The first major review of a preview screening of Expelled! has hit the net, and the reviewer basically confirms all our prophetic jeers and boos.
In keeping with what I’ve pieced together about film’s likely approach, it apparently never really even defines what Intelligent Design is, or really even explains what evolution is. Informing your audience about the basic ideas so they have some context to work with (and some way to understand the ideas and positions under debate) apparently got cut out of the film in the final edit.
In other words, this is not a film written by even someone like Michael Behe, who at least understands the basics of evolutionary theory and evidence to some extent. It’s a film written by pop creationists, who virtually never have the first idea what evolution is, how scientific evidence works, and so on. Instead of any serious discussion of biochem, genetics, or anything else, it looks like we get a heap of phony outrage generated by flat out lying and misleading the audience about cases like Richard Sternberg.
Fair warning though: one unfortunate part of the review is the discussion of junk DNA, which is just too simplistic to be anything other than misleading.
Note: My own final and detailed review/fisking here, finally. And there’s a whole host of much more in-depth Expelled-related content around here than you’ll find in just this short post.
Related: Another review casts more detail on the Hitler-happy nature of the film, as well as Ben Stein’s history of celebrating crazy conspiracy theories.
More: One of the best and most comprehensive accounts of the film, along with my debunking of one of its bizarre claims. And a review that sums up the film in a single picture. You should also check out Expelled Exposed, the official NCSE response site to the film’s claims, and I, of course, have plenty more to say on the subject.
The Bad Idea Blog 
Saw it last night, great film, really makes the obvious point that evolution is a theory that should have been thrown out years ago. Growing up in a family that worked for all the U.S. National Labs in the world, I can tell you, scientifically, evolution does not stand up. And yes, it is a dangerous philosophy. There totally expose Dawkins when Dawkins himself starts talking about intelligent design. No words were put in his mouth. I couldnt stop laughing at how absurd that man is. Anyways. Go see it folks. 4 stars. Again, you can prove god in an athiest, if god didnt exist theyd be indifferent and not defiant.
[…] They’ve screwed up on several occasions: accidentally inviting actual movie critics… who then refused to leave, refused to sign their “non-disclosure” gag orders, and then p…. […]
Matt,please first check facts then bash.
ID is ultimate joke.Or what is happening with virusees and bacteria????
How does it come that we have DIRECT evidence about our ancestors,like Homo habilis?
No ID should be expelled as the name of movie suggest…
Matt, you are a rational human being, are you not? This comment “Again, you can prove god in an athiest, if god didnt exist theyd be indifferent and not defiant” is the most fatuous absurd nonsense I have ever heard in my life. Yes, I am looking forward to the proof of God or Gods, as so far it is totally zero, and is nothing more than wishful thinking. When you have some irrevocable evidence of your supernatural entity, then please submit it. Asinine nonsense such as the comment above, obscurantism, and an army of straw men is NOT proof. If you believe that the pseudo science, misinformation and the blatant religious propaganda evidenced in this appalling film do your cause any good, then you are grossly and sadly mistaken.
As for evicting PZ Myers, what a colossal own goal by the producers of this film, particulary as he was actually
“”Growing up in a family that worked for all the U.S. National Labs in the world, I can tell you, scientifically, evolution does not stand up.””
As if THAT qualifies you for anything! My dad worked as an auctioneer, would you let me sell your house? It is perfectly clear that you have never read a book about evolution, so you plainly don’t know what you’re talking about.
G.
Expose him how? Expose the fact that he is willing to speak hypothetically about possibilities and how they could play out?
Dawkins was giving an example of how design could be made testable, and hence scientific. Apparently the producers either mangled the context, or simply relied on viewers not being capable of understanding the idea of hypotheticals.
“Again, you can prove god in an athiest, if god didnt exist theyd be indifferent and not defiant.”
That statement is interesting for two reasons:
1) Since Christians are defiant of all gods except their own – to the extent that they feel compelled to travel around the globe, persuading other people of the wrongness of non-Christian beliefs – does that constitute proof that all gods except for the Christian god exist?
2) It’s interesting that you feel this statement is insightful enough that it bears repeating “again”.
What does this mean exactly anyway: what labs? All of them? Are there some labs known specifically as “U.S. National”?
But as I keep trying to explain to people, you can’t just tell us: i.e. just make a claim. Claims are nothing. It’s making the actual argument: exposing it for all to see, that matters. I could claim to be the queen of england. Who cares?
This movie is exhibit A in not understanding that concept. As far as I can tell, there is virtually nothing of substance in it: it doesn’t even really explain what the arguments of ID are, specifically, not even to defend them. It just makes a bunch of tissue-thin claims: ones that have been debunked a million times before. And yet it offers nothing new to any of those old debates.
It’s amazing how much is being written about this.
Isn’t it what the IDiots want?
Seems to me that by letting Prof Dawkins get in and denying PZ Myer’s entrance, it would certainly create lots of controversy and they knew it.
DO NOT DO ANY MORE ADVERTISING TO THE ROYAL MORON BEN STEIN AND HIS PATHETIC MOVIE
Betty: to some extent, you’re right. This is what they want. But on the other hand, they’re going to be loud and capable of promoting their ideas regardless of us. Perhaps not quite as loud, but still loud enough.
As they say, the only way forward is through. We can’t go back. The key is, I think, to make sure that criticism of their efforts doesn’t play into their persecution narrative: that it takes care to point out exactly the core flaws in their case for ID as science, and the judgment of ID as poor science being some sort of check on free expression… rather than JUST calling them stupid, religious, or whatever else.
Matt- to say Dawkins embarrased himself shows your colours. I am not a big fan of the man but the point he was making was perfectly valid. You are a propagandist, just like the fools who made one hell of a boring documentary. And for you to say it should have been thrown out years ago. Well I have a test for you.
ALL THE VACCINES AND MEDICINES ESTABLISHED ON THE PREMISE THAT EVOLUTION IS INDEED A FACT……WILL YOU STOP TAKING THEM?????? You are a fool clouded by his slavish subordination to his religion!
I think it’s now even more clear that words were put in his mouth, through the film creatively forgetting to include the context and the whole of his discussion on this subject. His explanation in his review of the film follows pretty much exactly how I expected that they had misrepresented him on this point.
For the record, I don’t think creationists need to stop taking medicine because they don’t believe in the principles that underly it. To them, it just works, and that’s reason enough to use it.
At risk of putting my own head on the chopping block, it seems you guys are a little hard on Matt. I do not have a PhD in biology, but I do have a strong background in science (post-grad Nuclear Engineer). I have studied evolution and creation arguements and dating methods back and forth for some time. With both there is a point were philosophy and science start to meet. When science starts to touch on origins your personal worldview does affect your bias to theories. Absolute evolution is based on a purely naturalistic worldview, and absolute creation is typically based on a biblical-world view, and there is every iteration in between. Society must make room for these discussions where science touches on philosophy; and it should be done in a mutually respectful way; though all views have historically failed at this at some point. I think, though possibly to an extreme, the ID worldview is simply struggling to be allowed to speak without being insulted and judged strictly on alternate worldviews. Philosophical views that impinge upon the edges of science should never be viewed as a threat to real science and the scientific method (hypothesis, experiment, observe, demostrate), which should be the heart of science education.
I don’t agree, largely because science doesn’t have some big scary label “origins” for questions on how life began and so forth. This is just another attempt to carve out some special protected place for subjects some people don’t want science to look at. But science just examines what the facts are.
While no one can claim to be unbiased, science is a means for fighting bias, and does about as good a job as we can expect anything to do. However, if you start to explicitly let a “worldview” influence your account of the evidence, then you’ve left the realm of science.
I don’t know what you mean by “absolute evolution.” We don’t teach “absolute evolution” in schools or work on it in academia. We teach evolution as the best scientific understanding we have about the diversity of life on earth, and other scientific ideas about other areas (including questions on how life started, etc. that we don’t have any single solid answer to).
People are more than welcome to have philosophical discussions: who the heck is preventing people from discussing things? This is simply a red herring. What the ID camp is pushing for is not freedom to discuss, which they already have, but rather freedom from anyone’s professional judgment about the scientific vacuity of their specific claims. Science has standards. The ID camp wants to claim the prestige and benefits of being called science, but without having to meet those standards or playing by any of the rules. And the scientific method is a perfect example of this: their refusal to offer a means by which their ideas can be construed as a testable hypothesis makes just about any real science impossible.
When ID people complain that universities won’t support their research, what they are really complaining about is not that they are being prevented from speaking or explaining their ideas, but that no one will pay to support their ideas. What they want is affirmative action.
Also, I’m not sure if you meant anything by the order, but “observation” is one of the first steps in the scientific method, not the second to last. I mention this because quite a few people have the misconception about scientific experiment and knowledge that it is “observation,” often meant quite literally with eyeballs, which determines our ability to judge a hypothesis against the evidence.
This is the most ridiculous thing i have ever seen! you say they do not explain evolution in the film well i have only seen a couple of trailers and they have and the audience is informed of evolution because they teach it in schools now which is absurd.
Your saying the man who wrote speeches for the leader of our country has no idea about science and how it works? this review should be the one being criticized in this so called blog
You’ve only seen trailers, and yet you claim you know better than what people who have actually seen it say it covers?
They teach integrals in schools too: how many people remember how to do those? Regardless, you haven’t really addressed the specific omissions people have noted, or why they are important.
Yes, that’s exactly what I’m saying. Stein has demonstrated his lack of understanding, and I’ve explained it extensively. Do you have any substantive response?
And writing political speeches is hardly a qualification for understanding science. In fact, it might even be something of a disqualification. :)
And yet, you fail to raise even a single point of substantive criticism.
Help us fight the oppression of Avian Transportation Theory by the scientific Big Sex establishment!
Sexpelled: No Intercourse Allowed
Evolution is a theory. . . the lack of a fossil record is enough to break the theory.
As for intelligent design, I do not know enough about the ID to bash or agree with them. I will say this, and it’s a statement that goes back a long long way.
That the interaction of our ecosystem is such that plants use the waste of mammals (CO2) to create waste that is used by mammals (O2) shows either incredible coincidence, collaborative natural harmony (it works that way because it works that way, and if it didn’t work that way it wouldn’t work that way), or “design”.
A creation has a Creator. Whether it’s a watchmaker, an architect, what have you.
To think that something is created ex nihilo, out of nothing, requires far more faith than believing what is most logical.
So, if the anti-ID people will at least have the intellectual honesty to declare that their believe in evolution is, in itself, a religious faith (a belief in an explanation as to how things came to pass, and as such dictates their personal interaction with this world), they probably wouldn’t be seen as the angry little youth that they are.
If the ID people would simply say “you don’t know the truth, i don’t know the truth, so this is the truth I’m going to subscribe to”, they’d probably get more converts too.
Word to the wise: starting off a critique of science with the “a theory” trope is not a good way to demonstrate that you know what you are talking about. Nor is saying that there is a “lack of a fossil record.” We have a fossil record, and it conforms as expected to the very specific pattern of common descent, and matches up with all the other sorts of evidence and lines of ancestry we can derive by other means (i.e. genetic, matching up with ancient geological movements, events, etc.) It’s incredibly rich and revealing: far more so than anyone in the 1800s would have ever expected it to be.
All the evidence points to it happening over time as various ecological niches were filled. In fact, the system you describe was not always that way. Nor is it anywhere near complete or that simple.
This merely begs the question you are trying to answer. We don’t know if existence is a “creation” of something or not.
Except that a) no biologist suggested anything “ex nihilo” b) you snuck the question begging word “creation” in there again c) you don’t offer any logic to consider the reasonability of your proposed alternative (which, as far as I can tell, hypocritically just involves creation ex nihilo via a being magically capable of simply doing that: creating a far bigger mystery than the one we set out to solve).
The belief that it’s a religious faith must surely be a comforting idea for you, but it’s little more than a lame accusation, not a fact. It’s certainly not very intellectually honest of you to backhandedly accuse people you disagree with of being irrational and having no sound evidential arguments.
And it doesn’t make much sense in light of all the religious people who have no problem with evolution as science.
Subscribing to this or that is not what science is about. It’s about the evidence: what does it show, how does it stack up against this or that claim about the world? The more you keep avoiding that process, the less and less you can claim to be doing science.
Vaal this is an email to you, but like most Darwin believers you are to a close minded religion all to your own. Proof of God is very easy lets start with theArk of the Convenat please go to-http://www.bibleplus.org/discoveries/arkintro.htm-and take a look. Lets go to proof of the Red Sea Crossing-http://www.bibleplus.org/discoveries/redsea.htm-not enough? Lets take a look at another, Jesus tomb-http://www.bibleplus.org/discoveries/jesustomb.htm-I want to add to this saying it is a historical fact that Jesus walked the earth and dies on the cross that has been proved by even the most liberal people. The arguement is if he was raised from the dead or not. Lets look at Sodom and Gomorrah findings-http://www.bibleplus.org/discoveries/sodomfound.htm- one more. Noahs Ark-http://www.bibleplus.org/discoveries/noahsark.htm- I have more if you would like. After researching a little about the Bible and than looking for proof even a fool can find evidence all over the earth. However the smartest man in the world cannot find evidence to which he has predetermined is not true. It is my prayer that you take that to an open minded heart.
If it makes you feel better that I refer to the Theory as a watermelon, I’d be happy to. It is not now nor has it ever been the Law of Evolution. Nor will it ever be.
Rich and revealing, and yet not proof positive? See lack of Law of Evolution.
A long explanation of ecological niches will never take place in this forum, however, your statement is factually wrong. ALL THE EVIDENCE only points to it if you assume that ecological niches were in fact filled. Again, as I do not know what the ID folk state, I’m assuming they’re response would be that the filling of niches is, by definition, proof of design (i.e. a niche needs filling). And of course what I stated was not complete. . . only evidence that an interaction does in fact exist, and would beg the question, who defined the interaction? Chance? Or a Creator?
That’s silly. . . seriously. I may as well state that an automobile exists, therefore we do not know if it was created. Can you deny the Earth is, in fact among other things, an object. An object is a creation of either a Creator, or, to satisfy the other side, Not a Creator.
This is sounding very much like the OJ Simpson jury saying “I know the DNA says he was there, but it’s not enough evidence.” I would imagine that a man of science would have to be open to the idea that if something like a god of creation in fact exists, the ability to create would not be considered magical. And yet you use the term as a pejorative. . .
Magic? Like flying in the air across the ocean? Charles Darwin would have scoffed at that as magic or science fiction at best.
I would simply say any magic that was involved in creation is simply something we do not understand. Unless you’re willing to say we DO understand. . . in which case all the monies spent to find out more about our creation is simply paying for the comfortable lives of people with no real practical skills.
It is a religious faith. That the theory after all these years has never been accepted by the scientific community to the status of a scientific law means that some folks believe, others do not.
You have accused me of hypocritical comments, backhanded comments, lame comments, and being intellectually dishonest, and yet I’m the one saying neither ID nor evolutionists have a complete explanation of creation/existence.
I’ll leave it to the readers to see who of us is the emotional, evangelical, shall I say, zealot with religious fervor. . . and which of us is simply conversing.
Now who’s being intellectually dishonest. I’ve worked in my share of university labs. . . it’s not about evidence, it’s about proving a theory true and finding evidence to back that up. . . go review any research university and then tell me the scientists involved do not have an agenda before they got funding for their research.
Incidentally, I never claimed to be doing science, but neither are you. No religious person claims their faith is an exercise in science and nothing more.
But science has in recent years become more and more religious. Global warming is pure religion, with it’s own Eden, it’s Fall, it’s penance and it’s Messiah. Evolution has it’s faith based doctrines, to be sure.
Noone argues that a circle has 360 degrees, each of which has 60 minutes. It’s simply fact.
But going from T-Rex to a chicken takes faith.
And if you ask a person who believes in a Creator why the similiarities, I’d guess the answer would be. . . they had the same Creator, why wouldn’t there be structural similiarities and genetic similarities.
Ok Bad lets take a look at some of your responses to Tom. You tell him it is not wise to start his debate with “theory”. I guess you never turned that mirror around on yourself. You keep talking about proof for this or that but never give any proof. You keep stating things that have black holes and gray area but you state them as fact. You say we have a fossil record, yes we do but it has many gray areas that could prove something different than the evolution process. The something came out of nothing debate is really not a debate at all whether you are an evolution believer or a creation believer. It is a simplistic explanation but yet a true one. Unlike your responses I will show you proof. I could use other examples from what you responded to as completely fabricated. Please let me know and I will post them on here and make you look very ignorant. It comes down to a couple of things, evolution is only a theory and the reason it is a theory is because of the holes and inconsistencies associated with it. There is not debate there or else it would be fact-I hope you see that and don’t mock Tom for stating the obvious of which you look right past. You are a prime example of evolution being more than science and almost religious in nature.
Biblical Proof:
http://www.bibleplus.org/discoveries/noahsark.htm
http://www.bibleplus.org/discoveries/redsea.htm
http://www.bibleplus.org/discoveries/mtsinai.htm
http://www.bibleplus.org/discoveries/sodomfound.htm
http://www.bibleplus.org/discoveries/arkintro.htm
http://www.bibleplus.org/discoveries/jesustomb.htm
The proof in that I just gave you is more consistent than any proof I have ever researched for evolution. It has more evidence than any lecture in undergraduate or graduate classes teaching “Big Bang THEORY” or “Evolution THEORY”.
Even a fool can see proof of the Bible right in front of them on earth. However the smartest man in the world cannot believe in something no matter what the evidence supports if he has already predetermined it to be false. I hope those words open your mind to other possibilities.
That’s quite true: but not for the reasons you seem to think. Theories never become laws. In fact, theories often are made up of, amongst other things, laws. Theories in science are bodies of explanation that are then tested against the evidence, and retained based on how well they stack up.
Science doesn’t do “proof positive.” What it does is to say that the fossil record exists and it, as evidence supports the evolutionary explanation and set of facts. Period. You said that there was a lack of a fossil record. You’re simply wrong.
And I can’t “see the lack of Law of Evolution” because there the concept doesn’t make any sense. Again, the theory of evolution will never turn into the “law” of evolution. Laws aren’t explanations, they are observed universal regularities, relationships, etc.
It’s not an assumption, it’s a conclusion, based on physical evidence.
There is no reason to assume that anyone “defined” the interaction. That doesn’t even make any sense in this context. The interaction happened because, well, stuff in reality affects other stuff. That’s what an interaction is.
Again, you’re not making any sense here. What I said was that we cannot simply assume that, for instance, the earth was created by anyone. So therefore to say that “this is a creation, and therefore it must have had a creator” is simply to assume your own conclusion.
It’s not a matter of being “open” to it personally or philosophically. It has to do with the pragmatic constraints of science. AS science, magic is outside of the scope of explanation, almost by definition. If I want to resort to magic, then I can explain anything instantly without the need to even check and see if I’m right. In fact, you can’t prove me wrong, because magic can be endlessly creative in explaining away all attempts to discount it. This is why its not part of science.
That’s not what you’ve said though. If it were that would be fine. But you’ve said that it’s a “Creator.” That’s simply jumping to a conclusion.
We most certainly don’t understand everything. No one is more up front about this than scientists doing science. What we can and do understand, however, is so far whatever comes from looking at the evidence and seeing what it shows or does not show.
As I’ve already explained, you are deeply confused here. Theories do not become laws. Even in mathematics, where all the elements of theories can be deductively proven from their axioms, we don’t call “number theory” “number law.” That’s because laws are simply statements, while theories are large bodies or frameworks. Saying that a theory is somehow less than a law is like saying that an apple tree is less than an orange.
And in each case I’ve actually explained why those comments are as I characterized them. Here’s another: your last sentence here is a “straw man.” No scientist has claimed to have a “complete explanation” of all existence. However, scientists do claim that some things are well established by evidence, including evolution. Which, apparently, is not to your liking.
Again, no one claims that individual scientists don’t have biases. That’s not the point. The point is that this is what shakes out of the evidence after a process in which lots of different people with lots of different biases all try to compete on the strength the evidence. Now, if you can show that there is a bias that has illegitimately messed up some piece of evidence, go right ahead. That’s part of what science is all about: constant criticism. Unfortunately, uninformed criticism, starting with a lot of false assumptions about what it is criticizing, ceases to be useful.
This is what I mean about being uninformed. T-Rexes are related to chickens, but they did not “go to” them. And the evidence of this relation is based on all manner of evidential analysis, not faith. You’d like it to be faith because that would make it easier to dismiss without you having to do any of work required to find out what that evidential case is, in specific. Easier to simply dismiss the entire enterprise by falsely labeling it faith.
Sorry, but this still doesn’t fly. The issue isn’t simply similarity, but specific patterns of similarity and difference that are very specific to ancestry, along with genetic changes and relations amongst modern animals that support not just ancestral connections, but the same pattern of them. And these, on top of that, all match up with various things we know about the past history of the earth.
Now, you could always assert that all powerful magician simply arranged all this to specifically make it look like ancestry, when it’s not (and, no mistake, they’d have to intentionally make it look like ancestry, failing to do any of the things you can do if you ignore those constraints). But then, you can say the same about China. An all-powerful magician could fool us both into thinking that China exists when it really doesn’t, manufacturing all the evidence or even our memories. Again, falling back onto such explanations is pointless, because they can explain anything and support just about any conclusion at all. It isn’t following the evidence.
Wow… Lots of bashing happening here.
If you want to make a point, be nice, OK? No one cares what you know until they know how much you care. People who stoop to bashing are often the same very people you ignore.
“Matt,please first check facts then bash.
ID is ultimate joke.”
“Matt, you are a rational human being, are you not?”
“As if THAT qualifies you for anything! (…)”
A generalization, too:
“For the record, I don’t think creationists need to stop taking medicine because they don’t believe in the principles that underly it. To them, it just works, and that’s reason enough to use it.”
More insults:
“Isn’t it what the IDiots want?”
“As I’ve already explained, you are deeply confused here.”
It looks like someone hasn’t been very nice to Matt and Tom Moore…
A lot of fancy talk here.
At the end of the day, you can’t prove God doesn’t exist.
So your saying to yourself. “Ok, prove he does exist, smart guy.”
Me proving God exists isn’t my job, or anyone else’s. Here’s my point.
Assume for a minute, God exists.
Creator of the universe and all of that.
You would have to accept the idea that you are an intellectual infant compared to Him.
(For this scenario, you would be in agreement so far, correct? For you to disagree would mean you won’t accept this premise, for arguments sake. For you to call me names, and tell me I‘m confused would show your not interested in this scenario.)
Back to this assumption-
Being Intellectual infants compared to Him, one might say “Then why doesn’t He just tell everybody that doesn’t believe, that He exists?” I submit, the Bible. But for arguments sake, set the Bible aside.
(remember the scenario)
He doesn’t have to “tell” us anything.
And how are our demands met by the Master of the universe? Who
are we to say that He thinks like us? Nobody, that’s who we are.
And because of fossil records, or lack there of, tells us nothing.
And because a non-believer attempts to make an argument, tells us nothing.
And for a believer to not experience the joy of converting a non-believer, tells us nothing.
It is God who is watching us in all our secret places.
It all comes down to faith. What’s faith?
Faith is an indescribable bond with God.
Now assume God wants our faith.
If He sent an angel down to explain everything to the next non-believer reading this, then you would believe, but you would no longer need faith.
Then you wouldn’t be able to give to God what He wants.
There’s something about bending the knee in prayer that humbles us. It’s saying “I realize, I’m not the center of the universe.”
Maybe we should all pretend we’re not for a minute.
Never define evolution or intelligent design?? What about when they were talking about how evolution can have two definitions, then quoted the exact textbook definition of evolution. Also, even if they hadn’t it would be safe to assume that anyone interested in a documentary has even the slightest understanding of the topic at hand.
The film’s main point is not to push ID or creationism, but to point how intolerant and afraid dogmatic evolutionists are of the true scientific method: which is to let the facts lead where they may, despite pre-conceived notions. It is utterly amazing to see the hatred and outright fear that evolutionists have of anything that does not fit their pre-conceived notions. The same is true for some of the critics here. The references to Nazi Germany are fitting. Along the same lines, “Liberal Fascism” by Jonah Goldberg points out which political view fits the historical definition of fascism. What are you evolutionists so afraid of? Let the science lead where it may, without imposing your heavy-handed hatred on those who disagree with you. Reminds me of the flat-earthers.
I give five stars (that is 5*s) to the moview EXPELLED. To all the proponents of the intelligence design movement, we can see the evolutionists and athiests are on the run. They are using abusive language, reactionary tactics etc, instead of using some amount of intelligence (hopefully they still CAN think).
When even their god, Richard Dawkings, admits that he sees the design on this earth does call for intelligence, but then is stupid enough to say that it could have been seeded by a higher intelligence…. DUH…. shooting himself in the foot. I have heard him say, like an high school student might say… if God designed everything.. who designed God… well the arguement that another “evolved intelligence” seeded life on earth is plain a moronic idea. Now to all the other people who are athiests and argue here, who can not even, with and open mind study what this is all about, who accept statements of their gods like Dawkins, without thinking… THINK folks… it might prove healthy, and might improve your mind somewhat. Mathmatically, it has been proved that evolution is not possible, even evolution of a single DNA strand, let alone a cell, is mathmatically impossible (or with such a low chance that given the so called 13 billion years, if changes occured at the rate of several billion everysecond, even then the chance of even a single strand of DNA to come about would be in coceivable). Now, you can not argue that this is not necessary since this is “life” which does not behave like the rest of the universe. DNA is not life so it is absolutely necessary.
That is not even the beginning of life. You have far greater problems afterwards of explaining how this can then make a cell and subsequently make all the varied species. Until you have REASONABLE explanations about the mechanism of how all this happened, you should SHUT UP. This is a challenge to all you who think you are intellectually superior, while in fact unable to even think foryourselves, and let arrogant people like Richard Dawkings think for you.
To Richard Dawkins if he ever gets this. I heard what you said about what you would say to God if, after you died, you would confront him. You said that you would ask God why he was hiding himself from the world. The answer to this is very very simple. If God were to show Himself to you in the Power that He posseses, then that would mean that He just took your “free will” away. How, you ask, does He take away my free will? Well, when you realize how little power you have and how much Power God has, you realize that you HAVE TO DO exactly as God wants, or else He has the Power to annihlate you. Alternatively, if God tells you that He is not going to punish you WHATEVER you do, then what kind of a God would that be.
Secondly, God has NOT Hidden himself at all. He is manifest in this very creation that you study and attribute to this “Evolution” as being so beautiful and elegant. You are just missing one step sir, and that is giving glory to where glory is due. If by some chance, you get to read this sir, or anyone who thinks in a similar manner, gets to read this, try this experiment.. it is not hard. Just be a little humble and say to God, please show me the truth, and be sincere about it. God will show it to you if you say it from your heart. After all, no matter how big your brain is, compared to the UNIVERSE, we all are pathetically small, and compared to God who created the UNIVERSE, the UNIVERSE itself testifies to this… please study the extraordinary large library of material on videos and in print and on the internet that is available on this subject.
Evolution is a BIG LIE and all of you who have been infected by this BIG LIE, have a rough time understanding what I write, since you think in a different manner, However, let us seek the truth. At least be honest and recognise that ID is NOT THE SAME as Creationism.
ID claims to scientifically find the EVIDENCE of INTELLIGENCE from observation. THAT IS SCIENCE. Be a LITTLE open minded and not just chant the mantra of people who have an agenda to protect evolutionary theory.
Amen to Ashok! (I’m sorry if the word Amen offended anyone. Maybe the “tolerant” intellectually superior elitists will have to outlaw that word like they try to outlaw everything else they disagree with).
I think I was as nice as was warranted for a civil discussion. When someone makes an assertion that’s deeply confused, I think it needs to be pointed out as such. This isn’t the same as cracking wise about ones momma. And at some point, the complaint that by criticizing something I’m being too rough just becomes an easy excuse to dodge all substantiative criticism as needed.
Mike: you are basically attacking a straw man here. I’m not trying to prove that God doesn’t exist. And no, I’m not going to assume, aside from the sake of argument, that God does. For the sake of argument, your story about God is just one of millions of possible stories one could tell. So what?
None of these constitute knowledge about anything. And, strangely enough, none of them are marks of humility. Assuming that you know something like exactly how the universe began better than everyone else, all without any evidence to lead you there, is not humility.
Science and reason are humility, personified. They admit that they are of limited scope. They admits being restricted to evidence and rationally intelligible ideas. And then they force people to confront the evidence, to lay their ideas bare for criticism, and have to make an argument for something.
What’s more humble than that? Waving it all off by calling it “fancy talk” and then just asking everyone to assume what you believe is true, and then simply dismissing out of hand any possible evidence to the contrary?
That’s the story the film tells. But if you’ve read this site, you’ll know why I think this is a gross misrepresentation of reality. It’s a bait n switch. Science IS about letting the facts lead where they may. But the key word there is facts. That is, science isn’t just a “everyone states their opinions, then walks away, and that’s that.” Science demands that we put those ideas to the test. And sometimes, those ideas either fail to match the facts, or they aren’t even testable by facts, making them worthless as science.
The charge of fear is almost comical here. This entire movie is all about basically running away from debate. It constitutes Intelligent Design and creationism proponents giving up substantive debate, and embracing a message of content-free victim-hood. As I and others have documented, nearly every accusation of “intolerance” in the film is grossly misleading, leaving out key facts that contradict the stories being told and make it clear more was going on than merely people not liking religion or ID.
And it runs away from the larger point, which is that in the REAL scientific method, ideas fail. They get ruled against by evidence and argument. Creationism and ID have failed over and over and over. But this doesn’t deter them as it would any normal scientific idea that fails. It doesn’t even make them change their arguments to find better ones. Instead, they do things like make this film: try to turn it into a political issue, to demand affirmative action for their ideas outside any judgments of merit.
Again, this is just nutpicking: a lazy way to avoid the substance of criticism by pointing to intemperate or rude people you’ll encounter on the internet, or focusing solely on the fact that people have a very low opinion of ID and ID tactics, and say so, as if merely the fact that ID people are considered to be dishonest proves that they are honest. Trying to claim that criticism is “fear,” rather than strong disagreement, is just another rhetorical tactic.
We see right through it. We know which side of this debate is willing, has been willing, to hash out the details, to stand on the evidence. Who is running away from substantive debate? How many interviews has Stein had with critics?
Nah: as already explained many times, they are absurd. They are based on a logic that Stein and others only apply to evolution, not to other influences on the Nazis, like Christian antisemitism.
Funny you should mention that. By your logic, scientists are “scared” of flat-earthers because we don’t pour money in research grants into their ideas, or that geology departments don’t have equal representation of flat-earthers amongst their staff.
The hole in your logic is that science and academia have standards: standards of merit. Ideas that fail to live up to those standards, or, like ID, don’t even want those standards to apply to them as they apply to every other scientist, don’t get much attention or respect because they really don’t deserve it.
I would say that this sort of paranoia is probably more than a little silly.
Creationists have been declaring evolution to be on the very verge of collapse, or its supporters on the run, for around 160 years now. These sorts of declarations don’t seem to be very reliable.
That’s not, in fact, what he says or argues: even in the film’s presentation. Nor is he anyone’s “god.”
It’s high-school student level to point out that creationists do not apply their logic consistently?
No, it’s not moronic (since life exists here, it might exist somewhere else), but there isn’t any evidence for it, and it seems highly, highly unlikely as far as we can tell, which is why Dawkins doesn’t believe it. If you thought he did, I’m afraid you were rather misled.
Where is “Being Civil” to call you out on this pointless, purely insult-laden passage? :)
I’m afraid that you’ll have to show your work here. What is not possible, at least in the present day, is doing the calculation you describe. No doubt the calculation you are referring to is one of the many confused attempts to model biochemistry without including anything relevant to the way in which atoms and molecules work. This makes such calculations meaningless.
These two statements aren’t intelligible, you’re going to have to explain what you mean here more clearly.
No, I don’t think we will. We do have reasonable explanations for the origins of species. They may not be complete in every detail, and there may be many specific things we’ve gotten wrong. But we do know quite well that the varied species are all related by common descent, and seem to have changed in ways consistent with natural selection and other evolutionary mechanisms. And we’re going to continue to look at the evidence to see if we can refine that picture further, learn more, improve things, or even find out if we are wrong.
But we can only do this by doing science. Ditto for the origin of life. We don’t know exactly how life began (though, as I’ve pointed out before, not knowing everything is not the same thing as not knowing anything.) And actually, the major problem we face is not too few possibilities for how it could have happened, but too many, with not enough evidence yet to help select between them.
But it is only by going out and looking some more that we are likely to figure it out. You, on the other hands, apparently want us to throw up our hands and just declare that it’s pointless to go and look, or we should just assume it happened some way that you prefer.
Who, exactly, is demonstrating a willingness to think for themselves here?
Do you often mail letters to your relatives addressed to random people in the country? I’m not Richard Dawkins, and it is vanishingly unlikely that Richard Dawkins reads the comment threads of this website. He does have his own website and even an email address though if you are really interested in asking him something.
I don’t see how this takes away anyone ability to choose. First of all, if a God exists, that would be really important information. Asking people to make choices without pertinent information restricts their freedom by restricting their understanding of what it is they are actually choosing. Second of all, I expect a fair number of people would think such a god to be morally monstrous regardless of whatever threats or bribes it could make. Nothing about knowing it exists takes away their free will. But let’s for the sake of argument assume that you’re right, If so, then this makes no sense:
By your logic, he would be a God that actually respects “free will,” unlike the god described above.
So, let me get this straight. To determine whether or not God exists, one must first believe that God exists in order to ask God if he will show them that he exists… and subsequently, they will believe that God exists?
This is like saying that a good test of whether throwing an apple at a brick wall can make it rain is to wait until it rains, and then throw an apple at a brick wall.
Oh, but people have studied. They just aren’t very convinced by your arguments. And this includes vast number of Christians who have no problem with evolution as good science.
Not quite the same, but there is a huge amount of overlap, and arguably, not a single ID argument has been made that isn’t just a standard creationist argument re-framed so as not to mention God directly. I mean, I hate to keep harping on it, but the first ID textbook was just a creationist textbook that someone ran a find/replace on, replacing the word “God” with “designer” and “creationist” with “intelligent design proponent.”
Claiming and being are not the same thing. What is the evidence? How do you use this evidence to test and see whether ID is true or false, or not?
As opposed to… you. With no agenda… other than demanding that we “test” ourselves by first believing what you believe, and then afterwards agreeing that we do in fact believe it.
Most people are so angry one way or the other, they still don’t grasp what this film was about. The reason there wasn’t evidence for ID, Creationism or Darwinism is that is isn’t about any of them. What it is about, is the lack of Darwinists, who largely control the academic theater, are banning any approach of ID, in funding or exploration. The tie to racial supremacists is that they use Darwinism as proof that ridding the world of inferiority is truly helping us all. His contention isn’t that you should follow any one belief, but that we should have the freedom to explore what we want rather than being corralled by popular belief. Something that even Darwin had to face.
Bad,
Maybe I am paranoid, but I see liberals to be very intolerant of others views. They constantly try to shut down dissent through the courts and though academia. Maybe you’re not one of these, but I believe many liberals would try to outlaw the showing of this movie if they could. They are already trying to shut down talk radio through the fairness doctrine. Democracy is about being tolerant of views not your own, even if you think others’ views are inferior to yours. Liberals only seem to apply that standard one-way. For many liberals, not all liberals: Anyone who disagrees with them has to be shut down.
If it seems like “liberals” (I think you mean intelligent people both liberal and conservative) are intolerant of these views it’s because those views have been addressed a million times already but people still seem to think they have some new and improved version of creation to put forward that will turn science on it’s head. WHY should anyone waste time educating people over and over and over when they refuse to be educated? It’s NOT new info or new ideas here…it’s same old same old with new names. I got frustrated explaining things over and over to my kids when they were toddlers but I understood that would pass….this “ID is science” crap isn’t going to pass as long as fundamentalists exist. I’m sure you can see the problem here. There isn’t enough time in the world to deal with it. And no, nobody wants to “outlaw” this movie. This movie is going to do more to expose the faults of ID than anything else that’s happened to date.
The problem is that this contention makes no sense if you think about what he’s really arguing for. No one lacks the freedom to explore or say anything they want. Not one of the people in this film has had their free speech abridged in the slightest (indeed, most of their stories of persecution are simply phony: the film grossly misleads its audience to spin its tale of nightmarish conformity that bares little relation to science as actually practiced).
Instead, what they are complaining about is that scientists don’t take their ideas seriously, or that people think that they are dishonest, or not really doing good science.
But before we can go any further, this demands we first address the question of whether ID is good science, and whether the attacks on evolution are legitimate or not. You cannot side-step this issue, as you and the film seem to want to do. Otherwise, you are basically saying that any view, utterly regardless of merit, should get equal billing in science.
And you know what that view is? That’s relativism, not science.
You’ll have to cite some representative examples, because in my experience, the cases in which people claim involve shutting down dissent aren’t that at all. Often, in fact, it’s the opposite, as with all the times its claimed that the ACLU is trying to repress religious belief, when in fact it defends private expression of religion all the time, and actually opposes government claiming the authority to weigh in on religious matters (which is always an abrogation of the rights of the people).
That’s true, and I not only think the fairness doctrine is stupid, but government regulation of the airwaves period.
I think you could change the word “liberal” to “conservative” and make almost exactly the same argument. The reality is that people in general argue and put pressure on views they don’t like. But it’s important not to criticize, as this film does, criticism with persecution, and failure to fund as a means of oppression.
That’s not what I said: I said never really define what ID is, and never really explain what evolution is.
This isn’t the same as explaining what evolution is or is all about, let alone the evidence for it.
Given the number of silly things the producers and fans of the movie have said about matters scientific, I would say that it’s not safe to assume that at all. Evolution is not, in the end, a simple subject that you can grasp in two seconds: you need to know a decent amount of things about a bunch of different disciplines and a number of different principles and so forth. Not that it cannot be explained, but pointing at “evolution means blah” isn’t going to cut it for people who’ve only had high school bio at most.
The arguments for evolution and against intelligent design (ID) in this movie are pathetic, holding little fact and relying on the argument that my brain is bigger than your brain. Scientifically these are both theories, having no connection to faith. To connect the theory of ID to creation in a meaningful way requires a blessing from God that is only given to those that have faith and truly believe. All others will never see the light of absolute truth. This movie points out the disappointment much of the upper crust scientific community would suffer if God were to stand right in front of them . They would still reject that he is the one and only, true living God no matter what miracle they were shown. In the blink of an eye they would be weighing what they saw and skewing the facts of what really happened to support there own self-centered mindset. I believe it is because the majority of them have the desire of one day becoming little gods themselves. I wish them all luck. That would be a bigger miracle than the day when the first of a massive amount living cells were design and assembled to populate the earth. They will never believe if they continue to see themselves as their own deity.
Loved Expelled! Academia has a complete strangle hold on the core religion – you have to at least bow down to Darwinism…then you can be a Christian, Jew, whatever. So much at stake in just money for Academia that the coming scorched earth fear campaign from Academia will cause sensible people to backlash at them on a huge scale. It will be just like the tearing down of the Berlin Wall, that big…look out!
PS One other thing: Evolution is such a light theory. With “just so” stories making up the main “science” part – just read Darwin, one “just so” story after another. And it just so happens that 150+ years later not one of his “just so” scenarios have a leg to stand on. No one has ever improved on the Darwin model, he only has imitators with their own “just so” stories.
And this theory is so light that it would float away were it not for the billions of bricks that make up these huge universities across the world, with all the heavy egos inside, and all the $$$$$ that the biology departments need.
Nick: your argument seems to be 100% inventing nasty things you imagine people who don’t believe as you believe and 0% any sort of coherent argument as to why ID is legitimate science that has been wrongly treated in academia. And plenty of the “upper crust” of the scientific community already believes in God so…
Nope. They are two separate things, and you can be both a scientist and a believer at the same time. Or not. But the key issue isn’t whether you believe in a God or not, it’s whether your science holds up or not.
Sounds like the movie has you really pumped up! On the other hand, creationists have been insisting that evolution is about collapse any second now for more than a century. They’ve got people like you believing that there are all sorts of really strong arguments against it, that it’s only held up by dogma, and so forth.
But meanwhile, science chugs along, we learn more and more, and evolution has only become more sophisticated and well established.
This is what’s sort of amazing about Stein (and now, apparently you): he really does seem to think that this is so, that Darwin was some sort of towering pinnacle of evolution’s exceptionalism, and nothing much has happened since then to aid his ideas. But this couldn’t be farther from the truth. Darwin’s original work was one long argument, with countless examples used to build a case for his idea. But all of this was just groundwork: the spark that set off a new field of exploration. And since his time, we’ve learned whole paradigms worth of new information, all expanding, cross- confirming, and improving upon the basic idea. Anyone that’s actually read a journal of evolutionary biology would find virtually nothing recognizable in your claim that it’s all “just so” stories. To be sure, some specific ideas about ancient ecologies and adaptions do begin as such stories, but that’s simply the beginning: where the insight of a new explanatory idea comes from. The real meat comes when these ideas are tested against evidence, and either succeed or fail. That’s how actual evolutionary biology is done.
That must be a comforting belief indeed: most of all because it relieves you of any burden of learning what you are talking about. You can just claim it’s all a conspiracy and then… well, the master plan sort of trails off there, but at least you stuck it to those biologist jerks!
I am 100 percent believer. I don’t think it is possible to believe a little of God’s Word. If it is His inspired Word why consume just parts? You have to eat the whole fish. I also don’t think people who don’t believe are nasty, as you say. If you don’t believe God, there’s probably nothing wrong with wanting to be God at least for this moment. I believe them to be misled by a fallen angel, Satin. It’s evident to me in many of the arguments from the Darwinist/Atheists represented in the movie. There is a lot of anger unknowingly directed at God by Richard Dawkins and some of the others. I really think they want to be god, just like Satin.
If you think I’m not making a coherent argument, I’m okay with that. There is zero proof for the root of either of these theories. I think I have read the truth about the beginning and the end of this creation and beyond. I don’t need science to confirm what I think about evolution or ID. Everything we see was created in six days from nothing, I don’t think we can possibly comprehend how that happened. Time will allow everyone to understand the truth. For many the truth will come too late. This discussion is just one more step toward the end or the beginning, however you choose to look at it. If all you want to do is argue intelligent design vs. evolution, you have really missed the point. Is there one living God that created everything or isn’t there. You probably should decide if the Word is true,a fairytale or A Bad Idea.
I hope you find the truth.
Satan, chief. Satan. Satin is a fabric. Satan has its roots in a Hebrew word meaning “adversary”, and in the first written book of the Bible, Job, this is exactly the function he serves – subservient to and in regular communication with God.
Here’s something for you – where in this 100 percent of God’s Word does it say, explicitly, that Satan is a fallen angel?
And if you can’t find it anywhere, what else have you been eating?
Uh, no. All it requires is a lexicographer tracing the publication and draft history of a book called “Of Pandas and People”, the primal intelligent design textbook on the market currently.
Surprisingly, it seems that shortly after the state-sponsored teaching of creationism was outlawed, as being in violation of the establishment clause, the book underwent a miraculous transformation. Overnight “creator”, “creationism”, and “creationists” vanished from the pages of the book, replaced with “intelligent designer”, “design theory”, and “design proponents”. “Cdesign proponentsists” was left behind in the book as, if you will, a transitional fossil.
And there’s the connection, plain as day.
Or you could read the “wedge document” put forward by the Discovery Institute. That’s a pretty good link too.
Intelligent design is no more than creationism with the serial numbers filed off, and as such government dollars should never be used to fund its research or propagation.
Even the poison sacs?
Well, that’s just silly.
People who make this argument always seem to forget that they cannot keep the implications trapped up in their own cramped theology. If reality is so far beyond what we can comprehend and so far off from what evidence can show, then that affects god beliefs just as much as anything. Maybe you aren’t comprehending the reality of the Bible, which was meant to be read backwards in an alien language, and tells the true story of the two great beings that rule the universe. Or maybe it was all a trick from Loki. Or maybe… and the maybes trail on into an infinite number of other possibilities, all equally beyond comprehension, each exactly as likely as any belief you might insist is so.
That’s the price of doing away with science and empiricism: not victory for your views as the only alternative, but complete epistemic chaos where anything goes, and your beliefs are as quaint as science was beside the range of infinite brain in jar scenarios one could imagine.
Bad, you seem to be the most active in your responses. So I am directing this to you.
My dad once told me a story about his brother, Bob. Bob was driving home from work down a windy road in southern California. It was around 1:00 am. and he had picked up two hitch hikers, they seemed to be possibly boyfriend and girlfriend. When my uncle Bob got out of town a ways along the windy road that he would take home from work, the guy who was in the back seat grabbed my uncle around the throat and while holding him down against the seat the girl pulled out a knife and stabbed my uncle over 40 times in the chest. They pulled the car to the side of the road and dumped him over and down the hill.
I say “windy” for a reason and thats because the road he was on had angled drops of an average of 50+ feet down. Now for the best part of the whole story…
They left my uncle for dead at the bottom of the hill. He was still alive, barley. After laying there for a minute or so a large and strong man showed up. Told him he was going to be OK and picked him up and walked him up the hill and laid him in the middle of the highway. The man said he would go get help and just disappeared, not literally. Right then a car approached and stopped to help him to the hospital.
My uncle was barely alive and could only remember the details and those being:
1. He was stabbed
2. Kicked out of the car down the hill and he could see that the street was way up the hill and that there was no hope.
3. A large and strong man just “appeared”
4. Carried him up the hill and laid him on the road.
5. A car approached.
Now “Bad”, you have to do one of two things, without nitpicking sentences and pulling bits and pieces here and there I want you to discuss what I wrote and your reasoning on your decision.
I believe it was an angel that came and helped my uncle.
Please don’t expel this comment out of the blog. I would like everyone to read the story and respond if they want to. Or they can disregard(expel) the story and not respond :D because they have no “scientific” evidence.
Isa 14:12-17
(12) How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning! how art thou cut down to the ground, which didst weaken the nations!
(13) For thou hast said in thine heart, I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God: I will sit also upon the mount of the congregation, in the sides of the north:
(14) I will ascend above the heights of the clouds; I will be like the most High.
(15) Yet thou shalt be brought down to hell, to the sides of the pit.
(16) They that see thee shall narrowly look upon thee, and consider thee, saying, Is this the man that made the earth to tremble, that did shake kingdoms;
(17) That made the world as a wilderness, and destroyed the cities thereof; that opened not the house of his prisoners?
I have been eating my wheeties, have you? That was an easy one!
Well, it is my blog, so I’d hope that the host is good and responsive, within reason. :)
I’m not sure what you mean about my “decision.” Decision on what?
Ok. Sounds like a good Samaritan to me that ran off to get help, and when he came back, your uncle was gone. No matter what you believe about this incident though, I’m not sure what this story has to do with:
a) the validity and accuracy of the accusations made in Expelled (which do not rest on the existence or non-existence of angels)
b) the scientific validity of evolution (which do not rest on the existence or non-existence of angels)
and so on. If there was anything mysterious about the incident that pointed to some sort of non-natural powers that the mystery man had in either finding or helping your uncle, why would we jump to the conclusion of an angel? Maybe it was. Or maybe it was an alien. Or maybe it was a ghost. Or maybe a deamon (your uncle having some part to play in Satan’s designs). OR maybe an agent of Vishnu. Or maybe a psychic superhero. Or maybe your uncle, suffering severe shock, hallucinated going down the the hill and the man carrying him back up it.
Or maybe it was just some guy. I have no idea. If it’s an important family belief that it was an angel, so be it, but I’m not sure what it has to do with anything in particular.
I try not to delete any comments except those that violate the policy I’ve set (which is mostly to avoid encouraging spam or offtopic promotional claims).
John Locke once asked this question:
“What came first, mind or matter”?
For the materialists who do science, the answer is a forgone conclusion. Mindless matter came first and everything from the universe, to evolution to your decisions and actions are mind-less matter in motion. And anybody who presents factual evidence that suggests otherwise is just a toothless, “backwater”, snake-handling, creationist idea who also probably believes in fairies, gnomes, hobgoblins and that all leprecons are gay. (I happen to know that it’s true that the leprecons do have a strong gay community, but most are in fact strait. Elves on the other hand….)
Today they don’t burn you at the stake, but they do burn your reputation and career at the stake for even questioning materialism.
This documentary exposes modern materailists for what they are: puppets to there belief system. And by asking simple, direct questions Ben Stein shows his deftness as a masterful puppeteer.
Go see this documentary. It’s hilarious!
At 1:00 am in the morning? We both know thats highly unlikely. Considering it was at least 5 or so miles out of town in pitch black conditions.
You are absolutely right! I’m just trying to get you to think outside the box. What I mean is that you don’t fight fire with fire. The whole point of the movie was to show everyone that if you:
a) Question evolution your going to be aggressively refuted and/or be fired from whatever institute, job, etc you currently are applied to.
b) Creationism is to be separated from schools and institutes.
The idea of an “alien” is ludicrous. We don’t live in a science flick, we live in reality. A demon, as far as history, the bible, fables, or whatever teaches, is that demons are evil, bad, angry, anything and everything that is negative…it would be a negative aspect to rescue my uncle…catch my drift? A ghost, aren’t those guys made of vapor or mist and hang around graveyards and haunted houses? The rest of the “maybes” that you mentioned were simply out of ignorance. No harm intended. My point is, considering all the possibilities AND the hundreds of thousands of stories of people being saved from near death experiences by large and strong men who never mention there name, appear out of no where, and disappear as fast as they appeared implies that there are angels.
I’m not here to argue, or cause problems. I just wish that those who are in the science/evolutionary field could not hold so strongly to physical evidence as a starting point of a belief. There is a spiritual battle that going on neither I nor you can see. I understand that you will have a hard time believing that last statement I made because I have no scientific evidence to back it up. My starting point is the bible. Which is why there will always be a great gulf split down the middle between views and will never be removed….
Uh, no. That would be “Helel bin Shahar”, literally “son of the dawn”, which has snuck back into that translation as “son of the morning”. “Lucifer” is a rough Latin approximation of the original Hebrew, and may have been used by St. Jerome in his Latin translation to further his own notable feud with a bishop named Lucifer.
Yes, there’s a St. Lucifer. He opposed forgiving repentant heretics, which is why Jerome had a bone to pick with him.
Helel bin Shahar was a Babylonian god – well, an Israeli name for a Babylonian god, at any rate, and you’ve conveniently forgotten to include Isa 14:4: “you shall take up this taunt-song against the king of Babylon”.
Yeah, Isa 14 is basically “our God kicked your god’s ass”. Satan the adversary doesn’t have much to do with it – well, unless you’re a doctrinarian in the early Church using to make up a cosmology and ignoring what the Jews might have to say about your interpretations.
Good try, though!
A demon, as far as history, the bible, fables, or whatever teaches, is that demons are evil, bad, angry, anything and everything that is negative…it would be a negative aspect to rescue my uncle…catch my drift?
I guess if you can only look at things in terms of one-degree cause-and-effect. Of course, in terms of highly malleable mythology, it’s not hard to spin the motivations of nameless hypothetical entities to fit the story. Maybe down the road your uncle saves the life of someone who grows up to be oh-so evil and wicked. Or maybe he helps a start-up company become successful and sometime down the road its resources are used for “evil” purposes.
For someone who preaches thinking outside the box and fair representation of ideas, you’re pretty aggressively dismissive.
Actually, “they” hunt you down in the street and beat you for PROMOTING materialism. The same “they” who were doing the stake-burning originally.
Science confines itself to methodological naturalism for a reason: when you’re trying to understand the world, you can’t use the supernatural to explain it because the supernatural by definition cannot be understood. This doesn’t mean there is no supernatural. All it means is that theories involving the supernatural are useless, because a supernatural force can do anything and so the theory can be used to apply any interpretation to any observed phenomenon.
Also, where do you get off saying that matter doesn’t have a mind? I’m made of matter, and I have a mind.
Not sure where you get your translation information from, but you might need to re-check, but simply put. the word “Lucifer” is translated from the Hebrew word: hay-lale’ and the Shahar which is properly translated: shakh’-ar. The verse is explaining the past, which is that lucifer used to be the son of the morning, hay-lale’ shakh’-ar, and wanted to ascend higher then God therefore God cast him to the earth. Hence “fallen angel”. Which correctly answers your question:
Isa 14:4 has nothing to do with Isa 14:12-17 which is why I left it out. Generally you have to read from left to right, top to bottom. Our educational system in the United States still teaches that, thank God. But as for Isa 14:4, that is part of a group of verses consisting of Isa 14:1-11 which is speaking of the FUTURE, and the king of Babylon in Isa 14:4 is lucifer, satan, the prince of lies, etc…which, again, is speaking of the future. Simply put Isa 14:1-11 is future and Isa 14:12-17 happened in the past of when this verse was recorded.
I’m confused: why is this highly unlikely? 5 or so miles out of most towns still gets decently heavy traffic even at 1am in the morning, and seeing someone get dumped out of a car and rolled down a hill attracts a heck of a lot of attention.
The thing is, I can think way way farther outside of the box than what Stein and company want to present as an alternative to science. They don’t seem to understand that once you toss off the need for evidence and empiricism, that anything goes: not just their own special theology.
But as we’ve already shown, this accusation is a gross misrepresentation of reality.
Correction: religious beliefs are to be separate from the method of science, teaching how to do science, what the government teaches, etc. That doesn’t mean that schools can’t have religious studies subjects and so forth.
This doesn’t seem very “out of the box” of you. Like I said, you don’t seem willing to acknowledge that once you basically get to propose possibilities that are far outside conventional observable reality, you can’t very well run around objecting to other possibilities that do the same. If we want to appeal to things that are outside of our current knowledge, then what’s so crazy about shapeshifting aliens?
Again, not very out of the box here. Demons could ONLY be the way YOU imagine them? Period?
That’s one idea of what a ghost might be like. But if you think out of the box…
Oh, I don’t take offense, I just think you’ve missed the point. None of those things are any more or less plausible than angels as something to appeal to outside of the known natural world. If you want people to accept the possibility of an angel, then to get there, you basically have to open up the door to all those other things. You can’t shut them out and only get back the one option you most like or are culturally comfortable with.
Honestly, I don’t know of that many “large strong men” stories similar to this one. But even if there were, wouldn’t the most plausible explanation be, I dunno… all the large strong men living all over the world? Coupled with the fact that not everyone always sees where every person they meet in a stressful situation comes from or goes to? You’d have to do a lot better at ruling all the perfectly conventional possibilities like this than “another human being out and about a 1am in the morning, inconceivable!”
Why not? That seems to be the best way to keep people honest. It’s not that there couldn’t be things that are immune to evidence, but if there are, it’s a huge and perhaps even insurmountable problem to know what they might be, specifically. How would we ever know for sure, or demonstrate it to anyone else?
I suppose. The difference between our starting points is that mine doesn’t presuppose answers to all the basic and central questions right off the bat, before we’ve even gone out and looked.
Not at all. We see minds, and we see matter. As far as we can tell, minds require a very specific sort of matter (a brain functioning in a very specific sort of way), and cannot seem to exist without it. That’s what we know. We don’t know which “came first” or if that question even makes any sense to ask in this situation. Though we certainly don’t see minds existing prior to brains in any specific case, so there’s that.
We’re just looking at the evidence. What do you have to offer?
However a “mind” works, it’s inevitable that it will be made up of functions and smaller parts that aren’t themselves minds. Even if the whole thing is based in some so-far unknown supernatural realm. So why is this painted as being such an odd idea?
Again, this is a very lazy non-defense of what’s actually going on, which is that non-material science isn’t possible (if you think it is, then explain how!), and people trying to foist it on public schools are basically trying to teach religious beliefs.
Snore…. is this all you’ve got?
Sorry for the double post, I wanted to correct an html error above.
Not sure where you get your translation information from, but you might need to re-check, but simply put. the word “Lucifer” is translated from the Hebrew word: hay-lale’ and the Shahar which is properly translated: shakh’-ar. The verse is explaining the past, which is that lucifer used to be the son of the morning, hay-lale’ shakh’-ar, and wanted to ascend higher then God therefore God cast him to the earth. Hence “fallen angel”. Which correctly answers your question:
Isa 14:4 has nothing to do with Isa 14:12-17 which is why I left it out. Generally you have to read from left to right, top to bottom. Our educational system in the United States still teaches that, thank God. But as for Isa 14:4, that is part of a group of verses consisting of Isa 14:1-11 which is speaking of the FUTURE, and the king of Babylon in Isa 14:4 is lucifer, satan, the prince of lies, etc…which, again, is speaking of the future. Simply put Isa 14:1-11 is future and Isa 14:12-17 happened in the past of when this verse was recorded.
What it all comes down to is our education field and what is taught. What we teach in our schools today affect our future tomorrow. I think thats a quote from someone..Anyways, Science is extremely important, EXTREMELY! It teaches us all sorts of things about life, how and why animals do the things they do, anything and everything. But its crossing the line when you ONLY teach evolution to the kids of our future(evolution being the origins of life). Evolution and God/bible don’t mix. That is the problem. The people that have been born again and/or acknowledge their belief in God understand that our future generation cannot understand the things of God if they are taught that there is no ID’er. Which poses a problem. If we teach our future generation that we came from apes/monkeys then they are going to act like apes/monkeys, right? Ever since The demographs of murders, rapes, theft, anything and everything that makes us lock our doors at night and look over our shoulders when walking down a dark ally…Is due to the fact that we no longer teach that its wrong to steal because in God’s word it says so, or, that its wrong to rape a woman because God said that its wrong so on and so forth. If we take those teachings away and teach that there is no God or absolute truth then the window of opportunity opens!!! We then can say lets do what we feel is right in our own minds. Our minds are mysterious objects. No one knows what a thought consists of or where it comes from. But if you teach and train yourself to think a certain way and to abide by a set of rules, then you acknowledge that there is One who made the rules.
Gravity, too, is a theory. Look it up! But you don’t see us arguing about the mechanics of gravity, do you?
If not believing in gravity determined where you will spend eternity after you die and there was a group of people that have understood the “truth” of gravity and knew that you must believe in it to not spend an eternity in hades/sheh-ole, then you would be bombarded by them trying to get you to believe in gravity.
Because they don’t want that to happen to anyone. Unfortunately, many plummet there every day because they were misled.
…uh, no. You’re wrong. Isa 4:4b-21 is bracketed before and after by the framing verses of Isa 4: 1-4a and Isa 4: 22-23, which mark out the entire passage as the taunt-song against the King of Babylon. I mean, unless you want to argue that somebody took an account of the fall of Satan and just crammed it into the middle of Isaiah like they crammed the prophecy against Babylon in before the original Isaiah material on Assyria.
“The Teaching Authority of the Church does not forbid that, in conformity with the present state of human sciences and sacred theology, research and discussions, on the part of men experienced in both fields, take place with regard to the doctrine of evolution, insofar as it inquiries into the origin of the human body as coming from pre-existent and living matter.” Pope Pius XII, Humani Generis (Evolution explicitly works only on pre-existent and living matter, but the pontiff isn’t going to be the first or last person to misunderstand its scope.)
Yeah, uh, about that.
McClean v. Arkansas, the case that banned creationism from public schools, was in 1981.
Since then, the number of violent crimes have been cut in half.
Property crime is down almost two-thirds.
And that’s not even going into comparisons with other countries. The murder rate in the US is more than double that of largely atheist Norway, for example.
This movie is fascinating, and very educational. I have known for many years about the repression of intelligent design from personal experience. Its good to see some truth actually can make it to the public. The producers of the film had to jump many hurdles to bring it into the theatres and I applaud their victory. This movie will be talked about fot many years. It could well be the start of the demise of Darwins theory as the only allowable theory of mankind, and its about time. Darwins is totally obsolete in the new science of today. There are so many holes in the theory now thats its just a joke.
Give me one proof for evolution just one. There is not one they have all been proven wrong. And Natural selection and evolution are completely contrary to each other. One gains DNA one lose.
Of course! U.S. 303.9 million vs. Norway 4.7 million…If it takes 303.9 million people to more than double the murder rate of a population of 4.7 million, Thats incredibly degrading for Norway in comparison.
By the way, it’s been fun debating with you guys. I appreciate the fact that there was no degrading or name calling between us and that we were civil with each other. Thank you for responding as well.
Maybe one day I will see you guys on this list:HERE
Hope to meet you guys one day and that you will come over to the dark side…
God Bless..
Clinton: a murder rate would be a ratio showing the percentage of murders in relation to the entire population set. What is would not be is simple quantification comparisons.
Name one.
The proof for evolution is that there is that there is as yet no disproof of evolution. Science does not deal in absolute truths but in the most useful explanations, and right now there is no more useful explanation for the variety of life on earth than evolution.
You can study any organism – any organism at all! – and build a foundation from that study to begin to understand another organism. The similarities we observe in nature – the homologies of the fossil record, the conservation across all living things of the “homeobox” genes which regulate embryonic development, the genetic variations among all living creatures – these are not artifice, put here by some arbitrary force for reasons we can never understand. These are products of a simple process which began at the dawn of species and will continue as long as life exists. And because everything on earth is linked, we do not need to develop individual biologies of the cat and dog, mouse and lion, plant and fish. We can work toward a unified understanding of biology with the minor differences peculiar to each organism.
If life is the product of caprice by some external force, then this understanding collapses and no biology can ever share its findings with any other, as they will only be useful by chance coincidence.
See, There is no proof but you call Christianity religion because you think there is no proof, But if there is no proof for your evolution then it too becomes a religion not science. Because it is based on the idea that your thought is true, but its not.
“And because everything on earth is linked, we do not need to develop individual biologies of the cat and dog, mouse and lion, plant and fish.”
Everything on earth is linked hey. well this would also prove that they all have the same creator. Like all dodge cars look similar. Every dodge car or dodge truck that you get in you know it is a dodge why because it looks like the other dodge vehicles. Why is it maybe because they all have the same manufacture
Other than the fact that I do not believe evolution is true, the only problem I have with it is that it is being taught as fact in the compulsory monopolistic public school system in the United States. This theory (taught as fact in my school) distorted my “worldview” for many years. I am not getting into an intellectual debate here, as that’s the debate the evolutionists love to have – I don’t need it (already been down that road as a prior evolutionist myself).
The biggest issue is that children are being forced (without choice & without knowing – deceived) to throw out the God of the bible based on the mandatory teachings of evolution theory in our public schools. For a student to believe evolution he has to buy the underlying assumption that the God of the bible is a liar & the very first book in the bible (Genesis) is false. It seems that the state & science “know best” and there is no room for discussion unless you are on their side. The evolutionists have a stacked deck – mandatory monopolistic training of our youth to see things their way. Even though they fully admit their way is just a “theory” and may someday be proven completely wrong & devise a new theory. Make all the theory’s you want if that is really your motive – but I suspect the motive for a lot of evolutionists is to stamp out God and do so by forcing their theory’s on everyone’s children.
So my question is – What are you afraid of? If your theory’s have scientific backing and can be held up by solid argument and data why will you not allow other idea’s in our school system?
(Why do they have to be scientific ideas? Who made that rule? The state? Certainly not parents……)
I suspect the fear is that you may loose the mind share of the youth that you’ve freely stolen for many years. Otherwise, if you were sure of the data and facts you’d have nothing to worry about. I suspect there is a much, much bigger issue under the covers of this debate that few evolutionist will admit – it’s not just about science – not when people stake their lives efforts on supporting and defending it to no end – to ensuring nothing else is taught in our compulsory school system.
If this is what science really means to you (supporting and defending it’s theories as a life mission) then your science is itself the center of your life – your worldview.
Yours in Christ,
Jamie
So you have a disproof of evolution theory, then? Let’s hear it. It should be pretty easy. I mean, there are certain things that just shouldn’t happen. We won’t find fossil rabbits in the Cambrian explosion. There won’t be two humans who follow divergent developmental pathways in the womb, spurred on by wildly different homeobox gene complexes. No aerobic organism is going to omit the Krebs cycle as part of its metabolic pathway.
Science has adopted new theories in the past, after all. The heliocentric model of the solar system came about because certain phenomena, such as the observed “retrograde” orbits of the other planets, where they seemed to pause in their motion across the heavens and drift backward, don’t make sense unless considered from the viewpoint of an Earth that is also moving.
If there’s some fundamental problem inherent in the diversity of life that evolution theory isn’t addressing, and some other theory does a superior job, then scientists will adopt that theory, because exploring it will let them understand more things about life.
(Don’t pull that “origin of life” stuff out, though. Evolution theory is the succession step, dealing with what happens to life _after_ there is some. The origin of life is no more a problem for evolution than the authorship of Macbeth is a problem for Newton’s laws of motion.)
Why? If we’re postulating a creative intelligence capable of crafting fully-formed life ex nihilo, why should it be limited to producing only the same things over and over again? And why is seeing the same thing over and over again proof of a single creator?
Scroll up, just a touch, to the quote from Pope Pius XII’s Humani Generis. If evolution were in conflict with Genesis, don’t you think he would have noticed? Just a little?
Why do we teach children about the authorship of the Constitution? Shouldn’t we give equal time to the idea that it was stolen from the Martians by expatriate Martian George Washington?
Why do we teach children about germ theory? Shouldn’t we give equal time to the idea that disease is caused by an imbalance of the four bodily humours?
Why do we teach children about physics? Shouldn’t we give equal time to the storied traditions of magic and sorcery?
Why do we teach children the multiplication table? Shouldn’t we give equal time to the idea that 4×5 is whatever you want it to be?
Here’s a dirty little secret. All education is in part acculturation. If you want, call it vocabulary-building on a large scale. Once people acquire a vocabulary, they can communicate with other people who share the same vocabulary. But when you’re starting to learn a new language from zero, what you learn are the most basic and reliable elements. It’s the same way in primary schooling – focus on the most basic and reliable elements.
The difference between vocabulary and education are that vocabulary is a social construct, but education doesn’t rely on a society to back it up. You can see the original Constitution – it’s written in English and not whatever the Martian tongue may be. You can see the track records of physicians who attempted to cure polio as though it were caused by an imbalance of the humours, and those who attempted to cure it as though it were a germ. You can shout magic words at a soapbox racer and it will never move, but rest it on an incline and gravity sends it racing along. (And magic words won’t stop it either.) You can make four groups of five stones each and no matter how much you count you will always wind up with twenty.
But here’s the thing.
Yeah, see, while the Discovery Institute for the Renewal of Science and Culture writes its Wedge Strategy, makes up textbooks, and campaigns across America to try to get Intelligent Design into the schools…
The scientists are out there doing science. Writing papers, uncovering fossils, analyzing chromosomes, studying enzymes, all the things that require the tacit assumption that evolution lets them make – no organism is alone. All organisms are like all others, to a greater or lesser degree, and what is learnes from studying one organism can apply to others.
And the Discovery Institute says they have an alternative theory! It’s a bold new idea! It’ll change the world! But they don’t explore the theory. They don’t investigate the idea. They don’t try to actually change anything. They don’t do research beyond navel-gazing. They spend their entire lives trying to get this idea into schools without any shred of proof that it might actually be true.
If there’s something intelligent design explains better than evolution, then investigate it and present it to the scientific community, or heck, the world at large.
So my question is – what are they afraid of? If their theories should be allowed into our school system, why will they not present a solid argument or any data? Because without a solid argument or any data, what you get is Kitzmiller v. Dover and your school board fined a million bucks and thrown out on its ear.
What you teach in science class is… science. Evolutionary theory is sound science. Creationism is not. ID is not.
Well, the majority of Christians in the world disagree with you on that one. Myself, I have no opinion because I don’t have any vested interest in the Bible.
But they are not taught this. What they are taught is science. If they want to believe that a grand designer is behind it all, they can. Heck, if they want to believe that the Earth is 6000 years old, no one is stopping them from doing that either. But in the meantime, they can still learn what science is and says.
Uh… no? Because that’s silly. And we didn’t just “come from” apes. We are apes: a type of ape. I’m not sure why recognizing that would change our behavior at all. It’s just a description of what we are, and our behavior is what it is. Nothing about being an ape means that our behavior is somehow wrong or unapelike, and we need to go be more like gibbons (though, maybe that would be nice: gibbons are far far more consistently monogamous than human beings, for one thing).
And yet, society seems safer and overall nicer now than ever before.
No one is “taking those teachings away.” If people want to teach that to their kids, who exactly is stopping them from doing so? In public schools, we educate kids and teach them civil values. If people want to teach them religious ideas, that’s their right and duty as parents, not the state’s job.
And whether or not one believes in God has little to do with whether one values things like the rights of others, property, etc.
Pretty darn ironic considering that you accuse scientists of being “afraid” of ID farther down the page.
The reason we teach evolution in biology class (well, to the extent we even do: many schools simply try to avoid doing so to avoid the controversy, which is a shame), is that it’s good science.
This is simply ridiculous. Science classes do not teach anything about how anyone should regard God or the Bible. The only people lobbying for biology teachers to discuss theology in class are creationists and ID proponents.
Heck, even firebrand atheist professor PZ Myers doesn’t teach atheism in his biology classes. It just isn’t relevant to the subject.
Actually, no one is taught that they need to “believe” evolution, and no one is taught any sort of attitude towards Genesis. They are taught science.
I suspect you’d lose your enthusiasm for your principle here very quickly once you realized that dropping all standards for subject matter wouldn’t be restricted to allowing in just the beliefs you like. If you don’t want science classes to stick to science ideas, then we might as well teach kids black magic as well. Come on: what are you so afraid of? Why will you not allow Holocaust denial to be taught in history class? Are you scared? How about how great Allah is, fraidycat?
You’ll quickly realize that not having the government get involved in teaching religion is a GOOD thing. Because chances are, it’s not always going to be your religion that they teach.
Again, this argument could apply to anyone who wants public school classes to include THEIR beliefs as well.
You claiming it is hardly the same as it being so.
This is a common misunderstanding, but the unity we find in the animal kingdom is not merely one of random similarity, but rather a very specific pattern of branching similarity and dissimilarity that is distinctively representative of ancestry, which we see over and over confirmed in the very specific ways that the fossil and genetic records are laid out over time.
“You’ll quickly realize that not having the government get involved in teaching religion is a GOOD thing. Because chances are, it’s not always going to be your religion that they teach.”
The government is involved in teaching religion – the evolution science life is meaningless religion. You see if your so-called science attempts to explain the origin of life with it’s theories you have a religion. You may not want to call it that under the guise of facts and data – but that is exactly what it is. If you buy into the notion of evolution you buy into the notion that life is meaningless – there is no truth – other than the truth that science rushes in to explain.
If there is no truth save for science then what is the point? Why are you wasting your time gathering all the data and facts and creating new theories? If life is meaningless than what’s the point? To better the planet? Is Science our savior then?
Science in this context is indeed a religion.
I thought that this was a great movie, Ben Stein, did an outstanding job of showing how evolutionists attack scientists who try to mention Intelligent Design (ID) could be a possible alternative to evolution. They get them fired, deny them tenure. If they can not get them fired they harass them until they quit. They are denied grant money, so they can not do research in ID. Academic freedom does not exists in the science lab. What are you so afraid of? If ID is such a false claim, as you evolutionists claim, why not let the IDers speak and then say why you disagree with them? But you don’t.
Saw it last night. It exposes the disturbing dishonesty of the academic world. Dawinism clearly is a “Theory” which has HUGE holes. It is funny that “establishment” scientists are so afraid to do their work to test the theory, and at the same time repress honest scientists who are willing to test new theories.
Science and scientists are REQUIRED to inquire into other theories to attempt to gain scientific understanding, especially where the current theory is so flawed. This is not a religious issue. Its an academic honesty issue. The agenda of the establishment is exposed.
And, Stein does a beautiful job of correlating the naysayers attitude of superiority with the destructiveness that man imposes upon man in the name of science and how that lack of morality is encouraged. From academic expulsion to the gas chambers…that is evolution in action, and unfortunately has already been proven true.
Intelligent Design Theory (which simply states that all the sceintific evidence produced by man so far points to an orgaized and logical (therefore inteligent) pattern of development, as opposed to random accident (evolutionary theory)) seems the less evil theory from the humanistic stand point, and does address the gaping holes of evolutionary theory.
It’s OK that religious are attracted to ID. That does not make it any less scientific in its approach .
Thanks Ben for exposing the scientific gestapo! Nay the Scientific cowards.
The ending of the movie was marvelous, I thought it was hilarious, the part where Dawkins admitted that he believed in ID. He actually admitted that he believed in ID, how funny is that. A man who spends his career fighting ID, actually admits to it. You see, Dawkins (and other scientists)their problem is not with ID, it is with religion. ID is not creationism, let’s get that straight. ID is a rational scientific claim. Evolution has not been proven, despite claims otherwise. Evolutionists have yet to explain the origin of life, the cell. How does something living come from something nonliving? Dawkins himself explained that scientists could not know. The only solution that he could offer was that it came from space aliens.
The end of the movie where Ben Stein links Darwin to Hitler, was not “low” or “hateful” as some bloggers have suggested. There is a obvious link, and Stein was just pointing that out. It is fair play.
That is exactly how non-Christians characterize Christians. They say that “Christians” start most wars, much violence is done by “Christians”.
So from that point, what Stein has done is completely fair. If you dislike Stein’s link of Darwinists to the Nazi’s, do not link all Christians by the actions of a few nuts.
Overall Stein did a fine job in the film, mixing humor wit hit. One last comment, as I was reading several blogs, one common trend was that several people were reviewing the film based only on the trailer.
Come on now, you can’t give a complete movie review based only on the trailer. Watch it and then discuss it, if you disagree with it, that is your right. Just do not judge it based on the trailers.
I and others have answered this silly accusation, along with all of your other claims, many times over. On this site even. You just haven’t looked.
And yet, here you are speaking. Here this movie is. Here are publishing countless books, getting earned media, and having think tanks pushing their views. Here scientists are, responding to their every claim (though primarily in length and in print: they had to trick folks into starring in their movie because many have policies against helping these people promote their claims). Seems like they are speaking and speaking and speaking. And that their chief complaint seems to be that they cannot convince other scientists and universities to foot the bill.
Even the filmmakers don’t claim that is what he said… and yet you got that impression, did you? Seems like they did a good job misleading you to believe things even they wouldn’t claim, at least. Dawkins never says that he believes in ID. When asked what he thinks the best case scenario for ID being scientific could be (i.e. a hypothetical) he picks aliens. And his reasons for doing so make perfect sense… given the context that the film spends its 90 minutes running away from.
You guys are going to have a lot harder time convincing anyone of this after this film, which basically does away with that difference better than any ID critic could.
Ok, so what evidence would fundamentally weigh against it?
Then you are confused as to what “evolution” even is. What you mean to say is that it’s abiogenesis that has not been nailed down.
While there are tons of unanswered questions about the origin of life, this isn’t one of them. Living things are MADE of non-living parts: the only difference is the particular arrangement of those parts to allow the specific functions of metabolism and reproduction.
Again, no. He was asked to give his hypothetical best case scenario for ID as science, not for the origin of life in general. And he picked aliens specifically because a) it was testable b) it illustrated the problems with appeals to design and c) it was an example that ID proponents had long used themselves.
Nonsense. To simply present that tenuous link as a condemnation of evolution is ridiculous. We’ve explained why over and over, which apparently you haven’t read. And it’s pretty darn silly that you go on to complain about people condemning Christians for all sorts of bad things they were associated with. Myself, I don’t play that game, but if you want to look at Hitler and condemn anything he and his people appealed to in their quest for power, you’d better take a long hard look at Christianity too, because they cited THAT far more and more broadly than they cited eugenics or a twisted understanding of evolution.
For instance, here’s the problem with the film’s presentation in a nutshell.
Simply calling something a religion (particularly silly when many Christians, who already have their own religion, think evolution is sound science) doesn’t make it one. We might as well call math a religion and then have it excised from school. I’m sure many kids would celebrate this!
This seems to come up a lot: people seem to think that if you even mention the origin of life, you’ve touched upon some sort of magical subject that is only relevant to religious ideas. But tn reality, the origin of life is a specific set of events that seem to have occurred at a specific time in the planet’s history. It’s as much factual question to ask: “what happened? How” in this case as it is in any other. Examining the question is no more inherently religious than examining the evidence for a claimed global flood.
Except that you don’t “buy into” any of this. You’d be hard pressed to find a biologist who believes that their life is meaningless, or that there is “no truth” at all, or even no truths outside of science.
Again: the only person here claiming that life is inherently meaningless is yourself.
The only “context” that it’s taught in schools is as a method of testing and figuring things out. Your accusations of religion just don’t hold any water.
If it’s so clear, name one.
Really, now.
There’s a journal called the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. It doesn’t cover all science done in the United States, but it does publish weekly a wide variety of new research, including about four articles on evolution.
That’s per week.
Including the less well-defined areas, such as this article on bacterial diversity. Bacteria are tough to pin down as species since they reproduce asexually and can often take up and use free-floating genetic information in the form of plasmids, so how to classify bacterial speciation is still a bit of an open question.
How much research is there to support intelligent design? Most of it seems to follow the path of a literature review that ends with “and therefore THERE MUST BE AN INTELLIGENT DESIGNER! ISN’T IT SO OBVIOUS?” And it doesn’t come out at the rate of four articles per week.
Hey, I’ve got a question for you! Based on what you learned from the movie, how did Josef Stalin treat evolutionary scientists?
Im gonna go clean out my garage today and hope a BMW evolves! or better yet im get some crystals and shock it with a 9 volt battery and hope i create some sea monkeys!
These are both pretty good illustrations of how you don’t have a clue what evolution is or says, or what the abiogenetic hypothesis you are ridiculing involves. This is what’s sort of frustrating about this debate: the bulk of the other side is not interested in learning in the first place, which is perfectly okay, but then still insists on claiming that they know everything better than scientists, which is ridiculous.
Thanks for providing an illustration of why people need a better education in the fundamentals of evolution!
Evolution is not teleological, or in pursuit of some goal, in your case a BMW.
Nor does it produce living things from non-living things, such as brine shrimp from crystal, and it definitely doesn’t produce organic matter from inorganic matter.
Well, to the last point, I’d quibble some: life in general is creating organic matter from inorganic all the time, and evolution is part of that process. But you’re right that the question of where the first living things came from is specifically outside the scope of the standard ToE, which deals with the implications OF reproduction, not how reproduction came to be in the first place. That’s a different set of issues and questions, though whether they are broadly that different or not is an open question.
Plants incorporating minerals into their larger structure? Hemoglobin? Chlorophyll? Clam shells, maybe? Okay, point taken.
But there wasn’t some alchemy to produce carbon-based life from non-carbon sources.
Nor does it produce living things from non-living things, such as brine shrimp from crystal, and it definitely doesn’t produce organic matter from inorganic matter.
Ok if it does not produce life from non-life then were does life come from?
We don’t know how life arose, and evolution does not rest on how it happened, only that it happened. The study of this question is a separate issue from evolution: it’s known as abiogenesis.
But as I never tire of saying, just because we don’t know everything doesn’t mean that we don’t know anything. The main issue with figuring out how life began right now is not that we think it impossible, but that there are too many different possibilities, and we don’t yet have enough evidence to narrow things down. We also (contrary to creationist assertions) don’t have any good way to truly assess the plausibility of this or that mechanism.
The film ridicules one concept: the structural interaction of crystals, without ever bothering to explain why this is considered a plausible avenue of exploration. Ridiculing it as “mud and lightening!” is pretty silly, and basically relies on the audience not having a clue how organic chemistry works, or what exactly scientists are looking at: what hurdles to explain, what mechanisms we know of and suspect, what the range of conditions are, etc.
Romans 1:22
“Professing to be wise they became fools.”
You evolution personal may never see it my way, but in the bible Paul clearly talks about you. You claim that your theory is intelligent and that we are dumb and need Christianity for self-esteem. But on the final day of judgement, witch will come wether you believe it or not, you will become fools, and everyone that you have persuaded to follow you. Your idea will be reveled for what it really is and idol that you put in you mind to block out God. And by blocking him out you have made it easier to live the way that you want with out guilt or shame. And on that day God will say to you ” away from me I never knew you”. Then you will be cast in to the pit of hell. Where you will be under eternal punishment for all the sins that you have committed. Now you may think well that is unfair, why should I who never Murdered, stole anything big, rape anyone, Cheated on my wife, etc be punished like those who have. Well just like you don’t think it is a big deal to kill a bug, or if a gang member kills a gang member. But if someone kill you mom you would be upset. This is because it is who the crime is committed against. And if you think it is a big deal for some one to kill you mom because she is innocent and harmless and you love her. They how much bigger of an offense is it when you commit a crime or a sin against the creator of the universe. Who is perfect in every way. And some of you may be thinking this is a joke there is no God and you can prove it with evolution. Well I would not rely on some old guys theory that has never been proven to save me in the end of the world. And just so you know its been disproved. If you want to you can check out Kent Hovids web site http://www.drdino.com or creationministrieinternational.com or several others that be glad to disprove evolution for you. But some you will never believe because you have already harden you heart against God and hate him with everything in you and for you I pray that you eyes will open but until then i guess we will disagree. And just in case you are wondering I don’t think I am right I know I am right.
so theres fundaments in evolution just like there is in basketball? funny! something cant come from nothing fellas. Evoluion is a great theory, so why cant creation be accepted as a theory?
Fundamentals? Yes. Basic things you need to know before having a good idea what anyone is talking about.
Good thing then, that evolution doesn’t say anything at all about “something coming from nothing.”
All the evidence that either fails to confirm or is against the specific creationist accounts of things, and the lack of overall testability for the general idea.
Hey,
Bad, you better study you subject better. Because every theory that you explains where life comes from. Has life coming from non-life. And if you can not explain were life came from then you have not evidence to basis for you theory. so you better believe that life came from nothing or not believe in evolution at all.
How do you know he wasn’t talking about you? In any case, this is what’s known as a self-sealing argument: simply declare that, de facto, anyone who tries to argue otherwise is wrong: and if they have a GOOD argument, well, that means they are even more likely to be wrong!
Hmmm… I don’t remember saying anything like that regarding Christianity.
I used to be a believer, and now I’m not. I can’t see that life has gotten any easier or harder, or less with or without guilt and shame.
The views you are expressing here are a shocking sort of moral relativism.
Whether or not there is a God is a logically distinct question from evolution.
Are you looking to end the world now? That’s not very nice. But I’m sorry to say that evolution is not intended to “save” anyone. It’s meant to explain the diversity of life on earth using evidence, and this is does quite well, and is very well established with such.
It’s telling that you think the arguments on those sites are so weak that you need to invent an entire conspiracy theory to explain why no one even the least bit informed about biology finds them convincing. Heck, even other creationists list some of those arguments as too lousy or dishonest to be used.
Wow, you must be the only person on the planet that can assert this, so of course, you must be right!
How many theories do you have to come up with? everytime a theory is proven wrong or not as good as the one before you come up with another. Our quote on quote “theory” has never changed. If you think that there is a googooplex chance that life was created by a big bang then why is it so hard to belive that there is that same chance that something inteligent created it?
Josh, I’m not sure I understand most of your logic in that comment, but the fact that science improves and becomes more accurate over time as new evidence emerges is a good thing, not a bad thing. It’s a strength, not a weakness, at least for science.
No one thinks life was “create by a big bang.” They are looking for specific testable mechanisms that would explain how it came to be that life appeared on earth around the time it did. What you “believe” really has nothing to do with it. Many people interested in the origin of life already believe that not only something intelligent was ultimately responsible, but that it was a very specific God that did it. This doesn’t deter them as scientists trying to piece together the past with evidence though. As far as many of them are concerned, this activity is teaching them more about God’s creation. That’s why they can work with atheist scientists, who don’t believe any such things. It’s because the project of science is an objective one where everything has to be on the table and open to examination by all, not a particular worldview about what is out there beyond evidence and the physical world.
then why is it still in school texts books? the big bang that is?
[…] Hollywood Daily suggests that the film has underperformed so far, and despite the huge influx of recent viewers I’ve had gloating about how the film really stuck it to those dastardly evolutionists, it […]
Because Big Bang Theory explains where the universe in general came from, not life in specific.
You can mathematically transform the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle so it works with energy and time instead of position and momentum, and get the conclusion that you can have a net energy fluctuation for a period of time such that the product of the two doesn’t exceed Planck’s constant.
The energy inherent in the mass and light of the universe is balanced by the gravitational potential among the masses of the universe, so the universe is either zero-energy or exceedingly low-energy, and as such can persist essentially forever with no violations of physics. The fantastically rapid process of establishing this gravitational potential is called the “big bang”, and it’s not an explosion but rather an expansion. (There may likely have been a fantastically energetic reaction just prior, but that’s not an integral part of the theory.)
Big Bang Theory has nothing to do with the origin or propagation of life.
Erik, as we’ve tried to explain, evolution is not about where life came from.
It’s about how life developed into the forms we see and how it will continue to develop.
You accept Newton’s Laws of Motion, don’t you? (At least for the limited speeds available to most objects on the Earth.) But there’s nothing in any of them about where all the mass that’s moving around came from. This doesn’t make them somehow deficient . All that’s necessary for Newton’s Laws of Motion is that mass exist, which clearly it does.
Similarly, all that’s necessary for the theory of evolution by means of natural selection is that life exist, which clearly it does.
Uh, no. Romans 1:18-32 is a condemnation of idolators, those who worship false gods. Such as, just to pull an example out of nowhere, THE ROMANS.
You are without excuse, you who have passed judgment. For by the standard by which you judge another you condemn yourself, since you, the judge, do the very same things.
Evolution has become the false God of our time so in that case it talks about you. You better know a little bit more then that to shut down that statement. And I expect God to judge me by the same standard that he will judge you by. And you know what I will be guilty, but by the merit of Jesus Christ I will be saved.
I understand natural selection. It happens all the time its how we got all the different species of dog, cat, ect from the ark. But dogs do not evolve it cats or birds. Witch you claim that things do. They why have we not seen things evolving into different kinds today. If evolution is true we should. But no we don’t dogs are still dogs and cats are still cat. So i agree that natural selection is true but that does not prove evolution.
Well, I know that Pope Pius XII issued a papal encyclical called Humani Generis which explicitly stated that studying evolution did not conflict with dogma concerning the origin or purpose of man. Scroll up or search “humani generis” on this page for a quote.
I also know that over 10,000 religious leaders from all faiths have signed on to a statement that evolution and religion do not contradict one another in their essential natures.
What do you know that they don’t, to call evolution a “false god”?
Well, it has to do with the fact that “kind” is a cultural, not an absolute, category. You can turn one thing into a different kind of thing just by asking someone different to make the classification. What kind of animal is a bat?
No I don’t. Examples of dogs producing cats or birds will pretty solidly falsify evolution.
The fact that you think this is counter to what evolution suggests is as clear a demonstration that you do not understand common descent or evolution, as you claim. This is a pretty common misunderstanding: the idea that evolution proceeds by one thing turning into something completely different. But it’s called descent with modification for a reason: sub-groups form within groups.
You might just as easily say that mammals are still mammals, and they are. It’s just that from basic mammalian forms, they have diversified into, amongst other things, dogs and cats. It will be the same way with dogs and cats: sub-groups, sub-species within the larger group of “dog” and “cat.”
Ok, I do understand what you are trying to say i think you might have misunderstood what i was trying to say. How did we get from a blob of orgasmic matter to Humans. And i know that evolution says that we evolved from a blob of matter. And if your evolution does not say that then i must be dreaming or the school system does and really bad job of teaching Evolution.
“Well, I know that Pope Pius XII issued a papal encyclical called Humani Generis which explicitly stated that studying evolution did not conflict with dogma concerning the origin or purpose of man. Scroll up or search “humani generis” on this page for a quote.”
Well by stating that the Pope said. I a clear sin that you don’t what is the word of God is and what is wrong. The Pope has no authority over the bible and evolution is clearly contradictory to the bible. So maybe the Pope should read the bible instead of trying to please the multitudes. And you may think your just some guy who this he is write. But like many other Christian Evangelicals i think the Catholics are wrong in many different Theological Doctrines.
That’s a very, very different matter than insisting that there are “kinds.”
It might well do a pretty bad job: in many cases, school boards and parents have whittled it down into almost nothing.
What evolution says is that you, a eukaryote, are a descendant of early eukaryotes. These weren’t “blobs” but rather single celled organisms. Your body is, in fact, made up of a diversity of different and specialized eukaryotic cells that happen to all coordinate with each other. And past that point, the ancestry gets pretty hazy, especially because the earliest life seems to have done things like swap genes, or performed symbiosis (in fact, every one of your cells is an example of this distant historical event: your mitochondria structures are in fact descended from what was once a separate line of organisms that your eukaryotic ancestors enveloped and incorporated). As to the very origins of life, we aren’t sure what it would have looked like, other than that it would have been far far simpler than modern cells or modern single-celled bacteriums. But at no point does calling any of these things “blobs” really do justice to what anyone is talking about.
That’s nice and all, but Catholics of course think the same about you, and that’s all utterly beside the point. Whether or not you approve of Catholicism, Catholicism is a form of religion, and it is compatible with evolution. Not to “please the multitudes” but because, fundamentally, on its own terms, it is. And that pretty much puts right to bed the idea that evolution is some special magical worldview unique to atheists.
Ok, So we came from one cell if you want to believe that fine. My argument is over i will pray for you and all the other evolutionists out there. And can you tell me one thing do you think that creation science is not science at all or do credit them with studying science.
I don’t believe. I know we came from one cell. And it only took 9 months.
Well, eight in my case, since I was born premature.
Not science at all! Science is founded in methodological naturalism, meaning you have to limit yourself to testing natural causes. You can’t test whether or not a supernatural force created the world and all life.
dude! something cant come from nothing!!! do you not understand that! weither its life or a planet or stars or monkey fish frogs or particles or dust or lightning! SOMETHING cant come from NOTHING!!!! Everything was created by something that was inteligent! thats what im getting at. Im not just talking about something living or breathing. It’s not science. You cannot observe, test and repeat the ever-changing ideas that are little more than wild speculation.
It devalues real science. Chemistry, physics and biology don’t have the same problems of legitimacy because they are real sciences, not philosophical wannabes trying to appear legit.
Complex engineering. Do you ever drive past a skyscraper and think to yourself ‘Gee, I guess billions of years of random chance could have just as easily assembled all of that glass, steel and concrete as well as a team of engineers, architects, construction workers working from blueprints? Of course not! But that’s what evolutionists would have you believe in when it comes to living organisms. Genetics. The programming code of life, according to evolutionists, is just a series of biochemical accidents and mutations. If you believe this, I have a bridge in New York that’s for sale. The infinitely complex engineering of this code means that it did not come about via ‘natural selection,’ aka random chance. Mathematically Impossible. Basic probability tells you that the odds of a blob of primordial ooze morphing into a man, regardless of how much time has passed, are so remote that mathematicians regard it as impossible. Emile Borel and Fred Hoyle are just two mathematicians who reject evolution on statistical grounds. Evolution is a religion. Yes, evolution is the faith of atheism because it replaces God with man. When you’ve conned yourself into believing that some kind of ancient slime morphed into progressively complex and directional life forms, you are in the realm of faith, not science. Racism. This is the ugly secret that evolutionists don’t want to discuss; that Darwin, Huxley and many of the early advocates of evolution stated publicly that Asians, Africans, Australian Aborigines and other non-white, non-European groups were evolutionary throwbacks. Darwin’s cousin, Francis Galton, was a pioneer in the early field of eugenics which was the study of skills by ethnic groups. While Galton’s work was relatively harmless, Hitler’s work — to synthesize natural selection by exterminating a race of people — was not.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B8ZbnKnzzhE watch at your own risk. this puts light on the subject, but it also makes you think how dumb this theory really is.
Evolution isn’t about something coming from nothing. It’s about something coming from something else.
The odds of placing any 312 objects in a particular order are 1 in 2.102 * 10^644. Yet this is exactly what happens if you go to a casino that plays blackjack with a six-deck shoe. And I think you’ll agree with me that casinos are not impossible.
The argument from improbability is misguided on two counts. First, evolution is not teleological. It does not deterministically predict the future, except in very narrow and specific cases like sickle-cell anemia, where one copy protects you from malaria but two copies are lethal – and even then it deals in probabilities. Second, for any specific state of being to occur after billions of years of changes is fantastically improbable. But like the casino example, that doesn’t mean it’s impossible. After you’ve shuffled 6 decks of cards together, they have to be in some order. After billions of years, life has to be in some state.
“You see some classes of the human family that are black, uncouth, uncomely, disagreeable and low in their habits, wild, and seemingly deprived of nearly all the blessings of the intelligence that is generally bestowed upon mankind.
The first man that committed the odious crime of killing one of his brethren will be cursed the longest of any one of the children of Adam. Cain slew his brother. Cain might have been killed, and that would have put a termination to that line of human beings.
This was not to be, and the Lord put a mark upon him, which is the flat nose and black skin. Trace mankind down to after the flood, and then another curse is pronounced upon the same race–that they should be the “servant of servants;” and they will be, until that curse is removed.”
That’s Brigham Young, writing about issues of doctrine for the Mormon Church, which he founded. I’m sure I’m just misreading the references in there and they actually refer to On the Origin of Species rather than the Bible.
Bigoted people will turn to anything to justify their bigotry. That doesn’t mean that what they interpret to suit their own ends should be discarded. Darwin for his part wrote scathing rebukes of the slavery and oppression of the native people he encountered at the same time he was making the voyage that would lead him to discover the principles of natural selection. Some quotes here.
If Hitler was doing the work of any scientists at all, it was Pasteur and Koch, not Darwin and Huxley. Hitler seldom makes any reference to natural selection at all – rather, he often considers the German state as a whole to be a sort of body, and the Jews as disease-causing organisms in that body which must be exterminated.
Why are we teaching germ theory to our children again? Oh, right – because science just describes the world as it is, making no statements about how the world should be, and anyone who tries to use scientific findings to prop up statements of morality is either misguided or delusional.
You realize that this segment is sorta, like, making fun of creationists… right?
Sigh. I don’t want to believe that. What I want to believe that Hogwarts is real and any day now I’ll get an owl inviting me. Seriously, where do you get the idea that any of this has to do with what I want to believe? Part of the reason I like science so much is that it delivers a large quantity of things I never could have imagined myself, much less have “wanted” to be true.
I think its true because that’s where all the evidence leads, and I can’t think of any better way to figure out what’s true than actually going out and looking at the evidence directly.
I basically think most of them either don’t get, or secretly have no respect for science as a method. They envy it, because it has some serious authority in modern societies, and that authority came at the expense of what religious leaders used to enjoy when they got to tell everyone what was true and what wasn’t. So they try to put on the mantle of science in order to gain that legitimacy, but without understanding where that legitimacy comes from. I’m sure some are very sincere. But they’re just confused.
The movie is not about whether ID/Creationism nor Evolution/Big Bang theories are valid. It is about the mainstream scientific community’s staunch reluctance to engage in, and in some cases, allow the discussion of ID/Creationism from a scientific point of view.
Don, we’ve been over this fallacious point a million times already. The fallacy here is that you can’t have a sensible discussion over whether the treatment of ID/Creationism is fair or not until you first have the discussion over whether it is good science or not. If you applied your logic to nearly any other form of psuedoscience, you could make the similar claims about scientists’ general unwillingness to endlessly debate the merits of astrology, dowsing, black magic, or whatever else. You simply can’t run away from this issue, as the film and its defenders continually try to do. It’s central to the whole debate.
And there’s nothing more dishonest than the claim that mainstream science has not “engaged” ID or creationism. Endless amounts of ink have been spilled over these subjects, in many cases involving top scientists neglecting their fields of work to respond to these claims: many of which are made in bad faith in the first place, or have been dealt with many times before. The idea that we haven’t engaged and debated these ideas, or that they are somehow a hushed up secret, is pure nonsense.
The problem is that the ID/Creationist side has no standards to measure success or failure of arguments. In normal science, when you decimate an argument, or expose its lack of rigor or evidence, it’s over. The losers have to go back and reformulate their ideas, or come up with better evidence. But ID/Creationism has no game over: the exact same faulty arguments just get recycled over and over and over. Because they allow for the supernatural, no amount of failure in the evidence makes any difference: it can be explained away in an instant.
Sorry, but in science, you’ve FIRST got to demonstrate some real merit and some evidence, and THEN you can complain about being unfairly ignored or suppressed. Einstein didn’t succeed because he hired a PR firm and made lots of movies to promote his ideas: he succeeded because he marshaled the evidence to his ideas. Countless scientists who have challenged the mainstream have done exactly this… and then became the new mainstream. The ID/Creationism crowd, on the other hand, seems to be far more about winning a PR war in the culture than convincing scientists with evidence.
But the cards require a dealer (or shuffling machine) to reach their final order. They don’t shuffle themselves. :)
Uh, what cards?
Bad,
Thank you for the very civil response. To be perfectly honest, most evolutionists respond with a good deal of hostility to my comments on scientific blogs. I agree with you that mainstream science has, for many years, discussed the merits(or lack therof)of ID/Creationism. It seems as though the established scientific community has grown more averse to such discussions in recent years. Perhaps it is because the scientific community has grown weary of explaining to proponents of ID/Creationism that their ideas have no place in real science. Hmmm. This is actually the first time I’ve thought of it that way. Maybe the seemingly hostile evolutionists I’ve encountered are not hostile after all. Perhaps they really are just tired of hearing from we ID/Creationists. Makes sense. Anyhow, I just wanted to point out that every scientific theory is peppered with presuppositions and assumptions. Of course these presuppositions and assumptions are based upon at least some scientific facts. As you are well aware, scientific theories are evolutionary themselves. Contrast, for instance, evolutionary theory from the time of Darwin with evolutionary theory as we know it today.
I love science. I just wish that the scientific community could accept the possibility that perhaps not all things in the natural world can be fully explained by science. As a level headed, open minded, somewhat educated individual, that is my tiny little wish.
Not to endorse hostility, but do you think there might be a reason for that beyond Expelled’s claimed “fear?” There’s usually a lot more going on, and especially when Stein and Co cast this as a huge culture war, evolution as a tool of atheists, and atheists as demons, tempers are not likely to be subtle. :)
That hasn’t been my perception of things. If anything, the volume of debate has grown as blogs have gained prominence.
I think the main frustration is hearing the same arguments again and again, as if there is no quality control. How many times on this blog has someone come in with the “evolution is a THEORY” or “dogs never evolve into anything but dogs” stuff? It happens over and over and over, despite these being very bad and misleading claims indeed. At least on our side of things, it seems like nothing we do or say or argue makes any difference: the same debunked arguments never go away or get corrected. That can be sort of frustrating.
Definitely, though it should be said that science does its best to test as many of those assumptions as it can as often as it can, and perhaps better than any other human endeavor.
Certainly: it’s far far more robust and filled in today than anything Darwin could have imagined.
I think you’ll find that, contrary to the film’s portrayal, this is already the case. Even the most strident naturalists in their books on this or that discuss how science has limits: a particular scope. Things it can do and can’t. This idea is central to science.
Dude! south park makes fun of all religion. they did that sketch because that dont belive in evolution either. Read up on it. they did it b/c it sounds so stupid that people actually belive it. thats funny how u turned it into a mock against creation.
The cards that Glazius was talking about when discussing probability. Sorry, I don’t know how to use the quote function here :(
beer is sold in football games. beer has nothing to do with football. and beer does not become athletic by association with football. evolution does not become science because its stirred into a science book. evolution is a religion. how can nonliving material spontanious generate?
In 1999, National Geographic published a photograph of a creature which “proved” that birds evolved from dinosaurs. Named Archaeoraptor, it was discovered in China and trumpeted as “a true missing link in the complex chain that connects dinosaurs to birds” (Sloan 100). The photograph displayed a creature “[w]ith arms of a primitive bird and the tail of a dinosaur” (Ibid.), accompanied by statements like, “It’s a missing link between terrestrial dinosaurs and birds that could actually fly” (Ibid.), and “This fossil is perhaps the best evidence since Archaeopteryx that birds did, in fact, evolve from certain types of carnivorous dinosaurs [dromaeosaurs]” (Ibid. 101).
In the Letters to the Editor of the March 2000 issue, however, paleontologist Xu Xing (Chinese Academy of Sciences) wrote that “Archaeoraptor appears to be composed of a dromaeosaur tail and a bird body.” When investigative reporter Lewis Simons delved into the hoax, he uncovered
a tale of misguided secrecy and misplaced confidence, of rampant egos clashing, self-aggrandizement, wishful thinking, naive assumptions, human error, stubbornness, manipulation, backbiting, lying, corruption, and, most of all, abysmal communication (Simons 128).
A Chinese farmer had glued two separate fossils together and sold “it” to a fossil dealer who “acknowledged that he often sold ‘composites'” (Ibid. 129). It found its way to Stephen Czerkas, a dinosaur enthusiast with no scientific qualifications, who contacted paleontologist Philip Currie. Simons wrote, “Currie was so distracted by other commitments around the world that he gave the Archaeoraptor project short shrift” (Ibid. 130).
Currie had reservations about the fossil, but neglected to inform Christopher Sloan, who wrote the 1999 article. Simons called this “a most damaging lapse of responsibility” on Currie’s part (Ibid.). The fossil was examined by Prof. Timothy Rowe of the University of Texas who stated, “[T]here was a chance that it was a fraud” (Ibid.). Currie sent a colleague, fossil technician Kevin Aulenback, to investigate; Aulenback concluded the fossil was “a composite specimen” (Ibid. 131).
Meanwhile, Czerkas and Currie submitted a paper on the fossil to the journals Nature and Science. Simons describes the original draft:
On its fifth page the paper stated that the dromaeosaur-like tail on a birdlike creature suggested a previously unknown element in the evolution of birds from landbound dinosaurs. In short, this was what Czerkas would tell National Geographic was “a missing link” (Ibid.).
Both journals rejected the article (Ibid.131-132). Nevertheless, National Geographic went ahead and published its own version. Simons called the ensuing media frenzy a “dog and pony show for reporters”. (Ibid. 132).
Currie said it was “the greatest mistake of my life.” …
… they saw what they wanted to see.
Shortly thereafter Xu informed Sloan, “I am 100% sure…that Archaeoraptor is a faked specimen” (Ibid.). Once the fraud was exposed, Czerkas admitted he had made “an idiot, bone-stupid mistake.” Currie said it was “the greatest mistake of my life.” Sloan stated, “I was dragging in a monster” (Ibid.). National Geographic editor-in-chief William Allen asked, “How did we get into this mess?” (Ibid. 128). Simons offers an answer: “To some prominent paleontologists who saw it … the little skeleton was a long-sought key to the mystery of evolution” (Ibid.). That is, they saw what they wanted to see.
Criticism has been harsh. In an article on the twenty greatest scientific blunders in the past twenty years, Discover magazine listed “Piltdown Chicken,” its term for the fraud. The label derives from Piltdown Man, an artificial composite of a human skull and an ape jaw “discovered” in 1912 (Newman 80). Just as earlier paleontologists embraced Piltdown Man because they were dying for evidence of human evolution, contemporary scientists embraced Archaeoraptor because of their desperation to prove that birds evolved from dinosaurs.
Bad,
Thank you for the comments.
While I agree with some of your assertions, I still haven’t seen what I would consider solid theory for “macro” evolution. I do, however, see a culture war. This culture war does not seem to be precipitated by the scientific community. It would seem to be the offspring of socio-political activists who wish to marginalize Christianity. While some in the scientific community have joined this movement, I believe they are a very small minority. On the other hand, there are some in the Christian community(but mostly the more secular ID flag wavers)who have the same desire to silence evolutionists. Perhaps there is a small island somewhere where these people could duke it out. Survival of the fittest, you know. Obviously, in this case, there would be no survivors.
While we disagree on some things, I completely respect your point of view.
Thank you for respecting mine as well.
And who told them they were wrong in the end, then? Was it intelligent design advocates? Or was it other scientists? You can’t say that because some scientists believed in a hoax therefore all science is suspect, since science uncovered the hoax in the first place.
There’s no quote function. Put blockquote tags down in the comment field and cut and paste.
Anyway, the shuffler is an artifact of the analogy. The point is that just because something has a low probability of being randomly generated doesn’t mean it’s impossible. Every single arrangement of the cards in six decks of cards has the exact same teeny tiny probability, but that doesn’t mean it’s impossible to shuffle six decks of cards!
The culture war is entirely one-sided. There may be some nutbar atheist out there who wants to criminalize churches, but all of the actual “expulsion” has been by religious people for religious grounds. None of the cases presented in the film are authentic. See here for a point-by-point refutation, as well as some counter-examples of educators fired or demoted for criticizing intelligent design or biblical literalism. Classic tactic, really – accuse other people of the things you do yourself, so that they can’t fire back without looking like desperate copycats.
The scientific position that’s keeping Intelligent Design out of schools, for now, can be summed up as “you can believe what you like, but you can’t just call it science”. Both parts of that are important.
“You can believe what you like” is pretty much the establishment clause of the First Amendment, put there by some intelligent politicians who saw – and in some cases lived through – Europe’s track history of despots partnering with the local clergy to make criticism of the people in power a moral failing.
“But you can’t just call it science” is also important, because evolution led to the Stalinist gulags. That is to say, supporting Darwinian evolution in Stalinist Russia would get you thrown in a Stalinist gulag, because it was just “biological capitalism” according to Stalin. Biological science in Russia meant Lysenkoism, an offshoot of the old Lamarckian theory of evolution (supplanted by Darwin) that held that modifications during an organism’s life could affect the next generation. For example, pulling all the leaves off a mature tree would eventually result in trees that didn’t sprout leaves at all.
Just because Stalin called it science didn’t make it so, though, and through decades of mismanagement and declining agricultural productivity Russian peasants starved to death in droves – as did Chinese peasants when Mao, having learned nothing from history, adopted Lysenkoism as the guiding principle of the new Chinese agriculture.
I must disagree that science examines what the facts are. Science tries to determine whether a specific statement or theory is factual or not, and to what degree we can be certain. That is why a hypothesis must first be formed before the gathering or studying of data whatsoever. Therefore science cannot remove biases because individual bias is going to factor into the hypothesis itself. The point of the film is that there are “scientists” that have stopped searching for the truth, and that is a dangerous attitude to adopt. We have after all, been certain at different points of human history that the sun revolved around the earth and that the earth was flat. Science is supposed to promote thought and inquisition, not flog those that disagree when examining the same data.
Dude! south park makes fun of all religion. they did that sketch because that dont belive in evolution either. Read up on it. they did it b/c it sounds so stupid that people actually belive it. thats funny how u turned it into a mock against creation.
Parker is agnostic, Stone is much closer to atheist. I’ve never seen either portray a position of evolutionary denialism (though you imply you’ve done reading into the subject, so I’d love to see you cite your sources for this).
Regardless, it was obviously entirely satirical. And so I wonder what was even the point? Are you making an appeal to the authority of the creators of South Park, of all things?
And if you feel oversimplification and misunderstanding of the basics of the issues “puts light on the subject,” one could argue that it would also be fair to characterize Christianity as a two-thousand-year-old cult centered around the ghost of a crucified Jewish carpenter who had to let himself die to alleviate the world’s guilt over some people somewhere eating some dangerous fruit a long time ago because a snake tricked them. (Of course, this is not a position I hold; I only mention it to show how easily you can make anything sound silly when you take that road on handling the material in question.)
Yes. There are scientists who’ve stopped searching for the truth. Most of them are featured in the film.
As the “expelled”.
If you think questioning evolution is enough to get you booted out of the scientific community, you’ve never heard of Joan Roughgarden or Lynn Margulis, both of whom have substantial but different problems with the current scientific view of evolution and aren’t afraid to voice them at major conferences.
That’s because these two have actually done research into their claims and attend these conferences to present their findings.
The intelligent designers are the ones who’ve stopped looking, who decided that “Magic Man done it” is a good explanation, make no predictions and conduct no tests (because really, they can’t) and still expect to be taken seriously by their colleagues.
Glazius,
I must disagree that the culture war is one sided. It seems when one feels their ideals, beliefs, world view, etc. are being attacked, it becomes increasingly difficult to see the other side. I am just now beginning to become aware of baseless attacks on evolutionists. I agree that neither ID nor Creationism are the same thing as evolutionary science. They clearly do not make use of traditional scientific method. Having said that, one must also note that evolutionary theory itself is not an exact science.
Generally speaking, science is knowledge gained through study or experience or, a particular system of acquiring said knowledge. Therefore, ID and creationism qualify as a sort of science. Albeit a seemingly strange marriage of natural science and the supernatural. Much of ID/Creationism cannot be proved. The same can be said for a great deal of natural science. Natural science, however has scientific method on it’s side. This would appear to make it vastly superior to ID/Creationism. In fact, in the world of natural science, there can be no comparison. Natural science is the obvious winner.
While I agree that ID/Creationism has no place in the traditional science classroom, I believe it should be afforded a place as an elective alternative science class.
Thanks for being polite. It helps me to better understand your point of view.
That is, after all why I am writing on this blog. I wish to understand other perspectives, not just espouse my own.
Well, yes. there are no exact sciences.
Unless you count mathematics, which is just a bunch of tautologies in the first place. Not that there’s anything wrong with tautologies, they’re useful ways to organize other knowledge.
But there’s a difference between someone carving an imperfect statue and someone who shows up, dumps a slab of marble off their flatbed, and drives off, saying “all statues are imperfect anyway”. That statement may have its place in the realm of abstract art, but it doesn’t do much good if you want a statue for your garden.
Except there’s no science to it. Intelligent design doesn’t make any testable predictions, doesn’t do any experiments, and its “textbooks” consist of the same old lies wrapped up in slightly younger newspaper. Here is a partial dissection of some of the book’s claims, on the stand in Kitzmiller v. Dover, with slides for context. Here is documentation for the “same old” part – a lexicographer analyzed the book and found it largely similar to previous work.
ID/Creationism has its place as part of a philosophy or history study, because it certainly is a school of thought, and it certainly is something that happened. Perhaps it could be offered as a critical analysis course for students who’ve already been exposed to evolution, just to familiarize them with the usual broadsides. Of course, that assumes the professor offering the course doesn’t get stalked and beaten in the street by the people waging the culture war.
Well, yes. there are no exact sciences.
Unless you count mathematics, which is just a bunch of tautologies in the first place. Not that there’s anything wrong with tautologies, they’re useful ways to organize other knowledge.
But there’s a difference between someone carving an imperfect statue and someone who shows up, dumps a slab of marble off their flatbed, and drives off, saying “all statues are imperfect anyway”. That statement may have its place in the realm of abstract art, but it doesn’t do much good if you want a statue for your garden.
Except there’s no science to it. Intelligent design doesn’t make any testable predictions, doesn’t do any experiments, and its “textbooks” consist of the same old lies wrapped up in slightly younger newspaper. Here is a partial dissection of some of the book’s claims, on the stand in Kitzmiller v. Dover, with slides for context. Here is documentation for the “same old” part – a lexicographer analyzed the book and found it largely similar to previous work.
ID/Creationism has its place as part of a philosophy or history study, because it certainly is a school of thought, and it certainly is something that happened. Perhaps it could be offered as a critical analysis course for students who’ve already been exposed to evolution, just to familiarize them with the usual broadsides. Of course, that assumes the professor offering the course doesn’t get stalked and beaten in the street by the people waging the culture war.
Well, yes. there are no exact sciences.
Unless you count mathematics, which is just a bunch of tautologies in the first place. Not that there’s anything wrong with tautologies, they’re useful ways to organize other knowledge.
But there’s a difference between someone carving an imperfect statue and someone who shows up, dumps a slab of marble off their flatbed, and drives off, saying “all statues are imperfect anyway”. That statement may have its place in the realm of abstract art, but it doesn’t do much good if you want a statue for your garden.
Except there’s no science to it. Intelligent design doesn’t make any testable predictions, doesn’t do any experiments, and its “textbooks” consist of the same old lies wrapped up in slightly younger newspaper. Here is a partial dissection of some of the book’s claims, on the stand in Kitzmiller v. Dover, with slides for context.
ID/Creationism has its place as part of a philosophy or history study, because it certainly is a school of thought, and it certainly is something that happened. Perhaps it could be offered as a critical analysis course for students who’ve already been exposed to evolution, just to familiarize them with the usual broadsides. Of course, that assumes the professor offering the course doesn’t get stalked and beaten in the street by the people waging the culture war.
Glazius,
You make some very valid points.
ID/Creationism do not fit the definition of modern science.
While I am a born again Christian, I do not necessarily agree with everything the ID/Creationist community has to say about ID/Creationism nor evolution. I also have a problem with evolution not only because of my faith, but also due to the fact I have some difficulty accepting many evolutionary conclusions because of the assumptions and presuppositions involved.
I also realize that ID/Creationism will never be able to empirically refute evolutionary theory. The only way mankind will ever accomplish this is through the scientific community itself. Will that ever happen? Doubtful, but possible.
The point of the movie was not to define evolution or intelligent design. It wasn’t anti-darwinism or pro-creation. They weren’t trying to prove either. Mr. Stein was simply asking Americans and specifically American academia to not rule out intelligent design just because it is associated with the Christian God or any God. I know what I believe… or don’t believe. If you’re a creationist, apart from your God returning, you can’t prove your ‘theory.’ So, let others try to come up with possibilities. If you’re an evolutionist, you can’t prove your ‘theory.’ Why are you afraid of someone investigating intelligent design?
But if you’re receiving federal funding, you have to rule out intelligent design because it IS associated with the Christian God. Specifically with the Christian God. It’s Christian creationism with the names swapped around.
Establishment clause, remember?
You can’t be afraid of something that will never happen. Intelligent design has no theory and can’t make one with any predictive power. A supernatural cause can never be tested because it’s not amenable to any experimental measure.
Intelligent design is trying to force its way into the schools as science without having produced anything, and in the process lie about both the conclusions of evolution and its social effects.
What I’m afraid of is people believing these lies, and that the teaching of evolution will be ignored as a consequence. And when Stalin and Mao ignored evolution and came up with their own crazy ideas about how life changes, their countries’ agriculture suffered and people died in droves.
When Jesus multiplied the fish and bread for everyone at the feeding of the ten thousand….lets say that we took one of those fish and threw it on a table in front of a group of scientists. They would be able to see it, determine what kind of fish it was, how old it was by its size, what its last meal was, they would also see if it was a male or female of course. A scientist would be able to analyze the fish and determine all sorts of assumptions about it. But the fact of the matter is it was created by being multiplied. Same with the earth, the stars, light, darkness, the air, all living creatures were spoken into existence. That is how life came about. Case closed.
Also Bad, you mentioned that you were a believer once….I want to say, you need to reconsider again what you believe because the punishment is far greater for those that know the way of salvation but no longer believe. That is not a good thing..
1 side is right!
1 side is wrong!
…better to be safe then sorry.
Do you realize that it takes more faith to believe that life evolved then it does to believe that God created everything.
Also I remember hearing about a certain mathematician who wanted to mathematically figure out the chances of evolution happening. His conclusion was 1 to the 40,000th power.
Anything after 1 to the 50th power is deemed impossible.
It doesn’t take ANY faith to believe that life evolved. Mr. Clinton, are you alive? Do you have parents? Were you born to those parents? Are you different from those parents? Then, Mr. Clinton, you are alive and you have evolved from your parents, and the same can be said of everything alive on this planet today.
At some point in the past this obviously stops being strictly true, but evolutionary theory doesn’t care about that, because its point is to make predictions of the future. Having them explain all the past we’ve uncovered so far is an unexpected and joyful outcome, and there certainly would be problems if, say, a rabbit fossil was dug up from the pre-Cambrian strata.
But it doesn’t matter to evolution where life began, just where it’s going, in the same way it doesn’t matter to any equations of motion whether the object they’re describing is the result of deliberate creation or a cosmic accident.
Well then, he’s got it spectacularly right, because life has evolved, and the odds of anything having happened that has happened (for example, the odds that you have posted in this thread) is 1, which remains 1 no matter how large the power you raise it to. To raise something to the Nth power, after all, means to multiply it by itself N times.
Or perhaps you simply made the same typo twice in succession, and you mean 10 raised to the 50th power. Alright, then, Mr. Clinton, let me undertake a small thought experiment with you.
I have in my house a standard deck of playing cards, with 52 distinct cards, less the jokers. To play a card game I shuffle these cards randomly, placing them in some final order. I think you will agree that there are 52 possibilities for the card I draw from the top of the deck, correct? And for each of these 52 possibilities there are 51 for the next card, and for each of these 51 there are 50 for the card after, and so on, down to 2 possibilities for the next-to-last card, leaving only 1 for the last card.
The resulting multiplication is common among probability theorists and is represented as 52!, N! being called “N factorial” and denoting the product of all integers 1 through N.
52! is equal to approximately 8.066 times 10 to the 67th power.
How can it be, Mr. Clinton, that anyone can play cards at all, if any ordering of the cards is impossible?
I stumbled upon this blog while looking for some completely unrelated material but I love a good discussion and I began to read. After reading the majority of the comments, try as I might, I simply can not understand how posters like Glazius and Bad can fight so zealously for a theory as scientifically, logically, and mathematically absurd as Darwinian Evolution and then look down on others because they have “faith”. What i find even more absurd is Glazius’ comment, “It doesn’t take ANY faith to believe that life evolved.”
Glazius, are you so completely indoctrinated that you have lost your ability to think critically? You soon go on to say this,
“Mr. Clinton, are you alive? Do you have parents? Were you born to those parents? Are you different from those parents? Then, Mr. Clinton, you are alive and you have evolved from your parents, and the same can be said of everything alive on this planet today.”
This is a wonderful example of how your so called “proof” of Darwinian Evolution relies on a PRESUPPOSED belief in the theory’s validity. Do you not see the absurdity in this? You are completely unable to look critically at the theory because you assume it is true, you try and criticize others for what they believe, but you fail to extend your critical facilities to your own faith (and yes, it IS faith).
If my past experiences with more zealous and dogmatic Darwinians are any indication, I’m sure you will privately dismiss me as some loony “IDiot” simply because I am begging you question answers rather than answer questions. The fact of the matter is, I’m not a proponent of I.D. and I believe in testing ALL things. As Socrates taught us so long ago, the first step in gaining true knowledge is admitting to (and being continually aware) of your own ignorance.
Glazius said,
“Or perhaps you simply made the same typo twice in succession, and you mean 10 raised to the 50th power. Alright, then, Mr. Clinton, let me undertake a small thought experiment with you.
I have in my house a standard deck of playing cards, with 52 distinct cards, less the jokers. To play a card game I shuffle these cards randomly, placing them in some final order. I think you will agree that there are 52 possibilities for the card I draw from the top of the deck, correct? And for each of these 52 possibilities there are 51 for the next card, and for each of these 51 there are 50 for the card after, and so on, down to 2 possibilities for the next-to-last card, leaving only 1 for the last card.
The resulting multiplication is common among probability theorists and is represented as 52!, N! being called “N factorial” and denoting the product of all integers 1 through N.
52! is equal to approximately 8.066 times 10 to the 67th power.
How can it be, Mr. Clinton, that anyone can play cards at all, if any ordering of the cards is impossible?”
—–
That is a wonderful thought experiment Glazius, but in order for it to be any use to you at all you need to explain how exactly a deck of cards analogizes well with Darwinian evolutionary theory. Otherwise, you are simply saying “possible things are not impossible”. While true, this does nothing to further your argument.
Two different things, here, actually.
First, evolution is just a name for the observed process of life giving rise to other life. Different life. Different species of life, even! (And yes, speciation HAS been observed, mostly in new environments such as new offshoots of Lake Victoria and Lake Malawi, tailings from California copper mines, and Polynesian banana trees imported to Hawaii.) I know evolution happens, though I don’t know where life came from – much like I know that the motion of matter happens, though I don’t know where all matter came from.
The theory of evolution is an attempt to explain the observed process of evolution scientifically, but any challenges to the theory don’t change the process, much as Einstein’s challenge to Newtonian mechanics didn’t change the fact that things still moved around and interacted with each other.
The theory’s predictions have held up pretty well so far, though the specifics have been revised to reflect the evidence against strict common descent.
But I’ll say it again – evolution is real. Life comes from other life and it will continue to do so. Whether the current theory is a comprehensive explanation or not doesn’t matter at all – the process will keep happening.
The argument is more properly, “improbable things are not impossible”. Just saying that something is improbable is not in itself enough to disprove it. Statistical improbabilities make the assumption of a normal curve, a probability distribution clustered around a mean with a few outliers. But when everything that could happen is equally improbable, or at least not compliant with a normal distribution, then improbability isn’t as much of an argument.
You can’t argue that an improbable arrangement of proteins must have been created, rather than randomly generated, any more than you can argue that an improbable arrangement of cards most have been created, rather than randomly shuffled.
Ok, well, I’m rubber, you’re glue, whatever you say bounces off me and sticks to you… and so forth. In other words, I could make an equally sweeping rhetorical complaint about your position back at you, but this gets us nowhere.
So, now that we have that out of the way, what specifically do you think is absurd? Let’s get down to brass tacks, lest we both become hacks.
And for what it’s worth, I don’t look down on people for having faith. I certainly don’t agree with faith as a means towards knowing what is or isn’t true, but if people want to simply have faith in this or that… that by itself isn’t objectionable to me. Bare claims and beliefs cannot themselves be bad arguments, and it’s bad arguments I care chiefly about.
So they say. In fact, from what I understand of various takes on theology, it may even be unforgivable. In which case I’m out of luck no matter what, right?
However, it wouldn’t make much sense for me to act out of fear of some claim when I don’t have any more reason to believe it than I do to believe the claim that punishment is far greater if I became a Christian again, since Cthulu really really doesn’t like that.
And really, if it does turn out to be true: isn’t that sort of horrible and monstrous? It’s punishable by things worse than any human being has ever experienced to simply not have the “correct” beliefs? That’s worse than the worst totalitarian government ever to exist on the planet, and, it seems to me, thus far far more evil than any human evil could ever match.
Unfortunately, it seems some ID supporters here have a skewed interpetation of science. I understand, it is probably not your fault; as you may not have been educated about it, possibly. So, I hope I may clarify it a bit for you.
Science is completely and necessarily neutral. It does not care if a god exists, it does not care if one does not exist. It begs answers, but only by factual evidence, rigorous testing and falsifiable claims.
Science is unbiased. It will be the first to attempt to prove itself wrong. It has no ego to bruise and no claim that will shatter its foundation if put to question.
These are important things to note when thinking about the scientific method. It deals with facts, testing and, most important, fallsifying. If something is presented that can not fall into these important qualifications, it has no business in science. It is simply something that science has no part of and vice-versa.
Theories are far more sound in science than, say, the theories of a bar stool philosipher. Scientific theories are intentionally tried to prove wrong. The tests have to be repeatable by other scientists and have to be peer-reviewed. Do not take the word “theory” in science lightly.
Evolution has been tested against over and over. Certain things that you take advantage of, such as vaccines, *depend* on evolutional theories. If you need proof of evolution, you need simply go to your local museum. It sounds as if, no offense, many don’t have a full grasp of evolution and what it entails. They say it has a lot of holes in it, that it doesn’t make sense, etc., but if you truly understood it, you would find how solid it really is.
It may be that you have heard the arguments of creationists who don’t fully grasp evolution. This is common. Here are several things that are not true or are strawman arguments against evolution:
-We came from monkeys. Wrong. Evolution states that we are related, but never claimed that we evolved from apes.
-Croc-a-ducks. Wrong. Some people believe that if evolution were true, they should find this kind of fossil. The truth is, if a croc-a-duck fossil were ever found, it would prove evolution to be wrong.
-Transitional fossils never found. Wrong. If you were to fully understand evolution, you would find that, technically, every fossil is a transitional fossil.
-Irreducible complexities. Wrong. Science has never found anything to be irreducibly complex.
…These are a few. Feel free to look them up. While we’re at it, here are some terms that some creationists use that are, for lack of terms, nonsense:
Jars of peanut butter
Watches in forests
Paintings
And above all, peanut butter
First I should clarify what I mean by Darwinian Evolution since, in retrospect, I see how easy it is to misunderstand my above posts. When I refer to “Darwinian evolution” I’m talking specifically about “atheistic evolution”, the idea that the evolutionary changes we do observe through science lend support to an atheistic world view. I can’t stand when people try to use evolution as an excuse for an atheism. This is completely unscientific and absurd. If you would like me to explain why I would be happy to, but since I think I may have misjudged you (Glazius) I won’t bother for the moment. If I jumped to the conclusion that you (Glazius) where trying to use evolution in such a way when you were not then please forgive me.
That being said, I haven’t any problem with evolution itself; the fact that we observe changes within species over various periods of time is quite well documented. When the established scientific facts are twisted to suit a theory however, I will always object.
Still, I am a little bit wary about the way you treat evolution Glazius. I’m sure you are aware that no scientific theory can ever be proven. When you say that evolution is real and a fact, I get the impression that you simply want to leave it at that. Your wording leads me to believe that you feel the time for questions is over and the door should be shut. This attitude flies in the face of the scientific method and I can’t agree with it. Again however, if I am misinterpreting you then I apologize.
So to wrap it up: I don’t object to good science, and I don’t object to what science has observed regarding evolution. I DO object to the absurdities that arise from using evolution as an excuse for atheism. I DO object to the twisting of facts in order to support ANY one theory in particular because of an emotional or dogmatic attachment (such as the Piltdown man incident and the Archaeoraptor Liaoningensis fraud). This is what really, really worries me; that people who call themselves scientists are willing to go to great lengths to lie outright to defend evolution. I am passionate about defending good science and allowing the facts to take us where they may, rather than trying to make the facts go where we want them to. The theory should be changing to suit the facts, not the other way around.
If you don’t fall into the “dogmatic defender of darwinian evolution” category Glazius, and if you can agree with my principles, then I’m sorry I hastily misjudged you. If you don’t I would like to hear why, since I think in that case we will have more to discuss.
But this is a philosophical, not a scientific, opinion. And no one pretends otherwise. However, that doesn’t mean that the use of scientific facts in philosophy is illegitimate, as you seem to argue.
You’re 100% right about the scientific method though: no door is ever shut on any question. I think the main point people are making about ID is that just because no doors are ever shut, doesn’t mean that there are no standards to pass through the doors or claim that you’ve opened another door either.
Both of which were exposed by scientists doing science who were working within the evolutionary paradigm. In fact, the Piltdown hoax went undiscovered so long because it was largely considered a strange anomaly that didn’t fit right with the rest of hominid fossils, but since the original was locked up and away, no one could really get a better look to determine what the heck was going on.
Ah, so it’s a vocabulary problem then.
Here’s an analogy for you. Let’s say you’re watching a police procedural and the cops find a body face-down in the alley with stab wounds in the back. One of the cops says “What happened here?” and the other one says “I have a theory.”
Does that mean that there might not actually be a body face-down in the alley with stab wounds in the back? Of course not! The theory is an explanation for how the body GOT there, not a guess as to whether it actually IS there.
Similarly, evolution is a real process that is happening right now. One generation comes from the last and gives rise to the next, and each generation is different. The modern theory OF evolution (or if you prefer, THE theory of evolution since there’s only one major one) is an explanation for how this happens. Since the current theory says things about ALL life, not just the generations that humans have kept records of, we expect it to apply to things that have lived in the past as well.
But whether the theory is right or wrong, life is still evolving; much as whether the detectives’ theory about the dead body is right or wrong, it’s still a dead body; much as whether the current theories of motion are right or wrong, things still move.
Bad,
I’m not sure where you got the impression that I think scientific evidence can’t be applied to philosophy, but it certainly wasn’t from my post. You are right that science has a limited role to play (but a role nonetheless) when it comes to philosophical questions, but you are wrong when you say that no one pretends otherwise. Take Sir Julian Huxley for example, who claimed that
“…Darwinism removed the whole idea of God as the creator of organisms from the sphere of rational discussion (1960, pp. 46,252-253)
or more recently, Kenneth Miller who stated,
“…it is a fact that in the scientific world of the late twentieth century, the displacement of God by Darwinian forces is almost complete.” (1999, p. 15, Finding Darwin’s God).
Now as you said yourself, such conclusions about the supernatural are philosophical and NOT scientific, yet it is painfully obvious from Miller’s statement that many people ARE pretending otherwise. I accept evolution on scientific grounds, I don’t accept Darwinian evolution on scientific grounds because it oversteps the boundary’s of science and yet tries to present its conclusions as scientific when this is not the case.
I agree with what you have to say about standards, though I can’t comment on whether or not ID adheres to those standards or not because I haven’t really taken the time to investigate the theory for myself.
I also agree with what you have to say about the hoaxes I mentioned. My point was that I am angry with those responsible for allowing such hoaxes to survive as long as they did; these people felt it was acceptable to throw scientific scrutiny to the wind because they were more devoted to a theory than to fact. This is nowhere more evident than in the National Geographic Society’s treatment of the Archaeoraptor; I don’t believe there is any excuse for the society’s behavior, and I’m sure you would agree.
——–
Glazius,
I don’t have any qualms with your post; it seems clear to me now that you make the same distinction between factual evolutionary change and Darwinian theory that I do. Sometimes, because of semantics, the lines end up becoming fairly foggy, so I’m glad you took the time to clarify for me.
I think you are misreading Miller’s quote: he’s saying that science has displaced religion from areas it used to hold exclusive sway to. And Huxley seems to be talking about rational discussion in terms of science and evidence. Neither of these are saying what you claim they are: that science disproving “religion” is itself a scientific matter. No scientific articles are published in biology journals claiming to disprove the existence of god.
As for the Piltdown man, again, it just doesn’t fit your claims. Scientists were skeptical about it’s validity right from the start. And while it initially seemed to fit in with the idea that big brains developed before omnivorous diets (the question of which is NOT something on which the truth of evolution hinges on, but just a particular suspicion about how humans developed) it quickly came to be seen as a weird anomaly that for decades had no real access to and so was mostly ignored, especially as much better authentic fossils were discovered. It was first suggested to be as a hoax in 1923, but at the time there wasn’t any conclusive way to prove it for sure. When that technology became available, it was finally and decisively exposed. But, again, it wasn’t creationists that did it: it was scientists steadily and constantly improving their field and methods.
And overall, the effect of the Piltdown Man was in fact, harmful to demonstrating the truth of evolution rather than helpful: it threw scientists off track for decades. Once it became exposed, the case for homonid evolution became stronger and clearer, not weaker.
As for the Archaeraptor, this seems like a real stretch. You’re talking about a popular magazine publishing an article written by the art editor, not the scientific process and journals or even scientists, and a deliberate hoax that was exposed (again, by scientists) within a year. It’s pretty ridiculous to assert that there’s no scientific scrutiny when in fact scientific scrutiny exposed the hoax pretty darn quickly (unlike the Piltdown example, it’s no longer really possible to simply lock up a specimen away from scrutiny).
The fact is, deliberate fraud does sometimes fool people, but not because evolution robs them of their critical scrutiny, but rather because there is a level of professional trust, as in virtually any field anywhere, that basically assumes honesty in certain matters. There is also often a lag in the technology to expose certain kinds of fraud, which is hardly the fault of honest people who need evidence to go by, not accusation. And that assumption of trust, is, by and large, a good one: the few exceptions only prove the rule. When deceptions of this scale are concieved, it really doesn’t work for your argument that they are ultimately exposed in any case: often just as fast as one would objectively expect when the relevant contradictory information is available.
Both of these stories are often told in a way that is vastly out of proportion with paleontology as a field in any case. There are thousands of fossils relevant to both of these questions know, and yet creationists often try to pretend that a few hoaxes somehow invalidate them all. This is exceptional silly especially given that it is these authentic fossils that often are the ones that help expose and reveal the frauds!
Indeed, asking that a field be able to figure out outright hoaxes immediately, without ever failing or making mistakes, is a ridiculous standard that no one can live up to. Scientists, like anyone else, can be fooled when the evidence is outright fabricated. What matters is how good a discipline is at exposing and correcting those mistakes. I don’t think either of your examples can make any serious argument as to proving biologists or paleontologists to be generally blinded by ideology, or indeed even that they don’t rank amongst the LEAST likely to be fooled (non-scientists are fooled by hoaxes all the time, and often NEVER give them up even after they are exposed!). Of course fraud is outrageous: but I don’t see any sensible condemnation of science or even evolutionary biology here.
Oh, and the quote from Olson is simply wrong: there are many fossils that show evidence of feathers, making the assertion that there aren’t, and that everything rested on this one fossil, nonsense.
Bad,
I’ll let you read the entire quote for yourself:
“My particular religious beliefs or yours notwithstanding, it is a fact that in the scientific world of the late twentieth century, the displacement of God by Darwinian forces is almost complete. This view is not always articulated openly, perhaps for fear of offending the faithful, but the literature of science is not a good place to keep secrets. Scientific writing, especially on evolution, shows this displacement clearly”(1999, p. 15, Finding Darwin’s God).
From what I wrote in my last post, I do not think I’m misreading it at all, since I only reiterated what Miller wrote. As you can see, his quote has nothing to do with religion as you claim, as he makes clear in the opening statement. It has everything to do with a belief in God, which, as Miller points out, is being displaced by Darwinian forces. As we both just agreed, the question of God is ultimately beyond science (though science has a limited role to play). Why then is it being completely displaced by a scientific theory, as Miller explains? If you still think I’m the one misinterpreting Miller, you will have to be more specific as to how.
Also, I’m not sure if you are intentionally putting words in my mouth or not, but where on earth did you get the idea that I was arguing “that science disproving “religion” is itself a scientific matter.”? (Bad). I think it is perfectly clear in my last post that “science has a limited role to play (but a role nonetheless) when it comes to philosophical questions” (Me). I think my stance is clear enough, and it is not the stance you seem to think I have.
Regarding Piltdown man, I’m not sure what you are arguing about. I used it as an example of a fraudulent piece of evidence created to support a theory. I then voiced my displeasure over the fact that such things still occur, as theories are held in higher regard than evidence. If you think that such behavior is acceptable, then we have something to argue about. If not then I don’t see why you are trying to object. I’m not sure why you then go on to talk about creationists, scientist and evolution, since the point of my posts has not been to cast doubt on the scientific method or evolution. I don’t think I need to explain myself again, my previous posts make it pretty clear.
Regarding the Archaeraptor, my point was not that there is no scientific scrutiny in general (I’m not sure where you got this idea). My point was that a (once) respectable scientific magazine was willing to forgo proper scientific scrutiny because of an eagerness to defend a particular theory. As Nancy Pearcey wrote in Human Events,
“National Geographic was warned ahead of time that the fossil was probably a hoax, in a letter from Storrs Olson, curator of birds at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. “There is no such thing as a feathered dinosaur,” Olson says. Moreover, a paper describing Archaeoraptor, written by Czerkas, had been rejected by two scientific journals (Nature and Science). Yet astonishingly, National Geographic went ahead with its own publication anyway.” (March 10, 2000 from http://www.arn.org/docs/pearcey/np_hespotlight0300.htm)
Do you not see a problem with this? I don’t understand how you can say that my point is a “real stretch” when the magazine was not only warned ahead of time, but the Archaeoraptor had been flat out rejected by respectable scientific journals. Like Piltdown Man, I used the example of Archaeoraptor to illustrate how people who call themselves scientists are willing to throw science out the door in order to support a particular theory. I don’t think I can make myself more clear. Also, I have been gracious enough to support my ideas with evidence and sources because I assume you are intelligent enough to see the need for such things. You are quite welcome to say that,
“there are many fossils that show evidence of feathers, making the assertion that there aren’t, and that everything rested on this one fossil, nonsense.”,
but I would appreciate you to show me the same courtesy I have shown you, and back up what you say with a source.
I don’t think we have anything to argue about, unless you disagree with what I’ve said regarding the danger of becoming so attached to any particular theory (including Darwinian evolution [make sure you note the distinction I have made between Darwinian and factual evolution in my previous posts]) that you are willing to spit on science to support it. I think my posts have made my position clear, and I think you should stop pretending I’ve said something that I haven’t (whether or not you are doing this intentionally, is beyond me).
That last post was far longer than I thought it would be 0.0
Again, I still think you’re missing the point: Miller is saying that in the scientific world God has been almost entirely displaced. But Miller does not believe that God is a scientific matter himself. And “displaced” is not the same thing as “scientific writing says that there is no God.” It is that scientific writing no longer makes the case for God. Miller isn’t even saying that it’s displacing God in every realm: that would be laughable, given how religious this country is and always has been.
Miller does think that some non-believers overstep the bounds of what they can rationally prove in their arguments about God. But he does not accuse evolutionary theory of doing this, nor anything called “atheistic evolution” or “Darwinian evolution.”
Where do I get the idea that you think that your targets are wrongly claiming that disproof of God is a scientific matter (we seem to have gotten a little confused on this point: I was refuting your claim about other people, not stating that you believed the claim). Here: “I can’t stand when people try to use evolution as an excuse for an atheism. This is completely unscientific and absurd.” and then here “I’m talking specifically about “atheistic evolution”, the idea that the evolutionary changes we do observe through science lend support to an atheistic world view.”
You make some sort of distinction between evolution and Darwinian or, I guess “atheistic” evolution, but no such distinction exists. There is merely the scientific theory of evolution. And then there are additionally people who think that, because the argument for design is one of the strongest pillars for why many people decide there must a be God, making this role unnecessary does undermine reasons to believe. This, frankly, is a pretty reasonable and legitimate argument. You may not agree with it, but it isn’t “absurd.” And it isn’t a doctrine of evolution, or even of atheistic evolutionists. It’s a philosophical/logical argument made subsequent to evolution as science.
Give me a break. With both of these examples, you were trying to cast aspersion and doubt on the scientific process. You can’t very well argue that the only issue is whether or not I approve of fraud and the temporary success of fraud: you are again and again trying to draw further implications from these examples about scientists in some sense are generally or commonly being blinded by evolutionary theory. But as I pointed out, neither of your cases make very much sense in that vein at all. In the case of Piltdown, there was skepticism right from the start, but little means at the time with which to figure whether the fossil was real of not. Rather than being, it was considered a weird anomaly, and as time went on, it became a problem for hominid evolution. You’d think that if people were blinded by theory, they would debunk it then: when it threatened the idea. But instead, it wasn’t until the technology that could confirm it was a fake finally appeared that it was quickly debunked.
In the meantime, people (i.e. anti-evolutionists) who were not blinded by “the theory” never discovered or even specially realized the fraud (some people might have insisted that all fossils were frauds, of course, but this isn’t helpful), nor as far as I can tell, would have, and and yet you are claiming that the reason it wasn’t discovered is that people were blinded by allegiance to evolution as a theory. I say: the facts of the case do not bear that out. Nor in your other case either:
Except that you are talking about the art editor of a popular science magazine seizing on what seemed like a big sensationalist story. Again, your evidence of some sort of conspiracy all around supporting evolution doesn’t make much sense. You yourself admit that the actual scientists and scientific process were very wary of the fossil find, and then very quickly debunked it. The closest thing you have to deluded scientists were the original attempted publishers: but they were blinded not by it seeming to be the “long-sought key to the mystery of evolution” as Simons wildly overblows it, but of being the first to the table with a specific piece of evidence for a specific theory about a specific ancestry. And they got rebuffed, and admitted the error.
The fact that some people are willing to throw science out the door for some motive or another is not any sort of sensible condemnation of scientists or evolutionary science in general. It’s simply the reality of having human beings involved in the process. The point of science is that it’s a method for weeding these motives and mistakes out. And as far as I can tell, it’s done as good a job as it possibly can, including in your two cited cases.
Basic paleontological knowledge. Olson happens to be one of the very few who think that birds come from a different lineage. He’s provided a lot skepticism and harsh criticism to the idea (and lo and behold, hmmm… not Expelled!), but his while a worthwhile check and challenge, his objections have pretty steadily fallen away in the face of the evidence and the numbers of fossils that have piled up.
Note that feathers are far from the only reason, or even the only fossil-based reason, to draw a conclusion about this ancestry. We have things like unique homologies, such as a tissue layer that was known only in modern birds amongst all modern animals being found in exactly the right particular lineage of dinosaur. Countless trait groupings. Even protein analysis. And of course the confirmation of genetic cladistics which places birds in precisely the right ancestral relation to modern reptiles that we would expect if they were descendants of dinosaurs, which were themselves descendants of early reptiles.
Oh, and the story that Josh tells seems to leave out or obscure a rather interesting fact: while the Archaeraptor itself was a faked composite fossil, one part of the composite came from a legitimate feathered dinosaur fossil, the Microraptor, of which dozens of specimens have since been found.
Again, I think you are being a little disingenuous when you claim that you were merely pointing out something bad, that we can all agree is bad, and that’s that. Of course people sometimes make assumptions based on what they expect to see,a nd of course that’s a problem. This is a trivial point.
But especially with this “Darwinian evolution vs. factual evolution” stuff, it seems pretty obvious to me that you are making larger implications about the reliability of evolutionary science in general, which recognizes no such split or distinction. And those larger implications are, if anything, disproved by the two cited examples rather than proved by them.
I don’t think I would accomplish anything by posting seriously again, since you seem hell bent on arguing against things I haven’t proposed. You don’t seem to think there is a distinction between Darwin’s theory and factual evolution, I do. One is observed scientifically and one is largely the product of an underlying dogma.
As far as I can tell you are quite intent on trying to minimize the severity of the frauds I spoke about. Piltdown Man would not have ever been taken seriously if those responsible had not been overly zealous to a particular world view. We are fortunate that those scientists who eventually exposed it did not share a similar zeal.
National Geographic violated the standard paleontology code of ethics and ignored the advice of respected members of the scientific community because of an overeagerness to support a theory. NG is not some tabloid newspaper where such behavior is expected; some people actually trust them. To me, NG’s actions were dogmatic and wrong.
If you don’t think these frauds are as important as I do, then we will just have to agree to disagree. As for the proper interpretations of the various quotes we’ve been looking at, I suppose the reader will have to decide for themselves.
That’s your accusation, and the accusation of the film. Neither of you seem to understand that it isn’t enough to just allege it. You haven’t really even bothered to state exactly what claims are in which. Does “Darwinian evolution,” according to you, include common descent? Human ancestry? Just the dinosaur bird connection? What?
Nonsense. What I am doing is pointing out the unsupportable conclusions you are drawing from them. You and other people’s tellings of these stories are full of half-truths, unmentioned context, and in themselves are ridiculously out of proportion to what the bulk of the science and the evidence is. It’s as if you cited a single corrupt postman who was caught and drummed out of the postal service in order to allege that the postal service is crippled by corruption and thus cannot be trusted to deliver the mail.
You are using these cases as a distraction, which is essentially why creationists spend so much time talking about them. You don’t seem to want to look at the evidence that weighs against your allegations that there is something called “Darwinian” evolution which is not supported by science…. you only want to harp about a few long-ago rejected frauds which have nothing to do today with what the evidence for evolution is.
I’ve already explained that this is nonsense. The Piltdown Man was taken seriously because at the time it was a very good means of perpetrating deliberate fraud. And I’ve told you over and over, it was not simply “taken seriously”: scientists were skeptical of it right from the start. Evolutionary scientists who held the “worldview” you allege would bias them to accept it unquestioningly.
It was then exposed by scientists doing science when the technology to reexamine it became available.
Your claim that it succeeded because of anyone’s “worldview” is contradicted by the fact that creationists, with their completely anti-evolutionary worldview, did not pick it out as a fraud amongst authentic fossils either.
Your case simply doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.
I don’t think you get it :(. There WAS a lot of skepticism concerning Piltdown, but that doesn’t change the fact that those who wanted it to succeed won out. The Piltdown man (Eoanthropus dawson) discovery was PUBLISHED IN SCIENTIFIC TEXTBOOKS as “Dawson’s Dawn Man” and remained there for 3 decades. Now how can you tell me in good faith that it wasn’t “taken seriously” by the scientific community? Are you saying that textbooks aren’t taken seriously? You can try and explain it away all you like but that does not change the fact that Piltdown made it into accepted scientific literature for a good number of years DESPITE the fact that many scientists were skeptical.
Everything you’ve said about creationist vs evolutionist is completely off topic when it comes to what I’ve said, the only way you could try and turn my posts into a creation vs evolution debate is by jumping to conclusions. Do you think I’m defending Expelled and arguing in favour of ID? I haven’t even seen it and I don’t plan to. Nothing in any of my posts would even hint at the idea that I’m defending it.
You say I’m drawing unsupportable conclusions from the frauds, then you go on to debunk some wild claims. Where exactly (beyond your imagination) did I come to these conclusions? If I was so inclined, I could throw the Principle of Charity to the wind too and really make some meaty arguments against things you hadn’t said.
If you think that the frauds I mentioned can be compared to a corrupt postman, well I’m not sure anything I say will be able to sway you. To give you an idea, a postman isn’t considered a trustworthy scientific source, a postman isn’t writing science textbooks, and a postman isn’t publishing widely read literature. Why do you believe that I think the scientific community as a whole is “corrupted”? Nothing in any of my posts gives that impression.
I understand how the case you seem to think I’m making doesn’t stand up to scrutiny; the problem is, the case you are attacking isn’t the one I’ve made. The more I read your responses to various people’s posts, the more I wonder why you seem to go out of your way to interpret them in the most unfavorable way possible. Then again, I don’t really blame you, the inability to size up a person properly is just another shortcoming of internet debates.
I probably won’t be coming back here anymore, but thanks for the time you’ve taken to respond to me. I’ve enjoyed having this discussion, though I’m sorry that you think I’m some sort of anti-science, anti-evolution, conspiracy spewing creationist crusader. This couldn’t be farther from the truth but it is pretty clear to me that, regardless of what I say, you will respond to me as if I am such.
Before being formally debunked in 1952.
Those were the years when it was still illegal in some states to teach evolution (remember the Scopes trial? nobody put evolution in textbooks after that) and it never received a serious endorsement until the Cold War was on and the Biological Sciences Curriculum Study committee created formal standards for textbooks.
So, yes, textbooks weren’t taken seriously until several years after Piltdown Man was debunked, so of course people could just write any old malarkey down.
And the man who “discovered” Piltdown Man, Charles Dawson, was a known fraudster. He just happened to make a claim that nobody could disprove for several years, and was interested more in the financial value of the fraud than its scientific value. Piltdown Man had its defenders, but they weren’t mainstream scientists – rather, they were fringe thinkers with their own axes to grind. One of the main drives in debunking Piltdown Man was its aberrant nature in comparison with fossil discoveries elsewhere in the world.
Well, you’re cribbing off their playbook.
And this paragraph in particular tastes of sour grapes.
Tell me something folks, what do you believe in? do you believe in the evolution theory or in creation?
Because whoever reads this, let me just say this little bit,…what is there to really grasp with evolution? Now, now don’t go blow me off as a creationist and not read the rest. Are you an evolutionist because many people now in America believe that or are you truly putting your trust in that because you REALLY believe it for yourself? You have to ask yourself that question.
If someone can give me right now ONE good source for the origin of evolution, then maybe we can make something of it, but I’m telling you my friends, no evolutionist can answer that, because they do not know where we came from. Indeed, they do make up excuses and alley ways to escape confrontation.
That’s sort of the point: there’s an incredible amount of specific information to grasp. You really have to learn the details of biology, paleontology, geology, and so forth to understand it all. It’s a very rich and deep field of information and explanation and evidence in a way that no “creation” story is.
If this is a confused way of asking where life began, then the answer is that we don’t really know exactly how it happened: no scientist makes up excuses or alleyways to this question. They all say: we don’t have a definite answer. But as I never tire of saying, just because we don’t know everything doesn’t mean we don’t know anything: we do know quite a lot about the general timeframe for the origin of life, the general sort of thing that early life was like, and the basic shape and scope of what the explanation would be. If anything, the main problem in this area is that there are too many possible ways it could have happened, and we don’t have enough historical data or evidence collected yet to discern which is “the” one, if any.
Now, …let me give you something powerful that I have proof for. Everything in life needs a creator, correct? A painting, a house, a computer…everything. But some people say that the most incredible surrounding that we live on, and the things that we see in everyday life, came from nothing. From a single cell and it “just evolved”. Or the whole Big Bang. You need a Creator. I can tell you from personal experience that I have one on one fellowship with that Creator. The one who created everything you see. Go ahead laugh. I’m sure it sounds crazy. And that’s fine. But every scientist will come to a dead end when they pursue this origin of evolution. I’m serious, if you can find me just ONE source, that would be interesting, but there isn’t. The conclusion to the matter is that there IS a Creator. And whether you believe that or not, it doesn’t change the fact that it is the truth. That’s like saying…”ok, well I don’t believe that someone painted that picture over there. It just kind of jumped up on the board!”
And in response to the “we don’t know where we came from”. Guess what? I do know. It’s quite simple. And you get to enjoy studying all the great things about science while you do it. Genesis 1:1, “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” Do something for me. I don’t expect you to believe this right away and be like “yea, you’re right..i’m sold”. No, find out for yourself. Do something that you may have never done before…talk to God, quietly where no one will bother you and ask Him to reveal to you the truth. See what happens. Gotta run…it’s late.
religious scripture is the koolaid of all koolaids, and you binge on it Drew. You sound exactly like like those polygamist wives they interviewed on the tele the other day. They talk to god everyday and apparently he told them “take ten of your friends family and make babies with one guy” but he failed to tell them how inbreeding doesn’t always produce kids that look quite right. I would imagine this is because genetics, and science for the most part, is just a bunch of snobby liberal wish-wash born from the minds of secularist and non-believers. In fact, maybe your right Drew. This whole god thing sounds alot easier than studying and thinking and all other things sodomites do. From now on, Jesus is my health AND car insurance!! I’m gonna sell my whole library for some jesus and the apostles lawn figures. Thanx for showin the light Drew keep up the good work.
Believe you must. But let me tell you friend, one day you will stand before the King of Kings and the Lord of Lords. And you will give account for every word you say. Don’t you understand?! Of course it’s easy to understand…Creation. It is easy to understand. That’s how God made it to be. How much pride to us human beings have to think that we are anything. We are not. When we stop and just look to the Creator for answers, we will finally get some.
And by the way, if those so called “christians” said that God told them to do that with friends/family, then it was not god. Because God does not go against His own scripture that teaches against that. And He tells us not to do those things because of the results we will end up with.
Hey, Drew, get with the program. Genesis says THAT God created, not HOW. If you insist on putting words in God’s mouth, at least get a reverb function on your microphone, will you?
Drew, living things don’t need “creators.” They need other life forms. Reproduction doesn’t require intervention from God every time.
Can we get someone to give Drew the birds, bees, yeasts and bacteria lecture?
No. We have no reason to assume this.
These are all things made by human beings, and focusing on them belies a tremendously self-obsessed bias with humanity and how humanity relates tot he world. We can’t and shouldn’t assume that our way of doing things is universal.
No, no one in biology says that it came from “nothing.” And in physics, no one has any idea what to call what it came from, or if it even came from anywhere, let alone “nothing.”
You’ve got this quite backwards though. There is no “just” evolved: there are all sorts of very specific descriptions of how this all happened that are adapted to the evidence. Your explanation, in fact, is the one in which things “just” happen with no explanation of how, or really even anything else. There’s a story, but it’s paper-thin, and doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the evidence.
I’ve seen many people claim this, but when asked to elaborate, the personal experiences they describe are unconvincing, seeming stretched interpretations of things.
And yet, we’ve seen no real dead ends in the study of this question. We keep learning more and more, getting better and better understanding of things. Why is that so threatening?
I’m not even sure what you’re asking. Why would there only be one source… of what? The origin of life is not the same thing as the origin of the universe as we know it. They don’t even really involve the same disciplines.
And whether you claim it or not, doesn’t make it the truth. What is or isn’t the truth is, indeed, immutable by our understanding. But that doesn’t mean that your particular beliefs are knowledge, or true.
Again: you seem to be using that word, “know” in a very unconventional sense. If you did “know” then you’d be able to put together a compelling argument and lay out the evidence. That’s what “knowing” means. All I see, in contrast, is you believing, and then illegitimately claiming knowledge.
So, in other words, I need to make myself believe that God exists, and then I’ll believe that God exists?
Two problems there: the first is that this doesn’t accomplish anything. Even if I could make myself believe in God, and believed that I was talking to and relating to God that wouldn’t mean anything more than that I believed.
The second problem is that I’ve already been a believer: already believed that I had a relationship of the sort you describe. But as far as I can tell, I was mistaken. It’s very easy to mislead yourself when we’re talking about beliefs and the contents of ones own imagination.
Well, so far…all I got from whatever was said is that still you say that there are “specific descriptions”, but have not given me any. I have given you some. And I have put together an “arguement” if that’s what you want to call it. Let me ask you something…why when someone like me presents this arguement is it shut down and not even given any thought? You say you “were” a believer? How is that? What did you believe in? God? Because when God indwells in a true believer, we know what the truth is. Then maybe what you did was maybe say a prayer, well if you did that then maybe that’s why nothing happened. It’s more than a prayer, my friend. It’s a lifestyle. God is real. And He did create the earth. You blatantly stated that NO ONE knows where everything came from. And that is incorrect. Someone does know where we came from…and ED DARREL, did you just read the first verse of Genesis? Keep reading. He gives in description how he created the world. And also Mr. Ed, I am not doubting the reproduction of human beings…yes we can do that freely. But answer me something, how did we first get here?
Do you even know the purpose you are living right now? I mean why did the world ever come into existence? ever wonder? Because let me just tell you that most people are thinking “inside the box of reality”. We are thinking THIS WORLD. We cannnot comprehend this world. I mean science has done alot to learn about this world and that is truly super cool! But us as humans naturally think that this is it…us. There’s nothing else. But now let’s go outside the box. God is outside that box. He is eternal and everlasting. All we can ask is How did everything just begin with God? And you may ask, where did HE come from? My friend, He is the designer. We cannot understand that yet. We will one day. Everyone will stand before that Creator and give account for the actions that we have taken in this life. Our finite minds try to figure things out ourselves. And what have humans come up with….the origin of evolution? A study, not a theory because even Darwin admitted in his work that He failed. Do you remember The finch’s beak? Darwin thought that he had something good when he experimented the finch’s beak and how throughout time it was decrease in size. That really was a great discovery on his part. Great job Darwin! But the only thing is that he states that he failed in that study because he thought that he proved evolution and how some of us came from this finch species when really all it was, was that throughout a period of time, the finch’s beak would degrade due to the pounding rain. And hey, I just have a question…has anyone ever ever ever studied and watched a monkey or maybe a duck or even a finch turn into a human being? I’m not trying to argue and just put people down. I want to have a mature discussion that there is Intelligent Design. God. And also My friends, don’t get me wrong. Of course I believe in evolution. Now you’re probably like..huh? Yea, do you know what that word means? It means that something evolved. And guess what, even i’m not dumb enough to think that I didn’t evolve. of course I did. I was a baby, not i’m an adult. Ya know? But what people are saying is that THE ORIGIN OF EVOLUTION is that we came from little cells and we were formed on the backsides of crystals and that us humans came from monkeys and other animals and fish and all. That is NOT true. Please hear me. We all have an intelligent designer. Genesis 1:24-25 tells us that God created man. And if you read chapter 2 of Genesis, you find out that God made us from the dust of the ground. That was the ORIGIN OF MAN(God created him from the dust of the ground.) What people are saying is that we just evolved by connecting ourselves as cells to one another and we just kind of made each other. That is entirely not true. And you want to know what’s even more crazy. In the ORIGIN OF MAN (GENESIS) God took a rib out of the man and he created woman. That was His divine design. And he tells us in Genesis 1:26 that God gave man dominion over those animals. I mean, how much better can you get? We have a Creator.
And not to just blow you off, but compare that with this other theory that “know one knows where we came from”, and “We’re not entirely sure”, and “we just sorta evolved on our own, we didn’t need a Creator”. We do need a Creator. And if someone is to believe that the origin of evolution is just what we’ve just talked about, then we are completely ranom people wth completely random everything, right? WRONG. We are structured in such n incredible way and we do have a purpose on this earth. To glorify this Creator. And Ed, I’m sorry to say that whether you think we need a Creator or not, He never had to create you. But He chose to so that you can enjoy fellowship with Him forever. And If you say that there is no Creator, then please be my guest and create an apartment for me to live in this next semester. Because after all, you don’t need a Creator.
I apologize if this is alot to take in. Do something for me. copy and paste this information to your notepad and research it for yourself. Do not settle for what everyone else is believing in.
God Bless and I will be praying that Christ will open your heart and your eyes to His Creation.
Hey, Drew?
Did God make man before the plants, or after them?
I’m a little confused, what with this research I’ve been doing. See, I’ve got:
(Gen 1: 11-13, 26, 31)
But I’ve also got:
(Gen 2: 4-7)
Maybe you can help me out here, Drew. Which of the following should I believe?
– The entire Bible is the real, revealed, and literally true word of God. I should interpret both these passages literally and come to the conclusion that 3 must be greater than 6.
– Genesis is a compilation in the time of David of the oral history of the tribes of Israel, and the scribes compromised and wrote down two popular but differing accounts, themselves the creation of fallible men with a less complete understanding of the universe around them than we have today.
Also.
Drew, YOU came from a little cell. I know it’s hard to believe, especially since it was too small to see with the naked eye, but you started off your life as a single cell. I’m not going to pull out that “ontogeny recaptures phylogeny” canard, since that one only works in sociology, but you and everything else alive on this planet were once, not that long ago, just a single cell.
If humans didn’t come from monkeys, why do we share a lot of the same mistakes? Not the same working genes, because that might be expected given our similar body plans, but the same mistakes? Genes rendered inoperable, viruses that wrote themselves into our DNA and never got out again.
If humans didn’t come from other land animals, why do people suffer sleep apnea and suffocate? Our throats are flexible so that unlike other animals, we can converse in a wide range of tones and sounds, but they’re so flexible that sometimes when the muscles relax too much they can seal shut entirely. This makes sense if you consider that communication was a greater advantage than the occasional death while asleep, but if we were created from nothing else why would this be a problem?
If humans didn’t come from amphibians, then why do people hiccup? Because what a hiccup is, Drew, is the part of your brain that isn’t much different from a tadpole brain trying to switch over to the gills by clamping the lungs off so water doesn’t get down there.
If the human body really was Intelligently Designed, then it wouldn’t have so dang many design flaws which are strikingly similar to structures found in all those other life forms we’re not supposed to be related to.
Forgive me, but it’s really not my job to have to re-type all of modern biology into a comment thread every time a creationist demands to be told about it. There are countless internet sources, journals, and textbooks in which you can read and learn about all the specific and complicated matters I mentioned.
You have not. You’ve referenced a story in which things are just made to happen, and do, without any explanation whatsoever of how.
You believe you know what the truth is. That’s not the same thing as knowing.
Believe me, I’ve heard this sales pitch many many times. Nothing about the “lifestyle” dodge makes any of it any more convincing or compelling.
So you claim. But as far as I can tell, you don’t actually know if that claim is true, you simply believe that it is and that you know the particular someone you think knows.
As I’ve already explained, you’ve just expressed an incomplete thought. If you want to talk about purpose, you need to specify which particular agent’s subjective judgment you are talking about.
Which makes this all very, very boxlike. If we can’t understand that, then it’s an explanation that doesn’t go anywhere.
That’s not even close to accurate.
What we call monkeys are not directly ancestral to human beings, and neither are ducks or finches. Evolution is not about “turning into” it’s about descent with modification.
It’s true that we don’t know if clay crystals played a part in the origin of life. And its also true that humans didn’t “come from” monkeys or anything else. We are animals. We are primates.
So, a hypothetical step by step process by which we could understand how life began given a set of initial natural conditions is absurd… but a human body being magically molded out of dust (which isn’t even close to the general makeup of a human body) is much more reasonable?
And again, I dispute what you “find out” when you read those passages. What you “find out” is what a certain tribe of people once believed, or at least the sorts of stories they told each other, about the origins of man.
The difference is that the science version is honest about what we know and do not know, and what it does know, it explains quite well and convincingly from evidence. Your version doesn’t do that, and it just asserts all sorts of things without any justification or humility.
Darn right it’s wrong. But because you have a straw man understanding of evolution and moral purpose.
Hypothetically, that would be the purpose of the Creator, not necessarily our purpose. And geez, what a silly, vain purpose that is to have for creating something!
Uh…. the vast majority of people in the country I live in are believing some version of what you believe. Right or wrong to not believe it, I’m not exactly following the herd by not believing.
Instead, why not pray that Christ tell you my cellphone number so that you can call and proselytize me directly? Surely Christ knows what it is, and if you are such good friends, passing on contact information should be a small matter.
Glazius, those were 2 accounts of the story of creation. Kind of like when you hear 2 people tell you the same story. Sort of like the 2 of you trying to tell me I came from a monkey.
And Mr. Bad, I have given you the truth. Now you are responsible for yourself. You WILL give an account for blaspheming the name of Christ and rejecting the fact that He indeed designed the universe. Have fun with your monkey games. I Actually know where i’m going when I die and also I know the truth. No, not just think I know it, or hope so. I know it is true. And also I asked you what your purpose was on earth and you gave me this “particular agent’s judgement”. I’m asking you a simple question and if you don’t know the answer, then say that. What do you think is your purpose for living?
And you said hypthetically, we wouldn’t need to serve a Creator and something else must have to. My Friend, we are it. And the Bible says that the Rocks and the Trees cry out to him! And it is by far the silliest thing to create human beings to serve you. Do you understand that we as humans screwed up the world? Yea, Adam and Eve sinned against God when he gave them everything they wanted. They disobeyed. It’s our fault that the world is the way it is now. But that doesn’t mean that we cannot turn back to Him and ask forgiveness for our sin. And by the way, creationists are getting crapped on now a days for believing in truth. But i’m sticking with it, because I am confident of my creation, unlike many evolutionist who honestly don’t even know for sure what it is they came from. My friend, I must go, but please don’t ignore this truth.
God bless.
You keep using that word “know” and yet I keep getting the sense that you don’t understand what it takes to use that word.
No, I didn’t. I asked you to specify who’s opinion you are talking about. Someone’s parents might have conceived them and want them to be a doctor. That’s their purpose for that person. But the person might have another purpose for their own life. You were trying to talk about “purpose” in the abstract, but that makes no more sense than trying to talk about whether something is enjoyable in the abstract.
Again, you’re not understanding my request for clarification. Are you asking me what my purposes for living are? Or someone else’s purposes for me are?
Yes, it is. Or to create anything to do it. It’s particularly silly for something that is supposedly omnipotent.
Give me an appraisal that’s honest about it’s faults any day over unwavering belief.
I’m still waiting for your phone call.
Well, first off…I’m asking you what you think your purposes in living are. And second, my mistake completely, I meant to say it’s the farthest thing from silly to want to create a world that will in return serve you. My mistake. And dude, you don’t even know what you believe in. Seriously, I ‘d love to hear you describe to me what you believe in. Give it a shot. And i’m not sure you’re understand what I mean when I say that I do know where i’m going when I die. I do know. No one is going to convince me otherwise. I actually have a hope. What’s yours….after you die then you just fade away and disintegrate? I don’t know. No, one day my friend, I know for a fact, because the Bible says that we ALL meaning every human being will stand before the living God and give an account for our lives. And I have no one doubt that I am eternally saved from sin. But you, what hope do you have? When we are all standing before the judgement seat of Christ, what will you say when He asks you why you believe in the origin of evolution when blatantly He was the One who created you? Will you be guilty or innocent? The Bible says that there is only one way to heaven and that is through Jesus Christ. My purpose in life is to serve and glorify God the Father and tell others about His saving grace and love. My friend, He died on a cross for you and me because of our sin. Do you understand that? We messed up, but he humbled himself to die on a cross and was beaten for our sin, so that every one of us could receive His free gift of salvation. It was good chatting with you. I hope you find the answer. God bless friend.
-Drew
Well in that case it’s really a pretty simple matter: my purposes for living are to experience life, hopefully enrich the lives of others, one day raise kids, and fight for the advancement of causes that I believe in, such as better education, political liberty, and so on.
Ok, but I still don’t see how that isn’t quite silly. An omnipotent being would not need servants and a perfect being would not need yesmen to stroke its ego.
Again, you’ll have to clarify the question a little. If you mean in terms of faith, I try not to “believe” in that sense period. If you mean what sorts of moral convictions I have, then I’ve already outlined some, including not hurting others, preventing abuses of people’s liberty, learning about the world around us, and so forth.
Again, knowing and believing are two different things. Yes, I could certainly see how you could believe so strongly that you think you could never be convinced. I just don’t see how that is a form of “knowing” anything.
I really have no idea. I don’t even know what happens to “me” when a go to sleep every night. I certainly can hope all sorts of different things, but then I could also hope that I had a pony. That doesn’t make me have a pony.
See, here’s some more detail: the Bible. I don’t agree that simply believing what the writers of the Bible believed, or at least your interpretation of it, constitutes knowing anything.
First of all, I don’t know what you think this “origin of evolution” you keep talking about is. Do you mean the origin of life?
And second of all, if that happens, I’d just note that I was following the evidence, and probably compliment God on playing such a funny joke with all those fossils and such. He sure had me fooled!
Of what? Being wrong on a matter of factual judgment?
The Bible says a lot of things. So?
Actually, no, I don’t, because it doesn’t make any sense whatsoever. I’ve touched on one aspect of this topic before, and that’s not even the worst of it. The nonsensical idea of killing someone to magically do… what? why? how? None of it makes any sense.
DO YOU KNOW THE MIND OF THE LORD?
HAVE YOU BEEN HIS COUNSELOR?
WHAT HAVE YOU GIVEN HIM, THAT YOU SHOULD BE REPAID?
Wake up to your pride, man! Who are you to say that you know the mind of God? Even Jesus, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with Him as something to be grasped! Yet here you come, sure of your own salvation and flinging condemnations left and right!
You condemn yourself; for you, the judge, do the very same things.
Why are you so sure that God lied in the signs He leaves inside every living thing? Why are you so sure that two divergent traditions in Israel both got it right?
The thread of life runs through all things. We can read the truth of this written in the very smallest parts of ourselves, of everything alive. Is this no mystery, just because anyone can see it? With this knowledge we have turned a few grains of wheat into food enough to feed billions of the starving. (No, seriously, BILLIONS. Look up Norman Borlaug some time.) Is this no miracle, just because anyone can do it? If God has made all things, seen and unseen, why must looking at the things He has made be contrary to faith?
“What is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor. This is Torah. The rest is commentary.” “Love the Lord your God, and your neighbor as yourself. The whole Law and all the prophets are summed up in these commandments.” “Love one another, and love shall be the whole of the Law.”
And you have the gall to insist that the most important thing is a story about a man baked out of clay?
Ben Stein could have said a lot more about Darwinians and Eugenics: Euvolution 0.4.7.1
Saying more would not be the same thing as saying anything with accuracy. There were many people that subscribed to evolution and eugenics: but there were also many who subscribed to evolution and opposed eugenics (including virtually every biology today). And eugenics was far far larger than just evolution: it came before it, and had a logic independent of it (since it was based, ultimately, on ideas of good blood and good breeding from both ideas about nobility and animal husbandry).
It’s also worth noting that it was evolutionary science, not anyone related to Ben Stein, that conclusively refuted the core ideas inherent in eugenics.
BAD, people don’t have to be logically consistent – just because someone doesn’t subscribe to eugenics doesn’t discredit that it is just one logical outworking of raw darwinism.
No, it doesn’t: but it does discredit the idea that evolution is somehow inherently supportive of eugenics. And that association pretty much all people like Stein have in any case, because the “logical outworking” case is nonsense. Descriptive science is not proscriptive, and in any case, the ideologies and methods of the eugenics movement were composed of ignoring and distorting a lot of key factual insights of evolution in any case.
Eugenics can be thought of as more Lamarckian than Darwinian. It assumes that something that happens during the life of the organism (success) will influence offspring to also adopt that quality. It has nothing to do with the Darwinian theory evolution and in fact CANNOT be a “logical outworking” of it…
Because “eugenics” has Greek roots for a reason. It was first practiced by the Spartans. Yes, those Spartans. Over two thousand years ago.
So either eugenics isn’t a consequence of evolutionary theory… or Darwin had a time machine.
Shame on this disgrace of a movie. Lying to people to get them involved is just plain wrong. As an educator, anyone suporting ID should of course be doubted, even fired if they exposed their nonsensical beliefs to students.
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