Why Intelligent Design is not Science

[Dragonrider]

You did not tell where DNA gets it data from.

[Dragonrider]

Also here is the defintion of a theory. •S: (n) hypothesis, possibility, theory (a tentative insight into the natural world; a concept that is not yet verified but that if true would explain certain facts or phenomena)

Also gravity is a law, it is called,The
Universal Law of Gravitation

[Dan]

How do you explain dragons in almost ever culture.

So what? Are you saying that dragons are real? What about witches, are they real? All you're doing is pointing out that every culture creates myths, and that these myths are not true. This doesn't cast doubt on evolution; it casts doubt on creation myths.

Also in my opinion evolution is not science.

In your opinion, what is science, then?

The human DNA has 3 billion, base pairs. These consist of information that tells our bodies what to make and do. If we assume evolution is true, where did this information come from

If you knew anything about DNA, you would know that huge chunks of it are useless, genes that have been rendered inert over time and no longer do anything. You would know that huge chunks of it consist of DNA inserted into the genome by retroviruses. You would know that DNA doesn't just encode for useful stuff, but that it encodes for things like the appendix; fur, gills and tails on human embryos; leg bones in whales; hip bones in snakes, etc. If this information-rich DNA was created by an intelligent designer, why is so much of it useless?

or better yet which organ evolved first, the brain, the heart or the eyes.

This isn't the way evolution works. There was no point at which there were humans walking around without brains, or hearts, or eyes. One of these organs did not fully evolve before the other one began to evolve. It has all happened in concert. Early organisms had simple brains, simple hearts, simple eyes, and so on.

You should really read a book about evolution, since you obviously don't understand it. I recommend Why Evolution Is True by Jerry Coyne or Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body by Neil Shubin. They're both very accessible.

Evolution is not a law, but a theory don’t forget it.

Nothing in science is a law, because science is not so arrogant as to pretend to know everything. Self-doubt is fundamental to science, whereas it is anathema to religion. In science, a "law" is just a theory that is especially consistent and fundamental to the rest of science. The theory of evolution meets these criteria easily. Without evolution, the entire field of biology would collapse. For theories such as thermodynamics, evolution, gravity, etc., the words "theory" and "law" are used pretty interchangeably.

[Dragonrider]

I do understand evolution( by law they have to teach it in school), also scientists are still not sure if those segments of DNA is useless or not. If I would have to recommend a book it would be The Ultimate Proof of Creation, by Dr. Jason Lisle. This book is for both sides of the debate, Believers and non-believers. Also about the dragons, I mean dinosaurs.

[Robert]

Dragonrider wrote: "I do understand evolution( by law they have to teach it in school), also scientists are still not sure if those segments of DNA is useless or not. If I would have to recommend a book it would be Th..."

By law they have to teach it in school, but unfortunately they don't have any way of passing a law giving a student a brain to understand it with, do they?

Also, a book titled "Ultimate Proof" isn't for both sides of this or any other debate, because there is no "ultimate proof" in science, and religion doesn't need proof at all as it relies on believing unbelievable things for terrible reasons.

Just to get oriented, since religious people have so many different sets of beliefs about things like creation -- understandable since none of them are based on the unbiased analysis of evidence and all of them are based on Bronze Age mythologies elevated to "perfect truth" because, um, they say so, what do you think explains the evidence? In fact, what do you think the evidence is?

I mean, talking about dragons makes it sound like you are a complete idiot. If you mean dinosaurs, then say dinosaurs. Have you actually visited a museum of natural history in your life? Have you seen the assembled skeletons of dinosaurs there? Are you familiar with the dating of their fossil remains and the evidence that supports that dating?

That is, given that you are obviously a creationist, are you a young earth or old earth creationist? Do you believe in the literal truth of Genesis? Or are you an orthodox Hindu, believing in the literal truth of the Puranas and Mahabharata and Ramayana and Vedas? Or are you a pagan (and if so which flavor)? Do you believe that the giant Mbombo had a stomach ache and vomited up the sun, the moon, and the stars? Did Chaos give birth to Gaea, who in turn gave birth to Uranus and the starry sky? Was the Universe born of the sweat of the Frost Giant Ymir? Come on, man! Tell us which ridiculous mythology you subscribe to so that we can address the evidence that systematically refutes it...

rgb

[Dragonrider]

I am a young-Earth creationist, I belive in the literal bible. The literal bible mention "dragons" in the bible and also gives reference of a Broncosaurus, " I forget where, but I have red it." also I belive that you can not be neutral on such issues. Also mythology, look at your own worldview. I mean come on a bang creates everthing that surround you. The desk you sit at, the keyboard you type own, or even yourself. Have you ever wonder why you have morals,or why we heal the sick. When it would just be easier to let them die or to murder to get what we want, like animals.That is not a survial instinct of that is the core one of Darwin's theory, survial of the fittest is about. Is it?

[Hp]

Dragonrider wrote: "I am a young-Earth creationist, I belive in the literal bible. The literal bible mention "dragons" in the bible and also gives reference of a Broncosaurus, " I forget where, but I have red it." al..."

For pity’s sake use a spell checker! I see your world view is as bad as your spelling and grammar.

With regard to your “broncosaurus” (whatever the hell a “broncoaurus” is – I assume you meant brontosaurus or “Apatosaurus excelsus”)...

The bible mentions a leviathan (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leviathan):

Leviathan…, is a sea monster referred to in the Tanakh and the Bible. In Demonology, Leviathan is one of the seven princes of Hell and its. The word leviathan has become synonymous with any large sea monster or creature. In modern literature it refers to great whales, and in Modern Hebrew, it means simply "whale."

and a behemoth (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behemoth):

Behemoth …meaning beast or large animal… Suggested animals include the water buffalo, rhinoceros, crocodile, and the elephant, but the most common suggestion is the hippopotamus.

but then again the bible mentions satyrs and unicorns (as you can see above) and many, many other ridiculous and unbelievable things. Your attempt to equate these beasts to dinosaurs is completely refuted by the available cross-referenced radiometric dating evidence (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiomet...) which you will, of course, ignore.

You do not understand evolution in the slightest. I am sure others will deal with your supreme lack of knowledge concerning the big bang but the “desk you sit at, the keyboard you type own, or even yourself” were created from materials available freely on this planet using readily available energy sources (mostly solar). They did not just suddenly appear. Work had to be done to produce them - either to create the stars which produced the elements, power the many cell creation and multiplication processes, cut the timber, extract the oil, mould and shape the plastic, transport the raw materials and final products etc. etc. etc.

You then espouse on morals which can hardly be based on the terrible and horrific examples of the Jewish and Christian bible. Stories of mass murder, rape (e.g. Numbers 31) and every other kind of abomination do not support a worthwhile ethical system. My favourite story being Moses slaying at least three thousand of his followers for idolising false gods (Exodus 32:25-29) when he descends from the mountain with his wonderfully ethical commandments (including “Thou Shalt Not Kill”).

I would much rather believe my ethics are derived from the theories of kin selection of Haldane and Hamilton, reciprocal altruism of Trivers and the superorganism of Bloom: Basically it is in our interests to behave well to either our relatives or the people around us – it helps us and our genes survive. Our own selfishness helps others!

[Dragonrider]

15 Behold now the behemoth that I have made with you; he eats grass like cattle.
16 Behold now his strength is in his loins and his power is in the navel of his belly.
17 His tail hardens like a cedar; the sinews of his tendons are knit together.
18 His limbs are as strong as copper, his bones as a load of iron.
19 His is the first of God's ways; [only:] his Maker can draw His sword [against him:].
20 For the mountains bear food for him, and all the beasts of the field play there.
21 Does he lie under the shadows, in the cover of the reeds and the swamp?
22 Do the shadows cover him as his shadow? Do the willows of the brook surround him?
23 Behold, he plunders the river, and [he:] does not harden; he trusts that he will draw the Jordan into his mouth.
24 With His eyes He will take him; with snares He will puncture his nostrils.

I did not think a hippopotamusa tail like a cedar.

[Dragonrider]

I know I will not get through to the truth of this group. I am Christians and I know if I am wrong, I lose nothing. I will have died believing in my lord. While if you are wrong, well, lets just say that it will not be pleasant for you. I pity you and I will pray for you. I hope you will realize your mistake before it is too late.

[Robert]

The Big Bang didn't "create" anything. No reaction or process that is postulated to occur in the BB created mass-energy out of nothing, nor is it either generally postulated or believed that the initial state of the Universe was "nothing". Indeed, when the BB is referred to as its "initial state" it is generally just acknowledging that the physical evidence -- something you are obviously completely ignorant of and (I'm sure) unwilling to examine because it so very, very completely contradicts young earth creationism and it is so much easier to continue to believe a falsehood if you simply refuse to look at any evidence that reveals it to be the lie that it is -- suggest that there was a time where all existing matter was in a very compact, dense state that more or less erased any information content describing previous times as far as we can currently tell.

What is this evidence? Suppose you were watching a movie and saw an explosion. It would look like a flash (the explosion) followed by a rapid expansion of all the material of the bomb as it flew apart. The dynamics of the explosion and its aftermath are entirely predicted by the laws of physics to the point where one could simulate the explosion and create a cartoon movie frame by frame and (given modern rendering farms) it would be very difficult to tell from the real thing, and in fact in many movies from e.g. Star Wars on, space explosions have been cartoon simulations. Video games galore also rely on our ability to simulate physics exactly -- they present a "realistic" world to their players by simply computing a world that evolves in time much like the real world we live in. The point being that we understand the physics that governs objects like planets and stars very well.

Now pay attention: I am preparing to teach this to college students who such at math in a couple of days, and if they can understand it so can you.

Contrary to what the Bible says, the Earth goes around the Sun and not the other way around. If one observes the angles the Sun makes relative to vertical at noon at two different points on the earth's surface that are on a north-south great circle, the difference in those angles, divided into the measured distance between those points on the surface, yields the radius of the Earth. The first actual measurement (accurate to a surprising 1% or so) was made by http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eratosth... in roughly 200 BCE, but the fact that the world was round didn't make it into the Old Testament (which had a nice flat earth supported by pillars and surmounted by a bowl of solid sky, so much for the literal truth of the Bible.)

With the size of the earth in hand, the size of the moon is quite simple. Measure its average speed across the field of "fixed stars". By carefully observing it actual location, one sees that it isn't quite where it ought to be at sunrise and sunset (viewed from two different points separated by the diameter of the earth) -- in fact there is once again an angle difference that can best be explained by the moon being a finite distance away moving in a circle and viewed against a field of very distant stars. The same formula then gives you the distance to the moon, and by measuring the angle subtended by the moon itself the size of the moon.

Repeat one more time for the sun. In this case one cannot observe stars behind the sun, but one can determine the instant's in the moon's cycle when the moon is exactly half full. At that time, it turns its face directly at the sun at right angles to the observer. By determining the exact location/orientation of the earth relative to the sun at this time, one once again gets an angle, this time the angle subtended by the moon and the earth relative to the sun. Since the Earth-Moon distance is known, so is the distance to the Sun (same formula). Finally, given this distance and the angle the Sun subtends, the diameter of the Sun can be determined.

Understand this? This is called "parallax", and is the basis of binocular vision -- the way your brain "sees" distances and creates a three-dimensional view out of your visual field. The ancient Hebrews sucked at geometry -- the Bible gives pi as 3, for example -- compared to the Greeks, the Mayans, the Hindus, or any of the actual civilized cultures of the iron age -- but the math is quite simple and one can make all of the observations required using the naked eye, a protractor, a measure of distance on the surface of the earth, and patience.

So now we have a picture of a Sun a million or so miles in diameter that is 93 million miles away from an Earth 8000 miles in diameter that goes around the Sun (and not the other way around) -- giving yet another lie to the Bible. The moon is a solid object reflecting the light of the Sun and not glowing with light of its own -- giving a lie to the Bible. We know how far away they are, we know the geometry of their orbits, we know their sizes. Enter the planets.

The planets also exhibit a diurnal "anomaly" like the moon does, but they are much farther away. Still, by making very careful observations over a very long time, a gentleman named http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tycho_Brahe was able to use parallax and geometry to precisely determine the orbits of the principle naked-eye visible planets. His observations were systematized into "laws" that appeared to universally govern their motion by http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johannes.... These laws were further systematized by http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Ne..., who invented calculus, the law of universal gravitation, and the laws of mechanics which then explained Kepler's laws and Brahe's observations and which furthermore predicted the behavior of planets as yet undiscovered and much, much more. Which is why we consider them laws of nature and not just unsupported hypotheses.

Are you following all of this or have you already stopped reading because it makes your head hurt, or because you can see where we are going with it and you don't want to be forced to acknowledge that the Bible is a pack of falsehoods, lies, myths, and mistakes? Because now we get to the good part.

In the meantime, Galileo had invented the telescope, and suddenly people could see that there were far, far more stars than were visible to the writers of Genesis, who asserted that God created the stars as signs in the heavens and to mark out seasons. That's all well and good for visible stars, but why then did he make so many invisible ones? And: how far away were these stars?

Note well: The earth swings around the sun in an orbit roughly 186 million miles across. If the stars are not tacked onto a solid bowl of sky at a fixed -- possibly very great -- distance but are instead distributed in three dimensions, the near ones will once again swing back and forth by a very small angle relative to the really distant stars as the Earth goes around the sun. By viewing their location precisely at two times of year when the earth is at opposite sides of the Sun and determining the angle in between, simple parallax yields their distance in parsecs -- one astronomical unit (93 million miles) divided by the angle difference in arc-seconds. One parsec is roughly 3.25 light years -- the distance light travels in a year at its universally fixed speed (determined by laws of nature we believe every bit as much as we believe in the law of universal gravitation).

Suddenly, we know the actual distances to stars out to hundreds of parsecs. We have a three dimensional picture of all of the stars in our immediate neighborhood! And it is vast, hundreds of light years across, with an enormous number of stars that are much farther still at distances too great to determine using parallax.

Now we turn to energy. We know the Sun's size and the intensity of its light. We have a simple, geometric formula for the intensity of light as a function of the power (energy per unit time) generated by a star and its distance away. And we can measure the intensity of the light received by these "local" stars and we know their distance! Hence we know their total power. We have another formula that describes the temperature of the stars based on their power spectrum -- how much energy they emit in all the different wavelengths. Given their total power and their temperature, we can infer the size of the stars. Suddenly, we can classify all of the stars we can see, and by putting them onto a graph we observe that this graph is structured, with all stars falling on one of a handful of general curves: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hertzspr....

This diagram can now be used in the opposite direction. Using spectral analysis alone, a star can be accurately typed. Once its type is known, its luminosity is known, and a measurement of its brightness yields its distance. Bang! We know the distance to nearly all of the individual stars we can see! Suddenly we have a three dimensional map of all of the individual stars we can resolve in telescopes. Are you with me so far?

At this point we could quit. Young Earth creationism is already disproven. The distances to the individual stars we can see are much greater than 6000 or even 10,000, light years. Hence either God created a "lying Universe" with light from distant stars that was already en route exactly as if it had been travelling for a much longer time than the Universe had actually been around or -- the vastly simpler hypothesis -- we can literally believe our own eyes and mathematical reasoning in preference to believing in the literal truth of a document written by superstitious Bronze age tribesmen who thought pi was three and whose primary use for counting was to count loot -- slaves, captives, camels gold -- as in the two or three pages of loot detailed after the sack of the Midianites in Numbers 31. Those invisible stars are "signs in the heavens" indeed!

The story doesn't end here, of course. Some of the stars observed are very bright and variable: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cepheid_...

These stars act as a "standard candle" that permit us to use luminosity to determine galactic distances. This, in turn, permits us to build a picture of a vast Universe, as it turns out that with a good telescope one sees as many galaxies in the sky as one sees stars in this galaxy, and these galaxies are separated by hundreds of millions of light years and are hundreds of thousands of light years across. Not only are we seeing light that is older than 10,000 years, one can see light that is 250 million years old with the naked eye if one looks at the Andromeda galaxy (M31) on a very clear, dark night -- binoculars will make it jump right out at you, and with a small telescope you can see the actual disk (which is roughly 5x the angular width of the moon in the night sky when photographed)!

One can see regions (such as the nebulae in and around Orion) where stars are being born. One can see stars that are dying. One can observe that all of the galaxies we can see appear to be receding from one another (using the Doppler shift) -- and we're back to where we came in. If one runs the equations of motion for those galaxies backwards in time, one concludes that at a specific time 13.73 billion years ago, they were all jammed together into a very, very dense state and then "exploded" outward. The light from that original explosion is there, clearly visible if one looks at the night sky in the right wavelengths:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_m...

And that's why one should believe in the Big Bang. Not all of the reasons -- there are still more! But enough.

rgb

[Robert]

Oh, and as for chemistry -- the desk in front of you and so on -- we can save a lesson in quantum theory for another day. Back to those pesky "laws of nature" again.

It's funny. C. S. Lewis, famous Christian apologist and physicist-hater (of course he had to hate anybody that interfered with his ignorant ruminations by bringing up a simple matter of actual evidence and physical laws!) put the following line into the mouth of Aslan, Jesus as Lion, in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe: "Do you think that I would break the laws that I made?"

Well, punk? Do ya?

rgb

[Hp]

Dragonrider wrote: "I know I will not get through to the truth of this group. I am Christians and I know if I am wrong, I lose nothing. I will have died believing in my lord. While if you are wrong, well, lets just sa..."

So your supreme arbiter of ethics will punish me for not believing the tripe in the bible. I personally think you are the loser if you are willing to kowtow to such a bastard.

[Robert]

Dragonrider wrote: "I know I will not get through to the truth of this group. I am Christians and I know if I am wrong, I lose nothing. I will have died believing in my lord. While if you are wrong, well, lets just sa..."

Please! Do you seriously think that the earth is some sort of video game? Look, I am a human person of good will. I want nothing more than to understand the truth as best as we determine it.

To come to the truth, the enquiring mind has to achieve two things. First of all, it has to be open to the idea that whatever it believes might be mistaken. History may or may not teach us much, but it should teach us that certainty is often wrong, so that no matter how firmly you believe in the literal truth of the Bible you could be wrong. You could be wrong even if the BIble tells you that it always tells you the truth, because all con men and liars start by telling you that they tell the truth and never lie. Only a complete idiot trusts somebody just because they say "trust me".

This is called "having an open mind", and without an open mind you cannot possibly achieve a state of reliable knowledge because the chance that any particular set of beliefs you have at the beginning, no matter how they are founded, are precisely correct is pretty much zippo. Nada. Nil. Science builds in this openness to mistakes into the process of enquiry itself. It always tests its assertions, then tests them again and again, looking for inconsistencies and trying to make them fail. Religion, in contrast, tells you to never test its assertions but instead to believe on the basis of its authority -- the classic line of the classic con man. Trust me. No, no, you don't want to actually look -- that would show a lack of faith. Just trust me.

The second requirement for achieving the best possible knowledge is the elimination of bias, especially confirmation bias -- the tendency of humans to interpret their everyday experience in terms of their beliefs, to "cherrypick" special cases out that support some argument that they are fond of while ignoring the many, many cases that refute it. A great deal of the scientific method is designed to eliminate bias both conscious and unconscious from results and their interpretation. For example, scientists usually do "double blind" experiments so that they cannot cherrypick results because they literally do not know what group any given result is from.

This is critical in the testing of religious claims. For example, many people would claim something like "if you pray for healing, God will heal you". After all, Jesus pretty much promises to heal people and chides his apostles for failing to believe that they can heal people and raise the dead etc on their own without him!

Nearly anyone who is BICC (biblically inerrant conservative christian, like yourself) can come up with anecdotes of healing. "My third cousin's best friend had cancer, and his church prayed over him and he went straight into remission!" This cherrypicked result -- if true (it is just hearsay, communicated by people who desperately want things like this to be true and who are therefore inclined to exaggerate or lie) -- ignores two things. One is the two hundred other people who were devout Christians who had this same cancer, whose churches prayed just as fervently over them, and who died horribly anyway and the ten other muslims and hindus and atheists who had the cancer, and didn't pray over it or worse, prayed to the wrong gods over it, and who went into remission anyway.

Double blind experiments eliminate the confirmation bias. Double blind experiments testing the efficacy of prayer as a means of healing have been performed numerous times, and the results are negative. Prayer has no measurable effect on cancer remission rates, for example (some studies even show a slight negative rate, so that people who are prayed over die slightly more frequently.

The point being once again that I am a person of good will. I'd be perfectly happy to believe that the Bible is correct and that Jesus is Lord. However, I won't be convinced by feeling or anecdotes or a Bible that claims to be Perfect Truth but which contains obvious falsehoods. To convince me you'll have to provide solid, double blind evidence that it is true, not just wishful thinking and pious thoughts.

Now I'm not a bad guy. I'm kind to children and pets. I donate money to UNICEF. I work at an honorable profession, teaching. I love my wife and am faithful. I don't cheat on my income taxes. The only crimes I routinely commit are things like exceeding the speed limit by five to eight miles per hour when conditions are good. I have never committed a really grand scale "mortal sin" kind of evil act, and feel disinclined to ever do so in the future. I want nothing more than to understand the Universe as it is in good faith!

Yet, according to you, just being mistaken in my good faith beliefs isn't ground for correction -- it is ground for condemnation to an eternity of horrific torture!

This is utterly senseless. You do realize this, don't you? If I taught physics by telling my students that if they made an arithmetic error and got a wrong answer on their final exam I would kidnap them, take them to a remote location in the woods, and burn their skin off of them by pouring molten lead onto them you would consider me insane, would you not? Punishing a student for being wrong makes sense only if it is part of a process of correction so that they will eventually get it right -- to punish any sentient being for a sin real or imagined for eternity is simply sadistic spite and utterly pointless!

Only religion indulges in this sort of sick philosophical extortion. Believe what we tell you to believe or we'll shoot this dog. Visit the sins of the parents on the children unto the umptieth generation. If you fail to accept Jesus as Lord no matter what your reasoning you'll be cast into a lake of eternal fire. Why, Jesus even tells his apostles that he preaches in parables just so that many who listen will not understand and thereby will be damned. So much for the "god of love" most Christians cherrypick out of the Gospels. Speaking in plain language is too likely to lead to salvation -- let's hide the message and try to fool everybody into thinking that I'm not really God, so we can have the sheer pleasure of Glorifying God by roasting people who fail to believe for very good reasons for eternity!

This is just plain demented. If this is the standard of your personal ethics, and the ethics of the God you claim created the Universe and everything in it, in the full foreknowledge of every instant of the future (hence predestining every soul to eventual salvation or damnation) then it is a sick, twisted ethic.

Here's a simple one for you to chew over. Perfect knowledge leads to perfect compassion, not perfect vindictiveness. Perfect knowledge understands why the ax murderer murders. Where humans might not forgive (and might not want to live with an ax murderer in their midst no matter how good those reasons are) perfect knowledge understands that every flicker of every electron was destined from the beginning of time (so to poetically speak -- time of course probably had no beginning) and that moral responsibility itself is an illusion of the context of human experience, not present in a God's Eye View.

Yet you believe in a God that has the temper and character of a three year old, a God whose "name is Jealous", a God who tries to wipe out the entire earth -- and then is sorry. Wake up and smell the coffee, my young friend. This isn't moral perfection, it is a joke!

Or rather, a myth.

Let's see if you can muster a bit of open mindedness, an give up that urge for confirmation bias. Look at the world as it really is, as revealed by experiments that are not biased by a prior belief in the Bible no matter what inconvenient truths contradict it.

rgb

[Hp]

Dragonrider wrote: "15 Behold now the behemoth that I have made with you; he eats grass like cattle.
16 Behold now his strength is in his loins and his power is in the navel of his belly.
17 His tail hardens like a ..."

I much prefer:

"Obadiah, his servants. There shall, in that time, be rumors of things going astray, erm, and there shall be a great confusion as to where things really are, and nobody will really know where lieth those little things wi-- with the sort of raffia work base that has an attachment. At this time, a friend shall lose his friend's hammer and the young shall not know where lieth the things possessed by their fathers that their fathers put there only just the night before, about eight o'clock. Yea, it is written in the book of Cyril that, in that time, shall the third one..."

[Dragonrider]

Rgb, you can be either on one side of fence or the other when comes to evolution. So everone is bias. Also about carbon dating, here is a link aout. Also before you start, the article is bias, but so are your and my worldviews.
http://www.answersingenesis.org/artic...

[Dragonrider]

Also Hp, if you going to reply, please make relevant to the conversation.

[Dan]

you can be either on one side of fence or the other when comes to evolution. So everone is bias.

This implies that there is no actual truth, one way or the other, to evolution, and that it is entirely a matter of opinion. This is not true at all. Reality does not derive from our opinions. Reality is what it is, and we can be right or wrong about it.

[Dragonrider]

No Dan this implies that no one is bias, when comes to evolution or creation, also Nathan, why would matter if my English was wrong. If evolution is true, why should my written English matter since it does not increase my survival rate. However since creation is true, feel free to correct my English, I would appreciate it.

[Robert]

Dragonrider wrote: "Rgb, you can be either on one side of fence or the other when comes to evolution. So everone is bias. Also about carbon dating, here is a link aout. Also before you start, the article is bias, but ..."

DR, it is pretty obvious that on any binary question one can be "on one side of fence or the other". So I could pose a question such as:

"Is the sun a light that is hung in a solid bowl of sky that goes around the pillar-supported flat earth once a day?"

This is, as I'm sure you'll recognize, the Biblical model of the sun and the earth. For over 1000 years, to publicly express the "biased" opinion that this model might be incorrect was to more or less guarantee your painful execution for blasphemy or heresy, because everybody knew that the Bible was perfect truth and could not be mistaken about even the smallest fact it communicated. Galileo, for daring to propose another model was warned, arrested, subjected to a mock trial, forced to recant by being offered the simple option of "recant or burn", and then was sentenced to live out his final years under house arrest, with his works banned and anyone who read them automatically excommunicated. One of the greatest minds of all time held mute because he came down on the non-Biblical side of the fence. I can post a dozen links to the history of this series of events, if you like.

Now, your "bias" is obviously to take the Bible literally at all costs. It doesn't really matter what the facts are; if the Bible says something, it must be true. So I'm very curious -- do you subscribe to the view that the world is flat, supported by pillars, and that the sun and stars and moon are hung upon a solid bowl of sky because hey, the Bible says so and therefore things like photographs of the round Earth from outer space, parallax measurements of the Earth's curvature, the testimony of travellers (such as myself) who have flown completely around the world several times over must all be lies, right?

I mean, I'm just trying to get a good idea of where your common sense boundaries lie. You seem to be advancing the idea that if a proposition is advanced as a "fact" in the Bible, it must be true quite independent of all evidence. Is this the case, or is there a level of evidence that would convince you that the Bible is mistaken -- again?

I mean, if there is no possible evidence, including the evidence of your own eyes and the conclusions of your own process of reason, that would suffice to convince you that the world is round and that the Biblical story of six day creation is false, then there isn't really much point in discussing things, is there? Most of the rest of us will conclude that you're batshit crazy, of course, because most of the rest of us admit that there is a level of evidence that would suffice to convince us that almost any proposition is false.

rgb

[Dan]

No Dan this implies that no one is bias, when comes to evolution or creation

The point you miss is that, while you can be on one side or the other of the evolution/creation debate, one side is right and one side is wrong. It is not simply a matter of opinion.

[Dragonrider]

Where in the bible does it say , that the Earth is flat, Rgb. Also, did you check out that site in the previous message. Nathan, do you know where language origin from, and why there are different languages also why is it important to have writen language. Also thank you Dan for proving my point.

[Dragonrider]

Really, do we have to resort to such language?

My question is however, is why do humans have differnt languages? Why it is important to have a written one? ( Most anaimal don't) Finally, where did language come from.

Yes, "( Most anaimal don't)" is a sentense fragment.

[Dan]

Also thank you Dan for proving my point.

You haven't yet made any point, so I don't know how I could possibly have proven it for you.

[Dragonrider]

I meant you either believe the whole bible or evolution. Without genesis the whole bible falls apart.

[Robert]

Dragonrider wrote: "Where in the bible does it say , that the Earth is flat, Rgb. Also, did you check out that site in the previous message. Nathan, do you know where language origin from, and why there are different ..."

I assume that you want a list of verses? Damn, there are so many it will take me a minute or two to assemble them. But, since you seem inclined to want to pretend that the Bible doesn't make any mistakes about anything at all, I might as well start with this excellent book by book breakdown of all of its many, many mistakes:

http://www.skepticsannotatedbible.com...

So, flat earth:

Isaiah 40:22 It is he that sitteth upon the circle of the earth, and the inhabitants thereof are as grasshoppers; that stretcheth out the heavens as a curtain, and spreadeth them out as a tent to dwell in

Isaiah, in spite of his "prophetic" powers (that failed badly in the case of Ahaz, see Isaiah 7 and Chronicles 28) thinks that God sits on the flat disk of the earth where he can see the whole thing, with the solid heavens spread out as a "curtain", a "tent" draped down over the disk.

(Prov 8:26-27) When he had not yet made earth and fields, or the world’s first bits of soil. When he established the heavens, I was there, when he drew a circle on the face of the deep...

Again, a flat disk on the FACE of the deep -- the WATERS upon which the earth floats as established in Genesis.

(Dan 4:10-11) Upon my bed this is what I saw; there was a tree at the center of the earth, and its height was great. The tree grew great and strong, its top reached to heaven, and it was visible to the ends of the whole earth.

Now, unless you think that he saw a "tree" growing in the middle of a chunk of superheated iron some four thousand miles under your feet, Daniel was describing a tree growing in the middle of a flat disk. This is proven by the fact that he thought that it also was visible from the "ends of the earth", a phrase that occurs repeatedly in the Bible, so that everybody could see it. Of course, a spherical surface has no edge (unlike a disk) and there is no point on the surface of the earth where a tree, however high, could be seen from everywhere, is there?

(Mat 4:8) Again, the devil took him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor;

Must have been a high mountain if you could see the kingdoms of the Mayans (for example) from it at the same time you could see the kingdoms of China. Oh, wait. That's impossible. Maybe the devil used a laptop and wikipedia? Not to mention the fact that showing him the kingdoms of the earth in all of their squalor would have been a more appropriate description. Mean life expectancy was something like 20 years of age. Life even in the most civilized of cultures (e.g. Rome, which of course Jesus hated) was still ugly, nasty, brutish and short, and at that was far better than life in any part of Palestine.

Job, however presents the most compelling evidence for either a flat earth or a "failure" of his divine inspiration:

(Job 38:13) that it might take the earth by the edges and shake the wicked out of it?

Disk.

(Job 11:9) Its measure is longer than the earth, and broader than the sea.

Disk.

There are others (where he refers to shaking the earth upon its pillars, for example). Still not done:

(Deu 13:7) any of the gods of the peoples that are around you, whether near you or far away from you, from one end of the earth to the other,

Spheres have no ends. Disk. In fact, all of the following verses mention the ends of the earth, which is a sphere and has no ends:

Deu 28:49, Deu 28:64, Deu 33:17, 1 Sam 2:10, Job 1:7, Job 28:24, Job 37:3, Psa 2:8, Psa 19:4, Psa 22:27, Psa 33:13, Psa 33:14, Psa 48:10, Psa 59:13, Psa 61:2, Psa 65:5, Psa 72:8

Enjoy.

Not only is the earth a flat disk, it is a flat disk that rests immovable on pillars (well, immovable except when God makes the whole thing shake in an Earthquake that on a bad day can shake down stars from the fixed bowl overhead). For example:

(Psa 93:1) … He has established the world; it shall never be moved;

(1 Sam 2:8) For the pillars of the earth are the Lord’s, and on them he has set the world.

(Isa 24:18) or the windows of heaven are opened, and the foundations of the earth tremble.

(Job 9:6) Which shaketh the earth out of her place, and the pillars thereof tremble.

(and more, of course. Even with electronic search tools it is difficult to find them all.) Note well! Not only were these verses considered to be literal truth by the prophets and such that wrote them, they were absolutely considered to be literal truth by all of the church fathers, who really would burn you alive if you dared to challenge them. If you haven't actually read the story of Galileo and his infamous trial, you should. It was considered ultimately blasphemous and injurious to the Bible and all of the Saints and Holy Fathers to assert that the earth moved and the sun did not instead of accepting the model put forth in the Bible where the earth was immobile and either a flat disk or flat square (the "four corners" of the earth are also referred to, and perhaps "end of the earth" is more consistent with a square than a disk since a disk doesn't have a discrete "end", only a uniform boundary), where it rested on pillars, was surmounted by a solid bowl of sky, where the Sun went around it every day (as did the stars and moon), where the moon glowed with its own light. Legend has it that Galileo, after being forced to recant and after signing the rest of his life away to "penance" (house arrest) whispered "E pur si muove!" (Nevertheless, it moves!) as he was leaving the site of his trial -- probably this is just a legend, as it would have been most imprudent of him to do so but it makes it crystal clear that your belief that the world is round and goes around the sun is heresy, as it contradicts the literal truth of the model consistently presented in the Bible!

Of course, there are many, many other bald statements of fact in the Bible that turn out to be false -- unsurprisingly, since it was written by superstitious and ignorant men who were not inspired by God to write perfect truth -- they just made up things that seemed to explain the world around them or that inserted prevalent mythological beliefs of their day as if they were actual truth, and "believers" subsequently elevated them to dogmatic divinely inspired truths. The Book of Genesis, for example, is contradicted by science and history both from one end to the other. It even has anachronisms in it -- Tubal Cain is presented as an artificer in iron -- kind of difficult to be an ironworker in what would have been the earliest part of the Bronze age. It simply demonstrates that Genesis wasn't written or recorded contemporaneously -- it was made up mythology written no earlier than 1200 BCE (probably even later) -- somewhat after the beginning of the Iron Age.

So, you've obviously never actually read the Bible -- something that I find to be nearly universally true among believers, because even thought they've got this wonderful book that is supposed to be perfect, divinely inspired truth and everything they are content to let some preacher select a tiny, tiny fraction of the enormous amount of hogwash in it and present this cherrypicked stuff in the most favorable moral and scientific light rather than read it and actually critically judge its plausible truth for themselves. Hence satyrs (no such thing), unicorns (no such thing) dragons (no such thing), disease caused by demons (sorry, disease is not caused by demons), disease and disorder inflicted on people by God as punishments (sorry, but "good" believers and "wicked" nonbelievers get sick at exactly the same rates without the slightest shred of evidence that God either rewards or punishes with disease).

So I repeat: Now that we've established quite clearly, with numerous actual Bible verses explicitly quoted that show that the "patriarchs" considered the Earth to be flat, have edges/ends, rest immobile on pillars, be surmounted by a solid bowl of sky "like a tent" that separated "the waters above from the waters below" with windows through which God pours rain, now that we've established that God created the stars to mark out seasons and as signs (God loves astrology? Who'd have imagined it) in the Bible, is there any level of evidence that would convince you that these things are all untrue?

Do you believe that the world is flat, has edges, rests on pillars, is immobile, and that the sun and moon and stars go around it, or don't you? If you don't, you are a heretic and would have been imprisoned, tortured, threatened, and either forced to recant and then imprisoned or (if you were poor or happened to live in the wrong town) forced to recant and then executed more or less painfully for most of the last two thousand years if you lived in Christendom. If you do, what standard of evidence would you require to reject the rest of Genesis?

If your belief is truly blinding, so that you will never allow any contradiction, no matter how obvious, to come between you and belief in the truth of Genesis, if you are truly willing to disbelieve your own eyes and reason and other senses rather than disbelieve in a Bronze Age Creation superstition, then there is no hope for you. Your delusion is so strong that it destroys your ability to reason altogether. If you agree, on the other hand, that the world is not flat and that it moves, then you agree that the Bible is false in at least some places, and there is hope for you.

Which is it?

rgb

[Dan]

I meant you either believe the whole bible or evolution. Without genesis the whole bible falls apart.

I agree, and it's important that you recognize this. Now, the next step is to reject the entire Bible outright, because Genesis is clearly untrue. It fails in a large number of ways, but here are two blatant, uncontroversial errors to illustrate its failure: Genesis has God creating light before he creates the sun and stars - the sources of light; and, Genesis has God creating flowering plants before creating the sun, which supplies the necessary energy to keep these plants alive, and the insects and birds that pollinate these plants.

Here's where the problem probably lies: You recognize that if Genesis is untrue, the entire Bible collapses, but you interpret this fact backwards. You begin with the desired conclusion, that the Bible must be true. Since Genesis must be true in order for the entire Bible to be true, then you conclude that Genesis, somehow, is true. This is backwards.

Take an analogy: You find yourself in the middle of a starless night driving down a road somewhere in the middle of America. There are no landmarks, and you have no idea where you are or what direction you're going. You want to make it to the Pacific coast; you hope it's true that you're heading towards the Pacific coast. In order for this desire to be true, you must be heading west. Since you want to end up at the Pacific, and you've already decided that it must be true that you'll end up there because you want to end up there, you then conclude that you are, in fact, driving west.

This is obviously a bad way to reason. You know as well as I do that your desires will not shape reality so that it conforms to your hopes. Whichever direction you hope you're driving, that hope will not reshape the Earth, will not lay down pavement in front of your car. What you need to do is stop the car and get out a compass. Just because you hope it's true that you're heading west, you may have to, based on actual evidence, turn the car around. No matter what you want, you may be going the wrong way.

[Robert]

Dragonrider wrote: "I meant you either believe the whole bible or evolution. Without genesis the whole bible falls apart."

Right! Very good! And since Genesis is incorrect on the very first page, the whole Bible falls apart!

It's really quite simple, once you invent a telescope, and even the Catholic church has long since acknowledged that Genesis is false, although they prefer to dress it up as being "metaphorical truth" now that its literal falseness is so overwhelmingly proven. Once you invent a telescope, rocket ships, orbiting space platforms with telescopes that can see in all the wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum, once you make parallax observations of a fineness and with a baseline that even Tycho Brahe could hardly have imagined, it is proven beyond any conceivable doubt. If this is a trial it was over centuries ago.

The series of observations that demonstrates that Genesis is false is so very, very simple. Start by using parallax (the same thing your brain uses when you look at things with binocular vision) to determine:

* The size of the earth. Done at least by 200 BCE by Eratosthenes:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eratosth...

* Given the size of the Earth, measure the distance to the moon and the sun and the planets using parallax:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallax

This was done by Tycho Brahe. Brahe still lacked a good model for the Solar System, but he took extremely precise (for his day) astronomical observations and built huge tables of numbers for the coordinates of the primary visible planets as a function of date. It was, however, left to his assistant, Johannes Kepler:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kepler

to take the data and analyze it and form a set of "laws" -- a mathematical model! -- that described/predicted it. Kepler's Laws are still taught today (and are still correct today, and still at least approximately describe the motion of all objects in orbit in the Solar System even today). They were the target of Newton, who invented the calculus, the basic laws of mechanics, and the law of universal gravitation which all together predicted Kepler's Laws and thereby Brahe's observations, although they went far beyond describing just the motions of the planets!

With the distance to the sun known and a concrete model that predicted the behavior of the planets and comets that have been discovered since, it becomes possible to use parallax with a baseline of the entire earth orbit in order to determine the distances to the nearest stars! Parallax uses the formula for arc length on a circle:

s = r \theta

for small angles theta, and if s and \theta are known one can use it backwards to determine r:

r = s/\theta

Well, by performing measurements six months apart when a star is visible at sunset and (six months later) at sunrise to observe how its apparent position moves back and forth against the fixed background of very distant stars, one can measure the angle \theta for a baseline separation s of 2 astronomical units -- basically 300 million kilometers. Using heliometers or very large "protractors" to measure the angles (great sphere circles meters in diameter with angles accurately scribed) it is straightforward to measure angular distances less than an arcsecond -- by the late 1800's the neighborhood of the sun was mapped out to several hundred light years. Note well, that straightforward is not easy! Working carefully over years, angle shifts down to roughly 0.003 arcseconds can be measured using earthbound telescopes. Using the definition of a "parsec" = 1 AU/1 arcsecon = 3.26 LY, shifts of .003 arcseconds on a baseline of 2 AU means that we can measure distances of stars out to over 600 parsecs.

Using the Hipparcos satellite (which eliminates the distortion and blurring from Earth's atmosphere) we have now measured the distances and positions of over 100,000 stars, to a high enough resolution to (for example) clearly show that many of them have planets! In another year, Hipparcos' replacement will be launched, and will be able to extend our measurements of precise distances out to at least 10,000 light years using parallax alone.

To go beyond this to galactic scale distances, one has to build a systematic description of star sizes, types, luminosities, and their spectrum (and hence temperature). This has long since been done. Using the tabulated and very systematic result, one can at least estimate the distances to all of the stars in the Milky Way Galaxy and see that the light from the stars that we now see was emitted long before the Book of Genesis acknowledges that the Universe could exist at all. The Universe if much, much older than 10,000 years. We know this to be true -- there isn't a single physicist on Earth that would argue otherwise, as the evidence has long since passed from being "difficult to compute or believe" to "plain as the nose in front of your face" as measure after measurement, observation after observation, all confirm it and confirm it again. The Hubble space telescope, as I already pointed out, has (with the help of other orbiting scopes that look at specific wavelengths of light) mapped the Universe out to 13 billion Light Years. By looking out, we look back in time and can see the natural history of the Universe played as a sort of "movie" as we look at more distant galaxies to the nearest ones.

So believe me, Dragonrider. Genesis is wrong. It is so very, very wrong. It was wrong long before and quite independent of "evolution". It is wrong in every detail. There isn't a single part of the entire book that can be honestly considered to be right by someone who actually considers the evidence, even if they do start off with an enormous prior bias.

Where the key word is "honest", of course. So are you honest? Or would you prefer to continue to lie to yourself, and others?

rgb

[Dragonrider]

I think you have been misled, so here are the whole verses of some of the verses you gave me

The Bible does not prove that the Earth is flat. Some people have misinterpreted the following verses as showing a belief in a flat earth.

(Dan 4:10-11)

Thus were the visions of mine head in my bed; I saw, and behold a tree in the midst of the earth, and the height thereof was great.

The tree grew, and was strong, and the height thereof reached unto heaven, and the sight thereof to the end of all the earth:

This was a symbolic dream of Belteshazzar which was interpreted by Daniel.

(Mat 4:8) Again, the devil taketh him up into an exceeding high mountain, and sheweth him all the kingdoms of the world, and the glory of them;

Since God is omnipresence and Jesue is God's son it only make sense that he is also omnipresence

(Job 11:9) The measure thereof is longer than the earth, and broader than the sea.

This is poetic language indicating that God is immeasurable.

(Deu 13:7) Namely, of the gods of the people which are round about you, nigh unto thee, or far off from thee, from the one end of the earth even unto the other end of the earth;

The ends of the earth in scripture refer to the farthest extremities from one's current location.

Actually, in (Job 26:7) the Bible says "He stretcheth out the north over the empty place, and hangeth the earth upon nothing" evoking an earth in space, as the sun and moon.

And in Isaiah 40:22 according to Gesenius's Lexicon, the original Hebrew word "chuwg" which means literally something with "roundness," a "sphere" of the earth--quite an astounding point of view for the time period this book was written.

(Isaiah 40:22) It is he that sitteth upon the circle (sphere) of the earth, and the inhabitants thereof are as grasshoppers; that stretcheth out the heavens as a curtain, and spreadeth them out as a tent to dwell in:

So you can see that the bible does comfirms a spheritch Earth.

Now I will take my leave for the week. There are many final exams to study for.

If you were wondering I am a 3.9 GPA student.

The bible also says, Thou shall not lie.

[Robert]

So you can see that the bible does comfirms a spheritch Earth.

Now I will take my leave for the week. There are many final exams to study for.

If you were wondering I am a 3.9 GPA student.

The bible also says, Thou shall not lie.

The Bible does nothing of the sort. Again, you are trying very hard to apologize after the fact. As I said, read Bellarmine's Letter to Galileo:

http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/16...

Whatever you think now, for most of the recorded historical past all of these passages were interpreted as referring to a flat earth, supported on literal pillars, that did not move!

Even your passage from Job: What part of "the north" is stretched out over an empty place? Don't tell me that this is a poetical description of reality -- they had the language and concepts to precisely state things like "the earth is round". Instead they spoke of being able to see the whole thing from the top of a high mountain, they spoke of its edges, they spoke of the pillars that supported it. So what is that Job means when he or Isaiah speaks of these pillars? They speak of the corners of the earth. They speak of the edge of the earth.

And no, the word used by Isaiah does not mean sphere -- this is latter day apologia trying to remake the language to conform to what we have discovered since, to avoid the problem that you've already acknowledged -- if Genesis (or any other part of the Bible) is false, the Bible is hogwash (and Genesis is false, and the Bible is therefore hogwash).

It's far too tedious to recount all of the arguments, but the word gh in Hebrew, used in Isaiah, means circle. At least it means circle everywhere else it is used, and was uniformly translated as circle. And there was a word for sphere: rwd If you plug the word "sphere" into every passage where gh occurs it will result in very awkward translations.

All of the other translations (consistent with the word meaning circle leave the world being described as a disk, or possibly that Isaiah was referring to land surrounded by ocean, although given the highly non-circular shape of the continents to me this is just silly. Or to the "circle" of the horizon as a base for the overarching solid sky.

So sure, you can find somebody out there who will lie for you about any necessary interpretation of lines in the OT that are contradicted by science, and then you can rely on their authority to protect you from having to think, or you can think for yourself. To help you out, I'm posting this:

http://www.bibleandscience.com/bible/...

You should appreciate it, as the link is to a site that promotes Christianity. Not even this site is willing to grant that the word means sphere, and seeks other interpretations that aren't obviously false. However, the real point is that in toto the description in the Bible is consistent -- the Earth is everywhere described in language appropriate to a fixed, flat earth with edges and is nowhere described as a sphere at all, let alone a sphere travelling around the sun and tethered in place by gravity. It is absurd to think that any human being, ever, could have read the Bible and interpreted it as providing a correct description of the world as we now know it, and it is perfectly obvious that you would be tried for heresy if you tried.

So sure, don't lie! Starting with not lying to yourself, and not being deceived by others that are seeking to defend the indefensible.

And anytime you want to tackle Genesis for real and the story of Creation, I'm perfectly ready. Bear in mind that I personally can lead you through every step of the reasoning there. We don't need to rely on a battle of experts in ancient Hebrew.

rgb

P.S. Good luck with finals. Do remembrer, as Nathan suggests, to use good English on your exams -- teachers (like Nathan) tend to care about stuff like that....