Posted on 07/20/2002 2:08:38 PM PDT by yankeedame
Saturday, July 20, 2002
Creationists gather today:Dinosaurs subject of discussion
By Cindy Schroeder, cschroeder@enquirer.com
The Cincinnati Enquirer
UNION — As children create models of dinosaurs, their parents can search for Biblical references to the giant creatures at a weekend conference hosted by a pro-Creationist ministry that vows to “defend scripture from the very first verse.”
The site of the Answers in Genesis Creation Museum in Boone County is being graded. (Patrick Reddy photo) | ZOOM | Organizers of the program running today and Sunday at Big Bone Baptist Church in Union say the Answers in Genesis family conference is expected to draw between 500 and 600 people within a day's drive of the Tristate. They say it is part of an ongoing series of family conferences that the 8-year-old nonprofit ministry — now building a 50,000-square-foot museum in Hebron — has offered throughout the country to “give (believers) arguments to help debunk evolution.”
Answers in Genesis followers believe the Earth's creatures were created by God and were not the result of an evolutionary process as espoused by scientists such as Charles Darwin.
“Our purpose is to equip Christians to be able to defend Christianity against the evolutionary ideas (or) secular ideas that challenge the Bible,” said Ken Ham, executive director of Answers in Genesis and the conference's keynote speaker. He said organizers will present what they believe is the factual account of the history of the world as presented in Genesis, the first book of the Old Testament.
Like those who promote Intelligent Design, Answers in Genesis followers believe that all life was the result of a creator. However, they carry that theory further, in that they maintain the creator “is the God of the Bible and you can trust the God of the Bible,” Mr. Ham said.
With the help of the writings of “Scriptural Geologists,” Terry Mortenson, a full-time lecturer with Answers in Genesis who has degrees in theology and geology, will attempt to show that dinosaurs walked the Earth with man.
Arnold Miller, a professor of geology at the University of Cincinnati, challenged participants to “go out and examine the evidence themselves,” rather than allow others to interpret the evidence for them.
“I'm all for Answers in Genesis having every opportunity to say what they want,” Mr. Miller said. “But I would challenge anyone who goes to this conference to demand direct positive evidence that the creation of life took place over six days in 4004 B.C. or whatever they say. People should ask, "What's the evidence? Let's hear it.'
“It's one thing to provide misleading characterizations in scientific debates. It's another to say that the answers (to issues such as how life began) really are in Genesis.”
I'll describe mine. I have far too high an opinion of God to believe that the clowns of so-called "creation science" are speaking for Him.
Incrementalism.
Start at the earliest level(s) and keep adding until it's in the universities.
The PostHoleDiggers then reproduce themselves.
Man has always lived near water. The "whole earth" in that context meant the inhabited part; we are now living on areas which were viewed as plateaus prior to the flood and were sparsely if at all inhabited. The waters of the flood have not gone anywhere; there was simply not as much water on the Earth before the flood as there is now. As to salt, that apparently came with the flood. There is no reasonable theory as to a source of the salt in the oceans, on this planet at least.
This is an old talk.origins archive post. Basically, I had challenged the talk.origins crew (bandarlog) to see if they could tell the difference between ideological writing samples from the famous racist and evolutionist, Chuck Darwin, and the famous racist and evolutionist, Adolf Hitler. A champion (Pflanze) from amongst the bandarlog arose to take up the challenge:
Subject: Re: Darwin/Hitler Test
From: medved@access.digex.net (Ted Holden)
Date: 1997/05/11
Message-ID: <3375fdd4.143923491@newsreader.digex.net>
Newsgroups: alt.fan.publius,alt.fan.splifford,alt.christnet,talk.origins
On 11 May 1997 12:06:52 GMT, cwpf@news.utk.edu (Charles W Pflanze) wrote:
Therefore, here, too, the struggle among themselves arises less from inner aversion than from hunger and love. In both cases, Nature looks on calmly, with satisfaction, in fact. In the struggle for daily bread all those who are weak and sickly or less determined succumb, while the struggle of the males for the female grants the right or opportunity to propagate only to the healthiest. And struggle is always a means for improving a species' health and power of resistance and, therefore, a cause of its higher development.
>This is more likely Darwin's work. Anyone doing experimental or
>developmental work in biology knows and uses all the the above
>observations. What's the big deal?
"At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace the savage races throughout the world...
>This is more likely Hitler's work. Now we read about civilized races
>exterminating "savage races."
My reply:
Congratulations, you have earned an incredible distinction for yourself; you can tell your grandchildren that you were the first to flunk the official alt.fan.splifford Hitler/Darwin test. In years to come, after evolutionism has been laugh to scorn and is no longer taught in civilized nations, your name will be famous. Textbooks will note that, once it became obvious that even a genius such as Charles Pflanze could not tell the difference between Darwin's writings and those of Adolf Hitler, it was pretty much all over but the shouting.
I am also a geologist/geochemist and was fortunate enough to have had as a mentor a very fine Christian geology professor who believed that evolution was the mechanism God chose to create the Universe and all life within.
My personal belief is that if God did create the Universe, then He necessarily must follow the very laws He created, thus I believe evolution to be the best model we have to date of the origins of life.
I also believe we are not the only other life that exists in the Universe.
Anything else you would care to know about me?
That's the reason for the effort to rid American academia of evolutionism.
For the lowdown on Chuck Darwin, stupidest white man of all time and his BS theory, and on the continuing efforts of feebs like Steve Gould and Niles Eldredge to keep the charade going for another generation:
My world? Okay. Anyway, I have no desire to give you a course in biochemistry, even if I were qualified to do so. If you care to learn about biology, evolution, and the structure of DNA, there are probably thousands of well-written books produced by experts on the subject. If you prefer to remain in your world and believe that all such works are bogus, that's your choice.
You are apparently refering to his book Dialogo. I will qualify my statement: I didn't mean to imply Galileo never published. What I had in mind were incidences like what happened between him and Johannes Kepler, when Kepler asked Galileo for one of his telescopes, but being an @ss he refused to give Kepler one. Galileo would pull stunts like write his discoveries to Kepler only in anagrams so Kepler couldn't understand them. What I should have said was Galileo very rarely shared his discoveries.
Indeed, it was the publication of that book which triggered the Inquisition's actions against Galileo. The pretext for the proceeding was, in effect, publishing without permission, but the documents to prove that charge have never surfaced.
Pope Urban VIII suspected that the character 'Simplicio' (or Simplicius; I forget which) was a caricature of himself. I believe Urban initiated the trial for personal reasons and that most of the ten Inquisitors couldn't care less.
The actual charges, and the plea that they extracted from Galileo (said to be under threat of torture) was all about his "heresy" in teaching about the solar system: Heresy charges against Galileo and Galileo's confession.
I will concede the point that the "official charges" were of heresy. However, a number of high Church officials and Jesuit astronomers agreed with Galileo, and many had refuted the Ptolemaic system even before Galileo had been born. (Being a Lutheran, I am thoroughly embarassed that Martin Luther called Copernicus a "fool" for supporting a sun-centered system.) So the official charges were not unanimously supported.
Galileo himself was a commited Catholic and saw no disagreement between science and faith. You no doubt have heard of many scientists who held the same view, such as Kepler, Newton, Pasteur, Linnaeus, Faraday, Babbage, Dalton, and many others.
You might read this (as I have done): The Galileo Affair, by Maurice A. Finocchiaro, University of California Press, 1989. It's probably a more scholarly treatment of the subject than an article in a creationist journal.
Unless you have read the Creation T.J., you are hardly in a position to make that assertion. However, I will take my own advice and look up Finochiaro's book.
Of course, I'll concede the point if you can produce the personal hate mail you've gotten from Him.
It's really unfortunate you have to resort to name-calling. Judging from your Galileo post, you seem to be smart enough to defend your position without having to call people "clowns".
Interestingly enough, there is an undeniable parrot-like quality to your posts.
One has to infer that from all the problems idiots have in life, like getting laughed at for being sucked into stupid ideologies like evolutionism...
It's probably true that the Pope felt insulted, and probably for good reason. And as you point out elsewhere, Galileo did have his supporters. Nevertheless, he was forced to confess heresy, his book was banned, and he died under house arrest. Those are the facts. There's not a lot of room to sweep this event under the carpet. It's one of the most momentous episodes in the intellectual history of the West.
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