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

Go tell that to the religious nutters who feel threatened by science. Science isn't telling anyone "your gods don't exist." Science simply isn't concerned with the topic, as it's not scientific.

 

Young Earth Creationists have - in their misguided religious fervor- have done even more damage to the Bible's reputation. Somehow they have found a way to ignore what the Bible ACTUALLY says, refuse to allow thought about who the Genesis account was written for, what Biblical Hebrew means,etc.

A few factual points about the Genesis account.

Genesis 1:1 states that "In the beginning (a translation of a Hebrew word that is not bound by any specific time frame orstart/end point) God created the heavens and the earth"

So in one single verse, the people who believe that the physical universe AND the earth are only 6,000 years old are shown to be believing a falsehood. The Bible is shown to be in agreement with the scientific discoveries that the universe and our planet are very, very old.

Then verse 2 switches perspectives. As Genesis was written for a pastoral, migrant people who had no concept of human flight, were not accustomed to looking at things from a "birds - eye" view, etc Moses described events from the perspective of a person standing on the level of the ground: the earth's atmosphere clearing so that the light of the Sun, moon, and stars would appear, the volcanic and other geological forces causing continents "dry land" to appear, plant life growing and flourishing, animals being created to fill the earth and finally humans.

Well how could each of these events happen in a 24 - hour period?

They didn't. The Hebrew word translated "day" does not refer to a 24 - hour period but rather a period with a defined beginning and a defined end but NOT a defined length. So the Bible does not support the notion that things were created in 24 hour increments. Not only does such a teaching ignore logic and science it also ignores the original languages in which the Bible were written.

There are millions of sensible, honest Christians who DO NOT follow this artificial and insensible construct called "Young - Earth" creationism.

P.S. The Bible states that GOD brought the animals to Noah, not that he sent Noah to go get them.

 

But that doesn't explain how the flightless Kiwi bird got from Turkey to the island of New Zealand after the floods.

 

Of course god zapped them all back afterwards and poofed the whole ecosystem back into existance so all the animals could commit incest for the next centuries without starving.

 

One big change is that monkeys can barely reproduce at a replacement rate, because the mommy monkey has to keep one arm free to hold onto the tree, so she can't have another baby until the first one is independent. The other option was to grow three arms. This also means that monkey childhood can't drag out too long or it very adversely impacts the reproduction rate, because only one offspring can be "in queue" at a time.

 

I'm not entirely sure gturner is serious about anything he writes.

 

Two different principles. Murphy's Law states (somewhat facetiously) that anything that can go wrong, will go wrong.

 

The climate changed significantly at some point and the thick forests they had lived in previously slowly dried up and thinned out and eventually turned into savanna and desert. The trees going away is a pretty good reason to stop living in them.

Handy thing that geologic record.

 

Because evolution doesn't need God and why would an all powerful God need evolution.

 

Science can answer why and the answer is THERE IS NO WHY. Stuff happens.

 

This is not what science says.

 

Well, so far, science says there is no why necessary for stuff to happen.
So why would we assume there is?
Just to feel better about ourselves is the most likely answer to that why at least.

 

Actually, what science says so far is that natural phenomena seem to obey natural laws. As best that science can tell, any why that there is is to be found in the form of natural laws. So, the idea that there is no why is pretty much dead wrong.

In other words, I reject this restriction that natural laws provide only the answer to the question of how. Natural laws answer what, when, where, to whom; they answer all sorts of questions besides just how.

 

Yeah, though I suspect most people asking for the why mean that as in "the grand scheme of things and purpose/intend" and not as in "the mechanism behind it".

 

Science hasn't said that since the 19th century. What Science said is that all events have a probability and what you call "natural laws" are descriptions of high probability events.

Assuming I accept your outdated notion of science, how is having "natural laws" have anything to do with "why". You aren't going to state some old fashioned deist arguments.

 

Having a creator implies that the universe has a purpose BUT the universe doesn't need a creator therefore it doesn't need a purpose.

 

Sorta...

I also wrote a long post that was trying to say "Don't be a dick."

--Alex

 

Oh you mean the part that accused me of ignorance while stating shopworn apologetic arguments that they teach to third graders.

Guess what. Everything I stated is stuff you learn in the first year of seminary or any credible theology course. Rabbis in the time of Jesus were debating the inconsistencies in Genesis. In the end, people will make up silly arguments to support their delusion, I mean faith.

 

That's false.

I suppose you're going to try to argue that quantum theory only asserts probabilities for why things happen. Well, that may be for events on the atomic scale, but how those probabilities are calculated themselves constitute natural laws, in the sense that all the evidence indicates that natural phenomena obey those statistics.

There are three important objections to the notion that physical theories must abandon determinism. The first is that Bohm provided a completely deterministic field theory that is mathematically equivalent to quantum mechanics, whose primary aesthetic shortcoming is that it isn't a local field theory. The second is that there is still no unified theory of general relativity and quantum mechanics. The third is that, in his effort to unify quantum mechanics and general relativity, Everett's relative state formulation also provided a mathematically equivalent formulation of standard quantum mechanics, simply in terms of a field theory exactly satisfying a system of differential equations. In other words, the so-called many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics is, at least mathematically, a fully deterministic field theory.

The notion that there are no deterministic field theories accepted in the 21st century even by just conservative standards is patently false, on account of the fact general relativity is still considered valid for certain types of phenomena. Any argument that general relativity is less legitimate than quantum mechanics can be reversed to argue that quantum mechanics is less legitimate than general relativity, because neither theory offers an all-encompassing picture of physical reality. The truth is that neither theory is complete. Bleeding edge work such as that by Hawking is still only hypothetical and far from generally accepted.

The better question is why anyone should allow the term why to be hijacked to have only senses such as "for what moral reason".

If I were to ask whether you could say why the tides go in an out without ever a miscommunication between them, would you answer that it's largely because of the moon's gravity, or would you pedantically nitpick the question?

 

Deterministic formulas like general relativity exist because mathematically their results are close enough to a result of a probability base formulation (Which we don't have yet) but a Grand Unified theory will be by the nature of quantum physics be a probabilistic model. The simple fact is that no event can have a predetermined probability of 100% or 0% therefore the universe can not be deterministic in nature.

What makes you think "why" should have any association with morals. George Carlin believed the Universe existed to create plastic. The question of "why" is imposed by humans who want to impose their own views on the Universe.

Gravity explains HOW the tides function not why. Asking why tides exist (the purpose) is pointless because they are a natural phenomenon that simply happen because of circumstance.