A Challenge To All Creationists

[SkepticThinker]

Oh definitely. But that's to be expected from people who get their understanding of science from Chick tracts, Kent Hovind, and Ken Ham.

Well ... yeah.

 

[It Aint Necessarily So]

It's not rocket science and I don't believe you don't know all about Lucy.

lucy fossil hoax - Google Search

fossil hoax - Google Search

Ah, yes, Piltdown Man.

So you think fraud should render science suspect? How do you feel about religious fraud? How many huckster televangelists do you need to see to recognize that religion is the mother lode of fraud? Seniors are continually being prodded to send money they can afford. It's based on promises that don't need to kept. Nobody can follow the money trail after it's dropped in the collection plate. If you have the stomach for it, watch this:

Piltdown man was a great triumph for science. The fraud was not perpetrated by science. It was uncovered by science, which is self-correcting.

Contrast that with the Shroud of Turin. "Three radiocarbon dating tests in 1988 dated a sample of the cloth to the Middle Ages," yet the church continues t present it as authentic.

Sorry, but I prefer the ethics of the scientific community to that of the religious one.

 

[It Aint Necessarily So]

Endlessly fascinated by the examples.

On the subject of science -- what I find is that evangelicals and other religious objectors to evolution distrust science ONLY when it concerns evolution. They cannot answer why they think that everybody who actually does the hard of work of years of study and decades of research all manage to get it wrong, while a few who don't do any work at all magically arrive at the only correct answer. (Just another absurd bit of hubris that must be "taken on faith," one presumes.)

And that is a fundamentally foolish notion, given that they all accept the work of science in mathematics, in chemistry, in electronics (you use TV and a computer, no doubt). Very, very few of the religious doubters of evolution would manage to build a television, space ship or computer -- or program it -- without having studied, and when they do study and research, they continue to learn more and more.

This dichotomy is the very clearest evidence possible that yours is a purely religious, and quite uneducated stance. The only reason for it is that science that builds TVs and space ships and computers don't conflict with your creation fable, while evolution does.

I'm not sure what you mean by your reference to Lucy. However, I'm constantly reminded that nay-sayers simply do not understand the paucity of fossil evidence, while the answer is so simple -- that fossilization itself takes place only very, very rarely under very, very special circumstances.

You might like this one:

"Young earth creationism is essentially the position that all of modern science, 90% of living scientists and 98% of living biologists, all major university biology departments, every major science journal, the American Academy of Sciences, and every major science organization in the world, are all wrong regarding the origins and development of life…but [an ancient holy book] got it exactly right." - Chuck Easttom

[I modified it]

 

[It Aint Necessarily So]

Have you ever met a man incapable of telling a lie?

Meet God. He is most holy and He loves you. Your life isn't a random occurrence. You are here for a reason. You were created with purpose.

If Christian doctrine is correct, we were created to praise a god for eternity. That wouldn't be my purpose.

And that doesn't sound like love, especially with the threat of eternal torture thrown in for those that fail to figure out that a god wrote a book full of internal contradictions, unkept promises, failed prophecies, intellectual and moral errors attributed to the deity, and errors of science and history, after creating a planet laced with stratified fossils and a tree of life chuck full of nested anatomic, biochemical and genetic nested hierarchies consistent with evolution, hid from us, gave us reason and free will, and then tortured us for not finding the book credible or the god described therein plausible.

I reject that definition of God because I reject that definition of love. If this universe has a god, we know nothing about it yet.

"I do not think it is necessary to believe that the same god who has given us our senses, reason, and intelligence wished us to abandon their use, giving us by some other means the information that we could gain through them" - Galileo Galilei

"Question with boldness even the existence of a god; because if there be one he must approve of the homage of reason more than that of blindfolded fear. - Thomas Jefferson

 

[It Aint Necessarily So]

The research conducted in those sites is genuine. If it isn't then post your refutation and stop just saying there is no truth in it because they are "religious" sites. That is fallacious and you know it.

We have excellent reasons to reject creationist apologetics. Their reputations are shot. Their agenda is anti-scientific. Their methods are not ours. And their values are not ours. There is nothing that is true that is known only to creationists. If it's true, it can be found on a mutually acceptable site. If it is only on an apologetics site, how can it be a scientific or historical fact?

I am very familiar with these sites. I enjoy practicing deconstructing their arguments. Here's a nice example here from DNA tests prove Darwin Was Wrong - Ape DNA very different from human DNA - Laws of Genetics Contradicts Ape to Human Evolution :

"For example, until 1956, scientists falsely claimed that humans and apes had the same number of chromosomes and therefore humans evolved from apes.


"But the fact is, humans actually have 23 pairs of chromosomes while apes have 24 pairs of chromosomes. Apes, gorillas, chimpanzees, orangutans, etc. all have more chromosomes than humans.


"During the first half of the 20th century, that fact would have seriously weakened “ape into human evolution theory” because there is no way to explain how apes, with 24 pairs of chromosomes, could have evolved into humans with 23 pairs of chromosomes. We all know that if we lose a pair of chromosomes, we cannot reproduce.


"During the first half of the 20th century, there was a ferocious war between evolution theory and creationism and Darwin’s supporters were extremely hard pressed to “find the missing link.” Darwinians could not find the missing link so they simply fabricated one by faking the Piltdown Man skull.


"Darwinians also were determined to hide any evidence that contradicted their beloved evolution theory. That is why atheist scientists simply concocted a lie and told us apes and humans both have 24 pairs of chromosomes. "

Look at the despicable ethics of that. He is calling others liars while almost assuredly concealing the explanation for the discrepancy in the chromosome count between man and the brachiating great apes. And if he is unaware of the end-to-end chromosomal fusion event that happened sometime in man's ancestry to create human chromosome 2 after separating from the line that became chimps and bonobos, then he is still dishonest to be posting authoritatively and emphatically from a position of ignorance.

These sites are too dishonest to trust. If I didn't already know about human chromosome 2, I might have found the argument plausible if I trusted the source.

But I don't. I already understand that I would need to fact check every claim made, and that still wouldn't be enough. I'd need to go to trusted sources to review the whole area to see what the apologist omitted.

Why bother? I'll start with those other sources if I am interested enough.

Incidentally, this position is sometimes mistaken for the genetic fallacy - rebutting an argument by rejecting its source. It is not that. I am not rebutting the argument. I 'm simply not trusting it.

 

[It Aint Necessarily So]

What part of: the evolutionary researchers concluded that Lucy should no longer be considered man’s direct ancestor are you not getting?

At first it was claimed that Lucy was man's direct ancestor. Or did you not know this? I guess you didn't.

Why does that matter?

And what's a direct ancestor? My immediate ancestors were my parents. Nobody is claiming that Australopithecus afarensis became Homo sapiens without many other intermediate forms inbetween, most of them of the genus Homo.

And I don't believe that it is possible to tell yet whether Lucy was an ancestor or part of a branch from our line making her more of a great-aunt than great-grandmother (we do not descend from our aunts).

 

[Skwim]

Why does that matter?

It matters because one flaw flaws everything. That's why nothing science comes up with is true. Don't ya know nothing?

.

 

[It Aint Necessarily So]

It matters because one flaw flaws everything. That's why nothing science comes up with is true. Don't ya know nothing?

.

LOL.


From What's In Popeye's Pipe? , here's something to put in your pipe and smoke (first three paragraphs excerpted):

"Popeye is one of the world's most well-known and beloved animated characters. Since his creation, the pipe-puffing Popeye has become a global phenomenon, with millions of kids heartily munching on spinach in the hopes that it will make them as strong as the legendary sailor-man.

"Yet is the spinach which gives Popeye his super-strength really a metaphor for another magical herb? Have children around the world been adoring a hero who is really a heavy consumer of the forbidden weed – marijuana?

"The evidence is circumstantial, but it is there, and when added together it presents a compelling picture that, for many readers at least, Popeye's strength-giving spinach is meant as a clear metaphor for the miraculous powers of marijuana."