"Evolution isn't science"

Nothing here will get ugly.

Actually, I really hate the same old same old creationut LIES :boggled:
I just wish JF would stop making himself look like a liar and actually look at what scientists actually discovered.


I am really looking forward to seeing his sources and what the sources are, and actually say.
 
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Thanks for the thumbs up, kjkent, but I've had these conversations so many times with so many fundies. You see, it's men, not God, that have changed. God is simply being more (or less) tolerant with us than he did with the Old Testaament Jews. Oh, and you can't expect someone who creates the universe out of nothing and who is so perfect and pure that he/she/it has no choice but to condemn sinners to eternal pain and suffering to feel the same way as you and I do about slaughtering babies.:boggled:

There's no reason for me to argue the illogic of the above with you. I will wait for Mr. Freak. If he doesn't answer, then he will have admitted the inconsistency of the Bible by his silence.
 
Ok, I think we have a few things to sort out.

First, if you're saying that some highschool textbooks are incorrect, I won't disagree. On the other hand, they aren't terribly well written.

Next, we need to clarify what you mean by 'scientific fact.' Science doesn't deal in Truth with a capitol T. We describe the world and make models that let us make prediction. Yes, in Truth the universe might be illusion or whatever, but really those are questions outside of the scope of science.

Now, evolution is 'scientific fact' in the sense that it is a model which allows us to make accurate predictions and is accepted by basically everyone involved in the field. If you have another way to determine scientific truth, I'd love to hear it.

If you feel that it is not True, then you need to do one of a few things. First, you could provide a more predictively useful model. Or, you could demonstrate a phenominon not properly explained by the current model. A demonstration in science, much like for the JREF, must be something that other people can repeat and examine.

Alternately, you could show me errors in a scientific paper. Attacking textbooks is interesting, and possibly a useful exercise, but really doesn't do much to show me that science is wrong.

Finally, you'll need to define your terms. Macroevolution isn't a term used by scientists, and so you'll have to be clear what you mean by it. (or, show me that I'm wrong by citing a juried paper which uses it and defines it)

If you can't do this, then you're really not attacking science in any meaningful way.
 
OK my position is that the Bible is litteral and true, and that evolution should not be taught in public schools as fact and backed up with lies. I am willing to discuss this with anyone who has intelligent questions and I do not call people names and expect the same out of others, that gets us no where. I think it is possible to discuss without arguing and realize that I will probably change no minds but just like to have both sides represented fairly. Thanks.

See, evolution is backed up with lies, but it's creationut lies about evolution that makes JF think evolution is only backed up by lies. He doesn't bother to explore the creationut claims about lies, but chooses to just believe creationut lies about evolution.

Who is lying?

More about the appendix

What is a lie about appendix? I'd like to know. No more creationut site quotes, just your own words please.
 
OK my position is that the Bible is litteral and true, and that evolution should not be taught in public schools as fact and backed up with lies. I am willing to discuss this with anyone who has intelligent questions and I do not call people names and expect the same out of others, that gets us no where. I think it is possible to discuss without arguing and realize that I will probably change no minds but just like to have both sides represented fairly. Thanks.

Hey, JF, we're still waiting for you to respond to the replies over at CreationTalk. Are you coming back? I can't recall anyone calling you names over there.
 
I agree that the Bible is Fact but without scientific evidence I don't think it should be taught in public schools as the only truth like evolution is now. Why is that a problem?

Do you believe that students in astronomy class should be taught that the universe is 14 billion years old? Should students in geology classes be taught the Earth is over 4 billion years old?
 
In the time since the Bible was written the Earth has been steadliy demoted. First we were at the centre of the universe and everything went around it. Then we went around the Sun. Then the Sun turned out to be a star. Then the sun became a standard, run-of-the-mill star in a rather standard, run-of-the-mill galaxy. "Out on the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm," as Douglas Adams put it.

We now know there are about one hundred billion galaxies in the universe, each one containing from a few hundred thousand to a trillion or more stars, across distances so vast we can express them mathematically but are completely unable to comprehend them.

Bizarrely, though, cosmological theory has us once again at the "centre" of the universe, though strictly speaking, such a term is nonsensical.
 
If I could offer some advice for dealing with our young PRATT master, keep the apologetics out of this thread. If he responds with God is blah or the Bible is blah, just ignore those parts and stick to the science.
 
Pardon me, but you must have missed this lecture in science class. People can indeed live for 600 years, but only if their appendix remains fully functioning.
What about their table of contents?
 
The leading mathematicians in the century met with some evolutionary biologists and confronted them with the fact that according to mathematical statistics, the probabilities of a cell or a protein molecule coming into existence were nil. They even constructed a model of a large computer and tried to figure out the possibilities of a cell ever happening. The result was zero possibility! - Wistar Institute, 1966

Really? Who were these "leading mathematicians?" Name names.
 
If I could offer some advice for dealing with our young PRATT master, keep the apologetics out of this thread. If he responds with God is blah or the Bible is blah, just ignore those parts and stick to the science.
If the Pratt master could possibly muster up some actual science, then we could see to that, pronto like.
 
If the Pratt master could possibly muster up some actual science, then we could see to that, pronto like.

I think US is saying that we should focus on the specific falsehoods about science that jf has been repeating, and leave out nitpicking on the many, many, many, many inconsistencies in the bible for now.
 
If the Pratt master could possibly muster up some actual science, then we could see to that, pronto like.

I think US is saying that we should focus on the specific falsehoods about science that jf has been repeating, and leave out nitpicking on the many, many, many, many inconsistencies in the bible for now.

That's it. Stick with the erronious stuff he's saying about evolution rather than going off on long wasteful tangents about whether Hell is just or why Krishna makes more sense than YHWH or whatever. Just respond to the PRATTs and straighten him out on those.
 
Tomorrow I will give you books and pages, unless you have read every high school textbook I would ask you stop with the name calling or this will get ugly fast.

If you can provide valid factual errors in currently used science textbooks, then we need to make an effort to correct those errors. However some of the things you are saying, like "the appendix is NOT a vestigial organ" is in error. If a science text claims the vermiform appendix is vestigial, it should be left alone. If a science text claims that vestigial structures are useless, that should be corrected.

But really you've come here to argue that evolution isn't science. We've seen you attack high school text books, but that doesn't attack the theory. We've seen biblical apologetics, and I really wish you'd just stop that since it has nothing to do with the evolution/science debate. There is another forum here specifically for discussion of religion and you are welcome to open a thread there (or ask someone to do so for you).

What about evolution makes it not science? In reading what you've wrote I've come up with these key items, which you believe:

  1. Evolution says, but cannot support, that the animal and plant kingdoms came from a common ancestor.
  2. There are no such things as vestigial structures. All structures perform an important, not necessarily essential, function. Specifically the appendix has an immunological function.
  3. Scientists claim that developing embryos possess gill slits, but these are in fact just folds of skin.
  4. The big bang is a case of nothing exploding and creating something.
  5. Science believes that a lot of rain on a rock brought life into existence
  6. Comparative anatomy provides no evidence of evolution.
  7. Leading mathematicians at some point proved that evolution is essentially a statistical impossibility.
  8. Speciating evolution has never been observed in the laboratory.
Is that the meat of your argument? It would be nice to have a framework of your justification with which to counter.
 
Kewl, let's get on with it then:


JF has to go back to 1966 to point to the old beaten horse about evolution and math. We've come some way since then, but for some reason JF hasn't explored what mankind has learned since the 60's. Dawkins has unravelled a few things, but if it is math we want from mathematicians, then we need more I guess?

http://seenonslash.com/node/232
Anyway, the real issue I wanted to address was this one: the sheer numeric CERTIANTY. There's powerful mathematics to evolution, powerful effects going on that you don't hear about in the common explanations of evolution. The common idea of evolution is as a sequence of individual beneficial mutations, like climbing a ladder. If that's how evolution actually worked then critics would be right, it would have been mathematically impossible for evolution to produce the incredible complexity we see today.

So, let's see how evolution ACTUALLY works, and apply mathematics:

To show the true mathematical power of evolution I will first abandon that "ladder climbing" of beneficial mutaions. In fact lets assume that every single mutation that occurs is either neutral or harmful. I'll demonstrate that we still get the real and powerful mechanism of evolution, the math of evolution.
A good place to start is with the common complaint of creationists that mutation and evolution "cannot create information". Well in the initial mutation phase they are right. When a mutation occurs it introduces noise, it tends to degrade information. But look what happens the moment that mutation gets passed on to an offspring. That mutation is now no longer random noise, it now carries a small bit on information. It carries a little tag saying "this is a nonfatal mutation". The presence of this mutation in the offspring is new and created information, the discovery and living record of a new nonfatal mutation. Over time the population builds up a LIBRARY of nonfatal mutations. This library is a vast accumulation of new information.

Read on for the mathematical portion. Really interesting.

There has been a ton of MATH discovered regarding evolution since 1966, and many books are out there on the topic. I liked this article though, because it ties in why previous mathematicians in the 60s missed the mark.
 
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OK, there are some rules of conduct you need to know about. In general, you need to be prepared to produce a citation from a scientific paper published in a peer-reviewed and widely accepted journal of the scientific field that the paper you are quoting is relevant to. If you produce quotes from creationist web sites, you're going to find that everyone here who has the opposing viewpoint will quickly stop talking to you, and the reason is because the data from those sites directly contradicts the data from papers, and published in journals, like the ones I'm talking about above.

To the extent science can be said to "be done," or "advance," from the point of view of both the scientific, and the inclusive human, community, it is done in those journals. They're not some private cabal; they contain the sum of the knowledge of the sciences we have accumulated so far, along with a relatively much smaller number of books dating backward from the beginning of the Enlightenment (late seventeeth century or so- because, you see, before that they didn't have scientific journals, so we have things like Newton's Principia Mathematica). In fact, since the beginning of the twentieth century, essentially no major scientific discovery has been made that was not documented in such a journal, and most of them were announced to the world in such a journal.

Today, as far as the scientific community is concerned, if you wish to make an addition to the progress of science, you MUST publish your findings in such a journal, so that they can be examined, criticized, and ultimately accepted or rejected by that community, acting as individuals. Every accepted theory of science has gone through this process; in fact, as each scientist is educated, theoretically (and more or less really, depending on the level of skill and intelligence of the budding scientist) they examine each of these ideas at least once for themselves before accepting them.

I'm going to await your acceptance of the above before going on; I warn you, first of all, that there is a reason why scientists believe what they do and it can be found in those journals, second, that no one here is interested in conspiracy theories about all teh evul sciensetis, third, that science is not just composed of some random stories about how things happened, but instead a body of knowledge formed by the detailed examination of every statement made and comparison to observable facts that everyone agrees on. Any statement that disagrees with an observable fact is discarded; special statements that make verifiable predictions are called "theories."

If on that basis you are interested in having a rational conversation, you will be the first I (and no doubt many who have been here longer than I) have seen. And I have seen plenty (and those others no doubt plenty more).

What he said....

Why are we wasting our time with a guy who wants to the quote the Bible as if it is a fact. To start an arguement you need to have a premise based on facts not fiction
 

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