My first thought was "how can this be a problem for any creationist"? When you have a magical theory of origination, there are no problems (well, other that that your theory is based on magic.) Remember God is wiser than all of us put together and works in strange and mysterious ways. So what really could surprise or falsify anything a theist thinks?

The only ones who have to work at making sense are those who value making sense, atheists. If you a want a natural account of anything you can be wrong and you'd have to care. By switching to theism you would no longer have to worry about being wrong, and even if people thought you were .. you wouldn't have to care. Once you become safely swaddled in the imaginary world of the theist, reality becomes optional.

(June 11, 2012 at 11:30 pm)teaearlgreyhot Wrote: I've actually seen Ken Ham try to use the Platypus as evidence against evolution.

Yup. Ken went to the US because even the fundies here laugh at him.

I don't think anything is truly the Creationists' nightmare. You can declare that God made or did anything if you really want o.O

(June 12, 2012 at 3:53 am)Godschild Wrote: All I can say, get digg'in evolutionist, them fossils might be out there some where.

Yes, they are out there somewhere.

Obdurodon insignis, Obdurodon dicksoni, Steropodon galmani, Kollikodon ritchiei

During the Miocene and Pleistocene the existence of giant echidnas is evident. Three extinct species are known; two assigned to the genus Megalibgwilia. Several practically complete skulls have been found in caves in South Australia of the species Megalibgwilia ramsayi.

(June 12, 2012 at 3:53 am)Godschild Wrote: Show me the fossils please. Until that the platypus was created.

Major logic fail.

Even if there weren't any fossils, that doesn't mean your particular creation fable is true by default.

But since there are quite a few monotreme fossils, the point is moot.

(June 12, 2012 at 3:53 am)Godschild Wrote: How does a platypus give creationist any problem at all, the evolutionist needs to find the fossils that lead up to this very unusual mammal, then the creationist might have a problem. God knew evolution was coming down the line, He made the platypus to drive them nuts, and He has done that. All I can say, get digg'in evolutionist, them fossils might be out there some where.

See, Creationists can explain literally anything by just going "God did it" or "God planned for that to happen". You literally can't disprove God just like you can't disprove the Flying Spaghetti Monster and His Noodly Appendages!! lol

In reality, we find fossils everywhere of evolutionary forms of all kinds of animals, but of course I'm sure most of the attention is on human beings, for obvious reasons.

I'm not quite sure how anyone can really claim evolution doesn't exist in the year 2012. I think the education system simply doesn't spend enough time on this topic.

Quote:I'm not quite sure how anyone can really claim evolution doesn't exist in the year 2012.

G-C is helped a lot by being a total idiot.

(June 12, 2012 at 4:41 am)Godschild Wrote: Show me the fossils please. Until that the platypus was created.

The "I don't know, therefore God" stance isn't the best one to take. Before you know it, God will have to take another step back into the shadows when the platypus' past is uncovered. Just sayin'...

(June 13, 2012 at 1:33 am)FallentoReason Wrote:

(June 12, 2012 at 4:41 am)Godschild Wrote: Show me the fossils please. Until that the platypus was created.

The "I don't know, therefore God" stance isn't the best one to take. Before you know it, God will have to take another step back into the shadows when the platypus' past is uncovered. Just sayin'...

hehe

The sad thing is, all species are transitional forms — transitioning from something, or to something else — so if a creationist wants to see a transitional form, all they have to do is look in the mirror.

(Although, looking at their spouses might underscore the point more dramatically.)



Each Other
Old-Earth creationists think the Young-Earthers are too zealous and dogmatic, even for them. Young-Earthers know the Old-Earthers and Multiple-Catastrophists have given in to “liberal” (if not to say Satanic) influences. Some years there are multiple “Ark-hunting” expeditions to Turkey, each of which thinks the others are obstructing the progress of “Bible science.”

Stars
…somehow have grown a lot bigger and moved much farther away, so that by now it seems foolish to expect a sizable fraction of them to fall to Earth, as predicted in Revelation.

The Earth
…on the other hand, to test Man’s faith in the literal veracity of scripture, has shrunk to become much smaller than the sun, and has taken to circling the latter, instead of vice versa, as originally established. Furthermore (confirming its sinful nature), it has floated up off its pillars or foundations, lost its four corners, and become a silly ball, on which there just is no possible mountaintop from which one could see all nations of the Earth.

Ice Ages
Very inconvenient! They have to have occurred since the Flood, since, according to creationists, the surface of the Earth was reworked by the Flood (to create, for instance, the Grand Canyon practically overnight), which would have messed up all those marks of glaciers on the landscape. That means mile-thick ice sheets had to advance and retreat again and again, across half the Northern Hemisphere, with the speed of freight trains.

The Apostle Paul
Dustin Huwe points out that in 1 Timothy 1:4 and Titus 3:9, Paul advises us to ignore “fables and endless genealogies.” The genealogies of Gen 10, Chr 1-9, Mt 1, and Lk 3 are one of the key ways creationists have ‘proved’ the Earth to be about 6,000 years old. Secondly, in Titus 1:14, Paul tells us to ignore Jewish fables. Wouldn’t that mean most of the Old Testament, if not all of Genesis?

Other Cultures
Like those damn Egyptians that didn’t seem to notice a world-wide Flood, though they were around at the time and had a liking for writing everything down (they’d write down what people wore to parties, darn it, why would they fail to note a Flood that covered the entire Earth? AND they were there before and after the time of the Flood, so either they stayed there, high and dry, or one of Noah’s sons, who was not Egyptian at all, emigrated to the Nile and reinstituted the dead and damned Egyptian civilization perfectly, including the practices that got them damned in the first place!). Or the Asian Indians, or the Chinese, or any of the other cultures that also possessed written histories, yet failed to note any of the cataclysmic acts of the Judaeo-Christian god. (Satan must have told them to not write it down… yep… that must be it.)

DNA
Nasty stuff. It’s really a shame that it had to turn up and confirm predictions of relationships made by evolutionary theory perfectly. And what a dirty trick to have human DNA fit right into the distribution, right next door to the chimps’! It’s just not fair. It almost looks like Someone arranged the whole thing just to make evolution appear to be true.

Ribs
…human ribs, that is, present a real problem. I’ve been told, on good authority (by creationists, whose scientific authority is the Bible, and what could be more authoritative?), that men have one less rib than women, because one of Adam’s ribs was removed to mold into Eve. My creationist informant has generally become confused upon being asked if that means one less pair of ribs, or just one rib missing from one side. Then my instructor in human origins becomes red in the face and defensive, if not to say hostile, when asked if he has ever actually counted ribs on male and female human skeletons, living or deceased. None that I’ve met have ever actually tried this simplest of scientific experiments, which could go a long way toward proving a testable prediction of creationism.

NEWSFLASH: I’ve just been informed by a rock-solid creationist that the latest discovery of “creation science” is that men used to have fewer ribs than women, but they don’t anymore! Perhaps creationists have unearthed a whole bunch of ancient skeletons, with all the males being short a rib. An appeal: PLEASE reveal this evidence to the rest of the world, so that we all can be brought into the Light of True Bible Science!

The Order of Creation
…is a bottomless can of worms for literal creationists, especially if one takes literally and in their most obvious meanings both Genesis 1 and 2, which don’t match in many particulars. But consider just a couple of minor difficulties in the first chapter. For one, the light of day is created before the sun from which it comes. If we assume it was some divine form of light, requiring no material source, then what need of the sun? In the same curious order were plants created before the sun, which is needed for photosynthesis (especially confounding to the day-age folks).

Authentic Degrees and Credentials
Isn’t education a pain? It seems that creationists are more prone to getting their science degrees from non-accredited (or just plain fake) religious institutions rather than genuine, accredited schools or universities. Sometimes that’s too much of a pain, so they go to a degree mill. Fifty bucks and an SASE, and you’re a Ph.D., ready and qualified to refute evolution!

For a lovely picture of the “university” where “Dr.” Kent Hovind got his “PhD” :


Libraries and Schools
John has also realized that creationists hate libraries, because they allow curious people like him to find the resources they list, which have been terribly misquoted. That also makes him think they hate schools, that taught him to read and use the library to get information.

Flat-Earthers
Oh, yes, there are still some around, and they make young-Earth creationists uncomfortable, because their risible, crackpot notions are based on a literal interpretation of the Bible.

The Nobel Prize Committee
…is seemingly blind to the enlightenment brought to the world by “creation scientists.” Is that because “creation science” would overturn so many “preconceived notions” of the “scientific establishment,” with its “deeply-rooted prejudice against all things Christian”? I don’t think so, Tim. I’ll wager, conservatively, that at least half of all Nobel prizes go for discoveries that overturn, radically modify, or greatly improve upon older concepts. Science rewards the finding of better answers, not hiding from them.

Creationist Scientific Research Projects
They apparently hate them, because they’re seldom, if ever, attempted. There are multiple reasons for that, including the facts that few creationists have a clue about how to design and conduct legitimate scientific research; doing one is probably sacrilegious, since the answer is already in the Bible, and testing it shows a lack of faith; and (I think this is the big one) they are very afraid of that most common of research outcomes: negative results.

Their Own Lack of Faith
(Watch ‘em deny this one vehemently.) The reason creationists so rabidly deny evolution is that they have so little faith in the value and truth of the Bible that if one tiny detail is shown to be wrong, then the whole rest of it can’t be depended on, either. In other words, their faith is so weak that it will fall apart if one tiny brick is knocked out of their feeble structure of faith (I call this the Jenga Principle ).

Inconvenient Biblical Laws
Andrew I. Kapust wonders why creationists don’t keep kosher, as he proudly does. I accuse them of picking and choosing among Old Testament laws and pronouncements. Anything they like, like the six days of creation, or “Thou shalt not kill” (mainly as applied to fetuses) is the inerrant word of God. However, most of the other 687 laws (like not wearing cotton-polyester blend fabrics, keeping the SABBATH [Saturday] holy, punishing rapists by forcing them to marry their victims, etc.) they have been excused from observing by Jesus. I can’t seem to find the list in the New Testament, however, that details exactly which laws can safely be ignored by fundamentalists.

Insulin
Edward Oleen passes on this tidbit: All the human insulin available for diabetics today is made by genetically engineered E. coli bacteria (whose native country is your colon–eewww)! What does that have to do with evolution? Real human genes were spliced into bacterial DNA using recombinant techniques, so the nasty germs now churn out authentic human insulin. Kind of sounds like the stuff that makes us human and the stuff that makes germs germy is the same kind of stuff, and is almost as interchangeable as tinkertoys.

The Lengths of the Day, the Month, and the Year
According to Gen. 1:14, the lights in the firmament are there “for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years.” The lights are certainly not doing a good job. The solar and sidereal years are different. Neither is an integer multiple of the lunar month, and none of those time periods is an integer multiple of the day. The creationists’ watch in the desert was obviously not a moonphase perpetual calendar watch. Finally, if the Sabbath is so important that a man was stoned to death for violating it, isn’t it important enough that the year and the month should both be integer multiples of the seven-day week?

The Tower of Babel
...
It’s quite odd that the Chinese, in their 8000 year recorded history, failed to mention [the collapse of the tower] in any of their chronicles. Perhaps they were too busy cleaning up after the global flood, which they also forgot to mention.

Parasites of Animals
Before the Fall, all creatures lived in harmony, and there were no diseases. Either one of those would rule out parasites of animals. So what did tapeworms do for sustenance? Can anyone even begin to imagine a way in which a tapeworm could parasitize a plant rather than an animal?

The Poor Fossil Record
Once again, creationists’ logic arises to bite them in the hindquarters:
Creationists often use the paucity of the fossil record as evidence against evolution, claiming that if the world were millions of years old, and life on Earth had evolved over such a vast period of time, then you should expect to find billions upon billions of fossilized organisms. This, as they are more than happy to point out, is not the case. But lack of preservation is exactly what you would expect under natural conditions, as the chances of a decaying organism hanging around long enough to be preserved are remote.

However, if the fossil record were the result of a global flood, then high rates of preservation would be expected, as all organisms were subjected to the same conditions.

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The Missing Milk Commissar
One creationist argument cites the ‘irreducible complexity’ of biological systems. But we can turn this argument around, and in the process reveal a cultural contradiction of conservatism; for its cosmology and its politics do not match up.

Consider a carton of milk. How does it get from the farm to the grocer’s shelf? If you investigate this question, you’ll find that industrial society has truly elaborate food-distribution mechanisms and that its complexity is irreducible . Without the farmer or the trucker or the dispatcher or the grocer (or even the banker!) then that carton of milk would not arrive.

Milk production and distribution is irreducibly complex; does this imply that there must exist a milk director? Is there a Milk Commissar to micromanage every part of the milk trade? Does that milk carton on the supermarket shelf imply, by an Argument from Design, the existence of a Milk Commissar?

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The Ten Commandments
From me:
Especially the 8th, about bearing false witness. See 300 Creationist Lies, and that's just Kent Hovind. Feel free to investigate Duane Gish's bullshit, er, I mean, "bullfrog" proteins.

(June 12, 2012 at 3:53 am)Godschild Wrote: God knew evolution was coming down the line, He made the platypus to drive them nuts, and He has done that.

...and this god fellow appeared before you and personally told you all about it?

Or are you just making this up as you go along, which is what a pathological liar does?

Which one is it?