Senate Creationism (Now Discussing: Creation Museum)

Kilometers were proven to exist beyond a reasonable doubt through observation. That didn't happen with macro-evolution.

 

Macroevolution has been proven to exist beyond reasonable doubt through observation as well. Fossils and DNA evidence are more than enough evidence to support the existence of macroevolution.

Do you still think evolution means a whale turning into a horse?

 

That only works if you assume both naturalism and uniformitarianism to be accurate. When someone in search of the truth eliminates all possibilities they don't like from the start, their results will be tainted by that original assumption.

I don't accept common ancestry, but evolutionists do. They think a whale could become a horse in a few billion years, without any intelligence being involved. One of many problems with that is irreducible complexity, where an organism has to have all its parts functioning properly at the same time to survive. Order never comes from chaos.

 

No, evolutionists do not think that a whale could become a horse in a few billion years. Again, you demonstrate your ignorance about evolution at every turn.

Whales and horses are linked because they share a common ancestor that was neither whale nor horse. However long ago that was, that particular breed of animal shared characteristics that are common to both modern species. All species on this planet share a common ancestor at one point in the distant past. I don't see why that is so difficult to understand.

The evidence clearly points to this being the case. It's not a matter of eliminating undesirable possibilities. All possibilities are considered, but if they don't fit with the evidence, they are discarded. Science doesn't have some agenda to spread its "heathen lies" or whatever your pastor might have told you. Science is merely the pursuit of the explanation that best supports a given phenomena.

 

What about this one timmoishere??

Did you ACTUALLY just say "you don't need to observe, you just need to imagine"?!?!?!!?

Dude, seriously! Argument = thrown out!

 

Layers of sediment are one way of determining the age of a given object, but it's not the only way. Radiometric dating is a far more reliable way of dating a fossilized item. Seriously. Look it up.

As for your second point, you're clearly missing what I wrote. A kilometer is just one million millimeters lined up side-by-side. If you can directly observe a millimeter, by simple mathematics you can know a kilometer exists even if you can't observe it directly. This is exactly how we can know macroevolution is true because microevolution is directly observable. The existence of fossils that, as you go further and further back in time start to resemble each other, firmly supports this idea. DNA evidence also firmly shows the common ancestry between any two groups of modern animals.

 

Oh man, you are just making it too easy! And I'm not even a Creationist!! Moviefan2k4 have at it!

No, it really doesn't work that way. That's speculative hypothesis. Even if you can't SEE a kilometer (though, actually you can, on a obscured surface like the ocean the human eye can see about 7 kms I think), it can still be observably measured.That is totally different from micro = macro argument.
Its making a massive leap of implausibility to jump from minor observable changes within a species DNA to genus and order jumping.

 

Still not reading what I wrote, eh? There is a substantial amount of evidence that humans and apes share a common ancestor that was neither human nor ape. This particular creature lived in the African jungles. A group of these primates left the jungles sometime around 1 million years ago, and as they adapted to the harsher desert environments of northern Africa and the Middle East, they began to shed the extra body hair, stand more upright, and generally began to more resemble the modern human. The remainder of these primates stayed in the jungles and became the apes we know today.

The key is, the environment was a huge factor in the species' branching off. If humans ever start to colonize Mars, it is readily apparent that if those Martian colonists remain genetically isolated from those who live on Earth, after several generations they will start to develop slightly different characteristics than their terrestrial counterparts.

If you actually watch the Dawkins interview on the last page, you'll see the information he gave about the lizards who were placed on a different island. These lizards began to develop new characteristics based on their new environment and diet.

 

Where's the fossil record for that? Wheres the full creatures that show the shedding of body hair? Where the slow mutation of bones and joints to accommodate standing more upright? (just that in itself is directly opposed to natural selection, which always weeds out and destroys mutations, rather than singling them out as species transitions)

You know that that is known as 'anecdotal evidence' right? Also, the lizards developing new characteristics is not the same as changing a genus.

 

1) It's pretty obvious, isn't it? Since we know that modern humans and modern apes are linked by this common ancestor, there must have been a point when the two species branched off. We know environment plays a role in a species developing new characteristics. You don't need to have access to the bones of every single proto-human who ever existed to see how the pieces fit into the puzzle.

2) How is this anecdotal evidence? We know the lizards were introduced to this environment, and we know that those lizard's descendants are radically different than those in the original environment. So what is the problem here?

Please, stop demonstrating just how little you know. Go and do some actual research. Research is not a dirty word. In particular, please look up homo erectus, homo habilis and hominids in general.

 

edit: nevermind, had a few scotches.

 

So you decided not to watch that video Moviefan?

Oh well.

Lord Vivec Ramza

 

It was doing pretty well before that. I graduated before Andreessen and Bina developed the Mosaic browser, and there at the U of I in those dark days the creationist groups always had their tables up at the student union, plying their brochures and fact sheets, which were inexpensive folded or unfolded sheets of paper with text written on them.

But true enough the Internet is the greatest storehouse of misinformation the world has ever seen.

 

I've been summoned...

Okay, I can't for the life of me follow what nonsense Moviefan has been posting. But let me ask this of anyone here who actually supports creationism.

What use is it as a hypothesis (meaning how can it be tested)?

What does it predict?

How does it connect with already accepted biology? And other sciences?

What's the next step in moving to something more general from it?

 

Moviefan2k4, I am actually a bit disappointed that you elected not to watch the video I posted. Yes, I understand Dawkins is known for being a strident atheist but in this case he's talking about biology which is his area of expertise. He's not making hubristic statements about how atheists should, in fact, be called "brights" - it's factual, the discussion.

Accordingly, I really think you should go back and watch it.

 

That's quite an impressive amount of rubbish for a single paragraph.

It seems you feel that science (or at least the fields of geology and biology) exists only to discredit religious 'truth'. It seems like a paranoid position to take, if you don't mind me saying. Geology was not invented in order to discredit the bible, it's an insane assertion. It's telling that you try to belittle entire fields of science to precede your argument.

Labelling historical figures as anti-theist does nothing to discredit or diminish contemporary geology, palaeontology, biology, or astronomy, etc. It doesn't matter what their motivations were, what matters is what stands up to scientific scrutiny, what's supported by evidence. And what isn't...

I'd be interested in reading your sources for the trees. I reserve judgement until I've seen your evidence.

What do you mean "there's not one example of them all being set in the order Lyell described"? Is it that you expect Lyell, writing in the 1830s, to be no less than 100% accurate? Or are you demanding one fossil of every kind of creature to be found in order in one place?

I know you don't like the idea of plate tectonics, but the fact is that the ground is being constantly bent and churned up. Fossilisation is a rare event that only happens under certain conditions. It happens infrequently.

What you're claiming he is, technically speaking, bollocks.

Evolution does indeed require a huge length of time, but all evidence points towards the Earth existing for billions of years so that's not a problem. We see evolution happen all the time. Look into farming and agriculture, look into selective breeding and animal husbandry. Look at Lenksi's long term e.coli evolution experiment, or at other examples of observed speciation.

If your demand for proof of evolution is a whale morphing into a donkey or whatever, you simply don't understand what evolution is. I implore you to do some basic research, ignoring religious sources.

Regarding absolute morality, you famously don't reply when called up on it, so I'll not waste my keystrokes. Some basic research into the electro-chemistry of the brain will sort you out.

Your misrepresentation of survival of the fittest is silly. I hope it's a misrepresentation anyway, I'm prepared to flatter you that much.

 

Also, Darwin describes fossilisation as rare, as if a film was watched with 1 in 1000 frames remaining. This was in the video that was not watched.

 

It can be tested by marvelling at the wonder of god's creation. How else could such beauty exist? Certainly not by random chance.

That those who deny it will burn in eternal torment and agony in the fiery lake of hell with all of the homosexuals, cross dressers and the shellfish eaters.

All biology and science is connected to god through his omnipotence and omniscience. Note the "science" in omniscience. That is where science came from.

The Rapture.

 

The argument against evolution pretty much boils down to "I don't understand evolution at all, now let me tell you why it's wrong."

 

I've seen an interesting take on the whole subject of Creationism elsewhere on the Net in that what it really represents is not reeeallly science vs. religion so much as pre-modern thinking vs. modern thinking (as in, the modern vs. post-modern era we now occupy. Modernism is generally said to have birthed in the late 19th century and predominated over much of the 20th century.) LostOnHoth, for full disclosure, this is actually lifted from Dan Simmons' website, one of those articles I've mentioned elsewhere. Leaving aside Simmons' politics apparently on show in Flashback, like I said there's a lot of other interesting intellectual avenues he's wandered down, this being one of them.

Anyway, Simmons brings up a book called The Metaphysical Club by Louis Menand, which is a short history of the very short-lived discussion group of William James (the philosopher, brother of Henry "Call that a piece of literature, see what I can do with sentences two miles long and 900 pages to work with" James), Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Charles Sanders Peirce. We don't need to go into that as such, but towards the end of the book, Simmons offers up a quote from Menand summing up the differences between pre-modern and modern thinking like so:

". . . But in societies bent on transforming the past, and on treating nature itself as a process of ceaseless transformation, how do we trust the claim that a particular state of affairs is legitimate?

The solution has been to shift the totem of legitimacy from premises to procedures. We know an outcome is right not because it was derived from immutable principles, but because it was reached by following the correct procedures. Science became modern when it was conceived not as an empirical confirmation of truths derived from an independent source, divine revelation, but as simply whatever followed from the pursuit of scientific methods of inquiry. If those methods were scientific, the result must be science. The modern conception of law is similar: if the legal process was adhered to, the outcome is just. Justice does not preexist the case at hand; justice is whatever result just procedures have led to. Even art adopted the same standards in the modern period: it became defined as the realization of the aesthetic potential of the artistic medium. Poetry was talked about as an exploration of the resources of language, painting as a manipulation of canvas and paint . . . . democracy had the same logic. It is that a decision can be called democratic only if everyone has been permitted to participate in reaching it."

Pre-modern thinking was entirely the opposite. It asserts the conclusion first and then looks to find facts to confirm that truth. It's a shade different to confirmational bias fallacy because confirmational bias refers solely to a tendency to omit unhelpful facts and emphasise the helpful ones for a theory; pre-modern thinking so far as science goes could be said to be confirmational bias ab initio, i.e. it took the view that you already had the answer and then could only find facts to confirm it. Perhaps the simplest example of that was Darwin's voyage versus that of Louis Agassiz in 1864 to Brazil. The abovementioned William James accompanied him. As Simmons goes on to tell the story--

Agassiz’s Brazilian Expedition was set up primarily to prove that South America had been as glaciated as North America and Europe. (It hadn’t. No glaciers or signs of glaciers there. Sorry, Louis.) Agassiz had to find signs of glaciers because his Creationist “theory” was based on the premise that God periodically wiped out all life forms on Earth – using glaciers, naturally, scouring all biology from the surface of the planet like a Brillo pad aggressively applied to a dirty frying pan – so that He could create new species.

Also, as a vocal advocate of the theory of polygenism – i.e. that God created all species (and races of humankind) separately, some inferior, some (such as white Anglo-Saxons) quite superior – Agassiz had to gather thousands of specimens to “prove” that species of birds were isolated and did not move to different areas and change over time, that species of fish did not migrate upstream and evolve into different species, and so forth. For the period of time William James worked for Agassiz on this Brazilian expedition until he got sick and went home – (the young genius spent most of the time in the jungle building barrels and crates for Agassiz in which to ship specimens home, but he also spent a lot of energy trying to catch birds and fish) – James’s opinion of Louis Agassiz, once approaching something like religious awe, plummeted.

The reason is simple: Agassiz, scientist though he believed he was, thought exclusively in Premodernist terms. That is, he collected empirical evidence to shore up and confirm “truths derived from an independent source, divine revelation,” and no other facts need apply. The fact that fishes and birds did move from one area to another and eventually evolved into different species – just like the fact that there were no real signs of ancient glaciers anywhere in South America – did not deter him from his “scientific beliefs.”
The emphasis in that last sentence should be on the word “beliefs.” All Premodern Thinking, going back to a time long before the Greeks, eventually resorts to some sort of metaphysics, usually in the form of mystical and spiritual revelation.

As my sociologist and philosopher friend Dan Peterson likes to say after a few beers, “Sorry, kid, it’s turtles all the way down.” But in Premodern Thinking, the turtles are metaphysical.

William James, on the other hand, was already moving toward Modernist thought. Darwin’s On The Origin of Species had been published on November 24, 1859, and Agassiz’s doomed (at least in intellectual, empirical, and scientific terms) Brazil expedition was largely an effort to refute every element of Darwin’s book. Young William James embraced Darwin – as did all real scientists and most serious intellectuals who would shape thought for the next seventy years or so – including (and especially) Darwin’s revolutionary insistence that it is mere chance, never design, that shapes the slow evolution of life forms into new and disparate species.


Simmons goes on specifically in relation to the "evolution is only a theory" argument--


I’ve heard more than one Creationist say “Evolution is only a theory.” The emphasis here, of course, is on “only.” The variation on that is “Evolution is just a theory, not a fact.”

That’s intended to be a Q.E.D. argument stopper.

Anyone schooled properly since 1860 might just stop and stare at such a statement. The only proper reply would be – “Do you think that theories grow up to be facts?”

Just the opposite is true. There are billions of “facts.” Facts are random data. This morning’s temperature at six a.m. and the realization that Uncle Charlie is a drunkard are “facts.” On any ascending ladder of applied understanding, theories are much higher than facts. Theories explain facts.

Premodernist thinking cannot understand this. Premodernist thinking demands and requires revelation – it doesn’t matter so much where it’s from. Harmonic convergence, crystal power, good and bad karma, and feng shui will suffice as well as Holy Scripture, be it Vedic Scripture, Koran, the Book of Mormon, or otherwise. The important thing is – in one of the ugliest phrases our current ugly age has given us – to find closure.

Thus the philosophers on the Kansas School Board play their trump card. “The theory of evolution is not proven!”
Those who’ve made the transition to Modernist thinking – i.e. every human being on the planet who understands science – can only stare in embarrassment here as if the speaker has just stripped naked and started hopping on one leg and begun clucking like a chicken. A theory . . . proven? Don’t they understand that no scientific theory can ever be proven? This goes against the essence of science. You can’t PROVE a theory! You can only disprove theories.

It’s like Zeno’s Paradox where you can never catch the tortoise by covering half the distance to its butt with each step you take. There’s always half the distance left, no matter how infinitesimal. You can’t get there from here. Of course, a theory like Darwinian evolution has survived literally millions of challenges and its theoretical components have seen literally millions of confirmations under every sort of test and cross-test imaginable, but it will never be proven. It’s always open to revision and it’s always being revised as new data come in – punctuated equilibrium was a fun ride – but the “fact” of evolution as a real and ongoing process in nature is about as debatable as the existence of gravity.

The Premodernists on the Kansas School Board and elsewhere in the country understand that much. This is why they’ve been trying to change the wording for the entire definition of science in their state from “a system of understanding the world by working from empirical evidence to create theories” to “any internally logical system of rigorous thought.” The latter definition, of course, would make Sufi-ism, National Socialism, Aboriginal Dream Lines, belief in the Greek gods, Tarot card reading, Velekovsky-ism and UFOlogy as much “science” and as deserving to be taught in science classes in Kansas as “Intelligent Design.”

And finally, as one last little detour, a small quote some of you might like, from the same article, from Machines That Think:

“There is a popular view that the human mind is this fantastic thing that most of us are just barely using – 5 or 10 percent of its capacity. If we could only unleash the whole human mind and all its powers, we’d be supermen. Now my notion is that for an ordinary person to get along in society in a conventional way requires about 110 percent of the capacity of the human mind, causing breakdowns and troubles of various sorts. Basically, the human mind is not most like a god or most like a computer. It’s most like the mind of a chimpanzee and most of what’s there isn’t designed for living in high society but for getting along in the jungle or out in the fields.”​

 

Good stuff Saintheart. That is reminiscent of the story of geologist Kurt Wise, as recounted in Dawkin's The God Delusion, where Wise is quoted as saying:

"Although there are scientific reasons for accepting a young earth, I am a young age creationist because that is my understanding of the Scripture. As I shared with my professors years ago when I was in college, if all the evidence in the universe turns against creationism, I would be the first to admit it, but I would still be a creationist because that is what the Word of God seems to indicate."

That seems to be pre-modernist thought in a nutshell, although even non-religious pre-moderns would accept the absence of facts fails to confirm the contentions held. Many creationist are like Wise, they simply stick their fingers in their ears and choose to be blind to the evidence because it contradicts the scripture. Very sad.

 

To me, this goes hand-in-hand with the things that Karen Armstrong keeps thumping the desk on in her books: religiosity (for want of taking several massive pages defining the term better) is a different mode of thinking when practiced properly for the main requirement of providing meaning to one's existence. It's when one starts mixing meaning with truth and fact in the modern era that we start running into problems. However, that's my personal parenthesis only, not for discussion here -- carry on.

 

This!
Unfortunately evolution, creationism, ID, and pretty much any theory on the universe's origins still follow the pre-modern thinking pattern. From the time Darwin invented the theory until today, scientists and educators have been searching for and researching data to prove the theory. And in the same way some Creationists rely on incorrect data to prove their theory, Evolutionists have done the same. A little look into the crazy amount of frauds, hoaxes, falsified information, and ignored evidence over the last 200 years (give or take) does raise an eyebrow rather high for the unbiased thinker. And that lends weight to the creationist theories of evolution existing solely to 'discredit god'.

 

Slightly off topic, but Simmons' main thrust (tongue in cheek though it is) is that the vast majority of people on the planet probably still think in pre-modern terms. And pre-modern thinking is not restricted to religion: observe the "science" of Lysenko under the Communist regime, where similarly a prior political conclusion was asserted and a whole branch of theory created to buttress it. Or Nazism, at the risk of Godwinning it. As to pre-modern thinking in the evolutionary field, I'm not qualified and keeping Wittgensteinian silence on that one.

 

You're incorrect on one point, Jarren. Evolution follows the modern way of thinking. As new information comes to light, existing theories are modified or discarded as needed. That is the essence of modern thinking.

Pre-modern: "Here is our conclusion. What facts can we find to support it?"
Modern: "Here are the facts. What conclusions can be drawn from them?"