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Then there are the people who care very much about worldly "facts" or perhaps "axioms" are the word since they exist without proof only by Holy Scripture, like that the world is 6000 years old, all men come from Adam shaped of mud and Eve shaped from a rib, the earth is the center of the universe and so on. They are hostile to science because science is dangerous to their religion, every time evidence builds that these facts are wrong it threatens their religion as a whole. To them the Bible or Qur'an can't be wrong, where science and religion clash science must yield.

Yes, the Bible is authoritative. But it does not conflict with science, except the science that insists that naturalism is required.

It is claimed that the world is more than 6000 years old. It is essential for the naturalistic world-view that it be older, because if the world is young there is no time for evolution and there must have been a divine creation.

It is claimed that the evidence proves that the world is old. There is a difference between evidence and data. Data is neutral; evidence is data interpreted according to a set of beliefs.

A few years back, someone found unfossilised soft tissues in tyrannosaur bones. Rather than accept that this demonstrated that the bones were not very old, she insisted that somehow the soft tissue must have survived 60 million years. The age of the bones was not allowed to be questioned.

It has been demonstrated that the amount of helium remaining in zircons is consistent with a recent creation and incompatible with an old universe. The same project showed that inconsistencies between different methods of radiometric dating could be accounted for by one or two periods of accelerated radioactive decay which affected alpha and beta emitters differently. (Look up the RATE project.)

People like to say that creationists hate science! In fact, all modern science is founded on the work of creationists; what creationists hate is the "science" that tells stories about what it cannot observe and claims the stories to be scientific proof!

There is so much evidence for a young earth. I can only imagine that the people who speak pejoratively about AiG etc do not actually read the sites, or don't allow themselves to think about what they read.

To a creationist, faith in the bible is founded on the demonstrated faithfulness of God. The resurrection of Jesus proves his claims to be the Son of God and he verifies the scripture as true to the letter. Therefore we can safely trust what the scripture says. It is the atheist/naturalist who has blind faith: that by some unknown means the universe created itself; that the unimaginable complexity of living cells was somehow developed by chance; that the unobserved and unobservable must inevitably have happened.

Try some links:
Evidence for a young earth
Creation-Evolution Headlines
True.Origin Archive
Biblical Geology
RATE project

I read this 3 days ago here. So, when the theory and the facts disagree, what do we do, class? Yes, that's right. We discard both.

Bungie wins big in this fight, because they're lucky for Miyamoto to even acknowledge their existence.

In the same way, The World's Greatest Creationist Scientists win big whenever a real respected scientist agrees to debate them, not because the Creationists can possibly win the debate, but because they score points and gain undeserved legitimacy by having a real scientist take them seriously enough to waste the time debating with them.

It's as unfair a fight as Richard Dawkins debating A. E. Wilder-Smith, where the creationists totally lose the argument, but score propaganda points by being taken much more seriously than they deserve.

-Don

Yes; http://creationsafaris.com/crev200606.htm#20060616 b has a nice short article on it that questions this "missing link" spin.

Follow the dating methods chain link and see if these are all distortions:

http://creationsafaris.com/crev200606.htm#dating19 9

Posting as AC to avoid karma whoring:

Mandatory linkage for reading up on this (quoted from this site: http://creationsafaris.com/crev200606.htm#20060616 b

The news media are abuzz with the phrase "Missing Link" again. This time, it's about a fossilized duck or loon found in Early Cretaceous strata in China, announced in Science.1 The article calls it a "nearly modern" bird with soft-tissue preservation, including webbed feet, wing feathers and downy feathers. They said it "possesses advanced anatomical features previously known only in Late Cretaceous and Cenozoic ornithuran birds." Being found in Early Cretaceous strata (assumed 110 million years old) makes it "the oldest known member of the clade," but the paper does not call it a missing link. Neither does the summary page "This week in Science" earlier in the issue; in fact, the summary states "this Early Cretaceous bird has many derived features," and "It was also well adapted for an aquatic-amphibian lifestyle--the fossils even show what appears to be webbing in the feet." This particular species has been known previously from fragmentary fossils, it says.
Why, then, are the news media all calling this a missing link? See Fox News, for instance, and Associated Press on MSNBC News which states, "Waterfowl fossils fill in a big missing link." It was not missing, and it is not a link; it is a better-preserved specimen of a known species appearing much earlier than previously thought. Live Science did not use the phrase, but said that it "might be one of the oldest ancestors of modern birds," even when the original paper noted that the wing feathers "are asymmetrical and virtually identical to those of volant [i.e., flying] modern birds." National Geographic News avoided the buzzphrase "missing link" also, but claimed "The discovery supports the view that key characteristics of modern birds evolved quickly and early, long before the demise of the dinosaurs." Quoting Jerald Harris (Dixie State College), a co-author of the paper, "It was unexpected to find a bird this advanced in rocks this old. It tells us that the anatomical features we use to characterize modern birds evolved [sic] very quickly [sic]."
In fact, the specimen "shares many skeletal features with modern birds, including the knobby knees characteristic of underwater swimmers like loons and grebes." Even the "preserved skin of the webbed feet shows the same microscopic structure seen in aquatic birds today." There doesn't seem to be anything un-modern about this fossil other than its presumed place in the evolutionary tree. At the end of the NG article, Julia Clarke (North Carolina State U) makes the startling claim that "there was a wide range of bird types during the period that preceded the emergence [sic] of truly [sic] modern birds." That would seem to be the opposite of evolutionary expectations.
At the end of their paper, the discoverers noted one other puzzle: "Consequently, contrary to recent hypotheses, adaptation to an aquatic ecology appears to have played little part in the survival of birds across the K/P boundary."2

1Hai-lu You et al., "A Nearly Modern Amphibious Bird from the Early Cretaceous of Northwestern China, Science, 16 June 2006: Vol. 312. no. 5780, pp. 1640 - 1643, DOI: 10.1126/science.1126377.
2I.e., the Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary, assumed 65 million years ago when some catastrophic event killed off all the dinosaurs (but apparently not the sparrows and ducks).

This is scandalous. The news media should be ashamed of themselves. What should have been interpreted as the falsification of common notions about bird evolution has been twisted into support for evolution. In an act of contortion astounding in scope, the media expect us to believe three more impossible things before breakfast: (1) that the anatomical features of mode

"For instance, in your placental/marsupial example, these species are really not as similar genetically as they appear visually."

Do you have a link? I have been searching for a while for some data on how marsupials and placentals compare in their molecular phylogeny, but couldn't find anything (actually, I think I found something which referenced a single marsupial, but I was hoping for more complete information).

"Indeed, they're really not as similar morphologically as they appear visually, when you get down to it; there are differences other than merely placental/marsupial."

There are a few differences, certainly, but many evolutionary textbooks actually make quite a big deal about how similar they are, and that looking solely at morphology might place them in the wrong part of the evolutionary tree.

"And no, these organisms do not have completely different selective pressures; they do indeed live in similar ecological niches."

You are confusing selective pressures and ecological niches. They are different. An ecological niche is the function you play within a given environment. Selective pressures are what cause changes. Wolves and mice occupy different ecological niches, but being in a niche doesn't cause a mice to become a wolf. Selective pressures are what cause change -- adaptation to environment, etc. What you seem to be proposing is that in two vastly different environments, the same body forms arose independently to cover not-yet-existing ecological niches.

"an inability to consistently place species in the hierarchy (e.g. the genetic hierarchy doesn't match up with the morphological hierarchy, etc.) That does not happen."

Take a look at many of the recent phylogenic studies, and note how many of them are surprised by the number of times X has arisen independently in the environment. Each of these "surprises" is an example of what you are saying.

A good site which follows such things fairly well is Creation Safaris.

Atheism is not a religion. It is a either a lack of belief that God exists or a positive belief that God does NOT exist.

This is just as much a religion as beliefing that I don't have 3 arms is a religion. I dont seem to have 3 arms, so I believe I dont have 3 arms.

In fact if evolution didn't work, we would not be able to breed specific breeds of dogs, cats, flowers, etc etc.

evolution works. That is almost indesputible.

Creationism (or 'intelligent design', if you prefer) is unfalsifiable in part because it relies on an omnipotent creator who is used to explain every scientific question.

Why can't creationists be honest and say, "Evolution is the best scientific theory of how life evolved, but I believe in creation because I believe in God, something science takes no stand on"?

The Center for the Understanding of Origins is an interdisciplinary Center at Kansas State University. The center aims to foster bold and scholarly interdisciplinary research addressing issues of origins, especially the origin of the physical Universe, of the Earth, of Life, of intelligence, and of language.

The Center comprises permanent faculty from the departments of Biology, English, Entomology, History, Geology, Philosophy, and Physics. The Center's faculty are involved in developing general education courses and honors seminars for undergraduates, and a graduate certificate program in the study of origins. The Center sponsors both academic and public speakers, with the aim of transforming the discussion of important origins subjects such as evolution from one of hostile arguments between "experts" and "special interests" to informed debate among citizens.

..."It Just Evolved".

There are many, many physical situations in which Intelligent Design is easily the top Ockham's Razor candidate.

But thanks for yet another example of argument from ridicule. <sarcasm>We really, really needed another one of those</sarcasm>

...the science of a guy who can't even get footy scores right? Tough call.

IPOF, creationists are quite happy to have dinosaurs exist, the YEC variety say roughly 6-10,000 years not 3,000 and it took six days. Go and read their own stuff if you don't believe me.

You'd look like a bit of an ignoramus coming at them with so many misquotes.

And of course, when creationist do give a scientific source for their claim the gurus at talk.origins usually only take a matter of minutes to point out that its a misquote or a misrepresented context.

Said gurus couldn't even tell the difference between Darwin and Hitler when pressed to do so by one of their opponents, why trust them for more subtle reasoning? (-:

But perhaps more important, throw Apollos, the baloney detector at any one of their pages and see what happens. Apollos is a good deal more specific and exemplified than Carl's more, er, primordial detector. G'wan, print it out and go do a few pages, you know you want to!

Sit down for a few hours and figure out the odds against enough genetic material arising spontaneously...

A creationist ever being able to think objectively is even less probable.

I'm glad you had something objective to say, and didn't stoop to an ad hominem argument.

In point of fact, given the existence of creationists - and even asserting that they're all literally insane - the odds against one of them thinking objectively are many thousands of orders of magnitude more likely than even the simplest concievable life-form having formed entirely by accident out of 10^81 atoms (the vast majority of those being hydrogen) within 10^17 seconds even aided by the most eye-poppingly optimistic assumptions about the environment(s) that this may have occurred in.

Now take your religious zealotry elsewhere, materialist (-: or at least get some objectivity of your own installed :-)