Why people laugh at Creationists

[Dave Lane]

Taking a lead from Killer Clown I thought I'd create a alternative thread to post some videos I like...

[EDIT New video here]

So on with the show:

Here's the Kent Hovind Theory:



"Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it.
Do not believe in anything simply because it is spoken and rumored by many.
Do not believe in anything simply because it is found written in your religious books.
Do not believe in anything merely on the authority of your teachers and elders.
Do not believe in traditions simply because they have been handed down for many generations.
But after observation and analysis, when you find that anything agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all, then accept it and live up to it."

[mr. tegu]

Originally Posted by CLX

If that's what you want to take from it then you happy. Who am I to pop your bubble?

I'd rather consider it adaptation to conditions. You can adapt a monkey to live in a house but that monkey will never adapt, or evolve, to be a man.

Why would anything, in a controlled environment, ever have to adapt or evolve at all...don't be silly.

[KILLER_CLOWN]

[Fish]

Originally Posted by CLX

I don't buy your evidence in the manner you feel it applies, that is nothing new.

I could have said it in different ways, but the meaning is the same. I'm not always right and neither are you and in this case you are not.

You don't have to "Buy" my evidence. That is irrelevant to its validity. Not sure exactly what you mean by "Buying" the evidence anyway. It's either true or it is not. If it's not true, then show me why. Truth is not a judgment call on what sounds right.

[Fish]

Here's a relevant quote from Gould's Evolution as Fact and Theory:

In the American vernacular, "theory" often means "imperfect fact"—part of a hierarchy of confidence running downhill from fact to theory to hypothesis to guess. Thus creationists can (and do) argue: evolution is "only" a theory, and intense debate now rages about many aspects of the theory. If evolution is less than a fact, and scientists can't even make up their minds about the theory, then what confidence can we have in it? Indeed, President Reagan echoed this argument before an evangelical group in Dallas when he said (in what I devoutly hope was campaign rhetoric): "Well, it is a theory. It is a scientific theory only, and it has in recent years been challenged in the world of science—that is, not believed in the scientific community to be as infallible as it once was."

Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts do not go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's, but apples did not suspend themselves in mid-air, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from apelike ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other, yet to be discovered.

Moreover, "fact" does not mean "absolute certainty." The final proofs of logic and mathematics flow deductively from stated premises and achieve certainty only because they are not about the empirical world. Evolutionists make no claim for perpetual truth, though creationists often do (and then attack us for a style of argument that they themselves favor). In science, "fact" can only mean "confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent." I suppose that apples might start to rise tomorrow, but the possibility does not merit equal time in physics classrooms.

Evolutionists have been clear about this distinction between fact and theory from the very beginning, if only because we have always acknowledged how far we are from completely understanding the mechanisms (theory) by which evolution (fact) occurred. Darwin continually emphasized the difference between his two great and separate accomplishments: establishing the fact of evolution, and proposing a theory—natural selection—to explain the mechanism of evolution. He wrote in The Descent of Man: "I had two distinct objects in view; firstly, to show that species had not been separately created, and secondly, that natural selection had been the chief agent of change. . . . Hence if I have erred in . . . having exaggerated its [natural selection's] power . . . I have at least, as I hope, done good service in aiding to overthrow the dogma of separate creations."

[...]

Our confidence that evolution occurred centers upon three general arguments. First, we have abundant, direct, observational evidence of evolution in action, from both the field and laboratory. This evidence ranges from countless experiments on change in nearly everything about fruit flies subjected to artificial selection in the laboratory to the famous populations of British moths that became black when industrial soot darkened the trees upon which the moths rest. (Moths gain protection from sharp-sighted bird predators by blending into the background.) Creationists do not deny these observations; how could they? Creationists have tightened their act. They now argue that God only created "basic kinds," and allowed for limited evolutionary meandering within them. Thus toy poodles and Great Danes come from the dog kind and moths can change color, but nature cannot convert a dog to a cat or a monkey to a man.(Sounds familiar huh?)

The second and third arguments for evolution—the case for major changes—do not involve direct observation of evolution in action. They rest upon inference, but are no less secure for that reason. Major evolutionary change requires too much time for direct observation on the scale of recorded human history. All historical sciences rest upon inference, and evolution is no different from geology, cosmology, or human history in this respect. In principle, we cannot observe processes that operated in the past. We must infer them from results that still surround us: living and fossil organisms for evolution, documents and artifacts for human history, strata and topography for geology.

The second argument—that the imperfection of nature reveals evolution—strikes many people as ironic, for they feel that evolution should be most elegantly displayed in the nearly perfect adaptation expressed by some organisms—the camber of a gull's wing, or butterflies that cannot be seen in ground litter because they mimic leaves so precisely. But perfection could be imposed by a wise creator or evolved by natural selection. Perfection covers the tracks of past history. And past history—the evidence of descent—is the mark of evolution.

Evolution lies exposed in the imperfections that record a history of descent. Why should a rat run, a bat fly, a porpoise swim, and I type this essay with structures built of the same bones unless we all inherited them from a common ancestor? An engineer, starting from scratch, could design better limbs in each case. Why should all the large native mammals of Australia be marsupials, unless they descended from a common ancestor isolated on this island continent? Marsupials are not "better," or ideally suited for Australia; many have been wiped out by placental mammals imported by man from other continents. This principle of imperfection extends to all historical sciences. When we recognize the etymology of September, October, November, and December (seventh, eighth, ninth, and tenth), we know that the year once started in March, or that two additional months must have been added to an original calendar of ten months.

The third argument is more direct: transitions are often found in the fossil record. Preserved transitions are not common—and should not be, according to our understanding of evolution (see next section) but they are not entirely wanting, as creationists often claim. The lower jaw of reptiles contains several bones, that of mammals only one. The non-mammalian jawbones are reduced, step by step, in mammalian ancestors until they become tiny nubbins located at the back of the jaw. The "hammer" and "anvil" bones of the mammalian ear are descendants of these nubbins. How could such a transition be accomplished? the creationists ask. Surely a bone is either entirely in the jaw or in the ear. Yet paleontologists have discovered two transitional lineages of therapsids (the so-called mammal-like reptiles) with a double jaw joint—one composed of the old quadrate and articular bones (soon to become the hammer and anvil), the other of the squamosal and dentary bones (as in modern mammals). For that matter, what better transitional form could we expect to find than the oldest human, Australopithecus afarensis, with its apelike palate, its human upright stance, and a cranial capacity larger than any ape’s of the same body size but a full 1,000 cubic centimeters below ours? If God made each of the half-dozen human species discovered in ancient rocks, why did he create in an unbroken temporal sequence of progressively more modern features—increasing cranial capacity, reduced face and teeth, larger body size? Did he create to mimic evolution and test our faith thereby?

Faced with these facts of evolution and the philosophical bankruptcy of their own position, creationists rely upon distortion and innuendo to buttress their rhetorical claim.

Good read: http://www.stephenjaygould.org/libra...nd-theory.html

[phisherman]

Why rely on facts, when you have faith?

[petegz28]

Originally Posted by phisherman

Why rely on facts, when you have faith?

can one put faith in facts????

[phisherman]

can one put facts in faith?

[phisherman]

Blind faith vs. skepticism.

I'd rather be able to objectively think about things, myself.

[petegz28]

Originally Posted by phisherman

Blind faith vs. skepticism.

I'd rather be able to objectively think about things, myself.

Trust the man in the white robe, not your lying eyes!

[phisherman]

Didn't the architect in the Matrix wear white robes?

[Fish]

Originally Posted by petegz28

Trust the man in the white robe, not your lying eyes!

Learn the truth for yourself. The only difference between you and a scientist is taking the time to learn.

[KILLER_CLOWN]

Originally Posted by phisherman

Didn't the architect in the Matrix wear white robes?

[petegz28]

Originally Posted by Fish

Learn the truth for yourself. The only difference between you and a scientist is taking the time to learn.

I'm not sure what you are getting at, here?

[CLX]

Originally Posted by Fish

You don't have to "Buy" my evidence. That is irrelevant to its validity. Not sure exactly what you mean by "Buying" the evidence anyway. It's either true or it is not. If it's not true, then show me why. Truth is not a judgment call on what sounds right.

You don't understand, probably never will. Each time someone shows you their point of view you fall back on the work of others. How much actual study have you done to prove evolution? I see lots of evidence that was sorted out by what I will call non-believers. What have you proven?

[CLX]

Originally Posted by mr. tegu

Why would anything, in a controlled environment, ever have to adapt or evolve at all...don't be silly.

So you don't have a concrete answer? How many monkeys do you know that live in houses on your block? Should I have said apes? Chimpanzees? Spider Monkeys? The end of the story is that man did not evolve from the apes, or from fish. If that were factual the "missing link" would have never been a hanging point for anyone.