Acceptance, Evolutionists vs. Creationists

I don't think they can be called Lazy Thinkers. It ain't easy coming up with some of the theories I've seen them place on the table. You have to admire their courage if not their honesty.Which would you rather tackle, showing the the theory of Gravity actually works or convincing everyone that things really fall up? And that is the magnitude of the task that Creationists set out for themselves every day. They daily try to come up with ways to prove that the evidence that has been accumulated over the last several hundred years is totally wrong.Lazy Thinkers? Hardly. They seem to be some of the most inventive, imaginative minds out there.

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Aslan is not a Tame Lion

That is crap and you know it.You have been totally unable to show any scientific basis or method to Creationism.

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Aslan is not a Tame Lion

I happen to be one of the products from a Christian education. What little education I do have was at an all boys church sponsored school.One of the most unique things about that experience was that everything revolved around three RULES. There was no lying, no cheating, no stealing and we would not tolerate anyone who broke those rules. That concept included thought as well as behavior.At that time, St Paul's was a small, somewhat isolated campus where many of the faculty lived on site. Evenings were often spent sitting on the floor before a fire, drinking hot chocolate (later an occasional scotch, bourbon or beer but you never heard that) and violently arguing most every subject. That most definitely included the very existence of GOD and whether or not that had any relationship with everyday life.Far from teaching an acceptance of authority, it taught us to trust our own judgment and to question authority.It is not Christianity that teaches abject acceptance of authority, but rather some of the more perverted communities, those holding beliefs that cannot stand up to challenge. My personal experience of Christianity would say that any belief that cannot stand up to being challenged and that must be accepted on authority is certainly insufficient to be considered anything that a faith might be built upon.

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Aslan is not a Tame Lion

Nonsense. That is so silly that it is laughable.Evolution deals with what happened. That's it. End of story.It has nothing to do with behaviour, morals or any other such things. The fact that so many Christians also understand that Evolution happened and that Creationism is simply howling at the moon, shows your conjecture is not true.You continue making the same allegations, allegations with no basis and unproven. You keep saying that Creationism is Science even though it has none of the chracteristics of a science. You sound like the little children watching Peter Pan when Tinkerbelle is dying, their eyes shut tight, clapping their little hands and repeating, "I believe in fairies. I believe in Fairies".And you keep going back over the same old things. The great wetting that never happened, the boat that didn't float and asserting, despite the fact that you have no evidence, that they are fact.What you have done, and what you do continuously, is prove the premise of this thread. You are working from Authority, you are accepting absurdities simply because you are told they are true. Time after time when asked for evidence you return to the Bible. To Authority.

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Aslan is not a Tame Lion

What do you understand about how fossils are formed?

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Aslan is not a Tame Lion

How often do you think that happens?

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Aslan is not a Tame Lion

Hangdawg13Sure we even had a thread on that not too long ago.Let me give you an idea of a couple reasons why the hydroplate theory is all wet.All over the world we have found tracks of dinosaurs, other animals, imprints of plants that just left the most delicate tracing of their passing. Try this with your mud bath. Press something into the surface of the mud to make an imprint. Then do your slosh about. Then look at the imprint.There are many other very good technical reasons that the hydroplate theory won't work. But I'll leave that for you to explore. You're quick and you actually seem to check things and sources out. You'll do the same with hydroplate.But remember. Evolution is not anti Christian. God left us two great records. The Bible is there to deal with things like WHY, with the moral guidelines, a map that shows us how to live with ourselves, with others and with GOD.He left us a second record. It is the universe that surrounds us. While the Bible has been written, edited, vetted and translated by men, the universe around us is exactly as written by the hand of God. And it tells a wonderful, beautiful and intriguing story. It shows us life growing from simple soft sea creatures into great living forms that play their part of stage, then fade away.Read both records. I promise you that you cannot turn a page without increasing your wonder and appreciation.

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Aslan is not a Tame Lion

Actually, you might want to check on the history of the Nautalis. It will give you a good first look at the sea creatures and the part they have played over the eons.

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Aslan is not a Tame Lion

Well, let's deal with things one at a time. You can determine how old the universe is for yourself. Go visit an observatory, find an astronomy club. Somebody with even a small telescope can show you stars and galaxies that are far further away than 6000 light years. So the age of the universe isn't really an issue. It's billions and billions of years old. It takes that long for the light from distant galaxies to get to us.Next, the fossilized foot prints go back hundred of millions of years. So we can at least say that the history of live on Earth goes back that far.But the footprints are just one thing. There are imprints of where burrowing things like worms crawled along the sea beds that go back even further.

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Aslan is not a Tame Lion

That is always a great idea. But some of the things can be checked. For example, if we look at distant spiral galaxies, we find that the part turning towards us has a slight blue shift while the half spining away from us has a slight red shift. This shows us that things are behaving the same today as they did long, long ago. How can we tell? Well when we look at those far away galaxies we are actually looking at what happened long long ago. Yet we see the same things that we see with close objects that are happening right now.Also, you really need to do some more research on Einstein. The constant that he hated, and really wished he hadn't put in, actually seems to be true and needed. He turned out to be right afterall. Remember, he was really pushing the state of art, was always questioning his conclusions and we have learned a lot since then.Now let's just touch on the Pioneer Satelite for a second. First, it is creeping along. We aren't talking about very fast speeds at all. If it slows down, speeds up (and I don't know of any such thing happening even though I follow all of those things pretty closely) that still has absolutely nothing to do with relativity, with the speed of light or with any of the things we're talking about.

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Aslan is not a Tame Lion

No, you were adding that when I replied so I hadn't seen it.Actually, Mt. St. Helens is a very good example of one of the ways things are dated. I'm really glad that you brought it up.Long before we knew about radiometric dating, even before we knew about radioactivity, lots of dating was done based on special events. Let's for the sake of argument, imagine the footprints you describe. Someone is walking along a trail when the eruption happens and their footprints get buried in the ash. Since I'm a nice guy, I'll assume that the person gets away and is not also buried. All we have left is the footprints. Time passes, there are other eruptions, the land where the footprints are buried in turn gets buried, compressed, changed from ash to stone, pushed up into mountains and gradually worn down and eroded away until one day, millions of years from know, someone finds them.Well that future observer would be able to say, "Here is a set of human footprints. And they are in the layer from the Mt. St Helen's eruption from way back around the year 2000 (they might even still have the exact date and know it was in 1980)." So they would be able to see the layer, know that it is a descrete event and that it was related to just that one time.They can say a couple other things. And these are very important points.They can say that the tracks were laid down BEFORE the ash covered them. So the tracks have to be older than the ash.They can also say that the tracks were laid down AFTER the ground they are on. So the tracks are newer than the ground.Are you with me so far on this?Now let's look at your Pioneer issue.You laid out two possible reasons related to Pioneer.One, Pioneer is slowing down.Two, the radio signal (or light) is slowing down.Well, the second is pretty easy to check.Ask yourself, if light or radio signals were slowing down, what would we see? First, let's deal with light. If light were slowing down, when we looked out to find the planets, they would not be where we expected. We see the planets because light travels from the Sun all the way out to tiny Pluto, is reflected off Pluto's surface and bounced all the way back to the observer on Earth. Even when we are dealing with small distances like here to Pluto, that still takes time. Why it takes about eight minutes for the light from the Sun to get just to Earth. If it were slowing down, that trip would take even longer and the light we get back from Pluto would show that it was not where it should be. We would see this change everywhere, with all the planets, all the satelites, all the stars. But we don't. So it's not light that changed.The same thing is true when it comes to radio. If the speed of radio transmissions were slowing down, then we would also see that in every radio transmission. And we don't. Television still works. When the show is supposed to start at nine, it starts at nine. When I turn on the radio, I still get news at eleven (ten central).So option two is simply not happening. That means that Pioneer is slowing down. Can't say why, but I can say it is not the answer behind door number two.Did that answer your questions on those two?

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Aslan is not a Tame Lion

Remember in our last conversation we were talking about those footprints from the Hicker at Mt St Helens? Those footprints had to be older than the ground they were on but younger than the ash that covered them.Before we go to the next step, let's talk about this statement you made... There are a couple possible misconceptions in there that I'd like to discuss with you.First, Evolution is not always moving from less complex to more complex, or worse to better. It has nothing to do with that. It simply records what changes happened. It just shows which critters and plants lived, and which critters and plants died. Sometimes we see lots of change, sometimes little change and some things have stayed pretty much the same throughout all the ages. Check into the history of the Nautalus. At one time they were the bad guys on the block, the dominate lifeform. Today, except for being somewhat smaller than they were in the past, and there being fewer different species, they are pretty much the same.Second, over the billions of years that the Earth's been around, land moves. What was once sea floor gets pushed up into mountains, worn down into sand, bent, folded, stapled and mutilated. It get shoved over other sections, shoved under other sections and even on occasion turned upside down. But through it all, unless the rock is melted down into magma, you can usually still see the layers when they are exposed.The best tool that the Paleo folk have at their disposal, and also their biggest threat, is erosion. Frankly, there is no way to know where something died, was buried and became a fossil. The odds of grabbing a backhoe and just digging and finding a fossil are pretty slim. Instead, they look for areas where erosion has worn things down to where a particular layer, a particular time slice might be exposed.There ARE a few other places to look. For example, we know from experience that you often find fossils in Limestone and slate beds. So if you find such a deposite, there is a good chance that you'll find fossils there as will. Personally, I've split many a piece of slate and even found a few impressions over the years. It's always exciting when you do find something but you split a lot more than you find.So what does all that searching show us?Well, what we find is that certin things only are found in certain layers. You never find primates and dinosuars in the same layer. Never. You never find primates in a layer that is older than the dinosaurs. Never You don't find grasses, or grass pollen in old layers. Grasses only show up in newer layers. Never.Are we still together? Did that help?

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Aslan is not a Tame Lion

B2P says While that is true for some of the major Muslim sects, it's not true for all of them and certainly not true for the other Judaic religions. Afterall, just about every single Christian and Jewish celebration and event is one of the neat pagan rituals that they liked and so incorporated.Christianity is like the English of the religious world. Just as the English language readily adopts any neat word that comes along, regardless of the language of origin, so the Jews and Christians grabed every neat celebration that looked like fun. From Mardes Gras to Easter, Thanksgiving to Christmas, if there was a party, we wanted in.

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Aslan is not a Tame Lion

There is always room in the Christian calendar for one more party.

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Aslan is not a Tame Lion

Whiskeypalian!And have you ever noticed how many good old hymns were actually set to beerhall songs? Particularly those great Easter hymns and standbys like Rock of Ages and Eternal Father Strong to Save were just meant to be sung with a big beer mug held aloft.

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Aslan is not a Tame Lion