Senate Creationism (Now Discussing: Creation Museum)

If there was any evidence for anything like evolution, or to support the wild claims that the earth is older than 6,000 years, I've never seen it. All the evidence I need is in a book written exactly at the same time as the events it covered, which were miraculous.

 

Ender Sai just sayin' here that to nonliteralists on the Bible, contemplating a Creationist museum is kind of like rereading the epilogue to Kingdom Come.

 

Well it's just... a museum has a specific definition; "a building in which objects of historical, scientific, artistic or cultural interest are stored and exhibited."

Now, irrespective of your view on religion, you would argue religious art and artifacts play a significant role in the history and culture of the Western world. It would be stubborn and churlish to contend something contrary to this.

But that's because Christendom happened. There was a political entity called Christianity. Robes, tracts, and other artifacts related to this entity can be found. It's culturally significant, whether you believe in god or not.

Creation is a myth we have busted wide open; a relic from a bygone era in which less educated, barbaric men were forced to invent a sequence of events to give their religion (and the authority they derived from it) legitimacy. If you can't explain where men came from, what use is your god to me, etc.

So having a museum, a monument to our creative stupidity as a species, is both beyond belief and overkill. There are no museums with evidence of a flat earth or the firmament. And for good reason; these also are odes to our infantile brains of yore. Creationism could be a minor part of a bigger exhibit, where we can chuckle with relief that we're no longer so stupid as to believe God made man on a whim and gave him a woman by combining the building blocks for life, which aren't DNA and carbon but dirt and ribs kids. We have haughtily mock our insipid ancestors for believing all life started with just two people and that inbreeding was first discovered in 1794; but then we can remember that they had not the technology to unlock our true origins and count our blessings we are civilised.

 

Ender - I don't disagree; I just had this sudden flash picturing, say, Thomas Aquinas and Catherine of Siena walking into a Seventh Day Cafe, featuring menus with the Fake Fossil Steak: get your meat off a REAL bone, NOT ONE THAT SATAN PUT THERE, and her turning to him to say "Don't start..."

 

Actually, that was St. Helen's orgasm.

 

And God saw that it was damn good.

 

The key to understanding the evolution discussion is keeping track whenever advocates switch meanings of the term. For example, some may ask if I believe animals can change over time. I'd say yes, but then they'd ask why I don't accept a common ancestry for everything. If I argue that all observable examples lack clearly-defined transitions between set kinds, they'd immediately bring up broad words like "species" to confuse the situation.

For the record, I have no problem with limited changes, a.k.a. "micro-evolution" (though I can't stand that term). They've been observed many times over, resulting in traits like different hair colors, tail lengths, stripe patterns, etc. What I have a problem with are assertions of larger changes without observable evidence, like whales eventually becoming horses. This latter process is what most mean by "evolution" in general, though its also called "macro-evolution".

 

Ok but the only people who assert whales becoming horses are creationist Christians who don't understand science, and are fearful of what they don't understand. Your point is..? (besides lost)

 

I've never once heard such claims from Christians, but I hear it a lot from atheists. They look at something observable like the genetic similarity between apes and man, automatically assuming common ancestry's the only possibility. It never even enters their mind that a common Designer may be involved.

 

The problem is, the notion of a Creator is not one that is supported by the evidence. What is in the evidence is that ancient fossils show many surface similarities between humans and apes. DNA evidence also confirms the common link: that apes and humans share a common ancestor that was neither human nor ape.

There is no practical distinction between microevolution and macroevolution; macroevolution is simply many separate instances of microevolution. Think about the size of a millimeter compared to that of a kilometer.

Furthermore, I really wish the opponents of evolution would stop using the "whales turn into horses" fallacy or some other such nonsense. That is not what evolution is, so the sooner you dismiss that idea the sooner you will actually understand. One species turning into another overnight would be called transmogrification (thank you, Calvin & Hobbes!). And of course, transmogrification is something that has never occurred to our knowledge, and those who support evolution have never, ever claimed that something like that has occurred.

 

Sure, micro-evolution occurs within a species, and have been well-documented over the course of merely centuries or even decades. Those are little changes.

However, if you've ever played the game "telephone" with your friends, you know that little changes, as they compound, eventually make a larger change. This is how macroevolution works. Macroevolution isn't a prehistoric mouse giving birth to a bat. It is generations of prehistoric mice giving birth to slightly different prehistoric mice, whos differences make them more fit than the generation before them. (Such as large, webbed feet, which is advantageous in catching insects, etc.) Macroevolution is just like microevolution, except the scope extends to thousands/millions of years, rather than tens/hundreds.

 

Because there's absolutely no evidence in support of a designer? Exceptional claims- such as there being an unprovable entity whose interactions, as claimed by humans, share identical brain activity as schizophrenic hallucinations who is also all powerful and, contrary to what was first reported whereby he simply "made everything" actually designed an evolutionary process which frankly suggests he was drunk or stoned - require exceptional evidence.

Let's consider the human eye. Intelligent Designers, grappling with a biology they barely understand, cite the complexity of the eye as proof of an intelligent designer. Intelligent my backside; we've known for some time that God is a jerk, but it seems as per my comments above he was a raging drunkard too. He designed it backwards and had to go in and rewire the brain to correct the sensory input from the eye, which is of course an inverted image.

The eye, human or animal, however, speaks so comprehensively against intelligent design that it should be the final resting place of many stupid and primitive creationist beliefs. Eyes, as they've evolved in nature, are probably the best examples of morphological evidence for evolution we have.

I'd like to remind everyone of a lovely parable for creationism that the late Douglas Adams gave us;

"A man didn’t understand how televisions work, and was convinced that there must be lots of little men inside the box, manipulating images at high speed. An engineer explained to him about high frequency modulations of the electromagnetic spectrum, about transmitters and receivers, about amplifiers and cathode ray tubes, about scan lines moving across and down a phosphorescent screen. The man listened to the engineer with careful attention, nodding his head at every step of the argument. At the end he pronounced himself satisfied. He really did now understand how televisions work. "But I expect there are just a few little men in there, aren’t there?""


Mmmm-hmmm. Mmmmmmmmmmm-hm.

 

I think this is one of the setbacks of the intelligently designed human brain - we simply cannot comprehend the pace of change over so many millions of years so we get lazy and say "whales turning into horses!"

 

I really don't want to get involved here.....but my argumentative nature is...pulling....

 

Oh, go for it. The more, the merrier!

By the way, I just rediscovered this link: 24 myths and misconceptions about evolution That should help clear up some of the erroneous statements here (again, whales into horses? Really?). Pay particular close attention to the second myth from the bottom, labeled "Yet more creationist misconceptions"

 

Here's the bottom line: if we can't observe it in nature, and test it in a laboratory to confirm its validity, its not science. The "macro-evolution" theory is an assumption based on naturalism and uniformitarianism, insisting that what we do see will eventually lead to what we'll never see. Its the "frog to prince" story with billions of years thrown in.

"Given so much time, the ‘impossible’ becomes possible, the possible probable, and the probable virtually certain. One has only to wait; time itself performs the miracles." ~ evolutionist George Wald, 1954 ~

 

Microevolution can be tested and confirmed in a laboratory, and has been done so numerous times. Macroevolution is just thousands or millions of instances of microevolution occurring in a row. That's all there is to it.

And before you dismiss macroevolution as "only a theory," make sure you are up to speed on what a theory actually means. In common lay language, theory often means "guess or assumption." However, in scientific language, this is not the case. A scientific theory is a well-substantiated explanation of some aspect of the natural world, based on knowledge that has been repeatedly confirmed through observation and experimentation.

 

If its so substantiated, why do so many scientists still call it a theory rather than fact?

 

"Niels, you want to handle this one?"
"Nah, von Neumann, you can deal with it, I'm busy playing football."

 

Because theories are always subject to change if and when more evidence is discovered. For example, the previous theory regarding the age of the human species was altered when a set of human remains were discovered to be approximately 1 million years old; the theory used to say the human species is around 200,000 years old.

That's how science works: it builds on the knowledge that came before.

 

You should watch this:



Dawkins addresses this at 2:15 - theory has two different meanings. Theory in science is not "I have a theory about Jon Snow's parents in Game of Thrones".

Dawkins here is talking about his area of expertise more than attacking theology so you should consider him an expert on the matter. You should also take heed of scientific theory vs colloquial theory which is, as Dawkins notes, a hypothesis.

So far, Moviefan, you are doing precious little to suggest you understand evolution sufficiently to have formed a view on it.

EDIT: And please watch the whole video, you will find it illuminating.

 

I agree, please watch the whole video. I had seen bits and pieces of it transcribed elsewhere, particularly the bits about the whirlwind and the 747, and the fact that evolution could be disproved by a single fossil turning up out of order, but it was quite refreshing to actually hear Dawkins' words in their entirety. And at the end of the interview you'll find that "believing" in evolution does not preclude belief in a god, it just shows that the whole notion of creationism or intelligent design are quite erroneous.