Summations Only

One of the first things that caught my eye in your list was that in #1, there was an indication of a footnote, but that you did not provide that footnote. Nor did you provide us any link to where you had gotten that nonsense from. Even though you clearly indicated that you are not the author, it is still your responsibility to provide us references to your source.You remind me here of one particularly stereotypical creationist on CompuServe back around 1990. He would make long posts that he had typed verbatim from some creationist book and, in "response" to our own well-thought out responses which we had written ourselves, he would just post yet another long, long verbatim passage from a creationist book. In fact, he was so slavish in his verbatim copying, that he would include all the marking for footnotes, though would never provide those footnotes. And when I was finally able to get him to write in his own words, it turned out that all he wanted to do was to convert us. He finally gave up and disappeared from sight when he tried to convert me by relating stories of amazing physical feats that his sect's founder, Ellen G. White, could perform while in a deep trance, and I replied that I and my fellow Aikido students used to do all those things and much more all the time and without ever having to fall into any kind of a trance.To compensate for your appalling lack of due diligence: Top Ten Signs You’re a Foolish Atheist. I skipped several other Google hits because they were in fora and hence were sure to be secondary sources, such as your own OP. That footnote was a link to http://www.infidels.org/.../fernandes-martin/fernandes4.html, entitled Closing Statement by Phil Fernandes, in The Fernandes-Martin Debate on the Existence of God (1997) between theist Dr. Phil Fernandes and atheist Dr. Michael Martin.That sign #1 is a direct quote from Dr. Phil Fernandes, a theist arguing against atheism in a debate. But wouldn't it be much more enlightening to read Dr. Martin's closing statement at http://www.infidels.org/...tin/fernandes-martin/martin4.html:

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As I have shown again and again Dr. Fernandes' objections to atheism are based on either misunderstandings or question begging assumptions. Even though I have pointed out his misunderstandings and directed his attention to more accurate interpretations of atheism he has persisted in them. When I pointed out that he begged the question his defense was that he was merely putting forth hypotheses. But when I insisted that he had given no reasons to believe his hypotheses he was silent. When I countered with objections against theism--recall I brought up epistemological and ethical arguments--Dr. Fernandes managed to avoid them. They are beyond the scope of the debate, he said. When I showed that what he was saying was mistaken or unjustified he claimed he was not really saying it.

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In his conclusion Dr. Fernandes boasts of the explanatory power of theism over atheism. However, theistic explanations of the problem of evil and of the existence of hundreds of millions of nonbelievers are problematic. Atheism has no such problems. Moreover, a theory such that is inconsistent and lacks rational support, such as theism, can hardly have great explanatory power. As I have shown, atheism is a consistent and a rationally supported position.

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Please note that, unlike you, I have provided links back to my sources so that all readers are able to verify my statements about my sources against the sources themselves. What I have done, and you have failed to do, is nothing spectacular, but rather is something very mundane and is done every day without a second thought. It's called basic scholarship. If you cite a source, you provide a reference to it if at all possible. Now, true, many times in our discussions and attempts at discussion here (even though such attempts are too often obstructed by creationists) we may cite something that we remember having read or seen such that we do not have any means to provide the source at that moment. In those cases, most of us do try to identify that situation. However, in your case here you had at that moment access to the source because you copy-and-pasted it from there, yet you failed to cite that source. I have found this to be a frequent lacking among creationists.Edited by dwise1, : minor clean-up

As long as you've mis-posted a huge joke, albeit not one that had had much thought put to it, outside the Humor topic, I may as well add my assessments of each point to those assessments posted by others.Though if I may observe. This must be the saddest thing about being a fundamentalist, especially a fundamentalist who tries to advance creationism. They tell the most hilarious jokes and yet they have no inkling how hilarious they are. How incredibly tragic.

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Not all atheists are the same, though you cannot allow yourself to realize that, nor to try to imagine how somebody else thinks. We have the figures from Christian youth ministers that 80% of children raised on fundamentalism reject their faith and even religion itself by the time they reach young adulthood. Of course, I think that it's because of their having been raised on the lies of creationism which causes everything to unravel when they grow up and learn the truth. However, I have also read (blog linked to very long ago on FaceBook by Ed Babinski, former creationist and ultra-fundamentalist) that it's the humanities, not science, that leads to such massive deconversion. It's not so much learning that everything they had taught you about science was a lie, but rather learning other perspectives, that there are other ways of looking at things, and by placing yourself in somebody else's shoes that their fundamentalist upbringing completely falls apart. As I've observed before, fundamentalism and especially creationism depend very heavily on maintaining believers' ignorance.Atheists are individuals and few think exactly alike nor hold to the exact same beliefs and ideas. The only common characteristic is that they do not believe in the gods. Now, a common theistic definition of "atheist" is someone who does not believe in that theist's own god, so that polytheistic Hindus would be considered "atheists" by that definition, even though they are obviously anything but. Now, I would think that most all atheists would also agree that the gods are human inventions, but then I could find myself surprised at some time.Now, as for "the existence of God", we of course realize that you are talking about YHWH. Or rather, about your own personal misunderstanding of YHWH. Both of which are of human manufacture, based soundly on our inability to know or understand anything about such a supernatural power and/or entity as could be termed "God". While some atheists would indeed deny the possibility of the supernatural and hence of any supernatural entities/powers/whatever, some atheists know that by its very nature (pun not really intended, but it is nice nonetheless), the supernatural both cannot be detected nor completely ruled out. But still, those atheists who realize that they cannot completely discount the supernatural also still realize that the gods are human inventions and nothing more; if they cannot study the supernatural, then nobody else can either.The second part of your joke is indeed laughable. Do you blame the other gods for anything that happens? Of course not! You wouldn't blame a god you don't believe in, so why would an atheist? It's your inability to understand how somebody else would think that's getting in your way here. Instead, you project your own mistaken ideas on everybody else, thus blinding yourself to the truth.Now, in discussions with theists you will see atheists show the conclusions that a theist must arrive at, in that a theist would be in a position of blaming their own god for natural disasters and other bad things that happen. But, again, those are things that a theist would believe, not an atheist. What the frak are you going on about? Your projection is getting really silly here.But so long as I'm responding to a monumental joke, I would like to share a joke with you. It's from a cartoon in a 1973 German humor magazine, Pardon, which was kind of like National Lampoon. In the opening frame, the protagonist who has a huge nose is looking up asking God why he was given such a monstrous schnoz. In the final frame, God peeks out behind a cloud, sporting an identical monstrous schnoz, and saying, "Because you were created in my image." We do indeed know a lot about the Bible and its history. Or rather, about the Bibles and their histories, including the many variant versions of each verse; ironically and hilariously, even the verse in Revelations promising the plagues described therein to be visited manifold on anyone who changes this Revelation even the slightest bit, also has a number of variant versions. Your particular copy of that book is not magic, no matter how much you want to believe that it is.And it is an outright lie to say that we "never question any of Darwin's writings or Richard Dawkins' books." As the scientific community started to learn about Mendelian genetics, they came to question Darwin. Indeed, many of creationism's quote-mined nuggets of "scientists questioning Darwinism" come from those geneticists in the early 20th century, before Fischer et al. devised the Modern Synthesis and neo-Darwinism by showing that genetics actually solved the problems that Darwin had about the mechanisms of inheritance. Darwin's approach was a provisional hypothesis of pangenetics, a view of heritable use/disuse that was pretty much a back-slide into Lamarckism. It was actually pangenetics that Mendelian genetics was disproving, not natural selection.It would be a lie that scientists never questioned Darwin, because they did. And it is a lie that atheists never question Darwin, in part because most atheists should and undoubtedly would question Darwin's pangenetic ideas.I am an atheist and have been one for about 50 years, ever since I was about 13 (close to the traditional age of confirmation, so does that make me a "confirmed atheist"? -- hey, as long as we're dealing with a joke!) I am also a Unitarian-Universalist. One catch-phrase associated with our church dating from the civil-rights movement of the 1960's is "To Question is the Answer". In the open-ended search for truth (a UU principle), one must be ready to question one's assumptions. Even a fundamentalist should be ready to question his own imperfect, fallible misunderstanding of his own theology. But much more importantly, the scientific method depends on constantly questioning our previous conclusions. And most atheists arrived where they are at by questioning, so why would they suddenly stop?Everything that any authority says needs to be questioned. In most cases, what we accomplish is to clear up our misunderstanding of what that authority said, since what we question is always what we understand was said. But we may also find problems with an authority's statements, problems which raise further questions which lead to further research. Are you beginning to see how this leads into how science works? Because until you start to question, you cannot know what you don't know and need to learn.It is an outright lie that atheists "never question any of ... Richard Dawkins' books." Because that is exactly what this atheist did. When I read Dawkins' The Blind Watchmaker Chapter 3's section of his WEASEL program, I couldn't believe what he had written. I questioned it! So I took his description of the program and wrote my own, albeit in Pascal instead of in BASIC. And my program worked even better than his had (obviously, because of our choices of languages, my compiled code vs his interpreted). And I still questioned it. So I analyzed the probabilities involved in the program. And what I found was that with cumulative selection (what evolution uses and what creationist probability arguments always avoid) the probability of failure is far less than the probability of success. Though, in honor of Eddington's misunderstood statement, I named my program MONKEY: http://cre-ev.dwise1.net/monkey.html:

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A. S. Eddington. The Nature of the Physical World: The Gifford Lectures, 1927 -- about thermodynamics, not about biology (read Infinite Monkey Theorem):
... If I let my fingers wander idly over the keys of a typewriter it might happen that my screed made an intelligible sentence. If an army of monkeys were strumming on typewriters they might write all the books in the British Museum. The chance of their doing so is decidedly more favourable than the chance of the molecules returning to one half of the vessel.

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Douglas Adams. The Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy:
"Ford!" [Arthur] said, "there's an infinite number of monkeys outside who want to talk to us about this script for Hamlet they've worked out."

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Lennon and McCartney:
Everybody's got something to hide, except for me and my monkey!

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RFC 2795: The Infinite Monkey Protocol Suite (IMPS)
Abstract
This memo describes a protocol suite which supports an infinite number of monkeys that sit at an infinite number of typewriters in order to determine when they have either produced the entire works of William Shakespeare or a good television show. The suite includes communications and control protocols for monkeys and the organizations that interact with them.

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Just having a little more fun, since I'm responding to a monumental joke. But it is still very true that I learned a helluva lot by questioning Dawkins. And what I had found confirmed what I had read elsewhere (too many years ago to track down right now), that the processes of Darwinian evolution make the improbable inevitable. The main difference between fundamentalist Muslims and fundamentalist Christians is that Christians commit their religiously motivated murders in such a manner as to ensure their own personal survival. Evolution is a scientific idea. One which has been tested repeatedly over the past 150 years and always passing those tests.The Bible's record is somewhat sketchier. Some atheists do, while some don't. We're a mixed bag, don'cha'know? Now, if anybody could finally work out a workable methodology for dealing with the supernatural, we would really be interested in that. Especially since the ID lobby wants to reform science to include supernaturalistic hypotheses, we would be extremely interested in learning just how that is supposed to work. I even started a topic here seeking just that answer, which was never given.And probability arguments! Ha! Creationists keep coming up with probability arguments and none of them are any more than sick jokes. Most fundamental is the problem that they try to come up with probabilities for things turning out exactly the way they do. Idiotic! I never played with cards except for the ones with 80 columns (and you never wanted to shuffle those decks!), but let us use a card game that relies on each player receiving a hand of 5 random cards. You are in such a game and you have just been dealt a five-card hand. What is the probability that you would have been dealt that exact hand, in that exact order? 1:5251504948, or 1:311,875,200, AKA a probability of 3.20641e-9. Pretty low, and yet that is exactly the hand you were dealt! And what is the probability that you will be dealt the exact same hand you are dealt the next time around? The exact same very low probability! But what is the probability that you will be dealt a hand, any hand (assuming, of course, that you stay in the game)? 1.0, 100%, dead certainty.The point and the bottom line, besides the fact that creationist probability arguments are terminally fracked up, is both that in order to make probability calculations you need to know all the factors, and that your probability calculations are utterly dependent on your model. If your model is completely fracked up, then your probability calculations are worthless.For example, the main point of Dawkins' WEASEL program was to illustrate the difference between creationists' single-step selection method and evolution's cumulative selection method. Both Dawkins' WEASEL and my MONKEY took on the task of randomly selecting a predetermined target string, but with two very different types of selection. In single-step selection, you make repeated attempts, but you always start from scratch. In cumulative selection, you start from the previous best-guess. And while Dawkins' target string was a line from Hamlet, "Methinks it is like a weasel" (the play's characters were looking for shapes in the clouds), my target string was the alphabet in alphabetical order. For that to be produced through single-step selection, assuming a computer making 1,000,000 selections per second (conservative now, but reasonable when I worked the problem in the late 1980's) would have required 10²⁷ attempts to even approach a one-in-a-million chance for success, which at the stipulated rate would have required 10,000 times longer than the universe's estimated age of 20 billion years. And yet, with cumulative selection, we would succeed within a minute -- at the speed of today's computers, it's barely within seconds.Needless to say, creationists invariably choose the wrong models for their probability calculations. Of course, they have to, because otherwise they would have to face the truth that they persistently deny.And your " billions of years full of random mutations would result in the impossible" is completely and utterly bogus. For one thing, if something is impossible (ie, its probability is zero), then it is impossible. Period. That's all she wrote. What part of zero don't you understand? But if something is only improbable (ie, probability greater than zero), then that is an entirely different matter altogether. Didn't they teach you that in you statistics class, or wherever you had learned probability? What? You never learned anything about probability? Why am I so not surprised? When will you ever learn to not rely so much on abject ignorance?And if it is not "random mutations" that result in the improbable (to correct for your earlier egregious mistake), but rather those mutations and other genetic factors working in conjunction with natural selection. Evolution is not just mutations; that is more the anti-Darwinian genetics view of the early 20'th century (but only anti-Darwinian because of his erroneous pangenetic hypothesis). Rather, evolution is genetic variation plus natural selection. If you do not understand that, then you cannot understand evolution. And if you cannot understand evolution, then anything you try to say against it is meaningless. A joke, even, which is the post I'm responding to right now. Well, fundamentalist Christians are indeed intolerant, judgmental, and hateful. Let me check now. ... No, not a single speck of foam. We're just speaking the truth.Now of course, the discussion can get heated. And it can become infuriatingly frustrating for us normals as we try to conduct a discussion with fundamentalists. "Freaking lunatics", "weak-minded", "stupid" ... those aren't really what comes to my mind. "Ignorant", yes, because you repeatedly display abject ignorance about those things that you pontificate on. "Hateful bigots", yes, we see that all that time.Please think of how much of this situation is of your own making. You want to create the image of being persecuted, so you engineer all public encounters to provide you with that outcome. We are all familiar with self-fulfilling prophecies. If instead you were to act like a Mensch, then you would be treated like a Mensch, nu? Atheists do not ignore science. Rather, it is creationists who ignore science and misconstrue scientific terms to their whim.Plus, "your" talk here of defining what a closed system is in re: thermodynamics is disingenuous at best. The majority of creationist thermodynamics clap-trap deals specifically with trying to treat the open earth-sun system as if it were closed, which it is not. Let's put it this way. Evolution is what happens when life does its thing, so if evolution is supposed to violate the laws of thermodynamics then so does life, which according to the creationists means that life should not exist. And yet life does exist and does not violate the laws of thermodynamics. Uh, no, all evidence, logic and reasoning does not point to "a Creator and absolute truth." Your premise is false and hence the rest of your statement is not supported. Welcome to logic, which I am sure you are also abjectly ignorant of.OK, I think I can appreciate the lure of your position. You don't have to know anything. You don't have to think about anything. All you have to do is to parrot what your leaders/handlers tell you to. It is different for us normals. We have to learn things, to know things. We have to actually think. But you are released from all that responsibility.The theory of evolution deals with biology, whereas cosmology deals with cosmology. And the concepts of good, evil, and morality are human concepts, so they exist because our species, humans, exists. Duh? Well, as I covered in a previous post, that is a quote taken from a theist who was not able to make his case in an on-line debate (The Fernandes-Martin Debate (1997)). It is mere piffle.

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Think for a moment. What is "foolishness"? Doesn't it involve not thinking about your position? Atheists have thought about their position. A lot. Usually, that is what had led to their having become atheists.What about your position? Have you given it thought? I didn't think so.Edited by dwise1, : last sectionEdited by dwise1, : minor clean-up

The word is "too". And the other word is "responses" -- the forum software even does spell-checking so that you would have known immediately that there is no such word as "responces". Words mean something. Well, the thing is that creationists have nothing, so they don't last long. Anywhere they go, except for a specifically creationist site, though the side-effect there is that such sites are virulently opposed to any and all non-creationists. I have been to such a site. Completely arbitrary. EVC is a haven to members of both persuasions. Dude! You have absolutely no clue whatsoever! The moderation here is so even-handed that creationists are allowed to get away with all kinds of stupid shit.And, no, creationist stupid shit does indeed not cut it. Ever. Oh, we have indeed learned about creationism. Far more and better that you would like. I personally have been involved in this since circa 1981. I know far more about creationism that you would ever want me to know. I'm sure that many other regulars have put in almost as much time as I have. How much more do you want us to learn? Bullshit! Just do it already! What the frak is stopping you?You got something to present and actual evidence to back it up? So present it already! Nobody is holding you back. Except for your own sorry lack of any actual evidence.So prove us wrong!

You have absolutely no idea what you're talking about.I was on one Yahoo forum which had both creationist and non-creationist moderators (sound at all familiar?) and we were able to learn things through discussion. It wasn't easy, since creationists are notoriously reluctant to discuss their own claims, let alone even begin to support them. But then the other moderators left and there was only the creationist moderator. That forum turned into a tyranny in which he arbitrarily suspended non-creationists for the cardinal sin of asking creationist members for information about their claims. You want to see bias? That was bias.In another forum, a leading member, the founder or a moderator I think, in an email to me made a number of claims, including that radioactive decay rates have been affected by industrial pollution. That was the only time I had ever heard that claim and I was interested in learned what his source was, so I asked him. He became extremely hostile and belligerent. Did I neglect to mention that he's a fundamentalist Christian and a young-earth creationist? I tried to pursue the question, calmly and professionally, and he just became increasingly hostile. Years later, I tried a follow-up email and the moment I mentioned that claim of his he flew off the handle again. A bit more extreme of a case, but still an example of what we encounter when trying to discuss a creationist's claims with him. Would you like to explain to me how we're supposed to learn anything if that is the kind of response we keep getting?And the Christian forums are the worst offenders and the most biased. Their moderators are tin-plated tyrants ... no, they seem to think that they are gods. They not only arbitrarily suspend members with whom they don't agree, but they also arbitrarily expel them with no notice, no reason, no recourse ... they even redirect all future attempts to connect with their site to a 404, page not found. Furthermore, they turn those expelled members into desaparecidos, "disappeared ones", people whose very existence on that site gets completely erased.Now, compare those forums with this one. On this forum, creationists and non-creationists alike are welcome to post and participate ... unless they have consistently demonstrated an unwillingness to abide by a few simple rules, rules where are necessary to keep this forum from turning into complete anarchy -- that is the case of Buz in science forums. Yes, members get suspended, but they and everybody receive notification of the fact and the reason is given or at least linked to. Yes, at times a member must be expelled, but again we have the same transparency of notification and the reason being given; there is no attempt whatsoever to hide anything that we find in Christian forums. And at times a posted message is so off-topic and inflamatory that the content must be hidden, but again the fact that it had existed and that it had been hidden is presented for all to see, plus a way is offered to view the hidden content if you really want to view it.And you complain about the "bias" of this forum while, I'm sure, you would love the egregious bias on those Christian forums?Please grow up.Edited by dwise1, : subtitle

We're missing something here. Chuck77 copy-and-pasted a ludicrous joke. What does he have to say about it? What does he have to say about why he had posted it? Especially why he had not posted it in the Humor topic, which would indicate that he was thinking that he had a serious point that he was wanting to make.Let's see. The OP was posted at 3:01 AM PST. What was he doing up at that hour? Late night drunk? With unresolved anger over feeling persecuted (most of which is just a fundamentalist self-fulfilling prophecy that seems to go with the territory -- IOW, they create it themselves), he decided to strike out at others instead of realizing the problem is within himself? Though if he lives on the east coast it would have been 0600 for him, but anyone up that early would be busy getting ready for work or for school, not surfing for and copying such clap-trap with its obvious malicious intent.So, we still need Chuck77's input on this. What point was he trying to make with that post? Does he actually agree with all those points? Does he actually believe all those false things said there about atheists are true? If yes, why does he believe that? If not, then why did he copy-and-paste it?There is so much material for discussion here. Atheists have long known that Christians have many really bizarre about atheists, but have never been able to get any real explanation of where those ideas come from, only increasing hostility and belligerence from those "loving" Christians. Here we have an opportunity to learn why you believe those things about atheists that you do and you have an opportunity to learn form atheists what they really think and believe.Chuck77, all you need to do is to engage in discussion, instead of always running away from it.

I've been studying "creation science" since around 1981 and started discussing it on-line in the late 1980's on CompuServe. One thing that quickly became apparent was that the "evolutionist" side had great longevity, since the evidence was all on their side, while creationists would never last long at all. Without any evidence to support them, creationists would very quickly drop out only to be replace by new creationists (truly, suckers are born every minute) who had yet to learn that they didn't have any evidence to support them. In fact, towards the end of my time on CompuServe, there was one memorable creationist on CompuServe, Merle Hertzler, who stood out from all the other creationists: he actually took his position seriously and answered all questions as directly and honestly as he could. When asked for evidence to support his creationist position, he would do his best to produce and provide that evidence. I had never seen anything like it before and haven't seen anything like it since. He was the only truly honest creationist I have seen, outside of Dr. Kurt Wise in his earlier years, but that is another story.Before we turn our attention to Merle Hertzler, let me tell you another story. As I have said, I started studying "creation science" around 1981, shortly thereafter learned of the existence of the state-level "Committees of Correspondence" and of their national clearing-house, the National Center for Science Education (NCSE). I immediately ordered their newsletter and the Creation/Evolution Newsletter (many of which are still available at the NCSE's website). By the late 1980's I had found the Religion and Science section of the Religion Forum on CompuServe and had become a regular participant; most of the pages I posted when I put my webpage up (second edition at cre-ce.dwise1.net/) were my uploads to that section's library.Then circa 1990, a Fundamentalist Christian and creationist entrepreneur opened a creationist fossil shop in a local mall; he sold actual fossils labelled with their scientifically accepted dates, but he also had posters in his shop copied from creationist sources, including the classic misquoting Darwin on the eye, which had sparked our first conversation -- when I gave him a xerox copy of the original, he immediately placed it behind the counter and, I'm sure, to the trash can immediately thereafter.A few months afterwards, this same creationist entrepreneur used the mall's community meeting room to stage a series of amateur-night creation/evolution debate nights in which I participated. Of course, I first got a mailing list from the NCSE to inform other locals about this, so that instead of being stacked overwhelmingly with creationists, the audience ended up being more or less even. Of course, my own big learning experience from that was that many who identified themselves as "creationist" were not familiar with actual creation science teachings.But here is what really stands out and is the reason why I brought this all up. It was an amateur night and a free-for-all, wherein anybody who thought they had something to say could get up and say it; in a orderly manner, of course. So one night this young creationist, perhaps not yet even 20 years old, got up and announced loudly and proudly that he had new scientific evidence that was going to "just blow you evolutionists completely away!" "The speed of light has been slowing down." Immediately, half the audience burst into uncontrollable laughter while at the same time trying, despite the difficulty of catching their breathe, to explain to this poor guy that Setterfield had advanced that sorry claim at least a decade before and it was dead wrong and these are the reasons why it is dead wrong. I remember the completely devastated look on that poor guy's face. He never knew what had just hit him. I sincerely wish that I could have followed up with him to see what that experience had done to his faith. As Answers in Genesis had expressed in their article, What About Carl Baugh (having to be posted off-site because of a dispute with their site co-habitants; I personally verified this with AiG's webmaster), creationists who use totally bogus creationist claims end up "be[ing] less apt to witness, even perhaps tempted to doubt their own faith (wondering what other misinformation they have gullibly believed from Christian teachers)"You see, that's the problem. All the creationist claims were soundly refuted decades ago, but then new generations of creationists come up, the veritable "suckers born every minute", and they are only taught those old, bogus, soundly refuted claims, but never the refutations. That is where this forum's term, PRATT (Points Refuted A Thousand Times) comes from. Each new generation of creationist comes up and is given the same old shitty claims that were refuted back around 1980 (You're "Chuck77", which I assume means that you were born in 1977, so these claims were refuted by the time you were three years old!). They go out there convinced that they have the absolute latest scientific findings and instead they are devastatingly informed that their claim is completely and utterly bogus and here are the exact reasons why that is. How long are those creationists going to last? No time at all!That's why creationists don't last! Creation science has given them complete and utter bullshit and told them that it was the Gospel Truth. And then they learn, in the hardest way possible, that what they had been given was complete and utter bullshit. Just exactly how long would you expect them to last? Here's a quote from a veteran of that battle, one Scott Rauch:

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I still hold some anger because I believe the evangelical Christian community did not properly prepare me for the creation/evolution debate. They gave me a gun loaded with blanks, and sent me out. I was creamed.

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So what happened to Merle Hertzler, you may ask? He remained honest. Within a year, he had switched over to the evolution side. He had been asked a question about transitional fossils, so he went to the university library to research his answer and he found the evidence so everwhelmingly in support of transitional fossils that his original position had become untenable. From his Questioning: An Examination of Christian Belief (obviously pared way down to avoid clogging this message; follow the link yourself for the full story):

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I remember my decision to question. I had been defending creation in an online debate. I could see the futility in trying to convince scientists that the world was 6000 years old, or that the fossil record was formed during Noah's flood. Could I even convince myself anymore? My position was beginning to fade. Should I switch to old-earth creation? The idea of an old earth would be difficult to accept, but I was finding it even more difficult to believe in a recent creation. What was I to do? Along came a newbie, and he announced that he had all the answers. He informed us that the noted Christian apologist, William Dembski, was going to destroy the theory of evolution. Where had this fellow been all of this time? Many of us had struggled for months to destroy evolution, and had left little impression. Was Dembski going to be different? Naturally, I hit the reply button.

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The questions came easily. Exactly how was Dembski planning to perform this feat? Was he going to prove the earth was young, or present a believable old-earth viewpoint without using evolution? How and when did new creatures come into existence? I typed rapidly. I reached the end of my post, and sat back to look at what I had written. My mouth fell open. There were the same questions that atheists had been asking me, the questions that had been leaving me speechless. I had written them myself. I paused. Should I send this message? But these questions bothered me. Why not ask? I remember the fear. What would God think when he saw these questions? Would he be angry? The answer was all too obvious. How could God be upset that I wanted answers? So I hit the send button. As far as I could tell, God did not object. So I asked more questions, questions which would lead me on an amazing spiritual journey and change my entire view of religion.

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And from his Did We Evolve?:

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Years ago I was fighting the good fight of creation on the Internet. I argued that evolution was impossible, for it required that the genetic code had to be changed to make new kinds of animals. It did not seem feasible to me that evolution could do this. I argued in the CompuServe debate forum, basing my arguments on Michael Denton's Evolution: A Theory in Crises. My favorite illustration was the difference between mammals and reptiles. The differences between living mammals and reptiles are substantial. Mammals all have hair, mammary glands, a four-chambered heart, and the distinct mammalian ear, with three little bones inside. These features are found in no living reptiles. I argued that this is because there is no viable intermediate between the two, that an animal could have either the reptile genetic code or the mammal code but could not be in the middle.

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An evolutionist disagreed with me. He told me that in the past there had been many intermediates. He said that there were animals that, for instance, had jaw and ear bones that were intermediate between reptiles and mammals. How did he know this? He gave a reference to an essay in Stephen Gould's Ten Little Piggies . I wrote back that since the local library had a large collection of children's book, I should be able to find that book. (I thought I was so funny). I borrowed the book, and found an interesting account of how bones in the reptile jaw evolved and changed through millions of years to become the mammals' ear. That sounded like such a clever tale. How could Gould believe it? Perhaps he made it up. But there was one little footnote, a footnote that would change my life. It said simply, "Allin, E. F. 1975. Evolution of the Mammalian Middle Ear. Journal of Morphology 147:403-38." That's it. That's all it said. But it was soon to have a huge impact on me. You see, I had developed this habit of looking things up, and had been making regular trips to the University of Pennsylvania library. I was getting involved in some serious discussions on the Internet, and was finding the scientific journals to be a reliable source of information. Well, I couldn't believe that a real scientific journal would take such a tale seriously, but, before I would declare victory, I needed to check it out.

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On my next trip to the university, I found my way to the biomedical library and located the journal archives. I retrieved the specified journal, and started to read. I could not believe my eyes. There were detailed descriptions of many intermediate fossils. The article described in detail how the bones evolved from reptiles to mammals through a long series of mammal-like reptiles. I paged through the volume in my hand. There were hundreds of pages, all loaded with information. I looked at other journals. I found page after page describing transitional fossils. More significantly, there were all of those troublesome dates. If one arranged the fossils according to date, he could see how the bones changed with time. Each fossil species was dated at a specific time range. It all fit together. I didn't know what to think. Could all of these fossil drawings be fakes? Could all of these dates be pulled out of a hat? Did these articles consist of thousands of lies? All seemed to indicate that life evolved over many millions of years. Were all of these thousands of "facts" actually guesses? I looked around me. The room was filled with many bookshelves; each was filled with hundreds of bound journals. Were all of these journals drenched with lies? Several medical students were doing research there. Perhaps some day they would need to operate on my heart or fight some disease. Was I to believe that these medical students were in this room filled with misinformation, and that they were diligently sorting out the evolutionist lies while learning medical knowledge? How could so much error have entered this room? It made no sense.

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The impact of that day in the library was truly stunning. I didn't know what to say. I could not argue against the overwhelming evidence for mammal evolution. But neither could I imagine believing it. Something had happened to me. My mind had begun to think. And it was not about to be stopped. Oh no. There is no stopping the mind set free. I went to the library and borrowed a few books on evolution and creation--diligently studying both sides of the argument. I started to read the evolutionist books with amazement. I had thought that evolutionists taught that floating cows had somehow turned into whales; that hopeful monsters had suddenly evolved without transitions; that one must have blind faith since transitional fossils did not exist; that one must simply guess at the dates for the fossils; and that one must ignore all of the evidence for young-earth creation. I was surprised to learn what these scientist actually knew about the Creationist teachings of flood geology, of the proposed young-earth proofs, and of the reported problems of evolution. And I was surprised at the answers that they had for these Creationist arguments. And I was surprised to see all the clear, logical arguments for evolution. I read with enthusiasm. I learned about isochrons, intermediate fossils, the geologic column, and much more.

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I would never see the world in the same light. Several weeks later I found myself staring at the fossil of a large dinosaur in a museum. I stared with amazement. I looked at the details of every bone in the back. And I wondered if a design so marvelous could really have evolved. But I knew that someone could show me another animal that had lived earlier and was a likely predecessor of this dinosaur that I was observing. And I knew that one could trace bones back through the fossil record to illustrate the path through which this creature had evolved. I stared and I pondered. And then I pondered some more.

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Within days, I had lost interest in fighting evolution. I began to read more and speak less. When I did debate, I confined my arguments to the origin of life issue. But I could no longer ignore what I had learned. Several months later I first sent out an email with probing questions to a Creationist who had arrived on the scene. He never responded. I have not stopped questioning.

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I had found another page by a young man, one D. Jon Scott, and his page, Genesis Panthesis. Yet another inspired young creationist ready and charged up with all of creation science's bogus claims and ready to defeat that "evil evolution". But what happened? Well, here are his own words:

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Talk.Science was my own creation, and was graciously hosted by MyTownNet.Com (the company has since been bought out and no longer exists) at the URL [http://www.talkscience.mytownnet.com]. It received a healthy portion of both creationist and evolutionist readers, who avidly submitted feedback which I was happy to respond to on the web.

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For a very long time I was content to explain away the mounds of evidence supporting evolutionary biology as well as mainstream geology and cosmology. Particularly the fossil record - which I feel I can safely say that I was much more well-versed in than the majority of prominent creationists (Gish et. al.), was rather easy for me to dispute in my deluded creationist mind.

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After a while, I became very aware of the dishonest tactics used by creationists such as Gish and Morris, and developed a growing contempt for the majority of my fellow creationists/Christians. Though I was determined to help give creationism scientific respectability and aid in restoring the good name of the Christian religion.

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I kept updating the archive and working on it straight through 1998, the year in which Caudipteryx zouii and Protarchaeopteryx robusta - two creatures which scientists described as obviously non-avian dinosaurs (which means they weren't birds), but which had feathers! I simply emphasized their avian qualities and either explained away or dismissed as unimportant their reptilian characteristics, and went on happily spreading the myth of creationism.

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Yes - I had the evidence, the information, and the knowledge of how evolutionary biology works - yet I did not have the intellectual integrity to admit to the truthfulness of evolutionary theory and kept denying that this incredibly intricate law and set of 'trends' in nature could possibly have any validity.

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Then, in september of 1999, the bomb dropped. I picked up my issue of the National Geographic and saw what else on a page advertising an upcoming issue; but Sinornithosaurus millenii! It had long steak-knife-shaped teeth like a T. rex, a long, muscular tail, hyper-extendable "switchblade" claws on the hind legs like Velociraptor mongoliensis, a narrow snout that looked almost like a bill, a bird-like pubic structure, and worst of all - feathers!

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I simply stared at the page for a few moments, muttered "oh shit!" to myself a few times, and got up to check the N.G.News web site. This wasn't just some artistic depiction of what a reptile/bird might look like - and it was no hoax. It was a small dromaeosaurid ("raptor") with killing claws, razor-sharp teeth, and a pair of wing-like arms complete with plumage. My heart sank, and my gut churned. This was it - the one proof of evolution I had always asked for but never thought would come to light. In my mind, I was betting that even if evolution were true, the chances of finding such a beautiful example of transition would be slim enough to be dismissed as impossible. And yet here it was - proof.

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I stepped outside to compose myself, and stood there looking at the world around me.

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Weeks later, I began making plans to dismantle to the Talk.Science Archive, all the while researching the Christian religion. I soon came to the conclusion that since much of the first ten or twelve chapters of genesis had been plagiarized from Chaldean fairy tales and mythos, the truthfulness of the Bible must be strictly spiritual rather than spiritual and historical.

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It wasn't very long before I began to realize that since the 'historical' sections of the Bible, particularly those stolen from Chaldean mythos, were intended to influence spiritual truth - that the early Israelites must have simply been making up their own "spiritual truths", trying to make the fairy tales of their Hebrew (Chaldean) ancestors match up. I was faced with the realization that the Bible could not even be taken as spiritually true...it was/is nothing more than a book of myths and fables from a time and place in which people had no scientific knowledge, and made up these stories to explain what was going on around them (though the people making up these fables probably thought that they were coming to revelations given by their God[s]).

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Then that day in 1999 came back to me. I remembered standing outside on my porch, looking at the natural world of which I had always known myself to be an integral part - albeit created as such. On that day, however, I began to look at the world in a new light.

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I looked at the trees, thinking about how they worked. Photosynthesis, receiving energy from the sun, these creatures had limbs which branched out in every direction, tipped with leaves made green with chlorophyl, drawing energy from the sunlight which they captured. As they fed on the radiant light, blocking the light from the ground below, I began to think of how they might exist without God. A tiny bacterium absorbs energy from both heat and chemicals. Plants are exposed to heat, feed on chemicals, and have chemicals that allow them to feed on heat more efficiently - on a much larger scale than primitive bacterial cell strands. I thought, perhaps, that since some algae is bacterial and other is plant-life, that some bacteria might have used chlorophyl to extract nutrients from the sun. Also, perhaps from this algae, primitive coats of slime would evolve and dwell on rocks near river beds. In a few million years, you'd have moss growing on moist soil. Millions of years could come and go, and plants which harness the power of the sun and extract more nutrients from the matter around them (whether it be water or dirt) would spread more abundantly and prosper over their contemporaries.

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I looked at the trees again. They were large, tightly-packed groups of cells, which over millions of years grew larger and larger, growing green leaves which act as solar panels. They were cell-colonies trying to survive in an environment where new oportunities are as ample as the number of possible combinations of DNA. So here they were, beautiful, and majestic, and sitting there because of the opportunistic nature of living cells - not because God put them there. They were green because they had Chlorophyl to absorb sunlight - not because God thought that humans would think it an attractive color.

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I looked down at my own hands, studying my finger prints. I pondered the reason God might have given them to me. I recalled to myself that only primates have finger prints, and that they used the blunt part of their fingers - rather than claws, to grip limbs and branches. They have traction-treds on their fingers and toes. This is probably why all primates also have flat nails.

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But then why do humans have finger prints? For indentification? We've only had finger print identification for the past hundred years or so. Even if the world were only six thousand years old, that's less than a thirtieth of a percent of the time since humans were first created. Why give us this feature, why design such intricate patterns, if God knew it would be an absurdly short amount of time between the first use of finger print identification and the creation of DNA fingerprinting, which is much more accurate? And what how would this be any different from believing that the bridge of the nose were created for sunglasses, or the opposable thumb designed so that our hand could fit into gloves?

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The only way these hands of mine made sense, with the gripping fingers, the traction-tredded finger tips, the flat nails, was if my distant ancestors - and the ancestors of all humans - were creatures who used their front limbs for climbing.

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And why such low body hair? Wouldn't it be more effecient to not have body hair at all? We use resources to grow this hair which appearently serves no purpose. If we evolved from hairy creatures, it would make sense that we evolved to use our resources more effeciently and wasted less of our reserves on this useless feature. That way, the hair wouldn't have to be completely absent, since the industrial age - when we could produce many of our own resources from previousely unavailable sources - occured at a time which vary well might have been before we had the chance to evolve a completely bald body. Of course it must have been a bit more complex than that, but I had a feeling I was pretty much on-track with this line of reasoning.

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I looked down at my hands again, and studied them for a few moments longer...

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"This is it..." I spoke to myself softly, "Welcome to the real world."[/quote]

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Creationism constantly denies the real world. It has to, since the real world offers it absolutely no support. Doesn't that tell you something?

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In the early 1990's, I had gone into the university library and looked up Hoyle's book. This was after I had done my analysis in the late 1980's of Dawkins' Chapter Three of his book, The Blind Watchmaker, so I was aware of the vast difference between single-step selection (abysmally poor probability of success) and evolution's cumulative selection (virtually inevitable). Hoyle's argument was 100% single-step selection, so it had absolutely nothing to say about evolution. The guy, despite his PhD and reputation in astronomy, didn't have a clue. http://cre-ev.dwise1.net/monkey.html: the opening page to my MONKEY program and my mathematical analysis of how it works; it's my own implementation of Dawkins' WEASEL program in The Blind Watchmaker, Chapter Three.Here's another thought about his "tornado in a junkyard assembling a fully functional 707", or was that a 747? Put the parts of a, admittedly old model of car's, carburetor -- before computer-controlled fuel-injection, that was what cars' engines used -- into a coffee can and seal it with the can's plastic lid. Now shake it vigorously for a long time. A very long time. As long as your arms and ears can hold out. What's the result of your efforts? A bunch of disconnected parts and a degree of hearing loss. Now, belatedly for the sake of your hearing, what reason would you have ever had of any of those parts spontaneously connecting themselves into functional configurations? None whatsoever, right? Doesn't it make sense to you that mechanical parts do not connect and combine themselves in such a manner?Now, take a mixture of amino acids and combine them into a container. Furthermore, make that a super-unsaturated mixture in water at high temperatures. What do you observe? The amino acids readily form into protein-like chains and are encapsulated in microspheres, which interestingly strongly resemble micro-fossils. Many of them are auto-catalytic. And in an anti-septic environment (ie, no other organisms exist that would consider these proteinoids food), those microspheres last indefinitely.Those were the findings of Sidney Fox.So then, if we bang mechanical parts together violently, they fail to combine into any kind of functional mechanisms. If we mix amino acids together with a bit of heat, we get auto-catalytic protein-like chains. Conclusion? Hoyle's tornado analogy isn't worth a fetid dingo's kidneys.Share and enjoy! PS
I shouldn't need to, but just in case.Once upon a time, there was a great geek's show, The ScreenSavers on TechTV, originally Ziff-TV, I think. But then TechTV in San Fransisco got bought out by a gaming channel in Los Angeles, G-4. And they fired some of the old TechTV staff (eg, Leo LaPorte) and other staff members elected to remain in San Fransisco (eg, Patrick Norton, the Uni-kilt guy). So during the transition, G-4 got younger cast members and eventually morphed The ScreenSavers into a pale imitation, Attack of the Show.Somewhere in that wicked metamorphosis, after all the cast had been converted to the young and ignorant, one cast member had been given a t-shirt to wear. On the front was a circle containing the number, "42", and on the back was a person's head with a towel wrapped around it with the caption, "Do you know where your towel is?" And the kid had absolutely no idea what that meant. Nor did any other cast member know. Finally, members of the audience had to explain it to them and they still did not understand!Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Fit the First through Fit the Sixth.Edited by dwise1, : PS

Uh, life. Please pardon us for looking at you like you've just grown a second head, but ... you have heard about life, haven't you? Indeed? Then why in the qs block did you attribute it to me? Perhaps because you had copied that straight from the beginning of the third paragraph after the quotations on my MONKEY page? Where I am describing the algorithms for implementing both kinds of selection in MONKEY. Now, Dawkins could have written the same thing -- I had written that over 20 years ago -- , so could you please cite for us which page in his book he had written that?And please do try to keep in mind the context.

May I ask what you base that understanding on? Because my understanding is that he was talking about how life, having already been established, works. Indeed, as I recall from over 20 years ago when I had worked on MONKEY, he specifically used the example of the evolution of the eye, which is hardly in the "very beginning stages of evolution."How does life work? Doesn't life make multiple copies which are very similar to, yet slightly different from their parents? And then don't those copies not all live to create the next generation of copies (whether due to natural selection or to sexual selection)? And isn't the next generation of copies very similar to, yet slightly different from, the previous generation's copies who were able to participate in spawning that next generation? That is what cumulative selection describes.Or does life instead work by single-step selection? Does each new offspring just fall together randomly in one single act of creation without any kind of genetic information from the parents being applied? Think about it. What does single-step selection describe except creationism?Clearly, cumulative selection, not single-step selection, is descriptive of how life works. Single-step selection is much more descriptive of creation ex nihilo. Comparing the two forms of selection, we find that single-step selection is extremely improbable of working, whereas cumulative selection's success is virtually inevitable. And yet whenever creationists come up with one of their probability claims, they never ever apply cumulative selection, but rather they try to saddle with evolution with their own sorry excuse for a selection method, single-step selection. Does evolution say that modern proteins came into existence through single-step selection? No, evolution says that modern proteins evolved, which means that cumulative selection was used. No wonder creationism has to constantly lie about evolution; if they were to ever tell the truth, then they would have no case.Now, in the matter of the very beginnings of life, single-step selection would have indeed predominated, but once a mechanism for replication was established then cumulative selection would have taken over.But in working out the probabilities for the single-step selection that would have preceded that, you have to weigh in all the factors. Like multiple trials; eg, the probability of any one individual winning the lottery is very small, but when you have several millions of individuals playing, then the probably that at least one of them will win is fairly high and we do see that happening all the time.And the way that things work also has to be factored in. As with Hoyle's poor "tornado in a junkyard" example, mechanical parts do not assemble in the manner described, so the probability that they would of course has to be extremely small. But chemical reactions happen very readily, even though the probability of a specific reaction with specific atoms is very small, as a chemistry PhD friend had informed me. So the probabilities of certain chemical reactions taking place among many billions of atoms/molecules would of course be very much higher than Hoyle's junkyard. As I pointed out from Sidney Fox's work with thermal proteinoids, they assembled themselves very readily, unlike Hoyle's junk, and some were chemically active, able to perform some protein-like activities.Any serious attempt at working out the probabilities of the origin of life would have to take those kinds of factors into account. But, of course, creationists will continue to make up their bullshit probability claims unabated.

I think you hit the head right on the nail there. It's the same kind of thinking that the radical religious right fringe of the Republican Party had infect that body with as their tail wags them, the dog, more and more. The operative orders for the GOP has been to oppose everything that the President or the Democratic Party (but especially the President) proposes or does. The closest thing to a cogent ideological Republican position, or any actual position for that matter, has been to oppose the President in everything and in every way possible. Regardless of how ridiculous any anti-Obama or anti-Democratic statement or claim may be (eg, the "birthers" who still are not convinced, claiming that the President is an extreme-left socialist even though he is a right-of-center centrist, that the current President is totally responsible for the actions of the previous President and of persistent Republican obstructionism), they will embrace those ridiculous and contrary-to-fact statements and claims fully, such that the possible adjective for the Republican Party these days is "bat-shit crazy". Just like their tail which is wagging them.A little over a decade ago in a Yahoo forum (before the other moderators had left to leave it entirely in the hands of the creationist moderator, who immediately turned it into the kind to totalitarian dictatorship that Buz and Chuck grossly mis-characterize this forum as being), a creationist, before the fore-mentioned change, posted the tired old standard "the sodium levels of the oceans show that they are only millions of years old" claim (which also would say that the aluminum levels would say they're only 100 years old, if these devious creationists were to be consistent). I challenged his claim both by describing the concept of residence times to him (that these elements are not only being added to the oceans, but are also precipitating out of them; ever hear of massive salt deposits, like the ones we have been mining for centuries?), and by asking why, if he believed that the earth is less than 10,000 years old (which was the case), he would embrace a claim that contradicted his own position by showing that the earth would be millions of years old instead of ten thousands. His reply was an epiphany for me: "Because it says that the earth is not billions of years old, as science says it is!"That was the answer! They weren't trying to build any kind of cohesive self-consistent world-view, like science does. All they were interested in, like today's Republicans in re the President, was to oppose science in every way they could, to do and embrace everything possible that would show science to be wrong, no matter how ridiculous or contrary-to-fact.There's also a little insight provided on in a presentation in the late 1980's which was broadcast on the radio. Dan Barker, now labeled "America's leading atheist", was raised a fundamentalist Christian and served several years as a fundamentalist minister; his childhood memory was of his mother going about doing her housework while singing in tongues. In this presentation to a meeting of Atheists United (which was broadcast on radio, in the 15 minutes then given to atheists in Southern California as opposed to the hundreds or thousands of hours of radio time given to Christian evangelists; now there are none given to atheists), he offered this nugget: what happens to fundamentalists is that their theology has become their psychology.Therein may lie the problem. Since we normals all think that way, we expect fundamentalists to have or want to have a consistent world-view. They don't want to; they just want to oppose what they see as the opponent.

Which is totally false, as was pointed out to you, yet you persist in ignoring the truth.Let's put it this way, in the vain hope that you will finally understand: No life; no evolutionDoes that get through your unobtainium creationist bubble? Primordial soup is by no means at all a prerequisite to evolution nor even to the theory of evolution; life is. Completely and totally regardless of how life had originated.Why is that simple fact so impossible for you to understand? Except if your twisted and perverted theology forbids you to understand simple truths.The view outside your own rectum is truly amazing. You should try it some time.

The answer, quite simply and for the n'th time, is no. Neither the primordial soup nor abiogenesis is nor has it ever been prerequisite to evolution.
The only thing that is prerequisite to evolution, is lief/Why do you persistently refuse to understand that simple statement?My understanding of fundamentalist psychology (having been a "fellow traveller" in the "Jesus Freak" days of circa 1970) is that your theology-based psychology mandates that several things must be false and hence any inroads that might be made to understanding them must immediately be squelched, since by understanding those things your faith would be placed in peril. Well, any belief that must be so afraid of simple truths is not worth keeping. But as long as you choose to keep those unworthy beliefs, then you also choose to deliberately blind yourself to the truth, AKA "keeping your head wedged up your rectum", though burying your head in the sand could serve as a euphemism.Now, instead of bitching and moaning about particular wording, wouldn't it be so much better if you were to instead address the actual issues? Like, your presuppositions about what are prerequisite to evolution are completely and utter wrong. And that deliberately blinding yourself to that glaring and obvious fact is a deliberate act of self-deception, AKA "having your head up your arse".Or, are you going to bitch and moan about wording, or address the issue?

True and understood. By me, at least.But as long as he continues to confuse/conflate the two, the situation remains the same: head, arse, together as always.Only he can correct the situation. All we can do is to point out his problem so that lurkers can understand.

Your answer is pure bullshit and indecipherable. And on top of all that, it completely avoids the question, all too typical of creationists.Why don't you even dare to attempt to address my Message 104 (reproduced here with but two corrections (refer to the link for the original)):

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We're missing something here. Chuck77 copy-and-pasted a ludicrous joke. What does he have to say about it? What does he have to say about why he had posted it? Especially why he had not posted it in the Humor topic, which would indicate that he was thinking that he had a serious point that he was wanting to make.

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Let's see. The OP was posted at 3:01 AM PST. What was he doing up at that hour? Late night drunk? With unresolved anger over feeling persecuted (most of which is just a fundamentalist self-fulfilling prophecy that seems to go with the territory -- IOW, they create it themselves), he decided to strike out at others instead of realizing the problem is within himself? Though if he lives on the east coast it would have been 0600 for him, but anyone up that early would be busy getting ready for work or for school, not surfing for and copying such clap-trap with its obvious malicious intent.

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So, we still need Chuck77's input on this. What point was he trying to make with that post? Does he actually agree with all those points? Does he actually believe all those false things said there about atheists are true? If yes, why does he believe that? If not, then why did he copy-and-paste it?

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There is so much material for discussion here. Atheists have long known that Christians have many really bizarre ideas about atheists, but have never been able to get any real explanation of where those ideas come from, only increasing hostility and belligerence from those "loving" Christians. Here we have an opportunity to learn why you believe those things about atheists that you do and you have an opportunity to learn from atheists what they really think and believe.

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Chuck77, all you need to do is to engage in discussion, instead of always running away from it.

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Nu?Of course, if you truly believe that your non sequitur was meant to mean something, then you can support that.No, I didn't think you would.

Not, it is not. Since the balloon is being added to constantly from an external source. However, this particular analogy is flawed in re the expanding universe and should not be considered. The expansion of a closed system and the expansion of an open system drawing its expansion from external source(s) are not comparable.Nonetheless, that says nothing about whether the expanding universe is closed or open, nor does it lend any support whatsoever to your ludicrous claim that we define open and closed systems at will and completely arbitrarily.Edited by dwise1, : last paragraph