Summations Only

If you had stopped there you would have been correct. And if you're honest, you object to certain sciences only because they show that your religious beliefs are incorrect. Science is defined by following the scientific method. If you follow the scientific method, you have to accept the results whether you agree or not. Creationists can't tolerate the results, but that doesn't discredit the science or the scientific method. It just shows that for them, religious belief supersedes evidence.That's not science--that's the exact opposite.And we don't need creationists, working from this horribly biased viewpoint, trying to tell scientists how to do things. Its like fleas telling the dog where to go and what to do.

You can't really DO the scientific method with one-time events in the prehistoric past. the results you insist I must accept are not testable for the time period of the phenomena they purport to explain. You have to have testable results to have real science. All your tests can only test within the current time frame, they can't say anything about the prehistoric past no matter how plausible the methodology. Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

That is absolute nonsense from a "true believer" and has no relationship to reality.You are hopelessly biased by religious belief to the point that you can't accept the real world. On numerous occasions you have admitted this.Face it--you have no business even thinking about science and the scientific method, let alone expressing ill-formed opinions about either.Sorry to be harsh, but when one is 180 opposed to science and the scientific method, one should not be trying to define what science is or how it should be conducted.

Scientists disagree with you. And yet we have persuaded you to admit that there were once living dinosaurs, do we have to do this again?

You are probably the most hidebound blind believer in the shallowest idea of science I've ever encountered. At least you're consistent, for whatever that's worth.

How silly you all can be. How on earth could anyone deny there were once living dinosaurs? What an utterly silly idea. I never ever doubted it. I've seen the bones. I just think they lived before the Flood and died in the Flood or some of them shortly thereafter in the new climate. It's the timing and the explanation of strata as ancient time periods that is absurd and unprovable, not the facts of living things buried all over the world. Those I can see with my own eyes. Not the preposterous timing and the preposterous time periods you all made up for them to live in. The strata are clearly the result of a one-time worldwide deluge. Nothing could be more obvious to the objective observer of the facts.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

I've been doing archaeology for over 40 years. That is a science that studies the past. We have developed techniques for obtaining evidence, examining that evidence, and doing real science with that evidence.For someone to come along and tell me we don't know what we're doing is frankly insulting, along with ill-informed and flat-out wrong. This is particularly insulting when that person knows nothing about archaeology, geology, or any of the other similar sciences--they just disagree with the results. Disbelief is not evidence.And as my signature notes, "Religious belief does not constitute scientific evidence, nor does it convey scientific knowledge."

Well, for example, they could deny that observations made in the present can tell us about the prehistoric past, by saying something like this --- "the results you insist I must accept are not testable for the time period of the phenomena they purport to explain. You have to have testable results to have real science. All your tests can only test within the current time frame, they can't say anything about the prehistoric past no matter how plausible the methodology."You intended this as an excuse for ignoring the evidence for evolution, but it's an equally good excuse for ignoring the evidence for dinosaurs.

As long as there are no living witnesses from the archaeological sites themselves you have to depend on theories alone that have to remain forever uncorroborated no matter how well they seem to hang together.. I'm sorry to insult you of course, but it's far far better to insult a mere fallible human being who is limited by factors over which he has no control in his assessment of things that he can only interpret and never witness, than to insult the living God. Far far better. And I must say it gets very tedious to be told by scientists what I believe and why I believe it, based only on your OWN limited frame of reference. I often make my case on observable physical phenomena only to get told by you, and particularly you, that I'm not doing science I'm doing religion. That is a delusion, a really pernicious delusion. The least you could do is try to be honest about such things instead of just tossing out your usual half-baked prejudice. And that is a perfect example of your blind bias right there.; I know a lot more about archaeology and geology than the average college graduate. And you have never said one thing about the actual situations you work in, or anything any creationist has ever said about any of it, except to refer to your one-note argument about your dating methods. You never ever take anything else into account. You never address any argument, you just toss out your faith in your dating methods and your false ideas about religious belief that are getting awfully tiresome. Which is tyhpical nonsense because nobody claims it does. Such a silly blind statement just keeps you from seeing what the argument is really about.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Wrong, as usual. We depend on evidence, and from that evidence we form hypotheses and test them. Those hypotheses that survive might become theories. Theories are not "wild-ass guesses" as creationists often claim. They are the single best explanations for a given set of facts, they have survived testing, and they have made successful predictions.See, this is the point I'm trying to make--you don't know that a lot of what you are claiming is just wrong. And you don't seem to mind being wrong. When science says one thing and when the only folks who find problems with that are true believers in one religion or another, what other logical conclusion would I come to? This is particularly true in your case as you have repeatedly stated that when evidence contradicts the bible you will believe the bible. The only logical conclusion is that you are not doing science, you're doing religion. Actually I have described a lot of the evidence I have come up with, but you aren't willing to accept it because it disagrees with your religious beliefs. No matter what the evidence is, if it disagrees with your religious belief you find some reason to discount it.So don't claim to be doing science--you are doing the exact opposite.

It's odd how you managed to say something so detailed that is nothing but an abstraction that never comes down to earth. WHAT sort of evidence are you talking about? WHAT are your hypotheses ABOUT? How about some examples to make this real? How do you test your hypotheses? There could be many kinds of explanations for some particular evidence, is it possible to test them all? We really need an example or two, otherwise this is no better than any just-so story. Nobody has ever said by the way, at least I haven't, that your theories are "wild-ass guesses," just that because you are a lot more limited in your efforts than you are willing to recognize, because you are trying to explain something in the past based only on clues in the present, that there are a lot more ways to be wrong than there would be if you had say a written document from the time you are studying that mentions some of the evidence you have found. That would be a situation more like the hard sciences where there are many workers on the same project and their results can be exactly tested by the work of everybody else on the same project. You don't seem to appreciate how different the situation is when you are trying to explain something \that can never be directly tested. Well, YOU don't seem to know that you are not even providing enough actual factual description for anybody to have any idea what on earth you are talking about. Put in some real facts, along the lines I ask for above, Otherwise all this is just hot air. You should look at the argument itself and drop your prejudgment. The "religion" is claimed to shed light on real world facts and it's only your prejudice that dismisses it as merely a "religion" without bothering even to look at the argument itself. The Bible is mostly a historical report, not a "religion," that's just your blind prejudice and one gets awfully tired of being dismissed without any thought whatever having been given to the argument itself. Then you simply are not thinking. When I can't prove something from the observed facts I just figure I need to come at it some other way. With the observed facts. And yes even if I'm wrong about a particular approach I know the Bible is true so another approach is needed. To the observed facts. The Bible provides a few basic facts, all the rest is attempts to explain the physical situation as scientifically as possible. There is nothing unscientific about such an effort, it's about physical realities as imagined to have occurred in the past based on observations in the present, which is all anyone can do with things in the distant past.The Bible is the inspiration, but it provides very few facts, and those ARE foundational, there's no way around that. Such as: There was a worldwide Flood, that's foundational. The best estimates of when it occurred are around 4350 years ago. That is subject somewhat to change but so far there has never been any good enough reason to change it. Eight human beings and representatives of all land animals were saved from the Flood by a boat that it took a hundred years to build. First it rained forty days and forty nights. The Flood waters rose over so many months and it receded over so many months, after which humans and animals multiplied and spread out over the earth.That's about all we have to go on. The rest is what we are able to understand of observations of the physical world as it appears now in relation to those foundational facts. What would such a Flood do? Unbelievers come up with absurdly inadequate ideas and expect those to debunk the whole idea. But when we see the strata that occur in so many places over the planet, that are the basis for the ToE, that explanationt hits some of us as absurd just on the face of it, without even considering the Flood, but the Flood then enters as an amazingly good explanation for it, a deep stack of layered sediments with dead things fossilized in them? The only weird thing is why it isn't obvious to YOU and other believers in evolution, and the only explanation for that is the habit that has built up over years of believing it demonstrates evolution, no matter how absurd that is.This is just one of the arguments creationists make of course, but it's all constructed from observations of the physical world itself.All you ever seem to say is that your dating methods trump it all and you don't seem to feel any necessity of actually thinking about the presented physical facts. One example please, at least, because I don't recall you ever presenting anything other than your faith in your dating methods. Well, it's true that if you insist on a date that "proves" the Flood never happened or didn't happen on the Biblical time calculation I'm not going to accept it. But that's about the extent of it as I recall. That's another silly idea tossed around here. If all the evidence offered is actual physical phenomena then you can't rightly say it's not science. When I'm arguing from the Bible you'll KNOW I'm arguing from the Bible, I'll say so, I won't pretend to be arguing from physical facts when I'm not.You are just as committed to your conclusions as I am to mine, I mean to the point that you really don't want to debate at all because you are so sure you're right and that creationists aren't talking about anything real anyway. Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

That is not my argument. What I said was, "Evolutionary concepts drive new design approaches where constructions 'evolve' toward a final design." In other words, genetic algorithms.I also pointed out other ways in which evolution is useful. Besides being the central unifying concept of biology, I mentioned predicting flu viruses and tracking human migration. But something doesn't have to be of practical use to humans to be true. Of what practical use is knowledge of the distance to the nearest star, yet it is true nonetheless.--Percy

Please provide an example of how the removal of belief in speciation will change something useful in the real world.

Thank you for this information. I need to study it.

Why should we accept religious-based and unevidenced claims instead of real-world evidence?