• Starting today August 7th, 2024, in order to post in the Married Couples, Courting Couples, or Singles forums, you will not be allowed to post if you have your Marital status designated as private. Announcements will be made in the respective forums as well but please note that if yours is currently listed as Private, you will need to submit a ticket in the Support Area to have yours changed.

  • CF has always been a site that welcomes people from different backgrounds and beliefs to participate in discussion and even debate. That is the nature of its ministry. In view of recent events emotions are running very high. We need to remind people of some basic principles in debating on this site. We need to be civil when we express differences in opinion. No personal attacks. Avoid you, your statements. Don't characterize an entire political party with comparisons to Fascism or Communism or other extreme movements that committed atrocities. CF is not the place for broad brush or blanket statements about groups and political parties. Put the broad brushes and blankets away when you come to CF, better yet, put them in the incinerator. Debate had no place for them. We need to remember that people that commit acts of violence represent themselves or a small extreme faction.
  • We hope the site problems here are now solved, however, if you still have any issues, please start a ticket in Contact Us

Recent content by shernren

  1. shernren

    Evolution, Creationism, Intelligent Design-Gallup Poll

    So why are endogenous retroviruses called endogenous if (according to you) they invaded the germline? And remind me again, how on earth does the profusion of ERVs in the human genome form any argument whatsoever against evolution?
  2. shernren

    Evolution, Creationism, Intelligent Design-Gallup Poll

    As a complete aside, my cursory background research has led to what is probably the most bizarre genetic hypotheses I've ever seen in my life: the human testis may have exapted ERV sequences to stave off cell death while under stress. This cries out to be the subject of some form of lewd joke...
  3. shernren

    Evolution, Creationism, Intelligent Design-Gallup Poll

    Okay mark, good to see you start to read up on specifics. There is a good little snippet in the koala paper on what actually happens to integrated proviruses, but let's tackle this in little baby steps: What does the word "endogenous" in "endogenous retrovirus" actually mean?
  4. shernren

    Please Give Your Opinions on My Origins Viewpoints

    In fact, if you are aware of Kahnemann, you should be aware that most scientific work is acutely taxing on the cognitive Slow System, which is precisely the part of the brain that is supposed to unmask the dancing gorillas on the basketball court. It is precisely the scientists who are...
  5. shernren

    Please Give Your Opinions on My Origins Viewpoints

    Yes, I keep abreast with developments in cognitive psychology, and I am acutely aware of work by Kahnemann and Ives and such. Let me ask you a question, though: now that you know about the dancing gorilla experiment, do you keep an eye out for a dancing gorilla during every NBA game? Let's go...
  6. shernren

    the cultural mandate

    I love this OP! :D Let me give my take on questions 3 and 5. Q3 has to do with the meaning of the word "full", and you can see even in ordinary English that the word covers a range of meanings. On one hand, if you tell me that your pasture is "full of cows" and I see one miserable animal...
  7. shernren

    Evolution, Creationism, Intelligent Design-Gallup Poll

    You keep saying these things that I don't believe you yourself believe, like: What does that phrase mean, mark? What, precisely, is a devastating infection of the germ line with endogenous retroviruses? Surely you must know, as "devastating" is not an adjective to be appended lightly to a...
  8. shernren

    Genesis 1 and origins science

    To make matters more complicated there are factual-historical narrative poems, metaphorical narrative poems, fictional-historical narrative poems, metaphorical non-narrative poems, etc. So, for example, in The Charge of the Light Brigade, the Charge is not a metaphor for anything but is in...
  9. shernren

    Another bit of evidence firming up...

    The Standard Model interacts with cosmology (as we know it) in at least two ways, although it is true that quantum mechanics simply can't be applied (not without some considerable, er, creativity) at the level of general relativity. Firstly, our best large-scale model of the universe assigns a...
  10. shernren

    Please Give Your Opinions on My Origins Viewpoints

    Right-o, that sentence there was what I needed to hear. Before we can even proceed, can I assume that we also agree on what the word "isotope" means? And do not assume that the pursuit of Heaven precludes increasing our understanding of the earth. We are called to redeem earth in Heaven's...
  11. shernren

    Please Give Your Opinions on My Origins Viewpoints

    Heaven is indeed strange and distant from Earth. The question of what physical conditions and histories it takes for a wide variety of rocks, from Earth or from space, to have particular isotopic ratios - now that is not quite as strange and distant, however. What has Heaven to do with that?
  12. shernren

    Evolution, Creationism, Intelligent Design-Gallup Poll

    So go on, tell me exactly why endogenous retroviruses are extremely rare and dangerous. (Some things don't change, huh!)
  13. shernren

    Opinions on the Historical Jesus

    So, I've been thinking about this for a little while and I suppose I have some basic questions that I would need to know about before we proceed. 1. Is there any baseline agreement on the historiography of the Gospels + Acts? So most people agree on the source theory for the Gospels (Q +...
  14. shernren

    Opinions on the Historical Jesus

    I have to run for work so this is going to be a hit-and-run reply - for some reason Papias's reply didn't pop up on my usercp so I'll have to take some time with that. If that's what we're talking about then there's no evidence that the author of 2 Peter was addressing Gnosticism at all! I'm...
  15. shernren

    Survival of the Fittest: An Interesting Side Effect of Death

    Surely you are not claiming that all conceptually possible biodiversity is the result of microevolutionary accumulation (mutation, selection and speciation). For example, we already have AI of increasing flexibility, sophisticated robotic manipulators, and 3D printers. It is not inconceivable...