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Texas Creationist Museum Facing Extinction
gattaca writes "A small Texas museum that teaches creationism is counting on the auction of a prehistoric mastodon skull to stave off extinction. The founder and curator of the Mt. Blanco Fossil Museum, which rejects evolution and claims that man and dinosaurs coexisted, said it will close unless the Volkswagen-sized skull finds a generous bidder. 'If it sells, well, then we can come another day,' Joe Taylor said. 'This is very important to our continuing.'" Meanwhile, the much larger Creation Museum in Kentucky that we discussed and toured when it opened last year seems to be thriving.
Believe whatever you want while within your church. Just keep it out of the science classroom.
Rule #1 -- Politics always trumps technology.
I'm a Christian of the preterist nature. I believe in evolutionary forces as part of God's creation. I don't believe in a 6000-year old Earth (neither do most Jews who hold the Old Testament in a different way than many Christians do). I also think the debate of evolution versus creationism is really repugnant and a waste of time when there are so many other things we can be spending our time on (we meaning "us Christians.")
I can't even begin to count the billions of hours wasted by Christians in living life in ways completely counter to what our God teaches us. Look at the battle over the 10 Commandments, laws of the Israelites' God that have been countermanded by Christ's teaching to a much more simpler set of rules (completely love God first, completely love others second). And yet, when we dig deeper into the "Why" of modern Christian thought, we come up against the same problem that I see in those who are pro-government: we need "leaders" and we need "rules" and we need "penalties" to keep us in line.
What has happened to the powerful individual in today's society? Evolution versus creationism is a debate that strikes at the heart of my question: why is it that we need "teacher-leaders" to stick to a specific standard, rather than what the individual kid in a unique place in their specific city/society needs to be taught? I can't even understand why science is taught to ALL children, along with higher level maths, when the kids today can barely count, let alone read or speak properly. I had a 20-something in my town use a calculator at a checkout line 2 weeks ago when I gave her $21.01 for a $6.06 charge. Unbelievable.
Creationism and evolution are both articles of faith, and really have no purpose for MOST students. Then again, I truly believe that even High School is worthless for 70% of society considering what it is churning out.
Y'know, it occurs to me that anti-evolutionists don't just have a problem with evolution, but also geology, cosmology, carbon dating, physics. Any I missed?
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
Actually, I think a better argument is the predictiveness argument: Science is about learning to understand and predict the world around us, so we can make it better. (Of course 'better' has a host of different meanings, but regardless of which we choose, we need to be able to understand and predict, so we can choose the results of our actions.)
Evolution makes predictions that are accurate enough to be useful, regardless of whether is it aboslutely true or not. (For the record: It's as true as anything we've ever come up with.)
Creationism makes no predictions. In fact, it prevents them: Why did this happen? God did it. Will it happen again? If God wants it to. Will it stop? If God gets bored. Can we influence it? If God decides to be influenced, yes. In the end, 'God' is unknowable and unexplainable, so by saying God did it we have stopped all thought, inquiry, or prediction on the topic.
Which is probably why it is attractive to some people: They don't want to think.
'Sensible' is a curse word.
Sexuality. Other religions.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Y'know, it occurs to me that anti-evolutionists don't just have a problem with evolution, but also geology, cosmology, carbon dating, physics. Any I missed?
Logic?
ZuluPad, the wiki notepad on crack
Bronze age fairy tales vs a mountain of verifiable facts that also are the basic foundation of genetic research.
What possible prediction can anyone make from Creationism?
Evolution predicts that since all living things on the planet share DNA, then medical research using animals should produce useful medical procedures for humans.
When you cut someone open, it's not full of clay.
Bavarian Purity Law of Rice Krispie Squares: Rice Krispies, Marshmallows, Butter, Vanilla.
Anyone who believes that a first-century illiterate Jewish peasant from backwater Galilee is the "son" of an omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent divine being can believe anything
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
As a Christian, I have toi say that the parent comment is the best modded comment I've seen today. Science and religion ask completely different questions. Science asks "how", religion asks "why".For the religious to try to undermine a useful scientific theory with an untestable "theory" like "creationism" is to show an appalling lack of faith in the God they claim to worship.
My take on it? Creationism per se is bunk, and evolution is the best theory I've seen to explein how God went about growing this wonderous universe.
Yes, I know it's heresy to admit being a Christian at slashdot, where athiesm is the site relgion and its proponents will stone with mod points anyone who dares believe that God exists, so mod me down. Arguing the existance of God with an athiest is like arguing the existance of red with a blind man.
You're an athiest because God wants you to be an athiest. "All we are is dust in the wind" - Kansas.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
Indeed. If you ever have the perverse pleasure of debating with a creationist, the first thing you need to discover is what it is exactly that he/she understands by the term "evolution". If you're scientifically literate at all, I can guarantee you that 99% of the time you'll be amazed and discouraged by what you're dealing with. These are people who are not necessarily stupid, but rather something worse than that: willfully and intransigently ignorant. It can be like arguing with a toddler.
Typically, they think that "evolution" means that a monkey got pregnant one day and out popped a human baby. They think that a theory in science (as in "just a theory") is an idle speculation that just shot out of some scientist's ass and beat out competing theories in a popularity contest. Their faith requires them to believe without question what they are taught by their parents and religious authorities, and so the notions of reason and sceptical inquiry carry zero weight with them.
There's a multitude of them, they're refractory to reason, and they vote. They are also easily manipulated by unscrupulous politicians who don't give squat about their beliefs but are willing to pander to them to enhance their own power.
This circus is going to go on for a long, long time.
Actually, interesting that you bring up gravity. Last time I checked, we *still* have no clue what the heck gravity is. How it acts at such great distances and such. We can describe it mathematically (G m1 m2 / d^2), but we don't really know the reason for it. Why is it that this works? How can it act apparently instantly across great distances that even photons can't reach as quickly?
Perhaps your smart-ass answer isn't far off - it's God's will. Whatever it is, we do not thoroughly understand it. All we can do is take advantage of it (through mathematics).
Actually, there's no first-person accounts of Jesus actually having existed at all. So the whole thing is really not worth discussing, since the guy was probably a literary invention.
I would also suggest that the argument analogy you presented is inaccurate and misleading, as most analogies often are. Such topics cannot be summed up or dumbed down in such simplistic manners. Case in point, the popular "let me explain this as a car" analogy given so often on Slashdot. Your analogy presents a pre-determined supposition that God does indeed exist, which is the point of the argument in the first place, yes? You're an athiest because God wants you to be an athiest. "All we are is dust in the wind" - Kansas. I'm not sure what to make of this. Are you implying that atheism is a state at which humans arrive at, being theistic at first? I would propose that humans come out of the womb atheistic and them develop theism at a later date. This can probably be proven by the fact that there are plenty of religions out there that do not advocate "God" in a Christian fashion, or are monotheistic, or something completely different. Unless you're one of the "all paths lead to God" people, of course...
. In fact, I'm sure there are a lot of people who are much more intelligent than you are, who much more thoroughly understand evolutionary theory than you do, and who are much more generally enlightened and educated than you, but who still hold religious views which might properly be called "creationist" views.
Fortunately, no.
There are many intelligent, smart, wise people who believe in God. Thing is, for them faith always gives up to reason, never in opposite direction. You believe in things you don't know, you aren't certain. If science explains something, you adapt your faith to accept the fact, you don't deny it to keep that part of faith running.
You may believe that the first string of DNA that created the first living cell was created by an intelligent being. Thing is there's a lot of ways to mix bases of DNA code, just like slamming on the keyboard randomly, but getting a working self-replicating program by slamming on the keyboard randomly, well, that's a lot of slamming and what is more likely, that it happened randomly, or that it was created? We can't estimate the chance of random creation of such a string within several orders of magnitude, so it leaves room for faith: it might have been created this way. If you look at the amazing properties of electromagnetic waves, how simple rules create such amazing results, you think 'How could such rules come to be? Why is electromagnetism the way it is, so possiblity-rich and yet so simple in its essence?' and you think it would take quite a wise mind to invent such a thing... if it could be invented. Again, room for faith, never certainty, but elements of unknown.
But if you hear bones of dinosaurs were dug into the ground some 4000 years ago to confuse us, sorry. No matter how much you believe in God, with a bit of criticism, you say "bullshit".
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So I put it to Slashdot - Can anyone name a closed system? Something that has no outside inputs or outputs.
I am not stubborn. I am right!