... on a clip featuring anti-creationist bias

video commented on :

Tiffany Ondracek : Creationism (Penn and Teller) (2003)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X7_lhfUhrHY

HGL

I

"when someone comes in and says intelligent design is a science it is based on God - it's a religion!"

Which one of them? Protestantism is a Theistic religion. Catholicism is a Theistic religion. Islam and Judaism are Theistic religions. Platonism is a mainly Theistic Philosophy and the Transcendentals are mainly Platonic. There are even freemasonries that are religiously Theistic.

No, intelligent design is not based as for its proof on a single religion, it is rather proof of a certain - limited! - common ground to some of them.

Precisely as atheism is common ground for Evolutionism and Theravada Buddhism, and that too is limited.

II

You said genetics proved evolution ...?

Creation vs. Evolution : Letter to Nature on Karyotype Evolution in Mammals
http://creavsevolu.blogspot.fr/2011/11/letter-to-nature-on-karyotype-evolution.html

And you said astronomy proved billions of years of age of the universe ... or something?

Triviū, Quadriviū, 7 cætera : Distant Starlight Problem - Answered by Geocentrism
http://triv7quadriv.blogspot.fr/2012/11/distant-starlight-problem-answered-by.html

III

"supernatural ain't science"?

Not quite correct that either. Science can either have a view there is or that there is not supernature above nature. One view could be supported by positive evidence there is. The other by total lack of evidence there is. One way of proving the supernatural scientifically is exhausting all natural explanations.

At least all known ones. If you start getting "we cannot yet explain that ..." that means you have a scientist prejudiced against supernatural explanations.

Btw, the chief of ICR pronounced the word clearly and emphatically enough, there was no sneaking about it.

New blog on the kid : Proximate causes are not always secondary
nov9blogg9.blogspot.com/2013/12/proximate-causes-are-not-always.html

IV

"Their theology is such that if one thing is wrong with the Bible you have to throw it all out"

As far as Bible as religious authority goes, yes.

A word of GOD cannot contain one error.

Accepting parts of Bible after rejecting it as a religious authority or as word of God is perhaps feasible but not Christian.

"If one piece of the evolution puzzle does not fit, the whole thing has to go."

Misrepresentation of YEC position.

Th' kaal

+Hans-Georg Lundahl

In what way?

HGL

Th'kaal, it is more like major chunks not fitting than just one piece in a puzzle.

Guyon Hayklan

+Hans-Georg Lundahl Not sure I follow you, if Evolution were not true I'd still be an Atheist, and Evolution is not purely an Atheistic Science. All you can say is that Evolution fits with Atheists, and Creation does not. For example, there are many religious, including Christian people who accept Evolution!

HGL

A Christian who is evolutionist is illogical.

It is very much NOT a misrepresentation of the Creationist position that Christianity involves accepting the Bible as the word of God and THAT involves accepting Genesis 1 - 3 as historical. And of course Genesis 1 - 3 is not just a piece of a puzzle, it is the three first chapters of the whole story.

Break a) Moving down to another debate:

Josh Robinson

if god didn't create the sun till the 4th day...how did he know 4 days had passed....

Rod Byer

Your question is obviously disingenuous, and you should be ashamed of yourself.

Josh Robinson

I should be ashamed for asking how he knew or ashamed that so few people see the hilarious and obvious holes in the old testament.

Here is another gem for u.

In genesis 1 it says god created water before light. That's an interesting proposal because for there to be water u need oxygen (h2o) And to get that you need stars (light) to explode to fuse heavier elements like hydrogen and helium into heavier elements like.... Oxygen. So... Light had to came before water. Well.. Unless god made special water with no oxygen.

Science.. What a wonderful thing.

jsong1974

+Josh Robinson

5 And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.

Genesis 1. Did God tell you the light was the sun? No.

Josh Robinson

He doesn't have to. Any light source is light.

You not understanding how water is formed is not my problem. Stars came first. Sorry.

I don't need to Google any of this or bible versus. I can discuss it off the top of my head. We can discuss the Koran if u prefer as well.

You raise a compelling question however. The light hitting earth may not have been the sun. Maybe god had a really big flashlight. Good move. Just make up other things u have no way of knowing. Well played.

jsong1974

+Josh Robinson Are you God? You must admit you don't know everything. The bible speaks of God as light. Just because the finite mind can't figure it all out doesn't change the truth.

Josh Robinson

It also doesn't make your point. You taking it upon yourself to fill in all the blanks with information you do not have is not knowledge.

My position is the correct one. I do not know. Neither do you. And NOT knowing something does not = information about events.

Guyon Hayklan

+Josh Robinson He's God, he's clever :)

jsong1974

+Josh Robinson I do know . You can't know. All the evidence in the world will never get you there. This is what can't be understood by human will. Why? 14 But the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned. 1 Corinthians 2:14

And all men apart from God( JESUS CHRIST) are spiritually blind and dead from birth. The new creation is a work of God. Will you understand this? NO

Guyon Hayklan

+jsong1974 No that is what you have been fed. That is religious bullshit. How do you know the scriptures are true at all? Who wrote the Bible, when and in what language?

HGL @ Josh Robinson

+Josh Robinson "That's an interesting proposal because for there to be water u need oxygen (h2o) And to get that you need stars (light) to explode to fuse heavier elements like hydrogen and helium into heavier elements like.... Oxygen."

What if

• a) God created the oxygen of water directly, without using any stars to do it?
• b) when creating the atmosphere and dividing the waters He separated water into Oxygen and Hydrogen and made stars from part of that Hydrogen?
• and c) later used other parts of Hydrogen plus part of Oxygen to make Flood water?

"Just make up other things u have no way of knowing. Well played."

Well, you have no way of knowing whether oxygen in water was created by God or came from the stars.

Actually you might just have. There might be no way known for Hydrogen and Helium in stars to form Oxygen. That would leave God as the obvious answer.

+Josh Robinson

"And NOT knowing something does not = information about events."

Well, that leaves your objections to the Bible in the void as well, doesn't it?

As to initial question, He separated the light from the darkness and made the light chase the darkness around the earth. Each time it left and returned to the spot of presumably future Jerusalem where Adam was created, it was an evening and a morning. Even before he made the sun on the fourth of those days and assigned to it the task of giving the main light thereafter.

As how we know this is so, we trust that He gave Moses a vision of what happened. And we trust Moses because of the Exodus. And we trust both Moses in general and Genesis in particular because of Christ, God made Man, expressing trust. And we trust Him because of the Resurrection. And we trust the accounts of the Resurrection because of the Church.

And we trust the Church on its origin, because if you try inventing another origin for it, there is no scenario for how it came to be unaware of the real origin.

HGL @ jsong1974

+jsong1974 No man becomes a Christian without grace. You can however not be sure Josh Robinson will remain without grace.

In your chamber you can pray for him. On the forum you must argue.

If God gives him grace, he will understand it all. If God does not give him grace, he may still understand some. And you cannot predict what he will or will not understand.

HGL @ Guyon

+Guyon Hayklan

Are you implying everyone has been indoctrinated and nobody is thinking critically?

Or are you assuming precisely your indoctrination was the right one because your teacher was cool?

Or are you assuming that you know which if yourself and jsong, which of atheists yourselves and Christians have been more indoctrinated? If you consider that Atheism has spread under Compulsory Schooling, while Christianity spread while schooling was available but free, that may give you a hint about the real answer - not the one you assume.

Guyon Hayklan

+Hans-Georg Lundahl

You also assume a lot about me.

I'm not implying that everyone is indoctrinated.

I am implying that religion IS indoctrination and IS bad.

You concept of spreading of Christianity under various schooling situations is flawed, and does not take account of the world in general.

People were more theistic in the past and religion in schools was more accepted, in fact many schools were run by the religious, I know I went to a few.

The reason Atheism is spreading is that people are less afraid of admitting that they can no longer accept the illogical concept of a sky daddy. There have been many closet atheists in the past, many are coming out now.

I predict the end of religion within this century.

jsong1974

+Guyon Hayklan He who understands is a new creation in Christ Jesus. But the anointing which you have received from Him abides in you, and you do not need that anyone teach you; but as the same anointing teaches you concerning all things, and is true, and is not a lie, and just as it has taught you, you will abide in Him.1 John 2:27

same to me:

+Hans-Georg Lundahl 3 Jesus answered and said to him, “Most assuredly, I say to you, unless one is born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.”

4 Nicodemus said to Him, “How can a man be born when he is old? Can he enter a second time into his mother’s womb and be born?”

5 Jesus answered, “Most assuredly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God. 6 That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit. 7 Do not marvel that I said to you, ‘You must be born again.’ 8 The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear the sound of it, but cannot tell where it comes from and where it goes. So is everyone who is born of the Spirit.” John 3:3

Hans-Georg Lundahl

+jsong1974 Sure, he cannot SEE Heaven unless he is born again by Baptism and lives the faith of his Baptism.

But it is pretty usual to believe in Heaven before asking to get baptised as an adult. And of course as the Spirit bloweth where He wants, you cannot predict He won't blow on Josh or Hayklan or even when He will start doing so. That is why it is useless telling them, just to save your face, they cannot understand because they aren't born again. What you can do to them is argue or leave alone.

Guyon Hayklan

+Hans-Georg Lundahl With respect, that was gibberish!

Hans-Georg Lundahl

No.

The Gospel is not gibberish. I was discussing, if you like, the Gospel with jsong.

Are you implying everyone has been indoctrinated and nobody is thinking critically?

"I'm not implying that everyone is indoctrinated."

Thank you, that is one off the list.

Or are you assuming precisely your indoctrination was the right one because your teacher was cool?

Not answered.

[Before I had posted dialogue on alternative three he has posted:]

Guyon Hayklan

+Hans-Georg Lundahl The Gospel is fiction plain and simple. To think anything else is moronic... most of my teachers were religitards, and some kiddy fiddlers to boot!

Hans-Georg Lundahl (before reading above)

Or are you assuming that you know which if yourself and jsong, which of atheists yourselves and Christians have been more indoctrinated? If you consider that Atheism has spread under Compulsory Schooling, while Christianity spread while schooling was available but free, that may give you a hint about the real answer - not the one you assume.

"I am implying that religion IS indoctrination and IS bad."

In other words, you answer yes. One of my alternative guesses was right then.

Now to your other points.

"You concept of spreading of Christianity under various schooling situations is flawed, and does not take account of the world in general."

Schooling is precisely one of the situations that do mark the world in general.

"People were more theistic in the past and religion in schools was more accepted, in fact many schools were run by the religious, I know I went to a few."

But ...

a) ... afterwards met people who went to the majority schools?

b) Or, the religious who ran the schools were evolutionist?

c) Or, you had already decided before you went to school?

"The reason Atheism is spreading is that people are less afraid of admitting that they can no longer accept the illogical concept of a sky daddy."

My point is that the reason for that is a lot of schools towting arguments for making a "sky daddy" seem an "illogical concept".

Of course, they are not the only medium that does so. Penn and Teller show was about a situation touching school, but hardly a lesson in a school classroom. Books, magazines (Kent Hovind considers "National Geographic" as close to "National Pornographic" due to its Evolutionist bias, Nature Genetics did not publish my letter which attacked Evolution on the grounds of Mammalian Chromosome numbers, and yet many take information published in peer reviewed magazines as basically "the word of god", that is of their god), not to mention Carl Sagan's TV show Cosmos ... and then there is snobbery in company (I know it is snobbery the hard way, since refusing to bow down to it).

"There have been many closet atheists in the past, many are coming out now."

If they were really CLOSET atheists, how do you know they were atheists at all? If you recall an old man from your youth - some words you said imply your childhood and youth are over - whom you consider a closet atheist, how do you think you know that behind the Christian supposedly façade he was really atheist?

(after reading above)

OK, what you now say about your teachers may explain a certain hatred of religion.

"The Gospel is fiction plain and simple. To think anything else is moronic... most of my teachers were religitards, and some kiddy fiddlers to boot!"

Problem is, what you say about the Gospel is a handicap in your education, to say the least.

Guyon Hayklan

+Hans-Georg Lundahl You bet... I hate religion vehemently, I see the hypocrisy and the repression in it which creates priests who play with little boys. But I would still be an atheist even if I had not encounter Tony Beal (currently serving a prison sentence for abusing children).

Hans-Georg Lundahl

I suppose these religious were then doing this AFTER Vatican II (1962 - 1965)?

It matters, because you see, there was more repression in Catholic discipline for priests and religious before those years, and there was very much less people like Beal or Gheoghan (who was killed in prison after a similar sentence). If someone started showing signs of it, he was very promptly thrown out.

Guyon Hayklan

+Hans-Georg Lundahl
"Problem is, what you say about the Gospel is a handicap in your education, to say the least."

Oh really? Please provide evidence that you book is anything but the ramblings or bronze age men with an over active imagination?

People would say the same of the Koran, the Iliad, the Bhagavad Gita...

What, prey tell is so special about your God?

Hans-Georg Lundahl

Before we get into God vs gods, let us set the literary comparisons straight.

Koran or Book of Mormon could be compared to Theogony or to the rules of divination given Numa Pompilius by a nymph called Egeria.

Iliad and Genesis are things happening and getting retold centuries later. Gospel or Trial of Socrates are actual witnesses telling what they know from personal memory.

Bhagavad Gita could be that too. It proves that before Arjuna won a battle he had a pep-talk by a Pantheistic philosopher.

Neither Mahabharata nor Puranas claim that Krishna rose from the dead or rose bodily to the sky, like the Gospels and Acts claim for Jesus. They are agreed he died. They are agreed he was burned on a pyre.

The scene in which Krishna's soul is mounting into heaven and is greeted by the gods as a greater god than they is admittedly the dream of a poet who was mourning Krishna. So, the evidence for Krishna being a god is equal to the evidence of Hercules mounting to Olympus from his burial pyre. The hope that poets and priests guessed right about what happened OUTSIDE their sensual experience.

That is not so with the Gospels.

So, what is special with my God is that He is a God who manifests Himself historically, and I do not mean in a plague or in evil self-fulfilling prophecies that twist the lives of His believers, as is the case with Delphic and Trojan Apollo.

Guyon Hayklan

+Hans-Georg Lundahl "That is not so with the Gospels."

You don't even know who wrote the Bible do you?

Please, you are insulting my intelligence now, with your Sky Daddy is better then their Sky Daddy.

It's like you are a kid at school telling the other Kids your Dad is better because he has a Porsche. When in reality he's absent!

+Hans-Georg Lundahl According to Islam, the Koran IS THE WORD OF GOD... passed to Mohammed directly via Gabriel, so that makes it MUCH better than the Bible.

+Hans-Georg Lundahl And may I remind you that the bible was written over thousands of years, it contradicts it's self, some books were left out, others altered, and it is the result of translation from Aramaic, Hebrew and Greek through to Latin and then English.

Muslims however, read their Koran in the original language in which it was written, and it has not been changed or abrogated.

So again the Koran must be a much better source of God's will right?

Hans-Georg Lundahl

"Please, you are insulting my intelligence now, with your Sky Daddy is better then their Sky Daddy."

You are insulting mine when you take my documentation is better than their documentation for a mere synonym rather than a rational argument for my God being truer than their gods.

"It's like you are a kid at school telling the other Kids your Dad is better because he has a Porsche. When in reality he's absent!"

It is rather one kid being able to tell people "remember that day when dad came in a Porsche" - and no one denying it.

"You don't even know who wrote the Bible do you?"

I have very clear ideas both who did in fact write the Gospels as well as most other Bible books and who certain pseudoscholars think did not do it.

"passed to Mohammed directly via Gabriel"

Gabriel did not give Muhammed the power to raise dead or cure the lame and the blind. Neither did the Nine Muses give such a power to Hesiod. And I am not saying this merely on a Christian view of mine, obliged as I am to deny the divinity of their religions, I am saying this even according to what they say themselves see?

"the bible was written over thousands of years"

Very few of the [single constituent] books took that long to write, perhaps Genesis if Moses was just the final redactor. As to Kings and Paralipomenon, they did take a few generations but rather centuries than millennia.

"it contradicts it's self"

No.

"some books were left out"

Book of Jasher probably and Gospel of St Thomas certainly belong to a category to be left out of Scripture.

"others altered"

If you mean Jews shortened Daniel, and Protestants accepted the shorter version, I am aware of that and accept the longer version. As well as books like Baruch (sometimes called First Baruch), Tobit, Judith, Jesus Syrach and Wisdom, and at least two books of the Maccabees. You see, I am a Catholic.

"is the result of translation from Aramaic, Hebrew and Greek through to Latin and then English."

I think the translations from Hebrew and Aramaic to Greek of the Septuagint or Latin of the Vulgate were done correctly. And I think St Jerome translated the Greek of the New Testament correctly. English as such is not the language of the Bible, but I think Douai Reims is a very accurate translation of the Vulgate.

"Muslims however, read their Koran in the original language in which it was written, and it has not been changed or abrogated."

Mohammed made no miracle. He claimed to found an Ummah which abrogated BOTH Jewish synagogue AND Christian Church as if both could have had equal value up to his time. Unlike the God of the Bible, the god of his Qoran is only manifested in this revelation of Gabriel to Mohammed. You check the references to earlier - and real - manifestations of God, he bungles them. Check out how the Fifth Sourate does severe revisionism about Jesus from Nazareth, claiming BOTH Jews AND Christians were wrong about Him.

Guyon Hayklan

+Hans-Georg Lundahl Why is it so easy for you to see the lies and hypocrisy in other religions and not your own...? they are all the same, they are all based on stone age myths and legends.

You think that flying on a winged horse to heaven is not a miracle? wow!!

Fairy stories, all fairy stories, except the Old Testament is more like nightmares!

+Hans-Georg Lundahl "manifestations of God, he bungles them."

How do you know that Moh's version is not correct and the Biblical version is not "bungled" ?

Seriously, you just wear blinkers and see everything from one point of view don't you?

Hans-Georg Lundahl

"How do you know that Moh's version is not correct and the Biblical version is not "bungled" ?"

Pharisees agree with Christians on one detail: Christ claimed to be God and that was what he was ultimately crucified for.

Only difference is between believing the Crucified or His crucifiersbeing right.

BOTH these versions are centuries older than the Qoran.

And seriously, the blinkers are on your head, not mine, if you cannot see such an obvious answer before it comes.

+Guyon Hayklan I missed the flying horse part.

I do not think he flew to heaven on the back of a flying horse, and I do not think Muslims have given any coherent account of who saw him mount it.

But if he did think he flew to Heaven when mounted on Burak I think he was wrong. However, he can also have simply told people around him he had done so, they were ready to believe him without seeing.

And a real flying horse would have been a monster, but not a miracle performed by Mohammed. At the most a miracle performed to him, like Jibreel appearing or the spider weaving a web superquick in front of the cave he was hiding.

Break b)

Tone Capone (directly to video)

Do you know how to quickly tell if someone is scientifically illiterate?

The moment they say "It's just a theory".

Guyon Hayklan

+Tone Capone Very good point!

Hans-Georg Lundahl

So, if the Gospel of the kiddy fiddlers among your teachers disgusts you, you take Evolution as a substitute Gospel?

Guyon Hayklan

+Hans-Georg Lundahl "So, if the Gospel of the kiddy fiddlers among your teachers disgusts you, you take Evolution as a substitute Gospel?"

No I was taught and accepted evolution when I was a religtard like you.

+Hans-Georg Lundahl You see in my country of birth, we believe in education, and math and science were always my best subjects... Even though it was a catholic school, they taught what scientists had discovered, even if it was inconvenient in terms of their Bible.

Hans-Georg Lundahl

I believe in a certain sense in education too.

What you now tell is tantamount to Catholics with a heavy Galileo complex bowing down to teaching what the THOUGHT that scientists had discovered. Which was no news to me, but I am interested in the fact it did lead to at least one apostasy - yours.

I suppose LOGIC was less taught. I mean things like going back and forth between conclusion and its premiss or set of premisses. And checking what is logically coherent ...

To be continued?

Back to

my continuous comment :

V

"Science is a way of knowing things ... we have to start with ideas that can be tested and there is always the possibility that the conclusions we draw could be wrong."

Creationism is saying the conclusions YOU Evolutionists draw HAVE been tested and found faulty and ARE wrong.

"In science things are potentially falsifiable; that is not the case in Creationism."

Sounds a bit like Popper.

Now, it is true that a Creationist will not agree the Bible can be falsified, but you are not agreeing Evolution can be falsified.

A Creationist would usually say the Bible would already have been falsified IF it had not been the word of God. Meaning it fulfils the criterium of potential falsifibility quite as well as Evolution does.

The philosophy professor pretends Creationists are terrorising Science Class rooms.

That may be the case with popular Creationism in schools were Creation Science has already been kicked out of the door, and become a forbidden topic to discuss, or to discuss any further than the science teacher has time to give a very summary rejection.

But I recall an Evolutionist bullying against a discussion of the Creation Science I had learned from Edgar Andrews. Thus of course abusing his position as a teacher. I remember one occasion, unless it was two separate but parallel ones, he gave me the word twice and I would have proved him wrong if I had had the word the third time I asked for it too.

The philosophy professor here is abusing his position to not have Creation Science discussed in class rooms.

VI

And yes we SERIOUSLY do believe there was a Flood and that it explains Geology.

Not all Geology, of course.

The granite and gneiss of Northern Wermland in Sweden might very well be older than the Flood. And moraine is usually considered post-Flood and from the Ice Age,  only that Ice Age is considered to be much more recent.

But that does not mean the granite and gneiss are volcanic, as uniformitarian geologists pretend.

If you want Volcano, look at ...

Wiki : Kebnekaise
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kebnekaise

... perhaps. It has a form roughly remniscent of Vesuvius, but you could consider it partly flattened by erosion on the top.

But Northern Wermland is very far from Kebnekaise.

On the other hand, even Kebnekaise is like a bit too many volcanos side by side to fit in with a strictly uniformitarian view of these stones as solidified lava. If they were volcanos, then there were uncannily many of them all at once. So, I am not betting Kebnekaise is a former volcano.

Now, when we get to sedimentary rock, we are definitely suspecting the Flood of Noah for most of it.

Mr Penn or Mr Teller might think he can shrug that off by playing a short footage from a Disney version of the Flood.

He is appealing to age snobbery, relying that other U S Americans have enjoyed Mickey Mouse thoroughly but THEN "matured out of it". Other cultures do not have exactly the same age snobbery about maturing from things you really liked. CSL and JRRT indeed thought that if something you really liked as a child does not seem worthy of your attention when you are an adult, you were wrong to like it as a child even.

The lady around the hominid skulls, forgotten her name sorry, thinks it can be settled with élite snobbery. In such and such a set Creation versus Evolution is no debate. In such and such a set the mention of Flood Geology makes men go "huh". That proves nothing about how scientific creationism is or how scientific flood geology is, it only proves that a scientist is not objective all round but very capable of being prejudiced. As when she equates that snobbish set with the world of all "scientists".

And of course we get the music Disney choose for the Ark film to the flood, but then very impressive music for illustrating the lady's words about Grand Canyon ... not biassed at all, no ... :D

"You are not going to cut this very hard rock with just a bunch of water flowing" ... ok, what if it was less hard like not jet hardened at all in that period? Like more like mud than rock, hmm?

"But we actually do have fossils that show this transition" ... part of the lady's problem is she is showing a set of transitions which is irrelevant to Dr Gish's claim, since he was not speaking about ape to man but about single cell to vertebrates, and on top of that is a set of transitions where Creationists are specialised on debunking it - which the programme does not mention.

It seems calculated to keep US Americans in ignorance about the issue.

VII

"Dwayne does not want to find anything that might shake up his worldview"

And Penn or Teller (whichever of the two it is, I usually do not watch this) is of course very willing to risk his by making unsuspected finds?

With his speech after speech in <mode indignant but somewhat understanding ON> he could really have fooled me it was otherwise.

"Science is not a democratic process"

The greyhaired lady is confusing two issues for Creationists.

What is taught in school for tax money should be democratically decided. Or it might even be decided to defund schools when you find out what humbug has been taught since Eisenhower decided evolution has to be taught.

What is science in the sense of what the scientist considers a scientific explanation is of course not democratic, and I do not know any Creationist who claims it should be.

WHO is considered a Scientist might however be a democratic choice in some measure. Mainly, in Academia, it is a case of cooptation, but only within each academy. Between different academies, it may well be that a democracy decides the one or the other or both or neither should be considered as scientific.

Break 3

KoalaNoMarch

+Hans-Georg Lundahl
Uhm no, what is taught in school should NOT be democratically decided and is in danger of being completely contradictory to why your country was founded. The constitution exists to protect EVERYONE from the majority, for the very reason some of the early settlers in America left their homelands fleeing religious persecution.

You don't get to vote on what people are allowed to believe, and the place for religion is as stated, in your own homes or where you pay for it. not in the tax funded public school which exist to serve children of many faiths throughout the entire community.

Hans-Georg Lundahl

+KoalaNoMarch
As to "The constitution exists to protect EVERYONE from the majority" that is pretty ludicrous since 1/3 of the inhabitants of the Thirteen Colonies were either tarred and feathered or killed by Washington's troops in battle or fled to Canada or survived in a humiliated way because they were not protected against the Whig majority.

As to "what is taught in school should NOT be democratically decided" is pretty ludicrous too.

If you mean you don't vote on how much 2+2 makes or whether "vis" is second or third person singular in Latin, you are of course right. Noone is suggesting one should vote on such matters.

If however you mean it should not be democraticaly decided whether Cantor's and Gauss' maths or Cicero's Latin are the best complement after 2+2=4 and the spelling bee, or for that matter whether English spelling should be "color labeled" or "colour labelled" (US or UK spelling) you are saying it should be decided by some clique of oligarchs. Of course those matters are worth voting about exactly as it is worth voting about whether Evolution alone or Creationism alone or the Controversy should be taught in school.

Creationism alone by law was already overruled, by a judge who had an anti-Evolutionist prosecution that was already Old Earth and not Young Earth, and which was therefore inconsistent. As the defendant could show (Scopes trial). That leaves the alternatives Creationism alone by administrational decision, Evolutionism alone or Controversy.

Eisenhower did rule against Creationism alone, because he thought US were loosing the Space Race. As if teaching Evolution was going to fix that.

Now to this golden passage:

"for the very reason some of the early settlers in America left their homelands fleeing religious persecution.

You don't get to vote on what people are allowed to believe"

Voting against teaching Evolution and Creationism side by side IS precisely voting so that if they are formally "allowed" still to be believing Creationism, they are often no longer socially allowed to do so.

So, YOU are the one trying to vote for persecution.

I am not an US Citizen, but a Swede. I was raised in a country where Evolutionism IS and Creationism IS NOT taught in class. AND where homeschooling is very rare if not totally impossible. I am telling you, that system does mean religious persecution against Creationism.

+KoalaNoMarch "the place for religion is as stated, in your own homes or where you pay for it. not in the tax funded public school which exist to serve children of many faiths throughout the entire community."

First of all, I contest that Creationism is religion in the sense of a particular religion. It is common ground to Catholics, Orthodox, Protestants, excepting the Modernists of each community. Exactly as the Ten Commandments.

Second, one of the things one should vote on is precisely whether taxes SHOULD fund non-religious schools any more than religious ones. If religious schools are to be paid by private or at least non-federal money, why not the same for non-religious schools?

Third, the Constitution never ever stated that religion should be kept at home. It never ever instituted any "separation between Church and State", unlike Clémenceau who rescinded the Concordate, unlike Jules Ferry and Combes who legislated against religious schools and for a nationwide non-religious school during what amounts to a pretty clear persecution of the Catholic Church here in France.

KoalaNoMarch

+Hans-Georg Lundahl
Well, let me respond to some of the points made in the novel you've thrown back at me. When something is 'voted upon' then that in of itself it becomes the property and right to make the decision by the majority stakeholder, able to inflict their morals and values upon others through nothing but numbers.

Non religious schools cater to a wide variety of students of all faiths and nationalities sharing their community. In my ears the points you make sound alike to this: Why shouldn't we also give money to usually very well funded private select schools which exclude many children and let them teach a more coloured or perverted versions of accepted educational standards?

because its favourtisim? There's a difference between providing a proven toolset that's actually testable and works and providing a doctrine that cannon be tested or falsified.. nor is it truly known to be correct since science has shown many elements to be incorrect or at the very least suspect.

+Hans-Georg Lundahl
Unfortunate that you wished for Creationism being taught in your school and did not have it. But it was your choice as an adult, informed in both by your school life and home life that you made the decision to investigate and explore those beliefs, and I assume cherish them. However, there is no real fact or consensus to your belief, no scientific weighting to it and science if anything is a study on being able to understand and test the world around us. It is at present the best way humanity has to understand and make sense of the natural world around us.

That is science class. Children in the very least should learn enough to know the diference between a 'theory' and scientific theory.

You speak of adding supernatural tales with no real substantiated backing to science class as if it were not the antithesis of science. Should we teach also Astronomy, witchcraft and alchemy in the science class because they are also 'sciences' or ways of looking at the world? Science class is at it's root a bare bones explanation of how science itself works, models and testing alongside reasoning, hypothesis, critical thinking and exploring/entertaining thoughts for yourself. Religion has it's place but it's in other fields such a philosophy, ethics, morality and history. Creationism is not science, nor is intelligent design science.

if you speak of small children then they are learning what things are, like chemisty and physics. if you speak of high schoolers then they usually have the choice of studies which include classes dealing in history, philosophy and faith. Depends how good the school is and what they can afford to offer. You don't teach cooking in math class. If you want to argue that Abiogenesis should not be taught in class, at least that would make sense to me a a less crazed claim as it cannot be tested and there are many competing theories about the origins of life.

I would also like to point out that your feelings and passion mirror that of those in America who suffer because of rampant theism. Like you their choices are being forced upon them so perhaps you have a much deeper understanding of what they are going through. But, thesim is a clubhouse shared by millions even in small doses. Community shaking majorities who cannot be allowed to have their way with the few things that belong to and affect everyone.

Hans-Georg Lundahl

"Unfortunate that you wished for Creationism being taught in your school and did not have it."

I wished my teacher to allow me to discuss it by arguing against what he was teaching while teaching evolution.

"However, there is no real fact or consensus to your belief, no scientific weighting to it and science if anything is a study on being able to understand and test the world around us. It is at present the best way humanity has to understand and make sense of the natural world around us."

Honestly, that phrase is propagandistic blabla.

With some more patience: what about arguing against what we present as evidence etc. when we do so instead of repeating in a very tiresome way there is none when you know we claim there is.

Thirdly: behind Creationism there is the Consensus of the Church Fathers, experts in the Science that is Queen of other sciences: theology.

As to the previous comment: I simply wish and so do many other creationists, that creationism taught in school were available also without rich parents. And even many private Christian schools do accept poor students who do not contribute financially. Or not much.

"You speak of adding supernatural tales with no real substantiated backing to science class as if it were not the antithesis of science."

Indeed: as any other Young Earth Creationist I do not consider the flood as lacking in evidence, nor as being antithesis to science in the old and correct sense of the word just because it is supernatural.

"Should we teach also Astronomy, witchcraft and alchemy in the science class because they are also 'sciences' or ways of looking at the world?"

I think Geocentrism could very well be presented.

I also think the difference between acknowleging only natural and material causes and of acknowleging also divine and spiritual ones could very well be taught.

"Science class is at it's root a bare bones explanation of how science itself works"

But research in Evolution or Heliocentrism is not working as Science teachers claim that science itself works. That is one major claim of Geocentrism and of Creationism.

"models and testing alongside reasoning, hypothesis, critical thinking and exploring/entertaining thoughts for yourself."

A very great occasion for Geocentrism and Creationism, then!

"You don't teach cooking in math class."

You can however in math class very well debate whether pi is a number or minus two is one.

[I would for instance – as he did not answer – regard pi as a proportion between lengths that are incommensurable rather than between numbers one of which is not a whole one ; I would also regard « minus one » as a convention, convenient for some operations, particularly in algebra, but not as a number really found as such in the realities that mathematics study.]

KoalaNoMarch

+Hans-Georg Lundahl I'm honestly at a loss. From my perspective there is absolutely no reason to talk to you at all. You have some kind of belief you (or your particular doctrine) have the right to force your religious belief upon others who do not wish to listen to it and what? should have no other avenue than to withdraw their children from public schools and opt for homeschool thus ostracizing them from their own community's and government funding. because otherwise -- feelings might be hurt!?

Nothing has or can be proven for any one religion over another, they are all pretty much equally weighted. You're rights are no more important than anyone else and that your privately held beliefs system could and should be forced down everyone else's throats is an immoral tyranny. The classes are there for students to take, there are schools for it. The subject here is the schools where it doesn't have to be.

There will always be people who do not believe what you do, please someday learn to be okay with that. I'll leave you the final word on the subject.

Hans-Georg Lundahl

"You have some kind of belief you (or your particular doctrine) have the right to force your religious belief upon others who do not wish to listen to it and what?"

That is very precisely my question to people wanting evolution and evolution only to exclusion of creationism taught in school.

"Nothing has or can be proven for any one religion over another, they are all pretty much equally weighted."

That is very idiotical, and I happen to know it.

Protestantism insofar as it is Christian implies Catholicism. Islam implies by the Coran that Jews and Christians have preserved the original writings correctly, which is enough to condemn the Fifth Sourate and thus the divine pretentions of all the Coran. Genesis proves the Messiah must have come before the Jewish community lost state autonomy. Thus favouring Christianity over Judaism. Polytheism proves itself to have very easy criteria to accept the divine, in contexts where any Abrahamic religion would consider the demonic, so on what ground - religiously speaking! - are they excluding Abrahamic religion from being divine?

"You're rights are no more important than anyone else and that your privately held beliefs system could and should be forced down everyone else's throats is an immoral tyranny."

Giving attention to both Creationist and Evolutionist explanations of the Geological and Palaeontological evidence is hardly forcing one's privately held opinions down the throat of anyone, especially not in a class ordinarily dedicated to weighing different explanations against each other.

It is, as said, rather Evolutionists who have done that in recent decades.

"There will always be people who do not believe what you do, please someday learn to be okay with that."

When will evolutionists learn that lesson?

KoalaNoMarch

+Hans-Georg Lundahl
Seriously dude, you're a monster. I think you've explain that pretty well.

Hans-Georg Lundahl

Seriously, you are prejudiced if you think I am a monster.

And what about keeping your word, you were offering me the final one?

KoalaNoMarch

+Hans-Georg Lundahl
Oh sorry, that was a knee jerk response to your use of the word idiotical to insult someone who offered you the final word. You offer and contain no actual knowledge rather that an absolute belief you are correct with no foundation for it you can share with others. You know because you believe and because you believe you know. You take offense about something hurting or injuring your beliefs and then because of that you are oppressed.

Fuck you, I'm done with you. the earlier remark was a polite exit where i was endeavoring to exit the conversation on good terms. That is the heartfelt emotional one.

Hans-Georg Lundahl

Well, if you offer the final word politely after giving an idiotic argument as well as a generally insulting one as a next-to-final word, count on a response that might contain the word "idiotical" as an irritated response. Like, what was it you said? - a knee jerk response.

As to the rest of your word, you are insulting me with affirming what amounts to knowing my arguments better than I know them myself when resuming them like this:

"You know because you believe and because you believe you know."

To me that is prime evidence that public education compulsory for everyone, first of all should not exist, second of all if it sadly enough does should not contain pseudo-scientific evolutionism or hire teachers believing it BUT thirdly, if even that sad calamity is already a fact should AT LEAST offer a possibility of giving a balanced view. By offering also to teach creationism.

And if that does not take place nationally, it should at least be a liberty left to do so locally, and using it should not be an occasion for the likes of you to cry out about your freedoms being atatcked. OK?

KoalaNoMarch

+Hans-Georg Lundahl
Fistly, there is nothing psuedoscientific about evolution. When you can physically test something across fields like palaeontology, geography, genetics and have the results support each other but also and more importantly.. be unable to disprove one another. thats a pretty good way to go about finding a truth. Your view is not science. Your view involves magic, suspension of disbelief and faith. A book riddled with contradictions and an immoral barbarism that condones, slavery, murder, incest, genocide and worst of all.. tells people that knowledge itself is evil and the basis for a fictional original sin.

There is no reason EVER. To say that the innocent are born guilty or that ultimate power should belong in the hands of a corrupt church that is rocked by scandal again and again. Your liberties are still in place, but they are classified as they really are.. theology, mythology, religious studies. How can you understand science when the Institute for Creation Research, in order to treat evolution as a category of religions, including atheism, fascism, humanism and occultism, commonly uses the words evolutionism and evolutionist to describe the consensus of mainstream science and the scientists subscribing to it, thus implying through language that the issue is a matter of religious belief.

Once again you try to twist the facts and talk about me taking offense ~my~ liberties are under attack. I don't actually recall bleating on about my own personal liberties at all, my point was that the religions and world views other than yours must not be subjected to yours as if it were actually better or more comprehensive.. which it is not. Forcing nonsense into a reputable and trusted classroom in an effort to make it reputable hardly a responsible act.

+Hans-Georg Lundahl
You aren't half as educated and understanding as you think given you can't even spell the name of Quran/Qu'ran/Koran. Like five different spellings and you miss all of them and fail to support or comprehend a religion so closely following similar holy texts.

I am not an evolutionist, I identify nothing about who i am by using that word. I did my reading, I read hundreds of cited papers and devoured my weight in work, also read linked arguments for creation and have seen trends, campaigns of misinformation and falsehoods aplenty from only ONE SIDE.

You're a cog in a very dumb propaganda machine (the propaganda itself is) and speaks loudly, plaintively and with a hint of a choked sob in it's voice as if the loss of an absolute power were a slight on everyone elses part. Power that crushed and oppressed the masses in the name of what could be considered one of the first sciences.. people were killed for trying to read the bible themselves outside of a church, scientists punished and imprisoned for unpopular theories which proved to be true, testable and unable to be proven false.

If your mindset is that you are right or have all the facts without really looking then that's a perfect analogy for your position. You don't have all the facts, you don't understand the opposing views. I actually took the time to read creationist literature, I found it a chore and the big problem was there wasn't a lot of citations where I could check the validity of the claims.. but that's the essence of the contradiction isn't it. If your passion stems just one way, then go learn what the argument and evidence from out side is on the basis of refuting it. Then you will indeed wow and engage an audience.

Hans-Georg Lundahl

"You aren't half as educated and understanding as you think given you can't even spell the name of Quran/Qu'ran/Koran. Like five different spellings"

Yeah, right, it was written in the Kings English, exactly like King James Bible, and Mohammed really knew how he wanted to spell each word, including the name of it all in English or at least in the Latin alphabet.

Lesson one: it was written in the Arabic alphabet and its name was originally spelt in the Arabic alphabet.

Corollary: any spelling in Latin alphabet at all is a transliteration.

If you really want only one fixed of them, will Alcoran do? That is the traditional Latin transliteration!

(Pst, don't tell Koala about the sixth book of the Bible! Its hero and also name is transliterated Josue, Josué, Joshua and even Jesus!)

+KoalaNoMarch how is this for dishonesty:

"You're a cog in a very dumb propaganda machine (the propaganda itself is) and speaks loudly, plaintively and with a hint of a choked sob in it's voice as if the loss of an absolute power were a slight on everyone elses part"

Now, that is a fair description of people wanting to keep creationism out of classrooms, but not of anyone wanting to teach the controversy or of anyone wanting at least individual schools to be able to do so.

"Power that crushed and oppressed the masses"

Well, no.

"in the name of what could be considered one of the first sciences.. people were killed for trying to read the bible themselves outside of a church,"

Not exactly, no. They were killed for trying to read anti-Christian tenets into it or for circulating erroneous copies of it though.

"scientists punished and imprisoned for unpopular theories which proved to be true, testable and unable to be proven false."

Oh, dear! Are you speaking of Galileo in the plural?

No, Galileo was not several men, his two theses he had to recant have not proven true and are not testable if you discount the test that already proves them false: eyes and innerears of millions of men.

It is unfair to creationists if they want to compare themselves to Galileo, he was never anything as noble as Kent Hovind; but it is ludicrous if people who want the controversy stifled pose as his heirs insofar as he can be considered a martyr, them being only heirs to some of his errors, and not even to his faith, which the Inquisition did save and which all of the time did include Young earth Creationism. It would of course be grossly unfair to St Robert Bellermine or to Pope Urban VIII to compare you to them. Those guys were Christians, those guys were right, and those guys were also confining one man after giving him many chances rather than one whole population of schoolboys without giving them any, for most of them.

"I actually took the time to read creationist literature, I found it a chore and the big problem was there wasn't a lot of citations where I could check the validity of the claims"

When it comes to their claims for how Carbon 14 works, the problem is not for you to find a citation confirming their resumé of it, the problem for some - read you - is being able to imagine that the problem they find with it actually follows LOGICALLY from the way it works rather than being a separate fact to be separately looked up and cited from non-creationist literature.

I am sorry, but that would mean - if my guess about one of the examples when you gave no concrete ones is fair - what you need is not a citation but learning logic.

Why don't they teach logic in these schools?

+KoalaNoMarch
"Fistly, there is nothing psuedoscientific about evolution. When you can physically test something across fields like palaeontology, geography, genetics and have the results support each other but also and more importantly.. be unable to disprove one another. thats a pretty good way to go about finding a truth."

I accept the concurrence of two senses as scientific evidence. If inner ears agree with eyes that earth is still, I agree it is. If eyes say that the puddle in front of the car "stands still in relation to it" or moves in front of it, inner ears say nothing about that - illusions typically strike only one sense.

However, errors very easily strike, several fields at at time if the people working in them have access to each others' works.

Moreoever, paleontology is not exactly a field where the still available phyiscal evidence even supports evolution. What supports evolution are the conclusions made by most researchers in that field. Even you might be aware that physical evidence and conclusions from it are not the same thing.

"Your view is not science. Your view involves magic, suspension of disbelief and faith."

My view involves the supernatural. It also involves faith.

It does not involve half as much suspension of disbelief as discounting all the testimonial evidence to miracles, thus to the supernatural, which have happened since the Creation and even since the Resurrection.

In other words, you are showing a total disdain for people believing in a God who has the power to do what studies at Hogwart won't give Harry Potter the power to do, whatever the novels state. Not to mention the disdain this involves for your Creator who shall be your judge.

In other words, your agenda is not really about defending science, but about building a new civilisation in which new generations are no longer Christian, because they have not been taught, not just Christianity, but even facts according to which Christianity might just be a possibility. What you believe in is neither science nor education and least of all freedom, it is Communism. Or just possibly Nazism (which is little better than Communism but not much).

KoalaNoMarch

+Hans-Georg Lundahl
Actually my position is in defending all the other faiths and people in public school from a compulsory religious study. I do believe that religion does indeed have it's place and serve communities well. Some of the nicest perople i know are Christians, however their views should not be forced on others of varied faiths and backgrounds. that's not fair on them. The same way you should not be forced to study the muslim faith or learn the torah.

Hans-Georg Lundahl

Creationism is not a religious study.

It is one to-the-point answer to the already existing and since Eisenhower already compulsory study of Evolutionism. I actually do not know how long it has been compulsory in Sweden, but I think longer. Before Stopes trial or Stokes trial it was forbidden and I have from Kent Hovind it was Eisenhower who made it compulsory.

In Sweden a science teacher is free to read from the Bible in order to ridicule or patronise what people believed before evolution was "discovered". It would be disingenious to allow Creationism but disallow the passages of the Bible which it considers vital for a correct scientific underetanding of kinds or of man and of the Geological record.

But if a study at all delves into different kinds of critters, into man and into the geological record, which evolutionism does, it is even more disingenious when it comes to "religious neutrality" to allow one version because it does not involve reading from the Bible, and disallow the other version because it does.

KoalaNoMarch

+Hans-Georg Lundahl
but the bible is a religious text. The 'God' figure is completely and utterly integral to it's study since it cannot happen without him, also the events cannot be explored without relating the stories,

The problem here is that there is no recognition of the biblical account as being factual, for each thing creation scienests and scholars tend to produce there is usually a tested scientific method or theory which refutes it, that which it would depend totally upon is the supernatural. which is not part of science at all. Nor is the metaphysical.

So how to you reconcile testable phenomina and compatible theories building a model against a model you cannot show all of nor answer questions to the full extent. could it even ever be done?

Hans-Georg Lundahl

Well, the God figure is not just integral to the Bible and the Christian religion, it is, precisely as you say, integral to the non-Evolutionist, non-Deep Time explanation of kinds, of man and of fossil record.

So EITHER both evolution and creation are scientific explanations because kinds (though not always their exact limits), man, and after certain digs also a certain fossil record are data and it is scientific to seek explanations for data ...

... OR both are religious, since one of them involves a God who created a good world, saw it spoiled and wiped away the worst malefactors (a description covering very many men just before the flood) as well as their deeply implicated assessories (a description covering maybe even more, like in today's world a minority are victims of child rape, but they could have been far more numerous back then with far less hope of getting a normal life ever again), while the other of them involves, alternatively, absense of God or otherwise a God who is a bungler if he needs millions of years of death, suffering and universal stupidity and a sadist if he used them without need.

Obviously both of them are both. Technical implications of either scenario, like how fast wharves form in depositions, are a proper study for the science room. The moral implications of either could for instance be examined in a voluntary class of Catechism for Christians and a voluntary class of Atheism for non-Christians (often labelled Humanism).

I mean under your system, which is not ideal, but so many masses are non-Catholic and so many Catholics are half apostates through evolution acceptance that bringing on the Inquisition is not feasible and having a unified Catholic society without one is pretty impossible beyond the local level.

VII part b

What the lady is saying about science not being democratic is of course also a truth that condemns one certain modern science.

Psychiatry.

According to what Szasz had to say, it was decided by handlifting within a circle whether this or that or sundry should be regarded as a mental disorder or not and DSM is augmenting.

However, psychiatry is not even democratic, it is oligarchic, since only a very retraicted group are allowed to vote on that matter while new editions of DMS are being made.

This is however an aside.

VIII

"The idea of Evolution works"

Oh, yeah ... as if:

• no Creationist critique of how it works according to Evolutionists could be taken seriously ...?
  
  
• and as if no Evolutionist critique of how Creationism works could be left unconsidered, even though uttered by someone really out of her depth?

Creation vs Evolution : Letter to Nature on Karyotype Evolution
http://creavsevolu.blogspot.com/2011/11/letter-to-nature-on-karyotype-evolution.html 

"Evolution is largely a product of natural selection"

Just because its social predominance is largely a product of unnatural selection?

She is missing the point, for natural selection to produce men, there must be men to select. Natural selection per se is not giving an ape a rational and ethical mind.

IX

The philosophy professor got one thing NEARLY right.

Evolution is not responsible for a man beating his wife because he is angry. But it is responsible for a wife beaten getting abortion and divorce on a plate. Which produces more unhappiness overall - including teens forced to abort by their families.

X

Getting back to Grand Canyon.

As said, it was on any Flood Geology view probably effected while the rock was still mostly mud. But one thing more : it need not have been carved BY the Flood. It can very well have happened after the Flood, before it solidified into rock, as a landslide into a fissure in rising tectonics. You have been to a beach and taken a big heap of wet sand between your hands, and seen how, after you raise it a bit, it starts collapsing in the middle? That is what I mean.

XI (Penn in focus)

• 1) "And that means throwing out the scientific method"
  
  Not so.
  
  
• 2) "Atheists, Buddhists ... might want their tax money to teach real science"
  
  When it is a question about tax money, it is in US a question about democracy.
  
  It has not occurred to - is it Penn he's called? - that Creationists have the impression their tax money is despite them going to teach evne their children fake science?
  
  It has not occurred to him that the school board we saw is not exactly a federal school board, there is - fortunately - not exactly any such thing in US, it is a local school board. The one man supporting very clearly his view is a foreigner from New York.
  
  He is in there to ruin local democracy.
  
  
• 3) His "grammatical correction" of the teacher was not such.
  
  She does not just want to see things taught in school, period, she wants to see things in school taught as opposed to suppressed. Inversion clearly justified by the emphasis situation. But then, who says Penn knows English grammar? He has some undeniable skill in speaking English, but pretending to correct better speakers' grammar (not saying that just because she is better people than he, but that is true too) is a bit above his head.

XII

• 1) "In the history class you do not hear people asking for balance between those saying the holocaust happened and those who say it didn't happen."
  
  Maybe one should. But even if one should not, that is not a valid reason for suppressing non-conform doubts taken seriously by trained scholars in other fields. Faurisson was a literary expert delving on the credibility of Anne Frank's Diary. Leuchter was a chemist delving on the credibility of such and such a chamber having been used repeatedly over years or months to gas people to death (looking at quantity of stains from cyanide) and the credibility of such and such a chamber being able to be reused for a new gassing after only thirty minutes (looking at cyanide in aerosol not dissolving very quickly). Maybe their over all conclusions were over the top. That does not equate to a general warrant for teaching only consensus and blocking systematically minority reports.
  
  
• 2) Mr such and such think "certain sectors of the religious community" want a literal interpretation of the Bible.
  
  Now, the Church Fathers were for a literal interpretation of the first three chapters of Genesis as history, if not without any exception at all at least overwhelmingly.
  
  Here he is pleading for either a "religious community" cut off from its roots or for a tiny minority report of the past tradition and making it sweep away Patristic near consensus, because it seems to him less obstructive to accepting the modern majority consensus (but it is easier to find Creationist Scientists than to find non-literal Patristic interpretations of Genesis).
  
  Obviously he is not really a part of the Christian community or a very religiously ill-instructed such. He claims as being "certain sectors" what is in fact nearly the whole historic roots of the Catholic Church, Orthodox Church and so on.
  
  
• 3) He also gets it wrong when saying "and they want to use the Bible as their source of science".
  
  We do not use the Times to teach science. But we would usually trust the Times as a source for a historic fact with scientific dimensions. Like such a river in Northern Wermland flooding in - I think it was 1924 - would obviously be accepted as trumping a scientist watching the river flow clamly and saying "that river could never ever cause a flood". It is a historic fact it could. History trumps science, and Times is a source for history. The Bible is, according to Christianity, also a source of history, unlike the Times even inerrant.

XIII

History is rigid. Facts are rigid.

Whatever the exact number of Jews killed in WW-II, it will not change as estimates change. Whichever year Klarelfven in Northern Wermland flooded, it will never be the case that it didn't flood that year.

And precisely for that reason, the Bible also is rigid.

Now, science is not rigid. It must comply to the facts. It must first of all comply to the facts known by any scientist starting his investigation, but if he comes across facts that contradict his conclusions, he must change them. That is part of what testing is about.

Creation Science or Bible Science in general is not about making the Bible a science textbook. It is about making Biblical history part of the rigid facts against which science is being tested. In that case of course, Evolution (from Big Bang to Solar Systems or from Microbe to Man) is a big fail.

XIV

And no, Raelians are only to a limited extent creationist.

They are to a much bigger extent evolutionist. They think aliens created man, but they replace the Microbe to Man evolution on Earth with a Microbe to Alien Evolution somehwere else. They also think the aliens did not create man out of nothing, but by genetic manipulation of preexisting apes. So they do not ditch all of the Microbes to Man evolution, they accept a Microbe to Ape evolution.

Precisely as certain Evolutionist so called Catholics have done after 1950 (ok, Teilhard was before their time).

XV

Ah, New Yorker claims the creationists are stealing his liberty?

That IS funny. He and his likes have been stealing the liberties of Creationists for very long.

It is not Creationists who stop him from homeschooling his children if he wants to avoid them being exposed to Creation Science while living under his roof.

Break 4

Honestman400

+Hans-Georg Lundahl This is a perfect example why America is rocketing down the world education listings and why its top universities are actively recruiting world wide to try and fill their most prestigious courses, because there are not enough students coming out of the school system qualified enough to take them.

Hans-Georg Lundahl

Obviously:

• either teaching evolution which is done all over the country even where creationism is taught side by side with it, has not amended things
• or making evolution belief a requirement for academic success has screwed the statistics by eliminating perfectly competent students, but such who thought that Edgar Andrews was a better Scientist than Dawkins. And rightly so, as far as them thinking it, and wrongly so, as far as eliminating them.

Cynthia Albrecht

+Hans-Georg Lundahl Thank you, Hans-Georg, but I fear that you might actually expect critics to change their minds simply because you point out reasons to do so, when human nature is such that they will probably never change. Your comments help readers, though, so don't stop or give up, but consider your "target audience" to be readers, not these activists who make such shallow comments.

Hans-Georg Lundahl

I very much do consider readers, the not yet decided third party, one very legitimate reason to rebutt people who might already have decided as to themselves they are not converting.

Thijs Berends

+Hans-Georg Lundahl The Bible is rigid, are you serious?

Honestman400

+Hans-Georg Lundahl "The poor Christians are being picked on again." What a typical creationist cop-out.

It has nothing to do with bias as to a students views, other than if those views are damaging to the field they wish to pursue. If any religious person were to come up with real testable evidence for god or creationism, it would make his career. Nothing enhances the career of an up and coming scientist than to demolish the theory of one of his senior and revered colleagues. Stephen Hawking grew to prominence when he challenged the “steady state universe” theory of Sir Fred Hoyle, but when it comes to god and Evolution, nobody has made a successful challenge.

In fact, since Darwin's day, there have been over 240,000 peer reviewed publications confirming the accuracy of Evolution. There's not even been one publication trying to prove creationism that has even been submitted for peer-review. Why? Creationists know that if subjected to the rigours of peer review, their arguments collapse in a heap and they want to avoid that embarrassment."

Even the courts have thrown out every single case, where Creation science, or Intelligent design as it it now called, has tried to prove it is a science. It is not. It is religious superstition with no evidence whatsoever to back it up.

Hans-Georg Lundahl

"Nothing enhances the career of an up and coming scientist [more] than to demolish the theory of one of his senior and revered colleagues."

Ah, but Evolutionism and Heliocentrism are in fact NOT the theory of ONE OF his senior and revered colleagues. It is more like the theory of ALL OF them.

"There's not even been one publication trying to prove creationism that has even been submitted for peer-review. Why?"

http://creation.com is a publication, is trying to prove creationism AND is peer reviewed. And obviously it has been submitted to Old Earth Christian (ex-YEC) Glenn Morton and to Prothero (non-Christian Old Earther) too.

Then there is another question whether the peer reviewers that are not partial for it are not so partial against it (Glenn Morton excepted) that they do not refuse to do the peer reviewing.

http://creavsevolu.blogspot.com/2011/11/letter-to-nature-on-karyotype-evolution.html

Honestman400

+Hans-Georg Lundahl Again, you're only excuse is that lame old conspiracy theory of thousands of scientists, all over the world. Some in countries that actually hate each other, somehow getting together to conspire with each other, to reject creationism.

you really are scraping the bottom of the barrel for excuses.

You mentioned Heliocenticism. Am I to understand that you don't believe that either?

By the way, I went to Creation.com. You are Joking. Where was this peer reviewed?

You really need to understand how the scientific method and peer review work. If you like, I am quite prepared to give you an explanation and how it is completely at odds with the religious method

Hans-Georg Lundahl

Where was Creation.com peer reviewed?

That is like asking where Nature or National Geographic was peer reviewed.

Those are peer reviewed by Evolutionists. Creation.com by Creationists. In both cases each article by others involved.

I do not believe Heliocentrism, correct.

The conspiracy theory is a somewhat less lame one if I state:

• a) that they have a common inspiration in a common hagiography of Bruno, Galileo, Darwin (a hagiography shared by freemasons who are not scientists too, btw)
• b) that only few of them are actively conspiring while most are either hankering on from previous prejudice or, very occasionally, picking up new prejudice dropped carefully by conspirators. Or even among each other, without conspirational intent.

No, your answer about conspiracy theory being lame is simply a straw man.

And your quip about scientists from countries that hate each other is of course assuming me ignorant - or rest of your audience ignorant - of the scientific idealism of international cooperation. Soviet and US might have been hating each other, despite common idolatry of Galileo and Darwin except among the poor of each country, though Hungarians were a bit disappointed about the US hatred for Soviet after the latter entered Hungary in 56. But US and Soviet scientists hating each other? Whom do you presume yourself to be kidding?

And peer review BEFORE publishing (in order to suppress articles the peers do not consider worth bothering about) as opposed to AFTER it, is hardly a boon to the scientific method.

You are prepared to give me a lecture on how it differs from religious method, go ahead, but be prepared I am not buying your propaganda. Especially as I am religious myself and might know a bit more than you do about what "the religious method" really is.

Honestman400

+Hans-Georg Lundahl Do you creationists always dodge questions? I wasn't referring to the creation magazine itself as you probably guessed. I was referring to the articles they publish claiming to be scientific evidence of Creationism. In Nature or National geographic, articles on Evolution claiming scientific are peer reviewed by Biologists, Chemists, Geologists, Archaeologists etc. Depending on which field the evidence falls in. As for the difference between the scientific method and the religious method:

The Religious Method:

“You start with a belief based totally on blind faith, based on some ancient text or legend. You accept it as fact without question, purely because the book says so. You then search for evidence, in religious teachings, to confirm that belief, and also look for evidence to support the religious teachings.

Anything that contradicts the religious teachings is either dismissed out of hand as false, ignored, or interpreted out of all proportion, using great feats of mental gymnastics, to fit the belief.

However, anything, no matter how flimsy or dubious, that seems to confirm it, is accepted immediately, without question or further investigation.

The belief is then declared to be true for all time, and the faithful must never question it.”

That is the difference. You use the religious method every time. That is why you tie yourself up in knots and you have to resort to fanciful conspiracy theories to justify your wild claims, which you just did again, by the way.

I just want to clarify something. Are you telling me that you don't believe that the Earth orbits the sun?

Hans-Georg Lundahl

"In Nature or National geographic, articles on Evolution claiming scientific are peer reviewed by Biologists, Chemists, Geologists, Archaeologists etc. Depending on which field the evidence falls in."

And I think the same is the case with creation.com. Can you prove me wrong?

By the fact that Biologists etc. who are Evolutionist would not let those articles pass? Well, there are some which would not pass if instead of usual board in National Geographic they were reviewed first by those of creation.com.

Of course, they are a bit short on palaeontologists, as I have just found pretty convincing palaeontological arguments for Flood Geology but noone over there to peer review it (not that I am a scientist by training myself, I am an amateur in science from a scientific and scientific amateurs' family but did my own work in Latin and Greek mostly).

"You start with a belief based totally on blind faith, based on some ancient text or legend. You accept it as fact without question, purely because the book says so."

That is already one point where you get the Christian method wrong - at least if you try to consider it comparable to the Hindoo method.

I agree with Hindoos that Krishna was seen on earth, notably on the chariot of Prince Arjuna in the Mahabharata war. Historic facts are known through ancient texts. Either contemporary to events or later after centuries of tradition.

I do not agree "all is one" just because Krishna said so to Arjuna any more than I agree "god is one but not three" just because Jibreel said so to Mohammed. Neither the philosopher servant of Arjuna nor the spirit friend of Mohammed showed forth one single miracle by which their message could be known as coming from God. Both were potent victory charms as far as victory in battle is concerned. But Krishna failed the Hindoos as Hindookoosh, the Qoran failed Mohammedans at Vienna. And Oden was notorious for beig treacherous as a victory charm. Being a victory charm is not a sufficient evidence for coming frm God.

So, though I have faith through old books one spirit spoke to Mohammed appearing as an angel and presenting himself as Jibreel, and though I have faith through old books that Krishna spoke to Arjuna, I have no faith that their messages are from God.

Contrast Moses who parted the Red Sea, contrast Christ who walked on Lake Genesareth, contrast Moses who freed a people reduced to slavery (or what amounted to such), contrast Christ who cured the blind and the lame and raised the dead, contrast both who gave food miraculously to multitudes in the deserts.

"Anything that contradicts the religious teachings is either dismissed out of hand as false, ignored, or interpreted out of all proportion, using great feats of mental gymnastics, to fit the belief."

I challenge you to state one item requiring greater feats of mental gymnastics for me to remain Christian than for you to remain Materialist and Atheist.

"You use the religious method every time."

Sorry, I do not have blind faith in that statement just because you tell me so.

"That is why you tie yourself up in knots ..."

You attribute to me your own faults.

"you have to resort to fanciful conspiracy theories"

My observation of the sociology of Evolutionism are on the contrary very prosaic.

"to justify your wild claims"

Which are nowhere like wild.

"Are you telling me that you don't believe that the Earth orbits the sun?"

I do not believe that wild claim no.

Honestman400

+Hans-Georg Lundahl To simplify things, this is one reply to both your comments.

You really have no idea how peer review actually works. It is not done by any magazine. All magazines like Nature and the other scientific Journals do is publish the results of peer reviewed work, which is done by independent scientists. None of which are chosen by the magazine. They do not peer review anything themselves. In fact, unless your work has been independently peer reviewed, it is very unlikely that any reputable scientific journal would publish it at all. Even the scientists whose work is being peer reviewed don't get to choose who does the review.

Unlike Creation Magazines and websites like Creation.Com and Answers in Genesis, which either write the articles or at the very least choose the articles which appear and review them themselves. Talk about stacking the deck in your favour.

You said: “as I have just found pretty convincing palaeontological arguments for Flood Geology but noone over there to peer review it (not that I am a scientist by training myself, I am an amateur in science from a scientific and scientific amateurs' family but did my own work in Latin and Greek mostly).”

Please tell me what this convincing evidence is. I thought I'd heard every argument for the flood, but if you have found something new, I'd love to hear it.

You said: “That is already one point where you get the Christian method wrong - at least if you try to consider it comparable to the Hindoo method.”

and: “I agree with Hindoos that Krishna was seen on earth, notably on the chariot of Prince Arjuna in the Mahabharata war. Historic facts are known through ancient texts. Either contemporary to events or later after centuries of tradition.”

You also said: “Contrast Moses who parted the Red Sea, contrast Christ who walked on Lake Genesareth, contrast Moses who freed a people reduced to slavery (or what amounted to such), contrast Christ who cured the blind and the lame and raised the dead, contrast both who gave food miraculously to multitudes in the deserts.”

Why would I want to compare the Christian method with the Hindu method. If they all start with the unshakeable, predetermined position that either god or gods exist, then as far as I'm concerned, I do consider them comparable and equally superstitious.

Where is your evidence for any of this. Just because something is a traditional belief, doesn't make it accurate. The tooth fairy is a traditional belief, but that doesn't make the tooth fairy real. As for something written being contemporary to events. Nothing in the bible was written as a contemporary event. That even applies to everything we “know” about Jesus. Nothing at all was written during his lifetime and everything after he died was written by people who never even met him.

You may choose to believe ancient texts, but if a particular text is the only source for that belief, like the Bible, The Qur'an or the Bagvadhgita, then, without independent corroboration, why would you accept it without question, unless it is something that you desperately want, or more to the point, need to believe. Especially in the face of mounting evidence against it.

Take the Exodus, for instance. Outside of the bible, there is no evidence whatsoever that Moses ever existed or that the Exodus ever took place. In fact, there is no evidence that the Israelites were ever in Egypt in the first place. The whole of the Pentateuch is just a collection of myths and legends written hundreds, if not thousands of years after the events they are supposed to describe. The bible has no more historical accuracy than the Greek legends of Zeus and Olympus, or the Norse legends of Odin and Asgard.

You said: “I challenge you to state one item requiring greater feats of mental gymnastics for me to remain Christian than for you to remain Materialist and Atheist.”

I just have. Believing the historical accuracy of the bible requires an enormous amount of mental gymnastics.

How do I tie myself in knots and what is your prosaic observation on the sociology of evolution? Also, just so I understand you, could you tell me what you think evolution by Natural selection is and how it is supposed to work?

Regarding your last comment regarding you NOT believing that the Earth orbits the sun. I am interested in your evidence for that also. I doubt if there is a single, serious scientist anywhere in the whole world who would agree with you. Do you also believe that the rest of the galaxy orbits the Earth? I've heard about people like you, but you are the first one I've come across.

Hans-Georg Lundahl

+Honestman400
"Even the scientists whose work is being peer reviewed don't get to choose who does the review."

That is very fair.

"You really have no idea how peer review actually works. It is not done by any magazine."

So the redaction includes no scientists capable of doing it?

"All magazines like Nature and the other scientific Journals do is publish the results of peer reviewed work, which is done by independent scientists."

Then I suppose that is how creation.com works as well, since they claim to be peer reveiwed.

"They do not peer review anything themselves. In fact, unless your work has been independently peer reviewed, it is very unlikely that any reputable scientific journal would publish it at all."

Wait, now you are speaking about the kind of peer review that a doctoral thesis would receive, right? BUT the articles of a magazine are usually NOT doctoral theses. They are usually summaries of scientific work, including doctoral theses.

I was speaking about review given the articles. Oh, those are NOT peer reviewed? How then is the magazine peer reviewed?

The difference in either case boils down to this: Science choses works peer reviewed by non-creationists, Creation Magazine choses works where at least some of the peer review is done by creationists. So, if, not having passed any doctoral thesis yet myself I am not aware of what is done beyond such, at least I did not get this difference wrong.

Now, as to the overall peer review a reasearch programme (whether by one scientist of by a team) receives, it is not just the things that lead up to publication, it is also the reactions, sometimes virulent, that are voiced precisely in such magazines and precisely after the magazine has already published an article about it. That is what they are supposed to be there fore.

And that in turn means that a magazine that does not publish a creationist researcher's answer to an evolutionist research paper is not exactly doing its work in any way that is relevant to the Creation vs Evolution controversy, though no doubt it does so in a dozen of other ways.

+Honestman400
I said: “as I have just found pretty convincing palaeontological arguments for Flood Geology but noone over there to peer review it (not that I am a scientist by training myself, I am an amateur in science from a scientific and scientific amateurs' family but did my own work in Latin and Greek mostly).”

You answered: "Please tell me what this convincing evidence is. I thought I'd heard every argument for the flood, but if you have found something new, I'd love to hear it."

Sure:

Creation vs. Evolution : Three Meanings of Chronological Labels
http://creavsevolu.blogspot.com/2013/12/three-meanings-of-chronological-labels.html

Note that it is a series, and note that links to the other parts of it (with one of them linking itself to a set of tables over lagerstätten) are in top of each blogpost, over the text of it.

+Honestman400
"Why would I want to compare the Christian method with the Hindu method. If they all start with the unshakeable, predetermined position that either god or gods exist, then as far as I'm concerned, I do consider them comparable and equally superstitious."

Well, the thing is that this is precisely what at least the Christian method does not start with but lead up to. As a conclusion, rather than as a premiss.

+Honestman400
"Where is your evidence for any of this. Just because something is a traditional belief, doesn't make it accurate. The tooth fairy is a traditional belief, but that doesn't make the tooth fairy real."

A traditional story about the past of the own group is usually reliable. The Founding Fathers would be a far better parallel than the Tooth Fairy - which is not traditional but modern, not a belief but a make believe, and of course not about the past of the U S American nation indulging in it.

My point is that:

• A) if you accept history, you have to accept tradition as well as other evidence for events of the past;
• B) if you do so consistently you will have to accept the miraculous at one point or other; and, most of all:
• C) if we accept the traditional account of how Bhagavdgita and Alcoran came to us, and compare that with how the Gospel came to us, it is the Gospel that stands out as a really miraculous event, neither Bhagavadgita nor Alcoran go beyond what could possibly be demonic rather than divine.

That comparison I made in response to your question or argument, and you not wanting to make that comparison makes it pretty useless for you to ask that question or make that argument since you refuse to get to the terrain of facts which the answer leads to.

+Honestman400
"As for something written being contemporary to events. Nothing in the bible was written as a contemporary event. That even applies to everything we “know” about Jesus. Nothing at all was written during his lifetime and everything after he died was written by people who never even met him."

That one contradicts the traditional version of how Gospels came to be accessed by the Church.

And the people who did that attack on the Gospels VERY certainly did NOT meet the real writers, whether they were or were not identical to those identified by Christian tradition.

Admiral Nelson died at Trafalgar.

If someone after his death wrote about Trafalgar, is that not a contemporary? If someone wrote when Macaulay did who had never been serving under Nelson, that is another matter. But if a veteran from Trafalgar wrote, even if he did so at the same time as Macaulay, he was a contemporary.

That two of the four Gospellers did serve under Jesus during something like three and a half or three and a quarter years up to the Crucifixion plus met him during the forty days between Resurrection and Ascension, is a traditional and thus historic claim for the Gospels.

For one but not the other of the two there is one old - but no longer traditional - account that instead it was written by Cerinthus. If you wish to compare the Fourth Gospel to Cerinthus' known and identified writings, do so. Or if you have a study to show up for it, do so. As for Matthew there is not even one such old claim. And it is known how St John hated Cerinthus and that the Catholic Church revered Saint John and detested Cerinthus, which makes the idea that Cerinthus wrote a Gospel that was afterwards accepted by the Catholic Church a really staggering claim. On top of it contradicted by Saint Irenaeus of Lyons, who had been disciple to Saint Polycarp who had been disciple to precisely Saint John.

Socrates wrote no books. Plato was a disciple of his. Aristotle was a critical ex-disciple to Plato. Noone imagines that Aristotle could have attributed to Socrates a book he never wrote. He was more into denying some of Plato's written accounts of dialogues were really Socratic. But noone imagines he could have made a mistake the other way round and attributed either a book or a spoken dialogue to Socrates if this one had not been the author thereof.

+Honestman400
"Take the Exodus, for instance. Outside of the bible, there is no evidence whatsoever that Moses ever existed or that the Exodus ever took place."

Hyksos inasion suggests there was something deeply wrong about the Egyptian army.

"In fact, there is no evidence that the Israelites were ever in Egypt in the first place."

When Egyptians were dealing with Hyksos, they might have been forgetting about that earlier set of strangers. Or they may have mixed them up with myths about Horus and his uncle Seth. Or they may have made Moses a demon haunting Egypt, so to speak the prototype of Dionysus (confer Pentheus and the Pharao, but Pentheus was on top of that Phrygian, which takes the story one step further away from a defeat that must have galled Egyptian pride) or of Thoth (back when he was Prince of Egypt, especially if he invented the Hebrew alphabet). The fact that the Pharaos that chased the Hyksos were called Ahmoses and Thuthmoses might suggest they felt a need to appease some strange deity with such a name - or use it as a talisman.

Here is a creationist article on that:

CMI : Searching for Moses
by David Down
http://creation.com/searching-for-moses

But the kind of doubts you raise are about as absurd as to question whether George Washington was ever successively serving under and rebelling against George III, or whether Benjamin Franklin was ever a Founding Father rather than a myth "like Daidalos and Ikaros". Not that I doubt they existed either, but that is untypical for these days. You know what I mean.

+Honestman400
"The whole of the Pentateuch is just a collection of myths and legends written hundreds, if not thousands of years after the events they are supposed to describe."

Genesis as finally written by Moses acting as a redactor of previous material is indeed in its first chapters thousands of years before this writer. But apart from that, taking Exodus to Deuteronomy, let's have a look:

One thousand years after would be during Babylonic captivity. Hardly likely, since by then Jews and Northern Israelites (later called Samarians) were already distinct and both accept the Pentateuch. Two thousand years after would be during the fall of the West Roman Empire, as when Paris accepted Clovis after he agreed to be baptised. And by that time you had already Christians, Christ-rejecting Jews and Christ-rejecting Samarians as distinct religions, not at all likely all of those plus a few factions from Christian Orthodoxy like Nestorians or Copts and Armenians would all independently of each other invent the same Pentateuch or accept one invented by one of the rival religions.

A few hundred years after events would be about King David's time. It's like saying the story of the Founding Fathers was being invented now.

Assume it were the case rather than as we know that it is already traditional knowledge or traditional belief about history, well before our time, how could it have spread all over the nation so rapidly? Well, though the problem is on a lesser scale in a small nation as the Israelite one under King David, it is certainly of the same type, and scale needs to be very much smaller (like the people who recalled a long history of freemasonry in a pub in London in 1717 or so) before it is a radically different problem.

+Honestman400
"The bible has no more historical accuracy than the Greek legends of Zeus and Olympus, or the Norse legends of Odin and Asgard."

This is another mental gymnastic on your part.

I do not believe Greek legends about what was going on on Mount Olympus, because it was not under human observation. All in the Penteteuch except what was revealed to Moses - the six days up to creation of man and the laws given to Moses on Sinai - was human observation, before it was written down or purports to be so.

So Iliad or Odyssey would be a much fairer comparison. And unlike the parts going on on Mount Olympus (like Zeus and Athena debating the fate of Ulysses) the parts concerning humans are purportedly under human observation and I believe them, excepting a certain doubt about Ulysses being veracious about what he was only witness to. Exactly as I am not sure about all monster killings Hercules and Iolaos were alone witnessing, except insofar as a human local community was ridden by a monster before them and rid of it after they had been there.

"I just have. Believing the historical accuracy of the bible requires an enormous amount of mental gymnastics."

No, your disbelieving the Penteteuch as history involves you in the mental gymnastics of claiming all of Iliad and Odyssey are set on Mount Olympus.

I do believe that Oden was king and magician even before he was king in Upsala - and that his stepson's kin were reigning there up to Adils who conquered part of Finland but failed to keep Denmark and then beyond him to Ingjald.

Wikipedia : Eadgils
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eadgils

Wikipedia : Ingjald
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingjald

For Eadgils the wikipedians have used the word "semilegendary king" but the concept of semi-legendary is a prime example of the mental gymnastics I am talking about. Here is more of it:

"while there is no historiographical tradition that would confirm the historicity of Swedish kings prior to the 6th century, it is safe to assume that the Suiones, as a tribe mentioned by Tacitus in the 1st century AD, did have kings (Common Germanic *kuningaz) during the prehistoric period."

No historiographical tradition? What about the one which in its final redaction is Ynglingatal, a poem enumerating the kings, and the one which surrounds it by traditional comment which is basis for Heimskringla and Ynglinga Saga?

Now, here we are talking mental gymnastics!

+Honestman400
"How do I tie myself in knots and what is your prosaic observation on the sociology of evolution?"

My prosaic observation on sociology of evolutionism or of evolution belief is the one which you referred to as a conspiracy theory.

Last few generations have had pretty much compulsory education. Latter half of those (most of which are alive today) have had a well founded expectation to find evolution mentioned and thoroughly explained in class. And an expectation that if you want a scientific carreer you need to be no creationist (not quite true, Sarfati is in molecular biology, Tas Walker was an Old Age Geologist before becoming a convinced YEC ...). And less and less expactation of hearing in school any coherent explanation of Christianity. You have obviously not heard one yourself, you take it as a basic and undoubtable fact that Christianity is incoherent. And on top of that the last years we have seen Kent Hovind doing time. That is what I mean by sociology of evolution belief. If you call that a conspiracy theory, what exactly does that word or phrase then mean? That no conspiracies ever influence real events? So Gavril Princip was presumably never conspiring the the Black hand and nobody conspired with anyone else before shooting either Lincoln or JFK, is that your bottom line? But even if it were, what I refer to are facts that can be explained (though that might be strained) without conspiracy, as by mere prejudice and stupidity unfortunately getting an upper hand.

"Also, just so I understand you, could you tell me what you think evolution by Natural selection is and how it is supposed to work?"

My point is that appointments of teachers and researchers and - through school system - of dropouts is NOT in any sense Natural or for that matter artistic as in juridically sound but very crassly unnatural selection.

+Honestman400
« Regarding your last comment regarding you NOT believing that the Earth orbits the sun. I am interested in your evidence for that also. »

Two pieces of evidence : eyes of some billions of people saying earth does not move and heavenly bodies do move, and inner ears of same people saying also that earth does not move. You know the small bent tubes that look like a Turk Head knot because they are curved in three dimensions and which give some nausea and some a sensation of delight when on deck of a ship. Or in a fun ride.

« I doubt if there is a single, serious scientist anywhere in the whole world who would agree with you. »

Scientists are a small selection among the millions, their opinions are derived from evidence such as eyes and inner ears and what they say. Both ways that criterium is therefore much less basic – even if you were right. What about watching The Principle, where Robert Sungenis interviews different scientists on the evidence (I have not seen it btw) ?

« Do you also believe that the rest of the galaxy orbits the Earth? »

Have you heard « geocentrism means believing the solar system orbits the earth » or something ? It means believing the universe orbits the earth. Once every day or rather a bit faster than that, since the day is defined by the sun which lags behind the fixed stars.

I am fine with saying « solar system orbits the sun » if you add that the Earth is inside but not part of this solar system. But Moon, Sun and Fixed Stars directly orbit Earth. As can be observed by watching Orion at two hours delay same night, mark a sighting point on where you see it first time, then measure 15° angle by outstreched hand (thumb and knuckle of small finger stretched far apart and hand streched far out) and see if it fits. And 15°/360° = 1/24 meaning you will have to move the hand and measure the fifteen degrees twice. Orion makes one circle about earth per very little less than 24 hours.

I have never heard of any Geocentric who states that « solar system » ONLY goes around earth, since that would be patently incoherent. As for Galaxies, they are partly deduced from the heliocentric theory, unlike the stars that make up the visible parts of them. It is a theory that was basically ready by 1930.

XVI

"Evolution is a theory, not a fact"

Somewhat bad wording. It is of course a fact if the theory is right and a factoid if the theory is wrong.

What is obvious is that it is not an OBSERVED fact as far as we are concerned with Microbes to Man evolution. It is not observed, but concluded from observations - that others, notably creationists - might not be ignoring but interpreting differently.

As for Creationists in their majority ignoring lots of the observations that Evolution is concluded from, that is obviously true for Evolutionists as well.