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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.
Has any fellow European of mine ever come across any serious creationists? Is this solely an American phenomenon?
The KY Creation museum isn't too far away from here and everyone that I've talk to that has gone or wanted to go hasn't done so out of religious belief but out of morbid curiosity or think it's funny. Their success is the same as that of the bearded lady, or so it seems to me. Once people get over the initial shock and humor it'll fade into obscurity.
Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what your country did to you
Hi, I've been looking for a Christian who believes evolution poses no problem to Christianity for a few months. May I ask you a question?
How do you deal with the problem of original sin? I see the problem as thus: If evolution is true, there was no literal Adam. If there was no Adam, there was no "fall". If there was no fall, what do we require Jesus to "save" us from?
I (as an ex-Christian) deal with this by saying Christianity is not real. I had a long talk with my father (a conservative evangelical minister) over Christmas, and he feels that evolution would completely undermine his faith so he deals with it by saying evolution is not real.
I am quite curious how you feel about this issue. I rewrote this post about 4 times but couldn't find words that I was confident implied I'm not looking for a fight, so I'm resorting to this disclaimer. You'll get nothing but polite and (hopefully) well-thought out responses from me. I look forward to your answer!
.there is enough of everything for everyone.
Say you are a legitimate museum/educational institution capable of purchasing this skull.
Do you:
a) Purchase the mastodon skull to preserve an excellent fossil and put it on display for educational value, including its true age?
b) Allow this absurdity and insult to rational intelligence that is a Creation Museum die?
Not the original poster, but I'll tell you what I think anyway. :). So in short, I think the most salient aspect of the Genesis is not the idea of the Fall, but rather that of acquiring free will and then making choices - e.g. to respect God or not - and living with the consequences, in the mortal and the after-life.
The whole point of the idea of the Fall is that once you achieve knowledge, then you are responsible for yourself and will need to work out a way to survive and eventually be embraced by the grace of God. Before achieving God-like status by means of knowloedge, man was not responsible for himself, had no free will and was taken care of by God. After that, he had to adapt his ways of life quite a bit
Finally, what if Adam were not a literal human being but just a "token" for humankind? That wouldn't be unusual at all.
Global warming is a cube.
Though not the GP, I'm a Christian who believes in evolution myself, I'll try to tackle this if you don't object. Please excuse the brevity of the summary below; there is so much left out, I fear I've made it sound rather less structured and nuanced than it really is.
The way I look at it, the "fall" was not a one-time event that blighted the rest of us. It was, and is, and will continue to be, an over-and-over event that blights each of us individually. "Adam" is not an historical figure, but an allegorical one, a representative of our human nature.
We are human, and fallible. Not one of us makes it through life (or probably even through the day) without making some serious error of judgment that wounds another person, whether deliberately or thoughtlessly. Those errors are the things we need to atone for: our deliberately hurtful deeds, our thoughtlessness. No one is immune from this; it is a necessary consequence of our free will.
And in most cases, I think we cannot really make up for the wrong we have done. The errors create wounds that are beyond our power to heal. Yet in a just universe, evil requires an expiation.
As I see it, Christ's death provided that expiation. The salvation of Jesus is offered freely, as a pure gift -- nothing expected of us in return, except to say, "I accept." Without that acceptance, the expiation for the evil I have done then falls on myself.
(DISCLAIMER: Please understand, it's not my intent to proselytize or start a debate. I only expressed my view because the parent asked for an answer. I'm not saying that this is THE answer. I'm saying that this is AN answer, and one that I can live with. If your life, logic, and understanding have led you to a different conclusion about the world -- a different relationship with God, a different God or set of Gods, or no God at all -- and so long as you are harming no others, I won't presume to say that your view should be the same as mine. Go in peace.)
How can a post be modded "overrated" or "underrated" when it hasn't been rated yet?
I have a question that has always troubled me regarding evolution vs. intelligent design. Is there any meaningful way, or even a need, to differentiate "created" things from "naturally occurring" things? Homo Sapiens may have "evolved" over millions of years, but there are objects on this earth (now even "living" objects) which are 100% the "creation" of us as a species, which would be very difficult to explain from an evolutionary standpoint.
At some point, we may become so advanced, technologically, that there is nothing curently living which is beyond our ability to recreate in a laboratory setting. How would one determine what occurs naturally and what was created? There will be lots of legal issues related to "accident of nature" or "industrial accident" related to when created things go bad, and how to prove they were created versus just having occurred by themselves.
To some extent, this is us "playing God" with nature. Somewhere down the road, a wholly "created" being will gain consciousness, evolve some (if left alone long enough), then wonder where he came from. Then they will have the same argument we are having now.
I'm no fan of ID as having "scientific" merit. But it does have philosophical merit. And some of the thought experiments make my head hurt.
(Posting Anon, because I don't like to discuss my personal politics or religion in public.)
Nope, no problems with any of those. There's nothing factual, based solely on empirical evidence in any of these fields that conclusively proves macro-evolution. Micro-evolution is undeniable -- species are constantly changing. But the jump from a new breed of dog to man evolving from a single-celled organism is just a bit too much for me, given any time frame. There's no interemediary reliable fossil record, even though we've gone through enough rock to have seen that by now (geology), no proof that just because there are (as far as we can tell, and the evidence makes sense) old stars that this somehow proves the evolution of life (cosmology), no empirical proof that carbon dating is even accurate, let alone that this only proves that some creatures are very old if it is accurate, not that they evolved (carbon dating), and I'm missing what in physics conclusively proves evolution.
Creationism and evolution both require faith. I realize that makes you uncomfortable, but perhaps when we can both realize the severe limitations of our knowledge and stop accepting assumptions as fact, we can discover the truth together. This is what science is about, isn't it?
Regarding sexuality and other religions, I do have a problem with ideas that are wrong, as everyone does. That does not stop me from loving people, and listening to and learning from them.
prediction: modded down: -1 disagree
Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars.
I think I figured it out. Both are right - the Creationists and the Evolutionary followers. I argue only about the time scale. Assuming both are right, that is, life is 6000 years old and 4 billion years old, how can it be? It is possible if the scale of time, that is, how long is a year?, how is a second measured?, different from each other. If you take the time taken by the Milky Way to rotate once around its axis as a year (why not?), well, then the Earth is, sorry for the pseudorandom number, 10 years old. Taking the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium-133 atom as one second is JUST ONE WAY of defining time. I hope this solves all the misunderstanding.
I can't believe this comment has gone this long without an explanation. In good faith I will assume you are not trolling.
There is a lot of good information at Talk origins. In summary, it says "The entropy of a closed system cannot decrease." (Which, I believe, is what you are referencing.) It goes on to say "However, they neglect the fact that life is not a closed system. The sun provides more than enough energy to drive things."
Ed
"Long time listener, first time caller."
So then he's sending me to hell simply because he wants to send me to hell? Nothing for me to do about it, eh?
There is nothing that can't be figuratively speaking there.
But there's almost nothing that can be literately speaking there. And speaking figuratively, pi=3 for certain values of pi.
(the meaning can be changed entirely, or even reversed given enough 'interpretation'.)
The bible is supposed to be understood but it doesn't mean that people understand it.
And great most of people believe they do, while they don't. Likely including you.
If there ever was a greater truth to the Bible (which I doubt), it's been long lost to the ages, in translations, in political plots changing its content, in including apocrypha or banning parts of Bible into them, and today the Bible simply can't be understood, because it's a mess. It's a corrupted media, damaged data and there's no checksum to see what is right and what is broken.
Some use the Bible as a tool, to do good or evil by guiding or controlling people, while distancing themselves from their interpretations. Some believe their own interpretations, and accept them without criticism, with possibly catastrophic consequences. Some fish out pieces of wisdom that are still left there. But the Bible is NOT anything more than a book and believing anything else is dangerous. It leads people to believe they found some truths while they didn't. It can be useful when used with a lot of criticism, but it must be taken with a grain of salt, always.
picked up a pice of paper from the table and a glass fell to the floor.
The science won't assume anything except these events coincided in time: there's an unsupported hypothesis they were related. Then you can apply known knowledge or research, why. Resistance of paper, yes. And force - and what's the origin of the force? You. So you knocked it to the floor. No Ockham Razor because all data is known, confirmed.
But "God causing something" is you pulling the paper and then blaming breaking the glass on me. The glass broke because of me, because I printed the paper. It was about a push-pull data transfer system project. But you read 'receiver pulls the message' and interpreted you're the receiver, and the paper is the message. And I broke the glass by printing the instruction and leaving it under the glass, right?
That's what interpreting the Bible and following the interpretations directly does. Ockham Razor says: Literal interpretation is true. And if for a fact you know literal interpretation is false, and there's no key to decipher it into literal interpretation unambiguously, the info can't be trusted.
Science says you broke the glass. My printout is not to be blamed.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2