Just wait — this one will be featured in some cheesy Sci-Fi channel creature feature in a few months. Paleontologists have dug up a fossil boa that lived 58-60 million years ago. They haven’t found a complete skeleton, but there’s enough to get an estimate of the size. Look at these vertebrae!
a, Type specimen (UF/IGM 1) in anterior view compared to scale with a precloacal vertebra from approximately 65% along the precloacal column of a 3.4 m Boa constrictor. Type specimen (UF/IGM 1) shown in posterior view (b), left lateral view (c) and dorsal view (d). Seven articulated precloacal vertebrae (UF/IGM 3) in dorsal view (e). Articulated precloacal vertebra and rib (UF/IGM 4) in anterior view (f). Precloacal vertebra (paratype specimen UF/IGM 2) in anterior view (g) and ventral view (h). Precloacal vertebra (UF/IGM 5) in anterior view (i) and posterior view (j). All specimens are to scale.
Just to put it in perspective, the small pale blob between a and b in the photo above is an equivalent vertebra from an extant boa, which was 3.4 meters long. The extinct beast is estimated to have been about 13 meters long, weighing over 1100 kg (for us Americans, that’s 42 feet and 2500 pounds). This is a very big snake, the largest ever found.
The authors used the size of this snake to estimate the temperature of this region of South America 60 million years ago. Snakes are poikilotherms, depending on external sources of heat to maintain a given level of metabolic activity, and so available temperature means are limiting factors on how large they can grow. By comparing this animal’s size to that of modern tropical snakes, and extrapolating from a measured curve of size to mean annual temperature, they were able to calculate that the average ambient temperature was 30-34°C (American cluestick: about 90°F); less than that, and this snake would have died.
From other data, they know that the atmospheric CO2 concentration at this time was about 2000 parts per million, and that the forests it lived in were thick, wet, and rainy. They also estimate that slightly later, about 56 million years ago, mean tropical temperatures would have soared to 38-40°C (102°F), and would have killed off many species.
So there you go…this is one place I think I’d avoid if I had a time machine. It was a thick-aired, muggy, sweltering oven, with giant snakes crawling about. They were likely to have eaten large crocodilians, so I suspect a time-traveling human would be nothing but a quick hors d’ouevre. They’re still interesting, though, especially as an example of evolution and climate science meeting in a mutually revealing fashion.
Head JJ, Block JI, Hastings AK, Bourque JR, Cadena EA, Herrera FA, Polly D, Jaramillo CA (2009) Giant boid snake from the Palaeocene neotropics
reveals hotter past equatorial temperatures. Nature 457(7230):715-718.
Hey, I just saw this on MonsterQuest : )
It’s amazing what fossils Satan buries to fool the righteous.
Anyway, teach the controversy.
Seriously, what a fright that snake would be.
Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/6mb592
Great, nightmarish, beautiful stuff.
PS. But what about this did I not already know? What did I NEED to know? Ha!
I wish my good friend, Garfunkel, would stop by and explain that there is not enough evidence and that this is largely a philosophical affair.
But I am sure that millions of kids think that Titanoboa is the coolest thing.
I had a feeling I saw that giant crusher cloned to life in the movie “Ananconda”!
I remember when the authors announced this at the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology symposium last October. At that point it was sort of like a movie preview; a “Hey, check this out, and watch for our paper coming soon!” Details were sketchy at that point, but it was already the talk of the meeting.
Science is always interesting, but sometimes it is So. Frickin’. Cool.
“It’s amazing what fossils Satan buries to fool the righteous.”
They would rationalize it to being the serpent from the garden of Eden–drowned in the great flood!
Sweet, I dodged away from that croc! Wait, whats that sound? AAIIIIEEEEEEE……
Was wondering how long until you posted about this one.
Neat find.
@Glen D (#2)
Mock all you want, but you’ll be eating your words when scientists find that serpent’s larynx and prove that the Genesis account is true!
Eye-yai-yai… maybe religion is good for something because all I can think of is HOLY MOLEY!
Well sir,
You need to know that snakes had babies on land at one time, and what a profound revelation that is!
Just another rambling idiot,
DH
It’s amazing what fossils Satan buries to fool the righteous.
Tsk tsk Glen, didn’t you know that it’s God who puts these things there in order to test our faith.
God’s a southern baptist and an anti intellectual.
As any fule kno
Anyway, awesome snake, imagine the boots you could make out of the fucker,
I just love the correlation between size and temperature. And the confirmation from other sources of possible greenhouse effects. Sniff. The smell of science. Thanks PZ.
Doesn’t look the same without J-Lo.
Damnit! hje beat me to it. :-(
This post got 11 comments (12, counting my own).
The long-winded letter from the very angry young man got 273 comments.
Just sayin’.
Is it any wonder that this creature is extinct? There’s no way it could fit on the ark!
;-)
“But I am sure that millions of kids think that Titanoboa is the coolest thing.”
I’m 28 and I think this is the coolest thing.
This must be the snake from The Garden of Eden(R). If a bruiser like that told me to eat an apple I wouldn’t pause to ask if it was okay with Gawd.
From viewing the image of the bones and consulting my Bible science adviser, I’ve dated the fossil to be 5,732 (±6.83 days) years old. [/getting jump on AIG]
This would explain why Eve listened to the snake.
Edited for accuracy.
When I first mentioned this snake to my gf last night I forgot to add the word “extinct” in my description. She became very concerned!
14*
‘Anyway, awesome snake, imagine the boots you could make out of the fucker’
‘Okay we need non-volunteers to take one step backward…where the fuck do you think you are going Garfunkel’?
Enough is enough! I have had it with these motherfuckin’ snakes in this motherfuckin’ Palaeocene!
Bownian L Jackson
You think it would bother to eat a human? We’d be so small it’d barely have to open its mouth. I keep imagining what it would look like unhinging its jaw to swallow a much tastier, larger meal.
Would the 38-40°C temperatures kill these snakes? It wouldn’t make them bigger or less active/nocturnal?
#26
“Enough is enough! I have had it with these motherfuckin’ snakes in this motherfuckin’ Palaeocene!”
LOL! How did I miss that one?!?
Brownian L Jackson even
KoT
We know the vertibrae were extra huge, but I don’t quite see how the length can be estimated except by applying this larger girth to a larger length. I’m no snakespert, but is it possible these estimates are in error and that this extra-thick snake was far shorter in proportion, or perhaps even had use of its limbs?
I saw this (minus the super-cool bone photo) over at BoingBoing yesterday. I loved all the comments from folks heralding this as YET ANOTHER good reason to fight global warming, haha! Nobody wants giant snakes making a return!
28*
‘Would the 38-40°C temperatures kill these snakes?’
Nope the opposite apparently…that is why this mutha existed!
So could this be turned into some sort of argument to be used against the global warming denialists. We can’t let the temperatures rise because then the world becomes perfect for big mofo snakes. It could be an easy to digest Hollywood movie, “Snakes on Plane 2 – Global Warming” and Samuel L Jackson could become snake kibble at the end of the movie.
To all the faith-driven snake-handlers: Handle this!
33*
28*
‘Would the 38-40°C temperatures kill these snakes?’
Nope the opposite apparently…that is why this mutha existed!’
Actually nope… me bad…misread temps it would have killed them…according to the text!
There must have been a lot of other animals in those days for this thing to eat. A breeding colony of these suckers must have had an incredibly large territory to keep themselves fed. How long did it take for them to go extinct?
#31: Actually, the relationship between vertebrae size and body size in snakes is a pretty well-kept ratio. A short, wide snake would not be able to propel itself properly, be able to climb a tree, or in the case of a boa, attack in a non-venomous fashion.
As far as if the fossil had legs, I’m not cool enough to know if the existing bones could preclude that theory, but since the guys who dug it up are calling it a boa, I’m going to rely on their expertise until something or someone else comes along, and gives proof otherwise. My guess, is that since snakes have been at an evolutionary standstill, (or perfection, depending on your love for snakes) that the bone structure has distinguishing characteristics that separate it from a leg-bearing reptile. Probably something along the lines of bone density and rib connection points.
Cryptozoologists are already touting this find as evidence for giant snakes still alive today.
http://www.cryptomundo.com/cryptozoo-news/titanoboa/
Holy shit! That is one big snake.
Well, in my (admittedly limited) experience in keeping boas, they don’t eat very often. One good meal keeps them satisfied for a week or two. I’d guess something the size of a turkey would keep this one happy for a while. Snakes are very sedentary, and don’t burn a lot of energy, especially being cold-blooded.
BTW, thanks PZ for using units that 95% of the world uses and understands.
The biomass necessary to keep a population of these snakes might not have been that large. Poikilotherms only need a third to a tenth of the energy than similarly sized homeotherms to maintain a population, especially given a tropical environment where the ambient warm temperatures can support greater hours in the day available for hunting.
Our snakes go to “11”.
(sigh) Isn’t she loooovellyyyyy…
Brownian wins this thread, tho’.
Well human size prey was probably for the kiddies (or for the crocs that in turn the snake probably ate).
I also note they found bones from 28 different individual snakes. Apparently 8 were this large size.
Wow, the movie “Anaconda.”
I remember that huge thing. The way it moved. Imagining it smothering me. So scary.
The snake was just bad CG, though.
Is the 1100 kg figure before or after ingesting a giant sloth (or a prehistoric Rush Limbaugh)?
42 foot snake? That’s nothing. We’ve got 49-footers in Asia today! http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3845750/
Why did it have to be a snake?!
Stacy
Where is the fossilised voicebox? Was there a fossilised apple nearby?
Land snakes! Snake’s alive! For Christ’s snake!
I got a million of ’em….
Saw this on the news last night… so cool! I can’t believe the size difference between those vertebrae. One of the authors proclaimed that this snake could have taken, and beaten, a T-rex. Now either that’s one super proud (and biased) scientist, or this was one monstrous beast of a snake.
“Snakes are poikilotherms, depending on external sources of heat to maintain a given level of metabolic activity, and so available temperature means are limiting factors on how large they can grow.”
Ok, being an marine invert biologist, this seems a bit confusing to me. There are 1000lb+ Mesonycoteuthis in Antarctic waters, which are much colder. So this doesn’t seem to be a universal principle with poikilotherms, so when is different about snakes that causes this limitation. I guess I should go read the article…..but that time and being a grad student thing…..
… or a little of both. (An extension of my post @ #51).
Anyway, it’s still not as big as what I’ve got in my pants. Ladies, please form an orderly queaue to my right, your left…
(Hey, somebody had to say it…)
Gigantic (titan) snakes don’t bother me.
What would freak me out is if they found a SPIDER that large – or even worse, a >shudder< SCORPION.
Great. I come here for the atheism, and what do I find? Science! Where is the atheism? WHERE!?
We’ve got 49-footers in Asia today!
Not so much:
http://www.snopes.com/critters/wild/bigsnake.asp
I like esp. the quote from a python expert: “These giant pythons always shrink whenever a tape measure turns up.
Empiricism 1, Rumor mill 0
So it was east Texas? Well, I will say this – at least there aren’t any 50ft snakes about eating our alligators.
Wait for the correction, when the authors say, “On further analysis of the vertebrae, it now appears that this specimen was in fact … just a baby!”
I looked and looked for it but I can’t find where PZ mentions that these scientists are from the Univ. of Florida! http://news.ufl.edu/2009/02/04/giant-snake/
See!!Some Floridians are not backward hicks! :-)
Is it any wonder that this creature is extinct? There’s no way it could fit on the ark!
Nah, it’d fit just fine. It’d just have to eat—or scare away—everything else first. Including the T. Rex.
#60
Yes, UF does have a lot of good science. How that happens in Florida, I could never figure out. :-)
they were able to calculate that the average ambient temperature was 30-34°C (American cluestick: about 90°F); less than that, and this snake would have died.
I’m confused – why do higher temperatures allow for larger sizes? I would’ve thought it would be the opposite, due to gigantothermism.
I second that.
though I’d prefer to avoid any contacts with carnivorous fauna that’s heavier than me :-/
Wow, what a shoddy piece of lazy-ass reporting from NBC. Not surprising, I guess.
Does this mean Noa needed a bigger arc, or was this critter killed in the Flood?
Soooo … do poimegatherms live in volcanoes?
Any word on how closely related to the modern Anaconda this monster might be?
Thank you for posting this! It’s so exciting!
I’m thinking you might want to avoid my city too. It’s in the present, but gosh, what a horrible weather.
I read about this yesterday and thought of the Los Vegas woman who was snake-sitting when her child became Purina snake chow. It took about 5 police officers to cart the snake away after they killed it.
This ancient snake would need an army to cart it’s carcess away. Impressive!
I am sure someone will make a movie. It will probably be a Japanese horror movie with bad dubbing.
Sweet zombie Jesus! Somebody get my lightsaber!!!
Which one is it???
The one that says “bad motherfucker”!
@55
You had to bring up giant spiders didn’t ya? Now I won’t sleep for a week. Seriously I’d take two snakes that size over a skittery creepy arachnid half the size. *shiver* Well I guess I wouldn’t take them anywhere really, they are pretty big…
Snakes are poikilotherms, depending on external sources of heat to maintain a given level of metabolic activity, and so available temperature means are limiting factors on how large they can grow.
That’s amazing. I would have thought that anything that large had to have developed some means of regulating temperature. A snake that big basking in the sun would give me the shivers, 40C or no.
It’s name is Nasu and it eats heffalumps in the Gaian underground cave system.
Wow, it’s amazing what a toss-up the planet was after the K-T extinction event cleaned out so many ecological niches-terrestrial crocs, killer flightless birds, now this beauty.
I bet the folks at AIG are searching for giant pumpkins that it could have eaten before “the Fall”…
While running errands in the car I occasionally tune to the AM to see what sort of inannity I can find from a wingnut for some amusement. I happened to catch the Glen Beck show as he was talking about this very topic. Holy Crap! My brain still hurts from the stupid. Feast your brain on this if you dare:
http://www.glennbeck.com/content/articles/article/198/21101/
Its name is Nasu and it eats heffalumps in the Gaian underground cave system.
Ha! And it will soon be seen wrapped around a wanna-be god in the form of a 50-foot tall copy of Marilyn Monroe!
“or even worse, a >shudder”
A shudder that big would only be dangerous if it closed on you.
Yesterday’s ‘In the News’ picture on Wikipedia showed thousands of people cheering at the Super Bowl. The snippet reporting the finding of titanoboa was right beside it.
For one brief and happy moment I thought ‘Wow, paleontology has more fans than I would have expected!’
I have to admit that the pictures of Clock-spiders make me squirm, but I do realise that the dangerous ones and the small ones.
Now – if you show me evidence of a mansized snail/slug, I’ll be the first to scream like a little girl and have a nervous breakdown.
I hate hate hate gastropods.
That’s all very well, but did they get enough DNA to clone this thing?
Oh yeah. They showed the comparison to the Boa vertebra, and the whole room was taken aback.
What? What crowd did you hang out with? :-)
What reason is there for such an assumption? The proportions of known snakes are fairly constant.
No. It’s not just simply a snake, it’s specifically a boa. Therefore, it can’t possibly have had functional legs (though, being a boa, it almost certainly had the typical spur-like hindlimbs used for holding each other during copulation).
Unknown. All of the vertebrae found so far are from the same level (and ribs, skulls, or pelvic girdles haven’t been found yet).
Sloths didn’t exist yet, and (I hope) neither did Limbaughs…
Silly herpetologists! Once the T. rex bites, the snake is history.
Nope, that’s easy to see by whether the neural arches and the centra of the vertebrae are fused.
Bigger snakes have slower metabolisms. Too big snakes at too low temperatures would have too slow metabolisms to survive.
And how can anything snake-shaped be seriously gigantothermic? The only known gigantotherm is the leatherback turtle — constant locomotion, locomotor muscles located inside the shell, shell and thick fat layer adding to the insulation that the shape already provides…
The anaconda, too, is a boine boid.
I hate hate hate gastropods.
They are quite tasty. Try some with a bit olive oil, garlic, and some wine.
OUCH! Beaten by
MONTHS!
So. Fucking. Cool.
I wonder if the temperature estimate based on body size jibes with estimates from other sources and methods for the same time period and location. Always a beautiful thing when multiple independent methods point to the same value. Anyone know?
I think God did a bang-up job on this one. Probably went down like this: God was stumbling home a little buzzed from a party, perhaps a bit lit up and thinking about that one dude who kept monopolizing the conversation while in line for the kegger. God’s mumblin’ to himself “…’connoisseur of scotches’…my ass!…who does this guy think he is?” And a few steps later, God is all like “f_ck it, I’m making a snake the size of a f_cking bus!”
And Shazzam! 60 million years later Bloch et al., are digging up vertebrae the size of milk crates.
What would the diameter of that monster be?
David Marjanović @80,
I understand they are both boine boid. I’m wondering if it is even more closely related. Perhaps a direct line ancestor species or even a nearly identical species. Or are they no more closely related than modern Anaconda and other modern constrictors? I imagine that is extremely difficult to determine considering the limited information at present, but I’m curious.
I hate snakes. Really, really, really hate them. Imagining this…beast is probably going to haunt my dreams tonight.
Yeah, let’s wonder how the AiG people are going to spin a behemoth like this as a “good” thing. Like, what the frak was “God” thinking when he created that? I’m sure they’d say some shit like, “Oh, but it was a pretty, nice snake before Eve (that whore) saw the apple and listened to the pretty, nice snake.”
Larry: Holy crap, I couldn’t finish that Beck article. It was like wandering into one of the two offices here at work where Rush Limbaugh rants at high volume.
Among other things, that idiot gloated that science doesn’t know everything yet. Duh. I’d feel sorry for ignorant and simple-minded folks if they weren’t so determined to stay that way.
Anyway, let me be the first to welcome our heartless, expressionless, serpentine overlor… aw, the hell with it. I can’t say it. I’m not normally creeped out by snakes but this is absolutely magnificent.
My apologies to both Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly. I was wrong. Very clearly there is somebody less intelligent than both of you. Glenn Beck defiantly takes the prize for Media Moron. That level of stupid goes way beyond burn.
kermit: Sometimes I feel like I need to bear witness to the idiots like Beck, Limbaugh, O’Liely and Sean Inannity so that I may warn others when this nonsense comes up. Sadly, this moron has a pretty large following, sort of like Palin, but at least he is where he belongs now, on Fox, where the facts and reality never get in the way of their blathering. And worse, Beck thinks he’s funny!
Larry, that transcript was headache-inducing. is it possible to call a Godwin on a radio-show?
You all are all so very wrong. As we all know, nothing died before The Fall. This was a regular boa and nothing more. It’s just like how a T-Rex is really just an older crocoduck…err dile.
Serious time now. Sweet. I am also glad we don’t have those anymore.
Quoting David Marjanović, OM
Yes, but with some really notable exceptions. Big boas and pythons tend to break the rules pretty regularly (see Head and Polly 2007, Head et al.’s citation #13), and you have both long, slender snakes with small vertebrae (e.g. the Morelia amethystina complex) and short-bodied snakes with rather large vertebrae (the Python curtus complex). I was not satisfied with how Head et al. 2009 dealt with the conclusions of Head and Polly (2007).
However, there’s no doubt at all that this is a huge snake. I remember, at SVP, holding my hands out in front of me to visually estimate size when they mentioned the vertebrae were about 10 cm in diameter, and nearly falling out of my chair.
I think this is a pretty interesting find.. thats a big snake! But I’m more impressed that the lead researcher teaches not only at my school but my campus! University of Toronto Mississauga making media appearances. I like it.
RE: DGKnipfer
Head et al. suggest a phylogenetic relationship with genus Boa to the exclusion of other boine snakes on the basis of features of the paracotylar fossa and foramen. They do not subject the material to a phylogenetic analysis, though, which is understandable given the nature of the material (and the nature of the snake record in general).
If there is a well-defined relation between snake size and the temperature at which a snake can live, surely this snake must be an outlier. Isn’t there a danger in extrapolating data beyond what is observed?
For a snake that was as long as a bus (estimates up to 15 meters), and as heavy as ute (over 2 tonnes) that snacked on crocodiles, could munch a grown human as a single-bite apetiser, no wonder there is a huge fascinatiion over such monster.
If one ruled over the world today, it could easily crush any animal it faced, swallow goats and bulls, and nothing could be used to excavate such animal for further investigations.
So, if you are living in a Colombian rainforest, I d suggest that you close all your windows (not that windows would stop such monster enter your house), and hope that this monster doesnt flatten your house from the top.
Darn humans and their SUV’s back the must have caused the global warming that killed off the snake :-0
Run come see! – David Marjanović, OM made a factual error!
Actually, snakes don’t have neurocentral sutures at any stage (or epiphyses, at least in the crown clade). However, it’s still possible to tell a juvenile from adult by proportions (relatively short, wide and depressed vertebrae with large neural canal) and histology (more endochondral and less lamellar bone, with few or no LAGs).
Good point JDP: there are assumptions about vertebra number still implicit in the size-estimation method that may not be strictly accurate, but it’s an advance on simple linear scaling from a Recent skeleton (the best we could do previously). The best way to estimate the length of a fossil snake is to find the complete skeleton in articulation, but failing that, you want at least one sequence of articulated vertebrae long enough to measure a gradient (and substitute it into a model of size variation over the whole column). I note that multiple articulated sequences are reported for Titanoboa (Head et al Fig. 1e, and Supplementary Table 1) but gradient-based methods have not yet been applied.
There aren’t a large number of discrete characters you can score from snake vertebrae, so hardly anyone has bothered doing phylogenetics with no skull. The number of articulated chunks of Titanoboa lying around makes me very hopeful that skull remains will turn up as well.
I was actually blathering on the radio about this story yesterday. Can’t remember exactly what I said, but you can listen here if you’re interested. I think I managed not to say “Crikey!” even once.
I propose the next striking snake specimen have the genus name “Matricoitophis.”
Okay, I’m starting a breeding program immediately. If only snakes’ genes are as plastic as those of canids, I’ll soon be on my way to recreating that ancient snake god.
We’ll recruit some of those Pentecostals who are experienced at this sort of thing because, if as they say, they truly believe in Jesus, they will be safe. If not, they become one with the snake god and it is still win-win.
What do you mean, atheists can’t start religions? I’m sure that’s how every single one had its beginnings.
“What do you mean, atheists can’t start religions? I’m sure that’s how every single one had its beginnings.”
Atheists don’t make good prophets. The Bible leaves out the part about Moses’ smarter atheist brother, Manny. When he saw the burning bush, he just went out and invented the first fire extinguisher. Doesn’t have the same ring.
The post suggests Titanoboa ate crocodilians. Is there any actual evidence for that, or is it just speculation to make it seem even more fearsome than its mere size does? There was a photo posted on the web a few years ago of a constrictor that had swallowed an alligator and burst – I wonder if this gave rise to the idea about Titanoboa.
BTW, the rise in temperature that would have killed off Titanoboa (if it were still around at the time) would be the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) of 55.8 Mya, which while not anthropogenic, was apparently due to a sudden rise in atmospheric CO2 – in that case, from vulcanism.
This phenomena of gigantism was described in the Bible before actual fossil discoveries were made: Genesis 6:4 – “There were giants in the earth in those days…” (Click here for more descriptions of gigantism.) And don’t forget about leviathan and behemoth!
That was about the announcement at the SVP meeting. This is about the published description, with a name for the beast and everything.
<slowly taking hat off>
<throwing hat on floor while jumping>
<jumping up and down on hat>
Well, I never claimed to be a herpetologist. In fact, I never even claimed snakes are interesting. Dinosaurs, now, dinosaurs are interesting!
Anacondas regularly eat caimans, and in the time and place where Titanoboa lived, there simply weren’t any reasonably large mammals that could have sustained such a big predator.
Nope, from a sudden degassing of methane clathrates on the sea floor, which may or may not have been triggered by tectonic or other volcanic events.
Come ooooon. Gen 6:4 is about giant humans or rather demigods. The leviathan and the behemoth are the Nile crocodile and the hippo, respectively. And the very existence of the Paleocene contradicts both creation stories in Genesis!
Creationism can’t explain Titanoboa. It can explain everything and its opposite, in other words, nothing.
Behomoth is a “hippo”? Hardly. Job 40:17 – “He moveth his tail like a cedar…” The same holds for leviathan. This animal is described a being impervious to spears unlike a crocodile: Job 41:7 – “Canst thou fill his skin with barbed irons? or his head with fish spears?” You are overlooking one of the greatest attestations to the Earth’s past when you disregard (and distort) the Bible.
The KJV translators were too ashamed to translate “penis” correctly. They also talk about “stones”… those are the testicles. External testicles only occur in some kinds of mammal (not even in elephants).
What do you mean by “unlike”? To wound a crocodile with a spear, you have to aim between the armor plates. Crocodiles have lots of bone in the skin. The massive skull directly underlies the skin, unlike in mammals.
You are the one who’s doing the distorting here. You aren’t even looking beyond the letter of the KJV!
Hey Alan Clarke, why are there two contradictory genesis stories in the bible? And how did T. Rex fit on the ark (you gigantic dipshit)?
“Penis” was first used in 1676 according to Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edition so is it any wonder that it doesn’t appear in the 1611 KJV? Your chronology is all messed up.
“Stones” are not “testicles”. A quick jump to a Hebrew lexicon describes them as broken pottery or “shards”. So again, the Bible is way ahead of “modern science” in describing something like a projecting armored plate, like those shard-like projections on the back of a stegosaurus.
Yours is. I’m saying that what’s moved like a cedar is a(n erect) penis, mammal-style, not a tail.
Concerning “stones”, forget the Hebrew lexicon. Instead, try to find out which word is there in the original.
The lexicon you cite gives Job 2:8 and 41:22 as occurrences of the word you looked up. 2:8 is translated as follows in the KJV:
“And he took him a potsherd to scrape himself withal; and he sat down among the ashes.”
41:22 is in the description of the leviathan: “In his neck remaineth strength, and sorrow is turned into joy before him.”
While the “stones” of the behemoth are in 40:17.
BTW, compare the KJV translation of Job 40:15–17 to the translation by Stephen Mitchell:
“40:15 Behold now behemoth, which I made with thee; he eateth grass as an ox. 40:16 Lo now, his strength is in his loins, and his force is in the navel of his belly. 40:17 He moveth his tail like a cedar: the sinews of his stones are wrapped together.”
“40:15 Look now: the Beast that I made: he eats grass like a bull. 40:16 Look: the power in his thighs, the pulsing sinews of his belly. 40:17 His penis stiffens like a pine; his testicles bulge with vigor.”
If the “stones” are potshards, what does “sinews of his stones” mean…? You quote-mine the Bible, it’s incredible.
Massive fail. The rest of the description doesn’t fit Stegosaurus at all, and… Stegosaurus didn’t occur outside North America and what is today the Iberian peninsula. Wasn’t Israel under water in the Late Jurassic?
What a mess! “Tail” becomes “penis” and KJV translation is supplanted by translation of “Stephen Mitchell”. Is it any wonder your road map has landed you in “Alice in Wonderland”? Who on earth is Stephen Mitchell? I wonder how he compares to KJV translator John Bois, who not only read the entire Hebrew Bible at six years of age but wrote Hebrew elegantly at this age.
Good idea. The reference you gave about Job using a “potsherd to scrape himself” supports my argument even more. These sharp broken pieces of pottery (likely triangular in shape) are like the armor on a stegasaurus’ back.
It’s pretty clear from the text that behemoth likely had the ability to move his armored plates (slightly or greatly?) since there were sinews attached to them. Sinews and muscle tissues are not preserved well by fossil evidences whether mammal or reptile. That’s why these Biblical descriptions are priceless. None of this is “incredible” when you consider that a modern-day porcupine or a frilled lizard has the ability to move its protection. When one puts “flesh” on a fossil such as a coelacanth, the evolution argument dissolves.
Never was my intention to say behemoth was a Stegosaurus. I was using its armor for visualization purposes only.
Without even knowing where you live, I bet you’re standing on top of water-laid sediments right now. Pretty strong evidence for a global flood, eh?
Talking about this big bastard on NPR science Friday right now.
No.
No global flood? You’re not one of those contortionists are you?
Penis is a Latin word meaning penis.
Why should we accept the KJV, with every mistranslation, use of what was then archaic language, and use poetic language at the cost of accuracy in translation? The KJV is a masterpiece of English literature. It is not a particularly good translation of the Bible.
Wait, what?
You’re choosing two verses 39 chapters apart and saying they have something to do with each other?
Especially when you’re talking about stegosaurus — which lived on land — and referring to the description of fucking Leviathan?
Oh, I see. You’re referring to the word “חרש”, specifically.
That is the same word in both places.
In the first instance, the Septuagint gives the obvious “οστρακον”; in the second, it says “ὀβελίσκοι ὀξεῖς”. Hm.
But still. The verse says under.
Why do the words “χρυσος θαλασσης” show up in the LXX at all? “Golden sea”? That’s not in the Hebrew.
Stupid inconsistent texts. Bah.
No, but you are obviously a crank.
Hm. Maybe it’s not “golden sea”, but trying to describe a hard-to-describe color. “χρυσος” can also mean yellow; “θαλασσης” can also mean “blue”.
And I note that: “Nile crocodiles have a dark bronze colouration above, with black spots on the back and a dirty yellow on the belly.”
Job 41:30 looks like an attempt to be poetic about the crocodile’s claws, with what might be a reference to its belly that was missing in the Hebrew version that made it into the canon.
When science fails to support an argument, resort to ad hominem attacks. That always impresses the ignorant.
The KJV is English, remember? If the Hebrew was “shophkah” which actually is “penis”, then the translators would no doubt have used something like “privy member” as they did in Deut 23:1. But since the Hebrew word is “zanab”, they correctly chose the word “tail”, for behemoth’s cedar-like appendage.
All that’s been illustrated thus far in this thread is that the KJV is a masterpiece in translation as well. If a work is “archaic” in language, that does not discredit its voracity. Click here to see how KJV English supersedes modern-day English in articulating exactness in pronouns.
Oh, we have alive one, someone who doesn’t recognize a work of fiction when he sees it.
LOL.
My favorite KJV fuckup:
“Then spake the woman whose the living child was unto the king, for her bowels yearned upon her son”
She did what now?
Fiction or non-fiction? It’s all in the details. When a fiction writer goes out on a limb with too many details, he can easily be discredited. And the converse is true. When too many details are validated, then the “fiction” aspect disolves:
Study your history. Just recently, Herod’s tomb was discovered.
When too many details are validated, then the “fiction” aspect disolves
So, I suppose Dickens’ accurate descriptions of Victorian London are evidence that Oliver Twist was a historical person?
Just thought I’d point out that this is clearly the skeleton of a basilisk and therefor incontrovertible proof of the existence of Harry Potter.
Alan, I counter with the recent Nova episode The Bible’s Buried Secrets where the Torah was written over hunderds of years, and very inaccurately. Your god doesn’t exist and the bible is work of fiction. Prove otherwise. Show details of your work.
LOL, again.
http://ebonmusings.org/atheism/otarch.html
Platform 9¾ exists at King’s Cross Station. Therefore, the “fiction” aspect of Harry Potter is dissolved by this validated detail!
No, all that’s been illustrated is that you’ve made that claim. Very little evidence to support that claim has been offered. That English which was already archaic in the early 17th Century had more pronouns than modern English has is not a strong argument that modern translations are inferior to KJV.
Many claim that the KJV is the inspired work of God, and that all changes and mistranslations are the direct work of God and any research that questions it is wrong. This is not supported by the historical reality. King James did not encourage a translation of the Bible in order to enlighten the common people; his intent was to deny them the marginal notes of the Geneva Bible, the favored Bible of the time. The marginal notes of the Geneva version made it popular with the common people and contained over 300,000 words that questioned many concepts of orthodox religion.
James I of England was a devout believer in the “divine right of kings,” a philosophy claiming a king’s power came from God, thus the king then had to answer to no one but God. The reasoning was that if a king was evil, that was a punishment sent from God. The citizens should then suffer in silence. If a king was good, that was a blessing sent from God. James took this idea so far that he believed even disagreeing with him for a political act was an offense against God. If one considers James himself as inspired by God, the public record must be considered carefully in that judgment.
The KJV translators were limited in the manuscripts available to them. The Dead Sea Scrolls had not been discovered yet (1947). Ancient Greek manuscripts had not yet been uncovered. Aleph, a Fourth Century AD codex, was discovered in 1859 in a monastery at Mt. Sinai. Codex Vaticanus, also from the Fourth Century AD at the Vatican Library, was not made available until a photographic facsimile was published in 1890.
The current KJV being printed differs in a number of details from the 1611 KJV. There are also numerous printing errors in different editions of the KJV. The 1611 editions have “Then cometh Judas” instead of “Then cometh Jesus” in Matthew 26:36. There is the “Wicked Bible” edition where “not” is omitted from the seventh commandment saying, “thou shalt commit adultery.” William Kilburne in 1659 found 20,000 errors in six different KJV’s. In 1701 Bishop Ussher’s chronology was added. Even today there are differences between the KJV published by various publishers.
A number of words are mistranslated by the KJV. The KJV is not a perfect word for word translation. There is some paraphrasing like “God save the king” (I Samuel 10:24, II Samuel 16:16, I Kings 1:25, and II Kings 11:12). A number of words or phrases are mistranslated like John 20:17 which says “Touch me not” but should be rendered “Do not keep holding me.”
The “Unicorn” is mentioned nine times in the KJV (Num 23:22; 24:8; Deut 33:17; Job 39:9,10; Psalm 22:21; 29:6; 92:10; Isaiah 34:7). In Deut 33:17 it says the unicorn has “horns” plural, so the KJV solved this problem by translating “unicorn” as plural “unicorns.” It is a mistranslation of the Hebrew “reem” which means “wild ox.”
The KJV uses the term “dragon” which comes from the Greek word drakon which means “serpent.” It refers to a monster with a scaly snake like body. The Greek New Testament uses drakon 12 times only in the book of Revelation which the KJV translates as “dragon” (Rev 12-13, 16:13, 20:2).
The KJV is a mediocre translation. It’s outdated. It’s written in archaic English. There are better modern translations that make the Bible easier to read and understand.
Harry Potter
Oliver Twist
These two works were chosen for examples because they are known to be fiction. How do we know it? The authors will/would admit it. What more can I say? Paul, who wrote a large portion of the New Testament, did not present his writings in such a way. The cities he wrote about (Damascus, Tarsus, Ephesus, Rome, etc.) existed then and they exist now. Tolstoy wrote of St. Petersburg in “Crime & Punishment” but never attempted to publish his work as non-fiction. How about Joseph Smith? He wrote “The Book of Mormon” as non-fiction but the cities contained therein exist nowhere. You need a combination of both. Israel fought against the “Philistines” then and they are fighting against the “Palestinians” in the same Gaza Strip area today. Even the city that Samson frequented, Askelon, has been in the news lately. (Ashkelon) The mechanisms for discernment are all rather elemental.
Alan, no physical evidence you are right. Either put up or shut up. Given your evidence to date, you need to shut up. Welcome to science.
Granted: Paul claimed to be have absolute truth.
Fortunately, we are not obligated to accept Paul’s assertions about “truth” and his access to same.
The Iliad and Odyssey refer to various Greek city-states, and to Troy, which we now know existed then (well, actually, several cities built on the same location at different times), and some of which still exist now.
Will you bow down to and worship gray-eyed Athena, or bright Apollo? Maybe sacrifice your daughter to Zeus of the thunders?
Elemental dumbfuckery, you mean, given that the Philistines were Mycenean, and the Palestinians are Semitic.
Dammit Tis Himself – You weren’t supposed to give away the dragon and unicorn mistranslations. Those are two of my favorite subjects to quote on, and I was about to ask the Three Stooges about fossil remains.
Kill joy.
Now I’ll have to fall back on asking them why gawd sacrificed his son 4000 years AFTER Adam & Eve ate the apple.
“These two works were chosen for examples because they are known to be fiction. How do we know it? The authors will/would admit it. What more can I say?”
What do you say about Whitley Strieber’s Communion: A True Story ?
Sorry, Patricia.
You can ask about pi being equal to three.
‘Tis, Patricia might take your spanking couch privileges for a couple of days, but don’t worry. Keep whacking the godbots like you have today and she will most likely forgive you. Just leave a little room for others to jump in (fear to jump in is usually not a problem around here though-as Heddle is finding out). (Now where’s my list…)
Can I ask about the part where that guy breeds striped goats by mating them in front of a bunch of reeds or something like that?
Paul? We’re talking about the gospels –let’s just go with Luke, since you started it. Since we have no idea who the author was, nor any about what s/he would or would not admit, your only proffered “mechanism for discernment” is useless.
While I do forgive you Tis Himself, you were naughty.
Go to the back of the line for the spanking couch. And no twirling while you wait.
It’s tough to be so harsh, but I learned it from gawd.
We’re getting off the subject somewhat of giant snake fossils but for the record concerning the word, “Palestine”: The word itself derives from “Plesheth”, a name that appears frequently in the Bible and has come into English as “Philistine”. (source)
Note to “Tis Himself”: Wouldn’t you feel better about yourself if you developed your own arguments instead of relying on Stephen C. Meyers? At least give him credit if you’re going to copy & paste. (http://www.bibleandscience.com/bible/kjv.htm) Perhaps the bigger question is, “Does you life adhere to the modern versions of the Bible or do the modern versions provide less conflict with your current life?”
The KJV translators were indeed aware of the LXX which is the basis for several versions you spoke of and they rejected it. From the translators preface to the KJV: “The translation of the Seventy dissenteth from the original in many places, neither doth it come near it for perspicuity, gravity, majesty;”
Unicorns?
Rey Fox – That is from Genesis 30, 31 they were called ringstraked (striped). The animals conceived before the rods of hazel, chestnut, and green poplar set at their watering troughs.
It would be a long post to quote it all, so I’ll leave it up to you to look it up if you care to. It’s quite amusing.
er..I mean inspiring and proof of gawd. Whew, almost sent myself to hell.
Science has no problems with creationism.
Name a currently accepted evolutionary piece of research that you can refute with creationism.
Be specific. Show your work.
Why resort to creationism? Science rejects jumping from inorganic matter to living cells. You wanted me to be specific, so how about the law of biogenesis? How about mathematical probability refuting chances for all components assimilating randomly so badly that even Dawkins in his interview with Ben Stein alluded to life coming from another planet. If it can’t happen on Earth where there is known life, then the HOPE in deep space is nothing more than Star Trek Religion. Get a life! Many “scientists” reject evolution theory. Einstein who was agnostic stated, “God doesn’t play dice.” Evolution can’t exist without “dice”. Presently, “science” is supported by the government, as are casinos. Since both are “fixed”, you’ll lose at either if you play long enough.
Massive fail Alan. But that is to be expected. Go read some science books. One must really know what is going on to be able to refute it. You fail miserably, because you don’t understand science.
The worst part about this is that references to LVTN are not consistent throughout different books. The book of Yov has been reasonably well-established to have been written by a non-monotheistic author, and fits well within a rather extensive debate genre from Sumer and the various Akkadian city-states. Other references associate LVTN with Tihamat from Akkadian literature both thematically and textually, so you’re essentially claiming that a primordial sea-chaos deity is actually a Stegosaurus. This is patently absurd.
Alan Clarke wrote:
If that’s the case then how did the Judeo-Christian god create humans from clay? How about all the plants and animals, which are living cells? Are you implying that said god made them from himself? And are you then implying that God is made of cells and organic matter?
You might want to rethink that one, Alan.
Quoting John Scanlon FCD
I agree that it’s better, but at the same time, it’s perhaps even more problematic, because giant boids and pythonids are precisely where you would expect the method to fail. Additionally, the regressions in Head & Polly (2007) do not provide squared residual values, which tends to be an indication that the squared residual value is actually rather low. As for gradient-based methods, I am unsure of whether the articulated units are long enough to actually recognize a size gradient.
Well, given the current state of snake phylogeny, I’m not convinced that skulls are that great, either. Or, for that matter, the molecules. Too many long branches in too many places, methinks.
JDP: Please add this to your Stegosaurus portfolio. I figure any contribution to the “knowledge base” can’t hurt.
Thanks Wowbagger for the correction. I should have stated, “inorganic matter jumping to living cells through pure randomness” is not scientific. But even if all of a cell’s atoms were properly in place, would it be living? I say “no”. I realize Darwin’s theory of evolution speaks nothing about this, but “evolutionism” picks up where Darwin leaves off. The followers are like the Trekkies that William Shatner could never rid himself of.
Clarke: read this.
Go learn.
Alan Clarke,
from your comments,you seem to be lacking some basic knowledge about biology and evolution.
I suggest if you are confused about the distinction between “living” and “inorganic”,which by the way is your distinction and not one used in science,you could start with looking up the definition of a virus.
Your assertion btw that science says these living things come into existence by pure randomness,is of course a lie,or shall we say,misrepresentation.
“We’re getting off the subject somewhat of giant snake fossils”
Off the subject? You’re the one who brought up the Bible. How much further off the subject can you get?
“Why resort to creationism? Science rejects jumping from inorganic matter to living cells. You wanted me to be specific, so how about the law of biogenesis? How about mathematical probability refuting chances for all components assimilating randomly so badly that even Dawkins in his interview with Ben Stein alluded to life coming from another planet. If it can’t happen on Earth where there is known life, then the HOPE in deep space is nothing more than Star Trek Religion. Get a life! Many “scientists” reject evolution theory. Einstein who was agnostic stated, “God doesn’t play dice.” Evolution can’t exist without “dice”. Presently, “science” is supported by the government, as are casinos. Since both are “fixed”, you’ll lose at either if you play long enough.”
I can hear the grinding as Alan strips his mental gears bare.
“I should have stated, “inorganic matter jumping to living cells through pure randomness” is not scientific.”
You would be right. Fortunately, “pure randomness” does not enter into the equation, as there are physical constraints that narrow probabilities. To grossly simplify, it’s not “pure randomness” that makes the small pieces of dirt and rock pass through a sieve and the larger stuff stay on top.
Plus, for abiogenesis and evolution, you have a stepwise process where each step builds on the previous one. Since you are the one claiming life to have been “poofed” into existence, you have a lot more explaining to do than us since your explanation is so far outside what natural processes would produce. You are the one who has to account for some extra entity in the process. And pointing to a storybook to explain is considered bad form to those who actually have to consider the physical evidence.
“But even if all of a cell’s atoms were properly in place, would it be living? I say “no”.”
Um, vitalism has been dead since the 1800s.
“I realize Darwin’s theory of evolution speaks nothing about this, but “evolutionism” picks up where Darwin leaves off. The followers are like the Trekkies that William Shatner could never rid himself of.”
You are a very confused individual.
Clinteas: Isn’t hydrogen gas “inorganic”? Doesn’t “evolutionism” (not Darwinian evolution) stipulate that the other elements originated from hydrogen, then molecules, then amino acids, then single-cell organisms, multi-cell organisms, then… man? And the progression was without any goal or higher form of intelligence. Correct? Or am I among the company of theistic evolutionists?
Exactly, it’s in the “design” of the sieve. I once debated with a guy who claimed a computer program could randomly generate the sentence, “THIS IS REALLY REALLY SILLY BUT WTH LETS DO IT ANYWAY” in under 8000 iterations. But he placed the entire sentence in the program and whenever his “random” attempt didn’t achieve his goal, he discarded it. Try to generate it without placing the sentence in the program. Allow your “sieve” to create itself. Trying to achieve life without “life” as the goal is vanity. Achieving life accidentally is not possible.
Alan Clarke,
-isms like evolutionism are the nomenclature of creationists,not scientists.
As has been suggested to you above,go learn something,try it !
Clinteas: Excuse me for attempting to label you. May it suffice to say many “scientists” who hold to Darwinian evolution, extrapolate their theory to describe non-living things such as planet and star formation. Extrapolating in reverse traces man’s origins to primordial HYDROGEN gas as I stated before.
you’re severely confused. astrophysicists don’t extrapolate shit from biology. they are completely independent disciplines, and astrophysics has shit-all to do with the ToE.
and don’t come back with “then why are they talking about star evolution”?. I realize creationists are fully incapable of separating words from the things they describe, so I’ll explain right away:
nuclear processes in stars != Evolution by Mutation and Natural Selection
I see Alan doesn’t want to understand the research in abiogenesis. A lot of progress has been made, but still a long way to go. Real scientists have also postulated the possibility of primitive one-celled life arriving via comet. Gawd is not needed for anything.
By the way Alan, your imaginary god can never be part of any scientific endeavor. We will never use imaginary deities for any explanation, or a reason for something to occur. It’s been that way for a couple of centuries, and that will not change. That appears to be your major complaint.
Because it is blatantly obvious (at least to me) that that is where you a drawing your “inspiration” from.
And it is a big overflowing cup of fail.
This law of biogenesis you speak of, you should maybe read about it a bit more.
Oh please. Show us the mathematics and we’ll who you exactly why those types of calculations are worthless in these types of discussions. Mainly because at some point you are pulling numbers out of your ass. And Dawkin’s only left open the possibility that it could have happened that way. A extremely slim possibility. He was not asserting that it did.
A pattern is forming here. And that pattern is that your comprehension skills need some tuning.
What the hell are you even talking about now? How does this even fit into this discussion? Are you tired?
Are you suggesting a scientist cock off? I’ll put our measurements up against yours any day.
Einstein was a physicist not a biologist. I’m willing to bet that he would be 100% in support of evolution if you sat him down today and laid out the massive amounts of evidence for it. And you’ll have to qualify what you mean about dice. I’m pretty sure I know, but It’ll be fun watching you throw a few more shovels full of dirt from the hole you are digging.
There is so much wrong with that that It’s hard to know where to begin. The scare quotes around science are nice a touch. yes science is supported by the government. Show me where that is a problem with the subject we are discussion. No assertions, back it up with actual evidence.
Your casino analogy is, frankly, stupid.
Um no
O RLY? Why, then, does the KJV have 30,000 known translation mistakes, and why are there so many instances where it seems to have been translated from the Septuagint rather than the Masoretic Text?
Then why are the sinews “wrapped together”?
Your ignorance shows again. They aren’t preserved at all — but their attachment sites on bones are easily visible! It follows that no stegosaur had mobile plates (various suggestions to the contrary in older literature notwithstanding).
Yes and no, respectively, because not all water-laid sediments have the same age. Read this and then come back here.
And what would a cedar-like tail look like? Or, rather, how could a tail be moved like a cedar?!?
If it’s another appendage that stiffens till it can be compared to a cedar, everything falls into place. Last but not least the context — “loins” and “stones”…
Well, yes. The area is named after the Philistines (one of the “Sea Peoples” turns up in Egyptian records as p-l-s-t), and today’s Palestinians are named after Palestine. Duh. :-|
Bullshit. I had to read Das Fräulein von Scudéri at school. It’s an 18th-century novel by Adalbert von Chamisso. Every single person in the book is real, not to mention the locations, and nonetheless the entire plot is fictitious from beginning to end. Some of the people probably never even met. Looks like the author tried to express his admiration for Mademoiselle de Scudéri by making her the heroine of a novel.
The reason we know it’s fiction is not that the book says so. (I don’t even remember if it says so.) The reason is that the plot contradicts known facts.
Yes, the one who deserve scare quotes reject the theory of evolution because they don’t understand it.
Einstein was some kind of pantheist, and this quote was his objection to quantum physics. It was wrong. Einstein was wrong about quantum physics.
Too bad for Einstein — who, see above, was talking about something else anyway. Stop quote-mining him (…and the Bible, too).
This is the stupidest thing I’ve read all week. Man. Dude! Get a grip.
1) Doesn’t look like any stegosaur. The neck is missing, the head is way too big (it looks like a rhino’s except for the missing horn(s)), the tail spikes (and in fact most of the tail) are missing, the forelimbs are much too long and straight, and so on.
2) Stegosaurus itself is only — only — known from the upper part of the Late Jurassic Morrison Formation of the western USA, and from a formation in Portugal that has the same age. That’s it.
Fucking moron, that’s nuclear physics/astrophysics, not biology!!! The theory of evolution is about biology. Evolution is defined as “descent with heritable modification. Neither atoms nor stars can evolve, because they don’t reproduce.
You have completely overlooked natural selection. There are sieves in nature — it’s called the environment.
Really, you have a lot to learn.
Kent Hovind does, and you do. And nobody else. That’s because it simply can’t be done, see above.
Hint: Kent Hovind doesn’t understand science. He is therefore not a reliable source of information about it.
Thanks, Rev. Alan, look at the head… and the tail… and the missing neck… and… even the shape of the “plates”, which are most likely the same ornament as those outside of each circle.
Alan Clarke (#143):
This “law” is merely a generalisation to the effect that living organisms do not arise spontaneously from non-living materials over short timescales and under current chemical and other environmental conditions found on earth. That is the conclusion that the evidence supports, and that is all that the evidence supports. It is not a “law” that states that that life does not arise spontaneously from non-life under any conditions and over any timescales whatsoever – and if it did, then that would be a far stronger claim than the evidence supports. To that extent, calling it a “law” is misleading, since it has not been established as a universal principle.
In other words, science does not reject the development of living cells from non-living materials. It simply rejects the idea that it can happen abruptly under certain circumstances.
Einstein was talking about quantum mechanics here, and specifically the idea that events at the quantum level are probabilistic rather than deterministic. This has nothing to do with the “random” elements in evolutionary theory (such as mutation), which are “random” in the sense of being deterministic but (a) not easily predictable except through statistical modelling and/or (b) not biased towards any consistent outcome. Einstein certainly didn’t reject the idea of randomness in nature in the latter sense (one of his earliest papers was on Brownian motion, one of the most random of processes). What he was rejecting was the idea that the most fundamental processes in nature were non-deterministic.
In short, the “dice” that Einstein was talking about and the “dice” that operate in evolution are two very different things, involving different kinds of process operating at different levels. Doubt about one does not entail doubt about the other.
So to present Einstein’s doubts about quantum mechanics as a scientist rejecting the theory of evolution makes you pretty desperate, not to mention woefully ignorant.
Bullshit.
It is true that astronomers will talk of stellar evolution, but when they do so they do not have in mind similarity to biological evolution. That you are not aware of that indicates either you do not know much about astronomy (and biology) or you are simply being dishonest.
In fact, what the astrophysicists call “stellar evolution” isn’t evolution, it’s most similar to what biologists call “development” or “ontogeny” — the changes an individual undergoes during its lifetime.
Fuck, totally late to this one. Can I just register the complaint that here we see the problem with a “biology/atheism blog”: even a thread about an extremely cool piece of pure biology gets completely hijacked by a KJV-bible cultist. Pisses me off.
So back to
JormungarTitanoboa. Big big snake, very cool, but until I can spend some time with the paper you can color me skeptical about the thermal ecology extrapolations. PZ’s definition of “poikilothermy” is a little misleading; a true poikilotherm’s body temperature varies directly with that of its environment. The tricky part is defining “environmental temperature,” particularly on land when solar radiation plays a role. PZ’s definition better fits the concept of “ectothermy” in that an ectotherm’s body temperature is determined by external sources of heat.A snake’s body size is determined by age and age-specific growth rate. Growth rate is determined in part by body (not, directly, environmental) temperature and by feeding/digestion rate (in turn related to temperature, prey density and size, and the thermoregulatory abilities of the snake, whether behavioral or physiological; and also to poorly-understood internal controls on maximum growth rate). There are a LOT of assumptions necessary to predict air temperatures from maximum snake body size!!!
About the gigantothermy thing, I’d have to look up calculations and references to argue this rigorously, but I am certain that a >1 ton snake would not be fully ectothermic. Much smaller extant pythons can raise their own body temperature impressively while brooding eggs, by raising metabolic rate (in their case by muscular contractions) and decreasing heat loss (by coiling). A snake as huge as Titanoboa could, I suggest, easily raise its own body temperature simply by coiling, especially when digesting a meal.
I must also address a pet peeve: larger animals have higher, not lower, metabolic rates (rates of energy use and heat loss as, e.g., kJ/d). The “lower metabolic rate with greater size” thing refers to mass-specific metabolic rates only (energy loss per unit body mass, e.g., kJ/(kg d)). Statements like “it could get too big for its metabolic rate to support its bulk” make no sense. I can expand on this point indefinitely, if anybody cares.
Alan Clarke (#121):
On the other hand, “tail” is a common euphemism for the penis in many cultures (hell, even the word “penis” derives from the Latin for “tail”). And given the context of the passage (the Behemoth is being held up as an exemplar of male animal potency), the reading of “tail” as a euphemism for “penis” is perfectly plausible, no matter which term the original Hebrew employed.
p.s. I would be very, very surprised if T. was colored black, as pictured. Black would maximize absorption of solar radiation, implying the need to heat up, which I find unlikely. As an undoubted ambush predator, I’d predict its color would be camouflage in its typical hunting habitat. Of course, I am merely making shit up here.
Yep. I heard that every day in school in Austria.
Very good point.
Sven i forget. What is it you do again?
Are you a herpetologist?
Don’t all evilutionists?
‘raspberry’
Yeah, this is pretty much exactly what I “do,” ecological physiology. I measure a lot of body temperatures and metabolic rates in turtles, lizards, snakes, and whatever.
I just got a really bad picture of you, a thermometer, a turtle and some lubricant.
sorry. These things pop into my head and there’s nothing i can do about it.
Why is it so hard to believe that it is a Stegosaurus in that picture? And look how it is stomping on the head of a porpoise. There were porpoises back then, or do you scientists believe they just poofed into existence recently?
And down below it we see a unicorn shooting flames out of his head. (The bible, unicorns, burning bushes . . . hmmm? This is EVIDENCE, people!)
And look at the bottom figure. You see it? That is a STUNNINGLY accurate rendition of an English barrister monkey with a CHAINSAW and a CUTE LITTLE SOCK-PUPPET. How do you explain THAT, scientists? How did they have chainsaws back THEN if they are supposedly a modern invention? Why have we not been told about this race of intelligent and LITIGIOUS simians that used cute little sock puppets to COMMUNICATE and chainsaws to protect THEMSELVES from all the Stegosaurus’? Why are you afraid of the truth?
PRAISE JESUS!
That picture is a couple decades out of date. Now I have my own grad students.
I am not a scientist, so this question will probably sound really dumb. If our climate continues to get warmer does this mean that snakes will get bigger again?
That would be wild. :)
Maybe motivational speaking is your forté? Thanks for writing a book but if your science is as out of control as your person, I doubt it’s credibility.
Alan, still trying to prove you have no reason to post. here. Don’t worry, you are doing a good job of showing your irrelevance.
Typical creationist. Can’t refute the substance, so he refutes the style.
It’s very difficult to predict how global climate change will affect any particular species, but yes: one possible consequence is that ectotherms experience higher annual temperature profiles and therefore grow faster and bigger. Of course, that is subject to the same simplifying assumptions as the original conclusions. If the prey base decreases then there could be selection for smaller size, or quick extinction if some threshold for successful reproduction is crossed quickly. Et cetera.
Alan Clark, you more than earned the title “fucking moron” Even I can tell you got the different fields of science garbled and then forced to fit into your believe in the KJB. This is not a case of David Marjanović being out of control. This is a case of David Marjanović being accurate.
In my experience, this is almost always the case.
David Marjanović writes several hundred words refuting Alan Clarke and what’s Clarke’s response? He quotes one sentence and obliquely objects to one phrase of that sentence.
Alan, we’re not impressed by your debating skills.
I’m not impressed by anything from Alan so far, especially his ability to parse information.
At this point I fully expect Alan to tell us that humans and dinosaurs lived together and Jesus had one he used to ride to give the sermon on the mount.
I am highly skeptical of this. It seems to me that the implication that this sniveling little twerp has ever copulated with another human, let alone that he has done so with enough regularity to refer to it as a general state of being, is one of those “extraordinary claims requiring extraordinary evidence.”
Unfortunately Azkyroth, his type breeds. Like rabbits.
However, while he may do it, there is a good chance his partner doesn’t enjoy it.
Maybe even the whole hole in a sheet thing.
David Marjanović,#161
O RLY? Why, then, does the KJV have 30,000 known translation mistakes, and why are there so many instances where it seems to have been translated from the Septuagint rather than the Masoretic Text?
Wow, Glad to have located such a Biblical scholar with knowledge of the true word of God, knowing all the mistakes of the KJV.
Are there any mistakes with these passages?
John 8
23And he said unto them, Ye are from beneath; I am from above: ye are of this world; I am not of this world.
24I said therefore unto you, that ye shall die in your sins: for if ye believe not that I am he, ye shall die in your sins.
Roger S,
I might be wrong, but I sense that you think you’re going to outdo the Pharyngula top guns on scriptural knowledge and interpretation. If that’s the case then be prepared to learn a very important lesson the hard way. Here’s a hint: if you, personally, can’t translate from ancient Greek and Hebrew then stop where you are and admit defeat right now.
But hey, if you think you’ve got a shot and are prepared to back yourself, you go for it. It’s certainly going to be fun for the rest of us to watch.
Where’s my popcorn?
Roger S (#187):
No unambiguous factual errors as such, since one can always claim a metaphorical meaning for “I am not of this world” which needn’t be outrageously implausible.
Basically, these passages are just the veiled threats typical of any authoritarian cult leader. They don’t really have sufficient substance to be right or wrong about anything.
Isn’t hydrogen gas “inorganic”? Doesn’t “evolutionism” (not Darwinian evolution) stipulate that the other elements originated from hydrogen, then molecules, then amino acids, then single-cell organisms, multi-cell organisms, then… man?
I’d be amused to see such a big puddle of fail, if Alan wasn’t typical of far too many people with whom I have to share the road–the type that expects angels to grab the steering wheel and drive for them when their attention wanders.
I wonder if Alan has even the most vague notion of what he means to mock when he claims that evolutionismisticologistamafarians “stipulate that the other elements originated from hydrogen,” that poofing into existence by miraculous fiat is supposed to explain so much better. Does he think it’s claimed that the hydrogen atoms “mate” to become helium first, or does he imagine that hydrogen atoms just join bigger and bigger clubs to originate other elements? Does Alan think that people who can understand the Hertzsprung–Russell diagram are as ignorant about the origin of the elements as Alan is?
question why the fuck would anyone bring up religion to do a scientific thread fuck go to church and stay there where ur away from your computer
those of you on this looking at that and wondering why god had made such a thing well lets just say he didnt and there is no god the fact that this snake is 60 million years old disproves the bible that is a variation of mixed ancient religions plp have been constantly pray to the sky pointlessly everyday expecting something but in reality get nothing why cuz there is no god no satan no fuckin lucifer angels or fucking demons science–>(truth/reality/facts) and exploration have constantly proved religion wrong but like they say there are only handfulls of intelligent plp and truck loads of idiots right?
Shift key, dude.
The incoherence of #192 is a good illustration of why you shouldn’t huff paint and post.
For “for those of u”: here. I hope this has been helpful.
I want to know more about this
Rev BDC, I’ll help you write a grant request to study those.
Evolution relies on random mutations. What is “random”? “Random” is where theories on life and planet/star formation cross paths.
Planet “evolution” has an uncanny resemblance to the theory of how life evolved accidentally in the Earth’s primordial sea.
1) Both are theoretical; neither were observed.
2) Both infer that incomprehensible complexity originated from non-intelligent, random particle motion.
3) Both overcame incomprehensible odds. The miniscule probabilities gave birth to theories of multiple universes.
4) Both overcame the negative effects of entropy.
5) Both theories were birthed from an a priori assumption that God does not exist.
You are jumping on board after the random “magic” has been accomplished. Back up a little:
(non-intelligent processes) = (non-intelligent processes)
I suppose one could build their entire life upon randomness. Look how successful it was in creating life and building our universe. Gamble every day instead of getting a job. Pick a mate by tossing dice. Listen to white noise instead of music. Rig your alarm clock to activate when a dog barks. Blow yourself up when you tire of the alarm.
See? SEE?!!!?!
Planet “evolution” has an uncanny resemblance to the theory of how life evolved accidentally in the Earth’s primordial sea.
1) Both are theoretical; neither were observed.
Were observed? Try are observed. Evolution is happening now, it hasn’t stopped. Stars and planets in systems at every stage of development are all about us to be observed. Look, and learn.
What’s your story on how the elements came to be? Clue us in.
Uncanny!
oh wow. I think the ratio of words to falsenesses in #198 is preddy much 1:1. impressive.
1)Evolution is not random. mutation is semi-random (i.e it is unpredictable and goal-less, but it is limited by what it mutates from)
2)Abiogenesis is not random. we do not have the actual complete sequence, but the principle of self-catalyzed protein assembly with non-living chemicals has already been demonstrated; also, which atoms & molecules combine with which is strongly limited by environment, laws of physics, and chemical affinities.
3)Star formation is not random. again, basic laws of physics determine what happens when
4)Star formation has been observed in the sense that we have observed stars at all stages of their lives, and from this we can deduce how their lives look like; you know, the same way everyone under 80 figures out that people turn from babies, into kids, into teens, into adults, into old people, into dead people.
5)of course they are all non-intelligent processes. the only intelligent processes happen on planets with intelligent life on it, which means that there can’t be intelligent processes before intelligent life. that’s the worst, most obvious tautology EVER
6)non-intelligent processes != randomness
preddy…? *headdesk*
please forgive the typos *sigh*
Damn, Alan Clarke! Your logic is not like our Earth logic.
Take Alan Clarke’s posts, for instance…
Apart from not teaching him science – or perhaps not ensuring he learnt science – it seems that no-one has explained to Alan Clarke the weaknesses of the god-of-the-gaps argument.
Here’s it simply put, Alan – even if there are things science can’t explain (yet) we see no reason to default to ‘goddidit’ because that happens to coincide with the religious beliefs we hold by virtue of (for the most part at least) having been born into a family and/or a society where those beliefs were considered the norm.
If you say these things can’t have happened by the means we believe they happened you have to provide scientific evidence of an alternative.
And, as Our Bearded Overlord is wont to say, your ignorance is not evidence*.
*No, not your god – I mean PZ. Your god, on the other hand, loves ignorance – which goes a long way to explaining Christians.
Alan @198. What codswallop.
Have you not seen how planetary orbits in Sol’s system follow standard rules relating to condensation and mass interaction (related to distance from the sun)? The elliptical orbits described by Kepler. Conservation of angular momentum. And further how this appears to hold consistent for observed exoplanets as predicted?
Ken @200 asks about creation of the natural elements, something I am guessing you will see as the paw of dog. I too would like to see how you can explain this away.
Alan’s post at 198 has problems with entropy (a strong one granted that his arguments approach a minimum energy state). Unlike your arguments, it takes effort to climb Mount Improbable – Dawkins has written lots about this and none requires intervention by a magic man. Could I also recommend LIFE: What a Concept
http://www.edge.org/documents/life/life_index.html
which is neither light reading nor short but very informative. Abiogenesis happened, get over it, we are just trying to describe it (then replicate it). Venter’s work alone is awesome. Recent discovery (last few weeks) has overcome the long protein chain issue. You wanted it done in what, 7 days and explained in a couple of paragraphs??? The god you imagine must be the Reader’s Digest condensed version.
Ken, I agree that “evolution” is happening, but it’s going in the wrong direction. Perhaps you could give a better example than this poor fellow.
Alan: variation by accumulation of genetic mutations offers a logical explanation for the birth of creatures with extra limbs or other congenital deformities, and the willingness of humans, for various purposes, to preserve and provide the needed special care to creatures born with such conditions accounts for their survival. The fact that similar deformities can occur in such superficially different species is perfectly consistent with common descent – after all, genes specifying the overall tetrapod body plan would be expected to be conserved.
One has to ask why an omnipotent, benevolent God would do this to them, though. What’s your answer?
(Also, the “hah hah! Look at the freak kid!” attitude of your post suggests that you’re morally retarded as well as ignorant and intellectually dishonest. You’re not doing yourself any favors, scumbag).
Alan Clarke, it says a lot about your character that you link to a hoax.
When radiated/mutated fruit flies are “gifted” with a second pair of wings with no muscles attached, others of the same species will not mate with them. How will this ever develop into something beneficial if they don’t propagate? If humans have vestigial tail bones, why did we loose our tails? Wouldn’t women be impressed with men who could perform tricks of dexterity with their tails? A tail could/would provide many useful functions in an urban environment. Evolution theory makes no sense to me in this respect.
This blog is full of derogatory ad hominem attacks (scumbag, Fucking moron, etc.) If Janine, Ignorant Slut is attracted only to those who share her limited 4-letter vocabulary, then won’t her descendents die out because of strife, depression, inferiority complexes and inability to articulate deeper meaning? Sometimes teens will smoke cigarettes in order to “fit in”. I wonder if the camaraderie on this blog thrives on the same shallowness.
Alan, your mutations are typical of fused twin embryos and similar – these are developmental problems rather than genetic. If they were it would be obvious evidence for evolution through mutation in action, if they killed the person/organism this would be Natural Selection in action.
I’m not going to do your research for you, but look at the kid born in the USA last week with 6 fully functioning fingers and a thumb on each hand. His father had been born with 6 fingers also, but the 6th wasn’t functional and was amputated shortly after birth. Maybe you would acknowledge this as a transitional form? Regardless, what is your point (except to expose your ignorance to the whole group)?
Not all mutations are this dramatic (in fact, most don’t show up in the phenotype at all).
You’ve been provided with multiple resources for educating yourself. Stop smugly asking questions that would embarrass most third graders and go READ; it’s not our job to do your homework for you.
Additionally, unflattering descriptions such as “scum bag” and “fucking idiot” are not “ad hominem attacks” since they’re not being deployed in an attempt to refute your arguments, but rather to punctuate factual refutation and vent our disgust at your character and behavior.
I will do mote than show off my use of four letter words, you offensively stupid motherfucker. I just love how you know what I am attracted to. You scum sucking little puke, I will have no descendants because I have no desire to have any. Also, you willfully obtuse jackass, the ad hominem attacks came along with David Marjanović’s deconstruction of your incoherent rant. The fact that you think that the formation of planets and evolution are remotely similar show half way informed people that you have nothing to offer.
The reason why there is mostly ad hominem attacks is because most of us are now making fun of you. You have no knowledge to share and you have no interest to learn. You are the lowest self deluded dumbfuck, you how earned nothing but scorn. Now find yourself a cave, burrow in the dirt and wait for your deity of choice to come along and fuck some knowledge into head.
You sick little bug fucker.
I would prefer to call these “your mutations” and not mine. Regardless of what you call them, textbooks on evolution theory depend on them:
Janine, I now understand that your language is to “punctuate factual refutation and vent disgust at my character and behavior”. Why didn’t you just say so! From now on, I’ll dispense with the “Ignorant Slut” portion of your name knowing that you’re a regular human being venting frustration. BTW, are you actually a woman? Were you in the Navy? I know my conversing with you seems sado masochistic but you’ve got my interest tweaked.
Alan,
I’ve been generous until now, but you obviously have no desire to benefit from discussion. I just pointed out that what you showed were probably not mutations but chimeras. Don’t hold me responsible for poorly chosen fruit fly pictures in some biology textbook.
You reveal yourself as a troll not worth feeding. The comments at #217 were lowbrow physical insults – can’t you handle insults without resorting to gender bias? Maybe something non-sexist and equally trite like her counting ability instead? “Motherfucker” and “willfully obtuse jackass” are not 4 letter words regardless of how appropriate. You can count can’t you Alan? Reading and comprehension seem a little poor but maths too?
Wot Janine sez, with my own “Fuck off” thrown in
I’m still waiting for Alan Clarke to explain what he thinks explains the elements so much better than astrophysics does.
As for the blistering retort @208, the idea that evolution is going the wrong way is a tempting idea, only because of the increasingly inane spew we have to endure from creationists. Parsimony guides me, so I won’t attribute to some new, unexplainable agency, that which can adequately be explained by ignorance and incompetence.
Clearly, then, it would be somewhat more accurate to use the phrase “unfucking moron” as description.
Or, to include the entire universe of possibilities, “fucking or unfucking moron”.
Ah poor Alan, still showing why he has no business posting here. Alan, you are dealing with real scientists who know bullshit like your assertions when we see it. You cannot bullshit us. So, time for you to actually learn some science by say, taking courses and actually reading textbooks. Come back in five years.
But this contradicts your above assertion that there is no randomness; with the implication that God is controlling every single solitary speck of the universe. If that were true, then gambling instead of getting a job would be the perfect way to align oneself to the will of the Almighty God; tossing dice to find a mate would be the perfect way to make sure that you would find the mate that God wants you to find; and killing yourself when you’re tired of living is exactly the way to get to Heaven — since obviously the God who controls everything would cause the gun to misfire (or otherwise cause the suicide attempt to fail) if he didn’t want you dead yet.
You can’t have it both ways. Either God does control absolutely everything, or there are things that God absolutely does not control. Which is it?
This is quite rich. Could you provide a link to a “well chosen” fruit fly picture? Electron microscope images are permitted. If you are not responsible, then who is? Don’t hold your breath for Myers or Dawkins. Why is it that biology textbooks have shifted away from using 4-winged fruit flies on the same page where mechanisms for evolution are explained? What has changed? Science or politics or ?? Rather than sharing your irresponsibility, I’m risking angering people, so your response is quite positive.
I’m really not a troll, a hijacker or one trying to prove his intelligence. Allow me to return to the original thread subject and ask a question proving my lack of knowledge: Is Titanoboa’s unusually large size because his age or because he grew more quickly during the same life span as modern snakes are afforded? The mechanisms for Deep-sea gigantism are admittedly unknown. Could the reason be that creatures dwelling at lower depths are better shielded from harmful solar radiation? Gigantism seems to be common (click here) rather than a rarity for animal fossils. I think you are discounting a valuable resource when discussing gigantism and six-fingered humans. Also, Ferdinand Magellan’s crew member, Antonio Pigafetta, kept a log of the voyage and recorded detailed accounts of giants in Patagonia. I’m aware that subsequent stories became over-embellished, but Pigafetta’s original account seems to have no such embellishments.
Dear Owlmirror,
You seem unsure of what is the correct Biblical theology.
With careful consideration of the passages below you might conclude your latter stipulation is closer to the truth.
1 Corinthians 14:33
For God is not the author of confusion, but of peace, as in all churches of the saints.
James 1
13Let no man say when he is tempted, I am tempted of God: for God cannot be tempted with evil, neither tempteth he any man:
14But every man is tempted, when he is drawn away of his own lust, and enticed.
15Then when lust hath conceived, it bringeth forth sin: and sin, when it is finished, bringeth forth death.
-Regards
RogerS, when it comes to the bible, Owlmirror will blow you out of the water. Consider this a fair warning.
Roger, your bible is work of fiction, on the same order as a novel by Mark Twain. Except Twain is funny.
Why is an ancient account of polydactyly valuble? Interesting I will grant, but no more than that.
The phrase that KJV chooses to translate as “born to the giant” (“יֻלַּד לְהָרָפָה”) does not mean that, specifically. I note that the LXX for 2 Sam chooses to translate that as “ἐτέχθη τῷ ραφα” and simply transliterates “Rapha”, whereas in 1 Chron, the LXX translates the slightly differently-phrased and spelled Hebrew “נֹולַד לְהָרָפָא” as “ἀπόγονος γιγάντων”, which is where I presume the KJV translators got “giant”.
But nevertheless: So what? Gigantism and polydactyly are obviously not traits that are in any way necessarily linked.
There is no correct Biblical theology; theology is inherently contradictory and fallacious. There are only people with different claims of what is correct Biblical theology.
That contradicts this:
1 Corinthians 1
19: For it is written,
“I WILL DESTROY THE WISDOM OF THE WISE,
ANDTHE CLEVERNESS OF THE CLEVER I WILL SET ASIDE.”
See? God insists that he’s going to destroy wisdom and cleverness. When wisdom and cleverness are destroyed, nothing is left except for confusion.
Another contradiction.
1 Corinthians 1
21 For since in the wisdom of God the world through its wisdom did not come to know God, God was well-pleased through the foolishness of the message preached to save those who believe. 22 For indeed Jews ask for signs and Greeks search for wisdom; 23 but we preach Christ crucified, to Jews a stumbling block and to Gentiles foolishness,
Which insists that God deliberately chose to “tempt” the Jews and Greeks by doing something that could not be found by either signs nor by wisdom.
I should have done more searching. There’s a more famous example of God tempting man:
Genesis 22:1
And it came to pass after these things, that God did tempt Abraham, and said unto him, Abraham: and he said, Behold, here I am.
Remember that one? God orders the man to cut his beloved son’s throat with a sharp knife and burn the body. For God.
Sheesh.
Janine, if you need tax advice do you go to someone who hates the government so passionately that he breaks the law at every turn in securing you a larger refund? You’ll end up paying more in the long run. Just look at the ugly picture Owlmirror paints for 1 Kings 3.26:
A copy & paste from the Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd Edition, yields the following for “bowels”:
So the KJV is spot on, whereas Owlmirror is ??? Speaking of archaic documents in disrepair: “The Origin of Species: By Means of Natural Selection or the Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life”. Darwin’s original theory fell flat on its face when it encountered Weismann’s barrier. Not only that, but Darwin’s “favor” is in question:
Copying that citation with emphasis:
The KJV is not “spot on”. The KJV is fucking well archaic.
Modern English has changed to the point where the primary meaning of the word “bowels” is “One of the divisions of the alimentary canal below the stomach; an intestine, a gut.”
Sheesh.
Yes, and every single evolutionary biologist including PZ Myers knows this and acknowledges this.
You fucking or unfucking moron.
So, again, Alan, how do you account for elements? Elementals?
Owlmirror doesn’t understand the difference between tempting someone for evil and testing someone for good. A Hebrew lexicon for the KJV use of “tempt” yeilds the following:
1) to test, try, prove, tempt, assay, put to the proof or test
So which is it in the case of God speaking to Abraham? Consider the following:
Satan to man:
Jump off this cliff and see if God will help you.
Mother bird to baby bird:
Jump out of this nest and realize you can fly.
Owlmirror to Janine:
Don’t trust in God because he failed Abraham.
Keep reading after Genesis 22 then tell me if God failed Abraham. Abraham trusted God in his “test” which resulted in his offspring producing Jesus Christ about 1900 years later. This doesn’t seem like much of a gain in terms of today’s quick solution mentality but when compared to eternity, it means everything. The question that begs an answer is, “Does Owlmirror have anything beneficial to offer?” We see he has built an intricate maze of what not to believe in. What does he believe in? I have nothing against science, but if it’s science with the Godless “evolution” slant, be mindful of where it has taken Cornell Professor William Provine.
If I need tax advice, I will avoid a person who cannot tell the difference between a pound, a dollar and a yen.
Alan, your imaginary god doesn’t exist, and the bible is just a work of fiction. Anything else is a lie. Welcome to our world.
If you want to discuss god and the bible, it is up to you to first demonstrate the physical evidence for god that will pass muster with scientists, magicians, and professional debunkers as being of divine origin. Until you do this, the bible is just another work of fiction. Please show us your physical evidence for your god. The burden of proof is upon you to demonstrate your claims of existence.
He’s arguing the bible against Owlmirror?!
Haw! Ha ha ha! That’s a knee slapper.
Alan Clarke,
You’re furiously cutting and pasting and consulting dictionaries while Owlmirror is citing and explaining translations from Greek and Hebrew from memory.
That should tell you something.
I am done teasing Alan Clarke. The man is insane. I like verbally abusing the obtuse. Not so much when the person needs help.
Tempting someone for evil: Like the way God tells Satan to tempt Job.
Tempting someone for evil: Like the way God tempts the Greeks and the Jews.
God, as described in the bible, is indeed evil. What else have you got?
Did you notice that Abraham comes down the mountain alone?
Did you notice that God failed the offspring of Abraham?
By your logic we might as well toss out the Rosetta Stone and the Declaration of Independence because of their “archaicness”. Lincoln’s Gettyburg address is undoubtedly offensive to you also because of the “four score and seven years ago”, which sounds like some kind of total for a sports game. Do you like gay people? If you disregard word etymologies, then everything is offensive to you. Get free of it. Post #192 was obviously from a non-native English speaker. You have to consider where people are coming from. You can’t expect the world to revolve around your limited preferences of language, science, politics, ???ism, etc. As much as you may hate it, you are basically standing on these people’s shoulders right now.
By your logic we might as well toss out the Rosetta Stone and the Declaration of Independence because of their “archaicness”. Lincoln’s Gettyburg address is undoubtedly offensive to you also because of the “four score and seven years ago”, which sounds like some kind of total for a sports game. Do you like gay people? If you disregard word etymologies, then everything is offensive to you. Get free of it. Post #192 was obviously from a non-native English speaker. You have to consider where people are coming from. You can’t expect the world to revolve around your limited preferences of language, science, politics, ???ism, etc. As much as you may hate it, you are basically standing on these people’s shoulders right now.
Unlikely, especially considering that the deep-sea giants are generally separate species from smaller but similar creatures, but possible. What’s your evidence that it’s true rather than simply possible? How might one test this hypothesis?
You don’t see any particular reason why large, solid bones would be more likely to be preserved by the process of fossilization than small, thin ones?
What do gay people have to do with the frapping bible? Aside from jebus and david being gay?
You’re right Janine, he is crazy.
Why would we hate it? The accomplishments of the scientists listed at your link are indisputable. As is the observation that none of their scientific accomplishments had anything whatsoever to do with their putative “Bible-believing christianity.” Newton was also a dedicated alchemist, completely full of shit. Neither that nor his religion have anything to do with the calculus.
(By the way, citing Henry Morris as an authority about anything is a mistake.)
Heh heh heh. This is gold. Alan Clarke has realised exactly what he’s up against (an actual scholar, rather than a hack like himself) and is trembling so much he double posted.
Perhaps you could get a grip on your fear and limit yourself to a single post, Alan – and in it deal with the actual points Owlmirror raised, rather than taking umbrage at the tone. He’s giving you the words in the languages the bible was actually written in, not those which have been approved by Popes and committees and subject to the vagaries and subjective biases of the translators.
Or do you believe Jesus and the apostles spoke English?
One more thing – the line ‘Do you like gay people’ sounds to me like homophobia; that sort of thing is not tolerated here. You keep that shit up and PZ’ll ban you.
In the modern sense, I’ve met a few I dislike intensely, but overall I feel the same way about this subgroup of humans, on average, as I do about humans as a whole.
In the archaic sense, which I assume is what you’re getting at, they frequently irritate me.
Way to not get the point.
I am not saying that anything should be “tossed out”. For fuck’s sake, I’m not even saying that the bible should be “tossed out”.
The topic was the appropriateness and accuracy of that particular translation for a modern audience.
The KJV is neither appropriate nor accurate. How hard is it to understand that “רחם” means “mercy; compassion” when it’s a verb and “womb” when it’s a noun, and find a better translation for the phrase used than “her bowels yearned”?
Sheesh.
And they were standing on the shoulders of pagans, heathens, Deists, Jews, Muslims, and other non-Christians. What the fuck difference does it make? The only thing that matters is the evidence.
Oh, and Newton denied the Trinity and Pasteur was very secular and may have been an agnostic or Deist. Other refutations could probably be raised about others in that list.
I had a look through that list that Alan posted and I, while I didn’t check every single birth year, it looked like every one of the people listed were born before Darwin published his books.
Does anyone think that’s a coincidence there aren’t many (if any) scientists on this list who were wholly educated post-Darwin?
The people on the list were, for the most part, exemplary scientists, yes – but they had been raised in a society where there was no comprehensive scientific explanation for why organisms were the way they were. What was it that Dawkins said? ‘Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.’
YAWN, Alan is a bore on top of it all. This is about the hundredth time time some of these same arguments have been made here in the last couple of years. Why do godbots always think they have an argument we haven’t heard before? (/rhetorical).
Time to get the popcorn.
you’re using a KJV-specific dictionary to prove that the KJV uses the correct translations…? that’s rich. I’m not sure if this reaches the level of circular reasoning, but it’s certainly severely biased towards the specific ways in which the KJV translates stuff, so of course the KJV translation will agree with a dictionary devised to explain its word use
Eh, Alan’s crapped himself in fear and stepped away from the PC. Probably a good thing; he had no chance whatsoever – but it would have been fun to watch him try, though.
also, WTF does this have to do with anything:
This is about the hundredth time time some of these same arguments have been made here, and it was completely lame each time. Is this some sort of hazing ritual for creationists? Are they sent here as a test of their faith? “Here, take this URL and find a thread to hijack and used these quotemine sources to convince them that the 2LoT refutes evolution! They’ll be knocked out and won’t know what to say and convert to Xtianity immediately!” It’s like theater majors picking up a hammer to work with the tech crew for the first time, and being told to go wash the gels from the spotlights, and be sure and use hot soapy water.
Ken Cope wrote:
I don’t get it.
No, he was using the OED. And he had to scroll down past the primary definition, past the ones marked “Obs.”, to find the definitions that matched… and ignored that they specifically say “archaic“.
And then he comes back and says “spot on”! Well, maybe “spot on” in the early sixteen-fucking-hundreds. Sheesh.
Eh, it’s an initiation prank. You’re supposed to be surprised when the hot soapy water makes the (supposedly very expensive) gelatine color filters dissolve in your hands. It’s stupid hazing. I can’t imagine that anybody but a naive dumbass would believe this would be the place to whip out their inane anti-science drivel, unless somebody else convinced them that it would be, snickering into their hands and telling their cohorts, “This oughta be good…”
Maybe he’s referring to God’s favor, and is trying to hint that God hated Darwin and tortured him with illness out of pure spite for daring to come up with the theory of evolution?
Because God never lets good Christians get sick, of course, and they all live much longer and healthier lives than non-Christians. Why, Christians can heal the sick just by touching them, and can even drink poison and not die, did you know that? Everyone in hospital must be non-Christian!
/sarcasm
Ken Cope,
I was wondering more because I’ve been involved in amateur theatre for about five years – mostly as a performer, but I’ve also done backstage crew and lighting – but no-one’s ever told me that gels were that delicate. In fact, I had no idea that ‘gel’ was short for ‘gelatine’ in that context. But it’s good to know, so thanks.
Wowbagger, you’d be told to use the hottest soapy water you can stand and scrub with a sponge, but yeah, they’ll dissolve. I did a lot of college and community theater in the 70s, lotsa fun.
Alan Clarke:
Evidence of Common Ancestry: ERVs
actually, I was questioning the following line:
“A Hebrew lexicon for the KJV use of “tempt” yeilds[sic] the following:”
because it seemed a really strange, self-referential way of discussing the meaning and usage of words. but the one you’re pointing out seems also a case of willful confirmation-bias
This is worth reading:
Heh. Just like Alan Clarke sneered at above @#198.
Alan, why do you hate God and his bible?
This may have been too obvious and was overlooked:
John 1:14
And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father,) full of grace and truth.
So by definition, Jesus Christ of course had correct Biblical theology. We can therefore learn from his interpretations.
I am a little speechless after this…it would appear that God is trying to speak to you with your own quote. I believe your 1 Cor 1:19 quote and conclusion is about yourself. Please, I honestly do not intend disrespect since all mankind begins as the “natural man” and “of the world”. Natural wisdom falls short in understanding God (being Spirit). The following verses explain why we meet and understand God on His terms, not ours.
1 Cor 1:21
For after that in the wisdom of God the world by wisdom knew not God, it pleased God by the foolishness of preaching to save them that believe.
1 Cor 2:14
But the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned.
-Regards
Dear Owlmirror,
The following passages may help clear up the contradiction matter.
Hebrews 11
17 By faith Abraham, when he was tried, offered up Isaac: and he that had received the promises offered up his only begotten son,
18 Of whom it was said, That in Isaac shall thy seed be called:
19 Accounting that God was able to raise him up, even from the dead; from whence also he received him in a figure.
Your buddy Alan points out in #234, multiple meanings for “tempt” 1) to test, try, prove, tempt, assay, put to the proof or test
By the Hebrews 11 account above and the known outcome, I would say that God’s assay of Abraham’s dedication was not for evil, neither was it perceived as evil by Abraham. In verse 19 we learn Abraham had full confidence in God’s sovereignty even over death, and figuratively “he received him” back from death.
In context of James 1:13 the word tempted is associated with “…with evil…”.
Would like to discuss more –but I have a job.
-Regards
RogerS, #265
The posters here are, for the most part, atheists – which means we don’t believe in your god. Why on earth would we care whether or not someone who may or may not have believed in your god wrote things down and claimed they were his words?
Godbotting alert!!! Godbotting alert!!! Godbotting alert!!!
I was musing over the absurdity of Owlmirror’s hatred for the Bible. What is absurd is his attention to Hebrew & Greek detail but he doesn’t know the author.
Where would one best learn the martial art of Karate?
From someone who loves Karate or from someone who hates it?
Where would one best learn the Bible?
Reading it for yourself or allowing someone who hates the Bible interpret it for you?
Actually, Owlmirror is a new phenomenon for me. I’m beginning to perceive this forum as a bunch of frat & sorority students that have as their foundation another person who they esteem. I would feel rather intimidated if people worshipped me as a god, but Owlmirror seems to be lapping it up. Since he’s currently at the top, I don’t see many options for his pharyngulating other than down. I’m not claiming to know everything so I have nothing to loose. I was sincere when I asked a few questions about Titanoboa, but I can see that people have little interest in the original thread topic. I don’t blame anyone because I too would have little interest in a big snake if I were in such a spiritual wasteland as Pharyngula. There is such hatred for Christians here that I feel many people may have been molested (or something similar) by a “religious” person. Owlmirror owes it to his followers to make a full disclosure of any such conflicts of interest before he continues his crusade. If he has an “axe to grind”, it should be between him and God alone. Ugly divorces often drag down innocent children. On this blog, women are debasing themselves with such titles as “Ignorant Slut”. I honestly feel that I have more respect for Janine than she has for her(him)self. In the beginning, I questioned a few of the science theories and I’m treated as if I’ve challenged someone’s religion. People seem to be HIGHLY interested in God or the absence of God. I suppose this blog is like a therapy session for affirming one another that God does not exist. The level of insecurity among members is astounding. There’s a lot of talk about who has the most knowledge. In my college Chem labs, I remember some students hoarded their lab results forcing others to “dry lab” the data. Many wouldn’t share their results because it was below their dignity to converse or share with another partner who was less endowed. That’s what I feel this forum is all about. Dog eat dog. Facade personalities. Over-use of 4-letter words and under-use of meaningful words. I hope for the sakes of these persons that they are not over 24 years old:
“I might be wrong, but I sense that you think you’re going to outdo the Pharyngula top guns on scriptural knowledge and interpretation.”
“RogerS, when it comes to the bible, Owlmirror will blow you out of the water. Consider this a fair warning.”
These two people who have no foundation of their own, but the foundation of another fallible human. The last time I made such a statement was when I told a neighborhood kid that my dad could beat up his dad. If anyone is going to “win”, it will be the person who becomes the servant of others.
Mat 23:11 But he that is greatest among you shall be your servant.
Alan Clarke,
Im afraid you are beyond hope.Sad excuse for a human being waste of a lifetime arrogant liar for jebus.
I read that thread Alan Clarke links to in his name, is this guy serious? It reminded me of a Bill Hicks rant.
Whoops, link didn’t work. Take 2
I looked at the Bill Hicks video. He joked at the stupidity of Christians believing in a Bible that makes no mentions of “dinosaurs”. I would feel sorry for him, but he dug his own grave. Click here Bill before making a further fool of yourself.
It’s amazing how, when someone is thrashed so soundly at something they started out thinking they were superior at, they suddenly decide that being the best isn’t that important anymore.
And that’s exactly what’s happened to Alan Clark. He expected that he’d come and lay down his ‘vast scriptural knowledge’ and we’d all be so impressed that we’d show him the respect he seems to think slightly above-average (at best) knowledge of the bible provides him.
Sadly – for him – he misjudged us, as theists often do with atheists. And he got, as the kids today say, pwned.
So now, in desperation to try and regain any of the footing he’s lost, he’s trying to undermine the value of the knowledge that he formerly considered paramount and would, had the boot been on the other foot, be crowing about our ignorance of and how we couldn’t begin to argue with him until our knowledge matched his own.
You’re just seething, aren’t you, Alan. Too bad – I guess it sucks to be you. Now even more than normal. All you’re left with is tired old theist canards about ‘hating god’ or ‘someone religious must have hurt you for you to be so angry blah blah blah.’
Nice try at an analogy, but our dad didn’t need to kick your dad’s ass; it didn’t even get that close. Your pissweak dad only had to see our dad before he crapped himself in fear and ran off, stinking and covered in his own shit, to hide – leaving poor little Alan, who’d talked so big, blubbering in the street in shame.
Just like you are now.
“So by definition, Jesus Christ of course had correct Biblical theology. We can therefore learn from his interpretations.”
But we don’t have his interpretations. All we have is a gaggle of theologians and their interpretations of Jesus’ interpretations. You’d think if God thought this stuff to be at all important, he would have done a better job of making it clear.
“Where would one best learn the Bible?”
From a source unbiased by the unfounded notion that it is the source of all godly wisdom, of course. Same way you’d learn about any other ancient mythology. From people who understand the historical context in which it was written, then edited, then re-edited, then translated and retranslated and re-edited. Frankly, all that stuff makes my eyes glaze over at about the third or fourth “begat”, but more power to anyone who can demystify it.
“Owlmirror owes it to his followers to make a full disclosure of any such conflicts of interest before he continues his crusade. If he has an “axe to grind”, it should be between him and God alone.”
There ain’t no god, so the axe shall be ground upon all the charlatans who claim to speak in God’s name.
“I would feel rather intimidated if people worshipped me as a god, but Owlmirror seems to be lapping it up.”
Respect for another’s expertise is not exactly “worshipping”. But I can understand how your views of human interaction would be warped by a religious hierarchy.
“On this blog, women are debasing themselves with such titles as “Ignorant Slut”.”
It’s called self-deprecating humor, you probably wouldn’t understand.
“I honestly feel that I have more respect for Janine than she has for her(him)self.”
You’re attempting to insult her by questioning her gender. I’d say you have far less respect. I’d even go so far as to say you must have a serious deficit of respect for the entire female gender, because you fit the profile so well.
“I suppose this blog is like a therapy session for affirming one another that God does not exist.”
It’s a self-selected peer group based on common interests, yes. How that’s less noble than any church delusion session, I don’t know.
“The level of insecurity among members is astounding.”
Projection.
“Mat 23:11 But he that is greatest among you shall be your servant.”
And a big ol’ “Humperdumperdoo” to you too, from the Book of Ennis, issue 21.
Way to miss the point by a long way…
Though I read your adding of the dates and I wondered just how all the different areas of inquiry got it so wrong. Geologists date the earth through a variety of techniques to being around 4.55 billion years old. Palaeontologists see simple life in the fossil record around 3.8 billion years ago, complex life around 700 million years ago, and from about 530 million years a gradual progression of life and divergence. Through genetics we can trace ancestry of and we see the last common ancestors for mankind between 150,000 and 200,000 years ago. We also see the domestication of the dog at about 15,000 years ago. Archaeologists see the remnants of early cultures for around 50,000 years and point to the agricultural revolution at around 12,000 years ago. The invention of beer was before the date you described, as was glue.And all this fits in with observations of galaxies that are over 13 billion light years away.
So how did all those fields of inquiry go so wrong? I’m really curious as to how you can feel that millions of scientists and historians from all walks of life can all have been wrong, sometimes by the factor of over a million. Could it be that all of them are incompetent, misled, or appealing to the authority of evidence instead of the bible?
The smart students didn’t let you cheat off them? Tough.
Oh and Bill Hicks has been dead for 15 years. Asking a dead person to do something… well that’s making a fool of yourself.
The authors were all fallible human beings. The Hebrew bible was mostly written by priests hungry for power and feuding jealously with their rivals. The Greek bible was written by cultists creating a new religion based on bits and pieces of older ones.
From those who honestly analyze it as a human-created compilation of documents.
The only thing worthy of esteem is honest expertise. Your disingenuous attempts to fake expertise simply fail to impress.
*snort*
Oh, yes, I am going to start ordering people around, because knowing something about languages and the history of religion makes me special. Good fucking grief.
*eyeroll*
Dude. There are lots of experts around here, and a few genuine polymaths.
I just happen to be the one who knows more than you about a few things. There are plenty of others who know more than you in other fields — as you might have noticed if you weren’t so busy moaning about me, you big baby.
Nah, that’s a lie. You just used the big snake as an excuse to preach, equivocate, confuse, and wax disingenuous. Get over yourself.
Actually, I read the comments by those with actual expertise in palaeontology and biology with great interest.
Oh, LOL. Good grief, does it not occur to you that people might simply dislike frauds and liars because they dislike being defrauded and lied to? There’s agnostic anti-evolutionists out there as well, who aren’t particularly motivated by religion, but insist on spouting off their fraudulent, disingenuous, and fundamentally crackpot ideas about science. We make sure that they don’t get away with their crap here either.
I’m not ragging on you because you’re a Christian. I’m ragging on you because you have no idea what you’re talking about, and yet pretend that you do.
No mercy for bullshitters.
Owlmirror – Could you use some of your divine powers to rid my yard of the skunk trying to break into my chicken house?
I hate getting woke up at this time of night.
you may not realize this, but most of us have read the damn thing. for some, reading it cover-to-cover was the reason they stopped believing
we have great interest in the original topic, it’s just that we’re the ones with the questions. your godbotting has effectively bored the herpetology-experts to death and they’ve left the thread. now you’re left with people who suffer from SIWOTI Syndrome or enjoy troll-stomping.
it’s called humor. and it’s a reference to SNL. and a running joke. and you’re being condescending
woken up…?
I think I should interpret that as a sign that it may be time to go to bed soon :-/
Spoketh the man who needs medical help:
On this blog, women are debasing themselves with such titles as “Ignorant Slut”. I honestly feel that I have more respect for Janine than she has for her(him)self.
I said I was done speaking to this person. I was wrong.
Why are you so obsessed with me? And you do you keep shifting tones?
Despite the shifting tones, the constant theme is your smugness. You act as you are leading a intellectually deficient person.
Let me fill you in on a few things. I post here not because I am trying to fit in to peer pressure. I am here because I love the intelligence and humor I find here.
I am a dyke. I just loved the “Do you like gays?” that you placed in the middle of one of your rants. I guess I am one of your mortal enemies.
Because I can put together some sentences with swear words, you doubt my gender? You have not spent much time around women, have you?
Owlmirror has never lead me anywhere. I left my faith behind twenty five years before I ever read any of Owlmirror’s posts. And part of the reason was because, no matter what language they are in, the stories of Abraham and Isaac and of Job are the actions of a moral monster. I just happen to appreciate the depth of Owlmirror’s knowledge.
You claim to have more respect for me than I have for myself? Bullshit! You did not know any of the scant personal details about me that I just provided. You treated me as if I am some stupid and impressionable waif. Yet you respect me? Please go fuck yourself.
You do not like the title, “Ignorant Slut”? You show see some of the other titles I have used for myself. Everyone of them were either an insult tossed my way or a joke
You show so little respect for yourself that you show off an understanding of science that an intelligent middle school student would be ashamed of. You try to show off your biblical knowledge to us only to run into someone who can run rings around you. In response, you drop knowledge like it was a fire heated rock and babble on that what is important is that one KNOWS god. That is respect for one’s self.
Alan Clarke, you are a delusional, stupid and sick little man. No one is impressed by what you brought here. Most of the people here are laughing at you.
(SIWOTI!)
And the most famous example of God tempting Man is in the Garden of Eden.
The whole business of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil makes no sense whatsoever except as an example of God tempting man, or rather, Man and Woman.
Sheesh.
And of course, the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil in the Garden of Eden brings us right back to the titanic snake.
“Now the serpent was
more crafty than anythe biggest muthafuckin’ beast of the field which the LORD God had made.”If I had the Titanoboa suggesting that I eat a fruit, I think I would eat for the sake of my safety.
Ken, I’m not purposefully trying to avoid you. People are usually more convinced by reasons they discovered themselves than by those found by others. What are you really looking for? If you’re looking for me to fall on my face then rest assured I’ve done it many times and I’m not an astrophysicist. Now that I’ve lost your interest, let me move on to what may be more important than not finding God through astrophysics:
Elisabeth Kübler-Ross in her 1969 book “On Death and Dying, describes, in five discrete stages, a process by which people allegedly deal with grief and tragedy, especially when diagnosed with a terminal illness. The stages are known as the Five Stages of Grief.
1. DENIAL: I feel fine. This can’t be happening, not to me!
2. ANGER: Why me? It’s not fair! How can this happen, I hate this world!
3. BARGAINING: Just let me live to see my children graduate. I’ll do anything, can’t you stretch it out? A few more years. I will give my life savings if…
4. DEPRESSION: I’m so sad, why bother with anything? I’m going to die . . . What’s the point?
5. ACCEPTANCE: It’s going to be okay. I can’t fight it, I may as well prepare for it.
Hard-core atheists may only go through 1, 2, & 4 whereas the weaker may succumb to the “bargaining stage” like a pitiful American Idol contestant when they’re about to be booted. Cornell Professor William Provine seems to be where Sigmund Freud was before his demise, stage 4:
I never heard of Bill Hicks until last night. But after viewing his mocking on youtube, I thought to myself, how much longer will this guy continue? Evidently I missed it by minus 15 years. Obviously, not everyone is “stamped out” by God since his nature is very patient and forbearing. Darwin lived to be 73 but the quality of his life was near the bottom of the chart:
I had a friend whose wife left him for a “more intellectual” guy. The guy was a psychologist. I was visiting my friend when his wife was about to leave for a “night out”. She was all dressed up with a short dress and black patent leather knee-high boots. My friend pleaded with tears that his wife wouldn’t leave that evening but it was to no avail. The scene was so I ugly that I wanted to leave but he persuaded me to stay. He confided in me that the guy she was seeing had experienced “religion” and went through the “born again” experience, but later advanced beyond “all that” and left it behind for intellectualism. This cycle continued for about a month. I would get phone calls from my friend who cried like a baby and told me he couldn’t take it any longer. He prayed to God that the situation would end and his wife would return to her senses. He had lost about 50 pounds weight. I couldn’t discern whether the loss was purposeful in an attempt to look better than the boyfriend or if he lost interest in eating from the stress. One night I got another call and he said in a calm voice, “It’s all over.” The boyfriend was riding a bicycle on Division Street in Evansville, Indiana, behind the State Hospital. He got hit by an 18-wheeler truck and somehow managed to get twisted around the axle. My friend’s wife got to the scene and soaked up his blood in a towel which she kept in the trunk of her car. Why she would save the towel made no sense to him but his wife was in a state of shock for about a month. The boyfriend had a closed-casket funeral. Eventually they got divorced. Of course this is all anecdotal as is Provine, Darwin, Freud, Hicks, and Monty Python’s lead actor for “Life of Brian”, Graham Chapman, so please don’t ask why I even bring it up. Sometimes I too need a little therapy. Thanks for listening.
Afterthoughts: Just last night I read PZ’s rules on what gets a person banned from Pharyngula. I’m way off topic but so is everyone else. Perhaps the thread with Jesus depicted next to the snake would have been better. I honestly didn’t know if Janine was male or female until someone alluded to her being a woman (and just now she has revealed herself) so I’ll knock it off. With all the “morphing” going on you never know. Janine, I am not “homophobic”. I’ve sat next to gays in church, had dinner with them, got my haircuts, etc. I’ll admit I do view them as extremely troubled people but that’s my limited experience. Maybe you can prove me wrong. Actually if you were locked in a jail cell with me, we would survive.
post hoc ergo propter hoc Alan.
Not homophobic? What you wrote in your closing remarks for #287 is the most homophobic thing I’ve yet read on Pharyngula. I think PZ calls it slagging.
Bloody hell, Alan. You’re now trying ‘atheists are in denial’ and ‘all the atheists I know are unhappy’?
You really need to spend a little more time reading through some of the threads on this site so you get an understanding of the sort of pro-theism arguments we see here on a regular basis. Here’s a hint: on a scale of one to ten the arguments you’re presenting rating about a 0.5 – and that’s only if the judges are feeling generous.
Learn some more and then maybe you’ll be worth the effort of arguing with. Until then you’re just going to be mocked.
Alan, it’s the theists that are in denial. Their imaginary god doesn’t exist. Their bible is a work of fiction. Denial is not even considering those facts. Also, they keep draggin their silly god places it doesn’t belong, like the public square. Even Jesus was in contempt of those who engaged in ostentatious public prayers, and told his followers to go into the closet to pray. In other words, do it either in the temple or in private. So any True ChristianTM would not engage in public prayer, like at a football game.
…in this thread alone.
Ye cats.
God can’t be bothered to heal the sick, feed the hungry, or end religious disputes with clear communication… but if people get on his bad side, he’s just great at torturing them to death, or murdering them quickly if he’s in the mood.
Really, God sounds like the biggest mob boss ever.
“You don’t wanna mess with Me. You could have a little accident. I’m a patient and forbearing guy, but I swear, if you make Me unhappy, they’ll won’t even be able to find all of the little bits that you’ll be in. Capiche?”
Strangely enough, staying on God’s “good” side doesn’t seem to help much.
Did any of that make sense to anyone?
I never realized that Janine was a man’s name.
Bloody hell, Alan. You’re now trying ‘atheists are in denial’ and ‘all the atheists I know are unhappy’?
chalk up another religionaut who communicates via projection.
Of course this is all anecdotal
:/
indeed.
all of it.
…and always has been.
I hate to give anything to the faith heads, but damn they have stamina. He doesn’t make one bit of sense for two solid days.
It’s not – but judging by Alan’s comments his grasp on reality is rather weak, so I think we can charitably excuse that as simply more of the same.
Actually if you were locked in a jail cell with me, we would survive.
um…
have you considered a visit to your local mental health care professional?
his wife was about to leave for a “night out”. She was all dressed up with a short dress and black patent leather knee-high boots … He got hit by an 18-wheeler truck and somehow managed to get twisted around the axle. My friend’s wife got to the scene and soaked up his blood in a towel which she kept in the trunk of her car
score: 0.5 Rookes
Hey, sorry I missed this one! After a quick skim through, I can’t decide whether it’s Alan Clarke’s stupidity or his unpleasantness that is more egregious. Linking to a picture of a deformed child, and sneering about Darwin’s ill-health, in the apparent belief that he is providing arguments against evolutionary theory, combine the two characteristics in a way that few even among godbots can manage. Well done, Alan!
Shhhhhhhhh. Don’t tell Alan “Confirmation Bias” Clarke he’s an idiot -ignorance is bliss.
Wendy – love the Rooke Scale. Is it calibrated in “ghouls” or “WTFs”?
windy,
Snap! When I saw the phrase ‘leather knee-high boots’ I immediately thought of our old friend Pete. The projected necrophilia confirmed the initial judgement.
Alan, you don’t have any holy books bound with human skin, do you?
I missed this thread also.
Anecdotes are poor demonstrations for making whatever point Alan Clarke is making — not least because such stories are cherry-picked to conform to the ‘theory’ they’re supposed to support. Interpretation is significant also.
If Charles Darwin had been a deeply religious man, his productive life despite constant ill health would have been used by Mr. Clarke as evidence for how faith strengthens a person, and helps them endure what would break a godless man.
Patricia:
A bit of hand-me-down advice from my grandfather:
If the skunk is in a tree do not (and I can’t stress this enough) do NOT shoot the skunk with a shotgun.
Owlmirror: You have the stamina of a legion. Kudos. You have earned yourself a well-deserved break after all that. I’m sure it has been mentioned before and I apologize in advance if this has been covered but were you a believer? Or is the history of the Bible your vocation? Of course you don’t actually have to answer – I’m just curious. Because, well, damn if I had a fraction of that knowledge and applied it to trout fishing those buggers would never stand a chance!
What the heck is Alan Clarke drinking? He’s either blitzed out of his mind, or he’s insane.
Pharyngula is not your local mental health center. Get professional help.
I write a long argument on the problems I have with his argument, and he focuses on the offhand comment about the death of a comedian? Why don’t you answer why you think geologists are off by a factor of 700,000 and cosmologists off by a factor of over 2,000,000 instead of complaining about atheists?
Awesome.
Not creepy enough to score a full rooke but just disconnected enough to rate a half point.
I’m starting a fan club. It’s the Sastra is Awesome club.
-Not that many of you aren’t awesome, as well… ; )
What’s even worse about Alan Clarke’s post is that he took the pseudoscience that is the five stages, then applied it in an even more pseudosciency way. Are we sure this guy isn’t a poe?
Poe? Nah. He’s got too many web pages full of astoundingly stupid bullshit.
I just think hes a seriously deluded man. Seriously deluded and egotistical.
Dunning-Kruger
That much rings true.
Fuck, there goes another irony meter.
It’s amazing to see the ineptitude that Alan Clarke presents. He really should be kept away from concepts he simply doesn’t understand – like anything to do with reality.
What do the following have in common?
Autosurfing
Burnlounge
Chain letter
Holiday Magic
Lottery
Ponzi scheme
Pyramid scheme
Multi-level marketing
The unified underlying principles of these schemes existed before they were glorified with a name. Most violate man-made laws, all violate God’s laws, and they never achieve net wealth within the confines of a closed system. The proposed mechanisms are similar to theories which violate the laws of entropy. Every perceived “gain” is “lost” somewhere else. Some schemes are perceived “borderline” because their inherent deceptions are more hidden. But after enough time, people get burned and the system collapses just like a supposed perpetual motion machine or the hope for amino acids in a primordial soup accidentally forming a protein. Some people fall for a scheme because the monetary base is seemingly too large or the investors too numerous for the scheme to be perceived as fraudulent. Bernard Madoff’s $50 billion Ponzi scheme seemed legit because of its size. The same mentality leads proponents of evolution to believe their theory is safe because of its numerous followers. Here are some of its founders:
Greek Materialists: Leucippus, Democritus (460-370 B.C.)
Avicenna (980 – 1037)
James Hutton (1726 – 1797)
John Playfair (1748 – 1819)
Charles Lyell (1797 – 1875)
Charles Darwin (1809 – 1882)
Nothing is new under the sun. Darwin got his ideas from Charles Lyell then peddled them with the help of self-proclaimed “I am Darwin’s bulldog”, Thomas Huxley. Darwin’s theory is loved by those who hold dear the philosophies of atheism, agnosticism, materialism and uniformitarianism because it eliminates the God of the Bible by theorizing that man instead evolved from monkeys. Notice how the idea of “natural selection” predates Darwin by James Hutton who died 12 years before Darwin’s birth:
Since Darwin’s ideas were borrowed, the argument against “evolution” started before his 1859 “Origin of Species”:
Many founders of our modern-day sciences adamantly rejected evolution’s underpinnings. The inventor of the vacuum tube (precursor to the transistor), John Ambrose Fleming, helped found the “Evolution Protest Movement”. Located in England, the organization continues to this day under the name, “Creation Science Movement” (http://www.csm.org.uk), making it the first and oldest creationist organization in the world.
Conclusion: Many founding scientists on my list rejected evolution theory before Darwin echoed his version of it. Their rejection was based on 1) good intuition: vast information doesn’t create itself accidentally and 2) Greek-based philosophies of materialism were known to fail.
Ponzi schemes have nothing to do with evolution at all. There is no relevance. If evolution violated the second law of thermodynamics then so does the existence of life. In fact entropy can favour the production of amino acid chains from individual molecules. A good definition of life is “localised reversal of entropy”. Your body has to continually metabolise food producing low-grade heat energy in order to hold itself together. Any local decrease in entropy caused by life on earth is vastly outweighed by the increase in entropy from the sun.
Wikipedia specifically states that Hutton denied that one species could turn into another- a crucial difference between him and Darwin. I also note that Darwin does not mention Hutton as being a precursor to his own theory in the Historical Sketch that accompanies later editions of the Origin– and yet he does mention virtually everyone else who had evolutionary views, regardless of the mechanisms they proposed to explain the changes seen in the fossil record. Possibly this was because he was not aware of them- Hutton was an appalling writer, and most people never bothered to read his original work. The only reason his geological ideas spread was because of James Playfair.
“2) Greek-based philosophies of materialism were known to fail.”
Citation Needed! Greek ideas of materialism, and Lyell and Hutton’s principles of uniformitarianism have not failed. There is no evidence that they have failed at all. The ideas that everything is made of stuff, which behaves in a predictable and repeatable manner is essential to all areas of science and engineering. It is these principles that you trust when getting on an aeroplane, using a computer or virtually anything else you do.
I guarantee you that Ambrose Fleming was a materialist when it came to building vacuum tubes. And citing engineers and scientists who have no connection with biology or geology is never a good plan.
Such as, for example, religion. God violates the laws of entropy, and Christianity is a Pyramid scheme, with its pie in the sky by-and-by.
Autofail.
I see Alan Clarke is still drinking the whacko tea. Alan, you have no point and keep proving it with your posts. Time to put your tin foil hat back on and return to your basement.
Oh MAN. The inventor of vacuum tubes was on to us. That’s it, close up all the biotech labs, stop all the paleontological digs, the jig is up. Evolution is dead, blind faith rules, begin the chanting! Hoona igna chowa neha!
argumentum ad verecundiam and false attribution
petitio principii and historians fallacy
petitio principii (again), equivocation and a strawman argument.
argumentum ad consequentiam
Look at all that logical fail.
Ponzi schemes and evolution are similar in that they both defy entropy. And when I say “evolution”, I don’t mean pre-existing information contained in genes that allows for limited amounts of variation which are defined by Mendel’s laws. Nor am I referring to loss of information that produces flightless cormorants, bulldogs, and trip-leverless mouse traps that can be used as tie clips. Nor am I referring to scrambled information that produces 6-legged sheep or persons with sickle cell anemia who don’t worry about malaria because they are dying from 100 other problems caused by their “beneficial” disease. I’m referring to the non-existent evolution that produces 6-legged sheep which outrun those with 4-legs. The type that causes Dawkins to suffer memory loss when asked, “Can you give an example of a genetic mutation or an evolutionary process which can be seen to increase the information in the genome?” The monkey-to-man evolution that Darwin talks about.
This is true only if life originated from something less ordered and intelligent which is what I’m challenging. People continually tell me they possess a computer program that can generate intelligence. I always discover that their program was made by something more intelligent than the intelligence it generated.
I think failing casinos need a new advertising campaign: “Guaranteed Winnings! Localised Reversal of Entropy!” The only problem is they would need to be subsidized by casinos that don’t utilize the “localised reversal of entropy” technology. More seriously, I originally stated the improbability of “…the hope for amino acids in a primordial soup accidentally forming a protein.” This is likened to the components for an automobile arising randomly but unassembled. I’m telling you this isn’t going to happen but you’re telling me an assembled car with a working engine (i.e. a human body metabolising
), has the ability to travel if someone adds fuel to it. This is true but how is the car going to assemble without an “assembler”? Evolution isn’t the answer because it supposedly works only for living things and our analogy hasn’t reached the “life” stage yet. The probability of all this happening would be less than my original “amino acids in a primordial soup accidentally forming a protein.” But why even bother talking about a car forming accidentally if it can’t run without the miracle of the Sun randomly appearing at the proper distance so that everything doesn’t freeze or melt? Gasoline? Retrieval of crude oil and fractional distillation doesn’t happen without a lot of intelligent work. How does crude oil originate? If you don’t like crude oil then what kind of machine will you need to extract fuel from the atmosphere or soil? Will you have to put more work into it than what you get back? All of this is assuming you are conveniently located on planet Earth. Anywhere else will further upgrade your nightmare.
In 1923, geologist J. Harlan Bretz, theorized that melting glaciers and massive-flooding (later referred to as the Missoula flood) shaped the unusual terrain of the northwest U.S. The remnant flood basin of Dry Falls dwarfs Niagara Falls. Bretz was rejected by critics because his interpretations resembled the Biblical flood and contradicted their uniformitarian dogma. After the advent of aerial photography, huge ripples in the landscape were observed which could only be explained by Bretz’s catastrophic flood model. Bretz was further vindicated when the Washington State Parks Dept. installed information panels that utilized Bretz’ interpretation. Click here then scroll to bottom for “Overwhelming Proof for an Outrageous Theory” information panel. Click here for another rebuttal to uniformitarianism.
Conclusion: Uniformitarian principles blinded scientists to a truth and continue to blind as the Bible predicted:
2 Peter 3:3-6 Knowing this first, that there shall come in the last days scoffers, walking after their own lusts, and saying, Where is the promise of his coming? for since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as [they were] from the beginning of the creation. For this they willingly are ignorant of, that by the word of God the heavens were of old, and the earth standing out of the water and in the water: Whereby the world that then was, being overflowed with water, perished.
Hey, buddy, if yer gonna spew nonsense, could you at least shorten it up a bit?
thanks, ever so much.
Evolution does not defy entropy, which makes you a liar and bullshitter Alan. Chemical and biological reactions are all about Gibb’s free energy. In any general chemistry text, delta gee is equal to delta aitch minus tee times delta ess. Delta ess is the entropy term. If delta aitch the enthalpy term, is more negative than the tee times delta ess (remember the minus sign), then the free energy, delta gee, is negative, which means the reaction can occur. And the enthalpy of the reaction depends either on the heat given off, or the heat taken in, say by sunlight. The earth is an open system, with the sun supplying energy.
Alan, stop lying to yourself. That is the only way you can stop lying to us.
Alan Clarke,
How sad – you must have spent a lot of time typing, cutting and pasting. It’s such a shame it’s all bush-league drivel we’ve heard and seen refuted a thousand times before.
Go here to find out why. Take your time – so that you can stop wasting ours.
Hey Alan, why don’t you join the current most recent post?
It should be right up your alley.
Things that make creationists look stupid
While I know that title leaves it pretty wide open, because there are soooooo many things, maybe you can join the discussion and at least provide an example?
LOL. How about taking the trouble to read up on physics and chemistry and find out what entropy is, and how it relates to evolution ?
Uh-huh. The truth that catastrophes can and do happen in a generally gradualist geological history. So what?
So now you think you can tell geologists how to do their jobs, as well as biologists, physicists, and chemists?
You fucking or unfucking moron, do you really think that spewing common creationist claims is going to impress anyone here?
Alan Clarke, you haven’t explained just how geologists and nuclear physicists could be so wrong when it comes to dating the age of the earth. You’re off by a factor of around 700,000 there. As for cosmology, how do you explain those distant galaxies that are over 13 billion light years away? That puts you off by a factor of over 2,100,000! The question is, how do the plethora of scientists who work in those fields (many of whom have religious backgrounds) get results that are so far off from what you say?
Also, on the topic of evolution. How do you explain the fused chromosome, the ERV markers that are in both us and chimpanzees, the very close genetic code, and the humanoid fossils found in recent rock?
http://www.thedarwinpapers.com/oldsite/number5/darwin5.htm
Moving on from the Cambrian layer, did Darwin provide any evidence at all for intermediate links as evidence for evolution in any of the strata of the fossil record? Darwin wrote in his Origin:
“So that the number of intermediate and transitional links, between all living and extinct species, must have been inconceivably great. But assuredly, if this theory be true, such have lived upon the earth.”
He wrote immediately after this in his Origin:
“Independent of our not finding fossil remains of such infinitely numerous connecting links . . .” .(Origin, Chapter Ten: Imperfection of Geol. Rec.)
In the same section Darwin further confessed the lack of evidence for his theory:
“Why then is not every geological formation and every strata full of such intermediate links? Geology assuredly does not reveal any such finely-graduated organic chain; and this perhaps, is the most obvious and serious objection which can be urged against my theory.”
By Darwin’s own admission we discover that there is a complete absence of any fossil evidence for evolution not only in the pre-Cambrian layer, but throughout the entire geologic column.
Darwin clearly revealed in his Origin that geology, the fossil record, does not affirm any evidence of evolution occurring and Darwin could give no answer to this objection either except to cite the imperfection of the fossil record, hence the title of the chapter in his book.
Ecclesiastes 3:11
He hath made every thing beautiful in his time: also he hath set the world in their heart, so that no man can find out the work that God maketh from the beginning to the end.
Darwin wrote about the fossil record 150 years ago, since then a plethora of transitional forms have been found. Do you even keep up with where the evidence of palaeontology is at, or just try and push out an ignorant statement in the hope that those reading don’t know better?
But Kel, if we can only twist the words of Charles Darwin until they scream, we can just ignore all the evidence gained in the last one hundred and fifty years. All of the fossils, all the genetic markers, the similarities of of organs throughout all of the animal kingdom, we can ignore it all. Chop off the head and the beast dies. Ignorence becomes the greatest virtue.
By Darwin’s own admission
translation:
by deliberately quotemining Darwin, and ignoring the subsequent 150+ years of paleontology which have garnered literally thousands of complete series of fossils, I have created a completely unoriginal and flimsy strawman I like to call “Bob”.
I’m just waiting for the quote about how the eye couldn’t have evolved that’s in The Origin Of Species.
Ponzi schemes and evolution are similar in that they both defy entropy.
typing this sentence would also likely defy your notion of entropy.
so fucking what?
another moron who thinks there is something to the entropy argument, who knows fuckall about entropy and information.
*sigh*
C’mon, we’re dealing with Christians here. They can’t comprehend that anything that happened any more recently than two thousand years ago could have any relevance.
Plus they don’t realise that, when we admit – freely, without hesitation – that Darwin didn’t know absolutely everything there is to know about evolution and the processes by which it occurs it has absolutely no bearing whatsoever on the contemporary field which his findings instigated.
That’s the thing about science – it’s a gradual process, a cumulative increase in knowledge over time. Only an idiot would believe that you just get handed the answers to life, the universe and everything all at once from some sort of magic fairy…
Oops, hang on – that’s what they believe, isn’t it? Silly me.
Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of this world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and the seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he holds to as being certain from reason and experience. Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn. The shame is not so much that an ignorant individual is derided, but that people outside the household of faith think our sacred writers held such opinions, and, to the great loss of those for whose salvation we toil, the writers of our Scripture are criticized and rejected as unlearned men. If they find a Christian mistaken in a field which they themselves know well and hear him maintaining his foolish opinions about our books, how are they going to believe those books in matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven, when they think their pages are full of falsehoods and on facts which they themselves have learnt from experience and the light of reason? Reckless and incompetent expounders of Holy Scripture bring untold trouble and sorrow on their wiser brethren when they are caught in one of their mischievous false opinions and are taken to task by those who are not bound by the authority of our sacred books. For then, to defend their utterly foolish and obviously untrue statements, they will try to call upon Holy Scripture for proof and even recite from memory many passages which they think support their position, although they understand neither what they say nor the things about which they make assertion.
Imagine if they put forth all that effort to actually understand what scientists have discovered and worked out instead of in a futile quest to shoehorn hundreds of years of observation, experimentation, and deduction into some silly old mythological structure.
Imagine if they put forth all that effort to actually understand what scientists have discovered and worked out instead of in a futile quest to shoehorn hundreds of years of observation, experimentation, and deduction into some silly old mythological structure.
The shame is not so much that an ignorant individual is derided, but that people outside the household of faith think our sacred writers held such opinions…
I’d tell you to look up “the Courtier’s Reply”, but instead you have me a bit curious as to who you think your “sacred writers” are?
Alan Clarke,
FSTDT!
Projection
There are billions of stars out there and billion of planets. Many planets probably had the right stuff to form life but were too close/far away. It looks like a “miracle” when your sample size is 1.
Bullshit. A lot of new ideas come out all the time. Sure you can always go back and say person X had a similar ideas if you play lose with the word “similar”.
Nope. Darwin’s theory is accepted because the evidence supports it. Also, there are many who believe in the God of the Bible and in evolution.
If Jesus created oil why did he put so much under the Muslims?
Ichthyic, that was a historical quote from a 4th century christian philosopher, he might have a hard time answering your questions :-p (but he was spot-on about the effect ignorant christians have on how educated people view religion)
Where the fuck did this loon crawl out of?
Alan Clarke: Ok, so your god kills people that mock or question or disobey him and his Bronze Age commandments. Disease, trucks, whatever the gruesome instrument of wrath he chooses. Let’s for the sake of argument accept that as true and that your god exists.
Now, why exactly would someone choose to worship and serve a sick monster like that? What kind of jealous, insecure, petulant child of a deity feels angered or threatened by anything a human could say? There’s a microbe under one of your toenails right now cursing your name, laughing at your hygienic habits, and telling all the other microbes what a colossal wanker you are. Do you really give a shit? Or are you going to drop a cinder block on your foot and smite those single-celled apostates? FFS! Saddam Hussein tortured those who disagreed with him. Hitler lined them up against the wall. Stalin sent them to Siberia. Your god gives them AIDS or cancer or a Freightliner upside the head. OOH! Where do I sign up for that fanclub?
You’re a sick person, Alan Clarke.
As demonstrated by people who actually understand chemisty you don’t understand entropy. If evolution violates the 2nd law of thermodynamics then so does growth. You developed from a single egg. Evolution isn’t the answer for abiogenesis, chemistry is- and chemistry says this sort of thing is possible- and in the right circumstances inevitable.
I’m referring to the non-existent evolution that produces 6-legged sheep which outrun those with 4-legs.
And that’s a strawman view of evolution. If you can have a mutation that makes a cormorant’s wings smaller, why not one that makes its wings bigger? Either could be advantageous in the right circumstances. Macromutations like six-legged sheep are not advantageous. But a sheep with longer legs, bigger horns or an extra few inches of intestine could be. You only need a few more genes to be a little more active to grow a significantly bigger brain- and bipedalism confers distinct advantages if there aren’t any trees for you to live in any more. The step from “monkey to man” is not nearly as large as you might think.
In 1923, geologist J. Harlan Bretz, theorized that melting glaciers and massive-flooding (later referred to as the Missoula flood) shaped the unusual terrain of the northwest U.S. The remnant flood basin of Dry Falls dwarfs Niagara Falls. Bretz was rejected by critics because his interpretations resembled the Biblical flood and contradicted their uniformitarian dogma.
This could happen again if the conditions were right- e.g. ice-dammed lakes. Water wasn’t acting in totally different way during the ice age when this occurred. Set up the same conditions today, 10, 300, or 3,500 million years ago and you will see the same features. We even see them on Mars.
Kel, one way to check the accuracy of a radioisotope dating method is to measure a rock of known age. I’ve seen reports of recently-created rocks from spewing volcanoes measuring millions of years old. What are you using for your “standard” of calibration and tell me how you are certain of its age. How does Mary Schweitzer know that her T. Rex bone is 68 million years old? How do you know that the neighboring stratum it was found in is 68 million years old? Even if all dates agreed, then knowing the absolute date could still fail if all the “agreeing” dates were adversely affected by a false assumption of the initial amount of the parent isotope. If the decay rate was uniformly and simultaneously affected for all elements on this Earth by an unknown phenomenon (to you) in the last 6000 years, then everything would look consistent but everything would consistently be off. Problems with radiometric dating.
Close genetic code does not prove that two organisms are related. This could be interpreted as good evidence for a common designer (God). I almost exclusively choose wood when I build a book case. Does the fact that they are all made of similar wood prove that one case evolved from another without my intervention? If you didn’t know that I built the cases, I suppose you could interpret the origin of the most ornate case was from the plain case if they both had 6 shelves but you’d be wrong. Interpreting origins using homology.
Everyone starts with an initial assumption (God exists or God does not exist) then they build their framework and theories around their assumption. Your theory rests on the exact same amount of “assumptions and unknowns” as mine. Either way you go, it’s a “belief” system.
Kel, concerning starlight, I am a technologist, computer programmer, and mechanic, not an astrophysicist, so my forte is knowing WHERE to look for answers, but it’s so late right now I can’t do it. (okay, how about this: http://www.answersingenesis.org/articles/nab/does-starlight-prove) The properties of time, matter and energy all seem to violate known laws of physics (certainly Newtonian) when we are talking about T + .00000001?? seconds after the big bang (your theory) or a similar time when God created the Earth (my theory). During this time, questions about distances, the speed of light, matter, etc. becomes a myriad of disagreement and uncertainty. When you say that the Earth is so many years old because we know that distant starlight…, etc., etc., I hope you can appreciate why I have very little confidence in the “absoluteness” of your or anyone else’s statement. I know it’s a big turn-off to many in a “science” discussion, but my faith in the Bible is magnitudes greater than that of scientific knowledge which reverses, contradicts, falsely projects, etc. I really identified with the previous post:
Ecclesiastes 3:11 – He hath made every thing beautiful in his time: also he hath set the world in their heart, so that no man can find out the work that God maketh from the beginning to the end.
This is WAAAAY off subject but I wanted to clear something up. I think the KJV Bible is the best English translation for doing a critical word study without knowing Greek and Hebrew. But it may be awful if you are a person that hates tedium, details, word etymologies, and history. I became a Christian by reading the paraphrased “Living Bible” which is obviously further yet from the original, but it got me started. I bought a case of 30 NIV Bibles when I graduated from the university and distributed them among classmates. So I’m not a cram-it-down-your-throat KJV person at all.
Decay rates are at different rates, for something to have changed them all down to 6000 years would need to affect each one separately.
It could be, but those genetic markers I were talking about would be mistakes in genetics. Why would God make it look like horizontal gene transfer took place? Why would God fuse a pair of chromosomes? Why would God make similar active and inactive genes among closer morphologically related species?
Actually it’s not my theory, it’s the current scientific explanation. Are you saying that the speed of light at one stage is over two million times of what it is today?
The speed of light has shown to be constant countless times, just as the decay rates of radiometric minerals has shown to be constant as well. If you are alleging they are wrong, can you show a mechanism as to how both can be slowed by the factors of millions that you allege?
AIIIIEEEEE!!!! He quotes AiG now!!! We’re doomed!!!
Not. for every idiocy on AiG, there’s an answer here, I’m not doing your homework for you, read the relevant sections yourself
also, inferring from in-organic, obvious human constructs to organic natural object is a form on anthropomorphizing, and a MASSIVE fail. the universe is not human-like
further, scientists dig not start out with the presumption that there is no god, as the long line of quotes you’ve supplied evidences. “no god” is a conclusion, not an a priori assumption.
lastly, the KJV is a HORRIBLE book to read in order to learn about biblical writings, archaic language or not. FFS, it translates oxen as unicorns!
Just to add to that: the speed of light has been demonstrated to be constant, it’s one of the foundations of the universe. e=mc². Likewise radiometric decay has again shown to be constant, various methods have been tested against artefacts of known ages, as well as confirming with each other the tests also confirm relative dating as done by geologists. If there is a way of speeding up known half-lifes, firstly let the nuclear industry know so we can dispose of all that toxic decaying waste. And secondly if what you are saying is correct, then you should be in line for several Nobel prizes.
So the question is that if you have knowledge of how the science is wrong, why aren’t you fighting for your ideas in academia? To me it seems like you are simply speculating on concepts you have no idea about. Why aren’t you doing experiments to confirm your worldview? Why instead are you looking to the bible for answers when it’s the evidence that doesn’t fit the bible?
That’s the same thing with all creationists, deny the scientific evidence, offer abysmal excuses for the evidence that is inescapable, and claim that their “theory” is on equal footing to the last 500 years of accumulated empirical measure. Alan Clarke, do some science before you talk on matters about science, because what you are saying now is not only spectacularly wrong but it’s also impossible by all standards. And for what? Because a tale with a talking snake somehow trumps the last 200 years of understanding about the world. And what’s worse is that you do it all using the champion of the exact same method: the computer. Get a science education before you talk on matters science please!
oh yeah, one more thing: if similar genetics/phenotypes are proof of a designer, they are proof of a lazy/inept/cruel designer. what kind of idiot/sadist would use a quadruped blueprint for a biped?
the result was a species that has weak knees and backs, and gives birth prematurely (i.e. WAAAY before the young one is ready for the outside; even their bones aren’t fully fused) and often dies in the process. if he was gonna use existing blueprints, he should have made us marsupials. MUCH better “design” for a biped.
fark. two more things i remembered
1)radiometric dating has been confirmed by dendrochronology to 10000 bp. this is fully independent of decay rates of isotopes, and yet it has shown that isotope decay dates are correct
2)to disprove current dating methods based on radioactive decay you’d not only have to prove that decay rates were faster in the past, you’d have to supply a mechanism by which life would be able to survive the immense radiation caused by such quick decay rates as would be required to shorten timespans of millions of years to a mere few thousands. (basically, such quick decay would mean the garden of eden was about as radioactive as the inside of a nuclear reactor)
I like the analogy that Dawkins uses to describe creationism. To believe that the world is 6000 years old when scientists point to the evidence of the world being 4.6 billion years old is like saying that the distance from New York to San Fransisco is 10 yards. Yet that’s the size of the error that Alan Clarke is expecting us to swallow that scientists are making and have been making for the last century or so.
It’s amazing that one can be so ignorant of the evidence. The distant galaxies and sheer size of galaxies points to a very big universe, the speed of light makes a very big universe a very old universe. From various observations we can determine the age of stars as well, and we can see some very old stars. And we can age our sun too, and it’s age happens to correspond with the age of the rest of the solar system, what a surprise!
From there we can look at the age of rocks on our earth, and we can see that extremely old rocks have no trace of life in them. Go forward to some slightly younger rocks, and we see the first signs of life. Then we have to go a long way up (almost 3 billion years of rocks) before we find multicellular life, go even further up until we see animal life, even further up until we see vertebrates, even further up to see jawed vertebrates, then further to fish, to amphibians, to reptiles, to dinosaurs, to mammals, to birds, then finally to a situation of life as we know it today.
We see human ancestors appearing in the rocks but a few million years ago, correlating perfectly with predictions of morphology and genetic evidence. We see transitional forms between major gaps, and they correspond perfectly with evidence of genetic predictions. Likewise we can look at allele variation and see how long time scales it would take to develop such variations, we can see problems associated with low genetic transfer like in cheetahs and make determinations about heredity on a long term time scale.
We see marker after marker of common ancestry, we see it in the anatomical structure of species, on shared traits, on behavioural patterns, and all this lines up with the tree of common ancestry. For instance we don’t see any feathered mammals, nor do we see any mammary glands on reptiles. The morphologies link, the genetics link, the fossil record and geographical distribution link, and all this links with the geological and cosmological histories that are provided. In short, all the evidence correlates with itself to the point where all scientists are either conspiring or that God would have had to deliberately deceived us in order for young earth creationism to be valid. The other option is the old earth, older universe where evolution happened, but you can’t lose the talking snake can you?
Physics FAIL. That ain’t gonna work.
Parsimony FAIL. I guess the fact that you look like your mommy and daddy doesn’t prove you’re related to them, either.
Logic FAIL. Hey, we just did this one recently.
So you believe that the universe is a lie. Nice.
I’ll believe that when you drink a bleach, arsenic, cyanide, and strychnine cocktail, as described in Mark 16:18, of all true believers in Christ.
Until then, you’re just another yammering moron who doesn’t really have faith, but just thinks that posting lies about science will make God like you and not torture you to death.
Says the guy who hates the details and history of science.
Sheesh.
*giggle*
*looks at clock*
It’s almost 5am. yeah, I’m going to sleep. I’m starting to lose my mind.
Well shit. We lose. AIG is of course the preeminent scientific organization and has never been known to distort, deny or obfuscate evidence.
Alan still hasn’t figured out he is in wwwaaayyyy over his tiny head here. Alan, people here know things, and they know how to differentiate reliable sources like the peer reviewed scientific literature, from unreliable fairy tales like AIG. As I said earlier. Quit lying to your self so you quit lying to us.
Hmm, looks like the scientists are hammering Alan Clarke for his problems with science*; I’m just going to hammer him for his stupid…which I guess makes me a stupidist. Damn, I probably should have thought that one through.
Anyway, ol’ Al wrote this:
That’s so very wrong.
No-one starts with an assumption about god; it’s either taught to them or it isn’t. And if it is taught to them, it isn’t always taught to them as fact. Atheism is the default, and everyone is an atheist until someone explains a god concept to them – and which concept is limited to what those around them believe in. Whether or not they accept the god belief is, of course, a lot more complicated and not something I know enough about to discuss in depth.
But I can speak for myself. I was never a theist. I was raised and taught about Christianity but never accepted it. Subsequently, I see no more reason to believe in gods than I do in mermaids, minotaurs or Valkyries. It is not a belief; it is the state of lacking belief.
Which leads to Alan’s next stab in the dark:
Ah, theists and their projections. No matter how many times you make this claim it won’t magically become true. C’mon, it’s not that difficult to comprehend. Is bald a hair colour? No. Is not collecting stamps a hobby? No. Is atheism a belief system? Wait for it…no!
*He really linked to Answers in Genesis? Good grief.
I am astounded at the number of posts that expound the “unchangeableness” of light speed which is utilized to prove the Earth’s antiquity. There are other methods for measuring time such as using the Earth’s current human population and known population growth rates which fits perfectly to there being only 8 people 4400 years ago. (Your model misses it by magnitudes!)I said that current physics fails to articulate with absoluteness the state of affairs at time t=0 (your big bang)plus or minus a nano second. Kel rebutted, “the speed of light has been demonstrated to be constant, it’s one of the foundations of the universe. e=mc².” Does everyone notice that he is talking from a reference point of nothing less than t=0 + 6000 years which is way outside of my time in question? How about t – (1 second)? $9 billion was spent on the Hadron Collider so that theories could be validated or invalidated through “observable” science. If the theories were not in question, then the money was a waste, but THEY ARE IN QUESTION, and the “God Particle” is never going to be located. I noticed something that is conspicuously missing from this thread: an astrophysicist that is over 60 years old who has seen so many modifications and changes to what was thought to be absolute, that he now has enough sense to stop talking like 75% of those boasting to the contrary.
I thought this forum was full of academics, Professor Myers, Bible professor Owlmirror, etc.. Am I in the wrong place?
Can you please quote me where I have argued for my superior intellect? I’m just doubtful of your “science” as was every other scientific pioneer that upset the status-quo.
I don’t have enough money, but I have access to other’s published data. Just this week I read about an alternative theory to Mary Schweitzer’s supposed 68 million year old T. Rex fossil with soft tissue. Thomas Kaye thinks all of the tissues, blood vessels, and red blood cells are nothing more than a “biofilm” that was generated recently. A C14 test on this material yielded a date near 1960. Now it seems practically EVERY dinosaur fossil has the same tissue structures. How is one to interpret this new evidence? To begin with, I would be livid that former “irrefutable” uniformitarian theories kept people from even looking inside similar bones since only minerals were expected instead of the original tissues. “But as Kaye examined more fossils, he was puzzled to find similar materials in nearly every bone.” (source: http://bacteriality.com/2008/08/26/dino ) Do you see how false assumptions are leading people in the wrong direction? Now the “biofilm” theory is breaking at the seams on the web just within the last three months and people can’t wait to see how Schweitzer will respond because she actually sequenced the proteins and determined it to be like that of birds (like my wooden book case analogy – remember?). Isn’t this rich? I don’t have the money for an electron microscope, but I can utilize the same logic as the Greeks who deducted atoms without electron microscopes. BTW, one of the greatest logicians of all time, Socrates, deducted that the multitude of god statues were a farce since only one God was logical. He ended up dead for this but his ideas are alive and well today.
Boy are you ever wrong: “…no man can find out the work that God maketh from the beginning to the end.” So far science has proven nothing BUT this. Do you realize the Hadron Collider has severe limitations which prevent the observers from observing t=0? Do you realize that the absence of life on Mars has caused them to prepare looking in a different place on Mars nearer its polar cap? Do you realize the results thus far of SETI (search for extraterrestrial intelligence) point in the direction of Man being the one-and-only supreme creation? Have you ever considered why the Sun and the Moon from our vantage point are EXACTLY the same size? What are the odds?
I’ve been criticized for not keeping up with “real” science:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/1999/10/991005114024.htm
Objects moving faster than speed of light on early expansion (or stretching out) may have effect on time domain:
http://curious.astro.cornell.edu/question.php?number=575
The Bible doesn’t use the words astronaut, nitrogen, protein, and concrete but neither do modern Russian science books, so should we discount them? Look at the ideas and connect the dots:
Jeremiah 10:12 He hath made the earth by his power, he hath established the world by his wisdom, and hath stretched out the heavens by his discretion.
The heavens are “stretched” as expounded in the above science articles, but His modus operandi (you’re looking for it in naturalism) has thus far been undiscovered as expected since it is “by his discretion”. Can you imagine living on an earth where there are finite limits and thus our understanding can grasp the “beginning to the end”? The upper atmosphere would end with an inpenetratable hard shell enclosure. We would have no free will like Cornell Professor William Provine. I think people take too much for granted and their complaint about “suffering” and God being evil since he is causing it is all man’s excuse for his own failings. I’m happy. Are you?
Alan, here is the difference.
We take the evidence and go where it leads us.
You take the evidence and discard anything that doesn’t support your preconceived conclusion that the bible is 100% correct or twist it to appear to do so.
Alan the idiot. Your god doesn’t exist, and your bible is a work of fiction. Thems the facts. Deal with it elsewhere.
Science does not use god for anything. God cannot be proven with science, nor can science disprove your imaginary deity. God cannot be used in any scientific explanation. Also, religion cannot negate science, only science can negate science. So quoting the bible is like me saying it is Thursday, there there is an invisible pink unicorn in my garage. Just nonsense.
Your problem is that science makes religion look silly. The religionists need to deal with this properly. Your approach is not proper. Adjust your religion to fit with the facts. Then your religion won’t look so silly.
“Everyone starts with an initial assumption (God exists or God does not exist) ”
What about leprechauns? What about Coyote? There’s lots and lots of assumptions out there, and absolutely no reason why your Yahweh assumption should be priveleged any more than any of them, let alone the good old default null hypothesis that what we can’t detect, or can’t detect the effects of, AIN’T THERE.
Alan, if you are stupid enough to keep posting nonsense, then here’s some advise. Keep each post to about one screen ful when diplayed. Otherwise you will get tl;dr.
WTF?
one word: mummies
*sporfle* Population biology, genealogy, archeology, and anthropology FAIL.
Cosmology FAIL.
You wouldn’t know a Higgs boson if one passed through your nose! Particle physics FAIL.
Yet you use and profit from the products of that same science, hypocrite.
You don’t get to decide which peer-reviewed published data is true unless you actually become an expert in the subject yourself.
We’ve done that already.
And this has nothing to do with the dating of the fossil itself.
You haven’t been. You have no understanding whatsoever of the cosmological and physical science that you pointed at as if it had something to do with the bible.
Cosmology and physics FAIL, again.
False equivalence. Logic FAIL, again.
No. You read up on science and “connect the dots”.
Science is real, God isn’t.
I have no idea what you’re talking about, and neither do you.
You obviously don’t have the free will to not be a moron.
If your God is real, then your God created those failings. Including your own mental incapacity, I might note.
Sheesh.
this is creo-awesomeness: physical constants may change, but population growth (something that is soooo dependent on culture, hygiene, disease rates, nutrition rates) has been constant for thousands of years.
that’s pure, unadulterated stupid.
I thought this forum was full of academics, Professor Myers, Bible professor Owlmirror, etc.. Am I in the wrong place? you don’t know how the scientific process works, do you. this blog may be a science blog, but it’s not a peer reviewed journal. we discuss and debate, but nothing we say here has any influence of science unless we take and publish a rigorous paper about it in the appropriate scientific literature for other scientists to review/replicate/poke with a sharp stick to see what happens
more concentrated fail. Actually, the line “a C14 test yielded a date near 1960” makes me think of that Epic Fail image of Homer trying to make cereal and setting it on fire… how do you get a date in the 1960’s on a method that dates things as “x years Before Present”, with “present” being defined as 1950? the thing was dated at -10 BP? that’s fucking absurd.
also, anyone dating ANYthing that’s older than 30000 years with radiocarbon should have their lab privileges removed. it’s physically impossible to date anything older than 30000 with C14, since virtually all the radiocarbon will have decayed in such old objects. there’s other methods for older fossils
gah, blockquote fail. first sentence and question was supposed to be a quote from our Creobot of the Week
Boy, is Alan a fool. Yes Alan, there are people with PhD.’s floating around, myself included. But you are so wrong, there is no place to start in teaching you anything about science. If you want to learn, shut up and listen. If you think you are presenting science, you are sadly mistaken. You are presenting nonsense. So we won’t discuss your ideas because they are sooooooo wrong. That won’t change. And the peer reviewed scientific literature is the only place where real science is done. Write your paper and send it off to a journal. Don’t be surprised if it comes back in return mail very quickly with the words “this isn’t science”.
only 8 people 4400 years ago.
And, man, were we busy.
“Hey, you! over there! Get back to work! This ziggurat ain’t gonna build itself, you know!”
Kaye was trying to see if the biofilm was carbon-datable. I presume that he would have said if the results were beyond the range of carbon dating (and thus old), or younger than that range (and thus not old enough).
The paper itself says “The results were 139.01%±0.65 of modern (1950) of 14C activity” and “The results were ‘greater than modern’ indicating a modern origin for the material”
I actually had to go and skim over the relevant articles to unravel the garbled version of that C14 dating that Alan is presenting here. It makes more sense now: they tested the soft tissue to see whether it will date as “too old to date” or modern. the results were fully modern, i.e. tested as “present”, not “in the 1960’s” (that would be absurd, indeed).
Did he really pull out NOAH and the fucking ARK???
8 people 4400 years ago. What an ass.
with an average of one person per continent, how exactly did we not get extinct? those must have been some industrious people, considering the wide range of art and architecture that dates to that timeframe:
El Tarif Necropolis, Egypt, 1st Intermediate Period of Ancient Egypt: 2160-2055 B.C.
Akkadian Empire, Mesopotamia, 24th &23rd centuries BC
Longshan Culture, China, 30-20th century BC
Mohenjo-Daro, Pakistan, 26th to 19th century BC
Was Ötzi an immediate member of Moses’ family?
Did humans settle in the Americas before the flood and then the Americas have to be repopulated again?
I could not survive in a prison cell with Alan Clarke.
I often happen across articles written by schooled, educated, and those degreed in their field who meet the constant calls here on the forum, or to put it nicely, the recommendations for “getting it right”. To my surprise these published articles draw different conclusions from some of the revered “we” crowd here. (Gasp!) I doubt anyone would refute that disagreement commonly occurs within the respected scientific community (see Post’s #354 linked articles as an example).
That is why I, am of the opinion, that one’s education (or mis-education) is far from being an absolute for discovering truth. Though I would advocate traditional schooling, there are exceptions and you would be the wiser to respect them. I knew of a humble self-taught programmer who worked in Evansville for Whirlpool, who was summoned to the esteemed headquarters in Benton Harbor, MI. Their top notch “experts” failed to match the skills and success the simple home-schooled boy had provided for the Evansville plant and they found themselves disposed to call him up to their own facility. BTW, he got them going.
-LOL
Can you believe that English is my mother tongue?
That should be; was Ötzi a member of Moses’ immediate family?
Owlmirror: I noticed something conspicuously missing from your last post (maybe all posts??) Your last rebuttal is void of any science of your own. Just look at your words again and you’ll see that they equate to that drunk who stands on the corner yelling at people. At least I engage people as evidenced by the activity on this thread.
Here are your choicest words:
Alan, if you are stupid enough…
WTF? one word: mummies
Population biology, genealogy, archeology, and anthropology FAIL.
Cosmology FAIL.
You wouldn’t know a Higgs boson if one passed through your nose!
Particle physics FAIL.
Science is real, God isn’t.
You obviously don’t have the free will to not be a moron.
I’m sure your friends will come to your aid because drunks can’t defend themselves well, but your whole persona is pitiful. Obviously this is only my opinion because Janine thinks highly of you, but remember: This forum is a lot about “therapy” and members are expected to elevate one another. You will never see yourself unless you are tested by those of differing opinions. I may be your greatest asset. Your words do have a redeeming quality in that they indicate to me you are reading each and every one of my posts. Why are you reading them at all? Normally I do skip through the posts that look to be full of expletives since no real information is contained other than conveying the person is angry. If you were to compile a book of each and every one of your responses, I fear that you’ll have few buyers. Do you lead a Bible study group in your home? With all of your Biblical understanding, I’m sure people are breaking down the doors to be showered with your knowledge. I could be wrong but I’m curious.
alan, that’s because the moment you started quoting from AiG, you’ve lost the last shred of respect, and thus do no warrant anything other than having your mistakes pointed out. I’ve already linked to the Talkorigins archive, where most if not all your nonsense has been refuted. We’re not here to do your research for you. from now on, it’s all up to you, and we will simply continue making fun of you until you get around to actually do your homework.
Rarely do we see someone who is so proud of his meager resources.
You will never see yourself unless you are tested by those of differing opinions. I may be your greatest asset.
Owlmirror, where would you have been without Alan Clarke?
because we’ve never heard those arguments before. which is why we have an entire archive dedicated to answering those things we’ve never heard before.
*headdesk*
you should really get that narcissism treated.
Janine sayeth:
I personally would place the odds on him not surviving.
Alan “Noah’s Ark was real.” = FAIL
You’re done. You can’t start with the bible is literally true and work backwards from that.
Just stop.
Alan, why should we pay any attention to you? Keep it short, a sentence or two.
Alan Clarke,
You presented no ‘science’ – only often-debunked lies and non-science cultivated by known frauds and liars. Plus you’ve also admitted – and even if you hadn’t, you’ve certainly demonstrated it in your posts – that you are profoundly ignorant of what science is. What would be the point of Owlmirror citing equations or formulae? You wouldn’t understand them anyway.
But what’s more important is that you focused on this rather than the substantive points he succinctly raised. You mock his use of ‘WTF? One word: Mummies’ but you have no answer for why we have preserved remains of humans that blow your age of the earth out of the water.
Do you actually have answers for his other responses, or are you just going write some more drivel in an attempt to evade?
I’ll remind you once again, Alan, that we’ve seen all your ‘arguments’ before – many, many times. And your pedestrian, bush-league attempts at mocking and insulting are, at best, embarrassingly third-rate by the high standards of this site. But hey, if you want to keep getting soundly thrashed that’s up to you. But you’re going to need to come up with something vaguely interesting to say before too long.
You do know that there were other civilizations around back then outside of the Middle East, right? Why didn’t the Chinese or Indus notice the global flood that wiped them out? Silly bastards kept right on going as if they’d never been smote by your god. Ha! How stupid they must have been to keep on building cities and recording history when they were actually all corpses floating and bloating from God’s love.
Alan, this is a simple explanation from the website of Leeds University, in the United Kingdom.
Now, are you seriously suggesting that all universities in the world are either grossly incompetent, or lying? And how do you suppose that we have progressed so quickly, if, as you indicate, the most basic conclusions are incorrect?
Who are you trying to fool, Alan? I suspect that we all know the answer to that one. Even you.
Alan Clarke thinks that there were only 8 people 4400 years ago?
So, are we also to assume that Alan Clarke also thinks that, upon exiting the Ark, that Noah and his family then built the Pyramids of Giza, which also happen to be around 4400 years old?
Alan has a few problems. If he would acknowledge god doesn’t exist and the bible is a work of fiction, most of those problems would go away. Don’t hold your breath.
Ahhh, and here we have Pilty’s new room-mate! Come, let us stuff this D’Orc into the barrel along with our other resident trolls and tip the result down the nearest garderobe. It certainly won’t learn anything without a little proper flagellation first, and I’m not sure it will learn anything if the flensing it’s already gotten hasn’t made an impression.
Besides, the new titanboa down in the dungeon wants nummies. Since Trolls regenerate like mad, it seems only fair to give the big Freudian symbol junk food that keeps coming back for more, yes?
The MadPanda, FCD
If anything, mummies support the Biblical account since the oldest ones seem to coincide with the global flood 4400 years ago. I’m sure you’ll locate something with no accompanying written records as is NOT the case with Egyptian mummies. Fossilized remains with no tell-tale signs of annoying flesh are an evolutionist’s delight! How did the walking coelacanth myth get started? You can grind down the pelvis of Lucy to achieve your evidence but it’s not so easy when the remains come with inscriptions.
According to many evolutionists, homo sapiens started about 200,000 years ago. Where are the mummies for this time slot?
http://www.google.com/search?&q=oldest+mummy+years
Eight people, four female, four male. The males are a father and three sons. A whole lot of genetic diversity there. Not to mention a whole lot of incest. The Tower of Babel must have done genetic mixing as well as linguistic mixing.
Or else the YECs like Alan are babbling out of their arses.
Alan Clarke, do realize that a) there are other evidence against a global flood, such as written records from Mesopotamian cities such as Ur, Nineveh and Babylon, which have been inhabited for over 7,000 years, with no suggestions that the cities were destroyed and rebuilt 4,400 years ago, b) the oldest mummies in Egypt are 5,000 to 6,000 years old, and c) there are human remains from 200,000 years ago, they just don’t happen to be mummies.
Furthermore, why do mummies support the idea of a global flood, if the Jews, the culture whom Noah officially founded/saved from extinction, do not mummify their dead?
Pssst… Alan Clarke… look at the second result your Google search brings up. You don’t even have to click the link.
You probably should actually look at what a search link provides before you include it – sometimes it backfires, spectacularly, as it has now.
From the third link from your search includes this gem:
When we think of famous mummies, our minds naturally turn to the legendary “Valley of the Kings” in Egypt, final resting place for the great Pharaohs and their queens. But where are the world’s oldest mummies? The answer: Chile!
Around 8,000 years ago, the little known fishing communities of the Chinchorro began mummifying their dead in a sophisticated process that belies their otherwise primitive ways. Without the signature elaborate pottery, jewellery or textiles so common in the grander Inca, Mayan and Toltec civilisations, these humble folk desiccated their deceased relatives in an elaborate process before burial in family “plots”.
Hmmm, I ain’t no mathematician, but isn’t 8,000 > 4,400?
Epic FAIL.
Ohhh, don’t confuse the poor D’Orc with facts! They get in the way of his pretty little fairy stories and that makes him cross. Just line his hat with tinfoil, give him a cookie, and send him on his way.
That his grasp of the essentials is off the table and into somebody’s pint of lager is only too obvious. Just as obvious is the sad fact that he’s not about to admit that he’s about two notches past Epic Fail.
The MadPanda, FCD
3rd result:
4th result:
5th result:
7th:
8th:
And that’s without even clicking on a link!
Way to support your claim there, buddy.
oh for fucks sake, there’s living shrubbery older than Alan’s Earth…
And Alan will still not get why we think he’s a delusional fool.
Physical evidence. The bane of the religious mind.
Your right. Owlmirror could do well without me, but he clamors for debate, especially Biblical. He has no way of knowing the state of his belief system and vital signs unless he is engaged. I hope he finds someone (obviously not me) that can challenge him toward a meaningful life.
I really like Janine. She opened herself up for possible ridicule in a previous post. I was shocked when I realized she considered me worthy enough to even address me, so I’m honored. Seriously.
Even though Owlmirror has been slinging from his street corner, someone noticed that he really did have a few remaining coins in his pocket, so I felt compelled to dignify his question about mummies. I really didn’t know for sure what he meant because all of the “mummies” I was familiar with supported the Biblical account. But this is what I like talking about: actual evidences, data, web links, references, etc. Isn’t everyone just trying to support their scientific theory? If I contributed some data points in a chem lab and you doubted my figures, wouldn’t a normal person say, “Are you sure you got that right?” But instead people are saying, “Alan, stop lying to yourself. That is the only way you can stop lying to us.” I sure hope everyone thinks that I’m deluded rather than I’m wittingly lying to them. People are acting like their life is dependent on some data points. Their adherence to a particular interpretation is akin to a person’s religion or the denial that a spouse is cheating on them. Lighten up!
Alan you presented nothing scientific. I say this as a 30+ year practitioner of science. What you think of science is not science. It is just unrelated facts that don’t quite say what you think they do.
You lie to yourself in that you think what you present is science. It is simply an ineffectual attempt to back up your religion. Stop lying to yourself, then you can stop lying to us. Period. That means your religion must disappear from the discussions.
Yes, Alan. I’m willing to accept that you are deluded.
maybe if you were the first person to ever come up to us with those data points, that would be something worth looking into. but you’re not, and when someone comes up with known mistakes on an experiment, the more experienced person (teacher, senior lab partner etc.) will tell the less experienced one that he’s made a common mistake, tell what the mistake was, and that he needs to redo his work. when the less experienced one however insists that his data is correct, and shows him more data with the same errors to support himself, then an experienced person can only sigh and say “stop deluding yourself. you’ve made a mistake, here’s the correct answer, go learn something and don’t come back until you have.
and for that reason ( and I’m reminding you for the 3rd time now), I’ve provided you to all the data that counters/answers those things you’ve brought up. Seriously, go read the info at Talkorigins.org, it’s all there.
for some of us, our livelihoods do depend on science being taken seriously, either because science is their job, or because they depend on scientific progress for their healtn. for others, it’s a matter of not having our children lied to and disadvantaged by people who want to claim science is wrong. still others, and this includes me, simply suffer from SIWOTI syndrome, and can’t resist the urge to correct a wrong
Alan you’re floating between obnoxious over confident egotistical Creationist troll and obnoxious sappy “I’m just looking out for you”concern troll.
I’m not sure which is worse.
No Alan, scientists (good ones at least) follow the trail the evidence leaves them. It’s not an adherence to anything but good evidence based science. Following good scientific methods, they just follow that trail as that is the surest way to find the answers to this world’s questions.
Creationists start with the bible and work backwards, concerned only with confirming their bible at the expense of honest inquiry.
One provides insight and gained knowledge (scientific method) while the other only seeks to confirm a predetermined opinion (creationism).
Alan, it’s quite simple. The evidence doesn’t support your delusions and myths. If you had new evidence, we’d consider it. But you’re trotting out the same lies and distortions that all the creationists who show up here present. We’ve already seen “thermodynamics doesn’t support evolution,” “the speed of light increased a bazillion-fold up until it abruptly slowed down in 1887*,” “Noah and his family repopulated the Earth,” etc., etc., etc.
We don’t accept the Bible as a scientific authority because it’s flatly refuted by that niggling little process called “evidence.” The silliness you’re giving us doesn’t count as evidence because it’s been refuted.
So go back to your church and tell them how you got all over a bunch of atheistic evilutionists. I’m sure your buddies will accept your lies.
*The reason for picking 1887 I leave as an exercise for the student.
‘Tis Himself, I think I see where you are going with the 1887 reference. Let’s see if Alan the religionist idiot can figure it out. Nice work.
‘Tis Himself – it’s been a long time since I looked at that – I thought to myself surely he can’t mean the xxx-xxx experiment because I thought that was in the mid 1800’s. But no – 1887. (Maybe it was a trigger for the formation of Glasgow Celtic in ’88 — all that light had to go somewhere, right?)
i had to look it up, but i had the vague suspicion that’s what it was….
Close, but you just missed it. In 1888 Charles Turner becomes the first cricket bowler to take 250 wickets in an English season.
(SIWOTI, dammit)
LOL! You don’t have any science of your own. You don’t actually care about the scientific evidence or the scientific process or the scientific consensus. Why do I need to do anything more than point out your utter failure to understand anything at all about science? Doing anything more would be a waste of time for me.
You know what would convince me that you were halfway serious? If you took the crucial point of dogma that you’ve been spouting, the 6000-year-old-earth, and said, “You know, given that I don’t actually know anything about archeology, paleontology, geology, physics, chemistry, radiochemistry, quantum physics, astrophysics, or cosmology, I agree that I’m wrong about the whole young earth thing and our planet really is about 4.5 billion years old, and the universe is about 15 billion years old.”
If you say that, I’ll stop mocking you. But if you don’t, there is no point in doing anything other than mocking you.
Says the guy drunk on religion who can do nothing but harangue.
Haranguing people is not “engaging” them.
LOL. Reading comprehension FAIL. Neither of those two lines were written by me, or even by the same person!
You can’t even scold right.
I have no idea what forum you think you are reading. THIS! IS! PHARYNGULA!!
Says the guy whose only response to “differing opinions” is to ignore them.
Liar. You look specifically for the expletives so that you can whine about how hurt your feelings are.
However, just for you, I will leave off the “fucking or unfucking” from now on. How about that?
“Clamors for debate”, whines the whining whiner who can’t shut up about what he thinks is true. Hah!
You’re just mad because I know what the bible says better than you do.
Dude, you’re compounding your reading comprehension FAIL from above. I didn’t say anything about mummies.
Although I admit that mummies are a good point, and I’m glad Sven mentioned them.
I’m really tempted to go back on my word, here. Dude. It’s obvious you know nothing at all about how the dates for anything are actually determined, even for things in the relatively recent past, like mummies. So you obviously aren’t familiar with any mummies at all, if you think they “support” the Bible.
If your figures were obviously 6 orders of magnitude wrong, and you insisted that the reason we were wrong was because we had differing base assumptions, what would be the point in even discussing the matter?
Right. Because you don’t care about the actual data. The problem is that your “base assumption” is a lie, and you want to convince us that it’s true.
How are we supposed to deal with that? Explain, patiently and slowly why it’s a lie, when you ignore every explanation given? What’s the point?
To be honest, I have to wonder about that.
Are you saying that truth doesn’t matter? Because that’s really at the heart of this: You not caring what is true or not.
False equivalence. Logic FAIL again. Science is that which can be tested in the real world. Religion is that which cannot be tested at all.
Socrates would get some good laughs out of this. Can you give me an example of a scientific theory that doesn’t begin with a “faith” that something is literally true? How do you know you exist?
The reference to Noah’s ark has some interesting implications. I’ve been told that life would never survive on an ark for a year with that many animals and limited food supplies, yet the same people want me to believe a cell arose randomly and survived in a primordial sea. It even found some food and developed a working metabolic pathway to utilize the food, then learned how to reproduce itself! Which is more believable? Pre-existing life surviving on an ark or non-living material surviving entropy on its directionless and random path to life? I venture that the mathematical probability of the ark story happening divided by the probability of the soup story would be a number larger than the electrons in the universe. I DID NOT arrive at my belief in the former as steve_C suspects. I started with the supposition that the Bible was false. When I started reading it for the first time at 22 years of age, one of the first things I can remember underlining was the part where Lot had sex with his two daughters (or his two daughters had sex with him while he was passed out drunk). You’ve got to admit that nothing is being candy-coated here to make someone appear what they are not. How about Noah getting drunk? If the Bible looked like one of the Hare Krishna books with a guy in a lotus position adorned with beautiful flowers and artwork, then I would be suspicious. I noticed recently that the Dali Lama was at his wits end in the conflict with the Chinese communists. All of the façade dissolves when you see a person putting on his pants (or his toga?) like everyone else. When I read abut Jesus being attacked by the envious Pharisees and mocking crowds, I saw that it was real because nothing has changed to this day. You could read my whole conversion process here, but I’ll end in saying that I first found Jesus to be true and incapable of lying. I saw that his literal existence was attributed to a literal set of ancestors that coincided with secular history. Noah is in that lineage of ancestors. And Jesus, who has more credibility than anyone I’ve ever met, heard, or seen, said this:
Do I believe the Bible to be literal? Not always:
I guess it must be a shock to you that there are people in the world who dislike blatant lies and the reprehensible, dishonest scumbags who propagate them. Then again, you’re a Christian – you need to be lied to about the existence of a sky-fairy, because you need him to exist in order to make you feel special.
Because, unlike us, without your god you’re nothing; a nobody. So you lie to others and yourself and willingly believe the lies you are told.
Alan, quite a post with no point. You need to shorten your idiocy. That way you don’t look so stupid.
First thing, you’re god doesn’t exist until you prove that, and your evidence is sorely lacking. That means your bible is a work of fiction until you show conclusive physical evidence for your imaginary god. So you need to get cracking on that before any other discussions are carried out.
We are eagerly awaiting your attempt to show your imaginary deity exists.
we’ve already done solipsism and presuppositionalism. go away. I’ve lost my patience with you. you don’t actually want to learn anything.
And more breaking news: water is wet, and the Atlantic Ocean has just been kidnapped!
How about when Achilles was insulted by Agamemnon? Did you see that that “was real because nothing has changed to this day”?
You’re reading third or fourth-hand reports of what he allegedly said, even assuming he actually existed, and you come to this conclusion… how?
How about when he said to hate your own parents? Do you hate your parents because Jesus said to?
Dude, that’s the KJV screwing up again. The guttural consonant that ends Noah’s name might be difficult to transliterate, but “Noe” is more wrong than “Noah”.
I have a suggestion for people who profess atheism (i.e. they “think” they are atheists) but realize their knowledge is not all-encompassing. If you think you are the ultimate source for “truth”, but believe it only 99%, then act upon your other 1% in the fashion that Gideon did. Gideon’s method even allows for Creationism to be taught in public schools and universities since it doesn’t violate so-called “science”. Here’s the text in the NIV (gasp!!) version:
Gideon’s method doesn’t prove the existence of God, but it measures a probability for God’s existence. If you doubt God’s existence, then why don’t you formulate a test yourself, like Gideon, instead of waiting on me to prove it for you? People are usually more convinced by reasons they discovered themselves than by those found by others. If God answers specifically according to your formulated question, then you’ll own something that will be personal. You won’t be an echo of another’s opinion.
I don’t live by the “Gideon” method because I’ve developed a relationship where I can address God directly and get answers. But for newcomers, such as yourself, the Gideon approach may be a good starting place. Please don’t confuse this with an Ouja board, tarot cards, etc., which are all methods of contacting someone or something that is NOT God. I really believe everyone here knows a “phony” when they see one, so rest assured, if you make an honest attempt in contacting God, an Alan Clarke figure won’t suddenly appear in your crystal ball with a mocking grin.
I guess we can add probability and physics to the list of things Alan is clueless about.
No matter how small the probability of abiogenesis occurring is, it’s still considered a possibility, even by moronic creationists. That’s what the ‘one’ in ‘one in a gazillion’ means. Noah fitting the animals on the ark, on the other hand, isn’t a question of probability, it’s a question of possibility. Anyone with an ounce of common sense would take about half a second to realise that it is impossible for Noah to a) have obtained the animals in the first place, b) fit them in the ark, or c) kept them alive for the duration.
Low probability beats no possibility. Hands down.
Not to mention that there’s absolutely no reason for that fictional monster, Yahweh, to have bothered flooding and saving and arking in the first place when he could have just poofed everyone he didn’t like off the earth without having to drown anyone or anything. The flood story, apart from anything else, is just stupid – unless you realise it was the story a bunch of unscientific, superstitious goat-herders came up with to go along with a huge local flood. One guy, his family and a few goats in a boat survived a couple of weeks being washed out to sea before making land again; give it a couple of years and an oral folk tradition and bam! – here’s your Ark story.
Entertaining for children and fools; rational, well-balanced adults – not so much.
No reason to waste our kids time teaching mythology in science class.
Yep, see one every time I’ve looked at a bible.
And thanks for acknowledging my ability to do so.
Alan, we can recognise a phony when we see it – which is why we’re not Christians. You, on the other hand, fell for it hook, line and sinker.
Sucks to be you.
Yawn, Alan is an incompetent bore. No physical evidence for his alleged deity. Disappointment big time. But what else do we expect from liars and bullshitters who can’t show the existence for the god? Put or Shut UP Alan. An eternally burning bush would be nice. Otherwise, take you and your delusions elsewhere.
Just out of curiosity, Alan, have you ever considered that it might be possible to be a Christian and to
believeaccept and understand evolution? If you’re serious about not believing all the Bible to be literal, then A) Using what criteria do you decide which parts are/aren’t and B) What makes you think the Genesis account is accurate? What about Gen1 is more plausible than the story of Pan-Gu, or Marduk, or Brahma?1) Pascals Wager is pointless, as there’s a ridiculously large number of gods. if we’re 99% certain there aren’t any gods, then the remaining 1% needs to be equally divided among the thousands of gods whose existence is equally unlikely and unproven.
2) Creationism isn’t science. only science gets taught in science class. it doesn’t matter whether god is a possibility, the stuff that creationists peddle is either non-scientific, or has been proven to be incorrect
3)we had a poster here who tried such a test, but alas, god never turned his water into vodka. so not even the possibility of your god was shown. your suggestion fails.
4)go away, you’ve nothing to contribute to this conversation that hasn’t been said a million times already. your fairytale won’t convince us, because we’ve already seen the evidence to the contrary.
–EVOLUTION, A BIG PICTURE QUESTION —
If the mechanisms for evolution are still in place, and with over 1.5 million species of animals, plants and algae, why does each kind or specie appear to be “stalled” or confined to remaining within the allowed genetic variations afforded by Mendel’s Laws? The tremendous time frames required for changes (which is so slow that even their existence is debated) appear to be contradicted by short time frame allowances by observed extinction rates.
(Willing to learn, LOL)
Alan, before we go any further, answer ‘Tis Himself’s question in post #400. If you fail, you deserve to be ignored.
Ah, just love RogerS showing us nothing, because he has nothing. You aren’t willing to learn, so why should we talk to you. Go read a real textbook.
The flood is one of the things that really amazes me about creationists and the mental gymnastics they have to do to make excuses for it.
Where did all the water come from? Where is it now?
Where is the Ark? Surely something that important and large would have been preserved. I mean we find all kinds of ancient structures and artifacts but no ark.
How did land dwelling insects survive? Freshwater fish? Plant species that can not handle oxygen deprivation or salinity?
How could Noah fit all “kinds”? The engineering of something that size that would have to be involved would be incredible let alone actually fitting them in the size described. Where did the dinosaurs fit? How did noah keep the food needed from spoiling? The fresh water needed would be incredible and it’s doubtful that rain water could have contributed enough to resupply for all those “kinds” not even taking into account spillage from the motion of the ark.
This still leaves many questions about the geologic column, tectonic evidence for the topography of the earth and fossils that do not support any notion of a great flood
8 people is not that many to care for all those kinds. How the hell did they accomplish that? Any idea how many employees and animals are at the Washington DC National Zoo?
That’s a lot of contortion and back flipping to work your way through coming up with excuses and distorting data to get around those issues.
RogerS, have you tried googling “orchid hybrids” or “apple maggot Rhagoletis pomonella speciation” or “cichlid speciation”?
I’m sure your friends will come to your aid because drunks can’t defend themselves well, but your whole persona is pitiful. Obviously this is only my opinion because Janine thinks highly of you, but remember: This forum is a lot about “therapy” and members are expected to elevate one another.
reasons to be plonked into dungeon:
Slagging:
“Making only disparaging comments about a group; while some of this is understandable, if your only contribution is consistently “X is bad”, even in threads that aren’t about X, then you’re simply slagging, not discussing.”
Insipidity:
“A great crime. Being tedious, repetitive, and completely boring; putting the blogger to sleep by going on and on about the same thing all the time.”
Concern trolling:
“A particularly annoying form of trolling in which someone falsely pretends to be offering advice to favor a position they do not endorse; a creationist who masquerades as someone concerned about the arguments for evolution as an excuse to make criticisms.”
shall I go on?
bye, Alan.
all of your arguments are straight from AIG, and have been refuted so many times already as to have become the backbone of the Index to Creationist Claims:
http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/list.html
why don’t you go through that list first, and when you have actual responses to the evidence-based refutations listed there of your ages-old fucktardness, THEN come back and tell us, eh?
we can always go and read AIG for ourselves, ya know.
Alan’s arguments probably impress the other kids at Sunday School, but he should have realised that that’s hardly a good reason for him to think he can post at a place like Pharyngula and not get treated like a fucking clown shoe. Noah’s Ark? Bible quotes? Pascals fucking wager?
I’m sure if I could remember where I put my religidiot creotard bingo card I’d have shouted out twice by now.
Admittedly the Gideon test is new to me. About as uncompelling as any other the other hackneyed drivel he’s spouted, but at least it’s something different.
Nice. Unsubstantiated assertions.
Care to provide us with the research that calls this into question?
why does each kind or specie appear to be “stalled” or confined to remaining within the allowed genetic variations afforded by Mendel’s Laws?
what makes you think so?
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2008/04/still_just_a_lizard.php
hardly a case of standard mendelian sorting, eh?
…and that’s just one of literally tens of thousands of documented examples from the last 50 years.
you might try actually perusing even popular science magazines once in a while before making asinine generalizations.
Oh, and RogerS. please cite a primary peer reviewed scientific journal. Anything less says you are a liar and bullshitter. Welcome to science.
Noah’s Ark? Bible quotes? Pascals fucking wager?
oh, almost forgot:
godbotting:
“Making an argument based only on the premise that your holy book is sufficient authority; citing lots of bible verses as if they were persuasive.”
did I miss any others?
RogerS #419
Google “Lensky E coli” and learn something about evolution.
I’d maybe amend Owlmirror’s paragraph to:
“You know, given that I don’t actually know anything about archeology, paleontology, geology, physics, chemistry, radiochemistry, quantum physics, astrophysics, or cosmology, I agree that…
I have no basis on which to question the established knowledge and theories on these subjects, because it’s really vanishingly unlikely that all these thousands upon thousands of scientists have somehow either gotten it completely and utterly wrong by several orders of magnitude, or are all taking part in a conspiracy on a scale hundreds of times greater than any conspiracy that has ever been attempted, let alone any conspiracy that has ever worked. Or, for that matter, that they are all acting on the mere assumption that there is no creator god, and yet have all come to a pretty close agreement on how the Earth came to be, and how old it is and how life diversified on our planet.”
Further Clakre-isms…
“How do you know you exist?”
I will never understand the cognitive dissonance that must be maintained to argue for the bible from solipsism. “Everything is assumptions! Nothing is real! Except this old book of myths!”
“If you doubt God’s existence, then why don’t you formulate a test yourself, like Gideon, instead of waiting on me to prove it for you?”
Oh man, Alan. You’re going off script here. I thought God didn’t deign to be tested by us lowly mortals. Isn’t that the convenient out-clause always invoked by believers when someone says something like “May God strike me down if I’m wrong!”?
Rev.:
“Where did all the water come from? Where is it now? Etc.?”
Let’s not forget the curious mystery of how kangaroos and platypuses all got from Mt. Ararat to Australia.
YECs know that the oil they drive on is found by petroleum geologists who use the assumption that the earth is 4.5 byo and all the associated Satanic science to do so, right? I mean, they wouldn’t be a bunch of hypocrites as well as morons and liars, would they?
No, of course not.
-Sure, welcome the challenge:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinction#cite_note-Ulansey-22
“Biologist E. O. Wilson estimated in 2002 that if current rates of human destruction of the biosphere continue, one-half of all species of life on earth will be extinct in 100 years.”
The estimates for the past are 100 to 1000 times slower but the data facing us today does not look so good. So let’s use the most Evolutionary friendly rate for the historical estimate:
50%/(100 x 1000)yrs = 50%/100,000 yrs
The elephant for example, starts with a pretty big ancestor only 38,000,000 yrs ago but what the heck; we can call it a “lucky” single cell. With a linear extinction rate, we would have zero life left today beginning 200,000 yrs ago. Looks bad, so let’s throw a bone and use an exponential decay with 100K as the half-life. That would leave about 0.8% in 7 time constants or 700,000 yrs. Evolutionary time frame ratio to extinction time frame:
38,000,000/700,000 = 54.
A 54:1 ratio favoring extinction over evolution was what I was getting at in Post #419.
The numbers are not near the 1:1 equilibrium point; have any better numbers to use?
(Still willing to learn, LOL)
So you think the first picosecond that happened 14 billion years ago is enough to invalidate the constant that we have now? That before light had even formed the speed of light was enough to show galaxies that hadn’t formed yet?
The speed of light has been known to be a constant and of a precise speed for over 100 years, surely we’d see a slowdown. Honestly it would have been just easier to posit that God created the universe with light already travelling to earth, it would be stupid but at least it wouldn’t be super-stupid. Have you ever read a physics book?
There’s a good reason why new volcanic rocks give an older age – the radioactive isotopes in the rock form in the mantle. The dating techniques used with rocks have to work over 2,000,000 years for them to be accurate, it’s like applying C14 test to a dinosaur fossil. So how are they calibrated? Firstly we can correlate it with relative dating, we know that one layer must be older than the layer above it. Secondly we can see constants like lava flow and show that at the rate it’s going, the tests show accuracy. Thirdly we can work out the half-life using a simple mathematical function, we can watch decay and then count it. Fourthly we can calibrate it using the fossil record, fossils of a certain age usually stay in a certain stratum so we should be able to get the same age for the same rock all over the world. And fifthly, they are calibrated with each other. There are a variety of tests, a variety of half-lifes, yet all point to the same date.
Oh and this doesn’t take into account C14 testing, because that’s for organic material. We can calibrate and verify C14 tests to about 27,000 years using both dendochronology and ice cores. A man won a Nobel prize for demonstrating blind that C14 dating works.
All this shows that you are off by a factor of around 700,000. How can the trained scientists in their thousands of all religious persuasions be off by such a gross amount?
RogerS,
You do realise that humans haven’t actually been in a position to drive species into extinction until fairly recently, don’t you? Because, you know, there’s been life on the planet for a few billion years – not 6,000. You can’t compare pre-human rates of extinction with current rates.
Liar.
Alan Clarke, have you ever picked up a physics book? What about a book on geology? And some books onbiology would do you well too. It seems that you are talking out of absolute ignorance for everything that science has taught us then expect that your insight into the bible is on an equal footing. I’m a computer programmer too, my degree is in computer science. So how do I know about geology, nuclear physics, palaeontology, astronomy and cosmogy, biology, and evolution? I’ve spent a hell of a long time reading about all those topics, and even then I have only scratched the surface. It seems hypocritical on your part that you are casually throwing away almost the entire endeavour of human knowledge while typing on a computer. The same process of discovery that led to computer use has also shown the world to be 4.6 billion years old. Those same laws of physics work the same all the time and that is why such a device like the computer can work. Why do you reap the rewards of the scientific method then throw it to the scrap heap when it tells you that your interpretation of Genesis is wrong?
Simple. Creationists (particularly the young earth ones) are fucking parasites.
On the notion of doubt in the processes, I wrote a post on it. Each one piece of evidence can be falsified, it can be dismissed through doubt. But when several pieces of evidence on different lines all point to the same result, it’s really hard pressed to argue that all are wrong. That’s what Alan Clarke is doing, and he’s doing it from an armchair as opposed to actually testing the shit he’s preaching.
Oh man, Alan. You’re going off script here. I thought God didn’t deign to be tested by us lowly mortals.
indeed. wasn’t that in large part the lesson to be gleaned from the book of Job?
I rather think the “WERE YOU THERE” argument Ken Ham often likes to use came from a misreading of that very book.
Roger – please answer my earlier question:
given that I can provide thousands of documented examples of novel features having arisen that obviously cannot be the result of standard Mendelian sorting, where did you get the idea that species are static?
It’s a simple question, surely, since it’s one that is based on your starting premise. You are able to at least answer that, right?
A 54:1 ratio favoring extinction over evolution was what I was getting at in Post #419.
you might as well have literally compared apples and oranges.
nothing you said in that post makes any sense whatsoever.
Oh! Well, in that case, we’re done. God failed my test, which was pretty simple really.
All I ask is that God speak for himself and demonstrate that he knows a few simple things about the past, present, and future, so as to demonstrate omniscience.
Easy as pie — for a God that really exists and is omnipotent and omniscient.
What do I get? Nothing.
FAIL.
Why don’t you ask God what the next few digits of this random 1024-digit sequence are? I generated it back in July of last year, and the creationist that I offered it to, who also claimed to have a special relationship with God, refused to even try.
The first digit is “9”.
I’d prefer at least the next 35 digits, but hell, can God even give you 3 or 4? Can God even give you the next single digit?
So… God can’t move a simple planchette? That doesn’t sound particularly omnipotent to me.
Are you sure you’re in contact with God? How do you know he’s not lying?
Greetings,
That is the point in post #433, I used the factor of 1000 in the DIVISOR for most favorable rate pro-Evolution. The extreme low “fossil” record period rate being (the natural rate) / 1000. To favor Evolution further, I would need to use a larger factor than 1000; I haven’t seen natural extinction rates exceeding 1000 x fossil record rates. If you have better numbers, by all means please point the way.
One Source:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6502368/
Current extinction rates are at least 100 to 1,000 times higher than natural rates found in the fossil record, the report stated. The data were released as 3,500 delegates gathered in Bangkok, Thailand, for a World Conservation Union conference focused on halting what’s deemed an extinction crisis.
I have a new policy. I will trust and believe every person who claims that they talk to God and that God answers back. What could go wrong?
Janine – I wanna play, but I only had god show up. He never spoke, and I was too terrified to speak to him.
Does that count?
(My husband never saw a damned thing.)
So? Was the message; “Be afraid, be very afraid”?
The geologic record reeks of a flood: limestones far inland on all continents, sedimentary strata, oil, coal deposits which originate from massive buried fauna, corals & clams at high mountain elevations, polystrate fossils which intersect sedimentary layers of supposed different ages, “wavy” strata in mountain ranges indicating rapid formation while layers were soft, massive hydrologic erosion in Grand Canyon, flooding from Mt. St. Helen’s eruption created a small replica of Grand Canyon in a few days, presence of massive water-laid fossil “graveyards”, massive and sudden extinctions of the dinosaurs, etc. The real question is, “How do uniformitarianists explain away the massive evidences for a global flood?” They perform the most outlandish contortionist act of raising and lowering mountains, plains, and plateaus in order to keep something above water at all times. I’m frequently told that the fossilized sea fauna on the Himalayas, Rockies and Andes occurred when the mountains were low, then they raised later. Where did all of the energy come from? If all of the Earth’s land masses were completely flat, the existing ocean water would cover everything by a depth of 1.7 miles. Genesis 7:20 says the highest mountain was covered by 15 cubits, so the extreme case scenario of a “completely flat” Earth is not necessary. Where did the energy come from for my model? I asked you the same question for your model. Perhaps it was from the Earth’s warmer crust 4400 years ago. Tectonic plates were not as settled then as they are now. Maybe it was an asteroid impact that initiated the flood. Genesis 7:11 describes both atmospheric and sub-terrestrial waters initiating the flooding: “In the six hundredth year of Noah’s life, in the second month, the seventeenth day of the month, the same day were all the fountains of the great deep broken up, and the windows of heaven were opened.”
No message. He (after I had prayed for hours)just showed up. Robed as black death with red coke bottle eyes. Black satin wrapped hands and feet. Gossamer and floating in the air.
Pretty classic huh? But sure scared the shit out of me. I damn near had a heart attack!
Don’t think this apparition didn’t effect me. I was scared and twice as devout for over a year. Stupidity doesn’t end with childhood.
How many large wooden ships built prior to 1600 exist today? See for yourself: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_world's_largest_wooden_ships The ark would be important today as a museum piece but then it was not as important as salvage for fire wood or building materials. It may have been destroyed by fire as were four ships on the provided link. 2000 years is a long time for unprotected wood to last.
Gigantic floating log mats from massive de-forestation. The Mt. St. Helens log mats are floating to this day.
The oceans were not as salty then as they are now, but many fish did die.
Answered by both above and below.
I previously developed a model which answers your questions so rather than repeat it, here it is:
http://www.powerbasic.com/support/pbforums/showpost.php?p=303027&postcount=352
http://www.powerbasic.com/support/pbforums/showpost.php?p=303227&postcount=393
I don’t really criticize you for not knowing the fundamental precepts of creationism and flood catrastophism since more than likely you have been protected from such information, but knowing it is useful for debating.
Patricia, you were able to get away from that. But seriously, were you ever as delusional as Alan?
He looked like Death from “The Seventh Seal”? I was hoping he looked like Brundlefly.
wavy strata is proof of a flash-flood & flash-sedimentation?
I’m really curious now how that works. Are you imagining actual waves suddenly petrifiyng in mid-move?!
All the stuff you listed is proof for plate tectonics & the Ice Ages, and it doesn’t require any magic of the petrification of waves.
I’ll also not that you COMPLETELY ignored all the civilizations we’ve listed that somehow stubbornly continued to exist despite global flood and a world population of 8
The Bible has made multiple and numerous prophetical predictions that were fulfilled at a later date. And I’m not talking about cheap predictions such as “A great leader will arise somewhere from the northern hemisphere and lead a nation.” One of the fastest ways the Bible could loose credibility would be to risk stating that Babylon would never be inhabited: “it shall not be inhabited, but it shall be wholly desolate: every one that goeth by Babylon shall be astonished“, then later be contradicted with modern photography showing the city flourishing. Enjoy the miracle of modern photography here. Please study for yourself Saddam Hussein’s attempt to rebuild Babylon here. Pay particular attention to the areas entitled, “Reconstruction” and “Effects of the U.S. military.”
and you must be completely blind and deaf to think that the tectonic plates have settled. or are you one of those fuckwits who thought the 2004 Tsunami was Gods punishment?
Plate tectonics have this annoying habit of proving themselves to us with very unambiguous acts, not only here on Earth but on other planets as well. They do a better job of (violently) proving their existence than your God has. hmmm, wonder why that is [/sarcasm]
Alan Clarke,
*headdesk*
neither saltwater fish nor freshwater fish can live in brackish water for any extended period of time. the same for plants. what complete bullshit. and also, prove that oceans were less salty.
Patricia, I take it back. There is no way you could have been this whacked out.
Are you suggesting that Saddam had the power to falsify the bible but was prevented doing so by the US? WTF?
And if the Bible got it “right” on Babylon’s desolation why did it screw up on Egypt? And on so many other prophecies?
book of jeremiah, written ca. c. 626-537 B.C
Babylon: seat of the 9th Satrapy of Persio, until 311 B.C
experiences great revival during Hellenistic Period
your little prophed failed within 2 centuries of his rambling. massive fail.
also, you’re weaseling out of your previous suggestion to make a test for God to prove his existence. suddenly we aren’t supposed to do that, but rather just trawl the bible for vague passages that can be fitted to fleeting current events?
I used to do that with Pyramidology, and Nostradamus. Works like a charm, every fucking time.
Alan: http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/list.html
Just go there and spend a few hours reading. What are you afraid of?
It said something rather similar about Tyre, as I recall. How did that work out, again?
and since we’re talking about babylon…. explain to me how the tower of babel can date to 3000-2400 B.C, and yet Linguistics give us evidence for several different scrips and languages existing BEFORE that time?
there’s evidence for Peruvian Quipu as far back as 2600 B.C, Chinese writing to 2800 B.C, Cuneiform as far back as the late 4th millenium B.C., and Egyptian hieroglyphs all the way back to 4000 B.C.
also, Linguistics put the first diversions in the Proto-Indo-European Language as far back as the 7th millenium B.C., and by the 4th millenium the language had split into the Centum and Satem languages, and continued steadily from there
and in case you don’t know what that means: there have been several distinct languages before the tower of Babel, and there is no evidence whatsoever of a sudden linguistic explosion at the approximate time God was supposed to have different languages for the first time.
also, I’d highly suggest you stop this condescending shit:
we’ve told you already, we’ve heard all this shit so many times, we actually bothered to write the responses all down and index them for future reference. now go read them! (this is the 4th time I have to tell you to go and do you homework)
And Damascus
Hm. Alan Clarke the godbot, RogerS the disingenous.
Alan could be disposed of by anyone who cares to look at talkorigins.org, and is just a typical punching-bag.
with RogerS, I admit I hadn’t seen this “[species] extinction rates exceed [species] speciation rates, therefore [observed] evolution is impossible” claim before.
A breathtaking example of handwaving the obvious evidence to allow for inane theorising, and thereby reaching a patently false conclusion.
Interestingly, he uses one item of derived information based on paleontology (@443:Current extinction rates are at least 100 to 1,000 times higher than natural rates found in the fossil record) to explain how primary findings of paleontology (the fossil record of speciation) are wrong.
Interesting little discussion while I slept. Alan Clarke, please supply us with the physical evidence for god that can be evaluated by scientists, magicians, and professional debunkers as being of divine origin. Until you do so, you are just another lying godbot with an IQ of 5. Without god, you bible is a work of fiction. So shut up about the bible until you prove your god.
Boy Alan. Nothing new from you. You repeat the same debunked creationist canards that we’ve heard a thousand times. Been memorizing your Whitcomb huh?
Let’s start.
Um, no. There would not be enough food supply nor habitat for all the insects to survive. And the st helens log mats are in a contained lake. Not applicable to the the great flood model.
The oceans were not as salty then as they are now, but many fish did die. .
The salinity change as well as the heat, acidity and pressure change that would have been created by the flood would have caused massive fish kills. The species diversity and distribution we see today makes your notion impossible.
Alan Clarke,
The remnants of Babylon are found in modern day Al Hillah, Iraq. Al Hillah has an estimated population of over 350,000. The name has changed, but there’s still a city where Babylon used to be.
Alan repeating canards
From TO
1. Uniformitarian processes explain limestone formations far better than catastrophism does:
* Limestones form continuously today over wide areas (such as the Caribbean) as calcium carbonate is precipitated from water directly and through the actions of organisms. Limestone formation easily fits within conventional geology.
* Limestones appear in strata interleaved between strata of sandstones and other rocks. A single event could not explain all the layers.
* Limestones often include fragile fossils that could not survive catastrophic transport.
Dolomites require no exceptional explanation. They form via diagenesis (a sort of chemical rearrangement in the deep subsurface) from calcite, the main ingredient of limestone. Creationism does not explain the origin of dolomite.
2. Limestone could not have formed quickly from massive precipitation, because the formation of calcite releases heat. If only 10 percent of the world’s limestone were formed during the Flood, the 5.6 x 1026 joules of heat released would be enough to boil the flood waters (Isaak 1998).
You’re a big fan of Woodmorappe huh Alan?
You’ll have to expound on exactly what you think about the strata that supports a global flood.
You’ll have to say why this is a problem without a flood, show your work.
Tectonic plate movement and inland marine inundation (not a single great flood). For example, North American midcontinent outcrops record at least fifty-five cycles of marine inundation and withdrawal. (Boardman and Heckel 1989; Heckel 1986)
“polystrate fossils” A term made up by Creationists. And not a problem.
First you have to establish that there was rapid formation while layers are soft. But its not a problem for there to be “wavy” strata in mountain ranges. Tectonics again Alan.
Oh please.
So , no. The Mt St. helens > Grand Canyon comparison is one of THE worst examples given by creationists. Lame Alan. Very lame.
While true, this again is not a problem for those who accept actual science instead of relying on a single unreliable book.
more….
ok I got to this and /head desk
How did the dinosaurs go extinct because of the flood?
Didn’t your boy Noah take two of each animal?
You just directly contradicted your story Alan.
All supported by actual evidence based science.
And no, science doesn’t have to try and keep things above water at all times because there wasn’t a massive global flood. You are presupposing one and then projecting that onto what people who actually understand science are telling you.
Jebus fucking Christ Alan. Plate tectonics. It is still happening. It hasn’t stopped. Where do you think earthquakes come from? God farting?
Alan, do yourself a favor and read this. Be sure to click on all the relevant links. And here
Alan, I suggest you watch a PBS Nova episode called Bible’s Buried Secrets. You can watch it from the PBS web site, or maybe U-Tube.
Oh. I had a post, but it appears to have been eaten by the moderator monster. I didn’t even put any links in it either. I can um it up in two words though-
Plate Tectonics.
Not what I asked for. Read what I wrote; you copied and pasted the words yourself.
And why won’t God tell you a few digits of my random number? Is it that he doesn’t know, or he can’t talk in exact words?
Oh, I’ve got a single digit for you all right…
Go ahead, pull My finger!
Screw that. Last time you got me on that was around the boy’s birthday a couple years back. I was busy for weeks dealing with the influx at the gate.
You know, it’s kind of strange: There was a Muslim around a while back, claiming that God had spoken in the Quran. When I said that I wanted God to speak for himself, he was confused, and asked if I meant that he should e-mail me the Quran.
No. No. No. Words in an old book are not God speaking to me, here and now. I used the present tense quite deliberately.
Why do the religious have problems reading and understanding basic English words and sentences? Does belief in God make people generally stupid? Or is it just that specifically seeing the word “God” makes their brains turn off, even if they’re otherwise very intelligent?
Click here. Scroll to bottom. Look and learn.
Click here for more.
I’m quickly seeing a problem here. There are a lot of excellent questions, but they are becoming almost too numerous to answer. I’ve read practically everything and none of it is beyond me, but the time required for answering is beyond me. If some consensus were made, I’d be happy to answer the top #1 or #2 questions. But don’t hold your breath. My wife is going to have a baby in 3 weeks and my time spent on this computer is started to make her nervous!
Alan, it is all beyond you. If the flood really happened you should be able to cite the peer reviewed scientific literature demonstrating that fact. But you cite far lesser quality evidence, evidence you have no of knowing isn’t falsified (just a barefaced lie).
Show us the physical evidence for your god. The evidence must be able to be examined by scientists, magicians, and professional debunkers as being of divine (not man-made) origin. An eternally burning bush would be a good example–Moses and all.
Janine, Somewhere up thread you asked if I could possibly have been as deluded as Alan. Yes.
Being an ignorant slut, you probably didn’t know that there are only two books a female needs to read, the Good Book and a cookbook. Everyone in my world said this, so it was a fact. ;)
Ok can you answer them with actual science?
#478 – Translated: You guys are showing me the truth, that I’m full of shit, and there is no gawd. I’m scared, so I’m gonna run away.
oh man.
Not surprisingly, you do not understand tectonics. Not even a little bit. I even have a thin grasp on the subject and I can see glaring mistakes in your links.
You are basically in the business of denying every single field of currently accepted science from geology, to biology to astronomy to hydrology to archeology to vulcanology (and I’m sure many others we haven’t touched on yet) just to confirm your predetermined conclusion that the bible must be true. Your back must get sore from contorting like that.
Do you ever wonder why nearly every single scientific organization in the world disagrees with virtually everything you’ve said here?
I need a drink.
There are a lot of excellent questions, but they are becoming almost too numerous to answer. you’re soo deep in bullshit, you don’t even realize mockery when you see it. it’s very very sad.
once more: WE HAVE READ THAT BULLSHIT ALREADY, AND IT’S ALL INCORRECT ON WAAAAAYY TOO MANY LEVELS. YOU’RE NOT SHOWING US ANYTHING WE HAVEN”T SEEN BEFORE, AND CERTAINLY NOTHING THAT ISN’T RIDDLED WITH MISTAKES AND LIES
now I got so agitated, i fucked up my blockquotes. and since this bears repeating:
you’re soo deep in bullshit, you don’t even realize mockery when you see it. it’s very very sad.
once more: WE HAVE READ THAT BULLSHIT ALREADY, AND IT’S ALL INCORRECT ON WAAAAAYY TOO MANY LEVELS. YOU’RE NOT SHOWING US ANYTHING WE HAVEN”T SEEN BEFORE, AND CERTAINLY NOTHING THAT ISN’T RIDDLED WITH MISTAKES AND LIES
Liar.
The time required for answering correctly is the time it would take for you to actually educate yourself on the basics of the many various sciences that you keep mangling.
I know Alan personally.
I’ve read the majority of this thread.
Amazing the number of incredibly mean people.
I don’t know that Alan was trying to proselytize, but that would sure be my goal.
Obviously the vast majority, if not all, the readers of this thread do NOT believe the bible to be inspired by God (and many deny His existence.)
Regardless, I would hope that many could agree with my premise that the teachings of Christ, recorded in the New Testament, are the best way to live. I simply know that those teachings changed my life and are the basis for my decisions.
This thread certainly falls in line with the wisdom of these biblical verses:
2 Timothy 2:23
“Don’t have anything to do with foolish and stupid arguments, because you know they produce quarrels.”
Matthew 7:6
“Do not give dogs what is sacred; do not throw your pearls to pigs. If you do, they may trample them under their feet, and then turn and tear you to pieces.
2 Corinthians 4:4
The god of this age has blinded the minds of unbelievers, so that they cannot see the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God.
There is a video on the web of Penn – a professed atheist -commenting on a “very nice man” who came to him after a show and gave him a copy of the New Testament. Penn’s comment in the video was something to the effect of, “How much do you have to hate a person to truly believe that there is a God and a means to eternal life and choose NOT to tell them about it? If you knew someone was about to get hit by a bus, but they didn’t believe you, and you saw the bus bearing down on them, at some point you have to tackle them.” Penn mentions that he had ZERO respect for someone who believed in God and that people will either go to heaven or hell, but is afraid to share that belief.
I respect Alan’s diligence in remaining and making an effort at civil discussion, but at this point, I would counsel him to leave the rest of you to your unbelief.
I for one will happily remain ignorant of your “science” that, if one judged from this post alone, produces uncivil, hateful, belligerent and angry individuals.
I also pray that the one I believe created each of you opens your eyes to His existence.
My view is that you do not have to defend a lion – you simply set the lion loose.
Thank you, Todd.
Your concern is noted.
Todd, it is nice of you to testify to your friend, but in doing so you demeaned your character. We scientist types follow the evidence, and all evidence to date suggests god doesn’t exist and the bible is a work of fiction. Testimony does not change the physical evidence.
We atheists base our morality on game theory, where something similar to the golden rule works best. We apply these ethics/morality to all people. But we atheists also note that Xians do not seem to behave according to the golden rule, and they have two sets of rules, one for themselves, and one for all others.
concern troll alert
You mean that house cat I saw? I think the neighbors pit bull ate him.
Well goody for Penn.
Alan comes here spouting his creationism as if it is fact. It is far from fact and we’ve shown him and hundreds like him how exactly wrong it is. Yet his impenetrable skull of faith based ignorance keeps him and the hordes like him from seeing that. You have to understand that quoting scripture does not support your case. Hard empirical evidence does. People get “mean” because we’ve been through this so many times that it becomes annoying dealing with all the misinformation being spread by people like Alan.
Keep proselytizing Todd. See where that gets you. Quoting scripture proves nothing more than your ability to regurgitate something you read. And in this case possibly a low level understanding of how to use a computer.
That great Todd. You’d rather remain willfully stupid than face your ignorance. And because those big bad mean scientists and atheist said bad words.
Grow up.
Your concern has been noted and is stupid.
the teachings of Christ, recorded in the New Testament, are the best way to live. I simply know that those teachings changed my life and are the basis for my decisions.
So, you’ve made a complete split with your family, and now live an itinerant life of voluntary poverty? Good for you. But… what are you doing on the internet?
Knew I smelled something.
Todd – I urge you do go forth and consider the lord’s words, and all that he has for you, Jesus said: He it is, to whom I shall give a sop, when I have dipped it. John 13:26
Walt Brown farted.
No, he hasn’t made an “effort at civil discourse”. He has ignored all of the rebuttals of his nonsense, and then essentially stuck his middle finger up at us by presenting evidence from ridiculous creationist websites.
Do you know what? That kind of anti-intellectualism offends us (kind of)! It essentially says that you know that science has provided the modern world, and that will likely ensure that Alan’s new baby will survive in to adulthood, but screw that, he’d rather be a hypocrite, and when it suits him, he can ignore science and believe in magic, because it makes him feel all special.
Sorry that I can’t just accept that.
Right, but you’ll continue to take advantage of what it provides, though. Hypocrite.
Don’t hold your breath.
EVIDENCES THAT SUPPORT EVOLUTIONISM
People often think, “How can my theory be false if so many evidences support it?” It may or may not be, but remember, a multitude of supporting evidences can lead you astray if your interpretation for each and every one is wrong. How can so many interpretations be wrong? If a theory’s entire underlying framework is supported by one false assumption, then all of the interpretations can be wrong. All of the evidences will have the appearance of “unity”. Each one will support the other.
Wind is caused by the flapping of tree leaves. We know this to be true because every time we feel the wind, we see leaves flapping somewhere. During the winter when there are no leaves, the winds are generated by trees at the Earth’s lower hemisphere where it is summer. The Apollo 11 space flight to the Moon validated the theory when crew members noticed there was no wind as evidenced by the absence of trees. The fact that Mars has no trees but high winds is not fully understood but some have theorized that the atmospheric turbulence is a relic from ancient forests that once existed. The trees were thought to have been far greater in number and size than the Earth’s.
Since there are so many supporting evidences, how can the theory be false? Everything went awry at the first supposition. Some say that the first supposition is a “law”, but I’m telling you many people paid a lot money to have university professors give them head massages. Stepping aside from this analogy, what is the first false assumption made by practically everyone on this forum? ”THERE IS NO GOD”
2Th 2:11 And for this cause God shall send them strong delusion, that they should believe a lie.
Projection defined.
You fail at science, again.
Well Alan, where is god?
I can’t not comment again on that last babble from Alan.
That is hands down the worst example of how the scientific method works I’ve read in months. And that’s saying a lot considering the kooks we get on here.
Seriously Alan, with such a basic misunderstanding of how science works you will never be able to grasp how very wrong you are across the board.
And the first assumption you have is that there is a god.
I don’t assume there is something that there is no evidence of.
Do you assume that there is Leprechaun living in your ear?
Alan just doesn’t get it. His continued religous discourse just shows how wrong he is. Alan, there are hundreds of thousands, if not millions of scientific papers showing evolution is correct. None that show any other theory to be correct. They cannot be negated except by other science papers. Fail again.
His bible may be meaningful to him, but not to science, who ignores it, and us, who belief it to be a work of fiction.