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Creationist Bets $10k In Proposed Literal Interpretation of Genesis Debate
HungWeiLo writes "A California man who believes the literal interpretation of the Bible is real is offering $10,000 to anyone who can successfully debunk claims made in the book of Genesis in front of a judge. Joseph Mastropaolo, the man behind this challenge, is to put $10,000 of his own money into an escrow account. His debate opponent would be asked to do the same. They would then jointly agree on a judge based on a list of possible candidates. Mastropaolo said that any evidence presented in the trial must be 'scientific, objective, valid, reliable and calibrated.' For his part, Mastropaolo has a Ph.D. in kinesiology and writes for the Creation Hall of Fame website, which is helping to organize the minitrial. It's also not the first such trial he's tried to arrange. A previous effort, known as the 'Life Science Prize,' proposed a similar scenario. Mastropaolo includes a list of possible circuit court judges to oversee the trial and a list of those he challenged to take part on the evolutionary side of the debate."
Chapter 1 - Male and Female are created simultaneously.
Chapter 2 - Adam and Eve are created in that order.
One of the two accounts must be false - they are mutually exclusive factual statements.
Genesis is a collection of myths with no more truth to them then the parables.
What is this supposed to prove? Plenty of idiots have money in our society, money only has a tenuous correlation with intelligence.
Mostly random stuff.
someone should point him at Kitzmiller v. Dover.
There are three kinds of people in the world. Those that can count, and those that can't.
Yea the first day the earth was already there and light was created, of course it was a few days later when the sun was created so where did that light come from?
Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
For someone who's not too familiar with the Bible, what are the claims up for grabs in this challenge, aside from creating the earth in 7 days and 7 nights, Adam & Eve, and the talking serpent?
How can anything be disproved if one must first accept that Genesis is the inspired word of an omnipotent deity? And if that's not an accepted fact, then isn't the "disproof" the fact that it was written by man?
CMB. That's it. I love that three small letters (well, and and enter key I suppose) typed into google can debunk most of this.
But seriously, its actually quite hard to debunk that there were talking snakes/donkeys/gods etc. Its like trying to debunk an invisible pink unicorn is standing behind you.. (But how can it be invisible and pink at the same time?.. ahhh thats beyond scientific understanding!)
If nobody shows up for this nonsense and bets $ 10,000, it's proof that this religious believe system is true...
The universe came into being 6 seconds ago, in exactly the state we see now, with all of our memories intact.
Prove me wrong.
Hint - it can't be done. You can always reintroduce the possibility of some omnipotent force. By carefully framing the question, proving it wrong becomes impossible. Instead, you have to unask the question. Western philosophy spent then entire last century trying to unask the premises Descartes set forth for exactly that reason.
This isn't a scientific question, it isn't in a scientific arena, and any scientist thinking they can 'win' the debate/bet is on shaky ground. Not because the science is bad, but because it isn't about science at all...
-V-
Who can decide a priori? Nobody.
-Sartre
honestly it wouldnt be too difficult to debunk a ton of the stuff in the bible... as long as you are talking to a SANE judge, and not a bible thumping lunatic
Yea the first day the earth was already there and light was created, of course it was a few days later when the sun was created so where did that light come from?
An omnipotent being created the earth and the rest of the universe, and you're quibbling over how he could create light before the sun? If he can create matter from nothing, surely creating a few photons isn't beyond his powers.
Hector Avalos comes to mind: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BP5LdELd_0o
"How archaeology killed the Bible" from a former child evangelist.
Or James Randi, for that matter... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZxEJHO8KIXY
...do not give this guy more publicity.
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10,000$ could be much better off helping the poor. People starve to death with what $0.33 of food would nourish them. So 365days/year *.33food/day so approximately 100$ would keep someone from starving to death for a year. He could have saved 10 kid's lives for 10 years if he spent his money there. When talking of giving, Jesus doesn't want you to grandstand and boast about it though, and maybe that is all this guy wants to do.
The modern Christian's life involves working at a moral job, living frugally and giving one's excess to the poor. Jesus says we'll always have poor, but he didn't say they'll always be starving to death. Outside of horribly corrupt regimes, world hunger could be something that this generation could solve if enough of us helped out some.
God spoke to me
...I really shouldn't be doing this at nearly 1AM...
1.) I've always heard that there are solid grounds for debate. a "Long Day Creationist" (one who believes that the world/universe was created in 6 indeterminate periods of time) and a "Short Day Creationist" (one who believes that the world/universe was created in six periods of twenty four hours) both believe that the earth was created by God. It's not "fudging an interpretation" when there is room for questioning of God's methods, but the duration of time God used to perform the creation of the universe is an attempt to understand an implementation. It's not fudging to say that there were distinct stages, which the Bible does refer to as "days", and then have an internal debate as to exactly how it went down. It's loosely akin to saying "CentOS is the best server Linux distro!" only to have someone else say, "No, Debian is!" the two may have a disagreement as to which implementation of Linux is ideal, but they both agree that Windows Server 2012 isn't the tool for the job.
2.) Can someone PLEASE let me know where this whole "God testing us" crap came from? I'm sure someone somewhere said it, and I'm sure that someone somewhere believes it...but the rest of us are of the persuasion that much of the fossil record is in much of the state it's in due to the Genesis Flood; a worldwide flood causing the highest mountains to be covered (whether it be the highest known mountains at that time, or Everest) would involve enough water to cause some significant changes in the geographical layout and cover a whole lot of bones in a whole lot of sand over a very short period of time (with additional fossilization having happened before the Flood, and plenty after as well, as the natural course of such things tend to happen).
3.) Admittedly there's plenty of speculation on my part for this one, but Adam was listed as having lived 913 years, and Eve likely lived somewhere around there as well. I'm certain that they had plenty of other children besides Cain and Abel, they were simply the ones that made headlines. I'd wager the $5 I've got in my pocket that most people reading this would have to head over to Google/Wiki in order to get insight into the 13 ancestors of Louis XIV, but most of us learned about THAT guy in history class. The Bible wasn't exactly written like a complete family tree or Holy Phone Book.
4.) I'm certain they'll find someone to arbitrate if the offer money on top of that for their services.
Ohhh, makes sense now. My faith is renewed.
You're the one who could accept that the earth was created by god, except for the inconstancy that light was created before the sun was created.
You can't agree with one miraculous act and then claim that it's inconsistent with a second miraculous act when the first act was already so unbelievable that any being that could accomplish it is truly omnipotent.
The contractors that built my house put up temporary lighting before the wiring and permanent lamps in the house were installed, apparently god did the same thing - he created temporary lighting before installing the sun.
There's a church near where I work that has a sign in the window: "Come in and learn the latest scientific evidence for Biblical truth!"
I always smile when I see it, because they don't seem to realize they've already surrendered the epistemological war -- by admitting that weighing scientific evidence is the proper way to ascertain the truth (or falsity) of a claim.
Sure, they can fight a rear-guard action for a while by looking for scraps of evidence that appear to support Scripture (or whatever their take on Scripture is), but unless God starts making public appearances is an independently verifiable, repeatable manner, then the church has already laid the groundwork for their own logical impeachment.
The whole bedrock of religion is faith -- to believe that some things are true regardless of whether there is evidence for them or not. Once you've tacitly admitted that evidence is required, then faith is superfluous, and the church becomes just a group of extremely amateur scientists whose theories can't hold up under examination.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Unfortunately he's set the rules so that he can't lose. He's not saying he'll prove Genesis is true. He's saying you have to prove it isn't. It's virtually impossible to disprove things the previously didn't happen. "Prove the sun wasn't originally a giant marshmellow", etc. You can prove it *isn't*, but there's no manner of proving it *wasn't*. He's aware of the fact that science is all about discovering new knowledge, and the language is science is about proving things. Unlike the popular opinion amongst religous folk that "scientists think they know everything", the facts couldn't be further from the truth. It's them who think they know the answers to everything, where science is saying "we don't know, but we'll keep on discovering more."
It's because scientists aren't fraudsters like this guy, that the only response to such a marshmellow statement is "We can't prove the sun wasn't ever a giant marshmellow, but there's no evidence to suggest that is the case." However, to nuts like this guy, to them that's practically an admission that "you can't prove the sun wasn't a giant marshmellow, and this book I've got here says it was.. so it must have been!". Replace "giant marshmellow" with every claim in Genesis. It's exceedingly difficult to prove a prior negative. So difficult in fact, that he's $10k confident that nobody can disprove the non-events.
It'd be nice if someone put up a counter-offer of "$10 million to anyone who can PROVE a deity exists". While equally unprovable, as none exist, the issue we run into is the "judges". See, the people arguing "for" a deity would fall back on exactly the acknowledgement of science that we can't know everything, and don't. They'd say "how did the Universe come into creation?". "We don't know, we have nothing provable, but we have some good theories". "If you by your own admission you don't know, then you can't explain where all the wonder of the universe comes from.. we can.. blah blah blah". Judges: "Those theists make some good points, and the atheists don't have any solid ground to stand on." This is one of the fundamental flaws with the majority of the population - they want to have an answer for everything, to make sense of everything, and can't take "we don't know" as an answer. When presented with "We don't know.. yet" or "An all-loving zombie did it!!!", they'll go with the zombie.
"The true measure of a person is how they act when they know they won't get caught." - DSRilk
Incorrect. Adam and Eve had three sons mentioned by name (Cain, Abel, and Seth), and, additionally, "After Seth was born, Adam lived 800 years and had other sons and daughters." (Gen 5:4)
Abel is never identified as having a mate before being killed by Cain. Cain expressly has his own wife, though its not entirely clear where she came from, and following the chronology implied by the order of verses in Gen 4, by the time Seth is born, Cain has five generations of descendants. Though, arguably, the similar names in Gen 5 (which only traces Seth's line) suggest a slightly different chronology (or maybe just name-sharing), because some of the descendants of Cain that appear to precede Seth in Gen 4 appear to also be descendants of Seth in Gen 5, which might suggest that the discussion of Seth after the discussion of Cain's line in Gen 4 isn't chronological.
The devil's advocate in me wants to say...
One of the very first stable particles that would have formed after the big bang would have been a massive wash of photons. All those exotic particles and antiparticles smashing into each other would have created an incandescent soup, LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOONG before stars could even begin to form, so "light" existing before the sun is scientifically predicted.
Light would have existed long before baryonic matter in fact.
It does no good to debate these people; any evidence against their position is considered inadmissible.
You can point out that chapters 1 and 2 of Genesis tell different and incompatible creation stories: they'll claim that you must read them with the guidance of the holy spirit to truly understand them. Been there, done that.
Genesis says we're all descended from Adam in about 4kBC, and we're also all descended from Noah in about 3kBC (since the rest of mankind was destroyed in the world-wide Genesis flood.) You can bring in the roughly 10k years of Egyptian genealogies which make no mention of Adam, or Noah: they'll claim (without the slightest sense of irony) that the Egyptian genealogies are merely ancient writings of suspect provenance and uncertain accuracy. Been there, done that too.
You can bring in the entire science of geology, which gives zero evidence for and an entire scientific discipline worth of evidence against a world-wide Genesis-type flood: they'll bring in some mouth-breathing "geologist" who got a degree from one of the all-too-numerous fundamentalist "universities" to argue that the question isn't really settled yet, there's still scientific debate. Been there, done that, got the t-shirt.
You can point out that Genesis 1 is a poem. Instead of rhyme in sound, it rhymes in idea --- just like most other ancient poetry --- with day 1 corresponding to day 4, day 2 corresponding to day 5, 3 to 6, and then day 7 as a finale. You can point out that nobody takes Shakespeare's sonnets literally: "Ah," they say, "But this poem comes from God!" Yes, BTDT too.
Arguments from biology abound, of course: 5k years is insufficient time for one man's genes to diverge into the breadth of human genetic diversity seen today; you can't fit two of every species of insect in an ark, let alone the rest of the fauna; analysis of mitochrondrial DNA puts "Eve" at orders of magnitude before 4kBC; and then there's the whole fossil record of course. All the evidence in the world makes no difference: evidence does not change non-evidential belief.
And you're supposed to convince a JUDGE? That's the trap. Judges are pretty good at determining legal questions; they're about as good as a coin-flip when it comes to scientific questions. We bring in scientific evidence, this nincompoop argues legal blather, which will the judge best understand? If he was serious about the bet being fact-based, he'd offer to have the bet be settled by someone trained in determining the truth or falsity of factual claims. There are such people: they're called "scientists".
When I say "been there, done that", I mean just that. I was raised in a fundamentalist sect, and had most of my education in church schools. I spent 25 years being indoctrinated (it didn't stick, apparently) then 15 years trying to bring the church into the 20th century, and the last 5 years taking what is apparently the only productive approach. Here's the approach, for those who haven't figured it out yet: JUST LEAVE THE POOR IDIOTS ALONE.
I look at it, and the chances for each event are just too high to say that it's been a run of good luck for life on Earth in my opinion
I created amino acids out of basic molecules in a lab in college by mixing a few gases, water, and some electricity for a week. Extrapolate that over a few billion years over a few billion (or more) planets and the current result is just NOT a very low probability event. It's like saying they chances of winning the lottery are so low that when someone does God must have been behind it.
The traditional trick of these publicity stunts is to post a challenge, and claim there was no response otherwise and therefore it is true. The claim is made while plugging fingers in the ears and pretending there's no contradictions.
Look back to the Kent Hovind challenge, where he posted $250,000 to prove evolution. He gradually shifted the challenge from "provide any evidence of evolution" to "demonstrate beyond a reasonable doubt that God couldn't cause the big bang" - and each step at asking for clarification was given non-answers (if any).
Even if someone did manage to complete his challenge, Kent Hovind couldn't pay the amount - he's a NINJA - No Income, Job or Asset, by his own bankruptcy claim. Both a scientific and financial fraud.
This challenge is archived, with the current page saying you followed an imaginary link. "If you can't win, burn the evidence of losing."
This challenge may be "possible", but don't waste time on it. You have better luck compleing the James Randi challenge instead.
The man has a Ph.D. in kinesiology. According to the Chart of Woo, that's at the corner of Quackery Bol. and Pseudoscientific Bol.
If opportunity came disguised as temptation, one knock would be enough.
3^2 * 67^1 * 977^1
In order to orate, the teapot would have to make noise. If there were a patch of gas between the Earth and Mars big enough for that, we'd have detected it by now.
I'll take cash or gold.
fibs are often hard to string together...thats how you know they are fibs.
"Cain expressly has his own wife, though its not entirely clear where she came from,"
I am from the deep south and this is what my great aunt told me years ago, about Cain's wife. After Cain killed Abel, he was exiled to Ur. The only thing in Ur to mate with was monkeys. Black people came from Cain & a monkey. No lie. That's what my great aunt believed, which is not to say I believe it.
"Can someone PLEASE let me know where this whole "God testing us" crap came from?"
From a brain experiencing cognitive dissonance.
"the rest of us are of the persuasion that much of the fossil record is in much of the state it's in due to the Genesis Flood"
Are you of the persuasion that the fossil record is arranged in perfect worldwide strata due to an unlikely coincidence? That all those animals died at the same time, but just happened to stack up on top of each other in such a way as to coincidentally imply directional evolution? Seriously that might be the craziest thing I've ever heard a creationist say. No, wait, I take it back, that's actually not even close to the craziest thing I've heard a creationist say, but it is still totally crazy.
Had he expressed hatred or prejudice based on their religion, like the AC above did with Islam...
Fuck Christianity. The only thing it has going for it is that it's not quite as evil as Islam.
...that would be bigotry.
You know... picking A religion as being "more evil" based on current political situation, when every single flavor of Abrahamic religion has uncountable crimes to answer for, and those others aren't much different either.
Pointing out that all brands of Christianity are the same fairytale (only told a bit differently) is just telling the truth.
Just like pointing out that all religions are evil as they teach the people to build their view of reality based on a delusion - basically, inducing billions with cognitive dissonance bordering on insanity.
Meanwhile, staying politically correct and letting them carry on with their delusion without at least pointing out the most glaring flaws in it - that would be hypocrisy.
Also, infliction of harm through inaction.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Abel is never identified as having a mate before being killed by Cain. Cain expressly has his own wife, though its not entirely clear where she came from, and following the chronology implied by the order of verses in Gen 4, by the time Seth is born, Cain has five generations of descendants.
The second most likely explanation is that Cain's wife was from the "Other People", the Humans "created" on the 6th day of the Genesis 1 creation myth. This would have been before Yahweh decided to try the Eden experiment and make his own line of pet Humans at the end of the second creation myth.
Of course, the first most likely explanation is that it is all USDA Grade A bullshit that never happened, and was just an attempt by primitive people to explain the world around them.
This space unintentionally left blank.
See luke and leia were not the first to be tempted :P.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
The reason no one takes this idiot up, is because the odds are in the houses favor, and he knows it.
Never wrestle with a pig. You will end up covered in mud and the pig will enjoy it.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
If he claims creationism to be a science, then it's HIS job to disprove creationism. Not mine.
He's the one that should be looking for contradicting evidence.
Privacy is terrorism.
I'm wondering which version of which rewrite in which language Mr Mastropaolo believes is the "true" version of events.
-- Braden's law of data: All data spends some of its lifetime in an excel spreadsheet.
An applicant might methodically go through the copious evidence demonstrating the geological age of the earth is billions of years old. Or expound on the multiple plausible ways that abiogenisis (life) may have occured. Or how evolution is both a fact and theory supported by multiple strands of evidence. Or that there is no evidence supporting the biblical creation story. Or that there are many similar creation myths of which the Bible is just one.
And after this exhaustive presentation they still would not have proven biblical creation did not happen. They might have demonstrated beyond all doubt to a reasonable person that it was extremely implausible and unlikely, but they haven't proven it didn't happen. And if this "judge" is biased or following exact letter of the challenge, then the money will not be won.
Carl Sagan's "The Dragon In My Garage" essay demonstrates this point with a deliberately absurd example just to hilight the point. And contrast this challenge James Randi's $1 million challenge where applicants are not required to employ tortured logic - they perform a paranormal feat in a self evident way under agreed controlled conditions and they win.
I love tearing down these people just as much as the next book-readin' heathen but please, my fellow freethinking friends, do not think that for a second this has anything to do with an actual debate on the subject.
/. posting this it does nothing but drive pageviews and traffic and keep this and other kinds of similar stories in the spotlight.
It's meant to be a rallying cry for easily-led, mis/uneducated people and nothing more.
It's meant to show the Creation Museum as the stalwart fighter for the cause of Intelligent Design, which, I suppose it is.
By
We have more important things to be debating.
The enemy of my enemy is quite possibly also my enemy. I've made a lot of enemies.
Near where I live is a small 'creationist' museum (for want of a better word):
Genesis Expo
Surprisingly, it is a fasinating place (well worth a visit), with 100's of fossils and whatnot - which the place tries to debunk.
When I asked the guy behind the counter how these items, millions of years old, fit the bible story, he said; "God created those and made them look old for the benefit of man to wonder".
As Brian said in MP's 'life of Brian', "What fucking chance do I have!".
I just wanted to ask a question. What does God need with a title?
The Abrahamic religions are memes descended from older memes that had multiple gods. God had a title because there was a need to refer to all gods as a group. The language wasn't changed with the rewrite to monotheistic principles.
Contrary to the /. wisdom, the creationists have come up with scientifically based counter-arguments to a lot of the evidence that might tend to disprove Genesis. They don't rely exclusively on the "magic" explanation.
I think radiocarbon dating is fairly compelling evidence against the biblical narrative of creation occurring ~6k years ago, but they have an explanation for that too:
http://www.answersingenesis.org/articles/nab/does-c14-disprove-the-bible
The whole "prove something isn't true" thing...it doesn't work that way.
One common way to prove that an assertion is false is to prove that assuming it would lead to a contradiction.
We take it as a matter of faith that the unicorn is pink. And since you can't see him, you cannot prove me wrong.
This is why nobody wants to debate this fellow. People who argue from a faith-based viewpoint have different definitions of logical debate. A scientist trying to debate one of the faithful would be very much like showing up for a game of golf armed with a cricket bat. The two sets of rules are not compatible.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
Longevity prior to the Flood is easy to explain away: there hadn't been much time for imperfections to accumulate in the human genome. About sixteen and a half centuries in, there was a huge population bottleneck, allowing harmful recessive mutations to fix themselves in the genome.
The bible can't be literally true because it has been copied (manually by scribes) so many times and each copy introduced random mutations. If you add translation into the mix all bets are off. This is why we now have thousands of versions of the "same" texts and verses and different versions can have meaning that is quite different from other instances in the same language, let alone if you add multiple languages into the mix. So, which exact version/copy are we disproving? And why that version and not some other?
This is also a good argument that god is quite stupid and incompetent (and therefore not omniscient), first to leave it to chance which religion you get indoctrinated into (strongly correlated with where you were born), and second all you have is fallible text about him, so fallible that it is meaningless and open to contradictory interpretations.
But all this is quite consistent with idea that religion and gods are man made.
As the island of our knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance.
Starvation is primarily a problem of politics, not one of funding. Otherwise, Bill Gates could have solved world hunger - and I bet he would have loved to. Instead, he's finding himself wasting money on education - which is similarly hampered by politics.
That argument of the many different versions of the Bible therefore you can not trust it is not a good one. No other ancient document has anywhere as close to as many copies as the New Testament. With so many early copies spread all over ther Roman world errors in the writings can be tracted. Scholars believe the Greek text used for the modern translations is very close to the original text. There is quite the science and research involved in this. The majority of of those different versions have simply typos. Being a religious text means the scribes were extra careful in copying. And because of the discovery of the Dead Sea scrolls, it has been shown that even though there are not many old copies of the Old Testament in Hebrew, the Old Testament was accurately copied except for a few minor changes that crept in. So this "fallible text" is actually very likely close to the original text.
You're forgetting Passover. Crucifixion Wedn. afternoon, high holy special Sabbath for the Passover celebration (Wedn. sunset to Thursday sunset), normal day (Thursday sunset to Friday sunset) during which time the women prepared the items to take to the tomb, normal Sabbath (Friday sunset to Saturday sunset), resurrection after Saturday sunset, followed by their first day of the week and the discovery that He was risen.
Three days and three nights. Consistent.