The Statler Waldorf Balcony

[Minimalist]

He's probably soaking up more "wisdom" from answers-in-genesis.

With any luck he'll be back with a whole dump truck full of bullshit.

[Anomalocaris]

He's probably soaking up more "wisdom" from answers-in-genesis.

With any luck he'll be back with a whole dump truck full of bullshit.

A lot more bullshit came out of him then ever went into genesis.

[LastPoet]

He will be back, one can't leave so much arrogance behind like this. Its the weekend, he probably is on some bible camp filing a truck load of bullshit, like Min said

[The Omnissiunt One]

Hopefully he'll be back. I hadn't finished intellectually destroying his belief system.

[Cego_Colher]

Hopefully he'll be back. I hadn't finished intellectually destroying his belief system.

I'm pretty sure you won't because no matter what you say you are wrong. He probably thinks the same towards you.

but that's okay, I find it very entertaining and somewhat educational to read.

[Statler Waldorf]

Where to begin...?

Assuming you believe in the Fall and Original Sin, let me pose a question: where did sin come from? Adam and Eve were supposedly created perfect. This means that, even with the free will to choose evil, they would have chosen good, as they would have had no inclination towards evil. So where did this evil come from? Did God create it? If so, then he punishes us for something he created. Did the Devil create it? If so, why did God create the Devil, knowing that he'd create evil and hence doom many of us to hell? Any way you look at it, it seems that God is directly responsible, either through commission or ommision, for the eternal torture of his creations.

I like the question :-) Well scripture does not give us a lot on the nature of Adam's will. We understand how man's will works today (not a free will), but Adam's will would have been different. Many Theologens believe that Adam had a true libertarian free will, so he was just as likely to choose right than wrong apart from God's common grace. Whereas people today will always choose evil without the grace of God. Did God ordain the fall to occur? Yes, however God does not stand symetricaly behind evil events as he does good events. He ordains both to happen but does so in a manner that does not negate the responsibility of man. I would encourage you to pick up Jonathan Edward's "The Freedom of the Will" (the Theologen not the fake psychic haha) if you would like to learn more, I think it is probably the single best work on the subject.

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I too wish to see more on anisotropic light as apart from this Robert Newton( who's creationist leanings automatically make him suspect) I can find nothing in mainstream literature.

BTW you also have yet to answer my question. "Where the bible and science disagree do you take the position that science will be wrong?"

I would not have thought that it was that hard to answer.

A simple "yes" or "no" will suffice.

Ok, all of the views on the isotropic propagation of light use the Calculated Definition of Time. This is a viewponit of time that did not come about until the early 20th century (maybe late 19th). So scripture does not use this definition of time, it uses the observational definition of time. Under this definition of time light does move an-isotropically. So we are not playing with the speed of light so much as we are just defining time differently. So if all the light beams for the stars reached Earth on the 4th day of creation, this would mean that God created these stars on the 4th day. Even though, by using the calculated definition of time He would have created those same stars a longer period of time ago depending on how many light years the object is away from Earth. Scientists today will still jump back and forth between the two defintions of time, when naming cosmic events they use observed time (supernova 1987a), when you ask them when they believe the event "really" took place they will use the calcuated definition of time. So to argue against the Biblical account of creation with the calculated definition of time is in error because the account is not written using that definition of time. Does that make more sense?

As to the question, "when science contradicts the Bible?"- I think I answered that in a different thread, but I can do it again if you'd like. Well I think most of us can agree that Science does not deal with absolutes, right? So I do not believe you can use something that is non-absolute to truly contradict something that makes absolute claims. It is very important to also read scripture while paying attention to when it is describing an event that is supposed to be natural, and when the event is supposed to be super-natural. If a virgin did give birth it would be a super-natural or miraculous event, I think we would all agree to this. The Bible describes this as a suepr-natural and miraculous event so I don't think it is appropriate to argue against this event as if it were completely natural. Now if you have a completley naturalistic worldview then I could see why you would not believe this story because it is impossible according to yoru worldview, but that is more just proof that people have different worldviews than it is proof the biblical account never happened. I do not believe science contradicts the Bible though because of the nature of evidence and how it is interpreted.

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Yes I believe that creation happened in six 24 hour days on Earth.

Couldn't just sit by without replying to that.

God is all-powerful right? Well why would he take six fucking days to create everything if he could do it instantly?

Doesn't make any sense.

Well it is important to remember that not understanding "why" something is done, does not mean it was not done. I don't understand "why" a lot of you say the things you say, but that does not mean you did not say (type) them. That being said, we are given the reason for God's pattern of creation. God will use numbers symbolically, He always uses the number 7 to symbolize perfection. So a creation week of 7 days (the 7th being a day of rest) makes sense in that regard. He also created in this pattern to give His people a blue print to follow. The Jews works hard for 6 days and rested on the 7th, the reason they were given to do this was because God did it that way.

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Heya,

Yes I believe that creation happened in six 24 hour days on Earth. As to whether this was just in observed time on Earth so that more time passed in the Universe or whether this was accomplished by gravitational wells or black holes I do not know. I tend to lean towards the whole idea of observational time vs. calculated time idea because it's simple and clean. Though I did see a video on the black hole thing last week that was pretty good. I stay away from ideas like "c-decay" and "gap theory" though. How about you?

Thanks for the reply, but I don't understand what you're saying about the idea of observational time vs. calculational time. It seems like you just dodged away from explaining your standpoint by simply putting some scientific terms in your post without explaining how they are related to each other. Everything you wrote sounds really vague to me. So, I think you should elaborate on your post when you have more time to do so. No offense to you, btw. It's just that you're post is not clear enough to understand what you're talking about.

I elaborated on this some more in this thread, give it a look and see if it makes more sense. If it does not, I can elaborate some more. Ok?

[Anomalocaris]

Why don't you just start elaborating from now until you die? And don't hit "post reply" until you are ready to go to heaven in the next few seconds? I am sure none of this will make sense to anyone while you are alive. After you die, you can ask your tulip god why he ordained us to find you full of shit, and how that shifts the responsibility of finding you full of shit to us. Okay?

[Statler Waldorf]

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:-) So tell us if you didn't observe the growth of the trees you cut open, how would you know that the ones you cut open with less rings were younger and the ones with more rings were older? Kind of putting the cart before the horse there.

By being able to observe numberous trees in various stages of growth simultaneously.
And, of course, when you cut them open, you can see the tree rings.

As to your old trees. Certain genuses of trees can grow up to 5 rings per year. These rings are indistinguishable from true annual rings. Pre-ice age climates also could have caused trees to grow far more than even five rings a year. So counting annual rings (dendrochronology) is not nearly as accurate as you make it out to be.

Oh wow. Scientists must never take things like that into account. Puh-leese.

Ugh, you just don't get the light thing, so I will leave it alone.

If that's the excuse you have to use to justify the fact that you have absolutely no scientific grounds for you or your "astrophysicist's" theories, then go for it.

Wow, I had no idea that Colorado State was a Christian School! You learn something everyday. So can you tell us all what other "Christian" schools give out doctorates in Astrophysics? I am sure you are fully aware that in order for a school to give a graduate degree, that program must first be approved by all the other Universities in that State right? So even the graduate degrees that are given out at Christian Universities have been given the green light by secular schools.

I'll say that I'm forced to take both your and your "astrophysicist's" claims to prominance in any thing even remotely related to science with a grain of salt, at least in the fields in which creationism is opposed, which is virtually all of them.

Wow you dodged a lot there. You never answered, what happens when two things are supposedly the same age, but when you date the organic matter with radio-carbon dating it comes out to a vastly different age than the non-organic matter that is dated with radio-metric dating? We see this a lot with fossils that still have some organic matter left. Which date do you accept then?

How did I know they were the same age if the test churned out two different ages for the same material?
This looks like a fallacy by Rhetorical Question or someone goofed by testing carbon-14 with a different radiogenic test than the one designed to date carbon 14 or they picked a contaminated sample or any number of issues that could be solved by smarter or more sensible testing.

Scientists do things like test more than one sample before calling it a day to avoid situations where they might get a bad sample and they usually make sure they're testing the right material. That's just common sense.

It would not have to change the rates off the Earth for radiometric decay, only on the Earth. Go back and see the work by Dr. Newton. Using calcuated time definition the matter from off the Earth would date to be old. I know you don't get the whole time defintion thing, but give a look.

What work? You've neither shown nor have you linked me to anything this ... "genius" of a scientist who is apparently so sciency that he can out-science all of the previous centuries of observation and study.
I'm not even the one who is technially with the burden of proof as all of the evidence provided here and in reality all point away from your crackpot ideas that you're trying to evidence for creationism, despite the mountains of evidence to the contrary.

If this above response is all you have to everything everyone has said about radiometric dating thus far on this and other threads, then you really have nothing to disprove radiometric dating. Any of it outside of proven hoaxes. Your light theory violates some of the most well-established scientific principles in modern physics, and all of your other ideas are just as well thought out and NONE of them have been backed up by anything you have provided here.
You're constantly complaining about us using youtube or wikipedia and when one one of us does link something you accept, you've only moved the goalposts further because apparently, according to your reasoning, your theories are valid scientifically despite absolutely no public, peer reviewed papers of your own. You haven't even provided any links or evidence of any kind - not even bad evidence.

Either put up or accept that you're wrong.

You never gave us the specific passage that supposedly says the Earth is flat, so I guess I will just assume it does not exist.

You do that. After all, I'm sure a creationist at some point is going to argue that spheres have corners and ends.

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It's getting really tough to reply to your posts because you keep asserting I disagree with things that I never said I did, and actually pointed out that I do agree wtih. Light moves isotrpically when using the calculated definition of time, we all know this so stop trying to argue this point. Using the observational definition of time it moves an-isotropically, stop trying to use relativity and textbooks to agrue against this because they all use calculated time. The Bible is written using the observational definiton of time, so I am going to view light as propagating using this definition, this is not an erroneous thing to do, as long as I am clear as to which definition I am using.

I think I already pointed out why pointing to annual tree rings is not an appropriate means of disproving the time of the flood, I think most scientists with a knowledge of dendrochronology would agree with me. So you will have to try and find some other evidence.

I have not posted a lot of articles (though most of my info does come out of peer-reviewed sources) because they are not written for the lay person. So it's much more effective to summarize the article than just to post the link (as if posting a link proves anything).

You will have to take up the alleged dating mistakes made in the lab with the actual secular labs that dated the material. All I know is that radio-metric and radiocarbon methods disagree quite often. Just recently a piece of mineralized wood was found in sandstone that geologically dated to 250 million years but the piece of wood dated to around 35,000 years. Sounds like something has got to give to me.

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Statler Waldorf Wrote:
As to your old trees. Certain genuses of trees can grow up to 5 rings per year. These rings are indistinguishable from true annual rings. Pre-ice age climates also could have caused trees to grow far more than even five rings a year. So counting annual rings (dendrochronology) is not nearly as accurate as you make it out to be.

"Pre-ice age climates" So you are using old earth evidence to refute old earth evidence.

Nope, creation scientists believe in an ice age.

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Is it just me or has stat-wal run off crying?

Ah well, we'll just chalk that up as another kill.

Wishful thinking. I don't post on busy weekends.

[The Omnissiunt One]

Where to begin...?

Assuming you believe in the Fall and Original Sin, let me pose a question: where did sin come from? Adam and Eve were supposedly created perfect. This means that, even with the free will to choose evil, they would have chosen good, as they would have had no inclination towards evil. So where did this evil come from? Did God create it? If so, then he punishes us for something he created. Did the Devil create it? If so, why did God create the Devil, knowing that he'd create evil and hence doom many of us to hell? Any way you look at it, it seems that God is directly responsible, either through commission or ommision, for the eternal torture of his creations.

I like the question :-) Well scripture does not give us a lot on the nature of Adam's will. We understand how man's will works today (not a free will), but Adam's will would have been different. Many Theologens believe that Adam had a true libertarian free will, so he was just as likely to choose right than wrong apart from God's common grace. Whereas people today will always choose evil without the grace of God. Did God ordain the fall to occur? Yes, however God does not stand symetricaly behind evil events as he does good events. He ordains both to happen but does so in a manner that does not negate the responsibility of man. I would encourage you to pick up Jonathan Edward's "The Freedom of the Will" (the Theologen not the fake psychic haha) if you would like to learn more, I think it is probably the single best work on the subject.

That's the best answer I've heard to the question, which I've posed elsewhere. Nonetheless, it's not clear that libertarian free will is coherent in a deterministic universe. Besides, God's ordaining the Fall means that he is largely responsible for our evil today, for, as you say, we will always choose evil without his grace (though this is clearly untrue, as it's possible to abide by the Bible's commandments without accepting God's existence). Even if God is not responsible for our bad acts, he is still responsible for allowing them, thus permitting his creations to condemn themselves to hell.

[Statler Waldorf]

Why do you bother with that piece of shit?

'Cos I find him amusing.

I find all of you equally amusing, so I guess it's a symbiotic relationship. I was actually telling a few of my friends (several of which have doctorates) about some of the arguments you guys use on here and they were also quite amused. So I say we continue for all of our enjoyment!

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Why don't you just start elaborating from now until you die? And don't hit "post reply" until you are ready to go to heaven in the next few seconds? I am sure none of this will make sense to anyone while you are alive. After you die, you can ask your tulip god why he ordained us to find you full of shit, and how that shifts the responsibility of finding you full of shit to us. Okay?

Why are you so hostile? You act like a creationist stole one of your girlfriends. I don't agree with atheists but I am hardly hostile towards them, I think that is a sign of a weak position actually.

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Hopefully he'll be back. I hadn't finished intellectually destroying his belief system.

Have not finished? You have not even started lol. You're kind of like one of those guys who jumps into a fight, gets roughed up beyond recognition then when his friends pull him out he says, "let me back at him, I was not done roughing that guy up!" haha.