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Author Topic:   How do you define the word Evolution?
dwise1
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Posts: 5930
Joined: 05-02-2006
Member Rating: 5.8


(1)
Message 405 of 936 (805985)
04-21-2017 11:42 PM
Reply to: Message 397 by Dredge
04-21-2017 8:34 PM


Re: If Not, What?
What are talking about? Read my lips: I AGREE with you - they are two diiferent enrirely different mechanisms.
I'm sorry, but I cannot see your lips. Please move much closer to your computer monitor screen. No, even closer, like across the Pacific Ocean.
Sorry. I probably wasn't completely coherent at that time of the night.

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 Message 397 by Dredge, posted 04-21-2017 8:34 PM Dredge has not replied

  
dwise1
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Posts: 5930
Joined: 05-02-2006
Member Rating: 5.8


Message 406 of 936 (805986)
04-21-2017 11:50 PM
Reply to: Message 326 by Dredge
04-20-2017 2:05 AM


Re: Desperate evolutionists desperately need proof
Davidjay: "Desperate Evolutionists will twist anything."
Well said; you hit the nail on the head, imo. You can't trust them.
Funny, we say that same thing about creationists.
Seen creationists do it constantly over the span of three decades. There was one creationist I tried to carry on an email correspondence with for about 20 years. The guy lied about ... just about everything. I mean verifiable lies. Like about who had just said what. Like my response would be to send him the actual text of what we both had just written (my time on CompuServe when they were charging by the minute for connect time led me to the practice of capturing everything to a text file).
Needless to say, my three decades of experience have left me with a very bad opinion of creationists.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 326 by Dredge, posted 04-20-2017 2:05 AM Dredge has not replied

  
dwise1
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Posts: 5930
Joined: 05-02-2006
Member Rating: 5.8


Message 407 of 936 (805987)
04-22-2017 12:58 AM
Reply to: Message 394 by Dredge
04-21-2017 8:22 PM


Re: Are creationists anti-science?
I asked you to name a creationist belief that would prevent a creationist from becoming a competent professional in the field of applied biology. You responded by claiming that a young-earth creationist would not make a very effective geologist.
Firstly, not all creationists are young-earthers - me, for example; I'm an old-earth creationist.
Secondly, I was talking about applied biology, not geology.
Thirdly, I suspect that there is no reason why a young-earth creationist wouldn't make a competent professional in the field of applied geology.
First, thank you for pointing out that you are not a YEC. Most creationists we encounter tend to be. However, they also avoid discussing young-earth claims, since those are extremely vulnerable. For example, that creationist I had that 20-year email correspondence with. He is a dyed-in-the-wool young-earther. In two decades, he absolutely refused to discuss the age of the earth. He knew to avoid it. Too bad, because those claims are the most fun.
Thirdly, I suspect that there is no reason why a young-earth creationist wouldn't make a competent professional in the field of applied geology.
How's 'bout a real-life example: Glenn R. Morton. I already mentioned his presentation at the 1986 International Conference on Creationism in Message 404. You can find his story in his own words immediately below. Let me just say that that his presentation was the first indication that I had ever had that creationism is deadly to its believers' faith.
Here are those two links:
Here's his basic story which should jive with those two links, though it's been a while since I've read them so I'm going on memory here. He graduated from college with a bachelor's in physics (our university systems may differ, so please bear with me), but the job market was tight and he couldn't find work. Somewhere along the line he had converted and had become a YEC. He had also received "geology training" from the Institute for Creation Research (ICR), quite literally the creators of "creation science." -- you know, Gish, Morris. He wrote a number of geology articles for YEC publications, about 28 of them (check those links for his actual figures!) and ghost-wrote the evolution section of an evangelist's book -- Josh McDowell?
Somewhere in that chain of events or afterwards he found employment as a field geologist working for a petroleum company doing oil exploration work. He describes all that in those two links. And for support staff he hired several YECs who had been in his geology classes with the ICR.
Let's go back to the 1986 International Conference on Creationism (ICC) and ICR's John Morris' response to Morton's question about the age of the earth:
quote:
If the earth is more than 10,000 years old then Scripture has no meaning.
(http://cre-ev.dwise1.net/quotes.html#JMORRIS)
Glenn R. Morton's response was to describe his own experience and the experiences of all those ICR-trained geologists as they faced, day after day after day after day mountains of rock-hard geological data that the ICR had taught them did not exist and could not exist or else "Scripture had no meaning."
At the time, Morton described those ICR-trained geologists as suffering "severe crises of faith", though his other writings do no play it in quite those terms. Morton himself described what he had gone through after the 1986 ICC as having been driven to the verge of atheism. The only thing that saved his faith was to come up with some kind of harmonization. My understanding is that it was unorthodox, but since I have not need to harmonize anything, I dug no further.
Then later Glenn R. Morton unfortunately experienced some kind of existential or religious meltdown. He had built up a website with several articles of how the geological evidence contradicts Noah's Flood. But then, apparently, he learned that atheists were using his article to "attack Christianity". Whatever. The end result is that all we have of his pages are what archive sites had saved away.
Even though he took his site down, archives do abound.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 394 by Dredge, posted 04-21-2017 8:22 PM Dredge has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 408 by CRR, posted 04-22-2017 2:33 AM dwise1 has replied
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dwise1
Member
Posts: 5930
Joined: 05-02-2006
Member Rating: 5.8


(2)
Message 411 of 936 (806066)
04-22-2017 2:13 PM
Reply to: Message 408 by CRR
04-22-2017 2:33 AM


Re: Are creationists anti-science?
There are Young Earth Creationists who are competent in all fields of science including biology and geology.
I do not doubt that for a moment. A few, such as Dr. Kurt Wise (no relation to me), are (or were) notable. The ability of the human mind to compartmentalize and to rationalize is truly amazing. So I do not doubt that such YECs can work competently in science and then go home and live a separate religious life untouched by what they do and observe at work. Also, their actual work may not need to depend directly on evolution and so they can avoid evolution and not have to think about it.
As Morton discovered, the problem becomes a problem when you cannot avoid the evidence. As my quote of John Morris indicates, the typical ICR-style approach to YEC is to teach you what evidence does not exist and cannot possibly exist if Scripture were to have any meaning. That is what created that problem for Morton and the other ICR-trained YEC geologists, because they were faced with and had to work with just that kind of rock-hard undeniable geological evidence every single day. There are limits to how much you can compartmentalize before actually breaking your brain.
The presentation that Glenn R. Morton gave at the 1986 International Conference on Creationism was basically a scathing refutation of Flood Geology (invented by John's father, Dr. Henry Morris) based on the evidence. When John Morris confronted Morton in the question-and-answer period, he identified himself as a petroleum geologist, so Morton actually asked him two questions: "Where did you work in petroleum geology?" and "How old is the earth?" It turns out that John Morris never worked in petroleum geology, but rather had taught a class on the subject one semester. Sitting in his university office protected from exposure to the real-world evidence, feeling safe to ignore any part of reality he wanted to.
To illustrate further the ICR approach, I had read the report of the visitation committee from the California Board of Education during the flap about the ICR's accreditation for a master's degree in science. They observed a microbiology class which used a standard textbook that was used by most secular universities. However, the instructor was taking the class through the book page by page and telling them exactly which parts of the text to redact with a black felt marker because "we don't believe that."
Dr. Kurt Wise, who has a PhD in geology and had studied under Steven J. Gould, is a life-long young-earth creationist. His reasons for being a YEC are first and foremost because of his religious beliefs; he has stated that that is the only reason he rejects evolution, considering that the scientific evidence for evolution is so overwhelming. In high school he famously took a pair of scissors to his Bible and cut out every passage that he thought depended on YEC. For so many years, he was one of the few honest creationists out there, even to the point of refuting other creationists' false claims. At the ICCs, he would speak out urging higher academic and scholastic standards in creationism, even though his words fell on deaf ears. A bit over a decade ago he joined the ICR, a den of inequity. I do not know how pure he as been able to remain.
Since a lot of evolutionary biology deals with microevolution they probably work there too.
An interesting side story. But first, a famous quote that you have surely encountered, but never actually read:
quote:
Seen in the light of evolution, biology is, perhaps, intellectually the most satisfying and inspiring science. Without that light, it becomes a pile of sundry facts -- some of them interesting or curious, but making no meaningful picture as a whole. . . . Does the evolutionary doctrine clash with religious faith? It does not. It is a blunder to mistake the Holy Scriptures for elementary textbooks of astronomy, geology, biology, and anthropology. Only if symbols are construed to mean what they are not intended to mean can there arise imaginary, insoluble conflicts. As pointed out above, the blunder leads to blasphemy: the Creator is accused of systematic deceitfulness.
(Theodosius Dobzhansky, "Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution", American Biology Teacher 35:125-129 (March 1973), p. 129)
I assume that you are familiar with the National Center for Science Education (NCSE). Anthropologist Dr. Eugenie Scott had long been its Executive Director. Over a decade ago I heard her speak. She mentioned that surprisingly many university biology departments do not teach evolution. Of course, in her physical anthropology class, she most definitely did teach evolution.
Universities and colleges in the US have graduation requirements, mainly certain classes or types of classes that you must take in order to earn your degree; even if you are an art appreciation major, you still need to take a certain number of math and science courses in order to meet your "general education" requirements. Even biology majors had to take a few other science classes for "general ed". So every semester she would see biology seniors enroll in her class for "an easy A" (the top grade here is an A). And on every the face of each of those biology senior, she could see that moment of enlightenment hit them: "So that's why ... !" For all those four years they had been learning and memorizing all kinds of interesting individual facts unrelated to each other. But now they could see how all those facts tied together. Now they could understand what they had been studying.
In a similar vein there's the experiences of my sons and my sister's son. I had always been a big fan of science and my ex-wife shared that interest, so we passed that on to our sons. We saw science as a whole with all the parts relating with each other. We could reason through scientific problems and understand what was going on and even raise the right question at the right time when something didn't seem right. Science was fun! And still is. I remember when my elder son was about 5 and we were sitting there watching a geology program ("The Making of a Continent"?) as it covered plate tectonics. As the show presented something, Ian said, "I knew that." The next thing, "I knew that too." After a few of those, the show presented something else (plate subduction, maybe) and he said more quietly, "I didn't know that." Then again with the next thing. And he remained pretty quiet after that.
It was an entirely different story for my nephew. He hated science. It was the worst class for him in school. That sentiment is completely foreign to me, but then he explained the problem to me. None of it made any sense to him, because all they did was to teach a ton of individual unrelated facts and ideas. None of it tied together. None of it made any sense. It was pure memorization. It would be like a history class in which you did was to memorize names and dates. I've had history classes like that too. Contrast that with a history class in which you also learn the historical and geographical context of those names and dates. That's when it starts to make sense. That's when history becomes interesting.
That is what evolution does for biology.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 408 by CRR, posted 04-22-2017 2:33 AM CRR has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 414 by CRR, posted 04-22-2017 7:32 PM dwise1 has replied
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dwise1
Member
Posts: 5930
Joined: 05-02-2006
Member Rating: 5.8


Message 413 of 936 (806076)
04-22-2017 6:23 PM
Reply to: Message 412 by caffeine
04-22-2017 5:05 PM


Re: An Alternative consistent and coherent model
You probably should have included Kent Hovind in your sampling. He used a playground merry-go-round full of kids as an analogy for something, maybe spinning galaxies. He proposed that you make the merry-go-round spin faster and faster, which would cause the kids to fly off of it. While each kid's initial trajectory would be a straight line tangential to the circle of their rotation before letting go (like a weight on the end of a string that you spin over your head and then let go), Hovind's common sense informed him that the kids would still have that rotation working on them, so he described their flight as being curved.
I think that our problem is that we associate too much with smart people. For example, I cannot remember a time when I didn't realize that the sun does not burn through combustion. My research of Hovind's solar-mass-loss claim first started because of a college student's question in a Yahoo forum. That college student thought that the sun burned like a fire through combustion; I think he wanted to know where it got its oxygen from. Then some of what Hovind wrote on the subject made me suspect that Hovind also thought that the sun burns through combustion. On that page, I link to an anti-Illuminati wing-nut site's page (Cutting Edge Ministries) about an Illuminati plot to turn Jupiter into a second sun by crashing the Galileo probe into the planet which would cause its plutonium power reactor to explode and ignite the planet. They contacted astronomers about it, who all came back with the same answer, that Jupiter cannot become a second sun because it's not massive enough to start a thermonuclear reaction in its core. Cutting Edge could not understand any of the responses, but they could understand the one from a "Christian scientist", Kent Hovind, who explained that it wouldn't happen because Jupiter doesn't enough oxygen in its atmosphere to allow a fire to start or to sustain that fire.
So the point is that there are indeed people whose understanding of the world is wrong and who will arrive at false conclusions because of that. We may not think they exist because we don't encounter them (or because they don't normally say something that would reveal their existence). For example, when I would mention to a creationist the creationist argument, "Then why are there still monkeys?", that creationist would invariably deny that anyone believes that or would actually say it. In the decades since 1981, I have observed it used in the wild about four times, so those people do exist even though they may be rare (or we just don't hear from all of them).
That study about the metal ball on a spiral track was reported in a popular science magazine, Science'80 (which incremented its name every new year). I lost that copy decades ago. It was a good magazine; sorry to see it go. Though not librarians, who reportedly found it difficult to index because the name kept changing.

This message is a reply to:
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Replies to this message:
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dwise1
Member
Posts: 5930
Joined: 05-02-2006
Member Rating: 5.8


(1)
Message 432 of 936 (806135)
04-23-2017 9:12 AM
Reply to: Message 415 by CRR
04-22-2017 7:46 PM


Re: merry-go-round
I may have not understood that Hovind claim completely. I heard it mainly through a criticism of it.
The big problem with trying to research Hovind is that he avoided writing anything down, so most of his claims can only be found on his videos. Sitting through hours of his slanderous nonsense (ie, constantly misrepresenting science and scientists) requires a strong stomach. The only thing I can think of that would be worse would be listening to Trump "speeches"; at least Hovind knows how to speak and to form sentences.
Fortunately, somebody had created transcripts of some of his videos and posted them online. That is how I was able to find and quote his particularly colorful presentation of the leap second claim inflated the rate of the slowing down of the earth's rotation by a factor of over 30,000 because the originator (apparently Walter Brown) didn't understand leap seconds.
I also have found people who use the "Then why are there still monkeys?" question a few times. It shows a lack of understanding of evolutionary theory and, as CMI says, there are enough good arguments without using this one.
I also found it on Answers in Genesis' website circa 2002 through Dr. Sarfati's response to feedback from Kent Hovind attacking their list of claims they wish creationists wouldn't use. That's all been rotated off their site since then, but a lot of that list is still there as a collection of short articles. Also, I saved Sarfati's reply to Hovind and quote it here followed immediately by a similar quote from Dr. Don Batten concerning Carl Baugh. They both say exactly what I've been saying for decades, that using false claims can only do harm to creationists' cause -- for which I have received a series of vicious hate emails from "good Christians".
Where I part company with Sarfati and Batten is that I have yet to find any good arguments for "creation science." More specifically, despite repeated claims that they have mountains of scientific evidence for creation, since I started studying creationism in 1981 I have yet to see them present any scientific evidence for creation. Instead, all they do is attack their misrepresentations of evolution and any science that conflicts with YEC, as per their Two Model Approach, which is a false dichotomy.

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dwise1
Member
Posts: 5930
Joined: 05-02-2006
Member Rating: 5.8


Message 433 of 936 (806140)
04-23-2017 9:37 AM
Reply to: Message 414 by CRR
04-22-2017 7:32 PM


Re: Are creationists anti-science?
I have heard from geologist speakers who followed the reverse path, moving from secular old age geology to young earth.
I have heard such claims repeatedly, not only for geologists. In the cases that I've been able to research (eg, biologist Gary Parker), the reason for going YEC was not because of the evidence, but because they had converted to a form of Christianity that requires belief in YEC. And the reasons for their converting were for personal reasons having nothing to do with scientific evidence.
Also, I have found that such converts tend to exaggerate and rewrite personal history. For example, a YEC activist I've had the distinct displeasure of knowing claims that he used to be an atheist. That is a lie, because he described to me his life as an "atheist" in which he definitely continued to believe in God and would pray to God every night. What had happened was that as a teenager his church had taught him (perhaps not intentionally) that he could indulge his bubbling hormones and do whatever he wanted to without guilt if he were an atheist. So he pretended to become an atheist, apparently fooling himself in the process.
Similarly, we encounter so many creationists and fundamentalists who claim to have been atheists and to have believed in evolution almost all their lives until they converted. Yet they display profound ignorance of evolution and of atheism. So whom do they think they are fooling, besides themselves and fellow believers whom they wow with their testimonials?
IOW, I have found that such stories do not warrant being accepted on face value.
Dobzhansky's quote is often used but as you note many biology classes don't even mention it so it is apparently not required to make sense of these subjects.
Au contraire! Quite the opposite. Those biology majors in Scott's class had spent years of their academic life memorizing isolated facts without understanding them. It was only by learning about evolution that those years of study started making any sense to them.
Since I started out as a language major (German), perhaps that can serve as an analogy. A linguistics major in my Russian class (linguistics and foreign languages were separate departments) described the Berlitz method of language instruction as memorizing a million and one sentences and hope that one of them eventually comes up in conversation. IOW, you know a lot of facts (sentences and names of things), but you don't understand how to use them. For that, you need the theoretical framework known as grammar. By learning the grammar, you learn the structure of that language, how it functions, and hence how to use it.
Consider the case of my ex-wife who was a French major. She became quite proficient with French, having a natural ear for language, whereas I would always work through the grammar. A couple decades after school and she had been away from French all that time. She forgot a lot of it, whereas I, by knowing the grammar, would be able to reconstruct how something was said. Her approach was purely memorization while mine was understanding how the language worked. You can see the difference that makes.
Memorizing a large set of facts does not lead to understanding. Finding the underlying structure of those facts does.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 414 by CRR, posted 04-22-2017 7:32 PM CRR has replied

Replies to this message:
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dwise1
Member
Posts: 5930
Joined: 05-02-2006
Member Rating: 5.8


Message 434 of 936 (806145)
04-23-2017 10:10 AM
Reply to: Message 408 by CRR
04-22-2017 2:33 AM


Re: Are creationists anti-science?
This reply is to two of yours: Message 408 and Message 414. I have chosen to link through the former.
There are Young Earth Creationists who are competent in all fields of science including biology and geology.
Since a lot of evolutionary biology deals with microevolution they probably work there too.
The question that I'm addressing here is whether understanding is required to do your job. Of course, that depends on what your job is.
If your job is just to gather samples or data and/or to process those samples or data and generate reports, then all you need to know is how to perform those tasks; understanding what you are doing is not important.
If you are a technician, then all you really need to know in order to be competent is how to operate your equipment, how to use your tools, how to perform diagnostics, how to troubleshoot failures, and how to effect repairs. You don't really need to understand how any of it works, though that could help.
Isaac Asimov described it well in the first Foundation novel. When the Foundation was first expanding, it exported its only resource, technology, in the guise of a religion. The barbarians would send their people to the Foundation who trained them to be priest-technicians. What those priest-techs learned to operate a device was to say the proper prayers and perform the proper rituals, then push that red button. No understanding of the miniaturized fusion reactor technology they just deployed was required. That caught my attention, because the QC NCO in my shop, chosen for his knowledge of electronics, didn't understand electronics saying it was all just FM, "f**king magic". You don't need to understand the technology in order to be a competent technician, but it does help.
And here's a case where it helps. You have test and troubleshooting procedures provided to you by somebody who did understand the technology. But what happens when you encounter a situation not covered by those procedures, where you would have to actually stop and figure out just what's going on? Without understanding the technology, you couldn't do it. Our troubleshooting procedures for logic circuits included two simple rules: if an input is shorted, it's a logic zero and if it's opened then it's a logic one -- NOTE: logic circuits operate at two distinct voltages (eg, 5V and 0V) to which the logic values of one and zero are assigned. A few advancement exams in a row, I got a series of questions based on a logic circuit. Given that certain inputs were shorted or opened, I was to choose what the outputs would be. First time around, I couldn't understand why the answers I was coming up with didn't seem right, but it was a timed test so I had to move on. Then I figured it out. Normally, 0V is the logic zero, but in this example 0V was the logic one. That completely changed those two simple rules. The only way for me to have solved that problem was for me to understand the basis for those two simple rules and be able to create new rules for this new situation.
Of course, not everybody can be a fat, dumb, and happy technician. Some people have to conduct research or plan research. For that, they need to have an understanding of that field of science. Keeping them ignorant of the theoretical underpinnings of their field would make it virtually impossible to do their job effectively.

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dwise1
Member
Posts: 5930
Joined: 05-02-2006
Member Rating: 5.8


(1)
Message 903 of 936 (813916)
07-02-2017 6:10 AM
Reply to: Message 889 by Faith
07-01-2017 1:13 PM


Re: Faith: Macroevolution is any new population beyond the boundary of the Kind
I've shown over and over that evolutionary processes do use up genetic diversity, that mutation gets used up like any other allele in the same processes, even if it's rarely reached there is a point at which there is nothing but fixed loci left beyond which further evolution can't happen.
I know that so many others have tried to explain to you that you are concentrating on one aspect of evolution while ignoring the others. So let's try a really stupid analogy instead.
Airplanes.
Airplanes have wings and they have engines. They also fly, undeniably.
Look! We have all these aircraft with wings but no engines. They cannot fly!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Look! We have all these aircraft with engines but no wings. They cannot fly!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
OK, you fracking idiot! you need both wings and an appropriate power plant (engines) to achieve flight. To leave out either requirement is nothing but deception.
Faith, you are doing the exact same thing by concentrating on natural selection and ignoring the factors that increase genetic diversity.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 889 by Faith, posted 07-01-2017 1:13 PM Faith has replied

Replies to this message:
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dwise1
Member
Posts: 5930
Joined: 05-02-2006
Member Rating: 5.8


(1)
Message 926 of 936 (814357)
07-08-2017 12:17 AM
Reply to: Message 925 by RAZD
07-07-2017 7:37 PM


Re: Polyploidy -- evolution by doubling the genome
Same here. Like when I retire at the end of the year.
At many colleges and universities in the USA we have the Osher Lifelong Learning Institutes (OLLI) program for adults 50+. They draw on the members' own expertise for their own classes and special lectures, plus members get buy parking on campus and are usually able to audit the regular university courses. However, locally all the OLLI courses and lectures are during regular work hours, so you pretty much have to be retired to participate.
So I see auditing a population genetics course in my future ...

This message is a reply to:
 Message 925 by RAZD, posted 07-07-2017 7:37 PM RAZD has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 927 by Coyote, posted 07-08-2017 12:35 AM dwise1 has replied
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dwise1
Member
Posts: 5930
Joined: 05-02-2006
Member Rating: 5.8


Message 928 of 936 (814360)
07-08-2017 1:38 AM
Reply to: Message 927 by Coyote
07-08-2017 12:35 AM


Re: Polyploidy -- evolution by doubling the genome
One of the main problems I'm faced with right now is ready access to research materials, given my work schedule. That will give me ready access to materials in the libraries.

This message is a reply to:
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dwise1
Member
Posts: 5930
Joined: 05-02-2006
Member Rating: 5.8


(2)
Message 933 of 936 (815847)
07-25-2017 10:38 AM
Reply to: Message 931 by CRR
07-24-2017 6:36 PM


How do you define the word Evolution? ⇒ Reply
How do you define "evolution" so as to explain your equating it with atheism?
For that matter, how do you define atheism, including how you determine so conclusively whether something is atheistic?
How does Dredge define "evolution" and "atheism"? How does he determine whether something is atheistic? Or satanic as he has done?
How does marc9000 define "evolution" and "atheism"?
The real issue is not how we normals define evolution, nor your stupid creationist definition games. Rather the real issue is how creationists define evolution as they misrepresent it in their dishonest attempts to discredit it. Especially in Dredge's and marc9000's posts, whenever they mention "evolution" they are obviously talking about something far greater and completely different from actual evolution. But a great part of their deliberate creationist deception requires that they generate confusion by never divulging what they are actually talking about.

This message is a reply to:
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