Evolution & Abiogenesis were originally one subject.

Hi, Marc.

marc9000 writes: So there are similarities [between abiogenesis and evolution].

And there are also similarities between my wife and one of my co-workers. Would you advocate my treating them as the same woman?

Listing similarities, no matter how many there are, does nothing to overcome the presence of even one little difference. Abiogenesis details the transition to life from non-life. Evolution details the transition to life from other life. This is at least one difference. Therefore, abiogenesis and evolution are two different things. End of story.

Your arguments have so far amounted to nothing but an attempt to partition the universe of ideas into two groups: (1) Christianity and (2) Everything Else.

You may classify things this way, if you please. But this does not make it valid to say that everything in the “Everything Else” column is the same thing.

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marc9000 writes: The reason they've only recently seen attempts to separate [abiogenesis and evolution] is political...

We see attempts to separate them from the instant the term “abiogenesis” was coined. The very fact that Huxley made a term for this that wasn’t “evolution” should have been a clue to you that he didn’t think it was the same thing as the subject that already occupied the term “evolution.”

Ponder on that for awhile.

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-Bluejay (a.k.a. Mantis, Thylacosmilus)

Darwin loves you.

Hi, Marc.

marc9000 writes: Because ANY origin of life is being called "abiogenesis" throughout this thread, as if there was no other way for life to originate. There really is another way.

That’s the point of abiogenesis! If life had an origin at all, it was an abiogenetic origin: otherwise, all life must have come from pre-existing life, and, by extension, there must never have been a first life form. That was the dichotomy Huxley was attempting to set up in your favorite quote:

quote:

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And thus the hypothesis that living matter always arises by the agency of pre-existing living matter, took definite shape... I shall call it the hypothesis of Biogenesis; and I shall term the contrary doctrine–that living matter may be produced by not living matter–the hypothesis of Abiogenesis.

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It is quite true that naturalistic abiogenesis and special creation are different things, but this doesn’t give you the right to suppress all terminology that highlights the similarities between them.

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marc9000 writes: Abiogenesis is much more related to evolution than it is to supernatural creation.

There is more than one way to validly classify things, Marc. When discussing different aspects of the same subject, it becomes useful to switch between systems of classification as a pedagogical device.

Since the evolutionists here are trying to explain the differences between evolution and abiogenesis, it makes sense to use a system that highlights the similarities between naturalistic abiogenesis and special creation. This system nicely illustrates the point that abiogenesis---like special creation---is about the beginning of life, and evolution is about what has happened since then.

Furthermore, since naturalism/supernaturalism is not the dichotomy being discussed in the OP, system that uses naturalism/supernaturalism to classify things isn’t really helpful in discussing the topic of the OP.

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-Bluejay (a.k.a. Mantis, Thylacosmilus)

Darwin loves you.

Look, under most circumstances - for instance, all chemical interactions - the Law of Conservation of Matter holds true. Chemical reactions don't create or destroy matter, they just re-arrange it. Conservation of Matter states that the total mass of the products of a chemical reaction will be equivalent to the total mass of the reactants.

Major accomplishment here – I just got an evolutionist to use the term “rearrangement”! And yes, I have no argument with any of that.

I'm not entirely sure what you mean by "motivation."

A motivation in the scientific community to fervently study some things, and completely ignore others, in the interest of supporting one worldview. The study of things like abiogenesis that border on not even being science, while ignoring work associated with ID, like detailed study on recent discoveries of complexity in biology, including paths of information and the time sequences that could be critical in determining successes and failures in naturalistic processes.

I'll have to take your word for that, I guess, since I don't entirely understand what you're getting at. The US Constitution is a legal document, not a work of political philosophy.

I don’t agree, but that’s another subject. It was political philosophy, it’s worked amazingly well, and it’s philosophy was Biblically based.

Of course. But empiricism, and its more formal descendant science, have built-in protection against the personal biases of human beings. They're the most resistant to it, because they have a system of rigor that allows conjectures to be determined to be false. Religion doesn't have that. Intuition doesn't have that. Imagination doesn't have that.

Science is loaded with the personal biases of human beings, and makes some conjectures that are not falsifiable. It has become a religion. Somewhere between 85% and 95% of the National Academy of Science members are atheists. Have you ever heard of the book A Jealous God by Pamela Winnick? A description from Amazon;

quote:

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The age-old war between religion and science has taken a new twist. Once the dedicated scientist-martyr fought heroically against rigid religionists. But now the tables have turned, and it is established science crusading against religion, pushing atheistic agendas in the classroom, in textbooks, and in the media. This book shows how science has now become a religion of its own-an often fanatical one at that-furiously preaching atheism, punishing dissenters, dictating how and what we should think, and subtly inserting its worldviews in everything from education to entertainment. And, with stunning clarity, it proves that, with billions of dollars up for grabs in the race for stem cell research, intellectual integrity has been replaced with good old-fashioned greed. With sharp insight and completely original reporting, this book defiantly shows the extent to which science is beating down religion and how this systematic tyranny is unmistakably weakening culture and society.

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You’re a good poster, but forums such as these, with the ganging up sport of shouting down creationists and causing them to pack up and leave as quickly as possible does go along well with the documented points that this book makes.

marc9000 writes: Hypothesizing and experimentation is done by following pathways. I don't know what you mean by "pathway".

Think of a clearing in the middle of the woods. Two narrow paths go winding through the trees in opposite directions. One is the religious path, and the other is the atheist path. Things like billions of years, random mutation, natural selection, abiogenesis, scaffolding, claims and study of “religion defect genes” and all the study related to that – these all don’t happen at equal distances from the clearing. They often follow one another, build on one another, and the path is long. If something goes wrong, (a big Christian tree gets in the way) it doesn’t instantly offer a two step retreat back to the clearing. It’s easier to dance around that big Christian tree, and continue along the atheist path. Little school children, about to enter science class for the first time, are standing in the clearing. A science teacher (a member of the National Academy of Sciences) is standing 50 ft down the atheist path, calling; “come on kiddies, you can’t go down that other path since church and state have been separated! There’s no 10 commandments signposts along this path anyway!

Of course I understand that the Christian path works the same way. A Darwinist tree can get in the way, and be a problem, and Christians can tend to dance around it and continue on the Christian path. But the continuance on the same ‘worldview’ path is comparable, evolutionists are as guilty as religious people in making their study arrive at a conclusion that they’ve already reached.

Remember that the line of the debate isn't creationism vs. atheism, it's creationism vs. the science of evolution. Evolution is not equivalent to atheism. Atheism is a position about the non-existence of God. Evolution is a scientific theory that explains the history and diversity of life on Earth. They're two very different subjects.

Atheism is the conclusion and evolution is the pathway. Just like religion can be a conclusion, and Intelligent design can be a pathway. Either both are true, or both are false. Atheists want to disconnect evolution and atheism, and combine ID and religion. It’s a double standard.

I think you'll find instead that evolutionists are very much acquainted with the claims of "Darwin's Black Box", and have scientifically refuted the ones that aren't themselves nonsensical from the get-go. (Behe's concept of "specified complexity" gives zero indication of how we're supposed to actually detect it in nature; he just points to examples that he insists are too complex to evolve, even though it's been demonstrated how they did.)

Your “demonstrations” have been atheist dogma, they have not been completely empirical science. In William Dembski’s words;

quote:

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Mathematicians have not muscled into the biologists domain. Rather biologists have uncovered certain facts to which mathematics applies. The application of mathematics to these facts has been unsettling for some biologists. Even so, the proper response of biologists is to meet this challenge of mathematics head on. The wrong response is to keep oneself uninformed about mathematics, assert that mathematics is largely irrelevant to the biological enterprise and continue business as usual. Disdain for mathematics does nothing to foster scientific inquiry. Mathematics does indeed elucidate biological complexity. It is ignorance or dogmatism to claim otherwise.

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(From his book, "Intelligent Design", p271)

(My response to message 117)

Dr. Adequate writes: Sane people will note an amusing consequence of marc's paranoid fantasies. The fact that to date no creationist clown has been rubbed out by Evil-utionist ninjas must imply that so far not one of them has come up with a single good argument.

Henry Morris is dead. IT WAS YOU! IT WAS YOU!

(My response to message 116)

marc9000 writes: It’s only recently been transformed into a non-specific term, as I’ve been saying, and showing evidence and the political reasons for. You haven't shown me any evidence that it hasn't been used in precisely the way I describe.

I have, you’re just too far down the atheist path. When little kids in the clearing hear “abiogenisis is a fact”, religion is cleverly erased from their minds. Go ahead and dance around the tree, but it’s there in your path. Go ahead and cut it down.

But that's exactly how Huxley is using it - he's describing any conjecture that proposes life arising from lifelessness.

Any conjecture that involves naturalism. No supernatural conjecture, you won’t find it anywhere on that page. Your saw is getting dull.

But that's exactly backwards. Huxley coined the term to describe any conjecture by which life could have arisen from lifelessness. Nowadays it's more likely to refer to a scientific model of the origin of life, because it's a "science-sounding" word, and creationists frequently use it in opposition to their own position of special creation.

Huxley was ignoring the supernatural, and talkorigins nowadays links it to the supernatural. Still can’t link me to anything from Huxley’s day, or 50 or 75 years after that, showing a clear reference to abiogenesis being supernatural, can you?

You've got the history of the word precisely backwards. It means "life from lifelessness." That's what you believe and it's what I believe. Nowadays it more frequently refers to scientific models of the origin of life, but scientists don't really use the term, because it's irritatingly nonspecific and useless when you're debating how life arose from lifelessness.

They’re afraid of the term, because they’re studying it in the public realm, and it’s not science anymore than ID is.

What other realms?

Supernatural realms. Ones where creation can happen without complex rearrangement. Ones where there is more than one time dimension, ones where there are more than three space dimensions. Just because humans can't understand them doesn't mean they don't exist.

marc9000 writes: I’m worried about young public school students, not yet old enough to form a positive worldview, being tricked. Being "tricked" into what, exactly?

Into a godless, purposeless and pointless worldview, which can easily lead to an “if it feels good, do it” mentality, which leads to liberal political point of view, which re-writes the actual history of the United States.

Into believing that evolution is a highly-supported scientific explanation of the history and diversity of life on Earth?

Yes, that leads to a belief that Genesis is false. That leads to a belief that Exodus is false. That the whole Bible is nothing but fairy tales. That Christ wasn’t much of a Christian. That there is no such thing as sin. That if it feels good, knock up the girlfriend – taxpayers will pay for the abortion. That God might be a “she”. It can lead to a lot of things. Like a $13 trillion national debt, that didn’t exist before an activist court separated church and state in 1947.

Into believing that Christians are able to simultaneously hold religious faith and accept the scientific theory of evolution? That's true as well. I'm just not clear on what this great "trick" is supposed to be. And you're honestly the first person I've ever met who even thought this was some kind of issue, and I've debated hundreds of creationists at this board over seven years.

Good creationists have better things to do than enter these atheist playgrounds. They’re too intimidated – too polite. They can’t handle implications that they’re the only one on the planet with Christian conservative views. Or when a "Christian" claims that God is a she, or that "Christ wasn't much of a Christisn". ~I~ would have thrown up my hands and left after a few of jar's comments if I wasn't experienced at this. Current popular literature and the airwaves are loaded with people with views identical to mine. Have you ever heard of David Horowitz? He documents the relationship of atheist, liberal professors with Marxism. If you, and most other atheist like you are not like that, that’s great. But you should show more concern about those high profile people who are. Ever hear of Ward Churchill?

marc9000 writes: They're studied the same way, with the same type of scientific methods, by the same people, in the same buildings. No, they're not. Here at UNL for instance origin-of-life chemistry is done in Hamilton and evolutionary biology is done in the Beadle Center.

Well, I stand corrected on that! If they were done in the same building, abiogenesis study could be more likely to find itself in court, facing the same 1st amendment establishment clause that Intelligent Design did at Dover!

Come on. Now you're impugning the motives of people like myself, and more importantly my wife, who does actually study the evolutionary relationships of insects. Do you honestly think her motivation is to "cheapen Christianity"? I can tell you that it is not - her motivation is to feed people, by determining effective ways to control crop pests. Sure, we're atheists. If you think we sit around all day thinking of how to "cheapen" your religion, you're suffering from paranoid delusions.

I know there are a lot of decent atheist people, I have atheist friends. It’s your leaders that I’m worried about. I’ve read Horowitz’s book “The Professors”. And I’m noting the actions of our socialist president, the likes of which this country has never seen before.

And what about my wife's Christian colleagues? She's literally the only atheist in her entire department, but the work she does is hardly different than the work they do. Are Christians trying to "cheapen Christianity"?

It’s possible to do the here-and-now work that she does without applying worldviews. I know that it’s claimed work like controlling crop pests wouldn’t be possible without a deep application of evolution (Darwinism), but I think that can be exaggerated. I had another poster on other forums tell me that without a belief in a billions of year old earth, we couldn’t purify and distribute drinking water. It gets to be quite a stretch sometimes.

Don't you think there's anybody in the life sciences who is actually interested in how life works? That's the motivation of literally everyone in the life sciences I've ever met. It's certainly my motivation. It's insulting of you to insinuate otherwise.

Sure, I believe you. It’s the leaders, the prominent people in science that Pamela Winnick described in her book “A jealous god” that shows the publicly funded political action by the scientific community to promote itself, and oppose the traditional form of government and morality in the US.

We have the internet, you know. For instance, Harriet Beecher Stowe's "Uncle Tom's Cabin" was published the year before "On the Origin of Species"; it sold nearly 300,000 copies. Dickens' "The Tale of Two Cities" was published serially; each new issue sold well over 100,000 copies. "The Tale of Two Cities" remains one of the English language's most printed books, at over 200 million copies made.

In one day?

marc9000 writes: crashfrog writes: I'll have to take your word for that, I guess, since I don't entirely understand what you're getting at. The US Constitution is a legal document, not a work of political philosophy. I don’t agree, but that’s another subject. It was political philosophy, it’s worked amazingly well, and it’s philosophy was Biblically based.

I'm sorry but that is simply yet another false assertion and yet another attempt to change teh subject.

The US Constitution is NOT Biblically based in any way or form.

So far no one has been able to show ANYTHING in the US Constitution that is Biblically based.

Edited by jar, : hit key too soon

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Anyone so limited that they can only spell a word one way is severely handicapped!

Now you're just moving the goalposts.

I knew it! I knew it! It was me who gave you the idea to say that.

"Live"? Ok, let me try to get your precise meaning. You're saying that if a creationist asserted that there was some kind of gravitational evidence that the Earth's orbit around the Sun isn't stable over a timeframe of 4 billions years, scientists would kill him?

People have died for a lot less. The scientific community simply isn’t going to allow any evidence for a young earth to see the light of day. It would be the biggest political upset in the history of the world.

Seriously? You think that's the reason that creationism has no scientific traction? Because its prominent proponents are mysteriously murdered by a scientific hit squad?

Even if Dr Adequate wouldn’t have wasted Morris, prominent creationists are just as effectively silenced as death, when they’re shouted down by the peer review process at today’s ivory towers. The movie “Expelled” demonstrated it clearly.

Is that really what you're saying? Can you point to even a single prominent creationist, or ID proponent, who has been murdered in service of an "evolutionist conspiracy"? Michael Behe is even allowed to keep publishing biochemistry papers. I just linked you to one. How is that even possible if there's this vast conspiracy of evolutionists?

Murder isn’t necessary (yet) So far, academic discrimination and bought courts seem to be working well for the scientific community. But I’ll bet Behe has some pretty elaborate alarm systems on his house.

Did you ever even stop to consider that the reason the scientific community is so monolithic in their support for evolution is because it really is good, sound science?

Micro evolution, yes, Darwinism, no. If it were as sound as you say, the entire creation/evolution debate would be different. The anger from the evolutionist camp wouldn't be near as pronounced. Evolutionists wouldn't be so afraid of Intelligent Design, for example.

The movie “Expelled” demonstrated it clearly.

Show how Expelled wasn't just a bunch of lies.

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Facts don\'t lie or have an agenda. Facts are just facts

Hi Mr Bluejay

And there are also similarities between my wife and one of my co-workers. Would you advocate my treating them as the same woman? Listing similarities, no matter how many there are, does nothing to overcome the presence of even one little difference. Abiogenesis details the transition to life from non-life. Evolution details the transition to life from other life. This is at least one difference. Therefore, abiogenesis and evolution are two different things. End of story.

Religion is the belief in and current presence of a supernatural being. Intelligent Design is the study of empirical evidence of design in nature. They are two different things. End of story. Or do you have a double standard?

Your arguments have so far amounted to nothing but an attempt to partition the universe of ideas into two groups: (1) Christianity and (2) Everything Else.

That is what I observe in how these debates go. I believe people of all those beliefs should be able to get along in a society without any one of them being publicly established. One of the “everything else” group, evolutionism, has been publicly established.

You may classify things this way, if you please. But this does not make it valid to say that everything in the “Everything Else” column is the same thing.

It’s just that no two positions in the everything else column ever seem to debate each other on forums such as these, about anything. . Everything individually, or combined, in the everything else column always opposes Christianity. That’s the reason I classify things that way.
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marc9000 writes: The reason they've only recently seen attempts to separate [abiogenesis and evolution] is political... We see attempts to separate them from the instant the term “abiogenesis” was coined. The very fact that Huxley made a term for this that wasn’t “evolution” should have been a clue to you that he didn’t think it was the same thing as the subject that already occupied the term “evolution.” Ponder on that for awhile.

Just like the term “Intelligent Design” was coined to separate it from religion? It depends on who is doing the coining, doesn’t it? Lovers of Darwin are in, religious people are out.

It is quite true that naturalistic abiogenesis and special creation are different things, but this doesn’t give you the right to suppress all terminology that highlights the similarities between them.

Then why are all my opponents here suppressing all terminology that highlights the similarities between evolution and abiogenesis?

http://science.jrank.org/pages/1387/Chemical-Evolution.html

quote:

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Chemical evolution describes chemical changes on the primitive Earth that gave rise to the first forms of life.

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Please describe the differences between abiogenesis and chemical evolution.

marc9000 writes: Abiogenesis is much more related to evolution than it is to supernatural creation. There is more than one way to validly classify things, Marc. When discussing different aspects of the same subject, it becomes useful to switch between systems of classification as a pedagogical device.

But creationists aren’t allowed to do that are they? Intelligent Design is always religion, isn’t it?

Since the evolutionists here are trying to explain the differences between evolution and abiogenesis, it makes sense to use a system that highlights the similarities between naturalistic abiogenesis and special creation. This system nicely illustrates the point that abiogenesis---like special creation---is about the beginning of life, and evolution is about what has happened since then. Furthermore, since naturalism/supernaturalism is not the dichotomy being discussed in the OP, system that uses naturalism/supernaturalism to classify things isn’t really helpful in discussing the topic of the OP.

But the topic of chemical evolution is really helpful in discussing the topic of the OP, isn’t it? Thanks for inspiring me to find it. It seems to be all over the net.

Major accomplishment here – I just got an evolutionist to use the term “rearrangement”!

I think the sooner you start seeing this process as one in which we explore scientific truth side-by-side, and stop seeing it as a process by which you try to trick me into saying magic words, the better.

Just sayin'.

A motivation in the scientific community to fervently study some things, and completely ignore others, in the interest of supporting one worldview.

Sorry, you're still not making any sense. This isn't the motivation of any scientist.

The study of things like abiogenesis that border on not even being science, while ignoring work associated with ID

Nobody's ignoring any ID "work"; there just isn't any. ID is not a research program. It's not a functional explanatory model. It's a deceptive legal program to get creationism in schools under a guise that doesn't so openly violate the First Amendment's establishment clause.

It was political philosophy, it’s worked amazingly well, and it’s philosophy was Biblically based.

I think you'll find that's trivially untrue - there are no elections in the Bible, the Bill of Rights contradicts the Ten Commandments, and the Bible itself says precious little about how to organize the government of a nation. Few if any of the authors of that document were what you would recognize as Christians; most of them rejected almost every claim of the Bible. Why would they base a document on a book they fundamentally rejected?

. It has become a religion.

"Religion" describes a system of ethics explained by recourse to supernatural beings.

Science doesn't do that.

You’re a good poster, but forums such as these, with the ganging up sport of shouting down creationists and causing them to pack up and leave as quickly as possible does go along well with the documented points that this book makes.

Nobody can be "shouted down" on an internet forum. And we're actually making efforts not to needlessly duplicate points, so that creationists don't have to deal with ten people telling them the same thing.

And we're enthusiastic about science, like evolutionists tend to be. Creationists aren't ever enthusiastic about science - clearly you're not - they're enthusiastic about playing games. You know, like you're doing. And since truth wins out over games, creationists can't help but be discouraged when their games fail. Hence, a revolving door of new creationists, seemingly unaware that the debate has ever occurred before they joined it, spouting a stead stream of what we call "PRATTs" - Points Refuted A Thousand Times.

But, hey. You brought in something new. Something kind of stupid, to be sure, but something new. That's something you should be commended for. You're more interesting than the average creationist, who just rolls in here, calls us all "evo-tards", and shouts "Jesus ROOLZ!" as he makes a quick retreat to the exit.

One is the religious path, and the other is the atheist path.

Which religious path? Be specific.

But the continuance on the same ‘worldview’ path is comparable, evolutionists are as guilty as religious people in making their study arrive at a conclusion that they’ve already reached.

Ok, sure. "Path dependency" is a known cognitive bias in human beings. Sure, that's a problem for everybody - people don't want to admit that they're wrong after they've spent so much time defending a position.

But, between religion and science, only one system of knowledge gives its most famous award - plus a million dollar prize - to the person who disproves the scientific status quo. And it isn't religion.

Atheism is the conclusion and evolution is the pathway.

If evolution necessitates atheism then how do you explain all the religious evolutionists? The theistic evolutionists? The millions of Americans who believe that God shaped species through natural selection and random mutation, as scientists describe? The Pope? Are you saying the spiritual and legal leader of the Catholic church, the largest organized Christian church in the world, is an atheist? That doesn't make any sense at all.

Atheism is a position of philosophy. Evolution is a scientific theory that explains the history and diversity of life on Earth. And that's all it explains.

Even so, the proper response of biologists is to meet this challenge of mathematics head on.

And they have. Behe has never been able to cogently respond to these biologists.

When little kids in the clearing hear “abiogenisis is a fact”

What little kids have ever heard "abiogenesis is a fact"? Do you have an example of this from contemporary primary school educational materials? I mean, these days it's a struggle to get school teachers to accurately teach sound consensus science; expecting them to explain the RNA world to first-graders is a little much even for us.

I mean, you didn't even hear about nuclear physics in your schooling. You had no idea that matter could be created or destroyed. Somehow you'd heard of Einstein but never knew what he was famous for. Don't you think it's possible that maybe you have an inaccurate picture of the state of American science education? (Hint: it's deplorable.)

Any conjecture that involves naturalism.

He doesn't even say "naturalism." He does say "dogma", though, indicating that he's referring to religion.

They’re afraid of the term, because they’re studying it in the public realm, and it’s not science anymore than ID is.

Of course it's science, if science is used to study it.

Supernatural realms.

What supernatural realms? Be specific.

Ones where creation can happen without complex rearrangement. Ones where there is more than one time dimension, ones where there are more than three space dimensions.

And what realms are those, where those things are possible? Be specific.

Into a godless, purposeless and pointless worldview, which can easily lead to an “if it feels good, do it” mentality, which leads to liberal political point of view, which re-writes the actual history of the United States.

And how exactly do you explain all the political conservatives who accept scientific evolution? How do you explain the religious persons, of every denomination and flavor, who accept scientific evolution? How do you explain all the US historians who accept scientific evolution?

If it's an inevitable path to atheism how do you explain all the Christian evolutionists who won't ever become atheists?

Like a $13 trillion national debt, that didn’t exist before an activist court separated church and state in 1947.

Don't you ever get tired of being wrong? I mean, almost nothing you say is actually factual. You have some amazing delusions about the history of science and the history of the United States, all rolled up into a conspiracy theory that scientists are coming to kill you.

Don't you, at any point, begin to see how unsupportable that all is? Well, you will when you're older.

Good creationists have better things to do than enter these atheist playgrounds. They’re too intimidated – too polite

Not judging by the ones we get around here who do nothing but call people "evo-tards". Not judging by you, who doesn't even know me and yet you made imprecations against my wife's professional judgement and intellectual honesty.

Polite? If only. And didn't you just undercut your own conspiracy theory from before, where the reason we get so few creationists is because they get "shouted down", somehow, over a means of communication where nobody can hear you shouting?

Have you ever heard of David Horowitz?

The racist? Sure.

I know there are a lot of decent atheist people, I have atheist friends. It’s your leaders that I’m worried about. I’ve read Horowitz’s book “The Professors”.

My wife's professors are all Christians. Did it ever occur to you that David Horowitz is a liar? That he's wrong? That he's peddling conspiracy theorists to sell books to the easily deluded?

When you get to college, I think you'll find out. There's a reason why people come out of college laughing at the conservative freshmen who think they're going to be able to show up their liberal profs in class.

But you should show more concern about those high profile people who are. Ever hear of Ward Churchill?

Of course, but only from conservatives. How influential do you think Ward Churchill is in the grand scheme of things? You are aware that he doesn't teach anywhere, right? Hasn't since he was fired in 2007? And that when he did teach, it was at in fucking Boulder, Colorado? Not exactly Berkley, now is it? "High profile"? Please. He's a high profile conservative boogyman, not some prominent liberal figure.

It’s possible to do the here-and-now work that she does without applying worldviews.

No, it's not. Why would she need to manage emerging pest resistance if pests never evolved resistance? How could she do AFLP if species didn't inherit genetic characteristics from each other? How could she elucidate evolutionary relationships if those relationships didn't exist?

It makes no sense. If evolution really wasn't true, her research wouldn't be possible. But she's been doing it for years. She's been doing things that are impossible if your worldview is true. That's part of how I know your worldview is wrong.

And I’m noting the actions of our socialist president, the likes of which this country has never seen before.

You're right - he's black.

It’s the leaders, the prominent people in science that Pamela Winnick described in her book “A jealous god” that shows the publicly funded political action by the scientific community to promote itself, and oppose the traditional form of government and morality in the US.

And that's just tinfoil hat nonsense. A paranoid conspiracy theory.

We're not out to get you, Marc, and we're not out to get the nation. (Hardly any scientists are political.) We're out to find out how living things work.

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"Knowledge in most scientific domains is now doubling about every five years. How fast is it growing in religion?" - Sam Harris

The scientific community simply isn’t going to allow any evidence for a young earth to see the light of day. It would be the biggest political upset in the history of the world.

Which the scientific community frequently gives out Nobel Prizes for. You know, along with a million dollars?

The reason the "evidence" for a young Earth doesn't "see the light of day" is because there is none.

The movie “Expelled” demonstrated it clearly.

"Expelled" is a tissue of lies, even its producers admitted that. And I showed you one of Behe's papers in biochemistry. How did that get out - how did the dozen or so papers he's published since "Darwin's Black Box" get published - if there's this vast scientific "conspiracy" to suppress dissent?

But I’ll bet Behe has some pretty elaborate alarm systems on his house.

You're a paranoid schizo. Of course Behe doesn't have alarms. Of course no one is going to kill Behe. We don't have to kill him - he's wrong.

If it were as sound as you say, the entire creation/evolution debate would be different.

Different how? Different from how it is now, where the battle lines are invariably drawn between people with significant science expertise on the evolutionist side, and pastors, high school kids, and retirees on the creationist side?

The entire debate is exactly what it would be like if the scientific consensus was soundly behind evolution, and creationism was the sole province of persons with nearly no scientific background whatsoever.

Evolutionists wouldn't be so afraid of Intelligent Design, for example.

Why would we be afraid of what has become a national laughingstock?

Intelligent Design is the study of empirical evidence of design in nature.

Design by who? Be specific.

Like a $13 trillion national debt, that didn’t exist before an activist court separated church and state in 1947.

Please explain the following.
1) What is the court ruling you are referring to and what do you think the ruling says?
2) How is the national debt related to separation of church and state?

Edited by Theodoric, : No reason given.

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Facts don\'t lie or have an agenda. Facts are just facts

responding to marc9000:

Don't you ever get tired of being wrong? I mean, almost nothing you say is actually factual. You have some amazing delusions about the history of science and the history of the United States, all rolled up into a conspiracy theory that scientists are coming to kill you.

Isn't it remarkable how creationists almost always behave like that?

I really am beginning to think that religion does horrible damage to the human higher mental processes.

What do you think?

I really am beginning to think that religion does horrible damage to the human higher mental processes. What do you think?

Heinlein described that years ago:

Belief gets in the way of learning.

Robert A. Heinlein, Time Enough for Love, 1973

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Religious belief does not constitute scientific evidence, nor does it convey scientific knowledge.

What do you think?

I don't know if it does any permanent damage but it's certainly a handicap to rational thought.

People need to ask themselves why they would subject things, like religion, to a lesser burden of evidence - especially if the stakes are so important.