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Reversals of the Earth's Magnetic Field During the Genesis Flood
  http://www.icr.org/article/rev...

Here's an interesting read on the "accuracy" of the Bible...
http://www.icr.org/article/pre...

Here's a plausible explanation: http://www.icr.org/article/sunlight-before-sun/

The fact is, we can't know exactly what happened when the earth was formed by (pick your favorite conjecture). We'll never know. It can't be modeled. An experiment can't be designed that causes generation of living things from non-living (or seemingly non-living) things. What's left is faith. Study the evidence and judge for yourself. Did a deity create it all? Did it just 'happen'? Without personally witnessing it all, we are left with only conjecture.

And yes, of course water is older than the sun. 2 days older, to be exact. :-)

Fruit flies?
http://www.icr.org/article/a-1...

I beleive in natural selection, but not evolution.

...that they weren't crushed by the dinosaurs?

This is similar to the buzz around finding possible water on Saturn's moon:
  Saturn's Moon--Does Water Equal Life?

Holy crap, how did you get me to click on a link to a creationist website??

Sounds familiar. While this is an intriguing find it does not mean that life outside our solar system is anymore possible than it was before.

This is similar to the buzz around finding possible water on Saturn's moon:
Saturn's Moon--Does Water Equal Life?

Sorry, I don't think it is based on the paper below, and the previous citation.

Light propagation explains our inverted retina

In summary, the retina has developed its inverted shape to improve the directionality of intercepted light beams, to enhance vision acuity, increase immunity to scatter and clutter, concentrate more light into the cones, and overcome chromatic aberration. We are now assessing the effect of ocular aberrations on acuity to explore what happens when the beam hitting the retina is more spread and its phase is more random.

SPIE is an international society advancing an interdisciplinary approach to the science and application of light.

Previous: Is the Backwards Human Retina Evidence of Poor Design?

Also, note:

Introduction to: Cephalopod Vision

There are differences between vertebrate eyes and those of cephalopods. Perhaps the most surprising difference given the amazing ability of cephalopods to change color is that most cephalopods are completely color blind (Hanlon and Messenger 1996). How do we know? We can train octopuses to pick black objects over white objects, white objects over black objects, light grey objects over dark grey objects and vice versa but we can not train them to differentiate between colorful objects that look the same in grayscale (Hanlon and Messenger 1996). Also, most cephalopods only have one visual pigment. We have three.

If we had eyes like nearly all squids, we would be color blind. Does Dawkins think that is superior?

It isn't an idiot designer, as cephalopods have their eyes the right way around. The designer clearly can do it correctly, but chose not to do it with vertebrates. Furthermore, when looking at the way the world works, it becomes clear that the designer is evil, mad or both. All in all, Cthulhu is the best guess at a designer, given the evidence.

Guess again?

Is the Backwards Human Retina Evidence of Poor Design?

It is clear, but is it correct?

Is the Backwards Human Retina Evidence of Poor Design?

At least we can take our hockey sticks on the plane now

> so the firmament has water above it, and isn't "the entire universe except the surface of Earth".

Not a problem if Genesis is read literally - that water was the literal raw material of creation (of planet, galaxies even.)

A scientist who made a prediction based on this assumption:
http://www.icr.org/article/329/

In 1984, when no space craft had yet reached Uranus and Neptune, I published a theory predicting the strength of the magnetic fields of those two planets in the Creation Research Society Quarterly, a peer-reviewed creationist scientific journal.2 I made the predictions on the basis of my hypotheses that (A) the raw material of creation was water (based on II Peter 3:5, "the earth was formed out of water and by water"), and (B) at the instant God created the water molecules, the spins of the hydrogen nuclei were all pointing in a particular direction.

It doesn't matter. Anything that gives them an opportunity to attack science will be used. It doesn't matter if it makes sense.

It doesn't matter. Anything that gives them an opportunity to attack science will be used. It doesn't matter if it makes sense.

Because Genesis 1:21 says that God created the sea-monsters tannin, and everyone translator since Luther has tried to translate that word as whale/fish/dragon/waterspout/crocodile/greatSeaCreature or anything else other than the plain meaning of sea monster. Obviously now they have decided to embrace the sea monster and equate it with plesiosaur, instead of reading the text as it plainly is - a polemic against all foreign gods whether they are the sun, moon, stars, monsters, darkness, chaos, weather, fertility.

evidence of billions of years of random mutations and natural selection.

This bit kinda shows your ignorance of the actual processes behind micro-evolution and genetics (the very things that *might* make it possible for life to be as varied as it is without a "designer")

Macro-evolution (the kind that is supposed to make a human from an ape) isn't provable, at least not yet. The forces of nature (presence or lack of a specific food or predator) don't change the DNA of the individual animal at all. They only limit the total gene pool of a species by eliminating unfit individuals. Take a look at the "Positive Mutations" section of this article for a bit more on this. Mutations aren't all they're cracked up to be, once you take a look at it from the genetics standpoint.

I could care less if you think there is evidence for ID, or any other alternate explanation for that matter....as long as people who believe in the hypothesis of Evolution are realistic about the problems with what is being proposed in their own theory of how things came to be.

Depends on what type of evolution you're talking about. For example, micro-evolution (the provable, observable kind) involves things like people in the USA growing fatter over time because of excessive access to food, or the famous different beak sizes of Galapagos finches.

Macro-evolution (the kind that is supposed to make a human from an ape) isn't quite so provable. The forces of nature (presence or lack of a specific food or predator) don't change the DNA of the individual animal at all. They only change the total gene pool of a species by eliminating unfit individuals.

Only reason I bring this up is because the article you linked to relies heavily on mutation and natural selection (i.e. the slower/less aware prey escaped the predator, causing only positive mutations to be carried forward). If you feel like reading some research supporting the other end of it (that mutations aren't all they're cracked up to be), take a look at this article.

Just want to point out that the theory of evolution is constantly evolving itself, or should be: Scientists Late to Recognize Human and Giant Mammal Coexistence

is a top-ranking Christian university which promotes a correct scientific understanding of evolution. They recently opened an Evolution Education Research Center in conjunction with Harvard and McGill.

Pepperdine University and Wheaton College are two other prominent Christian colleges which teach evolution.

Sites such as http://truecreation.info/ http://theistic-evolution.org/ and http://biologos.org/ illustrate that there are Christians out there who have reconciled faith and science.

Sounds good, right?

That said, I still believe that the problem won't go away any time soon. Why? Power and money. The organizations behind the modern-day creationism movement (Institute for Creation Research, Answers in Genesis, Creation Science Evangelism, and The Discovery Institute) are multimillion-dollar Christian textbook publishing houses -- or they supply the "science" for other homeschool textbook publishing houses.

Even when it lands them in jail for tax evasion, they have a cult-like following:

http://freehovind.com/

As much as it seems like they're a united front, they love to criticize and sue each other:

http://www.icr.org/article/intelligent-design-or-scientific-creationism/

Legal controversy between AiG and CMI

It's not about the individual believer anymore. It's not about worldviews. It's not even about the churches! It's about the money-driven organizations that are feeding them. They've sucked people in using slick propaganda, books and Web sites, and encourage people to not just teach this stuff, but to teach other people to teach this stuff.

In short, it's not any different from any modern political movement.

See also:

Journal Censors 'Second Law' Paper Refuting Evolution
http://www.icr.org/article/journal-censors-second-law-paper-refuting/

After the paper was accepted for publication in Applied Mathematics Letters, an anti-design blogger wrote to the editor, warning that the journal's reputation would be tarnished if the paper was printed. So, the journal's editor withdrew it. Sewell, who has authored at least 39 other technical papers, then took legal action. Since the journal's own policy states that withdrawing a reviewed and accepted paper "can only occur under exceptional circumstances" such as plagiarism or fraudulent data, and since Sewell's article does not contain any known errors or technical problems, he was given an apology as well as permission to post the pre-publication version of his paper on his university faculty web page—although Applied Mathematics Letters still has no plans to publish it.

See also: http://www.icr.org/article/does-entropy-contradict-evolution/

If the energy of the sun somehow is going to transform the non-living molecules of the primeval soup into intricately complex, highly organized, replicating living cells, [...] then that energy has to be stored and converted [...] by an intricate array of complex codes and programs. If such codes and mechanisms are not available [...]then the incoming heat energy will simply disintegrate any organized systems that might accidentally have shown up there.

Evolutionists have hardly even addressed this problem as yet, let alone solved it. There are, to their credit, a few theorists who have at least recognized the problem
[...]

The one man whose speculations have received the most attention (even acquiring for him a Nobel Prize in 1977) is Belgian physicist Ilya Prigogine, who advanced the strange idea of "dissipative structures" as a possible source of new complexity in nature.

Such systems in no way contradict the principle of entropy but rather are illustrations of entropy working overtime! The Harvard scientist, John Ross, comments:
"...there is somehow associated with the field of far-from-equilibrium phenomena the notion that the second law of thermodynamics fails for such systems. It is important to make sure that this error does not perpetuate itself."

See finally: http://www.ldolphin.org/chaos.html
[dissipative structures] have never been shown—even mathematically—to reproduce themselves or to generate still higher degrees of order.

[Prigogine] used the example of small vortices in a cup of hot coffee. A similar example would be the much larger "vortex" in a tornado or hurricane. These might be viewed as "structures" and to appear to be "ordered," but they are soon gone. What they leave in their wake is not a higher degree of organized complexity, but a higher degree of dissipation and disorganisation.

[Prigogine, quoted in 1984:]
The problem of biological order involves the transition from the molecular activity to the supermolecular order of the cell. This problem is far from being solved.
However, we must admit that we remain far from any quantitative theory.

See also:

Journal Censors 'Second Law' Paper Refuting Evolution
http://www.icr.org/article/journal-censors-second-law-paper-refuting/

After the paper was accepted for publication in Applied Mathematics Letters, an anti-design blogger wrote to the editor, warning that the journal's reputation would be tarnished if the paper was printed. So, the journal's editor withdrew it. Sewell, who has authored at least 39 other technical papers, then took legal action. Since the journal's own policy states that withdrawing a reviewed and accepted paper "can only occur under exceptional circumstances" such as plagiarism or fraudulent data, and since Sewell's article does not contain any known errors or technical problems, he was given an apology as well as permission to post the pre-publication version of his paper on his university faculty web page—although Applied Mathematics Letters still has no plans to publish it.

See also: http://www.icr.org/article/does-entropy-contradict-evolution/

If the energy of the sun somehow is going to transform the non-living molecules of the primeval soup into intricately complex, highly organized, replicating living cells, [...] then that energy has to be stored and converted [...] by an intricate array of complex codes and programs. If such codes and mechanisms are not available [...]then the incoming heat energy will simply disintegrate any organized systems that might accidentally have shown up there.

Evolutionists have hardly even addressed this problem as yet, let alone solved it. There are, to their credit, a few theorists who have at least recognized the problem
[...]

The one man whose speculations have received the most attention (even acquiring for him a Nobel Prize in 1977) is Belgian physicist Ilya Prigogine, who advanced the strange idea of "dissipative structures" as a possible source of new complexity in nature.

Such systems in no way contradict the principle of entropy but rather are illustrations of entropy working overtime! The Harvard scientist, John Ross, comments:
"...there is somehow associated with the field of far-from-equilibrium phenomena the notion that the second law of thermodynamics fails for such systems. It is important to make sure that this error does not perpetuate itself."

See finally: http://www.ldolphin.org/chaos.html
[dissipative structures] have never been shown—even mathematically—to reproduce themselves or to generate still higher degrees of order.

[Prigogine] used the example of small vortices in a cup of hot coffee. A similar example would be the much larger "vortex" in a tornado or hurricane. These might be viewed as "structures" and to appear to be "ordered," but they are soon gone. What they leave in their wake is not a higher degree of organized complexity, but a higher degree of dissipation and disorganisation.

[Prigogine, quoted in 1984:]
The problem of biological order involves the transition from the molecular activity to the supermolecular order of the cell. This problem is far from being solved.
However, we must admit that we remain far from any quantitative theory.

Well, close: there's a grant program. Seriously.

It's too bad that nobody has proposed a theory that could be measured for each planet in our solar system and tested against a prior prediction to see if it is accurate. That would be the perfect scientific solution to the problem of planetary magnetic fields.

Or maybe someone has (article from before Voyager launched, summary from after it passed Neptune): Article Summary

One commentator says, "you would have thought we would have given up guessing about planetary magnetic fields after being wrong at nearly every planet in the solar system. . . ."

1. No evidence of birds?

http://www.icr.org/article/6398/
If dinosaurs evolved into birds, then protofeathers should be found on dinosaur fossils located below (and therefore dated before) fossils of birds, not above and after them. McKellar's fibers came from Cretaceous deposits, but true bird feathers have been found in fossil layers far below the Cretaceous. Why would feathers still be evolving long after they supposedly already existed?

2. Dino Feathers?

http://biology.kenyon.edu/courses/biol241/bird%20flight%202005%20Feduccia_Alan.pdf

[From the Abstract]
Our findings show no evidence for the existence of protofeathers and consequently no evidence in support of the follicular theory of the morpho- genesis of the feather. Rather, based on histological studies of the integument of modern reptiles, which show complex patterns of the collagen fibers of the dermis, we conclude that “protofeathers” are probably the remains of collagenous fiber “meshworks” that reinforced the dinosaur integument.

In the second part of the study we examine evidence relating to the most critical character thought to link birds to derived theropods, a tridactyl hand composed of digits 1-2-3. We maintain the evidence supports interpretation of bird wing digit identity as 2,3,4, which appears different from that in theropod dinosaurs. The phylogenetic significance of Chinese microraptors is also discussed, with respect to bird origins and flight origins. We suggest that a possible solution to the disparate data is that Aves plus bird-like maniraptoran theropods (e.g., microraptors and others) may be a separate clade, distinctive from the main lineage of Theropoda, a remnant of the early avian radiation, exhibiting all stages of flight and flightlessness.

Even without these points, the claim is circular - it would in time 'strengthens' the shaky 'fact' it depended on.

Note, I am not claiming a lack of integrity of the researcher - just that he has made an erroneous claim, based on what he believes to be true.

Hi... Gladly.

Please see my post above. Heres' the link to the paper quoted there.
http://biology.kenyon.edu/courses/biol241/bird%20flight%202005%20Feduccia_Alan.pdf

[From the main paper]
We examine the alleged support from the fossils Sinosauropteryx (Currie and Chen, 2001), Sinorni- thosaurus, an indeterminate theropod (Ji et al., 2001), and Caudipteryx (Qiang et al., 1998) with respect to the key features in stages 1–4 of Prum and Brush’s (2002) developmental theory on feather morphogenesis. ...

[From the Abstract]
Our findings show no evidence for the existence of protofeathers and consequently no evidence in support of the follicular theory of the morpho- genesis of the feather. Rather, based on histological studies of the integument of modern reptiles, which show complex patterns of the collagen fibers of the dermis, we conclude that “protofeathers” are probably the remains of collagenous fiber “meshworks” that reinforced the dinosaur integument.

I do believe what's written here:
http://www.icr.org/article/6398/

The "already known" fact that dinosaurs had protofeathers reinforces his theory, and his theory ends up reinforcing the "already known" fact?

Still seems circular to me.

http://www.icr.org/article/6398/

and

Feduccia, A., T. Lingham-Soliar and J. R. Hinchliffe. 2005. Do feathered dinosaurs exist? Testing the hypothesis on neontological and paleontological evidence. Journal of Morphology. 266 (2): 125.

See also 'Silkie chicken', referred to elsewhere in this thread

When these gases are ranked by their direct contribution to the greenhouse effect, the most important are:
Gas / Greenhouse Gas Contribution (%)
Water vapor (H2O) 36 – 72 %
Carbon dioxide (CO2) 9 – 26 %
Methane (CH4) 4 – 9 %
Ozone (O3) 3 – 7 %
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_gas

It's also generally accepted that these are not independent, since increases in CO2, CH4, and O3 increase the temperature, which increases the water vapor: "The average residence time of a water molecule in the atmosphere is only about nine days, compared to years or centuries for other greenhouse gases such as CH4 and CO2. Thus, water vapor responds to and amplifies effects of the other greenhouse gases."

(2) "and that the amount generated by human activity is further less than 10% of that CO2."
The CO2 in the atmosphere has increased from 270-280 ppm a century ago to 390 ppm today (and it was down to 180 ppm in the last ice age). 390/280 = 40% increase. And, before you say that not all the 110 ppm increase is due to human activity, I submit this graph showing that CO2 levels over the past 600,000 years have never been above 300 ppm until the 20th century ( http://static-www.icr.org/i/articles/af/does_carbon_dioxide_fig3new.jpg )

You know: I'd think there was a lot more to climate change denial if the facts presented by climate deniers weren't almost always wrong.

I would be interested to know, though, how they think this would lower the temperature - for example: if water vapor at different elevations have different effects.

They actually are. Institute for Creation Research

http://www.icr.org/article/human-mutation-clock-ticking/
Http://oilinisrael.net

http://www.icr.org/article/human-mutation-clock-ticking/

Besides, geologic processes do result in upside down strata. There's no indication that a flood could.

Depending on the order – and speed – in which the sediments were deposited there’s no reason to expect that they couldn’t be laid out-of-order from what you observe elsewhere.

That's why we don't find complete trees in a upright position. We usually only find the root system and a few feet of trunk. Of course they were buried rapidly as in less than a few decades.

Citation? This certainly doesn’t look like “roots and a few feet of trunk”. Besides which, the strata through which they often extend is thought to have required millions of years for deposition, not mere decades, and other fossils within those rock layers are dated accordingly.

In the case of the trees buried by volcanoes, they tend not to be upright.

They are if they’re floating in that position, as the case in both Spirit Lake (Mt. St. Helens) and Yellowstone Park IIRC.

OK. So the claim made about the water is that the entire Earth was flat so it wouldn't need nearly as much water.

Not entirely flat. Just not what we see today. It's interesting that the biblical text says the water covered all the "high hills" and not all the "mountains." This is actually quite in agreement with regular plate tectonic theory. The major difference is the timeline. Secular theory puts it way in the past. Creationist theory puts it recently at the time of Noah's Flood.

See Runaway subduction as the driving mechanism for the Genesis Flood. The subtler point here is to show how serious Creationists have become about researching and theorizing scientifically plausible mechanisms that would produce what we observe today.

Rubbish. First, don't use "by definition" when something isn't a definition.

From the wikipedia article on fossils,

Fossilization is an exceptionally rare occurrence, because most components of formerly-living things tend to decompose relatively quickly following death. In order for an organism to be fossilized, the remains normally need to be covered by sediment as soon as possible. However there are exceptions to this, such as if an organism becomes frozen, desiccated, or comes to rest in an anoxic (oxygen-free) environment. There are several different types of fossils and fossilization processes.

In the context of fossil formation, fossils must, by definition, be buried and preserved quickly, one way or another.

That's nonsense. First of all, as someone who can read Genesis in the original Hebrew, nothing in the text says anything at all about humans being created for diversity and adaption. So how you are getting that from there is beyond me.

There are a number of occurrences of the command to "populate the earth," both to humans and to animals. Using good deductive reasoning, if God did really do what he said he did and in the way he said he did it, then it is reasonable to also say that animals and humans were designed up front for adaptation to a large number of environments. It follows that if they needed to survive in different environments, they must have had the genetic diversity from which natural selection specialize traits to best fit the environment.

There's far more genetic diversity in even just the human population then what you would get from about a dozen people on a boat 5000 years ago, even if if every single one of them had very different genetic backgrounds.

The assumption is that that information has not been there the whole time. If the Genesis account of creation is true, all that genetic diversity was present at the beginning and benefited animals, given the command to populate the earth, by natural selection helping the animals to adapt to all sorts of environments.

For the last two issues above, see Adam, Eve and Noah vs Modern Genetics.

The geology alone doesn't allow people honestly looking at the evidence to reach any other conclusion.

Actually, it does. The problem is that we're inundated with the popular view, that of an evolutionary take on the evidence. It is no longer questioned in the mainstream. There are counter-arguments and there are failures and set-backs to evolution, but you don't hear about them. You hear about the new discovery but not the later debates between secular scientists, themselves, realizing the discovery doesn't mean much at all. It's a system into which all the pro arguments enter but none of the con arguments enter and so it's vastly imbalanced.

Take some time to rationally consider the links I've been leaving and this list of creation/evolution topics with a Creationist perspective. Taken with a level head, I

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

Thanks for that comment. It inspired me to post a snippet of a similar conversation I had months ago, with your links and some others added:

Is it right, however, to lump together those who are skeptical of evolution with those who are skeptical of AGW, particularly CO2-driven AGW ?

Creationists confuse religious faith with falsifiable science. Among the general public, climate-change contrarians (and your average Greenpeace/PETA loony) confuse political affiliation with falsifiable science. In both cases, scientists are much less likely to agree with either claim, and that likelihood decreases with increasing relevance of the scientist's field. That's probably why both groups tend to accuse the scientific community of conspiracy and/or widespread incompetence.

At my blog, the following statement is both legible and has popup titles describing why that link was chosen. Here it is without the links first: "And, in my experience there's a significant overlap between the two groups. Most of their arguments seem to be at similar intellectual and educational levels."

And, in my experience there's a significant overlap between the two groups. Most of their arguments seem to be at similar intellectual and educational lev els.

You should go and visit "uncommon descent" the blog HQ of intelligent design. They're always bringing up AGW skepticism, since the notion of a far-reaching conspiracy of scientific propaganda and elitist repression is the same excuse they use to wave away the fact that the overwhelming majority of scientific opinion is in favour of evolution. Throwing their lot in with other denialists "makes their worldview make sense".

Also institute for creation research states:

• Global warming appears to have been occurring for the last 30-50 years.
• This warming may only be a short-term fluctuation but could be a longer-term trend.
• Evidence is still inconclusive whether man is causing the warming.
• No "natural" causes for global warming have been confirmed.
• One possible new theory is that galactic cosmic radiation (GCR) modulated by solar activity affects low-level cloud cover and is causing the warming.

Global warming may affect some parts of our society negatively but would likely benefit others. In fact, the current warming trend may be returning our global climate closer to that prevalent in the Garden of Eden. Compared to climate changes which have occurred in earth history, a temperature rise of a few degrees is a small fluctuation which will not lead to a complete melting of the polar caps or another ice age. Earth has a stable environmental system with many built-in feedback systems to maintain a uniform climate. It was designed by God and has only been dramatically upset by catastrophic events like the Genesis Flood. Catastrophic climate change will occur again in the future, but only by God's intervention in a sudden, violent conflagration of planet Earth in the end times

Answers in genesis cry conspiracy and even cite "The Day After Tomorrow"!

The tactic used by Lomborg (quote mining) is the definitive modus operandi of a denialist. It is the bread and butter of Creationists, and for the person employing it, it is a strong indicator of either severe cognitive dissonance or outright lying.

And if you consider that many of these so-called 'independent' studies are in fact paid for by fringe anti-science groups, then perhaps their results are aren't as unbiased as they would have you believe.

That seems strange - I'm having trouble imaging what an anti-science directed study would consist of. And how unbiased would they have you believe their study is, if it's anti-science by definition? It seems like they would want to show off their own maximizing of bias if it's really anti-science.

Check with the people behind these sites for some excellent examples:
http://www.creationstudies.org/
http://www.creationbiology.org/
http://www.icr.org/
http://theflatearthsociety.org/

Wow. I'm impressed you took the time to rip apart my post line for line. That's good. We need more dissections of errant posts around here.

MODERATORS: Please mod the parent poster down as a troll or offtopic. And mod me down as flamebait or offtopic. I've wasted enough of my own time writing a response. Don't let any more readers waste their time reading any of this garbage.

I certainly hope nobody does that. This kind of discussion is exactly what is needed.

Would you care, shovas, user number 1605685 (my that IS a shiny new user account, isn't it!) to wager a guess as to what I think the real reason was for you posting that meandering soliloquy?

I've made two or three posts now and I've already got someone questioning my user ID. Awesome. I suppose it doesn't count for anything I've been reading here since the 90s? Why join now? I didn't think it was worth it before. I enjoy the site. I read a lot of the discussion. I saw a lot of misinformation on my hot button topics I thought I'd like to weigh into, though, so I thought I'd join after hearing my buddy join up recently too.

And, yes, I'd love to know what you think the real reason is.

Oh really. Do you have any reputable source to back that up? How about even one verifiable, specific number? A single believable example? Surely if you did, as a "staunch supporter of using scientific method", you would have mentioned it.

You know, mostly, I just assume if people wanted info on creation they'd google for "creation", maybe "creation science" if they think nothing of creation relating to science is out there. That's honestly why I didn't link to anything. I guess I'm seeing that most people just don't know about the creation "scene". I call it a scene, I know, but really there is a whole area of people and of study out there surrounding origins. There is so much serious research and data out there.

Without further adieu, Answers in Genesis (quite solid, I think), True.Origin (quite impressive the history between them and Talk.Origins), Institute for Creation Research (can't vouch for them but they've been around), Creation Research, and, I wish I had this in front of me, but a few weeks ago I was reading this dense, dense study on the atmosphere, it's composition, and relating it to young earth concepts.

This is just an example of what I thought most people would do: Google for "creation". Those are the items of interest which I particularly respect or that have a history. There is a whole world of creation science out there just a google away.

Do you have even a basic appreciation for how much information we carry around in our DNA [go.com]?

You are amusingly abrasive. That's ok, I can take it. I have a fuller apprecation than you know, although I'm always willing to learn more. The linked article is interesting and something, as I've read the news over years, I've already thought about (ie. "junk dna" is just our name for something whose purpose we haven't figured out yet).

To answer the first question: it was brought about by one or more mutations. Either you didn't read the article, or you don't understand basic biology ... or both. Your second question is invalid owing to the fact that you didn't know the answer to your first question.

Perhaps you want to read up on genetic mutation. My layman terms for pedant terms aren't really that confusing.

Did a mutation occur in which the genetic material acquired new information? My suggestion is that the mutation we're seeing is a re-expression of existing information.

Oh yeah, I'm stunned alright. Who the Hell invite

You raise interesting points and project a very interesting view of each moment being the product of numbers of organismes and mechanisms sustaining themselves and that expression being us as a contious being believing it's continious in its dynamic experience and being. I visualized the dynamic nature without massive organic renewal and sacrifice when I was pointing out the conscience would seem to be "untransferable", but you could pass it on as it would be an imprint of your current state.

The selfsacrifice is a known mechanism in cells. The tiny cell wont be able to conceptualize or understand its purpose. We can, as the an expression of it. Yet we don't know ourselves, for certain, what we are part of in a larger scale.

I don't know if I immediatly would stand in line. I'd humor the idea thoroughly first: Existence isn't always a pleasant thing, certainly not with our ability, psychology and often inability to adjust to drastic changes. (see the generation gaps fe.)
If you compare "eternity" with your current concept of "all my life", it's incomprehensible.

I personally don't feel I live for self-continuity nor act upon that, I act upon my perceived register of past, current and the projections I make with that set, coloured by desire, emotion, and moral/social constructs and even less conscious processes we identify as instinct which is arguably in place to sustain oneself and reproduce. (if I don't eat I'm hungry, to acquire food, within my society, I have to generate income to be able to trade it with someone specialized in another trade which allows me to feed myself. If I hurt myself, I damage myself and might make it harder for me to sustain myself or in extension makes me a less preferable candidate for reproduction or protect my mate and sustain a shelter until my offspring is strong enough to survive, so it's instinctly discouraged with pain and discomfort.)

That said, 1.67 exajoules seems a bit low. Are you sure that's the right number?

I got the number from Wikipedia, which apparently converted it from this article.

There are plenty of repeatable Creation experiments that include predictability. To assume there are none is pure ignorance of what Creation Science has to offer, the kind of ignorance that will be perpetuated by keeping it out of the classroom.

Prior to the Voyager launches, scientists attempted to predict the magnetic fields of each planet. Put simply, the Non-Creationists' theory is that the magnetic field is generated by metallic mass spinning at a certain velocity. The Creationists' theory is that everything was created from aligned water molecules ~6000 years ago and then decayed in a straight line from there.

Link to Original 1984 article Link to Less Technical Follow-Up

Mercury
Non-Creationist: 0
Creationist: 7.5 x 1022 J/T
Actual: (4.8 ± 0.3) x 1019 J/T
Non-Creationist quote: ... the very existence of the field is puzzling. If Mercury can maintain a steady dipole field, the earth, which rotates 59 times as fast and has a core twice as large, should be able to sustain more complicated fields.

Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn were known prior to the predictions.

Uranus
Non-Creationist: smaller field, or none at all
Creationist: 2.05 x 1025 J/T
Actual: 3.0 x 1024 J/T

Neptune
Both did equally well, but there was a surprise problem for the Non-Creationists. The Magnetic axis is at a 60 degree offset to the rotation axis, meaning that their predicted value would need to be reduced by 2/3.
Non-Creationist quote: Two odd magnetic fields is one too many.

The Creationist was within an order of magnitude on every planet in the Solar System. The Non-Creationists and their dynamo theory were wrong on more than 50% of the planets.
Non-Creationist quote: you would have thought we would have given up guessing about planetary magnetic fields after being wrong at nearly every planet in the solar system. . . .

Has the dynamo theory been falsified, even though it has an accuracy of less than 50%? No. It has been updated with wild additions involving multiple asteroid collisions and other even more fantastic theorized objects.

Has the Creationist theory replaced it, even though it predicted everything with 100% accuracy (within an order of magnitude)? No. It is rejected outright because it came from a Creationist, the same as what we are talking about in this article.

Although I only provided a single example (and there are thousands), I hope that this shows several points:

1. There are Creationists doing actual repeatable, predictable, falsifiable experiments according to the scientific method. These should be looked at because they are pure science. The source should be irrelevant if the experiment is sound and repeatable. The safety to do this is what is being proposed in the article.
2. Non-creationist theories are often not "falsifiable", even when they are wrong. The theory is simply updated with asteroid collisions or dark matter or the Oort cloud or various other "faith" objects that come out of devotion to a theory rather than observation. These violate the principle of the simplest explanation usually being the correct one.

3. Before making ignorant statements about what Creation Science offers (or doesn't offer), why not spend an hour or two familiarizing yourself with it: Answers in Genesis Q&A. Since this information has always been censored from you, you rightly assume that all evidence points unquestionably toward evolution, billions of years, etc., because there is "no evidence" to the contrary. Of course there is "no evidence", because your science books won't publish it. Why not read through it and make up your mind based on facts instead

Actually, Helium 4 (and especially Helium 3) escape out of Earth's atmosphere continuously into space. (As well as Hydrogen)
It is not merely that it is too expensive to extract Helium from the upper atmosphere, but it is also that the atmosphere is leaking Helium into space, lost forever.

http://www.icr.org/index.php?module=articles&action=view&ID=247
http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/dave_matson/young-earth/specific_arguments/helium.html
http://www.answersingenesis.org/tj/v8/i2/helium.asp
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helium

http://www.icr.org/index.php?module=articles&action=view&ID=283

So you put a few coins in the bank and now you're the richest man in the world?

No?

So you put a few chemicals together and created RNA?

No?

[ http://www.icr.org/index.php?module=articles&action=view&ID=245 , http://www.2ndlaw.com/obstructions.html ]

*yawn* And this post is a classic example of what's difficult in discussing Truth: use an inordinate volume of words to draw attention away from the issues at hand while simultaneously convincing the less scrupulous of us that the arguments hold true. This tactic is very useful for those who have good access to the media, as they can simply gloss over the details yet cite these "facts" as "overwhelming evidence" while they are really just lies made to polarize and separate people from the truth. This tactic is also found where one side of an "argument" has more money/resources/interest than they other, and so this rich "side" of the "argument" simply pays for or fabricates a bunch of arbitrary studies and buries the less fortunate side with more "evidence" than is possible for so few people to review and refute.

It's quite a genius strategy because it's hard to filter without seeming naive or single-minded. My general rule which seems to work well is that if someone cannot communicate a thesis in 400 words or less, they either don't know what they're talking about or they aren't very good at communicating the concept. Either way, the parent poster's argument fits as a long and complex argument built upon false assumptions and incorrect definitions. The foundation has been built for him/her via special interest groups with the aforementioned "resources" to spam the discussions and poison these so-called debates with armies of straw men for what should have originally been a non-issue. No wonder nobody bothers to refute these sources, they're illegitimate to begin with and do nothing but waste people's time, so why bother.

The parent uses two websites as primary sources which are Answers in Genesis and Institute for Creation Research. It is worth noting that none of this evidence has been published in a peer-reviewed journal and no information is available for auditing the cash flow for the websites, so naturally the content is largely produced by a few prolific authors of questionable moral and intellectual decency. The tone of the articles is polarizing and never avoids reinforcing the "us vs them" image via the usual straw man attack that supposes creationists are a legitimate group of individuals who have a legitimate alternative to what the "evolutionists" "believe".

I would like to take this opportunity to suggest that "evolutionists" or whatever you want to call them, don't "believe" in evolution. They observe it in nature and it so far best explains the natural progression of life from its origins until the present, and from the present until the end of life. And until anyone observes a repeatable phenomena that evolution cannot explain (that it ought to) and some other theory does, then evolution is the prevailing theory in the field.

It's easy to give in to the polarity and believe that it's us versus them. These sites and other such sources of misinformation with such strong politically divisive rhetoric ought to be ignored. They promote dishonest discussion where people need not think for themselves but rely on others to think for them and they play to our emotions by inciting us to anger so we no longer need to be rational. Not only that, but they serve as a distraction from more important issues, such as the general political shortcomings of the day (e.g. our foreign policy. Iraq. etc) and even the issue that originally brought up this whole mess in the first place: EDUCATION. Who cares about education in the US when we can talk about abortion or how fundamentalist Christians are forcing Christianity down the throats of a nation with the freedom of religion? Who cares that the US was founded by agnostics, deists, and the like (but not Christians)? Minor details lost in a sea of deception. It really does feel like the Matrix when people are so capable of willing arbitrary concepts to be truth. The red pill for those who question everything and the blue pill for those who are less s

See this article for the refutal of this weak argument. The last paragraph says it all. http://www.icr.org/article/14/

Anybody else want to try?

That's like the argument that people with sickle cell anemia are less prone to malaria. They may be resistant to malaria, but they still have sickle cell anemia (a negetive mutation)! Or wait, a mutant with no legs can't get athlete's foot, that's beneficial, right... haha

See this article for the refutal of this weak argument. The last paragraph says it all. http://www.icr.org/article/14/

Anybody else want to try?

Why is it that the truth is only the truth if it makes someone money. Just because you can't make money by believing what is so obvious to true scientists does not make it false. The world's formation by God and the transformation via the Flood are easily seen if you use a truly open SCIENTIFIC mind. That is, consider all the options and see what the evidence BEST fits. You will quickly see that it is not uniformitarianism and evolution.

You might also check out Answers in Genesis (http://www.answersingenesis.org/), the Institute for Creation Research (http://www.icr.org/), the Creation Research Society (http://www.creationresearch.org/), and True.Origins (http://www.trueorigin.org/). All of these organizations provide resources from scientists credentialed in their fields of study showing how the Bible explains the creation of the world better than uniforitarianism.

David

Carbon-14 found in diamonds and coal, suggesting that they are not millions of years old.
Polonium radiohalos that suggest that granite was cooled quickly.
Very inconsistent nuclear decay dates.
Helium in zircon crystals.

http://www.icr.org/article/3191/ Several years back, this writer attended the International Conference on Dinosaur/Bird Evolution. One afternoon, a number of us took a field trip led by a recognized "expert." He asked us if the field in which we were standing could have been a dinosaur-age environment. Several said no, because there was grass present. Evolutionists maintain that grasses were not present during the age of dinosaurs -- In my review |i.e., Eschberger, ed.| of Disney's new movie "Dinosaur," I mentioned that one of the few scientific inacurracies |sic| that I found in the movie was the presence of grasses in the dinosaur nesting grounds.3 However, in a 2005 report we read, "Plant-eating dinosaurs munched on grass, say scientists who had thought the plants emerged after the beasts died off."4 Students were taught that the only mammals during the "age of dinosaurs" were small, and barely able to stay alive among the terrible thunder lizards. Evolution theory said that the mammals were nothing more than "shrew-like insectivores that hunted at night." That radically changed with the recent discovery of large, dinosaur-hunting mammals!5