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Argument #1: Transitional Fossils
RE: Argument #1: Transitional Fossils
(April 26, 2014 at 5:43 pm)Revelation777 Wrote:
(April 24, 2014 at 7:05 am)Ryantology (╯°◊°)╯︵ ══╬ Wrote: If Jesus told you that we descended from earlier primate ancestors in central Africa, I might actually be tempted to take him seriously because it's evidence he isn't a total fraud.

If Jesus said that then I would of believed Him.

So what matters to you is not whether something is true but the authority of the person saying it?

Congratulation - you are fully deserving of the title "sheep" you gave yourself.

And it's "have", not "of". You would try the patience of saints.
At the age of five, Skagra decided emphatically that God did not exist.  This revelation tends to make most people in the universe who have it react in one of two ways - with relief or with despair.  Only Skagra responded to it by thinking, 'Wait a second.  That means there's a situation vacant.'
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RE: Argument #1: Transitional Fossils
(April 25, 2014 at 10:58 pm)Revelation777 Wrote: Do you know that most universities if a professor even hints that they believe in creationism that they will be brow beaten to the point where they will be forced to resign. Watch Ben Stein's movie Expelled, No Intelligence Allowed.

That's because it is not possible to reasonably reject the theory of evolution. There would be no controversy if those with a fundamentalist religious indoctrination didn't experience so much cognitive dissonance in a world where so much information is readily available.
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RE: Argument #1: Transitional Fossils
Quote: likely to take advantage of your ignorance

Now, there's a hole big enough to drive a truck through.
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RE: Argument #1: Transitional Fossils
(April 25, 2014 at 10:58 pm)Revelation777 Wrote: Do you know that most universities if a professor even hints that they believe in creationism that they will be brow beaten to the point where they will be forced to resign. Watch Ben Stein's movie Expelled, No Intelligence Allowed.

This is because you don't get to dictate new rules for a centuries old game, then cry when no one will let you play.

The very definition of science is looking for natural explanations for observed phenomena. Creationism is claiming that God did it. It is not falsifiable, doesn't explain observed phenomena, can't predict future phenomena, and isn't supported by the preponderance of evidence. If you would care to refute ANY OF THESE CLAIMS, please do so.

If you try to publish papers in a peer reviewed scientific journal without following the rules, you get fired. Sternberg published Meyers' paper in a peer reviewed journal, without letting any associate editors review it. If he had done this with ANY PAPER, he would have gotten fired. You know why? Because men stake their academic credibility on being a peer in one of these magazines. That might not mean very much to you, but it means a lot to them. If something gets published in one of those journals, it means they, as the reviewing editors, signed off on it and could not falsify it. Sternberg published a paper promoting ID that they didn't even get to see.

Do you see what creationists, over and over again, have to do? They have to lie and cheat and use other people's names incorrectly to promote their message.
Here's another perfect example of this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expelled:_N...ce_Allowed
Quote:Charles Darwin quotation issue[edit]
In support of his claim that the theory of evolution inspired Nazism, Ben Stein attributes the following statement to Charles Darwin's book The Descent of Man:[28]
Quote:With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated. We civilized men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination. We build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed and the sick. Thus the weak members of civilized societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. Hardly anyone is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.
The original source shows that Stein has significantly changed the text and meaning of the paragraph, by leaving out whole and partial sentences without indicating that he had done so. The original paragraph (page 168) (words that Stein omitted shown in bold) and the subsequent sentences in the book state:[28][71]
Original Text Wrote:With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated; and those that survive commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health. We civilized men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination. We build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed and the sick; we institute poor-laws; and our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of every one to the last moment. There is reason to believe that vaccination has preserved thousands, who from a weak constitution would formerly have succumbed to small-pox. Thus the weak members of civilized societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly anyone is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.
The aid which we feel impelled to give to the helpless is mainly an incidental result of the instinct of sympathy, which was originally acquired as part of the social instincts, but subsequently rendered, in the manner previously indicated, more tender and more widely diffused. Nor could we check our sympathy, even at the urging of hard reason, without deterioration in the noblest part of our nature. The surgeon may harden himself whilst performing an operation, for he knows that he is acting for the good of his patient; but if we were intentionally to neglect the weak and helpless, it could only be for a contingent benefit, with an overwhelming present evil. Hence we must bear without complaining the undoubtedly bad effects of the weak surviving and propagating their kind; but there appears to be at least one check in steady action, namely the weaker and inferior members of society not marrying so freely as the sound; and this check might be indefinitely increased, though this is more to be hoped for than expected, by the weak in body or mind refraining from marriage.[71][72]
According to John Moore writing in the National Post:
Quote:Stein quotes from a passage in Darwin's writing that appears to endorse the notion that for a species to thrive the infirm must be culled. He omits the part where Darwin insists this would be "evil" and that man's care for the weak is "the noblest part of our nature." When I asked Stein about this on my radio show he deadpanned, "If any Darwin fans are listening and we have misquoted him, we are sorry; we don't mean to diss Darwin."[73]
And you, yet again, lie and misrepresent facts here. This is becoming a trend, huh?
"There remain four irreducible objections to religious faith: that it wholly misrepresents the origins of man and the cosmos, that because of this original error it manages to combine the maximum servility with the maximum of solipsism, that it is both the result and the cause of dangerous sexual repression, and that it is ultimately grounded on wish-thinking." ~Christopher Hitchens, god is not Great

PM me your email address to join the Slack chat! I'll give you a taco(or five) if you join! --->There's an app and everything!<---
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RE: Argument #1: Transitional Fossils
(April 26, 2014 at 5:53 pm)Revelation777 Wrote: Fool me once shame on you, fool me twice shame on me. Can't we learn from the artful rendering of Nebraska Man? So now I have to buy into every rendering made from fossils that are supposed to be the missing link or a proof of a transitional organism? No, sir, no.

http://rdlindsey.com/flashfacts/Nebraska.html

I don't know if this has already been addressed; I've been afk for a few days and am only just catching up with the boards. However, since you brought up "Nebraska Man", it's only fair to get more of the whole story than that author chooses to share.

Creationist Arguments: Nebraska Man Wrote:The imaginative drawing of Nebraska Man to which creationists invariably refer was the work of an illustrator collaborating with the scientist Grafton Elliot Smith, and was done for a British popular magazine, not for a scientific publication. Few if any other scientists claimed Nebraska Man was a human ancestor. A few, including Osborn and his colleagues, identified it only as an advanced primate of some kind. Osborn, in fact, specifically avoided making any extravagant claims about Hesperopithecus being an ape-man or human ancestor:

"I have not stated that Hesperopithecus was either an Ape-man or in the direct line of human ancestry, because I consider it quite possible that we may discover anthropoid apes (Simiidae) with teeth closely imitating those of man (Hominidae), ..."

"Until we secure more of the dentition, or parts of the skull or of the skeleton, we cannot be certain whether Hesperopithecus is a member of the Simiidae or of the Hominidae." (Osborn 1922)

Most other scientists were skeptical even of the more modest claim that the Hesperopithecus tooth belonged to a primate. It is simply not true that Nebraska Man was widely accepted as an ape-man, or even as an ape, by scientists, and its effect upon the scientific thinking of the time was negligible. For example, in his two-volume book Human Origins published during what was supposedly the heyday of Nebraska Man (1924), George MacCurdy dismissed Nebraska Man in a single footnote:

"In 1920 [sic], Osborn described two molars from the Pliocene of Nebraska; he attributed these to an anthropoid primate to which he has given the name Hesperopithecus. The teeth are not well preserved, so that the validity of Osborn's determination has not yet been generally accepted."

Gregory confirmed this in his article which correctly identified the tooth:

"The scientific world, however, was far from accepting without further evidence the validity of Professor Osborn's conclusion that the fossil tooth from Nebraska represented either a human or an anthropoid tooth." (Gregory 1927)

Identifying the tooth as belonging to a higher primate was not as foolish as it sounds. Pig and peccary cheek teeth are extremely similar to those of humans, and the specimen was worn, making identification even harder.

Creationists often ridicule the Nebraska Man illustration, of two humanlike but extremely bestial creatures, done by Amedee Forestier for the Illustrated London News (Smith 1922). They rightly point out that an animal cannot be reconstructed from one tooth. But the drawing was not a reconstruction and was never intended, or claimed, to be accurate or scientific, being based more on the Java Man fossil than on the tooth. Smith emphasized (the following quote was in both the main text and below the drawing) its speculative nature:

"Mr. Forestier has made a remarkable sketch to convey some idea of the possibilities suggested by this discovery. As we know nothing of the creature's form, his reconstruction is merely the expression of an artist's brilliant imaginative genius. But if, as the peculiarities of the tooth suggest, Hesperopithecus was a primitive forerunner of Pithecanthropus, he may have been a creature such as Mr. Forestier has depicted." (Smith 1922, emphasis added)

Osborn, who had named Hesperopithecus, was less impressed with Forestier's artistic efforts, and remarked that

"such a drawing or 'reconstruction' would doubtless be only a figment of the imagination of no scientific value, and undoubtedly inaccurate." (quoted in Wolf and Mellett 1985)

Smith may have been the only major scientist who was enthusiastic about Nebraska Man's hominid status, but even he, in his 1927 book The Evolution of Man, was much more cautious than he had been in the ILN article. Although he stated that

"I think the balance of probability is in favour of the view that the tooth found in the Pliocene beds of Nebraska may possibly have belonged to a primitive member of the Human Family" (Smith 1927),

Smith also recognized that Hesperopithecus was "questionable", and admitted that

"The suggestion that the Nebraska tooth (Hesperopithecus) may possibly indicate the existence of Mankind in Early Pliocene times is, as I have explained in the Foreword, still wholly tentative. The claim that real men were in existence in Pliocene and Miocene times must be regarded as a mere hypothesis unsupported as yet by any adequate evidence." (Smith 1927)

Creationists often claim that Nebraska Man was used as proof of evolution during the Scopes Monkey Trial in 1925, but this claim is apocryphal. No scientific evidence was presented at the trial. (Some evidence was read into the trial record, but even this did not refer to Nebraska Man.)

Nor is it true, as Ian Taylor (1995) has said, that the retraction of the original identification was not publicized and never made the headlines. Bowden (1981) similarly states that "Little publicity was given to the discovered error". In fact, The New York Times and The Times of London both announced the news (the NYT put it on the front page), and both also printed editorials about it (Wolf and Mellett 1985). Taylor's other claim, that the retraction was announced in the scientific literature in only four lines in the back pages of Nature, is almost correct (it was 16 lines) but highly deceptive, since it conceals the fact that a one and a half page article retracting the claim was printed in the prestigious journal Science (Gregory 1927). Moreover, Taylor should have known about this article, because it was referenced by the item in Nature to which he did refer.

Nebraska Man should not be considered an embarrassment to science. The scientists involved were mistaken, and somewhat incautious, but not dishonest. The whole episode was actually an excellent example of the scientific process working at its best. Given a problematic identification, scientists investigated further, found data which falsified their earlier ideas, and promptly abandoned them (a marked contrast to the creationist approach).

What's particularly interesting is that you would have (not "of", you notice) had to scroll past this article and two others on your way down to Lindsey's "FlashFacts".
At the age of five, Skagra decided emphatically that God did not exist.  This revelation tends to make most people in the universe who have it react in one of two ways - with relief or with despair.  Only Skagra responded to it by thinking, 'Wait a second.  That means there's a situation vacant.'
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RE: Argument #1: Transitional Fossils
(April 26, 2014 at 11:13 pm)Revelation777 Wrote:
(April 26, 2014 at 8:42 pm)ThePaleolithicFreethinker Wrote:


We got a problem with Tiktaalik. According to this article the tracks of a tetrapod were discovered apx 20 million years BEFORE Tiktaalik. So, if he indeed he were a transitional fossil, he arrived too late to the party. Titaalik is a fish and worthy of a good ol' fish fry. Pass the tartar sauce.

http://www.evolutionnews.org/2010/01/tik...MssRw.dpuf
http://www.evolutionnews.org/2010/01/tik...30621.html

I know you didn't read it because I addressed those foot prints at the end.
[Image: guilmon_evolution_by_davidgtm3-d4gb5rp.gif]https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCOW_Ioi2wtuPa88FvBmnBgQ my youtube
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RE: Argument #1: Transitional Fossils
(April 27, 2014 at 12:21 pm)Stimbo Wrote:
(April 26, 2014 at 5:43 pm)Revelation777 Wrote: If Jesus said that then I would of believed Him.

So what matters to you is not whether something is true but the authority of the person saying it?

Congratulation - you are fully deserving of the title "sheep" you gave yourself.

And it's "have", not "of". You would try the patience of saints.

Thank you for helping me with my English. Yes, I am proud to be a sheep.
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RE: Argument #1: Transitional Fossils
(April 27, 2014 at 8:22 pm)Revelation777 Wrote:
(April 27, 2014 at 12:21 pm)Stimbo Wrote: So what matters to you is not whether something is true but the authority of the person saying it?

Congratulation - you are fully deserving of the title "sheep" you gave yourself.

And it's "have", not "of". You would try the patience of saints.

Thank you for helping me with my English. Yes, I am proud to be a sheep.

[Image: in170-sheep.jpg]
Dying to live, living to die.
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RE: Argument #1: Transitional Fossils
(April 27, 2014 at 8:22 pm)Revelation777 Wrote: Thank you for helping me with my English. Yes, I am proud to be a sheep.

I find it interesting that creationists like Ken Ham will derisively say "evolutionists think people came from monkeys!" as though being animals devalues our fundamental human dignity, but then they'll happily turn around and be all "I'm an unthinking sheep!" Rolleyes
"YOU take the hard look in the mirror. You are everything that is wrong with this world. The only thing important to you, is you." - ronedee

Want to see more of my writing? Check out my (safe for work!) site, Unprotected Sects!
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RE: Argument #1: Transitional Fossils
@ Beccs: Is that a Love Ewe, by any chance?

(April 27, 2014 at 8:22 pm)Revelation777 Wrote:
(April 27, 2014 at 12:21 pm)Stimbo Wrote: So what matters to you is not whether something is true but the authority of the person saying it?

Congratulation - you are fully deserving of the title "sheep" you gave yourself.

And it's "have", not "of". You would try the patience of saints.

Thank you for helping me with my English. Yes, I am proud to be a sheep.

So what if I were to tell you that God appeared to me in a dream and told me he doesn't exist?
At the age of five, Skagra decided emphatically that God did not exist.  This revelation tends to make most people in the universe who have it react in one of two ways - with relief or with despair.  Only Skagra responded to it by thinking, 'Wait a second.  That means there's a situation vacant.'
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