WHY CREATIONISM WILL NEVER WIN

Once again youve failed to launch. Your attempt at a logical and historically accurate argument has been cobbled from another poster's attempts at conflating biology and mathematics .(He claimed that Newtons contributions were from a Creationist basis).
Your entire argument seems to be
"since there was no evolutionary theory in the 16th century, Ill just assume that ALL developments were made under the mantle of Creationis,m". You are being double dense and , if you werent a "self professed" scientist, Id think that you were reading (and buying) Duane Gish .



Your post is just another presentation of an irrelevant biography and a hopeful attempt at assigning relevance . Sorry, no cigar. Both you and George understand that my question was asked in terms of sciences of TODAY, when the actual contributions of evolutionary theory are able to be measured and tested. If evolution were not a counter explanation to the CREATIONIST worldview of the 15th century(ie, it had not yet been developed,) then almost ANYTHING you claim could be considered CREATIONIST. That is just stupid of you to act like you dont understand the question.
SO far, no answers have been forthcoming from your ilk (like old QA2k members whove tried the same answer in the same fashion, and the closet IDers that have supported that answer).
So stop trying to weasel out of the question and answer.

Nice attempt, you get no credit.Others may be impressed, I am certainly not. Evasion has been your normal track, now you can add obfuscation to your debating techniques.

Not only will it not persuade, but spendis answer had absolutely no relevance.What do you think of Jerry Coynes review of Ken Millers book (Miller , who is a Roman Catholic "theistic evolutionist"I wherein Coyn states that religion and (in this case) evolutionary theory are incompatible?

I tend to agree with Coyne because he finely expresses the dichotomy of the bases of acceptance of Catholic Dogma and evolution. ie we want super strong evidence to underpin natural selection, but (Miller) accepts the "virgin birth" without a blink of an eye.

My reason for opening this thread are to recall the meanspirited and callous statements made by celebrities in recent years as they attempt to discredit Evolutionary theory in speech and print.
I feel particularly pissed at the following:

1Tom Delay,stated shortly after the event, that Darwinism had been the root cause of Columbine. He stated in front of Congress
"The massacre couldnt have (occured) because our schools teach the kids that they are nothing but glorified apes whove evolutionized out of some primordial soup of mud"(this was an attempt at Delays black humor at science's expense, the mean spirited bastard)

2Anne Coulter (whose never been accused of being anything more than a celebrity)
"Evolution lets liberals off the hook morally. Do whatever you feel like doing-screw your secretary, kill grandma, abort your defective child-Darwin says it will benefit society" (Sounds like spendis arguments all along, just add some misogyny to Coulters statement and that would bring her in alignment with shpendi). Of course this lie has nothing to do with Darwin, the Creationist/IDjits cant even call names without being symmetrical liars

3The Discovery Institute(and the Creation Research Institute) doesnt attempt to carry on a debate with any verifiable scientific data , instead , they arm themselves with claims of moral turpitude, (in its most legal sense). Then, on top, theyve wished to insert their baseless worldview into the science curriculum of public schools.
Then, when called out, they become indignant and retreat into their baseless claims of morality and "purpose" and beauty" ( all points tightly derived derived from Christian principles) .

4When confronted by evidence that several features in a phenotype are "poor design, Michael Behe stated that
"features that strike us as odd in a "design" might have been placed their by the Designer for a reason-for artistic reasons, for variety, to show off, for some as yet undetectable practical puprose-or not"
Then, with straight face, Behe gets the (then) president of the US to support the presentation of ID in our science classes.

Maybe you IDers see some value in education and statements like the above being consistent with good science I sure as hell dont and will beat away any attempts at trying to make the silly arguments that you do. If you do believe that you are being consistent with the scientific method and science in general, then you are quite mad and are quite afflicted with some kind of dissociative complex..

I seem to have stirred things up a bit.



The whole point of theology is that evolutionary theory had been tested and measured and had self destructed and that something needed to be done about it. You're whole lifestyle effemm, everything you do and think, leaving aside the biological exigencies, is a result of a new approach which hasn't yet gone into a pile of rubble. Quite the opposite in my opinion.

I sometimes think that the recession has been engineered to stop us getting too full of ourselves with success.



Bollocks. I've never heard of such a daft idea.

No calculus and no Beagle. End of that silly assertion.

And you have forgotten double-entry book-keeping.

You have no idea about history Set. You just know a lot of disconnected "facts". And the correct ones are a miniscule fraction of the actual facts.

Setanta, my ever irratible friend, I have never defended or even provided aid and comfort to a Protestant savant of any kind - it is the last thing I would knowingly do. I do agree that literalists of all stripes, and Christians in the particular matter at hand, are given to foolish doctrinal rigidity, and that the nonsensical struggle between those folks first with the new geologists over the age of the earth and later with biologists over evolution involved the collision of literalist cant with observation and common sense.

However, permit me two points. First one you yourself have made, namely that some in science venture to take its limits as the limits of all human understanding regarding all things - a foolish extrapolation. Second, that Spendius appears to me to be the antithesis of such literalists in spiritual matters. He may well be a crypto Protestant, but he strikes a sympathetic chord. You just don't like his posturing.

Monkeys understand the SM Cyclo. Suck it and see. Not putting your hand in the fire twice. It requires no diligence.



You obviously do afterplay.

Spendi represents web-master -debator's bifurcation between FORMAT and SUBSTANCE. My vote is that spendi represents format and thats good enough for several of you. Several others (me included) have yet to have a period of satisfactory dialogue with the fellow, and weve tried. To be impressed with format is like reading a copy of Jurssic Park and then making believe that you understand genetics.

farmerman,

You have correctly argued against "creationism", a word you use to describe the beliefs of those who reject geological sience with respect to the origin and age of the earth and biological science with respect to evolution. I certainly don't and I suspect Spendius doesn't reject either scientific discipline or its findings relative to these issues. We reject that "creationism" too.

However, that science doesn't claim to describe the origin of the universe or the potential meaning of our existence. One can imagine an infinite regression of cause and effect - universes destroyed and reborn in giant black holes and reciprocal singularities; an infinity of quantum multiverses; or even the act of a creator --- and still accept and admire the science with which we begin to unravel the mysteries of the observable material world and which has given us evolution and geology.

In short, there is a little deceptive wordplay afoot here. The "creationism" you reject is truly worthy of it. However, you have not and, as far as I can understand your position, have not even attempted to disprove the possibility that the universe had a creator. Apparently you don't believe it had one, but that is another matter.

That is not "creationism"; at least it is not the most common usage of the term.

The type of "creationist" described by Farmerman is a person who believes that that the Earth was created as described in Genesis, and rejects anything that contradicts said belief.

I only have but to have us recall that the above statement was not the planned purpose of this thread. ANd youve been suckered into a meaningless discussion of Nonocentro "design implications" . Whenever spendi invites himself into the fray, He tries to wrest the topic from the threadmaster ( in this case,me).This topic was carefully constructed to be a discussion as to why the Texas Board of education and its recent guidelines for teaching biological sciences in the public schools has provided for a required discussion of "sufficency or insufficiency of evidence" supportive of evolutionary theory. This is merely a camel nose wedgeing itself beneath the tent flap in a fashion sanctioned by the ICR and the Discovery Institute.

Im not willing to spend any more time on spendis attempt at subject wrangling by poting crap that is barely tangential to my original carefully planned tthread. I suppose that we could start another but Im interested more in leaving a clear record as to what many of us think is the way that the Texas legislature should be handling this outrageous attempt at trying to muscle science education in Texas and set it back 75 years. Spendi is more a pain in the ass and he never unserstands that these threads are often widely read by others and quoted by several more.

When it becomes apparent that we are herding cats and splitting hares over the digressions posted by spendi, I dont think it does the overall thread any good.

This is such a great picture. Jesus (the godly white man super hero with flowing robes) riding a snarling dinosaur (even though I've heard that T-Rex was a plant eater in that world). I love the "suggested" colors at the bottom of the page

One more. Can't resist.

The title of the thread implies a sociological question. How can anything win or lose outside the activities of human beings in relation to the exercise of power either using votes or some other way.

The question requires a sociological answer. Arguments about fossils, fish, missing links and Noah's ark are neither here nor there. You derailed your own thread in the first post effemm.

To show that Creationism "will never win" is a very tall order. That means its eradication. When will it never win? Where?

I could easily argue that until it ceases to be a component of cultural furniture, which would require a lengthy application of Orwell's language cleansing, it will never lose. It's such a great story. One might see how great by applying Darwin's ideas to explain the fact that the culture which had that story and was inspired by it can **** on all the other cultures which had less well adapted stories. So far. I'm not clairvoyant.

You may not realise this in your specialised fastness but most people do. In your own state there are three well known cults of Creationism. Maybe more.

It won. And it's the same with the institutions of private property and reproduction which are intimately bound up with Creationism in the widest sense of a complexity you seemingly refuse to recognise. Such complexities as are beyond your scope are easily dismissed as crap. They are beyond most people's scope which enables you to say such things to them without being laughed to scorn. Many of our institutions, habits of thought some call them, are in the blood.

We can hardly imagine any radical changes. One might play around with such notions around the dinner table or in coversations with colleagues (fully funded) in an abstract manner as if society was some sort of toy fort with little painted figurines made of lead all lined up and movable at the whim of the tiny tot playing with them. One might indeed.

But we are not toys. Not yet at least. I suspect we might be if toy soldier fanatics got their hands on the levers of power. The closer your side get to shifting your derisory 15% approval rating to, say, 40%, which is a long way short of the line, the more excitable this debate would become and then ALL the arguments would get an airing rather than just those carefully chosen ones you frown upon us not sticking to because if we did you can't lose. And we can't even afford to have ALL the arguments debated in front of the children with no quarter asked or given. Nor indeed the ladies. Don't forget that educated ladies fainted on hearing Darwin speak and I doubt it was from sexual ecstasies overcoming them in his presence. What sort of "epiphany" do you imagine them to have been having in the moments before they lost consciousness and were carried outside to be revived by strong smelling salts and much waving of fans?

So I would say that it is up to you to show how Creationisn will never win.

If you meant in a vote in a Texas room taken before the next elections then that is another matter entirely and if you want us to address that you might have had the decency to say so.

We love science and what it has done for us. But we want it in the drawer with the tin-opener and the other useful tools.

It's a rubbish thread title. Never say never for a start.

In other words, effem, science/evolution has nothing to do with your topic. Please get a clue, re spendi.

That's right. It could just as well be Greens versus Blues. They once burned Athens to the ground after a blood match. There are many lucrative career opportunities for both sides and why either would ever want to win defies all logic and common sense.

We do know that we can get the religious lot to preach what we like preached using the ratings system but the science side is all fixed on tested out facts and there's no scope for improvisation and that's a deadly condition for any species hopeful of evolving. It assumes a similar fixed environment. And a constant and controlled state of imaginations.

So I think anti-IDers are hanging on their own petard. Evolution is an organic process. Science can only claim to deal with the organic by controlling the conditions under which it studies it. And those are not the conditions in nature.

In Rabelais they tossed up but I don't think that's an option.

Jees, spendi; you can't wish it away or shout it down. Even if it successfully became temporarily suppressed, the truth would out in time. Evolution has proven itself. It is up to humanity how they deal with it and not up to evolution to water down its findings because some are not ready for it. You can wring your hands, proclaiming the sky has become unhinged, or you can fit the knowledge into an accommodating lifestyle. Either way, the process continues.

I take it that spendi is famished for attention. Perhaps I didnt just announce it outright but my topic has all to do with the reasons that the new regs in Texas wont last but a few years of testing and , perhaps, strong evidence, despite what the "Creation scientists" are appealing. Youre message to spendi is just the point, facts and evidence will eventually out over these little "mysteries" and theology will have to accomodate science or be relegated to some intellectual backwater. Texas is spending a lot of capital to try to make it a "tech hub" . Meanwhile, the ststae boards of education are attempting to return to the Middle Ages.
Under pure reason the weight of scientific truth "sufficiency/insufficiency" will gradually turn on the IDers and the CReationists as Texas becomes more embarrassed at what theyve wrought down there.

The Creationiosts are a fractionizing lot. They will "evolve" into separate minute noncooperating groups based on some microscopic variance among their various theologies. Im sure the OEC's and the YEC's are all , in some fashion , disputing the IDers"non religious" worldview.

I agree that the thread title was misleading. It wasn't until later in the thread that it became evident that Texas was the subject of the thread. I would not have entered the thread if this had been made clear since I wasn't even aware of the Texas situation.