Posted on 05/01/2006 8:29:14 AM PDT by SirLinksalot
Dammit!!!
Don't read my WORDS!!!
Read my MIND!!
This is where you're wrong. The skeleton of a modern human in one million year old strata. The skull of a modern mammal in one-hundred million year old strata. The distinctinve spores of a flowering plant in two-million year old strata. Two biologically similar animals with vastly different genomes. Any one of these things would *disprove* evolutionary theory, and scientists would have no choice but to go back to the drawing board.
However, scientists have not yet made such a discovery. All previous studies and fossil finds have supported the theory.
The popular consensus among certain groups of people seems to be there is a conspiricy to hide such discoveries, but, as Ben Franklin said, three may keep a secret if two of them are dead.
But you see, did not have to make a guess. If you knew what tools to use, you would not have had to venture a wild guess. Instead you could have compared those unknown sequences to known data and arrived at a result with a high degree of confidence. That's science.
Did the Dinosaur also have Bush's National Guard Records?
Well, that's two comments in recent posts about fertilizer/fertile ground. Pretty appropriate, considering the level of BS....
Preposterous. There are many, many people of faith working in the sciences and engineering, including the biological sciences. One does not need to "believe" in evolution. Belief is for faith. One only needs to understand evoultionary theory, as one would understand plate tectonics or circuit theory.
It's unfair to construe Darwin's loss of faith as the sole result of his scientific work, when certainly the loss of a close family member may have shaken his faith as much as anything.
I've told you before - because they're annoying, long, quote-mined regurgitations, which contribute nothing.
You sure you're not just a troll?
You can't calculate how much 87Sr was present at the beginning without first *assuming* that it is relatively proportional w/ 84Sr, 86Sr & 88Sr. Because of this assumption, you are *assuming* the amount of 87Sr that was present when the isochron was formed. Maybe that doesn't qualify as an assumption in your mind, but it does in mine.
And yes, they did find excess helium. You do the same thing when you assume how much helium should be present. Why criticize your opponent for the same thing that you do?
And the Law of Conservation of Energy is not violated with a faster rate with lower energies per event. See Setterfield.
http://www.setterfield.org/zpe.htm#zpeandatom
When 3 of 8 isochron samples by Dalrymple return dates of 34 billion years, there are no good 'independent' reasons for discarding these anomalies.
(Dalrymple, G. B., 1984 How Old is the Earth?: A Reply to ‘Scientific’ Creationism In “Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Pacific Division, American Association for the Advancement of Science” vol. 1, pt. 3, Frank Awbrey and William Thwaites (Eds).)
You are the one who is backpedalling furiously. You went from 'no asumptions on radiometric dating' to a focus only on isochrons. That's a huge step backward as non-isochronic methods were once presented as reliable just as isochron methods are today.
The only difference is that science hasn't figured out all of the problems w/ isochron dating yet. But they are starting to come out and that's not good for you.
Meanwhile, Schweitzer’s research has been hijacked by “young earth” creationists, who insist that dinosaur soft tissue couldn’t possibly survive millions of years.
You creationists are fos. Rock formation age is determined directly or indirectly by radiometric means.
Like the empirical evidence for the rock formation's age?
Had you posted raw date, we would see the real variability and 'convergence' would be seen as the manufactured result that it is.
Dalrymple had 3 of 8 samples that tested at 34 billion years old (p 79). How do you 'norm' that?
(Dalrymple, G. B., 1984 How Old is the Earth?: A Reply to ‘Scientific’ Creationism In “Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Pacific Division, American Association for the Advancement of Science” vol. 1, pt. 3, Frank Awbrey and William Thwaites (Eds).)
These guys are making this stuff come out the way they want it to. That much is patently obvious.
But... what about blasting SANTA???
Which may explain the accusation (on another thread) that evolutionists engage in genocide.
Ethics is illusory inasmuch as it persuades us that it has an objective reference.
Hi Heartlander! Jeepers, that's just what evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker says: “Ethical theory,” he writes, “requires idealizations like free, sentient, rational, equivalent agents whose behavior is uncaused.” Yet, “the world, as seen by science, does not really have uncaused events.” It's all matter in its motions, according to physical laws. (Not that science has yet defined what matter is, nor has it given a plausible origin for physical laws. No matter! Smuggle in the presuppositions and just go on from there.) Pinker, too, obviously thinks that ethics cannot have a ground in traditional understandings.
Well, of course this would perhaps be true if ethics were reducible to material causes, which is what science investigates. The fallacy is to believe that the universe reduces to what science studies. There are very real things in the world that are non-phenomenal, ethics beings one of them. This is true even in the sense that Wilson gives; for he sees this non-phenomenal thing called ethics as having positive selection value for reproduction and therefore the survival of species. Yet he cannot directly observe "ethics"; it's not something you can put under a microscope, or view through a telescope. The scientific method -- which involves a subject (observer) intending an object for investigation -- is not equipped to deal with the issue, since ethics is not an object that can be "intended" in this sense.
And neither is God. Neither, in fact, is the whole of the universe, which cannot be observed in its entirety, as it is in and for itself; for observers have only perspectival views of it, given that they are bodily-located consciousnesses at given space-time coordinates within the whole, and thus can never stand outside of the whole of which they are the parts and participants, so to view it "entire," spatially and temporally.
Plus arguably that part of the universe which we do directly observe is confined to three spatial dimensions and one of time. At least, that seems to be our general expectation. But then humans are strongly visually oriented/conditioned, and so may just naturally tend to doubt the existence of things that cannot be visually detected.
Yet many mathematicians and physicists -- unlike most biologists I gather -- conjecture there are more than four dimensions in the universe. Though they show up "in the math," so to speak, they have thus far not been observed directly. (Certainly string theory advances this idea.) Such extra dimensions may possibly include dimensions that we simply cannot observe owing to the limitations of the human mind.
I am amazed at the "arrogance" of thinkers such as Wilson, Pinker, et al., who suggest we might just as well accept the "fact" that ethics is an illusion, rather than simply admit that it is something that science cannot "get at" with its method.
In short in the italicized remarks at the top and Pinker's comment, we are here dealing with a fallacy that Whitehead called "the fallacy of misplaced concreteness." I gather it arises because modern science assumes and then asserts that everything there is in the universe is amenable to scientific description and explanation. So in effect, with this expectation, they must shrink the universe to fit their method.
But this, of course, is an assertion not yet proved.
Only philosophy and theology have methods to deal with things that, though real, are "unseen." It takes a deliberate act of intellectual oblivion to not see the reality of non-phenomenal things has empirical validation through the the intellectual activities and products of man over the course of some three millennia of human history, at least.
I gather, however, for some modern-day scientists, the human past no longer "counts." And if they keep going on with their "ethics is an illusion" business, soon the human present and future will not "count," either.
Well, FWIW. Thanks so much for writing, Heartlander!
Ahh, scientists, the ultimate human 'priesthood'.
Claiming to understand that which is not understandable and ridiculing all who disagree.
Even those who believe must do so on faith because the basis for the position is so esoteric that you would never know where they are fudging and they certainly aren't honest enough to tell you.
Nice.
A fascinating analysis.
I'd like to ask your take on:"...evening and morning a ..day"
That's a half day, more or less, and depending on season and how far from the equator. OR...first "evening and morning then - a day after that. A puzzlement.
A
cool!
There has?
But Genesis sure did Darwin in!
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