Thursday, March 24, 2005
Tyrannosaur morsels
Look! A scrap of soft tissue extracted from dinosaur bone:
Demineralized fragments of endosteally derived tissues lining the marrow cavity of the T. rex femur. The demineralized fragment is flexible and resilient and, when stretched (arrow), returns to its original shape.
Dr GH has already promised to describe this new find in more detail on The Panda's Thumb, so I'm going to be very brief—keep an eye on The Thumb for more.
Anyway, it has been reported in Science this week that well-preserved soft tissues have been found deep within the bones of a T. rex, and also within some hadrosaur fossils. This is amazing stuff; fine structure has been known to be preserved to this level of detail before, but these specimens also show signs of retaining at least some of their organic composition. What the authors have done is to carefully dissolve away the mineral matrix of the bone, exposing delicate and still flexible scraps of tissue inside.
Here, for example, is a piece of endothelial tissue, or the tubelike epithelia that line blood vessels and form capillaries. It is compared to a similarly prepared piece from fresh ostrich bone; you can tell the T. rex fragment has undergone some changes, but it's comparable in size and organization to the bird sample.
(I) T. rex vessel fragment showing detail of branching pattern and structures morphologically consistent with endothelial cell nuclei (arrows) in vessel wall. (J) Ostrich blood vessel liberated from demineralized bone after treatment with collagenase shows branching pattern and clearly visible endothelial nuclei.
Looking more closely with a scanning electron microscope, here's a similar piece of T. rex blood vessel that has ruptured, spilling out its contents. Maybe those cells don't look perfectly preserved, but they're darned close.
Exploded T. rex vessel showing small round microstructures partially embedded in internal vessel walls.
And lastly, here's a closeup of the surface of that epithelia, compared with an ostrich epithelium. The cells here are very, very flat, and the nuclei are the thickest part, bulging up and giving the surface a pebbled appearance. The T. rex epithelium has a similar pebbly look, suggesting that just maybe there is even some subcellular structure preserved.
(E) Higher magnification of a portion of T. rex vessel wall, showing hypothesized endothelial nuclei (EN). (F) Similar structures visible on fixed ostrich vessel. Striations are seen in both (E) and (F) that may represent endothelial cell junctions or alternatively may be artifacts of the fixation/dehydration process.
How could this be? Here's the authors' explanation.
…we demonstrate the retention of pliable soft-tissue blood vessels with contents that are capable of being liberated from the bone matrix, while still retaining their flexibility, resilience, original hollow nature, and three-dimensionality. Additionally, we can isolate three-dimensional osteocytes with internal cellular contents and intact, supple filipodia that float freely in solution. This T. rex also contains flexible and fibrillar bone matrices that retain elasticity. The unusual preservation of the originally organic matrix may be due in part to the dense mineralization of dinosaur bone, because a certain portion of the organic matrix within extant bone is intracrystalline and therefore extremely resistant to degradation. These factors, combined with as yet undetermined geochemical and environmental factors, presumably also contribute to the preservation of soft-tissue vessels. Because they have not been embedded or subjected to other chemical treatments, the cells and vessels are capable of being analyzed further for the persistence of molecular or other chemical information.
So, basically, these cells were entombed in a thick mineral sarcophagus, protected from bacteria and other external insults. There have to have been other factors at play—cells are full of enzymes that trigger a very thorough self-destruct sequence at death—so I'm definitely looking forward to the molecular analysis. Even if their form was preserved, I expect these cells to be denatured monomer soup on the inside.
Schweitzer MH, Wittmeyer JL, Horner JR, Toporski JK (2005) Soft-Tissue Vessels and Cellular Preservation in Tyrannosaurus rex. Science 307(5717):1952-1955.
Comments:
Well, as soon as I saw the headline on Yahoo I "ran" over here to get the real details. Several (dozen) clicks of the refresh button later, and I have my fix. Thanks, PZ!
So what's the big deal? By definition this can be no older than 4004 BC. Probably Satan made it look older to challenge our faith.
Or I could, seriously, find this a really exciting, very revealing and utterly fascinating bit of evidence that we are learning how to analyze bits of the past we've learned to examine, and explain.
No, on the other hand, thinking is hard. I say this can only be explained by Satan.
Somebody was actually given 1/4 of a page to explain this in a a local paper. Since it's owned by a large, nationwide syndicate, we know it has to be true.
I'm hoping this is all good, but I can't help but recall what happened the last time with Schweitzer and Horner's "rex blood" (http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/dinosaur/blood.html)
I'm gonna hang on for more info before I get my hopes too high.
Dinosaur cells? Deadly theme park islands ahead!
N.Y. Times has an article online which will be appearing on Page One tomorrow. From the article:
Dr. Schweitzer and other scientists not connected with the research cautioned that further analysis of the specimens was required before they could be sure the tissues had indeed survived unaltered. They said the extraction of DNA for studies of dinosaur genetics and cloning experiments was only a long shot.
But in a separate article in Science, Dr. Lawrence Witmer, a paleontologist at Ohio University, who had no part in the research, said: "If we have tissues that are not fossilized, then we can potentially extract DNA. It's very exciting."
If the tissues are as well preserved as they seem, the scientists held out some hope of recovering intact proteins, which are less fragile and more abundant DNA. Proteins might provide clues to the evolutionary relationship of dinosaurs to other animals and possibly help solve the puzzle of dinosaur physiology: whether, as argued, dinosaurs were unlike other reptiles in being warm-blooded.
"If we can isolate certain proteins, we can address the issue of the physiology of dinosaurs," Dr. Schweitzer said.
What is this? Extra fortified freakin' cool science day?
Not that I'm complaining, mind you.
"Deadly theme park islands ahead!"
Ted Turner should give up his bison-meat restaurant chain, and start working on a ritzy chain serving vat-grown hadrosaur steaks.
Maybe it'd be easier to grow big hunks of meat, than it would be to grow functional organisms.
Also, they'd have more room for fudging. If it came down to it, they could put some hadrosaur DNA into alligator or ostrich eggs, and work from there. They'd just need to be able to grow slabs of meat, so it wouldn't matter if the result was effectively 99.99% ostrich meat. There'd be dinosaur in the mix, which would be enough for marketing purposes.
This is all assuming that they could obtain DNA, which is probably unlikely. But then, obtaining soft tissue at all was also unlikely.
Holy...freakin'...cow.
I had no idea this kind of preservation was possible. Even if there's not much more we're able to learn from this, I'll never be able to look at fossils the same way.
I suppose I should have known at least a little better, but I'm used to thinking of fossils as rocks that tell us wonderful tales of what once existed but that are, in and of themselves, barely worth calling "bones." Now I find they can be on the opposite end of the spectrum...almost like mummies. Suddenly I'm no longer holding a rock, but a genuine piece of some incredible animal millions of years gone.
To quote Syndrome: "I'm still geeking out about it."
It could be done. But who wants to eat ostrich meat? Or lizard steak? I see more of a market in the entertainment / biblical parks industry. Dinosaurs may have no resistance to bird diseases, chicken flu may extinguish them again.
I'm so glad I wasn't the first to wonder what T. rex taste like.
If it doesn't taste like chicken, does that mean birds aren't really dinosaurs?
"It could be done. But who wants to eat ostrich meat?"
Ostrich isn't bad, actually. Does *not* taste like chicken. There was a recent damp-squib boomlet in ostrich farming a few years back, because people thought it'd become a popular, healthier alternative to beef.
I'm sure there are exotic meat outlets online where you can buy alligator meat. Never tried that.
Clones! Clooooones!
I know. Sorry. I just couldn't help myself.
I don't know about alligator, but I had crocodile once, and I imagine they'd be similar. It was sort of like pork chops.
Alligator isn't far off of pork either. It's the other other other white meat.
I found alligator to be too chewy. I can imagine it surviving intact for 65 my, even unfossilized.
You're not supposed to eat the skin, Harry.
Good, no can somebody please nail down Michael Crichton?
So what's the big deal? By definition this can be no older than 4004 BC. Probably Satan made it look older to challenge our faith.
I'm glad I wasn't the only one who immediately thought that. YECs may be out to destroy science as we know it, but they're doing wonders for my sense of irony.
P.Z.
Do you have any images of the analogous structures from reptiles for further comparison?
So what are the creationists saying about this? I remember seeing news in recent years about the fossilisation of ancient soft tissue - dinosaur eggs, I recall, but not even semi-preservation of the tissues themselves. But, then, I'm an ex-physicist, so what do I know? I don't regard it as axiomatic that tissues can't be semi-preserved for a long, long, time - dried-out ancient bacteria seem to be discovered all the time these days - but it is amazing. Why didn't bacteria eat the tissue before fossilisation set in, or even afterwards? Is this really a first? Don't fossil collectors section some fossil bones as a matter of routine?
Certainly, there's some interesting scientific work ahead.
There are interesting comments and some speculation from a UK 'ancient bio-molecule' specialist about this matter on the BBC's web page reporting it - see http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4379577.stm. (Is there markup available here to make that a clickable link?)
Does anyone know if the tissue work can definitively address the issue of dinosaurs being warm- or cold-blooded?
Great stuff. You realize, of course, that I study vascular endothelial cells in my lab, because I'm interested in tumor angiogenesis. This gives me an idea for a grant proposal:
Dinosaur angiogenesis, anyone?
It would be interesting to see if the blood cells are nucleated.
JM, I'm sure the basic creationist response will be "See! It's UTTERLY IMPOSSIBLE for soft tissue to survive in any form for millions of years! CLEARLY this is consistent with what we see in 4000 year old specimens. Evolution has now been undeniably disproven!"
Orac, in the justification, you'll have to promise to cure dinosaurian cancer.
And I know creationists are going to be jumping all over this in their usual clueless, dumb-as-a-stick fashion. Rather than looking for a reasonable explanation for this observation within local phenomena, they'd rather use it as an excuse to throw out all of physics and geology.
PZ,
Of course. Why else would one want to study dinosaurian angiogenesis...
There's certainly hope that more than monomers remain. "Spongy organic material" likely means proteins have survived. It's going to take some kickass biochemistry to pull them out and determine the original amino acids sequence, true, but damn, what a goal!!
Boy, are you guys slow. AIG almost scooped you on this one:
http://www.answersingenesis.org/docs2005/0325Dino_tissue.asp
So will this new evidence cause anyone to stand up and say there’s something funny about the emperor’s clothes? Not likely. Instead, it will almost certainly become an “accepted” phenomenon that even “stretchy” soft tissues must be somehow capable of surviving for millions of years. (Because, after all, we “know” that this specimen is “70 million years old”.) See how it works?
Schweitzer’s mentor, the famous “Dinosaur Jack” Horner (upon whom Sam Neill’s lead character in the Jurassic Park movies was modeled) is already urging museums to consider cracking open some of the bones in their existing dinosaur fossils in the hope of finding more such “Squishosaurus” remains. He is excited about the potential to learn more about dinosaurs, of course. But—nothing about questioning the millions of years—sigh!
I invite the reader to step back and contemplate the obvious. This discovery gives immensely powerful support to the proposition that dinosaur fossils are not millions of years old at all, but were mostly fossilized under catastrophic conditions a few thousand years ago at most.
Foucault
Why do you wonder what creationists will think of it? Because you know deep down that this particular bit of evidence fits their model better than the long ages of evolution.
But instead of making up ridiculous parodies of creationists' responses, see what they really say at http://www.answersingenesis.org/docs2005/0325Dino_tissue.asp
My prediction is fulfilled. Rather than trying to understand the mechanism of preservation, the creationists propose invalidating physics in order to make excuses for their ridiculous 6000 year old earth dogma.
PZMyers wrote:
My prediction is fulfilled. Rather than trying to understand the mechanism of preservation, the creationists propose invalidating physics in order to make excuses for their ridiculous 6000 year old earth dogma.
The same sort of criticism can be levelled at the evolutionsts, as the AiG article did (my bolding):
Unfortunately, the long-age paradigm is so dominant that facts alone will not readily overturn it. As philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn pointed out, what generally happens when a discovery contradicts a paradigm is that the paradigm is not discarded but modified, usually by making secondary assumptions, to accommodate the new evidence.What physics have supposedly been invalidated by the creationists? I presume you are referring to radiometric dating, but can you show where creationists propose invalidating physics to question the date? I reckon you can't.
That’s just what appears to have happened in this case. When Schweitzer first found what appeared to be blood cells in a T. Rex specimen, she said, “It was exactly like looking at a slice of modern bone. But, of course, I couldn’t believe it. I said to the lab technician: “The bones, after all, are 65 million years old. How could blood cells survive that long?’” Notice that her first reaction was to question the evidence, not the paradigm. That is in a way quite understandable and human, and is how science works in reality (though when creationists do that, it’s caricatured as non-scientific).
So will this new evidence cause anyone to stand up and say there’s something funny about the emperor’s clothes? Not likely. Instead, it will almost certainly become an “accepted” phenomenon that even “stretchy” soft tissues must be somehow capable of surviving for millions of years. (Because, after all, we “know” that this specimen is “70 million years old”.) See how it works?
We always question the evidence. That's no surprise.
The determination that the earth is 4.5 billion years old is the work of physicists and geologists, not biologists. Anyone who wants to claim it is only 6000 years old had better be prepared to address the issues their ludicrous claims raise in those disciplines.
Unfortunately, the long-age paradigm is so dominant that facts alone will not readily overturn it.
The age of the Earth is a measurement, not a "doctrine" or a "paradigm". Anyone who claims otherwise will have to show why the physicists can't do the measuerments they've shown they can do.
But instead of making up ridiculous parodies of creationists' responses...
Parodies of creationists = coals to Newcastle. In the arena of ridiculousness, we are but the rankest of amateurs compared to them.
I presume you are referring to radiometric dating, but can you show where creationists propose invalidating physics to question the date? I reckon you can't.
It's easy when you realise that the figure of 6000 years is totally arbitrary. It's arrived at by summing the approximate ages of Biblical characters. Why not base the figure on the number of times Allah is mentioned in the Koran, or the number of e's in Through The Looking Glass? Why not just claim that the universe is 30 years old, and the rest is a Matrix style illusion? Skyhooks, my friend.
I may have missed someone else mentioning it, but this discovery was pure serendipity, and I'm not referring to finding the bone. It seems, at least according to the artiicle I read, that the bone was too big to fit into the truck to carry it back to their camp, so they broke it in two. Only then did they discover that it contained soft tissue. I can now see every paleontologist in the world with a collection of fossil dinosaur bones cracking them open one by one like some predator looking for a meal of marrow in his/her quest for a major discovery.
PZ Myers wrote:
We always question the evidence. That's no surprise.You missed the rest of the sentence: "[but] not the paradigm".
PZ Myers wrote:
Anyone who wants to claim it is only 6000 years old had better be prepared to address the issues their ... claims raise in those disciplines.They do.
And I notice that you ignored my challenge to back up the claims you made.
euan wrote:
The age of the Earth is a measurement, not a "doctrine" or a "paradigm".You cannot measure age. You measure isotopes and determine an age from that, based on several assumptions, including assumptions that deny the Biblical record. That puts it in the category of a doctrine.
Neil wrote:
Parodies of creationists = coals to Newcastle. In the arena of ridiculousness, we are but the rankest of amateurs compared to them.More bluster, no substance.
I wrote:
I presume you are referring to radiometric dating, but can you show where creationists propose invalidating physics to question the date? I reckon you can't.Ben responded:
It's easy ...So why didn't you do it, instead of raising a new issue? Perhaps it's not so easy after all?
Ben continued:
...when you realise that the figure of 6000 years is totally arbitrary. It's arrived at by summing the approximate ages of Biblical characters.Incorrect. It is derived by adding the ages of Biblical characters when they had their offspring. And that makes perfect mathematical sense. What is "arbitrary" about adding up consecutive periods of time to derive a total period of time? Whereas your alternatives are arbitrary, as they have nothing to do with adding consecutive periods of time.
Incorrect. It is derived by adding the ages of Biblical characters when they had their offspring. And that makes perfect mathematical sense. What is "arbitrary" about adding up consecutive periods of time to derive a total period of time?
Because you're not taking into account the fact that the source you're using to formulate the figure has ever been proven to be anything more than a popular work of fiction. Is the Bible any more credible a source than a random work by Lewis Carroll because it covers a greater time period? Nope, they're both equally pertinant to the issue of calculating the age of the universe: not at all.
The age of the Earth is a measurement, not a "doctrine" or a "paradigm".
You cannot measure age. You measure isotopes and determine an age from that, based on several assumptions,
Any constant-rate process produces an age, and nuclear decays are measured as constant rate processes.
including assumptions that deny the Biblical record. That puts it in the category of a doctrine.
Now who's blustering, Mr Hypocrite?
I think he's asserting that spurious and arbitrary data can be transmogrified into reasonable and accurate results as long as the method of analysis is sound. More skyhooks.
Ben wrote:
Because you're not taking into account the fact that the source you're using to formulate the figure has ever been proven to be anything more than a popular work of fiction.The accuracy or otherwise of the Bible (which has been shown in many parts many times over) is a separate issue than the arbitrariness or otherwise of totalling time periods. Does switching arguments an acknowledgement that the argument of it being arbitrary holds no water?
euan wrote:
Any constant-rate process produces an age, and nuclear decays are measured as constant rate processes.No, a constant-rate process produces the daughter product of the process. I already indicated that the process can be measured, but as I said, deriving an age from that depends on a number of assumptions. This is clear from the fact that derived ages don't always agree, and in these cases the different ages are often harmonised by modifying some of those assumptions.
Additionally, the methods have often been shown to be wrong on rocks of a known age, so why should they be trusted on rocks of an unknown age?
euan also wrote:
Now who's blustering, Mr Hypocrite?Name-calling now? And how is what I said "bluster"?
I garbled a sentence of mine in the previous post. It should have read: "Is switching arguments an acknowledgement that the claim of it being arbitrary holds no water?"
The accuracy or otherwise of the Bible (which has been shown in many parts many times over) is a separate issue than the arbitrariness or otherwise of totalling time periods.
Are you insane? The accuracy of the source is the FOUNDATION of whether or not data, and hence the arguments, are arbitrary. Explain to me how using the aforementioned method of analysis on the ages of Biblical characters has any bearing on the age of the universe, and I'll show you how the number of replies in this thread has any bearing on the dimensions of my bedroom.
Ben kindly asked:
Are you insane?No.
Ben wrote:
The accuracy of the source is the FOUNDATION of whether or not data, and hence the arguments, are arbitrary. Explain to me how using the aforementioned method of analysis on the ages of Biblical characters has any bearing on the age of the universe, and I'll show you how the number of replies in this thread has any bearing on the dimensions of my bedroom.If you use a correct method on bad data, you will get a bad result. But that doesn't therefore mean that it was not a correct method to use if the data was correct. Adding up the numbers of years since birth until the next measured offspring of a series of generations that claim to begin at the beginning of creation is therefore a valid—and therefore not "arbitrary"—method of calculating the age of the Earth and will therefore give a correct result if the ages are correct and do begin with creation. I know that you disagree with the last point, but that is a separate issue to whether or not the method itself is arbitrary.
I will be interested to see your explanation of how the number of replies in this thread are related to the dimensions of your bedroom, considering that the number of replies in this thread keeps changing. You must have an interesting bedroom!
Adding up the numbers of years since birth until the next measured offspring of a series of generations that claim to begin at the beginning of creation is therefore a valid—and therefore not "arbitrary"—method of calculating the age of the Earth and will therefore give a correct result if the ages are correct and do begin with creation.
Creation is an assumption. The correctness of Biblical ages is an assumption. The relevance of anything Biblical to the issue of the age of the Earth is an assumption. Any data or arguments extrapolated from these sources is arbitrary. The METHOD isn't arbitrary (I never said it was), but the DATA and the RESULTS are. As I said, you seem to be asserting that spurious and arbitrary data can be transmogrified into reasonable and accurate results as long as the method of analysis is sound. You'll need to do a better job of explaining how this is logically possible, or else your argument remains nonsensical.
No, a constant-rate process produces the daughter product of the process. I already indicated that the process can be measured, but as I said, deriving an age from that depends on a number of assumptions.
That the time of day can be derived fom counting the ticks of a clock is deriving an age from a constant rate process. That this doesn't apply to rocks is simply special pleading
This is clear from the fact that derived ages don't always agree, and in these cases the different ages are often harmonised by modifying some of those assumptions.
Really? Where is this happening? Which rocks? Which assumptions? By being vague about this you are not arguing with facts but with the bluster you deride in other people.
Additionally, the methods have often been shown to be wrong on rocks of a known age, so why should they be trusted on rocks of an unknown age?
Often? Can you produce many such an examples, or is this just you and AIG making shit up?
Name-calling now? And how is what I said "bluster"?
Because you offered no proof, only your own egotistic certainty.
Ben wrote:
Creation is an assumption. The correctness of Biblical ages is an assumption. The relevance of anything Biblical to the issue of the age of the Earth is an assumption.Both sides have assumptions. But at least creationists acknowledge theirs.
Ben wrote:
Any data or arguments extrapolated from these sources is arbitrary. The METHOD isn't arbitrary (I never said it was), but the DATA and the RESULTS are. As I said, you seem to be asserting that spurious and arbitrary data can be transmogrified into reasonable and accurate results as long as the method of analysis is sound.You indicated that the result was arbitrary because of the choice of method. That amounts to the same thing. How can you claim that I argue that "spurious and arbitrary data can be transmogrified into reasonable and accurate results as long as the method of analysis is sound" when I specifically said that the accuracy of the results depended on the accuracy of the data?
euan wrote:
That the time of day can be derived fom counting the ticks of a clock is deriving an age from a constant rate process. That this doesn't apply to rocks is simply special pleadingNice analogy! So you've never known a clock to be wrong?
euan wrote:
Really? Where is this happening? Which rocks? Which assumptions? By being vague about this you are not arguing with facts but with the bluster you deride in other people.Not putting all the details in one post is not the same as throwing insults as a defence of an argument.
For starters, consider any of the arguments made to explain away evidence of wrong dates that creationists put forward. For example, from Talk.Origins:
Other factors can produce false isochrons (Stassen 1998; Zheng 1989). For example:
* Protracted fractionation. This requires slow cooling (over millions of years) and produces only a small error.
* Inherited ages as from partial melting. The age given by this method is the age of the source material. Furthermore, this factor requires unusual conditions and usually produces scatter in the isochron plot.
* Metamorphosism. This produces apparent ages younger than the age of the source material.
In other words, there are proposed to be various factors that need to be taken into account before the derived ages can be accepted. You do not simply measure an age. You measure isotope ratios and make a calculation based on what is believed to be the initial quantities, the likelihood of material leaching out or washing in, the likelihood of inclusions of other materials that affect the result, the likelihood of decay rates remaining constant over millions or billions of years, etc. etc. These factors are not directly measurable, as they are past events, so they remain assumptions, reasonable or otherwise. How reasonable are those factors? That depends on your paradigm—uniformitarianism or creationism.
euan wrote:
Often? Can you produce many such an examples, or is this just you and AIG making [deleted] up?The examples I would quote are ones from AiG as detailed in various articles here. No, I'm not making them up, and neither is AiG. Most if not all the dates they quote are calculated by secular laboratories; they are not "made up". Do you have any hard evidence for your insinuation of fraud?
Good night; it's time for me to go to bed.
"Nice analogy! So you've never known a clock to be wrong?"
I once saw a clock that stopped at 12:04:02 AM. Therefore, the evidence that the day is 24 hours long is inconsistent, and it may in fact be only four minutes long.
Four minutes and two seconds. This is SCIENCE, so accuracy counts.
Both sides have assumptions.
Alright, let's hear 'em. I'm in a patient mood.
You indicated that the result was arbitrary because of the choice of method.
Um, I've said about four fucking times now that the results are arbitrary because the source (ie, the data) is assumed to have anything to do with the issue, in this case the cast of Biblical characters with the age of the planet. Would you like me to say it a fifth time? Fuck it, I'll just copy/paste what I originally wrote.
<style illusion? Skyhooks, my friend.</blockquote>
I'm glad that you realise that the accuracy of the data is important. Now explain how you can tell how any of the Biblical data you're using is accurate. THEN tell me hwo it's pertinant to cosmology. WITHOUT using the words "belief" or "faith", and without circular logic. If you can't, then you're blatantly contradicting yourself.
Now you know why I don't use blockquotes very often.
<style illusion? Skyhooks, my friend. </blockquote>
And another thing...
Nice analogy! So you've never known a clock to be wrong?
You dump on his analogy, then you make a dick of yourself by using it in a totally ridiculous way? Sure, the radioisotopic decay stops when the rock's battery goes flat. Moron.
Now you know why I never use blockquotes.
<blockheadquote>That depends on your paradigm—uniformitarianism or creationism.</blockheadquote>
Homework for PJ Rayment: write a two-paragraph essay explaining why the above sentence proves you have no idea what you're talking about.
Do I get to grade these homework assignments?
I was assuming they'd be juried. But if you don't have enough homework to grade, have at it... assuming any of them ever turn in any of their assignments.
"The examples I would quote are ones from AiG [...]. No, I'm not making them up, and neither is AiG. Most if not all the dates they quote are calculated by secular laboratories ..."
Ahem. SECULAR laboratories?
I wonder why they used SECULAR laboratories? I mean, hey, if you're making a Christian argument, why not use laboratories run by CHRISTIAN Scientists?
Hey, Philip, you know what?
Ain't nobody here who has the JOB of educating you. All the knowledge, all the information, is out there. It's as close as your nearest library. There’s probably nearby junior high school students who could explain this stuff to you.
The real problem here is that if there's a brightly-lit place somewhere on Earth where only the truth gets told, you're a thousand miles away in the darkness. Telling lies, talking nonsense.
You're flat-out WRONG. Not because of anything any one person here says, but because you’re actually FIGHTING TO FAIL TO UNDERSTAND THE FACTS.
And because you think WINNING an argument, cowing your opposition, is what determines the truth of the proposition under discussion.
That's just dumb as all hell, boy.
Yeah, yeah, I’m sure you're going to go away from here telling yourself "I sure showed those atheist science assholes a thing or two."
But I hope you don’t. Because you didn’t show anybody anything. You defeated yourself. You’re continuing to defeat yourself, because you DON’T WANT TO LEARN anything about the subject under discussion.
You’re afraid.
For some reason, you find this field of knowledge threatening. And that’s the REAL challenge you face, bucko.
The question is not “Why can’t I make these people understand?” The real question is “What have I let into my head that’s made me so afraid?”
Really.
Hank that was a first rate summary of the situation.
It was really hard to keep reading:
"Your data may be wrong since you pulled it from a fairy tale", Ben.
"My method is not wrong. My data cant be wrong because I already said that bad data produces bad results. My method is not wrong", PJR
repeat..
Ben, please finish them off quicker in the future. I hate watching cats play with mice instead of just eating them. Well maybe not in a metaphorical sense.
Philip scrawled:
More bluster, no substance.
Phillp, me lad, you've stepped into it here. You have blustered on about "assumptions", even quoting from Talk Origins. The problem you have overlooked is that at the end of the day, assumptions must be testable. The radiometric ages determined for rocks must agree with the relative ages determined for the same rocks. Isochron plots are diagnostic diagrams that allow us to test if assumptions of lack of original daughter, or loss of radiogenic daughter hold up.
The typical YEC claims about 'incorrect' radiometric dates in the literature are yet classic examples of the rank dishonesty among creationists:
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/woodmorappe-geochronology.html
I swear, creationist Bibles must be leaving out the 9th commandment!
Philip Rayment: " It(the age of the earth = 6k years) is derived by adding the ages of Biblical characters..."
Gen1:1 "God created the heavens and the earth"
Gen1:16 " Then God made two great lights... He made the stars also."
Look up at the night sky and pick out any deep space object, say M31. The light that forms the image of that galaxy in your brain left that galaxy over 2 million years ago. And since the Bible says the earth was created BEFORE the stars, then the earth is AT LEAST 2 million years old, NOT 6000.
Nice sarcastic letter to the editor:
http://www.newsobserver.com/opinion/story/2253732p-8633667c.html
Phillip, what kind of catastrophe could've possibly fossilized such remains in a very short timespan without destroying them completely?
You wrote the alleged date of creation is derived by adding the ages of Biblical characters when they had their offspring. And that makes perfect mathematical sense
That's sheer BS. The date -- supposedly, 4004 BC -- came from Bishop James Usshar of Armagh, Ireland, in the 1600s. It's pure fiction, even using the ages given in Genesis.
Have you ever actually tried ADDING the numbers in Genesis together? I have. If you assume a starting date of about 1300 BCE (when the historical record can document early Hebrew occupation of Israel, clearly something that had to happen BEFORE Genesis was written down) and work back from there, adding the numbers together takes you back over 8000 years. In other words, not 6000 years ago, but over 11,000 years ago. Logically, you'd also have to add more time to account for the many years Genesis must've been an oral story before it was first written, but we have no way to know how long that was.
Why should we listen to YOU when you can't even check your own "facts", never mind accept other sources of evidence that the writers of that book simply didn't know about then? They were ignorant, but not by choice.
Genesis is simply one culture's story of how they believed they came to be in the world, just like thousands of others worldwide. The fact that it's known by far more people than most other myths and written in a very popular (and badly edited) book does not make it true.
What's more, the infamous date of 4004 BC did not come from adding up the ages of the patriarchs -- it's numerology, pure and simple. Just as there were 7 days in the Creation, there were to be 7 ages of a thousand years each, culminating in the Apocalypse or whatever and a last thousand year kingdom with Jesus back in the saddle. Why 4004 BC? Because Jesus was supposedly born in 4 BC, and all the ages are supposed to be precisely a thousand years long, with 4 ages preceding him.
All sorts of funky wild stuff should have hit the fan in 1996. I missed it.
Given the time he said he had to go to bed, I get the feeling he's in my approximate time zone (unless he's nocturnal). I forgot that it's Easter Sunday and they're all probably at church now. Damn. I should've slept in.
Reading the posts, I feel the creationists above have succeeded in drawing the discussion into a place we have nothing to do. They caused serious scientists compute the generations of Adam and the position of the stars at the first day of Creation. It is ridiculous. PZ is right: this issue was settled a hundred years ago, and no scientist with a minimum of self-respect keeps discussing with people who do not bother to study the basics.
On the other hand, I read the Wedge Project of Discovery Institute, and it is a serious effort that has to be addressed. The basic argument is that the godless, materialistic culture of the 19th Century has generated a hellish 20th Century, so better we go back to former religious ideologies. At this time, more than negating evolutionary biology and other natural sciences, they want to make a place for religions based on the Bible. Scientists debating biblical chronology is what they intend to achieve at this time. The Wedge Project is attacking science and strives to introduce doubt in its completeness not because they find fault with science in itself but because they think its political consequences are bad. They are a political or social movement and the battleground is neither on the science ground nor on the biblical literalicy, but on the political arena.
Ben wrote:
Both sides have assumptions.I'm not about to attempt to list them all, but for starters, creationists assume that the Bible is true, and evolutionists assume that uniformitarianism is true. Both also assume that our senses are reliable enough to study this stuff.
Alright, let's hear 'em. I'm in a patient mood.
Ben wrote:
Nice analogy! So you've never known a clock to be wrong?There are other ways a clock can be wrong. Something might interfere with the mechanism. It might not have been set to the correct time to start with. There's other possibilities also.
You dump on his analogy, then you make a [deleted] of yourself by using it in a totally ridiculous way? Sure, the radioisotopic decay stops when the rock's battery goes flat. Moron.
"Most if not all the dates they quote are calculated by secular laboratories ..." Ahem. SECULAR laboratories?Because you blokes would immediately jump on that and say that creationists invented their own figures. But if they used figures from sources accepted by non-creationists, it makes it harder for you to reject them (or you look sillier doing so).
I wonder why they used SECULAR laboratories? I mean, hey, if you're making a Christian argument, why not use laboratories run by CHRISTIAN Scientists?
Hank Fox wrote an extended piece in which he attempts to read my mind and discover my motives. It added nothing to the discussion except insults and unfounded (and incorrect) speculation.
Neil wrote:
The problem you have overlooked is that at the end of the day, assumptions must be testable.Then they wouldn't be assumptions. Some assumptions are simply not testable, so they must remain assumptions.
Neil wrote:
The typical YEC claims about 'incorrect' radiometric dates in the literature are yet classic examples of the rank dishonesty among creationists:The link was to a paper that disagreed with a creationist paper, and although the author did accuse this particular creationist of not being fully honest, the thrust was not primarily of dishonesty and certainly not "rank dishonesty".
SteveR wrote:
Look up at the night sky and pick out any deep space object, say M31. The light that forms the image of that galaxy in your brain left that galaxy over 2 million years ago. And since the Bible says the earth was created BEFORE the stars, then the earth is AT LEAST 2 million years old, NOT 6000.The stars are over 2 million light-years away, but that is a measure of distance, not time. It only becomes a measure of time with some assumptions, such as the constancy of the speed of light over time (which I am not disagreeing with to any significant extent) and, more generally, the whole Big Bang hypothesis. Creationist cosmologies that explain that apparent paradox have been developed, but that is really getting off the subject.
Gus wrote:
You wrote the alleged date of creation is derived by adding the ages of Biblical characters when they had their offspring. And that makes perfect mathematical senseArchbishop Ussher—just one of many people to come up with a similar date—derived his date by the method I described.
That's sheer [deleted]. The date -- supposedly, 4004 BC -- came from Bishop James Usshar of Armagh, Ireland, in the 1600s. It's pure fiction, even using the ages given in Genesis.
Gus wrote:
Have you ever actually tried ADDING the numbers in Genesis together? I have. If you assume a starting date of about 1300 BCE ... and work back from there, adding the numbers together takes you back over 8000 years.I don't know how you got that figure (perhaps you added their ages at death instead of their ages at the birth of their offspring?) See here for the actual figures. From Adam to Abraham adds up to just over 2000 years.
Gus added:
Why should we listen to YOU when you can't even check your own "facts", ...Hmmm.
PZ Myers wrote:
What's more, the infamous date of 4004 BC did not come from adding up the ages of the patriarchs...Yes it did. Adding their ages at the births of their offspring is precisely how Ussher did it.
jaimito wrote:
Reading the posts, I feel the creationists above have succeeded in drawing the discussion into a place we have nothing to do.Creationists? I've not noticed any others. Anyway, it wouldn't have gone this way if several different anti-creationists didn't bring creationary beliefs into the discussion in a derisory way.
Umm... back to dinosaur bone marrow preserved after 65 million years in an oxidizing atmosphere...
I'm very skeptical about this.
Yes, it's soft tissue of something.
I think they should go in there and do some PCR with conserved primers or mass spec peptide sequencing and do a BLAST at NCBI.
That might be a little more revealing as to what critter this tissue is really from.
Phillip, you don't seem to be grasping one fundamental fact:
When you're in a hole, stop digging.
Then they wouldn't be assumptions. Some assumptions are simply not testable, so they must remain assumptions.
Oooooookkkkkayy...so, when plotting isotope ratios on an isochron diagram, we assume that there was no original daughter and that there was no loss of radiometric daughter. When there are enough points, we test these assumptions by fitting the isochron. If it's a straight line, the assumptions have been tested and (pending further data) are valid. If there's scatter, then the assumptions weren't valid.
Ultimately, we make assumptions to get a result that can be compared with reality. That comparison is the test of the assumptions. This is a concept I readily explain to bright HS students. Let's stay with the program, eh?
The link was to a paper that disagreed with a creationist paper, and although the author did accuse this particular creationist of not being fully honest, the thrust was not primarily of dishonesty and certainly not "rank dishonesty".
Quotes from Schimmrich's paper on Woodmorappe's work (each is from a different section):
"This is a deliberate misquotation of McKee and Noble and this example alone would be enough to prevent publication of this paper in any reputable scientific journal."
"Woodmorappe's quotation of Wasserburg and Lanphere's work was incomplete and misleading."
"Therefore, this data point does not, in any way, support Woodmorappe's thesis that present-day techniques of radiometric dating are unreliable."
"Why didn't Woodmorappe discuss the 40 glauconite dates listed in the data table of this paper that were well within 10% of the expected geologic age?"
"...but if he accuses the authors of "fudging" data he has a responsibility to at least discuss it and to explain why he disagrees."
"The large amount of evidence carefully discussed and referenced by Higgins was totally ignored as if it never existed."
Keep in mind the author of the review is an evangelical Christian! Once or twice might be an honest mistake, but repeated like this it is clearly a case of, uh, design. If I were to receive a paper to review with analogous problems, I'd be on the phone to the editor in an instant.
evolutionists assume that uniformitarianism is true.
Wrong.
It would help your credibility immensely if you stopped arguing against 19th-century science.
OK, no it wouldn't. But it would give people who know what they're talkiing about one less reason to write you off as an ignorant fool.
Philip J. Rament writes: "It only becomes a measure of time with some assumptions, such as the constancy of the speed of light over time (which I am not disagreeing with to any significant extent)..."
If you're not disagreeing, then IT IS a measure of time. And don't forget, I picked a relatively close messier object. 'Slight variations in the speed of light' could easily be overcome by selecting much more distant objects.
Philip J. Rament: " Creationist cosmologies that explain that apparent paradox have been developed .."
I'd be interested to know what they are. Can you provide links?
I'm not about to attempt to list them all, but for starters, creationists assume that the Bible is true, and evolutionists assume that uniformitarianism is true. Both also assume that our senses are reliable enough to study this stuff.
Even if you're right about uniformitarianism (which you're not), don't creationists always rely on that one extra assumption? You also have to "rely" on uniformitarianism, and the reliability of your own senses. Why not use Occham's Razor to slice that superfluous assumption away?
It's all a moot point, however. Your uniformitarianism charge is a lie, and the "reliability of the senses" canard has been debunked by me and others in previous entries as unfalsifiable.
There are other ways a clock can be wrong. Something might interfere with the mechanism. It might not have been set to the correct time to start with. There's other possibilities also.
That's the problem with analogies. They're often the most expedient method of proving beyond all doubt that you have no idea what you're talking about.
Is this the best you can do? Isn't lying a sin in that dusty old book you claim to be the complete moral, historical and scientific history of the universe? I recommend abandoning your little tangent of ignorance and starting all over again. Present your case for the scientific nature of creationism, and we'll start taking it seriously. Until then, it remains a figment of the collective religious imagination whose sole aim is to sucker in gullible fools like yourself.
Now are you unwilling to present that case for creationism without lying, or unable?
Ussher not only determined the age of Creation in years, he also asserted that it began at 9:30 a.m.
Hard to derive that by summing up the length of the generations, unless he had copies of all the birth certificates.
Is that Greenwich Mean Time?
Neil wrote:
Phillip, you don't seem to be grasping one fundamental fact:But I'm not in a hole. Just because you blokes look down on me doesn't mean I'm in a hole.
When you're in a hole, stop digging.
Neil wrote:
Oooooookkkkkayy...so, when plotting isotope ratios on an isochron diagram, we assume that there was no original daughter and that there was no loss of radiometric daughter. When there are enough points, we test these assumptions by fitting the isochron. If it's a straight line, the assumptions have been tested and (pending further data) are valid.That's the theory, but it's not that straightforward in practice. See here.
Neil wrote:
Quotes from Schimmrich's paper on Woodmorappe's work (each is from a different section):Only one of the quotes you gave actually indicate dishonesty (as opposed to, say, inadequate treatment), and that one claimed "deliberate misquotation", without any proof that the misquotation was in fact deliberate.
SteveR wrote:
Philip J. Rament writes: "It only becomes a measure of time with some assumptions, such as the constancy of the speed of light over time (which I am not disagreeing with to any significant extent)..."Perhaps, but not necessarily the way you think. See my answer to your next question.
If you're not disagreeing, then IT IS a measure of time.
SteveR wrote:
Philip J. Rament: " Creationist cosmologies that explain that apparent paradox have been developed .."See How can we see distant stars in a young universe? and A new cosmology: solution to the starlight travel time problem.
I'd be interested to know what they are. Can you provide links?
Ben wrote:
Even if you're right about uniformitarianism (which you're not), don't creationists always rely on that one extra assumption? You also have to "rely" on uniformitarianism, and the reliability of your own senses. Why not use Occham's Razor to slice that superfluous assumption away?Huh? How is the reliability of our senses superfluous? Why do creationists have to "rely" (your quotes) on uniformitarianism? And how am I wrong about uniformitarianism?
Ben wrote
It's all a moot point, however. Your uniformitarianism charge is a lie, and the "reliability of the senses" canard has been debunked by me and others in previous entries as unfalsifiable.My uniformitarian charge is not a lie. Even if I am wrong (which I don't believe I am), I am not lying about it. I never saw any debunking of the reliability of the senses claim, and yes, it is unfalsifiable, which is why it in an assumption rather than a provable fact.
Ben wrote:
Present your case for the scientific nature of creationism, and we'll start taking it seriously. ... Now are you unwilling to present that case for creationism without lying, or unable?If you are prepared to be civil an not accuse me of lying when you have no valid reason for claiming that, I am prepared to do that via e-mail if you wish to contact me that way. But this page is not the place for that.
Harry Eagar wrote:
Ussher not only determined the age of Creation in years, he also asserted that it began at 9:30 a.m.Ussher actually suggested nightfall, not 9:30 a.m. He derived the year by adding the ages at childbirth (although he did use some other time periods for later stages), but other methods for determining the likely time and date of that year. Wikipedia's article is, as far as I know, accurate on this subject.
Hard to derive that by summing up the length of the generations, unless he had copies of all the birth certificates.
Huh? How is the reliability of our senses superfluous?
It's superfluous because it's a meaninglessly self-referential charge. You're using your human senses to make a judgment about general human senses. Do I have to explain to you what a Godelian nightmare this assertion is? It's the "This sentence is a lie" paradox all over again. Fuck man, don't make me explain this to you. *CHOP* It's gone.
Why do creationists have to "rely" (your quotes) on uniformitarianism?
OK, I'm assuming by "uniformitarianism" you mean "The safe bet that present natural forces exist throughout the universe and have existed far into the past". You can correct me if I'm wrong. But you're making extrapolations on the past by using present data, and as such your conclusions are equally predicated upon the constancy of natural phenomena throughout history.
And how am I wrong about uniformitarianism?
Because it's the only game in town. I can safely bet that the sun will rise in the east tomorrow morning. Of course, it's entirely possible that it WON'T, but to bet against it would be rather perverse(are you offering?). If you wish to put forward the claim that the natural forces of the universe DON'T exist throughout it and have existed as per the laws of physics throughout cosmological history, you're free to do so, but you'll have to do a good job as to explaining why this is a reasonable claim to make. There are assumptions, and then there's common sense.
Actually, isn't uniformitarianism a geological thing?
But this page is not the place for that.
Actually, it's the perfect place for that. After the cat-fart that was Rodger Dodger, we could use a calm and dispassionate polemic on the issue to soothe our collective palates. And I don't give out my email address to strangers. My offer remains open.
Philip, I read the Wikipedia on Ussher. Was that supposed to make him more credible in my eyes?
It didn't.
It seems that, when not busy persecuting Irish Catholics, he made endless calculations based on nothing at all. He and Lightfoot, though they claimed to know the hour and the day, could not agree on the year within 75 years.
Now, 75 years out of 6,000 is a pretty big error, so big that an error of similar proportions by those who figure the Earth is 4.5 billion years old would be big enough to leave out the entire Pleistocene, and then some.
Until you corrected me, I had thought that Ussher was just another Christian goofball. Now I know better. He was a murderous Christian goofball.
Thanks.
Philip J Rament wrote: "..see my answer (A New Cosmology..)"
Dr. Humphrey's cosmology was discredited quite some time ago. His model was not supported by the empirical data. His model also posits a universe billions of years old, putting him in conflict with YEC's. And, he has thus far refused to formally submit his work (books and magazine articles notwithstanding) for peer review - this alone is a sign that something isn't quite right, even in his mind.
Phillip replied:
That's the theory, but it's not that straightforward in practice
It’s nice to see that we agree, Phillip. So the only real question is how frequently the methods fails. Because it uses analytical data, the isochron method is only as accurate as the measurements allow, so it is possible to get false isochrons. Keep in mind that each point on the plot is an analysis of a different mineral (each of which having different structures and chemistries), so to get a linear, but false, isochron line requires an exceptionally fortutitous combination of original composition and subsequent diffusion. This is the real point that your wiki entry conveniently overlooked.
And, as I noted above, the test is how it compares with the relative dating, which is not subject to the same effects. If an intrusive rock cuts across Permian strata but not Triassic strata, and the isochron gives us 10 mya, then there is something else going on.
The example given by the wiki entry you referenced is a bit of a giveaway: using U and Th isotopes on something less than 100K years old is absolutely pushing the analytical envelope. It’s hardly surprising that there may have been analytical problems.
It appears that you are diligently painting yourself into the same corner that Woodmorappe has aimed for. If you want to discredit something, you can’t cherry pick a few weak examples, you have to tackle the strongest examples.
Only one of the quotes you gave actually indicate dishonesty (as opposed to, say, inadequate treatment), and that one claimed "deliberate misquotation", without any proof that the misquotation was in fact deliberate.
From Woody’s paper:
There are many instances of dates with good internal consistency being rejected as not giving the correct age of a rock because they conflict with accepted values. In a Precambrian situation, K-Ar dates were much younger than the (presumed correct) Rb-Sr dates, and about the K-Ar dates McKee and Noble commented: "Continuous partial argon loss may have occurred. If this is the case, the consistency of these apparent ages is fortuitous."
From the original reference:
Continuous partial argon loss may have occurred as a result of weathering or heating from deep burial, although neither phenomenon is apparent from field or petrographic studies. If this is the case, the consistency of these apparent ages is fortuitous. The consistency of the three K-Ar ages reported here suggests that the lower radiometric ages obtained by the K-Ar method may reflect an episode of heating about 800 m.y. ago.
Leaving out a portion of the middle of the original sentence in this manner is an “inadequate treatment” well beyond the point of fraud. Another quote shows that he deliberately selected data from a table while ignoring other data that contradicted him (and which he did not address). Yet a third points out another edited quotation..
Your apparently willful acceptance of such behavior leads me to reiterate my statement at the end of comment #63:
I swear, creationist Bibles must be leaving out the 9th commandment!
Ben wrote:
Huh? How is the reliability of our senses superfluous?Actually, as I was saying, we are making an assumption about our senses. It may be a necessary assumption to make, but it is an assumption nevertheless. And that's the point; that some assumptions are necessary to any worldview that one holds.
It's superfluous because it's a meaninglessly self-referential charge. You're using your human senses to make a judgment about general human senses.
Dismissing it as "self-referential" and a "paradox" is inappropriate. The fact is that we do believe that we an trust our senses, and the fact is that we can't prove that, so the fact is that it is an assumption.
Ben wrote:
Why do creationists have to "rely" (your quotes) on uniformitarianism?No, I'm not talking about the universality of the laws of physics, but the principle that geological formations have been formed largely by the same processes that we see occurring today. Geologists used to believe that processes unlike what we see today shaped the surface of this planet (specifically including a global flood), but Hutton and others threw out that idea and replaced it with uniformitarianism. Since then, the view has had to be modified somewhat in the face of overwhelming evidence, but most geologists still believe largely in uniformitarianism, but allowing for a few relatively small catastrophes.
OK, I'm assuming by "uniformitarianism" you mean "The safe bet that present natural forces exist throughout the universe and have existed far into the past". You can correct me if I'm wrong. But you're making extrapolations on the past by using present data, and as such your conclusions are equally predicated upon the constancy of natural phenomena throughout history.
Ben wrote:
But this page is not the place for that.I remain of the opinion that this is not the appropriate place, and my offer remains open also. If it means anything to you, I promise not to misuse your e-mail address.
Actually, it's the perfect place for that. ... we could use a calm and dispassionate polemic on the issue to soothe our collective palates. And I don't give out my email address to strangers. My offer remains open.
Harry Eagar wrote:
Philip, I read the Wikipedia on Ussher. Was that supposed to make him more credible in my eyes?No, it was meant to give you some accurate information about him, which you were appearing to lack.
It didn't.
Harry Eagar wrote:
It seems that, when not busy persecuting Irish Catholics, he made endless calculations based on nothing at all.That's misrepresenting what he (and many others) did regarding calculations. And as for "persecuting catholics", there was nothing in the linked article about that. The Wikipedia article on Ussher himself does say that he opposed Catholics, which must make him somewhat like you bibliosceptics here are doing to creationists, so I'd be justified in saying that you are "persecuting" me!
Harry Eager wrote:
He and Lightfoot, though they claimed to know the hour and the day, could not agree on the year within 75 years.If you understood their methodology, you would understand how that could be.
Harry Eagar wrote:
Until you corrected me, I had thought that Ussher was just another Christian goofball. Now I know better. He was a murderous Christian goofball.Where did you get "murderous" from? Just bibliosceptic slander? And your charge of "goofball" is nothing but arrogance. As the linked article said, Steven Jay Gould respected him as a historian, even though he obviously didn't agree with him. To quote Gould: "...our usual ridicule only records a lamentable small-mindedness..." And to be consistent, you ought to call Sir Isaac Newton a goofball also, as he also argued for a creation date of about 4000 BC.
SteveR wrote:
Philip J Rament wrote: "..see my answer (A New Cosmology..)"Of course. He is a creationist, so of course it was discredited.
Dr. Humphrey's cosmology was discredited quite some time ago.
SteveR wrote:
His model was not supported by the empirical data.Others obviously disagree.
SteveR wrote:
His model also posits a universe billions of years old, putting him in conflict with YEC's.Which is why, I suppose, that the young-Earth organisation Answers in Genesis promotes his work? Pull the other one.
SteveR wrote:
And, he has thus far refused to formally submit his work (books and magazine articles notwithstanding) for peer review - this alone is a sign that something isn't quite right, even in his mind.He has published articles in the peer-reviewed journal TJ, and I suspect in CRSQ also.
Neil wrote:
It’s nice to see that we agree, Phillip. So the only real question is how frequently the methods fails.So how do you tell if it's failed, except by comparing results to ages that you have from other radiometric methods that you are checking?
Neil wrote:
...[a] false, isochron line requires an exceptionally fortutitous combination of original composition and subsequent diffusion.Or something that affects them all equally.
Creationists don't dismiss radiometric dating at totally without merit. Despite the untestable assumptions and the proven false results from many tests, there is likely something else going on that has yet to be adequately explained. It's a bit like UFOs—you can dismiss most of them as weather balloons, sightings of Venus, hoaxes, etc., but there are some that require better explanations. With radiometric dating, you can show that the methods are not reliable, but there is still a certain amount of consistency that is not yet explained.
Which brings us to a fundamental point of creationism. It's not claiming that it can prove creation from science, and it's not claiming that it can scientifically prove evolution/long ages wrong. What is is claiming is that science can't prove those things right, so from a scientific point of view the question is still open.
Neil wrote:
If you want to discredit something, you can’t cherry pick a few weak examples, you have to tackle the strongest examples.Whilst creationists may not have yet totally explained the problems with radiometric dating, they have gone further than just "cherry pick a few weak examples". I believe that they have shown enough problems with the results to put a big question mark over them. And they are still working on it.
Neil wrote:
Leaving out a portion of the middle of the original sentence in this manner is an “inadequate treatment” well beyond the point of fraud. Another quote shows that he deliberately selected data from a table while ignoring other data that contradicted him (and which he did not address). Yet a third points out another edited quotation..Leaving out a portion of the quote was the one I was referring to as claimed deliberate dishonesty. The "inadequate treatment" remark was to do with most of the rest.
And the misquote may have another explanation for all I know. I've seen a case before where a creationist was accused of a misquote, but if I recall correctly the creationists actually got the quote from a different source than the person accusing him of misquoting (in that case a translation was involved). Alternatively, I don't for one moment think that it's impossible that the misquote was an accident, even if you want to argue that it was due to carelessness.
Isaac Newton was a goofball. He left behind something like 5 million words of biblical musings, which no one has ever thought worth publishing.
Imagine that, one of the rarest intellects evolution ever produced, and most of his efforts are recognized as worthless and boring.
It was a tragedy that silly religion superstitions implanted in him as an impressionable boy caused him to waste most of his efforts worrying about whether the Trinity was the correct description of the deity. (You want to be careful claiming him, he was not a Christian.)
If Ussher was part of the Anglican Supremacy, which he was -- he was the head of it -- he was a murderer. Read some history.
PJR said "Which brings us to a fundamental point of creationism. It's not claiming that it can prove creation from science, and it's not claiming that it can scientifically prove evolution/long ages wrong. What is is claiming is that science can't prove those things right, so from a scientific point of view the question is still open."
To which I say ...
But what Creationism is also claiming is that there is no need for a scientific point of view a the question is settled. Creationists believe therefore they have to need to investigate and question (which just might make them scientists). You cant find an alternative answer if you refuse to look for one. Scientists do question both their data and methods and regularly look for ways to validate both. PZ himself has said that while Darwin, Gould, et al are smart people, others have built on their findings and others have found better answers than those fine gentlemen in some cases.
On the other hand, the Bible is a static document and its dictates are enforced by various lies and intimidations and investigating it's accuracy as either fact or allegory is always discouraged by those who believe it contains only the truth.
**********************************************************
"Organized religion elevates superstition to an entirely new level, so let's call its institutions by their proper name: superstition-based institutions.
The creationism vs. evolution debate also illuminates this intolerance. Christians insist that their creation myth represent the creationist side. But there are many creationist myths, many of which predated both Christianity and Judaism. If evidence is not needed, why exclude any superstitions? As Sam Harris notes in The End of Faith, "there is no more evidence to justify a belief in the literal existence of Yahweh and Satan than there was to keep Zeus perched upon his mountain throne or Poseidon churning the seas."
http://www.alternet.org/story/21641
Harry Eagar wrote:
Isaac Newton was a goofball.If you say so.
Desert Donkey wrote:
PJR said "Which brings us to a fundamental point of creationism. It's not claiming that it can prove creation from science, and it's not claiming that it can scientifically prove evolution/long ages wrong. What is is claiming is that science can't prove those things right, so from a scientific point of view the question is still open."Many creationists are scientists, so makes a lot of sense.
To which I say ...
But what Creationism is also claiming is that there is no need for a scientific point of view a the question is settled. Creationists believe therefore they have to need to investigate and question (which just might make them scientists).
Desert Donkey wrote:
You cant find an alternative answer if you refuse to look for one.Good advice for the evolutionists too.
Desert Donkey wrote:
Scientists do question both their data and methods and regularly look for ways to validate both.True, but how many evolutionary scientists ever question evolution? They may question certain aspects of evolution, just as creationary scientists question certain aspects of creation, but just as anticreationists like to accuse creationists of not questioning creation, evolutionary scientists don't question evolution itself.
Desert Donkey wrote:
On the other hand, the Bible['s] ... dictates are enforced by various lies and intimidations...Rubbish.
Desert Donkey wrote:
... and investigating it's accuracy as either fact or allegory is always discouraged by those who believe it contains only the truth.More rubbish. On the contrary, Bible-believing Christians would love people to investigate its accuracy, as they know that it can stand up to investigation.
And the rest of your post was nothing more than uninformed rhetoric.
Further to my previous post, I find this quite ironic:
Desert Donkey wrote:
You cant find an alternative answer if you refuse to look for one. Scientists do question both their data and methods ...
In this particular situation we have the creationists questioning the date of the fossil, and the "scientists" failing to do that. Yet I am told that scientists do question their data and their methods, and that it is the creationists that are refusing to look for an alternative explanation!
And the clear inference is that the creationists are questioning because of their belief in a static book. When creationists point out that many evolutionists are atheists, and that that belief motivates them, we are told that their beliefs are irrelevant, and that it is the way that they do their science that matters. Yet here we have creationists questioning the date of the fossil on the basis of scientific evidence, specifically, a widely-used dating method. That method is what is used by pathologists to determine the date of death of a human or other living creature—the rate of decomposition. Sure, the rate of decay can be affected by a number of factors, including the temperature of the body, but the point is that we know that complex organic structures such as blood vessels deteriorate in a time range much less than 70 million years. To claim that they could survive intact for that long beggars belief.
So creationary scientists are questioning the validity of one type of dating method (radiometric decay) on the basis of another type of dating method (biological decay), yet in this thread are mocked for being unscientific and are being told that they should question things!
On the other hand, we have the evolutionists—the ones saying that we should question more—refusing to question the date!
So creationary scientists are questioning the validity of one type of dating method (radiometric decay) on the basis of another type of dating method (biological decay)
Please provide a citation of a peer-reviewed paper by cretinary scientists that delineates this problem.
"creationary scientist" ?? That is a better oxymoron than 'military intelligence'. Chris's version 'cretinary scientist' strikes me as more accurate.
And if the threat of an eternity in hell isnt intimidation, I dont know what is.
Why are there no Jumbo Shrimp transitional fossils!!???//?!1!
Chris, I think the transitional version is called 'popcorn' shrimp in Louisiana!
I have only one question about using the bible to date thigs: How do you know how long a year is in the bible? We've changed calenders several times in the last 2000 years how can you compare the ages given in the bible to todays dates when the bible gives no rate for comparision?
On the other hand, we have the evolutionists - the ones saying that we should question more — refusing to question the date!Through the specific scientific methods used to determine the age of the specimen, every date has (more or less) been put to the test of science.
The currently accepted date is the date that "won out" - that is, it is the date that fits the models and experimental data.
The Creationists are basing their answers on a static book. They have actually chosen their date for the tissue specimen by a random process, which can easily be spotted when realizing that the "Genesis" data certainly can not account for why there isn't soft tissue in every fossil - that is, if this sample (presumably) just happens to be around due to it's "young" age [sic].
Chris Clarke wrote:
Please provide a citation of a peer-reviewed paper by cretinary scientists that delineates this problem.I don't know of any cretinary scientists.
And as this is a new discovery, I wouldn't expect any creationary scientists to have published a peer-reviewed paper on it yet. You are asking a bit much.
Desert Donkey wrote:
"creationary scientist" ?? That is a better oxymoron than 'military intelligence'. Chris's version 'cretinary scientist' strikes me as more accurate.There is nothing oxymoronic about "creationary scientist", and if calling your opposition names is the level of your argument, you obviously don't have an argument.
Desert Donkey also wrote:
And if the threat of an eternity in hell isnt intimidation, I dont know what is.I suppose that you would also describe the threat of a jail sentence for committing a crime as intimidation. Words tend to lose meaning when you do things like that.
judgeMC wrote:
I have only one question about using the bible to date thigs: How do you know how long a year is in the bible? We've changed calenders several times in the last 2000 years how can you compare the ages given in the bible to todays dates when the bible gives no rate for comparision?If you are talking about a precise date, such as to the very day, you probably can't use the Bible to date that accurately (and notice that Ussher didn't come up with a precise date by exactly that means anyway). But ancient calendars were generally pretty close to a year, at least on average when you take leap months into account. The length of a year is sufficiently well known to give a pretty good idea.
Jeebus wrote:
Through the specific scientific methods used to determine the age of the specimen, every date has (more or less) been put to the test of science.Without specifics, this is a fairly meaningless statement. Many dates of individual fossils are derived from the accepted date for the rock layer it was found in. Is this what you mean by being "put to the test of science"? If you mean that dates assigned to fossils have been individually tested by radiometric means, then this is not the case. And if it was so, there would not be so many examples of scientists redating specimens at a later time. And neither would there be so many cases of radiometric dates being clearly wrong.
Jeebus wrote:
The Creationists are basing their answers on a static book.To the extent that that's true, surely that's better than basing it on a book that keeps changing, like many science books?
Jeebus also wrote:
They have actually chosen their date for the tissue specimen by a random process, which can easily be spotted when realizing that the "Genesis" data certainly can not account for why there isn't soft tissue in every fossil - that is, if this sample (presumably) just happens to be around due to it's "young" age [sic].I'm not sure that I follow this. What "random" process are you talking about? And who says that a creation model can't account for why there's not soft tissue in every fossil? And where did creationists "[choose] their date" for it, other than a reference to "a few thousand years at most" (which is a very broad range on a creationary time scale)? And who are you quoting when you quote "young"?
Admitting that available dating techniques are not accurate, how would a creationist date the fossil? Is there any alternative methodology? Can you prove that the elastic fossil tissue found is less than 6000 years old? Why nothing similar was ever found?
jaimito wrote:
Admitting that available dating techniques are not accurate, how would a creationist date the fossil? Is there any alternative methodology?A creationist would probably use similar techniques to a non-creationist, but with the differences that he would (a) have different starting assumptions and (b) recognise that dating methods are not infallible.
Creationists generally consider carbon dating to be pretty reliable over the time span for which it has been possible to calibrate it with artifacts of known age (i.e. known from historical records), so in this case would probably find a C14 date acceptable.
jaimito wrote:
Can you prove that the elastic fossil tissue found is less than 6000 years old?What do you mean by "prove"? When some amateur creationists claim that evolution has not been proven, evolutionists are quick to point out (correctly) that in science, nothing is ever considered "proved". So how do you expect me to "prove" that the tissue is less than 6000 years old?
What creationists would primarily argue is that the evidence is more consistent with the creation model than the evolutionary model.
However, they could potentially also advance other evidence in support of a "young" fossil, such as the afore-mentioned C14 date, if/when this is done. Note that because evolutionists believe that the fossil is far too old for C14 dating, it is very unlikely that the C14 method will actually be used on the specimen.
jaimito wrote:
Why nothing similar was ever found?Because no-one has looked?
This specimen was only found because it was necessary to break the fossil in two (thus exposing the material of interest) in order to get the very large fossil onto the helicopter removing it from the burial site. There is now talk of breaking open other fossils already in museums to see if more examples can be found.
Actually, similar things have been found. The same Dr. Schweitzer previously found what appeared to be red blood cells in a T. Rex fossil (the idea that it was blood was rejected simply because of the presumed age of the fossil and the belief that blood couldn't survive that long). And unfossilised dinosaur bones have been found in Alaska.
Philip J. Rayment responds to Jeebus' statement that:
Through the specific scientific methods used to determine the age of the specimen, every date has (more or less) been put to the test of science.by replying,
Without specifics, this is a fairly meaningless statement.Not so, PJR. Specifics are not the matter at hand, here. The manner through which every contemporary (newly-observed) data point is put to the "test of science," is by having to jive with each data point preceeding it. Thus, it is the entirety of the History of Science and the History of Empirical Study that stands as evidence for or against our observations.
Accordingly, if a relatively "fundamental" theory is found to be false, then all of it's daughter theories will have to be scratched as well.
Science is by and large a progressive enterprise, forever subjecting itself to the harshest of criticisms. Why? Because we know that if our research leads to the publication of false data, someone else will do it correctly, and the lights will begin to shine quite brightly then, my brother...
Jeebus wrote,
The Creationists are basing their answers on a static book.To which PJR responded,
To the extent that that's true, surely that's better than basing it on a book that keeps changing, like many science books?Whoa. Please, please don't tell me that you are against the progress of mankind! You don't think people should learn? <b>Would you like to be treated by physicians who practiced with the knowledge and expertise of the doctors of the time when the Biblical Tales were written?
Jeebus also wrote,
They have actually chosen their date for the tissue specimen by a random process, which can easily be spotted when realizing that the "Genesis" data certainly can not account for why there isn't soft tissue in every fossil - that is, if this sample (presumably) just happens to be around due to it's "young" age [sic].To which PJR responded,
I'm not sure that I follow this. What "random" process are you talking about? And who says that a creation model can't account for why there's not soft tissue in every fossil?The random process I'm referring to, is the observation that there are endless data that support Evolution - and therefore refute the ID/Creationist propositions.
But, when one (or a few) scientific phenomenon appear to have been guided by the hand of an immaterial being, it automatically means that Evolution is false, and that Creationism is on the money.
Ya'll spend all your time trying to un-explain completely random Evolutionary events, instead of making any observations or hypotheses or creating any data or theory or anything.
And you hang onto those few examples, as if your
No Creationist model has ever accounted for anything.
I'm not saying it never will, however, because as we all agree:
Science can't prove anything.
And who are you quoting when you quote "young"?So... you do, or do not think that the bones are very, very, very old?
A creationist would probably use similar techniques to a non-creationist, but with the differences that he would (a) have different starting assumptions and (b) recognise that dating methods are not infallible.
Creationists generally consider carbon dating to be pretty reliable over the time span for which it has been possible to calibrate it with artifacts of known age (i.e. known from historical records), so in this case would probably find a C14 date acceptable.
If I understood correctly, creationists have no special techniques for dating. I accept that starting assumptions do have an impact on the results, as shown by the discovery of the number of human chromosomes (the story goes that some authority counted the -wrong - number and generations of researchers kept quoting him. Another one is about Aristotles who wrote women have fewer teeth than men, and that was truth for two thousand years. I doubt if the stories are true). Regarding fallibility of dating techniques, only the Pope (and only speaking ex cathedra) is infallible. So I heard.
If creationists accept conventional scientific dating methods and only their attitude is more sceptical than those of conventional scientists, the conundrum is solvable. Calculation of carbon decay timing is based on equations that allow to extrapolate into the past and into the future. We cannot validate extrapolations into the far past, but extrapolations to the near future can be tested and they have validated the calculation method and the theory it is based on. Carbon 14 decay calculations are based on exactly the same theory as dating methods based on different isotopes. If you accept dating based on C 14 decay, why not the others? I have also a question on your acceptance of C14 dating results, which are considered very solid to 50 - 60 thousand years into the past: Do you accept it all the way or only to the limit of 6000 years?
Jeebus wrote:
Not so, PJR. Specifics are not the matter at hand, here.They were to the extent that it wasn't clear (to me at least) what you meant by the "test of science", and whether or not the dates were supposed to have passed that test.
Jeebus wrote:
The manner through which every contemporary (newly-observed) data point is put to the "test of science," is by having to jive with each data point preceeding it. Thus, it is the entirety of the History of Science and the History of Empirical Study that stands as evidence for or against our observations.So are you claiming that every bit of data is totally consistent with every bit that has gone before?
Jeebus wrote:
Science is by and large a progressive enterprise, forever subjecting itself to the harshest of criticisms. Why? Because we know that if our research leads to the publication of false data, someone else will do it correctly, and the lights will begin to shine quite brightly then, my brother...If only it were that straightforward. There are many examples of false data surviving for quite some time. And your ideal world ignores the power of popular paradigms, such as evolution, into which all observations are expected to fit.
I wrote:
To the extent that that's true [that Creationists are basing their answers on a static book], surely that's better than basing it on a book that keeps changing, like many science books?To which Jeebus responded:
Whoa. Please, please don't tell me that you are against the progress of mankind!My comment was partly tongue in cheek, but apart from that, you are missing the point. There is nothing in my comment that indicates that I am against progress unless you first of all assume that the information in the "static book" is wrong, and needs to be corrected. That is your assumption, not one that creationists make. If the information is correct, that information can still be built on and added to, which refutes your comment about creationists being against progress. In contrast, many science books do have incorrect information that needs to be dropped or corrected in later publications.
Jeebus wrote:
The random process I'm referring to, is the observation that there are endless data that support Evolution - and therefore refute the ID/Creationist propositions.That is your assertion; creationists don't agree.
Jeebus wrote:
But, when one (or a few) scientific phenomenon appear to have been guided by the hand of an immaterial being, it automatically means that Evolution is false, and that Creationism is on the money.This just shows that you simply don't understand what creationists say, or that you can't read.
Creationists do not says that a few bits of evidence that doesn't fit with evolution "automatically means that evolution is false, and that Creationism is on the money". That is a straw-man argument. What they say, and what I have said on this page is that those (this) particular bit(s) of evidence are more consistent with the creationary model.
There are other arguments that creationists use also, but these do not include claims of disproving evolution on the basis of a few bits of evidence.
Jeebus claimed:
Ya'll spend all your time trying to un-explain completely random Evolutionary events, instead of making any observations or hypotheses or creating any data or theory or anything.Simply untrue. Creationists do make observations, hypotheses, and theories. Your gross ignorance of what creationists do suggests that you ought to read some creationist material before pretending to know much about them.
Jeebus continued:
And you hang onto those few examples, as if your afterlife depended on it. Of course, there usually exist well-understood scientific explanations for these blindly chosen "exemplars" - these, of course, are completely ignored by the Creationist bandwagon.Creationists don't "ignore" explanations. In fact they frequently (attempt to) refute those explanations. That is the opposite of ignoring them.
Jeebus wrote:
No Creationist model has ever accounted for anything.Simply untrue.
Jeebus previously wrote
...due to it's "young" age [sic].So I asked:
And who are you quoting when you quote "young"?To which Jeebus responded:
So... you do, or do not think that the bones are very, very, very old?Which does not answer my question of who he was quoting when quoting "young" that warranted a "sic" after it.
As for his question, I am not denying that I consider the bones to be "young" by your timescale (although, being less than 50 myself, and assuming that these bones are even 1000 years old, they are "very, very, very old" compared to me. It all depends on your viewpoint).
jaimito wrote:
Regarding fallibility of dating techniques, only the Pope (and only speaking ex cathedra) is infallible. So I heard.I would say that only God (and, by extension, His book, the Bible) is infallible.
jaimito wrote:
If creationists accept conventional scientific dating methods and only their attitude is more sceptical than those of conventional scientists, the conundrum is solvable.That's not the difference. When I indicated that creationists would use similar methods to non-creationists, I was thinking of things like (a) radiometric dating (more on that below), (b) which rock layer it was found in (but creationists put different ages on those rocks than do non-creationists), and (c) the extent of the decay.
Creationists have different presuppositions than do non-creationists. For example, creationists believe that about 4500 years ago there was a global flood, with consequent globe-altering affects. Just by way of example, one of these affects might have been to change the carbon-12/carbon-14 ratio in the atmosphere. This would therefore affect any C14 dates from pre-flood matter. Non-creationists, on the other hand, have a presupposition that there was no such flood, so therefore no reason to believe that C14 dates beyond a certain time are invalid.
I'm not trying to get into a debate about the existence or otherwise of the flood, merely using that as an illustration of how creationists and non-creationists will interpret the evidence differently, depending on each's worldview or presuppositions. It is not a case of being "more sceptical".
jaimito wrote:
We cannot validate extrapolations into the far past, but extrapolations to the near future can be tested and they have validated the calculation method and the theory it is based on. Carbon 14 decay calculations are based on exactly the same theory as dating methods based on different isotopes. If you accept dating based on C 14 decay, why not the others?The methods can be tested on past dates with material of known age. For example, a piece of timber from a building in Europe that is known to have been constructed at a particular time can be tested to see if the C14 date agrees with its known age. Or a rock formed from a volcanic eruption in New Zealand last century can be tested by one of the methods available for dating rocks.
The problem is that there is no material available to be tested that has a known age (i.e. from historical records) beyond a few thousand years. Therefore, whilst the methods can be tested for dates up to a few thousand years (and this is much more than waiting to test into the near future), they cannot be tested beyond that period.
C14 has been tested on such material, and the method calibrated to the known dates. So C14 dates up to a few thousand years are generally reliable. Other dating methods have been used on rocks formed during volcanic eruptions but have frequently been shown to provide incorrect dates. If a method frequently gives incorrect dates on material of a known age, why should it be trusted on material of an unknown age?
jaimito wrote:
I have also a question on your acceptance of C14 dating results, which are considered very solid to 50 - 60 thousand years into the past: Do you accept it all the way or only to the limit of 6000 years?I have pretty well answered this by now, but to be thorough, C14 dates are not so much "considered very solid to 50 - 60 thousand years into the past" as considered possible to 50—60 thousand years into the past. That is, that range is the theoretical dateable range for the C14 method, beyond which there will be no measurable C14 left to determine an age. (And that's not to deny that many will also consider it reliable over that range). But it is interesting that material that is dated by other radiometric methods as much older sometimes yields measurable C14! Which goes to show that at least one of the radiometric methods must be giving a false age.
Thank you for your answer. I consider a privilege to talk to a creationist of your intelligence. If I understood you, you say there are no reliable, verified techniques to date anything older than historic times (circa 6000 years). Moreover, you hypothise that around that time a catastrophic occurance took place, which confused everything, making it impossible for us humans to ascertain former events. That our projections into the far past are wrong, because the said event acts like a mirror - we look into the mirror and think we are observing far away objects when in fact it is an optical illusion.
This scenario makes sense only if you presume the existence of a supernatural and powerful being that arranged things that way, in order to make us exist in a world of mirrors, deceptions and illusions. If we speculate that such being exists and cares to do things like that, there are no limits to the possible, for example, the world could have been created readymade just a minute ago.
What is interesting that in general, you do not deny that the world works in a coherent, consistent way following laws that can be discovered and understood, that science in general reflects the mechanism of the world and that science and not magic if effective. The only difference between us may be your theory that all is an illusion except the Bible. You may even accept that evolution could be a sensible explanation of the things we observe, with the proviso that what we observe is not true but have been purposefully arranged so as to deceive us. Our prejudices and presuppositions make us to interpret things in a wrong way.
I think if it is a question of interpretation, we have a shared basis and talk is possible. To show my openness and fearlessness, I would even take my daughter to enjoy a Dinosaur Park, in the same spirit as we visited Disney's Fantasyworld. The problem is, as PZ defined it, that "ignorance kills". If the people loses its faith in science, they will turn to charlatans to cure their diseases, they will stop vaccinating their children against polio, they too shall believe that AIDS is caused by witches and start hunting and burning them. All that superstition is out there, waiting to turn down the lights once again.
jaimito wrote all the bits in boxes:
If I understood you, you say there are no reliable, verified techniques to date anything older than historic times (circa 6000 years).That's about right.
Moreover, you hypothise that around that time ...About 4500 years ago actually.
...a catastrophic occurance took place, which confused everything, making it impossible for us humans to ascertain former events.That's going a bit far. It doesn't make it impossible. Rather, we will be misled if we don't take that factor into account.
That our projections into the far past are wrong, because the said event acts like a mirror - we look into the mirror and think we are observing far away ob jects when in fact it is an optical illusion.It's not an optical illusion. That implies that it looks one way but is really another way. In this case how it looks depends on our presuppositions. To creationists, it doesn't even look old.
Sure, there may be some evidence that points to millions or billions of years, but there is also evidence that points to a lot less.
This scenario makes sense only if you presume the existence of a supernatural and powerful being that arranged things that way, in order to make us exist in a world of mirrors, deceptions and illusions. If we speculate that such being exists and cares to do things like that, there are no limits to the possible, for example, the world could have been created readymade just a minute ago.This paragraph relies on the previous thought of it being an optical illusion, which it isn't. Creationists do not claim nor speculate that the supernatural being is in any way deceptive. In fact they specifically deny that.
What is interesting that in general, you do not deny that the world works in a coherent, consistent way following laws that can be discovered and understood, that science in general reflects the mechanism of the world and that science and not magic if effective.What is interesting is that historians of science have acknowledged that the rise of modern science is precisely due to these very presupposition, presuppositions that are grounded in a Biblical way of thinking. Ancient Greek science never really took off because they believed that the gods could and would change the laws of nature on a whim. But the Biblical view is that we are created by a god who is consistent, and that his creation is capable of being studied. Thus modern science arose in Christian Europe and many, if not most, early scientists were Christians.
Atheism, by contrast, proposes that the universe is the result of a cosmic accident, and life and human beings are the result of that accident. That means that their thought processes are the result of an accident, yet they believe that their thought processes can be relied upon to study this universe.
The only difference between us may be your theory that all is an illusion except the Bible.No, it's not an illusion at all. It's just a case of many people having different presuppositions on which they base their thinking.
You may even accept that evolution could be a sensible explanation of the things we observe, with the proviso that what we observe is not true but have been purposefully arranged so as to deceive us. Our prejudices and presuppositions make us to interpret things in a wrong way.Apart from what I have already said, it is farcical to bring a charge of "deception" when that so-called deceiver has actually told us what he did. We then reject his explanation, come up with our own, then accuse him of deception because our explanation is incorrect!
I think if it is a question of interpretation, we have a shared basis and talk is possible. To show my openness and fearlessness, I would even take my daughter to enjoy a Dinosaur Park, in the same spirit as we visited Disney's Fantasyworld.Living on the other side of the world, I have not been to Dinosaur Park (although I have heard of it). I expect that a better choice would be Answers In Genesis' museum currently under construction near Cincinnati.
The problem is, as PZ defined it, that "ignorance kills". If the people loses its faith in science, ...A belief in creation does not equate to losing faith in science (as I hope is clear from my previous comments in this post), merely in the origins claims of many scientists.
...they will turn to charlatans to cure their diseases, they will stop vaccinating their children against polio, they too shall believe that AIDS is caused by witches and start hunting and burning them. All that superstition is out there, waiting to turn down the lights once again.I truly believe that the best defence against that sort of thing is a belief on God. There is no reason to believe that a belief in God will lead them to rejecting medicine, etc. One of the pioneers of modern medicine, of whom it has been claimed probably saved more lives than any other, was the creationist Louis Pasteur.
Trackback: Mmm.. Dino Blood Vessels!
You might have heard that soft, Tyrannosaurus Rex tissue was discovered in a thigh bone cracked open to load into a too-small helicopter. Pharyngula has a great, illustrated discussion on the findings and says that the Panda's Thumb will have more com...
You might have heard that soft, Tyrannosaurus Rex tissue was discovered in a thigh bone cracked open to load into a too-small helicopter. Pharyngula has a great, illustrated discussion on the findings and says that the Panda's Thumb will have more com...
Trackback: Friday dinosaur goodies
Dinosaur angiogenesis, anyone?
Dinosaur angiogenesis, anyone?
Trackback: Vasos sanguineos de T.rex
Visto que PaleoFreak está de vacaciones (yo debería) o no está por la labor de comentar esto, lo haré yo. ¿Adivináis qué es esto? "Fragmentos desmineralizados de tejidos derivados del endostio que rellena la cavidad medular del fémur de Tyran
Visto que PaleoFreak está de vacaciones (yo debería) o no está por la labor de comentar esto, lo haré yo. ¿Adivináis qué es esto? "Fragmentos desmineralizados de tejidos derivados del endostio que rellena la cavidad medular del fémur de Tyran
Philip, you say the Bible is infallible on the subject of Creation, but then you continue to refer to 'God' when the Bible Creation story says 'elohim,' which means 'gods.'
Please explain.
Phillip, You are presenting a watered down, very reasonable version of Creationism. You bring to my memory when I was working in Nigeria and a missionary doctor saved my life: had passing episodes of fever and was unaware that I had malaria. How could anybody be against him? Certainly not me. I will not discuss anybody's faith in God. On the other hand, a biology teacher in Kansas was sent to jail for teaching evolution in class. Witches were hunted and burned.
Harry Eagar wrote:
Philip, you say the Bible is infallible on the subject of Creation, but then you continue to refer to 'God' when the Bible Creation story says 'elohim,' which means 'gods.'This article explains it better than I could.
Please explain.
jaimito wrote:
Phillip, You are presenting a watered down, very reasonable version of Creationism.I don't consider that it is watered down at all, but I'll accept it as being reasonable! What I have been presenting is very much in line with mainstream creationism as promoted by groups such as Answers In Genesis.
jaimito wrote
You bring to my memory when I was working in Nigeria and a missionary doctor saved my life: had passing episodes of fever and was unaware that I had malaria. How could anybody be against him? Certainly not me. I will not discuss anybody's faith in God. On the other hand, a biology teacher in Kansas was sent to jail for teaching evolution in class. Witches were hunted and burned.Who was the teacher sent to jail? I'm not aware of that one.
Like everyone else, Christians are not perfect, and some have done some shameful things. But witch-burning was clearly an exception to the norm. Even in today's more "enlightened" times, with science being more respected and Christianity less respected, there are plenty of bad things happening. Including people being denied jobs, sacked, denied tenure, etc. for believing in creation!
But the point is that those things are not caused by a rejection of science, and even if they were, Christianity (including creationism) does not reject science.
Thanks, Philip, my laugh for the day. But it doesn't make any sense.
Nor does saying that a practice (burning friendless old women to death because you believe -- whether the old women did or not -- in nonexistent spooks) that was practiced daily for a thousand years was not a 'norm.'
Creationism strives to maintain the authority of the Bible, but debating carbon dating techniques and so is a wrong, ineffective way to do it. The Catholic Church learned that with Galileo 400 years ago. Since I lack a burning desire to convince you or anybody, and am too settled and comfortable with my own ways, it seems to me unfair to continue using up Pharyngula's space.
Harry Eagar wrote:
Thanks, Philip, my laugh for the day. But it doesn't make any sense.And with a derisive and vague comment like that, I probably can't do much to help.
Harry Eagar wrote:
Nor does saying that a practice (burning friendless old women to death because you believe -- whether the old women did or not -- in nonexistent spooks) that was practiced daily for a thousand years was not a 'norm.'Daily for a thousand years? No. This article's introduction puts it in perspective.
jaimito wrote:
Creationism strives to maintain the authority of the Bible, but debating carbon dating techniques and so is a wrong, ineffective way to do it.If dating techniques are being used to undermine the Bible's authority, why is it a wrong way? And the experience of groups like Answers In Genesis is that it is a quite effective method.
jaimito wrote:
The Catholic Church learned that with Galileo 400 years ago.What was at stake there was not the Bible's authority, but the authority of the part of the Catholic church that had adopted the science of Aristotle. Modern-day bibliosceptics present it as an example of science versus religion, whereas it was really an example of the science of a creationist (Galileo) versus the science of a non-Christian (Aristotle) that had been adopted as the Church position.
jaimito wrote:
Since I lack a burning desire to convince you or anybody, and am too settled and comfortable with my own ways, it seems to me unfair to continue using up Pharyngula's space.If the latter point is the main point, you are welcome to continue this by e-mail.
For your own benefit, I pray that you will pursue this matter further, whether with me or by some other means.
So the Catholics burned only 50,000 witches. Why am I supposed to consider this as exculpation?
Besides, it's wrong. There were at least several hundred burned in one German diocese in about 10 years.
Furthermore, it didn't start in the 1400s but much earlier, although the structure of the Holy Office didn't come till later.
The key point, even more so than the death toll (anything over zero is a condemnation of Catholicism, by the way), is that during at least four centuries, it was not only a capital offense to be a witch, it was equally a capital offense to question whether there really were witches. (Del Rio, significantly, is not mentioned in your link.)
That's why creationism is such a threat to freedom. Religion and liberty are incompatible. It doesn't matter, from a practical point of view, how long the dinosaurs have been dead. It matters a great deal who gets killed in the future. Until the Christians understand and stop justifying their crimes of the past, we have to expect they will renew them, just as soon as they regain civil power.
Harry Eagar wrote the bits in boxes:
So the Catholics burned only 50,000 witches. Why am I supposed to consider this as exculpation?You are not. You are supposed to consider this an aberration from the norm. That's a different thing.
Besides, it's wrong. There were at least several hundred burned in one German diocese in about 10 years.I'm not an expert, so I can't comment, other than to point out that the linked article claimed that a commonly-held view was wrong, and all you have done in response is to claim some different facts, without any substantiation.
Furthermore, it didn't start in the 1400s but much earlier, although the structure of the Holy Office didn't come till later.Which might suggest that it wasn't related to Catholicism.
The key point, even more so than the death toll (anything over zero is a condemnation of Catholicism, by the way), is that during at least four centuries, it was not only a capital offense to be a witch, it was equally a capital offense to question whether there really were witches. (Del Rio, significantly, is not mentioned in your link.)No, the key point is that this was an aberration, whether it went for 40 years or 400 hundred years. It is not an inherent part of Christianity, being limited largely to one part of Christendom and for a limited, even if lengthy, period of time.
But yes, any is too many and Catholicism is rightly criticised for carrying it out. Just like atheism is rightly criticised for the millions of deaths resulting from its ideology being put into practice (Lenin, Mao, etc.)
That's why creationism is such a threat to freedom. Religion and liberty are incompatible.Nonsense. It is Christianity that has been largely responsible for much of the freedom that exists today. Some religions are anti-liberty, including atheism, and some Christian groups have at times been anti-liberty, but Christianity per se is not.
It doesn't matter, from a practical point of view, how long the dinosaurs have been dead.It does matter to the extent that it influences out beliefs about theories of origins, and the consequences of that (acceptance or rejection of God).
It matters a great deal who gets killed in the future. Until the Christians understand and stop justifying their crimes of the past, we have to expect they will renew them, just as soon as they regain civil power.And who is trying to justify past crimes? On the contrary, you are trying to reject historical research simply because it supports a religious belief that you don't want to accept. Does wrong actions in one area (witch-burning) mean that Christianity is wrong about the age of the Earth? No, the truth of the latter is totally independent of the former. You are trying to discredit the latter by raising the issue of the former. How about sticking to the subject?
Philip, a norm is what people normally do. Anything done 50,000 times is normal behavior.
To borrow a trope from Oscar Wilde, to murder one harmless old lady might be an accident, but to do it over and over begins to look like a concept.
It is not up to me to instruct you in witchcraft, but you could start with H.C. Lea's 'Materials toward a Study of Witchcraft.'
It is practically all documentation (nearly all in Latin, though, so you'll have to learn that), so there's not so much of a problem with interpretation of meaning. You can read what the Christians themselves thought about it.
They certainly did NOT think that skepticism about witches was normal. That was a crime.
Since I have sat through several dozen exorcisms conducted by members of the largest Christian church in my county, you cannot tell me that was then and this is now.
History affords no instances of a time/place when Christianity had the civil power and did not use to to murder heretics.
It might be nice to imagine that 200 years of having to live under secular government would have bred a new kind of non-murderous Christian in America, but since I'd be betting my life on it, I don't care to try to put it to the test.
History affords no instances of a time/place when Christianity had the civil power and did not use to to murder heretics.
Don't confuse what the Catholic Church did with what Christianity teaches. Jesus specifically prevented someone from being murdered. This is context where the quote "He who is without sin cast the first stone" comes from. Do not judge a religion by those who violate its teachings. Also bear in mind that many victims of the Inquisition were Protestant Christians.
It might be nice to imagine that 200 years of having to live under secular government would have bred a new kind of non-murderous Christian in America, but since I'd be betting my life on it, I don't care to try to put it to the test.
I would certainly say that the United States is the home of quite a few Christians. I don't see any type of murderous uprising. In fact to insinuate that Christians are naturally murderers would be offensive if applied to any other people group.
Back to the topic at hand. The defining event that created all of the fossils in the first place was the global flood. The Bible clearly states that there was a global extinction event in the recent past. Fossils cannot even be created without the presence of flowing water. Scientists seem to ignore the fact that the ground that they find the fossils in is sedimentary rock! (created from sediment settling from water) All you have to do is look at any downcutting on any expressway anywhere in the world and you will find sedimentary rock laid down in long consistent layers; no matter how high you go! Even to the Himalayas. Not laid down in millions of years as is supposed, but during a catastrophic event. The t. rex in question was rapidly buried and concreted in situ. That is the only way you would find tissue. I personally don't care if people believe in creation or not; I find it amazing that scientists ignore clear evidence of a catastrophe within human history.
Scientists will be astounded when they find that they have DNA, because they are already assuming that it would be long since decayed. I just hope that everyone is openminded enough to at least consider the evidence that the has been correct.
John A. Calhoun! Did you used to be Ted Holden?
I also will be interested in any carbon dating of the t. rex tissue. Since it was never inundated by water, we should be able to get an unambiguous date. I don't know of any way that tissue could survive in this state for 10s of millions of years. That truly is hard to believe.
Also I mean't to say "I just hope that everyone is openminded enough to at least consider the evidence that the Bible has been correct."
(oops. don't want to leave out the inspiration for my next murderous rampage!)
Phillip you made an excellent point when remarking about atheism. Atheism has clearly been the most murderous ideology know to man. And we aren't talking about ignorant people from hundreds of years ago; we're talking about TENS OF MILLIONS murdered by Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot and the like within our parents' or grandparents' lifetimes. BUT I don't hear anyone decrying the clear dangers of atheism in the way that Christianity has been. This, in my opinion, is clear hypocrisy.
John A. Calhoun! Did you used to be Ted Holden?
I don't recall ever being someone other than myself. (... but then those mysterious blackouts ... hmmmm ...)
Outsiders have no reason to care what a religion teaches, only what its cultists do. If they kill outsiders, that's way more important that what they say they think.
I was not, by the way, restricting my comments to the Roman church. Southern Baptists, when they held the civil power, also turned to murder.
I am amazed how much effort Phillip and Creationists in general are investing in protecting the literality of the Bible. They are ready even to discuss common sense and science! Why? I accept that Galileo vs the Holy Office was an aberration. The greatest successes of Christianity in the last 400 years were achieved when the Bible was joined with scientific books. China and Japan were opened up by Jesuit missionaries who were great scientists themselves. In my times, the best schools and universities used to be run by Christian organizations. The best hospitals. As the new Pope said, it is up to natural sciences to explain the world, the Church operates in the moral sphere, where science has nothing to say. All the new ethical studies chairs in the universities have nothing to say, are totally lost, and they know it. But argueing with professional scientists on things of their trade, like dating fossils, will surely lead you to untenable positions, even ludicrous statements, when all that is totally unnecessary. In my times, many of my friends, including most Jews, used to send their children to schools run by Christian religious organizations instead the State schools (it was in Latin America), because they were the best, but I am sure they could never accept their children being indoctrinated against science. There is a limit, and it is common sense.
P.S.: I remember some smartass schoolboys who pointed out the internal contradictions and absurdities of the Bible. How could the teacher, a cultured monk, believe in it? His answer: Should the Bible be clear and obvious, believing in it would require no faith. But faith requires to believe in a mistery, in things unexplainable. I never heard anything remotely in conflict with science till this American dinosaur in the ark nonsense.
Best anti-evolution evidence yet!
Soft tissue inside a T rex's thigh bone, found encased in Montana sandstone in 2003, and secular evolutionists are still closed-mindedly holding to the bone being 70 million years old. Like it wouldn't have completely decayed in 70 million years. This is the best anti-evolutiion evidence yet. Carbon-date the bone, as others have been, and they'll find it in the thousands of years, not millions. A couple of years ago, evidence was discovered that dinosaurs became extinct from flooding. Egyptian and Mesopotamian civilizations were wiped out about 2300 BC, exactly the time the Bible puts the global Flood. Dinosaurs were wiped out then too. The oldest village settlements in the world are just west of Jerusalem and are about 6000 years old, about the same age as the oldest city in the world, Jericho, just east of Jerusalem. Egyptian and Mesopotamian cities date to 3500 BC. Yes, "God created the heavens and the earth" 13.7 and 4.5 billion years ago, respectively. Then beginning in 3970 BC, over the first four years (the creation "week" was seven years long, as per The Book of Jubilees) He began to move the earth from a more distant orbit into its present orbit, explaining the ice ages and precluding evolution. And if hominids have been around for 50-100,000 years, why were there not wall-to-wall hominids? Oh, right, the ice ages, for which science has no explanation. When are we going to wake up to the truth of the Bible?
Don't be ridiculous. Of course carbon-dating something will give it a young age, in the tens of thousands of years -- it's only good for dates in that range!
The bone is in rock that has been dated to 70 million years. It is turned to stone itself. There are tiny fragments of stuff imbedded deep within it that have some curious properties...but they are most definitely not intact.
What I always find perplexing with people who think scientific evidence supports the accuracy of what they think the Bible says is how this coincides with the 'mystery of faith'. If the scientific evidence actually indicated the Earth is only 6000 years old for example, or that every species was created as-is and has not evolved, I would think the need for faith would largely evaporate; the evidence would strongly suggest that there is something supernatural going on and would lend some credence to what they think the Bible says and that God exists, et al. The usual response I've heard from Christians as to why God doesn't make it obvious he exists is that he wants us to have faith. If the evidence showed that all the species on earth were created as-is at one moment in time, it seems like we'd be crossing over from faith to rational deduction.
Getting back to T-rex, why is this one instance of soft tissue being found evidence that it is not millions of years old, but the fact that all other T-rex bones have no soft tissue is not evidence that they ARE millions of years old?
Clive,
science can explain glacial periods very well. It finds it harder to explain what exactly causes ice ages, because there have only been about four and each has been caused by different circumstances. In the current ice age, however, there are very concrete scientific explanations for the cycle of glacial and interglacial periods. There are several competing theories around, but they all explain the cycles well and have some predictive power.
John,
Mao and Stalin didn't murder people because of atheism. When the crusaders killed people, they killed them because they were not Christian. When the various powers that fought World War One killed one another's people, they did so not because of religion but because of nationality; hence, nobody accuses Christianity of causing WW1. Similarly, Stalin killed people because they opposed his regime or because he suspected them of doing so or because they were Ukrainians, but he didn't kill them because they were religious. Mao killed people who clinged to old traditions, including Chinese religions, but these were a tiny minority of the people he killed, on the order of less than one percent. Pol Pot killed people so indiscriminantly and for so many reasons you can't honestly fault atheism: he killed not only monks but also teachers, intellectuals, professionals, and in general people who were educated beyond elementary school.
Furthermore, all of these examples come from one ideology that most atheists oppose. Communism has killed many people. Liberalism is as anti-communist as it is anti-conservative. Modern Christian fundamentalists have an ideological affinity to the Christian murderers of past times whereas modern atheists have no such affinity to atheist murderers. The adoption of a liberal program bears no risk of decay into communism, whereas the adoption of a Christian fundamentalist program is guaranteed to result in mass murder.
This dinosaur obsession is becoming too long. Should I and the rest of the village tomorrow morning watch dinosaurs marching down the main street, the spectacle would do nothing to my conviction in evolution. The Coleocanth fish was given up as long extinguished, but some were catched alive, so what? Evolution is a mechanism observed in the living world, and it can and was modelled on computer, and it can be played out once and again with all kind of self-reproducing thingies, not necessarily made of DNA. There are even computer games simulating evolution. It is such a small deal that my daughter Naomi understood the working of evolution at age nine, not that she cares. Evolution is our best explanation of the living world, us included. Did Darwin led to Hitler or Stalin? In my opinion, no. And anyway, evolution was simultaneously discovered by Darwin and Wallace, and if not them, it would have emerged sooner or later, because it is so obvious. Well, I am making it even longer so I will stop here.
Harry Eagar wrote :
Philip, a norm is what people normally do.And people don't normally burn witches. So your point is?
Harry Eagar wrote :
Anything done 50,000 times is normal behavior.Not if it is not done more than that. Even taking the "worst case" figure of 400 years, that still leaves 1600 years of Christianity when they didn't burn witches. Why is 400 out of 2000 "the norm"?
Harry Eagar wrote :
To borrow a trope from Oscar Wilde, to murder one harmless old lady might be an accident, but to do it over and over begins to look like a concept.Which it was, for a limited period.
Harry Eagar wrote :
Since I have sat through several dozen exorcisms conducted by members of the largest Christian church in my county, you cannot tell me that was then and this is now.What have exorcisms to do with burning witches? They are two different things.
Harry Eagar wrote :
History affords no instances of a time/place when Christianity had the civil power and did not use to to murder heretics.What about (for example) countries in recent times that have had Christian leadership? Such as the U.S.A. over the past 200 years? I'm not saying of course that you won't find any single example (there are always exceptions and always individuals that go against the norm), but murdering heretics is not the norm for Christianity. At least not for protestantism, which in the past has itself suffered persecution for its beliefs.
Harry Eagar wrote :
It might be nice to imagine that 200 years of having to live under secular government would have bred a new kind of non-murderous Christian in America, but since I'd be betting my life on it, I don't care to try to put it to the test.That "secular government" has for the most part been influenced by Christian principles.
John A. Calhoun wrote:
The defining event that created all of the fossils in the first place was the global flood. The Bible clearly states that there was a global extinction event in the recent past. Fossils cannot even be created without the presence of flowing water.John, it's good to have your input here. But I'll just clarify some things you said there. First, Creationists don't say that the flood created all the fossils. The vast majority, but not all. Second, in talking about the flood, the Bible says that all land-dwelling, air-breathing creatures not on the ark died. But as there were examples of each kind on the ark, it wasn't actually an extinction event. Third, I don't know where you are coming from in saying that fossils cannot be created without flowing water. What I suspect you meant is that fossils cannot be created unless buried quickly, and the geological evidence indicates that this happened on a vast scale, thus it was something catastrophic. And, of course, almost all fossils are in sedimentary rock, as you indicated.
Harry Eagar wrote:
Outsiders have no reason to care what a religion teaches, only what its cultists do.I thought that we were talking about mainstream religion, not cults. Or was that your underhanded way of ridiculing mainstream religions by using loaded and incorrect terms?
jaimito wrote:
I am amazed how much effort Phillip and Creationists in general are investing in protecting the literality of the Bible.I'm amazed at how determined evolutionists are to protect their fairy tale. They are determined to censor evidence for creation from science journals and the education system, even protesting if a school board so much as suggests that evolution should be approached with an open mind! And so what if this dinosaur fossil turns out to be young? Other species known from the fossil record only from the alleged time of the dinosaurs have been found still living, yet that didn't destroy evolution (as you yourself subsequently acknowledge). How would it affect evolution if dinosaurs were found to be around recently? The fact is, it wouldn't, but because evidence for recent dinosaurs appears to provide support for the creationary view, evolutionists are quick to rush to the defence of evolution, as can be seen on this page.
jaimito wrote:
They are ready even to discuss common sense and science!Creationists have always been ready to discuss common sense and science. To suggest otherwise is just one more of the many unwarranted slurs that creationists have to suffer with from the ignorant sceptical community. Most early scientists (and many current scientists are creationists. Modern science developed in a mindset of there being a consistent God with a creation worth studying. In other words, modern science developed because of creationary views!
jaimito wrote:
As the new Pope said, it is up to natural sciences to explain the world, the Church operates in the moral sphere, where science has nothing to say.If the pope said that with reference to origins, he was wrong. The Bible provides the history of the world, and science does not have the past to observe or test. And belief in evolution (not science, admittedly) does affect people's morals.
jaimito wrote:
But argueing with professional scientists on things of their trade, like dating fossils, will surely lead you to untenable positions, even ludicrous statements, when all that is totally unnecessary.But what if those "arguing with professional scientists on things of their trade" are other professional scientists in the same field? There are many creationary scientists that do just that.
jaimito wrote:
...I am sure they could never accept their children being indoctrinated against scienceYet it appears to be nothing more than a bigoted assumption on your part that Christian schools would do that, because you wrongly equate creationism with anti-science.
jaimito wrote:
P.S.: I remember some [smart alec] schoolboys who pointed out the internal contradictions and absurdities of the Bible. How could the teacher, a cultured monk, believe in it? His answer: Should the Bible be clear and obvious, believing in it would require no faith. But faith requires to believe in a mistery, in things unexplainable. I never heard anything remotely in conflict with science till this American dinosaur in the ark nonsense.There are no internal contradictions and absurdities in the Bible, and I'm sorry that the monk was so indoctrinated by humanism or whatever to not be able to point that out. Faith is trust, based on evidence, not a belief in impossible things. And I notice that you ridicule the idea of dinosaurs on the ark without offering any reason whatsoever for it being "nonsense".
Just for the record in case anybody assumes otherwise, I don't agree with a fair bit of what clivedcampbell wrote.
PZ Myers wrote:
Don't be ridiculous. Of course carbon-dating something will give it a young age, in the tens of thousands of years -- it's only good for dates in that range!Incorrect. (And this is one point that clivedcampbell wrote that I agree with.) Carbon-dating determines how old the item is by how much C14 is left. After about 50 or 60 thousand years, there will be none left (not measurably anyway). Therefore the theoretical upper limit of C14 dating is 50 to 60 thousand years. If it is possible to measure C14 in the sample, it shows that the item is not that old.
Dave wrote:
What I always find perplexing with people who think scientific evidence supports the accuracy of what they think the Bible says is how this coincides with the 'mystery of faith'.That's because you have a mistaken idea of what faith is. See this article on what faith really is.
Dave wrote:
If the scientific evidence actually indicated the Earth is only 6000 years old for example, or that every species was created as-is and has not evolved, I would think the need for faith would largely evaporate; ...But you are putting forward an impossible scenario. Science only has the present to observe and study. So, as creationists have been pointing out for years, science is unable to speak with authority on what happened in the past. Therefore you have to have faith (trust) in someone who was there and recorded it for posterity. Which is what the Bible claims to be.
Dave wrote:
...the evidence would strongly suggest that there is something supernatural going on and would lend some credence to what they think the Bible says and that God exists, et al.And that is exactly what you do find. We observe that life only comes from life, that every effect has a greater cause, that the universe is running down. Evolution and the Big Bang idea propose that these observations did not always apply, whereas the Biblical record is consistent with them. So the evidence does suggest something supernatural going one, and does lend more than some credence to the Biblical record, but many people's religious beliefs (e.g. atheism) prevent them from acknowledging that evidence.
Dave wrote:
The usual response I've heard from Christians as to why God doesn't make it obvious he exists is that he wants us to have faith. If the evidence showed that all the species on earth were created as-is at one moment in time, it seems like we'd be crossing over from faith to rational deduction.That may be why God doesn't make it so patently obvious that we would have no choice but to accept it, because if we have no choice, then He has taken away our free will. But not giving us no choice is a long way from not supplying ample evidence.
Dave wrote:
Getting back to T-rex, why is this one instance of soft tissue being found evidence that it is not millions of years old, but the fact that all other T-rex bones have no soft tissue is not evidence that they ARE millions of years old?Because although soft tissue could not survive for millions of years, there is no guarantee that it will survive for even a couple of thousand years. So creationism explains both the soft tissue and the lack of soft tissue, whereas evolutionary ages explains only the latter.
Alon Levy wrote:
Mao and Stalin didn't murder people because of atheism.I disagree. They murdered people because their Marxist beliefs (Marxism being a form of atheism) taught that the ethics of the Bible (including "you shall not murder") were to be thrown out, and that was was "right" was whatever it took to achieve the Marxist goals, even if people had to die in the process. And of course Christianity was an enemy of Marxism, so plenty of Christians were murdered as a result.
Alon Levy wrote:
When the crusaders killed people, they killed them because they were not Christian.To start with at least, the crusades were to liberate Palestine from the invading Muslims. That is, it was a territorial dispute.
When the various powers that fought World War One killed one another's people, they did so not because of religion but because of nationality; hence, nobody accuses Christianity of causing WW1.
Alon Levy wrote:
Furthermore, all of these examples come from one ideology that most atheists oppose.The ideology is Marxism, which according to one report, is the ideology of 10,000 professors on American campuses.
Communism has killed many people.
Alon Levy wrote:
Modern Christian fundamentalists have an ideological affinity to the Christian murderers of past times ...Except that modern Christian "fundamentalists" are "fundamentally" opposed to murder. Big difference.
Alon Levy wrote:
...whereas modern atheists have no such affinity to atheist murderers.No?
Alon Levy wrote:
The adoption of a liberal program bears no risk of decay into communism, whereas the adoption of a Christian fundamentalist program is guaranteed to result in mass murder.Pure, unadulterated, offensive, nonsense.
jaimito wrote:
Evolution is a mechanism observed in the living world, ...What do you mean by "evolution"? Goo-to-you evolution, one creature turning into a very different creature, new genetic information arising, has not been observed.
jaimito wrote:
There are even computer games simulating evolution.And there are computer simulations of evolution not occurring. So what? Besides, those computer simulations, take note, were developed by intelligent (human) beings. What does that fit better with? Evolution--that life developed by chance, or creation--that life was designed by an intelligent being?
jaimito wrote:
Evolution is our best explanation of the living world, us included.Really?
jaimito wrote:
Did Darwin led to Hitler or Stalin? In my opinion, no.Hitler and Stalin were both keen evolutionists, and incorporated those ideas in their beliefs. If you are saying that it did not inevitable lead to Hitler and Stalin, you may be right, but evolution was clearly integral to their thinking.
All religions are cults, Philip.
You may imagine that yours -- whichever of the 23,000 brands you buy -- is more respectable than all of the others, but outsiders see the same thing -- ridiculous superstitions based (in the case of Christianity and Judaism) on the vile ravings of a bunch of ignorant goatwallopers.
It is hard for me, a father, to imagine anyone worshipping a god who tells fathers to kill their sons, but there you have it -- millions and millions of people do.
The United States of America has a secular government, though most of its citizens subscribe to one or another of the various cults (and despise the outsiders). See Article VI of the Constitution.
Phillip, your tenacity deserves a better cause! Allow me to improve on your last comment:
(1) Stalin was against evolution. He branded Darwin an idealist (in Marxian it means wrong, against the flow of history and on the waiting list for execution) and Lamarck, Darwin's opponent, a materialist (that is, right). He and Lysenko purged (killed) all biologist they could catch, destroying Russian agriculture by the way. Stalin definitely did not follow evolution, on the contrary, believed in the hereditary transmission of aquired characters. Lamarck says if you train hard and develope your muscles, your son will be born stronger. That sounds historically progressive, but unfortunately it is untrue. No one can accuse Stalin of believing in evolution, and his political decisions - like exterminating the Ukrainian kulak class of prosperous anticommunist farmers - cannot be connected with any biological concept.
(2) Regarding Hitler, he was a failed graphic arts student, and received his biological ideas from the end of century Viennese lumpen (dropout) environment (he resided a long time in public charity hostels). He had a special horror of siphylis that he believed hereditary and purposefully spread by you-know-who. His ideas of a nebolous mystic German volk were not inspired by Darwin.
Therefore, there is no connection between Darwin/biology/science and mass murder. On the other hand, not a few massacres are credited to religious fanatism and hysteria.
I'll jump back in here for one post. Re carbon-dating dinosaur bones, read http://www.worldbydesign.org/research/c14dating/datingdinosaurs.html. I agree with the author that life has been around for just under 6000 years, but not the universe and earth. They have been around for 13.7 and 4.5 B years, respectively. In fact, the fact that the universe had a beginning in the big bang and is not eternal and infinite has caused many scientists to believe in God, an Initiator. Stephen Hawking is one. Many others have come to believe in God because of the Intelligent Design (a fairly new movement from which this article comes) of the universe and of nature.
Say, one other comment about taking these radiocarbon dates with lots of skepticism. Recently, a tiny skull, claimed to be 18,000 years old and tiny bones, claimed to be 13,000 years old, made big news. I suspect they are simply the remains of children, small humans or pygmies, but secular evolutionists, because of the dating, insist they are from a hominid line different than the line from which came homo sapiens.
But did you read about the Neanderthal Man fiasco? A claimed 36,000 years old skeleton was re-dated to 7,500 years old, another claimed 23,300 years old one to 3,300 years old, and a claimed 27,400 years old skull to 1750 AD! Google-search it.
So view the claimed 18,000 years old date of the small skull and the claimed 13,000 years old bones with lots of skepticism. And open your mind to the possibility that we have been duped by Darwin and his followers. (Not to mention the devil.)
...The fact that the universe had a beginning in the big bang and is not eternal and infinite has caused many scientists to believe in God, an Initiator... Stephen Hawking is one.Um, who gives a shite?
That is, what does Stephen Hawking's personal faith have to do with the mountains of undeniable evidence in support of Evolutionary Theory? The "theory" you provide is ideological conspiracy theory, and your lying/arm-waving routine will likely not convince anyone.
Many others have come to believe in God because of the Intelligent Design (a fairly new movement from which this article comes) of the universe and of nature.Again, who gives a shite? How does this legitimize anything you are saying? People have forever believed in stupid things, my friend.
I suspect they are simply the remains of children, small humans or pygmies...Ah, now I understand perfectly.
This is a classic example of Creationistic arrignorance (an arrogance/ignorance combo move). He/She dreams up some uneducated and wildly speculative hypothesis, and without a shred of self-contempt goes on to present this whimsical notion as Truth...
...all the while assuming that the scientists - who actually did the research and understand the mechanisms and processes involved - hasn't ever before taken into consideration their (routinely elementary) "brilliant insight."
Why would a scientist want to publish false data, when he/she knows that some other scientist will eventually discover the true answers?
...But secular evolutionists, because of the dating, insist they are from a hominid line different than the line from which came homo sapiens.Sigh. The fossil's "phylogenetic" placement has nothing to do with a scientist's belief/nonbelief in God and little to do with the radiometric dating of the bone material.
Please stop being so lazy, and do some research!
Much of the analysis done was of the comparative anatomy of the bones, to bone fragments of other known species (i.e. known to be of a "non-sapiens" lineage). You'd be surprised how much we can tell about a an organism just by looking at the little bumps and ridges and squigglies on their preserved selves!
Science is objective; all of your commonsensical ideas have been thoroughly researched, and a relatively firm concensus has been reached. Of course, there is still much science to do, and the final story may still be out of our grasp.
There will never be a time when scientists say, "This is the final answer." Certainly, some things are presumed so as to allow for the advancement of knowledge; an evolved knowledge bank allows us to do just that (without worry of circular argumentation). Accordingly, if any of the current scientific theories do fail (and surely they will), it will be a scientist who is the discoverer - and his/her findings will be grounded in empirical findings, NOT on mere daydreams.
...And open your mind to the possibility that we have been duped by Darwin and his followers. (Not to mention the devil.)If Darwin had been wrong, we all would be making "Darwinian" jokes along with always delightful "Lemarckian" just-so-story jokes. Trust me, I can already think of several jokes to make fun of the Failed Theory of Natural Selection [sic].
Another thing... On behalf of my fellow scientists and laypersons, I would like to send out (down?) a big "Thank You" to Satan for the wonderful gift he has given us - The gift of being able to understand the Natural world around us.
Thanks, buddy!
The devil?
Now there's a scientific concept.
What are you, six years old?
Harry -
I was referring to clivedcampbell's quote (blockquoted), where he implied that we [Evolutionists] have been "duped" by the devil, as well as Darwin and his followers.
I can only assume that by "duped" he meant "gave us an accurate biological theory."
So, while I obviously owe much credit to Darwin (and others), I just wanted to point out that (apparently) we should also be thanking Satan, as well, for allowing us a better understanding of our beautifully complex natural world.
Get it, that's how we were duped...we were duped into knowing some really cool stuff about biology!
Fine, I guess it wasn't that funny. Then again, I wasn't the one who said it. Meh!
Jeebus and Harry, actually I am 52 and think Absolute Evil, personified in the Devil, and Absolute Good, personified in God, is scientific in both hard and soft science. E.g., on the soft science side, why is man a moral being, with a conscience, recognizing good and evil, and experiencing guilt? If we simply evolved in the classic "survival of the fittest" struggle, then there is no Absolute Being, holding Absolutes, and everything is relative to me as an individual and survival. If you competed for my survival, Jeebus and Harry, I could murder you and there would be nothing wrong with that, because Man would be the Absolute, and so anything in them would be within the law of nature. But we all know and experience that this is not true. There is something Higher that is pulling us to perfection and beauty, to faith, hope and love. That something Higher is God and He exists in Trinity because He is love: Father-Son-Spirit paralleled by Man-Woman-Children who possess His image, though fallen.
But fallenness means that I will never convince you of this or creationism unless God gives you eyes to see. Your faith, and it is faith, is evolutionary secular humanism and mine is creational Christianity. This topic is one of many examples of how utterly committed you are to your godless faith in spite of overwhelming and powerful evidence against it in many sciences: i.e., that you can believe that soft tissues, even though inside a T-rex thigh bone, encased in sandstone, would not have decayed in 68 million years is utterly absurd and idiotic. But understandable since you will not believe in God. You will die in your sins.
Well, I'm convinced. Sign me up for Jesus! I'll take two.
Mr Campbell has missed the obvious explanation:
This tyrannosaur was obviously a saint, it's tissues incorruptible. I expect its bones to be encased in an ornate gilt box and paraded through town on its very own feast day.
Seriously, though the earnest stupidity of his comments are sufficient to persuade me that he is deranged. What exactly does happen to soft tissues that are sealed inside dense stone, isolated from air and bacteria? I don't know. I'd like to see experiments done.
Oh, and no one thinks this tissue is unchanged. There are tiny scraps that retain some of the superficial characteristics of soft tissue, but we haven't yet seen any chemical analysis of them—the article cited above only reports on appearance and texture. But I've got an open mind: I don't know what the conditions were inside that bone, nor do I know exactly what the investigators have in their hands right now.
clivedcampbell
You will die in your sins.For such a mindnumbingly laughable statement, I can only respond by quoting one of the great minds in contemporary television...
Peter Griffin (Family Guy), while teaching Sunday School:
"And if you're pure of heart indeed, you will go to a beautiful place called Heaven...
...Nah, I'm yankin' ya! You just rot in the ground."
Harry Eagar wrote:
All religions are cults, Philip.So have you written to all the dictionaries, etc. to inform them that they are all wrong? Beside, you had already referred to religions, and could quite easily have referred to the "members" of those religions, but you chose to use the loaded word "cultists". Clearly you are attempting to denigrate rather than put forward an argument of substance.
Harry Eager continued with his vilification:
...outsiders see the same thing -- ridiculous superstitions based (in the case of Christianity and Judaism) on the vile ravings of a bunch of ignorant goatwallopers.In other words, "I've got nothing worthwhile to say, so I'll just ridicule and denigrate".
jaimito wrote:
(1) Stalin was against evolution. He branded Darwin an idealist (in Marxian it means wrong, against the flow of history and on the waiting list for execution) and Lamarck, Darwin's opponent, a materialist (that is, right). He and Lysenko purged (killed) all biologist they could catch, destroying Russian agriculture by the way. Stalin definitely did not follow evolution, on the contrary, believed in the hereditary transmission of aquired characters.On the contrary, Stalin became an atheist upon reading Darwin and recommended the book to a friend. Lamarkism is not opposed to evolution, but is a (now discredited) mechanism of evolution; the method that Darwin adopted, from memory.
jaimito wrote:
(2) Regarding Hitler, he was a failed graphic arts student, and received his biological ideas from the end of century Viennese lumpen (dropout) environment (he resided a long time in public charity hostels). He had a special horror of siphylis that he believed hereditary and purposefully spread by you-know-who. His ideas of a nebolous mystic German volk were not inspired by Darwin.None of that except for the last sentence--a claim, not an argument--is relevant to the question. However, Sir Arthur Kieth wrote: "The German Fuhrer . . . consciously sought to make the practice of Germany conform to the theory of evolution." and "The leader of Germany is an evolutionist, not only in theory, but, as millions know to their cost, in the rigor of its practice.".
Jeebus wrote in response to clivedcampbell:
That is, what does Stephen Hawking's personal faith have to do with the mountains of undeniable evidence in support of Evolutionary Theory? The "theory" you provide is ideological conspiracy theory, and your lying/arm-waving routine will likely not convince anyone.As opposed to your statement by assertion? Claiming "mountains of undeniable evidence" does not make it so, especially when so many people deny it!
Jeebus also wrote:
How does this legitimize anything you are saying? People have forever believed in stupid things, my friend.I know. Like evolution. And how does anything that you are saying legitimise anything?
Jeebus added:
Ah, now I understand perfectly.As opposed to how you ridicule and denigrate, along with name-calling, but offer no actual arguments? And not only that, you misrepresent the situation as one of scientists vs. creationists, when the truth is that there are many (albeit a minority of) scientists that are creationists. But misrepresenting reality seems to be the norm for anti-creationists.
This is a classic example of Creationistic arrignorance (an arrogance/ignorance combo move). He/She dreams up some uneducated and wildly speculative hypothesis, and without a shred of self-contempt goes on to present this whimsical notion as Truth...
...all the while assuming that the scientists - who actually did the research and understand the mechanisms and processes involved - hasn't ever before taken into consideration their (routinely elementary) "brilliant insight."
Jeebus wrote:
Why would a scientist want to publish false data, when he/she knows that some other scientist will eventually discover the true answers?Creationists don't claim that evolutionary scientists (as opposed to all scientists) are deliberately falsifying data (although there are exceptions!). You appear to have read that into clivedcampbell's comments, because he didn't claim that. Rather, evolutionists are working in a particular paradigm that colours their views.
Jeebus wrote:
Science is ob jective;...Yes, but we are talking about evolution, not science.
Jeebus wrote:
... all of your commonsensical ideas have been thoroughly researched, and a relatively firm concensus has been reached.Appeal to popularity is not a valid form or argument. But thanks for acknowledging that creation is scientific in the sense that it can be tested.
Jeebus wrote:
Of course, there is still much science to do, and the final story may still be out of our grasp.So creation could still be true?
Jeebus wrote:
There will never be a time when scientists say, "This is the final answer." Certainly, some things are presumed so as to allow for the advancement of knowledge; an evolved knowledge bank allows us to do just that (without worry of circular argumentation). Accordingly, if any of the current scientific theories do fail (and surely they will), it will be a scientist who is the discoverer - and his/her findings will be grounded in empirical findings, NOT on mere daydreams.So creation is still a scientific possibility?
Jeebus wrote:
Another thing... On behalf of my fellow scientists and laypersons, I would like to send out (down?) a big "Thank You" to Satan for the wonderful gift he has given us - The gift of being able to understand the Natural world around us.As I have already stated, it was belief in the Creator God that led to modern science.
Beyond that this page has degenerated into further ridicule purely because the bibliosceptics here have a different worldview to clivedcampbell. He may be getting off-topic, but that doesn't warrant the denigration of all Christians that follows in response.
__________________________________
PZ Myers, is it possible to do anything about the problem that putting the word "object" (or any word with that sequence of letters, such as "objective") in a block quote, trashes that quote?
Phillip, Lamarkism is indeed a mechanism of evolution, mea culpa, mea gravissima culpa. Regarding Stalin, he was rebelling against the sadistic (and probably pederastic) monks of the institute where he was studying, and no lecture of Darwin turned him to atheism. He was not interested in biology but in destroying the Tzarist colonial empire. The only thing that wrote was on nationalities. Regarding Hitler, he never mentioned evolution except in the lumpen sense he picked up in charity hostels, of "dog eats dog" or "survival of the strongest". Darwin described a natural phenomenon he observed, he certainly never proposed to "improve" upon natural selection. In general, political leaders are no ideologues, they just pick up bits enabling them to talk fluently on any subject. I feel that one most powerful emotional appeal of creationism is the idea that atheism and darwinism are at the source of the horrors of the 20th Century, and that religion is required to prevent those evils in the future. In order to protect and increase the authority of religion and the Bible, you seem to feel necessary to destroy evolution and to downgrade science in general. I repeat, Phillip, this is not effective, firstly because biological science is unrelated to those political horrors, and secondly because science is a method that works exceedingly well and produces results. All, absolutely all claims of supernatural intervention have been debunked. No one could ever reproduce the miracles described in the Bible. Personally, I am not against religion at all, but up to a limit, which is when it starts causing ignorance (like teaching creationism in schools as an alternative to evolution) and causing actual harm (like people going to faith medicine men instead of conventional doctors).
Philip J. Rayment:
Claiming "mountains of undeniable evidence" does not make it so, especially when so many people deny it!You're right, it doesn't matter whether I say there is lots of evidence. But, I don't see where it would have been appropriate to start spouting off references to biology journals. The data is ubiquitous and is constantly out on display within these threads, and the fact that some people can't accept it - simply due to ideological belief - does not falsify it in the least.
Philip J. Rayment:
I know [that people have forever believed in stupid things]... like evolution. And how does anything that you are saying legitimise anything?You seemed to feel quite threatened by evolution. Do you think we're trying to disprove God? Yes, it must be scary to be having your entire world being pulled out from under you... by the Soulless Horror of Science (copyright PZ Myers)! Of course, if you re-read my posts, I never mentioned God (or not-God) as evidence for evolution, OR that I used not-God a priori when looking for scientific answers!
I don't want to get into the "compatibility of science and religion" debate, but my opinion is that good science can be done by taking aim at the pitfalls of hell, or by yearning to understand the world provided by God.
Again, nothing I say can necessarily "legitimize" evolutionary findings. But still, what evidence should I have presented after hearing,
"I think Absolute Evil, personified in the Devil, and Absolute Good, personified in God, is scientific in both hard and soft science."
Seriously. How does one quantify "evil" and "good"? What are the SI Units for "Devil"?
I'm not saying anything about whether the devil or god exist, but there is certainly no evidence that suggests they do. Even if there were anti-Devil/God data, I highly doubt that it would come from biology.
Philip J. Rayment:
As opposed to how you ridicule and denigrate, along with name-calling, but offer no actual arguments?Is it not arrogant and ignorant to assume that your uneducated and biased viewpoint is obviously more accurate and "perfect" than those who do (actual) biology for a living?
Please, why should I tiptoe around just because you think our data are disrespectful to your God? His ideas are nonscientific, and they should be exposed as such.
Philip J. Rayment:
Creationists don't claim that evolutionary scientists (as opposed to all scientists) are deliberately falsifying data...No, they don't come right out and say it, but that is also one of their favorite methods. However, as I mentioned above, to assume that scientists are just "ignoring" creationist lines of evidence and are "subjectively interpreting data" is a clever way of saying that scientists are biased and closed-minded. Which, of course, is pretty funny...
...especially coming from people who trust in the invisible (on the whole, not a terrible thing), yet selectively and unashamedly ignore the reality around them.
Philip J. Rayment:
Yes, but we are talking about evolution, not science.So, you agree that science is objective.
Evolutionary theory is exhibited through science, and thus is also objective.
Evolutionism is not a religion!
Philip J. Rayment, after quoting me with hilarious context:
So creation could still be true?Creation, the act of God poofing life into existance? Um, I honestly don't think that happened. I'm not sure how there ever could be evidence for Creation, so it will be tough to convince me. About creation, I can say that if it happened, God intended for life to evolve just as it has.
Philip J. Rayment:
As I have already stated, it was belief in the Creator God that led to modern science.I'm sorry, but this is a terrible argument and even worse logic. Of course, it's also ignorant of the role religion played in the development of science.
Yes, it was the Creator God that led to much of modern science. But, were any of these scientists putting God into their formulas? Were they establishing God constants? Were they taking into account God's supposed violation of causal closure?
No. They all thought of God as the ultimate "first cause." They all considered him to be an epiphenomenal puppet, that set things in motion, motion that would follow scientific (i.e. materialistic) laws.
Honestly, I couldn't care less about clivedcampbell's worldview. I have not denigrated Christians on this thread. My "criticisms" of Creationism lie not with their theistic beliefs, but their (non-)scientific hypotheses, and attempts to portray them as worthy of merit in the scientific community.
They do not.</b>
Phillip, following on your (correct) observation on Lamarck, how can a well-read person like you accept the literality of the Bible and at the same time, explain Jacob's animal breeding methods? Laban cheated Jacob out his salary (a share of newborn sheep), so Jacob cheated back on Laban by inducing the birth of white sheep, which were his according to the terms of their contract. The Bible tells us that Jacob applied clever genetics, placing white twigs in front of pregnant ewes. Now, we know quite a bit about sheep genetics: Jacob's method could never have worked. Since infancy I wonder how this story could have been accepted by generations of pastoralists with hands-on knowledge of sheep, and how continues being accepted as literal truth by educated people like you. Will you please illuminate me?
Philip, it is always worthwhile to point out that religion is evil, that your particular religion, especially, is a murderous racket whose disgusting god tells fathers to murder their sons -- and gets praised for it!
No lesson could be more valuable. It'd save you a lot of money; you wouldn't have to tithe to those crooks any more.
I'm agnostic about what was inside the bone. I think I'll wait for some competent persons to make observations and then formulate an hypothesis about what happened. Maybe it will even be a testable hypothesis.
Anyhow, I won't just make crap up like you do.
Third point: I understand that you would like to kill me, either way, either because if you didn't believe in your creepy god, there's nothing internal in you to restrain you; or because you do believe in your creepy god and he seems to always be telling his people to kill people like me, and they keep doing it.
But maybe my brother would respond by killing you. Or my cousin. Somebody in my family, anyway. No need for a god to figure that one out.
(Sorry, jeebus, it's hard to keep the woowoos straight without a scorecard.)
jaimito wrote:
Regarding Stalin, he was rebelling against the sadistic (and probably pederastic) monks of the institute where he was studying, and no lecture of Darwin turned him to atheism. He was not interested in biology but in destroying the Tzarist colonial empire. The only thing that wrote was on nationalities.What's biology got to do with evolution?
Seriously, even if he wasn't interested in the biology of evolution, his ideas were based on the principles of evolution. Rebelling against the monks may have been part of his motive, but Darwin provided the rationale.jaimito wrote:
Regarding Hitler, he never mentioned evolution except in the lumpen sense he picked up in charity hostels, of "dog eats dog" or "survival of the strongest".Whether he mentioned evolution by name is not the point. His ideas were clearly based on it, as admitted by Sir Arthur Keith in the quote I included in my last post.
jaimito wrote:
In order to protect and increase the authority of religion and the Bible, you seem to feel necessary to destroy evolution and to downgrade science in general.Evolutionists are doing their best to destroy the Biblical record of creation; I'm simply fighting back. And disagreeing with evolution is not downgrading science, which I have a high regard for.
jaimito wrote:
I repeat, Phillip, this is not effective,...Sorry, but it is proving to be effective.
jaimito wrote:
...firstly because biological science is unrelated to those political horrors,...Yes, but we're talking about evolution, not biological science.
jaimito wrote:
...and secondly because science is a method that works exceedingly well and produces results.True. But evolution is a story about the past that is therefore beyond the scope of scientific observation, testing, and repeatability. Evolution is (claimed) history, not science.
jaimito wrote:
All, absolutely all claims of supernatural intervention have been debunked.Most would disagree with you, claiming instead that it is not possible to debunk claims of the supernatural, because the supernatural is not testable.
jaimito wrote:
No one could ever reproduce the miracles described in the Bible.And who claims they could? The miracles are claimed to be acts of God, not of humans, so nobody would expect us mere mortals to be able to reproduce them. Creationists don't claim that creation is scientific either, for the same reason that they deny that evolution is scientific. But it is the evolutionists that claim miracles as scientific, such as the miracle that new genetic information can arise for no reason and without an intelligence, despite observations that this doesn't happen.
jaimito wrote:
Personally, I am not against religion at all, but up to a limit, which is when it starts causing ignorance (like teaching creationism in schools as an alternative to evolution) ...And how does teaching creation cause ignorance? As I have repeatedly said, a creationary outlook was what gave rise to modern science. Rather, belief in evolution encourages ignorance. For example, evolutionary belief in so-called vestigial organs discouraged said organs being studied for a long time, because of the belief that they had no purpose.
jaimito wrote:
...and causing actual harm (like people going to faith medicine men instead of conventional doctors).Christianity encourages people to go to conventional doctors. One of the gospel writers was a doctor. Creationists made many of the medicinal discoveries, such as Joseph Lister and sanitary practices, Louis Pasteur and germs, Dr. Raymond Damadian and Magnetic Resonance Imaging. On the other hand, evolution has encouraged an over-willingness to remove organs such as the tonsils, on the belief that they are useless evolutionary leftovers (which is not to say that they shouldn't be removed if they really are causing a problem).
Jeebus wrote:
The data is ubiquitous and is constantly out on display within these threads, and the fact that some people can't accept it - simply due to ideological belief - does not falsify it in the least.Agree. Except that I say that of creation, not evolution. The evidence in this particular thread is more consistent with creation, as was tacitly acknowledged by the evolutionists who brought creation up in this thread.
Jeebus wrote:
Do you think we're trying to disprove God?Some are. Others are trying to undermine Him.
I'm skipping some of your post because it relates more to your reply to another poster with whom I don't fully agree.
Jeebus wrote:
I'm not saying anything about whether the devil or god exist, but there is certainly no evidence that suggests they do.There isn't? Many, many, people disagree. Our observations of the natural world lead us to understand that information only comes from an intelligent source. The only postulated intelligent source for the information of the DNA is God. That may not constitute proof of God, but it is certainly evidence. And that's just one example.
Jeebus wrote:
Is it not arrogant and ignorant to assume that your uneducated and biased viewpoint is obviously more accurate and "perfect" than those who do (actual) biology for a living?jaimito disagrees with you. He refers to me with the words "a creationist of your intelligence". Regardless, it is not just "my" viewpoint, but that of (some) "who do (actual) biology for a living"! Creation is believed by many very intelligent, well-educated people, including biologists. They may be in a minority, but it is a very significant minority, and you do your argument no favours to pretend that such do not exist.
Jeebus wrote:
Please, why should I tiptoe around just because you think our data are disrespectful to your God? His ideas are nonscientific, and they should be exposed as such.He is everyone's God, including those who don't acknowledge Him. I have no problem with you arguing that creation is wrong, but ridiculing and denigrating is not argument, and if anything demonstrates a lack of argument.
Jeebus wrote:
No, they don't come right out and say it, but that is also one of their favorite methods. However, as I mentioned above, to assume that scientists are just "ignoring" creationist lines of evidence and are "subjectively interpreting data" is a clever way of saying that scientists are biased and closed-minded. Which, of course, is pretty funny...Of course. All scientists are ob jective and infallible. My apologies for not acknowledging that. I guess that is why we have the frauds of Piltdown man and Haeckel, the journals that won't publish papers from creationary scientists because they are creationary, and the revision of previous interpretations. Before you jump, I'm not suggesting that there is anything wrong with revising interpretations, but it demonstrates that it is an interpretation, not an objective truth.
Jeebus wrote:
...especially coming from people who trust in the invisible (on the whole, not a terrible thing), yet selectively and unashamedly ignore the reality around them.And yet you have not demonstrated any cases of ignoring reality, as opposed to disagreeing with a theory.
Jeebus wrote:
So, you agree that science is ob jective.Of course. But that doesn't mean that all its practitioners are always objective.
Jeebus wrote:
Evolutionary theory is exhibited through science, and thus is also ob jective.Evolution is an explanation about the past to explain the present. Science does not have the past to observe and test, so evolution remains a story, not science.
Jeebus emphatically wrote:
Evolutionism is not a religion!Oh? Not according to some anti-creationists:
Professor Michael Ruse wrote:
Evolution is promoted by its practitioners as more than mere science. Evolution is promulgated as an ideology, a secular religion — a full-fledged alternative to Christianity, with meaning and morality. I am an ardent evolutionist and an ex-Christian, but I must admit that in this one complaint — and Mr Gish is but one of many to make it — the literalists are absolutely right. Evolution is a religion. This was true of evolution in the beginning, and it is true of evolution still today.
… Evolution therefore came into being as a kind of secular ideology, an explicit substitute for Christianity.
After Jeebus indicated that science is still open to further discoveries, I asked if creation could still be true. Jeebus responded:
Creation, the act of God poofing life into existance? Um, I honestly don't think that happened. I'm not sure how there ever could be evidence for Creation, so it will be tough to convince me. About creation, I can say that if it happened, God intended for life to evolve just as it has.Which avoided answering the question, instead offering an opinion on whether it was true. And in this post I have offered some evidence for creation.
Jeebus wrote:
Yes, it was the Creator God that led to much of modern science. But, were any of these scientists putting God into their formulas? Were they establishing God constants? Were they taking into account God's supposed violation of causal closure?What is the relevance of that? I have mentioned how a belief in the Creator God led to science. The point that other things might not have happened in a red herring.
Jeebus wrote:
No. They all thought of God as the ultimate "first cause." They all considered him to be an epiphenomenal puppet, that set things in motion, motion that would follow scientific (i.e. materialistic) laws.That's a contradiction. Materialism is the notion that matter is all that there is, i.e. that there is no supernatural. And neither did they consider God a puppet.
Jeebus wrote:
I have not denigrated Christians on this thread.I agree that you haven't much. But my comment in that regard was with reference to this that you wrote:
This is a classic example of Creationistic arrignorance (an arrogance/ignorance combo move). He/She dreams up some uneducated and wildly speculative hypothesis, and without a shred of self-contempt goes on to present this whimsical notion as Truth...I reckon that qualifies as denigration of creationists (and I didn't say that you denigrated Christians per se).
jaimito wrote:
Phillip, ... how can a well-read person like you accept the literality of the Bible and at the same time, explain Jacob's animal breeding methods? Laban cheated Jacob out his salary (a share of newborn sheep), so Jacob cheated back on Laban by inducing the birth of white sheep, which were his according to the terms of their contract. The Bible tells us that Jacob applied clever genetics, placing white twigs in front of pregnant ewes. Now, we know quite a bit about sheep genetics: Jacob's method could never have worked. Since infancy I wonder how this story could have been accepted by generations of pastoralists with hands-on knowledge of sheep, and how continues being accepted as literal truth by educated people like you. Will you please illuminate me?See here.
Harry Eagar wrote:
Philip, it is always worthwhile to point out that religion is evil, ...What's "evil"? The following was published today, but I have edited it slightly for this context:
First of all, please try to justify the concept of evil under your own evolutionary framework. I.e., if we are just rearranged pond scum, the result of survival of the fittest, then what could evil mean? What is the difference under your framework between a terrorist blowing up 3,000 people in the Twin Towers and a frog eating 3,000 flies? In fact, since under evolutionary theory your brain is just a piece of meat with neuronal connections, so even your moral sense is merely an illusion that provided survival advantage. The famous atheistic evolutionary propagandist Richard Dawkins agreed that evolution “leads to … a moral vacuum, in which their best impulses have no basis in nature” (see this exchange between Dawkins and Lanier). See also Bomb-building vs. the biblical foundation so you might understand what the moral argument is and what it is now.
Actually, I was in two minds about whether or not to respond to your post. It was so arrogant and rude that it doesn't deserve a response. On the other hand, it is so easy to answer, that I couldn't resist!
Harry Eager wrote:
...that your particular religion, especially, is a murderous racket ...Yep. That why is has a command, "You shall not murder"!
Harry Eager wrote:
...whose disgusting god tells fathers to murder their sons -- and gets praised for it!I guess that's why the Bible says, "Fathers, do not exasperate your children; instead, bring them up in the training and instruction of the Lord."
Harry Eager wrote:
Anyhow, I won't just make up ... like you do.And yet you have not demonstrated one thing that I have made up!
Harry Eager wrote:
Third point: I understand that you would like to kill me, ...Yes, as a good Christian, I will ignore that command against murder.
Harry Eager wrote:
...either way, either because if you didn't believe in your creepy god, there's nothing internal in you to restrain you; ...True, my belief that murder is wrong will not influence my decision to murder you one little bit.
Harry Eager wrote:
...or because you do believe in your creepy god and he seems to always be telling his people to kill people like me, and they keep doing it.Yep, that's why Christian-founded organisations like the Red Cross and World Vision are out there murdering people rather than trying to save their lives.
Harry Eager wrote:
But maybe my brother would respond by killing you. Or my cousin. Somebody in my family, anyway. No need for a god to figure that one out.Oops! I'd better be careful. God tells me that murder is wrong, but evolution teaches that we only got to be here by killing off the less-fit. So I have no reason to think that Harry's relatives would have any compunction against killing me!
(Except of course that, presumably, Harry lives in a society that's had a Christian background and that Christian values against murder are still held even by many non-Christians.)
Your silly book means nothing to me, Philip. I am among your god's unchosen, so I'd owe him nothing even if he did exist.
I just observe what Christians do. They murder.
Only when secularists obtain civil power, as in the United States, are Christians restrained from killing.
1,900 years of murdering Jews ought to cause Christians to examine their consciences, but, as you say, you are internally empty. You have to have something inside to have a conscience. It's a thing not even a god can give you.
Philip, I shall start by admitting that you are trying to answer all my questions and observations. Regarding Jacob's magical cattle breeding methods, I followed your link and learned that the Bible is so unclear and ambiguous that a clever and feasible interpretation of the story can be proposed. It was unwise on my side to enter an area I know only superficially.
Regarding Creationism, I thought it was such a nonsense that cannot be effective, but you countered saying that it is proving to be effective, and on reflexion, you may be right. People finds evolution very hard to digest, they dont like the idea that they rised up from the primordial mud through a senseless mechanism of natural selection and not by the hand of a great deity. Creationism offers an aesthetically more attractive explanation than blind evolution, and the Evangelium, I think, translates as "Good News". So I retract that Creationism is not effective, it is, people seems to like it.
The problem is that Creationism is wrong, untrue. Biological nature operates by evolution. There is no doubt about that among scientists and their explanation makes total sense. You say it is presumed history. I disagree, evolution is a mechanism that has predictive power and it can be and was modelled on computers, it simulates observed natural patterns, and it works and calculates the past and the future. It is untrue and childish to say that the past cannot be verified because no one was there to see it and take pictures. We have firsthand written history of the last 3 to 5 thousand years, history works logically and slowly, so we can easily extrapolate and work out what was going on even 10,000 years ago. And so on in evolution, in geology, in astronomy. In general, I get the impression that you do not deny scientific thought and therefore tend to avoid discussing them (except, may be, carbon dating).
The question is if we should teach the coming generations the truth of an indifferent universe, or the sweet hope of divine creation and eternal personal life. I am for teaching the truth. Anyway, when death becomes an immediate probability and reality turns unacceptable, people runs away from truth and looks for refuge in the (illusory) hope of religion. There is no chance that religion will ever disappear. But science may easily disappear so we need to strenghten and support it. For example, by teaching it in schools.
jaimito wrote the bits in boxes:
Philip, I shall start by admitting that you are trying to answer all my questions and observations.Thank you. The Bible instructs us to have an answer ready for those that question our faith, and I do try that. And I appreciate that, unlike one person in particular who is so "eagar" to keep throwing out accusations and insults and ignoring points made in return, you are trying to be fair and reasonable and actually discuss the issues.
Regarding Jacob's magical cattle breeding methods, I followed your link and learned that the Bible is so unclear and ambiguous that a clever and feasible interpretation of the story can be proposed. It was unwise on my side to enter an area I know only superficially.Yes, I suspect that was a good part of the problem. The Bible doesn't claim to tell us everything about everything, and a significant proportion of what the Bible records is history, including recording the evil, wrong, or simply mistaken things that people did. In reference to the incident with Jacob, you say that it is unclear and ambiguous, but I would respond by saying that the Bible was simply recording a historical event, not giving instruction on how to farm sheep. No, it wasn't an arbitrarily-chosen bit of history; there was a reason to recording this incident, but the reason was not one of teaching farming practices. The problem may be in not reading this incident in context.
Regarding Creationism, I thought it was such a nonsense that cannot be effective, but you countered saying that it is proving to be effective, and on reflexion, you may be right. People finds evolution very hard to digest, they dont like the idea that they rised up from the primordial mud through a senseless mechanism of natural selection and not by the hand of a great deity. Creationism offers an aesthetically more attractive explanation than blind evolution, and the Evangelium, I think, translates as "Good News". So I retract that Creationism is not effective, it is, people seems to like it.Except that in my opinion the reason it is proving effective is that it is intellectually satisfying. Creationists are reaching people who would otherwise not darken the door of a church. For example, I have a friend who was a science student and who, under the influence of friends and relatives, felt like becoming a Christian, but didn't, simply because he couldn't, in his words, "put my faith in a book that science has proved to be wrong". This was particularly with reference to evolution and the like. But material from creationists opened his mind to accept that science had not proved the Bible wrong. He is now a PhD and a Christian.
The problem is that Creationism is wrong, untrue.That's the crux of the question, isn't it? But have you really studied the evidence for creation and against evolution? Have you really looked at this issue from both sides and fairly weighed the evidence? The mass media, the education system, and science journals will give you lots of arguments for evolution, and you will hardly get any information from the other side unless you are prepared to go looking for it. Unless you have done that, are you really in a position to say that creation is wrong?
Biological nature operates by evolution.What do you mean by "evolution"? One of the problems with this debate is that evolutionists conflate a whole range of different things into that one word. I'll come back to this at the end of this post.
There is no doubt about that among scientists ...That is simply untrue. The majority view is that evolution is true, but there are many scientists that do question or reject evolution.
...and their explanation makes total sense.I, and many others, disagree.
You say it is presumed history. I disagree, evolution is a mechanism that has predictive power ...What has it predicted that has turned out to be true. Actually, you shouldn't answer that until we first of clarify just what you mean by "evolution".
...and it can be and was modelled on computers, it simulates observed natural patterns, and it works and calculates the past and the future.As I think I have already mentioned, computer modelling has also shown that evolution doesn't work. And computer modelling of evolution involves an inaccurate simulation at some point, such as Dawkin's model that had a pre-determined target phrase, unlike evolution that has no target to work towards.
It is untrue and childish to say that the past cannot be verified because no one was there to see it and take pictures. We have firsthand written history of the last 3 to 5 thousand years, history works logically and slowly, so we can easily extrapolate and work out what was going on even 10,000 years ago.We can? So if we had written history of only the last 2000 years, for example, we could extrapolate and learn about the start of the Roman empire? I doubt it, beyond trivial things like figuring that it must have started.
And so on in evolution, in geology, in astronomy.So, hypothetically, if 4300 years ago there was a one-off global flood, we could learn about that by extrapolation? How would we really learn about unique past events by extrapolation? Really, your suggestion of extrapolation presumes that extrapolation is a valid method.
In general, I get the impression that you do not deny scientific thought and therefore tend to avoid discussing them (except, may be, carbon dating).No, I don't avoid discussing other areas of science, but in threads such as this one my intention is to just respond to claims that knock the creationary view.
The question is if we should teach the coming generations the truth of an indifferent universe, or the sweet hope of divine creation and eternal personal life. I am for teaching the truth.That's not the question. I am also for teaching the truth. The question, as mentioned above, is "which view is the truth"?
Anyway, when death becomes an immediate probability and reality turns unacceptable, people runs away from truth and looks for refuge in the (illusory) hope of religion. There is no chance that religion will ever disappear. But science may easily disappear so we need to strenghten and support it. For example, by teaching it in schools.I have no problem with teaching science in schools, but maintain that evolution is no more science than creation is. And disagree with the inference that religion may replace science. If anything, given that modern science arose because of a Christian worldview, science's best hope for survival is if Christianity remains around.
To get back to the question of what evolution is, just to give you a taste of what I am getting at, I make the following points.
Creationists agree with some of what evolutionists call evolution. What they disagree with is what can be termed "goo-to-you-via-the-zoo evolution".
Creationists agree with natural selection. In fact it was described by a creationist before Darwin.
Creationists agree with speciation. It is actually predicted by the creation model. And they say that speciation is the result of a loss of genetic information.
Creationists disagree that new genetic information can arise without an intelligent being as the source, and claim that (a) goo-to-you evolution requires this, and that (b) this has not been observed.
In summary, creationist agree with a number of things claimed as evolution that have actually been observed, but disagree with certain claims that have not been observed. And they object to them all being lumped in under the all-encompassing term "evolution".
I found only two "hard" arguments and one interesting remark in your post:
(1) that unique events cannot be extrapolated, and
(2) that creationists disagree that new genetic information can arise without an intelligent being as the source.
(3) that science's best hope for survival is if Christianity remains around.
Unique events, like the Bing Bang, can and are being be extrapolated. A really big flood, a recent "genetic bottleneck" and such should have left salient footprints in nature. A creationist may say that the marks are there but we are not looking for them or mistaking them for other things. For example, this beautiful flexible bone marrow tissue from a fossil dinosaur. Since all I know about this discovery comes from publications, we will have to wait. I share PZ's confidence that conventional science will explain this discovery too, as it has been doing once and again during the last thousand years. That is not an argument, I know, so let wait.
Regarding the idea that no new information can arise except from an intelligent - extra natural - source, I think mutation - imperfect replication - is the evolutionary mechanism that generates new information.
Regarding christianity being the best insurance for science's survival, may be, but the contrary may also be true. Science requires a tolerant environment to survive, and religious dogmatism can easily kill it. Science is dry and bitter, people will always prefer the sweet illusions offered by religion. Science can easily be weakened, outlawed, forbidden, forgotten. Islamic fundamentalism in the 10th Century destroyed Arab science, and it is now unable to take roots there again. Catholic dogmatism in the 15th Century erased science teaching in Spain and for 400 years ignorance reigned. In the nineteen thirties, Communist Russia decided that Mendelian genetics was inimical to its essence and therefore wrong, and for two or three generations there was no biology (nor living biologists) there. Science is sensitive to dogmatic, fanatic environments and may easily disappear. The United States is one of the best things that ever to happen to humanity, and it would be a pity if fundamentalist attacks, like the current Kansas hearings, weaken its scientific leadership.
jaimito wrote the bits in boxes:
I found only two "hard" arguments and one interesting remark in your post:Ooohh? Couldn't you find more than that to chew on?
Actually, what happened to defining "evolution"?
(1) that unique events cannot be extrapolated, andI agree that evidence should be detectable (and claim that it exists). What I was questioning was whether knowledge of these unique events would be derived by extrapolation, rather than by extant evidence.
(2) that creationists disagree that new genetic information can arise without an intelligent being as the source.
(3) that science's best hope for survival is if Christianity remains around.
Unique events, like the Bing Bang, can and are being be extrapolated. A really big flood, a recent "genetic bottleneck" and such should have left salient footprints in nature.
Extrapolation is really the principle of uniformitarianism (not the idea that scientific laws are uniform throughout the universe). It says that history can be explained in terms of the processes that we see happening today. We can measure erosion rates, etc. and extrapolate them into the past to see how long it took to form the Grand Canyon, for example. Uniformitarianism is the opposite of Catastrophism, which proposes past events unlike what we see happening today. So extrapolating present-day erosion rates and the like will never lead to the idea of a global flood, but that is different to saying that there will be no evidence for a global flood. It's just that the evidence won't be in extrapolation.
A creationist may say that the marks are there but we are not looking for them or mistaking them for other things. For example, this beautiful flexible bone marrow tissue from a fossil dinosaur. Since all I know about this discovery comes from publications, we will have to wait. I share PZ's confidence that conventional science will explain this discovery too, as it has been doing once and again during the last thousand years. That is not an argument, I know, so let wait.I'm all for waiting, but I don't have a lot of confidence in an objective outcome. For example, I very much doubt that the artifact will be carbon dated, as it is presumed to be too old to retain any C14. Yet I would consider it likely to have C14, which would be strong evidence that it is not as old as claimed.
Regarding the idea that no new information can arise except from an intelligent - extra natural - source, I think mutation - imperfect replication - is the evolutionary mechanism that generates new information.Mutation is the mechanism that is claimed to provide new genetic information, but information theory argues against this being possible, and observations are that mutations, other than neutral ones, destroy information. There is no hard evidence of mutations ever generating brand-new genetic information, yet for evolution to work, more new information must be generated than the amount of information destroyed.
By the way, "information" is something that carries meaning, such as the instructions to construct proteins and organs. Bits that do not carry meaning are not information. For example, the first sentence below conveys information, the second doesn't, even though both might occupy the same space on an information-storage medium such as a hard disk.
1. The name of the author of this sentence is Philip.
2. Hlac ldqo ejpoib afeoab mbacj aema sd faeljmavs a.
If you feel in the mood to do some reading on how information theory supports creation over evolution, try some of the articles here.
Regarding christianity being the best insurance for science's survival, may be, but the contrary may also be true. ...Yet, with one exception, your examples were of religions other than Christianity! How does that argue against what I said? The one exception (which I'm not really familiar with) was 15th-century Catholicism, which was a period in which Catholicism was particularly corrupt and "un-Christian". In fact I would go a bit further and say that science arose in Reformed (i.e. post-reformation) Christianity, although I believe that parts of Catholicism have been very pro-science.
The United States is one of the best things that ever to happen to humanity, ...And isn't it interesting that the United States is one of the most Christian nations on Earth?
...and it would be a pity if fundamentalist attacks, like the current Kansas hearings, weaken its scientific leadership.Except that those so-called "fundamentalist attacks" are attacking the atheists' origin myth, not science.
There you go again, Philip.
Someone -- jaimito in this instance -- points out a notorious crime committed in the name of Christianity, and your response is 'those aren't real Christians.'
How are we outsiders to figure that out? The pope isn't Catholic?
I'd like to see your version of information theory, the one in which Philip can look at two identical items -- cultists, in this instance -- and infallibly proclaim one authentic and the other inauthentic.
Face it, Philip, you've signed on to a continuing criminal enterprise and it makes you uncomfortable, but you cannot make yourself break away. Just say No! to murdering Jews, Philip. Just say No! to murdering Gnostics, Philip.
It's really kind of easy when you get used to it.
those so-called "fundamentalist attacks" are attacking the atheists' origin myth, not science.
Since I am more of an "agnostic" (someone who does not know, but surely doesnt believe in anything supernatural) than a militant "atheist" (someone who wants to impose on others the idea that there is no God), I care little or nothing about defending any creation myth. It would be nice if the question debated in Kansas would be what you say and Creationist's aim would be limited to that. But it is not.
Through this conversation, I feel that personally, all you wish is to secure a space for the Bible. But to me, Creationists are undermining biological science and I object asking teachers to teach anti-science nonsense like the supposed weakness of evolution. Socially, politically, Christianity is very robust and expansive, while science is fragile and vulnerable. The attack on evolution could easily turn it into a taboo, killing all research and discussion.
BTW, I visited the site on the impossibility of creating new genetic information by mutation, and came back convinced that new information is being created all the time. The Japanese nylon eating bacteria proves exactly that. The fact that the precise mechanism is yet unknown cannot be interpreted as that a supernatural being is injecting new genes into bacteria, enabling them to feed on synthetic molecules, as the site seems to insinuate. You may rest assured that a more prosaic explanation is on the way.
Harry Eagar has ignored pretty well everything that I have written in response to him, but continues to try and pick on things I say, such as with this:
Someone -- jaimito in this instance -- points out a notorious crime committed in the name of Christianity, and your response is 'those aren't real Christians.'By comparing their beliefs with what the Bible says. The Bible, not the Pope, is the authority for Christianity.
How are we outsiders to figure that out? The pope isn't Catholic?
jaimito wrote the rest of the bits in boxes:
It would be nice if the question debated in Kansas would be what you say and Creationist's aim would be limited to that. But it is not.How is it not?
Through this conversation, I feel that personally, all you wish is to secure a space for the Bible.I'm pointing out that the attacks and criticisms of the Bible and its record of creation, etc., are unfounded, inaccurate, and/or biased.
But to me, Creationists are undermining biological science ...And yet you have not explained nor demonstrated how they are doing this, other than by disagreeing with the origins story that you prefer.
But to me, Creationists are undermining biological science and I ob ject asking teachers to teach anti-science nonsense like the supposed weakness of evolution.And again, you have not shown that it is nonsense.
The attack on evolution could easily turn it into a taboo, killing all research and discussion.How? And Why? Does that mean that nobody can criticise any theory put up by scientists (or non-scientists)? Or is evolution in some way sacrosanct?
BTW, I visited the site on the impossibility of creating new genetic information by mutation, and came back convinced that new information is being created all the time. The Japanese nylon eating bacteria proves exactly that.One example does not equate to "all the time", and the nylon bug does not prove that at all see my next paragraph). And is that all you got from those articles?
The fact that the precise mechanism is yet unknown cannot be interpreted as that a supernatural being is injecting new genes into bacteria, enabling them to feed on synthetic molecules, as the site seems to insinuate.You have misunderstood the article. It is not saying that God is injecting new genes into bacteria. It is suggesting that God designed the bacteria with a mechanism to create the new genes. Dr. Batten is saying that the evidence is that the new genes are not being formed by chance. If they are not by chance, they must be by design, even if that is by a designed mechanism for their generation.
...God designed the bacteria with a mechanism to create the new genes.Well that was very considerate of Him!
...Sorry, I couldn't resist.
And if we had not gotten around to inventing nylon, God's careful precautions would have seemed pretty silly, wouldn't they?
Anyhow, we can easily perform an experiment to determine whether, in fact, the ID approach is a neutral critique of evolution or a dishonest attempt to force our children to be indoctrinated with murderous Christian doctrines.
We simply draw up a syllabus to teach the kiddies creationism, following the Japanese conception, in which a brother and sister commit incest and generate a goddess who is the progenitor of the current emperor.
This creation story is as valid and checkable as any other, and therefore as worthy to be taught as the silly goatherd's ravings in Genesis.
Philip, I have answered all your questions. I keep bringing up the crimes of Christianity and you keep saying, 'Not me, not me.
Well, it was you. Nobody is making you join up with a gang of cutthroat murderers. You did it of your own free will, and we Unchosen People are entitled to hold you to account.
Next entry: A good decision
Previous entry: Maybe it's just me
Again and again, Dr. Myers, you bring out my latent science geek. I'm going to end up dropping out of my current program and going back to school in bio.