Jim Kakalios says the new Watchmen movie is going to be good…and we can trust Jim.
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tags: The Science Behind the Movie, Watchmen, physics, superheroes' superpowers, education, streaming video
In this streaming video, University of Minnesota physics professor James Kakalios discusses how he consulted with Warner Bothers to add a physics perspective to their upcoming movie, Watchmen…
Jim Kakalios puts a very humorous spin on quantum mechanics, and while the video may be neither here nor there, the book, The Amazing Story of Quantum Mechanics: A Math-Free Exploration of the Science That Made Our World, consists of the smallest possible number of words to explain the concept in…
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I've been married for 30 years, and there's no end in sight, fortunately. But just imagine that, in my imminent old age, I were to seriously injure myself and be hospitalized for a long period…and my wife wasn't allowed to see me. And then it was decided that we were both so feeble and in need of…
fixed that for ya [/latin geek]
I'm going to restate my question that you ignored 650 posts ago.
A man approaches you in the street, and declares that he is Jesus Christ, Son of God, returned to Earth. Would you believe or reject his claim? And on what grounds?
What if the person is of caucasian, or middle eastern appearance? Black? Asian? A woman? A child?
Does your answer change, and why?
Bible Heroes, collect them all!
Get your Magic Underpants so you can be a Bible Hero too!
Kagato, in comment #904, wrote:
I could, but you did such a good job demolishing that paragraph that anything I wrote would be superfluous. So too with comment #920.
Alan, in comment #910, wrote:
Where was the water before the "fountains" opened? There is no indication, from geophysical studies, of large areas of open pore space in the deep subsurface (below the crust). Are the open spaces not there any longer?
Alan, in comment #910, wrote:
What is a backwash?
Are the trees sitting on top of the limestones that you said were one of the primary deposits in the mid-continent, from the flood? If they were buried by mudslides (where is the mud coming from?), then shouldn't we see piles limestone, a layer of organic matter (with trees?), and then a layer of mudstone, as a common deposit across the continental interiors? Or is all of this stuff getting compressed into oil? If so, then shouldn't we always see oil horizons right below a mudstone?
Where are you getting the idea that oil can form in 100 or so years?
Josh, I'm going to have to start imagining all your comments in David Tennant's voice as Doctor Who:
Ok, maybe not that last bit.
Though it was a high point in the post for me. :)
Hmmm...not Tom Baker? Contemplate this, I will.
Actually, David Tennant works just fine...
*takes a bow*
I am happy to serve.
Exactly.
Of course, we might quibble over what "righteous" is actually supposed to mean here. Perhaps the Hittites, the self-proclaimed People of the Thousand Gods, were too tolerant. Hey, they worshipped each god(dess) in his or her mother tongue, srsly.
Different meanings of "marsupial". Off the top of my head (which means parts may be outdated) and simplified (some groups are missing):
Metatheria
|--Sinodelphys (As)
`--+--Deltatheroida (As, NAm)
`--+--Peradectidae (NAm, Eu, As, apparently Af)
`--+--Stagodontidae (NAm, As)
`--+--"Pediomyidae" (NAm)
`--Notometatheria
|--Sparassodonta (SAm)
`--Marsupialia (in the strictest sense)
|--Didelphimorphia (SAm, recently NAm)
`--+--Paucituberculata (SAm)
`--Australidelphia
|--Dasyuromorphia (Au)
`--+--Notoryctidae (Au)
`--+--Diprotodontia (Au)
`--Microbiotheria (An, SAm)
The abbreviations for the continents should be obvious. The clades in boldface have living representatives today. Microbiotheria could alternatively be, for example, the sister-group of the rest of Australidelphia. I forgot if any didelphimorphians (opossums) and/or paucituberculates (opossum shrews, and the extinct polydolopids) have turned up in the Eocene of Antarctica and won't look it up at this time of the night.
Metatheria is the sister-group of Eutheria, a small part of which (the surviving one, that is) is Placentalia.
The origins of both Metatheria and Eutheria lie in the trees of the middle Early Cretaceous of Asia. Look up Sinodelphys on the meta- side and Eomaia on the eu- side.
Josh asked (of Alan 'Master of FAIL' Clarke):
I'm guessing he's pulling it from the same place he's mining his methane gas from...
Oh, and... Alan, go read. We're waiting.
*nods approvingly*
They what? That's a transitive verb, dude.
Different meanings of "marsupial".
looks more like just how far one intends to go backwards.
the chart you posted appears to agree with woodward that the immediate ancestors of australian marsupials evolved in SAm.; just not the ancestors of ALL marsupials.
Woodwardburne
head's still full of snot from a 3 week flu.
Nice tat, dude, srsly but....oh never mind it looks gr8. Srsly.
He tends to speak very fast when talking about science (or what passes for it on Doctor Who), which is the most entertaining way to read that sentence. And he says "what?" a lot.
David Marjanović, OM #962
David, I hope you don't view this post as a personal challenge or to an attempt to cross swords. I simply see some fish line that is snarled.
And what does the environment offer? The environment offers adversity to life forms, to the extent that a tremendously greater extinction rate is in direct opposition to the long periods of time required for evolution.
If the shoe fits, wear it.
Heathen • noun derogatory, a person who does not belong to a widely held religion (especially Christianity, Judaism, or Islam) as regarded by those who do. (source)
Triumph with out truth and mercy never endures.
2000 year old manuscripts are “sketchy” but 4.51 BILLION year old events are clear?
I don’t see your flat earth assertion. I see the “Earth” described as having areas above and below water level. If you take the Bible in its entirety, the description is for another world environment, not today’s. The water cycle would be totally foreign to us having never rained, the ground exclusively watered by a subterranean system. We later learn the collapse and destruction of this system during the flood.
Genesis 2:5-6 …for the LORD God had not caused it to rain upon the earth … But there went up a mist from the earth, and watered the whole face of the ground.
Considering the long period of man’s history and world population levels, if the number of Biblical miracle accounts were evenly dispersed, miracles would be an exceedingly rare event. I hear cries against God’s recorded actions as unjust yet criticism for inadequate action, cries, of both inadequate demonstration of power and excessive use of nature. When God did “prove” himself on Mount Sinai and verbally spoke the Ten Commandments to the people, their desire for “miracles” was quickly replaced with dread and only wanting to hear from Moses.
Exodus 20:18-19 And all the people saw the thunderings, and the lightnings, and the noise of the trumpet, and the mountain smoking: and when the people saw it, they removed, and stood afar off. And they said unto Moses, Speak thou with us, and we will hear: but let not God speak with us, lest we die.
I believe you may be confused where “righteous” means sinless with when righteousness is imparted to man by faith in God:
Genesis 15:6 And he [Abraham] believed in the LORD; and he counted it to him for righteousness.
Dude. That is completely and utterly incoherent garbage. Life is flexible enough to adapt to environmental adversity over time. That's the whole point. The environment can and does contain gradients in environmental conditions, and it is along those gradients (not the sharp binary environmental "cliffs" and such) that evolution occurs.
Can you please read up on evolution, not from Creationist websites, but a good book on the topic?
Will you, at least, agree that Catholics are Christians?
Well, if that's true, Creationism is doomed: it has no truth whatsoever, and is merciless in its deceit.
It's not the age, it's the evidence. The 2000 year old manuscripts were written by human beings, ignorant of geology and physics. The age of the Earth is a conclusion derived from the evidence of the Earth itself.
So claims that part of the bible. Yet another part of the bible says that God is "a still small voice". Is God incapable of speaking in normal tones, without the thunder and lighting?
No, Exodus 20:18-19 is obviously written by priests, intercessors for an angry, violent, and cruel God. Don't make God mad by trying to speak to him yourself, or he'll thunder and lightning you to death! No, come to a descendant of Moses; he'll do all the talking.
That's because the writers of the bible were themselves confused. See?
Oh, and re: this:
You are forgetting Genesis 8:21-22. The whole point was that God promised to never again destroy all life. Peter was saying that God would destroy all life.
Peter was saying that God, in Genesis 8:21-22, was lying.
What does "virtue" even mean, in this context? What evidence is there of this abandonment of virtue? Only the bible — which, as we have already seen, contradicts itself, and reality.
If Christians are so virtuous, why are there so many Christian criminals? Why do Christians disagree with each other on theology? Why do Christians kill each other over points of theology? What does virtue mean, in those cases?
Ichthyic: I say the greek pantheon are beings that lived and existed and interacted with the world during the time things were written about them. prove me wrong. I say Loki existed, and was indeed responsible for ushering in ragnarok. prove me wrong.
You wouldn’t have chosen these examples if you didn’t think they were fables. Need I continue?
I'm going to guess this garbled mess is supposed to refer to the current high extinction rates. guess what, we're in a mass extinction event caused by the appearance and relative fitness of humanity, just as the relative fitness of photosynthesis caused an extinction event in the past. life will adapt and continue, albeit in diminished diversity at first. who knows if we'll still be around for that, or if we'll be superceded by the rats and cockroaches by then...
[Greek gods, Norse gods]
...
*slow clap*
Welcome to The Point. Looks like the trains have been running late in your area. Best make your way to the doors or you'll miss your stop.
All religions are fables. And they all have exactly the same truth value. (Hint: think low.)
The bible may reference real locations and historical figures...
But guess what? So do most other religious texts.
So does Harry Potter. (To a much greater extent, in fact)
A document containing one verified fact isn't evidence that everything in the document is equally true.
Alan and Roger the dodger
How did Prometheus and Methuselah, 2 bristle cone pines survive a supposed global flood lasting over 100 days?
When Noah let the dove out of the arc, it came back with an olive leaf. How did the olive tree survive the flood?
How did the last pharoah of the 5th Egyptian dynasty, Unas, survive the flood?
If the whole of the earths surface changed due to the flood, how did the Great Pyramid of Giza survive the flood?
Another uncomfortable fact for you to ignore. How come Stonehenge is not buried by the sediments from the flood? Did it somehow float while the sediments were laid down?
Alan, all religious texts are books of fables, and all gods imaginary. What physical proof can you use to determine that Yahweh is any different from the other gods like Zeus, Jupiter, or Odin, or that the bible is any less a work of fiction than Greek/Roman/Norse mythology? Show your work.
CosmicTeapot #1024
BTY, I love your Asian sounding blog name. Asians -great people to work with.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bristlecone_pine
"The wood is very dense and resinous, and thus resistant to invasion by insects, fungi, and other potential pests."
These characteristics are likely key to it's survival.
I had planted a Ginkgo biloba tree once, a replant about 7 ft. tall. The second year after a long dry spell it was "cooked", limp and dead like an old piece of celery. Not having time for removal, it was left for a long time. One day after seeing signs of life I was shocked! It revived and likely continues to this day.
Floating vegetation Island, amazing (here).
We see in Genesis that an olive tree in vicinity of the ark also survived.
Genesis 8:11 And the dove came in to him in the evening; and, lo, in her mouth was an olive leaf pluckt off: so Noah knew that the waters were abated from off the earth.
I hope this helps.
Oh fuck - they're playing the weeble defence!
RogerS, nothing helps. No real evidence, just idle speculation of an idiot. You still have nothing. Your bible is a real work of fiction, as we have repeatedly shown you. You will never convince us you are right, because you have no real evidence. So, why can't you just fade into the bandwidth?
How does that help it survive having several thousands of meters of water above it? How does that help it survive a tsunami?
Dude, you are so deep in denial…
We're talking about rooted trees distributed over a large area. You can't unroot a tree and then somehow reroot it by just stranding it somewhere.
Denial: it's not just a river in Egypt.
You are desperately trying to lie to yourself, RogerS. It's not working.
You can't use a story to prove that very same story!!!
Really, how much more stupid can it get?
RogerS
Actually, no. Here is a snip from the website you offered:
Your book said olive tree. You didn't address what would happen to an olive tree that was under a raging torrent for 4 months. You rambled about floating peat moss and a Ginkgo tree. You were asked about an bristlecone pine tree that was under a ragging torrent for 4 months. Did your answer address the question?
As to your first line, what would you said if the blog name didn't sound like an Asian name? This whole post is pretty typical of the way you "argue". Have a good tone, maybe say something disarming, throw out a few things that sound like they have something to do with the question, quote us a bible verse or two and then step back and admire your work like you have done everyone a great service. You do no service. Your book is not a recognized authority, it is a collection of quasi-historical ramblings told from the POV of an bronze age human. To make it a little more plain, a bronze age man won't have a POV that comes close to ours, a large local flood will appear to be global in nature. A human living during that time would have no idea the size of the world. Yet to justify the fable, you and Alan come here and spout gibberish about geology in order to wish this story of a global flood into existence. I would say you need to clap harder but you probably will any way.
Why don't you get to the point? Why do you need the flood? Get to it. We know there wasn't a flood, continuing to tell us there was a flood does nothing to convince or convert. So what are you really trying to tell us? Don't quote bible verses, it's annoying and doesn't prove anything. Think about why you are here posting like this and what you hope to gain. Be honest, tell us in your own words.
I think you are motivated by pride. If you suffer the heathens long and endure, you will be rewarded. I think that you aren't spending your time here for us, you're doing this for yourselves. You aren't scientists, your posts are mostly just ramblings as I described before. I still think you are here to be the last post standing. That's not being a witness, that's pride. You can point to this as an example of how you triumphed for your god. You do have a problem as most people will never be able to make it to the end, but for you that will not matter. You satisfied your pride and got the last post in and no one will ever read all the way through to see the crazy jumps, turns and pirouettes you performed. Won't you be proud to forward the link to this blog comment section to all your friends at how you were able to best all those heathens? Why are you here? What do you really want to accomplish? Does your god think you are helping? You know what, strike that last question, your god thinks whatever you want it to think.
RogerS wrote:
Yes, we do see that in Genesis. The question is, how did it survive? You have talked about massive kills of marine invertebrates that have resulted in tremendous piles of limestone accumulating in the deep continental interiors. You talked about these organisms getting "shocked." You have talked about waters rising above Mt. Everest so as to place fossils of marine organisms there, burying them so quickly that they were preserved with both haves of the shell closed. You talked about the flood covering all continents. If this all happened, then how did the olive tree survive? Moreoever, given that Genesis 6:17 says:
why did the olive tree survive?
Special, you know, bark and, like, resins. Sure do like them Orientals Asians. Hey, once I planted a tree. But back to Genesis...
Oh no. I see it as an opportunity to show you that you're making arguments from ignorance: "I don't know any evidence against my view, so there is no evidence against my view". I'm trying to help you. I'm trying to get you out of making yourself look stupid.
See, this, for example, is an argument from ignorance.
I've seen natural selection with my own eyes, in a lab course that is compulsory for beginning students of molecular biology in Vienna. As I was supposed to, I took a petri dish containing "full medium" (food) covered with Escherichia coli (a visible "lawn"), added a watery "solution" of a bacteriophage (a virus that kills bacteria – I forgot which one it was, maybe T4 or T7), and let that stand overnight in the incubator (E. coli is a gut bacterium and thus grows best at gut temperatures – 37 °C). The next day, instead of the opaque "lawn", there was a glassy layer – except for three little opaque dots. Tell me what had happened!
This isn't anything new. The Darwin finches of the Galápagos Islands have been followed through several climate cycles and the variation of beak length, which is heritable, recorded… more after you've told me what happened in my petri dish.
Ah, I'm not familiar with that sense. I meant "a person who believes in a religion other than one it's OK to believe in in polite company". Same as what "pagan" meant before the 1960s or so – in fact, the word is by origin an attempt to translate "pagan". Atheism not being a religion (any more than bald is a hair color or "off" is a TV channel or not collecting stamps is a hobby), atheists aren't heathens by that definition.
Sometimes yes. We know more about certain (!) species of ichthyosaurs than we know about certain (!) species of beaked whales.
I see the Earth described like in the Enûma Elis Genesis 1, Job, various psalms, and so on: a plate* that rests on – standing – pillars, with water both below the earth and above the heavens, which are (sometimes singular, sometimes plural) metal domes hammered out by God the way you turn a flat metal sheet into a kettle. Rain is water falling down through the heavens when God opens the windows in them.
* Usually with four corners, except for IIRC Isaiah, who says it's a circular disk.
(And not that it matters, but "sketchy" isn't a quote from me.)
See, this isn't even possible without at least one miracle. Evaporation happens, and condensation happens, so rain happens.
Without evaporation, trees higher than about 10 m are flat-out impossible, BTW. Unless of course there was another miracle.
Oh no. Oooooh no.
One of the more embarrassing arguments from ignorance you've made so far.
Yes, that page is long. Read it all. We can wait.
You've changed the topic right in the middle of a paragraph. Whether "God's recorded actions" are recorded only in the sense that Luke Skywalker's actions are recorded is among the very things we're trying to find out here.
2) You're among the people who believe the Bible is inspired by the Holy Spirit, right? If so, you're saying that the Holy Spirit can't express itself clearly. Always funny to find out that alleged literalists are blasphemers by their own criteria.
1) So what? Then forget about "righteous" and talk about "good" and "just". You can't treat 1/3 of a topic and believe the whole topic is dealt with.
Now, Roger the Dodger, answer the questions in comment 1024. All you've done so far is deny one and ignore all the others. We're waiting.
That's exactly the same. Traditionally, many people (apparently including Woodburne, I'll have to check) used "Marsupialia" as a synonym of Metatheria instead of giving it its own meaning.
The last common ancestor of all Australian marsupials lived almost certainly in Australia, perhaps 60 Ma ago. The last common ancestor of all marsupials – marsupials in the strictest sense; crown-group marsupials (the last common ancestor of all living marsupials, plus all its descendants); marsupials as I've used the term in the tree I posted – lived almost certainly in South America, around 65 Ma ago. The first metatherians lived in Asia, around 130 Ma ago (…that's twice 65).
Nothing is a recognized authority – except evidence itself.
BTW, Roger the Dodger, why do you even talk about the English word "heathen"? I bet what the original Hebrew of Psalm 2 uses is simply goyim – all those that are not Jews/Hebrews by ancestry and religion (that wasn't distinguished). Owlmirror? :-)
Owlmirror #1020
After such a traumatic event, God wanted to bring calm and assurance in the face of future heavy rains. The covenant only pertains to floods where I am sure all 8 had a healthy fear of.
Genesis 9:14-15 And it shall come to pass, when I bring a cloud over the earth, that the bow shall be seen in the cloud: And I will remember my covenant, which is between me and you and every living creature of all flesh; and the waters shall no more become a flood to destroy all flesh.
Correction, please substitute "pre-flood" for "post flood" mankind.
Back to your question: virtue - noun, moral excellence; goodness; righteousness.
The loss of virtue among pre-flood hummanity is black & white:
Genesis 6:5 And God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.
Genesis 6:11 The earth also was corrupt before God, and the earth was filled with violence.
Excellent points. Mankind tends to resort to God as a last resort only when their own attempts of reform fails. God often has compassion on the outcast, the rejected, and the worst of society. As you know, people don't always fulfill the title of their position. Where does the fault lay, with the manager who assigned titles or other people with the same title? Or is it the employee's lack of knowledge, wisdom, character, and ignorance of the Boss's desires? Some are still "green" and in development stage:
1 Peter 2:2 As newborn babes, desire the sincere milk of the word, that ye may grow thereby
The key is if the "Christian" is truely connected to Christ the "vine" and does not merely bear the title or warm a church pew. This is a little deep but see if you can chew it:
John 15:4-6 Abide in me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, except it abide in the vine; no more can ye, except ye abide in me. I am the vine, ye are the branches: He that abideth in me, and I in him, the same bringeth forth much fruit: for without me ye can do nothing. If a man abide not in me, he is cast forth as a branch, and is withered; and men gather them, and cast them into the fire, and they are burned.
RogerS, another post totally devoid of reason. Your quoting your fictional bible lends absolutely nothing to the discussion except your ignorance. Show us some real evidence that your mythical flud was world wide, happened in one time. That the whole world was under water, all life, both plant and animal died in the flud. Your lack of evidence to date says you are a liar and bullshitter. In order to change our opinion, you need to change your game. Now, what to you hope to gain by further posts if you have nothing to offer in the way of required evidence?
David Marjanović, OM #1033
#1024 question review: How did Prometheus and Methuselah, 2 bristle cone pines survive a supposed global flood lasting over 100 days?
Really David, even after that petri dish example.
I am surprised that this question is even asked by those of such great faith in the self creation, survivability, adaption, natural selection, and all those evolutionary powers of "science", to suddenly lose faith that only 2 of possibly 1000's of the most suvivor hearty trees known on earth could emerge. Don't underestimate all those numerous possibilities in the flood "primordial soup" as well!!!
David Marjanović, OM #1033
#1024 question review: How did Prometheus and Methuselah, 2 bristle cone pines survive a supposed global flood lasting over 100 days?
Really David, even after that petri dish example.
I am surprised that this question is even asked by those of such great faith in the self creation, survivability, adaption, natural selection, and all those evolutionary powers of "science", to suddenly lose faith that only 2 of possibly 1000's of the most suvivor hearty trees known on earth could emerge. Don't underestimate all those numerous possibilities in the flood "primordial soup" as well!!!
RogerS, What do you hope to gain by posting again? We have laid out the evidence you need to present, and your evasions tell us you don't have the evidence (which we already knew, being smarter and better read than you). Your repeated attempts to non-fictionalize your bible is hilarious. We laugh at you.
Please don't sneer at the interests of others. Apart from a brief period in my youth, much of my life has been happily spent in the harmless hobby of not collecting stamps. I have numerous conservations with my friends about this topic, read the many technical and light-hearted journals and books on the subject, and spend, I should say, about 100% of my income (yes, admittedly, I do sometimes buy stamps, even now) on this particular pastime. So please, less sneering - or do you personally have a non-interest in some topic which you consider superior?
But the war of attrition with the creotards continues here in this meandering backwater of a rationalist blog.
Finally shorn of any pretense of knowledge about any aspect of science (or history) whatsoever, the religious nutcases are reduced to grunting and pointing at random bible verses and asserting that the word of god must be true, because they think it says it must be true.
Unable - one does wonder why - to read the excellent article about radiometric dating from a "Christian" perspective - quotes only used because Alan and Roger define the word to mean only themselves (though not, one suspects, each other) - which is informative and, even we agree, largely fucking true.
Also, they should be reading Roger Moore's hiliarious takedown on Noah's Ark reposted in @1033.
Could I finally, but with no hope that it will happen, request that we not just descend into a war of stupid bible quotes? It's pretty much a random process for teh morons, but brings a hint of tedium to the process for those of is not entirely versed in Fairyology. Not that I have anything against discussing the "reality" of the bible, especially since we have so many people here who know much more about the bible than either of the babes in realityland we have here, it's just that their random citing of biblical verses rarely highlights anything of real interest, even if the replies often do.
Sorry. Carry on!
To suggest that bristlecone pine trees can survive immersion in salt water for over a month due to some sort of magical miracle of the Flood in order to deny the fact that the world never experienced the Flood as described in the Book of Genesis is, quite frankly, symptomatic of textbook idiocy.
If we're not going to plonk these losers in the Dungeon, can we at least kill this thread?
Oh, found one! The duck-billed platypus (remind me, which day was that created on?) although a quick internet search revealed a reply from someone who said he had them in the river at the bottom of his garden! How cool is that?
Incidentally, where did their venom come from?
Confession? What did you do that was so awful that you had to become one of the most stupid Christians to make up for it?
In general, just a little entreaty to Jesus - I'm mostly good, I promise - don't hit me - but do you think you could do your conversion experience just a little earlier - like before monstrous criminals commit monstrous crimes?
Thanks J, oh, and sorry about the crucifixion - we won't do it next time, promise ;o
Stanton #1041
Ocean salinity is continually increasing by rains washing in minerals. Pre-flood oceans would likely be of lower salinity 4,400 yrs ago. The flood model introduces a tremendous amount of subterranean water (fountains of the deep) plus a deluge of rain water (fresh). Anything floating would receive the greater dossage of fresh water from rain. Ice melt can also be a source of fresh water. Remember, the entire area of the globe is rather large introducing more chances for plant SURVIVAL than an inorganic "Primordial soup" would offer for SELF CREATION of a seed.
RogerS,
What?
Don't you think that a more plausible explanation of the whole flood story is because some bronze age man lived through a very devastating local flood, the waters receded and, oh my, there were still animals and plants. Well, how did they get here? Let me see.....
It's a story. You argue as if the book has a type of rational or legal authority but in fact your book can only claim charismatic authority. The book loses on the rational as exhibited numerous rebuttals contained within the comments of this blog post as well as hundreds of years of study, both scientific and of the book itself. It loses on the charismatic because it shown to not be absolutely true. The story can not stand up to scrutiny. Your arguing from charismatic authority is never going to resolve anything and all your hand waving trying to rationally explain the flood is just lies to justify the false authority you claim for your book.
I know what the problem is, you're just not clapping hard enough. Clap harder because you just know it has to be true, it just has to be. The book told me the book was true and I believe the book. How could it be otherwise? It can be otherwise because the book is a story and rational men discovered this when they began to question what they read in the stories.
Why are you really here? I still say it's pride.
RogerS, another failure to acknowledge your problem. You have offered none of the required evidence to back up your insane claims, and now you are stuck on a trivial piece of information that cannot do anything to your overall proof. So, do you have the physical evidence that we require for the total world wide flud and resuting death of all life except Noah and his ark or not? If the answer is no, why aren't you gone? If the answer is yes, why haven't you presented it? It is one or the other. Your continued posting screams I HAVE NO EVIDENCE EXCEPT WHAT IS IN MY FICTIONAL BIBLE. WAHHHH
RogerS,
Try a science experiment. Take two aquariums, one fresh and one saltwater, each stocked with fish. Now every day for 40 days dip a cup into each and then empty the cup into the opposite aquarium. How many fish will be left alive in either tank at the end of the experiment?
And now for extra credit, what did the animals eat after they left the ark? What did they eat while on the ark? Where did they store it? How did they keep it fresh? Who cleaned up all the wastes? Were there bogs of edible plants strategically floating throughout the possible landing areas for the ark? Did carnivores suddenly grow dagger-like teeth and forward-facing eyes for stereo 3D vision after the flood? Did prey animals have their eyes migrate to the sides of their head for a larger field of vision after the flood? There are millions things that just don't add up if there was a flood not including everything that's been discussed up to this point.
The more you look at the flood story, the more fantastic it is. The world we know today would be much different if your flood actually happened.
Why do you post here? I still think it's pride.
Another "bronze age myth" by ignorant ancient people?
The design is beautiful, the astronomy is exactly right. The way the mechanics are designed just makes your jaw drop. (source).
The Antikythera computing device, the most complex instrument of antiquity (more).
The Antikythera device (between 150 and 100 BC) displayed the position of the Sun in the zodiac throughout the year as well as the phases of the moon. It was the requirement of displaying the phases of the moon based on the Synodic month of about 29 ½ that necessitates a complex gear train to subtract the revolutions of the Sun from those of the Moon to produce the cycles of the synodic months. It was precisely this requirement that lead to the development of the Differential Turntable which is the single most astounding feature of the Antikythera mechanism.
-Batteries not required.
Roger "tap dancer" S, still no evidence, and you introduced a new topic hoping we would get sidetracked. Evidence for the world wide flud. Every continent. All the surfaces. All the animals. All the humans. With proper dating. All inclusive, or nothing. And by nothing, that means you just shut up and go away.
It's a device, not a myth, and it's made of bronze, but not from the "bronze age." Why are you people still talking to this idiot?
RogerS,
Not everyone was building ships whose size wouldn't be duplicated for 40 centuries. Let's see, ~2400BC. I think there were Egyptians building pyramids, there were Greeks, Phoenicians, Chinese and and peoples living in the Indus valley that were still there after the "flood" and they don't have a record a global flood for that period.
Bronze age men were capable of rational thought and ironically it was rational men who built the Antikythera device. A few rational men building a device does not raise the level of knowledge for all peoples living at that time.
Dear god, I don't understand.
Why you let the things you did
Get so out of hand
You'd have managed better
If you'd had it planned
Now why'd you choose such a backward time
And such a strange land?
Bronze age men were ignorant, not stupid. There were capable of rational thought and prone to superstition. You have so much more knowledge available to you, what's your excuse?
Why do you post here? I still think it's pride.
To labor my point in #1048, the line between myth and truth is faint being erased and redrawn throughout history.
Except for the evidence, claims that the knowledge and skill level required for producing the Antikythera computing device was achieved over 100 years prior to first Gospel manuscripts would have surely been laughed at -as myth.
Bingo. Indeed, other translations even say "nations"; the LXX says "ethni" (ἔθνη).
"Goy" was not (originally) even exclusive of the sons of Israel; they too were a "goy"; a nation. The word translated as "people" in Psalms 2:1 is actually "le'umim" (לאמים), plural of "le'um", which is a synonym used in modern Hebrew for "nation" — no doubt due to the slight pejorative sense that "goy" has picked up from its usage in Yiddish.
RogerS, your little charade gains you nothing. Time to show evidence or acknowledge you have nothing. More evasions means you are a liar and bullshitter. Otherwise, specify why you continue to post your inanities.
In reference to David Marjanović’s post #972, I would like to comment. David, you build an argument for the Bible’s seemingly contradictive statements of “there is none righteous” and then later, “the LORD hath recompensed me according to my righteousness”.
"Contradiction is not a sign of falsity, nor the lack of contradiction a sign of truth." – Blaise Pascal
I’ll explain how your seemingly good logic took you in a FALSE direction by using the following hypothetical illustration:
Notice the two seemingly contradictory statements:
1)Your son is a “foolish pauper”.
2)Your son is “intelligent and rich”.
What’s more David, your false assumptions on Biblical spiritual matters have propagated into an area of your life that you least suspected. If a person is blind-sided in the spiritual, is it not unreasonable to assume that one’s empirical interpretations could be flawed as well? Or do you think they are isolated from one another? Or worse yet, do you think that one side of the equation doesn’t even exist? If so, then your equation for empiricism will have an “unbalance” of grandiose proportions that approaches “delusional”. Don’t discount me as a “wacko” because you and I are on the exact same page empirically when the goal is to reach the Moon and return (Newtonian physics, mathematics, etc.). If your goal is to reach 4.5 billion years into the past or to find “first cause”, the opportunities for error become astronomical. Is it any wonder that differences of opinion are inversely proportional to the level of observability?
[differences of opinion] α [1/(level of observability)]
Q: Why do diametrically opposed opinions of the Earth’s age arise so easily?
A: The low observability level forces one to make non-empirical assumptions.
Click here to see a dual-analysis of Dr. Roger C. Wiens’“Radiometric Dating: A Christian Perspective”. Dr. Wien’s belief in an old Earth is based on evidences that can be empirically interpreted as young or old. Since the Bible is never convincingly disproven (as in David Marjanović’s “contradiction” argument), why jump to a theory that has never been proven?
Q: How could David’s hypothetical son turn his life around?
A: By freely accepting what David has worked so hard for and using it to bring honor to his father.
Luke 15:24 For this my son was dead, and is alive again; he was lost, and is found. And they began to be merry.
So now you are claiming that God was lying in 8:21-22?
Genesis 8:21-22 does not pertain only to floods. It says "never again destroy every living thing". What is wrong with your brain that you can't read those simple words?
Example: Some mafioso who shot someone swears first to never kill anyone ever again, and then swears to never again shoot anyone. Would you say that he has not lied and broken his word if he kills someone by setting them on fire?
What is wrong with you?
Another scientifically deprived post by Alan. Yawn, like that wasn't expected. Anything to avoid acknowledging the lack of evidence, which is by now painfully obvious to everybody whose name isn't Alan or Roger. Guys, I suspect you are on borrowed time unless you produce some real evidence. I doubt if PZ will just close the thread without plonking you. I suggest you post true evidence for the total flud worldwide, including all continents, all surfaces, all biota and all peoples. All we have to do is to find one lie, which we will, to trash your whole evidence. Otherwise, consider just fading into the bandwidth.
If you knew anything about actual, living pine trees, bristlecones or not, you'd realize that total immersion in even freshwater for over a month will kill them. In fact, total immersion in any sort of water, salt or fresh, for over a month, will kill ANY AND ALL TERRESTRIAL PLANTS. To demand that we must accept that the bristlecones survived due to some ad hoc magical miracle that was never specified in the Bible is the height of stupidity, RogerS.
Furthermore, exactly how does the Antikythera device lend credence to a literal interpretation of the Bible, let alone proof of the Flood?
You are a textbook example of an idiot, RogerS.
Alan, we use the same fundamentals of nuclear physics to radiometrically date rocks as we use to design nuclear weapons.
You accept Newtonian mechanics (presumably because you watched us get to the moon and back?). Do you accept nuclear physics? Do you accept that we have built nuclear weapons using the principles of nuclear physics and that they work? If your answer is yes, then how do you justify accepting what nuclear physics tells you over here (bombs) but then denying what nuclear physics tells you over there (dating)? It's the same science.
If this were really true; if logical and empirical contradiction had nothing at all to do with actual truth and falsity, then there would be no way to tell what true and false really were.
Given that Pascal was a mathematician, either he had something else in mind, or he was completely insane when he wrote that.
No. You're a wacko because you reject empirical science when it has falsifiable and parsimoniously reached the conclusion, from the evidence, that the Earth is about 4.5 billion years old, and that the universe is about 15 billion years old.
We only need to reach back a few thousand years to point out that there was no global flood then. 740,000+ years of ice-core layers, cross-referenced with the evidence of volcanic eruptions that left evidence in those ice-cores, as well as all the rest of geology, demonstrate that there was no flood. All of geology demonstrates no global flood. All of archaeology demonstrates no global flood.
False. The evidence cannot empirically be interpreted as young. It can only be interpreted as "young" by rejecting the empirical evidence.
The Bible is empirically disproven. It has logical and empirical contradictions that prove that it cannot possibly be true — unless you reject all standards of truth and falsity, as your quote from Pascal appears to suggest.
You yourself claimed that the Book of Mormon was "fallacious". What did you use to make that claim? The contradiction of the empirical evidence of linguistics and archaeology. The same empirical evidence of archaeology and linguistics prove that the Bible is just as fallacious as the Book of Mormon. You have no empirical basis for accepting the Bible if you are going to use an empirical argument for rejecting the Book of Mormon.
Neither David, nor any of the other sane posters here are discounting you as a wacko. We most definitely count you as a wacko.
But aside from your florid idiocy, we note that you have retreated from the mauling you have had in the geological arena (inter alia) and stumbled into what you presume is an area of intellectual strength (!) - theology. Here you can cherry pick the verses you think apply to your own mood and desire for heavenly wisdom (!!). Owlmirror, you spoilsport - with your Greek and Hebrew ...knowledge..telling the poor moron he doesn't even know his own Holy Book, or history -
(And incidentally OwlMirror - have you ever seen Bunuel's The Milky Way? It's a fabulous comedy where all the dialogue, and action, is related to Christian Heresies)
But our vestigial-brained correspondent has also managed to find a "rebuttal" to the paper on Radiometric dating.
I was going to say it was funny, but it's sad. Shorter summary "He's not a real Christian (like me), he wasn't there, and a very few Christians with sciencey qualifications think that it might not be true, so it's all wrong, according to our acknowledged belief that none of this is true".
I'd like to see him give a response to Robert Moore's great article about the ark, but then it will never be of equivalent merit.
And yes, I know that the morons are dragging this post way past it's scoff-by date, but I'm continuing to enjoy the lessons I'm getting here. And it's keeping the twats off the other threads.
Alan, have you considered going into politics?
Owlmirror #1056
Let's see-
Gen8:21 And the LORD smelled a sweet savour; and the LORD said in his heart, I will not again curse the ground any more for man's sake; for the imagination of man's heart is evil from his youth; neither will I again smite any more every thing living, as I have done.
22While the earth remaineth, seedtime and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease.
The phrase "as I have done" quite clearly refers to the method.
Ah Roger, what part of the bible is a work of fiction do you have trouble with? Another worthless post that got you nowhere. Time to either show your total flud evidence, or fade into the bandwidth like semi-intelligent people. (Which, I know, leaves you two bozos out.)
NO. It clearly refers to the killing of everything.
Good grief. Is this really how you conceive of God? Like some sort of pathetic human criminal, who breaks his solemn vows and promises by playing word games?!
What the hell kind of standard can you possibly have for "virtue", if your highest standard of "virtue" includes lying and twisting words around in pathetic semantic games?
2Chr4:2 says that pi equals three (or π=3, if you prefer).
What this verse tells me is that the ancient Hebrews weren't good at math and some rabbis living in Babylonia were describing something that was destroyed before they were gleams in their daddy's eyes. For that matter, if the rabbis had a clue about geometric ratios, they'd know if they gave the diameter of a circle then the circumference would automatically be given as well. But a Bible literalist has to jump through all kinds of hoops and do much hand-waving in a vain attempt get 2Chr4:2 to match the real world.
Re: Pascal's quotation - it was apologetics, not mathematics, which is why it makes little sense.
Source: Pascal's Pensées (Gutenberg English version) SECTION V- JUSTICE AND THE REASON OF EFFECTS
From the preface:
The plan of what we call the _Pensées_ formed itself about 1660. The completed book was to have been a carefully constructed defence of Christianity, a true Apology and a kind of Grammar of Assent, setting forth the reasons which will convince the intellect. As I have indicated before, Pascal was not a theologian, and on dogmatic theology had recourse to his spiritual advisers. Nor was he indeed a systematic philosopher.
[...]
To understand the method which Pascal employs, the reader must be prepared to follow the process of the mind of the intelligent believer.
Um, I was too terse above.
Pascal is clearly referring to contradiction as that which is denied by someone, rather than contradiction as a logical term for something necessarily false.
Owlmirror wrote:
It's amazing the flaws Christians will allow their god to have depending on the point they're trying to argue. As I mentioned upthread (and have had only a laughable attempt at a response to) they're okay with him having been demoted to the role of angry rain-god rather than a being who had the power to create the universe.
So, I'll ask again. Floodists - why would the god who could create the universe need a flood to achieve what he could just will to occur?
[crickets]
Anyway, at other times he's impotent, incompetent, deceptive, malicious, genocidal, callous, capricious, vengeful, ill-tempered, contradictory, disingenuous, dishonest, forgetful and ignorant - just to name a few.
Kind of an odd mix of characteristics for a benevolent, omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent being, aren't they?
Kind of an odd mix of characteristics for a benevolent, omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent being, aren't they?
But he's a blast at parties.
Josh: how do you justify accepting what nuclear physics tells you over here (bombs) but then denying what nuclear physics tells you over there (dating)? It's the same science.
There is a stretch between “theoretical science” and “applied science”. When one builds a bomb, the obstacles preventing the delivery of that bomb are easily observed: weather patterns, enemy aircraft, etc. When one builds a mass spectrometer for Ar-Ar radiometric dating, the obstacles preventing a reliable delivery of information lie within a 4.5 billon-year time frame (not 1 day as for the bomb). To assume that no unanticipated occurrences will thwart your data during this period is a rather large assumption. The most obvious unanticipated occurrence would be if the Earth didn’t exist 6100 years ago.
As a child, I sometimes thought I was seeing stars in my Edmund 3.5” reflector telescope when the source was nothing but light pollution and a lens out of focus. Obviously, my ineptitude is not to be compared, but on a 4.5 billion-year time scale, you may not be far off. Those “stars” I observed, always had a certain consistency. Geocentrism survived for centuries because of its orderliness, consistency and ability to predict. Its even making a come-back because of its ability to explain quantized redshift: Geocentrism Compared to geocentrism, radiometric dating is only a new kid on the block (1949). Judging from the history of by-gone theories and applications, why should one believe radiometric dating is invincible?
I'm not suggesting we dispense with radiometric dating technologies. On the contrary. I believe if the Carbon 14 dating method is perfected, its current evidence for a young Earth will be further enhanced.
Yeah, and I believe that when the California state lottery system is perfected, I'll win a million bucks.
Deluded moron.
Actually, to date 4.5 billion years, the wonderful Ar/Ar method wouldn't even cut it.
Ah Alan, the liar and bullshitter. Back with the carbon 14 idiocy, that has already been refuted. That just make you look like a total imbecile with a memory of gnat. Still no scientific content to your posts. The only way you will be saved from getting plonked for stupidity, is to start citing the peer reviewed primary scientific literature correctly and accurately. To date, you have failed miserably. Right now you have no credibility, and everything you say is considered a lie. Why are you continuing to post here?
CJO, your pessimism toward perfecting dating technologies betrays your position as a "scientist". Do you have an ulterior motive for not wanting it to succeed?
Only if the expression 'unanticipated consequences' has suddenly come to mean 'nonsensical beliefs of intellectually dishonest woo-heads with no evidence whatsoever to back up the claims they extract from a two-thousand-year-old folk tale concocted by scientifically-illiterate people who believed in invisible sky-fairies with magic powers'.
It is nice that you have found a reply to the article. However, that reply is full of arguments from ignorance (it cites the RATE stuff, which has been debunked repeatedly, as a few more hours on the web will show you), outright falsehoods (like calling talk.origins "anti-Christian"), and even a statement to the effect of saying that nothing that contradicts any literal reading of the Bible can ever be true -- which means that discussion is impossible and the whole sixty-nine-page reply is unnecessary! And all that is just on the first two pages. I haven't read the rest so far.
It doesn't even try to address the question of whether it's necessary for a Christian to try to be a literalist (see above on why there is no literalist). It doesn't even mention the very existence of the question.
How pathetic.
Scrolling through the rest of the reply, I see that it keeps harping on the point that radiometric dating only works if the assumptions behind it are correct. Fine -- but the reply never even tries to figure out if the assumptions are correct. It only tries to figure out if they're compatible with a self-described Biblical literalist standpoint, which is not the same; it just claims, again and again, that that's the same, without ever even just trying to test that claim.
Now please demonstrate that you've understood both the article and the reply... It is day 46, after all.
(When you're done, you can read this long list of instances where the New Testament contradicts itself on which conditions are necessary and/or sufficent for salvation, but that's less urgent.)
Just three things because it's so easy:
Wrong.
Come on. The Bible says hares chew the cud. What was that again about "never"?
Science cannot prove, only disprove. There simply is no such thing as a proven theory, or even just a provable theory. Period. Proof is for mathematics and formal logics, and that's it.
You don't know what science is. And yet you try to argue with it. How stupid!
Oh, and... inventing a scenario, putting a contradiction into it, and then claiming you've shown anything about other contradictions is just infantile.
Now back to Roger the Dodger.
No, Roger. Comment 1024 asks five questions. You have dodged one and completely ignored the four others. Come on, we're waiting.
That example isn't finished yet. Tell us what happened in it overnight!
You are again dodging the question instead of answering it.
Really, Roger. Have you no shame?
Huh?
That's what one might think, but reality is (as usual) way more complicated than that. Water also seeps into the ocean floor, exchanges salt for other minerals, and comes back out again through black smokers.
And then there's evaporation of seawater, which separates the water from the salt. Or where do you think the Permian salt that underlies northern Germany and much of the North Sea comes from? Where do you think the Triassic salt in the Austrian Alps comes from? Where do you think the enormous Miocene salt layers that underlie much of the floor of the Mediterranean come from?
(...And... how long does it take for a sea to evaporate in such a way that its salts precipitate in an orderly sequence, but nonetheless in such thick layers? First gypsum, then sodium chloride, then potassium chloride...)
There was a paper a few years ago that apparently showed that the oceans have sometimes been twice as salty as today, but I've never read it.
Plant a tree on any sea floor and tell me what has happened after 40 and/or 150 days. And that's not even taking into account that it's supposed to be deep enough to cover the highest mountains, and, shall we say turbulent because you keep talking about tsunamis and... all of geology happening at once.
And in the process kills every single animal that is marine but not adapted to brackish water. And that is the vast majority.
As I already observed, you seem to have no idea, by several orders of magnitude, of how many miracles are required to make the flood story work.
So you don't even know what the term "organic chemistry" means. Hint: "inorganic primordial soup" is a contradiction in terms.
Also, you have evidently been sleeping for the last 20 years -- it's not at all clear that the "primordial soup" hypothesis is at all required; there's evidence that the required chemical reactions could have happened on the chemically surprisingly active surface of certain clay minerals and/or pyrite crystals.
For crying out loud, the first organism wasn't a seed!!!
Not that it matters for showing that your argument from authority is a logical fallacy... but... 150 BC is not Bronze Age. In the Middle East (all the way to Greece) the Bronze Age ended around 1,000 BC.
So then provide the evidence for the two interwoven flood stories in the Bible already. We're waiting.
Roger the Dodger probably doesn't even know that plants breathe.
CJO, your pessimism blah blah blah...
I was just making fun of your self-centered stupidity. You have rather a backlog of more serious challenges to take a stab at.
Don't address me again unless you want to answer serious questions, questions from me you've so far assiduously ignored.
Guys, once something is refuted in a scientific argument it stays refuted until you can show more science that rebuts the refutation. Now, your C-14 dating crap has been refuted Alan, and you showed nothing new. Ergo, it is still refuted. All radioactive dating techniques are good, since you have not shown the scientific data to show that they aren't. Josh has refuted all your geology. Ergo, it stays refuted, until you cite new formation from the peer reviewed primary scientific literature. Something your are not very familiar with.
Alan wrote:
Well, I'm not sure what you mean by "stretch." If you mean that all observations in science have error attached to them (which is well implied by your second paragraph of comment #1071) and that everything we do is always tentative, then yes, I agree with you. But there are just as many error bars in the "applied sciences" as there are the "pure sciences" and there are things we understand in pure science better than that in applied disciplines. You're setting up a bit of a false premise that the applied sciences are "concretely known" and the pure sciences are "fuzzy and theoretical." It's not really like that.
Alan continued:
Well yes, that's true. But I was talking about the science that went into understanding radioactive decay, which was a forerunner to splitting the atom. But then you knew that, right?
Alan further continued:
You don't really have any idea how we obtain radiometric ages, do you? You really should go read that paper that David has been linking too forever (not a critique of it).
Alan further went on:
This sentence doesn't really make any sense, Alan. But please do show me where we proclaim that there can be no unanticipated occurrences in any science that we do.
He then continued:
Wow. You really are working for the title of King of Strawmen. Please provide a single link that indicates that we think radiometric dating is invincible? I await reading it with eager anticipation.
And then:
So...you're fine with using 14C as a radioactive isotope to date geological materials. So you accept that we understand the decay rate and half-life of 14C? But, what? You don't accept that we know what we're doing with 238U or 40K or any of the other long half-life isotopes we use to date older rocks? And what grounds do you have to judge the disciplines of nuclear physics and geochronology as deficient with these other isotopes? It wouldn't happen to be your a priori assumption that anything that contradicts your bible is wrong, would it?
And guys, don't forget all the refutations by David Marjanović, OM, who has handed you your ass on a platter time and time again. There will not be another go around of your fake evidence, as I'm sure PZ is ready to plonk you if you try.
So, ask yourselves this question. What is the purpose of you continuing to post here?
If it is to get us to believe you, you lost that about 1800 posts ago, when you first showed up with no evidence.
Please: the term is "invincible idiot."
Oooh no you don't.
1) Said bristlecone pine would not have been submerged in pre-flood waters, but flood waters.
2) The flood waters are supposed to be responsible for most of the sedimentation found in geology, therefore would have to contain a truly enormous amount of suspended minerals, soil & debris. Even if not strictly saline, it would be just as deadly (or more so) to submerged plant life.
3) The mechanism is correct... but 4,000 years of "rains washing in minerals" is enough to turn fresh water into saline seawater?
4) Even if you're in the microevolution-okay-but-macroevolution-bollocks camp, you think 4,000 years is enough time for all of the currently-surviving species to have adapted to such a dramatic shift in their environment?
5) By your thinking, would it be reasonable to assume that the oceans will be twice as salty in 4,000 years as they are now? That's a small enough timescale to observe the rate of salinity increase. Do you think observation matches your hypothesis?
Do please let's stick to the flood stories, it's far more entertaining than Dueling Bible Quotes.
(Despite this thread actually being about Watchmen...)
---
On a different note -- Nerd of Redhead, you sometimes write some really insightful stuff, but lately you've just been spitting out the same boilerplate posts over and over. I don't know about everyone else, but I'm getting pretty tired of every fifth post being "lair and bullshitter", "fade into the bandwidth" etc.
If you're going to post, can you please post something with a bit more content, rather than just shouting slogans from the sidelines continuously?
To be fair, it is true that lack of internal contradiction isn't a sign of truth. But when n ideas contradict each other, then obviously at least n–1 of them must be wrong, no matter if Pascal really meant to say the opposite or just got quote-mined.
Oh, so he got quote-mined. Why am I not surprised.
Alan, stop using Creationist sources. They all lie to you, or are copied from sources that lie, be it by omission, by word-game, or outright.
You wish.
BTW, what does Gen 8:22 refer to? It implies very clearly that if God wants to burn the world, he must first annihilate the world, because "[w]hile the earth remaineth, seedtime and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease" – if God burns the world while it still remaineth, he turns Gen 8:22 into a lie, and Pseudo-Peter says exactly this will happen.
No matter what convulsions you throw, the contradictions just don't go away. As I said – there is no Biblical literalist.
Just read comment 1065 again, and take it to heart brain. You know full well Owlmirror is right; stop trying to delude yourself.
Oh no, one shouldn't. If one has faith in science, one is doing it wrong and hasn't understood what science is.
Instead, one should propose something better.
Come on. We're waiting. Out with it already.
The piece linked to here is a typical AiG screed, containing all the usual logical fallacies as far as I can see from scrolling through. I'll take it apart in my next comment.
Correct! That's exactly why we're using U/Pb, Sm/Nd, Hf/whatever, and so on!
Of course -- as always, you can walk across the street, but you can't walk across the country!
David, my first impulse is to tell you not to bother with the AiG article - abstract: "science say this, but we don't believe it because it's not in our bible and God is too banal to do something so wonderful and we hate all other Christians ". Quite how they distinguish between true science that's not in the bible and false science they don't see in the bible is a mystery.
But please, go ahead.
I don't think so. Remember, each page view means PZ gets money from the advertizers. Crackergate paid for a plasma TV, he said. As long as our two would-be literalists stay on this thread and don't derail any others, I don't think he's got a reason to ban anyone.
Me too – and what's worse, I'm sure it doesn't even work: I bet our two would-be literalists simply scroll through them.
–––––––––––––––––––
From the AiG page:
Yes – however, it doesn't work, because Gen 1 says birds and all water animals appeared at the same time and before all land animals, which is just simply wrong.
This would fucking take my fucking breath away if I didn't already know that AiG had this as its Statement of Faith.
There are two hidden assertions in there:
1) the Christian god exists (a very complex assertion, but we can leave it at that);
2) the Bible in general, and Gen 1 in particular, was written under his inspiration.
Now show me where AiG tests these assertions.
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<cricket style="chirp">
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It doesn't. It simply makes those statements and then stops. It does not even try to answer the question "if I were wrong, how would I know?"
Got it? All the rest of that page is irrelevant, because even if it came to the conclusion that the scientists are exactly right about what all the evidence says, it simply would not matter: Mike Riddle would just draw the conclusion that reality itself must be wrong. The whole page, except for this one insane paragraph, was completely written in vain!
I can literally stop here and go to bed.
And that's exactly what I'll do, tired as I am. However, just for the sake of redundancy, I'll still go through the rest of the page over the next day or two (maybe more – as I just said, and as Mr Riddle says loudly and clearly, it's really not a top priority), just to show our two would-be literalists the sheer number of arguments from ignorance that the article makes.
For example, Mr Riddle doesn't even seem to know that there is coal that completely lacks 14C, nor does he seem to know that coal only contains 14C if it lay close to a source of neutrons – and that's quantitative, not qualitative: the closer it lay to a source of neutrons, the more 14C it contains.
Oh bloody hell... alan doesn't even know what a nuclear bomb is...
*facepalm*
You wouldn't have chosen these examples if you didn't think they were fables. Need I continue?
if you realize all religions ARE fables, then no.
if you don't, then yes, as you actually haven't addressed my point to you at all, and haven't even tried to disprove their existence and effect.
I can point to little ice ages being associated with Norse religion and ragnarok (timing is exactly the same).
I'd say that's good evidence to conclude the Norse Pantheon was active and interacted on earth.
can you prove this to be incorrect?
If so, please do.
The scientific and logical standard of AiG's site can be seen with this response to the inerrant Bible's statement that insects have four legs:
Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha!
All hail the Idiot God - on your knees morons!
In comment #1044, RogerS wrote:
But with "Prometheus," we aren't talking about floating vegetation. Rather, we're dealing with a rooted, growing tree(1) that lived through the time period (~4,400 years ago(2)) that you assert(3) a global flood covered "all the continents of the world."
Bristlecone pines, like most trees, increase their girth by adding an annual ring for each year of growth. But interestingly for our discussion here, bristlecones almost never exhibit(4) the multiyear growth flushes (seen in some other trees) that essentially produce a single ring over more than one year(5). Additionally significant, Pinus aristata that live at high altitudes routinely don't add new material during lean years, and so can live through those years without adding rings(4, 6). So a ring count taken on a individual Pinus aristata is going to return a minimum age.
"Prometheus" was dated to 4844 years old when it was cut back in 1964(7). But this is a minimum age considering the above paragraph and the fact that the middle rings of the tree weren't counted.
"Prometheus" lived on the edge of Nevada on the side of a mountain called Wheeler Peak. It grew at an altitude of 10,750 feet above sea level and was rooted in a glacial moraine(7) till that was heavily dominated by quartzite cobbles(8). The morainal gravels overlie the Cambrian-aged Prospect Mountain Quartzite(9, 10), which is the formation that that makes up most of Wheeler Peak. Quartzite is a metamorphosed sandstone; it's sandstone that has been heated and squeezed by enormous pressures until the quartz grains realign.
So what we have is a tree that began life on this mountain just about 5000 years ago (further back than your date for the flood). It sprouted from this glacial moraine and grew on the moraine soils through the time period of the flood.
So, how does your flood model explain this observation? How did this tree live through the flood? You can't say that the water didn't rise that high, because you've already said that the flood waters covered Mt. Everest (comment #372). Wheeler Peak rises to 13,065 feet in elevation; Mt. Everest stands at 29,029 feet above sea level(11). If the waters rose above the elevation of Everest, then this tree was submerged. How did it survive(12)? This tree did not float. It remained in place, rooted in that moraine. Where are the flood deposits on top of the moraine? How did the moraine not get eroded by the flood? What mechanism produced the Prospect Mountain Quartzite? Your flood model must be able to explain this observation and answer these questions.
References and Notes:
1A Pinus aristata, commonly known as a Great Basin bristlecone pine.
2This was asserted or implied by you as the date of the flood in comments #311, #367, and #1044 (and by Alan in #292).
3You asserted or implied that the flood was a global event in comments #311, #326, #365, #372, #430, #544, #1018, #1026, #1035 and #1044, and implied that it completely covered all of the world's landmasses in #372 and weakly implied it in #398).
4www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/154/3752/973
5Glock, W.S. et al., 1960, Classification and multiplicity of growth layers in the branches of trees at
the extreme lower forest border. Smithsonian Misc. Collections 140, No. 1.
6www.nps.gov/grba/planyourvisit/identifying-bristlecone-pines.htm
7A moraine is just a big jumbled bulldozer dump of material (sand, silt, boulders, cobbles, pebbles) pushed into place by the glacier.
8Currey, DR, 1965, An ancient bristlecone pine stand in eastern Nevada. Ecology 46:564-566(lakecounty.typepad.com/Methuselah/Curry-Pines.pdf)
9sbsc.wr.usgs.gov/cprs/news_info/meetings/biennial/proceedings/1993/
physical_resources/BrownandDavila.pdf
10geology.utah.gov/maps/geomap/7_5/pdf/m-140.pdf(this map is from nearby; the stratigraphy is about the same and it provides a good description of the Prospect Mountain)
11You can say that Wheeler Peak was lower then, but like Alan before you, you need to provide some evidence that this was the case (and it's a fine time to try and use that point, since you never weighed in on one side or the other of this point with Mt. Everest earlier in this thread (comment #407).
12Saying that it could live while submerged in that flood water is so preposterous of an explanation that you're going to have a huge hill to climb to make that case.
Seriously, Josh - you have to compile all your posts on this thread into a website or a blog; every time we come across a floodist peddling their delusional nonsense we can direct them to it.
Or, more likely, get to it ourselves to pull the facts out to refute their nonsensical drivel; Alan's fear of reading what's on the Wiens site illustrates how a floodist coward will avoid material against which he has no argument whatsoever, and - because it is written by a Christian - is unable to rely on the canard of 'it must be atheist dogma'.
Hahaha.
The day that the flood model can explain how a 1000-year old bristlecone was able to survive immersion in turbid fresh and or salt magical miracle flood water for 40 to 150 days in a logical, if not scientific manner is the same day I join the monks on Mount Athos on the back of a flying pig.
Did it just hold its breath?
because I KNOW the floodists will miss this point in Josh's post, I'll rephrase it for them:
if the flood is responsible for all the visible geological structures, how can a tree older than the flood grow on top of what would be those geological structures? or are the moraines not flood-geology? if not, how were they formed? (and no, the tree did not get transplanted there during the flood. it doesn't work that way)
I feel your pain.
So 2Chr 4:2 is right and π=3. Take that, 5th Grade math teachers. All this time you've been pratting about 3.14159 and 22/7, when The Word Of God™ plainly says that π is 3.00.
Yes, Alan, you came trying to sell an inferior product in creationism. You have tried to sell it time and time again, but we have you totally stymied with real facts and science. So now what? You and RogerS need to answer that question.
I doubt it. Religion has dulled your mind so much that as a grown man you think the whole world once spent six months on a wooden boat.
David's pain is a sympathetic ache at the unqualified stupidity of a man like you denying the world around him. I suspect that in this lifetime you will never understand enough to appreciate it.
And that constant dull ache in your head is not the same at all.
Jadehawk #1096
Saying it does not make it so.
I already discussed mechanisms that would have an effect of localized reduced salinity including “fountains of the deep”, rain water on floating vegetation mats, and ice melt.
I would agree that trees buried at great depths would not survive but those are not the ones I am discussing. I am discussing just a couple of all the floating ones.
"However, the logs that were deposited in the lake during the Mount St. Helens eruption (1980) still remain and cover a large portion of the surface water."(source)
Some but not all of the floating vegetation mats may have been iced down with snow or sleet causing some plants/insects to go dormant. The mats would also serve for plant bedding as the waters receeded. The following is not a myth:
"Sometimes what appear to be islands rising out of the water are actually drifting masses of peat, mud, and plants. In extreme cases, these "islands", which range in size from a few feet across to hundreds of acres, can contain trees more than 50 feet tall and 8-12 inches in diameter. Though this page pertains to tussocks and floating islands found in Florida, these phenomena are in fact world-wide, witnessed in such places as Argentina, Australia, Finland, India, Japan, Kenya and Papua New Guinea."(source)
(If you believe in Evolution, you only need a mustard seed worth of faith to believe this.)
But you're still ignoring the point raised about how, in such a short space of time, the waters reached the level of salinity they're at now. How did they go from being non-saline enough to allow the pine to survive to the toxic (to trees) level of salinity we have today?
You can't have it both ways. And you're still ignoring the fact that a tree would die if kept under completely fresh water for that length of time.
Then you're dodging because you don't like the answers. As Josh has already noted:
That means there was 16,000 feet of water above the pine being discussed, which puts the pine in the category of 'great depths', does it not?
Thanks to Josh and the others even a science-light like myself can easily burst your delusional bubbles!
roger you dimwit, old pines cannot transplant like that! unless you can show me conclusive evidence that hundred-year-old pines ripped up by storms can become re-anchored somewhere else, my point stands.
we don't do "faith". evidence, or it didn't happen.
BWAHAHAHAHAHA! This from a Creationist whose every argument is nothing but raw, naked assertion!
Let's take that phrase and smack you upside the head with it, with every single assertion you make with no evidence whatsoever:
Saying it does not make it so.
You have no evidence that these so-called "mechanisms" exist!
Saying it does not make it so.
You have no evidence that there ever were "fountains of the deep"!
Saying it does not make it so.
You have no evidence that there ever were "floating vegetation mats" that could have possibly included a bristlecone pine!
Saying it does not make it so.
You have no evidence that there was any "ice melt"! Especially since we have multiple uninterrupted ice cores going back hundreds of thousands of years!
Saying it does not make it so.
The logs on Spirit Lake are stone dead, dead, dead! They are bloody well demised! They are passed on! The trees have ceased to be! They are no more! They have floated off the mortal coil and joined the forest invisible! They are EX-TREES!
Saying it does not make it so.
You have no evidence that any "floating vegetation mat", with a bristlecone pine, or an olive tree, or any other sort of tree except those well-acclimated to salt water is even possible, nor that any of these supposed trees even can "go dormant" when on a putative "floating vegetation mat", frozen or unfrozen, instead of just dying.
Saying it does not fucking well make it so!!!
Show evidence or shut up already!
Alan if you want to convince us that evolution is wrong, first you need to actually understand evolution as we do. Otherwise it would be like us trying to convince you God is fictional based on the notion that God is a giant tyrannosaurus that created the universe by slipping into a quantum wormhole and thus creating an infinity paradox. Does that sound like God to you? If not, then stop pushing your definition of evolution to us. Understand what evolution is before arguing against it!!!
And now a brief intermission of the (Rogers and Allen) comedy routine.Since someone mentioned Plate tech, can someone tell me who came up with this theory?
Some people are sometimes over their head here, but RogerS is buried at great depths.
--
sphere coupler, Wikipedia is your friend. Plate tectonics.
I know Wegener was the accepted founder however Samuel Warren Carey was a great advocate of this theory until he realized that plate tech is but a minor action. He derived a (before its time) yet less acceptable theory, one that has been scoffed at by religion and politics as well, however his theories about EET may yet be proven...not from geology but from particle physics which is not good news for a young earth theory and is in more line with carbon dating.
All solar system bodies accrete and they will continue to do so until their demise, which of course is the final chapter of many story books.
How Can a Bristlecone Pine Predate the Flood by 500 Years?
Bristlecone pine trees have a high chance of surviving flood waters for numerous reasons. Click here to view numerous photos of how the tree already has the character of drift wood. Could the tree survive if it was uprooted? The trees can grow in a highly aerated soil of pure sand or on top of limestone. Bristlecones have a wide, shallow root system. The probability for a tree being successfully relocated increases proportionately to the number of trees growing at the time of the flood. If 1 million trees were growing, then only 0.1% needed to survive to end up with 1000 trees. Freezing water or glacial action may have played a role in preservation. Surely you can imagine success because your model postulates a lone cell surviving in a primordial sea. The bristlecone’s growth rate of about 1 inch per century means that the Prometheus Bristlecone tree had to be only 5-6 inches at the time of the flood. The tree survives despite most of its outer portion dying, leaving a hard, dense, resinous protective cover which makes it resistant to rot and disease. The tree’s ability to survive is incredible because of its extremely slow growth rate. If you look at the various photos, you’ll notice that several trees appear to be thriving even though they look as if they were planted in random crooked non-vertical positions. Bristlecone pines THRIVE in alkaline soil. Current-day seawater has a PH of 7.5 – 8.4, but more than likely the flood waters were closer to 7.0 with less salinity as defined in the young-Earth creationist model.
Another mechanism for the trees survival (and many other organisms) was gigantic floating log mats created when flood waters stripped entire forests from the continents. Click here to view. If you saw a conglomeration of floating debris the size of Hawaii (reasonable size given the size of much larger forested areas 4400 years ago), what would be the chances for some of that organic matter to resume growth again when it settles? I’ve personally seen 6” trees in a park that toppled to their side after a flood with their roots exposed. Some of those roots found soil and the tree sprouted leaves the next season before the park workers removed the fallen tree.
Someone asked how the dove returned with an olive leaf in its mouth when Noah released it from the ark if all the trees were dead. When an olive seed sprouts, the first thing that is formed is a leaf. An entire tree is not necessary. The mountain tops had already been exposed for 47 days when the dove returned with the leaf. Start reading at Gen 8:6.
If you can’t visualize pre-existing life surviving a flood, then how in the world can you visualize non-living matter turning into living things? Actually, the oldest-known living things are damaging to old-age theories since nothing extends back more than about 5000 years.
Alan, please stop insulting our intelligence. We have no need to engage in your biblical fantasy, please show that you understand the sciences involved by giving coherent definitions of the processes and using peer reviewed literature anywhere you go against the consensus, or please go and study some more before talking. It's painful to watch someone so oblivious go at it.
Drawing it does not make it so!
You have no evidence that any of these creatures ( 1, 2, 3 ) ever existed except in the mind of the artist.
Alan 'Master of FAIL' Clarke wrote:
I'm not botanist but I'm off the opinion freezing water isn't all that good for tree roots. I'm sure one of the genuine science-types will know for sure.
And you do realise there's more than salinity the tree would have had to cope with, don't you, Alan? If the entire earth was covered in water there'd be a lot of extremely toxic substances floating around in there. Not many of them likely to be good for trees I wouldn't imagine.
Wrong!
Hilariously, the Wikipedia page on bristlecone pines features this juicy sentence: Recently, Swedish researchers discovered a self-cloning spruce in Dalarna that has been dated to just under 10,000 years old. link
How much more than 5,000 is 10,000 Alan?
Where does the 'lone' come from, Alan? Again, not my topic, but I would gather that, when the circumstances that kick-started life occurred, many cells may have been formed.
But, since you don't appear to be able to define what evolution is, why would I be surprised you're also ignorant of what abiogenesis is?
Alan Clarke,
You have no evidence that any of these creatures ( 1, 2, 3 ) a global flood ever existed except in the mind of the artist scientifically illiterate Israelite tribespeople who thought that a flood which covered a lot of land could have covered the whole world.
Fixed. I'll add to your tab.
Answer: There was no global flood. Bristlecone pines have been growing undisturbed for many thousands of years.
Saying it does not make it so.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_long-living_organisms
Nothing extends back more than about 5000 years... except for the above organisms, the coral reefs, the polar ice caps, carbon-dated cities and settlements all over the world, fossils from all points in time before the Holocene, the Earth itself, the moon, the sun, the solar system, all of the galaxies with all of their suns, and the universe itself.
Science has the evidence. Science wins.
Kel: Alan if you want to convince us that evolution is wrong, first you need to actually understand evolution as we do.
Kel, you must remember that I had evolution jammed down my throat my entire educated life. Every time I turn on the TV, National Geographic and Nova keep me abreast. You want me to study it more? You've had your chance and have failed. A LOT people feel the same way. That's why I am presenting something that offers an alternative to Nova's wiggly-looking jello forming into tadpoles. (I'm not making this up.) Perhaps my children will read my postings in an archive 30 years from now and think, "My old dad was right!" I admit a lot of this requires filling in the blanks since I wasn't an eye-witness 6000 years ago, but neither were you. One thing I'm certain of is this:
Mat 24:37 But as the days of Noah were, so shall also the coming of the Son of man be.
You weren't there but you're certain you evolved, right?
No, I want you to show that you understand the theory by providing a coherent definition of it. Last time you just used evolution as a mask to attack atheism - that's not what evolution is and you aren't going to convince anyone while you persist to use evolution as a straw-man attack. All I'm asking for is you to show that you understand, I'm not asking you to change your mind, just that you know what you are talking about. Is that really to much to ask of you?
From the similarities and differences with respect to both my parents, yes I'm sure I've evolved.
Oh, bullshit. You have given no indication whatsoever that you even watched any of those programs, let alone understood them. Your entire time here has been your pathetic demonstration of your complete failure to understand anything at all about science and how it works.
No, you have failed. You have been a complete and utter hypocrite, trying to claim "science" is on the side of creation while completely rejecting actual scientific standards of evidence, parsimony, and falsification.
I certainly hope they get a better education than that, and think "My old dad was completely, utterly, humiliatingly ignorant and insane!"
You weren't present at your own conception, but I sure hope you don't think that you were dropped by a stork or found under a cabbage leaf.
Science follows the evidence. Science finds the dates of things from the evidence. Creationists ignore the evidence.
Science wins.
You lose.
alan: being surrounded by science != understanding science. that's like saying: sitting around the library = learning content of books in library. it doesn't work that way, you actually need to put some effort into understanding things. and so far you've demonstrated that you've even failed to grasp even the basics of any single subject this and the previous thread have touched upon. i mean, ffs, you think that the science-y part of making a nuclear bomb is the delivery!
As my 5 year old self complained to my Mum after school - "they told me that God made me, so I told them my Mum and Dad made me." If you can't figure out what this means Alan, then you have no understanding of where any of us are coming from, and as such you'll have no ability to convert us. It's a waste of time, not because we are closed-minded, but because you can't empathise with our point of view. If you can't understand where we are coming from, then you won't understand how you can reach us.
No evidence at all, except their fossilised bone structure, skin, hair and feather impressions, morphological similarities to known and extant species, etc, etc, etc...
Yeah. They're artistic impressions, so of course they won't represent exact reality. Right there in your example of Paranthropus boisei you've got two different impressions of what it might have looked like. I'd say the larger image is too 'humanised' to be really accurate; seems to follow the skull for the head shape fairly well, then slaps human eyes and a nose on to finish.
(By the way -- referencing a photo with a Google Image search string? Come on man, that's just sloppy. Find the original source.)
In any reconstructive artwork, there will be some details with creative license. Dinosaur colours are pretty much completely arbitrary, because colour is not preserved in fossils. Precise gaits, behaviours etc. can only be inferred at best. But what they looked like in general terms? That's pretty clear.
Oh, and with regards to your skull-to-illustration match-up:
You moron.
In comment #1110, Alan wrote:
This isn't about us not being able to visualize pre-existing life surviving a flood. This is about you providing plausible mechanisms for that life surviving. So far, all you have done is assert. By plausible mechanisms, we're asking for evidence at the same level of detail that we're providing for you. We're arguing in good faith, trying to carry on an actual discussion. You're insulting our efforts by engaging in an extended Gish Gallop, failing to answer direct questions for days, and providing large handwaving jumbles of word salad that don't refute any points, largely because they're so grammatically poor that we can't figure out what the hell you're actually saying.
Be honest, and provide a plausible mechanism for how "Prometheus" could have survived immersion in more than 16,000 feet of water, fresh or salt (hint: studies that demonstrate that Pinus spp. can survive immersion at all would be great here; just showing us a photo and asserting things on the basis of it isn't okay unless you can back up those assertions with actual work that has been done somewhere). Provide evidence that Pinus spp. trees can re-root when uprooted and moved (hint: this would be the place to go find a study demonstrating this). Yes, trees that fall over and expose root balls can still send off shoots. That's not the same thing that we're talking about here at all and I rather suspect you know that. Where are the flood deposits overlying the glacial till on Wheeler Peak from the receding flood waters? You know, those deposits that you and RogerS have been asserting for days accumulated everybloodywhere else in the damn world? Where are the deposits on top of that glacial moraine? And let's talk about that moraine, shall we? What is the mechanism for that deposit forming? Where does that glacier fit in the flood model? And what about Wheeler Peak itself. "Promethus" grew at an elevation of 10,750 feet on a glacial deposit that was draped over a tiny part of a quartzite mass that rises to an elevation of 13,063 feet. What about this giant mass of the Prospect Mountain Quartzite? I presume that this formation had to pre-date the flood? What mechanism produced all of the sand in this giant mass of quartzite? What mechanism then metamorphosed that sand deposit into the metamorphic rock that is quartzite?
Your flood model must explain ALL of these observations, Alan. Some armwaving about floating vegetation mats and an anecdote about toppled trees sending up leafy shoots simply doesn't cut it. That kind of crap work wouldn't have gotten us to the moon, Alan. You have to do better than that. You must address ALL of the observations on Wheeler Peak with your flood model for it to work, just like you must address the questions I asked you in comment #882. If you can't do this, at the level of individual rock exposures like the glacial moraine on Wheeler or that sequence in Iowa from #882, then your flood model FAILS. Period.
And why are you talking about pre-existing life surviving the flood, anyway? Isn't that being inconsistent?
Where in Genesis 7:4 does it say that anything that wasn't on the ark was going to survive the flood?
Where in Genesis 7:5 does it indicate that Noah failed in the task set before him?
Where in Genesis 7:21 does it say, even imply, anything about life that wasn't on the ark surviving the flood?
Where in Genesis 7:22 does it say, even imply, anything about life that wasn't on the ark surviving the flood?
Where in Genesis 7:23 does it say, even imply, anything about life that wasn't on the ark surviving the flood?
Where in Genesis 7:24 does it say, even imply, anything about life that wasn't on the ark surviving the flood?
And yes, you can thank me later for not asking you for studies related to Pinus aristata specifically. As I stated in comment #1123, work done on any species of Pinus would be fine as a starting point (just in case you're unfamiliar with the shorthand spp.).
Somehow I have managed to miss this thread 'until today and I must say it is a doozy. Well done to the usual suspects for your answers with a special mention in dispatches for Josh. I have learned a great deal and, of equal if not greater importance, your wealth of answers repaired the stoopid caused by reading Alan and RogerS' dross. So thank you one and all for joyfully sharing your knowledge and the stoopid repair.
Alan FM, SmD(candidate), wrote in comment #1110:
So, now you're adding glaciers to the flood model? How do they fit in? Where is the biblical justification for incorporating them?
Citation, please. this is how it's done here, Alan. Back up what you say or go home.
You're going to be so sad when you look into the pHs of soils that develop on glacial tills. Oh, and do you have a citation for the alakaline assertion?
Another gem from Alan Clarke FM, SmD(candidate):
Were you at the Battle of Gettysburg? Are you certain it took place?
Have you ever personally observed Neptune through an eyepiece, Alan?
Oh joy, the clueless RogerS #1101 and Alan #1110, 1112, and 1116, again show why they have no idea of what is and isn't scientific presentation. There was absolutely no science in those four posts. There was a lot of unsubstantiated speculation, and references to already refuted literature. Hint boys, anything in AIG is refuted by TalkOrigins. As I explained early, once it is scientifically refuted, it stays refuted. So you must remove AIG from your list of possible citations. Failure to do say means you are impeding your arguments.
You haven't answered this question, What do you hope to gain by continued posts, other than more humiliation?
Last sentence first paragraph #1128: Failure to do sayso...
I need coffee.
Alan Clarke @1116
How true, how so very, very true.
Roger @1026
1. I don't have a blog.
2. My name sounds asian! Really!
3. Sven @1032, brilliant.
Alan and Roger the Dodger
At least you tried! Jigging and dancing and dodging and failing. But you tried.
Again with the none answers. See Josh at 1123 to see how you were inconsistent.
Unanswered.
Unanswered.
Unanswered.
3 questions to go, so you earn another uncomfortable fact.
The Gospel of Matthew has Jesus born in the time of Herod, that is before 4 BCE. The Gospel of Luke has Jesus born during the census of Quirinius, that is 6/7 AD. Can you please explain this discrepancy for us.
Wowbagger, OM #1102
Irrelevant, localized reduced salinity in vicinity of the life form is all that is required.
RogerS, boy, are you deluded. Your post 1133 is a classic example of avoiding the point. You made a claim, but offered no citation to the Peer Reviewed Primary Scientific Literature (PRPSL) to support you claim, so it just fails due to no backing, and being illogical self-serving. You will never convince us of anything with such and inept tactic. You wonder why we laugh at you? It is due to such disrespect for the facts. The truth is there is no backing for your claim. So, what does that make you?
CosmicTeapot said
That one's easy, Druid magic :) After all, if he can claim a magic sky god, so can I.
RogerS at #1133 (apparently trying to earn the degree of FM (Master of Fail) that has already been bestowed upon Alan) wrote:
That's an interesting hypothesis. Now, test it. Try to find some indication that such pockets of localized reduced salinity can exist, at the same location, for extended periods of time, in bodies of highly turbulent water. Indeed, perhaps you should start with trying to find some indication that such pockets of localized reduced salinity can exist, at the same location, for extended periods of time, in bodies of calm water (understanding, of course, that calm water is a poor analog for the flood). After that, perhaps try to find evidence that they can exist in bodies of turbulent water.
It might be simpler, though, to start at an even earlier point and demonstrate that species of Pinus can survive complete immersion in water, be it salt or fresh, for any length of time. Again, at this early stage, any species of Pinus would be acceptable.
Wowbagger, OM #1113
The link also includes, "The age of its genetic material was recently calculated using carbon dating at a laboratory in Miami, Florida."
The laundry list of radioisotope carbon-14 corrections and required "calibrating" is too long to repeat. Of course, a global flood was not in the re-calibration list. Read (here).
RogerS,
As opposed to all the supported scientific evidence for anything in favour of a global flood. Here's a hint, Roger - mostly reliable is a lot better than not reliable at all. Guess which we have and which you have?
And you're also making the same mistakes Alan has made in citing material that actually undermines your argument even further than not citing it would have.
How's that? Well, the Wikipedia page you cited on radiocarbon dating - in a flimsy attempt to cast doubt on its dating capacity - had this section: Relatively recent (2001) evidence has allowed scientists to refine the knowledge of one of the underlying assumptions. A peak in the amount of carbon-14 was discovered by scientists studying speleothems in caves in the Bahamas. Stalagmites are calcium carbonate deposits left behind when seepage water, containing dissolved carbon dioxide, evaporates. Carbon-14 levels were found to be twice as high as modern levels.[20] These discoveries improved the calibration for the radiocarbon technique and extended its usefulness to 45,000 years into the past.[21]
You cited this page, Roger. Pray, tell me - how can something be considered useful for precision as far back as 45,000 years if there's only 6,000 years of history?
Dodging again Roger. Carbon 14 dating is very reliable, and those that do it for a living know all the pitfalls. After all, they are smarter than you. So still no scientific data to back up your inane and frankly illogical ideas. HAHAHAHAHA. You are funny Roger. Here's an idea. Get a clue how science really works. You won't look so foolish.
Wait, wouldn't that be MF? Oh, wait, my bad......
More then a thousand comments, I called it. It is time to set up an exclusion Alan Clarke and RogerS themed thread so that they do not hijack any random thread.
Posted by: reboho
Ridicule without substance is my honor.
Truth will ultimately triumph; which side will you be on?
Nope, I think it should be FM, MF.
Pharyngula is populated by a bunch of ELITISTS, remember? If they are gonna call us elitists, then I say we embrace it, and confer our degrees in Latin. And because of the general flexibility of word order in Latin, we of course should use the more pretentious options for degree titles (e.g., Artium Baccalaureus; Philosophiae Doctoris).
Thus, I propose that a Master of Fail should be an FM and a Doctor of Strawman should be an SmD. Although perhaps it should be a Doctor of the Strawman Fallacy, whereby we could abbreviate it SfD. I think I might like that one better (and perhaps we should think about creating an SfM too (or perhaps this content area is only a master's level discipline)). I'm of course open to suggestions, especially as I wasn't involved in establishing the course of study and requirements needed to earn the Master of Fail...
The side of truth: science and evolution. The side without the fictional bible and imaginary deities, and the deluded people who believe in them.
John Phillips, FCD #1125,
Somehow I have managed to miss this thread 'until today and I must say it is a doozy.
It's a wild ride, isn't it? Well, not so much wild perhaps as surrealistic in kind of a creepy way. Alan seems to have not gotten enough hugs from his father or something. He drops little clues every once in awhile, like in #1116 where he says: “Kel, you must remember that I had evolution jammed down my throat my entire educated life.” It seems that he was traumatized by a lack of parental empathy, went emotionally autistic, and is now curled up in a church basement fondling the muzzle of a 44. Magnum and a picture of Jesus.
Roger I don’t know about. He sounds somehow less fanatical and more typical of the kind of Christian I grew up with, i.e., utterly clueless about how science works and utterly devoted to the idea of unblinking faith and the attainment of salvation. If he doesn’t himself get all choked up and emotional when thanking jesus for forgiving him of his sins while saying grace before Sunday dinner then he almost certainly is surrounded by people who do. (I could be wrong, of course. The hypothesis needs evidence to back it up, but no way am I going to do the required investigation.)
Christians like Roger and Alan will not be swayed from their beliefs by any amount of evidence because they don’t live in a world of evidence. But this thread hasn’t been a waste of time. I’ve learned so much! Thanks guys!
And thank you, Alan and Roger, for providing a brilliant demonstration of the difference between science and religion, and reminding me yet again of just how aberrant, impenetrable and murky your world unconditional faith is, and why I reject it utterly. It has been very sobering.
Truth will ultimately triumph; which side will you be on?
You have no respect at all for truth.
Wow. That image was brutal. I think you have the nice solid makings of a fiction writer inside of you...
+10
Wow. That image was brutal. I think you have the nice solid makings of a fiction writer inside of you...
Cool! I just hope the publisher thinks so.
Ramblin Dude, have to agree with you. And before I finally leave for my bed a final big, big thanks to Josh, David M, WowBagger and so many more for an educational tour de force. It was a joy to behold and a pleasure to learn. Only a shame it was wasted on the two creotards.
Random quote that happened to pop up this time:
–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
One thing I overlooked:
…while failing at the rest of the theory of relativity: it ascribes faster-than-light velocities to the vast majority of stars.
And a book.
What do I care what the Nerd says. I don't cite him to bolster my points. Evidence would convert all of us to creationism – I've just never seen any, and you haven't even tried to show us any.
You see, the Nerd is wrong in theory, but happens to be right in practice, unless you will drastically change your approach: as long as you keep citing nothing but the Bible and random arguments from ignorance, you won't convince any of us.
And that state is supposed to have lasted throughout the Flood?
You have to learn to keep your thoughts coherent, Roger.
And how does a bristlecone pine get into peat in the first place? Pines don't grow in bogs.
This will be a shocker for you, but we don't believe in evolution.
Reality is that which doesn't go away if you stop believing in it.
I've seen it happen with my own eyes. I know it occurs, and the theory of evolution – no matter whether I might like it or not – is the most overarching and most parsimonious explanation found for it so far. That's a fact. I don't need to believe it any more than I need to believe there's a computer screen in front of me.
I do not have faith the size of a mustard seed, or the size of a clubmoss microspore, or even the size of a proton. I don't believe, I don't have faith at all.
This is a math question. Creationists don't do math. It's probably of the devil or something.
Science, on the other hand, quantifies and must quantify. One more reason why there's no such thing as "creation science".
Of the hypothesis of continental drift, not the theory of plate tectonics (which explains why the continents drift).
Evidence?
Also, there is no "tech" in tectonics. There's nothing technical about it. It isn't even pronounced the same in Greek.
Expanding Earth?
The people who believe in that are called EEdiots, for a very good reason – all their arguments are arguments from ignorance, as if they were creationists.
Also, science theory fail: science cannot prove, only disprove. No theory can be proven, not even in principle.
How?
Yes, but not at the rates that the EEdiots have to assume. If they were right, the inner planets and moons would all be covered by kilometer-thick layers of extraterrestrial sediment. Hint: they aren't.
No, actually… it doesn't.
Why do you keep talking about things you don't know anything about?!?
Have you no fucking shame?
What I just said.
Biggest non-sequitur I've seen for months.
[Link number 3 corrected for sheer mind-blowing stupidity.]
Hey, look, a dinosaur denialist!
1: We have their bones, and in most cases we have their feathers. I think it was back on the Titanoboa thread where Josh and I flooded you with references. As usual, you were too fucking cowardish to check any of those out.
I've been to museums in Beijing, Lingyuan, Sihetun and Beipiao (all in northeastern China). I have seen several of these things with my own eyes.
I mean, what next? Will you deny the existence of the computer screen in front of me?
Point and laugh at the dinosaur denialist!
2: That's a fake. A fossil dealer took a slab that contained most of a bird with 20 teeth per jaw quarter (Yanornis) and added another slab that contained the legs and tail with feathers of a dromaeosaurid (Microraptor) to make a unique animal that would fetch a higher price. Dinosaur experts quickly noticed it was a fake (the manuscript that described it as real was rejected by Nature, Science, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of the USA).
Instead of one transitional animal, we have two in there. Lose-lose situation for creationists. As usual.
3: You can't possibly deny the existence of the figured skull. So, you lose.
Months. It's day 47.
That bears repeating.
Yes, and each time the error bars have shrunk.
Because it wasn't necessary. :-|
That was fucking beautiful.
I have been to the Bristlecone grove in the White Mountains. Beautiful spot, in an arid and desolate kind of way. (It's also HOT in the summer, and at very high altitude-- bring lots of water!) It was quite a treat for me as I had wanted to go since I was a kid and first heard about the 5000 year old trees.
For some reason, I got more of a charge from seeing the occasional seedling than I did from seeing the oldest trees. Felt like breathing deep time.
Suffice it to say, the experience would be wasted on Alan and Roger.
A remark that, I am sure you are glad to learn, deserves special attention.
You are proud of that, aren't you?
As to your children, well if there really are useful intelligence genes, the chances are that they too will accept the irrational and the belief in the Big Fairy that you do. Or at least most of them.
But..to boldly go where no preposition has gone before - I don't accept that. In all likelihood, you will have deliberately infected your kids with your own insane belief system, and prolonged indoctrination in your faith, together with what I assume (I could be wrong!) are your batshit crazy ideas about "the afterlife" - perhaps best summarised by "Wait till your Father gets home!" - will probably terrify them through the age of potential reason so that hey will share some of your "ideas" and pass fairly happily into maturity with only (only!) the legacy of a reality-denying world view and the influence of a father who held to it throughout their childhood.
An unfortunate and potentially crippling legacy, as I'm sure you will agree..
(And let's not even consider what will happen if despite your best efforts, they turn out to be gay!)
Your mere presence and posting here indicate strongly that you are an intellectual (tiny "i") Bully (enormous fucking "B") who takes no advice from people far more knowledgeable than he is, and engages in a deeply dishonest exercise or religious apologetics in a futile attempt to enbiggen his wasted intellect.
I just hope that this repellent aspect of your internet persona does not spill over too heavily into your child-rearing practices but, I have to say, I fear the worst ;O
Aren't you?
Oh, and clearly, all this also applies to the equally witless and arrogant RogerS.
Cordially,
AnthonyK :O
Woohoo! All barrels at once! Euthanasia can be so cool!
They do say that, somewhere deep within Pharyngula, such a thread exists...
....and ridicule without cease your destiny..
That's the genitive, the nominative is Philosophiae Doctor.
Strangely enough, the ordinary word order is used over here: Doctor philosophiae, abbreviated Dr. phil. – now replaced by Dr. rer. nat. (rerum naturalium "of natural affairs" – of natural sciences), Dr. rer. soc. (social sciences), and so on.
BTW, here are a few quotes (from Thomas Henry Huxley), the exact opposite of the AiG Statement of Faith, which may help explain to our two geology/biology/physics/reality denialists the mindset that we come from:
AnthonyK, I meant "exclusive". As always, I blame Chimpy's Cooties. How they get spread by use of keyboard, I have no idea.
Damn, I was going for scorn.
Based on what you've posted here I'm pretty sure whatever side your on is the one I don't want to be on.
No worries Janine. Incidentally, I should have worked the word "rebarbitive" into my criticism of the two morons. Apologies for its absence.
Damn, I was going for scorn.
Not sure what you think truth is, but based on what I've read from you I'm pretty sure whatever side you're on is the one I don't want to be on.
It's not original, I learned it here… I just found that the Pharyngula Quote File attributes the arguably better wording "Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away" to a Philip K. Dick, whoever that is.
Now that was fucking beautiful. I'm so stealing that!
That's because he honestly doesn't know that such people even exist.
Full-on Dunning-Kruger effect.
Pharyngula statement of faith:
We accept reality.
Or is that too strong?
Fuck. You're right. Well, my Latin was a long time ago...
The universities over here that use the reverse word order have been doing it since their foundings.
*shrugs*
and that the name of the thread is FAILlapalooza!
AnthonyK, with as much snark that I fire, even to the good guys, I better be able to take some back.
I had to look up that word. It does fit. But you also have Chimpy's Cooties. It is "rebarbative". Hum, my spellcheck does not recognize the word and the suggestions do not even come close.
I think they inhabit the intertoobs, and occasionally come out to a keyboard to feed.
And Guys, DM is right, if you presented the proper scientific evidence showing that the flud actually happened, I would go with the evidence. However, I am well aware that at the present time there is essentially no such evidence in the PRPSL supporting the flud. Your alleged evidence isn't scientific, and doesn't have the breadth required to support your flud hypohypothesis. It is also painfully obvious, you have no idea how to find the proper information, what that information actually means, and how to properly present it. So effectively there is no chance of changing my mind in the near future based upon what you are likely to present.
David Marjanović, Philip K Dick was a science fiction author and since his death almost a quarter of a century ago, his stature has grown.
You can check here and here.
I would recommend The Man In The High Castle, Dr Bloodmoney, The Three Stigmata Of Palmer Eldritch, Ubik, Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep aka Bladerunner, or A Scanner Darkly. Yeah, I am a fan.
David Marjanović, OM | March 26, 2009 12:40 PM
Dave try to keep an open mind, it has been proven that science is only correct for its day and it can always be built upon, given that it has a sound base. Do not take my statements as fact only as one who keeps an open mind to scientific progress.Of course not all solar system bodies will or would accrete at the same rate. The earth is somewhat special in that it's initial accretion ring was at a specific distance from the source (sun). There are many factors that lead me in this direction, not least of all the ability of the existing and the possibility of past differing composite spheres that surround each planetary body.Please once again keep in mind that everything known is in transition, from the smallest sub-atomic particle to the best theoretical descriptions.As far as EET goes, it cannot be advanced by the mainstream academic community because of the mindset derived so long ago, however inroads have been made starting with S.W.C. despite the crazy looking picture on wikipedia ha! NASA has many satellites aloft in the study of sphere coupling, sphere evolution, particle precipitation and the role it plays in planetary evolution.In time my Internet friend...Academia and religion will have to reevaluate the foundations on which we have gained great knowledge.We are constantly being bombarded by many differing particles from the source(Leptons, Ions,etc) not just photons and in many differing delivery systems.
P.S. I am not an avid follower of the EET current phenomena and have not based any credence to any data that is not profoundly logical whether it disturbs academia or religion alike.
Sci-Fi writer, Bladerunner, Total Recall, Minority Report, A Scanner Darkly are all movies based on his stories. I started reading him with "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?". That's the book Bladerunner is based on. His "The Minority Report" is far superior to the movie and "Ubik" is my favorite.
And what distance was that, exactly?
You have much still to learn, young padawan.
I just found that the Pharyngula Quote File attributes the arguably better wording "Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away" to a Philip K. Dick, whoever that is.
Whoever that is!
Philip K. Dick was one of the greatest sci-fi writers of all time.
He wrote Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? upon which the movie Blade Runner was based; We Can Remember It for You Wholesale prompting the movie Total Recall; A Scanner Darkly; Minority Report; and others.
A deep thinker.
I'm familiar with Dick's writings. I had never seen that quote before. It's simply terrific.
Horselover Fat is Phil Dick.
What? Did I just give something away
#1136Posted by: Josh
Ocean currents and turbulence are quite complex involving many factors including the sun, moon, wind, temperature gradients, depth, volcanism, tectonic plate movement, and according to the flood model, action of "fountains of the deep". Quiet spots, as in the eye of hurricanes, would likely occur in some areas of the entire globe. A small source of fresh water in turbulent conditions would likewise have small impact on salinity. The converse is true and the volume of the fresh water input (for localized reduced salinity) would be unparallel in history. A large percentage of all the world's vast vegetation amassed in floating mats, consisting of many square miles of vegetation (forests predominately removed by water action, not 1000 deg C pyroclastic flows as in the Mount St. Helens eruption) would undoubtedly present opportunities for improved preservation and according to size, experiencing less turbulence toward the center of the floating debris. The thickness of some vege-mats may have been substantial.
-I would add that finding "life" after the flood would likely be greater than finding life on Mars, which many scientists are invested in.
Josh | March 26, 2009 2:10 PM
In cosmogony this is referred to as the solar nebular hypothesis. Our specific distance is between Venus and Mars.On the grand scale, this IS pretty specific.
RogerS, you have been concentrating on one small aspect of the big picture. You are still in the speculation stage even there, and have proven nothing. This is your problem. You need backup to your speculation. This can't come from your fictional bible, but must come from the PRPSL. So, even if you show one small point, you can't demonstrate the larger picture. The whole world. The whole biota. The historical record. The dating problems for you. Keep that in mind.
Yeah. I'm familiar with it.
I don't know what grand scale means. Your previous statement implied that you had evidence to suggest that the orbit of the proto-earth is precisely known with respect to the location, within the nebular, of the proto-sun.
Posted by: RogerS | March 26, 2009 2:30 PM
"I would add that finding "life" after the flood would likely be greater than finding life on Mars, which many scientists are invested in."
I must emphatically disagree, anywhere you find H2O it will be possible to find life...it's just harder to look.AND being the curious animals that we are, we WILL keep looking.
Yep. I'm with you there.
Okay, but hurricanes don't remain in one place. You need to keep your local area of reduced salinity around the growing tree for the whole time (presuming, of course, that reduce salinity solves the problem of the tree being submerged in the first place).
But so would the amount of sediment input into the overall system. You're creating a level of turbulence that would also be unparallelled in history. That's gonna move stuff around. If you're using the flood model to explain the sedimentary veneer that covers the continental interiors, then you're talking about MILES of sediment thickness. If that is getting moved around and deposited by this huge turbulent body of water, then the input of fresh water from the rains isn't going to matter much. Not only that, but this amount of material in the water pretty much erases the possiblity of reduced salinity zones by any mechanism.
Where is the evidence for this? And, this has nothing to do with our tree anyway.
I don't know what you mean, here. Preservation of what? Less water turbulence at the center of the mats?
Ours? Nah. It's mine now.
I've done enough research on the damn thing to feel some attachment to it. I'll fight you.
Pharyngula DEATHMATCH!
Posted by: Josh | March 26, 2009 2:38 PM
Sorry Josh I did not mean to imply a source of knowledge is privy to me.A grand scale(poor choice of words)solar system scale. It would indeed be quite a task to specifically place the proto-planet distance from the sun 15 billion years ago, yet I'm speculating it's distance remained between the Venus and Mars proto-planet rings. Seems logical to me...not exactly my interest of study.
It'll never become fossilised in limestone you know...
That's fine. I like clastic rocks better anyway.
@sphere coupler--oh, okay. I understand what you meant, now.
What? Oh, right, I forgot. You have nothing but ridicule without substance — nothing but stupidity without sanity; nothing but lies without even a tiny speck of truth the size of a mustard seed.
Well, for the sake of Alan's children when they grow up (since it's obviously useless to try and instruct Creationists, since Creationists hate truth, and are compulsive liars determined to oppose truth at all times), if there had been square miles of vegetation, then all of the bristlecone pines that predate the supposed flud would be surrounded by square miles of dead vegetation. There would be compacted piles of this supposed vegetation at the base of every mountain in the southwest, which could be carbon dated to the supposed flood. That's the evidence that should be there. That's the evidence that Creationists don't have.
There are no square miles of compacted vegetation mats, anywhere near the Sierra Nevada. There were no square mile vegetation mats. There were no fountains of the deep. There was no global flood. The bristlecone pines have been growing, utterly peaceful and undisturbed, for thousands of years.
They were still young and growing slowly as, far away in Egypt, the Pharaoh Unas ruled his kingdom. The only "flooding" in Egypt was that of the Nile, with its annuals rise as it brought fresh soil down from the East African highlands every summer, the same as it always did for the many thousands of years that Egypt had been settled before the reign of Unas.
There was no global flood. Deal with it.
Dude! Clastic rock? You mean, like Zeppelin and Skynyrd?
Sphere coupler..errr....wrong blog mate. You'll be much happier here.
- which is a dinosaur site more suited to your discourse level.
Josh - I am simply laying claim to the only tree in the whole world to be uprooted by the flood, to hold its breath for 6 months, and to replant itself exactly as if nothing had happened. Who said it was yours? I invoke the law of dibbs. And, come winter, I'm gonna burn that motherfucker, ring by miraculous ring.
What 'cha gonna do about it?
*smacks Watchman while rolling eyes*
"Play FREEEEEEEEBIRD!"
Bullshit, Anthony. You don't get to call "dibbs" unless you place your hand on the goddamn thing. You know the rules. Oh, no, my friend. For you, it's "Trial by StoneTM!"
There are at least 5 claimants on the reality-based side — Josh, AnthonyK, CJO, David M, and me.
But how about we wait until we wrestle the damn thing away from the Team Creobot claimants?
(I got an Occam's Razor. Do not make me cut you!)
AnthonyK | March 26, 2009 3:44 PM
Not familiar with your specific taste of social programing.This would explain a lot about the idiocy of some of the younger generation.
I grew up watching atom ant and mighty mouse, a much more logical form of entertainment.HA HA.
Great, Owl. Now they're just gonna go run and grab Facilis, who claims to have an Occam's Chainsaw.
Oh well. Just more carnage.
In other news, education fail:
http://failblog.org/2009/03/26/meat-fail/
Oh, and just to prove it here is a photo of me receiving the ownership certificate from President Clinton. As you can see, we are both just out of shot.
It wasn't a funny picture, but I laughed my ass off when I clicked that.
By the way, as an aside for Josh and David M, and anyone else who was following along on the now-closed "debate with creationists" thread after Nat Weeks joined.
I found out something else interesting about Nat. Remember how he mentioned going to San Diego? Well, guess what is in San Diego that has his name prominently on it?
http://www.sdcc.edu/uploadedFiles/07-08CATALOG.pdf
Note that it's a huge bloated file. His name is on page 196:
BOARD OF TRUSTEES
Rex Krueger
Chairman of the Board
Ronald Baker
Robert Harp
Steven Lamm
Gene Leslie
Michael Maples
Michael May
Charles Morse
Shirley Peters
Greg Pyke
→ Nat Weeks ←
Rob Zinn
Well, well, well.
If you go back and read page 13-14, there's a bit of history: The San Diego Christian College was formerly part of the Institute for Creation Research!
(see also here:
http://www.texscience.org/reviews/icr-thecb-certification.htm
)
As one last piece of burning irony, you may recall that his parting shot before his trip to Texas was a quote-mine about science teaching being "propaganda".
All I have to say is, glance at pages 8-10. The damn thing starts of with an iron-clad dogmatic religious doctrine. Sorry, what was that about "propaganda" again, Mister Creationist Hypocrite?
Godamn did he shake hands well! (As you can see)
Thanks, everyone. Those movie titles ring a bell.
<duck & cover>
B-)
Er… and? What's your point?
How is the sun a source of accretion rings? And… don't you mean accretion disk?
What do you mean by those spheres?
Again, what do you mean?
No. It cannot be advanced because the evidence is against it.
What?
You are hallucinating.
What does "sphere evolution" even mean? Do spheres reproduce?
Are you talking about the solar wind?
"Logical" is not enough, it also must not contradict the evidence.
Also, I don't think "phenomenon" means what you think it means.
Your l33t linguistics sgillz. :-)
How is that supposed to happen?
Why do you pull speculations out of your ass and then use them as evidence? I mean, what have you smoked, and can I get it legally in the Netherlands?
Wow. That's as bad or worse than Patrick Henry College's pile of stank statement of faith (that they require students and faculty to sign/support/pledge whatever).
Well, well, well, indeed.
And where did you scurry off to, Nat?
Oh, that's not his. That's Vox Day's. And as this reviewer (he only read a bit each week, so the review spans several posts) points out, it's outta gas.
Ahh...I only read the one comment where Facilis used that phrase (since I try as hard as possible to ignore all things VD). I should have known Facilis wouldn't have come up with something by himself, if even a phrase that's a single word bastardization of a two-word pre-existing phrase.
Where do you think fairground bubbles come from?
Or do you think they just poof into existence?
Would Rover be able to reproduce?
My strength has the strength of ten because my heart is pure.
Classic Upthread wit:
Alan: How did the kangaroos get to Australia?
Kel: They were born here
Owlmirror #1194, ah yes, the truth matters, but must be hidden from sight. Glycoconjugates my ass. Great find.
"What was that?"
"That – would be – telling."
What was it indeed? I knew YouTube held abysses of "so bad they're good" movies, but… what?
I am sorry David, that was yet an other science fiction reference. The was from a British cult classic, The Prisoner. The star of the show, Patrick McGoohan, recently died. There was a lot of mourning at this site as well as any other place geeks gather.
David or Josh or NEone - I read on the internet that you were stumped by the AiG radiocarbon dating article - is this true? *anxious face*
http://www.answersingenesis.org/articles/nab/does-c14-disprove-the-bible
"Where am I?"
"In the Village."
"What do you want?"
"Information."
"Whose side are you on?"
"That would be telling…. We want information. Information! INFORMATION!"
"You won't get it."
"By hook or by crook, we will."
"Who are you?"
"The new Number Two."
"Who is Number One?"
"You are Number Six."
"I am not a number — I am a free man!"
HA! HA! HA! HA! HA! HA! HA!
AnthonyK, Stumped by that? Hardly. There are lies there, mostly in the presumptions used by the creobots. They distort the techniques, the corrections, and the meanings. I think Josh and DM already covered most of the problems above. And the conclusion that carbon dating supports the flud is utter and total myth.
Good catch, Owlmirror.
Are we surprised by this revelation? Nope.
Ummm...Nerd, I wasn't suggesting that for a moment! I was just looking for another magisterial takedown of some classic creo-shite. I know I shouldn't ask - I could read the rest of the thread again, I suppose.
Have the fuckwits gone? Awwww..no fair! More!
David Marjanović, OM | March 26, 2009 4:29 PM
Dave I started to answer your question, and I stopped my self for no other reason that today I am lazy and I'm going to stay that way...(at least for today).Visit NASA webs, particularly JPL. When I spoke of satalites I was not speaking of gps, comm, or other such mundane orbitals.
Oh hell Just google helio---then click on (It has become increasingly clear etc.
It's the third one down.ENJOY!
Patience, young Anthony. I predict we shall not have to wait long for new "science" to discuss.
Sphere Coupler - everyone here agrees with you. Your work here is done. Fly my pretty! Tell the rest of the internet!
Adieu, sweet SC!
Anthony, I suspect Alan will be back. Roger posts more during the day, Alan more at night. Looks like I need to bone up on something so I can add more to these discussions.
Now, I've just been watching something about a government train, full of doctors, which provides free medial help for those suffering from cleft plates, reversible deafness, cataracts, and other "cured-in-5-by modern medicine" conditions.
Totally free, totally life-ehancing, totally compassionate, totally right.
And, of course, although many of the participants are religious, the whole venture has nothing to do with religion at all - vital in a country where it has killed so many.
To see the little boy, with his lip sewn up, say that from now on they wouldn't tease him at school (and he'd be able to get married) was delightful.
Only cavil - well, in his village, some of the religious leaders felt he should not be treated, as that would interfere with god's handiwork. Sigh - but in the case, a nice sigh.
Found it!
L. Paul Knauth: Salinity history of the Earth's early ocean, Nature 395:554–555 (8 October 1998)
I dealt with it in comment 1088. If you have any more specific questions, go ahead...
("NEone" is cool. Only surpassed by the French "LN".)
The video reminds me of Moonraker. The ugliest of the ugly 1960s and 70s, and the dumbest ideas from them, it seems.
Fine. I'll do it myself then.
Teeeheehee. Silly Willard.
What indeed? A major one, I'll be bound!
At last! Real scientists, unburdened by evolutionary assumptions. What will they find I wonder? Get your clipboard, Kuhney, this one looks like a real doozy!
Fuck no - not that data! It errrr...doesn't exist..or does it?
Yes.......
Of course. We would expect nothing less. But...
Gosh! That sounds like a significant discovery...
Told you so. But why?
What? You mean....
Only if we use an unrealistic no-flood supposition though?
Of fucking course! You see, your assumptions were totally, like, wrong, wet-earth denialists! Their assumptions trump yours every time. But wait - oh no, doesn't this mean -
If that's true then..
.
.
.
.
.
Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaagh!
We are so fucked! You've all lied to me!
I see it all now - god, snake, sin, no more paradise, death, jesus, the Christian right - it all makes total sense.
I'm one of them, now. And I feel persecuted already.
Alan, Roger, you were right all along. All I can say is, I am so so sorry. And from now on - I'm on your side. Sincerely.
*breaks down in sobs, refuses all help, reaches for whiskey bottle*
I'm....done.
Translation: the 14C content of those samples was at the limit of detection.
Or at least the limit of quantification, which isn't much higher.
Not listening. Lalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalala
Exactly. The LOQ varies with technique. And since NO2 would have the same mass as C14O2, contamination during sample preparation is a real issue. Also, at this level, generation of C14 from neutron activation of C13 can become a source of contamination. All that pesky uranium and thorium (and their daughter products) scattered throughout the rocks shooting off stray neutrons...
The RATE researchers took very careful steps to avoid contmination. Any "stray neutrons" were rounded up and kept well away from the precious lumps of coal. The researchers later took them home to amuse their children, who could then play at smashing tiny kiddy atoms in wholesome christian family reactors.
So... that would have involved technical sciencey stuff, like Geiger counters to check the background radiation, and lead boxes and stuff?
Nah. They probably just prayed. "Dear God, please let these samples not be contaminated. Although if they are, well, thy will be done. Amen."
I'm sure that's how they arrived at their "more realistic pre-Flood 14C/12C ratio", too.
"Dear God, since we want to arrive at an answer that matches Your Holy Scripture, we're going to rape the numbers. If we should not do that, please speak now or forever hold your peace. [...moment of silence...] OK, God approves! We're good to go with the mathfuck. Thank you, God. Amen."
Wowbagger: Bahamas…Stalagmites…Carbon-14 levels were found to be twice as high as modern levels. These discoveries improved the calibration for the radiocarbon technique and extended its usefulness to 45,000 years into the past.
I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. Your reference from Wikipedia was in every news headline of 2001 as follows:
What could be more wrong than Nerd’s naïve and credulous statement?
Nerd: Carbon 14 dating is very reliable, and those that do it for a living know all the pitfalls.
The people that were “doing it for a living” DID NOT KNOW “all the pitfalls” until they discovered a simple, obscure, stalagmite in an underwater cave in the Bahamas. Now Wowbagger is going door-to-door in true Jehovah’s Witness fashion persuading the unsuspecting with his “new and improved” dating technique that he sites from Wikipedia. What he’s not telling you (in true Jehovah’s Witness fashion) is his previous prophecy missed the mark by 8000 years.
In reference to the above article, British scientist Dr. David Richards says, "It means we have tended to underestimate the true age of objects from 20,000 to 40,000 years ago by up to 8,000 years." The clock may be working but the former ASSUMPTIONS required for one to INTERPRET the clock were wrong. One failed assumption, (assumed by C14 inventor Willard Libby also) was that atmospheric C12/C14 ratio has long been in a state of equilibrium since the Earth is assumed to be old. Creationists have argued a long time that this uniformitarian mindset is not to be trusted since many factors can upset the assumed atmospheric C12/C14 ratio (global flood, Earth’s magnetic field, etc.). Sometimes the corrected errors favor an old-age Earth, other times they favor a young-age. Depending on which “calibration factors” one wants to adopt, the age varies.
J. Warren Beck, one of the researchers in the above article states, "But the bottom line is that Earth's carbon cycle was significantly different than it is today."
BIG SURPRISE TO UNIFORMITARIANISTS !!!
Old news for creationists… yawn…
Of course the carbon cycle is different, but it's the rate of decay that stays the same. You can't speed up or slow down the decay rates, but you can have variation in the amount of parent compared to child that can fluctuate results. And why are we talking about Carbon dating when discussing an old universe? It's only good for ~50,000 years and the earth is ~10,000 times as old as that.
Alan's right again! Hooray!
I guess there was a wooden boat with the whole world in it after all.
I'm not even going to try to explain "asymptotic approach to reality" right now. suffice to say that yes, science does correct itself regularly, but i'm not aware of any point in its history in which it did a total turnaround and revived a long-discarded worldview.
in 100 years, science will not resemble today's science, but guess what. it'll have moved further AWAY from creationism, not returning to that utterly failed concept.
But AnthonyK, what of all of that shit and piss all of those animals and humans were making?
Guess what Alan?
First, the error in interpretation only took effect on results older than 10,000 years, already a good 4,000 years before you tell us the Earth even existed.
Second, the error could only possibly make things seem younger than they really were, by increasing the amount of carbon present. The measurement of rate of decay seems to be rock solid, so it could always be said with high certainty that "this object is no younger than X thousand years old". By adding a spike in historical atmospheric carbon, it means that an object dated ~20,000 years old might in fact now be ~25,000 years old. There aren't any environmental factors that could artificially reduce the amount of 14C present, so it's not possible to have an object appear 20,000 years old but only be 5,000 years old.
Third, the very science techniques you are scorning is what determined the inaccuracies in the readings in the first place! How can you accept their correction that says "because of this factor, we have to revise early dates to even earlier", then deny the results they obtain using those same methods because "their science is flawed"?
Alan Clarke, FM, wrote:
If you had a clue, it'd be 'cry'. Why? Because you've made the same mistake again by citing something that, even if it slightly invalidated my position, completely invalidates yours:
and
Remind me, Alan - is 11,000 (the lower limit of years from the first quote) more or less than 6,000 (the number of years claim for age of the universe)?
Is 12,000 (the lower limit of years from the second quote) more or less than 6,000 (the number of years claim for age of the universe)?
Here's the point you keep on missing, Alan. I don't need to prove the universe is 4.5 billion years old for you to be wrong - I only have to prove it's more than 6,000 years old.
And you keep doing it for me - over and over again.
Epic FAIL2!
I find it hilarious that he's citing the redating from 40,000 to 32,000 as evidence that the world is 6,000 years old. It was off by 25%, not off by 666% - not having an absolute date doesn't negate that we have a good approximation. If a cosmologist derives that the universe must be 14.6 billion years old and another derives that it must be 13.72 billion years old, it does not mean that the idea that the universe is 6,000 years old becomes any more plausible. Alan takes the uncertainty of the scientific process and uses it as an excuse to dismiss figures that show he's off by a factor of millions.
It's worse than that, Wowbagger -- they underestimated ages by up to 8,000 years. So the lower limit hasn't dropped at all; but a 20,000 year old object could now potentially be up to 28,000 years old. D'oh!
holy
shit
this thread will not die.
"Science of Watchmen"...
The Ghost Who Walks...
The Thread Who Cannot Die...
David: Water also seeps into the ocean floor, exchanges salt for other minerals, and comes back out again through black smokers. And then there's evaporation of seawater, which separates the water from the salt.
Please explain to the audience that these are your “theories” for keeping the ocean salinity in-line with your uniformitarian belief system. You’ve described two mechanisms but their percentage of contribution among 999 other factors is not known. I noticed that you subscribe to the seafloor spreading mechanism where the magic conveyor belt conveniently tucks the nasty salt under the continental carpeting.
David: As I already observed, you seem to have no idea, by several orders of magnitude, of how many miracles are required to make the flood story work.
Multiply the improbability of the “flood story” by another 80 magnitudes to arrive at the improbability of your “cell story”.
David: ...the required chemical reactions [for life] could have happened on the chemically surprisingly active surface of certain clay minerals and/or pyrite crystals.
"Borrowing" from crystals is popular among evolutionist magicians. The more "ordered" something is, the less likely it has gotten that way by chance. "Intelligence" is indispensible. Since the evolutionist is completely bankrupt in the "intelligence" department, he must borrow (or rob) from a pre-existing source of order. Crystaline structures are not created by "chance". They are a product of the already complex underlying atomic structure.
David: …mutation is random, but selection is not -- it's determined by the environment.
Let’s examine this more closely:
1)“mutation is random” has no intelligence
2)“environment” has no intelligence (unless you believe in “Mother Nature goddess”)
3)“selection” is being done by what? The random destructive forces of a non-intelligent environment? (rain, wind, blistering & scorching sunlight, exploding volcanoes, etc.)
The Sun never builds anything unless you have a pre-built machine to harness its energy.
Q: Where is the INTELLIGENCE in all of this?
A: Nowhere
David, you did a good job of angling Zinjanthropus’ skull to suit yourself but you left the poor fellow with the nastiest case of buck-teeth and overbite I’ve ever seen. That is unless you move his missing bottom jaw out so he can carry coal in it.
Natural selection is done by the quest for survival. Competition for resources means that any survival advantage an individual organism has will more likely be passed down. Over time these advantages accumulate - this has been demonstrated in the lab and seen in the wild countless times. Just what do you not understand about natural selection?
As it is written in Scripture: "That is not dead which does eternal lie, and with strange eons, even Death may die." - عبدالله الحظرد
HPL
Oi, I mentioned those trees first, they're mine!
Eh, that goes for the pyramids too.
Shit. Teapot did mention them first. Okay, brother. It's you and me in the ring. NOW.
You say you've had evolution crammed down your throat Alan, but evidentially you don't know the first thing about it. How is there such a disparity between what you know and what you think you know? Why aren't you reading Jerry Coyne, Richard Dawkins, Stephen Jay Gould and Ken Miller (among others) in order to brush up on the idea you are arguing against? When you don't even understand natural selection how can you possibly talk about evolution?
To a degree. But the environment isn't completely random. Certain aspects change little over relatively long periods of time. Some soils are much poorer in nutrients than others so that any plant that is more efficient at using those nutrients will survive for longer and have more offspring than one that doesn't. Parts of the world are hotter and drier than others, so any small adaptation that allows an organism to conserve water will be at a distinct advantage. As time goes on new variations appear and spread and gradually organisms become better adapted to their environments.
"Environment" doesn't just mean climate either, it can also include other organisms- parasites adapting to their hosts, hosts producing defences and parasites evolving ways around this.
Exactly. In the words of Laplace- "Sir I do not require that hypothesis." We don't need to invoke an intelligence to account for what we observe in the natural world. So we don't Indeed the more we know about the world the less we need to invoke one- the "God of the gaps" gets smaller and smaller and smaller.
This site has a picture of the original skull with a mandible from another individual scaled to fit. Modern humans have very much smaller jaws than other apes. What we have is a species with transitional features, the jaw is ape-like, but other features (like the position of the spine) are more similar to those in humans.
Alan, would you buy and read a copy of Jerry Coyne - Why Evolution Is True in order to better understand what the case for evolution is? Surely it can't hurt to understand how evolution works and what evidence there is for it if you are going to argue against the concept.
Alan, if you're going to try to argue against removal mechanisms for ocean salinity, you're just going to embarrass yourself. There are aluminum salts in the ocean that, if we assumed that they are not being removed (as you seem to do), would put an upper limit on the age of the earth of less than 200 years.
HAHAHAHAHA, Alan "repetition of lies is my friend", you are still beating dead well refuted horses with the same refuted lies. Scientific content your posts, again zero. Scholarship content zero due to repeating refuted lies. Again, no evidence for your god, no evidence of bible not being fiction. no world wide evidence of geological flood, no world wide evidence for death of all biota, no world wide evidence for death of existing civiliations. No evidence radiometric dating is wrong. Total fail Alan. You need evidence to convince us, and you have none. Your testament is worthless since we caught you lying.
Alan Clarke, FM, wrote in comment #1235:
Uhm, wait---what? Alan, what the bloody hell are you talking about now?
Alan, are you trying to say that you don't accept that ocean waters permeate into the igneous rocks that floor the ocean? Seriously? What are these other factors you refer to? Care to name, I don't know, five?
Subscribe to the seafloor spreading mechanism? You're not fucking serious, are you? You're really now going to tell me that you are a plate tectonics denier??? Alan, YOU said in comment #394 that Mt. Everest wasn't as high before the flood. HOW did Everest reach it's post-flood height? Are you going to try and assert that the Tetons aren't rising? That the Alps aren't rising? What exactly do think fucking causes earthquakes? Or is the San Andreas Fault just a liberal conspiracy invented by Al Gore? Dude, we measure the motions of this shit in real time from fucking satellites! We watch it fucking happen. Are you simply fucking nuts? Because you really have gone just completely off the fucking deep end with this one.
Goddammit. I just got a manuscript back from a co-author and I'm trying to get the damn thing submitted. There are other things in the world besides trying to teach people shit they should have learned when they were in high school. A treatise on the evidence for tectonics is just gonna have to wait a minute. I've some science to do.
Alan continued with this gem:
For fuck's sake, Alan. How can you so utterly and completely not fucking get it? Even if we end up being completely wrong about our current understanding of abiogensis, that will say nothing about whether or not your flood fairy tail is true. Nothing. Do you get that? Do you? Let me say this very slowly: the flood and abiogenesis are two different fucking things! The probability of one of the ideas being accurate has nothing to do with the other. Pluto has just been demoted from being a planet. Does this now mean that we must run off and recalculate the orbit of Mars? NO--they have nothing to do with one another.
What, have we hit the point in the conversation where you're going to start employing "advanced goalpost moving?" Is this a course they teach you in fucking Sunday school? Right before "advanced direct question avoidance?" You guys all do this, so it would seem that you've all learned the tactic somewhere. I've read the damn bible and it didn't appear to erode my ability to answer questions or form a coherent argument. So what--Sunday School? Guest speaker or something? Does the class start off something like this:
"Now this morning, children, we're going to talk about how to have discussions. At some point in your lives, you're almost certainly going to encounter people who can think. You might end up in conversations with them. Conversations happen when people try to communicate information to each other or exchange ideas. Conversations are difficult because they require the participants to think. Since thinking makes Jesus cry, we want to avoid that at all costs. And since we don't want our minds to be poisoned by outside information or knowledge, we have developed some techniques that allow us to seem like we're having a conversation when we're really not. We're going to teach you some of those techniques today. The first one I'd like to cover is the technique of moving the goalposts..."
PLEASE stop moving the fucking goalposts around and go answer the questions in comment #923! And then go read #930 again. Then #932. Then #961. Then #1006. Then #1080. Then go read #1123. Then answer the questions in #1126.
What are you afraid of?
No. The main tree, the really old one that survived the flood and then replanted itself is mine, as evidenced above. There's an olive tree somehwhere that also survived. You can have that.
But back to work. Fuckwittery of this truly awesome kind just never sleeps, does it? Just some idle speculation, but in the Clarke household, one imagines that the younger children read Alan a bed-time story every night:
"Once-upon-a-time (but not a very long time ago!) God decided that he'd completely got all his miracles wrong, so he decided to start all over again.. He went up to this wise old man -"
"Was he called, Alan" asks Alan, peeping excitedly over the bedclothes.
"No" says the youngest Clarke (let's call him "Sketchy") - it's always the youngest who are the best readers in the Clarke household, seeing as the children all get stupider as they get older - "his name was Noah, but, just like you, Daddy, he knew nothing about boat building..."
Actually of course, when we think of the poor Clarke children, whose main virtues are patience and the ability to fund the Psychiatric profession so richly in time to come, one suspects that there must be some of them who are unacknowledged, their conception being unremembered by the man-god Alan himself, and so, he confidently declares, impossible.
Thus young "Science" Clarke, a whispy, underfed and unloved creature deemed too unlikely to exist by boat-man Alan, and destined to wonder the Clarke household forever maintaining the flow of electrons and making sure that gravity works the right way on the Clarke stairs. Poor little mite.
But enough of the unfortunate Clarke children (who may well form the subject of Lemony Snicket's new series of books entitle "A Series of Delusional Events") No, the man who put the "Fuckwit" in "Alan Clarke ia a Fuckwit" is back, with yet more comically confident lunacy.
Let's see - a picture - something to do with "prophecies" - probably knocking another bunch of stupid Christians - and a little yellow highlighter pen bit to show that he's really cross.
So what do we learn from this latest pearl from the side of Alan's mouth?
Oh go on - have a wank! That's usually what you do when reality gets too hard for you.
But srsly - those nasty, bible-denying scientists haven't been openly correcting themselves again, have they? What, a finding that means 14C dating was wrong, and the earth must therefore be no older than 10 000 years (and once all lived happily in a little boat?) Well...not quite.
http://www.unisci.com/stories/20012/0514012.htm
Young earth, hooray!
So....what story will your kiddies read you tonight Alan? What about the one about the foolish man who believed in the Law of Ancient Myths? Bet that's your children's favourite!
Your assessment of it, for example.
Dude. "An enormous peak" means there is more 14C in stuff from that time than we expected. This means it looks younger than it is.
And then you even go on to quote:
Emphasis added.
Why do people laugh at creationists?
Only creationists don't understand why!
Now, I understand full well what your actual point is. Your point is that if we've overlooked this factor, what else have we overlooked? Perhaps the entire technique is altogether unreliable! But that doesn't work in science. You can't pretend to cast general doubt on something and then believe you can ignore it altogether just because it might be wrong by an unknown amount in an unknown direction. You have to put evidence on the table which shows that the technique is wrong by the right amount in the right direction.
Really, by your logic, I could throw away the entire Bible, from Genesis to Revelation, just because somewhere in (I think) Exodus it says hares* chew the cud!
* Does it actually mean hyraxes?
But you can't pick and choose which calibration factors to adopt, moron. You must use all of the known calibration factors at once, or your paper won't get published.
And "known" of course means that their numerical value is known. Science, remember? Science quantifies. It doesn't merely make qualitative statements.
–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Yes, it is.
Well, sometimes less of the radiation that produces 14C reaches the Earth than today. This is due to slow oscillations in the activity of the sun. So, sometimes old stuff does contain less 14C than would be expected for its age if we didn't know better, and that makes it look older than it is. However, firstly, this never amounts to a factor anywhere near to the 4 or 5 that the Master of Fail needs, and secondly, there are independent measures of solar activity through time (that's what all the beryllium stuff is about).
Because he 1) hasn't got a fucking clue about the methods, and 2) doesn't even get the idea that he could learn something about the methods by spending some time reading on the Internet instead of posting his ignorance.
To understand this, YECs would have to know anything about the methods.
But they don't. They don't even get the idea that they could learn something about them. The idea that there's knowledge out there that they don't already have is utterly alien to them. That's why they come across as insane in discussions: because they are.
More later, I have to go.
Alan,
You need to come up with evidence that the Earth is only 6,000 years old. So far you've quoted sources talking about dates from 20,000 years ago to several million years ago. The evidence you've produced contradicts your YEC stance.
I've mentioned that Alan Clarke's and RogerS' alleged faith in an inerrant King James' Translation of the Bible gives them the power of invincible, immortal stupidity, so that they can make any offensively moronic, fact-devoid excuse(or any number of such offensively moronic, fact-devoid excuses), and be deluded enough to think that they can get away with such, right?
Stanton, they may think so, but we know better. No solid physical evidence means they are stupid and delusional. So far, they are proving us right.
Our two reality deniers don't seem to be coming back, so this comment may not be necessary anymore, but just in case...
What comments 1243 and 1245 said. If you deny the existence of black smokers, you can just as well deny the existence of the computer screen in front of you. Scientists being scientists, they've also measured the water throughput...
Really, Alan, you might just as well agree with both the Old and the New Testament and be a flat-earther. If you deny one fact, what difference does it make if you deny another?
Make sure you understand what I mean by "fact". Not everything that's true is a fact.
If that is magic, then water in a pot on a hot hearth is also magic. It, too, is heated from below, rises to the surface, cools off, and sinks back down in different places from the ones where it came up. Convection, dude.
Also, what comment 1245 says: that the continents and the ocean floors move is a fact. It is easily observed with satellites even if you don't live at the San Andreas Fault. North America and Europe move away from each other at the speed your fingernails grow, 1.5 cm a year. The Alps are being squeezed together; they become taller by 1 mm per year and narrower by a few more (mountain ranges extend much farther down than up). Easter Island and Chile approach each other at 15 cm/year (15 cm being almost exactly 2 inches for you Americans). And so on.
Telephone cables across the Atlantic used to be ripped apart regularly before people understood the Atlantic is widening. Doesn't happen anymore.
When did you go to school, Alan? Before 1966?
If yes, shame on you for sitting there for 43 years with your eyes so firmly closed it hurts, your fingers in your ears, and you singing "lalala" so loudly that your ears hurt and your throat dries out.
If not, shame on you for not paying attention in school.
Oh, and... BTW... you haven't even tried to answer my questions of where the salt deposits on continents come from.
Once again: shame on you.
Link removed because it's irrelevant. Such complexity is not how life started.
I have already asked you if you know what a ribozyme is. You still haven't answered.
Here's another bucket of shame over your head.
They are a product of electrostatic attraction and repulsion.
And so is the shape of... everything else. How do DNA strands stay together, how do they find each other in the first place, and why are double strands most stable if the strands are exactly complementary? Electrostatic attraction and repulsion. How do proteins get and keep their shapes? Electrostatic attraction and repulsion. How do enzymes and substrates find each other and change each other's shapes? Electrostatic attraction and repulsion. How does signal transport along nerve cell membranes work? Electrostatic attraction and repulsion. Finally, what determines the shapes of molecules, the arrangement of electrons in atoms and molecules? Electrostatic attraction and repulsion!
Do you know anything, Alan? Really, do you know anything at all?
But let's return to the biggie.
Show me.
You see, that's a completely unsupported assertion you've thrown out here. It's also a completely unnecessary assertion: intelligence simply isn't necessary to explain nature. Sire, je n'ai pas besoin de cette hypothèse.
What's more, the theory of evolution explains where intelligence comes from!
That's something where creationism is simply stumped. Unable to explain the origin of intelligence, it is forced to project it back forever, in an infinite regress.
Correct. The watchmaker is blind, deaf, literally stupid as a rock, and unconscious. It's not a person, it's a process; it's not even a separate law of physics or anything.
Correct, as I just said.
It goes without saying that we don't.
Exactly.
(Among many, many, many, many others, see comment 1241 for a start.) Correct!
Take human skin color. Discounting recent migrants, people have darker skin the closer they live to the Equator and the more open their environment is. Also, among people living in the same place, women often have slightly lighter skin than men (famously exaggerated in ancient Egyptian and Cretan art). How come?
First, skin color is heritable. It's a little bit complicated (no less than six genes determine skin color, not just one), but still.
On the one hand, if your skin is too light, UV shines through and destroys the folic acid in your blood more quickly than you can eat more. You can't make folic acid yourself. Folic acid is an essential component of some essential enzymes, and especially important in embryonic development. Too little folic acid, and either you die or at least your early pregnancies all end in spontaneous abortions. This makes it unlikely that you'll have as many surviving fertile offspring as other people. This is called natural selection: people with too light skin are selected against.
(Skin cancer is another risk, but skin cancer develops way too slowly to be "noticed" by natural selection: by the time you get to the lethal stage of skin cancer, you already have children, and they barely need you anymore.)
At the same time, you need a small amount of UV to shine through your skin and turn the precursor of vitamin D into vitamin D. That's another chemical reaction you can't do yourself. Vitamin D is necessary for bone mineralization. Too little vitamin D (during pregnancy and childhood at least), and you get rachitis, the disadvantages of which are obvious – I don't mean the disadvantages to yourself, I mean the disadvantages to your prospects of having surviving fertile offspring, but these should be obvious, too. This is again called natural selection.
So, we expect to see compromises all over the world, depending on how much sunlight there is.
Lo & behold, we do.
The difference between men and women is such a compromise, too: vitamin D is so important in pregnancy that the risk from not having enough of it is higher than the risk from not having enough folic acid.
Even the exceptions support the rule. Various Arctic peoples have somewhat darker skin than Europeans; that's because they don't need to worry about vitamin D – they get more than enough of it from their food. The people in Yemen have somewhat lighter skin than the people in Ethiopia; they don't get as much sunlight because they've been wearing lots of clothes for thousands of years (for cultural reasons mostly).
Correct, for a very wide definition of "machine". There are many single molecules that count as "machines" under that definition. Do you know how seeing works?
Why do I ask a creationist if he knows anything <sigh> Here goes: Ultimately, the nerve impulse that goes from your retina to your brain is triggered by a chemical reaction: light turning 11-cis-retinal into all-trans-retinal. Shine light on it, and half of the 11-cis-retinal molecule moves into another position; the energy for this comes from the light.
I'm not sure, but I think this particular reaction decreases the entropy of the molecule. But anyway, consider the "fog" high in the atmosphere of Titan (the biggest moon of Saturn). It consists of large hydrocarbon molecules. How did they originate? By UV shining onto the methane that makes up a large part of the atmosphere and triggering all manner of chemical reactions that, in sum at least, amount to a pretty drastic entropy decrease (one large molecule instead of many tiny ones that can move around independently).
Again correct. That any INTELLIGENCE was involved is simply an unnecessary hypothesis. You have read in comment 1241 what scientists do with unnecessary hypotheses.
It's not my fault that you've never seen a Paranthropus lower jaw ("Zinjanthropus" being a junior synonym of Paranthropus).
It's also not my fault that the argument from personal incredulity is a logical fallacy.
It is your fault that you talk about stuff you don't know anything about.
Why do people laugh at creationists?
Only creationists don't understand!
Thread, meet winner.
snowflakes: individually handcrafted. *snort*
I don't think that's correct... 30cm = 1ft, so 15cm = 1/2ft, and 1/2ft = 6in
Well I read your post David, and pronouced it both necessary and good. Or rather, since I was chewing at the time, I pronounced it "mmmn nerenherher om bleugh".
Think they've gone for good; or even for evil? Stupidgod alone knows.
*looks around*
*shrugs*
*goes back to manuscript*
ARGH! Not 2 inches, 6 inches! 2 inches is very close to 5 cm, 1 inch being 2.54 cm.
Product of chance and electrostatic attraction and repulsion. See all those 120° angles? They come from the fact that the water molecule itself is a 120° angle. Where does that fact come from? From electrostatic repulsion between the four outer electron "clouds" (the bonds between the oxygen and the hydrogen atoms, and the two extra electron pairs on the oxygen atom).
*reads #1256 and then sits back and basks for a moment in the beauty of the whole thing.*
Well, even if Alan and Roger do not learn anything from this thread, I most certainly have.
So a heartfelt thanks to all those who have contributed, and to Dave and Josh in particular.
_____________<;,><_____________
Precisely. Hence the tri-une nature of god and the ultimate majesty of our lord and saviour, Jesus Christ. And the three wise men.
#1251
Damn that was fun to read! Another David Marjanović, OM, posting for my "Save" file.
:-)
Well, I've simply read a few popular books about particle physics, and I've had a physics teacher in highschool explain why, when 99.9 % of an atom is empty space, we can't put a finger into our forehead.
There are only four five forces in the world: electromagnetics, weak nuclear force, strong nuclear force, and gravity and the cosmological constant which makes the universe expand. That's it. At the base, the world is very, very, very simple.
And the two nuclear forces simply have no influence on anything large-scale, except that the weak one is important in radioactivity. For example, electromagnetics and gravity decrease with the square of the distance, but the strong force with the seventh power, and the weak one even faster.
Marjanović Tilt Hoax Revealed!
Evolutionists have no more “evidence” than creationists. Both are looking at the same evidence. The difference is the interpretation of the evidences. David Marjanović attempted to discredit my critique of a misleading artist’s rendering of Zinjanthropus by tilting the skull here . In doing so, he committed the following violations:
1) He tilted the skull an abnormal 30 degrees to fit it inside the artist’s untenable rendering of Zinjanthropus. How do I know? A reference point on the skull is the upper dental plate. I illustrate this by clenching a ruler between my molars. When the ruler is parallel to the ground, my head is referenced to zero degrees, whereas David’s interpretation should have Zinjanthropus looking up into the sky for UFO’s.
2) David didn’t tilt the skull enough to fit it inside the artist’s misleading rendering. Notice how the top of the skull extends beyond the hair on Zinjanthropus’ head.
3) After tilting the skull, the outer edge of Zinjanthropus’ maxilla is way out in front from the now-recessed brow. The artist’s flat-faced rendering is now far removed from David’s skull position.
4) David’s foot is now in his own mouth as his accusation “Have you no fucking shame?” comes back to haunt him.
Conclusion: When a theory is void of supporting evidence, create it!
Exactly, so when creationists look at the fossil record they can say "Goddidit" and be done. Or when they look at the evidence in molecular code, they can say "Goddidit" and be done. And when it comes to question the age of the universe, those pesky galaxies 13 billion light years away can be explained by "goddidit" and the results of several different forms of radiometric dating, they can say "goddidit". There's nothing "goddidit" can't explain - which makes "goddidit" a useless statement, and those galaxies 13 billion light years away make the universe at least 13 billion years old.
Nerd @1215,
Hm, you might be a prophet, but yet not know it.
Alan Clarke, MF, wrote:
Except that the 'evidence' both supports the evolutionary position, and makes the creationist perspective look laughably incompetent - not unsurprisingly, since it's essentially the attempts of a cadre of ignoramuses, self-deluders and intellectually dishonest liars trying to prove the folk-tales of superstitious, scientifically illiterate, bronze-age tribespeople actually happened.
What's equally hilarious is that it isn't just atheists who find creationists laughable; the majority of Christians aren't so weak in their faith that they deny the reality of the impossibility of a young earth.
As illustrated by how often Christians use 'having a fundamentalist interpretation of the OT' as an insult...against atheists.
Creationists have no evidence, and refuse to look at what evidence there actually is.
You mean like vegetation mats to ferry bristlecone pines around, and like "fountains of the deep", and like magical rapid re-arranging land masses, and like "more realistic pre-Flood 14C/12C ratios", and like everything else about the entire damn flood story?
And for that matter, like God? No supporting evidence for God, so you just make it all up!
We know that you have no fucking shame, because you're a sociopath who is a compulsive liar, on top of all the rest of your insanity.
Let's sic Maggie and her intellectual smugness on the these two. At least then it would be justified.
... and the Owlmirror becomes eponymous, reflecting truth.
Alan, behold your reflection. Become aware.
Kel: There's nothing "goddidit" can't explain - which makes "goddidit" a useless statement, and those galaxies 13 billion light years away make the universe at least 13 billion years old.
Your explanation is better? “Nothing did it.” “Non-intelligent eternal matter did it?” Which supposition is better supported by science? The thing “created” is always a lesser subset of the thing that created it, like a computer program for example. The old Greek theory of “atomic materialism” was refuted by Socrates, Plato, and Cicero no differently than it is being refuted today.
There's nothing "matterdidit" can't explain - which makes "matterdidit" a useless statement. Nevertheless, “atomic matter” is quite clever because it somehow created those galaxies 13 billion light years away and aligned the molecules in human brains so that many perceive them as being created by God. Who’s to blame for our disagreements? It’s got to be ATOMIC MATTER’s fault! Maybe atomic matter is deceiving us. The end of my fishing pole under water always looked like it was in a different place than where I thought it was.
Many people prefer “eternal intelligence” (i.e. God) over “eternal non-intelligence” (i.e. stupidity).
Alan @1269, why do you offer the argument from personal incredulity? We know you don't get it, how is that supposed to convince us?
Your efforts are futile, you realise.
Was it up your ass?
Because if you're inept at fishing as you are at understanding biology, botany, history, geology, geography, chemistry, physics, demographics, theology, epistemology, mathematics, probability, statistics, archaeology, paleontology, anthropology, physiology, tectonics and vulcanology - just to name a few - then I wouldn't be surprised.
That because we see galaxies 13 billion light years away that the universe must be at least 13 billion years old? Yes, far better. I explain the evidence, you ignore it and say "goddidit"
Alan,
Please explain how Creationism predicts both the cosmological red shift and cosmic microwave background radiation.
More tellingly, they say - or at least they would, if they were honest - 'goddidit and uses the very tools he gave us to unlock the puzzle that is the universe to lie to us about it'.
Again, why I'm far more prepared to accept a religion which posited a god who is incompetent and/or willfully malicious. But that doesn't include oh-but-our-deity-loves-us-just-like-he-loves-fluffy-bunnies-and-cuddly-kittens Christianity, does it?
I'll spell it out for you Alan:Both of us agree that something always existed, you think God is eternal, I happen to think that energy is eternal. Either way the something from nothing argument doesn't hold because we both are violating that with our basic principles. If you need to ask where the energy comes from, I can just as easily ask where God comes from.In terms of limitations, we can not look beyond the big bang so we really don't know what is before the big bang - or if there is even such thing as before. We don't know, and beyond mathematical speculation it would seem we can't know. So we are stuck to things that are in our universe - the empirical measurement.So any concept of what is beyond this universe is useless if it fails to explain what is in this universe. And in that when we see distant galaxies billions of years old - any idea that fails to predict the ancient and distant galaxies is wrong. If you think the universe is less than 13.23 billion years old, then you are not following the empirical evidence. Likewise when many different radiometric techniques show that some rocks on this planet are at least 4.3 billion years old, if you do not have a >4.3 billion year old earth your concept fails.Likewise when we see the geographical distribution of life, it needs an explanation too. As does the genetic code therein. This correlates to the morphological features and the fossil record. If your concept cannot explain the appearance of Tiktaalik at 370MYA, then your concept is again useless. Likewise for explaining feathered dinosaurs, your concept needs to be explain just why we find those. The problem I see is that you don't understand the processes by which the universe works - and then you take that personal incredulity and use it to dismiss any idea that doesn't say "Goddidit 6000 years ago." We see that the universe is big, and a big universe means an old universe thanks to e=mc². Old rock means an old earth to go in that old universe, and there is an emergence of life over billions of years gradually appearing through the fossil record. It may be God did it that way, but the real incredulous nature is to discard all that we've found to say Goddidit 6000 years ago. You are not looking at the evidence Alan, you are looking at a book of mythology and going from there.
A supposedly all knowing god puts the tree of knowledge in an easily accessable place so that an evil entity he created can tempt Eve to disobey god; and then curses the rest of humanity for his own stupidity! And you call this “eternal intelligence”!
Wow.
_____________<;,><_____________
By the way, you never did explain how Unas, the last Pharoah of the Egyptian 5th dynasty survived the biblical flood, which happened in the middle of his reign.
Actually Alan it was Kagato who tilted the skull to line everything up. Not David. If you're going to criticise this its worth getting the basic facts straight.
In fact the picture looks like the head is tilted upwards. But the point stands. There's a degree of artistic license. Artists generally aren't scientists. I've heard stories about artists being repeatedly told not to do something and doing it anyway. Errors like getting the front of the head a bit wrong happens all the time. If you can do better then you've got a good career for yourself as a palaeoartist right there.
But more importantly reconstructions like this aren't science. They're done to make things clearer for the layperson or look nice on the glossy cover. The actual paper describing the fossil will be full of photographs, and drawings of the actual fossils. Whining that the artist got something wrong doesn't make an iota of difference to the existence and transitional features present in the actual fossils its based on.
If you look at the link I gave (here) there's a picture of a skull and mandible.
I see Alan the addled is still at his nonsense. Alan, your opinion is worthless, and must be backed by true evidence, which you are totally incapable of providing.
As to the claim that there is no evidence for evolution, I suggest you go and read the myriad of papers in the peer reviewed primary scientific literature. I suspect, 150 years after Darwin, and rate that scientists publish, there are around a million or so papers supporting evolution, both directly and indirectly, and no papers supporting your form of creationism, including the flud. By ignoring that evidence you are showing your true ignorance, and your desire to remain ignorant. Repeating your lies does not make them true.
Yes, our explanation is much better, depending as it does on evidence. Although "nothing did it" would seem trivially true, a better summation might be "it happened", to which one might add "get over it."
But what further crap are you pulling from your enfeebled mind? And, bear in mind, that you are still someone who thinks that 6000 years ago God, his creation having become all sinfully and shit, decided to destroy the lot, by means of a global flood, and leave the fate of all of creation to a man who built a wooden boat and magically got all the things in the world into it, where they stayed for months.
How can you believe this crap, as a grown man? And when you do, and proclaim it loudly, based on zero - that number again "0" - evidence, in fact all evidence to the contrary, what arrogant derangement in your skull suggests that you should come here to proclaim it?
To take just one tiny little stupidity, how did all the animals and plants we see evolve from just two (or 7) the bible contradicts itself here, "types" of animals. All the dogs we see today from just two wolves? All the beetles from just two beetles?
And you think we're crazy for "believing" in evolution - you magic boat story requires madcap evolution as never seen before or since - evolution which is, in fact, impossible?
But how do you get to pronounce on these matters? What peculiar combination of deep stupidity and craven abasement to scary fairy tales sends you here?
I feel so sorry for any children you may have. Poor things. Dad's mad, and thinks the earth is 6000 years old and all the world once lived on a small wooden boat. What hope have they?
Unfortunately, knowing a little about how creationists raise the kids ("daily bathed in ignorance" is one description) it will involve early and constant religious indoctrination, all together with a constant reminder of the perils of hell for those who don't think the right way. Add to it your own insistence that the Bible is literally true, and that to think otherwise is the road to hell, and you have the perfect medium for your own monstrous egotism to thrive, and all at their expense.
You are certainly deeply, deeply stupid, and your reality-denying posts here indicate a breathtaking arrogance about your own ignorance.
I can only fear for your children. A man so unhinged cannot be a good father - if only for the simple reason that when your children do have problems (and I hope, for their own sakes, that they don't turn out to be gay, since your reactions then will be so uncomprehending and condemnatory that their mental health, no doubt already much damaged by your religious mania, will suffer terribly). But just their normal everyday problems of finding their own place in the world will be so compromised by your madness (and, obviously, you bullying, arrogant personality) that their future does indeed look bleak.
Make 'em as mad as you can, as early as you can, and just hope in the long run that they don't blame you.
Poor little fuckers. My heart goes out to them.
An artist drew a bad picture of a Paranthropus boisei and therefore evolution is falsified.
I'll tell my libertarian friends to have someone paint a bad picture of the Federal Reserve Building in Washington, so it can be shown to be wrong. Then fiat money will go away and the country will return to the gold standard.
Outreach? Charity? You must be a saint, 'Tis.
And no, I don't want to argue about that particular oupost of unreason ;) - it might derail this thread....
- it might derail this thread....
Ha!
5) Not that it matters, but that wasn't me. I haven't uploaded anything during this or any other Pharyngula thread. Comment 1277 is right, it was Kagato.
4) I do think the completely horizontal forehead of the reconstruction looks exaggerated. The way Dave Godfrey has put the skull, the top of the crest on the skull (...something completely lacking in Homo, BTW...) corresponds to the top of the hair on the head in the painting. Clearly, that's wrong. But why does that make it a hoax? Why can't the artist have screwed up? Very, very few paleoartists are scientists. Even the most prominent ones sometimes screw up; the edited book The Dinosauria (Second Edition), where every chapter is peer-reviewed and much original research is published, has a dust-cover painting by the famous John Sibbick, who confused the first and the fifth toe of many animals in that illustration. It's painful.
3) The molars and premolars in that skull are all damaged. They don't form a continuous line. BTW, the guy at the bottom of your picture has abnormally short incisors and canines.
2) You act as if that incomplete skull were the only Paranthropus skull that has ever been discovered. Dave Godfrey has already set you straight, so why do you continue to base arguments on previous ignorance?
1) Paranthropus is not Homo, nor is it Pan, Gorilla, or Pongo. I mean, just look at its unique teeth. Please.
Why do people laugh at creationists?
Only creationists don't understand why!
That's what creationists say again and again, as if chanting it often enough would make it true.
It's wrong. Without a single exception, creationists don't know all of the evidence. Without a single exception, they make arguments from ignorance. See my point 2) above for the latest example.
Except for the fact that creationism isn't a theory, I agree with comment 1266.
The one that needs the fewest extra assumptions.
We already know Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle and its effects such as the Casimir Effect which you should look up. We don't need the additional speculation that there might be something supernatural involved.
Really, you should learn some physics.
Huh?
If I write a program, the program is a subset of me?
If I trigger an avalanche, are the damaged trees a subset of me?
Shocker for you, because you don't know even the most basic physics:
We don't accept the philosophy of Democritus.
Democritus said "nothing exists save atoms and the void". But meanwhile, we have found out that:
* Particles and waves are the same, and matter is just one form of energy. So, make that "energy and the void".
* Energy behaves according to certain regularities. So, make that "energy, the void, and the laws of physics".
Democritus engaged in vain speculation. For example, he* simply asserted that the soul exists, and then concluded from this assertion that it must be composed of very light atoms. He never thought about testing his assertion or even just subjecting it to Ockham's Razor (...which, of course, hadn't been formalized yet, but on the other hand it's pretty self-evident, isn't it). In short, his philosophy was unscientific.
* Or was that Epicurus? I forgot.
Furthermore, the theory of (general) relativity and those of quantum physics are simply bigger than the philosophy of Democritus. They explain not merely the shapes and behavior of matter, but the rest of the universe as well.
We aren't philosophers. We are scientists. Is that so hard to grasp?
Which is exactly why nobody says "matterdidit".
You are so incredibly ignorant you don't even notice when your arguments are strawmen!
Evidently you haven't read comments 1256 and 1261, nor even the big one (1251). If you have any questions about them, please do go ahead and ask them.
After all, in comment 1251 I explained natural selection. That's important, don't you think? That's what explains the brain, after all.
The argumentum ad populum is a logical fallacy, as you know full well, oh intellectually dishonest one.
Indeed, Stupid Design abounds. There are lots and lots of facts about nature that make one go "whose bright idea was that!?!" – and where the simplest explanation is that they simply aren't ideas in the first place, while the poor creationists have to throw convulsions in order to avoid being blasphemic by their own criteria, and they inevitably fail. If you like, we can talk about this later (I have to go).
That's what creationists say again and again, as if chanting it often enough would make it true.
They're just trying to emulate their god who "spoke" the world into existence.
Believe!
I just wanted to say thank you.
I am only 3/4th thru this thread, every time I look back it gets longer.
But I have learned a great deal and I appreciate it.
Great! But don't you go out there and get all creationist on our asses, will you!
If Britomart actually reads the thread, he's already extremely unlikely to be a creationist. Take Alan, who still hasn't read the article on radiometric dating, even though it's day 50.
And then he/she/it/squid says to have learned. Creationists don't do that.
You probably meant it as a joke, but even that failed. :-)
Alan, the other comments were right, I was the one who posted the adjustment of your picture. (Another great job of image attribution there.)
I spent a grand total of about 45 seconds on it, so excuse me if I didn't produce a perfect solution for you.
First and foremost,you seem to be ignoring the fact that it's an artist's impression -- that means it's the impression of the artist, not some objective truth. If there are any incorrect details, then the artist got something wrong; that's all there is to it. The painting is not the science, it is merely a corollary to it. Artwork is not itself evidence of anything.
I have no biology background, and it's possible neither does the artist directly (being an artist). Perhaps he viewed the skull from a slightly incorrect angle when producing the painting. (Perhaps the subject is supposed to be tilting his head up, and he got the perspective wrong. Again, art is not science.)
Ohmygod -- then science must be wrong!
Or maybe I just spent 30 seconds rotating your diagram and didn't try and make it an absolutely perfect fit, just close enough to show that your hyperbole was moronic. If I scaled the skull down about 5% it would be a better fit. (There's also the depth of skin, cartilage and muscle to take into account, which neither I nor you have done.)
It's not a great picture. I don't even think it's a good picture. Technically it's well-enough executed, but I doubt it's a very good representation of the subject. It's kind of the equivalent to early paintings of indigenous Australians; they look like white guys with black skin and funny hair. The artist painted what made sense to them rather than truly sticking to the observed details.
So why don't you apply the same skull-photo-badly-aligned-to-artwork technique to the thumbnail in the corner as well? That clearly a different artist's impression, and I'd wager a far more accurate one.
Perhaps because it's a physical sculpture, and was probably moulded directly over the top of a skull replica?
Oh, you don't want to go there.
Alan:
"To talk intelligibly about modern physics, we have to admit the possibility of uncaused events."
"Quantum events have a way of just happening, without any cause, as when a radioactive atom decays at a random time. Even the quantum vacuum is not an inert void, but is boiling with quantum fluctuations. In our macroscopic world, we are used to energy conservation, but in the quantum realm this holds only on average. Energy fluctuations out of nothing create short-lived particle-antiparticle pairs, which is why the vacuum is not emptiness but a sea of transient particles. An uncaused beginning, even out of nothing, for space-time is no great leap of the imagination."
~ Taner Edis, Is Anybody Out There?
Owlmirror #1185
I'm back -you can start the party now.
I hope you have had the opportunity to stand on some mountains in the southwest; the uniqueness of this world can inspire awe. If you happen to travel there, look down, you are standing on aftermath consisting of 100's or 1,000's of feet of igneous, sedimentary, and metamorphic rocks. Your sedimentary layers will contain sandstone, shale, and limestone (consult Josh for limestone details, depths, & footnotes). The sedimentary layers contain preserved remains of plants and animals. You may also come across coal deposits with delicately preserved pressed leaf patterns. Fossil fuels may also be under your feet. If you are blind to seeing this as evidence then surely you would not conclude any remaining surface soils are the decayed remains of logs & branches from the flood.
1 John 2:11 But he that hateth his brother is in darkness, and walketh in darkness, and knoweth not whither he goeth, because that darkness hath blinded his eyes.
A further appeal to reason:
Today's environment recycles surface organic matter (esp. wet organic matter) very quickly. The effects of rain, wind, sun, and general erosion can remove rock. I am puzzled why you would expect to find evidence of flood surface biomass “mats” considering the effects above plus hungry plants, microbes, and insects in the mix. Living things last for a limited time, but dead leaves, limbs, and trees on the surface?
I purposefully postponed responding hoping the resident Geologist or Biologist may have had words of wisdom on detecting limited surface biomass after an expiration of +4,000 yrs.. I am a realist though and shouldn't expect those resolved to wear one-way glasses to refute a praising peer.
What's with the random bible quote, RogerS? Not helpful.
So, let me get this straight.
If you stand on a mountain and look about, the evidence of your vegetation mats is all around you.
Except that organic matter decays so quickly that you can't expect to find any evidence of it.
...
Gotcha.
Seeing what as evidence? The local geology as evidence for the local geology? Why would I not see it?
Since there was no global flood, of course I would not reach any such moronic conclusion.
I'm sorry that you hate, but what am I supposed to do about it? I cannot make someone blind with hatred see. I cannot force you to love truth instead of hating it.
You were the one referring to square miles of this crap. It would not be all just lying on the surface. The page on "tussocks" that you yourself pointed to did mention that they contained much mud, and of course, mud would be washed down the mountains as the water level rapidly drained.
And while I may not be Josh, I have heard of Debris Flows, Mudflows, Jökulhlaups, and Lahars, which can indeed contain carbon-datable wood under the thick mud.
No. Your entire religion, as you demonstrate it here, is based on deliberately and repeatedly and utterly denying reality.
You are an unrealist.
RogerS wrote:
Sorry, Roger. I've been busy with some other stuff for a few days. Is there a comment that I've neglected responding to? Which one?
RogerS wrote:
I have, and I agree. The region is breathtaking.
You deny the way in which we organize these rocks, but of course the fact is that there are many thousands of feet of sedimentary rocks alone. Also keep in mind that since you included metamorphic rocks in this statement, we're really talking about miles of geology below you, no matter where you are on the continent.
As well as a host of other varieties of mudrock, evaporites, and wackes, but broadly, yes.
Yep.
Yes. Coal (and lignite) deposits interbedded with the sandstones (which also often contain nice leaves) and mudstones (which also often contain nice leaves).
Well, since coal is a fossil fuel,* you already covered this, but yep.
Roger, it's not that we're blind to seeing this as evidence. It's really not. It's that your trying to make the data support a model that they do not support. You're trying to make your flood do things that the evidence not only doesn't support, but also flatly contradicts. You make all sorts of grand assertions about how this is evidence for the flood and that is evidence for the flood, and the flood did this and the flood did that, but when push comes to shove, you're flood model gets its ass handed to it when it tries to explain the evidence that we actually see. You need to explain how "Promethus" survived the flood while growing on that glacial deposit (And you must explain where the glacial deposit came from, since it's pre-flood. And while we're at it, it would be rather nice to have an explanation for the quartzite that makes up Wheeler Peak). You need to be able to explain the oolitic limestone/dolomite contact I showed Alan in comment #882. Plus, although they weren't questions specifically addressed to you, your flood model also needs to address the questions that I asked Alan in #1123 and #923, among other places (and numerous other questions posed by other commenters). Your flood model must explain these things. If it can't, then it FAILS. This isn't optional. We have internally consistent explanations for all of the observations I have provided for you in this thread. As I said way back when we started this, your flood model must be able to explain these observations better, or it gets thrown out. If you can't explain these observations**, then stop talking about evidence and just talk about miracles.
And it is fair for me to demand that your model explains these observations if you're going to talk about evidence. After all, your using our descriptive terminology for sedimentary materials (e.g., sandstone) while simultaneously waving away all of the work we do on understanding how these rocks form in favor of your a priori model. That's a bit hypocritical, especially since it's rather obvious that you don't really have much of an understanding of what the descriptive terms even refer to.
This is a good example of what I'm talking about. You're using our understanding of what soils look like, but are just dismissing the entire other side of the science, which is the process of soil formation. How do you do that with a straight face?
*I hate the term fossil fuel. Bleh. Everyone uses it, but I still hate it.
**And for the most part, you don't seem to even be trying (see the questions posed in #1179, #1092, #1031, among other places).
Aha, how I get to educate you all just a tiny bit !
Britomart is the only female knight of the round table. Google Spenser Faery Queen. She was the warrior for chastity in this 6 volume Elizabethan poem. Its a slog to read tho, if you like Shakespeare in the original, you will love this one.
A great spoof on the character is in L Sprague DeCamps Compleat Enchanter.
She has been my on line persona since I started, back in the days of the 300 baud modem and it was uphill both ways. You will find me Atheist number 62 on Alt.Atheism list.
I am also channel manager of undernets #atheism and we get a fundidiot or two a month to play with. Its always useful to have some good information. Their arguments have, believe it or not, evolved over the years.
I enjoy a good argument. Not that I have seen many from the believers. One stands out tho. We had a Mormon and a Moslem arguing one night, years ago. For hours we watched as they grew more and more frustrated with each other. Wish I had logs. They were using the same arguments on each other as we used on them. At least they had learned something from us, however little. I will be happy to deal with the ones you are tired of here, just send them to us.
And thank you again for all the good times here. You wont reason them out of a position they have not reached thru reason, but you reach all kinds of people who are watching and still capable of thinking.
No, Roger, you're not. That would after all be dodging. In reality, you are doing your homework, which is to read this. I wish you good-afternoon.
Oh, and, also make sure you read comment 1294 very attentively, though whether you do that before or after reading the page I linked to doesn't matter. Just read them both.
Yawn, RogerS with nothing to offer again. Just no evidence to support his points. Why do they even bother? [/rhetorical]
Owlmirror wrote:
unrealist.
I've come up with - or, am revisiting, if anyone's used it before - a term for these specific floodist clowns:
delugionist
Hmmm... Does capture the essence.
Roger S and Alan,
Can you please explain how Creationism predicts both the cosmological red shift and cosmic microwave background radiation?
I like it.
me likey
I'm back - I will start the stupid now.
I hope you have had the opportunity to stand on some mountains in the southwest; the uniqueness of this world can inspire awe which I confuse for belief in god. If you happen to travel there, stand back then take a hard run toward the edge and fly like an angel. As you are falling past the aftermath consisting of 100's or 1,000's of feet of igneous, sedimentary, and metamorphic rocks, you will begin to see the world as I do. When you land, your head will contain sedimentary layers of sandstone, shale, and limestone (consult Josh for limestone details, depths, & footnotes because, quite frankly, I just too damn lazy and will probably get it wrong anyway). The sedimentary layers contain preserved remains of plants and animals. Oh, look, a rabbit. You may also come across coal deposits with delicately preserved pressed leaf patterns. I like leaf patterns, they remind of ever branching tree of the evolution of life, er, of angel wings. Fossil fuels may also be under your feet. Careful, don't think that there are really fossils, it just god making mud patties and squeezing them really hard. If you are blind to seeing this as evidence then surely you and I should sit down over coffee and I will tell you about all the other delusions, er ideas, I have running around in my head. I'm really have a lot of ideas. Really. I'm not kidding. I really do. Really. Don't look at me like that, you're scaring me.
1 John 2:11 I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than the pre-frontal labotomy I got from reading this book over and over again. (I didn't have my book so I wrote this from memory, hope I got it right)
A further appeal to reason:
You know, I went back and reread this entire comments section and after I had flown off the cliff like an angel and survived, I realized that my head was made of rock. I've come to realize that that everyone has been appealing to me to use reason and I now realize that my arguments are appalling even though my head is filled with rock. Oh, I hope someday that you will put the letter K in front of the word now and and you will have Know. Did you know that Know sound like No? I'm not making this up, it really does. It is just awe inspiring, I feel like I am full of it. Isn't this just an "awe-full" world? Isn't God just an "awe-full" god? I know that what I know deep in heart tells me that what I know is "awe-full".
I purposefully postponed responding hoping the resident Geologist or Biologist wouldn't catch me in anymore lies or have words of wisdom on detecting limited surface biomass after an expiration of +4,000 yrs. I am a realist, you know. I REALLY thought that you would have tired of replying to this thread so I could get the last word but I should have expected that I wouldn't be able to lie about anything. I guess I am resolved to wearing one-way glasses so I don't have to look in the mirror and realize that I am a raving loony. I like looking in the mirror. Do you? It can be so reflective. Do you know what I mean? Do you? Where are you going? I thought we were just getting warmed up. I got some more Bible verses, would you like to hear them? OK, guess not. Maybe I'll see you later? OK, Bye.
It's with us nonetheless - and what else would dinosaurs have used to light their caves?
And fossil fools are still with us. Roger says, I have no idea why -
Breathtaking. It follows a bible verse. From the new testament. About darkness and blindness. In an "argument" promoting the global flood. Are we supposed to conclude that reason and blindness are connected in your mind Roger?
As for the rest of the post, well Josh and Owlmirror as well as every other post on this thread, have rebutted it completely. But the idea that we should be castigated for not seeing the non-evidence for an event that never happened is truly amazing.
And you really should read the article on Noah's Ark, which is funny because it's true - or get a child to read it to you, or at least summarize the main points - and if there's anything you don't understand that the child can't answer, please come back here. I'm sure someone will explain it to you.
That right there, my friend, is some of your better work.
*nods approvingly*
#1296 David Marjanović, OM
The "this" link (The Impossible Voyage of Noah's Ark) reads like a defense attorney's novel who had unlimited time to sell the jury while the prosecution attorney is bound and gagged. The Genesis account of Abraham, Isaac, and Israel suggests that they were men of great wealth. Gen 13:2 “And Abram was very rich in cattle, in silver, and in gold.” Families that remain united and value God’s principals, family, and hard work, as was the heritage of Noah, naturally tend to build wealth. How much wealth and knowledge could one build during 600 years in a world rich in resources and at the culmination of the former age? Much of the ark materials may have been acquired by trade. The long life spans recorded in Genesis allowed mankind to acquire numerous skills, experience, and knowledge that we may have marveled at. Here we read mankind had knowledge and “professors” from the onset of the Bible. Gen 4:22 “And Zillah, she also bare Tubalcain, an instructer of every artificer in brass and iron: and the sister of Tubalcain was Naamah.”
Pre-flood population: http://ldolphin.org/popul.html
During this time period, man was much healthier than he is now; the gene pool, less corrupted by subsequent harmful mutations and other defects; and the environment on earth, was much more favorable to good health and long life, as can be seen by the recorded pre-flood longevities.
Allowing for famine, disease, war, and disaster, a few sample calculations will show that the earth's population could have easily reached several billions of people between the time of Adam and the time of the flood. It is even quite possible that the pre-flood population was much higher than it is now. Genesis 4:21-22 gives suggestions of the development of music and advanced technology during this period.
Luke 18:27 “And he said, The things which are impossible with men are possible with God.” -All you need is faith the size of a mustard seed.
Kel: #1275 If you think the universe is less than 13.23 billion years old, then you are not following the empirical evidence. Likewise when many different radiometric techniques show that some rocks on this planet are at least 4.3 billion years old, if you do not have a >4.3 billion year old earth your concept fails.
Naturalism is a philosophical position that all phenomena can be explained in terms of natural causes and laws or more simply, “nature is all there is and all basic truths are truths of nature." Thus, there is a blind assumption that God could not have supernaturally created the universe from nothing as stated in Hebrews:
Hebrews 11:3 Through faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that things which are seen were not made of things which do appear.
The “supernatural” aspect was only when God initially created everything. After that point all phenomena can be explained using naturalistic causes. But naturalists want creationists to explain the universe’s formation using only naturalistic explanations which is an abandonment of the theory itself. For me to explain a seemingly 13.23 billion year old universe using only naturalistic causes would be as awkward for you explaining the same using only supernatural causes. It is irrational to argue that a supernatural act cannot be true on the basis that it cannot be explained by natural processes observed today. You are engaged in a subtle form of circular reasoning when you incorporate the assumption of naturalism to argue that distant starlight disproves a young universe.
What’s more, the idea of the time/space relationship being violated during the creation act is expected since the Bible repeats no fewer than 4 times that God “stretched out the heavens”. Evolutionists don’t necessarily contradict this assumption because they admit to much uncertainty at "time less than or equal to zero" in their “big bang” theory:
Kel: In terms of limitations, we can not look beyond the big bang so we really don't know what is before the big bang - or if there is even such thing as before. We don't know, and beyond mathematical speculation it would seem we can't know. So we are stuck to things that are in our universe - the empirical measurement.
A ship inside a bottle must be stretched after it is inserted into the bottle. Trying to define the finished product without ever violating the ship’s final extended state will result in fallacious theories such as “the bottle was formed around the ship”. Or in the case of the universe, the “bottle” must be 13.23 billion years old to accommodate for the distance to the stars.
This is naturalism and uniformitarianism in a nutshell. There is no acknowledgment of a “creator” or a supernatural act of creation. The presence of the “ship in the bottle” (i.e. light, matter, time principles) must be explained without changing the ship’s current state.
Notice from the chart that if God is rejected as the original cause for the created universe, then every subsequent interpretation is affected. Notice how every question for a creationist is easily answered empirically except for the first. Notice how the evolutionist’s denial of God (or omission in the first question) makes every subsequent explanation unbelievable, empirically indefensible, or controversial.
I present to you exhibit A @ 1307 :
Alan Clarke's comment,brilliantly highlighting what the use of false premises,strawmen,false analogies and non-sequiturs will do to an argument.
Like the eleborate delusional fantasy of a schizophrenic.
And do we have anything in the real world that corroborates this "account"?
No.
The word is "principles". I know that you hate truth and love lies, but can you please not mangle the English language? Thanks!
And of course, God's principles include families so united that they married their sisters. More than once, too.
Oh, and God's principles also include brothers who marry their sisters then pimping their sisters out. More than once, too. Not so united, eh?
It's hard out there for a pimp.
Wrong! No trade.
Given what you cited:
Genesis 6:5 And God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.
Genesis 6:11 The earth also was corrupt before God, and the earth was filled with violence.
Your entire thesis there was that every single human was so evil that they all (and all of the animals as well) deserved to drown because "the earth was filled with violence". That means you don't have trade, you have violence so terrible that there are no trading partners; everyone is all too busy fighting with and killing each other.
No. No skills, no experience, no knowledge. Just violence and corruption, according to your own myth.
No. He couldn't have instructed anyone. If there's just violence and corruption, no one can learn.
Garbage. Every human was so corrupt that they deserved to drown. Therefore, no health, and no long lives. The "longevities" must be lies.
No. If all humans were corrupt and violent, then war must have killed all but a paltry few, all of whom deserved to drown.
That must be a lie as well, given that all humans were corrupt and deserved to die.
Dude, do you even pay attention to the pathetic contradictions in your own myth?
If the pre-flood world was a golden age — then God is a vicious, despicable mass-murderer, much much worse than Hitler, Stalin, Pol-Pot, and every other butcher throughout history combined. Billions of humans murdered for no good reason whatsoever — according to your current exegesis.
If the pre-flood world was a horror deserving of death — then it could not possibly have been a golden age. A handful of corrupt violent killers who wouldn't be missed anyway were drowned, and good riddance — according to your previous exegesis.
You can't have it both ways.
Of course, it didn't actually happen, because there was no global flood. There were no people living to the ridiculous lengths claimed in the myth. There was no enormous population of billions, because the agriculture didn't exist to feed billions until just recently. Humanity did not arise in the Middle East or Asia Minor, it arose in Africa. Science has the dating methods; science has the archaeological evidence; science has the anthropological evidence; science has all the evidence. Science wins.
You have a myth. You have nothing besides the myth.
A lie, and not even one you really believe in. Do you drink bleach and other poisons without harm, to show your faith, as stated in Mark 16:18? No? Then shut up. Not even you really believe in the myth.
Really, why do you even bother? You have no science. You have nothing but your stupid myth. The myth is false. It is a story. It was made up by human beings.
Why is it so important to you to pretend that this false, made-up, fictional story is true?
this has nothing to do with explanatory power of naturalism or supernaturalism. Quite simply we know how light travels - to the particle of light it's like no time has passed. As such to see light that is 13.23 billion years old means that the universe has to be at least that old because there is quite simply no other way to explain it... not to mention there are about 1011 galaxies all between 1,000,000 and 13,000,000,000 light years away and that's the limitation of the observed universe.
And after 1300 comments,not counting the ones in the Titanoboa thread,we are finally getting somewhere !
But,but who stretches the ship inside the bottle,Owlmirror? Tell me that,ha !!
Alan, you say you are following the evidence but you aren't. You're just being selective with it to fit a conclusion you made long ago. That's the difference between science and religion. Now there may be a god out there. But in a universe where the speed of light is constant and we've seen distant galaxies, the only conclusion from the evidence is that the universe is old. This has nothing to do with God, it's just following the evidence. Why would God make it look 13.72 billion years old when it's really just 6000? that means scientists must be off by a factor of over 2,000,000. Likewise the age of the earth, why would God make it look like the earth is billions of years old? So much so that scientists are off by a factor of almost 1,000,000. It's like saying the distance between New York and San Francisco is only a few metres. There are many believers in God who accept an old universe and many non-believers who do not. But can you really honestly say that you will ever follow the evidence no matter where it leads you? The only reason I believe the universe is old is because the evidence points to an old universe, and even if I did believe in God I would still believe in an old universe. If I believed in God I would still believe in evolution, I would still believe that there was no global flood. Why because that's where the evidence points. My naturalistic bent is irrelevant to the evidence, and if you were intellectually honest you'd say the same about your supernatural bent.
Pretty ironic talking about "blind assumptions" given that the very verse you cite even says "Through faith". In other words, through blind assumptions. You can't even argue from your own theology without shooting yourself in the foot.
Kel already pointed out that we see the light from 13 billion light years away. Therefore, that light has been traveling for 13 billion years.
Oh, and for fuck's sake. The earth is not a ship. The universe is not a bottle. Stop pulling ships and bottles out of your ass to build a huge non-sequitur bottle-ship strawman monstrosity. Your entire argument is nothing but pathetic confused obscurantist garbage.
Science has the evidence. Science wins.
Given where the bottled ship came from, it must have been the emergency proctologist.
And that's not much - that's the smallest seed on earth!
Oh, wait...
This is, I think, the most hilarious thread I have read on Pharyngula. Two - (2) - full on nutters, trying to argue that the earth and the universe is 6000 years old, against what I like to think is a team of rationalists, arguing with wit, elegance, and logic that the world is how we know it really is.
Well, not that healthy because we were apparently so sinful and generally shitty that God, in a massive snit, something to do with homosexuals, I think (honestly what are they like - I mean we all appreciate fashion and haircuts and priests and art and interior design and that, but can it be worth the ultimate price? - destroyed everything except 8 people and enough animals to fill a little boat?
But then, of course, following brave Noah's and his incestous family's return to dry land, for some reason
God Swtiched On Science
And yet
Sigh, Alan is still incapable of doing anything other than providing his worthless and repeatedly disproven testament. What an idiot. Still no references to outside sources, just more citations to his fictional bible about his imaginary god. I think it is time for PZ to close this thread, but I also think he should plonk Alan and RogerS. They are learning nothing, so they are just proselytizing.
One more thing about the age of the universe. The speed of light and the distance of galaxies are so well established by evidence that if the world was only 6000 years old then it would mean that God is trying intentionally to deceive us. We sit on the outer spiral arm of our own galaxy that is 100,000 light years across. We have a dwarf galaxy orbiting us 168,000 light years away where a star went supernova. Meaning that if the universe is less than 168,000 years old then God would have had to fake the supernova explosion in this nearby galaxy. When it comes down to the evidence, experimentally special relativity holds true, and thus so does the speed of light. Through a variety of standard candles we are able to calculate the distances of nearby and distant stars in our own galaxy, and nearby and distant galaxies. e=mc² therefore the speed of light = sqrt(energy / matter). If you want to increase the speed of light, you have to increase the amount of energy in the universe (remember than matter IS energy) by order n². The only 3 options that I can foresee are: 1. God is deliberately deceiving us my making the universe look old, 2. the universe is old, or 3. all evidence from astrophysics must be ignored. 1 has theological implications, 2 is following the evidence, and 3 destroys the claim that you are following the evidence just like the "naturalists"
Pfffft. Your high-falutin' sciency "standard candles" can't hold a, uh, candle to one of these!!!!
Pooh. Goddamn original sin!
Maybe that's it - maybe God hit preview before he was ready to post!
Anyway so....after an indeterminate period of magicky time,
God Swithched on Science
Except of course, he didn't. You see, although God wanted us to live on, without gays, obviously, and letting science get on with on it, not only did he have to erase all the evidence of a global flood, he had to make sure that the world was stuffed full of the petrified bodies of plants and animals that never lived - so meticulously done that we have never found a single mistake - invent micro-evolution, and then let it go wild, like the false theory of macro-evolution only fantastically more rampant, but just for a little while, 'cos it aint happening any more, right (so does than mean he swithched it off again, I'm confused) and take time off his renewed smiting of those pesky sinners (what more gays? Thought he'd got rid of them for good!) introducing harmful pathogens, making the dinosaurs, which had orignally all been vegitarian, and then become meat eaters in the first sinful times, back to being meat-eaters again, only to think "Oh fuck it, I never liked them much anyway" and destryong them all, lovingly placing their corpses back in exactly the right place in the false geological record to lead the sinners astray....
Sorry, I'm exhausted already. Poor old God, eh?
And do you know the very worst thing?
It's that the obvious truth of all this lies only with a few brave individuals, like RogerS and Alan Clarke, who argue with infidels on atheist blogs.
Oh God, truly thou art strange and mystical!
I'm convinced anyway. So what church is it you two belong to? Sign me up. As long as there's no gays in it. I've nothing against them personally, but I think it only prudent to keep my distance just in case God decides to switch off science again, and destroy the whole lot. Again.
Phew. God must be shattered!
Which, as both Owl and Kel have pointed out, is a position that makes claims by you of following the evidence where it leads seem rather close to bearing false witness. But again, if it is awkward for you to use just evidence to explain your position, then whey the hell do you try to use evidence at all? You have miracles. Just stand on those. The evidence refutes your position, Alan. Completely and utterly. All you have left are miracles.
It's irrational to postulate that your supernatural actor wipes away all evidence of his actions and replaces that evidence with contrary evidence. You have NO PROBLEM not accepting, Odin say, on the basis of no evidence. But it's different with your myths. Yet we are irrational when we apply the same consistent standards to the entire universe? Beam, meet eye.
No. You, Alan, are engaged in a weird form of inconsistency whereby you're trying to support your position using evidence over there, while simultaneously using supernatural explanations over here. The evidence (distant starlight combined with a constant speed of light in a vacuum combined with "space" being mostly a vacuum) disproves a young universe. We're standing on the evidence. You are complicating the whole thing by ignoring the evidence and then adding this supernatural variable (god--based on your a priori that it has to be there) for which there is no evidence. How does our ignoring that variable (god) and standing only on the evience, which is consistent, constitute circular reasoning? Hmmmmmm?
I cannot teach this boy. He has no patience.
You can't! Oh Me. I was relying on you - they don't listen to a word I say.
I'm outa here. This creation's fucked. And stupid. I'll destroy it and start over.
Hot enough for ya yet?
Regretfully,
God - The real one.
@1322: Hey, if you're going to destroy it, can you maybe do a flood this time? I'd really like to see what deposits a worldwide flood would lay down...
Exactly. If you want to believe Goddidit Alan, you are more than welcome to. But please stop arguing that the evidence is on your side when it clearly isn't. The fact that we saw a star in a nearby dwarf galaxy go supernova where it's age was calculated from simple geometry to show that it's 168,000 light years away shows that your hypothesis of a 6000 year old universe is false. If you are in north america, look up at M31 - the light you are looking at is 2.3 million years old. And this is one of the closest galaxies to the milky way - it contains about 1 trillion stars and is ~100,000 light years across. So please show some intellectual honesty - admit that you aren't looking at the evidence or try to follow the evidence with an open mind to it's logical conclusions. For that's what having a scientific understanding of the world around us is about. With any pre-conceived conclusion, all you have is confirmation bias and you'll forever be stuck in your own conclusions. And if you want to stay that way, fine. Just please stop pretending you are looking at the evidence when you are ignoring the distance and observation of 1023 that are scattered across this vast universe.
Good point. If Alan and the other clown (I can't remember his name right now) and all the other delugionists just sat back and shrugged their shoulders and said 'Meh, we don't pretend to understand it. Such is the way of God' then we'd be screwed; we can't argue against something that can't be shown to be untrue (unlike creationism, of course).
From what I understand that's the Jewish view of things - and they've had access to the OT a lot longer than the upstart Christians have.
Through faith you believe without question what you have been told is True, with nothing but hearsay to support it, and despite any and all evidence against it.
Really? Great! Because all observed phenomena point to a very old Earth, and a much older universe using naturalistic explanations.
The origin of the universe can be considered a separate question to its age, but we can observe that whatever happened, it must have happened way back then.
Just like when he beat out the dome of the sky like a metal bowl, right?
Take another look. You're using four words as a perfectly justified explanation for violation of all physical laws. They explain everything about the way the universe was created! Four words.
Other people claim that the Bible is perfectly in line with modern cosmology theories because it accurately describes the big bang with another four words: Let There Be Light.
News flash: four words plucked out of a book don't constitute evidence for anything.
Not sure I follow this analogy very well; the ship is the universe, right? Or is the ship the solar system, and the bottle is the universe or something? (I guess the ship is "stuff we can observe and try to explain" in some fashion, anyway.)
Whatever: I think your analogy is backwards.
To the casual observer, the ship is whole and complete, and could not possibly fit through the neck of the bottle. Therefore the obvious explanation is the bottle was made around the ship, or the ship and bottle were made simultaneously.
On closer examination, however, there's evidence the masts are hinged. The rigging is tied off in some places and pulled through the whole hull in others, arranged such that the tension holds the masts up. The hull seems as if it would just fit through the neck if the masts were flattened. The more evidence you find, the more it indicates the ship was inserted into the bottle folded, and expanded once inside.
Despite this, many people insist that "The ship has always been in the bottle!"... because that's what they were told by the previous owner, so it's got to be true right?
[strawman chart:]
Evolutionism? How about "science"?
"Matter & energy origin": various hypotheses, work in progress. Science asks the question.
"Law of Life": WTF? You can't just make shit up and then accuse people of not meeting your "standards".
Origin of life: fine, but your creationist "law" is no such thing; is is merely an assertion.
Complexity of Life, Entropy: You think everything in the observed universe only ever decays under all conditions? Forget evolution running contrary to your ideas, every individual living thing falsifies that! Starting from a single cell, they develop into massively complex organisms with billions of cells! The hint this should give you is your understanding of entropy is fundamentally flawed.
The universe doesn't "overcome entropy by chance" -- you don't ever overcome entropy.
Information: Can you define your understanding of "information" with enough specifity and meaning to do anything useful with it? by any of the definitions of information used by scientists, evolution makes perfect sense.
Notice the missing first question: Origin of God?
Science: meaningless question; no evidence, known properties or even useful definition of proposed entity.
Creationism: ?? (don't know) or "uncaused cause"
(But you state "only life begets life".
Is God alive? If yes, wouldn't something need to beget God?
If no, your own axiom fails.)
You'll also notice you've merely moved the ultimate origin of all things back a step and postulated an entity with no known or observable parameters in the gap. Why can't I just write "uncaused cause" in for the Big Bang? That removes an unnecessary element from the equation and changes the outcome not one bit.
Then why did you stop reading after a page or two?
You, too, have unlimited time (proven by the fact that you comment here). So go read the rest. Bye.
Why do you simply believe that? Why don't you even try to find out if what is "recorded" is actually true?
Without modern medicine and artificial fertilizer?
You're kidding.
Worse, you're not even internally consistent. If humans were healthier because less time had passed since the onset of deleterious mutations (never mind natural selection, which removes deleterious mutations), then so were their pathogens and other parasites, because the same condition holds for them.
Also, isn't late pre-flood mankind supposed to have been horribly, horribly sinful? Why didn't that include constant war? Why didn't they slaughter each other off in huge numbers?
You and your sources are making shit up.
I'm incapable of even that. To convince me, you need evidence. I will follow the evidence wherever it leads, so put some on the table already.
After you've finished your homework, that is.
Exactly, "hard as a molten mirror" it says. The Earth as a plate, the sky/heaven as a dome above it – as a kettle made from sheet metal by hammering it. The Bible could hardly be clearer on that.
In sum. You can overcome it locally, just not universe-wide. For example, you can eat and grow, destroying the order of your food.
Well, probably you can. After all, the total energy of the universe appears to be 0, as required for a quantum fluctuation allowed by Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle.
All those creationists who have been sleeping since 1923… and then they wonder why people laugh at them.
Oh, BTW, Alan, arguments from Kent Hovind's ignorance aren't any better than arguments from your own ignorance. Like you, Hovind couldn't explain what "evolution" and "theory of evolution" mean if his life depended on it – and it shows!
Interestingly, your analogy with the ship in the bottle calls God a liar. Do you really want to do that?
Answer our questions, and do your homework. Or we shall continue to point and laugh.
RogerS: Much of the ark materials may have been acquired by trade.
Owlmirror: Wrong! No trade…you have violence so terrible that there are no trading partners; everyone is all too busy fighting with and killing each other.
When there is a common goal, those at odds are reconciled.
Luke 23:12 And the same day Pilate and Herod were made friends together: for before they were at enmity between themselves.
Alan, Alan, still the idiot. Your god doesn't exist and your bible is fiction. So quit quoting it like it means something to anybody except yourself.
Still no evidence for your imaginary god. Still no evidence for your world wide all continent flud. Still no evidence that all biota died at the same time. Still no evidence that existing civilizations died at that time. Massive, massive failure Alan. You got to present evidence, which you know you don't have. That means your presumption is wrong, and creationism is wrong.
How did people outside of Noah's family share a common goal with Noah? Were they aware of the impending deluge? If so, were they perfectly fine with not being counted among the saved? That's pretty altruistic. In todays world they'd probably be heralded as heroes. Still repugnant enough to merit death from above, though, eh?
How are the answers to those questions coming, Alan?
A myth is just a fancy way of saying "it was like that when I got here."
Roger S and Alan,
Can you please explain how Creationism predicts both the cosmological red shift and cosmic microwave background radiation?
I'm gonna keep asking. It's not like you can ignore me for 50 days......
Which contradicts Gen 6:5 and 6:11. Constant violence means that there was no possibility of reconciliation.
You cannot have it both ways. God is a mass-murderer, or no-one and nothing on the Earth could live without violence.
Alan Clarke: The “supernatural” aspect was only when God initially created everything. After that point all phenomena can be explained using naturalistic causes.
Kagato: Really? Great! Because all observed phenomena point to a very old Earth, and a much older universe using naturalistic explanations.
I take it that “all observed phenomena” excludes that which discredits your theory. Perhaps you meant to say "All my interpretations of our mutually shared evidences support my theory." Evidences don’t come with interpretations. Man adds that later. Which phenomena does one choose to accept or reject and how it is interpreted? Some are impressed by the Marjanović Tilt Phenomena while others reject it. Your statement “all observed phenomena point to a very old Earth” can easily be proven wrong:
Click here: radiocarbon dates that reject an old Earth for full source of above data that includes the following:
Our differences lie not in the data or “phenomena”. The differences lay in the a priori assumption of God’s existence/non-existence. After that assumption is made, one collects and arranges their evidences. I’m not arguing against your ability to align and order your evidences. I doubt the reason for why you want to align it that way. Why did David Marjanović want to rotate Zinjanthropus’ skull 30 degrees off axis?
Who would have ever believed that modern educated “scientists” would argue against entropy? Even the simplest understand that houses left to themselves do not become ordered and clean. Yesterday, my 3.5 year-old daughter asked repetitively, “What is that?” I finally figured out that she was looking at four jet vapor trails in the sky that formed a bisected triangle. When something is sufficiently complex, an untrained child makes differentiation. Approximately 4-8 years of exposure to “highly-educated teachers” are necessary to replace the foolish notion of a designer with the evolution fable.
2 Timothy 4:3-4 For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine; but after their own lusts shall they heap to themselves teachers, having itching ears; And they shall turn away their ears from the truth, and shall be turned unto fables.
Alan Clarke, we have already dealt with your carbon dating several times. Your inability to recall the rebuttals show you to be of a minor mentality, with the memory of a snail. And you seriously expect us to take you at your word? Massive, massive fail again. Alan, science expects and only works with honest practitioners. If you have been refuted, you stay refuted until you can show new evidence which is not the case here. Until you stop lying to yourself, you can't stop lying to us. Your god doesn't exist and your bible is fiction. Thems the facts until you show evidence otherwise, which has been sorely lacking.
Alan Clarke, FM, wrote:
Are you not actually reading for comprehension, Alan? That was Kagato, not David Marjanović - David Marjanović told you as much, as did Kagato him (or her) self in post post #1288.
Sheesh, no wonder you delugionists struggle so much.
The differences lay in the a priori assumption of God’s existence/non-existence. After that assumption is made, one collects and arranges their evidences.
I know, personally, practicing Christians who are scientists and who reject utterly your superstitious view of Scripture as not only Medieval as regards empirical matters, but blasphemous as regards Christian faith.
Your assertion is untenable. It is empirically false.
Would we call a radiometric date a "phenominon" anyway?
Alan--I'm glad you're back. How's that homework coming? Do we have to start deducting points for lateness?
That's not true at all, Alan. What is it about you guys and your need to make shit up? It's like it's a diagnosable affliction.
We have no a priori assumptions regarding a deity. If someone presents solid evidence of Odin's existence, I will take it very seriously.
It's like it's a diagnosable affliction.
fixed.
seriously, it really is a diagnosable affliction. There is so much denial and projection evident in the communications of every creationist I have ever seen (over 2000 now), that it is undeniable that there is some underlying pathology to it.
most of the pop-psychologists have suggested it is because of extreme cognitive dissonance (just too much extreme compartmentalization), but I'm certainly open to other ideas as to what it might be.
Actually, reading back over Alan's latest inanity, to which both Josh and I responded with a Wha...?, I realize that Alan is making a very important admission here, and it is completely devastating to his entire project.
Because the apologetics Alan and Roger are employing here aren't intended to prove YEC and then stop there; ultimately they're interested in (and, delugionally, believe they have acheived) an empirical proof of the existence of Yahweh.
But, Alan says, in order to properly interpret their 'evidences,' one has to have, a priori, assumed that very existence. What's it called again when you assume your conclusion, Alan?
I know what it's called when you do that and then proudly call attention to the fact: Not Very Bright, Alan.
"delugionally" - brilliant!
<claps>
Alan, we start with the presuppostion that Yahweh doesn't exist. Then you you must show the physical evidence that he does. We are waiting. An eternally burning bush ala Moses, that we have examined by scientists, magicians and professional debunkers, would be good.
Hmmmm.... Perhaps it's time for me to stop trying to give them the benefit of the doubt (my own affliction which will likely be my undoing) that there's some honesty and sanity buried in there somewhere.
CJO--interesting, and somewhat disturbing, analysis. And +10 for that expert use of delugional.
Approximately 4-8 years of exposure to "highly-educated teachers" are necessary to replace the foolish notion of a designer with the evolution fable.
sounds like Alan missed out on about 4-8 years of education.
...and will likely force his poor kid to miss out on the same amount, or more.
are you homeschooling your kid, Alan, to prevent her from "turning the skull 30 degrees"?
yes, put those coke-bottle thick colored glasses on her quick, Alan, before she gets exposed to all that nasty "reality".
frankly, though, if your kid has half a brain, then she will most likely abandon you and your idiotic notions around the age of 10 or so.
I predict she will start rebelling against your idiocy actively around 11 or 12, and have moved the fuck out of your house by 15 or 16 to live with her biker boyfriend.
another soul lost to the wastes...
it's inevitable, Alan.
join us...
Wowbagger's coinage. 'tis a good'un.
Say for instance like rejecting the observed distances of 100,000,000,000 galaxies each containing ~1,000,000,000,000 stars shown through observation to being anywhere between 2,000,000 and 13,000,000,000 light years away meaning that any universe with those inside must be at least 13 billion years old?
Alan,
2 things:
1) Who the hell says "my 3.5 year-old daughter"?
2) You have reproduced?...sigh....
The only one who has been excluding that which discredits your "theory" ... is you. Again, and again, and again.
Because you hate truth and love lies.
Like you reject the phenomena of forty different dating methods that can only be interpreted as evidence for an old Earth. Like you reject all of astronomy, all of cosmology, all of physics, all of geology, all of geochemistry, every single science that there is, except for carefully censored bits and pieces which is twisted and mangled into "support" for the bible, which no sane person would have thought of without the bible existing in the first place to inspire the distortion and lies of the evidence of reality.
And yet again you demonstrate your fundamental dishonesty. You hate truth and you love lies. It's a lie that Marjanovic is the source of the image; it's a lie that he agreed with it or suggested that it was correct; it's a lie that has been shown to be a lie... but you love it, because it's a lie, and you hate truth and love lies.
Alan, what does Exodus 10:16 say? How about Matthew 5:37? James 5:12?
Does honesty matter to you at all, or do you just lie to everyone? Or do you just not know what truth even is? Or do you not even care?
#1309 Owlmirror
I give your post an A for English in correcting my grammar error but a D- in History. Let's do a refresher lesson. Civilizations can often be divided into 4 basic periods:
1. The founding
2. The high point
3. The decline
4. The collapse
The last stage is often very rapid, as in an individual's life where the last stage may be cancer. The functions of a civilization can still be functional until the very end of stage 4. Noah with centuries of wisdom under his belt may have had foresight to have supplies on site. Just a few miles from the nearest town could prevent interference and disruption.
A surgeon may appear to some as barbaric in treating a patient in stage 4. Limbs are amputated, organs removed, radioactive shakes served and why? Is the surgeon "a vicious, despicable mass-murderer"? I say NO, but that the cancer must be removed in order for life to continue.
I would examine your own life; you may be postponing needed "surgery" by the surgeon. I am not the one to help you; I am just a middle man. You need to voice your complaints directly to your surgeon. If you are sincere, he will listen and proscribe treatment for your predicament.
No. I meant all observed phenomena.
The field of science is not some secret cabal who are all conspiring to put forth false theories. Scientists are individuals applying reason to their chosen area of study. If someone found credible evidence that conclusively discredited a long-standing theory, you can bet it would get worldwide attention in the scientific community. "The Scientists" don't collectively decide that certain results merits suppression. Revolutionary ideas are celebrated.
I repeat: You moron.
Not only have you failed several times now to notice you've misattributed that photoshop hack job despite repeated corrections (it was me, David just reposted it); but its whole purpose was to highlight your ridiculous interpretation of the imagery.
Let me spell it out again for you, slowly:
You took a photo of a skull, and positioned it next to an artist's impression (of ambiguous perspective and questionable anatomical accuracy in the first place) as "evidence" that evolution is therefore false -- and placed it in such a way that it was obvious even at a glance that a different positioning would not be inconsistent with the illustration.
I was not implying that the painting was accurate. In fact, I will go on record as saying I am confident it is not. It was merely to point out that your pathetic photoshop trickery was A) meaningless, and B) moronic.
---
I'm not going to directly address your carbon-dating list, because I know that I'm not qualified to do so (and I'm confident that you aren't either, and are merely parroting the list from a source you think agrees with you). I'm sure someone will jump in if they feel like wasting more time on you.
I have confidence in the scientists that are qualified, because I know dodgy science can never stand for very long. If I had the time and inclination, I could study geology, radiology etc. and verify the work for myself, and I know that many other people have done so. Fame and fortune would await anyone who could conclusively demonstrate radiometric dating doesn't work.
I did, however, do a quick Google search on a couple of the names in the references. I find it telling that the first page of hits for all that I tried only returned results from the 'Institute for Creation Research' and related links. You'll have to excuse me if I don't immediately trust their publications as far as I could kick them.
NO. YOU'RE DOING IT WRONG.
No scientist would ever "argue against entropy".
You clearly don't even have the most basic understanding of the concept.
Here. Go and read this.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy
If entropy worked the way you seem to think it does, life itself could not exist (never mind evolution), because any form of biological development would be impossible. Crystals could not form. The very world we stand on, stars, galaxies; none of it could even be here.
"In thermodynamics, entropy is a measure of the unavailability of a system’s energy to do work."
Doing work, pretty much by definition, must involve a decrease in entropy at some point, even though it will always result in an overall increase in entropy.
The classic example is an ice cube in a closed room. Over time, heat from the room will move into the ice and it will melt, until room and ice (now water) reach a temperature equilibrium. The entropy of the ice has increased -- but the entropy of the room has decreased (though by a smaller amount than the ice).
This is how the universe works.
I have no idea what point you were trying to make with your anecdote. (Though it saddens and disturbs me to know that you will be responsible for your daughter's upbringing.)
And oh good another Bible quote.
Stop it. When will you get it through your thick skull that quoting from a book we don't believe has any authority (and precious little factual content) is in no way persuasive to atheists? Should I start responding with passages from Harry Potter or something?
RogerS, a thoroughly worthless post on your part. You are trying to distract from the main issues, which is the failure of you and Alan to provide sufficient scientific evidence to back up your claims, starting with the existence of your imaginary creator. So far, nothing. And I suspect you have no idea what is meant by evidence.
Here is something for you and Alan to keep in mind. If you cannot supply the evidence required, then you can cease posting without admitting defeat.
RogerS @1351, FFS! WTF?
In reference to the “Marjanović Tilt Hoax”:
David Marjanović: Not that it matters, but that wasn't me. I haven't uploaded anything during this or any other Pharyngula thread. Comment 1277 is right, it was Kagato.
David, I apologize for doubting your integrity.
Alan Clarke, you have done nothing but doubt everyone's integrity.
Oh nice, after 100 comments Alan finally notices his error.
I don't really know why I'm bothering, but as he's now called my integrity into question by implication, I feel it necessary to follow up one more time.
1) I have no biology background, so I certainly may make some errors, but they will never be deliberate deception on my part.
2) Again, I don't like the picture. It's got too much of a 'noble savage' air about it, the eyes and nose are too human in my opinion. The mouth should probably protrude more too. But we've been over that.
3) Funnily enough, the Smithsonian's website displays the skull you've used at the same angle I did: (link)
4) You'll notice from the above link that the skull you picked wasn't even the correct species -- it's Paranthropus robustus, not Paranthropus bosei! Probably an honest mistake, but you might want to think on that before casting aspersions on other people's integrity. Glass houses, you know.
5) While I maintain it's a pointless exercise, you seem to place some value in it so here's the same silly diagram again, this time with the correct skull: (image)
Are we done now?
Feynmaniac: Can you please explain how Creationism predicts both the cosmological red shift and cosmic microwave background radiation?
Feynmaniac, I came across an article that addresses redshift from a creationist perspective by Dr. Russell Humphreys here.
I first became impressed with Dr. Humphreys when I was constructing a crude model of my own (click here) to explain the Earth’s declining magnetic field. I compared the Earth’s field to one generated by an automobile ignition coil when the primary circuit is opened. I found a voltage plot of a coil on the web that surprised me when I realized that the curve wonderfully explained magnetic reversals. After making this discovery, I came across Dr. Humphrey’s model which was almost a mirror of mine but much more developed. What is beautiful about Humphreys creationist-based magnetic field model is in 1984, Humphreys made some predictions of the field strengths of Uranus and Neptune, two giant gas planets beyond Saturn. His predictions were about 100,000 times the evolutionary dynamo predictions. The two rival models were inadvertently put to the test when the Voyager 2 spacecraft flew past these planets in 1986 and 1989. The fields for Uranus and Neptune3 were just as Humphreys had predicted. Humphreys’ creationist model also explains why the moons of Jupiter that have cores have magnetic fields, while Callisto, which lacks a core, also lacks a field.
Feynmaniac, I’m aware I’m diverting from your original question of redshift and background radiation but I mentioned this as an endorsement of Humphreys work. Let me know if Humphreys satisfactorily answers your redshift and background radiation questions. Also, I assume you are aware that the “big bang” theory has multiple problems: click here At any rate, I think that studying multiple models is beneficial to one’s education. Unfortunately, this benefit is withheld from students at all levels in the United States attending government-funded institutions.
Sigh. Alan, the minute I see creation science [sic], I check talk.origins.
News flash! Civilizations are not individuals. "Collapse" of civilizations results from more than one possible cause, but human beings are not "cancer". If the civilization is "functional", then it does not need to be destroyed; the actual resource problem needs to be addressed.
The code of the true surgeon is "First, do no harm". In your analogy, the "surgeon" does not "cure" the "patient"; he takes a few "tissue samples", and then kills "him" — or rather, all of the millions (or billions, or whatever) of living beings, even though he supposedly is capable of providing a 100% effective cure through omnipotence and omniscience. The only reason to withhold such a cure is utter malevolence. Your "surgeon" is indeed a vicious, despicable mass-murderer.
So far, you get an F- in Logic, an F- in Apologetics, and an F- in Theodicy.
Although, you have reminded me of something. Calling human beings you kill, or want to kill, or think ought to be killed, a "cancer" or a "disease" has a rather interesting history, often combined with calling yourself a "surgeon".
For example:
HINT: Agent Smith is not a good guy.
Of course, that's just fiction. Has such a thing ever happened in real life? Why, yes. Yes it has.
HINT: Hitler was not a good guy.
HINT: Your "surgeon" is not a good guy ... and by extension, neither are you.
F- in Ethics, too.
It's the smell! If there is such a thing...
Roger, come on--please stop doing this. We've asked you this before. We're familiar with your faith. We're not really interested in trying on the Christ hat. Many of us have already been there and done that.
We're probably all really interested in discussing other things that you know, such as upon what you base your atheism regarding Odin, or what basis you used to reject Islam and instead choose Christ (although sadly the answer is probably going to be that you were raised Christian and haven't really explored Islam in depth). And those of us who doggedly remain in this thread are obviously quite interested in how you reconcile the Bible with reality (and we've largely gotten our answers to those questions). But, and I don't want to speak for everyeone here, I don't think most of us are really interested in hearing the good news. We've already heard it. Many times. For many of us, Christianity had its chance: it lost.
Regarding radiocarbon dating: if I have to write a treatise on this I will, but I rather thought we'd pretty much dealt with it. I looked through Glem's paper. Lots of nice mental gymnastics therein. What an amazing amount of knots you have to twist yourself in when you start the paper with the conclusion already assumed.*
*And what the heck does an MD know about radiometric dating, anyway? I know that's just me bein' a librul elitist, but I couldn't find much indication that he knew what the heck he was talking about.
History, you don't really want to go there.
Unas was Pharoah during the highpoint. His reign started 2356 BCE.
2348 BCE was the date of the flood according to Ussher. You would think this would be a decline and collapse rolled into one.
Apparently not, because the reign of Unas ended 2323 BCE.
You never did answer how Unas survived.
Sigh, Still no evidence from the scientific literature from Alan. Hint Alan, there is no scientific literature to be found at any creationist site like AIG, because creationism isn't science, it is religion. And you can only refute science with more science. Religion cannot refute science. You need to focus on that. You and Roger can testament about religion all you want, but it is just meaningless words that do not advance your argument.
Your poor poor child. And you introduce her into your posts here? Why? Well, then I'll repost this:
I made two ammendments, in line with the latest peer-reviewed research ;)
Answer to Owlmirror’s Exposé on Jesus = Hitler
In Christianity, the character of Jesus Christ and his “father” (the God of the Old Testament) are one as stated by Jesus himself:
John 10:30 I and my Father are one.
This seems to be confirmed by Owlmirror because both are at the pinnacle of despicableness.
Further confirmation for Owlmirror’s suspicion:
John 5:36 But I have greater witness than that of John: for the works which the Father hath given me to finish, the same works that I do, bear witness of me, that the Father hath sent me.
So Owlmirror is indeed on the right track. Either character from the Old or New Testament is considered “the enemy”. For the Christian, the characters of Jesus and his father form a “duality”, but they are one:
1 John 2:23 Whosoever denieth the Son, the same hath not the Father: [(but) he that acknowledgeth the Son hath the Father also].
Owlmirror’s attempt to equate Christian ideology (teachings of Jesus Christ) to those of Hitler:
Owlmirror: Hitler’s ideology possessed a coherent structure revolving around the idea of Germany as an organism and Jews as pathogenic micro-organisms whose continued presence within the body politic could lead to its demise. Genocide grew out of the logic contained within this ideological fantasy.
I don’t know if Owlmirror is a member of the “Jesus is Hitler” organization but the two are soul partners. I suppose anything that resembles “Jesus Christ” is to be feared by Owlmirror. The “Golden Rule” could be a death trap in disguise. To be on the safe side, Owlmirror should “Not do to others as he would have them do to him.” Surely this plan will guarantee his chances for survival. Ultimately, if Owlmirror detaches his limbs and head from his body, then he will fulfill the antithesis of Jesus’ teaching “A house divided against itself cannot stand.” I often wondered why those who reject Christ to the extreme culminate their life by killing themselves.
Josh: Roger, come on--please stop doing this. We've asked you this before. We're familiar with your faith. We're not really interested in trying on the Christ hat. Many of us have already been there and done that.
Josh, there is a distinct difference between you and Owlmirror: Your posts have a much higher percentage of scientific empiricism while Owlmirror’s tend more toward “spirituality” or attacks on the spiritual. I detect that you want to depart from this spiritual genre but in doing so, you seem to be insensitive to Owlmirror’s needs. More than likely he is older than you. Socrates tells us that philosophy is a preparation for death. In that sense, you seem to exhibit a certain naivety toward where all of your empiricism will ultimately take you, or are you postponing that thought for when your energy has become exhausted as it has for evolutionary biologist William Provine:
"He wanted desperately to die but we couldn't help him die. I don't wanna die like that. I want to shoot myself in the head long before then. I'm gonna do something different." (source)
There is a correlation between one’s philosophy and how they leave this world: with or without honor.
sources: Wikipedia “Friedrich Nietzsche”
Another wasted post by a godbot. Sigh, just no real scientific evidence presented for anything.
It looks like Alan is feeling nervous. Alan is probably nervous because Alan knows that Alan is wrong, but can't admit it. Alan always goes on the attack when Alan is nervous. Or maybe Alan just has a psychotic attack. Alan always repeats people's names obsessively when Alan has a psychotic attack. That's because Alan is an obsessive psychotic, who also loves lies and hates truth. So of course, obsessive psychotic Alan lies some more...
For example, Alan is such an insane psychotic that Alan does not realize that the "Golden Rule" is something that the character called "God" explicitly violates, repeatedly and forcefully, in the collected myths of the Bible. The supposed global flood is simply the largest and most egregious example in the Bible; the one with the highest death count. But there are plenty of others, starting in the Garden of Eden, where God lies to Adam, and then curses Adam and Eve and all of their descendants, and the Earth itself.
Questions for Alan to ponder: Would God want to be cursed forever? Would God want to be utterly destroyed? If not, then why does God curse humans and the Earth forever; why does God utterly destroy all life on the Earth except for a tiny, tiny percentage? Why does God commit genocide?
Of course, Alan is such an insane psychotic that Alan does not realize that the "Golden Rule" is something that Alan himself explicitly violates.
Actually, the correlation is between one's sanity and how you leave this world. Just as Nietzsche was insane, you too are insane. Your psychosis will probably culminate in violence to those around you, and eventually, killing yourself, utterly without honor.
Seek medical help before it is too late. If the medication does not help, have yourself committed to an asylum so that you can at least avoid your obsessive and psychotic rage causing you to do unto others what you would not wish done unto yourself.
Nerd: Another wasted post by a godbot. Sigh, just no real scientific evidence presented for anything.
What is amazing is that your SETI probe continues to be directed toward me (a godbot) in search of intelligence despite continual futile attempts to detect intelligence.
Insanity: doing the same thing, over and over again, but expecting different results
If one truly wishes independent confirmation of a theory, then one cannot calibrate the confirmation test by the theory, or any part of the theory, that is being tested. What’s more amazing, and contradictory, is your persistent hammering away of words and phrases on your keyboard directed toward this forum. If the phrases are deemed “unintelligent” by the recipient and discarded, how will your hypothesis be tested? Even if the other beings speak your same “language”, they may discount your attempt to communicate:
On a more positive note: Nerd, I am your friend and will not discount you like the others because of your deficiencies. I have multiple weaknesses which other posters who are more “virile” have repeatedly pointed out. The race is not always won by the swiftest. Solomon noted a certain paradox in life when he saw princes walking next to horses mounted by their servants. (Ecc 10:7)
1 Cor 1:27-28 But God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise; and God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty; And base things of the world, and things which are despised, hath God chosen, [yea], and things which are not, to bring to nought things that are.
Alan, another wasted post showing no evidence for your imaginary god, no evidence for your bible being anything other than a work of fiction, no evidence for a all continent world wide flud, no evidence all the biota on the earth was wiped out in one event, no evidence that all existing civilizations with written records were wiped out all at once, and absolutely no evidence that the dating of the universe are wrong.
Pure evasion on your part, which tantamount to admitting defeat. So, if you have any evidence for the above, present it. Otherwise, you have the option of ceasing your posts, which you should take if you don't have any scientific evidence from the peer reviewed primary scientific literature to back up your assertions.
Liar.
The race is not always won by the swiftest.
did you meant that in terms of intelligence, or speed?
because if you're painting yourself as slow, or stupid, you don't need to distinguish.
you're both.
Of course you like that verse. God likes stupid and weak and base and despised things; you are all of those things, so you can pretend that it means that God likes you.
God may like stupid and weak and base and despised things, but science demands intelligent arguments with strong, conclusive evidence. Since all Creationists, including you, have nothing but lies and foolish arguments (along with your own personal base and despicable psychotic obsessions), you have nothing to do with science.
Go to church, pray all you like, but stop lying about the real world. Or at least stop lying about it here.
Creationists protecting teh intertubes
They put the air hole...there? It would seem that Wolverine hates getting a blow job!
Suck dammit! Suck! "Blow" is just an expression!
Alan Clarke: On a more positive note: Nerd, I am your friend and will not discount you like the others because of your deficiencies.
Stanton: Liar.
Stanton, admittedly there was about 30% sarcasm in that statement because of the contentious nature of this forum. When I was single, I literally housed persons who were homeless, down-and-out, and recently-divorced. At the time, they were just as contentious, angry, psychotic, and hard to get along with as any individual on this forum. So let me correct my statement and remove your doubts by withdrawing my 30% sarcasm and say I would receive anyone who needed help regardless of their past or quantity of Alan Clarke-directed expletives, including Owlmirror. If anyone of you were at my home, I would even shut up about creationism as an act of courtesy. The forum is different because no one is my “captive” guest. They have the freedom to turn me off at their choosing.
PZ, for pity's sake, would you close this thread?
It's around 2.5Mb.
If it must spawn, then let it be so, but on a new thread.
Good idea -- this is much too large and too messy. New thread here, if you must.