The Creationist Corner

[joshua 1 9]

For your religion to be true, do we need a "God" that allegedly walked and talked in a garden that has no evidence of having existed

The garden of Eden very much existed. There are many "Edens" on the earth and in the sea. Science tells us a lot about Eden. Evolution tells us a lot about the Eden we read about in the Bible. Science calls this a Biodiverce Ecosystem. Eden in the Bible like all Ecosystems had a beginning. The nice thing about Science is that it helps us to better understand the Bible. What science does is they study the evidence that God leaves for us in creation itself. So God talks to us though the Bible. Also Creation itself tells us about God and how God created this world that we live in.

because the Earth is really only somehow 6000 years old

The Bible begins 6,000 years ago with Adam and Eve. We know that Adam and Eve were the matriarch and patriarch of the Hebrew people. Yet something else happened here with this people at this point in time. Civilization and farming as well as Animal breeding or what they still call Animal Husbandry. Science has put a huge amount of study into this and from this small area in the Tigris Euphrates River valley civilization spread to the world. This is how Evolution works and this is how God does things.

There is a lot to be learned from Science about Biology and Ecosystems. There is a lot to be learned about what happened 6,000 years ago. You can spend years to study and learn about this. One thing that makes man different from ALL the other animals is that man has CHOICE. The animals really do not have the ability to choose the way man does. We can choose right from wrong, good from evil, life or death, sickness or health, poverty or prosperity. Those are the choices we are given. The main choice is love. The universe if filled with God's love. If you reject Christianity then you reject what Christianity endorses. We support all that is good, love, life, health and so on. Like a tree we are to produce fruit: Love, Joy, Peace; Patience, Kindness, Goodness; Faithfulness, Gentleness & Self-Control. That is what it means to be a christian. So they say we are to be a fruit inspector to see if people are producing the right fruit in their lives.

 

[KWCrazy]

You got a scientific source for this? Because the sources I have read that were written by people who actually study this stuff for a living say otherwise.

If they make their living trying desperately to find a way to demonstrate increasing complexity, why would they admit that it was all a fallacy? Kind of killing the goose that laid their golden eggs, wouldn't you agree? Maybe if they could demonstrate that increasing complexity was POSSIBLE they'd have more luck convincing people that it's the driving force of biology.

Maybe if they irradiate fruit flies for another century or two...

 

[KWCrazy]

Get back to me when you have an alternative that it not incomprehensible.

Get back to ME when YOU have an alternative that it not incomprehensible. Anyone who has ever cross bred anything or has worked with hybrid plants knows that you can only work with the information you have. Any offspring draws its genetic information from the parents. Just because Marvel Comics told you that mutations could make amazing new characteristics, it doesn't make it a scientific fact.

Asking someone to prove a negative is something I consider to be intellectually bankrupt.

Completely disregarding the personal accounts of people who have seen amazing things just because you choose not to believe them is something I consider to be intellectual bankrupt. You live in a make-believe world where natural law is the sole controlling force in the universe. I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but that is not the case. In the US alone the number of people who report supernatural encounters is in the millions. A full 25% believe they have experienced a miracle. How many of them need to be lying for you to be right? Every single one of them.

For your religion to be true...

Not my religion. I got it from a carpenter from Galilee.

 

[Kylie]

If they make their living trying desperately to find a way to demonstrate increasing complexity, why would they admit that it was all a fallacy? Kind of killing the goose that laid their golden eggs, wouldn't you agree? Maybe if they could demonstrate that increasing complexity was POSSIBLE they'd have more luck convincing people that it's the driving force of biology.

Maybe if they irradiate fruit flies for another century or two...

So that's no, you don't actually have a source for this.

So I can safely ignore it.

 

[Kylie]

If they make their living trying desperately to find a way to demonstrate increasing complexity, why would they admit that it was all a fallacy? Kind of killing the goose that laid their golden eggs, wouldn't you agree? Maybe if they could demonstrate that increasing complexity was POSSIBLE they'd have more luck convincing people that it's the driving force of biology.

Maybe if they irradiate fruit flies for another century or two...

Oh, and they can demonstrate that genetic complexity can increase.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene_duplication

Gene duplication can make a copy of a gene which can then change over many generations. What is this if not an increase in genetic complexity? So not only are you wrong, you don't do your own homework. And that took me literally five seconds on Google.

 

[Davian]

The garden of Eden very much existed. There are many "Edens" on the earth and in the sea.

Not an actual Garden of Eden, then.

Science tells us a lot about Eden. Evolution tells us a lot about the Eden we read about in the Bible. Science calls this a Biodiverce Ecosystem. Eden in the Bible like all Ecosystems had a beginning. The nice thing about Science is that it helps us to better understand the Bible. What science does is they study the evidence that God leaves for us in creation itself. So God talks to us though the Bible. Also Creation itself tells us about God and how God created this world that we live in.

The Bible begins 6,000 years ago with Adam and Eve. We know that Adam and Eve were the matriarch and patriarch of the Hebrew people. Yet something else happened here with this people at this point in time. Civilization and farming as well as Animal breeding or what they still call Animal Husbandry. Science has put a huge amount of study into this and from this small area in the Tigris Euphrates River valley civilization spread to the world. This is how Evolution works and this is how God does things.

Not if you are positing an actual "Adam and Eve".

There is a lot to be learned from Science about Biology and Ecosystems. There is a lot to be learned about what happened 6,000 years ago. You can spend years to study and learn about this. One thing that makes man different from ALL the other animals is that man has CHOICE. The animals really do not have the ability to choose the way man does. We can choose right from wrong, good from evil, life or death, sickness or health, poverty or prosperity. Those are the choices we are given. The main choice is love. The universe if filled with God's love. If you reject Christianity then you reject what Christianity endorses. We support all that is good, love, life, health and so on. Like a tree we are to produce fruit: Love, Joy, Peace; Patience, Kindness, Goodness; Faithfulness, Gentleness & Self-Control. That is what it means to be a christian. So they say we are to be a fruit inspector to see if people are producing the right fruit in their lives.

Belief is not a concious choice.

 

[Davian]

Get back to ME when YOU have an alternative that it not incomprehensible. Anyone who has ever cross bred anything or has worked with hybrid plants knows that you can only work with the information you have. Any offspring draws its genetic information from the parents. Just because Marvel Comics told you that mutations could make amazing new characteristics, it doesn't make it a scientific fact.

That you find it incomprehensible is not really a strike against evolutionary theory, is it?

Completely disregarding the personal accounts of people who have seen amazing things just because you choose not to believe them is something I consider to be intellectual bankrupt. You live in a make-believe world where natural law is the sole controlling force in the universe. I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but that is not the case. In the US alone the number of people who report supernatural encounters is in the millions. A full 25% believe they have experienced a miracle. How many of them need to be lying for you to be right? Every single one of them.

I never accused them of lying. I would, however, note that none have come forward with the abilty to demonstrate that they have not simply imagined their experiences.

Did you know that, according to a citation on wiki, an estimated 5 to 6 percent of the general population have been abducted by extraterrestrial aliens visiting Earth?

What precautions have you taken to prevent this from happening to you and your family?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien_abduction

Do you think all of those people are lying?

Not my religion. I got it from a carpenter from Galilee.

Are you not Christian?

 

[joshua 1 9]

Not an actual Garden of Eden, then.

It is what the science of evolution says it is. There are experts with Phd's working at the universities in Jerusalem that can tell you all about the botany in that part of the middle east. They know all about the domestication of plants and animals. There are experts that talk about how Agriculture spead from the Tigris Euphrates river valley to the rest of the world. They have put a lot of study into that. The main thing is that there is no conflict or contradiction between science and the Bible, never has been never well be. The Bible is very exact about the grains and the animals that you find there in that part of the world. Sheep, goats, lions, bears and all the rest of what we read about in the Bible can be confirmed by science.

 

[Squeegee Beckenheim]

Anyone who has ever cross bred anything or has worked with hybrid plants knows that you can only work with the information you have. Any offspring draws its genetic information from the parents.

http://mbe.oxfordjournals.org/content/15/8/931.full.pdf

Further analysis of the evolved strain reveals the existence of multiple tandem duplications involving two highly similar, high-affinity hexose transport loci, HXT6 and HXT7. Selection appears to have favored changes that result in the formation of more than three chimeric genes derived from the upstream promoter of the HXT7 gene and the coding sequence of HXT6.

That is a scientific experiment in which new genes were added to the mRNA of bacteria, in response to their environment.

You could argue that this is simply replicating information already present, rather than adding new information, but unless you are then claiming that these new genes could not mutate, then you must accept the mechanism by which new information could be added. If you're not denying the legitimacy of this scientific paper, then you're accepting the first step in a two step process.

I'll assume for now that you're not denying that genes can mutate, which is the second step in that two step process.

 

[Squeegee Beckenheim]

As a more general comment on this thread specifically, a hummingbird is not evidence for the Judeo-Christian God. In order for it to be evidence for the Judeo-Christian God it must point to the Judeo-Christian God and no other explanation for its existence. Since a Hindu may point to the hummingbird as evidence for the existence of his or her gods, anybody offering the hummingbird (or anything else that is known to exist in the world) as evidence of his or her personal interpretation of God must demonstrate why it is evidence for that particular god and that particular god alone. Or, indeed, why it is evidence for any deity at all, rather than a naturalistic process. To do otherwise is assuming the consequent.

 

[Squeegee Beckenheim]

The Bible begins 6,000 years ago with Adam and Eve. We know that Adam and Eve were the matriarch and patriarch of the Hebrew people. Yet something else happened here with this people at this point in time. Civilization and farming as well as Animal breeding or what they still call Animal Husbandry. Science has put a huge amount of study into this and from this small area in the Tigris Euphrates River valley civilization spread to the world. This is how Evolution works and this is how God does things.

I think you run into a problem here, if you're going to use the archaeological evidence of civilisation in Mesopotamia in around 6,000 BCE as evidence of the veracity of the Garden of Eden and a Biblical account of humankind coming in to being at the same time - you have to ignore the archaeological evidence of human habitation of the area prior to that time. That means that you must justify why you are accepting of the evidence which you can use to support your preferred conclusion, and why you are not accepting of the evidence which contradicts your preferred conclusion.

It's also worth noting that Ancient Mesopotamia is called "the cradle of civilisation", but depending on how "civilisation" is defined it's not the only one and, again depending on how "civilisation" is defined, it may not even be the earliest.

We can choose right from wrong, good from evil, life or death, sickness or health, poverty or prosperity.

I would suggest that the first two pairings would depend on how any particular individual defines those particular terms, and that our choices in the latter three are often somewhat limited by circumstance.

 

[Kylie]

It is what the science of evolution says it is. There are experts with Phd's working at the universities in Jerusalem that can tell you all about the botany in that part of the middle east. They know all about the domestication of plants and animals. There are experts that talk about how Agriculture spead from the Tigris Euphrates river valley to the rest of the world. They have put a lot of study into that. The main thing is that there is no conflict or contradiction between science and the Bible, never has been never well be. The Bible is very exact about the grains and the animals that you find there in that part of the world. Sheep, goats, lions, bears and all the rest of what we read about in the Bible can be confirmed by science.

Of course the Bible would be accurate about that, as it was written by people who would have seen that stuff every day.

Doesn't mean it is right about the formation of the universe though.

 

[AV1611VET]

As a more general comment on this thread specifically, a hummingbird is not evidence for the Judeo-Christian God. In order for it to be evidence for the Judeo-Christian God it must point to the Judeo-Christian God and no other explanation for its existence. Since a Hindu may point to the hummingbird as evidence for the existence of his or her gods, anybody offering the hummingbird (or anything else that is known to exist in the world) as evidence of his or her personal interpretation of God must demonstrate why it is evidence for that particular god and that particular god alone. Or, indeed, why it is evidence for any deity at all, rather than a naturalistic process. To do otherwise is assuming the consequent.

Then I submit you don't know how Satan operates.

Anything that is used for evidence for God, and God alone, Satan knows all he has to do is create a cheap imitation of it, and it will fool many people.

Especially the educated elite.

Study Jannes & Jambres in the Bible.

It doesn't matter how cheap an imitation is either.

Scientists will accept anything, no matter how fake it is, as a viable refutation of the existence of God.

Mention BC/AD as evidence for God, and scientists will bring up the days of the week.

Mention IN GOD WE TRUST on our coins, and scientists will bring up GOTT MIT UNS on belt buckles of the Nazis.

Mention the Bible, and scientists will bring up the Bhagavad-gita.

Mention the Flood, and scientists will bring up empires that weren't even in existence at the time.

Scientists don't even believe them themselves.

As long as it can be used against God, they've accomplished their prime directive.

Many times, I ask these guys, "Do you believe that? If not, is it okay with you if I don't, either?"

I guarantee you, they will never answer that question honestly -- if at all.

They know better.

It will ruin their train of thought.

They will treat it as a rhetorical and move on to something else.

 

[Squeegee Beckenheim]

Then I submit you don't know how Satan operates.

I don't believe that Satan exists at all.

Little of your post seems connected to what I wrote, though, so perhaps I should elucidate.

The hummingbird is not evidence for the hypothesis that God exists, it is consistent with that hypothesis. It is also consistent with many other hypotheses, including creation myths from other religions and evolution. That means that it's not evidence for any of those hypotheses, because it does not point towards any one of them.

Let me give an entirely different example illustrating the same reasoning. Let's say that there was a post on this forum from a new member, and all it contained was the words "God is good". Now, that is consistent with the hypothesis that the account was registered and the post was typed in by a woman. It is not, however, evidence that the account was registered and the post was typed by a woman because it's also consistent with the hypothesis that the account was registered and the post was typed by a man. It's also consistent with the hypothesis that the account was registered by a mixed-gender group, one member of which each typed one letter. It's also consisted with the hypothesis that the account and post were generated by a spambot which makes a few posts before starting to post actual spam. And many more hypotheses along those lines.

So the post is not evidence for any one of those hypotheses. The hypotheses may have different evidence which counts either for or against them, they may be seen to be more or less likely than each other. But that first post saying "God is good" is not evidence for or against any of those hypotheses.

I hope that clears up any confusion and you feel more able to directly address the points I've made.

 

[AV1611VET]

I don't believe that Satan exists at all.

I'm aware of that.

I'm also aware that that is where your misunderstanding is coming from.

Since you don't believe, you can't see it from a believer's perspective.

Let's say that there was a post on this forum from a new member, and all it contained was the words "God is good". Now, that is consistent with the hypothesis that the account was registered and the post was typed in by a woman.

Two things with this analogy:

1. The Bible clearly states Who the Author is, and who His secretaries are. So we're not dealing here with some anonymous "God is good" post. I can understand how you look it it that way, but you can't see how I look at it.

2. Using your example, if a woman anonymously posted "God is good" -- anyone who says a man did it is wrong. Anyone who says several persons did it by lining up and each typing one letter of the post is wrong. They won't know they're wrong, but they are wrong nonetheless.

 

[Squeegee Beckenheim]

I'm also aware that that is where your misunderstanding is coming from.

If I'm misunderstanding something, then I would appreciate it if you'd explain the flaw in my reasoning in more detail.

1. The Bible clearly states Who the Author is, and who His secretaries are.

And the religious texts of other religions that have a creation myth also name their creators. So the existence of a hummingbird doesn't favour any particular one of those religious texts.

You are, as I said in the original post, assuming the consequent. You're using the hummingbird as evidence for the existence of God, but you're also using your belief in the existence of God as evidence that the hummingbird is significant. It's circular reasoning.

2. Using your example, if a woman anonymously posted "God is good" -- anyone who says a man did it is wrong. Anyone who says several persons did it by lining up and each typing one letter of the post is wrong. They won't know they're wrong, but they are wrong nonetheless.

Which is entirely irrelevant as to whether or not the post itself is evidence for the post being typed by a woman. Whether or not the conclusion is right is irrelevant as to whether or not the reasoning by which that conclusion is reached is sound.

 

[joshua 1 9]

Of course the Bible would be accurate about that, as it was written by people who would have seen that stuff every day.

Doesn't mean it is right about the formation of the universe though.

There is no contradiction between the Bible and Science. The Bible was scientifically accurate when it was written. Abraham and Moses had the best most advanced education you could get in their day. The Bible continues to be accurate today.

 

[AV1611VET]

If I'm misunderstanding something, then I would appreciate it if you'd explain the flaw in my reasoning in more detail.

You're overlooking a doctrine known as diabolical mimicry.

For everything God has, Satan has a cheap imitation.

The goal is to dilute the true with fake.

And the religious texts of other religions that have a creation myth also name their creators.

So say the texts.

Their "creators" are, ultimately, Satan himself, who has his nine muses do the paperwork for him.

So the existence of a hummingbird doesn't favour any particular one of those religious texts.

Did I say one word about a hummingbird?

You are, as I said in the original post, assuming the consequent.

What?

You're using the hummingbird as evidence for the existence of God,

No, I'm not.

I use time division (BC/AD), iconography, the Bible, holidays, edifices, churches, organizations, debates, slogans & bumper stickers, etc. as evidence of God.

... but you're also using your belief in the existence of God as evidence that the hummingbird is significant.

You must have me confused with someone else.

It's circular reasoning.

You mean like science validating science?

Which is entirely irrelevant as to whether or not the post itself is evidence for the post being typed by a woman.

Right or wrong isn't relevant to you?

Whether or not the conclusion is right is irrelevant as to whether or not the reasoning by which that conclusion is reached is sound.

Wow. That's what we call Common Core education.

2 + 2 = 5, and as long as you can justify your answer, you can get away with it.

If a woman types "God is good," and someone can make a good argument for a man having typed it, are you telling me the gender of the typer is then "irrelevant"?

 

[Squeegee Beckenheim]

There is no contradiction between the Bible and Science. The Bible was scientifically accurate when it was written. Abraham and Moses had to best most advanced education you could get in their day. The Bible continues to be accurate today.

The two creation myths in the Bible don't even agree with each other, let alone with science.

 

[AV1611VET]

The two creation myths in the Bible don't even agree with each other, let alone with science.

What two creation myths?