So has someone ever pointed out to Ken Ham that his argument against an old earth is “you weren’t there, so you can’t be sure of what happened” also applies to the jotting down of Genesis?
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Sure, the question is whether the U.S. will exist as we know it 100+ years from now.
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Yes, but he was a filthy papist, and Dinosaur Huggin’ Jesus says they’re goin to hell.
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It does what it says on the can…
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Now, that’s just silly.
I haven’t had a chance to watch the debate yet. What was the audience reaction? I ask this assuming the deck was stacked against Nye.
The only person who “won” this debate was the mentally ill participant who thinks that The Flintstones was a documentary. His “museum” is going to take in tons of donations as a result of this farce…
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Yes. Maybe we can get them to accept a scientific explanation with God as a primary agent. Heck, if we can get them to accept evolution of everything except humans, that a win compared to believing in a 6000 year old Earth. More than likely, they’ll probably never believe anything, but one day maybe their kids steps out the door and wonders why a cat have 4 limbs a head and a tail like people do, or why doesn’t God build any new mountain ranges like he use to.
Simple, to complete the reasoning with those premises, you’re just wrong. You think, therefore you are. You think that you are not, but you are anyway.
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In other depressing bullshit news…
http://www.rationalskepticism.org/education-parenting/noah-s-ark-zoo-farm-gets-award-t10666.html
Well, not depressing that people are fighting this idiocy…
Gove is perfectly capable of championing the Noah’s Ark school just to wind up OFSTED and the NUT.
Of course there is evidence, though not of the sort you’d publish in a journal. For one thing, the Gods creationists believe in are universally regarded as good beings, while the process of evolution is fundamentally amoral, and involves an enormous quantity of unnecessary and counterproductive suffering - not to mention obvious design flaws. To say that God chose evolution as His preferred means of creation is to say that he is both incompetent and amoral. If so, why is He worthy of worship?
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Doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try. Most science education happens in schools. And most schools are controlled by school board members, most of which probably have no unique qualifications for the job (it’s okay… some of my best friends are school board members.) So whether it’s on YouTube or standing in front of a board as they try to remove evolution from a textbook, that debate will still happen.
And you are right, this is not just about evolution… this is about whether accept climate change, smoking dangerous to your health, stem cell research or a thousand other things these folks derisively call a science theory. All the more reason to no longer sit on our hand. No one said it would be easy.
An incompetent and amoral god, who made us in his image? Well, now…
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Now that guy, I could believe in!
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Is that a purple rag-top Jensen in your avatar? Badass indeed.
So we come back to the problem of evil, which is right where we began. the only theological difference is that, if there is a fall, then it was long before humanity.
A debate in front of a school board typically has a very narrow focus (the specific things impacted by the proposed changes). There are other focused situations where it is important to specifically and completely refute false assertions about the science.
But an open debate with an extremely vague premise and no real guidelines? Remember, the basic fact about religious or superstitious beliefs about the natural world is that they are the easy explanation. It’s simple to claim that a supernatural power is at work in any particular situation, and the only way to refute it is to describe a much more complicated explanation.
By entering into a debate against that viewpoint, a scientist is in the difficult situation of needing to actually communicate something of substance to the audience, while the non-scientist only needs to try to confuse the issue as much as possible. That’s a bad situation, and it becomes worse when it’s over and the non-scientist starts claiming that they “won” the debate (no matter what happened in the actual debate).
Some fossilized questions for a deeper and more funny debate, for instance: is there evolution if there is no time? How will evolutionary biology meet new physical paradigms about time, space and so on? Will new conceptual changes deny evolution? Or on the contrary, will it become a more extraordinary process, full of astonishing implications? If so, will past human beings and the rest of living beings become something different as science progresses? After all, is life something fix-finite-defined? That is, can one understand it by means of using a flesh brain and its limited words, axioms and dogmas? Does the whole of life fit inside a bone box? Indeed, will science add indefinitely without understanding completely, is there an infinite pool of knowledge and ignorance waiting for us? Otherwise, will religions use the word God forever and ever, as if it were a death thing, a repetitive thing that is part of human discussions? And, in order to speak about God, are they using his limited brain or do they use unknown instruments? Along these lines, there is a
peculiar book, a preview in http://goo.gl/rfVqw6 Just another suggestion in order to freethink for a while
What, like referring to god (small ‘g’) as ‘him’?
