wrhn

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Comment · 9 years ago
First your right about the 10k years thing. I misspoke, estimates are on the order of millions of years. But my point still stands at 10 million vs 1 billion. Anyways, all these dates are complete conjecture. Nobody really knows how old anything is, or what the effect of ice ages, meteors, etc. would be.

As for the rest of the interview, this guy is lying through his teeth when he says "Lucy had a brain just a bit larger than a chimp's" There is no possible way to get this from the bones. Here is a picture of what they found of "Lucy":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Reconstruction_of_the_fos...

These guys just make stuff up, probably to get more fame and funding. I just found another link, turns out they found a baboon bone in the skeleton! The reason that the hip is so important is because it's the only thing that's really fully formed enough to say it looks human (note that lucy is about 3.5 feet tall, the size of a chimp).

https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn27325-baboon-bone-fou...

As for Epidexipteryx, first, sure I will grant that it has something close to feathers, but it's still a weak argument, because they are in the wrong place! There must be a birdlike animal that has partially formed feathers on it's wings. Unfortunately, fossils are rarely preserved well, and it is difficult to tell what is actually happening. Combine that with scientists' desire for fame, and you get sketchy results like lucy

Comment · 9 years ago
Great question about translation. I read "Youngs literal translation" which is much more accurate. And I frequently use the Blue Letter Bible website which has an amazing resource to help you understand the Greek/Hebrew meaning of any word!

Science doesn't "chip away at the Bible". Bad science does though. Anecdotally I think what happens is that people want to have sex outside of marriage so they accept bad science to validate their choices. Sex hormones make people do really irrational things.

Comment · 9 years ago
1. As for facts, I am referring to things like the Cambrian explosiom, and the lack of transitional fossils. For example how about Lucy? Lucy was clearly a chimp. You can go read the actual PBS interview with the guys who reconstructed it. They said when they reconstructed it at first, the hip looked just like a chimpanzee hip. Since there wasn't much anything else to make it transitional, they decided there must be something wrong. So they broke the hip up and put in together again in the "right way". This is another fact that people just ignore. I think actually Google had a "Lucy day" when Lucy is clearly a hoax.

>The perfect fit was an allusion that made Lucy's hip bones seems to flair out like a chimps. But all was not lost. Lovejoy decided he could restore the pelvis to its natural shape. He didn't want to tamper with the original, so he made a copy in plaster. He cut the damaged pieces out and put them back together the way they were before Lucy died. It was a tricky job, but after taking the kink out of the pelvis, it all fit together perfectly, like a three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle. As a result, the angle of the hip looks nothing like a chimps, but a lot like ours.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/transcripts/2106hum1.html

2. This has not been thoroughly debunked at all. In fact over and over again the "missing link" turns out to be a fake. Or how about archaeopteryx? It has fully formed wings and feathers. Where is the creature with half wings and partial feathers? Surely feathers couldn't have developed overnight! Yet it simply doesn't exist.

3. It's convincing for "most people". Well it's not convincing for a lot of others. So should the opposing position be censored? I don't think so.

4. Speed of evolution. Observing the mutation rate of Malaria is instructive. It is a eukaryotes, not a prokaryote, so is much more similar to our cell structure. Up to 1 trillion malaria organisms can infect the host. 250 million get malaria per year. That's up to 250 million trillion organisms per year. Which is millions of times the number of generations between monkeys and people. Yet it takes years for malaria to develop a resistance to a single anti malarial drug. There is no way the far more complex transition from monkeys to humans occurred in 1/1millionth of the number of generations. The rate of evolution is simply too slow.

To your edit: the Bible is meant to be allegorical in some parts. But as for creation, trying to somehow rectify the Bible + evolution is no good. The Bible says God created them so they would reproduce according to their "kind" https://www.blueletterbible.org/lang/lexicon/lexicon.cfm?t=e...

This is exactly what we see in the fossils. When something shows up in the record, it stays the same.

Thanks for engaging, not downvoting! Your a cool guy (or girl)

Comment · 9 years ago
This isn't about grown ups, it's about children in school.
Comment · 9 years ago
No I read somewhere reputable, I think in his biography that he though this.
Comment · 9 years ago
This is not historically accurate. For example, Newton was both an insanely awesome scientist and devoted theologian. Similarly Galileo said "God is known by nature in his works, and by doctrine in his revealed word". There is a large movement called "apologetics" in the Christian world which sees faith and reason and science as mutually compatible. Ravi Zacharias is one of the great Christian thinkers of today who explains this well.

I think the real thing is that most people just don't really care about science, Christian or no. Many atheists take the word of scientists with as much blind faith as christians take the word of their pastor.

Comment · 9 years ago
Your comment is so ironic. You complain about conservatives wanting to "shut up" the media. And yet here you are advocating shutting up conservative ideas about creation in school. How hypocritical.

As for science, macro evolutionary theory isn't even science. The scientific method requires testing and 200 years isn't long enough to verify something that takes tens of thousands of years to occur.

Secondly, the fossil record shows all kinds of stuff that just doesn't jive with evolution. Darwin said if he was right the ground would be full of innumerable transitional fossils. But what we find is that as soon as something appears in the fossil record, it stays very similar. The Cambrian explosion is another thing that just doesn't make sense evolutionary speaking.

And all this is made worse by the fact that somehow evolution spent billions of years unable to move past unicellular organisms, and yet was able to jump from a monkey to a human in 10k years? Monkeys have the intelligence according to tests of a 2 and 1/2 years old. The difference is astonishing and yet supposedly happened in an exceedingly short period of time, when life couldn't get out of the bacteria stage for a billion years?

There are a lot of holes in evolutionary theory. What is unscientific, and all to common among liberals is ignoring those who point out inconvenient facts

Comment · 9 years ago
I agree. There are a lot of very smart people on both sides of the issue. It is better to be exposed to both sides.

Also, I think it is good that they are trying to limit nudity in textbooks. Even Steve jobs, who was by no means traditional, prohibited nudity from the App Store because he thought it was bad for young people.

Comment · 9 years ago
Netflix shows all kinds of stuff about how food and big business can be bad. Since they subsist on fees alone, and not on advertising, I guess they can be more free to show what people want. The good news is that with the internet, you are free to access whatever news source you want. I personally don't even have a TV subscription, because I can find what I want without annoying ads online anyways.
Comment · 9 years ago
Interestingly a private company is tying to build a high speed train from Dallas to Houston tx. The great thing is that it would be privately owned so if it's a flop taxpayers arent on the hook.
Comment · 9 years ago
If a gang member tells you he will severely hurt you unless you give him your money, and you give it to him without any fight, did he take it forcefully?

If the government tells you "give me your money or we will lock you up in a cage for years with people who will likely rape you", and you give it without any fight, did the government take it forcefully?

I would argue that even though force was not used, the threat of force is enough to say it was taken forcefully.

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