Evolution's bottom line

National Center for Science Education ^ | 12 May 2006 | Staff

[Almagest]

<< No, however your question is evidence that you have decided to change the subject >>


As usual.


<< when you saw that your position was being rather soundly disproven. >>


As usual.

[VadeRetro]

BTW, a nice resource on how and why sex evolved. (No, I wasn't there.)

[jwalsh07]

I have no aversion to making judgements. As a matter of fact I've judged you a loon.

[RunningWolf]

That comparison is going to be more than a little weak.

Well, right as a stopped clock is enough justification for them to latch onto the ACLU train, and thats one in 43200 or one in 86400. The rest of their comparisons are even weaker and the evidence exponentially so more weak.

Poor fellas, all they have is ad-hominem, pseudo science and the groveling adulation of mindless sycophants on their side.

Wolf

[andysandmikesmom]

Thanks for that book title...I will investigate it...appreciate these kinds of references...

[jwalsh07]

Well then we can agree that p(natural OOL) + p(supernatural OOL) = 1.

[cccp_hater]

Is everything around us natural or supernatural and does it make a difference? : )

[Almagest]

<< Tithing and taxes are pretty much the same (from a "wealth" perspective). The difference is voluntary vs mandatory. >>


Tithing wasn't voluntary -- it was mandatory. Tithing WAS taxation under the law of Moses. And it wasn't a piddly 10% either -- more like 23-25%.

[thomaswest]

Replying to your post 242 You act as though one can posit that creatures evolved from a common point of descent, without a creator, but divorce yourself from the problem of nonliving matter organizing itself into the first cell in the first place. I say, no, evolution HAS to tell a consistent story to be taken seriously. If I tell my five year old that Santa Claus gets on his sleigh, travels all over the world with his reindeer, and comes down the chimney, he will persistently ask, "but Daddy, where does Santa Claus come from?" until there is a satisfactory point of origin.

You act as though anybody can come along to claim that they know God's Truth. And that what you claim to know trumps everything.

Maybe what you "know" is superior to what all of the rest of us know. Perhaps you know god's email address. I have heard these claims before. I have not seen a single evidence from Budhists, Hinduists, Christiantists, Islmacists, Jewishnessist that they they know more "truth" than the rest of of us.

The story of "Santa"? Every 'Christian' opposed to evolution has to see Santa as rearranged letters for "Satan".

[Almagest]

<< Last I checked, God offers eternal life as a free gift. >>


And if you decide to refuse the gift? LOL! Now THAT is some sales pitch!

"I'm here to invite you to kiss Hank's feet. If you do, Hank will give you a million dollars. If you don't, Hank'll beat the living crap out of you, forever. Have a nice day."

[jwalsh07]

I'm a Catholic, a sinner to be sure, but a Catholic when I arrived and a Catholic when I depart. A creationist if you will. A creationist who accepts the natural and the metaphysical. Life, for me, is easy. :-}

Does that answer your question? It will have to do, I am past my self imposed time limit. Adios.

[Stultis]

On the other hand, as for young earth / flood geology creationists, there's the problem that there are far, far too many fossils for them to all have been alive on the earth at the same time. E.g.:

There are also too many microscopic animals. Most limestone is deposited by bacteria and invertebrate animals. The Austin Chalk, which underlies Dallas, is a 400-foot thick limestone bed made of the remains of microscopic animals, called coccolithophores or coccoliths. It is about 70% coccoliths. The coccolithophore is a small spherical animal, between 5 and 60 micrometers in diameter, each having about 16 coccoliths that separate upon the death. According to Stokes Law these animals would fall through the water at a rate of .1 millimeter per second. To fall through a 100 foot (33 meter) depth of water would take 4 days.

The time required to form the Austin Chalk is far longer than one year. The coccolith skeleton, when pressed flat, is about 1 micron or one millionth of a meter thick. A deposit of coccoliths 400 feet thick must represent many thousands of years of deposits. One hundred twenty-one million coccoliths could be stacked up like coins across the four hundred feet. The length of time necessary to deposit these 121 million coccoliths can be calculated by assuming the maximum density of living coccolithophores in the waters above. Such measurements can be made during an event known as a red tide.

Occasionally, growth conditions become so favorable that they grow beyond all reason. As many as 60 million creatures per liter of water grow and quickly use up all of the oxygen and nutrients in the water and then die. Their decay continues to use any oxygen entering the water and also gives off poisons. Fish who swim into one of these areas often die from lack of oxygen and the absorption of toxins emitted by the dead microorganism. These water blooms last only a few weeks as the microorganisms deplete the water's nutrients rapidly and die. However, even at their most dense, 60 million microorganisms per liter, only 39 layers of organisms are stacked in a single cubic centimeter. Thus, to stack 121 million coccoliths would require the death of nearly 8 million organisms. A 100 foot water depth, filled to the maximum with coccospheres, would only generate a thickness of six feet of chalk! The four hundred feet of chalk of the Austin formation would require 66 such blooms. If it required two weeks between each bloom to recharge the nutrients and one week for the bloom to occur, it would take 4 years to deposit the chalk. And these values are wildly optimistic for the deposition of chalk. This size bloom is not possible.

The coccolithophores remove calcium carbonate from the water to make their skeletons. In water depth of 100 feet there is not nearly enough calcium to deposit such a volume of chalk. One hundred feet of seawater contains only enough carbonate to deposit a little over 1-millimeter of carbonate. Thus, no bloom of the size mentioned above can even occur. Using the two-week recharge and one-week bloom mentioned above, it would take 7,000 years to deposit the chalk. Obviously, the chalk under Dallas would require much more time to deposit than merely one year. In southern Louisiana, the chalk is 2100 feet (640 meters) thick. I have drilled it. This would take considerably more time than seven thousand years.

Additionally, the quantity of chalk seen in the world is far too great to have been contained in the preflood world hypothesized by young-earth creationists. The Austin Chalk is a chalk deposit that stretches from Mexico along the coast of the Gulf of Mexico into Louisiana, a distance in excess of 800 km. In Mexico, the Austin Chalk is named the San Felipe Formation. A glance at the geologic data shows that the band is about 160 km wide and appears to average 120 meters in thickness.43 In the chalk in Texas alone there are enough dead coccolithophores to cover the earth to a depth of 3 centimeters. But Texas is not the only place on earth that has deposits of chalk. In Alabama and Mississippi, the chalk is known as the Selma. The Niobrara chalk - 5,000 km long, 1,400 km. wide and 6 meters thick - runs through much of the western part of the Great Plains of the United States.44 The Niobrara would add another 7 centimeters of cover to the earth. Throughout Europe Upper Cretaceous chalks cover large areas. The White Cliffs of Dover are made of chalk that is as much as 215 meters thick in parts of England. This chalk sweeps across southern Scandinavia, Poland and into south Russia where it attains an amazing thickness of up to 1000 meters. It is stopped by the Ural Mountains. The chalks of western Europe are enough to cover the entire earth to a depth of 83 centimeters.45 West of the Urals, in the Central Asian Tuar-Kyr mountain range, a deposit of chalk 20 meters thick is found. In Israel, Jordan, Egypt, Syria and Saudi Arabia, an Upper Cretaceous chalk is around 180 meters thick. If all the fossil record was the record of the destruction of one preflood biosphere, as Morris suggests, it must have been a crowded place. The worldwide quantity of dead coccoliths would cover the earth to a depth of one meter.

Source: Too Many Fossils for a Global Flood by Glenn R. Morton
http://home.entouch.net/dmd/toomanyanimals.htm

[curiosity]

Stop acting like a creationist, using quotes ripped out of context in an attempt to prove a falsehood.

In front of the masses, Hitler pretended to believe in Christianity, and not surprisingly all the quotes you pull come from public speaches or his published writings.

In private, he expressed contempt for the religion. Some examples:

Night of 11th-12th July, 1941

"National Socialism and religion cannot exist together....

"The heaviest blow that ever struck humanity was the coming of Christianity. Bolshevism is Christianity's illegitimate child. Both are inventions of the Jew. The deliberate lie in the matter of religion was introduced into the world by Christianity....

"Let it not be said that Christianity brought man the life of the soul, for that evolution was in the natural order of things." (p 6 & 7)

10th October, 1941, midday

"Christianity is a rebellion against natural law, a protest against nature. Taken to its logical extreme, Christianity would mean the systematic cultivation of the human failure." (p 43)

14th October, 1941, midday

"The best thing is to let Christianity die a natural death.... When understanding of the universe has become widespread... Christian doctrine will be convicted of absurdity....

"Christianity has reached the peak of absurdity.... And that's why someday its structure will collapse....

"...the only way to get rid of Christianity is to allow it to die little by little....

"Christianity is the liar....

"We'll see to it that the Churches cannot spread abroad teachings in conflict with the interests of the State." (p 49-52)

19th October, 1941, night

"The reason why the ancient world was so pure, light and serene was that it knew nothing of the two great scourges: the pox and Christianity."

21st October, 1941, midday

"Originally, Christianity was merely an incarnation of Bolshevism, the destroyer....

"The decisive falsification of Jesus' doctrine was the work of St.Paul. He gave himself to this work... for the purposes of personal exploitation....

"Didn't the world see, carried on right into the Middle Ages, the same old system of martyrs, tortures, faggots? Of old, it was in the name of Christianity. Today, it's in the name of Bolshevism. Yesterday the instigator was Saul: the instigator today, Mardochai. Saul was changed into St.Paul, and Mardochai into Karl Marx. By exterminating this pest, we shall do humanity a service of which our soldiers can have no idea." (p 63-65)

13th December, 1941, midnight

"Christianity is an invention of sick brains: one could imagine nothing more senseless, nor any more indecent way of turning the idea of the Godhead into a mockery....

"When all is said, we have no reason to wish that the Italians and Spaniards should free themselves from the drug of Christianity. Let's be the only people who are immunised against the disease." (p 118-119)

14th December, 1941, midday

"Kerrl, with noblest of intentions, wanted to attempt a synthesis between National Socialism and Christianity. I don't believe the thing's possible, and I see the obstacle in Christianity itself....

"Pure Christianity-- the Christianity of the catacombs-- is concerned with translating Christian doctrine into facts. It leads quite simply to the annihilation of mankind. It is merely whole-hearted Bolshevism, under a tinsel of metaphysics." (p 119 & 120)

9th April, 1942, dinner

"There is something very unhealthy about Christianity." (p 339)

27th February, 1942, midday

"It would always be disagreeable for me to go down to posterity as a man who made concessions in this field. I realize that man, in his imperfection, can commit innumerable errors-- but to devote myself deliberately to errors, that is something I cannot do. I shall never come personally to terms with the Christian lie."

"Our epoch in the next 200 years will certainly see the end of the disease of Christianity.... My regret will have been that I couldn't... behold ." (p 278) source: http://homepages.paradise.net.nz/mischedj/ca_hitler.html

[Virginia-American]

I always think its funny that God always agrees with the opinions of his worshipers

Just one of those eternal mysteries, I guess.

Here's a deconversion story where part of the problem is exactly that; her husband and pastors are always speaking as though they were channeling God. Warning: it's quite long.

[Fester Chugabrew]

Applications for religious fundamentalism: flying airplanes into buildings.

Do you have direct testimony regarding the position of all people who have flown airplanes into buildings WRT to their position on evolutionary fundamentalism?

[Fester Chugabrew]

Hmmm. The National Center for Science Education. Aren't these the same people who call an "Academic Freedom Act" an "Antievolution Bill?" They might need some help with nomenclature. Can't even get their labels right. Methinks they are more interested in politicizing science than defending it. Just like yourself.

[andysandmikesmom]

Fascinating read...thanks for that link, as well...

[jec41]

Using dishonest tactics to bash Christianity is really not a good strategy, unless you're a troll.

Well you can check and see if I'm a troll. You might want to reread the thread and see who started bashing scientists a atheist and Nazis. I didn't quote mine. I included all of what Hitler thought in Mien Kampf. He proclaimed himself Christian and now later Christians want to judge him according to todays thought.

[Virginia-American]

Let's nitpick:

Hitler was baptized in a Catholic church, he never renounced Catholicism, never converted to another faith, and was never excommunicated.

I may be wrong, but I think that qualifies as a Catholic under canon law.

[jec41]

I have no aversion to making judgements. As a matter of fact I've judged you a loon.

As worthless as your observation of history and your opinion. Opinion seeks agenda by name calling, lack of knowledge, accusation, judgment, misrepresentation of facts, lack of philosophy, lack of science, and in the end when frustrated violence. One that indulges in opinion is defined as a opinion-est.