Young Earth Creationism Vs. Science (Statler Waldorf Contd)

[Captain Scarlet]

Ugh, not argument from incredibility, it’s pointing to observed evidence that does not fit your theory. A coelacanth is a fish, it’s very similar to other fish we see today, to suggest that there would be millions of years worth of selective pressures that somehow destroyed or altered all the other fish around the Coelacanth is absurd. You are just believing in a theory that is not falsifiable, bad science. Then you say Evolution is a fact, which of course is a canard. Facts are observations, unless you or someone else observed the evolution of all life on earth from a common ancestor then you can’t say it’s a fact.

Its not my theory Statler, it doesn’t have an ownership. Just lots of hard working scientists validating on it a daily basis. You claim you are not arguing from incredulity and respond with “ugh”, "fairly tales" and “is absurd” and give no further evidence nor argumentation. You are condemned by your own words.

Again, un-falsifiable theory, bad science.

I have given you falsifiability tests, to which I’ll address again in another of your rejoinders below. Every piece of evidence presented never appears to be enough, because when predictions can be made and the evidnce does not concur with YEC; you ignore them. For instance c14 dates in coal (taken at the face value you seem to want to take them at) would date the coal seams to 40k years ago. Are you now going to accept YEC is wrong at 6k years (an error of nearly a factor of 7).

Untested hypothesis are just that, untested. Accept them all you want but it’s just a matter of blind faith for you, and not science. Shows a lot though that you would rather accept untested ideas than even admit you might be wrong about the age of the earth.

Twisting my words again Statler. Check my posts I didn’t say I accepted the hypothesis; just that I was willing to wait for the research. You on the other hand latch on and claim it is evidence and that diamonds are impermeable making contamination impossible (when the hypothesis being tested is that its contamination from within the mineral not extant to it). Again you have ignored that point.

Actually the fossils that contain soft tissue completely indicate that the animal died very recently since soft tissue cannot survive for millions of years. To say otherwise goes against all of the empirical evidence to the contrary. Rather than addressing this issue, you make jokes about a cartoon. Sad, but not surprising in the least.

You started the jokes by claiming all dinosaur remains where only a few thousand years old. It was naughty, but allow my some latitude. If you choose to ignore stratigraphy, paleontology, geochemistry (including radiometric results from a variety of isotopes - queue hysteria) which all yield a powerful explanation that is at odds with the YEC hypothesis, there is little I can do in addition to educate you.

Yes you have missed all of it, again sad but not surprising. Too bad you are not as skeptical of those untested ideas that support your worldview than you are of the actual tested ones that do not support it.

Yes I guess I missed it (and do you know what the world of science must have too, given the accusations of scientific conspiracy you claim keep this information from people) and yes I am skeptical. There are however some theories that seem a little hard not to accept provisionally and in science provisionally is as good as you get. I’m not sure why you keep banging on about my worldviews…I like facts, evidence and theories that are testable. Just a sneeking suspiscion that you may be the one with the fixed “worldview” (whatever that means) and a desparate to validate it…and I mean DESPARATE.

I am sure I can, it’s the same evidence we use to support our model. So maybe you need to be more specific about which evidence you are referring to.

Oh no! I’m not doing your work for you. The facts have already been established by these disciplines. They are ALL consistent with the ToE. You should be the one raking through the scientific papers picking out the facts and establishing why YEC is a better theory than the ToE. Requires a bit of hard work on the part of the creationists, as opposed to the typical armchair commentary and incredulity we normally hear.

Sea urchins? This is your amazing evidence that contradicts creation? Well it’s obvious that the “fossil record” is not an actual record of time, but rather a record of death and burial. So I would expect some animals to be buried after others and some to not even appear in the record at all. So your little sea urchin story is consistent with a global flood. More consistent than a Coelacanth appearing in the record “65 million” years ago, disappearing completely from the record forever and then being found alive today. If the fossil record is really a history of time, then where were all the Coelacanths for the past 65 million years?

You know when I said …Just one specific example the humble sea urchin…. That would mean it is one specific example and not the entirety of the “amazing evidence” you no doubt will ignore. The attempt to minimize the argument by using dismissive language like “little sea urchin story” is at best contemptuous and your rejoinder non-sensenical. If there was a freshwater flood off the continents into the oceans, non marine sediments would have buried bottom feeders like sea urchins in the lowest sediments. Infact they only appear in the middle upper sedimentary layers of the Triassic and in marine sediments such as oolithic limestones. If you care to visit sites in Gloucester (in the UK) you can dig them out the cliff face for yourself. Try to stick to the arguments instead of getting emotional.

As for coelocanths and there whereabouts for the last 65m years, all we can go on are the facts. They are now represented by only two known living species. As a group they were once very successful with many genera and species leaving abundant fossil record from the Devonian to the end of the Cretaceous, at which point they apparently suffered a nearly complete extinction. Before the living specimens were discovered, it was believed by some that the coelacanth was a "missing link" between the fish and the tetrapods. And although they have almost human articulation on their fins, subsequent research focused on rhypstidian crossptygerian fishes (the coelacanth being a member of the same family). It is often claimed (by creationsits) that the coelacanth has remained unchanged for millions of years, but, in fact, the living species and even genus are unknown from the fossil record. The most likely reason for the gap is the taxon having become extinct in shallow waters. Deep-water fossils are only rarely lifted to levels where paleontologists can recover them, making most deep-water taxa lacking or even missing from the fossil record. Unfortunatley this is not only true of coelocanths.

Showing how some of the biggest supporters of your position disagree with you is not an appeal to tradition or authority. I am starting to think you just throw fallacy names out without really knowing much about them. It’s a cute way of not having to address what I actually said though. Maybe you should show how Evolution and Supernatural Creation are not the only two models possible (in spite of what Darwin and Dawkins think I guess).

If I have erred please make the argument. You complain I don’t point out fallacies, then complain when I do. An Appeal to Authority is a fallacy with the following form:
1. Person A is (claimed to be) an authority on subject S.
2. Person A makes claim C about subject S.
3. Therefore, C is true.
This fallacy is committed when the person in question is not a legitimate authority on the subject. More formally, if person A is not qualified to make reliable claims in subject S, then the argument will be fallacious . Netwon and Kepler were brilliant, but not experts in evolutionary biology, biology, natural theology or anything else vaguely related to this thread. The accusation stands.

Why are you asking me to do your work for you again. You are making the claim that there is only YEC or Evolution, so you must demonstrate that via argumentation. All you are doing is saying these people said it is, therefore thats good enough for me. Firstly I don't know that they did, if it is true then you should be easily able to demonstrate it. YEC has less credibility than OEC, but you haven't disproven the view of the Raelians either. So come on lets hear you debunk them and any other argument via deduction or induction.

I read your article, and they don’t define information properly. Changing one letter in a book is not an increase in information (unless it happens to change the meaning of the word, or sentence). Copying a book does not increase information either, all the examples in the article were examples of these. The example with the people who have the mutation is an example of a reduction in information happening to benefit a group of people. This does not show how you could gain in over three billion bits of information in humans by mutation in only 4.5 billion years. To the contrary, observed entropy rates in the human genome show that it would completely fall apart in about ten thousand years.

What are you talking about? So you asked for evidence I presented plenty from just the very narrowest of spectrums of evolutionary biology, genetics and paleontology and you have no response again. You set the test, I met it and I do not hear you accepting the ToE as the best theory for explaining the facts.

Either you have moved your goalposts or you have not stated the goalposts clearly enough. So state them. The key word is, guess what the poster child of creationist nonsense; so called "information", so lets hear you hammer some detail out:

-What EXACTLY do you mean by “information”?
-How do YOU quantify “information”?
-Why is the amount of information “important” rather than the sequence of nucleotides in the genome?
-Are there any "informational" differences between coding and non-coding sequences in the structure of the genome?
-How much “information” is contained in just 3 animals of your choice?
-How much “information” is there in a human, compared to a chimpanzee?

I get the impression you are throwing around this term “information”, without defining it nor knowing what it means to obviscate the point. This isn’t surprising because the folks you are regurgitating this from don’t know either. However, you of course deserve the chance to respond, so you say it isn’t defined correctly; so you define it and answer the questions above.

Abiogenesis and chemical evolution belong to the General Theory of Evolution, so you will have to defend them as well if you are going to accept the theory as a whole.

You throw the term canard around a lot. This really is one, I do not need to defend abiogenesis to defend the ToE.

Uhh sorry. You already said that finding animals that were thought to be extinct alive today does not falsify your theory (the Coelacanth), and finding animals that are alive today (Maples and Oaks) in “ancient” strata obviously doesn’t falsify your theory, so why should finding people in ancient strata? A few years ago when we thought we may have found human tracks alongside dinosaur tracks in Texas one evolutionist was on record saying, “This is evidence for time travel not that the earth is young.” The fact of the matter is you have a theory that is not falsifiable.

Again, what are you talking about, you're arguments are becomming very ragged? The common ancestor to modern day coelocanths was first seen in the Devonian. The instance of a present day coelacanth is testament to its adaptability, survivability etc. Evolution predicts the animals change over time in response to their environment and random mutations, it says nothing about whether animals thought previously extinct (through no modern day representatives) will suddenly be found in environmental niches. The same is true with the crocodilians, they have speciated for sure since the creatceous but come down from those very ancient times almost unchanged morphologically. Except becuase they live in near shore environments, rivers lakes etc; there is better fossil evidence. Find a living dinosaur tomorrow, it does not falsify the ToE; find archaopteryx nesting in your tree, it does not falsify the ToE; find sabre tooth tigers in the tundra, it does not falsify the ToE; find tiktalik in the local swamp, it does not falsify the ToE...got it yet?...just in case....

....the ToE has never stated that animals that we think are extinct wont be found again.... and if you believe it has; find just one published scientific paper stating it.

However because of the fossil record is as good as it is we are able to trace whole lineages through large tracts of time (inc. coelocnaths when they are preserved and located in strata). There has never been a present day or near present day hominind let alone a human found in the Cambrian, our ancestral lineage as far back as the first proper mammals only goes back only to the Cretaceous, where our truly mammalian branch took hold. Therefore finding a human in the Cambrian would falsify Human evolution (at least), and probably most of mammalian evolution.

And again it is not my theory, but I really wish I'd have been bright enough to uncover it!

Methodological naturalism is only used in the operational sciences. Creationists use it too in the operational sciences. We are talking about origins sciences here. A supernatural explanation in origins sciences is completely legitimate.

The sound of an argument clutching at some very distant straws. I have no idea what you are talking about, the operational, origin science distinction is arbitrary and unfounded. You have evaded the question. I’ll ask again a try a different tack. If science is open to ‘supernatural’ interpretations, name one scientist proposing, one theory that is supernatural in origin or working on a theory which includes the possibility of supernatural agency.

And finally…..still un-retracted and bypassed in your last response. You have stated that you are more qualified than myslef, without knowing anything of my background. You have stated that I hold views only to fit in with my "worldview", and have also invented 'goalposts' moved them yourself and then claimed that I moved them.