The lack of empirical evidence for the theory of evolution, according to Faith.

Nonbelieving Bible "scholars" yes indeed, I do disrespect most of them. Disbelief destroys. They start from the presupposition that miracles are not possible for instance, and how much of the Bible do you think would remain intact starting from such a premise?

Uh huh, but this is precisely the kind of slanderous assumption I proved false. PROVED false (my posts 81 and 83). No, it's up to you to recognize the truth of the matter, that they are neither, and you and PS can't think your way out of a paper bag. This is NOT the point. The point is that the ID people are pointing out that it was evolutionists who came up with the junk DNA idea, and they think that possibly ID people wouldn't have -- or didn't. If their reasoning is wrong it certainly isn't wrong in the ways you ascribe to it. You are logic-challenged that's all. No, you are either the idiot or the liar, as I proved conclusively that PS misinterpreted their reasoning. Oh, which one is that? I don't agree with ID, remember, I'm just pointing out that they did not lie and are not stupid and those who think so are logic-challenged to put it nicely. It is you who are advocating THIS position which is the one that is "obviously and thoroughly wrong."This message has been edited by Faith, 04-09-2005 03:49 AM

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Picking fights and bickering distract you from overturning the modern concepts of geology. Strata formation in changing depositional environments awaits your comprehension.

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If I don't get a grip on the basic irrationality of some of the posters it won't interest me at all to try to grapple with the Grand Canyon because the whole enterprise here will remain a trip to neverneverland. I'd like to take the debate slowly if you don't mind. Or even if you do.And by the way, please see my posts 81 and 83 in this thread, because if nobody here gets the point of those posts I will truly understand what I'm up against and be able to act accordingly.

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I AM NOT "EQUIVOCATING!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

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Instead of shouting you might just go back and look at what is being said. It is quite clear you were (though it doens't have to be intentional). You were clearly taking about standards in the sense of quality (otherwise high standards is meaningless), and I was talking about standards in the sense of set curricula (agreed upon as important by those within the field).

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If you do not get that employing the term "high standards" implicitly means you are not discussing the "standards" I am talking about, you need to take a breather and figure out that there are two definitions being used here.

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I was well aware of what you meant and I spoke to it, although perhaps the other meaning of the word was also used somewhere in the discussion -- I would not have confused the two. I said very clearly that Christian schooling -- including homeschooling -- aims to meet established standards of curricula. I also said more than once I believe that my own personal objective would be to assure that Christians were taught evolutionism better than the public schools teach it, along with all the objections to it. That way standards would be more than met and the children would have learned how to think clearly instead of just absorbing information.

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There are about, what, TWO flat-earthers left on the planet? What are you worried about?

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That fact should indicate exactly why I am worried. You said that the legal criteria for not being taught something is belief in something else, and that one's own theories should be taught as true (at least to ones self) and you should be accredited for that knowledge. To do otherwise is to introduce church vs state issues.

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I never said any such thing. YOu have spun off from my one remark that the public schools' imposing evolutionism on children of creationists is as much a violation of their rights as the reverse situation is a violation. You just galloped off in some direction of your own with this and I never really did figure out where you were going with it. Nonsense. I never said anything about being accredited at all, as a matter of fact, and I wouldn't defend any notion of being accredited for idiosyncratic material, only for meeting national standards. I would also defend anybody's right to any kind of education they like, however, but I would not expect national accreditation. I never said anything remotely like that. That's your own strange worry. You can put the accreditation idea to rest. I have no idea why you think that is even remotely a possibility. If I defend people's right to idiosyncratic education and experience, that is not a demand that these oddnesses be made part of a system of national standards. The idea is absurd. I simply think we should stop being so uptight about people's differences. We do not all have to be robots in lockstep with a national program of education. But that idea also does not imply anything about giving up on standardization. If they can't meet certain standards then they can't meet them, and if that harms their outlook in life, then they will learn the value of meeting them, and if they'd prefer not to, well it's a free country, and you don't have to worry about them competing for positions against those who HAVE met the standards. We don't all have to be stamped out by the national cookie cutter. Then rest easy as that isn't going to happen. They will have to be taught them in order to meet them. Isn't that clear yet? They will ALSO be taught how to criticize the models to smithereens as well as defend them, and THAT they won't get in the public schools. No. Competition for success will assure that no such splintering could occur. Nevertheless there would be a healthy variety, and if some don't meet the national standards then that's just that, they don't meet them. It isn't the end of the world if some people go their own way.

It's just that I gave my conclusion up front instead of at the end. It is true for many evos that they think the creationists lie a lot and it was the case in this particular example. It was a conclusion I drew from the evidence and there's plenty more where that came from. This is not about scientific methods. And you are right this is getting very tiresome indeed. I said absolutely nothing about scientific methods -- already you've committed a logical gaffe there. This is about is what the ID people said and what Pink Sasquatch said they said and if you can't follow that, oh brother, I'm going to have to give up on the whole lot of you here. Did you read PS's post? Did you read the links? Did you get the accusation of lying? Did you read Commike's post first? How is this about ID theory at all? It is not. It is simply about whether they lied or not. Good grief you are going to drive me to distraction. AGAIN, this is not about ID theory, this is about simple COMMUNICATION, what people MEAN when they SPEAK, and whether they LIED or not.We're back in Wonderland when you want to make this an issue of ID theory. I am not defending ID theory. I don't even agree with it. I simply read the material and understood what they were getting at and realized that they are not lying or being stupid as both PS and Crashfrog are claiming -- regardless of their scientific views.I don't suppose there's any point in asking you to reread 81 and 83 very carefully is there?

No, again, you have missed the point. It doesn't matter if they are right or not. I pointed out that this is their claim because it proves they were not lying. PS simply misunderstood what the ID people were saying about the Scientific American article. He apparently didn't realize they were referring to the formulation of the idea of junk DNA, which happened to be done by evolutionists). The ONLY point is whether they lied or not and THEY DIDN'T!!!!!!So the rest of your post is pointless as you are arguing about whether they were right or not instead of whether they were lying or not. I hope this simple fact may eventually sink in!!

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Without going back to Pink's posts to see what he found most egregious, I assume this (and passages similar to it) is what caught his attention:

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This article [the Scientific American article] clearly shows that junk-DNA is the product of evolutionary predictions that were wrong...This mistake was apparently caused by evolutionary assumptions.

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The facts make this perspective difficult to justify, but I suspect others have already provided detailed explanations, so I won't bore you further. The primary point of the Idea Center article is that ID theory assumes that junk DNA has a function, and that if evolutionary biologists had instead used ID theory as an interpretive framework they would have made the discovory that some junk DNA has a function years earlier.

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Yes, that is what they are saying. They may be right or wrong but they weren't lying. That was my only point.

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Excepting that laboratory and analysis techniques might not have been up to the task until recently, I think the Idea Center is correct. ID theory definitely leads more directly to the possibility that junk DNA has a function, and that's a win for ID theory.

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Yes. Score one for them and one for Commike.

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Functional junk DNA fits neatly within a traditional evolutionary framework, and in fact makes more sense than if somehow huge amounts of DNA with no function had somehow been passed down across thousands of generations of evolutionary history.

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That would be my assumption too. I can't see why evolution would have any use for useless DNA. This makes ID reasoning wrong. My only point is that they made their points honestly, however wrong they might be.

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This and the fact that it was evolutionary biologists and not IDists who made the discovery is why ID is being given no credit or credence for this. It will be much better for ID if the next advance in knowledge is discovered by IDists. This would be a first.

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Of course. But Commike's point has ONLY been that if ID theory can be right about something evolutionism is wrong about, the hegemony of evolutionism prevents this fact from being recognized.I'm not sure how creationists could come up with advances in knowledge. There aren't that many of them. I don't know about their financial situation, but I would doubt they have the facilities that are available to the evos.

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But Pink's main point is that the Idea Center article misrepresented the Scientific American article. I disagree. The Scientific American article does a fair job of misrepresenting the case all by itself, especially where it quotes Mattick, once saying the non-coding sequences "were immediately assumed to be evolutionary junk", and later saying, "The failure...may well go down as one of the biggest mistakes in the history of molecular biology."

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This particular SciAm article is not by scientists but by a senior science writer, W. Wayt Gibbs. His flair makes for dramatic reading, but the conclusions it might lead one to reach about mistaken paths taken by evolutionary science are probably not widely shared within the field. Pink seems very familiar with the nuances of progress within evolutionary science, perhaps more so than Mr. Gibbs. Unfortunately, more and more main articles in SciAm are being written by non-scientists.

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Thanks for a very thorough analysis of the situation. I was about to lose my marbles again with so many others claiming the ID people had misrepresented the article.

Dear Mark,
Thank you for the reminder again. I'm very sorry for keeping you waiting so long but I don't want to just plunge into that thread again until I get this one out of my system as it were. And I'm keeping Jazz waiting on the Great Debate too. Some people here tell me there is no rush, others seem eager to push things along. In any case, as long as I'm still here -- which has not been a sure thing -- I'll eventually get back to it. Thank you, and again I'm sorry for keeping you waiting.
Faith

No, he asked people to stop ACCUSING people of lies, as that is a subjective judgment and unfair,{EDIT: Maybe he also wanted my objection to this accusation to be stopped and I misread his warning. However, I disagree: it is possible to prove that PS's accusation was simply wrong, that the ID site were not lying, by showing that PS misunderstood what they were referring to -- the ORIGIN of the concept of junk DNA -- so it isn't just a matter of unprovable opinion whether they were lying or not; clearly they weren't if you follow the whole sequence carefully.}and since I was in the middle of proving that those accused had not committed the offense, that remained the topic to you, which you failed miserably to address as did Crashfrog. I didn't make a single statement about how science functions and I'm sick of hearing this from you. And if you haven't noticed the accusations of creos of lying by evos at this very site you've had your head in a very dark place. I'm sick of being accused of everything under the sun here. What's my huge offense now? Man I'm sick of you guys and your constant irrelevant needling accusations out of context, and usually based on a misrepresentation if they can even be tracked down since you just sling this stuff without bothering to back it up. Thanks for that much but it would help if you would follow the reasoning I went to lengths to develop against the accusation that they are lying, and it would help if sometimes the evos here were called on such a big fat booboo as Mr. Pink's by others than myself. Fortunately Percy had the grace to recognize it or I'd be flaming you a lot worse than I am. Well, maybe your part of this thread isn't important to ME. How do you like them apples?This message has been edited by Faith, 04-09-2005 04:56 PM

At least you have the good sense to tell they weren't lying, and that's a big plus after the struggle to get this simple point across. I think your overall point is hopelessly muddled however, as their possibly being deluded has nothing whatever to do with whether or not they were lying. You are simply enjoying making that accusation since the other one has been shown to be false.I believe however that they are wrong about the idea of junk DNA's being in any way congenial with evolutionism and probably wrong about a lot of other things if they start from the premise that everything we see must show the work of an intelligent designer's perfect creation. They apparently discount the effect of the Fall which would explain all kinds of imperfect and malfunctioning elements of reality, and perhaps even explain junk DNA. The functioning that is now being observed doesn't sound too efficient to me, more like something that's misfiring, or like something half dead that still has some organs working -- with erratic results since the whole system is out of whack.This message has been edited by Faith, 04-09-2005 05:12 PM

As I recall you started this sequence by quoting me about the lying. If you didn't want to discuss that, that is NOT the place you should have started. I consider it important to defend people from such a hideous charge against them as PS's. If you aren't interested in it THEN STAY OUT OF IT!!. You are now also accusing me of accusing others of lying which is false. I'm not taking accusations very well lately. This seems to be the MO of most posters here and I'm disgusted and infuriated by it.If you want to discuss actual issues please rewrite your post to leave out all the references to my interest in the false accusation of lying, and your accusations of my supposed heinous offenses which are false, and address the actual point you claim to be interested in, because I'm not going to bother with the rest of this insulting post of yours.