[Northern Alliance]

What frosts me is how creationism is always, always, defined in the Christian terms of a 6,000 year old universe.

People, there are other religions and therefore other thoughts and theories on creationism with much different time frames. For example the Vedas teach that time is cyclical, with the outer cycle existing 311,040,000,000,000 years, which is also the age of the universe.

http://www.salagram.net/cycleOages.html

[onedoug]

Gerald Schroeder, The Science Of God

[Moonman62]

Let me guess. The NYTimes published this to make the anti-evolutionists look bad.

[Senator Pardek]

"...small-bore problem...."

Very punny!

[danneskjold]

bump...

[RightWhale]

I doubt the laws of quantum mechanics and the process of deriving them can be related to anything else outside physics without considerable stretch. Especially biology.

[David]

"[B]iologists argue about the degree to which evolution moves smoothly or progresses in fits and starts, a Gould-ian theory called punctuated equilibrium."

The "Punctuated Equilibrium" hypothesis is fundamentally inconsistent with the theory of evolution which requires movement of specie development in minute increments.

The principal problem with the theory of evolution is the absence of any single fossel supported record which is consistent with the theory under circumstances where many such fossel records should be found. Hence Punctuated Equilibrium--it happened in sudden giant steps. That sounds a lot more like God than it sounds like Darwin.

As far as the time argument is concerned, the dating mechanism depends on a clock calculated by the decay rate of Carbon 14--there is not only no evidence that the decay rate of Carbon 14 has been constant throughout the ages; there is a fair body of evidence that it has not. If not, the clock is wrong and we have no idea how long the ages are.

[Doctor Stochastic]

In the fall of 1900, a young German physicist, Max Planck,...

That's only if you consider 42 to be young and someone who had his PhD 21 years earlier and was director of a prestigious institute to be at the "beginning" of a career.

[adam_az]

ping!

[Pointblank]

IMO, science is a lot like politics. Even when scientists disprove science they find a way to spin their agenda. And creationists, as I am, will continue to doubt skewed scientific truth no matter how much evidence you present.
What chaps me, is that my taxes fund scientific research attempting to disprove Christianity so they can strike the word GOD from U.S. history.

[<1/1,000,000th%]

I'm not registering with these weasels.

Anybody have a login for anti-NYTimes FReepers?

[<1/1,000,000th%]

Thanks. That worked.

[tucker93]

You know what I enjoy.....people who get their science from a newspaper! If you want to have an informed opinion about science and the debate about creation vs. evolution, at the very least pick up a Scientific American magazine. For crying out loud!

[betty boop]

...the works of God rather than the words of God, as Darwin himself is said to have put it

This is a perfectly unobjectionable statement, supposedly gratis Darwin himself. Of course the business of science is to look at the "works" -- one of the two sources of divine revelation -- for its method is addressed to the natural world. But this is not the same thing as saying that ONLY the works are real, and the word is an illusion.

However it is a fact that many neo-Darwinists say precisely that (e.g., Dawkins, Pinker, Lewontin, Dennett, Monod, et al.).

Thanks for the post, infocats!

[johnnyb_61820]

My problems with the article:

"The supposed 'data contradicting evolution' do not exist," a Steve, Dr. Steve Rissing, a biologist at Ohio State University, said in an e-mail message.

But if they did, Dr. Rissing added, "I sure would want to be the scientist publishing them. Think of it - the covers of Nature and Science, and Newsweek and Time, too!"

This is just stupid. By this logic Mendel should have been a hero. However, his work was ignored for 35 years and not widely received for another 35 because it contradicted what evolutionists believed about evolution, despite the fact that he had reproducible experimental data to back him up.

Todd Wood has proposed a mechanism for biodiversity that explains things that evolution has difficulty explaining and matches current evidence, but I doubt that Newsweek is going to be calling him any time soon, even to reply to these idiotic evolution propoganda pieces.

Scientists form hypotheses, devise ways to test them, analyze the data that they collect and then decide whether the results support or undermine their hypotheses.

This is wrong on two counts. (1) this is not the only way in which science proceeds. (2) this is implying that creationists do not proceed in this way, and in fact they do.

The telling part, though, is this last line:

That is the difficulty faced by advocates of creationism and intelligent design. It is possible to believe in evolution and believe in God. Plenty of biologists do. But their deity is not a creator or intelligent agent at work in the material world in ways that transcend nature and its laws. That would be a matter of faith, not science.

And that is where the issue is. This reporter echoes evolutionists in saying that God cannot have worked in a way that transcends nature or its laws. I have also seen it phrased that if he had, its not science. Both of these are specifically what many people in and outside of the scientific community reject -- philosophic materialism.