The smoldering of EVC

Faith drew responses like this after determinedly demonstrating her "incredible ignorance" at great length and over many posts, and by maintaining it at considerable effort. She even flat out stated that she didn't know much about geology and wasn't interested in knowing much. And it isn't like Faith was innocent. This is from Message 347 where she said views like ours come from being high on drugs: If you think Faith wasn't incredibly ignorant but was correct and supported by evidence, the thread is still open, knock yourself out: Why the Flood Never Happened--Percy

You touch on a good point. CompuServe is dead, MySpace is dead, why should EvC Forum live forever if former giants like these didn't?As I've described before when declining activity at EvC is discussed, we're also affected by the twin migrations to mobile platforms and social media. Discussion boards are more difficult to use on mobile platforms, and those looking around for something interesting are going to emphasize social media sites like Facebook and Twitter where we have no presence.We're also affected by the cooling of the public creation/evolution debate. Those who still like to browse in brick-and-mortar bookstores like I do will have noticed the significant decline in books on the creation/evolution debate. ICR has moved from California to Texas and no longer offers college degrees. The Discovery Institute is much less in the news. Legislative efforts promoting creationism in education have diminished in frequency and intensity. Creationist efforts haven't gone away, but they're now less overt and consequently draw far less public attention.--Percy

.Edited by Percy, : Deleted experiment.

Hi Marc,I think you're going to find that people on both sides of the debate are just people. Neither side has any monopoly on good or bad traits.Where those on the science side differ from those on the creation side is in how much they value evidence from the natural world. Those on the science side believe that evidence tells us the laws and history of the universe. Those on the creation side believe that the testimony of the evidence can be trumped by Bible stories.--Percy

Hi Marc,Everyone's been very patient with Faith and put a lot of time and effort into their messages. Why don't you take a look at some of her recent posts over at Why the Flood Never Happened, Message 910 for example. Or check out her response to the suggestion that she solicit assistance from you and Bolder-dash in Message 897 - she apparently thinks you guys are laughable.I think you're overgeneralizing in your comments about "atheists/naturalists". No group that broad has the degree of homogeneity you suggest.I understand how you and Bolder-dash feel, but just repeating it again and again isn't a discussion. I outlined the reasons behind diminished participation at EvC Forum, and they are problems shared by bulletin boards all across the Internet.--Percy

Hi Marc,The creation/evolution debate has been going on ever since Darwin. Dwise1 and I have been part of the debate for at least 30 years.If you're speaking generally about those on the science side and not about specific people, what you're experiencing as anger is probably just frustration at those who work so determinedly at giving Bible stories a false mantle of science.--Percy

This isn't the place for a debate on science and evidence, so I'll just say that evidence doesn't come from science. It comes from the natural world. Scientific evidence is just evidence that's been gathered in a scientific manner from the natural world. If you have evidence that doesn't come from the natural world then it must be, by definition, supernatural.You criticize science as a way of understanding the past later in your message. If the nature of evidence is something you really want to discuss you should probably propose a new thread. No, of course not, why would you PM her with an offer of help? Faith complains how unfair it is that she's outnumbered in her thread, you make the same complaint in this one, but she won't request help and you won't offer it. I think I've found the true source of the problem. The essence of Christianity is believing the best about everybody. Stigmatizing and denigrating groups is the first step down an ugly path.The reason for unanimity among those on the science side is not a result of any effort to "harmonize with each other." It comes from basing one's views upon evidence.Using various interpretations of stories from the Bible as a foundation results in widely varying views. That's why there are so many religions and religious denominations. It may also be why you're not helping Faith, because you don't share her views.--Percy

Hi Faith,There's no such thing as "Old Earth Geology," there's just geology, and whether you admit or not it is eminently clear from your contributions that you know very little. You don't understand or accept some of the most basic principles of geology, like the law of superposition, or some of the most basic principles of physics, such as that heavier sediment must fall out of suspension first, or some of the most basic principles of biology, such as that the production of vast amounts of limestone requires thousands and thousands of years.Now that you and Marc are both here, why don't you invite him to join you over in the Why the Flood Never Happened thread?--Percy

If you can't convince other creationists, if even those most sympathetic to your point of view and most interested in your success are dubious, how can you blame scientists for their skepticism? Why isn't some of your vituperation directed at people like Marc? Ah, the big conspiracy. Well, good luck with that.--Percy

Another way this can be approached is to note that all witnessed events take place in the past (because all information travels at a finite speed), and no events are witnessed first hand (because they require interpretation of indirect sensory information arriving at our senses).Given this premise, the creationist position becomes one of describing how far in the past an event must be and how indirect its observation before analysis becomes impossible, and why.I don't know why creationists keep repeating this silly idea about unobserved past events being indecipherable or uninterpretable. They must be terribly outraged every time someone's convicted by forensic evidence.--Percy

I wasn't trying to go quantum on you. It was a simpler point about all events taking place in the past. If you see a burglar pry open a window and enter your house from 20 feet away, you're actually witnessing an event that took place 20 nanoseconds ago. And you didn't actually witness the event. What you did was interpret reflected light from the event.This means that the question for creationists becomes, "How recently must something have occurred, and how directly must we have observed it, in order for us to decipher what happened, and why?"So say you have a super telescope and observe a burglar breaking into a house on a planet 10,000 light years away. Is the fact that the event took place 10,000 years ago instead of 20 nanoseconds ago mean that this observational evidence is invalid? I assume the creationist answer must be no, that they'd concede that this observational evidence is valid and that therefore it isn't the mere passage of time that makes evidence invalid.So it must be the degree of indirectness of the observation combined with the passage of time that creationists think creates a problem. Say you come home after work one day and find your house has been broken into. Are the fingerprints the burglar left behind earlier in the day valid evidence? Creationists would undoubtedly say yes, it's valid evidence. What if you came home after a week's vacation? Is the fingerprint evidence still valid? How about after a year's absence? A century's? What if archaeologists dig up your house millennia hence? Are the fingerprints still valid evidence that could be matched up with ancient databases that might still exist? What is the creationist answer? If there is some amount of time that renders the fingerprint evidence invalid, what is that time and why? If it's argued that fingerprints degrade then change it to an inscribed ring ("To Louie with love from Loretta") that he accidentally dropped at the scene.But if creationists accept that fingerprint or other tangible evidence left at the scene is still valid after millennia, why not geological evidence buried in the ground? I'd like to see answers to these questions. So far all they've given us is bald declarations that ancient events can't be deciphered.--Percy

In Faith's defense, and before you become the target of her invective, I think what she was calling a "lie from the pit of Hell" was that evidence is why we agree. She thinks there's some kind of secret conspiracy and that evidence has nothing to do with it. Lacking the ability to connect dots of evidence into reconstructions of what actually happened and having to just make it up, she assumes that everyone just makes it up.--Percy

I did create what now appears to be a Facebook Ads account (that wasn't what they were calling it at the time - I signed up under some sort of organization category), but I lacked the time to do anything with it. If someone wants to volunteer to run our Facebook page they should send me a PM.Before anyone rushes to volunteer, in my view no Facebook page at all is better than a half-baked or slapdash one. While I couldn't do much if any of the work I'd need to be involved in decisions about what it looks like and what is done with it, and I'd have to have ultimate say.So, that being said, I think having a Facebook page would be a great idea, and I'm usually not that impossible to deal with. --Percy

You email Snowden and get a copy. --Percy

I see an EvC Facebook page more as just a way to let people who use Facebook know that we exist. Not being a Facebook user mysel, these ideas might be impractical or inappropriate, but maybe a Facebook page could also list the most active current threads, provide a place for people to upload images, provide an alternate login point (I'd have to add a hook on the EvC side), or could echo any announcements.I also see that there's a "Developers" link at Facebook (bottom left of some pages), so there may be some interesting possibilities I'm not aware of.--Percy