Evolutionism Religion's Fruit 3
Apobetics
What is the goal of evolutionism religion and who is behind it?
The atheist, evolutionist and the humanist are not the root cause of
this insanity. Much as they would like to take credit they are only
pawns in the hands of one far more clever and deceitful then them.
They are merely used as foolish tools (the communists used the term
"useful idiots" for those they could manipulate). Their herder is one
who uses subtly and gradualism to accomplish his goals. He comes in
under the guise of "freedom", intelligence, pragmatism telling his
fools they can be their own gods. He uses their pride, self
importance, and independence to manipulate them by his deceit and
lies. Being gullible and foolish they swallow all he tells them.
God has told us who this one is and how he works. Those who know Him
are well aware of the deceit:
His modus operandi is described in Genesis 3:1-7
"The thief comes for but to steal, kill and destroy..." John 10:10a
This is a pretty good description of what is taking place in the
public schools-decay and destruction- by his direction and the
cooperation of his useful fools.
Jelena
Isn't it a bit complicated, to use science and humanism as a tool to
make us our new gods? I mean there are many scientists believing in
christian God, there are scientist amon Muslims, there are scientists
among Jews and so on? The purpose of not teaching religion in public
schools is partly to give children freedom to choose whether to
believe or not. Noone tells them that they shouldn't or even mustn't
believe in nothing but science.
I think, that these thoughts about choosing either science or religion
belief is actually the worst thing you and people like you can do for
your religion. You in fact tell people, that they can't believe in God
if they see some true in evolutionist theories, because evolutionist
theories do not allow any kind of religious belief, especially any
real christianity. Because evolution is evil. Because evolution is
bad. Because evolution is devil's work... No wonder that many people
accepts those black and white points of view and do not approve
religious beliefs among scientists... You are a scientist - how can
you believe in those religious bullshits. and you, you are a
christian, how can you believe in those devil's lies. Why is it like
that? You can't mix those thing together. We are in search for causes
of natural things. What we are definitely not doing is searching for
evidences of God's (non)existence. It's not a case for scientists,
this is a case for thelogists. "Beliving in evolution" is the same
nonsense as "beliveving in table". I know that some kind of evolution
took place on the Earth. And I know, that there is some table in front
of me. But that's no proof of God's nonexistence, nor is it any kind
of religion. We are talking about two different worlds - about natural
world and about spiritual one. Laws in one of the can't make the other
one disappear.
Steven J.
post. But then, your actual post has little discernable connection
with actual reality.
>
> What is the goal of evolutionism religion and who is behind it?
>
attempt to assert that, because some areas of modern science reach
conclusions different from those preferred by creationist dogma, these
are not really areas of science, but are, themselves, religious
doctrines. By declaring a scientific theory a "religion,"
creationists at once excuse themselves from any attempt to understand
the evidence for it, or even the theory itself (why bother to learn
the tenets of a false religion?), and at the same time they hope to
create a premise for either excluding, from the school curriculum,
these theories (on the premise that they are religion, and should not
be taught in school), or else for including creationism alongside
actual science (on the principle of equal opportunity for all
religious views, or at least for all religious views with powerful
lobbies). When this argument fails (because evolutionary theory is no
more a religion than, say, atomic theory or meteorology), the phrase
"evolutionism religion" gives creationists a chance to feel persecuted
and discriminated against (because, as they prefer to see it, some
other religion is unjustly being given preference to their own),
instead of ignorant and stupid (because they neither understand modern
science nor wish to).
>
> The atheist, evolutionist and the humanist are not the root cause of
> this insanity. Much as they would like to take credit they are only
> pawns in the hands of one far more clever and deceitful then them.
>
point out that you (and creationists in general) show no signs of
being "far more clever" than "the atheist, evolutionist, and
humanist" (of course, atheists, evolutionists, and humanists are
neither identical groups, nor uniform in their cleverness, just as
creationists are not uniform in either their dogma or their obstinate
stupidity). I will concede that you are more deceitful than the
people you oppose. Have you ever considered giving that up, and
trying to be honest?
>
> They are merely used as foolish tools (the communists used the term
> "useful idiots" for those they could manipulate). Their herder is one
> who uses subtly and gradualism to accomplish his goals. He comes in
> under the guise of "freedom", intelligence, pragmatism telling his
> fools they can be their own gods. He uses their pride, self
> importance, and independence to manipulate them by his deceit and
> lies. Being gullible and foolish they swallow all he tells them.
>
forming a theory is gullible, foolish, and diabolical. Or perhaps you
are describing, again, the work of creationists and ID proponents:
they speak of "academic freedom" when they mean putting lies on a par
with actual data, and encourage students (at least creationist
students) to confuse their own self-importance with the actual merit
of their views on science.
>
> God has told us who this one is and how he works. Those who know Him
> are well aware of the deceit:
>
> His modus operandi is described in Genesis 3:1-7
>
> "The thief comes for but to steal, kill and destroy..." John 10:10a
>
> This is a pretty good description of what is taking place in the
> public schools-decay and destruction- by his direction and the
> cooperation of his useful fools.
>
proponents want to kill anyone. They do, of course, want to steal
taxpayers money and teachers' time to indoctrinate students in their
own lies, and they want to destroy modern science, and a lot of them,
I grant you, are pretty foolish (but not terribly useful).
-- Steven J.
KlugeHans
"Apobetics" <apob...@hotmail.com> wrote:
> Evolutionism Religion's Fruit 3
>
> What is the goal of evolutionism religion and who is behind it?
The aim of science is to understand the world and the universe
A secondary aim is to free the world from its current bondage to shit and
the theocratic filth that promulgates it
In fact the aim of science is pretty similar to the apparent original aim
of Jesus - to understand - and to view with compassion mans role in an
often hostile environment - and to bring him into greater harmony with it
Religion has had its shot at it and fucked up big time.
If Jesus were alive today he would be a scientist
Andrew
news:1176586672.0...@n76g2000hsh.googlegroups.com...
> On Apr 14, 10:44 am, "Apobetics" wrote:
>> Evolutionism Religion's Fruit 3
>>
> Your post title has little discernable connection with your actual
> post. But then, your actual post has little discernable connection
> with actual reality.
>>
>> What is the goal of evolutionism religion and who is behind it?
>>
> "Evolutionism religion" is an invention of creationists; it is an
> attempt to assert that, because some areas of modern science reach
> conclusions different from those preferred by creationist dogma, these
> are not really areas of science, but are, themselves, religious doctrines.
"Evolution is a fairy tale for grown ups. This theory has helped nothing in
the process of science. It is useless."
--Professor Louis Bounoure, former President,
Biological Society of Strasbourg
"Scientists who go about teaching that evolution is a fact of life are great
con-men, And the story they are telling may be the greatest hoax ever."
--Dr. T. N. Tahmisian, Atomic Energy Commission, USA
"Evolution is unproved and unprovable. We believe it only because the only
alternative is special creation, and that is unthinkable."
--Sir Arthur Keith, Anthropologist
"In conclusion, evolution is not observable, repeatable, or refutable, and thus
does not qualify as either a scientific fact or theory."
--Dr. David N. Menton, PhD in Biology from Brown University
The above references are referring to macroevolution which is perhaps the
greatest hoax of all time.
> By declaring a scientific theory a "religion,"
> creationists at once excuse themselves from any attempt to understand
> the evidence for it,
There is no proven mechanism for macroevolution. Thus there is no
empirical evidence that it ever occurred. Diversity of life exists today,
but to assert that its origin was purely naturalistic without intelligent
input is contrary to evidence.
> or even the theory itself (why bother to learn
> the tenets of a false religion?),
When you refuse to allow evidence which supports an alternative
model you have caused some to identify your camp as 'religious.'
> and at the same time they hope to
> create a premise for either excluding, from the school curriculum,
> these theories (on the premise that they are religion, and should not
> be taught in school), or else for including creationism alongside
> actual science (on the principle of equal opportunity for all
> religious views,
The contention is to show evidence supporting the various models.
This the evolutionists have adamantly opposed. For if permitted, it
would decisively expose the foolishness of their false theory.
Andrew
KlugeHans
<andrew....@usa.net> wrote:
> -
> When you refuse to allow evidence which supports an alternative
> model you have caused some to identify your camp as 'religious.'
Not correct
Knowledge has evolved in its own way over time
You want to put the clock back because you have a severe mental problem
related to an ionability to cope with the real world. Creationism and
Intellergint Dersein are ignorance and arrogance wrapped in a theocratic
fascism
I have found it a waste of time talking to you before - You need
counselling and medical treatment that includes deprogramming and i cannot
offer them
Rather than waste any more time in you in this post I wil just quote a
releveant post of mine used in similar circumstances
In article <1176597769.8...@w1g2000hsg.googlegroups.com>, "Read
The Bible" <bible...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> "Verily I say unto you, Except ye be converted, and
> become as little children, ye shall not enter into
> the kingdom of heaven" (Matthew 18:3).
What he clarified however in his teaching is that you are not granted
license to remain as children, you are expected to GROW up. Jesus grew up
enough to die as a result of his priciples and actions. You seem to be
spiritually at nappy change level - that is a very weird idea of what
Jesus wanted.
Christians in fact in their Apologetics and other often misguided ravings
do seem to grasp that they are SUPPOSED to show some kind of adult
thinking, They even found universities and schools - making it quite
clear that you are not supposed to restrict yourself to a kiddiwinks
pattern of following to the letter a particular simplified version of one
book of fairy tales , myths, religious teachings and matters related to
goat herding and sheep shepherding
So what happened to you?
Seems to me by remaining at this infantile cut and paste level you are
seeking brownie points from Jesus that he ain't going to award you
Jesus wants you to grow up - become better educated - understand more
about the world - embrace scientific knowledge reasoning and
understanding, including evolutionary theory - learn to analyse and reason
- accepting the Bible as quite frequently self contradicting and errant
and even misrepresentative of God.
He wants you to properly participate in the Elightenment and in the
democratic process and to ameliorate the effects of an economic structure
that is impoverishing a Third World and underclass now internationally
based everywhere - including your OWN country.
In other words GROW UP! ALL of YOU
KlugeHans
>
> When you refuse to allow evidence which supports an alternative
> model you have caused some to identify your camp as 'religious.'
> The contention is to show evidence supporting the various models.
> This the evolutionists have adamantly opposed. For if permitted, it
> would decisively expose the foolishness of their false theory.
>
>
> Andrew
As I said in another thread - equally applicable to you
I don't know what your medical condition is but it seems very likely you
at least need counselling. You simply are living in a fantasy world and
not a real one. Even if you know the reasons why you are unable to cope
with reality or if you have been conditioned by a Fundamentalist
upbringing out of it - you probably need counselling to improve your mental
state without unneccessary pain. People like me stepping out from Strict
Baptist Fundamentalist ideology some 45 to 50 years ago had to do it
harder than you now have to.
Reuben Hick
news:1176565486.9...@n59g2000hsh.googlegroups.com...
> Evolutionism Religion's Fruit 3
>
> What is the goal of evolutionism religion and who is behind it?
Not everything has a black helicopter sending beams into your head.
Origins described by Creationists makes the basic assumption that what God
had to say about it is true, and given the parameters of what we know
through His revelation, we attempt to discover our world by various means.
The many Evolutionary ideas all have in common rebellion against the
Creationist model, removes any part of it that glorifies God and then
repackages what is left. To spackle up gaping holes, they just make up crap
out of thin air like Big Bang and Oort clouds - anything, no matter how much
it defies reason, just as long as it also denies a Creator.
No conspiracry here, just a bunch of misotheists and empty headed crowd
pleasers who will believe anything so that they can be cool like their
hoodlum friends.
Reuben Hick
"KlugeHans" <Cleve...@smartnag.com> wrote in message
news:Clever-Hans-15...@192.168.0.3...
> In article <mTeUh.333$Ut...@newsread1.news.pas.earthlink.net>, "Andrew"
> <andrew....@usa.net> wrote:
>
>
>
>> -
>> When you refuse to allow evidence which supports an alternative
>> model you have caused some to identify your camp as 'religious.'
>
>
> Not correct
>
> Knowledge has evolved in its own way over time
This statement is so vague and meaningless that I wonder why you stated it.
Lack of anything substantive to say and you just felt you needed to toss out
a jumble of words?
Being that this is, among other places, in a "creationism" newsgroup, I'm
assuming that you might be making a feeble attempt to link this to the word
"evolution". Since its really hard to agree or disagree with an empty
statement like "Knowledge has evolved in its own way over time", I'm
guessing you are trying to defuse general opposition to the misotheistic
explanations on the topic of Origins.
First of all, "knowledge" is not a living biological organism, thus
describing how knowledge "evolves" does you no good in trying to extraplate
that into the various wacked out ideas of how something improves itself by
accident, or as your handlers like to call it [by the power of the god]
"Chance".
For instance, you can sit there and stare at your hand all day "willing" it
to mutate into a claw or something, but it won't change. You can even go as
far as chopping off your hand and attaching a claw-like prosthetic, but in
the unfortunate case where you were able to reproduce, your spawn would not
be born with a claw.
Ignorance, with the possible exception of your case, can be cured if there
is a will to cure the ignorance. And the knowledge can be passed on with
relative ease.
If you took your "Dick and Jane" book and randomly "mutated" letter clusters
with other random letter clusters, you would not eventually end up with the
complete works of Shakespeare. If we mixed in the reality that every time
a non-word was entered into the book the page would spontaneously combust,
you would quickly be out of source material and we would never have Romeo
and Juliet if we waited for your favorite book to mutate with the same rate
of success as biological organism.
For the sake of argument, lets say that knowledge, in some absurd way would
"evolve" in the same way that biological organisms. Since in real life,
almost all mutations harm the organism (we even have a medical term to
describe them: "Cancer") , most often killing the organism, the organism
only gets one good chance to replicate; and in higher organisms, that
mutation can easily be lost if the corresponding reproductive partner
doesn't have the same genetic code to sustain that mutation.
So you have an original thought - a mutation, if you will. And like all of
your other original thoughts, (in keeping with the statistical reality of
biological mutations) its a profoundly stupid, cancerous and destructive
thought. In fact it is so stupid it kills you. Maybe its something like
an overwhelming desire to jump off tall buildings or gargle battery acid,
nevertheless it kills you, and because everyone ignores every stupid thought
that comes from your head, we ignore your death and such the "mutation" is
lost until, by accident, someone else has an identical series of misfired
synapses and thinks that a glass of Sears Diehard goes well with fish.
So your one big chance to have an original thought instantly kills you and
no one notices or cares. That is one way "knowledge would have evolved" if
we were to be consistent with biologic reality.
As far as the vapid phrase "in its own way over time", I think we have been
exposed to enough of your stupid and destructive thoughts. Its time to
return to the state of ignoring them.
Steven J.
> "Steven J." steve...@altavista.com wrote in message
>
> news:1176586672.0...@n76g2000hsh.googlegroups.com...
>
> > On Apr 14, 10:44 am, "Apobetics" wrote:
> >> Evolutionism Religion's Fruit 3
>
> > Your post title has little discernable connection with your actual
> > post. But then, your actual post has little discernable connection
> > with actual reality.
>
> >> What is the goal of evolutionism religion and who is behind it?
>
> > "Evolutionism religion" is an invention of creationists; it is an
> > attempt to assert that, because some areas of modern science reach
> > conclusions different from those preferred by creationist dogma, these
> > are not really areas of science, but are, themselves, religious doctrines.
>
> "Evolution is a fairy tale for grown ups. This theory has helped nothing in
> the process of science. It is useless."
> --Professor Louis Bounoure, former President,
> Biological Society of Strasbourg
>
Theodosius Dobzhansky. I cannot find anything Dobzhansky was
president of, but he is noted for his actual contributions to biology
(e.g. in genetics), as well as for that statement. What is Prof.
Bounoure known for, except for a quote that 99% of all the biologists
who have ever existed disagree with?
>
> "Scientists who go about teaching that evolution is a fact of life are great
> con-men, And the story they are telling may be the greatest hoax ever."
> --Dr. T. N. Tahmisian, Atomic Energy Commission, USA
>
sort of expert on evolutionary theory. His assertion does not
convince me, against the weight of such things as, e.g. shared
pseudogenes and endogenous retroviruses in humans and other primates,
or fossils that straddle any dividing line you might wish to draw
between bird and nonavian diinosaur, or between human and nonhuman
ape.
>
> "Evolution is unproved and unprovable. We believe it only because the only
> alternative is special creation, and that is unthinkable."
> --Sir Arthur Keith, Anthropologist
>
explained none of the evidence and contradicted much of it. All
scientific theories are impossible to "prove" in the same sense as,
say, a theorem in geometry. There is, however, a very great deal of
evidence for common descent.
>
> "In conclusion, evolution is not observable, repeatable, or refutable, and thus
> does not qualify as either a scientific fact or theory."
> --Dr. David N. Menton, PhD in Biology from Brown University
>
Genesis. No matter what his credentials, he has forsaken science on
the subject of evolution, by agreeing (per AiG's statement of faith)
that no possible evidence could persuade him that Genesis (literally
interpreted) is false, or that common descent really happened.
Note that science, and scientific theories, deal with many things that
are not directly observable: atoms, subatomic particles, magnetic
fields, and gravity come to mind as examples. And it deals with many
events that are not, in detail, repeatable: forensic scientists, for
example, investigate murders (one can't very well resurrect the victim
and murder him all over again), arsons (again, try burning a building
down more than once), etc. What science requires is that observations
and tests are repeatable, and that a theory make testable
predictions. Evolution (common descent) is quite testable: if one
found, e.g. that humans shared pseudogenes with dogs that we don't
share with monkeys, that would be a rather severe problem for
evolution. Duane Gish, the late creationist debater, was correct that
it would be evolution would have been refuted by test and observation
if human albumin were more similar to frog albumin than to chimpanzee
albumin; he was incorrect only in asserting that human albumin did
have this odd affinity.
>
> The above references are referring to macroevolution which is perhaps the
> greatest hoax of all time.
>
No, but thank you for playing.
>
> > By declaring a scientific theory a "religion,"
> > creationists at once excuse themselves from any attempt to understand
> > the evidence for it,
>
> There is no proven mechanism for macroevolution. Thus there is no
> empirical evidence that it ever occurred. Diversity of life exists today,
> but to assert that its origin was purely naturalistic without intelligent
> input is contrary to evidence.
>
There are fossils of nonavian dinosaurs with feathers, and other
fossils of whales with hind legs and feet. There are, as noted,
shared nonfunctional DNA sequences in humans and other primates, more
similar, in most cases, between humans and chimps than between humans
and orangutans. There is the pattern of faunal succession in the
fossil record (the manner in which the earlier the fossil assemblage,
the less it resembles the mix of species alive today). There is, in
short, a great deal of evidence that evolution has occurred. Now, I
suspect that you don't mean "macroevolution" in the same way that
biologists mean it; they mean evolution of new species or higher taxa,
and evolution of new species has been observed, so it must have some
mechanisms. The ability of mutation and natural selection to produce
new traits (e.g. the ability to digest substances not even found in
nature, or to resist poisons that are not found in nature) is also
proved.
Note that evolutionary theory does not state that the diversity of
life was achieved "without intelligent intervention." From Darwin on,
evolutionists have assumed that natural selection was only one of
several mechanisms of evolution, and that other, unknown causes of
biological adaption and diversity might exist. However, one does not
provide evidence of such causes merely by showing that there are
things that currently-known mechanisms cannot fully explain.
>
> > or even the theory itself (why bother to learn
> > the tenets of a false religion?),
>
> When you refuse to allow evidence which supports an alternative
> model you have caused some to identify your camp as 'religious.'
>
There are no alternate models, and _a fortiori_ no evidence for such
nonexistent models. "Somehow, somewhere, for some reason at some
time, and unknown Intelligent Designer (or the LORD God of Hosts, if
you prefer) did something or other to cause this to happen" is not a
model or theory; it makes no testable predictions. It certainly gives
us no clue as to why things are one way rather than some other
imaginable way. "Evidence against evolution" is not evidence *for*
creation, or "design," or space aliens tinkering with terrestrial DNA
as a school project. Most of the time, of course, "evidence against
evolution" is not even evidence against evolution, and it would be
deceitful and irresponsible for schools to pretend it was or allow it
to be presented as though it were.
>
> > and at the same time they hope to
> > create a premise for either excluding, from the school curriculum,
> > these theories (on the premise that they are religion, and should not
> > be taught in school), or else for including creationism alongside
> > actual science (on the principle of equal opportunity for all
> > religious views,
>
> The contention is to show evidence supporting the various models.
> This the evolutionists have adamantly opposed. For if permitted, it
> would decisively expose the foolishness of their false theory.
>
You are free, of course, to present some of that evidence here, even
if it would not be allowed in a public school. Please note that quote-
mines from allegedly eminent scientists do not qualify as "evidence;"
even where the original context would not completely change the
meaning of what they said, these are expressions of their own opinions
about the evidence, not of the evidence itself.
>
> Andrew
-- Steven J.
Steven J.
> "Apobetics" <apobe...@hotmail.com> wrote in message
>
> news:1176565486.9...@n59g2000hsh.googlegroups.com...
>
> > Evolutionism Religion's Fruit 3
>
> > What is the goal of evolutionism religion and who is behind it?
>
> Not everything has a black helicopter sending beams into your head.
>
course....
>
> Origins described by Creationists makes the basic assumption that what God
> had to say about it is true, and given the parameters of what we know
> through His revelation, we attempt to discover our world by various means.
>
Does it not impose unnecessary and unwarranted constraints on what
evidence one can accept, or else compel you to force-fit the evidence
to your theology?
>
> The many Evolutionary ideas all have in common rebellion against the
> Creationist model, removes any part of it that glorifies God and then
> repackages what is left. To spackle up gaping holes, they just make up crap
> out of thin air like Big Bang and Oort clouds - anything, no matter how much
> it defies reason, just as long as it also denies a Creator.
>
attempt to explain various patterns of evidence in terms of known
processes and causes. These theories are not a rebellion against the
creationist model, but rather various attempts to deal with
disrepancies between the creationist model that used to exist and the
actual evidence. For example, the idea that the Earth was a mere
several thousand years old was incompatible with, e.g. places where
layers of water-laid sediments had been tilted or folded (after being
in place long enough to harden into rock), and new layers laid down
(and solidified into rock) much later. It was further contradicted by
the evidence that there had been many successive suites of fauna and
flora on the Earth, including species that no longer existed anywhere
on Earth. Denying a Creator was not part of the agenda of those early
geologists, many of whom started out looking for evidence supporting a
young Earth and a global flood during human history, without finding
such evidence.
The idea that life was the product of common descent with modification
grew out of an attempt to deal with several observations that were
incompatible with special creation of "perfect" species. There was
the problem of extinction itself, which was incompatible with the 18th
century "creation model" (God would not allow any species He created
to go extinct), as well as the problem of homology and analogy (e.g.
similar structures for dissimilar functions and, at the same time,
dissimilar structures for similar functions) and the nested hierarchy
of life noted by Linnaeus and never explained in terms of separate
origins. Again, many of the scientists who accepted this explanation
still accepted God as the Creator who set evolution in motion and,
perhaps, worked through it.
Creationists, in turn, responded to this evidence in part by
incrementally abandoning any sort of testable creation model; they
were left with a Creator Whose methods and motives were inscrutable,
about whose creative methods and acts no testable inferences could be
legitimately drawn.
The Big Bang is not part of what is usually called evolutionary theory
(which deals with biological evolution, not the origin of life, much
less the origin of the Earth or the universe). Indeed, there are
creationists who see the Big Bang as evidence for creation (in the
sense that it implies a universe with a beginning and a finite
history, rather than an eternal universe of unending cycles). On the
other hand, the Big Bang is strictly speaking a theory about the
history of the universe rather than about its origins. Note that the
Big Bang is not just "made up ... out of thin air;" it is based on
observations of the pattern of galactic redshifts (which imply that
distant galaxies are receding from our own, and the more distant they
are, the faster they are receding), and additionally supported by
measurements of the relative cosmic abundances of hydrogen and helium
and the cosmic microwave background.
What exactly is unreasonable about the Oort Cloud?
>
> No conspiracry here, just a bunch of misotheists and empty headed crowd
> pleasers who will believe anything so that they can be cool like their
> hoodlum friends.
>
And yet there have been and are evolutionists who believe in God and
try to serve him (and, of course, the aforementioned young-earth
creationists who reject evolution but accept the Big Bang and, I'm
pretty sure, the Oort Cloud).
-- Steven J.
Steven J.
> "KlugeHans" <Clever-H...@smartnag.com> wrote in message
>
> news:Clever-Hans-15...@192.168.0.3...
>
> > In article <mTeUh.333$Ut...@newsread1.news.pas.earthlink.net>, "Andrew"
>
> >> -
> >> When you refuse to allow evidence which supports an alternative
> >> model you have caused some to identify your camp as 'religious.'
>
> > Not correct
>
> > Knowledge has evolved in its own way over time
>
> This statement is so vague and meaningless that I wonder why you stated it.
> Lack of anything substantive to say and you just felt you needed to toss out
> a jumble of words?
>
has been allowed in (e.g. the widespread acceptance of Kimura's
"neutral drift" theory in evolution), and therefore the contempt that
is heaped upon ID and creationism cannot be mere refusal to consider
alternate models and evidence.
>
> Being that this is, among other places, in a "creationism" newsgroup, I'm
> assuming that you might be making a feeble attempt to link this to the word
> "evolution". Since its really hard to agree or disagree with an empty
> statement like "Knowledge has evolved in its own way over time", I'm
> guessing you are trying to defuse general opposition to the misotheistic
> explanations on the topic of Origins.
>
willing to replace one purely naturalistic theory with another, and
thus open to new purely naturalistic theories, are unwilling to
abandon their insistence on purely naturalistic ("misotheistic?")
explanations. Of course, if you did that, I would point out that
"explanations," by definition, must account for why things are one way
rather than some other imaginable way, and that this demands that
causes be constrained by their nature: there must be effects they tend
to produce in particular situations, and other effects that they
cannot produce. "Supernatural" causes, causes that we cannot
understand or predict, cannot serve as explanations in this sense, nor
can we say whether the evidence is consistent with them (since, in the
case of a cause that can produce any effect, any evidence is equally
compatible or incompatible).
>
> First of all, "knowledge" is not a living biological organism, thus
> describing how knowledge "evolves" does you no good in trying to extraplate
> that into the various wacked out ideas of how something improves itself by
> accident, or as your handlers like to call it [by the power of the god]
> "Chance".
>
success of variant offspring." This is not a "chance" or "accidental"
phenomenon. Mutation is random (that is, the causes of mutations have
nothing to do with the reasons that particular mutations are
beneficial, harmful, or neutral), and thus it is "chance" that a
particular mutation is beneficial, but it is not "chance" that a
beneficial mutation is likely to survive and multiple in future
generations, while harmful mutations are likely to disappear.
>
> For instance, you can sit there and stare at your hand all day "willing" it
> to mutate into a claw or something, but it won't change. You can even go as
> far as chopping off your hand and attaching a claw-like prosthetic, but in
> the unfortunate case where you were able to reproduce, your spawn would not
> be born with a claw.
>
individuals. A mutation that altered your hand so drastically would
be something that happened either before you were conceived or very
shortly afterwards, not something that happened to you after you
already had a hand. It is worth noting that ectrodactyly (a condition
in which the hand and/or foot takes on a claw-like appearance) is
sometimes the result of a mutation, and is inherited by the mutant
human's children.
>
> Ignorance, with the possible exception of your case, can be cured if there
> is a will to cure the ignorance. And the knowledge can be passed on with
> relative ease.
>
> If you took your "Dick and Jane" book and randomly "mutated" letter clusters
> with other random letter clusters, you would not eventually end up with the
> complete works of Shakespeare. If we mixed in the reality that every time
> a non-word was entered into the book the page would spontaneously combust,
> you would quickly be out of source material and we would never have Romeo
> and Juliet if we waited for your favorite book to mutate with the same rate
> of success as biological organism.
>
there is nothing in the analogy to correspond to natural selection.
You need to make multiple copies of each "Dick and Jane" book, make
minor, random, and different changes in each one, and save only the
copy that best matches some standard of "fitness," and repeat the
process over and over. The second problem is that, if you make a
random change to an English word, you are likely to get some string of
letters that is not an English word. But a mutation to any three-
nucleotide codon in DNA must produce some other three-nucleotide codon
(corresponding to one of 20 amino acids used in proteins and three
stop signals). Inserting a string of codons at random will,
generally, cause a gene that codes for some protein to code for a
different protein, but still a protein.
A third problem, of course, is that in your analogy a particular
target, _Romeo and Juliet_, is in sight, but natural selection is not
aiming at some particular distant target, but always at improved
fitness in the current environment (which may change, or the same
species may exist in different environments, leading to different
adaptions).
>
> For the sake of argument, lets say that knowledge, in some absurd way would
> "evolve" in the same way that biological organisms. Since in real life,
> almost all mutations harm the organism (we even have a medical term to
> describe them: "Cancer") , most often killing the organism, the organism
> only gets one good chance to replicate; and in higher organisms, that
> mutation can easily be lost if the corresponding reproductive partner
> doesn't have the same genetic code to sustain that mutation.
>
The vast majority of mutations are neutral. A fairly large minority
are more or less harmful. A tiny minority are beneficial. But recall
that in a large population over time there will be enormous numbers of
mutations, and many instances of each mutation arising. Beneficial
mutations need not be very common; if they help an organism survive
and pass on its genes, copies of that mutation will become more common
in each successive generation, while the more numerous harmful
mutations vanish with the death of the disadvantaged mutants.
Note two things. First, the "genetic code" is the correspondence of
various three-nucleotide codons to amino acids. Humans have slightly
different genetic codes in their nuclear and mitochondrial DNA, but we
use the same nuclear DNA code as monkeys, and, for that matter, as
mushrooms. The "genome" is the complete set of DNA (whether nuclear
or mitochondrial), and the genetic code determines how genes are
transcribed into proteins. Second, there is no need for a mate to
have the same mutation: if a mutation is not recessive (i.e. if it is
dominant or if both copies of a gene are expressed), it can have its
effect even if the other copy of the gene is different. Of course,
genes can be lost if they don't happen to be passed on to offspring
(only half your genes make it into each child), but if one has (as
most reproductively successful organisms do) many offspring, this is
statistically unlikely.
>
> So you have an original thought - a mutation, if you will. And like all of
> your other original thoughts, (in keeping with the statistical reality of
> biological mutations) its a profoundly stupid, cancerous and destructive
> thought. In fact it is so stupid it kills you. Maybe its something like
> an overwhelming desire to jump off tall buildings or gargle battery acid,
> nevertheless it kills you, and because everyone ignores every stupid thought
> that comes from your head, we ignore your death and such the "mutation" is
> lost until, by accident, someone else has an identical series of misfired
> synapses and thinks that a glass of Sears Diehard goes well with fish.
>
Yet thought does, in fact, evolve in a quasi-biological manner. That
is, new ideas in science are modifications of older ideas, or new
combinations of old ideas; they do not just pop into existence without
precursors or development like Athena from the brow of Zeus. There
are usually many such minor modifications of older ideas in a
generation, and they compete to describe reality; the ones that do
unusually badly are abandoned and forgotten, while the more successful
ones intermix with one another and spawn another generation of
variants, that are tested again. Look, e.g. at the slow halting
progress from the Ptolemaic solar system, through the Copernican
(still with Ptolemaic epicycles and perfectly, if eccentrically,
circular orbits), to the Keplerian and then the Newtonian. Note also
the various unsuccessful offshoots such as the Braheian solar system
(with the sun orbiting the Earth but all other planets orbiting the
sun). Look, for that matter, at the successive modifications of the
Lamarckian evolutionary ladder (itself a modification of the
creationist ladder of creation) until one reaches the Darwinian
evolutionary tree, or the modification of ideas of natural selection
that reach back to Aristotle through Darwin.
>
> So your one big chance to have an original thought instantly kills you and
> no one notices or cares. That is one way "knowledge would have evolved" if
> we were to be consistent with biologic reality.
>
Well, there are lots of people having original thoughts. Some of them
work better than others. That is, as noted, somewhat analogous to
natural selection of random mutations.
>
> As far as the vapid phrase "in its own way over time", I think we have been
> exposed to enough of your stupid and destructive thoughts. Its time to
> return to the state of ignoring them.
-- Steven J.
Reuben Hick
> On Apr 14, 10:05 pm, "Reuben Hick" <outerdarkn...@warmoose.com> wrote:
>> "Apobetics" <apobe...@hotmail.com> wrote in message
>>
>> news:1176565486.9...@n59g2000hsh.googlegroups.com...
>>
>> > Evolutionism Religion's Fruit 3
>>
>> > What is the goal of evolutionism religion and who is behind it?
>>
>> Not everything has a black helicopter sending beams into your head.
>>
> That's what the guys in the black helicopters want you to think, of
> course....
>>
>> Origins described by Creationists makes the basic assumption that what
>> God
>> had to say about it is true, and given the parameters of what we know
>> through His revelation, we attempt to discover our world by various
>> means.
>>
> Is that assumption necessary to investigate the universe, though?
> Does it not impose unnecessary and unwarranted constraints on what
> evidence one can accept, or else compel you to force-fit the evidence
> to your theology?
You don't want to argue that. ID and Creationism are banned from classrooms
allegedly under the guise of school admins violating a misunderstood
comment made in a letter by Thomas Jefferson to the Danbury Baptist Church.
The stronger argument can be made that the various sects of the evolution
cabal have decide to impose unnecessary and unwarranted constraints on what
evidence one can accept, limiting it to only that which is consistent with
naturalistic philosophies. That is why ONLY naturalistic contraints are
permitted.
I don't believe the matter from the ID/Creationism side is a function of
what evidence "one can accept", as Creation scientists will continually
remind, its a function of how the evidence is interpreted. Old Earthers
look to the Grand Canyon and say that water ran up hill for billions of
years, Young Earthers will say, "hmmm, looks like a dam burst." The Old
Earthers will see layers upon layers and say "billions of years of sediment"
even though upside down trees are poking through several "million years"
worth of sediment. Young Earthers say, "liquifaction, global flood".
Same evidence, different interpretations based on those "constraints".
I find it hillarious that many secular scientists have absolutely no problem
assuming that Mars was once completely under water, and the wild guesses as
to where that water came from and went, but absolutely positively would
never for even one moment entertain the possibility of the truthfullness of
a global flood despite the abundant evidence from a wealth of sources.
>>
>> The many Evolutionary ideas all have in common rebellion against the
>> Creationist model, removes any part of it that glorifies God and then
>> repackages what is left. To spackle up gaping holes, they just make up
>> crap
>> out of thin air like Big Bang and Oort clouds - anything, no matter how
>> much
>> it defies reason, just as long as it also denies a Creator.
>>
> What evolutionary ideas (in the broad sense) have in common is an
> attempt to explain various patterns of evidence in terms of known
> processes and causes.
There is a known process and cause for dirt coming to life? for information
to come from no where? to even get beyond the "irreducible complexity" of
things such as the eye? (never mind matter ex nihlo) The world has been
anxiously waiting well over a hundred years for that "missing link" yet even
today I was reading an article that evolutionists are still fighting the
"Whose Your Daddy" regarding the reptile and the bird.
> These theories are not a rebellion against the
> creationist model, but rather various attempts to deal with
> disrepancies between the creationist model that used to exist and the
> actual evidence. For example, the idea that the Earth was a mere
> several thousand years old was incompatible with, e.g. places where
> layers of water-laid sediments had been tilted or folded (after being
> in place long enough to harden into rock), and new layers laid down
> (and solidified into rock) much later.
That's strange. I have a number of Creationist books on my bookshelf that
point to those very same places and show how it is perfectly consistent with
a violent global flood described in Genesis. Again, its how the evidence
is interpreted.
> It was further contradicted by
> the evidence that there had been many successive suites of fauna and
> flora on the Earth, including species that no longer existed anywhere
> on Earth.
And how exactly would that conflict with a global flood described in
Genesis?
> Denying a Creator was not part of the agenda of those early
> geologists, many of whom started out looking for evidence supporting a
> young Earth and a global flood during human history, without finding
> such evidence.
I find it interesting that much of what we see in the universe is explained
by secularists as a series of devastating catastrophies, but
uniformitarianism is the only faith system accepted when studying evidence
on earth - and even then the evidence is ignored when it conflicts with
old-age theories.
For instance, the earth's magentic field is decaying with something like a
1400 year half-life. Under uniformitarian rules, the maximum age of the
earth (before it could maintain life) would be around 30,000 years. Yet,
because of the age limitation based on this fact, scientists scrambled about
for some sort of old-age explanation and behold we get several convoluted
and contradictory explanations of "magnetic pole reversals" They say, it
isn't decay, ignore those insruments, what you are seeing is a magnetic
field reversal, don't ask us how that happens. Granted, volcanic rock
retrieved from the Mid Atlantic Ridge does show rapid changes in the
magnetic field, the insistence that the earth must be old forces truly
unsuportable theories based on messing around with the data. Once again,
Creation Scientists have a perfectly plausible explanation that is
consistent with a Young Earth.
There are many other age limiters too: saline levels in the oceans, helium
releases, the moon's distance from the earth, etc. But as you noted above,
there is a tendancy to " impose unnecessary and unwarranted constraints on
what evidence one can accept, or else compel you to force-fit the evidence".
> The idea that life was the product of common descent with modification
> grew out of an attempt to deal with several observations that were
> incompatible with special creation of "perfect" species. There was
> the problem of extinction itself, which was incompatible with the 18th
> century "creation model" (God would not allow any species He created
> to go extinct), as well as the problem of homology and analogy (e.g.
> similar structures for dissimilar functions and, at the same time,
> dissimilar structures for similar functions) and the nested hierarchy
> of life noted by Linnaeus and never explained in terms of separate
> origins. Again, many of the scientists who accepted this explanation
> still accepted God as the Creator who set evolution in motion and,
> perhaps, worked through it.
I didn't know that 18th century "creation models" prohibited the extinction
of certain species. But I will take your word for it.
Nevertheless, science from either the secular or the creationist standpoint
is no longer restricted by Rome.
> Creationists, in turn, responded to this evidence in part by
> incrementally abandoning any sort of testable creation model; they
> were left with a Creator Whose methods and motives were inscrutable,
> about whose creative methods and acts no testable inferences could be
> legitimately drawn.
Do you really want to argue "testable model"?
Because macro evolution hasn't been proved or demonstrated in the lab, life
has not been made from non-life, matter has not been made from nothing in
the lab. We can't even get a computer model that can do this. We can't
"test" Big Bang, and after decades of generations of fruit flies, the best
"testing" has gotten us is a few mutant flies that are worse off than the
others. I'm still waiting for someone to explain to me how matter came
from energy, how helium and hydrogen managed to concentrate enough energy
to give us heavy metals, the list is endless.
As I mentioned in another thread on a different topic, Dr Dean Edell
proposed a method for rationing out the vaccine against Bird Flu. He
accurately claimed that in order for the H5N1 to become a pandemic in human
populations, it would have to "evolve", that is mutate into a higher order
more complex virus. Since Christians are supposed to be Creationists, then
we won't be losing sleep at night because we are afraid the virus will
mutate into a super bug killing large populations of people. This would
keep the list of those wanting the antedote shorter. Many years, and
billions of dollars later into the Bird Flu FUD machine, we still don't have
our mutated wonder virus. Will we have to wait millions of years for this
test to be conclusive? That's the beauty of evolution "tests", for a
"test" to prove itself, we have to fund the research project for millennia.
Given my age, I can only wait a few decades.
> The Big Bang is not part of what is usually called evolutionary theory
> (which deals with biological evolution, not the origin of life, much
> less the origin of the Earth or the universe).
I understand that. But Creationism spans the entire topic of Origins
including how matter got here in the first place. The thing with evolution
is, that "Evolution Theory" is a blanket term for a a large collection of
constantly mutating and evolving set of explanations and hypothesis and wild
guesses. If I were to rail on about the problems with Darwinian Evolution,
you could just say "well I tend to believe in PE" or one of a dozen other
explanations. With Creationism, we don't get a new branch, or a whole new
path of thought, we have the same singular explanation that has been with
mankind since the very beginning thousands of years ago. The secularist
has a single target to criticize. The creationist has a constantly moving,
changing, mutating target.
I mean, does anyone still defend Haeckel's recapitulation "theory"? Even
though modern biology tries to distant itself from his embryo drawings,
there are still text books out there with it. So is it a fair target for
Creationists, or do you say "uh, never mind... look at this distraction of
the day..."
Since Creationism deals more with the origins of everything in a few short
paragraphs, the contraints on our biology is pretty simple: "Each produces
after its own kind." and "Man is a special creation" (meaning we aren't a
mutated primate regardless what secular taxonomists insist) After thousands
of years of empirical evidence, this appears to be true. Dogs don't
produce cats but they do produce kinds of dogs, Trees don't produce fish,
apes don't produce politicians.
We have yet to see an ape as any human's ancestor - even in computer models.
Steven J.
> "Steven J." <steve...@altavista.com> wrote in message
> news:1176611377.2...@n76g2000hsh.googlegroups.com...
>
-- [snip]
>
> > Is that assumption necessary to investigate the universe, though?
> > Does it not impose unnecessary and unwarranted constraints on what
> > evidence one can accept, or else compel you to force-fit the evidence
> > to your theology?
>
> You don't want to argue that. ID and Creationism are banned from classrooms
> allegedly under the guise of school admins violating a misunderstood
> comment made in a letter by Thomas Jefferson to the Danbury Baptist Church.
> The stronger argument can be made that the various sects of the evolution
> cabal have decide to impose unnecessary and unwarranted constraints on what
> evidence one can accept, limiting it to only that which is consistent with
> naturalistic philosophies. That is why ONLY naturalistic contraints are
> permitted.
>
passing reference to "separation of church and state" in a letter by
Thomas Jefferson. But I am not proposing to argue constitutional law,
here. My point is that only naturalistic theories are testable. More
to the point, to the extent that a purportedly supernaturalistic model
or theory is testable, it is really "naturalistic" in the sense
required by science. "Naturalistic" causes are those that are
constrained by their own nature, so that they tend to produce certain
effects in the appropriate circumstances, and cannot produce other
effects. If we cannot say what effects a cause is supposed to
produce, how can we possibly say whether the effects we observe are
consistent with that sort of cause?
>
> I don't believe the matter from the ID/Creationism side is a function of
> what evidence "one can accept", as Creation scientists will continually
> remind, its a function of how the evidence is interpreted. Old Earthers
> look to the Grand Canyon and say that water ran up hill for billions of
> years, Young Earthers will say, "hmmm, looks like a dam burst." The Old
> Earthers will see layers upon layers and say "billions of years of sediment"
> even though upside down trees are poking through several "million years"
> worth of sediment. Young Earthers say, "liquifaction, global flood".
> Same evidence, different interpretations based on those "constraints".
>
(and it runs downhill, not up, and mainstream geology holds that the
layers were laid down (at various times, not continuously) over
millions of centuries, and cut by the Colorado River in much less
tiime). The channeled scablands of Washington (the state) look like
the results of a dam burst, and that is more or less how they are
interpreted (a massive but local flood at the end of the last ice
age). Dam bursts don't dig deep, steep channels through solid rock,
and they especially don't do so through recently-laid sediments with a
consistency somewhere between quicksand and mud (walls of wet mud
can't stand at angles anywhere near that steep). Mainstream
geologists don't assume that sediments and other deposits need to be
laid down at the same pace in every place; the "polystrate tree
fossils" to which you refer were buried by successive waves of
volcanic ash over months to decades (in places new trees took root in
the layers laid over earlier trees, and were buried in their turn),
not over millions of years.
>
> I find it hillarious that many secular scientists have absolutely no problem
> assuming that Mars was once completely under water, and the wild guesses as
> to where that water came from and went, but absolutely positively would
> never for even one moment entertain the possibility of the truthfullness of
> a global flood despite the abundant evidence from a wealth of sources.
>
completely under water (and, conversly, some think that the Earth was
completely under water, albeit some three billion years ago, when the
most advanced form of life on Earth was pond scum). There are
abundant indications of drainage channels on Mars (though some
scientists think they may have been made by flowing dust, not water),
and some indications that Mars once had oceans, like those of Earth,
but that is not quite the same thing as a global flood. No one, after
all, denies that Earth has oceans.
>
-- [snip]
>
> > What evolutionary ideas (in the broad sense) have in common is an
> > attempt to explain various patterns of evidence in terms of known
> > processes and causes.
>
> There is a known process and cause for dirt coming to life? for information
> to come from no where? to even get beyond the "irreducible complexity" of
> things such as the eye? (never mind matter ex nihlo) The world has been
> anxiously waiting well over a hundred years for that "missing link" yet even
> today I was reading an article that evolutionists are still fighting the
> "Whose Your Daddy" regarding the reptile and the bird.
>
abiogenesis is an area of research, not a full-fledged theory yet.
There is a known process for "information coming from nowhere" (or,
rather, from modification of existing "information"): gene duplication
and subsequent mutation of the duplicate gene. I cannot figure out
what your point about "the reptile and the bird" is; there are a
number of fossils of dinosaurs with either downy coverings or clear
feathers (see, e.g. _Microraptor_ or _Caudipteryx_), as well as early
birds (e.g. _Archaeopteryx_ or _Confuciusornis_) with clear
"reptilian" features (I put "reptilian" in scare quotes because,
according to cladistic taxonomy, birds ought properly to be considered
a group within the reptiles).
>
> > These theories are not a rebellion against the
> > creationist model, but rather various attempts to deal with
> > disrepancies between the creationist model that used to exist and the
> > actual evidence. For example, the idea that the Earth was a mere
> > several thousand years old was incompatible with, e.g. places where
> > layers of water-laid sediments had been tilted or folded (after being
> > in place long enough to harden into rock), and new layers laid down
> > (and solidified into rock) much later.
>
> That's strange. I have a number of Creationist books on my bookshelf that
> point to those very same places and show how it is perfectly consistent with
> a violent global flood described in Genesis. Again, its how the evidence
> is interpreted.
>
is interpreted" means basically, that you can accomodate any evidence
with the "supernaturalist" premise that, well, a miracle could have
that effect.
>
> > It was further contradicted by
> > the evidence that there had been many successive suites of fauna and
> > flora on the Earth, including species that no longer existed anywhere
> > on Earth.
>
> And how exactly would that conflict with a global flood described in
> Genesis?
>
and mososaurs. Note that there were many different species in each of
these groups, as there are many different species of modern whales.
How is it, then, that we don't find plesiosaurs or mososaurs in the
same sediments as modern whales and dolphins? How is it that, given
that modern mammals live in an enormous range of ecological niches
(including the sea) we don't find modern mammal species alongside
nonavian dinosaur fossils? We ought to expect, if the sediments of
the (so-called) Mesozoic and early Cenozoic Eras were laid down by a
global flood, that we would find species jumbled together, sorted only
by weight and ecological zone: elephants alongside sauropods,
sabertooths alongside velociraptors. Or, for that matter, take the
Paleozoic marine invertebrates: just how fast did one species of
ammonite replace another, to have different suites of species in each
different layer of Paleozoic rock?
There is a point here that was raised on another thread in another
newsgroup: recently, paleontologists looking for a "missing link"
between lobe-finned fish and early tetrapods (land vertebrates and
their marine descendants) found _Tiktaalik_, a very primitive tetrapod
which neatly fit their expectations, by looking in sediments dated
(according to conventional geology) to the correct age. Now, if we
accept YEC arguments about the age of the Earth and when different
"kinds" lived and were laid down as fossils, they might as well have
found a fossil whale (a very advanced tetrapod), or a plesiosaur
(another advanced tetrapod) in those sediments. Finding _Tiktaalik_
is not only a confirmation of evolutionary ideas, but something of a
puzzle from a creationist standpoint: at the very least, it should be
no more likely in those sediments that creatures that mainstream
paleontology assigns to periods millions of centuries later.
>
> > Denying a Creator was not part of the agenda of those early
> > geologists, many of whom started out looking for evidence supporting a
> > young Earth and a global flood during human history, without finding
> > such evidence.
>
> I find it interesting that much of what we see in the universe is explained
> by secularists as a series of devastating catastrophies, but
> uniformitarianism is the only faith system accepted when studying evidence
> on earth - and even then the evidence is ignored when it conflicts with
> old-age theories.
>
That is because you misunderstand the sort of "uniformitarianism" that
is used by mainstream geologists. The assumption is that the same
laws of nature applied then as apply now. This sort of
uniformitarianism does not suppose that the prehistoric past was an
uninterrupted succession of mild spring days; you surely have heard of
the Chicxulub asteroid impact at the K-T (Cretaceous-Tertiary)
boundary 65 million years ago? That was pretty catastrophic (albeit
mild compared to whatever happened at the end of the Permian, right
before the onset of the Mesozoic Era). Of course, the asteroid impact
left evidence: the global iridium layer in 65-million year-old rocks,
the Chicxulub crater itself.
>
> For instance, the earth's magentic field is decaying with something like a
> 1400 year half-life. Under uniformitarian rules, the maximum age of the
> earth (before it could maintain life) would be around 30,000 years. Yet,
> because of the age limitation based on this fact, scientists scrambled about
> for some sort of old-age explanation and behold we get several convoluted
> and contradictory explanations of "magnetic pole reversals" They say, it
> isn't decay, ignore those insruments, what you are seeing is a magnetic
> field reversal, don't ask us how that happens. Granted, volcanic rock
> retrieved from the Mid Atlantic Ridge does show rapid changes in the
> magnetic field, the insistence that the earth must be old forces truly
> unsuportable theories based on messing around with the data. Once again,
> Creation Scientists have a perfectly plausible explanation that is
> consistent with a Young Earth.
>
"Rapid" changes, in this case, take place over thousands of years. I
cannot make out why you find your own argument convincing: you point
out that there is evidence of repeated changes in the direction of the
magnetic field, and you note, implicitly, that the field changes over
thousands of years, not over thousands of days or weeks. What sort of
"messing around with the data" is needed to turn that sort of data
into evidence for an Earth much older than young-earth creationism
allows? Of course, mainstream scientists don't deny that (one aspect
of) the magnetic field is decreasing currently; they are not asking
you to ignore the instruments or the evidence. And as for "don't ask
us how that happens," I suspect that you'd get a much better theory of
how the Earth's magnetic field reverses from mainstream geologists
than you'd get an explanation of *why* the magnetic field is decaying
from creationists.
By the way, what is it with modern creationists? The praise the power
and wisdom of Almighty God to the heavens, and then insist on every
occasion that presents itself that Almighty God made some crappy Yugo
of a creation that falls apart after a few thousand years of ordinary
use. The magnetic fields are decaying to nothing! The comets are
evaporating! It's like God takes no pride in quality workmanship.
Back when creationists had guts and integrity and testable models,
they believed in that God had made a world that was intrinsically
capable of lasting forever.
>
> There are many other age limiters too: saline levels in the oceans, helium
> releases, the moon's distance from the earth, etc. But as you noted above,
> there is a tendancy to " impose unnecessary and unwarranted constraints on
> what evidence one can accept, or else compel you to force-fit the evidence".
>
Helium is very light. Gases can escape from the Earth's gravitational
field, and light gases do so more easily than heavier gases. The
moon's distance from the Earth does not increase at a constant rate
(at least, a proper application of Newtonian physics implies that it
should not), but at a rate that changes and even reverses itself over
time. As for saline levels in the ocean, this assumes that salt can
only be added, rather than precipitate out of solution (my second-
favorite young-earth creationist argument is based on the fact that,
based on levels of aluminum in the ocean compared to the rate at
which it is being added, the Earth cannot be more than a couple of
hundred years old).
>
> > The idea that life was the product of common descent with modification
> > grew out of an attempt to deal with several observations that were
> > incompatible with special creation of "perfect" species. There was
> > the problem of extinction itself, which was incompatible with the 18th
> > century "creation model" (God would not allow any species He created
> > to go extinct), as well as the problem of homology and analogy (e.g.
> > similar structures for dissimilar functions and, at the same time,
> > dissimilar structures for similar functions) and the nested hierarchy
> > of life noted by Linnaeus and never explained in terms of separate
> > origins. Again, many of the scientists who accepted this explanation
> > still accepted God as the Creator who set evolution in motion and,
> > perhaps, worked through it.
>
> I didn't know that 18th century "creation models" prohibited the extinction
> of certain species. But I will take your word for it.
>
It was based on philosophical concepts of "plenitude" (God had created
creatures for every possible niche on the ladder of complexity and
perfection, and would not permit a link in the "great chain of being"
to go missing), and the presumed perfection of God's creation. It
also seems to follow from the Noah's Ark story: why bother to save
every "kind," if some "kinds" are going to be permitted to go extinct
right after the flood? Again, modern young-earth creationism seems to
be saving the glory of God by assuming He really isn't very good at
His job.
>
> Nevertheless, science from either the secular or the creationist standpoint
> is no longer restricted by Rome.
>
I was thinking more of the position of Thomas Jefferson, who advised
Lewis and Clark to be on the lookout for mastodons, since a fossil
skeleton of one had recently been dug up in the United States. But
many creationists were puzzled by the evidence in the fossil record
(as compared to the living world) for extinction; one of Charles
Darwin's arguments for his theory was that it made extinction less of
a puzzle for biology (some species will become less successful over
time, and become rare and limited to a small space; what is an extinct
species but one that has reached the limiting case of rarity?). I
doubt that Jefferson, for example, was much concerned with the Pope's
views of biology (and I'm not aware, actually, of much that the popes
had to say about creationism in the 18th century).
>
> > Creationists, in turn, responded to this evidence in part by
> > incrementally abandoning any sort of testable creation model; they
> > were left with a Creator Whose methods and motives were inscrutable,
> > about whose creative methods and acts no testable inferences could be
> > legitimately drawn.
>
> Do you really want to argue "testable model"?
>
Sure. Please note that arguing that "evolutionists" don't have
testable models for everything does not establish either that they
don't have testable models for some things, or that creationists have
testable models for anything.
>
> Because macro evolution hasn't been proved or demonstrated in the lab, life
> has not been made from non-life, matter has not been made from nothing in
> the lab. We can't even get a computer model that can do this. We can't
> "test" Big Bang, and after decades of generations of fruit flies, the best
> "testing" has gotten us is a few mutant flies that are worse off than the
> others. I'm still waiting for someone to explain to me how matter came
> from energy, how helium and hydrogen managed to concentrate enough energy
> to give us heavy metals, the list is endless.
>
There is no complete theory of abiogenesis, as I have noted. There
are testable partial theories (e.g. the "RNA world" hypothesis is
testable by showing that RNA can in fact serve as both an enzyme and a
carrier of heredity). The Big Bang is testable by, e.g. noting if the
blackbody temperature of the cosmic microwave background is compatible
with theoretical predictions, and by attempting to measure the
relative abundance of hydrogen and helium in the universe.
Experiments with fruit flies are attempts to understand how genetics
and developmental biology works, not attempts to test common descent
or, usually, natural selection.
If you want to know how hydrogen and helium produced metals, you may
need to stop waiting for a cosmologist or astronomer to stop by and
tell you, and actually look up information on "stellar
nucleosynthesis." You could probably take a college course on the Big
Bang if you want to.
Oddly, in a thread about biological evolution, you don't say much
about the actual testing of common descent or natural selection. I
have mentioned elsewhere tests of common descent (e.g. we should not
find shared endogenous retroviruses in humans and dogs that we do not
find in humans and monkeys).
>
> As I mentioned in another thread on a different topic, Dr Dean Edell
> proposed a method for rationing out the vaccine against Bird Flu. He
> accurately claimed that in order for the H5N1 to become a pandemic in human
> populations, it would have to "evolve", that is mutate into a higher order
> more complex virus. Since Christians are supposed to be Creationists, then
> we won't be losing sleep at night because we are afraid the virus will
> mutate into a super bug killing large populations of people. This would
> keep the list of those wanting the antedote shorter. Many years, and
> billions of dollars later into the Bird Flu FUD machine, we still don't have
> our mutated wonder virus. Will we have to wait millions of years for this
> test to be conclusive? That's the beauty of evolution "tests", for a
> "test" to prove itself, we have to fund the research project for millennia.
> Given my age, I can only wait a few decades.
>
Now, far be it from me to urge you to lose sleep over this. As Jesus
would surely have said if he'd been thinking of bird flu, "who, by
taking thought, can prevent a pandemic killing scores of millions of
people?" But please note that "evolution" just means changes in
inheritable traits over time, not necessarily (although it can include
this) increases in complexity. The virus doesn't need to evolve to a
"higher order;" it just needs to aquire new traits that enable it to
be transmitted (as many flu viruses can be) from human to human
instead of just from bird to bird or human. Most creationists, in my
experience, accept this much evolution, even if they sometimes refuse
to call it "evolution." Of course, the mutation may not happen, or
may die out quickly. Neither evolution nor the flu virus itself has
the goal of becoming a repeat of the 1918 Spanish Flu, a mutated
wonder virus that killed more people than all the guns and bombs of
World War I, but scarcely any evolutionist, and, I think, few of your
creationist experts (the droll but apparently clueless Dr. Edell
aside) would be quite so sanguine that we won't have a repeat of the
Spanish Flu.
>
> > The Big Bang is not part of what is usually called evolutionary theory
> > (which deals with biological evolution, not the origin of life, much
> > less the origin of the Earth or the universe).
>
> I understand that. But Creationism spans the entire topic of Origins
> including how matter got here in the first place. The thing with evolution
> is, that "Evolution Theory" is a blanket term for a a large collection of
> constantly mutating and evolving set of explanations and hypothesis and wild
> guesses. If I were to rail on about the problems with Darwinian Evolution,
> you could just say "well I tend to believe in PE" or one of a dozen other
> explanations. With Creationism, we don't get a new branch, or a whole new
> path of thought, we have the same singular explanation that has been with
> mankind since the very beginning thousands of years ago. The secularist
> has a single target to criticize. The creationist has a constantly moving,
> changing, mutating target.
>
Well, creationists may use "evolution theory" as a blanket term for
"everything in Genesis that contradicts our interpretation of
Genesis," but actual biologists use it to refer to theories of how
biological populations change over time. Punctuated Equilibria is not
an alternative to "Darwinian Evolution," but a particular "tempo and
mode" in which such evolution is thought to operate in some cases.
Let me make two points here. First, it is easy enough to span the
origins of everything from matter to life to humanity to civilization
and morality simply by saying "God did it," and dispensing with any
actual explanations of why these things are one way rather than
another conceivable way, or offering any way to test your
propositions. Actual ("evolutionary") science has a much harder row
to hoe: no one accepts "It just happened by natural causes" as an
explanation for anything; you're supposed to say what specific natural
causes produced the effect, and how you would tell it from the effects
of different causes. What you call "evolution theories" were not
devised to replace creationism, but to solve specific problems in the
history of the universe, the earth, and life. Think of it as putting
small parts of a large jigsaw puzzle together without worrying, until
you got some larger chunks assembled, what the entire puzzle looks
like.
Second, from a scientific point of view, not modifying your ideas as
new evidence emerges is not a virtue. On the other hand, it's also
not a characteristic that creationism actually has, so I don't know
that it matters that you're boasting that creationism has this trait.
When Darwin first proposed evolutionary theory, creationists quite
routinely denied that one species could change into another. Sometime
after World War II (when Marsh coined the term "baramin"), they
switched, mostly, to a claim that a species in one "created kind"
could change into another species in that "kind," but not into a new
"kind." Creationists used to argue that the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics
prohibited anything from becoming more complex and orderly over time;
but when it was repeatedly pointed out that this statement literally
implies that seeds can't grow and refrigerators can't work, they
switched to an argument about "information" (which is rarely defined,
and never defined consistently). And, of course, as I've noted,
creationists didn't use to freely accept extinction, or continental
drift. Of course, there are old-earth creationists who accept the Big
Bang and faunal succession (but not, usually, speciation); surely that
is a new thing since the first draft of Genesis thousands of years
ago?
>
> I mean, does anyone still defend Haeckel's recapitulation "theory"? Even
> though modern biology tries to distant itself from his embryo drawings,
> there are still text books out there with it. So is it a fair target for
> Creationists, or do you say "uh, never mind... look at this distraction of
> the day..."
>
Haeckel's few defenders today deny that he ever proposed a theory that
embryonic forms of organisms recapitulate *adult* forms of ancestral
animals (though it seems that such a view existed, as a fairly fringe
offshoot of evolutionary theory); they point out that he argued that
they recapitulate embryonic forms of those ancestors instead,
retracing how stages of development were added, subtracted, or
modified over time. This position is usually associated with the
earlier work of von Baer, whose views are still widely defended (and
were used by Darwin). And, of course, the illustrations of embryos in
modern textbooks are there to illustrate von Baer's position, not the
recapitulation concept attributed (perhaps wrongly) to Haeckel. Note,
by the way, that embryonic structures such as pharyngeal arches ("gill
slits") actually exist (so do the vestigial hind limb buds and teeth
in baleen whale embryos, for that matter), whether Haeckel drew them
accurately or not.
>
> Since Creationism deals more with the origins of everything in a few short
> paragraphs, the contraints on our biology is pretty simple: "Each produces
> after its own kind." and "Man is a special creation" (meaning we aren't a
> mutated primate regardless what secular taxonomists insist) After thousands
> of years of empirical evidence, this appears to be true. Dogs don't
> produce cats but they do produce kinds of dogs, Trees don't produce fish,
> apes don't produce politicians.
>
We are primates, of course, as the (creationist) taxonomist Carrolus
Linnaeus named us back in the 18th century. "Apes" includes (even
discounting humans) over a dozen species of gibbons, chimps, gorillas,
and orangutans. Cats and dogs had their last common ancestor (a
rather weaselly-looking species similar to the fossil genus
_Miacis_). It would, as has occasionally been pointed out, an
argument for creation (miraculous, directed saltational suites of
mutations) for a dog to give birth to a cat. "After its own kind"
does not preclude offspring being different from their parents (as the
offspring and parents differ from one another). It apparently, as
observed in both the lab and the field, does not prevent some traits
from becoming commoner and others becoming rarer, or of new mutations
appearing and old alleles disappearing. That is, "kinds" are clearly
variable over time, so that great-to-the-nth grandchildren can be
strikingly different from their great-to-the-nth grandparents, even
though no generation gives birth to offspring strikingly different
from itself. Speciation has been observed in the laboratory and very
strongly inferred in the field (e.g. polar bears are more genetically
similar to some brown bears than those brown bears are to other brown
bears, a very strange thing unless polar bears have evolved fairly
recently from brown bears). Thousands of years are, after all, not
millions of years, and without some evidence of limits to possible
biological change, there is no reason to suppose that "after its own
kind" cannot, over time, yield species as diverse as crocodiles and
chickens, or even penguins and pine trees. There is, in the nested
hierarchy of homologies and analogies, and in the patterns of faunal
succession and transitional fossils in the fossil record, much reason
to conclude that such evolution has happened.
>
> We have yet to see an ape as any human's ancestor - even in computer models.
>
It is more or less impossible, of course, to tell if any given fossil
was the ancestor of any living organism, or merely the relative
(brother or tenth cousin or sister species) of the actual ancestor.
There are, of course, a number of good hominin fossils that some
creationists insist are "fully-formed humans" and other creationists
insist are merely typical nonhuman apes: e.g. ER1470 (usually called
_Homo rudolfensis_), or even the infamous "Java man" (Asian _Homo
erectus_).
-- Steven J.
Jelena
> "Steven J." <steve...@altavista.com> wrote in message
>
> read more ยป
"I find it hillarious that many secular scientists have absolutely no
problem
assuming that Mars was once completely under water, and the wild
guesses as
to where that water came from and went, but absolutely positively
would
never for even one moment entertain the possibility of the
truthfullness of
a global flood despite the abundant evidence from a wealth of
sources."
I find it hilarious, that many secular scientists have absolutely no
problem assuming, that Europa is now completely under thick layers of
ice, but absolutely positively they would never for one moment
entertain the posibility of the truthfullness of an Earth nowadays
staying completely under thick layers of ice.
I find it hilarious, that many secular scientists have absolutely no
problem assuming, that Sun mainly consists from hydrogen and hellium,
but absolutely positively they would never for one moment entertain
the posibility of the truthfullness of the possibility, that Earth
either mainly consists from hydrogen and helium.
I find it hilarious, that many secular scientists have absolutely no
problem assuming, that Venus is quite hot nowadays, but absolutely
positively they would never for one moment entertain the posibility of
the truthfullness of the Pluto with the same temperature.
Sorry, you are mixing apples with bananas. Earth and Mars are
different planets, different cosmic objects, with a bit different
history and definitely different conditions (have you seen some nice
animals on the Mars, recently?). Even if truth, that scientists
assume, that Mars was once completely covered with water (which I
strongly doubt), that doesn't mean the same is probable in Earth's
case. I can for example assume, that I am late for school today,
again. But I really don't think that's truth also for my friend, who
is also woman, also student, also Czech, almost the same age et
cetera: but she's a bit different, after all... either is Mars from
the Earth. They have a few things in common - and few other things
not. Life would be boring without these little differencies...
Jelena
problem
assuming that Mars was once completely under water, and the wild
guesses as
to where that water came from and went, but absolutely positively
would
never for even one moment entertain the possibility of the
truthfullness of
a global flood despite the abundant evidence from a wealth of
sources."
I find it hilarious, that many secular scientists have absolutely no
KlugeHans
<outerd...@warmoose.com> wrote:
> As far as the vapid phrase "in its own way over time", I think we have been
> exposed to enough of your stupid and destructive thoughts. Its time to
> return to the state of ignoring them.
The world does not mind being "ignored" by America. Most of us are sick
to death of the arrogant pigshit coming out of it.
Everything we are receiving from you these days seems aimed at the
restoration of IGNORANCE. As I said, knowledge and understanding have
evolved in their own way - we don't NEED you any more. We don't need your
crap dismemberment of Christianity into a nationalist fantasy- it is
rubbish even by Christian standards. We don't need any of your bleatings
about the direness of political situations overseas that your nation has
over the period since 1945 been largely responsible for creating
Grow up. Get out of your superstitous and pseudo occultist theocratic
fantasy. Elect a Government the world can have some respect for - that
will spearhead America as a progressive people.
Or retreat into isolation ridding the world of what has increasingly
become a pest.
Jelena
his electional period is gonna be over in a short time, after all. We
can hope his succesor will be a bit a bit better (which I, in fact, no
doubt, almost anybody would be better). Never-the-less: look at the
failed european constitution or nowadays Russia. I'm not very sure
about the fate of Europa in the next decades, is it reasonable to try
to isolate us from the United States? Thought I'm quite against wars
of any kinds - therefore against the one in Irak, too, I must consider
what my mum told me a few years ago: If the Americans had came to our
country (Czech Republic, Czechoslovakia in the past) during the Soviet
occupation, we would have been happy and never would have asked them
for their true reasons...
I don't know what epople in ther European countries think, but here
in Czech Republic, some us prefere American christians rather than
Russian communists. Because it's not the religion, that's bad. It's
ideology.
> In article <G5hUh.3664$2v1.1...@newssvr14.news.prodigy.net>, "Reuben Hick"