Enmos
Valued Senior Member
It hinders science if people believe the bible literally. They teach it to their kids etc. Now they can take their kids to this wonderful museum as well. It's wrong.
Creation Museum
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It hinders science if people believe the bible literally. They teach it to their kids etc. Now they can take their kids to this wonderful museum as well. It's wrong.
Oh heck. Crap like this is all over the internet. They listen to sermons on it on Sundays. This museum isn't showing anything they don't already believe.
I wanna go so I can laugh and point. And maybe get my pic with the man and dinosaur exhibit. Hey, I know its true cuz I saw it on the Flintstones.
I wanna go so I can laugh and point. And maybe get my pic with the man and dinosaur exhibit. Hey, I know its true cuz I saw it on the Flintstones.
Enmos
Valued Senior Member
The thing about this museum is that it's all packaged like a fun day out for the family..
They made it very accessible for kids and that's what bothers me I guess.
I have...
See Enmos. There are worse thing for Christian kids than that museum.
Enmos
Valued Senior Member
LOL You have a point there..
My dad believes the world is only 6000 years old...I've never got a straight answer from him about dinosaurs and why they are not mentioned in the bible.
You'd think with eating machines, like T-rex running around, at least someone would have mentioned them.
You'd think with eating machines, like T-rex running around, at least someone would have mentioned them.
I will tell you right now that most Christians don't believe this. I hope you aren't judging every religious person based on this one museum.Enmos said:
If you hate the museum so much, simply don't go there. Vote with your wallet. You don't have to sit there and criticize other people for what they believe. It's their choice, and it really doesn't affect you.
Enmos
Valued Senior Member
Of course I know that, but apparently the creationists are working to get a larger audience..
Who cares if they believe in creation? Natural selection is just as dubious.
Enmos
Valued Senior Member
Natural selection is not dubious :bugeye:
Some members of the public might have the impression that scientists have solved the problem of abiogenesis. But that doesn't mean that scientists actually say they have solved that problem. As a matter of fact, they do not.
On the other hand, life had to come from somewhere. If it did not arise from non-life, then where? Did God tweak the universe just the once? Or what?
Spoken like somebody who knows next to nothing about evolution.
Fraggle Rocker
Staff member
Yes. We have not yet put together all of the pieces of the puzzle to explain how organic matter developed from inorganic matter. No one disagrees with that.
But the Evolution Denialists equate abiogenesis with evolution. They try to use the fact that at this point abiogenesis is an unsubstantiated hypothesis as a rationale to assert that evolution is also an unsubstantiated hypothesis. That is scientific fraud and anyone who makes that assertion on SciForums is automatically guilty of the worst category of trolling: misrepresentation of science. We just finished kicking a guy out of here for that, although it wasn't about evolution. He deliberately misquoted a scientific paper to make a fraudulent point.
Let us be clear: Anyone who states that evolution has been disproven because abiogenesis is a weak hypothesis is trolling. They will be dealt with mercilessly.
Furthermore, creationism is an anti-scientific theory because it is based on the existence of a supernatural universe, which cannot be observed or tested by science. It denies the fundamental principle of science as the study of nature: The future behavior of the universe can be predicted by making logical deductions from empirical observations of its past behavior. Posting anti-scientific rhetoric in any of our science subforums also qualifies as trolling because this is a place of science. Debates about the validity of the scientific method can be held in the Philosophy subforum, where they will meet with considerably better debating skills than we're required to have here.
Apparently he thought better of it and deleted the post in question. We do put up with a certain level of personal insults considering that most of our members are children and these days children get away with talking that way to their own parents.
What's outrageous is that they're denying a huge chunk of history in which some very important events occurred.
- The self-domestication of dogs ca. 15000BCE. This may have been the key experience that made civilization possible. By learning that it's possible to live in harmony and cooperation with "people" who aren't even our species, we might have begun to speculate that we could just as easily try to get along with the tribe in the next valley.
- The migration of the first of three waves of Paleoindians from Siberia ca. 12000BCE. They left much of their culture and technology behind to make that trek. Yet they managed to recreate it and develop two civilizations only 10,000 years later... which the Christian armies of Europe obliterated.
- The invention of the technology of agriculture ca. 9500BCE, which both allowed and required us to stop being nomads and build permanent settlements.
- The building of the first city at Jericho in 9000BCE. Just a few hundred years after the division of labor and economy of scale of village life produced the first surplus, or capital, we were ready to experiment with even larger communities to see if we could create even greater prosperity. Civilization produced such a large surplus that for the first time people could have full-time careers in teaching, inventing, exploration, art, music... and science.
Judging by what some of our foreign members say, this appears to be primarily an American phenomenon. This fashionable ignorance of science and math will very likely be the downfall of our country. I'm old enough that I probably won't live to see that happen. But you younger people might be wise to start thinking about emigration. If the Religious Redneck Retards don't persecute you for being rational, they will at least destroy America's culture and economy so you will be trying to make a decent living in a vassal state of China and India.
some? the real problem i have with this situation is that this isn't really stressed in our high schools. teachers do not stress the fact that science regards evolution and abiogenesis as two separate things. how many times have you personally pointed out to posters here that abiogenesis and evolution are not the same thing?
you are correct.
as a matter of fact they stay completely mum on the subject, they do not mention that the origins of life and evolution are not the same things, and they teach only evolution in our schools. so, what are students going to assume james?
read my posts james.
i stressed that there is no proof that life came from non life naturally.
again, read my posts.
i did not say anything about a god did i.
all i stated is that science has no proof that life arose naturally on this planet and the place becomes thoroughly unglued. amazing isn't it.
Enmos
Valued Senior Member
Excellent posts James and Fraggle, thanks !
Leopold, I don't know what teachers you had but mine did stress that abiogenesis and evolution are not the same thing. Furthermore when learning about evolution abiogenesis isn't even included, so I don't know why anybody would assume they are the same thing even if their teacher didn't expressively tell them.
Life must have come from non-life.. if not what did it come from ?
I suspect that you are going to say that God made life from non-life. So it is, in your view, a process that is naturally possible (the materials didn't change, carbon form non-life material is still the same carbon in the alive material).
If the emergence of life from non-life is naturally possible then why couldn't it have taken place naturally. To assume that God did it is a far bigger assumption than the assumption that it arose naturally.
This point isn't even relevant, because religion and science answer different questions. Science answers the "what", whereas religion answers the "who" (or "what motive"). Things that are natural happen by the will of God, and things that God does are natural (he doesn't break the rules of the universe, because he causes the universe to be that way).Enmos said:
Many people think that Christians can't believe in evolution. This isn't true at all. Educated Christians believe that evolution occurs, and that it is made possible by God. Likewise, we believe that abiogenesis occured in some way or another (because like you said, if not from non-life, then from where?).
We simply believe this happened because God wanted it to, through natural processes (i.e. by setting up the chain of circumstances making it possible). This doesn't go against Christianity, since the bible is an allegory, and it doesn't go against science, because it doesn't deny any known scientific occurrence.
In other words, you don't have to get so mad when someone uses God to explain a natural event. Nobody is contradicting you, or science. (The only exception to this is by people who don't believe in an allegorical interpretation of the Bible, which is a relatively small portion of Christians - and a portion I don't agree with).
Fraggle Rocker
Staff member
No it's not amazing at all. The fundamental thesis of science is that the natural universe is a closed system that can be understood and predicted by logically deriving theories from empirical observation of its past behavior. To throw one's hands up in the air and say that there must be a supernatural universe merely because we have not yet learned enough about this one to understand its more elusive phenomena is to give up on science! It is more egregious than the people who postulated that the sun revolves around the earth, or that earth, air, fire and water are the four elements, or that the earth is flat, because those theories were within the bounds of the natural universe as it had been observed up to that point.
If you're saying that organic matter cannot arise naturally from inorganic matter, then there are only two ways to interpret your statement. The first deals with your first word "arise." Perhaps you're saying that life has always existed in the universe, that there has always been organic matter. This is unscientific because we know enough about the early microseconds of the universe to know that there was no solid matter, much less organic matter. The second deals with your second word "naturally." If life has not always existed in the universe, and it cannot arise from inorganic matter, and there was a time in the history of the universe when only inorganic matter existed, we have a paradox and the natural universe does not allow paradoxes. You carefully avoid using the word "god," but if you're not hypothesizing a supernatural force, then how indeed do you resolve this paradox? This is no longer an exercise in science, whose theories can never be proven true, but in logic, which is pure abstraction and therefore delivers incontrovertible truth. The truth is that there are no paradoxes in nature, so the only resolution of the paradox is to postulate a supernatural universe.
Either way you're being at best unscientific and at worst antiscientific, and in either case your argument has no place in a scientific discussion. Take it to the Religion subforum, our ghetto for the superstitious, or the Philosophy subforum, where you'd better sharpen your debating skills to survive, or the Pseudoscience subforum, where there are no rules. But in General Science and Technology this is trolling and trolling is forbidden.
To speak of a "motive" implies that nature isn't enough for you. That is human hubris. Are these lumps of protoplasm that have evolved the ability to think so gol-danged important that the entire universe must be modeled after us, with a "motive" for everything? That there just has to be a caretaker tweaking things here and there to make them perfect, the way we prune and rake our gardens? That a universe without conscious control could not possibly exist, at least not in this exalted state in which Homo sapiens happens to exist?
In any case, this is the old Cosmic Watchmaker theory. The C.W. carefully built a universe with Euclidean geometry, a lightspeed limitation, four basic forces, and the other natural laws (if that's not already a complete set). Then he set it in motion and here we are. This theory even allows for the C.W. to have created fossils, suspiciously similar DNA patterns, lightwaves in transit, and galaxies moving away from each other, making the universe appear to be billions of years old when in fact he actually pushed the Start button six thousand years ago.
This makes for a nice story and of course it cannot be disproven, so it is not a scientific theory. Nonetheless it does not resolve the paradox of abiogenesis. The C.W. is alive. Where did he come from? Is the proscription against abiogenesis just one of the rules he created for our natural universe, but it doesn't apply to the much larger supernatural universe he inhabits?
Well ain't that just special?
Uh dude, you must not be writing from America. A majority of our population (a slim majority or a substantial one, depending on the poll, but a majority nonetheless) are evolution denialists. Politicians are falling all over each other to avoid saying they accept the validity of the theory of evolution, because to do so would be to alienate more than half of the electorate. You can bet these people are not the Jews and the atheists.
As I say, you can't be an American. Our universities are cranking out graduates who deny evolution and they are not the Jewish and atheist students.
Once again, in America it is the majority of Christians. This is probably the main reason I coined the term Religious Redneck Retard Revival. And the reason I counsel young people to keep their options open in case it gets so bad they have to emigrate.
I suspect that the reason abiogenesis is not taught in schools is the same reason that string theory is not taught in schools. Both areas of knowledge are not settled - they are controversial among cutting-edge scientists. What we teach schoolchildren is things we're fairly sure are correct.
Why should they assume anything?
Why are you avoiding the issue?
If life did not come from non-life, where do you think it came from?
You must have some alternative idea.
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