Most atheists dont know about science (Page 292) Blackshoes: Really: so when I've given you the words from your evolutionary scientists that support everything creation has stated they're not to be trusted? And again nothing other than more of your opinions "Biologists are simply naive when they talk about experiments designed to test the theory of evolution. It is not testable. They may happen to stumble across facts which would seem to conflict with its predictions. These facts will invariably be ignored and their discoverers will undoubtedly be deprived of continuing research grants." Professor Whitten (Professor of Genetics, University of Melbourne, Australia) (Edited by Blackshoes) MJ59: Because 99.9% of what you post can always be backtracked to the Discovery Institute (no agenda there, unless you read their wedge statement) MJ59: The Wedge Strategy is a creationist political and social action plan authored by the Discovery Institute, the hub of the pseudoscientific intelligent design movement. The strategy was put forth in a Discovery Institute manifesto known as the Wedge Document. Its goal is to change American culture by shaping public policy to reflect politically conservative fundamentalist evangelical Protestant values. The wedge metaphor is attributed to Phillip E. Johnson and depicts a metal wedge splitting a log Nope, no agenda there people, nothing to see, move along The Wedge Document outlines a public relations campaign meant to sway the opinion of the public, popular media, charitable funding agencies, and public policy makers. The document sets forth the short-term and long-term goals with milestones for the intelligent design movement, with its governing goals stated in the opening paragraph: "To defeat scientific materialism and its destructive moral, cultural and political legacies" "To replace materialistic explanations with the theistic understanding that nature and human beings are created by God" There are three Wedge Projects, referred to in the strategy as three phases designed to reach a governing goal: Scientific Research, Writing, and Publicity Publicity and Opinion-making Cultural Confrontation & Renewal Recognizing the need for support, the institute affirms the strategy's Christian, evangelistic orientation: (Edited by MJ59) Blackshoes: So what . You still haven't brought anything here that can justify your faith in nothing Nor can you invent a plausible fairytale to make your pseudoscience possible Seriously everything within microbiology denies your faith and belief in abiogenesis and macroevolution! (Edited by Blackshoes) Blackshoes: I have! mountains of information and science facts that clearly refute your faith in nothing! However, you'd need to read it' and we both know that will never happen "I, myself, am convinced that the theory of evolution, especially to the extent to which it's been applied, will be one of the great jokes in the history books of the future. Posterity will marvel that so flimsy and dubious an hypothesis could be accepted with the credulity that it has." Malcom Muggeridge, Pascal Lectures, Ontario Canada, University of Waterloo. (Edited by Blackshoes) MJ59: Well who wants to read a whole pile of cherry picked, mine quoted "facts" taken from actual scientists which are basically a pile of steaming MJ59: How not to argue against a theory: 1. Neither ignorance of, astonishment at, dislike of, nor refusal to accept an existing theory will serve as scientific objections. All such arguments are really about you, not the theory. 2. No scientist claims that he knows everything, or that he has solved all problems; and no theory has been subjected to all possible tests. Therefore, pointing out that that there are things not yet known, tests not yet made, or problems not yet solved, isn’t much of an argument. Such items routinely become the research projects of scientists and PhD candidates; the scientific journals are filled with the results of their research. That’s how science progresses. Unsolved problems are the daily work of science, and no unresolved question, by its mere existence, is a magic bullet that will bring a theory crashing down. A newly-discovered fact may indeed upset an existing theory; but a list of unknowns is inevitable. The unknown does not refute a theory. Theories explain that which is known. 3. It should be obvious that denial of verifiable facts doesn’t score any points; it just costs you credibility. And blindly copying material found at frequently discredited websites — especially their often bogus quotes from alleged experts — is intellectually vacuous and makes you appear ridiculous. 4. A theory is not disproven by pointing out occasional acts of academic misconduct, or even outright fraud. There are about five million scientists worldwide, and a few have disgraced themselves. (Similarly, a religion is not discredited because of the personal flaws of a few clergymen.) A demonstration of fraud could be a successful attack on a theory, but only if the theory can’t survive without the fraudulent material. This would amount to a contradiction of the theory, which is Method One described above. But be careful here; well-supported theories usually don’t collapse because of one faulty data point. 5. Other worthless arguments are attempts to discredit the character of individual scientists, or to quote them on unrelated topics, because such matters are irrelevant to the scientific merits of a theory. Isaac Newton was said to be an unpleasant man, and Einstein was a socialist; but the value of their scientific work is not affected by such irrelevancies. 6. Likewise, quoting opinions of people who aren’t practicing in the field is of little value, because a scientific theory isn’t about opinion — it’s about testable explanations of verifiable data. 7. Claiming that the theory somehow causes undesirable consequences — even if such claims were true — is irrelevant to the validity of the theory. Atomic theory, for example, is not discredited because of the bomb, nor is gravity discredited because someone gets tossed out of a window. 8. Claims that a scientist (like Darwin) renounced his theory are meaningless, even if true — but as with Darwin’s deathbed recantation, such tales are almost always fictitious. Galileo, however, really did renounce the solar system (when threatened with torture), yet the heliocentric solar system theory survives quite handily. A scientific theory can survive even a sincere renunciation by its originator (although no such event is known to have happened), while a religion would probably collapse under similar circumstances. This is because a scientific theory is based on objectively verifiable evidence, not the support of its founder or anyone else. 9. Claiming that your opponent’s religious views aren’t the same as yours is irrelevant in a debate about a scientific theory. Also irrelevant is claiming that you can’t harmonize your religious views with the theory. The subject under discussion is the theory, not your religion, and not your opponent’s religion. Science isn’t opposed to religion; it’s just not about religion. Copyright © 2008. The Sensuous Curmudgeon. All rights reserved. (Edited by MJ59) Blackshoes: I like the wool-cotton blend of socks Notice how a simple question easily defeats the mightest academic minds. Why haven't we seen any macroevolutionary change in either bacteria or insects whatsoever in over 4000 to 6000 years nor within any research whatsoever in the last 80 years? (Edited by Blackshoes) MJ59: Gotta love people who knock science because they say science can’t explain [fill in the blank]. Uh, isn’t that really the point of science, to fill in the blanks? We don’t know how or why something occurs. Science says, lets look and see if we can figure it out. If you go with an intelligent designer, no need to figure anything out. The designer did it, he/she/it must have had a reason, we don’t need to question it. Oh for the good old days when we knew that illness was a punishment from god. You know, before science says they found invisible germs that do it. MJ59: Debating Creationists: The Big Lie Posted on 8-April-2008 | Comments Off on Debating Creationists: The Big Lie WHEN ARGUING WITH CREATIONISTS (including those hiding behind the term Intelligent Design), there is no point in starting out with a discussion of the evidence. It will all be waved away, due to a psychological mechanism known as Morton’s demon. The first thing that must be addressed is the Big Lie that the theory of evolution is a 150 year-old front for atheism, racism, liberalism, sexual perversion, socialism, communism, fascism, Stalin, Hitler, etc. Until the Big Lie is dealt with, no rational discourse is possible. Unfortunately, this may be where your debate bogs down, but that’s okay because it’s where the debate belongs. The Big Lie is the principal source of all the confusion about evolution in the public’s mind. (The leading promoters of creationism and ID probably aren’t confused at all, but they know a good scam when they see it.) If your opponent can be persuaded that evolution isn’t an immense, generations-long scheme for promoting all the world’s evils, then the evidence can often be allowed to speak for itself. But while the creationist believes that he’s engaged in a grand battle of good against evil, there is no hope of any effective communication. In most cases, because your debate opponent begins with the belief that you represent the forces of evil, he is morally compelled to dismiss your evidence. Fossils? They’re either fakes or they’re caused by the Flood, and you’re deliberately misinterpreting them. DNA? That’s how the Designer does things. Besides, you weren’t there, so how do you know? This is silly stuff, and serious debates can’t be conducted with such arguments. There are instances of creationists who have cured themselves when confronted with irrefutable evidence, but experiences like this are rare. Here’s an example of the intellectual journey of a former creationist: The Geologic Column and its Implications for the Flood . It should be noted that such transformations don’t occur as a result of debates. Rather, it takes both serious study and intellectual integrity, not very different from the efforts of those scientists who pioneered the fields of geology and evolution. So don’t expect any instant results from your debating activities. Your purpose should be to present information rebutting the Big Lie to those who are willing to think about it. It’s probably the best that can be done. The scientific evidence will always be there for those who are interested. There are several good, solid rebuttals to the usual Big Lie allegations about a connection between evolution and atheism, communism, Hitler, and all the rest. Perhaps we’ll devote future articles to these. At this time we’ll just offer some general Big Lie rebuttals to get things rolling. Argumentum ad Dawkins: Richard Dawkins is a prominent biologist who is also an outspoken atheist. So what? With professionals in all fields, like math, physics, or astronomy, some will be atheist, some not; some will be socialist, some not; etc. Evolution is no different. It’s a science, and individual scientists can be found on every side of topics where they are not experts, like religion, politics, and economics. But their science needs to be judged on its own merits, not on the personal opinions of individuals in fields outside of their specialty. Similarly, there are clergymen who have exhibited the most appalling personal behavior, but we don’t hold that against theology in general, or claim that religious faith must necessarily lead to such behavior. There’s no there there: If evolution is nothing but a shabby cover story for wickedness, then surely the scientific value of the alternative theory should be busting out all over. But so-called creation science has produced nothing of value in medicine, agriculture, or any other field. Yes, we know — there have been scientists who were creationists. Of course. Before Darwin, just about everyone was a creationist. However, we’re speaking specifically of “creation science.” It’s a scientifically barren doctrine. Outside of the specifics of creationism, a creationist can do good science. We assume a creationist can also be a good architect, dentist, or musician too. But he can’t do anything of scientific value while using the principles of “creation science,” because that “science” produces nothing and never has. Where are all the evil biologists? If evolution were the road to evil, one must wonder how Darwin himself somehow managed to lead such an exemplary life. And where are the headlines screaming: “Another Biology Teacher With 30 Bodies Buried in His Back Yard!” It’s certainly interesting that those who are the most involved with the theory of evolution are the least likely to justify the creationists’ fears. Follow the money: Even if all biologists were in the clutches of evolution’s vile, atheist conspiracy, presumably bribed by their academic paychecks and research grants, there’s no reason for profit-seeking corporations to cripple themselves by sticking with a “fraud” like evolution — not when there’s an allegedly better theory around. The free enterprise system isn’t interested in ideology — only what works. Business executives and their shareholders are results-oriented, and if there’s a legal way to use knowledge to earn profits, they’ll do it. But somehow, despite the incentives to stay ahead of the competition, flood geologists aren’t recruited by the mining or oil industries, creation scientists aren’t hired as researchers for the biotech industry or pharmaceutical firms, and — this is trivial, but true — specialists in Noah’s Ark aren’t in demand by naval architects. Isn’t it amazing that these industries, which are profit-oriented and thus non-ideological, which employ tens of thousands of scientists in the fields of biology, geology, etc., never specifically recruit creationists and don’t waste their time or their shareholders’ money doing “creation science”? Why don’t they offer big salaries to hire the leading ID scientists away from the Discovery Institute? Why don’t they make tempting offers to all the creationists who claim that universities discriminate against them? Why are they avoiding such a rich source of talent? If there were any creationists who were actually doing creation “science” in any industry, or if there were any fruits to be derived from the “science” of creationism, the usual websites would be delighted to point it out. They routinely proclaim that evolution is dead, and creationism is the future, yet they are strangely silent about their failure to penetrate results-oriented industries. Does the “Darwinist” conspiracy control not only academia, but also the hiring and research activities of major corporations? Oil companies too? If so, where are the gutsy little start-ups that have some hot new creationist development to sell? Why don’t venture capitalists bankroll such enterprises? If creation science is such hot stuff, why isn’t there a creationist version of Silicon Valley? Could it be that — gasp! — investments in creationism don’t offer anything of value? We may deal with the rest of the Big Lie, regarding specific arguments about Hitler, Stalin, and the rest in later articles. The foregoing should be enough to get your debate opponent thinking. But as we said earlier, don’t expect any immediate results. These things take time. Blackshoes: 44 Reasons Why Evolution Is Just A Fairy Tale For Adults "The theory of evolution is false. It is simply not true. Actually, it is just a fairy tale for adults based on ancient pagan religious philosophy that hundreds of millions of people around the world choose to believe with blind faith. When asked to produce evidence for the theory of evolution, most adults in the western world come up totally blank. When pressed, most people will mumble something about how “most scientists believe it” and how that is good enough for them. This kind of anti-intellectualism even runs rampant on our college campuses. If you doubt this, just go to a college campus some time and start asking students why they believe in evolution. Very few of them will actually be able to give you any real reasons why they believe it. Most of them just have blind faith in the priest class in our society (“the scientists”). But is what our priest class telling us actually true? When Charles Darwin popularized the theory of evolution, he didn’t actually have any evidence that it was true. And since then the missing evidence has still not materialized. Most Americans would be absolutely shocked to learn that most of what is taught as “truth” about evolution is actually the product of the overactive imaginations of members of the scientific community. They so badly want to believe that it is true that they will go to extraordinary lengths to defend their fairy tale. They keep insisting that the theory of evolution has been “proven” and that it is beyond debate. Meanwhile, most average people are intimidated into accepting the “truth” about evolution because they don’t want to appear to be “stupid” to everyone else. In this day and age, it is imperative that we all learn to think for ourselves. Don’t let me tell you what to think, and don’t let anyone else tell you what to think either. Do your own research and come to your own conclusions. The following are 44 reasons why evolution is just a fairy tale for adults… #1 If the theory of evolution was true, we should have discovered millions upon millions of transitional fossils that show the development of one species into another species. Instead, we have zero. #2 When Charles Darwin came up with his theory, he admitted that no transitional forms had been found at that time, but he believed that huge numbers certainly existed and would eventually be discovered… “Lastly, looking not to any one time, but to all time, if my theory be true, numberless intermediate varieties, linking closely together all the species of the same group, must assuredly have existed. But, as by this theory, innumerable transitional forms must have existed, why do we not find them embedded in countless numbers in the crust of the earth?” #3 Even some of the most famous evolutionists in the world acknowledge the complete absence of transitional fossils in the fossil record. For example, Dr. Colin Patterson, former senior paleontologist of the British Museum of Natural History and author of “Evolution” once wrote the following… “I fully agree with your comments about the lack of direct illustration of evolutionary transitions in my book. If I knew of any, fossil or living, I would certainly have included them …. I will lay it on the line – there is not one such fossil for which one could make a watertight argument.” #4 Stephen Jay Gould, Professor of Geology and Paleontology at Harvard University, once wrote the following about the lack of transitional forms… “The absence of fossil evidence for intermediary stages between major transitions in organic design, indeed our inability, even in our imagination, to construct functional intermediates in many cases, has been a persistent and nagging problem for gradualistic accounts of evolution.” #5 Evolutionist Stephen M. Stanley of Johns Hopkins University has also commented on the stunning lack of transitional forms in the fossil record… “In fact, the fossil record does not convincingly document a single transition from one species to another.” #6 If “evolution” was happening right now, there would be millions of creatures out there with partially developed features and organs. But instead there are none. #7 If the theory of evolution was true, we should not see a sudden explosion of fully formed complex life in the fossil record. Instead, that is precisely what we find. #8 Paleontologist Mark Czarnecki, an evolutionist, once commented on the fact that complex life appears very suddenly in the fossil record… “A major problem in proving the theory has been the fossil record; the imprints of vanished species preserved in the Earth’s geological formations. This record has never revealed traces of Darwin’s hypothetical intermediate variants – instead species appear and disappear abruptly, and this anomaly has fueled the creationist argument that each species was created by God.” #9 The sudden appearance of complex life in the fossil record is so undeniable that even Richard Dawkins has been forced to admit it… “It is as though they [fossils] were just planted there, without any evolutionary history. Needless to say this appearance of sudden planting has delighted creationists. Both schools of thought (Punctuationists and Gradualists) despise so-called scientific creationists equally, and both agree that the major gaps are real, that they are true imperfections in the fossil record. The only alternative explanation of the sudden appearance of so many complex animal types in the Cambrian era is divine creation and both reject this alternative.” #10 Nobody has ever observed macroevolution take place in the laboratory or in nature. In other words, nobody has ever observed one kind of creature turn into another kind of creature. The entire theory of evolution is based on blind faith. #11 Evolutionist Jeffrey Schwartz, a professor of anthropology at the University of Pittsburgh, openly admits that “the formation of a new species, by any mechanism, has never been observed.” #12 Even evolutionist Stephen J. Gould of Harvard University has admitted that the record shows that species do not change. The following is how he put it during a lecture at Hobart & William Smith College… “Every paleontologist knows that most species don’t change. That’s bothersome….brings terrible distress. ….They may get a little bigger or bumpier but they remain the same species and that’s not due to imperfection and gaps but stasis. And yet this remarkable stasis has generally been ignored as no data. If they don’t change, its not evolution so you don’t talk about it.” #13 Anyone that believes that the theory of evolution has “scientific origins” is fooling themselves. It is actually a deeply pagan religious philosophy that can be traced back for thousands of years. #14 Anything that we dig up that is supposedly more than 250,000 years old should have absolutely no radiocarbon in it whatsoever. But instead, we find it in everything that we dig up – even dinosaur bones. This is clear evidence that the “millions of years” theory is simply a bunch of nonsense… It’s long been known that radiocarbon (which should disappear in only a few tens of thousands of years at the most) keeps popping up reliably in samples (like coal, oil, gas, etc.) which are supposed to be ‘millions of years’ old. For instance, CMI has over the years commissioned and funded the radiocarbon testing of a number of wood samples from ‘old’ sites (e.g. with Jurassic fossils, inside Triassic sandstone, burnt by Tertiary basalt) and these were published (by then staff geologist Dr Andrew Snelling) in Creation magazine and Journal of Creation. In each case, with contamination eliminated, the result has been in the thousands of years, i.e. C-14 was present when it ‘shouldn’t have been’. These results encouraged the rest of the RATE team to investigate C-14 further, building on the literature reviews of creationist M.D. Dr Paul Giem. In another very important paper presented at this year’s ICC, scientists from the RATE group summarized the pertinent facts and presented further experimental data. The bottom line is that virtually all biological specimens, no matter how ‘old’ they are supposed to be, show measurable C-14 levels. This effectively limits the age of all buried biota to less than (at most) 250,000 years. #15 The odds of even a single sell “assembling itself” by chance are so low that they aren’t even worth talking about. The following is an excerpt from Jonathan Gray’s book entitled “The Forbidden Secret“… Even the simplest cell you can conceive of would require no less than 100,000 DNA base pairs and a minimum of about 10,000 amino acids, to form the essential protein chain. Not to mention the other things that would also be necessary for the first cell. Bear in mind that every single base pair in the DNA chain has to have the same molecular orientation (“left-hand” or “right hand”)? As well as that, virtually all the amino acids must have the opposite orientation. And every one must be without error. “Now,” explained Larry, “to randomly obtain those correct orientations, do you know your chances? It would be 1 chance in 2110,000, or 1 chance in 1033,113! “To put it another way, if you attempted a trillion, trillion, trillion combinations every second for 15 billion years, the odds you would achieve all the correct orientations would still only be one chance in a trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion … and the trillions would continue 2755 times! “It would be like winning more than 4700 state lotteries in a row with a single ticket purchased for each. In other words…impossible.” #16 How did life learn to reproduce itself? This is a question that evolutionists do not have an answer for. #17 In 2007, fishermen caught a very rare creature known as a Coelacanth. Evolutionists originally told us that this “living fossil” had gone extinct 70 million years ago. It turns out that they were only off by 70 million years. #18 According to evolutionists, the Ancient Greenling Damselfly last showed up in the fossil record about 300 million years ago. But it still exists today. So why hasn’t it evolved at all over the time frame? #19 Darwinists believe that the human brain developed without the assistance of any designer. This is so laughable it is amazing that there are any people out there that still believe this stuff. The truth is that the human brain is amazingly complex. The following is how a PBS documentary described the complexity of the human brain: “It contains over 100 billion cells, each with over 50,000 neuron connections to other brain cells.” #20 The following is how one evolutionist pessimistically assessed the lack of evidence for the evolution of humanity… “Even with DNA sequence data, we have no direct access to the processes of evolution, so objective reconstruction of the vanished past can be achieved only by creative imagination.” #21 Perhaps the most famous fossil in the history of the theory of evolution, “Piltdown Man”, turned out to be a giant hoax. #22 If the neutron were not about 1.001 times the mass of the proton, all protons would have decayed into neutrons or all neutrons would have decayed into protons, and therefore life would not be possible. How can we account for this? #23 If gravity was stronger or weaker by the slimmest of margins, then life sustaining stars like the sun could not exist. This would also make life impossible. How can we account for this? #24 Why did evolutionist Dr. Lyall Watson make the following statement?… “The fossils that decorate our family tree are so scarce that there are still more scientists than specimens. The remarkable fact is that all of the physical evidence we have for human evolution can still be placed, with room to spare, inside a single coffin!” #25 Apes and humans are very different genetically. As DarwinConspiracy.com explains, “the human Y chromosome has twice as many genes as the chimpanzee Y chromosome and the chromosome structures are not at all similar.” #26 How can we explain the creation of new information that is required for one animal to turn into another animal? No evolutionary process has ever been shown to be able to create new biological information. One scientist described the incredible amount of new information that would be required to transform microbes into men this way… “The key issue is the type of change required — to change microbes into men requires changes that increase the genetic information content, from over half a million DNA ‘letters’ of even the ‘simplest’ self-reproducing organism to three billion ‘letters’ (stored in each human cell nucleus).” #27 Evolutionists would have us believe that there are nice, neat fossil layers with older fossils being found in the deepest layers and newer fossils being found in the newest layers. This simply is not true at all… The fossil layers are not found in the ground in the nice neat clean order that evolutionists illustrate them to be in their textbooks. There is not one place on the surface of the earth where you may dig straight down and pass through the fossil layers in the order shown in the textbooks. The neat order of one layer upon another does not exist in nature. The fossil bearing layers are actually found out of order, upside down (backwards according to evolutionary theory), missing (from where evolutionists would expect them to be) or interlaced (“younger” and “older” layers found in repeating sequences). “Out of place” fossils are the rule and not the exception throughout the fossil record. #28 Evolutionists believe that the ancestors of birds developed hollow bones over thousands of generations so that they would eventually be light enough to fly. This makes absolutely no sense and is beyond ridiculous. #29 If dinosaurs really are tens of millions of years old, why have scientists found dinosaur bones with soft tissue still in them? The following is from an NBC News report about one of these discoveries… For more than a century, the study of dinosaurs has been limited to fossilized bones. Now, researchers have recovered 70 million-year-old soft tissue, including what may be blood vessels and cells, from a Tyrannosaurus rex. #30 Which evolved first: blood, the heart, or the blood vessels for the blood to travel through? #31 Which evolved first: the mouth, the stomach, the digestive fluids, or the ability to poop? #32 Which evolved first: the windpipe, the lungs, or the ability of the body to use oxygen? #33 Which evolved first: the bones, ligaments, tendons, blood supply, or the muscles to move the bones? #34 In order for blood to clot, more than 20 complex steps need to successfully be completed. How in the world did that process possibly evolve? #35 DNA is so incredibly complex that it is absolutely absurd to suggest that such a language system could have “evolved” all by itself by accident… When it comes to storing massive amounts of information, nothing comes close to the efficiency of DNA. A single strand of DNA is thousands of times thinner than a strand of human hair. One pinhead of DNA could hold enough information to fill a stack of books stretching from the earth to the moon 500 times. Although DNA is wound into tight coils, your cells can quickly access, copy, and translate the information stored in DNA. DNA even has a built-in proofreader and spell-checker that ensure precise copying. Only about one mistake slips through for every 10 billion nucleotides that are copied. #36 Can you solve the following riddle by Perry Marshall?… 1) DNA is not merely a molecule with a pattern; it is a code, a language, and an information storage mechanism. 2) All codes are created by a conscious mind; there is no natural process known to science that creates coded information. 3) Therefore DNA was designed by a mind. If you can provide an empirical example of a code or language that occurs naturally, you’ve toppled my proof. All you need is one. #37 Evolutionists simply cannot explain why our planet is so perfectly suited to support life. #38 Shells from living snails have been “carbon dated” to be 27,000 years old. #39 If humans have been around for so long, where are all of the bones and all of the graves? The following is an excerpt from an article by Don Batten… Evolutionists also claim there was a ‘Stone Age’ of about 100,000 years when between one million and 10 million people lived on Earth. Fossil evidence shows that people buried their dead, often with artefacts—cremation was not practised until relatively recent times (in evolutionary thinking). If there were just one million people alive during that time, with an average generation time of 25 years, they should have buried 4 billion bodies, and many artefacts. If there were 10 million people, it would mean 40 billion bodies buried in the earth. If the evolutionary timescale were correct, then we would expect the skeletons of the buried bodies to be largely still present after 100,000 years, because many ordinary bones claimed to be much older have been found. However, even if the bodies had disintegrated, lots of artefacts should still be found. #40 Evolutionists claim that just because it looks like we were designed that does not mean that we actually were. They often speak of the “illusion of design”, but that is kind of like saying that it is an “illusion” that a 747 airplane or an Apple iPhone were designed. And of course the human body is far more complex that a 747 or an iPhone. #41 If you want to be part of the “scientific community” today, you must accept the theory of evolution no matter how absurd it may seem to you. Richard Lewontin of Harvard once made the following comment regarding this harsh reality… We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, . . . in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated commitment to materialism. . . . we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counterintuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door. #42 Time Magazine once made the following statement about the lack of evidence for the theory of evolution… “Yet despite more than a century of digging, the fossil record remains maddeningly sparse. With so few clues, even a single bone that doesn’t fit into the picture can upset everything. Virtually every major discovery has put deep cracks in the conventional wisdom and forced scientists to concoct new theories, amid furious debate.” #43 Malcolm Muggeridge, the world famous journalist and philosopher, once made the following statement about the absurdity of the theory of evolution… “I myself am convinced that the theory of evolution, especially the extent to which it’s been applied, will be one of the great jokes in the history books of the future. Posterity will marvel that so very flimsy and dubious an hypothesis could be accepted with the incredible credulity that it has.” #44 In order to believe the theory of evolution, you must have enough blind faith to believe that life just popped into existence from nonlife, and that such life just happened to have the ability to take in the nourishment it needed, to expel waste, and to reproduce itself, all the while having everything it needed to survive in the environment in which it suddenly found itself. Do you have that much blind faith" by Michael Snyder (Edited by Blackshoes) MJ59: Annals of Technology Why the One Appealing Part of Creationism Is Wrong By Lawrence M. Krauss February 17, 2014 Why the One Appealing Part of Creationism Is Wrong Earlier this month, Ken Ham, the founder of the Creation Museum, in Petersburg, Kentucky, held a debate with Bill Nye at the museum. Within the creationist crowd, Ham represents the young-Earth wing, which believes that the planet is around six thousand years old. He also has other extreme interpretations of biblical claims: for example, he believes that the Tyrannosaurus rex and other dinosaurs were actually vegetarians that lived in the Garden of Eden before the fall of Adam and Eve. Ham often stresses a line of argument made within the broader creationist community, which resonates, at least somewhat, with the public at large. “There’s experimental or observational science, as we call it. That’s using the scientific method, observation, measurement, experiment, testing,” he said during the debate. “When we’re talking about origins, we’re talking about the past. We’re talking about our origins. You weren’t there, you can’t observe that…. When you’re talking about the past, we like to call that origins or historical science.” In other words, Ham was saying that there is a fundamental difference between what creationists call the “historical sciences”—areas of study, like astronomy, geology, and evolutionary biology, that give us information about the early Earth and the evolution of life—and other sciences, like physics and chemistry, which appear to be based on experiments done in the laboratory today. On the surface, this does not seem completely unreasonable. There is, after all, a difference between an observation and an experiment. In the laboratory, one can have much better control when attempting to establish cause-and-effect relationships. However, to suggest that somehow this qualitative difference between observation and experiment translates into any sort of deep qualitative difference between the different sciences mentioned above is to demonstrate a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of science itself. In the first place, science doesn’t involve merely telling stories about history. If it did, scientific explanations might not have any claim to a higher level of veracity than religious stories. The stories that science does tell have empirical consequences, and make physical predictions that can be tested. In this sense, all science is historical science. We make observations about past events, based on everything from data gathered in the laboratory yesterday to remnants of phenomena, like meteor impacts or stellar explosions, which may have happened billions of years ago. We then use them to make predictions about the future, about experiments or observations that have not yet taken place. To quibble about how long ago the original data was generated is to miss the point. Predictions about the future, rather than a focus on the past, is what gives science its ultimate explanatory and technological power. Let’s consider some examples. In the field of evolutionary biology, scientists can postulate an evolutionary relationship between species, which suggests the development of some biological characteristic—legs, say, as animals moved from the sea to the land, or eyes, as organisms developed photoreceptors that helped to guide their search for food. One can then search for fossil evidence of such developments, looking for transitional fossils that demonstrate gradual evolution. It is a prediction that such transitional species existed. Given the sparseness of the fossil record, there is no guarantee of unearthing evidence of such species, but, in the cases of legs and eyes, the predictions have been validated by discoveries made over the past decades. Or, take my favorite example: the prediction of a genetic relationship between the great apes and humans via a common ancestor, as taught in many (I wish it were all) introductory biology courses. Humans have twenty-three pairs of chromosomes, where all the great apes have twenty-four pairs. If they have a common ancestor, this difference must be explained. One possibility is that two of the chromosomes in the great apes fused together at some point in the human lineage. But this makes two testable predictions. Each chromosome has a characteristic end, called a telomere, and a distinctive central part, called a centromere. If fusion had occurred, then one of the human chromosomes should, in its central region, include the remnants of the two fused telomeres, lined up end to end. It also should have, at between roughly a quarter and three-quarters of the way along the chromosome, a structure identical to that of the centromeres of the great-ape chromosomes. This prediction, tested in the laboratory today, and not in the distant past, has been beautifully verified. Video From The New Yorker Rome, Closed City Now, think about geology, another bugaboo of the young-Earth creationists. The phenomenon of plate tectonics and continental drift has transformed the field of geology in the past fifty years. When I was young, it was a new theory. But continental drift is measurable today. Moreover, given the measurements and the current shape of continents, one can speculate that, in the distant past, at periods determined by measurements made using modern physics and chemistry, which allow us to model the dynamics of the crust and the mantle of Earth, the currently existing continents were fused together, apparently several times, in a supercontinent. This theory makes predictions, most notably that—like the chromosomes—one will find identical geological structures at the edges of the current continents that were once fused. Guess what has been observed? Finally, let’s consider the particles, called neutrinos, coming from the Sun—one of the great astrophysical observations of the past century. It established directly a fact that is at the basis of stellar astronomy, that the Sun’s power arises from nuclear-fusion reactions at its center. The neutrinos interact so weakly that they make it out of the Sun unimpeded after they are produced. If our ideas about the Sun’s power source are correct, each second of each day, six hundred billion neutrinos are going through each square centimetre of your body, originating from the Sun. The Nobel Prize-winning observation of solar neutrinos—made by Ray Davis and his colleagues over a twenty-year period, starting in the nineteen-sixties—was performed using a mammoth tank of cleaning fluid located deep in a mine in South Dakota. A deep mine was required to shield the detector from all the other cosmic rays that bombard Earth’s surface. Cleaning fluid was a cheap source of chlorine, and calculations suggested that, of the billions and billions of neutrinos going through the detector each day, one, on average, would interact with an atom of chlorine and change it into an atom of argon. So the task was to detect a few atoms of argon in a hundred thousand gallons of cleaning fluid. The experimenters succeeded, and their results have been validated by many other experiments since then. This has established that our detailed model of the Sun—which determines other aspects of its structure measured in independent ways, such as by techniques like seismological observations of the solar surface—is, essentially, correct. But there’s the rub. The model uses the very same physics that we test with the neutrino data, which probes the nature of the very dense core of the Sun where the neutrinos are produced. It also implies, however, that it takes almost a million years for light to get from the center of the Sun, where the energy is generated in the nuclear reactions, to the outside, as it is continually scattered to and fro by the dense material in between, and before it escapes for us to see. Thus, when we feel the warmth of the light from the Sun on a warm day in the summer, we are doing historical science. And, if the Sun were only six thousand years old, it wouldn’t be shining as it is while I sit here and write this in Phoenix. Nor would it be shining in Petersburg Kentucky, on the Creation Museum and Ken Ham. Blackshoes: May I remind you that Ape chromosomes have 2 strands of DNA or 4 depending on whether it's duplicated or undupicated . Note that this DNA is totally different from Human DNA So if human DNA fuzed as you suggest it would be entirely useless for Apes and impossible to be of any benefit. Also, it doesn't matter if the earth is 5 billion years old or ten days old . Abiogenesis is impossible! No creation theory that I know of ',states that continental drift didn't happen? "Cambrian Explosion Disproves Evolution Introduction One of the most remarkable pieces of evidence disproving evolution is the “Cambrian Explosion” Most textbooks never mention it, and the ones that do relegate it to a short phrase or paragraph as if it is some insignificant detail. This phenomenon is so pronounced in the fossil record that Scientific American called it “life’s big bang.” It is considered one of the biggest challenges to evolutionary theory. Many reputable and highly accomplished scientists at major accredited universities worldwide say it is an insurmountable challenge. Moreover, I believe it is proof that evolution is merely a widely held myth of popular culture. Cambrian Explosion “Cambrian explosion” refers to the great quantity and diversity of life found in what is called the Cambrian layer of the geologic column. The Cambrian age in the geologic time scale is dated by scientists as being about 530 million years old. What is really interesting is not just what is found in this layer, but what is found in the layers above it, and what is not found in layers under it. The Cambrian layer has virtually every phyla known to man. Yes, all major body plans and enormous varieties of each all coexist in this layer. No evolutionary sequence here, they are all coexistent simultaneously. Layers Above and Below Remarkably the layers below the Cambrian have practically nothing with regard to fossilized specimens. The few creatures that are found in pre-Cambrian strata are all soft-bodied organisms like worms. So essentially you have nothing along the lines of organic complexity and diversity pre-Cambrian, and then suddenly everything. But wait, it gets even more interesting. To compound this huge problem the number of species fossilized in the layers above the Cambrian period gradually decrease with each successive layer. Once you reach the most recent layers approximately 98% of every thing that has ever lived is extinct. Have you ever heard that 98% of everything that has ever lived is extinct? This is where that saying came from—hard scientific fact. A reasonable and honest person must conclude from the evidence that the fossil record is diametrically opposite what would be predicted by evolutionary theory. It is noteworthy that these conclusions are derived from a geologic time framework that is put forth by scientists own interpretation of geologic evidence. In fact, the belief that the strata represent different geologic ages is just that, a belief. Nevertheless, it is a belief held among scientists world-wide. Darwin Knew Darwin and his contemporaries were aware of this problem with the fossil record some 150 years ago, but they believed that the fossil record had been insufficiently sampled up to that time. Their “belief” was that paleontological research in the future would more adequately sample the fossil record and show it to be more in line with evolutionary theory. They were wrong! Exactly the opposite happened. After a century and half of excavating fossils from the strata we have found the problem to be worse, not better. Contrary to the tree of life depicted in the school books, the fossil record depicts exactly the opposite story. The tree of life is an inverted cone, and not a tree at all. No Correlation Remember, evolutionary theory states that everything evolved from a common ancestor that climbed out of the primordial soup. This ancient ancestor gradually evolved. Its evolutionary progress branched out into different paths and these different paths led to the creation of increasingly complex and divergent organic forms. The paths continued to branch out resulting in the great diversity of life we have today. Now, if this is true, what would you expect to see in the fossil record? Of course you would expect to see simple organisms in the lowest layers and a gradual increase in diversity and complexity of life as you progress to more recent layers in the geologic time scale. But what do we really find in the fossil record? We find the exact opposite. Not something ambiguous like everything found in each layer. No, you find the exact opposite of what is predicted by evolution. From a correlation perspective you do not find a factor of 1, meaning perfect correlation, or a 0, meaning no correlation, you find a -1, meaning perfectly uncorrelated to the prediction. Now I don’t know about you, but I find this compelling proof that evolution did not happen. This begs the question, how much proof do evolutionary scientists need anyway? Belief In Spite of Evidence You must be saying to yourself at this point, “How could that be? How could they speak about this theory with such surety with such strong evidence to the contrary?” The answer is simple. They believe the theory in spite of the evidence. That is why many leading creation scientists keep referring to evolution as a philosophy of science or even a religion. This belief is so strong in academic circles that scientists are chided if they even question evolution publicly. Why are they ridiculed? They are ridiculed because the only alternative to evolution is creation. Some like to pretend there are a variety of options in explaining origins. This is simply not so. The options often presented are merely shades of the two primary options, and scientists know this. Conclusion If evolution did not take place, if the natural forces at work today did not create the diversity of life we see on our little blue world, then something supernatural must be responsible. True science seeks to understand, no matter what the philosophical or metaphysical ramifications may be. That is why evolution is not science, but rather a philosophy, for it seeks to explain things within only one possible framework, whether or not this framework is true. The facts are that the scientists' own interpretation of the fossil record clearly demonstrates that every species appeared at once suddenly and then gradually died off with the passage of time. The significance of this great body of evidence against evolutionary theory in the fossil record cannot be stressed enough. It is utterly devastating to evolutionary theory completely by itself. But in the final analysis, it is but one of a plethora of scientific facts that refute the 19th century fable that is evolution. In closing I would like to share with you some of my favorite quotes on the subject by leading evolutionary scientists, and even Darwin himself. By their own words they admit this very important piece of the evolutionary puzzle does not fit, and never will. Enjoy. “There is another and allied difficulty, which is much more serious. I allude to the manner in which species belonging to several of the main divisions of the animal kingdom suddenly appear in the lowest known fossiliferous rocks.” (Darwin, The Origin of Species, p. 348), “The abrupt manner in which whole groups of species suddenly appear in certain formations, has been urged by several palaeontologists—for instance, by Agassiz, Pictet, and Sedgwick—as a fatal objection to the belief in the transmutation of species. If numerous species, belonging to the same genera or families, have really started into life at once, the fact would be fatal to the theory of evolution through natural selection.” (Ibid., p. 344), “To the question why we do not find rich fossiliferous deposits belonging to these assumed earliest periods prior to the Cambrian system, I can give no satisfactory answer.” (Ibid., p. 350), “The case at present must remain inexplicable, and may be truly urged as a valid argument against the views here entertained.” (Ibid., p. 351), “The most famous such burst, the Cambrian explosion, marks the inception of modern multicellular life. Within just a few million years, nearly every major kind of animal anatomy appears in the fossil record for the first time ... The Precambrian record is now sufficiently good that the old rationale about undiscovered sequences of smoothly transitional forms will no longer wash.” (Stephen Jay Gould, “An Asteroid to Die For,” Discover, October 1989, p. 65), “And we find many of them [Cambrian fossils] already in an advanced state of evolution, the very first time they appear. It is as though they were just planted there, without any evolutionary history. Needless to say, this appearance of sudden planting has delighted creationists.” (Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker London: W.W. Norton & Company, 1987, p. 229), “One of the major unsolved problems of geology and evolution is the occurrence of diversified, multicellular marine invertebrates in Lower Cambrian rocks on all the continents and their absence in rocks of greater age.” (I. Axelrod, “Early Cambrian Marine Fauna,” Science, Vol. 128, 4 July 1958, p. 7), “Evolutionary biology’s deepest paradox concerns this strange discontinuity. Why haven’t new animal body plans continued to crawl out of the evolutionary cauldron during the past hundreds of millions of years? Why are the ancient body plans so stable?” (Jeffrey S. Levinton, “The Big Bang of Animal Evolution,” Scientific American, Vol. 267, November 1992, p. 84), “Granted an evolutionary origin of the main groups of animals, and not an act of special creation, the absence of any record whatsoever of a single member of any of the phyla in the Pre-Cambrian rocks remains as inexplicable on orthodox grounds as it was to Darwin.” (T. Neville George Professor of Geology at the University of Glasgow, “Fossils in Evolutionary Perspective,” Science Progress, Vol. 48, No. 189, January 1960, p. 5).' Will Hoyt http://www.learnthebible.org/cambrian-explosion-disproves-evolution.html (Edited by Blackshoes) MJ59: Creationism isn’t about science, it’s about theology (and it’s really bad theology) Eric Sundrup, S.J. January 30, 2018 (iStock photo) The Creation Museum is a $27 million example of how Christians can lose their way fighting the culture wars. After spending time there this Christmas, I left convinced that as wrong as the museum’s science is, the most frightening driver of its “logic” is an impoverished theology, which is coupled with a desire to win moral arguments. This toxic combination propels devout people into strange and unnecessary battles with modern science. I did not visit the Creation Museum, and the offices of its parent organization Answers in Genesis, to have scientific arguments. The pseudo-science behind the beautiful exhibits (Eden is lovely, full of lush greenery and gentle vegetarian dinosaurs) has been sufficiently refuted by more qualified experts. But those refutations hold little sway over the almost half a million yearly visitors. So I spent most of my visit struggling to understand the purpose behind the museum, and also the reasons why so many people find its teachings compelling. Creationist engagement with science is a consequence of attempting to read Genesis literally. Scientific knowledge is not the source of their literalism. For this reason, scientific debates like those between Bill Nye and Ken Ham, the founder of the Creation Museum, are a waste of time. The museum isn’t here for scientific reasons, even though it presents itself that way. The question we need to ask is: What beliefs are creationists trying to uphold with science? When I visited the museum, Mark Looy, the chief operating officer and vice president of outreach, altered his busy schedule to meet with me on short notice. The place is welcoming, and the staff was extremely kind and hospitable. Mr. Looy explained that, for the purpose of getting the word out, they encourage even their most skeptical critics to visit and see the place for themselves. What beliefs are creationists trying to uphold with science? Mr. Looy noted that from his perspective natural selection is wasteful and thus cannot be true. He described his realization that “[evolution] went totally against God’s nature…. Evolution is a story of the struggle of the survival of animals…‘nature, red with blood and tooth and claw.’ It didn’t make any sense from that philosophical and logical point of view.” This concern about evolution and what it implies about God reveals that creationism’s core motivation is not science, but questions about evil, pain and suffering. Can a loving God use a process of death and competition to create life in all its awe-inspiring diversity? Can the biblical tradition give us insight? How and why can we trust that tradition if the narratives in the Book of Genesis do not match up with scientific facts? These are great theological questions, but they are not scientific ones. The Creation Museum has a serious theological problem that needs theological scrutiny. In addition to the theological problems, the Creation Museum also has a moral viewpoint that warrants an honest moral debate. Answers in Genesis has a particular vision of society and what it means to be a virtuous and upright Christian person that it wants to protect. RELATED STORIES Mocking religion is not a requirement for scientific literacy Adam D. Hincks New planetary discoveries renew questions about extraterrestrial life Adam D. Hincks In my journey through the museum, I passed through a series of dark rooms with eerie red lighting. One room was covered with news clippings describing mass shootings and terrorist attacks; in an adjacent space, videos showed painful conversations among young people about abortion, teen pregnancy and pornography. The mood was dark and the implication was clear: when our society abandons Scripture, we get hopelessness and pain. These dark rooms lead into another space filled with bright light, where a soothing voice slowly read the opening verses of Genesis. Dr. Nathaniel Jeanson, a research biologist who works on the Answers in Genesis staff, told me that during arguments about culture war issues like divorce, same-sex marriage or abortion, “at some point people are going to say, ‘Why? Why is this right or wrong?’: He explained, referring to Ken Ham, “His point has been primarily to Protestant churches, saying ‘Hey, biblically all of these issues are grounded in Genesis.’” Mr. Ham’s motivations for founding the museum and its parent organization clearly grew out of the culture wars. Answers in Genesis argues for the inerrancy of the Bible and specifically for a literal interpretation of Genesis because they think this provides them a strong footing in public discussions. And that, I think, is exactly how this group of Christians got lost. They are trying to win moral and theological debates with what look like scientific arguments. Strangely, in their attempt to provide definitive empirical answers to moral and theological questions, creationists like Mr. Ham have more in common with some of their most strident scientific opponents than with the broader Christian tradition. They are proponents of the strictest form of biblical inerrancy and literalism. And in this mode they are actually advancing a mirror-image of scientism, in which God’s revelation, both in Scripture and in creation, is meant to convey a list of facts. Places like the Creation Museum make any appeal to the biblical tradition seem foolish. But for the broader Christian tradition, God’s revelation is compatible with scientific inquiry even as it explores realities and questions that are beyond the realm of science. Pretending that scientific answers will solve theological questions gives in to the proponents of scientism, who treat science as the sole arbiter of meaning and truth, instead of one avenue of human understanding alongside others, like theology or ethics. Ultimately, creationism starts with a failure of faith, not of scientific rationality. Literal interpretations of the Book of Genesis buttressed by pseudoscience weakens the standing of Christian conceptions of the human person in our public discourse. Places like the Creation Museum make any appeal to the biblical tradition seem foolish, which presents a greater danger to the public understanding of faith and morality than it does to our understanding of science. The Creation Museum’s scientific questions are not serious enough to require careful debunking, but the theological and moral goals that inspire their mission are—and they deserve a thorough and charitable refutation on those grounds. | Science Chat Room 3 People Chatting Similar Conversations |