The Anti-theist Thread

[emplynx]

Originally posted by Anduril
Emplynx, should we take your continued presence as evidence against God?

Should I take the fact that my kind is not evolving as evidence against Evolution?
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My good creationist friends, I have decided that our good evolutionists friends' argument needs to be summed up.
"Because I cannot see God, I cannot possible believe in him, and I am going to use very, very incomplete evidence to prove that I can exist with out him."
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Lord Kelvin, (1824-1907)
Established Thermodynamics and the scale of absolute temperatures
"In regard to the origin of life and science it all positively affirms a creative power at work."
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In reagard to Dino's on the Ark:

And keep in mind that the largest dinosaur eggs ever found are only about the size of footballs, so if Noah took some dinosaurs shortly after they had hatched, they needn't have been much bigger than footballs!

According to Genesis 6:15, the Ark measured 300 x 50 x 30 cubits, which is about 460 x 75 x 44 feet, with a volume of 1.54 million cubic feet. Researchers have shown that this is the equivalent volume of 522 standard railroad stock cars (US), each of which can hold 240 sheep. By the way, only 11% of all land animals are larger than a sheep.

[BeardofPants]

Originally posted by emplynx
According to Genesis 6:15, the Ark measured 300 x 50 x 30 cubits, which is about 460 x 75 x 44 feet, with a volume of 1.54 million cubic feet. Researchers have shown that this is the equivalent volume of 522 standard railroad stock cars (US), each of which can hold 240 sheep. By the way, only 11% of all land animals are larger than a sheep.

I sincerely doubt that your ark is big enough to house all the dinosaur babies that ever existed, plus all the now extant mammals, reptiles, all the insects, and aves (inluding the giant flightless bird), plus the modern species today.... And before you say that they died in the flood, these species are separated by different strata in the record.

[BeardofPants]

Regarding those measurements of the ark, they are not taken directly from the bible, they have been derived from information in Genesis, so again, we are dependent on one man's interpretation of size.... (fallacy of man? anyone?)

Here is a site that details why the ark story could not have happened, and how the species have not all originated from one place.

Noah's Ark

[BeardofPants]

What Is Biological Evolution?

by Lenny Flank

(c) 1996

The word "evolution" actually means two quite distinct and separate things (and it is a favorite creationist tactic to attempt to blur the distinction between the two). On the one hand, "evolution" means simply that organisms have changed over time, that some organisms have disappeared from the planet and have been replaced by other organisms that did not exist before. In this sense, "evolution" is not a scientific theory or hypothesis; it is an observable fact, in the same way that the life cycle of a frog is an observable fact. The fossil record is very clear in indicating that organisms once existed which no longer exist (dinosaurs, trilobites, pterodactyls, mastodons), and that organisms exist now which did not exist in earlier geological eras (humans, chimps, white-tailed deer, viperine snakes).

On the other hand, "evolution" is also the word used to indicate the scientific theory of how this process of organism replacing organism occurred. In this sense, "evolution" is not an observable fact; it is a scientific model (more later on the definition of a "model") which purports to explain the fact of evolution (changes in species through time).

Most of the time, when a scientist speaks of "evolution", he or she is talking about the currently accepted model of the process through which organisms have changed over time, not about the actual existence or nonexistence of such change itself. The creationists, on the other hand, like to interpret various scientific criticisms of some aspects of the evolutionary model as an attack on the existence of evolution itself. It is important to recognize that this argument is spurious, since the two spheres are quite separate and distinct.

The currently-accepted scientific model of evolution was first laid out in Darwin's book On The Origin of Species Through Natural Selection. The Darwinian theory of evolution can be summed up in a number of simple postulates:

(1) The members of any particular biological population will differ from each other in minor ways, and will have slightly differing characteristics of construction and behavior. This is the principle of "variation".

(2) These variations can be passed from one generation to the next, and the offspring of those possessing a particular type of variation will also tend to have that same variation. This is the principle of "heritability".

(3) Certain of these variations will give their possessor an advantage in life (or avoid some disadvantage), allowing that organism to obtain more food, escape predators more efficiently, etc. Thus, those organisms that possess such a useful variation will tend to survive longer and produce more offspring than other members of that population. These offspring, through the principle of heritability, will also tend to possess this advantageous variation, and this will have the affect of increasing, over a number of generations, the proportion of organisms in the population which possess this variation. This is the principle of "natural selection".

These principles are combined to form the core of the evolutionary model. The traditional Darwinian outlook holds that small incremental changes in structure and behavior, brought about by the natural selection of variations, produce, after a long period of time, organisms that differ so greatly from their ancestors that they are no longer the same organism, and must be classified as a separate species. This process of speciation, repeated over the 3.5 billion year span of time since life first appeared on earth, explains the gradual production of all of life's diversity.

In recent years, two new theories have been widely accepted which complement the traditional Darwinian theory of evolution. The first of these is "punctuated equilibria", a theory set forth by Stephen Gould and Niles Eldredge in the early 1970's. The original Darwinian theory holds that the incremental changes which produce a new species occur throughout the entire population of the "parent" species, and that the entire population gradually becomes replaced by the new species, a scenario known technically as "sympatric speciation" (sympatric means "same place"). In 1972, Gould and Eldredge proposed that the majority of speciations take place not in the entire population of the parent species, but within a small, geographically isolated portion of it. After this isolated transition to a new species has taken place, the new species moves outward from the area of its birth to replace the older species throughout its range. This scenario is known as "allopatric speciation", from the words for "different place".

Gould and Eldredge pointed out that an allopatric mode of speciation, in which the evolutionary transition from one species into another takes place only in an isolated geographic area and over a relatively short period of time, would necessarily limit the number of such transitional fossils that would be found by paleontologists, since these transitional populations would be extremely limited in both space and time, and would not be found unless they were preserved as fossils (itself a rare occurence) and also unless a fossil hunter happened to stumble onto the specific area where such a transition had taken place (Gould and Eldredge did manage to describe one such area--a single small quarry in New York which illustrated the transition from one Phacops species of trilobite to another; the lower levels contained the parent species of trilobites, the upper levels contained the new species, and in between were a series of transitions leading from one to the other).

Another theory of evolution is called "genetic drift", "neutralism" or "nonadaptive evolution". In the Darwinian view, all of an organism's traits are the result of natural selection, which continuously weeds out unsuitable variations and selects suitable ones to be retained in the next generation. However, in at least some instances, the presence of a particular genetic trait may be solely the result of chance. In a small population in which a portion of the members possessed one trait and a portion possessed another, it is possible for an accidental set of circumstances such as a disease or natural disaster to wipe out all of those possessing one of these traits, leaving only one trait left. Thus, this trait would be retained not through natural selection, but solely because of fortuitous circumstances. This is often referred to as "survival of the luckiest".

There also seem to be a large number of traits which are equal in their "fitness"; none has any selection advantage over the others. In this manner, these traits are said to be "neutral"--they are neither selected for nor selected against, and the proportion of one trait to another in a population can change haphazardly through purely statistical methods.

Neither the punctuated equilibria theory nor the neutralist theory replaces the Darwinian theory of gradualist natural selection, nor does either consider the Darwinian theory to be "wrong". Rather, both processes are complementary to the Darwinian viewpoint, while at the same time completely separate from it. Thus, it cannot really be said that there is a single "theory of evolution"--there are in fact several. Although much scientific debate today centers around the relative frequency and importance of each of these modes of speciation, none of this debate concerns the actual existence or nonexistence of evolutionary change (although creationists are very fond of citing selected quotations from evolutionary theorists criticizing this or that aspect of evolutionary mechanism theory, in an attempt to cast doubt on the entire model).

It is also important to note here that evolution as a scientific model is completely silent on the ultimate origin of life on earth; although the evolution model asserts that all life is descended from some common source (which may have been a single original organism, or may have been a number of different organisms which appeared at more or less the same time), the model itself has nothing to say about the process through which this original organism or organisms appeared on earth--evolutionary mechanism theory is only concerned with the question of how life can be transformed into new forms of life. There is no evolutionary theory concerning the original development of life from non-living chemicals, since this topic falls outside of the framework of the evolutionary model. The question of origins belongs to an entirely separate biological discipline known as "abiogenesis", which is the province of bio-chemists rather than of evolutionary biologists. In the same vein, the evolution model has nothing whatsoever to do with astronomy or cosmology, and is completely silent about the original formation of the universe (big bang, steady state, closed or open universe, etc).

And, like any other scientific model (gravity, relativity, quantum physics, molecular chemistry), the evolution model presents no moral, ideological, economic or political agenda. Evolution theory does not posit any way that humans "should" act, or any assertions about how society "should" be organized, any more than does the theory of relativity or the theory of quantum electrodynamics. Likewise, evolutionary theory does not assert that history (either human or biological) is inevitably "progressive", moving inexorably from "good" to "better"; neither does history move from "less complex" to "more complex". The process of evolution is totally ad hoc and nondirectional.

There, in a nut shell. Thanks, Lenny.

[BeardofPants]

HAS THE SPEED OF LIGHT DECAYED?

by Lenny Flank

(c) 1995

One method of demonstrating the extreme age of the universe is done with a telescope. Using powerful reflecting telescopes (and now with the space-based Hubble Space Telescope), we are able to observe objects in space that are several million--even several billion--light years away. When we observe a quasar in our telescope that is a billion light years away, the light we are seeing now left that object a billion years ago and is just now reaching us. If the universe were only 6,000 years old, though, as the creationists claim, we would be quite unable to see anything more than 6,000 light years away from us, since the light from objects further away than that would not have had enough time to reach us by now. The fact that we are able to see objects several billion light-years away indicates that the universe itself must be at least several billion years old.

The creationists attempted to explain this inconsistency with a theory called "C-Decay", first put forth by the Australian creationist Barry Setterfield in 1981. Setterfield's thesis was a simple one: "The basic postulate of this article is that light has slowed down exponentially since the time of creation." (Setterfield, 1981, cited in Strahler, 1987, p. 116)

Setterfield cites figures for the speed of light (known to physicists and astronomers as "c") that were calculated at various times as far back as 1675. Back in the 17th century, the astronomers Roemer and Picard measured the speed of light at 299,270 km/sec, plus or minus 5 percent. Setterfield then took the higher value in this range, 301,300 km/sec, and compared it to the modern figure of 299.792.5 km/sec . (He ignored the fact that scientific instruments in 1675 were nowhere near the quality as modern ones and could not give a similar accuracy).

Setterfield then concluded that the speed of light had lessened or "decayed" from 1675 to the present, and if this trend were projected backwards, the speed of light would have been 1.5 million billion kilometers per second in the year 4040 BC (plus or minus twenty years), approximately 500 billion times faster than it is now. Thus, Setterfield concluded, the only reason why astronomical objects appear to be so far away today is because the speed of light has slowed down by a factor of half a trillion. In reality, says Setterfield, these objects are only several thousand light years away from us. "I propose," Setterfield concluded, "that this initial high value of c would have produced the appearence of great age to the universe in that one week (to those who look with eyes and minds fixed on the current value of c)." (Setterfield, 1981, cited in Strahler, 1990, p. 116)

The flaws in Setterfield's reasoning are obvious. There was no justification for assuming that the highest possible value of Picard and Roemer's experimental range was the correct value, other than the fact that it exaggerated the presumed "decay". The 1675 range of values, in fact, contains the current value of the speed of light, and there is thus no reason whatsoever to conclude that the speed of light in 1675 was any different than it is now.

When it was pointed out to Setterfield that the values for c that were measured in the early 1960's are identical with those made in the 1980's, he promptly concluded that the "decay" must have stopped shortly before that: "From these observations it would seem that beyond 1960 the speed of light had reached its minimum value and was constant thereafter". (cited in Robert P.J. Day, "The Decay of C-Decay", undated) Setterfield has never cited any reason why the speed of light should suddenly stop decaying after so many centuries (and, coincidentally, just at the time when technological methods were becoming precise enough to measure the speed of light very accurately).

Similarly, Setterfield made the assumption that the speed of light did not decay at all for some period of time after the original creation, but remained stable for a period. His "scientific reasoning" for this conclusion? "I will assume that this value held from the time of creation until the time of the Fall, as in my opinion the Creator would not have permitted it to decay during His initial work." (Setterfield, 1981, cited in Strahler, 1990, p. 116)

If, creationists point out, we assume that the value for c has varied over time, then some other consequences can be derived from that fact. As creationist Alan Montgomery points out, Setterfield's theory would "radically alter the dimensions of the age of the universe, eradicate the 'Big Bang', sink the Nebular hypothesis, undermine geological Uniformitarianism, and destroy Darwinism all at the same time." (Montgomery, "Creation Science", Creation Science Association of Ontario, Summer 1987) It is indeed unfortunate for the creationists that there is not a shred of evidence which indicates that the speed of light has ever varied.

By the late 1980's, the complete lack of scientific support for Setterfield's assertions caused even the ICR to publicly reject his theory, concluding that it was "not warranted by the data upon which the hypothesis rests." (Gerald Aardsma, ICR Impact, "Has the Speed of Light Decayed?", May 1988). "Even a cursory glance at the data," the ICR concluded, "reveals that the above analysis is inappropriate for the given data set, and, hence, the conclusions drawn from it are not valid . . . . This result says pretty clearly that there is no discernible decay trend in the data set." (Gerald Aardsma, ICR Impact, "Has the Speed of Light Decayed?", May 1988)

[mirrille]

Originally posted by BeardofPants


I sincerely doubt that your ark is big enough to house all the dinosaur babies that ever existed, plus all the now extant mammals, reptiles, all the insects, and aves (inluding the giant flightless bird), plus the modern species today.... And before you say that they died in the flood, these species are separated by different strata in the record.

Maybe it only housed dinosaur and bird eggs. They are more compact and don't grow as fast and they bring their own food. But those mammals are going to be a problem.

[BeardofPants]

Originally posted by mirrille


Maybe it only housed dinosaur and bird eggs. They are more compact and don't grow as fast and they bring their own food. But those mammals are going to be a problem.

... Not to mention the insects crawling everywhere! "No! Bad Moa! Baaaad Moa! Drop the poor worm NOW!" *another species of worm goes extinct*

[emplynx]

After taking some advice from a fellow Christian mooter, I am going to come up for air and do some talking to God about this topic. I am not planning on posting here for an undifinite period of time. I will be praying for you all. Thanks.

[BeardofPants]

Originally posted by emplynx I will be praying for you all. Thanks.

Oh, thanks! But really, if I wanted prayers, I'd ask for them.

PS Did you run out of answers?

[emplynx]

I know I was going to stop, but BoP, I never run out of answers! I don't stop an argument untill the other person kills me... Really, ask ANY of my teachers... (My science teacher and I are still arguing about 1 question from a test 2 months ago...)

[mirrille]

emplynx: running out of answers is totally allowed.
It's when one runs out of questions that things get scary.
That's the inner scientist talking.

Of course, if it makes you feel better to pray, go ahead!
Can't hurt.
But I'd just like to point out that in future, you might want to refrain from mentioning it in this context. When one suggests that one is going to "pray for the infidel", as it were (and this really is the context you were using, whether you can really see that or not) it tends to upset the said "infidels". They tend to get testy if they feel they are being patronized or their point of view is being trivialized in such a manner. Just trying to explain why people might not take well to that.

[BeardofPants]

This is a story, about silly man.... (to the tune of Brady Bunch).

"Once upon a time, there was this stupid man who lived in Turkey. One day, a voice boomed down at him:

"Stupid man, I am going to cause a flood, such as you've never seen before."
"Oh no! What shall I do?" Said stupid man.
"You shall build a holy device that shall protect you and all your family, and all of the cute fuzzy animals in my kingdom."
"Okay," said stupid man, "but why are you killing all of the other animals, and stinky stupid men?"
"Because they are stupid and stinky, and they keep trying to hump my leg. It's most distracting, when you are trying to create a cool world for all the boys and girls, and one of your creations keeps humping your leg."
"Oh." said stupid man. "Well, what will I need for this holy device?"
"Thou shalt cut down the entire Amazon forrest for this holiest of Arks, and ruin all the ecosystems, and habitats of all those silly rainforest creatures." said the holiest of Gods.
"Oh, and what shall I use to stick it all together, since I don't have any iron nails?"
"Use some of your spit you silly man."
"Okay!".

So, stupid man went and carried out Gods word, and mowed down the entire Amazon forest, to build the most holiest of arks. As for all the mass extinctions he caused, oh well, that is another story. Next, he tried to capture all of the animals in the most holiest of kingdoms. After a hundred years of wild goose chases, he decried to God:

"They are not easy to catch! How am I supposed to get everything into this ark?"
"Oh stupid man! Just catch two of everything! That should be enough."

So silly man ran around and around in circles, and tried to catch two of everything. Two tigers. Two hornets. Two grizzly bears. Two Tyrannosaurus Rex'. Two Lions. Two skunks. Two wolves. Two tasmanian devils. Two unicorns. Two velociraptors. And so forth. By the end of another hundred years, silly man was now a deeply scarred, poor misbegotten fool.

"Oh, God. Is there any easier way to catch these horrid creatures?"
"Stop complaining, fool, and gather some more insects. Here is a jar (with a perforated lid so they don't suffocate.)"

Stupid man ran hither, and thither, trying to catch alll of the insects, and all of the mammals, and all of the birds, and so on, and so forth.

Eventually, Stupid man, had successfully captured two of every single creature in Gods Kingdom (don't ask how he trapped the T-Rex!). Luckily, God had granted him some extra time, so by the time he was 600 the ark was complete. So he put all of his animals in to his big wooden ark, glued with spit. And God caused 40 days, and 40 nights worth of rain...

... In the meantime, because silly man had forgotten to build cages, the lions ate the unicorn, the Moa ate the rare giant worm, the army ants bit everyone, and the Giant Sloth fell overboard. And then, to the Silly Stupid Man's horror, the ark slowly started leaking, from all the wooden spit seams, and sinking from all the weight. Finally after 40 days of rain, and 40 nights of rain, God caused a rainbow to come forth, and celebrate the survival of all his cute fuzzy creatures, and Stupid man and his family, in the ark. Only, to Gods horror, there was no ark to be found.

The moral of the story? Don't create silly stupid men to do your bidding, if you can do it yourself."


Hehe. I kill me.

[Rána Eressëa]

Originally posted by emplynx
After taking some advice from a fellow Christian mooter, I am going to come up for air and do some talking to God about this topic. I am not planning on posting here for an undifinite period of time. I will be praying for you all. Thanks.

Haven't I mentioned the story of my friend who wrote my name on her prayer board? Or did you miss it? It had a very nice moral: "Do not seek to JUDGE; only to UNDERSTAND."

emplynx, I have respect for you for standing up for your beliefs, but when it comes to the point you choose to judge and not to understand why others are the way they are, I begin to feel sorry for you. Not to mention the insult you will cause many non-believers. Nibs, Arathorn, and Starr Polish are the only Christians I can name that handled this topic with great care on not judging between wrong or right on others. Maybe so, even at times, Wayfarer did the same as them. But that was a real low you just hit there, my friend. A real low.

I may have called religion a fairy tale, but not once did I say it was wrong.

[jerseydevil]

I agree with RE. How would you like it if we said we all were going to work on converting you to not believe? I Don't care if you believe or not. Don't think that you're beliefs are the right ones - it's a bit egotistical. I've only stated why I don't believe - and you have to accept it. Why do i need to be saved? What aboiut us saving you from brainwashed views? Would that make you mad if we said that? Because that's what you're doing to us.

[Andúril]

And keep in mind that the largest dinosaur eggs ever found are only about the size of footballs, so if Noah took some dinosaurs shortly after they had hatched, they needn't have been much bigger than footballs!

I stand to be corrected, but doesn't the bible claim that the animals came to the ark? For this theory to be correct, it would mean that all animals that ever existed, were found a few kilometers from the ark.

Besides this, does anyone know how the kiwi got to New Zealand after the flood? And what about all other flightless birds that couldn't swim - how did they get to far-away islands?

[Cirdan]

Wayfarer...

The best resource on fossilization I could find in short order is this. Notice that a)flooding is one of the most feasible methods of fossilization, and b) that the more likely methods of fossilization are catastrophic (as opposed to gradualistic)

In actuality, fossilization is usually caused by a buildup of material over a carcass. i.e. sedimentation. The faster this occurs, the higher the liklihood of fossilization.

Aren't you embarrassed to post a link like this, or are you really that uneducated in the earth sciences? Please refrain from posting ANYTHING about geology unless you preface it by saying it's just your uniformed opinion. The best resource for information on Geology would be a book by a geologist.

Try "Invertebrate Fossils" Moore, Lalicker, Fischer
and "Dynamic Stratigraphy: An Introduction to Sedimentation and Stratigraphy" Matthews

It's like chalk on a blackboard to read articles like that one. Chalk, by the way, is fossilized pelagic (swimming) calcite based plankton. It's deposited in the middle of the ocean, very slowly, far from any sedimentary sources. Think white cliffs of dover. loooooooong time to deposit those babies.

[Cirdan]

Originally posted by BeardofPants
This is a story, about silly man.... (to the tune of Brady Bunch).

"... In the meantime, because silly man had forgotten to build cages, the lions ate the unicorn, the Moa ate the rare giant worm, the army ants bit everyone, and the Giant Sloth fell overboard. And then, to the Silly Stupid Man's horror, the ark slowly started leaking, from all the wooden spit seams, and sinking from all the weight. Finally after 40 days of rain, and 40 nights of rain, God caused a rainbow to come forth, and celebrate the survival of all his cute fuzzy creatures, and Stupid man and his family, in the ark. Only, to Gods horror, there was no ark to be found.

The moral of the story? Don't create silly stupid men to do your bidding, if you can do it yourself."


Hehe. I kill me.

Must be a suicide joke bomb... your killing me, too. ow, ow, stomach hurts.
Has anyone seen the kangaroos? ... and that platypus thing... do we need two or not?

We forgot to get a date for the Loch Ness monster!

[crickhollow]

Perhaps the context of emplynx's comment made it come off as condescending. I know that that is not what he meant. However, last month I was branded as a heretic by a friend, and when he told me he was praying for me, I reacted the same way you folks have.

ps. sarcastic comments go a long way toward hurt. Whether or not you believe in the bible, keep 1 Corinthians 13 in mind when posting, especially on a thread like this that involves personal beliefs. It starts like this:
If I speak in tongues of men and of angels but have not love, I am only a resounding gong, or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy, and can fathom all wisdom and all knowledge, and if I have faith that can move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing.

BoP, I hope you don't think we wait for people to ask us to pray. Prayer changes things. But I find that the more I pray, the more it changes me as well. Jesus was wise to tell his disciples (in matthew 5) to "Love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you". It's impossible to hate someone that you're praying for.

*ahem* *steps down off of soapbox* I've had my say. Continue your Noah bashing party if you like...

[BeardofPants]

*pulls out baseball bat...*

[mirrille]

Originally posted by crickhollow
Perhaps the context of emplynx's comment made it come off as condescending. I know that that is not what he meant. However, last month I was branded as a heretic by a friend, and when he told me he was praying for me, I reacted the same way you folks have.

On second thought, emplynx's comment could just mean that he was going to pray for us as people . Sort of like "I'm going, but I'll be thinking about you.", where praying is just one way the devout might "think of" someone. I'll give him the benefit of the doubt...this time. However, my advice still applies. One should be very careful about saying that one will "pray for" the unbeliever/heretic/infidel/deviant. Be careful of saying the wrong thing in the wrong place. I saw some heretics getting upset not long ago, so it obviously came off badly, whatever the intent.