Okay, time to dispute your points, since i dislike you claiming victory because no one really wants to put up with this again.
1. Evolution can and does lead to gradual extinctions, especially when the population is not large compared to the food source. Furthermore, the difference between homo sapiens and Neanderthals is fairly minor, and both species traded with each other.
2. A canyon carved out of volcanic ash and a recent mountainside collapse is rather different from the grand canyon.
Not having seen the grand canyon, I can't exactly say if such evidence is present, though i highly suspect that it'd have gotten compressed to nothing as part of the sediment to rock process. However, the canyon being cut deep into hard rock isn't exactly a likely result of a flood.
Source the stalactite claim, so i can get details
3. If you mean the brown areas i think you mean, fault lines are known to stay in roughly the same place
4. Source A. B is artificial selection, and not of a type that leads to evolution, because future generations of great Danes aren't exactly able to be less likely to be killed by death robots.
5. It is entirely likely arrow shapes have been formed from rocks somewhere in the universe
6. However, a stronger jaw is useful independently, and jaws are often stronger than is needed to support the muscles. While I'm at it, I'll head off the eye argument. A single photosensitive cell would allow an animal to determine whether an area is most likely full of plants.
7. Polonium halos are exclusively found in rock with uranium halos. A decay product of uranium is polonium. This is not likely just a coincidence.
8. Actually, the myths are mostly based off cultural fear of great floods, and possibly also from catastrophic local floods. They are likely as literally true as the stories of a 50 foot tall lumberjack with a giant blue ox from the American Midwest.
9. Cerebral cortex.
Re: determinism. It doesn't work that way. I'm sure you are willing to agree that, knowing what you did at the time you made a given decision, you would not have made it any other way. That is how it works.
Re: Darwin. He wasn't an atheist. That is precisely why he delayed publishing his results, because it seemed to clash with his religious belief.
Furthermore, atheists are not mad at God, since they do not believe he exists.
Next bit.
1. A flood would not produce the grand canyon.
2. The ice age could also get the icepack from oceanic freezing, which is where the modern icepack come from
Next bit
1. Errors. If you used the wrong method, that would actually be below the margin of error for some of them.
2. Source this, but i suspect errors again, sample contamination, or snails consuming sedimentary rock, which is a known source of errors
3. Collagen doesn't decay radioactively, so it was probably preserved by the fossilization. Rare, but so are raptor feather patterns.
4. But not metamorphic layers.
5. I find it hard to believe no one noticed that during Arctic studies, since we have a known rate at which it thickens annually.
6.
A. if true, there is no way to tell the age of the universe
B. I rather doubt that a black hole could cause that much time dilation without matter getting close enough to the event horizon to spagettify (Actual Term).
Next bit
Guess which side figured all of these out and announced them.
Finally, still no clear motive for darwin and his contemporaries to commit the fraud, only, at most, a motive to perpetuate it.
Wodium,
No, I didn't concede they were strong. Winning a hand with a 4 and a 5 is pathetic. Check your poker rules. I said that his pathetic arguement was the best offered, and he actually did well enough to get a point.
JTM,
You made me smile some, but not in a way you're likely to like.
1. Unsupported claim first. Yes, Neanderthals and Humans traded with each other. That's cause Neanderthals are humans with rickets.
2. Nah.
Its just a matter of scale. And the GC was probably pretty soft at the time. Volcanic tufa (a type of rock) is soft to the carving, but hardens when exposed to air.
The picture came from a Kent Hovind video on Creationism. It showed a man standing in a basement next to a pillar. There were numerous other pictures of mines and parking garages.
3. Look at the American West. There is an American Indian legend that gods came down and fought in Alabama, and thats why the place is so 'wrinkled'. There are a number of water bodies on this planet that look suspiciously circular.
I'd say this was wild speculation, but Chixlcub the dinokiller asteroid is considered mainstream science now.
4. Icons of Evolution by Jonathan Wells would probably have that data. Bones of Contention might too. I read it in a book a while ago.
I talked about a general loss of genes for smallness and yappiness. Brock tells me evolution is 'change over time'. This is change over time. Just what is the definition of evolution. Will we ever know?
Yes, thats sarcasm, but deserved it is/Yoda.
5. Hmmm, maybe. Now how about something that is ten to the thousand times more complex?
This is straightforward logic...the only thing we've seen thats made a message is a mind. You see a message....
6. A jawbone suited for a soft-tissue eater is going to have muscalature suited to such. Changing and upgrading the jawbone to one suited to a bone-cruncher is going to be a waste of energy (and thus be selected against) and the musclature to power that stronger jaw is not going to arrive before the jawbone is selected against.
7. I think he answers this in Creation's Tiny Mysteries. I'm not sure. I'm just going to reccommend you read the book. Laziness kicking in. Besides, its a really solid book.
8. So our ancestors were clueless and they couldn't tell the difference between grandpa's fish stories and his serious warnings. M'kay.
All 200 of them, dispersed over the planet, having roughly the same story. What are the odds of that?
9. I'd heard that was disproven and kinda out of date theory.
Character being destiny is not determinism.
Darwin did not support the God of the Bible. The point of his work was to remove the necessity of God from Creation. I don't know his heart, but I may have read a claim to be an agnostic.
Atheists not angry at God? Many of the ones I've talked to have been.
1. Yes it would. Woohooo! I'm so totally smart! Now its your turn to say 'no way, dude!'
2. Thats a largely unsupported statement. Just how did we get from oceanic icepaks to glacier ice carving up the Ten Thousand Lakes in Minnesota?
1. So you're left with impugning the basic skill of the scientists involved. Could be. Hey, can I impugn the skill of Darwin? He wasn't very good as an experimentalist after all.
2. Same Kent Hovind vid.
3. Collagen doesn't decay radioactively...not to the point. The question is, why is something that should not be there, that should be gone after thirty thousand years, there after Seventy Million Years?
4. Metamorphic. Break up stuff, heat it, squish it together again? That couldn't happen fast near a volcano or in the wake of a global flood (or since a lot of Creationists think they went together, lots of volcanoes blasting off at the same time as a global flood.)
5. People are never self-deluding and find what they want to find instead of what's actually there, right? We're all biased. I want to find proof of Creation. We should strive to be honest and objective and admit when the other guy makes a good point.
It may be hard to believe. But you have two facts that don't match. Scientists claim proof of old age. Its shown that old age is not necessary.
Now to make you happier, this is not proof of young age either. Its merely the refutation of a proof of old age, and a further proof that scientists are human.
6. A. You might have some things that were available. It seems likely that if this were done, it was not done to disguise data, but as a practical matter to make the universe livable. Thus, you'd look for clocks in areas that were not necessary for livability.
You might look and find star clusters that were gravitationally unstable, and that could not have lasted for gigayears.
B. I hope I said it, but if not, let me state. I am not a physicist. I am not qualified to pass judgment on this theory. I pass it along as a suggestion for one major problem, to let people know that there may be a solution.
I took a look at this book at least once, and ran away screaming. I have a similar reaction to MJ's time travel site.
Why did Darwin and his friends attack God?
1. Darwin was bothered by theodicy, or the problem of evil. Why does God allow evil in the universe?
2. I've heard that Darwin believed before Evo in a sorta Creationist theory called the Great Chain of Being which is not Biblical. It had its problems. I'm not really up to dealing with that. But you can see how finding a substandard theory on the one side might drive one to the other side. Its happening now with many scientists forsaking their allegiance to Darwin.
3. J.P. Hogan in Kicking the Sacred Cow talked about how Evo was beneficial to radicals?? and the aristocracy. It benefited the aristos because it was a theory of slow, gradual change, and since the aristos were on top and threatened, they liked that idea of slow change.
He goes on to point out the Geology Club which promoted Evo. And oddly enough had no geologists in its eighteen or so members. Politics. Its time to get a little pomo.
One person pointed out that only in England in that time would a theory based on the struggles of the individual have taken on such life.
It justified racism. Darwin was a racist. He believed blacks were halfway between the Great Apes and Whites. And he figured that in a few centuries therew would be a war of extermination....The Origin of the Species and the Preservation of Favored Races.
Sir Francis Dalton (or Galton), Darwin's close cousin, was a leading Eugenicist.
That bad nasty, ruthless, racist Big Businessman who speaks of the 'law of the jungle' and 'competition'--that bogeyman that lives in our popular dreams has a lot more owed to Darwin than is generally realized.
I'm going to get Marxist. Evo served the class interests of some very powerful people and their lesser friends.
Add in self-delusion and hatred of moral limits and of God the Creator....
We know Ernst Haeckel was a liar. He was working at the same time as Darwin. Why did he lie? I don't know. Why did so many Evos support the lie? I don't really know. I can speculate.
A lot of Evos think they're facing off against the forces of reaction, oppression, tyranny, anti-science and so forth. And if you fight the Devil, a lie might be okay. Unfortunately for them, they are the forces of reaction and oppression and tyranny and anti-science. Carl Sagan wrote about a demon-haunted world lit only by the candle of reason. A lot of Evos seem themselves that way. They tell themselves that if they give way on Evo, all science will die. In this they steal teh glory of real scientists and real engineers who did marvelous things. In this, they ignore history as many of the greats of science have been Christians and Creationists starting with Newton and going on forward.
Its also a class thing. In Iraq, under the dictator Saddam Hussein, twenty percent of the population did okay, crushing the other eighty under foot. In America, 11% are Darwinian Fundamentalists. This serves as part of the badge of the Establishment, and it serves as justification for the Establishment (they have to defend Darwin from all those lowbrow red state hicks, the fifty percent who bellieve in Young Earth Creation, and the rest who believe in other forms of Creation.) This gives the Establishment the power to crush the rest of America under foot.
And some of that power is used to keep Creationist scientists from getting tenure or getting peer reviewed and to try to brainwash little kids to Leewontin's point of view so that even if they see the evidence, they won't see it. But facts are stubborn things. At one time, academics told us over and over that men and women were just alike. And that house of cards collapsed. This one will too.
Its a preference cascade waiting to happen. Perhaps if Palin gets elected President in 2012 that might be enough to trigger the avalanche of people feeling free to express themselves in public without fear, of going into a classroom and not being frightened of losing tenure for being honest. The internet is a great thing. Its taken power away from the gatekeepers, and given it to (ordinarily you say common man at this time, but its not true) and given it to truthseekers and real experts (instead of talking hairdos.) and just plain folk. Its likely that we will see the utter collapse of Evo. It happened with the Berlin Wall, it can happen here.
eh-hem.
I believe it is more appropriate for this debate to happen in it's own thread, so that interested parties can read it there, and those looking for the definitions of various words can look here. So I made a thread for you to debate there, if you would.
Of course, you don't have to, but I believe it will be better for the interested parties.
Besides, nothing is going to get resolved if every post tries to discuss twenty-five issues at a time. If anyone actually wants to resolve differences in belief through discussion, we should stick with a single concept, issue or fact until agreement has been reached or the precise point of irreconcilable difference has been identified.
How about just close the damn thing? These kinds of debates never go anywhere, and just prompt Scott and Eric (Two good friends, otherwise) to go at each other's throats.
Brock wants definitions so....
1. Superstition: As MJ said, a belief with an irrational basis. Typically, this is used in this fashion..."My honest beliefs, and your irrational superstitions."
Its also used to cover small rituals that may well be the pagan remants of Pre-Christian Europe. These are scattered bits and pieces of belief that don't add up to a system.
I hardly use this term as most people have good reasons for what they believe. I don't go so far as to say they're accurate beliefs, but most people aren't totally irrational if you get down to understand what they believe and why they believe it. Superstition is a word tossed out by those who see the surface more than the depths, I suspect.
Edit: Jacques Barzun in Dawn to Decadence (which covered the last five hundred years of history) pointed out the similar usage of religion in American Transcendentalism. He called it a religion. The ATers did not. Again its more of 'My learned philosophy/pursuit of truth/way of wisdom/system of thought vs. your ignorant religion.'
Again its more of 'My learned philosophy/pursuit of truth/way of wisdom/system of thought vs. your ignorant religion.'
I made a point of this in a different thread. Native, primitive, "savage" peoples performed hours of dancing, praying, and complex rituals for a good harvest. As long as no one got hurt, what's the harm?
Modern, "civilized" people spend a few moments head bowed and praying for a good harvest.
Now I ask you, who is showing more faith and devotion to their god? I'd say the "savages" were, but that's just me.
That depends, John. Did the ancients believe they had to cajole their god into answering, and the modern believe that their god would do it if they asked? In that case, it's the modern who has the faith.
--M. J. Young
Good point MJ. I hadn't thought of that. I still like the "Savage" way better though......
(Doing Therapy)