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Author Topic: Darwin  (Read 19478 times)

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AGelbert

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Re: Darwin
« Reply #30 on: December 18, 2013, 09:33:23 pm »
We have centipedes and we have mosquitos. How come such analogous shapes are allegedly NOT related? BECAUSE they show up at the same time in the fossil record. Why do they assume (no proof, just Darwinian based speculation) something is not related to something else when they appear at the same time? Because the Theory REQUIRES a distance in time for one thing to evolve into another, period.


A similar major flaw in the evolutionary paradigm can be shown by comparing species with very similar mental attributes, but which are, according to evolutionists, not at all related.

http://www.reasons.org/articles/quoth-the-raven-nevermore
In the recent opinion essay in Nature, biologist Johan Bolhuis and psychologist Clive Wynne accept the premise that species have naturally evolved and, thus, possess shared ancestry. But they contest the Darwinian principle “that species with shared ancestry will have similar cognitive abilities.”5 For example, researchers have noted cognitive similarities between physically disparate species, but not necessarily between physically similar species. Bolhuis and Wynne point out that this “illustrates that cognitive traits cannot be neatly arranged in an evolutionary scale of relatedness.”6

Bolhuis and Wynne contrast the cognitive capacities of birds and primates. In the Darwinian models, apes and humans are closely related and share a relatively recent common ancestor. Birds, on the other hand, are only distantly related to primates. Thus, Darwinists predict that of all animals, apes should come closest to manifesting the cognitive capabilities of human beings.

But Bolhuis and Wynne give examples where birds defy this prediction. They cite how “Caledonian crows [though not quite matching ravens in intellectual prowess] outperform monkeys in their ability to retrieve food from a trap tube–from which food can be accessed only at one end.”7 They also refer to an experiment demonstrating that “crows can also work out how to use one tool to obtain a second with which they can retrieve food, a skill that monkeys and apes struggle to master.”8 Evidently, certain bird species exhibit greater powers of the mind than do apes. (See crows’ cognitive powers in action here.)

High cognitive abilities of certain bird species even sometimes challenge a purely physical explanation for their behavior. Take for example the marsh tit. This bird stores seeds in tree bark or in the ground and is able to retrieve them days later while its “close relative,” the great tit, doesn’t store food at all.9 Biologists presumed the difference would be explained by a larger hippocampus in the brain of the food-storing birds. Alas, the evidence doesn’t support this suggestion.10 Studies also show that food-storers do not perform any better in spatial memory tasks than do the non-food-storers.11

In their paper in Behavioral and Brain Sciences, three psychology researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), boldly declared Darwin’s idea of the continuity of the mind (from lower species to higher) a mistake.12 They argue “there is a significant discontinuity in the degree to which human and nonhuman animals are able to approximate the higher order, systematic, relational capabilities of a physical symbol system.”13 They go on to show that this discontinuity “pervades nearly every domain of cognition and runs much deeper than even the spectacular scaffolding provided by language or culture alone can explain.”14

He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. Matt 10:37

AGelbert

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Re: Darwin
« Reply #31 on: December 18, 2013, 09:46:50 pm »
More from the doomstead Diner Thread  ;D

http://www.doomsteaddiner.net/forum/index.php?topic=2195.0

GO said,
Quote
Might I suggest that belief in a Creator, and belief in magic are two very different things?

Likewise how things work and what humans are.

  


Might I also suggest to the claim that "creationists are JUST LAZY" by others here that probability and statistics mathematicians are anything BUT lazy.

It is they who accuse you evolutionists of believing in fairy tales and magic. Respond to that instead of hurling abuse at creationists who you try to ridicule by bunching them falsely with the "God created the universe in 6 days and we are only 6,000 years old" NUT BALLS.

You Darwinists are as NUTTY and faith based as the 6 day creationists. You are also as arrogant and stubborn as they are.

Science states that either God did it or ET made this biosphere. Either way, evolution is BUL****! Live with it or die in denial. Your choice.  ;)

Quote
... information theorist Hubert Yockey (UC Berkeley) realized this problem:

"The origin of life by chance in a primeval soup is impossible in probability in the same way that a perpetual machine is in probability. The extremely small probabilities calculated in this chapter are not discouraging to true believers … [however] A practical person must conclude that life didn’t happen by chance."43

Note that in his calculations, Yockey generously granted that the raw materials were available in a primeval soup. But in the previous chapter of his book, Yockey showed that a primeval soup could never have existed, so belief in it is an act of ‘faith’. He later concluded, "the primeval soup paradigm is self-deception based on the ideology of its champions."44

More admissions

Note that Yockey is not the only high-profile academic to speak plainly on this issue:

"Anyone who tells you that he or she knows how life started on earth some 3.4 billion years ago is a fool or a knave. Nobody knows."—Professor Stuart Kauffman, origin of life researcher, University of Calgary, Canada.45

"…we must concede that there are presently no detailed Darwinian accounts of the evolution of any biochemical or cellular system, only a variety of wishful speculations." —Franklin M. Harold, Emeritus Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology Colorado State University.46

"Nobody knows how a mixture of lifeless chemicals spontaneously organized themselves into the first living cell."—Professor Paul Davies, then at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia.47

"The novelty and complexity of the cell is so far beyond anything inanimate in the world today that we are left baffled by how it was achieved."— Kirschner, M.W. (professor and chair, department of systems biology, Harvard Medical School, USA.), and Gerhart, J.C. (professor in the Graduate School, University of California, USA).48

"Conclusion: The scientific problem of the origin of life can be characterized as the problem of finding the chemical mechanism that led all the way from the inception of the first autocatalytic reproduction cycle to the last common ancestor. All present theories fall far short of this task. While we still do not understand this mechanism, we now have a grasp of the magnitude of the problem."49

]"The biggest gap in evolutionary theory remains the origin of life itself… the gap between such a collection of molecules [amino acids and RNA] and even the most primitive cell remains enormous."—Chris Wills, professor of biology at the University of California, USA.50

Even the doctrinaire materialist Richard Dawkins admitted to Ben Stein (Expelled, the movie documentary) that no one knows how life began:

Richard Dawkins: "We know the sort of event that must have happened for the origin of life—it was the origin of the first self-replicating molecule."

Ben Stein: "How did that happen?"

Richard Dawkins: "I’ve told you, we don’t know."

Ben Stein: "So you have no idea how it started?"

Richard Dawkins: "No, nor has anybody."51


"We will never know how life first appeared. However, the study of the appearance of life is a mature, well-established field of scientific inquiry. As in other areas of evolutionary biology, answers to questions on the origin and nature of the first life forms can only be regarded as inquiring and explanatory rather than definitive and conclusive."52 (emphasis added)[/b]




In nature, DNA can do some very wild things. I have seen what a mosquito larvae looks like under a microscope in a bit of pond water.  Observe the segmentation present also in millipedes and centipedes. Observe the feather/fin like multiple appendages instead of feet. It's a swimming centipede!


Mosquito larvae on left - much smaller than centipede on right

Yet a mosquito is not related, according to the evolutionists, to a centipede. That is, one did not evolve from the other. The insect hordes all show up around the Devonian - supposedly 400 million years ago with a few changes due to "natural selection" and extinction events to arrive at our "modern" insects - Triassic until now (you know, Dinosaurs until NOW  ;)).



comparison of Dinosaurs of the Triassic Period

Quote
Insect evolution is characterized by rapid adaptation  ???
with selective pressures exerted by environment, ???
with rapid adaptation being furthered by their high fecundity. ???

It appears ??? that rapid radiations and the appearance of new species, a process that continues to this day, ???
result in insects filling all available environmental niches.

Insect evolution is closely related to the evolution of flowering plants.     Insect adaptations include feeding on flowers and related structures, with some 20% of extant insects depending on flowers, nectar or pollen for their food source. This symbiotic relationship is even more paramount in evolution  considering that about 2/3 of flowering plants are insect pollinated.  ;) 

Insects are also vectors of many pathogens that may even have been responsible for the decimation or extinction of some mammalian species.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phylogeny_of_insects


I will take the above quote apart in a minute but let me tell you where I'm going with this centipede/ mosquito thing as related to studying hominid skulls.

We have centipedes and we have mosquitos. How come such analogous shapes are allegedly NOT related? BECAUSE they show up at the same time in the fossil record. Why do they assume (no proof, just Darwinian based speculation) something is not related to something else when they appear at the same time? Because the Theory REQUIRES a distance in time for one thing to evolve into another, period.

Now you would say, HEY, didn't Darwin think we came from apes (which, of course, exist now too!)? YEP. It was OBVIOUSLY, as Ashvin pointed out in a quote here recently, based on prejudice against negros and had nothing to do with science. If Darwin had been approaching the issue scientifically, he would have to ASSUME that all modern life forms are evolved from something that is not present today. But he didn't do that, did he?  ;)

The evolutionary scientists DO THAT today saying that, OBVIOUSLY, what we evolved from doesn't exist today so it was incorrect to think we are related to apes or chimps. It HAS to be that we have a common missing link someplace back there, they say. Sniff!

When they do that they step further into illogic. Why? Because Mosquitos and centipedes and dragon flies and MILLIONs (about 12 million total of which most are insects at last count) of other insects STOPPED "EVOLVING" at the time of the Triassic (and the links to their Devonian cousins are speculative due to the NEW forms that were symbiotic with the NEW types of plant life - angiosperms
Quote
The apparently sudden appearance of relatively modern flowers in the fossil record initially posed such a problem for the theory of evolution that it was called an "abominable mystery" by Charles Darwin.[6]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flowering_plant)!
But they just don't want to address that brazen bit of inconsistency in their flawed theory. Now of course they want to talk about "rapid adaptation" and "evolutionary spurts" and all sorts of silliness that strains credibility in all but the most gullible.

So, back to the basic premise of a truly scientific approach to what is in the fossil record. A mosquito larvae looks like a centipede adult form. Let's check the DNA package to look for similar gene coding sequences. We find, say a 30% identical set of sequences for two creatures that did not evolve from each other. Hmmmm. There is NO fossil evidence of insects before the Devonian. Working hypothesis: Somebody designed them both. Why? Because they have a similar design and did not have time to evolve from anything else because there simply isn't anything else remotely similar to insects prior to that time. To complicate matters further, we have the angiosperms (flowering plants) showing up at the same time as the insects that pollinate AND feed on them(symbiosis).

In the quote from the evolutionary view of insect phylogeny above, observe the following DATA presented and why the conclusions are exactly backwards in an attempt to fit the facts to natural selection (and even that they mess up!).

 

1. RAPID ADAPTATION can ONLY occur when the DNA PACKAGE has latent coding sequences that respond to environmental pressures. Think of an aircraft fliying through the air. It has a landing gear that NEEDS TO BE HIDDEN or the plane won't fly as well. However, when it has to land, the landing gear has to come out for the plane to survive. The landing gear is in the ORIGINAL "DNA" package design of the aircraft and environmental conditions cause the "landing gear gene" to be expressed. This is NOT EVOLUTION. This is adaptation from a pre-planned DNA design.

The SLOW ADAPTATION to environmental stresses from mutations in natural selection CANNOT produce RAPID ANYTHING because 98% of mutations are harmful. I've discussed the math before. When Positive mutations occur, it is a glacially slow process. That process becomes MISSION IMPOSSIBLE when we have multiple symbiotic mechanisms occurring SIMULTANEOUSLY between two extremely disparate life forms (flowering plants and insects). 


2. After they emit all this silliness, "Insect evolution is characterized by rapid adaptation 
with selective pressures exerted by environment,..." , they jump to the old 'evolution through multiple generations' trick,   ;)
"with rapid adaptation being furthered by their high fecundity." .

WHY is this not logical, or truth based? BECAUSE the flowering plants arrived at the SAME TIME in the fossil record as the insects that feed on them AND pollinate them. If fecundity had anything to do with natural selection or any other "evolutionary" species modifying mechanism, we would have VERY DIFFERENT insects than the "modern" ones we have that are virtually UNCHANGED from the Triassic!

So fecundity works when it is CONVENIENT to the theory of evolution and doesn't when they don't need to explain some "difficulty" in their procrustean bed?  I don't think so.



After that package of pseudo-scientific assumptions above, they go ALL OUT into speculation to make a giant assumption,
"It appears  ;D that rapid radiations and the appearance of new species,...".

Let's correct that statement to state the FACTS,  "It appears  that rapid radiations and the rapid simultaneous appearance of new species depending for their existence on multiple symbiotic mechanisms cannot be explained by natural selection".



Finally, they make the final leap of Darwinian faith to the present despite not having ANY significant change in insects morphology since the Triassic to indicate "evolution" is in progress,
"a process that continues to this day, result in insects filling all available environmental niches."   

Let's correct that last bit of wishful thinking to reflect the facts on the ground: It appears  that  the rapid simultaneous appearance of new species depending for their existence on multiple symbiotic mechanisms cannot be explained by natural selection, indicating a (still unexplained) process occurred in the Triassic period that resulted in insects filling all available environmental niches of the present biosphere.

The symbiotic angiosperm/insect relationship is not rapidly adapting to the present level of planetary industrial toxins. Therefore, whatever the unexplained rapid adaptation mechanism that occurred in the Triassic Period was, there is no evidence that it is present today because we are experiencing a high level of species extinctions affecting, but not limited to, insects and angiosperms.


THAT is honest science.


To do HONEST SCIENCE as to our origins, I would proceed from my observation that mosquitoes and centipedes and angiosperms appeared simultaneously to find out when WE appeared. I would need a clock. I would start with Carbon-14 (up to 100,000 years accurately IF the carbon radioactive decay clock hasn't changed over that period but I would start with it just the same). WHY? Because we have items with organic carbon that we KNOW the date of like Egyptian mummies that we can crosscheck for accuracy.

Crude oil, for example contains NO carbon-14, indicating that, since the plant life form that became that oil decayed, all the C-14 has radiated out. That means crude oil is technically older than 100,000 years.

I would proceed to more higher scale dating methods only if I couldn't get C-14 data.


THEN I would start looking at DNA sequences.

Only after I was convinced our closest relative was not the one that looks most like us would I dig further. During that time I would study the tendon bone attachments, anatomy and physiology of hominid skulls. I would go where the data took me.

Yes, I have a working hypothesis that we are a package DNA deal (created by God) and I would certainly want to find proof. But it is far more logical to start with that hypothesis than the Darwinian one  because evolution doesn't have proof of their most basic premise! (the self assembling amino acids for the first cell).

Furthermore, I have fossil evidence that millions of species popped up out of nowhere in more than one strata.

I think I'm being more scientific and empirical than the Darwinists "it's all a crap shoot" arrogance, don't you?


It isn't "EASY" to believe in Created life versus Evolution; it is LOGICAL and Science BASED. It is also HARD to accept that we owe our existence to a supreme being much smarter than we are. But it is REALLY EASY to pretend we can do whatever the **** we want using a Darwinian Fairy tale to ignore ethical behavior. In Fact, there is NOTHING EASIER or LAZIER than saying life is a crap shoot. How ****ing convenient for you arrogant ****s.  ;)  Have a nice day. 

« Last Edit: January 04, 2014, 05:32:13 pm by AGelbert »
He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. Matt 10:37

AGelbert

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Re: Darwin
« Reply #32 on: December 18, 2013, 11:54:36 pm »
Eddie,
You are on a ROLL, today. Yahoo! If I didn't know you were from Texas, I would know now!  :icon_mrgreen:

Thank you for your enjoyment of my Renewable energy support. 


Of course I am prone to a bit of sermonizing and vitriol now and then.  ;D

It goes with the territory. Eddie, I have been THERE with college professors and health care professionals for the last 30 years or so on the intolerance, disdain, disparagement and continuous smirks about being ignorant and a magical thinker.

For nearly 8 months you have consistently weighed in on the issue of Christians in particular and believers in God in general maintaining repeatedly that they are magical thinkers as if you are discussing root canals or some other truth of your experience and profession.

Every time you do that, you are moving into religious territory and defending your world view. It should NOT bother you that we challenge it. But every time you talk about believers in God and scoffers of evolution like they are idiots, you are opening yourself up to debate.

If you don't want to talk religion, that's cool. Don't say we are magical thinkers. Every time you do, I will challenge you.

Do you think I have no clue where you are at? You live in Texas! You married someone who's father was a preacher, right? I know how intolerable and stuffed shirty those people can be. I know how pompous and rigid they can be too. Hypocrisy is rife in Evangelical Christianity. But they don't have a ****ing franchise on magical thinking and hypocrisy. When they get legalistic about 6 day creation or the Sabbath or whatever, they are justifying such wishful thinking with magical thinking that Moses was God's stenographer. But to group people who believe God created us with judgmental legalists is wrong, offensive, objectionable and unscientific. I do admit it's easier to group us all together as whackos not worthy serious consideration.

I have argued against evolution while I believed it was the way things happened since 1985 because my profs could not answer my questions about it logically.

I read a lot of science articles and the word "evolution" is like flies on **** for them. They just cannot write without using that word. I've got one about E. Coli "evolving" for a few years through thousands of generations in closed containers by varying nutritional content (the latest buzzword in evolutionary circles because they are in the process of **** canning natural selection in favor of caloric forced gene expression - more fairy tales  ::)).

The E. Coli is STILL, low and behold, E. Coli but one group metabolizes sugars at a few percentage points (about 3%) faster than the other so that is EVOLUTION!  Give me a ****ing break here! The term ADAPTATION has been captured by the evolutionists. Adaptation is gene expression to environmental conditions from a pre-existing package. That is NOT EVOLUTION.

WE intelligently designed E. Coli to make insulin by putting some plasmids into it but in millions of years it didn't do it on its own, did it?

Remember those coin flipping exercises in genetics? You know that it takes a LONG time to get students to obtain 9 tails and one head or vice versa by each person flipping one coin ten times. Now to get protein folded amino acids just right (assuming you HAVE all the amino acids you need all present) you need SEQUENTIAL 9 to one "mutations" (gross simplification but you get the idea). You need thousands of SEQUENTIAL (as in one after the other with NO GAPS) 9 to one mutations for that first cell. So if it takes one million years of primeval soup amino acid random folding to get ONE key protein, you need to go FACTORIAL (million times a million times a million, etc.) to get ALL the protein sequences needed for life.

There isn't enough time in a 14 billion year universe for that.

Remember all that stuff about vaccines and evolution? Remember how the cocci this or the bacilli that will "EVOLVE" antibiotic resistance? Hello? They are STILL cocci this or bacillus that, are they not? They didn't become E. Coli. There was adaptation, not evolution.

But they DID get some foreign genetic material so that must be evolution, right? WRONG. The "evolutionary advantage" that allowed them to become more virulent did not change their species. They adapted BECAUSE their DNA package allowed a plasmid for antibiotic resistance to be incorporated as part of its original design. The process by which Streptococcus pneumonia  metabolizes sugars and reproduces DID NOT CHANGE. It is STILL  Streptococcus pneumonia. But we were TAUGHT that was EVIDENCE of EVOLUTION. NOT!

What we did to E. Coli for insulin production is crude. It's still E. Coli even though we altered its metabolism. There comes a point in messing with bacterial DNA when the changes are rejected and it dies because every life form has programming to prevent becoming whatever it ISN'T. Nature breeds TRUE. DNA edits fastidiously to AVOID change. You know this.

Natural DE-selection works to cull species but natural selection has never produced an ORIGIN OF SPECIES as Darwin postulated.

If Darwin had seen the following short video, he would NEVER have tried to push the theory of evolution. Evolution is story telling magical thinking. If you don't agree, show me some proof that it is occurring. Instead of "change is constant in the natural world" meme we had hammered into us by evolutionary thinking, science has discovered that the DNA inside cells fight change continuously through very sophisticated editing.


Notice what happens AFTER a protein amino acid sequence is (in a complex, multistage process)  manufactured. At that point these tiny machines called Chaperones grab the sequence to PREVENT it from RANDOMLY folding. Did you get that? Every millisecond of every second of the day, trillions of chaperones inside cells are busy PREVENTING random amino acid folding. These chaperones carry the sequence to the chaperonin. They DO NOT KNOW how this CRUCIAL MACHINE does what it does.

And what does it DO? It FOLDS an amino acid sequence in EXACTLY the right complex 3 dimensional pattern worthy of a sophisticated factory robot and pumps out a protein. IT makes many, many DIFFERENT proteins. Protein folding is the process that was necessary for the first cell. And the arrogant evolutionists, who can't explain NOW the nuts and bolts of the Chaperonin have the brass balls to assume it happened randomly! Talk about MAGICAL THINKING! 

How does it KNOW, when a sequence arrives, that the folding pattern is one of thousands? They DON'T KNOW.

And NO, the key is not in the amino acid sequence. You can have two proteins (enzymes are like that) with exactly the same amino acid sequence but folded differently so they actually have different and extremely specific functions.

The more science learns, the more they realize we don't know BEANS about life yet.
 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LY0hZLDOb00&feature=player_embedded
HOW can ANYBODY believe the above happened RANDOMLY?

For those who have no training in microbiology, I will provide a series of pictures in the next post to give you an overview of the above video so you can view it again and marvel at this cell machinery in action.
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AGelbert

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Re: Darwin
« Reply #33 on: December 19, 2013, 12:03:12 am »
He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. Matt 10:37

AGelbert

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Re: Darwin
« Reply #34 on: December 20, 2013, 09:18:49 pm »
Ashvin Debates Bot Blogger:

 
Quote
So God dropped some life on the planet 4 BILLION years ago and then, three and a half BILLION years later (500 Million years ago) during the Cambrian period, God dropped the garden of Eden on earth. Then God took to sprinkling life forms on earth over the next few hundreds of millions of years culminating in humans being plunked onto the planet. Is that your story? Is That AGs story?
 



That could be a working hypothesis to explain the scientific data, yes. (but the science here only gets us to an "Intelligent Designer", not necessarily the God of the Bible)



Quote

Quote
Do we trust scientists to use carbon dating or whatever meager method they have to judge the passage of millions and billions of years? Or is that out the window? Also, please feel free to point out the places on the timeline where all the various events coincide with biblical stories, if you don't mind.   :icon_mrgreen: 




Excluding Genesis 1 creation account, all of the Biblical stories coincide with times after the appearance of modern humans...



Quote

Quote
Science is going to be the means by which this is resolved.
Bottom line is, neither you, AG or me are going to come up with an answer to the 'mystery' of the Cambrian explosion.
But thankyou for bringing it into the conversation. I love mystery.  :icon_sunny:
 


Why not? You just came up with a plausible scientific answer above.  :emthup:

Agelbert, now that Ashvin has done most of the logic and truth   leg work,  makes a few observations and adds a few emoticons too!  :icon_mrgreen:

Quote
So God dropped some life on the planet 4 BILLION years  ago and then, three and a half BILLION years later (500 Million years ago)  during the Cambrian period, God dropped the garden of Eden on earth.  Then God took to sprinkling life forms on earth over the next few hundreds of millions of years culminating in humans being plunked onto the planet. Is that your story? Is That AGs story?  ::)

 



Let's skip the bible because my argument is based on CREATION of the physical universe versus EVOLUTION through Random mutations as a function of a RANDOM universe WITHOUT AN intelligent designer. The later position is, I believe, your position, is it not, Bot Blogger?

The former is my position and the one I wish to argue. I do not wish to mix the stories in the bible with this simply because I do not believe the stories in the bible about human origins are scientifically accurate. Yeah, I believe God CREATED us. No, I don't have a clue how he did it. That is why I accepted, for most of my life, the theory of evolution as God's chosen mechanism UNTIL I actually started studying molecular biology and realized it was bullshit.

You claim that I claim that God "dropped" and "sprinkled" life here and there along a multi billion year time line. You seem to have a problem with using the verb "create". does it give you hives or something?  :icon_mrgreen: I get the fact that you don't accept Creation as a possiblity in this universe. You have make that painfully clear.



Quote
Do we trust scientists to use carbon dating or whatever meager method they have to judge the passage of millions and billions of years? Or is that out the window? Also, please feel free to point out the places on the timeline where all the various events coincide with biblical stories, if you don't mind.   :icon_mrgreen:

I repeat, the biblical stories aren't the issue here. We can discuss HOW Creation took place ONLY if you AGREE that it took place. As long as you don't, your best talking point is to ridicule (rightfully so!) the 6 literal day creationists that BELIEVE (without a shred of proof) that the Earth and the rest of the universe is only 6,000 years old. Nice try. 

I think Carbon-14, as I posted earlier, is the best way to go with the dating. the other dating methods that reach into millions or billions of years must work 100% of the time (They don't. The scientific bias is ALWAYS to cherry pick the method that provides the oldest age - to support the Evolution Hypothesis, of course).

Tell me, dear Bot blogger, what does a scientist DO when he finds a mosquito in geologic column strata of the Triassic period (meaning some of his pals dined on Dino blood) and discovers that the blood (REAL BLOOD - Heme Groups with iron and Carbon - Not fossilized mineralization) in his gut has Carbon-14 in it? He discards it as an anomaly, a mistake, an instrument error, etc. This has happened repeated times. I can provide sources if you want.

So what's the problem? The problem is OTHER radiometric dating techniques revealing a multi-million year strata where that mosquito was found. And modern science (the experts, not me!) state unequivocally that dead things with Carbon-14 in them CANNOT be older than approximately 100,000 years. So the "prudent" scientist tosses out the Carbon-14 data as contamination or instrument error.

That is NOT science. That is Evolutionary Theory BIAS.

I bring all this to your attention because, while I agree that the universe is possibly 14 billion years old, I am not convinced that WE are. The Earth very well may be 4.5 billion years old. SO WHAT? That isn't enough time for the FIRST CELL to come about by random mutation amino acid folding.



Quote
Science is going to be the means by which this is resolved.
Bottom line is, neither you, AG or me are going to come up with an answer to the 'mystery' of the Cambrian explosion.
But thankyou for bringing it into the conversation. I love mystery.  :icon_sunny:
 


MY purpose is to eliminate unworkable theories of our origins. If you feel you must have one to explain our existence apart from an intelligent designer God, go for it. I will listen to you. But you have nothing with evolution UNTIL you get past that first cell.

Which brings me to my final observation. Please EXPLAIN the Chaperones and, more importantly, the Chaperonin amino acid processing, exquisitely precise protein folding mechanism from the RANDOM UNIVERSE point of view which dictates primeval soup self organizing amino acids and protein folding and the evolution of complex, multicellular life and different species through natural selection.

If you can't, because of probability and statistics, go where the data takes you. I'll give you a working hypothesis that excludes a CREATOR:

Monism: We are really just ONE organism. We have ALWAYS been one organism. Time is an illusion. Matter is an illusion. Separateness is an illusion. WE oscillate (Hi Carl Sagan) between alternate universes creating (sorry to use that word old boy.  :icon_mrgreen:) the illusion of a Big Bang where everything starts anew in a time line of ascending complexity of life!

Since there ARE multiple universes and dimensions, probability and statistics mean
nothing at all so ANYTHING is possible, prudent and we don't need no silly creator. No evolution OR creator REQUIRED! So there! 

But that hypothesis seems a bit like magical thinking to me. How about YOU?    


He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. Matt 10:37

AGelbert

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It seems that NEANDERTHAL APPEARANCE is "Evolving". LOL!
« Reply #35 on: December 24, 2013, 01:57:22 am »
Well this is interesting.  ;)

Here's the Neanderthal facial "reconstruction" we are used to seeing in the press:




Now look at the Neanderthal facial reconstruction in this recent article.  :o It seems that they have DECIDED this fine fellow had a bigger nose and chin. And they call this "SCIENCE"?


Quote




A reconstruction of a Neanderthal face. Image Credit: CC BY-SA 2.0 Tim Evanson

 
Scientists have come up with a list of the genes that distinguish us from our prehistoric cousins.

 Humans may be the dominant species on the planet today, but thousands of years ago our ancestors shared the Earth with the Neanderthals, a species very similar to modern humans but that would ultimately die out despite being very close to us both physically and intellectually.

In an effort to learn more about what set us apart, scientists have been identifying specific genes that distinguish modern humans from Neanderthals. In particular, researchers have been keen to learn which changes might have been instrumental in enabling our dominance over the planet.

The research was made possible thanks to a project founded in 2006 that aimed to sequence the entire Neanderthal genome. The team managed to do this by extracting DNA from a 50,000-year-old Neanderthal toe bone discovered in the mountains of Siberia.

"We are quite confident that among these genetic changes lie the basis for the interesting differences between modern humans and Neanderthals," said geneticist Janet Kelso.

     

  Source: The Guardian

http://www.unexplained-mysteries.com/news/259632/what-makes-us-different-to-neanderthals

Well, at least the professional archeologists have come to the same conclusion I did (Neanderthals had a nose and a chin VERY much like Homo Sapiens). In fact, you couldn't tell this fellow above from some of our larger human specimens, now could you? The trick is angling the skull. If you rotate it FORWARD, it looks more human. If you rotate it BACK, it looks less human (assumed more sloping forehead).

Let's be clear. They DO NOT know exactly how their head sat on their neck. Ape heads sit forward of ours. I think they made that SAME assumption about Neanderthals as they do for apes instead of humans and that is why they pushed the MISSING LINK scam with some "appearance" justification.

NOW they are forced to admit these people were pretty intelligent. So low and behold, the face starts to look more like Homo SAP! 


It's a nut house of facial reconstructions out there right now!

http://www.thesubversivearchaeologist.com/2011/11/nose-to-nose-thine-neanderthal-eye-in.html

And it gets BETTER! They have discovered proof that Neanderthals BURIED THEIR DEAD in addition to using stone tools! You know what? I think they are US! Just like domesticated dogs are quite different from wolves, that explains the differences. Not that the evolutionary true believers would accept that, of course. But, but, they were shorter and stockier!! Uh, I guess pygmies aren't HUMAN, right?  ;) There wasn't a lot of travel. Inbreeding DOES that sort of thing. We have lots of proof of that in modern history!

Do you want some more proof that morphology can change radically without evolution? The Spaniards lost some domesticated pigs in what is now the USA in the 16th century that, without breeding with any other animal or changing their DNA, grew tusks and increased in size and ferocity in the wild and became WILD BOARS! Google it if you don't believe it!

As mankind had a more domesticated and less violent existence, he, like the domesticated dogs and goats and pigs, adapted with a softer appearance in less robust skull. If you don't believe that is possible, then WHY do you think the moment and astronaut gets into zero G, his body tries to get rid of his calcium? What would a human baby, with the SAME DNA (no evolution whatsoever) look like that was born and raised in Zero G? RADICALLY DIFFERENT!

The adaptation mechanisms in our DNA package are incredibly underrated by modern science for no other reason than the assumption that we "evolved" from some monstrous and semi-intelligent brute.

Well, if you had to live in ice age conditions and fought bears and mammoths, you might not be exactly a tender hearted fellow with good table manners. In fact, only the meanest, baddest, strongest males would survive. And they probably, as you can see by their skulls, were pretty fierce fellows. How do we KNOW they "died out" because WE "replaced" them? I've seen wrestlers that look more primitive than these Neanderthals! There is, even now that we are all a bunch of softies because of technology, and amazing amount of variation in human skull morphology. So much so, in fact, that some racists archeologists have tried to establish with measurements and angles that Africans are "less evolved" than Caucasians! BULLshit!

You don't believe me? Check this out:

Quote



Erectus Walks


Amongst Us

The evolution of modern humans
by


Richard D. Fuerle


Spooner Press, NY

Copyright © 2008


ISBN 978-1-60458-121-8


Printed in the United States by Lightning Source

http://erectuswalksamongst.us/

If you are the least bit racist, you will LOVE the way this guy, a scientist, mind you, twists science to push racism. 

He DELIBERATELY angles skulls to make Africans look more ape like and Caucasians more "beautiful" (his words! when describing forehead slopes angles and such.). He measures something to do with the protrusion of the teeth below the nose and the width of the jaw to claim Africans are more ape-like than Caucasians by showing some drawings from the ape to an African to a Caucasian jaw. The pictures of skulls of Africans, Asians and Caucasians look normal except the African skull has exaggerated features. I would not be surprised if he altered the picture to make the African skull look more ape like.
 

There are a lot of very SICK racists out there. A lot of them are scientists. Some of them are archeologists like the low life that wrote the above book.  >:(

Just because a SCIENTIST said it, doesn't not mean you should BELIEVE IT!
He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. Matt 10:37

AGelbert

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More Proof that Bacteria ADAPT, they DO NOT EVOLVE
« Reply #36 on: January 04, 2014, 05:18:30 pm »

Pseudomonas aeruginosa looks SIMPLE, doesn't it?  ;)



Pseudomonas aeruginosa reality is quite complex.  8)


The above is just ONE example of thousands of extremely complex amino acid folding operation products (a protein) manufactured by the humble Pseudomonas aeruginosa.

In a 14 billion year old universe, their isn't enough TIME to produce this folding complexity randomly. Tough luck, evolutionists!   ???  



Genetically Identical Bacteria Can Behave in Radically Different Ways

Posted in  News, Bacteria, Research 

Although a population of bacteria may be genetically identical, individual bacteria within that population can act in radically different ways. This phenomenon is crucial in the bacteria's struggle for survival. The more diversity a population of bacteria has, the more likely it will contain individuals able to take advantage of a new opportunity or overcome a new threat, including the threat posed by an antibiotic.
   

In a recent study, researchers at the University of Washington showed that when a bacterial cell divides into two daughter cells there can be an uneven distribution of cellular organelles. The resulting cells can behave differently from each other, depending on which parts they received in the split.

"This is another way that cells within a population can diversify. Here we've shown it in a bacterium, but it probably is true for all cells, including human cells," says Dr. Samuel Miller, UW professor of microbiology, genome sciences, and medicine and the paper's senior author.

Bridget Kulasekara, who obtained a PhD in the UW Molecular and Cellular Biology Program, was the paper's lead author. Other contributors included: Hemantha Kulasekara, Matthias Christen, and Cassie Kamischke, who work in Miller's lab, and Paul Wiggins, UW assistant professor of physics and bioengineering. The paper appears in the online journal eLife.

In an earlier paper, Miller and his colleagues showed that when bacteria divided, the concentration of an important regulatory molecule, called cyclic diguanosine monophosphate (c-di-GMP). was unevenly distributed between the two progeny. c-di-GMP is a second messenger molecule. That finding was published in the journal Science in 2010.

Second messenger molecules transmit signals from sensors or receptors on the cell's external membrane to targets within the cell, where they can rapidly alter a wide variety of cellular functions, such as metabolism and mobility.

The ability to respond to external stimuli quickly is important for the bacteria's survival. For instance, to stay alive, a bacterium must not hesitate to swim towards nutrients or away from toxins. This directional movement of microorganisms, spurred by the presence of a helpful or harmful substance, is known as chemotaxis.

"The effect of second messengers is almost immediate," says Miller. "They allow bacteria to change their behavior within seconds."


To detect the difference in c-di-GMP levels between cells, the researchers used a technique called Förster resonance energy transfer microscopy, or FRET microscopy. This allowed them to measure nanomolar changes of the concentration of c-di-GMP within individual bacteria as the changes happened second by second.

Different concentrations of c-di-GMP can have a profound influence on a cell's behavior. For example, in the bacteria Pseudomonas aeruginosa, cells with high levels of c-di-GMP tend to remain still, adhere to surfaces and form colonies. Those with low levels, on the other hand, tend to actively swim about by using a corkscrew-shaped propeller located at one end of the bacterium.

In the latest study, the Miller and his colleagues worked out the molecular mechanism behind the difference in c-di-GMP concentrations seen between daughter cells.

When Pseudomonas cells divide, they pinch in half to create two daughter cells. Although the cells are genetically identical, only one daughter cell can inherit the bacterium's single propeller. The other cell can synthesize its own propeller, but immediately after division the two cells are quite different.

What Miller and his coworkers report in the eLife paper is that the daughter cell that inherits the propeller also inherits an enzyme that is closely associated with the propeller that degrades c-di-GMP, as well as the organelle involved in directing movement toward or away from stimuli that activates this enzyme.

Together these two organelles work in concert to lower the concentration of c-di-GMP and control swimming.

"What we have shown is that the uneven inheritance of organelles is another way cells have to create diversity and increase the chances of the survival of its species," Miller says.

He added that his team's findings may help explain how bacteria resist antibiotic treatments by always having some cells in their populations be in a slow-growing, resting state. Since antibiotics target fast-growing cells, these resting cells are more likely to survive the treatment. The findings might also help explain how some bacteria are able to adhere to and colonize surfaces such as urinary catheters, intravenous lines and heart valves.


In ongoing research, Miller's team is trying to get a better understanding of the signals that can change second messenger concentrations very quickly and is screening compounds that could interfere with or alter those signals. Such compounds could be used to combat drug resistance, for instance, or inhibit a bacterium's ability to adhere to surfaces and form slime-like colonies, called biofilms, that are highly resistant to antibiotics.

The new paper, as well as the earlier study, which appeared in the journal Science in 2010, are both available free online.

The research was funded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (Grant number: 5U54AI057141-09) the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship (Grant number 2007047910) and the National Institutes of Health (Grant number 1R21NS067579-0).

Reference: Kulasekara et al. c-di-GMP heterogeneity is generated by the chemotaxis machinery to regulate flagellar motility. ELife. 2013;2:e01402. Chisten M et al. Asymmetrical Distribution of the Second Messenger c-di-GMP upon Bacterial Cell Division. Science. 2010; 328(5983):1295-1297 DOI: 10.1126/science.1188658

http://www.infectioncontroltoday.com/news/2014/01/genetically-identical-bacteria-can-behave-in-radically-different-ways.aspx

Agelbert NOTE: There is zero proof that Pseudomonas aeruginosa (or any other bacteria for that matter) becomes another bacterial species when it adapts to some antibiotic by developing antibiotic resistance (less or more cyclic diguanosine monophosphate in the progeny aiding or inhibiting chemotaxis). No ORIGIN OF SPECIES here, folks! No CHANGE from this bacteria to a NEW kind of bacteria means NO EVOLUTION. Signed, your favorite "fanatic". 
He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. Matt 10:37

AGelbert

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Quote
Amber fossil reveals ancient reproduction in flowering plants

 01/02/2014

CORVALLIS, Ore. – A 100-million-year old piece of amber has been discovered which reveals the oldest evidence of sexual reproduction in a flowering plant – a cluster of 18 tiny flowers from the Cretaceous Period – with one of them in the process of making some new seeds for the next generation. ;D

The perfectly-preserved scene, in a plant now extinct, is part of a portrait created in the mid-Cretaceous when flowering plants were changing the face of the Earth forever, adding beauty, biodiversity and food. It appears identical to the reproduction process that “angiosperms,” or flowering plants still use today.

Researchers from Oregon State University and Germany published their findings on the fossils in the Journal of the Botanical Institute of Texas.

The flowers themselves are in remarkable condition, as are many such plants and insects preserved for all time in amber. The flowing tree sap covered the specimens and then began the long process of turning into a fossilized, semi-precious gem. The flower cluster is one of the most complete ever found in amber and appeared at a time when many of the flowering plants were still quite small.

Even more remarkable is the microscopic image of pollen tubes growing out of two grains of pollen and penetrating the flower’s stigma, the receptive part of the female reproductive system. This sets the stage for fertilization of the egg and would begin the process of seed formation – had the reproductive act been completed.

“In Cretaceous flowers we’ve never before seen a fossil that shows the pollen tube actually entering the stigma,” said George Poinar, Jr., a professor emeritus in the Department of Integrative Biology at the OSU College of Science. “This is the beauty of amber fossils. They are preserved so rapidly after entering the resin that structures such as pollen grains and tubes can be detected with a microscope.”

The pollen of these flowers appeared to be sticky, Poinar said, suggesting it was carried by a pollinating insect, and adding further insights into the biodiversity and biology of life in this distant era. At that time much of the plant life was composed of conifers, ferns, mosses, and cycads.  During the Cretaceous, new lineages of mammals and birds were beginning to appear, along with the flowering plants. But dinosaurs still dominated the Earth.

“The evolution  of flowering plants caused an enormous change in the biodiversity of life on Earth, especially in the tropics and subtropics,” Poinar said.

“New associations between these small flowering plants and various types of insects and other animal life resulted in the successful distribution and evolution of these plants through most of the world today,” he said. “It’s interesting that the mechanisms for reproduction that are still with us today had already been established some 100 million years ago.”       


The fossils were discovered from amber mines in the Hukawng Valley of Myanmar, previously known as Burma. The newly-described genus and species of flower was named Micropetasos burmensis.
http://oregonstate.edu/ua/ncs/archives/2014/jan/amber-fossil-reveals-ancient-reproduction-flowering-plants

Agelbert NOTE: Yeah, it SURE IS "INTERESTING" ALL RIGHT! It's SO "interesting" that it is absolutely amazing that it doesn't occur to these marvels of erudition that the FACT that the flowering plants show up at the same time as the pollinating insects with no change in the mechanism for 100 million years NEGATES evolutionary theory rather than supports it.

And then there is the further bag of pollen "worms" that IF this pollen has C-14 in it, there is no way in hell that this angiosperm can be older than 100,000 years!

Don't expect any C-14 tests from these "100 million year old" true believers. They simply will not go there. These "scientists" actually claim that doing a C-14 test on non-fossilized, flexible tissue from the cretaceous period is NOT SCIENCE!   


You don't believe me? Listen to a world famous Dinosaur fossil hunter Jack Horner being asked to do a C-14 test on flexible dino tissue found in cretaceous period strata:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8T3rEX4zq_4&feature=player_embedded

Here are some scientific, not creationist, HARD DATA VIDEOS:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cVVZ-H4Xk9I&feature=player_embedded

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVzb_Pxot7s&feature=player_embedded

What's the take away from all the above?

1) Fossilization is normal in abnormal circumstances like peat bogs and rapid sedimentation which eliminates oxidation of organic matter. Otherwise the organic matter is recycled by the biosphere. Bear in mind that this means the ENTIRE natural history of speciation diversity on planet earth as constructed by evolutionists comes from less than 5% of the life forms that have existed simply because 95% of them successfully were recycled by the biosphere! How these scientists could make such sweeping assumptions about a mere 5% or less of the "geologic column record" data is arrogance personified. And I didn't come up with that bit about fossils being an anomaly, the evolution believing paleontologists of mainstream science did. I agree with them on that.  ;D

2) All cretaceous period fossils are found, like those in Madagascar, in a place that underwent a catastrophic amount of rapid sedimentation which instantly buried the dinosaurs meters below the atmosphere underground.

3) The chemistry of the ground had to be non-porous in order to prevent fossilization(bones turn to rock through mineralization) so organic tissue (containing carbon) could be preserved. This is extremely rare.

4) The fossil record will only show animals that died catastrophically, period. When their is no catastrophe, nature recycles 100% of organic matter.

5) If any of the recovered tissue from plants or animals in the geologic strata has C-14 present, they cannot have died more than 100,000 years ago. Evidence of this would be a "catastrophe" for the present interpretation of the age of the strata in the geological column throughout the planet.

6) If the evidence continues to pile up against the current multimillion year paradigm age of various strata, no change in the scientific consensus will occur until the current crop of scientists dies off and is replaced by new ones. The current crop cannot handle being so abysmally wrong. So it goes.

Here 's some proof for you readers of the sad fact that scientists are as stubborn and resistant to change when proven wrong as any other turf defending human group.

The Death Of President Garfield, 1881

President Garfield died from infection due to lack of antiseptic practices, not from a gun shot wound.

Quote
Surgery without Anesthesia

Garfield's physicians did not serve him well. It seems each of his 16 attendants wanted to literally get their hands into him - to prod and grope his wound in an attempt to find the elusive bullet. Infection invariable set in. Internal sores developed - oozing pus and requiring periodic lancing in order to reduce their size. Medicine had not yet fully accepted the relationship between germs and disease.
Operations were routinely performed without benefit of surgical gloves, masks, sterile instruments, or any antiseptics to protect the patient.

Of more immediate concern to the patient, operations were performed without any means of deadening the pain.  ??? The patient was left to his or her own devices to cope with the trauma of surgery. >:(

.
http://www.eyewitnesstohistory.com/gar.htm

That bit of COVER for the Medical Doctors of 1881 (i.e. "Medicine had not yet fully accepted the relationship between germs and disease") is BALONEY!

Pasteur, several decades before, proved that germs cause gangrene and claimed they were responsible for infections. Lister read Pasteur's stuff, tested antiseptic procedures on his patients and, in 1867, a full FOURTEEN YEARS before Garfield was shot, published the results in the Lancent. This medical journal HAD to have been read by any leading doctor in the USA. They just refused to change.  :P Even Lister, before he read Pasteur and performed experiments, did not wash before surgery and routinely performed operations in his street clothes. And if you really want to see how SCIENCE dragged its feet on the empirical evidence that antiseptic procedures saved lives, read about the Hungarian doctor that was killed in a looney bin because he SUCCESSFULLY saved the lives of pregnant women by requiring the doctors that performed autopsies washy their hands and change they robes before going upstairs to deliver babies!

Quote
gnaz Semmelweis
According to Wikipedia*, "Ignaz Philipp Semmelweis (July 1, 1818 - August 13, 1865) was the Hungarian physician who demonstrated that puerperal fever (also known as "childbed fever") was contagious and that its incidence could be drastically reduced by enforcing appropriate hand-washing behavior by medical care-givers. He made this discovery in 1847 while working in the Maternity Department of the Vienna Lying-in Hospital. His failure to convince his fellow doctors led to a tragic conclusion, however, he was ultimately vindicated.

Semmelweis realized that the number of cases of puerperal fever was much larger at one of his wards than at the other. After testing a few hypotheses, he found that the number of cases was drastically reduced if the doctors washed their hands carefully before dealing with a pregnant woman. Risk was especially high if they had been in contact with corpses before they treated the women. The germ theory of disease had not yet been developed at the time. Thus, Semelweiss concluded that some unknown "cadaveric material" caused childbed fever.

He lectured publicly about his results in 1850, however, the reception by the medical community was cold, if not hostile. His observations went against the current scientific opinion of the time, which blamed diseases on an imbalance of the basical "humours" in the body.
It was also argued that even if his findings were correct, washing one's hands each time before treating a pregnant woman, as Semmelweis advised, would be too much work.

Nor were doctors eager to admit that they had caused so many deaths.
Semmelweis spent 14 years developing his ideas and lobbying for their acceptance, culminating in a book he wrote in 1861. The book received poor reviews, and he responded with polemic.

 In 1865, he suffered a nervous breakdown and was committed to an insane asylum where he soon died from blood poisoning.

Only after Dr. Semmelweis's death was the germ theory of disease developed, and he is now recognized as a pioneer of antiseptic policy and prevention of nosocomial disease."
http://inventors.about.com/library/inventors/blantisceptics.htm

Agelbert Note: The head doctor at the hospital was the one that led the effort to have him committed and the guards at the looney bin beat him severely before he dies of "blood poisoning".  >:(


THINK about this stuff, people! The SCIENCE points to antiseptics being great and the doctors refuse to DO IT for nearly half a CENTURY! Don't tell me they did not KNOW about Semmelweis, Pasteur and Lister! 


The geologists and paleontologists clinging to the multimillion year old strata paradigm are being showered with evidence that they MUST accept that, regardless of how many billions of years old this planet is, the age of the fossils in the strata is WAY OFF!  :o It's embarrassing, to put I mildly.

But this new war is NOT about science at all, but about the challenge to the random universe paradigm. Consider the very real possibility that a race of super intelligent ETs seeded this planet and we are just a giant petri dish. The periodic rapid crustal movements (see Hapgood theory supported by Einstein) would cause extinction events from giant several mile high tsunamis that instantly buried a bunch of dinosaurs at one point.

At another point a large asteroid could have smacked the earth and created the pacific ocean basin, expanded the planet, reduced the rotation speed, increased the gravity so creatures couldn't be so large and created the rings of fire with mountain chains around the  earth. Each time, the ETs would step in and do some intelligent design.

Another, more milder crustal movement after the last ice age, might have been responsible for freezing those mammoths in Russia with summer flowering plants in their stomachs.

I'm not happy with that theory but I recognize that, from the present evidence, it is a highly probable scenario. That's even more humiliating than a creator God having done it!

So the scientific community will fight it until a new crop can figure a way to accept the C-14 data without requiring a creator. The oscillating universes theory is the one I think they will use because probability and statistics, like time for this or that to evolve, don't apply. How convenient.  :)

Whatever they come up with, they will NOT be able to dance around the presence of C-14 in dino bones, mosquito gut blood from the alleged cenozoic period (http://cryptozoologynews.blogspot.com/2013/10/rare-blood-engorged-mosquito-fossil.html), coal and even diamonds for much longer. 

Humans are REALLY GOOD at RATIONALIZATION! It's not so much about objective reality or science; it's mostly about endowment bias (i.e. PRIDE).   

Quote

Giant asteroid, mega-tsunami may have triggered Ice Age

By Rachael Bayliss

Cosmos Online

A 2km-wide asteroid that hit Earth 2.5 million years ago may have triggered the Ice Age, according to a team of Australian researchers.
 
Asteroid impact artist's concept
Artist's concept of a catastrophic asteroid impact with the early Earth. Credit: Don Davis / NASA
 
LONDON: A 2km-wide asteroid that hit Earth 2.5 million years ago may have triggered the Ice Age, according to a team of Australian researchers.

The monstrous Eltanin asteroid plunged into the Pacific Ocean 2.5 million years ago and generated a mega-tsunami with waves hundreds of feet high, wreaking devastation across the globe. It is the only identified deep-ocean impact in our planet’s history, and could prove to be as significant as the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs.

While previously little has been known about Eltanin and its subsequent impact on Earth, a team of Australian researchers has painstakingly gathered data from around the world to piece together the puzzle.

Inconceivably large waves

“The Eltanin asteroid seems to have largely been overlooked because it was a deep-ocean impact and so there is no easy-to-access crater to remind scientists about this event,” said James Goff, lead author of the paper published in the Journal of Quaternary Science.

The beginning of the Pleistocene epoch was marked by significant climate change and cooling of the planet, and recent refinement of dates shows that the Eltanin impact coincided with this. Computer models demonstrate that an asteroid collision of this magnitude would have generated a tsunami with inconceivably large waves.

“A deep-ocean impact of this size would have thrown a lot of things into the stratosphere,” said Goff, who is co-director of the Australia-Pacific Tsunami Research Centre at the University of New South Wales in Sydney.

This would create additional problems after the initial destruction of the mega-tsunami – with so much water vapour in the atmosphere, sunlight would have been drastically reduced and the surface temperature would start to plummet, kick-starting an intense period of glaciation.

“All the pieces started to come together”

“If the Eltanin impact was a major driver of climate change … then it may have been one of the key drivers of the Pleistocene Northern Hemisphere glaciations, which in turn had implications for human evolution,” said Goff.

To help solve the mystery, Goff and his colleagues at UNSW collaborated with researchers at the Australian Nuclear and Science Technology Organisation (ANSTO).

The team analysed previous research carried out by institutions worldwide. Focussing on that time period, all the existing evidence of possible Eltanin tsunami sediment deposits in Antarctica, Chile and New Zealand were compiled and studied.

“All the pieces started to come together and, about a billion papers later, the questions have at least been able to be framed in a way that they can be asked in a high impact, peer-reviewed journal,” said Goff.

To develop the theory further, more sites with possible Eltanin tsunami deposits need to be investigated to see more clearly the scale of the event. This will in turn provide more data for the models predicting the extent to which such an impact could alter the climate.

“At the moment [the research] hasn’t altered a thing, but we hope that our colleagues will read the paper and consider the question of the significance of the Eltanin impact to not only their research, but also the work of others – and consider it as a possible explanation,” Goff said.
.

http://www.cosmosmagazine.com/news/giant-asteroid-triggered-ice-age/


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7kL7qDeI05U&feature=player_embedded
« Last Edit: April 08, 2020, 05:19:46 pm by AGelbert »
He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. Matt 10:37

AGelbert

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Re: Darwin
« Reply #38 on: January 13, 2014, 12:12:06 am »
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L9TCtmoyBaI&feature=player_embedded
Nice video.  ;D My only beef with these creationists is not their arguments against evolution, which are rational, science based and logical. It's the deep end stuff where they try to say that the flood written about in Noah was the ONLY world catastrophe and that the Genesis account of a 6 literal day creation is the real deal. They refuse to entertain the possibility that the planet was here billions of years before we were created. They refuse to admit the possibility that God would step in and do some intelligent design after a series of catastrophes like the Permian extinction and the K-T boundary evidence of extinction and a massive flood, to name just two extinction level events. They KNOW that's WAY OUT THERE and they can't prove it but they flat refuse to consider the possibility that the bible is wrong on WHEN God created us even if it is quite right about the fact that all life was intelligently designed by God.

In my view these people are extremists pushing people away from Christ, something the Apostle Paul pointed out thousands of years ago about intolerant, legalistic Jews that claimed you weren't "right with God" unless you crossed all the "T"s and dotted all the "I"s in the MOSAIC LEVITICAL LAW.

When I wrote some of the "luminaries" above in the video and told them the Pharisees believed in a six day creation and the inerrancy of the old testament and it didn't do them any good, they REFUSED to even debate that issue.

They have their own Achilles Heel; it's call Pharisaic Legalism. They worship old testament of the bible, not God.  >:(

 I suppose they are doing some good by challenging the evolutionary fairy tale but going in the other extreme is just wrong. The bible has always been about proper, harmonious behavior among fellow men and nature as EVIDENCE of our belief in a just God.

Any time people in the bible started killing people and things that got in the way of their RELIGION, they screwed up.

A pox on all these stuffed shirts that think humans can follow rules. The "rules" were given to Moses to PROVE humans are incapable of following them, not to be used to finger point at each other.

Legalism leads to judgementalism which leads to war, cruelty and killing. The creationists that think the bible is a scientific document are not doing the Gospel of Jesus Christ any good. I told them so and got banned. So it goes.
He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. Matt 10:37

AGelbert

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Natural Selection is DEvolution, not Evolution
« Reply #39 on: January 13, 2014, 11:07:31 pm »
Kauai’s silent nights (the crickets have gone quiet)


by David Catchpoole

kauai



Crickets, renowned for their distinctively loud chirping song penetrating the night, feature prominently in Polynesian folklore and traditions. But on the Hawaian island of Kauai, the crickets have fallen silent.

The reason?

The larvae burrow into the cricket and devour it—a week later, the cricket is dead.

In the 1990s, a deadly parasitic fly arrived from North America. This “acoustically orienting” fly tracks down male crickets calling for mates (only male crickets chirp) and deposits its eggs on them.1 The larvae burrow into the cricket and devour it—a week later, the cricket is dead.

The impact of the fly was dramatic, as the cricket population on Kauai plummeted. By 2001, the island was “virtually silent”—a university research team heard only one cricket call.2

In 2003, Kauai was still silent. But researchers were surprised to discover that crickets hadn’t been wiped out.3 They found plenty of crickets in fact.4 But they didn’t chirp.5

On closer examination, “virtually all” of Kauai’s male crickets were found to have wings more like female wings than normal male wings, i.e. “lacking the normal stridulatory apparatus of file and scraper required for sound production”—hence why they couldn’t chirp.4 In normal males, the wings have a prominent toothy vein that is scraped to make sound. But now, in most males the vein was smaller and in a different position. Females don’t have the toothed vein at all.




Not surprisingly, this discovery was heralded by many media organizations and the researchers themselves as ‘evolution’.2,3,6 “This is seeing evolution at work,” lead researcher Marlene Zuk said.5

But the information they themselves provided about the observed facts of the case (as opposed to evolutionary interpretation) was sufficient to show that it is not ‘evolution’ at all, in the chemicals-to-cells-to-crickets sense, which requires an increase in complexity and genetic information. Rather, there has been a loss of information (the ability to chirp) because of degradation of the genome.

The silent males were mutants, with the ‘flatwing’ trait being caused by “a mutation to a single gene located on the crickets’ X chromosome.”2Researchers made it clear that the silence-conferring mutation was “not part of the quantitative genetic background of song itself but, instead, a morphological mutation that eliminates males’ ability to produce this sexual signal.”7

This is not evidence for an evolutionary process said to have produced chirping crickets from chancy chaos, no matter how much time is claimed …

So, despite the ‘fogging’ of the facts by evolutionary-paradigm jargon, the story is quite simple—and anything but evolutionary. A loss-of-information flatwing mutation which would presumably normally be a disadvantage (rendering male crickets unable to call acoustically for a mate) became highly advantageous once the acoustically-navigating parasitic fly came to Kauai.8 This is not evidence for an evolutionary process said to have produced chirping crickets from chancy chaos, no matter how much time is claimed for it to have happened. The Kauai change is in the wrong direction to be evidence of microbes-to-man evolution. Instead, it fits with the biblical description of a created world now in “bondage to decay” (Romans 8:19–22).

And other things fit, too. The Hawaiian cricket populations had “extremely low genetic variation” compared to crickets in Australia, with Pacific Islands populations being intermediate.9 This hints at the crickets’ likely island-hopping colonization route to Hawaii (perhaps partially matching that of Polynesian settlers—who seem to have had an affinity with crickets10), with the progressive reduction in gene pool variation consistent with an original higher-level creation, not evolution. A cricket subset of the gene pool, once isolated from its parent population, cannot of itself regain the starting level of genetic information. ‘Evolution’ can’t do it.

Note that there is no doubt here that natural selection is operating, and powerfully. But natural selection is not evolution, as it can only remove individuals (in this case, chirping ones), and thus the genetic information they carry (coding for chirp-capable wings),11 from a population; it cannot provide new genetic information. And it is not the trumpeted ‘rapid evolution’ that is being observed here,12 but the rapid culling of cricket songsters under the deadly selection pressure of being fresh food for fly maggots—natural selection does not need long periods of time to achieve outcomes as dramatic as this—the virtual silencing of a population.13,14

If only more people knew that examples of natural selection such as the Kauai crickets were in no way evidence for evolution but rather evidence for the Creator God of the Bible—now that would be something to chirp about.

http://creation.com/kauai-silent-crickets
He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. Matt 10:37

AGelbert

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Huge study highlights stupendous design in human DNA
« Reply #40 on: January 20, 2014, 06:32:51 pm »
Agelbert NOTE: Hot Dog! I have been claiming since 1986 that there is no "junk" DNA. I HAVE MAINTAINED THAT THE ORIGINAL DESIGN INCLUDED adaptive DNA coding to respond to environmental pressures WITHOUT "evolving" into another species; i.e. SAME species, new genes turned on and some turned off.  Now it seems science is proving I was right!  

Dazzling DNA

Huge study highlights stupendous design in human DNA


by Don Batten

This is an exciting time to be a creationist! Following pilot studies published in 2007,1 the ENCODE (Encyclopedia of DNA Elements) project has now published some 30 papers of phase two, revealing that most of our DNA is functional and effectively killing the evolutionary idea that nearly all our DNA is ‘junk’.

The research involved over 440 scientists in 32 institutes performing over 1,600 experiments.2 They found that over 80% of the human DNA does something, although the details of what it does mostly remain to be determined. Less than 2% of the DNA codes for proteins; the rest turns out to be like a huge control panel, with millions of switches that turn protein-producing genes on or off.  And different cells have different switch settings, because they need different parts of the DNA to be active.

Discover magazine’s website reported:3

“And what’s in the remaining 20 percent? Possibly not junk either,  ;Daccording to Ewan Birney, the project’s Lead Analysis Coordinator and self-described ‘cat-herder-in-chief’. He explains that ENCODE only (!) looked at 147 types of cells, and the human body has a few thousand. A given part of the genome might control a gene in one cell type, but not others. If every cell is included, functions may emerge for the phantom proportion. ‘It’s likely that 80 percent will go to 100 percent,’ says Birney. ‘We don’t really have any large chunks of redundant DNA. This metaphor of junk isn’t that useful.’”

Evolution needs ‘junk DNA’

Many evolutionists don’t like the findings.  ;D

Even with the most favourable assumptions, evolutionists could not account for more than a tiny amount of the human DNA  :o, so they have long claimed that 97% or more of it is useless leftovers of evolution—‘junk’. In contrast, based on the premise that we were created by a super-intelligent Creator—‘fearfully and wonderfully made’—creationists have long questioned the idea that we have mainly useless DNA. In 1994, founder of Creation magazine Carl Wieland wrote,

“Creationists have long suspected that this ‘junk DNA’ will turn out to have a function.”4


Many evolutionists don’t like the findings. One blogged on Scientific American’s website that he doubted the death of junk DNA and complained about the “public damage” done by ENCODE publicity.5 


Damage to what?  ;) Surely not science? Atheism? Giving three reasons why evolution requires lots of junk DNA, he concluded that the finding of 80% (+) functional must be wrong/misreported. But junk DNA is dead and this blog only shows that evolution should die with it.

“Far from finished”

Scientists have a huge job ahead to work out what specifically all this active DNA does. Much will undoubtedly be very important, other parts less so. It presents an enormous task. Geneticist Rick Myers remarked, “We are far from finished. You might argue that this could go on forever.”6


Related Articles

DNA: marvellous messages or mostly mess?

Astonishing DNA complexity update

Large scale function for ‘endogenous retroviruses’

The slow, painful death of junk DNA

Further Reading

What about ‘Vestigial’ (‘junk’) DNA that evolutionists claim is a useless leftover of evolution?

References and notes

1.See, Williams, A., Astonishing DNA complexity update, July 2007; creation.com/astonishing-dna-complexity-update. Return to text.

2.See overview papers in Nature 489, 6 September 2012. Return to text.

3.Yong, E., ENCODE: the rough guide to the human genome, in the ‘Not Exactly Rocket Science’ blog; blogs.discovermagazine.com/notrocketscience/2012/09/05/encode-the-rough-guide-to-the-human-genome/ Return to text.

4.Wieland, C., Junk moves up in the world, Journal of Creation 8(2):125, 1994. Return to text.

5.Jogalekar, A., Three reasons why junk DNA makes evolutionary sense; blogs.scientificamerican.com/the-curious-wavefunction/2012/09/13/three-reasons-to-like-junk-dna, 13 September, 2012. Return to text.

6.Nature 489, p.48. Return to text.


http://creation.com/dazzling-dna
He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. Matt 10:37

AGelbert

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Re: Darwin
« Reply #41 on: January 27, 2014, 03:57:28 pm »
Excellent hard boiled, detailed scientific evidence ONLY article on the anomalies in Homology that refute the Theory of Evolution:

http://creation.com/homology-made-simple
He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. Matt 10:37

AGelbert

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C.S. Lewis on materialistic thoughts
« Reply #42 on: February 06, 2014, 08:09:57 pm »
Quote
C.S. Lewis on materialistic thoughts

‘If the solar system was brought about by an accidental collision, then the appearance of organic life on this planet was also an accident, and the whole evolution of Man was an accident too. If so, then all our present thoughts are mere accidents—the accidental by-product of the movement of atoms. And this holds for the thoughts of the materialists and astronomers as well as for anyone else’s. But if their thoughts—i.e. of materialism and astronomy—are merely accidental by-products, why should we believe them to be true?

I see no reason for believing that one accident should be able to give me a correct account of all the other accidents. It’s like expecting that the accidental shape taken by the splash when you upset a milkjug should give you a correct account of how the jug was made and why it was upset.’

C.S. Lewis (1898–1963), The Business of Heaven, Fount Paperbacks, U.K., p. 97, 1984.
He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. Matt 10:37

AGelbert

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“Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable  Enemies”

Agelbert Note: Memes taken apart here (and at the link) are quite common on liberal forums attacking Christianity and VERY MUCH part of RE's mistaken view of history at the DD  >:(  I always new RE's childish tantrums about religion and Christianity being total failures was BS. This book sets the record straight; not that people like RE will listen, however.  :(

Book Review

Anthony Kenny on ‘Atheist Delusions’

Posted on May 13, 2010

This review originally appeared in The TLS, whose website is www.the-tls.co.uk, and is reposted with permission.

In the ongoing suit of Secularism vs God, David Bentley Hart is the most able counsel for the defence in recent years. Though confident in the strength of his case, he does not hesitate to abuse the plaintiff’s attorneys, and he does so in grand style. Richard Dawkins is guilty of “rhetorical recklessness”. Christopher Hitchens’s text “careens drunkenly across the pages” of a book “that raises the wild non sequitur almost to the level of a dialectical method”. Daniel Dennett’s theses are “sustained by classifications that are entirely arbitrary and fortified by arguments that any attentive reader should notice are wholly circular”.

Hart (in his book “Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies”) has the gifts of a good advocate. He writes with clarity and force, and he drives his points home again and again. He exposes his opponents’ errors of fact or logic with ruthless precision. He is generous in making concessions on his own side, provided they leave intact his overarching claims. Above all, he has ensured that his brief is modest and manageable.

Thus, no attempt is made to plead in defence of religion as such. “Religion in the abstract”, Hart says, “does not actually exist, and almost no one (apart from politicians) would profess any allegiance to it”. This is a sound and fundamental point. The creeds of the major religions are mutually contradictory, so that the one thing we know for certain about religion is that if any religion is true then most religions are false. Hart’s client is not religion in general—it is traditional Christianity. It is this, he claims, that has been misunderstood and slandered by its cultured despisers.

Again, Hart concentrates on issues of history rather than philosophy. True, he claims that Dawkins’s philosophical arguments are ones that “a college freshman midway through his first logic course could dismantle in a trice”. However, the claim that Dawkins is philosophically illiterate is based on an ontology that would be rejected by many a seasoned professor of philosophy. Hart’s own strengths lie elsewhere, so he is wise to concentrate on narrative and invective.

The aim of the first half of the book is to demolish “the mythology of a secularist age”. Secularists invite us to believe the following story. (RE's MISTAKEN View of History Pushed NONSTOP at the DD) In the medieval ages of faith, culture stagnated, science languished, wars of religion were routinely waged, witches were burned by inquisitors, and Western humanity was enslaved to superstition. The literary remains of antiquity had been consigned to the flames, and the achievements of Greek science lay forgotten until Islam restored them to the West. The age of faith was succeeded by an age of reason and enlightenment, which gave us the riches of scientific achievement and political liberty, and a new and revolutionary sense of human dignity. The modern separation of Church and State has put an end to the blood-steeped intolerance of religion. Western humanity has at last left its nonage and attained to its majority in science, politics and ethics. “This is”, Hart says, “a simple and enchanting tale ... its sole defect is that it happens to be false in every identifiable detail.” Six chapters demolish detailed elements of this secularist myth. Chapter Four refutes the allegations that the ancient library of Alexandria was destroyed by Christians and that the pagan philosopher Hypatia was murdered out of hatred for women and learning. Chapter Five shows that far from burning Classical texts, Christian monastic librarians preserved them from decay. Chapter Six argues that Greek science had become sterile long before the Christianization of the Roman Empire. The only innovative physicist of late antiquity, we are told, was the Christian John Philoponus. During the four and a half centuries of its scientific pre-eminence, Islam made “no more progress than a moderately clever undergraduate today could assimilate in less than a single academic year”. Paying tribute to the Oxford calculators of the fourteenth century, Hart illustrates the continuity between medieval and Renaissance science. Pope Urban VIII’s condemnation of Galileo, he claims, was not an index of inherent ecclesiastical hostility to science, but a clash of arrogant personalities.

The seventh and eighth chapters defend Christianity from the charges of intolerance and cruelty. The persecution of witches, Hart points out, was an early modern rather than a medieval phenomenon, and the inquisitors of the time did their best to suppress witchhunts.


To see long excerpts from “Atheist Delusions,” click here. (at link)


The rise of modern science and the obsession with sorcery “were two closely allied manifestations of the development of a new post-Christian sense of human mastery over the world”. In exculpation of the use of torture and the burning of heretics, it can be said that the Church was merely following a fashion which was originated by the State.
During the so-called Dark Ages, the only penalty for misbelief was excommunication, whereas in the heyday of the Holy Roman Empire heresy became a capital crime. “Violence”, Hart says, “increased in proportion to the degree of sovereignty claimed by the state, and whenever the medieval church surrendered moral authority to secular power, injustice and cruelty flourished.”


Addressing the responsibility of the Church for warfare, Hart briskly gets the Crusades out of the way. Admitting that they were “holy wars”—the only ones in Christian history, he maintains—he dismisses them as “the last gaudy flourish of Western barbarian culture, embellished by the winsome ceremonies of chivalry”.   The European wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are treated at greater length. Here, we learn, “no prince of the time waged war against another simply on account of his faith”. In its bloodiest days the Thirty Years War was not a war of religion, but a struggle between two Catholic houses, the Bourbons and the Habsburgs. Hart is at his most convincing when he argues that for the sheer scale of its violence, the modern period trumps any of the ages of Christian faith. “The Thirty Years War, with its appalling toll of civilian casualties, was a scandal to the consciences of the nations of Europe; but midway through the twentieth century ... even liberal democracies did not scruple to bomb open cities from the air, or to use incendiary or nuclear devices to incinerate tens of thousands of civilians.”

In the second part of the book, Hart seeks to replace the secularist myth with a positive account of what he calls “the Christian revolution”—“perhaps the only true revolution in the history of the West”. Many of the values prized by modern secularists are inheritances from the early days of Christianity.

Pre-Christian cults involved human sacrifice, self-castration and self-mutilation. PreChristian society despised the poor and weak and tolerated infanticide; it enjoyed gladiatorial combat, and it was built on slavery. 

Only Christianity fostered the concept of a dignity intrinsic to every human soul. Only the Church built hospitals and almshouses, and taught that charity was the highest virtue.

More at link:

http://www.truthdig.com/arts_culture/item/anthony_kenny_on_atheist_delusions_20100514

Agelbert NOTE:THIS IS WHERE HE TEARS TO BITS THE ATHEIST'S RELIGION! (Many worshippers at the DD, by the way, with RE as the high priest).


"There is also, however, a negative side to my argument.  It is what I suppose I should call my rejection of modernity — or, rather, my rejection of the ideology of "the modern" and my rejection, especially, of the myth of "the Enlightenment."  By modernity, I should explain, I certainly do not mean modern medicine or air travel or space exploration or any of the genuinely useful or estimable aspects of life today;  I do not even mean modern philosophical method or social ideology or political thought.  Rather, I mean the modern age's grand narrative of itself: its story of the triumph of critical reason over "irrational" faith, of the progress of social morality toward greater justice and freedom, of the "tolerance" of the secular state, and of the unquestioned ethical primacy of either individualism or collectivism (as the case may be).  Indeed, I want in part to argue that what many of us are still in the habit of calling the "Age of Reason" was in many significant ways the beginning of the eclipse of reason's authority as a cultural value;  that the modern age is notable in large measure for the triumph of inflexible and unthinking dogmatism in every sphere of human endeavor (including the sciences) and for a flight from rationality to any number of soothing fundamentalisms, religious and secular;  that the Enlightenment ideology of modernity as such does not even deserve any particular credit for the advance of modern science; that the modern secular state's capacity for barbarism exceeds any of the evils for which Christendom might justly be indicted, not solely by virtue of the superior technology at its disposal, but by its very nature;  that among the chief accomplishments of modern culture have been a massive retreat to superstition and the gestation of especially pitiless forms of nihilism;  and that, by comparison to the Christian revolution it succeeded, modernity is little more than an aftereffect, or even a counterrevolution — a reactionary flight back toward a comfortable, but dehumanizing, mental and moral servitude to elemental nature."
  >:(

Agelbert NOTE: YEP; Modernity claims that IF YOU CAN'T MEASURE IT, IT DOESN'T EXIST so you are a fool to believe in God or Christianity or tie yourself in "neurotic" knots by attempting to live a moral life. After all, Freud "proved" that freeing yourself from moral behavior and any moral restrainst is good for your mental health, right?


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qYWEYuhiWzE&feature=player_embedded

http://www.catholiceducation.org/articles/apologetics/ap0471.htm
He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. Matt 10:37

AGelbert

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What about bad things done by the Church?
« Reply #44 on: April 28, 2014, 07:37:47 pm »
What about bad things  :P done by the Church?  >:(

by Jonathan Sarfati

Professing Christians who committed atrocities were acting inconsistently with the teachings of Christianity. Conversely, evolutionists who committed atrocities were acting consistently with evolution.

This article mainly addresses point 2. In the past, we have frequently supported this point by showing that Christianity has been the most powerful force for good in history.1

This includes motivating charity, education, abolition of slavery,2 and science.3 The evidence is so strong that even some high-profile atheists have conceded that biblical Christianity drove the Salvation Army’s charity and one even proclaimed, “As an atheist, I truly believe Africa needs God.” 4 Similarly, T.H. Huxley (1825–1895), the famous agnostic known as ‘Darwin’s Bulldog’, advocated teaching the Bible to children for its great morality, and insisted on this for his own children.5

The vital difference

About the only response that anti-Christians can give is that the history of the church has not always been good. The most important issue in reply is this:
Atrocities in the name of Christ are inconsistent with real Christianity, which is revealed in the Bible; atrocities in the name of atheism are consistent with it.


Note that we are NOT claiming that all atheists are always ‘evil’ or can never do good things, but that atheism provides no basis for judging right from wrong.

Evolutionist Jaron Lanier showed the problem, saying, “There’s a large group of people who simply are uncomfortable with accepting evolution because it leads to what they perceive as a moral vacuum, in which their best impulses have no basis in nature.”

In reply, the leading atheist and evolutionist Richard Dawkins affirmed, “All I can say is, That’s just tough. We have to face up to the truth.”6

So here we have a leading atheist admitting that evolution provides no basis for morality. Instead, he and his fellow atheists have needed to borrow from Christian concepts of sanctity of life and charity. Similarly, the Jewish libertarian columnist Jeff Jacoby gave a lucid summary of the argument:

“Can people be decent and moral without believing in a God who commands us to be good? Sure. There have always been kind and ethical nonbelievers. But how many of them reason their way to kindness and ethics, and how many simply reflect the moral expectations of the society in which they were raised?

“In our culture, even the most passionate atheist cannot help having been influenced by the Judeo-Christian worldview that shaped Western civilization. …

“For in a world without God, there is no obvious difference between good and evil. There is no way to prove that murder is wrong if there is no Creator who decrees ‘Thou shalt not murder.’ It certainly cannot be proved wrong by reason alone. One might reason instead—as Lenin and Stalin and Mao reasoned—that there is nothing wrong with murdering human beings by the millions if doing so advances the Marxist cause. Or one might reason from observing nature that the way of the world is for the strong to devour the weak—or that natural selection favors the survival of the fittest by any means necessary, including the killing of the less fit.

“It may seem obvious to us today that human life is precious and that the weakest among us deserve special protection. Would we think so absent a moral tradition stretching back to Sinai? It seemed obvious in classical antiquity that sickly babies should be killed. …


“Reason is not enough. Only if there is a God who forbids murder is murder definitively evil.”
7

Therefore, the corrective for faulty application of Christianity is not atheism but correct (biblical) application of Christianity.

Given the reasoning above, it should be no surprise that the atrocities committed in the name of Christ are not only an aberration, but pale compared to the monstrous atrocities committed by atheists for atheistic reasons. Some specific well-known cases in each category will now be addressed.

Christian atrocities?


Inquisition

The Inquisition is certainly a black spot; biblical Christianity, from a human standpoint, tells people to come freely to Christ, not be forced to profess Christ because of threats. But the Inquisition also must be put into perspective, both compared with the numbers and the culture of the time. Spanish Inquisition (1478–1834): historians such as Henry Kamen estimate between 1,500 and 4,000 people were executed for heresy,8 out of Spain’s 6–10 million total population. So at most 0.05% of Spain’s population was killed. While this is nevertheless deplorable, it means that the Inquisition’s rate of executing people was lower than that of the state of Texas today, while atheist Stalin often killed that many before breakfast (so to speak). Furthermore, Inquisition trials were often fairer and more lenient than their secular counterparts—indeed, some criminals uttered heresies precisely so they would be transferred to the Inquisition courts.

Salem witch trials

This was a travesty of paranoia and mass hysteria in colonial Massachusetts between February 1692 and May 1693. However, they killed fewer than 25 people, far short of the “perhaps hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions” that the late antitheist Carl Sagan (1934–1996) claimed. Further, they were stopped when Christians protested at the travesty of justice in the unfair trials and how they violated all biblical standards of evidence.9 Even a trial proponent, the Puritan minister Increase Mather (1639–1723), opposed the ‘spectral evidence’, i.e. from dreams and visions, instead of the biblically required plurality of eyewitnesses (Deuteronomy 17:6, 19:15; Matthew 18:16; 2 Corinthians 13:1). He also made the statement that has now become a vital part of Western justice, “It were better that Ten Suspected Witches should escape, than that One Innocent Person should be Condemned.”10

Crusades


While many people attack Christianity for the Crusades, an increasing number of historians regard them as a belated response to four centuries of Islamic aggression that had conquered two-thirds of the Christian world.11

The Muslims quickly conquered the Iberian Peninsula (now Spain and Portugal) well before the Crusades. They would have almost certainly conquered Europe were it not for the King of the Franks, Charles Martel, grandfather of Charlemagne. In the Battle of Tours (ad 732), Martel’s infantry army stood firm against Muslim cavalry, and repulsed their repeated charges while inflicting enormous casualties. The Muslim leader Abd-er Rahman was killed. Afterwards, the remains of the shattered army retreated back across the Pyrenées, and never returned.

Also, just think about the historic centers of Christianity, such as Jerusalem, Antioch, Alexandria and the rest of North Africa—they are now Muslim lands, converted at the point of the sword. And after the crusades, the Muslim Turks conquered the ancient land of Asia Minor, the birthplace of the Apostle Paul, the site of many of his missionary journeys and home of the Seven Churches of the book of Revelation. Furthermore, when they conquered Constantinople (now Istanbul) in 1453, some 800 years after its founding, they turned Hagia Sophia (‘Holy Wisdom’), the world’s biggest Christian church at the time, and the center of Eastern Orthodoxy, into a mosque.

In this, they were following the example of Muhammad himself. Evangelist Lowell Lundstrom (1939–2012) observed, “During Muhammad’s ten years in Medina, he planned 65 military campaigns and raids, and he personally led 27 of them.”12 In Sura 66:9, the Koran affirms, “O Prophet! Strive against the disbelievers and the hypocrites and be stern with them. Hell will be their home, a hapless journey’s end.” Historian Sir Steven Runciman notes, “Unlike Christianity, which preached a peace that it never achieved, Islam unashamedly came with the sword.”13

Even Richard Dawkins recently admitted:

“There are no Christians, as far as I know, blowing up buildings. I am not aware of any Christian suicide bombers. I am not aware of any major Christian denomination that believes the penalty for apostasy is death. I have mixed feelings about the decline of Christianity, in so far as Christianity might be a bulwark against something worse.”14

So, in a similar note to the main teaching of this article, while atrocities committed in the name of Christ, such as during the Crusades, were inconsistent with the teachings of Christ (such as “Do not murder”), the atrocities committed by Muslims are consistent with Muhammad’s teachings and actions.15

Religious wars?

It’s important to note that religion had nothing to do with the vast majority of wars, e.g. Hutu–Tutsi war in Rwanda, Falklands War, Vietnam and Korean Wars, WW2, WW1, Gran Chaco War in South America, Russo-Japanese War, Spanish-American War, Prussian-French War, Crimean War, US Civil War, Napoleonic wars, Wars of the Roses, Mongol wars, Gallic War, Punic wars, Peloponnesian War, Assyrian wars …

Christian terrorists?

When Islamic or atheistic atrocities are announced, the secular media almost invariably resort to moral equivalence with claimed Christian terrorists. Let’s address a few of them.

Regarding the IRA (Irish Republican Army), Rev. Dr Mark Durie, a fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, points out the truth:

“The example of the IRA, so often cited as Christian terrorists, illustrates the Christian position, because the IRA’s ideology was predominantly Marxist and atheistic. IRA terrorists found no inspiration in the teachings of Christ.”16

Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City Bomber who killed 168 people and wounded over 680, has often been called a “Christian terrorist”. But he was an agnostic to the end. In fact, his final pre-execution public statement was William Ernest Henley’s strongly humanist poem Invictus (1875). This starts, “I thank whatever gods may be/ for my unconquerable soul,” and finishes, “I am the master of my fate: I am the captain of my soul.”17 Such defiant rejection of his Creator is hardly the mark of any Christian, good or otherwise.

Also, the news media were quick to label the Norwegian mass-murderer Anders Breivik as a Christian
. But Breivik specifically denied that he was a religious Christian, caring nothing for God and Christ:


“If you have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ and God then you are a religious Christian. Myself and many more like me do not necessarily have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ and God. We do however believe in Christianity as a cultural, social, identity and moral platform. This makes us Christian.”18 

He could not be more wrong.


Hypocrites in the Church

Hypocrisy is the compliment vice pays to virtue.
Jesus reserved some of his strongest criticism for the hypocrisy of the Pharisees. But He in no way condemned the righteousness that they stood for in public. Matthew 23:1–3 records:

Then Jesus said to the crowds and to his disciples, “The scribes and the Pharisees sit on Moses’ seat, so practice and observe whatever they tell you—but not what they do. For they preach, but do not practice.”

Thus the charge of hypocrisy was not an attack on the morality they preached but on their failure to live up to it. He actually told His followers to be even more righteous than the Pharisees (Matthew 5:20).

We are upset by hypocrisy precisely because we recognize that something intrinsically good has been debased and let down by the hypocrite’s failure to meet the very standard he proclaimed. Hence the saying, “Hypocrisy is the compliment vice pays to virtue.”

This atheist criticism amounts to preferring that we both say and do the wrong thing rather than say the right thing but do the wrong thing.19

Atheistic atrocities

Atrocities committed in Christ’s name pale in comparison to the record-breaking tens of millions killed by atheistic regimes just last century. This was thoroughly documented by Rudolph Rummel (b. 1932), Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of Hawaii, who coined the term democide, meaning ‘murder of a people by their government’:20 77 million in Communist China, 62 million in the Soviet Gulag State, 21 million non-battle killings by the Nazis (including 6 million Jews, ⅓ of all Jews in Europe), 2 million murdered in the Khmer Rouge killing fields. This is many times more deaths than all ‘religious’ wars put together in all centuries of human history, and this is just for the 20th century!

We have previously documented the evolutionary basis for the Holocaust.21 This included eugenics, which was so Darwinian that non-creationist Denis Sewell documented:

Atrocities committed in Christ’s name pale to the record-breaking tens of millions killed by atheistic regimes just last century: 77 million in Communist China, 62 million in the Soviet Gulag State, 21 million non-battle killings by the Nazis, 2 million murdered in the Khmer Rouge killing fields.


“[In the] years leading up to the First World War, The eugenics movement looked like a Darwin family business. … Darwin’s son Leonard replaced his cousin Galton as chairman of the national Eugenics Society in 1911. In the same year an offshoot of the society was formed in Cambridge. Among its leading members were three more of Charles Darwin’s sons, Horace, Francis and George.”22

Summary

Professing Christians who committed atrocities were acting inconsistently with the teachings of Christianity. Conversely, evolutionists who committed atrocities were acting consistently with evolution.


The term ‘atrocity’ has meaning only under a Judeo-Christian worldview; it has no meaning in an evolutionary philosophy.
Agelbert NOTE: Yep! the only "morality" for an atheist is CALORIC INTAKE EFFICENCY = MORALITY, STARVATION = IMMORARLITY.  As stated in the book "the Brothers Karamazov,". "If God does not exist, then ALL THINGS ARE PERMITTED".


The horrors of atheistic atrocities in the 20th century alone dwarf all the ‘Christian’ atrocities in all centuries combined.


He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. Matt 10:37

 

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