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Author | Topic: Questions Creationists Never Answer | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
nator Member (Idle past 2169 days) Posts: 12961 From: Ann Arbor Joined: |
I have been involved in these on-line Creation/Evolution discussions for several years now, and there are some basic questions which I always ask of Creationists who claim that "Scientific Creationism" is scientific. I have yet to get any answers to them.
Perhaps the Creationists in this forum will provide. I will list a few of them to get us started. 1) Define "kind". In other words, how do we tell one "kind" from another? 2) If ALL of the various radiometric dating methods are wrong, then how is it that they are ALL wrong in such a way that they are almost always remarkably consistent with one another? 3) Why do we never find flowering plants, including trees, grasses, etc., in the lower levels of the geologic column if all fossils were laid down in one Biblical Flood event?
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nator Member (Idle past 2169 days) Posts: 12961 From: Ann Arbor Joined: |
Well, I'm still waiting for a *straight* answer...
I'll answer each question separately. First, "kind".
[QUOTE]Originally posted by John Paul:
[b] 1 Kind- The organisms originally Created by the Lord our God.[/QUOTE] This definition is exactly the sort of empty definition I usually get. In fact, it's wrong even for creationists, since most "scientific" creationists allow that there are new species of organisms, just not new "kinds". What I want is some way to tell one kind from another. What if I say there is only 1 "kind": "life-kind". How do creationists know I'm wrong?
quote: Well, at least, starting in the "summer of 1999" (that late!!!) *some* creationists realize what a weakness this is. First: There's no definition of kind in the entire article. If I've missed it, please point it out. The article says: "An important example of a holobaramin would be humans, Homo sapiens." But it doesn't justify this assertion. Anywhere. Why is the author SO certain that homo sapiens is a "kind"? (For those who haven't read an article, 'holobaramin' is essentially jargon for "kind": "the holobaramin consists of all known organisms in a group beginning after God created the original organisms") Note, here that this is only a *single species*. The article then goes on to say: "Another holobaramin could consist of the sea turtles ". The "could" is OK, it's nice to see some tentativity in creationist writing. But again, no justification is given for this assertion!! Note that this "kind" is a number of species, not just a single one. The article later says: "It is believed that the horses (horses, donkeys, and zebras) all are related because they can hybridize, and therefore they belong to a holobaramin. " Now here a "kind" seems to defined by inter-fertility. YEt we know - and so do most "scientific creationists" - that new, non-hybridizing populations have been observed forming. So if this is the definition of "kind", then we have already proved that new kinds can form. The article is filled with un-backed up assertions, such as: "A group of all the horses (equids), all the dogs (canids), and all the cats (felids) would be apobaraminic because no horse or dog or cat shares a genetic relationship with any organism which is not a horse, a dog, or a cat." Why do we know this? This is just an assertion. Finally, the article gets down to some business in the "Guidelines" section. It gets off to a bad start. The number one guideline?: "1. SCRIPTURE CLAIMS (used in baraminology but not in discontinuity systematics). This has priority over all other considerations." The rest of the guidelines are merely the same sorts of guidelines any one uses in classification. Nowhere is there a guideline that tells you at what level of the complicated hierarchy of living things a "kind" exists. Animals bear a similarity to each other over plants. Plants and animals bear a resemblance to each other over fungi. Etc. But I doubt any creationist would even allow consideration of these "kinds". Why not? So, the article has no definition of kind, just some bald assertions and loose, unjustified guidelines, and openly admits that Biblical authority is the primary motivation. Side note: The article clearly states that there is *absolutely no relationship* between sea turtles and land turtles (no common ancestors), or gorillas and chimpanzees. But my tabby cat and a Bengal Tiger are the same kind, and are therefore intimately related. Nor does it find it worth justifying these distinctions within the article. Whatever.
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nator Member (Idle past 2169 days) Posts: 12961 From: Ann Arbor Joined: |
Point 2:
quote: You didn't read my question very closely. I said "almost always". This is key. It isn't news to anyone that weird dates sometimes show up. The question which you have, unsuprisingly, avoided is why is there any consistency AT ALL? Let's say for a moment, to be extra-generous to creationists, that 25% of all dates are "random noise" and don't make sense from a standard interpretation. (The real percentage is probably much less than 5%, but that's not important to the point). However, the remaining 75% are *all consistent*. This is a pattern that NEEDS AN EXPLANATION. What is the creationist explanation for this pattern?
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nator Member (Idle past 2169 days) Posts: 12961 From: Ann Arbor Joined: |
Schrafinator:
quote: JohnPaul:
quote: Hey, you sound just like Darwin! Creationists criticize these very same arguments when used to explain gaps in the fossil record, so I don't see that you are any more justified in using them. At the level of classification we're talking about, these arguments ARE nonsense. If we were talking about a missing species or a missing genus, the imperfection of the fossil record is relevant. We're talking about the DOMINANT FORM OF PLANT LIFE ON EARTH - Angiosperms rule as far as plants are concerned.
quote: If you think this way, that's OK (although I wonder how you know which layers are Great Flood layers and which aren't). This doesn't help you at all, however. This opens up an entirely new can of worms: Why did only non-Angiosperms get buried before the flood? This is essentially the original question: What is the creationist explanation for the distribution of angiosperms in the geological layers? [This message has been edited by schrafinator, 01-09-2002]
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nator Member (Idle past 2169 days) Posts: 12961 From: Ann Arbor Joined: |
quote: At the risk of getting off-topic, I will. (JP, please realize that I am still waiting for answers to my questions). One can talk substantively about evolution without detailed knowledge of the starting point. The sentence "Birds evolved from dinosaurs" means something, even if we don't know all about the origin of life itself. On the other hand, "Evolution occurs only within 'kinds'" is meaningless if you can't define kind. By "definition" I mean a definition that will let me know, at least tentatively, if animal A and animal B are the same kind or not. Instead of such a definition, I get nonsense like:
quote: Bald, unjustified assertions. I could just as easily assert that canines and bovines are clearly related and thus are part of the same kind. The quote above says that they are all mammals. Why isn't this enough of a connection to be a kind? Can any creationist definition of kind address this matter? Not that I've seen. In this thread, I want to stick to this problem.
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nator Member (Idle past 2169 days) Posts: 12961 From: Ann Arbor Joined: |
quote: I can show you "numerous accurate depictions" of lots of unverified stuff, randman. Where is the scholarly article that has been published by experts in a professional journal? Seriously, that site is clearly a crackpot source if it lists no outside verification from scholarly sources.
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nator Member (Idle past 2169 days) Posts: 12961 From: Ann Arbor Joined: |
quote: See, you have the problem of not understanding that Biologists do not "believe" in the ToE the way that you "believe" your mythology. ANY scientist would give almost anything to be the one to discover something that overturns a dominant paradigm. That's what makes scientists famous. Einstein and Stephen Jay Gould immediately come to mind. They win Nobel Prizes for it and go on TV and get great book deals and get lots of funding for their work and get a (relatively) high salary from their university, and they get lots and lots and lots of citations and attention given to their work in the form of other scientists dissecting it and seeing if they can replicate it. Biologists (all scientists) are constantly testing and trying to find holes and errors in their theories. Is this what you do? Are you constantly questioning your beliefs, and does the religious community heap praise and accolades upon those who show that what everyone thought was true in the past was quite wrong? No, of course not. They are excommunicated, they are run off, they are branded as "heretics", they are hated. This message has been edited by schrafinator, 10-19-2005 08:06 AM
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nator Member (Idle past 2169 days) Posts: 12961 From: Ann Arbor Joined: |
quote: I have two words for you, hun: Photo Shop
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nator Member (Idle past 2169 days) Posts: 12961 From: Ann Arbor Joined: |
quote: OK, so how do I determine what "kind" of creature something is? What specific system and criteria do we use to make distinctions? For example, how many "kinds" are there in the world right now, approximately?
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nator Member (Idle past 2169 days) Posts: 12961 From: Ann Arbor Joined: |
OK, so how do I determine what "kind" of creature something is?
What specific system and criteria do we use to make distinctions? For example, how many "kinds" are there in the world right now, approximately?
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