Evolution - Possibly Not True
- Thread starter Graeme
- Start date
You've got to remember that ID is merely a backdoor for the human supremacists. I firmly believe the planet does not belong to us. We're in a critical period. Global biodiversity is at risk. I say chop the legs from under anyone who would use a theory like ID to continue this lawless and heartless hegemony.
Its "turtles all the way down" refers to a infinite regression belief about the nature of the universe.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtles_all_the_way_down
supersymmetric string theory and a multidimnesional universe is based on much the same principle.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtles_all_the_way_down
supersymmetric string theory and a multidimnesional universe is based on much the same principle.
Re: RE: Evolution - Possibly Not True
Sure it's possible, but so what? There's no way to ever test or verify that, if the divinity is the omnipotent, omniscient being it's usually presumed to be. And if that's how it behaves, I don't think it's worthy of unconditional respect and admiration or any of the other things I keep being told it wants from us.
Somehow, I get the impression you're not taking all this very seriously. Just a hunch...
earth_as_one said:
Sure it's possible, but so what? There's no way to ever test or verify that, if the divinity is the omnipotent, omniscient being it's usually presumed to be. And if that's how it behaves, I don't think it's worthy of unconditional respect and admiration or any of the other things I keep being told it wants from us.
Somehow, I get the impression you're not taking all this very seriously. Just a hunch...
Re: RE: Evolution - Possibly Not True
Then the divine spirit must be meddling in everything that we do. Nothing I have ever observed contradicts the laws of physics. If we assume that the laws of physics always hold then we have a deterministic universe (though if a quantum physicist is reading this they'd probably have a fit). If God created a universe that is deterministic, then humans have no free will. If humans have no free will, how can we be punished or rewarded with hell or heaven (assuming is is the Christian God)? This is basically what Einstein argued, and I agree with him.
earth_as_one said:
Then the divine spirit must be meddling in everything that we do. Nothing I have ever observed contradicts the laws of physics. If we assume that the laws of physics always hold then we have a deterministic universe (though if a quantum physicist is reading this they'd probably have a fit). If God created a universe that is deterministic, then humans have no free will. If humans have no free will, how can we be punished or rewarded with hell or heaven (assuming is is the Christian God)? This is basically what Einstein argued, and I agree with him.
Re: RE: Evolution - Possibly Not True
Einstein was almost certainly wrong about that. Read this. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPR_paradox
And this. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell's_theorem
gc said:
Einstein was almost certainly wrong about that. Read this. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPR_paradox
And this. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell's_theorem
RE: Evolution - Possibly
...Evolution is a Theroy....Theroys are possibly not true...I cant beleave this is a thread. lol
...Evolution is a Theroy....Theroys are possibly not true...I cant beleave this is a thread. lol
Re: RE: Evolution - Possibly Not True
I tend to believe that free will becomes possible through the quantum physics theories. I'm really limited in my understanding of quantum physics but as we go deeper in the microscopic realities, we seem to reach a point where things are not determined by mechanic laws anymore. Energy seems to exist as a field of possibilities where no prediction is possible. Perhaps this is the realm where free will becomes possible. If we have a soul, perhaps it is at the quantum level of things that it can act upon the material world... ???
With this idea in mind, I would guess that a divine being would be able to act upon the world through the undetermined micro-level and thus, indirectly influence the mechanic macro level.
gc said:
I tend to believe that free will becomes possible through the quantum physics theories. I'm really limited in my understanding of quantum physics but as we go deeper in the microscopic realities, we seem to reach a point where things are not determined by mechanic laws anymore. Energy seems to exist as a field of possibilities where no prediction is possible. Perhaps this is the realm where free will becomes possible. If we have a soul, perhaps it is at the quantum level of things that it can act upon the material world... ???
With this idea in mind, I would guess that a divine being would be able to act upon the world through the undetermined micro-level and thus, indirectly influence the mechanic macro level.
Re: RE: Evolution - Possibly Not True
That statement's been bothering me for a couple of days. I knew I'd read something that bears on it, but it took me a while to dredge it out of my memory. It was in a chapter of an old reference book about the halting problem in computing, and relates to Gödel's Theorem, which was discussed here at CC not long ago.
Here's the deal: write a computer program and start it running. Does it ever halt? In general, nobody knows. There's no general way to compute the answer to that question, because in computing terms it's self-referential: if it were computable, there'd be a program to do the computation, a sort of universal debugger, which would take the first program and a description of what it's supposed to do as input, then verify that the program does what it's supposed to. Gödel showed that self-reference in logic leads inevitably to paradoxes (e.g. Bertrand Russell's paradox about the barber* who shaves all men who don't shave themselves; so who shaves the barber?), then Alan Turing showed that self-reference in computers leads to uncomputability. A computer is about as purely logical a device as there could be, and it's when we behave like one, moving rationally and logically from step to step, that our behaviour becomes provably unpredictable.
So, you don't need to invoke quantum indeterminacy to explain free will.
*yes it's a male barber; you can't solve the paradox that way.
s_lone said:
That statement's been bothering me for a couple of days. I knew I'd read something that bears on it, but it took me a while to dredge it out of my memory. It was in a chapter of an old reference book about the halting problem in computing, and relates to Gödel's Theorem, which was discussed here at CC not long ago.
Here's the deal: write a computer program and start it running. Does it ever halt? In general, nobody knows. There's no general way to compute the answer to that question, because in computing terms it's self-referential: if it were computable, there'd be a program to do the computation, a sort of universal debugger, which would take the first program and a description of what it's supposed to do as input, then verify that the program does what it's supposed to. Gödel showed that self-reference in logic leads inevitably to paradoxes (e.g. Bertrand Russell's paradox about the barber* who shaves all men who don't shave themselves; so who shaves the barber?), then Alan Turing showed that self-reference in computers leads to uncomputability. A computer is about as purely logical a device as there could be, and it's when we behave like one, moving rationally and logically from step to step, that our behaviour becomes provably unpredictable.
So, you don't need to invoke quantum indeterminacy to explain free will.
*yes it's a male barber; you can't solve the paradox that way.
Really? I thought it was only in the last century or so that humans have increased their average body size significantly, and that's got nothing to do with evolution. Evolution doesn't work on that short a time scale, it's just better diet and medical care. Have you got a reference for that, Champloo? I'd like to know more about that.
Re: RE: Evolution - Simply Not True
The story of Noah is INconceivable. Only a simpleton would believe in it.
1) Noah supposedly took two of every species of animal with him on the Ark. How was that possible? There are millions of different species of animal on Earth. In order for him to fit all of those creatures onto his Ark, the Ark must surely have been almost as large as Earth itself.
2) How could he take two of every animal with him onto the Ark when never in the history of humanity has every single species of creature been known about? New creatures are discovered every year. For example, how the Hell could he have taken animals such as kangaroos and koalas with him aboard the Ark when Australia wasn't even discovered until the 18th Century? How did he take New Zealand's kiwis? And if he DIDN'T take those animals onboard with him, then how did they survive the Flood?
Graeme said:
The story of Noah is INconceivable. Only a simpleton would believe in it.
1) Noah supposedly took two of every species of animal with him on the Ark. How was that possible? There are millions of different species of animal on Earth. In order for him to fit all of those creatures onto his Ark, the Ark must surely have been almost as large as Earth itself.
2) How could he take two of every animal with him onto the Ark when never in the history of humanity has every single species of creature been known about? New creatures are discovered every year. For example, how the Hell could he have taken animals such as kangaroos and koalas with him aboard the Ark when Australia wasn't even discovered until the 18th Century? How did he take New Zealand's kiwis? And if he DIDN'T take those animals onboard with him, then how did they survive the Flood?
Things Creationists hate -
Charles Darwin - he must have thought Creationists were "stoopid".
Geology
Even before Darwin, it was geologists (geology is another science that started in England) who began to establish that the Earth is much older than old Jim Ussher said it was. And modern geology stubbornly refuses to yield up proof of a universal flood, or the recent and coeval existence of all creatures, living and extinct.
Charles Darwin
Well, duhh....
The Whole Silly Flood Story
So many things were accumulating under this heading that I decided to make a separate Whole Silly Flood Story page!
Physics
...has all those embarrassing laws, like decay rates of isotopes, the non-decaying speed of light, the refraction of light to produce rainbows, etc., which have to be ignored, twisted, or denied to defend Genesis. And to add insult to injury, physicists can't seem to see the truth that evolution violates the Second Law of Thermodynamics --a "fact" that every good creationist knows, even without a degree in physics!
The Scientific Method
Creationists detest it so much that they've apparently invented their own, improved version, with the following highly logical rules:
o Take as a given fact all those parts of the Bible we tell you to.
o Use not the null hypothesis; make no attempt to disprove any creationist hypothesis; report not any negative findings.
o Quote as authoritative anything a fellow creationist writes, regardless of his qualifications or subsequent discrediting of his methods or results.
o Misquote or quote out of context famous "evolutionists" so that they appear to admit evolution isn't real.
o Continue to repeat your old “evidence,” long after you’ve been publicly shown to have the facts dead wrong. Your new marks—oops, faithful followers—won’t know that you were proven wrong and that you’re now lying.
o Don't waste your time with actual laboratory or field experiments. All the answers are in the Bible.
And Stephen Reese reminds us that creationists can't seem to abide peer review. They must REALLY hate it because no one has ever seen a trace of creationist peer review.
Each Other
Old-Earth creationists think the Young-Earthers are too zealous and dogmatic, even for them. Young-Earthers know the Old-Earthers and Multiple-Catastrophists have given in to "liberal" (if not to say Satanic) influences. Some years there are multiple "Ark-hunting" expeditions to Turkey, each of which thinks the others are obstructing the progress of "Bible science."
The Holy Bible
That old Book persists in saying things that the creationists, who claim to take it as literal truth, have to admit are metaphorical (like the "doors" in the firmament that let the rain through). That means, of course, that they have to arbitrarily decide which parts are literally literal, and which are only metaphorically literal (and can't they twist the English language!). I've never yet read a justification for who gets to make that determination and how, so I'll summarize it thus: Everything is literal except things that even we creationists can't stomach.
Even worse, the "scientifically accurate" Bible reveals not a single fact about nature that wasn't commonly known at the time. If only it had revealed the atomic structure of matter, or the inverse square law, or the existence of bacteria--or even the heliocentric solar system!
Still doubt that creationists hate the Bible? Ask several if they've ever read it--all the way through, cover-to-cover. 97% of the time the answer will be no. They're sure every word is literally true, and the divine message of God, but somehow they've never quite found the time to actually read the thing. Is this irony thick enough yet?
Bats
Somehow, quite perversely, they changed from "fowls" to mammals between the time Moses (according to literalists) wrote the Pentateuch and now.
The Human Mind
...just to be ornery, has moved from the heart, where it resided through New Testament times, into the brain.
Stars
...somehow have grown a lot bigger and moved much farther away, so that by now it seems foolish to expect a sizable fraction of them to fall to Earth, as predicted in Revelation.
The Earth
...on the other hand, to test Man's faith in the literal veracity of scripture, has shrunk to become much smaller than the sun, and has taken to circling the latter, instead of vice versa, as originally established. Furthermore (confirming its sinful nature), it has floated up off its pillars or foundations, lost its four corners, and become a silly ball, on which there just is no possible mountaintop from which one could see all nations of the Earth.
Plate Tectonics
Since this is such a new development in geophysics, creationists don't seem to have much to say about it yet. (They haven't been told yet that they can't believe in it.) Though they may not have heard it excoriated from the pulpit yet, it surely makes them uneasy, since it just doesn't jibe with young-Earth or Flood geology.
Update: Creationists seem to have missed the boat on the plate tectonics question. Since it was around for a number of years without being denied by creationists, by the time they got around to considering it, it was too late to deny (if it was wrong, why didn't they say so from the start?). So recently I've seen several creationist attempts to somehow work plate tectonics into their fantasy, and even use this ultimate account of an ancient and evolving planet as proof of a recent creation!
Micro-organisms
Why did they have to show up? They're never mentioned in the Bible at all, so creationists have to do some creative rewriting of Genesis to account for their day of creation, and their presence or absence on the Ark.
Ice Ages
Very inconvenient! They have to have occurred since the Flood, since, according to creationists, the surface of the Earth was reworked by the Flood (to create, for instance, the Grand Canyon practically overnight), which would have messed up all those marks of glaciers on the landscape. That means mile-thick ice sheets had to advance and retreat again and again, across half the Northern Hemisphere, with the speed of freight trains. (As with plate tectonics, some creationists seem to have abandoned complete denial of ice ages [even though they're never mentioned in the Bible {How could the true history of the world miss those?}], and acknowledged a single ice age, which had to have occurred within historical times.)
The Sky
...has evaporated! In Adam's time it was clearly a solid dome, a "firmament," which was firm enough to separate waters above it from those below on the Earth. By Noah's time it was still solid enough to have windows in it that had to be opened to let the rain through. I think that creationists that try to rationalize (weasel) their way out of this one by calling it "poetic metaphor" have given in to the godless materialists! The Bible really is literal, in the true sense of the word. The sky was a hard firmament with windows in it--but at some time since then it evaporated. Anybody who says different is a mealy-mouthed evolution-sympathizer. [Paul Murray adds the footnote] The word "firmament," according to Strong's Concordance (word 7549) is a translation of the Hebrew "raqiya." "Raqiya" means a canopy, as in "Hast thou with him spread out the sky?," and "that stretcheth out the heavens as a curtain, and spreadeth them out as a tent to dwell in."
A Pile of Sand
So the universe comes from randomness, and order only comes as a result of a conscious intent? When sand trickles down into a pile, the pile is conical. Now a cone is an ordered shape. Does God, therefore, organize each collision of one grain against another so as to fulfill his purpose that the pile be conical? Is there some reason why He goes to all that trouble? It's a mystery, no doubt. Or maybe, just maybe, dissipative systems like this can exhibit spontaneous order-forming behavior. Other dissipative systems include crystal growth, snowflake formation and--horrors--organic life itself.
-Paul Murray
And Burt Ward adds one more in the same vein: Cans of mixed nuts and bags of potato chips. Those awful, incovenient examples of a steady application of energy promoting order instead of chaos. Big nuts and large chips go to the top, small nuts and crumbs go to the bottom. Don't those silly containers know that the odds of that happening BY CHANCE ALONE is trillions to one against? It's against the second law of thermodynamics !
The Apostle Paul
Dustin Huwe points out that in 1 Timothy 1:4 and Titus 3:9, Paul advises us to ignore "fables and endless genealogies." The genealogies of Gen 10, Chr 1-9, Mt 1, and Lk 3 are one of the key ways creatonists have 'proved' the Earth to be about 6,000 years old.
Secondly, in Titus 1:14, Paul tells us to ignore Jewish fables. Wouldn't that mean most of the Old Testament, if not all of Genesis?
2 Corinthans 3:6 "He has made us competent as ministers of a new covenant--not of the letter but of the Spirit; for the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life."
Fossils
...have always been a thorn in the side of creationism. First of all, extinct creatures shouldn't even exist in a perfect Creation, since their very extinction implies that they were not so perfect. And there are so darn many of them, of so many different kinds. Every excuse they come up with for why there even are fossils of extinct organisms makes creationists look silly. And the very fact that they've come up with so many different, mutually exclusive explanations would seem to indicate that, essentially, they're clueless. I have personally been offered all these sound, creation-scientific explanations of what fossils are and how they got there:
o Dinosaurs were too big to go on the Ark, so they got buried in the mud of the Flood. (How about extinct smaller creatures--and what about the "fact" that Noah collected pairs of all animals?)
o Extinct creatures were on the Ark. They died out later. (How many seismosaurs, T. rexes, mastodons, and megatheria can you fit on the head of a pin? And why rescue them if their immediate future reads "extinction"?)
o Fossils never were animals. They're a hoax by Satan and/or materialistic science.
o Fossils never were animals. They're a hoax by God to test your faith. (And I will go to hell for falling for a trick pulled by the Almighty Himself? Doesn't that seem just a bit petty?)
Transitional Fossils
...can't possibly exist, since nothing ever gradually evolved into anything else. Less sophisticated creationists handle the issue by merely spouting the slogan "There are no transitional fossils." They heard that from a good, born-again fundamentalist, so it must be true--no further research necessary. The few who are vaguely aware of the vast range of fossils that have been found, including beautiful examples of transitional series, merely draw lines: everything on that side of the line is ape, and everything on this side is human. If another fossil turns up with features exactly between the two, no problem--just assign it to one side or the other. No matter how fine the gradation, creationists will never admit seeing transition, because they know ahead of time that it can't exist. Amusingly, however, in series such as the hominid line leading to us, different creationist "experts" draw the line between ape and human in different places !
DNA
Nasty stuff. It's really a shame that it had to turn up and confirm predictions of relationships made by evolutionary theory perfectly. And what a dirty trick to have human DNA fit right into the distribution, right next door to the chimps'! It's just not fair. It almost looks like Someone arranged the whole thing just to make evolution appear to be true. Worse yet, this ultimate blueprint for building entire human beings turns out to be just plain chemicals, with nothing magical or even particularly unusual that sets humans aside from other living things. And those geneticists can even tinker with the stuff, and build new creatures. They can replace defective genes in people, and even put human genes into pigs. Why wasn't something put into Leviticus to forbid such ungodliness?
Honesty and Moral Behavior
...among evolutionists. It must really irk creationists that the great majority of us "evolutionists" are basically upright, moral folks. We shouldn't be, because belief in evolution "destroys our faith in the Bible," so naturally we have "no moral guide" and "no fear of eternal damnation," and since "we think we came from monkeys," we see ourselves as "animals with no eternal souls." I'll confess it right now: my basically upright, honest, cleanly-lived life is all a sham. I'm part of the One World Government Evolutionist Conspiracy (OWGEC), and my apparent morality is merely a deception to lure unsuspecting young creationists over to the Dark Side! (And yes, I've signed Satan's black book, I have a barcode on my left arm [just like "Dr." Kent Hovind says] with which I pay for groceries, and I am in personal email contact daily with the Antichrist. I admit all that, so accuse me of something original.)
Ribs
...human ribs, that is, present a real problem. I've been told, on good authority (by creationists, whose scientific authority is the Bible, and what could be more authoritative?), that men have one less rib than women, because one of Adam's ribs was removed to mold into Eve. My creationist informant has generally become confused upon being asked if that means one less pair of ribs, or just one rib missing from one side. Then my instructor in human origins becomes red in the face and defensive, if not to say hostile, when asked if he has ever actually counted ribs on male and female human skeletons, living or deceased. None that I've met have ever actually tried this simplest of scientific experiments, which could go a long way toward proving a testable prediction of creationism. (For members of the Republic of Texas Militia: men have exactly the same number of ribs as women.)
NEWSFLASH: I've just been informed by a rock-solid creationist that the latest discovery of "creation science" is that men used to have fewer ribs than women, but they don't anymore! Perhaps creationists have unearthed a whole bunch of ancient skeletons, with all the males being short a rib. An appeal: PLEASE reveal this evidence to the rest of the world, so that we all can be brought into the Light of True Bible Science! (Dang, I posted this back in '98, and not a single creationist has written me about that archaeological Shocking Proof of the Genesis Story! I so wanted that one tangible piece of evidence that would prove that evolution is a sham.)
Insects
...which have so many generations of nasty babies so often that in just a few years they can change. Those ugly boll weevils, for instance, develop resistance to pesticides; and those filthy peppered moths in England (Darwin's home--coincidence? I don't think so.) change the shade of their camouflage. Evolutionists want to call those piddlin' changes "evolution"--which just shows that they don't even know what the term means. So we creationists have to tell them that "evolution" means apes popping out human babies. You'd think them evil-utionists'd have that straight by now. (For folks who trust Rush Limbaugh to ever get any facts right: the above is sarcasm.)
Footprints
...especially human ones, which creationist "investigators" keep discovering in the same strata as dinosaur bones or footprints, and paleontologists keep demonstrating are nothing of the sort. It's been my experience that creationist authorities (oxymoron) usually end up admitting that they weren't really human prints after all. But they are somewhat lax in passing that information on to their flocks of True Believers, with the result that your average grassroots creationist is under the impression that the fossil record is replete with human footprints, clear back to the beginning (suggested by Floyd Waddle). (To my knowledge, there are NO "manprints" in mesozoic strata that are claimed as such by the main creationist organizations. It's only a few fringe crackpots that continue to make those claims, and embarrass the "mainstream" creationists, who have to eventually denounce them. Your pot has to be SERIOUSLY cracked to get even your fellow creationists to admit you're over the top.)
Craters
Creationists have to hate those pesky asteroid craters which are found all over the planet, throughout all geological strata. The Bible is strangely silent on such devastating impacts as Meteor Crater in Arizona, the Ring Lakes in Quebec, and that biggie that likely dusted off the dinosaurs and created all that beautiful beachfront property on the Yucatan peninsula (suggested and borrowed nearly verbatim from Jason Bowes). (The Tunguska explosion or its aftereffects were noticed worldwide, and it didn't even leave a crater! Why wasn't the Chicxulub event, with a 170 km crater, which had to have caused worldwide devastation, at least noted in passing by some biblical patriarch or another?)
Planets
Anybody notice that in the last few years astronomers, using improved techniques and instruments (like Hubble ), have begun to discover other planets around other suns (over 100 located so far) ? Have we noticed that several of those solar systems are at several of the stages of planetary-system evolution hypothesized for the evolution of our own system? To further increase the squirm factor for our reality-challenged fellow citizens, perhaps they would be kind enough to locate the passages in the "scientifically accurate" Bible which acknowledge that there are, in fact, other worlds (or even that the moon is a world upon which men could someday live, and not just a "lesser light" hung in the sky).
For many other things that Creationists hate, go here - http://members.aol.com/darrwin/things.htm
Charles Darwin - he must have thought Creationists were "stoopid".
Geology
Even before Darwin, it was geologists (geology is another science that started in England) who began to establish that the Earth is much older than old Jim Ussher said it was. And modern geology stubbornly refuses to yield up proof of a universal flood, or the recent and coeval existence of all creatures, living and extinct.
Charles Darwin
Well, duhh....
The Whole Silly Flood Story
So many things were accumulating under this heading that I decided to make a separate Whole Silly Flood Story page!
Physics
...has all those embarrassing laws, like decay rates of isotopes, the non-decaying speed of light, the refraction of light to produce rainbows, etc., which have to be ignored, twisted, or denied to defend Genesis. And to add insult to injury, physicists can't seem to see the truth that evolution violates the Second Law of Thermodynamics --a "fact" that every good creationist knows, even without a degree in physics!
The Scientific Method
Creationists detest it so much that they've apparently invented their own, improved version, with the following highly logical rules:
o Take as a given fact all those parts of the Bible we tell you to.
o Use not the null hypothesis; make no attempt to disprove any creationist hypothesis; report not any negative findings.
o Quote as authoritative anything a fellow creationist writes, regardless of his qualifications or subsequent discrediting of his methods or results.
o Misquote or quote out of context famous "evolutionists" so that they appear to admit evolution isn't real.
o Continue to repeat your old “evidence,” long after you’ve been publicly shown to have the facts dead wrong. Your new marks—oops, faithful followers—won’t know that you were proven wrong and that you’re now lying.
o Don't waste your time with actual laboratory or field experiments. All the answers are in the Bible.
And Stephen Reese reminds us that creationists can't seem to abide peer review. They must REALLY hate it because no one has ever seen a trace of creationist peer review.
Each Other
Old-Earth creationists think the Young-Earthers are too zealous and dogmatic, even for them. Young-Earthers know the Old-Earthers and Multiple-Catastrophists have given in to "liberal" (if not to say Satanic) influences. Some years there are multiple "Ark-hunting" expeditions to Turkey, each of which thinks the others are obstructing the progress of "Bible science."
The Holy Bible
That old Book persists in saying things that the creationists, who claim to take it as literal truth, have to admit are metaphorical (like the "doors" in the firmament that let the rain through). That means, of course, that they have to arbitrarily decide which parts are literally literal, and which are only metaphorically literal (and can't they twist the English language!). I've never yet read a justification for who gets to make that determination and how, so I'll summarize it thus: Everything is literal except things that even we creationists can't stomach.
Even worse, the "scientifically accurate" Bible reveals not a single fact about nature that wasn't commonly known at the time. If only it had revealed the atomic structure of matter, or the inverse square law, or the existence of bacteria--or even the heliocentric solar system!
Still doubt that creationists hate the Bible? Ask several if they've ever read it--all the way through, cover-to-cover. 97% of the time the answer will be no. They're sure every word is literally true, and the divine message of God, but somehow they've never quite found the time to actually read the thing. Is this irony thick enough yet?
Bats
Somehow, quite perversely, they changed from "fowls" to mammals between the time Moses (according to literalists) wrote the Pentateuch and now.
The Human Mind
...just to be ornery, has moved from the heart, where it resided through New Testament times, into the brain.
Stars
...somehow have grown a lot bigger and moved much farther away, so that by now it seems foolish to expect a sizable fraction of them to fall to Earth, as predicted in Revelation.
The Earth
...on the other hand, to test Man's faith in the literal veracity of scripture, has shrunk to become much smaller than the sun, and has taken to circling the latter, instead of vice versa, as originally established. Furthermore (confirming its sinful nature), it has floated up off its pillars or foundations, lost its four corners, and become a silly ball, on which there just is no possible mountaintop from which one could see all nations of the Earth.
Plate Tectonics
Since this is such a new development in geophysics, creationists don't seem to have much to say about it yet. (They haven't been told yet that they can't believe in it.) Though they may not have heard it excoriated from the pulpit yet, it surely makes them uneasy, since it just doesn't jibe with young-Earth or Flood geology.
Update: Creationists seem to have missed the boat on the plate tectonics question. Since it was around for a number of years without being denied by creationists, by the time they got around to considering it, it was too late to deny (if it was wrong, why didn't they say so from the start?). So recently I've seen several creationist attempts to somehow work plate tectonics into their fantasy, and even use this ultimate account of an ancient and evolving planet as proof of a recent creation!
Micro-organisms
Why did they have to show up? They're never mentioned in the Bible at all, so creationists have to do some creative rewriting of Genesis to account for their day of creation, and their presence or absence on the Ark.
Ice Ages
Very inconvenient! They have to have occurred since the Flood, since, according to creationists, the surface of the Earth was reworked by the Flood (to create, for instance, the Grand Canyon practically overnight), which would have messed up all those marks of glaciers on the landscape. That means mile-thick ice sheets had to advance and retreat again and again, across half the Northern Hemisphere, with the speed of freight trains. (As with plate tectonics, some creationists seem to have abandoned complete denial of ice ages [even though they're never mentioned in the Bible {How could the true history of the world miss those?}], and acknowledged a single ice age, which had to have occurred within historical times.)
The Sky
...has evaporated! In Adam's time it was clearly a solid dome, a "firmament," which was firm enough to separate waters above it from those below on the Earth. By Noah's time it was still solid enough to have windows in it that had to be opened to let the rain through. I think that creationists that try to rationalize (weasel) their way out of this one by calling it "poetic metaphor" have given in to the godless materialists! The Bible really is literal, in the true sense of the word. The sky was a hard firmament with windows in it--but at some time since then it evaporated. Anybody who says different is a mealy-mouthed evolution-sympathizer. [Paul Murray adds the footnote] The word "firmament," according to Strong's Concordance (word 7549) is a translation of the Hebrew "raqiya." "Raqiya" means a canopy, as in "Hast thou with him spread out the sky?," and "that stretcheth out the heavens as a curtain, and spreadeth them out as a tent to dwell in."
A Pile of Sand
So the universe comes from randomness, and order only comes as a result of a conscious intent? When sand trickles down into a pile, the pile is conical. Now a cone is an ordered shape. Does God, therefore, organize each collision of one grain against another so as to fulfill his purpose that the pile be conical? Is there some reason why He goes to all that trouble? It's a mystery, no doubt. Or maybe, just maybe, dissipative systems like this can exhibit spontaneous order-forming behavior. Other dissipative systems include crystal growth, snowflake formation and--horrors--organic life itself.
-Paul Murray
And Burt Ward adds one more in the same vein: Cans of mixed nuts and bags of potato chips. Those awful, incovenient examples of a steady application of energy promoting order instead of chaos. Big nuts and large chips go to the top, small nuts and crumbs go to the bottom. Don't those silly containers know that the odds of that happening BY CHANCE ALONE is trillions to one against? It's against the second law of thermodynamics !
The Apostle Paul
Dustin Huwe points out that in 1 Timothy 1:4 and Titus 3:9, Paul advises us to ignore "fables and endless genealogies." The genealogies of Gen 10, Chr 1-9, Mt 1, and Lk 3 are one of the key ways creatonists have 'proved' the Earth to be about 6,000 years old.
Secondly, in Titus 1:14, Paul tells us to ignore Jewish fables. Wouldn't that mean most of the Old Testament, if not all of Genesis?
2 Corinthans 3:6 "He has made us competent as ministers of a new covenant--not of the letter but of the Spirit; for the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life."
Fossils
...have always been a thorn in the side of creationism. First of all, extinct creatures shouldn't even exist in a perfect Creation, since their very extinction implies that they were not so perfect. And there are so darn many of them, of so many different kinds. Every excuse they come up with for why there even are fossils of extinct organisms makes creationists look silly. And the very fact that they've come up with so many different, mutually exclusive explanations would seem to indicate that, essentially, they're clueless. I have personally been offered all these sound, creation-scientific explanations of what fossils are and how they got there:
o Dinosaurs were too big to go on the Ark, so they got buried in the mud of the Flood. (How about extinct smaller creatures--and what about the "fact" that Noah collected pairs of all animals?)
o Extinct creatures were on the Ark. They died out later. (How many seismosaurs, T. rexes, mastodons, and megatheria can you fit on the head of a pin? And why rescue them if their immediate future reads "extinction"?)
o Fossils never were animals. They're a hoax by Satan and/or materialistic science.
o Fossils never were animals. They're a hoax by God to test your faith. (And I will go to hell for falling for a trick pulled by the Almighty Himself? Doesn't that seem just a bit petty?)
Transitional Fossils
...can't possibly exist, since nothing ever gradually evolved into anything else. Less sophisticated creationists handle the issue by merely spouting the slogan "There are no transitional fossils." They heard that from a good, born-again fundamentalist, so it must be true--no further research necessary. The few who are vaguely aware of the vast range of fossils that have been found, including beautiful examples of transitional series, merely draw lines: everything on that side of the line is ape, and everything on this side is human. If another fossil turns up with features exactly between the two, no problem--just assign it to one side or the other. No matter how fine the gradation, creationists will never admit seeing transition, because they know ahead of time that it can't exist. Amusingly, however, in series such as the hominid line leading to us, different creationist "experts" draw the line between ape and human in different places !
DNA
Nasty stuff. It's really a shame that it had to turn up and confirm predictions of relationships made by evolutionary theory perfectly. And what a dirty trick to have human DNA fit right into the distribution, right next door to the chimps'! It's just not fair. It almost looks like Someone arranged the whole thing just to make evolution appear to be true. Worse yet, this ultimate blueprint for building entire human beings turns out to be just plain chemicals, with nothing magical or even particularly unusual that sets humans aside from other living things. And those geneticists can even tinker with the stuff, and build new creatures. They can replace defective genes in people, and even put human genes into pigs. Why wasn't something put into Leviticus to forbid such ungodliness?
Honesty and Moral Behavior
...among evolutionists. It must really irk creationists that the great majority of us "evolutionists" are basically upright, moral folks. We shouldn't be, because belief in evolution "destroys our faith in the Bible," so naturally we have "no moral guide" and "no fear of eternal damnation," and since "we think we came from monkeys," we see ourselves as "animals with no eternal souls." I'll confess it right now: my basically upright, honest, cleanly-lived life is all a sham. I'm part of the One World Government Evolutionist Conspiracy (OWGEC), and my apparent morality is merely a deception to lure unsuspecting young creationists over to the Dark Side! (And yes, I've signed Satan's black book, I have a barcode on my left arm [just like "Dr." Kent Hovind says] with which I pay for groceries, and I am in personal email contact daily with the Antichrist. I admit all that, so accuse me of something original.)
Ribs
...human ribs, that is, present a real problem. I've been told, on good authority (by creationists, whose scientific authority is the Bible, and what could be more authoritative?), that men have one less rib than women, because one of Adam's ribs was removed to mold into Eve. My creationist informant has generally become confused upon being asked if that means one less pair of ribs, or just one rib missing from one side. Then my instructor in human origins becomes red in the face and defensive, if not to say hostile, when asked if he has ever actually counted ribs on male and female human skeletons, living or deceased. None that I've met have ever actually tried this simplest of scientific experiments, which could go a long way toward proving a testable prediction of creationism. (For members of the Republic of Texas Militia: men have exactly the same number of ribs as women.)
NEWSFLASH: I've just been informed by a rock-solid creationist that the latest discovery of "creation science" is that men used to have fewer ribs than women, but they don't anymore! Perhaps creationists have unearthed a whole bunch of ancient skeletons, with all the males being short a rib. An appeal: PLEASE reveal this evidence to the rest of the world, so that we all can be brought into the Light of True Bible Science! (Dang, I posted this back in '98, and not a single creationist has written me about that archaeological Shocking Proof of the Genesis Story! I so wanted that one tangible piece of evidence that would prove that evolution is a sham.)
Insects
...which have so many generations of nasty babies so often that in just a few years they can change. Those ugly boll weevils, for instance, develop resistance to pesticides; and those filthy peppered moths in England (Darwin's home--coincidence? I don't think so.) change the shade of their camouflage. Evolutionists want to call those piddlin' changes "evolution"--which just shows that they don't even know what the term means. So we creationists have to tell them that "evolution" means apes popping out human babies. You'd think them evil-utionists'd have that straight by now. (For folks who trust Rush Limbaugh to ever get any facts right: the above is sarcasm.)
Footprints
...especially human ones, which creationist "investigators" keep discovering in the same strata as dinosaur bones or footprints, and paleontologists keep demonstrating are nothing of the sort. It's been my experience that creationist authorities (oxymoron) usually end up admitting that they weren't really human prints after all. But they are somewhat lax in passing that information on to their flocks of True Believers, with the result that your average grassroots creationist is under the impression that the fossil record is replete with human footprints, clear back to the beginning (suggested by Floyd Waddle). (To my knowledge, there are NO "manprints" in mesozoic strata that are claimed as such by the main creationist organizations. It's only a few fringe crackpots that continue to make those claims, and embarrass the "mainstream" creationists, who have to eventually denounce them. Your pot has to be SERIOUSLY cracked to get even your fellow creationists to admit you're over the top.)
Craters
Creationists have to hate those pesky asteroid craters which are found all over the planet, throughout all geological strata. The Bible is strangely silent on such devastating impacts as Meteor Crater in Arizona, the Ring Lakes in Quebec, and that biggie that likely dusted off the dinosaurs and created all that beautiful beachfront property on the Yucatan peninsula (suggested and borrowed nearly verbatim from Jason Bowes). (The Tunguska explosion or its aftereffects were noticed worldwide, and it didn't even leave a crater! Why wasn't the Chicxulub event, with a 170 km crater, which had to have caused worldwide devastation, at least noted in passing by some biblical patriarch or another?)
Planets
Anybody notice that in the last few years astronomers, using improved techniques and instruments (like Hubble ), have begun to discover other planets around other suns (over 100 located so far) ? Have we noticed that several of those solar systems are at several of the stages of planetary-system evolution hypothesized for the evolution of our own system? To further increase the squirm factor for our reality-challenged fellow citizens, perhaps they would be kind enough to locate the passages in the "scientifically accurate" Bible which acknowledge that there are, in fact, other worlds (or even that the moon is a world upon which men could someday live, and not just a "lesser light" hung in the sky).
For many other things that Creationists hate, go here - http://members.aol.com/darrwin/things.htm
Graeme said:
TWENTY ONE cases of transitional fossils have been found. Any individual pushing this sort of “argument” is conveniently ignoring an overwhelming body of scientific evidence. Secondly the deduction that the entire Theory of Evolution is based on the finding of missing-link fossils is one based on an incredulous lack of knowledge about paleontology and the theory of evolution. According to the punctuated equilibrium model of evolution, change is not gradual. Rather, it happens in BURSTS, with entire new species forming in time period of perhaps 100 generations (and that answers question 1). Now the fossil record is clearly incomplete; only 7 tyrannosaurus rex skeletons have been found, and this species existed for approximately 20 million years.
Therefore it is only logical that there are many transitional species that didn't exist long enough to form fossils. In fact the presence of the transitional fossils that we have found indicates that transitional species are actually extremely common.
Info from this website - http://members.shaw.ca/amitdeshwar/creationism.html
In another sense, EVERY fossil is transitional, and every living thing is transitional. Natural selection doesn't stop when new species appear, everything's on the way to becoming something else, all the time, or heading for extinction. We all know dinosaurs are extinct, for instance, but it's pretty clear that birds evolved from them.
One trouble with the 'lack of transitional fossils' argument is that it provides an infinite regression. A fossil that is clearly a transitional form between two others doesn't answer anything for the creationists and IDers, it just creates two more gaps they can point at and demand transitional fossils for, which if found will create four gaps...
That's logic on a par with, "If we descended from apes*, why are there still apes?"
*Hint for creationists: we didn't.
One trouble with the 'lack of transitional fossils' argument is that it provides an infinite regression. A fossil that is clearly a transitional form between two others doesn't answer anything for the creationists and IDers, it just creates two more gaps they can point at and demand transitional fossils for, which if found will create four gaps...
That's logic on a par with, "If we descended from apes*, why are there still apes?"
*Hint for creationists: we didn't.
Graeme said:
Damn! I guess all those skulls of early humans (Cro-Magnon etc.) and dinosaur bones are fake! It is a huge conspiracy! It is the flim-flam to end all flim-flams! I wish to shake the hands of those who perpetrated such a fraud! Such professional work! I am jealous!
Graeme said:
Trust me, scientists have asked the same questions. After searching for the answers, they still believe in evolution. Actually, Darwin himself even gave some pretty good aswers to these very questions (more or less).
Would you like me to point you to some good books on the topic?
Re: RE: Evolution - Possibly
Interesting. I've also heard that back in the day -I'm talking further back than 3000 years ago- human beings actually got smaller on average. A guess was that it had something to do with eliminating some of the more violent and aggressive, often larger members of the species.
Champloo said:
Interesting. I've also heard that back in the day -I'm talking further back than 3000 years ago- human beings actually got smaller on average. A guess was that it had something to do with eliminating some of the more violent and aggressive, often larger members of the species.