Evolution vs Creationism debate tonight in 'murica

[CrazyCracka420]

"I'm going to create man and woman with original sin.  Then I'm going to impregnate a woman, with myself as her child, so that I can be born.  I will then kill myself, as a sacrifice to myself, to save you from the sin I originally condemned you to."

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[Kafein]

It feels like Nye was pitted against an absolute straw man, but you got to start somewhere right? Proving that young earth theories are absurd is... absurdly easy. I mean, Nye doesn't even begin to touch on the body of evidence here.

And as expected, Ken Ham's argument against evolution is the typical "intelligent design" way of looking at coherent and predictive scientific work and basically saying "But it happened in the past, you have no way to prove anything about the past". Which would of course require extremely unlikely unfalsifiable and unpredictive alternative explanations. It's quite a remarkable defense from a biblical literalist though. It just comes down to the essence of faith : I can believe in the existence of an undetectable teapot behind the Moon and you can't prove it's not there because the teapot is not detectable. To state that the world was created 6000 years ago is just the same thing but more elaborate and more difficult to justify.

I mean it's a defense that is technically true because you don't have accounts of the past, but if you take that defense as valid to dismiss all the body of scientific work that talks about the past, then you might as well dismiss everything in science because there are equally convincing theories to doubt about "obvervational science". This world view makes as much sense as saying "everything is an illusion", and the correct response to that is that it doesn't matter, science is defined by what works. This debate was pretty pointless, because it all comes down to discussing the nature of unfalsifiable theories and Ken Ham playing devil's advocate with the evidence.

Also Ken Ham obviously doesn't understand the nature of mathematical truths (such as the laws of logic he keeps on referring to). Mathematical truths would be true even if no physical world existed, and apparently to him without God it would be impossible to have logic.

I have a question for the non-believers among you:

If god is unreal, what about quake and half-life?

Well I personally own Unreal (the very first one) and I think it is the best single player FPS I ever played. That including good modern FPS like Metro.

[Jeade]

I'm surprised no one linked the debate.
Just now starting to watch it, so I'll post it here if anyone else is late to this party:

[Molly]

Saw the topic and was about to write "What's there to debate?" and then noticed that I am kinda late to the party...

[CrazyCracka420]

This is what the creation museum links to, to describe dinosaurs, how they came to be, and how they became buried in the ground. 

http://www.answersingenesis.org/articles/nab/what-happened-to-the-dinosaurs

It's as full blown bat-shit crazy as you would have expected.  How the fuck do these people actually know that the different writers that are included in the bible are speaking the word of God?  Even if there is a God, these people are 100% positive that all the works in the bible are the word of God.  That's some pretty amazing copy/paste skills for whoever put the bible together to know who was really speaking the word of God, and who was a crazy cult leader.

Representatives of all the kinds of air-breathing land animals, including the dinosaur kinds, went aboard Noah’s Ark. All those left outside the Ark died in the cataclysmic circumstances of the Flood, and many of their remains became fossils.

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After the Flood, around 4,300 years ago, the remnant of the land animals, including dinosaurs, came off the Ark and lived in the present world, along with people. Because of sin, the judgments of the Curse and the Flood have greatly changed earth. Post-Flood climatic change, lack of food, disease, and man’s activities caused many types of animals to become extinct. The dinosaurs, like many other creatures, died out. Why the big mystery about dinosaurs? (emphasis mine)

Why Such Different Views?

How can there be such totally different explanations for dinosaurs? Whether one is an evolutionist or accepts the Bible’s account of history, the evidence for dinosaurs is the same. All scientists have the same facts—they have the same world, the same fossils, the same living creatures, the same universe.

If the “facts” are the same, then how can the explanations be so different? The reason is that scientists have only the present—dinosaur fossils exist only in the present—but scientists are trying to connect the fossils in the present to the past. They ask, “What happened in history to bring dinosaurs into existence, wipe them out, and leave many of them fossilized?”4

The science that addresses such issues is known as historical or origins science, and it differs from the operational science that gives us computers, inexpensive food, space exploration, electricity, and the like. Origins science deals with the past, which is not accessible to direct experimentation, whereas operational science deals with how the world works in the here and now, which, of course, is open to repeatable experiments. Because of difficulties in reconstructing the past, those who study fossils (paleontologists) have diverse views on dinosaurs.5 As has been said, “Paleontology (the study of fossils) is much like politics: passions run high, and it’s easy to draw very different conclusions from the same set of facts.”6

OH really?  Shall we get some paleontologists' views of the Creation Museum?

http://phys.org/news165555744.html

Exerpt:

For a group of paleontologists, a tour of the Creation Museum seemed like a great tongue-in-cheek way to cap off a serious conference.

But while there were a few laughs and some clowning for the camera, most left more offended than amused by the frightening way in which evolution -- and their life's work -- was attacked.

[Prinz_Karl]

My opinion to this: Of course evolutionary theorie is absolutely correct and logical, anyone denying it doesn't want to look it up closely or is ignorant. But this doesn't give you the right to put the Bible away as trash. The bible is no science book after all but a spritual/moral book. By the way there are many priests who also believe in evolutionary theorie.

Yeah I'm kind of offtopic I realised but anyway.

[Ninja_Khorin]

No, I'd never throw away a book in the trash.

However, that doesn't mean I won't disagree with a huge part of the book, even when it comes down to morality.

Anyway, Bertrand Russel is one of my favourites. He's an agnostic atheist and one I mostly agree with. If you're interested in his views:

Here's his message to us:

(click to show/hide)

And here's a lecture on why wasn't a Christian:

(click to show/hide)

[BASNAK]

I watched both the 30 minute speeches and some rebutals etc. I have to say that the Australian guy (even tho I dont agree with him) was much better at speaking and conveying his message. It pretty much looked like the creationists had prepared for a very long time. Bill Nye also did a good job but he was not as good at being pedagogical. His evidence wrecked the creationists however. Maybe he didn't prepare as much as the creationists.

If you're a person with little knowledge in Science you wouldn't understand much of what Bill Nye was trying to convey, and understand more from the Australian guy. Like when speaking about the icecores drilled from Antarctica that are 800.000 years old the Australian guy clearly didn't understand jackshit  about how it works (but acting like he knows), and Bill Nye didn't really explain how it does either.  Just that it's evidence. The huge layers of glacier ice show clear layerborders inbetween summer and winter, and you can count backwards in time (summer + winter = 1 year) layer for layer back to approx 800.000 years  and also measure the atmosphere by looking at the gas bubbles stuck in there.

[CrazyCracka420]

I'm not saying the bible is trash, I'm wondering how you know that the words in the bible are "the word of God"?  It seems amazing to me that some people can channel the words of God into writing, and even more miraculous that someone came along and correctly compiled the writings of people who channeled the word of God into text.  How do you know there are no false prophets in the bible (or that all are false prophets)? 

Good thing those people who put the bible together didn't accidentally get the writings from a lunatic who claimed to be speaking the word of God.   Like David Koresh, or Jim Jones, Sun Myung Moon or Marshall Applewhite.

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

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

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Myung_Moon <---(they leave out the part about having sex with him to cleanse your body and soul)

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

[Xant]

My opinion to this: Of course evolutionary theorie is absolutely correct and logical, anyone denying it doesn't want to look it up closely or is ignorant. But this doesn't give you the right to put the Bible away as trash. The bible is no science book after all but a spritual/moral book. By the way there are many priests who also believe in evolutionary theorie.

Yeah I'm kind of offtopic I realised but anyway.

The Bible is about as good a moral book as Mein Kampf. Seriously.

[Turkhammer]

What do you think?  It was on the internets, nobody wins.

[Swaggart]

No, I'd never throw away a book in the trash.

I never understood this line of thought. We are not living in the 11th century where only a handful of books exist and even fewer with the ability to read them. Any crackhead can get a computer, a printer and make a book - they're about as special these days (especially with digital media) as the hairs on my chode.

[Xant]

http://lesswrong.com/lw/kq/fake_justification/

[CrazyCracka420]

Cool website (lesswrong.com) never been there before (because I've never been wrong) 

[Sir_Hans]

All Ken Ham did was show a few videos of PHD scientists who agree with him and then point to the bible for the rest of the debate.

Bill Nye brought fourth scientific evidence and Ken Ham rebuttles with "The Bible is the most foolproof evidence in the history of mankind". That's pretty much the entire debate in one sentence.

I still need to finish watching the last half hour to hour or so, but I don't know if I will. As far as debates go, it's not really interesting when one side just points to the bible and says that is the proof, every step of the way. But I guess that's what I should expect from the president of that ridiculous museum.

Thought I will say, It would probably be pretty entertaining to get high as fuck and go through that museum with a few friends just for the constant lols.



I do think it's funny how some of the religious think it is completely absurd that matter was always around (pre-big bang) and that nothing created it. But then they go on to believe that God has always been around and nothing created him.