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(May 7, 2014 at 12:35 am)Revelation777 Wrote: They found a safe harbor.
I think you mean that, because they had no evidence for their beliefs, nothing testable or falsifiable and hence couldn't publish their ridiculous fantasies in mainstream publications, they split off and made up their own journal in a transparent attempt to paint a veneer of respectability over the things that they still have no evidence for, nor interest in performing tests.
'Dear Atheist friends consider these quotes. Please consider a counter view. These are reputable people:
The more I study nature, the more I stand amazed at the work of the Creator.
-Louis Pasteur, Medicine
Finite man cannot begin to comprehend an omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent, and infinite God … I find it best to accept God through faith, as an intelligent will, perfect in goodness and wisdom, revealing Himself through His creation.
-Werner Von Braun, Rocket Science
The conduct of God, who disposes all things kindly, is to put religion into the mind by reason, and into the heart by grace. But to will to put it into the mind and heart by force and threats is not to put religion there, but terror.
-Blaise Pascal, Hydraulics
When with bold telescopes I survey the old and newly discovered stars and planets when with excellent microscopes I discern the unimitable subtility of nature’s curious workmanship; and when, in a word, by the help of anatomical knives, and the light of chemical furnaces, I study the book of nature I find myself oftentimes reduced to exclaim with the Psalmist, How manifold are Thy works, O Lord! In wisdom hast Thou made them all!
-Robert Boyle, Chemistry
The flowers’ leaves… serve as bridal beds which the Creator has so gloriously arranged, adorned with such noble bed curtains, and perfumed with so many soft scents that the bridegroom with his bride might there celebrate their nuptials with so much the greater solemnity.
-Carl Linnaeus, Taxonomy
It is His work,” he reminded them; “and He alone carried me thus far through all my trials and enabled me to triumph over the obstacles, physical and moral, which opposed me. ‘Not unto us, not unto us, by to Thy name, O Lord, be all the praise.’
Rev, we already know that otherwise smart people can have enormous blind spots when it comes to their religious beliefs, and we already know that smart people can be wrong! Quit it with the arguments from authority and give us something real. Give us a scientific test that found evidence of creation, give us some peer reviewed, mainstream work that shows why evolution stops at the species level...
Give us anything beyond trite platitudes and refusals to admit when you've fallen victim to creationist dishonesty!
Also, I asked you a question on page six that I think is very important, that you still haven't responded to despite my repeating it later on. Could you give us an answer on this:
Quote:And when you do address them, your response is nothing more than "nuh uh!" But let's have some fun with this: all I said was "human chromosome 2," that was literally the extent of my allusion to genetics. You could have looked it up because that was plenty to light a google search up, but instead you just tell me about "similarities," a word that I never used, and actually- and this is the smoking gun for how little you know what you're talking about- isn't applicable to the situation at hand anyway.
You told me that similarities in genetics doesn't constitute proof, when the thing I was talking about has nothing to do with similarities. Be honest, Rev: did you even look up human chromosome 2 before you responded?
What is it, and why are scientists claiming that it's proof of our common ancestry with apes? It's certainly not because the chromosome is similar to ape chromosomes, so... why? What information do you have on this right now, before you look it up for the first time now you've been called out, and why did you think it was okay to disagree with me without even knowing what we were disagreeing on?
Are you that completely lazy and dishonest that you won't even do a cursory wikipedia search on the things people point you to, in a thread you've made ostensibly about people debating these issues with you?
Have you even opened a single other link that's been posted to you on this thread?
"YOU take the hard look in the mirror. You are everything that is wrong with this world. The only thing important to you, is you." - ronedee
Want to see more of my writing? Check out my (safe for work!) site, Unprotected Sects!
Rev, give us one falsifiable prediction that "creation science" (I shouldn't have to explain the need for quotation marks) makes with regard to anything -- fossil distribution, molecular similarities among species, gene frequencies in populations, anything! I'd also ask for a peer-reviewed scientific paper, published in a recognized professional journal devoted to the discipline in question, but I know better. (And papers published under the circle jerk editorial policies of the Discovery Institute don't count for reasons that have already been given to you.)
Why would you like to refer us to yet another "wrong understanding of the world"?
Can you understand that we are not interested in anything related to any god that has been conjured up by man?
Without a god to fall back on, we take reality... or our best abilities to understanding it... and that, old boy, is where science excels.
Among many other things, science has brought us the theory of evolution of the species by natural selection.... a theory that got a huge boost when DNA was discovered and it confirmed that we are all made up of the same building blocks.. all animals, plants, fungi... all life.
What the conditions were for the first spark of life on this planet... we can only speculate. We can show that it is possible to have energy put into a particular system and get proteins out and, on some occasions, it is possible for these proteins to clump into some form of self replicating structure.
There is no absolute way, except time travel, to find out exactly how it happened... but we know it's possible.
Life - and Evolution - is the continuation of this self-replicating process, where the better suited individuals formed new populations in diverse habitats, which then specialized further and further, and further... and BANG... and perform a few system restores to a previous state... ahah, no... not a previous state, it's just that many habitats that were taken by other more powerful creatures got mangled and those creatures disappeared, leaving new niches for the few who remained... And now here we are, sharing this small blue marble with an astounding variety of life, brought on by a simple principle: stay alive, procreate.
I used big strokes on this painting, because I know that any fine stroke requires way too much time to research... and ultimately, without a time machine, we can't know for sure.... we have educated guesses.
The model, "evolution by natural selection" has withstood all new evidence that's been thrown at it, since Darwin was first mocked for his idea. Through DNA sequencing, ice core analysis, radio-isotope dating, fossilization and mummification (think Mammoths)... our educated guesses have been time and again corroborated.
You wish for mankind to throw it all out the window, because your special book has in it that some magic entity made all of this by itself... and, if the chronology accountancy is right, it was all done some 6000 years ago and done in such a way as to make it look much much much older...
Please, stop embarrassing yourself.
The magic entity that the book mentions seems to be no more real than Darth Vader or Harry Potter. Work with reality.... not against it. You'll lose.
You make it sound that straightforward and simple, but it is not.
I see you missed the part where I said just that.... I left it out of the hidden tags, above just for you...
It's not simple, it's very complex... it's millions and millions of years of tiny events....most beyond our ability to discover them.... all we have is fossils, dated by the rocks where they were found.... DNA... perhaps a few other details.
But, you know?... the theory of evolution by natural selection is, as all scientific theories, a model. A simplification of reality which tries to depict the way that the living species we see in the world have come to be as they are.
All the evidence fits in with the model.
You find one piece of evidence that doesn't fit and wither the model has to be revised, or the evidence is faulty and the model stands.
So, instead of trying to redefine what the model is, just give us a piece of evidence that challenges the model.
It's all we ask.
As long as you shy away from that, I see no point for you to bring this argument forward.
May 7, 2014 at 9:15 am (This post was last modified: May 7, 2014 at 9:17 am by Confused Ape.)
(May 7, 2014 at 8:31 am)Revelation777 Wrote: 'Dear Atheist friends consider these quotes. Please consider a counter view. These are reputable people:
The more I study nature, the more I stand amazed at the work of the Creator.
-Louis Pasteur, Medicine
Finite man cannot begin to comprehend an omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent, and infinite God … I find it best to accept God through faith, as an intelligent will, perfect in goodness and wisdom, revealing Himself through His creation.
-Werner Von Braun, Rocket Science
The conduct of God, who disposes all things kindly, is to put religion into the mind by reason, and into the heart by grace. But to will to put it into the mind and heart by force and threats is not to put religion there, but terror.
-Blaise Pascal, Hydraulics
When with bold telescopes I survey the old and newly discovered stars and planets when with excellent microscopes I discern the unimitable subtility of nature’s curious workmanship; and when, in a word, by the help of anatomical knives, and the light of chemical furnaces, I study the book of nature I find myself oftentimes reduced to exclaim with the Psalmist, How manifold are Thy works, O Lord! In wisdom hast Thou made them all!
-Robert Boyle, Chemistry
The flowers’ leaves… serve as bridal beds which the Creator has so gloriously arranged, adorned with such noble bed curtains, and perfumed with so many soft scents that the bridegroom with his bride might there celebrate their nuptials with so much the greater solemnity.
-Carl Linnaeus, Taxonomy
It is His work,” he reminded them; “and He alone carried me thus far through all my trials and enabled me to triumph over the obstacles, physical and moral, which opposed me. ‘Not unto us, not unto us, by to Thy name, O Lord, be all the praise.’
-Samuel Morse, Inventor
Erwin Schrödinger, a pioneer of quantum mechanics, is another reputable person.
Quote:Nirvana is a state of pure blissful knowledge... It has nothing to do with the individual. The ego or its separation is an illusion. Indeed in a certain sense two "I"'s are identical namely when one disregards all special contents — their Karma. The goal of man is to preserve his Karma and to develop it further... when man dies his Karma lives and creates for itself another carrier.
Writings of July 1918, quoted in A Life of Erwin Schrödinger (1994) by Walter Moore ISBN 0521437679
The plurality that we perceive is only an appearance; it is not real. Vedantic philosophy... has sought to clarify it by a number of analogies, one of the most attractive being the many-faceted crystal which, while showing hundreds of little pictures of what is in reality a single existent object, does not really multiply that object...
"The Mystic Vision" as translated in Quantum Questions: Mystical Writings of the World's Great Physicists (1984) edited by Ken Wilber
(May 7, 2014 at 9:07 am)LastPoet Wrote: An angel would disprove evolution. A human hexapod would be indeed a falsification. As a crocoduck would.
Actually none of them would disprove evolution. They would disprove our current understanding of genetics and heredity, and thereby falsify one possible mechanism that we believe to actually underpin evolution. But alternative mechanisms can be conceived.
The things that would conclusively disprove evolution would be total absence of evidence of large cumulative incremental change through time of lineages. Unfortunately for the likes of revs the evidence of presence of this is as conclusive as evidence of gravity, evidence that the sun rises in the east, or the moon is round.
But nonetheless, realizing this is what it takes to convince thinking people that evolution is false, they keep beating that primitive, ignorant, idiotic drum.
Hence rev's so called "questions" and "arguments".