Creationists PWNED

[Boris Godunov]

Originally posted by trev

To the best of my knowledge, no local flood has left even 100 feet of sedimentation in a small area in historical times, let alone coal seams etc, so how do you think that a local flood can leave the sedimentation and coal seams of the Latrobe valley, where there is a 1000 feet plus of coal seams and sedimentation over a large area, so do not keep invoking local floods for things local floods have never been observed doing.

The Latrobe valley is a major flooding zone, so it's not one flood we're talking about, but literally hundreds of thousands of floods. The coal in the deposit has been dated 45 million years old and older. There's plenty of time, over tens if not hundreds of millions of years, to get a coal accumulation as such in a basin like Latrobe.

Now, ask a geologist...do the sediment patterns in Latrobe indicate a gradual layering over millions of years, or one giant heap of a deposit? I can guarantee you the answer is the former.

Now, explain why, if a huge flood happened and killed almost everything on earth, the fossils are sorted in layers with the largest on top and the smallest on the bottom? Common sense dictates that when corpses of drowned animals were settling, the larger ones would settle deeper. So the tiny trilobytes should be on top and the big dinosaurs on the bottom.

But instead we see the opposite in the fossil record. Big animals on top, smaller and smaller ones further down. And before you go proposing the childish "they were running for higher ground" scenario, keep in mind the same is true for plant fossils. I doubt plants were running for higher ground.

[Last Conformist]

Originally posted by trev
No one has yet presented any arguments against my meteorology reasoning and methoology

How about the little matter than rain falls at sea, where there isn't any mountains around?

This supports my argument, as near death experiences are associated with changes in electrical activity in the brain, ie a decrease in activity, or near or actual cessation of electrical activity for a period of time.

Don't be stupid. All experiences are associated with changes in electrical activity in the brain, not to mention that the electrical stimulation increases activity rather than decrease it.

But any experimentation designed to separate soul/spirit from the body is inherently dangerous and should be discouraged.

It may comfort you to know that the out-of-body results were quite accidental - the stimulation was undertaken something quite else.

[beingofone]

BlackCat

Please give some references to this and don't be shy to give references to physical books if there are no web links.

Whaleboy

You cannot seriously be suggesting that you believe in the biblical account of Noahs flood, and that it was the cause, or related to the cause of all the geology we see before us? . If so, seek help.

and frankly I think when you're deluded to this extent you really should seek psychiatric attention and a couple of elementary science courses.

As for memory and issues of consciousness, you demonstrate that you're not aware of neuroscience, psychology or philosophy.

MRT144

whaleboy, dont you realize that most people from australia and new zealand are generally ignorant about everything other than dingos?

Last Conformist

You should take a chat with some real bible scholars some day.

Boris Godunov

Good grief, trev... could you possibly be this naive?

Your suggestions are laughable in that they contain not a clue about true geology.

And the purpose of listing all these quotes


Boris Godunov

Fine. I gave you three examples of scientific inaccuracies in the Bible. Instead of answering, you post the childish dodge ahead which is nothing but an appeal to "authority."

My post was not a game of one upmanship. You can have opinions about any subject. Many people have no formal education and yet are deserving of being listened to with respect.

The point I was making is with all these posts it appeared to me this appeal to "authority" was being demanded, especially from Trev. Now I can understand if you doubt my claim especially with my spelling at times. (an anomally).

I also decide to challenge the bold statements made that the scripture has no value at all. That is just ignorance and I issued a claim and challenge on that point.

So feel free to utilize your expertise in these languages to tell me how it doesn't really say that rabbits shew their cud, bats are birds or insects have 4 legs. I'm rapt with eagerness.

Cud - gerah Hebrew - to scrape or massage the throat as in chewing any partially digested food .
This word is used nowhere in the Old Testament besides these verses in Leviticus and Deuteronomy. We have only this context to help us decide what it means in terms of the Mosaic law.


Eating habits of the hare - Three to eight hours after eating, and thus mainly at night, soft, mucus-covered caecal pellets are expelled and eaten directly from the anus (a process known as caecotrophy, coprophagy, refection, or pseudorumination). Arrival of the caecotrophs at the anus triggers a reflex licking of the anus and ingestion of the caecotrophs, which are swallowed whole and not chewed.
It is not just "dung" that the rabbits are eating, which is probably why the Hebrew word for "dung" was not used here.
The writer was using word association.

Maybe this is why it was outlawed in Lev 11 and communicated in a way that made sense to the listeners?
"Those Wascally Wabbits" - Elmer Fudd

Bats - You are suggesting that the writers in the scripture knew the phylums as a means of classification .Linnaeus was not born untill the early 1700`s. Perhaps they had another way of classifying species then we do?

4 legged insects- George Orwell's Animal Farm. In this story, Snowball the pig invented the slogan, "Four legs good, two legs bad" so as to exclude humans from Animal Farm society. The geese and other fowl objected, because they had only two legs. Snowball explained (more clearly in the book than in the movie) that in animal terms, the birds' wings counted as legs because they were limbs of propulsion, not manipulation, as a human's arms and hands were.

You are trying to pick fly dung out of pepper.

Immortal Wombat

If the soul is disconnected from the body, (and therefore the eyes), how does it see? Surely a discorporeal experience would be one of utter sensory deprivation?

Hey thats our question not yours

Giancarlo

The bible is inadequate and has been proven to be wrong numerous times including with accounts related to the great flood. You speak of a perfect record of predicting future events? Wrong again. The bible is a stupid book and this son of god stuff, won't get you too far.

Urban Ranger

The bible contradicts itself, let alone laws of nature.

At any rate, seeing that people have been tranlating the bible for hundreds of years, is there any reason to believe that they aren't doing a good job?

Again - it is a language barrier more than anything else.
There is an American Indian word called "destarte". It means "good morning". But that is not really all of the meaning nor precise.
It also means it smells good this morning.
I feel good this morning.
It is a beautiful morning.
The birds are singing this morning.
Creation is happy this morning etc.

Hebrew in general is an emotional language, Greek tries to be logical.

Immortal Wombat

Start counting integers and tell me when you reach God.

EXCELLENT STATEMENT - I mean that.
A singularity - that would be my counscious awareness of reality
ie. life. I just found God.

Perhaps you could explain yours? Simply "God made it so" is no different from me saying "those things we call life invented mirrors and saw that they existed"

I AM
I am the universe
I am reality
I am life


Boris Godunov

Likewise, today we may not "know" the exact cause of abiogenesis (though there are some pretty solid theories), but someday we could. Would life's miracle so easily be rendered mundane in that case?
But I wonder--if an event surpasses all "natural knowledge and powers," just how would you test for it?

And how do you know life meets this definition?

Do you value and cherish your existence? You must because you are still here. Sounds very close to worship . Why do you value your life so much?
There are volumes of books written on this subject and we are still scratching our wooden heads.
Could it be you are the meaning to all existence?

If we understand our own existence the seeming miraculous works of Jesus might not seem so extraordinary. In other words perhaps we have not yet fully "evolved" to understanding counscious awareness in its full cabability.

Urk. The plurality of god wasn't even an issue! Reread it carefully. It's about the distinction between having no belief in god and believing there is no god. Do you not see the difference?

I thought that was agnosticism.

Indeed. What was the point? I didn't see any mention of ID or god there.

Some conclusions were that consciousness either effects reality or creates it. If a tree falls in the forest question.

Would any of them possess magical powers?

As you stated and I agree, with proper study and thought it could be explained. Same holds true for God.
Maybe you have been looking in the wrong place for proof. Perhaps he is the substance of your very being ie. life.

Well, if so...duuuuuh!

Hey you started it.

Urban Ranger

That's basic. Anybody who is self-aware can tell the difference between individuals

How do you know I am experiencing life and reality except it is a subjective conclusion on your part? There is only one thing you know for sure and that is that you and your experiences are real. Everything else is a subjective conclusion. There is only one reality that you can experience and that is yours.

Relativity treats time and space as part of a four diminsional system, called spacetime. However spacetime is not rigid.

Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle does not state that it is impossible to place any object in this coordinate system with arbitrary precision. It merely states that one cannot measure position and momentum with arbitrary precision at the same time.

Doesnt it take position and momentum to place an object within a cooridinate system?

[trev]

Don't be stupid. All experiences are associated with changes in electrical activity in the brain, not to mention that the electrical stimulation increases activity rather than decrease it.

Erratic brain activity I understand can also lead to out of body experiences, the sort generated by halluncingenic drugs, so any abnormal electrical activity seems to sometimes lead to the separation of soul/spirit, whether it is an increase in stimulation of certain areas, decrease due to near death,or erratic activity due to drugs. Some pschics/mediums would say they can achieve this also. But the main issue is that there is no better solution to the question about what an out of body experience is than that it is the separation of soul/spirit from body, because many of these experiences involve an entity 'seeing', 'hearing' etc from a perspective outside of the body

[Immortal Wombat]

Originally posted by beingofone
Immortal Wombat

Hey thats our question not yours

So you conceded the Bible doesn't actually explain out-of-body experiences then?

Immortal Wombat

EXCELLENT STATEMENT - I mean that.
A singularity - that would be my counscious awareness of reality
ie. life. I just found God.

Thankyou. I'm afraid I don't understand your response though.

[BlackCat]

Originally posted by beingofone
BlackCat

quote:
Please give some references to this and don't be shy to give references to physical books if there are no web links.

And the purpose of listing all these quotes

My post was not a game of one upmanship. You can have opinions about any subject. Many people have no formal education and yet are deserving of being listened to with respect.

The point I was making is with all these posts it appeared to me this appeal to "authority" was being demanded, especially from Trev. Now I can understand if you doubt my claim especially with my spelling at times. (an anomally).

I also decide to challenge the bold statements made that the scripture has no value at all. That is just ignorance and I issued a claim and challenge on that point.

Anyone may as you say have an opinion about any given subject, but if anyone states something like :

Originally posted by trev

There are instances of people in scientific literature who have some measure of sight even when the optic nerve is severed totally...

then I can't see anything wrong in asking for documentation - science has a habit to do such things. Actually Trev gave an answer to my request :

Originally posted by trev
I cannot give any scientific reference to claims of sight without eyes, but I often go down to the local library and read mainly 'New Scientist' but also others. Most likely it was read as a brief report in the New Scientist possibly about 2 years ago but that is a best guess of mine only.

wich of course is fair enough if it is common knowledge, but if I'm not wrong, then it is not common knowledge that people without eyecapacity can see. It is not my job to find documentation for Trev's claims, that's his job, and if he can't deliver I'm certainly allowed to belive that his claims is rubbish.

I don't care if you can spell correct or not, I actually have tree colleagues whom are wordblind (dyslexic ?), and I don't doubt their cababilities. What I look at is the content of your statements. Especially if you claim that the content of the bible should be taken as pure truth, not based upon facts, but on belief. That I won't accept, and again, it's your job to prove it, not mine.

[Urban Ranger]

Originally posted by Whaleboy
UR: I can't believe he said it either. How can we take someone seriously if they attempt to talk about cosmology, with such a blatently wrong understanding of basic special relativity?

From my long, uh, dealings with Creationists, it appears that a lot of them love to throw what appears to be specialised scientific knowledge at their opponents.

I admit it's a good trick, because if their opponents lack such knowledge, they can't counter. With the advent of the Web, we evolutionists gain a powerful tool, because we now can find real scientific knowledge on the Web.

In the long run, we will become more knowledgable, while Creationists are still stuck with their old bag of tricks.

[Urban Ranger]

Originally posted by Boris Godunov
So a "loss of information," as it were, seems capable of leading to beneficial evolutionary changes. Who would have thought? (okay, evolutionary biologists would have...)

[threadjack]
I particularly like this quote from the original Carl Zimmer article

Perhaps Neu5Gc limited brain expansion in other mammals, but once it was gone from our ancestors, our brains exploded.

[/threadjack]

[DarkCloud]

Beingofone

DarkCloud
quote:

And it's even more ridiculous when one considers that there could very possibly be an infinite number of universes and that thus, there are an infinite number of chances for an universe such as our own to have possibly arisen, even WITHOUT aid from a Divine Source.



An "infinite" hmm - sounds close to the definition of God. Infinite concepts are reserved for the supernatural by its very definition.

ONE- An infinite concept doesn't need a god- if there are no laws of physics, no one knows what could have happened.

TWO- Your definition of Deity seems to have loosened here. I mean, one coudl make the argument that the atom which exploded in the big bang is the Creator... but does it have sentience? Can it actively and thinkingly change the world- I think not- it is bound by its own laws of physics within the world.

THREE- or perhaps you define the Deity as the thing causing the movement of matter that formed the universe... from outside, where it is NOT bound by the laws of physics- okay, well then, is the thing a thinking deity? Does it interfere in the world? Can that be proved? I think not. Indeed, it presumes more on a person to believe that a THINKING Deity takes INTEREST IN A WORLD IT CREATED than either a: UNSENTIENT CREATOR accidentally created thing... or b: SCIENTIFIC EVENT randomly occured.

It's much simpler to presume the less-involved data.

quote:
Just becasue something is very unlikely to have happened doesn't mean that God needs to have created it as such.


You mean like the resurrection of Jesus is just as unlikely as you existing as a cogent human?

Actually, it's even moreso unlikely since it violates the known laws of physics WITHIN the world and there is very little evidence that on the macro-scale that the known laws of physics are violated.

on the subatomic scale- it becomes evident that science has yet to design a "Theory of Everything", a "Grand Unified theory" however, on issues such as everyday mass/body relations on a human-scale- ressurection would be wholly impossible without breakage of the laws of physics.

That being said- it IS allegedly possible for the quantum foam to shift aside minutely enough so that a man could put his arm through a wall... though as far as is known- that has NEVER happened.

I will admit, the entire laws of physics are not yet known- and as such I do not deny that Jesus COULD HAVE been resurrected, but I sincerely DOUBT that, with the tenuous evidence we have that he ACTUALLY DID.

As such I argue that the spontaneous creation of the universe without a "thinking, rational, acting" god could very well have happened.

[Proteus_MST]

Originally posted by BlackCat

wich of course is fair enough if it is common knowledge, but if I'm not wrong, then it is not common knowledge that people without eyecapacity can see. It is not my job to find documentation for Trev's claims, that's his job, and if he can't deliver I'm certainly allowed to belive that his claims is rubbish.

I don't care if you can spell correct or not, I actually have tree colleagues whom are wordblind (dyslexic ?), and I don't doubt their cababilities. What I look at is the content of your statements. Especially if you claim that the content of the bible should be taken as pure truth, not based upon facts, but on belief. That I won't accept, and again, it's your job to prove it, not mine.

The only thing I could imagine trev could mean is a phenomenon called "blindsight"
In this phenomenon higher brain-centres for visual are severed and the patients believe they are blind.
But if you test them for example by telling them to "grab the pencil" they do it, although they claim they can´t see it.
But it has nothing to do with a seeing soul but rather with the fact that, despite the higher braincentres of visual perception in those patients being destroyed, the lower centres along the visual pathway are still intact.

[Urban Ranger]

Speaking of memory, there just happens to be an article in the latest Scientific American on it.

Be careful what you wish for

[Last Conformist]

trev:
EXCELLENT STATEMENT - I mean that.
A singularity - that would be my counscious awareness of reality
ie. life. I just found God.

It's extremely unclear what you're trying to say here, but if you are saying that, yes, you equate God with infinity, I am forced to conclude you are neither Christian nor sane.

Erratic brain activity I understand can also lead to out of body experiences, the sort generated by halluncingenic drugs, so any abnormal electrical activity seems to sometimes lead to the separation of soul/spirit, whether it is an increase in stimulation of certain areas, decrease due to near death,or erratic activity due to drugs. Some pschics/mediums would say they can achieve this also. But the main issue is that there is no better solution to the question about what an out of body experience is than that it is the separation of soul/spirit from body, because many of these experiences involve an entity 'seeing', 'hearing' etc from a perspective outside of the body

You've yet to convince me that such people are seeing or hearing anything from a perspective outside the body (as opposed to only thinking they do so).

Neither have you answered the obvious question why do we have eyes if the soul can see without them.

[Urban Ranger]

Originally posted by beingofone
Again - it is a language barrier more than anything else.

It seems implausible that such difficulties created such contradictions such as two versions of Creation and several versions of the Resurrection.

Originally posted by beingofone
I thought that was agnosticism.

Agnosticism is "I don't know." More precisely, agnostics hold that there is not enough information to decide one way or the other.

Originally posted by beingofone
How do you know I am experiencing life and reality except it is a subjective conclusion on your part?

Please re-read my statement you quoted, and explain to me how your counter carries any force.

Originally posted by beingofone
There is only one thing you know for sure and that is that you and your experiences are real.

Is this your subjective conclusion? How does it apply to me, then?

Originally posted by beingofone
Doesnt it take position and momentum to place an object within a cooridinate system?

No. To place is to give a location. You don't need to worry about momentum.

[Proteus_MST]

Originally posted by Urban Ranger

No. To place is to give a location. You don't need to worry about momentum.

Jep,
momentum is just needed to calculate where an object with a known Location will be (or was) at a time t

Which is the reason that you will never be able to build a computer which calculates the future,
as, according to Heisenb ergs uncertainty Relation, for very small particles (the size of an electron and smaller) you are either be able to calculate the position with a high precision or the momentum, but not both at the same time (as the measurement of position alters the momentum of the particle to a great extent [and on the other hand the measurement of momentum without at the same time altering it to a large degree gives only few informations about its position])

[trev]

Speaking of memory, there just happens to be an article in the latest Scientific American on it.

The incredible complexity of actions involved in short term memories and converting that memory to long term memory to me is extremely suggestive of an intelligent designer, it seems inconceivable that all the action sequences mentioned in the Scientific American article could have occurred through the random acts of evolution, the presence of a master designer is much more likely. Try to think logically about how such a system could have evolved and the answer will be - This could not have evolved by accident.

The only thing I could imagine trev could mean is a phenomenon called "blindsight"

My memory of the article I read is of a patient where the optic nerves were totally severed, and therefore no connection between eye and brain, but the patient had some 'sight'. This sight was deficient, ie may have been limited to light/dark differentiation, or black/white colours, not sure exactly what, if I get the chance I will try to locate source, but may not be able to do that in a timeframe appropiate to this thread