Young Earth Creationists

[PedroPonyLikesCrisps]

I know Young Earth Creationists exist, I've seen them on telly, but never met one in real life, so I'm just wondering if anyone here is one or knows one or whether they are actually just incredibly rare and reserved for extreme tv debating!

'"Anyone know how the fire breathing worked? It does say in the bible that Leviathan breathed flames, but doesn't explain the mechanism."

See the bombardier beetle, BOB. It shoots a chemical out its butt that burns its attacker. (I do that sometimes too after eating at Taco Bell.) This could be what was being described.

hahahahahahahahha
Even a pissed saxon couldnt mistake a beetle for a dragon

No, there isn't room for doubt in maths! Pythagoras' Theorem is, and always will be true for all time, 100% certainty. Goedel says that there are true statements for which no proof exists, within a consistent axiomatic system.

I have studied some maths though not geometry to a very high level but surely Pythagoras' theorem (have studied Pythagorean triple in context of Number Theory so not just being ignorant) depends on your frame of reference so it is possible to ask what if it wasn't true and look at the implications. For me maths is often about asking what if and although really good proofs are fantastic logic itself is worthy of study IMHO.

Anyway this debate isn't about maths and I'm not trying to derail. I do love the "God made the integers" quote

"Even a pissed saxon couldnt mistake a beetle for a dragon"

What??!! I'm saying they could have used the same process. The bombardier beetle has three chambers inside its body. One contains hydroquinones and another hydrogen peroxide. When threatened, the beetle combines the two chemicals in the third chamber and shoots the resulting liquid at its attacker. According to Wikipedia, "The boiling, foul-smelling liquid partially becomes a gas by flash evaporation and is expelled explosively through an outlet valve, with a loud popping sound."

The extinct species of crocodile Sarcosuchus (sometimes called supercroc) has three such chambers inside its skull. It is not unreasonable to think that something like this might have been possible.

dinosaurs.about.com/od/otherprehistoriclife/a/Sarcosuchus-Facts.htm

But let me make two other important points here. Evolutionists have much more ambitious claims to overcome than fire-breathing dragons so they should remove the beam from their own eye before looking at the splinter in the eye of creationists. Or to use another biblical metaphor, they strain at gnats while swallowing camels.

Second, I have no doubt that if this hypothesis turned out to be true, you would praise secular scientists for discovering it and give no credit whatsoever to creationists or the Bible.

Dragons.
Best laugh I've had all week

If our efforts to contact aliens ever succeed I doubt the makers of E.T or Mork & Mindy will get much credit either. :)

You are still trying to make stuff fit the story you have already decided is true. I know you think that's the same as science - hence your use of the word hypothesis - but it isn't really. You should be looking at what is, not what you'd like it to be.

Didn't marking a map "Here be Dragons" come to mean "no, I don't have a clue what's there"

Bob the butt-burning bombadier beetle - where can I get me one of these?

And the dragon you speak of - quick, I need one, it's St George's Day soon!

I just looked up Sheldrake. An Archeaologist who has decided dogs are telepathic and launched himself into neuroscience and psychology. Ouch. As a neuroscientist I'm afarid I laughed at some of his stuff. Call me old fashioned and boring.....
But at least it was 20 mins of amusement.

But here is a handy list of why YEC are plain wrong and a list of the science data against them for the non-scientists. You know, apart from boring archaeological writings and remains that are older than 6000 years. But maybe I'll ask my psychic dog...

Oi Conyo, you cant kill dragons. They are endangered. They must be. Cos there aint none. Innit.

Sorry, my mistake, he is a biologist. I got confused by his forays into psychic dogs.

"Any comment on the moon being a light, best?"

Here are two possible explanations for why the Bible calls the moon a light. Even today, we talk of moonlight. And meteorologists speak of sunrise and sunset even though we know that isn't really what's going on. If, a thousand years in the future, someone found a newspaper from 2013 and saw "Sunrise at 6:23 am" they might conclude that we were clueless about the nature of the solar system.

But the better explanation is that the Hebrew word "maor" that has been translated as "light" in Genesis 1:16 actually means "luminary" and is even translated as "luminary" in some translations. Luminary means "a celestial body, as the sun or moon."

www.thefreedictionary.com/luminary

He's a biochemist, infamous - but a barking mad one. Geddit? Eh?

I'll get my coat

Here are two possible explanations for why the Bible calls the moon a light

Actually there are three. How about - the writers of the Bible were clueless Bronze Age cave dwellers who had no farking clue about anything, so made stuff up? Kind of like you're doing.....just saying.

And I'm a bit confused about why you're bringing the Bible into a discussion about science at all.

merriam-webster defines Luminary as: "a body that gives light; especially : one of the celestial bodies."

Which puzzled me as why would the free dictionary have it different so I checked your link and that says "a body that gives light" too.

So what was your point again?

I'd just like to reassure people that all Christians are not like BV! I love evolution, physics etc, I'm a Geography teacher.

I can totally see he creation story as mythos. It was written so long ago. And in poetic language (the change in style comes in Genesis 12 when Abram/Abraham comes on he scene).

Please don't judge us as similar to Best, who I would (in Christian love) describe as rather misguided!).

"Contamination happens in a variety of ways, so you're simply not correct. Do you have any links to research showing that the sample was intrinsic rather than a contamination? Let me save you time - no. That C-14 was detected is irrelevant when all the issues are corrected for."

I was referring to when contamination has been ruled out. Yes, there are examples. For now, just take these quotes into consideration. They are not by creationists.:

"In general, dates in the ?correct ball park? are assumed to be correct and are published, but those in disagreement with other data are seldom published nor are discrepancies fully explained."
- R.L. Mauger, Ph.D. (Geology) (Associate Professor, East Carolina University), ?K-Ar ages of biotites from tuffs in Eocene rocks of the Green River, Washakie and Uinta Basins?. Contributions to Geology, Wyoming University, vol.15 (1), 1977, p.37.

"The troubles of the radiocarbon dating method are undeniably deep and serious. Despite 35 years of technological refinement and better understanding, the underlying assumptions have been strongly challenged, and warnings are out that radiocarbon may soon find itself in a crisis situation. Continuing use of the method depends on a ?fix-it-as-we-go? approach, allowing for contamination here, fractionation there, and calibration whenever possible. It should be no surprise, then, that fully half of the dates are rejected. The wonder is, surely, that the remaining half have come to be accepted.

"No matter how ?useful? it is, though, the radiocarbon method is still not capable of yielding accurate and reliable results. There are gross discrepancies, the chronology is uneven and relative, and the accepted dates are actually selected dates. This whole blessed thing is nothing but 13th-century alchemy, and it all depends upon which funny paper you read."
- Dr. Robert E. Lee, ?Radiocarbon: Ages in Error? Anthropological Journal of Canada, Vol. 19(3), 1981, pp. 9,29 (Assistant Editor).

"If a C-14 date supports our theories, we put it in the main text. If it does not entirely contradict them, we put it in a footnote. And if it is completely ?out of date,? we just drop it."
-T. Save-Soderbergh and I.U. Olsson (Institute of Egyptology and Institute of Physics respectively, Univ. of Uppsala, Sweden), ?C-14 Dating and Egyptian Chronology in Radiocarbon Variations and Absolute Chronology?, Proceedings of the Twelfth Nobel Symposium, New York 1970, p. 35

Isabeller, I think this thread can cope with a slight tangent. It's not frames of reference you mean, but the axioms which form the basis of your system. Pythagoras has been proved true in Euclidean geometry and is 100% true within Euclidean geometry, that is certain and will never be disproved. What Goedel showed was you could have a statement that was true within a consistent axiomatic system, but there be no way within that system to prove it was true - causing concern that famous unsolved problems might not be simply very difficult to prove, but unprovable.

However, the axioms of Euclidean geometry aren't the only possible axioms for a system of geometry. I think you were thinking of the parallel postulate. In Euclidean geometry it is assumed parallel lined never meet. If you consider that parallel lines do meet, you end up with different geometries (e.g. the geometry of curved spaces), and within those systems you can form and prove theorems. In those geometries, Pythagoras theorem might not be a theorem, angles in a triangle add up to more/less than 180 etc.

But so long as you state your axioms, certainty is possible.

Sarcosuchus did not have 'three chambers inside its skull', it had one bulbous growth, a bulla, on the tip of its snout - Randy Ruggle BV's link states this.

Modern gharials have something similar.

BV appears fond of scattering these 'facts' randomly in his writings, I was particularly taken with his authorative pronouncements on entombed frogs in one of his earlier posts on this thread. He didn't provide any evidence for this though, possobly because there isn't any

Don't worry Weegiemum, all the Christians I know recognise bronze-age desert-dweller myths and legends for what they are.

"Not dishonest - a fact. All living things are "transitional" - that's how evolution works. How unfortunate that you don't know this."

I DO realize that if evolution were true, this would also be true. But to use that arguments as evidence for evolution is question-begging. Do you see what I mean? It's almost as if I were to make this argument.:

Me: God exists because the Bible says so.

You: How do you know the Bible is true?

Me: Because God wrote the Bible and He wouldn't lie.

See? That's circular reasoning - something I would never do. Now let's look at your argument.

You: Evolution is true because we have transitional fossils.

Me: But we don't have enough transitional fossils of the kind that should exist if evolution were true.

You: Sure we do. Every fossil is a transitional fossil and that proves evolution.

Do you not see that a lack of numerous transitions is a failed prediction of evolution? Darwin knew the fossil record was impoverished. But he thought more fossils would be found to vindicate his theory. By the early 1970s, the situation was so bad that Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge had to invent punctuated equilibrium to try to give some explanation for the lack of transitional forms.

"You seem to think that we ought to be finding half-cow, half-monkey fossils. You really do, don't you???? If we found anything like that, evolution would be disproved there and then."

Uh, no I really don't. As you say, if that were found it would falsify evolution immediately. I don't expect crocoducks either. All I ask for, is that out of all the trillions of fossils found, half or better should be extinct organisms weeded out by natural selection that appear to have characteristics of the two species on either side. Why not just be honest and admit that the fossil record does not match evolutionary predictions and abandon it as evidence? Most evolutionists have.

Have just Googled some of that stuff, Best - they are ALL written by creationists and ALL appear on creationist sites.

Please don't be silly.

"There is no "barrier" to how much an organism can evolve! What a daft thing to say to say. I suppose it's your attempt at the "Mutations can't add information". Well, they can - and do. Even idiots like the Answers in Genesis lot have distanced themselves from this frankly ludicrous claim. Why are you still using it. Catch up with the bullshit at least!"

What is your evidence that Answers in Genesis is distancing themselves from this claim? I say you're wrong. It is their - and my - primary argument against evolution. Give me a mechanism that can generate new features, traits and body plans and I'll accept evolution again. But I mean completely new body parts - not just new functions for previously existing ones. If you have any evidence for that I'd be very interested to see it. That one thing is all it would take to win me over.

I agree that it seems fairly obvious that the Bible calls the moon a light because the Bronze Age authors thought it was a light. If god really created it to rule the night, then he did a really bad job seeing as it's only really useful when there's a full moon.

I actually have to go now, but I'll address just this:

I DO realize that if evolution were true, this would also be true. But to use that arguments as evidence for evolution is question-begging. Do you see what I mean?

You said there are no transitional fossils. I pointed out that, actually, all fossils are transitional - since all living things are, then all fossils must be.

Evolution predicts the sort of fossils that we should find - and indeed we find them. It's not that complicated, is it?

Give me a mechanism that can generate new features, traits and body plans and I'll accept evolution again. But I mean completely new body parts - not just new functions for previously existing ones

Evolution PREDICTS that there will be new functions for previously existing body parts - that's how organisms evolve. Nowhere does it suggest that a nose or a limb or an organ should spring out of nowhere.

By asking to see evidence of new body parts springing into life from nowhere, you are actually asking for evidence that would disprove evolution. We don't have any of that, Best because evolution is true.

The information issue is addressed in this New Scientist journal:

www.newscientist.com/article/dn13673-evolution-myths-mutations-can-only-destroy-information.html

Best I Google one of your quotes above, and guess what, I found pages and pages and pages of results linking to websites which also have all those quotes on. Looks like you didn't have to far to get those.

It's also a classic example of quote mining and taking quotes out if context. Next time perhaps you can provide a link to a whole paper so we can read about what's actually going on here.