Evolution Exposed

[Not_By_Chance]

For anyone who doubts that the so-called Theory of Evolution and the Big Bang models for the origin of the universe have massive problems, here are just a few of them exposed by the great Mike Riddle in his video "Is Evolution Both a Fact and a Theory?"

http://www.creationtraining.org/is-evolution-both-a-fact-and-a-theory/

 

[Heissonear]

NBC,

As you may well know nothing in God's physical Creation happens by chance but is what He intends and in multiple ways controls.

The godless lose this intimacy with the Designer and the One in Control. He gets further away by their naturalistic reasoning rather than Him being close, even in His Presence.

 

[eclipsenow]

For anyone who doubts that the so-called Theory of Evolution and the Big Bang models for the origin of the universe have massive problems, here are just a few of them exposed by the great Mike Riddle in his video "Is Evolution Both a Fact and a Theory?"

http://www.creationtraining.org/is-evolution-both-a-fact-and-a-theory/

I'm a Christian, and take Genesis 1 very seriously as the true word of God. But you've made a category mistake. It's a variety of genres of literature, and the first 11 chapters are written in a style that is quite different to the more literal historical narrative that takes over around chapter 12. Creative narratives that are close to poetry and parable in style contain truth, and make true observations about the world, but are NOT going to be understood properly to obtain those truths if read literally.

 

[Dave RP]

For anyone who doubts that the so-called Theory of Evolution and the Big Bang models for the origin of the universe have massive problems, here are just a few of them exposed by the great Mike Riddle in his video "Is Evolution Both a Fact and a Theory?"

http://www.creationtraining.org/is-evolution-both-a-fact-and-a-theory/

I'd rather trust thousands of qualified scientists than someone who makes plausible sounding statements but not in an open debate with a scientist. He's preaching to the converted. Where the hell did the creator come from? Just because we don't fully understand the natural world doesn't mean we retreat to superstition.

 

[eclipsenow]

I'd rather trust thousands of qualified scientists than someone who makes plausible sounding statements but not in an open debate with a scientist. He's preaching to the converted. Where the hell did the creator come from? Just because we don't fully understand the natural world doesn't mean we retreat to superstition.

I blame bad reading in the first place. Genesis 1 is a direct polemic or rebuke to the Babylonian Enuma Elish. It is not, and was never meant to be, read literally. To do so is a category mistake like reading Shakespeare to fix your computer, or reading Lord of the Rings to understand how to build a Jumbo Jet. It's just the wrong genre! There are no spiritual brownie points for poor reading. Many of Darwin's early supporters were Christians. Indeed, "by 1867 the phrase 'Christian Darwinism' was already in use to describe the vigorous defense of the theory by prominent conservative Christians."

(See more extensive quote below).

Historically some of the most conservative Christians did not react to Darwin or evolution like today’s creationists. In 1855, four years before Origin of the Species was published, Charles Darwin was assiduously refining his arguments and collecting data in support of his theory. Darwin's key idea was that all life was descended from a common ancestor. Natural selection was the means by which life descended into its multiplicity of forms. In gathering his evidence, Darwin sought the assistance of Harvard University's professor of botany, Asa Gray. Gray is now regarded as America's foremost botanist of the nineteenth century. Few people were granted a preview of Darwin's explosive (and secretive) theory prior to publication. So it is a measure of Darwin's respect for Gray that he sent him an abstract in 1857.

Gray was born in upstate New York and raised in a Christian home. However in early adulthood his spiritual outlook had drifted into an agnostic rationalism then popular among north-easterners. But when Gray moved to Harvard in 1842 he chose not to join the spiritualistic, unorthodox Unitarian chapel services which most of his colleagues attended. Instead, Gray transferred his membership to an evangelical Congregational church in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His return to an evangelical faith was steadfast. Gray became a leading defender of Darwinism in America. He corresponded with Darwin at length, often turning to a Congregational minister, G.F. Wright (also an advocate for evolution) for theological expertise when dealing with Darwin's agnosticism.

Despite his best efforts Gray never resolved Darwin's doubts. But this did not cause Gray himself to waver on either the scientific case for Darwinism, or its compatibility with orthodox Christianity. Gray was not a lone voice. Others including Princeton theologian James McCosh, James Iverach and Audrey Moore defended Darwinism in Britain as well as America. Indeed by 1867 the phrase 'Christian Darwinism' was already in use to describe the vigorous defense of the theory by prominent conservative Christians.


https://publicchristianity.org/library/the-history-of-creationism#.VXrWUhOqpBc

 

[DogmaHunter]

For anyone who doubts that the so-called Theory of Evolution and the Big Bang models for the origin of the universe have massive problems, here are just a few of them exposed by the great Mike Riddle in his video "Is Evolution Both a Fact and a Theory?"

http://www.creationtraining.org/is-evolution-both-a-fact-and-a-theory/

Can you please summarize, in your own words, what you feel is the BEST argument presented in this video?

That kind of saves everyone the time of wasting 20 minutes.

 

[The Cadet]

Dude, this is an 18-minute long video by a creationist whose voice is incredibly boring. But what the heck, I got nothing better to do right now.

...

Boy I regret that decision. I got to listen to this guy twaddle on for almost a solid 6 minutes explaining what "fact" and "theory" mean to an audience who clearly understands them better than him, and then immediately jumps to the typical crap argument of "The big bang cannot be observed". Um... Yes, it can. You want to observe the big bang? Measure the speed at which galaxies of different speeds are moving away. Measure the cosmic microwave background radiation. The fact that our universe is expanding and the distribution of the CMBR are facts which are easily observed and which point without question to the universe being smaller, denser, and hotter in the past. As Martymer81 points out in his (considerably less stupid) video, any model that would replace the big bang model would still have to account for all the same observations, and as a result would look more or less the same.

It's this same childish approach to science. "I didn't see it, ergo it didn't happen." I wonder, by this guy's definition of "fact", is the existence of Hurricane Sandy a scientific fact? After all, it's not repeatable, and not observable. But that's nonsense - science has no problem asserting that Hurricane Sandy existed. The problem here is not that science is unable to access the past, it's that he's completely ignorant of how science examines the past.

Then he goes on to claim that the origin of the universe is a problem for the big bang model. Um... No. The big bang theory points to the existence of a singularity. It makes no claim about how that singularity got there or what happened before there was a singularity. He clearly does not understand the theory he's critiquing. Why, pray tell, do I have the feeling that this is going to be a running theme? The claim that the spiral shape of galaxies is a problem for the big bang model is also total bunk. The spiral shape is energetically stable.

Here comes what I hope is the dumbest thing said in this video (ha, as if!):

"What happened when the cosmic background radiation was not what the scientists expected? They changed the big bang to accommodate it. That's not good science."

...Oh, so what, we throw out the model entirely in favor of... Some other explanation which reflects both the expansion of the universe and the CMBR? No, when the model is flawed, we see if we can change the model to better fit the evidence. This is how most progress happens in science. It's iterative. Newtonian physics could not explain the procession of mercury (or whatever cosmological effect it didn't explain that was known about in the early 1900s). Did we chuck it? No, we did not. We refined it, we built upon it, we recognized, "hey, this models reality pretty well, but we have to adjust this calculation by such and such to make it model reality better in the light of the new evidence".

See, this is what most people miss when it comes to science. It's like if one little thing in any given theory is wrong, it has to be completely thrown out. But that's just not how it works, unless this contradictory piece of evidence completely undermines the basis for the theory. So the CMBR is different. We still need a model that accounts for both it and the expansion of the universe. As Martymer81 said in his video, and I will keep quoting this,

"Any model of cosmology that could ever replace the big bang theory still has to have an expanding universe that started out in a hot, dense state and which is still expanding today at an accelerating rate. Those are the facts, and a model which is in conflict with the facts obviously cannot explain the facts. What that means is that a model that replaces the currently accepted big bang model would simply be a modified version of it. And guess what: the current big bang theory is not the same one that was proposed all those years ago."​

The problem here is that Mike Riddle knows nothing about either science or cosmology. And then he tries to debunk star formation, literally claiming that we never observed... well, this. He's just downright wrong. Star formation is entirely observable.

See, kids, this is why you don't get your science from an organization with a statement of faith which claims the bible as an absolute authority. These people aren't interested in furthering scientific discovery. They have their answers, and anything that goes against those answers will be denied, and most likely lied about.

Then he goes on to make some completely unfounded claims about early life and oxygen, and I'm honestly bored enough to go do the dishes now. Seriously, this video is complete garbage. Virtually nothing this guy says is true. He combines the ridiculous "historic vs. observational science" lie of Answers in Genesis with a big fat healthy heap of lies about what "historic science" has discovered. He knows nothing about the scientific method or the fields he's ineptly trying to critique.

Going to creationists for science information is like going to Taco Bell for haute cuisine.

 

[OldWiseGuy]

No worries. The 'camel' of evolution is fully ensconced within the tent of modern science, and won't be dislodged.

 

[sfs]

Then he goes on to claim that the origin of the universe is a problem for the big bang model. Um... No. The big bang theory points to the existence of a singularity. It makes no claim about how that singularity got there or what happened before there was a singularity.

The Big Bang model doesn't even claim that there was a singularity. It only claims that the visible universe was in a hot, dense state (cue the theme song from "The Big Bang Theory") and expanding. If you extrapolate backwards from there, the known laws of physics say that at some point you'd reach a singularity, but that just means the known laws break down there. Which we already knew, since gravity has to be combined with particle physics to handle that state, and we don't know how to do that.

 

[OldWiseGuy]

The great paradox of evolution is that the product appears to be the product of special creation. It can be confusing to some.

 

[Split Rock]

For anyone who doubts that the so-called Theory of Evolution and the Big Bang models for the origin of the universe have massive problems, here are just a few of them exposed by the great Mike Riddle in his video "Is Evolution Both a Fact and a Theory?"

http://www.creationtraining.org/is-evolution-both-a-fact-and-a-theory/

Why do you refer to the "so-called" Theory of Evolution? What is "so-called" about it?

 

[Audacious]

From the National Academy of Sciences (US):
"Scientists most often use the word "fact" to describe an observation. But scientists can also use fact to mean something that has been tested or observed so many times that there is no longer a compelling reason to keep testing or looking for examples. The occurrence of evolution in this sense is a fact. Scientists no longer question whether descent with modification occurred because the evidence supporting the idea is so strong." [source]

The scientific consensus is extremely strong: every major scientific organization in the world says that evolution is real. A 1991 Gallup poll showed that 5% of scientists, including those working outside of biology, agree that evolution is real -- and it's probably higher inside biology, considering that it's a basic element of the field.

There's really no ground to stand on for creationism; all you can do is pretend that if you insist on something long enough, it will become real. But it won't, and the evidence shows that.

 

[Loudmouth]

SJG said it best.

"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts do not go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's, but apples did not suspend themselves in mid-air pending the outcome. And human beings evolved from apelike ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other, yet to be discovered."--Stephen Jay Gould, "Evolution as Fact and Theory"
http://www.harvardsquarelibrary.org/speakout/gould.html

 

[Loudmouth]

Boy I regret that decision. I got to listen to this guy twaddle on for almost a solid 6 minutes explaining what "fact" and "theory" mean to an audience who clearly understands them better than him, and then immediately jumps to the typical crap argument of "The big bang cannot be observed". Um... Yes, it can. You want to observe the big bang? Measure the speed at which galaxies of different speeds are moving away. Measure the cosmic microwave background radiation. The fact that our universe is expanding and the distribution of the CMBR are facts which are easily observed and which point without question to the universe being smaller, denser, and hotter in the past. As Martymer81 points out in his (considerably less stupid) video, any model that would replace the big bang model would still have to account for all the same observations, and as a result would look more or less the same.

That seems to be a common theme among creationists lately. They really like to confuse the concepts of hypothesis/theory and facts. They somehow think that we observe the hypothesis. The SJG quote above is a good way of explaining the difference between the two.

 

[HitchSlap]

Nobel prize awaits.

 

[Not_By_Chance]

I blame bad reading in the first place. Genesis 1 is a direct polemic or rebuke to the Babylonian Enuma Elish. It is not, and was never meant to be, read literally.
(See more extensive quote below).

Where does that idea come from and how, if indeed it were so, would it not completely undermine the Bible as God's Holy Book? After all, if God's book is filled with myths and half-truths then that would make Him a cruel [life forming by evolution is very cruel] deceiver and would make Christ's sacrifice pointless as there would not be any sin for Him to take upon Himself. The Bible and evolution are completely incompatible and one has to choose which to trust. I put my trust in the Bible (all of it). I would recommend the New Defender's Bible with footnotes by Henry Morris for further reading http://www.amazon.com/product-revie...w Defender's Study Bible-KJV&showViewpoints=1

 

[Loudmouth]

Where does that idea come from and how, if indeed it were so, would it not completely undermine the Bible as God's Holy Book?

The best way to undermine the Bible and Christianity is to insist that Christians be young earth creationists. It is the creationists who insist that science disproves the Bible.

 

[joshua 1 9]

Facts do not go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them.

They go away when new information show they are not facts.

 

[HitchSlap]

They go away when new information show they are not facts.

Exactly. Everything in science (understanding of reality) is provisional. As better evidence comes in and our understanding of theories improve, and thus science advances. It's a hallmark of the SM!

 

[Not_By_Chance]

[QUOTE=" It is the creationists who insist that science disproves the Bible.[/QUOTE]
No they don't - quite the opposite in fact. The creationists have nothing against honest science and have nothing to fear since such science must by definition, always be in agreement with God's laws, since He created them in the first place. What the creationists object to is unproven ideas being presented as fact or only half-truths being told - in other words, exactly what evolutionists accuse them of doing.