Perhaps God's question was to teach Adam and Eve something about themselves
You forgot to mention that he offers to take the punishment himself. If God's intent is to give us free will, then he seems willing to accept that people will biff it. The whole point of Jesus proving he was the messiah, dying and rising again was to pay for sins. If that is an insult please go ahead and pay for them yourself. My failures are too much for me, so I will accept God's offer.
I guess one thing that i prefer about the creationist model is that it offers a fully consistent framework in which to describe the world around us. There is no need to move some part of the explanation out from the attention of the investigator, as there is with evolution, nor is there a need to avoid topics that present a challenge.
I think there are challenges to the standard understanding of the bible story presented by the standard understanding of the geologic record. Since I am not insane, I cannot hold two contradictory opinions at once, so something has to give. Since the Genesis text is rather straightforward, it seems to me more likely that the assumptions WRT the geologic record bear closer examination.
I do not think it is unscientific to wish to examine the assumptions used in interpreting data, the data itself, or the the methods used to obtain the data. Rather, it is a recognition that even large groups of educated people can fall victim to groupthink.
What a compliment God pays to us, however, to create us so that what we do matters. I must respectfully disagree with the idea the evolution can coexist with creation as ideas for origins. I don't think you really think that either, given the vehemence of your statements. I have investigated the attempts by 'God used evolution to do his creation' creationists to do such a mash-up, and they end up disposing of wide swaths of plain bible text to make the attempt,and most of time they do violence to the ideas in evolution as well.
The evidence from Genesis is that Eve knew about the penalty for sin before she sinned, and that Adam was right there alongside her for the whole episode. Eve quoted the rule, even going beyond it a little.
What I will say is that I am not content with the state of my knowledge about either the bible or evolution. I can look at evolution arguments and see where there is fallacy, but the state of the debate is such that pointing out such a fallacy is unwelcome at best and career-threatening at worst. The funding formulas are evolution=good creation=bad.
One of the things I noticed about talkorigins.org is that their falsifications were falsifications of the idea of randomicity, not falsifications of ID. It as if I said "I have proof that your car is not Chevy, therefore it is not a Ford." In other words, saying that common DNA sequences prove evolution is not random is fine, but it does not prove that there was not ID.
I still have the same problem with proving something from taxonomy: Taxonomy is a carefully chosen set of relationships. Where I put a critter in the tree causes my Taxonomy, so it represents an prior arrangement of selected data. I would be very poor evolutionist indeed if I could not make such cooked books look good.
There is no penalty specified in Leviticus 19:19, where it talks about cloth woven with different materials. I am not sure where you got a death penalty for that.
Just a bit of history: every foot of ground in the middle east was Christian or Pagan before Mohammad ~900 AD, so every town he converted with the sword was something else before he killed those that would not convert. The Christian response could be considered self defense and defense of those who could not defend themselves.
I just finished Gibbons "The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire" (downloaded from Gutenberg.org), which covers the rise of Islam.
I sure don't feel like a privileged majority. The Christian viewpoint is excluded from all textbooks by Madalyn Murray O'Hair and her legacy.
Even if ID or Creationism had some valid input, it would not be acceptable to atheists on the principal that anything that weakens evolution is unacceptable. I took the time to review the "29+ Evidences for Macroevolution" on Talk origins. Many of the 29+ evidences could support the design hypothesis just as easily as Macroevolution by replacing 'Common Ancestor' with 'Common Designer'. The one argument they make that might hold water is the 'vestige organ' argument: Why would God give us 99% of the cure for Scurvy?
The answer is that we live in a fallen, imperfect world.
God has seen fit to make our actions Matter. When we do good, it makes the world better. When we do evil, it makes the world worse. We see the downside of that all the time, because we inherit a world where human evil has generated a lot of problems.
Since we are talking about a situation in which we are limited in the detailed information available, we can either take the details to be irrelevant, because it is either a myth and does not matter, or it is scripture and it happened and so there is no need to discuss such details.
In either of these cases there is not need to discuss any of this. The challenge comes at the periphery, where the discussion is about the probability that such an event could occur. The evolutionist says the probability is near or at zero. Can that be supported?
The answer to that is based on the assumptions one brings to the story. Those assumptions can be used to 'prove' that it is impossible. A different set of assumptions might 'prove' it is possible. I think it is valid to question assumptions, even if they are trumpeted by PhDs.
I notice that you did not answer my question about what you would do. Why is that? Is the question invalid?
I have been to talkorigins. I did a quick re-read for you, and the fallacy they promote is that short time frame observations will generate a meaningful observation of the entropy state of a system. The system must be observed in the presence of statistically significant opportunities for change to occur or the observation is meaningless. They are like someone investigating the theory that a copier will introduce change if a copy is copied, and they go make one copy, then extrapolate the fact that they can read all 2,000 words on the document to mean that they could make 2,000 generations of copies and read the 54th word on all of them.
It is the usual sort of argument, couched in the usual terms "I get tired of explaining this, but, ONE MORE TIME:" Since they haven't listened in the first place, the explanation misses the point of what the creationist was saying, or is deliberately misleading.
My sources for information theory are Shannon, Penrose and Hofstadter.
I am uncertain as their status on the creation/evolution question.
Information theory is quite independent of the creation/evolution debate, and has well accepted definitions for every other use, but when those are applied to evolution, using the exact same definitions, evolutionists cry foul, because they clearly contradict evolution assumptions.
The fallacy propounded in the probability article is that order is the same thing as information. They bury the fallacy in a great irrelevant discussion of thermodynamic entropy, which is irrelevant to entropy applied to information. Information theory uses the term entropy because of the similarity between the dissipation of heat and the dissipation of information in the presence of noise.
Further, I notice that talkorigins does not reference any of the standard works in information theory, at least not that I could find.
the talkorigins website also makes statements like:
"The creationist position would necessarily discard the entire mathematical framework of thermodynamics and would provide no basis for the engineering design of turbines, refrigeration units, industrial pumps, etc. It would do away with the well-developed mathematical relationships of physical chemistry, including the effect of temperature and pressure on equilibrium constants and phase changes." -- F. Stieger http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/thermo/probability.html Downloaded 11-Feb-2011
No creationist takes such a position that I have ever read, and the statement is made without reference.
Maybe I should do the same thing, and explain how talkorigins authors kick cute little kittens. I could bury it in a huge and irrelevant discussion of racoons
Very interesting observation. So Life originated by some unknown means, and evolution just handled differentiation into species. Very conveniently, the hardest problem (Creating life and stocking it up with all the information needed for differentiation) is handled by some other means. Please share how this hardest of problems was solved.
Feel free to drop out at any time if I am not amusing you.
Maybe he fed the lions Tofu. That's why they are so mean today.
One mans unwarranted rationalization is another mans well considered argument.
On the engineering of the ark: It looks to me like the design calls for a window that runs the length of the ark walls, covered with an overhang of 18 inches, but your idea might work too.
Genesis 7:5 depicts Noah as having completed the ark,yet Genesis 8:6 talks about the window Noah made, I could be that this was a new window suited to launching birds, rather than the window for ventilation mentioned earlier. The ventilation window may have been optimized for ventilation (and to keep the odd wave out), and the birds could not easily fly back in.
God gives the reason for the flood: mankind was wholly given over to violence. What would you do?
Orthodoxy is about a refusal to consider new or divergent ideas, and it can apply to science as well as in any other field of human endeavor. Evolutions has the status of a belief that is not to be questioned if one wishes to be accepted by the group.
Thanks for the link. Just to play devils advocate here, I could take my cars and park them in order of size and then claim that this represents an evolution of cars. My point is that the hundred or so fossil examples (I did not do an exact count listed at talkorigins.org) can just as easily be examples of extinct distinct species as transitional forms. We have seen many more species come to extinction in recorded history than there the fossil listed by talkorigins.
Talkorigins also misstates and dismisses the 'hydrologic' argument without answering the basic idea. The hydrologic argument I am familiar with is that the early fossil record is sorted by the creatures' probable swimming capability. It is not water sorting, but the ability of the animal to escape burial. No creationist I have read holds the idea the way talkorigins states it, but I have not read them all.
By the way, this type of intellectual dishonesty is no surprise to me. Why should an evolutionist deal truthfully with an idea? after all, there is no god to judge the evolutionist, so why not lie? A Christian, on the other hand believes in a God who will judge each action, so we have a good reason to deal as honestly as possible with the evolutionist.
The point of this is that the status of these fossils is dependent on how one interprets the fossils. A creationist might point out Genesis 6:12 and say that the fossil record would disprove the bible record if there were not some degenerated forms present.
I will handle this in reverse order - Elephants are unclean, so just two.
There is no proof that the mesopotamian stories predate the bible, just conjecture based on some questionable assumptions. There is also no reason why those stories may not be derived from the stories in Genesis. Cultural contamination can go both ways.
It was raining, so they may have used rainwater for sustenance
I did not say science was a religion, I said evolution was a religion thinly disguised as science. Science is a tool, or a philosophy.
Christians are killed every day for their faith in Iraq, Iran, in India and throughout Africa. More Christians were martyred during the 20th century than the previous 19 centuries combined.
You seem to have forgotten (or never heard about) the slaughter of Christians that accompanied the Islamic conquest of the middle east in the 9th and 10th centuries, the actual first crusade. Whole countries (Dalmatia) were obliterated for the crime of being Christian.
The old testament did not cause the Koran, Mohammad did. Most Moslems would be incensed at that idea.
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So it would not be possible for Noah to take young animals?, I would say that you are vastly overestimating the weight of the animals to add to the story.
(From another post today I wrote today).
An elephant weans as early as 6 months, at a weight of about 200-300 kg. Since there is nothing for the animals to do, they probably spend the year sleeping, like my cat. Since the bible is clear that only land animals were involved with the ark, it is pointless to talk about fish. The fact that we have freshwater fish would seem to indicate that the water was fresh enough to support such species. I am not sure about the amphibians, many of them are enough at home in water to suggest they would not need the ark.
Noah may also have been bright enough to stock high-value grains instead of hay. That reduces the cubes quite a bit compared to hay, and remember the goal is survival, so the animals might well be kept close the minimum calorie count needed for survival without activity. Uncomfortable, but survivable. If such a level is taken to be ~10 Calories/Kilo/day (what it is for humans - who are notoriously inefficient) that means the total calorie count for your estimate of an average of 50kg(high estimate) x 10,000 animals (high also) results in a total calorie requirement of 5 million calories a day x 420 days yielding ~2.1 billion calories total Divided by 3700 calories/kg (a value I found for breakfast cereal) yields under 600,000 kgs of food. Cracked wheat is 673 Kg/Cubic meter., so you are talking about roughly 1,000 cubic meters. The ark was about 42,000 cubic meters.
Please note that this does not credit any ride time (the practice of fattening an animal before a time when they will not be able to eat.) Which could probably cut the food needed by ~8% without any risk to the animals. Barnum and Bailey uses a train with 20 freight cars to ship their circus show, which has many of the larger mammals.
The ark would cube out over 600 freight cars, so It looks to me like there would be enough volume to contain all the animals that are needed.
you claim there would be problems with ventilation, yet the ark design clearly spells out ventilation. It might be that your desire for this story to be implausible causes you to overlook some of the text, which would be unnecessary unless one actually were building an ark. These kind of engineering detail typically are only included in 'been there, done that' stories. A myth would not need to talk about the paint job on the ark nor the windows, yet the bible mentions that it was sealed in and out. The logical explanation is that the writer was an experienced boat builder.
(Back to fresh writing)
I have not been claiming that the bible contains science, but that it can inform science. Further, I am questioning those that present a conclusion without data, and I do not really care whether the conclusion is
So it would not be possible for Noah to take young animals?, I would say that you are vastly overestimating the weight of the animals to add to the story.
An elephant weans as early as 6 months, at a weight of about 200-300 kg. Since there is nothing for the animals to do, they probably spend the year sleeping, like my cat. Since the bible is clear that only land animals were involved with the ark, it is pointless to talk about fish. The fact that we have freshwater fish would seem to indicate that the water was fresh enough to support such species. I am not sure about the amphibians, many of them are enough at home in water to suggest they would not need the ark.
Noah may also have been bright enough to stock high-value grains instead of hay. That reduces the cubes quite a bit compared to hay, and remember the goal is survival, so the animals might well be kept close the minimum calorie count needed for survival without activity. Uncomfortable, but survivable. If such a level is taken to be ~10 Calories/Kilo/day (what it is for humans - who are notoriously inefficient) that means the total calorie count for your estimate of an average of 50kg(high estimate) x 10,000 animals (high also) results in a total calorie requirement of 5 million calories a day x 420 days yielding ~2.1 billion calories total Divided by 3700 calories/kg (a value I found for breakfast cereal) yields under 600,000 kgs of food. Cracked wheat is 673 Kg/Cubic meter., so you are talking about roughly 1,000 cubic meters. The ark was about 42,000 cubic meters.
Please note that this does not credit any ride time (the practice of fattening an animal before a time when they will not be able to eat.) Which could probably cut the food needed by ~8% without any risk to the animals. Barnum and Bailey uses a train with 20 freight cars to ship their circus show, which has many of the larger mammals.
The ark would cube out over 600 freight cars, so It looks to me like there would be enough volume to contain all the animals that are needed.
you claim there would be problems with ventilation, yet the ark design clearly spells out ventilation. It might be that your desire for this story to be implausible causes you to overlook some of the text, which would be unnecessary unless one actually were building an ark. These kind of engineering detail typically are only included in 'been there, done that' stories. A myth would not need to talk about the paint job on the ark nor the windows, yet the bible mentions that it was sealed in and out. The logical explanation is that the writer was an experienced boat builder.
The cost claim of far less than 53 billion is based on the success of $3.5 million in prize money at:
http://www.darpa.mil/grandchallenge
Looking at what a 2 million dollar purse will do for a contest it looks to me like the time may be right to automate the driving task.
There is also Google, which I believe a bit less than the grand challenge, but they are putting some of their financial muscle behind software to drive cars.
The Kinect vision processing takes one of the harder part of the task (stereoscopic ranging) and puts it in an inexpensive peripheral.
There are also numerous automation projects that have completed similar level of complexity tasks, such as aircraft pilotage. No designers wildest dream included a budget of 53 Billion, most such tasks were completed for under 10 billion, even after the inevitable cost overruns from DOD fiddling during development. The Apollo program put a man on the moon for 138B (adjusted for inflation) dollars.
the value of the existing code base that could be applied is quite large. All such estimates are phoney, of course, but the value of having a stable real-time capable operating system is quite high.
BTW I love the Cap'n Hammer reference it makes me smile every time.
In other responses in this same topic area I have given several examples of predictions utilizing Genesis or some other portion of the bible. Why do you assume that I am a layman? Because I disagree with an established orthodoxy?
I've seen no such posts by you. Please feel free to point me to some.
C- Sorry to be noobish, but I blew away my first answer trying to get out to where a reference might be. I know it is really lame-"Somewhere out there in the ~400 posts under the main subject..."
The initial conditions of an on-going process are often crucial in determining the course of error, (If one is investigating an undesirable phenomenon) or the reason for success, (if one is attempting to replicate a particular success.)
The bible does not present a 'flat earth'. Those that argued for a flat earth against Galileo in 1633 did so not from the bible, but from the authority of a man (the pope) to decide what the bible says, not from the text (Isaiah 40:22, with controversy).
Ah... the POPE's interpretations of the Bible were wrong. What makes YOUR interpretations more special and more accurate than one of the Pope's who is supposedly god's representative on Earth? See the fallacy with your excuse? If you invalidate his, god's representative's interpretation, then yours must be even less valid.
C- I will freely admit that I might be wrong. I am pointing out the disconnect between the flat earth argument and the bible. Just because one person is wrong does not invalidate all persons. I am not the one claiming infallibility.
Those same folks, in 1572, committed a genocide against people for the 'crime' of reading the bible. It sounds like you would not be terribly upset if a vocal genocide were committed against folks (like myself) who hold the bible as true.
Don't be a bigoted idiot - I *know*, our argument aside, that you've got better in you. I would NEVER wish harm on you or anyone else. Heck, stranger that you are, I'd probably, without a thought, step in to protect you from unwarranted harm (and I have done so in the past for other strangers, because I *cannot stand* seeing someone needlessly hurt. It feels like it's a part of me that's getting lost right alongside them). I don't have to believe what you do to hold life precious - FAR more so than those who have professed Christianity & Judaism and caused UNENDING wars and holy crusades in the name of their god.
C- It is possible that not everyone that called himself a christian actually read and believed the bible. I know of no current war on behalf of the bible, although there is plenty of violence against Christians around the world. The bible calls us to very high standard, we do not expect the same of the world.
Far more than some of the vocal nutjobs who, to this day, call for the death of many people for all sorts of bigoted reasons (which, I do NOT include you in - I *REFUSE* to group every Christian in the category of nutcases who "claim" to represent the religion, and I am SURE, however firm in your beliefs you are, that you do NOT fit into that category - just wanted to clear that up now, before you misinterpret that). So, I *refuse* to group you in with any such category, and I hope you will not consider to do so with me again. I do not agree with your beliefs, but I respect them and will fight for your right to have them. Heck, to clarify something else, it's not your beliefs that I think are idiotic (in case you got that opinion from my past posts), it's people who think that religion-as-science should be taught, or that it's anything other than an attempt to indoctrinate people into a religion... or the fact that doing so is ILLEGAL and AGAINST other's religious beliefs, which I am equally adamant about being respected. See why I call it idiotic? It's discrimination, it's against the LAW, and it's aga
The 40k deaths a year on the highway system are a good reason to automate the operation of motor vehicles, an option that would cost far less than 53 billion, and pay for it self rapidly in avoided costs, of course it would make the socialist dream of complete control of travel much more difficult, since even a mid-size car realizes better energy efficiency than buses, because it does not ever run empty, and is handily where it is needed when it is needed. If our time is worth anything at all the car makes very good sense.
Thanks for the map reference. I confirms that I will still have to drive or fly to get anywhere, even at the end of the plan. So I will end up subsidizing a lot of other folks, because I live out west, where the population density does not even rate a dot.
Most of the estimates for Mars are well above the cost of a toy train for barry. What we don't need is for the Gov't to get involved in another boondoggle that will end up requiring billions of dollars of subsidies year in and year out, like Amtrak. Here in New Mexico we installed a passenger train that requires a $7 dollar ticket to be subsidized to the tune of $50 dollars. What a deal.
If I recall correctly, the law is to prevent legal action against someone who dissents from an orthodoxy. The fact that this applies to AGW and Evolution are indicative of these being an orthodoxy. This law has come out of attempts to use the legal system to prevent scientific discussion if that discussion includes questions of origins that do not include slavish adherence to evolution. We have come so far from a christian nation that even the mention of creation is a reason to punish.
There are good sound reasons to dissent from evolution, but these cannot be discussed in a rational manner without the questioner being refered to as an 'idiot' by the orthodox.
When I examine the assumptions behind an inference I am not being unscientific, I am being curious as to why things are the way they are.
One other observation is in order: No experiment can prove that we arrived here by either creation or evolution. Philosophically speaking, the question cannot be answered by experimentation, because whichever it was, it happened and is unlikely to happen again, given the extreme complexity of life on the one hand and the nature of the creator on the other.
With that gloomy statement made does that stultify science? By no means. It just means we need to be cautious when we extrapolate from data sets.
I must confess that I am not an evolutionist, so I would be reluctant to propose experiments based on evolution. I do love the idea that there is a design behind the universe, (You may have noticed this.) and that we are invited to find that design. What could we discover by examining the way proteins fold? could we cure baldness, maybe? How cool would that be!
The God of the bible invites us to examine the world, to reason and learn about ourselves and him. He also promises some things that help our science enormously: God is the same yesterday, today and forever (Hebrews 13:8) so we can expect that the universe itself to exhibit the same characteristic of consistency.
Let me first apologize for making an assumption. I assumed that someone with an interest in evolution would also have done some investigation into past reasoning on the subject. I realize that this is an oversight on my part.
There is a decent (incomplete) explanation of entropy in information theory at:
Evolution predicts that a given line of organism will get better over time, given random inputs. Organisms are quite complex, but the same rule should hold for simpler systems, and allow a demonstration in a shorter time-frame then the evolutionary time-line, hence the example of cars. The use of a junk yard is a way of compressing the time required for the experiment, because we can examine many samples quickly. The point of the thought experiment is to demonstrate that instances of a design do not get better in the presence of random inputs. ID predicts that the quality of information decreases over time as random changes are made in copies of the information. Evolution predicts the opposite.
Why choose this thought experiment? because it demonstrates a crucial difference between Evolution as an origin model and Intelligent Design. I suspect the actual problem with a creation origin is that a Creator God has the authority to make a moral claim on his creation, on us. Evolution, on the other hand, presents successful procreation as the only virtue, perfect for the 'Me' generation.
In other responses in this same topic area I have given several examples of predictions utilizing Genesis or some other portion of the bible. Why do you assume that I am a layman? Because I disagree with an established orthodoxy?
The initial conditions of an on-going process are often crucial in determining the course of error, (If one is investigating an undesirable phenomenon) or the reason for success, (if one is attempting to replicate a particular success.)
The bible does not present a 'flat earth'. Those that argued for a flat earth against Galileo in 1633 did so not from the bible, but from the authority of a man (the pope) to decide what the bible says, not from the text (Isaiah 40:22, with controversy). Those same folks, in 1572, committed a genocide against people for the 'crime' of reading the bible. It sounds like you would not be terribly upset if a vocal genocide were committed against folks (like myself) who hold the bible as true.
On the subject of a 6K year old earth, remember that the bible presents a world that has been subjected to some very severe upsets, Genesis 6 and 7 (Noah's flood) being an obvious example. It is not inconsistent with the world of geology that we see, in fact it predicts precisely the world we see: Sediment every where, except where mid-flood and post-flood Orogeny has pushed mountains through. Both ideas are contained in the account of flood.
you will argue that one does not need a bible to find mud, and that is true, but how does one explain the fact that some mountains are still getting higher (the Himalayan plateau) at a rate that could not have been sustained for millions of years, but is consistent with a process that started recently? How recent is open to interpretation, but a rather simple energy/mass logistic balance equation (Similar energy over time, but an increasing mass to rise, working against gravity) can be constructed that reasonably starts 4k years ago. Does that mean it is right? absolutely not. It does, however suggest some total potential energy values for the Indo/Asian geologic system that might well predict the frequency of earthquakes. The 'reasonableness' of the values could also be checked against earthquake frequency in Asia.
Would you reject the possibility of determining such an energy value just because the idea starts in Genesis 7:11? Now who is being unscientific? I personally think such a value would be fascinating to find. (Not much use to me personally, but way cool none the less.)
There are some other predictions that might well prove out: There are the remains of an entire Bronze-age Egyptian army at the bottom of the Red Sea. Scuba Archeology, anyone? (Exodus 14:28) Wind can pile up water (Exodus 14:21) (A standing wave excited by wind energy?)
I find some of the most fascinating things in the bible are the ones I do not understand. - Could further thought reveal a truth about the universe that has not yet been discovered? I am quite sure that a flaccid approach to the bible will yield as little result as a flaccid approach to science. I prefer to raise my eyes from the mudstone of orthodoxy and examine a horizon of possibilities not yet found.
You claim my argument is debunked without reference. I know of no such debunking, and I have examined the literature for an honest argument to debunk it. All local increases in entropy are accompanied by a global decrease, so the 2nd law holds true.
It is a good point that creationism violates all laws, but the point of it is that the root cause of the universe is different from the universe itself. So what? a steel foundry is different from a car dealership. Different rules apply in a steel foundry WRT steel than the same steel at a car dealer. Does that invalidate the steel foundry? No.
I should warn you that when I am presented with an interpretation of data, I ask three questions:
1: Show me the original, unprocessed data. I prefer to check statistics, since there are often problems with statistics that go unnoticed in an uncritical environment.
2: Show me the assumptions used in any calculations or relational correlations.
3: What confounding variable have not been accounted?
I do not think any of these requests are unreasonable. The problem most evolutionists have with these steps is that examination reduces the 'science' to 'because I say so, and I have a PhD' I am happy for their achievement, but that does not mean I have to accept their say so. Give me facts, I find that they tend to support the veracity of scripture and the hollowness of evolution.
Pseudo-scientific garbage would be someone not willing to debate an issue with a theory.
I would propose a measure of information that can be readily measured, such as the number of deviations a car exhibits from the original design. (To stay with the J-yard example.) This is easily measured and gives repeatable results. The control is the original design, with a value of zero deviations. Of course, we would prefer to limit confounding variables (mechanics, in this case.) who would reinsert design back in to the data set. We would probably also prefer to limit changes to the design we are comparing. (Newer models are right out.)
There are some very interesting results that cannot be obtained without knowing something of the original state of things.
I remember the debate that preceded the Voyager Magnetometer experiment. There was exactly one person who correctly predicted all measurements. His basis for estimation was derived from Genesis 1 and 2 Peter 3:5.
Could he publish the basis for his estimation? of course not! your compatriots in the evolution-only orthodoxy would never hear of such a thing! In order to publish his predictions and the agreement of the experiment with theory he had to hide the origin of the idea.
Your religion of evolution does not make scientific predictions. It cannot, because at the core it calls for a random process. It can, however make philosophical predictions: since the universe is random, no outcome is any different from any other, since a good role of the dice on Tuesday can be wiped out by a bad one on Friday.
You have decided the bible is myth. You might also decide that I am a petunia, but that would not make it so. The bible may be true. Why are you so opposed to the idea of subjecting evolution to the light of an opposing view? is it because there are weaknesses in evolution that come to light when examined closely?
I happen to prefer the second law of thermodynamics. Every know process exhibits compliance to the laws of thermodynamics. Evolution theory violates the second law of thermodynamics by proposing an uncaused decrease in entropy. This is religious faith, not science.
I said the Bible is book of history, at least the part of Genesis you are concerned with, which is the creation account. I would say that your understanding of the bible has been disproved, but that is no great feat. Why should the creation of the universe be simple and easy to understand? It seems to me that it might well be a complex process that we do not understand, filled with things that appear to a superficial analysis to be contradictory. Is it possible that there are clues provided about the universe that we do not yet have the science for? Might the problem be with us, and not a God imaginative enough to create all we see?
Your analysis of my argument missed my point, which is that a theory should make predictions about that world that can be tested. ID makes predictions, so does evolution. ID predicts that there is a design behind the universe, and that it is discoverable. Evolution predicts that the universe is ultimately random.
My point about archeology is that there are provable points in the bible that have been found to be correct. That does not mean that I (Or anyone) understand all that is there. I say investigate the text to see if there are clues to what appear to be contradictions.
There are better forums to discuss bible proofs, I would suggest that those might be a better place to find out about contradictions, if you wish.
Science requires full examination of a theory, not blind agreement just because it is in a 'Science Journal' full examination requires full disclosure of assumptions, caveats, problem with the data sets and the willingness to discuss alternative theory.
ID does make predictions about the world, the fundamental one being that there is design in life. There is order that can be discovered. ID also predicts that people are valuable as individuals, because we were designed as individuals, and there is a deeper purpose to our design than mere existence. Evolution reduces the value of the individual to zero, since there is nothing he could do that a sibling could not do as well. Even carrying a positive mutation is not enough, since that mutation could arise again making the individual's contribution moot.
With respect to the current generation of evolutionary theorists, there is no better statement of the theory than Darwins. (I reviewed it about a month ago, for a project I was working on.) The problem has gotten no easier over the centuries, indeed, now that we understand the complexity of life it is considerably harder that Darwin thought. There is no current idea in evolution that any better than Gould's punctuate equilibrium, But this is just ID by stages, not uniform process.
The problem I see here has nothing to do with science, and everything to do with the nature of God. One could postulate a god outside the christian system that was a 'joker in the deck', but the christian system proposes a god who is the same yesterday, today and forever. That idea, philosophically speaking, is what makes science possible: Behind all that we see is a constant, unchanging design. We make this assumption anytime we measure anything, that our ruler is the same length (Plus or minus some margin) for the fifth trial as it was for the first.
My complaint with AGW is that there is a leap to conclusion without a supporting data set. Controlling CO2 may or may not save the planet, but the data set being used to enrich Al Gore is much too thin for my taste. We only have about a dozen or so truly global temperature measurements, and they do not support the warming hypothesis. That paucity of data, and the chicanery associated with some of the funding leaves me suspicious of the idea.
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Perhaps God's question was to teach Adam and Eve something about themselves
You forgot to mention that he offers to take the punishment himself. If God's intent is to give us free will, then he seems willing to accept that people will biff it. The whole point of Jesus proving he was the messiah, dying and rising again was to pay for sins. If that is an insult please go ahead and pay for them yourself. My failures are too much for me, so I will accept God's offer.
I guess one thing that i prefer about the creationist model is that it offers a fully consistent framework in which to describe the world around us. There is no need to move some part of the explanation out from the attention of the investigator, as there is with evolution, nor is there a need to avoid topics that present a challenge.
I think there are challenges to the standard understanding of the bible story presented by the standard understanding of the geologic record. Since I am not insane, I cannot hold two contradictory opinions at once, so something has to give. Since the Genesis text is rather straightforward, it seems to me more likely that the assumptions WRT the geologic record bear closer examination.
I do not think it is unscientific to wish to examine the assumptions used in interpreting data, the data itself, or the the methods used to obtain the data. Rather, it is a recognition that even large groups of educated people can fall victim to groupthink.
What a compliment God pays to us, however, to create us so that what we do matters. I must respectfully disagree with the idea the evolution can coexist with creation as ideas for origins. I don't think you really think that either, given the vehemence of your statements. I have investigated the attempts by 'God used evolution to do his creation' creationists to do such a mash-up, and they end up disposing of wide swaths of plain bible text to make the attempt,and most of time they do violence to the ideas in evolution as well.
The evidence from Genesis is that Eve knew about the penalty for sin before she sinned, and that Adam was right there alongside her for the whole episode. Eve quoted the rule, even going beyond it a little.
What I will say is that I am not content with the state of my knowledge about either the bible or evolution. I can look at evolution arguments and see where there is fallacy, but the state of the debate is such that pointing out such a fallacy is unwelcome at best and career-threatening at worst. The funding formulas are evolution=good creation=bad.
One of the things I noticed about talkorigins.org is that their falsifications were falsifications of the idea of randomicity, not falsifications of ID. It as if I said "I have proof that your car is not Chevy, therefore it is not a Ford." In other words, saying that common DNA sequences prove evolution is not random is fine, but it does not prove that there was not ID.
I still have the same problem with proving something from taxonomy: Taxonomy is a carefully chosen set of relationships. Where I put a critter in the tree causes my Taxonomy, so it represents an prior arrangement of selected data. I would be very poor evolutionist indeed if I could not make such cooked books look good.
There is no penalty specified in Leviticus 19:19, where it talks about cloth woven with different materials. I am not sure where you got a death penalty for that.
Just a bit of history: every foot of ground in the middle east was Christian or Pagan before Mohammad ~900 AD, so every town he converted with the sword was something else before he killed those that would not convert. The Christian response could be considered self defense and defense of those who could not defend themselves.
I just finished Gibbons "The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire" (downloaded from Gutenberg.org), which covers the rise of Islam.
I sure don't feel like a privileged majority. The Christian viewpoint is excluded from all textbooks by Madalyn Murray O'Hair and her legacy.
Even if ID or Creationism had some valid input, it would not be acceptable to atheists on the principal that anything that weakens evolution is unacceptable. I took the time to review the "29+ Evidences for Macroevolution" on Talk origins. Many of the 29+ evidences could support the design hypothesis just as easily as Macroevolution by replacing 'Common Ancestor' with 'Common Designer'. The one argument they make that might hold water is the 'vestige organ' argument: Why would God give us 99% of the cure for Scurvy?
The answer is that we live in a fallen, imperfect world.
God has seen fit to make our actions Matter. When we do good, it makes the world better. When we do evil, it makes the world worse. We see the downside of that all the time, because we inherit a world where human evil has generated a lot of problems.
Since we are talking about a situation in which we are limited in the detailed information available, we can either take the details to be irrelevant, because it is either a myth and does not matter, or it is scripture and it happened and so there is no need to discuss such details.
In either of these cases there is not need to discuss any of this. The challenge comes at the periphery, where the discussion is about the probability that such an event could occur. The evolutionist says the probability is near or at zero. Can that be supported?
The answer to that is based on the assumptions one brings to the story. Those assumptions can be used to 'prove' that it is impossible. A different set of assumptions might 'prove' it is possible. I think it is valid to question assumptions, even if they are trumpeted by PhDs.
I notice that you did not answer my question about what you would do. Why is that? Is the question invalid?
I have been to talkorigins. I did a quick re-read for you, and the fallacy they promote is that short time frame observations will generate a meaningful observation of the entropy state of a system. The system must be observed in the presence of statistically significant opportunities for change to occur or the observation is meaningless. They are like someone investigating the theory that a copier will introduce change if a copy is copied, and they go make one copy, then extrapolate the fact that they can read all 2,000 words on the document to mean that they could make 2,000 generations of copies and read the 54th word on all of them.
It is the usual sort of argument, couched in the usual terms "I get tired of explaining this, but, ONE MORE TIME:" Since they haven't listened in the first place, the explanation misses the point of what the creationist was saying, or is deliberately misleading.
My sources for information theory are Shannon, Penrose and Hofstadter.
I am uncertain as their status on the creation/evolution question.
Information theory is quite independent of the creation/evolution debate, and has well accepted definitions for every other use, but when those are applied to evolution, using the exact same definitions, evolutionists cry foul, because they clearly contradict evolution assumptions.
The fallacy propounded in the probability article is that order is the same thing as information. They bury the fallacy in a great irrelevant discussion of thermodynamic entropy, which is irrelevant to entropy applied to information. Information theory uses the term entropy because of the similarity between the dissipation of heat and the dissipation of information in the presence of noise.
Further, I notice that talkorigins does not reference any of the standard works in information theory, at least not that I could find.
the talkorigins website also makes statements like:
"The creationist position would necessarily discard the entire mathematical framework of thermodynamics and would provide no basis for the engineering design of turbines, refrigeration units, industrial pumps, etc. It would do away with the well-developed mathematical relationships of physical chemistry, including the effect of temperature and pressure on equilibrium constants and phase changes." -- F. Stieger http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/thermo/probability.html Downloaded 11-Feb-2011
No creationist takes such a position that I have ever read, and the statement is made without reference.
Maybe I should do the same thing, and explain how talkorigins authors kick cute little kittens. I could bury it in a huge and irrelevant discussion of racoons
Very interesting observation. So Life originated by some unknown means, and evolution just handled differentiation into species. Very conveniently, the hardest problem (Creating life and stocking it up with all the information needed for differentiation) is handled by some other means. Please share how this hardest of problems was solved.
Feel free to drop out at any time if I am not amusing you.
Maybe he fed the lions Tofu. That's why they are so mean today.
One mans unwarranted rationalization is another mans well considered argument.
On the engineering of the ark: It looks to me like the design calls for a window that runs the length of the ark walls, covered with an overhang of 18 inches, but your idea might work too.
Genesis 7:5 depicts Noah as having completed the ark,yet Genesis 8:6 talks about the window Noah made, I could be that this was a new window suited to launching birds, rather than the window for ventilation mentioned earlier. The ventilation window may have been optimized for ventilation (and to keep the odd wave out), and the birds could not easily fly back in.
God gives the reason for the flood: mankind was wholly given over to violence. What would you do?
Orthodoxy is about a refusal to consider new or divergent ideas, and it can apply to science as well as in any other field of human endeavor. Evolutions has the status of a belief that is not to be questioned if one wishes to be accepted by the group.
You are more righteous than God.
Fascinating.
Thanks for the link. Just to play devils advocate here, I could take my cars and park them in order of size and then claim that this represents an evolution of cars. My point is that the hundred or so fossil examples (I did not do an exact count listed at talkorigins.org) can just as easily be examples of extinct distinct species as transitional forms. We have seen many more species come to extinction in recorded history than there the fossil listed by talkorigins.
Talkorigins also misstates and dismisses the 'hydrologic' argument without answering the basic idea. The hydrologic argument I am familiar with is that the early fossil record is sorted by the creatures' probable swimming capability. It is not water sorting, but the ability of the animal to escape burial. No creationist I have read holds the idea the way talkorigins states it, but I have not read them all.
By the way, this type of intellectual dishonesty is no surprise to me. Why should an evolutionist deal truthfully with an idea? after all, there is no god to judge the evolutionist, so why not lie? A Christian, on the other hand believes in a God who will judge each action, so we have a good reason to deal as honestly as possible with the evolutionist.
The point of this is that the status of these fossils is dependent on how one interprets the fossils. A creationist might point out Genesis 6:12 and say that the fossil record would disprove the bible record if there were not some degenerated forms present.
I will handle this in reverse order - Elephants are unclean, so just two.
There is no proof that the mesopotamian stories predate the bible, just conjecture based on some questionable assumptions. There is also no reason why those stories may not be derived from the stories in Genesis. Cultural contamination can go both ways.
It was raining, so they may have used rainwater for sustenance
I did not say science was a religion, I said evolution was a religion thinly disguised as science. Science is a tool, or a philosophy.
Christians are killed every day for their faith in Iraq, Iran, in India and throughout Africa. More Christians were martyred during the 20th century than the previous 19 centuries combined.
You seem to have forgotten (or never heard about) the slaughter of Christians that accompanied the Islamic conquest of the middle east in the 9th and 10th centuries, the actual first crusade. Whole countries (Dalmatia) were obliterated for the crime of being Christian.
The old testament did not cause the Koran, Mohammad did. Most Moslems would be incensed at that idea.
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So it would not be possible for Noah to take young animals?, I would say that you are vastly overestimating the weight of the animals to add to the story.
(From another post today I wrote today).
An elephant weans as early as 6 months, at a weight of about 200-300 kg. Since there is nothing for the animals to do, they probably spend the year sleeping, like my cat. Since the bible is clear that only land animals were involved with the ark, it is pointless to talk about fish. The fact that we have freshwater fish would seem to indicate that the water was fresh enough to support such species. I am not sure about the amphibians, many of them are enough at home in water to suggest they would not need the ark.
Noah may also have been bright enough to stock high-value grains instead of hay. That reduces the cubes quite a bit compared to hay, and remember the goal is survival, so the animals might well be kept close the minimum calorie count needed for survival without activity. Uncomfortable, but survivable. If such a level is taken to be ~10 Calories/Kilo/day (what it is for humans - who are notoriously inefficient) that means the total calorie count for your estimate of an average of 50kg(high estimate) x 10,000 animals (high also) results in a total calorie requirement of 5 million calories a day x 420 days yielding ~2.1 billion calories total Divided by 3700 calories/kg (a value I found for breakfast cereal) yields under 600,000 kgs of food. Cracked wheat is 673 Kg/Cubic meter., so you are talking about roughly 1,000 cubic meters. The ark was about 42,000 cubic meters.
Please note that this does not credit any ride time (the practice of fattening an animal before a time when they will not be able to eat.) Which could probably cut the food needed by ~8% without any risk to the animals. Barnum and Bailey uses a train with 20 freight cars to ship their circus show, which has many of the larger mammals.
The ark would cube out over 600 freight cars, so It looks to me like there would be enough volume to contain all the animals that are needed.
you claim there would be problems with ventilation, yet the ark design clearly spells out ventilation. It might be that your desire for this story to be implausible causes you to overlook some of the text, which would be unnecessary unless one actually were building an ark. These kind of engineering detail typically are only included in 'been there, done that' stories. A myth would not need to talk about the paint job on the ark nor the windows, yet the bible mentions that it was sealed in and out. The logical explanation is that the writer was an experienced boat builder.
(Back to fresh writing)
I have not been claiming that the bible contains science, but that it can inform science. Further, I am questioning those that present a conclusion without data, and I do not really care whether the conclusion is
So it would not be possible for Noah to take young animals?, I would say that you are vastly overestimating the weight of the animals to add to the story.
An elephant weans as early as 6 months, at a weight of about 200-300 kg. Since there is nothing for the animals to do, they probably spend the year sleeping, like my cat. Since the bible is clear that only land animals were involved with the ark, it is pointless to talk about fish. The fact that we have freshwater fish would seem to indicate that the water was fresh enough to support such species. I am not sure about the amphibians, many of them are enough at home in water to suggest they would not need the ark.
Noah may also have been bright enough to stock high-value grains instead of hay. That reduces the cubes quite a bit compared to hay, and remember the goal is survival, so the animals might well be kept close the minimum calorie count needed for survival without activity. Uncomfortable, but survivable. If such a level is taken to be ~10 Calories/Kilo/day (what it is for humans - who are notoriously inefficient) that means the total calorie count for your estimate of an average of 50kg(high estimate) x 10,000 animals (high also) results in a total calorie requirement of 5 million calories a day x 420 days yielding ~2.1 billion calories total Divided by 3700 calories/kg (a value I found for breakfast cereal) yields under 600,000 kgs of food. Cracked wheat is 673 Kg/Cubic meter., so you are talking about roughly 1,000 cubic meters. The ark was about 42,000 cubic meters.
Please note that this does not credit any ride time (the practice of fattening an animal before a time when they will not be able to eat.) Which could probably cut the food needed by ~8% without any risk to the animals. Barnum and Bailey uses a train with 20 freight cars to ship their circus show, which has many of the larger mammals.
The ark would cube out over 600 freight cars, so It looks to me like there would be enough volume to contain all the animals that are needed.
you claim there would be problems with ventilation, yet the ark design clearly spells out ventilation. It might be that your desire for this story to be implausible causes you to overlook some of the text, which would be unnecessary unless one actually were building an ark. These kind of engineering detail typically are only included in 'been there, done that' stories. A myth would not need to talk about the paint job on the ark nor the windows, yet the bible mentions that it was sealed in and out. The logical explanation is that the writer was an experienced boat builder.
The cost claim of far less than 53 billion is based on the success of $3.5 million in prize money at:
http://www.darpa.mil/grandchallenge
Looking at what a 2 million dollar purse will do for a contest it looks to me like the time may be right to automate the driving task.
There is also Google, which I believe a bit less than the grand challenge, but they are putting some of their financial muscle behind software to drive cars.
The Kinect vision processing takes one of the harder part of the task (stereoscopic ranging) and puts it in an inexpensive peripheral.
There are also numerous automation projects that have completed similar level of complexity tasks, such as aircraft pilotage. No designers wildest dream included a budget of 53 Billion, most such tasks were completed for under 10 billion, even after the inevitable cost overruns from DOD fiddling during development. The Apollo program put a man on the moon for 138B (adjusted for inflation) dollars.
the value of the existing code base that could be applied is quite large. All such estimates are phoney, of course, but the value of having a stable real-time capable operating system is quite high.
BTW I love the Cap'n Hammer reference it makes me smile every time.
In other responses in this same topic area I have given several examples of predictions utilizing Genesis or some other portion of the bible. Why do you assume that I am a layman? Because I disagree with an established orthodoxy?
I've seen no such posts by you. Please feel free to point me to some.
C- Sorry to be noobish, but I blew away my first answer trying to get out to where a reference might be. I know it is really lame-"Somewhere out there in the ~400 posts under the main subject..."
The initial conditions of an on-going process are often crucial in determining the course of error, (If one is investigating an undesirable phenomenon) or the reason for success, (if one is attempting to replicate a particular success.)
The bible does not present a 'flat earth'. Those that argued for a flat earth against Galileo in 1633 did so not from the bible, but from the authority of a man (the pope) to decide what the bible says, not from the text (Isaiah 40:22, with controversy).
Ah... the POPE's interpretations of the Bible were wrong. What makes YOUR interpretations more special and more accurate than one of the Pope's who is supposedly god's representative on Earth? See the fallacy with your excuse? If you invalidate his, god's representative's interpretation, then yours must be even less valid.
C- I will freely admit that I might be wrong. I am pointing out the disconnect between the flat earth argument and the bible. Just because one person is wrong does not invalidate all persons. I am not the one claiming infallibility.
Those same folks, in 1572, committed a genocide against people for the 'crime' of reading the bible. It sounds like you would not be terribly upset if a vocal genocide were committed against folks (like myself) who hold the bible as true.
Don't be a bigoted idiot - I *know*, our argument aside, that you've got better in you. I would NEVER wish harm on you or anyone else. Heck, stranger that you are, I'd probably, without a thought, step in to protect you from unwarranted harm (and I have done so in the past for other strangers, because I *cannot stand* seeing someone needlessly hurt. It feels like it's a part of me that's getting lost right alongside them). I don't have to believe what you do to hold life precious - FAR more so than those who have professed Christianity & Judaism and caused UNENDING wars and holy crusades in the name of their god.
C- It is possible that not everyone that called himself a christian actually read and believed the bible. I know of no current war on behalf of the bible, although there is plenty of violence against Christians around the world. The bible calls us to very high standard, we do not expect the same of the world.
Far more than some of the vocal nutjobs who, to this day, call for the death of many people for all sorts of bigoted reasons (which, I do NOT include you in - I *REFUSE* to group every Christian in the category of nutcases who "claim" to represent the religion, and I am SURE, however firm in your beliefs you are, that you do NOT fit into that category - just wanted to clear that up now, before you misinterpret that). So, I *refuse* to group you in with any such category, and I hope you will not consider to do so with me again. I do not agree with your beliefs, but I respect them and will fight for your right to have them. Heck, to clarify something else, it's not your beliefs that I think are idiotic (in case you got that opinion from my past posts), it's people who think that religion-as-science should be taught, or that it's anything other than an attempt to indoctrinate people into a religion... or the fact that doing so is ILLEGAL and AGAINST other's religious beliefs, which I am equally adamant about being respected. See why I call it idiotic? It's discrimination, it's against the LAW, and it's aga
The 40k deaths a year on the highway system are a good reason to automate the operation of motor vehicles, an option that would cost far less than 53 billion, and pay for it self rapidly in avoided costs, of course it would make the socialist dream of complete control of travel much more difficult, since even a mid-size car realizes better energy efficiency than buses, because it does not ever run empty, and is handily where it is needed when it is needed. If our time is worth anything at all the car makes very good sense.
Thanks for the map reference. I confirms that I will still have to drive or fly to get anywhere, even at the end of the plan. So I will end up subsidizing a lot of other folks, because I live out west, where the population density does not even rate a dot.
Most of the estimates for Mars are well above the cost of a toy train for barry. What we don't need is for the Gov't to get involved in another boondoggle that will end up requiring billions of dollars of subsidies year in and year out, like Amtrak. Here in New Mexico we installed a passenger train that requires a $7 dollar ticket to be subsidized to the tune of $50 dollars. What a deal.
If I recall correctly, the law is to prevent legal action against someone who dissents from an orthodoxy. The fact that this applies to AGW and Evolution are indicative of these being an orthodoxy. This law has come out of attempts to use the legal system to prevent scientific discussion if that discussion includes questions of origins that do not include slavish adherence to evolution. We have come so far from a christian nation that even the mention of creation is a reason to punish.
There are good sound reasons to dissent from evolution, but these cannot be discussed in a rational manner without the questioner being refered to as an 'idiot' by the orthodox.
When I examine the assumptions behind an inference I am not being unscientific, I am being curious as to why things are the way they are.
One other observation is in order: No experiment can prove that we arrived here by either creation or evolution. Philosophically speaking, the question cannot be answered by experimentation, because whichever it was, it happened and is unlikely to happen again, given the extreme complexity of life on the one hand and the nature of the creator on the other.
With that gloomy statement made does that stultify science? By no means. It just means we need to be cautious when we extrapolate from data sets.
I must confess that I am not an evolutionist, so I would be reluctant to propose experiments based on evolution. I do love the idea that there is a design behind the universe, (You may have noticed this.) and that we are invited to find that design. What could we discover by examining the way proteins fold? could we cure baldness, maybe? How cool would that be!
The God of the bible invites us to examine the world, to reason and learn about ourselves and him. He also promises some things that help our science enormously: God is the same yesterday, today and forever (Hebrews 13:8) so we can expect that the universe itself to exhibit the same characteristic of consistency.
Let me first apologize for making an assumption. I assumed that someone with an interest in evolution would also have done some investigation into past reasoning on the subject. I realize that this is an oversight on my part.
There is a decent (incomplete) explanation of entropy in information theory at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_(information_theory)
Evolution predicts that a given line of organism will get better over time, given random inputs. Organisms are quite complex, but the same rule should hold for simpler systems, and allow a demonstration in a shorter time-frame then the evolutionary time-line, hence the example of cars. The use of a junk yard is a way of compressing the time required for the experiment, because we can examine many samples quickly. The point of the thought experiment is to demonstrate that instances of a design do not get better in the presence of random inputs. ID predicts that the quality of information decreases over time as random changes are made in copies of the information. Evolution predicts the opposite.
Why choose this thought experiment? because it demonstrates a crucial difference between Evolution as an origin model and Intelligent Design. I suspect the actual problem with a creation origin is that a Creator God has the authority to make a moral claim on his creation, on us. Evolution, on the other hand, presents successful procreation as the only virtue, perfect for the 'Me' generation.
In other responses in this same topic area I have given several examples of predictions utilizing Genesis or some other portion of the bible. Why do you assume that I am a layman? Because I disagree with an established orthodoxy?
The initial conditions of an on-going process are often crucial in determining the course of error, (If one is investigating an undesirable phenomenon) or the reason for success, (if one is attempting to replicate a particular success.)
The bible does not present a 'flat earth'. Those that argued for a flat earth against Galileo in 1633 did so not from the bible, but from the authority of a man (the pope) to decide what the bible says, not from the text (Isaiah 40:22, with controversy). Those same folks, in 1572, committed a genocide against people for the 'crime' of reading the bible. It sounds like you would not be terribly upset if a vocal genocide were committed against folks (like myself) who hold the bible as true.
On the subject of a 6K year old earth, remember that the bible presents a world that has been subjected to some very severe upsets, Genesis 6 and 7 (Noah's flood) being an obvious example. It is not inconsistent with the world of geology that we see, in fact it predicts precisely the world we see: Sediment every where, except where mid-flood and post-flood Orogeny has pushed mountains through. Both ideas are contained in the account of flood.
you will argue that one does not need a bible to find mud, and that is true, but how does one explain the fact that some mountains are still getting higher (the Himalayan plateau) at a rate that could not have been sustained for millions of years, but is consistent with a process that started recently? How recent is open to interpretation, but a rather simple energy/mass logistic balance equation (Similar energy over time, but an increasing mass to rise, working against gravity) can be constructed that reasonably starts 4k years ago. Does that mean it is right? absolutely not. It does, however suggest some total potential energy values for the Indo/Asian geologic system that might well predict the frequency of earthquakes. The 'reasonableness' of the values could also be checked against earthquake frequency in Asia.
Would you reject the possibility of determining such an energy value just because the idea starts in Genesis 7:11? Now who is being unscientific? I personally think such a value would be fascinating to find. (Not much use to me personally, but way cool none the less.)
There are some other predictions that might well prove out: There are the remains of an entire Bronze-age Egyptian army at the bottom of the Red Sea. Scuba Archeology, anyone? (Exodus 14:28) Wind can pile up water (Exodus 14:21) (A standing wave excited by wind energy?)
I find some of the most fascinating things in the bible are the ones I do not understand. - Could further thought reveal a truth about the universe that has not yet been discovered? I am quite sure that a flaccid approach to the bible will yield as little result as a flaccid approach to science. I prefer to raise my eyes from the mudstone of orthodoxy and examine a horizon of possibilities not yet found.
You claim my argument is debunked without reference. I know of no such debunking, and I have examined the literature for an honest argument to debunk it. All local increases in entropy are accompanied by a global decrease, so the 2nd law holds true.
It is a good point that creationism violates all laws, but the point of it is that the root cause of the universe is different from the universe itself. So what? a steel foundry is different from a car dealership. Different rules apply in a steel foundry WRT steel than the same steel at a car dealer. Does that invalidate the steel foundry? No.
I should warn you that when I am presented with an interpretation of data, I ask three questions:
1: Show me the original, unprocessed data. I prefer to check statistics, since there are often problems with statistics that go unnoticed in an uncritical environment.
2: Show me the assumptions used in any calculations or relational correlations.
3: What confounding variable have not been accounted?
I do not think any of these requests are unreasonable. The problem most evolutionists have with these steps is that examination reduces the 'science' to 'because I say so, and I have a PhD' I am happy for their achievement, but that does not mean I have to accept their say so. Give me facts, I find that they tend to support the veracity of scripture and the hollowness of evolution.
Pseudo-scientific garbage would be someone not willing to debate an issue with a theory.
I would propose a measure of information that can be readily measured, such as the number of deviations a car exhibits from the original design. (To stay with the J-yard example.) This is easily measured and gives repeatable results. The control is the original design, with a value of zero deviations. Of course, we would prefer to limit confounding variables (mechanics, in this case.) who would reinsert design back in to the data set. We would probably also prefer to limit changes to the design we are comparing. (Newer models are right out.)
There are some very interesting results that cannot be obtained without knowing something of the original state of things.
I remember the debate that preceded the Voyager Magnetometer experiment. There was exactly one person who correctly predicted all measurements. His basis for estimation was derived from Genesis 1 and 2 Peter 3:5.
Could he publish the basis for his estimation? of course not! your compatriots in the evolution-only orthodoxy would never hear of such a thing! In order to publish his predictions and the agreement of the experiment with theory he had to hide the origin of the idea.
Your religion of evolution does not make scientific predictions. It cannot, because at the core it calls for a random process. It can, however make philosophical predictions: since the universe is random, no outcome is any different from any other, since a good role of the dice on Tuesday can be wiped out by a bad one on Friday.
You have decided the bible is myth. You might also decide that I am a petunia, but that would not make it so. The bible may be true. Why are you so opposed to the idea of subjecting evolution to the light of an opposing view? is it because there are weaknesses in evolution that come to light when examined closely?
I happen to prefer the second law of thermodynamics. Every know process exhibits compliance to the laws of thermodynamics. Evolution theory violates the second law of thermodynamics by proposing an uncaused decrease in entropy. This is religious faith, not science.
There is no call for being uncivilized.
I said the Bible is book of history, at least the part of Genesis you are concerned with, which is the creation account. I would say that your understanding of the bible has been disproved, but that is no great feat. Why should the creation of the universe be simple and easy to understand? It seems to me that it might well be a complex process that we do not understand, filled with things that appear to a superficial analysis to be contradictory. Is it possible that there are clues provided about the universe that we do not yet have the science for? Might the problem be with us, and not a God imaginative enough to create all we see?
Your analysis of my argument missed my point, which is that a theory should make predictions about that world that can be tested. ID makes predictions, so does evolution. ID predicts that there is a design behind the universe, and that it is discoverable. Evolution predicts that the universe is ultimately random.
My point about archeology is that there are provable points in the bible that have been found to be correct. That does not mean that I (Or anyone) understand all that is there. I say investigate the text to see if there are clues to what appear to be contradictions.
There are better forums to discuss bible proofs, I would suggest that those might be a better place to find out about contradictions, if you wish.
Science requires full examination of a theory, not blind agreement just because it is in a 'Science Journal' full examination requires full disclosure of assumptions, caveats, problem with the data sets and the willingness to discuss alternative theory.
ID does make predictions about the world, the fundamental one being that there is design in life. There is order that can be discovered. ID also predicts that people are valuable as individuals, because we were designed as individuals, and there is a deeper purpose to our design than mere existence. Evolution reduces the value of the individual to zero, since there is nothing he could do that a sibling could not do as well. Even carrying a positive mutation is not enough, since that mutation could arise again making the individual's contribution moot.
With respect to the current generation of evolutionary theorists, there is no better statement of the theory than Darwins. (I reviewed it about a month ago, for a project I was working on.) The problem has gotten no easier over the centuries, indeed, now that we understand the complexity of life it is considerably harder that Darwin thought. There is no current idea in evolution that any better than Gould's punctuate equilibrium, But this is just ID by stages, not uniform process.
The problem I see here has nothing to do with science, and everything to do with the nature of God. One could postulate a god outside the christian system that was a 'joker in the deck', but the christian system proposes a god who is the same yesterday, today and forever. That idea, philosophically speaking, is what makes science possible: Behind all that we see is a constant, unchanging design. We make this assumption anytime we measure anything, that our ruler is the same length (Plus or minus some margin) for the fifth trial as it was for the first.
My complaint with AGW is that there is a leap to conclusion without a supporting data set. Controlling CO2 may or may not save the planet, but the data set being used to enrich Al Gore is much too thin for my taste. We only have about a dozen or so truly global temperature measurements, and they do not support the warming hypothesis. That paucity of data, and the chicanery associated with some of the funding leaves me suspicious of the idea.