quote:During the Ham on Nye debate last February 4, Bill led off with a great example to throw Ken off balance. He pointed out that (ironically), the Creation Museum itself was built upon rocks which refuted flood geology! Bill even brought a piece of fossiliferous limestone from a road cut nearby to show that it was full of fossils, delicately preserved, and not the kind of thing a flood would produce. He explained it briefly, but I don’t know how many people got the pointand given the humorless nature of most creationists who don’t catch on to sarcasm and snark, I doubt they even noticed the irony that their entire model was refuted by the rocks beneath them at that very place.
... Consequently, modern limestones are formed in shallow clear tropical waters far from the mud of land-based rivers: the Bahamas, Bermuda, Yucatan, the Atlantic Coast of Florida (but not the Gulf side, where Mississippi mud darkens the waters), the Persian Gulf, and the southwest Pacific and Great Barrier Reef of Australia. Nowhere else! Not only is this a very restricted setting, but under no circumstances do limestones (today or in the past) show any evidence of being formed in the muddy, turbulent, cold waters of a typical floodor even a supernatural flood. If you look at them closely, they are accumulations of layer after layer of fossil communities, slowly building on top of each other in quiet waters, often with delicate organisms (such as the stick-like bryozoans and delicate corals and sponges) buried in life position, with no evidence that they had been battered and toppled by the powerful energy of flood waters. ...
Next, let’s look more closely at the rocks of the region around the Creation Museum. That area of northern Kentucky, southwest Ohio, and southeast Indiana is underlain by upper Ordovician rocks (445-460 m.y. old) that are part of a structure known as the Cincinnati Arch’; the older rocks of the region (Ordovician in this case) have been buckled upward in an arch-like feature and exposed to erosion, while younger rocks (Silurian, Devonian, and Carboniferous) are trapped in the basins on each side of the arch. The Cincinnati Arch is world-famous as a place to see an amazing sequence of thousands of individual beds full of delicately preserved fossils, reaching several thousand feet in thickness, and loaded in every bed with a huge diversity of fossils. It is often called the Cradle of American Paleontology for that reason, since many famous paleontologists started their careers in Cincinnati, working on these amazing beds and their fossils. When I took a Knox College geology class there on a field trip in 1984, I could not believe how rich every bed was with fossils, and how the ground in some places is literally paved with the shells of brachiopods that you can collect by the bagful! It’s so rich that almost ANY road cut or quarry yields great fossils, and even Bill Nye (not a paleontologist) could find some with a short stop at any random outcrop.
The key point about these beds is that there are thousands of individual layers, and each one is full of delicate fossils like branching bryozoans and stick-like corals, some delicately preserved in life position as they were buried in a gentle rain of sedimentand this repeats, over and over again. Under no circumstances could a single flood do this! Most of these rocks are limestones--under no circumstances do floods produce these! ...
But the real clincher is the many different coral fossils in the Ordovician beds around the region. I took my students to several outcrops in northern Kentucky just down the road from Ham’s monstrosity. In many cases, you can find these huge coral heads from an extinct coral group (tabulate corals), known as favositids (honeycomb corals to the amateurs). You will find layers in the road cuts where coral heads had grown up from one layer (once an ancient sea bottom) over many decades, since inside the corals are growth lines that often show decades of growth. Then this coral head was buried in a gentle rain of sediment, and a new coral head (which also has growth lines showing decades of life) is growing from the old sea bottom in the layer above the previous one. This goes on, layer after layer, and is widespread across a large area of ancient sea bottom. ...
This is one of hundreds of lines of evidence that Bill could have mentioned to show the earth is not 6000 years old, nor is the rock record produced by the mythical Noah’s flood. To any reasonable mind, this evidence bespeaks decades to centuries to grow these corals, and to accumulate thousands of years of layers of sediment, all showing the flood myth is bunk. Yet the creationists must accomplish incredible mental gyrations to fit this mythology with the real world, by using confirmation bias and cherry-picking the few examples of rocks on earth that can be misinterpreted to support them and ignoring the 99.99% that don’t, and thus reducing their cognitive dissonance of trying to believe two contradictory things at the same time. They are indeed like the the foolish man of the Bible, building his house (or museum) on the sand of lies.
He doesn't mince words.
There are similar layers of growth in other areas, such as Brachiopods on Mt Everest -- a clam-like order that typically grows on stalks attached to the ground -- where the shells show growth rings, the stalks show they grew undisturbed in location for decades, where they were gradually buried by slowly accumulating sediment as other younger brachiopods grew on top of those sediments forming overlapping layers of decades of growth.
The world is old, and to believe in a global flood is delusional.
I can't help but think of Huxley's essay, "On a Piece of Chalk" from 1868. ...
Indeed, and Donald Prothero mentions similar in the House of Cards article:
quote: ... In fact, the devout creationist geologists of the early 1800s realized this as soon as they began to carefully study and map and collect rocks and fossils all over Europe. They began as flood geologists (a popular idea before 1795), but by the 1830s, they had all abandoned any notion of a Genesis flood. When you know what the rocks really look like, the idea is laughable!
quote:In Leonardo's day there were several hypotheses of how it was that shells and other living creatures were found in rocks on the tops of mountans. Some believed the shells to have been carried there by the Biblical Flood; others thought that these shells had grown in the rocks. Leonardo had no patience with either hypothesis, and refuted both using his careful observations. Concerning the second hypothesis, he wrote that "such an opinion cannot exist in a brain of much reason; because here are the years of their growth, numbered on their shells, and there are large and small ones to be seen which could not have grown without food, and could not have fed without motion -- and here they could not move." There was every sign that these shells had once been living organisms. What about the Great Flood mentioned in the Bible? Leonardo doubted the existence of a single worldwide flood, noting that there would have been no place for the water to go when it receded. He also noted that "if the shells had been carried by the muddy deluge they would have been mixed up, and separated from each other amidst the mud, and not in regular steps and layers -- as we see them now in our time." He noted that rain falling on mountains rushed downhill, not uphill, and suggested that any Great Flood would have carried fossils away from the land, not towards it. He described sessile fossils such as oysters and corals, and considered it impossible that one flood could have carried them 300 miles inland, or that they could have crawled 300 miles in the forty days and nights of the Biblical flood.
The world is old, very old, and belief in a world wide flood is delusional.
The mystery isn't why we can't find sufficiently persuasive facts, because we have. ...
Indeed. I'll bet that you could dig down into rock in any location in the world and you would find evidence of an old age and a continuity of life for billions of years.
After all the original hobby geologists were looking for evidence of the flood and they found that the earth was old and that there was no flood. And that is just looking at surface evidence, before radiometric dating methods confirmed the old ages.
... The mystery is why people hold beliefs that facts can't touch. I...
Well I look at what Dawkins said about evolution deniers -- that they were either stupid, ignorant, insane or malicious ... or tortured.
I put deluded in there between ignorant and insane. Mislead is another term, but it is a little kinder than deluded, and doesn't carry the emotional undertones that deluded has, and which are very much in evidence: there is an emotional commitment to these false ideas and they have been instilled in people by people that are (perhaps unwittingly) malicious in spreading the false ideas without vetting them against reality.
It's like an infection of delusion from person to person, where emotion is used rather than rational evaluation.
Ignorant, delusional, mislead people can be cured with knowledge, but they have to want to change. This is where it becomes a psychological issue, treatment of clinical delusion is only possible when the people want to change.
So what do they get by holding on to delusions? Is it worth it?
... The same indomitable human will that leads to our greatest achievements also causes creationists to cling tenaciously to their beliefs.
Yes, people are basically stubborn, especially where it comes to cherished beliefs, and this is why cognitive dissonance arises.
The world is old, very very very old, and denial serves no real purpose, provides not benefit, not any that I can see.
In a space about the size of a studio apartment, the Northwest Science Museum Vision Center accommodates a life-size plaster cast mastodon skull that rests in the middle of the room. But the 25-foot-by-25-foot room feels uncluttered and organized, with tidy displays, a bookshelf and a model for what the NSM hopes to become: a 300,000-450,000-square-foot museum with creationism and young-earth theories in the spotlight. And a full-scale replica of Noah's Ark docked out front. And an A-10 Warthog parked on the roof.
Can anyone explain why there would be an A-10 Warthog on the roof?
While the center purports to give visitors equal access to biblical and natural science explanations, its mission, according to its strategic plan, is to "distribute the abundance of scientific evidence in support of the Biblical account of creation and young earth history."
And ... we can assume ... ignore any evidence that calls such belief into question, such as the evidence that the earth is much older than any YEC model ...
According to Lutz, the most compelling pieces in the museum are Ica stones from the Aeronautical Museum of Lima, Peru: smooth andesite stones etched with images of humans and dinosaurs interacting. ...
Lutz is not a scientist. The product of a "nominally Christian household," he said he had an early interest in science, but for much of his adult life he worked as a farmer. In 2001, after a work injury, he trained as a medical technician, went on religious missions to Ukraine, Siberia and Peru, and accompanied archaeologists on fossil digs. ...
But the lack of any formal training doesn't stop him from thinking he can put together a museum and comment on the science involved ... after all he is interested in ... (wait for it) ...
Among the center's other activities is promoting itself through community engagement. A kids camp, "Dare to Dig for Truth" ... "Equip your kids with the TRUTH and enable them to stand up against the growing influences that contradict TRUTH," stated the camp's brochure.
Somehow I don't think any scientists, or even scientifically literate people will be beating a path to this new mecca of self delusion.
And what these "museums" seem to be most concerned with - desperate - is showing that SCIENCE supports the bible ... but that they know the TRUTH that is somehow ignored in real museums.
A quick look exposes them as loaded with ludicrous misinformation and wishful thinking.
But I'm sure the gullible are easily enthralled ...
... and remain ignorant of the evidence for an old earth, or the absence
I would say that there are more christians that have no quarrel with evolution in general than there are those who find it problematical ... and that those who do have been brainwashed by propaganda.
Certainly this letter project demonstrates that evolution can be accepted within the christian faith umbrella.
... but they all have one thing in common - other than the YEC thing. They all make comparison between real science, which does not contradict the Bible and it's teaching on a young earth and the false science of evolution and an old earth. ...
Fanatics are not biological evolutionary scientists ...
Just so I have it right... if these doctors are against the theory of evolution, then they are not "real" scientists.
An appeal to authority is usually a logical fallacy ... unless it can be shown that the person is actually an expert in the field and that their position is similar to other experts in the field (in which case you can just provide the information without the appeal).
Just because a person has a PhD that doesn't mean that he is a biological scientist or has any expertise in the field.
quote:Walter T. Brown (Aug 1937) is an American engineer and young earth creationist, who is the director of his own ministry called the Center for Scientific Creation. The Skeptic's Dictionary considers him to be one of the leaders of the creation science movement.[1] He proposes a specific version of flood geology called hydroplate theory.
According to his self-published book, Brown has a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a B.S. from West Point and he served as an officer in the US military until he retired in 1980.[2] Since retiring from the military in 1980, Brown has been the director of the Center for Scientific Creation and has worked full-time in research, writing, and speaking on origins theory.[2] In 1998, Brown was appointed to a committee reviewing Arizona's state science standards. However, evolution was retained in the Arizona state science standards after a final decision in August 1998.[3][4] He currently lives in Phoenix, Arizona.
Mechanical engineering is not a field of science, to say nothing about not being related to biology in general and evolution in particular. His "expertise" on evolution is no better than the person next door without a degree.
quote:Jason Lisle is Director of Research at the Institute for Creation Research. He was previously a speaker and researcher for Answers in Genesis.[2]
Dr. Lisle is a creationist with a Ph.D. in Astrophysics from University of Colorado in Boulder. Lisle earned his undergraduate degree from Ohio Wesleyan University summa cum laude with a double-major in physics and astronomy and a minor in mathematics. His postgraduate research concentrated on solar dynamics, utilizing NASA's Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO)[3] to monitor the surface of the sun. His dissertation "Probing the Dynamics of Solar Supergranulation and its Interaction with Magnetism" is available from the University of Colorado[4] and he has also published numerous papers in legitimate scientific journals concerning convection cells in the sun.[5]
Although some creationists claim that a creationist would be unable to earn an advanced degree from a secular university because of institutional prejudice against their beliefs,[6] Lisle's academic progress was not hindered by his creationism. While members of his Master's thesis and Ph.D.dissertation committees might have been aware of his young Earth beliefs, their evaluation of his work was based on his research and not his personal beliefs.[7]
In other words his field of science is not related to biology in general or evolution in particular, and his field of "expertise" is the behavior of the sun, and he too has no more "expertise" in evolutionary biology than the neighbor next door without a degree.
If either of these gentlemen claim to be PhD's with expertise on biological evolution, then they are lying, and such a claim would be a hoax.
Sarcasm aside, how can you discount the number of DRs from secular universities that doubt evolutionary theory?
One, because virtually every one is not an evolutionary biologist and evolution is NOT their field of expertise.
Two, because those few who have actually studied evolutionary biology (like Jonathan Wells) are few and far between, and their purpose in studying this field is to find and expose it's weaknesses being fully committed a priori to creationism.
quote:Wells said that "destroying Darwinism" was his motive for studying Christian theology at Yale and going on to seek his second PhD at Berkeley, studying biology and in particular embryology:
Father's [Rev. Moon's] words, my studies, and my prayers convinced me that I should devote my life to destroying Darwinism, just as many of my fellow Unificationists had already devoted their lives to destroying Marxism. When Father chose me (along with about a dozen other seminary graduates) to enter a Ph.D. program in 1978, I welcomed the opportunity to prepare myself for battle.[3]
Wells's statement and others like it are viewed by the scientific community as evidence that Wells lacks proper scientific objectivity and mischaracterizes evolution by ignoring and misrepresenting the evidence supporting it while pursuing an agenda promoting notions supporting his religious beliefs in its stead.[29][30][31][32][33]
So far he has been ineffective in his religiously motivated aspirations.
There are more scientifically literate people named Steve (or some variation on that name) that support evolution than there are scientists of any stripe that "doubt" evolution.
And, as DrA says, if you don't actually practice the science of the field you do have a degree in then you are not actually a scientist in that field.
Sarcasm aside, how can you discount the number of DRs from secular universities that doubt evolutionary theory?
Because they are easily discountable on a rational basis founded on evidence rather than belief. The opinions of people, whether actual scientists in a specific field of inquiry or the average joe (joan) (wo)man on the street are still surprisingly ineffective in altering either reality or the evidence of reality.
To be fair, you need a good grounding and more in many relevant areas of science ...
Science is the art of understanding life, the universe, and everything ...
Engineering is the art of making practical use of scientific knowledge.
Yes you need a basic foundation in what science says, but you still are not a practicing scientist.
Engineers don't need an understanding of how things work, they just need a practical application, and can derive that via approximations and parametric equations ... and then throw on a factor of safety to account for unknowns.
If it works you use it, if it doesn't work you try again. Newton's gravity is good enough to get to mars, so you don't need to figure dark stuffs and relativity.
When a bridge falls down then you add another factor of safety to the next design.
Dunno what happens in the USA, but here in Blighty, engineers receive BScs (Bachelor of Science degrees) and would be astonished to hear that they are not considered to be scientists.
Curiously, I have three degrees ... a bachelor degree, a masters degree ... and an associate of science degree in design, so does that make me a design scientist? ... yet I don't consider myself a scientist (in spite of doing many controlled experiments), rather I consider myself to be scientifically literate, educated in the practical application of knowledge derived by science.
The scientific method involve falsification tests, and the experiments done by engineers don't really have falsification tests involved, so strictly speaking, while they may run experiments and adopt changes, it isn't a full application of the scientific method (see Working Hypothesis -- what is the value?Message 18 for more).
In fact they actually have to a eat botanists in their second year and form a box girder bridge out of their rib cages.
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