Bill Nye vs. Ken Ham

Mikey you aren't stupid but your prejudice and lack of thought do make your conclusions unreliable, to say the least. And that's the case with your judgement of Faiths arguments.Now you certainly didn't have to boast of your cleverness to encourage Faith, and really I don't think she should be encouraged to make foolish claims, like the idea that some sort of mechanical sorting is a viable explanation of the order of the fossil record. If only for her own sake.As for your response it is notable that you try to obscure the fact that DevilsAdvocate was responding to your false boasting. It's not as if you offered any evidence to support your claims is it ?So your claim of ad hominem is invalid. You made yourself the subject of argument by boasting of your cleverness (not mentioning that you've been caught making bad arguments - and I feel that has rather more to do with your retreat from this forum than you'd be prepared to admit).

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And largely that's why I urge clever creationists like Faith to not hang around these parts too long, because if they do, they will soon realize that they are expending exponential energy fighting against an angry mob.

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When it comes to anger and abuse Faith is more one to dish it out. Indeed, she is known to try to bully people into accepting her false assertions.If Faith had decent arguments and evidence she would do a lot better.Sadly, like you, she is too ruled by prejudice to tell good arguments from bad. Helping her to overcome that would be more useful to her cause than encouraging her to make a fool of herself.

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You STATED I have a lack of thought, and my conclusions are unreliable, you didn't show it. It's nothing more than an ad hominem remark.

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Which is a fact. And if you want evidence the fact that you ran away from defending your blog post with my criticisms unanswered rather helps to demonstrate the point.

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Secondly, I claimed Faith made some cogent points, which you incorrectly took to mean whatever you wanted it to mean. It did not mean what you thought it meant because you don't know what points I meant, given I never divulged the information.

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I guess that you can't remember your own post. You started with a quote which actually indicates that the evidence is a major problem for Faith's views and tried to suggest that it showed that YEC was on an equal level with mainstream science !

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I didn't try to obscure what you call, "false boasting", I actually shown that my reason to tell Faith I was cleverer than most here, was so that she could see that when I said she had cogent points, she could accept that judgement.

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So you boasted to try to give your claim credibility, thus making criticism of you a valid response. Then when DevilsAdvocate responded with such criticism your reply carefully omitted any evidence of your boasting and accused him of making an ad hominem argument.

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Another empty assertion. I haven't been "caught" making bad arguments, you have concluded I have made them, in your unworthy opinion. I don't accept your counter-offerings, because you didn't flesh them out, whereas I provided a whole blog entry.

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A very short blog entry. Which relied more on deception than reason. And which pointed to conclusions you wouldn't accept. And that's not including your past history here... I can dig up plenty of examples if you really want to get into it.

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Yet another empty, unproven assertion. Don't you notice the fact that you simply state these things?

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Some things are just that obvious.

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I've seen no evidence that you have any comprehension of what constitutes a good or bad argument given you seem to think that empty and opinionated assertions are sound syllogisms rather than sophistry.

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I guess that you must be ignoring my recent critique of your blog post which is exactly the sort of evidence you "haven't seen".

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That's the first statement you've made that has any backing. There you go, you can back up statements after all!!

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But of course I provided no more evidence for that than for statements you reject as unsupported assertions. That you like it is not "backing"

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I see that you have predictably used my post as an opportunistic assassination of Faith's character. This is transparent, and predictable of your style, you used to do this with Buzsaw if anyone chose to state something positive about his posts. It's a kind of indirect, passive agressive dig at the other Christian, you use my post to get to her.

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Actually it was serious suggestions for how Faith could be helped.
That you should dismiss them with such hostility rather shows how little interest you really have in helping Faith.

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People that argue well don't need to use such tactics so we can safely rule out your opinion as having any credence.

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You think that giving honest advice on how an opponent might be helped to become a better debater is a sign of weakness !But think about this Mikey. Is false pride really better than working to become good enough to have something worthy of pride ? Because that is where you are now, and I can only blame creationism for it. Faith is the same way. It's a sad waste of a human life.

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Something to do with the principles of hydraulic sorting.

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And Faith just demonstrates why my advice was good.No Faith, as others have pointed out, hydraulic sorting is not a viable explanation. Even at the simplest level, the fossils associated with each era have a huge range of shapes and sizes, quite the opposite if what we'd expect if hydraulic sorting were the issue.

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I just want to know what everybody means who keeps saying such transitionals are not found

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It seems pretty obvious to me. The animal remains found in archaeological digs aren't the transitionals we'd expect if your model were true.

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As I've been saying I wouldn't expect there to be such transitionals anyway, but I'd still like to know why you all expect them, what you think they'd look like, and what you DO find that ISN'T what you think they should look like.

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Well perhaps you should explain why you don't expect to find them, because they're a straightforward prediction of your idea of kinds radiating and rapidly evolving.Let's take a simplified version of your idea. A population of ark-cats splits off and eventually becomes the ancestors of modern lions.How does that happen ?If it happens by your version of evolution, where the non-lion traits get weeded out over a period of generations then anyone who observed the population would see them becoming progressively more lion-like. Any individual which could be seen to be lion-like but not a lion would be a candidate for a transitional, the more so since it should have characteristics particular to other cat species, not found in lions.In fact numerous transitionals should have existed in the period between the ark landing and the establishment of modern species, given your ideas. So it seems very odd that you are't expecting them to be found. Why not ?

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Hydraulic sortibng plus original location of the original creature, plus level of the currents in the ocean that carried them etc etc etc.

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And still not even plausible. Dinosaurs lived all over the world, had a huge range of sizes and shapes. Even the difference between Cretaceous and Jurassic dinosaurs is a problem for you. And when we add in the marine reptiles of those eras and the pterodactyls we really have to ask ourselves how they came to be restricted to a relatively narrow range of eras, with no modern mammals - none from the huge range of different mammals alive today - mixed in with them.Hydraulic sorting isn't any real help. Location isn't either. Ocean currents would really depend on location again so it isn't really distinct.I guess that Mikey really should have discouraged you from going this route - instead of encouraging it, as he did.

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I must have missed this. Where is it?

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And why are you talking about "blog posts?" Was some of this conversation you are referring to carried on somewhere else?

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Easy to summarise the first. I suggested that you needed better arguments and evidence and that you should learn to tell good arguments from bad.Mikey raises and links to his blog post in Message 48 You can see where the discussion went there.

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Well, it's really a narrow range of layers, not eras.

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I meant to write strata, there, so you're right. But it still needs explaining.

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It's just mammals that you notice are absent? What about creatures lower in the strata, none of them either? If no other animals are found with them in their layers that should be a hint that they aren't eras at all but locations where dinosaurs were buried

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Oh no, I didn't mention the amphibians because you would just argue that that was different locations (even though such a claim is hard to support). I guess that there is some distinctive land life from the Permian, though which is worthy of mention. And of course we find plenty of other life in layers with dinosaurs, birds, crocodiles, the first snakes even some mammals. Not to mention the sea life.

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Dinosaur beds often have the look of a bunch of them having been buried together in a massive mudslide.

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There may be some that are, but there are plenty of dinosaur fossils found in different places which definitely weren't.

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I don't know how hydraulic sorting would work and neither do you so why are you speculating about it?

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Shouldn't the question be why are YOU speculating about it, when you don't understand it at all ? Anyone with a decent understanding of the issues can see that it is a very silly idea.

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Original location would determine which current the creature got carried along in to which ultimate grave.

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Which really only applies to fossils found in marine rock, and even then it would be an incredible (as in not at all credible) for all of the numerous and diverse dinosaurs, all over the world, to happen to end up in strata identified as Triassic, Jurassic or Cretaceous.

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As I said I don't know how it all happened and I don't think it's necessary to explain everything. The large animals often look like they were buried in mudslides but it's hard to fit that all into the picture too.

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Should be pretty easy. They died where they were found. You aren't going to move a huge pile of dead bodies buried in mud without disturbing it.

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But what I do know is that the strata look like they had to have been laid down in a huge deluge, that WOULD have involved transportation in water, and the usual interpretation of them as time periods is ridiculous, I mean insanely ridiculous

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Of course, the opposite is true. The idea that all the strata were laid down by the deluge is silly, while the idea that it took long periods of time is the only sensible explanation. That's why you have to hand wave away so much evidence.

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For Faith, the bible trumps any and all evidence no matter what.

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More accurately her sect's dogmas trump any and all evidence, usually including the Bible. And even when she chooses the Bible she sometimes has to be reminded of what it actually says.

Of course, Creationism is the real promoter of immorality. We see it here all the time. In fact we have an example right here.

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The thing about evolution is that the idea implies different levels of evolution between races, implying in those days inferiority versus superiority, at least it did to those who first encountered the idea right after Darwin, including Darwin himself.

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This is an outright falsehood. The racial hierarchy was normal thinking before Darwin. The most that can be said is that some appealed to Darein's theory to "explain" what they already believed. The theory itself implies no such judgements, and the whole idea of "different levels of evolution" is itself widely regarded as nonsensical.

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As I said, people have a built in moral sense and that's what finally did away with that sort of thinking,

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I have to say that yours seems to be malfunctioning. My morality won't let me be a creationist. Lying is really, really hard for me.

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but it can't be denied that it's still there IN the theory itself if somebody decided to come along and exploit it.

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It certainly can be denied, there's nothing in the theory about different levels of evolution.Edited by PaulK, : No reason given.

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One more time: I get it from the quote from Darwin himself, just read it as it seems to present itself to me, as implying an EVOLUTIONARY distance between the civilized races and the "savage" races, which he hopes will be ended with an even higher evolution of the civilized making an even wider gap between them and the baboon "instead of as now between the negro or Australian and the gorilla. "

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Even if that's the intended meaning, it would still only reflect existing views. However, you must ALSO note this part: The loss of chimpanzees and gorillas would indeed widen the evolutionary "gap" between humans and living apes, just as Darwin said.

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Darwin himself may not have had racist attitudes. The point is that this paragraph reads to me as implying that his THEORY assumes evolutionary differences (which today we'd call genetic differences) between human groups.

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Faith I understand that you wish to smear the theory more than the person (not that that makes it any less immoral). However there's simply nothing there to back up your claim. The idea of racial differences isn't even clearly expressed, let alone attributed to the cause.If Darwin WISHED to claim that racial differences were derived from theory then there would be an explicit claim. Although how he could make such a claim is something of a mystery - and one that you really should have considered if you actually cared about the truth. However, you have no explicit claim from Darwin, you have no understanding of how the theory even could be inherently racist, you have nothing to back your smear.How about actually showing some honesty and retracting your obviously false claims ?

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Oddly enough I have NO wish in this matter at all, I merely honestly read that paragraph to imply that the differences between the civilized and savage races are evolutionary differences, same as they are between humans and apes. Honestly that's the truth.

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But that isn't all. That's not even the main issue I was objecting to.You're trying to tar the Theory of Evolution as racist.e.g. you claimed: Differences are generally observed (or in this case "observed" through the lens of preexisting racial views) rather than derived from theory.IF we had a VERY good idea of the evolutionary relationship between two populations AND the selective pressures on them we MIGHT be able to come up with some (uncertain) predictions about the differences between them, but that's rarely the case and observation is so much easier.So, there's really no way that you could get the idea that Caucasians are superior to Africans from the theory. The most you could do is to START with the idea of racial superiority and then appeal to the theory to "explain" it. But then the racism wouldn't be coming from the theory...

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The point was that the PARAGRAPH presents the THEORY in that light. Everything I've said is based on how I read what that paragraph says. It suggests to me that that was DARWIN's view of the theory at that time.

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There's nothing in the paragraph to suggest that the differences are derived from the theory and not simply assumed, or held to be observed.
(Indeed it should be obvious to anyone familiar with the actual theory that the loss of chimps and gorillas etc would be far more significant to opening up an evolutionary gap between humans and the surviving apes.)So can you explain why you are reading the paragraph as claiming something which it clearly doesn't say, and can't be true anyway ?

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Well, I've already indicated what I see in the paragraph that suggests Darwin has an evolutionary explanation for the differences between the races as he has for the differences between the species.

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Which wouldn't be racist in any way. The racism comes from the false idea that one race is better than another, which you can't get from the ToE.But you claimed that the differences were assumed from the theory, which isn't true.

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Again, what the theory is today is apparently somewhat different than it was in Darwin's mind, as evidenced by what he wrote in that paragraph that has been quoted here.

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I think you're confusing the theory itself with common (but wrong) ideas ABOUT the theory - and projecting them on to the quote.The main point of the quote is to say that the differences between humans and other animals was not an adequate objection to the theory. And Darwin pointed to extinction as one way such a gap could be created. And he was right, as we've since discovered.The quote is NOT about the differences between human races. Those differences are simply assumed and referred to in the service of making a quite different point.Edited by PaulK, : correction & clarification to 1st sentence