Posted on 08/09/2002 10:52:13 PM PDT by jennyp
There have been a lot of little news items having to do with creation vs. evolution lately, each one not necessarily worth a thread on its own. Here are the last 10 days' worth of headlines culled from Creation/Evolution: The Eternal Debate:
Posted on 2002/08/09
New Fossil Discovery Sinks Evolutionary Theories
Harun Yahya - 2002/08/01
When the Toumaï fossil was found recently, and was quickly dismissed by some as just a female gorilla, most creationists rejoiced at the foolishness of those deluded evolutionists. But prominent Muslim creationist Harun Yahya is more impressed. He hopes Toumaï will "sink our current ideas about human evolution".
Posted on 2002/08/09
Scientific American's 15 Errors
Harun Yahya - 2002/08/01
Not to be outdone by the Christian ministry Answers in Genesis, the Muslim creationist Harun Yahya provides his own critique of Scientific American's recent "15 Answers to Creationist Nonsense".
Posted on 2002/08/09
Revolution in science: a genetic discovery to change the world
The Independent - 2002/08/10
RNA interference (RNAi) is a new technique for turning off individual genes that could turn out to be revolutionary for curing genetic diseases, cancers, & viral infections of all kinds, not to mention for our understanding of which genes do what. (Set of 4 articles)
Posted on 2002/08/09
Researchers' Latest Results in Search for Ancient Martian Life
NASA-JPL - 2002/08/02
In the latest study of a 4.5 billion-year-old Martian meteorite (ALH84001), researchers have presented new evidence confirming that 25 percent of the magnetic material in the meteorite was produced by ancient bacteria on Mars. These latest results were published in the journal Applied and Environmental Microbiology.
Posted on 2002/08/09
History of Science Society Adds its Voice for Evolution
NCSE - 2002/08/09
NCSE is pleased to announce a further addition to New Voices for Evolution: a statement from the History of Science Society reading, in part, that "such concepts as evolution and geological change are well established and belong in science curricula along with other basic scientific ideas. ... In view of this historical perspective, the History of Science Society disapproves of recent efforts by state school boards effectively to remove evolution as a subject from the secondary school curriculum, either through textbook disclaimers or censorship."
Posted on 2002/08/09
Speed of light slowing down after all?
AiG - 2002/08/09
...in addition to being different from the prediction of Barry Setterfield's theory, this research by itself does not support c-decay theory of the magnitude that Setterfield proposed. The change is billions of times too small. In fact, the newspaper hype surrounding Davies’ theory, and the quotes attributed to him, hardly seem to be justified by the Nature article itself, which is rather speculative. ...
Posted on 2002/08/09
KC conference explores evolution debate
Kansas City Star - 2002/07/29
Until intelligent design is accepted by a majority of scientists, don't look for it in public school science classes, a panel of evolution supporters said on Saturday (7/27). The idea that life arose not through unguided natural processes but from the intent of an intelligent being is an interesting postulate at this point, but nothing else, the panel said at a debate closing a Kansas City gathering of ID advocates. Four evolution advocates debated four ID adherents at the third annual Darwin, Design and Democracy conference at Rockhurst HS.
Posted on 2002/08/08
Moderates Lose 2 to Conservatives in Kansas Board of Ed Primaries
KC Star - 2002/08/07
Voters on Tuesday ousted two incumbent moderates on the Kansas Board of Education, raising the possibility that the board could return to a 5-5 moderate-conservative split. The split on the board has been an issue since Aug. 1999, when a then-conservative majority approved science standards that omitted many references to evolution, the big-bang theory and the age of the Earth. After a moderate majority was elected two years ago, the board reversed the 1999 vote.
Posted on 2002/08/07
Selection for short introns in highly expressed genes
Nature Genetics - 2002/07/22
Transcription is a slow and expensive process. Thus, at least for highly expressed genes, transcription of long introns, which are particularly common in mammals, is costly. We show that introns in highly expressed genes are substantially shorter than those in genes that are expressed at low levels.
Posted on 2002/08/07
T.O. Creates New Kent Hovind FAQs Portal
Talk.Origins - 2002/08/08
Talk.Origins has come out with a page that gathers together their several Kent Hovind pages, as well as several off-site links, into a handy starting point.
Posted on 2002/08/07
Save Me from My Comrades: Dawkins Disses Bush
Here - 2002/08/07
Inside a longer article re: Iraq appealing to England to stop the invasion: "A Guardian survey yesterday of leading politicians, diplomats, military chiefs and scientists showed the depth of scepticism across British society about any involvement in an Iraq attack. ... Richard Dawkins, an Oxford science don, suggested Mr Bush was just as much of a danger to world peace as Saddam Hussein, adding: 'It would be a tragedy if Tony Blair were to be brought down through playing poodle to this unelected and deeply stupid little oil-spiv.'"
Posted on 2002/08/07
Inconstant Speed of Light May Debunk Einstein
Reuters - 2002/08/07
A team of Australian scientists has proposed that the speed of light may not be a constant, a revolutionary idea that could unseat one of the most cherished laws of modern physics -- Einstein's theory of relativity. The team, led by theoretical physicist Paul Davies of Sydney's Macquarie University, say it is possible that the speed of light has slowed over billions of years. If so, physicists will have to rethink many of their basic ideas about the laws of the universe. "That means giving up the theory of relativity and E=mc squared and all that sort of stuff," Davies told Reuters.
Posted on 2002/08/06
Evangelical colleges paid to teach evolution
AiG - 2002/08/06
Increasing numbers of evangelical colleges around the world are accepting large monetary awards from the John Templeton Foundation to run courses that promote evolutionary teaching and millions of years. One such course, run by an evangelical Bible college and taught by theistic evolutionists, never touched on the implications of evolution and millions of years for the Gospel of Jesus Christ or the implications for the authority of Scripture.
Posted on 2002/08/05
AiG Strikes a Nerve
AiG - 2002/08/03
Ken Ham revels in the fact that Scientific American's lawyers accused AiG of copyright infringement when it responded to SA's recent article "15 Answers to Creationist Nonsense". Obviously it's proof that "the secular world is closely watching AiG and is trying to suppress our Biblical message", which "is seen as a serious threat by the ‘world.’"
Posted on 2002/08/02
Sheer vs. Real Possibilities: A Response to Allen Orr
designinference.com - 2002/08/02
This is Dembski's response to Allen Orr's review of No Free Lunch, which we reported on a week ago. Dembski repeats his demand that biologists produce actual causal explanations for IC structures instead of merely showing why they're plausible. At the same time, Dembski ignores Orr's critique of Dembski's use of No Free Lunch theorems to prove that Darwinism can't create specified complexity.
Posted on 2002/08/02
Human-Specific Retroviruses Developed When Humans, Chimps Diverged
U. of Georgia - 2002/08/02
Scientists have known that remnants of ancient germ line infections called human endogenous retroviruses make up a substantial part of the human genome. Once thought to be merely "junk" DNA, many of these elements in fact perform functions in human cells. Now, a new study suggests for the first time that a burst of transpositional activity occurred at the same time humans and chimps are believed to have diverged from a common ancestor - 6 million years ago. These new results suggest retroviruses may have had some kind of role in that divergence.
Posted on 2002/08/02
The Battle for the Cosmic Center
ICR Impact - 2002/07/25
Biblical teaching places man at the center of God's attention. Recent astronomical evidence restores man to a central place in God's universe. Over the last few decades, astronomers have become convinced that the red shifts of light from distant galaxies occur in distinct, evenly spaced groups. The Hubble Law implies that galaxies are expanding in evenly spaced spherical shells around us, who are sitting at the center of the universe - just where the Bible says we are.
Posted on 2002/08/02
Commentary on Scott and Branch's "'Intelligent design' Not Accepted by Most Scientists"
designinference.com - 2002/07/02
This is a must-read, if only to see Dembski say "All the design could have emerged through a cosmic evolutionary process that started with the Big Bang." Later, he compares evolutionists to the Taliban!
Posted on 2002/08/02
Boiled Creationist with a Side of Hexaglycine: Sarfati on Imai et al. (1999)
No Answers in Genesis - 2002/07/31
In an AiG web article titled Hydrothermal origin of life? Jonathan Sarfati manages to write three pages about a single five page original peer reviewed paper on growing short peptides in a simulated hydrothermal vent system, published in Science by Imai et al. (1999), and to make over seventeen errors of fact, emphasis or interpretation. Not bad, even for a fanatical creationist.
Posted on 2002/08/01
Updates to Talk.Origins Fossil Hominids Pages
Talk.Origins - 2002/07/31
Jim Foley's comprehensive set of pages on hominid & australopithicene fossils at Talk.Origins has been updated. Includes new pages on the spectacular new skull from Dmanisi, Georgia, which causes problems for creationists who claim that habilis is an ape and erectus is a human, the new 6-7 million year old Toumaï skull from Chad, and Homo habilis: is it an invalid taxon?
Posted on 2002/07/31
Pufferfish DNA Yields Clues to Human Biology [Another 1,000 Human Genes?]
DOE Joint Genome Institute - 2002/07/25
An int'l research consortium led by the US DoE’s Joint Genome Institute reported today on the draft sequencing, assembly, and analysis of the genome of the Japanese pufferfish Fugu rubripes. Pufferfish have the smallest known genomes among vertebrates. While it has roughly the same number of genes as the much larger human genome, it's in a compact form streamlined by the relative scarcity of the “junk” DNA that fills much of the human sequence. Through comparison of the human and pufferfish genomes, the researchers were able to predict the existence of nearly 1,000 previously unidentified human genes.
Posted on 2002/07/30
Race Is Seen as Real Guide to Track Roots of Disease
NY Times - 2002/07/30
Challenging the widely held view that race is a "biologically meaningless" concept, a leading population geneticist says that race is helpful for understanding ethnic differences in disease and response to drugs. Dr. Neil Risch of Stanford U says that genetic differences have arisen among people living on different continents and that race (i.e. geographically based ancestry) is a valid way of categorizing these differences.
Posted on 2002/07/30
Species and languages flock together
Nature Science Update - 2002/07/30
Areas with the most animal species also contain the greatest number of human languages, say researchers. The coincidence of biological and cultural diversity hints that preserving cultures may also preserve species, and vice versa. Development and conservation "probably need to go hand in hand", says Carsten Rahbek of the U. of Copenhagen. His findings call into question the wisdom of trying to save wildlife in remote uninhabited areas.
Posted on 2002/07/30
U.S. News and World Report joins in the evolution onslaught
AiG - 2002/07/30
U.S. News and World Report ran a major story pushing evolution on 29 July, 2002, giving it cover story exposure. The usual evolutionist hand-waving and bait-and-switch tactics were employed in a grand piece of propaganda. Here is our detailed response, interspersed between their actual item which is reproduced in full to avoid suggestions of misrepresentation:
Posted on 2002/07/29
Boeing tries to defy gravity
BBC News: Science/Nature - 2002/07/29
Researchers at the world's largest aircraft maker, Boeing, are using the work of a controversial Russian scientist to try to create a device that will defy gravity. The company is examining an experiment by Yevgeny Podkletnov, who claims to have developed a device which can shield objects from the Earth's pull. Dr Podkletnov is viewed with suspicion by many conventional scientists. They have not been able to reproduce his results.
Posted on 2002/07/29
Bacteria defies last-resort antibiotic
Nature Science Update - 2002/07/29
US doctors have reported the first case of a new strain of Staphylococcus aureus that is completely resistant to the antibiotic vancomycin, one of the last lines of defence against bacteria. Further outbreaks of infection are expected.
Posted on 2002/07/29
Jonathan Wells and Darwin's Finches
Talk.Origins - 2002/07/27
In Chapter 8 of Icons of Evolution, Jonathan Wells examines the case of "Darwin's Finches", and claims that textbooks exaggerate not only the importance of the finches to Darwin's thinking, but also the evidence that they are an excellent example of evolution in action. He also accuses biologists Rosemary and Peter Grant, who spent 30 years studying these birds, of exaggerating the evidence as well. As we shall see, Wells's case is weak. Darwin's Finches remain one of the best examples of adaptive radiation in the literature of evolutionary biology.
Posted on 2002/07/26
Book Review: No Free Lunch
Boston Review - 2002/07/25
Excellent, engaging article by Orr, as he cooly dismantles Dembski's latest book. Assuming his understanding of "NFL" was correct, his critique is devastating. And to think I found this at the ARN site! If they're highlighting this review, then it can only mean there's a fierce counterattack in the works. Read this article now to understand what all the fireworks will be about shortly.
Posted on 2002/07/25
Paranormal beliefs linked to brain chemistry
New Scientist - 2002/07/24
Whether or not you believe in the paranormal may depend entirely on your brain chemistry. People with high levels of dopamine are more likely to find significance in coincidences, and pick out meaning and patterns where there are none.
Posted on 2002/07/24
UCSD Researchers Identify Eye-Formation Strategy in Mice That Provides Clues to Development of Other Organs
UCSD Health Sciences - 2002/07/23
Researchers at the UC San Diego School of Medicine have discovered a linkage between proteins that is an essential part of the complex series of molecular events leading to normal eye development in mice. The investigators also suggest that the combination of specific proteins in eye formation may be similar to yet unidentified genes that act together to allow development of other organs.
(Excerpt) Read more at crevo.bestmessageboard.com ...
Dembski's chief argument is that Dawkins's algorithm—and Darwinism generally—does not do what it seems. Indeed despite our unerring arrival at METHINKS…, the "Darwinian mechanism does not generate actual specified complexity but only its appearance." How can Dembski possibly claim such a thing? Enter the No Free Lunch theorems.
The NFL theorems compare the efficiency of evolutionary algorithms; roughly speaking, they ask how often different search algorithms reach a target within some number of steps.7Because the NFL theorems are deeply counterintuitive, it'll help to start with an informal rendition. It runs like this: If algorithm A beats algorithm B at some class of problems there will always be another class of problems at which B beats A. Further, one can show that A and B are equally efficient when averaging over all possible problems. The NFL theorems thus show that there's no such thing as a universally efficient algorithm: when faced with all problems, any algorithm is as good as any other. To appreciate Dembski's "generic" form of the NFL theorems, you need to appreciate that reaching a prespecified target with a particular fitness function is an example of a problem. Reaching the target with a different fitness function is a different problem. The NFL theorems thus say that if we average over all possible fitness functions—where some lead directly uphill to the target and others don't, and some are smooth and others rugged—no evolutionary algorithm outperforms any other. But one allowable algorithm is blind search, where we randomly move to a neighboring sequence regardless of its fitness (remember our monkey with a word-processor). The NFL theorems thus prove that no evolutionary algorithm beats blind search when averaging over all fitness functions. A surprising result.
The apparent success of Dawkins's algorithm at getting to METHINKS… must therefore be just that, an appearance. If Dawkins tried reaching his target when averaging over all fitness functions, he'd find he does no better than blind search. So why does Dawkins's algorithm seem to work? The answer is that it subtly cheats: it starts not only with a target but also with a fitness function that leads straight to it. Everything's been cooked into the fitness function. Algorithms like Dawkins's thus "fail to generate specified complexity because they smuggle it in during construction of the fitness function."8
Hence Dembski's big claim: "Darwinian mechanisms of any kind, whether in nature or in silico, are in principle incapable of generating specified complexity." At best, Darwinism just shuffles around preexisting specified complexity, using up that available in the fitness function to give the appearance of producing it de novo.
We can now complete the Dembskian Syllogism: Organisms show specified complexity; Darwinism can't make it; therefore, something else does. You won't be surprised to learn that that something else is intelligence. Indeed the "great myth of contemporary evolutionary biology is that the information needed to explain complex biological structures can be purchased without intelligence."
Nice answer, wrong question
The problem with all this is so simple that I hate to bring it up. But here goes: Darwinism isn't trying to reach a prespecified target. Darwinism, I regret to report, is sheer cold demographics. Darwinism says that my sequence has more kids than your sequence and so my sequence gets common and yours gets rare. If there's another sequence out there that has more kids than mine, it'll displace me. But there's no pre-set target in this game. (Why would evolution care about a pre-set place? Are we to believe that evolution is just inordinately fond of ATGGCAGGCAGT…?) Dembski can pick a prespecified target, average over all fitness functions, and show that no algorithm beats blind search until he's blue in the face. The calculation is irrelevant. Evolution isn't searching for anything and Darwinism is not therefore a search algorithm. The bottom line is not that the NFL theorems are wrong. They're not. The bottom line is that they ask the wrong question for what Dembski wants to do. More precisely, the proper conclusion isn't that the NFL theorems derail Darwinism. The proper conclusion is that evolutionary algorithms are flawed analogies for Darwinism.9
The astonishing thing is that Dembski knows all this. In a remarkable revelation—and one that follows two hundred pages of technical mumbo-jumbo—Dembski suddenly announces that Darwinists won't find his NFL objection terribly relevant. And why not? For the very reason I just gave. Dembski even quotes Richard Dawkins at length, who, it turns out, warned all along that his METHINKS… example is
…misleading in important ways. One of these is that, in each generation of selective "breeding," the mutant "progeny" phrases were judged according to the criterion of resemblance to a distant ideal target, the phrase METHINKS IT IS LIKE A WEASEL. Life isn't like that. Evolution has no long-term goal. There is no long-distance target, no final perfection to serve as a criterion for selection….In real life, the criterion for selection is always short-term, either simple survival or, more generally, reproductive success.10
At this point the reader of Dembski's book is a tad confused. Why, given the above revelation, is the book entitled No Free Lunch? Why is its dust jacket lined with blurbs from physicists attesting that Dembski has done something big? And, most important, why did I spend two nights reading about a theorem that reports an irrelevant result? The reader at this point has some right to know what Dembski's real problem with Darwinism is. And he comes through. After two hundred pages, Dembski finally unveils his Über-Objection: Darwinism does "not guarantee that anything interesting will happen." (I'm not making this up.) Darwinism, he admits, will work on a small scale—it will make bacteria resistant to antibiotics and insects resistant to insecticide—but it might not work on a big scale, yielding complex critters and the breathtaking biological diversity that envelops the earth. Dembski's problem isn't then with Darwinism per se. Like the scientific creationists before him, it's with Darwinism writ large. He's worried about the proper limits of extrapolation. And the non-extrapolationist evolution he ends up allowing—one that tinkers but doesn't innovate—is "certainly not a form of Darwinism that is worth spilling any ink over."
There are so many problems with this view that it's hard to know where to start. For one thing, it's wholly subjective. Though Dembski enjoys dressing up his claims in mathematical garb, his key objection to Darwinism ends up being a tad less rigorous than set theory: whether he finds the likely products of natural selection "interesting." For two of the 3.5 billion years of life, nothing fancier than bacteria lived on earth. Is this interesting? A virus might only have four genes. Is this interesting? Just where does one draw the line between beasts or changes that are sufficiently uninteresting that they can be subsumed under a Darwinian mechanism and those that are sufficiently interesting that they can't? Dembski's equations are silent here. For another thing, Dembski's anti-extrapolationist view leads him into some formal muddy waters. If, as he oddly continues to claim, the NFL theorems pose a problem for Darwinism, why don't they pose a problem for a little Darwinism? The NFL theorems don't say anything about scale. To say then, as Dembski does, that a little bit of Darwinism is okay (despite NFL) but a lot is bad (because of NFL) is to say something odd. Dembski comes precariously close here to saying that while there's no such thing as a free lunch, you can help yourself to brunch. Last, surely it's the refusal to extrapolate Darwinism from the small to the large scale that needs justifying. If Darwinism can explain small changes in organisms over the last fifty years (antibiotic resistance, say), surely it can explain progressively bigger changes over the last 500, 5000, or 50,000 years. The cumulative effects of mutation and selection aren't going to get smaller. Dembski's anti-extrapolationism seems a lot like saying that, while Kepler's laws might hold on any given day, they don't hold over whole years. Such a position is, I suppose, formally possible but it—and not extrapolation—requires special justification.
Alas, Dembski's attempts to explain why Darwinism won't extrapolate don't wash. He offers two reasons. The first is that things get simpler not fancier under Darwinism. "Simplicity by definition always entails a lower cost in raw materials…than increases in complexity, and so there is an inherent tendency in evolving systems for selection pressures to force such systems toward simplicity." Darwinism thus chokes when confronting a biological world that's so baroque. This is an ancient argument and the replies to it are equally old. Even if selection favors simplicity, note that the history of life must show a trend of increasing complexity. The reason is this history starts at zero complexity. On average it can only go up (where we cannot see the descendants of lineages that crashed and burned back into zero complexity). There are also good reasons for thinking that organisms get stuck at higher levels of complexity. John Maynard Smith and Eörs Szathmáry argue at book length that the formation of complex assemblies is often irreversible.11 When free living mitochrondria and early cells came together, for instance, to make the first eukaryotic (true) cells, they swapped genes, so that mitochondrial proteins are now encoded by nuclear genes and vice-versa. At this point, things are essentially irreversible and the two partners can't go their separate, simpler ways. Dembski seems unaware of this well known point. Dembski's it-just-gets-simpler argument also relies on an erroneous assumption that natural selection cares primarily about the cost of raw materials. But selection cares only about how many kids you have. If I use more raw materials but have more kids than you, my type gets more common, period. Last, Dembski's argument is betrayed by his own examples of admitted Darwinism. When Salmonella evolved penicillin resistance and the mosquito Anopheles evolved DDT resistance just how did they get simpler? The answer is they didn't.12
Dembski's second anti-extrapolationist argument is that Darwinism could explain the fantastic range of biological diversity only if fitness functions are well-behaved. As he puts it, "the fitness function induced by differential survival and reproduction [may not be] sufficiently smooth for the Darwinian mechanism to drive large-scale biological evolution." If not, natural selection can't gradually ascend lofty fitness peaks and "there is no reason to think you will get anything interesting." Dembski tries here to reconnect his argument with the NFL world—you have to sneak in a fitness function that's just right. But the argument doesn't fly. To see this, consider fitness functions that are as unsmooth as you like, i.e., rugged ones, having lots of peaks and few long paths up high hills. (These are the best studied of all fitness landscapes.13) Now drop many geographically separate populations on these landscapes and let them evolve independently. Each will quickly get stuck atop a nearby peak. You might think then that Dembski's right; we don't get much that's interesting. But now change the environment. This shifts the landscape's topography: a sequence's fitness isn't cast in stone but depends on the environment it finds itself in. Each population may now find it's no longer at the best sequence and so can evolve somewhat even if the new landscape is still rugged. Different populations will go to different sequences as they live in different environments. Now repeat this for 3.5 billion years. Will this process yield interesting products? Will we get different looking beasts, living different kinds of lives? My guess is yes. Dembski's is no. And that is, I suppose, fine. He's entitled to his guess. But don't let him tell you that it follows ineluctably from some mathematical theorem because it doesn't. The troubling thing is that the above scenario isn't some contrived attempt to sidestep Dembski. It's the standard explanation of why organisms don't get permanently stuck on local peaks. For one brief moment Dembski seems to realize that changing environments might matter, pulling the rug out from under his it-won't-go-anywhere argument. But the worry is quickly dispatched with a footnote: "More precisely, f needs to be an evolving fitness function indexed by time. My argument, however, remains intact." Unfortunately it doesn't.
Your argument is weak. It took nearly 2000 years for Christianity to cease it's butchering of infidels, and even other Christians -- how many of us feel some level of shame at the way our Christian forebearers treated the Americans found here when they arrived?. Pockets remain today: Ireland, the Balkans. Beyond Christianity, other non-atheists, today, advocate the butchering of other/non-believers: Muslims and Jews/Christians/Hindus; Hindus and Sikhs.
The problem is not rooted in atheism but in liberty, or rather the want of liberty. Butchers of all stripe seek dominion of over others. They are so convinced of the correctness of their position, they are more than willing to practice human sacrifice to achieve it.
The solution is to base society in liberty. It neither requires nor precludes your beliefs.
Yes, they were. Buffalo Bill destroyed the herds of buffalo in order to take away the Indians food supply.
HV reserves certain prerogeratives to himself. He argues the extremes and concludes the absurd. Pronouncing liberty completely subjective, one finds his own basis for dealing with others to be the Word of God, something about which there is zero confusion and disagreement as we all know. He is a divider seeking precicesly the type of society he rails against.
Why? Did Christianity start in the 20th century? That would be akin to limiting communist atrocities to only those committed between 1995 and 2000.
Killing one person is an abominable sin; 6 million dead is simply a matter of scale. Pogroms were a regular feature of Christian Europe for centuries. Only in the 20th century was advanced technology added to the mix.
Not really. Now my conversations with the Almighty have gotten interesting, especially when He blindsides me with something I hadn't considered before.
And worse still, they project their own failings onto to you and me. Too many are too ready to practice human sacrifice. Even more have little use for liberty.
You:
Plain B.S., Patrick. Get your facts straight. Germany may have adopted certain of its forms but good Christians do not kill 6+ million people. Your argument is offensive, Patrick.
First, I made my statement about Germany is response to HV's claim that all the mass murder in the 20th century was done by atheists. That is an historical misstatement. I was not trying to defend the likes of Pol Pot, nor even to defend atheism. I wanted to set the historical record straight. I was not trying to condemn Christianity, or even Germany, but just to show that HV's hysterical claims about atheism are not correct. HV claims, and I clearly and unambiguously refuted, that atheism = communism, and all the big-time murder is by atheists. My refutation was in the form of pointing out that religious communists exist, and that there have been mass atrocities commited by religious people and nations.
Second, my facts are correct. The German nation were indeed Christians, and thought of themselves as such, and not atheists. (This is a generalization, but a true one.) You claim that "good" Christians don't behave like that. This is the third time this week I've had to point out that someone on your side of this debate is invoking the "No True Scotsman..." Fallacy.
Thirdly, you are offended way too easily.
Semantics and sophistry of course. Communism is materialistic, it is often called philosophical materialism by its adherents. And destroying churches and persecuting believers of any and all religions certainly makes it atheistic.
Take it up with HV - I have, as I said, merely expropriated the argument.
No, what you have shown is very empty rhetoric. That atheism and mass murder go together is undeniable.
No, Hegelianism is also bad, it is an ideology and ideologies are destructive of reasoning and common sense.
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