Transubvagination

Anyone who's got 2.5 hours to waste can see Bill Nye (the Science Guy) struggle to wade through an avalanche of bullshit from a dickhead Australian Creationist...

The main argument was over the age of the Earth. The chief tactic of the douchebag was to muddy the waters by referring to one supposedly anomalous dating result many years ago and this is supposed to discredit all of science. He claims you can't know anything about things you can't observe i.e. the past. If you freeze frame his Powerpoint slides and actually read them, they're full of lies, but it's all too much for Bill Nye to handle in real-time given the time constraints of a formal debate.
In any case, all these debates are ultimately futile. Those that want to believe in mumbo-jumbo will continue to do so. The internet allows anyone with genuine curiosity and critical self-reflection to already have come to their own conclusions.

Last edited by avatar (2014-02-06 19:22:30)

Buzzfeed asked Creationists to ask non-believers a question. This is my favourite-

Believe in God all you want but.....holy shit! Really?

Here's the article. The stupidity on display is, quite frankly, astounding.

Though I'm pretty confident that last one is a joke.

These knuckleheads don't just have cardboard and bad spelling. They also have a megaphone...

"Because Science is a 'theory' - not testable, observable, nor repeatable."

Ugh. She basically defines the whole god damn point of science, and then says it isn't science. In order for a theory to be accepted, it has to be tested, repeated, and observed to the point of redundancy. And when an observation refutes or challenges a theory, the theory must either be changed or discarded (after ample testing of the observation which challenged the theory in the first place.) I know I'm preaching to the choir here, but fuck. Blind faith (i.e willful ignorance, i.e stupidity) is quite possibly the largest detriment to the human race.

/rant

No, it's a real argument, one made due to the poor way evolution has been described by its opponents. If you say "man is descended from apes", there is the image of all the apes slowly turning into men. If this only happened to some, why? And why aren't the apes still here turning into men?

The answer, obviously, is that we're not descended from apes, but both humans and apes have a common ancestor, but that's not how it has been described to these people.

This is exactly why I wish so many Christians would just shut up.

Don't argue about things that you don't understand. Setting up a straw and then knocking it down is not arguing. (By the way, that goes both ways)

Diderot said (in French) in the 18th century: Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.

Emile Zola later wrote something similar (also in French): Civilization will not attain to its perfection until the last stone from the last church falls on the last priest

Probably slightly over-aggressive for modern tastes and a tad exaggerated, but colourful & quotable nonetheless.

Exactly. And a scientific theory like evolution IS testable, observable, and repeatable. Otherwise it would just be a hypothesis. (This is, to be sure, more a problem of the language of science than anything else. Scientists should agree on a new word, like "principle" or "theorem", that doesn't clash with the common definition.)

Specifically, when you examine fossils, you can directly observe traits that you can describe, categorize, and compare with other examples, both extinct and living. You can then hypothesize the function of those traits and the relationships between the examples. That allows you to predict the discovery of other fossils that reinforce your hypothesis. And you can test that hypothesis by finding other examples to support or falsify it. And, very importantly, others can duplicate your work by finding similar fossils, making the same observations, and doing the same tests.

None of this is possible to do with angels.

Worse, to propose that evolution is false requires that you believe not only that God created animals as they are, but that he obscured all evidence of that creation by laying an incredibly elaborate false trail that makes it look like they evolved.

Not only are there vast arrays of fossils that suggest a transition between land animals and whales, between apes and humans, and between dinosaurs and birds, but, as Nye pointed out, there are no kangaroo fossils between Mt Ararat and Australia.

Simple evidence of breeding demonstrates that animals can change over time. And fitting all the "kinds" of animals into Noah's Ark requires there not be too many, so most creationists admit that the millions of species "bred out of" thousands of "kinds" on the ark. (They talk about this as "micro-evolution" but speciation IS evolution.)

And to explain the distribution of marsupials, you have to admit that North America and Australia were once connected, which means you have to accept continental drift. Pretty soon, you're agreeing to almost all of evolution and almost all of geology and just trying to cram it all into a couple of thousand years after the Great Flood (an event that geology does not support). And for some reason the Babylonians, Chinese, and Egyptians didn't record any of it.

Here is someone doing just that.
http://books.google.com/books?id=vvjcye … mp;f=false

The author is essentially saying that God created a world that looked like Pangaea, populated by proto-animals like primitive marsupials (and also dinosaurs). These dispersed after the Great Flood and evolved into the animals we see today, meaning the proto-animals (including dinosaurs) went extinct because they were less fit. That's so close to admitting to all of evolutionary and geological science that it's baffling.

More important: I WANT THAT TO BE THE NOAH'S ARK MOVIE, RUSSEL CROWE. I want to see Pangaea from space and see the ark fill up with a cave bears, giant sloths, wallaby-roos, toothed platypuses, eohippuses, mammoths, T-rexes, brachiosaurs, archeopteryxes, land whales, and saber-toothed cats. THAT WOULD BE AMAZING.

Last edited by Zarban (2014-02-07 21:00:46)