Posted on 03/09/2008 1:50:11 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
” Ben Stein Smart Bombs Darwinian Bunker “... LoL..
This stuff is harder than it looks folks.
Oh, please. We Conservatives have got to dump this Intelligent Design Crusade if we’re going to go anywhere in this country. There is ZERO evidence that the universe as we see it was “designed”, other than statements resting on one Faith or another. Faith = absolute belief without proof.
If you want to teach this in religious schools, fine, but do NOT try to replace the teaching of science with it. The two are totally different paradigms, and most of the nation knows it. When Conservatives spout this rhetoric, it makes us look like fools.
What's that you say? By his being associated with this Ben Stein film? Did you see it? What elements, exactly, are so foolish?
Like Coulter, you say? Just lump Stein in with her, huh? What a shortcut!
Rather than being a "critique" of science;
Isn't this film much about more about, how even the mere expression of doubt, as to the validity of the idea that life just somehow sprung up on it's own --- life, coming from non-life, produces such vehemence among the Neo-Darwinists that they viciously excoriate, and seek to entirely banish all those who dare to raise such doubt?
You might fool yourself into believing that isn't going on, and wish to also blow a smokescreen with your blithe comments, but you can't fool everyone.
There is a witch-hunt going on, enforced by the faithful followers of the Church of Neo-Darwinism, and it is as merciless as a Stalin lead purge.
"Science", is one thing....
but on this other matter, concerning the socio-political implications, including the viciousness of the anti-theists towards those among them in the scientific community who dare break ranks with them, I'll believe my own lying eyes, since I could see clearly, before the puffs of smoke arrived, thank you very much!
Now watch this thread devolve into typical crevo-thread debate nonsense --- without discussing or referencing the subject matter of the article, directly!
...three, two, one...
bookmark for later
First, Gore’s Inconvenient farce and now, this crap. What is about people too lazy to read a real science book falling for commercially motivated junk science like this?
What, is Stein trying to set up corporations to trade in "design credits"?
Cheers!
And why would Dawkin be assigning the role of Creator to space alien?
Crick and Dawkin - denying God exists but publicly speculating that life was planted on Earth by someone/something else “out there”- which begs the question of who/what created someone else??
BTW- do schools teach Crick's “panspermia” theory as an alternative to Darwinism theory? Or do they only teach Crick's research up to the point where he realized his findings did not support the theory of non/natural design?
My only comment - please reserve judgment of this film and Ben Stein until after you have seen the movie!
ping
That is unless you have a rock with a date stamped on it by the original big bang as a specimen to calibrate your decay rate assumptions.
Here is a good link. Perhaps you could learn something about the subject before you grace us with your opinions:
Radiometric Dating: A Christian Perspective by Dr. Roger C. Wiens.
I would expect not and anything you try to claim to bolster your argument will border on that of religion as it will take faith to believe that the way it is now is how it has always been.
It is unfortunate that education propagates unscientific thinking as such as to assume that everything is the same today as it was 1000 years ago.
I guess you couldn’t wait for the “Media” to put it down before seeing it. Oh I forgot, you don’t have to see anything as you already know it all.
Ben Stein isn’t as smart as he thinks he is.
He supports Al Franken.
The movie is so good the producers are paying schools ten dollars a head to send kids to see it.
I would expect not and anything you try to claim to bolster your argument will border on that of religion as it will take faith to believe that the way it is now is how it has always been.
It is unfortunate that education propagates unscientific thinking as such as to assume that everything is the same today as it was 1000 years ago.
Faith? No, I don't need faith as science has evidence. Even creationists, on those rare occasions that they try to do research, come up with the same evidence. The RATE Project was designed to prove a young earth, but they produced evidence showing just the opposite!
See Assessing the RATE Project, by Randy Isaac.
From the article (emphasis added):
In 1997, the Institute of Creation Research (ICR) and the Creation Research Society initiated an eight-year research program to investigate the validity of radioisotope dating of rocks. The project was named RATE for Radioisotopes and the Age of The Earth. Preliminary investigations carried out in the first three years were summarized in volume I of this work, published in 2000. Volume II, published in 2005, represents the final report. At $79.99, 818 pages, and 3.5 pounds, the book is a heavy investment. For most interested parties, the final five pages of text, pp. 765–9, are sufficient to grasp the essence of the book. A nontechnical version of this book, authored by Donald DeYoung, and a video documentary have also been prepared. Both are titled Thousands Not Billions: Challenging an Icon of Evolution.
...
The conclusions of the RATE project are being billed as “groundbreaking results.” This is a fairly accurate description since a group of creation scientists acknowledge that hundreds of millions of years worth of radioactivity have occurred. They attempt to explain how this massive radioactivity could have occurred in a few thousand years but admit that consistent solutions have not yet been found. The vast majority of the book is devoted to providing technical details that the authors believe prove that the earth is young and that radioisotope decay has not always been constant. All of these areas of investigation have been addressed elsewhere by the scientific community and have been shown to be without merit. The only new data provided in this book are in the category of additional details and there are no significantly new claims.
In this book, the authors admit that a young-earth position cannot be reconciled with the scientific data without assuming that exotic solutions will be discovered in the future. No known thermodynamic process could account for the required rate of heat removal nor is there any known way to protect organisms from radiation damage. The young-earth advocate is therefore left with two positions. Either God created the earth with the appearance of age (thought by many to be inconsistent with the character of God) or else there are radical scientific laws yet to be discovered that would revolutionize science in the future. The authors acknowledge that no current scientific understanding is consistent with a young earth. Yet they are so confident that these problems will be resolved that they encourage a message that the reliability of the Bible has been confirmed.
In Thousands Not Billions, the incompatibility of the young-earth position with current scientific understanding is glossed over in the final four pages of the book. The thermodynamic dilemma is dismissed with
Possible mechanisms have been explored that could safeguard the earth from severe overheating during accelerated decay events. One of these involves cosmological or volume cooling, the result of a rapid expansion of space. Many details remain to be filled in for this and other proposed processes of heat removal (p. 180).
Unfortunately for young-earth advocates, cosmological expansion does not cool material on earth nor does it cool some materials and not others. Yet DeYoung concludes: “Young-earth creation is neither outdated nor in opposition to science” (p. 182).
In other words, the RATE project spent over a million dollars and concluded that science is right. B
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