Ken Ham vs Bill Nye (Is creation a viable model of origins?)

[DrCosmic]

To offer an alternate point of view, I find there being nothing after this life to make it all the more special.

This baffles me. Help me out here, what makes life special? What makes a life with no eternal ramifications more special?

 

[random_havoc]

A century after Jesus died.



Over 100 years after Jesus died.



Over 100 years after Jesus died.

Seriously. Look it up.




If you have to shift your claim until it can't be falsified then why should anyone take it seriously?

Again you're provably wrong. Watch the video I posted. The oldest biblical manuscripts that we have are dated at between 90-100ad and Jesus died at approximated 35ad. That means that just the oldest COPIES we have are from 55-65 years of his death. Obviously the originals are from earlier than that.
Again, if we deny the historical evidence of Jesus than it would be ludicrous to think we can believe an emperor caesar existed for example.

 

[The End]

Here's where it's important exactly how you're going to define evolution. By definition, to get from microbes to man requires genetic mutations that over time would have ADDED an incredible amount of genetic mutation over time. In the studies you're referring to there have been mutations that lost genetic information (which can still overall benefit the organism but by definition cannot equal evolution like we're talking about) or already exising information has been duplicated (same problem).
No mutation has ever been recorded that added brand new genetic information in any scientific study (which would have had to have happened consistently for millions of years).

So, no, evolution has not been tested, observed or recorded

This is simply untrue.

As one example, E-Coli were able to process lactose via adaptive mutation when they weren't able to before.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2929355/

There are other examples of mutation adding information.

I appeal to people here not to post willy nilly creation myths, these are easily refuted and debunked. "Mutations do not add information" is a creationist myth.

http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CB/CB102.html

Source:

AIG, n.d. Creation Education Center. http://www.answersingenesis.org/cec/docs/CvE_report.asp
Response:

It is hard to understand how anyone could make this claim, since anything mutations can do, mutations can undo. Some mutations add information to a genome; some subtract it. Creationists get by with this claim only by leaving the term "information" undefined, impossibly vague, or constantly shifting. By any reasonable definition, increases in information have been observed to evolve. We have observed the evolution of

increased genetic variety in a population (Lenski 1995; Lenski et al. 1991)
increased genetic material (Alves et al. 2001; Brown et al. 1998; Hughes and Friedman 2003; Lynch and Conery 2000; Ohta 2003)
novel genetic material (Knox et al. 1996; Park et al. 1996)
novel genetically-regulated abilities (Prijambada et al. 1995)

If these do not qualify as information, then nothing about information is relevant to evolution in the first place.

A mechanism that is likely to be particularly common for adding information is gene duplication, in which a long stretch of DNA is copied, followed by point mutations that change one or both of the copies. Genetic sequencing has revealed several instances in which this is likely the origin of some proteins. For example:
Two enzymes in the histidine biosynthesis pathway that are barrel-shaped, structural and sequence evidence suggests, were formed via gene duplication and fusion of two half-barrel ancestors (Lang et al. 2000).
RNASE1, a gene for a pancreatic enzyme, was duplicated, and in langur monkeys one of the copies mutated into RNASE1B, which works better in the more acidic small intestine of the langur. (Zhang et al. 2002)
Yeast was put in a medium with very little sugar. After 450 generations, hexose transport genes had duplicated several times, and some of the duplicated versions had mutated further. (Brown et al. 1998)
The biological literature is full of additional examples. A PubMed search (at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi) on "gene duplication" gives more than 3000 references.

According to Shannon-Weaver information theory, random noise maximizes information. This is not just playing word games. The random variation that mutations add to populations is the variation on which selection acts. Mutation alone will not cause adaptive evolution, but by eliminating nonadaptive variation, natural selection communicates information about the environment to the organism so that the organism becomes better adapted to it. Natural selection is the process by which information about the environment is transferred to an organism's genome and thus to the organism (Adami et al. 2000).

The process of mutation and selection is observed to increase information and complexity in simulations (Adami et al. 2000; Schneider 2000).

There's a whole list of common creationist claims and responses to those claims here.

http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/list.html

even on the micro scale.

Diversity of life is such as it is that even most young earth creationists do not deny evolution on a micro scale. You're going even further than many young earthers go.

 

[random_havoc]

This baffles me. Help me out here, what makes life special? What makes a life with no eternal ramifications more special?

agreed

 

[JewishHobbit]

IE: I stated my case. Everyone found seriously flawed holes in my logic, Im out!

If that's what you want to believe, go for it. My annoyance actually has nothing to do with anything I've said or any replies to what I said. I don't really care if anyone agrees with my mentality regarding a Godless world. It's not like I was pushing it on any of you. I actually stated it for the simple reason of confirming a previous post.

As for my (soon to be) exit from the thread, I just don't like reading religious debates. People are cocky and seem to think they know better than everyone else; thus, it's irritating to read.

 

[KevanG]

Ah, I see. I've never been near an active volcano. Be that as it may, if the other members of the species don't have curiosity as well, then that trait dies out, never becomes dominant. The local cluster learns one fact for every curious individual... they do not become a curious species.



Curiosity is what people do when they leave what works to try new things, correct? For an ignorant individual in competition, that means that they will likely find some new surprising way to die, and even if they don't, they won't be optimizing their resources and thus will be at a disadvantage. Is that stupid? I dunno... is it productive and evolutionarily advantageous? Absolutely not.

But hey, if you guys are convinced that these curious individuals never got themselves killed and consistently found advantages that allowed them to become dominant, good on ya. That's too much coincidence for me. I don't believe individuals can go through life taking ignorant risks and dominate their species. If you do, then you have much more faith in humanity than I do.

You don't learn without risk. It's flat out impossible. Otherwise you just stay put and stagnate. Some beings can and will die, that's life no matter how you see it. Not everyone dies when they get curious, some learn from afar, telescopes, various cameras and sensors, robots, ect. and some send others to learn for them.

The entire species doesn't stop learning things just because one person gets hurt. They learn they did something wrong and take steps to avoid the same mistakes, that is intelligence in action. If they had the entire species make the same mistakes repeatedly and kill themselves off then yes, that is a species that will not survive for very long. Like I was saying before we get curious, yes sometimes we get burned, but we learn, we adapt and we try again even if it hurts.

Life is learning and adaptation to new experiences. You can and will get hurt no matter how much you try not to. If you stay put you don't grow, you don't grow you stagnate, you stagnate you get left behind in life.

 

[Hal_Jordan]

That's unneeded and quite rude a statement to assume about anyone.

It's kind of how creationism still functions.

Present ideas, be shown how those ideas don't really work in reality.

Disappear. Start over and hope the new crowd is less critical.

 

[Superwoman Prime]

DrCosmic is a lethal theist. Maybe a modern day Thomas Aquinas, why not.

But we're dealing in abstract concepts. And that's all. DrCosmic's god is still a god of the gaps.

We have yet to decypher the mysteries of the universe's beginnings, so. . . "a wizard did it".

 

[random_havoc]

Diversity of life is such as it is that even most young earth creationists do not deny evolution on a micro scale. You're going even further than many young earthers go.

Again, it's definition I'm talking about. I don't deny mutation and speciation. I deny that mutations have provably added genetic information. As to the rest of what you posted it'll take some time to look into the links you shared before I can respond.

 

[Hal_Jordan]

Again you're provably wrong. Watch the video I posted. The oldest biblical manuscripts that we have are dated at between 90-100ad and Jesus died at approximated 35ad. That means that just the oldest COPIES we have are from 55-65 years of his death. Obviously the originals are from earlier than that.
Again, if we deny the historical evidence of Jesus than it would be ludicrous to think we can believe an emperor caesar existed for example.

The bible was written by man. Men are flawed according to the bible...the end.

 

[webhead9707]

If that's what you want to believe, go for it. My annoyance actually has nothing to do with anything I've said or any replies to what I said. I don't really care if anyone agrees with my mentality regarding a Godless world. It's not like I was pushing it on any of you. I actually stated it for the simple reason of confirming a previous post.

As for my (soon to be) exit from the thread, I just don't like reading religious debates. People are cocky and seem to think they know better than everyone else; thus, it's irritating to read.

I'm leaving with this guy!t:

 

[Hal_Jordan]

If that's what you want to believe, go for it. My annoyance actually has nothing to do with anything I've said or any replies to what I said. I don't really care if anyone agrees with my mentality regarding a Godless world. It's not like I was pushing it on any of you. I actually stated it for the simple reason of confirming a previous post.

As for my (soon to be) exit from the thread, I just don't like reading religious debates. People are cocky and seem to think they know better than everyone else; thus, it's irritating to read.

Right, someone who dares to think they know better than you, while you tell everyone how it is. Ok.

 

[Hal_Jordan]

I'm leaving with this guy!t:

Careful...Leviticus...

 

[random_havoc]

It's kind of how creationism still functions.

Present ideas, be shown how those ideas don't really work in reality.

Disappear. Start over and hope the new crowd is less critical.

Wow, do you enjoy being rude for no good reason? Must be nice to make wide sweeping negative judgements about vast amounts of people. There's a whole lot of comparisons that come to mind.

 

[The End]

Again you're provably wrong. Watch the video I posted. The oldest biblical manuscripts that we have are dated at between 90-100ad and Jesus died at approximated 35ad. That means that just the oldest COPIES we have are from 55-65 years of his death. Obviously the originals are from earlier than that.
Again, if we deny the historical evidence of Jesus than it would be ludicrous to think we can believe an emperor caesar existed for example.

We don't have originals, and this is still many decades after his death even-if what you say is true which, I'm sorry, its far from convincing to me, the fact that people can't even show anything dated to within the lifetime of Jesus, only long after his death.

Also, the authors of the gospels are disputed, with anonymous authors, and contain internal inconsistencies. You can't take the gospels alone as evidence particularly without any originals.

Consider then, the leaps in reasoning it takes to believe he not only existed, but that he performed miracles

To compare this with the historicity of Caeser is beyond dishonest.

Portraits, coins, dated to the time of Caeser bear his image. Documents written by Caeser within his lifetime. If only the evidence for Jesus were that good.

 

[JewishHobbit]

To offer an alternate point of view, I find there being nothing after this life to make it all the more special.

I'll hit this one too before I go.

I understand the mentality, but I know I wouldn't look at it that way. After embracing the idea of eternity, 80 years is nothing. It wouldn't be special to me, it'd be a quick race to obscurity. Everyone I look at will die, and everything I see or create will wither away to nothing and be forgotten. We'll all be those old graves that you can't even read any more, so how special could a measly 80 years really be?

Sorry to bring it down, but that's just how my mind works. It's why I refuse to completely let go of God even when my faith wans and dangles by a thread. There are other reasons, like I said, but this is one of the bigger ones.

But hey, if you can find life special without God, I'm happy for you

 

[webhead9707]

Careful...Leviticus...

MY NAME ISN'T LEVITICUS IT'S WEBHEAD.

Seriously though I gotta go do some stuff, I'm out. You guys have fun.

 

[KevanG]

This baffles me. Help me out here, what makes life special? What makes a life with no eternal ramifications more special?

I wouldn't say it makes it more special but it makes it far different. If you know that there's nothing afterwards then it makes you think more about what matters now. If nothing happens to you when you die then why be good? Why not be a bastard and just kill rape and loot everything because there's no consequences? It's all about the legacy you leave behind. All power dies and memory fades.In the end it's not how you are now that you'll be remembered for, it's how you were to the people that mattered to you.

There's people out there that don't believe in any afterlife and they aren't murderous lunatics and there's heavily religious people who are serial killers and on both sides of the scale there's everyone else on the planet in between. History couldn't care less what you thought would happen when you die. If you leave a legacy worth reading about how would you want it to read?

 

[random_havoc]

The bible was written by man. Men are flawed according to the bible...the end.

Does this actually sound convincing to you? I have a bachelors and masters degrees both revolving around philosophical and religious studies. You sound like a freshmen.

 

[JewishHobbit]

Right, someone who dares to think they know better than you, while you tell everyone how it is. Ok.

You must be thinking of someone else or just like to argue. I didn't tell anyone anything. I just stated how I would view the world if I lost my faith. If you took it any other way then that's on you. Now stop replying. I have to get to bed

 

[random_havoc]

You can't take the gospels alone as evidence particularly without any originals.

I don't think you understand how ancient documents work. We don't have the originals of any. I'm not talking the Bible, I'm talking all ancient documents.

Check out this chart, it will give you an idea of how ridiculous it is to be skeptical of the Bible's manuscripts when compared other historical documents that we have no skepticism of.
http://lynnmaynard.files.wordpress.com/2013/03/manuscript-comparison-short-list1.jpg

 

[The End]

Wow, do you enjoy being rude for no good reason? Must be nice to make wide sweeping negative judgements about vast amounts of people. There's a whole lot of comparisons that come to mind.

I'm afraid that its warranted.


This is considered a settled issue in science. There are stacks and stacks and stacks of peer review science journals across multiple fields of science that back up evolution.

There is a religious and politically motivated denial against all of that - exactly how much patience can this movement be afforded, especially considering the damage they do to education?

 

[random_havoc]

I'm afraid that its warranted.


This is considered a settled issue in science. There are stacks and stacks and stacks of peer review science journals across multiple fields of science that back up evolution.

There is a religious and politically motivated denial against all of that - exactly how much patience can this movement be afforded, especially considering the damage they do to education?

What he posted had nothing to do with the evolution issue. I was responding to what he posted.

 

[Hal_Jordan]

Does this actually sound convincing to you? I have a bachelors and masters degrees both revolving around philosophical and religious studies. You sound like a freshmen.

*Freshman, "Master."

 

[random_havoc]

Alright, I've spent an hour or so here so I'm out. Again, some of you guys really need to look up how historical studies of ancient documents work. That video I shared is a start. And at least one of you really needs to take some philosophy classes.