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.
Alan Clarke’s Bible Babble:
So, Alan, your god is a liar. A fraud. A spreader of delusion and untruth. A bearer of false witness. And a hypocrite. Even if such a being were real, how could it possibly be worthy of worship?
Of course, your imaginary friend isn’t real, and you have not even come close to offering the slightest speck of evidence that it is. Nor will you ever. Not surprising that you worship an imagianry hypocritical liar. You’ve created your god in your own image.
waaaaaaaiiiit a minute…
I thought wind was the breath of Zephyrs or something like that…or, no, that bearded dude with puffy cheeks on the old maps. Ha! What about those evidences, you infidels? Old maps!
checkmate.
No, I think that hating your parents and families just so that you can be Christian is wrong. Sorry, I just plain disagree with Jesus there.
Yes the god of the bible certainly is worthy of your worship Alan. He just loves babies. “Happy shall he be that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones. Psalm 137:9 And thou shalt eat the fruit of thine own body, the flesh of thy sons and of thy daughters. Deut. 28:53 Slay utterly old and young, both maids and little children. Ezk 9:6
And when your wife is in labor Alan, remember god wants her screaming in agony, Genesis 3:16.
God Swallows?
too much?
So God isn’t just a mob boss who tortures and kills people, but is also a con man. Hey, I guess you’re happy worshiping a murderer and a liar.
But that does say something rather unpleasant about you.
Alan
How do you know that the delusions are being sent to us, and the lie is science?
Personally I think the delusion is Christianity and your (Xian) behavior demonstrates the lie.
“Stepping aside from this analogy, what is the first false assumption made by practically everyone on this forum? ”THERE IS NO GOD””
Show us it’s false. Show me that there really IS a dragon in my garage. No fair claiming that it’s invisible or disappears when I go out there to check.
“I’ve never been one for blind faith.”
Ennis 12:2
that right there is solid proof that you’ve got no flaming clue how science works. science tests its theories not by accumulating evidence that can be used to support it, but by testing it in ways that could prove it wrong. and how do we test your silly little “wind is made by trees” idea? by growing an indoor orchard. if during a 20 year study the orchard fails to produce wind, wind is not produced by moving leaves. it’s called falsifiability, and works by removing all external variables to test a specific claim
you fail.
another massive fail.
“there is no god” is a conclusion. remember all those creationist scientists you quoted a while back? the evidence lead scientists to ditch God as an explanation, because there was no evidence to support it, while the evidence for a fully natural explanation was abundant
also, you keep forgetting that most of us were christians once. Evidence lead us to conclude that there is no god.
you’ve got your thinking ass-backwards. you’re the one viciously trying to fit evidence to a conclusion, we’re the ones trying to make a conclusion from available evidence (and even making tests to see if we can prove our conclusions wrong)
Hmmm… Alan, are you aware that some wind on Mars cleaned some of the dust off the rover Spirit recently? They know because more light was getting through to the solar panels. Another lie exposed.
Yeah, but if he thought too hard about falsifiability, he would realize that God is either already falsified, or unfalsifiable (depending on the claims made about God), and then his head might explode.
It’s better for his health all around if he doesn’t think too hard.
Todd The Godbot Bacon @488:
Imagine all the people who are reading and lurking here and not posting. Think of what mean thoughts are going through their heads. There are dead people who think you’re a deluded moron.
See, from time to time a moron or two plops in here and spouts his version of some ancient text of myths to somehow prove his version of some ancient text of myths. While sometimes funny it does get boring as all fuck.
I believe Groucho Marx said it best and it definitely applies to you and Alan Clarke:
Oh, and I just realized that Alan contradicted his own theology!
@#354:
@#497:
In other words, mans failings are his own, and God deliberately causes failings in man.
MegaFAIL.
OK Chimpy, you win.
EEEEWWWWW!
One major difference between most goddists and most atheists is that the atheists don’t have a need to believe in god. There isn’t a void in our lives that cries out to be filled by a petulant, sadistic bully with the emotional maturity of a spoiled six year old.
Your pet deity is the one who sends bears out to maul 42 children because they laughed at the Prophet Enoch’s baldness. I can hear Enoch whining: “Lord, those kids are being snotty to me, time to do some smiting.” It certainly appears that omniscience, omnipotence, and various other omnis do not a mature divine being make.
That could have been a squeegee-Martian. Maybe it’s where all those guys went when Rudy cleaned up NY NY.
That Thessalonians quote is famous for use in debates about biblical contradictions.
My favorite is: Thou shalt not bear false witness. Ex 20:16
Then god hauls off and sends strong delusions. Niiice.
I was about to counter that with Quod licet Iovi non licet bovi, but then I realized I was talking about a different god. and if it’s not from the bible, it’s not true anyway :-p
hmmm…. good thing i didn’t make fun of the reverend for his c/p fail in the “I get mail” thread!
Take two:
I was about to counter that with Quod licet Iovi non licet bovi, but then I realized I was talking about a different god. and if it’s not from the bible, it’s not true anyway :-p
Bah, I probably deserved it.
*cough*. Actually, that was the Prophet Elisha.
But still, the point stands.
that may be so, but it would make ME look like an even bigger idiot, now that i’ve done exactly the same ;-)
And yet there are plenty of theists who accept evolution. Were you to visit the biology departments of major Universities, you’d have no trouble at all finding scientists who are Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu…pick a faith, you’ll find it. And they’ll all tell you the same thing; that evolution is supported by a mountain of empirical evidence. Who accepts creationism? Fundamentalist Christians. Fundamentalist Muslims. And the occasional Orthodox Jew. Yes, there’s ideology driving one side, but it isn’t ours. Is projection all you’ve got?
I miss Alan Clarke and Todd (I refuse to use bacon as his last name in fear of sullying that wondrous of all pork products) INSERT LAST NAME HERE
Alan PLEASE COME BACK AND TELL US ALL ABOUT MOON DUST PROVING A YOUNG EARTH.
Why do I feel that Todd Bacon is a sock puppet, Alan?
My favorite is: Thou shalt not bear false witness. Ex 20:16 Then god hauls off and sends strong delusions. Niiice.
“whoever says, ‘Thou fool,’ shall be in danger of Hell fire.” -Jesus
“But God said unto him, Thou fool” -Luke
“You fools and blind men!” -Jesus
Are you serious? I described a method in which you can answer the question for yourself (i.e. Gideon said to God, “If you will …). As far as I can tell, no one has tried as evidenced by the numerous mockings. I don’t really expect anyone to publicly report success on the forum because this would admit defeat. (success = defeat??) What I am expecting is for a few to call upon God privately in a SERIOUS tone when a crisis arrives in their life. Let’s face it. God is not going to reveal his inner person to a mocker any more than a wife would reveal herself to an abusive and mocking husband. The ball is in your court.
You Sir,are one fucked up individual.
did he just seriously try to explain talking to god to Patricia…?
and couldn’t he have waited another 10 minutes with this post? i was so close to actually getting some sleep tonight *sigh*
What theories are helping petroleum geologists to find oil? It’s not old-earth uniformitarian theories of continental drift & sea-floor spreading:
Oil is found where uniformitarian theory says it shouldn’t:
Read full abstract here.
Please correct your “we know” to “we assume”. The layers could be the same age and sorted hydrologically if there was a global flood.
Translation: “Do not quote from a website that is invalidated by my website.”
ergo, you fail.
Removing the trees from their natural ecosystem will undoubtedly stop their leaves from flapping since the indoor orchard can’t duplicate the incalculable number of variables that the Earth’s ecosystem provides. If no wind is produced after 20 years, it will be because the leaves never flapped.
How will you remove “all external variables” to test that evolution actually occurs?
Alan Clarke,
you are one braindead individual…..Please move on
fixed that for ya.
Jadehawk,
as the resident doc here,I order you to go to bed and get some rest now….
( and I should bloody hell do the same,got to get up and save lifes in way too few hours time lol)
oh, I don’t know, maybe the way this guy did?
please do try to have a thought that hasn’t been debunked already
but… but… *whinge*
oh ok…
The layers could be the same age and sorted hydrologically if there was a global flood. Alan Clarke
You contemptible, pitiful, halfwit. The fact that the major geological strata were laid down over an immense period of time, and not by a global flood, was firmly established well before the first scientifically developed theory of evolution was published by Darwin. It was established, in fact, by scientists who were Christians, who believed in the fixity of species, and many of whom initially believed they would find evidence of a flood. Being honest scientists, most of these came to accept that the evidence was clear, and that it refuted this belief utterly and completely. They would have held you in as much contempt as I do.
Copying & pasting your refutations leave you looking like an automated phone system that has no ability to direct one’s call.
You are misinterpreting my use of “hydrologic sorting”.
Hydrologic: the effects of water on the Earth’s surface.
Sorting: the order that the soil and rocks are placed.
The water I am speaking of is the global flood. How would a catastrophic global flood “place” the soil and rocks? It would place it randomly and “jumbled” up. In other words, Kel’s assumption of, “we know that one layer must be older than the layer above it” is wrong.
BTW, Alan Clarke, did you notice the date on that abstact you linked to? 1969. Do you have anything more recent? I thought not. Science moves on you know, and plate tectonics is as firmly established as the periodic table. Meyerhoff was one of the last holdouts – a sad relic of refuted ideas. No wonder you feel a kinship with him – although of course he’d have laughed at your ludicrous fantasies of a global flood.
Patricia, notice the verse says, “Happy shall he be…” Who is he? If it is God, shouldn’t the verse read, “I will be happy…”? Nevertheless, I can see you are disgusted with an act of injustice performed against an innocent child. Or is your anger directed more at God? Who are you more concerned about? Where are your energies most directed?
1) Pitying defenseless children
2) Anger toward a disgusting God
3) Pity for yourself (you’re mistreated, misunderstood, and disadvantaged)
Test yourself. How disgusted are you of this recent botched abortion in Miami where the baby was born alive then killed? “Ms Williams’ lawsuit offers a cruder account: She says Ms Gonzalez knocked the baby off the recliner chair where she had given birth, onto the floor. The baby’s umbilical cord was not clamped, allowing her to bleed out. Ms Gonzalez scooped the baby, placenta and afterbirth into a red plastic bio-hazard bag and threw it out.”
Or is it the person performing the action that is the most disgusting? As the verse says, “Happy shall he be that…” Just look at the smiling happy faces.
Is God to be blamed for the above? Isn’t God directing the Christians to act against this?
That’s pretty much the exact opposite of what “hydrologic sorting” means.
Even most creationists are aware that rock layers and fossil types are, in general, not placed randomly and jumbled up. “Hydrologic sorting” is the hypothesis they propose to explain this, a competitor to the mainstream geological explanation that the layers are ordered by time of deposition.
I see our fuckwit Alan still thinks the bible is not a work of fiction. We can’t fix your delusions Alan, but we will correct your science. You have nothing of scientific nature to offer, and your lies about the bible are ludicrous. Time for you to move on. Your continuing attempts to testify are boring.
Allow me to point out a problem with your logic: The abstract states the that oil discoveries where made in 1968 in locations that weaken unifomritarian theories. Since when did older discovery dates make a find less credible? The 1968 finding was a problem for uniformitarianists then, and it is a problem now.
Alan, go away. You are in over your head. Save yourself some embarrassment, which is coming.
Thanks for your honest attempt: two separate places
That’s what? A mile away? A fucking MILE! Alan, you’re getting ridiculous now trying to prop up your favorite bit of fiction.
Sorry, but I’m not convinced that your silliness about “Babylon isn’t inhabited” is true. Better luck next time.
Alan, have you watched Bible’s Buried Secrets yet? It tells how the first five books of the bible were put together. Watch it before you post here again.
Jadehawk: I found the hidden caveat emptor of your link to Richard Lenski’s “Experimental Evolution” here: “Relative fitness is a dimensionless quantity, which is calculated as the ratio of the growth rate of the derived type to its ancestral competitor during direct competition.”
Here is why his “evolution” is “nowhere”: If something has a “faster growth rate” than its ancestor, does that mean it is more viable? No. If I wind a clock too tightly and it runs faster than all other clocks, does that mean it is more viable? The main spring will probably wear out more quickly. Evolution must gain useful INFORMATION. Where is any information gained in Lenski’s experiment?
Your statement that Lenski has “removed all external variables” is not theoretically possible.
I asked someone previously to provide an electron microscope scan of something that gained useful information, not a quantitative difference. We need a “new component”! Can someone please direct me to the link on this forum if someone has already posted it?
Actually, I was keen to Lenski’s supposed “evolution” on this post last year.
Alan, its getting obvious you have no real point. You are too deluded and stupid to discuss the science in a scientific manner. Your attempts to make science look bad are childish and in vain. Now run along and help your wife. You will accomplish nothing with further posts.
Alan, you freakin’ dope, relative growth rate was used as a fitness measurement because the different bacterial phenotypes were pitted together in a competition for limited resources. It’s not analogous to clocks at all.
I’m not sure what you would accept as a new structure or increase in information, but how about the new gut valve in Podarcis lizards? Look it up.
Oh, yes I did. It’s right up there in comment #442.
Been there, done that, got no answer. No answer means there’s no one there to answer.
You mean like the way that you mock God by comparing him to a wife? (A wife is supposed to submit to her husband. Colossians 3:18, moron.)
You mean like the way that you mock God by asserting that his feelings are easily hurt and he becomes sullen?
You mean like the way that you mock God by violating his commandment against giving false testimony?
You claimed that you developed a relationship where you can address God directly and get answers.
I offered a pathetically simple empirical way to test this.
You didn’t even bother answering.
Ergo, you were lying, and not just lying, but literally bearing false witness. God does not give you direct answers.
Yes, and that’s how we now that a catastrophic global flood never happened. Because there is no global layer of randomized flood sediment.
I interpret your two question marks as two questions (or two time wasters). There’s no need to live in darkness since Google conveniently provided a distance legend at the bottom left corner of my original “Uninhabited Babylon” post. You seem to be infatuated with making Babylon a nice place to live despite the fact that God cursed it. Be my guest. There’s a little hole carved in the mud that you might find comfy. View Here What’s one man’s dump is another man’s palace!
Alan, Lizards Rapidly Evolve After Introduction to Island.
There are thousands of examples like this.
Look, we know what your game is, sonny jim. There is literally nothing that we could show to you that would count as evolution. Seriously. In your mind, having to accept that life has evolved would destroy almost everything that you believe in. How likely is it, then, that you are going to allow that to happen?
Of course, you couldn’t be more wrong, but you would almost certainly have to modify your beliefs, and I can understand how even that would scare the crap out of you. But you need to remember that, if we are right and life on earth has evolved pretty much as the scientific community has described (thus far), you are not only missing out on understanding His method of creation, but denying Him the glory.
If, as many people believe, everything is within God’s control, then so too is randomness, chance, and all of the other things that you rail against. You need to make a decision, Alan. Does God decide which side of a coin falls face up, and which lot is drawn, or doesn’t he? If he does, then what we consider to be random is entirely within God’s purview. If not, you need to decide what exactly is God’s role in the universe and stick with it. It is not, after all, for you to decide, arbitrarily.
This is a problem with your own theology, Alan, not with reality. As Deacon over at Evangelical Realism always says, the truth is consistent with itself.
Thanks Damian, I’ll read up on it when I get some time.
But as expected, I like reading both views:
http://www.answersingenesis.org/articles/aid/v3/n1/life-designed-to-adapt
AIG isn’t science. To say so, is an damn lie.
Which, I note, repeats the question I asked @#223. Alan was unable to answer. Roger S said that no, he thinks we have free will, but then Alan posted that quote from 2 Thessalonians which says that not only does God not allow us free will, but goes so far as to deliberately force us to “believe a lie”. And Todd Bacon posted the quote from 2 Corinthians that confirms the assertion that God deliberately lies to us.
All of which makes me wonder what Alan is doing spewing common creationist claims here. Alan, you think that God is forcing us to not believe in him. Who the hell are you to go against the will of the God that you claim to believe exists?
Alan, AIG is a joke. It is not science it is only apologetics.
Alan,
AiG is a fucking joke. They don’t even allow comments on their articles or blogs. This despite the fact that many of their own readers have requested such a function.
Don’t you find it ironic that here on an atheist blog your dissenting opinions are heard while on that Christian Apologetics site not only is dissent not tolerated but even those who agree can’t be heard?
I see the pig singing lessons are still proceeding.
Indeed, and that’s the source of your problem, Alan. You have no way of differentiating between what is good science, and bad, or what is even science at all. You appear to rely solely on authority, instead.
Anyway, they have essentially admitted that the Lizard has evolved a novel structure. That’s terrific, it really is. It’s only taken several decades for us to get them to admit that.
I’m not really seeing where the science is, though. That whole article consists of hand-waving, knowing full well that they can no longer deny that novel structures can evolve.
Now, explain why those changes — admitted to even by that monument to anti-science, AIG — cannot continue to accumulate, up-to-and-including the point where an organism is no longer recognizable? In other words, what is preventing it from happening?
Without explaining that, Alan, you have no basis for denying that it can happen — and indeed, does — and thus, you have pretty much just conceded the argument.
Damn, you were just too eager for your own good.
Alan sounds like someone who may have spent a little too much of his life behind a bible. Recently, he has spent way too much time at AiG or some place with a similar simple reputation. Since learning to be a skeptic at AiG over the past few months he has decided to plop over here and question reality. Not only won’t he do his own research into many of the matters he has questions about he assumes his witnessing and testifying here will convince at least one of us to begin speaking to his version of his god.
Alan, your ignorance appears to know no bounds. Is there anything you do well besides spouting South Park quotes or whatever the fuck that notated crap is?
Massive FAIL Alan.
Your inability to accept your failure is a sign of mental illness and stubbornness. Stop acting like a child, put down your bible, and watch patiently and quietly. That, everything going on around you, all that unpleasantness, confusing and obnoxious stuff going on around you, that’s reality. Get used to it or cover yourself up in your delusions and please try not to disturb those around you.
There are many times when I wish there really was a filter at the ISP level to remove morons from the online world so that they would be limited to sputtering their nonsense on their own streets and only bother the poor locals.
Alan, when you speak your ideas to others in real life do they nod and mumble “uh huh” a lot? Here’s a clue for you: they aren’t agreeing with you – they think you’re a delusional crank and just about crazy enough that you might hurt them if they disagreed or called you on your bullshit in person. Here online you have been called on your bullshit many times on every subject and yet your major source for rebuttal appears to be a combination of your own stubbornness and an ability to quote South Park or whatever that crap is. The things you don’t know about the things you think you know would fill a library.
Adios muchacho, my dog needs a walk. Hey look, my dog can lick his balls. Can your god do that? I and my dog scoff at your god. Now I think he’s doing his Holy Grail impersonation – there was a bark then a growl, then something about waving his freshly moistened testicles in the general direction of your god. I second that.
Sorry for the delay,
I do appreciate you providing exceptions to look at. I did like learning about the latest research.
Comments:
Orchid hybrids-
Question: Is there any new science here other than what farmers are doing in cross-breeding varieties of corn? Please excuse my weakness on the subject.
Apple maggot Rhagoletis pomonella speciation-
I see we have flies with genetic maturing time differences and dividing into 2 food preferences, hawthorn & apple. I also have genetic differences with blacks and I prefer different foods, that doesn’t make me a different species does it?
African Cichlid-
Looks like color sensing chemicals differences in the fish’s eye causing different red & blue sensitivity. I personally attribute my greater sensitivity to light compared to my wife is my light blue eyes compared to her beautiful dark eyes. I may be wrong but have discounted dilation and rhodopsin production. I also noticed that people with different genes than myself also prefer wearing purple to attract a mate, but that’s ok, we are all brothers and sisters from Mitochondrial Eve, right?
Conclusion:
So out of over 1,500,000 species we are reduced to looking at a yield of 3 curiosities: flowers producing flowers, flies producing flies, and fish producing fish.
– I just don’t get the enthusiasm, must be missing the evolutional trend here. It doesn’t look like a good theory to invest in from a business standpoint (unless Gov’t funded).
What an idiot.
Alan Clarke (#529):
I.e., when they’re liable to be in a highly emotional state, less likely to analyse carefully, and most likely to be prone to wishful thinking and all manner of cognitive biases.
Yes, Alan, I imagine that’s exactly what you’re hoping for. It would never do for people to conduct the test while they’re actually capable of thinking critically.
Alan – Your answers to me are typical fundie bullshit that equals nothing. You have no idea how many times we have had the same tired rerun. There are no converts here for you. I was a much better true christian than you are. At least when I saw peoples eyes glaze over I would quit. *HINT*
But they are, in fact, examples of speciation. What do you think, that we should provide you with examples of flies producing beetles, or beagles? Fish producing frogs? That isn’t what evolution predicts will happen in human timespans.
Getting from fish to amphibians took millions of years. That transition is recorded in fossils, as well as in the DNA of living fish and living amphibians: We can compare them and see both the similarities and differences that demonstrate common ancestry.
A couple of simple questions for all you evolution deniers: It’s been pointed out that there are biologists who do accept evolution and common descent, and explain it within the framework of believing in God. Would you read book(s) by these biologists that explain why evolution is real? If not, why or why not? If you read the book(s), would you accept that believing the scientific consensus on the age of the earth and the evolution of life could in some way work with believing in God? If not, why not?
‘Tis Himself: One major difference between most goddists and most atheists is that the atheists don’t have a need to believe in god.
That’s my problem – I do have a very compelling emotional need to believe in God, but on a strictly rational, intellectual basis I can’t do so. Which is why my comments about religion sometimes seem confused and incoherent; I have no idea what I actually believe, and change my mind from day to day. I have no doubt that theists and atheists alike, reading this, probably consider me a weak-minded fool. But I can’t help it.
Alan Clarke (#553):
Wrong. Evolution by natural selection can occur with an increase in genetic information, a decrease or with no overall change. The quantity of information embodied in a genome (by whatever metric you choose to use) has nothing to do with the utility to the organism of any changes in that quantity. Insertion and duplication mutations (which tend to increase the amount of information) can be harmful, and deletion mutations (which tend to decrease the amount of information) can be beneficial – e.g., the CCR5-Delta32 deletion that confers partial immunity to HIV.
Of course, I’m using the term “information” very loosely here (although not as loosely as you, since you show no indication of understanding what the term actually means). No doubt someone else could explain the finer points of information theory to you in the necessary detail, although on past evidence I doubt that the attempt to educate you would be worth the effort.
The old “no atheists in foxholes” idiocy. You’re such a child.
amazing. Alan not only fails at science, he fails at English, too.
you do not know what the terms “sorting” “information” “component” “viability” and “growth rate” mean. either you’ve got the reading comprehension skills of a 7 year old, or are so deep in denial, Eqypt is about to grant you citizenship.
i’ll make a deal with you. you’ll stop giving canned arguments, i’ll stop giving canned answers.
though, the fact that you can’t even get you own side’s story right makes you an extra special kind of stupid. here’s a hint: when something is “sorted” it cannot be “jumbled”; those are opposites.
a clock can never be viable on account of it’s not alive, you dolt
the bacteria acquired(!) a new skill though mutation and natural selection. WTF do you think “information” is? and it’s not only theoretically possible that he removed all external variables, it was practically achieved. your denial of this is meaningless.
oh yeah. you also don’t know what “quantitative” means. the difference I’ve shown you was qualitative. under an electron microscope, you’d be only able to see quantitative differences if gene addition happened, otherwise nothing. you fail basic genetics.
oh yeah, and as a bonus:
Tyre, Lebanon. looks like it was build again, after all.
I’m sure you can come up with some hand-waving bullshit why it’s ok for this prophecy to fail utterly, but your babylon one is (temporarily) being (almost) fulfilled. here’s my take on it: even a stopped clock…
and I’ll note that you STILL haven’t addressed the existence of civilizations that blithely continue to exist right through your supposed global flood, languages and scripts that existed before the Tower of Babel was built, living plants that are older than 6000 years, or the conundrum of the radioactive Garden of Eden, or the conundrum of non-radioactive dating methods being wrong in such a way as to coincide with the wrongness of radioactive-decay rating methods (a rather massive coincidence, and you don’t believe in coincidences, do you?)
Alan Clarke @ #529:
So, in addition to your god being a liar, a fraud, and a hypocrite, it’s also a scavenger, a carrion eater, a cowardly predatory bastard who takes advantage of the helpless and downtrodden. Primary sources of followers are children too young to think for themselves, and people driven mad by horrible circumstances beyond their control. Your god is a ghoul. A con artist who steals from those down on their luck. Little more than a child molester.
And again you offer not the slightest speck of evidence that such a being exists! Why would you WANT such a monster to be real? What kind of lowlife scum are you that you would willingly serve such a foul thing? How horribly brainwashed do you have to be to think such a thing is actually good?
If your god were real, it would be a monster. Lucky for all of us, it isn’t real. If you disagree with this analysis, you could try offering the slightest speck of evidence to support your claims. But we all know you’re incapable of that.
And after the final thrust, Jadehawk walked to the sink and began to rinse the the blood off her finely honed stiletto.
You don’t need a god, you need a mother. No, I am not being facetious.
Alan Clarke began his cascade of Epic Fail @#105 by stating that:
Note, by the way, that the verse contradicts the Nicene Creed, saying: “the sons of God”. It can also been seen as contradicting the monotheism the bible is supposed to espouse; the phrase “בני האלהים” is more literally “the sons of the God”, but “God” is “Elohim”, a word which appears as being plural (but usually used in the singular when referring to the God of Israel). The phrase can just as easily be read as “the sons of the Gods“.
The Hebrew terms “נפילים” (nephilim) and “גברים” (giborim) are both translated in the LXX as “γιγαντες”, (gigantes); giants. But that latter Hebrew term should definitely be “heroes”; “mighty men” in the KJV is probably OK. “Nephilim” is harder to get an accurate sense of; “fallen ones” is suggested because of the closeness of the word to the common Hebrew term that means “fallen”: “nafal”. Note that the term appears again in Numbers 13:33, in reference to the spies saying that they saw the Nephilim (again translating in the LXX as γιγαντες), “sons (or “children”) of Anak” — but “anak” is the common Hebrew term for “giant”, and in some cases, “בני” (“bene”) can have a more poetic/abstract sense of “deriving from”. ¹
So who were all these giants; heroes; “mighty men”? Well… here’s an interesting hypothesis. It is based on the simple fact that Alan is quite wrong in saying that the bible predates fossil discoveries.
There are places where fossils simply appear due to the earth shifting for various reasons. In the Gobi desert, Protoceratops and Psittacosaurus bones are eroded from hills and cliffs by the ferocious scouring of sandstorms, and have been for thousands of years; it is suggested that these are the source of the legend of the griffins, which were reported as living in the exact same area, guarding the gold that is to be found there. In the Mediterranean, storms and earthquakes can erode cliffs and hills, exposing Neogene and Pleistocene fossils of elephant-related Proboscidea (various mammoths and mastodons), the giant giraffe Samotherium, cave bears, and other large mammals.
Josephus wrote in Jewish Antiquities 5.2.3. that in the area around Hebron (Israel), the early Israelites wiped out “a race of giants, who had bodies so large and countenances so entirely different from other men, that they were surprising to the sight, and terrible to the hearing. The bones of these men are still shown to this very day, unlike to any credible relations of other men.”
Now “unlike to any credible relations of other men” suggests something genuinely strange. Not just large, but obviously different from human bones.
Once we take into account that fossils of giant animals were and are in the earth throughout the Mediterranean, and these fossils can simply erode out over time, the stories of giants in the bible, especially in the fable of the spies in Numbers 13, begin to make more sense: The ancient Israelites found these fossils and created stories about them as being the sons of the Gods and men; the original inhabitants of the land of Canaan who were fought and killed by the ancestors of the Israelites themselves.
I’ve picked this up from reading the first chapters (and skipping a bit to find the parts about Israel) in The First Fossil Hunters, by Adrienne Mayor. She is not the first to suggest that the monsters of myth were actually fossils found by various peoples, but this is a good popular treatment of the subject. Note that she does not actually make the inference that this was the case for all myths; she tracked down references to giant bones in the Greek and Roman classical literature and correlated them with the latest known palaeontological findings. While she references the myth of the griffins and the myth of Andromeda (chained near Joppa, also in Israel) and the myth of Cyclops being a misinterpreted mammoth or mastadon skeleton, and possibly some others which I have yet to read, the specific correlation of the giants in the bible with fossils is my own interpolation, via her citation of Josephus’ description of the giant bones of Hebron.
Still, I think it quite plausible that most (or even all) of the stories of giants and giant monsters all around the world may well derive from preliterate findings of millions-years-old fossils.
__________________________________________________________
1: Consider the English phrase “son of the desert” (Arabic “ابن الصحراء”, “Ibn al-Sahraa”). Another example in Hebrew is the common name “Ben-yamin”, meaning literally “son of the right (hand)” (or “south”, because when facing east, the south is on the right). An example in Aramaic is “Bar Kochba”; “son of a star”.
Or anti-anxiety medication. Or anti-depressants, perhaps.
I could probably use something for my SIWOTI syndrome.
What?!! And spare us the pleasure of reading you? Your syndrome is our entertainment (and edification).
So what is the main cause, local FLOODS or the slow building of layers by dying vegetation in bogs resulting in DECAY and not preservation? The local flood pitch is a bit of a sale, but the same sale to explain evidences over the whole globe? The waffling or recalibrating I have come across of late smacks of gamesmanship, but I may be wrong.
I found the exurpts from the following link very compelling with sound logic for the topic above.
http://www.detectingdesign.com/fossilrecord.html
“A great deal has changed, however, and contemporary geologists and paleontologists now generally accept catastrophe as a ‘way of life’ although they may avoid the word catastrophe…
For fossilization to occur, burial or some other form of preservation must be fairly rapid in order to protect the remains from significant scavenging and/or decay.
As far as the fossilized bones of large animals, such as the dinosaurs and large mammals, they are also generally oriented in the same direction for any given layer, and this is true the world over. Did these animals position themselves in the same direction as they died? This does not really sound too likely. Even the legs and tails of these animals are oriented in the same direction for a given sedimentary layer. How does this happen?
There are so many other features of the geologic column and fossil record that seem just as difficult, if not more so, for the notion that very long periods of time are represented. For example, it seems that many land animals, excluding birds and mammals, do not generally have their footprints located in the same layer in which their bodies are found, but in lower layers.56 Did the footprints evolve before they did? –That’s it, Regards
all fossils point it one direction? are you confusing graphics with the real deal, or what!? most the fossils i’ve seen were of severely contorted individuals that didn’t always point any which way at all, or even have their bonesspread out over a pretty large area.
as for the rest, i don’t know why I have to do your homework, but here it is
also, if a global catastrophe caused fossilisation (rather than personal mini disasters), a far larger percentage of formerly existing critters would have been preserved, since they would have ALL suffered from the same rapid-burial conditions.
also, i’d like some citation on that “critters leave footprints in layers older than they are”, because all i can think of with such meager info is “he’s surprised that critters make footprints in already existing ground, not in the ground that will form after they die…?”
lastly, fossil LAYERS are formed in different ways depending on what the substance is; a lot of it is compressed topsoil, calcification (the shit you need to clean off your faucet) sediment stone etc. in any case, it’s all indicative of slow, periodical development, not one massive event. unless you’re saying god was in an artistic phase during the flood and felt like stripes when he was making those. (incidentally, having been in those particular hills during rainy weather and seen the effect water has on them: how do you explain mountains of soft clay? shouldn’t they have all turned to a muddled goo-puddle and dried as relatively flat from complete and long-term inundation?)
Well, duh. And of course, only if the catastrophe is supported by evidence — which is and was found by the geologists and paleontologists themselves.
Picking out one particularly discordant honk in a cacophonous symphony of FAIL:
Where the hell did you get this from? I’m absolutely certain that it’s not in any book on palaeontology, and I don’t see why even the dumbest flood geologist would suggest it. How would orientation in the “same direction” be consistent with a global flood?
Unless, of course, it wasn’t from a flood geologist, but rather from a flood pulling-it-all-out-of-his-ass-ologist.
What, when you just told us that this God is as shy as an abused housewife? Is that the type I want to call upon in a crisis? Unless the crisis is that I need a sandwich so God should shut up and make me one.
RogerS (#582):
Given that local floods occur all over the globe, it’s hardly a sale. In any case, many coal deposits were formed in coastal plains subject to periodic inundation by the sea as sea levels fluctuated, so it’s not necessary to postulate local flooding of the catastrophic variety.
Supposing this were true (it isn’t, but let’s pretend), then it would be just as big a puzzle for the flood “model” as for mainstream geology. Fluid dynamics tend to the chaotic, and a global flood occurring in such a ridiculously short timescale even more so. Given such a flood, one would actually expect fossil skeletons to be arranged higglety-pigglety.
Another imaginary creationist “fact”. Generally one can’t identify the species that made a track from the track alone – one has to look at the fossil fauna from the same or contemporary strata and then infer the most likely candidate (e.g., particularly large theropod prints from the late Cretaceous in North America? Probably a T. rex). And even then, one can often only say “the track was made by an animal like such-and-such”. I.e., identifying tracks is not something one can do independently of one’s knowledge of what the available candidates are, and the available candidates are those preserved in the same or surrounding layers. So your claim makes precious little sense.
More importantly, the fact that surface features like animal tracks are found throughout the geological column is itself a conclusive falsification of the flood “hypothesis”. These are not features that could have formed underwater in conditions of rapid and chaotic deposition. I can wander into Cambridge University’s Sedgwick Museum any day of the week and see terrestrial surface features like cracked sun-dried mud and the imprints of rain-drops dating from the Permian. Any semi-comprehensive geological museum has materials like these – geological specimens that are completely incompatible with a global flood.
One thing that hasn’t been mentioned- but completely invalidates the idea that a single flood is responsible for all the sedimentary strata are angular nconformities.
How can a flood that took a year account for layers of rock that were deposited, solidified, uplifted, tilted, eroded- and then had another layer of rock deposited on top? This makes absolutely no sense in this context- but if we allow the world to be millions of years old this kind of thing is expected.
I’d just like to interrupt to point out for the record that this was one big-ass motherfucking snake!!!!
Please, carry on now with the scholarly discussion of biblical-flood geology. *eyes rolling almost painfully*
Jebus, AC didn’t appear until around post #100, and here we are approaching 600 due to his denseness. Sigh.
The ridiculously pathetic “all fossils in same orientation” assertion didn’t just bother me for its brain-exploding stupidity, but because after thinking about it, it seemed to me that I had seen something like it here on Pharyngula before. So I finally broke down and Googled, and found this hilarious gem:
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2007/09/if_youve_ever_been_tempted_to.php
( see also funny comments )
I knew that the flood proponents were deeply ignorant — for example, why are terrestrial layers ever found on top of marine ones, such as the Hell Creek Formation (the one with Tyrannosaurus in it) on top of the Bearpaw Formation? And why is that sometimes repeated several times over? And why do phenomena like fining-upward exist? Why is that repeated (as I’ve seen with my own eyes — several storm-induced layers on top of each other)? Why do things like limestone or salt or gypsum deposits exist at fucking all?
But I didn’t know that they make stuff up, too — and such ridiculous stuff! All body and trace fossils pointing in the same direction — I’ve seen the disproof of this with my own eyes! MORONS!!!
Miscellanea:
— Back in comment 161 — that’s right: one hundred sixty-one –, I told Alan to read this and come back. He didn’t read it, but came back anyway. I conclude he’s afraid he could learn something! Shame on him.
— Oil doesn’t require ocean floors to form, and it doesn’t necessarily stay where it forms. Heat and pressure can make it go elsewhere. Find me Triassic ocean floor in the Atlantic, and then we can talk about problems with plate tectonics.
— Creationists copying & pasting from AiG, and then complaining when other people copy & paste from the Index of Creationist Claims, are among the dumbest of hypocrites.
— Yes, global catastrophes do happen. Plural. There’s the Ediacaran-Cambrian boundary mass extinction, the Late Ordovician mass extinction, the Frasnian-Famennian boundary mass extinction, the Devonian-Carboniferous (Famennian-Tournaisian) boundary mass extinction, the Permian-Triassic boundary mass extinction (the biggest of all), the Olenekian-Induan boundary mass extinction, the Triassic-Jurassic boundary mass extinction, the Early-Middle Jurassic boundary mass extinction, the (roughly) Jurassic-Cretaceous boundary mass extinction, the Aptian-Albian boundary mass extinction, the Cenomanian-Turonian boundary mass extinction, the Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary mass extinction, the Eocene-Oligocene boundary mass extinction, the middle Miocene mass extinction, and so on… Some places, like Gubbio in Italy, preserve two or more of these on top of each other in the same section.
Alan and RogerS, you believe that everyone is just as ignorant as you. You believe that any piece of knowledge that you don’t have does not exist. You deny Rumsfeld’s “unknown unknowns”.
You are wrong.
Bigtime.
Thanks Owlmirror. I did not need to know you did a variation on a Cold War era Yakof Smirnoff joke.
But I have a question to ask of the flood proponents. They do know that the Earth is a spheroid? Are the footprints all running parallel to each other or all they running from one point or running towards a point. That statements makes no sense at all.
Of both, that is. I’ve seen dinosaur and pterosaur tracks going in all directions, and I’ve seen all manner of bones (mostly, but not limited to, Metoposaurus skulls) lying every which way in the ground.
I Saw Jesus in a WD Hard Drive
[I would like to share a recent “event” in my life with all of you]
The ice storm had knocked out our power for 14 hours and I had momentary line losses days after power was restored. The server power supply fizzled which was easy to replace. These events got me stirred toward better security, wanting more than the internal server back-up drive on which my engineering services livelihood depended. So I dig out the ol’ reliable 250 GB Maxtor portable DH. The IT tech that set up my server provided two simple 2-click icon programs to run, one to “Sync Server to Maxtor” & the other vise-versa. Being too early to call my tech, I thought surely “Sync Server to Maxtor” is the right choice and ran it (unfortunately target was 1’st, source 2’nd). To my dismay, only outdated file folders appeared on the server. Heck, ran the wrong one! At that point, all concerns with an early morning call to the IT were gone. He informed me a system restore would not work, all files were not deleted but written over and non-retrievable. It was like being in the surgery waiting room and your head flushes as you see an unenthusiastic doctor approaching with bad news. We then checked the (F:) WD Hard Drive, the auto-backup had worked last night, I was recognizing recent work and folders!!! Files were soon streaming back in, work that morning was retrieved from e-mail attachments in the outlook sent box. In short time, I was fully restored, business saved, still employed.
Next morning had an unusual “text” page requiring an F4 command. Windows booted but I sensed a problem. Soon the IT tech was remotely back on and he traced it back to the (F:), sectors going out were scrolling down the screen, the WD Hard Drive was dying before my eyes! It was replaced next day, with a larger drive with more memory, pulled a noisy fan, and at last I was finally in the clear, fully running.
Conclusion:
Luke 24:24 (KJV)
“And certain of them which were with us went to the sepulchre, and found it even so as the women had said: but him they saw not.”
Later I began to reflect on all the problems and stress I went through and reality began to hit hard. I realized how my current life and future was literally in the balance, it could have went either way. I messed up, took the wrong path, with one stroke of the finger I took a huge risk and lost big, really big. I thought how for years the backup WD Hard Drive was always there, quietly running in the background, unnoticed, there, but appearing useless, it performing no realized benefit or interface to my life. Considering how long it lasted was unimpressive; it may have died prematurely. However, when ALL MY ATTENTION was now focused on it, when my life’s past, present, and future were literally on the line, it came through for me BIG TIME, at the very end. It had fulfilled its purpose, it hanged on to the very end, it completed the task intended by the system designer. It restored to me all I had foolishly risked and lost. It “wrote over” my mistake and made it new again, and in this traumatic experience I am humbled, thankful, and saw a type of Jesus Christ.
I write this to you because I hope in the totality of your own life’s journey, it will not be said of you as it is said in Luke above, “but him they saw not”.
Yawn, a post full of nothing by RogerS, but then what can one expect from the religiously deluded. Boring Roger. Your god doesn’t exist, and your bible is a work of fiction. Get with the program or go away.
RogerS wrote:
Was there a point in there somewhere? Because it appears to be nothing more than a poorly-written anecdote with no relevance to, well, anything – other than advice on buying decent hardware.
RogerS could really do with some formatting training. It’s not that hard to learn some appropriate HTML tags.
RogerS @593 – are you serious????
Proof of god by software? When luke quotes harddrives god protects and recommended restore software, I’ll be impressed – until then “but him, they saw not”
Another stupid proof of god through his complete lack of presence or verifiable effect. Anyway, wouldn’t it be your god that caused the icestorm and drive failure?
Of course, to send the ice storm to destroy the drive to then show his recovery prowess would then destroy your whole blind faith argument by proving his existence. See how all this crap just tumbles down on your head?
Heartfelt, but utterly, completely meaningless.
What does hard drive technology of any sort, working or not, have to do with anything being discussed here?
I mean, seriously, we’re trying to explain the validity of the fossil record; the correctness of palaeontology, geology and biology; the reality of the genuine evidence for evolution and the billions-of-years-old earth and universe; in some ways, the proper way to do science itself…
What does that personal anecdote have anything to do with anything?
Gah!
Aren’t religitards illogical. Ice storm and HD failure. Both have natural explanations, but only in the godbesotted deluded mind does such natural occurrences become acts of god. Actually, the acts were telling RogerS to shut up and stay home, but he goes against the wishes of his god by posting here. Tsk tsk.
Alan:
I’m telling you many people paid a lot money to have university professors give them head massages
I must have missed that when I was there.
Is it more to get the happy ending?
Jadehawk: Sorry about my use of “hydrologic sorting”. I should have realized that your understanding of the phrase encompasses the type of sorting that is accomplished by water of proportions and velocities that you are familiar with. I was thinking of sorting from water proportions and velocities that matched my global flood model, the one you deny even happened. How would the soil & rock distribution look after a global flood? The origins of oil and coal deposits are believed by both creationists (& non-creationists) to be from compressed plant and animal fauna which is why they are often referred to as “fossil fuels”. A coal mine can be almost 1 mile deep but this depth is limited only by the practicality of retrieving the coal. The deepest oil well is about 7.5 miles in Russia but the oil could be deeper as argued for coal. These evidences are easily supported by the Biblical flood where the highest mountain was covered by 15 cubits (22.5 feet) of water. The height of the highest mountain cannot be known for sure since the flood itself would have changed the geography to what we have today. Evolutionists and uniformitarianists are forced to invent alternate theories in order to explain the presence of coal and oil at great depths. How do plants and animals of catastrophic proportions get buried this deep? Wikipedia states: “Over geological time, this organic matter, mixed with mud, is buried under heavy layers of sediment.” “Buried under heavy layers of sediment” sounds like the Biblical account but how does this happen without a flood? A lot of “little” floods? On land, when plants and animals die they decompose and turn into humus, not coal. Do local floods bury huge quantities of plants and animals in suitable quantities and depths for forming coal? I have never witnessed this phenomenon in my life time. I saw videos and photos of the recent 2004 tsunami in Indonesia but never saw such evidences. Do we need a bigger flood? In the oceans, when sea fauna dies, it too decomposes and leaves little behind. How many times have we seen nature shows which allow us to see for ourselves that the ocean depths are void of mounds of dead organic sea life accumulating for the future production of “coal”? Did bigger catastrophic tsunamis of long ago provide the mechanism?
If floods and catastrophes are needed to explain what the Bible has already stated, then why create another theory? Answer: The Biblical account must be rejected for its account of God and miracles. Unfortunately for evolutionists, another “leader” must be created with miracles that are no less improbable. Whether the “leader” is one’s self or another is debated by many. I say it is one’s self which is the “ultimate” violation of Christ’s teachings.
Luke 9:23-24 And he said to them all, If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow me. For whosoever will save his life shall lose it: but whosoever will lose his life for my sake, the same shall save it.
So, it’s all a matter of what one WANTS to “believe”. Some say, “No! I am only looking at the evidences and forming my opinions from them!” This is impossible. One must have a pre-conception before he can evaluate any evidence. A person examining fossilized bones and deciding to organize his discoveries according to color, size, and proximity shows that he holds the “belief” that color, size and proximity are the key qualitative values for organizing his discoveries. Imagine a person with no prejudices (i.e. “pre” & “judge”). Their mind is a “clean slate”. Ask that person to organize a discordant number of fossil discoveries from animals, humans, plants, extinct species, etc. When he is finished, ask him how the evidences weigh on his “beliefs” concerning his origins. Put yourself in his position. What is your CHOICE of criteria for organization? Your CHOICE will determine everything. If you still claim yourself free of prejudices before looking at the evidences, then I say you must throw everything into one big box with no order and conclude nothing. You have a CHOICE. What do you choose to BELIEVE?
All of our reasoning ends in surrender to feeling. – Blaise Pascal
Still no real peer reviewed scientific evidence from AC. Alan, your bible is a work of fiction, and is not considered reliable for anything. So quoting from it just shows how stupid you are. Yawn.
You need to work on your formatting too Alan. Paragraphs are imperative in making a readable text.
Alan,
1) Show physical evidence that your god exists. An eternally burning bush would be nice. Failure to prove god destroys all your arguments to date.
2) Then show your bible is historically accurate. Failure to do so with positive evidence means the bible is a work of fiction.
3) Now, you can use the bible to back something up. Until then, you have nothing with god and the bible.
#593 filed away under “confirmation bias”. FFS, “Jesus on a Toast” is more convincing.
#601 filed under “failure to comprehend large timescales”
I “believe” I’ll be having dinner in a little while.
actually, not even that is true. I have evidence that I will be having dinner in a little while. I guess that means I believe nothing.
The problem is that the bible doesn’t explain anything that correlates with observations of the natural world. It’s not that God and miracles are rejected, it’s that what is written simply doesn’t match up with what we’ve found. The cosmological and geological time scales that scientists are dealing with are in the billions, and many of those scientists believe in a deity. By positing a 6,000 year old earth, you are positing that the sciences of: cosmology, astronomy, nuclear physics, geology, palaeontology, and genetics, are not only wrong but wrong by a factor of millions. And for what Alan? For a tale with a talking snake.
If you think the millions of scientists who have worked on ageing the earth an the universe in the last century are all so inept at their job, surely you can demonstrate just how they are all so inept. Instead you just talk about salvation and quote Luke at us. Do some science damn it!
Dude.
If you actually —ing well cared about —ing sediment deposition, you could —ing well go to a —ing geology website and do the —ing research on sediment deposition. Or you could maybe pick up a —ing book. Or even continue reading —ing Wikipedia.
The fact that you don’t do any such thing but instead come here and post your —ing whiny bafflement combined with —ing religious presuppostionialist garbage and —ing scriptural glurge demonstrates that you don’t give a —ing shit about geology and how it actually works.
You pathetic infantile —ing μωρός.
AC @ 601
filed under “failure to prove…er”, fuckit – FAIL
AC’s post demonstrates a terrible knowledge of any of the sciences. Coal made by tsunami? Hey, maybe all those oil forming algae used “flagella” to swim to their god-mandated resting place. And they used convergent eyes to see the light?
Scripture as geology just fails, fails, fails.
he doesn’t just fail at the basic sciences, he fails at the derivative sciences as well. he even fails agriculture, if he doesn’t understand such basics as creation of topsoil
What do I choose to BELIEVE? I choose to believe the scientists who actually work on questions of astronomy and geology. I choose to believe the nuclear physicists. I choose to believe the palaeontologists, geneticists and biologists. I choose to believe them all because they have the evidence behind them and have done actual science. I choose to believe that one person reading an old book of mythology is going to have a far worse grasp on reality than one who decides what to believe based on the evidence. I choose to believe that God is as much a fairy tale as Zeus, Thor, Ra or Brahman. I choose to believe this based on the sheer number of gods that have been invented by different cultures and I find Yahweh no different.
I choose to believe that Alan Clarke is hurting the image of Christianity by proclaiming he knows better than the entire scientific community, that he makes the bible look foolish by taking the wrong meaning out of the obviously allegorical tales. Quite simply, I choose to believe that testing ones ideas is the only way to validate ones ideas, so Alan Clarke is full of shit until he can demonstrate his wacky ideas on light transmission and radiometric decay.
Hey, how about the “preconception” that reality isn’t a big —ing lie? How about that “preconception”, huh? Is that too big of a “preconception” to have?
How about the “preconception” that people who examine empirical —ing reality with the “preconception” that reality isn’t a big —ing lie and honestly record what they find can then have their findings used as a basis to perform more examinations of empirical —ing reality with the “preconception” that reality isn’t a big —ing lie? Is that too much to —ing ask?
For —’s sake.
Alan, you began trying to impress us with your knowledge of the bible and got thrashed by Owlmirror. Now you’re cutting and pasting anti-science lies in a vain attempt to support your baseless, archaic superstition.
Some advice: stop wasting your time and ours. You’re taking a beating from people who don’t cut and paste but who know the science to counter the lies of AIG and TDI. Once again, when you go up against people who have studied the topics first-hand, cutting-and-pasting from already-debunked sources isn’t good enough.
Nerd of Redhead: You have requested of me to:
1) show physical evidence of my God.
2) show the Bible is historically accurate.
Your “requesting” is likened to a deadbeat asking Obama to send a welfare check. I gave you some tools so you could find him for yourself, but you refused to work as has everyone else as far as I can tell. So you’re sitting in the same squalor. Thus far, your pursuit of “science” has only landed you in front of a computer, incessantly checking a blog to make sure no one has sufficiently discounted your current belief system. Science hasn’t gotten you the peace you’re looking for. Neither will asking God to perform a miracle do you any good. It’s all been tried before and gotten people nowhere. I’m not asking you to “believe” anything because you don’t have the ability to manufacture “belief”. What you do have is the ability to realize your hate for some people only hurts yourself and not the person who is unaware that you are “hating” them. We’ve heard stories of this from ex POW’s. They were miserable for what happened to them because they couldn’t stop hating the person who tortured them. I was beaten by some Russian thugs once to the point I thought I might die. After it was over, I couldn’t turn my brain off on imagining how I wish I could make their lives miserable. I daydreamed about 20 different scenarios on how I would “fix” them. Mike Tyson was my friend, I built a pit with punji stakes, I trapped them in a cylindrical building with slowly rising water, etc. All of my mental exercises produced nothing to provide satisfaction. You are in the same fix. All of your mental exercises are contained within you. Until you can say to God, “I give up hating people. I’m in as much sin as the ones I’m accusing. God, reveal yourself to me in a way that will free me from this directionless life. Forgive me of my sins and come into my life.” If you say you have no SIN, then you’re not ready. You may need to go a little lower before the realization hits you. God is indeed a loving God, but he is also a God of justice and can’t allow you to slip into his kingdom while in your current state. There is no “canned” system for finding your maker. Every Christian has a different story. No two are the same. Who knows? You could be the next Christian world leader. I attribute knowing Jesus Christ to my happiness and well-adjustedness. I know the difference between “blissful ignorance” and “blissful knowledge”.
1Cor 1:18-23 For the preaching of the cross is to them that perish foolishness; but unto us which are saved it is the power of God. For it is written, I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and will bring to nothing the understanding of the prudent. Where [is] the wise? where [is] the scribe? where [is] the disputer of this world? hath not God made foolish the wisdom of this world? 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. For the Jews require a sign, and the Greeks seek after wisdom: But we preach Christ crucified, unto the Jews a stumblingblock, and unto the Greeks foolishness.
filed under “failure to prove…er”, fuckit – FAIL
LOL
sometimes even poking them with a stick gets just too boring and repetitive.
:p
#615 filed under “projection” and “proselytizing”
btw, proselytizing is a bannable offense on this blog.
Do you even know why people are on this blog? Or do you just find making baseless assumptions a good enough descriptor for reality?
Alan’s post #615 can now add psychology and sociology to the list of topics in which he rates an epic FAIL.
What don’t you suck at, Alan?
I am having visions of Pete Rooke. God is an abused wife, Nerd refuses to work and we all have been beaten by Russian thugs and dream of revenge. I guess bad analogies are the only tools one can use when one has no working knowledge.
I guess if he can put it on us for being on this blog, then what is he doing preaching on here? Surely the same charge of lacking inner contentment can be thrown at him by his arguing on here.
I do pity Christians like Alan Clarke*, since he’s obviously suffering from serious doubts about his religion – as would anyone who actually stops to think about it; most, however, don’t – and he’s here trying to find some crack, some flaw into which he can cram his god-belief in such a way that he can convince himself that the god of his religion actually exists.
So he comes here trying to impress us with his second-rate biblical knowledge – like the most arrogant and ignorant theists, he has no idea that there are atheists with far more knowledge of scripture than many of his people – and gets creamed. Then he tries to refute actual science by cutting and pasting from AIG and TDI, and gets his ass handed to him by actual scientists.
All he’s got left now are analogies so lame that even Pete Rooke wouldn’t touch them with the two femurs of his favourite decomposed grandmother tied together with a thong made from a leprous howlers monkey’s skin.
You’re going to love atheism once you get there Alan. It’s so much simpler, and you need not lie to yourself anymore.
*Okay, that’s not true – I pity all of them, not just those like Alan Clarke.
Still ignoring what I wrote @#442, eh? Fine, be that way.
Funny, your religion has got you in exactly the same place.
Of course not, because a God that does not exist cannot perform miracles. Not even little tiny ones.
Who hates who, I wonder?
You wrote, rather smugly, about the bicyclist getting wrapped around a truck axle, and all of those other deaths. Not a particularly loving anecdote, I think.
Oh, really? Assuming it’s true, and assuming you were entirely innocent, I offer my condolences.
You don’t sound particularly happy or well-adjusted. Why would you need your “therapy”, as you posted @#287, if you’re so happy? Why does your “well-adjusted” life require gloating over the miserable and painful deaths of those who didn’t believe the same thing you do?
Why are you here, if you’re in such great shape?
Dude.
That’s one of the passages in the bible that I use to show that God and science are not compatible.
It says, clearly, and unapologetically, even smugly, that God deliberately does things deceptively; that God chooses to essentially lie to people; it says that God even does things so as to essentially lie to his allegedly chosen people.
It is utterly anti-intellectual. It says “give up” to anyone who tries using intelligence and reason to understand either the world or God. It says “God hates everyone but us” with a contempuous sneer at everyone else in the world.
You can believe in a God who does that, if it makes you happy. But don’t think you’re going to convince us that your God is loving, powerful and knowing, when he pulls that sort of cruel trick.
And don’t think you’re going to convince us that your God has anything truthful to say about the world and how the world works.
Alan, regarding your post @ #601 and the assumptions scientists must make in order to so foolishly see evidence that contradicts the biblical account:
Would you include Galileo and Giordano Bruno with those scientists? I’m assuming they’re as wrong as Darwin, Arthur Holmes, and all of us wicked evolutionists.
Alan, don’t talk about preconceptions tarnishing observation. You’re the one that will never change their view no matter how much evidence they are confronted with. Science is littered with the corpses of discarded hypotheses and failed or inadequate explanations. You won’t even look at the links you’ve been offered. Every time you’ve been backed into a corner of your ignorance, you jump onto something new and change the subject. Your precious faith is so weak, or your need for it’s false comfort so desperate that you won’t allow the smallest challenge to it.
Yes, Alan. Gods must be challenged and holy words questioned. If man hadn’t done so from his very beginnings, we would have never left the caves and achieved the accomplishments that led to the Israelites and their occupation by the Romans, your precious Jesus, the Bible, the Church, Martin Luther, and Answers in Genesis. Done your way, Alan, you’d live in a cave or as a nomadic hunter, and your perception of the world and how you spent your short life would be dictated by the shaman. Be grateful for scientists questioning past assumptions and examining our surroundings critically, it’s what gives you the opportunity to be a christian fundie and to spew your ignorance across the internet where it can piss off rational people all over the world.
Maybe Dawkins line about cultural relativism needs to be updated for the internet.
“Show me a cultural relativist on a computer and I’ll show you a hypocrite. The computer is built according to scientific principals it works. It performs billions of calculations a second with no errors. Computers built to tribal or mythological specifications don’t.”
Well, duh. Plate tectonics explains vertical movements, too. Sometimes some land areas are lifted and erode, others sink and have sediment swept in over the millions of years. Whether they are lifted, sink, or neither depends on how close they are to midocean ridges and subduction zones and on how active those are; it’s all connected.
Now a question for you. Why didn’t the Flood fill in the oceans? Why are these thick sediment layers on the continents and not on the oceanic crust?!?
(Is it just because you don’t even know the difference between continental and oceanic crust?)
More on the Flood and the innumerable miracles it would have required here. Do NOT come back before you have read that page, and yes, I know it is long.
And indeed, there is no coal on or under the ocean floor, moron. Coal is exclusively found above continental crust.
That’s because it consists of moors and mangrove swamps that were slowly covered by advancing deltas and the like.
Why do you act as if you actually knew anything?
Not all at once and overnight, moron!
(Yes, I am losing my patience, in case you wonder.)
Yes, but what’s important is that scientists are capable of recognizing when a preconception of theirs contradicts the evidence, and that they then proceed to throw that preconceptions on the trash heap and try another.
Creationists, on the other hand, never let go of their preconception. They stick to it, no matter how blatantly incompatible with reality it turns out to be.
Don’t pretend to be a postmodernist. You agree with us that there is such a thing as reality out there, and there is such a thing as a wrong statement.
That’s something he was wrong about. :-|
LOL! Best Freudian typo ever. Or was it deliberate? :-)
Excuse me… who are we hating?
Seriously. I have no idea what you mean. Please explain.
What peace are we looking for, and what has science got to do with peace in the first place?
Again, this is a completely serious question.
Are you maybe projecting, as suggested by comments 622 and 623? Are you looking for whatever you mean by peace, have failed to find it, and now imagine everyone else must have failed, too?
But don’t answer any of these questions yet. First click on the link I’ve given and read the whole page.
And don’t forget to do the same with the link in comment 161.
Oh yeah. I had the whole sentence in the plural, then changed it to the singular, and overlooked this instance.
Now I wish you lots of fun reading, Alan.
Alan, your vain attempt to sidestep proof for god and the bible simply says you cannot face the prospect you are wrong in your belief. Until you prove yourself right by showing physical evidence for your imaginary god that passes muster with scientists, magicians, and professional debunkers, you have already lost any argument. So you may as well go away. We know you are a liar and bullshitter. Once you prove god, then you need to prove the bible is historically correct before quoting it. Again, all you look like is a lying weasel by dodging these basic proofs.
Kel’s statement illustrates a fundamental misunderstanding between two parties on the meaning of the word “evidence”. In a court of law, “evidence” may be a gun, a letter of confession, a tape recording, etc. None of these in themselves convict a person of a crime. In the debate on man’s origins, what are the “evidences”? Fossils, radiometric dating results, planets, physical laws, living things, geologic stratum, etc. Both parties have the same “evidences”, but both disagree on how to in interpret them. I don’t discount that evolution/uniformitarian theory has continuity and supportive arguments for every detail, but I demonstrated earlier in the “flapping leaves produce wind” analogy how an opposing interpretation can have the same features. The analogy has limitations (as all analogies do), but it illustrated the “seeming harmony” in a false interpretation. O. J. Simpson was made to look guilty by Mark Furman who planted false evidences of blood because of his hate for blacks. A bloody leather glove wouldn’t fit O.J.’s hand and he was disabled by a bad leg. The ideas have supporting continuity. When the number of evidences increases, the number of needful interpretations increases likewise. If O. J.’s case required interpretation of the same number of evidences that our planet and universe offers, I suppose the trial would still be happening. Such is the case with the evolution/creation debate. The trial is not completed because we continually become aware of new “evidences”. Who is doing the “science”? The greater number is undoubtedly the evolutionists because that’s where the money is. Creationists can view the evidences such as expensive Hubble images but they can’t control where the telescope is directed. The same non-influential, non-consequential observers stood by haplessly as the elite took control of O.J.’s trial. Potential profits opened the doors of an otherwise closed courtroom and the media thrived for a full year on advertising revenues.
“Science” is adulterated similarly with its elitist majority.
Can the “scientific” elite who control what is taught, funded, and advertised be wrong? My intuition was that O. J. was guilty but the “majority”, the group with the money, the incumbent judiciary, and a jury that was a “true” cross-section of our moral society, prevailed and Simpson was declared innocent. Was O.J. helped by the evidences or by the interpretation of the evidences? At the time, I thought to myself, “The system exonerated him but he can’t fool God. His “life” will be like a prison even though he walks free.” Perhaps my intuition wasn’t so good and I should stop prognosticating the future for evolutionary theory. In the meantime, the evidences keep coming in. What’s O.J. up to now? What’s that “false witness” Mark Furman doing now? What’s the latest science news?
How about yesterday’s news which contains the following excerpt:
“So finding species at both ends of the Earth — some of which don’t have a known connection in between — raises a whole bunch of evolutionary questions…” – (Russ Hopcroft – University of Alaska Fairbanks plankton ecologist)
“Raises evolutionary questions” does not mean “raises questions about whether evolution happened” you dimwit. Two sentences later from the same article you quoted:
Would it be more true in boldface?
False equivalence
The way scientists interpret the data is far more discretionary and self checking compared to how creationists deal with it. Creationist are always looking to prove the bible true at the cost of following the evidence where it leads. Scientists are always willing to change a theory provided the evidence is strong enough and leads them in a different direction.
You are being dishonest when you claim that creationists and scientists just “interpret the evidence differently”.
They interpret it differently because the methods are not equal. Creationist are working backwards from the bible. Never veering from the course no matter how strong the evidence is against them. They do no use the scientific method and they are demonstratively guilty of denying, obfuscating and ignoring evidence when it is found.
Scientist modify and update their knowledge according to the evidence, not in spite of it.
By the way, while this is indeed interesting news, the article itself is a good example of why science should not be done by press release. “Rewriting the textbooks” is purest hyperbole–despite the thousands of species found in these surveys, the tropical oceans are nevertheless far, far more diverse. (see the article for context).
Alan, Alan, Alan…sigh… You linked to a google page, not the article.
Nice quotemining. Here is all of Russ Hopcroft’s statement.
CBC
There is no doubting of evolution here. Just how this could have happened.
Alan Clarke, how fucking stupid do you think we are?
Alan thinks OJ is innocent? I guess we can add forensics and law to the things Alan doesn’t understand.
also court evidence != scientific evidence. but even in court, the eyewitness account is considered the least reliable form of evidence(especially when it’s happening under the kind of stress you’re advocating as the right time to look for god), i.e. your “personal” experience of god would not stand in court as evidence of god.
Alan, go read at last. Go read, and then come back, in this order.
What good is possibly supposed to come out of you discussing things that you do not understand???
Untrue. The creationists don’t know that most of the evidence even exists.
Which is precisely why you should go read the two pages I’ve pointed you to.
For crying out loud, you didn’t even know that terrestrial sediments occur on top of marine sediments in many places!
What, then, is the force that makes the leaves flap?
You have introduced an extra entity that you need to account for.
Yes, I am an elitist. I like my elite so much that I believe everyone should belong to it.
Hey, that requires nothing more than education!
That leaves two possibilities, Alan.
Either you are too stupid to read two more sentences.
Or you are a quote-miner — you are dishonest — you are, wait for it, an asshole.
I lack the evidence to decide between these hypotheses, and am fully prepared to choose the former because, all else being equal, it’s not parsimonious to invoke malice where stupidity would suffice. Unfortunately, however, both possibilities are not exactly flattery.
Hey, he’s a creationist. He honestly believes that everyone is at least as stupid — or at least ignorant — as he is.
So sorry — three more sentences.
Personal experiances with god are now easily understood.
V.S. Ramachandran – Beyond Belief 2006
Ramachandran, The Temporal Lobes and God
(If these don’t work chalk it up to my hillbilly computer skills.)
Obviously, the answers are A) Noah and B) Big honking boat.
[/snark]
Speaking of unanswered questions, Alan…
What about your god’s failed prophecies about Babylon, Tyre and Damascus? (Your pic of Babylon isn’t sufficient for me, Alan. But, show me the fossilized dragon and satyr remains in it’s ruins, and I’ll give that one to you.)
David M @#636, re Alan Clarke:
I am certain that that is the case. He repeatedly and proudly asserts that God lies to humans. Why should he be more honest than God?
“evidences” is not a word.
“specie” is not a word.
Anyone using these non-words can safely be assumed to not know what he or she is talking about.
That is all.
With regards to the common lament “Why should I do your homework for you,” I have to wonder what the correlation is between adults who believe in creationism and adults that had their homework done by the “nerds” in school.
Alan the armchair psychologist:
“So you’re sitting in the same squalor.”
Squalor, eh? You mean, sitting on this computer chair interacting with people thousands of miles away, with a huge wealth of information at my fingertips, not shivering from cold because I’m in an insulated apartment building, nor from vitamin deficiency because of my modern diet, nor from infectious disease because I’ve been vaccinated against many of them?
Reg: Okay, but apart from all that, what has science ever done for me?
“Thus far, your pursuit of “science” has only landed you in front of a computer, incessantly checking a blog to make sure no one has sufficiently discounted your current belief system.”
Perhaps someone can relate to you the fable of the pot and the kettle. It’s not from the Bible, but I think it imparts some nice lessons all the same.
“Science hasn’t gotten you the peace you’re looking for.”
I’m calm, Dude. I’m calm.
“What you do have is the ability to realize your hate for some people only hurts yourself and not the person who is unaware that you are “hating” them.”
Who’s hating? What you see as “hate” is merely the exasperation any adult would feel if they were trying to fix a car and some neighbor kid kept getting in the way and trying to tell him to fix it by putting a rocket engine on.
BigDumbChimpWhoParadesAroundLikeaHumanLookWhatEvolutionHathWrought!:
“The way scientists interpret the data is far more discretionary and self checking compared to how creationists deal with it. ”
Yeahbut…scientists are still operating on the ASSUMPTION that up is not down and black is not white and there is no cosmic trickster moving everything around when we’re not looking. It’s all in what you BELIEVE, man.
In science, evidence means empirically derived fact, and that’s what I’m talking about. Are you going to show the facts are wrong, go ahead!
Like I said, we’ve shown the speed of light is constant, and through a variety of standard candles we’ve been able to measure galaxies millions and even billions of light years away. That ages the universe in the billions of years. Show me I’m wrong.
Like I said, we can see the radiometric decay of certain materials and show empirically that decay always sticks to a certain formula. From that we can measure the age of the earth through a variety of techniques all with a different half-life that also correspond to relative dating techniques. Show me I’m wrong.
We can show through the geological strata that there is a gradual emergence of life, the first evidence of single cellular life around 3.8 billion years ago, the first multicellular life around 700 million years ago, and a gradual emergence and change in life where we have found many transitional form including some big ones like fish to amphibian and reptile to mammal. Show me I’m wrong.
We can see in the genetic code markers of common descent, ERV markers that sit not only on our genome but in the genome of chimpanzees as well. We see a fused chromosome in our genome. We have inactive genes and vestigial organs. Just like other species too. Show me I’m wrong.
Through dendochronology, we can date the earth to at least 10,000 years. Through ice cores, it’s about 27,000. That’s already putting the earth thousands of years past your biblical estimate. Show me I’m wrong.
What you are doing is false equivalence, it’s not a matter of cultural relativity. Quite simply the science works and if you think it’s wrong then you are welcome to demonstrate empirically that fact. I await your tests, because that’s what science is all about. It’s not looking at evidence and going “that supports X,” we see it as supporting X then think of ways to falsify that position and put it under rigorous testing. That’s what sets science apart from your deluded fantasy, and if you think that sitting in an armchair and reading the bible is the equivalent to the millions of scientists who have spent decades researching the evidence and furthering mankind then you are truly deluded. Quite simply, put up or shut up. Do a fucking experiment instead of talking out of your arse!
More like 2100 million years ago. But that doesn’t matter, because multicellularity evolved several times independently. The oldest fossils of (multicellular) animals are roughly 700 million years old, or maybe twice that (the “worm traces” of Chorat in India).
No, 800,000 last time I checked. Greenland alone reaches back to 250,000.
However, good that you remind me of that. How can a YEC possibly deny the yearly layers in an ice core? Noah’s Flood my ass!
And, in many cases, in many other animals too: all primates, all “glimates”, all placentals, all mammals, all limbed vertebrates, all sarcopterygians, and so on…
Thanks for the fact checking there David. I can see where I got the 700 million date from, but i have no idea where the hell I pulled out 27,000 for the ice core ageing.
Maybe it happened in the same way as they think the geological column was made. Sequential freezing of layers of ice… of course that defies all known physics, but then again so does everything else they say.
http://www.galenfrysinger.com/tyre.htm
yeah. and if I show you the ruins of the Capitol, that’ll be proof that Rome no longer exists?
your straws are getting flimsier. go away.
Alan Clarke, just what is the point of those travel photos?
HAS TYRE BEEN REBUILT, THUS DISPROVING THE BIBLE?
Alan: http://www.galenfrysinger.com/tyre.htm
Look who’s “hand-waving”. The picture says it all. If someone killed your family, burnt down your house, and erected THEIR house in its place, would you argue that you prevailed? If tourists came by to gawk at the ruins of your burnt house, would you argue that you prevailed because someone else’s house(s) stand nearby your former?
Ezekiel 26:4 And they shall destroy the walls of Tyrus, and break down her towers: I will also scrape her dust from her, and make her like the top of a rock.
Read for yourself from Wikipedia and notice that “Tyre” was an island separated from the mainland district “Ushu” until Alexander the Great built a causeway to the island of Tyre when he seiged it. The district on the mainland was not even called “Tyre”. It was called “Ushu”. So what does the original “Tyre” look like today? I provided the link which shows nothing but ruins for tourists to stare at. What does the mainland “Ushu” look like today? Ushu will be of little value to you if your goal is to disprove the Bible since the Bible says nothing about Ushu. The prophecy was made against the inhabitants of Tyre which is that destroyed area sticking into the sea. Your blurry Google satellite map failed to show that the structures are nothing more than ruins.
Wikipedia – Tyre, Lebanon:
Tyre was not only separated from the mainland by water but by culture. Wikipedia states: “Josephus even records them fighting against each other…” If you attempt to expand the original Tyre to include areas that were not originally Tyre, such as Ushu, then I suppose you’ll have the consolation that Babylon, New York is proof that ancient Babylon is thriving today also.
Will Tyre ever be rebuilt? I don’t have to “stretch” anything to prove my point. Keep on reading Wikipedia:
Lame.
Damascus, Alan. Damascus. I’m curious to see what weaseling you attempt about a city continuously inhabited since a few thousand years before you think the world was created.
Ooh! And maybe some pretty pictures too! Please!
eh. By that logic, Dresden doesn’t exist either. Neither does Athens, or Rome, or Carthage, or any other Ancient City sacked and destroyed at some point, for that matter.
High wordage weaseling. I was right. Now you need to listen to everything I say, since I’m obviously a prophet!
If you mean “veracity” you should learn to spell it. Voracity is something entirely different and makes an amusing mess of the sentence.
Heck, the Sumerians had had glue and beer for a thousand years prior to when Alan thinks the world was created. You’d think they’d have noticed that they hadn’t been created yet – but then again, it might have been really good beer…
and really good glue…
Alan, you came back without reading the pages I gave you to read. Shame on you once again. Go read at last.
And besides, do look up what “voracity” and “veracity” mean. It’s hilarious!
LOL!
ROTFLMAO!
Inhabited? Hah. Jericho has city walls that are older than the YEC world! And Çatalhöyük… but I digress.
Alan, you god doesn’t exist and your bible is a work of fiction. It is up to you to prove that both god exists and the bible is historically accurate. Your failure to do so to date says you are a liar an and bullshitter. At this stage, everything you say is considered a lie.
Evidently you still haven’t watch The Bibles Buried Secrets, which indicates you are interested in a dialog, but merely want to proselytize. That is crime against Pharyngula. Discussions of god and religion are fine, but not you just preaching, which is what you are doing. Either make this a true dialog or go away.
No matter the context, this is rich. But Alan, why have you not defended yourself from charges of quotemining? Do you concede thatyou were wrong? If so, why did you feel the need to lie?
You do realize you have no credibility? Why do you keep trying?
Your are exactly right Steven. I should have said, “Those who try to refute the Bible loose their verasses.”
Alan, go read.
What’s up? Are you afraid of something?
Next up, trying to inform Alan that “loose” is not the same as “lose”. In about a week, he may successfully say what he means. He’ll still be wrong, but coherent would be a good step.
Anyway, Bible refutation takes zero effort. Genesis 1, Genesis 2, contradictory and both wrong, game over, next myth please.
And worse, Genesis 1 talks about “morning” and “evening” and “days” for 3 days before Elohim gets his lazy ass around to creating the sun; coming after plants, even..
Although he might be forgiven a little, given that Shamash (= sun) was a rival deity to Elohim. Hey, if I were going to pretend my god created what other people are worshiping as a rival god, I might have my god do it late in the week too just to diminish said rival’s importance.
Dear all that is holy, Alan Clarke is fucking retarded. And willfully so.
Hey Alan, Quoting the bible? Come on, you can get more deluded, ignorant, and moronic than that, can’t you? Aren’t there some worms you can quote? Or some dust bunnies to learn from? How many times do you think we would need to hit ourselves on the head with a hammer to reach your level of stupidity? How many seconds do you think we would need to breathe from a vat of methyl ethyl ketone before we could approach your level of idiocy? Dude, drop the hammer and step outside for some fresh air.
Voracity or Veracity? Loose or Lose?
Don’t say I didn’t warn you: Click here.
In all seriousness, thanks for the spelling lesson. See, you do have something to offer!
Alan, you not only lack any ability to see how utterly ignorant you are on science, you are also sorely lacking in any sense of humor.
Why does Alan sound like the SHAMWOW! guy?
Alan, if you were the least bit introspective, you would be mortified over how limited your thinking actually is. You are clueless as to how much you don’t know. Reading your comments is like watching The Gong Show – I’m embarrassed for you, but many here will just feel schadenfreude and point and laugh. So post away, Bible Boy!
That’s the last time I click on one of Clarke’s links. Is he Pete Rooke in disguise?
I don’t think so. Both are so besotted with dog that they can’t think straight, but my impression is that Alan is some type of Protestant. Still, the stupid is found in both of them.
Alan, you troll! Go read!
Yep. It seems to be the whole point of Genesis 1 to establish quasi-monotheism: everything that other people(s) worshipped as gods was merely created by Elohim. It’s the oldest example of atheism-minus-one that I’m aware of.
(Even though the polytheism isn’t quite gone yet — “let us make man”.)
The burden of Damascus. Behold, Damascus is taken away from being a city, and it shall be a ruinous heap. Isaiah 17:1
I took a look at your photos. The aerial view shows conclusively the presence of a large built-up area in the northern part of the original island, with modern roads & buildings.
In other words, yes it was rebuilt.
CITY OF TYRE REBUILT?
Eze 26:14 And I will make thee like the top of a rock: thou shalt be [a place] to spread nets upon; thou shalt be built no more: for I the LORD have spoken [it], saith the Lord GOD.
Dave, thanks so much for pointing this out. I found another map site that had superior resolution, and saw exactly what you’re talking about. One half of the former island on the north has homes and one half on the south has the original ruins.
I am not one who likes stretching interpretations to suit my needs. The “gap theory” interpretation of Genesis 1:2 has this characteristic. Using a “stretching” approach leads one further from the truth, so it should be avoided at all costs. Also, this approach positions MAN as the ultimate source of truth which doesn’t jibe with my theology. So, what am I to do with this new information? All I can make of it is this:
1) The original city provided a separation from outsiders by 150-foot-high walls (Wikipedia) which were never rebuilt. So perhaps the “shalt be built no more” refers to Tyre’s original fortifications and structures. The original ruins are designated as a “Cultural Property” which explains why they can’t be rebuilt.
2) The current city has fishing boats docked on small peers on the north side which can clearly be seen from the map link I provided. This seems to conform with Ezekiel 26:14: “thou shalt be a place to spread nets upon”, indicating that it won’t be without persons since someone will obviously be there to “spread nets”.
Here are links to show that those boats are actual fishing boats with “nets” drying:
http://flickr.com/photos/nailman/2516744287
http://www.phoenician.org/pic_tyre_harbor.htm
Alan, your god doesn’t exist, your bible is a work of fiction, and you are a known-nothing BORE. Until you look at our evidence, we won’t look at yours. Fair is fair, and if you think this is a monologue, we will do the same.
Alan Clarke, with no concern for those readers with irony meters, wrote:
Reality begs to differ.
Alan, Ezekiel claimed that Tyre would be destroyed forever (by Nabuchadnezzar). Isaiah that it would be barren for 70 years. Both failed and you have not provided evidence to the contrary. For that matter, how do you reconcile those two incompatible prophecies?
Oh, I almost forgot…
Damascus
Ragutis, thank you for the challenge. The original pieces of the Ishtar Gate of Babylon are spread throughout the world in various museums. The Pergamon Museum in Berlin has a lot of it. You can read all about it in Wikipedia: “Ishtar Gate” I don’t mean to be condescending, but I’m rather surprised that you doubt the discovery of ancient Babylon. Do you think all of these excavations are a hoax? Even in my own lifetime, some people were uninformed of the actual existence of Babylon, thinking it to be a Bible fable. Just yesterday I saw a travel video called “Passport to Europe – Germany, Switzerland & Austria” hosted by Samantha Brown. She stated that she thought Babylon was a fable for many years. Prior to Babylon’s discovery over 100 years ago, the idea of it being a fable was almost universal. So the Bible proved to be ahead of archeological science and correctly described Babylon as a “literal” place. How about Damascus?
Isaiah 17:1 The burden of Damascus. Behold, Damascus is taken away from [being] a city, and it shall be a ruinous heap.
Believe it or not, every time I get challenged on something like this, I have no idea where it will lead but I end up having my faith increased. I realize that a printer can misplace his typeset and end up with something like, “Thou shalt commit adultery.”, but is the Bible to be faulted or the printer? I’ve seen some awful translations in my life like the OMV where Abraham returned from Moriah empty-handed without Isaac. But don’t we know the Owl Mirror Version to be false since no other version has this foolish interpretive scribbling in the margin? Some have suggested that the OMV could be useful if each idea is simply reversed in order to get the proper rendering. But how do we know if all of its ideas are reversed? For this reason, I advise to avoid the OMV like one would avoid rat poison. 98% of it may be wholesome but 2% of it will kill you. Is the Bible to be faulted or is the OMV author?
Notice the difference between Isaiah 17:1 and a verse four chapters earlier concerning Babylon:
Isaiah 13:20 It shall never be inhabited, neither shall it be dwelt in from generation to generation: neither shall the Arabian pitch tent there; neither shall the shepherds make their fold there.
One verse says of Damascus, “It shall be a ruinous heap”, while another says of Babylon, “it shall never be inhabited”. The question is, “Was Damascus turned into a ruinous heap anytime after Isaiah made his prophecy?” Or better yet, “Was Damascus turned into a ruinous heap shortly after Isaiah’s prophecy?”
741 B.C. – Isaiah’s prophecy *
732 B.C. – City destroyed (Wikipedia – Damascus)
* My source for Isaiah’s prophecy is “Thompson Chain Reference Bible” Kirkbride Publishers, and Wikipedia “Isaiah Prophet” which lists a date that corroborates with my Bible. I’m certain you’ll want to seek alternate sources for a possible refutation, but this is what I’d do myself if my theory was challenged.
Conclusion: The Bible wins two-fold on “Damascus”. It not only maintains its integrity on the fact that the city was destroyed, but it predicted it as well.
Actually, we know that what I wrote was true and 100% correct because that’s what the text says.
Go ahead. Read Genesis 22, even in the KJV translation that you think is so great. Tell me where Isaac is mentioned as descending from the mountain with his father.
You cannot, because it is not there.
Abraham goes down from the mountain alone.
Alan Clarke,
Only when you’re able translate the scriptures from Ancient Greek and Hebrew yourself may you criticise Owlmirror’s translations. Until then you remain a desperate, scrabbling cut-and-paster dependent on the unreliable work of others.
You’re the one who offered the verses that proudly proclaim that God lies and deceives.
Alan Clarke @#406:
Alan Clarke @#496:
Alan Clarke @#615:
And check this out:
Alan Clarke @#676:
Alan Clarke @#130:
EPIC FAIL. LOL.
fuck alan clarke with a bumpy stick, damnit!
can’t we just vote him off the island already?
Considering how soundly Owlmirror is thrashing him on every topic he unwisely brings up, I can’t imagine that his head will remain unexploded for much longer.
For a while I wondered how it is someone so patently stupid can justify sounding so smug in his posts, but then I remembered that it is the Christian way to take pride in ignorance and revel bizarre rationalisations concocted to distract themselves from the obvious – that their god cannot exist.
Well, I certainly am surprised. I was expecting the standard fundie response “It hasn’t been destroyed… yet.” You’re the first not to try to tell me that it’ll be fulfilled at some undetermined point in the future by an Israeli nuclear strike.
You’re also the first to completely wave away that Isaiah foretold that Damascus would cease to be a city. (But I guess you had to.) Hence everyone one else I’ve ever seen attempting to defend that prophecy going with the nuke scenario.
This won’t matter an iota to you or your delusions, but IMHO: Fail.
Thanks for indulging my curiosity though. Wanna give the one about the Nile drying up a shot? Nabuchadnezzar’s conquest of Egypt? Reconciling Ezekiel and Isaiah’s takes on Tyre?
Give poor Alan a break – he can only cut-and-paste so fast you know!
Big snake.
Wow.
That’s a big, big…BIG snake.
Does God lie when he sends a strong delusion? On this forum there are two contending spirits. One is obviously lying because both can’t be true. Is it God doing the lying or is it a person doing the “dirty work”? Look at these verses and you’ll see that “lying spirits” are indeed at play here. A person willingly opens himself up as a spokesperson on behalf of a lying spirit. God is not a liar. Satan is a liar and he uses men as pawns. The next question that begs an answer is, “How much do you have control of yourself?” If you are continually doing things to yourself and others that you hate, then you have little control because sin is running your life. What other explanation do you have for not being able to become the moral person you want to be?
I’m confused why everyone seems to be confused on Damascus. What is the problem? It existed then and it exists now. It got destroyed at least once in the middle by Tiglath-Pileser III in 732 BC.
Speaking for no-one but myself, I am the moral person I want to be, Alan.
Satan? Seriously?
Using men as pawns?
Are you serious?
I think someone is trying to get back on topic. Funny thing, that big, big…BIG snake has been dead for millions of years but it still has more sense than Alan Clarke.
Contradiction is not a sign of falsity, nor the lack of contradiction a sign of truth. – Blaise Pascal
That is just the story of Job. Jehovah and Satan are shooting the shit and Jehovah, full of pride, points at Job as being all devout. Satan says that Job will curse Jehovah’s name if all of Job’s fancy thing are taken away. So a friendly wager is placed. Satan causes Job’s farm to fail, kills all of Job’s children and gives Job an ass full of boils. Yet Job remains a good little sheep.
I say that chess players treat pawns better than the big sky daddy treats humans.
Alan, you silly little git, stop using quotes. You just hurt yourself when you do.
I’ve always wondered about my own behaviour, whether I am moral and whether I do the ‘right’ thing, if indeed there is a right thing. Is there some impossible-to-obstain standard base for morality, or is morality contingent on culture? In the end I realised that I like who I am and I feel that overall I am who I am. There’s no desire to be better or worse, no need to live up to a standard I don’t believe exists nor do I sest myself a low standard in order to feel good about myself.
In short, I am the moral person I want to be. And if that’s Satan using me as a pawn, then the way he makes me help out others, to be kind, to be open and honest as much as possible, then that Satan character seems like a pretty decent guy. Though I prefer the game theory and a mix of genes and memes as an explanation. It makes so much more sense that my behaviour is largely dictated by the environment around me than by some supernatural being.
Sven: Satan? Seriously? Using men as pawns? Are you serious?
In your view, the only things that exist are those things you have experienced. How old are you?
That is so cute! The itty-bitty little troll is trying to understand how an other person thinks. But he just cannot get it right.
Who’s the cute little troll? Who’s the cute little troll?
I’m 49. So what?
I once experienced Satan… the bastard didn’t call the next day!
I heard that he had to get back to his main sweetie, Saddam Hussein. Saddam is quite jealous and abusive.
Please, stop! You’re embarrassing me!
Besides, many are far more knowledgeable than I am in far more topics, and have more of them immediately accessible in their memory.
And I found myself wishing that Josh was here to respond to the brain-dead silliness about petroleum geology.
Speaking of which!
The link posted @#531 is to a 40-year-old article by A. A. Meyerhoff. Note, by the way, that Meyerhoff does not appear to have any problem whatsoever with the standard geological dating system.
Naturally, I wondered, who Meyerhoff is (or was), and if anything he did had any influence, or if he changed his mind.
He’s apparently accepted continental drift:
http://www.talkorigins.org/origins/biblio/continental_drift.html
And he’s contributed to writing a book, which appears to have a non-standard model for how continents move.
http://search.barnesandnoble.com/Surge-Tectonics/Arthur-A-Meyerhoff/e/9780792341567
I could find nothing suggesting that he is any sort of creationist, or that he has any problem whatsoever with the earth being dated to 4.5 billion years.
God is a liar, by your own bible verses.
Satan was created by God. If God knows what Satan does, and knew what Satan would do before Satan did it, and allows and orders Satan to act, then God is responsible for Satan’s lies and Satan’s actions.
Job 1:12, Job 2:3, Job 2:6
I’m sorry that you have no control over yourself and that sin is ruining your life.
Have you considered meditation or psychotherapy, or medication?
“Does God lie when he sends a strong delusion?”
“Marge, it takes two to lie. One to lie, and one to listen.”
Ah, it’s hilarious to behold. Alan’s downward spiral continues; he’s now blaming Satan for his inability to compose cogent arguments.
Comedy gold!
So according to you the Bible predicted fishermen in a town on the Mediterranean coast. Oh wow, how could anyone have guessed such a thing?
…or could it be that even Ezekiel wasn’t that big of a bore and he actually thought that Tyre would sink underwater?
26:18 Now shall the isles tremble in the day of thy fall; yea, the isles that are in the sea shall be troubled at thy departure.
26:19 For thus saith the Lord GOD; When I shall make thee a desolate city, like the cities that are not inhabited; when I shall bring up the deep upon thee, and great waters shall cover thee;
(Owlmirror, got any juicy textual commentary on this?)
So if God is not a liar, but Satan is… When all the natural evidence points to an old world and universe, when all evidence points to live evolving over billions of years, when scientists of all faiths and none at all all agree on these commonalities and the preacher lies and says it’s not true… which one is more likely to be the agent of satan?
Alan just can’t seem to understand how far in over his head he is. Alan, the first rule of holes is when you are in over your head, stop digging. In your case, that means stop posting. I think you came here to show us testimony that evolution doesn’t exist, but god created the world according to the bible. You found us ignoring your testimony, ignoring your god, and showing the bible isn’t quite as accurate as you thought, and you tried to save it (deeper), again and again (deeper). Now, you don’t know how to get out. It’s very simple. Just stop posting. Most creobots and godbots declare victory then leave. Do so.
Or possibly stop believing in fairy tales.
Anyone who thinks that adding the dates of the bible up constitutes a valid history of the earth is going to be in over his head anywhere he goes.
Never heard of “freezing layers of ice” for describing the global flood in its totality. The waters were accompanied by freezing but this in no way properly describes coal formation, sedimentary layers on Everest, etc. If a flood stripped off minimally a 1-mile layer (7 miles in some places??) of the Earth’s surface and re-arranged it, wouldn’t that stripping action expose dormant geologic layers that were volcanic? Wouldn’t there be a lot of volcanism mixed with flooding and later freezing? Ice dams would proliferate in sizes never before seen. The U.S. Northwest is explained with an accepted catastrophic interpretation: “The Missoula Flood”. There is a remnant water fall basin that is twice the size of Niagara in depth and width. Before you ridicule catastrophism, you better make sure you’re not contradicting your own colleagues.
Welcome to the club of non-convincing arguments! “No one can observe it today because it happens too slowly, but we know it happened millions of years ago from the evidences. The interpretations of the evidences are OBVIOUS!”
OBVIOUS defn: Apparent from observation.
In what way?
Alan digs himself deeper and deeper. Still no peer reviewed scientific literature, which means both his posts are worthless dreck. Alan, go preach somewhere else. If you want to talk science, then you need about a year of schooling offline to realize how little you know, and why you shouldn’t have posted here in the first place.
Your god doesn’t exist, and your bible is a work of fiction.
The fossils of marine life found in rocks from mountaintops means nothing while the remnants of a water basin implies a flood. Alan Clarke, tiresome and stupid. Hey Alan, have any more quotemines from scientists that you want to share.
Funny that you have nothing to say about that.
Oh, only a few notes, here and there, as the thoughts strike me.
Ezekiel 26:7 For thus says the Lord GOD, “Behold, I will bring upon Tyre from the north Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon, king of kings, with horses, chariots, cavalry and a great army.
Wait, what?
God says that the same fucker who sacked God’s holy city, destroyed God’s holy temple, and killed and enslaved God’s chosen people, is now going to be directed, by God, against Tyre to destroy it?
I mean, he says that the ones being killed will know that YHWH is God… they’re going to know this how, exactly? Given that it’s the enemy and destroyer of everything that belonged to YHWH who is doing this, I would think they would know that Nabu is God, or maybe Marduk ¹ is God… why the hell would they think that YHWH, the loser, is God?
Of course, the point is moot. YHWH fucked up his predictions again. Nebuchadnezzar did not destroy Tyre, but rather accepted a surrender with tribute. Really, if YHWH meant that Alexander the Great would destroy Tyre, about 250 years after Nebuchadnezzar, he could maybe say “a Greek named Alexander from Macedon, in about 250 years from now”?
On predicting that Tyre would be covered by the sea: Given the complex geology of the Mediterranean, it actually isn’t that far-fetched that a generic piece of land might be undercut by erosion or subsidence, and maybe shaken to pieces by some spaced-out sequence of earthquakes.
But that isn’t going to happen with Tyre. The name of the place does mean “rock”, after all.
In fact, exactly the opposite happened with Tyre. A sandbar that had been growing larger and taller for thousands of years between Tyre and the mainland was what enabled Alexander to reach Tyre, and the entire area is now being used.
Geoarchaeology: Sandbar led Alexander the Great to victory
Holocene morphogenesis of Alexander the Great’s isthmus at Tyre in Lebanon
I suppose that rising sea levels from global warming might “fulfill the prophecy”, but you know, that will also drown the coastal cities of Israel (not to mention the entire Mediterranean basin!). Although, that strikes me as being like God getting Nebuchadnezzar to destroy Jerusalem in the first place, as a “punishment” to the people, so you never know.
_________________________________________________
1: Wikipedia says: The Akkadian name, Nabû-kudurri-uṣur, means “Oh god Nabu, preserve/defend my firstborn son”. Nabu is the Babylonian deity of wisdom, and son of the god Marduk.
Do you even understand the lines of evidence that are brought forth in order to formulate and support scientific theories? Do you know how we date the universe and the age of the earth? Or did you prefer to see who begats who and think that you know better than the millions of scientists who have actually studied the evidence?
Dude?
Geologists estimate that the cycle of flooding and reformation of the lake lasted on average of 55 years and that the floods occurred approximately 40 times over the 2,000-year period between 15,000 and 13,000 years ago.
Before you ridicule the scientific consensus on geology, you better make sure you’re not contradicting your own biblical chronology.
Sheesh.
Considering how soundly Owlmirror is thrashing him on every topic he unwisely brings up, I can’t imagine that his head will remain unexploded for much longer.
bah.
surely you know that creationists automagically reset with each new day to square one?
projection followed by denial followed by projection…
sez Alan today:
“No one can observe it today because it happens too slowly, but we know it happened millions of years ago from the evidences. The interpretations of the evidences are OBVIOUS!”
I’ve seen cyclical arguments with self-deluded fools like Alan go on literally for YEARS.
meh, maybe I’m just bored of poking feces flinging monkeys, that have constructed their own cages.
moving on.
How has evolution advanced us or led us to look in unsuspecting places like dino bones with soft tissues. Wasn’t it evolution theory that prevented evolutionists from looking since they “knew” nothing could exist that long. Even if it ISN’T dino tissue, their theories prevented them from entering new theorized world of biofilms that emulate tissues. I think the biofilm theory fails considerable for explaining the dino bone’s inner properties but who’s to stop another from dreaming?
The Age of Enlightenment was not driven by evolution theory!
Alan Clarke wrote:
Amazing, Alan – you managed to work out that 1859 comes after 1800? What a genius you are! Did your Mom help you with that?
Tool.
But the Thirty Years War was driven by people acting in the name of Jesus.
WHo is ridiculing catastrophism? I’m just ridiculing the idea of a global flood – and one that happened within the last 6000 years. You do realise that there’s a difference between localised flooding and global flooding right?
No no no kel, you don’t understand. All evidences of any flooding are evidences of the “great flood”. It’s all a matter of perspective. Mainly that you are looking back in time at it and that you are a a presupposing biblical innerancy believer.
Given enough time creationists will swear the flooding from Katrina and the tsunami in SE asia from a few years ago were all part of the great flood. Just give them a few hundred or thousand years to compress time.
Kel wrote:
Don’t give Alan too much to think about, Kel – I believe he’s still working on his essential research project Ass vs. Elbow: Which is Which?
And in other obvious statements, England were the first europeans to colonise Australia and Neil Armstrong was the first person on the moon.
Oh drat, I knew I was missing something. Here I was thinking that something that happened on a global scale would leave the same evidences at the same geological timeframe. I guess I’ve been spoilt that way from the K-T boundary where there’s evidence all around the world of a global catastrophy. What I really needed to do was look in the bible and then I would have found all the evidence I ever needed (or could handle)…
You mean besides teaching us how to successfully combat the spread of viruses and bacteria, help us in the fight against AIDS, explain our anatomy and how it fails, given us a mechanism by which to fine-tune engineering, and account for many different biological and palaeontological empirical facts?
Say for instance like travelling into the arctic region where there exists freshwater devonian rock which by evolutionary theory should house transitional forms between fish and tetrapods? Then when checking in the rocks of the right age, one discovers a fishapod that shares the exact morphology as one would expect in a transitional form between fish and tetrapods?
LOL! *sporfle* Made of win!
And 3 comes after 2, and not before!
Burro?
Burrow?
Burro?
Burrow?
Ass?
Hole in the ground?
David, let me offer you a little advice when debating scientific theories. Avoid use of words like “moron” in describing others, and sentences like, “Why do you act as if you actually knew anything?” They could come back to bite you. All it takes is one little discovery that negates your position. Secondly, use of such language will lower your credibility in a board meeting of scientists. Scientists are looking for answers, not for showmen who can yell louder and cuss people out.
What is disturbing are the number of people who I assume are older or more “mature” than David but offer nothing to help David in his untenable assumption that coal doesn’t exist under the ocean floor. Surely a simple Google search would refute his false assumption. But everyone seems to keep quiet. Rather than advance “science”, helpful information is suppressed in order to advance a “theory”. Shame on you!
If coal is found under ocean floors what are the implications for uniformitarianist interpretations of geology? A discovery like this would help support the idea of a world-wide global flood. Keep in mind that coal may not have been discovered under ocean floors similarly to soft-tissue (or biofilms) in dino bones not being discovered because no one bothered to look. If you do a little research you will find that the tissue/biofilm phenomenon is practically everywhere. Coal may not have been explored under ocean floors simply because the technologies weren’t available as they are now and/or the expense in retrieving it would far exceed that of coal more easily retrieved under the continents.
David, I am speaking to you as a friend. The day will come when all of these questions will be answered by a single event. I will not gloat or say, “I told you so!” There will be no time for that. Each person must account for himself. I will have enough problems of my own to account for let alone those of another. The only satisfaction I could get from “winning” a debate would be for you to find happiness.
Respectfully, Alan L. Clarke
“UNTAPPED coal reserves under the Pacific Ocean could provide enough energy to power every house in NSW for about 13000 years…”
source: http://peakenergy.blogspot.com/2008/09/ucg-retreats-under-sea.html
If David was dealing with someone who actually knew something about science then I imagine he would converse with them in a civil manner. As he is dealing with you, an ignoramus of epic proportions, why should he bother? Surely a
deluded, superstitious cretinperson of religious persuasion is familiar with the expression commonly shortened to ‘pearls before swine’?Liar.
Delusional idiot.
Liar – again. You’re already hoping your wacko religion’s version of Ragnarök happens for precisely this purpose, you pompous twerp.
Oh, you’ve got problems alright. I’d have them seen to before you die, though. Just in case.
Liar – for a third time. Oh, and I can’t bring myself to believe that you’ve ever ‘won’ a debate, Alan – unless it was one against one of the few people in the world less capable than yourself. Or perhaps a poorly-watered houseplant.
What a great big appeal to emotion there. I guess if you can ignore evidence, why not ignore logic too?
I see Alan is still being stupid and posting here. He has nothing to offer, and is not really dialoging, since he really isn’t looking at our evidence. Alan, you have lost every argument you started, except that of your faith, which we didn’t really have any expectations of changing. But then, nothing you have said has changed any of our minds because what little evidence you presented wasn’t proper scientific evidence. Just your opinion and from your fictional bible, both of which are worth exactly zero. It is time to retire from posting here, and take care of your wife. I suspect PZ is going to have to eventually have to close the thread.
Alan Clarke, you are in no position nor have any authority to give anyone advise about science and how it is conducted. You have shown your self to be illinformed, incapable of logic, unable to tell the difference between physics, chemistry and biology and have no idea how they intersect. You have posted bad information, you have lied and then pretend that you have not done so. You are simply one of the most foolish persons to have stumbled into this place. You are shown disrespect because you have earned enough for a dozens trolls.
Do not talk to any of us like we might be friend for we are not. You are just being disingenuous and rather creepy. The only reason why people keep respond to you is because it is fun to taunt you. Juvenile? Yeah. You you have not posted anything that an intelligent middle school student could not blast through, let alone people with higher degrees.
Alan Clarke, you are a joke.
Alan, David Marjanović, OM, IIRC, is in a PhD program in (correct me if I’m wrong) paleontology. You telling him about science, is like the non-scientist twit who was trying to tell me, a PhD with 30+ years in science, how science is done. We both know what is and isn’t science, and having ignoramuses like you pretend to know more about science than us is just laughable. You are just embarrassing yourself at this point.
Which scientific theory are you talking aout Alan? All I hear is apologetics. If I am wrong please correct me by showing us all some science.
Only at this point? As soon as he linked to himself explaining the age of the earth using biblical chronology, he effectively wrote “I’m a complete joke” in permanent marker on his forehead.
Alan, first you go read the sites I linked to. Then we’ll see if I find a reason to apologize for losing my patience and calling you a moron. In this order.
That you, at present, don’t understand what you’re talking about is so plainly obvious that I really can’t imagine I’ll ever have to apologize for saying so.
Whether this state of affairs will persist, however, is something you have control over. You can learn. You can read.
What? How is that supposed to work?
How does this explain the fact that we have ice cores that reach back eight hundred thousand years?
This is not the late 19th century, Alan. Nobody ridicules the idea that catastrophes happen at all. What we ridicule is how you imagine the consequences of a flood that would be orders of magnitude bigger than anything explainable!
The only way to trigger a flood of Biblical proportions would be the impact of a really big asteroid. Maybe the Texas-sized one in the (in this respect) rather crappy movie “Armageddon” would suffice. Well, if such a thing had come down in the last half-billion years, we’d know it. Or rather, we’d never have existed in the first place.
Oooooh, you want to propose a miracle instead. Fine, then show us that such a miracle happened. Good luck.
If he had read the first of the two pages I directed him to, he would.
But he’s afraid of learning, or something.
See, Alan, here’s an example of you not understanding what you’re talking about.
Evolution is merely descent with heritable modification, and the theory of evolution by mutation, selection and drift explains how evolution works. That the end-Cretaceous layers where the mentioned fossils were found are about 67 million years old was not and cannot be derived from the theory of evolution! It comes from radiometric dating, and if you had read the second of the pages I directed you to, you would already know how radiometric dating works.
How so? How does the theory of evolution predict that fossil bones can never contain a biofilm?
See, Alan, that’s yet another example of you not understanding what you’re talking about.
A biofilm probably is present, but chemically altered (!) protein from the original tissue is also present. There are lots of things that can’t be explained otherwise.
By “chemically altered”, BTW, I mean “the peptide molecules are crosslinked by a chemical reaction that involves iron ions from the blood”; reactions similar to the ones that must have happened there are fairly well known.
One would naïvely think that a statement cannot be both correct and deeply, deeply stupid. Well, here’s a counterexample.
On both sides, funnily enough.
Indeed. In that case, I will gladly eat my words. Scientists do that all the time. :-|
“Board meeting”? What do you mean? ~:-|
I give a talk at several scientific congresses every year, and though (of course!) lively discussions sometimes result, my contributions have always been well accepted so far. Obviously, at such congresses it’s extremely rare that anyone doesn’t understand very well what they’re talking about, so such disagreements never get as heated as this here.
Above I mentioned I’ve seen two scientists almost jump at each other’s throat. Didn’t come to pass, because one reminded the other about some evidence the other had forgot to consider… that’s a rare event… and then the situation defused.
Scientists, too, are human. They, too, have a finite patience. Your insistence on refusing to learn what is only a click away, and the fact that you continue to behave as if you could teach others about subjects that, as your mistakes so clearly show, you haven’t understood yourself, of course make me angry.
Seriously, what did you expect?
How would you react if, say, I kept claiming that Christianity must all be wrong because Jesus was the bastard son of a Roman soldier called Panthera — and kept refusing to consider the facts that 1) Panthera would be a very, very strange name for a Roman and 2) it can very easily be explained as a distortion of párthenos, “virgin” in Greek, by someone who had heard that Jesus was claimed to be the son of párthenos but didn’t know enough Greek? Would you just smile and say “I disagree”? After six hundred comments, and after going through this discussion with different people for the twentieth time in, like, twice as many weeks, would you still just smile and say “I disagree”?
How so?
No, honestly, I don’t understand how that’s supposed to work. Please explain.
Some semblance of keratin often gets preserved in those very few sites with exceptional preservation, like in volcanic lakes, under collapsed dunes, or in plate-limestone lagoons, but that basically is it. There’s one such exceptional site in Spain that preserves some altered form of soft tissue inside bones, but it’s merely 10 million years old… What else are you thinking of? Off the top of my head, I can’t find more. Oh, yes, the body-outline “shades” around, for example, the fossils of Holzmaden, which formed on the oxygen-free floor of a marine basin, but that’s just… well, coal, basically.
Is that so?
Evidence, please.
Oh, sorry for not making myself clear enough. I used “ocean floor” in the geological sense. Coal of course occurs in the continental shelf — the parts of the continents that happen to be underwater right now, the entire North and Baltic seas and the entire Hudson Bay for example, never deeper so than about 200 or (if recently covered by inland ice — the Barents Sea is the only example I know of) about 300 m. Ocean floor in the geological sense is underlain by oceanic crust, which is denser and deeper than continental crust and therefore lies much deeper under the sea level, on average 4000 to 5000 m, unless there’s an upwelling of hot magma under it — midocean ridges, including all of Iceland, are ocean floor in this sense, and so is the hot-spot volcano of Hawai’i.
Actually, I think I’ve already told you to look up the difference between continental and oceanic crust… Wikipedia must have a good explanation of that.
Actually, Herr Doktor David Marjanović, OM, Ph.D completed his thesis in lissamphibian palaeontology a couple years ago, and has been doing post-doctorate work since then.
Now:
Consider what David M. wrote:
Consider that the article pointed to by Alan referred to the coal as being between Wollongong and Newcastle, both cities on the eastern coast of Australia where coal seams are already known to exist.
Consider the continental shelf of Australia:
http://www.news.com.au/story/0,23599,23574192-2,00.html
Consider Alan Clarke boasting over his ability to Google, and failing to Google enough.
So, Alan, just a little advice: When you’re telling someone not to call you a moron, it would help if you try to avoid being a moron.
No, Alan. You ignore the fact that the coal formed, as expected, on the coast of a continent, and, over geologically long timespans, the sea level has risen and covered what were once, indeed, moors and/or mangrove swamps.
No world-wide global flood. Just geology as usual.
Now, David M. might have been a little unclear with this phrasing: “And indeed, there is no coal on or under the ocean floor, moron”. Indeed, the news article itself implies that the terms “ocean floor” and “seabed” means “any earth under the waters of the ocean”. But the technical oceanographic meaning of “ocean floor” is indeed that which is lower than the continental slope — far below the waters that the mining company wishes to explore.
*grumble* I swear that I refreshed before posting, and didn’t see that David M had already responded.
Oh, wait. I was only off by one minute. Spooky!
And why does coal occur in the continental shelf?
Because some of it happened to be dry land during a time when mangrove forests grew on it, got buried, and had enough time to become coal. Which parts of a continent are above sea level depends not only on the sea level (which depends on the climate and the speed of plate tectonics*), but also on plate tectonics, which lets mountain ranges grow at to zones of pressure and lets land slowly sink next to zones of strain, and on erosion (and deposition — like growing deltas –, which depends on erosion elsewhere).
* Because when that speed increases, that’s because the magma under the midocean ridges is hotter. This means the midocean ridges get lifted, and the oceanic crust on either side sinks more slowly to abyssal-plain levels.
Thank you Owlmirror. My sincere apologies to Herr Docktor David Marjanović, OM. I skimmed through a section of the archives and may have missed the announcement. This is why I asked to be corrected. And he did a magnificient post #736.
In his copious free time, I wonder if Alan would care to respond to Robert A. Moore’s The Impossible Voyage of Noah’s Ark? Here’s just a sample of Moore’s problems with the Ark:
That’s what I love about posting at this place. So many people here with years / decades of training and experience in a wide range of disciplines. Each time I come on here, I supplement and further my knowledge by leeching off those who spent the time doing the hard yards. Though all the actual scientists here are making me want to go back to university and do a proper science degree, computer science seems like a dead end intellectually.
Alan Clarke’s a gem, isn’t he?
He comes to a science blog and, expecting to find only ignorant, unschooled atheists with no knowledge of the bible, decides to cite scripture in order to bignote himself. But he gets reamed by people who know his own holy book – the only thing he knows anything about – better than he does.
What does he do next? Starts trying to argue science.
It’s like offering to fight someone with one arm tied behind your back, getting your ass kicked, and then trying again with both arms tied.
Kind of sad – but funny to watch.
Interesting. Where did you get that from? No, I’m only 26 years old, I’m still working on the origin of lissamphibians* and turtles; my thesis is supposed to be finished late next year, though I think it will likely take longer.
And if we’re pedantic, I won’t be a PhD because that’s not how things work over here anymore. In Austria, I’ll be a Dr. rer. nat., a doctor of natural sciences, not of philosophy; in France, I’ll be a Docteur de l’Université Pierre et Marie Curie — apparently they put the institution and not the field of study into the title. (It’s a cosupervised thesis with two supervisors in two countries, therefore the duplication.)
* Those amphibian groups that survive to the present: frogs (including toads etc.), salamanders (including newts etc.), and caecilians (look them up, they only occur in the tropics).
No, in this particular case the continent has probably sunk in that particular area, at least if the coal in question is Carboniferous in age (as most of it worldwide is). The sea level was higher back then — there were no ice caps for most of the period.
Or rather, I should have gone to bed long ago. It’s 10 past 3 at night. I’m only still up to feed the troll…
That’s the second of the webpages I’ve been trying to push him to all the time.
Good observation.
Alan, walk away.
Seriously, at this point, man, just disappear.
Tis Himself,
Yeah, I’m fairly sure no-one who believes in Noah’s Ark has ever worked at housing animals in any serious capacity.
What I also like to ask people who think it’s true is why did their god need the humans to save any of the animals in the first place – since all said god would have needed to do is poof brand new animals into existence.
I have no problem if he comes back — after he has read those two pages.
By the way, glad to hear you’re still working on the turtle problem, David. Can you let any preliminary guesses or conclusions slip?
I saw your first published paper linked to a while back, and obviously mistook it for a thesis. Or perhaps the person linking it stated that it was your thesis? There may have been some other confounding factors.
Plus, you know more about more subjects than nearly anyone else around, which is intimidatingly like a full professor.
Tet Zoo, woot!
Well, perhaps I got that detail wrong. I did remember that Australasia (or Meganesia, or Sahul, or whatever the combined Australia-New Guinea area is called) was one plate, and the shelf was pretty shallow, and that during the ice ages, at least, the area where they are looking for coal would not have been under the ocean. I’m pretty sure, anyway.
I will second this. With the likes of Owlmirror, David Marjanović, SC, Sastra, Nerd and all the others(I hope are not insulted that I don’t name them.), I really am out of my league. I love all the bit of knowledge that I find here. And I am humbled that they put up with me.
third
Comparatively I know squat. I just have a finely tuned bullshit detector.
Yeah, I can’t make claims about contributing too much to the science-fu either. I just pick holes in the (small ‘l’) logic where I see it, and hammer those who set my layperson science-spidey-sense to tingling.
Humorous snark, on the other hand, is my weapon. That and perseverance. Two! My two weapons are…
Janine, not all of us need to be scientists. I admire your knowledge of various music genres and U-tube videos. So you contribute in your own way. We are a very diverse group.
So I was right about our resident turtle expert not having his degree yet, but that will change. I will proudly raise to toast to his success when he presents his dissertation.
Let me direct this to you, Alan, or any other creationists that might be reading:
There’s a wealth of knowledge around here, in PZ’s posts and in the contributions of many extremely intelligent and knowledgeable regulars. Take my advice and consider what they say, follow the links they provide. It’s highly educational and very rewarding. This community is a resource as much as a place to hang out, be snarky, or shoot the shit. You simply don’t understand how silly you appear attempting to chastise or lecture people waaaaaay more knowledgeable in the field than you. You’re like a patient laughing at the doctor for a diagnosis and smarmily telling them “You medical elite with your cancers and tumors. It’s demons. Cancel the chemo and get me an exorcist.”
I’m not a science professional or expert in biology. I haven’t even finished university. (Although, I am returning soon) I’m aware of these limitations and realize that when I reach the limits of my knowledge A) it’s usually best to defer to the professionals/experts, and B) if I shut up and listen, I’m likely to learn something.
You, apparently, do not. Google “Dunning-Kruger Effect”.
With some humility and introspection, you can avoid making a fool of yourself any further and learn something new instead. Try it. It’s a wonderful thing.
Alan-
How long have you been arguing against evolution? (I don’t mean here, I mean everywhere). Virtually everyone here has been debating creationists off and on for years. I first encountered David Marjanović on the BBC Science boards about 5 years ago- I’ve been sparring with people like you for 10 years- and we’re newcomers to this game compared to some.
You will lose because we have the evidence, we are familiar with it, and we’ve all done this before. You could do something suprising though- you could read the links David Marjanović gave you, and actually learn something. You never know, you might find out you like being educated.
I have just witnessed the greatest concentration of back-patting, credential-advertising, and degree-boasting of my life.
The global flood buried masses of land and ocean fauna under the Earth’s surface. Land masses containing forests & vegetation, provided the raw materials for oil and coal. One would expect certain fossil fuels to be distributed in relative proximity to their sources (i.e. the continents and continental shelves!). The temperature of the oceans rose from volcanic action and killed masses of sea fauna (i.e. plankton, sea creatures, etc.). When the flood waters assuaged, tidal actions were less restricted by the continents since much was still submerged. Much material was washed onto the continents as evidenced by today’s limestone and oil deposits (and much, much, more). Much material was also covered under our ocean floors, far from the continental shelves, as evidenced by known recoverable and non-recoverable oil deposits.
Is it any wonder that fossil fuels are referred to as “Non-Renewable?
The city where I live is planning to utilize the landfill to extract methane gas from the trash heaps for an alternate source of energy. If hydrocarbon fuels can be produced in a relative short time, why aren’t we seeing coal and oil produced naturally today in large volumes? How about small volumes? Can someone provide me a photo of a pile of organic material sitting on the ocean floor waiting to be turned into future oil? My guess is you won’t because uniformitarian theory fails miserably. How about a photo of organic material sitting somewhere on dry land waiting to be turned into coal or oil? My guess is you won’t find that either unless of course YOU PAY FOR THOUSANDS OF DUMP TRUCKS TO PILE UP A MASS OF ORGANIC GARBAGE AND DEBRIS. But why bother? One big global flood will do it for you. And you’ll have it distributed EVERYWHERE!
“Decomposing waste in Laubscher Meadows Landfill generates enough methane gas to equal about 70,000 barrels of crude oil or 15,000 tons of coal each year.”
source: http://www.courierpress.com/news/2008/apr/23/landfill-methane-put-to-use
Owch.
Alan please. Watch where you are swinging that stupidity around. It hurts when you get hit with it.
I have just witnessed the greatest concentration of back-patting, credential-advertising, and degree-boasting of my life.
Did you just come back from a visit to Uncommon Descent?
otherwise, I’d say you need to get out more.
Alan, there either was no global flood, or whatever agent was responsible for it 1) completely erased all evidence of said event and 2) erected a geological record that says there was no global flood. We disproved the flood hypothesis centuries ago. The people out there who support flood geology are either completely ignorant of the entire discipline of sedimentology or are lying/deluded.
Alan Clarke’s way of arguing for debating –
Alan – Evidence A requires a global flood as an explanation, so the bible = true.
Everyone else – A global flood is contrary to evidences B through V, each one of those is impossible if there were a global flood. And A is explainable through X.
Alan – nope, you can’t explain A. Therefore God created the world 6000 years ago.
Everyone else – *facepalm*
Says the moron who thinks he has the truth direct from the creator of the universe itself.
There was no global flood.
Sorry, you don’t get to say that the actual geology supports your moronic false claim.
Good for them.
Because they require heat and pressure, as you would know if you bothered to look it up.
I realize this is hard for you to grasp, but methane gas is not oil nor coal.
You really have a hard time thinking, don’t you?
Guesses? Yes. Strangely enough, it more and more appears that my supervisor is right, and turtles and procolophonoids are sister-groups. For the pareiasaur hypothesis, certain features of Proganochelys (like the fully functional basicranial articulation) had to be interpreted as reversals, but Odontochelys shares them, and its teeth are not adapted to herbivory. I still haven’t read the paper on the procolophonoid Sclerosaurus in the latest Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, but I note with great satisfaction that it has one row of osteoderms per rib…
However, I haven’t run any analysis yet, not even a very preliminary one. (Because of all the lissamphibian work, I’m still stuck in the snout and have yet to fuse characters of the rest of the skeleton.) So, everything could change.
Together with the second paper, it will — retroactively — become a chapter in the thesis, and I might have mentioned that…
Exactly. :-)
All of the above…
Correct.
Last time I was accused of having the patience of a saint, I said I have the perseverance of a nerd instead…
Well, duh. Unlike Alan, you are (as your name says) aware of your ignorance. :-)
Well, if Alan is still being stupid, I’ll repeat myself too. Alan, your god only exists between your ears, and no place else, the bible is proven work of fiction. There, twice as much content as he provided.
Alan,
A couple of days to search and that’s the best you can come up with? Sheesh. My scientific education went as far as first-year Univeristy chemistry and I’m a genius compared to you. Maybe you should go away again and think about the processes involved in turning organic matter into oil and coal. There’s more to it than time and pressure.
That’s brilliant, must use that in the future.
Hold on, hold on… are you trying to argue that because I don’t shit crude oil, uniformitarian geology is false?
Hi Josh,
Alan Clarke linked to a paper on petroleum geology at #531 (Meyerhoff 1969). I don’t have the expertise to figure out what Meyerhoff was trying to say, so I was wondering if you might be able to decipher it? Of course, I’m certain that Alan didn’t understand it either; he was probably thinking along the lines of “Scientist says there are anomalies, therefore God, nyah!”
And have you heard of Meyerhoff’s “surge tectonics” (linked to @#698), just out of curiosity?
I think I’ll refer to “teh flood” as “teh flood” from now on.
Strangely enough, it more and more appears that my supervisor is right,
I can’t count the number of times I essentially said that very thing as a grad student.
:)
Hold on, hold on… are you trying to argue that because I don’t shit crude oil, uniformitarian geology is false?
LOL
Sheesh, what’s the point of studying for years and defending a thesis if you can’t pat each other on the back over it? If I can get into grad school this year after two previous years of insufficient funding and whathaveya, I expect everyone to kiss my ass just for THAT.
Oh, and also, that is one HUGE ENORMOUS MOTHERFUCKING SNAKE. Just saying that so that “Titanoboa” might not end up forever associated in our minds with superstition and obstinate fractal wrongness.
Alan, you are an insufferable git.
One word for you: peat
Randy, tell me something.
How do you think that scientists promote their theories / hypotheses in the scientific community? I’m not just talking about evolution, I’m talking about all fields of science.
It’s through peer review. It is the best structure for weeding out the good from the bad, the unsupported from good empirical science, the crack pots from genuine new discovery.
Why should that change? So far what we have seen from creationists is trash. From ID it is sciency trash. It is rejected because it doesn’t measure up. If you are so convinced of your science shouldn’t it be easily supported?
Now if it works for the entire rest of the many scientific fields why do you supposed it shouldn’t work for this subject? Is there that big of a conspiracy?
Crap
wrong thread
shit
Which explains why all oil and coal has exactly the same age, contains as much 14C as one would expect of something that’s barely 4000 years old, and…
Nope, none of that is the case. You can even find oil fields on top of each other, and finding lots of coal measures on top of each other is the normal condition — coal measures don’t normally come alone.
Of course. I don’t see what your point is here.
Yeah. That explains the Permian salt deposits of northern Germany that reach far under the North Sea. Riiiiight…
Nice to see you’re acknowledging your mistake about the coal.
Methane can be. Oil and coal can’t — no matter what amount. Next question!
You don’t even know what oil and coal are chemically, do you.
Try to look up what kerogen is.
Why, why, why do you keep parading your ignorance so aggressively?
Plant matter that sits on top of dry land just rots. It has to be covered so well that no oxygen reaches it during millions of years.
Do you know what peat is?
Take a peat bog. Put a river delta next to it. Have the delta cover the bog — if this takes a few hundred thousand years, fine. Then have the delta keeping on growing, so that a few hundred meters of sediment are deposited on top of the peat. (This takes tens of millions of years and usually requires that the land sinks.) The pressure of the sediment, and the heat present several hundred or thousand meters below the surface, trigger slow chemical reactions that make the plant matter give off water, methane, hydrogen, carbon dioxide and the like, so that it turns into coal. Depending on how much pressure and heat there is, you get lignite, coal in the strict sense, anthracite, or even graphite.
Really, Alan, you should stop acting like the whole science of geology just didn’t exist.
And now go read the two pages I pointed you to. Here they are again.
The first is this article, which is entitled “Radiometric Dating — A Christian Perspective“. The abstract follows:
So, you can read it without fear of downloading the devil or something.
The other, entitled “The Impossible Voyage of Noah’s Ark“, is an excruciatingly meticulous list of the miracles that are required to make the Flood story* possible. You thought the Flood was a single miracle, or five, or ten? You’re mistaken. You’re mistaken by several orders of magnitude.
Here’s the introduction:
And mind you, that study doesn’t even mention the contradictions in the story, for example that the Flood lasted both 40 (Gen 7:17) and 150 days (Gen 7:24 and 8:3) at the same time, that Noah was told to take both one couple of every animal (Gen 6:19, 7:8-9, 7:15) and one couple of every unclean animal and seven couples of every clean animal (Gen 7:2), that the Ark was afloat both seven (Gen 8:4) and ten months (Gen 8:5), that the earth dried both on the first day of the first month (Gen 8:13) and on the 27th day of the second month (Gen 8:14), and so on… It’s obvious that two different Hebrew versions of the ancient Mesopotamian flood story were intertwined here. But I digress.
Heya Owl,
Well, it seems to me (and I have to admit, I didn’t go back up and wander through whatever else Alan had written, so I might be a bit off on the real thrust of the conversation) that Alan linked to that paper as support that oil isn’t found where we uniformitarianists(tm) would expect to find it? Well, if he is trying to push that idea using that article, he should perhaps go back to the library.
Meyerhoff was basically a Plate Tectonics denier (even though he comes out and says it at the end, the code words for this is that he’s still referring to it as drift in bloody 1969–we can go into that if you like–it’s not directly relevant to this argument), and whereas he did have a few points to make in that article, most of what he wrote was irrelevant even then and much of it has subsequently been blown to pieces (e.g., his insistence that low-latitude Gondwanan glaciations were impossible-HA is all I have to say about that). Actually, looking back at the abstract again, he got almost everything wrong. I mean, he actually asserted that sediments proximal to island-arc trenches don’t get deformed! As if it were a fact. I have no idea what the hell Meyerhoff was smoking when he wrote that, but I’d like some. Who did he think he was, Martin Lockley? That paper is worthy of the recycle bin and little more, except as a historical piece. If Alan needs it, I can point by point list out everything that has been subsequently refuted, but I’ll hold off on that for the moment because it take a minute and will be fucking tedious to both write and read. The refutation will probably take as long to write as the bloody manuscript did in the first place.
But what’s more, it isn’t like Meyerhoff was arguing against uniformintarian models. Why the hell is Alan using him as a poster child? Meyerhoff was simply arguing against this particular scientific theory (badly). Based on what I know of him, to say that Meyerhoff didn’t accept an old earth or uniformitarianism is like trying to argue that Gould was a creationist because he was a punctuated equilibrium proponent. It’s ridiculous. LOTS of geologists took a while to accept Plate Tectonics. That doesn’t mean that they were catastrophists or some shit.
Seriously, Alan, try another angle to support your assertions than offering up mid-20th century detractors from Plate Tectonics as evidence that geology is wrong. You’re out of your league.
David M @#776:
There might be one or two other places where the only explanation for the weird changes in phrasing is text interlacing like the flood story, but I forget exactly where.
This shows the interlacing nicely for Gen 7 & Gen 8, though.
Josh @#777 (jackpot!):
Then, seriously, don’t bother. It’s only worth the effort if it actually interests or amuses you, and I really think that Alan can’t sustain the extended intellectual effort necessary to understand the refutation anyway. He’s a real short-little-span-of-attention kinda guy.
But it would be nice if you hung around in case he tries any more “Fossil fuels, therefore Global Flood!” bullshit.
Alan using a plate tectonics denier as evidence?!?!?!?!?
I’m shocked.
If this is what is keeping you from God, then you have one of the lamest excuses ever invented. Or should I say ever swallowed by an uneducated generation void of critical thinking and originality. The North Koreans may have a better chance of breaking from Kim Jong Il’s domain. Here is why my sarcasm has validity:
When I constructed post #676 describing the locations of the Babylonian ruins in various museums, I didn’t realize until I was about 90% finished that the “dragon and satyr remains” Ragutis was referring to were not images inscribed on the Ishtar Gate, but supposed “mythical” ones described in the Bible, implying that the Bible is a fable. I decided to post it anyway and deal with the “mythical” animals at a later date. A Harvard or Oxford student from the 1800’s could have easily refuted this false deduction, but a current student cannot. The difference is that people have become “less educated” in languages, word etymologies, and Biblical history. Instead, they have become indoctrinated by a world-view that obscures former knowledge.
Suppose our current English-speaking civilization ceases to exist tomorrow. One thousand years later someone unearths a document that has the words “catbird”, “walking stick”, and “dragonfly”. Suppose these animals are extinct. The discoverer might somehow piece the meanings together and think surely the animals are mythical since a stick can’t walk, cats and birds can’t crossbreed, and dragons can’t fly. His deduction would be that our current-day zoology books were mythological in nature.
Similarly, another archeologist unearths an old astronomy textbook that has the word “Uranus” which he interprets as “Father of the Sky and of Titans who banished the Cyclopes to the underworld.” After cross-checking multiple Greek documents, the archeologist deducts the book is mythological in nature.
You may argue that archeologists will not come to this absurd conclusion if they have evidence showing that the Greek’s usage of “Uranus” referred to a planet or evidence exists depicting a “walking stick” insect next to a textual inscription, etc. Are supplementary evidences available to guide the proper interpretation of the Hebrew word שָׂעִיר which literally means “hairy” and was translated “satyr” in the King James Bible?
Isaiah 34:14 The wild beasts of the desert shall also meet with the wild beasts of the island, and the satyr shall cry to his fellow; the screech owl also shall rest there, and find for herself a place of rest.
If not, then would it be wise to translate the above verse as, “…and the hairy shall cry to his fellow…”? Suppose the actual animal was a goat, but a certain type of goat that earned it the name “hairy”. Or perhaps this type of goat achieved a legendary status by copulating more frequently than other breeds and earned itself a vulgar Hebrew slang name like “hairy” which had a double meaning. Even in our English language, “hairy” has multiple slang usages. But as explained before, a translation like, “…and the hairy shall cry to his fellow…” would not reflect this baser meaning. What was the original Hebrew meaning for “hairy” as applied to this animal? Who would have the greater chance of knowing? Desiderius Erasmus was considered the most learned man in Europe 500 years ago. He was much closer to the original sources and had great influence on subsequent translations such as the KJV. The KJV translators chose the word, “satyr”. Unless someone can prove they chose wrong, I’ll stick with “satyr” since current non-mythical animals and objects may have mythical names. Orion and the Pleiades are good examples.
Suppose an archeologist comes across a small papyrus written in a discernable ancient language describing a large %*#? animal. Everything is understood and translatable except for one single word which is the animal’s name (indicated by %*#?). The animal terrifies other animals, leaves huge footprints, and roars loudly. Is the animal extinct or extant? Some argue that it has elephant-like attributes, others disagree, etc. Rather than risk guessing wrongly, the translator assigns a “generic” name such as “giant” or “behemoth” or “dragon” or “leviathan”. The problem with this approach is even the generic names connect to some former meaning that may be specific. Put yourself in the translator’s shoes and derive a non-commital name for an animal if you don’t know the animal with certainty. Or if you are a writer trying to convey ideas about cats, make sure no one will misunderstand you 3000 years from now in case all cats become extinct. You’ll want to avoid using words and subjects that will be misconstrued by future civilizations where there may be mythical meanings, like “catbird” or “sphinx cat”. Avoid “generic cat” which will mislead translators into thinking they are purchased in a special area of a grocery. Drawing pictures may not be feasible if your document is to be copied multiple times where only text is easily reproduced.
Plants, trees, and herbs provide even more problems. I challenge someone to write a poem about the beautiful sycamore tree. Write the poem so that no one in a future non-English speaking culture will confuse the sycamore with a birch. You don’t want them ridiculing, “The fool is unaware that birch trees never existed where he reports them to exist!” One will argue, “Surely someone would interpret “sycamore” properly if they were to excavate America 3000 years from now. We have so many libraries that will inform them! We have microfilm, and computer chips with information. We have photographs, iron engravings, pictures of sycamore trees adjacent to the word “sycamore”, DVD’s with the information locked in fire-proof safes!” Your arguments are not applicable for a Hebrew culture that didn’t have these technologies or quantities of evidences. Your attempt to convey “sycamore” may fail future readers if the tree is not sufficiently described so as to differentiate it from a birch.
Conclusion: Many perceive the Bible as having errors because they are unknowledgeable of word etymologies, semantics, literary mechanisms, original languages and cultures, history, etc. An example of this lack of knowledge is evidenced by those asking the question: “Why doesn’t the Bible say anything about dinosaurs?” Consider that the 1611 King James Bible was translated before Sir Robert Owen coined the word “dinosaur” in 1841. Don’t become a victim of “stupid on purpose” syndrome or as the KJV puts it: “willingly are ignorant“.
I make a snarky remark and you do all that tapdancing? Seriously?
This is fun! :p
No, Alan, that’s not the thing “keeping me from God”. What’s “keeping me from God” is his nonexistence. Same as what’s “keeping me from Zeus” and “keeping me from Vishnu” and “keeping me from Ra”. If evidence of a creator being or race emerges, well I’ll judge then whether to admire, follow, or worship He/She/It/Them.
Although, I would like to see Owlmirror’s take on your wall o’ text. I see a lot of speculation and “suppose”, but no evidence you actually know any of the “word etymologies, semantics, literary mechanisms, original languages and cultures, history, etc.” I suspect you’re bullshitting. Owlmirror? A little help?
BTW: peat
I wanted you to look it up, but David made it easy for you. Read. Think. Learn.
Alan,
Okay, I’ve waded through your tidal wave of banal inanity and realised this that your argument is this: ‘Writers use poetic license and language changes over time; therefore, my god exists’.
Seems like it would have saved you a lot of time and effort if you’d just written that. It’s about as compelling.
Alan the logorrheic.
Well, here’s what I’ve come up with…
and:
Do I really need to point out that dragons were common in the mythologies of the area of the time?
It’s looking like “Dragons” and “Satyrs” is what they meant.
http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=satyr
Now, I don’t know why the KJV translators chose the word, but it looks like one they got right. Whether the vague “hairy devil” of the Hebrews or the more familiar half-man/half-goat of the Greeks, Romans, and Arabs, there certainly appears to have been a belief in this type of creature in the region and timeframe. “Goat” seems to appear on a lot of apologetics sites, but not anywhere unbiased. But I’m just casually looking.
The first sentence has good support. The second is a helping of Waldorf word salad.
This has got to be the dumbest evasion of a serious question I’ve ever heard. You don’t have to have a word for dinosaurs in order to mention them. “Fucking giant killer lizards” would have done just fine.
Your ability to completely miss the point is nothing short of astonishing. You remind me of some former students I’ve had. You can’t run around screaming “the flood was real and global!” on one hand because the text says it is and then, in other place, say, well, the text says this, but that’s just poetry.
Common mistake. Owen didn’t coin the word during the 1841 lecture. The name was published in 1842.
Owen, R., 1842, Report on British Fossil Reptiles, Part II. Report of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, Plymouth, England.
Ah, the genre defence. I only started hearing this one recently – the idea being that, wherever the bible contains some serious batshit, it’s not meant to be taken literally because it’s not just a book, it’s a collection of stories written in different genres.
Of course, when you ask them how it is they tell the difference – and to clearly identify which bits are to be taken literally and which aren’t – you get the same hand-waving nonsense and evasion. Or, if you’re really lucky, they’ll point out how interesting they find it that atheists and fundamentalists think the same way about literalism.
Welcome to the cafeteria!
No, he’s actually got a point there. Dragons and many other mythological creatures are very likely (I’d guess almost certainly, from the gut) based on fossil remains of dinosaurs and other extinct critters. The point Alan is missing is that the ancient Hebrews believed in dragons and these satyrs/hairy desert demons. So (to me at least) the Book of Isaiah is likely to have said and meant just what the KJV attributes to it: Hairy goat/man demons would dance in the ruins of Babylon and “Fucking giant killer lizards”( to borrow your phrase) would sleep in it’s palaces. Especially since (IIRC), the KJV OT is closer to the Hebrew than other translations. The little googling I’ve done seems to support this. (Feel free to correct me, folks)
Alan, your testament is worthless. By now, you are proven liar and bullshitter, so you have to take the evidence out of yourself and onto a third party. That is called citing the literature. Your god doesn’t exist and your bible is a work of fiction. Watch The Bible’s Buried Secrets and see show books were put together over centuries by many scribes. See, a citation. Now either watch the show or shut up.
David, your “tens of millions of years” requirement is too long. Rivers aren’t as short-lived as lakes, but geologically speaking, they’re still pretty ephemeral. We do have some “long-lived” rivers crisscrossing the modern planet (e.g., the Nile), but most river deltas aren’t accumulating sediments for stretches of tens of millions of years (at least not from the same river usually). A few hundred thousand? Easy. A couple of million? Okay. Multiple millions? Probably only a few of the rivers currently active on Earth can boast this (but keep in mind that I’m part of the school that views a single river as an uninterrupted flow regime–I see most “ancestral” rivers as entities that are distinct from their currently active “descendants”). Otherwise, nice description. I love the use of a prograding delta to cover the bog.
TO ALL CREATIONISTS/SCIENCE DEINERS WHO ARE WATCHING: Do you see? This is how science works. Heck, this is how learning should work. I disagree with David on a detail within a larger argument that he’s making. But (wait for it…), his larger argument is solid (gasp!); of the paragraph I cited, only this detail is in dispute. More importantly, and why I bring it up: the detail could be argued as being minor and it does not alter the overall thrust of David’s point. What I’m doing is trying to refine his description of the process of peat burial and alteration. I’m not disputing the process itself.
This is what we do. He has done it to me in the past and I have done it to him. We’ll do it in the future. It doesn’t change the overall point: we are both on the same sheet of music with respect to the general process of peat burial and alteration.
Now, do two things. First, extrapolate this example to all those disagreements between professionals that you so love to point to and say “See! This proves that there’s a lack of consensus among scientists about the validity of evolution!” Second, turn your brains on.
Alan, could you please point to some references that show flood indicators preserved within a limestone sequence?
Or more appropriately, turn your brains in. You aren’t using them anyway.
Giant snake seen in borneo, allegedly.
Story picked up by telegraph and mail so it’s probly a fake.
Please. “Animals, cats, and dogs”?
The sycamore (sycomore?) is Platanus, right? In that case, why not simply mention the leaf shape, which could hardly be more different? Or even just the leaf size?
Describing the bark and completely failing to mention the black-and-white pattern of birch bark should also help.
I find the question strange to begin with. Except for the creation stories, all of the Bible is supposed to take place within the last few thousand years. It would be very surprising if any dinosaurs other than extant birds were mentioned!
And indeed, there aren’t any mentioned. The behemoth and the leviathan are quite obviously based on second-hand information on the hippos and crocodiles of the Nile.
Let me just repeat that.
AFAIK, he did coin it during the lecture, but the lecture wasn’t printed till the next year, and that (publication in ink on paper) is what counts for biological nomenclature — when the name was actually coined is irrelevant for it.
That’s generally true. What I was mostly thinking about is that depositing several hundred meters of sediment takes a little longer.
Alan, go read already.
Regarding leaf size and shape of sycamores, you can go very far without making any confusion with birch leaves possible. Even if you say “its leaves are as hands”, you might mean a maple, but not a birch!
I think, Alan, that you aren’t used to thinking your scenarios through.
Huh…that’s funny. I was under the impression that he didn’t actually utter the word during the lecture. I’m gonna try and dig around. But yes on publication date.
For your safety, I advise you to steer away from the current so-called “science” of astronomy. My first suspicions arose when I came across a university textbook with a chapter entitled “The Solar System”. The chapter was filled with references to “Neptune”, “Jupiter”, and “Mars”. I quite reading such foolishness years ago, but a friend recently tried to re-kindle my interest by suggesting I read the next chapter. But it had all the same mythology! Orion and Pleiades! What a joke! My friend is a Christian who attributes the entire universe’s origin to God. He has no credibility.
You are in the exact same quagmire.
Your “quagmire” is further exemplified. I have NEVER built such an illogical argument. My God exists far beyond the fact that he personally answers my questions. What is your basis for the belief in God’s non-existence? He never “spoke” to you? You didn’t see him in a telescope? Look at the pitiful state of another man’s logic that is a product of his Netherland culture:
How did you first manage to get into the quagmire? Rather than have an opinion of your own, you built upon the opinions of others. Two days ago I thought I saw a man with a familiar face at the local Walmart. When I addressed him with a few questions, he resorted to his elderly mother seated in a wheelchair for each answer. I realized he wasn’t “all there” when he looked to her before responding that he was 51 years old.
Owlmirror!!!! Owlmirror!!!! Where is Owlmirror???
Wait
What?
Umm… yeah Alan is off his meds.
Dude, why don’t you recognize such an obvious joke when you see it?
And why are you still here? Why don’t you read the two pages we’ve been pointing you to? What am I supposed to do, reach through the Internet, grab your occiput, and press your nose against the screen?
I think we are watching Alan Clarke’s brain melting as he types out his words. Such an odd sight.
Alan, you need to quit bothering us. You have lost all credibility. Your god doesn’t exist and your bible is fiction. You have been trying to prove otherwise for weeks without making any dint in our skepticism, due to your inability to cite the refuting scientific literature. We will simply not take your word for anything.
If PZ has any mercy on poor Alan, he would close this thread.
Allan:
… Just sayin’.
*sigh* So, of course I made the mistake of reading further up.
Okay, so volcanic activity. Okay, so enough volcanic activity to raise ocean temperatures to lethal levels for lots of marine species. Okay.
Sooooo, are we talking about a “during-flood” ocean volume here (the order of what you wrote in your comment would suggest yes). If so, and indeed, even if not, where are the deposits from such volcanic activity? Volcanic activity, even subaqueous, tends to make things rather messy, depositing ash everywhere and spewing lava about. Hawaiian volcanism has had documented effects on marine life, very proximal to the point where the lava is entering the water. You’re talking about raising the temperature of the ocean to levels that “killed masses of sea fauna.” That’s going to require a powerful lot of volcanic activity. There’s going to be a record. You’re talking about massive volcanically induced marine extinctions in the recent past (’cause the flud was like 4000 years ago, right?). Yeah–that’s gonna leave a trace we can see. Where are the volcanic rocks that support this hypothesis?
Owlmirror is a human being in the real world (who is not reading Pharyngula 24/7). Why are you so overexcited?
Here in the real world, real human beings who know actual facts can answer questions based on what they know, or at the very least, say that they don’t know the answer.
Since God can not give you answers to real-world questions about languages, geology, biology, mathematics, or, indeed, anything really, the inescapable conclusion is that “God” only exists inside of your own head. The “answers” that you’re getting are just you talking to yourself.
Stop trying to pretend to us that God is real outside of your own head.
My diagnosis: Yup, that’s a wall o’ text, all right.
Alan rambles on about how “שָׂעִיר” means “hairy”, then switches around and says, no, “satyr” was right because that’s what the KJV used.
Really, “hairy ones” would have been just as good, and avoids the obvious mental image of a Greek satyr — which may or may not be correct; we simply do not know.
Speaking of satyrs, the book I cited from @#578, The First Fossil Hunters, also mentions intermittent reports of satyrs in classical era. They were sort of the “Bigfoot” of that time and place.
Speaking of “hairy ones”, though, I am reminded that there are real albeit rare mutations that results in hair growing all over the body: hypertrichosis lanuginosa. The book that I have that describes it, Mutants, by Armand Leroi, also mentions that Darwin was aware a famous Burmese family that had it, and wrote of them in The Descent of Man. Could the Hebrew word have something to do with an ancient memory of a similar mutation?
As long as I am speculating, I note that “שֵׂעִיר” (“Se’ir”) was also the name of a mountain in the southeast of Israel, the alleged inheritance of Esau in Edom. Given that Isaiah is ranting about Edom anyway, is it possible that he simply meant animals that live on that particular mountain? That seems parsimonious and simple.
Meh.
In response to my example of a landfill generating hydrocarbons for an alternate energy source:
The landfill has been in existence for about 25 years and is it at a relative shallow depth compared to sediments deposited by the global flood 4400 years ago at much greater depths. The bottom line is, methane gas is a hydrocarbon and is an accompaniment of naturally occurring oil. Connect the dots…
Note that one representation of a “drakon” in Greek imagery was … a big mothafuckin’ snake, just like Titanoboa:
http://www.nikawatters.com/picture_gallery.html
Note the skull there of Giraffokeryx, which as the name suggests was a fossil species of giraffe.
Another possible dragon culprit that should not be overlooked is Eocene whales.
See also The First Fossil Hunters.
Speaking of “dragons” and Isaiah – I note that the only place the KJV could have gotten “dragon” from was the Latin Vulgate. Translating “תַנִּים” (jackals) as “draconum” is a fuckup, pure and simple.
Actually… I can almost see how it might have happened. Maybe the Latin translator asked someone “Quid ‘tanim’ est?”, and the word was misheard as ‘tanin‘. Which means “crocodile”. LOL. I can just see the Hebrew-speaker waving his arms and trying to describe this big, long, green, man-eating beast, and Jerome (or whoever) saying to himself “O! Draconis!”
There. Was. No. Global. Flood. Ever. You. Moron.
The “dots” that I connect are that you don’t know anything about methane or oil.
There, that was easy.
Alan, you’re attributing things to me that others said. And are you mocking me for asking someone more knowledgeable than myself for an opinion? One can only guess what you think of me inviting others to correct me. That kind of thinking is antithetical to you, isn’t it? You’ve drawn your conclusions and all evidence to the contrary be damned! (literally)
You’ve yet again shown us your aversion to learning. Why you choose to wave willful ignorance like a flag, I don’t understand.
Also, you may not have noticed subsequent posts where I *gasp* went looking for further information on my own. You should try it sometime. You’ve even been provided with links.
Ragutis, I apologize. My actions may have become rather “knee jerk” after being inundated with “moron”. I’ll try to look past it. Best Wishes.
Alan, you need to quit preaching at us and leave. You lost the intellectual arguement about 600 posts back, and you never had a chance with an emotional argument, which you lost even sooner. You are continuing because you don’t know how to quit. It is very easy to quit. Remove us from you bookmarks and never post here again. Take care of your wife and soon to be child.
*sigh*
Do we have to go through this again?
Alan,
THERE WAS NO GLOBAL FLOOD.
Period.
There simply was NOT.
Let it go.
OR: Whatever supernatural agent was responsible for said flood did two things. It first, erased all record of the flood and second, created a rock record that screams at every possible turn of a sand grain, THERE WAS NO GLOBAL FLOOD.
Yes, there are geologists out there who assert that there is geological evidence for a global flood. They are not just wrong–they are lying. And worse, they know they’re lying.
A group of fairly hard-core Christians, who set out to prove that there WAS a flood, were shredding the flood hypothesis a hundred years before you were born. There are some aspects of Christian Creationism that are scientifically testable. The flood hypothesis is one of those things. It’s has been continuously falsified pretty much since people started systematically trying to prove it.
There is about as much geology supporting the idea of a global flood as there is astronomy supporting the idea that the earth is flat. It’s in the same category. And again, you can moan that the geology is all wrong, and that we’re all misreading the data, but if so, you’re being a hypocrite. How? Because you’re arguing against geological methods and principles in some areas, and welcoming with open arms the fruits of those same principles in others (e.g., you’re sitting here today making your arguments on a computer built in part out of plastics and silica-derivatives that geologists (using the principles we’re talking about) found the raw materials for, and running on electrical power, most of which is generated by means that geology (using the principles we’re talking about) plays a central role in finding the raw materials for). Doesn’t your theology have a rather large problem with hypocricy?
Jeeze…how many times have we all written varients of this comment? And they complain about us not being able to see.
Owlmirror, thanks for the input.
The KJV translators apparently did consult the Vulgate, but I’m finding where it’s claimed that in Job and Isaiah “Nachash Bare’ach” is used. This is “Pole Serpent” and was associated with Thuban (Arabic for dragon and pole star of the time) and the constellation Draco.
Or am I missing something or making some horrendous mistake?
Alan Clarke @ #810:
Apparently you are under the impression that all hydrocarbons are identical. To test this, please pour several gallons of kerosene in your car’s gas tank. See how well it runs?
You obviously don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about. That’s been obvious since your first post here. Yet no matter how many times your nonsense is exposed as such, you can’t even imagine the possibility you could be wrong. The Dunning-Kruger effect has been mentioned before, but of course you won’t read about it, precisely because you are a living example of it.
I know next to nothing about hydrocarbons, but even I know that coal, oil, and methane are different substances that form through different processes! Yet you spout off idiocy without the slightest understanding of the differences, without even attempting to understand!
Do you put DVD-ROMs in you car’s CD player and get mad when they don’t install correctly? They’re both disks, right?
Do you take a FireWire cable and pound it into your computer’s USB port with a hammer, then scream bloody murder to tech support because it doesn’t work right? They’re both cables, aren’t they?
Do you regularly give your cats hemlock instead of catnip, then get pissed off when they die? They’re both plants, aren’t they?
When your doctor prescribes antibiotics, do you take horse tranquilizers instead? they’re both pills, aren’t they?
Have you ever bathed in sulfuric acid? It’s a clear liquid, just like water, right?
I’m thinking phantomreader42 has reached a breaking point and will no longer suffer
foolsidiots gladly.Alan, a global flood would leave evidence everywhere. There is not the slightest speck of evidence of such a flood. There are people in the world who study rock and layers of earth and the things found therein. These people are called “geologists”. They would have noticed evidence for a global flood if there were any. They haven’t. One of these geologists in this very thread has explained to you, in great detail, that there is not the slightest speck of evidence for a global flood.
Of course, no matter how many times you are shown to be wrong by experts in every field you spout off about, you won’t even consider the possibility that you might be wrong. No, no, no, you, Alan Clarke, cannot possibly be wrong! All the scientists in the world must be engaged in a vast conspiracy to sap and impurify your precious bodily fluids! The alternative, the possibility that you, Alan Clarke, might have made a mistake, is simply too horrible for you to contemplate.
Alan, you are profoundly, hopelessly, willfully ignorant. You don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about, and you don’t WANT to know. You are a sad, pathetic creature. Why is it creationists treat learning as a fate worse than death?
I’m surprised no one’s used this yet with Alan’s methane idiocy: I fart in your general direction!
E.V. @ #819:
I haven’t suffered fools, idiots, frauds, liars, crooks or sociopaths gladly for as long as I can remember. Creationists tend to fall into those categories, often all at once.
I was gonna say…I had a bean burrito for lunch and there is already evidence of methane production a few hours later. Whereas I have never once shit out any coal.
Add a little habanero to that burrito Sven, and you just might shit fire.
Ah, but that’s for a different verse in Isaiah (I was looking at 34:13, which definitely has “dragon” for “jackals”).
Huh. While “Nachash” is indeed “serpent”, the translation of “Bare’ach” as “Pole” looks wrong to me. WTF? Other translations of the verse do say “fleeing”; that seems more correct to me (The verb “ברח” (barach) does mean “flee”).
Job 26:13 and Isaiah 27:1 look like they might be faint echoes of attempts to syncretize YHWH with the Babylonian Marduk, and turn the destruction of Tiamat into a prediction. I dunno
It looks to me like someone bunged some cosmogonic woo into the Wikipedia article on dragons with that “Pole Serpent” business, and I do not trust it at all. Who is the source of that particular claim? The citations say “Kaplan”; who is Kaplan? What’s the damn title of the work?
Thuban/Alpha Draconis would have been the pole star long before either Isaiah or Job was written.
Checking the Wiki article on Draco, I note that the whole dragon interpretation was Greek, and the Arabs presumably named Thuban because they picked it up from the Greek Astronomers. However, Wikipedia says that the original Arabic interpretation of the constellation was “The Mother Camels”. LOL. Real dragon-like, there.
Alan’s new arguments:
‘Astronomers named stars, planets etc. after mythological gods; therefore, my god exists.’
and
‘Methane is a hydrocarbon. Coal and oil are hydrocarbons, too; therefore, my god exists.’
What’s next?
Yeah, Wikipedia was about all I could find in limited time, and the lack of information on the Kaplan source bugged me too. And I should have spent more time looking into Thuban(Th’uban) and Draco instead of relying on fragments of memories from a long ago astronomy class. My bad.
Thanks for the info and taking the time to respond, Owlmirror.
About all that is left, is “I fart and/or shit, therefore god exists”.
Coal and oil are both hydrocarbons, but coal is a lot more aromatic (graphitic) in character. In order to make gasoline from coal, a lot of hydrogen is required.
If I remember my high school chemistry correctly, methane is an odorless gas. Are you sure that you were producing methane?
The Mythbusters showed that methyl mercaptan and dimethyl disulfide are present in flatus. These are the main odorants. Add trace amounts of a few volatile aldehydes and ketones for slight change in odor.
Indeed. The air would be chock full of carbon dioxide!
Dracones, more likely :-}
———————————-
Alan, go read.
And then come back and explain the thick Early and Middle Jurassic desert sediments (fossil sand dunes) in the US Southwest — which periodically record somewhat wetter periods like how the Sahara, including Arabia, was more or less green 9000 to 5000 years ago. I’m saying there are many such events recorded on top of each other.
But first go read.
Hey, look which random quote just popped up.
Kel, I suspect you may be a computer programmer. Your excellent logic example illustrates how one conclusion spawns another. I remember how the Pope once spoke “ex cathedra”, literally meaning “from the throne”. The idea was that any statement he made when speaking “ex cathedra” was incapable of error since his words were in fact “from the throne of God”, thus the doctrine of “Papal infallibility”. About 18 years ago, a woman geologist was working for me who was Catholic. I asked her about this questionable-sounding doctrine. She said that many critics “overplayed” its importance because it was exercised only once by one Pope. My interest was really tweaked wondering what this one-time utterance was.
The 1854 declaration generated the question, “If Mary had no sin, the penalty for sin, “death”, would not have affected her. If she never died, then where is she now?” Every good question deserves a good answer, so Pius XII was forced to respond, “Mary didn’t die. She ascended into heaven.” Obama is forced to spend 1 Trillion dollars because he must fulfill his campaign promises. Nasser was forced to attack Israel in 1967 culminating in the disastrous Six-Day War because his “attack-based” political platform demanded it.
The examples illustrate how a single blunder in the beginning propagates a bigger problem or lie in the end. What was my first logical assumption and subsequent logic that led me to becoming a Christian and believing the Bible as “truth”? I’ll answer the question without giving thought to the negative consequences of a possible “illogical” progression. I’ve never answered this question before (in detail), so I have nothing to clip & paste. I’ll just type as I “spill my guts”. I’ve lost everyone anyway so how can I worsen my credibility by speaking the truth? I had to take a lie-detector test once after being robbed and I was fearless even though the detective kept pressing, “Alan! I think you’re lying to me!” Truth has the side benefit of not having to “manufacture” a story.
LOGICAL PROGRESSION OF MY CONVERSION:
Realization of Sin
I reached the “bottom” at about 21 years of age: pot smoking, beer drinking, profanity, robbery, viewing women as “objects” in pornography, complete self-indulgence, etc. At the same gas station where I was previously robbed, I gazed at my blood-shot eyes in the filthy restroom mirror. I had dropped out of the university, I was high, and had cheated about 5 customers that night. As I starred at my pupils in the mirror wondering what was behind them, I began to question myself out loud, “Alan! Who are you?” For the first time, I realized that the only difference between me and a full-time bum behind bars was that I had not been caught. Looking back, I realize the first step in my conversion was becoming aware of my sin condition.
A New Mentor
I returned to the university with a gift Bible from my mother. No one attended church in my family, so I attributed her actions as a last resort to help me since my debauchery was not hidden from her. I was so clueless that I didn’t realize the book my mother had given me was a Bible since the title was “The Way”. My admiration for Jesus started when I saw that the religious establishment persecuted him out of jealousy. He character, wisdom, and wit were “untouchable” by the Pharisees or any other character I had known, personal, literary fiction, or literary non-fiction. I developed an immediate admiration for this man.
Reality or Fable?
When I first read Jesus’ words in John 14:15-16 “If you love me, you will obey what I command. And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Counselor to be with you forever.”, I immediately perceived that his words applied to latter generations of people such as myself. I took him at his word and tried to “obey what he commanded.” They events in my life that followed were such that I could attribute my complete reversal of character and enlightenment to human nature to no other than what Jesus had promised – “A Counselor” or “Holy Spirit” must have been sent to me. I’m sure an unbeliever will have an alternate explanation, but people that knew me before, commented that I was not the same person, and people who knew me thereafter could not believe I could have been the old person I described above. Go figure.
Short-lived excitement?
I was told by others at that time, that my new-found “religion” was a “temporal high” and I would eventually return to “normality”. My grandfather warned me, “Religion can make a person go crazy.” A university professor told me that the Bible fails to explain the knowledge that can be gained through mind-enhancing drugs. The barrage of voices never ceased: “If you solely dedicate your life to helping others, you will go broke and hungry.” “If you help someone before a test, you’ll hurt yourself by raising the grade curve.” “If you proclaim Jesus before others, you will be taken for a fool.” “If you don’t start interviewing for a job, you will lose your only opportunity for success.” “If you don’t start making more money, you’ll never attract a mate.” I chose instead to listen to the inner “Holy Spirit” that contradicted every one of the above advices and a thousand more. During the 33 years of following the Spirit’s advice, I developed a firm belief.
Final Logical Conclusion
I can’t “prove” God to anyone, but I have “proved” him for myself, or should I say, “He has proved himself to me” too many times for me to attribute my fortunes to chance. The “voices” on this forum are reminiscent of those 33 years ago that battled and raged for my allegiance. They all proved themselves to be lies so at this stage in my life, I almost welcome derogatory remarks because they remind me of my true counter-identity, the one that I received from Jesus Christ. I can now look at myself in the mirror, for a long time, and without reservation.
Is the Bible Scientific?
The question is, “Are theories that oppose the Biblical account scientific?” I’ve noticed a pattern in life: The wisdom of man invariably fails and the wisdom and words of the Bible renew each successive generation. Trusting an opinion or theory simply because it has the “majority” backing is prone to failure. I’ve learned to discern supposed “scientific” theories that have their roots in “God-denial”. Evolution is patently false to me because it not only denies the Creator, it fails miserably in its believability by proposing that man formed accidentally without a designer. The theory is as viable as a full-time bum playing the slot machines at a casino in order to produce sustainable wealth. Actually, the bum may be more viable than my home-town casino: http://www.google.com/search?&q=casino+aztar+bankruptcy
What? What?
uh…Sorry…must have dozed off there.
What?
So you deny evolution because of your belief in God? Got it.
Alan Clarke,
so you were a cheating stealing druggie,then became religious and now you are a brainwashed moron that has “found god” as a way to sublimate.
Cant say Im impressed.Just confirms the fact that most religious people are either intellectually disabled,simple-minded,or sublimating.
Since I asked this question to other people, I may as well ask it to Alan as well –
If all the evidence points to evolution, what does that say abut God? Does it say that God has deliberately deceived us by making it look like evolution happened, or does it tell us that God worked through evolution in order to create us? I’m really curious, because when so many lines of evidence all point to life evolving over time, when the size and age of the universe are huge, it brings theological implications of either a deceptive God or a God who works through nature.
Alan, it’s great that you were able to turn your life around. (although, frankly it sounds more like you were just a bit of an irresponsible prick than in some bottomless well of despair. Beer, weed, porn? That’s college, not rock bottom. I’ve seen people at “rock bottom” and trust me, it sounds like you had a long way left to fall. But good that you recognized a change was in order.)
Anyway, good for you. Sincerely. And if a belief in Jesus helped you somehow. Great.
It’s just too bad you felt it necessary to sacrifice reason and critical thinking. Millions of others have been in similar situations and far worse. Millions of others found faith and used it to help rebuild themselves. And millions have done it while having no conflicts between their beliefs and established scientific fact. Seriously, you simply wave away the fact that several civilizations continued, uninterrupted and without even noticing, your catastrophic global flood. Just so you don’t have to do any extra thinking about your beliefs. Beer is older than you think the universe is.
Obviously you credit your god with this beautiful world full of fascinating creatures and wondrous places. Fine, if you must. But you’re shorting him by many orders of magnitude. The god described in the bible is pathetic compared to say, Ken Miller’s god, the one that set up the evolution of billions of creatures over billions of years, and potentially in hundreds of billions of places in the universe. The god described in the bible is a chump compared to one that would actually explain what science reveals about our surroundings.
You want to believe in a god? Fine.
But why such a small one?
Alan, you have come in here to have a discussion. But there are two problems.
One, you have shown up at a poker event having never learned how to play the game, and yet you expect to be seated at the table with those of us who play it for a living.
That text of yours that I’ve copied above completely misrepresents how evolution works. The word that begins turning your comment into word salad is “accidentally.” Your bum in the casino analogy fails spectacularly because it misrepresents what the theory of evolution actually says. It’s a terrible analogy that says nothing at all about evolution. You’re screaming that you don’t think the accepted rules of baseball can allow anyone to win the game, but we’re sitting here playing football. You’ve shown up to play poker with the professionals, but you don’t even know what all of those pretty colored plastic chips are for.
Now, that shouldn’t be a problem, in and of itself. Evolution is not the most user-friendly scientific theory out there and much of the information you can quickly, and easily, find about it is confusing or, well, simply wrong. So, there should be no harm and no fowl, and wouldn’t be, except for problem
Two. Problem two is this: you have repeatedly demonstrated a completely unwillingness to learn how the game of poker is played. You don’t want to wander over to the beginner’s table and spend some time learning how to play. You don’t want to sit down with them and actually play a few hands. Instead, you want to come over and sit at the pros’ table. That would be fine too, except that you don’t want to watch and listen and learn. No–you apparently hate that last word. Instead, you want to sit there and tell professional poker players that their game has fatal flaws and that every time they win a hand it was just an illusion: they’re just deluding themselves because the hand was never really played in the first place. Rather, they’re just blind. But–of course you’ve offered no evidence that they haven’t been playing hands of poker and you’re yelling this stuff at them when it’s obvious that you have no idea what the game of poker even is. And then you get annoyed when they are confused by your arguments and don’t take them seriously.
Additionally, it doesn’t matter if evolution appears false to you. Science isn’t about public opinion. Your opinion of a scientific theory is irrelevant. My opinion of a scientific theory is irrelevant. It doesn’t matter if you like evolution or if you “believe” evolution. Evolution explains the relevant observations regarding the development of life through time. Period. I have 150 years of continuous work behind me backing that statement up. If you are going to come in here and assert that we are all reading the observations wrong, then please at least have the common courtesy to learn what the poker chips stand for. You’re walking into the Ford plant and screaming that cars don’t exist. It’s not our fault that you’ve never taken a tour of the assembly line floor. I wouldn’t even think of dropping myself into a blog that has spent time discussing the finer points of Christian theology without first doing two things. One, learning what religion was, and two, reading the Bible. You are just being rude, and, I will reiterate, hypocritical, since you are screaming that no hands of poker are being played while you’re wearing clothes that were purchased with the money from last week’s winnings.
Alan, your testimony may be compelling to you, but it is simply less-than-poor evidence to us. Until you understand that your bible is a work of fiction we can’t have a discussion. If you can’t accept that, stop posting here.
Science doesn’t care what you or any non-scientist thinks. Your opinion doesn’t count, because you don’t work in the field, and are truly uneducated as to the nuances of science. So science is democratic within science, but doesn’t include anybody outside of science. You can keep presenting your uninformed opinion, but nobody is going to it seriously. Until you understand the need for hard physical evidence, and have the ability to put it into context without a holy book, there can be no discussion.
We are wasting both our times. You need to quit posting. We will have the last say.
Congratulations, you have proven your grandfather right.
Oh, I don’t know about that, but I would counsel you to listen to this somewhate related piece of advice from St. Augustine:
De Genesi Ad Litteram Libri Duodecim
So you live in a cave, eating raw meat you kill yourself and whatever nuts and berries you can scrounge from trees and bushes. You must do this because you reject god-denial science. The folks who designed and built your computer didn’t say prayers before they produced the machine you’re using to post your screed. No virgins were sacrificed when your car was designed and built. Your doctor doesn’t get a priest’s blessing before he treats your bursitis.
Science isn’t god-denial. Science neither accepts nor rejects god. Napoleon asked Pierre Simon Laplace why he hadn’t mentioned God in an astronomy book. Laplace replied “I had no need of that hypothesis” (Je n’avais pas besoin de cette hypothèse-là). What was true for Laplace is true for all other scientists.
One point you might consider about the St. Augustine quote that DaveL gave. [i]De Genesi Ad Litteram Libri Duodecim[/i] (On the Literal Interpretation of Genesis) was written around 400 AD. Augustine considered creationism (and the Noachian flood) over 1600 years ago. He rejected your opinion. Are you claiming you’re a greater theologian than Augustine?
OK, Alan. Let’s postpone reading those two pages that you treat with “la, la, la, I can’t hear you” for a few more hours. I’ll go through your latest comment.
It is great that you put these two sentences right next to each other. We’ll get back to this.
Erm — wait a minute.
How is that possible? The Bible contradicts itself all the time. This makes a lot of sense if you just consider the idea that the Bible has a history, but if you believe it came down from Heaven in one piece, it just doesn’t work.
Even the two creation stories contradict each other. Was Adam created first, then the rest of the world, and then Eve, or did “as man and woman let us create them” happen at the very end? Tell me, Alan. Tell me.
And it’s not just stories about physical reality where the Bible contradicts itself. The New Testament contradicts itself all the time on how to reach salvation. Even some gospels and some of Paul’s epistles contradict themselves on which conditions are necessary and/or sufficient for salvation. Look, if you dare.
I don’t doubt your innocence, but pedantry compels me to point out that the lie detector doesn’t measure whether you lie. It measures whether you’re excited. If you’re afraid (as the detective was trying to make you), you’ll be considered guilty; if you’re capable of lying in cold blood (and that’s something you can train), you’ll walk free. This is why the so-called lie detector is forbidden outside the USA.
I have to agree with Ragutis here. Except for robbery, all of this is normal. Fine, I have never drunk alcohol (it stinks) or smoked anything (it stinks) or used pornography (most of it isn’t even my taste), but I am not normal… Alcohol can of course utterly destroy a life, but even if you get drunk once in a while, long-term consequences are unlikely — when you get drunk every day, that’s different. Pot is probably less harmful than tobacco (just don’t drive if you’re high).
And profanity? Rock-bottom? What the — I’ll spell it out — fuck? Do you mean blasphemy or something?
1) It’s hard to imagine you grew up without any contact to basic Christian doctrine in the USA. Really. I’m not sure whether you aren’t exaggerating here.
2) Yes, if we kindly gloss over the constant and sort of random threats of hellfire, the Jesus character is pretty admirable. But how does that make him different from Luke Skywalker? Don’t tell me “but Luke is fiction”. Whether this is a difference should be a conclusion, not a presupposition.
That was you yourself.
That much is true.
LOL. Knowledge? Through drugs? Not if you don’t test your hallucinations afterwards — in other words, not if you don’t do science. :-) What did that professor teach?
Would surprise me.
WTF. Does it work like that in the USA?!? That’s crazy!!!
Over here, yes, because over here the faithful obey Matthew 6:1-8. But in the USA?
I don’t think it’s that bad.
Never say never again! Stranger things have happened.
Again, that’s yourself. Aren’t you committing blasphemy here by your own criteria? :-)
What? Why do you suddenly change the topic?
That depends on whether they fulfill the definition of “scientific”. Here goes: Are they testable? Can it be found out what evidence that would disprove them would look like? If the answer is “yes”, then they are scientific.
“Scientific” neither means “correct” nor “in accordance with anything”.
Shit, another blockquote failure.
Anyway, here’s another quote for you, Alan. It’s from Thomas Henry Huxley, “Darwin’s Bulldog”, the paleontologist who, upon reading On the Origin of Species, said “how stupid of me not to have thought of this myself!”
As long as you continue to ignore all facts that might contradict your preconceived notions, as long as you keep not even wanting to find out where the evidence leads, you will continue to learn nothing.
And don’t tell me — or yourself — that you don’t need to learn anything. Creationism can’t explain a single champsosaur.
While I am at it, here’s another quote, this time from Francis Bacon, one of the people who developed the scientific method:
BTW, you almost certainly don’t know what a champsosaur even is. That was deliberate. I’m trying to illustrate to you that there’s orders of magnitudes more knowledge out there than you’d ever have suspected even exists.
Champsosaur
{Google is my friend.)
uh…what about the, you know, next 25 years after college?
or am I doing it wrong?
Oh, I am happy to hear that, because I just love saying the word “procolophonoid” out loud (the other fun one is lophotrochozoan).
So what about all the strange molecular results? Are procolophonoids also diapsids in disguise? What about the rest of the parareptiles?
Shorter Alan:
1) My life was a mess.
2) I read a bible and turned my life around
3) Therefore God exists.
Such as? Examples, please, of this invariable failure.
Also: What “wisdom of man” failed in producing the computer that you are using at this very moment?
Such as? Examples, please.
Especially since you’ve consistently demonstrated nothing but folly in the Bible.
That’s true. Christianity is the majority opinion in the Americas and Europe, and of course, it fails to explain anything about anything real (other than the history of Christianity).
Islam is the majority opinion in North Africa and the Middle East, and of course, it fails to explain anything about anything real (other than the history of Islam).
No scientific theories have their roots in “God-denial”. Scientific theories have their roots in examining the physical universe (and in assuming only that the physical universe is not a lie).
Evolution does not deny the Creator.
Of course, it denies a Creator that does not permit evolution — but then, physics denies a Creator that does not permit gravity, or electricity, or magnetism, or light or radioactivity. Yet the same physical forces that are used to demonstrate the age of the earth and of the universe are also used to drive the technology that you are using right this very instant. And as Kel notes, that means that God either does permit all those things, or God provides an enormous set of perfectly inter-consistent observations that are nevertheless all lies. And if you pick the latter, then you have no basis on which to claim that we are denying God. If physical reality is a lie of God, then God denies himself. Who are you to challenge God?
Getting back to biology: Evolution is an explanation of how life changes over time.
“Nothing about biology makes sense except in light of evolution” was the famous line by religious biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky, and it is echoed and repeated by religious biologists such as Ken Miller and Francisco Ayala.
If you see evolution as denying God, then it is your own understanding of evolution that is wrong.
Nonsense, of course. You don’t believe it because you don’t understand it. You have demonstrated repeatedly an enormous amount of things that you don’t understand, so your complaints about “believability” are as laughably silly as a small child not “believing” that the Earth is round rather than flat because he doesn’t understand the geometry used to demonstrate that simple scientific fact — or the refinements in our understanding of the Earth’s shape.
http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
We’ll see. I like to throw accusations of long-branch attraction all over the place, but we’ll see.
There is one molecular analysis that finds the turtles outside the (crown-group) diapsids; it’s a byproduct of the great big lissamphibian phylogeny of Frost et al. (2006).
Now that would really surprise me.
Well said.
Though… wait. Even this is not necessary. It does not really matter for science if the physical universe is a lie — it just has to be a consistent lie!
This I can agree with. :-)
I’m back but not well yet, wanted to share a notable personal life experience in investigative science.
A Case of False Assumption Leading Research
I need to be a little nonspecific with this story since I kept no connection with the timing of the legal proceedings. I was sourced by company X as “the best man” to travel with a company official in-charge of handling a potential wrongful death lawsuit. The destination was a high tech research consortium where the failed and fire damaged remains of a product was being analyzed. Upon arrival, a Tech buddy from California filled me in on the details of the research while representatives of multiple “at risk” companies with lawyers & analysts in tow were coming and leaving the various research rooms. The investigation was winding down to a “module” manufactured by company X. The room of attention happened to be where the “module” was being dissected. Surfaces were being scanned by an electron microscope and the mass spectrometer was divulging the metal composition with attempt to prove that exposure of certain underlying metals indicated premature wear that lead to failure which lead to etc, and eventually to the sad incident. I began to take in how this focused attention (by truly experts in their field) with the use of impressive high tech equipment had began to solidify a consensus among those there. They seemed to be gleaning assurances from each other in their pursuit which ultimately was laying blame at the feet of company X.
I wasn’t ready to drink the Kool-Aid because of God given insight to the nature of corruptible man. A nature that fears going against a consensus or disagreeing with the “research” of the highly educated elite. A reflex nature instilled across campuses to only formulate answers the instructor approves of, that is if you want to succeed under their rules. The real world is just a bigger campus where reality can be bought and paid for. Contracts, status, career building, politics, peer acceptance, we can all name many people who have become so tainted of late that society can no longer tolerate their “criminal” actions. On the other hand, only a few are willing to take arrows in opposing “the apparatus”. (Ok, enough preaching, sorry for paragragh errors, and back to the story.)
I began to dig in the other rooms which involved some of my buddy’s research of specific parts. Discussion naturally lead to possible different scenarios which generated limited discussion among those present which lead to someone (most likely a lawyer) pulling a fellow aside and in hushed tones said, “Don’t talk to him.” The time of our stay was coming toward the end and my focus was on the burned sensor assembly which CONTROLLED company X’s module. The sensor was disconnected and lying in the bottom area, possibly done very carefully on site as various parts were examined. That sensor had a welded-on bracket with two holes for securing.
It was obvious that only one hole had been “upset” by a sheet metal screw. The conclusion soon followed that a single screw would naturally loosen due to movement and a miss-positioned sensor would be catrosphic. Everything moved very quickly from there and I began to pity those representing the installers as we left. The company X companion expressed delight he was able to solve this and put the issue at rest; I was glad for his career.
Conclusion:
Don’t trust in research built upon a false premise, it may all be conducted by people who are simply missing a screw.
RogerS, what was the point of that? Boastfulness?
Uh-huh. Like the false assumption that the real world is a lie? And the false assumption that only the literal meaning of words inside the covers of a particular 2700 book can possibly be true, even when in direct contradiction to what can be observed in and about the real world?
Sheesh.
Don’t trust in research built upon a false premise, it may all be conducted by people who are simply missing a screw.
Someone please correct me if I am wrong but did not chemistry and astronomy emerge out of the false premises of alchemy and astrology?
The trick is to find the truthful nuggets and making use of them in a better setting.
RogerS, your god doesn’t exist except between your ears, and the bible is a proven work of fiction. Yawn, these godbots are so boring and pointless.
Science gets rid of the false stuff and only keeps that which works. Theory of evolution works. Atomic/molecular theory works. Theory of gravity works. Theory of relativity works. God doesn’t, so science ignores god.
RogerS – for you analogy to be appropriate to evolution and ID the screw would have had to have been loosened by a unicorn – one which not only could be seen and which left no tracks, but which also had the power to make it look as if it’d be done through a slow, gradual process over billions of years.
Er… Roger… you do realize that creationists would be the ones working on the false assumption and looking in the wrong place, and the proponents of evolution via observable natural means would be you, the hero of the story?
All ID and the other forms of creationism are doing is insisting that the original, “obvious” yet thoroughly refuted answer is still correct.
My post #856 – that should be ‘…a unicorn which could not be seen and which left no tracks…’
Apologies.
A guy was not killed by a malfunctioning piece of equipment but by a different piece of improperly installed equipment, so god exists.
With a bit more detail:
Such as the glib and unexamined religious consensus that the bible is literally true even though it contradicts itself and empirical reality?
The difference between the consensus of religion and the consensus of the highly educated elite in the hard sciences is that the consensus of religion rejects analysis, rejects falsifications of religious statements about reality, and in the worst case rejects reality itself.
The consensus of the highly educated elite in the hard sciences welcomes systematic analysis, and welcomes falsification with empirical evidence of the current scientific model.
Religion does not have evidence that falsifies current science, and if it did, that falsification would become part of the current scientific model, open to being falsified itself.
If it can be demonstrated that some premise is empirically false, or that the tools being used are somehow defective, then you might have a point.
Are you willing to put up or shut up? Are you willing to apply the same reasoning to your religious assumptions? If every step of reasoning and evidence showing that the bible cannot possibly be literally true was given to you, would you then agree that the premise of the bible being literally true was false?
If not, why not?
If this is true then what do you have besides science to conclude that my God is an “imaginary diety”? Your statement destroys itself.
Alan, you deity is imaginary because it only exists between your ears, no place else. Otherwise you need to show physical evidence, like an eternally burning bush, to prove your god.
Ragutis attempted to disprove the Biblical account of the world being 6000 years old by posting ages of the world’s oldest mummies in post #392: 9000, 9000, 6000, 5000, and 9000 years. Notice that most (maybe all??) of Ragutis’ links have something conspicuously missing: How the ages are determined is not stated. If they were determined by mechanisms of evolution/uniformitarian theory, then this is likened to the forbidden practice of defining the meaning of a word by itself. (i.e. “Kill” means to kill something.)
Look at the multitude of problems with C14 dating techniques that I garnered from Wikipedia’s “Radiocarbon dating”:
A hypothesized global flood would affect no less than 5 of the above conditions. Volcanic eruptions can belittle atomic bombs. Thus, a global flood could easily account for mummy dates exceeding 4400 years. But what really plagues Ragutis’ position is the oldest mummy dates of 9000 years are much closer to the creation model than evolution’s Homo sapiens which supposedly began about 200,000 years ago. Where are the 200K, 150K, 100K, and 50K year-old mummies that have age evidence outside the highly questionable C14 method, such as sarcophagi inscriptions similar to the Egyptians? If you can’t produce them then let me help your defense. Just say that writing never “evolved” until that time. To say that mummification practices never occurred until the last 4% of Homo sapiens’ existence is hardly believable.
For a real “eye-opener”, read Wikipedia’s Radiocarbon Dating and see for yourself the multiple assumptions necessary for the method to work. If you can’t prove a young Earth through C14 unless principles of uniformitarianism are not upset by a hypothesized global flood, then you have “proven” nothing. Notice that I am sticking to “science” by merely “hypothesizing” the global flood event.
Someone said there is absolutely no evidence for such a flood. This statement seems unfounded in lieu of the fact that the entire Earth shows evidence of sedimentary deposition from the lowest basin to the highest mountain. Another evidence you can add to your list is the 1.5 million km^2 Morrison Formation in North America which reinforces flood catastrophism since its chocked full of dinosaur fossils, thus explaining their sudden mass extinction, and is explained (even by evolutionists) as being formed by water.
A second evidence is the Powder River Basin coal bed which is 200 miles long, 120 miles wide, and in some places more than 200 feet deep. Explaining this anomaly by gradual accumulation of peat is awkward since over 1200 feet of it would be required to achieve 200 feet of coal. Are there any 200 mi. X 120 mi. X 1200 ft. peat beds today? According to Wikipedia, peat grows at about 1mm/year. Could an ecosystem remain constantly conducive for peat formation for 365,000 years? In the short period of recorded human history, we know that the ecosystem has changed before industrialization existed. The Sahara desert has increased. Why would the Egyptians build pyramids in a parched desert to honor their kings? Nothing is constant. A steady environment for this much peat accumulation belies reality.
Alan Clarke, in desperation, wrote:
That you can possibly be so stupid and yet manage to operate a computer is fascinating.
You do realise that things like mummification and writing are human inventions? Did humans always have electricity, or the internet, or aeroplanes? No. We invented them. Someone had to invent mummification; mummies appear after that point. Ditto writing.
Sheesh. I’ll let someone else take you to task for your egregious foolishness about dating. I can only handle so much stupid.
You still haven’t read the link David provided in post #161 (and 3 or 4 times since), have you?
http://www.asa3.org/aSA/resources/Wiens.html
Read it
Then ask any questions you may still have about radiometric dating methods. You’ve been pointed to the answers to these questions repeatedly. So fucking read it already or admit you aren’t interested in learning anything at all.
Read that link, and maybe tomorrow we’ll get around to explaining to you why mummies and writing weirdly only appear after certain dates and how that relates to the strange fact that no cell phones have ever been unearthed in ruins from the Roman Empire.
Poor, desperate Alan, full of FAIL.
Dude. You can’t have writing before writing was invented.
No. Writing did not “evolve”. Writing was invented.
What the fuck do you know about “mummification practices”, and how “believable” it is that they were the inventions of particular times and places, you pathetic stupid pig-ignorant cretin?
If you want human remains dated through other means than radiocarbon, there is always “Thermoluminescence dating of Mousterian Troto-Cro-Magnon’ remains from Israel and the origin of modern man“, as but one example.
Alan, you keep talking about things that you don’t understand. Why? Why?
Yes, and for the last several tens of thousands of years, these variations are now very well known. That’s what all the talk about “uncalibrated” and “calibrated radiocarbon years” is about.
Did you seriously think all those physicists are gibbering, drooling morons? Did you seriously believe that all these hundreds or thousands of people never tried to find out what the uncertainties are and precisely how big they are? Did you seriously believe that they never even tried to get them under control?
If so, your stupidity is beyond my wildest imagination.
1) Why do you keep tying the Flood to volcanic eruptions? ~:-|
2) The reason atomic bombs produce 14C is the radioactivity. Bombard air — which mostly consists of 13N — with neutrons, and you get lots of 14N, which then undergoes rapid β decay and becomes the less unstable 14C. The fact that an atomic-bomb explosion happens to be an explosion has nothing to do with it.
Do you even know what the notation “14C” means? I was taught it in public school… it’s in the national curriculum where I come from.
The opposite, you lackwit! Nuclear explosions produce 14C, they don’t destroy it — and stuff with more 14C looks younger!!!
You read of uncertainties and automatically assume they are all in your favor. How much more stupid can one possibly get?
I think you understand now why I’ve lost my patience.
Why, no — how should a population of hunter-gatherers in the African savanna mummify their dead?
Did you ever think about that?
OK, so you have never thought about that, and I have to adjust my ideas about the maximum extent of human stupidity, because you just falsified them. Oh well, science progresses.
<sigh>
This is not truly stupid. It is merely ignorant.
You see, there are other methods.
First of all, 14C is just one of dozens of radioactive isotopes that can be used for radiometric dating; all others are not subject to the vagaries of the atmosphere or solar radiation, and many have much longer half-lives — for example 238U has one of 4.5 billion years.
Then there are completely different methods.
You can, for example, count year-rings in trees. Each year has its own weather, so each tree has its own pattern of tree rings of variable thickness; trees of overlapping age have overlapping patterns. This is called dendrochronology and — in some regions — reaches back about 10,000 years. All of them happen to be in north-central Europe, which had only glaciers and cold steppes before about that age…
You can only count the yearly layers in a glacier. People have been to the thickest part of the ice shield of Greenland and drilled down. Lo & behold, 250,000 year-layers before the rock with the fossil tree stumps and pollen comes — and keep in mind that this is less than the age of the inland ice of Greenland, because the ice flows.
People have also been to one of the thickest part of the ice shield of Antarctica and drilled down. Lo & behold, 740,000 year-layers. The last eight ice ages are recorded in that core. And it has not yet reached the bottom!!!
Thermoluminescence dating has already been mentioned…
Yes — mountains consist of folded sediments (and often metamorphic and/or plutonic rocks, too). Why is that? Why don’t they have horizontal layers?
I mean, have you ever been to a mountain?
Also, what the fuck makes you think that only floods can deposit sediments?
You have no idea how ridiculous this is.
1) The Morrison Fm is very thick. It spans a lot of time. And dinosaurs are everywhere in it.
2) Above the Morrison Fm (more precisely, its uppermost member, the Brushy Basin Member) comes the Cedar Mountain Fm (except in those places where it has been eroded away — how did that happen exactly… hmmmmm…) (more precisely, its lowermost member, the Yellow Cat Mb). It, too, is thick, spans a considerable amount of time, and it, too, has dinosaurs in it. Different dinosaurs. And different mammals, different crocodiles, different lungfishes, different pollen, and so on! The Morrison Fm is Late Jurassic in age, the Cedar Mountain Fm is Early Cretaceous in age, and — except for the modern birds — the dinosaurs died out at the Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary, which is recorded in the Hell Creek and Lance Fms among others.
3) Yes, the Morrison Fm is mostly water-lain. More precisely, it consists of river sediments. Lots and lots of river channels that cut through each other and then redeposited sediment on top of each other. Probably you were so incredibly stupid that you honestly believed all sediments — whether laid by meandering rivers, braided rivers, deltas, estuaries, seashores, sand dunes, whatever — look exactly the same. If so, well, you were mistaken. There’s a whole fucking science called sedimentology.
4) Why did I say “mostly”? Because there are paleosols in it. Fossil soil. The sort of stuff that would be washed away and dissolved by a flood of any size.
“Evidence” is a mass noun, like “information” (in English), “sand” or “water”. It is not countable. You have to say “further evidence” or something.
You’ve misunderstood. Coal beds are hardly ever over a meter thick. What you’re talking about is a place that has lots and lots of such beds on top of each other, separated by rock layers which are maybe a few meters thick. You’re not talking about 60 m of nothing but coal.
1) Peat bogs — muskeg — are inland freshwater environment where a certain moss species grows on top and dies at the bottom; the dead parts form peat. Coal can form from any buried vegetation if the conditions are right (mainly lack of oxygen); the Carboniferous coal, which is full of fossil tree parts, has formed from something like mangrove forests.
2) I don’t think a single coal bed has to have exactly the same age (down to the millennium) all over its extent. It must be due to a single process, like a swamp being covered by an advancing delta or an advancing seashore, but such a process can take a while or three or a thousand.
With interruptions (see above for the rock between coal beds), yes, of course.
Yes — though that’s because we’re currently living in comparatively unstable times: wobbly ice ages which are punctuated, about every hundred thousand years, by a fairly stable but short interglacial. This has only been the normal state of affairs for the last 3 million years; most coal is over 300 million years old.
Several reasons.
0) Yes, it was already a desert at that time, even though its southern border was IIRC a bit farther north than today.
1) Try putting a pyramid on Nile mud. What will happen? — Remember that the pyramids were intended to last for eternity. Their own homes the ancient Egyptians built and rebuilt of mud bricks, not of stone.
2) Said Nile mud was still needed for agriculture. Pyramids don’t need to be surrounded by fields.
3) The Nile valley is pretty deep. It’s more impressive when the pyramids are above it than when they are in it, don’t you think?
In sum…
4) The ancient Egyptians simply weren’t quite as stupid as you think.
Yes, and that was only the start of the development. Classical Egyptian mummification — which is not what the oldest mummies even in Egypt have undergone — was a very complicated and extremely time-consuming process that required materials that had to be discovered first (natron for example) and don’t occur everywhere (natron is hard to get outside the Wadi Natrun in Egypt, for example).
Now, Alan, heed Ragutis’s advice. It simply makes no sense if you keep blathering about stuff that you don’t understand.
I read Wikipedia’s entire Radiocarbon Dating. The assumptions and problems with this dating method are staggering. To say “for the last several tens of thousands of years, these variations are now very well known”, is not true at all. It is especially not true as illustrated by your later, and frequent allusion to tree growth rings. And what do tree growth rings tell us? They are a second piece of evidence that supports my original argument using mummies. No trees existed before 10,000 years ago.
Your repeated appeal to populism damages your credibility as a scientist. Get into politics. Yesterday I e-mailed a Ph. D. chemist at a large company that supplies petroleum additives for fuel and lubricants for Exxon Mobil hoping that he could provide some information to support my argument. Unfortunately, his field was too specialized and he referred me to another doctor higher up who responded, “I am not an expert on the formation of oil and coal because most of my interest is on upgrading and refining.” He eventually provided some textbook information which is readily available on websites. Often we esteem others too highly. The less we know about a person’s limitations, the more we can inflate them in our imagination. I fear that you have succumbed to being awed by those in “high position”. Perhaps one day you’ll have a son or daughter that insists upon marrying a “dream” person who you know is a phony.
The Biblical account demands it:
Genesis 7:11 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.
The key phrase is “all the fountains of the great deep broken up”. This indicates there was an upheaval in the Earth’s crust. The Grand Canyon was obviously cut by water, but there are also basalts flowing over the edges of the canyon walls. Sometimes floods are created by volcanic eruptions as in the case of the recent Mt. St. Helens eruption. Catastrophic flooding and volcanism work hand in hand.
I’m so thankful I can admit my mistakes, learn, and move on. Even the best of us sometimes unwittingly support our opponent’s argument as poor Josh did. Maybe Josh is a creationist? If not, thank you Josh for bolstering my argument by an additional one year:
Nevertheless, the atomic bombs illustrate something more important: The atmospheric C14 can be changed by outside events which may (or may not) support a young or old Earth. The case in point is your dogmatism on C14 has little basis.
Don’t get too excited about my mistake. The atmospheric pollution created by a volcanic eruption reduces the cosmic radiation and thus reduces the atmospheric C14.
David, you practically wrote a book on your post and I credit you with that. A lot of time is undoubtedly required for such an undertaking and I’m sure your supporters appreciate it. Keep up the good work! Many are learning.
One thing is obvious in this debate. Each person is convinced of their own theory because there is continuity and harmony in the interpretations of the evidences. Continuity and harmony is not a sign of truth however. Many stories can be manufactured and woven seamlessly to support a falsity. There is something more basic that underlies this debate which determines each person’s perception of reality. I am not disagreeing that your arguments have an appearance of agreement, continuity and harmony. We both have the same evidences. We are interpreting them differently.
Alan, you lie again. All the problems with carbon dating are explained. Carbon dating is reliable.
However. all the problems of your work of fiction called the bible are not explained. You have presented absolutely no evidence of the flood except from your work of fiction. You keep pretending that the bible has any authority. We know it is a work of fiction, and it has no authority. Until you understand the need for an impartial third party, like the peer reviewed scientific literature, you cannot do anything other than continue your lies. Your god doesn’t exist except between your ears. Deal with it elsewhere.
Maybe Josh is a creationist?
Not in the least but then, paying attention is not your strong suit.
Alan still hasn’t accounted for galaxies we see 14 billion light years away. He still hasn’t accounted for the dwarf galaxy orbiting our own we see 168,000 light years away. The universe is huge, and thus old.
And Young Earth Creationism is exactly that: A lie manufactured and created by human beings who would rather lie about reality than admit their religion is a lie.
No, you are ignoring and lying about everything that contradicts you.
For example:
This is a lie; the sort of complete and utterly stupid lie that only a religious fanatic could come up with.
David M pointed out that there are ice cores that go back hundreds of thousands of years.
He also said: “Lo & behold, 250,000 year-layers before the rock with the fossil tree stumps and pollen”
I realize that you are stupid and deluded beyond anything remotely resembling sanity, but what that means is that there were 250,000 years worth of ice layers, and underneath that was fossil trees, and evidence of living trees (pollen).
Sigh.
Why do we even bother? You’ll just find some other lies to throw out there, because you are a liar who loves lies and hates truth. That’s what’s really driving you, isn’t it? Hatred, pure hatred, of the simple truth that we live on an old planet in an old universe.
Then where, pray tell, do calibration curves like these come from?
You can count years by counting rings, and date the material between rings to get the corresponding carbon age, thus generating a calibration curve. That’s what growth rings tell us.
Oh, sweet tittyfuck.
We have ample evidence that trees go back much farther than 10 000 years ago.
What we only have going back 10,000 years is a continuous series of growth rings.
Agreed, Alan is just another Liar for JesusTM, one who blatantly misrepresents science to try and create enough doubt for his obviously and manifestly false claims to sit in there. If he had any intellectual honesty he would stop misrepresenting the science involved and actually do some experiments in order to verify.
OH, FFS!
Yes, Alan… trees did exist more than 10,000 years ago. There are trees alive today that have stood for several thousand years and others that have been cloning for tens of thousands of years. You are just completely unwilling to consider any evidence that contradicts your interpretation of the Bible and absolutely adverse to learning anything that may require you to reexamine your beliefs. Just how weak is your faith that not even the smallest change can be risked?
READ THAT LINK or don’t bother responding any more. You’re not going to convert anyone here, and it appears that we have no chance of getting you to learn anything or move your mind out of the Bronze Age.
Have fun with your stork theory of the planet’s origins. Enjoy your tiny world and your simple god and be sure to keep that small mind tightly shuttered lest you learn something by accident and jeopardize your immortal soul.
So Alan is saying the world is only 6000 years old, but agrees there are trees that are 10,000 years old as demonstrated by dendochronology? Would he agree that the ice core layering means you need hundreds of thousands of years to get the layering cycle? Though I doubt he’s interested in seeing how science really works, just about selectively using data to make his fantasy of a 6000 year old earth plausible.
You fools! You’re shackled by your dogmatic assumptions, like uniformitarianism for example. How do you know the speed of light didn’t used to be faster? Ice packs probably used to lay down 5 or 6 “annual” layers per day! Treerings too; what makes you think it’s always been one per year? Unsupportable assertion! All radiometric dating systems are suspect for similar reasons: the background rate used to be all over the place. Why don’t you read something and learn a little before wasting Alan’s time with all of these easily-refuted poopyhead “evidences”?
Sorry for the confusion Josh. I was using “evolution” in the broader term as in “evolutionism” which utilizes randomness and chance to achieve increased complexity from non-living matter in order to achieve life, (i.e. the first living cell). As applied to this, my casino slot machine analogy is excellent because there is nothing to “learn”. There is no organism that can remember a positive or negative experience. With non-living matter, there is no “goal”, only randomness. I noticed in your rebuttal you jumped ahead in the assumption that non-living matter has already “won”, a cell is created, and now it’s time to learn the game of “Darwinian Evolution”. Since Darwinian Evolution indeed applies to living things then it’s time to “roll the dice” or take note of those “pretty colored plastic chips”:
Josh, the sad reality is that there is no game to be played if the first cell doesn’t form. Some hopeful players have not been informed and are rolling the dice but the Feds have already surrounded the building. All of the “perceived winnings” are an illusion.
Enthusiastic “players” beware! There is nothing to learn on a slot machine, remember? You just pull the lever. But I know evolutionists inside and out. The next objection is one can win at a slot machine if they monitor the machines that haven’t paid out in a long time. Play those machines! The image of that 65-year-old retired floozy in Las Vegas is fresh in my mind. She had too much makeup; she was drunk and had a cigarette dangling from her lips. She had spotted such a machine that hadn’t paid in a while. But she was fearful to leave the machine that already contained her entire purse. She wanted someone to “watch it” for her. The expression on her face said it all. Oh, and she was alone. Any man in his right mind would have nothing to do with her.
What was I doing there? Maybe God was giving me a glimpse of what to avoid.
Alan, you are just talking drivel. That is to be expected from godbots in over their heads. You have proven nothing to date. Your god doesn’t exist-not proven. Your bible is fiction-it being true is not proven. Science and evolution being false-not proven. Now what? Your continued testament will show us nothing, since we consider you a liar and bullshitter. So your only reasonable option is to just fade into the bandwidth.
How the first replicating cell formed and the question of evolution are two very different things. The evidence for evolution is overwhelming, and it’s all still valid even if we don’t know how the process originated. But positing that because we don’t know where the first cell came from, therefore Goddidit 6000 years ago is a blatantly dishonest way of misrepresenting what we do know by equating it to what we don’t.
There’s a difference between “We don’t know where the first cell came from, so God started off the process” and “We don’t know where the first cell came from so God made all life in it’s current form 6000 years ago”. One is putting God in a gap in our knowledge, the other is taking a gap then pretending that it means there’s a gap where it was long filled.
Alan Clarke, off-topic as usual, blathered an analogy worthy of maybe 0.5 of a Rooke:
Hmmm, waiting and hoping your whole life for something that you’ve got no evidence for believing is going to happen plus a whole industry based around extracting money from you for giving you that false hope.
Doesn’t sound like science to me. Sounds a whole lot more like something else. What could it be? What is it that offers you something but can’t say for sure is going to happen, but tells you you’re better off believing just in case?
Oh, yeah – it’s religion.
Epic analogy FAIL.
Alan just gets funnier and funnier with his little “anti-evolutionist” tap dances. I wonder if he wears white short sleeve dress shirts with a tie and rides a bicycle?
Keep on putting it out there. I love your ignorance of biology Bible Boy, that makes you this evening’s entertainment. Tell us again about the first cell.
Alan, you can’t use the unresolved matter of abiogenesis to disprove evolution. Mainly because, in terms of the ToE’s validity, it doesn’t matter where the first protocell came from. Evolution addresses the changes in organisms that have occurred and are occurring since. You’re saying a man can’t have been born and grown up because we don’t know if he was the product of natural or artificial insemination.
And yes, as Wowbagger said you’re the one that that’s desperately unsatisfied and gambling on the promise of something more. We’re quite happy with the universe around us and the opportunity to live in it, appreciate it’s wonders, and explore it’s mysteries.
Alan,
There’s something (Ok, one thing among many) that you don’t seem to understand:
Even if your god or any other god literally miracled the first cells into being, it would not invalidate the theory of evolution.
Evolution would remain by far the best explanation we have for the diversity of life on earth.
Now, as yet there is no firm theory on how the first life forms first arose, but what scientific work has been done on the problem still stands head and shoulders above the “God did it” explanation. What explanation can religion give us for biological chirality that it couldn’t just as easily have applied if it had turned out opposite what it is? What about God can tell us whether metabolism, replication, or encapsulation occurred first? These are real questions that any real theory of life’s origin must explain.
You see, we’ve tried it your way. We really have. Appealing to supernatural agency was the first and last resort for explaining the natural world for untold thousands of years stretching back into prehistory. In all those thousands of years, this approach has given us… precisely squat.
No further avenues for research, no specifics, no applications. Nothing.
We’ve since found a better way. We used to explain illness in terms of evil spirits – that’s no longer the case and mankind is far better off for it. We used to explain earthquakes in terms of the gods’ anger. Since we stopped doing that we’ve figured out how to build earthquake-resistant buildings rather than sacrificing virgins. We used to rely on God’s whims for good harvests. Now we feed the world with crop science based on evidence and reason.
Invoking God as an explanation is a useless exercise that has been thoroughly tried and found universally wanting.
Someone suggested I should have heeded my grandfather’s warning, “Religion can make a person go crazy!”, but lacked knowledge that his statement was accompanied by a belief that WWF Professional Wresting was real, heat produced by a hacksaw cutting an iron pipe would be retained longer than heat from a flame, Truman was President in 1978, and man had never walked on the moon prior to 1977 and never would.
Alan @885, you seem to be appealing to the genetic fallacy.
Hey! Nice way to avoid all the points people have been making that tear apart your arguments!
Did you read this link yet?
Um, someone has to point this out to you. The description of your grandfather sounds more sane than all of the madness you have scrawled here.
So… telling us that insanity runs in your family is supposed to convince us that you’re not crazy?
It certainly seems like you have early-onset dementia, just like your granddad, only instead of an insane belief in moon-mission denialism, physics denialism, and some sort of weird conspiracy about Truman, you have an insane belief in the literalness of biblical history.
There’s not much point in anyone telling you to educate yourself in geology, or about all of the myriad problems with a “global flood”. You’ll just ignore them/reject them, as I am sure your grandfather rejected any biographies of Truman or pictures and movies from NASA of the moon missions.
Why bother believing true things when holding on to delusions is so important to you?
But can you at least stop posting here? You’re not going to convince us of the literal truth of the bible any more than your grandfather could convince you that any of his wacky ideas was true.
No, it does not. And anyway, volcanic ejecta don’t stay in the atmosphere for more than a couple of years.
Now stop worrying about 14C dating, which only goes back 50,000 years (and even that only if you’re willing to accept large uncertainties — if you want uncertainties in the centuries range, you have to stop at 20,000 years ago) and learn about the other dating methods: counting tree rings, counting ice layers, counting lake sediment layers, and the radiometric methods other than 14C.
Really, as long as you haven’t read that, there’s just no reason I should continue talking past you.
It really bamboozles me that you completely refuse to read that page or even mention it!
Damn SIWOTI syndrome.
So what? I was talking about people working on their very own field. Did you really manage to completely miss that?
Yes, I have seen large amounts of people making errors, even the same error, in my own field. What I have not seen is large amounts of people making the same stupid and extremely short-sighted series of errors.
Poisoning the well is a logical fallacy.
I’ve never come across that interpretation. I’ve always thought the “fountains” were supposed to be taken more literally — as springs, from which water was supposed to have come and contributed to the Flood waters.
(Hmmmm. Are you a literalist, or not? B-) )
The Grand Canyon was obviously cut by water, but there are also basalts flowing over the edges of the canyon walls. Sometimes floods are created by volcanic eruptions as in the case of the recent Mt. St. Helens eruption. Catastrophic flooding and volcanism work hand in hand.
First, your logic is wrong. You say “sometimes” in one sentence, and then act as if it meant “always” in the next sentence.
Second, your facts are wrong to begin with. What the eruption produced was a debris avalanche. It just so happened that the mountain was covered with snow, which melted in the process, and surrounded by water courses, so the debris avalanche became a mud flood.
So much distortion just to uphold a highly questionable interpretation of one little sentence fragment in the Bible. So pathetic…
Then propose a process that was capable of leaching all the 14C out of all fossil fuels. Or just give up.
You know, all fossil fuels are older than 50,000 years and therefore lack 14C. I guess you didn’t know that…
Your flattery is misplaced, and very tellingly so! It took me couple of minutes. It practically flowed out of my fingers. I’m a tetrapod paleontologist, I’m familiar with all this stuff. I had read about the Yellow Cat Mb of the Cedar Mountain Fm and its contact with the Brushy Basin Mb of the Morrison Fm just the evening before, for example…
Oh, of course not. However, disagreement with physical reality is a sure sign of falsity.
That’s why science cannot prove, only disprove. It’s also why YEC is disproved: there’s evidence — facts — that contradicts it.
No, we don’t have the same evidence*. You fucking deny the very fucking existence of fucking 90 % of it. And then you have the gall to claim we have the same evidence!
You don’t interpret the existence of the Cedar Mountain Fm and its fauna differently than I. You don’t interpret it at all, because you didn’t even know it exists in the first place.
Oh, BTW, there are champsosaurs in the Morrison Fm. B-)
* I already told you it’s a mass noun. It’s uncountable. It’s like “sand”, not like “sand grain”.
But there is no such thing!
Evolution means descent with heritable modification. It can therefore only happen to something that is capable of replicating itself — and that means that whatever process generated the first self-replicator was by definition not evolution. And this means that the theory of evolution has nothing to do with it. It takes the first replicator for granted. How the first replicator arose is a very interesting question, but it’s another question.
Ever wondered why only creationists ever use the term evolutionism?
But no, don’t answer to this question just yet. First read comment 873, and then read this page. It was written by a Christian for Christians, so I doubt that the devil will jump out of your screen if you click on the link, o most embarrassing of all cowards.
The Hebrew word “מעין” (ma’ayan) means more literally “spring; well”, although “fountain” does appear to be an acceptable translation as well. It definitely means a water source, rather than anything that might be considered a volcano.
Speaking of volcanoes inspired me to search for Mediterranean volcanoes, which serendipitously found a tidbit about the mountain so loved by flood proclaimers: “Ararat appears to have been active during the 3rd millennium BC; pyroclastic-flow deposits overlie early Bronze Age artifacts and human remains.”
Re: evidence/”evidences”:
I have pretty much only seen the term “evidences” used by creationists/apologists (I have do wonder: do they think that police find “evidences” of a crime? One footprint is evidence; two footprints is evidences?)
Although… oddly enough, while the number of google hits for “evidences” is lower by 2 orders of magnitude than for “evidence”, and most of the top ten hits are religious/creationist apologist sites, one of the first ten hits is this:
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc/
Ah, I see that he was quite deliberate (being quasi tongue-in-cheek) in choosing that particular term, as he explains when you click on the word “Evidences” in the title:
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc/evidences.html
I assume that the term is used today by apologists as a sort of defiant deliberate linguistic archaism — like sticking to the KJV when better translations do exist.
“Thou shalt have mine auncient Godde-inspyred woordes and phrazes when thou pryest them from mine colde dead fyngers, thou modernizing knave and rogue!”
:-D :-D :-D
Goes to show, once again, that cdesign proponentsists only look to each other for information and completely ignore the rest of the world.
BTW, here’s a quote for Alan from someone he might (!) respect:
“Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call to her tribunal every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blindfolded fear.”
— Thomas Jefferson
Hi David, I am glad to see you find the Bible worthy of your time for comment. As you can see in the following verses the Bible makes use of redundancy for reinforcement.
> Verse 12 is extremely clear for explaining the 40 day duration:
Gen 7:12 And the rain was upon the earth forty days and forty nights.
> Verse 17 re-iterates the 40 day period of the increasing deluge and adds additional detail:
Gen 7:17 And the flood was forty days upon the earth; and the waters increased, and bare up the ark, and it was lift up above the earth.
> Verse 20 uses the word “prevail” although the rain had stopped at the 40 day period. The “fountains of the great deep” were not stopped until Gen 8:2. Here we learn the cresting height.
Gen 7:20 Fifteen cubits upward did the waters prevail; and the mountains were covered.
> The same word “prevail” is used again in verse 7:24 as a 150 day duration before it begins to recede. This is further clarified in Gen 8:1-3.
Gen 7:24 And the waters prevailed upon the earth an hundred and fifty days.
Gen 8:1-3 And God remembered Noah, and every living thing, and all the cattle that was with him in the ark: and God made a wind to pass over the earth, and the waters assuaged; The fountains also of the deep and the windows of heaven were stopped, and the rain from heaven was restrained. And the waters returned from off the earth continually: and after the end of the hundred and fifty days the waters were abated.
> David, I could continue with clearing up your confusions but I think you are more focused on refuting at this point.
Respectifully, RogerS
Ah, RogerS, but it is all fiction. There is absolutely no sign of the world-wide flood outside of the bible. If you would watch The Bible’s Buried Secrets on PBS, you would understand that the Torah was put together over several hundred years, and included myths, including the flood, from the area. The Torah came together as a means to solidify Jewish culture from the other inhabitants of the region. In particular, so they wouldn’t be absorbed by Babylon.
So you still have nothing. Come back with a third party evidence or just stay away.
Jebus! Will this thread never die?
Why!
‘WHACK’
Won’t!
‘WHACK’
This!
‘WHACK’
Thing!
‘WHACK’
Die!
“WHACK’
I’m finding it really hard to reconcile that it’s the year 2009 and there are approximately 6 million species of animal on this planet with the fact that people believe in a literal reading of the flood story. You’d think that even a single walk through a zoo would show that the whole endeavour would be physically impossible – not to mention the myriad of other things wrong with the whole concept.
And this is why I can’t take religion seriously. For all the modern theologians, for all those who make a more philosophically and ideintifiable version of God, it still comes back to the absolute lunacy as personified by biblical literalists.
RogerS,
Why do you think God didn’t chose to let all the animals die and just poof new ones into existence after the floodwaters had receded?
Why do you think God needed to flood anything at all when he could have just snapped his fingers (assuming he has them) to achieve the same goal – which also would have saved a lot of time and effort?
Why would an omnipotent god be limited to manipulating physical elements to achieve his goals?
So, Roger, did Noah take two of every kind, or seven each of the clean kinds and two each of the unclean kinds?
You’re presumably aware that Genesis 6-8 is a redaction of two separate and originally independent flood stories according to the Documentary Hypothesis.
“Whack”
“Whack”
We need some help. Paging Tony Soprano…
Kel:
I typed your basic premise up and then hit delete. Physics challenged Godbots always rely on “with God anything is possible.” The capacity for the human mind to avoid reality is amazing indeed.
It’s time for PZ to close this thread.
#s 896 & 897
The bells of hell go ting-a-ling-a-ling
For you but not for me,
And the little devils how they sing-a-ling-a-ling
For you but not for me.
Oh death, where is thy sting-a-ling-a-ling?
Oh grave, thy victory?
The bells of hell go ting-a-ling-a-ling
For you but not for me.
From Oh What A Lovely War
Shorter RogerS:
“What are you talking about? I don’t care what you say! All these disconnected parts and pieces and screws you’re pointing to don’t matter! The sensor is NOT disconnected and THERE IS NO LOOSE SCREW!”
That’s a great show – my community theatre company put on a production of it a few years back and I was running the follow-spot. I got teary every night – though not over that particular song…
It’s also very informative. I learned that war profiteering – in my mind one of the worst crimes imaginable – isn’t a recent invention.
Sadly, Blue Heaven brings to my mind, The Pogues.
That’s it.
I’m calling in a cleaner on this thread.
It has it coming.
Bah god damn it.
Wrong link
ok i give up. Multitasking fail on multiple fronts.
Time to start drinking
SOMEONE KILL THIS FUCKING THREAD
Be aware that although Genesis is written chronologically, there are some exceptions that divert from the “chronologicalness”. Look at Genesis 2:5 for example: “And every plant of the field before it was in the earth, and every herb of the field before it grew: for the LORD God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was not a man to till the ground.” (emphasis mine) Man is created in Genesis 1 but this verse states man is not created yet. This is a common literary device in which the author “backtracks” in order to explain something more fully.
I have written this way myself:
I “backtracked” in the sentence, “When I first saw my wife…” How can one know when the Bible is breaking from the usual chronology and “backtracking”? The methods are no different from other classical and modern literatures. Don’t get hung up on “literal” or “not-literal” arguments. The Bible uses the full gamut of literary devices as well: similes, metaphors, analogies, etc. But for chronology, here is a phrase that frequently precedes a “backtrack”: “these are the generations of”
Because suffering in hell for all eternity was too good for those sinners, their innocent children, Fluffy the camel, and Spot the goat! They had to die in an excruciating, terrifying manner to boot!
Or perhaps God was being merciful by letting those millions of hellbound bring with them all the water that they could carry… in their lungs.
Alan Clarke, you are an idiot.
Yes, this thread is dead.