by hooberus 282 Replies latest jw friends
Kurt P. Wise, geology
Dr Wise is director of origins research at Bryan College, Dayton, Tennessee.....He is a member of the Geological Society of America.
Now not to resort to petty issues of credentials but seriously??? They tout that he is a member of GSA? So is my wife! or anyone else who wants to pay the memberhip dues. You get a cool magazine. I don't deny he is a competent geologist but the GSA is a trade organization not an elite thinktank or something.
Apparently you can't read even your own paste carefully, since the author states that in his opinion "there are scientific reasons for accepting a young earth".
And apparently you are as inept as I am, earlier in my own paste:
It was there that night that I accepted the Word of God and rejected all that would ever counter it, including evolution.
1. Another poster recommended this book for scientific information supportinig biblical creationism, and it does contain much in that way, along with biblical and other reasons as well (perhaps he should have stated this as well to you)
Cool since you provided a link do you want me to go through the entire thing and dismantle it?
2. You then (obviously without reading it), tried to dismiss it as faulty because of an alleged faulty "main [scientific] argument" I simply pointed out that you obviously hadn't read it since it contains no speciifc "main [scientific] argument." I also then posted the online book for anyone to see.
I didn't try to dismiss it as faulty, bearing mind that I have a 3 year old daughter and an 8 month old son I'd rather not have to read through a bunch of drivel that has already been disproved numerous times if I don't have to. I read through a summary off a creationist website that said the main argument involved which many of the testimonies pointed to was irreducible complexity. Hence I posted a link to the refutation of the irreducible complexity argument.
3. Your resonse was then to highlight some scriptural reasons from one of the 50 authors and then pretend that he (and I) refer to "those" reasons as "scientific reasons" for creationism.
Actually it was the very first one I looked at which I mention in my post. You seem to love the whole argument from selected evidence don't you?
1 Werner Gitt, information science (In Six Days)
from his testimony:
"For me, as an information scientist, the key question is the source of information. Regarding the length of the creation days, there is only one information source, and that is the Bible. In the Bible, God tells us that He created everything in six days." (the testimony is all about the meaning of that word).
you go Gitt! You are trained in a subfield of mathematics, therefore you are an expert in linguistics and the relevants fields of science that give evidence to this question!
worst-application-of-credentials-ever.
Who you are speaks so loudly I can't hear what you're saying. (Ralph Waldo Emerson)
Does anyone in here have an open mind, or are we here for the sole purpose of convincing everyone else that they are wrong and we are right?
All people possess survival mechanisms to which they give free reign. It's not a choice, really. You can't not allow your adrenal gland secretions to spike when you sense danger, for example. Your brain becomes flooded with adrenaline and depending on your psychological makeup you fight or you flee. Whether mechanisms like these come from God or from millions of years of evolution is irrelevant. They just are.
For the most part survival mechanisms are good, for obvious reasons. But there's one that's a mixed bag and that is denial. Our brains invoke the mechanism of denial as an automatic protective response to what we do not want to experience.
Say you're sitting on the front porch on a warm sunny afternoon and you're watching your kids playing fetch with the family dog. Someone throws the ball a bit too hard and it rolls onto the street. Before you can even think, Rex is mangled horribly by a pickup truck. What is the first word out of your mouth?
It is "NO". Maybe it's "Oh my God NO!" Same thing. Your brain is confronted with something it does not want to experience and it triggers the defense mechanism of denial. In this example it doesn't work, because the evidence of what you don't want to believe is overwhelming and manifestly real.
That is what is happening in here. The difference is the defense mechanism of denial works only with belief, because only belief is deniable. The Title of this thread could have been "Non-evidence reasons why people embrace Creationism". It could even have been singular. "Non-evidence reason ..." because ultimately there is only one, and that is denial. The very notion that there might be no God is horrifyingly incomprehensible to those for whom belief in God is absolute. Entertaining the thought would be like watching Rex getting hit by the truck, only much, much worse.
When there is an option and we are confronted with evidence of something we don't want to believe, no matter how compelling, the defense mechanism of denial kicks in, we choose not to accept it, and the bad feeling goes away. The reality, however, remains unchanged.
Watching biblegod get hit by a truck, the truck being lack of evidence of life or action.
S
If we instead of speculating what interlectual dishonesty the other side is engaged in told what our own evidence was, or perhaps asked the other side what their evidence was, it would be a far more interesting discussion.
Yes, bohm, but that would require genuinely open minds.
ATTACK OF THE CUT AND PASTE MONKEY'S!!!!
WOW, 50 whole "scientific sources"! That's almost as many people as there are in two decently-sized biology departments!
Mad Dawg - One opinion piece does not a fact make. It's like saying that a comprehensive understanding of physics isn't needed to do engineering. (Strictly true.) It would be possible to eliminate real physics from engineering education and just teach formulas. (Does the moment of inertia "exist"? Is conservation of energy "true"?) One can build a bridge just by treating the textbook like a book of magic incantations that work for some unknown reason. Likewise, you could teach someone to cook a few dishes by timing how long each ingredient should be prepared or cooked, and grant no overarching understanding of how heat changes food, etc. Science is a (among other things) conceptual framework that explains HOW things happen, not just THAT they happen. One can do a bunch of experiments with no regard to any theoretical framework, but when you're done, all you have is a bunch of disconnected results. But to make sense of these results in a comprehensive way, you need an coordinating explanation. Evolution is the grand explanation for biological diversity.
jaguarbass - Your postings fail to understand any sort of philosophy of science. If you completely destroy any idea of induction, then I can understand why you would disregard science.
Also, science isn't about "proving" things. It's about supporting theories with evidence.
Doctors are great, but they are basically mechanics of the body. If I want to learn about the origin of development of the body, I listen to biologists.
Would it not be refreshing if people just stood alone and expressed themselves rather than standing on the shoulders of others whose opinions mesh with their own?
