(October 13, 2010 at 7:56 pm)Statler Waldorf Wrote: I think a literal view of Scripture should be taken for many reasons

This should be good....

Quote: but here are four. . .

And away we go!

Quote:1. If you don't take the book of Genesis literally then why take any of the rest of the Bible literally?

Yes, why indeed?

Quote:Maybe Jesus didn't actually rise from the dead. Maybe he was not actually born of a Virgin? If you start compromising on all of these cornerstones of the Faith then you start believing in something that is not Christianity at all.

So, in order to accept unbelievable crap like a virgin birth and a man rising up from the dead, you must also accept OBVIOUS bullshit like a 6,000 year old Earth? Great reason to believe a literal interpretation of the Bible!

Quote:2. Why compromise on it to begin with? It will not help anyone come to the Faith. "Well I just can't except a Young Earth because Science does not back it, but I will accept Virgins giving birth." You see my point?

You've just given a great reason NOT to believe any of this crap.

Quote:3. Jesus seemed to take the Genesis account literally, so if the Son of God did, then so too must His followers.

So, because a most likely fictitious character believed in a literal account, you must also? (By the way, there is zero evidence Jesus was a real person.)

Quote:4. People will believe when God wants them to believe. So it is my job to present and support what scripture says, not water it down to make it more appealing. One Creationist said it very well, "It's God's job to open their hearts, it's our job to shut their mouths." :-)

Watered down bullshit is still unappealing. And your first sentence is nothing but a meaningless platitude.

Quote:Science requires interpretation,

Yes, we must view the evidence and interpret it correctly to have a valid conclusion.

Quote:it can all be interpreted to support the Biblical view of creation.

No, it can't. There is no way you can reconcile the notion of a 6,000 year old Earth with the sciences of geology, paleontology, astronomy, anthropology, or archaeology.

Quote:So I really do not see any reason to abandon that view.

I don't see any logical reason to hold that view.

(October 13, 2010 at 10:41 pm)Statler Waldorf Wrote: Oh brother. Football Team A claims to be the best football team in the League. Only one problem, they refuse to play anyone. Football Team B claims to also be the best football team in the league and will play anyone, no matter where. They will even pay all the costs for the game and will even play the game at the Football Team A's Stadium. Football Team A still refuses and just says, "Football Team B is just not good enough to play us, we are not scared." Which football team is most likely the better team? Team B of course. Well that was almost too easy.

A man avoids the prostitutes because he disapprove of prostitution, or because fears for his reputation should he be seen hanging out with prostitutes; not because he fears the prostitutes. This is why most biologists don't like to have "debated creationists" on their resumes.

Prostitutes may think this avoidance makes them superior human beings if they are so dilusionally inclined, but their salient feature remains that they are prostitutes, only now with less impressive clientale.

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(October 13, 2010 at 10:41 pm)Statler Waldorf Wrote: Actually the Astrophysicist I cited DOES have articles in Peer-reviewed journals.

DO those peer reviewed articles discuss instantenous travel of light towards you, but finite speed of light going away from you? Have his peers thought well enough of his articles to CITE them as basis of real work? Perhaps he also illuminated why radio transmissions from the moon can be clocked to take 1.3 seconds to reach the earth, and radio transmission from mars can be clocked to take 20 or so minutes to reach us from Mars?

Maybe if you school yourself in rudimentary history of science, you might discover the finite speed of light was first determined with reasonable accuracy precisely by measuring the different length of time taken by light traveling directly to us from slightly different distances as moons of Jupiter orbit their parent planets?

Incidentally, from which schools and for what did did your "students" go on to receive scholarships?

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(October 13, 2010 at 7:56 pm)Statler Waldorf Wrote: 1. If you don't take the book of Genesis literally then why take any of the rest of the Bible literally? Maybe Jesus didn't actually rise from the dead. Maybe he was not actually born of a Virgin? If you start compromising on all of these cornerstones of the Faith then you start believing in something that is not Christianity at all.

2. Why compromise on it to begin with? It will not help anyone come to the Faith. "Well I just can't except a Young Earth because Science does not back it, but I will accept Virgins giving birth." You see my point?

3. Jesus seemed to take the Genesis account literally, so if the Son of God did, then so too must His followers.

4. People will believe when God wants them to believe. So it is my job to present and support what scripture says, not water it down to make it more appealing. One Creationist said it very well, "It's God's job to open their hearts, it's our job to shut their mouths." :-)

1. Because you shouldn't take genisis literally, you shoudln't therefore take a single word of the bible seriously. Jesus certainly didn't rise from the dead. If he was ever born at all, then he was most certainly born of a woman who has been well penetrated by mortal man (men?). Although it is possible she did not wish this to be known to her son, and knew him to be enough of a turnip to buy her virgin alibi, it is more likely the son was either a down right fraud or was totally deranged and conceived of his false parentage pretenses out of pathological dilusions of grandeur. Because Christianity relies on cornerstone such as this, it is quite a exceptional pack of trash.

2. You compromised on it to begin with because you started believing all of it, and needs to end up rejecting every last bit of it, and you are not smart or courageous enough to do it in one go as better men have.

3. If the derange turnip, or outright fraud Jesus is actually known from evidence to have believed in something, it's all the more reason to add a bit more to usual level of skepticism about it.

4. Do your job in a airtight box somewhere, we'll let you out when you are done.

(October 14, 2010 at 11:24 am)Chuck Wrote: DO those articles talk about instantenous travel of light towards you, but finite speed of light going away from you?

Are you suggesting this is not possible? If so, it is interesting that you never put a comment or any line of reasoning into the thread where this was being discussed. I would still be interested in any relevant comments as up to this point, nobody here has provided much regarding the issue I raised in that thread.

(October 14, 2010 at 11:52 am)rjh4 Wrote:

(October 14, 2010 at 11:24 am)Chuck Wrote: DO those articles talk about instantenous travel of light towards you, but finite speed of light going away from you?

Are you suggesting this is not possible? If so, it is interesting that you never put a comment or any line of reasoning into the thread where this was being discussed. I would still be interested in any relevant comments as up to this point, nobody here has provided much regarding the issue I raised in that thread.

Yes, instantenous travel of light is not possible. I didn't post in that thread because I just joined and I try to be less of a dork by not digging through old threads to look for opportunities to say something.

(October 14, 2010 at 12:59 am)Statler Waldorf Wrote: Haha, you again? Well either you missed what Dr. Netwon said, or you just flat-out ignored it to try and make a dishonest point abou tSpecial Relativity. Dr. Newton deseribes Special Relativity as a "well tested and valid theory"- so of course he is going to follow the theory. However, according to special relativity the speed of light is constant in a vaccum when using the calculated time definition. You will notice that Dr. Newton says he uses the observational time definitioin, which is a whole nother hill of beans. So you have essentially tried to disprove Dr. Newton by stating something that he himself agrees with. Kinda funny.

I'm sure he said something to that effect, but his theory still violates special relativity rather obviously. That evil youtube video you keep dismissing even eliminates the possibility that light can travel at anything other than a constant speed using high school mathmatics.
I'm sure he thinks he's following relativity because he's certainly saying as much but, speaking of dishonest, what he's saying and what he's doing are two different things when it's blatantly obvious that even a casual observer can see the disparity between his crack-pipe theory and special relativity.

(October 14, 2010 at 12:59 am)Statler Waldorf Wrote: So does this mean you discredit Secular Scientists because they only had their articles reviewed by like-minded secularists? You are commiting the old fallacy of Special Pleading. If you have to move the goal posts to keep up with me, then I guess you have to do what you have to do right?

That depends on the secular scientist and where the articles were peer reviewed, but by and large, no. Normally, if I see an article in scientific american, I'll give it some thought.
If you're wondering how I'd react to even the same article in Christian Science magazine, I'd meet it with far more skeptisism unless they're merely reprinting an article with a much farther reach.
The same applies to virtually anything at any christian website - like Answers in Genesis.

As far as your accusation about special pleading, there is a reason for that and it's the same reason that I listen to doctors over faith healers on matters of health, scientists over pastors on matters of science, evolutionary biologists over creationists on matters of biology, chemists over alchemists on chemicals and chemistry, archeologists over creationist sunday school teachers about the history of life on earth, and why I'll listen to Stephan Hawking or Albert Einstein over your Dr. Newton on matters of Astrophysics.
The reason being is that people in those fields and those individuals who have proven time and time again to have no presuppositions about where the evidence leads and they have the ability to give conclusions without the kind of bias that a creationist has - who very clearly has a specific world view point to defend.

In short, they know what the fuck they're actually talking about.

Further, I've not moved any goal posts because I've presented no goals for you to reach and thus I cannot have committed that fallacy. I have not committed the special pleading fallacy because I did not ignore and specifically addressed your arguement by presenting counter-evidence directly from the stated special theory of relativity.
Your only response to that has been, from my understanding, to be "Nuh Uh!"

When you have something more substantive, let me know.

(October 14, 2010 at 12:59 am)Statler Waldorf Wrote: I have an idea, why don't you read a peer-reviewed article about this subject by Dr. Newton and tell the rest of us where he goes wrong? I am guessing since it is rather obvious you do not have a Science Degree that it will go way over your head, but you can still give it the old college try right?

Considering that you still believe in Young Earth creationism despite the fact that some youtube person used high-school level math and science to utterly and completely disprove a universe that must be all of very old, very large, and possesses a constant speed of light and the fact that a casual google search of the special theory of relativity allowed me to dispute any notion of a variable speed of light or any kind of preferrence in the speed of light in relation to its observer or multiple observers, I'd say that the science I need to dispute your theory is accessable to a small child, or at least a teenager who has any competance in math and science.

... or any idiot with a good search engine.

But hey, no one's stopping you from providing links or whatever, right? I'm sure you could give it a shot.

(October 14, 2010 at 12:59 am)Statler Waldorf Wrote: I didn't give your youtube video much attention because it was not peer-reviewed. I can't let you break your own rules of only peer-reviewed material! Fair is fair right? :-)

I didn't present that youtube video as a physicist with a radical new theory that all scientists everywhere are popularly leaning toward. I didn't present someone with a worldview inconsistent with all the evidience in his primary line of work.
What I presented was a video that clearly and effortlessly used basic math and science that's very well understood and developed by people whose work that formulated those things have been very well studied and confirmed by observation.
As such, no, I don't need this youtuber to be peer-reviewed because he didn't present anything that isnt' already well established and proven in the scientific community - in some cases for centuries.
Your astrophysicist-creationist is another matter, however, because his work, from what I know of it so far, already contradicts the math and science in those videos AND the special theory of relativity.
But that's fine with me if you want to ignore it because it's from youtube. I have no problem finding a few high school or basic-level college textbooks or online educational journals or websites to do basically the same thing. I only chose those videos because it presented less effort to search for all the science and math I needed to find were all in one place.

(October 14, 2010 at 12:59 am)Statler Waldorf Wrote: By the way, Dr. Newton graduated summa cum laude from his doctoral graduating class, so to act like he is some Pastor trying to do Physics is laughable. He knows what he is doing.

Good for him.

(October 14, 2010 at 12:59 am)Statler Waldorf Wrote: You can only do this when you measure a significant portion of the Earth. Obviously you must have missed that from my post. Measuring 100 years worth of a supposedly 4.5 billiion year history would be the same as trying to do calculations on the Earth's surface by only measuring 3.5 inches of it! Good luck with that lol.

Actually, I can measure the circumferance of the earth with a yardstick by simply using simple geometry on a particular set of days of the year depending on where I am on the earth.
As a 'science and math' teacher, you should know about things like this.
This is something I did even before high school.
So, hilariously, YES, lol, I can, in fact, measure the circumferance of the earth by measuring only 3.5 inches of it.

(October 13, 2010 at 3:53 pm)Statler Waldorf Wrote: Well if the Earth is really 4.5 billion years old then you cannot "observe" that decay rates are constant because yoru observation is vastly too small and insignificant compared to the whole time period. Even if you could observe it for 100 years it would still only be 2.2X10^-11 percent of the total time. Even a curved line looks straight when you only observe an insignificant portion of it. So you're going to have to provide some other backing as to how you know those rates are constant.

Sit down and learn newbie.

Saying that a particle decays on average after 10^8 years also means that if you have a group 10^8 particles you will see one decay every year because even though the average particle decays ever 10^8 years, there is a probability that 1 in a set of 10^8 particles will decay in within 1 year, if you had 10^80 particles you would get 10 decays a year, and 10^800 100 decays, and this idea applies to all decay rates. That's not a hell of a lot of particles comparatively, you could quite easily measure decay rates to a really high degree of accuracy by seeing rate of decay in large sets of particles.

Premise: Decay rates indicate that the Earth is ancient.

It seems to me that what you are surmising is that decay rates were massively accelerated right up to the point where science started observing and detecting them thus giving the impression that a 10,000 year old Earth was really 4.5 billion years old.

If this where the case then wouldn't most of the Earth's (short) history be incredibly radioactive?

I bet that Statler Waldorf wanted the world to fit his worldview, but I'll let the professor respond:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iMDTcMD6pOw

(October 14, 2010 at 4:00 pm)theVOID Wrote:

(October 13, 2010 at 3:53 pm)Statler Waldorf Wrote: Well if the Earth is really 4.5 billion years old then you cannot "observe" that decay rates are constant because yoru observation is vastly too small and insignificant compared to the whole time period. Even if you could observe it for 100 years it would still only be 2.2X10^-11 percent of the total time. Even a curved line looks straight when you only observe an insignificant portion of it. So you're going to have to provide some other backing as to how you know those rates are constant.

Sit down and learn newbie.

Saying that a particle decays on average after 10^8 years also means that if you have a group 10^8 particles you will see one decay every year because even though the average particle decays ever 10^8 years, there is a probability that 1 in a set of 10^8 particles will decay in within 1 year, if you had 10^80 particles you would get 10 decays a year, and 10^800 100 decays, and this idea applies to all decay rates. That's not a hell of a lot of particles comparatively, you could quite easily measure decay rates to a really high degree of accuracy by seeing rate of decay in large sets of particles.

It seems unlikely that he would see your point when he could divide 1E2 by 4.5E9 and be 5 orders of magnitude off. Maybe he uses the new peer reviewed concept of non-isotropic division, able to solve many problem in the Big Bang theory, that is suitable for use on a earth 6000 years, give or take 5 orders of magnitude, old.