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Author Topic:   One liners, or how to make the PRATTS fall
Dr Adequate
Member (Idle past 284 days)
Posts: 16113
Joined: 07-20-2006


Message 8 of 50 (649515)
01-23-2012 9:25 PM


Well the one-line answer to 90% of PRATTs is "but that's not true, that's something creationists made up". It is only rarely that you get something like "why are there still monkeys" which rests on an error of reasoning rather than of fact.
I suppose a couple of error-of-reasoning ones would be ---
Creationist: Mutation can't account for blah blah blah blah blah.
Me: That's because that's the role played by natural selection.
Creationist: Natural selection can't account for blah blah blah blah blah.
Me: That's because that's the role played by mutation.
That is quick. It's not effective, because of the tendency of creationists to be idiots, but it can be compressed into a single line.
Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

  
Dr Adequate
Member (Idle past 284 days)
Posts: 16113
Joined: 07-20-2006


Message 10 of 50 (649525)
01-24-2012 12:09 AM
Reply to: Message 9 by herebedragons
01-23-2012 10:12 PM


I had a YEC friend of mine tell me the other day that the fossil record was out of order. That the fossil record was better explained by other means, such as hydro-logic sorting. I just didn't know what to say. I just looked at him. I mean where do you start? I didn't want to spend hours trying to explain why that doesn't make any sense when obviously he was convinced that it did. I think he felt like he had won a victory, but I just didn't have a simple, one-line, easy-to-understand, quick response.
Well, the short answers to those assertions are: "No it isn't, that's something creationists made up" and "No it isn't, that's something creationists made up". The long answers are indeed longer, because we don't have to rest on bare assertions.

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Dr Adequate
Member (Idle past 284 days)
Posts: 16113
Joined: 07-20-2006


Message 15 of 50 (649566)
01-24-2012 12:04 PM
Reply to: Message 14 by jar
01-24-2012 9:36 AM


Hydrological sorting does not explain repeated layering.
Yes, but in order for that argument to work you then have to start telling them facts about the geological record of which they are almost certainly ignorant.

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 Message 14 by jar, posted 01-24-2012 9:36 AM jar has replied

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Dr Adequate
Member (Idle past 284 days)
Posts: 16113
Joined: 07-20-2006


Message 19 of 50 (649866)
01-26-2012 3:56 AM
Reply to: Message 18 by Rrhain
01-26-2012 12:42 AM


When they look at you quizzically, point out that in a bag of potato chips, all the biggest chips are on the top and all the crumbs are on the bottom. That's what we should see if there were hyrdological sorting: The little bits fall through the gaps that the big bits leave as they clump together and settle at the bottom.
Actually that's not how it works. What you're describing is not hydraulic sorting (N.B: only creationists call it hydrological sorting, because they took a vow to be wrong about everything). what you're talking about is the Brazil Nut Effect, which is different. Hydraulic sorting requires water, and in h.s. the finest particles of sediment settle last, because their small size makes them behave like dust-motes in air, they don't plummet straight down, but swirl about. (I think I read somewhere that a coccolith takes about a year to "fall" from the surface of the sea to the ocean bed. A chip of gravel would obviously go much faster.) Another difference is that the B.N.E. requires a prolonged period of shaking for the small nuts to settle down to the bottom, whereas with h.s. if you give a jar of earth and water one good shake and then leave it alone, it'll settle as I've described --- with the B.N.E. the shaking is the cause of the sorting, whereas with h.s. the shaking is just the cause of the sediment being distributed through the fluid, and it would happen if there was some other cause of the original mixture.
However, your point as amended is a good one --- if the sediment had been hydraulically sorted, then the sediment would be hydraulically sorted. This kind of logic will always remain out of the grasp of the average creationist, because of its immense and baffling complexity.

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Dr Adequate
Member (Idle past 284 days)
Posts: 16113
Joined: 07-20-2006


Message 22 of 50 (649899)
01-26-2012 11:36 AM
Reply to: Message 21 by Tangle
01-26-2012 10:12 AM


Q. But I see order and design everywhere. Order and design requires a designer, it can't happen by chance can it?
A. That's exactly why no-one has ever said that it did.

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Dr Adequate
Member (Idle past 284 days)
Posts: 16113
Joined: 07-20-2006


Message 24 of 50 (649902)
01-26-2012 12:00 PM
Reply to: Message 23 by Tangle
01-26-2012 11:41 AM


Sloppy of me, try this:
Q. But I see order and design everywhere. Order and design requires a designer doesn't it?
But you do not see design everywhere. You see order; you infer design.
But this inference is not necessarily correct --- if you see the order in a snowflake, you would be wrong to infer design by Jack Frost; we know that this order is produced by natural processes.
That's not as pithy as one would wish, but there's two mistakes packed into the same question.

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Dr Adequate
Member (Idle past 284 days)
Posts: 16113
Joined: 07-20-2006


Message 26 of 50 (649915)
01-26-2012 2:19 PM
Reply to: Message 25 by Tangle
01-26-2012 2:09 PM


Q. but snowflakes show design, even if the process of forming them is natural, something had to create the process that forms them naturally.
A1. Assertion is not evidence; it is not even argument.
A2. So you're a deist now, or what? If you will admit that the process of forming the various kinds of organisms was completely natural, then since I was arguing for evolution, rather than against deism, I win.
Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

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Dr Adequate
Member (Idle past 284 days)
Posts: 16113
Joined: 07-20-2006


(6)
Message 37 of 50 (650719)
02-02-2012 12:54 PM
Reply to: Message 36 by New Cat's Eye
02-02-2012 12:18 PM


Re: Incredulous to Chance
Nice line about the path of least resistance.
Actually, this sparks a thought in me. Whenever we talk about a "fitness landscape" we always represent the optima as being the peaks, to which we laboriously climb. Richard Dawkins wrote a whole book entitled "Climbing Mount Improbable". But it's the other way round, isn't it? Life did not climb Mount Improbable, it flowed into Valley Improbable.
--- and it is improbable only if we ask: "What is the probability that all the water should be in the valleys and not on the mountaintops if the distribution of the water was by pure chance?" Well, that's a question that answers itself.
Whereas the picture of climbing Mount Improbable gives a fallacious impression that effort was involved.
---
A sidebar. It seems natural to our species to represent good as up and bad as down. Hence the "fitness landscape" where adaptation lies at the peaks. Hence the idea that God is in the sky somewhere, in "heaven above", even when the people expressing this opinion would, if asked explicitly, say that God is everywhere.
I read recently about an interesting experiment. (I don't have a reference, sorry.) It is claimed that people more quickly recognize "good" words ("altruism", "patriotism", "kindness", etc) as being good if they are presented high in their visual field, and conversely they more easily recognize "bad" words as being bad if they are low in their visual field. The really remarkable claim of this study was that this effect vanishes if the test subjects are sociopaths.
This is by-the-by, which is why I haven't striven to find the reference, except that if it is true it goes some way to explain why evolutionists represent the fitness landscape as having the optima at the top.

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Dr Adequate
Member (Idle past 284 days)
Posts: 16113
Joined: 07-20-2006


Message 39 of 50 (650723)
02-02-2012 1:14 PM
Reply to: Message 38 by New Cat's Eye
02-02-2012 1:08 PM


Re: Incredulous to Chance
Heh heh ... I am English, and I often say "indubitably". In an English accent. THE STEREOTYPES ARE TRUE. I do not, however, wear a monocle. I wear two monocles, one for each eye.

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Dr Adequate
Member (Idle past 284 days)
Posts: 16113
Joined: 07-20-2006


Message 48 of 50 (692755)
03-07-2013 9:36 AM
Reply to: Message 43 by Bolder-dash
03-06-2013 11:02 AM


1. Why are there so many fence sitters ?
There aren't, this is something you made up in your head. Polls show that the proportion with no opinion on the matter is by far the smallest group, averaging about 5% over the past decade.
2.Why do evolutionists always want to try to convince them?
They don't, this is something you made up in your head. The amount of time the average evolutionist spends trying to educate the ignorant is nugatory.

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 Message 43 by Bolder-dash, posted 03-06-2013 11:02 AM Bolder-dash has not replied

  
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