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Posted on 05/06/2003 11:22:05 AM PDT by \/\/ayne
9:00 AM “Origins of Life and the Universe” . . . . .Hank Giesecke
10:00 AM “Fifty Facts Why Evolution Doesn’t Work” . . . .Russell Miller
11:00 AM Lunch
1:00 PM “Age of the Earth, and Intelligent Design” . . . .Hank Hiesecke
2:00 PM “Data from Mt. Saint Helens” . . . . .Russell Miller
3:00 PM Break
4:30 PM Dinner available at U of A’s McKale Center
6:00 PM Debate at University of Arizona McKale Center “Alternative World Views: Evolution and Creation”
Dr. Duane Gish and Professor Peter Sherman
Sunday May 11, 2003
Calvary Tucson East Campus
8:00 and 10:20 AM “Take Creation Captive”.......Hank Giesecke
Calvary Tucson West Campus
9:10 and 11:30 AM “Creation or Chaos”......Dr. John Meyer
Calvary Tucson East Campus
6:00 PM “Why 600 Scientists Reject Evolution” ......Dr. John Meyer
The point here is that by scientific evidence agreed to by all scientists, and even by evolutionists themselves, the fossil record, there is no way to explain the in an evolutionary manner the tremendous explosion of new totally different organisms within a very short period of time. What my beliefs are, is therefore inconsequential and your attempt to turn this into a personal discussion shows quite well that my statement is correct and you cannot refute it.
Actually, 15 years have passed since the debate, and the pamphlet was written 17 year before that. At any rate, whether 8, 15, or 32 old, perhaps Gish's opinions have "evolved" since then. Isn't that how it's supposed to work?
Do you actually read the source for the links you post?
This is, I believe, the file that includes the Gish-Pilmer debate about the lack of truthfullness in Gish's "Brainwashed" comic book. If you can easily contact the appropiate author above, let him know that the ICR has FINALLY updated this booklet. Apparently all the flack about it on the information superfreeway has had an effect. The copy I got at the ICR's 2-25-94 has clarified their position on pre-cambrian fossils and eliminated unambigious claims of dino with man footprints at Paluxy. The new version is undated as near as I can tell, but must have been created within the last 6 months or so as the copy I got at the ICR office then was dated 1986 and still included the claim, "fine clear tracks of dinosaurs and man".
We're making progress! Now if only they would do some science instead of just responding to it.
First ad hominem attack, then unsupported assertion. That's no way to have a rational debate. Shame on you.
Highly recommended.
This comment by the author of the TalkOrigins article is just the kind of misrepresentation used by evolutionists all the time to attack opponents. Gish had just said that the age of the pre-Cambrian fossils was in dispute at the time and that the fossils themselves were very dubious. Sepcifically, their relevance to the discussion of the origin of the Cambrian fossils, is still in question since many of the fossils are undoubtedly of plants and the Cambrian discussion is of animals which could not have descended from plants.
And I will continue to be non-responsive as long as you wish to discuss me instead of the facts.
My statement stands unrefuted - the Cambrian explosion totally disproves evolution.
Thanks for doing your part to keep the discussion on an appropriate track.
Name calling is a typical evolutionist, modern, non-constructionist non-debate tactic...
...If you refuse to say how long ago you feel...
Our colleague is trying very much to promote thinking, not feeling, rationality not emotions on this thread. I suspect that's one reason why he declines to express his feelings. That and keeping the debate depersonalized, as he already explained.
Six-day literalists (the kind of creationist most readily lampooned and turned into a readily toppled straw-man as PatrickHenry did in his earlier post on this thread) grasp at straws when they try to find a Church Father who would support their idea of Scriptural exegesis. They usually point to St. Basil the Great's Hexameron, his commentary on the creation account in Genesis. The trouble is, in that very work he wrote, "it matters not whether you say 'aeon' or 'day' the thought is the same." St. Gregory of Nyssa, while maintaining their truth, plainly discounted the literal historicity of the first two chapters of Genesis, describing them as "doctrines in the guise of a narrative."
I am told by the webmaster of the newly revived Orthodox Christian publication The Christian Activist that the article "The Eternal Will" should soon be available on-line again. When it is I'll start a thread with it. The author (if I remember correctly, it was Alexander Kalimoros) argues that the Genesis account, when read in light of patristic commentaries, actually gives essentially the same chronology as modern scientific accounts (both cosmological and evolutionary).
That being said, I have come to the conclusion that the evolution/creation debate is viscious and heated primarily because the most vocal proponents of the two sides (committed pious protestants on the one and atheistic proponents of scientism on the other) both share a common misconception of the relationship between stochastic processes and intent or purpose. Both believe that a stochastic element in the description of the origin of biological diversity and humankind precludes there being any intent behind those events. The former therefore, believing firmly in God, hotly deny the theory of evolution. The latter rejoicing in using it as an iron with which to brand theists as obscurantist, retrograde, and anti-scientific.
This common assumption, however, is wrong, as two examples suffice to show:
First, there is a well-known physical system in which thermal (and thus random) effects produce an increase in the order of the system. (It is an open system, in the process energy is added and removed from the system, so the creationists can shut up about violations of the second law of thermodynamics.) The system is the hardening of metal: by a suitable sequence of heating and quenching, a metal is made harder by increasing the average size of the crystals in the metal, that is increasing the order of the system.
Now, the curious thing about this system is this: any archeologist upon finding a shard of hardened metal will immediately conclude that it is a fragment of an artifact, something made intentionally.
From this example, we see that the fact that a random process is involved in a material change most assuredly does not show that it is not an intentional or willed change. Rather, in this example (which like the evolutionary description biological diversity involves an increase in the order in an open system via stochastic effects) the natural conclusion is the opposite: the state of the system is intentional. This observation is absolutely contrary to the common assumption of the polemicists on both sides.
A second example is that of options markets. The best predictor of the behavior of options markets is a stochastic differential equation, the Black-Scholes Option Pricing Formula. Now, we all know that options markets function by the interaction of intentional actors, traders, buyers, sellers (of the options and the products or securities they are options on), all of whom are seeking to maximize their profits, and act with intent. Nonetheless, the best model of this activity is stochastic, and not because it is accounting for extraneous influences, but rather because market dynamics when the actors do not have complete information share some features with Brownian motion.
Here, the stochastic element is epistemological only and not ontological at all: it gives a good model, even though a microscopic model in which the actors willingness to make certain trades was known could be completely law-driven, deterministic, and based on intentional actions. There is good reason to argue that much of the randomness incorporated into evolutionary theory is epistemological and not ontological. Again a fact which tells against the common assumption of the most vociferous debaters on both sides.
You may consider "G3k" to be your colleague, but just to set the record straight, he surely isn't one of mine.
Why?
To set the record straight, I only spoke for myself and to Dr. Stochastic...are you his alter ego? If so, I stand corrected; perhaps I was using the term too loosely.
The sequence of heating and cooling needed to harden a metal happens with vanishingly small probability in the absence of a craftsman.
Actually, the 'coincidences' pointed to in anthropic cosmology suggest that one might do well to consider the hardened shard as an excellent analogy for the earth's ecosystem (and a better analogy than a watch to an organism at that). If one does, and chases off any six-day literalists hanging about, the debate can be quited down very quickly.
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