Re: West Virginia creationism

Burkhard wrote:

Ron Dean wrote:
 

Vincent Haycock wrote:

On Wed, 8 May 2024 15:01:28 -0400, Ron Dean
<rondean-noreply@gmail.com> wrote:
>

Vincent Maycock wrote:

On Tue, 7 May 2024 22:47:15 -0400, Ron Dean
<rondean-noreply@gmail.com> wrote:
>

Vincent Maycock wrote:

On Mon, 6 May 2024 23:53:05 -0400, Ron Dean
<rondean-noreply@gmail.com> wrote:
>

Vincent Maycock wrote:

On Mon, 6 May 2024 15:29:30 -0400, Ron Dean

<snip>

I understand the obsession to "explain away" these deserters, but
honesty over bias needs to be the ruling objective not excuses.

>
No, there's nothing to explain away.  There will always be crackpots
amidst the more reasonable background of mainstream science.
>

You call them crackpots, but as I pointed out they are just as educated
with the same credentials as mainstream scientist. The question is what
are your credentials to pass judgement on these intellectuals including
scientist holding PhDs. Probably nothing more than extreme bias.

>
No, a PhD is not a license to believe in nonsense, although some
people act like it is.  You've made the error of argument from
authority here, since even PhDs can easily get things wrong.
>

You called them crackpots.

>
So do you believe that crackpots exist, or are all claims to
scientific validity  equally worthwhile, in your view??
>

Of course crackpots exist. However, calling them crackpots because they
offer a different point-of-view from one's own view is protective and
self-serving.

>
I call them crackpots because they're out of step with mainstream
science without adequate grounds to be that way -- not because they
offer a different point of view from my own.
>

This is they way any contrary evidence to
scientific theories IE evolution or abiogenesis is dismissed without
knowing or understanding anything about the case they bring against
evolution. When one relies strictly on on sided information and based on
this, they are in no position to pass judgement. It's exactly parallel
to a case where the Judge hears the prosecution, then pronounces I've
heard enough - _guilty_! I strongly suspect this describes you knowing
nothing about actual ID or the information

>
Okay, why don't you fill me in about what I'm "missing" in the field
of information science as it relates to Intelligent Design?
>

I don't know that you are familiar with anything ID proposes, or the
case against evolution and especially the impossibility

>
You don't know that.
>

of life from inorganic, dead chemistry. There are over 500 known amino acids
know in nature, but all living organisms are made up of only 20 different amino acids.
What what was the odds of this happening without deliberate choice?

>
It's just the number of amino acids that happened to be in the
earliest genetic code, obviously.  If there were 25 amino acids in
living things, you'd ask the same question.
>

And all are
left-handed, but if they were the result of blind chance, purposeless
and aimless natural processes about half of the amino acids should have
been right-hand.

>
This was probably the result of a "frozen accident," where the
earliest life forms were left-handed by chance, and all their
descendants were also as a result of that.
>

This is not the case. Exactly what was the selection
process that selected this particular set of 20 out of 500 known amino
acids? Of course there are educated guesses, hypothesis and theories,
but no 0ne knows.

>
So you agree that Intelligent Design is not known to be the answer to
these kind of questions?
>

Each protein is expressed by a particular order or
arrangement of amino acids. The smallest protein known, the saliva of a
Gila minster is 20 amino acids. What are the odds of these 20 amino
acids having the correct sequence on just one protein by chance?
The number would be greater than the number of atoms (10^80) in the
known universe. What is so incredible is that there is about 1 million
proteins in the human body each made up of a specific order of amino acids.

>
Obviously, the proteins didn't poof into existence all at once. You
would start out with something that only vaguely resembles the protein
you're concerned with, and then natural selection will turn it into
that protein over time by removing what doesn't resemble the target
protein and retaining what does.
>

What do you  offered by IDest pointing put
the fallacies in abiogenesis or evolution. If you think you know
anything regarding this, it's no doubt from proponent of evolution.

>
No,  I used to be a creationist and I'm quite familiar with their
arguments.
>

Really? What turned you against both creationism or intelligent design?

>
I was a young-earth creationist, so my reading of geology and
paleontology led me to the conclusion that flood geology is a cartoon
version of science with nothing to support it.

Around the same time,

I became an atheist since Christianity didn't seem to make any sense.>

>

So, you turned to atheism and evolution, not because you first found positive evidence for evolution and atheism, but rather because of negative mind-set concerning the flood and Christianity.
 >The fact of the matter is, intelligent design says nothing about either the flood story nor Christianity or any religion or God for that matter. ID observe essentially the same empirical evidence as evolutionist do, but they attribute what they see to intelligent design
rather than to evolution. Both the evolutionist and the ID est interprets the same evidence to _fit_ into his own paradigm. IOW the paradigm rules. Now to clear up another situation. While IDest see evidence which supports design, there is no known evidence which points to the identity of the designer. One may believe based upon faith the the designer is Jehovah, Allah or Buddha  or some other Deity but this is belief

>

At one time I was also an evolutionist. In addition to a book I was
challenged to read, and to some extinct, what I discussed above I also
thought that after reading Paley, Darwin dedicated his effort to
discounting or disproving Paley's God. This seemed to be more than a
coincidence.

>
How do you square that with the enormous amount of research he did
into the subject?  If he was just "mad at God" you would think he
would have published immediately with only a scant amount of
supporting evidence to support his ideas.
>

There is something, rarely mentioned in the literature.  Darwin was a
Christian until a great tragedy befell him and his family. That's the
death of his daughter, Annie in 1851 at the age of 10.  This naturally
caused great pain to Darwin and this terrible tragedy turned him against
religion and God whom he blamed. One could certainly sympathize with him
on the loss of his daughter.

>
What's your explanation for why Annie had to die?  Is it better than
my explanation? (which is that there is no reason she died -- nothing
in the universe is out there to care whether she lived, suffered, or
died)
>

Everyone dies, including you and me. Some much older and others  much younger. Annie didn't have to die, but she was exposed the the weather or a disease which caused her death.
I personally think there is something terribly wrong with the devaluation of human life caused by accepting evolution. We descended from common ancestors along with chimps, gorillas, monkeys horses, swine and dogs. Consequently, we are just animals same as other animals. So, as animals in every respect we are of no more worth or value than any other animal. So, we kill and eat other animals so, from a moral standpoint, why is this more acceptable? The question was asked in a YouTube site of young college people, "If you saw a man and your dog, that you loved, drowning you could only save one which would you save"? As I recall the everyone except a professor said they would save their dog. This means they would let the man die, his life is of no more value than a dog's life. This I'm afraid is where evolution is leading the human race.

 That is utter garbage on so many levels it's difficult to know where to start.
First, the argument works just as much for creationism. After
all, in most creationist accounts, the God(s) design all animals
including humans. So you could just as well say "we were designed by a common designer along with chimps, gorillas, monkeys horses, swine and dogs. Consequently, we are just designed things the same as other animals. So, as designed things in every respect we are of no more worth or value than any other stuff the designer designed".

 >
OF course theist place a much greater value on human life. "Image of God, with the ability to know right from wrong". Animals have no moral value that eat other animals while their victim is still alive, what animal knows right from wrong? In Richard Dawkins universe, says at the end of chapter 4 of his book River Out of Eden, “The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.” So, as  an atheist how does one determine morally what is right from wrong?
Another problem with evolution, in this world survival and reproduction is paramount. When one
person sacrifices or gives up something personal for another person, it's because this person is kin or shares the same genes: evolution justifies even advocated selfishness. I recently saw where a man
risked his own life to save the life of a complete stranger who fell in in front of an oncoming train:
both barely escaped being killed. This was not a kinsman, but a person of a different race.  It did nothing to improve his reproductive success, quite the contrary he risk his chances for reproduction. From the standpoint of evolution this was an insane thing to do.

 In fact, your opening gambit is directly expressed in the Bible: Judges 10:16 or Ecclesiastes 3:19: "For what happens to the children of man and
what happens to the beasts is the same; as one dies, so dies the other.
They all have the same breath"

 >
I question that. But this is Old Testament which Christians turn to for back ground,  but the Old Covenant contained in the Old Testament was like a contract which was fulfilled by Jesus Christ and set aside. The new Convent contained in the New Testament is the one Christians are under.

 so a much stronger commitment to "identity" than you find in
evolution.
That whether one accepts evolution or believes in a designer makes
no difference especially for YOUR designer.

 >
after all you claim (not

that anybody  believes you at this point) that the only thing the designer did was to meddle a bit with DNA and organic chemistry a few  billion years ago and gave all living things the same code, and things like flagella to us and bacteria alike - and then disappeared. In fact, you made the  ubiquity and early appearanceof body plans in the
Cambrian your main evidence. So from this it would follow that as far as the designer is concerned,  we are indeed the same as, and not more valuable than,  bacteria,
or maybe Brachiopods such as craniidas today.
 Your nonsense also contradicts the historical record. Ideas
such as the University Declaration of human rights, the equality
and dignity of all humans etc are decidedly ideas of modernity, when creationist thoughts were in decline.  Go back just
a few decades before Darwin and look eg at the legal process, the still frequent use of torture, the death
penalty for minor thefts etc etc, Or the atrocities committed as a matter of course during wars- the international rules of armed conflict again coming on the scene only after creationist ideas were in decline.

 >
This is mans inhumanity to man. We have our free agency and this is how we too often use it.
This is still alive today. Russia's war against the Ukraine is just one example where civilians are just
murdered.
 >

Oh, and of course the slave-holding South, creationism
central even then, trained dogs to hunt and kill
humans (well, their human property) which gives you
a clear idea of what life they valued more.

 >
The Slave-holding South. Southerners bought slaves from the North. What about the Northern Slave Merchants and Manufacturers who built ships for the cargo for the slave trading North. This is rarely mentioned in history. And of course, history is written by the victors.
Not to mention the real cause of the US Civil War was tariffs imposed on the South. Lincoln had no objection to slavery. In fact slavery as a issue did not exist until 2 years after the start of the war. It was raised by Lincoln only after Great Brittan showed an interested in entering into the war on the side of the South. Slavery was then made a moral issue, which deterred Britten, which earlier had outlawed slave trading.
 >
Darwin stated, "The civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage races. At the same time the anthropomorphous apes . . . will no doubt be exterminated. The break will then be rendered wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilized state, as we may hope . . . the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as at present between the Negro or Australian and the gorilla."
https://www.firstthings.com/article/2001/11/darwin-and-the-descent-of-morality

Conversely, people having strong emotional attachments
to their pets is documented long before modernity. A
Roman emperor had a servant who injured his dog brutally
killed, and in the early 17th century, we read e.g. that
Sir Roger de Coverley, was praised for his loyalty to
his servants like this:  "They had all grown old with him, from
his grey-headed butler to ‘the old House-dog, and . . . a grey Pad
that is kept in the Stable with great Care and Tenderness out of regard to his past Services, tho’ he has been useless for several Years’"
 So for the writer, a human servant and a service dog and
horse are pretty much treated in the same breath, their status was due to the servant role that they shared.
 The watershed moment, if there was any, was the ate 17th, and
18th century in Europe, when "social pets" became more common,
animals valued for their social bonds rather tha n their usefulness, and that again is centuries before Darwin. (cf.eg.
The history of emotional attachment to animals by Ingrid Traut,
The Routledge Companion to Animal-Human History, 2018)
  Are there any ethical implications of common descent?
I doubt it, though maybe in the margins, a slightly more pronounced tendency to be in favour of animal rights and
against vivisection, But even this is ambivalent,
There was a really interesting historical dialectic between Darwin,
and Christian conceptions of animal souls, played out in the vivisection
debate in Victoria Britain. The Darwinian notion of the relatedness of
all life had given a  boost to the anti-vivisectionists, and
observing that Darwinian arguments had success where religious ones had
had less let religion based anti-vivisectionists like Hull revive
theological arguments about animal souls.
 

Who do you think anyone approves of such as this today. Do you think is was ever justified by the general population. But it's the result of power. Lord Acton once remarked "that power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely." This I think probably explains much of man's inhumanity to man both in the past and today. Unfortunately, we see this in our world today and in recent history.