Creationism

Caliban said:

The following are findings from scientific and Governmental sources that conclude Creationism is unscientific

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wow - evolutionists conclude that the Bible historic account for creation by God happening in the past 10,000 years is not as reliable as "guessing" that bacteria will one day turn into a horse.

Ok... I think we can all see how that would be

Caliban said:

I'm not sure what you think the Verge story says, but it does not support a young earth, much less Creationism in general. It simply says they found red blood cells. It also says this: ...before this finding, the researchers note in the study, the oldest un-degraded collagen ever recorded was about 4 million years old.

Hardly a case for Creationists. What do you think this demonstrates?

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It demonstrates that biomolecules should not be there if their guesswork about the actual age of Dinosaurs is correct ... and they know it. The problem with biomolecules is that their half life does not support the "observations in nature" that they are making for their specimens still having those biomolecules.

Your point that their guesswork "did not also" leap so far forward as to be as accurate as the Bible is not the surprising part. The surprising part is that they themselves know that their "observations in nature" do not fit their claims in regard to this science so they "hope" for better days.

BobRyan said:

wow - evolutionists conclude that the Bible historic account for creation by God happening in the past 10,000 years is not as reliable as "guessing" that bacteria will one day turn into a horse.

Ok... I think we can all see how that would be

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The fact that you phrased it that way--"guessing," informs me that you are unable to steel man the evolutionary position accurately. If you can't steel man your opponent, you cannot engage in honest and effective dialogue with them.

Do you actually want to have a conversation, or is your shtick to simply win internet points and insult other's ideas? Because I don't know why anyone would want to engage with a person who is not sincere about civil discussion.

BobRyan said:

It demonstrates that biomolecules should not be there...

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No, it demonstrates that they did not expect to find it. Science is all about discovery and looking for new understandings. Do you know who made the discovery? Do you know what her conclusions are? Hint: she doesn't think it points to the earth being a few thousand years old.

Caliban said:

The following are findings from scientific and Governmental sources that conclude Creationism is unscientific and merely qualifies as religious teaching:


Wikipedia: Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District

The ruling in this case identified Creationism and ID as religious teaching and not scientific. The ruling was based on testimony on both sides.

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And it was disputed by the Discovery Institute (which if I recall correctly is a proponent of ID). More importantly it just means that it is not considered science in a US court of law. I know you might think that the US is the only place that matters, but the rest of the world really couldn't care less what the US courts said.

It should also be pointed out that the principle point of the law case was to try and get ID taught in schools in violation of the ruling that religion should not be taught in schools.

Such a lawsuit is not likely to ever be bought in the UK and the only school that I know of that teaches ID teaches it along with Evolution and by teachers who are both for and against ID.

Caliban said:

This peer reviewed essay describes why the U.S. Government considers ID and Creationism religious instruction. The Department of Education does not permit the teaching of Creationism in schools because they identify it as Religious teaching and not a valid scientific theory.


An article from Scientific American that provides contrary evidence to Creationists claims.

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The first article seems to be just a paragraph listing a number of issues/statements.

The second is not about why Creationism is not a scientific view, but rather about why a set of ideas is wrong. This latter to me seems reasonable - after that is what science is - falsifying ideas so that better ones can be put forward. But in order for this article to have meaning, the claims have to be taken seriously and then scientifically be proven wrong. So science is definitely engaging in Creationism, even to attempt to disprove it. They are not then completely separate as you imply.

Also (and I didn't read the whole thing) it seems that the article is attempting to answer objections to evolution.

But Creationism and Evolution aren't totally at odds with one another. There are plenty of Creationists who just see Evolution as the mechanism that God used to Create.

Silly Uncle Wayne said:

And it was disputed by the Discovery Institute

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A completely unreliable and biased organization in my opinion--much like the Templeton Foundation.

Silly Uncle Wayne said:

...the rest of the world really couldn't care less what the US courts said.

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They were cheering the decision on. You know that the vast majority of every other educated democracy outside the U.S. believes in evolution. That is a fact. The do care what our courts say because much of what happens in the States influences other countries.

The simple fact is that Creationism is not a scientific approach, it is a presupposition based on what the Bible says about how the world was created. If a person started without the Bible and had all of the access to modern science, they would not arrive at ancient conclusions. The Bible is the source that inspires the idea of a creator God.

Let's change tactics: I will only provide peer reviewed evidence from scientific journals. You do the same. We will see which case is stronger. If Creationism is science. It will be found in the scientific literature. You down?

Silly Uncle Wayne said:

I agree to a certain extent, but perhaps you should try John Walton's The Lost World of Genesis 1 which treats it as a historic account and still accepts the scientific views of origins.

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If God creates a pink bird in my backyard it is not "unscientific" to watch the bird. It is not "unscientific" to admit that it exists today and that it did not exist yesterday. In fact it is now a fact of nature once it exists. So it is not at all surprising that accepting historic fact does not contradict science, it might contradict guesswork but not actual "observations in nature".

Caliban said:

The following are findings from scientific and Governmental sources that conclude Creationism is unscientific and merely qualifies as religious teaching:

Wikipedia: Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District

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This is a perfect example of evolutionists employing brain washing. They take a class that was totally devoted to blind faith evolutionism.. and they notice that at the start of the class a short paragraph is read that says "A book on intelligent design EXISTS in the library" and that students can go to the library "AND READ" if they are interested in it - but that this course will be fully dedicated to blind faith evolutionism.

That brief statement "could not be tolerated" by the devotees to evolutionism. They did not want students to know that "a book exists in the library" that does not include the same guesswork options that they will find in their current blind faith evolution textbook which is the only option they would have for the class at hand.

That 'appeal to authority' as the "solution" for what is science and what is not - is not even remotely the "scientific method" in fact it is 100% against it.

That was in intro to science 101.

What is really "instructive" is that this classic example of crushing defeat for science and ideas -- is often held up as if "it is a good thing" as if we would ever want to resort to such methods in actual areas of science.

Caliban said:

The ruling in this case identified Creationism and ID as religious teaching and not scientific.

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A ruling from someone who knew nothing about either science or religion as it turns out.

Caliban said:

This peer reviewed essay describes why the U.S. Government considers ID and Creationism religious instruction.

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An evolutionist reviewed by a peer group of evolutionists is more like the dark ages to me. It is an example of not allowing thought if it is not in line with the orthodoxy of the evolutionists that are in charge at the moment.

The Department of Education does not permit the teaching of Creationism in schools because they identify it as Religious teaching and not a valid scientific theory.

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I am fine with not allowing the religion of blind faith evolutionism in the science texts and also not allowing a statement that is of the form "For in six days God created". I would be just fine with that as limits for a science class..

BobRyan said:

An evolutionist reviewed by a peer group of evolutionists is more like the dark ages to me.

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I get why you think evolution is valid not. You dismiss real experts in the field and favor those who agree with your religious beliefs. I am done with this thread--Good luck with your nonsense.

Caliban said:

I get why you think evolution is valid not. You dismiss real experts in the field and favor those who agree with your religious beliefs. I am done with this thread--Good luck with your nonsense.

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I can't believe that evolutionists are so reluctant to confront facts even when their own fellow evolutionists are telling them they are wrong for being so closed to outright fact.

But I suppose it has come to this..

Meanwhile... for the rest of us...

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Collin Patterson (atheist and diehard evolutionist to the day he died in 1998) - Paleontologist British Museum of Natural history speaking at the American Museum of Natural History in 1981 - said:



Patterson - quotes Gillespie's arguing that Christians

"'...holding creationist ideas could plead ignorance of the means and affirm only the fact,'"


Patterson countered, "That seems to summarize the feeling I get in talking to evolutionists today. They plead ignorance of the means of transformation, but affirm only the fact (saying): 'Yes it has...we know it has taken place.'"


"...Now I think that many people in this room would acknowledge that during the last few years, if you had thought about it at all, you've experienced a shift from evolution as knowledge to evolution as faith. I know that's true of me, and I think it's true of a good many of you in here...


"...,Evolution not only conveys no knowledge, but seems somehow to convey anti-knowledge , apparent knowledge which is actually harmful to systematics..."

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So then -- Patterson gets put on "ignore" while some judge Penn who knows nothing about relgion or science -- is left to tell us 'what science is'.

Caliban said:

I get why you think evolution is valid not. .

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I am wondering if that is really the case. If you really see the extent of the issue at hand.


Colin Patterson (Senior paleontologist at the British Natural History Museum and author of the Museum’s general text on evolution) in a talk given at the American Museum of Natural History 1981


--------------------- Patterson said -


“Can you tell me anything you know about evolution, any one thing…that is true?


I tried that question on the geology staff at the Field Museum of Natural history and the only answer I got was silence. I tried it on the members of the Evolutionary Morphology seminar in the University of Chicago, and all I got there was silence for a long time and eventually one person said “I know one thing – it ought not to be taught in high school”

"...I'm speaking on two subjects, evolution and creationism, and I believe it's true to say that I know nothing whatever about either...One of the reasons I started taking this anti-evolutionary view, well, let's call it non-evolutionary , was last year I had a sudden realization.

"For over twenty years I had thought that I was working on evolution in some way. One morning I woke up, and something had happened in the night, and it struck me that I had been working on this stuff for twenty years, and there was not one thing I knew about it. "That was quite a shock that one could be misled for so long...

It does seem that the level of knowledge about evolution is remarkably shallow. We know it ought not to be taught in high school, and perhaps that's all we know about it...

about eighteen months ago...I woke up and I realized that all my life I had been duped into taking evolution as revealed truth in some way."

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yep... that is the poster child for why we call it "blind faith evolutionism"

Collin Patterson - Paleontologist British Museum of Natural history

On April 10, 1979, Patterson replied to the author (Sunderland) in a most candid letter as follows:

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April 10, 1979 Letter from Colin Patterson to Sunderland


“ I fully agree with your comments on the lack of direct illustration of evolutionary transitions in my book. If I knew of any, fossil or living, I would certainly have included them.

You suggest that an artist should be used to visualise such transformations, but where would he get the information from? I could not, honestly, provide it, and if I were to leave it to artistic license, would that not mislead the reader?

I wrote the text of my book four years ago. If I were to write it now, I think the book would be rather different. Gradualism is a concept I believe in, not just because of Darwin’s authority, but because my understanding of genetics seems to demand it.

Yet Gould and the American Museum people are hard to contradict when they say there are no transitional fossils. As a palaeontologist myself, I am much occupied with the philosophical problems of identifying ancestral forms in the fossil record.

You say that I should at least show a photo of the fossil from which each type of organism was derived. I will lay it on the line- there is not one such fossil for which one could make a watertight argument.[The reason is that statements about ancestry and descent are not applicable in the fossil record. Is Archaeopteryx the ancestor of all birds? Perhaps yes, perhaps no there is no way of answering the question. It is easy enough to make up stories of how one form gave rise to another, and to find reasons why the stages should be favoured by natural selection. But such stories are not part of science, for there is no way of putting them to the test. So, much as I should like to oblige you by jumping to the defence of gradualism, and fleshing out the transitions between the major types of animals and plants, I find myself a bit short of the intellectual justification necessary for the job “

[Ref: Patterson, personal communication. Documented in Darwin’s Enigma, Luther Sunderland, Master Books, El Cajon, CA, 1988, pp. 88-90.]

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"It is easy enough to make up stories of how one form gave rise to another, and to find reasons why the stages should be favoured by natural selection. "

Agreed - that is "easy enough"

hmmmm... " But such stories are not part of science, for there is no way of putting them to the test. So, much as I should like to oblige you by jumping to the defence of gradualism, and fleshing out the transitions between the major types of animals and plants, I find myself a bit short of the intellectual justification necessary for the job “

< now keep in mind that supposedly in these discussions it is the Christians that are not paying attention to the details... >

so while I am appealing to an actual scientist talking about the problem... someone else will settle for a non-science judge in the state of Pennsylvania to tell us what is or is not science.

well everyone has free will.. choose as you wish.

Lycurgus89 said:

That isn't even what's at stake here. If you read my post, the argument is not another creationism: fact or fiction debate. Instead, this thread is about what is meant by six day creation. Moses himself believes, if he's even the author of the pentateuch, the world was created in six days. I just quoted the verse where Moses says God made the world in six days and rested on the seventh. Pretty much everyone ignores it in these arguments. What did Moses from the text believe about his own book? He was only a man (if he lived), but I think its conclusive he believed in a six day creation story.

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I don't think Moses is the author of the Pentateuch, I think the evidence for the Documentary Hypothesis is fairly strong. As Mosaic authorship has Moses writing about his own death, or else the argument goes that Joshua completed the work after Moses died--but there's no reason to believe this other than as an ad hoc measure of retaining Mosaic authorship.

I also think that the reference to the six days made in Exodus is simply a reference to the story of creation from the first chapter of Genesis, both are understood to come from the same source, the Elohimist, one of the four sources of the Pentateuch in the Documentary Hypothesis.

I also think that the best explanation for the days of creation in the text is that they serve as the framing device, providing the structure of the text. The use of "There was evening and there was morning" serves as a poetic refrain. Because Genesis 1 is poetry. And it's not asking the question of "In what way did the material universe get here as we see it" But "What are the relationships between God, creation, and human beings?"

In the most literal reading of the text, when God began to create (verse 1) there is already a primordial earth, "The earth was a formless wasteland" with the primordial sea "and darkness was over the face of the abyss. And the Spirit of God hovered over the face of the waters" (verse 2). The creative work of God in Genesis 1 is to take the primordial world and give it shape and form, which is what happens over the period of the six days, with the first three days and the second three days forming a parallel to one another. The first three days God shapes, expands, forms the spaces of creation, and the second three days God fills those spaces with creatures to inhabit and rule in those spaces. For example, on the first day God makes light and separates light from darkness, day and night; and on the fourth day God creates the creatures--the heavenly bodies--to rule day and night. The climactic work of creation is mankind, made in the Divine image and likeness to inhabit and care over the world which God has made, to be the image-bearing caregivers and representatives of God to creation, and of creation to God.

-CryptoLutheran

Lycurgus89 said:

I don't know what happened. "But, after all, who knows, and who can say whence it all came, and how creation happened? The gods themselves are later than creation,
so who knows truly whence it has arisen?"

What does Moses say six days mean? The guy who supposedly wrote the books and God talked to directly about creation. When Mo says god made the world in six days, he definitely appears to mean them literally.

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The bible definitely does not teach 6 litteral 24 hr days: https://www.jw.org/en/bible-teachings/questions/days-of-creation-universe/