Summations Only

Watched the video, boy is it a misbegotten piece of nonsense. You guys actually think it reveals anything of value?First, how can you justify the basic craziness of getting a bunch of clearly average believers together with professional scientists and think anything about the creation-evolution debate could be revealed this way? The "creationists" on the bus trip hardly know anything about creationism or the Bible either for all I can tell, or science of any sort. They are clearly inexperienced in this sort of debate, but you pit them against working scientists and consider that a fair contest? Well, it's what happens here too, though in that case I assume the participants were chosen. Couldn't they have done better? If not, why have such a challenge at all, it's meaningless. However, it wasn't really meant to be a challenge, something the creationists might have answers to. Clearly the whole point was to break through their belief with what they consider to be the enlightening truths of science. Which is the point of EvC too.It's rather telling it seems to me that the most popular "creationist" to some on this thread was JoJo who is no Bible believer, probably doesn't know much Bible at all, supports gay rights as if the Bible has nothing to say about that, obviously has a merely sentimental "belief" which can hardly be called faith. But it figures she'd be popular here. True believers are the ones you guys can't make sense of.And of course the least popular were the two strongest believers. I'll grant that Bronwyn doesn't seem to know much either, unfortunately, she just has a firm grip on what seems like a blind faith and how much Bible knowledge is behind that is impossible to tell though I'd have to guess not much. But her faith seems genuine. She knows that anything that contradicts the Bible is false. Yes, we must know that, but of course that's the most scorned position here. We know it's God's word, it can't be contradicted.Sam was harder to read or for some reason I didn't pay a lot of attention to him, but he seemed to end up in a position similar to Bronwyn's.Phil was of course the most disliked because he was combative, at least after a while. He probably has the most Bible knowledge although even that is hard to assess from the video. He was right to say that it's not fair to expect him or the others to be able to answer a professional geologist. These guys were TOTALLY unprepared. The whole trip was badly misconceived.Nobody cracked a Bible that I noticed. Did I miss it?Then there were the sad excuses for "science" that were used to "challenge" this poor sad lot of "creationists. I could hardly believe the silliness of the "experiment" the geologist did to "prove" that a Flood couldn't have cut the Grand Canyon. A bucket of water poured on a slight slope. Huh? I did a whole long post on this at my blog, but I don't feel like repeating it here yet.The chimp was another sad excuse. What on earth does it prove to ask people how they "feel" about being "related" to this creature? I never felt anything when I was an atheist evolutionist, I just accepted it. Nobody becomes a Christian because they don't like the idea of being related to chimps. Where's the science here?What was that fountain in the desert all slimed with bacteria supposed to prove anyway?Oh and Jerry Coyne "challenged" them with the ridiculous idea of a whale being on the ark. Well, don't you see, it wouldn't fit, you couldn't HAVE a whale on the ark. Well, no you couldn't and they didn't. Sea creatures were not on the ark, why would they be? They had a planet covered with water to live in. Good grief.Remember, some of you guys said this video was, I think, "enlightening?" You need to get out more.What else. Oh yes, the skulls that "prove" that human beings evolved from something less human. Why? Because they were said to have been found in the expected order from bottom to top of a deep stack of strata in Ethiopia. That's the whole logic of evolution right there, the Evidence. Is it proof? Of course not. It's only theory, or conjecture, as the Muslim creationist intelligently said. To the scientist it's as good as fact. Well, what can you say, it's not. It's conjecture, it's theory, it's interpretation. They ASSUME the stack represents millions of years of time from ancient to modern and then they interpret its contents as having evolved from one period to another. This is bizarre from many points of view. Oh well. Anyway, if you don't assume time but rather a single deposition of all the layers at once, as I and some Floodists do, you come up with a whole other interpretation of the evidence.And, what else. Oh yes, the dinosaurs. I never understood why it seems so improbable to some that humans could have occupied the same planet with these beasts. As one of the creationists said, we occupy the planet with other predators, why not these? But actually it's possible, not really clear from the Bible but possible, that just as people ate no meat until after the Flood, animals may not have eaten meat either. They were originally created to eat plants, all of them. Whether or not that changed at the Fall is not revealed, but certainly it would have changed after the Flood when human beings became meat-eaters too. {ABE: Reading in Genesis came on the verse about God's telling Noah to stock "food" on the ark. I have to think that can only refer to plant food, He wouldn't have been requiring animal food when the whole point is to save the animals. Should have been obvious before. So now I'm convinced all the animals lived on plants before the Flood and some became meat-eaters afterward just as people did. Probably because the plant life after the Flood was so devastated and not really enough, in quantity or quality, to sustain all the animals and humans as well. So now I'd argue that there was no danger to humans from the dinosaurs before the Flood anyway, and afterward they don't seem to have survived very well.}In any case, the entire Fossil Record a few miles deep is a record of what died in the Flood. Of course humans and dinosaurs lived together.I think that's all the "science" that was attempted.I was also interested in how Phil "explained" why he thinks unbelievers refuse to believe -- They refuse to accept the idea of being judged for their sins. That never made sense to me. I had no idea of sin or judgment until well after I believed. But maybe it's true for some, who knows.But there are equally silly ideas on the other side, such as Jerry Coyne's explanation for how hard it is for them to get through to creationists - we get too much comfort from our "delusion" and all that. Sigh. Nope, we just believe God. We really BELIEVE Him.Besides, when you confront us with whales on the ark all we can do is roll our eyes. Edited by Faith, : Add ABE about animals becoming meat eaters after the Flood

The mind-set is faith in the true God. If it's true faith it isn't going to yield no matter what you think ought to make it yield, because we KNOW God, we've EXPERIENCED His truth and His faithfulness through His word.You think that's a sort of craziness partly because you actually think there is evidence for the "science." All I've ever seen, after working through it many times over, is illusion, not evidence, illusion aggressively enforced as if it really were evidence.This video, however, is so laughable science-wise even all of you should be groaning at it. There's PLENTY to dispute in this film, it's STUPID "science" and straw man tactics. The geologist's notion thatwater on the scale of a worldwide Flood could be modeled by the pouring of a bucket on the ground is, well, it's demented. I know more physics than that. A whale on the ark is ignorant of the Bible, but lacking in just plain common sense.Of course if all you want is to dazzle barely educated creationists with the aura of hotshot scientists and don't really care about the science part, you ought to be ashamed of yourselves.Evolution is not science, it's all smoke and mirrors. Science is something else. Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Ananias and Sapphira were not punished for "selfishness and greed"as you claimed.They were punished for lying to the Holy Spirit, which is said quite plainly in the passage you quoted: Jesus did not advocate communism. There is one description of the church VOLUNTARILY sharing among themselves, it is not PRESCRIBED, it is not advocated or taught, and obviously they did not include people outside the church.

Yes, it's a "belief lockdown," it's RIGHTLY a belief lockdown. She has EVIDENCE of God and His word, she rightly KNOWS there is no "evidence" against His word, even if she can't prove it. She has enough faith to avoid being sucked into the Evo Illusion.

Bible believers do not lack discrimination or the ability to judge by evidence or anything having to do with true science,. We hold our faith BY evidence as a matter of fact, it's been proved to us over and over again in our experience.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

This is pernicious nonsense, Tangle. Every time somebody says this it's painfully clear how little any of you understand.No it is NOT about true science it is ONLY about the fake "science" that is used to justify evolution. You guys are unable to sort it out, you take it all as one indigestible lump, but MOST true science has nothing whatever to do with evolution. Zip, nada.I need to get back to the DNA thread. It's blissfully free of evolutionist fantasy. Not that somebody couldn't throw some in and think they're just doing science, but it would all be interpretive fantasy without their recognizing it.Dr. Adequate's geology course is a joy until he gets into the evolutionist fairy tale WAY into the course, which he didn't have to do, he could have kept it as pure science as all the rest of it was/is.Science is good stuff. Evolution is a hideous nightmare that got imposed on science.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

It doesn't invalidate the field of geology at all, the age of the earth is entirely an interpretive scheme. The only actual science it contradicts is radiometric dating, which someday will be proved to be false but meanwhile that's the only science that takes a hit. Everything else is interpretation or theory. Everything in geology is quite easily accommodated in 6000 years. You only THINK the billions of years has been scientifically established. It's all smoke and mirrors.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Yes, Percy, They would have GIVEN away things to the poor, but the unbelievers did not share in their temporary voluntary association of believers anly. There is no report that other churches ever did the same, though perhaps a few did, because again it was voluntary. It was not a recipe for state-run communism where everyone is forced to give and share.And again, Ananias and Sapphira were not punished for selfishness but for lying to the Holy Spiri. They had control over their possessions as Peter said and could have given and kept back any portion they wanted, but they lied to make it look as if they'd given all when they'd held back some.

Coyote, I'm using "theory" as an explanation that has never been proved or disproved, which is the case with evolutionary theory. You claim there is evidence for it, I claim the evidence supports creationism as well or better than evolution.

Yes, Coragyps, geologists gave up on a young earth long before radiometric dating had come along, but they'd been deceived by Hutton's ridiculous subjective interpretation of Siccar Point and similar silly cogitations. Have you seen pictures of Siccar Point? Does it look like there's any difference between the degree of erosion/weathering of the upper strata versus the lower? But millions of years are claimed to have passed between the formation of the two. You guys are easily deluded. And I've given a perfectly reasonable explanation many times for how unconformities were created AFTER all the strata were laid down, which they were in the Flood.Edited by Faith, : typos

Sorry, Tangle, there's really nothing in Geology as such that contradicts a young earth. That's all imposed on it when you get to the Geological Column, which is ridiculous. I don't know how you guys continue to look at such neat horizontal slabs of rock as in the Grand Canyon and think they could have been deposited over millions of years and remain so untouched by any kind of disturbance. The only disturbance that occurred was the cutting of the Canyon itself which obviously occurred after all the strata were in place. But apparently you guys are under a spell and can't see the reality for what it is.

The bottleneck you have in mind, Panda, occurred about 4300 years ago at the Flood, not 6000 which was the Creation. And my answer to that challenge is that how a recent bottleneck shows up genetically today, with its drastic reduction to homozygosity for all the traits that define the breed, otherwise known as "fixed loci," isn't how it would look after the Flood bottleneck when there had to have been far greater genetic diversity, meaning far more heterozygosity, also a great many more functioning genes which have since become dead or junk DNA. The junk DNA is one piece of evidence for that great bottleneck, and I would assume that a great reduction in heterozygosity was also an effect although we wouldn't be able to prove that. If there was 98% heterozygosity before the Flood and only 20% afterward (I believe it's something loike 6% now if I recall correctly), that is a huge difference in genetic diversity as a result of the bottleneck that we wouldn't be able to see today because we are used to far less heterozygosity and regard it as normal. Now when there is a bottleneck it can so severely reduce the reduced heterozygosity that it threatens the wellbeing of the creature. That would not have been the case when there was so much greater genetic variability than there is today.

Hello Devils Advocate, how do I explain the extinction of dinosaurs? Well, the great majority of them obviously died in the Flood, as can be seen in the many dinosaur beds where they're all jumbled together. Those that were saved on the ark must not have found a very congenial environment in the post-Flood earth and didn't survive long. Nevertheless there are stories of "dragons" that aren't too too long ago, that could be reports of the few survivors.And since I believe the strata were all laid down in the Flood I believe all the creatures whose fossils are preserved in those strata lived together before the Flood and drowned in that event, which of course includes humans and dinosaurs and the whole rest of the fossil record. You impute a time period to the various strata so you think that the different creatures that are found in different strata lived in different eras from each other. Seems to me that if that were the case you should find practically the whole fossil record in various stages of evolution in each layer, since it's absurd to think there was a time CHARACTERIZED by the creatures that are found in particular layers, like a Dinosaur period. Truly absurd. There's a whole layer that spans thousands of miles in the Grand Canyon region which is packed with nautilus sea creatures and just about nothing else. Was that the Nautiloid era? I guess you guys are deluded enough to think so.

I know how you guys weasel around about the word theory and I don't care. It doesn't matter if it's the highest you've got, it's still wrong, it still has no evidence that establishes it and that's the real reason it has to be called theory. it's all fantasy, I gave my definition and I'm off this thread.

OK my nerves are getting frayed so I'm taking another break. I'll try to deal with the last post more thoughtfully later. Sorry.