Posted on 07/24/2003 1:55:39 PM PDT by Mr.Atos
I was just lisening to Medved debating Creationism with Athiests on the air. I found it interesting that while Medved argued his side quite effectively from the standpoint of faith, his opponents resorted to condescension and beliitled him with statements like, "when it rains, is that God crying?" I was reminded of the best (at least most amusing)debate that I have ever heard on the subject of Creationism vs Evolution, albeit a fictional setting. It occurred on the show, Friends of all places between the characters Pheobe (The Hippy) and Ross (The Paleontologist). It went like this...
Pheebs: Okay...it's very faint, but I can still sense him in the building...GO INTO THE LIGHT MR. HECKLES!!
Ross: Whoa, whoa, whoa. What, uh, you don't believe in evolution? Pheebs: Nah. Not really. Ross: You don't believe in evolution? Pheebs: I don't know. It's just, ya know, monkeys, Darwin, ya know, it's a, it's a nice story. I just think it's a little too easy.
Ross: Uh, excuse me. Evolution is not for you to buy, Phoebe. Evolution is scientific fact. Like, like, the air we breathe, like gravity... Pheebs: Uh, okay, don't get me started on gravity.
Ross: You uh, you don't believe in gravity? Pheebs: Well, it's not so much that ya know, like I don't *believe* in it, ya know. It's just...I don't know. Lately I get the feeling that I'm not so much being pulled down, as I am being pushed.
Ross: How can you NOT BELIEVE in evolution? Pheebs: [shrugs] I unh-huh...Look at this funky shirt!!
Ross: Well, there ya go. Pheebs: Huh. So now, the REAL question is: who put those fossils there, and why...?
Ross: OPPOSABLE THUMBS!! Without evolution, how do YOU explain OPPOSABLE THUMBS?!? Pheebs: Maybe the overlords needed them to steer their spacecrafts!
Pheebs: Uh-oh! Scary Scientist Man!
Pheebs: Okay, Ross? Could you just open your mind like, *this* much?? Okay? Now wasn't there a time when the brightest minds in the world believed that the Earth was flat? And up until what, like, fifty years ago, you all thought the atom was the smallest thing, until you split it open, and this like, whole mess o' crap came out! Now, are you telling me that you are so unbelievably arrogant that you can't admit that there's a teeny, tiny possibility that you could be wrong about this?!?
Pheebs: I can't believe you caved. Ross: What? Pheebs: You just ABANDONED your whole belief system! I mean, before, I didn't agree with you, but at least I respected you. Ross: But uh.. Pheebs: Yeah...how...how are you gonna go in to work tomorrow? How...how are you gonna face the other science guys? How...how are you gonna face yourself? Oh! [Ross runs away dejected] Pheebs: That was fun. So who's hungry?
Great post. It also needs to be added that evolution depends on a whole series of successively beneficial mutations. The vast preponderance of harmful mutations over beneficial ones (admitted to even by the most ardent evolutionists) makes the odds of achieving successively beneficial ones astronomical in just a single instance. To achieve them in the miriads of times it would have had to occur to turn bacteria into men, would be totally impossible.
Indeed. Even creationist websites seem to agree. This is found at the Institute for Creation Research website:
DARWIN'S INFLUENCE ON RUTHLESS LAISSEZ FAIRE CAPITALISM.
Indeed I would be saying the exact same thing. See here post #268 "Heck I sure have made my doozies on this website. I am glad when they are pointed out. Again it is good for me (I learn) and it is good for the lurkers, they don't go away with bogus info I posted in error."
I note that she did not treat anyone from the evolutuionist side as an example of what should not be done, so her statement was definitely not fair.
This is also not the case:
"VadeRetro: Now, you've got a great sense of humor and your scientific knowledge is impleccable. But, you've been letting ALS get to you way too much. Lurking on other threads, I saw at least one thread completely unrelated to science where you and ALS engaged in fistcuffs."
Seems to me also, that you should be asking her to call her post a mistake (preferably by Freepmail - as the posts made by the three of you should have been addressed) instead of excusing it. Civility goes two ways, not one.</font.
I did not consider her post a mistake. (I am also fully aware that our exchange she was referring to was in the past). My thoughts on this is she is reminding both you and the rest of us that it's ok to admit an error.
I still wish you would drop this.
I am not the one that keeps bringing this up. It is those who are trying to excuse her post that keep bringing it up. She can drop this anytime she wants.
How come not one single evolutionist is asking her to make things right? Why is this not being handled by Freepmail as it should be?
Self-evident.
That is the key issue. However I would not say impossible. I would say unproven. I criticize the TOE because it requires a "leap of faith", which I find objectionable in a theory that is supposed to be scientific. To call it a hypothesis, yes, okay, but a theory? How the heck can anyone falsify "given enough time and space, positive mutations explain natural selection"? It isn't falsifiable. It's like the induction joke I posted a while back....
That soliloquy is one of the all time greats . . . Rutger Hauer almost literally chewing the scenery . . . . howling . . . . the dove . . . . rain . . . .
In fairness, that article from creationist website which blames laissez faire capitalism on evolution also somehow manages to blame communism and Hitler on evolution too. That's really an amazing article. In the minds of some, evolution can be blamed for everything, even contradictory economic systems.
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is classic Philip K. Dick, which has never really been translated to the screen well. His theme in a nutshell - what if the world changed before your eyes? What if you are the only person who remembers how it used to be? What is real, your memories, or what everybody else remembers? What if you are the only one who is entirely sane? What is real, your perceptions, or what everybody else perceives?
Oh, dear, I wish you hadn't done that.
Not unless you really, really cared what he has to say.
My motto is, "never ask a question the answer to which you do not really want to know."
Sadly, the post from Nakatu X was not timely with regard to the agreement of the willing. It would have been much easier had it been made before the effective date.
Nevertheless, where we stand at this point is that all parties involved in that post and all of us here are in agreement not to bring forward anything from the past.
Therefore, gore3000, I ask you kindly and with much respect - although you have been hurt by this, to please turn the other cheek on this one and let's all move forward together on the principle which you devised for the agreement:
Besides all that, anyone can go to Google and start searching on this subject and quickly see that all you've done is become an apologist for Marx and Hitler in order to salvage your unholy grail called evolution.
shame!
It may be hard, but I think it has been falsified, here's why: while evolutionists say the above there is no such thing as 'given enough time'. According to their own statements which they agree to we have the following: life has been on earth some 4.5 billion years, mammals separated from reptiles some 150-200 million years ago, man separated from apes some 10 million years ago. Let's take the last two. Since the mammalian genome is some 50% different than the reptilian one that means that in that time there would have had to be a minimum of 7.5 beneficial mutations per year (3 billion dna base pairs/2/200million). Since the human genome is some 5% different from that of the apes, that would mean some 15 beneficial mutations a year. Since we have yet to see the first beneficial mutation in some 150 years of looking for them (and not just in men and mammals but in uncountable numbers of the over a million species alive today) it is fair to say that evolution has been scientifically refuted.
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