Worst Creationist Argument Ever?

Very problematic. How could you distinguish between organic matter that originated within the jar from the organic matter that had been placed into the jar at the packing plant?A related problem with new life forming in the present day, besides being able to distinguish it from life that's already existing, is that there's a name for that new life: food! In other words, the life forms that are already present will make lunch out of new organic matter that might form spontaneously.

Ooh. What's the worst creationist argument? So many to choose from.There's the ICR statement, mainly from Gish and H. Morris, that creation is a far better explanation of origins than evolution is, because creation can't explain anything whereas evolution fails to explain everything.There are the protein comparison fiascos. Like Walter Brown's rattlesnake protein claim that cytochrome c shows humans to be the rattlesnake's closest relative, given that we differ by about 14 amino acids. Even though we differ from the macque monkey by one amino acids and our cytochrome c sequence is identical to the chimpanzee's.
Or Gary Parker's claim that chicken lysozyme is more similar to human
lysozyme than is chimpanzee lysozyme even though chicken and human lysozyme differ by 51 amino acids whereas human and chimpanzee lysozyme are identical.Or Hovind's solar-mass loss claim that if we take the rate of mass loss of 5 million tons per second (which is about right) and extrapolate back 5 billion years then the ancient sun would have been so incredibly massive that it would have sucked the earth in. Even though if you actually did the math you would find that the ancient sun would have only been a few hundredth's of one percent greater, sucking the earth in by less than 100,000 miles. The best support that Hovind offered for his claim? He twice tried to pick a fight with me over my email address, dwise1.Verily, creationism is more fun than science!

You mean the Sun?No wonder early Christianity had assimilated so much Sun God theology.

"How did food evolve?"

Along with the article of faith:
"If evolution is true, then everything about Christianity is false, nothing in the Bible is true, and God does not exist. So if evolution is true, you must throw your Bibles into the trash, become hedonistic atheists, and run naked down the street."[theme from "Highway Patrol", Broderick Crawford]
Dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb. Dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb. DUMP!
[/theme]PS
It's amazing how many creationists have vehemently insisted on this claim to me. And also insisted that they only believe what the Bible says, yet whenever I ask them where in the Bible it says that they immediately change the subject and/or have extremely pressing matters to attend to elsewhere.PPS
The theme music from "Highway Patrol" was also played in "Sixteen Candles".
10-4.PPPS
Or maybe it was from Dragnet, another early 50's police show. It's just that every time I heard it I'd think of "Highway Patrol".Edited by dwise1, : Corrected faulty TV nostalgia
Added postscriptsEdited by dwise1, : Realization of failing memory

IamJoseph just brought another perennial gaff:

quote:

---

Evolution as per Darwin, though accepted by a majority world mindset in science - is still a THEORY

---

Implicit admission that they don't know what they are talking about, since they just revealed that they don't even have a clue what a theory is.PS
Actually, the originator of that claim probably did know what he was doing. He used the standard creationist deception of "semantic shifting" -- substituting a different definition of a word in order to misquote without having to change a word -- in which he substituted the street usage of "theory" to mean a SWAG ("some wild-asterix guess") in place of the scientific definition of "theory", thereby enabling the creationist deception that whenever a scientific source or an opponent of the creationist said "theory" that he meant a SWAG instead of a scientific theory.It is the creationist's followers intoning of "it's only a theory" that demonstrates that they are merely parrotting what they've been told without comprehension.Edited by dwise1, : No reason given.

Actually, as I remember it, the claim is:

quote:

---

Evolutionists believe that ancient man in early historic times were far less evolved than modern man, low-intelligence brutes just barely above being apemen. This is obviously wrong because the ancient builders displayed great skill and intelligence equalling and even surpassing modern man.
  —"loosely from memory"

---

I've only seen two instances of this claim. The first was in a local creationist club's newsletter several years ago, quoteing a guest speaker, an author, at their last meeting. The second was an article on Answers in Genesis that I found while researching the first instance. Unfortunately, I cannot find my notes on it.

I'll have to plead the "granola defense". I wrote that during breakfast and my blood sugar hadn't risen yet.Oh yeah, that's right: No webpage found at provided URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DVa2c7iR_oQ. Hey, keep in mind that I'd last seen that show nearly 50 years ago.Those two shows you mentioned seem vaguely familiar. I actually seemed to get most of my viewing in during the afternoons in the summer. That's when I watched "Highway Patrol" and "Dragnet", though my favorite was "Burns and Allen". I also watch "Amos and Andy", though I couldn't understand some of the jokes, like the perfume called "Manslaughter". I also remember that one of my favorites was "Men into Space".Ever see Alan Hale Jr's father? It's like they had run the old man through a Xerox machine. Same with the Robert Walkers.

As I recall, the Bowery Boys wasn't a TV show, but rather a series of movies.One day an old 3 Musketeers movie came on featuring Alan Hale Sr as one of the three. Our immediate reaction was "Another clone!"Actually (in a vain attempt to make this appear on-topic) that raises a question I've always had. What's the genetics of family traits? How does the genome manage to express itself in such a way that kids with only half of a parent's genome end up appearing identical to that parent? Or for someone to look almost exactly like an ancestor (eg, a picture of my father's sister who died as a teenager looked exactly like my sister)? Or for siblings or cousins to resemble each other so much that you can tell at a glance that they're related? That's just something that's always amazed me.Oh yeah, "Men into Space" (BTW, I had newspaper route 54, so I got a lot of Toody & Muldoon jokes tossed my way). Wikipedia has a good write-up on it at Men into Space - Wikipedia. Aired in '59 and '60. Tried to be an accurate depiction of our plans for manned space and of the problems and solutions thereto. I think they had some support from the military space programs, what with the mention of the pilot using actual Navy high-altitude pressure suits.I was 9 at the time and I only remember a couple things. On the moon one astronaut had snuck along a pistol and was threatening to shoot another; I remember we were trying to figure out whether a gun could actually be fired in a vacuum. Maybe in the same episode, they were trapped outside with their suits' oxygen supply about to run out, so they buried themselves in a void next to the outlet of a large oxygen tank and filled it with air. The rescue team figured out where they were and, as I recall, had to tap instructions to them to suit back up so they could be rescued. All I remember of one other episode was that they went to an asteroid and one of the astronauts exposed his unshielded eyes to the sunlight; next shot was of him back on earth in the officer's housing area, blind. Seems like the actor looked like James Franciscus, but we already discovered how good my memory is, right?Several years ago SciFi Channel had late,late night programming -- like around 2 to 4 AM -- that they called "Retro TV" and which featured really old and obscure programs. Like "Men Into Space" and "Science Fiction Theater" (where the grey-haired host would introduce some of that episode's concepts and illustrate them with a brief science experiment). Also, one of the links from the "Men into Space" Wikipedia page mentioned a DVD with some of the episodes.Edited by dwise1, : No reason given.

Like the Spanish Inquisition, nobody ever expects the Rock of Ages!Well, OK, so it was a stunt double ... .

It definitely has the talent. Plus, I've never seen such a solid stage presence.And in the old days of Hollywood, it could've gone on to become a leading man. What with those chiselled features. But nowadays, it would just be a male porn star.
[I'm not sure if forum rules would allow me to state the obvious reasons for that last line]Edited by dwise1, : No reason given.

I received this one seven years ago in an email. It was the first time that I'd heard it, but I've heard hints of the same claim since then. Also, I just noticed the "(sic)", which suggests that he had copied it from somewhere else:

quote:

---

Now given, data doesn't lie, but I do not think that all data is intrinsically pure. In other words this: it has been tampered with by supernatural beings, namely satan himself. satan's (sic) main concern is that he takes as many people down with him as possible. If he can convince us that God doens't exist by "tampering" with geological data and other findings, then we will think that we are alone in this universe with no spiritual meaning, and that when we die, we are worm food. Has anyone ever expressed this view towards you before? How do you respond to it? I know it sounds like an easy cop-out, but God has given satan the power over the earth and spiritual warfare does take place every day.

---

Thinking back on it, I realize that it's a variant of the Omphalos Argument, only instead of making God out to be a liar it puts the blame on Satan.Anyway, my response was to point out that Satan is one cleaver devil who knew that he didn't have to go to all the work of falsifying physical data everywhere on earth to create a consistent lie, but rather all he had to do was to create a false theology that would have us believe that the real evidence of the world proves that God doesn't exist. Then all he had to do was to enlist the aid of the fundamentalists and they would then do all the work for him. With great zeal.He never did respond.

Just today I stumbled across Malcolm Bowden again, only this time he's listed as a modern geocentrist (Geocentric model - Wikipedia) -- they believe that the earth is at the center and that everything revolves around us, literally.Also on that list was respiratory therapist Paul Ellwanger, author of the model state law upon which the Arkansas and Louisiana "balanced-treatement" laws of the early 1980's were based.Why are we not surprised?