BILL NYE VS KEN HAM: TONIGHT AT 7 PM

[EvolutionKills]

Simple, an all powerful Genie made the entire universe 25 minutes ago;

Great rebuttal. May I suggest you missed a point:
That the Evil Genie included in its simulation a prevalent though false memeplex represented by a collection of ancient documents. This 'bible' was edited by committed priests and described a creator God who brought the universe into existence 6000 years ago. Coincidentally there is also record that this collection of documents provided thousands and thousands of man-years of gainful employment free lunches for clerics up until the present. Though they've only been real free lunches for the last 25 minutes.


Sheesh last Tuesdayism is hard to deal with. I can't do the mental gymnastics needed to make up (implausible) explanations why such a preconception is True when it differs from observation. I guess I'll just stick with reality.

Between the 'free lunches' bit and 'Last Tuesdayism', the first thing that popped into my head was a reference to Lord Sheogorath the Daedric Prince of Madness from The Elder Scroll series.

Wonderful! Time for a celebration... Cheese for everyone! Wait, scratch that. Cheese for no one. That can be just as much of a celebration, if you don't like cheese, true? You've run a maze like a good little rat. But no cheese for you yet. Well, maybe a little.

[Mudhammam]

Given that I was once a fundamentalist Christian like some the creationists in this thread (creationism was drummed into my brain too) who insist on debating atheists, as I also once did online, I can only hope that everyone's diligent and persistent rebuttals will plant little seeds of doubt into the believers' heads. Maybe it won't sprout for many years but that's okay, something is still better than nothing. More than likely though, you are all wasting your time because their emotional addiction to faith is so strong that heroine fiends probably have a better recovery rate.

One time as a child, my parents took me to this big creationism presentation at some mega church near our house. It seemed like a big deal then, I think Institute of Creation Science put it on. The event even spanned two days. To this day I remember day two was the dinosaur presentation--all the kids were excited! The "scientist"/presenter actually played a fucking audio that some idiot creationists allegedly recorded on one of their silly adventures in some remote jungle. They were actually searching for dinosaurs. And they thought they got one on audio. Looking back, I don't understand how adults could be so fucking stupid to bring kids to something like that. That's why I wear my militant atheism as an honor.

[Fruity]

Given that I was once a fundamentalist Christian like some the creationists in this thread (creationism was drummed into my brain too; I even saw a Henry Morris lecture in person as a child) who insist on debating atheists, I can only hope that everyone's diligent and persistent rebuttals will plant little seeds of doubt into the believers' heads. Maybe it won't sprout for many years but that's okay, something is still better than nothing. More than likely though, you are all wasting your time because their emotional addiction to faith is so strong that heroine fiends probably have a better recovery rate.

Don't be so negative. I was invested in religion, but a little research woke me up. The reason I researched was that an agnostic had questions. There are a lot of people out there willing to consider and open their minds.

[Dragonetti]

The person has to be willing to open their minds to new concepts.

[pocaracas]

Ah... sometimes, being european isn't all that good...

Sometimes?

Yes, sometimes...
Most of the time, it's healthier to be european, hence it's better.

Oh, welcome back Stat. How did that surgery go?

Great, still healing up so taking it kind of easy on here. I just wanted to see what the heathens had to say about the debate They did not disappoint, very long on personal attacks and short on specifics.

Glad everything went fine!
Take it easy, and recover well and you'll live a long time with that fixed!
Ah, the debate... personal attacks, moi?

Didn't I once give you a proper paper detailing that deleterious genetic mutations are filtered out in some 20 generations, on average? I thought you had understood it.

I do not recall that, perhaps it was someone else? I’d be interested in reading it if you still have it even though I think it’s a different issue than the one I am addressing since in higher organisms, up to 90% of all deleterious mutations would be un-selectable.

Actually, it was indeed you... and it was a paper you referenced yourself! I almost forgot about that! look at our exchange back then:

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No that’s not quite how the percentages work; Humans have been around for fewer than 250 generations which is fine given the rates of genetic entropy, it’s doubtful they’d last another 250 generations though.

The 3-5% rate is taken from the following study though…

Crow’s “The high spontaneous mutation rate: Is it a health risk?” published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences number 94

Interesting paper...
Didn't read the whole thing, but I did read some particular bits:
- mutations arise primarily from the father zygote, given that the father produces millions of sperm per day, the odds of some error are greater than on the mother's side, who produced all the zygotes before birth... this checks out with something I read recently that stated that there are more autistic kids from older fathers than from younger ones. IF you're over 35, you have a higher tendency to produce an autistic child than if you're 20.
- Deleterious mutations are removed from the population in about 80 generations.
- On the other hand, there's this gem "In [...] people, recessive mutations may persist for thousands of generations. "

Thousands of generations.... and yet you claimed that "Humans have been around for fewer than 250 generations "... Another piece of your story that doesn't add up. Care to produce some evidence for this 250 number?
Or should I just take your word for it?

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Look at what I also wrote about your 3-5% of genetic mutation every generation:

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Well without going into too much detail; the Human genome has been observed to degenerate 3-5% per generation due to harmful mutations within the code. That rate seems to be fairly consistent amongst the higher ordered animals. If the genome degenerates too much, it will eventually experience gene catastrophe, where the species will simply die off. So how can a species such as the crocodile survive for 200 million years (over 50 million generations) all the while experiencing 3-5% genetic degeneration per generation and remain unchanged and unharmed? It seems impossible.

3-5% per generation?
Are you seriously considering this?
10 generations and you could get 50% degeneration..... 20 generations and total chaos... Tell me, do you accept that humans existed 20 generation ago?... That's about (1 generation every 30 years [high estimate, I know]) ~600 years ago!

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You also said this just yesterday "90% of all deleterious mutations would be un-selectable."... why?
If a mutation is deleterious, it has an impact on the individual's ability to function and survive.
There are some that only show up at a late stage of life and can be easily passed on, like Parkinson's... but 90%? I'm curious to know where you got that number.

[Zen Badger]

I got the impression that the debate was secondary to Nye's main objective. Which was to push the value of objective science to the Christian audience. But at least some of them would have finally gotten a view of evolution and the universe undistorted by the lies of the likes of Ham, Hovind et al.

What do you mean by objective science?

You know, where real scientists base their conclusions on the evidence.
As opposed to creation"science" where the evidence is twisted, distorted and generally fucked up by mentally diminutive cretinist morons who've had their chromosomes painted on in order to conform to a Stone Age fairy tale written by goat fucking savages that thought bats were birds. So that they can attempt to give credence to their delusion that the creator of the infinite universe is their special friend.(and incidentally, fleece the gullible masses of even more money in the process)

That objective science.

[BrokenQuill92]

Woah I'm pathetic I fell asleep AGAIN!!

[DeistPaladin]

Given that I was once a fundamentalist Christian like some the creationists in this thread (creationism was drummed into my brain too) who insist on debating atheists, as I also once did online, I can only hope that everyone's diligent and persistent rebuttals will plant little seeds of doubt into the believers' heads. Maybe it won't sprout for many years but that's okay, something is still better than nothing.

Though I was never religious, unless you consider "libertarian" a religion (which I've argued that it is), I can strongly relate. For the newcomers to this forum, I was once a Reagan idolizing conservative Republican.

Gradually, as I saw reality not conforming to my ideas of how it was supposed to work and as I learned new things that didn't support my old ideology, I began to shift accordingly. Over the course of 15 years, I went from conservative to libertarian to moderate libertarian to liberal.

Those who are thoughtful enough and who care more about what's really correct than their own pride are capable of saying "I was wrong" and shifting to a new worldview that conforms to the known facts.

Escaping religion has to be even harder than shifting political affiliation, partly because of the emotional aspect and partly because its harder to disprove the supernatural. With a political or economic ideology, you eventually expect the proof to be in the pudding. For example, when tax cuts for the wealthy don't trickle down, create jobs or pay for themselves, you have counter-evidence for the ideology of Reaganomics. On the other hand, it might be easier to cling to ideas about the afterlife, because nobody ever comes back to say "not so".

I have a lot of respect for ex-Christians and others who've escaped religion.

[Rampant.A.I.]

Note the posters in this thread using the same wall-of-assertions tactic Ham does, to make claims like "The Bible is an infaliable source" and then bury said claims under heaps of other nonsensical garbage.

What qualifies The Bible as an infallible source? It says it is, but it's been shown to be an inaccurate source repeatedly.

So it's not only a fallible source, but if divine in origin, is also an intellectually dishonest one. If mundane in origin, an outdated, untrustworthy source, shown to be mistaken repeatedly by empirical observation.

#Hashtagging #Godsez onto an assertion doesn't make it reasonable, no matter how strongly you believe it does.

[JuliaL]

Wonderful! Time for a celebration... Cheese for everyone! Wait, scratch that. Cheese for no one. That can be just as much of a celebration, if you don't like cheese, true? You've run a maze like a good little rat. But no cheese for you yet. Well, maybe a little.

Where repeated references to 'cheese' trigger my reflexive Wallace and Gromit response.



Gromit, that’s it! Cheese! We’ll go somewhere where there’s cheese!