Posted on 02/14/2003 5:41:19 PM PST by Remedy
The president of a Christian apologetics ministry says there is a bias within the mainstream media to present anything that seems to support evolution or undermines the Bible.
When evolutionists claimed they found a meteorite from Mars with life in it, the report received front-page headlines around the world -- and even then-President Clinton got involved. Yet when even secular scientists agreed that there was no evidence of life in that rock, the story received little attention from the press.
Ken Ham, president of Answers in Genesis, says that was not an isolated case of bias. He explains that the secular media -- which he describes as atheistic and anti-Christian -- publishes most anything it can that appears to indoctrinate people and "hits against the Bible."
"It's very hard for us to get anything in there because coming from a biblical, creationist position and worrying about biblical morality [and believing] that the Bible's true, the secular world by and large doesn't want to hear it -- and secular media certainly don't want people to hear it," he says.
Ham says II Peter 3 tells us that men are willingly ignorant, deliberately reject, or choose to disbelieve. Certainly, Ham says, that is being exhibited in the media. And according to Ham, that even extends to scientific journals.
He explains that his ministry, which defends the biblical account of creation, has had to produce its own scientific journals because of censorship by evolutionists. He says it is nearly impossible to have creation research papers published in magazines like Nature or Science.
"They say [our articles] are not scientific [because] they have the creationist philosophy," Ham says. "It doesn't matter how scientific our scientists are, if they come from a creationist perspective, they won't publish them.
"And then they turn around and tell the public [it] can't trust creationists because they don't publish reputable papers in scientific journals," he says. "In fact, they won't let us publish the papers."
Ham says when this occurs, he is often reminded of the passage in scripture which says: "The heart of man is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked."
The model requires the newly deposited rocks to become strong enough within a few months after deposition to stand as mile high cliffs in violation of all reasonable calculations from hydrology, soil mechanics, and strength of materials.
Did this person run some tests to prove his theory? I do not believe this person considered the pressures caused by having an oceanload of water on top of the sediments for over a year.
P.S. Man can create oil in a labratory with completely insignificant amounts of time.
Where is there evidence that water flowed uphill for millions of years?
They'll stop being fossilized after they aren't around anymore. We see a lot of that in the fossil record now. The pattern of appearances and disappearances that we see there says something other than one big flood built those sediments. So do the indications of non-catastropic surface and near-surface conditions (delicate worm and insect burrows, hardened tracks and footprints, raindrop imprints, dried mud cracks) from various different eras up and down the column.
</ end creationist-idiocy posting mode >
Stood there boldly
Flamin' in the sun
Felt like a million eons
Felt like number one
The height of arrogance
I'd never believed that strong
Like a rock
I was eighteen
Didn't have a care
Looking for missing links
Not a fossil to spare
But I was foolish and
Deceived everywhere
Like a rock
My hands were steady
My eyes were clear and bright
My Descent had purpose
My posts were quick and slight
And I held firmly
To what I believed was right
Like a rock
Like a rock, I was right as Darwin could be
Like a rock, nothin' ever got to me
Like a rock, I was something to see
Like a rock
And I flamed arrow straight
Unencumbered by the contrary weight
Of all these Creationists and their facts
I stood proud, I stood tall
High above it all
I still believed in my evolution, religiously
Twenty years now
Where'd they go?
twenty years
I don't know
sit and I wonder sometimes
Where they've gone
And sometimes late at night
When I'm bathed in the monitors' light
The Creationist comes callin' and is mostly right
And I recall
recall
Like a rock. Flamin' arrow straight
Like a rock, pingin' from the gate
Like a rock, carryin' Darwins' weight
Like a crock
Like a rock, the sun upon my skin
Like a rock, hard against the Inherited wind
Like a rock, I see myself down again
Like a rock
This is the classic bait & switch argument. Here's how I respon to that at Creation/Evolution: The Eternal Debate:
Here's the prototypical 2LoT debate:
Creationist: The 2nd Law of Thermodynamics (2LoT) makes evolution impossible. The 2LoT says that everything tends to disorder, but evolution creates order out of disorder. Therefore it's impossible.
Evolutionist: You've got it half-right, but halfway isn't nearly enough if you want to understand the real issue. Living things must keep total disorder at bay on a molecular level, and to do this they must move molecules around. This takes work, which requires energy input and waste heat output. So the 2LoT tells us that all living things must eat. It implies nothing more than that!
Creationist: Oh, um, did I say the 2LoT prevents evolution from happening? I meant that even though the 2LoT does not prevent evolution from happening, it's not sufficient to explain it. There also has to be a "programmed energy transfer mechanism". After all, if you lay in the sun, it doesn't mean you can stop eating - you have to get your energy in specific ways for it to help your body to keep disorder at bay.
Evolutionist: Well, duh. Nice try at changing the subject!
Creationists can be notoriously sloppy about how they structure their arguments, but it seems they are really trying to make two different claims:
- The 2LoT makes abiogenesis impossible
- The 2LoT makes subsequent evolution of structures of increasing complexity impossible
Claim #1 is answered when we realize how small were the first RNA strands that were able to catalyze metabolic functions including their own replication, thus rising above the molecular "noise" to create self-sustaining colonies. (These molecules don't need any outside "information storage mechanism" nor "programmed energy transfer system" to keep the process going.) Some of these are small enough that they could have arisen initially by pure chance.
Once colonies of reproducing chemicals exist, it makes sense to think of them as populations - competing and cooperating within & between populations in a "free market chemical economy". As any economist will tell you, in any free market specialization is inevitable because of Comparative Advantage. There are greater rewards to be found in (and therefore selective pressure towards) specialization. In the chemical "economy", we see that RNA can catalyze reactions, and it can also store information. So can RNA's close cousin, DNA. But DNA is much better at storing information than is RNA, and RNA is a better catalyst than DNA. Proteins & peptides can be more efficient at catalyzing reactions than either RNA or DNA, but generally cannot store the information needed to direct their own replication. There is nothing in the 2nd Law that prohibits these kinds of specialization, except that these chemicals must have a source of energy. The "programmed energy transfer mechanism" that a more complex & tightly-integrated economy would eventually find indispensible, would at first simply be another such advantageous specialization: ATP, a precursor to RNA nucleosides, also turns out to be a very efficient store of energy on its own, and today it's used as a widespread "energy currency" throughout all kinds of cells. Similarly, our economy was originally based on barter, with one useful commodity or service being traded directly for another; but as it evolved certain versatile commodities such as gold and silver became used more as the basis for money than did anything else.
Claim #2 is particularly vague. Creationists never define exactly what they mean by "evolution of structures of increasing complexity". Do they mean species whose genomes have more base pairs than their parent species? More genes than their parent species? More chromosomes than their parent species? More random-looking letter sequences than in their parent species' genes? Higher number of cells in their bodies than that of their parent species? More differentiated cell types than their parent species? More organs than their parent species? More neurons in their brains than their parent species?
Standard, well-known processes explain all of these phenomena - gene duplication and hijacking, recombination, chromosome doubling (mostly in plants), etc. And remember: None of these are prohibited by the 2nd Law, as long as the organisms remember to eat dinner!
That's why creationists' 2nd Law of Thermodynamics arguments fail.
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