And they’re the worst kind of zombie: they have no brains, so shooting them in the head doesn’t work! AAAAAAAAH! What good are horror movie rules if they don’t apply to real life?
At least something is explained: recall that I mentioned I’d received a small flurry of creationist emails about Hovind? It seems Eric Hovind has been coordinating something: this afternoon, a small collection of new goons all speaking the same phrases has invaded this thread. They aren’t really discussing anything, they’re just throwing out smug one-liners and bible quotes that they seem to think will be persuasive.
They’re not. They look like mindless idiots.
Their primary approach is to assert that because logic exists, god exists, and therefore any attempt to apply reason to a problem is evidence for god. They are unable to justify their premise, however, so it’s a silly game they’re playing — there is no reason to assume an anthropic being was necessary to conjure logic into existence or even that any kind of intelligence was required, any more than we could argue that intelligence is required to start an avalanche. Small fluctuations can lead to large scale changes in that example, so there’s no logical barrier to the idea that unintelligent processes seed universes that expand with internally consistent rules (and universes seeded with illogical rules, if that were possible, wouldn’t exist and definitely wouldn’t be populated with intelligent beings contemplating the laws of their universe).
So how do they know a god created the laws of the universe. They’ve obligingly answered that.
He told us.
See? Utterly brainless.
I was amused by this question.
If you knew that God exists, would you worship Him?
If your god were shown to exist, I would fall into despair, because it means we’re living in a universe dominated by an insane cosmic tyrant. I would not worship such a horrible creature. I don’t know whether I’d collapse in futility, or whether I’d be able to fight him somehow — that omniscience and omnipotence thing is rather daunting.
But no, I’d never worship that thing. I find it disgusting that the Hovindites would so hate humanity that they’d throw themselves into servitude to an alien monster.
If I knew God existed?
If it was Odin I’d die in battle. Party down for eternity!
If it was Cthulhu I’d just hope to be eaten first.
Glad you caught the “He told us” line. I thought that was particularly hilarious. Gave the game away that easily, and probably didn’t even realize it. I don’t know why they are talking about logic with such high esteem, though: It is obvious that they have utter contempt for it, given that they don’t even give it a passing glance when uttering their “arguments”.
Yeah. Worship it? Hell no. Not that there would be any good alternative. But I’d sulk.
Hmmm … if a good god actually existed, it would have some ‘splainin’ to do.
And why would it even want to be worshipped? Even a reasonably mature human being, with godlike powers, wouldn’t want a bunch of ‘worshippers’.
Anyway, a tri-omni god looks pretty much impossible, what with the POE and all.
It would depend on the god. If it were the god in the bible, I would fight it. As you pointed out, the christian god is an evil monster. Even if it were futile and useless, it is still better than worshiping such a creature.
If it’s another god, it would depend on their theology and how they act and how they answer the questions “Why do you need to be worshiped? Why do you want us to worship you?”
I, for one, welcome our insane cosmic tyrant.
I suspect that if God really did exist its nature would surprise the Hovinders as much, if not more, than it surprises us atheists.
The God I stopped believing in was too transcendent, vague, and Other to be the Christian God. It didn’t require worship: it invoked awe.
Until I figured out it was a little too transcendent, vague, and Other to invoke awe. ‘Twas but an idea in my mind and it went away when I no longer thought about it and thought instead about the real things that inspired it in the first place.
But it was still more plausible — and nicer — than the Hovind-ish God. The reason they can be so sure about God is the same reason we can be certain only about analytical truths like A=A. God is an abstraction that they define and control. Presuppositionalism uses God like a tool.
If their god was true, I don’t know what I’d do. Probably cry a lot.
After all, their god says that I’m evil, depraved and an abomination.
Why the fuck should I worship that?
Nothing new about that…. killfile and ridicule happeneth to them all.
If it were Mr. Deity, I might be alright with it.
Still a jerk, but kind of fun.
But…how can humans live without brains?
Hovind’s idiots are miracles for this modern age!
Glen Davidson
If It exists and we’re going to fight It, I suppose that puts up on the side of Satan. I expect the Hovindites would be wank themselves into ectasy at the prospect of doing “real” biblesque battle against us. See them thundering across the plains of Megiddo, a new Crusader force lead by their cavalry astride their mounts of holiness. Allosaurus, say.
Totally off-topic, but that’s the reason I’ve always found the story of Lucifer to be both ridiculous and fascinating. If God is omniscient and omnipotent, then the whole idea of leading a rebellion against him is absurd because he already knows your every move and has unlimited powers to call upon in order to thwart you. Unless of course you believe that Lucifer is somehow powerful enough to be a challenge, but then God can’t be omnipotent, but the very existence of a potential threat to you means you don’t have unlimited power over it.
I’m sorry. I’m using logic again.
I’d look skywards and laugh “Stupid god. Despite supposedly having endless reserves of wisdom, you looked at some random maggot-minded Bronze Age tyrant and said – I’m gonna be just like him!”
Oh, and “Why are you represented by a book that gets so much shit wrong?”
A couple of things have always bugged me about this line of argument.
First, it assumes what it posits–a good and intelligent god. I can posit a god who wants us always to be wrong about everything but survive anyway because that’s just so fucking funny. Merely having a god is no guarantee that we’re right about anything.
And second, doesn’t the fact that so many people are not just religious but deep-down-bugnutty-deluded to their very core argue against logic being much of force, anyway? I find fundamentalist religion absolutely refutes what they’re trying to promote.
Finally, is it really so hard to imagine that beings who hold an accurate representation of reality would outperform those without it? That seems like an entirely natural conclusion to draw that benefits not at all from a god hypothesis.
This is among the more desperate attempts I’ve seen to rescue theism. And the theism it rescues is hardly worth it, because to the extent this idea can be defended at all, it’s more consistent with deism than it is with any of the world religions.
It’s a beautiful apologetic for the naive. You’ve got to give them that.
Once they accept the premise that only God can provide a capacity for knowledge, they have no escape. They can only circle round and round in their little aquaria, condescending to all of those sad folk outside who know none of their watery truths.
How anyone can accept such a stupid premise is the question, but clearly a good many do.
Glen Davidson
Presuppositionalism is the lamest of a long line of lame apologetics.
inb4 Hov-mind
No, I’d start building iron chariots…
If it weren’t a god that simply programmed a computer in which the universe is simply a simulation, then the only way most atheists would be convinced that the god existed would be if we could interact with it. If we can interact with it, and it has the properties attributed to it in the Bible, then we can kill it. After all, it can’t even defeat a group of iron chariots fielded by a bronze age army. What is it going to do against an M-1 Abrams, let alone enough artillery pieces to be lined up wheel to wheel for 10 miles straight? I say fight.
A discussion over here got the ball rolling on that scenario.
Andrew Arensburger has a few old posts up about Hovind and his legal troubles. Every so often, he gets a drive-by comment from one of Hovind’s acolytes. Without exception, they are the scrapings from the bottom of the intellectual barrel, usually only semi-literate, mouthing slogans as if they were arguments, and apparently incapable of comprehending any rebuttal containing words of more than two syllables.
IOW: the other thread is a pretty typical sample.
If it were THAT god, fighting it wouldn’t be futile at all. It has a self-admitted weakness against iron.
And iron happens to be the basic ingredient of almost all modern weaponry!
Glen Davidson:
Yeah. Presuppositionalism begs the question as hard as it can. If question-begging were a rock, it would be the one God made so heavy he couldn’t lift it. If question-begging were bad TV sports, it would be a WWF wrestling match between the ropes and the mat. It’s like a Death by Chocolate Question Begging cake.
When you arrange the argument such that the conclusion is necessary for the foundations of the logic employed in the argument, the question has had its brains begged out.
I didn’t get the memo.
Eric ignored my questions about if evolution caused his daddy to go to jail and about rendering unto Caesar. I am so hurt.
These godbots, they remind me of agent Smith clones.
God told me to skin you alive.
Some of you know where that is going.
Yeah, if the Biblical god existed, I’d get Lucifer on the phone straightaway and ask what I could do to help. At least he’s not always sniffing in my panties.
The premise of the question “If you knew god exits, wouldn’t you worship him” immediately brings up an obvious question of its own, “HOW do you know?” If the answer to that is “God told me”—well, I would hope that a relative or friend would see to it that I got competent medical help from a psychiatrist or neurologist ASAP. Also, why a “him”? I’ve always thought the whole idea of a male creator god was absurd on the face it, and never understood why women would hear such a story and not snicker. And as for worship in general: why in the world would perfection need worship? Ever since I heard Aristotle’s conclusions about the “unmoved mover” that spends its time contemplating its own wonderfulness I realized that that was the only truly logical conclusion one could come to about a perfect god. But then, Aristotle actually knew logic….
I’ve always been curious why religious folks are ready to worship their god for the very traits they’d abhor in another person.
I suspect they imagine themselves with god-like powers and those very traits, and it makes them happy. But I have no evidence with which to back that up.
Damn it! Tulse @19 beat me too it, except my line was going to be “If the biblical god was real? I’d put all my money into iron chariots.”
It would be a wise investment.
if god can do anything, can he make a rock so heavy even he can’t lift it?
Did you not get the memo?
Fans of Derrick Rose and the Chicago Bull should get this joke.
What do you mean no good alternative? If the being they call YHWH is shown to exist, there are any number of things to be done.
Our moral imperative is clear. We must destroy him at all costs.
He’s afraid of iron chariots, he can hardly tell one of his followers from their oppressors without the stench of hemoglobin to identify them, and I don’t think I need to mention the score of slack-jawed worshippers we’ll have at our disposal as various forms of cannon fodder. Sure, he’s got a standing (flying?) army, but that only further demonstrates his vulnerability, and if a sizeable contingent of them could rebel once, I’ll bet more could be persuaded a second time.
Pragmatically, forget the trumpets used to topple Jericho; how many walled cities do you suppose could stand up to a WalMart full of American Christians lobbed their way?
“Hey, Eric Hovind: wanna get close to God? I mean, real close? Just sit right there. What are you, about 180ish? Perfect. Let me dial that in, and you just hold on. You ever played Angry Birds? No? Good. Now, just close your eyes and pray.”
[Sproing! Thunk!]
“Bam! Right in the fucking eye! Try picking off us motes with that timber-headed dolt lodged in your lacrimal, asshole!”
The one thing we’ll need to do in preparation is steel ourselves against the possibility God might come to seduce us with one of his more humorous and/or sonorous-voiced avatars, such as George Burns or Morgan Freeman.
If their god really existed, “Go to hell” would be a compliment.
@26: These godbots, they remind me of agent Smith clones.
By numerosity, maybe. But by competence? Agent Smith at least gave Neo a run for his money. The Hovind-clones? Imagine Neo wading into a sea of yapping teacup chihuahuas.
The Bible itself seems to hint at the way to defeat its god, in this verse from Genesis regarding the Tower of Babel:
“The LORD said, ‘If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them.'”
Sounds to me like if we can just pull together, victory is all but assured.
A trawl through the Old Testament reveals that Yahweh was not originally all knowing or all powerful or even the only god in the game. People developed the concept that modern theists would recognise over a very long time. When I read the Bible all the way through, I was surprised not only by the fact that the god that Christians regard as all good is in fact pretty evil, but also by the fact that he is also rather stupid.
As for fighting this god, he does in fact exist but only in the minds of those who believe in him. That is, like Tinkerbell, only gods that are believed in exist. We joke about Odin, Thor and Zeus, but no one thinks that these gods actually exist or accuses you of being an arrogant, dogmatic atheist for stating that they don’t. That is why gods are afraid of atheists, by diminishing the number of believers that they have, we force them to die the death of a thousand paper cuts until they join all those other gods in the graveyard of no longer believed in gods.
So all it takes to defeat this god dude is a bunch of cars?
No wonder he’s been so scarce.
if i know god exists i would shake his hand and kick him in the balls(or whatever) at the same time. and then i would give him a wet willy get him in a full nelson and make him say uncle a hundred time.
but i know better don’t i!
I’d probably look for a stronger god to stand up to this cosmic tyrant. Odin looks like a good bet.
“Bam! Right in the fucking eye! Try picking off us motes with that timber-headed dolt lodged in your lacrimal, asshole!”
please tell me you at least at some point have considered doing standup?
Angel, Wes, Gunn and Lorne needed a car to get to Pylea.
I’d have to put myself into the ‘fight him’ category as well. I figured that any god that would give black people nothing but martyrs and abuse in the world that he created probably just throws everyone into hell anyway just for the sick fun of it.
I’d probably look for a stronger god to stand up to this cosmic tyrant. Odin looks like a good bet.
and, let us not forget about his son, Thor, who carries a hammer…
If god existed, I’d probably worship God’s father, El. You know, the one with three wives (who were also his sisters) and who had many sordid sexual adventures.
He seems far more badass than Yahweh.
There deity would net naught but derision, fear, and hatred from me were it to exist. I don’t know how anyone can find that farce comforting and still look at themselves in the mirror.
and by the way, Saint Isaac of Asimov wrote a book called IN THE BEGINNING. Asimov does his thing with the first part of the book of Genesis. He compares the story with the science. Excelent info for someone like me that doesn’t know sheite from shinola.
Ichthyic,
Is it an iron hammer?
Actually, the fact that logic exists and is consistent would seem to at least be consistent with the idea of a universe that functions in the absence of an intervening god.
If, for instance, “a=b, b=c, therefore a=c” was randomly not always true, that might be a hint of some omnipotent intervention in the order of things.
Janine: And my favorite thing about Angel was “Not Fade Away.” Just because fighting supernatural tyrants was a doomed exercise was no reason not to do it. “I’ll take the 20 on the left, you take the 50 on the right.”
Numfar! Do the dance of joy!
Imagine Neo wading into a sea of yapping teacup chihuahuas.
naww, chihuahuas still have teeth.
these clowns have no teeth, even.
at first I was thinking an army of hagfish, but then reconsidered since hagfish slime is actually an effective deterrent.
so… what WOULD a good analogy be, given that it has to be numerous and mildly irritating, but also completely toothless and ineffective?
pollen?
plant sperm is mildly irritating…
I’ve always wanted to slay a dragon.
I.e., superior technology, for that time.
And such a low level of technology, comparatively speaking, to successfully thwart the Will of an omnipotent, omniscient god! Did he not know anything about Sidewinder missiles? bombing drones?
I’d say that our (meaning, humanity’s) chances of winning this fight have never been better.
–
“God” as an Iron Age Mary Sue? Yeah…*looking at certain fundies of my acquaintance*…I’d buy that. “If I was a god, there’d be a smiting the likes of which the world has never seen. Yeah! Damned neighbors, letting their dog crap in my yard, owning a nicer car, living in a bigger house….*subsiding to grumbles* Yeah, you bet!”
–
Is it an iron hammer?
don’t know, but you of course know that hammers are good for hitting nails with…
Ragweed leaves me dripping and sneezing.
Those clowns could not even do that to me. They just made me giggle.
I thought it was more because they believed that god was on their side and was defending them/empowering them against the people that they loathed. That would be more of a “he’s a psychopath, but he’s our psychopath” justification.
I.e., superior technology, for that time.
not necessarily.
could be that the “iron” part is what is the effective issue.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_in_folklore
I had a cat long ago that coughed up this astounding hairball one day. It was ginormous, and the reek coming off it was vile. But I couldn’t stop staring at it, because it looked like a little person. A little hairball-person, with arms and legs made out of dripping, matted hair and half-digested cat food, and a head that I am pretty sure was made from chewed up corn and a nickle. I know that the cat didn’t intentionally form it into a little hairball-person in his gut, like a gastrointestinal Houdini-Picasso hybrid cat, but it sure looked like there was some intelligence behind it. I stared and stared, but eventually the fact that I was looking at a pile of cat vomit sank in, and I turned away in disgust.
I had the same feeling when I read that thread.
@ichthyic
Or Shadow, who carries an existential burden.
Aww shucks, thanks. [Blushing.] It’s religious belief that’s so ludicrous it’s funny; I’m just pointing it out.
I posted the following on the other thread, but thought it might be useful to share here.
To the christians:
Adorable undetectable purple aliens control human governments. The aliens are quarrelsome and thus human governments are often at war. However, if you give the aliens’ human representatives money, status and power, they will ask the aliens to be less quarrelsome. I know this because the aliens favor me and place this information in my mind.
An undetectable supreme being created a world in six days. The supreme being is vain, vengeful, and cruel, so it endorsed genocide, slavery, sexism and homophobia. However, if you give this undetectable supreme being’s human representatives money, status, and power, they will communicate to the supreme being and ask it to intercede beneficially to those who worship the supreme being. This knowledge was obtained from those whom the supreme being favors by placing the information into their minds.
Neither one of these arguments can be disproved. They can’t be disproved because both the adorable purple aliens and the supreme being are, by definition, undetectable. Ideas that by definition cannot be disproved are called logically unverifiable ideas. The number of logically unverifiable ideas is infinite. Since these kinds of ideas cannot, by definition, by disproved, they get dismissed out of hand.
Knowing basic logic is a useful thing. You might want to consider that as you ineptly attempt to use logic to prove the existence of your logically unverifiable god idea.
I’ve always found it amusing that christians use the “you can’t disprove a god exists” as evidence for their idea of a god. If they understood logic and its consequences, they would understand that not being able to disprove their god idea is why it gets dismissed.
My high school teachers in the seventies were right when they said prop 13 (I’m in CA) would compromise public education. I don’t think anyone realized until the Hovinds in the world hit the internet just how badly public school education has been hit.
christian = logically compromised, which is a polite way of saying, christian = really stupid.
i heard that all the viking heroes taken to Valhalla by the Valkyries are not having fun there but waiting for the final battle. the final battle is one they know they can not win but they fight because they are warriors and heroes. Odin will not win either but he will fight like there is no tomorrow.
i hope there is some accuracy to what i wrote as the Norse Gods are real Gods.
I’d “worship” it.
In the Old Testament, worship seemed to consist of burning the occasional sheep.
A small price to pay to avoid eternal damnation.
If you knew that God exists, would you worship Him?
No. I’d start asking It a lot of questions. The first one that came to mind as I was thinking about this… Why’d you even let that horrible Hitler character to be born? Seems like there’s something you could have done to stop that.
Is it an iron hammer?
I got curious, so I looked it up.
turns out, yeah, Mjolnir is made of iron; and gold.
*applause, confetti, roses* for Brownian @34.
Hmmm….iron chariots….cold iron….I see a pattern, here.
Aaaaand….the Big G is revealed as….a fairy. One of a whole race of ’em.
And not even a particularly smart one, either.
–
Why’d you even let that horrible Hitler character to be born? Seems like there’s something you could have done to stop that.
If it could answer, it probably would tell you it wouldn’t have helped. There were plenty of replacements available at the time.
So maybe I’ve been reading an awful lot of Lovecraft lately, but if the god that Hovind’s cultists (and hey, let’s face it, most gods period, including the “mainstream” Xtians) worship existed, the result would be horrifying. Like Dunwich, but worse. People like Hovind and co. deserve the kind, tolerant approach shown to all bloody death cultists in say, a game of Call of Cthulhu.
Absolutely not. I’d have a metric fucktonne of questions though.
the is way off but some of you folks seem to be able to set down thoughts that are odd.
I thought maybe you might like to enter a contest at u cal. san jose. Bulwer–Lytton Fiction Contest
samples: http://www.bulwer-lytton.com/2011.htm
“It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents, except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.”
If you knew that God exists, would you worship Him?
I always get a shocked look from my believer friends when I answer that question. If it were proved to my satisfaction that such an entity existed why in the world would I worship it? Besides, if you really look at the wording of the first commandment… “You will worship no other god but me” is NOT the same as “Worship me.”
Not to mention that recurring “King of kings, Lord of lords” line… Well I’m not a king or a lord.
Well, that depends. If God is truly benevolent, by a normal and sane definition, then worshiping him would be immaterial. What sort crazy bastard would torture people forever for simply not believing he exists? Shit, what sort of insane bastard would torture people forever for any fucking reason? Any entity that would torture people forever cannot be said to be benevolent at all. So there’s no real need to worship this God. Fuck, I would argue that a truly benevolent deity that looks at us as his children would hope that we could live good lives without depending on him. As a parent, I want my child to grow up strong and independent, not forever deferring to myself and her mother.
So, if a benevolent god that sees us as his children exists, I doubt strongly that he want our worship. Considering the complete lack of evidence for the existence of any deity, if there is a god, he probably wants us to be atheists and figure out life for ourselves.
Now, if there is a Hell, then that god is a malevolent despot. He has created a world, and stacked the deck against the vast majority of people. People are being condemned to hell forever. Worshiping this God requires you pick the right god out of the god line up. So by being born into the family that backs the wrong version, or just simply believing someone who incorrectly interpreted the holy book, or whatever justifies this bastard’s condemnation of people to hell? The only dodge for this is to load the question so that everyone knows which god is the true god.
And finally, if there were more than one god, I would worship the one that had the best bribe. Fuck ideology in this case, I want some good divine intervention. Come on Gods, I need a new pair of everything!
Caine: I’m with you. Why should I worship a misogynistic, paternalistic, homicidal, homophobic, perverted disgusting, hateful, unforgiving, wrathful, genocidal god?
I believe the noted theologian J. Joplin, made a similar point.
As for me, if I met such a being, I think I would paraphrase the question of another noted religious thinker, J. T. Kirk, and say “Excuse me…I’d just like to ask a question. What does an omnipotent being need with worship?”
Okay, you guys hold the god off with your iron tanks long enough for my team to break into Eden and get the fruit from the Tree of knowledge, we’ll reconnoiter, have a fruit-feast, become like the god, and kick its sorry ass.
I’d worship Ganesha if he existed. He likes sweets and helps smooth obstacles from your path, especially financial obstacles. Laddoos are tasty. Also Saraswati is a nice goddess, she’s all about music and the arts and intellectual achievement.
Yahweh, not so much. That guy is like a celestial toddler. Always throwing temper tantrums because people don’t believe in him enough. Doing stupid things and then blaming his creation for it.
I’m all about worshipping Aphrodite…..
And hey, at least the Indian pantheon produced the Kama Sutra….sorta.
So, while you’re in there, be sure to pick up some fruit from the Treat of Life, too. That way we’ll not only be like god, but also immortal!
BTW, anyone know to whom god is speaking to when he says they are “like one of us”?
Err. “Tree of Life”. Stupid autocorrect fail.
BTW, anyone know to whom god is speaking to when he says they are “like one of us”?
Asherah?
BTW, anyone know to whom god is speaking to when he says they are “like one of us”?
…alternatively…
Haven’t you ever watched Mr. Deity?
I’ve been seriously tempted to drop some His Dark Materials spoilers, but resisted. Man, what good books.
Hmm.. Atheists fighting a war against god once he showed his face. Could make a good story. But it would have to end with the cliched, “the main character was insane”.
McWaffle:
I think most people here read those long ago. Now, if we’re talking daemons, I’m all for it. Much rather have a daemon than a god with a nasty insecurity complex.
@86
I had a friend make it all the way to book 3 then drop out during the climactic battle. He said he just couldn’t get into it, but I think it’s just because he didn’t like the idea of fighting against God. It’s the action sequence, you’d think it’d be most exciting.
Atheists fighting a war against god once he showed his face. Could make a good story.
It’s already been done, decades ago, by Michael Moorcock.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corum_Jhaelen_Irsei
of course, when it comes down to it, technically nobody would be an atheist if they are actually fighting a god now, would they?
you’d for sure recognize there is a “god”, just not that it is omnipotent, nor benevolent, nor indestructible.
again, this is pretty much what Corum figured out in the “Swords Trilogy”, before taking it upon himself to wipe them all off the face of the planet.
great bit of fantasy, that.
Jesus Christ, which fucking god am I supposed to worship?
The light and fluffy one?
The one that wants me to sell my daughter?
The one that wants me to cut a piece of my son’s dick off?
Or the fire and brimstone massacre all of its enemies god?
Maybe we’ve all been fooled and Thor is up there in Valhalla with his wife, Proserpina laughing at how most of humanity is worshiping a Hebrew shepherd who didn’t really exist.
spoiler alert, but just so you know it’s worth reading to the end…
I’m going to take our off-topic and run with it, because I too have long been fascinated by the implications of rebelling against an omniscient and omnipotent being.
For starters, god must have known what Lucifer would do from the very beginning, so Lucifer’s “rebellion” must have been part of god’s “plan” (unless we’re also adding “incompetent” to the list of adjectives describing The World’s Most Acceptable Imaginary Friend™), which means that god wanted a bunch of “fallen” angels running around for some reason. Especially since the “omnipotent” thing implies that god could have wiped the lot of them out whenever he wanted – and still can.
What I’ve always wondered is whether god created Lucifer as a total moron who doesn’t grasp that he’s a tool or if Lucifer knows he’s doing what god intended him to do all along, especially since the same question applies to any Christian who truly believes that god is both omniscient and omnipotent.
Because if that were actually true, the whole “free will” bit becomes a total red herring.
I’ve always thought Calvinists seemed to be the most honest about all of this.
I’ve also thought that Judas is the most horribly ill-used and abused character in the bible, beating out Job by a frickin’ mile; he gets punished and vilified for doing exactly what god required him to do as part of “the plan.”
So, if god already knows how everything plays out and he can change the game whenever he wants to be whatever he wants it to be and to effect whatever outcomes he wants, it seems reasonable to conclude that god wants a whole lot of suffering, a whole lot of death, a whole lot of eternal torture, and a whole lot of incredibly stupid and unperceptive sycophants telling him how awesome he is for the rest of eternity.
But he wants them all to feel like they deserve the lot he’s decided they should have in life, since he’s making them go through the motions instead of just creating the situation he wants de novo.
What an asshole.
And he’s got a pathetically fragile ego for someone who’s both omniscient and omnipotent.
Plus, given that he’s rigged the game, he’s also rather petty.
On a side note, what do you call a Xanatos Gambit if you’re omniscient and omnipotent? A Xanatos Wank?
Also, how about summoning the Justice League of Really Pissed-Off Forgotten-About Gods?
Hey if cheesus was the incarnation of god, as they claim and he would come back again, we could crucify him again, it´s what tyrants get. And he seemed to be very mortal the last time.
I don’t see how logic can exist without intelligence. It doesn’t prove God of course, but I think you took it one step too far.
I’ve also thought that Judas is the most horribly ill-used and abused character in the bible, beating out Job by a frickin’ mile; he gets punished and vilified for doing exactly what god required him to do as part of “the plan.”
but Judas getting punished and vilified was obviously ALSO part of the plan.
it fits right in with the rest of Yahweh’s twisted agenda.
Wooooow! That was quite the pack of idiots.
I don’t see how logic can exist without intelligence.
no, the ability to analyze whether something fits the definition of “logical” requires some level of intelligence.
logic itself does not require it.
I encountered God in a dream not too long ago. His face sort of resembled some kind of African tribal ceremonial mask.
I was sitting on a sleeping bag in a lighted room cradling a beautiful baby boy, whose name, I think, was “Lentil” (a name which sounded Old Testament-y to my dreaming brain) and I noticed God sitting a few feet away on another sleeping bag.
He told me, “You must take the baby Lentil down to the churchyard and lay him to rest.”
Me: “But he’s not dead.”
God: “He is sickly and must be laid to rest.”
Me: “Who the hell are you to tell me to bury this baby alive?”
God: “I am ALMIGHTY GOD.”
Me: “Oh yeah, right.”
I awoke before I was forced to disobey God.
Pretty sure it was the Old Testament God, too; you know that guy wouldn’t flinch at ordering his subjects to bury babies alive.
Worship him? Not hardly.
Which would seem to be creating as much sturm und drang as possible to stave off eternity’s inevitable boredom.
Welcome to the Cosmic Soap Opera, suckers!
Remind me; why do xians believe this stuff, again?
@Janine:
DK FTW
I don’t know, ‘omnipotent’ and ‘omniscient’ from the perspective of Bronze Age goatherds probably isn’t that high a bar by modern standards. Remember that this was the guy who was stymied by iron chariots, how is he going to react to a main battle tank or a helicopter gunship?
As for myself, I would never worship anything so capricious and evil. If it was truly omniscient, it would know that any pretence I put up was a lie, so there would be no point anyway. Let it take its best shot. Kill me, send me to hell, I won’t bend the knee unless it alters my mind by changing my brain chemistry, which is as good as an admission of defeat.
Besides, I have seen tough-talking jerks before. My money is that, if Yahweh did exist, he would have quite the glass jaw…
Also, if evidence goes out the window, then why shouldn’t Cthulhu exist as well? I say we summon the scion of the Elder Gods, and arrange for a little death-match between it and Yahweh. It should be easy enough, just tell Cthulhu that Yahweh was dissing his face-tentacles. You know it is on then.
Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn
My money is on the non-Euclidean, tentacled death god, but even if Yahweh should get lucky, it doesn’t matter. Remember;
If God existed?
I’d introduce him to Kent Hovind, Ray Comfort and Ken Ham (and WL Craig, and every theologian ever, and the Pope, and the Phelpses, and Andrew Sullivan, and the Australian Christian Lobby and show him a few million comment threads full of godbots, creationist copy-pasters and liars-for-Jesus).
Then I’d belt him with a rolled up newspaper and say “BAD GOD! BAD!!”
Then he’d look at me with his big puppy-god eyes and I’d give him a cuddle. I think he will have learned his lesson.
Remind me; why do xians believe this stuff, again?
quite simple.
they were told to.
tons of direct evidence to support this, and indirect evidence in the form of those that WEREN’T forced to believe this nonsense, very rarely do.
Then he’d look at me with his big puppy-god eyes and I’d give him a cuddle. I think he will have learned his lesson.
More likely he’d just slaughter them all.
…and then you, because you tattled on them.
We’ve had Eric boring the tits off us about this a couple of times on the Fundamentally Flawed podcast, it’s painful.
http://fundamentally-flawed.com/2011/10/01/fundamentally-flawed-podcast-13-sye-and-eric-special/
http://fundamentally-flawed.com/2011/10/30/fundamentally-flawed-podcast-18-eric-hovind-and-dustin-segers-special/
I see Sye Ten Bruggencate has turned up as well, we’ve had him on a couple of times – http://fundamentally-flawed.com/2011/10/15/fundamentally-flawed-podcast-15-dustin-segers-and-sye-ten-bruggencate/ and http://fundamentally-flawed.com/2011/10/25/special-%e2%80%93-alex-vs-sye/ – he’s infinitely worse than Eric, he’s literal podcast poison, the most annoying man I’ve ever talked to.
Shibujiro #94 wrote:
Depends on what you mean by “logic.” Is it the necessary consistencies in relationships or the way we describe them?
Here’s someone (a Reformed Christian — this originally came out of Calvinism surprise surprise) defending the presupp:
Isn’t that clever? Everything is faith. Even analytical truths. Oh, right.
As has been already pointed out, the desire to “test” the preconditions for testability already assumes those same preconditions. The question is irrational. It’s self-refuting. Obvious, necessary, accepted assumptions are not baseless matters of “faith.”
Peel it down far enough and presuppositional apologetics reduce to “everyone knows deep down that God exists.” It’s not a real argument meant to persuade: it’s a scold meant to shame and evoke confession.
I call it the “Neener Neener School of Debate.” And it’s freakin’ hilarious that someone with such a virulent form of empirical argument for God (Hovind and his ‘scientific’ evidence for Young Earth Creationism) is reverting to what amounts to a postmodern-style rejection of empirical arguments for God.
Any port in a storm, I guess.
Shorter Reformed Christian claim: “There’s nothing we can’t faith up.”
Good point Ichthyic (104/105). I forgot who we’re dealing with here: a negligent, abusive parent who’ll throw you in a furnace (but not let you die) if you don’t believe his prophets, a jealous and petulant child, an alleged omniscient that’s clearly impotent against the one sub-deity to ever rebel against him (http://generalsystemsvehicle.blogspot.com/2011/01/re-post-theatre-fixing-christianity.html) and a genocidal rapist.
I’d still whop him with fucking newspaper though – the Saturday edition with all the extra crap in it.
Don’t forget, the biblical account of hell is way old. By now, they’ve probably invented the necessary technology for air conditioners. So it won’t be so bad; I’ll go hang out down there in the cool-kinds’ section.
Alex Botten @ 106:
You had to endure a conversation with Sye “HOW DO YOU KNOW THAT” TenB? I think the flames of Hell would be a relief after talking to that childish buffoon. I still have nightmares after reading a protracted exchange between him and Stephen Law. Pre-sups blow my mind – in my book they’re on a par with solipsists as being utterly pointless to discuss anything with. Even what to have for lunch.
Just a side note, but while YHWH was defeated by chariots in Judges 1:19, he has been able to turn the table on chariotteers later:
(Judges 4:14-15)
Of course, since it took G. over a century to work out a solutions (the second chariot battle apparently happened several generations after the first), he’s a slow learner and should still easily succumb to the modern technology.
By now, they’ve probably invented the necessary technology for air conditioners. So it won’t be so bad; I’ll go hang out down there in the cool-kinds’ section.
fo shizzle!
don’t forget to check out the endless campy sci-fi marathon I’ve been running down there for yonks now.
I hired Joel Hodgson to host it.
just turn right at the entrance gates, go past the pool of mutant sharks, and it’s right there.
can’t miss it.
the LORD routed Sisera and all his chariots
no, see, those weren’t IRON chariots.
that’s why he could win.
Mandrellian @111:
Yeah, I’ve spoken to him more than once, though I did boot him off the show the second time after he repeatedly asked ‘How do you know that?’ to everything myself and the other host said.
The last time was this one – http://fundamentally-flawed.com/2011/10/25/special-%e2%80%93-alex-vs-sye/ – just him and me, when I listened back I was amazed at how calm I sounded (even if I did divert in to a bit of woo and mentioned quantum immortality to shut him up).
Truly he’s one of the worst people alive, and Hovind Jnr has learned all his presup bullshit from him. I firmly believe they use it as a smoke screen to avoid ever having to discuss anything that might have evidence to contradict it.
Cool, I’ll be there. Next Sunday, AD.
Cool, I’ll be there. Next Sunday, AD.
next sunday, last thursday, AD, BC, BCE…
don’t matter in hell!
@ Ichtyic:
Verse 3 of the same chapter says they were nine hundred chariots fitted with iron.
Perhaps we now know roughly when the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch first appeared.
Glen Davidson
Yeah, that thread went nutso.
My favorites:
Them arguing that immutable physical laws show the existence of God. Actually, the fact that an object at rest tends to stay at rest is pretty good evidence that there aren’t any demons and angels pushing it around. Which leads to …
Them saying that you can’t be sure of anything without God. Actually, if God exists, all forms of surety are oot the windae. Miracles would be happening, demons would be attacking, mountains would be moving, prayers would be granted, and laws (both of nature and man) would be broken. And the God of the Bible would be fucking you over for a bet with the Devil (blessings on his horny hooves).
Them thinking that if they could find one slight flaw in anything we think, our whole belief system would come crashing down. Actually, it isn’t a belief system, it’s science, and it isn’t that fragile. If we find an error, we award the finder a Nobel Prize, check everything, and move on with a new and better approach to the truth.
Them quoting Bible verses. I think their overall goal was to show they had consistency, and we don’t. But it is really hard to make a case without using science and/or logic, and they didn’t have anything but faith.
According to the propaganda he’s a narcissistic, sadistic bully with the emotional maturity of a spoiled six year old. In other words, a typical god.
Verse 3 of the same chapter says they were nine hundred chariots fitted with iron.
damn.
there goes the cold iron hypothesis.
maybe he figured out some way to shield himself?
…or maybe Glen is right, and he simply destroyed all the chariot with standard explosive devices before they could get close.
@91 Gaebolga
I’ve always assumed that the whole omnipotence thing is propaganda after the fact. Lucifer, the highest of the angels, was in the best position to know what this god guy is capable of. So if Luci thinks the rebellion has a chance, I believe him.
So he and his followers take up arms and god just barely squeaks out a win, kicking Lucifer to earth, but not able to kill him. Now Lucifer has a planet full of potential recruits which could swing the balance of power his way, so god has to put out his manifesto where he claims the whole thing was a divine plan from the get-go.
So if we get enough of us together, side against the insane genocidal god and arm ourselves with iron, we really could kill god.
Of course, that’s all assuming that one of the drooling godbots can actually convince us that he exists in the first place. (On a related note: it was the whole ridiculousness of an angel rebellion that got me asking questions about the babble in the first place)
there goes the cold iron hypothesis.
maybe he figured out some way to shield himself?
I have to admit I like Glen Davidson’s explaination better. And him using ranged weapon (sort of ) would be an obvious solution if the iron is the actual godkiller.
One religion I would consider following if it existed is Sci-fi author John Ringo’s version of Satanism. Imagine an Irish Catholic colony planet that collapses back into religious warfare. One side demonizes its opponents, calling them Satanists. The Satanists eventually win and overturn Christianity, on the grounds that obviously the Xians are all wrong. Their theology goes like this:
Paradise Lost is propaganda. Satan didn’t rebel against God, the other angels did. And they won. And the winners write the history books, so Michael, Gabriel etc look like the good guys but aren’t — they are actually imprisoning God, and Satan is trying to free Him. Eventually, the Satanists expect to be fighting on Satan’s side at Armageddon, to rescue God from the angels.
The proof that God is imprisoned in Heaven? Well, the universe wouldn’t be so crappy if He was still in charge, would it? :p
@ Gaebolga
You may be interested in checking outGnostic Gospel of Judas. It’s a total trip, Judas is the hero and he’s just doing what Jesus wanted him to when he handed him over. And not only that but he is the only who truly understood Jesus’ teachings and the other 11 apostles got it wrong. All the gnostic gospels pretty much say what we know as canonical Christianity has got it wrong, terribly wrong…
Well we all know who won out in the end.
PZ wrote
sigh…. I feel like that everyday. Right now even.
If you knew that God exists, would you worship Him?
Well, seeing as “he” has had no discernible influence on the observable universe for going on close to 14 billion years. I think I’d just follow “his” lead and ignore “him”.
I’m cheating a bit, God could exist and be doing all sorts of things over on the other side of the universe where it is physically impossible for us to detect it, but hopefully the point is clear. If it exists, it clearly isn’t particularly interested in being worshiped by humanity seeing as it never interacts with us; so why should we be worshipful?
Otherwise, I’m not sure I could drive an iron chariot, do you think a aluminium bicycle would work?
Shibujiro #94 wrote:
@107
seems self-consciousness of the human type is required to “know” about logic and intelligence and those sort of things.
Well, it`s never said that he is HELPLESS against iron, only that it causes problems for him. I mean, humans are vulnerable to teeth and claws, but with proper preparation and planning we can win in combat against lions and bears.
So if 900 chariots wasn`t enough, we`ll just have to up the ante to 9000 Merkavas.
Their primary approach is to assert that because logic exists, god exists, and therefore any attempt to apply reason to a problem is evidence for god.
Presuppers. That cock-sucker Eric has brought in Presuppers.
What’s even worse? I know DAMNED well just who the guy is who started him off on this shit, since that bit PZ mentioned right above is right out of this fucker’s playbook.
For those who’re interested, an actual philosopher has dealt with this character before.
The link is to the philosopher’s site, not the site of the presupper.
That same presupper is seen on another atheists site here.
If anyone feels masochistic they can go to either of those two blogs and click on the presupper’s name and go to his sites, one of whom is Eric Hovind’s blog. Yep, he’s a fellow writer of Hovind’s blog.
To top it off, the guy who’s behind this is a CANADIAN.
I am so fucking, fucking, sorry.
I won’t link it directly here or mention his name.
Ok, I see that I was beaten to the punch here by Alex.
Maybe I should actually READ before I post, eh?
Never mind then. Still, my first link, to Stephen Law’s blog is still informative.
Amphiox: How about some Titanium sheathing and explosive reactive armor on those things? That might do the trick.
@ ichthyic #95
Can you explain a little how logic doesn’t require intelligence? I think of logic as method for, say, processing a group of fact (the facts I agree do not require intelligence) to derive other facts. It is this processing, and the rules under which this processing is conducted, that constitutes logic. Perhaps you’re thinking of the premises and conclusions themselves which I think PZ may have been referring to. But these are just facts, not logic. Of course the facts themselves don’t require intelligence for their existence (although intelligence is required for the comprehension of these facts, which might be what you’re referring to with your comment above).
Compare computer logic: it’s called computer logic because it is the rules that are necessary for processing data to arrive at the desired output. I hope you’ll concede that at least computer logic requires intelligence for its existence, namely ours.
No, you’re fine. I appreciate your description of Eric son-of-convicted-criminal-daddy Hovind. And I appreciate your delicacy in NOT linking to either Hovind or SyTenborg, gawd forbid they get any more legitimacy.
Thanks for the link to Law’s site. Sounds like I have some reading to do !
I kinda like Tak, the Dwarfs’ god in the discworld series.
He made stuff, told the dwarfs to think for themselves, and left.
Maybe the Lucifer character is more awesome than we imagine, and even though he knows for certain that he’s going to fail and suffer eternal punishment, he rebels against the god character out of principle.
Now that would be something worthy of a god.
How do they reconcile Gödel’s incompleteness theorems with a god that is both logical and omniscient?
Because of it, if god is omniscient it means that he must know some things from outside of logic but if god is logical how can that be?
Logic can be either the process by which one assesses the validity of one’s concepts according to a self-consistent set of rules, or it can be the internal system of rules that we attempt to process.
If we all got wiped out tomorrow by a virulent virus, the logic of computers would still exist, at least for a little while, despite there being no one around to perceive it. Similarly, the logic of evolution would still exist even if no intelligent species ever evolved to grasp it.
Gods aren’t that scary after all the graveyard of the gods is full to bursting. I’m sure they still have room for Yahweh and his son. All you need to kill a god is to cut of the oxygen of their worshippers, without them it is a house build on sand.
Gaebolga,
In terms that they understand, perhaps not, but I would take Judas’ place a million times over Job’s. Job ends up profiting on the deaths of his original family. The callous elevation of man to family and the depression of non-father value in that tale is more than enough to make me spit and curse at an evil demon who would pretend to worth.
Would he care if I didn’t?
Presuppers are the lowest of the low. Martin Luther was right when he said Reason is a whore, but in an enlightened society we punish the pimps and the johns. And the presuppositionalists are about the worst and most toxic examples.
It’s like watching someone take a useful machine and slowly mangle newborn babies with it, a complete and utter perversion.
And if you are wondering, as you stand in line to have Ghey Secks with Brownian, why the bloody line is so long, all you have to do is read @34.
AlteredStory:
That sort of a god doesn’t ask for or require worship.
Someone upthread mentioned the dwarf god Tak. The little bits of “scripture” that begin Thud just show how badly written the Bible is. And at least these scriptures make a little bit of sense. The first thing Tak did, he wrote himself.
“Him who raise him head above him heart, Him Diamond” See YHWH, even a stupid troll (the real kind, not the kind that hang around here) can figure that out.
There are some nice sections in the Bible, but if it is supposed to be the word of God, why can a mere man write so much more appealing scripture? Hmmm?
Presuppers are what you would call appetizers. Now would you say that to maintain an orderly society you would have to get rid of the “pimps and johns”? I know that Atheists have not been appreciative of the TAG argument that has been all over PZ’s blogs these days. Just to satisfy you momentarily, but also to make a point, I will make an evidential statement that points to the Truth of the Bible: There are millions upon millions of fossilized animals across the entire globe (even on Mt. Everest and the Teton Mts. of Wyoming). As scientists well know, fossils are only formed by the rapid burial of animals especially by massive amounts of water. The evidence across the world thus points to the fact that a global flood did occur at some point in time–this I would propose to be around 2400 B.C.
Yahweh is a tiny God, did you notice? A Bronze-age leftover with a huge ego and the mind of a petty Assyrian tyrant. If there is a God, it is so much bigger, better, more moral, and more universal than Yahweh that there’s no comparison.
I sometimes, when asked why I’m not a Christian by the fundier fundies, retort that I refuse to blaspheme any God that may exist by attributing Yahweh’s bullshit to it.
If I believed that the God of the Bible exists and if I believe that God wrote or inspired the writing of the Bible, I don’t know why I should worship him.
It’s already been stated that God is described as a malicious, violent, spoiled brat in his own Good Book – but even if we disregard the bad parts (as so many Christians do) I still don’t feel like anyone should be convinced.
The Bible is clearly written as propaganda (at least large parts of it). I say that it’s regular human propaganda, but even those who believe that God exists should see that it is propaganda for God. Now, if any Hovindites are reading this – I’m not saying that in a way that is supposed to be read as too derogatory. Propaganda can be based entirely on truths – I’m just saying that even if the Bible is based on truth, it’s obviously written to tell the story “God is great”.
Now, what rational person would ever believe that the people writing a piece of propaganda are telling us the whole story? Any brutal dictator worth his salt knows how to spin a story and get a big old “I’m so great”-text written about it.
Let’s say that the story about the Garden of Eden is based on truth. How do we then know that God isn’t the evil dictator torturing his creations trapped in Eden? How do we know that the serpent wasn’t actually the hero, liberating them from bondage? We have only the words from one side to go by. Why should I trust that God tells us the whole story, even if you can convince me that God exists? Maybe Satan has always been the good guy.
Today, many people talk about small events as if they were proof of God’s existence. One common example is someone with a deadly illness getting better without doctors being able to explain why. Now that is obviously not real proof of God – but even if you could prove that it was done by the hand of the God of the Bible, why should I worship him?
How is healing some cancer, some lupus or addiction proof of God’s benevolance? If we take into account all the innocent people – especially children – who die in treatable and untreatable horrible illnesses each day, I think it’s hard to see a case of cancer going into remission as anything other than a cheap trick. Like a brutal dictator going with a TV-crew to an orphanage and giving out toys for the children. His propaganda machine can spin it into him being a hero while not actually lying – just telling the truth about him giving toys to tots. The dictator scores points with the populace even as large parts of his country suffers.
How would a God that heals one person here, one person there while billions suffer be any different? He’d just be out for propaganda making him look good without actually doing much. Even the better miracles of the Bible (the ones not involving slaughter of the innocents) read like that.
I say that even if you could prove that the Bible is based on true stories, I’d want to hear the other side of the argument before I believe in God’s take on it. Where are Satan’s memoirs? If he’s real, I’d like to hear his story too. And of course independent evidence so we can judge if any of the accounts is closer to reality..
Whiskey-Tango-Foxtrot ?
This is a joke, right ? right ?
@Yo Yo Pa
You are either a terrible troll or a complete ignoramus. Plate tectonics, motherfucker, have you studied it?!
If your God is real I hope he throws you into Hell for being so ignorant that you turn off any potential converts with it.
And since we are talking about Job, I’d like to invite you to my favorite Youtuber’s series on Job right here.
@Yo Yo Pa #148
If no one else steps forward, I’ll happily explain why you are so very very wrong. But I’m not a geologist, and it seems unfair of me to steal such a nice juicy target away from from someone who’s life’s work you just pissed idiotic mythology all over.
Sorry, paleontology. I just got back from a site claiming the Grand Canyon is proof of the flood, and I got my wackos mixed up. Fossils would be a different discipline. My bad.
First of all I must ask how plate tectonics explain fossilization. I may not know something. Second, how could I turn a potential convert on by what I say? Third, you slightly proved the point I am trying to make through my comments: Any evidence claims will not be heeded, and thus the best argument and truly the only argument I can make is that since God exists, logic exists. This is contrary to the article to previous comments and the article we are commenting on, for the writer said “they believe that God exists because logic exists”. Ultimately, Without God (which is the starting point) we cannot know anything.
Both paleontologists and geologists study fossils. Some limestone rocks are made completely of fossils.
Yo Yo Pa We should talk
Yo Yo Pa, you’re dumber than a box of rocks.
Go away, learn at least as much reality as the rest of us did in middle school, then come back if you’re still interested in asking (real) questions.
Right now, you’re not even fit to waste time with.
I think evolution is Blasfemy
Yo Yo Pa, the brain absorbs facts without needing a magic man to hold its neurons.
Umm, yeah, dummy, that’s part of the evidence that demonstrates your idiot god never made a worldwide flood …
Jayzus, being religious just rots peoples’ brains to total mush. I can’t believe how stupid people can get, and still remember how to breathe.
Indeed, you may not know something.
Burial in mud under lots of water is just one way fossils form. Simple burial without the water will also suffice. Then there’s petrification, perimineralization, and replacement.
Plate tectonics explain how fossils that were once at the bottom of a sea ended up high in the mountains.
There’s no evidence that a global flood occurred at any point. 2400 BC is a particularly laughable date to propose for one though, since it’s so painfully easy to verify that there were continuous human settlements at various locations around the globe at that time.
Wow, the trolls are out in force tonight! Something about the phases of the moon, you think?
It seems you do not want to talk evidentially even–where you boast of being intelligent and able to defend your case properly. This again proves a point that you hate the Christian worldview–regardless of what it says. I doubt that you hate Zoroastrianists as much as believers in the God of the Bible.
@156
Plate tectonics explains the marine fossils at altitude, dipshit. In the roots and low altitudes of the Himalayas are large chunks of oceanic rock, basaltic and serpentine-enriched. This means upthrusting, which also takes layers of sedimentary rock with marine fossils in it up with it.
And to the moron who said evolution is “blasfemy,” listen and listen good, shitdrip: evolution is a fact. It’s better-proven and better-understood than gravity. If there is a God, that God used evolution to get us where we are now. Your refusal to acknowledge your God’s reality, your inisistence on slapping him in the face with your Bible, that is “blasfemy.”
And you can prove your god’s existence how?
Without proof, it’s completely illogical to believe in a god. Thus, any ‘logic’ dependent on a god would be completely illogical as well.
The answer can fit on a bumper sticker.
No god worthy of worship would require it.
Ok, I am glad someone explained how fossils can be found in the mountains via plate tectonics. Yet the fact that fossils formed in the bottom of the ocean means that the ocean must have filled very rapidly. Indeed, archeological digs have uncovered human remains and settlements. These were buried rapidly as well. The Bible clearly says that humans existed at the time of the global flood. Why do you think there are flood mythologies of some sort in virtually every remote people group–those that have not been affected by Western Society?
That’s it, God is an elf! (How much damage does He take from exposure as compared to insinuation?)
Things I hate about the Christian worldview:
1. Anti-woman
2. Anti-children
3. Justifies a whole lotta killing and genocide
4. Promotes mindless obedience to murderous tyrants
5. Discourages critical thinking and the advancement of science
I could go on.
Zoroastrians keep to themselves and don’t pass laws trying to tell me what I can do with my body or who I can and can’t marry. They don’t spam chat boards. They don’t knock on doors and get all preachy. They don’t bully LGBT kids to the point of suicide. They don’t deny women life-saving medical treatments. If they did, I’d be just as upset about them as I am about stupid ass Christians always trying to get up in my face.
Sally Strange, OM:
I gotta linky-link:
Scientists know nothing of the sort. This sentence is pure ignorance.
Also: Plate tectonics doesn’t explain fossilization. It explains the way the mantle of the earth has moved over the history of earth to create and destroy continents.
Damn it Randide, you made me laugh so hard I snorted beer out my nose. That hurts!
Nope.
From just before, and just after the date you proposed. If there were a flood at that date, you’d expect a cessation of the production of human artifacts in the immediate aftermath. Such is not the case.
This is just you making assertions without facts. You haven’t even specified which types of fossils you’re talking about. It’s so obvious that you’re either making it up as you go along, or, more likely, parroting something somebody told you, which you didn’t entirely understand.
It also says the flood wiped out all humans except for Noah and his family. Archeological, geological, and chromosomal evidence shows this is not true.
Because floods are a relatively common occurrence over human history, and ancient humans did not know how big the world was. They assumed that the land they could see was the whole world. Therefore a flood covering all the land they could see = a flood covering the whole world.
Easy peasy.
Why do you believe this malarkey?
Here, watch this. It demonstrates pretty well how fucking stupid and childish the flood story is.
I’m willing to bet that there are flood mythologies because in the past people have experienced big scary floods.
There are also tree mythologies. Probably because somewhere along the lines humans encountered forests.
If Zoroastrians (not Zoroastianists, you halfwit) were as determined to destroy civilization as the christian death cultists are, then yes we would hate them both.
But if you’re not a death cultist of any flavor, we don’t hate you. We just pity you for your religion-induced stupidity.
What “evidence” do you feel we have not talked about, that’s worth discussing intelligently ?
Your imaginary deity doesn’t exist, but logic does. Logic that came from evolution. Logic and senses that helped prey avoid predators, and predators to find prey. Going through hominids about 6,000,000 years ago, and ending in modern Homo sapiens 200,000 years ago. All without your imaginary deity, which didn’t arise until 2,500 years ago.
Nope. A local flood, not a world wide one time flood, could do that. As any intelligent person would know. What’s your excuse?
Local flooding occurs everywhere there is a river. DUH. The timing of the floods don’t match. Sorry, you lose…
They treat their god like it came already delivered up on a plate, rather than evolving over time as new ideas were encountered and different historical contexts emerged. So first, I’d have to ask “Which one?” One of the Mesopotamian creator gods of Genesis 1-3? The henotheistic tribal god of Judges? The Hellenic Logos of John? The omni everything trinity of the patristic period? The god who turns saints’ body parts into magical cure-alls? The unmoved mover of the Aristotelian Aquinas? The infant innocent who sits on the lap of a Raphaelite Queen of Heaven? The mystical god who gives orgasms to counter-Reformation saints? The cruel Calvinist god who’s just going through the motions to prove how bad-ass he is? The deistic god of the Enlightenment who sets the universe in motion and disappears never to be seen again?
Whatever answer I get though, the answer is I honestly can’t say what I’d do, since it would be a different universe than the one I live in and couldn’t possibly say how that would make a different me to be doing the worshipping.
Personally, I’m a polytheist at heart. Why choose just one? Worshipping Aphrodite with romance and sex, worshipping Athena with learning new stuff, worshipping Mars when you just have to kick some butt? But never, never, never could I imagine me as the person I am worshipping any of the Christian gods. They’re all pretty repulsive in their different ways.
Fuck…now we all have to learn Esperanto
The Zoros were nicer to women and slaves than x-ians.
That was awesome, Randide. The Onion wins again!
Like creator, like worshipers.
Tee hee hee. We’ve got a live one here, folks, Yo Yo Pa is actually crazy enough to believe in TE FLUD and dumb enough to admit it in public.
Oh, hell, I can’t laugh, really. It’s just too sad that in this day – with the evidence of science’s success in the very computer YYP used to type that insipid drek – that anyone could be so poisoned by religion. Just so sad, what a waste of a human mind. Poor Yo Yo Pa.
Apparently the Esperanto word for ‘peace’ is ‘bacon.’ I’m down with this idea.
Zoroastrianists are irrelevant to the societies we belong to. Compare this to fundamentalist Christians, who want to destroy science and deprive people of their rights because of some passage in the Bible, while ignoring other passages. Eaten any shrimp today, Yo? Or a cheesburger? Touched a woman having her period?
There are varves that go back 13,000 years. No sign of your global flood 2,500 years ago. You lie. But then, godbots/creobots always do…
Zoroastrianists [sic] produced Freddie Mercury. A Christian minister and his wife produced Katey Perry. I guess you’re right. I like Zoroastrianists [sic,again] better.
Well I’ve got to go guys. It was a pleasure. I have not given up in any way. I am talking to a Hindu friend of mine on skype right now. I hope to get in a somewhat similar discussion with him.
You must hate your “friend”
No doubt, you are too stupid to understand the scientific universe. If you did, you would never show your nym here again, as you were that outclassed.
they weren’t all buried at the same time.
you lose.
just that simple.
*headdesk*
is there really any point in bothering with this one?
Why bless your little heart ! It does you credit that you’re unselfishly trying to share your wisdom with the heathens. Why, even with the Hindus ! God give you strength for your good work, Yo Yo Pa.
it’s like trying to talk to someone who’s convinced themselves the Moon is made of cheese.
Is it any wonder we make fun of you?
you’re an ignorant jack ass.
You could fix that, but you won’t, so you make yourself a perfect target for ridicule.
You should hire yourself out as a dunk-tank specialist for children’s parties.
Nope.
Over in the other thread, we had Mac who states that he’s certain that things ALWAYS fall DOWN if you let go. And there’s gravity in space, too, where things fall down, you know, so … umm … god, you dumb atheists. TA-DA.
And here we’ve got the other one, who is too stupid to know that things USUALLY fall DOWN if nothing on the Earth’s surface is holding them up, so … umm … TE FLUD, and so … umm … god, you hateful atheists. TA-DA.
Damn idiots should have some kind of book that would tell them which story to believe, so they could at least be consistent with one another.
Oh, wait.
“If you knew that God exists, would you worship Him?”
Indeed, what does god want with a starship?
If Yo-Yo Ma plays the cello, does Yo Yo Pa play the world’s tiniest violin?
What does this even mean?
Damn idiots should have some kind of book that would tell them which story to believe, so they could at least be consistent with one another.
there are dozens of different versions of that now, and 40 THOUSAND different sects surrounding the last half of the various versions alone.
Christianity = complete fail, no matter what perspective you look at it from, unless the perspective is maximizing chaos.
compare to Judaism.
at last check I think it has less than a handful of recognized sects…
interesting, eh?
[OT]
Esperanto ‘peace’ is NOT “bacon”, but paco, pronounced [patso], NOT [pako]. The -n is the accusative ending, as used in greetings, thus “pacon”. (Apparently there is a controversy in the movement if the ending should be omitted or not. Research articles speak of “accusative apologists”)
[/OT]
probably not, but I do. In fact, I just stopped playing it for him.
no point, really.
Insects have been found in amber, the petrified form of tree sap so don’t say ‘only formed …’.
Also no evidence of a single catastrophic drowning incident. Lots of animals and plants died and happened to get buried in shallow lake and sea areas over the entire geologic history of the planet.
OK, Yoyo.
Explain koalas. Bear in mind these grumpy little buggers are dear to my heart as we raised several in our house when I was young, and I got to know them and their habits intimately. Suffice it to say I’ll know if you’re bullshitting.
So, for fifty points:
Explain how koalas got from the only place they exist – Australia – to the Middle East in order to meet up with Noah. How did they cross the Torres Strait to Papua New Guinea, then over to Indonesia, then over to the Asian mainland? They can swim, but not great distances. Did they build a raft?
But then what – did they walk all the way to the Middle East? Koalas aren’t fast on the ground (they have two thumbs, for crying out loud), aren’t great distance travellers and would have been easy prey. Koalas generally only walk in order to change trees, usually for sex or food or a better resting spot. They’re also semi-nocturnal and prefer to sleep around 18-20 hours a day (understandable, considering they’re fat & furry and live in a warm climate).
Speaking of trees, the _only_ food koalas eat are the leaves of eucalyptus trees which, like koalas, are indigenous only to Australia. Did the koalas carry a stash of leaves with them on their intercontinental odyssey? If so, that stash would only have lasted a few days before it dried out. Koalas only eat fresh, moist, young eucalyptus leaves so you can see how this would have been a problem.
That also raises the question of what they ate for all those months at sea, assuming they made it to the Ark. Maybe they took eucalyptus saplings with them?
OK then – let’s assume two koalas made it to the Middle East without starving to death, drowning or being eaten. Let’s assume they’ve survived being stuck on a giant wooden boat for months. Now the rain’s stopped and the waters have receded. How the heck do they get home? Float all the way back? Even if they pack a lunch and make it back to Australia in time to repopulate the entire continent, the flood will have washed away every scrap of vegetation including every last eucalypt.
After you’ve solved the travel, lifestyle, habitat & dietary problems of the koalas, do the same for the echidnas, sloths, polar bears and every other creature who ordinarily wouldn’t last five minutes trying to cross oceans and continents for a genocide-avoiding mystery cruise. Then explain how the freshwater and saltwater fish both managed to survive in mixed-up rainwater and fresh water. Then you can explain to all of us how all the assembled creatures stayed on that barge for so long without dying of starvation or disease or killing each other or just going insane through lack of stimulation. Then you can explain how the handful of people who God allowed to live (one family) managed to repopulate the entire planet in the order of billions of people, all in a couple of thousand years and all without committing incest.
For bonus points, explain how that handful of people is meant to take care of a floating zoo and how they didn’t suffocate on faeces fumes on a boat with no windows.
I see I have missed a lot of what has been going on tonight and am late to the party. Have some new kids in the neighborhood come to join us for a fun Friday night?
The one liner Q and A session is great fun.
Hey, why don’t you guys spend your time usefully, by figuring out how not to be made to look as foolish as Haught did. So many other ways of knowing, blah, blah, blah.
I know, you don’t buy that either as you are all true believers, ans so don’t go in the sophisticated theological stuff (its so Deist like). You take your dose of Theistic delusion straight up just like your Absolut god. No metaphors allowed.
I’d laugh at him. It’s the only possible right answer.
— TWZ
There’s enough nonsense in that thread to fill a bible…
One thing though, I’d appreciate it if we could represent atheism without being dicks about it. I see no reason to present Eric with snide remarks about his father. He is not guilty of the tax evasion his father was sentenced for, and however silly you find his arguments, it is not OK to deal blows below the belt like that.
The Yo Yo said:
Reminds me of a book I read that insisted that the Mesoamericans got the idea of pyramids from traveling Egyptians. One of the pieces of “evidence” was the fact that both cultures had a crescent shape as an important part of their iconography. All I could wonder was if the author had ever been outside on a cloudless night 12 days or so after a full moon.
And I have to wonder if Yo Yo thinks big floods only happen in “Western society”.
I’d appreciate it if we could represent atheism without being dicks about it.
fuck off.
In fact, I can relate stories about how being a dick saved someone’s life…
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2010/08/how_being_a_dick_probably_save.php
and Hovind is just as big a conman as his old man ever was.
so, again, FUCK OFF.
For goodness sake, what’s wrong with you. Are you completely unable to reason out what is meant by “not being a dick” in this case? I am not talking about “not being a dick” as in being non-confrontational, I am talking about it in the sense that whatever mistakes your dad have done or how many people your mom have slept with are completely irrelevant to the discussion.
For goodness sake, what’s wrong with you.
I hate clueless tone trolls.
frankly, there is NOTHING Hovind says that even CAN be relevant to any discussion of any merit.
it’s not why he’s here, it’s not why he runs his pop’s ministry for money, it’s not why he does anything.
so, actually, there is nothing misplaced.
it’s you who does not get this, you who does not understand who this guy really is.
Not only or even by “massive amounts of water”.
Sometimes they are covered by large volumes of volcanic ash, it rains a few times making it set up like cement, and then gets covered by more stuff. There are whole petrified forests found in basalt and other volcanic formations. I once saw a petrified log halfway up a 1,000 foot basalt cliff. I have a piece of it that spalled off.
That is why we have footprints of human ancestors that are several million years old.
A similar process with sand, silt, and clay at water’s edge can preserve footprints of a lot of animals. We have footprints of dinosaurs and even older animals going back 100’s of millions of years. A lot of footprints are found in sedimentary rocks.
BTW rapid burial of animals and plants is a frequent event. The rivers and creeks near my house flood several times a year, every year. This also happens everywhere, even in deserts.
Yo Yo go to school, finish your high school diploma, go to the library, or hit wikipedia. Your science knowledge base isn’t even at the level of grade school.
We have ice cores from Greenland that go back 400,000 years. The ones from Antarctic go back 800,000 years.
Tree ring sequences go back 8-9,000 years.
There are living organisms that are twice as old as Yo Yo’s universe.
And therefore you find it appropriate to hurl irrelevant insults about his dad in his direction instead of, say, ignoring him.
I’m not sure about you, but some of us left that sort of behavior behind not long after having been potty trained.
It was noticed 2,000 years ago by the very early xians.
The Gnostics and similar sects had two or dozens of gods. One common theory was that Yahweh was a lower creator god who wasn’t too competent or good. That is why the world is always a mess. The real god is much better and more powerful.
In some of those mythologies, jesus showed up to show people how to free themselves from the world of matter and Yahweh and rejoin the spiritual plane of the true god.
This was an important movement in early xianity. Or it was until what became the orthodox xians suppressed it.
What Icthyic said.
Seriously, fuck off with your vapid pointlessness, vivace.
Eric Hovind has chosen to maintain his criminal father’s empire too long for any rational person to extend to Eric a presumption of “innocence”, and he is in fact at this very moment making his fortune by stealing from actual innocents – whom Eric has conned with the same line of blarney he tried pulling on us.
If anything, Eric got off a lot more lightly here than he deserves for his dirty existence.
So, yeah, you can just fuck right off with your concern about “not being a dick”.
Oh, and take your goddamn “dick” with you. No sexist trolling is needed to get your point across – if you had any point, that is.
I can tell religious people to fuck off and claim I’m being constructive in doing so.
I regularly tel homophobic religious idiots to fuck off on Twitter, and according to Klout, I am THE most influential person for one of the worst religious bible-literalist bigots around.
We trust Klout don’t we?
See, my constant belittling of his silliness is a major influence on him!
I’m a virologist, not a geologist or geohistorian, so my explanation may not be perfect. Quite simply, these myths are based upon localized major flood events (like 100 year floods) that were particularly bad. Remember, at that time, the world did not extend much beyond the horizon, so if your province/region was flooded, for all you cared, the whole planet was. Remember, floods happen everywhere.
You are, of course, free to ignore the slimeball Eric Hovind all you like. You’re not going to get a speck of traction trying to bully others into ignoring Eric, though. Just in case you care how you waste your time …
Who was that who just mentioned something about find[ing] it appropriate to hurl irrelevant insults ? Who, oh dearie me, vivace.
Hey, vivace, choke on this:
See, I told you Eric had gotten off more lightly (up till now) than he deserves for his dirty life. Fortunately for truth, justice, and the American Way, Atticus Dogsbody has the courage to pitch it straight.
Thanks again, Atticus !
No, I would kill
Himit.My favourite Pratchett god:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discworld_gods#Quezovercoatl
When he is forced to reveal himself to his followers it turns out he is six inches tall…
I see no reason to call his organization criminal, or call what he is doing “stealing”, at least not with intent. I am sure he actually believes the crap that they are touting, but spreading stupidity on the grounds that you believe it yourself is not criminal.
What I said was that ignoring him would be a more mature response than holding him accountable for what his dad has done. If you, as me, find the idea of a fathers “sins” passing on to his children an abhorrent, inhumane idea, I would ask you to kindly remove your hypocritical foot from your mouth and attack his ideas on non-ad-hominem grounds. Or ignore him.
vivace:
Oh, what a pity this isn’t all about you. By the way, I don’t have a dick, Cupcake. I do have a handy decaying porcupine, feel free to help yourself and shove it firmly up your nether orifice (proper protocol calls for the decaying porcupine to be backwards, better spinage, you see). Bye now, be sure not to come back.
Vivace: I’m going to attempt to be civil with you while I explain that Eric Hovind is exactly the kind of monster who needs to be attacked, and attacked at every possible chance. Ignoring him with do nothing. He is actively ruining minds and lives.
Tone trolls are definitive evidence that the gods don’t exist.
If they did, vivace would have been hit by a lightning bolt by now and be in hell. Tone trolls would end up in the lowest part, of course.
The gods would have created a special hell for them.
True. But they aren’t the best minds and lives. Just look at Yo Yo, less than a grade school level of science education and has yet to realize that the real world exists.
The Hovinds are predators but not very good at it. OTOH, they are picking off the weakest and dullest of the bunch.
I am attacking the substance of what you are writing (or rather the lack of it), not your tone.
Sociopaths tend to travel in family packs. Why I don’t know.
V. Day’s father is in prison too. For tax problems and because, IIRC, he threatened to murder a judge.
It’s a fundie xian thing. I’m really surprised that V. hasn’t yet been arrested for something horrible.
…and to be precise, not you in specific. I am complaining about the stupidity of responding to bad arguments with abuse and ad-hominems. That is not because I have a problem with the style. It’s because there is no fucking logical pathway from “your dad’s in prison” to “you’re religious ideas are wrong”
Now you are just lying. Tone troll.
Well, at least we know the gods definitely don’t exist. Perhaps future humans will invent them just to deal with tone trolls.
Don’t worry vivace. Humans aren’t nearly as vicious as their imaginary gods. You’ll probably get out of hell after a few thousand years.
These people can’t possibly be Pharynguleans. This has to be Hovind’s people posting under false pretenses.
Why on Earth would you make a fatuous statement like that ? You’re sure ? You’re sure Eric Hovind actually believes ? Yeah, and I’m sure that at least one of those Nigerian scammers actually believes he’s the son-in-law of a deposed prince.
What do you have to gain by aligning yourself with con artists like Hovind ? Do you have something to admit about your own unsavory way of making a living ? Are you one of them ? That would explain a lot …
Go fuck yourself hard, you lying shitbag. No one here has tried to hold Eric Hovind “accountable for what his dad has done”,
What we do try is to hold him – and other christian terrorists – accountable for what he personally does, when he tries to destroy western civilization (yes, the same civilization which allows you the luxury of being so “mature” and pseudo-tolerant, you ass).
Fighting against the black-hearted Dominionists and the forces of Christian Sharia and deliberate ignorance personified by Eric Hovind IS mature. Ignoring him would be immoral. And boring, too, but of course you think that’s a plus, you petrified old stick.
Jesus Haploid Christ, are you as dumb as a rock. Eric Hovind didn’t inherit his father’s “sins” – he inherited his father’s illegitimate fraud empire and Eric is making a fortune at the conman’s game his dad set up. Eric didn’t even have to set up his own company, he just stepped into his dad’s office when they took dear old daddy away in handcuffs. See, it’s like the Mafia, only fundie christian and ethnically Anglo-American, not Catholic and ethically Italo-American. Oh, and there is a tiny difference in how much violence the two crime families use: the Mafia merely tortures and maybe kills your body in one lifetime, the Hovind criminals promise that their enforcer will torture throughout eternity.
You’re an offensive ass. And your ideas suck. But they don’t suck because you’re an ass – that would be an ad-hominem. Your ideas suck because they’re not congruent with reality, as demonstrated just above here. Funny how much you’re like your buddy Eric Hovind. He’s an unredeemed scumbag. And his ideas are even more sucktastic than yours, because his ideas are downright disassociated from any semblance of reality. So console yourself that even though you’ve got two separate strikes against you, at least you’re not as bad as him.
Oh, and you’re boring. So that’s three strikes. You’re out. Now go, shoo, get on out.
Oh, now that is funny. You know, we’re thinking the same thing about you: one of Eric’s botmen posting.
C’mon, admit it. It’ll be good for a laugh when you admit what you really are.
I hope it’s Osiris, so I can make some tasty Osiris-entrail stew, and become a god myself. It could happen! There’s even historical precendent!
http://www.touregypt.net/featurestories/unas.htm
*goes off to get a cloth to clean coffee off keyboard*
I’ll admit it, if the Christian god were real, I’d suck up, spout the expected inanities, go some genuflecting. So shoot me. I want to see what the BFD about heaven is. And I’ll cheerfully lie, cheat and even steal a halo if I have to in order to sneak in and take a peek around. I expect I’d end in in hell soon enough, though. Either for subversion or perversion, or running for my afterlife from an eternity with blithering godbots.
Ragutis:
I wouldn’t, I’m ethical and I have principles. Pesky things.
Fuck off and fuck you, fuckface, Eric likes to ask if atheists can form morals from evolution. (Their terms, not mine.) If he asks these kinds of questions, it is fair game to ask where his father got his morals. And fundy tripe like “humans are fallible” does not cut it.
Eric does not have to right to imply that we are immoral and ignore the deceitful way his father set up the ministry he now runs.
Cram that dead porcupine so far up your ass that the quills poke out of your skull.
Ah, well, you certainly won’t be getting in then. Don’t worry, I’ll stuff my pockets full of hors d’ouvres and stash a few bottles of ambrosia under my coat on the way out.
And please choose another example to judge my ethics and principles by than an obvious joke.
Or at least I thought it was obvious. Maybe a ;) or :p would have made it clearer.
The Hovindites are not presenting bad arguments. They are not presenting arugments at all, merely Biblical quotations and canned responses such as “How do you know that?”. Such behaviour is grossly insulting, and merits an insulting response. There has also been plenty of substantive explanation of why presuppositionalism is absurd. But like all tone trolls, you couldn’t give a shit about content.
When Eric Hovind stops profiting from his father’s con game, will be time enough to stop reminding him that his father is a convicted felon.
Says “vivace”, whose nym AFAIK I’ve never seen here or anywhere else before, about a group of people who have been commenting here – and setting the tone – long before the move to freethoughtblogs. And why, I wonder, would that particular barb occur to vivace?
I just read through all the comments on that article and I must say that they were being extremely childish, although doubtless they will crow about taking on the unbelievers who were unable to answer their questions (even though they did, multiple times). I think that if it happens with them again PZ should not allow it, as they clearly were not paying any attention to people’s genuinely thought out answers. No one benefited from the exchange, although Mr. Fire gave me my first laugh out loud moment of the day (thank you!). They also messed up the comments on what was quite an interesting post. All of them running away together was pathetic, and it showed how they were not actually engaging with anyone. I really hope some uncertain people will have read it and seen Hovind’s lot for what they are.
@19. Tulse says: 4 November 2011 at 7:09 pm
In case this hasn’t already been linked here see :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NlySyGKnhtI&feature=related
courtesy of Dionysus voice with music by John R. Butler.
For the animated version.
Wrong, you are a tone troll. You don’t like how we do business. So time to fade into the bandwidth, as we aren’t changing,
If we try to engage them, they stay and preach. By getting in their faces, we shock them, and they go find greener pastures. And, by later testimonials, actually get one or two to start thinking due to the ridicule.
Show us a literature citation wherer your tone control method works on folks solidly entrenched in their thinking like Hovinds crew is. With the control being an in-your-face approach. Evidence, not opinion, is required. We do have some evidence our approach will work.
vivace, your fucking concern is noted. Now collect your porcupine, you lying tone troll.
http://web.archive.org/web/20110725013851/http://kent-hovind.com/
Somebody already did the research for me… and I love it!
Bill #73 kind of sums it up for me re: worship part. As long as I do not worship any god I am safe. How do I know? Well Sister Mary Joseph, the Biiiiible tells me so!
To add:
Do these godiots ever really read their handbook? I know many of them claim they “read” it, but I mean do they REALLY read it? Genesis, Deuteronomy, .., through to the Book of Revelation, the whole of them, seem designed to make one atheist or at least seek a better god.
Yeah I know the NT has SOME appealing bits – perhaps overall more aligned with modern thinking than the OT – praise Greco and Pax Romana influence. Still it’s logically challenged – and it is OBVIOUS.
What logic do the real godiots apply? Well they apply bad logic and make up meanings of things. If you want a classic case of such wanderings follow the line of reasoning say in the Q&A section of the Jerry Coyne/John Haught debate http://www.uky.edu/OtherOrgs/GainesCenter/2011_boone_video.html.
John H (theist) does arm waving at its best (which is to say articulately elegant [not guttural] yet ludicrous and vacuous in meaning). His “why is the water boiling?” spiel is beyond bad logic, misdirected assignment of meaning and concepts, and intellectual dishonesty that it must become a textbook case on fallacious argumentation.
I do not want to steal your fun so I’ll just give this hint: if you posit a level of understanding that can have a testable (via direct observation and induction or deduction, or via preponderance or evidence – circumstantial or direct) that is something Jerry C and we rational atheists accept along with you. When you jump from there to something like “you have to learn to suspend your powers of reason to reason through to my revealed conclusion” then we get antsy.
I tried to read that thread, but it made my brain hurt. You can’t argue with people who don’t agree that ‘reason’ is a valid way of knowing things. It’s as pointless as arguing with a toddler.
They kept asking what basis there was for any morality or reason if god doesn’t exist, and never seemed to notice that they were using human brains to ask the question. Human brains: the basis of their morality and reason as well as mine, because it’s the only tool available to us for reasoning with. It’s like they’re standing in a pile of broken glass, holding a hammer, saying, ‘If god doesn’t exist, then how did this window break?’
If the God described in the Bible really existed, would I worship him? That’s a hard question that I don’t think I know the answer to. The right thing to do, if you found yourself living in a world ruled by an insane tyrant, would be to fight him to your dying breath. But I am not always brave. I suppose it’s possible that cowardice would win out and I’d worship him to save my own life. Of course, the god of the Bible is such a mean bastard he’d probably kill me anyway, so the ‘worship’ thing is pointless. The Bible is full of people who worshipped god and just got hurt worse.
It occurs to me that it’s easy to test whether human morals come from human brains or from belief god. Just take two people who both have good morals. Ask one of them to disbelieve in god, and see if she is still a moral person. Ask the other one to remove his brain, and see if he is still a moral person.
Oh & when it comes to fighting Gods didn’t Buffy the Vampire Slayer defeat at least one of those?
I say we get her and her Scooby gang .. (Or the real Scooby gang? ..Nah too many Ruh Wroh! moments) on side .. see what they can do!
…ph’nglui mglw’nafh YHWH R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn…
You could turn the Hovind kooks question around. Not that it is a good one or anything.
Would they worship the gods if they turned out to be Allah, the Moslem one?
How about the Mormon god who lives on Kolob?
Zeus, Odin, Cthulhu, Tlaloc, Brahma,or Bob the Rain God?
How about PZ Myers if he took the Scientology course and became a god?
What if the fundie xian god was really satan? Oh wait, the fundie god looks a whole lot like satan anyway. Probably they already do.
The fundie god is a Sky Monster. They practice human child sacrifice. Their sacred sacraments are hate, lies, hypocrisy. QED.
All that tired jazz about porcupines aside, I still think it’s fair game to bring up Kent Hovind’s imprisonment. First, because it’s hilarious, second, because it shows the family business to not be as moral as all that. Believe me, the only difference between Eric and Kent is that Eric has most likely learned to be more careful about the legalities. They both missed the “render unto Caesar part of the Bible.
Pseudonymous Commenter #251
May you be eaten first.
Don’t care if there is a god, I’m a good wrestler.
StevoR #250
Hey, have you ever noticed you never see Buffy and Daphne in the same place? Makes you wonder.
Of course THIS might all be a giant coincidence.
Probably a different Vivace.
There are a few petrified forests at the door asking to see you, sir…..
Well, as far as I know, some, if not all, the basic logical operations (like AND, OR, XOR, etc) occur spontaneously in a variety of natural processes without intelligence (both living and non-living systems). Regulation of DNA expression, for example.
Of course it takes an intelligent mind to look at the process and call it logic, but that’s just an issue of labeling.
Well, I wouldn’t be surprised if the Merkavas already had those things, as optional add-ons to the Mk IV, at the least.
But we must be careful with the titanium-ferric ratios. Wouldn’t want to accidentally dilute out the iron….
If it could be shown that there is a creator god, I would still need a damn good reason to worship it. I love my parents, but I certainly don’t worship them, even though they “created” me (and they’re not even homicidal, genocidal maniacs).
I’ll believe in god when I can levitate in midair while a camera sidetracks around me for a full 360 degrees.
I’d also c
oops didn’t finish.
I’d also consider believing in god if I could do the splits in order to dodge a hail of machine gun fire.
Homeopathic iron chariots? Surely they’d be even more powerful?
For me, that would depend on if it forces you into an afterlife, and if so, if the choices of two hells are the two as preached by so many Christian churches – eternal fire or eternally singing the monster’s praises.
Okay, Let’s say that, hypothetically, that I somehow knew that god existed.
So what?
I could throw the teapot or the invisible dragon thing at you but let me try another approach.
If I knew that god existed, exactly what would that knowledge amount to? I would be aware of the existence of being of unknown characteristics that has no demonstrable effect on anything.
Yet, I am supposed to fear/love/obey this thing because it’s presumably the creator of the universe.
You see, you’re not just asking me to believe in god.
You’re asking me to believe in a god that has instructions for me to follow that he gave to you to tell me.
In reality what you’re saying is not
“believe in god”
What you’re actually saying is
“Do what I say”
Now, I’m sure that some of you fundies out there care about me and are afraid for my soul or whatever. That’s very kind of you and I’m sure that your good people deep down inside somewhere. So please understand I am treating you with all due caring and respect when I say
go fuck yourself
This just in…
Due to a printing error, Congress has affirmed that “In Dog We Trust”. On that note, let me be the first to extend my personal welcome to our new Canine Overlords.
(Okay, that didn’t really happen, but it sure would have been funny as hell if it had.)
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheSalvationWar
The Lord Jesus Christ, King of kings and Lord of lords, not only exists but you all exist because He made you. Moreover, people like me are not zombies. The Lord came into this world so that walking-dead people (people in rebellion against their Creator) might have vibrant life – life to the full. You all will meet Him some day, and I hope you all meet Him on friendly terms. People need two things, however. First, they need to get cleaned up spiritually. The Bible says that the blood of Jesus cleanses from all sin. Secondly, we all need perfect righteousness. This is received like you receive a garment. You need Jesus’ perfect righteousness over your shoulders.
The Apostle Paul wrote: “no one will be declared righteous in His sight by observing the law.” We need to be declared righteous if we are to have any hope of heaven. Where can we get it? All that we have is polluted. It makes no difference if we are creationists, evolutionists, church-goers, or atheists. We all flunk in righteousness. Not even Adam and Eve qualified before they sinned! Only One Person ever passed the test, and He did so perfectly. The Apostle added, “But now a righteousness from God, apart from law, has been made known, to which the Law and the Prophets testify. This righteousness from God comes through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe.”
But exactly how did God’s righteousness get down “from God” to us? Mary received Him into her womb and placed Him in a manger. Hundreds of years prior, the prophet Jeremiah prophesied that the coming Messiah would be called (notice especially the third word) “The LORD Our Righteousness.” How does Jesus become “Our” Righteousness? Isaiah experienced it in anticipation –“I delight greatly in the LORD; my soul rejoices in my God. For He has clothed me with garments of salvation and arrayed me in a robe of righteousness” (Isaiah 61:10a). Jesus’ perfect righteousness must cover over us—as a garment. Arrayed in Jesus’ righteous robe, heaven’s gates will burst off their hinges when we arrive clothed “in Him”—so perfect is He!
The Apostle added, “For if, by the trespass of the one man, death reigned through that one man, how much more will those who receive God’s abundant provision of grace and of the gift of righteousness reign in life through the one man, Jesus Christ” (Romans 5:17).
Over and over again the Apostle wrote of our being “in Christ.” To be “in Him” is to be clothed in His righteousness. The Apostle wrote, “God made Him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in Him we might become the righteousness of God.”
Recall the prodigal’s father: “Quick! Bring the best robe and put it on him.” That robe is Christ’s cloak of perfect righteousness!
Elsewhere, the Apostle wrote: “What is more, I consider everything a loss compared to the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things. I consider them rubbish, that I may gain Christ and be found in Him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ—the righteousness that comes from God and is by faith” (Philippians 3:8-9).
In celebration of this truth, William Cowper wrote: “Let others in the gaudy dress of fancied merit shine; the LORD shall be my righteousness, the LORD for ever mine.”
Wow, thankfully elsewhere PZ bans godbotting at the first sighting, so this is instructive to see this in action for once.
Nope, doesn’t exist, and you presented no conclusive physical evidence for you presuppositional claim. What else will you lie about?
How can we meet something that doesn’t exist? Another lie. What next?
Oh, Adam and Eve, quotes from your book of mythology fiction (another presupposition on your part that it is inerrant), I am so impressed by your ignorance. You had godbotting bingo. You are a delusional fool without solid evidence. Whereas the solid physical evidence says your deity is imaginary. Your holy book is mythology/fiction. Prove otherwise with solid and conclusive physical evidence, not witlessing (Janine!).
Your stupid, smug, boring, godbotting screed shows exactly the opposite. Fuck off.
Yep, godbotting in the wild. You can almost see the flecks of spittle on the post from its ravings.
Assertion without proof. May be be dismised without proof. Your Invisible Sky Fairy doesn’t exist.
Being a zombie would be a huge step up for you. You are a cognitively defective meat robot.
The rest of your godbotting is just routine babbling. Not worth my time.
Which just goes to show how stupid the bible is.
Blood makes stains. It doesn’t clean anything.
Sheesh.
Hah.
You wander in here, blather a lot of nonsense prefixed with “Bible says”, and you claim not to be a zombie?
You’re not just a zombie. You’re a godzombie who doesn’t even know that you’re supposed to request “BRAAAAIIIINNNSSSS”.
Paul G. Humber, what makes you think that your cut and paste job is nothing that any of us have heard a thousand times before? Or are you counting on repetition being convincing?
Simply pointing at quotes claiming that some higher power made us does not prove your point.
Bye-bye, parrot.
The malfunctioning meat robot is a minister for Cthulhu’s sake.
I suppose the factory gives the churches a deal on defectives while the good robots make toasters and toys.
Paul G. Humber is worse than a malfuncitioning meat robot. He is an evil and prolific liar and a fundie xian.
This guy is far below a zombie. Continual evil liar, fundie xian, creationist. Zombies are way more innocuous and cuddly in comparison.
Among his many lies are the Hitler was an atheist one. Hitler was a Catholic and all his millions of followers were xians.
He is also a creationist who thinks the earth is 6,000 years old.
Atheists don’t believe God/gods/Satan, etc. exist. (or that there’s no evidence for God/gods/Satan, etc.)
Funny thing that an atheist can believe dark matter and dark energy exist, yet they haven’t seen it, but when it comes to God……But what atheists don’t realize is they actually _belong_ to Satan–the god of this world–until such time as they become Christians. You’re going to have to
serve somebody.
http://www.bobdylan.com/songs/gotta-serve-somebody
Gotta Serve Somebody
You may be an ambassador to England or France
You may like to gamble, you might like to dance
You may be the heavyweight champion of the world
You may be a socialite with a long string of pearls
But you’re gonna have to serve somebody, yes indeed
You’re gonna have to serve somebody
Well, it may be the devil or it may be the Lord
But you’re gonna have to serve somebody
You might be a rock ’n’ roll addict prancing on the stage
You might have drugs at your command, women in a cage
You may be a businessman or some high-degree thief
They may call you Doctor or they may call you Chief
But you’re gonna have to serve somebody, yes indeed
You’re gonna have to serve somebody
Well, it may be the devil or it may be the Lord
But you’re gonna have to serve somebody
You may be a state trooper, you might be a young Turk
You may be the head of some big TV network
You may be rich or poor, you may be blind or lame
You may be living in another country under another name
But you’re gonna have to serve somebody, yes indeed
You’re gonna have to serve somebody
Well, it may be the devil or it may be the Lord
But you’re gonna have to serve somebody
You may be a construction worker working on a home
You may be living in a mansion or you might live in a dome
You might own guns and you might even own tanks
You might be somebody’s landlord, you might even own banks
But you’re gonna have to serve somebody, yes indeed
You’re gonna have to serve somebody
Well, it may be the devil or it may be the Lord
But you’re gonna have to serve somebody
You may be a preacher with your spiritual pride
You may be a city councilman taking bribes on the side
You may be workin’ in a barbershop, you may know how to cut hair
You may be somebody’s mistress, may be somebody’s heir
But you’re gonna have to serve somebody, yes indeed
You’re gonna have to serve somebody
Well, it may be the devil or it may be the Lord
But you’re gonna have to serve somebody
Might like to wear cotton, might like to wear silk
Might like to drink whiskey, might like to drink milk
You might like to eat caviar, you might like to eat bread
You may be sleeping on the floor, sleeping in a king-sized bed
But you’re gonna have to serve somebody, yes indeed
You’re gonna have to serve somebody
Well, it may be the devil or it may be the Lord
But you’re gonna have to serve somebody
You may call me Terry, you may call me Timmy
You may call me Bobby, you may call me Zimmy
You may call me R.J., you may call me Ray
You may call me anything but no matter what you say
You’re gonna have to serve somebody, yes indeed
You’re gonna have to serve somebody
Well, it may be the devil or it may be the Lord
But you’re gonna have to serve somebody
Copyright © 1979 by Special Rider Music
Slow Train
http://www.bobdylan.com/songs/slow-train
Wow, we got a visit from the one and only Paul G. Humber, MS. Ladies and non-ladies, Paul G. is a genuwhine, free range, organic, 99 and 44/100s percent thought-free, godbothering zombie. We haven’t seen one of those around here since the last time one came around here, which was last night.
False equivalency. Atheists (and non atheists) think that there is dark matter and dark energy because that is what the math and the evidence is suggesting. These scientists did not just make it up.
What test have you seen that show that god exists?
Also, concluding you post with fundamentalist era Bob Dylan does not prove a thing, jokerman.
All it tell me is that you are fit to be a slave.
“…not only exists but you all exist because He made you.”
Pure and utter nonsense. My daddy put his penis inside my mommies vagina and ejaculated. That’s how I came about. Unless you consider my daddy some kind of supreme spiritual being. Which would be a surprise to all of us…
Sigh.
This nonsense again.
Cosmologists have evidence of the effects of something that acts like mass, or matter, but cannot be seen. This is called “dark matter”, because no-one knows what else to call it.
Cosmologists have evidence of the effects of something that is increasing the size of the universe at an accelerated rate. This is called “dark energy”, because no-one knows what else to call it.
There is no evidence of an invisible person with magical superpowers.
Your blasphemous granting of the status of “God” to Satan is noted. When did you become a polytheist, I wonder?
Bob Dylan — and you — committed the logical fallacy of begging the question. Clearly, you serve falseness itself.
We haven’t seen gravity either.
By your nonreasoning analogy, gravity doesn’t exist. The earth really does suck.
If the xian god exists, all it seems to do is make people like Dave stupid and people like Humber evil, liars, and often rich by scamming the dumber members of the churches.
Cthulhu, this thread is becoming a moron festival. It only takes a few fundies to lower the average IQ by 50%.
Jokerman
http://www.usask.ca/relst/jrpc/article-dylan.html
We accept the existence of dark matter and dark energy because there’s evidence for their existence. Since there’s no evidence for god(s), we don’t accept their existence.
As for belonging to Satan, it’s kind of hard to belong to a figment of someone else’s imagination.
Now do you have any evidence to support the existence of god(s), Satan, etc.? Or are you going to quote some other song at us? For your next selection, may I recommend The Bastard King of England. It’s a song few here will be familiar with.
No. Especially not if they are mythological.
I do serve my cats. Tuna and dry food mostly.
Occasionally, I’m a disciple of Bob the Rain God. This is one of the few gods for which there is evidence for their existence. It does rain and quite frequently. Without rain, the hydrological cycle would stop and we would run out of beer and wine.
EWWWWWWW, Guh-ROSS!
Can you people really not see how fucking creepy your weird death-worshiping blood sacrifice cult is?
Funny, I believe you exist and are stupid and I haven’t seen you.
I have seen evidence that you exist and are stupid, however…
Glen Davidson
“But what atheists don’t realize is they actually _belong_ to Satan–the god of this world–until such time as they become Christians. You’re going to have to
serve somebody.”
The supreme being came to me in a dream and spoke thus;
“I have been cast out of my spiritual realm. I have been imprisoned and am unable help the suffering of my creations. Satan presents himself as me. He has had men write books in my name to enslave you. They seem to be my words but they are not. Heed not the utterances of men who read them, their souls have been tainted. Speak amongst yourselves, compare your experiences, lift one another from the darkness of superstition. I love all of you, my creations and require nothing from you in return, only that you seek the truth about this creation and in so doing lead the meaningful life of beings that strive to be free from ignorance.”
Thus spoke the supreme being to me.
Now I know that’s got to be a lie. From my own personal experience, Jesus is a top.
Evidence for Creation
http://www.icr.org/evidence/
The Tri-Universe
http://www.icr.org/articles/view/2590/215/
Time, Space, and Matter
http://www.icr.org/first-cause/
The Logical Implications
http://www.icr.org/transcendent/
Random Links!
whee!
David… nobody will look at those.
Nobody cares.
Now, if YOU have something to say, SAY IT.
you know, for the lulz?
Yawn, not one citation to the peer reviewed scientific literature David, the only thing that can refute evolution, which is more science, not religion. Hint, if the web site says babblical interpretation, or mentions an imaginary deity, it isn’t scientific, but rather religious. And the US court system agrees, creationism and idiot design are religious theories. So you just made a mess on our blog. Clean up after yourself, just like any dog owner needs a pooperscooper…
Mr. Fire says: “Over and over again the Apostle wrote of our being “in Christ.””
The Bible says when a person becomes a Christian, Jesus Himself indwells each person:
Paul wrote in 2 Corinthians 13:5 “Examine yourselves to see whether you are in the faith; test yourselves. Do you not realize that Christ Jesus is in you–unless, of course, you fail the test?”
That’s how I know cult groups like the Jehovah’s Witnesses aren’t really Christians–as defined by the Bible. Because if you ask a Jehovah’s Witness: “You say Jesus is the Son of God. Do you also believe
the spirit of Jesus/God actually lives _inside_ of you?” They will say no. They will only say “God is _in union_ with us” or words to that effect. The JW Bible also changes the wording in 2 Corinthians 13:5 to say “in union”, but it’s not there in the Greek text. So they have failed Paul’s test. JW’s believe Jesus was Michael the archangel before coming to earth.
after reading it, all I could think of was that there must be some hidden subliminal message in it…
Not random, specifically chosen because they tell the lies that David believes.
Here David, is the truth (as much as yours is, dipshit):
http://www.subversiveelement.com/planet_x.html
Glen Davidson
Correction. It was Paul Humber, not Mr. Fire, who said “Over and over again the Apostle wrote of our being “in Christ.”” …. which Christians agree with.
That’s how I know cult groups like the Jehovah’s Witnesses aren’t really Christians
there are 40 THOUSAND sects of xianity, idiot.
which ONE are you, and how do you *KNOW* that ONE is the TRUE(tm) path to
enlightenmentnirvanavalhallaheaven?David,
Nobody here is going to look at the ICR (Institute for Creation Research) site. We already know and reject the mythology you creationists pump out. Even a brain-dead zombie goddist like you should be able to figure that one out.
Also don’t quote the Bible at us. We don’t accept it as an authoritative source for anything other than bullshit.
It’s so cute when a cultist Christian claims that another Christian cult isn’t “really” a Christian cult.
Well, it’s cute until one groups starts setting members of another group on fire.
Aw. How precious. They don’t use the exact same words that your cult uses, so their cult is a fake cult!
Good grief.
David,
Nobody here cares if you think Jehovah’s Witlesses are True Christians™ or not. To us you’re all deluded and the various flavors of your delusions aren’t that interesting to the non-deluded.
David is a minion of satan. He will lead you astray in your seeking of truth. He quotes from the un-holy words written by the usurper, who claims to be the god of creation. Do not heed the words of satan written by men and that claim to be the truth!!!!! The “holy” books where created to enslave the souls of men.
None of this actually means anything. You can’t define exactly what “the spirit of Jesus/God” actually IS, so how can you tell if it’s living inside you, or just in union with you, or sitting on your shoulders, or whatever.
Is the spirit of Jesus/God akin to a tapeworm? It lives inside you, and rather than extracting a share of your nutrients, it takes a portion of your brain away so you can’t use it anymore. Wait, no, the spirit of God/Jesus is like a trematode parasite! It lives in your brain and makes you stupid.
That makes just as much sense as anything else you’ve said.
Also, it fits with the whole zombie theme. You really do need brains.
Instead of being proselytized at, I think I’ll make supper. It’ll be more interesting and the end result will be useful.
I know, the Apostle would love to be “in christ”, but I’m telling you again, it ain’t gonna happen: Jesus only pitches!
I agree. But the Redehead is making supper, so I think I have a drink. *grabs a tankard and heads for the grog barrels*
David:
Every Christian sect has been anathemetized and/or condemned by multiple other Christian sects. Which means there are no True Christians. (Maybe the BatShitCrazyness of Gnostics was correct.)
Can you point to any evidence outside of the bible or your brain which points to the existence of any god (not even, specifically, the Abrahamic one, just a god)?
It’s so cute when a cultist Christian claims that another Christian cult isn’t “really” a Christian cult.
Emo Phillips most famous joke…
They can only circle round and round in their little aquaria, condescending to all of those sad folk outside who know none of their watery truths.
I’d put my finger down my throat to vomit up poison, thanks.
The Lord Jesus Christ, King of kings and Lord of lords, not only exists but you all exist because He made you.
Jesus didn’t exist until 2000 years ago, so he couldn’t have created people, because they were already in existence before that emo slacker scumbag was.
No, don’t try to vomit your trinitarian nonsense on anyone. You’re the ones who said he was born 2000 years ago. You have to live with asserting that bullshit.
Honestly, do any of your lying scumbag morons ever think through what you’re saying?
David:
Evidence, evidence, evidence. We can detect dark matter and dark energy acting on our universe, but we cannot detect god. Funny that.
Where’s your evidence? Besides a poorly translated book and a warm and fuzzy feeling in your pants whenever someone praises Jesus?
Mr Fire:
Just how old are you? O.o
Actually, I did go here, just to see what they say.
http://www.icr.org/first-cause/
And there it is in black and white:
Good grief.
David, you sound very indoctrinated, so I’ll translate that for you:
“We don’t have any evidence or logic that there is an uncaused First Cause, or that the uncaused First Cause is an invisible person with magical superpowers that can somehow “exist” “outside” of existence, but we’re going to presuppose it anyway, despite it being a logical fallacy. Because we’re religious fanatics who are psychologically committed to believing in an invisible person with magical superpowers and a mythology where this invisible person with magical superpowers became a visible person with magical superpowers (but not anywhere near as magical or as super as when he was invisible), who sort-of died (but not really) who will whisk us away to a magical fairyland after we die.”
Also, I will save you all from quoting random song lyrics to make a point.
Sing Ta na na
Ta na na na
She got diamonds on the soles of her shoes
Owlmirror says: at 314
Oh so true! Who would try to pass off a mind fuck like like that? All christians are actually the unknowing minions of satan!!!
The effects of dark matter and dark energy are observable, and those observed effects are used to limit our descriptions on what dark matter and dark energy are like. Also, there are alternative competing hypotheses that postulate no dark matter or dark energy, which aren’t dismissed out of hand.
What we DON’T DO, is presuppose properties and characteristics of dark matter and dark energy without EVIDENCE of the effects of those characteristics that we can observe and verify. We DON’T presuppose intelligence, or benevolence, or planning, or intent. Hell, we haven’t even presupposed what dark matter is even made of.
We can do the same intellectual exercise with the concept of god, too. We cannot see god, but we can observe reality and see if what effects an entity such as god might be having, and using that observed reality we can set limits on what the properties of god must be.
And our observations drop those limits all the way down to zero. Or as close to zero as we are capable of measuring.
If you want to stick a god into those teeny tiny remaining gaps, be my guest. But you’re not going to end up with a very impressive god, and certainly not one worthy of anything remotely resembling worship.
Mark 16:16-18:
(from Bible Gateway, NIV)
Ok, David, Paul & goddists, it’s time to put up or shut up.
Go handle snakes – if you get bitten, you’re not godly.
Suck down some Draino – if you get ill, you’re not godly.
Find an amputee and lay your hands on them – if the limb doesn’t regrow, you’re not godly.
God said it.
Do you believe it?
Does that settle it?
Seriously, get to it.
We’ll be watching.
Dwarf galaxies suggest dark matter theory may be wrong
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-14948730
See also:
Trouble in Cosmologyland
http://crev.info/content/110918-trouble_in_cosmologyland
Ain’t no doubt about it we were doubly blessed
‘Cause we were barely seventeen and we were barely dressed
It always amazes me there still even ARE pentecostal sects who practice ritualized poisonous snake handling… even with their kids!
It just goes to show how much irrational deference is given to bad ideas, so long as they claim to be religious in nature.
Can you imagine what would happen if we had poisonous snake handling rituals at an atheist conference… anywhere in the world?
Guess what, David. We don’t believe in dark matter or dark energy like you believe in your fictions. So they might be wrong–there have always been other ideas out there to “explain” the observations, and we know that these could be true. We just accept what makes sense from the evidence.
You fail to make sense, save that you’re obviously projecting your mindless dogmatic belief onto us.
Glen Davidson
example:
http://www.rickross.com/reference/snake/snake12.html
religious sect exposing families and kids to venomous reptiles for years?
no problems with the cops, state officials, child welfare…
so who busted them?
ROFLMAO
and the final comment from the head wildlife official?
David tool of satan;
“Dwarf galaxies suggest dark matter theory may be wrong
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-14948730
See also:
Trouble in Cosmologyland
http://crev.info/content/110918-trouble_in_cosmologyland”
Why may the theory be wrong? Because of new evidence presented by science? Or because of the satanic influence of your un-holy book of enslavement?
David,
Your post linking to cosmology stories merely demonstrates that you haven’t the slightest idea what science and rationality are, or how the atheists here relate to them. We don’t feel threatened when a favoured hypothesis is challenged by new evidence, as you do when your faith is challenged – we feel exhilarated.
Imagine that, David. Imagine that.
Good grief.
You didn’t even read that, did you? You certainly didn’t understand it.
It’s offered, as alternative hypotheses, that the model of galaxy formation used was wrong (and thus dark matter itself does indeed exist as posited), or dark matter exists but is “warm” instead of “cold” (and those terms have specific meanings in dark matter cosmology).
In other words, scientists are using logic and evidence, and are willing to change their minds in light of better logic and new evidence.
Since religious presupposition is based on logical fallacy and no evidence, no logic or evidence can possibly change a religious fanatic’s mind — unless they decide to reject their religious fanaticism.
David bleated:
Here’s a snippet from the BBC article:
I’d like David to notice something. Professor Frank has new data which may change the present theory. That’s how science works. A theory is made which tries to explain the evidence. When new evidence is found, the theory is retained, modified or discarded as dictated by the new evidence. The present dark matter theory seemed to fit the evidence fairly well, but it doesn’t fit Frank’s data. This happens in science a lot. Science is self-correcting.
I’d also like David to answer one simple question: When was the last time religion had any new data to change its theories?
In my post #329 I misspelled Carlos Frenk’s name twice. My apologies to Professor Frenk.
Wait, no, the spirit of God/Jesus is like a trematode parasite! It lives in your brain and makes you stupid. – SallyStrange, OM
Exactly. It’s a software parasite, made possible by the evolution of language capability. A virus, as Dawkins says – but closer to a computer virus than a biological one.
I always find it interesting how the God of the Bible is referred to by a lot of believers in monarchical terms. Let’s see, the people who wrote the OT lived in a time when their land and their neighbors were ruled by kings who sat on thrones and passed judgment on their subjects. So where did the OT writers get their idea for their god? Hmmm.
When was the last time religion had any new data to change its theories?
Not to mention it never had ANY data, EVER.
I’m going to post a variant something I said in the bullying thread, as I think it’s relevant here.
My parents are Bible-thumpers, and when I was little they belonged to a nutty nutbar extremest Quiverfull cult. They’re doing much better now (not as well as I would hope, but better). I supply that biographical info for context of what I speak.
Many Bible-thumpers (creationist and otherwise) have a very childish view of the universe. Such and such is true because the Sky-Daddy says so! They are caught in a circle of self-affirming logic that says that the Bible is true because it is the Word of God, and God is true because the Bible says so.
A lot of the appeal of the Bible-thumping creationist viewpoint is that it offers certainty. They don’t need to worry, to wonder, or to doubt. They submit, they get taken care of. That is one thing the religious do well – they take care of each other. Of course, you must “deserve” to be taken care of.
A lot of the Bible-thumpers are very authoritarian. There’s only one way to properly live, and you must live that way. Casting about for a quote to sum up their view, I landed with a Dune quote: “A place for every man and every man in his place.”
That is what it boils down to for them. When a person man (women belong to men, of course) is born, the course of his life is set out for him. He must live that life, submitting to the those who outrank him and controlling those below him. In exchange for not deviating, he will be taken care of in life and after death gain the opportunity to gloriously submit to God. Add the Calvinist thought that infects many Bible-thumpers to this, it gets even stricter and more emphatic.
They fear people who resist, especially those who live successful and happy lives outside of this system, because it exposes the flaws in it. We must be brought to heel! Otherwise, then the reason why they accepted the crushing of their dreams, the reason they hurt those they love, the reason they submitted to authority they knew to be illegitimate is worthless. They did it for nothing except pride. They have sacrificed their very humanity on the altar of blind obedience to a vengeful brat of a god and they know it!
But we must tread carefully and ignore the man behind the curtain lest we hurt their feelings, of course.
KG #327
Yeah, it really is jarring to read about some surprising new data, and note the excitement of the scientists as they gleefully contemplate going back to Square One, and then later on see some creationists pointing to that exact event and shouting “LOOK! THEY’RE FRANTICALLY TRYING TO PROP UP THEIR SHAKY HOUSE OF CARDS!!!111”
Complete comprehension failure.
The Bible says when a person becomes a Christian, Jesus Himself indwells each person – David
David, we don’t give a shit what your Big Book of Sky Fairy Stories says. Stuff it up your fundament – that will have the added advantage of preventing you from speaking. I’m sure all those within range of your voice will be grateful.
They get bit often and sometimes die. It’s a form of human sacrifice to an ancient middle eastern tribal god.
After a while, you would think they would learn that their magic book is wrong about immunity to venomous snakes.
According to the xian magic book, you can kill fig trees by smacking them and move mountains wherever you want them. By the power of prayer and belief.
Of course, it has never been done. I suppose that means there has never been any True Xians. Maybe the RCC should have kept one of those hereticial sects around just in case they were the ones.
Audley, did you misunderstand on purpose?
‘Tis Himself, OM says:
“I’d also like David to answer one simple question: When was the last time religion had any new data to change its theories?”
Oh!oh!oH! (waving hand) Can I answer that?
…never…
The “true spawn of satan(TM)” never change or adapt. Because to do so might benefit mankind, which is against satans plan. It’s right there in the bible. I mean think about it… let snakes bite you… drink poison… no one who actually loved you would ask you to do that!
I know Christians who are very adamant of ripping out pictures of snakes and dragons from books, and even burn wooden carvings of snakes. This is based on some bible quote about dragons, I think?
Why would they handle poisonous snakes in that particular sect? It’s probably about the Fall?
Argh trying to keep all this religious nonsense straight makes my head hurt..
adamant ABOUT
Sounds more like a vampire.
More random lyrics:
I said “I’m so happy I could die”
She said “Drop dead” then left with another guy
pelamun says:
5 November 2011 at 10:22 pm
Argh trying to keep all this religious nonsense straight makes my head hurt..
To put the name to its only real use in describing David and his sad, stupid, vain, empty, would-do-harm-if-they-could-without risk-or-major-expense-to-themselves Xian meat-robot dumber-than-a-bag-of-hammers:
Jesus Christ, what assholes!
Disclaimer: I am in no way admiring said portion of their anatomy.
Brownian, you have great wit. You could be another George Carlin and open at all the atheist conferences.
Iron…? Tanks!
Thanks someone for pointing out that in the Old Testament, there are other gods and YHWH is not all-powerful.
Pelamun,
The snake-handling sects cite two quotes from the Bible to support their practice: Mark 16:17-18 and Luke 10:19.
Both are about how a person with faith can endure bad stuff happening to them. They take this to mean that they should handle poisonous snakes.
Daft.
Esteleth,
that’s even more stupid than I thought. At least my snake-pictures-ripping-out-of-books friends have a biblical quote actually mentioning snakes (or snake-like) creatures.
Not that I’d ever get HOW one can feel so afraid of depictions of serpents in your home…
It was probably the other children of El.
But it might have been the rest of the committee of gods of various tribes.
Oh, both verses mention snakes as things that a person of faith can endure. Snakes, scorpions, poison, and bad people are the examples given.
Mark 16:17-18 indicates that drinking poison without harm and handling snakes are things that people who truly believe in Jesus will do; they are the signs of true believers. It’s not about enduring bad stuff, but demonstrating miraculous mastery of bad stuff.
The parts about healing sick people by laying on hands, and speaking in tongues, aren’t about enduring bad stuff. They’re just different miracles that True Believers ™ are supposed to be able to do.
Esteleth wrote
In other words, it’s what economists call the lure of sunk costs. “I’ve put so much money into this, if I stop now I’ll lose everything.” It works another way, too: if you do something nice for someone, you’ll like them better.
Oh, I’m sorry then. I don’t know my bible…
I don’t know my bible…
what are ya, some kinda Christian?
;)
I was watching a televised documentary about a Peruvian forest tribe. their god lives in a steep, beautiful river canyon where there are many waterfalls. He lives in a sacred cave behind the largest waterfall. The souls of the dead meet there. Meanwhile, out in the real world the evil frog spirit and the good monkey spirit battle for supremacy.
As far as I know, the original meaning of “paradise” is “garden.” In the mythology of desert-dwelling tribes, paradise was a beautiful where their god walked and the souls of the dead gathered. Sound familiar?
Paradise was a beautiful garden.
We can see only a microscopic fraction of the electromagnetic spectrum. We use an invisible (to us) part of it to communicate. I can’t see electricity going through a wire. Nevertheless, these things are quite real enough. Whether you believe in it or not, if I put a naked live wire on your moist tongue, you’ll feel it.
Only in the poor deluded malfunctionning brains of zombie xians, these things are.
Meanwhile, out in the real world the evil frog spirit and the good monkey spirit battle for supremacy.
interesting.
I wonder if this is one of the forest tribes that uses the poison from dendrobatid frogs to hunt monkeys with.
the lure of sunk costs
We were taught that as “the Concorde fallacy” way back when.
It’s a series, “Living with the Machigenga.” In that episode I didn’t see any sign nor hear any mention of poison darts or poisonous frogs. It wasn’t a rain forest. The people seem to shoot birds and moneys and sloths with full-sized arrows.
It wasn’t a rain forest.
kk, but there ARE plenty of Peruvian tribes that do use poison darts in blowguns to shoot monkeys down with.
Just curious as to whether the poisonous nature of the frogs might have become “evil spirits”, and the nourishing aspect of the monkeys for the tribe made them “good spirits”.
not even necessary for those beliefs to have arisen within the tribe that was part of the documentary; could have been adopted from another tribe even.
Oh Ichthyic,
I do know enough to know that it is full of contradictions.
But where I grew up, it was Christians who were mocked for their beliefs.
I remember a party during high school, where my classmates where aggressively questioning the beliefs of one self-professed Christian, incl. the conflicting accounts of how Eve was created. It went all night until 3 or 4am. At some point she just fell back to the only defence possible, “I don’t know, I just believe”.
Made me want to convert on the spot. NOT.
David:
Can you point to any evidence outside of the bible or your brain which points to the existence of any god (not even, specifically, the Abrahamic one, just a god)?
Originality Throughout the Universe by Joseph Mastropaolo, Ph.D.
http://originalitythroughouttheuniverse.com/
Any takers?
THE LIFE SCIENCE PRIZE
http://lifescienceprize.org/
Well it’s pretty clear that David knows nothing except where certain Xian lies on the internet are.
Dumbass, if you have any fucking evidence for your claims at all, present it. We don’t care about your stupid links to stupid liars.
Glen Davidson
David, sorry, that’s been concluded. Regarding the Life Science prize, the case HAS been actually impartially adjudicated, see the Kitzmiller vs Dover case. Scientific EVIDENCE was presented for evolution.
The judge declared : “The overwhelming evidence at trial established that ID is a religious view, a mere re-labeling of creationism, and not a scientific theory.”
Originality is disputed by the simple scientific premise of ENTROPY, which has, as it’s core, the empirical testable evidence of ‘originality’…
Joseph Mastropaolo is a known crank. The works of Dr Richard Lenski is enough to refute that nonsense.
Janine:
Uh… no?
I was just thinking, if Mr Fire has experience bangin’ Jesus, well, that means he’s way older than he claims.
I obviously missed something. :)
David:
*sigh*
I suppose it would be pointless to explain to you that our knowledge changes and grows based on the available evidence.
David, either cite the legal or scientific literature to show creationism isn’t a religious idea, or shut the fuck up. We have your number as another liar for jebus. Seems to be a problem with those who believe in imaginary deities and inerrant holy books. They lie to themselves, then lie to science, the legal system, and us. They are always exposed for what they are….
David:
Can you point to any evidence outside of the bible or your brain which points to the existence of any god (not even, specifically, the Abrahamic one, just a god)?
Tee hee, dummy David
Don’t you know that’s a scam, a carnival game designed by the lying christer to ensure than no one can ever “win” and collect the prize ?
It’s just bait for rubes like you.
Grow up, child, let the scales fall from your eyes, pay attention to the reality around you – which you supposedly think your god created for you to learn from. Hey, dummy, why are you ignoring your own god’s created reality in favor of your sinful Bibliolatry ?
Or Jesus really did come back after he died ;)
So there’s a gotbot here playing the “Satan” card?
I am under the influence of an invisible evil entity who controls me without my knowing it?
I do believe it was Janine who said, in a different thread “Arrogance on stilts”.
What an arrogant, holier-than-thou fuckwit. Typical christer, claiming to have knowlege of the motivations of entities unseen and unknowable.
Go scream at yourself in a mirror, creepy godbot, likely you’ll see Satan there.
“I love it when someone claims to know what god thinks.”
Satan
A stem covered in agitated aphids?
re “iron chariots”:
All this mention of God’s greatest weakness: iron chariots. I’m strangely reminded of recent documentaries of stellar evolution, such as Brian Cox’s “Wonders of the Universe”, where iron is labelled the “star killer”. Noting that iron is THE dead end for fusion, and any star massive enough to start fusing iron end products will last mere days doing so. I think it a strange coincidence that “God” is also supposedly vulnerable to iron. How is it possible that they randomly picked iron to be God’s “kryptonite”, when it is also the killer element of more ancient god figures, i.e. the Sun?
Just be sure I am no theist of any degree; a “pure” atheist through and through, but I am fascinated by coincidences such as this. And also somewhat surprised no mention of this coincidence has ever been voiced by theists before.
David says:
See also:
You really don’t get it, do you? You really seem to think that dark matter is some bit of dogma that the Physics-Pope decreed in a moment of infallibility.
That’s not the way science works, you dolt. New information often requires hypotheses to be modified or abandoned. The system is working the way it’s supposed to, and it’s telling that you seem to think this serves as some kind of indictment of the whole endeavor.
Do you seriously think the scientists involved are trembling, worried little dogmatists, fearfully contemplating the likelihood that their received wisdom might be wrong? In the very BBC article you linked to, there’s this:
Get the difference? “Exciting.” Not “Oh jesus, protect us from the words of satan!!!” Every time some bit of existing science is shown to be incomplete or wrong, it’s “exciting,” because there’s new work to be done and reputations to be made. How sad and drab, by comparison, are the lives of the literalists, who, in response to every new thing, frantically pore over their bibles, desperately looking for some reassurance that what’s new is wrong, and that the world will remain as it has always been.
A few of the Darwiniacs here are asking for evidence, evidence, evidence.
Here’s some evidence reported last July that supports D. Russell Humphrey’s white hole cosmology model. (Before retiring, Humphreys worked at Sandia National Laboratories)
http://crev.info/content/110723_water_water_everywhere_in_space
http://www.icr.org/article/water-near-edge-universe-bolsters-creation/
Sorry, a religious site like ICR is not scientific evidence. That is found in journals with names like Nature, Science, Journal of Biological Chemistry, Biochemisty, and a few hundred other journals where science is published. Still no evidence for you claims, and you need to remember, only more science can refute science. Religion cannot refute science. Science can’t refute religion, but it makes it look silly when there is no scientific evidence for the flud.
And yet you give us no evidence, just more mindless links to stupid prejudiced a-holes like yourself.
There’s water in space. Wow. Hydrogen’s the most common element in space, and oxygen is something like third most common, and the two easily combine chemically. And it means nothing to your pathetic claims about creation anyhow–you’re just too stupid to know what evidence actually is, so you buy into dumb creationist lies.
You really are a pig-ignorant troll.
Glen Davidson
What does all this stuff about possible conflicting models of universal expansion have to do with whether or not Yahweh exists?
Howdy David!
What do you make of my comment @344? Strike a nerve?
Wow. THer is wAter in spaec? Yuo have Convinced me! I am Saved! All Hail Tpyos! I am Yurz!
Here’s some evidence reported last July
…that is absolutely fucking irrelevant to anything.
water surround the event horizon of a fucking black hole?
are you shitting me?
It’s like you take random facts and just toss them out as if they had any meaning.
dude, you’re nuts!
but then, so is ICR.
@ David 376
You noticed? Good. So you have some positive evidence for the existence of supernatural entities, good and evil?
Citing disagreement between scientists is not positive evidence.
Disagreeing is what science does. Having one’s claims torn apart is the vigour of science! But those claims have some basis in, y’know, what exists, what we might call reality.
I just bumped my shin and it hurts. That really happened.
Satan controlls me? Nope, there’s no Satan I can sense. You don’t perceive Satan, either.
Come on down from your holier-than-thou tower and enjoy reality with the rest of us.
Oh, that’s right, nobody can perceive Satan.
…I’d note that the fact that the water is aged to 1.6 billion years after the big bang itself somehow isn’t a problem for ICR…
fucking.
nuts!
whee!!!
Joseph Mastropaolo’s main thesis seems to be “I reject your reality and replace it with my own…. !!!!”
Why on earth would you find such a kook convincing?
From his “FAQ”:
Uh-huh.
And Joe Mastropaolo didn’t appeal the verdict… because?
I see that he claims the evolution is “vitalism” — which is ludicrous.
I think it a strange coincidence that “God” is also supposedly vulnerable to iron.
meh, it’s not the iron that “kills” the star, it’s just that the fusion process vs gravity doesn’t allow for the process to create any heavier elements.
gotta get beyond that balance…
*boom*
it could still be looked at as a creative process from that perspective.
I mean, all a star IS is a process of physics and chemistry. It just *looks* like a significant object because that’s what we’re used to.
a supernova creates even MORE elements than a sun does.
so is it destructive, or creative?
SteveM
The weapon and tool predecessor to iron, bronze, was extremely expensive due to the rarity of tin. Most soldiers in those days were required to provide their own armor and weapons. We tend to think of Greek hoplites wearing a fairly extensive suit of metal armor, having a large metal helmet protecting most of the head, and a big, round metal shield. Actually only the wealthy could afford to be so equipped. Most Greek soldiers of the 4th and 3rd Centuries BCE wore leather armor and had wooden shields, because that’s what they could afford.
Then the various secrets* of smelting iron were discovered. Iron is much more plentiful than copper and, especially, tin and much cheaper. While Roman gentry (patricii and equites**) wore bronze armor while serving as senior officers in the army, the legionnaires’ iron armor was actually stronger, easier to maintain, and much cheaper.
There is a school of thought that the switch from bronze weapons and armor meant that instead of only the aristocracy being well armed and armored, everyone was (or could be). The nobles were suddenly only as powerful as a conscripted serf. Naturally the nobles resented this. Since The Big Guy In The Sky was automatically a noble, the same resentment was assigned to him.
Something similar happened with the introduction of the longbow and crossbow in the 14th Century. The plebs could kill the armored nobles at a distance. During the Battle of Agincourt, the French nobles attacking the English longbowmen charged through their own crossbowmen. This was excused, at least by other nobles, as “getting the rabble out of the way.” Since a trained longbowman could shoot an arrow every five seconds or so, the French charge was halted before it reached the English lines. The Church outlawed the use of longbows and crossbows, a legality nobody paid any attention to.
*They were secrets, jealously guarded by master craftsmen and government arsenals.
**Equites in Latin has the general meaning of “horsemen” or “cavalry” (from equus, horse), but in this context carries the specific meaning of “knights” in the sense of members of an aristocratic group. An eques was one who could afford to keep three horses.
Life Science mini-trial
yeah, they tried that in Kansas BEFORE the Dover trial, and you clowns had the deck entirely stacked in your favor!
Now tell me, how did that work out again?
Oh yeah, that’s right, even the citizens of Kansas realized you fuckheads are nuts, and voted you out on your asses.
congrats on the pyrhic victory of your “mini trial”.
ROFLMAO
morons.
@David:
*Sigh*
You really don’t get it, do you? If you know of any evidence, PRESENT it. I doubt that you have even read the documents on the links that you are spewing at us, so why should we care. Give us a summary of the argument, give us the general idea…
That this “evidence” of yours has not been published in any peer-reviewed literature. And if this guy really had any real evidence for the existence of a god this would be the news everywhere around the world. The fact that it’s not should raise a huge red flag for any human being that is not completely braindead.
That this “evidence” of yours has not been published in any peer-reviewed literature.
no, see, the evidence in some of his links HAS been published…
but the people that published hardly had the same conclusions about what it meant that ICR did.
their conclusion:
“Water maybe be fairly well distributed in the universe”
ICR’s:
“That means God!”
I’m sure if asked, the authors of the actual paper would just respond with a headdesk.
More plentiful in space due to being the actual end point of the fusion process in supernovae II, and especially common from supernovae Ia and pair-instability supernovae. More plentiful in earth’s crust because it oxidizes more easily than most other common metals, and fits relatively well into silicate minerals. So there is a connection between death of stars and the importance of iron chariots (which could be made more cheaply than bronze chariots).
Much cheaper, yes, but stronger? Unless they had actually steel armor–and steel was very expensive–it’s probable that the bronze armor was actually stronger. People didn’t move to iron from bronze for the strength of iron, which wasn’t great unless it was highly expensive steel (early knights sometimes had iron rather than steel armor, for economic reasons), but due to the cost of bronze.
Glen Davidson
And all you’ve done is blather like the godzombie you are. Tch.
It does nothing of the sort. Nothing supports his cosmology model, because his cosmology model is just a stupid religion-based fantasy that ignores real-world cosmological evidence.
Pity that his brain is rotten with religious fanaticism.
Hazuki #379
David doesn’t understand science the way we do. His religion is dogmatic and consists of Revealed Truth™. He thinks science works the same way. If we could show that, for instance, Jesus did not die on a cross or Adam and Eve didn’t exist then his Christianity would completely fall apart. In a similar way he feels if he can show that some scientific “truth” is untrue then science will completely fall apart. This is why creationists/IDers spend so much time and effort in trying to poke holes in evolution. If some creationist can find the slightest flaw in evolution then it’ll come tumbling down.
There’s another point that goes with this. In David’s view there are two and only two competing ideologies, science and his particular flavor of Christianity. The conflict between the two ideologies is a zero-sum game. If science fails then his fundamentalist, evangelical Jebusism automatically wins! That’s why he takes such glee in presenting things which apparently “overturn” science. We have a completely different understanding of science. We see new evidence and modified theories as features, he sees them as bugs.
Glen Davidson #391
I sit corrected. Thank you.
Seeing as it makes more sense for me to respond here, I’d like to thank all those people who responded to the “godbots” in the bullying thread.
I’m relatively new to this blog, but I did find it entertaining how you all responded it to them over the first 600 or so posts. I haven’t quite read everything since, nor have I read most of the comments in this thread, but doing so may have made the chance to write this approach absurdity.
I will admit that I found some of the responses a bit arrogant, but putting my shocked feelings aside, I could see clearly that you were answering their questions and arguments, while they just kept asking questions. Sometimes they would reply that “You’re not answering my question!” when it had been answered numerous times beforehand. It reminded me of an article I read about questioning being an atheist’s bane: completely idiotic in practice, as you all showed it to be.
Once again, thank you very much for the enlightening entertainment. Now I’ll return to lurking, as I recall someone comparison these “godbots” to someone in introductory philosophy, and I’m in an introductory philosophy class.
Intro to Psych? Then you’re one up on me, supersysscvi. I’ve never studied philosophy, so every time a godbot says “Were you there?” I’m like all “OMG!!! TOTALLY NEW CONCEPT!”
Hello, supersysscvi, c’mon in, the water’s fine (mostly no sharks).
Yeah, that was quite an afternoon’s “entertainment” – we don’t usually get a synchronized invasion of minions – but there are always the stray biblebashers (like David, now) popping in at random.
Feel free to stick your words in edgewise wherever you see fit. Really, it’s good practice, especially for answering questions in real life classes.
supersysscvi #395
We’ve seen the “how do you know that?” and “do you believe in absolutes?” shuck and jive many times before. erichovind and SyeTenB used to visit the old site. erichovind varies his questions to some extent but SyeTenB is convinced that if he keeps repeating the same dishonest question then we’ll all fall on our knees, shout “praise Jesus” and tear up our copies of Why Evolution Is True just to shut him up.
Yeah, Sye Ten Bruggencate is a megalomaniac. He really thinks he’s the man that’s got the power.
Hey, Bragger-cate, this one’s for you:
You remind me of a man.
What man?
The man with the power.
What power?
The power of hoodoo.
Hoodoo?
You do.
Do what?
Remind me of a man.
What man?
The man with the power
What power ? …
.
.
.
.
.
.
#391, Glenn
That’s my understanding too, with the caveat of what type of bronze are we talking about, and the exact type of steel; there being an upper limit to the amount of tin and carbon respectively, and how each alloy is treated by the smith.
Quality control and metallurgy wasn’t all that hot back in the early Iron Age, so bronzes and irons/steels would vary in composition and thus in quality/strength. One noble’s panoply would be more a brass than a bronze, and thus weaker than the more bronze equipment of another’s. Meanwhile Assyrian armor and weapons would be more something along the lines of a mild steel, giving them a reputation for being mightier warriors than their enemies.
Once paged through a book on specialty steels, which mentioned something like 20,000 types. Some of which incorporated metals like tin and copper for various properties. Copper for wear if I remember correctly. Metallurgy and materials science are interesting subjects in their own right.
ICR is dishonest in the extreme they take research and twist it to suite themselves. The challenege is to read their article then read the references here try this one
http://www.icr.org/article/new-evidence-shows-duck-like-birds/ now have way through the article it goes from duck-like to duck. While if you read the actual articleby Gareth Dyke Scientific american you find he is talking about duck-like that occupied the same ecological niche as modern ducks. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=winged-victory
His poor deluded brain seems to be harboring the illusion that science works like his cult : decrees by all-powerful authorities.
So he concludes that if can find something wrong in any presently accepted model in science, it proves science wrong, and since godbots tend to think in simple dual, black-and-white, us vs them terms (and he himself certainly does – just look at his drivel about non-xians being controlled by satan), that it also in the same stroke proves his own delusions true.
You know, I used to find threads like this one and the other one amusing, you know? A fun way to kill a few minutes here and there.
But the stupidity, it HURTS! Gah!
Is it because trolls like Yo Yo Pa refrain from invective and decline to show the foamy mouth-flecks that,instead of being comical, they come across as merely pathetic?
And there’s obviously no conversation coming from him. No attempt to respond (or maybe there was, and I couldn’t read that far, because, as I said, the stupid burns SO BAD).
Sigh.
Dear Eric Hovind,
Please send better trolls.
Yours in giant invisible misogynist homophobic magic psychopathic tyrants in the sky,
IB
The Dave one doesn’t have the slightest idea what science is or how it works. He was putting up those links without being able to read or understand them. This shows a lack of education.
In a way it’s too bad. He certainly was trying hard and that was amusing.
I used to ask some of the more uneducated godbots if they had ever even seen a university much less walked through one. None of them ever said yes. Some people live restricted lives and never travel more than a few miles from home.
Kieran wrtes: “While if you read the actual articleby Gareth Dyke Scientific american you find he is talking about duck-like that occupied the same ecological niche as modern ducks.”
Speaking of ducks….
Here’s an idea for any talented artists out there: Create some large diorama-like posters depicting dinosaurs eating rice and grass, and add some ducks, possums, flamingos, sandpipers, loons, parrots, snails, frogs, salamanders, rose bushes, apple trees, sassafras trees etc. since they are also found in the SAME rock layers as dino fossils. Maybe sell them at natural history museums.
http://www.icr.org/article/6428/
Dinosaurs Ate Rice
by Brian Thomas, M.S.
Just what did dinosaurs eat?
[snip]
For example, in 2005, researchers found phytoliths from grass, palm trees, conifers, and other flowering plants in (probably sauropod) dinosaur coprolites from India.1 “It was very unexpected….We will have to rewrite our understanding of its evolution….We may have to add grass to the dioramas of dinosaurs we see in museums,” palaeobotanist Caroline
Strömberg told Nature News at the time.
[snip]
*
RSF: What Museums Aren’t Showing You
http://kgov.com/bel/20110415
RSF: Whale of a Tale, Telethon, & Saturn’s Rings
http://kgov.com/bel/20110902
Part 1 interview with Dr. Carl Werner
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XIqto00mf3w&nofeather=True
Part 2 interview with Dr. Carl Werner
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cf9CTrvEeE0&nofeather=True
Part 3 interview with Dr. Carl Werner
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZNO3_SorHDM&nofeather=True
http://www.thegrandexperiment.com/
Evolution: The Grand Experiment,
Volume 1 The Quest for an Answer: DVD, book, teacher’s manual
Evolution: The Grand Experiment,
Volume 2 Living Fossils: DVD, book, teacher’s manual
Part 3 [Human Evolution] will be published in about 18 months, and includes an interview with Donald Johanson. Part 4 will be on Earth Science.
Kieran wrtes: “While if you read the actual articleby Gareth Dyke Scientific american you find he is talking about duck-like that occupied the same ecological niche as modern ducks.”
Speaking of ducks….
Here’s an idea for any talented artists out there: Create some large diorama-like posters depicting dinosaurs eating rice and grass, and add some ducks, possums, flamingos, sandpipers, loons, parrots, snails, frogs, salamanders, rose bushes, apple trees, sassafras trees etc. since they are also found in the SAME rock layers as dino fossils. Maybe sell them at natural history museums.
http://www.icr.org/article/6428/
Dinosaurs Ate Rice
by Brian Thomas, M.S.
Just what did dinosaurs eat?
[snip]
For example, in 2005, researchers found phytoliths from grass, palm trees, conifers,
and other flowering plants in (probably sauropod) dinosaur coprolites from India.1
“It was very unexpected….We will have to rewrite our understanding of its
evolution….We may have to add grass to the dioramas of dinosaurs we see in museums,”
palaeobotanist Caroline Strömberg told Nature News at the time.
RSF: What Museums Aren’t Showing You
http://kgov.com/bel/20110415
RSF: Whale of a Tale, Telethon, & Saturn’s Rings
http://kgov.com/bel/20110902
Part 1 interview with Dr. Carl Werner
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XIqto00mf3w&nofeather=True
Part 2 interview with Dr. Carl Werner
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cf9CTrvEeE0&nofeather=True
Part 3 interview with Dr. Carl Werner
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZNO3_SorHDM&nofeather=True
http://www.thegrandexperiment.com/
Evolution: The Grand Experiment,
Volume 1 The Quest for an Answer: DVD, book, teacher’s manual
Evolution: The Grand Experiment,
Volume 2 Living Fossils: DVD, book, teacher’s manual
Part 3 [Human Evolution] will be published in about 18 months, and includes an
interview with Donald Johanson. Part 4 will be on Earth Science.
So, no science from David, other than trivia like the fact that grass evolved earlier than we used to know.
Moron, that’s what science does, it learns.
Lies from liars like Werner are of no greater value than are lies from liars like von Daniken.
If you ever understand what an honest source is, what honest evidence is, David, you’ll be able to converse about them. While you shovel shit at us, no matter how stupidly you believe the shit, you’re going to be called the ignorant fuck-up that you are. I’m sorry that you learned lies from lying liars, but we learned something about truth and how to get it.
Glen Davidson
David #405
FAIL
ICR is the opposite of a reputable source. The link is less than useless.
FAIL
Rewriting on the basis of new data? THAT IS HOW SCIENCE WORKS.
You pretend that you’re showing some sort of shocking “problems” with evolution, but all you’re showing is science exploring, testing, and sometimes changing part of some theory or other to better fit reality. Your supposed “problem” is actually demonstrating WHY SCIENCE WORKS.
Also, you are demonstrating a classic error of the anti-evolutionists: you see a scientist saying that some aspect of the accepted evolutionary timeline may have to be altered, and you shout AHA EVOLUTION IS WRONG!
FAIL
What I really don’t get is that the ‘tactics’ these godbots use ‘work’ just as well against them.
God exists.
How do you know?
The bible says so.
But how do you know?
The preacher said so.
But how do you know?
Because I believe
But how do you know?
Every single one of their ‘arguments’ can be turned back around to destroy their own belief systems, and yet they persist. Through the whole thread, I was picturing this little man sawing down a tree branch that he was standing on, cackling gleefully about it hitting the person watching him from below.
The arguments aren’t rational, aren’t logical, don’t work, and don’t actually support their stance, so why do they keep using these same one-liners over and over and over again? That’s like, guinea fowl level stupid.
David @ #405:
From the article you linked:
Now, there’s two possible reactions to it:
One reaction, that of a person with proper training in how scientific theories work (or a person that bothers to think, or otherwise exhibits behavior that shows they have a functioning brain) would say something like this:
Source: http://www.nature.com/news/2005/051117/full/news051114-13.html
The other reaction, that of a fucking idiot who probably needs little notes to remember not to stop breathing, would be something like this:
Source: http://www.icr.org/article/6428/
So, while I personally doubt you’ll get it, here it goes again: “Science adjusts its views based on what’s observed. Faith is the denial of observation so that belief can be preserved”
(Thank you, Tim Minchin!)
What you present as “proof” of how evolution is false it’s actually an excellent example of how science-based knowledge evolves in order to adapt to data. This should have been clear if you bothered to read the articles your own damn links cite.
Damn. And here I was taking my sweet time thinking Sundays would move a bit more slowly. Good to know the Horde never sleeps :D
(That, and a world-wide readership helps to, I guess)
Dave, is that you *l*n Cl*rke (* = “a”). Still not showing any science, just religion attempting to masquerade as sciency.
David the testicle polisher of satan;
“and add some ducks, possums, flamingos, sandpipers, loons, parrots, snails, frogs, salamanders, rose bushes, apple trees, sassafras trees etc. since they are also found in the SAME rock layers as dino fossils.”
Your silly link says nothing of dicotyledonous plants in the dino poop. You can’t even quote your erroneous source properly. Which proves once again that you are a liar for satan.
What’s even sadder is that the restrictions seem to keep them from traveling in their own minds – you don’t need to get a college degree to understand the ToE, most high school kids are quite competent enough to do it, provided they aren’t afflicted with the jeebus mind virus.
A virus that’s so efficient that it keeps them emprisonned in their own minds even in the age of the internet, where everything is at the tips of their fingers, no need to ever set foot in a meatspace library or museum.
All theology and apologetics reduce down to, “The voices in my head said so”.
Once you understand this, you know everything about them.
There are billions of people with voices in their heads. The voices all say different things and agree on nothing.
Yet you ignore the fact that icr has misquoted and misrepresented the work in question, so your source has bared false witness. If they have the truth and the answers why do they have to lie, which is against the ten commandments, number nine from exodus 20 not the other ten commandments from exodus 34 which are obsessed with fruit.
David is not responding to anyone here. He occasionally quotes from a post but never replies to comments made. He gives links to ICR articles which he must know we’ll never look at. He also links to articles from reputable sources but quite obviously doesn’t understand what they’re saying, even when he quotes from them. All he does is show he has no understanding of how science works but he knows it’s wrong.
David’s willful ignorance is pathetic. I’m not sure why he bothers posting here, unless he’s trying to rack up brownie points with Jebus.
I listened to some Carl Werner, since I was at the computer anyway and didn’t need to watch.
He’s especially stupid. Caricatures of evolution, stupid claims that Rodhocetus isn’t a transition because not all the parts were found, lies that whale evolution is the best evidence for evolution (couldn’t be better than hominin evolution, in any case). But the most stupid thing I noticed after a while is that Werner’s so dumb that he thinks that evolution through “volition” was Darwin’s theory, and neo-Darwinism moved toward mutation plus natural selection. Of course it’s true that Darwin agreed with the notion that acquired characteristics were passed on to the following generations, although Wallace did not (or so it’s claimed), but clearly natural selection was his baby.
He’s an MD, by the way.
If you can’t get the most basic facts about the history of evolution right, and instead confuse Darwinian theory with Lamarckism, you’re too stupid to have anyone listen to you. Werner’s about as competent as David is–I’d guess there’s some chance that they’re the same people, even.
Glen Davidson
The Darwiniacs say, “We continually revise our theories. That’s how science works. Science-based knowledge ‘evolves’ in order to adapt to data.” (Yeah, I like that word ‘evolve’.)
The Darwiniacs may revise certain aspects as new data becomes available, but evolution is incredibly malleable. But how much contrary evidence must accumulate before evolution is discarded? Today it survives, not so much as a theory of science, but as a philosophical necessity: methodological naturalism.
Methodological Naturalism? by Alvin Plantinga
http://www.arn.org/docs/odesign/od181/methnat181.htm
Methodological Naturalism? Part 2 Alvin Plantinga
http://www.arn.org/docs/odesign/od182/methnat182.htm
Only within some very fixed aspects, lying hound. Idiots like yourself would love to find a true chimera, something that shows evidence that it was designed by taking parts from unrelated organisms (and which would not be due to horizontal gene transfer). Of course they can’t, while their equivalents are rampant throughout actual designed artifacts.
Show us any, dumbass. You sure haven’t presented any, and I can’t think of any that anyone else has.
Fuckwit liar. Merely chanting your bullshit evidences and changes nothing at all.
Glen Davidson
David, you’re way late on your links to Plantinga. We discussed and dismissed his idiocies over two years ago.
Oh, another fuckwit liar.
You can’t just keep shoveling stupid shit at us, dumbfuck, and expect anything but well-deserved contempt.
Glen Davidson
David @ #420:
Here’s the thing: There is no valid contrary evidence against evolutionary theory. Using the example you linked in #405, the fact that a specific type of plant evolved before the K-T extinction event instead of after it doesn’t prove that evolution is wrong, only that the specific knowledge regarding this specific type of plant needs to be revised.
As an example, imagine I have a red car. I show it to you and say “hey, look at my red car!”. And as soon as you spot a small spot where the paint has chipped, you say “AHA! This here is not red! Your car is clearly not red!”
But most people would consider such a reaction to be completely ludicrous. And yet it is exactly what you are doing regarding evolutionary theory (except for the fact that an invisible father figure is apparently telling you that the car is not red)
Sigh…
One good solid verifiable piece of evidence. Just one. As it is more famously answered “fossil bunnies in the Cambrian”. But there isn’t any. No one has provided that evidence. Do you have it David? Are you hiding the critical proof against evolution? Not some silly link to the ramblings of idiots, published peer-reviewed scientific literature. If not, then kindly fuck right the hell off.
And its not evolution that’s “malleable”, its science. Every discipline adjusts itself to adapt to new data. Its what makes science brilliant. If you can’t accept that, please stop using all the wonderful things science has provided you with. Your computer, your electricity, the clean water in your tap, your house, your car, and on and on and on.
Science, it works!
David the bearer of false witness:
Any theory that can no longer fit the evidence IS DISCARDED. That’s why Lamarckism was discarded. That’s why Ether was discarded. THAT’S WHY SCIENCE WORKS.
Not only does Evolution fit the evidence, THERE IS NO OTHER VIABLE THEORY THAT DOES.
Nonsense.
By the way, “Evolution” doesn’t say anything about when grasses evolved compared with dinosaurs. There are theories which use evolution as a foundation and which may say specific things like that. If one of those theories proves untenable, it can be discarded without affecting other theories.
Glen Davidson says: “Of course it’s true that Darwin agreed with the notion that acquired characteristics were passed on to the following generations, although Wallace did not (or so it’s claimed), but clearly natural selection was his baby.”
Although English chemist/zoologist Edward Blyth didn’t use the specific term “natural selection”, the idea was Blyth’s (who was a creationist)
http://www.icr.org/article/natural-selection-creationists-idea
He wrote his first of three major articles on natural selection in The Magazine of Natural History, over 20 years before Darwin’s book was published. But Blyth didn’t attribute God-like qualities to natural selection, as Darwiniacs do today. At least some are willing to admit: “Natural selection can only act on those biologic properties that already exist; it cannot create properties in order to meet adaptational needs.” Noble, et al., Parasitology, 6th ed. (Lea & Febiger, 1989), p. 516.
http://creation.com/charles-darwins-illegitimate-brainchild
You’re a barefaced liar, David – and in your insolence you are slandering thousands upon thousands of scientists whose boots you are not worthy to clean, as liars. The theory of evolution by natural selection is the basis of all modern biology, because it explains and connects a vast range of facts, and there is no evidence whatever against it. You have provided none, nor do your fellow-liars at answersingenesis and similar moron hideouts.
In fairness, Plantinga is the one person of the lot who seems to be a philosopher first and a fundie second, albeit a very very very close-on-its-heels second. He’s also less of a frothing maniac than, say, van Til.
But his “Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism” is trash. Ditto his free-will theodicy, which is apparently the gold standard for apologetics (poor bastards). I have no formal training in any of this and can still rip them apart in a matter of seconds.
The EAAN in particular displays a risible lack of understanding of probability theory and a bizarre presupposition that beliefs form “out of nowhere” and with no real referent to the outside world or former experience. His free will theodicy fails on the grounds that his God still chose to value free will above all else (i.e., he has not shown that God could not have decided to value something else instead in the interest of reducing suffering and/or evil).
And like all Abrahamic cultists, he continually conflates Yahweh with the concept of God. All of his arguments could work for showing that a Deist-type God is not absolutely illogical, but they don’t work for Yahweh, especially in light of what we know of the evolution of the Abrahamic tradition.
And they still don’t explain why Yahweh had to sacrifice himself to himself to stop himself from throwing his creations who he knew would sin (and exactly where, when, why, and how much) into the Hell he created (but never mentioned through all history until Jesus).
This is the guy who has multiple philosophy PhDs and has been doing the deepest work in the field since before I was a twinkle in my father’s eye. Fan-friggin’-tastic.
David, every time you use ICR to back up your claims, you are admitting that you are lying in God’s name.
You are a liar, David.
So fucking what? I know about that, and I don’t care. It’s evolution through natural selection that matters.
Actually, dumbass, the reason that evolution fits the data is that it produces predictions that are decidedly ungodlike and unintelligent. The chimera, which you ignored you dishonest piece of shit, is what would be at least intelligently made, conceivably “god-like.” So, pure lying shit from you again.
It’s not an “admission” you endlessly-lying ignoramus, it’s a prediction from the mechanisms.
Glen Davidson
@David
Yeah, this is pathetic. Ken Miller, a devout Catholic, acknowledges that the endogenous retrovirus record and the fused human chromosome 2 (product of end-to-end fusion of ape chromosomes 2q and 2p, complete with inactive centromere and telomeric sequences in the middle) are “knockout punch” evidence for evolution.
You are an idolator. You slap God in the face with your Bible and tell him “Fuck your reality and fuck you, my ideas are more important than you.” You would not know Jesus if he came up to you and smacked you in the face and left a big red handprint with a nail hole in it.
Here’s your porcupine cadaver. You know what to do.
Except Blyth viewed natural selection rather than a means of creating new species it kept species as they where rather than being a force towards speciation. If you read outside of creationist sources you might just get a bit of information that is useful, such as Darwin giving praise to Blyth in chapter one of the origin of species.
Never let the truth get in the way of a good story, should be the motto of all creationists.
Dave, the Kwisatz Haderach says:”One good solid verifiable piece of evidence. Just one.”
OK. Explain why microfossils of pollen, spores, angiosperms, gymnosperms, and at least one winged insect, have been found in Eocambrian (Upper Precambrian) rock:
http://creation.com/pollen-paradox
And although modern reports acknowledge overthrusts in the Salt Range, they unanimously declare the Salt Range Formation to be Eocambrian, not Eocene. (Yeats et al. 1984, Butler et al. 1987, Jauné and Lillie 1988, Baker et al. 1988, Pennock et al. 1989, McDougall and Khan 1990).
McDougall, J. W., and Khan, S. H., 1990, Strike-slip faulting in a foreland fold-thrust belt: The Kalabagh Fault and Western Salt Range, Pakistan: Tectonics, v. 9, pp. 1061-1075.
http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/1990/TC009i005p01061.shtml
Werner also makes the weirdest, most ignorant attack against Archaeopteryx (which, btw, is said to once again fit into the bird clade, based upon a purportedly more-refined analysis) as the great transitional fossil that it is. That it might have had feathers rather than scales on its head is supposed to be somehow important.
More ludicrous is his attack on feathered dinosaurs. I don’t know when he made his idiotic piece, but feathered dinosaurs are certainly well known today to have existed. Even if at the time one could still argue against feathered dinosaurs, clearly they connect birds with dinosaurs now. So he hitched his wagonload of manure to something that certainly upended his shitload by now.
Nowhere does Werner evince any capability to actually discuss the evidence showing relatedness of organisms in the whale series, or archaeopteryx’s relatedness to dinosaurs. Or to understand epistemology or inference, let alone any competent critical analysis.
Glen Davidson
FAIL
creation.com? NOT A REAL SOURCE.
WHY DO YOU KEEP LYING, DAVID?
Lava intrusions in the sandstone would have burnt up the pollen and then take into account that only a year after that was first published they found that the pollen is at most late eocene. Once again don’t let the facts get in the way of your story andwe love a gish gallop since you seem to be on a mission to bounce from topic to topic.
http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CC/CC341.html
If you cared half as much about truth as about telling lies, David, you’d at least read such responses to your BS, rather than just quoting lying asshats like yourself.
Obviously the biggest problem with claiming that pollen and spores were made by such plants in the Eocambrian is that the trees and other plants simply aren’t found at that time. Find petrified wood from, say, 2 billion years ago, and we have a real problem in the context of the rest of life’s evidence. Find pollen that’s “out of place” and there are a variety of processes that might explain it.
Glen Davidson
I bet he ignores the DNA evidence, as it were :) The fossil record has nothing on genetic analysis as far as proving evolution goes. At this point, if evolution somehow turns out not to be true, we may safely conclude that the universe is being run by an evil (and very trollish) being.
“Dinosaur bones, Hazuki,” I tell myself on threads like this. “For ages the cultists said dinosaur bones couldn’t be what they are for religious reasons. Now it’s genomic fossils instead of somatic they’re resisting.”
For a discussion of “feathered dinosaurs” go to:
Evolution:The Grand Experiment
http://books.google.ca/books?id=avpVUs7AtmkC&printsec=frontcover&dq=evolution:+The+grand+experiment&hl=en&ei=99q2TsKwPMfYiAKmzZR6&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&sqi=2&ved=0CC0Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false
and scroll down to start at p. 166. The section extends to p. 184
Werner has no excuse for claiming that non-avian dinosaurs don’t have evidence for feathers. The book came out in 2007, and the first part of his execrable videos based on the book was uploaded in April 2011.
So he either doesn’t care enough about the truth to find it, or doesn’t care enough to tell it–or both.
Glen Davidson
Linking to lies told by other liars doesn’t make you any less of a liar, David.
Lying creationists are not the source for veridical knowledge.
Here’s just one of many reliable sources of the evidence of feathers in non-avian dinosaurs:
http://www.nature.com/nchina/2010/100210/full/nchina.2010.19.html
Glen Davidson
I didn’t reference any pollen discoveries by Clifford Burdick, nor did the article I linked:
http://creation.com/pollen-paradox
*
Burdick had nothing to do with what Stainforth and Sahni reported:
“The discovery of pollen and spores in beds considered Precambrian (Proterozoic) has received brief notice in geological journals and the press.” (Stainforth, R. M., “Occurance of Pollen and Spores in the Roraima Formation of Venezuela and British Guiana”, Nature, 1966, 210, pp. 292-296.)
“The great majority are undeterminable as to genus and species, being mainly shreds of angiosperm wood, but there are also gymnosperm tracheids with large round bordered pits, and at least one good, winged, six-legged insect with compound eyes.” (Sahni, B., “Age of the Saline Series in the Salt Range of the Punjab”, Nature, 1944, 153, p. 462.)
To Sahni, this meant the Salt Range Formation must be Eocene. He later found plant fragments not only in the kallar (thin layers of saline earth) but in associated solid rock layers composed of dolomite and shale. In his report, Sahni (1945, p. x) said “stringent precautions” were taken to prevent contamination of the samples with modern organic remains. He also emphasized that samples were taken from locations where the geological evidence ruled out intrusion from younger strata.
Yeah, god-like qualities are pretty laughable to ascribe to anything.
so, like most creobots, David doesn’t even understand the information he keeps linking to, he just relies on it as authority, and continues his copypasta viral extravaganza.
Banhammer please.
Yes David, I don’t give a fuck what sources lying you or the lying ICR used.
There are two points that are important, one being that pollen can and does travel through rock. The second being that you actually need plants to create pollen. That’s true whether you’re creationist or evolution, unless you’re reverting back to Satan or God making fake fossils to tempt or to test us.
Find the fucking plants, dickhead. Otherwise, we have no reason (especially since you never give us any original sources) to believe that the pollen was produced that early.
Glen Davidson
David the creobot. What evidence is required for you to acknowledge creationism is a religious idea that in no way refutes science?
Or better yet, what evidence is required to make you think your deity is imaginary, a delusion in your mind?
It really is sad to see someone expending that much effort on not understanding a subject.
Pollen being discovered earlier than evolutionary theory previously thought doesn’t help creationism…since it’s even earlier than their dogma.
You can’t win by sinking my battleship when we’re in the same boat, idiot.
Pollen being discovered earlier than evolutionary theory previously thought
I’m not convinced this is even the case.
have you examined what he posted?
Microfossils of pollen, spores, angiosperms, gymnosperms, and at least one winged insect, have been found in Eocambrian (Upper Precambrian) rock. Now the Darwiniacs have to deal with it.
http://rpasmd.org/rms/Discussion_Roraima.htm
http://rpasmd.org/rms/Pollen_Roraima.htm
And these geology papers (all peer-reviewed in the scientific literature) were written by evolutionists, not creationists:
Yeats et al. 1984, Butler et al. 1987, Jauné and Lillie 1988, Baker et al. 1988, Pennock et al. 1989, McDougall and Khan 1990.
Clueless.
Both those papers are very old.
The Venezuela data was never followed up. No one takes it seriously or cares.
The Punjab data was followed up. It turns out that the stratigraphy was more complex than originally thought and that there were in fact, Eocene deposits there.
BTW, David has been here before and done his mindless creobot copy and paste. Including these papers which were shown to be wrong. He simply isn’t interested or capable of learning.
Whatever. I’m off to do something far more worthwhile. Eat lunch.
Oh, and David, the Gish Gallop doesn’t impress us, and shows us your desperation. Try only one piece of evidence, which can’t be from the religious site, ICR.
…you people are being too lazy.
look at what David considers to be a peer reviewed article supporting the idea that there were pollen grains in precambrian rock.
Stainforth, R. M., “Occurance of Pollen and Spores in the Roraima Formation of Venezuela and British Guiana”, Nature, 1966, 210, pp. 292-296.
what is that?
IT’S A FUCKING LETTER TO NATURE.
there is no science there.
you should ALWAYS suspect anything posted from ICR, let alone some link to a journal from 1966.
I’m sure if you actually use the science citation index to look for people that have examined the papers listed in that letter, you would find what’s really up.
David suspects conspiracy, because he drank the koolaid.
you don’t have to accept his claims at face value.
especially when it’s so obvious they are complete bullshit.
Why don’t mindless godbots like yourself need to deal with it, dweeb? Because you have fuck-all for theory and explanation of anything at all?
I guess that’s it. Even by claiming that we have problems and implying that you don’t, you tacitly admit that we do science, while you do nothing but lie.
So gee, there are serious questions under an honest view of the earth. Why would this not be expected now, as it has occurred in the past?
You having nothing but lies as a foundation have no problem, because you have nothing coherent or meaningful to say in the first place.
Glen Davidson
…Crosspost with Raven.
:P
Wow.
That’s quite a bad infestation of the jeebus virus we have here.
How are those two things even related at that level ?
Look, jeebus freak, what you say makes absolutely no sense whatsoever.
First you think “evidence” == “opinion from authoritarian source”, however much people keep telling you that’s not how it works. Then you cite authors which are known kooks, some of them so kooky that real scientists are too ashamed for them to even laugh at them – a bit like you cringe when seeing your old grampa stand up stark naked on a table in a chic restaurant to pee in your boss’ coffee.
Then you jump around on a bunch of unrelated subjects in science or philosophy, using the very same worthless, already discarded, sources, trying to find something that might be wrong with any present scientific theory at all as if that would automatically validate your xianist delusions.
There’s a major thing that you seem to fail understand here : even if every single bit of bullshit that you seem to hold as true was actually true, even if the morally abhorrent fairy tale book that is the xian bible was completely true, most of us here would think it our duty as decent human beings to resist your batshit-insane, sociopathic god.
Yep, science is incredibly flexible, quite unlike your petrified mind. The thing is,
it.
fucking.
works.
Evolution is useful because of that single fact – it works, that is it fits with reality, which means that we can use it to explain some aspects of reality to our advantage – to develop technology.
Tell you what – give us a single example, just one, of the usefulness of the design “hypothesis” (I’m afraid that knowing as much as I do about human physiology, I would have to call it “stupid” rather than “intelligent” design) in any field.
Doesn’t matter. The point is that even if he was right it means evolution adjusts the dates and creationism is still off my orders of magnitude.
It’s the same deal with that retreat into sophistry “how do you KNOW anything”. They don’t seem to realize this pushes any claims they make back too…you’re subtracting from both sides of the equation. It changes nothing.
It’s almost like he’s afraid of something. Like his whole world will collapse if he allows a new thought in.
So very sad.
And these geology papers (all peer-reviewed in the scientific literature) were written by evolutionists, not creationists
But, you haven’t actually READ a single one of them.
go ahead, read them David.
come back and tell us then JUST HOW ACCURATE the creationist take is on them.
see, the problem is, you want to rely on authority that agrees with your presuppositions.
we HAD no presuppositions going into science. We were actually convinced by evidence.
but then, we also actually read all the damn papers instead of relying on what our peers or teachers told us about them.
Free your mind.
Yes, it’s a letter, which is the rubric under which many Nature papers are published. It’s not “correspondence,” it’s a genuine report on science.
Nothing wrong with it, but nothing to get very excited about, of course. Even if some such claims have never been fully resolved, what of that? There are a host of things we don’t know, and a number of things that we know very well, like that “design” is an utter crock, and that life evolved.
Glen Davidson
Yes, it’s a letter, which is the rubric under which many Nature papers are published.
not my point.
it contains no original data, it is a summary opinion piece.
correct or not, it is irrelevant to the actual work being discussed, but is posted as if it were an actual piece of scientific work by ICR and the like.
so, thanks for the, uh, what?
condescending crap from someone who already knows I publish in scientific journals myself?
I don’t need your “corrections” Glen, thanks.
David: Let us say that your claims regarding pollen finds are correct (they are not). This is not a particularly damning piece of evidence. Even if we found J.B.S. Haldane’s hypothetical “fossil rabbits in the Precambrian (a far more serious problem that the one you are proposing), evolution would still stand as a theory. In fact, real scientists would be attempting to validate the claim immediately, by checking the age of the surrounding rock formations, checking for glacial irregulars, ensuring that the fossil is not a hoax, and even checking their own equipment. But, for the sake of argument, let us assume that the fossil is genuine, and the the surrounding rock is indeed 2-3 billion years old. All this means is that science has the time scale wrong. The process is not at all invalidated. That rabbit still evolved by natural selection from its phylogenetic ancestors. That pollen came from a tree that evolved from simpler plants. The genetic evidence tells us that in the absence of a fossil record. In fact, even if there were not a single fossil on the planet we would still have an insurmountable mountain of evidence for evolution; from embryology, from genetics and phylogeny, from long term bacterial evolution studies, from virology, from anatomy and physiology. We don’t need the (very incomplete) fossil record. The evidence is there, please consider it without your preconceived notions that have been so deceitfully placed in your mind by your ministers.
Thank you,
A. R
You know, you seem to go out of your way to show that some, or at least one, on our side are about as stupid and dishonest as David is.
You said that there was no science there.
That wasn’t your point and that wasn’t what you said.
No thanks needed, you’re just blithering because you were wrong, and you can never admit to it when you are.
When you’re very wrong while condescending to the idiot creationist, who cares about what you know or don’t know, ass? Fuck you and your stupid mendacity, compounded by your moving the goalposts to keep from admitting the nonsense you spouted.
So your bullshit stands no matter how wrong it is? That is exactly the stance that idiot David takes, and it’s appalling that you sink to his level.
Now fuck off and I’m out of this thread. I don’t deal long with you, having learned how egregiously and nastily dishonest you are whenever you’re found to be wrong. You can just piss on yourself, I’m not going to bother with your screeching nonsense.
Glen Davidson
FWIW, there are a lot of papers on the age and stratigraphy of the Salt range in Pakistan more recent than 1944.
Here are two. FYI, the paleocene and eocene are long after the cambrian by hundreds of millions of years, and after the demise of the dinosaurs by the Chixulub asteroid event.
I have argued before that a Precambrian bunny would not be “contrary” evindence against evolution. I’ll repost the entire thing, because I’m curious if anyone has a reasonable counter-argument. I’m sure that David doesn’t since he’s nothing but a badly malfunctioning script.
[Repost of comment on to thread “Episode LX: Revenge of the bunny” originally made on May 27, 2010 10:32 PM]
So.
Bunnies. Let’s talk bunnies.
Bunnies aren’t just cute like everybody supposes.
They got them hoppy legs and twitchy twitchy little noses
And what’s with all the carrots?
What do they need such good eyesight for anyway?
So let’s say that you’re a paleontologist who is interested in investigating the changes in life forms between the Precambrian and the Cambrian. So you go to do some fieldwork in a nice Precambrian Lagerstätte, such as in Mistaken Point, Newfoundland. And you manage to find some forms that have never been seen before, by searching harder: maybe by levering off or up some big slabs; maybe by rappelling down a cliff to a fresh exposure. Anyway, in addition to all the Precambrian life, you turn your head, and there you see embedded in the same rock is the skeleton of… a rabbit.
Well, crap. Now what?
Let’s posit, for the sake of argument, that there is no evidence of a hoax; no discontinuities between the rock, the Precambrian fossils, and the rabbit skeleton embedded with them.
So you call over your fellow investigators, and you all take high-resolution photographs, and maybe even an impression or a cast. And you wonder what the hell it means. Is evolution falsified now?
You take the photographs and whatnot to a vertebrate zoologist, to figure out exactly what species of Leporid this is. And the zoologist looks up references, and compares the characters to the photographs &c, and says that it’s definitely in the Lepus genus, probably Lepus europaeus. And then wonders what all the weird marine lifeforms overlying and intermixed with the rabbit skeleton are. “They’re Precambrian”, you say. The zoologist stares and says “Wait, what?”
Does this mean that evolution is falsified now?
The theory of evolution explains the differences in living organisms: offspring differ from parents, some of those differences are inheritable, and these differences can lead to better survival rates for those offspring that have them. Different traits can aid survival in different ways, too: one set of individuals may have traits that enable coping with warmer or cooler climate, while another may have traits that lead them to shun those climate changes. Both work in different ways to enable survival. Evolution is not prescriptive; there is nothing that says that changes must happen. There is nothing that makes one set of traits “better” except in how they permit survival for those organisms that have those traits. In modern evolutionary biology, these inherited differences are specifically linked to the units of inheritance; to genes made of DNA.
How does the rabbit skeleton falsify any of that?
The theory of common descent is often conflated with the theory of evolution, but it isn’t exactly the same. It basically looks at the organisms alive today in light of the theory of evolution, and extrapolates backwards: Given the differences and similarities that exist between different species now, those species are best understood as the descendant populations of a single ancestor species, and this extrapolation can be repeated indefinitely going backward in time to older single populations that split, until a single and unique ancestral population is reached. Since geochemists have discovered that the Earth is 4.5 billion years old, this means that there was plenty of time for these changes to have taken place, given the small amount of changes per generation. Hence, the tree of life.
There are certain reasonable assumptions that palaeontologists usually make about fossils: that an individual or group of individuals fossilized actually represent a much larger population; that that population itself may well have quite a few sister and cousin species; that the organism lived in a particular ecosystem and climate, and had a particular diet and living environment, and its remains may well reflect that.
Do those assumptions make sense in the case of this Precambrian rabbit? For the sake of this scenario, all that is found is the rabbit skeleton itself. There is no sign of pollen indicating the sort of plants that rabbits eat (such plants did not evolve until at least another hundred million years after the end of the Precambrian).
How about an alternative scenario?
Consider watches; wristwatches and pocket-watches. We have a theory as to how watches come about: Human beings make them. The design of the watch is drafted by a human. Humans find the metal, refine it, pour it into molds of the desired shapes, or flatten it into sheets which are then cut up or punched out. In modern watches, tiny jewels are cut to seat some of the metal pieces. The pieces are assembled into movements according to the design. All this is either done by humans, or done by machines themselves made by humans.
What if you found a watch in the Precambrian strata, instead of a rabbit? Would this falsify the theory of how watches come about? Would it matter if the watch had markings or writing on it that clearly indicated Arabic or Latin numerals, and some human language or some obvious descendant of human language? How about if it was clearly marked with a manufacturer’s brand like ROLEX?
Let’s consider a few theories to account for a watch showing up in the Precambrian.
1) It spontaneously self-assembled.
2) An omniscient and omnipotent God, knowing that watches exactly like it would eventually be manufactured by humans, created it and put it in the strata to eventually be found, for reasons completely opaque to us.
3) Intelligent beings evolved on Earth before the Precambrian, developed a manufacturing process and language identical to that of modern humans, and left no sign of themselves besides the watch.
4) Aliens from outer space had a manufacturing process like ours, and spoke and wrote the same language as what humans would eventually evolve to speak, and dropped the watch there.
5) Time travel of some sort is possible. The watch was manufactured in the near past or will be manufactured in the future, by humans, and somehow went back in time to the Precambrian.
Which of these theories is the most parsimonious and probable, best able to explain the watch as it appears? I’m going with number 5. Does anyone want to defend any of the others? Are there theories that I might have left out?
Getting back to the Precambrian rabbit scenario:
We have a theory of how rabbits arose, just as we have a theory of how watches come about. It involves lobe-finned fish evolving from craniates; tetrapods evolving from lobe-finned fish; synapsids evolving from tetrapods; mammals evolving from synapsids; and rabbits evolving from mammals. It’s not something we have as good a “picture” of as a watch factory — there are plenty of pieces still missing, and some that that are arguable about where and how they fit — but is well-supported by everything we know about rabbits, mammals, and other tetrapods.
In analogy to the watch, let’s consider some theories to account for a rabbit showing up in the Precambrian.
1) The rabbit, or its skeleton, spontaneously self-assembled.
2) An omniscient and omnipotent God, knowing that rabbits exactly like what we know of would eventually evolve, created the rabbit and put it in the strata to eventually be found, for reasons completely opaque to us.
3) Vertebrate mammalian life evolved on Earth before the Precambrian, and left no sign of itself besides the one rabbit.
4) Aliens from outer space evolved life exactly like what we have now, and dropped the rabbit there.
5) Time travel of some sort is possible. The rabbit is one that was born of rabbits that evolved as described by the theory of evolution, following the timeline (tetrapod-synapsid-mammal-rabbit) as currently understood, and this one individual somehow went back in time to the Precambrian, leaving its skeleton to puzzle paleontologists.
I’m still going with number 5 as the most parsimonious and probable explanation. Any disagreement? Is there a possibility I didn’t think of?
Thus we refute Haldane…
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Some respones:
llewely:
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Owlmirror | May 27, 2010 10:32 PM:
You left out an important hypothesis.
666. Satan planted the rabbit in order to turn you into a creationist.
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David Marjanović:
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Number 5 suffers from the problem that faster-than-light travel and time travel seem to come in a package. So I wonder about 3 and 4, but of course those require insane amounts of coincidences.
4 is to be preferred over 3, simply because it so conveniently outsources the question of how the fuck intelligent life could have evolved that early.
Hm… combinations of your 5 (time-travelling aliens and stuff), but of course those just pile up their components’ unparsimonious assumptions.
I was just over at Phil Plait’s Bad Astronomy site, and liked a phrase he used in discussing antivaxxers: “Once you let go of evidence-based reasoning, anything at all makes sense.”
Merde, first time I’ve messed up blockquotes in a while, and of course it’s the time when I didn’t preview.
Ah, you can tell what I meant, anyways.
Somebody on Magrathea made a mistake with Earth mark II.
The mice are going to be mad.
I have to jump in here. Evolution itself (descent with modification, change in allele frequencies in populations, or whichever level you choose to define it) is a phenomenon that evolutionary theory serves to explain. As such, evolution is a fact. Evolutionary theory is the bundle of explanations for the fact of evolution. Because evolution occurs multifariously, not all of these hypotheses are required to explain any particular distribution of data (mostly in the form of homology statements among populations of organisms). Further, if the likelihood of our observations is greatest under the null mode of no evolution (eg Hardy-Weinberg Equilibrium), we can say that no evolution has occurred.
Falsification is deeply built into evolutionary inquiry. A brief glance through the journal Evolution will indicate as much. However, falsification does not apply to evolution *the phenomenon* any more than falsification applies to the conjecture that earth is round.
6. Rabbits appear from a parallel universe. They do so throughout spacetime, but of course rarely appear in places suitable for rabbits to live.
Why, you may ask, is it specifically rabbits that appear? It may be that they are made in God’s image; or perhaps simply because in that parallel universe, just as here, rabbits breed like rabbits.
Clearly, this traffic is not one way: it’s well known that biros and odd socks vanish from our universe on a regular basis – so maybe the parallel universes are in fact conscious beings, and for reasons of their own are trading rabbits for socks and biros.
I have to admit, it occurs to me now that while it might be possible to rule out a hoax made with current technology, it might not be possible to rule out a hoax made using nanotechnology of a level of sophistication that it appears identical to what the real thing would. Presumably by very sophisticated (and contemporary) aliens, with a very sophisticated sense of humour.
This goes for both the Precambrian watch scenario, and the Precambrian rabbit.
Perhaps socks and biros are all that are meant to be traded, and the appearance of a rabbit demonstrates that the sock exchange has suffered hyperinflation and crashed.
@476
In other words, to paraphrase Arthur C. Clarke, “sufficiently advanced (and dickish) aliens are indistinguishable from God” :)
Obviously you’ve found an ancestor of the Killer Rabbit of Caerbannog.
Owlmirror says: “Is there a possibility I didn’t think of?”
6) a worldwide flood
http://www.usnews.com/usnews/culture/articles/970616/archive_007221.htm
*
http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,1090909,00.html
As for gaps in the fossil record, Dawkins says, that is like detectives complaining that they can’t account for every minute of a crime–a very ancient one–based on what they found at the scene. “You have to make inferences from footprints and other types of evidence.” As it happens, he notes, there is a huge amount of evidence of evolution not only in the fossil record but also in the letters of the genetic code shared in varying degrees by all species. “The pattern,” says Dawkins, “is precisely what you would expect if evolution would happen.” Dawkins insists that critics of Darwin are wrong to say that evolution has become an article of faith among scientists. He cites biologist J.B.S. Haldane who, when asked what would disprove evolution, replied, fossil rabbits in the Precambrian era, a period more than 540 million years ago, when life on Earth seems to have consisted largely of bacteria, algae and plankton. “Creationists are fond of saying that there are very few fossils in the Precambrian, but why would there be?” asks Dawkins. “However, if there was a single hippo or rabbit in the Precambrian, that would completely blow evolution out of the water. None have ever been found.”
David, what you have just written is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever read. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this thread is now dumber for having read it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.
Dawkins, like Haldane, is simply wrong. When you have a theory as well-supported by world-wide evidence as evolution, no single anomaly can disprove it. Rather, such an anomaly would demand a new theory to explain it.
@ Pseudonymous Commenter. : 5 November 2011 at 2:19 pm
Durnnit. I don’t get it. I thought that was saying something in rot13 code :
http://www.rot13.com/index.php
But apparently not.
Would I be right in guessing a Cthulu / Lovecraft invocation here?
@386. Ichthyic : 6 November 2011 at 1:53 am
I like to think of a star as the result of a stalemate between gravity pulling everything in Vs radiation pressure pushing everything out.
Fusing iron at the stars core is where gravity wins the tug-o’-war and radiation pressure collapses. (Iron takes more energy to fuse than it emits) Of course, gravity’s victory is short-lived and it falls over too! (Apart from the central remnant)
Both. Destructive for the star in question, creative for the future generation of stars and planets – and everything upon them like, well, us.
@Owlmirror : 7 November 2011 at 6:19 am
Time travel would spring instantly to mind as apossible explanation. Time travellers who have a strange fondness or need for rabbits or hippos as the case may be.
Such a discovery would certainly raise a lot of questions but not necessarily – on its own – disprove evolution, I’d agree.
Even if you somehow did disprove evolution – durn hard to do in itself – that wouldn’t be the same as proving Creationism or the Bible’s cosmogony.
Well, I would let Dawkins statement stand – not as simply wrong – meant as a vivid easily-understood example of why evolutionary theory is not a matter of blind faith which can’t be tested (the common slander from the sleazy creationists, that “evolutionist” is a faith position no better, not even as good as, their own christer faith. ) It’s easy for most laymen to see why finding a rabbit in the Precambrian would be a stiff test of evolutionary “faith” and Dawkins used it to show that scientists would NOT blindly cling to a “faith” position in that case but would in fact re-evaluate their science. Yes, that’s a huge amount to pack into a relatively short sentence or two. I give him credit for doing the best he could – since the real explanation of how scientists would incorporate such a finding into the theory is going to take much more than a soundbite.
That specific Dawkins quote is taken from an interview just prior to the Dover trial.
Since then, I think we’ve all learned something about how carefully we need to speak to avoid leaving opportunities to be deliberately misunderstood by those creationist liars. Dawkins should not have said it would “completely blow evolution out of the water”. But given what he was trying to accomplish in that interview for the future of science education, I’m more charitable than to say “it’s simply wrong”.
D’oh! That’s what I get for skimming the thread isn’t it?
Now I see :
#470. Owlmirror : 6 November 2011 at 9:52 pm
Plus :
#476. KG : 6 November 2011 at 10:38 pm
Then there’s :
David : 7 November 2011 at 5:41 am
(Renumbered for clarity)
With a few flippant suggestions with good Hitchhikers Guide and Monty Python references as well. :-)
Finally :
Okay, so all these options have issues and raise a lot of questions.
Physics currently rules out time travel – but will we one day come up with a theory permitting it – like the Wormholes speculation.
Early sentient life seems unlikely but plausible – but why would they have rabbits?
We’d certainly have a mystery on our hands to solve – and how would we go about solving that?
By using science! That’s how!
I’d say either 4,5 or 6 are most probablye perhaps in some combination thereof.
PS. Also of all those hypothetical “Precambrian rabbit” explanatatory options note that only one option – (7)the worldwide flood one argues in favour of Creationism.
Only two involve Christian theology even with (&) being added to in that category by option (666) the “Satan diddit” one.
Because option (2) does not necessarily invoke an *Abhrahamic* religion at all simply a possible diety (or dieties) with an inordinate fondness for rabbits rather than beatles.
In all those cases what we’d do is study – scientifically – the mystery rabit and surrounding rocks for clues. BEcause prayerand IDiotism, / doesn’t take uh=get us very far at all.
Arrgh.Sorry. Make that :
Whatever the answer regardless of which solution was correct – what we’d do is study – scientifically – that mystery wascally rabbit and the surrounding Precambrian rocks very meticulously and thoroughly for clues.
We wouldn’t pray or convert to ID / Creationism.
Because prayer and IDiotism, just doesn’t get us very far at all.
Neither affection nor requirement need be involved — although those are valid hypotheses, I suppose.
I was thinking that a temporal researcher might use a rabbit simply because they are a convenient and common organism.
A hippo would be more unusual, but could be written off as accidental.
I am not so sure that it can even be done. I have a much longer argument on falsifiability that I’ve been pondering, but
this margin is too smallI am too tired to go into it just now.I think the best case scenario for ID-proponents is that they would quantify what “design” is and what it looks like at the genetic level, and demonstrate that some organisms have that sort of genetic signature. This would not disprove evolution per se, but would rather add on design analysis to the theory of evolution.
But they won’t ever get that far, because they’re all IDiots.
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To the best of my knowledge, it does no such thing.
I mean, it hasn’t proved it possible. But it hasn’t proved it impossible either. As I understand it, physicists are still arguing the matter.
Frex, I recently read Sean M. Carroll’s From Eternity to Here, and there’s a whole chapter on closed time-like curves.
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My #477 “alien hoaxers with sufficiently advanced nanotech” was not entirely flippant.
On the other hand, I utterly reject “a worldwide flood” as being in any way viable as an explanation. You can’t use something that never happened to explain something that (putatively) has happened, especially when, even if it had happened, it could not have done what needs to be explained.
And I’m too tired to read but I do hope you’ll finish writing it out and post where we can all see it one day soon – I’m sure I’m not the only one who would learn a lot.
Interesting thread, ladies and gentlemen, thank you all. Good to see some benefits can come from a zombie invasion.
Why do atheists hate God?
http://creation.com/atheist-god-hate
Why a global flood doesn’t work from a plant perspective.
Time and again creationists argue for a global flood occurring 4000-5000 years ago. While physicists will point out the problems of a global flood from a purely physical point of view http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7QJ7yZ9L1po or Potholers videos http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7QJ7yZ9L1po I feel there is part of the debunking that botany can provide.
What happens to a plant in flood scenario?
Some plants have adaptations to deal with being flooded but these are designed for short term flooding or low level flooding http://aob.oxfordjournals.org/content/96/4/501.abstract Some plants have arenchyma and other morphological adaptations and some have molecular ones. However the requirement would be to be submersed in water of depths of up to a mile for nearly a year. In other words they would be dead. Don’t worry, I hear you cry this is where gas and oil came from, if accept this you must also accept that no adult plant survived.
I know bristlecone pines and a few other species are much older than the flood but that just facts, you don’t want to get bogged down in those.
How could plants regenerate?
Well firstly some plants could not regenerate from the seed bank as their seeds do not exhibit the level of dormancy required to survive both the inundation and subsequent long period of flooding. Secondly the entire seed bank has been destroyed due to the catastrophic flood conditions. There is no native soil as you want it to be used to lay down all the geological features we see in nature. I have read one creationists attempt to show seed regrowth and his experiment out of 5 native weed species only 3 shows any kind of regeneration after his experiment, which was flawed due to the use of native soil which may have contained seeds of these local weeds in the first place. http://www.evolutionflunksbotany.org/images/12_Plant_survival_and_the_great_Flood.pdf
Floating mats, firstly we would have to test if plant material left floating in water for over a year would be capable of vegetative re-growth. It’s a simple one to carry out yet none of the creationists have bothered to do so. Secondly not all plants can regenerate in this fashion to begin with.
Some plants require their seeds to be eaten to germinate, some like the giant redwood require fire to release their seeds, as such after a global flood these species should cease to be due to not been able to set seed.
Then we have the problem that no plants have been found growing in the wrong areas of the world, should some native Sahara plants be found in the Gobi or the Kalahari?
What to breath?
Plants provide oxygen for us to breath. So all land based plants are dead, so we can rely on the sea flora… well no remember that plants like to live under certain conditions, change those suddenly and you kill the plant. We’ve seen a reduction by half of the phytoplankton at present due to ocean acidification. Imagine what would happen if we changed the salinity of the water in a matter of hours? You’d have wiped out the phytoplankton, so now there is nothing for people to breath unless the ark had a life support system.
What happened after?
Well there is not soil as that has been used to create the geological column according to creationists, there are no trees, no grass, no plant life, just miles and miles of wasteland smelling of methane as the entire flora of the world rots. There is no evidence genetically for plants to have gone through such an extreme bottle neck event just as there is no evidence for animals.
This is a work in progress, but some of the basic ideas need to be addressed if you want to keep your fairytale alive.
What Happened To Land Plants During The Flood?
http://www.icr.org/index.php?module=articles&action=view&ID=1205
http://creation.com/images/pdfs/cabook/chapter14.pdf
[snip]
Many terrestrial seeds can survive long periods of soaking in various concentrations of saltwater.4 Indeed, saltwater impedes the germination of some species so that the seed lasts better in saltwater than freshwater. Other plants could have survived in floating vegetation masses, or on pumice from the volcanic activity. Pieces of many plants are capable of asexual sprouting.
Many plants could have survived as planned food stores on the Ark, or accidental inclusions in such food stores. Many seeds have devices for attaching themselves to animals, and some could have survived the Flood by this means. Others could have survived in the stomachs of the bloated, floating carcasses of dead herbivores. The olive leaf brought back to Noah by the dove (Gen. 8:11) shows that plants were regenerating well before Noah and company left the Ark.
Noah’s Flood Questions and Answers
http://creation.com/noahs-flood-questions-and-answers
I note that you don’t deal with the questions of plants with low to no dormancy in seeds, viability of rotten material after a year, serotinous plants, seeds that need stratification, need to be ingested, need scarification, lack of soil to germinate in, lack of oxygen for anyone to survive.
None of the links you’ve put up actually deal with these problems, they are huge problems that a little bit of work would show one way or another the viabilty of the hypothesis but since they don’t do science it doesn’t matter that they lie to you.
Rember the only evidence from a creationist source shows that two species out of five could not have survived a flood.
The olive branch actually shows that it was a local not global event as has been pointed out you can’t have plant material forming oil and have it surviving on the surface of a flooded land these are mutally exclusive posibilities.
David, why do you hate Zeus, Thor, Odin, Marduk, Mithras, Elves, Elvis, and the Easter Buuny?
They are very sad. You never call or write much less worship them.
Actually, we atheists get along great with the gods. Couldn’t be better. The gods have been so quiet for centuries that it is almost like ..THEY DON’T EXIST.
PS: Any sympathy I had for David for having a low IQ and no education just evaporated. David is a liar and a hater. At the bottom of creationism is a lot of routine fundie xian hate.
Did you get to the creationists faking the rabbit fossil option yet?
They do fake fossils when they aren’t just lying about them.
In Texas there is a dinosaur trackway. The creationists have carved human footprints into them so they can claim humans lived with dinosaurs.
If their religion was true, they wouldn’t have to lie all the time.
Creationists prove that the gods don’t exist.
Why do atheists hate God?
This is a very strange and ignorant piece. Atheists just point out that the God of the old Testament is a really nasty piece of work. (The new testament God is better, but still not very nice.) That is just a fact. It doesn’t mean that we think he exists. Just that if he did exist, it wouldn’t be a positive development.
I don’t hate Yahweh just like I don’t hate Sauron, Lord Valdemort or any other fictious villian. That’s just plain silly.
If he were real, Yahweh would be a total asshole. Tantrum-throwing tyrant with a fragile ego. I really don’t get how anyone can read the bible and decide he’s worth respecting, much less worshiping.
I don’t hate god any more than I hate purple unicorns or rational creationists. Mythical creatures aren’t worth the bother of hating.