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On 7/17/2010 11:54 AM, Warp wrote:
> Why do creationists (with which I'm referring to certain specific dogmas
> rather than "christians" or "believers" in general) continuously confuse
> two completely different and separate fields of science, namely astronomy
> and biology?
>
> You constantly hear claims like "evolutionists claim that the universe
> began with a 'big bang' from nothing" and such.
>
> The so-called Big Bang Theory is part of the field of science called
> astronomy. The Theory of Evolution is part of the field called biology.
> Astronomy and biology are both natural sciences, but that's approximately
> where their commonalities end. Otherwise they don't have about anything
> in common. They are completely different fields of science.
>
> It seems that there's a misconception among creationists that "the theory
> of evolution" is a catch-all term which encompasses, among many other things,
> the Big Bang theory, stellar evolution, abiogenesis and biological evolution.
> All kinds of claims are made about the "theory of evolution" which have
> nothing to do with it and belong to completely unrelated fields of science
> such as astronomy and astrophysics.
>
> Of course "evolution" is a relatively narrow field of science (compared
> to the whole) which encompasses a lot less than creationists seem to think.
>
> Another (perhaps "lesser", but definitely more common) misconception seems
> to be that the theory of evolution claims that life formed from non-organic
> elements. Of course the theory of evolution says no such thing. They are
> confusing it with abiogenesis, which is the theory of how and why life could
> have formed from non-life. The theory of evolution only encompasses *already
> living* groups of organisms, not how they became into existence in the first
> place.
>
> But that confusion can be forgiven, as the subject matters are quite
> related (namely, how modern life came into existence). What is less
> forgivable is confusing two completely different branches of science
> which have nothing in common (ie. biology and astronomy).
>
> Do they do that on purpose or something?
>
First, for the wackos actually making this argument, Evolution was seen
as the "weak link" in science. The point wasn't to just overturn
evolution, but every science *including* astronomy, where it conflicted
with a literal interpretation of the Bible. This can be seen pretty
clearly in the recent gibberish out of the Disco Institute:
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2010/07/physicists_brace_yourselves_fo.php
The whole point is that **all of science**, from astronomy, to physics,
to chemistry, and especially evolution, is **universally** wrong, if it
contradicts their crazy assed idea that everything in the Bible is
absolutely 100% true, and actually all happened 6,000-10,000 years ago.
Second, Abiogenesis is only not part of the concept because its a) not
well understood, and b) not fully replicable, never mind observable.
However, as I pointed out at least once, we have things like Prions,
which, if malformed, quite happily turn damn near anything they touch
into more prions, so its hardly impossible for simpler-than-life
chemicals to propogate, on a massive scale, and be damn close to the
base amino acids and other chemicals that *do* happen without biology,
have been created, in incomplete, but numerous forms, in lab conditions,
without existing biological organisms involved, etc. The only question
is, when, how, and what?
Finally, its also fairly clear from some recent experiments that not
even the DNA we have is *necessary*, it just happens to be the DNA we
ended up with. There are dozens of other chemical forms that could have
done the same job, and some early experiments with those have shown that
a) they can be replicated by cellular mechanisms, b) they can code for
the same processes, and c) something could end up having the same double
helix, yet share not one *single* protein that we have to code for
features *in* that helix. And, that is presuming that something other
than a helix isn't possible too.
In short, the gaps they whine about keep closing, but the strategy goes
forward. For them, distance galaxies "must" have all formed at the same
time, they "must" only appear to be billions of years old, the dinosaurs
"must" have all drowned in a giant flood, people "must have" lived side
beside with them, all the evidence for an ancient earth "must" be a
misinterpretation of the facts, and it doesn't matter if the science
contradicting these things it the science behind biology, or astronomy,
or even fracking origami. If it says something that contradicts their
religion, its *wrong*, and must therefor be part of the vast Darwinian
conspiracy, because "evolution" is the "weak point" in the whole mess,
according to them.
Mind, this is a bit like trying to defeat a porcupine, or a skunk, by
attacking its ass, instead of its underbelly, but no one said these
people have a damn clue what they are doing. To them, since evolution,
or their badly stupid understanding of it, undermines the most
*important* idea of their faith, i.e., special creation of man, separate
from all other creatures, the idea that it may not be the weak point at
all probably offends them 100 times more than the theory itself. Thus,
there is no other possible conclusion for them, other than, "Either
Darwinism falls, and with it all the other lies of science, that we
imagine are based on it, or we do, and we can't since God is real and
everything in the Bible is true."
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On 18-7-2010 8:13, Warp wrote:
>
> (And, in fact, the big bang theory doesn't actually say that there was
> nothing and then suddenly something appeared. It just says that everything
> was initially compressed in a singularity. AFAIK there's currently no
> widely accepted theory about what happened *before* that.)
Big Bang theory says that at the moment of the Big Bang, time was
created. Asking what was before is nonsensical. On par with 'what is
outside the universe', 'how cold is -280C' and the one Hawkins uses that
temporary escaped me.
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"Warp" <war### [at] tag povray org> wrote in message
news:4c41fc71@news.povray.org...
> The so-called Big Bang Theory is part of the field of science called
> astronomy. The Theory of Evolution is part of the field called biology.
> Astronomy and biology are both natural sciences, but that's approximately
> where their commonalities end. Otherwise they don't have about anything
> in common. They are completely different fields of science.
To be the devil's (or god's) advocate, why should a christian accept that as
a fundamental demarcation? Science may say they are completely different
fields, but religion definitely does not say so. For those accepting
creation as written in their books, it's all a single intervowen creation
event with god at the helm, and it's the scientists that are on the wrong by
compatmentalizing their explanations and pretending that they can make the
questions go away by designating it as some other scientist's problem.
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somebody wrote:
> To be the devil's (or god's) advocate, why should a christian accept that as
> a fundamental demarcation?
For the same reason the Christians don't like getting lumped in with
Hinduism, Norse mythology, and voodoo.
> Science may say they are completely different
> fields, but religion definitely does not say so.
Because if you're talking about "evolution", you should use the term the
scientists mean by it, not the term the christians mean by it, because the
scientists invented the term.
--
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
C# - a language whose greatest drawback
is that its best implementation comes
from a company that doesn't hate Microsoft.
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On 7/18/2010 4:17 PM, Darren New wrote:
> somebody wrote:
>> To be the devil's (or god's) advocate, why should a christian accept
>> that as
>> a fundamental demarcation?
>
> For the same reason the Christians don't like getting lumped in with
> Hinduism, Norse mythology, and voodoo.
>
> > Science may say they are completely different
>> fields, but religion definitely does not say so.
>
> Because if you're talking about "evolution", you should use the term the
> scientists mean by it, not the term the christians mean by it, because
> the scientists invented the term.
>
Ah, well. That's simple. They generally use "Darwinism", which, with
very rare exceptions, some of which are also borderline ID people
themselves, ***isn't even the scientific term***. Problem solved. lol
Well, except of the unfortunate fact that they still insist on claiming
Evolution "is" Darwinism, but that is a bit like a Conservative,
demanding everyone obey their mythology based edicts, (whose principle
ideals tend to be, according to studies of how differently people
actually do think, purity, authority and loyalty), calling a Liberal
(primary focus being fairness and harm, with authority and loyalty being
like "bottom of the list"), who advocates for careful consideration of
consequences, the "fascist", because, well.. they *demand* that everyone
ignore the mythology. Where, maybe suggest it is harmful, or imply there
might be a problem with it, or imply people don't have to all follow
it.. You know, fascist, gun toting, 'forceful', stuff like that. lol
But, yeah. In general, it would certainly be nice if they didn't try to
borrow everyone else's words, mangle them beyond all recognition, then
insist that *they* are the ones being oppressed by the people protesting it.
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andrel <byt### [at] gmail com> wrote:
> Big Bang theory says that at the moment of the Big Bang, time was
> created.
Are you sure about that? The Big Bang theory cannot go back to the
initial singularity because there are no established theories which could
be used to describe what happened when the universe was smaller than a
certain (larger-than-zero) size. As wikipedia puts it: "there is no physical
model that can explain the earliest moments of the universe's existence
(Planck time) because of a lack of a consistent theory of quantum gravity."
There's thus a finite limit beyond which current theories cannot go
because of lacking theories. Hence it's impossible to say what exactly
happened before that.
--
- Warp
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Patrick Elliott <sel### [at] npgcable com> wrote:
> the dinosaurs "must" have all drowned in a giant flood
Not if you believe Kent Hovind, who claims that dinosarus didn't go extint
at all, but there are specimens alive even today (and no, he's not talking
about birds, but actual cretaceous period dinosaurs). His arguments are,
basically a combination of cryptozoology, taking known hoaxes at face value,
as well as an outright conspiracy theory (about scientists ignoring and
destroying evidence because dinosaurs being alive would, according to Hovind,
somehow discredit evolution, even though he doesn't explain why).
Btw, does someone know how Young Earth creationists explain what killed
all the trilobites?
(Trilobites were probably as numerous as cocroaches today, and claiming
that they were killed in the flood would be a somewhat hilarious claim
taking into account that trilobites were *marine* arthropods.)
--
- Warp
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somebody <x### [at] y com> wrote:
> "Warp" <war### [at] tag povray org> wrote in message
> news:4c41fc71@news.povray.org...
> > The so-called Big Bang Theory is part of the field of science called
> > astronomy. The Theory of Evolution is part of the field called biology.
> > Astronomy and biology are both natural sciences, but that's approximately
> > where their commonalities end. Otherwise they don't have about anything
> > in common. They are completely different fields of science.
> To be the devil's (or god's) advocate, why should a christian accept that as
> a fundamental demarcation? Science may say they are completely different
> fields, but religion definitely does not say so. For those accepting
> creation as written in their books, it's all a single intervowen creation
> event with god at the helm, and it's the scientists that are on the wrong by
> compatmentalizing their explanations and pretending that they can make the
> questions go away by designating it as some other scientist's problem.
If they try to discredit evolution in rational and scientific terms (as
many Young Earth creationists try to do), then at least they should get
their terminology right.
--
- Warp
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Warp wrote:
> Patrick Elliott <sel### [at] npgcable com> wrote:
>> the dinosaurs "must" have all drowned in a giant flood
>
> Not if you believe Kent Hovind, who claims that dinosarus didn't go extint
> at all, but there are specimens alive even today (and no, he's not talking
> about birds, but actual cretaceous period dinosaurs). His arguments are,
> basically a combination of cryptozoology, taking known hoaxes at face value,
> as well as an outright conspiracy theory (about scientists ignoring and
> destroying evidence because dinosaurs being alive would, according to Hovind,
> somehow discredit evolution, even though he doesn't explain why).
To be fair, AFAIK even most young-earth creationists think that Kent
Hovind is a bit of a nut and people shouldn't pay much attention to him.
> Btw, does someone know how Young Earth creationists explain what killed
> all the trilobites?
>
I don't think there's really a standard and excepted explanation for
this, but the most common seems to be that the flood resulted not just
in water, but also in a great deal of ocean volcanic activity, as
perhaps hinted to in the line:
"on that day all the springs of the great deep burst forth"
Thus the extinction is attributed to massive water turbulence, changes
in temperature, change in water salinity, etc. I believe the thought is
that some sea creatures (like fish and whales) were able to survive
through this while others weren't.
It's also worth noting that in this particular case there isn't an
accepted scientific (as in real scientific, not creation-scientific)
explanation as to why trilobites went extinct either, so it's probably
not the best example of a question to stump creationists on.
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Kevin Wampler <wam### [at] u washington edu> wrote:
> It's also worth noting that in this particular case there isn't an
> accepted scientific (as in real scientific, not creation-scientific)
> explanation as to why trilobites went extinct either, so it's probably
> not the best example of a question to stump creationists on.
Science doesn't really need an explanation of why they went extint.
(It would, of course, be very *interesting* to know the exact reason,
but it's not really a *necessity* to know it to support any scientific
theory.) Apparently 250 million years ago something happened that killed
tons of species, including all species of trilobites. During millions of
years extintion events happen. It is a known fact, however, that they did.
Creationists, on the other hand, do have a stronger need to explain what
killed them because they claim that it happened just some thousands of years
ago. From the tens of thousands of different species of trilobites not even
one survived to this day. What exactly killed them?
Creationists also claim that dating methods are unreliable and give random
results. They would have to, however, explain why all dating methods give
*consistently* the same result: Trilobites went extint significantly earlier
than dinosaurs (250 vs. 65 million years). Even if we accepted that the dating
methods are unreliable in determining the exact age of the fossils, the fact
that they *consistently* give the result that trilobite fossils are older than
dinosaur fossils is a strong indicative that trilobites died way before
dinosaurs did.
So at which point did they go extint, and why?
--
- Warp
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