My two favorite arguments for creation

[nyjbarnes]

The watch and the watchmaker-

Predictive Nature of the Bible and the veracity therin-

Who's game?!

 

[Logic]

My #1 favorite argument against creationism: A global flood never occured.

 

[Null-Geodesic]

My #1 favourite argument against Creationism: Most fundamentalists believe it.

 

[USincognito]

I'll take you up on predictive nature of the Bible.

Please present your opening argument.

 

[Asimov]

The watch and the watchmaker-

Predictive Nature of the Bible and the veracity therin-

Who's game?!

What do you mean by "the watch and the watchmaker"?

And by the Predictive Nature of the Bible...?

 

[Logic]

The watch and the watch maker.. basically..

You find a watch in the woods, you don't know where it came from, but it's too complicated to come about by "simply random chance." Now you walk through a McDonalds funland and find a biological organism, which is exponentially more complex, so you must assume a designer! Praise Cthulhu!

 

[Jimmy The Hand]

It must have been Grimace

 

[Arikay]

Well, they don't have much to do with the age of the earth, but I guess they work. You will have to expand on them a bit.


(Logics) watchmaker (incase its different). I walk along and I find a complex crystal, its is obviously too complex to come from random chance, so it must have a designer that did not use natural means to create this crystal, otherwise known as a snowflake. Or not.
Ok, next argument.

 

[Logic]

It must have been Grimace

Blasphemy! It was one of the french fry kids, now knows as the freedom fry kids. If you don't even know the basics of watchmakerology, you shouldn't profess to understand it!

 

[USincognito]

Can we keep the superfluous posts to a minimun guys? This isn't chat and some of us are trying to have a serious - well, as serious as possible discussion here. One or two snipes are fun, but don't clog the thread with them.

It's been a real problem of late, especially at night.

 

[nyjbarnes]

Yes thank you....it get's tiring...where I am from Mod's pinch people for doing that. Ahem.

Watchmaker theory. Explained in brief you guys are close but miss the mark on several items...someone mentioned a crystal.

It's not about coming accross a watch. It's about understanding how a watch works. The reality is, if I were to place a watch into a box and shake it up how long to you think it would take before the watch came out fully assembled and functional?

This parallels what scientists would have you believe about the earth and the origins of life. The simply by things being in the right place at the right time, the earth formed exactly in the right place to support life and exactly on a 23.5 degree axis, so perfect in fact that if were to move just a few degrees closer to or away from the sun we would burn up or freeze respectively. This they would have you believe happend all by chance. Now, the illustration of the watch is a good one, because a good watch has life,(it tells time or ticks) and a good watch has complex moving parts. Things that are dependent on each other for the overall goal of telling time. This relates directly to life. I expect that won't be enough for some of you. But that is the start of the debate. Also, why the crystal doesn't have any significance to what I am talking about is because as crystal is a formation of rock. There are no complexities to it. It's caused by a number of different things that can be easiliy accounted for and repeated today. Not similar. Thanks for playing though.

Now for the predictive nature of the Bible. The Bible predicts over 300 things that relate specifically to Jesus Christ. I will name a couple.

That Jesus' legs would not be broken during his crusifixion
That Jesus would be born in a manger

Now here is the significance. This is recorded history. The torah is not just a book of stories. It is a document that is corroborated many places not the least of which is the dead sea scrolls. That said, these prophecies were written 2000 years before Christ's brith. If you just took 8 of these prophecies, the odds of a person coincidentally fulfilling all eight of these would be one in 10 to the 17th power. Since we can't easily picture what that means, I'll give this illustration: Suppose you took the state of Texas and spread silver dollars two feet deep across the whole state, then marked just one of them and buried it somewhere in the state. Then, if you chose one person, blindfolded him, and told him to pick just one silver dollar, his chances of getting the marked one on his first try would be one in 10 to the 17th power

And for the most powerful part, Jesus fulfulled all of them. Not just 8, not 18, not 180. All of them. Well not all of them, because he has to return yet again, but that will be fulfilled.

Now just for reference, scientific absurdity is 10 to the 25 power. It might be less but I can't seem to find my reference.

 

[Null-Geodesic]

Yes thank you....it get's tiring...where I am from Mod's pinch people for doing that. Ahem.

Watchmaker theory. Explained in brief you guys are close but miss the mark on several items...someone mentioned a crystal.

It's not about coming accross a watch. It's about understanding how a watch works. The reality is, if I were to place a watch into a box and shake it up how long to you think it would take before the watch came out fully assembled and functional?

The tornado in a junkyard argument. Wouldn't be bad except processes like natural selection don't follow such a random assemblage.

This parallels what scientists would have you believe about the earth and the origins of life. The simply by things being in the right place at the right time, the earth formed exactly in the right place to support life and exactly on a 23.5 degree axis, so perfect in fact that if were to move just a few degrees closer to or away from the sun we would burn up or freeze respectively.

This is just plain hogwash. Shows you (or should I say your cut/paste website) does not know anything about the solar system. Seasons are not essential for life and anyway the obliquity of the Earth varies from 21.5 degrees to 29 degrees over tens of thousand year timescales.

Why are you saying a few degrees closer or farther. That is an angular measurement not a distance which is what you want. Anyway even varying the distance by many millions of miles would not have that much effect. You might want to figure the math out for this if you can because it will show you the effect is modest. In reality it is even less effective than such a crude radiational calculation would show because of the change in albedo due to cloud cover variations due to the amount of evaporation.

That using degrees closer or farther cracks me up. You could have at least amended that so you didn't seem quite as challenged.

Now for the predictive nature of the Bible. The Bible predicts over 300 things that relate specifically to Jesus Christ. I will name a couple.

That Jesus' legs would not be broken during his crusifixion
That Jesus would be born in a manger

Now here is the significance. This is recorded history. The torah is not just a book of stories. It is a document that is corroborated many places not the least of which is the dead sea scrolls. That said, these prophecies were written 2000 years before Christ's brith. If you just took 8 of these prophecies, the odds of a person coincidentally fulfilling all eight of these would be one in 10 to the 17th power. Since we can't easily picture what that means, I'll give this illustration: Suppose you took the state of Texas and spread silver dollars two feet deep across the whole state, then marked just one of them and buried it somewhere in the state. Then, if you chose one person, blindfolded him, and told him to pick just one silver dollar, his chances of getting the marked one on his first try would be one in 10 to the 17th power

And for the most powerful part, Jesus fulfulled all of them. Not just 8, not 18, not 180. All of them. Well not all of them, because he has to return yet again, but that will be fulfilled.

Now just for reference, scientific absurdity is 10 to the 25 power. It might be less but I can't seem to find my reference.

What a bizarre argument. For all you can possibly know the Bibles writers had the fix written in. Even accepting your interpretation (which I don't) if the authors altered older text so that the prophecy is seemingly fulfilled that is meaningless. You cannot claim after the fact writing as prediction, thats postdiction.

You really need to do a better job, and especially lay off the science arguments, you seem ill prepared to use them.

 

[tryptophan]

Does the Torah contain prophecies about the messiah? I thought it was the prophetic books that did, as well as some of the historical ones.


Anyway, your argument is flawed. Watches cannot reproduce and do not have any heritible information. Organisms, on the other hand, have both of these, and natural selection works to help create more diversity in life. Of course, science doesn't flat out deny the existence of God.

 

[Arikay]

Since Null has answered the others I thought I would ask if you could provide the verse that says Jesus would be born in a manger, and then the verse that says Jesus was born in a manger.

I would recomend getting a better understanding of evolution, the www.talkorigins.org FAQ would be a good place to start. Strawmen arguments are not good arguments.

 

[Physics_guy]

I can't believe this - you are actually grossly confusing two totally fallacious creationist arguments. Paley's Watch and a Watchmaker argument is totally different from the Tornado in a Junkyard argument. They are both wrong, but at least get them right!

 

[Physics_guy]

in fact that if were to move just a few degrees closer to or away from the sun we would burn up or freeze respectively.

What does "degrees closer" mean? What is the unit of degree in this reference?

You do realize that the Earth changes its distance from the sun throughout the year by a pretty large margin (i.e. the Earth's orbit around the Sun is not circular - it is elliptical), don't you?

 

[Dexx]

The simply by things being in the right place at the right time, the earth formed exactly in the right place to support life and exactly on a 23.5 degree axis, so perfect in fact that if were to move just a few degrees closer to or away from the sun we would burn up or freeze respectively. This they would have you believe happend all by chance.

Heres an analogy; my legs are exactly the right length for my feet to touch the ground. If they were shorter i'd drop and fall over.

The fact that everything is perfectly in tune is not necessarily a proof for intelligent design. Statistically we'd have to know of a few universes that working right to know whether ours is exceptional.

 

[Mistermystery]

Heres an analogy; my legs are exactly the right length for my feet to touch the ground. If they were shorter i'd drop and fall over.

The fact that everything is perfectly in tune is not necessarily a proof for intelligent design. Statistically we'd have to know of a few universes that working right to know whether ours is exceptional.

Also works for puddles with water.

 

[Sanguine]

freedom fry kids

That is such a spectacularly corny name, almost as mawkish as the Freedom Tower...

 

[USincognito]

What does "degrees closer" mean? What is the unit of degree in this reference?

You do realize that the Earth changes its distance from the sun throughout the year by a pretty large margin (i.e. the Earth's orbit around the Sun is not circular - it is elliptical), don't you?

He's conflating several things.

Here's the webpage that covers several of the points he asserts above, and it appears he's mixing up axial tilt and distance.

Of course while Googling, I found this ICR page that asserts.

In my book, "a few million" means 3, which is precisely the variation between parahelion and aphelion.

Finally there was ths Angelfire page I didn't take the link for[/ur] that the Google summary says, "... the sun were to move just a matter of miles closer to the ..."

And that was just the first page of my results.