Creationists gather at a conference to explain, well, everything:
The 2005 Creation Mega-Conference, slated from Jul. 17 to 22 in Lynchburg, Va. tackled several prominent issues facing the creation/evolution debate, such as the dinosaurs, the flood and Big Bang theory.
The six-day conference opened with a performance by Buddy Davis – a Dinosaur sculptor, author/speaker, and musician, whose keynote presentations clarified the creationist’s take on issues such as the age of the earth and fossils.
David Dewitt, Director of the Center for Creation Studies and associate professor of Biology explained in a nutshell, “We believe that Adam and Eve were real people and that God created everything in six 24-hour days.”
In “Rocks Around the Clock: The Eons That Never Were,” Geologist Dr. Emil Silvestru rejectedmthe notion that the earth had existed for millions of years, and instead offered a six thousand year chronology: Creation, six days, Lost World, 1700 years, no big mountains, no plate tectonics, Flood, 370 days, creation of high mountains, deep oceans, sedimentary rocks, plate tectonics form continents, Ice Age, 1000 years, and Post Ice Age, 3000 years.
Flood hydrology is a belief that the flood covered the entire earth.
Dinosaurs were also explained. According to John Whitcomb, co-author of the seminal creationist book, The Genesis Flood (1961), Noah’s ark carried 1,000 different kinds of dinosaurs as well as all of the other species, and the book has sold more than a quarter of a million copies in English…
According to one assessment, at the root of the creationist argument is the concern that evolution undermines moral beliefs, leading to lawlessness, family breakdown, homosexuality, pornography, and abortion.
If evolution is true, said Philip Bell in his talk, and we are descended from ape-like animals with no morality, no aesthetic sensibility and no soul,” then “you would have no purpose for your existence.”
“If we don’t understand the young earth and how God created it in six 24-hour days, then our values are skewed, said the Reverend Jerry Falwell, and he is hopeful that “The biblical account is the believable one. The creation debate is being won.”
The report is so rich that any attempts at snark would simply fall short, so I will not even try. I will, however, note that this report was filed under the heading of ‘Education.’ A Lynchburg television station filed this report:
“We’ll be able to show people the mounting scientific evidence that supports creationism,” said David DeWitt, the director of Liberty University’s Center for Creation Studies. “There is so much propaganda out there depicting Creationists as ignorant. We’re not a bunch of flat Earthers.”
The overriding theme of the conference is to debunk secular theory and to show a creator’s hand in the development of the universe.
“Science rightly interpreted is consistent with the Bible,” DeWitt said. “The speakers all believe in the Biblical account of creation.”
Discuss
The Panda’s Thumb has a man on the inside. Here are parts one and two.
JonBuck
Here’s a quote from my favorite author that I find quite appropriate:
Stormy70
Wow. They know the answer to Life, the Universe and Everything! Thousands of years of Theology wrapped up in one 6 day conference, with an all you can eat buffet.
Mike S
Time to go murder someone, leave my wife, rob a bank, tell my mother she’s dead to me, get buggered, star in a porn flick and cause an abortion.
Sorry, no propaganda needed. You do a damn fine job on your own.
Otto Man
Since when does learning about evolution lead to reading pornography? I think someone needs to explain to them that the phrase “homo erectus” doesn’t mean the dirty things they think it means.
I can’t remember who said it first, but it is ironic that the people who distrust evolution the most are generally the ones who seem like they missed out on the process.
Mike S
Ken Ham, president of AiG, rejects the Big Bang because Genesis explains God created the waters and Earth on the third day, and the sun, moon and stars on the fourth day.
Oh, OK. What more proof do you need? I don’t know what I was thinking.
Warren
Are these people for real? According to the bible, the measurements of the arc are well known. How in hell would it hold all of those animals and not sink, and secondly, not have them all devour each other? I can not believe that educated people would believe this fairy tale.
Mike S
BTW. If the Sun and moon weren’t created until the fourth day, how was it possible to have 24 hour days?
ppGaz
The mind fucking boggles.
Mike S
and secondly, not have them all devour each other?
Maybe that is where the song Kum-Ba-ya was first sang.
Steven
And we wonder why this man is President:
As a matter of policy, Bush told The Associated Press last Nov. 14:
I’d make it a goal to make sure that local folks got to make the decision as to whether or not they said creationism has been a part of our history and whether or not people ought to be exposed to different theories as to how the world was formed.
http://slate.msn.com/id/1006378/
Just to make sure No Child is Left Behind. Has it ever bothered anyone that the education initiative is named after an end times series?
http://www.leftbehind.com
Mike S
The first Creationist Science Fair.
flackman
After reading this inane dribble coming out of the mouths of these Creationist Con monkeys, if I had just taken a sip of a drink, I’d likely have sprayed it all over my computer, similar to Danny Thomas in “Make Room For Daddy”.
Mind boggling. Absolutely mind boggling.
docG
Of course creationism is a fact. Cultures have always created some sort of god mythology.
kenB
The six-day conference
Took me a minute, but now I get it.
But I think you missed the key graf:
If evolution is true, said Philip Bell, … then “you would have no purpose for your existence.” People will believe any fool story in order to escape the horrible, ego-slaying thought that our lives are meaningless.
MikeS:
BTW. If the Sun and moon weren’t created until the fourth day, how was it possible to have 24 hour days?
Foolish mortal, don’t you know that all things are possible with God? The better question is why She would limit Herself that way in the absence of any astronomical reason to do so.
Jay
You know, it’s one thing when creationism gets mixed in with politics and schools. At that point, it becomes an issue that deserves as much scrutiny and criticism as possible.
But it’s another when you post something like where the intent is to do nothing more than mock.
I can’t imagine the same kind of contemptuous attitude towards Jews and Muslims.
Mike S
Jay
If the nuts have their way it will be in the schools and a lot harder to get rid of. I’m not willing to wait until that happens before I ridicule them. And if John writes a post about Kabala I’ll be there too.
7
“we are descended from ape-like animals”
This statement alone shows how little these fools know about evolution. First, we are ape-like beasts in that we, humans, are primates. Second, we did not descend from monkeys as is often claimed; we share a common ancestor. That’s a big difference. The tabby sitting in my window did not descend from the tiger in the jungle.
These people are in a panic. For ages they were comfy knowing it was a long time coming before complete fossil evidence supporting evolution could be assembled. Then along came DNA.
John Cole
The entire intent of the conference is to ‘prove’ creationism so that it can be injected into education.
They aren’t doing this because they believe in creationism. They are doing it so your kids are taught it as a ‘theory:’
CaseyL
They don’t “believe in” plate techtonics?? Where do they think earthquakes and volcanos come from?
The thing about Creationism – and, for that matter, all the rest of fundamentalist theology – that really amazes me is how uninteresting it is.
The universe is an amazing place, with singularities and quarks and planets like massive jewels, gorgeous nebulae and cosmic forces; evolutionary biology is a fascinating exercise in multi-dimensional puzzle solving; paleohistory is a never-ending source of delight, all those astonishing creatures of so many mind-boggling shapes and sizes and behaviors.
But theology reduces it all to a neat little box, tidily tied off, so plebian and mundane it kind of breaks my heart.
It’s like looking at the wonder and grandeur of a real horse and deciding you like My Pretty Pony better.
JonBuck
They can believe that the Earth is flat and carried by Great A’Tuin the Star Turtle. But when they want it taught in public schools as scientific fact, I have to oppose them.
Jimmy Jazz
Republicans don’t need critical thinkers John, that should be obvious by now. They want mindless little fundie drones who will just shut the fuck up and not complain while they skim off the top and flush the rest down the drain. Sort of a do-it-yourself Rapture.
Otto Man
The Creationist stuff is ridiculous, but not nearly as worrisome as the other end of the spectrum — the longing for the End Times. Is anyone in the Republican Party worried that the fate of the Free World is in the hands of a man looking forward to the Rapture?
DougJ
Evolution is one of the greatest farces ever perpetrated by the loony left. I’m supposed to believe that my great-great-great-grandfather was a frog?
Jimmy Jazz
OT, but looks like Doughboy Rove and Scooter will need somebody to Rapture their asses pretty soon:
Ides of Frogmarch!
j.d.
John, I don’t know how you do it and still remain sane.
You get idiots from the left and right. Namely, the three commenters above me.
On top of that, you actually had to read this creationism garbage.
Mike
Once you guys get tired of ridiculing these folks, you might want to check this out:
http://amywelborn.typepad.com/openbook/2005/07/im_evolving.html
It provides an excellent discussion from some fairly well informed folks about evolution and how Christianity fits into it. You’ll find little supporting the view of these folks here (The “Young Earth Crowd), but I think you’ll also find that only an idiot immediately dismisses the fact that much of Evolution is NOT fact, but still theory, AND Science and Christianity are NOT necessarily incompatible.
DougJ
Jimmy Jazz, your post shows in a nutshell what is wrong with liberalism. We’re discussing something important: the rollback of all the liberal propaganda about “evolution”, the “big bang”, etc. and you bring up all this Rove crap. No wonder you lose all the elections.
I’ll make it simple for you
Creationism = issue Americans care about
Plame leak = something people in New York and San Francisco care bout.
John Cole
I don’t think for one minute science and Christianity are mutually exclusive. But I reject the characterization of evolution as just a ‘theory,’ as if that means that there is nothing there concrete.
DougJ
Mike, I like that link you provided. It goes to show how much thought and, yes, real science is beyond creationsim and ID. Here is another link along those lines
http://www.csama.org/199711NL.HTM#NewDino
Matt West
If you guys really want to see the ridiculousness that is the CMC, I would recommend stopping by http://www.pandasthumb.org to read the (two so far) reports from the festivities. Jay Rosenhouse has a PhD is mathematics and is a regular poster about Biology and Creationism over at the Thumb. His reports gives a detailed dissection of the stupidy that is clustered in this small burg this week thanks to Jerry Falwell.
TIm F
I reject the characterization of evolution as just a ‘theory,’
Hate to pull rank, but we in the science community take the word ‘theory’ very seriously. It can’t just be any crazy idea that a few experiments support. That’s a hypothesis. To reach the level of theory you must have on your side an overwhelming weight of unimpeachable evidence. Very, very few ideas in science make it that far.
That’s why the stickers themselves are so silly. Calling evolution ‘just’ a theory is like calling Lance ‘just’ a six-time champion of the Tour de France.
Jimmy Jazz
Hey j.d., I use hyperbole to make my points, but ask yourself a simple question. Who’s more valuable to the Republican party, a critical independent thinker like John or a fundamentalist that thinks God put Bush in the White House to smite the heathen? If the latter, do you think the Republican leadership might be interested in creating more voters/donators like those described?
insomni
It may be stupid to declare that I believe what the Bible says in what looks like a room full of atheists, but there it is. That said, I’m sure my views differ greatly from the mainstream at the 2005 Creation Mega-Conference (I can’t believe they called it that — okay, I can). Every time I start rolling my eyes at the arrogance of atheists acting like they know just how humans and the universe came into being, the religious folks (especially the kind who think Jerry Falwell is a good spokesman for the Bible) provoke the same response in me. Nobody has a perfect understanding of Life, The Universe, and Everything. Both sides (and there are many, such as myself, in between) could use some humility.
One book that really helped inform my view was The Science of God, by Gerald Schroeder. The author is a Jewish scientist and does a great job of showing that scripture and science don’t necessarily contradict. This includes a fascinating explanation — and yes, a scientific one — of how the six days of “Creation” don’t contradict the millions of years that a more empirical (if that’s the right word) view necessitates. It might sound far-fetched, but it’s worth checking out, whatever your stance is. The first few pages are available on Amazon.
John Cole
Tim F.-
I said:
To which you responded:
I am not sure where you think we disagree and/or need to pull rank. I systematically reject attempts to downplay the significance of evolutionary theory by using the “It’s just a theory” BS. In fact, I have written about this before.
Rather than disagreeing, I think we agree completely.
lrwoo1
What amazes me, as an atheist, is that the fundamentalists don’t believe that their god is capable of creating something as complex as eveloution. Guess “he” isn’t all that powerfull and all knowing after all
Dave Ruddell
Whenever someone says that evolution is “just a theory”, I lie to point out that gravity is also just a theory. Go ahead, ask a physicist how gravity works. They don’t know. And yet, if I let go of my pen at eye level, it unfailingly falls to the ground.
JonBuck
The best resource, hands down, is Talkorigins.org. not that it will convince people like Doug who think that evolution is a Vast Left Wing Conspiracy, but anybody interested in this subject should read this site.
insomni
CaseyL: I share your view of the universe as a fascinating place, and that’s one great thing about the book I mentioned above. It’s written by a scientist who feels the same way and is able to show how the wonders of science don’t refute the Bible, just as the Bible need not render science as folly. As we know, many of the most celebrated scientists of the past (including Darwin) believed in God. The two weren’t always considered mutually exclusive.
The Bible was written long before most modern science had been developed. I don’t think it’s the book itself that “reduces it all to a neat little box, tidily tied off, so plebian and mundane” (nor did you say so, you said theology), it’s the narrow-minded believers who have written off science.
ppGaz
No, that would be devolution.
Slomas
If fundies really want to listen to the Bilble then they first need to realize what the the whole “tree of knowledge” thing was really about. The garden of eden is meant to represent living from gods providence (what he gives you or if you aren’t religious what nature provides every creature that has a place in the ecosystem). When adam and eve lived in the garden they were allowing god to run provide food but when they took the apple from the tree of knowledge they were symbolically learning how to control their own food source. Thus the tree of knowledge is a symbolic stand in for the agricultural revolution and it is our ability to control our own food source that is leading to our downfall. Think about it . . . virtually every problem that we have now can be traced back to our exponential population growth. And ultimately our population growth and every technology that we have developed is a result of being able to surpass the restrictions of what “nature” or “god” provides. Thus, the story of the garden of eden has been interpreted backwards by fundies. If they want to be faithful to it then they will cease to grwo their food or eat grown food and merely subsist on what god provides. Like pulling the apple from their own mouths.
Not a verry appealing prospect, but unless their willing to do that they should be more flexible in their view of the debate.
DougJ
EVOLUTION IS JUST A THEORY!
Mac
I promise to keep my Science out of your Faith, if you promise to keep your Faith out of my Science.
I won’t teach Bible Classes. You won’t teach Biology, Geology, Paleontology, Geomorphology, Zoology, Paleobotany, Astronomy, Physics, Ancient History, Anthropology, Comparative Religions, or Animal Husbandry.
Now that is a division of Labor.
For ways to respond to the above Arguments=
Also, Google Project Steve, to show you just how much in crisis the “Theory” of Evolution is in world wide.
Mac
It amazes me that Darwin could predict the whole Rove thing, and have been on the right side of the argument. That guy was good…
j.d.
JimmyJazz: I don’t really give a damn what the Republican Party wants or needs, or whether it gets those things or not. I’m not a member of the Party, I never have been, and I never will be.
Independent thinkers (and brilliant men) like John can take care of themselves.
Don’t hide behind your rhetorical “skills.” It’s funny: when liberals like you meet conservatives who like science and don’t thump the Bible, their heads literally explode. Like, skull fragments all over the monitors.
And DougJ:
Evolution is one of the greatest farces ever perpetrated by the loony left. I’m supposed to believe that my great-great-great-grandfather was a frog?
EVOLUTION IS JUST A THEORY!
Your great-great-great-grandfather wasn’t a frog. Quite likely, he was a rock of some kind. Maybe granite. Or quartz with flecks of mica. Which, those doesn’t exist, because the earth is only 6,000 years old, right?
ppGaz
Which is why it has value. A hypothesis can be tested, measured against data.
Whereas, creationism is a fairy tale. Can anyone send me the process for validation of a fairy tale? TIA.
If I am trying to understand the world, and I have a choice between a hypothesis, and a fairy tale …. I’ll take the hypothesis, thank you. I can explore, test, measure, collect information, perhaps draw conclusions or form new hypotheses. I have a self-renewing mechanism for gaining a greater understanding of the world. I might find cures for illness, or learn to judge the true age of the earth.
But if I have a fairy tale …. all I have left, at the end of the day, is the fairy tale.
You are welcome to your fairy tales. I need something a little better.
Mac
I feel very strongly about this topic. For the last 40 years I have attempted to teach folks about evolution and have been called every name in the book. I check myself for horns and a pointed tail every week and have seen nothing yet. This merely proves that I am apparently still alive, cause the horns and the tail appear to be the uniform of the day where I’m going according to most of my critics. I am retiring soon and I promise to travel to these meetings like the one in SC and ask some pointed Questions of the “Experts”
I am evolving into a gadfly for the Science Community. My mission- annoy the Excrement out of Jerry Falwell…
Bob
Just started reading In Gods We Trust today, which I think is going to examine the biological reasons for why people need to believe magic stuff like walking on water, riding chariots into heaven, etc. The print is small and the author writes with a scientific precision in his turns of phrase that suggests that it’s going to be a tough slog. But he seems to be on to something more than meme meme meme, so I’ll get it a shot.
DougJ
I’m not here to call you names, Mac, but I think that liberal scientists need to admit there are a lot of holes in the theory of evolution.
Jimmy Jazz
You don’t have any rhetorical skills or, evidently, any answer to my post.
I’ve been posting here for awhile and my head hasn’t exploded yet.
ppGaz
Science does not rest on the correctness of any theory. It rests on process.
Faith rests on the correctness of dogma. It refuses process.
Process is the issue, not a particular theory. Without process — science — not much of what we consider the modern world would exist in its present form. Your clean drinking water, your medicines, your cheap and high-quality food, in all liklihood your job, either directly or indirectly, all rest in their present form upon advances in science. The machine you are using to make posts which dismiss science ….. comes from science. Not from a set of theories, but from a set of processes, which led to discovery, and then to utility.
The only thing required to maintain a viable connection between science and myth is the ability to see and create metaphors. Of course, this requires intelligence. With intelligence, the putative conflict between science and myth is mostly irrelevant. One does not have to literally believe in Santa Claus in order to appreciate Christmas. Most eight year olds understand that.
Mac
I prefer to think of myself as an agnostic. Thats an Aethist with an insurance policy. I have no beef with anyones belief system, more power to ’em, but not when it comes to science. Does this make science my religion? No. Anything that can be proved can be disproved or replaced with a newer, better theory. So to embrace what is out there now as “gospel” may be wrong, but its got my loyalty for the moment,(looong moment, but then I think of time in geological terms).
If you want to study creation myths, fine. Just put them in a comparative anthropology class. Include the Native Americans, the Maori, Aboriginies, Shinto worshipers, Hindu, Bushman, Wiccan, Druids, Budhists, Deists, Moslems, Jews, Christianity’s 30 Main groups, I think we can leave the snake handlers out of this one, and anyone else I have forgotten. This will Bring about some interesting ideas about creationism. And of course show the Creationists for what they are. Religious bigots. For they are not interested in what other religions have to say but only that they have the only right and true answer.
j.d.
JimmyJazz: I did answer your post. You asked:
Who’s more valuable to the Republican party, a critical independent thinker like John or a fundamentalist that thinks God put Bush in the White House to smite the heathen? If the latter, do you think the Republican leadership might be interested in creating more voters/donators like those described?
I answered that I don’t really care what’s more valuable to the Republican Party. I’m not part of it. That is a determination for the GOP to make.
But, all that doesn’t matter in your world, where we’re either “you” or “Bible-thumping Rethuglican RoveHitler Nazis.”
But, I was just using “hyperbole”, so we’re cool, right?
ppGaz
Ergo, the phrase, and the attitude, “You’re either with us, or against us.”
I’m sorry, was that a liberal notion?
Jcricket
Nice smear without any evidence to back it up. I especially like the “liberal scientist” BS.
First of all, science and scientific theories aren’t liberal or conservative. They are well-supported or not. They explain the facts and make useful predictions, or they do not. As others have pointed out, gravity is not actually that well understood, but it is an excellent scientific theory, well supported by the facts. It makes useful predictions (like what happens to objects as they that rotate around stars, allowing us to find remote planets). Evolution is even better understood and supported than gravity.
I’ve been reading the talk.origins (USENET newsgroup) for 15 years now, and in those 15 years, not a single creationist claim has ever had any validity. None of the holes Creationists claim exist, do. They’re either mischaracterizations of science, based on faulty math and/or shoddy evidence.
Please note that I said Creationists, not “religious folk”. Religion and Evolutionary theory aren’t at odds, except for those Creationists that frame it that way
jg
No one denies the holes. The holes are what make it science.
Mac
Whereas, creationism is a fairy tale. Can anyone send me the process for validation of a fairy tale?
Put on Ruby slippers, Click your heels together three times, and say-
“The Bible says it. That proves it”
ppGaz
“Jesus loves me, this I know
For the Bible tells me so.”
I can’t tell you how many thousand times they made me sing this as a kid.
I find the second part of the lyric the part that is hard to swallow. But I have to admit, I haven’t tried the heel-click thing.
demimondian
Hey, John, you’ve got a live one!
Liberal and conservative scientists together would be more likely to suggest that there is a significant hole in your understanding of science.
The theory of evolution — more properly termed the theory of natural selection — has very few holes at all. It’s a theory of a process, which makes a set of predictions about the world. Those predictions include the observation that there must be a mutable germ plasm which can be passed from generation to generation, a prediction confirmed later by Muller and his colleagues. They also include the conclusion that animals and plants — and individual living organisms — die, and are replaced by other, similar, but not identical organisms.
I can go on — but the point is that you only need a very few facts to conclude that natural selection through the survival of the locally most fit members of a reproducing population is a real effect, which is imminent in our world right now. We have no observation which suggests that the past is in any significant way different from the present. We see a chain of fossils showing gradual changes consistent with evolutionary processes generating the modern species.
No, we don’t have holes to fill. We have a mechanism which we can see and observe right now. The mechanism is sufficient to explain the modern species. We even have intermediate forms, which, although nice, are not necessary; the absence of intermediate forms would not in any way threaten an evolutionary theory. Evolution only requires selection, variation, and time — and we have shown that we have all three. Those, themselves, are sufficient, and leave no holes.
Mac
I don’t want to cast any stones, but I do need to make an observation from past experiences.
I have seen often the glazed look in someones eyes as they listen to stories of speciation mechanisms and mutable germ plasm, natural selection and other high falutin’ science type stuff. It may last for a testing period, but then its gone from the tiny mind. And never thought of again. Until. News of Kansas comes up, or Tennesee or South Carolina, Texas, ad nauseum. The mind remembers that Science was hard, icky, lots of tiny details, a fog. The alternative, Six days, Bingo Bango Bongo. Done deal. Give it a chance, they shout. Let the kids hear it as an alternative, they demand. Science doesn’t have all the answers, they bleat. Luke,(and Matthew, Mark, and John) come away from the dark side, they whisper. I didn’t come from a frog, they blog. And my personal favorite, Its too complicated to have happened by chance, they calculate.
These and other ideas are so much easier to remember. I feel that most creationists were rather poor science students, and to make science easier for their kids, they reject all science for superstition. So much easier to remember “Step on a crack, Break your mothers back” than the order of geologic time periods, I guess.
Jimmy Jazz
There seem to be a lot of strawmen in your world j.d., so be careful with matches.
eileen from OH
The thing that always cracks me up (admittedly easy to do) about folks who take the Bible literally is that they seem to think that there was some long-legged secretary taking it all down in ENGLISH. Wouldn’t it be a hoot if somewhere along the line there was a translator with a really perverted sense of humor? “Oh, yes, I’m gonna put him in the belly of a whale. A whale, hahahaha! Oh, goodness, me, that is so good. What? C’mon, you guys! You didn’t let me turn Lot’s wife into a pillar of yoghurt, you gotta give me the whale.”
eileen from OH
Jimmy Jazz
Ahahahahaha. :)
That’s worthy of Dr. Seuss.
Mac
The Bible is accurate on other points, so it must be accurate on creation.
Leviticus 11:113,19 and Deuteronomy 14:11-18 list fowl, and both have bats in the list with heron, lapwing, and bat closing off the list. The bat is not a bird.
Leviticus 11:6 has a hare chewing its cud. Rabbits do no such thing.
reminder for Barry: “cud” is not “s—“.
BTW: ‘Gerah’, the term which appears in the MT means (chewed) cud, and also perhaps grain, or berry (also a 20th of a sheckel, but I think that we can agree that that is irrelevant here). It does not mean dung, and there is a perfectly adequate Hebrew word for that, which could have been used. Furthermore, the phrase translated ‘chew the cud’ in the KJV is more exactly ‘bring up the cud’. Rabbits do not bring up anything; they let it go all the way through, then eat it again. The description given in Leviticus is inaccurate, and that’s that. Rabbits do eat their own dung; they do not bring anything up and chew on it. thanks to Robert Low
Leviticus 11:21-23 lists things with four legs. Among the list are locust, beetle (cricket in some translations), and grasshopper.
Psalms 58:8 says “as a snail melts…” Snails do not melt.
Gen 1:20-21 has the waters bringing forth Gen 2:19 has them coming from the ground. Maybe some one should tell them about eggs?
Genesis 30:39 cattle looking at pilled rods conceive and bring forth ringspeckled, speckeled and spotted calves. changing the characteristics of a descendant by showing them a rod just doesn’t work…
Matthew 4:8 ..took upon a high mountain and shewed all the kingdoms of the world.
Geology – rock simply isn’t strong enough for such a megamountain.
astronomical bodies are spherical, and you cannot see the entire exterior surface from anyplace.
Genesis 3:14 “…and dust though shalt eat all the days of thy life.” Snakes, while built low, do not eat dirt.
(Referring to a genesis “day”) It ALWAYS (Morris’s stress) refers to a twenty-four-hour day.
So much for the apologists…
Roadrage
My favorite myth story:
A young male teacher was telling an adult education class about the formation of planets and how the Earth revolves around the Sun. An elderly lady objected that she had read and believed that the Earth rests upon the back of a large turtle; to which the teacher inquired: ‘If that were true, then upon what does the turtle rest?’ To which the lady replied, ‘Very clever young man, but it’s turtles all the way down’!
SweettP2063
“According to one assessment, at the root of the creationist argument is the concern that evolution undermines moral beliefs, leading to lawlessness, family breakdown, homosexuality, pornography, and abortion.”
none of these things happened before Darwin wrote his theory? And pigs fly…
Mac
I just have a question regarding the Ark of Noah, some Bible scholar can answer it I’m sure. Allowing that Noah took a breeding pair of every animal and enough food for more than a year, and shoveled all of the pooh overboard even going up several decks to do so with only seven folks living in what had to be the mother of all stinks, and allowing that the animals were all safe and well fed once the Ark grounded and the waters receded, my question is this- What did the predators eat? Even if they all shared an animal, there goes that species.
Must have eaten dinosaurs and unicorns…
robert green
a sideways question:
is it not clear that it is only science that will either save us from our (often scientifically-created) headlong rush towards mass self-inflicted genocide? i mean, we are pushing the envelope on this earth–we are devastating our natural resources, stripping the oceans of their fish, the forests of their trees, dumping pesticides everywhere that poison our ever more depleted groundwater and topsoil, have i mentioned peak oil?, oh and there are many more of us on the way, mostly poor…
etc.
now, the bible would say…well, the bible wouldn’t say much that’s helpful about any of this. because. it. was. written. by. ignorant. people. 5,000. years. ago.
not helpful for dealing with our real world day-to-day and quite terrifying problems. mostly, using the bible to live your day to day life is just sticking your head in the sand. and that isn’t going to help matters.
science, on the other hand, along with a judicious application of our native intelligence in concert with the scientific method–now THAT just might save us. i’m not sure how, nor am i willing to bet the farm on it just yet, but maybe.
and anyone who is not part of that solution is most assuredly part of the problem. this brings me, of course, to today’s republican party. these are the not the republicans i remember growing up in new england, noblesse oblige yankees who had “the best” education and so on. they were creeps and assholes, sure, but they understood the world as it is, not as some 5000 year old fantasy. unfortunately, and quite indisputably, the current republican party is beholden to the 20% of its adherents who believe all the specious bible crap. no scientifically minded and intellectually honest person could deny this fact. the democrats, whose faults are legion, are not beholden to any such folk nor a “left wing” equivalent, as no “left wing” equivalent exists to fundamentalists and their ilk. so i am always perplexed by just what people like john are doing hanging out with republicans.
the party they are talking about died a long time ago, and was replaced by people whose recidivist views may well kill us all.
Joey
Anybody who has ANY, and I mean ANY of the basic knowledge of evolution/natural would agree that it is the most logical conclusion that can be drawn given the, well, you know, EVIDENCE. Vestigial structures, DNA, the finches of the Galapagos, the evidence truly is overwhelming in support of evolution. And yet people still wish to argue over it, providing no evidence to support any other hypothesis (Creationism isn’t a hypothesis, it can’t be tested. And there’s no evidence to even warrant testing, should testing even be possible.). Notice that word choice, hypothethesis, because that’s what it would be. Evolution is a theory because it withstands the most rigorous tests applied to it by the scientific community. Didn’t anybody else pay attention in any of their science classes? A theory is, by definition, a hypothesis that has been tested, and retested, and retested, and retested to the point that it is a near fact. It’s as close to being a fact without actually being one as there possibly can be. And you know what? After reading this, I’m ready to declare it a fact. It’s happening right before our eyes, all we have to do is open them. As John Rogers likes to say, “Everybody who wants to live in the 21st century over here, everybody who wants to live in the 19th century over there. Good luck with that.”
Mac
Amen Joey, Amen.
Cassidy
“Science rightly interpreted is consistent with the Bible…”
67 commenters and no one caught this duel meaning? I think this phrase says it all. :)
Cassidy
Excuse me: dual
Kimmitt
That’s kind of where I’m at — those folks who don’t want to take part in technology which benefits from our understanding of evolutionary processes can forego cancer treatments, a fairly wide variety of vaccines, antibiotics, analgesics, and other medicines, and (believe it or not) Guiness.* It’s your life, live it how you want to.
*Guiness uses evolutionary algorithms to solve their shipping and other logistics problems. Amusingly, Guiness has been in the forefront of science before, as the Student’s t-statistic, used near-universally, was invented by a statistician working for that fine company.
baronelmo
My college biology professor was a Christian who thought that creationism was 101% bullshit. “It’s bad science and bad theology wrapped up in one package,” he’d say. Why can’t Christians see Genesis as the allegory it obviously is? Every religion has its personal creation myth, but I’ve never heard of Hindus or Buddhists having hissy fits because their men of science choose not to take sacred texts literally.
And what is so damnably objectionable about evolution anyhow? (“Because it’s not what the Bible says,” is an unacceptable answer.) Isn’t the idea of mankind evolving its way up the ladder of existence, one hard-fought step at a time, much more satisfying than “An all-mighty being clapped his hands and POOF! There we were!” Problem is, Creationists are simply too proud to acknowledge that their species could have humble origins — the theological equivalent of high society folk too ashamed to admit that their ancestors were dirt-poor immigrants.
space
This is my favorite part. “We’re not a bunch of flat Earthers!” It’s like some murderer in prison saying “at least I’m not like that freaking cannibal Jeffery Dahmer.” Everybody needs to reassure themselves of their humanity by finding someone more out there than they are.
But, Hell, at least people believed in a flat Earth based on the best available evidence at the time.
space
Here is what creationists can’t seem to grasp. Scientists don’t inherently have a problem with their theories. Scientists didn’t all get together and decide that they preferred the idea of a 4.5-5 billion year old Earth to a 3000 year old one. No, they CALCULATED the age of the planet using the most accurate tools available to them.
If you believe that current scientific theories are inaacurate, show why yours is more accurate. Show why scientific measurements are wrong. But don’t cry because nobody takes you seriously.
Blue Neponset
DougJ:
Creationism = issue Americans care about
Plame leak = something people in New York and San Francisco care bout.
I don’t give a flying rat’s ass about Creationism, but I don’t live in NY or SF. Does that mean I am not a ‘real’ American?
This is one of the things that drives me insane about Conservatives. They love to try to make most arguments an ‘us vs. them’ and a zero sum debate.
We could find out later today that Evolution is completely wrong, and it wouldn’t make Creationism more or less right.
DougJ
“We could find out later today that Evolution is completely wrong, and it wouldn’t make Creationism more or less right.”
Obviously, there are other possible explanations for how life developed. I choose to believe a creation story that is simple and is put forth in a document that people have been reading for 2000 years: the Bible. You choose to believe a story fabricated by a left-wing 19th century science that is supported only by a very spotty fossil record. You tell me who is irrational and starry-eyed.
Stonicus
Yeah, I don’t care about Creationism, but I do care about the integrity of our government, and I live in North Carolina.
The problem alot of people have with evolution, is that they just cannot mentally phathom the length of time it takes. It doesn’t go from a frog to a dog in two or three generations. It takes a few million generations. If you let 24 hours represent the entire time life has existed on Earth, then the amount of time during that 24 hours that humans were on the Earth would be less than one second. That’s alot of time for stuff to happen.
People who believe in the Bible are allowed to believe in whatever they wish. The Bible is a great story. One of the best stories ever written. But just that, a story. Yeah, it does have legitimate historical fact, but so does Star Trek. The Bible was written a long time ago. It has been “revised” and translated through many many generations and languages and cultures. In today’s modern world of technology and communication capability, we still can’t get 100% accurate information about what happened in Iraq yesterday. How do you think the Bible can be accurate about things that happened thousands of years ago?
Tell your friend something and tell him to tell someone else. So he does. Then that friend tells someone. By now, the story has changed. It went from you not going to school because you’re sick, to you’re in the hospital. By tomorrow, the rumor is you’re going to die. In 10 years, the rumor is you were on an undercover CIA mission. Imagine what the rumor is 2000 years from now. You didn’t go to school because you were being crucified for all of our sins. See how that works?
DougJ
“Tell your friend something and tell him to tell someone else. So he does. Then that friend tells someone.”
Look, here’s how the world came into being: the Lord created in 6 days. End of story. You can repeat that story a thousand times and it stays the same. Because it is true.
All these convoluted big bang stories, all these stories about tectonic plates, all these stories about evolution DO change when they’re retold because they’re so darn convoluted. Maybe that’s partly because they’re not true. The truth is usually simple.
Blue Neponset
Dougj: You tell me who is irrational and starry-eyed.
First, thanks for responding.
Second, I never called you irrational or starry-eyed. I called you a Conservative.
Dougj: I choose to believe…
Exactly, you and I can believe anything we want. The problem is belief and science are not the same thing.
If the Bible is the final word on everything what does it say about thermodynamics or the history of the Incas or the human genome?
I think I believe in the same God as you do, we just don’t agree on how he created the Universe. I can’t understand why you seem so threatened by the fact that we disagree on God’s method for creating us.
I do understand why you get angry when some moron makes fun of your beliefs. That bothers me too.
Creationist_Doug
Can we PLEASE stop feeding the DougJ Troll? I’m sure he had a great run at fuckedcompany.com and can always go back there. Thank you.
PS: DougJ, your ancestors were not frogs, they were jackasses. :-)
Blue Neponset
Rat farts!
Forgot to turn off the italics.
Dougj: I choose to believe…
Exactly, you and I can believe anything we want. The problem is belief and science are not the same thing.
If the Bible is the final word on everything what does it say about thermodynamics or the history of the Incas or the human genome?
I think I believe in the same God as you do, we just don’t agree on how he created the Universe. I can’t understand why you seem so threatened by the fact that we disagree on God’s method for creating us.
I do understand why you get angry when some moron makes fun of your beliefs. That bothers me too.
DougJ
“I can’t understand why you seem so threatened by the fact that we disagree on God’s method for creating us.”
I don’t feel threatened by your belief, blue. I appreciate your thoughtful post.
What I do feel threatened by, and quite rightly, is that liberals have been shoving pseudo-science down the throats of children for the past several generations. I’m tired of seeing children brainwashed into believing in evolution and the big bang. There’s a simpler and better explanation for how the world and life came into being and it’s about time schools started teaching it. That’s all I’m saying.
Buford
I know the argument that Creationists should forego all the benefits of recent scientific advances is a tired one, but seeing Doug’s inane comment above that the rational among us “believe a story fabricated by a left-wing 19th century science” raises it anew. Isn’t it extremely hypocritical for anyone with this idiotic viewpoint to use any method other than those described in Leviticus 13-15 to treat an infectious disease?(http://bible.gospelcom.net/passage/?search=Leviticus%2013-15&version=31;)
Antibioitcs = blasphemy, right? I wonder if Doug was vaccinated as a child.
Luddite
Like “Otto Man” I’m STILL trying to understand the link between evolution and porn. Does this mean there is a link between evolution and Paris Hilton? What about Darwin and the Brazilian women’s beach volleyball team in the summer olympics? I might need to do some research on this today.
Doctor Don
Not all the madrasses are in the middle east; we, apparently, have them here as well — just with a different ideology, and fewer suicide bombers (although people like Eric Rudolph come awfully close).
I pity those who succumb to the siren call “don’t think, don’t read, don’t listen to THEM, don’t form your own opinion; just believe what I tell you and nothing else, because God talks to me — and ONLY to me. I know what’s best for you.”
As for me, I’m a great believer in faith, but religion — NO.
BinkyBoy
I just have to believe that DougJ is one of the absolute BEST trolls to have ever wandered in and out of a forum.
Thank you DougJ, you make my days full of humor and amazement.
TarHeelCP
Why is it that creationist can “examine” the current evidence gathered by humans supporting evolution and dismiss it as misguided, yet the refuse to accept even the possibility that the HUMANS who wrote the Bible may have been wrong?
Believe me, it’s not based in reason and trying to have a reasonable debate with someone who is thinking without reason will never work. Creationism is rooted in fear that evolution just might be right. If science has it, and evolution is more than just a theory, well then what’s to say that science won’t prove that God doesn’t exisit.
Faith never has been and never will be based in scientific fact. Just look up the definition of faith. That doesn’t mean that you can’t respect both faith and science. But it does mean that science can sometimes prove matters of faith to be unprovable.
This isn’t the first time in human history that faith and science have collided and it certainly won’t be the last. Let’s just be thankful that so far, no one has been crucified, sent before the Inquisition, or otherwise burned at the stake.
space
Doug J:
Sorry. If you want to teach your children about religion, do it in church or the privacy of your own home. Don’t ask taxpayers to fund it.
If you want to teach your kids that storks bring babies, be my guest. Just don’t do it in a high school biology class.
If you want to teach your children that the Bible says the world is only 3000 years old, despite the countless factual evidence to the contrary, go right ahead. But don’t lie and suggest that the facts are unclear. Call it a miracle. Call it a leap of faith. Just don’t call it science. Because it isn’t.
Schools aren’t teaching pseudo-science. They are teaching science. If you have a problem with science (which you clearly do), then just say so. Calling science “pseudo-science” is about the dumbest thing I can imagine. If astrophysicists aren’t scientists, I have no idea what the term refers to.
7
Since it is very difficult for these anti-science people to get a grip on evolution as it presented, I will attempt at explaining it the way my high school biology teacher did. Why are the pesticides from 70 years ago not as effective today as they once were? The answer you will often hear is the intended targets have built up a tolerance to the chemicals; they have adapted or become immune to the pesticide. Well, that’s evolution. You spray one hundred cockroaches with an insecticide. All but a handful die. The ones that made it have a genetic mutation that renders the insecticide harmless. These survivors then pass that mutation onto their offspring. Soon it won’t be long before all the cockroaches are immune to the insecticide. This is not a “theory”, this is a fact. This is something that has been observed time and time again. This is natural selection, albeit one in response to an unnatural act (by unnatural act I mean the chemical compounds are not naturally occurring, they are man made. Nature did not expose them to these chemicals, man did) But the basic principle is the same. Organisms with the desirable traits that help them survive make it. Those with out don’t make it. It is really very simple. I cant for the life of me grasp why adults cant comprehend something that I, as a 13 year old fully understood.
TarHeelCP
It’s not that the can’t understand. It’s that it collides with a matter of faith, therefore they choose not to accept it. You’ll never convince them, no matter how much evidence you have.
Mike
So when we’re talking “Fundies” or “Fundamentalists”, which ones are we talking about. Religious Fundamentalists or Darwinian Fundamentalists?
Just want to be clear who we’re calling idiots.
Jcricket
False equivalency there. Science is not a religion. And people who believe that the evidence supports evolution and that Creationism is not science are not fundamentalists. Period.
Orac
“Darwinian fundamentalists”? Give me a break. That’s just a term creationists like to bandy about to make the false implication that evolution and science are no different than religion.
DougJ
“Like “Otto Man” I’m STILL trying to understand the link between evolution and porn.”
I don’t understand it either. Look, I’d be the first to admit that there are some creationists who go too far with this sort of thing — please don’t lump us all together on this.
Sojourner
Wow. I never felt so proud to be a liberal.
Thanks, DougJ. I’m so thrilled to be categorized with the smart folks!
Blue Neponset
DougJ,
Again, thanks for responding and thanks for the discussion.
I think we are both firm in our positions on Creationism & Evolution and anything I say isn’t going to bridge the gap between our positions.
I would like to comment on this statement of yours, however:
DougJ: What I do feel threatened by, and quite rightly, is that liberals have been shoving pseudo-science down the throats of children for the past several generations.
As a ‘more or less’ liberal American I can assure you that not all (I believe the vast majority of) liberals have no desire to shove any pseudo-science down the throats of children.
You are absolutely right that evolution and the big bang are theories. Right now they are both the best explanations science can offer about the creation of the Universe and life on Earth. I believe, as part of a science class, children should be taught the best explanations that science can offer. That is my position in this debate and I reached it without any malice in my heart.
The only things that ‘liberals’ or scientists or educators are asking children to believe are the latest, consensus conclusions that the scientific community has reached. In other words, an opinion. Again, I believe children should be taught the opinions of the scientific community in science class. They can reach their own conclusions as to the validity of those opinions, but they shouldn’t be shielded from them because they may contradict some religious teachings.
insomni
Funny, I was just going to tell the others not to lump all Christians (including myself) in with folks like you.
It seems to me that the strict Creationists must have a lack of faith. If someone is strong in their faith, why would they feel threatened by scientific advancement and increasing knowledge about how the earth and universe are put together? The Big Bang doesn’t bother me a bit. In fact, it marks a beginning to the universe… something that wasn’t always acknowledged by science. God is the supreme Designer. Why couldn’t he create the universe that way? Same for evolution.
Patrick
Watch this short video:
http://www.freedomunderground.org/memoryhole/pentagon121.swf
TarHeelCP
insomni Says:
Exactly!! It stems from a fear of being wrong. Pretty natural among us humans. Only when it comes to faith, denial becomes much stronger. It’s much harder to admit that your belief in the foundations of human existence are wrong, than to admit you lied about stealing bubble gum when you were three. It’s still denial, but a different degree of denial.
mac Buckets
Edit! Come on, John, some of us need a Preview option!
In accordance with Internet Law, we’re calling everyone who does not agree with us “idiots.” I do find it funny that the multi-cultural tolerance that Americans (especially on the left) pretend to advocate gives way to ridicule and mockery when it comes to the Judeo-Christian culture. Probably tells you more about them than it does the CMC.
This conference is one reason that I instinctively distrust things with Falwell’s name on them, and I’m a Lutheran preacher’s kid.
Some Christian scientist (not a Christian Scientist, though) needs to talk to the CMC about a couple things:
1) Evolution’s “killer ap” is not to disprove the existence of God (so don’t worry about evolution science leading to homosexuality or pornography—claiming this makes you look silly). Darwin believed in God, and vice versa.
2) A small point: Is it important that the “days” be 24 hours, and if so, why? And how?
3) A big point: If teaching Creation to your kids is important to you, ummmm, you DO see your kids fairly often, right? You own a Bible, right? Problem solved! Hey, you could even start “Creation Outreach” to teach the general populace, if you think it’s so critical to society.
Also, I’m guessing that 75% of the CMC would agree that public schools are largely-to-totally inept at teaching history, science, math, literature, etc.—so why trust them to teach your kids about something this important to you? If you teach your kids well at home, I assure you that hearing about Darwin (or even the Big Bang) WON’T turn them into Larry Flynt, Sid Vicious, or the “Will & Grace” guys.
This CMC seems like an opportunity for certain groups to put their hands out for donations—you know, to “fight for the cause” of Judeo-Christianity. I wonder where the money goes…
TarHeelCP
Mac, I think that’s the point that insomni was trying to make. Falwell represents the scum of Christianity. He’s never been intrested in the well being of Christians, only making sure that as many people know his name and hear him speak as possible.
The CMC isn’t interested in making sure that children are exposed to a variety of theories on the creation of life. If that were the case then people WOULD be able to make up their own minds. The CMC is just another way for Falwell to try to get folks to pay attention to him. It has very little to do with God.
insomni
TarHeelCP: I’m sure that fear of change, something that most (if not all) people have to some degree, plays a big part in this. Like I said before, none of us has all the answers. It makes sense for all of us, on all sides of the argument, to be open to new thoughts and explanations.
mac Buckets: Good points. I do not want religion taught in public schools for the same reason I wouldn’t recommend that Christians listen to Falwell. There are plenty of nutty, bigoted “Christians” out there, and I don’t want their ideas taught to my children. Belief is something that should be taught to children in the home. It saddens me that people I would agree with on many things (I’m also a Conservative) make such ridiculous arguments — arguments that don’t accurately reflect the Bible or, in the case of religion in schools, our Constitution.
Patrick
All these insightfull comments are moot if we don’t the madman out of the Whitehouse.
We can now expect something very big, and very sad to happen here in our country, very soon! Our president truly believes the rapture is right around the corner (within 20 years according to one of his statements a few years ago). I have always had no doubt he would be willing to expidite it if he had to (remember Jim Jones?). Up to now people have told me to just relax. We have a madman in the Whitehouse running everything and fineally the world is beginning to see it! We cannot afford to relax.
Go to JohnConyers.com and find a Rovegate/Downing street party (tommorrow at 1:00 Eastern) in your area, and GO TO IT!
Jimmy Jazz
Along with their penises, copies of Barely Legal 17, and gay marriage, right?
You’re a funny troll.
Steve
Creationists are afraid of enlarging their world view. People need to struggle with life being difficult and bad things happening to good people. It’s the truth and builds character. To stick to one book that has a story of how everything came into being is much easier but also results in not struggling with the truths of life which result in empathy for other people. These people are scared. Almost every religion has a story of creation. To be an adult and not a child you need to realize that. The fact is no one has can explain everything. Science is constantly changing but we do have some principles that can be replicated in experiments thousands upon thousands of times. The bible is a bunch of stories. As are the books from other religions. By the way, most of them are older than the Bible.
insomni
Patrick: How’s this for an “insightfull” [sic] comment? You’re nuts… and your comment is completely off-topic. I hesitate to even respond, but I have a helpful link for you. The well-known urban legend debunkers at Snopes.com have some info on the Pentagon attack just for you.
Kevin D
People believe creationist non-sense and based their “belief” on the idea that its the best explanation because its the explanation they can understand.
These people don’t understand what a proton and an electron are for Christ’s sake and you want them to understand uranium decay rates? They just ain’t gonna do it.
They don’t understand DNA. They don’t understand science and they don’t want to learn.
I thought the best example was “how does a cellphone work?” well… I believe that there are little telepathic monkey men that live inside the little phone and when you talk into the phone they send a message to their kin who then repeats the message to the person that you want to speak with. Tha’s why cell-phone reception is so bad because alot of the time the monkey men are drunk.
This is a completely reasonable explanation; or as reasonable as creationism.
The idea that life has no “meaning” is scary to many people so they turn to a “god” to pray to so it will protect them.
Existentialism addresses exactly this point..what is it ennui? The solution is to imbue your on life with your own meaning. There is no external force that will save you and you are responsible for everything that happens to you. the is no good and no evil…there are people who do really mean and rotten things to other people and we should liek shoot them … but are they evil and in and external demonic possesion….unlikely…there brains just don’t work the same way as other peoples.
Just think like a lion….who kills another male lion and then kills its kids and then mates with the female….Is that lion EVIL? no. now substitute some nut-job instead of lion…ohhh he’s evil…bull-crap
TarHeelCP
insomni says:
To most of us it makes sense to be open-minded. Do you really think that, in Falwell’s mind, it make sense to be open-minded. Again you’re talking reason here. That’s something that is seriously lacking at the CMC.
Chris
Before the heavens and the earth came into existence, all was a chaos, unimaginably limitless and without definite shape or form. Eon followed eon: then, lo! out of this boundless, shapeless mass something light and transparent rose up and formed the heaven. This was the Plain of High Heaven, in which materialized a deity called Ame-no-Minaka-Nushi-no-Mikoto (the Deity-of-the-August-Center-of-Heaven). Next the heavens gave birth to a deity named Takami-Musubi-no-Mikoto (the High-August-Producing-Wondrous-Deity), followed by a third called Kammi-Musubi-no-Mikoto (the Divine-Producing-Wondrous-Deity). These three divine beings are called the Three Creating Deities.
[Post edited- try to keep your thoughts below the 4000 word threshhold]
Sojourner
Oh I see. Those of us who respect science and refuse to allow others to replace scientific method with beliefs are bigots.
And those of us who don’t want to be forced to pray someone else’s prayer are bigots because we respect the multitude of ways people can talk to God.
And those of us who don’t want the writings of one religion to be posted in court rooms are bigots because we want everyone to feel they will be treated equally under the law.
What kind of twisted logic is this?
mac Buckets
LOL. Hey, it’s your strawman. You tell us what it is.
Buford
CHRIS brings up a good point (again)… approximately 70% of the world population is non-Christian. Since the biblical account of creation could therefore be considered a minority view worldwide, why would anyone feel it is important to teach this as ‘truth’ in the US? Anyone schooled solely in the Christian version of creation would be at a significant intellectual disadvantage when they are set loose into the newly-globalized real world.
If creationists can’t handle the faith vs. science argument, there should at least be a HUGE discussion regarding which faith-based version is the most widely accepted. Should such a discussion take place, I am not sure the biblical account would come out on top.
Fred B
Stonicus mentions Star Trek, which is exactly what I thought when I read this piece. These guys are like the Star Trek and Star Wars continuity geeks who seek to iron out every bit of narrative inconsistency in increasingly disparate franchises.
Reading about squeezing geological evolution into the biblical timeframe reminds me of the exhausting discussions I’ve seen of people trying to figure out how Luke Skywalker had time to train with Yoda while the Millenium Falcon was on its way to Bespin, or trying to justify the existence of the Ewok tv movies or the Droids cartoon.
TarHeelCP
That is one discussion that I wouldn’t want to be anywhere near. I would be surprised if anyone walked out of that room alive.
mac Buckets
It’s actually 33% Christian (and .2% Jews!). Muslims are the next biggest group at 19%, followed by Hindus and the Non-Religious, both at 13%.
If it were a plurality vote of what theory to teach, the Bible would likely win out. Actually, teaching both creationism AND evolution would likely win out, based on recent polls.
Now if you want to know who controls the MONEY in the world (as long as we’re talking about the newly-globalized real world), the Judeo-Christian side would REALLY clean up.
stonicus
To all the Creationists out there who believe 100% in the Bible, do you agree with the part of the Bible where it says it is ok to have and own slaves? Do Creationists support slavery? Or do you just pick and choose what parts of the Bible further your own personal agendas?
7
I was wondering how long it would take to read the above. Typical of the American Taliban, when someone points out how flawed their approach may be, the first reaction is to play the role of victim. Those who discount Creationism do so not because of the lack of valid evidence; they do it because their real aim is to persecute Christians. People who use birth control do it primarily to mock Christian values. “Queer Eye” and “Will & Grace” are still on television not because they are popular and have an audience, but instead exists to insult and ridicule the good God fearing way of life.
Judeo-Christian culture deserves respect as do all cultures. But when its practitioners start trying to force others to think and behave according to their rules, when they openly attack others, the respect stops. Despite what they say, multi-cultural tolerance does not mean we should be non pulsed when someone’s culture dictates they fly a jet into skyscrapers or stone to death women who refuse to marry men they do not love. As these “Christians” are immensely selfish and see everything in the context of “its all about me”, they have no other way of reacting.
Sojourner
What a great idea! Let’s take a poll on matters of science.
Stormy70
It pisses me off to see the American Taliban thrown around about Christians, by quite a few on the Left. I’ve yet to see the christians who are advocating for shooting women because they work or show their ankle. I’ve yet to hear of them advocating turning sports arenas into execution exhibitions. They are working within the political process, just like every other group out there. So you disagree with them, big deal. Must you call them names that would get you slammed if it were any other religious group? Oh well, keep on doing it. You will keep losing elections, since most Americans are not afraid of religion. But Lord forbid anyone of you guys would unequivocally condemn terror committed against Americans or Iraqis. Pathetic bunch of bigots, you are (channeling Yoda). Once again, one can mock without being hateful about it.
Jacques Graber
As a Geologist/Paleontologist and Biologist, I am always amused by these Christies’ condemnations against Evolution and Science. The ancient Greeks had even pretty well figured out that the ancient fossil shells found on high mountain sides must have come from an ancient sea.
If Noah supposedly held all the dinosaurs in his Ark where did the ichthyosaurs, plesiosayrs and mososaurs come from? What about the ammonites etc.? What about titanotheres, large ground sloths, smilodon and thousands of other Cenozoic species??? How do they explain the repeated extinctions including at the Cammbrian and end of the Permian? How do they explain radiocarbon dating and the physics behind all dating processes?
If fundamentalist Christians hold such a disparaging point of view and dislike of “Science” and “Evolution” as well as those “Secular Humanists” that created these disciplines, then why don’t they live up to their “principles”?
I have one simple challenge for Christies.
Absolve yourselves of all the things “science” and “Evolution” have created. Give up your electronics, your TV’s, the printed word, medicine, modern agricultural crops (that were developed through genetics) use of airlines (the use of heleocentric based navigational theory), and everything else science-based. Live according to Moses’ time; wood, rock iron, copper, crude agriculture.
Leave us Secular humanists alone.
mac Buckets
Yes, how could I doubt the tolerance and cultural openmindedness of the left, especially after you are so tolerant and understanding as to call me, whom you’ve never met (nor heard my views), “the American Taliban?”
Thanks for making my point for me. Again, I think it says more about you than it does the Christian Right.
mac Buckets
If you can read, you’d see that Buford posted:
It’s a hypothetical, and no one was saying a poll should be taken. But don’t let that stop your ranting!
Robert
There is so much propaganda out there depicting Creationists as ignorant. We’re not a bunch of flat Earthers.”
Realy….cause the bible’s pretty damn clear about a flat earth at the center of the universe
http://hypertextbook.com/eworld/geocentric.shtml
7
How are we bigots for resisting when others (strangers at that) try to force us to live life according to their rules? You don’t like the term American Taliban? Too bad. They want to dictate what we do in our bedrooms, what books we can read, what entertainment we can enjoy, what sort of medical treatment we can seek. What would you call such a bunch? Has anyone of them spoken out against Eric Rudolph? No. After 9/11, did they blame the terrorists? No, they blamed other Americans. And when ever someone calls them on it, instead of trying to explain their position in rational terms, they resort to playing the victim card. As they see it, they are being persecuted not because they are being prevented from practicing their own faith, but because they are being prevented from forcing others to practice their faith. If refusing to submit to someone else’s dogma makes me a bigot, then call me Archie Bunker.
Oh, and in case you have not realized, American Taliban is not a term used to describe all Christians.
insomni
I might agree with a lot of things that the secular humanists, atheists, and agnostics here say about science, but I’m sorry, you don’t have all the answers either. There are a lot of bigoted, closed-minded religious types out there, and some of their views may seem deserving of a little mockery. No point in trying to argue against that — say what you will. But do you really want to be so arrogant about what you know as to write off ALL Christians based on the extreme views of what I believe is a minority of all Christians? Are derogatory terms like “Christies” and “American Taliban” really necessary? When you say things like that, you’re no better than the Falwell fans who call you heathens or the spawn of Satan.
Or is it different for you… because you’re right?
Well, in their opinion, so are they.
Sojourner
Hardly a stretch. How many times have I heard the fundies claim that the US is a Christian nation and since it is the majority religion, it should be integrated in with politics. Now they want to teach ID under the guise of science.
The reality is they want the rest of us to treat their beliefs as scientific fact and to accept their doctrine as law. No one should be surprised at the great hostility they will receive from those of us who prefer the US Constitution and the scientific method.
Sojourner
Nobody is writing off all Christians. In fact,a lot of us are Christians.
mac Buckets
FDR Democrats?
7
Again, American Taliban only refers to one segment of the population that calls themselves Christian. I would not say all Muslims are terrorists; all Germans are Nazis, etc. That high school teacher I posted about, the one with the cockroach analogy was Christian, his wife sang in the church choir. Calling me a bigot because I am intolerant of other people’s intolerance defies logic. Its like saying “the women who fought to get the right to vote were bigoted against men.” Then again, we are talking about people who need to keep the focus on themselves at all times.
7
Please share with us the occasions FDR (or any Dem for that matter) made laws regarding the above.
insomni
I glanced through the page you linked to, though it’s too much to read at the moment. Your comment wasn’t aimed at Christians such as myself who don’t take every verse literally, but consider this… The Bible was written by men (the early books are said to have been given to Moses, or “dictated”, by God). When both the OT and NT were written, man’s understanding of the world didn’t include a spherical earth or a sun-centered galaxy, among many other concepts. If certain things were revealed by God, maybe he didn’t want to reveal too much so we could develop on our own, just as the Star Trek folks wouldn’t interfere with less-developed cultures.
Did you hear Scotty died?
Wilbur P
The Bible is not the enerrant word of God. God didn’t dictate anything in the Bible. He didn’t talk from whirlwinds or burning bushes.
God is not stupid though. If he was smart enough to create the universe, he knew he created a globe. Yet according to the “enerrant word” Job 38, (where he was trying to get Job to humble himself) God keeps referring to the earth having breadth, footings and cornerstones, striking lines etc.. It sounds like the authors had a flat world perspective. Or God would have asked Job, “If you know the “diameter” of the eath, declare it! Where were you when the “Globe” was being created? Do you know the orbital periods of your sister planets? No questions like that were being asked by the authors God.
Also the authors state in Genesis, he created the earth before the heavens. Sounds like the authors had an ego problem there too.
Trying to prove science through the Bible is total foolishness. The authours may have been good guys, but they didn’t get it. True believers can see God without the help of science.
Mike
““Darwinian fundamentalists”? Give me a break. That’s just a term creationists like to bandy about to make the false implication that evolution and science are no different than religion.”
Actually the term was coined by Steven Jay Gould (an “Evolutionist”) who was talking about irrational Darwinists who RELIGIOUSLY”accept evolution with little thought as to other points of view. Sorta like well…most of you. :
“My own field of paleontology has strongly challenged the Darwinian premise that life’s major transformations can be explained by adding up, through the immensity of geological time, the successive tiny changes produced generation after generation by natural selection. The extended stability of most species, and the branching off of new species in geological moments (however slow by the irrelevant scale of a human life)—the pattern known as punctuated equilibrium—requires that long-term evolutionary trends be explained as the distinctive success of some species versus others, and not as a gradual accumulation of adaptations generated by organisms within a continuously evolving population. A trend may be set by high rates of branching in certain species within a larger group. But individual organisms do not branch; only populations do—and the causes of a population’s branching can rarely be reduced to the adaptive improvement of its individuals.
The study of mass extinction has also disturbed the ultra-Darwinian consensus. We now know, at least for the terminal Cretaceous event some 65 million years ago that wiped out dinosaurs along with about 50 percent of marine invertebrate species, that some episodes of mass extinction are both truly catastrophic and set off by extraterrestrial impact. The death of some groups (like dinosaurs) in mass extinctions and the survival of others (like mammals), while surely not random, probably bears little relationship to the evolved, adaptive reasons for success of lineages in normal Darwinian times dominated by competition. Perhaps mammals survived (and humans ultimately evolved) because small creatures are more resistant to catastrophic extinction. And perhaps Cretaceous mammals were small primarily because they could not compete successfully in the larger size ranges of dominant dinosaurs. Immediate adaptation may bear no relationship to success over immensely long periods of geological change.
Why then should Darwinian fundamentalism be expressing itself so stridently when most evolutionary biologists have become more pluralistic in the light of these new discoveries and theories? I am no psychologist, but I suppose that the devotees of any superficially attractive cult must dig in when a general threat arises. “That old time religion; it’s good enough for me.” There is something immensely beguiling about strict adaptationism—the dream of an underpinning simplicity for an enormously complex and various world. If evolution were powered by a single force producing one kind of result, and if life’s long and messy history could therefore be explained by extending small and orderly increments of adaptation through the immensity of geological time, then an explanatory simplicity might descend upon evolution’s overt richness. Evolution then might become “algorithmic,” a surefire logical procedure, as in Daniel Dennett’s reverie. But what is wrong with messy richness, so long as we can construct an equally rich texture of satisfying explanation?”
Stephen J. Gould, Darwinian Fundamentalism, June 12, 1997, The New York Review of Books
Thanks for playing…
Arnold Zifel
Science is a “liberal”/”leftwing” conspiracy to poison the minds of children and invalidate the “facts of the bible”?
If I understand you properly, then when J.J.Thompson who determined the charge to mass ratio of of the electron through scientific methodology and because of his work and the the work of many other “theoretical physicists”. he made it possible for the mass dumbing down and almost incomprehensible ignorance of millions of Americans through televangelism, his efforts were a left wing conspiracy of the 1800s.
I for one will not coddle you ignorant bastards. In my opinion you are a detriment to the security and health of our nation. Everyone has the right to believe anything they want but when they try to take over the curriculum of our public school system with their theocratic nonsense or worse try to undermine the public school system altogether, then they are no longer simply believing in something they are imposing their belief system on others.
You play on the foibles and weaknesses of humanity. Everyone alive has insecurities about mortality and question the reason for existence, and their is any number of flim flam men who will create religions to answer these insecurities. Time after time we have seen the world slip into dogma with horrific consequences (the crusades, the inquisition, the holocaust, and now terrorism and Iraq.
You Christians who advance this gibberish called creationism have embarked upon a political mission that has all of hallmarks of a theocratic fascist movement. You need to be called out for what you are totalitarians bent on destroying our country as we know it. If you do not believe this read some of the literature of the Dominionists. You were laughable at one time but now you are gaining momentum and present a clear threat to our democracy. It isn’t about respecting different religious opinions anymore it is about fascists from the christian right trying to take over the reigns of power and fundamentally changing our way of life and throwing all of us back into the dark ages.
I will resist you to my last breath.
Joey
First off, the death of Mr. Doohan, “Scotty”, is tragic, and I know all of oru thoughts are with his family. Scotty wasa good one. Back to the topic though, let’s get a few things down that we can’t simply argue about. You know why we can’t argue about them? Because they are facts. Fact #1: The earth is not 3,000 years old or some other ridiculous estimate like that. Carbon dating has been used to get at least a reasonable estimate of the earth’s age, the number of which I am not sure of as of this moment. Carbon dating uses the half life of carbon, which like all isotopes slowly decays, to measure how old something is, i.e. the earth’s crust, based upon the loss of matter from said carbon atoms. It’s pretty damned accurate, as half-life’s do not change. Like, ever. They vary between elements, but are consistent within the same element. Fact #2: If you ever put quotation marks around the word “theory” (and not like I just did, putting q marks around it there was just proper grammar), you instantly show yourself to be ignorant, thus making your opinion unwanted and unrespected. Learn the definition of the word, please. Fact #3: If Noah had an ark, I 100% guarantee you dinosaurs we’re not in it. They died 65,000,000 years before people even existed. And could you picture Noah trying to feed a Tyrannasaur or Velociraptor? That would be entertainment my friends.
Joey
Insomni, if there is a god, I sure do hope that he does indeed use the Prime Directive. That would be a deity worhty of worship without question.
mac Buckets
I didn’t say that the FDR Democrats made laws regarding the above, although I’m sure they did. But it is unarguable that during FDR/Truman’s tenure as President, the US had laws on the books proscribing certain “bedroom activities,” certain books were banned from schools, certain “entertainments” were outlawed and/or heavily regulated, and certain medical procedures were outlawed.
If the FDR Democrats didn’t back these laws (and there’s little reason to believe they didn’t), they certainly didn’t care enough to repeal them.
Wilbur P
Is what gets me is the right wing radical creationsits want to reject science findings only to a certain point. Their line in the sand. The many benefits sicence gives us, like our life today, they will gladly accept. If a science of a geologists tells them to get out of the way of a volcano, they will run for cover. They will gladly accept the advances we have made in medicine and all other fields too. They take our aspirins.
But they think they can be selective with science, and it doesn’t work that way. They are saying:We want to take your aspirins eat your crops and fly in your jets, but we don’t want to accept the earth is 4.5 billon years old. We don’t accept deep time nor evolution? (Coo Coo for Cocoa Puffs)
That ain’t religion. That ain’t spirituality. God gave us a brain didn’t he? Can’t we discover some of his miracles? Does that make them less miraculous? A birds flight is still a wonderment to me, even though I can fly higher and faster. Oh lord, deliver me from some of your followers.
Albert
Albert Einstein
“I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religion than it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.”
“I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation, whose purposes are modeled after our own — a God, in short, who is but a reflection of human frailty. Neither can I believe that the individual survives the death of his body, although feeble souls harbor such thoughts through fear or ridiculous egotism.”
“I do not believe in the immortality of the individual, and I consider ethics to be an exclusively human concern with no superhuman authority behind it.”
“If people are good only because they fear punishment, and hope for a reward, then we are a sorry lot indeed.”
-Albert Einstein, German-born American physicist
Buford
Arnold Zifel sums it up nicely. The difference between normal Americans and the far-right zealots is simply personal choice. We prefer a society that simply follows the golden rule and a ‘live and let live’ philosophy. What my neighbor chooses to believe or to do in his bedroom with other consenting adults is none of my business. The right-wing seems determined to prohibit any activity (by any person) that is not deemed acceptable by their religious tenets. As such, they are forcing their beliefs on me and others, and must be stopped.
Don’t like gay marriage? Don’t marry a gay person. Anti-stem cell? Refuse any SC-related treatment. Don’t like sex or violence in entertainment? Turn it off and refuse to watch or listen. Want your child to believe Creationism over Natural Selection? Teach him at home, away from my kids.
7
The same could be said about that era’s republican leadership as well.
Mac
From
Science feeds on mystery. As my colleague Matt Ridley has put it, “Most scientists are bored by what they have already discovered. It is ignorance that drives them on.” Science mines ignorance. Mystery – that which we don’t yet know; that which we don’t yet understand – is the mother lode that scientists seek out. Mystics exult in mystery and want it to stay mysterious. Scientists exult in mystery for a very different reason: it gives them something to do. Maybe we don’t understand yet, but we’re working on it! Each mystery solved opens up vistas of unsolved problems, and the scientist eagerly moves in.
“Mystics exult in mystery and want it to stay mysterious.”
I think this says it all. The leaders of the Creationism movement are all, whether they admit it or not, fundamentalist Christians. And, whether they admit it or not, must do anything to protect the mystery, supernaturalness, the occultness, (any of these real words?), of the bible. Is it any wonder that they are acting like the Taliban? Afghanistan or American versions are all the same. Protect the dogma, attack the infidel.
I am looking for the creationists smoking gun memo. Quite a document. I will post it when I find it.
Your’s in a more evolving world…
Mac
Mac
Didn’t mean to make the whole thing a link…
Joey
That is maybe the dumbest fucking thing I’ve ever read in my life. We STILL have laws in some states that prohibit certain bedroom activities. And besides that, FDR was president in the NINETEEN FORTIES! Justabit of a different era, dontcha think? And, lastly, what the hell does that have to do with evolution?
Chris B
Intriguing thread! The “pseudo-science” indoctrination appears to have worked, at least in some cases. This thread is full of stated “facts” that are at best conjectures. Please consider the following:
Evolution is not “science” and creaion is not “religion”, both evolution and creation are better called world views.
Neither evolution nor creation can be proven – both are at best theories, arguably hytpothesese. Reasonable scientists on both sides of the deabte bring their own world view into the laboratory when they perform their science, so the outcomes of their research and experiementation carry their biases. The resulting disagreements on the analysis of the data is therefore understandable.
Creationists see the world as created and attempt to use sceince to support that belief. Evolutionists see the same world, but, because many if not all have an “a priori commitment to materialism” (quote from Harvard Prof. Richard Luwantin)they must not allow for a Creator. Same data observed, but colored by each person’s world view.
A lot of bad science is used to explain the billion year old universe and spontaneous and evolving life: e.g., –
– dating dinosaurs as ~50 million years old because some dino bones are found near other things have been non-scientifically determined to be as old – circular reasoning
– the universe must be billions of years old because light from distant stars would so indicate – while conveniently ignoring that what Albert Einstein postualted would allow for the universe to be only a few thousand years old
– still no good explanation for multi-strata fossilized trees – how could they have fossilized from top to bottom over hundreds of millions of years
– the carefully controlled experiment that produced some amino acids from gases and sparks explains how life started? Oops – the experiement itself was highly controlled (not random) and the result (which many of today’s so-called “Sceince” books omit) was a mixture of left and right handed amino acids that do not support or allow for any life.
– Evolutionists suggest that all life came from a single form, and continually became more complex via evolution. Two big problems here – the fossil records in China and elsewhere clearly show that all life forms showed up at about the same time, and since then, the number of phyla have decresaed, not increased. Also, there has never been a demonstration of or explanation for the increased information that would have to have “happened” in DNA for there to be anything other than micro-evolution (changes within a species), a process that is not argued.
All in all, none of us has all the answers, or likely ever will – we are left only to intepret data ourselves or believe the scientists who do. If you know the scientists’s world view you will likely be able to predict that scientist’s interpretation.
Joey
Actually, they carbon date the bones themselves to prove that they are over 65,000,000 years old. And how about providing some evidence for the rest of your claims?
Willymack
Ain’t it great? Instead of all that dreary and mentally enervating twaddle about evolution (adaptive change through time),plate techtonics which nicely explains earthquakes, volcanos, and continental drift, and geology, which reveals the true antiquity of our home planet,you can have a belief system which relieves you of all that THINKING, so necessary to any progress and improvement to the human condition.Oh, yeah; give me that old time religion-along with smallpox, polio, tin lizzes, women in bondage, and a complete ignorance of the beauty and magesty of the human intellect.
Neil H.
Fundamentalist Christians in general, and Creationists in particular, wouldn’t know truth, scientific or otherwise, if it came up to them, shook their hands, and then proceeded to beat them to death collectively with a baseball bat. They are completely averse to critical thinking or any intellectual persuits beyond the sermons and bible verses that they parrot mindlessly, as freedom of thought is a threat to a faith which must remain, in the end, unquestioning. Any educational persuits outside of that which promotes the gospel or has some “practical” application is considered anathema, and leads to the rebuke that one should “trust in the lord with all thine heart and lean not unto thine own understanding”. In other words “don’t think, don’t question your god; it isn’t your place to do so and you’ll only hurt yourself spiritually”.
This kind of willful ignorance, and the theocracy it promotes, is perhaps the greatest threat to freedom of speech, thought, and how we live our out our daily lives that the world has seen since the days of the Nazi and Stalinist dictatorships, and perhaps even more so as it has the blessing of a fellow believer who controls the world’s only standing military and corporate hyper-power. Creationism isn’t something to be laughed at or be dismissed as trivial or quaint, it is a serious threat to the scientific, intellectual, political, and social progress of our species as it is so deeply ingrained in the Dominionist and Christian Reconstructionist movements, movements which seek nothing less than the complete, absolute and repressive control of the world’s pepole through the application of it’s backwards, ignorant, and violent religion.
Creationism musn’t be ignored; it must be fought against and defeated with the best tools we have; the truth of the natural world revealed through science, and political activism and organizing on the part of scientists, educators and citizens everywhere. We can’t afford to have it any other way.
Neil H. (amateur astronomer and former christian)
mac Buckets
Really? Something 100% factual is the dumbest thing you’ve ever read in your life? Interesting. Or do you disagree? Are you saying that the FDR Democrats in fact repealed all the anti-sodomy laws, legalized abortion, didn’t censor? Hell, you probably don’t think they interned Japanese. No, that statement would be the dumbest thing you’ve ever read in your life.
I am aware of all that, but none of that was even part of the question I was answering.
Ask “7.” He brought up how the “American Taliban” want to move us to an era where the Government is intolerant, intrusive, backward, and restrictive. I merely brought up that we’d already been there, like in the FDR days (and before then). We seemed to all survive and prosper through that era, despite that horribly “backward” government. It’s my way of suggesting that he is over-reacting. It also points out how far the left has gotten from The Greatest Democrat Of Them All. It was a small point — let it go.
Geez, mention how socially conservative FDR would seem today on a message board, and just watch the reaction… Good thing I didn’t mention that the government was just as “backward” during the Kennedy Administration!
7
You clearly do not understand the scientific definition of theory and of hypotheses. The rest of what you write shows that to be so. You seem to think that by casting doubts on evolution, that some how validates Creationism. You are wrong. The doubts you are casting on evolution make it no easier to believe God did it in 6 days, or space monkeys did it in a year. Some of the doubts you have are the same doubts many scientist have. That’s why they keep looking for answers. Also, you forget the qualifier all who study evolution use, that being the phrase “this may be” It makes no difference that one may see the amino acid experiments as flawed. Those experiments never stated they were the definitive explanation. If someone told you there were, then you have been misinformed. Of course if one kept up on the latest scientific discoveries of our age they would know we have moved beyond the amino acid tests. Now the place to look is deep sea volcano vents.
You don’t seem to have much of a grasp on what is required in scientific thought. Scientists live to do three things. Discover something new, improve on a discovery someone else made, or revise something someone else discovered. When a scientist says “hey look. I discovered something new” other scientists say. “ok let me do what they did and see if I get the same results” So if a scientist has let their “world view” color the results, that is going to turn up. Scientists come from all walks of life, from all over globe. All from different cultures with different worldviews. Saying a scientist lets their personal world view have an impact on their results is like saying a Buddhist mathematician is going to come up with a different result for the same equation a Christian mathematician is working on.
mac Buckets
Sounds just like something Falwell would say, only switching Creationism rhetoric to Evolution rhetoric. You know, the country has survived about 230 years of people believing in Creationism, and about 200 years since Lemarck suggested interspecies evolution. I somehow think we’ll do just fine if we let everyone believe what they want.
And Bush had really get working on that whole Dominionism thing, hadn’t he? Only three years left to change the US into a theocracy, and he hasn’t even started by banning science yet!
Coo-koo! Coo-koo!
7
7 can speak for themselvs, thank you. For starters, this all started because you took exception to me calling some the American Taliban. I asked, what would you call people who want to control our lives the way these people aim to. If someone is going to try to control aspects of my life simply to please their god, then I will call them on it. Its what the Taliban did in Afghanistan. I see the comparison as apt. I asked what would you call them and you answered FDR Dems.
Your reply is stupid. If you want to reach back some 60 years to look for a government that abused civil rights, the fact that you chose the US and not the most obvious candidate from that era tells us two things. Either you hate America or you slept through high school history.
You made a ridiculous statement, and your defense of such statement is nearly laughable.
In some parts of the country people cant buy birth control, because the only pharmacist has been directed by their god not to sell them. In some communities libraries are harassed for stocking books that don’t support Christian values. Self-appointed do gooders make it their business to interfere with the end of life decisions, the most important and private aspects of ones life. They are actually pressuring the California legislature to invalidate all living wills that don’t meet their approval. These people are on record for saying the only people who should be allowed to marry are heterosexuals who intend and are capable of reproducing (that was Alan Keyes) And we are just supposed to sit here and say nothing?
Calling them the American Taliban is being kind. What they really are is un American.
7
The people who decide what is and what is not science have something to say about that. We dont get to pick and choose what is science any more than we get to pick what constitutes the discipline of geometry
Tell me again this isnt about religion?
mac Buckets
It’s inarguable that all the “abuses of civil rights” that you mentioned in your original post were occurring as part of American daily life at the time of FDR, and some still occur today. So by your definition, during the 1930s and 1940s (hell, up until the 70’s, certainly, or even today!), we were living under the rule of the “American Taliban.”
But MY statement was ridiculous? Gotcha.
I chose FDR because it shows how idiotic the claim that these “intrusive” government policies are tantamount to the Taliban — choosing Nazi Germany for an example wouldn’t have made the same point.
So anyone against gay marriage or birth control is un-American and Taliban. Gotcha. You’ve just besmirched the patriotism of about 99.9% of Americans who have ever lived. I’m guessing George Washington wasn’t cool with two guys getting married — he was UN-AMERICAN! John F. Kennedy? Catholic Taliban!
You just keep repeating that hatefilled mantra at the top of your lungs, please, while getting bludgeoned every election cycle. America hates your type of nonsense.
Mac
Oh, it certainly is about religion, no doubt.
7, you rock!
Gary Farber
“I can’t imagine the same kind of contemptuous attitude towards Jews and Muslims.”
How’s this?
7
Look I realize that you answered FDR as a flippant way of getting out of admitting the real answer. Every one here knows there is a big difference between government taking their time to revise outdated legislation and government restricting civil rights because and invisible sky spirit says it must be so.
No. I don’t care what people think. What I take exception to is when others try to get me to live according to how they see fit. I and everyone else here has made that very clear. I don’t care if you worship a coconut monkey god from the moon. If you think it makes you a better person, knock your self out. But don’t try to make me obey your lunar master. I fail to see how your neighbors use of birth control has an impact on your life. It has none on mine. Is it really too much to ask you to mind your own business.
I have besmirched no ones patriotism, because interfering with the private matters of your fellow citizen was never a central tenant of patriotism. It has something to do with that all man is equal thing. You know, the sort of reaction you get after centuries of being lorded over by some crazy inbreed who passed themselves off as Gods representatives on earth.
And George Washington? Great man. Couldn’t have done it with out him. But, he owned slaves so I am really not all that hung up on what his hypothetical moral judgment may be on my character.
Joey
It wasn’t the statement itself that was stupid, it was the context. It has nothing to do with the current issue, and whoever mentioned the “American Taliban” or whatever was in the wrong too. This thread is about evolution and creationism, not anti-sodomy laws. And bringing FDR into this was just stupid. As I said before, it was a different time. What’s liberal now socially would have been considered extreme in the forties, and what was liberal in the forties would be considered extreme today. Your statement, and whomever mentioned the “American Taliban”, added nothing to the discussion. Thus, it was the dumbest fucking thing I’ve ever read.
RadioFreeDenver
I am a Christian who accepts Darwin’s theory of natural selection as the mechanism for the origin of new species. I believe that evolution is simply the mechanism that God chose to get us here, and that we will never know exactly how things got started. That’s not a problem, anyway, because much of the beauty and mystery of belief in God is being able to accept things on faith without demanding proof. As far as I am concerned, there is no conflict between belief in Jesus Christ and acceptance of evolutionary theory. I recommend Ken Miller’s book “Finding Darwin’s God” for an excellent discussion of evolution and Christianity. Miller also provides a very thorough analysis of the various creationists arguments, and he does a great job refuting intelligent design.
If you’ve been wondering why fundamentalists are so attached to creationism, I refer you to another book, “The Battle for God” by Karen Armstrong. It is an eye-opening account of the recent rise of Islamic, Jewish, and Christian fundamentalism, and provides valuable insights into the mind of a fundamentalist.
Personally, I have a very big problem with creationism based on a literal interpretation of Genesis. Genesis 1 has a different version of creation than Genesis 2. Which version are we supposed to believe if they are both literally true? Which version gets taught in science class?
As a Lutheran Christian, I get tired of being lumped in with all of the creationists. I would appreciate it if the posters here would be more careful with the labels they use. We Christians are a diverse bunch and, like every family, we have crazy relatives like DougJ who would have us believe that the God who gave us the physical laws which tell us that the universe is probably 13 billion years old is in fact some sort of cosmic practical joker who actually created everything only 6,000 years ago! The joke’s on us!
Finally, it’s upsetting to me when fundamentalists call themselves “true” Christians and discount the beliefs of everyone else. I truly believe that if Jesus showed up today, he would be derided as a “liberal” and would probably be labeled as a terrorist and locked up. Just remember, being a Christian and being a fundamentalist are not the same thing. Thanks!
Mac
If it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart? –
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Say what you will about the sweet miracle of unquestioning faith. I consider the capacity for it terrifying. – Kurt Vonnegut
It is possible to store the mind with a million facts and still be entirely uneducated. -Alec Bourne
eric
how, exactly, is it that god said, “let there be light” on the first day and didn’t create the sun until day four. do we need to have blind faith in this rediculous lunacy?! an earlier poster was right: evolution DOES seem to have passed some of us by……
Simon
And don’t allow yourselves to be forced by any leftist supported law to recognize such marriages in any way, including being forced to rent to homosexual couples or pay benefits to and for homosexual spouses. If the government forces you to pay taxes, then fight to your last breath not to have a single penny of your money going toward the support and recognition of these oxymoronic “marriages.” Resist even the potential for such oppression. Since the leftists have wrested control of the courts from everyone else so that now the court routinely “finds” new laws in support of leftism, fight tooth and nail to gain control of the courts.
And be sure to fight leftist oppression. If leftists will be content to do their dirty deeds only with their own money, then let them do it. But if they in any way compel you to pay for it by public funds, stealing your taxes to pay for it, then you have a right and duty to fight their oppressiveness until you win. You must never yield to leftist oppression. Life is not worth living in such a low and yielded state. When leftists ridicule you, know that they have stolen YOUR money to spread their dirt. You have not stolen theirs. So fight them. Take control of the courts, the Congress and the Executive. Control the government and make it minimalist, because leftists will only use government to force their ridiculousness upon you.
By all means do this. But if even one cent of your public money is used to support or maintain public airwaves, then at a minimum fight to make sure you are not paying money to support what the leftists call “entertainment.” Since leftists are forcing you to pay for it, you have a duty to fight it. That duty will never end, even after you win. God will never have you sitting idle to knowingly pay for leftist filth. Since they are forcing you and you have the freedom to resist it without losing your life, you have a duty to resist.
The issue is creationism over evolution. If leftists are going to force you to pay for their godless evolutionist beliefs in any way, then you have a duty to fight it. They are forcing you to pay to teach your own children what you know is wrong. No matter how much they KNOW they are right, they still have no valid right to force money out of your pocket to teach it. If they wish to teach it without challenge, then they should use their own money. But since they apparently fear freedom of thought so much that they must force take your money and then call out the government’s guns whenever you challenge them, TAKE OVER THE GOVERNMENT! You have no choice but to do this. Fight them because they are oppressing you.
—–
Now I don’t necessarily believe the above to anywhere near the extent expressed, but only express it as I do to underscore what I think is the essential sentiment driving many social issues. I also think the people here tend to overlook, viciously, the validity of the sentiment.
You argue that if one does not like a certain thing, one ought not participate in it. But you overlook that when a thing is federalized in government law, everyone must participate in it to a highly significant degree and therefore everyone has a right and duty to themselves to fight it if they wish it to change.
The solution is to allow people to opt out wherever possible. These issues would mostly vanish overnight were they not so oppressive to human rights. You are actually forcing people to support what they detest. Then you ridicule them when they protest. Let them be free to teach their children as they wish without forcing them to pay for your views. Otherwise, they would be perfectly in the right should they ever change the law so that they force you to pay for their views.
I respect the creationists and social conservatives for employing their right to protest and change the system. I wish them well because I understand their position. These folks have no choice but to fight and win because people like you simply are not being fair to them. The comments here bear out this view. You people do not have the power of mind, the broadness and magnanimity of spirit, to pause and give kind consideration to those who differ from you. You simply take money by law and expect them to shut up.
And you take money by ever increasing amounts. For “education” alone you take upwards of $11,000 each year to baby-sit each American child in your failing public schools. Your failures will only worsen because you do not understand that education is based upon honor and self-respect, not facts. You erroneously think that by increasing money, you can solve your education problems and you have no issue with forcing people who think otherwise to support your view with their hard-earned dollars.
It is rank, putrid leftist oppression that needs to be attacked at all cost. Social conservatives, for all their weaknesses and for all the ridicule they incur from “open-minded” allegedly “educated” moderates like the good leftists here, are the salt of this earth. I think it is quite clear that should they ever disappear, you would catch hell indeed.
Chris Aable
Since I have taught Psychology and Sociology at CSULA and have studied comparative religions for several years now, allow me to offer my perspective. People have believed in strange gods and demons since the first cavemen who’s fossils were found buried with food and flowers, no doubt placed next to the departed by loved ones who wanted to see them off to their prehistoric version of an “afterlife”. It is unfortunately, natural for most people to believe the crazy things not only because they don’t want to die and see their loved ones “gone forever”, but because it is difficult for our still-evolving brains to apprehend non-existence and to deeply understand the complexities of science. This is obvious from the repeated claims of not-so-deep-thinking “Christians” who keep proclaiming “evolution is just a theory”. They can’t seem to grasp that a theory is the best set of evidence we have, based on facts that have been independently varified and published for peer scrunity the world over. One of the many striking differences between science and religion is that the scientific method begs for criticism correction for better theories – religionists fight critism and don’t want to hear of any theories that contradict their own, no matter how sound and rational. The mountains of evidence for evolution can be found in almost every field of science from Biology, anthropology and geology to agricultural science, animal breeding and all fields of health and medicine. All of these fields have resulted in millions of lives being saved, and there is no evidence that any prayer has saved anyone’s life – ask any praying parent of children at terminal cancer wards. My apologies for ending on a “down” note, but the fact is that scientific theories have made life better for us all, not superstitions about world floods, that incidently were invented by the Syrians and Egyptians long before the old testament. Christianity is a long series of ancient fairy tales. Honor thy father ? What if your father is in the KKK or a Skinhead? We don’t need the “ten commandments” we need to learn to treat others not how we would like to be treated – but how they would like to be treated, but above all else treat ourselves and others with compassionate rationality – which is a hallmark of medical science, not ancient fairy tales. – Chris http://www.self-evolution.org
Sojourner
Well, I guess this explains the crazy arguments you come up with. I’m a tax payer who helps to pay for public education. I want kids to be taught to think, not mindlessly believe what anybody or anything says, be it the Bible or George Bush.
The problem with the fundies is they don’t want kids to be taught to think. They want them to unquestioningly accept what their parents and their religion tells them. In spite of the fact that God gave us brains and, presumably, expects us to use them.
It’s worth a try for you, too, Simon.
baltosak
I suggest giving this whole issue an acid test. What I would propose is a deal that would allow them to teach their theory along with the evolution theory in the schools if they would give up their tax free status. Now that would be a real test of faith.
Zach
First things first, creationism/ID, no matter how it’s pitched, is not science. The hallmark of all scientific study is “The Scientific Method”, which is absent from creationism research. In a nutshell their are basically two ways of constructing a theory. One, you start with a hypothesis, evidence is gathered to test the hypothesis, if you conclude that your hypothesis does not “fit” with the evidence, than you throw out the hypothesis. This is the way of science. This is the way of creationism; start with a hypothesis, gather evidence, if the evidence does not fit with the hypothesis than throw out the evidence. Creationism will never be able to prove itself null and void, this is not science, science cannot have a foundation. Creationisms foundation is obvious. I think there is this misnommer that “science” means studying something with test tubes and and line graphs and white coats. I’m sure that ID researchers do good work and are very educated, but they are not scientists.
Now on to education, teaching creationism/ID in schools, effectively waters down science. If you want it to be taught in a Christian school, or a public school in a Christianity class, than fine. But teaching it in a biology class creates an inaccurate representation of the scientific community. You wouldn’t acknowledge flat-Earth in a Geology class, or geocentric universe in an Astronomy class, even though there do still exist people who believe these things. Simply because there are people who promote ID, it still stands that the OVERWHELMING majority of biologist, anthropologists etc. think it silly. If you want to fight to teach these things than great, but don’t do so under this idea that it is science, because it isn’t, and don’t do so by pretending that evolution is some crazy idea that has no credible evidence.
It simply doesn’t belong in a science classes curriculum.
Simon
If there are people who wish to conduct themselves as atheists, even if only methodologically, they should be free to do so. But they ought not have the power to compel philosophical theists to pay for it by tax dollars. It is this gross oppression and injustice against human freedom of thought that infuses the evolution issue with bitterness. Were we to work toward a way to allow philosophical theists to opt out of support for methodological atheism, both camps would get what they most want and this issue would be a debate for logged only in history.
As it exists currently, the theists have no choice but to insist on taking control over the courts and then allowing greater freedom in schools.
We can claim ID does not belong in the science classroom, but this is just wrong. ID makes a definite claim and scientifically framed challenge to evolutionists. To kill ID, methodological atheists merely need present a description of the evolutionary development (with pressures that brought the changes to bear) of just one of the protein structures that ID claims are irreducible. That is a fundamentally materialistic, a scientific challenge and we cannot run from it with the lie that it does not belong in the classroom.
Sojourner
Subjecting ID to scientific scrutiny does not mean finding holes in evolution. ID itself must be scientifically testable. So, Simon, how would you suggest that we measure the presence/absence of the supreme being?
Mac
Simon- This is a tired and convoluted argument. It has been refuted again and again and again ad nauseum. Sounds like you just don’t like paying your taxes to a “godless” guvmint.
Have a gander at this, don’t worry it won’t make you a heathen just by reading it, and its free…
According to the definition of design, we must determine something about the design process in order to infer design. We do this by observing the design in process or by comparing with the results of known designs. The only example of known intelligent design we have is human design. Life does not look man-made.
Nobody argues that life is complicated. However, complexity is not the same as design. There are simple things that are designed and complex things that originate naturally. Complexity does not imply design; in fact, simplicity is a design goal in most designs.
In most cases, the inference of design is made because people cannot envision an alternative. This is simply the argument from incredulity. Historically, supernatural design has been attributed to lots of things that we now know form naturally, such as lightning, rainbows, and seasons.
Life as a whole looks very undesigned by human standards, for several reasons:
In known design, innovations that occur in one product quickly get incorporated into other, often very different, products. In eukaryotic life, innovations generally stay confined in one lineage. When the same sort of innovation occurs in different lineages (such as webs of spiders, caterpillars, and web spinners), the details of their implementation differ in the different lineages. When one traces lineages, one sees a great difference between life and design. (Eldredge has done this, comparing trilobites and cornets; Walker 2003.)
In design, form typically follows function. Some creationists expect this (Morris 1974). Yet life shows many examples of different forms with the same function (e.g., different structures making up the wings of birds, bats, insects, and pterodactyls; different organs for making webs in spiders, caterpillars, and web spinners; and at least eleven different types of insect ears), the same basic form with different functions (e.g., the same pattern of bones in a human hand, whale flipper, dog paw, and bat wing) and some structures and even entire organisms without apparent function (e.g., some vestigial organs, creatures living isolated in inaccessible caves and deep underground).
As noted above, life is complex. Design aims for simplicity.
For almost all designed objects, the manufacture of the object is separate from any function of the object itself. All living objects reproduce themselves.
Life lacks plan. There are no specifications of living structures and processes. Genes do not fully describe the phenotype of an organism. Sometimes in the absence of genes, structure results anyway. Organisms, unlike designed systems, are self-constructing in an environmental context.
Life is wasteful. Most organisms do not reproduce, and most fertilized zygotes die before growing much. A designed process would be expected to minimize this waste.
Life includes many examples of systems that are jury-rigged out of parts that were used for another purpose. These are what we would expect from evolution, not from an intelligent designer. For example:
Vertebrate eyes have a blind spot because the retinal nerves are in front of the photoreceptors.
On orchids that provide a platform for pollinating insects to land on, the stem of the flower has a half twist to move the platform to the lower side of the flower.
Life is highly variable. In almost every species, there is a spread of values for anything you care to measure. The “information” that specifies life is of very low tolerance in engineering terms. There are few standards.
Life is nasty. If life is designed, then death, disease, and decay also must be designed since they are integral parts of life. This is a standard problem of apologetics. Of course, many designed things are also nasty (think of certain weapons), but if the designer is supposed to have moral standards, then it is added support against the design hypothesis.
The process of evolution can be considered a design process, and the complexity and arrangement we see in life are much closer to what we would expect from evolution than from known examples of intelligent design. Indeed, engineers now use essentially the same processes as evolution to find solutions to problems that would be intractably complex otherwise.
Does evolution itself look designed? When you consider that some sort of adaptive mechanism would be necessary on the changing earth if life were to survive, then if life were designed, evolution or something like it would have to be designed into it.
Claiming to be able to recognize design in life implies that nonlife is different, that is, not designed. To claim that life is recognizably designed is to claim that an intelligent designer did not create the rest of the universe.
As it stands, the design claim makes no predictions, so it is unscientific and useless. It has generated no research at all.
Mac
Index to Creationist Claims
From TalkOrigins Mark Isaak
http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc
Claim CA350:
Professional literature is silent on the subject of the evolution of biochemical systems.
Source:
Behe, Michael J. 1996. Darwin’s Black Box, New York: The Free Press, 68, 72, 97, 114, 115-116, 138, 185-186.
Response:
The claim is simply false. Dozens of articles exist on the subjects for which Behe claims the literature is missing. David Ussery, for example, found 107 articles on cilia evolution, 125 on flagella evolution, 27 on the evolution of the entire coagulation system, 130 on the evolution of vesicle transport, and 84 on “molecular evolution of the immune system” (Ussery 1999).
Behe tries to make his claim appear more dramatic by overstating our understanding of the molecular workings of the cell. For example, he says, “Over the past four decades modern biochemistry has uncovered the secrets of the cell” (1996, 232). But our understanding has only just begun. In the years since Behe wrote his book, journals have been filled with thousands of research articles uncovering new information, and much remains to be uncovered. When the complete Escherichia coli genome was sequenced in 1998, the functions of a third of its genes were still completely unknown, and E. coli is much simpler than human cells.
Behe’s work on intelligent design theory has produced no publications in scientific literature. In fact, there have been no scientific publications on intelligent design by any of its proponents (Gilchrist 1997).
Links:
Catalano, John (ed.). 1998. Publish or perish: Some published works on biochemical evolution. http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/behe/publish.html
See for Yourself:
You can do a search of biological and medical research yourself at PubMed ( http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/PubMed ). Try keywords such as “flagella” and “evolution”.
References:
Ussery, David. 1999. A biochemist’s response to “The biochemical challenge to evolution”. Bios 70: 40-45. http://www.cbs.dtu.dk/staff/dave/Behe.html
Gilchrist, George W. 1997. The elusive scientific basis of intelligent design theory. Reports of the National Center for Science Education 17(3): 14-15. http://www.ncseweb.org/resources/articles/2083_the_elusive_scientific_basis_o_3_16_2001.asp
Further Reading:
Cavalier-Smith, Tom. 1997. The blind biochemist. Trends in Ecology and Evolution 12(4): 162-163.
Li, Wen-Hsiung. 1997. Molecular Evolution. Sinauer Associates, Inc., Sunderland, MA.
Simon
I have read each of these alleged “refutations” and remain thoroughly unconvinced in their effectiveness. Indeed, most are illogical even on their surface.
Here is just one example of the sort of illogic employed by those who have aimed to refute ID. I have spent considerable time here explaining my view that evolution proponents have commandeered the courts to compel the teaching and funding of their views, and now you claim that it sounds as if I do not wish to support a godless government. The issue is, and always has been, that no government, whether godless or not, has a valid right to compel anyone to support godlessness as a philosophy. Yet that is exactly what our government does when it compels theists to learn and pay for evolution.
We have a veritable nation of theists for whom God is a real entity Who is in and through everything. Theirs is a God to Whom even a casual disregard is considered blasphemous. Nevertheless, evolutionary science, by definition, ignores this God and employs government force to make sure these theists teach their children to do likewise. It even forces theists to pay for this oppression with their own money. This is rank leftist oppression. Whatever you may think of the theists, no one has a right to force them as evolutionists now do. I think they have a duty to work for the death of evolution’s legal protection.
Of course the rest of your post was taken word for word from talkorigins. I have been aware of it for some time and think it is childishly inept. I will give a few examples of this.
This is woefully incompetent. ID adequately relies upon what we already know about structural organization and function. It depends upon essentially the same train of thought that causes the scientists at SETI to look for intelligence in the universe.
And yet we are confident enough in our ability to detect intentional structure and function that we have initiated a “Billion Channel Extraterrestrial Assay (BETA) survey of the heavens using one of the world’s largest receivers, an 84-foot radio telescope set up in Harvard, Massachusetts. The goal of this heavenly scan is to receive intelligent messages that some advanced civilization could be beaming our way. It is a program within the borders of legitimate science. It is safe to put the objection aside that modern science is opposed in principle to the notion of intelligent cause.”
http://www.arn.org/docs/thaxton/ct_newdesign3198.htm
This is comprehensively irrelevant (and maddening that it comes from alleged “scientists”). The issue here is not mere complexity, but IRREDUCIBILE complexity (which can be mathematically determined).
1. Consider we have a certain multipart structure that produces a function. This particular function would automatically cease should we remove any single part of the structure that produces it. ID has demonstrated many such structures and functions.
2. Now we have this theory that claims all things have come into being by a step-by-step evolutionary path.
Put the above two ideas together and what we absolutely MUST claim that for any irreducible machine described above, its functions came into being all at once – suddenly. It is a fantastic claim.
To try getting around this problem, evolutionists have claimed the structures developed in step-by-step fashion in response to ‘some sort of pressure’, creating ‘some sort of function’ that is different from their current functions. As pressures changed, the now fully built structures suddenly took on their current functions. It is pure hogwashic speculation, especially since no one, not a single scientist has produced a sequence detailing how this happened, including the pressures that made it happened.
This is the challenge ID levels toward evolution. It is a valid challenge however much evolutionists whine against it. And until evolution solves it, it does not warrant any reasoned mind’s loyalty. Why? Because the creatures that evolution claims evolved in step-by-step fashion INEXORABLY DEPEND upon the irreducibly complex machines ID claims exists. If therefore evolution does not yet have the ability to convincingly demonstrate how these machines came to be, it really has no fit basis for declaring how any creature came to be.
This does not apply to ID. ID simply looks at the theory that is alleged to have produced an irreducible structure, and then tries to build the irreducible structure by the forces described by the theory. It has discovered that the theory is inadequate to produce those structures and now challenges evolutionary science to explain itself. Until evolutionary scientists do this, the theory of evolution is necessarily dead as far as I am concerned. Evolutionists undoubtedly hold to it because they cannot (or rather will not) envision an alternative.
Here we see evolution by implication declaring that the God of the theists, if he exists, obviously did not design life because what we know of design tells us He didn’t do a good job of it. It is an embarrassingly childish philosophically atheistic argument, and may easily be dispatched by challenging anyone at talkorigins to go ahead and create an entire system of nature equal in size to ours, that it is better than what now exists. Human design, contrary to the claims of talkorgin, is quite obviously inferior to the force that actually created nature. It is one thing to claim a better design of life and quite another to prove a better design by actually creating it.
Moreover, nature is quite large and intricately linked. What may appear as inefficiencies to us perhaps exist for the health of the entire system. It seems a bit narrow-minded to conclude that “Life as a whole” looks beneath human design when we do not even fully know the interplay of life as a whole.
It is this sort of mind-numbing fallaciousness (Petitio principii) that ought to cause all reasoned minds to doubt the judgment of evolutionary scientists. Talkorigins seems to have forgotten that evolution is the issue under debate here. We can’t simply claim as an example of evolutionary design that “Life includes many examples of systems that are jury-rigged out of parts that were used for another purpose.” This is precisely the claim that everyone is questioning.
Surely we see the childishly sloppy thinking here. Yes? “Life is nasty” is no fit argument against a designer, even from a human perspective. It is to say vaccines are “nasty” because they often involve pain as we administer them. Roses are “nasty” because they grow in soil, etc., etc. An intelligent designer may simply look upon death and suffering as we look upon pain in medicine and soil in gardening. They are necessary and trivial in view of a larger reality. Our children may be convinced in themselves that vaccines are evil, but we know differently and the children are simply incapable of understanding how any moral parent can possibly approve of such pain.
This is quite a lot of obvious nonsense. Engineers employ intelligence.
I need not continue dealing with this sort of rubbish. It won’t take a genius to see it is unworthy of further consideration.
ID makes one essential claim and on that claim rests everything else: that there are systems in nature that could not have been produced by step-by-by evolution. Darwin himself declared that if it could be shown that such systems exist, then his theory would be disproved. I can only consider it disproved at this point, until it is shown capable of adequately addressing the considerable challenge before it.
Simon
This takes Behe’s claim out of context and also restates it so that the original meaning is destroyed. Behe makes his claims concerning COMPLEX biochemical systems, in context of his book he refers to irreducibly complex systems. When we see the Behe’s true statements, we see there are indeed NO papers on such systems.
…microbiologist James Shapiro of the University of Chicago declared in National Review that “There are no detailed Darwinian accounts for the evolution of any fundamental biochemical or cellular system, only a variety of wishful speculations.” (Shapiro 1996)
In Nature, University of Chicago evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne stated, “There is no doubt that the pathways described by Behe are dauntingly complex, and their evolution will be hard to unravel. . . . [W]e may forever be unable to envisage the first proto-pathways.” (Coyne 1996)
In a particularly scathing review in Trends in Ecology and Evolution Tom Cavalier-Smith, an evolutionary biologist at the University of British Columbia, nonetheless wrote, “For none of the cases mentioned by Behe is there yet a comprehensive and detailed explanation of the probable steps in the evolution of the observed complexity. The problems have indeed been sorely neglected–though Behe repeatedly exaggerates this neglect with such hyperboles as ‘an eerie and complete silence.'” (Cavalier-Smith 1997)
Evolutionary biologist Andrew Pomiankowski agreed in New Scientist, “Pick up any biochemistry textbook, and you will find perhaps two or three references to evolution. Turn to one of these and you will be lucky to find anything better than ‘evolution selects the fittest molecules for their biological function.'” (Pomiankowski 1996)
In American Scientist Yale molecular biologist Robert Dorit averred, “In a narrow sense, Behe is correct when he argues that we do not yet fully understand the evolution of the flagellar motor or the blood clotting cascade.” (Dorit 1997)
We ought to at least be honest about what our opponents are claiming. Behe responds quite effectively to this false claim against him: http://www.arn.org/docs/behe/mb_evolutionaryliterature.htm
This is profoundly irrelevant and an objection on this basis is just a childish picking of nits. Behe is still correct in stating we have discovered the secrets of the cell, though we may not have discovered all of the secrets. The point of Behe’s statement is to claim we have discovered the secrets of cells as they relate to irreducibly complex structures within the cells. It is THIS aspect of cellular knowledge that evolutionary science is being challenged to address. Whining that Behe is allegedly wrong about knowing everything betrays a lack of a real argument on the part of evolutionists.
More childishness. Behe hasn’t produced papers in journals because the journals have discriminated against his views, rather than promote open discourse. One merely needs fully read these exchanges to see the fear and irrationality in the scientific establishment. http://www.arn.org/docs/behe/mb_correspondencewithsciencejournals.htm
The fault here obviously lies with scientific close-mindedness and dishonesty– not with Behe.
Sojourner
Once again, here’s the essence of your problem. You believe that disproving evolution is enough to prove ID. This is not how science works.
So once again, put forward a set of testable hypotheses concerning the tenets of ID specifically, not those of evolution.
Only then can ID be considered science. You can put forward as much of your famous convoluted logic as you want but without testable hypotheses you have nothing.
Zach
Simon this is absurd, ID is not true scientific study, it is prose. I am still baffled as to how you can make a case for ID being a science. I don’t think ID research is stupid or not worth while, it just isn’t real science, it belongs in a Christian inspirational reader, not a textbook.
Simon
Chuck Darwin once wrote:
“IF it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed, which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down. But I can find out no such case.”
Well ID claims to have found such organs, vast numbers of them. It has found them in the very small world unknown to Darwin – the world of microbiology and biochemistry. Evolution has thus far been powerless to show how any of these structures evolved by “numerous, successive, slight modifications”. Indeed, evolution’s only response to this considerable challenge has been to whine, as the readers here have whined that “ID is not science.”
This whining is irrelevant because whether it is science or not, ID has met Darwin’s own challenge, throwing down the gauntlet on Darwin’s own terms. It claims gradualism mathematically cannot produce certain systems. In fact it pointedly demonstrates how certain systems completely shut down with one change, proving that they could not have developed step-by-step. Because the creatures Darwin observed to form his theory depend upon these sorts of systems, his theory was formed too hastily and must now back up and explain the irreducible systems.
Whatever one claims about ID, it now presents a most valid scientific challenge to evolution. I think evolutionists are running because they know that, in Darwin’s own words, the theory has ‘absolutely broken down.’
Evolution cannot stand in the public on its own evidence. It only survives because it commands the courts. Courts are forcing everyday Americans to pay for and teach their children evolution. Were the government to leave Americans free to make their own choices concerning what they wish their children to learn, they would reject evolution as it is currently taught.
But Americans are not free. Leftists, especially leftists who are self-deceived into thinking they are “moderates,” are actually working to force the public to learn what it obviously does accept – even after over 150 years of attempted indoctrination.
Link. Link. Link.
Even in polls asking what should be taught in schools an overwhelming majority of Americans think both evolution and competing ideas should be taught.
But when the public declares what it wishes via its own democratically elected school boards, leftists (especially the self-deceived sort we see on this blog), actually sue them in activist courts, ultimately threatening them with federal weapons if they do not relent.
I think evolutionists have left Americans no choice but to take the courts away from activist judges. It wants a change toward creationism and I think ultimately it will get this change. ID will likely help finish off evolution in the public’s mind once the argument gets out.
There was a better way to all this. Evolutionists ought to have respected the sensibilities of others. They ought not have taken the public’s money and forced vast portions of the public by law and ridicule to shut up. Now, I think the Supreme Court will be turned hard toward the right in response to leftist opponents. If this does not happen soon, then it certainly will eventually. It is just a matter of time.
[Editor’s Note: Simon- start embedding your links. That is what the buttons are for in the comments, and I get tired of having to clean up your comments. Please work with me.]
Mac
Simon
If it was on my list of things to do, (Comandeer Court system, Fund Evolution) I must have missed it. Didn’t get the memo from Guvmint Inc., nor have i ever listed my Religion as Darwinist. My statement that You dont like paying taxes applies to myself and most other people as well. Sorry if that offended.
Having said that, My point echos what Sojourner and Zach are saying. If ID were a true science, and not a shield for a (narrow) religious viewpoint, I would welcome it in classrooms. But it is not. It is pseudoscience. I put this in the same realm as crystals, astrology, Magnetic Therapy, Penta water, etc.
If two scientists disagree, which is almost always, there are ways to determine the amount of correctness by each side, that both sides abide by, and the result is an advancement of mans understanding of some facet of the universe around him.
If a scientist and an ID researcher disagree, one of them is going to hell. The result and benefit to man? Zero.
If two ID proponents (Actually creationists) disagree, the result is a cat fight. See http://www.AnswersinGenisis.org and their tiff with Ken Hovind, over what arguments that creationists should avoid. I do wish you well.
Simon
[Simon’s Note: To the Editor- Please consider being consistent with your requests. There are no fewer than SIX other participants in this thread who failed to embed their links, including Mac, who seven posts above this one included at least FIVE links in one post – ALL UNEMBEDDED. Yet not one of these posters were pestered on the thread by you. I understand your distaste for opposing views, but you dishonor yourself with such childish leftist hypocrisy. Very well. I will do as you wish and just move along.]
Besnik
My grandfather, an albanian commie (no offence to anyone), when got wounded in Byalistok, was visited by a polish priest.
The guy told him about the bible, creation stuff etc…My grandfather, a chemist also, got up to his gun, and left the priest two choices. Either he proved that a man could be created in 6 days, either he started digging. Well my grandfather was a stalinian (what… any one can make mistakes). The priest fainted. Well this is the kind of questionning i would like to see. You’ll see they will all start to dig.
No,no gulag idelogy, far from me the Idea of depriving them of their civil liberties, but these teachings are criminal.
Now these guys are special, IMHO we should park them and send them to Ala…(oh yeah we said no Gulag policy). Ok, ok we let’em free.
I can’t belive this crap…you know the same guys firmly believe the Jews killed Jesus (you know the guy that got drunk and started it’s own magic school but as he was lousy he was chased from city to city).
Ok enough bad taste humor, this is a Joke this guys suffer from some kind of biblical Peter Pan syndrome. SO LOL people.
Besnik
SIMON, you know mr. DARWIN wasn’t the only kid in the block claiming that we were all the results of a slow but firm evolution.
I mean we’re far from the small darwinian theory. And of course we got at least undissmisable evidence that the timeline and theory of the BIBLE is BS. So either explain to me how the bible could be right, or start digging…to find fossiles. You got many that dislike the radicality of the darwinian theory about the “winner species” but no one will challenge the fact that we evolve. You got evidence (jaws shrinking from 36 to 34 or 32 teeth, the general male height climbing from 5 feet to 6)…
But then, quoting one phrase and trying to interprete it like it was the ultimate proof of it’s falseness that’s an old rhetoric. If I was to compare the darwinian theory with the biblical one and then with reality (that by the way has still so many mysteries) man the bible would be food for my fire…oups already burned some bibles (oh yeah and please spare me that nazi-comparison about books burned, burned down some very fine mein kampfs)…
Besnik
I glanced through the page you linked to, though it’s too much to read at the moment. Your comment wasn’t aimed at Christians such as myself who don’t take every verse literally, but consider this… The Bible was written by men (the early books are said to have been given to Moses, or “dictated”, by God). When both the OT and NT were written, man’s understanding of the world didn’t include a spherical earth or a sun-centered galaxy, among many other concepts. If certain things were revealed by God, maybe he didn’t want to reveal too much so we could develop on our own, just as the Star Trek folks wouldn’t interfere with less-developed cultures.
Did you hear Scotty died
Bumped on this. So you embrace scepticism? You think that god tries to hide something from us? Isn’t that a bit nietzschean? I mean if god acts like a man….maybe he is one and thus…there is no GOD.
What ever. You should know that we knew when the NT was written that man knew that the earth was spherical and that the stars were turning around. Do you know some thing about Ptolemee? Please don’t speak about things you don’t know. And don’t claim the truth, simply beacause one of the many sects that were in action at that time, in this world, claims it.
That is simply being totalitarian or relativist (you pick the one that suits you).
Besnik
This is dedicated to creationists.
About science…and scientificity read some epistemology (specially methodology).
That’s crap comming from Yurup. The purpose of this C.R.A.P. is to show what is science and what isn’t. Start with monism and Poper’s scientific unicity. He explains that in order for a theory to claim a scientific nature it should be:
1. Falsifiable
2. OPEN (so you could analyse it till the smallest concept)
3. Revisable.
Done that then you could go for more mature and complex methodology:
Dualism
and maybe you could even end liking it and growing up to:
Pluralism.
But in the end you’ll see that there is much more out there that an old over falsified book that can’t even scare teenagers.
Chris B
In response to Joey’s “Facts” – first, I’m with you on Scotty – great character, great show. Now – what you claim as “Facts” are at best theories – “Fact #1: The earth is not 3,000 years old or some other ridiculous estimate like that. Carbon dating has been used to get at least a reasonable estimate of the earth’s age, . . .” Carbon dating is not useful at all for items over a few thousand years old, and moreover it is not 100% accurate for even the shorter period – a live snail has been “carbon dated” to have been dead over 10,000 years old – right! “Fact #2: If you ever put quotation marks around the word “theory” (and not like I just did, putting q marks around it there was just proper grammar), you instantly show yourself to be ignorant, thus making your opinion unwanted and unrespected. Learn the definition of the word, please.” Joey – your point is well made but refutes your own writing. The use of quotation marks around a word or phrase in this case denotes a usage or inference that is not necessarily accepted as correct – which is my point. You should have used this or similar notation around the word “fact” as you wrote. Otherwise the reader would be lead to beleive that you are at least 65,000,000 years old and have witnessed first hand the creature whose bones were later postualted to be that old. “Fact #3: If Noah had an ark, I 100% guarantee you dinosaurs we’re not in it. They died 65,000,000 years before people even existed. And could you picture Noah trying to feed a Tyrannasaur or Velociraptor? That would be entertainment my friends.” So you were in the ark 65,000,000+ million years ago? Please post the photos for us all to see! (Otherwise, since you’re so careful with grammar and word usage I’m sure you wouldn’t make a claim, no less a guarantee, that you cannot personally verify!) I agree that a fully grown T-Rex was probably not on the ark, but young ones, who were on the ark for about a year, could easily have fit. My point in all this not to discount the notion that reasonable people subscribe to evolution and an old universe, but rather to (good-naturedly, I hope) point out that we all have our biases, and to varying degrees these biases – these pre-suppositions – color our communication, if not our thinking. There is a great deal of by-the-book good science that points to a young earth and a created universe, as there is science that points away from it. Obviously, the universe is either young (~10,000 years) or old (billions of years), and life was either created supernaturally or occured through random chance. Neither of these can be proved or elevated to the level of natural law – hence neither can be called fact. We all have to have faith, then, in whichever we believe, faith in the supernatural or faith in the random processes. Statisticians say that the probability of evolution is immeasurably lower (less likely) than that of a created universe – belief in evolution takes more faith. This is what I beleive, but since I wasn’t there, I know that a faith component is required. I respectfully submit that we all have to add the faith factor – where you place your faith is the issue. Joey – live long and prosper!
Besnik
Curious minds have always killed static doctrines.
Hey Jesus…I means Chris B do you know the average growth rate of a T-Rex?
If Noah would have had some on his arch (come on!!! how can i say such BS)why in the world don’t we have any “christian” transcript of any of this? I mean it’s so difficult not to be amazed about these creatures…that differ in such features with nowadays animals! Come on 25m tall/60 ton brachiosaurus couple fitting in that nut shell?
In one year a T-REX becomes an “adolescent” of two tons and can crush your skull. The raptors had an active life cycle of 15 years. In one year they had grown to full hunting maturity…
I mean i have a 1000 more questions to ask but i know that you could not answer me. You just don’t know and that makes you prefer a nice, fairy tale.
Chris B
Besnik – thanks for your thoughts. Good points, but hardly conclusive. I don’t claim to know for fact (none of us can), merely offer possibilties. Three speciifc responses come to mind – your comments about the life span and maturation of the T-Rex, while certainly possible, are no more verifiable or factual than the yet-unproven or unverified period of the creature’s exitence on the planet. Specifically, if the specifications you purport are based on their being millions of years extinct, but in fact they were around a few thousand years ago, the age and growth rates could be off as well. Also, the Biblical account of the flood and the ark are not written as scientific journals, so a lot of details of interest to scientists were simply not included. That being said, following what is does say, if true, should not lead to any factual errors, and no such errors can be proven. We are told that pairs (or more) of each “kind” of animal were on the ark, and here the geneology of the T-Rex vis-a-vis other such creatures suggests the possibility that another animal of its “kind” was on the ark. It is thought, for example, that not every breed of dog was on the ark, but the non-sceintific classification of “kind” of animal meant that all dogs we see today (as well as those that have become extinct) were represented “in kind” on the ark. [The creation account fully supports micro-evolution, variation and change “within kind”, so a pair of dogs could generate the broad range of genotypes and phenotypes we have today.] One other option that I have heard archeologists suggest is that certain of the members of animals within each kind (perhaps the T-Rex) were not taken in, and those ended at the flood. This notion is consistent with a great deal of the fossil record and the written records – from many civilizaations after the flood. You say this is all a fairy tale – I simply disagree. What is to me a fairy tail is the notion that, for example, non-living things not only come to life but developed in complextiy and information contentin ways that in hundreds of billion of years would still be stasticially impossible. Perhaps you can explain to me the process by which mutation adds information to DNA – the world’s most learned scientisits can’t do it, but insist it happened – that’s what I can fantasy! Cheers!