Good morning, everyone! I’m in Fargo, and I need to go home, so I’m looking at a few hours on cold roads next. But I was in a debate with Dr Fazale Rana of Reasons to Believe last night, and I said I’d post my opening statement, so here it is.
In general, my strategy last night was to go meta on him. He’s trained as a biochemist, so I expected he’d try to slug it out toe-to-toe with lots of facts about biology, but I didn’t want to lose sight of the fact that he would be trying to use mundane, material evidence obtained by scientists who did not accept his creationist interpretations, and that his job was to provide evidence of the miracles that he would insist must have occurred in the history of life on earth. So I hammered him to give specifics about any divine intervention — to not just say we don’t know what happened in the Cambrian or at the beginning — and to explain how he knew it was definitely a supernatural transition rather than a natural one, like all the other examples he used. I think it worked and wrecked his rhythm and got him to stagger off of his planned script, which was enough.
I can’t declare victory though — as I predicted in the opening, the Christians didn’t abandon their beliefs, the atheists (there was a pretty good contingent of them there) weren’t going to join the church, and all we could hope to do is to get people to think.
Is there evidence for a creator or not?
I’m a reluctant debater. There are a couple of reasons for that.
One, debate is not how scientists resolve differences of opinion. You might find a few examples back in the 19th century or earlier, but in general nowadays, when a scientist finds himself on a stage with an opponent, it’s usually because an advocate for a fringe position is begging that their ideas be judged as credible enough to discuss. Theology and politics are hashed over in debates, but science is resolved in the court of observation and experiment.
Two, debates never seem to decide anything. I have no illusions that this audience will find my arguments so persuasive that anyone will change their minds. All I can hope to do is share a little bit of what I know with you, and hope it will trigger some of you to do deeper study of the subject.
Third, because scientists don’t debate, we never get training in it. Seriously, not once in my graduate or post-doctoral training, or in 25 years as a professor, have I ever done a debate in an academic setting, or even seen one put on at a science conference. It was important for us to get training in presenting science in talks and papers, but debate? Nope. So you’ll have to appreciate that I’m not very good at it. Again, all I can do is use the stage as a platform to present a few ideas.
But there’s another reason I find debates like this to be an exercise in futility. I’ve already won. As nice and persuasive as Dr Rana may be to you, nothing he says will influence the scientific consensus: it’s settled. Evolution works. You, the audience, may want to believe in God, but science has no need of that hypothesis.
I also know exactly how this debate is going to go.
Let me tell you a little story. Many years ago, I was in Washington DC, and as I usually do, I found an excuse to visit the museums on the mall. As a biologist, I always make a beeline for the Smithsonian, but this one time I thought I’d try something different, and I went to the National Portrait Gallery, thinking I’d do something light and easy.
It really opened my eyes.
I was doing the usual superficial visitor thing — “uh-huh, that’s nice, next” — moving quickly through rooms full of pictures, when I turned a corner and right there, in my face, was this painting: “Two Women at a Window”. Instead of my usual two-second glance before moving on, I stopped and really looked at it, and something about it compelled my attention.
It was beautiful. The subject was enchanting: the two women looking out, that smile on the face of one and the coy laughter of the other. There was the lovely lighting — really, the digital image is inadequate, and you have to see the real thing to get a feel for how gloriously cheerful and enticing the painting is. And I stood right there, and I looked at it for about 45 minutes before I had to leave — just this one painting! —and I just immersed myself in it, looking at the brush strokes and fine detail, stepping back and seeing it from different angles. I’m no fancy art aficionado, but for a little while I could see what drew people into art.
The painting is by Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, a 17th century Spanish artist, and it’s a portrait of two Gallician women. But now imagine, as I stand there enjoying it, that I’m joined by a fellow art lover — someone who thinks exactly as I do, that this is a beautiful painting well worth savoring. But he has a different idea. This painting is so beautiful that it could not possibly have been created by Bartolomé Esteban Murillo — it could only have come into existence by supernatural means, and he says he knows exactly who painted it and what magic was involved, and he’d like to debate me on the subject.
Do I need to paint the similarity to the situation tonight with a broader brush?
Anyway, the correct answer is obvious to me, and I’m curious to see how this person is going to defend his peculiar position. As a minimal necessity, I expect to hear something about the identity of the mysterious True Painter, and something about the True Painter’s methods, and I would hope quite a bit about epistemology — how did my opponent make his case, where did he learn the Truth of this painting?
In this little parable, I am disappointed, as I expect to be tonight. While insisting that everything had a supernatural cause, he dwells on the physicality of the painting: it’s on canvas, the colors come from complex combinations of organic and inorganic compounds, that scientists can bounce lasers off it and determine the proportions of each element in it spectroscopically.
Wait, I say, you’re making my case for me. The painting is a natural object, made of earthly matter, of compounds arranged in a way that is perfectly compatible with all physical laws.
So then he tells me, look, it’s made of hundreds of thousands of precise tiny brushstrokes, each one contributing to whole. It’s incredibly complex. It can’t have been created by natural means.
And I try to explain that complex objects are generated by natural mechanisms all the time — that something is complex is not evidence that it was spontaneously generated by an invisible spirit. We can look at how paintings are made even now, and see equally complex images created without the aid of metaphysical agents.
His reply is to cast doubt on the existence of Bartolomé Esteban Murillo. We don’t know his exact birthday — sometime late in 1617. We don’t know whether he was born in Seville or Pilas. Therefore we should question whether Bartolomé Esteban Murillo even really existed, opening the door to the idea that some other mystical agent actually created the paintings.
Then I will be tempted to reply in kind: but we have his baptismal certificate from 1618! We know the names of his parents (Gaspar and Maria)! We know that he studied under Juan del Castillo, and that he was prolific and left a great many surviving paintings!
That’s the temptation, that I respond by deluging you in kind with more and more details, while failing to address the great big void in the room — that despite postulating a supernatural mechanism, despite calling into doubt the existence of the material cause on the flimsiest of excuses, my critic has not revealed who the True Painter is, how he knows its identity, how it placed all those exquisite brush strokes on the canvas, in fact, no positive evidence at all for his hypothesis.
My little story expresses my frustration with these kinds of events, and tells you what I predict.
I predict that tonight Dr Rana will first simply assume without evidence that his proposed creator of all exists, and further, that this creator is the Christian god. He will not actually defend this proposition, because it is indefensible, and because as is typical at these events, the audience is packed with people who take the assumption for granted. It’s a shame, too, because the basis of the whole creationist premise relies entirely on the existence of this being…a being who leaves no trace of its activity and no explanation of its motives or methods. I would suggest that in the absence of any evidence for the proposed first cause, any discussion of its hypothetical actions is simply dismissible.
Second, any attempt to justify the existence of this creator will involve pointing at a bible or pointing at biology, chemistry, and physics. The bible is irrelevant; I could point at the Harry Potter books, and at best they are evidence for the existence of JK Rowling, but not for the existence of magic powers. As for science, as I have seen many times before, when asked for evidence of supernatural miracles in the history of life, creationists provide examples of natural, material processes rather than the actual supernatural processes we’re asking for. It makes no sense. If you’re insisting that a painting was created by magic, telling me about the fine details of the brush strokes is making my case for me.
Third, much of the argument will consist of claiming that the evolutionary explanation is incomplete or even erroneous in parts. That’s something I’ll agree with: science is always a work in progress, and if we knew everything, science would stop. But while nitpicking at the details and telling you about what we don’t know, Dr Rana will not say the obvious: that the creationist explanation is empty and nonexistent, void of all details, having no experimental or explanatory power, and so feeble that all of science has simply abandoned it.
I wandered a bit from that text here and there. The sponsors did have a professional video crew present, so the event was recorded — we’ll have to see if it makes it online eventually.
Nope stupid presuppositional one. Any deity that interacts with nature can be detect. Only if your imaginary deity does nothing to nature like a deistic god can you claim the it is “beyond science”.
You claim your imaginary deity designed life. A factual claim that science can test.
What part of logic did you fail? All of it.
I still don’t see how you automatically go from “This must have been designed.” to “This must have been designed by the JudeoChristianIslam Monogod.”
There are alot of much smarter gods.
@498 didgeman
Hate to burst your bubble but evolutionary theory is as much a foundation of the ENCODE project as it is of all credible life science research. You’re completely misunderstanding it if you think otherwise.
Menyabal @ 483:
This is of course plain wrong. Have you ever heart of “Methodological naturalism”? This is the basic guideline for scientific research. And I think, this is a good working principle for answering the “how” question (see #500) in the daily lab work. But as soon as science tries to leave the “how” area and is going in the direction of the “why” area (which is no more save ground for science), then all options should be taken into account, not only purely naturalistic explanations.
chris61@ 3:
ENCODE is a very good example for the hard work of hundreds of skilled scientists for the benefit of medical research, despite the miserably refuted 97% junk DNA claim after the human genome project. Instead of the evolutionary biased claim of junk DNA, serious scientists could have said the truth in 2001: “We have completely decoded the human genome. For 3%, we have found a function, for 97%, we have no idea at the moment and must do more research”. This would be a serious interpretation of scientific data. But the junk DNA claim nearly stopped further research! Luckily, some biomedical findings and interests in the “desert areas” made the ENCODE project taking off.
Citation mother fucking needed.
Didgeman, make you a deal. You quit pretending know anything about science, and speak no more of it in support of creationism, and I will stop reminding you your deity is imaginary. But,the first mention of science, your non-evidenced imaginary deity will be back in full force….
re: OEC vs YEC: The earth is here. It was created. The creatures upon it were obviously designed and created.
How long ago I do not know.
#490 Nerd of Redhead
Nerd, I gave you 3 definite proofs for God. You choose not to believe it. That’s fine.
You presuppose humans descended from a common ancestor. That is not science, it is philosophy adhered to from the rejection of God. This common ancestor has never been identified except in the desparate imaginations of those wishing it to be so. There is no evidence of a progression from the pre-human ancestor to us, just a bunch of imaginative pictures in science books suggesting how it could have happened and how they could have looked.
You presuppose No God even when the handiwork of God is self-evident. There is nothing more to say. Your mind is closed.
#493 azhael
It is not a lie, it is the truth: God created all things. It is self-evident from the 3 reasons I gave. My wife and I go over this about every night with them at bedtime to reinforce into their minds what is true. Walks in the woods and countryside (I live in a rural area) give living proof of what I have said: “see the squirrel nest, who taught it?” “God!” they say back to me. We share a snack. Positive reinforcement. Grandma and Grandpa say the same when we visit.
And they will be taught how science works but to ignore philosophy wrapped and obscured by
a false appearance of being science which is Common Descent. At home (yes, I homeschool to a degree) we already perform experiments with observation of the results. There is no observation and testing of an ape-like creature becoming a human.
I know exactly what evolution is. You cannot accept that someone who understands it could not possibly reject it.
It is like someone smoking crack cocaine offers someone a hit on the crack pipe and the person turns it down. The crackhead cannot possibly understand why someone would reject something that seems so wonderful and “right”.
I will teach my kids about Darwin’s “crack” and to identify it for what it is: the hypothesis of the origin of the species.
I do not need to convince my kids that I am right and others wrong for the data speaks for itself. I am correct to conclude that the overwhelming evidence of purposeful, intelligently designed biological constructs throughout all of nature bespeaks of a a most high intelligent being, God.
What I do in teaching them is to show how definitely wrong those who deny the existence of God are in the false conclusions they draw from the data. Similarly, I teach them that homosexuality is wrong, it is confusion, or a type of schizophrenia concerning the purpose of their gender, that is, to mate with someone of the opposite sex. They are not to accept it. Verboten. There is a role for the man and a role for the woman and they are currently learning this too.
And so, I pass on to my children the truths and traditions of the founders of this country who proclaimed:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness
They will not be taught “We hold these assumptions to be not false, that all people are evolved from an ape-like creature, that they are given permission by Government to Live and have Liberty and to pursue acceptable forms of Happiness.”
My dear @dadsen, this phrase
is irrefutable evidence that you don’t have the slightest idea how evolution works; if you knew it you wouldn’t have written it.
@5 didgeman
ENCODE in no way refutes evolution. As I said if you think it does you don’t understand either evolutionary theory or ENCODE. Evolutionary theory puts upper limits on the fraction of the genome in which mutations affect reproductive fitness and defines junk DNA as that DNA in which mutations/deletions don’t affect reproductive fitness. ENCODE is looking at something entirely different. Their definition of function refers to biochemical activity associated with specific DNA sequences and says nothing whatsoever about reproductive fitness.
You gave me nothing. My defintion of proof for god? Physical evidence that would pass muster with scientists, magicians, and professional debunkers as being of divine, and not natural (scientifically explained), origin. Since your alleged proofs are explained by the theory of evolution (science) you presented nothing but fuckwittery, lies and bullshit.
No, your mind is closed is you think the “evidence” is self-evident, as that implies presupposition of the existence of imaginary things, like god. Show me the evidence, not what convinces your presuppositions, which isn’t evidence.
NO, NOT SELF-EVIDENT AT ALL. They are explained by science. YOU LOSE.
didgeman @500
As usual when you pontificate about science, you’re completely wrong. Why is a perfectly legitimate scientific question. One of the more interesting questions in astronomy is “why is the night sky black?” In 1823 the German astronomer Heinrich Olbers asked this question, which became known as Olber’s Paradox:
The answer to this “why” question tells us several important things about the universe.
dadsen @7
No, you gave three definite examples of your ignorance of basic evolution. Like many creationists, you think that your personal ignorance is a proof of a specific god. Ignorance may be bliss but it doesn’t prove anything except that you’re ignorant.
What didgeman anad dadsen are attempting is an argument called “god of the gaps”. It is an inane argument, where god gets to hid in places where science can’t explain. Except the gaps are getting smaller, and their imaginary deity is getting smaller too. Too small to see. It was at that point a hundred years ago, and since science doesn’t stand still, their god is at virus level and diminishing, to be totally lost at Planck distance.
dadsen @ 485 says:
Paley was wrong from the get-go because he was arguing that you could tell a designed watch from an undesigned heath, then going on to say that that proved that the planet (which includes the heath) was designed. He had just said that you could tell undesigned things – which actually is true – then claimed that his example of undesigned ws therefore designed. (I do design, and I can assure you that this universe was not designed.)
You are seriously going to screw up your kids. You need to be teaching them critical-thinking skills, not hogwash.
Look, kids start doubting their parents, and when they find that their parents are wrong about something, they really go too far in over-reacting. I have seen it, and I can assure you that your kids will wind up in the deep trouble – I grew up with preacher’s kids, and I grew up in a Christian family.
Especially don’t start accusing scientists of fairy stories when you believe in magic food.
Arrrr. I cannot edit well on this tablet. There is much more wrong with that comment …..
Paley gave his design argument in a book published in 1804. David Hume refuted the argument in a book published posthumously in 1778. No, Hume wasn’t psychic, it’s that the argument was around long before Paley.
dadsen is lying to his children and intends to continue to lie to them. dadsen must be hoping they don’t recognize his lies as lies or else he and his god will be rejected by his children. It really says something that someone has to lie to his children to get them to believe what he believes. But that’s what happens when people like dadsen believe in imaginary things.
Yeah, it happened that the first time I heard of Paley was when some smart-arse creationist kid sprang Paley’s Watchmaker on me. I gave it some thought, gave him my response, and got laughed at for my pains. I went and looked it up, and found that not only was it refuted long, long ago, but the best-known refutation was what I had come up with and what the kid had scoffed at. (I soon realized that the kid had never been told of the refutations, just that Paley was a zinger. And that he was too fucking stupid to figure anything out – oh wait, I already said that he was a creationist.)
chigau @ 2:
There is no other holy book on earth, which describes the origin of the universe (including big-bang and expansion of the universe) and the correct sequence of creation of life (recorded in the fossil record) as precisely as the Bible.
Among all religions and creation accounts, the Bible is by far the most credible account in the light of the latest scientific discoveries. To show this compatibility is one of the goals of the organization Reasons to Believe, for which Fuz Rana (debating partner of PZ Myers) is working.
didgeman:
Laughable. Do you actually believe this to be true, or are you just trying to fast talk us and think no one else is capable of reading the first fucking page of your holy book?
Here’s the quick first three, fucking easy and simple, science lessons that make your order of creation idiotic:
1. Creating night and day before there are even stars and planets: Day and night have to do with whether your side of the planet is facing the sun. They are not things that exist independent of stars and planets.
2. Plants existing without the sun: Photosynthesis is a thing. It is pretty much the thing that defines plants. Plants did not exist before the fucking sun.
3. Fish and birds, then all land animals: Birds evolved from reptiles. There were land animals before there were birds. Fuck, there were land MAMMALS before there were birds: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_evolutionary_history_of_life
There are plenty more issues too, but I am sure you have more than enough questions to dodge as it is.
Didgeman, and the holy book you believe in most happens to be the one you were indoctrinated in from a very early age? Coincidence, not. It’s just a comfy old pacifier to you.
Bullshit! There’s hundreds of “holy” books, each one as holy as the other. The only thing that differentiates the Bible from the Upanishads is that you prefer one over the other. Other than that, they’re equally holy.
dadsen:
You would think the proof that life was Designed would be difficult than figuring out the approximate date. Or at very least ruling out ridiculous dates like “6000 years ago”. Godly “science” works in mysterious ways.
It’s projection all the way down with these assholes.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_human_evolution_fossils
“Lalalala, I can’t hear you” is rather inconsistent with the assumption that WE are the dogmatic ones ignoring evidence, ya know.
Fucking blockquote fail number fucking two. Okay, I’m done for the day.
Islam claims the Koran does. You lie and bullshit. Nobody believes a word you say, since you can’t/won’t back up your assertions with neutral third party evidence. You have nothing but TrueXianBeliever™ website, which isn’t neutral evidence, it is religion. Bwahahahahaha. You deserve to be laughed at for your utter and total stupidity.
There seems to be a misunderstanding of parsimony in science. It is not metaphysical or ad hoc, but rather a requirement for a theory to have the greatest predictive power. The easiest way to see this is via information theory with quantities like the Akaike Information Criterion:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akaike_information_criterion
Basically, there are two terms–one represents how well the model fits the data and the other penalizes a model that is more complex relative to one that is less complex. There is nothing ad hoc about this quantity–it is an unbiased estimator of a fundamental comparison between two models. There are similar quantities, including the Schwarz or Bayesian Information Criterion. We now know not only that parsimony is fundamental, but why this is so.
anteprepro @ 19:
Please do not quote traditional YEC interpretation of the Bible. This is not my approach. Instead, go to the reference, which I gave earlier orread the sequence of creation again in my long post #309.
For the question of birds, it is important to know, that the word “owpf” in Biblical Hebrew translated “birds” in many translations is also defined as “flighted life”. If you look at the fossil record, dragonfly like insects with a wingspan of more than 30″ appear before the first land animals (about 300 mya).
So, the main sequence of the creation account really fits the fossil record (including the later extinction/recreation cycles, which I addressed in an earlier post with reference to the creation account in Psalm 104), although bacteria and dinosaurs are not explicitly mentioned.
It doesn’t matter what your approach is, if it is based on the twin lies your imaginary and mythical/fictional babble. You are talking nonsense, not based in reality, nor any type of science. You will say or do anything not to be wrong, even though you are by your presuppositions.
Descended from dinosaurs, and any account by a book of mythology/fiction is to be dismissed and laughed at for utter and total stupidity. Somebody repeating it, like it is any work to be considered scientific, deserves even more laughter.
@ Nerd, #24:
Your comments on scientific questions seem to be kind of credible (if you stay with science). But chigau’s question in #2 was a philosophical question about different religions, and here, your comment does not show much understanding about the subject. This is basically o.k., but then, please hold back and do not tell such unqualified stories (to keep my own language moderate :-) )
@Menyambal
http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2015/02/13/my-darwin-day-debate-in-fargo/comment-page-1/#comment-915089
Politely disagreed. Science began as a practice of the ancient Greeks, some godless, some pagan, but none Christian. Over a thousand years later, some Christians revived the works of the ancient Greeks, and some of later advancements by the Muslims who preserved the writings of the Greeks.
Amphiox here:
http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2015/02/13/my-darwin-day-debate-in-fargo/comment-page-1/#comment-915095
also seems to get things a little off.
For more information, I suggest the work of Dr Richard Carrier. For example:
http://richardcarrier.blogspot.com/2006/11/science-and-medieval-christianity.html
…
@dadsen
Didgeman is at least partway intellectually honest, and capable of reasoning. Your dadsen are intellectually vapid, and don’t know even the first thing about evolution. Again, I suggest you read up on what evolution actually is, rather than relying on the lies of your pastors. Again, I suggest The Greatest Show On Earth by Richard Dawkins, and Why Evolution Is True by Jerry Coyne. No one should be replying to any of your specific points, because you have no clue what you are talking about. Any sort of discussion with you should start with a remedial 101 course in what evolutionary theory actually is.
…
@didgeman
You should see earlier in the thread where I argued this exact same point. It is a rare thing when you are legitimately correct. I spend a great deal of effort arguing about this earlier in the thread. A lot of the discussion was moved to the Thunderdome, link here:
http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2015/02/05/thunderdome-58/comment-page-1/#comment-912935
I think I managed to pull most people here around to my way of thinking on methodological naturalism. Note that even PZ Myers is IMHO completely on board with me on this particular point.
You are right that science is not intrinsically limited to methodological naturalism. However, it is probably fair to say that most practicing scientists do say that. Those scientists are wrong. IMHO, this is the result of religious accommodation run amok – these scientists want to avoid the conflict with religion, and so they say that scientific results will never contradict religion, without realizing the fallout which is the conversation we’re having right now. Having said that, I’m pretty sure most scientists would immediately abandon this position if we ever found even remotely compelling evidence of gods or the supernatural. For example, if the Templeton prayer study came back positive, no one is going to dismiss the results by claiming that science doesn’t work on the supernatural.
What about Judaism?
How did you come to the conclusion that one of the Earth’s contemporary popular religions must be right? Why can’t all of them be wrong?
Specifically, how did you dismiss the possibility that god does exist, and did speak to people in the past, but the record of that contact is some musty long forgotten tome sitting in some library somewhere?
Specifically, how did you dismiss the possibility that god does exist, and did speak to people in the past, but the record of that contact has been lost and destroyed?
Specifically, how did you come to the conclusion that humans are the center of the universe, and that we are created in god’s image, etc.? Specifically, how did you dismiss the possibility that god created the aliens of Rigel 7 in its image, and we humans were created to fulfill only a single task – to teach the aliens of Rigel 7 an important lesson in a million years time?
I can name a different god hypothesis just as plausible as Christianity by taking the Christian bible, replacing “Earth” and “humans” with “some planet around some star in the observable universe” and “some alien species on that planet”. There is about a trillion trillion stars in the observable universe. According to modern physics, the whole universe is probably much larger than that. Any evidence you have that is not specific to Christianity supports all of these hypotheses just as well as it does Christianity, and thus it supports none of them at all. Evidence for a trillion trillion mutually-incompatible hypotheses is basically evidence for none of them – Bayesian reasoning 101. Only by unmitigated unsubstantiated hubris can you assume that this ridiculously large universe was made specially for humans.
PS: I’m still waiting on a response to what I wrote here:
http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2015/02/13/my-darwin-day-debate-in-fargo/comment-page-1/#comment-914761
didgeman @26
There were land insects before there were flying insects. Insects are animals. Guess again.
I haven’t had time to catch up, and probably won’t be able to do so tomorrow. :-( So here’s a quote from comment 500:
I am a scientist. Behold the words of D’Arcy W. Thompson (in his book On Growth and Form, 1917, which I’ve already quoted at you in another thread):
Everything is the way it is because it got that way.
Notice something? This little fact answers all “why” questions. More precisely, it turns all “why” questions into “how” and “what” questions: “why is it that way” becomes “how did it get that way”, “what caused it to get that way”, “what influences were there on the process”, “what prevented it from getting another way”…
Let that sink in.
Dude, I’m a vertebrate paleontologist. The earliest land vertebrates lived at least 335 million years ago, in the Early Carboniferous, unless we could the bizarre seal-like Ichthyostega (370 Ma old) as a land vertebrate (I think we shouldn’t). The oldest known land animal is this; it’s a good hundred million years older than the earliest winged insects.
I’m afraid you’re a victim of the Dunning/Kruger effect.
Every known mass extinction had well-documented survivors. Those evidently went to, shall we say, be fruitful and multiply.
…where by “could”, bizarrely enough, I mean “count”. Typo by motion memory. ~:-|
Al Dente @ 30:
O.K., thats a point, I just found a 400 mio+ land animal fossil on the web. I have to check this closer. Compared to the grand picture of corresponding sequence, this is a rather minor glitch (especially in comparison with other holy books). But it has to be verified and evaluated correctly.
What about the two sequences in Genesis that don’t agree with each other? Which is it – humans last, male & female on the same day, or Adam first, then everything else, then Eve?
Ah, the standard “birds” means “all flying things” piece of rubbish apologetics.
And still flat wrong.
Not even counting the tetrapods that precede those insects, there were scores of earlier wingless insects that predate those fossils by tens to hundreds of millions of years. The biblical account puts the creation of the “birds” a full day before ALL LIVING THINGS ON LAND.
It is laughably dishonest to call an error this enormous a “minor glitch”.
And since when is the inerrant word of god supposed to have ANY glitches whatsoever?
Oh, wait. I forgot something important.
It doesn’t just say that “birds” were created before land animals; it also says “birds” and “fish” were created at the same time.
Go ahead, define “fish”. You won’t manage to define it in a way that makes the oldest “fish” no older than the oldest winged insects.
Not hundreds. :-) One hundred maybe.
Speaking of “glitches”,
Genesis account has water (which god separates) on Day 2, and stars not until day 4. Water of course contains oxygen, which is only produced in stars.
So, a “glitch” of order on Day 2.
Genesis has land vegetation on Day 3, including SEED bearing plants, and TREES, but no life of any kind in water until Day 5.
So, a “glitch” of order in Day 3.
Day 4 has the sun, moon and stars all being made, and I suppose one could quibble about the length of the day, but the first stars appeared over 13 billion years ago, the sun some 5 billion years ago, and the moon less than 4.5 billion years, and there are new stars being born this very day, so that’s a LOOONNNGGG day. Also no mention of the giant impact that created the moon whatsoever. You’d think an event that melted the entire surface of the planet would have been important enough to mention. (And the trees and seed bearing plants surviving through it….)
Day 5, of course we have the “flying things” before all the land creatures.
So a “glitch” in Day 5.
Day 6, has the creation of the has the creation of the land animals, followed by humans, but crucially all the livestock BEFORE humans, but cattle and chickens at the very least are a distinct species from their wild ancestors, and did not exist until AFTER humans domesticated them.
So yet another “glitch” in order in Day 6.
That’s a glitch in EVERY. SINGLE. DAY. OF. CREATION., the wrong order in EVERY. SINGLE. DESCRIBED. DETAIL, except for one, day 4, which only escapes the problem by having a day be essentially as long as the entire history of the universe.
That humans descend from a common ancestor is a point that evolution and the bible do not disagree. Once can hardly call adhering to a belief in a common ancestor of all humans to be rejection of God, when Genesis one flat out gives a name to that common ancestor.
When you use a definition of “why” that specifically refers only to things with intent and purpose behind them, you presuppose a creative mind from the get-go. Until such time as there is evidence for a creator with purpose, there are in fact NO such “why” questions worth asking at all, pertaining to those phenomenon. Of course there are other definitions of “why” that do not require intent and purpose, and these are well within the scientific realm, but naturally you ignore that, and think you have a point when all you have is a category error.
Yet another example of your despicable intellectual dishonesty, didgeman.
Since your deity doesn’t exist, and your babble is mythology/fiction, who the fuck with one ounce of thinking brain cares about your fantastic and illogical views? You have nothing until you show real evidence. And you haven’t done that. All you have is your presuppositions, which are WRONG.
That was never refuted. In fact, calculations of known mutation rates show that the total amount of functional DNA (using the same definition of “functional” that those studying junk DNA use) in the human genome cannot be much more than 5%, or else the human genome would have undergone a mutational meltdown and the human species would have gone extinct.
That is, in fact, what the scientists DID say at the time, and what they have always been saying. “Junk” dna is just a name, a label for the non-coding DNA. It is, in fact, not even a widely used or accepted scientific name, but rather one coined by the lay press. In most of the scientific literature the name used for that DNA is “non-coding DNA”, and whenever “junk dna” IS used, it is accepted to mean the “non-coding and non-regulatory DNA”.
The junk DNA claim most certainly did not stop further research. LONG before ENCODE, researchers were happily and busily investigating the junk DNA, identifying over half of it as retroviral and parasitic DNA repeats, other large portions as pseudogenes with HUGE relevance to analyses of evolutionary history, inventing the technique of DNA fingerprinting (which almost exclusively on segments of DNA that are within the “junk” – note that DNA fingerprinting WOULD NOT WORK AT ALL if there was no non-functional junk DNA, since functional DNA sequences are conserved between large groups of individuals and some of it even at fixation, ie the same in everyone, so the only reason you can use DNA to identify individuals is because of the existence of junk DNA), and even finding cases where some of the junk DNA evolved new functions and became functional DNA again.
Seriously didgeman, are you really this ignorant of the things you talk about, or do you just enjoy lying for your god?
@didgeman
I also apologize for the minor lack of reading comprehension skills and minor lack of good faith argumentation that you’re receiving now regarding specific details of the book of Genesis. You addressed many of those points earlier. Of course, I think that the way you address those points is quite ridiculous and patently absurd. If you stick around long enough, I plan to address them. However, first I want your reply to my questions about the trees of life, see here:
http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2015/02/13/my-darwin-day-debate-in-fargo/comment-page-1/#comment-914761
Funny how only two groups argue this is wrong. Creationists and ENCODE. Is there possibly any similarities in the presuppositional way both think?
Amphiox @41
Both didgeman and dadsen are quite ignorant about evolution. This doesn’t stop either of them from trying to refute it and bolster their creationism.
Lying for Jesus is a time-honored tradition among fundamentalists, evangelicals, and conservative Christians.
@didge 475
You just can’t wrap your brain around this, can you? Thousands of words have been written trying to explain the very simple concepts of evidence and the scientific method to you, trying to explain how whoever sold you this line was wrong, and how you’re wrong to keep repeating it as though it’s Gospel. I suspect you don’t care because maybe you’re chasing some Jesus points of some variety, but on I go (if for no other reason than to let you know, yet again, that noone here is buying your bluster, no matter how many times your repeat it)…
Evolution is a conclusion (tentative and open to modification by further evidence) that is drawn from looking at the raw data gleaned from nature. Evolution is not presupposed and is it not assumed in advance.
The implication of your quoted sentence is, again, that evolution is a concoction – a fiction – and that generations of scientists have been fudging their data to support something they know isn’t true, somehow out of the gaze of the rest of the scientific community. It is implausible, unevidenced, frankly offensive and I’m going to ask you nicely, once, to give it a rest.
This conspiracy you invoke is so implausibly huge it defies description – and I mean that literally; you yourself have not once been able to describe in any remotely convincing way how this scam operates and why scientists felt so wedded to the alleged fable of evolution that they implemented it. Vague waffling about obsolete textbooks and commitments to a godless worldview are as implausible and contrary to evidence as the existence of the conspiracy itself. Unless you’re prepared to give chapter and verse on how countless scientists since the 19th century have scammed the entire planet, I strongly suggest you leave this nonsense out of your playbook while you’re here. You’re not convincing anyone.
As for actual conspiracies, you only have to educate yourself about the behaviour of the creationists in the 2004 Dover trial in Pennsylvania to get a good idea of what they look like. If anyone wants a perfect example of a conspiracy in the world of science, they should look no further (although that’s not the only example of creationists bearing false witness and using subterfuge to sneak their dogma into science classes, in violation of the law and contrary to real science).
—
In #485 dadsen posted a link to an Answers in Genesis article. That bunch of yahoos has failed so many times to get even the junior high-school basics of evolution right before presuming to tear the whole field down to please their Old Testament beast-god that I feel completely justified in dismissing them out of hand every time they’re used as a source.
FYI the only answer you’ll find in Genesis is to the question: “Just how much did the ancient Hebrews know about nature and the universe?” That answer is “sweet fuck all, as it happens. But go ahead and ask about conquest & genocide!”
—
Anyway, bugger all that. It’s clear that neither of you want to have this conversation like grownups, so why don’t you talk to each other?
Creationists: you need to have a chat about which one of your creation models has the best support. After all, Answers in Genesis is a Young Earth organisation that touts such things as the infallibility of the Bible, the 6000 year-old universe, the existence of 800 year-old humans, the repopulation of the Earth from a group of just eight people after the flood 4000 years ago, while didgeman’s mob apparently accept deep time and a 4 billion year-old Earth.
So, who’s right? Who has the better model? How do you even decide? Quite often I see the various creationist varieties ignore their differences when they troll the science-literate, but what about behind closed tent-flaps? Raving fundamentalist Pat Robertson, of all people, had a shot at Ken Ham for being such a glib fool when it came to basic science. So how do young-earthers and old-earthers discuss, much less settle, their differences? Or do they not bother, because all they really give a fuck about is opposing evolution?
The reason I ask is this: creationists shouldn’t expect people to take them and their “models” seriously if they can’t even agree on what they’re selling. People take science seriously because science draws reliable conclusions from data; creationists take instruction from scripture and then attempt to cram their version of God into conclusions drawn by science – if their God can’t fit, they fudge or just ignore the conclusions and accuse science of being a scam.
TL:DR; Just be honest: if you just don’t like evolution because of its implications for scripture or your human specialness, fine. Noone’s making you admit you’re an ape. But if you think you can destroy evolution with scripture or claims of deep conspiracies – especially at websites frequented by people who understand and practice science – you’re, frankly, pushing shit uphill with a toothpick. Not only do we understand science better than you do, we understand creationism better than you do.
We’ve seen this sad display before, but didgeman is doing the same thing every other creationist who has ever come here to try to talk about the non-coding “junk” DNA, and completely missing the point.
The importance of junk DNA for evolution has absolutely nothing to do with the question of its existence or whether or not it has function. On this point, evolutionary theory is in fact utterly neutral. It can readily accommodate both scenarios. Indeed there exist on this planet today many organisms that have virtually no non-functional DNA, as well as many organisms that have lots of non-functional DNA, and the amounts of non-functional DNA between species can vary by many multiple orders of magnitude. Evolution theory contains mechanisms both for producing junk DNA (genome duplication followed by disabling mutations of duplicated genes, retroviral infection, selfish jumping genes, symbiotic mergers followed by disabling mutations of duplicate-function genes, and so forth) as well as a mechanism for getting rid of junk DNA (purifying selection for energy efficiency and fast replication time which favors deletion mutations that eliminate nonfunctional junk DNA). Prior to the first discovery of non-coding DNA, all evolutionary scientists believed that all DNA in all organisms was functional. When they learned that it was not the reaction was basically “well this is interesting”, and evolutionary theory did not have to change in any fundamental way to accommodate that new finding. If it should come to pass in the future that we actually (unlikely) find some function for every last nucleotide base pair in the every single organism’s genome, the reaction from evolutionary scientists would be “well this is interesting” and evolutionary theory would not have to fundamentally change at all to accommodate it. We’d only need to set aside the evolutionary sub-hypotheses formulated AFTER the discovery of junk DNA to explain how it arises and how it persists as no longer necessary.
The significance of the “junk” DNA for evolutionary theory lies in the SPECIFICS of the sequences of the junk DNA regions and the implications they have for the details of common descent. It is from the junk DNA that we obtain the gene-based trees of descent with didgeman so gleefully clung to earlier with respect to them being different from anatomic trees by 0.01% or so at the tips of the cladistic branches (note to didgeman, if junk DNA does not exist then the gene trees would have their reliability confounded by the effects of stabilizing selection on functional DNA sequences, the strength of which over time could not be knowable and accounted for, and any disagreement between gene trees and anatomic trees would have zero theoretical significance.) None of this evidence depends in any way shape or form on the junk DNA having absolutely no function, just not a function that would lead to natural selection having some impact on how quickly the sequence would change over time from random mutations.
The existence of junk DNA is not a problem for evolutionary theory. For evolutionary theory, it is just an interesting detail that the theory can readily accommodate. Pertaining to the evolution vs creation debate, though, the existence of junk DNA absolutely has significant impact on the creationism side of things, which is probably why people like didgeman are so desperate to cling to the idea that junk DNA will be discredited one day. The existence of junk DNA has no bearing one way or another on the broad outlines of evolution theory, but it is absolutely antithetical to all creator theories (except for the trickster-asshole-criminal creator theories that posits a non-benevolent creator who deliberately tries to hide its own existence from human investigators for shits and giggles). Why should an intelligent designer put nonfunctional DNA in any organism? Why, if nonfunctional DNA somehow got into the genome during the creation process (tinkerer’s junk?), wouldn’t an omnipotent creator simply take it out before releasing the “finished product”? Why would a creator put a broken gene for vitamin C synthesis that does nothing in all great apes and humans, put a DIFFERENT broken gene for vitamin C synthesis that does nothing in guinea pigs that is broken in a different place, but have a working vitamin C synthesis gene in most other mammals. Even if it wanted humans, apes and guinea pigs not to be able to make vitamin C (to, I don’t know, encourage them to eat fruit?) why not just leave that gene out in the first place?
The existence of junk DNA, for evolutionary theory, is just an interesting minor detail, but it is a flat out falsification for most creator hypotheses.
Amphiox @46
I have had a creationist tell me, with a perfectly straight face, that junk DNA is a result of the “fall.” That’s the same “fall” that caused tyrannosaurs to change their diet from pumpkins to meat and made certain viruses infectious. The hand-waving, tap-dancing, and brazen balderdash YECs bring out to try to fit their mythology into reality is quite astounding.
didgeman #18
Holy Shit.
You’ve never actually read the Bible.
To dream the impossible dream.
This is, in fact, true.
I’ve always loved the phrase “creeping thing that creepeth”. My favorite part of the Babble, I think.
Late to the game, but I find this from didgeman hilarious:
So somehow the bible, in its allegedly super-accurate description of the creation of all living things, managed to overlook (a) the largest land animals that ever lived and (b) the most ubiquitous form of life.
Oops.
Just a small glitch. Nothing more.
The whole idea of a fall is incompatible with an omnibenevolent and omnipotent deity. (Yeah, the religion contradicts itself, everywhere. We already knew that….)
An self-proclaimed engineer should know the difference between “precise” and “accurate.”
There’s also the little detail that we don’t actually know the level of precision of the vast majority of holy books that were ever on earth, in no small part because the followers of that one particular holy book burned, erased, defaced and destroyed so many of the others.
dadsen @ 485
You mean that you believe it is good. We are getting a real good grip on your need to believe, your criteria for belief, and your absolute lack of critical thinking.
Nobody said that. You jump to absolutes, don’t you?
See, one-hundred-percent surety. And “true” isn’t the right word for accepting an analogy – “valid” would be better – but true is what you do.
Those links you gave, well, their arguments defending Paley were not valid.
I agree with “pre-programmed” but half the time you make it sound like Jesus is holding classes for baby squirrels.
No, no it isn’t. It is evidence of crappy design.
Look: Building a squirrel’s body is a hardware problem, which in this case is “cooked” from a DNA recipe. Programming a squirrel is a software job, and really should be installed just before birth – since you have the Holy Spirit hanging around, give it the duty. But since the critter is “programmed” by the hardware of the brain, the arrangement of the synapses, you just admitted that there is no program, no spirit, no soul, no inspiration – it is all just physical. There is no god.
Can you say why your god would arrange things so that it is not self-evident to everyone? Can you say how you seeing self-evidence is effectively different from raging paranoia?
No, no it did not. The link you gave did not support your case at all. That is very common for Creationists, and further evidence that they cannot read for squat.
Don’t put your absurdities in my mouth. But thanks for the good example of how stupid you think everyone else is. And yes, it is perfectly valid to assume that the male bird did the nest-building. How fucking sexist are you?
By the way, that crev.info site is ragingly awful. Poor design, poor writing, terrible arguments, and really shitty attitude. So very Christian.
Amphiox @53
To be fair, the bible is neither precise nor accurate in describing the natural world. Sadly, this semi-retired* petroleum engineer has encountered all too many engineers during my career who were oblivious to the effects of accuracy and resolution on their analyses of well tests and material balance reserves calculations. If I was able to donate enough to a university that they would name the faculty of engineering after me, I would ask that it be named the Dunning/Kruger School of Engineering instead.
Menyambal @14
I think you are overlooking the possibility of a malicious and incompetent deity.
When creationist engineers argue that the complexity of biological systems is proof of design, I like to quote what Antoine de Saint-Exupéry said about design.
I recently heard this about “creation” – On the first day god created the world. On the second day everything else was made in China.
*A euphemism I use to explain why I am now an assistant manager in a self storage centre due to my area of expertise (pressure Transient Analysis) being irrelevant since Packer Plus figured out how to multiply frac horizontal wells.
didgeman
This may be true, but jumping over the limbo stick is not an accomplishment to boast about. There are a great number of unholy books that describe these things much more accurately and precisely than the Bible does.
Nerd @ 13:
No, this is not the case. There is the Biblical creation account (in multiple chapters, not only Geneis, which have to read and interpreted consistently). The scientific results (when not permanently interpreted through the glasses of the null hypothesis) now show more and more, how good this predictions, which were made in the Bible some 2500 years ago match. No “god of the gaps” at all. And again (this is now the third time, I invoke this analogy), a 100% re-ingineered and re-constructed iPhone does not disprove the existence of Apple.
Amphiox @ 37:
Sorry, but you come again up with YOUR YEC interpretation of the Bible. I asked people here multiple times to read my post #309 or the book “Navigating Genesis” by Hugh Ross.
David @ 36:
#57: Sorry, block quote typo, here again:
Nerd @ 13:
No, this is not the case. There is the Biblical creation account (in multiple chapters, not only Geneis, which have to read and interpreted consistently). The scientific results (when not permanently interpreted through the glasses of the null hypothesis) now show more and more, how good this predictions, which were made in the Bible some 2500 years ago match. No “god of the gaps” at all. And again (this is now the third time, I invoke this analogy), a 100% re-ingineered and re-constructed iPhone does not disprove the existence of Apple.
Amphiox @ 37:
Sorry, but you come again up with YOUR YEC interpretation of the Bible. I asked people here multiple times to read my post #309 or the book “Navigating Genesis” by Hugh Ross.
David @ 36:
If people would find a living Metaspriggina from Cambruim today, it would be called a fish. It has focus eyes, it is a vertebrate and it has fins. Even if it is not classified today as fish, this is a fine description as part of the Cambrian explosion, which largely correspond to creation day 5 (day = age). Of course, today’s fishes appear later in the fossil record and today’s bird also appear later (again in an incredible explosion :-) ), but this is not excludes in the creation text. I never claimed, that the Bible is s scientific textbook with a super precise language. But it contains more scientific credible content that all other holy books combined.
Yet it contains less credible science than a penny comic book from the 1950’s, let alone a first year introductory science text.
@didgeman
I’m sorry, but concerning the cosmology of the Christian bible – it describes the same bronze age superstitions concerning the firmament, the 3 layers of heaven (later expanded to 7), the 4 pillars that hold up the sky, and the 4 pillars the Earth. This is the exact same cosmology of every contemporary culture in the surrounding area. The Christian bible describes the same concepts with the same terminology.
It doesn’t get the order of creation right – it gets the order of stars and trees wrong, and you have to use a wholly dishonest method of “interpretation”, otherwise known as motivated reasoning, to get the right answer. It could have said the universe is about 13.8 billion years old. It doesn’t. It could have said that the Earth is about 4.5 billion years old. It doesn’t. It could have talked about descent with modification and the rest of evolutionary biology, but it doesn’t.
Hell – one of my favorite examples is that it could have described microbes. Deaths caused by infectious disease was rampant, and simple tips like “wash your hands” would have been invaluable. And yet to the contrary, we have Jesus advising his followers to not wash their hands, perhaps contributing in some small part to the misery and deaths of millions.
It is trivial to think of examples which would conclusively show that the book was not written by mere bronze age shepherds: A periodic table of the elements with atomic numbers, atomic weights, accurate to several decimal places. The mass of the proton relative to the electron, again accurate to several decimal places. A table showing the orbits of the 8 planets, only 5 of which were known at the time. (Protip: Pluto is not a planet.)
However, we do not find a single unambiguous bit in the bible which was impossible to know by mere bronze age shepherds. Further, you cannot point to a single there in there now that would be a nontrivial prediction which you expect will be confirmed in the future.
Motivated reasoning – the lot of it.
PS: I’m still waiting for your answer to my questions here:
http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2015/02/13/my-darwin-day-debate-in-fargo/comment-page-1/#comment-914761
EnlightenmentLiberal @ 60:
Sorry, but as long as you are not willing to go deeper in the analysis to the Old Earth Creation model, which I recommended you, I can’t help any further. If you have abandoned the Christian faith by good reasons, it is of course easier, to maintain this view by believing, that the Bible is as wrong as any other holy book. But my point is, that this is not the case. Reasons to Believe has created a list of predictions, which they derive from their understanding of the Biblical creation account. You may, know, that for establishing a scientific theory, it does not matter, from where the author has got his idea for the theory. It can be an observation, a dream, an inspiration, an accident … The important point is, whether this theory formulates predictions, which are falsifiable. The Biblical creation model from Reasons to Believe makes such predictions and compares it to the predictions of other models. Here the list:
http://www.reasons.org/resources/predictions
This is exactly, what the Bible is doing extensively in Leviticus and it is a shame, that this important knowledge got lost in the middle ages. Here some remarks and references to it, which I found in quick google search (I have no time, to search for more details at the moment). I do not know this specific church and site, but I support the claim, that the instruction in the Bible contain exactly, what you were asking for:
http://newhopeforliving.com/old/98-01-11.htm
Yes, I know. But for answering it, I need to dig deeper, which is not possible for me within the next 10 days because of time restrictions. But I’ll try to answer it as soon as possible.
Yawn stupid proselytizer can’t refute science, which requires more science, not religion, and can’t shut the fuck up about their imaginary deity and mythical/fictional holy book. That tells world how desperate they are to impose their world view, based on their twin fallacious presuppositions, upon everybody else. Paranoia run rampant. Be like me, so I don’t feel so stupid….
didgeman @60
Reasons to Believe have woven a tissue of ambiguous statements, half-truths and flat-out lies to try (and fail) to make the Bible match reality. I spent half an hour looking at various topics they have on astronomy (my particular field of semi-expertise). I was unimpressed. They’re good at jargon, argue from analogy a lot, and really like begging the question (aka presupposition). I even found an argument for incredulity in an article. When lies and logical fallacies are used to promote a particular viewpoint then I’m inclined to reject that viewpoint.
Fixed that for you. Your babble is a book of mythology/fiction. You haven’t provided the hard physical evidence to change that fact, and your own claims are dismissed as unevidenced presuppositional fuckwittery.
I’m still waiting for hard physical evidence from the peer reviewed scientific literature for:
Your imaginary deity
That the flud really happened, as a one-time-all-continent-flood-extinction.
That the exodus really occured.
Until then, you lie and bullshit with every post where you claim a code and inerrant holy book.
Dang #64 last sentence, code = god.
didgeman @ 61:
Heh-heh, no. Your site on the medical wisdom of the Bible doesn’t even stand up on its own, with all the mining that it did. Anyone who knows the Bible knows what it left out. It even includes a verse that advises the use of the ashes of a heifer that had been sacrificed – which it doesn’t even try to explain – when everybody knows that it needs to be the ashes of a red heifer, it says so in the scriptures.
That red-heifer bit stuck with me because some site like that was ranting about how the Bible never included any simplistic, sympathetic-magic, folk medicine like wrapping in red flannel. I learned long ago that when a Christian makes a blanket statement about the Bible, it is always wrong.
didgeman, if your holy book is so well-written, how could people misunderstand or forget the wisdom contained in it? I mean, you state that the information was passed down by the people – even though the book was right there. So why wasn’t it all the people all the time, and somebody put some of it in the book? You just removed your god from the picture, once again.
And if the people had forgotten, could not God have reminded them? A little dream in the night, and the glory of God is back. Or did your god want people to die, just because one generation of their ancestors had bockled-up a sermon?
Sorry, but you deliberately, again, miss the entire point of my posts. Why should YOUR (or Hugh Ross’) personal interpretation of the bible be any privileged over mine, or the YECs, or anyone else’s? You and Hugh Ross cherry pick your passages and metaphors to, painfully, make them, sort of, fit (badly) with what is ALREADY KNOWN from science, and even then only in the broadest of outlines of details.
Any work that can be interpreted in self-contradictory ways fails as an explanatory text, and is most certainly incompatible with the inerrant word of a divine creator.
The order in Genesis is WRONG. It is irrelevant if you can metaphorically try to make it right later. It is irrelevant if somewhere in Psalms there is some ridiculously pitiful attempt to retcon that fact. The order in Genesis WRONG. Not just in small “glitches”, but COMPLETELY WRONG in MASSIVE chunks.
It doesn’t even matter if the perfectly right order is given elsewhere, later (it isn’t, no matter how much you or Hugh Ross try to lie about it). The order in Genesis WRONG. COMPLETELY WRONG. UTTERLY, TOTALLY, COMPLETELY WRONG.
Genesis 1 is IN THE BIBLE (we’ll even ignore the fact that it is the FIRST part of the bible, and the most logical place any intelligent entity would put the most important and most accurate description of beginnings, that part that should supercede all else, would be in the beginning), and Genesis is WRONG. Ergo the Bible is not inerrant.
Once more missing the point of the original post.
Original quote by David M: “You won’t manage to define it in a way that makes the oldest “fish” no older than the oldest winged insects.”
Metaspriggina is definitively NOT “no older” than the oldest winged insects.
So thanks for conceding David M’s point.
Making the 5th day correspond to the Cambrian “explosion” and having it include the creation of “living creatures that move about” in the water and all winged “birds”/animals is STILL WRONG. Living creatures that move about in the water massively pre-date the Cambrian explosion, we have both the Ediacaran fauna, and a recent discovery of macroscopic multicellular creatures even older than that, almost 2 BILLION years ago, not to mention all the free swimming bacteria, AND we have the fact that the winged insects evolved definitively AFTER the Cambrian period was over and the Cambrian “explosion” long passed.
There is also, which is the other part of David M’s overall point, no description of “fish” that includes metaspriggina that would not also include all land vertebrates. Even if you do the intellectually dishonest thing and insist that limbs and fins are not the same class of thing, amphibian larvae and the embryos of reptiles, mammals, and birds all have appendages that unambiguously fit the exact same definition for “fins” that the fins of fish do.
The fact that life began in the water, and not the land, is among the most basic of all facts about biology. No matter how much you try to metaphorically walk it back, there is absolutely no honest way to reconcile the biblical claim that land vegetation, created on Day 3, comes before the “creatures that move about in the sea”. It doesn’t matter what dishonest cherry-picked metaphor you use for vegetation, seed, or land, or creature, or move, you cannot make it work.
This is the most simple and basic of all basic facts about biological origins, and Genesis gets it WRONG.
I prefer the origin of the world mythology given in Tolkien’s Silmarillion over the pastiche that’s 1st and 2nd Genesis. The Music of the Ainur is more consistent and better writing that Genesis. If I’m looking for a good creation myth, I’ll take Tolkien over pseudo-Moses any day.
If I want science, I’ll cut out the middleman and consult the writings of science, which have the benefit of not having to be “interpreted” through smoked glass and strident wishing.
Since didgeman continues to drop references to his 309 (all points therein already refuted multiple times of course), let’s take a look at what he said then, again:
Already wrong. The primordial earth was not “void”, nor “dark”. The surface of the earliest earth was not covered in water, it was molten rock and bone dry, and the water came later. The water covered earth is therefore derived and not primordial, and to make the metaphor fit didgeman has to change the very definition of the word primordial mid sentence, to have it mean one thing at the beginning, and then use a broader more inclusive meaning by the end of the sentence!
(Note how he is ALREADY having to muddle the dates, since the water on earth definitely came after 4.5 bya, and the time difference between 4.5 billion and 4.4 billion years, 100 million years, is almost twice as long as the time from the extinction of the dinosaurs to now. Note how much more precise AND accurate the scientific datings for all these things are).
False. It most certainly was not completely dark at the surface of the earth at any point in earth’s history. In fact, a completely dark surface of the earth would mean no radiant energy whatsoever, and whatever water that would be there would be frozen solid.
It is utterly laughable for anyone to try to claim this as in any way equivalent to a description of the moon-forming impact, when it completely leaves out the salient point about a giant planet-sized rock crashing in from the sky. Only someone who already knew from other sources about the moon-forming impact could possibly fit the metaphor into this.
Wrong again. The first land plants appeared only about 450 million years ago, and plate tectonics started long before 1.2 bya. This also completely misses the very important fact that oxygen levels fluctuated, with several upward spikes and downward falls, during this period, before rising to the modern range of values.
So once more, flat out error, along with gross oversimplification of the facts the even make it appear to match.
Wrong yet again, since sea animals predate the Cambrian “explosion” by a very long time. The oldest known animal fossil is now dated to 760 million years ago. (And molecular clock dating puts the first emergence of animals several hundred million years earlier than even that)
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2012/120207-oldest-animals-sponges-earliest-science-evolution/
This is longer ago, to the cambrian “explosion”, than the very FIRST dinosaur is to modern times, and a full THIRD the entire time of existence of animals. Would any reasonable person consider a time line that was only about 60% accurate to be a reliable one?
(Note also that C14 dating is not used for anything older than 50-60k years, so who knows where didgeman is getting his 70-200k year range from)
There is absolutely NO WAY anyone can get mass extinctions out of this, unless they already knew that mass extinctions existed, and were desperate to fit the metaphor to the data. It is quite notable that when the first evidence for ANY mass extinctions whatsoever was discovered, many scientists (all devout christian creationists) rejected it because they considered it counter to the biblical account for there to have been any mass extinctions at all. That’s several thousand years of biblical scholarship and study of that Psalm, and no one in all that time considered it to even remotely hint at the possibility of mass extinction. (In other words, this passage had zero predictive power with respect to the phenomenon of mass extinctions)
Without prior knowledge of mass extinctions, this Psalm much more closely fits with a description of individuals living and dying and decaying, and the renewal of life in spring. It could even be read more easily as a reference to the story of Noah’s flood than anything to do with mass extinctions.
Even with the strained metaphoring fitting mass extinction
It is further notable that, as a description of mass extinction, this Psalm completely misses what, from the perspective a human observer, should be the most salient point about mass extinctions, which is that they leave FOSSILS behind. IE, not ALL the dead organisms “return to their dust”.
So, once more, useless post-hoc metaphor fitting after the fact, and the moment you examine things in closer detail, either completely blank, or plain WRONG.
One notable factor in all of didgeman’s perseverating is that, in order to make the biblical descriptions fit, he basically has to use definitions of “living creature” that exclude all the bacteria and archaea, most of the single-celled eukaryotes, and all the viruses.
That’s (even dropping the viruses out) something like 99.9% of all the living things on earth.
So even if completely accurate, we’re talking about a description of only 0.1% of reality….
The science of Genesis, in five lines.
In the beginning was the void,
Which wasn’t a void; it had a god within.
Then these words were hoid:
‘Jebus I’m bored. Let the World begin.
Then Magic stuff happened.
Shorter Reasons To Believe: MAGIC MAN done it!!
And there, by immediate comparison, we see why Robin Ince is a renowned comedian, while I’m just a nobody on t’internet.
Daz @76
You’re not “just a nobody on t’internet.” You’re just not Robin Ince. So few of us are.
“Hey, at least we’re less wrong and not quite righter than the others!”
This has been quite an entertaining read. Thanks to all involved, especially to the battered and bruised didgeman.
Caught up.
Comment 190:
Well, you do get things like some people in New Guinea classifying cassowaries with humans instead of with other birds.
198:
Has nothing to do with “crisis”. Depends instead on the strength and direction of selection.
The most common case is stabilizing selection: the environment is stable, the population is well enough adapted to it, no mutation that has yet happened has brought a noticeable advantage, so all mutations are nearly neutral (thus subject to drift) or worse (so they disappear from the population about as soon as they show up), and the phenotype of the population does not change. As soon as the environment changes, certain mutations that used to be nearly neutral or worse will suddenly be beneficial, and others that were neutral or nearly so will suddenly be bad; and then you can watch the average phenotype change.
201:
Some ecosystems can take 10 Ma or longer. Google for “coal gap” and “reef gap”.
211:
OK, OK. But you overlook how disadvantageous some of these common modules are for some organisms. Are the same 20 amino acids really a good idea for all organisms, at all temperatures, at all pH values, at all amounts of UV and other radiation?
You also overlook how disadvantageous some of them are for all organisms. As I said in comment 162, which you appear not to have read: “More generally… DNA and intelligent design… did you know DNA falls apart when it’s kept in water? A large part of our basic metabolism does nothing but constantly repair DNA (with less than 100 % accuracy).”
(And all that is long before we get to cephalopod eyes.)
Phylogenetics is my very field. :-) In most cases trees from molecular and trees from morphological data are impressively congruent. The number of exceptions keeps shrinking; some famous examples have turned out to be due to peculiarities of molecular evolution that hadn’t been modeled well enough, while the others occurred in areas where no good work on the morphological data had ever been done.
Let’s talk about examples! Do you have any? :-)
Furthermore, design shouldn’t merely result in incongruent trees. It should result in no trees at all – or at most in very poorly supported trees that are, together, indistinguishable from random. That’s not what we’re seeing. It’s nowhere near what we’re seeing.
229:
Really? How do octopuses manage not to mess up their camouflage, then?
Cephalopod eyes do, however, have a double cell layer through the lens (well, coleoid eyes, because nautilus eyes don’t have lenses).
234:
Also, if you can’t explain something, you haven’t understood it.
237:
There’s a good reason we’ve lost that, actually: given our high metabolism, the risk for cancer would be crazily high. Your other examples stand, however!
250:
Hemorrhoids. Connected to “blood” and “flow”, not to “emerald”.
254:
*giggle*
256:
That actually refers to hammering it out, starting from a flat sheet of metal. The sky is a kettle, you see.
284:
That requires a… strangely narrow definition of “Christian”.
287:
How would you know?
How would you know what we biologists actually think nowadays?
I’m sorry to inform you once again that you have no idea what you’re talking about.
What kind of evidence for evolution do you want? Observations? Experiments? Whole trees full of transitional fossils? Tell me, and I can provide something that was unknown in Watson’s days.
And that’s before we even consider comments 295, 327 and 331; I do hope you’ve read them and followed the link in 295.
289:
Define “higher order” (really, what is that supposed to mean?), and define “species”.
Uh, we have a whole tree full of fossils from the Cambrian “Explosion” out of which only three branches – Onychophora, Tardigrada, Arthropoda – have survived. A few names you should look up: Kerygmachela, Aysheaia, Microdictyon, Hallucigenia, Opabinia, Pambdelurion, Anomalocaris, Parapeytoia, Marrella… and also Parvancorina. Mind you, those are just the most famous names off the top of my head; there are many, many more.
We also have a somewhat less full tree of fossils from about the same time out of which again only three branches – Mollusca, Annelida, Brachiopoda + Phoronida – have survived. Halkiera and Wiwaxia belong in there. You should take a look at the early mollusks Kimberella and Odontogriphus; notably, Kimberella is 555 million years old and thus more than 10 Ma older than the beginning of the Cambrian “Explosion”.
298:
What do you mean by “best”? It’s what was selected for.
(Also see comment 304.)
1) Define “completely new body plan”. That should be fun.
2) The oldest known mollusk is 555 Ma old. It must have had the same sort of blood circulation system as is found in mollusks today, including some kind of heart… indeed, genetic evidence strongly suggests that some kind of contractile blood vessel is much older, because at least one gene that plays a role in its development is shared across almost all animals.
3) The length is quite important.
“Massive”? Faster growth of the brain, that’s basically all. The voice box of Homo ergaster is not known, and the rest isn’t well understood either.
Again, it’s not remotely comparable. The experiment was done in an environment where one parameter was changed once (citrate was added to the medium). Human evolution of the last million years saw something like ten ice ages…
That is simply and plainly not true. Take a look around yourself. You can even start on Wikipedia.
Oh wow, you have misunderstood punk eek by several orders of magnitude.
It does not refer to mass extinctions.
It refers to the evolution of a single lineage over just tens to hundreds of thousands of years: the equilibrium lasts tens of thousands of years, the punctuation a few thousand.
Both punk eek and gradualism are seen in the fossil record. This is not surprising at all: some environments are largely stable and then change rather quickly, while other environments show long-term trends.
Google doesn’t let me provide a direct link to the paper that shows this best, but it’s the first result when you search for “speciation in the fossil record”.
And Lamarck is chopped liver?
It took well into the 20th century till (Neo)lamarckism died out. Hey, Lysenkoism is derived from Lamarckism!
You know, this is so funny for me as a paleontologist to read. :-)
:-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D
…You know, that’s actually an insulting lie.
It’s a lie, because you’re making it up (and then call it a !). You have no idea what anyone thinks. I, for one, have no problem with the idea of a personal Creator – it’s the data that have a problem with that idea.
It’s insulting, because wishful thinking is the last thing a scientist ought to do. You just said all of us haven’t noticed that wishing something into or out of existence doesn’t make it so!
Be no longer surprised why azhael is so angry at you.
It’s not widely accepted among cosmologists. That’s because 1) it fits black holes, for example, at least as well as life or whatever “advanced life” is; 2) many, many other combinations of parameters would fit life just as well, perhaps even better; 3) different kinds of life that could exist in different universes are not impossible.
You’re blindly relying on sources that don’t understand what they’re talking about.
303:
…When did that happen? I mean, he’s considered an asshole since the incident, but there was no argument in there, and he didn’t try to get us to take it on his authority.
Ooh, don’t get mired in the gunk of terminology. Some species concepts allow anagenesis (change within a lineage that happens not to split at that time) to be speciation; others… well, the extreme case is Willi Hennig’s species concept, which treats “species” as a synonym of “internode”, so that every split is automatically a speciation and nothing else is.
Species don’t exist outside of our heads. Many species concepts (and there are lots!) describe interesting entities, but they don’t overlap as much as one would hope; the concepts have nothing in common except that the word “species” is used to name them. According to two different species concepts that are in actual use today, there are 101 or 249 endemic bird species in Mexico, and the region of greatest endemicism lies in totally different parts of the country.
306:
No, see above.
309:
This is… complete nonsense.
Plate tectonics is much older, at least 2.5 Ga; remember, continental and oceanic crust already existed 4.4 Ga ago. The first land plants… where do you even take 0.8 from? They’re about 0.5 Ga old.
CO2 is transparent. What are you talking about?
Wow, you should be embarrassed to interpret so much into so little. You should be ashamed.
See comment 319.
And why does the Bible talk about cities and empires that drowned in the flood, when you say it was at least 60 ka ago?
Modern humans were all over Africa south of the Sahara by then, at the very least.
Except for the irritating little fact that Babel is Babylon.
Except for the astonishing differences between the legends… and the complete absence of flood legends from, of all places, Africa.
322:
He’s a layman; he still makes the occasional mistake… in the quote you provide, he gets the words “theropods”, “digitigrade” and “pentadactyl” wrong, and using the term “reptile” is not a good idea.
You make mistakes, too: the term “cladistics” refers variably to one or all of the methods of the science of phylogenetics, not to the phylogeny (the tree).
337:
The year before the book came out, Darwin and Wallace published a scientific paper on this subject together, precisely because they wanted to avoid priority disputes.
There are also two other people who independently published on natural selection a few decades earlier, but their works were simply overlooked. One is buried in the middle of a large work on earthworms, IIRC… Darwin & Wallace instead read their paper before the Royal Society (as was the custom at the time) before they published it, so their colleagues all took notice.
Also, he had talked to a few colleagues about his idea, and they recommended he should first do some solid, uncontroversial biology to become famous enough that the authoritarians wouldn’t just dismiss his idea as crankery. So he sat down and described and classified the barnacles of the world, producing a huge work that took him many years. His children grew up seeing him receive barnacles by mail, dissecting and drawing them; one of his children – I think it was Annie – once asked one of her friends “and where does your father do his barnacles?”.
342:
If that were true, how would you know?
Tell me some of those nasty data, then. I’m a phylogeneticist and… not seeing them.
But what makes you think there was such dust?
There isn’t any dust in the atmosphere of Venus either; Venus has clouds of sulfuric acid from volcanic eruptions, that’s all.
346:
Oi, Amphiox, do something about your spellchecker! I recommend turning it off altogether…
352:
Nerd of Redhead, PZ has told you several times that he doesn’t like calls for banning someone… he usually lets creationists and similar cranks who stay in a single thread ramble for a few thousand comments before declaring them too boring and banning them.
381:
Please don’t write it with a capital letter unless you mean this. :-)
397:
There would absolutely be a lot of work done to find out how old the rock really is. But the finder? Who cares about the finder? The only important thing is the fossil and the rock that’s sticking to it; the finder is completely irrelevant.
Fossils are evidence. Finders are not.
406:
Lateral gene transfer could explain this, though there are probably too many genes involved for that to happen at all easily.
And if all you have are fossils, good luck finding out what genes they had.
427:
No… really… not every Christian is an American fundamentalist. There are many who believe that hell is empty.
431:
They do talk about it like that all the time. They clearly haven’t understood that transcription is an inefficient, sloppy process that generates heaps of useless RNA.
441:
Why not? Why wouldn’t they? Do you think histones have 0 K?
444:
Again: we’re talking about DNA-binding proteins, not just any proteins, and we’re talking about different affinities for different sequences – they’re just hardly ever, if ever, zero or otherwise too small for ENCODE to detect.
446:
I’m so, so tired of creationists who believe that there is no theory of evolution – that instead of having a theory, biologists just believe everything is pure random.
Mutation and drift are random; but selection is not – it’s determined by the environment.
Evolution is descent with heritable modification. Learn what you’re talking about before you talk about it.
If you’re asking how nest-building evolved, I suggest you compare bird nests to crocodile nests and then to lizard nests…
It’s innate behavior. You never learned how to drink – you were born with that behavior.
It’s hard-wired in the brain.
You didn’t learn to be sexually attracted to certain sorts of people; you underwent puberty, and poof, you had sexual attraction.
That’s a part of the brain that isn’t always on (like the one that lets you drink), it’s switched on by hormones.
Innate behavior again. Almost all behavior spiders have is innate.
First, learn about the diversity of spider webs and… other things made out of spider silk.
I’ll wait.
454:
Nice. Very interesting.
469:
Thread won.
480:
Isn’t it obvious? Sufficient similarity of the sequence in question to the target sequence(s) of the protein in question.
481:
That’s not what “null hypothesis” means. It means “no correlation, just random chance, nothing to explain here, move along”. Neither creationism nor evolution have ever been the null hypothesis; the null hypothesis is not necessarily anything anyone has ever seriously proposed.
485:
Watches don’t reproduce, and they don’t inherit…
There are a few things you need to learn about birds… and about crocodiles.
How about the wild male bird just starting to build?
In many bird species both sexes brood. In some, only the males brood, but I digress…
So what? Have you confused evolution with progress? That’s not what it means. It means descent with heritable modification.
504:
The embarrassing part is that you evidently don’t know what methodological naturalism means.
It doesn’t mean metaphysical naturalism. Metaphysical naturalism means “nothing supernatural exists”. Methodological naturalism is merely a special case of parsimony: “supernatural explanations require lots of extra assumptions, so they’re not a good place to start”.
505:
That would have been dishonest.
You see, more than half of the human genome consists of retrovirus corpses in all stages of decay; a third consists of mindless repetitions of various sequences of 2 to 4 bases, with the exact number of repetitions varying between individuals* because DNA polymerase isn’t good at copying that shit; and 10 % consists of pseudogenes – broken genes (or broken copies of genes) that may still have a functional promoter (yay, RNA polymerase binding and transcription!!!) but have a stop codon somewhere in the middle, so they can’t make a useful protein anymore.
That doesn’t leave much.
* Genetic fingerprinting uses this fact.
507:
Oh, they were creationists alright. But most of them were Deists, not Christians.
522:
I wonder if they even exist, or if dadsen made them up to troll us.
525:
Actually… isn’t this circular? Doesn’t the AIC just measure which of the compared hypotheses explains the data most parsimoniously?
529:
Eh, all that depends on how strict your definition of “science” is. Under the strictest definition, none of the above was science, and there was no science before the 19th century or so – just philosophy of nature (and of history, of society, yadda yadda).
541:
It is exceedingly common among creationists and other denialists to believe that everybody is at least as ignorant as they are – that if they personally don’t have a particular bit of knowledge, it doesn’t exist.
545:
*steal* :-)
546:
No, that is for the most part not true. Most sequences used for molecular phylogenetics are, as you actually mention, genes – coding most commonly for proteins (often basic housekeeping proteins) or for rRNA; complete mitochondrial genomes are also often used. Junk DNA can only be used to resolve very recent divergences, because it quickly mutates to the point that the differences between different branches become indistinguishable from random (that’s called saturation); sequences that are subject to stabilizing selection are needed for everything that happened longer ago. For a whole tree, you need different sequences that are subject to different strengths of stabilizing selection so that both the older and the younger cladogeneses can be resolved.
553:
Do you think so many were ever written down?
557/558:
Fine. If Metaspriggina is a fish for Biblical purposes, then you have fish two hundred million years before the first flying insects – while the Bible instead claims they were created at the same time. That’s exactly my point.
The radiation of Neoaves in the Paleocene isn’t incredible at all. It’s just what happens in a world that is exceptionally poor in predators and especially competitors.
561:
…um. The Book of Leviticus didn’t exactly get lost…
568:
Since for the sake of the argument I’m accepting flying insects as “birds”, I’m perfectly happy with paraphyletic “fish”. But even if we restrict “fish” to Actinopterygii, so that sharks, coelacanths and lungfish aren’t “fish”, the oldest “fish” are still about a hundred million years older than the oldest flying insects.
Accepting all non-tetrapod total-group vertebrates as “fish” goes in the other direction and doubles the time gap.
572:
That can’t be calibrated well, though.
You misremember: that was not about mass extinctions. It was about extinction in general. People simply refused to believe that God would allow any of His created kinds to die out till it became clear that there’s no place on the planet where a population of living Mastodon could hide today.
I stand in awe of your blockquoting, David.
I would have messed up at least six or seven of them in a post that long.
didgeman, #58
I guarantee you haven’t researched in depth even a couple of other holy books and their creation stories. Guaranteed.
You just want it to be Jesus’s dad.
David M @190
Please do! As royalties I accept Internet Points*
FYI and meta: I’m still kind of scratching my head over someone who isn’t a Young-Earth dim-bulb trying to beat the obvious mythology of Genesis into something that vaguely resembles an accurate description of the universe and our planet.
And I have another question for the creationists (another one I’ve asked before that hasn’t been answered, but that’s standard procedure for creationists so I won’t harp on it): how, if at all, do you decide whose creationism is the most valid model? The fundie-YEC mob would say theirs, because theirs is taken from a literal reading of scripture. The OEC-ID mob would say their own, because they use science-words, accept non-threatening science, seeming to only have major problems with biology. I’ve heard creationism described as a “big tent” and heard various mouthpieces make all kinds of nice noises about a united front against the Darwin Jong-Un conspiracy, but behind closed doors they’re starkly at odds – the OEC-ID crowd know only too well that the YEC fundies are making them all look like fools, while the YECs are upset that the ID’ers are diluting God’s word and presuming to sub-edit it on His behalf to suit their purposes.
So how precisely do YECs like dadsen and OECs like didgeman reconcile? They’ll absolutely need to do so if they want to make any impact on how biological science is practiced – that’s leaving aside the fact that, once united, they’d then have a couple of centuries of science to first understand and then supersede with better science.
Creationist guests: considering some form of creationism was the default position for centuries until scientific inquiry shed light on many of life’s mysteries and caused creationism to wither on the vine, how do you hope to undo all of that progress and revert the scientific paradigm to some form of Western Christian Creationism?
How do you hope to even begin this revolution when you don’t agree on how much Bible to put in your science?
_____________________________________________
*Redeemable only for other Internet Points
Agh. My #81 should say “David M @ 79“, not 190.
@didgeman
I’m not interested in dishonest apologetics, which is the what you are offering me. You assert that when the text clearly says “god created the stars on day X”, it actually means “god didn’t create the stars on day X; god created the stars on an earlier day”. If you have to completely reverse the plain meaning of the text to match reality, then it’s simply not honest to call it a falsifiable prediction which verifies the scientific accuracy of the Bible. At this point, your standards are so loose that if you applied it to other books, you would accept all sorts of nonsense, like the amazing prophetic power of Nostradamus, or the similarly idiotic scientific predictions of the Koran.
So, you’re saying you don’t know the first things about evolutionary biology. Before coming here, did you think you were decently educated in evolutionary biology? Do you now recognize that you don’t know anything and that you have been lied to by your creationist “scholars”?
…
@David
He is a layman. I am curious – how did he misuse those words? He would also agree that the word “reptile” is rather ambiguous and difficult to use because it’s paraphyletic.
Ehh… We are talking US founders, right? I don’t think what you wrote is actually true. I think a minority were actual deists. The rest were just intelligent people who recognized that theocracy is bad for everyone.
…
@Saad
The preview button is your friend.
What is amusing is that there is nothing from creationists trying to actually write and publish papers in the peer reviewed scientific literature. Except for the minor details of needed to define their deity sufficiently it can be falsified, same for their holy book, and they must accept without complaints evidence from the scientific literature that does falsify their claims. Minor details that good scholarship and research of the scientific literature might be able to get around. *snicker*
They just simply can’t face the concept that they could be wrong, so that won’t even try.
One would have hoped that an omnipotent and omnibenevolent designer could have put in some other mechanism that would have solved that metabolism/cancer linkage….
David M spoils me. I know that whatever small (or large) errors I might make in phylogenetics, paleontology, etc, he will rapidly provide a correction for the group.
About the only thing he can’t seem to do is be my spellchecker….
Well, if it was never written down, you don’t burn the book, you burn the body that contains the brain that contains the neuron networks that contain the memory of the book….
Or, in these enlightened times they just work frantically to discredit the books, the writers and the ideas.
David Marjanović, thanks for the comments, the corrections and the compliments.
I stand in awe of your blockquoting, David.
Years of experience. You haven’t seen much of it, because there have been almost no creationists here in years. I’ve written 23-screeners…
He only got the words themselves wrong, writing “Therapods” instead of “theropods” (a very English, if not specifically American, mistake) and “digigrade” instead of “digitigrade”.
And if he agrees with me on “reptile”, why does he use that word? It’s not really something that’s widely known to the public – few people can tell a lizard from a salamander.
Oh, I may just have a narrower definition of “founders”.
Not before you click on “Post Comment”, no :-)
LOL, look where I fucked up the blockuqote! :-)
@David
So, it’s a spelling issue on the other two! What a relief. Lol.
About the word “reptiles”. He’s writing for a lay audience, trying to stress how the various Godzillas don’t fit in modern taxonomy / cladistics. Most discussions on this topic from him will definitely include his dislike of paraphyletic clades, and especially such underspecified and ambiguous words like “fish” and “reptiles”.
Good. :-)
“Clade” isn’t the fancy new way of saying “taxon”; it’s the fancy new way of saying “monophylum”. Its definition is “an ancestor and all its descendants”. Clades are by definition monophyletic.
And again thank you for the correction.
Hmm. Look at the time. Did we exhaust the creationists or did they, pigeon-like, fly home to the coop to declare victory after knocking all the chess pieces over and shitting on the board?
Should I hang around waiting to have my mind blown by unassailable creationist logic? Or should I just face the fact that if creationists had a knock-down argument against evolution they’d have used it long before 2015 C.E. and just pour myself another scotch? As far as I can tell, evolution is still standing and my glass is nearly empty; at this point my dilemma is 95% solved.
I wonder why our creationists haven’t come back. I had to make do with two Jehovah’s Witnesses letting me talk to them for 20 minutes this morning.
I’m sorry for y/our loss. This has been stimulating.
#485 dadsen
You continue to pile up subjective impressions as if they had some scientific value. Every one of those articles says, in essence, “This looks too complex to me to have evolved, therefore it must have been created. Game over, evolution!”
That is not scientific evidence in any way, and has no value in an objective discussion.
@96: Indeed. It’s hard to know how to reply to someone whose argument consists of “Ooh, shiny! Therefore God!” The flaw in the argument is that it isn’t one — but how do you explain that to them, in a way they will listen to?
I think two things finally got to them. Everybody kept saying their personal skepticism is not relevant to any logical argument. For somebody who thinks “giving testament” is the highest form of evidence they can give, that is a grievous insult. The second was that they were being laughed at due to inane logic they used trying to tie the babble to real scientific evidence. Not only was it being laughed at, it was being ignored and dismissed on more testament.
Partial credit to didgeman for sticking around as long as he did. What he lacked in argumentation and understanding of science he more than made up for with persistence and word-count. He put in some effort, which I can respect on some level, wasted though it was on hollow apologetics & ID drivel and peppered as it was with disrespect and ludicrous conspiracies that got my goat more than once. Didge could even spell and punctuate (I suspect there was some kind of language barrier there, though it wasn’t a big deal), which is a rare bonus. In general, I’ve noticed that you see far better written language from Old Earth/ID creationists than from YEC ravers. Perhaps it’s a side effect of being exposed to more than one book.
Dadsen, on the other hand, was as much a fly-in creo-clone as any other. Argument from incredulity, argument from complexity, inevitable argument from scriptural infallibility (he really should’ve started with it to save time and keystrokes), rinse, repeat, flounce.
Both of them argued badly & fallaciously and Gish-galloped, though in markedly different ways. In fact, it added to the entertainment value of the whole exchange to see two very different creationist variants arguing against the essentially united front of evolution in the same thread (and, to my recollection, not acknowledging the other’s existence). Between them, they highlighted a key and irreconcilable difference within the big tent of creationism, most notably the question of just how much of the Bible should be taken literally. Didge’s Old Earth/ID camp, to their partial credit can clearly see the folly of dadsen’s literal reading of Genesis and wholesale rejection of evolution and the acceptance of Ussher’s 6000-year timescale. However, the OEC/ID reading of Genesis is, in its way, also literal (in that it accepts the Bible is infallibly factual) despite being spiced with liberal interpretations of the precise meanings of the words used in order to force the Bible to gel with scientific knowledge. The OEC/ID approach is an almost equal folly to the YEC approach – after all, there is no more reason to accept “micro” evolution while rejecting “macro” evolution or to accept deep-time Creation while rejecting six-day Creation than there is to just go Full Ham and bollock on about vegetarian T-Rexes on the Ark. Didge’s insistence that science is all acceptable except for biology, which is a perfectly walled-off Stalinist conspiracy sect, impermeable to the rest of science, compounded his folly and highlighted the intellectual bankruptcy of his position just as much as dadsen’s stock-standard creationist pamphleteering highlighted his.
Creationists are already fighting an uphill battle (and none of their subspecies seem content to admit publicly just how far down the hill they’ve slipped in the past two or three centuries); if they can’t reconcile their internal theological quibbles I don’t know how they can ever expect to get a seat at the grownups’ table to discuss science.
@99: dadsen’s beliefs about homosexuality seem to have gotten mostly lost in the shuffle. Believing in creationism is stupid. Brainwashing one’s children into it is tragic. But believing, and passing on, that homosexuality is akin to schizophrenia is plain evil. Especially if one of the kids turns out to be gay.
I noticed Didge was unable to demonstrate one of the lynchpins of chemistry from babble (mis)quotes. The conservation of matter and energy. Chemistry doesn’t hold up well as a biblical science, any more so than biology.
EK @ 100:
After a while I tuned out of dadsen’s ravings so I didn’t even see his homophobia. And here I was thinking I couldn’t possibly think less of him. Ugh.
@101: Bah, that whole schtick was a random-association game between Bible verses and any old bit of science that sounded sorta-vaguely similar. It’s like Ross & Co. noticed that “Let there be light” is evocative of the Big Bang in poetic way, and didn’t know when to stop.
Hank_Says @ 99,
Two small points: Didgeman did mention that English wasn’t his first language. And Dadsen did compliment Didgeman in his first post.
As for Dadsen, in addition to being a homophobe he also revealed himself as a misogynist. An all around asshole.
And no, I’m not going to go back through this thread to find the posts to back up my claims. Y’all will just have to take it on faith.
@What a Maroon #104
Ah, I must’ve missed Didge mentioning English was a second language. Wasn’t a problem, for the record. Like I said he was far better at expressing himself than dadsen, in a general sense and in a technical sense, and probably understood more of the conversation too.
And dadsen was a misogynist as well? Well, there’s more justification for ignoring him when I did. I’m sure I don’t need to take your assessment on faith as it’s entirely plausible: based on my lengthy experience, Young Earth lunacy is almost inseparable from homophobia and where there’s alethephobia and homophobia there’s almost certainly gynophobia.
Speaking of misogyny, this thread has reminded me of the Golden Age of internet atheism, AKA the few short years before it was brought rapidly to the community’s attention that we have our own problems with raging misogynist manchildren and LGBT-phobic arseholes. Ah, memories.
David @ 79:
A lot of work, but unfortunately with many points, which are totally wrong and show much story telling instead of serious investigation (BTW, Wikipedia is not always the ultimate source of reliable data, mainly, when it comes to worldview issues).
But as I wrote earlier, I am actually very time restricted. please make a copy of the predictions below (link was already posted earlier) and compare it in some years from now. You my see a trend in one or the other direction. Because I am convinced about God as the Grand Designer, I am quite relaxed about the outcome:
http://www.reasons.org/resources/predictions
Of course, you presuppose your imaginary deity and mythical/fictional holy book. Nothing can penetrate your cone of stupidity.
Science has spoken. You lost before you ever became stupid and believing in phantasms. Science doesn’t care about your unevidenced opinions. They are dismissed as religious fuckwittery.
didgeman:
The very nature of “reasons.org” makes them a useless source. They aren’t interested in facts. They’re only interested in things they can use to reinforce their faith. Shame on you for shilling for them as if they were a real source of information.
Well, the “fine-tuning” predictions seem to be coming out in favour of the “Naturalism” model. Not that I expect Didgy to admit that his heroes at (No) Reasons To Believe to be wrong….
Didgeman @106
I’ve skimmed that list and its amazingly shitty. I can already tell its shit and I’m not even a college graduate, just have a love for learning. In just the first 10 predictions there are: 0/10 that are good. From stealing what naturalism would say and placing some weird version only RtB thinks naturalism would say, to ones that aren’t predictions as every model except YEC agrees on them, to even having the stupid fine-tuning argument. The rest of the list doesnt look good from that extremely poor start.
Take all the time you need to read my comment and reply to it. I can wait. I won’t bother downloading a pdf of 508 kB when I have work to do, though; why can’t spell out their in HTML on their own website?
Quoted for truth.
Oh, didgeman, you still haven’t read comment 162 on the previous page.
didgeman, if you’re so pressed for time, why did you come here to begin with? Why did you even personally respond to anybody at all, much less with the lengthy and detailed comments from before? Did you think your rehashed pseudo-scientific theology was going to convince even a single person, or even just make them reconsider science for as much as a nanosecond? If you had the slightest idea about science and about the consensus among all sciences, not just biology, about the evidence for evolution (as you would, had you done the slightest bit of non-biased research), you wouldn’t have bothered. You’d know that creationism is dead in the water and that ID and Old Earth creationism are just desperate re-brandings of a hypothesis that was discredited over a century before most of us were even born.
You should’ve just pasted a link to your embarrassing failure of an apologetics website and left, because the end result would have been exactly the same as it is right now: you’re still convinced your god designed sunflowers and galaxies and HIV and milk-drinking fish-shaped aquatic mammals that can drown, while we’re still convinced your “theory” is bankrupt and that you’re wasting your mind trying to smash your irrelevant god into the gaps in our knowledge.
By the way, I’m still interested to hear precisely how this biological North Korea of yours is supposed to function. I really do have a difficult time imagining how biology – and biology alone – managed to construct for itself an unassailable citadel of scientific orthodoxy, ruthlessly suppressing “dissent” from evolution and keeping generations of students, teachers and laypeople completely ignorant via such nefarious methods as obsolete textbooks and – hell, I dunno – Far Side cartoons? It’s as plausible as anything else you’ve said.
Alternately, you could go with my theory: on some level, creationists of all subspecies understand how little evidence they have for their creation stories but, rather than admit it, they concoct an elaborate, worldwide, generations-long campaign to pull the wool over the eyes of the world that’s such an unqualified success that even other scientists haven’t noticed.
Didgeman proves with prima facie evidence that website names, like ‘nyms, with terms like reason, intelligent, skeptical, rational, often are far from that. Any website calling it reason, but presupposes fuckwittery like imaginary deities, is not showing reason. Reason implies Evidence based, like say from the peer reviewed scientific literature. So Didegeman shows utterly no reason with his presuppostionalism, but those of us waiting for physical evidence from the scientific literature show the reasoning he so hopes to project. You fail when you presuppositionally believe anything.
I’m ready to abandon the ToE if the right evidence and theory presents itself. But there must be no imaginary deities in sight, which is unscientific thinking, and refuted for centuries.
I forget who made this comment (I don’t want to go read it again) but to the person who said they would tell their child homosexuality is wrong and something they disapprove of:
Please don’t do that. It’s a very damaging thing to tell a child. If the child is gay, the reason is obvious. If they are not, then you are still passing on a hurtful way of thinking which will only perpetuate the bigotry. I hope you won’t actually do this.
didgeman, your 106 is a low point, even for you. But it nicely encapsulates your problems, so thanks for that.
Your response to all of David Marjanovićs excellent points, clear writing, and hard work, was just a short snivel in which you said that most was totally wrong and it all was storytelling. You do realize that your statement there was a perfect summing up of how we see your case, don’t you? And that we say that one of the traits of creationists is projection – they accuse others of being just like they are – and, by your god, you delivered a perfect example of projection.
You even accused David Marjanović of referring to Wikipedia, for which there is no evidence, and snapped out a snotty about why Wikipedia is bad, as if that was something you had to enlighten us about. (By the way, PZ posted about not even using Wikipedia just a few weeks back.) And once again, your spit on Wikipedia is exactly what we have been trying to tell you about your dumbshit “Reasons to Believe” site – I even slagged your crev.info site.
Your entire stance, and that of all your favorite sites, is that the Bible must be right. You are driving yourself nuts trying to maintain that belief, and believing in conspiracies, and thinking that everyone else is idiotic, and God knows what else, just to keep that going. I have trouble believing that you are that messed up, and it saddens me to think that you are, but, by your God, you believe far worse than that about most of the people in the world, and you hold on to that belief with both hands and your teeth because it makes you happy, in some twisted way.
Didgemen, another resource you appear to ignore is Neil Shubin, who wrote a book entitled Your Inner Fish, and later, a PBS series. He confirms the Theory of Evolution in great detail, rightly ignoring your unevidenced imaginary deity. Just think what he might have thought if you would actually attempt to publish your drivel in peer reviewed scientific literature, where he publishes.
Just be prepared to have skeptics question your presuppositional imaginary deity…..
Put up or shut the fuck. Publish (in the peer reviewed scientific literature) or perish, in scientific terms…..
Just went through the predictions pdf from didgeman’s link. In every single one, EVERY. SINGLE. ONE., the “predictions” given to the “naturalism” box are a flat out lie and misrepresentation of what the actual scientific theories are actually predicting on those points.
Not surprising, and already well known to most of us here. Didgeman and Reasons can only assemble their cases by egregiously lying.
Wow, who would’ve thought that Old Earth creationists are just as obtuse and ignorant as their Young Earth cousins, just as motivated to defend an invisible omnipotent immortal and just as willing to lie and misrepresent science in order to do so?
Just about everyone here, as it happens.
Didge, you might not be as objectionable as dadsen and better able to construct a sentence, but on the whole you’re no more credible than Ken “Dinosaurs were on the Ark” Ham and your apologetics, argumentation and dishonest tactics are just as transparent. You’re nothing new and neither are your “reasons”.
And this, ladies and gentlemen, is a fine example of how a man who knows he has lost the argument, but is too dishonest to admit it, behaves. With his position utterly eviscerated, he desperately attempts to ignore the critique that destroyed him, brushing it aside without addressing it at all, as if his opinion as to what is or is not “story telling” had any weight whatsoever.
The most notable thing about didgeman’s disgusting Wikipedia quip is, of course, the simple fact that in the entirety of David M’s @79, in which he drops multiple references, ONLY ONE is to wikipedia, and it was for a pretty minor point.
So it is pretty obvious that didgeman did not, in fact, even read that post.
Despicable intellectual dishonesty all the way down. Typical.
Amphiox #120 Re Didgeman
Amen!
Well, you only have to believe something if it isn’t true. If something really happens or really works or really is so, you can accept it, understand it, see it, think it, demonstrate it, or deal with it, but you don’t have to just believe it. Only if it is a flat-out, fucking lie do you have to believe it.
Well, you can believe things that you aren’t fully sure of, but you could just say that you think it is likely, or that you want to think so. But when the definition of your belief system starts with the word “belief”, you have some justifying to do.
The same holds for the word “faith”, and maybe I should have led with that. When the official government description of your whole blessed organization is “faith-based”, you really don’t have a lot of validity. Faith isn’t that far from irrational, and your god sure made a lot of irrational people. How do you know that you aren’t one of them? Oh, yeah – faith.
Menyambal, #122
I believe that’s a lot of nonsense, which also has nothing to do with how the word is actually used. I also believe I ate toast for breakfast.
Of course, since I used your magic naughty-word, you may now deduce that what I just said isn’t true. (It may even be a flat-out fucking lie, but I’m not sure.) Yet, for some reason “you have to believe” what I just said, despite that.
I’m glad we have all of that sorted out.
#122, #123
This seems to be about “faith” more than “believing,” as in Tim Minchin’s excellent quote: “Science adjusts its views based on what’s observed. Faith is the denial of observation so that belief can be preserved.”
Meh, time-consuming perhaps, but not hard.
I do link to Wikipedia in cases when I’ve read the article and find that it’s a good explanation – which is, depending on the topic, pretty often the case. PZ’s opinion on Wikipedia isn’t differentiated enough.
That said, it’s an encyclopedia; it’s not an actual scientific publication, it (ideally) summarizes and compares what the actual scientific publications say. The file I linked to – I should have used this link, not the annoying MediaViewer – is a wonderful example of this: the text under the picture explains how the graph was made from data published in two paywalled papers which are cited and linked to at the end. For this kind of thing, Wikipedia is ideal.
, on the other hand, is not even an encyclopedia. It’s a presuppositionalist website: it starts from an assumption that it completely refuses to test.
It seems I shall taunt a second time.
I believe that 2+2=4. Indeed, I am fully sure of it.
*taunts a second time*
*and a third*
*and a fourth, because why not!*