Fundamentalists re-create Eden, with dinosaurs

The Sunday Times (U.K.) ^ | 03/10/2002 | Oliver Poole

[sirchtruth]

That's why I believe there was never "nothing."

So your conclusion is that Something has always existed. What has alway existed?

[Admin Moderator]

Knock it off.

[PatrickHenry]

So your conclusion is that Something has always existed. What has alway[s] existed?

The evidence of the state of affairs before the big bang seems to be lost, so I don't know. No one does.

[sirchtruth]

The evidence of the state of affairs before the big bang seems to be lost, so I don't know. No one does.

HuH? If the evidence is lost then what leads you to believe Something existed....Pure Blind FAITH perhaps?

[Lurking Libertarian]

Place Marker.

[PatrickHenry]

If the evidence is lost then what leads you to believe Something existed....Pure Blind FAITH perhaps?

No, that would be irrational. In post 125, you had said: " My point is simply there is no logical way to conclude Something exist without a Something in the first place..." and I agreed with you. But I agreed not from some superstitious conjecture, but because of the well-known observation-based conservation law of physics, which says that matter cannot be created or restroyed, only changed in form. I see no reason why that wouldn't hold true forever.

[Revolting cat!]

What I have observed is dinosaurs are to the modern Aemrican popular culture what Hans Christian Anderson's fairy tales were to the Euro-American cultures a couple of generations ago. Fairy freaking tales, Bambi, Star Wars characters, dinosaurs, evolution. Evolution as a fairy tale is where we have evolved to now, whatever this wacky 19th century's theory's validity.

[Junior]

So you're saying dinosaurs are figments of our collective imagination? How do you explain the dinosaur skeletons in museums or the dinosaur remains that are, from time to time, discovered?

[Revolting cat!]

So you're saying dinosaurs are figments of our collective imagination?

No, I'm not. I don't dispute the authenticity of dinosaur skeletons in museums. I'm saying that they have become mythical creatures like Snow White, the Seven Dwarfs and Little Red Riding Hood, and yes, Bambi. But combining myth with science has led, I think, to a kind of acceptance of a questionable 19th century evolution theory on an intellectual level of kindergarten. Aren't those dinos so cuddly? Oh yes, so then, evolution must have really, really happened. Those other two 19th century now discredited alchemists Freud and Marx should have had it this good!

[VadeRetro]

You are saying that Something has always existed and randomly started life because the right circumstances of a mixture just happened to come together?

Does it depend on what you mean by "always?" The freeper known as Physicist often explains that there simply was no "time before" the big bang, any more than there's a spot north of the north pole. Time is a property of the universe and was created with it.

To the extent that it's a physics question, I defer to the experts. Do I have a problem with there being nothing "before the big bang?"

Let's look at the dilemma you'd like to impale me on, one which I've tried to outline earler. If "something has always existed," that's "something from nothing" because something that has always existed has no origin. But if you say "the something came from something else," you might as well say the something has always existed, just sometimes in a different form and in a different place. If you say "the something hasn't always existed, even in a different form in a different place," you've just locked yourself back into "something from nothing."

Read Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time. Something may have come from nothing 14 or 15 billion years ago, and it may even now have a net energy of zero. If that sounds as funny as all the others, at least there's a chain of evidence for this one.

BTW, the other version, the infinite regression, is still alive, too. That's the one in which the big bang was fed by mass from the collapse of some other universe in a "multiverse."

Take your pick; I don't have a favorite. But I don't see any evidence for supernatural elements or any point in throwing them in.

[Archaeus]

>>>...And God prepareth the great monsters...
Gen 1:21<<<

I believe it goes something like this...

21: And God created great whales, and every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly, after their kind, and every winged fowl after his kind: and God saw that it was good.
22: And God blessed them, saying, Be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the waters in the seas, and let fowl multiply in the earth.

[VadeRetro]

Time is a property of the universe and was created with it.

Don't get all excited over the "created" in that sentence. I also talk about species "inventing" things.

[#3Fan]

You said, And studying Genesis in the original Hebrew, there is no problem with the earth being 4 billion years old. that's well and good, but creationists don't think the earth is 4 billion years old; they think it's 6,000 years old lol

Yes, they're called "young earth creationists", I believe. (Yesterday was the first time I've seen that term. I don't get in very many of these arguments.) But it seems more and more people are seeing that the original manuscripts do allow for an earth that can be the age that science and observation say it is.

[gore3000]

Ah, can't argue your position effectively so you try to get your opposition banned

No Junior, those posts that Medved showed were utter filth. They were not discussion, they were not argument, they were the work of total losers who cannot discuss facts, who cannot talk like human beings. You should hang your head in shame for defending their actions.

[gore3000]

There is a third version, which someone much smarter than us posited (Aristotle) - the prime mover, the one who started it all, us Christians call him God.

[gore3000]

"just because evolutionists don't have easy pat answers to every mystery of life and the creation of the universe does not mean they are wrong on what they do know."

If they do not have the answers then they should not lie and say they have the answers. The attack on religion by the statement that man descended from monkeys was used by evolutionists for some 100 years - and they had no proof for it because it was a lie. They call it science, but science proves their statements before they make them.

[Junior]

Gee, both you and medved pull a dozen (not terribly offensive except to the thinned skinned) posts out of the nearly 10,000 posts I've made since joining in 1998 and call that indicative. No one here excerpted the several hundred "slimer" posts (you know, the ones where you called everyone who disagreed with you "slimers" and "liars") you made last year alone. My posts were made in frustration at the fact that neither you nor medved (nor f.christian, but that's another matter) ever seem to learn anything from these threads. New data comes in and the evos here update their understanding of biology. You and medved see the same evidence as proof that evolution is Satan's work and maintain the same discredited viewpoint regardless. It wouldn't be so bad, but in medved's case he spams every thread with the same outdated drivel when he could just as simply stick it in its own thread (the rest of us do this) and simply link to it. It would save oodles of bandwidth and still get his "message" out to the masses. In your case, it's like arguing with a brick wall (this quote will be excerpted). As for the coyote-whale thingy, I called that one several dozen posts before you made it -- you've become that predictable (hence the reference to a computer algorythm - which also plays on the software-esque nature of your handle). Also, I noticed that several of the posts wherein you and medved excerpted the quotes, they were taken out of context. More often than not there was a substantial posting regarding evidence (often that had been presented to you several times) along with the remark of frustration. It would be nice if y'all did not engage in quote mining on these threads, but that's probably asking too much.

[Junior]

Just out of curiosity, what myths have grown up around dinosaurs? I mean, other than Fred Flintstone owned one and Rachel Welch nearly lost her boyfriend to another? We know quite a bit about dinosaurs simply from their remains. We know which ones ate meat and which one's ate plants (teeth and jaw muscle attachments tell that story). We've found coprolites (dinosaur poop) from both types of critters. From skin impressions, and one "mummifed" duckbill, we know that some had feathers, some had scales, and the winged reptiles - pterosaurs - mostly had fur. With our knowledge of the biology of living critters and with the help of modern computers, we've been able to reconstruct their movements; for instance, a recent reconstruction showed the T. Rex lacked the muscle mass to run. With modern CAT-scans, we know how well their senses of smell and sight worked, etc. Researchers didn't pull any of this out of thin air, which is the implication of the term "myth." They used comparative anatomy and biology to reach their conclusions. If a dinosaur really showed up on the streets of San Diego, odds are we'd learn that some of the details we'd derived were wrong, but that in general we'd got the critter pegged.

[PatrickHenry]

Placemarker.