Scientific American threatens AiG : Demands immediate removal of Web rebuttal

AIG ^ | 2002/07/11 | AIG

[ZGuy]

The prominent magazine Scientific American thought it had finally discredited its nemesis—creationism—with a feature article listing ‘15 Answers to Creationist Nonsense’ (July 2002). Supposedly these were the fifteen best arguments that evolutionists could use to discredit the Bible’s account of Creation. (National Geographic TV also devoted a lengthy report to the article.)

Within 72 hours, Dr Jonathan Sarfati—a resident scientist at Answers in Genesis–Australia—had written a comprehensive, point-by-point critique of the magazine article and posted it on this Web site.

So Scientific American thought it would try to silence AiG with the threat of a lawsuit.

In an e-mail to Dr Sarfati, Scientific American accused him and AiG of infringing their copyright by reproducing the text of their article and an illustration. They said they were prepared to ‘settle the matter amicably’ provided that AiG immediately remove Dr Sarfati’s article from its Web site.

AiG’s international copyright attorney, however, informed Scientific American that their accusations are groundless and that AiG would not be removing the article. Dr Sarfati’s article had used an illustration of a bacterial flagellum, but it was drawn by an AiG artist years ago. AiG had also used the text of SA’s article, but in a way that is permissible under ‘fair use’ of copyrighted materials for public commentary. (AiG presented the text of the SA article, with Dr Sarfati’s comments interspersed in a different color, to avoid any accusations of misquoting or misrepresenting the author.)

Why the heavy-handed tactics? If AiG’s responses were not valid, why would Scientific American even care whether they remained in the public arena? One can only presume that Scientific American (and National Geographic) had the ‘wind taken out of their sails.’ Dr Sarfati convincingly showed that they offered nothing new to the debate and they displayed a glaring ignorance of creationist arguments. Their legal maneuver appears to be an act of desperation. (AiG is still awaiting SA’s response to the decision not to pull the Web rebuttal.)

[balrog666]

It was only a double post from me. Self-abuse so to speak ;->

Awwwww, I wanted the juiciest of tidbits to enjoy!!!!!!

[Gumlegs]

Phaedrus has announced he's ignoring me. I can take it. However, casual observers may be interested in the following.

Me: Not all [E]vols ... are in the "Materialist Atheist" camp.

Yes, I exaggerated to make a point.

Ah. You get to exaggerate. Do I?

However, those who maintain they believe in both Evolution and God do not subscribe to the Evolution of Dawkins or Gould, that is, mainstream Evolution, which is both Atheistic and Materialistic ...

Are you sure your characterization of "mainstream Evolution" is correct? Or might this be another "exaggeration"?

Some apparently delude themselves that Christianity is reconcileable with the Evolution of Dawkins and Gould. It's not. And that's why the Evols exhibit such delight in bashing "Creationists", which, incidentally, has nothing whatever to do with science.

Interesting. You actually know why people who believe in evolution do things. Mind reading? I'll ask you the same question I've asked Gore3000: I'm thinking of a number from one to ten. What is it?

Me: You appear to intend to allow the impression ...

There you go again, Gumlegs. You have the irritating habit of putting words into peoples mouths, then arguing your case, even while looking the words themselves straight in the face. My words require no interpretation. Please break this very bad habit.

I have a habit? Look in the mirror. My words you quoted above were paraphrasing ... you! Your objection only appears to make sense because you unaccountably deleted the context! Here it what you had posted, and the words I responded to:

Right Wing Professor intended to allow the impression that the Pope and the Catholic Church were in accord with the "theory" of Evolution (see his post), as have other Evol posters in recent months. The Church is not and it is thus a lie, Gumlegs, pure and simple.

You clean up your act and mine will be fine. After all, I was paraphrasing you.

Me: [In response to material in the blockquote above]. Be careful about the casual use of the term, "lie."

A lie is a lie, Gumlegs, and I am not casual about lies or liars. You also have the irritating habit of giving unbidden and unnecessary guidance. Kindly direct it elsewhere. Your subsequent posts will be ignored.

It appears to me that it was you who was doing lying. However, I will comply with your unbidden advice and offer you no further advice. I hope other posters will note the lies and distortions in this exchange ... and their source.

[medved]

This one might take more than one reply. The first would be a list of catastrophist links:

Catastrophism

• Kronia
• Catastrophism dot Com
• Aeon
• Global Flood(s)
• Velikovsky Page, Links
• Saturn Thesis
• Al DeGrazia's web site, Quantavolution, Solaria Binaria etc.
• Venus and Differing Paradigms
• Holden WWW Site, Main Page
• American Indians and Dinosaurs
• World Ages Archive

Big Bang, Electric Sun, Plasma Physics and Cosmology Etc.

• Wal Thornhill home page
• Electric Universe
• Tony Peratt, Los Alamos; plasma cosmology etc.
• Don Scott's Version of Electric Sun Theory
• DragonScience: Arp, Demise of Big Bang etc.
• Goodman Site

Finding Cities in all the Wrong Places

Given standard theories wrt the history of our solar system and our own planet, nobody should be finding cities and villages on Mars, 2100 feet beneath the waves off Cuba, or buried under two miles of Antarctic ice.

• Hydaspis Chaos
• More on Hydaspis Chaos
• City off Cuba
• More on City off Cuba
• Images of City off Cuba
• Lake Vostok Magnetic Anomaly
• Recent Cydonia Images and their Meanings

Intelligent Versions of Biogenesis etc.

• Quantum intelligence in the universe?
• Message Theory/Remine
• Rupert Sheldrake, Morphogenic fields, resonances etc.
• Bruce Lipton, Cells and Computer components etc.

[medved]

From what I recall, IV clearly connected Saturn (Kronos) with the flood. In the Greek myths, the titan Kronos was said to swallow his children. It was his son, the chief God Zeus, who made him to cough them up. What if it were Saturn which grew to be as bright as 7 suns? It would have obscured the view of all the other planets (swallowed) just as daylight does now.

IIRC, IV also suggested that Jupiter was once "the light of the night" rather than the moon. That when Venus was ejected "from the brow of Zeus," Jupiter lost just enough mass to lose it's binary sun qualifications.

There are two versions of a theory involving Jupiter and Saturn being a small double-star system, i.e. that of Al DeGrazia and Earl Milton available (Solaria Binaria) on the quantavolution cdrom available at www.grazian-archive.com, and that of Wal Thornhill and David Talbott (www.kronia.com).

There is now overwhelming evidence of Mars having been inhabited in past ages and there is no way to explain that within the confines of standard theories. Given the solar system in anything remotely like its present configuration, Mars is always going to be too small to hold an atmosphere (by gravity) and too far from the sun to support life. Both the DeGrazia/Milton and the Thornhill/Talbott theories invision a system-wide atmosphere in the early system. In other words, getting to Mars may easily have required no more than a zeppelin.

[medved]

Did you go out to a store and purchase this new software or did it just appear on your computer?

You don't think maybe it just sort of evolved from DOS or CP/M software via a series of mutations (electrical glitches) and "natural selection" (user only keeps glitched software which is functionally more complex and better)?

[gore3000]

So some presume. But there is a big jump from affirming that the size of a bird's beak can vary to making the claim that the bird turned into a whole other animal.

Actually, the beaks did not even micro-evolve. They got bigger in droughts, but when rain became plentiful, they got smaller again. So there was no positive change either way on beak size, just a temporary change. Because the changes took place, back and forth in less than a dozen years of looking at them. So there was no mutation at all, there was no new genetic information created either way. There was just adaptation through the use of already existing traits in the gene pool of the species. Science recognizes these differences in the gene pool as essential for the survival of a species. That is why when they are trying to bring back a species from near extinction, they try to get as many different animals from as many different places as possible to help them restart the species.

[VadeRetro]

Did you know Phaedrus isn't a creationist? He's always being mistaken for one, but he isn't. Poor fellow!

[gore3000]

The changes that occur in species due to natural selection is called 'evolution'.

No, no, no. Evolution is about the descent of one species from a simpler, less complex species. In fact Darwin for a long time did not even use evolution to describe his theory he called a theory of descent. In fact, adaptation is in a way a contradiction of the whole evolutionist ethos. If a species can adapt to its environment without transforming itself into another species - what need, what necessity is there for it to go through the long, dangerous, indeterminate process necessary for it to evolve as evolutionists claim it happens. The answer is that there is no need at all.

[medved]

You see nothing to consider from thermodynamics? Oh well -- at least I thought of you.

There is an argument to be made against evolution along such lines buttalking about energy is not the best way to do it. The best description of that sort of thing I've seen is that of Alexander Mebane of the Tampa Bay Area Skeptics (Darwin's Creation Myth) in which he notes that coordination is the thing the evos lack (by several orders of magnitude from what they actually have) even as the midieval alchemists lacked the energy by the same sort of factor for the transmutations they wished to be able to do. The Wizard of Id in fact once showed some clown getting thrown into the slammer and the spook asked him what he was in for and he replied "Transmuting base metals into gold." "By what process??" was the immediate question from all over the prison; the guy replied "Counterfeitting..."

[Phaedrus]

Did you know Phaedrus isn't a creationist? He's always being mistaken for one, but he isn't. Poor fellow!

Hello, Vade. Hey, don't educate Gumlegs -- let him stumble around in the dark. Stayin' out of trouble?

[gore3000]

And if you change Windows enough, patch it enough, you do end up with a fundamentally different piece of software.

Yes, you do, but those changes were done by intelligent designers. Are you seriously saying that if you wrote a program to randomly change bits and bytes in Windows you would ever get a better program? Are you saying something that ridiculous?

[VadeRetro]

Stayin' out of trouble?

Not so far tonight, but I'm extracting myself by heading for beddy-bye.

[southland]

It takes more faith to believe in evolution than creation.

[gore3000]

But you can easily prove it's likelyhood to yourself. Just consider every single system you know. If you make a million small changes to a thing, you end up with a very different thing than you started with.

But the problem evolutionists have is that each one of those changes has to be beneficial. We know how seldom mutations are beneficial. To postulate that we can have a long series of such changes, all of them beneficial is ludicrous. To postulate that this has happened millions of times, for each species living and dead, is utterly unbelievable.

[Phaedrus]

It takes more faith to believe in evolution than creation.

Yes, exactly.

[medved]

The bible notes that:

GEN 1:16 And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also.

Modern people would assume that means the sun and the moon. More likely would be either the sun and Saturn or Jupiter and Saturn. Saturn used to be called the "sun of night" and you only need to read the littlest bit of the pyramid texts to comprehend that whatever those guys were seeing when they looked into the sky was totally different from what WE see.

Green Sun Over Egypt

The reference to Osiris as the "night sun" is fairly common. From Ignatius Donelly's "The destruction of Atlantis / Ragnarok, the Age of Fire and Gravel, page 234:

"M. Mariette-Bay says: 'Originally, Osiris is the nocturnal sun; he is the primordial night of chaos; he is consequently anterior to Ra, the sun of day". Mr. Miller says: 'As nocturnal sun, Osiris was also regarded as a type of the sun BEFORE ITS FIRST RISING, or of the primordial night of chaos...'"

which is a bit closer to the kind of thing David Talbott is talking about.

There is a great deal more of the unusual in the character of Osiris; the pyramid texts insist on claiming that the sun they called Osiris was GREEN! Actually, what you will notice looking at the shenbond jewel above or at the representations of the Saturn system alignment depicted on the Kronia WWW site, is that humans formerly observed at least three other bodies in a stacked alignment above us, and that one of those (Venus) was blue-green, and hence the light which the entire apparition radiated might well have been greenish.

Egyptian enclosed crescent (prototype cosmic ship) and Babylonian Shamesh petroglyph

What the artists actually saw...

The Shamesh glyph is, in fact, the same thing as the familiar Islamic icon which is normally taken to be a star-moon icon. In real life, that cannot happen, i.e. a star will never be seen inside the crescent of the moon, simply because the unlit part of the moon will occult the star.

---

For instance, Budge's "Book of the Dead", page 253:

"Becometh green through thee the earth in triumph before the hand of Neberter..."

page 10:

"Golden of limbs, blue of head, emerald upon both of his sides..."

page 250:

"Thou hast come with thy splendours, and thou hast made heaven and earth bright with thy rays of pure emerald light..."

page 251:

"...governor of the mountains of Aukert, thou dost rise in the horizen of heaven and sheddest upon the earth beams of pure emerald light..."

page 254:

"Through thee, the world waxeth green in triumph before the hand of Nebertcher.... Thy body is of gold, thy head is of azure, and emerald light encircleth thee..."

We simply no longer see anything in the sky shedding green or "pure emerald" light over the world. At least, I don't see anything like that from Northern Virginia this evening. Let me know if you see anything like that from your own locale.

[medved]

It takes more faith to believe in evolution than creation.

Beyond some point, the word "faith" doesn't really work any more. Face it: to be an evolutionist, you gotta be an outright sucker.

[gore3000]

That's not "proof", as I understand it. That's the argument that, "if we haven't found it yet, it doesn't exist".

But the question is how long can you keep saying that absence of proof does not disprove evolution? Is not 150 years enough? What is most important, how can you say that evolution is true if you admit that the proof for it is not to be found? It's like saying there definitely are Martians, we just have not found them. One can make up almost any silly theory one wants with such an argument.

[Free Vulcan]

I may not understand molecular biology, but I do understand statistics, and the numbers for evolution are not very good.

[Elsie]

And if you change Windows enough, patch it enough, you do end up with a fundamentally different piece of software.

In fact, software is a perfect example of 'adaption'. Software like Windows has 'evolved' thru many, many small adaptions.

Your example proves my point.

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The ONLY point proven here is that Windows did NOT change itself from 98 to 2000.

It took the brains and hands of MANY 'Intelligent Designers'.