Posted on 06/09/2006 6:16:57 AM PDT by tomzz
You can't help but notice that there is a very vocal sort of a little clique of evolutionists on FreeRepublic, and there has always been a question in a lot of people's minds as to whether or not the theory of evolution is in any way compatible with conservatism.
This new book ("Godless") of Ann Coulter's should pretty much settle the issue.
Ann does not mince words, and she has quite a lot to say about evolution:
"Liberals' creation myth is Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, which is about one notch above scientology in scientific rigor. It's a make-believe story, based on a theory which is a tautology, with no proof in the scientists laboratory or the fossil record, and that's after 150 years of very determined looking. We wouldn't still be talking about it but for the fact that liberals think evolution disproves God....
It gets better from there, in fact a lot better. Ann provides a context for viewing the liberal efforts to shut down everything resembling debate on the subject in courtrooms and makes a general case that it is the left and not the right, which is antithetical to science in general. Anybody interested in this question of American society and the so-called theory of evolution should have a copy of this book
Discuss the issues all you want, but do NOT make it personal.
We aren't still arguing some of the things you think we are. In other news, phlogiston theory is dead.
At this point we are at an impasse. Once one side begins referring to the other as a cult or a liar, any hope of useful debate is over, and the discussion is at an effective end.
God may have given us the Bible, but He also gave us radio carbon dating, and radio carbon dating has determined that certain artifacts belonged to humans (or, at least, distant cousins of modern humans) who lived more than 5,000 years ago.
Dinosaurs aren't mentioned in the Bible. Do the Creationists among us believe that they existed? Where did all those really large bones displayed in the nation's museums come from? Those bones that radio carbon dating tell us come from millions of years ago.
Don't do it then.
I do graduate school admissions in the sciences. We don't ask anyone to profess anything. We don't even know students' views on evolution when we admit them.
First off, the effective limit for radiocarbon dating is about 50,000 years, tops.
Second, last summer, scientists had to break a tyranosaur bone in half to get it out of a remote area by helicopter, and here is what they found inside the bone, i.e. this is what tyranosaur meat looks like:
The MSNBC version of the story.
If you really think that stuff is 65 million years old, I've got a bridge you'll probably be interested in purchasing.
Some creationists say that Adam and Eve walked with the dinosaurs.
The thing that gets me about the young earth theoriticians is that educated, intelligent people who know history and mathematics and philosophy and can speak about them fluently turn into children when they read the Scriptures. What's more, by reading the Bible in the way they do, they turn God into a juvenile magician who flips physics and His own laws of nature on their heads
I have had creationists tell me many different things about dinosaurs...some have said, that man lived alongside of dinosaurs, and that Noah moved some dinosaurs into the Ark...
Other creationists have told me, that dinosaurs never did exist, but that the devil put dinosaur bones on earth to mislead and deceive man...
Others have told me, that God, put those dinosaur bones there, to test man, to see what he would and would not believe...
There are many different stories that are told about the dinosaurs...
Young-earth creationists also see Schweitzer’s work as revolutionary, but in an entirely different way. They first seized upon Schweitzer’s work after she wrote an article for the popular science magazine Earth in 1997 about possible red blood cells in her dinosaur specimens. Creation magazine claimed that Schweitzer’s research was “powerful testimony against the whole idea of dinosaurs living millions of years ago. It speaks volumes for the Bible’s account of a recent creation.” This drives Schweitzer crazy. Geologists have established that the Hell Creek Formation, where B. rex was found, is 68 million years old, and so are the bones buried in it. She’s horrified that some Christians accuse her of hiding the true meaning of her data. “They treat you really bad,” she says. “They twist your words and they manipulate your data.” For her, science and religion represent two different ways of looking at the world; invoking the hand of God to explain natural phenomena breaks the rules of science. After all, she says, what God asks is faith, not evidence. “If you have all this evidence and proof positive that God exists, you don’t need faith. I think he kind of designed it so that we’d never be able to prove his existence. And I think that’s really cool.”
I think she means you.
There's a stone simple way to avoid being quoted as saying something, i.e. don't say it. Likewise if you don't want people talking about a picture you snapped, there's always the strategem of not publishing it. That always works.
This whole notion concerning Schweitzers work, that it somehow shows that dinosaurs are not millions of years old, but certainly only thousands of years old, pops up again...
Its kind of like Darwins recant story....
I guess you haven't noticed that the sociological use of the word 'myth', unlike the popular usaged, does *not* imply falsehood, rather denotes a story fundamental to a world-view irrespective of its truth or falsehood.
Also don't confuse creation per se with creation ex nihilo. The Hindus have a creation myth, but their cyclic cosmology only allows for the creation of the present state of the present cycle from the detritus of the previous cycle. So, the present state of the world, human beings included, has been created by something. The question (with all the heat created by folks on both sides defending their respective creation myths removed) is how much of that is explained by various dynamical mechanisms governing the changes of allele frequency, and how much of it is due to something (whether material or immaterial) prior (if not temporally, then logically) to that dynamics beginning.
Why should a creek be considered as old as the bones buried in it, or vice versa? Are you as old as the dirt you walk on?
Yeah, I think He calls them miracles or something.
Is this serious? A thing dies in the mud. As it happens, more mud covers it, and more sediment layers cover those. The thing gets fossilized as the mud layers turn to shale rock.
The age of the shale is the age since it was mud. How is the age of the fossil any different?
I'm not claiming you can tell that directly, of course.
That's because Ann's stupidity on this point is such a colossal EMBARASSMENT that we're trying to sweep it under the rug. No thanks to you for dragging it out again.
New Testament miracles are entirely different from most Old Testament "miracles," which don't really merit the name miracle.
Precisely. Such attacks have the effect of conflating religion with superstition, and dragging down the credibility of the former down to that of the latter.
It's not a creek. Sheesh.
If we find Jimmy Hoffa's bones embedded in the middle of a piece of concrete poured on April 23, 1975, when was Jimmy Hoffa deposited there?
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