Summations Only

"Constructive criticism" is criticism which suggests how the focus of criticism could be improved. But I don't see much of that in Chuck's post. For instance:

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It's such a great debate site with great moderation supposedly, that it only lets one side of the debate express itself? Why can't Creationists express themselves here without being shot down? We are Creationists. Do you want our views and evidence or not? The answer is no, you don't. It's obvious this site isn't about learning thru discussion because if it was the non-Creationists here would be willing to learn about our sides views and accept our arguments on the entire forum, not just in certain sections.

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I don't see what's constructive about this, or where there's a realistic suggestion for how the moderation of the board could be improved. How should the moderation be different? Does it mean that creationists should be allowed to violate whatever forum guidelines they please? Does it mean that creationists should be allowed to lie? To insult? How would that improve the debate?I know that creationists frequently have issues with moderation - evolutionists do too, incidentally - but what I never get from creationists is how they would like it to be different. Chuck comes close:

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Why can't Creationists express themselves here without being shot down?

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Really? Is this what you want, Buz? To be able to use Percy's website to say whatever you like with no opportunity given for anyone else to respond? How would that be a "debate"? I don't follow, I guess. Can you explain it to me? Shouldn't the truth be able to withstand all assault?

Right, but you appear to be agreeing with it. Am I mistaken? I understood "being shot down" to refer to the firestorm of replies that creationists usually get, like as happened in this thread. In the post under discussion, after all, that's the first thing Chuck refers to:

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Well, i'm not sure where to start. To many responces.

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I mean, I'm not sure what else Chuck could possibly mean. There is, after all, not a single moderator post in this thread, so whatever aspect of the moderation Chuck is referring to - and it's by no means clear - it's something that the moderators didn't do, and I read his Message 49 as complaining about moderators not taking steps to prevent 14 different people from responding to his "copypasta" (that's a new Internet word the kids are using, it means "something that gets copied and pasted on different forums.)I'm just trying to get a handle on his perspective, and since you seem to share it (and you're still here to talk about it) I'm asking you. I'd love it if you could explain it to me. What actually is the creationist complaint about EvC? How are the moderators biased against creationists? It seems like inviting the creationists to become moderators dispels any notion of bias. Chuck was asked to moderate after a handful of posts - I've never been asked to moderate, after nearly 20,000 posts - and his moderation was warmly received by all. Including me.The only thing that Chuck could possibly be complaining about is that he was not insulated in any way from the reaction of board participants to the things he cut and pasted. But what kind of debate site would it be if nobody was allowed to reply?

No, I think the point was that Percy has posted a "top ten list" that as thoroughly misrepresents the Christian perspective as Chuck's list misrepresented that of atheists.It certainly doesn't take an idiot to accidentally misrepresent another's position. That happens because it's harder for us to understand something we don't agree with. But it does take an idiot to hear someone tell you how badly you've misunderstood another's position, and then completely ignore that and continue to assert that atheists are people who blame a God they don't believe exists for all the world's ills. LOLWUT?

What treatment? I still don't understand the complaint. You were mildly disagreed with. Nobody called you a "childish idiot", that phrase only appears in your posts, and again Percy's post wasn't a list of what you believe, it was a list that applied the same errors in Chuck's OP to your own beliefs. Sure. On the other hand, we're frequently attacked by creationists for those errors (if they even catch them, which is fairly rare.) You creationists don't seem to make much of an effort to correct each other, kindly or not, at all. Does Chuck know that atheists don't "blame God for the evils of the world" because, in fact, they don't actually believe in God? If he does, why did he post an OP that suggests otherwise? Because barns are dead, not alive.

Not so. We have contemporary examples both of RNA reproduction and RNA catalysis, and even of RNA self-catalyzed reproduction.Something that small, of course, cannot fossilize so we can only look to contemporary evidence to support our notions of the original protolife, and we can't really "prove" that it happened this way or that. But creating a model that says "this is how it could have happened" goes a long way to answering the question, and certainly rebuts creationist arguments that it was impossible for life to have evolved.

I'm one who contends that there's no historical support for the existence of Jesus (or, at least, that particular Jesus.) My impression, however, is that you're right and that the majority of atheists are accepting of the general consensus that Jesus was a real historical person.Mostly I think that's because they've not yet looked closely and seen that the entire case of the historical existence of Jesus is that, 70 years after he's supposed to have lived, people seem to have believed that he did. (I don't find that compelling. If I ask Alice why she believes Jesus existed, and she says because Bob believes he did too, and I ask Bob and he says he believes because Charlie does, and eventually I get down to Yves, who says he believes because Zed did, only Zed's dead, baby, Zed's dead, and so we can't ask him why he believed - that chain of taking the other guy's word for it doesn't lend any credence whatsoever to what they believe. None at all.)I'm fairly sure Theodoric would agree that he and I are in a minority. As you'll recall, we had that discussion and many atheists came out in support of the existence of a historical Jesus (but were not able to present much compelling evidence for it.)

If I can just kind of bridge the divide, here, I think there's a usage problem.I think you're using "primordial soup" to refer to any and all naturalist, scientific models of the origin of life; the rest of us view "primordial soup" as a reference to an older and somewhat obsolete (quaint, really) proposal about how life might have arisen.The most modern scientific view is the "RNA World", where RNA molecules - which we now know can be both self-replicating, unlike proteins, and catalytic, unlike DNA - constituted the whole of ecology, which then gave rise to the dominant "protein/nucleotide" world we live in today. This chemistry is proposed to have arisen not in a "primordial soup", where organic compounds reacted randomly in solution, but at the surface of clays or crystals where molecules might have formed using repetitive crystal structures as physical templates. Structural repetition, of course, being a critical feature of biomolecules.Further I think you're folding in the idea that evolution connotes a Godless universe - which I, unlike many, tend to agree with you about - and implicitly saying that it hardly makes sense to propose a world of Godless evolution started by a divine act of creation, and therefore evolution has to be paired with a similarly-naturalistic origin of life. But as you well know, not everybody's notion of God seems to be inconsistent with an evolutionary world, or worldview, so while I agree with you that evolution should be paired with a naturalistic view of the origin of life, I think you're wrong to say that it has to be that way for everyone. Evolution works regardless of how life arose, just as baseball is the same game regardless of whether gravity is relativistic or Newtonian.I think your interlocutors are primarily objecting to these unstated assumptions in what you've been saying - that "primordial soup" is the accepted, modern scientific view on the origin of life, and that evolution necessarily implies a naturalistic view of life's origins. I think you can adjust your terminology in a way that will address the objections you're getting without actually changing your position. For instance, instead of invoking "primordial soup", say something like "naturalistic origin of life." And it's important to at least appear to accept that evolution and the origin of life are two very different fields of science; one is biology, and the other is chemistry, and whether or not chemists are wrong has little bearing on whether biologists are.

This is kind of what I'm talking about - no, actually, scientists (notable and otherwise) have overwhelmingly moved beyond a "primordial soup" notion of the chemical origins of life. It's as quaint a notion as the luminiferous ether, at this point, and it persists as a phrase largely because origins of life research doesn't really trickle into popular culture.Life evolved from things that were almost life, which evolved from things that were almost almost-life, and so on. Evolution, in this sense, is actually older than life on Earth. Living things aren't the only things that can evolve by random mutation and natural selection. We see that today in the evolution of viruses and prions.

Wait, you look back on an exchange where dozens of people show you you're wrong as a victory? How does that work?What "ideological butts" did you kick? I don't dispute that you've received some weak-ass responses, but if I said that Allah was the only true God, and all you Christians on the board posted and told me I was wrong, would that constitute a victory on my part?Producing a hubbub isn't any evidence that you're right; in fact, it's exactly the trolling you claim to oppose.

But how does it work for you? That's what I'm asking.

Yes, but did it provoke debate? Did anybody learn anything?Or isn't it just 300 messages of Christians like you and Buz saying "dur, this is what atheists believe" and atheists saying "uh, no, trust us, it's not":10 PRINT "Is too!"
20 PRINT "Is not!"
30 GOTO 10If you can produce it with a BASIC script, here's a hint - it's not a debate.

What are you guys trying to argue with Buz, exactly? I can't follow it. His position seems to be that since evolution is the explanation for the history and diversity of life on Earth, it sort of relies on life actually existing, and therefore that implies to some degree various scientific proposals for the origin of life.I mean I don't think any biologist or biochemist thinks that the origin of life is just something we can ignore and say "nope, doesn't matter, no reason to even look into it." Do they? Who on Earth would find that a more satisfying answer than "well, we don't know yet, but we're looking"?I'd like to see a lot more in your posts about what Buz is actually wrong about, why he's wrong, and a lot less "oh you need to go back to school, lol, you're so dumb." If you want him to read something - present it, or tell him where to find it. If you want him to know something, tell it to him.As it is I just can't understand what the three of you are on about.

Right, but I've run up into this problem before, and it's that you can be given premises and an argument, but if you don't want to follow them to their obvious conclusion, nobody can make you.The way that a definition supports an argument is that you provide the definition, and if it contains something that supports your argument, that's how it supports your argument. If you're asking for the means by which definitions mind-control you and give you no choice but to be reasonable and accept that a conclusion was supported by the premises and arguments deployed to support it, you're asking for the impossible because that's not how arguments work.If something has to exist before something else can happen, then it's perfectly reasonable to say that the first is a prerequisite for the second. When Buz says that the existence of life is a prerequisite for the evolutionary history of life, I don't see that he's doing anything but repeating what we've told him for years. So what on Earth are you people on about? If Buzsaw comes out and opposes cancer, are the three of you going to argue that cancer is awesome, too?It's incumbent on you to accept reasonable arguments as reasonable, not on anybody else, because nobody else can make you do that.

How would that not be "biogenesis"?If aliens seeded the Earth with life, where did they get it? From their own planet, where biogenesis must have happened. Unless you assert that life is a phenomenon of infinite duration into the past - which is a little weird, since the universe is not of infinite past duration - then it seems pretty obvious that biogenesis, of some kind, is necessary for the existence of life and therefore the existence of the evolution of life.

Yeah, but he's being wry (or thinks he is) so he's using "primordial soup" not to refer to any specific biochemical model of the origin of life, but to refer to all scientific models of the origin of life.And, look, you can hardly propose a Godless evolution happening as a result of a Godful creation. A naturalistic evolution of life certainly implies a naturalistic origin of life, that's why scientists are trying to develop one.