Hello atheistforum

[Epimethean]

It seems BruthaLuv is taking a cue from Zak now.

[leo-rcc]

I have sad news Ace, I just went to a historical documentary showing how Valhalla is burned down and its gods destroyed. It's called Götterdammerung by the historical author Richard Wagner.

He lies! He LIES!!!

All one has to do to get into Valhalla is to accept Odin as your lord and saviour!
All who don't go to hel. Ha ha Christians! Sucks to be you

Sorry Ace, he's not lying, because he wrote it in an old book and as you know, old books are always accurate.

[Mister Agenda]

You do doubt them though; you explain them away as delusion. I explain them as being either authentically from God or authentically not from God.

I don't doubt that people have them and that the feelings are real. Feelings are what you feel, they're pretty much real by definition unless you're lying about them. I do interpret experiences differently from you. You explain non-Christian's experiences by invoking another spirit who fools them, I explain it with the clear scientific evidence that these experiences are natural and produced by altered states of consciousness.

It isn't hard to wrap my mind around. I came from a secular background, remember? I've seen the world as you see it now. Neither do I dispute that someone who was born again could fall away, although it is far more rare.

Hm. Perhaps like you have trouble seeing born-agains becoming atheists, I have trouble believing you ever saw the world through a skeptical and science-minded lens. But I will assume you were at least close enough for discussion purposes. It would be presumptuous of me to think I can infer your journey better than you can report it.

It seems on various skeptics and atheist forums, it's the ex-born-agains that are more common than the ex-liberal Christians. I suspect your sample is skewed because of the intense social pressure in fundamentalist religious communities to conform. Those who have doubts are more likely to leave the community without sharing that the reason is that they no longer believe in God anymore. Now I'm not claiming that born-agains are highly likely to defect, just that, anecdotally, there's a mild tendency for atheists to be ex-born-agains, bearing in mind we're a small minority. A friend of mine is an ex-missionary, another is an ex-preacher. My pastor is an atheist who started out as a Baptist minister. You may be right about it being rare for born-agains to become atheists, but you should consider that you may be underestimating the frequency. I suspect that a rigid faith is brittle.

What I don't understand is how someone who claims to have loved God, sincerely and truly loved Him, could reject Him so easily. You had a lifetime of experiences which you threw away over your skepticism of the bible, when God had given you all of the evidence in the world to trust Him. That isn't love, I'm sorry to tell you.

Actually, I found that in pretty much every instance in which my church and the Bible differed with science, it was science that was correct and could prove it. I love truth more than I love believing in a fantasy.

Also, to note, speaking in tongues isn't direct evidence of being born again or having the Holy Spirit. That isn't biblical. There are however false spirits in the church that emulate these things. Check out "kundalini warning" on youtube sometime.

Yes, I've run into the 'you were in the wrong denomination, those speaking-in-tongue guys are channeling false spirits' approach to my experiences before. It's funny how some Christians are so quick to dismiss the genuiness of the experiences of others while expecting respect for their own claims.

The devil can make secular life go very smoothly for you. He has no reason to attack you any longer.

So the druggies and hookers and thugs and murderers and thieves aren't on the devil's good side? Do you know what an ad hoc explanation is and what the problems with it are? Didn't you start out claiming that you were suffering in life and Jesus made your life smoother? I imagine one of the joys of not using critical thinking is always being able to have things both ways.

Just 50 years ago scientific evidence claimed that the Universe didn't have a beginning, something the secular world used to mock Christianity. Scientific evidence can be contrary to reality.

The evidence wasn't contrary to reality. We just lacked the means to detect it. There wasn't evidence the current state of the cosmos was eternal (except for the 1st Law of Thermodynamics), just a lack of evidence to base a convincing case otherwise. We didn't know the universe was expanding, for instance. I notice you're fine with claiming science supports a beginning to our cosmos while dismissing that the evidence that brings us to that conclusion necessarily makes it billions of years old.

I used to believe in an old age of the earth and evolution, but after investigating the actual evidence, I found those beliefs unjustified.

I regret being dismissive, but what actually happened is that you started getting your information from creationist sites that specialize in trying to find any weaknesses in scientific measurement of age that they can; instead of from mainstream scientific sources. This is like a conspiracy theorist being impressed by the inconsistencies in the account of Princess Diana's death and concluding it wasn't an accident, or by issues with 9/11 reports and conclude our own government bombed us. These kind of theories have a power to suck people in, because we seek patterns, and nothing is perfect. If you scrutinize anything involving humans for weakenesses, you will find something. It's not just celebrities whose deaths are missing details, it's just that celebrities are more compelling subjects for nitpicking the police reports to death. How many people in apparent good health drop dead while jogging? That doesn't mean the police are incapable of coming up with the most likely cause of death. It means that armchair critics with an agenda can distort any inquiry.

It's good to hear that you are at least open to the truth. Many atheists would never admit this.

Maybe it's due to my perspective as a former insider.

I don't blame people for what they believe. I was just as deceived as they were.

Of course not. You're a decent human being.

Neither was I predisposed to accept Christianity; due to my beliefs, I was predisposed to reject Christianity. I explored many different religions, philosophies, and belief systems. It was only because of signs I had received that I decided to give Christianity a try.

My signs seemed to run the other direction. My experience was not standard in that my family was split up and my parents belonged to different fundamentalist Pentecostal sects, differing in a point of doctrine but agreeing that the members of the other church were deceived and hellbound. Perhaps what you think of churches that practice glossalalia.

You made implications that the gospels were invented narratives designed to control people. That is what I would call a conspiracy.

It's what I would call salesmanship. A conspiracy necessarily implies a group of people got together in secret and decided to make these changes. I propose they are the result of organic changes to the narratives over the years before they were written, and perhaps an individual or two took the initiative to spice up the narrative independently. 'Pious fraud' is an age-old phenomenon. How can it be wrong to rig a statue of the Virgin to weep if it reinforces the faith of the people and gets them into church?

However, at no point does anyone need to deliberately alter the narrative. The reason it's so good is that it evolved. Narratives naturally vary, especially if based on oral tradition. The ones that are most compelling are retained.

According to scripture, Matthias was there from the beginning, and was one of the people who travelled around with Jesus and saw His miracles. It is likely that He also saw the resurrected Jesus.

If that's good enough for you to believe it, I've no complaints.

At least two of the gospels were written by direct witnesses, and the other two were written by people who had access to the testimony of direct witnesses. If you want to say the resurrection wasn't literal, you would have to say they made it up. If they made it up, they certainly wouldn't have died for it.

It's almost like you're divorced from human experience. Just now, although there's no narrative to support Matthias witnessing the resurrection, you're believing it because it forms a better narrative for your argument if all the apostles who were martyred saw the resurrection, and hey, whose to say he wasn't there? That is exactly how narratives get changed, especially if there's a long gap between the event and writing it down. Wanting to believe is a powerful force, and we don't know for sure if the apostles believed in a literal resurrection. We do know that people will castrate themselves and commit suicide if their faith in a charismatic leader has them believing that a spaceship hiding behind a comet is going to transport their souls up if they show enough faith. Again, and I'm not sure why you keep bringing this up when I've repeatedly said this, I don't doubt the apostles believed...I'm just not sure exactly what it was they believed in.

The testimony states the apostles did not expect a resurrection, despite Jesus telling them about it many times. They were hunkered down in Jerusalem, living in fear of the jewish authorities. The movement would have died then and there, if not for the total convinction of the apostles that Christ had risen. Witness the transformation of their personalities between the record of the gospels and Acts. Before the Holy Spirit came, they had a weak knowledge and were mainly bumbling and ignorant. Afterwards, they became bold, couragous, and possessing a superior knowledge of the scripture and the teachings of Christ. Again, you either have to say they made it up, or something happened there that you can't just explain away.

Or in the gospels they were supporting cast while while in Acts and the Epistles they were the protagonists. You're assuming everything happened exactly as written as if by an unbiased observer. That these books are profoundly different from other books. However, if they were mere humans writing them from their own limited perspectives with their own biases, there's nothing to explain away. The change in character serves the interest of making the narrative more compelling. Harry Potter becomes more assertive and bold in later books, too.

Were they also mistaken about all of the miracles? Do you think they just imagined Jesus feeding 5000 people with a few loaves of bread, for instance? You basically have to say it is all made up, but then you have explain why they would die for what they knew was a lie.

You're saying that people in a book knew that other events in a book really happened. You're assuming they were motivated by the big miracles they witnessed rather than being motivated much like any other ferevent believers and the miracles being added later by the writers. Not only didn't they know it wa a lie, they may not even have known all these stories themselves. If this kind of thing was happening in a Hindu story, like Krishna lifting a hill, most Christians wouldn't have trouble dismissing it as fanciful, which they can only do by applying a double standard in how they evaluate religious claims.

Neither does it make any sense to use the lack of documentation as a point of skepticism when it is actually remarkable how much documentation we do have.

You lower the standards because you believe. We would expect contemporary documentation from sources outside the NT if these extraordinary events involving earthquakes, dead people walking the streets, kings slaughtering children, and so forth actually happening. The lack of such is striking. What we have is believers writing an account decades later when the tale has had plenty of time to grow without outside sources confirming any of the miracles, which is exactly what one would expect if they didn't really happen as described. You should hear my Pentecostal parents. The fuel gauge reads E but they make it to the tent revival anyway. Suddenly fumes or an inaccurate reading are less likely explanations than a miracle. Two thousand years ago maybe a big crowd gets hungry and it turns out someone thought to bring snacks; by the time it's been retold a thousand times it all started with one sandwich. What you have to establish is that this religious tale is more believable than all the others...and you can't, because if you apply the same standards to all, the reasonable conclusion is that no religion has real miracles.

If Jesus didn't die, how did He get out of the tomb?

How do you know he was in the tomb? The same book that tells you he wasn't in it. Remember, my point is that the Gospel narratives were written decades later by partisans. It's the narrative itself that I question, so it's not much of a counter to point to events that I doubt were accurately reported. However, if I were to play along, supposedly there was an earthquake, so no biggie to escape if the rock rolled a little bit out of the way on it's own. I would totally think that angels did it if I was a disciple (remember my parents?).

One person having a vision, that's fine. Dozens (hundreds) of people walking, talking, touching, interacting, and sitting around a campfire eating fish with a vision isn't exactly plausible.

Who were these hundreds of witnesses? Where is their testimony? Y'know yesterday, I levitated my way to work. There were hundreds of witnesses. Do you think claiming there were hundreds of witnesses equals there being hundreds of witnesses?

That's what you assume, but do you understand how radiometric dating works? You probably don't understand how many assumptions are inherent in those dating methods.

The main assumption is that an omnipotent being isn't out to deceive them regarding the age of the earth and the universe.

Scientists will use the methods to cross verify eachother but they are still based on the same faulty (and unprovable) assumptions.

Like the rate of atomic decay being constant instead of much faster in the past. It's a big assumption and about the only evidence for it is that the planet is habitable instead of destroyed by runaway fission back when elements decayed faster.

You also probably don't realize that these dating methods give ranges of dates, and scientists simply pick and choose from these date ranges and discard the "anomalous" results.

Yes, I thought they gave the Greenwich Mean Time and day of the week for exactly when a rock was formed. Thanks for setting me straight.

They select the most likely date range out of the broader date range based on independent evidence. And, as always with science, the conclusion is tentative and will happily be modifed if new evidence suggests the original conclusion was inaccurate.

This is the opposite of science, that you interpret the evidence by the conclusion you wish to reach.

Strange that you should realize what a problem that is when real scientists do it, but how it applies to your side seems to completely escape you. Yes, scientists expect their findings not to contradict what they already know, it's hard to get through the morning without expecting your breakfast to be edible and your clothes to fit; that the rules aren't going to suddenly change on us is an inference, but it's hard to see how it's an inference that could be more strongly supported.

We also know that when we have used these dating methods on things we do know the ages of, they always give extremely faulty results.

Yes, and real scientists know what kind of objects a given dating method can measure the age of accurately, which it can't, and why they're accurate for some things and not others. Leave it to a creationist to use a method for dating a specific kind of volcanic rock on a sedimentary deposit and concluding the there's something wrong with the method. And some of those known ages? They're very, very, old.

If we can't trust these results for things we know the ages of, how can we trust them for things we don't know the ages of?

Figuring out which methods give us results that are accurate when we know the ages of an object are how we figured out how to date things in the first place.

The tree has no representation in reality, first of all. It comes entirely from the imagination of evolutionary biologists. Second, your ideas about phylogeny are not accurate. Yes, there is the appearance of nested hierarchies, and there also many non-nested patterns. The theory of evolution has to be able to explain both occurrances, and it cannot. Consider this quote from a Science article called "Is it time to uproot the tree of life?"

A year ago, biologists looking over newly sequenced genomes from more than a dozen microorganisms thought these data might support the accepted plot lines of life's early history. But what they saw confounded them. Comparisons of the genomes then available not only didn't clarify the picture of how life's major groupings evolved, they confused it. And now, with an additional eight microbial sequences in hand, the situation has gotten even more confusing . . . Many evolutionary biologists had thought they could roughly see the beginnings of life's three kingdoms . . . When full DNA sequences opened the way to comparing other kinds of genes, researchers expected that they would simply add detail to this tree. But "nothing could be further from the truth," says Claire Fraser, head of The Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR) in Rockville, Maryland. Instead, the comparisons have yielded many versions of the tree of life that differ from the rRNA tree and conflict with each other as well . .

Gotta love quote-mining. Yeah, it has turned out that there are types of micro-organisms that are entire branches of the tree in and of themselves. There are more than three kingdoms, it's just that the others are composed entirely of microorganisms. Yay science for changing with new evidence. It's even possible that some day a whole different tree composed entirely of microorganisms that shares no common ancestors with us will be discovered, maybe deep underground, that represents a separate abiogenesis event. That addition to our knowledge would be amazing, and would do nothing to detract from the evidence for common descent for the rest of life.

The findings are not as universal as you have claimed, in fact they are the opposite. As far as your critiques go, how would you know what is wasteful and what isn't? Again, you are going on your presumption of deep time. You believe a comet killed the dinosaurs, whereas I believe a flood wiped them out, as well as all the other creatures you attribute to the various extinction events. You say God is not novel; that is kind of a joke when you examine the incredible diversity in the world, but why should He reinvent the wheel? Why would He have ten different versions of pumping blood throughout the body when one does the job?

Why would he have the same endogneous retrovirus sequences (genetic information inserted by viruses) in both great apes and humans? Why would he have the same broken gene for making vitamin C (it's not missing, it's present in both apes and humans, it just doesn't work anymore because apes got plenty of vitamin C in their diet so there weren't any selection pressures to eliminate individuals with the broken gene) and give guinea pigs an entirely different problem in synthesizing their own vitamin C? Why do humans have two fewer chromsomes than apes, and those chromosomes are clearly two sets of ape chromosomes joined end to end? Given an omnipotent designer, the most likely explanation is it wants us to think we're related to apes because none of those things have to do with design, they're just markers that indicate common inheritance.

It is a question of efficiency and also durability, versatility, and utility. It is all a marvel. All in all, the whole of nature works together seamlessly, so I don't see where you are getting a committee from.

There are plenty of seams. Organs that are neither fully functional nor fully gone, whales with bones where their ancestors would have had legs, snakes with vestigial hips, pandas with poorly functioning 'thumbs' and a carnivorous digestive system, human beings not fully adapted to walking upright and thus prone to back and foot problems, connected breathing and eating tubes, joined waste excretion and reproductive features, human retinas placed to cause a blind spot; all signs of a natural process making do with what was already available and incapable of fully novel design without thousands of tiny, inching, intermediate steps. Evolution has to make do with altering what's already there, and that's what we see in the world around us; with plenty of examples of things a mere human engineer can see could have been done better.

I have nothing against science at all, just bad science.

It's bad science to determine what's good and bad in science based on whether it supports your religious views.

What you don't understand is that when it comes to evolutionary theory and dating methodology, it is exactly what you have accused "fundamentalists" of.

What you don't understand is that creationist sites lie freely. They don't care about the truth, only supporting their agenda. They take quotes out of context, mislead about scientific conclusions were arrived at, and in general are liars for Jesus. I'd say they do more to make atheists than any atheists do.

The conclusion is assumed and anything which disputes that conclusion is dismissed.

The conclusion was arrived at over generations of field and lab work, which at any point could have been thrown into an uproar by a dolphin fossil in the Precambrian or dinosaur bones showing signs of cooking and tool marks. You're asking us to reinvent the wheel every time we look at a fossil. It's not a reasonable demand.

I hope you don't mind but I am going to recycle a reply I made to someone else regarding the skepticism towards a conspiracy:

I like this quotation by Max Planck:

A scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.

Maxwell Planck

The conspiracy is human nature.

The word 'conspiracy' has a specific, well-understood meaning. Human nature is not a conspiracy, although it can be an explanation for why certain things seem like conspiracies that actually aren't.

Many scientists are atheists, especially the elites who control the peer reviews and the funding,

Yes, for some reason the members of the American Academy of Science and the Royal Society, the most famous and accomplished scientists in the world, tend to be very disproportionately atheist.

and atheists rather like the idea that they can explain away special creation with evolution.

There's no evidence of special creation to bother to explain away.

It gives them great comfort to have that alternative and it isn't something they are going to give up very easily. They even admit it:

Here come the out-of-context quote mines.

I do not want to believe in God, therefore I choose to believe in that which I know is scientifically impossible: spontaneous generation arising to evolution

George Wald - Harvard Professor
Nobel Laureate

the worlds brightest minds building on years of research and millions in lab equipment and computers can not make non living matter produce living matter

evolution became a scientific religion; almost all scientists have accepted it and many are prepared to bend their observations to fit in with it.

H S Lipso
Physics professor

we take the side of evolutionary science because we have a prior commitment to materialism. it is not that the methods..of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation..on the contrary..we cannot allow a divine foot in the door.

richard lewontin

harvard professor of zoology and biology

If I were you, these quotations would disturb me.

If you were me, you'd understand that even if they weren't quote-mined, it's not quotes that matter, it's evidence.

They prove that not all scientists are the open-minded champions of reason that you believe they are, and that even if they had evidence that contradicted the prevailing theories, they wouldn't consider it.

You shouldn't speculate about what I believe, you aren't good at it. Scientists are better educated than most people and knowledgeable in their specific fields, but they're as ornery and close-minded as any other homo sapiens. They're so bad that it takes the scientific method to keep them honest.

Science isn't interested in a young earth; in fact it is running away from it and screaming.

Science isn't aware of any persuasive evidence for a young earth and it's laughable the way you're projecting how you feel about the overwhelming evidence for an old earth onto them.

Simply put, a young earth means the bible is true, and as you have just seen, they don't want it to be true.

Again, there's a Nobel prize and a solid place in the history books for any scientist who can prove it to be true. And it will trouble me not a bit, might even become an agnostic theist if that one gets overturned.

There are scientists out there working on these things, and because of the prejudice of the scientific community, which I have just demonstrated, they are mostly ostrasized, prevented from having gainful employment, denied access to resources and facilities, and locked out of the process.

And what those poor saps have in common is a firm grasp of the conclusion they want and an obsession with finding evidence to support it. I've heard somewhere that that's bad science.

Your skepticism of anything that contradicts the conventional wisdom of the day cheapens the spirit of inquiry that science is supposed to be built upon.

Yes, science was built on believing things without evidence...wait, what?!

What we're dealing with are a number of sacred cows which are so intergreted into the secular mind that you couldn't seperate them without extensive surgery. There are several good theories which can explain distant starlight, and what you apparently don't realize is that you have your own light travel time problem as well, because the big bang theory doesn't explain why we are seeing light from billions of light years away. The uniform temperature of the CMB is a huge problem for big bang cosmology, and the reason cosmic inflation was invented; it is simply a fudge factor.

The difference between you and me is that when I investigated science, I got it from actual scientists. I started off thinking evolution was hooey, but when I actually looked up from what my pastor told me and books like Evidence That Demands a Verdict; I found in museums and laboratories and universities and libraries how science is actually conducted, why it works, and how and why the evidence has led them to where they are. I suppose if the intertubez were around when I was in my twenties and early thirties I might have found it easy to cocoon myself with sources that told me what I wanted to hear.

Creation scientists are real scientists, so please don't trot out the tired old atheist line here. Many of them are highly credentialed and have made many significant discoveries, as well as being published in peer reviewed journals.

However, the ones that are being published in peer review journals are not publishing articles that claim to disprove evolution or that the earth is young. The ones that are publishing such things are putting them into vanity journals. What makes a scientist real is doing real science that has results that add to our body of knowledge. Creationism hasn't done that yet.

I find that atheists will believe any ridiculous theory that scientists come up with, (like something coming from nothing for instance) but the idea that the Universe could be intelligently designed, and that this is something that could be investigated is somehow quackary.

And your suggestion on how to investigate intelligent design is what? So far, all intelligent design 'researchers' have been able to come up with is: 'hey, that looks irreducibly complex to me!'

It is real science to investigate intelligent design, especially, in the case of the information in DNA, that it is a much better explanation of the facts.

I would love to hear one actual, true fact about life that evolution doesn't explain as well as or better than special creation. Because thinking I'm right isn't as important to me as actually being right. If I'm wrong I want to find out so I can correct myself.

Based on evolution and continental drift a biogeographer can make accurate predictions in advance about the number of novel species to be found on an unexplored island if it's size, distance from the mainland, and how long ago geology suggests it was connected to the mainland, if ever. You know why it's so important to know how old the island is and whether it was connected to a continent? Because the farther an island is from a continent and the longer it's been separated from a continent, the more novel species it will have. Why? Because evolution needs space and time to produce those novel species. What's the special creation explanation for that?

Substitute struck down for shut out and it'll be more accurate. Did you know that public education was started in this country by the "Old Deluder Satan Act" which instituted the scriptures as our primary means of education? The only reason we do not teach the bible in school any longer is because this country has become more secular and secular people hate religion.

Millions of secular people are religious. Secular and atheist aren't synonymous. A plumbing handbook is secular, too. People are secular if they believe we're all better off if our government remains as neutral as possible on religous issues. Do you have any idea of the carping and whining between Catholics, Protestants, and Jews when we had prayer in public schools?

It has nothing to do with science or not science, it has to do with a worldview and an agenda.

That would be more convincing if the science weren't all on one side.

There is nothing in science ruling out a Creator,

True, science has just not come across anything that seems to require anything other than natural processes as an explanation.

there is simply bigotry towards the idea.

Including among the over half of American scientists who believe in God?

I don't expressly disagree with you here; I have met many atheists who claim that hypocripsy by Christians is the main reason why they don't believe Jesus is God. There are many out there who are ruining Christs reputation, and this is mainly because the church, in times where there is little persecution, becomes completely apostate. It's the "easy believism" I have been talking about, where anyone who recites the sinners prayer is now a Christian. They are the ones who go to church on Sunday and live like hell the rest of the week and act just like the world does.

They are unregenerate but the world can't tell the difference. You're a Christian if you say you are. What has happened in America is that the church fell asleep during the 60s and is now waking up too late. The country moved on without the church, and now the church is struggling to stay relevent in the culture, at least in the national discourse portrayed in the media. The reality is 80 percent of everyone is Christian in this country, however, how many of them are actually saved is impossible to say.

Which reminds me of what I say when someone tells me I'm an atheist just so I can sin without being accountable to God: I've not noticed believing in God to be much of a barrier to sinning.

Years ago, I started using the term 'Christianist' to describe the Christians who annoy me to distinguish them from the majority of decent and mostly reasonable for day-to-day purposes Christians out there who treasure the same liberties and peaceful coexistence I do. Because Christians are more complicated than that, you can't lump them all together. Over-generalizing is a sin.

[Mister Agenda]

However, the nature of true evidence is that it leads someone who is initially skeptical to believe; religion turns it around because it has hit on the technique of getting potential recruits to convert themselves by convincing them that to give whatever religion they're selling a fair chance, they have to try believing it first and then getting the evidence. It's really very brilliant.

Sorry to quote myself. I thought I would go back and try to figure out what has brotherlylove thinking I'm proposing a conspiracy theory. I believe it's the bolded portion above, and somehow over the course of our conversation that has become a claim that the apostles knew there was no resurrection and died for it anyway.

To clarify, it is a claim that it is common for religous people to use the tactic of trying to get someone to believe and promising them they will get evidence once they've done so. It's a technique that brotherlylove used himself. It's brilliant because it is so effective: once you truly believe, of course you will perceive evidence confirming that you were right to do so. Most people don't know that any charismatic religion can induce brain states of acceptance, religious ecstacy, feeling loved, of belonging, and so forth; so they are easily led into 'trying it' and finding 'it delivers'; when they could have tried Voodoo or Sufism and gotten equally 'profound' results. I've even had a Wiccan try to convert me by claiming that once I performed a few rituals and seen how well they work, I'd know her beliefs were true. My sister-in-law went on a whole 'just try believing' campaign on me a few years ago. From the other side it seems ridiculous. I can't imagine trying to get someone to 'just try not believing' for a while in order to try to get them to give up their theism. But maybe it's because I don't really care if someone is a theist. It's not like they'll go to hell if I don't enlghten them, so I'm not tempted to trick them into it. If my evidence and arguments are unconvincing, I hope they have a nice day. And you never know what seeds you plant might eventually come to fruition. I've seen more than one Christian come to an atheist board only to switch sides after a few hundred posts (and I've seen the opposite, too). Being exposed to ideas outside your group can make a big difference.

But anyway, I was not trying to imply the apostles came upon this great brainwashing technique. I'm not even claiming they used it. It's not profound, and it's the kind of thing lots of people figure out independently: if you can get someone to agree to sincerely try to convince themselves your religion (or ideology, or self-help program, or psychic meditation regimen) really works/is true, they will do most of the hard work for you. The point I was making was about the proposal to believe first and trust the evidence will come; not about a conspiracy or anything to do with the apostles.

[Ace Otana]

Sorry Ace, he's not lying, because he wrote it in an old book and as you know, old books are always accurate.

Damn it! There's no way an old book can be wrong. They never contradict themselves or contradict facts. So accurate and detailed about everything we don't even need science to learn things.

Fuck, well if the old book says so then it must be true!

[brotherlylove]

I don't doubt that people have them and that the feelings are real. Feelings are what you feel, they're pretty much real by definition unless you're lying about them. I do interpret experiences differently from you. You explain non-Christian's experiences by invoking another spirit who fools them, I explain it with the clear scientific evidence that these experiences are natural and produced by altered states of consciousness.

How would you tell the difference?

Hm. Perhaps like you have trouble seeing born-agains becoming atheists, I have trouble believing you ever saw the world through a skeptical and science-minded lens. But I will assume you were at least close enough for discussion purposes. It would be presumptuous of me to think I can infer your journey better than you can report it.

It's not a trouble of believing that people fall away, because I've seen it happen. It's that people who are born again know God and love God. When you described falling away, you were talking about an intellectual decision you made. Yet, in your heart you rejected God, who you had been living for most of your life. How did you make the choice so easily if you actually did love God? Did you ever stop to think that you were falling into deception?

As for me, I was a genuine skeptic. I didn't believe in any supernatural claims, and I thought people who had those experiences were delusional. I wasn't really openminded towards any of it because I saw no evidence for it. I did however recognize the limitations of human knowledge, and our finite minds. I didn't put human understanding on a pedestal; on the contrary, the state of the world was a testament to how flawed it is. Even in science; did you know, when they were testing the first bomb, that they weren't entirely sure it wouldn't burn off the entire atmosphere? Of course, they didn't it anyway. Such is the way of science today. Just recently, I hear they made a super virulent form of the bird flu for no reason other than to see if they could. Eventually, one of these science projects is going to get turned lose on the planet; it's only a matter of time.

It seems on various skeptics and atheist forums, it's the ex-born-agains that are more common than the ex-liberal Christians. I suspect your sample is skewed because of the intense social pressure in fundamentalist religious communities to conform. Those who have doubts are more likely to leave the community without sharing that the reason is that they no longer believe in God anymore. Now I'm not claiming that born-agains are highly likely to defect, just that, anecdotally, there's a mild tendency for atheists to be ex-born-agains, bearing in mind we're a small minority. A friend of mine is an ex-missionary, another is an ex-preacher. My pastor is an atheist who started out as a Baptist minister. You may be right about it being rare for born-agains to become atheists, but you should consider that you may be underestimating the frequency. I suspect that a rigid faith is brittle.

I know you were born again because I know you had the Holy Spirit. I can tell by your personality, and the way we are interacting. I also think you still do have the Holy Spirit, that He hasn't left you, like the light is dimmed but not yet gone.

A rigid faith is a legalistic faith, usually. People justify their faith with their works but don't really know God. When times of trouble come, their faith fails because it wasn't founded on Jesus Christ.

I may be underestimating the frequency, but I think you may also may be overestimating the genuine conversions. I know of plenty of pastors who preach a false Jesus and a false gospel, wolves in sheeps clothing as it were. You'll know them by their fruits..

Actually, I found that in pretty much every instance in which my church and the Bible differed with science, it was science that was correct and could prove it. I love truth more than I love believing in a fantasy.

I love truth too, which is why I stopped believing in deep time and evolution. I came into my faith believing in these things, and was willing to incorporate them into my faith, but upon actual investigation of the facts I found that they were based on very flimsy, circumstantial evidence. The indoctrination I have received in school of evolution being a proven fact turned out to be a bald faced lie. The fossil record itself has overturned every prediction of evolutionary theory to the point where they had to come up with "punctuated equillibrium", which is the theory that tries to explain why they don't find any evidence of evolution. It's a fairytale for grownups, friend.

Yes, I've run into the 'you were in the wrong denomination, those speaking-in-tongue guys are channeling false spirits' approach to my experiences before. It's funny how some Christians are so quick to dismiss the genuiness of the experiences of others while expecting respect for their own claims.

I think there are saved Christians in every denomination, and as I said earlier, I don't doubt you were born again, I am just letting you know that those experiences aren't biblical. For instance, there was a man was being saved in a pentecostal church, and he didn't have a gift of tongues. He said when he was baptized he came out of the water faking speaking tongues so he wouldn't be judged, and lo and behold, people around him interpreted it. There is a lot going on in the charismatic and pentecostal churches which is not from God.

So the druggies and hookers and thugs and murderers and thieves aren't on the devil's good side? Do you know what an ad hoc explanation is and what the problems with it are? Didn't you start out claiming that you were suffering in life and Jesus made your life smoother? I imagine one of the joys of not using critical thinking is always being able to have things both ways.

There was someone I knew who was saved when he was a teenager, and immediately after conversion he came under spiritual attack. When he called upon the name of Jesus, the attacks would cease for a few days, but the devils would always come back. One day, he had the idea to call out to the name of Thor instead of Jesus. After he called out to Thor, the attacks stopped for good. Do you know why? Because once he stopped calling out to Jesus, the devils work was done.

The serpent is subtle, friend. If someone is living in quite a bit of sin, they are being egged on by the devil; he is running them down, trying to destroy them. He is hoping he can get them overdosed, suicided, killed by police, or so beaten down that they never get back up again. He is trying to kill them off or utterly ruin them before they can make a profession of faith. If it wasn't for the mercy of God, there would be no hope for them. If he could convince you to murder or get you addicted to hard drugs, he would do the same thing to you. As it stands, he is content that you worship the false idol of scientism.

Jesus has improved my life in innumerable ways, but that doesn't mean that trials do not come. The bible doesn't guarantee you a perfect life, in fact it says we are guaranteed to be persecuted. So you have simply misunderstood where I am coming from, because there is nothing contradictory in what I have said. To imply I am some sort of moron I would have thought was beneath you.

The evidence wasn't contrary to reality. We just lacked the means to detect it. There wasn't evidence the current state of the cosmos was eternal (except for the 1st Law of Thermodynamics), just a lack of evidence to base a convincing case otherwise. We didn't know the universe was expanding, for instance. I notice you're fine with claiming science supports a beginning to our cosmos while dismissing that the evidence that brings us to that conclusion necessarily makes it billions of years old.

It was the interpretation of the evidence that was contrary to reality, and that stemming from the conventional wisdom of the day. Scientists present their interpretations as proven fact, as we see in science textbooks. Entire generations have been indoctrinated into atheistic naturalism because of this, and it is still going on today. Do you agree or disagree with Richard?:

Richard Lewontin “does acknowledge that scientists inescapably rely on ‘rhetorical’ proofs (authority, tradition) for most of what they care about; they depend on theoretical assumptions unprovable by hard science, and their promises are often absurdly overblown … Only the most simple-minded and philosophically naive scientist, of whom there are many, thinks that science is characterized entirely by hard inference and mathematical proofs based on indisputable data

I regret being dismissive, but what actually happened is that you started getting your information from creationist sites that specialize in trying to find any weaknesses in scientific measurement of age that they can; instead of from mainstream scientific sources. This is like a conspiracy theorist being impressed by the inconsistencies in the account of Princess Diana's death and concluding it wasn't an accident, or by issues with 9/11 reports and conclude our own government bombed us. These kind of theories have a power to suck people in, because we seek patterns, and nothing is perfect. If you scrutinize anything involving humans for weakenesses, you will find something. It's not just celebrities whose deaths are missing details, it's just that celebrities are more compelling subjects for nitpicking the police reports to death. How many people in apparent good health drop dead while jogging? That doesn't mean the police are incapable of coming up with the most likely cause of death. It means that armchair critics with an agenda can distort any inquiry.

I'm sorry, but you're wrong. I've spent much of my life learning about science. I've read many a work of evolutionary biologists, such as the blind watchmaker, and I've read origin of species. I've even read books like the God delusion. I know more about the subject than your average bear. When I investigated this, I simply researched what the actual hard evidence for evolution was, and my primary research tool was papers from the secular scientific community. I was both horrified and astonished to find that what had been taught to me as absolute fact was founded in nothing but circumstantial evidence.

I don't reject evolution because I have a low standard of evidence and believe creationist websites, I reject evolution because I have a high standard of evidence that the theory of evolution falls far short of.

My signs seemed to run the other direction. My experience was not standard in that my family was split up and my parents belonged to different fundamentalist Pentecostal sects, differing in a point of doctrine but agreeing that the members of the other church were deceived and hellbound. Perhaps what you think of churches that practice glossalalia.

I believe the true church is the body of Christ, as scripture says, so I reject all of this denominationalism. The churches around where I live are all working together, crossing denominational boundaries, which is the way it should be.

It's what I would call salesmanship. A conspiracy necessarily implies a group of people got together in secret and decided to make these changes. I propose they are the result of organic changes to the narratives over the years before they were written, and perhaps an individual or two took the initiative to spice up the narrative independently. 'Pious fraud' is an age-old phenomenon. How can it be wrong to rig a statue of the Virgin to weep if it reinforces the faith of the people and gets them into church?

However, at no point does anyone need to deliberately alter the narrative. The reason it's so good is that it evolved. Narratives naturally vary, especially if based on oral tradition. The ones that are most compelling are retained.

Starting from the 2nd century we know what the scripture looked like and it is the same as it is today. We know what the early church believed because we have all of their writings. There is no room for pious alterations. From the beginning, Christians have believed in Christ crucified and Christ risen; that is why people went to gruesome deaths singing hymms, and that is why the early church survived the terrible persecution it faced.

It's almost like you're divorced from human experience. Just now, although there's no narrative to support Matthias witnessing the resurrection, you're believing it because it forms a better narrative for your argument if all the apostles who were martyred saw the resurrection, and hey, whose to say he wasn't there? That is exactly how narratives get changed, especially if there's a long gap between the event and writing it down. Wanting to believe is a powerful force, and we don't know for sure if the apostles believed in a literal resurrection. We do know that people will castrate themselves and commit suicide if their faith in a charismatic leader has them believing that a spaceship hiding behind a comet is going to transport their souls up if they show enough faith. Again, and I'm not sure why you keep bringing this up when I've repeatedly said this, I don't doubt the apostles believed...I'm just not sure exactly what it was they believed in.

There is a narrative support it:

Acts 1:21-22

Therefore it is necessary to choose one of the men who have been with us the whole time the Lord Jesus went in and out among us, beginning from John's baptism to the time when Jesus was taken up from us. For one of these must become a witness with us of his resurrection."

I erred in what I said because although I knew Matthias had been with them throughout the ministry of Jesus, I wasn't sure whether Matthias witnessed it or not, but this passage indicates he did.

Or in the gospels they were supporting cast while while in Acts and the Epistles they were the protagonists. You're assuming everything happened exactly as written as if by an unbiased observer. That these books are profoundly different from other books. However, if they were mere humans writing them from their own limited perspectives with their own biases, there's nothing to explain away. The change in character serves the interest of making the narrative more compelling. Harry Potter becomes more assertive and bold in later books, too.

Luke is the one who wrote Acts. You're in wide disagreement with most historians then, if you believe that they are fiction. Do you have any idea how meticulously detailed Acts in regards to historical data? Luke was an eminent historian and everything he wrote was so accurate that his writings have been used to make many archaelogical discoveries. Consider this conversation between Bart Ehrman, the agnostic bible critic and an atheist (infidel guy)

You're saying that people in a book knew that other events in a book really happened. You're assuming they were motivated by the big miracles they witnessed rather than being motivated much like any other ferevent believers and the miracles being added later by the writers. Not only didn't they know it wa a lie, they may not even have known all these stories themselves. If this kind of thing was happening in a Hindu story, like Krishna lifting a hill, most Christians wouldn't have trouble dismissing it as fanciful, which they can only do by applying a double standard in how they evaluate religious claims.

It's impossible to have a conversation about this unless you nail down what you actually believe. Please tell me what you believe. Are you saying now the gospels are complete fiction? Are you saying none of the people in the gospels are actually real? If so, what standards are you using to make these determinations?

You lower the standards because you believe. We would expect contemporary documentation from sources outside the NT if these extraordinary events involving earthquakes, dead people walking the streets, kings slaughtering children, and so forth actually happening. The lack of such is striking. What we have is believers writing an account decades later when the tale has had plenty of time to grow without outside sources confirming any of the miracles, which is exactly what one would expect if they didn't really happen as described. You should hear my Pentecostal parents. The fuel gauge reads E but they make it to the tent revival anyway. Suddenly fumes or an inaccurate reading are less likely explanations than a miracle. Two thousand years ago maybe a big crowd gets hungry and it turns out someone thought to bring snacks; by the time it's been retold a thousand times it all started with one sandwich. What you have to establish is that this religious tale is more believable than all the others...and you can't, because if you apply the same standards to all, the reasonable conclusion is that no religion has real miracles.

You dismiss any report of a miracle apriori because you are a naturalist, so you have already made up your mind before you examine the evidence. In your mind, there must be some other explanation. The lack of contemporary writings is not striking, it is actually quite usual. The bible is the most well attested to ancient manuscript there is; there is attestion from multiple sources as well as superior manuscript evidence. The fact is that the apostles knew exactly what happened and they have testified to it in the gospels. Where are the legends coming from when the church is run by those who were closest to Jesus and the most important thing they have are His words? They would have zealously guarded these truths from being changed in any way. You act like these people were all morons who were willing to believe anything, when in fact they were true believers, convinced by the evidence they saw with their own eyes, and unwilling to compromise the truth they knew came from God.

Who were these hundreds of witnesses? Where is their testimony? Y'know yesterday, I levitated my way to work. There were hundreds of witnesses. Do you think claiming there were hundreds of witnesses equals there being hundreds of witnesses?

Scripture records that hundreds of witnesses saw the resurrected Jesus, and it personally identifies dozens. What you're doing is avoiding the point. You claimed that they were just halluncinating Jesus, when in fact they were interacting and having lunch with Him.

The main assumption is that an omnipotent being isn't out to deceive them regarding the age of the earth and the universe.

And He isn't. Your blind certitude in deep time and evolution is what is deceiving you. You have closed your mind to any alternative.

Like the rate of atomic decay being constant instead of much faster in the past. It's a big assumption and about the only evidence for it is that the planet is habitable instead of destroyed by runaway fission back when elements decayed faster.

You have quite a bit of certitude for not doing much research. The clocks could have changed due to a global catastrophe, such as a global flood perhaps?

‘There has been in recent years the horrible realization that radiodecay rates are not as constant as previously thought, nor are they immune to environmental influences.
‘And this could mean that the atomic clocks are reset during some global disaster, and events which brought the Mesozoic to a close may not be 65 million years ago but, rather, within the age and memory of man.’

Frederic B. Jueneman

The clocks also could be changed by

1. high energy particles (neutrinos, cosmic rays, etc)
2. nearby radioactivity
3. pressure
4. chemicals

That is actually the least egregious assumption.

Assumption 1: A closed system. That nothing has contaminated the parent or daughter product over millions or billions of years. Problem being, there are no closed systems in nature and contamination is inevitable.

Assumption 2: That each system contained no daughter product, because if it did the reading would be false. Yet, how shall we confirm this? Answer, we can't, there is no way to know the initial conditions. Therefore, when you have your range of dates, just throw away the ones that don't match your assumptions.

Assumption 3: Clock started at the beginning, no daughter products were present anywhere. Only elements at the top of the chain existed. That, for example, all of the U238 in the world had no lead 206 in it, nor did any lead 206 exist anywhere. Yet, after a flood or the moment of Creation, all of these daughter elements would be present and the clocks would start from there.

You cannot get accurate dates using these assumptions, and when we test things we know the ages of, they give us inaccurate readings. Radiometric dating cannot be trusted.

Yes, I thought they gave the Greenwich Mean Time and day of the week for exactly when a rock was formed. Thanks for setting me straight.

They select the most likely date range out of the broader date range based on independent evidence. And, as always with science, the conclusion is tentative and will happily be modifed if new evidence suggests the original conclusion was inaccurate

The accepted dates are selected dates, and a date will not be accepted unless it is thought to be correct. IE, the conclusion interprets the evidence, and anything which doesn't match the conclusion is thrown away. The conclusion is based on the field relationships and ages that other geologists have already determined. So, the geologist already "knows" what the age is supposed to be for his rock before he tests it. If the dates come back a lot older, he will say that the rock had crystals that were older, that formed before the rock was solidified, or a dozen explanations. If it is much younger, he will say it was disturbed by ground water, or something else. What he will never do is question the method.

Strange that you should realize what a problem that is when real scientists do it, but how it applies to your side seems to completely escape you. Yes, scientists expect their findings not to contradict what they already know, it's hard to get through the morning without expecting your breakfast to be edible and your clothes to fit; that the rules aren't going to suddenly change on us is an inference, but it's hard to see how it's an inference that could be more strongly supported.

It's called conventional wisdom, and it is the death of real science.

Yes, and real scientists know what kind of objects a given dating method can measure the age of accurately, which it can't, and why they're accurate for some things and not others. Leave it to a creationist to use a method for dating a specific kind of volcanic rock on a sedimentary deposit and concluding the there's something wrong with the method. And some of those known ages? They're very, very, old.

Real scientists went to the grand canyon and dated 27 samples using the potassium-argon, rubidium-strontium, samarium-neodymium and lead-lead dating methods at state of the art laboratories and came back for wildly divergent results (variations of many hundreds of millions or billions of years) for the same rock. The results were so divergent that they were entirely useless in yielding any absolute ages for any rock.

So tell me, how do you know which dating method is accurate, or how could any of them be accurate given these results?

Gotta love quote-mining. Yeah, it has turned out that there are types of micro-organisms that are entire branches of the tree in and of themselves. There are more than three kingdoms, it's just that the others are composed entirely of microorganisms. Yay science for changing with new evidence. It's even possible that some day a whole different tree composed entirely of microorganisms that shares no common ancestors with us will be discovered, maybe deep underground, that represents a separate abiogenesis event. That addition to our knowledge would be amazing, and would do nothing to detract from the evidence for common descent for the rest of life.

There is no evidence for abiogenesis at all, so don't you think you're getting ahead of yourself? No matter how unlikely something is, if you say once upon a time, it suddenly becomes plausible:

However improbable we regard this event, or any of the steps which it involves, given enough time it will almost certainly happen at least once....Time is in fact the hero of the plot.

Given so much time, the impossible becomes possible, the possible probable, and the probable virtually certain. One has only to wait: time itself performs the miracles.

George Wald, Nobel Laureate, Harvard
Physics and Chemistry of Life p.12

You have also completely dodged the point that your nested heirarchies are plagued with non-nested patterns, such as this:

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn6568

Turns out the resemblence to birds was more than superficial

Talkorigins:

"Anyone who reads any evolutionary literature, even at a basic level, will quickly find out that birds are thought to have evolved from dinosaurs in the Jurassic about 150 million years ago, and that mammals are thought to have evolved from a reptile-like group of animals called the therapsids in the Triassic about 220 million years ago. No competent evolutionist has ever claimed that platypuses are a link between birds and mammals."

doh.

There are plenty of seams. Organs that are neither fully functional nor fully gone, whales with bones where their ancestors would have had legs, snakes with vestigial hips, pandas with poorly functioning 'thumbs' and a carnivorous digestive system, human beings not fully adapted to walking upright and thus prone to back and foot problems, connected breathing and eating tubes, joined waste excretion and reproductive features, human retinas placed to cause a blind spot; all signs of a natural process making do with what was already available and incapable of fully novel design without thousands of tiny, inching, intermediate steps. Evolution has to make do with altering what's already there, and that's what we see in the world around us; with plenty of examples of things a mere human engineer can see could have been done better.

What organs? Do you know it is the faulty assumptions of evolutionary biologists that led to an epidemic of removing "useless" organs of our bodies, such as adnoids, and appendixes. Turns out there is nothing useless about them. This is the fruit of evolutionary biology.

The so-called vestigial whale hips are there to strengthen the reproductive organs, and they're different for both males and females, which means they are best explained by creation and not evolution. a loss of legs does not prove evolution, in fact that is the opposite of evolution. I'll let Nature speak for the "poor" design of the Pandas thumb

""The radial sesamoid bone and the acessory carpal bone form a double pincer-like apparatus in the medial and lateral sides of the hand, respectively, enabling the panda to manipulate objects with great dexterity."

(Hideki Endo, Daishiro Yamagiwa, Yoshihiro Hayashi, Hiroshi Koie, Yoshiki Yamaya, Junpei Kimura, "Role of the giant panda’s pseudo-thumb," Nature, Vol: 347:309-310, January 28, 1999, emphasis added).)

The authors go on to marvel at the functionality of the panda thumb saying, "[t]he way in which the giant panda .. uses the radial sesamoid bone -- its 'pseudo-thumb' -- for grasping makes it one of the most extraordinary manipulation systems in mammalian evolution."

Doesn't sound very poor to me.

What is your point about the digestive system?

Back problems are not due to a poor design, they are due to a lack of exercise, sedentary lifestyles, poor posture, abuse and sometimes poor genetics. It is actually darwinian theory which led to a host of harmful back treatmet techniques based on the idea that we used to be on all fours, which today have been debunked and replaced by new models that are in many ways completely opposite to that paradigm.

Darwinist David Shuman said:

‘… no question [that] … the human back, given proper care and rightly understood, is an astonishingly effective mechanism. As much as the more frequently lauded human brain, the human back is the hallmark of our true nobility and a major factor in the … supremacy of … man.’21

They conclude that:

‘… given proper care, a fair shake, and just a little understanding, your back will take on any job you ask of it … . When it fails, in practically all of the more severe cases the failure is due to some sort of weakness

this "truly marvelous hunk of machinery, an amazingly durable arrangement ready to serve the purposes of a ditch digger or a banker, a prizefighter or a stenographer, equally well’ requires only regular maintenance"

Rather than paste a bunch of things, I'll address your concerns about the pharynx with this article: http://creation.com/is-the-human-pharynx...y-designed

Retina: http://www.trueorigin.org/retina.asp

If you're too biased to look at them, that's your issue.

It's bad science to determine what's good and bad in science based on whether it supports your religious views.

As I already explained, I was willing to incorpate evolution and an old age of the earth into my faith but after investigating, I found the evidence sorely lacking and changed my view. It's bad science to believe whatever scientists tell you is true. It's bad science to apply your skepticism to everything except your own views.

"What you don't understand is that creationist sites lie freely. They don't care about the truth, only supporting their agenda. They take quotes out of context, mislead about scientific conclusions were arrived at, and in general are liars for Jesus. I'd say they do more to make atheists than any atheists do."

I have found inaccurate statements on both sides of the argument. I'll give you a logic puzzle

atheists hate anything that advocates for creationism
creationist websites advocate for creationism
atheists hate creationist websites

Are you honestly going to say that every creationist website is just a bunch of deliberate lies? Do you have any idea what a ridiculous statement that is?

The conclusion was arrived at over generations of field and lab work, which at any point could have been thrown into an uproar by a dolphin fossil in the Precambrian or dinosaur bones showing signs of cooking and tool marks. You're asking us to reinvent the wheel every time we look at a fossil. It's not a reasonable demand.

Much like you dismissed over 50 young earth dating methods without looking at them, you will also dismiss evidence of anomalous artifacts and out of place fossils. I could give you hundreds of examples.

The word 'conspiracy' has a specific, well-understood meaning. Human nature is not a conspiracy, although it can be an explanation for why certain things seem like conspiracies that actually aren't.

I think it is a conspiracy in that any idea of special creation is universally shunned by the scientific community, even as the evidence mounts. There is more evidence today of special creation than there ever was.

Yes, for some reason the members of the American Academy of Science and the Royal Society, the most famous and accomplished scientists in the world, tend to be very disproportionately atheist.

And some of the famous and most respected scientists in history were theists.

There's no evidence of special creation to bother to explain away.

Except the evidence from design.

Much evidence can be adduced in favor of the Theory of Evolution from Biology, Biogeography, and Paleontology, but I still think that to the unprejudiced the fossil record of plants is in favor of special creation.

EJH Cornor, Cambridge
Contemporary Botanical Thought p.61

(on the cambrian explosion)
And we find many of them already in an advanced state of evolution, the very first time they appear. It is as though they were just planted there, without any evolutionary history. Needless to say, this appearance of sudden planting has delighted creationists.

Richard Dawkins - The Blind Watchmaker 1986

Biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose.

Richard Dawkins
The Blind Watchmaker p.1

Biologists must constantly keep in mind that what they see was not designed but rather evolved.

Francis Crick Nobel Laureate
What Mad Pursuit p.138 1988

You shouldn't speculate about what I believe, you aren't good at it. Scientists are better educated than most people and knowledgeable in their specific fields, but they're as ornery and close-minded as any other homo sapiens. They're so bad that it takes the scientific method to keep them honest.

Regardless of whatever raw data you have, the interpretation of that data is philosophical.

Science isn't aware of any persuasive evidence for a young earth and it's laughable the way you're projecting how you feel about the overwhelming evidence for an old earth onto them.

The evidence is overwhelmingly faulty, but that is all that overwhelming about it. There is more evidence for a young earth than an old one. Ask yourself why you find blood cells and muscle tissue in dinosaur fossils, or why all fossils contain carbon 14 when that should be long, long gone after millions of years.

And what those poor saps have in common is a firm grasp of the conclusion they want and an obsession with finding evidence to support it. I've heard somewhere that that's bad science

They would have a lot in common with evolutionists then, who keep jumping the gun on finding the "missing link", spreading the story to all of the newspapers, and then having the sad thing debunked a few months later.

The difference between you and me is that when I investigated science, I got it from actual scientists. I started off thinking evolution was hooey, but when I actually looked up from what my pastor told me and books like Evidence That Demands a Verdict; I found in museums and laboratories and universities and libraries how science is actually conducted, why it works, and how and why the evidence has led them to where they are. I suppose if the intertubez were around when I was in my twenties and early thirties I might have found it easy to cocoon myself with sources that told me what I wanted to hear.

The difference between you and me is, you abandoned God and bought the story the world sold you. You put down the truth for a pacifier. I came out of the world because I love the one who made it. It's not a dichotomy of science and religion, that doesn't even matter. What matters is what the truth is. You think what man says means something, but God says the thoughts of men are futile. You think the world is wise, God says the wisdom of the world is foolishness. You think what man does is great, but God says what man highly exalts God finds to be an abomination. You think you have a way that works, but scripture says there is a way that seems right to a man, but in the end its way is death.

However, the ones that are being published in peer review journals are not publishing articles that claim to disprove evolution or that the earth is young. The ones that are publishing such things are putting them into vanity journals. What makes a scientist real is doing real science that has results that add to our body of knowledge. Creationism hasn't done that yet.

http://www.discovery.org/a/2640

And your suggestion on how to investigate intelligent design is what? So far, all intelligent design 'researchers' have been able to come up with is: 'hey, that looks irreducibly complex to me!'

How can you say something like this and avoid the label of pathological bias?

I would love to hear one actual, true fact about life that evolution doesn't explain as well as or better than special creation. Because thinking I'm right isn't as important to me as actually being right. If I'm wrong I want to find out so I can correct myself.

Information in DNA

Based on evolution and continental drift a biogeographer can make accurate predictions in advance about the number of novel species to be found on an unexplored island if it's size, distance from the mainland, and how long ago geology suggests it was connected to the mainland, if ever. You know why it's so important to know how old the island is and whether it was connected to a continent? Because the farther an island is from a continent and the longer it's been separated from a continent, the more novel species it will have. Why? Because evolution needs space and time to produce those novel species. What's the special creation explanation for that?

That's strange, because the theory of punctuated equillibrium says that evolution can happen very quickly, so quickly in fact that this explains why we don't see any evidence for it in the fossil record. So this is all very variable according to evolutionists. In any case, I don't deny speciation; that is how the world was repopulated after the flood. It is something that can happen very quickly even according to evolutionary theory, and our own observations. You have your long age assumptions about continental drift, I have my young age assumptions, and speciation could support either.

Millions of secular people are religious. Secular and atheist aren't synonymous. A plumbing handbook is secular, too. People are secular if they believe we're all better off if our government remains as neutral as possible on religous issues. Do you have any idea of the carping and whining between Catholics, Protestants, and Jews when we had prayer in public schools?

Secular culture is opposed to Christianity, it doesn't tolerate it. It will tolerate Islam though.

True, science has just not come across anything that seems to require anything other than natural processes as an explanation.

You can explain mechanisms all day long, which does not speak to agency. Since you don't know where the Universe came from, or how it got here, or why it is the way it is, you are left with an incomplete explanation. You simply cannot say the Universe does not require God to operate when you don't know why it operates. If you think you can then explain the uniformity in nature.

Which reminds me of what I say when someone tells me I'm an atheist just so I can sin without being accountable to God: I've not noticed believing in God to be much of a barrier to sinning.

The barrier to sinning is how much you love God and trust in Him.

Years ago, I started using the term 'Christianist' to describe the Christians who annoy me to distinguish them from the majority of decent and mostly reasonable for day-to-day purposes Christians out there who treasure the same liberties and peaceful coexistence I do. Because Christians are more complicated than that, you can't lump them all together. Over-generalizing is a sin

I try to avoid labels. I think stereotypes make you stereotypical. I love everyone, even the ones who hate me, even the ones who are outwardly despicable.

Which reminds me of what I say when someone tells me I'm an atheist just so I can sin without being accountable to God: I've not noticed believing in God to be much of a barrier to sinning.

The church is apostate, and thus, it is looking more and more like the world every day.

Sorry to quote myself. I thought I would go back and try to figure out what has brotherlylove thinking I'm proposing a conspiracy theory. I believe it's the bolded portion above, and somehow over the course of our conversation that has become a claim that the apostles knew there was no resurrection and died for it anyway.

To clarify, it is a claim that it is common for religous people to use the tactic of trying to get someone to believe and promising them they will get evidence once they've done so. It's a technique that brotherlylove used himself. It's brilliant because it is so effective: once you truly believe, of course you will perceive evidence confirming that you were right to do so. Most people don't know that any charismatic religion can induce brain states of acceptance, religious ecstacy, feeling loved, of belonging, and so forth; so they are easily led into 'trying it' and finding 'it delivers'; when they could have tried Voodoo or Sufism and gotten equally 'profound' results. I've even had a Wiccan try to convert me by claiming that once I performed a few rituals and seen how well they work, I'd know her beliefs were true. My sister-in-law went on a whole 'just try believing' campaign on me a few years ago. From the other side it seems ridiculous. I can't imagine trying to get someone to 'just try not believing' for a while in order to try to get them to give up their theism. But maybe it's because I don't really care if someone is a theist. It's not like they'll go to hell if I don't enlghten them, so I'm not tempted to trick them into it. If my evidence and arguments are unconvincing, I hope they have a nice day. And you never know what seeds you plant might eventually come to fruition. I've seen more than one Christian come to an atheist board only to switch sides after a few hundred posts (and I've seen the opposite, too). Being exposed to ideas outside your group can make a big difference.

You don't realize the spiritual nature of all things, especially beliefs. It's entirely possible for people to come to illegitimate conclusions about their own beliefs, because most people don't understand the nature of their own beliefs. You take that as evidence that they have no actual reason for their beliefs beyond some delusion they are experiencing. For those who do not know God, they are experiencing a delusion, but a carefully engineered delusion.

I'll give you my theory on it. God controls everything, and that includes access to truth. That knowing truth is actually a priviledge. Your particular access will determine who you meet and what experiences you will have, and what you take from those experiences. You will find an entire Universe of meaning there, and so you won't notice that your access is actually tightly controlled. What determines your access level is your openness to truth. Inherently, what keeps you closed to truth are positions you take which you rationalize as being intellectual but are actually predicated on things like: what you hate, what you lust for, what you lie about it, what you hide, your many sins, etc..all of your unreasonable emotionally laden baggage, guilt, and secret sins you carry around from life. The evil you have done compromises your ability to reason and know truth.

God is always giving you opportunities to attain a higher access level and get closer to the ultimate truth (that Jesus is Lord), opportunities which test your character and inherent fairness and balance towards truth. He gives you access to real truth, but if you reject it, you are conversely left with nothing but lies, and these seem as truth. You also have temptations, and the more you succumb to them, the more the deluded you become; the more you sin the less able you are to reason and attain to truth. Sin literally makes you a moron.

That's just a general thought, not meant to be theology. It actually supports your theory in some ways and explains confirmation bias, but not for any reason you speculate.

But anyway, I was not trying to imply the apostles came upon this great brainwashing technique. I'm not even claiming they used it. It's not profound, and it's the kind of thing lots of people figure out independently: if you can get someone to agree to sincerely try to convince themselves your religion (or ideology, or self-help program, or psychic meditation regimen) really works/is true, they will do most of the hard work for you. The point I was making was about the proposal to believe first and trust the evidence will come; not about a conspiracy or anything to do with the apostles.

The evidence will come when you believe, and it will come, in my case, before I believed. The question is, where is it coming from. You think belief ends in the brain, but it is spiritual and extends into the spiritual realms. Regardless of what you're saying, the apostles had lunch with the resurrected Jesus on the beach, so either it's made up or they were with Him.

[Epimethean]

"The evidence will come when you believe, and it will come, in my case, before I believed. The question is, where is it coming from. You think belief ends in the brain, but it is spiritual and extends into the spiritual realms. Regardless of what you're saying, the apostles had lunch with the resurrected Jesus on the beach, so either it's made up or they were with Him."

The lack of evidence supports make-believe rather then suggests it (evidence) can come as a result of belief.

[thesummerqueen]

How is this thread 17 pages long already?

[The Grand Nudger]

Did you manage to find either of those words in the texts you imagined them to be in yet BL? I see you've spent plenty of time on responses. I'm feeling left out. Have we progressed to the drive-by claims and quote mining portion of our adventure already?

[Mister Agenda]

How would you tell the difference?

I suppose it's a matter of perspective. I find spirits useless as an explanation because they can be used as an explanation for anything at all without really being anymore of an explanation than 'because of magic'. Accepting spirits as an explanation doesn't lead to anything useful, while regarding spirits as an insufficient explanation for anything is the difference between planetary communication via the internet and the horse-drawn wagon.

It's not a trouble of believing that people fall away, because I've seen it happen. It's that people who are born again know God and love God. When you described falling away, you were talking about an intellectual decision you made. Yet, in your heart you rejected God, who you had been living for most of your life. How did you make the choice so easily if you actually did love God? Did you ever stop to think that you were falling into deception?

It took a few months to get from born-again to agnostic theist from reading the Bible. I didn't reject God, I rejected the Bible as God-inspired. I didn't know what God was, but I couldn't believe the creator of the universe wasn't better then the magnified oriental potentate described in the OT. It was about 15 more years before I realized I no longer believed in the existence of God at all. Have you ever stopped to think that if this is where a respect for healthy criticism and critical thinking has led me, that I might not be the one who is deceived?

As for me, I was a genuine skeptic. I didn't believe in any supernatural claims, and I thought people who had those experiences were delusional. I wasn't really openminded towards any of it because I saw no evidence for it. I did however recognize the limitations of human knowledge, and our finite minds. I didn't put human understanding on a pedestal; on the contrary, the state of the world was a testament to how flawed it is. Even in science; did you know, when they were testing the first bomb, that they weren't entirely sure it wouldn't burn off the entire atmosphere? Of course, they did it anyway. Such is the way of science today. Just recently, I hear they made a super virulent form of the bird flu for no reason other than to see if they could. Eventually, one of these science projects is going to get turned lose on the planet; it's only a matter of time.

I can't say I really disagree with you here.

I know you were born again because I know you had the Holy Spirit. I can tell by your personality, and the way we are interacting. I also think you still do have the Holy Spirit, that He hasn't left you, like the light is dimmed but not yet gone.

I will take that as the compliment it is intended to be. Thank you.

A rigid faith is a legalistic faith, usually. People justify their faith with their works but don't really know God. When times of trouble come, their faith fails because it wasn't founded on Jesus Christ.

I do think legalism is a trap that Christian fundamentalism is prone to walk into. It can become 'bibliolatry'.

I may be underestimating the frequency, but I think you may also may be overestimating the genuine conversions. I know of plenty of pastors who preach a false Jesus and a false gospel, wolves in sheeps clothing as it were. You'll know them by their fruits..

Sure, who knows what the real rates/frequencies are? My sample size is small.

I love truth too, which is why I stopped believing in deep time and evolution. I came into my faith believing in these things, and was willing to incorporate them into my faith, but upon actual investigation of the facts I found that they were based on very flimsy, circumstantial evidence. The indoctrination I have received in school of evolution being a proven fact turned out to be a bald faced lie. The fossil record itself has overturned every prediction of evolutionary theory to the point where they had to come up with "punctuated equillibrium", which is the theory that tries to explain why they don't find any evidence of evolution. It's a fairytale for grownups, friend.

All I can say is that your experience has been incredibly different from mine.

I think there are saved Christians in every denomination, and as I said earlier, I don't doubt you were born again, I am just letting you know that those experiences aren't biblical. For instance, there was a man was being saved in a pentecostal church, and he didn't have a gift of tongues. He said when he was baptized he came out of the water faking speaking tongues so he wouldn't be judged, and lo and behold, people around him interpreted it. There is a lot going on in the charismatic and pentecostal churches which is not from God.

Of course, I don't think any of it is actually from God, but some of what goes on is certainly less sincere than other things.

There was someone I knew who was saved when he was a teenager, and immediately after conversion he came under spiritual attack. When he called upon the name of Jesus, the attacks would cease for a few days, but the devils would always come back. One day, he had the idea to call out to the name of Thor instead of Jesus. After he called out to Thor, the attacks stopped for good. Do you know why? Because once he stopped calling out to Jesus, the devils work was done.

When you're first converting, it's spiritual attacks. When those are over, you get tested. I recall a story about a roof collapsing on someone in Africa. Immediately, people (lets call them Witch Hunters) set about trying to figure out who the witch that caused it was. A skeptic pointed out the roof was weakened by termites over a period of years, it was bound to collapse sooner or later. The Witch Hunters replied 'sure, it was termites, but the timing was because of a witch'. I just don't live in the same world of invisible spirits that you do, I don't see agency behind everything that happens, and I don't feel a need to find an explanation for a run of bad luck. Stuff happens, and people are wired to look for intention behind it, but that doesn't mean it's there.

The serpent is subtle, friend. If someone is living in quite a bit of sin, they are being egged on by the devil; he is running them down, trying to destroy them. He is hoping he can get them overdosed, suicided, killed by police, or so beaten down that they never get back up again. He is trying to kill them off or utterly ruin them before they can make a profession of faith. If it wasn't for the mercy of God, there would be no hope for them. If he could convince you to murder or get you addicted to hard drugs, he would do the same thing to you. As it stands, he is content that you worship the false idol of scientism.

I would trust you if you were giving me information about your neighbor. You seem a trustworthy sort. I trust my dear old aunt implicitly, and if she told me something was hot, I wouldn't touch it. However, if she told me about the activities of invisible spirits, I would have to wonder how she came by such inhuman knowledge and how anyone could possibly tell if what she was saying is really true or not. There's no way to know if what you're saying is true, even if it is true, without evidence that anyone can observe to support it. Otherwise I can't tell whether your claims are superior to those of the Witch Hunter who says it's witches to blame.

Jesus has improved my life in innumerable ways, but that doesn't mean that trials do not come. The bible doesn't guarantee you a perfect life, in fact it says we are guaranteed to be persecuted. So you have simply misunderstood where I am coming from, because there is nothing contradictory in what I have said. To imply I am some sort of moron I would have thought was beneath you.

I apologize for that. The rain falls on the just and the unjust alike, I hear. It does seem like you're covered no matter what happens, though, which is a very convenient position to be in. I can think of events that would freak me out and make me question what I think I know, but there's nothing that could happen to anyone that isn't covered by your belief system. The same is true of the Witch Hunters and their witches.

It was the interpretation of the evidence that was contrary to reality, and that stemming from the conventional wisdom of the day. Scientists present their interpretations as proven fact, as we see in science textbooks. Entire generations have been indoctrinated into atheistic naturalism because of this, and it is still going on today. Do you agree or disagree with Richard?:

Richard Lewontin “does acknowledge that scientists inescapably rely on ‘rhetorical’ proofs (authority, tradition) for most of what they care about; they depend on theoretical assumptions unprovable by hard science, and their promises are often absurdly overblown … Only the most simple-minded and philosophically naive scientist, of whom there are many, thinks that science is characterized entirely by hard inference and mathematical proofs based on indisputable data

Richard has a point. It's not the scientists I trust but the process; which has repeatedly forced the scientists to change their views.

I'm sorry, but you're wrong. I've spent much of my life learning about science. I've read many a work of evolutionary biologists, such as the blind watchmaker, and I've read origin of species. I've even read books like the God delusion. I know more about the subject than your average bear. When I investigated this, I simply researched what the actual hard evidence for evolution was, and my primary research tool was papers from the secular scientific community. I was both horrified and astonished to find that what had been taught to me as absolute fact was founded in nothing but circumstantial evidence.

Well, I find your position inexplicable under those circumstances, I was amazed at how broad the support for evolution was across many different scientific fields. Every time I've heard a creationist objection, it's been easy to put my finger on exactly where they went wrong (except for the tl;dr walls of text, which aren't worth responding to because they rely on burying their opponent under more claims than can reasonably be responded to). But it isn't really true that great minds think alike, different people process the same information differently.

I don't reject evolution because I have a low standard of evidence and believe creationist websites, I reject evolution because I have a high standard of evidence that the theory of evolution falls far short of.

Maybe you're too skeptical about some things. That's what strikes me about my parents, how little evidence they need to believe their car was running on miracles and how much they need to believe the medical community isn't hiding an inexpensive cure for cancer.

I believe the true church is the body of Christ, as scripture says, so I reject all of this denominationalism. The churches around where I live are all working together, crossing denominational boundaries, which is the way it should be.

I agree, the splitting has gotten out of hand. I only wish the best for Christians, and i think it is in any case better for them to support each other in their search for meaning than to bicker over minor doctrinal differences.

Starting from the 2nd century we know what the scripture looked like and it is the same as it is today. We know what the early church believed because we have all of their writings. There is no room for pious alterations. From the beginning, Christians have believed in Christ crucified and Christ risen; that is why people went to gruesome deaths singing hymms, and that is why the early church survived the terrible persecution it faced.

Well, before the 3rd century there were still the Arians (believed Jesus was the son of God figuratively, not literally), the Ebionites considered him to be an ordinary man who was 'adopted' by God. Docetism held Jesus as not human at all, and you don't want to get into Gnosticism. But they did agree on the resurrection, if not necessarily on the physicality of the resurrected Jesus, who was sometimes described as having a 'spirtual body'. Again, I have never maintained they didn't believe in the resurrection.

There is a narrative support it:

Acts 1:21-22

Therefore it is necessary to choose one of the men who have been with us the whole time the Lord Jesus went in and out among us, beginning from John's baptism to the time when Jesus was taken up from us. For one of these must become a witness with us of his resurrection."

I believe they believed in the resurrection.

I erred in what I said because although I knew Matthias had been with them throughout the ministry of Jesus, I wasn't sure whether Matthias witnessed it or not, but this passage indicates he did.

No worries, I didn't know either.

Luke is the one who wrote Acts. You're in wide disagreement with most historians then, if you believe that they are fiction. Do you have any idea how meticulously detailed Acts in regards to historical data? Luke was an eminent historian and everything he wrote was so accurate that his writings have been used to make many archaelogical discoveries. Consider this conversation between Bart Ehrman, the agnostic bible critic and an atheist (infidel guy)

I'm afraid that I can't view the clip right now. I do know that Bart Ehrman has remarked on the problems of Luke when it comes to history, but in any case, I don't think it was wholly fiction, any more than I would think that a biography of George Washington written decades ago was wholly fictional because it contained the apocryphal stories of the cherry tree and throwing a dollar across the Delaware.

It's impossible to have a conversation about this unless you nail down what you actually believe. Please tell me what you believe. Are you saying now the gospels are complete fiction?

No.

Are you saying none of the people in the gospels are actually real?

No.

If so, what standards are you using to make these determinations?

Humility. It is very difficult to sort out what really happened exactly as described, what happened pretty close to the description, what may have been exagerrated, what may have been misremembered, or what may have been interpolated by a copyist. I don't know what exactly happened at the time of the events of the Gospels and Acts. And neither does anyone else. I'm inclined to think the mundane parts are more likely to have happened than the miraculous parts, just as I would think with any other religion's claims; because I think that is the most rational position to take.

You dismiss any report of a miracle apriori because you are a naturalist, so you have already made up your mind before you examine the evidence.

Actually, it was personally investigating claims of healings and paranormal events that led me toward skepticism. I found people believing in extraordinary things that always melted on close examination. I learned that many people are highly motivated to fool themselves and unable to evaluate their experiences critcally. An object levitating turned out to be an optical illusion. A kneecap growing back turned out never to have been more than a sprain according to the doctor. A person struck down with lameness was able to walk freely, only to be struck down again in a few weeks: just gout, which comes and goes. The worst cases were people who were clearly still ill but wanted to believe so badly in their cure that they were in denial. I wasn't able to find a natural explanation for all cases...only every single case where there was evidence available to examine. Even I wanted something that would prove there were miracles, but miracles have way more to do with how you process your experiences than what is actually happening outside your head.

In your mind, there must be some other explanation. The lack of contemporary writings is not striking, it is actually quite usual. The bible is the most well attested to ancient manuscript there is; there is attestion from multiple sources as well as superior manuscript evidence. The fact is that the apostles knew exactly what happened and they have testified to it in the gospels. Where are the legends coming from when the church is run by those who were closest to Jesus and the most important thing they have are His words? They would have zealously guarded these truths from being changed in any way. You act like these people were all morons who were willing to believe anything, when in fact they were true believers, convinced by the evidence they saw with their own eyes, and unwilling to compromise the truth they knew came from God.

True believers don't need evidence. Even today most people regard hearsay as strong evidence. It isn't, and that's what those writings are: hearsay, twice removed, and ancient. Have you seen what cops have to work with in trying to build a picture of what happened thirty minutes ago when multiple witnesses are involved and the events are mundane? Our minds continually fill in the gaps of what we don't see in the world around us, we make unjustified assumptions all the time, and unconsciously edit our memories to match what we think must be so. So-called 'recovered memories' have put innocent people in jail for preposterously unlikely crimes. I don't think the Apostles were morons, I think they were human, and products of their time and culture. Our ancestors used to be dinner for predators, they survived by not assuming that the rustling in the brush was just the wind. We come by our disproportionate sense of agency honestly, but it's not always a tiger behind the tree. Humans get by by being able to get the gist of what's going on and what has happened in the past, if we had to be 95% accurate in our perceptions and our memories of them to survive we'd be on the way to extinction. Not morons, just people. People are fallible.

Scripture records that hundreds of witnesses saw the resurrected Jesus, and it personally identifies dozens.

Then you should be able to give the names of 24 witnesses from the Bible. We've got the 11 remaining Apostles plus Matthias, Mary Magdelene, Salome', Mary the mother of James, Joanna, and who else? That's 17, so you only have to find 7 more. Presumably, we're not counting Paul since the men with him did not see Jesus.

What you're doing is avoiding the point. You claimed that they were just hallucinating Jesus, when in fact they were interacting and having lunch with Him.

I try not to claim too much. A vision was one possibility I suggested. Another was that Jesus was not actually dead but only in a coma and revived. Another was that much of the story was missing in Mark, the earliest Gospel, and that the rest was added later as the tale grew in the retelling.

And He isn't. Your blind certitude in deep time and evolution is what is deceiving you. You have closed your mind to any alternative.

What would convince you deep time is real? I can think of a number of things that could convince me it wasn't. I admit it's hard to imagine just how much scientific knowledge would have to be overturned to accommodate shallow time, it's easier to imagine evidence for Last Thursdayism (the universe was created as is last Thursday) than that science has gotten it so completely wrong. You're really in no position to chide me when you assume I thought the Apostles were morons when you think much worse of scientists, given the incentives to get their discoveries right and that you think they've been systematically wrong for generations. Maybe this will help you understand how I can think the ancients could be mistaken without being morons.

You have quite a bit of certitude for not doing much research. The clocks could have changed due to a global catastrophe, such as a global flood perhaps?

How on earth do you think water pressure or whatever affects atomic decay rates? What criteria did you use to determine how much research I did?

‘There has been in recent years the horrible realization that radiodecay rates are not as constant as previously thought, nor are they immune to environmental influences.
‘And this could mean that the atomic clocks are reset during some global disaster, and events which brought the Mesozoic to a close may not be 65 million years ago but, rather, within the age and memory of man.’

Frederic B. Jueneman

The chemist who is a fan of Velkovsky and writes for science fiction and fringe science journals? Was no one less reputable available to cite as a source? There's a Nobel Prize waiting for him if he's right and decides to go into lab work instead of writing.

The clocks also could be changed by

1. high energy particles (neutrinos, cosmic rays, etc)
2. nearby radioactivity
3. pressure
4. chemicals

That is actually the least egregious assumption.

So you do think atomic decay rates are affected by water pressure. That's an easy experiment to do. Please refer to it. How much pressure does it turn out to take to reset the atomic clock? Can that pressure level be found under several miles of water?Assumption 1: A closed system. That nothing has contaminated the parent or daughter product over millions or billions of years. Problem being, there are no closed systems in nature and contamination is inevitable.

Assumption 2: That each system contained no daughter product, because if it did the reading would be false. Yet, how shall we confirm this? Answer, we can't, there is no way to know the initial conditions. Therefore, when you have your range of dates, just throw away the ones that don't match your assumptions.

Assumption 3: Clock started at the beginning, no daughter products were present anywhere. Only elements at the top of the chain existed. That, for example, all of the U238 in the world had no lead 206 in it, nor did any lead 206 exist anywhere. Yet, after a flood or the moment of Creation, all of these daughter elements would be present and the clocks would start from there.

You cannot get accurate dates using these assumptions, and when we test things we know the ages of, they give us inaccurate readings. Radiometric dating cannot be trusted.

People with much more impressive credentials than Mr. Jueneman regard him as a crank. Not just because of his odd notions, but because he chooses to stay away from challenging working scientists by actually providing evidence of his claims and chooses to focus on persuading people outside the field of radiometric dating who aren't qualifed to assess his arguments (not science, just arguments).

The accepted dates are selected dates, and a date will not be accepted unless it is thought to be correct. IE, the conclusion interprets the evidence, and anything which doesn't match the conclusion is thrown away. The conclusion is based on the field relationships and ages that other geologists have already determined. So, the geologist already "knows" what the age is supposed to be for his rock before he tests it. If the dates come back a lot older, he will say that the rock had crystals that were older, that formed before the rock was solidified, or a dozen explanations. If it is much younger, he will say it was disturbed by ground water, or something else. What he will never do is question the method.

That's because he understands the method. When an anatomist finds a skeleton of a human with thigh bones that belong to a horse, she doesn't question anatomy, she figures something has messed up her specimen. That's because she knows what she's doing. Give her time to do some detective work, and she can probably figure out a lot about how those horse's bones got mixed in with a humans. In any other historical field, what you're describing would be counted as sound practice.

It's called conventional wisdom, and it is the death of real science.

Science seems to have muddled through okay with the exception of pleasing young-earth creationists, geocentrists, and flat-earthers.

Real scientists went to the grand canyon and dated 27 samples using the potassium-argon, rubidium-strontium, samarium-neodymium and lead-lead dating methods at state of the art laboratories and came back for wildly divergent results (variations of many hundreds of millions or billions of years) for the same rock. The results were so divergent that they were entirely useless in yielding any absolute ages for any rock.

Sigh. It's crazy to use all those dating methods on the same rock. Not every radiometric dating method applies to every sample. Different rocks have different concentrations of those elements depending on how the rock was formed. Some things do 'reset' the clock, otherwise all rocks would be billions of years old. Radiometric dating depends on 'clock resetting', but you have to know exactly what kind of rock you're dealing with.

So tell me, how do you know which dating method is accurate, or how could any of them be accurate given these results?

There are volumes written on the subject and classes available. I bet a geology professor would love having you in his class. These posts are already getting too long without me trying to provide you with an education in the science you're lecturing us about.

There is no evidence for abiogenesis at all, so don't you think you're getting ahead of yourself?

The only alternative is that biological life has existed for eternity. I thought you were in the camp that a non-biological entity made the first life from non-life. That's abiogenesis, even if it was done by a miracle.

No matter how unlikely something is, if you say once upon a time, it suddenly becomes plausible:

You're telling me!

However improbable we regard this event, or any of the steps which it involves, given enough time it will almost certainly happen at least once....Time is in fact the hero of the plot.

Given so much time, the impossible becomes possible

No it doesn't. The impossible can never happen, no matter how much time is involved.

, the possible probable, and the probable virtually certain. One has only to wait: time itself performs the miracles.

Not necessarily just time. The wildly improbable can happen in a short time given enough simultaneously opportunities. Have a billion dealers deal at once and the chance that someone will get a straight flush is pretty good.

George Wald, Nobel Laureate, Harvard
Physics and Chemistry of Life p.12

George Wald was not the pope of evolution. I know you guys think quotemines are the way to go because you use them amongst each other, but elsewhere it's regarded as less than cricket.

You have also completely dodged the point that your nested heirarchies are plagued with non-nested patterns, such as this:

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn6568

Turns out the resemblence to birds was more than superficial

Talkorigins:

"Anyone who reads any evolutionary literature, even at a basic level, will quickly find out that birds are thought to have evolved from dinosaurs in the Jurassic about 150 million years ago, and that mammals are thought to have evolved from a reptile-like group of animals called the therapsids in the Triassic about 220 million years ago. No competent evolutionist has ever claimed that platypuses are a link between birds and mammals."

doh.

What you want is an animal displaced from the tree, not just one with it's position on the tree adjusted. The platypus will not be the last creature whose place is changed due to following the genetic evidence instead of sticking with previous best guesses based on less information.

What organs? Do you know it is the faulty assumptions of evolutionary biologists that led to an epidemic of removing "useless" organs of our bodies, such as adnoids, and appendixes.

'Vestigial' does not a synonym for 'useless'. I did not say useless. I said 'not fully functional'. For instance, adenoids and appendixes are not so useful that we can't live full and productive lives without them, and they're not worth keeping if they become too diseased.

Turns out there is nothing useless about them. This is the fruit of evolutionary biology.

Doctors didn't remove appendixes and tonsils because of evolutionary biology. They removed them because their experience told them their patients did pretty well without them.

The so-called vestigial whale hips are there to strengthen the reproductive organs, and they're different for both males and females, which means they are best explained by creation and not evolution.

Again, 'vestigial' is not a synonym for 'useless'.

a loss of legs does not prove evolution, in fact that is the opposite of evolution.

So now you're saying the ancestors of whales did have legs?

I'll let Nature speak for the "poor" design of the Pandas thumb

It's not like your post isn't so long already that it takes very long to respond.

""The radial sesamoid bone and the acessory carpal bone form a double pincer-like apparatus in the medial and lateral sides of the hand, respectively, enabling the panda to manipulate objects with great dexterity."

(Hideki Endo, Daishiro Yamagiwa, Yoshihiro Hayashi, Hiroshi Koie, Yoshiki Yamaya, Junpei Kimura, "Role of the giant panda’s pseudo-thumb," Nature, Vol: 347:309-310, January 28, 1999, emphasis added).)

Almost as much dexterity as a real thumb. If only the designer had known about those.

The authors go on to marvel at the functionality of the panda thumb saying, "[t]he way in which the giant panda .. uses the radial sesamoid bone -- its 'pseudo-thumb' -- for grasping makes it one of the most extraordinary manipulation systems in mammalian evolution."

And when it comes to bamboo-eating animals, which is the winner when it comes to extraordinary manipulation? The gorilla.

Doesn't sound very poor to me.

It's not very poor. There is a better one, though. One a designer would have been aware of. Why would a designer use a second-best thumb? Evolution explains it nicely, the Panda's thumb is an adaptation of what it already had, in evolution, real thumbs don't spring up full-fledged, an organism has to go through lots of tiny stages to get there. It's bear ancestors didn't leave the Panda much to work with, but it's a very creditable job considering it had to be evolved from scratch.

What is your point about the digestive system?

Pandas have to put an enormous amount of time into eating because their digestive systems are more like an omnivore than an herbivore. More like a bear. Of course, as special creations, they're not actually related to other bears, the resemblance must be due to...the...uh...aesthetic advantages of having a bamboo-eating bear.

I'm afraid I don't have time to read the rest. I'm not retired or alone in life, I have work to do and other things that demand my attention; and I'm more interested in people's own thoughts than what they can copy and paste. If you want to count making posts too long for a reasonable person to adequately respond to in under an hour a victory, I don't mind. Best of luck.