Summations Only

Yes, that is quite correct. In fact, it is the basis of the topic, The Great Creationist Fossil Failure, that had spawned this very topic. The one that, as I recall, you were unable to respond to so you started this topic.To summarize, we have very good explanations for that observation, though it involves a long and complicate geological history. Your young-earth flood-geology ideas completely fail to explain anything. Yes, that is correct (though your own thought processes must understand your statement differently). And just how does one stay in one's own time period? It just happens. It's the opposite that is difficult and exceptional. Lacking an operational TARDIS (or any other time-travelling methodology outside the standard one of inching ever so slowly into the future), how could anyone ever possibly move outside of one's own time period?When I first read that, I thought that you were proposing exactly that, that the fossilized organisms had wandered about up and down through the "levels". I wanted to challenge you to do the very least that you were demanding of those creeping crawler, since you as a human are so superior to them, that you wander down to a level buried 50 feet down without benefit of any excavating equipment (since the creeping crawlers had none). Or to wander up to that level 100 feet up from the surface.When put to you in such straight-forward terms, can you begin to understand how absolutely bat-quano-crazy you make yourself appear? At first blush, you appear to be suggesting such "roam{ing} around from one level to another" is something that you think had happened. But upon further inspection, it appears that you think that that is what geologists think. No, they most definitely do not think that! You are creating ludicrous strawmen to knock down. Who do you think you are fooling with that? Just yourself, that is all. And fooling yourself is your most important goal with all this.

Finding your specific post would be difficult, so I will use this one.What did I tell you, Faith? Build your edifice brick by brick, stone by stone! You even said you loved me for that. In this topic, you have taken all your bricks (nowhere near enough for the job) and thrown them all out at the same time hoping that your edifice would rise up. Well, it doesn't work that way. All you created was a mess, a big confusing mess that confused us as to what you were rambling about but more importantly it confused you about what you were trying to think. Structure and organization! I am a software engineer. Computer science students almost never write any programs that are more than a few source files in size, whereas professional projects typically consist of hundreds of source files. Those students are able to keep the logic of their entire programs in their heads. So-called "super-programmers" are able to do the same with several source files. But when the program grows to hundreds of source files, then no human mind can keep track of everything that is going on, which is why software engineering practices need to be followed.You have been trying to hold the whole of geology in your mind and that has failed miserably. By attempting to do so, you have rendered yourself terminally confused and, in your own confusion, you continuously confuse the rest of us as to what you are babbling on about.In software engineering, there is the concept of "divide and conquer" -- I may have mentioned it before. You have before you an enormous task, an impossible task. So you break it down into smaller problems, and those smaller problems into ever smaller problems. And so on until you have before you several problems which are each easy to solve. At that point, since you have solved the lowest-level problems already, you can solve the next-higher-level problems, etc.So then please apply those principles.Start with landscapes. Landscapes exist on or about the surface as I and several others have already described to you. Life lives in a landscape (to which we had agreed to apply also to the seascape, the bottom of an aquatic environment).So then what happens to landscapes? Several scenarios are possible depending on the particular properties of a specific landscape. Depositation, erosion, both. List all the possible landscapes and their properties. Then describe everything that can happen to each landscape and determine what the consequences are for that particular landscape. In other words, generate a series of scenarios and analyze them!Then extend specific scenarios. What kinds of depositational patterns would they generate? Do not confuse one scenario with another!Faith, you repeatedly confuse one scenario with another and generate nothing but confusion. Stop it!

Faith, nobody believes such an absolutely ridiculously thing nor would any even-marginally-sane person every believe such a ridiculous thing! Absolutely nothing in geology could ever possibly require believing such an absolutely ridiculous thing.If you truly believe what you just blabbered, then please present a coherent logical case for it! [ The incomplete quoting left me wondering what you're talking about. --Admin ] WHAT THE F*** ARE YOU SAYING???No, geologists definitely do not think that, because it is absolutely pure bat-shit crazy! You claim that you are showing that they do not believe that, while at the same time claiming that that is what they do believe.Are you just blatantly lying to us? [ More incomplete quoting. Here's a fuller quote from Message 882: --Admin ][ End of Admin insertion. --Admin ]What "actual circumstances"? The simple fact that your dogma is contradicted by reality? Perhaps you would care to specify?Geologists avoiding the facts? From someone who adamantly refuses to talk with a geologist? Glenn R. Morton was a young-earth creationist (YEC) who wrote several YEC articles for YEC publications, along with having been trained by the Institute for Creation Research (ICR), the President of which, Dr. Henry Morris (PhD Hydraulic Engineering), was literally the Father of Flood Geology (even though he had robbed that child from the cradle of Seventh-Day Adventist George McCready Price). Morton went to work for a petroleum exploration company, so he worked extensively in field geology, which entails looking at the actual rock-hard geological evidence. He hired several other ICR-trained geologists, all of whom had been trained extensively to believe that certain geological facts were not true and could not be true for Scripture to have any meaning. Morton reported that those ICR-trained geologists, when faced day after day after day with rock-hard geological evidence that they had been taught did not exist and could not exist for Scripture to have any meaning, all suffered crises of faith. After that report, Morton himself was driven to the verge of atheism by YEC.Geologists work with and deal with the actual evidence. Creationists deny it. Creationists have to deny the facts in order to preserve their faith. So just who is avoiding the facts?Edited by Admin, : Insert comments.

So then, you will have absolutely no difficulty in demonstrating that your motivation has absolutely nothing to do with supporting your dogma.You could start by demonstrating that the very idea that the earth is actually old would have absolutely no effect on your young-earth beliefs.Or by demonstrating that you would follow the truth and the evidence even if it were to contradict your young-earth beliefs.

Again, you have blathered so much nonsense that finding the pertinent post is difficult.You have demonstrated great confusion about "landscapes". One of the weird ideas that you seem to repeatedly raise is that landscapes are continuously being destroyed and replaced with new ones. We have tried to explain reality to you, but to no avail.We have tried to explain to you that the "landscape" (which you have extended to include seascapes) is on and about the surface of the earth, such that most all life we know of lives on that surface, slightly below it, and slightly above it. That is where the "landscape" always is and always remains. Now the surface itself, that can change. Surfaces can get buried or eroded away, but the "landscape" continues to exist on and about the new surface.Let's try an analogy in which you, Faith, are a landscape. Have you been destroyed repeatedly and had a new copy created? Are the older copies of you lying about somewhere? Are you one person or has there been many of you?Sure, you will argue that there has only ever been one of you, but is that true? There is a truism that all our bodies' cells replace themselves every seven years. And you deposit parts of yourself all the time. Hair clippings, nail clippings, dead skin cells (purportedly the major source of dust in our homes). Are you truly the same person you were as a child, or a teenager, or a young adult, or a year ago, or a week ago, or a day ago, or a minute ago? Or a second ago (eg, the 1986 episode of the new Twilight Zone series, "A Matter of Minutes" in which instant by instant everything is removed and replaced by the next instant's objects)?So then, Faith, are you a series of repeatedly reproduced instances of yourself? Or have you always been a single person who is constantly changing?Isn't every "landscape" the same "landscape" that is changing over time. And all that actually gets buried is the old surfaces of older versions of that "landscape"? Just as we have repeatedly tried to explain to you?

And yet nobody is able to understand you.In most group dance classes, you rotate to different partners. My Lindy teacher once told us (from memory from about a decade ago):

quote:

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You'll find that the move will work with some partners and not with others. So if you're having problems with a partner, they might be the problem or you might be, but don't worry because the next partner might be getting it. But if you have problems with all your partners, the you are the problem!

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You're not just having problems with Tanpteryx, but you are having problems with everybody. That would mean that we are not the problem, but rather you are the problem. So what could you do to stop being the problem?I have a modest proposal. Work through an intermediary. Find someone, probably someone here, whom you can get to understand what you are trying to say. Then that somebody can post to us a coherent explanation of what you are trying to say, one that we might have some chance of finally understanding. And when we respond, then that person can discuss it with you and work with you to write the response. During this process, you should refrain from bypassing your intermediary and respond on your own, since that would only return the discussion into the state of confusion that you have created so far.Think it over. After more than 1000 messages, you are screaming about pulling your hair out from frustration, complaining, as you have repeatedly done in far too many topics in the past, that we are all too stupid to understand what you keep saying over and over again. Obviously there is something fundamentally wrong with your messages, something which makes them incomprehensible. You are the only person who is able to do anything about your messages, to resolve the problem that they repeatedly cause: the generation of confusion.So, you can either try to resolve the problem or you can continue to waste bandwidth by generating thousands more messages trying to deal with your terminal confusion. Your choice. Unless, of course, it is your intention to generate nothing but confusion -- confusion is the creationist's best tool for fighting against the truth.Consider implementing my proposal or something very much like it. You obviously need a translator. And, no, I am most decidedly not volunteering for that job.

What personal comments?Identify the problem, then formulate a plan to solve the problem.Or prevent any possible solution.And BTW, you did express frustration and confusion about your own ideas because it's too much for you to keep in your head all at once. Nobody can keep an entire large and complex idea in their head all at once, which is why we have techniques such as "divide and conquer" and which is why I offered that technique to you. And of course you ignored it.

Science isn't in the business of winning hearts and minds. It is in the business of discovering and understanding how the universe works. Part of that business is communicating with other scientists using clear and concise language, which outsiders call "jargon". Using "non-jargon" in those communications would result in confusion -- witness Faith's wasting and causing the waste of several thousands of messages resulting in ever increasing levels of confusion.In general, scientists don't care about communicating with the general public. Most scientists couldn't be bothered about "creation science". The closest they come to having to care is when they write their proposals for grants in order to do their research.Rather, it is the educators and science popularizers who do care and have to care about communicating with the general public, about winning hearts and minds. But there again, in their efforts to make science more accessible, they have to loosen the language and use "non-jargon" and analogies to explain those concepts. And again, that generates some confusion and misconceptions. Unfortunate, but an occupational hazard that cannot be fully eliminated. They have to offer the public a "royal road" to understanding science where no actual "royal road" exists (borrowed from the famous statement about teaching mathematics to royalty).It should be noted that many creationist claims, especially the 1980 classics, rely on the popular science literature as their "scientific" sources; eg, Walter Brown's leap-second claim literally used articles in Popular Science and Readers Digest as its sources.

There are indeed serious problems for science education which need to be solved.The obvious problem is with the textbooks. Creationist battles over science curricula and textbooks continue -- the NCSE regularly posts news about such activity. Creationists have been pressuring textbook publishers since the 1920's to keep evolution out; even though they've been less successful since 1969, the pressure is still there.Another part of that problem is the writers' scientific incompetence. Most textbooks are written by professional textbook writers, not by scientists. As a result, many falsehoods and misconceptions are included, causing the quality of the science in those textbooks to be appalling. Since the 1980's, scientists have become more involved in textbook selection (eg, California science textbook selection in the 1980's in which the state ended up approving a minimally-corrected textbook behind the scientists' backs -- I need to write a webpage about that). Also, scientists have taken to writing some of the textbooks themselves -- in the 1960's, it was the Biological Sciences Curriculum Study (BSCS) textbooks written scientists which placed Susan Epperson in violation of Arkansas' "monkey law" which led to the striking down of those laws in Epperson v. Arkansas (1968).The second problem is that many secondary-grade science teachers lack competence in the subject matter and, as a result, end up teaching their own misconceptions to their students.Many school districts cannot afford to hire teachers trained in science and instead press other teachers into service with the philosophy of "They know how to teach so they don't need to understand the subject matter." My younger son's first middle school science teacher was the home-ec teacher; he knew more than she did and was able to explain it better, so his fellow students kept coming to him for help. In the early 1990's, John Peloza was a high-school biology teacher who sued his school district for not allowing him to proselytize between classes (Peloza v. Capistrano School District). In his own schooling, he had taken the bare minimum number of biology classes. His bachelor degree was in Physical Education and his MS was in Education in which his thesis was about coaching softball. While teaching in a small school district (on Santa Catalina Island, as I recall), that PE teacher was assigned to teach biology.Interesting historical note: John Scopes was a PE teacher whose appearance in the biology classroom was in order to serve as a test case for the ACLU. That attempt to get the "monkey laws" before the US Supreme Court failed when Scopes' conviction was overturned in the appeals court because of a legal technicality.