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Author Topic:   There are easy creationist answers to problems evolutionists pose
dwise1
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Posts: 5930
Joined: 05-02-2006
Member Rating: 5.8


Message 26 of 111 (885251)
03-29-2021 11:42 PM
Reply to: Message 25 by Dogmafood
03-29-2021 11:21 PM


mike the wiz writes:
floccinaucinihilipilification
What kind of a useless word is that?
The explanation comes with the definition:
quote:
"floccinaucinihilipilification" is defined as "the action or habit of estimating something as worthless. (The word is used chiefly as a curiosity.)."
So by Mike the Wiss' own words, he's just jerking our chains. Making much more noise than his content is worth.
mike the wiz
Consider CIWS, in which a "close-in weapon system"(CIWS) is deployed on ships with an almost automatic manner. Because of the physical appearance of the system, it's referred to as an R2D2 (made you look!).
Sorry, but I still think that how that system is described, "sea-wiz", still refers to a sailor taking a leak over the side (ie, urinating over the gunwale).
Which cannot help but describe the value of what "mike the wiz" ("pissing over the side") posts and ever has to offer.
Edited by dwise1, : Sorry, cleanup in aisle whatever.

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dwise1
Member
Posts: 5930
Joined: 05-02-2006
Member Rating: 5.8


Message 28 of 111 (885253)
03-30-2021 10:32 AM
Reply to: Message 27 by vimesey
03-30-2021 2:25 AM


Sorry, but I guess I'm of "that certain age" that had spent my early teenage years during the surfing craze of the early-mid 60's (eg, Jan and Dean's song, "Sidewalk Surfing" with its refrain of "bust your buns!"). To me, a "woodie" is and always will be a particular kind of car that was popular with surfers, a station wagon with a wooden body.
Lovely looking cars and they still catch my eye. They had also been around in my father's day. I forget whose it was, but one day he decided to redo the varnish on it. So he dismantled it (you could do that) and redid the varnish on each piece. But then he realized that he didn't quite remember how to put it back together again. He did finally work it out, but it had him worried for a while.
I also know that the guy nickname of "Woody" long predates that new connotation that I had never heard of until a later episode of "Rosanne". Kind of like someone's description of me circa 1970 as "the straightest guy he had ever met" would mean something entirely different now (then, "straight" meant that you weren't a "freak", meaning a hippy type in any way).
But a wiz is a wiss is a whiz is a whis and always will be. Such are creationists.
But seriously, follow that link for the CIWS and try to tell me that's not an R2D2 unit! Another friend (other than the shipmate who had used that name for it) described seeing one in action. It kept looking around for a target, pointing its rotary cannon (a modern Gatling gun) as it did so.
So that should raise the question of when the nickname of "Woody" could have become crude. Whenever did that other meaning come into use? I can most definitely assure you that if I were to start driving a Woodie that it would not be a form of penis display!
Refer to the old British comedy, "Coupling" (the USA tried to clone it but failed miserably just like with "Red Dwarf" -- loved it (brilliant semi-autobiographical writing by Steven Moffet who also wrote some of the best modern Doctor Who); I think I have it in my list on Hulu). In one episode, Sally Harper (kind of a over-sexed air-head -- Patrick was trying to guide her into parallel parking, but she instead popped into the pub for a drink) is trying to chat up a doctor at work who drives a sports car, a steel penis. But every time she refers to his car she calls it a "penis" and she tells him that she also used to have a "penis" but she just drove it into the ground. Brilliant!
Edited by dwise1, : Minor grammatical correction changing a contraction to the intended possessive (its).

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dwise1
Member
Posts: 5930
Joined: 05-02-2006
Member Rating: 5.8


Message 30 of 111 (885257)
03-30-2021 11:33 AM
Reply to: Message 29 by Phat
03-30-2021 10:47 AM


Re: Beginning Participation As Phat
I suspect most posters are just likely to be trolls that have been given a free pass to just troll any creationist that stops by.
Dream on, Dude! I've been studying "creation science" since 1981 and have discussed it online since about 1986. Mike the Wiz (AKA nothing but pissing over the side -- see my Message 26). In my considered opinion, everything Mike the "pissing over the side" posts and has posted is complete and utter nonsense bull sh*t.
I am waiting to see otherwise.
The absolute proof why a pessimist is the happiest person possible.
99.9999 percent of the time he's right.
The remaining time, he is pleasantly surprised.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 29 by Phat, posted 03-30-2021 10:47 AM Phat has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 31 by Phat, posted 03-30-2021 1:05 PM dwise1 has replied

  
dwise1
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Posts: 5930
Joined: 05-02-2006
Member Rating: 5.8


(3)
Message 33 of 111 (885260)
03-30-2021 3:16 PM
Reply to: Message 31 by Phat
03-30-2021 1:05 PM


Re: I would call myself a Cosmological Creationist
By the way, do you consider yourself a pessimist?
I read something some where. Gee, where was that? Oh yeah, in the Bible:
quote:
Prove all things; hold fast that which is good.
(KJV, 1 Thessalonians 5:21 )
Rather than a pessimist, I consider myself more of a skeptic: I have to test it out before I can accept the conclusion. After all, I became an atheist by having read the Bible and finding it unbelievable. But still, as I described it, being a pessimist is still the most satisfactory position to take: 99% of the time you have the satisfaction of having been right and occasionally you are pleasantly surprised.
Edited by dwise1, : cleaned up a bit

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dwise1
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Posts: 5930
Joined: 05-02-2006
Member Rating: 5.8


Message 37 of 111 (885265)
03-30-2021 10:48 PM
Reply to: Message 36 by FLRW
03-30-2021 6:01 PM


Decades ago on a different forum I responded to a creationist making that same tired old creationist claim with "why do you persist in in making such unconvincing claims?" Unable to respond to the rest of my disemboweling response to his claim, he replied with "you only think them unconvincing because you are not yet convinced yourself."
That was an epiphany for me about how creationists think. They are only convinced by their arguments, even the stupidest ones, because they are already convinced. That inspired my own still-unfinished page, Fundamental Differences Between Scientists and Creationists.

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dwise1
Member
Posts: 5930
Joined: 05-02-2006
Member Rating: 5.8


Message 38 of 111 (885274)
03-31-2021 11:16 AM
Reply to: Message 36 by FLRW
03-30-2021 6:01 PM


I don't know why mike mentioned nickel but neglected to mention aluminum. If he had actually read Dr. Henry Morris (which I did do despite mike's accusation that we don't) then he would have seen Morris mention that the residence time for aluminum is only 100 years. Morris immediately lost interest in that fact and just shrugged his shoulders with a "I wonder what that's supposed to mean."
BTW, do you remember that Steve Austin wrote geology articles in creationist magazines under the pseudonym of Stuart Nevins? That was while the ICR was paying him to earn his PhD Geology, just so they could have an actual PhD Geology on their staff. I read some of those articles in which he made false statements about geology which any first year geology undergraduate would know better than to say (and here Austin was already a post-graduate).
So Steve Austin makes false creationist claims despite knowing better. That makes him a professional liar, doesn't it?

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dwise1
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Posts: 5930
Joined: 05-02-2006
Member Rating: 5.8


(3)
Message 41 of 111 (885284)
04-01-2021 3:50 PM
Reply to: Message 39 by Phat
03-31-2021 10:41 PM


Re: Already Convinced
If you didn't go to read my still-unfinished and hence unpublished page, Fundamental Differences Between Scientists and Creationists, then please do so (these links in messages and email are the only place that the URL shows up; none of my published pages link to it and it didn't show up in a quick search on Google for that specific title).
The response of "The only reason you find these claims unconvincing is because you are not yet convinced yourself" is not the only point, since it then led to further observations. Also, a very good reason for finding creationist claims unconvincing is because they're mostly crap, which is what I learned in my initial research and which has been confirmed repeatedly since then.
On that page, I formatted a other-forum discussion into table form. Scientists and creationists have very different motivations which shows in their work and in how they test and verify their conclusions/claims and eliminate the ones that prove to be false (done all the time in science, but virtually never in creationism, hence PRATTs, "Points Refuted A Thousand Times" in which we have to repeatedly refute the same old claims that were soundly refuted decades ago like having to deal with the Walking Dead (eg, DWISE1'S CREATION / EVOLUTION PAGE: Earth's Rotation is Slowing which was created around 1979 because the author didn't understand leap seconds and which was soundly refuted in 1982, yet it still lives on even to the point that creationist sites are willing to deliberately lie in order to keep it because it still sounds "convincing" to the general public who also do not understand leap seconds (I worked with GPS for two decades and hence also with leap seconds); the shrinking sun claim based on a 1979 abstract (but no follow-up paper) for research that involved historic data containing systematic errors -- science tested their results and found the problem, whereas creationists thought it sounded convincing and so still keep it four decades after it had been refuted (Kent Hovind has even expanded upon it with his claim about the sun's mass loss due to "burning its fuel" along with directly ordering his followers to never do the math to test his claim -- see my DWise1: Kent Hovind's Solar Mass Loss Claim)
So my table on the differences between scientists break down to questions and consequences:
  1. Science / Scientists ...
    1. What they are trying to do:
      The scientist is either trying to make a new discovery or to test or find corroborating evidence for a previous discovery, hypothesis, or theory.
    2. How they measure success:
      The success of the scientist's efforts depends directly on the quality of his research and on the validity of the studies that he bases his research on. Therefore, a scientist is motivated to verify his sources and to maintain high standards of scholarship.
    3. Scholarship
      Since scientists depend so much on the validity and quality of the work of other scientists, the scientific community is motivated to police itself against shoddy or fallacious research.
    4. How they handle dishonesty:
      Thus, a scientist who is discovered to be performing substandard or dishonest work loses his credibility and his standing in the scientific community. IOW, a career killer.
    5. How they handle mistakes:
      Mistakes and hoaxes will still happen in science, but the near-constant scrutiny and testing will uncover them.
      Please note that in the history of scientific hoaxes, they were all uncovered and eliminated by scientists, never by creationists.
  2. Creation Science / Creationists ...
    1. What they are trying to do:
      A creationist is normally not trying to make a new discovery, nor to test or find corroborating evidence for a previous claim. As rustyb (a creationist denizen of that other forum) puts so succinctly in his signature, "I already know the Truth." There's little use in trying to discover something new about the "Truth" that you already know a priori, nor is there any use in testing it (which would probably be sacrilegious anyway), nor to try to add to its Completeness. Rather, what a creationist is normally trying to do is to come up with convincing claims and arguments against anything that appears to contradict "the Truth" that they already know.
    2. How they measure success:
      It doesn't matter whether that creationist had done a proper job of researching the claim, or had even researched it at all (though it does help to make it more convincing if there's something in the bibliography, even if that source had never actually been looked at -- remember that NASA document?). It doesn't matter if the claim or argument is valid, just that it sounds convincing; after all, the creationist already "knows" that it must be true.
    3. Scholarship
      When you research some other creationist's claim, you're not depending on that claim being true or valid; you're only depending on that claim sounding convincing.
    4. How they handle dishonesty:
      And if a claim is discovered to be false or a creationist is discovered to practice questionable methods, none of that matters, just so long as they still sound convincing. A creationist is far more likely to face censure for theological lapses than for shoddy or questionable scholarship.
      Of course, if a claim starts drawing too much negative publicity, then it is no longer convincing and must be dropped, as quietly as possible, until everybody has forgotten about it, whereupon it can be resurrected and received as a "new" claim.
    5. How they handle mistakes:
      Mistakes and hoaxes will also happen in creation science, but in this case there is no mechanism in place to uncover them; indeed, there is much resistence to uncovering creationist mistakes and hoaxes.
One of the interesting side-effects of the shoddiness of creationist claims is that these claims pretty much take on the form of urban legends, rumors which get circulated about within the community. That can make researching into creationist claims very difficult.
For the most part, all that most creationists, including the professionals, do is to repeat another creationist's claim as if it were their own (basically plagiarism, which is a huge crime in academia). Since having scientific sources can make your claim look more convincing, creationists normally don't cite their actual creationist sources but rather instead just list their actual sources' "scientific bibliography" as if that were their own -- in my "Earth's Rotation is Slowing" page above, I cite a very rare instance when the creationist (Kent Hovind no less, so color me gob-smacked at that surprising event) cited his actual creationist sources, which enabled me to track it back to Walter Brown, the most likely "Creationist Zero" source of that leap second mistake and its resultant false claim.
For another case of what happens when creationists claim their actual sources' sources as their own, refer to my page, MOON DUST, which details my own original research into a creationist claim which included corresponding with the Institute for Creation Research (ICR). Basically, I attended a 1985 debate pitting SDSU professors Awbrey and Thwaites (who ran the only true "two-model" class I know of with members of the then-nearby ICR gave half the lectures -- they did such a good job of exposing creationist claims that the class was eventually shut down due to strong protests from campus Christian clubs) and Drs Henry Morris and Duane Gish of the ICR. Morris responded to the criticism that they depend on outdated sources by citing a "1976 NASA document written well into the space age" (quote reconstructed from memory) of "direct measurements of meteoric dust" (the implication seemed to be that those direct measurements had been taken from the lunar surface) supporting that a 4-billion-year-old moon should be covered a layer of dust about 240 feet thick.
I wrote to Dr. Morris at the ICR and got a reply from Dr. Gish which included a letter by creationist Harold Slusher (a piece of work in himself) which detailed that claim -- here is a PDF of that letter (with personal info redacted) as well as an HTML-ized version for greater readability; BTW, he signed that letter as a PhD even though that was an honorary degree or else that was his other "PhD" from a diploma mill (he was on the faculty staff in the Physics Dept at UT El Paso where the directory at first listed him as a PhD, but then later it dropped his "Dr" title and maybe just cited his MS Physics (I have received a few emails of complaint against him from his students)).
Two glaring problems:
  1. The letter clearly shows that the much-cited "expected" 284.8 ft-thick dust layer on the moon was not given by that "cited" NASA document (scare-quotes fully explained on my page with a summary below) but rather was the result of a calculation performed by Harold Slusher based on a formula that he had contrived himself and presented in that letter.
    In contriving that formula, Slusher had inserted two extraneous factors (which implies multiplicative effect) which inflated his figures by a factor of about 10,000. So take his 284.8 feet of dust and correct for his extraneous factors and you arrive at about a third of an inch of dust, which I do believe we did actually find. Again, do please read my pages on that research, though the real zinger hasn't been revealed here yet.
  2. I believe it was Dr. Gish's letter that pointed me to Dr. H. Morris' page in his "Scientific Creationism" book on moon dust, a footnote of which (2nd ed., page 152) mainly just repeats the claims and "sources" of Harold Slusher's letter. I did already have a copy of that book, so I committed the unthinkable and unforgivable sin by looking it up.
    In that footnote, Dr. H. Morris (to differentiate him from his son, John, who has since inherited the shop) cited that NASA document as his primary source. No, Harold Slusher was Morris' primary source, not that NASA document. Furthermore, I am very certain that Morris had never ever seen that NASA document (and I've become highly suspicious that even Slusher had never ever seen it).
    But still, Dr. Henry Morris did deliberately lie to his public by claiming that NASA document as his primary source. How do I know that? Because I have personally seen that NASA document myself, so I know the rest of the creationist lie about it.
I was doing some Computer Science post-graduate work at my old university (Cal-State Fullerton; I had earned my BS Computer Science at the University of North Dakota while on active duty), so I would return to my old haunts in the library (now that everything's online, I'm lost there -- plus the campus has been closed for about a year now). While wandering through the government document stacks looking for other documents about meteoric-dust collection experiments on Gemini windows, I spotted the pertinent NASA document, the "'1976' NASA document 'Meteor Orbits and Dust' (NASA SP-135, Smithsonian Contributions to Astrophysics Vol. 2)".
Except when I pulled it off the shelf and actually looked at its cover that was not at all what it actually said. First, it was "Vol. 11" ("Volume Eleven"), not "Vol. 2" That is actually one of my clues that Slusher had probably gotten his claim from yet another unknown creationist who had communicated with him in hand-written format. The document was a collection of papers submitted at an August 1963 conference which was printed in 1967 (nineteen sixty-seven, not nor ever "1976") Far from being "well within the space age", that was years before our very first soft landing on the moon on 02 Jun 1966.
I replied to Dr. Gish about this with xerox copies of the pertinent pages from that NASA document. He replied insisting that that NASA document was from "1976". I replied again explicitly point his attention to the xerox copies of the actual pertinent pages from that NASA document. No response from the ICR.
At about the same time there was another attempt by PhDs through a parallel channel to talk with Dr. H. Morris about this. Again, within three exchanges there was no further response from the ICR.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 39 by Phat, posted 03-31-2021 10:41 PM Phat has seen this message but not replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 44 by WookieeB, posted 04-07-2021 12:56 PM dwise1 has replied

  
dwise1
Member
Posts: 5930
Joined: 05-02-2006
Member Rating: 5.8


Message 42 of 111 (885286)
04-01-2021 6:28 PM


An Easy Creationist Question Mike Cannot Answer
From Message 22:
DWise1 writes:
A fact is for example the C14 we find in diamonds and coal.
Please explain exactly why you think that to be important enough to have mentioned it.
What are you trying to say?
And please refrain from hand-waving. The more specific you can be, the better.
He has ignored it since 28-Mar-2021 13:07. And I predict that he will continue to ignore it in perpetuity.
Such are creationists.

  
dwise1
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Posts: 5930
Joined: 05-02-2006
Member Rating: 5.8


(2)
Message 46 of 111 (885356)
04-07-2021 2:49 PM
Reply to: Message 44 by WookieeB
04-07-2021 12:56 PM


Re: Already Convinced
Define what a "creationist" is?
Certainly!
Within the context of these discussions, a "creationist" would be a member of the anti-evolution movement which was originally based almost completely on a particular literalist belief in the Creation stories in Genesis. Even though the anti-evolution movement has diversified a bit since then (eg, to include some IDists who describe their opposition as being for "philosophical reasons" like ID founder Phillip Johnson saying that he opposes evolution because "it leaves God with nothing to do"), this is still a good basic description of the type of creationist we're talking about.
Therefore a simple operational definition of "creationist" would be one who practices or supports creationism. So what is creationism? It is a movement or position of opposing evolution for religious reasons basic on the mistaken idea that Divine Creation and evolution are somehow mutually exclusive. General belief in Divine Creation does not involve rejection of specific science like evolution, so that would not be the defining characteristic needed to identify a "creationist". What would be the defining characteristic of a "creationist" in this context would be one's involvement with creationism. That is to say that since not all believers in Divine Creation would also practice creationism, then they would not be classified as "creationists" in our discussions -- indeed, most believers would not be creationists, but rather would be labeled by creationists as "atheistic evolutionists".
What could confuse the matter is that the basic definition of "creationist" should just be someone who believes in Divine Creation, which in reality would include a very large number of people who accept evolution (eg, Dr. Kenneth Miller, one of the leading opponents of creationism), people whom creationists denounce as "atheistic evolutionists" (more on that below).
Also, please note in my Message 41 to which you are "replying" specifically identifies the creationist side as "Creation Science / Creationists", thus identifying creationists as practicing "creation science". So what part of that don't you understand?
A common type of creationist would be an advocate of "creation science", which itself is a deliberately crafted legalistic deception designed to circumvent the plethora of US court decisions against the anti-evolution movement's attempts to bar the teaching of evolution on the basis of their actual motivation which is purely religious. Thus "creation science", which falsely and deliberately deceptively proclaims "our opposition to evolution is purely for scientific reasons, nothing religious about it whatsoever", seeks to hide from the courts their actual religious purpose, which led their opponents to call "creation science", "the game of 'Hide the Bible'." That game was exposed for the fraud that it is in the late '80s through the court decisions McLean v. Arkansas (1981) and Edwards v. Aguillard (1987). Once the game of "Hide the Bible" had been exposed and could no longer be used to deceive the courts, the anti-evolution movement had to find a new game to play, a game of "Hide the Creationism". That game would now be (and is still) played with "Intelligent Design" (ID).
Fundamental to "creation science" is their "Two Model Approach" (TMA) which allows for two and only two mutually exclusive "models" (in scare quotes because they are not actual models): the "Creation Model" (CM) and the "Evolution Model" (EM). The definitions of the two "models" are very telling. The CM is worded only in very vague terms in which some "unnamed Creator" created everything by means that we do not know. The EM is then everything else, "including most of the world's religions, modern and ancient" (as Father of Flood Geology Dr. Henry Morris told me himself and as he has written elsewhere). While the CM is so vaguely worded that they could argue in court that it covers all kinds of traditions, in practice it is very narrowly defined as the very narrow fundamentalist literalist interpretation of Genesis which is YEC hiding behind the "Hide the Bible" smokescreen of "creation science". That is only one of many forms of creation (including old earth creationism) which get lumped into the "atheistic EM" -- so creationists classify the vast majority of Christians as "atheists".
With the TMA creationists set up a false dichotomy. In a true dichotomy, you can list all the possible models and then test each one and eliminate the ones that prove to be false. After that process, the one that remains, however unlikely, must be true (Sherlock Holmes said that and was quoted centuries later by CDR Spock). Therefore, with their TMA creationists seek to prove the CM solely by disproving the EM. In doing so, they never ever present the CM, nor discuss it, nor present any evidence for it, nor even attempt to support it nor to defend it in any way. In debate when Dr. Morris would be challenged to present or discuss the CM, he would refuse to do so saying explicitly that doing so would be injecting religion in what is supposed to be a purely scientific debate.
Instead, all they have ever done has been to attack their fallacious EM. One of their critics describes "creation science" as a book with two chapters: Chapter 1 "Evolution", Chapter 2 "Everything that's wrong with Chapter 1". The problem is that they have piled into their EM a multitude of different actual models along with all kinds of outdated and just plain wrong ideas, not to mention just about every religion there is or has been (including Christianity minus fundamentalism). They seek to prove the CM by disproving the EM, but in order to disprove their EM they would have to disprove each and every single idea in it, a truly Herculean task, which is rendered absolutely impossible by the inclusion of religions which have their own supernaturalistic ideas which cannot possibly be disproven.
It would be so much easier and more practical to just present the evidence for the CM and to attempt to prove it. But they absolutely refuse to even consider doing so. Why? Because that would expose their deception.
An extension of our definition of "creationist" would be to include the "Intelligent Design" (ID) movement. Many people think that ID was invented in 1987 because they hadn't heard of it before then when "creation science" had been exposed by Edwards v. Aguillard (1987). Rather, they had been developing some years before that it was only in 1987 that creationists chose to repurpose it to "Hide the Creationism". ID had developed on a parallel track which avoided the young-earth trap and the need to base itself on the Bible -- quite literally, the ICR's public school educational materials started out in the late 60's with explicit Bible references and verses, when they started to create their "creation science" deception they edited those materials doing a superficial scrubbing and eliminating of all explicit Bible references. In similar fashion, the creationist book, Of Pandas and People, exposed how the creationists were masking their deception in Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District (2005). The book started out as a creationist book but then had to be "rewritten" because of the switch to the ID smokescreen. Practically all they did, since it was on a word processor, was to do a global find-and-replace of "creationists" to "design proponents", but which got munged up at one place to create "cdesign proponentsists", the smoking gun of what was really going on.
Also, for the most part ID writers had technical and academic training and tried to keep mainly to their areas of expertise (though not failing to talk over the heads of their audiences and using obtuse mathematics in order to deceive them), whereas most "creation science" creationists would operate outside their areas of expertise and keep getting caught in their mistakes -- ie, creationism is almost pure BS, but ID's BS is stronger (refer to the Lone Gunmen and how Melvin and Richard would bicker over whose Kung Fu was stronger).
Does that answer your question? Was there any part of that which you did not understand?
Edited by dwise1, : Added qs box of WookieeB's message to preserve context since this went to the next page

This message is a reply to:
 Message 44 by WookieeB, posted 04-07-2021 12:56 PM WookieeB has replied

Replies to this message:
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 Message 61 by WookieeB, posted 04-19-2021 8:14 PM dwise1 has replied

  
dwise1
Member
Posts: 5930
Joined: 05-02-2006
Member Rating: 5.8


Message 47 of 111 (885368)
04-08-2021 1:52 PM
Reply to: Message 46 by dwise1
04-07-2021 2:49 PM


Where is WookieeB?
So just where is WookieeB?
He asked me a simple and direct question and I answered it immediately.
It has been almost 24 hours. So just where is he?
I did see him still logged into this forum during that time. So just where did he disappear to?

This message is a reply to:
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dwise1
Member
Posts: 5930
Joined: 05-02-2006
Member Rating: 5.8


(3)
Message 55 of 111 (885390)
04-10-2021 12:19 PM
Reply to: Message 51 by Phat
04-10-2021 11:32 AM


Re: Believers/Apologists vs Creationists
Oh, and the reason GOD is always a "He" apart from the patriarchal culture of that time is simply that Jesus is a He. Not a She.
Actually, that is not how parthenogenesis ("virgin birth") works. Instead, the products of parthenogenesis are clones of the mother. Therefore, female.
If you're going to take stuff like that seriously, then you do need to take them seriously.
Didn't you read my page, "Jesus H. Christ": Why "H"?, which I had recommended to you? In it I attribute that "middle initial" to English speakers mistaking the Greek letter eta (Η, η) for an "H" when it appears in Christograms, religious symbols constructed out of a few letters from "Ιησους Χριστος" (or "ΙΗΣΟΥΣ ΧΡΙΣΤΟΣ" which is the same thing only in all caps).
Towards the end, I note a few other popular hypotheses including one humorously advanced by biology students that the "H" stands for "haploid" (having only the half of the alleles such as found in an unfertilized egg), though naturally occurring parthenogenesis can produce diploid offspring (ie, an exact clone of the mother).
 
ABE:
From what I've gathered about the letters "H" and eta, they both derive from the same source, Old Semitic to Phoenician, in which it was pretty much the same voiceless pharyngeal fricative as English "h", Spanish "j", German "h" and voiceless "ch" (eg, as in "ich" but not as in "doch"), Russian "х" -- to write "hahaha" in Spanish it's "jajaja" and in Russian it's "хахаха" (when reading a Mexican cousine's email, I had never seen it written before so I at first made the mistake of pronouncing her "jajaja" as in German).
From Phoencian "H" entered into Etruscan and Old Latin as that same "H" sound and it also kept that same sound in Archaic Greek. It was later that it turned into a vowel sound in Greek.
The history of the Cyrillic letter "Н" for the "n" sound is entirely different. According to my Russian professor from the Linguistics Dept it started out being borrowed from the Greek letter nu ("Ν") which looks just like the Roman "N". But once borrowed that diagonal member started shifting towards the center until it became a horizontal member and we ended up with "Н".
Edited by dwise1, : ABE: a bit of linguistical history on "H"

This message is a reply to:
 Message 51 by Phat, posted 04-10-2021 11:32 AM Phat has seen this message but not replied

  
dwise1
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Posts: 5930
Joined: 05-02-2006
Member Rating: 5.8


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Message 57 of 111 (885393)
04-10-2021 8:14 PM
Reply to: Message 44 by WookieeB
04-07-2021 12:56 PM


Re: Already Convinced
Define what a "creationist" is?
First, the syntax of that sentence is positively not a question, so just exactly why did you use a question mark? Please note that I just asked you a "why" question, therefore a question mark is required (AKA "an interrogative"). But you gave me a command (AKA "the imperative"), which does not in any manner call for a question mark.
Is English your native language? It is mine, but I'm also a bit of a polyglot so I have learned more about English than do most monoglots raised with English. I used to participate on a C programming forum (gone now) which attracted many non-native English speakers. The posts of foreign members would often get a bit off with the syntax (word order is extremely important in English since we no longer have case except with personal pronouns ... and even that is fast eroding away, between you and me) and they would sometimes choose the wrong word *, but the posts of monoglot Americans were virtually incomprehensible.
FOOTNOTE *:
There was one programmer from Portugal who wanted to know how to use "lights" in multi-threaded programming. Nobody had any idea what he could be talking about. But I know some Spanish, so I checked out the Portuguese Wikipedia page on traffic lights (AKA "lights" as in "turn right at the next light") and found that they call traffic signals the same thing as Spanish does, "semáforo". In multithreaded and multiprocessing programs with multiple lines of execution accessing the same resources at uncontrolled times, those multiple lines of execution use a method of signaling to everybody else when it is using that resource so "keep your hands off it!". That method is called semaphores. I also used that opportunity to teach him that dictionaries are not always your friends (so I have a collection of language dictionaries between various pairings of languages that I know).
A similar incident happened to me in West Germany in 1973 when I needed to buy a pen. Not seeing what I sought, I asked the clerk for a "Feder", literally a feather but then that is what we had been taught in class. She had no idea what I wanted -- a quill? Then when I was leaving in frustration, I saw the pens and held one up. "Ach! Sie wollten einen Kugelschreiber!" (a "ball writer", AKA "ball-point pen"). Too often we are taught archa¨i;c vocabulary that the writers of new textbooks have just simply copied from older textbooks.
And a classic American monoglot faceplant from that programming forum was when someone wanted to know how to write the code for a "Barber Poll". Thinking that it must be some kind of statistical method that we hadn't heard of, we asked for more information. "You know, that twirly thing in front of a barber shop." We just wanted to reach through the screen and slap that idiot up the side of the head to wake him up. Not even knowing the difference between a "pole" and a "poll" (two entirely different words!).
BTW, there are some people who use the intonation of an interrogative every time they give a command. That can be very confusing, since it indicates a complete lack of confidence, like you're not even sure that you want them to do what you are telling them to do. Is that your issue? That you are so unsure of yourself?
I have already complied with your command (even though you are not sure about it) in Message 46 and apparently duly ignored by you.
Now to return the favor, riddle me this!: Define what an "evolutionist" is! (please note that an exclamation point is quite appropriate for a command, though not absolutely necessary, whereas a question mark almost never is (ie, there could be stylistic or narrative reasons, such as to convey the speaker's great uncertainty in issuing that command as discussed above, but those are special cases).
I assume that you are familiar with that uniquely creationist term, "evolutionist", and would not be surprised to learn that you have often used it yourself.
So just exactly what is the definition? And how would you know to classify someone as an "evolutionist"? What are the other characteristics assigned to one who is an "evolutionist"?
 
Well, since you obviously will never reply, I will note that almost every single creationist source that even began to offer any kind of definition for "evolutionist" basically classified anybody, regardless of religious belief, who accepted evolution was an "evolutionist". And that they were all atheists!
Which would include the vast majority of Christians.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 44 by WookieeB, posted 04-07-2021 12:56 PM WookieeB has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 60 by WookieeB, posted 04-19-2021 8:09 PM dwise1 has replied

  
dwise1
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Posts: 5930
Joined: 05-02-2006
Member Rating: 5.8


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Message 65 of 111 (885631)
04-20-2021 8:17 PM
Reply to: Message 63 by WookieeB
04-20-2021 4:18 PM


Re: Already Convinced
Working on my replies. I was away in Phoenix for the weekend and had just returned last night.
AZPaul3 is quite correct. I don't understand why you think that my definition is so different from his.
The anti-evolution movement in the US started in the early 20th century and really picked up momentum after WWI -- BTW, most of anti-evolution claims linking evolution to Nazism are just slight redressing of the earlier movement's linking evolution to their anti-German stereotypes ("The Hun", as Edgar Rice Burroughs called a German villain in one of his Tarzan novels). They weren't an actual organization, but rather a collection of church groups all outraged that their high school children were being taught evolution. They didn't know anything about evolution, but they were certain that it was anti-Christian (there was a similar negative reaction to evolution by the clergy in the late 1800's, but they soon learned what it was and came to realize that it posed no actual theological difficulties, something that the Fundamentalists never could grasp).
While not explicitly organized, small local groups did campaign locally to pressure schools and school boards and even individual teachers to not teach evolution. State-level organizations lobbied state legislatures to pass "monkey laws" and also to pressure textbook publishers to leave any mention of evolution out of the textbooks. It was a form of populism. Their spiritual leader was the populist politician William Jennings Bryan. Yes, he was involved in the John Scopes Trial and, yes, he did die shortly thereafter.
Even though they had won the Scopes Trial (and the ACLU's plan to take his conviction to the US Supreme Court to get a decision striking down the "monkey laws" failed when the appeals court reverse his conviction on a legal technicality regarding how he had paid his fine), the publicity it gave them was public humiliation, plus their spiritual leader, Bryan, had died, so they seemed to have faded out of sight. But the "monkey laws" were still in place as was their pressure on teachers, schools, school boards, and textbook publishers, so they just maintained their status quo suppression of the teaching of evolution for the next four decades.
That status quo ended in 1968 with Epperson v. Arkansas concerning a teacher running afoul with Arkansas' "monkey law" because her school required her to use the BSCS textbook (written by actual biologists instead of the usual textbook hacks) whose evolution-rich content (because it was written by actual biologists) brought her in conflict with the "monkey law" that would punish her very severely just for mentioning the "e-word" in class, let alone teach it.
That US Supreme Court decision led to the striking down of all the "monkey laws" and suddenly the anti-evolution movement, which to this point could just sit there fat, dumb, and happy, had lost its primary bulwark against evolution. So they had to spring back into action.
Also in the 60's a new generation of creationists had been organizing and developing what would later become "creation science". Duane Gish and Henry Morris (the Father of Flood Geology having co-written The Genesis Flood in 1961) tried in vain to get the Christian organization, American Scientific Affiliation, to take a more young-earth position so they left the ASA and formed their own YEC organizations eventually leading them to found the Institute for Creation Research (ICR) which became the primary source for creationist materials, claims, and arguments.
Now up to the mid-70's the anti-evolution movement was unabashed about the fact that they opposed the teaching of evolution for purely religious reasons. And they renewed their battle against evolution education in the same manner as before by not hiding their religious purpose (it has been said that when a new war starts the generals start fighting the last war). In court they repeatedly lost their lawsuits precisely because they wanted to bar the teaching of evolution solely for religious purposes.
That is when that legalistic deception, "creation science", was created for the precise purpose of circumventing the courts. Though it also worked well to deceive the general public. Their big lie was "We do not oppose evolution for religious reasons. We oppose it for purely scientific reasons, nothing religious about it."
Gee, does that sound familiar to you? Maybe if we were to examine what you had stated and to which AZPaul3 had replied:
Where would you categorize someone that accepts Divine Creation and that opposes evolution based on a non-religious stance, such as having scientific reasons for rejecting (some aspects of) evolution?
As he said, we have seen that subterfuge used by creationists and IDiots so many times in this past half century.
Over the decades, creationists had been building up a body of claims about scientific research supporting their theology of a young earth, etc. Most of it was done by a church, Seventh Day Adventists (SDA). This new generation of creationists got most of their "scientific" claims from the SDAists and Henry Morris stole (er ... "researched") much of the material for his "Genesis Flood" from the infamous SDAist "geologist" George McCready Price.
Also, the ICR's publishing house, Master Books, had been preparing textbooks for teaching creationism in the schools, including public schools. They were filled with Bible verses and references. Now that they suddenly discovered that religious content would keep their books out of the schools, they created their "public school edition". All they did was to perform a superficial scrubbing of all overt Bible and religious references from the book.
That was one of the first steps in their deliberately deceptive game of "Hide the Bible". Plus their materials retained their blatant proselytizing in that at the end of each lesson after they had misrepresented and distorted the science they would implore the students to choose right there and then whether to believe in their "unnamed Creator" (nudge, nudge, wink, wink, know what I mean?, know what I mean?) or the "atheistic evolution model". Compelling belief like that is diametrically opposed to the goal of education, which is for the student to understand the material and not to compel belief in the material; rather the goal of religious indoctrination is to compel belief. When these materials have been used, students have responded by choosing atheism because "the creationist theory was so stupid, he thought. Well, if religion requires me to believe this, then I don't want to have any part of it." (quoted on my quotes page, an account of what happened in Ray Baird's Livermore elementary grade class is reposted here).
They created and deployed their Two Model Approach (TMA) in which the "creation model" only made vague references about some "unknown Creator" while the "atheist evolution model" was everything else "including most of the world's religions, ancient and modern" (Dr. Henry Morris' exact words to me).
There is so much more we could discuss about the TMA, but it suffices here to mention that it formed the basis of their entire approach to "creation science". It led directly to their "balanced treatment" and "equal time" campaigns to get their "balanced treatment" "educational" (proselytizing, actually) materials into the public schools. Their entire debate system for which they are infamous consisted entirely of attacking their fake "evolution model" while avoiding any discussion or defense of their "creation model". In fact, the very first thing they would do in a debate would be to state the Two Model Approach.
OK, we've gone over the first two phases in the Evolution of Creationism:
1. The original populist reaction of parents to their high school kids being taught something that they assumed in their ignorance to be against their religion. BTW, that period of time was when high school attendance was on the rise. Their actions and accomplishments were to pass the "monkey laws" and to pressure all levels of public education to exclude the teaching of evolution -- BTW, they had no effect on colleges and universities which continued to teach evolution unimpeded.
This situation continued for decades from the 1920's to 1968.
2. "Creation science". In the dismantling of anti-evolution's major bulwark against evolution education in the wake of Epperson v. Arkansas (1968), the anti-evolution forces immediately went into action and found that the rules had changed. In response, they conducted the evolution (Navy-speak) of "Hide the Bible" in order to sneak their religious material into the public schools. Part of that was the creation of "creation science" as a legalistic deception to fool the courts.
As AZPaul3 quite correctly said, "Now you can't do creationism." You have to "Hide the Bible" with "creation science".
OK, let's move on.
The "creation science" generation of creationists went on to try to pass their own "monkey laws" under the guise of "balanced treatment". The most famous examples are the Arkansas and Louisiana laws passed around 1981.
The Arkansas law required the inclusion of "creation science" if evolution is taught (AKA "balanced treatment"), but if evolution is not taught then there would be no need to include "creation science". IOW, the threat of having to include "creation science" could be enough to eliminate evolution from the classroom, a case of "... -- the idea of killing evolution instead of playing these debating games that we've been playing for nigh over a decade already." (from a letter admitted as evidence in the trial).
The trial, McLean v. Arkansas, was held in federal court and was followed closely. Teachers testified as to the near-impossibility to find any suitable materials to form a creationist curriculum. The ICR materials, which were the best to be found, were just so blatantly religious as to be totally unsuitable. All that they could find was an article in Reader's Digest about polonium halos, but that claim by Robert Gentry has since then been soundly refuted. One teacher broke down in tears on the stand because the law would require him to lie to his students.
But the Achilles Heel of that law was that it committed the Cardinal Sin of creationism: providing a definition of "creation science". The First Rule of Creationist Club is that you do not define creationism. Here's my page reposting what the ICR's lawyer Wendell Bird had published in the ICR's newsletter in 1981 to "differentiate" between the "scientific" and biblical creation models: The Creation Model. To quote Austrian Emperor Joseph II, "Just look at it!" Placing them side by side as Bird did we can plainly see that they are identical except for some superficial lawyerly word-magick.
That definition of "creation science" in the law proved to be the smoking gun which led to the law being struck down because it failed to pass the Lemon Test by having a religious purpose.
The legislators in Louisiana were watching what was happening in Arkansas because their law was identical, so when they saw the fatal mistake of the Arkansas law they immediately removed their definition of "creation science". Their law was challenged in court (Edwards v. Aguillard) and made its way all the way up to the US Supreme Court which in 1987 struck it down for failing the Lemon Test by having a religious purpose.
But the key part of that decision was as AZPaul3 said quite correctly, "Can't do creation science." In their decision, the court recognized "creation science" as being purely religious in its nature. That meant that as of 1987 nobody could use "creation science" any longer as a deceptive ruse to circumvent the courts. "Hide the Bible" no longer worked. They needed a new game, one of "Hide the Creationism".
Well for the previous decade or so, a separate branch of anti-evolution had been forming: Intelligent Design (ID). Most observers of creationism think that ID was invented immediately after Edwards v. Aguillard since that's the first that they had ever heard of it, but years before that I saw ID founder and lawyer Phillip Johnson on NOVA where he based his entire case for Darwin on Trial on the most stupid analogy possible. He attacked evolution because it did not follow courtroom rules of evidence. That means that his analogy for how science should work was for it to always follow courtroom procedure and standards. The problem for that idea is that a far better analogy for science would be a police investigation where you search for and find clues which then lead to other clues which leads to evidence and to more evidence until you have enough to build a case. It is only after you have been able to build a case that courtroom procedures and standards would apply. If you had to follow those courtroom procedures from the very beginning of the investigation, you would never have gotten anywhere. So regardless of how brilliant that lawyer may be, he's a complete idiot (or IDiot) when it comes to understanding anything about science.
BTW, to poke a pin in your conceit of "non-religious" reasons for opposing evolution, in an essay Phillip Johnson wrote that his main reason for rejecting evolution is that "it leaves God with nothing to do." Bone-headed idiocy!
Also, this is one case where my memory does not fit the actual timeline. I remember seeing Johnson in the early 1980's, but his book wasn't published until 1991, four years after ID was adopted and adapted by creationism. I do remember having heard of Johnson before 1987. I cannot explain this discrepancy.
So, back to the thread. The ID community had been in contact with the creationist community looking for common ground despite their differences. Creationists are primarily YECs, so they are tied closely to young-earth beliefs. They are also rather explicitly religious, usually with a fundamentalist bend, and hence very tied to the Bible. Creationists are fairly monolithic in religious matters. Their opposition to evolution is primarily for religious reasons, which are mainly that their beliefs don't fit reality.
IDists are more eclectic religiously and as a group are not tied too strongly to specific religious beliefs nor to trying to prop up the Bible. They are not tied to ideas of a young earth, which is by far the weakest part of YEC -- most of my research into and refutations of YEC deal with young-earth claims.
Even though some are hiding their deeper religious reasons for opposing evolution, most IDists claim that their objections are purely philosophical. Those objections are primarily their rejection of materialism, but there again they don't understand what they are talking about.
Science practices methodological materialism, which means that science can only deal with the physical universe and has no ability to deal with the supernatural, so anything supernatural just has no place in the business of science. That does not deny the possibility of the existence of the supernatural, just that science cannot do anything with the supernatural.
BTW, YHWH (AKA "HaShem" (apparently the basis for the Vulcan hand salute), AKA "G-d", AKA "God" to goyim) is supernatural by its very nature.
There is also philosophical materialism, which is the philosophical idea that the supernatural does not exist. This is referred to disparagingly as "molecules to Man", etc. This is what IDiots wrongly believe that science uses, but they are dead-headed wrong!
So IDiots don't know the simple and abundantly clear difference between methodological materialism and philosophical materialism. And because they don't understand that difference, they want to "reform" science to include the supernatural. Just how the flying Frak is that supposed to work? Everything happens through "goddidit"? That answers absolutely nothing.
Just because IDiots don't understand science, they want to obliterate it. FRAK THEM! We had a topic back in 2007, So Just How is ID's Supernatural-based Science Supposed to Work? (SUM. MESSAGES ONLY), in which I posed the question of just how IDiots' reformed science was supposed to actually work. 396 message in total. No answer to my fundamental question of just how it is supposed to work.
I should also note that "creation science" claims are all BS and as far as I've seen ID arguments are also all BS. However, creationists normally make their claims based on science that is outside of their own training, so not only do they not understand what they are talking about but they cannot respond to any questions or challenges. IDists normally try to stay closer to their areas of expertise and so are better able to respond to questions or challenges. Creationist claims are based on misrepresenting science, even basic science, and so are easily refuted by almost anybody with any basic knowledge of science. IDists also do their share of misrepresenting, but they couch most of arguments in byzantine mathematics -- they are usually also fairly well versed in math -- which means that anyone trying to address or refute an ID claim must also be highly trained, especially in math. So, creationism is pure BS and so is ID, but ID's BS is much stronger than creationism's. Refuting creationist claims is like shooting fish in a barrel, while ID claims present a much harder target.
So since creationists could no longer use "creation science", they created their new game of "Hide the Creationism" by adopting the "complexity" arguments of ID and hiding behind an ID smokescreen (stronger BS and all).
So the third phase in the Evolution of Creationism is:
3. Create a new game of "Hide the Creationism" by adopting ID complexity arguments. In order to make that work, they have learned to avoid the entire young-earth issue.
For example, there's a local YEC activist with whom I had had a 20 year long email correspondence. The absolutely most dishonest lying scum that I have ever encountered. When I think about creationists and how thoroughly dishonest and despicable they can be, he is the prime example of that.
Even though he is an avowed YEC, guess how many times in all of twenty years, two whole decades, he ever presented or discussed any young-earth claims. Absolutely zero times! Even though I asked him about it repeatedly (discussing young earth claims are the only fun part of creationism). That is because he knows himself as a fact that those claims are false (how could he not know when over the years they'd get refuted right to his face?) and that they are the weakest part of his position, so he must avoid them at all costs.
OK, so now we are in the "Hide the Creationism" phase where the creationists are using ID-esque complexity claims as a smokescreen. And that is pretty much the current situation. I mean, they have nowhere else to go.
But AZPaul3 says "Can't do intelligent design." I don't know of any sweeping court decision to support that, but I do know what he is referring to.
Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District (2005). District court, so not binding nationwide like a US Supreme Court ruling would be. It revolved around an "ID" (reason for those scare quotes below) textbook, Of Pandas and People. The ID side lost in large part because of the smoking gun which proved that that book was a "creation science" book and therefore religious in nature and purpose as per Edwards v. Aguillard (1987).
The book, Of Pandas and People, was in the process of being written when Edwards v. Aguillard (1987) went down destroying any and all "creation science" efforts. Of Pandas and People was a "creation science" book from the very start. Now that being a "creation science" book would keep it from being adopted by any school district, they had to play the game of "Hide the Creationism" and give it the traditional superficial scrubbing of all incriminating references.
As per proper practice, the book was being written on a word processor, so they just did a global find-and-replace to change all references to creation and creationism to "intelligent design" and creator to "intelligent agency", and "creationists" to "design proponents". Well, global editing commands don't always work perfectly. The smoking gun for what they were doing was one instance of "creationists" that wasn't changed cleanly, creating the word "cdesign proponentsists". That revealed the true creationist nature of that book.
In the ruling, Intelligent Design was found to be religious in nature. But while that does establish a case history of ID having been found to be religious in nature (hence AZPaul3's comment), its scope is much more limited than a US Supreme Court decision would be.
So that leaves us with creationists still able to continue their "Hide the Creationism" with their ID BS deception.
 
Now as a summary:
AZPaul3 writes:
That subterfuge has been tried with intelligent design.
Now you can't do creationism. Can't do creation science. Can't do intelligent design.
So, this non-religious Divine Creation is the next ploy?
See you in court.
  1. The original populist reaction of parents to their high school kids being taught something that they assumed in their ignorance to be against their religion. BTW, that period of time was when high school attendance was on the rise. Their actions and accomplishments were to pass the "monkey laws" and to pressure all levels of public education to exclude the teaching of evolution -- BTW, they had no effect on colleges and universities which continued to teach evolution unimpeded.
    This situation continued for decades from the 1920's to 1968.
  2. "Creation science". In the dismantling of anti-evolution's major bulwark against evolution education in the wake of Epperson v. Arkansas (1968), the anti-evolution forces immediately went into action and found that the rules had changed. In response, they conducted the evolution (Navy-speak) of "Hide the Bible" in order to sneak their religious material into the public schools. Part of that was the creation of "creation science" as a legalistic deception to fool the courts.
    As AZPaul3 quite correctly said, "Now you can't do creationism." You have to "Hide the Bible" with "creation science".
  3. Create a new game of "Hide the Creationism" by adopting ID complexity arguments. In order to make that work, they have learned to avoid the entire young-earth issue.
    A court has found ID to just be the same old creationist nonsense, but it's not a high-enough court to stem the tide of creationist BS.
 
So despite your attempt to mischaracterize your position as "non-religious", reality proves you wrong on that point.
Edited by dwise1, : Added indents to improve readability

This message is a reply to:
 Message 63 by WookieeB, posted 04-20-2021 4:18 PM WookieeB has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 70 by WookieeB, posted 04-21-2021 11:19 PM dwise1 has replied

  
dwise1
Member
Posts: 5930
Joined: 05-02-2006
Member Rating: 5.8


(2)
Message 66 of 111 (885633)
04-20-2021 10:18 PM
Reply to: Message 61 by WookieeB
04-19-2021 8:14 PM


Re: Already Convinced
Where would you categorize someone that accepts Divine Creation and that opposes evolution based on a non-religious stance, such as having scientific reasons for rejecting (some aspects of) evolution?
Just in case you missed it in my other reply (my Message 65 to your Message 63), AZPaul3 in his Message 62 very correctly called bullshit on your question quoted above (also quoted by him).
Let me explain it again where you cannot overlook it.
The entire "creation science" deliberate deception was based on this big lie: "We oppose evolution for purely scientific reasons. Has absolutely nothing to do with religion." When in reality "creation science" is purely religious in nature and in purpose. So that big lie was intended first to deceive the courts and then to deceive the public. That claim of "rejecting evolution for scientific reasons" is nothing but a massive fraud.
Now, look at that and look at what you had written. Aren't they virtually identical in what they claim?
We have watched creationists for decades lying out of every orifice of their bodies and shoveling tons of bullshit all over everybody.
How else could you expect us to view you when you try to shovel that same old bullshit lie on us as you just now did?
 
Now let me quote to you a disclaimer from my cre/ev website:
quote:
From the start, my approach has been to examine and critique creationist claims.
My position is that:
  • If you want to oppose evolution, then you need to do so honestly and truthfully.
  • Using false and deceptive claims must be avoided because of the damage that that does to your cause, which I assume to be The Cause of Christ.
  • Using false and deceptive claims both drives away potential converts (especially those with any knowledge of science and hence can readily see how bogus your claims are, so you just gave them very good reasons to reject your religion from this point on) and entraps believers into a vicious circle of lies that will either corrupt them morally or eventually destroy their faith.
  • You also need to learn as much as you possibly can about actual science, including evolution. Going to war against an enemy (as you are warring against evolution) without knowing anything about that enemy will lead you to defeat, so it is in your own best interest to learn all that you can learn (HINT: not from creationist sources, since they will only feed you misinformation).
I never attack religious belief, but rather warn against using lies and deception to support and defend religious belief. Over the decades, I have received vicious emails denouncing me for attacking the Bible. Nothing could be further from the truth, since I almost never even mention the Bible. Rather, I oppose the use of false and deceptive claims and arguments to support or promote a religion. Nor do I oppose belief in Divine Creation, but rather "creation science" which is a deliberately crafted legal deception which escaped the petri dish and has infected the Body of Christ. In short, using falsehoods and deception as the basis for your faith and as a means to defend your faith and proselytize to others can only be counter-productive at best and self-destructive at worst.
And
quote:
My position basically boils down to this:
If you honestly and truly want to fight evolution, then at least do it right!
Learn everything you can about evolution and then attack it, not some stupid strawman caricature of it.
And do so honestly and truthfully!
By refusing to fight evolution honestly and truthfully, but rather using "creation science" instead, you are constantly shooting yourself in the foot, dooming your cause (ie, the Cause of Christ) to failure and your followers to losing their faith.


What part of "then do so honestly and truthfully" are you unable or unwilling to understand?

This message is a reply to:
 Message 61 by WookieeB, posted 04-19-2021 8:14 PM WookieeB has not replied

  
dwise1
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Posts: 5930
Joined: 05-02-2006
Member Rating: 5.8


(3)
Message 67 of 111 (885637)
04-20-2021 11:42 PM
Reply to: Message 60 by WookieeB
04-19-2021 8:09 PM


Re: Already Convinced
But I was unaware that on this forum there was a requirement to further acknowledge your response with one of my own, much less be held to a 24-hour time limit to accomplish that. Considering that some of the threads on this forum have stretched on for years without having a daily request-response-response-..., I would not have expected such a standard. Did I miss some posted rule to that effect when I originally registered on this forum? If so, please point out the relevant text.
That was mainly speculation of whether you'd turn out to be a hit-and-run troll like Mikey the Whiz has a long history of being on this forum.
AKA "drive-by flaming" (or Robin Williams' "run-by fruiting"), characteristic of many absolutely vicious emails "about" my website I've received from "good Christians" full of "Christian love" accusing me of horrible things that are nowhere to be found on my site. And almost invariably when I would respond and ask them to tell me which page they were referring to (about 35 pages in the creation/evolution section) and which specific sentence they were objecting to, they would not respond, even when I sent follow-up emails.
Sadly, that's what decades of bitter experience have taught us to expect from creationists. Though it does get worse, a lot worse.
As I seem to recall, you do seem to lean strongly towards creationism even though you appear to try to hide it behind the popular "intelligent design" smokescreen. I seem to recall that I included that game of "Hide the Creationism" in my message that you replied to.
There were a few reasons why I made this request -
1) The term "creationist" tends to have different meanings depending on where it is used. (A similar case can be said for the term "evolution"). In the majority of definitions, there is often an overlap of the description, usually that being the involvement of something supernatural. But there are distinctions between the varying definitions that are important to know as well. I can usually figure it out, but this thread seemed to be all over the place with meaning of the term.
2) Regardless the weakness of the OP's (mike the wiz) arguments, his apparent meaning of creationist was a more general one. Whereas dwise1's usage seemed to refer to a more formal group of people, of whom he had argued over YEC related topics over 30 years ago, and of whom he somehow has worked up a full psychological profile.
I value clarity over agreement, and as such I was having some difficulty reconciling the OP's and others usage of the term to what dwise1 was alluding to. Despite some of the past arguments dwise1 had been involved in, there was a desire in my mind to further explain the general description and beliefs of this group he referring to. Thus, my request.
"Creationist" is not the only term that depends on context to tell you what it means. Almost every single term we use in all fields depend on context for their actual meaning.
When you buy or use ketchup, why is it always labeled "tomato ketchup" and not just simply "ketchup"? What do they think, that there are other kinds of ketchup? Well, that is the case. Ketchup was a Malaysian fish sauce from before any tomatoes had ever been exported from the New World. On YouTube, Townsends has presented a number of different 18th century ketchups, none of which use tomatoes (they might have still thought tomatoes were poisonous). So to refer to the only kind of ketchup we have ever known, we need to modify it with "tomato" to provide the proper context.
Similarly, you don't use a napkin but rather a "paper napkin". Just plain napkins are made of cloth, so we have to specify that we are using a paper napkin. Same thing with paper towels. And with many other common items which are different than their original form.
Going further, many different endeavors and trades have their own specialized vocabularies (AKA "jargon") in which they still use common words but with different very specific meanings within the trade. For example, when working with a movable type printing press, you need to use coins. Not money, but rather pieces of metal used to fill in the empty space at the end of a line in order to hold the print in place.
Another example from my personal life is "rhythm." I was never able to learn how to dance the freestyle 60's stuff( which in German was called "Auseinandertanzen", "dancing away from each other" ... I only know the name for it in German but not in English). I was told to follow the rhythm, but nobody ever pointed out to me what that was -- I was and still am a listener who hears and listens to what all the instruments are doing, the downside of which was that if I need to follow one particular instrument for the key to dancing I keep getting distracted by all the melodic instruments. I studied music theory, in part to finally learn about this elusive thing, rhythm. In music, that's how you divide the beats within a measure. Not how it's used in dance. I finally came to realize that both music and dance use the same word, "rhythm", but differently -- kind of similarly, but still differently -- causing much confusion.
So, context is King! You need to determine what the context is so that you can know what the terms mean. Devoid of context, a word could mean anything.
Now, there is a very typical deceptive creationist trick which has been called "semantic shifting". They use it to "quote a scientific source" and still change that quote to mean something quite different than what the source actually said. The key is to remove that quote from its context or else (or also) stick it into a different context. In doing so, you "shift the meaning" of that quote which enables you to misquote your source without having to change a single word. One example of changing the meaning by lifting it out of context would be to quote the Bible as saying "There is no God."
Most commonly, the creationist would quote the scientific source in which those terms had very specific meanings and present it to their audience/readership in colloquial terms, street English, where those terms have quite different meanings.
The example that comes to mind is "transitional fossil forms". Is a fossil transitional between two other forms? Let's take Archaeopteryx as an example of a transition from a particular kind of dinosaur to birds. The scientists will say that Archaeopteryx is not transitional, but they are using a very specific definition of "transitional" which is quite different than the street use of that term (kind of like "tentative" in lawyer-speak, but that's another story). So creationists lift the words of the scientists out of context and plop them into the street meanings, thus misquoting their sources without ever having to change a single word.
On the street, all that means is whether that fossilized critter was on a line of descent from one form to another (eg, from a particular kind of dinosaur and birds). But in one of the sciences that study such things (eg, systematics, cladistics) for a fossil to be transitional all its characteristics must be intermediate between the before and after forms. Since it very rarely works that way (different characteristics change at different rates and at different times), creationists can find examples of scientists saying that a particular fossil is not transitional in the strict, scientific sense of that term when that fossil is clearly transitional in the street sense which is the sense that the creationists are misrepresenting the scientists as using.
BTW, in the notes from their two-model class at San Diego State University (it was the only true two-model class I have ever heard of until the campus Christian clubs rebelled and had it shut down), Awbrey and Thwaites compared 27 features of birds, Archaeopteryx, and Coelurosaurs (a kind of theropod dinosaur). In two features, all three groups were the same (eyes having sclerotic ring and scapulae having same shape). In two other features, birds and Archaeopteryx were the same and different from Coelurosaurs (body covered with feathers and fused clavicles [wishbone]). In 17 other features, Archaeopteryx is different from birds and the same as the coelurosaurs (femur, fibula, sternum, ribs, gastralia, cervical vertebra type, caudals, vertebral column, humerus, ulna, carpometacarpus, teeth, palate, snout (instead of a beak), occipital condyle and foramen magnum, anteorbital and external mandibular skull openings, and external nostril openings near the tip of the snout (instead of near the eyes). In 6 other features, Archaeopteryx is intermediate between birds and Coelurosaurs (metatarsals, bones being hollow and pneumatic, coracoids, pelvis, orbits, braincase). So Archaeopteryx is obviously intermediate between Coelurosaurs and birds, though technically not transitional in the strict technical sense of that word. Hence creationists deny Archaeopteryx as being transitional and claim that it's either 100% bird or 100% reptile and sometimes they even make both claims in the same article (as Duane Gish has done).
 
The term "creationist" tends to have different meanings depending on where it is used. (A similar case can be said for the term "evolution")
There's an entire line of misleading creationist argument that points out that there are several different kinds of evolution. In that argument, they misrepresent "evolutionists" (what is the definition of that pejorative creationist term?) as knowing nothing about evolution. Besides being an attempt to play "gotcha" (like catching somebody misusing the imperative as an interrogative), their argument also reveals their own confusion about what evolution is; what they understand evolution to be is a long unanswered question.
According to one dictionary, the word "evolution" first appeared in the English language around 1610, more than two centuries before Darwin used the term. The basic meaning from the roots is "turning out". It is generally used to refer to change over time, so we can talk about the evolution of the telephone, the evolution of Western art, the evolution of the English language, the evolution of Christianity, stellar evolution, etc. It also has some more specialized meanings, like biological evolution (note the need for a modifier, like in "paper napkin", to distinguish it as differing from the general usage) and Navy evolutions.
From this point on, our context is that "evolution" refers to biological evolution primarily of the Darwinian and neo-Darwinian varieties. Other forms of evolution will be indicated with a modifier (eg, stellar evolution).
Creationists often try to create analogies between evolution (which they never define so I don't know what they think they're talking about) and the evolution of the designs of all kinds of other things, like cars or Mikey's drone. Those analogies are false, because the way that evolution works and what it is restricted to work with are very different from changing the designs of cars or drones or whatever -- biological evolution does not nor ever would have an option like dropping a Mitsubishi engine into an American minivan; life does not even begin to be able to work that way! Hence, Mikey's argument for intelligent design based on his false analogies falls apart.
I can usually figure it out, but this thread seemed to be all over the place with meaning of the term ["creationist"].
How so? What other uses for "creationist" do you see except for adherents of creationism which is one side of the contrived dichotomy, "creation/evolution", which is a creationist invention intended to promote the deception that there is some kind of "controversy". One goal of that "controversy" is to severely damage science education with campaigns calling for "teach the controversy" which is just a newer form of their "balanced treatment" and "equal time" campaigns of the past.
That "controversy" is still tightly bound with their other false dichotomy, the Two Model Approach (TMA), despite most creationists' ignorance of it (along with their ignorance of professional creationists, since they get most of their creationist material from their church or by word of mouth -- Mikey the Whizz had it completely turned around when he claimed that "evolutionists" don't read what the creationists write; rather it is most creationists who don't do that reading). The TMA posits two mutually exclusive "models", the "Creation Model" (CM) and the "Evolution Model" (EM), and attempts to "prove" the CM solely by "disproving" the EM. In a true dichotomy that would work (and is used in some mathematical proofs using "proof by contradiction" -- assume the complete opposite of what you are trying to prove and prove that opposite to be false, therefore the original proposition must be true). However, there are strict requirements for a true dichotomy, none of which the TMA meets, therefore the TMA is a false dichotomy (AKA "false dilemma"). The only purpose that a false dichotomy serves is to deceive and to mislead your audience and followers.
I have already discussed the TMA elsewhere, plus this subject needs its own message for a full discussion.
Regardless the weakness of the OP's (mike the wiz) arguments, his apparent meaning of creationist was a more general one. Whereas dwise1's usage seemed to refer to a more formal group of people, of whom he had argued over YEC related topics over 30 years ago, and of whom he somehow has worked up a full psychological profile.
The problem with mike's usage is that it is typical of creationists in that they will claim that every believer is one of themselves even while decrying most believers to be "atheistic evolutionists" because they do not reject evolution. IOW, they have usurped the title of "creationist".
{ABE -- 21-Apr-21 0834
Part of the problem in comparing what we say with what Mikey says is that while we want to analyze and classify and define what a creationist is, to YECs like Mikey (he proved he's a YEC with his flimsy sea salt claim) it's binary: "to be a creationist you have to buy into the entire YEC package, otherwise you're an atheistic evolutionist." That traces back to the Two Model Approach in which their "vague" "creation model" is actually very specifically defined as YEC. If you don't buy into the "creation model" then you've bought into the "atheistic evolution model"; if you're not a YEC, then you're an "atheistic evolutionist". I have literally witnessed YECs denouncing old-earth creationists (yes, there is such a thing) as "evolutionists" for no other reason than that they do not accept a young earth.
So Mikey the Whizz ignores reality and nuance in order to create an either-or "classification system" which is utterly useless.
In the past I have tried to work out a way to classify different types of creationists which even sub-grouped YECs in terms of their degree and form of activity. First I divided them as inactive or active: most are inactive primarily feeding on creationist claims, including "creation science", while some have taken the next step by becoming active in spreading those claims, first among other believers and then venturing out into the real world (eg, non-creationist friends and family, co-workers/co-students). Some newly active creationists will wonder into online forums, first on creationist forums which exclude non-creationists (members here have had bitter experience with that). As they become more confident they venture out onto forums which contain normals. That is normally the first time they have ever gotten honest feedback about their claims.
My classification attempt looks at that exposure to the truth and its effect on the creationist. Some will realize that they have nothing and so will retreat to a lower level of activity. Some will press on to become activists who seek out non-creationists to convert with some even going professional (eg, the ICR, Kent Hovind). The problem is that the more active they become the more they are exposed to the truth that their claims are pure crap. So basically, the higher their level of activity the greater dishonesty they must employ.
I presented some of this about 4 years ago in this message, Message 1174. There I present these classification ideas more clearly than here.
}
Here is what was written on this by an evangelical Christian who did not reject evolution, went on to earn his PhD in Physical Geology, and opposed "creation science":
quote:
Introduction
I am an evangelical Christian and a creationist. I am also a Ph.D. candidate in geology, believe that the earth is approximately 4,600,000,000 years old, and have taught evolution in historical geology courses. Does this sound contradictory to you? Well, read on...
. . .
These results shouldn't be surprising since a 1991 poll on religion by the Graduate School of the City University of New York (New York Times, April 10, 1991) indicated that 86% of Americans profess to be Christian and only 7.5% claimed no religious affiliation.
I draw two inferences from these polling results:
1. Most Americans believe in God and believe that humans were created by God.
2. Most Americans are scientifically illiterate and have no idea how difficult it would be to scientifically justify an ex nihilo creation of man less than 10,000 years ago.
Unlike many atheists, however, I do not believe these two issues are necessarily related. People believe in God because God exists. People are ignorant of science because our public school system does not effectively teach them science, our culture does not value science, and the Christian Church has generally been either indifferent or hostile to science. For the most part, the public school system teaches that science is a system of facts to be memorized (which is why many students dislike science) and not that science is a way of investigating the world around us (which is fun and interesting).
. . .
"Scientific" Creationism
I've read many of the materials written by young-earth creationists such as Steve Austin, Thomas Barnes, Carl Baugh, Duane Gish, Ken Ham, Henry Morris, John Morris, Gary Parker, and Harold Slusher among others. I'm also very familiar with the material put out by Answers in Genesis, the Institute for Creation Research and the Creation Research Society. In addition, I've even attended lectures and seminars by several well-known young-earth creationists.
In general, I've been dismayed by the lack of scholarship, research, and ethics displayed by these men who claim to be devout Christians. They totally misrepresent mainstream science and scientists, ignore evidence contrary to their claims, and display an amazing ignorance of even the most basic fundamentals of science and scientific inquiry. Their materials are aimed toward laypeople who are in no position to evaluate their claims. I don't mean to sound arrogant, but who is better qualified to judge the accuracy of K-Ar dating, an evangelist who reads creationist literature and has never taken a physics or geology course in his life or a Ph.D. in isotope geochemistry (who may also be a devout Christian) who has spent 25 years studying K-Ar dating in granites?
As an example of some creationist's arrogance, intellectual laziness, and apparent abandonment of any allegience to the truth, I offer the following quotation which I recently came across from Pastor James B. Coffman of a Church of Christ in Houston, Texas. Coffman claims, in speaking about the flood in his Commentary on Genesis (1985, Abilene Christian University Press), that:
A scientific community that has no explanation whatever for how marine fossils are found at elevations above the snowline in the Cordillera and the Himalayas are not at all convincing in their shouted denials that what is recorded here is a record of what really happened [p. 121].
Is he serious? No explanation whatever? Has the Pastor Coffman ever heard of plate tectonics, the unifying theme of modern geology for the past quarter century? Perhaps before trashing the work and reputation of geologists (many of them Christians), he should have read an undergraduate textbook or two. I can give dozens of examples like this from creationist literature that are factually wrong. Not just differences of opinion, but factually wrong. Read my detailed criticism of John Woodmorappe's claims about radiometric dating.
. . .
A Fine Line
Keeping all of the above in mind, I think it's time for Christians to reclaim the word creationists from the Biblical literalists. To be a creationist means to believe that God created the heavens and the earth and all life therein. This is the historic, orthodox Christian position and implies nothing about the age of the earth or the mechanisms (or lack thereof) of biological evolution. Let's speak of Biblical creation or young-earth creation when distinguishing the beliefs of those who accept a literal reading of Genesis.
In regard to the Biblical-creation/evolution controversy, I think it's probably best for Christians not to become dogmatic one way or another, to accept that devout Christians can hold differing viewpoints on the issue, to be willing to examine the evidence with an open mind, and to remain humble in the knowledge that only God knows the whole Truth. I think we'll all be surprised when we one day stand face-to-face with our Creator!
IOW, the "creation science" crowd has usurped the title of "creationist" and believers like this individual feel that they need to take that title back.
This also means that Mikey Whizz is not using the term "creationist" any differently than I have been. He just does not understand that most actual creationists would not believe most of what he does.
So why do you have the mistaken idea that I'm talking about something different from what everybody else is talking about?
I value clarity over agreement, and as such I was having some difficulty reconciling the OP's and others usage of the term to what dwise1 was alluding to. Despite some of the past arguments dwise1 had been involved in, there was a desire in my mind to further explain the general description and beliefs of this group he referring to. Thus, my request.
Creationists are not a formal organization, but rather people who adhere to certain biblical literalist beliefs and who have bought into the false claims of "creation science". I honestly do not understand why you would think that I'm talking about a formal organization.
Where are you getting those ideas from?
Edited by dwise1, : {ABE -- 21-Apr-21 0834}

Edited by dwise1, : In ABE added " for no other reason than that they do not accept a young earth"


This message is a reply to:
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