Ham's argument seemed to be that since he could find a group of scientists who believed the world was created, that his version of creationism was somehow true. Despite all of them believing that God created the world, I doubt that many of them have such extreme views as he does. I doubt that most of those people believe that the world is 6,000 years old, and that the story of Noah's ark is factual. If you are a Christian, you have to believe that the world and the creatures in it are created for a purpose, not a result of the operations of blind chance. You must believe that you were specifically created by God. That is an essential part of the faith. Belief in God as a father. Otherwise God would be a stranger to you. It is a difficult problem for a rational and scientifically literate Christian to solve. Most people fudge it by simply ignoring it.
I beleive that it is possible that the universe was created just 5 minutes ago, with everything set in motion to make it look like it is billions of years old, memories for all of us to think there was a past more the 5 minutes ago, etc, all by our true god, Bruce Lee. You see Cthulu destroy reality some times ago, or the time before this time, but Bruce Lee came along and kicked his ass with a tripled round house kick to cthullu spongy head, Bruce then reformed a replicate of the reality before the rise of cthulu via Bruce's infallible awesomeness alone. It all here in what I title "Chuck Noris's bible: humble prophet of the almight Bruce" As a scientist I can tell you that this is how it happened... possibly... well it impossible to say it did not! it better then the christian's bible, in that we have no explanation why their god of aberham would create a 6000 year old reality and make it look like it way other and also make it look like nothing specific in genesis happened. I heard them cay lucifer did that, but why would this all powerful god let lucifer do this, oh because he wants to test us, send us to hell for all eternity if we don't beleive and follow him, what a fucking dick! Bruce Lee has no hell, Bruce Lee demands no followers, in fact he wants none and has made sure to leave no trace of how turely awesome he is, Bruce Lee is a better god then aberham's god, and Chuck Norse could totally throat stomp Jesus, Mohamed and Moses! Mind you that is my compeltely scientific opinion.
That and his notion of two types of sciences, "historical and observational" as he called them. O and don't forget his skepticism on carbon dating, fossil records, the scientific method, Physics, astronomy, biology, the tree of life, Noah being a MASTER ship builder!, living trees that Nye brought up that predate Ham's age of the earth lol... etc etc...
Time.com had this to say: What You Missed While Not Watching the Bill Nye and Ken Ham Creation Debate which I found sounded rather insolent. I could never give an unbiased opinion of such a debate. The Christian's arguments turn my stomach *barf*. That said, I really wish Nye would stop appealing to Nationhood on why 'we' (Americans) are going to be left behind blah blah blah..... no one in Science thinks like that. Well, I suppose I have met some Japanese who think a little like that, but not most American, English or European scientists. Science is about discovering empirical truths which have nothing to do with individual nations. Anyway, I'm not sure how your typical Christian would have thought of the debate, but we'll call the win for Nye. Lucky for him this Ham fellow is an idiot.
Yes, true, but my only point was that a professional Christian apologist will not 'lose' a debate like this. If they thought there were fundamental problems with Godel's axioms then they'd never bring them up. BUT, you can bet they'd understand the arguments in case you brought them up. The pro's are good. Lucky for Nye, Ham was an idiot Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! Unlucky for us, now this Ham has made a household name for himself as 'if' his idiotic ideas were even worth of a debate - which they obviously were not. He actually 'won' in his own way. I'm sure other Christians will think "Ham's bringing the fight to them" and give this dumb-arse even more monetary support. As an aside, I find that interesting the debate you described. It's been something like 20 years since I used to participate in formal debates. I can barely remember that I had debate let alone what we debated.... Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! I don't think they were that good if I can barely remember them.
I don't see why I'd even need to make any mention of Godel's "proof" in the first place, unless I was playing Devil's advocate and arguing for the theists. There's a story that Godel announced to the judge at his own US citizenship hearing that he could prove the US President was illegitimate or some such, and his buddy Einstein had to personally shut him up. Again though, if the theists were to attempt to bring Godel's work into the discussion, I think a skilled and knowledgeable opponent could tie them up in their own red tape. In the end I don't think it would matter though, because I don't believe deeply-held fundamental opinions change in a flash, and these debates only serve to plant a seed of doubt in the minds of those who believe they hold an irrefutable position. I haven't watched the debate yet (and not sure if I ever will, in all honesty), but the way you describe it reminds me of an old debate between Kent Hovind (a fundamentalist creationist nut operating a Flintstones-style dino Bible theme park) and Michael Shermer (at the time, chief editor of Skeptic magazine). It didn't look to me like a single person in the room changed their opinion from whatever it was at the start. Hovind gained some fame and notoriety for himself back when Bush Jr. was contemplating allowing teachers to preach the Bible in biology class, but he ultimately proved his own undoing in the end because he held himself above the laws of Man and got thrown in prison for repeatedly refusing to pay a penny in taxes for his political causes. There's an embarassing phone call of him speaking to his wife on the phone from prison that somehow leaked onto the web, not exactly Mel Gibson meltdown material but enough to pretty much shatter his public aura. Guy was a circus sideshow from the start, his biggest claim to credibility was that he had "taught high school science" (without any formal record of such), what made him big was simply his ability to express an opinion already held by a great number of hillbillies and other backwater trash. What should one expect from this particular debate anyhow? Bill Nye's a TV personality who popularizes science, I don't know of any journal publications or research prizes attached to his name. Not saying the guy's an idiot or not worth listening to, but all the same, what makes his opinions more valid or important than your everyday high school physics teacher? Society is far too fixated on personalities and who said what rather than just focussing on ideas and allowing ourselves the freedom to reach our own conclusions. Like I said, I just found it far too anal for my liking. I did have fun on one occasion acting as a judge when I basically had to tell a girl on one side to shut up after exceeding her time limit (in a polite, official way), she was probably thinking I'm a mean bastard stacking the whole debate against her, and then at the end I awarded her the victory anyhow because of a single errant sentence uttered by her opponent. I don't see this level of rigidity in most of the debates I watch especially regarding religion- the audience and debaters frequently try to shout over each other and interrupt each other, and they're still able to maintain a sufficient level of self-control to make it a functional debate, knowing there's no point in wasting their valuable time by showing up to a shouting match. I think the most rigid of "formal debates" should be restricted to those rare topics such as "be it resolved that this man standing here should leave this room today hanging from a noose".
Bill should have simply put this photo up on the board ... Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! ...and explained that these are single chromosomes from humans, chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans arraigned side by side. Each Chromosome is one of a pair, Humans have 46 Chromosomes, the rest all have 48. The group in the middle is chromosome 2 in humans, 2p and 2q in the rest. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! This is what happened. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! Man and ape are two twigs on the same branch on the tree of life. And then sat down. Grumpy
No evidence what so ever will ever break through the impenetrable wall of delusion that is the creationist.
What always amuses me (in a tragic way), is the claim by theists that because science "admittedly" only can ever reach "99.999% certainty" from known evidence, the remaining ".001% possibility" of a mythological sentient creator, set forth in a book written by local "wise men" (a few thousand years ago), MUST be the correct answer. I am truly amazed and amused by the assertion that all living things were created after their own kind, perhaps 5 to 7 kinds from which all later species evolved. I was so disappointed that Nye did not correct Ham on that point, but cited that 11 new species would have to be created each day to account for the variety (speciation) in "kinds", which IMHO was a weak argument. The proper argument here is: All living things evolved from ONE single kind. A single celled organism that had the ability to duplicate itself and use energy from its environment to sustain its living state and reproduce. This is the starting point of the evolutionary process and proves we are all of the same ancestor kind speciated into the complexity we can observe today. And that would predictably take a few hundred million years, as is being confirmed over and over by science. The YE notion evolving and speciating is physically impossible, in view that about 80+% of all species that have ever lived on earth are now extinct. The OT is not wrong in its simplicity of the creation account of a few kinds, but it is wrong in its assumption of "irreducible complexity" of the simultaneous creation of several kinds. This assumption of irreducible complexity (after his kind) was debunked in the Kitzmiller vs Dover Trial. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K_HVrjKcvrU
Ham would appear to be about as professional a Creationist apologist as you're likely to find. He runs the Creation Museum for the Answers In Genesis group of creationists, doesn't he? He may not be a seasoned debater, though, and maybe that was your point. Apparently William Lane Craig is supposed to be a good creationist debater, but I've never directly looked at anything he has done. Most creationists don't understand science well enough to acquit themselves reasonably in any debate with somebody who understands the theory of evolution, the scientific method, something about geology and so on.
I'm actually just finishing watching the debate, and surprisingly it does indeed remind me a lot of the old Shermer-Hovind debate, although this Kenneth Ham guy comes across as far less arrogant and brash than Hovind. Hovind was the kind of guy I could picture at the front of the unwashed masses chanting for the "witch" to be burned, back in the days when that was how things were done; just an opinionated drunk minus the alcohol. I think Nye does a pretty sound job of stating the general scientific case, would have been interesting to see how he'd handle the Godel argument or some other attempted "logical" segue. At the end of the day, science can never crush religion and doesn't need to- if you want to believe the laws of the universe were different back in the old days and magical things happened just for the heck of it, no one can really stop you or prove your folly, other than pointing out the total lack of practical applications and testable predictions coming from religion.
Witches are being burned. They are being burned in poor countries, under the influence of extreme evangelical churches. Here is a witch fire in Papua New Guinea, in which a young mother was burned alive. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/02/07/new-guinea-woman-tortured-burned-alive-in-sorcery-case/ As with stonings and beheadings, people treat these kind of events as entertainment.
To my understanding "theists" generally do not make the claim you ascribe to them. The core of most religion, certainly Christianity, is emphatically not an alternative account of how the physical world came to be the way it is. Christianity is essentially a guide to living your life, based on the teaching and example of Christ, as described in the New (not Old) Testament. The theists I know do not claim to be infallible. If they thought they were dealing with certainty, they would not speak about "faith", as opposed to demonstrable fact. Like you, I find the arguments of creationism to be at best ignorant or deluded, and at worst, dishonest. But most Christians are not creationists, certainly not those belonging to the mainstream denominations.
Ok this might be a bit off topic, but I do feel the need to comment here. Your post reminds me of a clip I saw on Youtube not so long ago of "witches" being tortured and burnt to death somewhere in Africa, I think it was in rural Kenya or thereabouts. Yeah it's very frightening that stuff like this still occurs in some parts of the world, amongst all the other brutal realities humans are dealing with every day. In the video I watched, the most shocking thing for me was how the victims weren't even flinching or responding, just sitting there curled up into balls and taking it. Such a lack of response to the beating and burning must have convinced the villagers that these people really were witches, whereas my impulse was to wonder just how horribly broken they were that they didn't even have the reflexive strength to react every time someone would kick them in the back or spread the fires to other parts of their bodies and clothes as they slowly burnt.
Excellent presentation! This was indeed a specific kind of "chromosomal anomaly" which happened to work out OK -- out of the countless ways anomalies can go very, very bad. Nothing in the process of cell division is 100% reliable, otherwise all life would be confined to something more primitive than Euglena. One of the very curious aspects of the real creation story is that random processes are favorable to diversity, therefore natural selection prefers those macromolecules which can hold together enough essential genes to ensure more continuity in the gross traits of the phenotype while guaranteeing that successive generations are not mere clones of the parents. Sexual reproduction came fairly late in all of the primordial stages of evolution, as an exploit that rides on top of the diversity due to mutations -- which highly optimizes the result across populations by ensuring that even local variations within small groups will be further randomized. Otherwise, all of life would be constrained to the forms that reproduce exclusively by asexual budding, spores and mitosis. The key fact is that life is immersed in processes which are random, as is all of the real world in general. The fundies simply can't deal with this concept, even when they've been spoonfed reasonable doses of science in the same schools the rest of us attended. I found Ken Ham to be far too presumptuous and manipulative. I could only sit through the first few minutes of his opening remarks before he played all the cards played by the worst of anti-science cranks seen here and everywhere else. Who knows how he would respond to this key fact you raise, about the fusion of ape chromosome pair into the singe human chromosome #2 ? No doubt it would involve trotting out all of the same styrofoam that holds up his fantasy museum and all of the rest of his propaganda ventures.
While this is true, many of those that are creationists are very vocal. It would be nice to see the mainstream denominations standing up to them and telling them to get a clue.
The Pope himself could have stood in for Bill Nye and made all the exact same arguments simply based on the Vatican's very practical, modern scientific doctrine. That would be a nice day to witness, just watching all the rational people of the world putting their emotional beliefs aside and uniting over basic matters of common sense.
What are you talking about? This is crazy. Mainstream doesn't have a clue. Their fairy tales pave the way for extremists. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! Atheism is still a taboo in the United States. You’re living in a fucking bubble if you don’t think it is. And you know what; all these irrational beliefs do have an effect on our effectiveness. Go ahead, ask around. Ask people if they believe in gods, ghosts, astrology, psychics, etc., most of them do. Do you know how many times I've been hushed, even in here? At times, I want to scream, "WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU PEOPLE?" We live in a country where we are kowtowing to irrational beliefs. I’m sorry, but this whole "LIVE AND LET LIVE" shit ...just isn't working. Whether you like it or not, it is still freedom of religion, not freedom from. "Merely being present at a military ceremony or event where a military chaplain says a solemnizing prayer, however, does not violate the First Amendment, since no person is being compelled or pressured to assent to any belief, no person is being asked to participate in religious worship, and no person is being asked to engage in a religious act." *ahem-ahem* Bullshit! They are told to bow their fucking heads. Go to church or clean the barracks. Google it, if you don't believe me. Prayer and Religion in the Military Spoiler No official in the US government or armed forces—regardless of rank or station—has the right to compel or pressure any other person (1) to assent to any specific philosophy or religious belief or creed, (2) to participate in a religious worship service (such as forcing someone to attend a chapel worship service—unless that person is on duty, for example, serving as a member of an honor guard or a color guard at a funeral or other ceremony), or (3) to engage in a religious act (even so simple an act as being asked to join hands with others when a short prayer of blessing is said over a Thanksgiving or Christmas meal in the military dining facility). Merely being present at a military ceremony or event where a military chaplain says a solemnizing prayer, however, does not violate the First Amendment, since no person is being compelled or pressured to assent to any belief, no person is being asked to participate in religious worship, and no person is being asked to engage in a religious act. Likewise, no official in the US Government or armed forces—regardless of rank or station—has the right to compel or pressure a chaplain (or any other person, such as a lay religious leader on a naval vessel or someone else asked to pray) to pray in any particular manner. Instead, the chaplain or other person should be free to follow his conscience and the traditions of his specific faith group and to pray as he deems appropriate in the circumstances. Allowing a person to pray as he desires does not violate the establishment clause, whereas directing how he prays or pressuring him to pray in a certain way does violate the establishment clause. See Lee v. Weisman, 505 U.S. at 588–89 (noting that it is inappropriate for a government official to tell a member of the clergy how to pray). http://aclj.org/military-rights/prayer-and-religion-in-the-military Superstitions & Irrational Beliefs.pdf
