebert: I hope this doesn't offend anyone: A Mercedes-Benz drives up to the pearly gates. St. Peter telephones God, who says, "Put them with the Episcopalians." Then a van jammed with kids. "Put them with the Catholics." Then a Prius. "Put them with the Unitarians. They only think they have a car."

Thank you, Mr. Ebert. I've been reading your reviews for nearly 30 years -- and it never would have occurred to me that your piece was meant to do anything other than point out the absurdity of creationist beliefs. I saw the headline to the "Adaptation" review and made the connection to your timing of the piece.

After reading it, I printed it and gave it to my 15-year-old daughter to read, with no comment other than "Look what Roger wrote today. This is interesting." She got it, too.

I don't know what's with some of your readers. I've never felt a need to go to some blog to read and write and about what you've written, but this time I wish I had. Wait -- no I don't. It just would have been a frustrating waste of time. Time that should be spent watching great movies, and reading your great reviews. Reviews that so often move me to contemplate life, the universe, and everything.

Thank you for every review and article. I am one of those who have read considerably more than 100 of them.

The problem isn't that people can't sense irony. The problem is that creationists routinely trigger the "oh, that's got to be a joke... wait, they're SERIOUS?" irony detection in any rational person. Over and over, they write stuff that HAS to be a joke. And it turns out they really believe in nonsense, and deliberately fabricate lies to explain any contradictions between their nonsense and evidence.

For anyone familiar with creationism, it's become impossible to make a parody that won't be mistaken for real creationism.

The creationists didn't complain or notice, because you looked like one of them, and by definition of still being creationists, they lack the critical thinking skills or sense of humor to understand it.

Worst of all, there are perfectly rational people who do go crazy and become theists and creationists. It's especially common in old people who are in poor health. You presented a good impression of a guy who'd finally lost his marbles.

I join many other readers in saying that I was confused. I didn't automatically assume you had become a Creationist, but it seemed possible. To paraphrase a closing line in one of your reviews ("Spartan"), it seemed just about as possible as anything else. Movies, those great windows into human nature, have taught me to appreciate that any person can change most radically against what others may expect.

And who taught me to see movies that way in the first place? You did, of course.

But Roger, this is kinda like what happened when your students argued about the ending of "Being There." One kid argued that Peter Sellers walked on a pier, and not water itself. You said, "The movie presents us with an image, and while you may discuss the meaning of the image it is not permitted to devise explanations for it."

I know, words aren't images. But you presented us with a straightforward discussion of Creationism that began with the words, "should be taught in schools as an alternative to evolution." It was neither a ringing endorsement of Creationism or a negative analysis. But be honest, it appeared closer to the former, didn't it?

I hadn't seen the article till now, but when I went back and read it just now, it's fairly obvious that it was ironic (and I'll confess to being a Creationist myself).

Did Buckman have trouble with Suresh's quotation of Yeats' "Second Coming," or was he able to figure that one out by the title of the episode?

Mr. Ebert, you seemed to have racked up more Loki points for any evolution/creation writing with the possible exception of the Objective: Ministries website that is routinely mistaken for being real. Congratulations, a job very well done.

Folks, even ignoring Ebert's previous pro-science statements, the satire should have been obvious even though most of it was superficially similar to creationist literature, the emphasis was such to make it look silly. By the end of it though, it was saying things that no real Young-Earth Creationist would say. No YEC would imply the Bible has contradiction which was the message of the how long the flood lasted answer. (It is almost like Ned Flanders saying he obeys even the parts of the Bible that contradicted the other parts.) After all that would defeat the whole point of being a YEC: that the Bible has no errors and that its history and "science" must be taken as literal truth. And creationists would never use "unverified reports" to refer to their own "evidence."

There were stylistic differences as well. What creationist would have answered the what did the animals in the Ark eat like Ebert did? Creationists recognize that people tend to find the Ark story ridiculous and thus they make up B.S. explanations for why it is not. I thought the "possibly trapped sea birds" bit was funny and yet another tip of the hat.

I wonder how many of those who were fooled simply failed to read beyond the first couple of paragraphs?

He he he. Well done. Irony does indeed seem to be a lost art. People need to be spoon fed information, and cannot accept ironic comparisons without a sense of personal attack. Most of the US gets it's sense of humor from what they see on TV, sadly enough, and it is a virtual desert of irony. Its quite nice to have you on the good side Rog.

I knew that it wasn't meant to be taken seriously given that you have 'Inherit the Wind' in your Great Movies section, and that's just one of the many hints. But I had absolutely no idea what the article was doing on your site, as it seemed to serve absolutely no purpose whatsoever, and I also had no idea it was sparking so much controversy all over the internet. Just a few hours before I read this entry, I was starting to pick up on the title for your 'Adaptation' review, but that article still made absolutely zero sense to me. Pretty incredible what it all amounted to though. Excellent entry!

I know it sounds lame to claim that I understood the "quotes" from the beginning, but I actually did. I also happen to be part of the Creationist demographic that apparently did not stand up. The reason for not writing earlier (on my part at least) was two-fold:

1. I just assumed that everyone would understand the satire because of Ebert's clear support of evolution in the past, as well as his criticism of creationism.

2. I did not want to be part of the angry retaliation I expected to come from the creationist camp (they like that angry retaliation stuff).

The reason I write now is to offer an opinion not commonly heard from creationists, namely that I also believe in evolution. Believing that God created the universe does not automatically exclude evolution from being part of the plan. I don't see why these beliefs have to be exclusive from each other, especially since modern Biblical scholars almost universally accept symbolic interpretations of the creation story. Anyhow, just thought I'd throw out something different.

Ebert: I believe that if God is active in the universe, evolution suggests a more awesome and elegant process for him than an instant creation within recent years. But aren't you in the minority? Many read the Bible literally.

Mr. Ebert,
You mentioned that you didn't receive any messages from Creationists once you posted "Creationism: Your Questions Answered". I don't know if you have received explanation for this, but this is mine.
I suppose I would be considered a Creationist. There are elements of evolution which are indisputable, and yet I believe in the Bible before anything else.
I was confused about "Creationism: Your Questions Answered" because I know you have always been a evolutionist. I didn't expect this to change, and nowhere in the article did it say you've changed your minds. I assumed (correctly) you were up to something. I initially thought a satirical jab at Creationists like me. But the article wasn't offensive or snide. Hence no need for outrage.
I somehow knew the article would get a follow up explanation and am happy it did. This is why I didn't respond. I was waiting to see what you were up to.

i've had many lunch hours reading through all of your answerman questions and answers (until the new site design prevented me from going through them so easily) and also most of your essays/interviews.

i remembered several years ago (2005) you reviewing evolution and even providing a link which was such a clear point by point answer to intelligent designs questions.

Sorry to link back to your own site, but here ( http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050328/COMMENTARY/503280301 ) is the article i remembered.

With a memory like that i KNEW what you believed, but i will say you wrote your evolution defense so accurately that i was tricked for a minute. I suppose i read it more as a book report on evolution.

Unfortunately, as a protestant american i've heard exactly what you said told by many, many of my peers. My feeling was that, once again, christianity was digging in its heels to another humiliating science defeat. I'd prefer if that were not the case... maybe i'll see what the pope is up to during my upcoming visit to italy. he seems like a stand-up guy.

Anyway, you exploded the blogosphere and challenged readers of all ages with a single page of text.

As much as I respect your opinion, sir, I must point out it's hardly arcane knowledge that sarcasm doesn't work well online. Over the years, I've seen this observation repeatedly on most of the forums I visit.

Then too, I might suggest that it's not impossible for an intelligent, rational individual to begin espousing insane notions without warning. We've all seen this -- after all, it's an election year.

I thought it was really funny. I knew you were being sarcastic, if that's the word. Making fun of, in a way, creationism simply by stating what creationists believe. Why, with a question such as "why would God invent the moose," would people think you were being serious?

As a semi-regular feature of my weekly humor column, I offer up an advice column written from the perspective of someone completely unqualified to offer advice on the subject at hand. In my mind, the invisible quotation marks couldn't be any more obvious, but invariably I receive an angry letter questioning how I could possibly, for instance, say that it's OK for someone to listen to his iPod during a job interview. (Example: http://tinyurl.com/5xjlm6 ) Each time I get one of these letters I'm amazed, so I don't know what that says about me.

Having been exposed to creationism in some detail, I immediately spotted your article as satire. (And yes, I would argue that evolution and creationism should be taught side by side, to show students what science is and what it isn't.) I attribute some of your readers' inability to divine your intent to their unfamiliarity with the subject matter.

Still, I regret to inform you that many creationists would dispute your scholarship, especially as it pertains to Noah's Ark. For instance, in one passage from Genesis, Noah is commanded to bring seven of every clean beast, and two of every unclean beast. This detail is of vital importance, because it allows Noah to perform animal sacrifices on the Ark without eradicating several entire species in the process.

Also, many young-earth creationists contend that "speciation" occurred after the Flood, and that the animals Noah brought on board the Ark were therefore limited to some two to three hundred "created kinds," instead of tens of thousands of individual species. Coyotes, wolves, and French poodles, therefore, are all lineal descendants of a single pair of created canine animals transported on the Ark. Creationists often refer to the study of these created kinds as "baraminology."

Very few creationists would claim that all species were created in their present form ten thousand years ago. Instead, they argue for "microevolution" -- tiny changes within a single created kind, leading to species diversity. Creationists object to what they call "macroevolution," in which one kind of animal evolves, over millions of years (or more), into a different kind of animal. But they are perfectly happy to concede some ground regarding small changes observable over time.

Another thing, too: Most young-earth creationists don't believe that the Colorado River carved the Grand Canyon over a period of "64 to 100 centuries." They claim it happened over a period ranging from a few weeks to several months, in the immediate aftermath of the Flood.

I loved the article. My dad is a minister and I grew up a pastor's kid, but one with beliefs very different than those of other members in the church (including my parents). One of those beliefs is the belief in evolution. Like Ben S. above, I choose to believe that God is the creator of the universe and he did so through, like you said in your comment, "a more awesome and elegant process." And I happen to be a liberal democrat (gasp!) that is a professing Christian. You want to talk about irony, try being a liberal democrat that believes in evolution and teaches Sunday School.

At first I thought it was neither satirical nor reflecting your beliefs, but rather just informative. I figured it had to be satirical and not just informative when you wrote, "Genesis tells us it lasted for 40, 150, 253, 314 or 370 days." (It's 370 by the way, if you're reading a translation that doesn't use confusing words.)

Mr. Ebert, you wrote:

It was a Q&A that accurately reflected Creationist beliefs. [...] On every one of the blogs, there are a few perceptive comments gently suggesting the article might have been satirical. So far I have not seen a single message, negative or positive, from anyone identifying as a Creationist.

Nevertheless, the article was still directed at informing your readers of the beliefs of, well, people like me I guess... but I do not agree with a single one of the answers in the Q&A (except for the antepenultimate one, but it doesn't answer the question). Due the public's association of "Creationists" with Bible-believers, you make it look like the Bible actually teaches fables like "Evidence of a catastrophic collision between Saturn and another object within the same 10,000-year span." Please do not make false, culture-driven associations. You're only helping the foolish cultural trends of "religion" and "anti-religion" to sway to and fro like the wind even more, causing confusion and prejudice.

I have a question for you though, one you never cleared up. Is your first statement in the satirical article ("Creationism, which should be discussed in schools as an alternative to the theory of evolution") satire as well?

I was actually just about to write your mailbag asking whether your article was serious. It seemed out of character for you, especially as you didn't make any of your typical humorous comments.

Roger, I've been a devoted and regular reader of your site since I was 13 years old. I know full well what you think of creationism and your love of all things Darwin since you've mentioned it many times- and your article confused and shocked ME!

You really had me worried for a few minutes and I knew what you thought of evolution vs. creationism and figured it *had* to be satire- so you can't blame other readers.

Now, I knew that you must have been being ironic since I knew you couldn't possibly be serious but I didn't see the joke, try as I could. It sounded like you were being serious.

Except for the moose line, that is.

It's not a good joke if even people who know you have to be kidding don't understand it.

"For anyone familiar with creationism, it's become impossible to make a parody that won't be mistaken for real creationism."

But some of it really should not be mistaken for real creationism.

I have been watching creationism for over twenty years and have been debating creationist on the net off and on since I first got net access in 1993. I have a bunch of creationist books and have examined many creationist web sites. That creationists say outrageous things cannot be doubted. Indeed every time it seems that one thinks that nothing they could say could surprise or shock any more, they do just that. But seconds after following a link some commenter made calling Roger Ebert an idiot, I knew that it was satire.

For all its use of creationist real claims (especially at first), it really did not sound like a creationist. And then it started what seemed to be jokes at the expense of creationism: like feeding on trapped birds. Creationist literature is usually not self-deprecating. Real loons try to make the absurd seem rational. The article seemed be trying making the absurd seem absurd. And by the end of it, it had contradicted the most fundamental of young-earth creationist beliefs: that the Bible really is consistent. Yes that belief is absurd, but they believe it. Without a belief some sort of sacred scripture, no one today could hold the Earth is young. Thus no creationist will argue the Bible says both A and not A.

I followed the thread in Pharyngula and just could not believe that people really took it seriously. I was tempted to comment that "If it is a hack, the hack is still a parody written by an non-creationist." But scanning to the end, I saw that someone liked to this article's confession of parody. I missed the Fark thread too, probably because I did not turn on the computer yesterday night to watch Elizabeth I on DVD.

so basically you were trolling. How "clever" of you. And yes, i meant you to see the quotation marks there.

I quite liked your Q&A about creationism. I know you are a believer in evolution. Initially I thought you were mocking creationism which I think you were. I got the joke by the time I saw your answer to the question "Why would God invent an absurd creature such as the moose?" (which was quite fuuny). Come to think of it, moose are absurd looking creatures. And like Ben S. I interpret the creation story as symbolic. You're right most people interpret the Bible literally which is unfortunate because most literal interpretations are quite shallow. Sort of like the seeing an iceberg over the water and thinking "well, that's all there is to an iceberg."

Forget Poe's Law, forget that you've made it very, very clear that you recognize evolution as a fact: you cannot read your Q&A and not know what your intent was. Anyone who tries to cite obscure "laws" or a lack of silly emoticons is simply excusing their lack of attention, not to mention common sense.

I enjoyed reading your words as always Mr. Ebert. I made a more detailed commentary here:
http://www.damonpayne.com/2008/09/24/RogerEbertAndTheAgeOfCredulity.aspx

"Art imitates life, and life in turn imitates art (which is a part of life)

I have often remarked to friends that the enduring success of Roger Ebert is hard to understand, though I am happy to see it. After all, this is the 2000's we are living in. He is, forgive me, not a particularly attractive man, nor does he speak and write at a level accessible to to the average high school graduate. This is after all the age in which we vote for politicians based not on their qualifications to make decisions that are "far above our pay grade" but rather on whether or not we would feel comfortable having them over for BBQ chicken without having a chance to clean the house first or if they would fit in at our local church. What I mean to say is that Roger Ebert does not have qualities which would immediately invoke the words "mass appeal". He is, rather, an elitist - a word which should be badge of honor and not the insult is has become in our praise of mediocrity in this nation.

Roger Ebert writes thoughtful insights about Film, which I consider to be our highest art form to date. Why? Because it combines music, philosophy, dancing, drama, words, and technology into a single medium. Each of these expressions can be profound in themselves, but combined into a single human experience moving through time can approach something truly sublime. Surely all these things are excellent achievements of Humans and the combinatorial effects of overlapping them are worthwile of educated commentary. The success of Roger Ebert, then, I attribute to there being just enough intelligent people in America who care just enough about things that matter to humans to give this man an enduring audience.

Ebert tells us that these days there are few rewards for critical thinking, and I must sadly agree to a point. It would seem to me that his true talents lie not in interpreting Art, but in observing and reporting on human behavior. Keep up the good work, sir."

Re: Ben S
"Ebert: I believe that if God is active in the universe, evolution suggests a more awesome and elegant process for him than an instant creation within recent years. But aren't you in the minority? Many read the Bible literally."

Surprise, surprise... you sound kind of Catholic.

Many do read it literally, and I don't know statistics, but if Ben S is in the minority I don't think it is a small one. Catholics teach that faith and reason are not contradictory, but complementary. The Wiki page about evolution and the Roman Catholic Church is clear as mud about what the Catholic church teaches about the science. But that's the point, the Church isn't supposed to teach science. What is clear from the wiki discussion is that Church leaders recognize the authority of scientific reason in matters of empirical science.

I think it is quite wise to use the example of literalist Biblical creationism, when you could have used any other, to make your point about unreasonable credulity. To my mind, there is an unfortunate lack of critical thinking among those who read your article but didn't understand it, and those who reject science for faith ... and also those who, like the skinny guy in Nacho Libre, say "I don't believe in God, I believe in science."

I would be surprised if most Christians interpreted the Bible literally in a sense as broad as the one carried through in your article. The Catholic church, for instance, argues that man's soul is a special creation that may have occurred in concert with physical evolution, and interprets as allegorical many early old testament figures. There are very large protestant groups with a strictly inerrant view of the scriptures, certainly, but that's not even true of all very large protestant groups.

Some years back you brought talkorigins.org to my attention in one your columns. Sadly the site was compromised by a computer Cracker and is no more. It was however an excellent introduction into the thinking of the intellectual elite of intelligent design. Their immediate goal was always to gain legitimacy for their views and thus have them included in local school's science curriculum nationally.
And they got their day in court. The creme of this intelligently designed crop of experts descended upon Dover,Pennsylvania in September,2005 for a 6 week trial "where the future of science education in America, the separation of church and state, and the very nature of scientific inquiry were on trial." This quote is from the introduction to "Judgement Day:Intelligent Design On Trial."
I suggest that this November 13, 1996 Nova documentary would be of interest for any of my fellow bloggers,but particularly for those of you with school age children who value truth as the basic prerequisite for your child's education.

Could it be that Jonathan Swift wrote a satire better than you?

Respectfully,
Mike Lukash

Ebert: He certainly did. Actually, my primary purpose was not simply satire. I guess I thought that more people who were not Creationists should know what some of them believe. My guess is that many people, hearing that someone is a Creationist, don't know what that is. I may not have emerged from this as a brilliant satirist, but at least I got a certain number of people talking and thinking about it who might not have otherwise. I do not of course believe a candidate's religion should be a test for public office. But I believe we should be informed. It would be dangerous to have a leader who believes he is fighting "evil" and that God specifically approves of his activities. Isn't that the sin of Pride? A more reassuring stance would be: "I'm doing the best I can with the information I have, and I humbly hope I have God's blessing."

Maybe I'm just a big fan of satire but I got it as satire instantly, despite being under the age of 30. But there are always some people who miss satire. I remember in a literature class reading Swift's "A Modest Proposal" and some of the students when it came time to discuss it, voiced endless complaints about how awful it was that anyone would suggest eating babies. If people would miss the satire in that, then it does not surprise me at all that people would miss the satire when talking about creationism, since far more people believe in creationism than in eating babies.
After thinking about how few creationists complained to you I decided there were probably two reasons for that. One, it wasn't so mean spirited. It was saying "that's a silly thing to believe" without saying "you're an idiot for believing such a silly thing". And there is a big difference between saying things those two ways. Second, having come from a community that does believe in every word of the bible literally I think I can say with very little doubt that most of them are not going to be reading a web page about movies. Many of the ones I know don't even go on the internet. But definately a page about movies they wouldn't be going to since Hollywood is "anti-Christian" and "sexually perverse". If it's not G-rated they aren't going to watch it so what do they care about your review of some sex filled decadent European film?

But back to the idea of satire being something that people just don't get anymore. Didn't we already see that this year with the whole New Yorker magazine Obama cover fiasco?

As a frequent practitioner of irony, I’ve come to question how useful it is to say the opposite of what you mean. I’ve given it some thought and I’m confused why you think it is somehow wrong that people took your words sincerely. Generally speaking, aren’t we taught from childhood to tell the truth and say what we mean. It is a simplistic teaching, but in your blog post you never say why people should say the opposite of what they mean. I see in the post a lamenting of this loss of irony, but you never say why irony is good as a means of social commentary. Take A Modest Proposal, to my knowledge, no one started eating babies as a result of Swift’s essay. Swift didn’t want to people to start eating their babies, and that’s what happened. If all Swift wanted was to discuss problems in Ireland, then I don’t see how that helped.

The same is true with the Q&A on Creationism. You don’t want to convert people to creationism, and it seems like you didn’t. But you didn’t convert anyone to evolutionism either. The post was almost entirely young earth creationism verbatim, an accurate representation of what some people believe all around the world.

I think that it is important to take people sincerely and to start from a position that when someone says something, the person talking (or writing) means what the words ordinarily mean. I think that one non-ironic post says more than a thousand ironic ones. Little is lost when people fail to see irony. Much is lost when people fail to say what they mean because they are to busy being ironic.

There is, an element of humor that is lost with irony. Irony is used extensively as a source of humor. I think it is overused. It is impossible to find a position that is so extreme that someone somewhere doesn’t believe it, so ironic humor that is extreme losses an edge to reality. What remains is people who clearly don’t believe something say the opposite of what they believe. The clearer the person speaking doesn’t believe what they say, the funnier it is. The problem comes when it isn’t as clear what the person believes. This I think is what happened you. You don’t control how much people have read of your work or how much they have paid attention to your views and opinions before reading any particular post, so a post that says the opposite of what you believe is bound to cause confusion. If the concept of irony didn’t exist, that would be an easy concept to see.

I’m sorry that I have written such a long post, but I didn’t have time to write a short one. ;)

Roger Ebert Wrote:

"Q. Why would God create such an absurd creature as a moose?

A. In charity, we must observe that the moose probably does not seem absurd to itself."

I doubt a creationist would be asked such a question. I doubt even more they would give such an answer.

I will admit that at first I was confused by the article. Roger always seemed liberal and a normal average Catholic. He never seemed conservative or even a religious extremist. So I was a little worried that maybe he had converted to creationism and was dining out with Sarah Palin. As I read through his question and answer article, it dawned on me that it is actually pretty funny; especially the above question. I don't believe that any serious creationist would poke fun at their beliefs. By the end of the article I had gone from thinking, "did Roger become a creationist?" to "Roger is actually looking at creationism in a humorous way."

As everyone knows, these are tough times and the thought of Sarah Palin leading our nation and having schools teach creationism is scary. But I thank Roger for giving us some much needed humor. Humor is what we need the most during these challenging times.

Oh Roger, I couldn't help but gasp in amusement and disbelief, in finding so many people incapable of figuring out where you stand. Anybody who has been following your writings knows the irony in your Creationism piece. Nobody these days can take a joke, seems like nobody can tell one either.

I so dearly wanted to tell you in person when responding to Blake, "Be gentle Roger.". :D

No Roger, you have not lost your mind. In fact, you've proven to me again that you do in fact have one. You can't say that for many of us these days.

To paraphrase Shakespeare:

"To expostulate why day is day, night is night and time is time, is nothing but to waste day, night and time."

I hope I got that right, I've read Hamlet so many times. I still find the words very enlightening and comforting.

I don't know a lot about evolution, creationism or credulity; I certainly wouldn't presume to know much about them or even care to know more. However, there are a few truths about the world that I hold dear:

1) The love of money is the root of all evil.

2) If in fact God exists, and if his presence would make his existence known to us, I would in fact care to know him, for that would put to rest all my reservations. Then again, I'm not opting to have a search party hunt down his whereabouts, for if indeed, they should ever discover him, I doubt I'll be alive or competent enough to even notice.

3) You can mish-mash, bend, burn, twist, deform, unform, rearange, desintegrate and restructure the written word, images and art; but no matter how hard you try, you as a human being, can never ever hope to be superior to that giant uncontrollable creation, you are merely a messenger, for this reason alone, art will always exist and be worthy of intake. Our cynicism and overthinking can never diminish it.

4) To paraphrase that great author again: "Nothing is either good or bad, but thinking makes it so."

...If there was ever a more in plain-terms, profound explanation of the nature of mankind ever written down on paper; I'd challenge anybody to find words more frank and illuminating than that.

5) I believe in the likely occurrence of all things, and for this reason we as people cannot become too attached to ideas. This in turn will be our downfall. Instead we should set aside free time for ourselves to breath the fresh air, to say hello to the person next to us, and to observe and cherish as best we can. Everything else will fall into place.

6) When all else fails, give it up to routine and/or meditation. Hell, it works in prison.

7) I don't believe there will ever be a time, when all movies will in fact, become bad. If and when that day comes, I'll consider my faith in the arts retired, since I'll have to occupy my interests with a new distraction. Even though I can't really think of many more charming than the movies.

I am an, "Evolutionist," for a lack of a better term, but I of course did not desire to respond to your before posting. This was not because I knew there was a satirical plot going on or not. I really didn't care all that much about your opinion.

I am, however, gathering from your response about what happened that you have had little in the way of contact with creationists, and have not dealt in depth with their BS in the past. We are in the middle of a war at this point where those that are on the side of science are in the minority, and our only legit tactic to fight with is loud vocalizations countering their BS at every turn.

Anyone with experience knows Poe's law is a legitimate law as solid as gravity and to suspect satire on this issue is a little like suspecting satire in a nuthouse when someone tells you he is, "Napoleon Bonaparte."

Unfortunately, Roger, creationism is a powerful force at least in America, and is steadily creeping into the UK and elsewhere too. There are lots of people out there who deny evolution and think the world is 6000 years old. You are trying to fault the reader for mistaking your satire, yet you fail to understand the simple concept of Poe's law. As PZ Myers has written on his blog:

"That's Ebert's mistake. He presented a plain statement of creationist beliefs with satirical intent, but that intent cannot possibly be scene in a world where millions say exactly the same things with sincerity. Does Ken Ham have invisible quotation marks around the AiG Statement of Faith? No. Was the Wedge Document an amusing practical joke by the Discovery Institute? No. Is Sarah Palin pulling the entire nation's leg when she attends her speaking-in-tongues, young-earth-creationist, End-Times-worshipping church? I wish."

"Creationist" is a pretty broad term - even in anthropology 101 you learn that "creationist" applies to anyone who believes that a supreme being created the universe.

Being a creationist does not exclude belief in evolution, be it micro or macro or what have you.

The "creationism" that gets its fair share of ridicule these days is a fundamental creationism. I just hope everyone understands this.

Ben S. :

If my understanding of creationism is correct, then your opinion isn't commonly heard from creationists because it conflicts with the definition of creationism. "Creationism" doesn't just mean believing that God created the universe; it specifically rejects the theory of evolution. Both Wikipedia and Conservapedia agree on this definition.

From Wikipedia:
"Creationism is the religious belief that humanity, life, the Earth, and the universe were created in their original form by a deity... or deities, whose existence is presupposed. In relation to the creation-evolution controversy the term creationism (or strict creationism) is commonly used to refer to religiously-motivated rejection of evolution."

From Conservapedia:
"Dr. Norman Geisler stated that 'Both young- and old-earthers believe that God supernaturally, directly and immediately produced every kind of animal and human as separate and genetically distinct forms of life.'"

An earlier commenter said that most creationists accept microevolution, which seems to conflict with conservapedia's definition but still doesn't fit your unqualified acceptance of evolution. Wikipedia goes on to say that "the term theistic evolution has been coined to refer to beliefs in creation which are more compatible with the scientific view of evolution and the age of the Earth." This sounds more like your stated belief.

You (and others who have made similar comments) may want to rethink what you are really telling people when you say you're a creationist. I only bring this up because the term "creationist" is apt to indicate (in the eyes of many) an uncritical view of the world that is hostile to scientific advancement and completely dependent on ancient religious books for truth and direction, and that doesn't seem like something a proponent of evolution would really want to say about themselves.

In regards to the original post, I have to say that I think the mass misunderstanding was a result of Poe's law more than the degradation of people's perception of irony (Poe's law: it's impossible to parody fundamentalism without being mistaken for the real thing). Satire seems to be alive and well in comedy shows. The Colbert Report, for example, relies entirely on irony and satire, and it's extremely popular. I guess I would say that people's ability to perceive irony is just fine, but it's harder to use because people believe such crazy things and such a wide variety of things, and the information age has facilitated the widespread awareness of all those ideas. Even if you haven't heard one particular crazy idea before, you still have to suspect that it's legitimate because you've heard of so many other things just as crazy that people actually believe.

I'm aghast at the vitriol you're receiving from the duped. People resent you because they didn't think critically.

Now that I think about it, your knowledge of science has shown through in several reviews, but I didn't know for sure you weren't a creationist when I started reading. It didn't take very long, though--as soon as you acknowledged the planet-dating discrepancy, I was laughing out loud.

On his blog, Jim Emerson recently posted a link to a satirical article by Kathleen Murphy railing against critics. Many commenters praised her for her apparent position, clearly not getting the satire.

P.S. Buckman is exactly right about Heroes' pretentious dialogue. He just picked the wrong quote.

I'm sorry Roger, but to be good satire your piece would have needed to go beyond what even the mildest of creationists seem to accept as fact. For instance, your thesis sentence "...which should be discussed in schools as an alternative to the theory of evolution" is exactly what many school board court cases have tried to do in the past few years. A slightly better attempt might have been, "...which should replace the failed theory of evolution in all public school science classes." It is difficult to satirize creationist thought without getting into outright parody, because it is so outrageous to begin with.

It is not difficult to find weekly occurrences of creationists saying things like, "If man evolved from monkeys, why are there still monkeys?" Usually with several spelling and grammatical errors thrown in for flavor.

Regarding the Internet:

"You'll never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy."

From Pharyngula:

"But Ebert is no Jonathan Swift. Imagine if, in 1729, there had been a number of letters to the editor by various authors proposing that Irish children be exterminated and eaten. Imagine that laws of that nature were being seriously debated in Parliament, and that one of the parties had made it a part of their platform. While the laws were being regularly defeated, opponents still had to stand up and seriously debate why it was unethical to eat babies. Imagine that a candidate for prime minister actually solemnly suggested that we ought to at least consider the merits of eating Irish children.

In that context, Swift's essay would have fallen flat as a cowflop dropped from the Tower of London. His efforts to use straight-faced absurdity and hyperbole and satire to expose the lesser injustices of the time would not have succeeded at all. The invisible quotation marks would be undetectable, because there would have been a substantial background of equivalent proposals given in absolute seriousness".

I don't think this is the Dawning of the age of Credulity. I think it has been around for about ten years.

Let me explain. I am a long-time fan of The Onion, the ultimate in invisible quotation marks. I used to hand Onions out at school when the newspaper (yes the Onion used to be an actual hard-copy newspaper)first came out in 1992. I have always tried to brighten people's day by showing/e-mailing them articles.

Around 1997-98 I began to notice that a lot of people I would show a story to would think it was, in fact, REAL news. This has always stunned and saddened me. I remember one person actually asked me, "....so they are actually going to build a bridge from Mexico to Canada OVER the United States?"

I don't know how or why this started happening. Back in the early to mid-nineties everyone I would show an article to got the joke. Now I'd say sixty percent don't get it.

Maybe the internet has something to do with it. Like I said, I started noticing this phenomenon around the time the internet became part of our daily lives.

I think a good sociology experiment experiment might be the creation of National Credulity Index. Basically what it would entail is taking a representative sample of people (who have not been exposed to the Onion) and showing them articles and seeing if know they are jokes.

I don't have the time and money to devote to something that grand so I guess it will have to fall on Ebert.

Mr. Ebert,

I am something of a creationist. I don't really know what that sentence means. It's a reluctant admission of my true belief, which doesn't say good things about me. Familiar with your reputation as a Darwinist and an evolutionist, my eyebrow was raised by that article. I thought many a time about writing you about it, confused by your sudden shift in tack, but something was telling me to wait and see how this plays out. I'm glad I did. I feel like I passed your test, to a certain extent. If we are indeed in an age of credulity, it is a melancholy time for me. I have always found that such exercises as ranting relentlessly on the internet and such subtract from my ethical and human fibre rather than adding to it. To use such a topic to cover such a fascinating theory on our times was truly inspired. I for one respect those who uphold evolution as fact though I do not join them. I would not be a very good Christian if I joined the unfortunate evolutionists in their unexpected slander.

I don't know if this reaction to your current blog is common among my fellow creationists, but I certainly hope it is. I groan to think of those who only have one interpretation of the Bible. I continue to believe that you are one of the great minds of our time and this blog just confirms that.

And I wrote all this in reply to a blog. How peculiar!

I'm pretty sure if that was irony, you're not doing it right.

Roger:

I read your article with the "Creationist Q & A." I didn't see the "invisible question marks." As I read the article, I thought: "Well, Ebert's just stating the Creationists' point of view here, for the record. He's not criticizing it. He's just saying, "This is the Creationists' argument. This is what they believe.'"

I'm of the opinion that you can't really satarize the Creationist point of view -- because the Creationists do it so well themselves without realizing it. To those of us who do believe that "evolution is God's Intelligent Design," the Creationist argument itself has become a satire on the symbolic myth of the "Seven Days of Creation and the Garden of Eden." Simply stating the Creationist argument, with its unbending denial of scientific evidence, points out the flaws of reasoning in the Creationist myth. The more they try to deny evolution, the more illogical their arguments seem. It becomes a self-satire, although most Creationists are not aware of it.

At any rate, Roger, I have read enough of your work to know that you had not converted to Creationism. I thought, after reading the article, "Well, this is just the first part of the story. He's going to follow this up with another article (or blog entry) that will give us the point he's trying to make."

But I disagree with your final question in the article, Roger. We should not ask, "Why would God invent an absurd creature such as the moose?"

Instead, we should ask, "Why did God create such an absurd creature as Man?"

Well played, Roger. There's a sucker born every minute, and correcting for inflation, I think we've got an excess of them. Having read your columns for a decade, and having argued with you over an IMDb summary I wrote once, I may not have known that you were writing a setup about irony and satire, but I knew you didn't believe in Creationism. I assume it was a poke at the VP nominee who actually believes that man walked with dinosaurs. Especially with the moose line. As H.L. Mencken predicted, we'll probably have a bona fide moron in the White House, if we don't already.

Thanks for showing that people are all too willing to be trolled on the internet, even when they should know better, and that we now use outrage as the default response instead of reason.

Not only do I think that Adam Buckman's paragraph had (fairly obvious, if) invisible quotation marks around it, but I suspect suspect that your discussion of that paragraph did too. My head's starting to spin.

I would call it an age of INcredulity, rather than Credulity, to be honest. Perhaps if we could be certain that you (Ebert) were the direct author of those words, we could see the "invisible quotes", but that was not a given, and can not be assumed these days. Fakery abounds on the Internet, and eternal vigilance is necessary, to avoid being taken in. Failure to stay alert has real consequences - just ask anyone taken in by a "419" scammer.

If anything, this is a post-Ironic age, because one man's satire is another man's reality. Were he around today, Swift would be able to read about actual cases of baby-eating - perhaps not in Ireland (I think!), but it does happen. In the past 8 years, George W Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld et al have made straight-faced statements that would border on satire if uttered by other Republicans, never mind Democrats, far less non-Americans. We know that such Creationist statements are made and believed with alarming frequency, particularly in the USA, so... where's the satire in repeating them, almost verbatim? Satire, where is thy sting?

I thought your creationism article was hilarious. And I think your essay above is, as almost all of your writing is, to the point, polite, well thought out, and deeply expressive.

I completely fail to understand why people believe they can switch off their capacity for critical analysis when discussing religion.

On a more personal and unrelated note, the fact that you published a letter of mine in your Answer Man column some years ago was the kick start to my own career in film criticism. I only hope I will have your sense of humour once I've been at it for 40 years as well.

With best wishes,

Sarah Manvel

Ebert: I googled your criticism and was impressed. In the Answer Man for Sept. 26, I have a message from Prof. Nate Kohn, who despairs of the movie going patterns of many young people. I respond that although his observations may be true enough, I do know of a lot of young moviegoers who give me great cheer. I might have been thinking of you.

I think Ben Stein erased the quotation marks.

You've made the same mistake that many ineffective satirists have made: namely, that simply because you claim that something is satire, it is. If you look at good satire, say A Modest Proposal or Dr. Strangelove, you see that they don't just rehash talking points - they push things to a logical extreme that by their extreme nature become illogical. The only thing you did (really) to push things was the moose joke at the end, which frankly wasn't particularly extreme or damning - it was just sort of a gag to get a chuckle. I think the joke should have been enough to make people recognize that you weren't serious, but it didn't make it good (or even recognizable, thanks to Poe's law) satire.

Everybody's a critic...

"We've been gammoned!" (^_^)

I mentioned in a comment on another article, but just to be fair, Mr. Ebert's article pertained to young Earth creationism, which "is the religious belief that Heaven, Earth, and life on Earth were created by a direct act of God dating between 6,000 and 10,000 years ago" (Wikipedia). Old Earth creationism, on the other hand, is "typically more compatible with mainstream scientific thought on the issues of geology, cosmology and the age of the Earth" (Wikipedia again), it basically just acknowledges God as the ultimate cause of being. Indeed, even evolution is even becoming more and more accepted in Christian circles... just this week the Roman Catholic church acknowledged that evolution is compatible with the Bible. So not all creationists are crazy, or sticking their heads in the sand when it comes to science.

One need only look at the reaction to the recent New Yorker cover featuring the painting of the Obamas to see that we’re living in a world where irony, sarcasm, and satire are no longer appreciated. As an Obama supporter, I thought it was a brilliant counterattack against the types of people who believe and perpetuate the crazy rumors about the Obamas, and I was sure the readers of the New Yorker would feel the same. But, I quickly realized that many didn’t get the joke, and many of those who did were still incensed because they felt that the Obama detractors wouldn’t—and would just use the cover to further their own cause. I just sighed with disappointment as I wrote this.

Never I suspected that you became a Creationist, not for a second. I was just very sad to know exactly the kind of nonsense that the Creationists believe. Don't mean to be disrespectful, but 'nonsense' is the slightest word I can find.

Mr. Ebert, does it come to your mind that the 'age of credulity', as you call it, is a local event? I come from Spain and things like Creationism wouldn't endure much there, not in such a large scale at least.

Credulity is a symptom, a manifestation of overt manipulation that we don't even notice anymore. News anchors dissect campaign ads explaining exactly how candidates are using them to manipulate us and yet they are still effective in shaping our opinions. I was most struck by this line in your post:

"In other words, the scene isn't about the baby. The scene is about scenes about babies."

Our credulity is fueled by ever-increasing distance from "reality". Once the psychological warriors and ad men of the fifties got a hold of the technique we have been spoon fed our politics, our opinions, our wants and desires. We are all being moved into private rooms - from concert halls to digital reductions on headphones, from correspondence and conversation to blogs and sound bytes, from spectrums of gray to black and white. Our credulity springs from lack of information that we don't even want anymore. I am not sure it is divinity that shapes our ends, but I'm all for rough hewing.

I suppose that since I am from the South and am surrounded by powerful Southern Baptists that your comments seemed too safe to be effective. Swift's treatise was rather obvious; yours left me confused, as it is so much more subtle than that of the average Creationist. I have heard preachers say that homosexuals should be murdered because "God doesn't change his mind," I have heard one say he must "Live in Sin to understand Sin" as an excuse for philandering and drug use. These are normal, day-to-day reactions of wealthy, respected Creationists, and parishioners don't question any of it. I am an atheist, and I attend church every Sunday because I am paid to do so. I feel your blog entry was too tame to draw any type of distinction in a time where Creationists openly argue that evolutionists believe "it just happened by accident" and we "came from a glob of goo" followed by the words "EWW!" I recently saw a Christian skit performed where the goofy, loud, ugly scientist (with wig, dirty clothes, and make-up) kept bumping into walls while trying to fix a broken experiment. Luckily the well dressed Christian college student girl was there to teach her the Word of God, after which the scientist (with kids laughing hysterically) had an epiphany from God and rolled around the floor, jumping up to solve the experiment. LOL! Rational people are so worthy of ridicule! Hopefully, the children will remember not to let critical thought get in the way of their spiritual duties when their pastors read them fresh entrails.

We live "IN A WORLD..." where parents brainwash children, children who are barely able to decide upon their favorite colors yet have pressing existential matters solved for them early. Parents choose to keep their children home so that they may salute a Christian flag. This type of frightening activity is the norm down here in Northeast Florida, and any average Christian pamphlet, book, or sermon in the right hands would be more suitable satire. I feel, perhaps, that you have become distanced from the horrors and power that these people possess, the absurdity of their own documents, musings, and blogs, and the ire they have for non-Creationists. While I admire the effort, now is not the time to be meek. †

Oddly enough, Keith Phipps of the Onion A.V. Club wrote yesterday, September 23rd, that he was "puzzled" by your post on creationism (). (And I have to mention that his thoughts appeared the same day the A.V. Club offered the headline "Clay Aiken confirms what you already knew.") I would think that any writer affiliated with the Onion would know irony whenever he or she saw it--but I guess nobody's perfect.

Consider the source.

There used to be a short biography of Mr Ebert on the old (we’re talking ’98 –’99) Siskel and Ebert webpage that offered Real Audio versions of the week’s reviews. It was a fun little blurb, which made mention of, among other things, Mr Ebert’s penchant for cooking anything he came across in his Japanese rice cooker. Before I went further with this paragraph, I googled “Ebert Japanese Rice Cooker” and found out it was a bio used by the Universal Press Syndicate. It reads:

“When Ebert is not reviewing films and spending time with Chaz and their family, his hobbies include ‘reading, cyberspace, walking, travel, sketching, cosmology, and using the Japanese rice cooker to cook almost anything.’"

I left out one of his hobbies. I shall come back to it.

I have known of Mr Ebert since the eighties (when my dad, back from a visit to the States, told me about Siskel and Ebert at the Movies, and that I would love it), and I have been an avid follower of his work since the early nineties when, thanks to the internet, I finally had, almost, unlimited access to his work. I consider myself a fan. So when fellow readers enquire about Mr Ebert’s views on, say, television, I always want to point out to the Larry David question on Answerman from a few years back, or a passing comment he made about 70’s TV in one of the Charlie’s Angels reviews. Similarly, when an occasional comment flies in calling him a conservative, or an elitist with a disdain for genre, especially science-fiction, I feel like the kid in class with his arm raised enthusiastically in his desire to set the record straight. Moments later, however, I calm down, reluctant to speak out of turn.

Which was the mindset I found myself in a few days ago when I saw the brilliant Creationism piece on the main site, and many of the confused comments in response. I wanted to say, “Come on, it’s satire,” or quote from his many pieces on the subject, or just encourage people to take a step back, and consider from whom this piece originated. Consider the source. I didn’t. I just thought that one didn’t have to have been aware of the man and his work since the eighties (or before), or been an avid reader of his work for nearly twenty years, or remembered a short little biography of him from 15 years ago. I guess I was wrong.

The hobby I left out from Mr Ebert’s bio at the beginning of my comments, by the way, was Darwinism.

And if Adam Buckman’s ignorance of Hamlet wasn’t enough to lose all faith in humanity, then the news this morning of Timur Bekmambetov’s desire to update Moby Dick, stripping it off its pesky dramatic core, and doing away with, I can only assume, Ahab’s self-destructive monomania, should do the trick. I am getting my headshots done just in case they decide to cast Pip as a diminutive Turk.

I've never read your site. Went to it after I saw the jabs on FARK (yes, delightful, and addictive). So I read your Creationist piece a few times, mulled, sipped my crystal light and thought, "Oh, yeah, he's yanking chains."

It is troubling that I have read many of the same statements presented as absolute fact.

I am learning rapidly that it has oozed into the schools.

Ironic in a country that was founded to get away from theocracies. Or so the theory goes.

This was a well written response to the criticism you received on Fark. Bravo sir!

Your attempt at irony and satire didn't work, nor is it analogous with Swift's "A Modest Proposal."

If your article was as accurate as you claim, the clues to its satire must have, by definition, been non-existent, or at least extremely small. And in fact they were. Had you thrown in a few triggers that were preposterously non-Creationist in nature it would have been more believable as satire; that bit about the moose, for example, missed the mark because it sounded far too similar to something a Creationist would actually say.

Swift's "A Modest Proposal" works because it starts from a point of view that most everybody agrees with and, using logic, quickly reaches a point of absurdity that nobody agrees with. Therein lies the difference between what you wrote and what Swift wrote. Since thousands (millions?) of people believe in Creationism, all you did was spout their rhetoric and paint yourself to look like one of them. Now, had you used satirical, twisted logic to reach Creationist-like conclusions that no Creationist believes, it have been not only deliciously ironic but also funny.

In any case, why are you giving precious attention to absurd Creationist beliefs? That's like spending time reviewing and analyzing movies that are fiction but purport to be actual documentaries.

--K

Ebert: In theory, I would see nothing wrong with such a movie. The test would be whether viewers could determine that it was fiction. The ability to distinguish truth from fiction is one of the requirements of an informed citizen. See my boldface comment two or three message above for my confession that satire was not my primary purpose.

No offense but it wasn't that too many people are incapable of recognizing satire (although I think that that is also true), or that it was too subtle (the statements with the contradicitions on dates were obvious), nor weas it even Poe's Law (and most of the Comments on Fark.com for instance quickly moved away from your article itself and into a standard and ongoing discussion on that website), it was that the satire wasn't particularly witty or well, good.

I saw the satire and I think that those who didn't overreacted. Apart from the moose quip, it was obvious in at least two places in the text.

Q. Was there a Noah, and did he have an Ark?

A. Certainly. There are many unverified reports of a massive wooden vessel on Mount Ararat. The Arc contained eight people, from whom we are all descended. It also contained two of each kind of animal. Since living species were obviously not created through an evolutionary process, every surviving land-based mammal species (about 5,400) had both ancestors on the Arc.

and

Q. How long did the Great Flood last?

A. We know that Noah was 600 years, two months and 17 days old when he sailed. Using that as a starting point and counting forward, Genesis tells us it lasted for 40, 150, 253, 314 or 370 days.

The first quote underscores the self-evident ridiculousness of creationist claims. The second points out internal contradictions that must be accommodated by biblical literalism.

The satire may have been subtle, but I don't think it means it was bad simply because everybody had a knee-jerk reaction to it.

Do you really believe in Creationists? Have you ever seen one and spoken to him/her/it? Do you have video footage of your contact with the Creationists? I ask because there are so many reports of Creationist sightings from people who have only heard about them third hand that it is easy to get excited over nothing, like the Bigfoot hoax.

I read your earlier article and assumed it was an alien abduction story. The proof that you have accurately described these aliens is that they have failed to come forth to contest your description of their practices.

We observe only those objects which our theory permits us to observe. http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Einstein

Do you really believe that any of what you have written is outlandish enough to pass as satire in an age when 67% of Americans believe in the existence of angels and you have a woman running for vice president who's a member of a cult that speaks in tongues ?
I say you are entirely out of touch with the reality of relgious thinking in this country.

Do you really believe that any of what you have written is outlandish enough to pass as satire in an age when 67% of Americans believe in the existence of angels and you have a woman running for vice president who's a member of a cult that speaks in tongues ?
I say you are entirely out of touch with the reality of relgious thinking in this country.

Count me among the readers who recognized your quotation marks. First, I have been reading you for too long to think that you were being serious. Second, as I was reading, I was thinking of the scene in the wonderful "Inherit the Wind" where Spencer Tracy is questioning Fredric March about the creation of the world. So convinced was I that this was your reference that I was shocked when you DIDN'T site the movie at some point.

As I grow older I find that satire and irony are lost on the masses. Bravo to you and bless you for trying!

That's like spending time reviewing and analyzing movies that are fiction but purport to be actual documentaries.

And I am reminded of This is Spinal Tap, and Paul Benedict's sublimely delivered line:

"I'm just as God made me, sir."

I'll admit, Mr. Ebert, I was so busy worrying about the thought that one of my favorite intellectuals had gone over to the academic dark side that I missed the quotation-marks. I think Poe's Law is a very apt observation (second in importance to all-wise Godwin's Law). When such an emotionally charged issue as fundamentalism vs. empiricism arises we tend find ourselves blinded by our gut reaction, forgetting there's probably a "wink wink, nudge nudge" in there somewhere. In retrospect, I can look over the article and crack a grin at the absurdity of believing that you had jumped the fence. Comments like Noah's age, and your "steadfast" belief in the story of the Ark, combined with your assertion that man and dinosaur had roamed the Earth at the same time should have slapped me into awareness given your past articles.

On a some-what related note, just want to say that I was very happy to see that you drafted "Adaptation" into your Great Movies list. I've loved and cherished that movie for years and I'm glad to see you've done the same.

The problem with the article is that it mimics claims made by Creationists perfectly. That's not satire. Satire contains an element of the absurd; Creationism is already absurd, recited with a straight face.

By your own standards, we should regard Ben Stein's EXPELLED as satire. After all, we have a preconceived notion of Stein from his Comedy Central game show. Shouldn't we expect him to be reasonable? I did. I think my preconceived notion of Stein was valid, which explained the almost universal surprise when his movie came out. Nobody expected Stein to take up such an insane stance. My reaction to your own article was the same: I can't believe it, but I've seen smart people say the same dumb things before.

"In any case, why are you giving precious attention to absurd Creationist beliefs? That's like spending time reviewing and analyzing movies that are fiction but purport to be actual documentaries."

Pah! Is that a bash of "This is Spinal Tap!" that I see? Boo!

On topic, I think that part of what would determine one's ability to parse out the irony/satire/deadpan/whatever of the Creationism QA would be the point at which one makes their judgement of it. That is, if I were to just read the first half or so, without putting it in context of who is writing it (and what the author has previously revealed as his views on the topic of evolution and related topics), and make my judgement at that point (without allowing my brain to budge from this position going forward), I would miss the tongue-in-cheek. Reading the whole thing, though, and putting it in context of the writer, draws out the whole picture. After all, nobody putting together a serious QA on creationism would include the line about the varying number of days that were spent in the Ark. I tend to wonder if most readers who got fooled even read that line.

So anyway, kudos on your epic baiting.

Personally I think it odd that one of the people leaving a comment asked why you were giving attention to Creationist beliefs. Other beliefs get attention in the world all the time not just Creationism. Why single it out as being a special type of absurdity? *grin*

Mr. Ebert:

Point taken.

You actually had me going for a while.

However, the problem as I see it is that your satire was indistinguishable from the real thing. Creationists actually believe this nonsense, and they repeat it constantly.

As such, there was reason to believe that you actually believed what you wrote. Especially for someone like me, who had no idea about your actual position on the matter.

You could of course counter with "why didn't you research it, then?", to which I reply: Because, again, what you wrote was what a creationist would have written.

Knowing you, knowing your taste for this kind of thing, it was clear to me that this was irony. And also the fact that it just appeared on your site, that it was given without explanation, without warning, without proviso, sent up warning flags. Probably most of your dedicated readers expected an upcoming blog entry about it.
I must thank you, Mr. Ebert. I feel that the decline in the public's sense of irony has been a theme in your writing for a long time. Reading your reviews has helped me develop a great appreciation for what I call straight-faced slantedness (if that term makes any sense). Two movies that I learned of through you have been especial revelations to me in this regard: The Rapture and Pumpkin. I wonder if you have any other movie suggestions for those of us who crave such irony-encompassed films . . .

Roger,

I've been reading your reviews, watching your TV show, and reading/buying your books since I was 13 in the early 90s, perhaps that gives me more insight into your writing style. I am in the (great) minority here, as I was howling with laughter.

I disagree with those who think it was poorly done. I thought it was very obvious and brilliant. I'm a little annoyed with some of my fellow 'evilutionists' who had it fly over their heads and blame you for their misunderstanding.

For those who might be interested, here is a link to "A Modest Proposal" (1729 ~ Jonathan Swift).

http://www.uoregon.edu/~rbear/modest.html

Best regards,
Psalmanazar (a native of Formosa)

I sort of choked on my coffee when I read Mr. Ebert's creationist piece, but I thought that it must be a very poker faced satire. A quick Google later to find out a little of Mr. Ebert's previously established position on the matter, I was satisfied that this was so.

Credulity is indeed the word. In this day and age, there really is no excuse for not finding out the facts before reacting in what I dare call a rather hysterical fashion.

Mr. Ebert,

Please be careful to define terms in this discussion. "Evolution" as you are using it references the general theory of evolution, or single cell to complex organism evolution. Obviously, this conflicts with the Biblical account of creation in six literal days, i.e. each day had a morning and evening (Gen 1). Of the large number of Christians that I know, however, none disputes evolution within species or "micro" evolution. Changes in finches, moths, or dogs lead to amazing variety withing species, but in every case a dog remains a dog.

Thanks.

Thanks very much for another engaging article. As one of your commenter's mentioned, not that you don't probably already know this, but David Foster Wallace spoke of a nearly identical phenomenon in his article "E Unibus Pluram."

I also feel strongly compelled to quote the first paragraph of a recent New York Times book review of the novel "The Blue Star":

"Sincerity is in. Never mind the skewering irony of the Facebook generation, or the postmodernism that led boomer intellectuals to see the fractures in every value system. Since 9/11, American readers have shown an appetite for simple tales told with becoming directness. While that approach may never characterize our most self-important fiction, it has been reflected in a number of artful works of popular literature in the last few years. I am thinking of Khaled Hosseini’s tale of Afghanistan, 'The Kite Runner,' and Alice Sebold’s 'Lovely Bones,' about a murdered little girl in heaven who still longs for life. Less venerated by critics, but very much on point, are Mitch Albom’s wildly popular short novels — 'The Five People You Meet in Heaven' and 'For One More Day' — which, at a minimum, deserve the respect due any works that so resonantly reflect the tenor of their times. In the wake of 9/11, Americans seem to crave the reassurance of straightforward tales about good people trying to live good lives, who believe in love and friendship, work and honor and charity, the prosaic but immense forces that dignify most of our lives."

Just thought it was interesting and relevant.

As you mention in your article, I did see the quotation marks in your article. But it was based on a ridiculously thorough reading of your previous writings (I haven't taken the time to search your reviews for the term 'Creationism' but I am positive you've slighted the concept previously). I knew enough to think "This is so inherently ridiculous that Roger does not need to add any text stating so." But I will confess that if I stumbled upon the article without a diploma in Ebertology, I'd have been duped. The old adage "Consider the source" made me look smart.

Oh, and in later the same thread, I bemoaned your use of an emoticon as the fall of the last bastion of grammatical holdout. Now I see that it may have been a concession to the above.

To what extent can the reaction to your satire really be taken as indicative of a rise in credulity? It strikes me that, maybe, it’s just that it’s mainly those incapable of recognizing the satire who waxed indignant enough to write in to various places on the net to express their disquiet. Those who did see the implicit quotation marks just had a laugh and moved on.
I suggest that the reaction you observed may not be so much a matter of increasing general credulity as of increasing opportunities, thanks to technology, for the perpetually indignant and anguished among the already credulous to publish their indignation and angst instantly. Not so long ago the only way for ordinary people to do that was to write a letter to the editor, but that takes time, may not be selected for publication anyway etc.. By contrast, the Internet makes proclaiming one’s opinions almost effortless, and almost instantaneous too, removing any delaying mechanism that might force a sober second thought about just what it is that one is reacting to.
In short, such commotions on the Internet may not be much of an indicator of a deeper trend toward credulity as a sign that most of the medium of the Internet itself is like the surface of a shallow pond, constantly rippled and stirred by the lightest and most ephemeral of breezes.
This isn’t to say that there isn’t actually a rise in credulity, by the way, or in incredulity, or both at once about different subjects and among different people, in society at large. It’s just that reactions on the Internet and on blogs may never tell us much that’s significant or unambiguous on that score.

I think irony may be a largely self-indulgent literary form. Irony requires a layer of meaning that is different from the literal or obvious one; if there's to be irony in writing, then, it requires significant context. Things like, as Mr. Ebert pointed out, biographical details about him (the author), or a sense of how likely certain claimed actions are (the sex education political ad). Because of this required context, irony works best for making points with those who are already most similar to the author, that is: those who share the same context. It's strikingly limited in its ability to evangelize, cutting itself off, as it does, from forming bridges to different contexts.

In the case of politics, the majority of Americans (I speculate) believe in the evil will of the other side. They were raised in this belief, the media they read has reinforced it for years, and, generally, whichever party they happen to identify with reinforces it with its rhetoric. As such, it's perfectly natural to believe claims of outrageously bad behavior regarding politicians on the opposing side. Should we berate them for believing something so base? Is it their inability to perceive irony that is at fault? Or is there simply a deep problem with the belief that one's opponents tend to be bad people, rather than people with differing conclusions?

Irony can be particularly satisfying for an author: he or she, after all, is best equipped to get all the invisible quotation marks and flag words. It is, however, a pleasure that shouldn't be enjoyed too frequently: there's far more to be accomplished by making our meanings eloquent, persuasive, and true.

Hi Roger --

We are in the middle of a war at this point

This is indicative of the attitude of the mighty web warriors that have flocked to the latest battlefield, and they don't much like being told that there's no battle.

And people wonder why I'm curtailing my 'Net activity...

Thank you for your experiment; it's certainly shed some light. Perhaps not simply on credulity, but on the notion that screaming at Web people for outmoded beliefs constitutes some form of intellectual courage.

If I remember correctly, Chuck Jones wrote this in 'Chuck Reducks':

"There is no inevitability as long as there exists the willingness to think."

I think, Mr. Ebert, your article might have demonstrated the inevitability of not thinking on the part of some readers.

Sorry Roger, I tried to tell them early on...

LarryDan43 Quote 2008-09-22 04:24:28 PM
It's satire people!

LarryDan43 Quote 2008-09-22 04:29:39 PM
It also goes along with this older review he put up:

Adaptation (R) (2002)
Evolution is God's intelligent design

Please explain to me how posting a straightforward summation of an extremist group's belief functions as satire. The only context we had was that of a movie review site, which was not sufficient to shine the light of mockery on the content you were posting.

If you've learned anything, it should be that people don't think as much of you as you seem to think of yourself, and so the juxtaposition of your great personage with ridiculous nonsense is not enough to provide a grounds for satirizing the nonsense.

It was a poor article, executed artlessly, and its failures are yours, not the readers'.

I did have to read that your creationism piece twice before I got it. It didn't really occur to me that you were really a creationist, but I did entertain the idea that your site had been hacked.
The problem I had with the moose bit at the end or in fact any of the points was that they were so far within the creationist margin of error that they hardly register. After all, Kirk Cameron has adduced the banana as knock-down proof for intelligent design.
As for Adam Buckman, I went to high school with him--Lower Merion High School in Ardmore, Pennsylvania, class of 1977. Friendly, outgoing, confident fellow, but far, far, far from the sharpest guy around. His success has amazed many. If he studied Hamlet, it was probably by way of Monarch Notes. As a student, he was a lightweight.

Roger,

You stated in your article here that

" So far I have not seen a single message, negative or positive, from anyone identifying as a Creationist."

Well I guess finally you do. And if I had to place myself in one of these two camps, "negative" or "positive" I would have to claim surrender. You see the reason I didn't respond were (1)I wasn't quite sure what the proper forum would've been, since the post you had on your blog was about movie critics, I topic I found interesting and wished to not deviate from and (2)I was not exactly sure how I would've responded. After reading the piece on evolution, I believe I read it how it was "designed" (no pun intended), in that for the first couple of questions there seemed a rather straightforward facts approach, wheras near the end I could tell this was meant to mock a creationist view. Yet, in not posting I would have to say i've thought for quite some time over this post. It's been in the back of my mind this week since I read the article on Sunday. I oftentimes like to think of myself as "liberal" and in my own Southern, conservative family, seminary graduated context, when all of my views are known I would most likely be seen as liberal leaning. Nonetheless on issues like abortion, creation, gay rights, I have to admit to myself that I'm not as liberal as I sometimes think myself. Nonetheless, I don't quite find many safe homes on any sides of the fence with some of my views on a whole other host of social and economic issues(i.e. i'll be voting for obama). Ultimately i'd probably characterize myself as someone who is conservative but feels more at home in a background where people see differently.

Yet, sometimes there are times when I can't help but feel that my views are mocked, and a part of me did feel mocked by the article for the very reason that I did get it. Nonetheless, I appreciate the style and craft in which it was delivered. Also, i'm mature enough to realize that satire is not meant to be precise. The article clearly is not meant to characterize what all creationists believe always and everywhere. Yet, I was aware that ultimately my views would fall somewhere in here. And the article as well as the responses would put me in a place to be ridiculed....

" I was just very sad to know exactly the kind of nonsense that the Creationists believe. Don't mean to be disrespectful, but 'nonsense' is the slightest word I can find."

"Simply stating the Creationist argument, with its unbending denial of scientific evidence, points out the flaws of reasoning in the Creationist myth."

etc. etc.

Now I realize, as many poster have pointed out, that many Christians do have a view that synthesizes evolution and the Bible, seeking to make both worldviews compatible. Now I do believe there is some merit here, but that it does cause complication that make this view more hairy than originally it seems. Where do you cut off the historicity of the old testament or the new for that matter? Where does it stop mattering what hapenned in the Bible really hapenned? there have been very competent theologians to deal with these issues, and most of my favorites are not "6 day creationists". I would probably fall somewhere in an understanding of what is termed a "framework" view, where the 6 days described are meant, by the author (Moses) to present a framework of God's act of creation, not requiring only 6 days. I say this is the closest to my understanding,
but I think ultimately I find myself not completely satisfied with it. Maybe i should just not care about being intellectually respectable and say that Mr. Ebert's satirical q & a completely (without the parts that require explaining every detail of the history of the earth with little details from the Bible) express my own view? Because, I guess it's not help to get into the specifics of what I believe or don't believe about creation, but simply to speak to my experience as one who feels that the article was in some way regarding my own understanding. Ultimately I just have to accept that I may look a little less plausible in the eyes of my movie loving peers for this fact without overdramatizing my plight as receiving some unusual persecution because of my faith.

My response comes as one who points to the insights of a postmodern age over against a modern one. My main comfort in all this is that I do believe that the theory of evolution is just as riddled with difficulties and contradictions as any attempt to explain this world. We're swimming in a sea of mystery and wonderful inexplicability and even if I wasn't a Christian I would probably not accept evolution as such a seal tight explanation for the why, who, where and when of existence. Existence is way too interesting for that. As Walker Percy put it, "Why it is that of all the billions and billions of strange objects in the Cosmos-novas, quasars, pulsars, black holes-you are beyond doubt the strangest?"

In all my rambling I am responding, as a "creationist", even a "6 day" one if need be! with a hearty unoffended reply of "oh you think you can do better!"

You lament the dissapearance of the Invisible Quotation Marks. I can't help but be reminded of South Park's Scientology / Tom Cruise in the Closet episode. There was a giant invisible flashing "THIS IS WHAT CREATIONISTS ACTUALLY BELIEVE" sign right above your article, held up by two invisible pink unicorns.

"The Age of Credulity" sounds way too nice. It's more the age of Truthiness, or the Age of Bellyfeel.

Unfortunately, intelligent satire is fighting an uphill battle. Next time, consider putting those quotation marks visibly, I think we're quickly becoming blind from the satirical third eye, or someone has stabbed a fork in it, I'm not sure.

See the difference between your blog post and Johnathon Swift is that your blog post was not interesting enough for me to read all the way to the end. It wasn't until the moose line that the satire came out. Before that it was more or less quoting creationist positions.

Swift: good writing
Creationist Q&A: boring

The best satire is the kind in which the group that is being satirized is unaware of the satire, but everybody else gets it. I think your creationism post did just the opposite, and got the wrong group of people to take you seriously. The creationists should have thought it was genuine; the evolutionists should have seen the satire.

But, I think that has always been a problem with satire. No one can control who gets it and who doesn't.

Misunderstandings have always been here and always will. Myth becomes belief, and truth becomes the treasure at the other end of the rainbow.

I'm a biologist and I read the piece as an attempt to show the absurdity of creationist thinking. The trouble is that it gives a rather mild version of what they actually want to teach in school. Is the line about the moose more obviously a joke than the standard creationist claim that the Tyrannosaurus was a vegetarian who used its dagger like teeth to open coconuts?
I suspect most biologists reading your piece would view it in a similar fashion. Its not that people were fooled into thinking you were a creationist, its that they thought simply listing what creationists believe is not particularly distinguishable from the real thing and likely to be viewed, by at least some sections of the community, as support for an incredulous position.
Should satire really depend on knowing the political or social view of the writer? Should it not stand by itself? Your piece could be read aloud by Ken Ham or Richard Dawkins to completely opposite effect. Creationism takes on such a range of teachings that satire tends to be almost impossible without adopting a sledgehammer approach.

It is my hope that this blog will evolve, AND GET SOME LINE SPACING on the article text so my eyes won't suffer reading it.

Ebert: Easy. Blow up the text size. On a Mac, hold down Command and tap the plus (+) key.

RE: "Ebert: I believe that if God is active in the universe, evolution suggests a more awesome and elegant process for him than an instant creation within recent years. But aren't you in the minority? Many read the Bible literally."

Yes, unfortunately many fellow Christians read the entire Bible with literal interpretations, a fact that continues to to baffle me since many Christian scholars do not. The book "Reading the Bible Book by Book" (by the greatly respected Old Testament scholar Douglas Stuart and New Testament scholar Gordon Fee) follows the "radical" idea that the Bible is made up of many types of literature (histories, poems, laws, parables, etc.), that each type obviously has different rules for interpretation, and that each should be studied in light of the historical/cultural context in which it was written (revolutionary, I know). None of this in any way diminishes the role of God, but instead views his work through a somewhat reasonable lens.

Also, I didn't say that the universe was created in recent history, just that it was at some point created.

Thank you for the opportunity to have such a fun discussion. I've followed your reviews since childhood and have great respect for your opinions.

I'm amused, rather than concerned, with credulity--that so many folks have trouble with irony, subtlety, or the difference between science, fiction, and faith. Besides, however many people there are in the world who don't get it, there are plenty who do (see many previous comments for examples of both).

Years ago, when my wife would get really cynical and depressed about dense, stubborn, or humorless people, especially mobs of them, I would assure her that, "Our child will have the advantage."

I now have two children, and I was right--they do.

Mr. Ebert, I wanted to point out that internet responses and reactions often have their own invisible quotes around them. I'm fairly confident that even if every poster on Fark.Com knew the purpose of your original article (perhaps via revelation) that you would observe that 90% of the responses would be unchanged.

I will also say that what you did is essentially the same as a popular internet passtime ... trolling. Yours may be a bit more high brow, but it was an attempt to provoke a response, which is also one of the goals of trolling (among others). This does in a way undermine your own point about "consider the source". You have a reputation for speaking in a frank and honest manner; you don't have a history of spiking the punch.

I also wanted to say that I enjoyed your original article and the subsequent 'fire'storm. Well done!

My opinion of you just went up a metric ton, Roger Ebert. Props.

Great piece, Roger.

My fiancee and I were just recently discussing how it seems that people are thinking critically less and less these days. Your Creationism essay fits right into this. I've noticed in recent years that people merely want to react when they are confronted by an idea, a film, a piece of writing, etc., rather than actually think about it. I fear we have become a disposable culture.

I was fortunate enough that my parents collected books of your reviews when I was growing up. Reading them was one of several influences that led me to pursuing a career as a film critic. I'm 31 years old and, sad to say, but I'd estimated that less than 20 percent of the people in my age range whom I have encountered during the past few years read regularly or watch many films - and I live in New York!

Repertory theaters are a dying breed and it's becoming more and more difficult to find video stores that specialize in hard-to-find films: New York's Kim's Video, LA's Eddie Brandt's Saturday Matinee and Facets are among the few left standing.

So, your piece was not merely clever, but quite poignant.

My coworker is British. Yesterday, I said something sarcastically--I forget what exactly. She looked at me with great confusion until I told her I was being ironic.

"Americans aren't allowed to do that," she said.

The problem with comparing your piece to A Modest Proposal is that Mr Swift's solution is clearly out of line with societal norms of the time. Your piece, by contrast, just blends in with all the other irrational creationist screeds plastered across the internet. Reductio ad absurdum doesn't work against positions that are already illogical.

Sorry, but giving Mr Ebert grief for being an ignorant creationist based on him writing commonly-held, commonly-stated, ignorant, creationist ideas is not a failure of irony detection. It's only a failure in knowledge about Roger Ebert, and that's no failure at all.

I read the original, and assumed Mr Ebert was a credulous religious idiot capable of holding obviously counter-factual beliefs. There's a lot of it about. Then I read some commentary on it and discovered that he is not an idiot, or a creationist. My ignorance of the man is reduced, and my irony detector is still functioning just fine thank you.

Yesterday I almost wrote to commend you on your Creationism Q&A, which I felt did a beautiful job pointing out the absurdity of Creationism merely by letting it speak for itself. As a sometime professor of religious studies I can affirm that your characterization was fair, and that no Creationist would disagree with any of your answers. I hoped that this presentation would make obvious the level of ignorance, intellectual dishonesty, or bad faith (pun intended) necessary to hold the belief. I thought your approach was a more effective and elegant way to counter the ridiculousness of Creationism than arguing with it. Now I am downcast indeed to find that this point was almost universally missed. And missed by your self-selecting readership (at least by those who posted: maybe those who got your point didn't trouble to write, as I didn't) who are generally smarter than your average bear (or caveman). It reminds me of the people who did not understand that Jonathan Swift's "A Modest Proposal" was satire. Perhaps you should come away chastened, and make your deployment of irony broad and obvious. I hope not.

I am being forced to reconsider my belief that evolutionists are the smart ones if it wasn't immediately obvious that the piece was satirical.

I think that much of what has passed as irony is really just cynicism. Irony requires knowledge, intelligence, critical thinking and engagement with the world in order to poke at it. Cynicism requires only carping about the world as it appears on the surface. When one makes a habit of cynically rejecting everything at face value, one cultivates the habit of only seeing the surface. Looking deeper, reading more closely, listening for the invisible quotes, would require greater effort and since the effort is not required for a cynical response, why bother? With a face carefully kept free of expression, a slightly monotonous voice and laconic speaking style, mere cynicism is easily disguised as irony.

I think it was inevitable that the Age of Cynicism would give way to the Age of Credulity.

How could anybody not see the humor in it? The piece was hilarious!

"Ebert: I believe that if God is active in the universe, evolution suggests a more awesome and elegant process for him than an instant creation within recent years."

God doesn't need to be active in the universe for evolution to fit well with Creationism. Evolution seems like a reasonable tool for a watchmaker God.

I had to give a big frown when I read the majority of commenters thought your piece was genuine. Although I think that says more about our misplaced reverence for religious belief -- to the point where something as absurd as that list of creationist beliefs could ever be considered a reasonable list of "facts."

Bravo, at least, to the people who thought it was ridiculous or crazy (regardless of whether or not they thought you meant it). Because it is crazy, and sad that reason and logic are so devalued that ANYONE could possibly believe this (and, according to one study I saw quoted recently, 44% of Americans believe in Creationism).

Skepticism is wildly underrated, and I hope anyone who thought you meant it has learned that lesson now.

Well, it certainly shows the limits of the FARKers' intellects.

Unfortunately, such credulity among the population plays directly into the hands of religious demagogues who set groups of people up as either saints that must be mindlessly followed, or demons that must be equally mindlessly slaughtered. People are strapping suicide bombs to themselves in ever increasing numbers, to blow up children that they see as demon-spawn because the people they have placed absolute trust in have suggested that they should.

If this anti-reason, pro-esteem trend is not stopped, it will be the 1970s here in the US, all over again. Only this time with nukes.

I posted the first defense of your satire to the New York magazine Lane Brown blog. I mean, come on:

Q: What about dinosaurs?

A. They walked the earth at the same time as man, but were wiped out by the Flood, whose turbulence buried their bones in non-sequential sediments.

"Non-sequential sediments" is delicious. I'm a little ambivalent about what I see as movement toward a hypertextual readership. We skirt quickly from one place to another, interlinked, engaging text at a surface level, ignoring the substrate. We are bad geologists.

Believe it or not, Mr. Ebert, there are people including me, who don't know you from Adam, but came across your "satire" via other sites. How were we supposed to detect the irony, when real creationists write stuff more stupid than anything in your piece every day of the week? Your comparison with Swift is ludicrous on two counts: first, there was not (so far as I am aware) a powerful movement advocating eating Irish babies when Swift wrote his piece. Second, I've read Jonathan Swift. Mr. Ebert, you're no Jonathan Swift.

Ebert: I couldn't agree with you more! However, there was widespread indifference to Irish starvation.

I just read your previous Q & A and found it quite hilarious. I think the irony is even more apparent in your writing style than in Swift's, though both articles appear equally absurd when stated so bluntly. I think our problems with today's society as well as today's art is that we live in a time that has traded existentialism for narcism. We live in a time of mePods that give every walk down the street its own soundtrack, and instead of reading a newspaper we can write about our own all important lives on our blogs (not your blog, which looks outward). So naturally, instead of simply thinking about what you had said, everyone rushed to add their own unique viewpoint on the subject. No one goes to the movies anymore to explore thoughts or places outside their sphere of reality. It's all about how it makes them feel, and if it doesn't "entertain" (I can't trust the quotes to be applied by the readers here) them for every millisecond then it must be a pretentious failure. They are the audience afterall. Isn't it all about them?

"What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason! how infinite in faculty!"

I must say these two articles are an utterly brilliant piece of work.

A one-two, intellectual punch.
Wonderful...

Armand

I predicted (correctly) that you were going to get tons of hate mail for that article. However, I was assuming that this hate mail was going to be written by Creationists.

It is so sad to learn that most people didn't get the invisible quotation marks. And these angry comments come from people that are supposedly educated and critical thinkers.

I once uploaded a video on Youtube, claiming that I was able to change the molecules of a 200 pesos bill just by saying “pleasant” or “unpleasant” words to it. If I said a word like “love,” the lady in the bill (Sor Juana) would smile. If I said a word like “hate,” Sor Juana would get sad. Of course I was parodying "Dr." Emoto's claim about water crystals. There was even a sort of wink at the end: I said “Dr. Emoto” and Sor Juana got a sad face. However, 90+% of the people that saw this video thought I was being serious and wrote lines like "You are lying to us... you are simply moving the bill up and down."

I guess some people believe in evolution in the same way other people believe in a 6,000 year-old universe. So sad. It is not about believing, it is about knowing.

Yeah, right. You write a whole article on creatism, there were no "jokes," it was written straight forward as if Palin had wrote it herself and we were somehow supposed to know you were joking. Now we're all the idiots for not getting it. Well, you've lost one reader here, my friend. I'm sure it makes no difference to you, but it's a fact.

I'm so pleased you posted this article explaining your intent! When I first read the article a wave of emotion passed over me - 'how could he print this?'. Then, my critical self realized that you must have a reason, and there was 'something' you were testing or looking for. I was quite anxious to find out what it could possibly be?!
Seeing the results of your test in print confirms what I've been experiencing for quite some time. In conversations I've been quite dissapointed to find how few people understand 'satirical remarks' - and - are quick to believe everything they see in print (or hear for that matter). Satirical remarks are usually in jest - they can be FUN for heavens sake! Credulity with no consideration of the source is ignorant. Both disappoint me.
I feel no desire to comment on the creationism, it's not the point. However, it proved to be a very fine device!
Again I am SO pleased to see what you were up to!
Thank you SO much for giving us all something to consider. And hopefully - some will remember this while reading, viewing, and/or hearing anything in any one of the multitudes of media. In this day and age it's critical.
P.S. - lighten up people! This was a FUN experience. Albeit, humbling for some.
Thank you Mr. Ebert for the intelligent discourse in a world of, what appears to be, only semi-intelligent blogging!

I've seen some comments here in the past week, to the effect that "God created evolution" is some sort of progressive new idea. I was born in 1949. For the first thirty years of my life, the Scopes Trial was thought to be a rapidly-becoming-ancient footnote from an ignorant past. And yet most people I knew growing up were Christians who read the Bible and attended church. Unless I was horribly mistaken, all those Christians accepted evolution in this God-created world, the same way they have accepted a round Earth the revolves around the Sun.

I'd like to believe that "God created evolution" is the mainstream position of a solid (albeit no longer overwhelming) majority of Christians, and has been for my entire lifetime.

At the top I'd like to point out that the analogy between the Post guy not knowing that the character was quoting Hamlet and the internet community not reading your post as satire is quite large. A journalist not doing his homework and criticizing a television show for sounding odd (really, if anyone, especially a villain, sounds odd I just assume they're quoting from Faust, Shakespeare's stuff, or Paradise Lost, most writers of melodrama seem to have this Freudian dislike of their lit teachers and want to dig at them every chance they get) can be nailed for not backing up what he states as a basis for his criticism. Asking the public to be able to know what you're thinking when you're publishing a satire that is straight-faced and fairly reasonably what I would hear people who believed this stuff might say is something else. At least baby eating was discordant enough an idea to cause people to gasp if they didn't get the joke. Evolutionists are getting a bit jaded with pronouncements like those in your article, and the lack of relative hyperbole didn't help.

I've followed your work since I was little, but if people asked me if I knew anything about your personal beliefs, before 2000 I might not have been able to tell them very much except you liked Benji the Hunted more than Gene Siskel did. I think many people look at you first as a movie critic, and many people don't go beyond that. Your image, your thumb, and your name have reached the symbolic status for a lot of us, and that symbol refers to movie criticism.

It took me a while to gather up significant doubt when reading your creationism post (given that I've read a enough of your essays that I sorta see where you were coming from), in order to be able to put it on the back burner until you clarified. In the interest of your satire I think you could have held back for a while, perhaps even sneaked in a reference to evolution in a different essay when it seemed appropriate just to show what was going on, but I guess it was better to get this out of the way now. I'm sorta glad you did, now fewer people will be intractably convinced of your views than there might have been.

The internet is a strange animal, and with it comes a lot of technology that lets random folks make videos, write essays, and pass along information at a quick rate. It's easy to get lost in all this (I feel smaller now than I did when I was 12), but it's just as easy to get swept up in a tide of passions, fads, or controversy, and your being a recognized personality, whose work is read by media folks as well as the rest of us, only expands this.

I think this democratization of media is in some ways really exciting, but it also invites a lot of people to become journalists who are really aren't prepared to be, and it pressures people who might otherwise be good journalists into doing some crazy things.

Your satire itself isn't necessarily what I'm getting at here, because, whether it came from you or from someone who writes a blog under an unpronounceable pseudonym filled with numbers and hyphens, it should be scrutinized just like any other piece of information.

No, I more mean that there are sites out there now which claim to be news sites which are instead more like popular meta-blogs, where people with press passes try to push for quantity instead of quality, finding as many random ideas that they think are pertinent and doing little or no legwork to see if what they post is in any way backed up. False rumors are the source's fault, not theirs, and no matter how many letters you send them telling them their information is false, they'd prefer to ignore you rather than stop and examine one tiny entry from one day last week and actually see if their statement is backed up.

It's a different art altogether. It's not journalism, it's rumor mill. You have enough of these that happen to notice that Roger Ebert has posted creationist doctrine, combined with your being a symbol of movie criticism to many people (and, unfairly, not much else at times) and you will have an explosion of indignation or confusion.

Journalists had, and still to a smaller degree still have, access to avenues of information that most of the rest of us couldn't dream of having. They were trusted to do the research on their own before they presented us with their information. It was our job, after that, to refine the conversation further, to filter out what we felt to be bias or haste and try to figure out some approximation of what happened. Now a lot of these avenues seem to be breaking down, and we learn things quicker than trusted news outlets do.

The pressure increases to speed things up, to get the footage out there, and to not look back. I get the feeling that fact checking is dropping across the board in light of this pressure, and that we're often getting reports, even from respected journalists, that are hand-me-down rumors. The assumption that someone is eventually going to do the research, so it's no big deal.

The problem is that the consumer of information, while having more tools, also has a lot more information. It becomes crushingly difficult for us to edit our way through the barrage of data that comes through the net, on top of local, regional, and national papers, television, radio, and the good old water cooler. Groups like Fact Check try to keep up, try to check sources and statements, but they're already behind the wave, and the damage was done a long time ago. Groups like Fact Check even have their own quotes distorted, and anyone who doesn't do their own homework will never learn any different.

Because of this demand for us to all do our own homework, we're all, in a way then, becoming amateur journalists whether we want to or not. So when I read what you wrote, my first instinct should be to check back and make sure I can figure out where you're coming from, to check for those invisible quotes you refer to. But in the consumer of information role, I fall into the old human fallibility of taking you at your word. How much time do I have in a day to run back through your essays to see if this matches up? What about the tons of other things I've seen today, the things I believed and the things I thought were doubtful, and the things I didn't believe?

I may be old fashioned, but I thought it was the role of journalism to cut through that for me.

Therefore I think it's a bit harsh to assume readers are completely credulous. There's actually a damaging streak of cynicism that I've noticed lately in a lot of people because they simply can't process everything that comes at them. True things get piled up next to false things, and people stick with their safer views, often using examples from the world not to challenge them, but just to back them up. So if I read the creationist post without some knowledge of your essays I would either bemoan that yet another person has fallen into the creationist crowd, or be happy that the message was being spread (even if I didn't quite believe you were sincere).

Without the Evolution is God's Intelligent Design (which seemed a bit incongruous with the article it headed) I don't think I would have doubted your surface intentions like I did, and that was information that you provided because you wanted to give us a clue.

Still, I'm ultimately happy you did this stunt. I think you were in a proper position to see what sort of effects there might be without it getting completely out of hand. I just wish a young earth creationist would actually read Origin of Species and quote it directly as some sort of attempt at satire. I don't think it would have had nearly the same effect, no matter how popular she or he was.

These issues are both old and new, but they're ones I think we're going to have to recognize in order to stay on top of things.

As far as young-earth creationists being the majority, I'm unconvinced. I know that many of them are vocal, and among their family or among their peers there's no way you're going to hear any doubt. But I've met too many people on a one-on-one basis to think this entire belief system is in any way a majority. We often use the minority/majority see-saw to be able to rally like-minded people around a cause. America, and really the world, is just too big to be able to measure properly. The interconnectivity of the 'net just tells us the world is big, but I don't think we're much closer to understanding what a majority of anyone really believes beyond some cursory basics.

Before I stop I'd like to add a question to that list. What do creationists believe about how we can see stars whose light would have taken millions of years to get to us? I don't remember anyone believing in the celestial sphere anymore, but I could be wrong.

Thanks for your time, and impishness.

Ebert: That last Q is an easy one. Stars zillions of light-years away from us, *and* their light streaming toward us, were both created at the same time; some say in the last 10,000 years.

Here's why it didn't work Mr. Ebert:

1. Nobody really knows you. In fact, your reviews have been changing and I can no longer count on your movie reviews. Example: Bend Like Beckham was a horrible movie, and the last I saw based on your suggestions.

2. People change. Most, including myself, assumed you had a religious moment, and wanted to share it with the world.

3. Based on this lack of information, there is no hint that we know where you are coming from. All we can tell is that you are now a creationist, based on your latest post.

I still believe you to be a creationist, and this "follow-up" article did not change my mind. It's not ironic at all, just someone who feels foolish for posting foolish information.

There's really nothing to "get" here, except that, nobody knows what Roger Ebert's religious views are. In fact, I still don't know your religious views!

I'll admit, my initial reaction upon reading about the entry on PZ Meyers' website was one of, "WTF?". But after paying close attention to what was actually in the next, I began to get the joke. Well done, Mr Ebert! Never hurts to keep people on their toes.

I had an epiphany! Now I understand it all!

Q. Why would God create such an absurd creature as Michael Moore?


A. In charity, we must observe that Michael Moore probably does not seem absurd to himself.

Well allow me to dodge the sharp, pointy finger by saying that the more I read from the entry, the more I realized it might have been an ironic piece. I was never sure, but the thought lingered nonetheless.

I too posted the Q&A on a forum, with big bold letters titled "EBERT IS A CREATIONIST?!", and then proceeded to wonder aloud if it was a joke, and if it wasn't, what happened to my favorite critic.

However, I don't really think that the reaction had as much to do with critical thinking and analysis as you'd think.

I'm a big proponent for giving the audience credit. Of course, it's when I mention that that the audience reaches around with a large, protruding comment and stabs me in the back with it, but I still believe it.

I think it was more to do with the vocal nature of both people in the media's eye and the impression we have of creationists.

You said it yourself: You tried to fly under the radar... and you were practically skidding on grass.

The facts on creationism are things we've heard before, and facts which we've seen spouted with gleeful abandon by the likes of Kirk Cameron and other notable creationists.

What I mean to say is that, rather than not being able to see the "invisible quotation marks", which I'd like to point out a large number of people at least sensed, it did not seem overly strange or tongue in cheek for someone to be saying what you wrote.

Someone eventually pointed me to some sort of article or entry written by you siding with Darwin, and that sealed the deal for me, but otherwise it just wasn't that far-fetched.

I think the analytical lens should be pointed in this case less to what is a cultural phenomenon. Less to the internet. Less to people "absorbing" information (Which they've always done. To the smarter minority the larger, stupiderer 'sheeple' will always be airheads no matter what age you live in.) and more towards the fact that a theory proposing man and dinosaur living together, and a great cataclysmic flood responsible for shaping the earth is taken seriously.

The satire, Mr.Ebert, is that we live in an age where that is being considered seriously.

It's as if Swift had written his proposal while sipping an eyeball latte at the local Baby-Q (see what I did there? Instead of BBQ I wro....never mind).

I don't know that I'd label myself in the discussion of the universe (both extremes have tried to make it a simple answer when it clearly isn't). However, I'm sure I would be labelled by those who call themselves 'evolution proponents' as a 'creationist'. As such, I would say there were errors in your presentation of the creationist perspective (i.e., they do not believe there were different forms of man like 'Cro-Magnon' or 'Neanderthal' but that these are misinterpretation of the data). I also think that the 'young earth' creationist perspective is flawed in many ways.

The piece was, in its purpose, brilliant. There were Christians who fell for it (that's how I found it, from a link on a Christian website that said you were a Creationist). I particularly enjoyed the comment on the moose. I would bet that the moose wonders about the strange creature we call 'human'.

I find it incredibly disturbing that so many people would have such strong opinions about your possible position on the origins of the universe. If you DID believe the earth was created by a divine being, why does that matter to people that don't know you? Why would creationists proclaim you their new leader? Who cares what Roger Ebert thinks about any number of things? I say that about myself too. I used to be so happy to find out that a certain actor or musician was a follower of Jesus, as if that somehow added validity to my life as a Christ-follower. I now don't understand why I responded that way. Famous people can be as dumb or intelligent as anyone else. Celebrity and wealth do not bring insight and discernment with them (and may, in some cases, prevent those traits from developing). The poorest, most unrecognizable woman in southern Africa may have a stronger grasp of truth than the wealthiest movie star.

Thanks for starting the firestorm. The comments above continue to show the ignorance that exists and that people haven't learned to keep their mouths shut (or fingers still, as is the case on the Internet), even after reading the article. Because "James" and "B.P. Odom" think that they are experts and that the creationist position is "ignorant", "dishonest" and "absurd" does not make it so.

I'm sorry, Mr. Ebert; I was one of those people who e-mailed you to make sure you hadn't really lost your mind, and I really did suspect satire. But the fact remains that every sentence you wrote in that article is one that could be spoken by a true-believing creationist, including the bits about biblical contradiction and the noble moose. These people really exist. I'm afraid that at this very moment, as I write this, there is a creationist forwarding your article to all of his or her friends and relatives under the subject "ROGER EBART KNOWS THE TRUTH!!!!!1" They'll never see your follow-up journal entry, and your name will be bandied about for years to come as an example of an intelligent celebrity who genuinely believes this stuff. If I were in your shoes, I'd forward the text of this entry to Snopes.com (a site with which I know you're familiar) just for the sake of damage control.

I read your Q&A about Creationism and am as incredulous as they come, but I could not see the invisible quotes around it. I looked and I looked and I looked, because I am a regular reader and know you to be a liberal who does not hold those beliefs, but I could not find the invisible quotes, so I shrugged and decided that some light may be shed on the article in the future and to give you the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps, though, the misunderstanding is not a product of an age of credulity, but rather a reflection of the article, which I don't believe was clear in its aim. You have said about films that if you have to ask what something symbolizes, it doesn't. A corollary perhaps: If you have to ask what something satirizes, it doesn't.

Ebert: All too true. I have mentioned I had another purpose. Many people have heard of Creationism but don't quite know what it means. Now some of them do.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nfv-Qn1M58I

This morning, 'James' said, "Sorry, but giving Mr Ebert grief for being an ignorant creationist based on him writing commonly-held, commonly-stated, ignorant, creationist ideas is not a failure of irony detection. It's only a failure in knowledge about Roger Ebert, and that's no failure at all. I read the original, and assumed Mr Ebert was a credulous religious idiot capable of holding obviously counter-factual beliefs. There's a lot of it about. Then I read some commentary on it and discovered that he is not an idiot, or a creationist. My ignorance of the man is reduced, and my irony detector is still functioning just fine thank you."

James, thank you. I agree with you 100% and couldn't have put it better.

While I'm glad to learn that Ebert wasn't serious, I still think he forgot to bring the irony. We get the exact same Creationist nonsense all the time from the religious right, and they're not kidding...

The fact that there are a good number of people out there who do, in fact, completely believe and live by the words you wrote in your satire is what made it not easily identifiable as such.

I think the problem here is this: satire has, in recent years, become so hostile and mean-spirited that it's only seen to 'work' if it sets off a firestorm of angry protests from its targets. The nudge and the needle are gone, long displaced by the club and the meataxe. In a week I'll be turning 58; I grew up with spoofs and parodies that were no less pointed for being gentle and even friendly in their approach. My favorite humorist when I was growing up was Richard Armour, now long out of print and sadly forgotten; his satires of history and literature made some workaday high school courses a lot more bearable. There's no one like Armour nowadays (that I know of, anyway) and that's too bad. (Favorite Armour line: "Ezra Pound preferred Mussolini to Franklin D. Roosevelt, and because he was not a Republican, was declared insane." Funny, pointed, not brutal.) My other problem: when did sarcasm turn into irony? I always understood irony to be situational: the perfect plan that yields the opposite of the intended result (the prohibition of booze was supposed to reduce crime by reducing drunkenness; our sole real legacy of that period was the most widespread organized crime apparatus the world had ever seen to that point - now that's ironic.) The surprise endings of O. Henry, the plot twists of Roald Dahl, the stories on TWILIGHT ZONE and ALFRED HITCHCOCK PRESENTS - I was taught that these were examples of irony. What I've been reading here is what I learned about as sarcasm - the 'invisible quotes' and so forth. If the word was officially changed - well, I'd just like to have gotten the memo. (That was sarcasm, by the way.) What I think we all need to get is this: Cold print gives a kind of gravitas to things. Read a transcript of a satirical monolog and compare it to the live perfomance, and I hope you'll see what I mean.

I am reminded here of Mark Twain's famous comment about General Funston, the American general who devised the slaughter in the Philippines. Twain bemoaned the fact that his "weapons of satire" were completely lost on Funston, because Funston was "satire incarnated." I think there are certain subjects (and people, certainly) that satirize themselves, hence our weapons of satire go awry. I read your "Creationist" article and laughed out loud, despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that a) you represented the views of Creationists accurately and b) I come from a fundamentalist family and tradition, so they were familiar arguments. What you essentially did in your article was let the creationists satirize themselves (except for the moose bit). But the reactions you got in the blogosphere are certainly representative of our diminishing ability to detect satire, especially satire incarnate (just look at the lack of laughter and/or head-slapping from the mainstream media when the Bush Administration condemns Russia for invading a sovereign nation).
Part of it is the media, part of it is the TV/video-game generation. But the intellectual community is also partly to blame: George Orwell said that our universities are institutions that work to control the discourse of civilized society; that what they essentially teach you is that it "would not do" to say certain things in public. So, going back to the Bush/Russia example, one can apply the established American more: Politicians are sincerely acting for the best interests of this country. Therefore, it "would not do" to call our politicians hypocrites. Therefore, you see the lack of such statements in mainstream media, even when our chief politicians act hypocritically.
Back to the creationist issue, conventional wisdom dictates that everyone is entitled to their religious beliefs. Therefore, any expounding of a particular belief system, when accurate, must be respected. Again, this comes largely from the "intellectual" sector of society, the college-educated sector, which is probably why there was more consternation from the evolutionists than the creationists (of course, I'm being a bit stereotypical here by assuming that evolutionists are generally more educated than creationists).
One last note: You ask a reader if he/she is in the minority when it comes to a fundamentalist interpretation of the Bible (the minority being a position that allows a metaphorical approach to Biblical stories). I would say this reader is probably not in the minority. Most Christians that I know, for example, acknowledge that much of the early Old Testament stories should not be taken literally or that science and religious belief can coexist. "It will all be explained to me in heaven" is the common stance (fairly aloof, but oh well). Even the Catholic church has, over the centuries, begun to approach the Bible with a more discerning eye and room for didactic interpretation (which is why Catholics don't typically believe or preach on a "rapture" --they interpret the book of Revelation much differently than fundamentalist Christian denominations). Hardcore Creationism (that is, a literal interpretation of every word of the Bible) I think is falling into the minority, probably due to recent Intelligent Design theories that by their nature must concede some Biblical ambiguity in order to be politically viable.

Well, this journal entry certainly comes as a shock. I read the article a few days ago, and the joke was clear to me. Maybe because I'm not American? ;-D (Or should I say, " " ? )

I blame the internet. We've trained ourselves not to recognize sarcasm, satire or irony unless it comes hand in hand with the semi-colon/end parentesis "wink wink" emoticon.

Speaking of credulity - your reference to Swift reminded me of a story a Prof. told us while discussing satire. Peter O'Toole quoted "A Modest Proposal" (how to cook a baby) to reporters (I don't recall the situation or circumstances). Apparently there was much outrage in the news regarding the actors quotes which were taken at face value. Borderline funny but if you don't wonder about the education of said reporters, you would have to wonder why they wouldn't have wondered about what was said enough to do research!!! You'd think they'd recognize satire.
Why so serious!! Carry on with the great blogs!

True hilarity sir. You have definitly proved a point by making fun of another group of people. People who truely have a genuine belief and stand for something. Bravo Mr. Ebert. I commend you and look forward to your YouTube video of beating up homeless people.

Ebert: Hey, I don't blame them for not being able to get a mortgage.

I picked up on the irony and satire right away, but that didn't stop me from being disappointed in the piece. I think it's part of the reaction I have now to any attempt to mock/ridicule creationism, because of the way young-earth creationists and more progressive creationists are being lumped together. I believe in a Creator God, and I believe in evolution. I believe the religious/mythological understandings of the origins of the universe should be taught in schools, but not in science class (perhaps in literature or comparative religion classes). It simply pains me to find no distinction being made across the spectrum of creationist beliefs. I suppose it would be similar if I wrote a piece satirizing movie critics based entirely on Michael Medved.

Satire is especially difficult to decipher on the Internet, when your eyes are constantly scanning the text to get to the gist of information as quickly as possible. Mainly, so you can click onto your next bookmark.

Irony has (ironically) thrived on the Web. It's an environment where a snarky comment, preferably with a YouTube clip embedded, can say more than 1000 well-chosen words.

As for Creationism, I've always felt that a certain number of their believers -- particularly conservative politicians and pundits -- know it's a stalking horse that will drive liberals crazy. While liberals struggle to stamp it out, these "Creationists" can pursue their actual agenda (the Iraq War, deregulation of credit default swaps, etc.).

These so-called "Creationists" are, of course, the ultimate "Ironists."

I think that the age of credulity can be directly linked to things like CNN and other "all news" networks. Particularly when it comes to politics, or ideas that impinge on politics, like creation "science", they spend so much time dissecting, parsing, analyzing, sifting for sub-text, etc., etc., that the critical facilities of the population are atrophying.

The mass of population either
a) doesn't care enough to listen to or read the mass of information to extract what is important to them, so they shut down their attention, or
b) cares to go through the whole thing, but it's so big, unwieldy, and the competing and contradictory interpretations so abstruse, that people have no way of deciding for themselves what to believe. Since they're not themselves experts, they suspend thought and decide based on emotion.

I certainly detected the sub-text of the quotation marks Roger was putting in the article - the moose helped; yet in a sense there are no quotation marks. To my knowledge, Roger's answers are straightforward responses a IDer would give to those questions...and as for the "which should be taught in schools as an alternative to evolution...", I agree - it should be taught in schools, as an alternative to evolution, so that kids will learn what is a science and what isn't. ID certainly isn't science.

It's not satire unles it's understood. It's not funny unless it's laughed at. For a critic you have exposed yourself to ridicule for not understanding the fine line.

I thought the post was a joke after reading it; especially because it gives such a simplified and watered-down view of Creationism. Also because there are very few people in the public eye who would actually claim to believe in such a thing for fear of being ridiculed by their many liberal, arrogant, evolutionist peers. The whole article (and subsequent explanation) reek of someone obviously pleased with himself for debunking a theory he believes to be false! Usually, the purpose of irony or satire is to enlighten or to provoke change; but as we all know the evolutionists will still stand by evolution and the creationists will stand by creationism. So thanks for creating such a "controversial" waste of time.

Could it be that we all detect the irony in Swift's "A Modest Proposal" because he was a far better writer than you are?

And, having only glanced at the comments, there seems to be a lot of agreement that we readers do not think critically. I would argue that's false. My friends and I had a good time ripping apart the logical fallacies and inconsistencies of your post. We might not have recognized it as satire, but we certainly thought critically about it.

Honestly, as a person who probably has read at least 100 of your reviews on your website, the first thing that I thought after reading your post was "Why is he doing this? Why here?" What gave it credit in my mind was my recollection of the times that you have decried video games as never being capable of art. Knowing that you have a propensity for mixing your opinions on things that I never asked you about (video games, evolution) with the only opinion that anyone really wants from you (thumbs up or thumbs down?), I thought the post was because of age or illness. Oddly enough, I am still right in spite of this post. It seems to me that you have developed the habit of lashing out at things that are new and different as you get older; you reject new mediums as less worthy than your own, new schools of thought as less admirable than those of the past. Honestly, this whole affair has done nothing more than affirm my fears that you are losing your relevance as these new ideas permeate our culture. The whole thing boils down to you reminiscing about the good old days behind the front of the wise old teacher.

Roger, you asked the person who believes in both God and evolution if he was in the minority. My sense as a Christian is, he's not. My sense is that only a small minority of Christians believe that all the Bible is literally true. It's just that those who do -- or who claim to -- are louder and better organized, and get more media attention. I admit I have no data to back this up.

Maybe it was just easier for people who HAVE read hundreds of your articles to detect the irony... You've made it readily apparent that you are a proponent of evolution in quite a few reviews...

Also, just wondering if you and Mr. Emerson purposefully write thematically similar blog entries? This seems to have happened more than once...

You might want to check out what PZ Meyers had to say about this at: http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2008/09/there_is_such_a_thing_as_bad_s.php

Ebert: I did, and posted this comment: posted this comment on PZ Myers' Pharyngula blog: "Let me suggest that while satire was certainly my purpose, creationists were not my intended audience. By stating their beliefs accurately, my hope was that on a site such as mine they would reach a wider readership that might have heard about creationism but didn't realize what it actually believes. Only 4 percent of Americans are creationists. Do you have any idea how many Americans don't know what it teaches? I don't. I know the original article was linked far and wide, which is encouraging."

Buckman almost certainly had quotation marks around that; I don't know him or his work, but it's pretty clear that he chose that particular sentence to highlight the fact that McDowell, an actor I've admired most of my life, has been reduced to being in a sci-fi opera in which the writers, bereft of original ideas, insert Shakespeare to substitute for plot or sense.

I haven't watched much of Heroes since its first season, as it wore thin quickly for me, but I accidentally flipped on the program the other night, just in time to hear McDowell recite from the Bard.

My thought was probably Buckman's: Someone was trying to be too smart.

"We want to gobble all the food on the plate, instead of considering each bite." This made my week! I'm not missing a journal entry from now on. Loved the food analogy. Do you ever post on Chowhound? Just wondering. Thanks again so much! -Linnea

I was pointed to your article by someone who thought your site was hacked. As soon as I finished reading it, I replied to him that it appeared to mock creationism.

They key is not the exact word at which your purpose became clear. I think that Ms. Seward gave that instruction in order to make you all read a little more closely and precisely.

Great satire does not come down to a single word. There is no particular tipping point. Rather, it is the thousand paper cuts that no long seem disconnected. In a way, "The straw that broke the camel's back" is the perfect explanation. Sure, the expression works OK for bricks, too, but bricks each seem more substantial. Each piece of straw is almost nothing; each element of the satire is almost straight.

And so, your satire had some more obvious moments, but they weren't needed to make it satire. They were needed to make the implied quotes more obvious.

And so, the problem is not that we are in an age of credulity. The problem is that we too often miss the forest for the trees. The problem is that we cannot simultaneously note the tree AND its role in the forest.

The problem is that people don't know how to read. They know how to decode words. They know interpret sentences. But anything larger that gives them some trouble Complex paragraphs or ideas that take multiple paragraphs are often missed. People can read for facts, but not really read for themes.

Does this lead to credulity? Perhaps. When you can't pay attention for long enough to hear the contradictions, you will be more credulous. But credulity is not the root problem.

Roger,

I'm reminded of your review for "Wag The Dog":

"The movie is a satire that contains just enough realistic ballast to be teasingly plausible; like 'Dr. Strangelove,' it makes you laugh, and then it makes you wonder. Just today, I read a Strangelovian article revealing that some of Russian's nuclear missiles, still aimed at the United States, have gone unattended because their guards were denied bonus rations of 4 pounds of sausage a month. It is getting harder and harder for satire to stay ahead of reality."

I often wonder after watching a fiction film if it is more or less absurd than would be a documentary film about the same subject (or vice versa). "Taxi To The Dark Side," for example.

The same can be asked about a newspaper article (or in this case, a blog post). Is a neutral report of a subject or event more or less absurd than an editorial of the same? How does one tell the difference between the two?

The sad thing is not that people fail to sense satire. It's that there's practically nothing to satirize.

Why did you post that article ?
Very simple...You're an attention whore.

I'd rant on but there's no reason to.
Of course the creationists didn't complain, why would they, their world view is so skewed and ancient that even a lifespan isn't enough to wipe superstition away from their minds.

ugh, the media.

Re-appropriating the Creationist discourse to a different context seems to spark the discussion, I'd say. Had Mr. Ebert's article appeared on a placard at the Intelligent Design museum, we would assume nothing of it and continue walking beneath the trunks of giant plastered dinosaurs in a partially static recreation of the landscape 6,000 years ago.

I think it's valid that people misinterpreted the piece, without the accumulated knowledge of Mr. Ebert's previously reported views on evolutionary science. But doesn't its appearance on a movie website, beneath an article referencing the movie "Adaptation" with "Evolution Is God's Intelligent Design" (Mr. Ebert might not write the headlines, I'll admit), during a politicized climate where the vice presidential nominee has argued for the teaching of creationism within schools--doesn't this POINT to an agenda of some sort?

I think that a lot of the confusion comes from a hypertextual readership. People are linked to the article from an outside source that has its own agenda (in the case of New York Magazine or Fark, tearing apart all arguments for creationism, which in its own zealotry resembles quite a lot the same thing it's attacking), and they come to it with a (browser) history of opinions.

This is the danger of satire. When you can no longer SEE the Author, and the work has to speak for itself, it can twist into something unexpected, maybe building up what it means to tear down. I'm sure Jonathan Swift had similar difficulties in the 18th century. You don't write about eating babies and expect everyone to laugh their snuff out with you (makes you long for an 18th century version of the comment thread, however).

With the democratization of information and its universal accessibility, you have a lot more places where the Author's (Mr. Ebert's) voice can be distorted. These things never exist in a vacuum. The vacuum has just gotten a lot bigger, with a lot more hoses and attachments. Oh Hoover.

Unfortunately, it will be impossible to discuss this topic without mentioning politics, because modern politics are the main reason we are having such a hard time with irony. The following excerpt from the Onion AV Club's: Oscar-O-Meter™: The A.V. Club's Second Annual Guide To The Fall Prestige Movies, Part One:

"An ignorant hillbilly (James Brolin) with an incongruously aristocratic bloodline f**ks around for 40 years with the aid of mountains of cocaine, gallons of booze, and enough loose women to stock a Texas whorehouse. Then he discovers Jesus, buys a baseball team, becomes governor of Texas, and kills a bunch of people through capital punishment. Then, in a far-fetched, credibility-straining plot twist, this funny-talking, semi-literate yahoo becomes a two-term President Of The United States and nearly destroys the world in the process."

How can we tell the difference between satire and reality when reality is so much harder to accept? It goes beyond politics, too, into religion. We have huge, capitalistic christian megachurches. Christ was clearly a socialist and biblical texts have warned us about building giant expensive edifices in his name. A rational person might think Pat Robertson (a hugely respected Christian voice) was being sarcastic in saying that homosexuality caused hurricane Katrina. He wasn't, he meant it and he said such a horrible, insensitive thing days after the tragedy occurred.

And look at the state of entertainment and the media. Would you believe in 1989 that John McCain, one of the main figures of the Keating 5 scandal, would be running for president on a platform of economic responsibility? That he could claim to be for removing power from DC lobbyists while staffing his campaign with them? And that the news media would completely glaze over all this while focusing on non-issues and hypotheticals?

And as for entertainment, just look at some recent movie trailers that look like jokes you would find on the Simpsons: The Happening, Ghost Town, The Women...

Irony is not dying, it's just that reality is so much more outrageous these days and it is very hard for the average person to tell the difference.

Roger,

Your disappointment in the average perception of the average evolutionist shows the reason why the creationism vs. evolution debate doesn't matter. Critical thinking easily solves this debate, yet most people will not think critically about it. They will blindly accept what they are taught. I really don't care whether millions of sheep are taught to bleat one way or another. It is the action of critical thinkers I'm more concerned with, and I'm confident that any critical thinker will come to the correct conclusion.

Upon further reflection, a few more considered observations about the Creationism Q&A donnybrook:

1) There is a sense among many commentators that because they did not appreciate the satire in the work that it was bad satire. This seems a way to shift their embarrassment at being fooled. Many were more candid in admitting that they had fallen for it.

2) The idea that we must understand something about Mr Ebert's beliefs or other works in order properly to interpret this work is to commit what is known in interpretation theory as the intentional fallacy. It is the mass commission of the intentional fallacy that has caused so many to claim that they did or didn't "get" the satire, or that the satire was good or bad. They were seeking not to interpret the text, but to interpret Mr Ebert, to interrogate his beliefs, to find out what he "meant." What Mr Ebert's mental states are may be very fascinating, but they should not bear on the interpretation of the text. Indeed, the discussion has not been about the text itself but about whether Mr Ebert has lost his marbles, or gone over to the dark side, or is just a bad writer. All the man did was make a list, and it is ridiculous to reprove him for not properly letting us into his brain in doing so. In fairness it must be said that in this journal entry itself Mr Ebert is more interested in how well the Creationist Q&A communicated his own beliefs than in what the text itself offers. Thus the preoccupation with tacit and thereby overlooked "quotation marks."

3) Avoiding the intentional fallacy means developing the interpretation with reference to material immanent within the text, not with respect to what the author may have had in mind. In this case the textual cues are the inapt joke at the end and the inclusion of the more extreme absurdities of Creationist belief, namely: that nearly 11,000 animals could fit on an ark the dimensions of which are specified in the Bible and which are clearly inadequate to the task; that these animals were somehow fed, for perhaps a year, on stores, fish, and birds; that all humans now alive are descended, in only 7,000 years, from just eight people; that the duration of the flood is not definitely established even in the Bible itself; that the date of the Creation even among Creationists is not known with any precision. These are all beliefs that are, or should be, highly dubious even on the Creationists' own terms. Faith cannot defend them unless faith can tell us that apples fall up, nor is abstruse science required to refute them. Common sense will suffice.

3) But this brings up the idea that the work itself is not even satire, good or bad. For it merely presents the beliefs of the Creationists, which are self-parodic except to the Creationists themselves. As previously indicated, Mr Ebert's intentions in deploying this work may be relevant to our understanding of him and his beliefs, but are not relevant to our interpretation of the text. The comparison with "A Modest Proposal" is infelicitious. That work was indeed satirical in that it took the prevailing attitudes towards its subject and exaggerated them until they were manifestly absurd. No knowledge of Jonathan Swift's particular beliefs was required to reach this conclusion. In the case of the Creationist beliefs they require only to be presented to be undermined; no satiric hook is required. This also explains why few Creationists have responded in outrage: there is no satire here. What can they do, complain that their beliefs are being represented fairly (as they are)? It is the beliefs themselves that are (self-) parodic, not this presentation of them.

4) With great respect and affection for Mr Ebert, it must be said that his claim that the Creationist Q&A was not meant to be political but to be about credulity and satire is difficult to believe. For one thing, Mr Ebert himself admits to being surprised that so many people missed the satire, and grateful to the few who got it. He cannot plausibly then go on to claim that the entire point was to show how credulous people are. If that had indeed been his purpose ab initio then he would have anticipated the response he got, and would be neither surprised nor grateful to have got it. That the subsequent firestorm did largely concern whether people "got" the satire does not imply that this was Mr Ebert's purpose in the first place. Secondly, there are any number of topics on which to write satirically; the idea that Mr Ebert just happened to select one that is currently so politically vexed seems disingenuous. By his own admission and on the evidence of his work he has little use for Creationism. The only purpose for choosing this topic is precisely to be political, and to hold the Creationists up to critical scrutiny merely by rehearsing their own beliefs. (N.B.: This is not to commit the intentional fallacy because we are here interested in Mr Ebert himself, not the work.)

I think unfortunately Ebert has missed a key element of satire in his piece, which is ultimately why it doesn't work. Satire by definition takes belief or practice, overextends or develops it by its own internal logic, and the end result is shown to be ridiculous (worthy of laughter) and thus reveals the ridiculousness in the original position. What we have here is simply Creationist belief, verbatim what a supporter might actually write, posted haphazardly on his website without much insight or wit. Satire needs to push the dialogue beyond where a proponent themselves might take the argument, otherwise it fails to problematize the original position, which is exactly what happened here.
What is most interesting here is that despite what I knew about Ebert (I really enjoy his reviews typically), the cultural state of America made a revelation such as this completely credible. Age of credulity? Maybe. But after eight years of America with a man in power who holds these beliefs, not to mention the millions of Americans who write exactly these arguments daily, is it any surprise that the international community on the internet fell hook, line, and sinker?
There is some great satire being done in America which shows exactly how weak Ebert's attempt was here. Case in point: Steven Colbert's 2006 speech at the White House Correspondent's Association Dinner http://video.google.ca/videoplay?docid=-869183917758574879&ei=nZbaSMaFGJGQ-QHhvv2VCw&q=Colbert+white+house+correspondant&hl=en

Here is possibly one reason why it was not obvious as satire.
From yesterday's news-
http://www.cnn.com/2008/CRIME/09/23/alamo.evangelist.raid.ap/index.html?cfm=seatoverthere
Evangelist: 'Puberty' is age of sexual consent
...
Direct quote from article, "On Saturday, he had said that for girls having sex, 'consent is puberty.'"

How can you satirize people like this?

I find it somewhat disheartening that so many of the "I saw the satire right away" commentors make reference to your previously expressed opinions and reviews to explain what tipped them off. Good satire should speak for itself and not require the reader to go and research your previous articles to come to the conclusion, "oh, that must have been a joke." I think your statement, "consider the source," is somewhat misleading. As PZ points out, not only was Swift not a cannibal, but neither was any large faction of people at the time. Had there been a powerful political party or religious group at the time genuinely arguing for the eating of babies, had there been court cases in which parties tried to legalize baby-eating, then the power of Swift's satire would have been lost.

If the main point of your article was instead to draw attention to the ridiculousness of creationist beliefs, I wonder how effective it actually was. I get the impression that most posters here do not have to deal with creationist craziness on a daily basis. Many people seem to think that your answers were so ridiculous in themselves as to be obviously a joke (they should be; but they aren't). Therefore readers may be unaware of the large (and well-funded) groups that actually espouse these claims. These are the groups trying to consolidate power in the school systems. These are the groups duping children with "creation museums," wasting taxpayer money at court to put creation back into the science classes, drafting the Wedge Document. These groups are not satire. And yet, for too long, American society has ignored them, dismissing them as harmless religious kooks, bless-their-hearts-they-just-have-faith. So now, we're back in an era where school districts are taken to court for trying to teach kids that evolution is a lie, or that creationism is a viable alternative "theory." And our society is going to be paying the consequences, literally and figuratively, for years to come. I'm curious whether any reader actually came away from reading your article with any more information about what many creationists actually believe than he or she had when he or she started. If a reader were to read your article as satire like AMP, then a reader could not gain any actual information about creationist beliefs because satire is generally NOT just a recitation of genuinely held and common opinions. Satire writers deliberately go over the top, ham it up, and push things far beyond the range of "normal" for the satire to be effective. Therefore if you read this article as satire, you cannot come away with an understanding that creationists actually commonly believe these statements. In fact the actual beliefs many creationists hold are crazier than anything you included in your post.

Bravo Roger.

I must admit that having never read your blog before, when someone sent me the link with your Creationist essay I wasn't sure what to think. Reading it without any context, I wondered whether you'd become the next Kirk Cameron (a frightening prospect indeed). I'm very glad to learn that you have not lost your proverbial marbles—in fact, you have quite a few more in your sack than most.

A couple of years ago, I too suffered a very similar backlash regarding a piece of satire I wrote. In my column for HIGH TIMES magazine, I verbally attacked Comedy Central pseudo-pundit Steven Colbert as retaliation for his mock attacks on marijuana users. Obviously, as a devoted fan of his show, I was more than aware that his conservative blustering was an act, that he was playing a character. Being something of a self-styled absurdist, I decided to play on his court—pretending to take him seriously and feigning outrage. I included some pretty wacky claims and accusations in my rhetoric, making it—in my mind—obvious that the attack was a spoof.

Well... that month, the magazine was inundated by letters and emails calling me a moron and chastising me for not recognizing that Colbert was a "character" and that his show was meant to be ironic. It never occurred to them that I too play a character (as if Bobby Black were my REAL name!) for entertainment purposes, and that my rhetoric was as fraudulent as his. The fools had no clue that they were now guilty of the very accusations they were hurling at me—simply by making them! Now THAT's some pretty delicious irony right there. While I was disappointed in their apparent lack of sophistication, I was nevertheless giddy at the thought that I had "put one over" on them. Were my hero Andy Kaufman still alive (as he may very well be), I know he would be proud.

And so Mr. Ebert—in closing, I would like to once again say bravo, and though I'd never read your blog before, I intend to start as of today.

Highest regards,
Bobby Black
Senior Editor / Columnist, HIGH TIMES Magazine

PS - How would you feel about being interviewed for the world's most notorious magazine?

And what kind of a critic could write a review featuring this description of a character: "He is...meticulous, obtuse, at times ridiculous?" How do you keep a straight face, Mr. Ebert?

Ebert: I spent five minutes trying to somehow work in Almost, at times, the Fool.
...but it just wouldn't fit.

Yes, I think the problem with satire is that sometimes it is lost on people so utterly that becomes meaningless.

I had a friend once with whom I quoted Sarah Silverman jokes for some time, and she laughed and often said similar things. I assumed that a) she understood the satire of Sarah Silverman's jokes, and b) was continuing to make jokes in the same vein. It turns out she actually a) didn't, and b) was actually making some racist, nonsensical arguments seriously. I had assumed that she was playing along, but she wasn't at all. Once I realized that she didn't get it at all, I tried with some desperation to explain her jokes:

"One of her jokes is, 'A lot of people blame the Jews for killing Christ, and a lot of the Jews try to pass it off on the Romans. I'm one of the only people who blames the blacks.' The joke is that she's blaming a race who wasn't even remotely involved in order to point out how ridiculous it is to blame an entire people for one event--and so she's mocking the racism that people use Christ's death to justify."

She responded, "Isn't that overanalyzing it?"

I asked her then, "So if that isn't the joke, what is?"

She honestly didn't have an answer--I suspect the closest would be that it's funny BECAUSE it's a shocking statement and not for any other reason.

I knew instantly that your post was satirical, Roger, because I have read articles of yours in the past in which you express a similar tone, and because you have written articles in the past that indicate that you have respect for the sciences and evolution and (especially) reason. But I do understand why people who aren't familiar with you missed the joke. It's so easy to go the opposite way--to assume people are joking when they are dead serious. And that might be more damaging.

This is madness. Perhaps we all should type emoticons at the end of every sentence. We could reprint the works of Twain, Swift and Sartre with smiley faces appended to all appropriate sentences; reprints of Updike would remain untouched.

There is a man in my office who punctuates every story with a "just kidding" or "get it"? We hate this man. Once, when he succumbed to pneumonia, nearly everyone in the office laughed.

Please never write another article explaining yourself to the masses -- they still will not understand your point and will become distracted by television shows in which men are whacked in the crotch by baseball bats, pies, or flying babies.

i thought the picture was a dead give away since i couldn't see a foot and not to mention that's just one fossil out of who knows how many. however, i confess i thought you were crazy until i got to the 600 year old Noah part of the article. love the blog

From the 9/23 post: "Only 4 percent of Americans are creationists."

Depends a lot on how you ask the question. When asked something like "Do you believe the story of creation in Genesis is true?" something like 40-50 percent of American adults say yes. I would feel so much better if it were down around 4%.

I didn’t read every post on this blog, so I apologize in advance if I’m repeating, but I’m surprised that no one mentioned the The New Yorker cover with Barak Obama and his wife. I still can hear my democratic friend all in an uproar that they’d present him in such a fashion. Yes, he doesn’t read the magazine or know of their political positions, but still you’d think people wouldn’t look at it for face value.

Mr. Ebert,
I couldn't agree more. a couple of years back I wrote a "Letter to the Editor" of my local newspaper, regarding the debate on illegal immigration. It began, "I wish to offer a modest proposal and final solution for dealing with the problem of illegal immigrants." From this alone, you certainly can see where I was heading. The Editor responded and said he wanted to use the piece, which he ultimately did - but only after having me add a last paragraph telling people that if they didn't like my proposal, they should consider some form of path to legal status or citizenship.

He explained that if such wasn't added, he'd have to deal with hundreds of phone calls and emails from those who didn't get it as satire. I'm sorry I can't find a source for the quote, but, "The amount of intelligence in the universe is finite; only the population varies."

I think the other symptom of this dawning age of credulity is not merely the lack of ability to detect irony, but on a larger scale the inability to detect subtlety altogether. That, I think, is the saddening part of this, that far too many people reading your post simply regarded a question about the absurdity of a moose as one final crazy moment from a clearly demented old man.

If I may posit a second theory, the other problem was that many people probably never got to the moose question, or even read the article carefully. They were likely linked to it by a person or site with the addendum that Roger Ebert has posted an article in favor of creationism on his website. They clicked the link, scrolled down just far enough to see that what they already assumed was true, and moved on to other things.

In many ways, it's the same impulse that has people who come to your site, see only how many stars you've given a movie, and never bother to actually read the review itself. The internet provides an infinite quantity of information, but our desire for qualitative, meaningful content seems to be getting lost.

Bravo sir! Your satire was not lost on all of us. I will say that it was beautifully subtle which is all too rare these days when it seems many people need their answers spoon-fed to them.

You've always been a favorite of mine Mr. Ebert. Thank you for your wit and intelligence.

Such an ad would have to say about us that television is all about money, and that the people running the television station will take a certain amount of money to let such an advertisement be placed on their station. Such a person probably has no interest in their line of programming, and/or believes that they are kind of like the Charles Foster Kane of television, in that they control what entertains the masses--who have no minds of their own with no value or much thought of a democratic ideal or philosophy, therefore, have to accept what is on the television...such people would have to be enticed immediately: with images of "beautiful people", people that are enthusiastic every second with what they are selling you etc.

I had several friends send me this article when it came out, shocked that you would say something so audacious. After reading through it, I was greatly amused. To me, the irony of the article was clear. By presenting these views without bias and by trying to be as accurate as possibly, it underscored the absurdity of their beliefs. (It also helps to have read many of your reviews that reference Darwin or Darwinian ideas.) But alas, the irony was lost on my friends. This illuminated the other point to me, which was that we have lost our sense of irony.

Incidentally, Roger, I wouldn't take criticism of your satire too personally. Satire of creationism is nearly impossible to pull off. In a world where "creationism experts" genuinely argue that T-Rex used his sharp teeth to eat coconuts before the fall, that a banana's ability to fit comfortably in a human hand is proof of design, that the Ark was magically bigger on the inside than on the outside to fit all the animals (also common: the animals taken were babies so as to take up less space), satire becomes impossible. As you discovered, this is the point of Poe's Law. The well-known Onion satirical article "Evangelical Scientists Refute Gravity With New 'Intelligent Falling' Theory" was hilarious... until Bill Lucas from "Common Sense Science" began giving presentations at college campuses "to explain the new theory of gravity that supports a Biblical view of creation". Reality overtook satire long ago.

As I suggested before, I don't think the problem is that those who were hoodwinked were too gullible. They've just seen too much of what's actually going on.

Personally, I just thought your website had been hacked.

I am a Creationist and I agree that the Q&A article was very accurate describing my beliefs. I know your position on it very well, so while I knew you were certainly not endorsing my position, I nevertheless was satisfied that you were simply educating your readership on "the other side" (there are some quotation marks for you). The satire was present, but mild enough that I was not offended, although in your other articles I think you have incredibly missed the point of the heart of the debate. I would encourage you in future discussions (regardless of what you have or haven't done already, since I haven't read all the articles you've written on this debate) -- I'd encourage you not to dismiss the high education, intelligence, and deep sincerity of the many Creationist scientists and educators. They are not fanatics or quacks or misguided schizophrenics (as Dawkins and Bill Maher would say). I think the theory of evolution is as ridiculous, clumsy, and poorly thought-out as you think literal Creation is, but I still respect your thoughts and intelligence.

But yes, regarding the Q&A, even if you did intend scathing satire, you neither offended me nor convinced me you had converted. Perhaps you are too clever for either.

"Can you think of a famous Creationist?"

Isaac Newton, for starters.

A site that I frequent and help to moderate was one of the many where your article popped up, prompting scratched heads among many regulars. I can't claim to have seen through the satire immediately, but that really wouldn't have been much fun anyway. It was the last line, however, that left me no doubt. Bravo on a fair and elegant bit of journalistic pranksterism.

What Creation resource does the Q&A below come from? I'm not aware of a single Creationist who believes this. On the contrary, the Bible and Creationist organizations teach that there was no death before Adam's original sin. I'm not aware of any Creation organization teaching that "Cro-Magnon" and "Neanderthal" were anything less than fully human, but that they lived in isolated gene pools after the dispersion of Babel. Creationists not only believe, but embrace natural selection within a created kind. They do not teach that every species was created as-is, but that there has been genetic mutation and speciation, which represents a loss of genetic information, as opposed to a gain in information as required by evolution.

Q. What about bones representing such species as Cro-Magnon Man and Neanderthal Man?

A. Created at the same time as man. They did not survive. In fact, all surviving species and many others were created fully formed at the same time. At that moment they were of various ages and in varying degrees of health. Some individuals died an instant later, others within seconds, minutes or hours.

"Only 4 percent of Americans are creationists."

Source?

According to an ABC News poll, 60 percent of Americans believe God created the world in six days.
http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/story?id=3211737&page=1\\

Ebert: Saw it on the web. Shouldn't have believes it. Now here's a 1991 (!) Gallup survey cited by religious tolerance.com that says 47% of all Americans and 14% of science teachers believe the earth was created pretty much in its present form within the past 10,000 years. Hasn't the website been able to find a poll not older than the Web? I'm finished Googling for polls. (Same poll says however that of all scientists professing expertise in the area, only 0.14 percent subscribe to creationism.) How could that many people "believe" in creationism? Do they? It is not a matter for faith, it is a matter for rational thinking. Believing doesn't make it true. I have a friend who converted to a religion teaching creationism. She told her pastor it was the one area of dogma she had trouble accepting. "I doubt it, too" he told her. "But we have to believe in it. That's the meaning of faith."

I have to admit out of wishful thinking, I wanted to believe that humans and dinosaurs walked the earth together when I read saw that photo in the article...but then I looked up again, noticed that the picture showed a shoe print, not a footprint and lauged...hilarious. So, I wonder if part of the credulity is a wishful thinking syndrome. There was also an Andrea Yates case in Houston, about the baby drowning, where she was found guilty and then upon considering the death sentence, the jury changed their minds. Although, I don't believe in the death penalty, I found it curious about how the jury changed their minds to not execute her, and it was reported, at least, on the news like this: Andrea Yates lawyer's strategy was to change her story: from believing that the devil telling her to do it to God telling her to do it. It seemed this was the only reason she was not executed. Then, it was taken as a kind of triumph for the mentally ill.

Although, of course, I was glad she was not executed, I found it frightening how people will excuse some things as long as God's name is put in front of something. It's not about religion, but about how passively credulous we can be when it comes to being held accountable or holding someone accountable.

I was pretty sure this was satire, but my true question is what brought it out of you. I am a firm believer in creationism, but I wasn't foaming at the mouth hopeing that my favorite writer had "seen the light". It is one thing to believe in the past, it is another to trust in the future. Anyway, that may be political. I do think the main reason for such an uproar are the oversensative, but also the fact that it came seemingly out of nowhere. I think that any scientist who does not go through the bible is misgiving themselves. The only example I will use is when God talks to Abraham and Issac (and unless I'm misgiven Jacob as well) and tells them that his decendents will be as numerous as the stars in the sky. Until recently (about the last couple of centuries, I suppose), scientist thought that there were barely over a thousand stars. Hum.

Mr. Ebert, I am among those whom you successfully 'Poe'd' simply because as a scientist invested in science literacy and education I've seen far crazier ideas promoted in dead earnest by Creationists.

I'm not sure what the source of your 4% figure is, but several large polls in the past few years have consistently put the number of Americans who believe in a 6-10,000 year old earth and a 6 day creation at around 30% or more. Instead of lamenting about the dull-witted nature of those who did not immediately see the hilarity in your Creationist Q & A, it would be nice if you could ponder the underlying reason for our initial confusion. If your intent was to enlighten readers who were unfamiliar with the Creationist dogma, that's a good start. But the follow-up article seems to trivialize a very real, grim threat to science education in our country. Even a cursory look at current events in Texas and Louisiana, both of which (along with several other states) are endeavoring to limit the teaching of evolution or include some form of Creationism in their science curricula, should demonstrate that this is not some insignificant fringe belief.

Is this the reason you gave "Fight Club" the review you did, because you feared the credulous age would take its scenes depicting violence the wrong way?

Ebert: Nope.

I have enjoyed this experiment of yours very much and will confess that I was one who knew that much of the content of that entry was a cold buffet of Creationist beliefs...meaning that I'd found the quotation marks there. I just did not stretch them out far enough to properly account for your clues, the hot spots to get what you were trying to do...

Thanks for a fun experience.

Take care...

It was funny. I got it. Perhaps Creationists could explain kangaroos, which come from a continent that wasn't even known in the time that Genesis 5-9 was written.

I should also like to point out that highly educated, intelligent, and deeply sincere people can be completely misguided--and sometimes just downright silly. I'd name names, but let's not go there.

Oh, okay, let's: Albert Einstein and Neils Bohr were Socialists. 'Nuff said.

I wasn't terribly sure what to think about your Q&A. I really don't know much about you. A friend sent me the link and I was a bit surprised by it. Without actually knowing what you've said in the past, you never struck me as a Creationist. In the end, it didn't really matter one way or another to me because the bit about the moose had me laughing.

I love moose, by the way.

Mr. Ebert:

I read your creationist essay with no knowledge whatsoever of anything you have ever said, written, or implied in the past. I only knew your name from watching one or two Siskel & Ebert shows in the mid-80's.

I'm a scientist, but very familiar with creationist and fundamentalist thinking. Since I read your creationist essay through a news aggregator, and had never read anything you had ever written before, this single essay of yours was my one and only exposure to your personal expression, in my life.

I read about half of it, and then came to the conclusion that you were parroting typical creationist themes which I had heard and debated and dismissed many times before, and dismissed you as an idiot not worth my further attention.

Now I came upon your retraction, through an entirely different channel, and while I have regained some respect for you as a person, I must inform you that your other essay - the purely creationist one which you intended to be satire - will henceforth live on the internet independantly forever. The freak chance that led to me reading BOTH the original essay AND your retraction/explanation through two different news aggregator services is not likely to be repeated in all cases; many readers will never see the retraction. Ten years from now, people will still be stumbling upon your creationist essay online and using it to buttress their arguments against modern science with the authority of your name.

I never realized it was satire. If it was, it was too much like actual creationist thinking to be satirical. Your argument that your previous works should be taken into account when reading shows how little you know about how the world works today. I have never read anything you have ever written and never will again, my single exposure to your thoughts was reading an idiotic creationist diatribe unworthy of serious consideration. My only reaction was "Wow, that chubby movie-critic guy is one of those fatuous numbskulls, just like Tom Cruise." Having formed that opinion, I closed the browser and went to bed, like thousands of others no doubt did as well.

For the future - if you are going to try your hand at writing satire - make sure you turn it up a notch, because your supposedly satirical version of creationism is actually more credible than most of the arguments put forth by the actual creationists who really believe this kind of crap. You milquetoast satire isn't shocking enough to be recognized as such.

This is a 2006 study, published in the journal Science, which has the numbers for acceptance (and rejection) of evolution in various countries.

The USA just managed to beat out Turkey.

  http://richarddawkins.net/article,706,Public-Acceptance-of-Evolution,Science-Magazine-Jon-D-Miller-Eugenie-C-Scott-Shinji-Okamoto

I think the humour would have been more obvious if you had gotten a bit sillier, and referenced a more well-known site for satire.

Q: What about geology?

A: Geologists claim that the Earth is spherical, and consists of concentric layers, like an onion. This contradicts scripture.

People are quick to point out perceived problems with Creationism, but rarely do they present facts to uphold evolution. Can they say, for example, how all the energy and matter released by the big bang came to be contained within a single point? Can they produce the missing link, or will it forever be missing? Or, if one was to judge the intelligence of modern man based upon the kinds movies he most often watches, could he not then be said to be evolving backwards?

I'm a bit surprised no one has mentioned the classic "Is Your Son a Computer Hacker?", a deadpan spoof which provoked a huge number of outraged replies several years ago. The URL is http://www.adequacy.org/stories/2001.12.2.42056.2147.html

Well, the Creationism post had me roaring with laughter. Having followed you and your writing for more than twenty years, I knew instantly that what you had posed was satire. I also can't help but feel there may have been the slightest bit of glee in your heart at the enormous reaction you received for it (which brings me great joy, by the way). The people who took the time to debate this post in any serious manner (and by serious, I mean humorless) are probably the same ones who, regardless of their political leanings, found Tina Fey's impersonation of Sarah Palin wildly offensive (or simply curious) and dissected it down to the last eye movement for its political accuracy. And then there are the media outlets that debated the sketch for days afterward, helping to give it the very life that Fey and Lorne Michaels had probably hoped for when they wrote it. If the collective people had unanimously giggled at the satirical angle and moved on, the sketch would probably have died with little fanfare; but now it has entered into television--and political--lore. I guess the same goes for your post, Roger. Self-perpetuation. As long as divisive issues have life--which will be as long as we scrubby humans can manage to stay on this earth--there will always be room for satire, the people who get it, and the people who don't. The ensuing firestorm is just gravy.

To paraphrase a well known adage, "when it comes to satire, Roger Ebert is an excellent movie critic". People who had little to no idea about what Creationalism is would view the original commentary may see it as something that they had heard their friends expressing as their own personal views. And to those people, there is the likelihood that they might scan parts outside of the article, for bits and pieces that have nothing to do with the topic, and spot the details which seem out of place. Or they might be puzzled into suspecting something when getting to a segment which would seem, to them, to be odd. (What percentage of them believe in angels, talking to the dead, and psychics again?)

But to other readers, the contents of the original commentary were all too familiar, since the "accuracy" was something that many of them had seen hundreds of times through other sources. Due to the nature of this blog, I won't go into the details of the long pre-existing debate, other than saying that the roads are well worn. The "satiric" commentary was covering the exact same ground that had, repeatedly, by a great many people, been covered before. Some people have the patience to address those same points again and again and again, but many others do not.

Jonathan Swift was known for his satire, and pages in a book are not as easily hijacked as web pages are today. I suspect that many who can appreciate good satire are among those who remained confused by the original commentary.

I wholeheartedly agree with the comments which point out the dreadful apathy and inability to think critically which is so desperately prevalent in our society. Right now a massive nationalization of the consequences of losses due to private greed is being perpetrated on the American people, and for the most part people (myself included) seem to be much too hot for a good episode of Heroes or Two And A Half Men-- or to play Mob Wars on Facebook again-- to even squawk, never mind stand up and begin to demand, with voice and body, that the rape of the country be stopped once and for all.

I suspect that irony suffocates in an era like our own, in which so much which is flatly insane goes on commonly, and the immediacy of media in our global village exposes us to it all in massive toxic doses many times each and every day. Irony is defined as what happens when the intended meaning is opposite to the apparent meaning. That incongruity, to be recognized, requires a strong and stable sense of what is normal, in order to recognize that which is abnormal and stands in amusing contrast.

But what is normal in our day? No culture, no standard, no sense of propriety, no 'this is how things are' seems to maintain stability across more than a small minority of the overall fractured populace. One group sees Creationism (as Ebert paints it) as Normal. Another sees that as Bizarre. Scientologists feel triumphant about their ideas, while most of the rest of us feel they are idiotic in their painfully gullible credulity. A government here proposes a law and a large portion of the population governed considers that law so inimical to their values that they will abandon longstanding practices to avoid having to follow it. (Abortion referral in Australia.) Our own country recognizes this issue as so overwhelmingly divisive that a presidential candidate (whom I happen to like, for the most part) says talking about it is "above his pay grade."

How can irony not strangulate in such an atmosphere? If there is No View From Nowhere, how can there be any irony, either? Or humor? Or, eventually, recognition? Soon enough all communication breaks down utterly between factions, and eventually even within cohorts that were once tightly unified enough cracks open to shatter every individual into alienation.

Irony in Swift is quickly discernible, even among those who know nothing of him before reading A Modest Proposal. So I don't think the anonymity, or lack of face-to-face contact (body language, a shrug) of a blog make irony impossible to see.

I do think Mr. Ebert's blog was far less obviously ironic than Swift's piece for several reasons. In our culture is not obviously unthinkable that someone would believe the things about which he wrote, unlike cannibalism in Britain in Swift's day (or now, obviously.) Also, Mr. Ebert didn't really write to persuade-- ironically or otherwise-- the reader to take any particular point of view. It was more of a quick summary of points some folks believe.

DISCLOSURE: I believe that "in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth." The interpretation of this scripture which I hold (along with many other folks) is very different than the Young Earth people. I find it reasonable to theorize that God utilized the mechanisms which science suggests occurred (Big Bang, formation of stars, planets, etc., evolutionary development of species, and so on) as the means by which he created these things. And, I assert that the only path away from the alienation I mention above-- indeed the only way to get irony, humor, or any meaning at all back-- is found through the commonality of life through God's son, Jesus Christ. "In him there is neither Jew nor Gentile, slave nor free, for Christ is all, and in all."

I thought the title revealed the satire very plainly: "Creationism: Your Questions Answered." It made me grin all by itself. The underlying problem is humans who want to switch off their brains (like that recalled "Math is hard!" talking Barbie doll) and have the answers to life's deepest questions spelled out by someone else to spare them the trouble of thinking critically. After all, performing a scholarly inquiry would take years and very well might answer their questions with more questions. We want our knowledge in convenient pill form, even if doing so causes unwanted side effects like black and white thinking or priapism (if you have a doubt that lasts for more than four hours, call your pastor).

I used to write a column for a newsletter that dealt with assistive technology for the handicapped. One time I wrote a column as an advertisement for a talking machine with a redneck accent. I submitted it without any context. I was disapointed when I saw that they had put a disclaimer in front of it saying it wasn't real

I don't think there's much to write here about satire and the proper usage thereof; most has already been said (in just two days!). In this case, I saw it immediately, not only because I am generally suspicious towards creationism and especially when someone like Roger Ebert—who I have noticed often makes in his reviews good points about science in films—is concerned, but because he made no actual effort to justify the view stated in the opening. I missed the colon at the end of the sentence on the main page, and expected to find more when clicking on the link, half-amused, half-puzzled, but instead found the Q&A following immediately below. That, I think, was a dead give-away. From that point, only the questions and answers could lend some seriousness to the premise, but they proved to be expectedly absurd. From the second or third question I was already simply enjoying the ride.

I must say, though, I did wonder in the end about the purpose and context of the article.

One final note... Why is everything on this page italicised?

Roger,

You mention that most people read the Bible literally. In fact, virtually no one (outside of the standard hollywood fundamentalist stereotype) reads the Bible literally. Most understand there is a mix of exhortation, history, poetry, biography etc. For example, I know of no one who believes that God has a physical body, yet taken literally the Bible talks about his hands, feet, legs, arms, fingers, nose, mouth, and face. And, the only people I have ever heard take the Bible's reference to the four corners of the earth as literal proof that the earth is flat have been agnostics or atheists (and maybe once Sherri Sheppard on The View). I would very happily discuss it further, as we have many beliefs in common, and I think you would enjoy getting to know what most "fundamentalists" really think (not just the ones they feature on the news shows screaming at soldier's funerals).

Here's food for thought:

Why should God even have taken six days to fulfill Creation, when He (with all due respect to Him) is perfectly capable of bringing all things about in one single second and in one single fiat?

I see a discordance in credulity.

Mr. Ebert, in all the years I've been reading you I've come to expect curve balls from you. So much, in fact, that I didn't really think twice about your essay. Does that mean you failed? (or that I failed?)

But I would like to add that it is very cool that you used your position as a celebrity who reaches a lot of people to essentially, f*** with the lot of them. Good show.

I saw that it was a shoeprint and not a foot print and started laughing. Then as I read, I thought it was deadpan humor, and the moose part was the main trigger, as well as the evolution is god's intelligent design; I could sense it was actually meant to inform people that don't know. A part of me wanted to believe that humans did walk with the dinosaurs, I just can't imagine they'd be wearing loafers.

Ebert: You sound like one of my hoped-for readers.

Oh, now I see the footprint. I thought it was a shoe print. But, birds are our dinosaurs, they are fantastic. I am friends with all the birds, and I can't imagine wanting to be friends with the dinosaurs of old, they'd all eat me if I didn't feed them. I was surprised a couple of weeks ago to see that a road runner snuck up behind me and was walking with me a little bit. I fed it a few days a later. How do birds know me, I figure they all speak the same language, but I don't really want to know because I just enjoy all these new birds approaching me. A bird crapped on George Bush about a year ago in the rose garden, I like to think it was because of me....but, no, probably not.

Is PatrickR really saying that creationists are pedophiles or am I failing to see the invisible quotation marks? I was wondering what the low point of this civilized discussion would be and I think I've found it.

I hate ironing. I stopped ironing a long time ago because it's too time consuming. I have much better ways to spend my time that to lots of pointless ironing. I mean, who really cares if my clothes are a little wrinkled; not I.

This reminds me why I stopped ironing in the first place.

To add one point that is religio-scientifico (oh, jeez what did I just do, give them amo?!), if religious persons were desirous of truly understanding their beliefs then, they must accept that 600-Noah years is actually 50 years. Many people used a moon calendar and those who wrote the Bible, obviously were too. If they stopped to explain that the years noted in the New Testament are divisible by 12 then, people would start to see them as somewhat enlightened. Then we could talk.

There are some religious persons teaching in a way that I've come to respect such as two televangelists: Pastor Murray and Mrs. Scott who also has a lovely voice. One other kid is making some sense but I don't remember his name. They explain what past peoples experienced and there are some words of wisdom often. But more than anything it seems to be a code, not literal truth. And often they just come right out and say the devil is a man, he could running for senator and he's no Christian. Then I'm like, "Joe Lieberman! No, he's the devil but he's not running, they've already opened the door for him." Then I think of a few subversive filmmakers. Spielberg comes to mind. I think of how he made Americans feel like we didn't do enough in a war started by bankers with a loyalty to Israeli bankers which is a fact he intentionally left out of his first film about WWII, the one before "Stealing Private Ryan."

(Raises hand)

I have one question.

Why, when other nations were building large sturdy ships and sailing around the European continent from Greece to Crete to India and back, did the Jews not think to sail across the Red Sea and chose instead to walk across it? It would have been much faster and safer.

By Dave on September 24, 2008 9:43 AM

Irony is necessary if we're to have a dialogue. Dialogue is necessary if we are going to bring the unenlightened over to the other side where all of science isn't swallowed in all-or-nothing gulps.

The problem with the all-or-nothing gulps swallowed by the unenlightened is that if they are told that their god robbed the Federal Reserve Bank then, they'd believe it without questioning a thing.

Part of the problem is that they are told what they can and cannot read. If we could open a dialogue without trampling over those with opposing views ala Xienamen Square Redux then, we could pass along some truths here and there.

In this world of "irony" one way to end terrorism or rather solve the "war on terror" dilemma is to help others to see the light, the true light, that the sun was the original god who gave them light, kept them warm and was their "rock" (mostly gaseous rock but rock at its core anyway). That reminds me, I had a pet rock that had life and spoke to me as a child. But I never had a talking snake. And I've watered a lot of bushes but none of them imparted any words of wisdom to me. But Rosemary does have a delicious aroma. When no one else is around it whispers, "Come back and smell me again sometime."

The religio-scientifico angle isn't so bad if you accept irony as a door to truth and education. Be kind and gentle, is all I'm saying.

You speak of credulity. Maybe the simple answer is that perhaps most of your readers don't think you're very smart. Ever considered that option?

Ebert: I believe most of my readers think I'm smart enough. But the article reached thousands who were not my readers, through FARK, reedit, science blogs, NY mag, gawker, google, etc, etc. Many of them seem to have had opinions based on second-hand message boards, and didn't even read the article.

So, I read your Creationist-themed article when it debuted on your website. I don't want to sound self-serving, but I immediately knew it was satire, of the most biting kind. I have read your website for nigh on 12 years, so of course I hadn't thought you lost your mind or converted to Creationism. I had only one question, which I knew would be lost in the crowd and wouldn't get answered, so I never asked it. But now, I gotta ask: 'What precipitated this wonderfully delightful and insightful, fully flaying revelation of a what a sham Creationism is in the light of real science?' I took by your moose comment (again, no politics here) that is had to do, maybe, with a certain veep nom (I hide the politics in idiotic jargon), but I wasn't certain. But, kudos for your Q&A, and double kudos for fooling so many people. Ralph Waldo Emerson once said: "To be great, is to be misunderstood." Well, you have written a great commentary. I salute you, sir.

Roger: I must disagree with you on one significant point: I don’t think your essay is intended to convey “what Creationists believe.” It’s intended to convey what Creationists’ beliefs amount to. There’s a fine line and an enormous chasm between the two. To be offensively over-simplistic here, Creationists believe that God actively created the world as we know it. Yet that belief leads to an incredible amount of contradictions or (being polite) curiosities, which is what your essay reveals.

Having said that, I have to disagree with anyone in this comments section who suggests that the essay itself is at fault because it isn’t explicit enough. It is plenty explicit, if you’re thoughtful enough to consider each of the points against one another. Truly, I have no idea how anyone could read the original essay and miss the satire.

This is especially true if one considers the source, as you suggested. But commenters above are correct that it isn’t impossible to imagine your essay posted on a message board debate somewhere as a serious argument in favor of Creationism. In those cases, though, we wouldn’t know the source. Big difference. (For example: I have no idea whether to take seriously the comments of Hax Or on 9/24 at 11:14 am. I think it’s satire to try and underline your point, but since I have never read Hax Or before, I can’t be entirely certain. That's the problem with the Internet.)

One more point: In addition to the ‘problem’ created by the democracy that is the Internet, where the thoughtful and the knee-jerk-reactors getting equal play, there’s also this: the Internet has revealed many people to be absolutely horrible at sarcasm, which only adds to the confusion.

Ebert: I must admit I was disappointed that so many people concluded I had lost my mind, when I had about 15 perfectly sane pieces on the same page. It shows a conclusion taken without a second thought.

I am a *former* creationist. Young-earth, six-literal-days, yes-the-flood-was-real creationist. Was so for the first 30 years of my life.

(A couple of years living in mainland China knocked my religion clean out of me.)

Your ironic post? Nothing to respond or react to. It was spot-on.

(Except for misspelling "ark" and incorrectly suggesting that Cro-Magnon Man and the Neanderthals were anything other than a fossil myth cooked up by God-hating evolutionists.)

Clever. Not Jonathan-Swift clever, but clever.

I just assumed everybody knew we believed this stuff ...

I suppose the one thing I would like to say because it often gets lost in these discussions is that it is very possible to take as my freshman biology teacher, at a secular university, did a stance that is neither orthodox in regards to evolution or creationism.

Adorno states in the Culture Industry in the section on Transparency on Film
"Children when teasing each other in their squabbles, follow the rule, no fair copycat"
So the response to your piece is typical, as now “adults” simply copy each other, the discussion grounded away with taunts, just using each other’s words against each other…

So, Mr. Ebert, your original voice, and satiric piece, simply doesn’t compute, it requires thought, and cannot be copied to refute it, hence the personal attacks, as thought makes people uncomfortable. Sad, but true

Good job for putting something out there!
I got a good chuckle. And I always enjoy an original laugh.
Rare these days…

"Ebert: I must admit I was disappointed that so many people concluded I had lost my mind, when I had about 15 perfectly sane pieces on the same page."

This is, in part, the point. People have an amazing capacity to compartmentalize. Many people who would otherwise be considered "perfectly sane" do buy into creationism. A number of your commentors above believe it. I suspect most of them would be able to produce sane articles on non-scientific subjects. I would argue that otherwise sane people determined to believe insane things is exactly what has created the bizarre complexity of most creationist beliefs: the invention of and arbitrary distinction between "micro" and "macro" evolution, the perpetually undefined animal "kinds," etc. The sadder commentary is actually that one doesn't have to have a website at the craziness level of the infamous Gene Ray to be a young-earth creationist.

I didn't read the creation article until I read this one, so my perspective is different. I have read nearly every article you've written in the past ten years and when your new site was unveiled, many older ones. I have some knowledge of your beliefs, but I'm still not positive that I would have caught on.

The article is short and, for the most part, straight-laced. I understand why people thought it to be true. I probably would have written you, asked what the hell was going on, and then patiently hoped for a follow up article explaining that your creationism article was in satirical quotes.

Now, if I hadn't actually read the article and someone told me about it, I would tell him without hesitation that you were joking. People, including myself sometimes, tend to look at articles as self contained worlds. Your decision to muffle sarcasm made it difficult to figure out.

To All-American Patriot on September 25, 2008 4:57 AM,

Well, today, my dad gave me 50 pelts in the bum for showing him this article of Mr. Ebert. He got very crossed after hearing me extol, with great sincerity, the practical usage of irony in his profession. You see, my dad is a blacksmith.

Thanks, Mr. Ebert, for the 50 pelts.

Vexed,
Robert of Taoyuan City, Taiwan

"Ebert: I must admit I was disappointed that so many people concluded I had lost my mind"

I wouldn't be disappointed. First, for a large part of the population, those not as enamored with movies as us smart people are, your name is little more than a pop culture meme. If you (or I) were to be scrolling down through a list of blog entries, and some equivalent 'name-recognition' cultural touchtstone were identified as adopting some absurdity (e.g. "Tony Robbins Converts to Creationism" ; "Fundamentalism embraced by Jeffrey Bezos" ; "Michiko Kakutani to vote Green in November" ) we'd probably register it, keep scrolling, and later feel flippant enough to question their sanity.

Second, being ever the optimist, you could see the chalice as half-filled in that they at least thought that anyone who would embrace Creationism was of questionable sanity.

By the way, I'm using this example of stony faced satire to help explain your positive review of 'Flightplan'. Inside them there invisible quotes, all is good in the world.