Dawkins calls for mockery of Catholics in America

[Grasshopper]

If you go back a few replies you might be able to see how I need help commenting between quotes. How should I fix that post, Grasshopper? Gratias.

It's kind of a pain. What I do is this: every time I want to insert a comment between quotes, I type "/quote", then hit the "Enter" key a few times, then type "quote" (Note: both the /quote and the quote should be surrounded by square brackets, "[" and "]" but if I actually put those in, it will do it instead of showing it ). Then I go back and insert my comment in the blank line(s) that I created between the unquote and the quote. Then when I'm done, I click on "Preview" to make sure it looks right before I post it.

There may be an easier way, but that's how I do it.

[per_passionem_eius]

If you go back a few replies you might be able to see how I need help commenting between quotes. How should I fix that post, Grasshopper? Gratias.

It's kind of a pain. What I do is this: every time I want to insert a comment between quotes, I type "/quote", then hit the "Enter" key a few times, then type "quote" (Note: both the /quote and the quote should be surrounded by square brackets, "[" and "]" but if I actually put those in, it will do it instead of showing it ). Then I go back and insert my comment in the blank line(s) that I created between the unquote and the quote. Then when I'm done, I click on "Preview" to make sure it looks right before I post it.

There may be an easier way, but that's how I do it.

Sorry about the difficulty in making sense of my comments as they appear in that quote from you a few posts back. I'm looking forward to hearing your reply.

[per_passionem_eius]

It's #119. Clumsy oaf me. 

[Vetus Ordo]

The fossil record

Does not prove evolution. In fact, it's been a huge disappointment to evolutionists.

the radiometrically-measured ages of the rocks in which it appears

A process that has been criticised and open to lots of assumptions like stable radioactive decay.

sedimentation patterns

Don't prove evolution. In fact the assumption that the lower parts are older than the parts on the surface has been disproved at least by one Russian scientist.

astronomical observations

I'm not sure I follow. Astronomical observations prove evolution?

Pick up any basic geology textbook. It's all there.

Books are being rewritten all the time. The amount of factual errors inserted in those books in order to prove evolution should make any evolutionist blush with shame.

We may not have specifically observed one species transforming into another (how could we -- it doesn't happen within a human lifetime), but we haven't physically observed animals materializing out of nothing either.

Oh, yes, it really hasn't been observed. A small inconvenient.

And your jab at biblical creation is, again unwarranted. We don't believe animals materialise out of thin air, we believe they were all created by God according to their kind in the beginning. They're not evolving into something else, they're already there. In fact, there's no way evolutionists can tell that the human being won't evolve into something else in a few million years. Who knows? Man is certainly not the pinnacle of creation, made in the image and likeness of God, and desceding from one original pair according to the evolutionary hypothesis. He's just another animal in an undefined evolutionary stage. There are no definite and stable life forms in the perptual chaos of evolution. It's ridiculous.

At least we have scientific mechanisms (which have been observed) that can explain speciation.

What mechanisms? Mutations? Those don't explain anything, they only obscure the matter even further since they're mostly harmful. And then again, you can't have "partial animals" (half-reptile, half-birds, etc.) that function properly and reproduce, not to mention healthy organs: half-eyes, half-livers and so forth.

Your theory is not even remotely plausible without invoking miracles. And if it indeed happened within a 6-day period 6000 years ago, this would directly contradict all the geologic evidence referenced above. I don't believe that God is a trickster.

Miracles? All life and existence is a miracle unto itself, what did you expect? I don't see the problem in accepting the fact that God simply created the animals and the plants of the earth as they are, with the possibility to change within kind but not out of it. How is that fact any more fantastical than abiogenesis, primordial soups, punctuated equilibrium, a reptile slowly turning into a bird after millions of years and so on?

You keep repeating that God is a trickster because you just take for granted that there's incontrovertible "evidence" out there supporting evolution when that's simply not the case. I've suggested this site to you before but it seems you're not very interested in the fact that Genesis has a really a factual account of creation. Here it goes anyway: The Kolbe Center

[Grasshopper]

If you go back a few replies you might be able to see how I need help commenting between quotes. How should I fix that post, Grasshopper? Gratias.

It's kind of a pain. What I do is this: every time I want to insert a comment between quotes, I type "/quote", then hit the "Enter" key a few times, then type "quote" (Note: both the /quote and the quote should be surrounded by square brackets, "[" and "]" but if I actually put those in, it will do it instead of showing it ). Then I go back and insert my comment in the blank line(s) that I created between the unquote and the quote. Then when I'm done, I click on "Preview" to make sure it looks right before I post it.

There may be an easier way, but that's how I do it.

Sorry about the difficulty in making sense of my comments as they appear in that quote from you a few posts back. I'm looking forward to hearing your reply.

Hmmm... I wasn't going to reply to that one, precisely because of the difficulty of dealing with all the embedded quotes. I didn't have any trouble reading your post, but replying to it would be a bit of a headache. To do that, I would have to copy it into Word and do some heavy editing. Maybe I will do that, but probably not tonight.

[per_passionem_eius]

If you go back a few replies you might be able to see how I need help commenting between quotes. How should I fix that post, Grasshopper? Gratias.

It's kind of a pain. What I do is this: every time I want to insert a comment between quotes, I type "/quote", then hit the "Enter" key a few times, then type "quote" (Note: both the /quote and the quote should be surrounded by square brackets, "[" and "]" but if I actually put those in, it will do it instead of showing it ). Then I go back and insert my comment in the blank line(s) that I created between the unquote and the quote. Then when I'm done, I click on "Preview" to make sure it looks right before I post it.

There may be an easier way, but that's how I do it.

Sorry about the difficulty in making sense of my comments as they appear in that quote from you a few posts back. I'm looking forward to hearing your reply.

Hmmm... I wasn't going to reply to that one, precisely because of the difficulty of dealing with all the embedded quotes. I didn't have any trouble reading your post, but replying to it would be a bit of a headache. To do that, I would have to copy it into Word and do some heavy editing. Maybe I will do that, but probably not tonight.

“It's not so much Genesis itself that is the problem, as people's interpretation of it. It seems clear to me that the "days" in Genesis are not the same kind of days that we experience now. For one thing, we define days in terms of the sun, and according to Genesis, there was no sun until the fourth day. So what kind of "days" could there have been before then?”

(Why couldn't God have created time before the markers of it?)

“Genesis is a very vague, schematic account of the creation, written down many generations after the fact by someone who was not there. It's not an eyewitness account.”

(No, it's divine revelation. Any eye-witness accounts to your ideas of old-earth evolutionism?)

“It seems absurd to me to interpret it as a step-by-step factual account of exactly what happened. It is clearly not intended that way.”

(It was intended to help us save our souls.)

“I don't deny a spiritual Maker at all, nor do I demand proof of such. However, I also do not judge the quality of scientific evidence by how closely it conforms to the details of Genesis. For the most part, there are no details in Genesis. It is, like I said earlier, a vague schematic account. I see nothing in the theory of evolution or the concept of an old earth that conflicts with Genesis, unless you insist on 6 literal days of the same sort that we have now.”

(Original sin conflicts with it, as has already been pointed out.)

“I have already given one objection to that interpretation. Another objection is that the evidence simply contradicts it. Unless our understanding of physics, astronomy, geology, etc. is completely wrong (and if so, it is truly amazing that we have managed to build cars, computers, and airplanes that actually work)”

(Our technical ability is not any guarantee that we're right about everything else too!)

“or unless God (or the Devil) is tricking us by planting a bunch of false evidence”

(I wouldn't be the slightest bit surprised to find out (on the Last Day) that the reason the calculations of the time from the creation of Adam, to the birth of Christ vary so much, is because God didn't intend for us to place so much importance on dates - He only meant to give us a general idea.)

“the earth is billions of years old, it existed for hundreds of millions of years before any life appeared on it, and it was hundreds of millions of years after that before humans appeared. No way it all happened in 6 days 6000 years ago. It's hard to think of any physical evidence that would convince me of that.”

(You're right to know you'll never have evidence of that. That's obvious. All we have is divine revelation. That's enough for me.)

“All the evidence to the contrary (and there is a ton of it) would have to go away.”

(Or be explained somehow.)

“Again, I see no contradiction or conflict in any of this. Genesis tells us that God created the universe, without providing much in the way of details. Science does the best it can to fill in those details. I have no problem accepting both.”

(I see a problem in what appears to be a kind of idol worship of material science.)

[Grasshopper]

This is in reply to Vetus Ordo's long post (responding to one of mine). I'm not quoting his, because there are only a few statements I want to reply to, and I just don't want to deal with all the embedded quotes.

Yes, geology textbooks (and scientific textbooks) are continuously updated as the science advances. That's the way science works -- it corrects itself. But what changes are the details, not the overall structure. The basic framework of evolutionary theory and how evolution happens hasn't changed much since Darwin.

As for the various kinds of evidence that "don't prove evolution" -- no, not specifically, but they do prove that the earth is much much older than 6000 years (astronomical observations prove the same thing about the universe in general), and that living species have appeared differentially over a span of hundreds of millions of years. There were trilobites long before there were dinosaurs, and there were dinosaurs long before there were people. And so on. Given that we have never observed any life coming into existence any other way than by reproduction of existing life, we put two and two together and come up with evolution. It is the best scientific explanation that we have yet found to explain the observed facts. As soon as you have a better one -- that doesn't rely on miracles -- I'm all ears.

As for the Kolbe Center website, I've been there, and I found no science whatsoever -- just endless ad hominem attacks against evolutionists, and how the theory can't be true because they "have an agenda". The Kolbe Center has its own agenda -- a preconception that the book of Genesis is literal historic and scientific fact, and we'll just ignore any evidence to the contrary. I will repeat what I have said many times before -- the theory of evolution is a scientific theory, based on physical evidence. If you want to refute it, you have to demonstrate its falsity scientifically. by addressing the details of the argument -- and ideally, proposing a scientifically viable alternative. You can't just say "my agenda is better than your agenda", and that's all I see them doing. I couldn't find a single scientific argument anywhere.

[Hawaii Five-0]

This is in reply to Vetus Ordo's long post (responding to one of mine). I'm not quoting his, because there are only a few statements I want to reply to, and I just don't want to deal with all the embedded quotes.

Yes, geology textbooks (and scientific textbooks) are continuously updated as the science advances. That's the way science works -- it corrects itself. But what changes are the details, not the overall structure. The basic framework of evolutionary theory and how evolution happens hasn't changed much since Darwin.

As for the various kinds of evidence that "don't prove evolution" -- no, not specifically, but they do prove that the earth is much much older than 6000 years (astronomical observations prove the same thing about the universe in general), and that living species have appeared differentially over a span of hundreds of millions of years. There were trilobites long before there were dinosaurs, and there were dinosaurs long before there were people. And so on. Given that we have never observed any life coming into existence any other way than by reproduction of existing life, we put two and two together and come up with evolution. It is the best scientific explanation that we have yet found to explain the observed facts. As soon as you have a better one -- that doesn't rely on miracles -- I'm all ears.

As for the Kolbe Center website, I've been there, and I found no science whatsoever -- just endless ad hominem attacks against evolutionists, and how the theory can't be true because they "have an agenda". The Kolbe Center has its own agenda -- a preconception that the book of Genesis is literal historic and scientific fact, and we'll just ignore any evidence to the contrary. I will repeat what I have said many times before -- the theory of evolution is a scientific theory, based on physical evidence. If you want to refute it, you have to demonstrate its falsity scientifically. by addressing the details of the argument -- and ideally, proposing a scientifically viable alternative. You can't just say "my agenda is better than your agenda", and that's all I see them doing. I couldn't find a single scientific argument anywhere.

Pffftt! 

[Vetus Ordo]

Yes, geology textbooks (and scientific textbooks) are continuously updated as the science advances. That's the way science works -- it corrects itself. But what changes are the details, not the overall structure.

Actually, many books have been corrected because of evolutionary hoaxes found in them. In that sense, yes, science and intellectual honesty have advanced a bit.

The basic framework of evolutionary theory and how evolution happens hasn't changed much since Darwin.

Of course not. And how could it? It's an unfalsifiable theory. It's not even (empirical) science by common standards. You can basically fit any "evidence" into it and call it evolution.

As for the various kinds of evidence that "don't prove evolution" -- no, not specifically, but they do prove that the earth is much much older than 6000 years (astronomical observations prove the same thing about the universe in general), and that living species have appeared differentially over a span of hundreds of millions of years. There were trilobites long before there were dinosaurs, and there were dinosaurs long before there were people. And so on. Given that we have never observed any life coming into existence any other way than by reproduction of existing life, we put two and two together and come up with evolution.

 

You're confused. So, you observe how animals and plants reproduce and infer evolution?

It is the best scientific explanation that we have yet found to explain the observed facts. As soon as you have a better one -- that doesn't rely on miracles -- I'm all ears.

1. Evolution is not a scientific explanation, it's a philosophical assumption.
2. Creationism is not about miracles, it's about fidelity to God's word and true human knowledge, which is what science should be all about.

As for the Kolbe Center website, I've been there, and I found no science whatsoever -- just endless ad hominem attacks against evolutionists, and how the theory can't be true because they "have an agenda". The Kolbe Center has its own agenda -- a preconception that the book of Genesis is literal historic and scientific fact, and we'll just ignore any evidence to the contrary. I will repeat what I have said many times before -- the theory of evolution is a scientific theory, based on physical evidence. If you want to refute it, you have to demonstrate its falsity scientifically. by addressing the details of the argument -- and ideally, proposing a scientifically viable alternative. You can't just say "my agenda is better than your agenda", and that's all I see them doing. I couldn't find a single scientific argument anywhere.

In a single paragraph you've just demonstrated never to have read anything from Kolbe Center. It's too bad. It's your own bias speaking.

[Grasshopper]

As for the various kinds of evidence that "don't prove evolution" -- no, not specifically, but they do prove that the earth is much much older than 6000 years (astronomical observations prove the same thing about the universe in general), and that living species have appeared differentially over a span of hundreds of millions of years. There were trilobites long before there were dinosaurs, and there were dinosaurs long before there were people. And so on. Given that we have never observed any life coming into existence any other way than by reproduction of existing life, we put two and two together and come up with evolution.

 

You're confused. So, you observe how animals and plants reproduce and infer evolution?

Not from that isolated fact. You have to put that together with the fact immediately preceding it in the above paragraph -- that we have lifeforms existing now that didn't exist a few hundred million years ago, and lifeforms existing then that didn't exist a few hundred million years before that, and so on. If you only get new life from reproduction of existing life, the only way to get from the lifeforms of the Jurassic to those of today is evolution. You can propose creation if you like, but then we have millions of separate acts of creation spread out over an extremely long period of time. That could have happened, but science generally attempts to proceed without invoking miracles -- otherwise, there's no point in doing science at all.