Bill Nye to debate Creationist tonight at 7 - 2.4 on CNN

Discussion in 'Science and Technology' started by DarthTom, Feb 4, 2014.

  1. Yminale

    Yminale Rear Admiral Rear Admiral

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    And science doesn't have all the answer and is constantly in flux (Religion also but that's a dirty little secret.)

    One of the problems with science based evolution is that people get unhinged when you tell them that life is based on random events.
     
  2. Yminale

    Yminale Rear Admiral Rear Admiral

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    Yeah but you have to come up crazy with $#!^& to explain it.
     
  3. DarthTom

    DarthTom Fleet Admiral Admiral

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    A great example of that is how he attempts to validate the flood story. Ham's argument about how we have multiple species in a 4,000 year old flood story is to summarize that using dogs as an example different types of dog species all came from the original same line. Similarly, cats et al.
     
  4. Amaris

    Amaris Fleet Admiral Admiral

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    Not really. When your god is all powerful, all capable, and all knowing, you don't have to try very hard.
     
  5. Robert Maxwell

    Robert Maxwell memelord Premium Member

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    It's too bad God doesn't show up for a Q&A session. It would go just like this:

    Host: And here's God Almighty to answer your questions. Yes, you, down in front.
    Asker: Hey, God. Long-time fan. Is it true that You can make a burrito so spicy even You can't eat it?
    God: (angry) THERE WILL BE NO MORE QUESTIONS!
     
  6. Amaris

    Amaris Fleet Admiral Admiral

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    For some reason, the voice of God, in my head, sounds like Lrr, from the planet Omicron Persei 8.
     
  7. Robert Maxwell

    Robert Maxwell memelord Premium Member

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    That is exactly what I was going for. :D
     
  8. iguana_tonante

    iguana_tonante Admiral Admiral

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    Yeah, that's the first thing that I thought, too.
     
  9. CorporalCaptain

    CorporalCaptain Fleet Admiral Admiral

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    Well, I guess it's time for this again:

    [​IMG]

    I think it's unjustifiably presumptuous of the creationists to presume that God's on their side in this argument. If God showed up at a Q&A, I think he'd rip them to shreds with all the science he'd whip out on them. :D
     
  10. Gov Kodos

    Gov Kodos Admiral Admiral

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    If we're on to favorite God comics...

    [​IMG]
     
  11. Timelord Victorious

    Timelord Victorious Vice Admiral Admiral

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    Oh, we are posting funny things now?

    :lol:

    [yt]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IBHEsEshhLs&list=PL7420408E36541DA4&index=18[/yt]
     
  12. gturner

    gturner Admiral

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    Well, in defense of creationists, Darwinists don't have a very good explanation for why we would've climbed down from the trees, other than we realized that living in a tree really sucks when you get down to it. In fact, living in a tree is really pretty stupid for anything bigger than a bird or a squirrel. Sure, as a tree dweller you get to poop on ground dwellers, but isn't there more to life's hierarchy than that? Is the fun of dropping a turd on some other animal's head really worth foregoing pottery, farming, metallurgy, and aerospace engineering? Swinging on a vine is fun, but is it really all that? And it's not like living in trees protects you from the wrath of Zeus, because above all he seems to despise tall trees.

    But still, Darwinists haven't offered a convincing account of how the first ground dwellers convinced their breeding cohorts to get down out of the trees.

    "I say there. Do you realize you're in a f***ing tree?"

    "Yes, and if you come closer I'll poop on your head."

    "Do you have any life goals, or is pooping on my head pretty much it?"

    "I can poop on your head and swing from branches."

    "Delightful. Well, I'm down here on the ground where all the cool stuff is. Flint, gazelles, tasty berries, running water, pretty much the entire future of Western civilization."

    "We have free bananas."

    "Yes, but you don't have banana farms, because to make a banana farm you'd have to come down here and plant a bunch of banana trees."

    "Well, you build the banana farms and then we'll live there and eat the bananas."

    "Now why would I do that?"

    "Because it's socialism! It's fairness! Why should you horde all the bananas?"

    "But I haven't actually planted the banana trees yet. This is all hypothetical."

    "My tribe, poop on the heads of the greedy capitalist exploiters!!! They're trying to trick us down with imaginary bananas!"

    "Oh bollocks. I'm heading onto the plains to seek my fortune."

    There's really no way Darwinists can sidestep that situation.
     
  13. Albertese

    Albertese Commodore Commodore

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    Well, I don't have anything funny to add, but I did watch this debate recently. A friend at work recommended it.

    I found the whole thing fascinating. I was raised as a Christian, but over the past year, my faith in the Bible has steadily waned. But even at my most fundamentalist, I've never been a YEC.

    Anyhow. I find my personal beliefs becoming quite secular, leaning towards the idea that some creative intelligence started everything out via the Big Bang and then everything unfolded as per Science.

    But, even though I think Genesis is, at best, metaphor, I would hope that people who argue against it would not do so from their own position of ignorance.

    This post is a perfect example:


    To address these numbered points:

    1: Gen 1:1 and 1:2 have exactly nothing to do with the creation of humans of any gender.

    The verses read: "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now, the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters."

    You may be thinking of Gen 1:26-28 where God creates male and female in his image, and then Gen 2:7 and 22 where God creates Adam from the dust of the earth and then creates Eve from Adam's rib. These are not two different stories, but rather, follow the style throughout Genesis where the different sections of story have their own introductions and sometimes retelling of events in a different context. Usually these sections begin with a phrase like "This is the history of..." or similar.

    Such so-called contradictions are usually the result of people giving the text the most cursory of examinations. If you think about it, it's really a very insulting attitude to both the ancient people who wrote these books and all those who believed in them up to our own times to suggest that they all just latched on to something so riddled with internal flaws as people like you suggest.

    2: You are correct in calling out the Ark as being a box and not a boat. Though, I do still think A Great Flood did happen, I don't personally believe The Great Flood ever covered the entire surface of the earth... certainly not 4,000 years ago. However, certain of the details do seem more plausible to me if the vessel was a simple box shape and not anything at all boat shaped.

    3: The Bible does claim extraordinary life spans for humans of ancient times. I doubt it. Though I'm sure Ham's explanations would be entertaining.

    4: What you (and, ironically, most YECs) seem to have missed is that Gen 1:1 says that the heavens and earth WERE already extant before the time of the start of the first creative day.

    And, you again demonstrate your own ignorance of the matter with this one. The second "day" brings "The Expanse" which is the atmosphere, though, again, the "Heavens" or sky had already existed since way back "In the Beginning" at Gen 1:1. On the next day, "Seas" were made in the sense that the dry land was raised above the surface of the already existing watery deeps of Gen 1:2. Both really are, in that sense, already assumed in Gen 1:1,2 and were extant before the first "day" which was the making of light. (and lest you think the ancient Jews were all illogical pea-brains... the Hebrew terms for "create" and "make" have subtle yet definite differences which make it all a lot more internally consistent than you might assume. The definitions allow it all to have been "created" "In the beginning" and the later "making" to refer to how these things effect the surface of the earth where the human audience would be standing... Well... there's a lengthy explanation here but it would go beyond the scope of this topic).

    5: The making of stars and the moon and sun on the fourth creative day (note, not the creation of them) clearly demonstrates the ancient cosmology people of that time and place believed in. Though, thanks to the difference between ancient Hebrew "create" and "make" I was able for a long time to rationalize all of this as a poetic description of how current science describes star system formation. Now that I'm less tied to those beliefs, I'm much more ready to say that they just had their own ideas that worked well enough for what they were up to in those days.

    6: Why does God hate dinosaurs? The Bible makes no mention of them, as no one in those days knew a thing about them. To the faithful, what possible importance would dinosaurs even have to the topics discussed in the scriptures? The Bible is silent on plenty of sciences, but no one claims God hates electricity simply because He failed to inspire any of his men to write about it. If your comment is about why should they have all been wiped out... well I had my own ideas about this when I was faithful. As the Bible is silent on it, feel free to imagine whatever makes the most sense to you why he made and then destroyed them. YEC's ideas are pretty hard to swallow given the evidence.

    --"etc. infinitum"...? I'm not sure how your education failed you with these two very common Latin phrases. Both are similar in usage, but "et cetera" (lit. "and the rest") and "ad infinitum" (lit. "to infinity") aren't usually contracted in this unusual manner.

    ANYHOW... the point I'm trying to make here is that if you're trying to persuade people to accept mainstream science over Biblical literalism, then you might have more success if you come across as less of an ignorant jackass while doing so.

    Bear in mind, I can tell you from personal experience that the Bible actually does hold up pretty well by itself. I didn't lose my faith over internal inconsistency. For me it was that the details of Biblical history DO NOT line up with the physical evidence of history left in the ground. But you aren't going to win anyone over by telling them how dumb they are to have read a book, especially if it's a book that you have no knowledge about.

    Posts like what I quoted above aren't doing anyone any favors.

    --Alex
     
  14. N-121973

    N-121973 Fleet Captain Fleet Captain

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    I watched it last week on Youtube and I thought it was very interesting, and terrifying at the same time. The fact that there were people working on the Hubble Space Telescope who believed that the ENTIRE UNIVERSE was only 6,000 years old, gave me cause for concern. Like some on here I didn't feel that Bill Nye quite delivered the KO (not that it would have changed the minds of any YECs) on the otherhand he clearly performed better than Ken Ham who at times resorted to Bible thumping.

    I will give Mr Ham one bit of credit, at no point did he outright say when confronted with an anomaly in the Biblical accounts, that we're not meant to understand it, its all part of God's plan (at least I didn't detect that). Nor did he say when confronted with such things as the 9,000 year old tree or the ice core samples, "God made them to look that old". Playing evil's advocate (in possibly more ways than one ) he could have pointed out that Adam and Eve were created as fully-formed adults - at least I imagine they were and that that's how God did it with the 9,000 year old tree. Now don't get me wrong, his arguments were no less absurd and seemed to hinge on the idea that none of the dating methods from today could be used in the distant past because such measurements haven't remained constant through time. For instance, in the past tree rings appeared at a rate greater than one year per year.

    I think there were a couple of places where maybe Mr Nye could have administered a KO, the upper jaw and the solar plexus . No seriously, Mr Ham brought up the laws of logic a couple of times, well given the central Biblical event (apart from the creation itself of course) was the Flood, had I been Bill Nye, I would have to that.

    We've all heard of Occam's Razor, aka Murphy's Law, to quote wikipedia: "among competing hypotheses, the hypothesis with the fewest assumptions should be selected". Applying that to the Flood, the story falls down.

    Lets assume that God can do all that the theists say he can do, including creating an entire universe and its physical laws in only 144 terrestrial hours and making it appear approximately a quarter of a million times older than it actually is by simply willing it into existence. And lets assume that he feels after awhile that humanity has strayed too far from his preferred path. How does he go about resolving this? Well he has a lot of options being omnicient, obvious one, is to alter people's behaviour via mind control, classic example -
    "You don't need to see his identification, these aren't the droids you're looking for."
    Or there's the Ebenezer Scrooge approach, and scare people into changing their lives.
    Nope instead he chooses genocide, deliberately sparing the lives of a fortunate few who he deems worthy based on their behaviour (and I suspect also the quality of their genes).

    So how does he go about killing all the humans? A virulent plague perhaps that only kills those who've let God down? Or maybe a storm of meteors? Or how about having all the people deemed worthy of survival, paint their doors with lamb's blood, lock their doors and windows one night with orders not to come out of their homes until morning and then unleash the destroyer he would employ a few centuries later to kill the Egyptian first born, upon the wicked? Or why not just click his fingers and be done with it that way?

    No instead he chooses an unnecessarily complicated method that involves a man with no apparent background or skills in naval or marine architecture, building a boat that dwarfs any wooden boat ever built, has him round up two of every KIND (Mr Ham's words) of every land and air animal, numbering many thousands from every corner of what Mr Ham contends was still Pangea. Plus his extended family but minus dinosaurs, wooly mammoths, rhinos, sabre-toothed cats, giant sloths, bigfoot and not forgetting proto humans and neanderthal man. And solve all the logistical problems that would ensue for the year they would be cooped up together. Then he floods the surface of the whole planet in a torrential downpour lasting approximately 960 hours causing Pangea to break apart into the current form of the continents, using water which had to be conjured up out of nowhere as there apparently isn't enough water on Earth to begin with to produce the quantities of rain water required.

    Lets be honest, it doesn't hold any water (see what I did there ). No if Mr Nye had used that kind of logic, Mr Ham would have been forced onto the defensive, but he didn't. Another way would have been to bring up ETs. When they were asked during the Q and As what would change their minds, I instantly thought of aliens. If a spaceship landed and aliens got out and reaffirmed the creation story, somehow the chances that an identical account of the same thing springing up on two planets light years apart would have to be at least re-evaluated. And if a spaceship landed and aliens said they'd been observing/visiting Earth far longer than YECs contend the universe has been around, then they would be forced to evaluate their views.

    One more note, someone mentioned earlier about belief systems that can be checked, specifically how within a certain mountain

    Unfortunately it doesn't necessarily work like that. I read in Andrew Chaikin's excellent book on the Apollo programme that after their expedition to the Moon, one of the Apollo 14 crew visited a school in Nepal and in a Q & A session with some of the children, he was asked: "When you were on the moon, who did you see?"
    They obviously replied that they hadn't seen anyone on the Moon because there was nobody there. They later learned that some Nepalese believe the Moon was where the spirits of the dead go and after they left the teacher is supposed to have told the children to disregard that answer.
     
  15. Alidar Jarok

    Alidar Jarok Everything in moderation but moderation Moderator

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    I'm not entirely sure you understand evolution. Those who were better at walking on the ground probably walked on the ground because they were better at it. They got better at it through a random gene mutation.

    Given that there are plenty of monkeys that hop around on the ground or sway awkwardly, bipedalism is clearly better than that. It also gives advantages in carrying food and the like - particularly if they mated for life and cared for one another (this is at least one theory I've heard for bipedalism, but it's not exactly provable).

    The issue isn't "why did they go on the ground," the issue is "why were the ones on the ground better at survival." However, most apes tend to be on the ground these days so clearly there were some advantages.
     
  16. Yminale

    Yminale Rear Admiral Rear Admiral

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    You wrote a very long post stating that 1.) we shouldn't take the Bible literally and 2.) the Bible isn't perfect. Well DUH! The point is the more you think about science and read the actual history of the Bible, the less the theistic world view makes sense.
     
  17. Yminale

    Yminale Rear Admiral Rear Admiral

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    People need to be careful using Occam's Razor. It's an interesting tautology but flawed. For instance evolution has more assumptions than creationism. Creationism only requires God, while evolution requires a whole assortment of events. The other flaw is that you know all the assumptions beforehand.
     
  18. JarodRussell

    JarodRussell Vice Admiral Admiral

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    Months ago I asked the question, why is it an "either or" debate at all? Why can't evolution be seen as one of God's many tools? Is he supposed to control everything at every second? Rain, wind, gene mutations? I guess meteorology is witchcraft as well, because weather doesn't evolve either, thunderstorms are all made by God personally. Wouldn't it be enough to believe that S(HE) created the universe and set up specific rules and mechanics after which the world functions? I don't get why some people are so desperately trying to force the idea of God into the world view.

    Also the idea that it's ridiculous to think that the universe big-banged out of nowhere, but it's okay to think that the universe was created by a God that - surprise - came out of nowhere. That additional level doesn't change ANYTHING about the notion that, in the beginning, something came out of Fucking, NW.



    Heck, those who say Earth is just 6000 years old deny EVERYTHING. Biology, geology, astronomy, astrophysics, general physics, sociology, archeology, fuck, they disagree with everything.
    I guess after the previous plans of keeping the folk stupid via illiteracy didn't work out, religious sects are now counting on those who deliberatly do not read.
     
    Last edited: Feb 11, 2014
  19. B.J.

    B.J. Rear Admiral Rear Admiral

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  20. JarodRussell

    JarodRussell Vice Admiral Admiral

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    Kinda the thing. Religion and philosophy is supposed to answer the WHY, not the HOW.