Blondie's Comments You Will Not Hear at the 04-10-2011 WT Study (CREATION)

by blondie 41 Replies latest jw friends

• 

  witnessdater

  When I dated a JW, I naively tried to show her the error of her ways. The last thing I wanted was for her to believe in nothing, because of the "where else can you go mentality". That is the worst thing about this cult. It worships the true God, but so distorts the gospel for the WT benefit. Then, if they lose faith in that, it is a slippery slope to not believing in anything.

  That is what I am seeing on this thread in particular. Vastly incorrect statements. Science does not point to evolution. The ONLy mutations ever known were not of the nature of building a new part, but have all been destructive mutations. There is not one example of a mutation that improved something. Study the law of irreducible complexity. For an organism to have no eyes, and therefore see no light, the organism doesn't "want" light, it doesn't know what light is. What was the "factor" or cause that thought "I think it is time to form an eye for myself".

  The Big Bang: Atheists hate this theory, because it wipes out their theory that everything was just always here and that our time had no beginning. Immediately before the big bang, there was absolutely nothing. That is supernatural, and of intelligence.

  The likelihood that we are here by chance, and came from primordial slime are incalulable. If the gravititational constant were off by something like one-tenth of one percent, the universe would collapse. This is akin to sticking your hand into a coontainer holding 10 to the 40th power black balls, and pulling out the only white one among the bunch. You would begin to think the game had been rigged.

  Get and Read the book "Who Made God" by Ravi Zacharias and Norman Geisler.
• 

  sd-7

  Interesting. The thing is, first of all, the WTS needs to create a kids' book series entitled "Where's Jesus?", designed like the "Where's Waldo?" books. Because there's no Jesus in here, though supposedly he made everything in heaven and on earth. Holy spirit is mentioned, Jehovah is mentioned, but no Jesus.

  The thing is, coming around 15 billion years later and trying to extrapolate the process of the birth of an entire universe which we can't even SEE all of from our vantage point is a process that, if humanly possible, would take many millennia to fully unravel. This fact alone does not demand that one attributes everything to a Creator. That's just the easy way to stop thinking about it, to say, well, I can't figure it out, God made it, we're done here. If all men reasoned that way, we would've continued believing the Earth was flat. Exploration of science need not prove or disprove a Creator, as that is not and should not be its purpose. Religion exerts itself to prove everything else wrong, and it usually does so in the end because money and power are the end result for its leaders. Science seeks to take a mystery and solve it, pick a point in the sky or on the earth and explore it, find answers, test the answers, find better answers. That kind of creative thinking requires one to dispense with as many assumptions as possible. Religion requires you to assume that a book written 2,000+ years ago is indeed a factual record of events. Science, if pursued properly, will render a more objective set of conclusions every time.

  Even if there is a Creator, that still doesn't prove that the Creator wrote the Bible or indeed any holy book. So believing this article requires you to mke two major assumptions without a lot of tangible evidence to do so.

  Also, using the term 'propaganda'? Seriously? Because a belief is different, the Society by default labels it propaganda. The Society is the one known for presenting dubious reasoning and failing to even provide bibliographies for its outside quotations in many cases, thus expecting the reader to simply read and believe rather than read and fact-check and then decide whether or not the logic is sound. What the Society does in this one sentence is use loaded language, engage in name-calling, and make a broad generalization--none of which proves anything. It appeals to negative emotion rather than sound reasoning. Sounds like propaganda to me.

  None of this is to bash a belief in creation; I believe that either something or someone created everything. Even if it was a force--a collision with another universe, as some scientists believe--it still resulted in all this stuff being designed. I do take issue with their saying God used 'no additional material'--he had to use some kind of energy to make matter. The Society makes the argument time and again in defense of creation that something cannot come from nothing, yet they assert that indeed, God made something from nothing. It would've been more accurate to just say that he used his own energy, in the form of holy spirit, to create everything. That's at least somewhat more scientific.

  It's an article that just uses bad logic and relies on credulity to make its point. Standard for the Watchtower, par for the course.

  --sd-7
• 

  undercover

  Notice that paragraph thirteen comments about the creation process up to man's creation taking aeons.

  Websters definition of "aeon":

  1. an immeasurably or indefinitely long period of time

  2a. (usually eon): a very large division of geologic time usually longer than an era

  2b. a unit of geologic time equal to one billion years.

  The nail in the coffin for the 7,000 year creative days.

  When the notion of a planet and it's contents less than 50,000 years old became too ridiculous to continue to hold on to and to preach as "truth", they WTS quietly and conveniently drops that teaching and slips in a more acceptable timeline. At least acceptable enough to a group of people who won't question beyond the obvious.

  How long before they give up the ghost on Adam being created 6,000 years ago? The scientific data on the history of man makes that belief equally ridiculous but I have yet to see them drop that teaching. How long before it becomes an obvious issue with even the most zombiefied dub that they'll have to revise their timeline yet again?
• 

  hamsterbait

  Witness dater -

  Mutations that produced dark skin in sunny regions actually IMPROVED the survival of humans in equatorial reigions.

  Mutations that reduced the size of herons wings on windy pacific islands IMPROVED the survival of these now flightless birds in bad weather conditions.

  Mutations in harmful bacteria occur all the time - they are beneficial to the bacterium when it ensures resistance to antibiotics, or enables them to exploit a hitherto indigestible food source.

  The mutation that allows certain branches of humanity to digest milk is beneficial.

  The mutations conferring immunity to TB, plague and other diseases are irrefutably beneficial.

  Throw your copy of "Did Life Get here by Evolution or Creation" in the bin it is full of errors deliberate misquotes and LIES.

  Mutations that remove the ability to speak in ignorant people IMPROVES the overall feelgood factor of people who have acquired (by mutation) the inability to swallow intellectual shit churned out by the former.

  By the way by 1905 Astronomers had telescopes that confirmed the existence of galaxies. This is a deliberate LIE by the FDS.

  And arguing that the "PROBABILITY" of our being here is incalculable proves NOTHING. AS far as anybody here is aware intelligent life - even life itself - perhaps even the universe as we know it is unique.

  IT IS MATHEMATICALLY IMPOSSIBLE TO CALCULATE the PROBABILITY OF A UNIQUE EVENT.

  The bag full of balls is a false analogy. Since we are only aware of ONE universe, or ONE example of say intelligent life, or of life at all, we are in effect dipping our hands into a bag with only the one ball that we can possibly find inside. Since this ball is the only one that irrefutably exists (whatever fairy stories stone age know nothings made up) you need to prove that something that evidently does NOT exist (ie NOTHING) is just as likely to exist as what we know does exist.

  Since nothing evidently does NOT exist, the universe as we know it is more likely, though we cannot, as said above prove the mathematical probability of this unique event that did nevertheless happen.

  Since my father ejaculated millions of sperm into my mother, the probability of me existing is billions to one. That is soo unlikely God must have guided those little swimmers to where he wanted them to go.

  I have only contempt for those that gave up swimming before they had even reached the oesophagus.

  HB
• 

  hamsterbait

  And can SOMEBODY please tell me how to reconcile the Disneyland God of the New System with the sociopathic genocidal killer we see in the Bible.

  True he seems to be "Love" in the NT, but didnt he inspire his own prophet (Isaiah??) to say a leopard cannot change its spots?

  Maybe we are looking at the first recorded case of paranoid schizophrenia?
• 

  witnessdater

  Hamster,

  Most notably, your response was merely intended to insult, rather than provide much to think about. This is usually the mark of someone who can't think of much worthwhile to say. CS Lewis once said " Can a mortal ask questions which God finds unanswerable? Quite easily, I should think. All nonsense questions are unanswerable."

  First, everything has a cause. If you are a scientist, you must admit this. Second, if everything has a cause, then, if the rule is followed strictly, the series of causes would go into the past for infinity. This cannot be, else we would never arrived at the present. Since this cannot be, this means there must have been an ultimate uncaused cause. This uncaused cause must be intelligent, else it is the result of something else and is not the first uncaused cause.

  On your question about God killing people in the Bible, can you give me an example of when God killed people without any strong warning directly from him? Because I know that if God appeared to me in a dream or vision and warned me, I would probably obey. It is probably about as fair as you can get.

  The container of black balls - you've got it wrong also. It is not just the probability at stake here, but the specified probability of a life-permitting universe existing. This may also PROVE nothing, but you have to use your logic along with knowing you must be nuts if you thought this occured by chance. You actually have to have more faith to believe it happened by chance (and you still haven't explain the cause) than to believe in God. The cosmological constant, crucial to the development of the universe, must be inexplicably fine-tuned to an accuracy of one part in 10^53 in order for a life-permitting universe to exist. If you can't trust your own logic, then any argument that you make is meaningless. How do you know you even exist?

  In the beginning of an "evolution" scenario, the odds that ten to twenty amino acids coming together by chance (remember, no natural selection or chemical evolution at this stage) to form an enzyme has been estimated to be on the order of 10^20. There are two thousand different enzymes made out of amino acids, all of which would have to be formed purely by chance, and the odds of that happening are around 10^40000, ods so outrageously small that they could not be faced even if the whole universe consisted of organic soup.

  Darwin himself said that if the transitional forms of organisms were not ever found, then his theory could not hold. Thus far, those transitional forms have not been found, only distinctly different fossils of organisms which died off. Barrow and Tipler list ten steps in the course of human evolution - the development of aerobic respiration, the development of an inner skeleton, the development of the eye, for example - each of which is so improbable that before it would occur, the sun would have ceased to be a main sequence and incinerated the earth!

  Questions: Why aren't there any people walking around with a third arm sticking out of the top of their head? Isn't evolution random? Also, shouldn't we be seeing organisms that have died off millions of years ago coming back around? Where are the dinosaurs, why haven't they "re-evolved"?

  Use your common sense Hamsterbrain: If the guy across from you in the poker game gets 4 Aces 12 times in a row, are you going to play another hand because he says "Well, it had to happen somewhere in our finite universe, might as well be here!"
• 

  witnessdater

  "Since nothing evidently does NOT exist, the universe as we know it is more likely, though we cannot, as said above prove the mathematical probability of this unique event that did nevertheless happen."

  Hamster,

  Just because we are conscious and what is here is obviously here, that means that we cannot observe the fact that if certain measured or calculated physical forces were off by a trillionth of a percent, then the universe would have collapsed long ago? What you are saying to me is that ANY universe is equally as improbable as this. But when you put the cosmological constants into the picture, that isn't true. Any other universe would not exist, it would die. In any case, we'd never know. Just because we are here does not mean we can't make these observations, and then deduce that it is highly improbable that the universe was not created. Or, in other words, if it were virtually any other way, there would not be anything.
• 

  witnessdater

  Hamster,

  The vast majority of visible mutations are admitted by the evolutionists themselves to be bad. Furthermore, it has not been shown experimentally that mutation and natural selection can produce new structures or organs. Most mutations are deleterious or change (lots of times for the worse)something that is already there, they do not create livers, hearts, arms and legs. Limited changes have been observed in all species, but that does not prove that these species could evolve in millions of years into entirely different kinds of creatures. Scientists merely assume that this happened in the past when no scientists were present to observe the process.

  The human skin cell itself is so complex, it would all have to have evolved all at once (by sheer chance with no intent by anything), or that cell would have died or would not have done its job. Same for the human eye. This is the principle of irreducible complexity. But your argument is that from all of the chance, accidental mutations of the past, the result we have is absolute beauty and order in our organism and universe.
• 

  Cadellin

  Witnessedater:

  Questions: Why aren't there any people walking around with a third arm sticking out of the top of their head? Isn't evolution random?

  Questions like these are a clear indicator that your understanding of the current state of evolutionary biology might not be as complete as you would like. While certain aspects of organic life are random, evolution itself is not. Natural selection most definitely is not random but rather predictable and thus falsifiable. Mutations are neither "good" nor "bad," in fact the vast majority are neutral. They only take on beneficial or deleterious characteristics in context with the organism's environment. A mutation (or, often, cumulative series of mutations) only imparts benefit if it helps the organism in its pariticular setting. When that happens, those organisms have an advantage and can come to dominate a population. THis is essentially how antiobiotic resistance in bacteria work.

  Ah, yes, you might say, but it's still a bacteria. Well, of course. To find out if an accumulation of changes can (over time) trigger speciation, we have to look to the fossil record. And an honest appraisal of that might surprise you. Kathleen Hunt provides a pretty good overview here . Or at least read Prothero's Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why it Matters.

  One of the biggest challenges for creationists right now, IMHO, isn't the fossil record (though it's pretty solid) but the genetic record. Gene sequencing of ancient DNA means that genomes of humans, chimpanzees, Neanderthals and the latest find, Denisovians can be laid side by side. It becomes very easy to see that humans are pretty homogenous and that Neaderthals and Denisovians fall outside the range of modern human genetic diversity.

  Finding that the human evolutionary tree is more of a bush? Cool. Trying to fit it all into the last 6,000 years? Impossible.
• 

  witnessdater

  Cadelin,

  I certainly don't claim to know everything about evolutionary theory. But, the argument at hand, that evolution (the combination of mutation and natural selection) brought forth from either amino acids or say, one organism, all of the life on earth including us, can be observed in very general terms to where one does not have to know all of the science of it. It is observed (which is the essence of science - observation) that mutations do not add - they change what is already there not to a new species but change attributes, or take away, or actually cause sickness. In essence, the do not create. This is my main point. The question about the arm out of the head was a joke, but all humor has some truth to it. If this is all random, and not part of a plan of creation, then why do we not see much more mutations that miraculously produce humans with a zoom lens in their eyeball for instance? Or six fingers on each hand? Anything significantly different?

  Natural selection obviously eliminates. Only the strong survive is the principle, and the result is less species.

  And not only could the theory not play out in 6000 years, it couldn't have occured in billions.

  As for fossils, the reason they haven't found the transitional fossils is because they are not there to find.