I HATE SPORTS!
Would you like to react to this message? Create an account in a few clicks or log in to continue.

February 12,2015 - I celebrated the 206th birthday of Charles Darwin, with these 17 YouTube videos, The Foundational Falsehoods of Creationism!

Go down

February 12,2015 - I celebrated the 206th birthday of Charles Darwin, with these 17 YouTube videos, The Foundational Falsehoods of Creationism! Empty February 12,2015 - I celebrated the 206th birthday of Charles Darwin, with these 17 YouTube videos, The Foundational Falsehoods of Creationism!

Post by Big Fat Heretic Fri Feb 13, 2015 1:34 am

Here is a series of 17 YouTube Videos and the transcripts of each of the videos.

Now, since we're limited to only 60,000 characters for each forum post, then I will probably be able to post only 3 or 4 transcripts with each forum post, so it will take a few posts to cover all 17 transcripts.

Each video is at least 10 minutes long so it will take approximately 3 hours to view all 17 videos.  

Please view these with an open mind, also while reading the transcripts below each YouTube Link.

I would also welcome your comments.



1st Foundational Falsehood of Creationism


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KnJX68ELbAY

The 1st Falsehood of creationism:
“evolution = atheism”

The U.S. population seems pretty evenly divided over whether the human species is biologically related to other animals or whether we were “specially-created” as part of a flurry of miracles.  Even our collective politicians -seemingly all of them- are wrapped up in this controversy.  Yet its hard to find even one of them who knows what its about.  Why is it that there is such concern in so many grade schools (K thru 12) about teaching evolution, yet there is still a complete consensus among scientists all over America and the rest of the world -that evolution is the backbone of modern biology, and a demonstrable reality historically as well?

Most people really don’t understand science; what it is, how it works, what hypotheses and theories are, or even the purpose behind it.  Sadly even those on your school faculty or state Board of Education often need an education themselves before they can be trusted to govern how or what our kids will be taught, and that’s why I thought I should speak up and do what I can to help.

To adequately understand evolution, you not only have to understand how to be scientific, (which is the real trick for most people) but you also have to know something about cellular biology, genetics, and anatomy, geology, particularly paleontology, as well as environmental systems, tectonics, atomic chemistry, and especially taxonomy, which most people don’t know squat about at all.  Most people who accept evolution also tend to know a whole lot about cosmology, geography, history, sociology, politics, and of course, religion.

But to believe in creationism, you don’t have to know anything about anything, and its better if you don’t!  Because creationism relies on ignorance.  It is not honest research!  It is a scam, a con job exploiting the common folk, and preying on their deepest beliefs and fears.  Creationist apologetics depends on misrepresented data and misquoted authorities, out-of-date and out-of-context, and uses distorted definitions if it uses definitions at all.

There are basically two types of creationists; the professional or political creationists; these are the activists who lead the movement and who will regularly deliberately lie to promote their propaganda; and the second type which are the innocently-deceived followers commonly known as “sheep”.  I know lots of intellectual Christians, but I can’t get any of them to actually watch the tele-evangelists, because they either already know how phony they are, or they don’t want to find out.  But that only allows a radical fringe to claim support from they masses they now also claim to represent.  So there’s nothing to stop them.  Professional creationists are making money hand over fist with faith-healing scams or bilking little old ladies out of prayer donations, or selling books and videos at their circus-like seminars where they have undeserved respect as powerful leaders.  All of them feign knowledge they can’t really possess, and some of them claim degrees they’ve never actually earned.
"You are a scientist, correct?"
"That's right; I have a PhD in truthology from Christian Tech."
Were it not for this con, they’d have to go back to selling used cars, wonder drugs, and multi-level marketing schemes.  They will never change their minds no matter what it costs anyone else.  So it is obviously the “sheep” whom I’m attempting to reach with this speech –so that they might not be sheep anymore, and will stop feeding fuel into that manipulative movement.  Because its one thing to believe in something that might be true (like God in general or Christianity specifically) even though neither can be substantiated or tested in any objective way.  But it is a whole other matter to willfully deceive others into believing things which are definitely not true -like creationism, especially when we can also prove that those doing this know their assorted arguments are bogus, and know they’re lying to our children, and that they hope to continue doing so under the guise of “education”.

Creationism extorts support through peer-pressure, prejudice, and paranoid propaganda, and sells itself with short, simplistic slogans which appeal to those who don’t want to think too much, or are afraid to question their own beliefs.  Worst of all, it actually forbids critical inquiry, and promotes anti-intellectualism, and it is based on at least a dozen foundational falsehoods.  First and foremost among them is the idea that accepting evolution requires the rejection of theism, if not all other religious or spiritual beliefs as well.

For decades those behind the creationism movement have tried very hard to portray the illusion that one cannot accept evolution and still believe in God.   They know better, but they still want you to believe that evolution is atheist, and that it is either evolution without God, or God creating without evolution.  That’s been their central claim since the creationism movement began.  But this supposed controversy never was about whether or not there is a god. Most people believe there is a god, and they believe he is in control of all the seemingly-random events of our lives. This is true of most of the people who accept evolution also. Most of them believe in God as well, and they believe that God is in control of evolution; that evolution, like every other system in nature, is part of God’s design.

Of the couple hundred different, and often violently-conflicting denominations of Christianity, the largest of them by far is Catholicism followed by Orthodoxy.  Both of these have stated support of evolution and denounced creationism.  Pope Benedict recently described evolution as an “enriching reality” and described creationist contests against it as “absurd”.  Both of the popes before him advised Christians ‘round the world to consider evolution to be “more than an hypothesis” and not to fear acceptance of that as being any challenge to their faith in Christ.

The early pioneers of evolutionary science were all initially Christian, (including Darwin) and many leading proponents of modern evolutionary science are still Christian today. For example, microbiologist Dr. Ken Miller, (who testified against intelligent design creationism in Kitzmiller v. Dover) -is a Catholic. Another outspoken proponent of evolution, Dr. Robert T. Bakker, (who has PhDs from both Harvard and Yale) is not only one of the leading, and most recognizable paleontologists in the world today, but he also happens to be a Bible-believing Pentecostal preacher; though he interprets Genesis differently than literalists would.  In his book, Bones, Bibles and Creation, he says that to treat the Bible as though it were common history is to degrade its eternal meaning. One of the earliest geneticists, Theodosius Dobzhansky was an Orthodox Christian who many times professed his belief that life was created by God, but that nothing in biology made sense except in light of evolution.  All these men agree that even if there really is a god, and even if that god is the Christian god, and even if that god created the universe and everything in it, =which they all believe- evolution would still be at least mostly true, and creationism would still be completely wrong.

Of all the developed nations throughout Christendom, only the United States has a significant number of creationists, and they’re the minority even here!  Every other predominantly-Christian country tends to regard creationism as an incredulous, (if not insane) radical fringe movement which is an almost exclusively American phenomenon, and not taken seriously anywhere else.  Poll after poll continues to reveal that, around the world, most “evolutionists” are Christian, and most Christians are evolutionists.  So evolution is not synonymous with atheism, and creationism isn’t synonymous with Christianity either.  Most creationists aren’t even Christians!  There are millions more Muslim and Hindu creationists than Christian ones.

Regardless which religion they claim, creationism can be collectively defined as the fraction of religious believers who reject science, not just the conclusions of science, but its methods as well, and I mean all of them, from uniformitarianism and methodological naturalism to the peer review process and requirement that all positive claims be based on testable evidence.  These people rely instead on blind faith in the assumed authority of their favored fables. In all cases, creationism is an obstinate and dogmatic superstitious belief which holds that members of most seemingly-related taxonomic groups did not evolve naturally, but were created magically, -that plants and animals were literally poofed out of nothing fully-formed, in their current state, unrelated to anything else –despite all indications to the contrary.

Creationists may side with western Abrahamic religions, (being the Judeo-Christian/Islamic mythos) in which there are conflicting versions of the same tales. Or creationists may belong to one of many eastern religions where the sacred stories of creation are much older, completely different, and dedicated to other gods and pantheons. But in every case, the proposed "creator" is supernatural, meaning that it is not a part of perceptible reality. Therefore it is undetectable by any testable means, and can only be assumed to exist for subjective emotional reasons, or as a result of cultural indoctrination, rather than because of any measurable evidence or logical rationale. In other words, there’s no way to say if its really there.  Worst of all, there’s also no way to distinguish anyone’s gods or ghosts from the imaginary beings some primitive folks just made up either. This doesn’t mean no god exists.  But it does mean that science can’t say anything about them.  Because even if gods are real, they still don't appear to be, and apparently don't want to –since all the holy books demand they be believed on faith alone. As there is nothing anyone can verify and thus actually know to be correct about gods, then science is unable to make any comment about them at all. Because science can only ever investigate things with demonstrable evidence can be tested or measured.  

From the creationist’s perspective, the method or mechanism of creation which these mystical beings use is nothing more than a golem spell where clay statues are animated with an enchantment.  Or its an incantation in which complex modern plants and animals are "spoken" into being. That’s right, magic words which cause fully-developed adult animals to be conjured out of thin air. Or a god simply wishes them to exist; so they do. That’s it! There really is nothing more to it than that; pure freakin’ magic –by definition.  Remember that the next time you hear anything from a creation “scientist”.

So for those who believe in God, the question really is how God created, and whether it was by one of many inextricably integrated natural systems he seemingly designed, or whether he simply blinked, wiggled his nose, wished upon a star and said "abra-cadabera".
2nd Foundational Falsehood of Creationism


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZFrkjEgUDZA

The 2nd foundational falsehood of creationism:
scriptures are the “Word of God”.

The 2nd foundational falsehood of creationism is the belief that sacred scriptures were written by a god rather than by the actual human authors. When believers argue over any of the many things which contradict their religion, they often challenge us to decide whom we are going to believe?  The alleged “word” of God?  Or that of Men?  As if human inquiry had no chance against the authority they imagine their doctrine to be.  But when they say, “men”, they’re talking about science.  And when they refer to the “word of God”, they’re talking about myths written about God by men.

If there really is an intelligent and purposeful creator, then it would have to be he who constructed the fossil record revealing evolutionary history, and he has to be the one who conceived the genetic patterns which also trace that same course, and it must have been he who added the other lines of evidence which point to the evolutionary conclusion exclusively and in brilliant detail.  Why else would all these things exist?  Its as if he were trying to tell us something!  Men couldn’t create any of those things.  But men can tell stories, whoppers in fact.  And it was men who wrote all the scriptures pretending to speak for God.

Every one of the world’s supposedly “holy” doctrines of any religion describe themselves as being written by men, not gods; men who were “moved by” or inspired by their favorite gods, or perhaps taking dictation from angels, but they were written by lowly imaginative yet imperfect mortals none the less; not by angels, and certainly not by gods.

If there really was one true god, it should be a singular composite of every religion’s gods, an uber-galactic super-genius, and the ultimate entity of the entire cosmos.  If a being of that magnitude ever wrote a book, then there would only be one such document; one book of God.  It would be dominant everywhere in the world with no predecessors or parallels or alternatives in any language, because mere human authors couldn’t possibly compete with it.  And you wouldn’t need faith to believe it, because it would be consistent with all evidence and demonstrably true, revealing profound morality and wisdom far beyond contemporary human capacity.  It would invariably inspire a unity of common belief for every reader.  If God wrote it, we could expect no less.  But what we see instead is the very opposite of that.  

Instead of only one religion leading to one ultimate truth, we have many different religions with no common origin, all constantly sharding into ever more deeply-divided denominations, seeking conflicting truths, and each somehow claiming divine guidance despite their ongoing divergence in every direction.

The Jewish Torah, the Christian gospels, the Qur’an of Islam, the Kitab-i-Aqdas of Bahá’u’lláh, the Hindu Vedas, the Avestas of Zarathustra, the Adi-Granth of the Sikhs, the Mahabarata’s Bhagavad-Gita, the Book of Mormon, and the Urantia book are all declared to be the “absolute truth” and the “revealed word” of the “one true” god, and believers of each say the others are deceived.  The only logical probability is that they all are –at least to some degree.

None of these have any particular advantage over the others.  None of them have any evidentiary support, and none of them are historically verifiable.
“I’m Dr. Paul Maier, professor of ancient history at Western Michigan University . . . I’m not saying that now I have proven the Bible is authorative, is accurate historically.  Of course not.  You still have to have faith.”
All of them require faith, and apologetics as well, because they also contain inconsistencies, absurdities, and primitive notions once held true but which have since been disproved.  So they can claim no evidence of divine wisdom.  Many of them promote heinous atrocities in place of morality, and many claim to be validated by prophecies now fulfilled – where each may also contain prophesies which failed to come to pass as predicted.  

Leading theologians admit that all of the scriptures of any religion were written by human hands and were thus subject to the interpretations, impressions and perspectives of their primitive and often prejudiced and politically-motivated authors, and they cite this as the explanation behind many of the contradictions in those books, especially those in the Bible.
“Well I wouldn’t call them contradictions as much as commentaries, the one on the other.  Again, let’s point out, we probably do have two different authors here who’s work was blended together then in editorial re-visioning somewhat.”
He’s right about there being more than one author for Genesis, and it was definitely not an eyewitness account!  Some experts now recognize four different sources just for the Pentateuch, the five books of “Moses”, and they don’t credit Moses as the author of any of them as he evidently never existed as described.  The scholarly consensus is that Genesis was compiled, (probably by Ezra) from several unrelated oral traditions less than 2,500 years ago.  Other documents filtered in at the same time, all of which attributed to human authors.  The Bible is nowhere near as old as believers say it is!  The Dead Sea Scrolls are the oldest archaeological texts known for the still unfinished basis of all of western monotheism, yet they’re each centuries younger than the origins of Zoroastrian, Buddhist, Hindu, Helenist, Druidic, Chinese and Egyptian religions.

Christianity began with the Gnostic faith, and then the Docetics, and Ebionites, and their completely different perspectives of Jesus were eventually combined into a kind of compromise called Orthodoxy.  Other Christian subsets like the Luciferians were overrun and discredited by further Biblical revisions.

One of these revisions relates to the king of Ugarit around 3500 years ago.  As his followers were the principle competition with the emerging religion of Moses, scribes working on the New Testament chose to demonize Ba’al ZeBul, the “Lord on High”, by distorting his name to Beelzebub, the “Lord of the Flies”.  So the Bible has been deliberately and deceptively altered for both religious and political reasons.

The rest of what became the New Testament was canonized in the 4th century in a series of committee decisions at a convention at Nicea.  Four gospels were accepted and sixteen more were rejected, all by a show of hands, as if the facts of the matter could be evaluated or dismissed by popular vote.
“The way the canon developed was by what was being read on Sunday in the centers of Christianity.  What do you read on the 2nd Sunday after Easter in the church in Jerusalem?  What’s the church of Rome reading at this time?  And they found that again and again, they were zeroing in on the same stories in the gospels.  And so the core of the canon kind of developed from the usage of the early church”.
So the council simply accepted as gospel whatever few relevant stories the uneducated masses happened to like at that time.  But they still opted to remove more than a dozen books from the Bible even though they were still referenced by other books they chose to include.  Among the rejected items were the writings of both apostles and prophets.  Why would God’s word refer us to other books which were some human’s word, and/or are no longer available?  Who were the real editors here? The Bible often names human authors.  But how could it make such an admission if God were the real author and editor of this haphazard jumble of fables, parables, and psalm lyrics?

The Bible was very definitely written by men, and not superior men either; far from it!  This is why so much of it can be shown to be historically and scientifically dead wrong about damned-near everything back-to-front.  We’re talking about people who believe snakes and donkeys can talk, who believe in incantations, blood sacrifice, ritual spells, enchanted artifacts, pyrotechnic potions, astrology, and the five elements of witchcraft.  They thought that if you use a magic wand to sprinkle blood all over someone, it will cure them of leprosy.  We’re talking about people who think that rabbits chew cud, and that bats are birds, and whales are fish, and that Pi is a round number.  These folks believed that if you display striped patterns to a pregnant cow, it would bare striped calves.  How could anyone say that who knows anything about genetics?  Obviously the authors of this book didn’t.

If the Bible had been written by a supreme being,  then it wouldn’t contain the mistakes that it does. If it was written by a truly superior being, and meant to be read as a literal history, then the Bible wouldn’t contain anything that it does.

As a moral guide, it utterly fails, because much of the original Hebrew scriptures were written by ignorant and bigoted savages who condoned and promoted animal cruelty, incest, slavery, abuse of slaves, spousal abuse, child abuse, child molestation, abortion, pillage, murder, cannibalism, genocide, and prejudice against race, nationality, religion, sex, and sexual orientation.  Why?  To justify their own inhumanity by claiming to do the will of God.

But creationists still continue to ignore all of that.  Some of their sites even admit that wherever reality conflicts with the Bible, then reality must be ignored!  And why is that?  Because if creationists didn’t have their beloved books, they wouldn’t have a god either.  One is the other in their world.  Ironically, the faithful reject the "works" of God as "worshipping creation over the creator." But then they prop up the words of men before God, as God, and even insist that disproving their supposedly "holy" books would somehow disprove God too; not just their version of God, but everyone else's version of God as well.  Creationist Christians think that if the Bible is wrong, then God lied.  They cannot accept that God could exist but the Bible be wrong because they can’t distinguish doctrine from deity.  So it is a form of idolatry wherein the believers worship man-made compilations as though those books were God himself -because they think it is HIS word.  But God never wrote or dictated any of the scriptures of any religion. Everything men chose to reject from or include in their supposedly “in-alterable word” of whatever god was conceived, composed, compiled, translated, interpreted, edited, and often deliberately altered and enhanced by mere fallible men.
3rd Foundational Falsehood of Creationism


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fnj7PlqmJ5o

The 3rd Foundational Falsehood of Creationism;
human interpretation = absolute truth.

George Harrison, the guitarist for the Beatles was a Bhakti Hindu.  He believed in a personal god, and he said that if one chants the mantras with devotion, Lord Krishna would visibly appear and speak to him in an audible voice.  Many pagans are similarly convinced of having met their deities too.  For example, a cat fancier in Texas insists he began worshipping Bast only after the Egyptian goddess dramatically appeared physically manifest, having personally chosen him to become her disciple.  The Chinese religion is a mixture of Confusionism, Taoism, Buddhism, polytheism and ancestor worship. Devotees of this blend of traditions are capable of remarkable feats of faith, and many of them claim direct communication with their gods and spirits as well.  All of these different believers, and some Buddhists too, talk about their spiritual rebirth once they accept whichever deity into their lives.  Every religion boasts their own miracles and prophecies proving thiers is the truest faith.  So its no surprise that Christians say the same things about their versions of God too.  No religion is significantly different from any other in this respect.  But whatever else may be going on, when men claim revelation from God, it usually means is that they’ve decided to promote their own biased and unsubstantiated opinions as if they were divinely inspired.  So its not like any “one true god” is really guiding all these people they way they all insist he/she/they, or it  is.

If any god exists, and it happens that there’s only one of them, then surely every spiritually enlightened and visionary holy man from any nation or tribe should be able to sense it, if men can sense such things at all.  And their scribes would write the scrolls seeking to make sense of it –however feeble an attempt that may be.  Perhaps that’s why there are so many different religions; because no man can know the true state of God.  There can only be one truth, and only one version of it.  But rather than coming together, as everyone’s search for the one truth should, religions continuously shard further and further apart into more divided factions with mutually-exclusive beliefs, -and there are as many wrong interpretations as there people claiming theirs as the “absolute truth”.  Which brings us to the third foundational falsehood of creationism; the assertion that any human's understanding of their various internally-conflicting and inter-contradictory beliefs should, -or even could- be considered infallible or inerrently accurate.

In reality, there is no such thing as “absolute truth”.  Everything within the capacity of human understanding contains a degree of error, and everything men know to be true is only true to a degree.  Everyone is inevitably wrong about something somewhere.  We don’t know everything about everything.  We don’t know everything about anything!  And what we do know, we don’t know accurately on all points nor completely in every detail.  Honest men admit this.  Anyone claiming to know the absolute truth is not being honest, especially not when they claim to know anything about things which can only be believed on faith.  Even if men were given genuine revelations by truly omniscient beings, they must still be filtered and interpreted by weaker minds influenced by our limitations, biases, and misimpressions, as well as linguistic and cultural barriers.

In the history of history itself, no account human journalists have ever given has been absolutely complete, inerrant, and perfectly accurate -especially when there is a desperate emotional bias such as there is at the source of each of the world’s religious books.  All of them were written decades or centuries after the alleged events they claim to have witnessed, and they speak of many scenes no one could have witnessed at all.  Some of them, -like the Bhagavad Gita and much of the Torah- were originally written as poetry.  So the conversations can’t have been verbatim unless all the characters really spoke in rhyme.  These tales include impossible absurdities which can’t even be corroborated by any other contributors internally, much less external records.  No matter how many witnesses there supposedly were, or how many historians should have known about it, the only source for any of the fables in the Bible is the Bible itself.

Archaeology certainly doesn’t support any of these stories.  Instead, we have many earlier versions of many of them coming from myriad myths of polytheism, some of which written by the very ancestors of the Biblical authors.  They apparently conceived all the original, but as-yet unassociated elements which were eventually “blended together” into the fables we now know as Genesis.  These stories can be interpreted wildly differently by anyone who reads them.

Some argue that the Bible doesn’t really say some of the things we can prove that it does, while others are convinced that it clearly does say things that it doesn’t really even hint at anywhere.   For example, the idea that there was no death before “the fall”.  The Bible doesn’t say that.  In fact, it says there was death before the fall, because Adam and Eve had to ingest and digest living cells in order to survive, the very definition of what it means to be an animal.  The only way around that was to eat of the fruit of the tree of eternal life, which directly contradicts the creationist’s interpretation, because it wouldn’t need to be there if they already had eternal life.  It is an obvious metaphor representing a choice, perhaps between innocence and responsibility.  That too is an interpretation.  But it was obviously not an actual deciduous plant!  

The council of Nicea gathered theologians from all over the Roman empire trying to interpret what their scriptures meant rather than what they said.  One of the central points in dispute was whether Jesus was who he said he was, or whether he was secretly God instead.  Those trying to reconcile contradictions between the Old and New Testaments may have borrowed concepts of trinitarian gods and avatars from the Hindus.  In the Bhagavad Gita, Lord Krishna said he was the creator of the world and God-in-the-flesh, an avatar of Vishnu. But in the gospels, which are the only documents claiming to record the Christ’s actual words, Jesus never implied any of that at all.  Jesus only did what Akenaton did; promote himself as the sole prophet of the sun-god.  At one point, Jesus says he is "one" with God. But he clarifies that he is referring only to his purpose, and he says that any of us might become "one" with God just as he is, and that we may perform even greater miracles than he did. But throughout the Bible, regardless whatever else he may claim about himself, Jesus always only ever described himself as separate from, and subordinate to El/Allah/Abba/YHWH.  And he said that the god of Abraham, and bringer of the flood was someone else somewhere else, who knows things Jesus doesn't know, can do things Jesus can't do, and who did things Jesus didn't do, but only witnessed, like creating the world.  Jesus also spoke about God in 3rd person and to God in 2nd person, and in one scene God talks about Jesus in 3rd person too –when he introduced his son to the Jews.  Then the Holy Ghost showed up and lead Jesus to somewhere Jesus did not already know.  None of this could be if Jesus were an avatar or "god-in-the-flesh" because then Jesus and God and the holy ghost would all still share the same knowledge, power, identity and position in space and time. So it is pretty clear that Jesus did not believe himself to be the same god as the one he and the Jews both worshipped.

When the Nicene creed was being conceived, the committee took a vote on the identity and divinity of Jesus.  Even that is subject to interpretation!  Those who said Jesus was a prophet of God but not of the same essence as God –lost the vote, and were banished to prevent their ideas from influencing the Christian formation.  For a time, both sides labeled the others heretics.  

If the Bible is interpreted literally, then it is clear that its authors believed that the world was a flat disc, which was originally said to be covered by a giant crystal dome.  It was a common belief at the time in all the neighboring regions.  But it was still wrong.  The Biblical authors obviously knew nothing about the real state of this world nor the worlds beyond this one either.  But we know what lies outside our atmosphere. And that proves that there is no water above where the firmament isn't, and no windows to let it drain in -if there was either water or firmament there.

Some Persians at that time said that the god, Mithras had the stars sewn into the lining of his cloak, which he would drape over the crystaline firmament to bring on the night.  But we know that night is not a veil to be spread over the missing firmament like a curtain or a tent.  We also know that the stars are not made to stand in the span of this expanse because they are not "high" in the firmament; there is no firmament, and they are so far beyond our puny world that "height" is meaningless and inapplicable. They are much too far away to be blown out of place by any storm and they couldn't be taken "down" by anything at all. We've also proven that the illusive heavenly firmament has no foundations either, and neither does the Earth. There are no pillars holding the Earth above the deep, because there is no deep. Outer space is not full of water!  We also now know what lies outside our gravitational field. And that proves that you can't have any passage of days and nights without a sun to measure them against an Earth which constantly moves. We also know that the sun cannot be made to set at noon, and that neither the sun nor the moon can be stopped in the sky. We also now know what is beyond our solar system. And that proves that the stars can't fall from the sky, and even if they did, we still couldn't stomp on them because they're each millions of miles around. Which makes it a bit silly to imagine a whole group of them having conscious minds, and ganging up in combat with a mere human being.  We even know now what lies beyond our galaxy. And that proves that nothing or no one could ever "seal up the stars". We also know that the Earth with its fictitious firmament didn't predate the "lights in the heavens" by any amount of time, and that the stars weren't "set" specifically to light the Earth; because the Earth is not at the center, -or the beginning- of the universe in any respect. The way the Bible depicts the Earth in relation to the rest of the universe is wrong and has been known to be wrong for thousands of years.

Many creationists say that it is impossible to understand or believe the Bible unless it is read “in the spirit of the holy ghost”.  In other words, you must already assume its truth before you read it, and you have to read it through filters of faith because it certainly isn’t compelling on its own without those blinders on.  If it doesn’t make sense, then you’ve got to convince yourself that you must not understand it properly, and you’ve just got to try to make yourself believe it anyway somehow.  That is precisely why creationist faith is deemed ‘dogmatic’.  But that’s also proof by admission that even a literal reading must be “interpreted”.  So its very design is such that the Bible can not be either inerrant or “absolute truth”.
OK, more videos continued below . . . . .

Because of the 60,000 character limit for each forum post, I have to continue below.

Please refrain from posting comments until after I'm done posting all 17 videos.

Thank you.


Last edited by Big Fat Heretic on Fri Feb 13, 2015 2:17 pm; edited 1 time in total
Big Fat Heretic
Big Fat Heretic
IHateSports Fanatic

Posts : 402
Join date : 2012-12-26
Age : 72
Location : El Paso, Texas

https://www.youtube.com/user/BigFatHeretic

Back to top Go down

February 12,2015 - I celebrated the 206th birthday of Charles Darwin, with these 17 YouTube videos, The Foundational Falsehoods of Creationism! Empty Re: February 12,2015 - I celebrated the 206th birthday of Charles Darwin, with these 17 YouTube videos, The Foundational Falsehoods of Creationism!

Post by Big Fat Heretic Fri Feb 13, 2015 3:09 am

Continued from above.

More videos.

Please enjoy.


4th Foundational Falsehood of Creationism


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=80nhqGfN6t8

The 4th Foundational Falsehood of Creationism;
belief = knowledge

The next in our series of foundational falsehoods of creationism is a logical fallacy illustrative of the fundamental sophistry behind the creationism movement; the idea that really really believing something is the same thing as knowing it.  

Every religion claims to believe as they do because of reason, education, or intelligence given by their god in revelation.  But whether they admit it or not, all of them are assuming their preferred conclusions on faith, and this would still be true even if all of their gods exist.  Believe as hard as you want to.  But convincing yourself however firmly still can’t change the reality of things.  Seeing is believing.  But seeing isn’t knowing.  Believing isn’t knowing.  Subjective convictions are meaningless in science, and eyewitness testimony is the least reliable form of evidence.

For example, if I go into my front yard and I see a large sauropod walking down the middle of my street, I will of course be quite convinced of what I see. I may be even more satisfied when I follow the thing and find that I can touch it, maybe even ride it if I want to. When I gather sense enough to run back for my camcorder, I may not be able to find the beast again, because I don't know which way it went. But that doesn’t matter because I saw it,  I heard it, felt it, smelt it and I remember all that clearly with a sober and rational mind. But somehow I'm the only one who ever noticed it, and of course no one believes me.  Some other guy says he saw a dinosaur too, but his description was completely different, such that we can’t both be talking about the same thing.  So it doesn't matter how convinced I am that it really happened. It might not have.  When days go by and there are still no tracks, no excrement, no destruction, no sign of the beast at all, no other witnesses who’s testimony lends credence to mine, and no explanation for how a 20-meter long dinosaur could just disappear in the suburbs of a major metropolis, much less how it could have appeared there in the first place, -then it becomes much easier to explain how there could be only two witnesses who can’t agree on what they think they saw, than it is to explain all the impossibilities against that dinosaur ever really being there. Positive claims require positive evidence.  Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and that’s what I’d need –since what I propose isn’t just extraordinary; its impossible.  But since there's not one fact I can show that anyone can measure or otherwise confirm, then my perspective is still subjective -and thus uncertain.  Eventually, even I, the eyewitness, would have to admit that, although I did see it, I still don’t know if it was ever really there –regardless whether I still believe that it was.

I'm a geoscience major at the University of Texas.  I’m a student of paleontology, which if you don't know, is the study of ancient life forms. We're always finding new things in the fossil record. That record is already much more rich than any layman would ever suspect, and some of the many things we've found were pretty weird. So all kinds of things might be there, including this: I call it Godzillasaurus dios.  Is it possible that this once existed? Well, to be philosophically correct, I would have to say ‘yes’, it is technically 'possible' this form of Lepidosaur actually could have existed, and I concede that it is even conceivable that we could find it in the fossil record someday.

But let's forget what is possible, and concentrate on what is probable. Is there any reason to believe this particular gargantuan lizard actually did exist? No, nothing at all. I mean, there were several old folklorish movies about it, and there are a heckuva lot of Kaiju fans who would love it if this thing were really real once. But apart from some fanatic devotees and their beloved fiction, what evidence is there for Godzilla? Not one thing which could be verified by anyone.  Consequently, there is every indication that the king of the monsters is just a made-up character.

If I found a five-toed footprint the size of a whole T-rex, that at least would be something. But it still wouldn't be enough to justify the illustration, would it? I would need volumes more evidence than that!  I mean, how can I claim to know all these details about something I can't even show was ever real? Especially if I have no reason to imagine such a thing in the first place.  Still, I live in a country where I have a Constitutionally-guaranteed freedom to believe whatever I want, and I’d really like to believe that something like this existed once.  No one can conclusively prove that no extinct reptile could have looked like this, right?  We’ll never discover every species that ever lived, and absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.  So don’t I still get to believe Godzilla was real, if I want to?

What if I then went on to list all sorts of other details I supposedly knew about Godzillasaurus? What color it was, or what its reproductive peculiarities were, or the unique way it would respond to certain stimuli, and I say all this as if I had the facts and test results necessary to prove each point, when I really don’t have any indication that anything like this ever even lived at all.

What if I still didn't stop there?  What if I didn’t just say that Gojira could have existed? Given the utter lack of evidence, just that comment alone might have cost me my credibility as a scientist. If I even said he “probably” existed -my reputation would be ruined because I can’t substantiate that claim.  But let's say I went several steps beyond too far, and stated flat-out that he did exist? Not that I "think" he existed, or that I "believe" that he did, but that I knew he did. What happens to my credibility then? Can one even say something like that and still be trusted anymore?  If I have no positively-indicative evidence at all to back me up, and thus can't prove I’m right about anything I profess to know, then if I go ahead anyway and confidently posit that Godzillasaurus did in fact roam the Japanese islands two million years ago, would that be an honest claim?

Normally, anyone disreputable enough to flatly affirm such positive proclamations without adequate support would lose the respect of his peers and be accused of outright fraud; anyone but a religious advocate that is.  When allegedly holy men do the exact same thing, then its not called fraud anymore.  Its called “revealed truth” instead.  That’s quite a double-standard, innit?

Like when some minister gets on stage at one of those stadium-sized churches -to state as fact who God is and what God is, and what he wants, hates, needs, won’t tolerate, or will do -for whom, how, and under what conditions; they don’t have any data to show they’re correct about any of it, yet they speak so matter-of-factly.  Even when they contradict each other they’re all still completely confident in their own empty assertions!

So why do none of these tens of thousands of head-bobbing, mouth-breathing, glassy-eyed wanna-believers have the presence of mind to ask, “how do you know that?”  Well, for all those who never asked the question, here’s the answer; they don’t know that!  There’s no way anyone could know these things.  They’re making it up as they go along.  These sermons are the best possible example of blind speculation; asserted as though it were truth and sold for tithe.  If anyone or everyone else would be called liars for claiming such things without any evidentiary basis then why make exceptions for evangelists?  For these charlatans are obviously liars too!  The clergy are in the same category of questionable credibility as are commissioned salesmen, politicians, and military recruiters.

You could raise a commnity of children to believe in Cthulhu if you always insist that he’s true.  If you make them worship him regularly, and pray to him in fear begging for signs or impressions revealing his existence to them, then at least some of those children will eventually claim to have experienced that god despite the fact that he only ever existed in fiction.

Occultists, transcendentalists, and faith-healers of every religion know the auto-deceptive power of faith.  It doesn’t matter which gods or spirits they pray to.  No matter which devotion one practices, if the ambience of the ritual is right, then faith can prepare the mind and psyche the senses into perceiving or experiencing whatever the subjects want to believe.  Seemingly miraculous feats and visions occur in every faith because faith itself is the cause of them, rather than whatever devotees may have faith “in”.  That has to be the case, because faith is the only common bond between all religious beliefs.    

Believers often say they “know for a fact” that their beliefs are the “truth”.  They “testify” to things they don’t know anything about.  They pretend to “witness” things they’ve never really seen, and they like to use other confident-sounding terms like “conclusively proven” when they’re really only talking about baseless assumptions, (and vice versa).  They often claim “absolute truth” when they’re really talking about bald-faced lies, and all too often, they will continue to repeat and appeal to arguments they know have already been proven wrong.  But if you believe in truth at all, then you should make sure that the things you say actually are true, that they are defensibly accurate, and academically correct.  And if they’re not correct, you should correct them!  You wouldn’t claim to know anything you couldn’t prove that you knew, and you wouldn’t talk about anything being “proven” at all, unless you’re clearly using that term in the sense that a court of law would use.  Scientists must choose their words very carefully, because science is brutal in peer-review, and no scientist would ever get away with any of the wild raving propaganda which religious zealots or the news media use.  That’s why they say the devil is in the details!  

First of all, “truth” is more than just facts.  It implies something that is completely true, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.  So every word of it better be accurate, or it isn’t truth at all; and depending on the topic, such a concept is likely beyond human comprehension anyway.  Truth may be pursued but never possessed.  That’s why we should trust those who seek the truth and doubt those who claim to have it!  A fact is a unit of information that is verifiably true beyond dispute, and obviously beliefs based on the conflicting faiths of different religions cannot qualify as that.  Belief may be either rational, or assumed on faith.  But in either case, it doesn’t matter how convinced you are; belief does not equal knowledge.  The difference is that knowledge can always be tested for accuracy where mere beliefs often can not be.  No matter how positively you think you know it, if you can’t show it, then you don’t know it, and you shouldn’t say that you do.  Nor would you if you really cared about the truth.  Knowledge is demonstrable, measurable.  But faith is often a matter of pretending to know what you know you really don't know, and that no one even can know, and which you merely believe -often for no good reason at all.

5th Foundational Falsehood of Creationism


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HzmbnxtnMB4

The 5th foundational falsehood of creationism;
“Evolution-ism” (part I)
“Evolution = the religion of atheism”



U.S. politics have flip-flopped since our revolutionary beginnings.  The United States was originally famous as a haven for immigrants with any religion or none, precisely because it wasn’t founded on any one.  Now the Religious Right is trying to say America was founded as a Christian country.  But the fact is that while we have become the most religious of any of the predominantly Christian 1st world nations, (due to repeated surges in rural revivalism) the US in its infancy was once the most secular government in history.

The original colonies were primarily peopled by refugees fleeing religious persecution in other countries. But almost upon arrival, the Puritans only continued that practice against native Shaman, then against Quakers, and even each other –over religious differences. Catholics to the South were even worse!  The founding fathers however were largely Deists, the least devout form of theism.  They were brilliant men who knew better than to let religion rule over law because theocracy has in all instances almost automatically violated human rights and it inevitably always does.  Consequently, the irreligious and non-Christian framers of the American Constitution produced the first government ever to grant all its citizens the right to religious freedom, and they did so by forbidding the government from sponsoring or promoting one religion over any other.  Because it is not possible to have freedom of religion without having freedom from religion.  

Creationists campaign continuously to overturn that, trying to undermine science education and teach their particular Bible-based religious beliefs in its place by pretending that creationism is science too.  They know it isn’t, but they say it is anyway.  So far they’ve been beaten in the courts on every attempt because they’re not trying to teach “better” science, nor any “alternative” science.  Many of them don’t want students to learn science at all.  They want to impose their religion instead.  They don’t want to educate; they want to indoctrinate, and they want the government to support them in public schools because they’re intolerant of other views, and they want to condition everyone else’s children to believe as they do.

"Do you believe in UFOs, astral projections, mental telepathy, ESP, claivoyance, spirit photography, telekinetic movement, full-trance mediums, the Loch Ness monster, and the theory of Atlantis?"

But America’s pioneer concept of separating church from state still prohibits this.  In 1987, creation “science” was outlawed in public schools as being exclusively religious and not scientific in any sense; and in 2005, it happened again.  Since even intelligent design creationism cannot compete with evolution as a science, creationists try instead to evoke the same constitutional prohibitions against them –and turn them against science, by asserting that evolution is a religion too.  They know it isn’t, but they say it is anyway.

And so we have the fifth in our series of fundamental falsehoods of creationism; the persistent insistence that perspectives opposed to faith and religion somehow still require faith as religion.

A religion is not just any ol’ thing you happen to believe, and its not just anything you believe strongly either.  Every belief-system which is commonly accepted as a religion by both its adherents and its critics -is a doctrine of ritual traditions, ceremonies, mythology, and the associated dogma of faith-based belief systems which all include the idea that some element of ‘self’ (be it a soul or portion of consciousness, or memories, etc.) may, in some sense, continue beyond the death of the physical being.  This applies to every religion and only to religion, but doesn’t apply to evolution or atheists either, unless they happen to be Druids or Shaman or one of those other religions which don’t happen to include gods.

Some Buddhists believe in a god and some don’t.  Some traditional Chinese beliefs are the same way.  Not all religions have creative deities, but every religion must propose something paranormal, beyond tangible existence which they believe we’ll experience after we die. You can’t posit something like that without faith, and if you don’t have faith, you can’t have religion.

And when creationists complain about atheists, they’re not talking about Buddhists or Shaman.  They’re referring to material empirical rationalists, people they know don’t have any faith in anything supernatural at all –which only makes their lie that much more brazen.

According to a consensus of every authoritive or definitive source available anywhere -including theologians, dictionaries, scriptures, hymns, sermons, -everything; faith can be accurately defined as a complete and unwavering conviction; a positive belief –which is not dependant on evidence, and will not change because of evidence.
 
“That is unreasonable, and it's unscientific. That is the definition of blind faith; I believe something even though there is no evidence to support it.”

Faith is often a belief in things which are impossible according to everything we know about anything at all. The belief is sacred, meaning that it is never to be questioned or critically examined, but must be believed no matter what.  Skeptical inquiry is strictly forbidden, and apologetics exists only to obligately rationalize away any criticisms so that they may be dismissed without consideration.

In other words, faith assumes its own conclusions, believes impossible things without reason, and defends those beliefs against all reason to the contrary.  So it can’t help but be wrong to some degree to start with, and any errors will never even be acknowledged, much less sought out or corrected.  So that situation can never improve.  However wrong it already is is however wrong it will forever be.  So faith offers no way to discover the real truth about anything, but it’s a great way to stay wrong forever and never admit it –even to yourself.

Science is completely opposite in every respect.  Rather than any need-to-believe, science is driven by a desire to understand.  And the only way to improve your understanding of anything is to seek out errors in our current position and correct them.  You can’t do that if you claim your initial assumptions are already infallible, and you can’t even begin to seek the truth if you won’t admit that you might not already know it, or that you don’t know it all perfectly already.      

While scientists themselves may be religious men of many different faiths, their methodology was designed to be the antithesis of faith because it requires that all assumptions be questioned, that all proposed explanations be based on demonstrable evidence, and that all hypotheses be must be testable and potentially falsifiable.  Blaming magic is never acceptable because miracles aren’t explanations of any kind, and there has never been a single instance in history when assuming the supernatural has ever improved our understanding of anything.  In fact such excuses have only ever impeded our attempts at discovery.  This is one of many reasons why science depends on methodological naturalism; because unlike religion, science demands some way to determine who’s explanations are the more accurate, and which changes would actually be corrections.  Science is a self-correcting process which changes constantly because its always improving.  Only accurate information has practical application.  So it doesn’t matter what you wanna believe.  All that matters is why we should believe it too, and how accurate your perception can be shown to be. So you can’t just make up stuff in science (like you can in religion) because you have to substantiate everything, and be able to defend it even against peers who may not want to believe as you do.  Be prepared to convince them anyway.  Its possible to do that in science because science is based on reason.  That means you must be ready to reject or correct whatever you hold true should you discover evidence against it.

All this stands completely counter to faith, and religious assumptions cannot withstand any of these rigors.  But evolution can, and does, and has.  For 150 years so far the greatest minds of the modern age have collectively failed to controvert the essence of evolution.  It is a study which neither requires nor desires faith, and doesn’t even permit it, nor is it needed, because evolution is easily indicated and evidenced, measured and tested myriad ways without it –and even against the harshest scrutiny.  And remember that evidence must be objective, meaning that it can still be verified whether you want to believe in it or not.  Evolution has all that in spades, and is a unifying theory which has enhanced our knowledge of many different aspects of biology enormously, and that’s why so many religious as well as non-religious scientists endorse it.

Believe what you want about the supernatural realm.  But those beliefs have to rely on faith because there’s no way to know whether any of it is true or not; because science can’t look at the metaphysical.  It can only help us understand the material world we can actually study.  So ‘evolutionists’ may still believe in any religion they like.

Lest we forget, when creationists complain about “evolution”, they’re really complaining about science in general –both in principle and practice.  Most Christians accept evolution, and some atheists do not.  So evolution is NOT atheist! Creationists know its not, but they say it is anyway.

Creationists often say that secular humanism is recognized as a religion by law, and since they wrongly that think atheism and what they call “evolution-ism” are the same thing, then by extension they think even rationalism should be considered a religion; that even anti-religion is religious.  But of course they’re wrong again on all counts.

In the 1961 case of Torcaso v. Watkins, Roy Torcaso was denied his commission as notary public when he refused to declare a belief in God.  At that time, the state of Maryland’s “Declaration of Rights” required “a declaration of belief in the existence of God” as a qualification for any office of profit or trust in that state.  The Supreme Court ruled that such requirements violated Article 6 of the United States’ Constitution, as well the 1st and 14th amendments.  But the official ruling also included a series of footnotes, called "obiter dictum," or "said in passing." These are only the personal opinions of the justice, with no official or legal significance.  In a dictum footnote attached to his opinion, Justice Hugo Black listed “Secular Humanism” along with “Ethical Culture” and Taoism as religions which do not teach a belief in God.  The footnote is not legally binding, which is fortunate since none of those things really count as religion.  Imagine attending the church of ethical culture!

So secular humanism is not a religion in any sense, legal or otherwise, and neither is atheism. Religion must include a professed conviction, and simply being un-convinced as to the real-life existence of what they see as mythical characters –hardly counts as that.  So atheism alone is no more a religion than health is a disease.  One may as well argue over which brand of car pedestrians drive.

Evolution is even less religious!  It is the branch of biology which explains biodiversity.  As such it doesn’t permit supernatural explanations, has no doctrines, nor dogma, nor fables with morals; it has no rituals, traditions or holidays, nor either leaders or defenders of the faith because it doesn’t allow faith.  It holds nothing sacred, there’s no place of worship, no enchantments, no clergy, no fashion of garb, and it neither promotes nor discourages belief in gods or souls, and says nothing about how we should live or what happens after we die.  Evolution is therefore NOT a religion, and creationists KNOW its not – but they say it is anyway.

6th Foundational Falsehood of Creationism


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3k0dDFxkhM

The 6th falsehood of Creationism:
“Evolution-ism” (Part II)
“Evolution must explain the origin of life, the universe, and everything.”



It is fair to say that none of the people who deny evolution exhibit any understanding of what it is.  But it's not always their fault because many of the people promoting evolution don’t know what it is either.  Hollywood producers certainly don’t!

“Are they the next link in the evolutionary chain? Or simply a new species of humanity fighting for their share of the world?”

The word, “evolution” simply means “change over time.”  But in the context of science, that word refers to an aspect of biology.  Specifically, it is a process of varying genetic frequencies among reproductive populations; leading to (usually subtle) changes in their morphological or physiological composition, which –when compiled over successive generations-  can increase biodiversity when continuing variation between genetically-isolated groups eventually lead to one or more descendant branches increasingly distinct from their ancestors or cousins.  Or more simply, it is how life forms diversify via “descent with modification”.  To put it another way, it is the method by which cats branched into so many different breeds within several distinct species in a half dozen genera.

Creationists usually accept that this happens, and they sometimes even accept how this happens.  But they don’t call it “evolution” because they’ve been conditioned to execrate that word and to utter it only with a distasteful sneer.  So they use other, safer words but which don’t quite mean the same thing.

The problem creationists have with evolution is not that it challenges belief in God, because it doesn’t.  Their problem is that evolution, -like every other field of science- challenges the accuracy and authority of the storybooks which creationists equate to God.  Consequently, they tend to reject science almost entirely, and will often take all the sciences they perceive as threatening, and lump them all together under one heading, which they then refer to as “evolution-ism”.  It’s an attempt to minimize the sheer volume of sciences allied against them.  This is also part of their intentionally-erected illusion of equality; a false dichotomy that if their legendary folklore isn’t the absolute authority -being both literally and completely true, then God couldn’t create or even exist any other way.

Sometimes they’ll say that if it wasn’t that way, or if they couldn’t believe that it was, then they’d all go mad and do terrible things to people just for the fun of it, as if causing people to suffer would be fun.  Its a desperate and destitute delusion of dichotomy that if their legends aren’t right, then nothing is right.

So they insist that for evolution to be true at all, it must utterly replace God and account for everything they attribute to God.  So whenever they meet someone trying to explain or endorse evolution, the first thing creationists may ask is where “everything” came from; not just living things, but all matter and energy in the universe, as if evolution should account for the origin of “Life, the Universe, and Everything”.
 

“Both defendants and many of the leading proponants of Intelligent Design make a bedrock assumption which is utterly false.  Their presupposition is that evoluionary theory is antithetical to belief in the existence of a supreme being, and to religion in general.  To be sure, Darwin's theory of evolution is imperfect.  However the fact that a scientific theory cannot yet render an explanation on every point should not be used as a pretext to thrust an untestable alternative hypothesis grounded in religion into the science classroom, or to misrepresent well-established scientific propositions."

Creationists do deliberately misrepresent evolution many different ways in all their arguments.  Even when they know better, they still say that evolution necessarily requires the godless origin of life from inorganic matter.  But it doesn’t mean that, and never did.  For one thing, all the building blocks of life were already organic long before the first organism, before anything could be considered alive.  We’ve even detected vast amounts of organic matter in deep space.

But creationists claim space evolved too, and that the big bang is part of the same evolutionary process as that which leads to new species on earth.  So they often say that evolution requires “something coming from nothing”, which is ironic since creationists believe that themselves while strict scientists do not.  

Obviously no aspect of biology has anything to do with how the earth formed or where anything else in the universe came from.  It really doesn’t matter how the cosmos came to be. It could be a steady-state, or a cyclic series of big bang and big crunch contractions, or a one-time eruption from a  string theorist’s “dimensional rift”.  It could even be magically conjured by the gods of creation.  Or it could be some other method used by a more reasonable version of God. However the universe originated, it does not relate at all to how life evolved.

Creationists habitually misdefine their terms, and commonly insist that evolution means “life from non-life”.  But of course that’s not right either.  Evolution explains how life diversifies, not how it began.  Since evolution at every level is -by definition- limited to the variation of allele frequencies inherited over generations of living organisms, then it obviously can’t operate where no genomes yet exist.  The evolutionary process starts with genetics and can’t start before it.  So how the first genes came about may seem similar to evolution, and may even involve a form of natural selection in some way, but it is in fact a very different chemical process called 'abiogenesis'.  

Creationists also misrepresent hypotheses on the origin of life.  They will use any parody they can to link it to evolution, and make both sound ridiculous, and that isn’t surprising considering how ridiculous their own position is.  The most common fib they use here is to point to the complexity of any single eukaryotic cell and question how that could have poofed into being in its current state –as if by magic- from a rock or from mud.

They often say that the “evolutionist’s” explanation for the origin of life is ‘spontaneous generation’ where already complex organisms somehow pop out of organic sludge fully-formed.  But of course the scientific perspective is nothing like that.  It’s a surprisingly intricate multi-stage sequence.

Creationists obviously have no appreciation for how solid all our combined forensic sciences are, be it genetic orthologues confirming ancestral phylogenies which were once only indicated morphologically, by determining derived synapomorphies; or whether it is the several different kinds of radioactive decay rates which cross-confirm each other to produce the same consistent results once any variables are accounted for.

Creationists often cite the laws of Thermodynamics as if they could somehow apply to the diversification of life on earth.  They don’t.  Lord Kelvin, the scientist who discovered those laws was a creationist himself.  He was definitely opposed to evolution.  But even he said that thermodynamics demands that the earth would still have to be on the order of twenty to forty million years old at least, even if the bowels of the world didn’t continue to heat themselves radioactively, which of course they do, and that pushes the age back much further.

But whether creationists accept any amount of proof against them or not, the fact is that everything we know about physics demands that the earth be billions of years old.  And according to every ounce of paleontological evidence anyone has ever dug up, there is every indication that the further back in time you look, the simpler and more similar living things appear to be until there are only single cells, and prior to that, there is no evident life of any kind at all.  

There were no primates 100 million years ago, and no mammals 200 million years ago, and no land animals at all 400 million years ago.  600 million years ago, there weren’t any fish or even bugs yet.  We’ve never found any trace fossils for macroscopic life forms prior to 700 million years ago, but we have oodles of bacterial microfossils covering another 2.8 billion years prior to the first multicellular anythings we’ve ever found a trace of.  The only possible conclusion we can draw from all that is that life was only microscopic & microbial for the first 80% of the history of life on this planet.

Add to this the fact that organic molecules form naturally in all sorts of environments, and we know from the Urey/Miller experiment and other discoveries, that even the nucleotides required for genetic structure also form naturally even in the hostile environments we should expect of the pre-biotic earth.  We also know through repeatable experiments how these can combine in the right common medium into polynucleotides and so on.  Even Christian biologists admit that at its most basic, life is simply chemistry, and living tissues conform completely to those guidelines.  The elements which form basic cell structures for example create a phospholipid bilayer automatically upon contact with water, due to their combined polarity.  Even the function of enzymes and transport vesicles and other miniscule but critical elements within a cell all conform to the functions of chemistry.  Consequently, there are a number of competing concepts to explain exactly how the first replicative polymers lead to the next stage, known as hypercycles, and then on to still more advanced stages before they qualify as life.  Teams of biochemists around the world are still working out the long, complicated string of chemical combinations which began with simple and already self-replicating polymers and eventually lead to the first metabolic cells capable of maintaining some level of homeostasis, a balanced internal environment.  That is the definition of life.

Viruses are not considered to be alive, even though they can be killed, because they lack metabolism, which is an independent internal chemical process.  Protobionts (which biochemists propose) would be quasi-biotic cells very similar to viruses.  But whether we’re talking about fully “living” cells or not quite yet living cells, they are both driven by the natural functions of enzymes, chemical reactions, and molecular polarity.  If there is any other aspect to life, science has yet to detect it.  And if there is a supernatural component to life, science will never be able to detect it.

Abiogenesis has a decent amount of evidence behind it, but nowhere near as much as evolution does.  So far we still don’t know which (if any) of the explanations posed for the origin of life is the most accurate one.  But if there’s one thing the wisdom of the ages has taught us, it is that simply not yet knowing the real explanation is no reason to go and blame anything on magic.  Besides, even if a god did appear and summon the first life into being billions of years ago, there is no question but that life has certainly evolved since then, and is still evolving now.
 

More videos continued below . . . . . . .
Big Fat Heretic
Big Fat Heretic
IHateSports Fanatic

Posts : 402
Join date : 2012-12-26
Age : 72
Location : El Paso, Texas

https://www.youtube.com/user/BigFatHeretic

Back to top Go down

February 12,2015 - I celebrated the 206th birthday of Charles Darwin, with these 17 YouTube videos, The Foundational Falsehoods of Creationism! Empty Re: February 12,2015 - I celebrated the 206th birthday of Charles Darwin, with these 17 YouTube videos, The Foundational Falsehoods of Creationism!

Post by Big Fat Heretic Fri Feb 13, 2015 4:04 am

More videos, continued from above.

Enjoy!


7th Foundational Falsehood of Creationism


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g8Q2Db17v5U

The 7th foundational falsehood of Creationism:
“Evolution is random.”

“Do you believe in fate, Neo?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because I don’t like the idea that I’m not in control of my life.”

Some say it is a contradiction to believe both in prophesy and simultaneously in free will –for they can’t really co-exist. Because if anything a time traveler does in the past might dramatically alter the present, then anything done in the present could also change the future into something no prophet or fortune-teller could foresee.  We can examine events of the past because the past is set and cannot be changed.  The only way we could ever see into the future would be if it too were set, and couldn’t be changed either.

“Everything is fixed, and you can’t change it.”

But some religions believe that everything that ever happens and everything we think we’ve decided to do –is controlled by the fates, as if we were merely characters in an old movie where someone already knows how it ends.
 
“I’ve never seen anything to make me believe there’s one all-powerful force
controlling everything.  There’s no mystical energy field controls my destiny.”


Imagine you’ve misplaced your keys, and you’re running late for work trying to find them, the phone rings at a time when you would normally have been gone already.  It happens to be a radio station running a promotional contest where you’ll win a prize if you can answer one obscure question.  But oddly enough, the subject of that question happens to be something you learned all about from one of your friends just yesterday.  So you win a dream vacation where you just happen to meet a wonderful person who just happens to fall in love you, and changes the course of the rest of your life.  Maybe that was just a lucky break, something that could only happen once in a lifetime to one person in a million.  But most theists would readily say that God wanted that to happen, and so he arranged for all these lesser events to lead up to that.

"Call it fate, call it luck, call it karma, I believe
that everything happens for a reason".


They’ll tell you that, if your brother struck out in baseball, and your daughter has an obsessive compulsive disorder, and your son suffers from a chronic and potentially deadly affliction, that’s all part of God’s unified plan. If young children lose their mother in a tragic accident which leaves others traumatized for life, then God wanted that to happen too.  No matter what happens or how it happens, Goddidit, and only God knows why.

“It was like it was meant to be.”

“There are no accidents.”

Because “accident’ implies there’s nobody to blame.”


They never say how God arranges these things either.  Such orchestration is impossible in our reality.  That’s one of the many reasons why God and science are wholly separate topics which do not overlap.  Yet creationists do say how God could not have done it.  Creationists differ from mainstream Christians in that they impose limits on their God, insisting that the one element of nature which God cannot control is evolution.  Their black or white perspective only permits one of two extremes: Either God cannot use natural processes creatively, or naturally-creative systems cannot be governed by God, and thus somehow count as evidence against God.

"What matters is that whatever happened,
happened for a reason".

"Creation is 100% scientific proof there was a creator.
You cannot have a creation without a creator".


They think that scientists believe simple elements just accidentally fell together in extremely complex working configurations.

“And it would be a leap of faith far beyond
belief in Jesus or Buddha or Allah to think
that it just ‘accidentally’ got that way.”



Creationists say evolution is random.  But evolutionists do not say that regardless whether they believe in a god or not.

"Sometimes its hard for a human being to study the ear or study the eye
and think that happened by accident."

"I beg your pardon.  Did you say ‘by accident?"
"Yeah"
"What do you mean, ‘by accident’?"
"That the eye just formed by itself somehow."
"Who says it did?"
"Well, some evolutionists say it did".
"Not a single one that I’ve ever met!"
"Really?"
"Really!"



Evolution does depend on mutations, and these do appear to be random.  But each cumulative mutation may become significant factors for that organism once pitted against the dynamics of the environment in which they are introduced.  Thus natural selection isn’t random; it’s deterministic.  Many creationists will even admit this.  And as some computer models have already shown, natural selection can actually even exceed the skills of human designers.  In fact, natural selection can be so deterministic that it often leads to innovations which some perceive as evidence of intelligent design, and which even rationalists describe as though modified for intended benefit.

Whether it is deliberately guided or not, there is definitely a system of design.  But there doesn’t actually have to be any apparent intent or intelligence involved.  Because, while our normal intuition might be to imagine one governing body issuing authority from the top down, –a new field of science, the study of “emergent complexity” uses computers to trace numerous patterns in nature which are all “emergent” from the bottom up, being controlled or constructed by an intricate interrelated array of the lowest componants working together in unison, each according to a set of relatively simple rules.

“Based in a world that is built on rules.”


Emergence is a new study revealing many ways in which order can come from disorder, and how chaos can also achieve balance; illustrating how even the origin of life is as much chemical as it is mathematic.

“Your life is the sum of the remainder of an unbalanced
equation inherant to the programming of the matrix.”



Regardless what field or subject we’re talking about, anything that is regularly analyzed or revised naturally tends to become more complex as those processes wear on, and we know that environmental pressures on population genetics is no exception.  Even before computers existed, we already knew that natural selection can, -and often will- produce results which look like trial-and-error experiments, including elements of seemingly-intentional fine tuning.

But for all the implications of apparent design, there is never any indication of any intended goal or final product, nor any hint of infallibility on the part of the designer.  In fact, so many errors of so many types are known that even if there was an unnatural architect using miraculous means instead of natural ones, then it seems that entity must either be blind and barely competent, or there are whole teams of designers working on separate lines competing against each other.  

Natural selection even mimics the experiments of human designers when new technologies emerge.  For example, when men first achieved powered flight, there were myriad marvelously imaginative contraptions all at once collectively trying to set the standard for what airplanes should be.  Eventually, they followed a more standardized pattern as many of the fancier designs were discontinued and more functional tried-and-true contrivances remained.  Significant improvements occasionally appear, but there are no more wildly diverse variants like the pioneer planes built when aviation was new and less understood.  

The same sort of thing occurred when life moved up to the multicellular level in the late Vendian era, some 600 million years ago.  Contrary to the claims of creationists, we do have evidence both in trace fossils and in the genome, as well as complete fossils of Pre-Cambrian precursors of later orders.  The first multicellular animals had no skeletons or organs or sensory systems of any kind.  Once primitive drafts of these began to develop, then over the course of the next 160 million years, the oceans went from being basically a sea of sponges and plankton to a virtual “explosion” of new forms even more dramatic than when they began to move onto land some 70 million years or so later.  There were also more phyla to emerge in that era than we have left today.  Many of the earlier ones were so bizarre that we can’t even make sense of them; they’re so alien to anything still around.  Then, as with early designs of airplanes and automobiles, once other possibilities were explored, the more functional lines continued to diversify and less practical derivations of the early days thinned into extinction.

In any environmental niche, there is a “perfect shape”, one especially efficient form which, once obtained, need not be substantially modified until the environment changes or the animal moves on to new circumstances.  For example, the shape and job of the crocodile has been used by several extinct predecessors including ancient amphibians and the precursors of whales.  The shark shape has also been employed by bony fish as well as ichthyosaurs and by dolphins, and even by a Mesozoic crocodile who moved on to the open ocean.  And the role of ‘lion” has been played by everything from fossil marsupials to dinosaurs and giant half-mammalian “reptiles” who lived before the dinosaurs.  So some styles can be preferred by conditions which allow them to become classic motifs.

"Life uh, finds a way".

"I suddenly had this feeling that everything was connected".



Anything or everything could seem like the result of an undirected and incidental string of random chance accidents, right?  Or is it?

"We have not come here by chance.
I do not believe in chance".



Theistic evolutionists understand that many drugs and medicines are being discovered or derived according to our growing understanding of the effects of evolutionary principles in biology.  Yet, in any life-saving operation, even when they know the natural explanation is the right one, believers still credit God over the skilled surgeons using state-of-the-art equipment and the advantages of cutting edge medical breakthroughs.  So it doesn’t matter how seemingly disconnected or coincidental any series of occurrences may be; those who believe in destiny will still suggest otherwise:

“I do not see coincidence;
I see providence.”


“There are no coincidences, Delia...
only the illusion of coincidence.”



Most Christians would say that evolution is one of God’s creative methods.  But creationists reject that possibility outright, because the issue for them is not whether their God is true; but whether their dogma is true.  It can’t be in any case.  Even if current concepts of evolution were proven wrong tomorrow, Biblical creationism still couldn’t be true either, because it has already been disproved many times, many ways, and collapses on its own lack of merit.  But of course believers can never admit that.

“Denial is the most predictable of all human responses.”


Many people, –not just creationists, but most people in fact- feel that if reality is not manipulated “in mysterious ways” for our benefit, then life is without purpose; and since creationists think evolution most directly disproves the purpose they choose to believe in, then they say that evolution must be without design by design simply because it is natural.  Of course, if there is such a thing as supernatural providence, then all these seemingly undirected evolutionary advances were obviously destined to happen.

“I believe it is our fate to be here.  It is our destiny.”


8th Foundational Falsehood of Creationism


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TU-7d06HJSs

The 8th foundational falsehood of creationism:
“Mutations are rare, harmful decreases in genetic information.”

"Mutations are genetic disorders that occur in the DNA in a random and unconscious manner. Like all accidents, they cause harm and destruction . . . The changes affected by mutations can only be like those experienced by people in Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Chernobyl; that is death, disabled, and the freaks of nature. Evolutionists claim these distortions cause organisms to evolve. However, scientific findings reject this claim because all observable occasion of mutations cause only harm to living things".

Creationists insist that mutations are very rare and are usually, if not always harmful.  But the fact is that the vast majority of mutations are completely neutral.  They’d have to be because, according to the National Center for Biotechnology Information, there is an overall average of 128 mutations per human zygote!  So apparently, in creationist terms, “very rare” means “more than a hundred per person right from the point of conception”.  Because those are just the mutations we start out with.  Our cells will mutate again 30 more times over the course of our lives, and some of these subsequent mutations can be passed on to our children too –usually with no more effect than those we recognize as family traits.

Its hard to find one rigid set of numbers from any laboratory for a constant rate of how many mutations are beneficial versus those that are detrimental, because these are determined by variable environmental conditions.  But there is a general consensus that they’re nearly equal with deleterious mutations being slightly more common.  They’re also more profound too.  But there are plenty of cases where a definite advantage has been identified and positively linked to a specific mutation.

"All mutations that take place in humans
result in mental or in physical deformities
such as albinism, mongolism, dwarfism,
or diseases such as cancer."


That’s not quite right.  For example, kinfolk in the village of Limone Sul Garda in northern Italy have a mutation which gives them better tolerance of HDL serum cholesterol. Consequently this family has no history of heart attacks despite their high-risk dietary habits. This mutation was traced to a single common ancestor living in the 1700's, but has now spread to dozens of descendants. Genetic samples from this family are now being tested for potential treatment of patients of heart disease.

Another example of new variance is the Glycophorin A somatic cell mutation which has been identified in some Tibetans, which allows them to endure prolonged periods at altitudes over  7,000 feet without succumbing to apoplexia, or “altitude sickness”. A different, but similar mutation was identified in high altitude natives in the Andes.

Another example of that is the CCR5-delta 32 mutation. About 10% of whites of European origin now carry it. But the incidence is only 2% in central Asia, and is completely absent among East Asians, Africans, and tribal Americans. It appears to have suddenly become relatively common among white Europeans about 700 years ago, evidently as a result of the Black Plague, indicating another example of natural selection allowing one gene dominance in a changing environment. It is harmless or neutral in every respect other than its one clearly beneficial feature.  According to Science-Frontiers.com, if one inherits this gene from both parents, they will be especially resistant, if not immune to AIDS.

Similarly, population genetics is being credited as one reason incidence of sickle-cell genes in African-Americans is apparently decreasing over time.

For another example we’ve also identified an emerging population of tetrachromatic women who can see a bit of the normally invisible ultraviolet spectrum.

There’s also a family in Germany who were already unusually strong. But in one case, one of their children was born with a double copy of an anti-myostatin mutation carried by both parents. The result is a Herculean kiddo who was examined at only a few days old for his unusually well-developed muscles. By four years old, he had twice the muscle mass of normal children, and half the fat. Pharmaceutical synthesis of this mutation is being examined for potential use against muscular dystrophy or sarcopenia.

And then there’s a family in Connecticut who've been identified as having hyperdense, virtually unbreakable bones.  A team of doctors at Yale traced the mutation to a gene that was the subject of an earlier study. In that study researchers showed that low bone density could be caused by a mutation that disrupts the function of a gene called LRP5. This clued them that a different mutation increased LRP5 function, leading to an opposite phenotype, that is, high bone density.  According to their investigators, members of this family have bones so strong they rival those of a character in the Bruce Willis movie, 'Unbreakable'.

All of these are examples of specifically identified mutations which are definitely beneficial, and which have spread through the subsequent gene pool according to natural selection.  This is one of many indesputable proofs of evolution in humans.  But we’ve identified beneficial mutations in other many other species too.

"Another reason why it is impossible for mutations to cause living things to evolve is that mutations do not add any new genetic information to an organism. Mutations cause existing genetic information to be randomly reshuffled similar to playing cards. In other words, no new genetic information is introduced by mutations."

The evolution of life is analogous to the evolution of language.  For example, there are several languages based on the Roman alphabet of only 26 letters.  Yet by arranging these in different orders, we’ve added several hundred thousand words to English since the 5th century, and many of them were completely new.  The principle is the same in genetics.  There are millions of named and classified species of life, all of them based on a variable arrangement of only four chemical componants.

For another example, we know that Spanish, Italian, French, and Portuguese all evolved from Latin, a vernacular which is now extinct.  Each of these newer tongues emerged via a slow accumulation of their own unique slang lingo –thus diverging into new dialects, and eventually distinct forms of gibberish such that the new Romans could no longer communicate with either Parisians or Spaniards.

Similarly, if we took an original Latin speaking population and divided them sequestered in complete isolation over several centuries, they might still be able to understand each other, or their jargon may have become unintelligible to foreigners.  But they won’t start speaking Italian or Rumanian because identical vocabularies aren’t going to occur twice.

It works the same way in biology.  Mutations are degrees of variation which are usually quite subtle but cumulative, normally harmless, and occasionally advantageous.  Any change in information is different information, not already present, and therefore can only be considered “new”.  But of the many types of mutations known to occur, there are additions and duplications as well as deletions and the rest. So yes, genetic material can be added or taken away.  But as to whether “information” has been added as opposed to lost, we can’t really tell because creationists won’t tell us what they think “information” is or how to measure it.  They’ll readily state (as if it had somehow been confirmed) that it takes more "information" to make a bird than it does a dinosaur, but if you ask 'em how much more, they’ll shut right up.  And if you demand to see the data that justifies how they could even make that claim in the first place, they’ll to change the subject.

"While a very simple structure of
bacterium comprises 2,000 different types of proteins,
a human's organism has 100 thousand proteins.
Exactly 98,000 new proteins has to be discovered
for a bacterium to evolve into a human being."
 

"Actually, we have about 250,000 proteins being coded
by 25,000 different genes. But you know what? A grain
of rice actually has forty to fifty thousand genes! Can you
imagine?  A little grain of rice has fifty thousand genes,
and we have twenty-five? What's up with that?

Hi, my name's Crystal. I graduated from Texas A&M University
with a degree in agricultural leadership and development with
emphasis on genetics and biochemistry. I also researched in
several labs on campus in genetics.

Now when scientists first started to study genetics and the
human genome, we actually expected to find three times more
of the number of genes than we actually found . . . the twenty
to twenty-five thousand genes that we did find is only about
twice the number that a roundworm has. And in fact, there’s
a variety of an amoeba that has 200 times the number of
genes that a human being has.

A puffer fish has approximately 21,000 genes.
The pufferfish (isn’t it adorable) actually has
no junk DNA, which is interesting because
humans are actually made up of 95% junk DNA.

Well, one thing that researchers are particularly interested in is
finding out,what is junk DNA?  And does it actually do anything?
One recent study suggests that, it really doesn’t. Researchers
took 2.3 million letters out of DNA out of a mouse, and compared
it to a mouse with a full-length version of DNA, and found out that
there were no differences whatsoever".

Natural selection weeds out detrimental mutations and selects for
beneficial mutations, but the neutral ones, having neither cost nor
ill effect may freely accumulate as “junk”.


These mutations, though seemingly random, can be interpreted as occuring at a more regular rate when examined over a span of many generations.  The relatively fast mutation rate of mitochondrial DNA provides further confirmation of the extensive periods of time in an organism’s matrilineal history.  DNA can also help us establish geneology precisely because it contains a sort of record of inherited mutations which can be compared and matched to more distant relatives.  Just like a court-ordered paternity test can positively identify your immediate lineage, a more in-depth genomic sequence analysis can also determine more distant ancestry.  And the more in-depth it is, the further it can trace, even where it pairs different species to one genus, or different genera to one taxonomic family, collective families of one order, and so on.

Judgements of law are based on a preponderance of evidence, and genetic evidence is so reliable, it can get a life or death sentence even without need of other types of evidence to corroborate it.  So the fingerprints of mutation in molecular phylogeny are not only profound evidence of evolution, they amount to legal proof of it.

9th Foundational Falsehood of Creationism


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qfoje7jVJpU


The 9th falsehood of Creationism:
“No transitional species have ever been found.”

When Charles Darwin published his landmark observations in 1859, he lamented that the fossil record was still quite poor at that time.  It was only in the last century or so earlier that anyone had even proposed the possibility that a single species could completely die out, and the first dinosaur wasn’t discovered until Darwin was a boy.  Fossils were known by previous generations of course, but extinct and therefore unfamiliar varieties were often mistaken for the fanciful monsters of mythology –if they were recognized at all –which usually requires a well-trained perception of both geology and animal morphology.  That’s especially rare when you’re talking about an organism no one has ever seen alive.

When something dies, it is usually disassembled, digested, and decomposed.  Only rarely is anything ever fossilized, and even fewer things are very well-preserved.  Because the conditions required for that process are so particular, the fossil record can only represent a tiny fraction of everything that has ever lived.  Darwin provided many environmental dynamics explaining why no single quarry could ever provide a continuous record of biological events, and why it would be impossible to find all the fossilized ancestors of every lineage.  But despite this, he predicted that future generations, -having the benefit of better understanding- would discover a substantial number of fossil species which he called “intermediate” or “transitional” between what we see alive today and their taxonomic ancestors at successive levels in paleontological history.

In fact, in the century-and-a-half since then, we’ve found millions of evolutionary intermediaries in the fossil record, much more than Darwin said he could reasonably hope for.  There are three different types of transitional forms and we have ample examples of each.  But creationists still insist that we’ve never found a single one, because what they usually ask us to present are impossible parodies which evolution would neither produce nor permit.

“You’ve gotta be able to prove transitional forms; one animal
transitioning into another. And all through the fossil record and
life, we don’t find one of these, a crocoduck.
There’s just nothing like it.”


In fact, Darwin explained in detail why we should NOT find anything like this.  We’re not looking for a blend of two species that both currently exist. Such a thing would actually go against evolution.  Instead, he said, that if his theory were true, then what we should find would be a basal form potentially ancestral to both current species.  And in this one case alone, we’ve found dozens of them in a near continuous lineage dating beyond the dawn of the Mesozoic era.      

The most famous one was the first ever recognized as such.  Archaeopteryx lithographica was discovered in 1860.  It was the first of many lines of evidence revealing that birds had evolved from dinosaurs.  So Darwin’s theory was first vindicated while he was still alive.  Of course creationists will never accept that, and still complain that archaeopteryx can’t be intermediate because we can’t prove it’s the single crown species from which all other birds emerged.  But it doesn’t have to be, and that’s not what transitional means.  In biology, species can be precisely identified genetically.  But in paleontology, they’re determined morphologically.

So creationists argued that Archeaopteryx still doesn’t qualify because it’s “100% bird”.  But they’re difficult to pin down as to why they say this, because this animal, like all other quasi-birds of that age, lacks many definitive features of modern birds, and it retains so many distinctly saurian features that when the last Archaeopteryx was found in the 1960s, the traces of its feathers weren’t immediately evident, and it was thus mistaken for a small dinosaur called Compsognathus.

But creationists continue to use every excuse they can think of to dismiss Archaeopteryx as an intermediate species.  They complained that its lungs weren’t right to be transitional, or that it had the wrong kind of pelvis. They even tried to imply that every such fossil found so far were fakes.  They think any excuse will do, and they’ve done the same attempting to summarily dispute every additional intermediary ever seen since.  No matter what, creationists will not admit that anything we ever find can fulfill Darwin’s prediction of transitional intermediates.  

This is why creationists demand only monstrous absurdities or issue challenges they know still couldn’t be satisfied no matter how true evolution may be; because they know already that whatever they insist on seeing today we may show them tomorrow, and if that happens, they’ll have to make up new excuses for why it still doesn’t count.  So they won’t request to see anything evolution actually requires, and they usually won’t define any criteria they would accept either, because they already know they won’t accept anything even if we show them everything they ever ask for.

It doesn’t help that they won’t look at what they don’t want to see either.  Many people think there are no transitional species because the only fossil forms they’re aware of at all are a handful of plastic pieces in a prehistoric play set.  They’ve no idea how rich the fossil record is!  We know of several hundred species just within dinosaurs, to say nothing of the thousands of examples of each of hundreds more taxa apart from that.  Experts estimate that all the collective genera still roaming around now only amount to about 1% of all the species that have ever lived.  Practically everything there ever was ain’t no more.  Every species living today has definite relatives both extant and extinct, and evident in the fossil record.  And in one sense, all of them, even the things still alive, count as transitional species.  

But of course creationists don’t accept that, and insist on a much more restrictive definition.  That’s fine.  But in order to determine for certain whether anything does or doesn’t meet the requirements, we have to know what those requirements are, and there is one creationist website brazen enough to post a definition of transitional species which is also correct according to evolutionary biologists.  So at least we can verify there is a common set of criteria both groups can agree upon.  

However, this site also says that no such evolutionary links have ever been found.  But then it goes on to list several that have been –attempting to dismiss extant examples of single-cell to multicellular transitions, the successive phylogeny of insects, the emergence of vertebrates, and of whales, amphibian fish, therapsid “mammal-like reptiles”, and acquired adaptations for flight in dinosaurs, pterosaurs, insects, and bats.  I wrote to one of the webmasters of this site, and pointed out all these items in their list of things never-found that we actually have, and explained how all of them meet every one of the criteria he himself laid out.  He wrote back saying he knew that of course, but wouldn’t make any corrections on the excuse that he could even ignore his own rules if he needed to.

A decade ago, Kathleen Hunt, a zoologist with the University of Washington, produced a list of a few hundred of the more dramatic transitional species known so far, all of which definitely fit every criteria required of the most restrictive definition.  Myriad transitional species have been, and still are being, discovered; so many in fact that lots of biologists and paleontologists now consider that list “innumerable” especially since the tally of definite transitionals keeps growing so fast!  Several lineages are now virtually complete, including our own.

“By the way, the missing link?  It’s still missing!”

No it isn’t.  Hasn’t been for a long time now.  There was a missing link in 1859 when there were only two species of humans yet known in the fossil record, and no intermediate fossils to link them with any of the other apes we knew of at that time.  Since then, we’ve found the fossils of thousands of individuals of dozens of hominid species, many of which provide a definite link to the other apes.  But there were two particular pieces predicted to complete the puzzle:

First, it was never supposed that we evolved from any ape species still alive today.  Instead the theory held that chimpanzees and humans were sibling species, daughters of the same mother.  So the first link we needed to find was an ancient ape apparently basal to either of us –to prove there was a potential progenitor of both groups.  We had already found that link in Europe five years before Darwin went public.  So we already had an evident “chain” of transitional species from which only one more “link” was needed.

The theory then required that another extinct hominid be found in strata chronologically between the Miocene Dryopithecus fontana and the earliest known human species, which from 1891 to 1961,  was Homo erectus.  We’ve found lots of candidates, as many as fifty species of apes which are now all extinct.  But more than that, the theory also demanded that we find one “half-way” between humans and other apes in terms of morphology.  We found exactly that too way back in 1974.  Australopithecus afarensis proved to be a fully bi-pedal ape who’s hands, feet, teeth, pelvis, skull, and other physical details were exactly what creationists challenged us to find, yet they’re still pretending we never found it.

But worse than that, we didn’t just find that one.  In 1977, three years after we discovered the no-longer-missing link in the human evolutionary lineage, Harvard paleontologist, Stephen J. Gould mentioned an “extreme rarity” of other clear transitions persistent in the fossil record ‘til that time, and his comment, -taken out of context- remains a favorite of creationist quote-miners to this day.  But in the more than 30 years since then, there has been a paleontological boon such that we now have way more transitional species in many more lineages than we ever needed or hoped for.

Now the problem for evolution is that there are too many contenders, while a compounding problem for creationists is that not even one of them should exist if their story was true.  And yet they do –by the bushelful!  Despite their complaints to the contrary, the intermediate gradations in the human evolutionary line are now so fine that paleoanthropologists can’t agree whether they’re all different species or merely mildly modified varieties of the same ones, such that there are no more links needed for human evolution anymore.

But creationists still say we’ve never found anything that was “half-ape and half-human”.  Adhering always to black or white absolutes, and being thus unwilling to admit any degree of variance other than 100% or zero, they make sure to divide every find into one of two boxes even when they can’t make up their minds which side of that imaginary partition each one belongs to.

Demanding an “ape-man” is actually just as silly as asking to see a mammal-man, or a half-human, half-vertebrate.  How about a half dachshund, half dog?  It’s the same thing.  One may as well insist on seeing a town half way between Los Angeles and California.  Because the problem with bridging the gap between humans and apes is that there is no gap because humans ARE apes –definitely and definitively.  The word, “ape” doesn’t refer to a species, but to a parent category of collective species, and we’re included.  This is no arbitrary classification like the creationists use.  It was first determined via meticulous physical analysis by Christian scientists a century before Darwin, and has been confirmed in recent years with new revelations in genetics.  Furthermore, it is impossible to define all the characters exclusively indicative of every known member of the family of apes without describing our own genera as one among them.  Consequently, we can and have proven that humans are apes in exactly the same way that lions are cats, and iguanas are lizards, and whales are mammals.  So where is the proof that humans descend from apes?  How about the fact that we’re still apes right now!
 
More videos shall be continued below . . . . .
Big Fat Heretic
Big Fat Heretic
IHateSports Fanatic

Posts : 402
Join date : 2012-12-26
Age : 72
Location : El Paso, Texas

https://www.youtube.com/user/BigFatHeretic

Back to top Go down

February 12,2015 - I celebrated the 206th birthday of Charles Darwin, with these 17 YouTube videos, The Foundational Falsehoods of Creationism! Empty Re: February 12,2015 - I celebrated the 206th birthday of Charles Darwin, with these 17 YouTube videos, The Foundational Falsehoods of Creationism!

Post by Big Fat Heretic Fri Feb 13, 2015 8:13 am

Continued from above.

I hope you're all enjoying the show!

I know I am!



10th Foundational Falsehood of Creationism


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5MXTBGcyNuc

The 10th falsehood of creationism;
“The evolutionary ‘tree of life’ is nowhere implied
either in the fossil record, nor in any aspect of biology.”


Creationists often complain that science supposedly says there was only one universal ancestor of all livings and that along the way, we evolved both into, and then from, bacteria.  But that doesn’t seem to be the case.  21st century revelations in genomic research now imply that the origins of evolution come quite a while after the origin of life.  There are now indications that at the root of each of the largest possible taxonomic divisions, there was a point when “descent” (as it is currently understood) was not yet occuring, (at least not in any determinable lineage) and instead there was a sort of horozontal gene transfer going on which could not truly be considered part of the evolutionary process.

By definition, evolution requires inherited genetic frequencies, but the co-requirement of "descent with modification" only allows for one series of ancestors rather than multiple lines of largely unrelated ones being inexplicably blended together.  While taxonomy still points to a single common ancestor for all eukaryotes, that ancestor seems to be one of two or maybe three cellular siblings who evidently did not all descend from any sort of shared conventional parent!  So at the point where an actual evolutionary phylogeny began to take over more or less exclusively, the domain, Eukarya had evidently already emerged separately and quite distinct from either of the "prokaryote" lineages.

"The branching tree pattern of Darwin's theory is actually not seen
anywhere in the fossil record, unless we impose it with out own minds."

“Wrong, sir! Wrong!"

The only way to objectively categorize all sorts of life is by their common characters, those features shared by every member of that collective and only by them. This is how their traits become diagnostic and directly indicative of unique groups.  Let us also remember that the first man to attempt to classify all living things was a convinced Christian creationist who knew of no other option as he had never heard of evolution, and had never even conceived of common ancestry, and therefore certainly wasn’t trying to defend or promote either one.  But the system he originally devised, -which is still in use today- determines that everything that is truly alive can be divided into two main branches which each then continue diverging in an ongoing series of subdivisions emerging within parental sets, henceforth known as clades.

The accuracy of divisions at the base of Eukarya are still being explored, because Protista turned out to be way too diverse to be considered a single grouping.  But there’s no speculation required to determine that humans definitely descend from eukaryotes because it is a verifiable fact that every one of our cells is initially nucleic.

Moving on, one notable subset of Eukarya is Opisthokonta, who's gammete cells have a single posterior flagellum.  One subset of this this group is Metazoa, also known as Kingdom, Animalia, multicellular opisthokonts which must ingest other organisms in some sort of digestive tract in order to survive.  The biological definition, and in fact even the common dictionary defintions describe humans as belonging to the animal kingdom.  Creationists howl at that idea that they should be animals, but if you have any knowledge at all of what an animal even is, then you know that you are one!  This isn’t a matter of opinion either; It is a fact, and we can prove it!

Taxonomy is based as much on an organism's physiognamy, reproduction, and development as it is on the form itself.  For this reason, the animal kingdom is then divided between the sponges, and everything more advanced than that -including Bilateria. These are triploblast animals which at some stage of development are bilaterally-symetrical.  One subset of that is Coelomata, bilaterally-symetrical animals with a tubular internal digestive cavity.  One of its subsequent subdivisions is Deuterostomia, coelomates in which early development of the digestive tract begins with a blastopore opening the anal orafice before the one for the mouth.

This is a strange thing to have in common with every other 'higher" life form. If they were specially-created, one might think that any of them could develop by some other means, or in some other order. Maybe snails would develop like mammals, and fish develop like squids, something like that, something that wouldn't only indicate an inherited trait consistent with both the genetics and morphology of common ancestry. But instead, every vertebrate has red blood while chelicerates and mollusks all have blue blood, with no exceptions on either side.  Everything we see in nature consistently adheres to everything we would expect of a chain of inherited variations carried down through flowering lines of descent, just as it is in this case too.  Starfish, sea urchins, acorn worms and every single thing that ever had a spinal chord all develop the opening for the anus first. Isn't that odd?  The common ancestry model obvious explains this fact, but to date no would-be critic of evolution has ever been able to offer any explanation of this, or any of the other trends we see in taxonomy.

The next definitely determinable division includes Chordata, Deuterostomes with a spinal chord. This group includes Craniates, which are Chordates with a brain enclosed inside a skull.  A subset of this group also includes vertebrates, which also have spinal vertebrae descending from the skull.  And the next subset is Gnathostomata, vertebrates that have all that plus a jawbone.

Remember that we’re only following one lineage, and that each of the left or right turns we take cause us to overlook the other branches that may become just as hugely diverse as the one we’re on; sometimes much more so.  But staying on our course, the next fork in the road lies between Gnathostomes who’s skeletons are either cartilaginous or calcified.  The right turn here leads us to Sarcopterygii, bony vertebrates which have both lungs and legs.  One subset of that are the Stegocephalians; limbed vertebrates with digits on the ends of their appendages.  This clade includes a sub-clade called Tetrapoda, which are now gill-less Stegocephalians which are skeletally-adapted for four limbs.  Included in that are the Anthracosaurs, pentadactyl post-aquatic 'terrestrial' tetrapods.  We now also begin to see more pronounced development of the brain.

One of the anthracosaurian subsets reveals a seemingly small aberration but one which is among the rarest and most profound because the difference is developmental. These are usually the most integral and therefore the hardest things to change, and normally wouldn’t be expected to be significant –unless the environment changed profoundly, as it would in the adaptation from sea to land.  The development of the amnion made this transition possible, and was evidently inherited by all the  mammals, reptiles, and birds to come since.

Here another division occurs, this time determined by the number of holes appearing in a particular place in the structure of the skull.  On the one-hand we have Synapsids with one temporal fenestra.  On the other hand, we have what are traditionally known as “reptiles”, starting with anapsids that have no temporal fenestra, and Diapsids which have two.  That line can be shown to divide again between Lepidosaurs on one side, which divide into plesiosaurs and other things including lizards, which also divided into many different sub-groups including snakes.  The Archosaurs on the other side also divide into crocodilians, phytosaurs, pterosaurs, and dinosaurs, which themselves divide again and again, and eventually include a subset we now know as birds.

"We should expect the phyla, the classes, the orders,
families, down to and including the genera at least;
each would appear fully-formed with no transitional forms."

“Wait a minute!  Strike that.  Reverse it.  Thank you.”

All the taxonomic levels are readily evident of course with many more clades now than anyone ever expected to find –so many in fact that the original construct can no longer bear the weight of all the new data.  But not all the organisms in these clades are yet “fully” in the forms we find familiar today because there are so many obvious transitions at every level.  One of the many examples of that is a Synapsid subset known as Therapsids, with increasingly mammal-like skeletal formations as well as vestigial stages evident in the continually advancing development of the brain.

Within that set are Cynodonts, therapsids with canine teeth.  They’re actually a parent clade of Theria, the mammals, themselves identified are endothermic warm-blooded therapsids with lactal glands.  Even the ones who eventually lost their canines still belong to this group because some members of usually fangless mammals still have those teeth.  That, and of course because even when something is born without one or more features diagnostic of its parents, it must still be recognized as part of that family.

All the mammals alive today belong to one of three major divisions which are only a fraction of the major mammal forms that used to exist.  In some respects, the platypus is the sole surviving karyotype illustrating what was the norm of mammalian diversity but which is now found only in fossil record.

The most familiar race of modern mammals are eutherians, which have nipples like marsupials, but are born in a placenta.  This clade contains many subgroups at various levels, one of which includes the clades for both bats and primates.

Remember how we can objectively verify that every member all these groups still belongs to every parent clade already listed, and we can do the same for every subdivision from this point on.

For example:

“Primates” are collectively defined as any gill-less, organic RNA/DNA protein-based, metabolic, metazoic, nucleic, diploid, bilaterally-symmetrical, endothermic, digestive, tryploblast, opisthokont, deuterostome coelemate with a spinal chord and 12 cranial nerves connecting to a limbic system in an enlarged cerebrial cortex with a reduced olfactory region inside a jawed-skull with specialized teeth including canines and premolars, forward-oriented fully-enclosed optical orbits, and a single temporal fenestra, -attached to a vertebrate hind-leg dominant tetrapoidal skeleton with a sacral pelvis, clavical, and wrist & ankle bones; and having lungs, tear ducts, body-wide hair follicles, lactal mammaries, opposable thumbs, and keratinized dermis with chitinous nails on all five digits on all four extremities, in addition to an embryonic development in amniotic fluid, leading to a placental birth and highly social lifestyle.

“And that’s what’s important.  But you know, if anyone wants to believe
that they’re the descendants of a primate, they’re certainly welcome to do it.
I don’t know how far they will march that back...”


We don’t believe this because we want to! And why would we want to? We believe it because we can prove it really is true, and that applies to everyone whether you want to believe it or not.  We’re not just saying you’ve descended from primates either; we’re saying you ARE a primate!  Humans have been classified as primates since the 1700s when a Christian creationist scientist figured out what a primate was –and prompted other scientists to figure out why that applied to us.

It wouldn’t be this way if different “kinds” of life had been magically-created unrelated to anything else; not unless God wanted to trick us into believing everything had evolved.  Because the phylogenetic tree of life is plainly evident from the bottom up to any objective observer who dares compare the anatomy of different sets of collective life forms.  But it can be just as objectively confirmed from the top down when re-examined genetically.  This is why it is referred to as a “twin-nested hierarchy”.  But there’s still more than that because the evident development of physiology and morphology can be confirmed biochemically as well as chronologically in geology and developmentally in embryology.  Why should that be? And how do creationists explain why it is that every living thing fits into all of these daughter sets within parent groups, each being derived according to apparently inherited traits?  They don’t even try to explain any of that, or anything else.  They won’t because they can’t, because evolution is the only explanation that accounts for any of this, and it explains it all.
     

11th Foundational Falsehood of Creationism


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dm277H3ot6Y

The 11th foundational falsehood of creationism:

“Macroevolution has never been observed.”

You share more traits in common with your siblings than you do with your cousins due to the recent ancestors you share with them, your parents.  Deeper down, you share more in common with those in your extended family than you do with neighbors and classmates, etc., people you don’t recognize as part of your biological family.  But you must realize that on some level you’re still related.  Deeper down, one could likely recognize subtle indications of cultural demes which most people will still agree all descend from one common ancestral lineage –despite their current apparent diversity and unfamiliar ways.

Deeper down, we've seen that new breeds of barnyard birds, domestic pets, livestock, corn, even bananas have to some degree been engineered by human intervention via artificial selection, and new sub-species have occurred in the wild via natural selection.  In both cases, these stem from common ancestry, be that hundreds of breeds of dogs coming from one strain of wolves, or dozens of commercial bovines being derived from the now-extinct European Aurochs.  

All these reveal that life is a fluid dynamic producing new and subtle variation with every descendant.  But evolution only occurs when new alleles are spread throughout a given community.  This is where selection comes into play, because the parent gene pool actually does more to inhibit new aberrations than to promote them.  A smaller gene pool is much easier to influence.  So what you usually get are more significant changes emerging in smaller colonies that have been genetically isolated from the main population.  Eventually, they may get to the point where the two groups are distinct, where a trait now held in common by every member of one group is not shared by any member of the other group.  This is known as a subspecies, or “breed”.  If the two groups resume interbreeding, then all that may meld together again as if it had never been.  But if they’re isolated long enough, they will continue to drift further apart both physically and genetically until it becomes difficult to interbreed at all anymore.  Eventually they’ll only be able to sire infertile hybrids, if they can still produce anything living.  At the point when two sexually-reproductive populations can no longer interbreed with viable offspring, then they have become two different species.

This is the most significant level in the whole of phylogenetics –when the daughter strain is now unrestrained by the once-dominant parent gene pool, and is therefore free to express an even greater variance thus continually widening the gap between them. This is a practical parallel of what creationists call the addition of new “information”.  Speciation is the only taxonomic division which is genetically significant, and it is the only one that can be objectively determined.  So it is the only possible point of division between the largely unnecessary distinctions of macro and microevolution.
 
"The theory is perfectly valid at that level; minor changes that
do not produce new kinds of organisms, and that above all do
not add to the genetic information . . . breeders are able to
produce change only within boundaries. Even those dogs are
all members of a single biological species, which are chemically
interfertile. Uh, we don't get dogs getting bigger and bigger
indefinitely – as big as elephants, or whales, much less changing
into elephants or whales  . . . and the claim that if selective
breeding hasn't produced the kind of macro changes, the kinds
of new forms of life, new biolo- complex organs uh, that are
needed, that's only because there hasn't been enough time."


Creationists insist that macroevolution has never been observed, and the excuse they use to deny that it has requires the addition of a bogus condition that simply does not apply. Creationists argue that evolution can only occur within “definite limits”, and then only to subtle variance within their “kind”.  They say new diversity is limited to rare and unviable hybrids between those “kinds”, and they usually say that the emergence of new species is impossible.

No “Darwinist” would ever say any of these things.  Sorry Stein, but you’ve lost your mind.

In the evolutionary perspective, any single ancestral species can diverge into two or more daughter species, each becoming so distinct that eventually either of the new species would be unable to interbreed with the ancestral and/or sister species anymore. But by ignoring fossil forms, the creationist’s perspective has that completely backwards, insisting instead on an illusory sequence of separately conjured “kinds” which (like “information”) must remain forever undefined, and they imagine that evolutionary diversity can only occur by mixing these “kinds” in hybridization.  This is another reason they reject transitional fossils, and instead demand some blend only between current “kinds”.  Their perspective has no depth.

Creationists may refuse to acknowledge geologic time scales, and cannot admit that any new organism might be unable to interbreed with the stock from whence it came because their sacred fables say they were “created each after their own kind”.  But of course they can’t say what a “kind’ is either, because it’s impossible to identify any point in taxonomy where everything that ever lived isn’t evidently related to everything else.  So they largely ignore phylogenetics altogether.

Creationists have to deny macroevolution for the same reason they have to deny transitional species, not because these combined realities can only indicate an animal ancestry, but because either one alone proves that such is at least possible, and creationists are not permitted to admit even that.

If it is possible to walk twenty feet, it’s possible to walk twenty miles.  So creationists insist there must be some “definite boundary” blocking the evolution of new “kinds”.  But they won’t say where or what that boundary is.  Creationists habitually misdefine their terms –if they can be forced to use definitions at all, because they will not be accountable. They can’t be, because they’ve decided in advance never to change their minds even if they’re proven wrong.  If they were to find out that macroevolution was ever actually seen and proven to have happened for certain, their cultish faith would still forbid them to admit it.  Instead they’d have to redefine their terms, to “move the goalposts” to some higher taxonomic level –but not so high as to have to admit where humans belong in the families of apes.

But now we know there really is no level above species, because every other “grade” in taxonomy is more or less arbitrarily assigned as a construct of human convenience.  The Linnaean ranks of family, genus, order, and phyla, are all factually illustrative, but virtually meaningless otherwise because every new taxonomic class that ever evolved began with speciation, the emergence of a distinctly new species, but one that was still just a modified version of whatever its parents were, and who’s eventual descendants will always belong to whatever categories their ancestors did also –no matter how much they may change as time goes on.

The only reason creationists cling to these “micro” and “macro” distinctions is so they can have some excuse to accept “small scale” evolution, which they begrudgingly admit cannot be denied even with the greatest faith; while still denying “large scale” evolution where their exact parameter of “how large” must remain illusive to prevent it ever being disproved.  Of course that means “large scale” evolution can mean whatever they want it to at that moment.  Frank Sherwin from the Institute of Creation Research recently defined macroevolution as “the origin of every kind of animal”, and later on in the same discussion, he changed his definition to “the origin of all life”.  He knows he’s using the terms incorrectly.  He simply doesn’t care!

But the fact is he doesn’t get to conveniently redefine what these terms have always meant to the scientists who invented those words in the first place.  According to Universities actually teaching this subject, microevolution is variation within species, and macroevolution is variation between species. The different breeds of dogs are an example of microevolution, while the different species of wolves and foxes, panthers and felines, horses and zebras, or llamas and camels –are all examples of macroevolution. Each set is definitely biologically closely-related, but they’re each different species, not different “kinds” of the same one.

Macroevolution is properly defined as the emergence of new taxa at or above the species level.  The only time creationists will use the proper definition is when they are as-yet unaware of the fact that speciation has already been directly-observed and documented dozens of times –both in the lab and in naturally-controlled conditions in the field.  In fact, we’ve seen it so many times we’ve had to categorize recurrent types of macroevolution we’ve seen so often repeated.  Once creationists find out about all this, their first reaction is to use the excuse that some newly evolved species of fruit fly or fish somehow still doesn’t count because it’s “still” a fly or it’s “still” a fish.  Well of course it is!  Evolution couldn’t permit them to be anything else.  

Creationists demand that the new species be so different from their parents that one can’t even tell they’re related.  The irony there is that evolutionary theory never suggests that one “kind” of thing ever turned into another, fundamentally-different “kind” of anything, not unless you ignore all the intermediate stages –which of course creationists do.

To comprehend evolutionary Theory, one must first understand that it’s only ever a matter of changing proportions –altering or enhancing existing features to build on what is already there.  Developmental biology, genetics, and comparative morphology combine to confirm many of these taxonomic stages such that organs do not seem to have appeared abruptly or fully-formed as if out of nowhere, because there is an implied evolutionary origin evident in every case.  Even the transition of fish-to-tetrapods, dinosaurs-to-birds, or apes-to-men are each are just a matter of incremental, superficial changes being slowly compiled atop successive tiers of fundamental similarities. These represent monophyletic clades which will forever encompass all the descendants of that clade.  This is why birds are still dinosaurs, and humans are still apes, and both are still stegocephalian chordates.

No matter how much you or your heirs may change, you obviously can’t outgrow heredity.  The very concept of common ancestry is a multi-tiered and intertwined complex phylogenetic system which shows why there can’t be any distinctly separate “kinds” to begin with!  At the same time, the act of speciation splits the population presenting an eventually impassable boundary between them.  We often see this demonstrated live in the form of “ring species”, where different evolutionary stages exist all at once in a geographic rather than chronological distribution.  Subspecies (A) may breed with subspecies (B), and (B) may breed with (C), and (C) with (D), but (A) and (D) cannot interbreed because by the time their territories overlap again, they’ve grown too distant genetically, and can’t come back.  This is when we see the formation of new features, organs, or skeletal structures, each examples of new genetic “information”.  What all these show is that even though a new species of perching bird (for example) is “still” a finch, it is now a different “kind” of finch, a distinct descendant species proving there is no “boundary” against macroevolution.

12th Foundational Falsehood of Creationism


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2TkY7HrJOhc

The 12th falsehood of Creationism:
“Creation science”

Paleontology in its early days was a difficult discipline.  We had to devise a way to test and confirm the claims that were made because 19th Century pioneers were often confused by their own preconceptions, and often made simple mistakes that went undiscovered for decades.  Unwary professors were sometimes made the victims of pranks, and not every respected scientist was entirely honest.

For example, Sir Richard Owen was a celebrated biologist and the foremost authority on paleofauna in the world in his time.  He was credited with the establishment of the British Museum of Natural History, and of inventing the word, “dinosaur”, but he did so by suppressing the work of other scientists and taking credit for their discoveries himself.  Owen was not well-liked.  He had a reputation of never admitting his own mistakes, and he was often described as dishonest, malicious, and hateful.  He was devoutly religious, but he was also a leading anatomist and zoologist, respected and unrivaled in each of these fields, and he was both Darwin’s superior and fiercest adversary.  Unlike Darwin, Owen believed religion should guide and even override scientific research.

Throughout history, there have been many scientists who believed the universe was “created” in the same sense that Christian proponents of natural sciences still believe today.  But those men who believed in God and made historic contributions to science still relied on necessarily natural methodology because that is the only way science can progress.  In many cases, they found natural explanations for things previously believed to be miraculous, and they only succeeded when they did not allow religious convictions to subvert or inhibit their inquiry.  None of them were able to vindicate the Bible stories, and their efforts to do so only ever indicated another origin.  Thus these men wouldn’t have supported creationism as we know it today, and many of them wouldn’t have been creationists if they’d understood evolution.  But Richard Owen was a creation scientist –both in the sense that he preferred magical manifestations to material mechanisms, and because he deliberately misrepresented evidence in an attempt to mislead others into believing as he did.

For example, Darwin said that if his theory were true, then we should find a sort of proto-bird with unfused wing fingers, and two years later, we did.  Confronted with this, Owen admitted that Archaeopteryx was a “peculiar” bird, but he dismissed it as ‘just’ a bird, and not exactly what Darwin had predicted.  He couldn’t honestly accept or admit a transitional species.  So Owen largely ignored Archaeopteryx’s saurian features and went on to argue how it couldn’t have evolved from reptiles by distinguishing its anatomy from pterosaurs rather than from dinosaurs.  Thomas Huxley immediately exposed Owen’s deceptive analysis when he published his own counter examination.

Owen also promised his religious fellows that he would succeed where Linnaeus had failed, in finding some physical trait to distinguish humans from apes, whether it was really the case or not.  First he presented similarities as differences, and when he couldn’t find any legitimate differences, he made up entirely fictitious ones.  As if his authority would always remain unquestioned, he proclaimed amid other scientists in peer-review, that the hippocampus minor was a uniquely human lobe of the brain and absent among apes.  Such an expert as he couldn’t have made such an obvious mistake, and his curious inability to concede any error except by way of evasive maneuver finally allowed Huxley to indict him for perjury.

Although Owen gave many lectures, wrote hundreds of scientific papers, and received honors, lands, and titles from the crown, he was also accused throughout his career of deliberate deceit, of “lying for God and for malice”, and even of writing anonymous letters to the press praising himself -in third person- while raving disdain against his colleagues.  Finally, Sir Richard Owen was dismissed from the Royal Society's Zoological Council amid myriad charges of plagiarism spanning the entirety of his career.

Owen believed in common archetypes rather than a common ancestor, and his conduct presents an archetype of the modern creation scientists, except that they submit to peer review rarely, (if ever) and none of them are experts in anything.  They’ve never produced any research indicative of their position.  They cannot substantiate any of their assertions, and they’ve never successfully refuted anyone else’s hypotheses either.  But every argument of evidence they’ve ever made in favor of creation has been refuted immediately and repeatedly.  All they’ve ever been able to do was criticize real science, and even then the absolute best arguments they’ve ever come up with were all disproved in a court of law with mountains of research standing against their every allegation.  Yet creationists still use those same ridiculous rationalizations  because they will never accept where their beliefs are in error!  Their only notable strength is how anyone can be so consistently proven to be absolutely wrong about absolutely everything, 100% of the time, for such a long time, and still make-believe theirs is the absolute truth.

More amazing still is how often they will actually lie in defense of their alleged truth.  Every publication promoting creation over any avenue of actual science contains misquotes, misdefinitions, and misrepresented misinformation, while their every appeal to reason is based entirely on erroneous assumptions and logical fallacies.  There is a madness to their method, but it is naught but propaganda.

“We don’t believe in evolution.
Evolution is an idea some people
have to explain life without God.”


No, evolution is science, and as such it’s a way of explaining life without magic; there’s a difference.  Even at the kindergarten level, science is defined as a way of learning about the natural world; “natural” meaning, “in accordance with the laws of nature”.  “Nature” is further defined as the sum of all forces or phenomenon in the entirety of perceptible reality.  Everything that really exists has properties, and anything that can be objectively indicated, measured or tested is therefore natural.  The supernatural is contrasted with this, being defined as that which is beyond the material universe, outside our reality, a transcendent dream-like dimension indistinguishable from the illusions of imagination, independent of, and even defiant of physical laws, and thus neither detectable nor describable by science.  The evocation of inexplicable paranormal forces or supernatural entities to influence natural events or phenomenon are usually described as “miracles” but are also clearly “magic” by definition.  

Creationists contend that they don’t believe in magic.  But “speaking” anything into existence is an incantation, and the Bible is full of spells of one sort or another.  Animating golems, or conjuring interdependent systems, and causing complex organisms to appear out of thin air -are each logically implausible and physically impossible according to everything we know about anything at all, yet this is exactly what religiously-motivated pseudoscientists actually promote!

How do we test these ideas?  How can we tell them apart from any of the thousands of fables men have concocted for the ghosts and gods of other religions?  How can we tell whether any of this is even real, and not something someone just made up?  Because despite anyone’s assertions of personal conviction, it is impossible to distinguish miracles from subjective impressions imagined out of nothing.  In the realm of fantasy, it’s easy to demonstrate psionic talents, astral entities, and magical manifestations.  Until they do that in reality too, then science has nothing but nature to work with.

Those who know the necessity of naturalism can list millions of practical advantages that continue to come from that.  So science requires a way to weed fiction from function through independent verification and the process of elimination.

Natural science works; creation science doesn’t.
That’s why faith healers don’t work in hospitals.

The National Academy of Sciences, defines it as the systematic enterprise of gathering knowledge about the world and organizing and condensing that knowledge into testable laws and theories, –a definition further endorsed by the Academic Press Dictionary of Science & Technology.   Fraudulent evangelical charlatans often say that creationism is scientific, but there’s utterly no verifiably accurate evidence behind any of their assertions, and no way to construct any hypotheses to explain any of their claims because no experiments could possibly support them, and faith prohibits believers from ever admitting when their notions would be falsified.  Creationists are therefore unable to add to the sum of knowledge and instead only offer excuses trying to actually reduce what we already know.  They’ve no way to recognize their own flaws and won’t correct them, so they can neither confirm nor improve their accuracy.  But that’s all real science is or does.

Consequently, since the dawn of rational thought, the advancement of science has been retarded by the minions of mysticism, and profound revelations have often been opposed or suppressed by the greater part of the dominant religion, because dogmatic faith is not based on reason and zealots will not be reasoned with.

“So this is a war of the world views, and all science
is creation science. Would you agree with that this
evening? All science is___? Creation science. All
truth is ___?  God’s truth! And certainly science is
the search for ___?  Truth!”


Science is a search for truth –whatever the truth may turn out to be, even if it’s evidently not what we wanted to believe it was.  In science, it doesn’t matter what you believe; all that matters is why you believe it.  This is why real science disallows faith, promising instead to remain objective, to follow wherever the evidence leads, and either correct or reject any and all errors along the way even if it challenges whatever we think we know now.  But creationist organizations post written declarations of their unwavering obligation to uphold and defend their preconceived notions, declaring in advance their refusal to ever to let their minds be changed by any amount of evidence that is ever revealed.  Anti-science evangelists display their statement of faith proudly on their own forums, as if admitting to a closed and dishonest mind wasn’t something to ashamed of or beg forgiveness for.

They don’t want to do science.  They want to un-do science!  They try to segregate experimental science from historical science, ignoring the fact that both are based on empirical observations and both can be checked with testable hypotheses.  Worse, they want to redefine science in general so that astrology, subjective convictions of faith, and excuses of magic can supplant the scientific method whenever necessary in defense of their beliefs.  They’re only open to critical inquiry so long as that is not permitted to challenge the sacred scriptures nor vindicate any of the fields of study to which they’re already opposed.  In short, everything science stands for, -or hopes to achieve- is threatened by the political agenda of these superstitious subversives.

You can believe whatever you like.  As long as you admit that it is a belief, you don’t have to defend it.  But if you assert your belief as a statement of fact, then you do have to defend it!  Stating anything as definitely true when there is insufficient evidence to back it –is dishonest.  Making such positive proclamations without any evidence at all is a matter of faith.  And promising in advance to forever defend an unsupportable a-priori preference even against an avalanche of evidence against it -is apologetics, which is all creation “science” really is.

More videos continued below . . . . .

The show's not over yet!
Big Fat Heretic
Big Fat Heretic
IHateSports Fanatic

Posts : 402
Join date : 2012-12-26
Age : 72
Location : El Paso, Texas

https://www.youtube.com/user/BigFatHeretic

Back to top Go down

February 12,2015 - I celebrated the 206th birthday of Charles Darwin, with these 17 YouTube videos, The Foundational Falsehoods of Creationism! Empty Re: February 12,2015 - I celebrated the 206th birthday of Charles Darwin, with these 17 YouTube videos, The Foundational Falsehoods of Creationism!

Post by Big Fat Heretic Fri Feb 13, 2015 8:53 am

More videos continued from above . . . . .

Get yourself some popcorn.

As for me, it's late at night, so I'm just going to have some dark roast coffee and a cigar.


13th Foundational Falsehood of Creationism


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=myfifz3C0mI

The 13th foundational falsehood of creationism:
“Evolution is a fraud!”

Ernst Haeckel was a pioneer zoologist and taxonomist whose numerous contributions to biology go largely unnoticed compared to a couple rather odd errors.  First, he proposed that “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny", suggesting that embryonic development reflects the organism’s evolutionary ancestry.  To illustrate this, he produced about a hundred drawings of embryos at various stages.  But he  later admitted that about a half-dozen of them were ‘falsified’ due to a lack of visual references.  The fact that any of his drawings were admittedly without reference has disgraced Haeckel’s name in the annals of science.

Darwin wrote that embryology contained compelling evidence of evolution.  Creationists dismiss this on the assumption that Darwin’s theory was inspired by Haeckel’s fraudulent drawings, and that consequently, evolution is a fraud.  But of course the truth is the other way around.  Darwin referred to real embryos; Haeckel’s drawings didn’t even exist until years after Darwin’s final publication.

What is especially sad about Haeckel’s “embellishments” was that they were unnecessary.  Creationists adamantly complain that textbooks referred to his admittedly inaccurate drawings for so long.  But for some reason, they continue to accuse those authors of fraud even when those books replace the drawings with microphotographs which still indicate those same evolutionary parallels which Haeckel envisioned.  Now his original assumption that embryonic development would indicate adult species in an organism’s ancestral history was proven false by 1910.  But the fact Darwin recognized, that embryology does provide testable confirmations and predictions of phylogeny was already evident before Haeckel ever picked up his pencil, and has recently began a new embryological study known as “evo devo”.  Among other discoveries, this field revealed the evolutionary origin of the feather, as implied by transitional stages in the fossil record, and summarized in the formation of feathers in developing chickens.

It is no hoax that mammalian embryos temporarily have pharyngeal pouches, which are morphologically indistinguishable from the gill slits in modern fish embryos, and that the divergence of development from there matches what is indicated in the fossil record. This is fact, not fraud.  And none of these facts should be true unless evolution were true also.  

100 years ago, the only human fossils yet known were a few Neanderthals, Cro-Magnon, and Homo erectus.  Then an English attorney and amateur archaeologist presented bones and associated artifacts of what appeared to be an as-yet unidentified species.  British Imperialists were generally accepting of the news, but French and American scientists were skeptical, doubting that the skull and jaw even belonged together.  The British museum touted the “Piltdown man” as authentic, but the American Museum of Natural History displayed it only as a “mixture of ape and man fossils”, which is what it eventually turned out to be.

There was no way to adequately examine such things back in 1915.  Chemical tests –common today- didn’t yet exist and we didn’t yet have a practical understanding of radiation.  And before the first australopiths were discovered, we didn’t know exactly what to expect of the links that were then still missing between humans and the other apes known at that time.  But as we began filling in the gaps in human evolution with thousands of legitimate fossils, a pattern emerged which left Piltdown an increasingly obvious anomaly.  Consequently it was taken off display and stored away almost continuously for decades.  It lost importance in most discussions because, in light of everything else we discovered over the next few decades, it just never fit, and was eventually dismissed from the list of potential human ancestors for that reason.  

As the years wore on, criticism arose against everyone who ever promoted the Piltdown collection because there seemed to be so much wrong with it.  Finally, in the 1950s, it was taken back out of the box and scrutinized via more modern means.  First fluorine dating revealed that it was much too recent, and it was shown to have been chemically-treated to give a false impression of its age and mineral composition.  Then it was finally determined that the jaw must have come from an orangutan, and that it had been deliberately reshaped with modern tools in a well-crafted and deliberate forgery.

No one knows who did it either. And more importantly, why?  Errors were already known and previously reported, but few ever suspected fraud because, what would be the motive?  Nearly everyone who stood accused was a man of high reputation and credentials.  Maybe that was the motive.  Maybe Piltdown man was just a joke that had gone too far. But no one was laughing, and they weren’t going to let it happen again.

Even before the Piltdown hoax was officially exposed, an American paleontologist earned himself a life-time of embarrassment when he found a tooth from an extinct species of pig in Nebraska, and mislabeled it, Hesperopithecus.  The cheek teeth of pigs and peccaries are fairly similar to ape molars, and this one was badly worn such that Henry Fairfield Osborne initially believed it to be human.  But the real embarrassment came when he publicized his find in a popular magazine rather than submitting it for peer review first.

Creationists like to say that scientists were as duped by Nebraska man as they were by Piltdown man. But they weren’t.  Everyone who saw the fossil agreed that it did look like an ape’s tooth.  But with only a couple tentative exceptions, the entire contemporary scientific community either immediately rejected the accuracy of Osborne’s assertions, or they demanded more substantial evidence to back them.  He obviously couldn’t provide that evidence despite another five years of searching.  Eventually, he came to the sad realization that his fossil probably wasn’t really human after all.  His more skeptical associate, W.K. Gregory then published a formal retraction in scientific journals.    

Creationists often accuse scientists of contriving the illustration of Nebraska man and of conjuring a whole skeleton and facial construct out of a single tooth that was never even human in the first place.  But the fact is that the magazine commissioned their own ‘artist’s impression’, and scientists of the day, including Osborn himself, immediately reacted with harsh criticism. As a result, the article was never reprinted.

Now even though Piltdown man was eventually exposed by evolution itself; and even though Nebraska man was simple stupidity, honestly and voluntarily admitted, and even though there were no other such examples in the history of paleoanthropology, -creationists still portray both of these events, and many others, as if they were all part of some ridiculous unified international conspiracy intended to fool the world into believing evolution over creation ex-nihilo.  These paranoid propagandists also commonly contend -based only on these exceptions- that each of the thousands of fossil hominids we’ve found and confirmed before and since were all proven to be fakes too –even when the alleged authorities making these claims are already-exposed charlatans currently imprisoned for fraud.

Some forty examples of Peking man were lost in World War II.  But they were just part of a subset of Homo erectus, and not the only evidence of human evolution.  Modern man didn’t just come from a monkey, but as a member of the infraorder, Catarrhini, he is a monkey by definition!  Cro-Magnon wasn’t a different species; they were just the first of our own species known in Europe; displacing the sons of Heidelberg man.  Homo heidelbergensis was “quite human” because he was a human, just not the same species we are.  And it was never known from a single jawbone either, but from more than 4,000 bones representing nearly 30 individuals found in one site alone, and there are still dozens more.  Their evident descendants, the Neanderthals weren’t “just an old man with arthritis” either.  We’ve found hundreds of Neanderthal men, women, and children, and even their DNA, which has provided proof that they were not part of our species!  None of the experts believe “Lucy” was a chimpanzee.  All the experts agree that australopiths lie between humans and modern apes, or that they were simply basal human forms.  Nebraska man was never accepted by the scientific community. Piltdown man was the only such fraud that ever duped scientists, and there’s never been a fossil of “New Guinea man” because he is apparently a lie made up out of nothing by the author of this entirely fraudulent religious tract.

“Homo habilis was made up of at least two -if not more- different groups
that did not belong together. They’re an assemblage of several different
types of animals put together and made into one.”

“That’s not entirely accurate.”

Actually we’ve found the remains of dozens of Homo habilis individuals, and about a half-dozen Homo rudolfensis too.  These were once thought to be distinct hominine species, but they’re so similar that many paleoanthropologists now consider them to be two variations of one species.

“Homo erectus or “Java man” isn’t a half-man, half-ape either. The
man who discovered it admitted before he died that it was a fraud.
He confessed that he had found an ape’s skull about fifty feet away
from a human leg and two human skulls. And had mixed-and-matched
to create a fictitious creature.”

“Are YOU a rotten liar!”

The two modern skulls weren’t fifty feet away; they were found in a cave over sixty miles away!  Despite the many lies repeated by Duane Gish and other creationists, Java man was just one out of hundreds of Homo erectus individuals documented thus far.

Also, Homo floresiensis wasn’t microcephalic; there was a whole community of them.  Similarly “Lucy” wasn’t assembled from bones found miles apart; those were different individuals who each bore their own independent evidence of strict bipedality.  And the total number of hominin fossils will no longer fit on a pool table either; now you’ll need a whole pool!

Even though there’s now been innumerable examples of natural selection acting under direct observation, and a multitude of experiments gauging these, creationists are still trying to deny even the first of these observances, the peppered moths of industrialized England.  Creationists say that was a fraud too, because the photos had to be staged, not for the normal convenience of photography, but because these creationists claim that peppered moths don’t rest on tree bark.  But a thirty year study by Cambridge University revealed that in fact most of them do!

“You lied to me!”

“To some people in this world, money is
more important than truth; and if they
have to lie to you to keep their paycheck
coming in, they will lie to you.”


“And so I am!”

“If you do the research, you’ll find that a Chinese farmer glued together
the head of a bird and the parts of a reptile, and completely fooled the
world-wide scientific community including National Geographic with what
they thought was a transitional form.  It was called Archaeoraptor.”


“You’re always wrong.”

Only a handful of scientists ever saw Archaeoraptor, but every one who did noted that it was composite piece, and the artistic amateurs who paid for the fossil were repeatedly warned that some parts of it might not even belong to the whole.  Popular press foolishly scooped the story prior to peer review, where it was instantly exposed as a fake by multiple experts, and each submission to scientific journals was immediately rejected.  Archaeoraptor therefore fooled no one in the scientific community at all.

The irony there is that the tail of the alleged archaeoraptor turned out to belong to the as-yet undiscovered Microraptor, a four-winged and apparently gliding feathered dinosaur which turned out to be even more compelling proof of avian evolution from dinosaurs than Archaeopteryx was in Darwin’s day.

The scientific process of peer-review seeks out and exposes fraud by design.  But antievolutionist arguments are withheld from peer-review because they are driven entirely by frauds including misstatements, out-of-context quote-mining, and contrived or distorted falsehoods, and terms erroneously redefined into instigative reactionary nonsense unintelligible as anything other than propaganda.  In short, if creationists knew how to expose a fraud, they wouldn’t be creationists anymore.

14th foundational falsehood of creationism Pt 1


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MYsnVMjG4lk

The 14th foundational falsehood of creationism:
“Creation is evident”
Part 1

In May of 2007, former child actor, Kirk Cameron and fellow advocate of idiocy, Ray Comfort, promised to scientifically prove the existence of God on national television,

“100% absolutely –without the use of faith”.

Of course that didn’t happen.  Religious beliefs –as everyone knows- are assumed on faith in lieu of proof and regardless of evidence.  Cameron and Comfort had neither.  Instead they presented a series of fallacious absurdities revealing the depth of their own impressive ineptitude.  First they tried to parody cosmology and abiogenesis -as if criticizing them should somehow challenge evolution; as if disproving evolution could imply creation by default; as if God would only be indicated by a failure of science to explain what religion also does not explain; as if science did not adequately explain every aspect of biodiversity very well, and hadn’t already disproved all the Genesis fables which Cameron and Comfort are still trying to save.

Failing that, they immediately resorted to their usual staple of mined quotations appealing to authority with irrelevant comments made by folks who often meant the very opposite of what these two implied.  Then they revealed a profound incompetence on the subject of logic.  When all that inevitably failed to impress anyone either, they tried to intimidate the audience with a sermon of emotional pleas entirely reliant on fear and ignorance.  But this assembly wasn’t stocked only with paranoid and superstitious zealots; this was a more intellectually curious group, many of whom already believed in God.  But whether they did or not, everyone in attendance was sincerely disappointed with Cameron’s & Comfort’s inability to produce anything they promised.

"I think everybody here can tell that
there was not one piece of evidence
presented -at all- for their god."


Comfort insulted fellow believers by assuming that, if there is a god, then his religion and absurdly narrow interpretation of it was the only acceptable option, a notion his cohort unwittingly described as idolatry.  Cameron insulted the rest of the audience by pretending to have once thought as rationalists do, a lie he himself also accidentally exposed when he then accused rationalism of being a belief based on faith.  Finally, Comfort implicitly admitted that his god could only be indicated if one was already determined to believe in it regardless of evidence, and the only claim to it they had depended on religious references which they had earlier promised they would neither need nor use.  If they knew this going in, then their whole premise was phony, because they also knew they didn’t have any evidence, –much less proof- and would have to rely entirely on assertions of faith, –and their reverence of scripture.

“The invisible things of him from the creation of the world are
clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made.”


“I find it incredulous –if not astounding- that when
it comes to knowing all things and having all things
at your fingertips, you turn the Bible, a book riddled
with things we know are wrong!”



Amazingly, subsequent interviews showed the duo apparently oblivious to any of their string of utter failures in that forum.  They went into this venue as if they actually believed they had something to present, and may even have come out thinking they showed it.  But much of the alleged evidence they declared to be “irrefutable” had already been refuted thousands of times.  The rest were merely unsubstantiated assertions, flatly stating as fact unsupported assumptions which can neither be evidenced nor confirmed, presenting their baseless speculation as though it were certain knowledge.

“God is gonna punish murderers.  He’s good.  He’s just.
He’s gonna make sure murders get what’s coming to them.
But realize this; that God is so good, he’s also gonna punish
rapists, adulterers, pedofiles, fornicators, blasphemers.”



Obviously Cameron & Comfort hadn’t any idea what they were talking about at any point, neither in fact nor fiction.  They certainly didn’t know what the words, “science”, “knowledge”, “proof” or “evidence” even mean.  Creationists typically don’t.

“We’re both looking at the exact same facts;
we’re just coming to different conclusions.”



No we’re not.  First of all, facts are objectively verifiable -and thus indisputable- data.  But dogmatic religious beliefs depend instead on subjective impressions of personal preference, erroneous assumptions, and assertions of logical fallacies.

“Creation is 100% absolute scientific proof there was a creator.
You cannot have a creation without a creator.”


“Everything is just so incredibly complex, there has to be a creator.”
“Everything that has information and is complex has to have been created.”


“That’s not true at all.”


Second: We could rationalize a few of the facts differently.  But mere facts don’t qualify as evidence until or unless they collectively indicate –or can be accounted for by- only one scenario over any other available option.  By definition, the same evidence cannot imply two mutually-exclusive opposing positions.

Besides, we’re obviously not both looking at ERVs, atavisms, transitional forms, physiological, anatomical, and molecular vestiges, ontogeny and developmental biology, protein functional redundancy, convergent phenotypes, mobile genes, observed speciation, or the myriad methods of dating geologic stratigraphy, nor any twin-nested hierarchy of phylogenetic clades.  All of these are peer-reviewed and verified accurate evidence positively promoting evolution as well as directly disproving creationism.  But you know what we’ve never seen?  We’ve never seen anything “created”.  No one has ever seen a complex life-form (or anything else) magically pop out of thin air.  But that’s what creationists are arguing for!  Talismans, incantations, elemental component spells, enchantments, clairvoyance and prophesies all consistently fail every test.

To confirm this, James “the Amazing” Randi, a former Las Vegas illusionist well-versed in the angles used in supernatural pseduoscience -has for ten years- offered a million-dollar prize for anyone who can show testable evidence of the things we should expect would also be true if there were etherial entities influencing things with molecular structures.  In that time, he has exposed a few frauds.  But to date, no one has ever produced any actual evidence for faith-healing, telepaths, psionics, precognative psychic friends with astral bodies, past life remembrance, or spectral manifestations of any kind.  So where is there any field of study or accurate fact positively promoting a magical creation?

“We’re considering this matter of life origins, and there’s an incredible
body, a pyramid of evidence in support of divine orchestration, divine
engineering, divine creation.”


Great!  Where is it?  What is it?  Because each of the arguments presented for “irreduceable complexity” (the best arguments creationism ever had) were disproved scientifically and exposed in court.  And apart from a series of frauds and falsehoods like these- the only arguments anti-science evangelists have ever had seem limited to nothing more than ignorant criticisms of dwindling and already irrelevent gaps in the ever-enveloping advancement of science.  But vague criticisms against science still wouldn’t count as evidence for creationism even if those arguments weren’t all completely wrong.  Even if there was evidence of gods, it might not be their god.  Even if it was, that wouldn’t be evidence of creation either, because that still wouldn’t dismiss any of the evidence for evolution and against mythology; nor could it change the fact that humans are still apes.  Creation relies on a false dichotomy –rejecting all other options and insisting that there can only be two alternatives; So they can imagine that criticizing the one will vindicate the other by default.

“Question for doctor Hovind: What is your strongest piece of evidence for creationism?”

“I think the evidence for creation would be the absolute impossibility of the contrary.”


Convicted fraud and pseudoscience charlatan, MISTER Kent Hovind argues that what has already been directly-observed and shown to be certainly true is (in his opinion) impossible, and the only option he thinks is possible is that an imperceptible (and possibly imaginary) mystical being poofed everything out of nothing by magic.  The irony is that what he proposes is physically impossible because it defies all natural laws, and it’s logically implausible since it has neither precedent nor parallel anywhere in reality to imply that it could still be true anyway.  Where is there evidence anywhere that such a thing actually exists, or that anything even could have any of these abilities?

The evidence of evolution, and even the event of evolution itself, –the proof of it-  are both directly observed, and testable, and demonstrably factual.  But religious beliefs are none of the above and never have been; they’re assumed on faith.  Whether or not these beliefs turn out to be correct, they are asserted as true without justification in the form of evidence.

14th foundational falsehood of creationism pt 2


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3XHbRGiQccM

The 14th foundational falsehood of creationism:
“Creation is evident”
Part II


Defenders of pseudoscience scornfully reject scientific methodology and gleefully ignore  evidence on purpose, and their leaders even admit this openly and publicly; Because they actually preach not only that we should make positive proclamations of complete conviction even without the slightest indication, but also that we should automatically reject –without consideration- everything we ever find that doesn’t fit into their pre-conceived bias.
   

“We need to be looking at the world through our Biblical glasses. We have a revelation
from one who says, “I know everything; I’ve always been there. Here’s what happened
in the past.” So when we take that revelation, -put on our set of glasses, and we look
at the evidence, we can say, “Aah now I understand. Fossils couldn’t have formed before
sin. There was no death before sin. There was a global flood.  That connects to geology.
God made distinct kinds of animals and plants.  That connects to biology”, and so on."



This is how to prove that creationism really is willfully ignorant and deliberately dishonest, because here is another admission that they don’t care what the truth really is.  They just wanna believe what they wanna believe, and if that doesn’t turn out to be true, then they don’t want to know what is true, and sometimes they’ll even admit that too.

“I’ll be the first to admit that creationists view evidence from
a biased perspective. Evolutionists, would you be willing to
admit you also view evidence from a biased perspective?”



Religion is a bias by definition.  That’s why it relies on propaganda.  But science dispels propaganda because it eliminates bias by design; it has to because it’s an investigation, not a predetermined conclusion like religion is.  So every proposition must be requisitely evidential and potentially falsifiable, and must be subjected to a perpetual battery of independent and unrestricted tests wherein anyone and everyone who thinks they can is welcome to try and find and expose from flaw in it –to correct it.  Creationists won’t subject their beliefs to any of that because they’re not interested in finding out what is really true.  They want to defend their preferred beliefs whether they’re true or not.

“Look, the bottom line is, the creationist answer is God just did it that way.”
“That’s good enough for me, man.  He just  [snaps fingers]”
“That’s good, yeah.  We don’t need science to back us up.”


And that’s the thing about the Biblical view;
it doesn’t have to be explained by science.”


“I’ve chosen to believe the god of the Bible. Now the evolutionists
chooses not to believe in the god of the Bible. We’ve chosen to
believe.  They’re both matters of faith.”



Science is necessarily rational and empirical.  That means that whatever we believe isn’t a matter of choice; its an obligate condition imposed upon us by our knowledge of the evidence, and that position will only change in accordance with our understanding.

“Well think about it; very little evidence. Blind
faith, that’s all we have to go on. There’s not a
shred of proof anywhere –nothing!”



If there’s no evidence for a particular notion, then there’s no reason to believe it either. It may as well have been imagined out of nothing because it has no basis in fact.  We can only proclaim a positive belief if we have sufficient evidence to support only that, and no evidence at all against it.  Even then we can only accept it tentatively.  Because, if future evidence ever confirms that we were wrong all along, then we’ll be forced to change our minds accordingly even if we didn’t want to.

Defense of faith doesn’t work that way.  It relies instead on apologetics; the branch of theology concerned with the manditory promotion and reinforcement of faith in a particular religious doctrine, and the obligate defense of that belief by systematically rationalizing or denying any or all arguments that may ever be laid against it.

Lemmie explain how it works.  It’s really quite easy: “GodDidIt” explains everything by explaining nothing.  Since magic is exempt from all rules of nature or logic, they think that means that anything that seems impossible somehow proves them right.  Conversely, anything and everything that might imply otherwise can be immediately dismissed as a knee-jerk reaction with the phrase, “that doesn’t prove anything”.  Virtually all anti-science apologetics are composed of variants of these two thoughtless comments, in addition to the usual propaganda of  inflammatory emotional pleas, tall tales, petty bigotry, incredulity, and appeals to authority.

No matter how scientific, how commonly believed, or how apparently workable or logical it may seem, no evidence of any sort can even be considered if it contradicts their sacred stories –which they insist must take priority in the event of any apparent conflict.  Their position is wholly dishonest, and it’s everything science isn’t; because it’s an a-priori position which must never be seriously questioned, corrected or rejected.

They have to defend their preconcieved notions because they’re forbidden –on pain of a fate worse than death- to even consider that they could be wrong, and they must maintain that belief no matter how wrong they obviously are.  Even when they know they’re wrong, they still have to make-believe anyway.  Their position is the definition of a closed-mind.  It is not a search for truth!

“For the remainder of this program, we’re going to put you right here where I’m sitting in the
juror’s box. But this time you’re going to hear the facts about evolution vs creation, not some
media spin, not wishful thinking, not the biased view of a scientific minority.”
“ . . . The truth is you’ve been mislead, scammed, lied to.”



There’s no rational need for apologetics and science rejects it.  We don’t hold evolution sacred.  We defend it only because it is evidently true.  Superstitious politics have made evolution an icon necessary to the defense of the scientific method –which is the real target of religious fundamentalism.  But their under-handed attempts to undermine science is also eroding their parent theology more so than atheism ever could.  Because if you have to lie to defend your truth, then it was never really truth to begin with, and creationism obviously IS not like the truth and DOES not like the truth.

That’s also why they don’t like free speech.  Where science invites critical inquiry in peer review, apologetics depends on one-sided assertions based on nothing and defended only by censorship.

For example, if you Google QuestionEvolution.com, either on the web or in the Talk.Origins news group, you’ll see that –to their credit- their webmaster once agreed to host a link to an offsite collection of rebuttals from the evolutionary perspective.  However despite this several months later, his home page still said “these questions remain unanswered by the evolutionist”.  So we pressed him about correcting that error, and he said he would when he had the time.  But that was several years ago, and his site still tells the same lie.  All he did was to quietly remove the links to all our answers, so he could pretend they didn’t exist –rather than correct his false accusations.  

For another example, someone still stupid enough to promote Kirk Cameron actually bought a domain named after me, with all the tags applicable to me, in an obvious attempt to redirect search engines looking for me.  Of course there’s no way to post comments to that site, nor to contact them to correct it.  So they use that page to post idiotic falsehoods deliberately misrepresenting my position.  It’s so crazy that on some level they have to know how wrong that all is.  But they don’t care about accuracy and we’ve already heard them declare they don’t care about evidence either.  They’ve assumed their conclusions without it, and admit they’ll never change their minds because of it.  But sometimes they’ll contradict themselves and pretend otherwise –if they think they have a few facts on their side.

“I have, we have footprints of humans with dinosaurs in Dakota. We have
dinoglyphs from Lake-on-the-Woods in Ontario all the way down to Peru.”


“Dinoglyphs being native drawings.”

“Native drawings of tyrannosaurs.”

“Right, just like there are native drawings of all kinds of fantastic creatures.”

“Yes but these aren’t fantastic; they’re consistent.
And . . . it’s not that I don’t know something; it’s
because I know something I’m a creationist.”



What this creationist doesn’t know is that he has just cited known forgeries as evidence.

Many of the famed Ica stones have been recently created and artificially aged as part of a hoax financed by a Peruvian dentist seeking to defraud gullible tourists.  Some of the hucksters involved have even confessed to their part in this crime.  Even other creationists reject this -including cryptozoologists –the ones who most want to believe in persistent existence of extinct paleofauna; even they say they can prove that these artifacts aren’t really ancient depictions of dinosaurs.  AnswersInGenesis.org, –a leader in the apologetics resistance against science- admits this too.

Fundamentalists have never exposed a single evolutionary fraud or scientific conspiracy since their mindless movement began, but they’ve perpetrated many of each!  Some sites supporting science have long lists of creationists’ criminal cons and thoroughly-disputed fabrications along with citations of peer-reviewed research proving why every single allegation of evangelical evidence ever examined is either unsubstantiated or entirely erroneous if not deliberately deceitful.

Religious fundamentalists seldom correct any of the many flaws in their data, and increasingly desperate wanna-believers keep repeating the same old wives’ tales and urban legends long after they know they’re not true.  That’s all they ever had; and before the age of information, they could still get away with that.  But some of these frauds and rumors are now so blatantly bogus that even apologetics propaganda mills are compelled to admit it; Because refuting the various fallacies, fibs, and fakery of creationist claims has become a sort of internet sport.  It’s like shooting fish in a barrel because every single thing the fundies ever presented in their defense –if it could ever be tested at all- has always turned out to be either misunderstood and grossly distorted or intentionally misrepresented.

The simultaneously saddest and most laughable irony of this whole stupid controversy is that these zealots claim they’re opposed to evolution as an issue of morality.  Yet while we can cite dozens of examples where politically-influential creationists clearly know they’re lying about science, there is no such instance wherein evolutionary scientists can be shown to be dishonest in their criticisms of creationism.  There’s no need to be.  Despite all the attempted deception, the baseless assertions and political division produced by the creationism movement, the truth is there has never been a single verifiably accurate argument of evidence indicative of miraculous creation over biological evolution or any other avenue of actual science.  Not one –period.  Neither has there been any credible proponents of creation science anywhere ever, because, (with one crackpot exception) everyone who has ever published anti-evolutionary rhetoric to any medium did so only according to a prior religious agenda rather than any amount of scientific comprehension.  They’ve all revealed inexcusable ignorance in the very fields where they claim expertise, and their arguments are all dependant on erroneous assumptions, prejudicial bias, logical fallacies, ridiculous parody, misdefined terms, misquoted authorities, distorted data, fraudulent figures, or out-and-out lies.  Thus, there are only two types of arguments for creationism; those which are untestable, indistinguishable from the delusions of imagination, and can neither be indicated nor vindicated, verified or disproved, and those which have already been disproved many times over, both scientifically and in a court of law.


Well . . . it's not over yet!

The opera ain't over 'till the fat lady sings!

More videos continued below.

Enjoy!
Big Fat Heretic
Big Fat Heretic
IHateSports Fanatic

Posts : 402
Join date : 2012-12-26
Age : 72
Location : El Paso, Texas

https://www.youtube.com/user/BigFatHeretic

Back to top Go down

February 12,2015 - I celebrated the 206th birthday of Charles Darwin, with these 17 YouTube videos, The Foundational Falsehoods of Creationism! Empty Re: February 12,2015 - I celebrated the 206th birthday of Charles Darwin, with these 17 YouTube videos, The Foundational Falsehoods of Creationism!

Post by Big Fat Heretic Fri Feb 13, 2015 2:09 pm

Continued from above . . . . .

OK, here's a couple more videos for your viewing pleasure.

Enjoy!



15th Foundational Falsehood of Creationism Pt 1


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_wv6kgjOEL0


The 15th foundational falsehood of creationism:
“Evolution has never been proved.
It’s still just a theory, not a fact.”


“In this episode of scientific truth journal, we’ll explore the theory of evolution
and we’ll implicitly mock the people who hold opposing viewpoints.”


“Hmph!  Evolution, what a crock!  Can we change it, please?”

“Evolution is a scientific fact –unless you’re ignorant.”

“If it’s a fact, why is it called a ‘theory’?”

“There are scientific reasons; It’s all very complicated!”

People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals, and you know it! Fifteen hundred years
ago, everybody ‘knew’ the earth was the center of the universe; Five hundred years ago,
everybody ‘knew’ the earth was flat, and fifteen minutes ago, you ‘knew’ that people
were alone on this planet. (sigh) Imagine what you’ll ‘know’ tomorrow.”



The mission of religion is to make followers believe.  Subjective assumptions unsupported by evidence will almost certainly be wrong at the onset regardless of the source, and without any means of regulation, will only get wronger over time.  Sacred dogma once written is forbidden to be changed, so it can’t be rectified either.  But science must be amenable to change because its objective is to add to the sum of knowledge and to improve understanding continually.  So whatever explanations we ever propose are not to believed, but to be tested and corrected, even rejected if necessary, and our explanations must be refined accordingly.    

For example, once upon a time, all the religions of the near east believed the earth was a flat disk divided into four quadraints, and enveloped by a giant crystal dome, which was their sky.  The earliest actual scientists described the earth as a sphere and even calculated its size with surprising accuracy.  But a hundred years later, the authors of scripture still wrote of a disk-shaped world.  As the centuries wore on, some dogmatic believers refused the wisdom of scholars who knew better and even suppressed or destroyed their knowledge, and held to belief in a flat earth even until Columbus provided the final disproof.
“President Bush recently suggested that public schools should teach Intelligent Design alongside
the theory of evolution because after all evolution is [quote] “just a theory”. Then the president
renewed his vow to drive the terrorists straight over the edge of the earth.”



Modern creationists oppose evolution and sometimes cosmology the same way flat earthers reject the theory of geosphericity, the same way geocentrists deny the theory of heliocentricity!  Rather than swearing in advance to uphold and defend our preconceived notions against all reason, we would do better to suspect and inspect every belief to see if flaws can be found out and our knowledge consequently increased.
 

“There are many hypotheses in science which are wrong. That’s perfectly alright; it’s the aperture
to finding out what’s right.  Science is a self-correcting process. To be accepted, new ideas must
survive the most rigorous standards of evidence and scrutiny.”



Aristotle once proposed that everything was made of earth, air, water, and fire, -here represented by the perfect solids once associated with them- and a fifth element considered to be the substance of life.  Based on these long-held yet obviously delusive beliefs, Georg Stahl and other 17th century scientists composed two theories; the theory of vitalism, (which held that life was animated by an infusion with an elemental spirit) and the theory of phlogiston.  For decades, European scientists imagined that a nigh-undetectable sort of fiery air called phlogiston was present in everything flammable.  A series of experiments ensued and these men began to rationalize how phlogiston could still somehow account for all the inconsistent data.  Finally more accurate measurements and more critical thinking eventually challenged the status quo and brought chemical theory out of the realms of alchemy.  Neither of Stahl’s theories are valid theories anymore.  Phlogiston theory was disproved in 1777.  His theory of vitalism was disproved fifty years later.  But after a hundred and fifty years, Darwin’s theory is still going stronger than ever.
“Evolution is still a theory. It’s still a theory. We just
had two hundred years of evolutionary theory, and it’s
still a theory.”


“I heard someone ask one day, 'Well, you know, *you haven’t disproved the theory
of evolution' [*speaking about Christians] And my reply was, 'um, there’s nothing
to disprove; The theory of evolution has never been proved'.”



You don’t have to prove something before it can be disproved.  Nor should we both prove and disprove the same thing.  Science doesn’t permit anything to be proven positively.  Instead, every hypothesis must be potentially falsifiable in order to count as science.  That means there has to be a way to identify errors, to find out what’s wrong with it –and fix it.  It’s still possible to falsify evolution too, though it’s now so well-supported it will take more than an unsubstantiated anomoly to do it.  So your inability to distinguish dinosaurs from barnyard animals will be insufficient to disprove evolution.
“It’s a pig.”

“Nyah nyah”

“Evolution has not met the test, and deserves only to be treated as theory.”

“Darwin considered it a theory and it is still a theory; it has
never been proven and never will be.  Thank you.”



As any internet philologist will readily explain, words may have different meanings at different times or contexts.  Creationists exploit the academic meaning of theory as though it were only blind speculation like their own position is.  But a scientific theory isn’t a ‘guess’ or ‘conjecture’.  Look it up.  In most instances, a Theory is a field of academic study.  For instance, the high school I went to taught a class called Music Theory.  Being an insufferable jerk then as now, I remember bursting in one day and yelling at the class;
“You shouldn’t teach music in school. It’s
just a theory; it’s never been proven!”



If music theory is a field of study, and as such can never be proved, then neither can the theories of evolution or even economics, and for the same reason; The notion is silly.  Even if a theory passes every test forever, we still wouldn’t say it was proved, because positive proof exists only in matters of mathematics or law, wherein evolution actually has been proven.  Otherwise, no theory has ever been proved, nor can be.  They can only be dis-proved.  And when that happens, a theory that doesn’t work must be replaced by one that does.  We can’t discard any theory just because we haven’t perfected every part of it yet.  You can’t trade something that works for nothing that doesn’t.  If the original theory works at all, you’ll still have to use it, and perhaps fix it.  But we can’t dismiss it until we can replace it with something better.  And Darwin’s theory is actually better-supported than Newton’s theory of gravity.        

Let’s look at the facts.  Remember that a fact is merely data, a demonstrably accurate observation which is indisputable because it can be objectively verified by either side arguing about it.  So let’s demonstrate the fact of gravity.  We see that things tend to fall down.  What’s that mean?  Well, nothing yet; a fact on its own is meaningless.  We need to understand it more specifically.  When seen on an astronomical scale, we can determine a universal rule; that matter attracts matter.  This is the law of gravity; a law being a general statement of nature which is always true under a specific set of circumstances.  Now why does matter attract matter?  That’s the theory!

Now let’s look at the fact of evolution.  Since the dawn of livestock cultivation and agriculture, we’ve seen that species diverge, with new races branching out of older family trees, each with its own distinct traits and features which are in-turn inherited by new variants diverging thereafter.  This is a readily evident fact in any lineage one cares to examine, and is implied at every level in taxonomy.  Now creationists try to say that this doesn’t count because it’s only “microevolution”.  But that isn’t true because we’ve actually witnessed the emergence of new species too.  But even if that were true, this would still count because it is still evolution according to the laws of population genetics and descent with inherent modification which is all evolution really is.  Opponents say evolution isn’t allelic variance in reproductive populations over successive generations because that doesn’t mean spontaneous generation of something coming from nothing, or dirt coming to life, and fish turning into giraffes, or some other ridiculous thing no scientist could ever endorse.  But none of those things are evolution; They’re all strawmen fallacies created to obfuscate what evolution really is by those who refuse to admit that it really happens.  So they call it something else instead.

"Darwin observed many things in in nature. He was a good naturalist, a good
observer of information. What he saw was various plants and animals altering
somewhat through through adaptation, through variation, he saw them change.  
We never see one basic type of something changing into something else. That
has never been observed in science or in in genetics. It just has never been
observed.  What we see is variety. Variety happens, adaptation happens.  
Evolution doesn't happen."



Evolution DOES happen, and this twit just admitted it.  But he also lied about what it is.  Evolution never permits one thing to turn into another, fundamentally different type of anything; that would violate the laws of evolution.  All of this is vindicated with independent peer-reviewed empirical research.  Everything evolutionary science actually demands are things we actually do see throughout biology.  Consequently, evolution is a unifying theory explaining virtually everything we can prove to be true of biodiversity.    

Such is not the case with gravity.  Because not only has the theory of gravity never been proven, it’s demonstrably wrong!  One reason is that it incorrectly predicts how Mercury orbits the sun.  Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity replaced Newtonian mechanics, and has even been proven to be more accurate.  But it also assumes things about particles that we now know are false, otherwise quantum mechanics wouldn't work.

“Frankly, Darwinism is not an established scientific fact; It is a theory
of evolution, that’s why it’s called the theory of evolution.”



Would you also say that gravity is not an established scientific fact just because it is called “the theory of gravity?”  You see, Huckleberry, that’s why you didn’t get the job!

And frankly, “Darwinism” doesn’t exist.  At best, it was a relic of the 19th century and is limited only to Darwin’s own postulation, natural selection of mutations, which were not yet understood.  Darwin hypothesized that units of information were passed down from both parents, but he couldn’t imagine what those units were.  Gregor Mendel discovered the proof of Darwin’s prediction and tried to alert him to it in a manuscript; But it was written in German.  It was discovered in Darwin’s desk after he died.  With that discovery, Darwinism was replaced by “the modern synthesis” of Darwinian selection with Mendelian genetics and the subsequent discovery of an additional mechanism, genetic drift.  Evolution is not “Darwinism” anymore and never really was.  Some now associate it with cell theory.  Would you also say that cells aren’t an established scientific fact because they’re called “theory” too?

15th Foundational Falsehood of Creationism pt 2


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eGmLDKQp_Qc


The 15th foundational falsehood of creationism:
“Evolution has never been proved.
It’s still just a theory, not a fact.”


“Real men of genius”
“Real men of genius”
“Today we salute YOU . . .”

“So your evolution has got holes all in it; It’s just a theory.
There’s no… you have no way of provin’ evolution ever existed.
And if we came from apes, why are there still apes?”



Why are you still an ape?  We can’t prove a theory only because that’s against the rules imposed by the game of science.  But we can prove that evolution exists, and that it works, just like we can prove that gravity works, even though it too is ‘just’ a theory and has never been proved.

Atomic theory has never been proven either –not even in Hiroshima.  But just as evolution is the foundation of modern biology, modern chemistry is completely dependent on atomic theory.  And there are huge holes in that theory!  Just look at our classic model of atomic structure; it’s wrong, and we know it’s wrong, but we still teach it in school anyway, because despite their virtual invisibility and being understood only in theory, atoms are still a matter of undeniable fact.  So we have to use that in a series of imperfect models because we’re still trying to figure out one that works in all instances.

We’re also trying to devise a single theory to blend quantum theory with the theory of relativity, and act as a unifying theory of everything.  The closest we’ve come is string theory; which really isn’t an actual theory yet; because it hasn’t been vindicated by substantial empirical evidence, and it hasn’t born itself through the battery of critical examinations which every hypothesis must endure before it can graduate to the highest level of confidence science can attain.
“I’ve not come across any book which says ‘fact of evolution’. All the
books say, ‘theory of evolution’.  There’s no book I’ve come across  
saying ‘fact of evolution’.”



A theory is made of facts.  It’s is an analysis of how reality works, but every theory has holes in it and no theory is complete.  That’s why science must remain objective.  For example, expanding planet theory addresses some compelling points which plate tectonics doesn’t adequately account for.  But it also calls for assumptions that can’t be justified, it’s refuted by definite observations that are only supportive of plate tectonics, and it can’t explain everything that tectonics does.  But remember also that the man who first proposed the theory of plate tectonics was ridiculed for it ‘til the day he died, though his theory has since gained universal acceptance.      

Other theories never had any competition at all.  For example, Louis Pasteur, –who disproved the creationist hypothesis of spontaneous generation- also rejected the notion long promoted by religious leaders, that ailments of the body were of supernatural origin.  Science can only examine natural explanations, and Pasteur provided that with his proposition that diseases weren’t caused by demons, but by germs.  Like evolution, germ theory can never be proven, even though we know and can show that it is definitely correct beyond any doubt, and that’s why there’s no competing theory.
”Today the teachers in a rural Pennsylvania town became the
first in the country required to tell students that evolution is
not the only theory.”


“In looking at the biology book the teachers wanted, I noticed that
it was laced with Darwinism. I think I listed somewhere between
twelve and fifteen instances where it talked about Darwin’s theory
of evolution. It wasn’t on every page of the book, but like every
couple chapters, there was Darwin in your face again; and it was
to the exclusion of any other theory.”



There is no other theory.  Creationists only ever had a few hypotheses, and all of them were utterly refuted; although they’ll never accept that.  They’re still trying to revive arguments that have been already proven wrong at least a century ago.  Evolution with natural selection is the only explanation of biodiversity with either evidentiary support or scientific validity.  There has only ever been one alternative theory against it, and it was an earlier version of evolution.

Centuries before much of the Old Testament was even written, the Greek scientist, Anaximander had already proposed that modern forms of life, -including humans- had evolved from simpler forms.  Similar ideas were echoed -and argued- by other figures of the age.  The mutability of breeding populations has long been a well-known fact but not at all understood.  The first attempted explanation was proposed by Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, who suggested that giraffes stretching their necks to reach higher food would somehow bestow longer necks onto their offspring.  His theory of evolution by acquired characteristics proved a failed hypothesis almost immediately, but it offered a sort of personal control over racial advancement which appealed to those ambitious in politics.  Joseph Stalin and Mao Tse Tung, for example both embraced Lamarckism and publicly denounced Darwinism, as Hitler did also; yet creationists label all three of them Darwinists and can’t distinguish Lamarck’s failure from Darwin’s success.
“And when it comes to the subject of origins, there are basically
two views; the evolution theory and the creation theory.”



No branch of creationism has ever met even one of the criteria required of a theory.  They can’t because science demands both accuracy and accountability.  So there has to be a way to detect and correct any errors in a given explanation, and determine for certain whether it’s wrong in whole or in part, or whether any of it is true to any degree at all.
“Ah, so it's a test you're looking for. We don't do tests!”

“Sure you don’t.  They never do tests. Not many real deeds either.
Oh, conversation with your grandmother's shade in a darkened room,
the odd love potion or two, but comes a doubter, why, then it's the
wrong day, the planets are not in line, the entrails are not favorable,
'we don't do tests'!”



A theory has to be tested indefinitely.  It demands understanding instead of belief.  So it must be based on verifiable evidence; It must explain related observations with a measurable degree of accuracy; It must withstand continuous critical analysis in peer review, and it must be falsifiable too.  If it doesn’t fulfill all these conditions at once, then it isn’t science.  If it meets none of them, it may be religion.
“Intelligent Design is a theory that there was some, there is some master
plan, some creator of some type that that put together the world as it is.”



Intelligent Design isn’t a theory at all; it’s a scam, a scheme conceived solely to undermine legitimate science.  It doesn’t even count as an hypothesis, because it isn’t based on evidence, offers no mechanism, and isn’t falsifiable either.  It is backed by nothing and produces nothing because it is nothing but untestable conjecture.  None of it has been shown to be right and lots of it have been proven wrong.  So it’s useless in any field, because only accurate information can have practical application.
“I’ve worked in the private sector.  They expect results!”


That’s why we have billion-dollar industries in medicine, toxicology, agriculture, and biotechnology, where we have Nobel prize-winning research that is all dependent on the functionality of evolution and would only work if evolution were factually correct.
“Doctor Behe, we believe that the purpose of science is to serve mankind. You however
seem to regard science as some kind of dodge or hustle. Your theories are the worst kind
of popular tripe, your methods are sloppy, and your conclusions are highly questionable.  
You are a poor scientist, doctor.”



Just to illustrate how under-handed creationism’s tabloid ‘scientists’ are, let’s look at the BIG picture:
“Up until the 1920s, everyone thought the universe was essentially static and
unchanging in time.  Then we discovered that the universe is expanding. Distant
galaxies were moving away from us.” This meant they must have been closer
together in the past. If we extrapolate back, we find that they must all have
been on top of each other about fifteen billion years ago. This was the big bang,
the beginning of the universe.”



Now very early stages of the universe are as yet unknown because our current theories are insufficient to explain it.  So we can’t yet be certain what “the singularity” is, where or what it came from, or if it was eternal.  How do creationists explain the evident expansion and its reverse implication?  How do they account for the cosmic background radiation we discovered later on?  They don’t.  Creationists delight in saying that scientists have “proven” the universe had a beginning, and they use that argument against the big bang.  But the discovery of the big bang is our proof that the universe had a beginning!  That’s one example of how bewilderingly inane creationism is.
“We must require that evolution agree with all the facts
if it is to be promoted from theory to truth. Evolution as
an explanation of the origin of man cannot pass this test.”



Nothing would ever be promoted to “truth” because truth implies that there’s nothing more to learn.  That’s why science –being objective- demands that everything be considered theory no matter how proven it seems to be.

Evolution has survived every test the greatest minds of the modern age have ever been able to pit against it.  It’s been demonstrated myriad ways with lab and field experiments, and is further enhanced by compounded revelations in paleontology and systematics, as well as developments in embryology and advances in genomic research and bioengineering.  Evolution is now one of the strongest theories in science.  There is no fact it doesn’t agree with, and it’s never failed any test.  But sadly, those controlling education in the Southern United States don’t want students to know that.  So what can you expect?
“I don’t believe personally that the evolution itself is anything more than a theory."

“You keep using that word, I do not think it means what you think it means."

“Well you see, evolution is a theory, not a scientific
fact as it’s generally considered to be.”



It is a fact that evolution happens; that  biodiversity and complexity does increase, that both occur naturally only by evolutionary means.

It is a fact that alleles vary with increasing distinction in reproductive populations and that these are accelerated in genetically isolated groups.

It is a fact that natural selection, sexual selection, and genetic drift have all been proven to have predictable effect in guiding this variance.

It is a fact that significant beneficial mutations do occur and are inherited by descendant groups, and that multiple independent sets of biological markers exist to trace these lineages backwards over many generations.

It is a fact that birds are a subset of dinosaurs the same way humans are a subset of apes, primates, eutherian mammals, and vertebrate deuterostome animals.

It is a fact that the collective genome of all animals has been traced to its most basal form, and that those forms are also indicated by comparative morphology, physiology, and embryological development.

It is a fact that everything on earth has definite relatives either living nearby or evident in the fossil record.

It is a fact that the fossil record holds hundreds of definitely transitional species even according to it’s strictest definition, and that both microevolution and macroevolution have been directly-observed.

Evolution is a fact!
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ THE END ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~


Well . . . . . I certainly hope you all enjoyed watching these fantastic video.

In the meantime, now that I have finished posting this rather long topic, I would welcome any comments.

Ya all come back now! Ya hear?
Big Fat Heretic
Big Fat Heretic
IHateSports Fanatic

Posts : 402
Join date : 2012-12-26
Age : 72
Location : El Paso, Texas

https://www.youtube.com/user/BigFatHeretic

Back to top Go down

February 12,2015 - I celebrated the 206th birthday of Charles Darwin, with these 17 YouTube videos, The Foundational Falsehoods of Creationism! Empty Re: February 12,2015 - I celebrated the 206th birthday of Charles Darwin, with these 17 YouTube videos, The Foundational Falsehoods of Creationism!

Post by Sponsored content


Sponsored content


Back to top Go down

Back to top

- Similar topics

 
Permissions in this forum:
You cannot reply to topics in this forum