Consequences of Creationism

I actually don't expect most people to understand the issues involved in this particular topic.

But what got me was the way you thought AIG had a good explanation then your backtracking when, as you admit, you don't understand the issue.

That is the kind of logic that makes most people either shake their heads in disbelief or laugh out loud.

The truth is on many Creationist arguments they rely on an audience that does not know anything about the issues involved BUT likes the way they sound because it supports their preconceived notions.

I'll bet these same people would not apply logic like this in any other area of their lives.

I don't mean an insult here Driven, but doesn't this embarass you?

The truth is chi_cygnia is that creationist's are out gunned on the topics. Evolution is so easy and popular to believe right now. The reason its so popular is that any religion(or lack there of) can believe in evolution. Yes I know we are all Christians here, but thats why evolution is so popular. I would guess that scientists as a group have a greater percentage of atheists. Evolution and the big bang make it easy to leave God out of the equation. The truth is there is plenty of evidence to believe either. You choose to believe evolution and refuse to give creationism equal time much less consider the points seriously and look for supporting arguments. Unfortunately Bible prophesy does not support that one day science will figure out how little it knows. There is much i don't understand, but I still hold the Bible above science. And no I'm not embarrassed its not my first (or last)mistake(if its a mistake). I don't know of anyone that claims to be perfect(except Jesus).

DRIVEN, you're making a serious mistake, however, when deciding what evidence to accept and what not to accept.

If you go looking for evidence of creationism, you'll find it, no matter what. The only way that evidence can be accepted as evidence of creation is if both a.) it was found in a serious attempt to falsify creationism (i.e., you said "if creationism is true then x will occur and if it's false y will occur", and you get x) and b.) the evidence can only be explained by creationism and creationism alone. As well, a better theory will have more exclusions from what is allowed within the theory. Any creationist model allows for God to just zap things the way the creationists want it to be. The Theory of Evolution has several ways it could be falsified, i.e. the beneficial nature of macro-mutations or the removal of mutations all together.

As well, theories work on falsification. The worth of a theory isn't on how much supporting evidence it has, but on whether or not it has been falsified. Evolution has not been. Specific evidences have been, but not the three main brances of evolution (mutations occur, natural selection, and extrapolation if I'm not mistaken, lucaspa, please comment). Creationism, on the other hand, was falsified centuries ago by Christian Scientists looking for evidence of creation and catastrophic flood geology.

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Hmmmm....

The sudden creation of the universe portion sounds rather similar to the big bang, doesn't it?

The definition of Creation Science was written by Creation Scientists. This is how Creation Scientists defined Creation Science. That it is in Act 590 is simply coincidental.

The AiG post is basically the Oomphalos Argument. God created the light in transit. God created the universe to look old. As AiG says
"To create such a detailed series of signals in light beams reaching earth, signals which seem to have come from a series of real events but in fact did not, has no conceivable purpose. Worse, it is like saying that God created fossils in rocks to fool us, or even test our faith, and that they don’t represent anything real (a real animal or plant that lived and died in the past). This would be a strange deception."

AiG has not fully stated the theological problem. This means that God LIED. Christianity can't tolerate that. Yes, it gives you a young universe but at the cost of destroying the very thing --Christianity -- that they are trying to defend.

Now, their later idea, the new cosmology, has some obvious problems:

"If the speed of light (c) has not changed, the only thing left untouched in the equation is time itself. In fact, Einstein’s relativity theories have been telling the world for decades that time is not a constant."

This is not what Einstein's theory tells us. Notice that c is still constant. What is c? The distance that light travels in a period of time! Thus, there is a reference frame where time is constant! And out goes their cosmology!

"Dr Humphreys’ new creationist cosmology literally ‘falls out’ of the equations of GR, so long as one assumes that the universe has a boundary. In other words, that it has a center and an edge—that if you were to travel off into space, you would eventually come to a place beyond which there was no more matter. In this cosmology, the earth is near the center, as it appears to be as we look out into space."

But the earth is not at the "center". This has been shown. We are in a galaxy that is also moving "away" from the initial point of the Big Bang. To be at the "center" our galaxy would not be moving. But it is. So the data falsify the assumption on which the new cosmology is based.

I'm not interpreting data differently. I'm using the same data these guys are. I'm saying that the data are opposite of what they assume or deduce.

Data are repeated observations. What happens is that data is used to evaluate and test hypotheses/theories. The data doesn't change. What happens is that creationists ignore data that falsifies their theories.

They also rig the game. Notice this part:
"This new cosmology is proposed as a creationist alternative to the big bang theory. It passed peer review, by qualifying reviewers, for the 1994 Pittsburgh International Conference on Creationism.2 "

Notice that they are trying to gain the repute of "peer-review" as used in science. However, the "peer-reviewers" are only people who already agree with them. In science, your peer-reviewers are your sharpest critics! Your most bitter enemies in the field. You have to convince people who don't like your idea to start with. Here you only have to convince people who are desperately trying to agree with you!

"If the universe is not much bigger than we can observe, and if it was only 50 times smaller in the past than it is now, then scientific deduction based on GR means it has to have expanded out of a previous state in which it was surrounded by an event horizon (a condition known technically as a ‘white hole’—a black hole running in reverse, something permitted by the equations of GR).
As matter passed out of this event horizon,"

We have to look at this one, too. Remember, a black hole is a gravitational field so dense that even light can't escape! Light can't move fast enough. GR says matter can never be accelerated to the speed of light. So just how can matter escape a black hole? They fibbed about the white hole.

"The negative square root solution inside the horizon represents a white hole. A white hole is a black hole running backwards in time. Just as black holes swallow things irretrievably, so also do white holes spit them out. White holes cannot exist, since they violate the second law of thermodynamics."
http://casa.colorado.edu/~ajsh/schww.html

Oops. Violates SLOT. So where was the peer-review that they didn't catch this whopper! The very thing that creationists are basing their theory on can't exist! Remember, in other contexts creationists try to falsify evolution because it supposedly violates SLOT. So they can't very well use an entity that violates SLOT, can they?

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"If sound science appears to contradict the Bible, we may be sure that it is our interpretation of the Bible that is at fault." Christian Observer, 1832, pg. 437

"Christians should look on evolution simply as the method by which God works." Rev. James McCosh, theologian and President of Princeton, 1890

I disagree. Evolution is "popular" because 1) all alternatives are falsified and 2) everyone can see the data for it.

Evolution is religiously neutral. So is all of science. Science is agnostic. It simply can't directly test for the existence of a deity. It equally can't falsiy one.

Only if you have already decided to leave God out. IOW, if you already have an atheistic faith, then evolution is consistent with that. But evolution and the Big Bang won't really support atheism as valid.

Sorry, Driven, but this isn't how you evaluate things. Karl Popper, among others, noted that for any idea, if you look for supporting evidence, you will always find them. Therefore, by itself, supporting evidence does not count. You don't decide ideas by stacking up supporting evidence and seeing which stack is higher. You'd never get anywhere.

Instead, what you do is try to falsify the idea or theory. And I mean you really do try. Hard. Supporting evidence only counts if you get it as a result of seriously trying to falsify a theory and you failed.

So, let's look at my OP and the AiG response in this light. I posted that the speed of light and the presence of distant stars falsifies a young earth. It does. What AiG is doing in their websites is offering alternative hypotheses to explain the data but keep a young earth. IOW, the data hasn't changed. What is offered is different explanations for that data. AiG shows that two of those alternative hypotheses -- creation of light in transit and changing c -- are falsified in turn by 1) theological condiderations and 2) other data, respectively. So that still leaves distant stars as falsifying a young earth. So AiG is now offering a new hypotheses to give the distant stars in time but preserve a young universe. And that is to say time has slowed. However, as I pointed out in my reply, this hypothesis too is falsified by other data.

So, a young earth remains falsified because the alternative hypotheses proposed to avoid the original falsification are falsified in turn.

The problem is that modern day creationists don't seriously try to falsify their theory. 18th and 19th century creationists were different. They were good scientists and really tested creationism. And they succeeded in falsifying it. Creationism has been a falsified theory since 1831. It's just that modern creationists won't admit that the theory is falsified.

Let's be clear. You are holding your fallible, human interpretation of the Bible above science. And it may be a spiritually fatal mistake. I think it is. Because I think what you are doing is making your interpretation of the Bible into a god to worship. Nothing can challenge this false idol. What is science? It is the study of the physical universe. Well, who created the physical universe? GOD. So what science does is read God's second book. Creation. By ignoring science you are ignoring God.

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"If sound science appears to contradict the Bible, we may be sure that it is our interpretation of the Bible that is at fault." Christian Observer, 1832, pg. 437

"Christians should look on evolution simply as the method by which God works." Rev. James McCosh, theologian and President of Princeton, 1890

If you look, the location of Eden, which is pre-Flood, is identified by post-Flood rivers. Now, for Genesis to be literally true, it means the geography could not have changed due to the Flood. If Moses used "familiar names", you are now saying Moses made it up and God didn't tell him the real names of the rivers. And there goes your literal interpretation of Genesis 1-11 as literal, actual history and completely accurate.

This is a lose-lose situation for creationism. Creationism requires a violent Flood in order to give the geological and fossil record. Yet they insist that Genesis 1-11 is literally true. But those requirements conflict and you can't have both.

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"If sound science appears to contradict the Bible, we may be sure that it is our interpretation of the Bible that is at fault." Christian Observer, 1832, pg. 437

"Christians should look on evolution simply as the method by which God works." Rev. James McCosh, theologian and President of Princeton, 1890

Yes, which is why Hugh Ross claims that only atheists can doubt the Big Bang! www.reasons.org It's also why one atheist has written a book entitled The Big Bang Never Happened and accuses Big Bang of being a theist conspiracy!

The problem is that Genesis 1 also says that stars, earth, and the moon were also formed from nothing. Modern cosmology has those formed by physical processes and not zapped into existence by God. So you get resistance to Big Bang.

However, notice that "life" is also included in that phrase. And I have posted many, many, many times ( ) the data on life arising from non-life by chemistry.

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"If sound science appears to contradict the Bible, we may be sure that it is our interpretation of the Bible that is at fault." Christian Observer, 1832, pg. 437

"Christians should look on evolution simply as the method by which God works." Rev. James McCosh, theologian and President of Princeton, 1890

The Bible's account of creation only uses bara' three times: The first time is when God created the universe in Genesis 1:1, and the other two times refer to the creation of human beings or living souls. The verbs used for the forming of the sun, moon and stars are wayyaas (He made), yehi (let them be), and wayyitten (He placed). In other words, Genesis 1 does not tell us that they were created out of nothing, but were rather formed or made from existing material that was presumably formed from matter traced back to the first verse when God created the universe [or "the heavens and the earth"--which is the Hebrew phrase that corresponds to the English word "universe"].

It might also be noted that bara'--create out of nothing or create totally new--can only apply to God's divine creative activity (never of human activity) when God is creating something from nothing or is creating something that is totally new and which has never been before. As The Complete Biblical Library's commentary says, "Thus the use of bara' draws attention to the fact that the creation in the beginning was totally new. There never had been a creation or a created universe before."

I've heard this before. Notice I was stating the creationist position. Now you are arguing against it using a Hebrew exegesis. As much fun as dissecting this would be, I think it pointless. IMO, Genesis 1 was not meant to be a history of creation. It is not meant to be in any way accurate to modern science. Rather, it is a refutation of the Babylonian pantheon. What is important is that all of the entities mentioned are Babylonian gods and Genesis 1 is destroying them as gods by showing that they are created by Yahweh. I suspect that the different words are used because they fit the meter and rhyme of the poem better. Only that.

Really? Then we can view Joyce's work of having natural selection create a DNA enzyme as "bara"? A DNA enzyme has never been before. Cool.

I would debate that commentary because God creates light, but the waters seem to have always been there. What is the Hebrew verb used for the creation of light?

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"If sound science appears to contradict the Bible, we may be sure that it is our interpretation of the Bible that is at fault." Christian Observer, 1832, pg. 437

"Christians should look on evolution simply as the method by which God works." Rev. James McCosh, theologian and President of Princeton, 1890