Posted by Ed Brayton on July 4, 2006 Email? Yeah, I get email. Some of it is even as funny as this one from someone named Ken Mayfield:
Creationist nonsense? You find it easier to believe that the perfect order around you is a culmination of chance, amoeba, and some ethereal intelligence called evolution.
Unbelievable
I think we may have found our Robert O’Brien Trophy winner for the month.
Ed, I respect your views but frankly I’ve been waiting for months for someone to put the rhetorical smackdown on your incessant claims that evolution is the result of “chance, amoeba, and . . . ethereal intelligence.” Finally Ken Mayfield has made the airtight argument that has been on the minds of all your readers, waiting for a superior intellect like his to synthesize into the irrefutable monolith of convincitization you quoted. I trust you will no longer make your specious amoeba-based arguments, now that you have been shown the light.
The best post I’ve seen this month (on another forum) carefully explained how if reptiles lived for 1000 years and grew to be 180 feet long, they would be mistaken for dinosaurs.
He also told us that researchers involved in facial reconstruction (from old or fossil skulls) have been able to determine what human beings would have looked like when they lived to be 900 years old. To their shock (!) they found that around the 400 year mark, the image looked like that of Cro Magnum (sic) man and around the 800 year mark, the image looked remarkably like Neanderthal man.
I asked for a reference to that remarkable research. As you can guess, none is yet forthcoming, just a couple of Bible verses.
Creationist nonsense? You find it easier to believe that the perfect order around you is a culmination of chance, amoeba, and some ethereal intelligence called evolution. Unbelievable
Oooo, sorry Ken, close but no cigar. We actually believe the perfect order around us is a culmination of luck, mycoplasma, and an empyreal intelligence called evolution. Really, you were almost there.
Perfect order? What perfect order?
I’d agree that he probably should get the Robert O’Brien award, but it might be a bit early in the month to select winner just yet.
Yes, I agree with Raj – You should not underestimate the stupidity of a creationist. It is WAY too early to make the monthly SCA (Stupid Creationist Award).
Dawkins would respond by asking how it can possibly make sense for you to think it is impossible for life to come about without supernatural forces, but that it is entirely possible for there to be an omniscient, omnipotent, supernatural being that created life/made it possible.
It’s simply an easy way out of trying to answer the question, which is understandable, because science is damn hard.
He also told us that researchers involved in facial reconstruction (from old or fossil skulls) have been able to determine what human beings would have looked like when they lived to be 900 years old. To their shock (!) they found that around the 400 year mark, the image looked like that of Cro Magnum (sic) man and around the 800 year mark, the image looked remarkably like Neanderthal man.
I had not heard that one yet. Thanks for the morning laugh.
I already knew what I wanted to post after reading this one and then raj beat me to it. This guy has a really strange idea of perfection.
Oh, so it wasn’t the Flying Spaghetti Monster, it was amoeba! (Shouldn’t it be capitalized, in that case?)
July 4, 2006