Knuckle-Dragging Creationist Threatens College With Unorthodox Thoughts & Shield Of Faith, But Mostly Thoughts

Posted on | May 5, 2012 | 47 Comments

by Smitty

Insty relates the outrageously outraged outrage of the faculty at the Methodist college Emory University, in the Druid Hills section of metropolitan Atlanta. Stacy McCain has not denied having too much fun figuring out what sort of rituals those Druid Hills Methodists were getting up to in their groovy grove. Apparently those Methodists are hard core Evolutionists, and cannot countenance the withering intellectual assault of an unhinged Demogorgon who would utter such over-the-top phrases as:

“You have a theory in which you place your faith, and I have a theory in which I place my faith,” Carson said in a speech posted on YouTube. “I say you can believe what you want but I simply don’t have enough faith to believe what you believe. I’m a person of faith so I have to believe in God. You know that always gets them.”

This has sparked the rebuttal from one

Arri Eisen, Ph.D., Emory University Department of Biology. “What worried me the most was the fact that he said if you do accept evolution that you’re somehow ethically lacking.”

Carson doesn’t seem to make a statement of that sort in the proffered video clip:

From Wikipedia:

In 1987, Carson made medical history by being the first surgeon to successfully separate siamese twins (the Binder twins) conjoined at the back of the head (craniopagus twins). The 70-member surgical team, led by Carson, worked for 22 hours. At the end, the twins were successfully separated and can now survive independently.

CBS has done a lousy job connecting the letter with any statements made by Carson. Given the propaganda campaign against George Zimmerman, one views CBS Baltimore as guilty of a hatchet job here. Then again, maybe Eisen and the Biology crowd are worried that the lack of repeatable experiments to prove any evolutionary theories has them looking like global warming hucksters.

I have personally studied Biochemistry at George Washington University. It ain’t beanbag. When there is a repeatable experiment that goes from the periodic table of elements to self-replicating life, the evolution shall have evolved a leg to stand on. Until then, how about more work and fewer potshots at skeptics, eh?

Category: Education, Georgia

Comments

47 Responses to “Knuckle-Dragging Creationist Threatens College With Unorthodox Thoughts & Shield Of Faith, But Mostly Thoughts”

PaulLemmen
May 5th, 2012 @ 10:05 pm

Seems like an effort to spark an attention-diverting brouhaha where none exists, to draw attention away from real issues like Barry’s sub-par “campaign kick-off” attendance, HHS mandate controversy and the numerous examples of his campaign’s “dick stepping” moments. Virtual bread and circuses for the pearl-clutching set.
richard mcenroe
May 5th, 2012 @ 10:10 pm

The “conflict” between “evolutionists” and “Creationists” is a sham foisted by demagogues on both sides.

There is not reason a Creationist need believe Evolution is anything other than one of the Almighty’s tools of creation and the development of His ongoing plan.

There is no reason an Evolutionist is not free to believe the same thing because there is no conflict between that notion and his or her current beliefs.
McGehee
May 5th, 2012 @ 10:30 pm

Oh, but if an evolutionist ever says he finds no conflict between evolution and the Bible, he’ll be dubbed a believer in Intelligent Design and thus a Creationist — and all Creationists believe (they do, jut as the anti-Creationism Police) the entire universe was turned from nothing into the fully formed Whole we see now, in just 144 hours.
Stogie Chomper
May 5th, 2012 @ 10:52 pm

Evolution, like man-made global warming, is largely believed on faith.
higgins1990
May 5th, 2012 @ 11:30 pm

I remember when natural scientists would actually debate Creationists back in the 60s, but after losing every time, they refused to debate further. They shifted gears and declared the science as settled, and began personally attacking creationists as flat-earth deniers. Sound familiar?
ThePaganTemple
May 6th, 2012 @ 12:34 am

Wait, so if the scientists lost every debate, the Creationists must have proven their case. So what would constitute this “proof”?
John Higgins1990
May 6th, 2012 @ 4:41 am

Prior to these debates, “gradualism” was the theory held by natural scientists, slow change over long periods of time. This is what I was taught in school. But the geological evidence doesn’t support this. The formation of the Grand Canyon, the formation of coal/oil/natural gas (do you think there is enough organic matter being trampled underfoot to create the oil reserves that we see today?), petrified forests, even the numerous inversions in the stratigraphic record point to a catastrophic flood. Natural scientists changed their model and came up with “punctuated equilibrium” (see Steven Jay Gould), long periods of no change punctuated with short periods of abrupt change. But that still doesn’t explain why we don’t see evolution occurring today, or why there isn’t evidence in the fossil record. It takes more faith to believe in upward evolution of a single cell into the plethora of life we see today than to believe in a Creator.
.
Radiometric dating is another indicator. Have you ever seen the mathematical derivation of this?
It’s tough to find. The
derivation yields two equations with three unknowns. Natural scientists
assume no daughter element at initial time. Bad assumption.
Further, no one can account for contamination over time, or how energy
(neutrinos, cosmic rays) affects the rate of decay. Huge variations are seen by this
method, for example (one of many) volcanic rocks
produced from lava flows which occurred in Hawaii in 1800 were dated at
160 million to 2.9 billion years old. And yet radiometric dating is gospel to natural scientist. C14 is another method that, when examined closely, supports a young earth theory better than an old earth theory. Yet that too is often cited as “proof” of evolution.
.
Other questions still can’t be answered by natural scientists, like the decay of the earth’s magnetic field. If we were to go back in time, the magnetic field would be seen as increasing in strength. Yet a magnetic field induces an electric current, and within 50,000 years the induced current within the earth would be strong enough to fry everything on the planet’s surface. How does one model this over 5 billion years?
.
Like Smitty said, the Biology crowd has no repeatable experiments to
prove any evolutionary theories. None. Zero. Yet evolution is somehow a fact. How did that happen?
Tennwriter
May 6th, 2012 @ 9:30 am

Creation’s Tiny Mysteries explains that polonium radiation of particular isotope occurs in a three minute time span. This creates a ‘halo’ in the rock.

There is no way for the polonium to drain into the rock (no cracks). And there is not nearly enough time for the uniformatarian rock formation to occur.

Answer: the primordial granites were formed and cooled to rock in the space of three minutes.
========================
Consider going to Las Vegas. I hope that if you do so, you don’t have any great plans of ‘beating the house with your system’. Over time, you will lose your money even if you are a very statistically minded gambler because the odds are against you.

Now imagine you’re going to the DNA Casino. You have been given at Creation a perfect, no errors, genome. You start gambling, and instead of the odds being oh 51-49 at Harrah’s, you’ve got 100-1 odds for a favorable mutation.

Actually that’s generous as no one has seen a mutation that increases the information of the genome (some are favorable in that a sluggish bacterium does better in a sea of poison antibiotic than its more energetic brethren).

So you gamble, and gamble, and lose and lose. Unfavorable mutations keep stacking up. First you lose long life as the repair mechanisms for the repair mechanisms go. Later, its farsightedness, and later its diabetes.

Terrified at your losses, you take a walk to clear your head,and you see a guy who lost nearly everything…..he’s now a slithering pocket of mucus, and if he lost too much more he’d be below the rather high threshold limits foruni- cells, and just go extinct…
t-dahlgren
May 6th, 2012 @ 10:06 am

” Yet a magnetic field induces an electric current…”

A changing magnetic field induces a current. If the Earth’s poles were routinely swapping north for south you’d have a point. Otherwise you don’t.

And yes there is geologic data that indicates the poles do shift, just not that often (last changes estimated to be about 750,000 years ago.)

I have no problem with the idea that creation, even via mechanisms such as promoted by various sciences, are entirely God driven. But you do yourself more harm than good when you use false or faulty arguments to refute the efforts of others.

It is best that you truly understand what you are attempting to say, especially when it is copypasta.
John Higgins1990
May 6th, 2012 @ 11:03 am

Copypasta? No, my friend, that was from memory of when I studied this 20 years ago. Here is some copypasta, though, about the dynamo model for the generation of the electric field:

“The earth’s rotation and convection is supposed to circulate
the molten nickel/iron of the outer core. Positive and negative charges in this
liquid metal are supposed to circulate unevenly, producing an electric current,
thus generating the magnetic field.”

The magnetic fields is due to the electric current; it doesn’t induce the current, but vice-versa. My bad.
Pathfinder's wife
May 6th, 2012 @ 12:43 pm

Yes, and what often gets lost in the shouting match is that there are several different theories of just how evolution happens; we don’t know which one is closer to the truth (or at least we don’t have enough data to positively say which one) — it may be a case of multiple strategies occuring.

And in none of that is there any evidence of the presence of a divine originating essense, or lack thereof.

I find it ridiculous and annoying that either camp would like to pigeonhole people into Group A or Group B and then brand them. I really don’t see how either belief need infringe upon the other.
ThePaganTemple
May 6th, 2012 @ 12:56 pm

Through all this I saw no evidence of proof of Intelligent Design, though bearing in mind lack of evidence is not proof of the opposite. But that’s true of both sides.

The best thing to do in my opinion is to admit, frankly and forthrightly, that there is no way of knowing in any way that could constitute proof, and that therefore both sides are still theory.

Faith, of course, is not proof, nor does it need to be, unless you insist on it.

You also make the mistake of assuming the fossil record should be abundant. There have been fossil records that show some evolution within animal species, such as the giant sloth and even crocodiles, but they are very scant. But this is to be expected. After all, the world had an abundant human population two and even three thousand years ago, yet how many remains of those folks have been found? The answer of course is an extremely limited, very few of them. How then can we expect there to be a wide range of fossil remains of wild animals from tens and hundreds of thousands of years ago?

As an evident believer in a six day creation theory, you also make the mistake of assuming the evolutionary record should be nearly immediate and drastic. It doesn’t work that way. The elephant is not a radical departure in evolution from the Wooly Mammoth or the Mastodon, yet clearly evolved from both, over a period of centuries, if not millenia. Such changes are minute and gradual, otherwise as I think Tennwriter inferred, they would likely be negative and harmful.

Whatever the truth is, we might never know in a provable way. I’d bet money we’ll never know in our lifetimes, and maybe never in the future. But that’s only as important as you want it to be. It is whatever it is, whether we believe it or not, or even whether we know it or not.
Ford Prefect
May 6th, 2012 @ 1:45 pm

Hate to burst the “can’t we all just get along” bubble here but Christianity and the ToE (Theory of Evolution aka Darwinian Evolution) are incompatible with each other.

Many people, even Christians, tend to favor theistic evolution because it is the easy, moderate, centrist position. However, it is intellectually untenable because Scripture is vehemently against naturalism. NO WHERE in Scripture is there even the slightest hint that God used evolution as a method of creation. In fact, writers throughout the Bible anticipate the theistic evolution meme by going out of their way to use language that eschews materialistic naturalism.

Probably the most central theological tenant of Christianity can be summed up in a simple but profound statement in 1 Corinthians where Paul writes: For since death came through a man, the resurrection of the dead comes also through a man. For as in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive. (1 Cor 15: 21-22).

Paul is covering two critical points here:

1: Death came into the world after Adam sinned.
2: The “death” to which he is referring is both spiritual and physical.

If Adam only died spiritually when he sinned then Christ would only have had to die spiritually (that is, be cut off from God the Father as we know he was when he was crucified). God the Father could have cut off communication with Jesus without seeing Him crucified but Jesus had to also physically die as a way to save us from permanent physical death.

Another way of putting this is that if death occurred before Adam sinned, then Christ died fruitlessly because death was never a punishment for sin but was simply the method that God was using to create His world.

So when Christians agree with the secularists about God using evolution as a method for creation, then they are tacitly admitting that Christ died for nothing.

To paraphrase famous atheist Douglas Adams

“‘Oh dear,’ says God, ‘I hadn’t thought of that,’ and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.”

Christians need to bear in mind that we have two things going for us in this debate:

1. Scripture is valuable and should not be set aside just because you think it is out-dated or doesn’t speak to current scientific conventional thinking. The Bible has been affirmed time and again as correct on matters of science. It is not going to change the mind of a secularist of course but it should be relied upon as a foundation for any believer. If Paul says that there was no death before Adam, then don’t just abandon this foundational truth because some anti-Christian materialist says you should.

2. Everyday the ToE is further disproven. The work of people like Stephen Meyer in the realm of ID should be an encouragement to any Bible believer that we have the high ground.

People should also keep in mind that the ToE doesn’t speak to abiogenesis (the creation of life itself). It only attempts to explain the complexity of life. Evolutionists have no answer for where life itself came from. Furthermore, they have no answer for how the INFORMATION found in a “simple” cell originated. There is a factory floor found in a single cell more complex than that of any Toyota or Ford factory on the planet and yet the materialist’s view is that this could “evolve” in the primordial soup by chance (or by necessity as is the current thinking).

I prefer to follow Paul’s teaching that Adam’s sin happened in a world that up until then, had not seen death. Liberals and secularists don’t buy Paul’s position, but I do.
Ford Prefect
May 6th, 2012 @ 2:00 pm

We’re never going to know as long as the predisposition of those doing the research are adamantly anti-ID.

Like the pseudo-scientific field of AGW, evolution research is a field for true believers only.

There was a time that the science community was made up of Creationists. This was the golden age of discovery because the researchers were predisposed to learn “how God did it”. They assumed design, they assumed order, they assumed there was a plan. So when they did their work, they were actually uncovering truths that they believed had to be there.

No longer is this the motivation for researchers, especially those in biology. If anything, they are predisposed to prove that Creationists and ID proponents ARE “knuckledraggers”.

So if they come across evidence (which they do all the time, especially in DNA research) that supports ID, it is dismissed – to the detriment of science.

Personally, I don’t really care if researchers want to carry on in highly ideological ways as long as it is not supported with my tax dollars. They can be intellectual hypocrites on their own dime. The problem is, that most research is being done at publicly funded liberal universities. The same people who gave us AGW gave us evolutionism.

I judge them by the company they keep.
ThePaganTemple
May 6th, 2012 @ 3:45 pm

That’s a good point. I, personally, think that all fields of scientific inquiry and testing should be conducted with an open mind, and a clear one, free from any preconceived notions one way or another.

But unfortunately, that’s not the way the world works. People tend to dig in their heels in search of proving their own pet assumptions, rather than objectively setting out to find the facts, whatever they might be. As a result science and learning suffers.
Tennwriter
May 6th, 2012 @ 4:45 pm

PT, you cannot prove a scientific theory, but you can offer evidence in support of it.It is my opinion that Creationism has vastly more proof in its favor than ToE.

I’ve pointed out to you that the primordial stone of Earth was created in three minutes or less. This flies right in the face of evolutionary planetary creation theories. It says that the Earth must have been Created, although admittedly it doesn’t say how or Who did it. It could be Odin, or Zeus, or Jehovah, among others. And once you assume a Creator, I don’t think its very far to get to ID (although there are tons of evidence for ID).

The importance of this is Foundational. Its far easier to win Conservative battles when you’re standing on a Conservative foundation. It tilts the whole battlefield.
LeeBowman
May 6th, 2012 @ 4:47 pm

Sorry, but the brouhaha is real, and I feel that it’s you who digress.

Anyway, Carson’s disagreement with evolution is thinly stated here, and in a video where he debated Dawkins and Dennet back in 2006, he elaborates slightly more.

But, does he disagree with it in toto? Or simply with its purely natural causative position?

In that video, Francis Collins also chimes in, and I feel that the ‘skeptics’ of the Darwinist premis make the more viable points regarding. Feel free to comment on the video as well.
Tennwriter
May 6th, 2012 @ 4:48 pm

And minute and gradual just means you’re playing on the nickel slots and hoping to win the 1 in a googleplex mega-jackpot. You’re still going to go bankrupt.
LeeBowman
May 6th, 2012 @ 5:06 pm

A TE, or ‘theistic evolutionist’ perhaps, but definitely NOT an IDst.
LeeBowman
May 6th, 2012 @ 5:10 pm

So just what is ‘Intelligent Design’ as a premise?

In its current state, ID is an adjunctive hypothesis to c0mpete with, or work in concert with both RM and NS as causative factors in phylogenetic progressions [speciation].
LeeBowman
May 6th, 2012 @ 5:35 pm

” … there are several different theories of just how evolution happens”

Essentially, natural or directed. I feel that both are valid operatives, and am thusly open to both.

” … it may be a case of multiple strategies occurring.”

Uh, strategies? Yes, if you are referring to the ‘political’ motifs involved.

“And in none of that is there any evidence of the presence of a divine originating essense, or lack thereof.”
LeeBowman
May 6th, 2012 @ 5:56 pm

” I, personally, think that all fields of scientific inquiry and testing
should be conducted with an open mind, and a clear one, free from any
preconceived notions one way or another.”

Tell that to the AAAS, but don’t expect a response.

http://www.aaas.org/news/releases/2002/1106id2.shtml

“Therefore Be Further It Resolved, that AAAS urges citizens across
the nation to oppose the establishment of policies that would permit
the teaching of “intelligent design theory” as a part of the science
curricula of the public schools;”>/blockquote>
ThePaganTemple
May 6th, 2012 @ 6:41 pm

Actually, the only religion outside the monotheistic ones that teaches creation is, maybe, some Hindu sects. A look at the Greek and Norse myths, among others, reads a great deal like evolutionary theory, albeit dressed in symbolic form. The gods, although of immense power, are beings with a definitive beginning, usually a birth, however unusual in circumstance.

I’ll let the fossil records of Mammoths and Mastodons speak for itself. Evolution doesn’t mean what you seem to think it means. It just means the ability of a species to adapt to a changing environment. It doesn’t mean that a troop of chimpanzees somewhere in darkest Africa might some day turn into human beings.

Nor does it mean our ancestors were ever chimpanzees, or gorillas, etc., way back in the past. We just had a common ancestor, and somehow different groups of that ancestor’s descendants evolved differently.

And somewhere far back in the distant past, probably millions of years ago, all life evolved from some very simple form of life, call it a one-celled organism or amoeba, whatever you like.

Life feeds on life, and different sets evolved in such a way as to feed sufficiently, some on grass, some on fruits, and some on the life forms that fed on grass and fruits. That’s the laws of nature, and of the jungle. Nobody created or made it that way any more than anybody has to make you stop and get a hamburger when you’re out somewhere and you get hungry. You just do it instinctively. Or maybe just because you want to. Or you might decide to wait until you get home, whatever.

Rabbits evolved to eat grass due to its abundance, and after so long, as the grass started getting scarce and the rabbit population expanded, some rabbits evolved into other kinds of animals that fed on the rabbits. That’s a simplistic way of looking at it, but its a pretty concise way of defining the process, as I see it.
Quartermaster
May 6th, 2012 @ 6:55 pm

Some time last year I pointed out that there are two types of evolution. One is the Darwinian fantasy that over credentialed morons like Dawkins, Gould, Myers and Krauss push, what Duane Gish used to ridicule as “the fish to Gish Theory.” There is utterly no evidence of this unless you make certain presuppositions that themselves are not supportable by anything we know. This form is also known as Macro-Evolution and it is philosophy, not science.

The other form, Micro-Evolution, is a settled fact. We have used this fact in selective breeding to accentuate certain characteristics in the descendants of the original pair. It yields breeds of dog, cat and cattle.

Over credentialed morons attempt to conflate Micro with Macro hoping the factual will give the fantasy a bit of cache. All it does it make them look more stupid.

I’m with Smitty. When they reach a point where they can really show periodic table to WYB, then they can call me. Until that time, they need to get back in their nursery and play with their tinker toys. at least there they won’t bother the rest of of actually doing something useful.
Ford Prefect
May 6th, 2012 @ 8:07 pm

The argument over evolutionary theory is a side show anyway since it assumes life already exists before it “evolved”. Most of us have participated in conversations or sat in classrooms where it was clear that the person professing authority on the subject of evolution was either purposefully or ignorantly conflating the ToE with abiogenesis.

I don’t really care about these people’s opinion on Darwinian evolution since there is an infinitesimally small likelihood that life could have arisen by chance from the prebiotic earth in the first place.

Abiogenesis, the notion that life arose spontaneously, has been shown to be a probabilistic impossibility and getting more impossible as origins research moves more into the realm of information theory. In 1913 Arthur Holmes did the early radiometric earth dating research and he pegged the earth’s age at 1.9 billion years. Today it’s estimated at 4.1 Billion.

What’s the reason for the increasing estimates of the age of the earth over the last 100 years? Is it that radiometric dating is getting more accurate? Hardly, it’s actually just as dubious in its accuracy as it ever has been.

No, the reason, IMO, is that mathematicians have been running the math and the math doesn’t favor an earth as “young” as a few billion years in order for life to have evolved spontaneously. In fact, mathematician Dr. Dermott J. Mullan ran the numbers and estimated the likelihood of life forming on its own by chance is one in 10^79.

In other words, pretty much impossible.

Not that long ago biologists thought cells were like globs of gelatin, but as we have learned that cells are incredibly complex, the math has not been favorable to chemical evolutionists. The problem is that DNA research is outpacing their 19th century notions of “simple” life.

Living systems, even the simplest ones, are based upon symbolic language structures of extreme complexity. There is no hint in the laws of chemistry and physics that matter on its own can ever generate symbolic language regardless of the time allowed. Researchers are realizing this and turning to other more “plausible” solutions.

Gould’s “punctuated equilibrium” was an early, although mostly unserious alternative, but since then “panspermia” (the seeding of life from another planet via comets, meteors, or even aliens) and “multiverses” have been proffered.

So okay, these “scientific” notions are deemed persuasive but my belief that a being of power created this planet and the life on it is seen as nutty? I’m supposed to believe in alien seeding of life and not in God.

As the article quoted, “I don’t have that level of faith”.
yestradamous
May 6th, 2012 @ 9:10 pm

No that isn’t the answer. Gentry’s hypothesis doesn’t hold water for many reasons.
McGehee
May 6th, 2012 @ 9:47 pm

I’m talking about what they would call him. Obviously it has no resemblance to what he would actually believe. I thought I made that clear.
Tennwriter
May 6th, 2012 @ 9:59 pm

I’ve explained why it does. I will also point out that in court a noted evolutionist said it was a ‘tiny little mystery’ which would eventually be resolved (the evo had faith), but this is admitting its currently a solid point.
Tennwriter
May 6th, 2012 @ 10:10 pm

I’m pretty much familiar with all that PT.

I’m not sure about the Greeks. I know Odin used the body of Ymir to make the Earth. But, I will agree that most or almost all deities sound more like angels or other lesser powers than Ultimate.

But I do not want to say Jehovah is proven by the proof that there is a Creator.

As to the rest, check out Quartermaster’s reply below.

Adaptation, sure. Macro-evolution, no.

Ask yourself this: Can you build a tower to the moon?
Pathfinder's wife
May 6th, 2012 @ 10:16 pm

Sorry, hadn’t had my second cup of coffee, and “strategy” was the first word that popped into my head.

Strategy, as a descriptive term, works in the sense of ID and there being some intelligence that created (and thus guides) evolution. I suppose it also works on the level of ascribing some sort of response to events that works as an engine for evolution (whether or not as the result of some intelligence or just a series of events).

So, it was the word that popped into my head to (in one word) describe something, while at the same time trying to cover the viewpoints of the opposing camps (without cheesing them off too much…today was a mellow day for me).
LeeBowman
May 6th, 2012 @ 10:19 pm

Depends on the ‘they’ in question. And since ID and Creationism has been so widely conflated as one-in-the-same, a Darwinist will use either (or both) terms interchangeably.

But an ID’st does not necessarily hold to Biblical doctrine, just inferential design inferences.

I hold to ID (as a hypothesis), but am not a Creationist in the 6000 year sense.
LeeBowman
May 6th, 2012 @ 10:32 pm

Actually, “strategy” isn’t that far off base, since evolution could be regarded as such, ergo a ‘way’ to produce biologic forms.

“I suppose it also works on the level of ascribing some sort of response
to events that works as an engine for evolution (whether or not as the
result of some intelligence or just a series of events).”

I view the ‘engine’ for evolution as in several parts.

– – First, is embryogenesis, or the self-reproductive function.

– – Then, a built-in variability of adaptability factors (fur/ hair, pigmentation, bone structure, etc)

– – But, it is my current conclusion that radical change (novelty], and non-evolvable complexities [NEC] are ‘directed’ genomic changes.

NEC would entail modifications where the intermediate stages would offer no selective advantage, and would in-fact be disruptive to extant functions. It would also require a degree of ‘look-ahead’ strategy, which gradualism by random mutations does not entail.
McGehee
May 6th, 2012 @ 10:42 pm

Exactly. I remember when ID first appeared in I-can’t-remember-which-magazine I read about it in. It was obvious to me that it was offered as a way that — as Richard McEnroe points out above — people on either side of the literal Genesis-vs.-militant Darwinist divide could find common ground.

As I recall it was the Darwin side that attacked it as Creationism-in-disguise, and that uproar is what drew the literal-Genesis Creationists to use ID as a cudgel against the Darwin side. A Grade-A Charlie Foxtrot.
LeeBowman
May 6th, 2012 @ 10:57 pm

Exactly [seconded].

And I hold Barbara Forrest’s deceitful skewing of the facts regarding what ID is based upon. Google “Creationism’s Trojan Horse”.

Religious motives (and motifs) have had a play in both promoting and undermining ID as a hypothesis.

The Kitzmiller v. Dover trial is a prime example, where a religiously motivated school board co-opted the term for their purposes.

As a result, Judge Jones equated their actions with ID as an all inclusive correlation, ergo ‘one in the same.’

ID is an investigative hypothesis, and with evidence to support it.
yestradamous
May 6th, 2012 @ 11:49 pm

No, you haven’t explained anything. Your first mistake is. To believe the perpetual meme that has been around since 1981 that Gentrys rocks were primordial. They were not. They were quite a bit younger and in fact from igneous intrusion into older granites and sedimentary formations and even older volcanic action. When asked about these misconceptions on Gentrys part about the geology of his samples he had no answer except that a supernatural event must be responsible.
The trial you referred to w in 1981. Wakefield did an investigation in 1988 that made Swiss- cheese of Gentrys starting premises. He didn’t understand the geology of what he was claiming. Since then, further research points to radon being responsible for the halos anyway.
yestradamous
May 6th, 2012 @ 11:59 pm

Also, that isn’t Gentrys only mistake. He assumes that the decay rates of a bunch of elements must have been quite a bit faster at the beginning than they are now, with each element at a different multiple. Not even the same multiple for all of them! For that to even be partly true, the earth would still be a molten mass today, unless you want to say another supernatural event occurred in which the earth cooled at a faster rate than we know it does.

And of you are going to rely on 500 non-natural events to try to fit the conclusion to the data, you might as well just give up and say God did it and stop even trying to find out how.
Higgins1990
May 7th, 2012 @ 12:16 am

There is no “proof” either way. I thought that was obvious, and inferred by your use of quotation marks.

The evolutionists used the fossil record as “proof” to promote evolution. When creationists began to ask questions, they get your answer “Hey, whoa, you can’t use the fossil record!”
John Higgins1990
May 7th, 2012 @ 12:32 am

“And somewhere far back in the distant past, probably millions of years ago, all life evolved from some very simple form of life”

That’s your belief, PT, your faith-system right there.
John Higgins1990
May 7th, 2012 @ 12:40 am

And that was my point earlier. The evolutionists, when challenged, continue to introduce new hypothesis, but all from an atheistic world-view. And they hold to these by faith. I’m OK with that, it is just they don’t call it faith while mocking mine.
Pathfinder's wife
May 7th, 2012 @ 12:45 am

Interesting idea; although
there could be an argument that there is no look ahead strategy based on some rapid mutations winding up as “dead ends” that didn’t work.

Of course, I’ve always considered the counter to that might be that even these “dead ends” are not necessarily the failures that we might consider them to be — if you take the idea of a look ahead strategy in which the “dead end” was more beneficial to the system as a whole than allowing it to progress.
ThePaganTemple
May 7th, 2012 @ 1:24 am

I’m not sure what building a tower to the moon has to do with anything, TW. Are you referring to the space program?

But you are right about Odin creating earth out of Ymir’s skull, along with waters of the earth from his blood, plants and grass from his hair, etc. He also created the first man and woman, if I remember right, from a couple of trees, I think the Ash and the Elder.

But he wasn’t conceived as what a Christian might call the “cause of all causes”. In fact, he himself was born, and was the grandson of the first of the Aesir gods.

Extant Norse myths even state that there is an unknowable supreme being, superior to Odin or any other of their known gods. Here, however, you have to be careful, because Snorri Sturleson wrote this well into the Christian era, and it might have been a method of preserving the fading memories of the old myths in a way that reconciled them to the widespread and dominant Christian theology at the time he wrote it.

A lot of what we know about the old pagan cults is shadowy at best. For example, some of the old rivalries, like between Ares and Athene, might have been based actually on real cult rivalries, each vying for ascendancy over the other. This is even more true of the Norse religious cults, which did practice human sacrifice, but much of what we “know” about them is conjecture and speculation.

Also, angels, while godlike beings, are merely messengers, servants if you will. The Gods are independent minded in nature, with wills of their own. Hermes is closest to the aspect of angels, but even he has a dominant aspect.
ThePaganTemple
May 7th, 2012 @ 1:26 am

You say that like its a bad thing. It’s just a possible answer, one that makes sense to me. I don’t discount out of hand other possibilities. For what its worth, I think this evolution was gradual, I don’t think all life forms evolved all at the same time. There are innumerable species that didn’t or couldn’t adapt, and died out, and by this I’m not just talking about dinosaurs and dodo birds.
ThePaganTemple
May 7th, 2012 @ 1:28 am

Living systems, even the simplest ones, are based upon symbolic language structures of extreme complexity.

Horse, meet cart, and kindly step to the front.
ThePaganTemple
May 7th, 2012 @ 1:32 am

I don’t do that, nor do I necessarily approach this from a purely atheistic standpoint. I don’t discount that out of hand either, but I agree there is the possibility of a guiding hand, if you will, taking the reins and managing the process at some point. Where I diverge from most is that I adhere to the position that, if there is a deity, or deities, then he, she, or they probably evolved over time like everything else. Granted, they might be “eternal” in the sense that the energy that they are comprised of has always been present, only not necessarily in its current form, but as more of an unconscious force.
John Higgins1990
May 7th, 2012 @ 2:01 am

My apologies…I didn’t intend for it to sound like a bad thing. In my opinion, this is such an emotionally charged subject because we are talking about matters of faith (on either side of the argument). Like you posted earlier, it would be good if all parties admitted this at the outset.
Where Art Thou Tiggerman? « An Ex-Con's View
May 7th, 2012 @ 9:39 am

[…] about Tiggy all weekend, about the memorable things he did and the comments on an article over on The Other McCain regarding evolution, Intelligent Design and […]
PaulLemmen
May 7th, 2012 @ 10:14 am

Linked to an article on my blog http://wp.me/p27DAO-kr