Common Creationist Arguments - Pseudoscience

http://www.stardestroyer.net/Creationism/Arguments/Pseudoscience.shtml ^

[oldcats]

Conrgats...part of your post makes some kind of sense....guess the meds must be kicking in huh?
I am sorry that you are so rigid in your "beliefs". I have no problem being a Christian and believing in evolution.
If you're a Christian that means you beleive in God and automatically creation--only
Not me...sorry. Why is deist evolution so difficult for you to comprhend?
I will ask a question that I have posted a few times, but still noone has answered. Do you take the Bible literally...word for word?
The rest of your post again sinks into your typical style, making little sense to anyone but yourrself.
Oldcats

[Tribune7]

No problem there, but the motion is what scientists study, not the creation.

RIGHT! I'm not in the slightest claiming to have "disproved" evolution or saying intelligent people shouldn't consider it -- although I wish some would get off this tendency to place all their chips on that square. I'm saying I'm skeptical of it and the skeptics shouldn't be discounted.

[PatrickHenry]

To communists, everything is a class struggle.

And to Jesse Jackson, everything's about race. But you're right, to a creationist, there is no rationality. Everything's a miracle, beyond the creationist's capacity to comprehend, and the tale you believe is just a matter of one swami competing with another. Hence, all their whacko declarations about how it requires "faith" to believe in evolution; and about how evolution is "just another religion,"; and about Darwin being a divinity, etc. They can't imagine seeing the world in any other way.

[Tribune7]

The brontosaurus -- the most famous of all dinosaurs, the emblem for Sinclair gas and the model for the Flintstone's Dino -- never existed. O.C. Marsh somehow got some head's mixed up and what he thought was a new type of lizard was really just the previously discovered apatosaurus. So, order of discovery takes precedence over fame of name.

I just point this out to illustrate the dangers of depending too much on the reliability of the fossil record.

[VadeRetro]

The brontosaurus -- the most famous of all dinosaurs, the emblem for Sinclair gas and the model for the Flintstone's Dino -- never existed. O.C. Marsh somehow got some head's mixed up and what he thought was a new type of lizard was really just the previously discovered apatosaurus.

Thus we call the animal the apatosaurus today, yes. The animal existed. Does the species we call "dog" exist, or is it just what the Romans used to call "canis?"

The answer is "yes." It's not and either-or question.

[AndrewC]

But you're right, to a creationist, there is no rationality. Everything's a miracle, beyond the creationist's capacity to comprehend, and the tale you believe is just a matter of one swami competing with another. Hence, all their whacko declarations about how it requires "faith" to believe in evolution; and about how evolution is "just another religion,"; and about Darwin being a divinity, etc. They can't imagine seeing the world in any other way.

Where do you hang your boxtop version of a Psych Diploma? You seem to be pretty glib in projecting your values on others. I believe God created everything, therefore I am a creationist. Yet I can comprehend using a slide rule to add, because that really is all a slide rule "does". Some people refuse to admit that fact. Who's the rational one?

[VadeRetro]

"Rhodesian Man", Homo sapiens (archaic) (was Homo rhodesiensis)

Discovered by a laborer in 1921 at Broken Hill in Northern Rhodesia (now Kabwe in Zambia) (Woodward 1921). This was a complete cranium that was very robust, with large brow ridges and a receding forehead. Estimated age is between 200,000 and 125,000 years. The brain size was about 1280 cc.

Prominent Hominid Fossils.

So, what's next?

SO WHERE ARE ALL THE HOMINID FOSSILS FROM BETWEEN 125,000 YEARS AGO AND 100,000 YEARS AGO POST THE PROOF HERE VADE COME ON YOU MUST HAVE A TON OF THEM YEAH RIGHT!

[Tribune7]

Usually, though when examples are provided they are disappointingly anti-climatic. Can you provide an example? Remember, we are talking about macro-evolution. (original)

I can't tell you how this sounds this far along on this thread. gore3000 told me a long time ago that, for all you can tell from a fossil, there were mammary glands on dinosaurs.(response)

That's not what I was getting at. The ability for the theory of evolution to make predictions is cited as evidence of its accuracy. If, using this theory, one were able to consistently turn the descendents of a horse into cows, the debate would be pretty much over. Micro-evolution is consistently observed in nature and laboratories and nobody questions it.

Maybe you can help them out. Why does an evolutionary framework say Mrs. T was a flat-chested as Mr. T?

The point is everybody's guessing. I would say it's impossible to know for certain and we would all be better off admitting that. (There is nothing wrong with speculating but nobody should get upset when one's speculation in challenged.)

On this point, you're supposed to defend how ID really tells you something. To continue to attack evolution here is to stay stuck on the last item, which is where you feel more comfortable.

Again, since I belive in God i would be an intelligent designer even if I were to conclude that macro-evolution is right. I think the question (and glory) for science is always to try figure out how God does things -- sort of like a kid trying to emulate his father albeit one can never forget the rules Dad sets down.

ID seems to me to be more a strong critique of evolution rather than an attempt to find the mechanism of creation which is what evolution (not unfairly) tries to explain.

[AndrewC]

Are you happy to be lumped in Jerry Falwell or Jimmy Swaggart

Why pick on them? God loved and chose David. David had Uriah murdered in order to get his wife. I want to be lumped in with David, loved by God. We, save one, are all fallible and fall short of the glory of God.

[Tribune7]

Marsh thought the brontosaurus was a differnt type of lizard than the apatosaurus. The apatosaurus existed when he found what he thought was the brontosaurus. It's more like calling the fossil of a horse a unicorn because it's skull got mixed up with one from a rhino.

[Tribune7]

Why pick on them? God loved and chose David. David had Uriah murdered in order to get his wife.

David had Uriah murdered because David got Bersheeba pregnant and Uriah -- who felt guilty about leaving his comrades in battle -- wouldn't sleep with her and hence provide cover for the baby. David really wasn't trying to steal the wife.

David still sinned greatly but he's not as much of a slug as that interpretation implies.

[Lurking Libertarian]

I see nowhere in Darwin or any evolutionist the statement that "God created life" and then afterwards the rest of life came about through evolution. If I missed that statement kindly show it to me.

Glad to. The last two paragraphs of ch. 14 of The Origin of Species:

"Authors of the highest eminence seem to be fully satisfied with the view that each species has been independently created. To my mind it accords better with what we know of the laws impressed on matter by the Creator, that the production and extinction of the past and present inhabitants of the world should have been due to secondary causes, like those determining the birth and death of the individual. When I view all beings not as special creations, but as the lineal descendants of some few beings which lived long before the first bed of the Silurian system was deposited, they seem to me to become ennobled. Judging from the past, we may safely infer that not one living species will transmit its unaltered likeness to a distant futurity. And of the species now living very few will transmit progeny of any kind to a far distant futurity; for the manner in which all organic beings are grouped, shows that the greater number of species of each genus, and all the species of many genera, have left no descendants, but have become utterly extinct. We can so far take a prophetic glance into futurity as to foretel that it will be the common and widely-spread species, belonging to the larger and dominant groups, which will ultimately prevail and procreate new and dominant species. As all the living forms of life are the lineal descendants of those which lived long before the Silurian epoch, we may feel certain that the ordinary succession by generation has never once been broken, and that no cataclysm has desolated the whole world. Hence we may look with some confidence to a secure future of equally inappreciable length. And as natural selection works solely by and for the good of each being, all corporeal and mental endowments will tend to progress towards perfection.

"It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. These laws, taken in the largest sense, being Growth with Reproduction; inheritance which is almost implied by reproduction; Variability from the indirect and direct action of the external conditions of life, and from use and disuse; a Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for Life, and as a consequence to Natural Selection, entailing Divergence of Character and the Extinction of less-improved forms. Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved."

[AndrewC]

That's why the people who are still creationists make lousy scientists. They're the people who have stopped asking questions, or maybe never were asking questions.

Bold statements from an armchair quarterback.

[VadeRetro]

The point is everybody's guessing.

No. Not everybody is guessing. There's a powerful line of logic that says the odds of mammaries on Mrs. T. Rex are extremely remote. It's not just the lack of soft-tissue evidence.

Your characterization is accurate for ID. That's the problem. With ID it is just a guess.

I also think it's odd that none of the ID proponents will even acknowledge the existence of the evolutionary logic by reproducing it. The score now stands at 0 for 3 for the experts who happily force predictions on evolution that it doesn't make for itself all the time. ("The fossil record should be nothing but transitionals." "Where are the instances of snakes turning into birds?" "Where are the pre-biotic soups forming today?")

[VadeRetro]

Marsh thought the brontosaurus was a differnt type of lizard than the apatosaurus.

Fossils get reclassified / renamed all the time. The animal depicted on the Sinclair logo existed. You're running around telling people that it didn't.

[Tribune7]

No. Not everybody is guessing. There's a powerful line of logic that says the odds of mammaries on Mrs. T. Rex are extremely remote. It's not just the lack of soft-tissue evidence.

OK, it's not a guess. I'll call it informed speculation. If I had to put money on it, I'd say that the mom T Rex was a flat-chested, egg-laying reptile. But there is nothing wrong with thinking outside the box on this matter either and there are enough missing pieces to allow for it.

[oldcats]

Why pick them?...Well for one, he started this thread of negative association, I don't hear you saying anything to him. I have no problem being associated with some evolutionists.
As in all "groups" there are good and bad. Do you think if you ignore them, they will just go away?
Oldcats

[Tribune7]

The animal depicted on the Sinclair logo existed. You're running around telling people that it didn't.

No, I'm sitting at my computer telling people it didn't. Apatosaurus and brontosaurus were (or would have been if the brontosaurus existed) different dinosaurs. They had different skulls. Don't lose track of the point being made which is the reliability of the fossil record.

[oldcats]

Bold, but accurate.
Sometimes the truth is tough to take isn't it?
Oldcats

[VadeRetro]

If I had to put money on it, I'd say that the mom T Rex was a flat-chested, egg-laying reptile.

You're working your way there, but you're still not showing that ability to take off your creationist hat and put on the evolutionist hat. I think it was jennyp who speculated that probably any of the usual E-side suspects could log on with a new name and convincingly portray a creationist. She doubted that any of the then-usual C-side players could do the mirror-image thing, pretend to be an evolutionist. (We might have to make an exception these days for AndrewC, data lawyer extraordinaire.)

Here's the problem for your oversimplification and a key to your answer. Evolution says that mammals arose from reptiles. Why, some of the dinos even appear to be growing warm-bloodedness to support their increasing levels of physical activity! (We can tell from microscopic analysis of the blood channels in their bones.)

And yet no one reasonably versed in the evolutionary story would happily accept the possibility of mammaries on Mrs. T-rex.