Hawk one
Emperor of the Internet
Sorry, clarsct. 
It seems there are enough people posting at the moment, so I can take a break for now anyway.
It seems there are enough people posting at the moment, so I can take a break for now anyway.
Nothing here will get ugly.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.
Human embryos do not have gill slits; The pharyngeal pouches that appear in embryos technically are not gill slits, but that is irrelevant...
Nothing here will get ugly.
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.![]()
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.
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.
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?
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.
What about their table of contents?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.
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
If the Pratt master could possibly muster up some actual science, then we could see to that, pronto like.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.
It has never been observed in any laboratory that mutations can cause one species to turn into another.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).