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.”
Regardless of what the Nazis believed (and a quote would be nice, but heck I know I will not get it) fact is that man did not descend from Neanderthal. The truth that in addition to other evidence there have been three (3) separate DNA analysis that show positively that man did not and could not have descended from Neanderthals. As to the Nazi racist views, they were not Christian, regardless of who those folk you said promoted racism were. The Nazi views were completely Darwinian stating that some races were superior to others - just as Darwin himself said.
Well, Galileo did not spend his life in jail. It is totally ludicrous to equate the light punishment of one man with the murder of over a hundred million innocent people by atheists. Don't you have any sense of proportion?????
I'd be interested in seeing a debate between believers of this delightful logical fallacy, and the people who think that Franz Liszt was responsible for Nazism.
Did you ever notice there's a difference between "cannot" and "did not"?
ID predicts the total interrelatedness of organisms. Evolution predicts a stochastic organization of the life functions.
Ever notice that evolution doesn't do this?
Ever learned to count to two?
This is a partial list (it omits Ghengis Kahn, for example.) Note that many such events happened long before the time of Darwin.
I've posted this before, but it's appropriate at this point:
I've been saying all along, but you FOOLISH SIMPLETONS won't listen, the arch-fiend who was responsible for all the horrors of the 20th century wasn't Darwin, it was that evil, demented, science-minded, satanic monster, Thomas Edison! Think about it. Edison altered the divinely-ordained darkness. He diabolically illuminated the night. Since then, we've had coarse music, vulgar dancing, teen pregnancy, atom bombs, falling church attendence, homosexual rights, drug usage, and ever-higher crime rates. Hitler used electric lights! Stalin used electric lights. Mao used electric lights! Castro uses electric lights. Isn't the pattern obvious? Wake up, you idiots!!
Gore, I've corrected you on this before. Darwin did thousands and thousands of experiments. He could barely leave the house he would have so many experiments running simultaneously. What's you deal? Do you really clear your mind of this stuff every time a new CREVO thread starts?
Have you ever read a single biography of Darwin? How do you have the hutzpa to hold forth like an authority when you are so glaringly ignorant of the most basic facts?
Seriously, what's your deal?
And don't forget its revival by the theosophist W Scott Elliot, which formed the basis of Hitler's racist anthropology. Combine it with Hoerbiger's Welteislehre, and you have pretty much the whole Nazi doctrine of the individual special creation of successive "Root Races" of mankind, and their successive destruction.
Don't forget the Nazi's prime architect of racial philosophy, Alfred Rosenberg. From the little bit I've dipped into his stultifying and tedious "masterwork" Myth of the Twentieth Century, he doesn't seem to mention evolution at all. Instead he uses the language of creation. He writes of the various races being separately "created," and of each having a unique "soul". Some, particularly the Aryans, are created to war and to rule. Most others are created to be slaves. But the whole thing is so steeped in mysticism I can't figure out what, if anything, he means to be saying about the literal biological origin of races.
In this thread, we have several creationists who seem to be reviving Nazi doctrine, for instance their insistance that homo sapiens and homo neanderthalensis could not have shared a common ancestor is exactly what the Nazis believed.
You see, guilt by association is a game two can play.
Not a very one though. History is more interesting when each figure is considered in all their fullness and individuality. Incuriously shoving historical figures into pigeon holes defined by prejudice and bigotry, with no attempt to made to know them, is boring. It is the game many are playing here, however.
I am a purveyor of creation science. Am I therefore a "clown"?
I personally know several of these so-called "clowns", and none of their ideas or behavior merit the label of "clown" being given to them. What do you cite as your proof of calling them "clowns"? What makes them "clownish"? Disagreeing with them does not count. I strongly disagreed with Gould, Sagan, and Asimov, but I do acknowledge they were brilliant men.
Dr. David Menton (creationist "clown" who holds a PhD in Cellular Biology) told me that on many occasions he has debated a professor friend of his. Dr. Menton said, "Our debates were often lively. We would disagree, he'd call me a liar, and then I'd take him out to lunch."
I don't think it does.
We do not indulge in ad hominem remarks on thie web site. Permit me to refer you to a recent article in Scientific American which has enough information to allow the thoughtful observer to reach his own conclusions: 15 Answers to Creationist Nonsense . We had a thread recently, with over 2,000 posts on that article. There was another thread about a response published by "Answers in Genesis" on their website. It's all been thrashed out here on FR, and I'm fairly certain that no one has changed his mind as a result of all this. I haven't changed mine, and I suppose you won't change yours. That's how it goes.
A candle a day keeps the devil away?
Didn't I tell you??? Edison is the all-time monster. Darwin has been unfairly blamed for the horrors of Edisonism.
"I am also convinced that science pursues a foolish and possibly fatal policy when it tries to keep up its bluff of omniscience in matters of which it is still woefully ignorant. Sooner or later, the intelligent public is going to call that bluff."-- Dr. Earnest Hooton, Harvard University
(author of "Apes, Men, and Morons"
"Any profession that does not supply its own criticism and iconoclasm will discover that someone else will do the job, and usually in a way it does not like."
-- Norman Macbeth
author of "Darwin Retried" An Appeal to Reason"
From Carol Hugunin, a biologist on the staff of 21'st Century Science:
Noting:
"For more than a century, Darwin has dominated the biological sciences, but his hypothesis for the evolution of life does not cohere with natural history and leads to a philosophical morass."
What would you figure the final fall-back position of the evolutionists will eventually be after it finally reaches the point at which they cannot even talk about evolution without inviting laughter and ridicule?
I fully expect, within the next five years, to hear from the talk.origins crowd and others like them, something like:
"Well, Darwin may not have been much of a scientist, and evolution was obviously a crock of BS, but Darwin was basically a good boy who simply went wrong, and he treated his dog good and his mother loved him..."
Don't believe it. The Bible itself tells us that is unlikely:
17 Even so every good tree bringeth forth good fruit; but a corrupt tree bringeth forth evil fruit.
Hugunin delves into the social and political melieu which spawned Darwinism, and the story which emerges is somewhat different from the picture evolutionists would have us see of Darwin, to say the least:
In an entry to his diary dated October 1838, the affable Darwin tells exactly how he came up with this hypothesis:
"I happened to read for amusement Malthus On Popula- tion, and being well prepared to appreciate the struggle for existence which everywhere goes on from long-con- tinued observation of the habits of animals and plants, it at once struck me that under these circumstances favor- able variat{ons would tend to be preserved, and un- favourable ones to be. destroyed. The result of this would be the formation of new species. Here, then, I had at least got a theory by which to work."Parson Thomas Malthus, an economist working at the British East India Company college in Haileybury, England, had insisted that population (of men and of other living crea- tures) tends to expand geometrically, while food supply ex- pands arithmetically. Hence, the Malthusian world is so arranged that in the natural course of things, horrible crises must occur as population presses against fixed resources. This cycle can be alleviated only by the depopulating effects of "vice and misery"-that is, nonreproductive sexual activity and death-dealing poverty. To cull the human flock, neo- Maithusians advocated active social measures beyond accep- tance of starvation and disease.
The original full title of Darwin's 1859 opus, it should be noted, is
Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life. Francis Galton, Charles Darwin's cousin, went a step further than Malthus in explicitly proposing that the human race should be culled on the basis of the inferiority of certain sub- groups, thus winning his title as the father of British eugenics. With the support of T.H. Huxley, Darwin's publicist, Darwin's son Leonard wrote The Need for Eugenic Reform, "dedicated to the memory of my father. For if I had not believed that he would have wished me to give such help as I could towards making his life's work of service to mankind, I should never have been led to write this book."
As for Malthus, publication of his dogmas led to the enact- ment of the 1830s Poor Laws in England, which abolished "outdoor relief"-the equivalent of today's welfare pay- ments-and forced the unemployed into workhouses,. where they slaved for scant rations of food until they took sick and died. This was the practical corollary of Malthus's precept that charity (or, even worse in his view, policies of elevating a na- tion's per capita living standards and productive capabilities) would simply lead to disastrous overpopulation.
Like Alexander von Humboldt, Malthus and the East India Company knew that statecraft can transmit the benefits of sci- entific progress throughout society. The United States was al- ready a living example of geometric expansion of new re- sources when Malthus assembled his Essay Humboldt and his associates devoted themselves to promoting that statecraft, while the Malthusians devoted themselves to opposing it.
Malthus's collaborator Sir James Mackintosh at Hailey- bury was the father-in-law of Darwin's cousin Hensleigh Wedgwood; Charles himself married his Wedgwood cousin and lived on his wife's Wedgwood wealth. The Darwin- Wedgwood~cIan were among the leading merchant-banking clans with immense control over colonial raw materials.
Can we simply ignore those dark, Malthusian thoughts, or are they perhaps relevant to the scientific issues? It is generally said that Darwin synthesized and subsumed the work of the scientists such as Humboldt who preceded him, but can this be the case, when we consider how at variance their funda- mental assumptions really are?
Man, in Darwins view, is just another beast and thus the human herd might be culled (via eugenics) just as one might cull a herd of cattle. And once one tries to justify eugenics, in- evitably the claim is made that some groups of men, for rea- sons of skin color, reIigion or whatever - are more fit than another.
Compare Darwinian eugenics to Alexander Humboldt's view: Humboldt insists that man and human civilization are of a higher order that is not dominated by the same kind of law- fulness that characterized the evolution of life up to that point.
Humboldt, Dana, and others of the continental science tradi- tion assert not only that man is the crowning glory of the process we call evolution, but also that man goes beyond this, taking evolution into a different, a higher realm.
This is very much a hot issue today. The much publicized book The Bell Curve, for example, by scientists Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein, claims that human beings of darker pigmentation are just not as "fit" as those of lighter pigmenta- tion. The research for the book was supported by The Pioneer Fund, which had its start in the eugenics movement of the first half of this century. Before World War II, Harry Laughlin, leader of the Pioneer Fund, wanted the "lowest" 10 percent of the human population sterilized, in order to better build a race of human thoroughbreds. Laughlin and his Fund distributed Hitler's propaganda films in American schools, while Hitler put the Darwinian implications of eugenics into practice in slave labor camps.
Other contemporary researchers with a eugenics theme in- clude neuroscientist Xandra Breakerfield at Harvard University, who is trying to prove that violent behavior is genetic, while others are trying to prove that homosexual behavior is genetic.
At this point, it ought to be clear that no scientist studying something as broad as the origin and evolution of life can to- tally avoid issues that have political, philosophical, and reli- gious connotations. As much as such scientists might want to stay out of politics, the political questions are raised because of the very nature of the underlying assumptions adopted.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.