There’s a common tactic used by creationists, and I’ve encountered it over and over again. It’s a form of the Gish Gallop: present the wicked evolutionist with a long list of assertions, questions, and non sequiturs, and if they answer with “I don’t know” to any of them, declare victory. It’s easy. We say “I don’t know” a lot.
Jack Chick’s Big Daddy tract is a version of the creationist list, and contains a fair amount of fantasy as well. You know what they believe will happen: they’ll ask that one question that the scientist can’t answer, and then they’ll have an epiphany, a revelation, and realize that all their science is a lie, at which time they’ll resign from their university position and join a good bible-believin’ church.
It happens to me all the time, too. At one talk I gave, there was a woman at the door who had printed a 5-page, single-spaced list of questions, and she was telling everyone going in to ask me to answer them — I invited her to come in and listen to the talk and ask them herself, and she ran away. I’ve had a Canadian creationist do the same thing, and then I talked to him for several hours in the hallway after the talk. He seemed stunned and angry that I actually had answers for most of his questions. I have been confronted by people with questions (more like ignorant assertions) about biology, who once I’ve answered them and reveal that I’m a biologist, switch to asking me about geology and the Big Bang, to get me into a corner where I’d have to say, “I don’t know.”
Here we go again. The IDiot, Salvador Cordova, has written up his list of 16 questions to challenge scientists. He even has the typical anecdote:
I once gambled a little bit on a weaker question that a creationist biology student should ask her anatomy and physiology professor regarding the evolution of hearts. I basically suggested she ask about how the intermediate plumbing can work if it is not all wired-correctly in the first place.
…
When that biology junior posed that question, she came back the next week at our ID/Creation meeting beaming. She said, “you’re right, there are no transitionals!” I realized then whatever I said might not be as powerful as what professors are unable to say when asked the right questions!
But we do have intermediates, both phylogenetically and developmentally! People are using zebrafish to study the evolution of the four-chambered heart. How can you conclude that there are “no transitionals” from one question about one feature, asked of one professor? But that’s exactly the illogical conclusion creationists want you to draw.
Here’s how the scam works and gives them the answers they want.
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Ask questions about wildly different fields: Cordova’s list includes questions about biology, geology, and cosmology. There are few people polymathic enough to know them all; I can handle most biology questions comfortably, but I have to beg off on geology and physics, or give general answers built on the lay knowledge I have of those fields. “I win!” declares the creationist, because Myers hasn’t memorized all the transitions in nucleosynthesis.
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Ask about obscure phenomena within the evolutionist’s own field. No, I haven’t tracked every fossil discovery in the world; no, I haven’t memorized every signaling pathway; no, I don’t have a complete, step-by-step explanation for the evolution of every molecule in your body. I can look it up later, or I can give you an example of a related phenomenon, but that’s taken as an admission of failure of the whole field of biology, rather than an admission of my personal, limited competence.
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Rely on the fact that not everyone pays attention to the basics. Most scientists are specialists; we’ve got a narrow set of topics that we know exceedingly well, and a great cloud of generalities that we sort of vaguely accept. Nobel prize winners are rarely the best people to consult about the kinds of things creationists want to know; for that, you’re better off talking to the academic grunt who teaches introductory biology, or the person who has a hobby of following the creationist literature (hey, that’s me!).
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Ask really stupid questions. They misuse jargon, babble about facts that have been strongly established as if they’re controversial, throw in random bits of sciencey terminology that aren’t actually relevant to the question, but sound impressive to lurkers who are as ignorant as they are. The goal is to get the scientist to screw up their face in a “WTF?” expression, and go silent for a few minutes as they try to puzzle out a diplomatic way to shoo the time-wasting creationist away. That counts as scoring a coup.
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Lie. Lie, lie, lie. Nobody in the audience will care to double-check creationist claims, except the scientists, and by the time they write up a detailed rebuttal, the creationist will have moved on to the next sucker.
So let’s take a shot at Cordova’s questions. I’ll just fire back as I would in person, without looking things up in a textbook or the internet.
1. How can functional proteins form without ribosomes or ribosome-like machines?
Ribosomes are great big elaborate enzymes…that is, they’re catalysts that enhance the rate of a reaction that would occur naturally. Without ribosomes, you’d still get short peptides forming; to get long ones, you’d need efficient catalysts to get the sequence to be assembled with high probability in a reasonable period of time. Early life would have been relatively inefficient, but they only had to compete with other protocells without the advantage of ribosomes.
2. How can natural selection or neutral evolution evolve poly constrained DNA or any poly constrained systems in general?
Classic use of jargon, “poly constrained”, to pretend the problem is a serious scientific one. An enzyme might be constrained in its sequence at multiple points — it needs a specific amino acid at the active site, it needs another amino acid at a specific point to put a particular kink in the shape, it needs yet another specific amino acid at a distant point to interact with a regulatory protein — but that just means substitutions at those locations will occur at a lower rate and have fewer degrees of freedom than other locations.
3. How did the first organism regulate protein expression and cellular development without regulatory elements or developmental mechanisms?
Define “first organism”. Sufficiently primitive protocells probably didn’t regulate everything — they may have produced an enzyme for substrate X even when substrate X wasn’t present. So? But you can also see how, in an organism like that, there would have been a selective advantage to organisms that had a sensor to detect the presence of a substrate, allowing them to conserve a little energy by not producing the unnecessary enzyme. And the word “sensor” is used generously here: it would just mean a protein that could undergo a conformational change when bound to the substrate, and since it has an enzyme that binds the substrate already, it wouldn’t be difficult to evolve.
4. How did any vital organ or protein form given the absence of the organ would be fatal? Absence of insulin is fatal in organisms requiring insulin. How did insulin become a vital part of living organisms? If you say it wasn’t essential when it first evolved, then how can you say selection had any role in evolving insulin without just guessing?
This sounds like a clumsy version of irreducible complexity, which has already been shot down many times before. The organ/protein would not have been vital essentially, but could still have been useful. Look at Thornton’s work on the evolution of receptors: a broad spectrum corticosteroid receptor evolved into two much more specific glucocorticoid and mineralocorticoid receptors. The function only became essential after it was fully integrated into the physiology of an organism.
5. How did DNA evolve in a proteins-first or RNA first scenario?
You do know that the difference between DNA and RNA is simply the presence or absence of a single hydroxyl group, right? Once you’ve got the machinery to build and assemble ribonucleotides, it’s a short step to deoxyribonucleotides.
6. How did amino acid homochirality evolve since the amino acids in biotic soup experiments are racemic, plus homochiral amino acids spontaneously racemize outside of living systems? How about DNAs and sugars? If the expectation value is 50% left, how do 100% left or right forms emerge in pre-biotic soups, and more importantly how is homochirality maintained long enough for chemical evolution to work?
Enzymes are chiral, too. To maintain the synthesis of racemic products, you’d often need two different enzymes. To produce just one chirality, you need one kind of enzyme. Which is easier, to evolve one enzyme, or to evolve two simultaneously, one of which is a mirror image of the other?
7. Don’t dead dogs stay dead dogs and doesn’t Humpty Dumpty stay broken?
I don’t even…
There’s a bit of a difference between incremental assembly of the components of a dog over billion years, where each step is viable and subject to selection, and the instantaneous assembly of a complete dog from a non-viable collection of rotting organic compounds.
8. Describe how a partially functioning ribosomes or any partial implementation of the DNA code could operate in a working cell, and how a such cell can operate without such vital parts.
Didn’t we already address that in #1?
9. Are most laboratory and field observations of evolution reductive rather than constructive of new coordinated functions? For the sake of argument, let extinction can count as reductive evolution. When bacteria evolve antibiotic resistance, what proportion of cases involved evolution of a new complex protein?
Answer to the first part: no. If extinction is “reductive evolution”, then speciation is “constructive evolution”.
Second part: quantitatively, I don’t know. Almost certainly very low. Evolution is largely going to proceed by modification of existing components, and de novo creation of a complex protein is unlikely.
10. Cite an experiment or field observation where a substantially new protein was evolved in real time or is expected to evolve in real time over the next few generations. Nylonase is the most cited example, but that wasn’t a substantially new protein. But even granting that, how many complex proteins are evolving in the biosphere versus those getting lost forever.
Wait, why are you ruling out nylonase? It is a new protein! I notice you’re hedging your question, asking for a “substantially” (quick, define it) new protein, which has to evolve in “real time”, whatever that is, and right away you’re excluding obvious examples. What’s the point of answering this if you’re going to set it up with weasel words and exceptions?
All of the complex proteins in the biosphere are evolving. Since the number of genes in animals, to use one subset, wobbles about in different species but is staying in the same ballpark for the last few hundred million years, I’d have to estimate that gene losses are roughly equal to the addition of new genes.
11. What new trait in human populations do you expect to become genetically fixed in all 7 Billion or so people, and how fast do you expect that trait to overtake the population in how many generation? If you can’t identify convincingly one or a few traits, how then can you argue for evolution of so many traits in the past?
You’re asking me to do something that evolution does not claim to be able to do: evolution is not deterministic, involves a great deal of chance, and even selection is contingent on interactions with a changing environment, so it is impossible to predict the future fate of a single allele.
We can see it retroactively. A third opsin gene arose early in primates, and is basically now fixed in the human population, giving us trichromatic vision; we’re seeing lactose tolerant variants arising in humans within the last 10,000 years, not reaching worldwide fixation yet, but rising in frequency rapidly. That one could reach fixation, if dairy products become universally available and popular.
12. If a species has a population of 10,000, how can selection act in a particulate manner on 4 giga bases of DNA individually? Wouldn’t such a large genome relative to small population size result in lots of selection interference, hence wouldn’t most molecular evolution be neutral of necessity as Kimura asserted?
Most molecular evolution is neutral. Done.
13. Do geological layers involving permineralized fossils or other kinds of well-preserved fossils require rapid burial? If the burial process is rapid, does it really take millions of years then to make that particular layer that has fossils? If you find C14 in Cambrian fossils not the result of contamination or lab error, does that mean the fossil had a more recent time of death than 500,000,000 years? Given the half lives of DNA and amino acids or other decay processes of biological organisms, how can we account for preservation of these biotic materials for far longer than indicated by their chemical half-lives?
Now we get into geology and physics, outside my domain of expertise. I would either pull a convenient expert into the conversation, or admit I can only speak in generalities at this point. I would say, for instance, that 14C is produced by the interaction of high energy particles with nitrogen, so we wouldn’t expect it to be simply zero in all ancient specimens — just much, much lower than the amount produced by high altitude cosmic ray interactions with our atmosphere. Also, the life of an organic chemical is going to be dependent on the presence of other chemicals in the environment. It’s not going to be clocklike, like radioactive decay.
14. Can geological strata form rapidly? What about the university experiments and field observations that show strata can form rapidly? If they can form rapidly, and if fossil presence demands they form rapidly, doesn’t that suggest they formed rapidly?
What do you mean by “geological strata”? I think you mean just layers. Layers can form rapidly or slowly. They can be modified by processes that take long periods of time, and geologists look at the totality of the events that led to the feature they’re looking at. I’d say your question is very silly and it sounds like you’re about as ignorant of geology as I am, or worse, so talk to a geologist.
15. If redshifts in the Big Bang model are discovered to be possibly caused by other mechanisms than relative motion, wouldn’t that put the Big Bang in doubt? Wouldn’t that also raise questions about stellar distances?
Physics now? There is much more evidence for the Big Bang than just redshifts. Talk to a physicist. Are you seriously trying to suggest that the stars are significantly closer than has been measured by, for instance, parallax? Is this a question about the age and size of the universe? Because you’re really drifing into abysmally stupid territory here. Would you also like to argue that the sun orbits the earth and that the earth is flat?
16. What is the farthest astronomical distance that can be determined by parallax or very long base line interferometry, and what fraction is that detection distance relative to the claimed size of the visible universe relative to the Big Bang? How do you account for Super Nova by stars not inside galaxies? If so, doesn’t that mean there is a higher probability of Super Nova in a star outside a galaxy by a factor of hundreds of billions if not more? If so, why should this be?
I am not an astronomer, but I do happen to have a vague idea of the answer to the first question: it depends entirely on the accuracy of the instrument used to measure parallax. I think we’ve got parallax measurements out to around 500 light years? I’m sure an astronomer will correct me.
This question is so far outside my field I’m more curious to know what your intent in asking it might be. Are you really playing at being an intelligent design creationist, and are actually a young earth creationist at heart? Are you really bothered by the immensity of the universe, and are desperately trying to justify shrinking it down…happily contradicting all the physical evidence? How small does the universe have to be to make you content?
Ah, well. That’s Salvador Cordova for you. I think he’s competing with Casey Luskin for the title of Dumbest ID Creationist of Them All.
Particular written creationist Gish gallops can be worth answering in detail, as an educational exercise. I’m particularly proud of this RationalWiki feature article: 101 evidences for a young age of the Earth and the universe (rebuttal). Read through the questions and answers there and you’ll definitely learn stuff. I’m told by ex-creationists that this article would have been helpful to them in their fallen state.
I have a question for SCordova and everybody who thinks he’s smart.
Do you use GPS in your car or do you accept that GPS works? If yes, why do you doubt the singularity generally known as the Big Bang, which can be mathematically derived from General Relativity (as actually has been done by Soviet-commie Alexander Friedmann and catholic priest Georges Lemaitre), which is used by GPS? You see – no Big Bang no GPS.
You know, I’m thinking that if I were teaching a college class and someone started asking me a bunch of gotcha questions like that I’d simply say that it was going a bit far afield from the day’s lecture, but if they’d like to report on it they should do a literature review and prepare a paper on what’s been done in the field. Make them do the work, and put it in such a way as to make clear that the literature already exists and that if they take this path they’d better not miss it.
Data from the Hipparcos astrometry mission gave us parallactic measurements of stars out to about 300 parsecs or about 600 light years… so your guess of 500ly is pretty close. Probably a better answer than if I tried to answer anything but the bare basics of biology.
It’s also amusing to think that they take parallax as the only method of determining distance. Though less accurate, standard candle methods are more than accurate enough to measure out to billions of parsecs.
Stumpers? Like the Black Knight as Arthur walked away?
What’s clear to me is that Cordova doesn’t actually fully understand the science behind the questions he’s asking.
What’s not clear is why anyone should think that not knowing (or not HAVING, for that matter) answers to complex questions regarding biology, bio-chemistry or science in general entitles one to dismiss entirely a cornerstone scientific theory with literally mountains of supporting evidence.
And substituting “god” for “I don’t know” is simply lazy.
Yes, and dead Jews on a stick stay dead Jews on a stick. Is this supposed to be relevant to evolution?
Yes I know that there are about 3.26ly in 1 parsec… so closer to 950 ish ly…. let’s head that one off at the pass …
The answer PZ gave for carbon-14 formation is the nucleosynthesis leading to carbon-14 in the environment. For the nucleosynthesis of carbon-14 in old carbon (diamonds and coal), an atom of carbon-13 (about 1% of the carbon) absorbs a neutron from the background radiation in the earth, forming its heavier isotope.
Just a quick swat at the first question….does Sal realize that ribosomes are assemblies of protein and ribosomal RNA, that he rRNA has a catalytic role, and that RNA molecules are quite capable of catalyzing reactions without protein?
Sheesh.
rodents in arms
Well, he’s certainly sprinkled enough jargon in there to put your run of the mill layman in all of those fields, like me, out of the game. The only way I could answer that would be to say that those things are outside my areas of expertise, but that I’m pretty convinced that the experts in those fields aren’t lying or omitting obvious questions in their research, and the evidence for evolution is so overwhelming that I don’t see anything there, from my limited understanding of it, that is cause for any questioning of the existence of evolution as a whole.
Or maybe I’d just ask them to explain what they mean by each term in the question, which no one regurgitating this list would be able to do.
I’m an astronomer, so I’ll speak to (15) and (16), both of which lead to a “WTF” expression. For (15), the redshifts in the Big Bang model are *not* Doppler shifts due to relative motion. They are caused by the expansion of space itself, because the wavelength of a photon traveling through expanding space is stretched by that expansion. It has nothing to do with stellar distances determined within our galaxy – he doesn’t understand what he is saying, or as Fermi would say, he’s “not even wrong.” Also, in general, *of course* if we discover that some phenomenon had a different explanation than the generally accepted one, it would call our theories into question. So? As for (16), very-long-baseline interferometry isn’t used to determine distances. It’s used to produce very detailed images at radio wavelengths. Again, no understanding of the science behind his question, but it would sound good to a fellow ignoramus. I don’t have to account for Super Nova [sic] outside galaxies, because they are observed inside galaxies, where the stars are. Sheesh.
Very-long-baseline interferometry, you say?
N. Bartel et al. (1994), “The shape, expansion rate and distance of supernova 1993J from VLBI measurements,” Nature 368, 610–13. (A more recent paper on the subject can be found here.)
Number (15), redshifts and the big bang:
There are at least 2 other major pieces of evidence that establish the big bang model (and goodness knows how many minor),
(i) cosmic microwave background resulting from recombination about 380,000 yrs after the big bang – note: not caused by pigeon poo
(ii) abundance of the elements (hydrogen, small bit of helium, and a miniscule amount of lithium) in inter-galactic space perfectly matches models of nucleosynthesis following the big bang, based on observed ratio of matter to radiation in the universe
There is no evidence that redshifts are caused by anything other than expansion.
How about this question, so called PZ: if evolution turned out to be false, wouldn’t it be false?
aggressivePerfector @15
Penzias and Wilson were able to eliminate pigeon poo as a source of the CMBR.
When I’m confronted by a list of creationist “stumpers” (or even a single stump) I play mean. I turn the topic away from evolution and science and back on to what really concerns the creationist — their faith.
1.) Do you think that if evolution is true then Christianity is false?
2.) Is evolution a test for God?
3.) If you were to discover that the scientists were all correct, would you become a theistic evolutionist or an atheist?
4.) Would you be willing to renounce your faith in Jesus Christ if you discovered that evolution did indeed occur?
5.) Will you put that in writing — or just repeat it clearly so there is no mistake?
Just spend all the time here. They think they want those questions till they actually have to deal with an atheist who is asking them and getting happier and happier. That last one … makes them nervous. Also seems to get them thinking.
I don’t think Cordova understands what a star is, let alone a supernova or a galaxy. His grasp of rhetoric is pretty shaky, as well: how does an “If so…” follow “How do you account for…?” without an intervening exposition? What is the “If so…” supposed to be referring to? “If” what? “If supernovae are stars…”? “If some trifling fraction of a percentage of a mil of stars are not in galaxies…?” “If stars were sneezed into existence by the great Green Arckleseizure…?”
I guess it was after or before the Nye-Ham debate that videos surfaced with these “stumpers” written by creationists in attendance.
The one that sent me to the text books was whether metamorphosis counted as evidence for evolution. I didn’t know the DI had spent some time declaring the fact of metamorphosis to be incompatible with evolution.
So, I learned a little bit about metamorphosis. Not a bad outcome over all.
The rest of them (maybe 20 in all?) were of the dead-dog variety.
Indeed, Cordova is a faker. He tosses about bits of jargon in an effort to appear knowledgable in the subject, but he really hasn’t a clue. I learned as much when he tried to use blackjack card counting as an analogy to attack evolution, but didn’t expect to run into an actual card counter (me), who understood the jargon and could tell he didn’t understand any of it. I’m surprised he’d use this phrase
So soon after I handed him his ass.
It’s always been interesting to me that creationists take no small pleasure in trying to find any small detail or question that might “stump” scientists and thereby dismiss the entire theory, but they never take the same dogged approach to scripture.
I actually strongly suggest that if a creationist starts asking you questions outside of your field of expertise you answer “I’m not a physicist/geologist/cosmologist/whatever – go ask a physicist/geologist/cosmologist/whatever.” rather than trying to answer them. You know that they’re not interested in an honest conversation about science, so just cut them off at the knees and don’t give them the “win”.
Also I think Sastra @17 has an excellent tactic for dealing with creationists that are trying to get the “gotcha moment” – turn it around on them. Make them explain to you why they care. I find that, unlike Sastra, I don’t even get to question 5 – they get scared off by variants of question 3! They don’t want it to be about them, and by taking their “just asking questions” crap seriously and turning it around on them they get petrified because they know their faith isn’t as strong as it “should” be – if it were, they wouldn’t need to be out badgering scientists for validation! If their faith was strong they wouldn’t need it – they could just live quietly secure in the knowledge that they were right and everyone else was wrong. But they don’t – they spend a good-sized chunk of their lives trying to force everyone to believe what they believe.
I think number 7 is an attempt to bring entropy and thermodynamics into the list, things do not become more complex over time sort of argument.
Of course the dead dog becomes a seething mass of other life which eventually becomes other complex organisms. Think of the full version of
On Ilkla Moor Baht ‘At
Humpty is you cannot put broken eggs back together so things can’t become more complex. Personally I like the information theory answer in that Humpty’s fragments now contains far more information; such as his rate of fall, the surface he impacted and so on. This shows that the information content of every portion of the universe increases with time.
Added I’ve probably got that wrong – sorry
Ah, very good, Blake Stacey! I hadn’t seen that use of VLBI before. I am glad to be corrected.
Time to start our own list for creation “scientists”; I’ll start off:
1. Please describe the process of how, in the creation, God’s word became substance?
Many creationists fear that if a crack occurred in their dogma then their belief in Jesus would fail. Likewise they think if they can chisel a hole in evolution then it’ll crumble into pieces. They also see evolution vs creationism as a zero-sum game. If evolution is falsified then creationism automatically wins.
I think that Cordova’s intent with the questions about parallax and red-shift is to piecewise discredit the entire Big Bang hypothesis. He has some clue about the chain of observations that create and sustain the theory, but it’s telling that he left out the Cepheid variables. (Did he? I’d have expected some attempt to debunk that measurement to appear in his questions.)
Our ability to determine distance with parallax depends on the resolution of our instruments and on the baseline, which is Earth’s positions half a year apart. We can’t use parallax to measure the distances of galaxies (a-HA!), but we can use it to measure the distance to cepheid variables in our own galaxy and then use that type of star to measure the distance to other galaxies (Oh. Well, aren’t you assuming that distance stars follow the same physical laws as nearby ones?) Distant stars and galaxies have all the same kinds of spectrographic and structural features as nearby ones, so there’s no reason to assume their physics is any different. (Oh. Uh…)
Type II Supernovas (the splodey ones) happen only in very young stars (big stars burn exponentially faster than smaller ones), so you need some kind of continuous formation mechanism to keep those happening … and lots of hydrogen lying around. But that occurs mostly in galaxies, so I doubt his implication that there are lots of supernovas outside of galaxies. Type I happens with a neutron star or black hole orbiting a giant star and periodically taking bites out of it. You still need a big star.
So that whole line of questions follows the same pattern: tempting to chip away at bits and pieces here and there, hoping that the whole things falls apart. Unfortunately, there are, as usual, multiple independent lines of evidence that support the whole thing. And as usual, the questioner is willfully or otherwise ignorant of some of them.
If only you could truly grasp entropy…
@27…Indeed, as Hitchens once observed — “all your work is still ahead of you” in establishing the god hypothesis as a viable alternative.
Nice job on the answering their questions, PZ. Biology isn’t my strongest point, so I particularly your example below:
15. If redshifts in the Big Bang model are discovered to be possibly caused by other mechanisms than relative motion, wouldn’t that put the Big Bang in doubt? Wouldn’t that also raise questions about stellar distances?
You could also throw in for good measure, basic time/distance calculations involving C, (the speed of light). For instance, the one-way/round trip time that would be expected or predicted, to send and/or receive a radio signal to an interplanetary probe. That distance is able to be calculated based on C and elapsed time,…unless they think that C is different for stars. (Like figuring the distance it takes to get to Grandma’s house by figuring average speed and time in transit.)
Al Dente #27
This may be true for biblical literalists and YEC’s, but I find that the run-of-the-mill average christian I come across that rejects evolution will quite smugly do so using arguments like the ones in this list (the ‘entropy’ argument is the one I get the most, usually from people who have no idea how thermodynamics actually works), yet also allow that many biblical tales (like the flood myth) are probably not true. It’s a type of cognitive dissonance I’ve yet to fully understand… they can dismiss evolution as a whole because they call in to question some certain aspect of it, but readily reject certain biblical stories while accepting the whole of their faith as incontestable truth.
If evolution is true THEN HOW COME IT CAN’T TELL US WHAT HAPPENED TO FLIGHT 370?!?
Cod Ararat Demonstrandum!!!
Seconded. This is how I handle the climate change deniers in my life who never tire of bringing me the latest argument that supposedly brings the whole conspiracy down. I usually say something like this:
I’m not a physicist and won’t even try to address the physics points. But I am an actuary and know a thing or two about curve fitting and analyzing data and I can say without reservation that every denialist argument that involves graphs or what happpened in the last X years is crap. All of them, without exception. Now if I, a statistical expert , think that about their statistical arguments, what makes you think a physicist will think any more highly of their physics arguments?
@26…I like this game. Mine is.
2. Prove it wasn’t aliens.
Yes. Yes, he does.
But only because the person who created that story decided that he’d stay broken; as a fictional character, Humpty Dumpty could have turned into Robo-Dumpty and defeated the Great Frying Pan in personal combat if his author had wanted the story to go that way.
How does this have anything to do with reality again?
#26… I’ll play too!
3. Please describe exactly how many species of flora / fauna MUST have been present on the ark, and if the dimensions precisely described in the bible for that vehicle would be adequate to accommodate them.
I’ve encountered this phenomenon myself when listening to interviews and debates. One that comes to mind, I believe was Lawrence Krauss, who was brought on to debate the origin of the universe on a radio show and then spent two hours being talked to about biology. I went ahead and researched the answers to the questions he couldn’t answer, and found them instantly, indicating the creationist inability/deliberate aversion to Google. The question that interested me the most was the one about the presence of Carbon-14 in crude oil, which based on the common understanding of radioactive decay and Carbon-dating organic materials, certainly should not be there. This research led to a wonderful sequence of discoveries in which I found that the answer had been discovered by astrophysicists frustrated with the quality of materials they were sourcing for their Borexino neutrino detector in Italy (this is mostly from Talk Origins, though the first time I checked this out I had to gather from multiple sources, it should have been my first port of call). I’m not actually sure whether they did that research themselves or enlisted the assistance of scientists specialised in the relevant field, but anyway: neutrino detection works by detecting the visible light produced when certain materials are struck by neutrinos. But the same thing happens when struck by beta particles, such as those produced by the radioactive decay of Carbon-14.
The material used is called scintillation fluid, which is made from fossil fuels. It is actually used to detect C-14 in other circumstances, such as detecting tagged hormones. About three and a half milliliters is used for this kind of work, with a maximum background count of 25 counts per minute in order to be usable. Because neutrinos so rarely interact with matter, the Borexino detector needs 800 tones of scintillant with a background count of 1 per week. So sourcing oil with a low C-14 count is critical.
Different sources of fossil fuels have different levels. This turned out to correlate with the quantity of Uranium-Thorium decay isotopes in the surrounding rocks. It seems that the Uranium-Thorium series is a source of C-14 that regularly contaminates fossil fuels (one of several reasons it is useless to Carbon-date them), so the Borexino researchers resolved to use scintillant made from fuel extracted from regions very low in Uranium-Thorium sequence isotopes, thus solving both their experimental problem and Krauss’ debating problem, if he had known it at the time. Of course, the creationist might have known it himself: all that matters to him is that the audience doesn’t know it.
I also noticed how well this instance illustrates the importance of cross-field communication in science. Real headscratchers for researchers in one field may have already been solved by researchers in another. I’ve head of such examples where ignorance of another field means that some scientists don’t realise that an obstacle they are facing is a routine issue for others.
If being the operative word here. If such a thing was discovered, it could have implications on stellar distances, maybe, which may in turn have implications for the big bang, depending on what that discovery is. That can only be answered to any degree in the event that such a discovery is ever made. Since there is no such dispute though, you may as well just be asking ‘if the big band is refuted, will that refute the big bang? Sure, dude, whatever.
Also, look up ‘distance ladder’ and ‘standard candle’.
Hundreds of light years; which is absolutely puny compared to the observable universe. I have no I dea what you mean by adding ‘relative to the big bang’ though, because describing the big bang as having a particular size or location simply does not make sense.
A star can go nova no matter where it is, the only determing factor is the mass of the star rather than the location. Also, I’ve not heard of any supernova being discovered outside a galaxy, so I’m not sure what this question is aiming for.
…Why should that be so? Stars are concentrated in galaxies and the globular clustars / minor galaxies in orbit around those. Correspondingly, we expect the supernovae in galaxies and their satellites.
Really not sure what this line of questioning is aiming at. We expect supernovae to occur within galaxies / satellites of galaxies, and that’s exactly where we find them.
These lists are such a waste of time. Like PZ said, very few people can provide cogent answers to address every subject asked, even if the questions actually made sense. And fewer still are able to extemporaneously explain complex concepts clearly enough for non-scientists (like me) to understand. Questioners are bound to catch respondents who venture out of their field in semantic traps that might not slip up an expert. That’s why the tone and manner of the quiz is almost always weighted against the answer of, “I don’t know.” Questioners who attempt this strategy expect audiences to count the least mistake and all admissions of ignorance as a point for their side. It doesn’t really matter that one person’s specific ignorance, mistake, or deference isn’t proof of anything but a gap in that person’s specific knowledge or their ability to communicate. And even if PZ is wrong about any details, even on biological subjects, it doesn’t mean this Cordova is correct about anything. He’s relying on the perception of a false dichotomy. Some (like the people who show up at PZ’s lectures) are most likely promoting this false dichotomy unwittingly, thinking they’re really shaking science to its core. But it’s my opinion that most (probably including this Cordova) who generate these lists understand exactly what they’re doing. They ask unanswered, vaguely scientific, or even virtually unanswerable, questions, not to persuade the respondent, or out of any genuine curiosity, but to simply plant a seed of doubt in the minds of any hapless bystanders. This strategy also can suggest to the casual listener that scientists might actually be colluding in a cabal to hide certain ugly, inadmissible facts; that scientists are too stubborn to admit they’ve found a god’s fingerprints all over the universe.
The most laughable thing about it is that many IDiots and creationists actually claim to believe that science will one day reveal the full truth of the existence of their creator, yet they do little but obstruct and obfuscate the work of scientists. If these fingerprints are so readily obvious, why don’t they stop writing these lists and go out there, find them, and prove them to us once and for all.
I find it really sad that a stumper-bearing acquaintance is so often stunned that I can answer such questions (granted that most are nothing like as detailed and specific as Cordova’s) most without even hesitating and often seem to find them amusing. They think they’ve got them some atheist-busters because they’ve been told that atheists can’t/won’t answer these questions, so when I do answer them, it confuses them.
I avoid answering specific questions if I don’t know the answer in detail, but I do insist: So you think a guy who might have had a low-level biology class in college twenty or thirty years ago at best knows more about biology than biologists do? You think that a person who can’t solve quadratic equations understands more physics that physicists do? At that point there are usually mentions of “agreeing to disagree” and the subject gets changed.
Number 14, about strata forming rapidly, may have to do with a sorting phenomenon.
If you make a thing like a hourglass, and fill the top with two different types of sand, well mixed, the two sands will sort into alternating layers in the bottom. If looked at from the outside, bands will be clearly visible. The key is to look at the mound in cross-section, and to see the cone-shaped layers. (It has something to do with angle of repose, or something, maybe, and last I knew it wasn’t explained.)
I have seen a creationist site where they ran that experiment, but did not look at the cross-section. They just showed the bands on the outside of the receiver tube, and extrapolated madly to refute geology and all layers.
It only works in an hourglass with a narrow nozzle feeding onto a sloping mound. In the real world, it might happen on an alluvial fan. Maybe.
Ken Ham says alternating layers formed rapidly after Mount St Helens, but I have no idea what he was referring to.
I have seen a sand filter bed in a water-treatment plant get cleaned. They run water up through it, and it erupts in mud. That water gets drained off, and the backflush stopped. The gravel sinks to the bottom fast, the finer pebbles fall slower, and the sand lands on top. In about a minute, there are lovely sorted layers. They don’t alternate, and it is obviously density sorting. But it is fast.
Otherwise, the range of questions in that list is too much for any one person to be asking sincerely, or to understand the answers to. If they knew about all of that stuff, they’d not need to ask.
Question 14 makes me really twitchy. He does know that to a geologist time scales tend to be relative.. but we think of a few hundred thousand years to a few million years as being rapid events. It’s really quite situationally based.
Twitch
Twitch
I forgot the “right?” portion at the end of that second sentence. Too busy twitching.
Oh, for fuck’s sake. I teach about the evolution of hearts. Know what I don’t teach? Anatomy and physiology. Know what the anatomy and physiology teacher doesn’t teach? Evolution of hearts. These people think that there’s such a field as “science” and we all know about all of it. It’s like that line from The Lost Skeleton of Cadavara: “I have a Ph.D…. in SCIENCE!” Ignoramuses.
It might ( I emphasize might ) be worthwhile pointing out to the buggers that Jesus believed in the Flood Myth.
36 “But about that day or hour no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father. 37 As it was in the days of Noah, so it will be at the coming of the Son of Man. 38 For in the days before the flood, people were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, up to the day Noah entered the ark; 39 and they knew nothing about what would happen until the flood came and took them all away. That is how it will be at the coming of the Son of Man. 40 Two men will be in the field; one will be taken and the other left. 41 Two women will be grinding with a hand mill; one will be taken and the other left.
42 “Therefore keep watch, because you do not know on what day your Lord will come.
— Matthew 24.
This is a Second Law of Thermodynamics question. A dog dying or an egg getting broken are, in thermodynamics terms, examples of real or irreversible processes. The point about an irreversible process is that it can never go back to its initial state along the path that it originally followed.
What the creationist is trying to say is that everything decays so evolution must be impossible. But the question to be asked is, ‘If all dogs die and all eggs get broken, why are there still dogs and eggs?’
The creationist would now argue that these are special cases and the 2nd Law is not actually broken because of blather, blather. But these are the examples that the creationist chose himself, though it would make no difference if he chose machinery rusting or walls falling down; it is no mystery where eggs come from or how machinery is made or how walls are built.
mnb0 @ #2:
What’s amusing is that the engineers who designed the GPS satellites insisted that the circuits that do the corrections for Special Relativity (clock slowing due to orbital motion) and General Relativity (clock speeding up due to lower gravitational field) be capable of being switched off (and in fact start that way), just in case both theories turned out to be bunk. All the millions of measurements confirming both didn’t count, I guess, because “Relativity is only a theory.”
I would think the bible-thumpers would be copacetic with GR by now, since it helps smart bombs land on brown people with pinpoint accuracy.
(I’m shocked my spell-checker knows the word “copacetic”)
Drifting? Slimy Sal Cordova lives there on a permanent basis; has for many years.
Okay, what kills me about these and similar lists is that I was an evolutionary bio major 30 years ago, and, unlike PZ, I really would be hard-pressed to answer any of them accurately without resorting to old textbooks, or going online to research a bit. So the obvious Elephant In The Living Room is that the IDiots have dug DEEP into EVOLUTIONATRY-FUCKING-BIOLOGY to come up with their questions!!! Their bedrock strategy is to use the very science they don’t believe in to come up with the trickiest questions that particular science is tackling. If you don’t believe in evolution at all, than discussions of this or that peptide chain or some random ribonucleic function is akin to learning how to play the violin as a means of proving that violins can’t be played perfectly.
Modern technology is evil, I said in my e-mail composed on my iPad!
roharmon, @13:
As *Pauli* would say…
Sal Cordova? Wow! Blast from the past! Ahhhh memories. Very, very stupid memories.
Louis
@26…another one
4. If Jesus said he was coming again, if Paul says he met Jesus on the road to Damascus, how is this not counted as “coming again”? Aren’t you waiting for something that happened 2000 years ago?
Delurking to ask if it is okay to print out PZ’s post, and only PZ’s post, to carry with me in my wallet? Much lesser educated here, and this has got to be the most helpful defensive offense I’ve yet encountered.
I think they are trying to claim that something like sandstone, limestone, or even granite could all form “quickly”. This is of course nonsense. You need time, pressure and heat, in all of these cases. Its not like making diamonds, or other gemstones, where you can cheat, as long as you have the right ingredients. If you want sandstone you need a “specific” amount of time, depth, and heat, otherwise you get something else, same with any other “layer” they might describe. Any “shortcut” you take would alter the resulting molecular structure in predictable ways. Limestone being probably the stupidest on the list, but I might be wrong about that. In any cases, if you tried to make, say, sandstone, in a lab what you would get, since you would be controlling for every factor, would be “too” uniform, at the least, even assuming you could manage it at all. What you can’t do, however, is make it by laying down a bunch of sand in a week, then just having it “happen”.
Mind, if you wanted to raise the planetary temperature a few thousands degrees, for some set time, and increase gravity sufficiently to generate the needed pressures, and you had some way to make absolutely sure all of the material “sorted” into the right layers, then.. it still wouldn’t work because, if you have 50 layers, you would either get, say a dozen layers of “sandstone” with stuff that ***in completely wrong*** in between them, or one layer (the top) which actually is sandstone, and 49 layers of the wrong stuff under it, or… who the heck knows what, but it wouldn’t be layers of sandstone, interspersed with either other materials, or different consistencies, and densities, of sandstone.
The very question is idiotic, in its assumptions, if for no other reason than, even if plausible, and it isn’t, you would still have to explain why “lighter” forms ended up “underneath” heavier ones, all, somehow, carefully separated out, into completely illogical, unbelievable, and physically impossible layers (since, after all, we are presuming that it “settled” into layers, and physics, sadly, tends to make heavy shit sink to the bottom, and/or mix the layers, so there *is* no distinctions between them, not make light, then medium, then light, then heavy, then light, then lighter, then heavy, etc. layers of materials. You only get that over long spans of time, due to “changes in what is being deposited”. The “great flood” they want this to be a gotcha for would have made soup of the whole bloody thing.
And, that… is may “layman’s” assessment of the reality of the question. lol
Oh, and, yeah, time and pressure, but not “heat”, with limestone, of course, but still, you get the point.
There’s a version of Question 6, that’s actually very interesting and related to the origin of life. If the primordial soup was a mixture of racemic sugars, amino acids, and nucleic acids, why do modern living organisms only use L-amino acids and D-sugars? That question hasn’t been fully answered yet, but there are some hypotheses.
One possible answers to the chirality question is that the minerals that supported early biochemical reactions were themselves chiral and favored the formation of chiral biomolecules. The chiral mineral would have been serving the same function a chiral enzyme serves today. Another possible answer is that it was random chance. In a small enough pool where the first biochemistry was occurring, only a small subset of the possible stereoisomers could form because there just wasn’t enough material to explore every possibility. For instance, if you string 10 alanine molecules together, there are 1024 possible stereoisomers (2^10). Maybe there weren’t enough alanine molecules in the tiny pool to make all 1024 strings. Some of the alanine strings wouldn’t have been made, and you wouldn’t have an exactly racemic mixture.
Once the original asymmetry forms, it’s fairly easy to amplify. Some biomolecules will spontaneously form crystals of only the left-handed or right-handed chiral form, so a slight excess or 1 chiral form can easily become a large excess.
But of course, all that assumes the creationist is actually interested in learning more about the way the universe actually works, as opposed to how some 2000 year old book says it works.
Those cosmology questions just reminded me of a conversation I had a few months ago with a very religious person with a somewhat sincere interest in science. I was explaining how we know about dark matter.
It’s often said that dark matter hasn’t been detected, but actually we have beautiful photographs of it. For example, the Bullet Cluster, is actually a pair of galaxy clusters passing through each other. As the interstellar gases in the two objects pass through each other, they slow down a bit from the collisions. This also causes the gas to heat up and emit an x-ray signal that allows the distribution of non-dark matter to be imaged. The dark matter, being non-interacting, passes right through, unimpeded, and so separates from the baryonic (non-dark) matter. The combined distribution of dark & non-dark matter can be mapped, by looking at gravitational lensing of luminous objects behind the bullet cluster, and is found not to coincide with the distribution of non-dark matter only, thus showing where the dark matter is.
In explaining this, I had to point out that when galaxies collide, the stars don’t actually bump into each other – the vast majority of a galaxy’s volume is empty space, so the collision probability is tiny. This was instantly seized upon as proof of god’s protecting hand, guiding all those stars safely through. Never mind that I’d just explained that the low frequency of collisions is a prediction based on a model that does not include divine intervention. Never mind the question: Why? Never mind far too many other face-palm inducing objections to try enumerating here.
(For those wondering how you do x-ray astronomy, when focusing x-rays with lenses is (damn near) impossible, the answer is to use coded apertures, the simplest form of which is a pinhole camera (note, I work with x-rays, but have no professional involvement with astronomy (also note, I apologize for my excessive use of multiply nested parentheses)).)
That’s not how English works. “If so” follows either a yes/no kind of question; “how?” is not a yes/no kind of question.
I suspect that the “how do you account for supernovae outside of galaxies?” question is actually a challenge (“can you account for the supernovae outside of galaxies?”) and has been superficially rephrased as a “how” question because “how” questions sound sciency.
that’s also not how English works, but I forgot what was supposed to go after the “or” I also didn’t write.
agressivePerfector @ #58:
Just tell them stars don’t have to collide. When two spiral galaxies collide, the interstellar dust and gas in them do too, which leads to a huge burst of star formation. Many of these stars will be very short-lived massive stars, which will explode as Type II supernovae, totally sterilizing any life-bearing planet within many light-years. It’s unlikely a single one could escape.
Of course, elliptical galaxies are the product of many coalescences like this and have been thoroughly depleted in gas, so this doesn’t happen (as much) when they collide, but all life that may have existed on the planets of any of their stars was wiped out long ago.
We owe our existence to living in a spiral galaxy in a poor cluster that just hasn’t undergone such a collision yet. (Supposedly in 2 billion years we’re supposed to collide with M33, but that’s assuming no transverse velocity worth mentioning, and I don’t know how they think that’s likely.)
agressivePerfector @ #58:
Just tell them stars don’t have to collide. When two spiral galaxies collide, the interstellar dust and gas in them do too, which leads to a huge burst of star formation. Many of these stars will be very short-lived massive stars, which will explode as Type II supernovae, totally sterilizing any life-bearing planet within many light-years. It’s unlikely a single one could escape.
Of course, elliptical galaxies are the product of many coalescences like this and have been thoroughly depleted in gas, so this doesn’t happen (as much) when they collide, but all life that may have existed on the planets of any of their stars was wiped out long ago.
We owe our existence to living in a spiral galaxy in a poor cluster that just hasn’t undergone such a collision yet. (Supposedly in 2 billion years we’re supposed to collide with M33, but that’s assuming no transverse velocity worth mentioning, and I don’t know how they think that’s likely.)
I should add, even the gravitational effects of a near-miss can have the same effect.
I added the last line when I saw nothing had happened upon hitting “submit” the first time. Sorry.
We should come up with a list of questions for them, like:
1) Can god make a stone he cannot lift?
2) What is the mechanism by which god “gives us morals”?
3) How do you know you have a soul?
4) How do you know there is an afterlife?
5) If the bible was written by humans, why do you believe any of it?
5a) If you believe the writers of the bible were divinely inspired, how did that work?
6) How does prayer work?
7) Given that the universe is finite, is god “infinite”? How does that work?
8) How do souls interface with bodies? Extra credit: does a stroke affect your soul?
etc.
PZ:
Yep, when it comes to zebrafish hearts, Stainier is the shit. This is also a good paper with detailed sections on heart formation.
Uncovering the Molecular and Cellular Mechanisms of Heart Development Using the Zebrafish
9) If souls are energy, what’s their frequency?
10) If God has a plan, why does prayer cause him to deviate from this plan?
Marcus Ranum @66: Ask Kenneth.
Rob Grigjanis @68:
Maybe that’s how Kenneth lost his religion.
Or a White Dwarf. Type Ia supernovae, last I checked, were WD supernovae (and according to some models, may not require a massive star in orbit). Though I imagine that an ID-creationist would pretty much immediately scoff at the notion of an explosion that powerful with only two WDs, for some reason.
Maybe he thinks we can only see distant Super Novas if they are not inside galaxies. He doesn’t realize that Super Novas out shine the galaxies they are in. Creationists cannot comprehend large anything, be it the age of the Earth, the size of the universe or the number of animals crammed into the ark.
Considering #15 and #16, I wonder why he’s fishing for loop holes in the Big Bang theory and stellar distances. Is he leading up to refuting the age of the universe, or putting into question, and thus validating in some twisted way that creation could have been only 6000 years ago (per the Masoretic chronology) rather than 13.798 billion years ago? If so, his curve balls are looping around third.
Surely the best way to respond to these would be to turn the tables on them.
Ask them what the formula was for getting to 6000 years. Ask them what are all the species of birds listed in the bible, and the chapter and verse. And when they get stumped or unsure of one tinsy tiny bit, declare that this proves creationism is obviously a lie.
And them point out that that was what they were trying to do to you.
I’m sort of surprised that he knows what a racemate is, but I’m not at all surprised he doesn’t understand anything about amino acids in general. Firstly, “homochiral” is not a term of art. We’d say “enantiopure” or “enantioenriched.”
Further, there is no good reason to assert that a biotic soup would contain only a racemate. Why would that be the case? We generally think of chirality having to come from somewhere, but we don’t (to my knowledge) know much about the development of small nitrogen-containing organics on the early earth. However, even taken that as given it’s entirely possible to envision some sort of kinetic resolution in the formation of early enzymes, allowing for the formation of one enzymatic enantiomer in preference to the other and isolating the amino acid enantiomers in the process. It’s also entirely possible that diastereomers of early peptides weren’t particularly stable, so we ended up with the same absolute configuration for all of the proteinogenic amino acids through iterations of the kind of process I just mentioned. These are just hypotheses (at best) pretty far afield from my actual area of synthetic chemistry, but
I would nitpick a little – I think that the chirality of enzyme binding pockets originates with the chirality of its amino acids because they drive not only the primary structure, but the absolute position of the side chains, so far as I know, should have a pretty substantial influence on folding. Of course, there’s likely no reason other than some bit of random chance early on that everything is (S) instead of (R). Or, I for the biology types (L) instead of (D) – so long as we remember that the rotation of light and the absolute configuration are impossible to predict from one another.
A theoretical paper on chirality of amino acids using neutrinos and supernovae. This appears to agree with a paper Asimov cited years ago in one of his assays where CPT wasn’t conserved with the weak force, and degradation of the D-amino acids occurred faster than the L-amino acids in the presence of radiation…
militantagnostic # 71
Zero is not a large number.
Yay, Geology (and Paleontology)!
Seems you’re a tad confused about fossils and rock layers. Fossils form when minerals from the surrounding rock infuse–and replace–the bone (“perminieralization”), or harden over the object (e.g., plant, feathers), leaving an imprint when the original decays.
The short answer is “yes”. Often dead animals are covered in mud or some other fine material, such as sand, silt, etc., which protects against scavengers carting off the carcass and the wind/sun from bleaching and weathering away the bones. Eventually the accumulated materials harden, but it takes a LONG time for the rest of the layer to form.
Just because a carcass is buried, the layer isn’t “finished”. The layer “ends” when a different rock is deposited on top (seas become desert; lava flows across the sand), or the ground shifts (dips), is eroded, and another layer starts forming on top. Layers form horizontally, but can be buckled, cut, flipped, scraped, etc.
The process can take millions of years.
Stop. If you find C14, it means nothing, because C14 isn’t the right tool for dating rocks 490+ mya. Do you use a paintbrush to pound in nails, also?
In geologic time, yes. Human time, more rare but happens: see Eldfell and Pompeii.
I just said they can. Also, the terms “university experiments” and “field observations” are meaningless unless you provide the where, what, when, why, whom and how.
Now that your ‘gotcha’ has been nullified, you come off looking like a flaccid, impotent cretin. Congratulations.
He seems unaware that dogs can make baby dogs.
Yes, Cordova is a YEC. There is of course no contradiction between ID and YEC, just different emphasis.
@cag
But, given that they were crammed into a volume of zero, we need to use l’Hopital’s rule to determine the density.
I did not realise Slimy Sal was still around. They never change do they? Sal has been around long enough to know why lists of questions like this are so stupid yet he just cannot help himself. It is clear that after years and years of directly interacting with scientists he has learned absolutely nothing.
Educated atheists aren’t Cordova’s target audience. This is a shot across the bows for the believers who dare poke their noses into the wider world beyond the safe confines of doctrine. Feed a devout but questioning disciple enough credible sounding bullshit and they’ll stay in the fold. Why waste quoting real facts if you can make your own?
As a geologist manqué, this is one of those I-don’t-even questions. In order: yes (although sometimes they can form slowly); which experiments and really, so what; and, what I just said to the last question.
Ignoring terrestrial sedimentation (volcanic, glacial, etc.) because, well, erosion … In the marine sedimentary environment, most stuff settles slowly. But it can then be re-settled much more quickly, at much greater depth, and at much greater distance from the original deposition zone:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbidite
(This does play havoc with paleostratigraphy. So it goes.)
But strata can form slowly, e.g., Cretaceous chalk deposits. Or salt deposits. Or gypsum. Or …!
What was the question again? Oh it was stupid; that was it.
Al Dente @#67
If god had a plan, what would it be…The missing verse from the Joan Osbourne song.
In Roots of Rabbinic Judaism, Gabriele Boccaccini touches on the theological conflict over intercession among the various Judaic cults in the 3rd-1st century BCE. The priest/temple cults promoted that sacrifices, prayer, etc could change god’s will and your fate. It probably didn’t hurt that it was the source of their power and wealth. The wisdom cults said no way. No human could fathom god’s will and as god is perfect, there could be no flaw in the plan to warrant a change. So the purpose of prayer isn’t to change god’s plan, but to put you into harmony with it.
Modern Christians, however, seem so intent on proving god and the direct involvement of god in human affairs that they never see that dodge for themselves, and if they do, perhaps it’s one of those cracks in their dogma you noted at #27.
“Many of these stars will be very short-lived massive stars, which will explode as Type II supernovae, totally sterilizing any life-bearing planet within many light-years.”
So much for God’s protecting hand.
1) Can god make a stone he cannot lift?
My friends have gone on up the street and I have to go and knock on some more doors. Have a nice day!
2) What is the mechanism by which god “gives us morals”?
We’re born knowing them. And they’re in the Bible, which was written by people inspired by God.
3) How do you know you have a soul?
Says so in the Bible.
4) How do you know there is an afterlife?
Says so in the Bible.
5) If the bible was written by humans, why do you believe any of it?
It was inspired by God; says so in the Bible.
5a) If you believe the writers of the bible were divinely inspired, how did that work?
Says so in the Bible.
6) How does prayer work?
God listens to the prayers of believers.
7) Given that the universe is finite, is god “infinite”? How does that work?
My friends have gone on up the street and I have to go and knock on some more doors. Have a nice day!
8) How do souls interface with bodies? Extra credit: does a stroke affect your soul?
My friends have gone on up the street and I have to go and knock on some more doors. Have a nice day!
etc.
My friends have gone on up the street and I have to go and knock on some more doors. Have a nice day!
I think the Seventh Day Adventists will not be coming to my house any more.
Strata are also deposited very slowly. Very, very slowly. Cyclostratigraphy is visible in some road cuts around here. The layers run in a pattern that matches long-term cycles in Earth’s orbit. There are hundreds of millions of years in tens of feet, and the rock itself is the product of life and time.
Question 16’s second part should be a separate question. I really don’t know what they are getting at, as there are few stars that are not in galaxies, and they are less likely to go supernova than stars that are in galaxies. (Writing “Super Nova” is just silly, BTW.) As has been said, supernovae can sometimes be seen from further away than their entire galaxy, which is a help when looking for galaxies.
The existence of galaxies and supernovas, and even stars as anything other than lights in a dome, pretty much shits all over Genesis (the bible book, not the band). Trying to piddly-ass a few imaginary errors into the downfall of astronomy is bizarre. We have an atomic space-tank rumbling around on what is supposedly one of the lights that were placed on the firmament for signs. As Jeff Foxworthy would say, “Here’s your sign.”
God’s plan is to let the giant monkeys fuck around for a while, before we move on to Act 5 with the rats, crows, and cockroaches.
And he sees that it is good.
I fucking hate the people that do this, so so so damn much. It’s clear they’re not interested in actual knowledge, as when I do answer some of these (my degree, low though it is, is in earth sciences…) they seem genuinely taken aback.
Some YEC dingleberry is stalking me on Facebook sequentially vomiting creationist claptrap (gaiz, the NEW and IMPROVED Hydroplate Theory explains SO MUCH!!11one), and as apologists are wont to do, completely ignoring it every time I bring up the magnetic zebra-striping athwart the Mid-Atlantic Ridge.
That may be the worst thing about dealing with these people. Every time I do, whether the subject is morals or epistemology or physical sciences, they just flat-out ignore anything they don’t like and proceed as if it hadn’t been said. How do you get through to people like this?!
I knew a guy that drove a “Super Nova.” He would ride to “Church SS” in it.
If this people spent the time they waste on trying to “stump” scientists, actually studying and learning the current state of science in the relevant fields they want to discredit, they´d be able to see how stupid their questions really are and all the fallacies they commit. Oh wait, yeah, i forgot that none of that could pierce the wall of mindbogling dishonesty….my bad.
I would just fire off a list of made-up sciencey-sounding explanations at them, with a dead straight face. They obviously don’t understand the questions to begin with, so how are they going to know what a correct answer would even sound like?
How did the first organism regulate protein expression and cellular development without regulatory elements or developmental mechanisms? By reversing the polarity of its floxiribonoids, of course.
73 thisisausername
They added up all the ages of the people in the bible. Seriously.
Species don’t matter, they just make up the term ‘kind’ and disregard your question as ‘irrelevant’.
Problem is: these people are liars and bullshitters, and sure that they are In The Right and that God Is On Their Side and therefore are never stumped but can spout bullshit at anything you can throw at them.
re robro:
yeah, that’s the ticket!;-]
Seriously, It must be the plan to get “scientist” to say something inconsistent with other scientists (i.e. the scientists makes a mistake), that can then be woven into a paradox “proving” that science is wrong and scientists lie about knowing everything they claim. The questions are just bafflegab, to sound sciencey to the audience and get the scientists wrapped up in knots trying to figure out the question itself before even trying to answer the quasi-question.
EG the question, “How do you explain Super Nova not in galaxies…” Is he asking why there are stars outside of galaxies, or implying that only stars in galaxies can nova, or is he back to the ‘old-school’ where ‘galaxy’ was the word for ‘everything’. OR he is just wanting to show how long it takes for a scientist to unravel his question and unravels it into so many questions that scientists are just bonkers.
1. millions of babies die every year, from disease, malnutrition, and violence. why does god kill so many babies?
2. when god sent the flood to purge the world of wickedness by killing everyone except noah’s family, exactly how did he quantify the wickedness of the babies he killed?
3. if i do my best to make sure as many people go to heaven as possible, does that make me a good person? so if i kill every baby i see, since babies automatically go to heaven, that makes me a good person?
4. the bible says that all of humanity came from adam and eve. that meant that adam’s children had sex either with their mother or their sister. the same holds true for noah’s family and descendants. since god twice specifically required incest, why don’t christians practice it anymore?
i’m sure we can collectively think of more “stumpers” for the christians!
Question for Christians: Why are you still so afraid of God, when everybody’s got iron chariots these days?
On the subject of measuring the distance to stars using parallax, NASA just announced that they have used Hubble to measure the distance to stars about 7,500 light years away.
Okay, that’s it…at the age of 55…I’m going back to our local community college…and taking SCIENCE classes! For fun!
And thank you all so much for this thread.It has been so helpful!
JCB @ #96:
Hot Damn!
I hope the Hubble keeps working for a long time yet, since the James Webb is an infrared telescope—not really a replacement.
I suppose it’s too much to hope for it to last until (and if) the Orion spacecraft is available for a repair mission?
This just in: Astronomers have extended parallax distance measurements out to 10,000
light years using the HST as documented here: http://phys.org/news/2014-04-hubble-stellar-tape-space.html
This means we have direct parallax derive distances to several Cepheid variables which makes
the “standard candle” approach to deriving distances even more reliable.
So how do the Creobots explain the fact that measuring the size (and therefore age) of the Universe working our way up with the distance ladder, and determining the age of the Universe by measuring the power spectrum of variations in the Cosmic Background Radiation give pretty much exactly the same answer? There would be no reason for them to even be in the same ballpark in their Universe.
@94:
Not just their mother and any sisters:
Where did Cain’s wife come from and who created Nod?
“
14. Can geological strata form rapidly? What about the university experiments and field observations that show strata can form rapidly? If they can form rapidly, and if fossil presence demands they form rapidly, doesn’t that suggest they formed rapidly?”
Another lying TrueTheist who would benfit from seeing Potholer54’s videos on Youtube, and who has done no investigation at all about his lies.
Poor thing also seems to think that fossils form e.g. become rocks as layers form. As always pure willful ignorance drives the lies of these people.
Rather late to the party, but in fielding a scatter-gun list of “questions” such as above, this link will provide some handy explanations and not a few references:
http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/list.html