Dawkins Series on Darwinism

Well, it's all here, all laid out to be taken apart:



Darwin observes the variations between isolated populations of various species and sees no reason why a Creator would need to make versions of each Kind with small variations. This was within the cultural context of the day that considered each variation to be a separate creation by God. AAs I recall, there was also the idea that not only were they separate creations but some of them were created long after the Creation Week of Genesis. Im'm not enitrely sure about that, but at least they were considered to be separate creations.

Then he went on to ponder the structural similarities of various creatures, the fact that limbs, whether arms or wings or flippers or whatnot, are constructured with the same parts and funcdtions although in different proportions according to their different uses. This suggests to him that they are all related to each other.

It is Nature Red in Tooth and Claw, according to Dawkins, that persuaded DCarwin to the theory of Natural Sepection as the mechanism fore ecvolution from species to species. Those that succeeded best eitherat catching prey or escapting being caught would pass on their characteristics to their offspring in greatter numbers.Mbr> Mbr> According to Darwin it is modern genetics that clinches darwin's theory absolutiely , so that he can call it a Fact.

More Evolutionist Witlessness -- Imaginative Guesses Ordained As Science

Dawkins, like other evolutoinist thinkers, seems quite content to explain whatever he wants to explain in evolutionitic terms by whatever he able to dream up off the top of his head. So believe in God or gods becomes people's need to explain scary nature and somehow gods does the trick for them. That is enough to make Dawkins satisfied that he's arrived at something scientific it seems. No need to inquire whether that is in fact how the human mind works at all, which I strongly doubt. All he knows is that people believed in gods and it doesn't bother him to impos3e his own wild imaginings on them and call it science. That's all evolution is anyway, wild daydreams callsed fact. So whatever they want to explain they just imagine themselves into the situation and don't seem to think twoice about the inadeuqacy of their own modern minds to imagine themselves into another completely different cultural situationb or even into an animal's situation. Since there is no way to test their imaginary scenarios they get treated as scientific fact.

Even in Ebven in imagining our own time we get it wrong all the time, but imagining themselves into wholly different contexts is all it takes to make a fact out of a mental exercise? I think of something Jordan Peterson has talked about, how we would naturally expect that in the more liberal cultural and governmental systems where women's equality is strongly supported, that women would become more like men in their job preferences, but when this has been studied it turns out that no, women oddly enough don't fit the expectations, tin fact they grravitate MORE to traditional female roles even in jobpreferences, such as nursing over engineering and that sort of thing. Liberal expectations turn out to be wrong. So how is it imagining situations in the ancient past is just about ordained as Fact when there is no way to study it as this current situation is studied? Modern man's arrogance toward the peoples of ancient times.

Ande it most certainly is not Science. But then Evolution istself is not science, being founded on exactly the same sort of mental operations. Dream it up, call it fact. That's all there is to it.

Dawkins ignorantly attributes the ending of slavery in the west and the improvement of women's rights, to rationalistic thinking, though in fact both were brought aboutg my Christians. Certainly slavery was as the abolitionists in America and Wilberforce in particular in England were acting from their Christian principles. Dawkins thinks it's a matter of finding a verse here and there that can be used against slavery while there are others that suppo0rt slavery in the Bible, but the Christians who ended it rad the Bible as tending against slavery in its e3ntirety. As for women's rights, Jesus is known for his acceptance of women in a way none of th4e Jews of His day were, and that is the basis for mmost of the western equality movovements. The Bible accommodated the universal practice of slavery while ven in ancient Israel liberalizing laws for dealing with slaves and setting dates for them to be freed. You don't just forbid a universal practice that is a major part of the economy, that is a modern impositionj on the text. God is much wiser than that, He deals with people according to our weaknesses, and even in the New Testament Paul has to approach a slaveowner with careful appeals to his Christian belief to request theat he consider rfreeding a slave of his who is also a Christian. As for women's rights, it should be remembered that in the biblical context we learn that women were subjugated to men because of Eve's disobedience of God in e3atin gof the tree of the knowledge of Good and Evil. Ever since the Fall women have been subje8ugated to men and you can see that in every culture up until very recently and certainly see it in Muslim countries still. It was the influence of Christ that brought women into the modern world with rights, Christ who pay id penalty for original sin and began the process of freeing us from the effects of the Fall.

More Atheist Evolutionist Witlessness

How do these guys get away with it, KI mean the atheists, Dawkins and the rest of them. Mostly they are misrepresenting the opposition but the opposition does nothing to answer them, at least not anywhere near sufficiently. I've heard some really senseless answers to Dawkins from people who talk about their religious feelings, their sense of the presents of God and so on, but you'd think they'd know that isn't going to fly. Dawkins is wrog when he answers back that members of other religious have the esame experiences, but the audience doesn't know that. Some young guy reporting on the Ham0Nye debate was super impressed by Nye's sceincey talk. He doesn't discuss the points Nye made, he's just impressed that he was talking science, or really sciency talk. So part of the problem with this area of disc ussion is that people really just don't know much. ,br>
Dawkins is always sying that faith is without evidence and of course I want to answer for Christianity but a big problem is that Dawkins lumps together all the "abrahamic" religions which is already ab gig bogus concept, and then includes all the other religions of the world. Answering for Christianity I'd say that the Bible is tons and tons of evidence. that is what it was written for, to be evidence, evidence of the existence of the Craetor God, of the nature and charater of the Creatioor God, of His plan of redemption. It explains all the issues and events Dawkins and others complain about but they don't take any of it seriously so how can that be dealt with? If they start out dismissing it all as ancient fables with no reality, then go on to assault it from a modern moralistic perspective, not even known ting that their own morality derives from Christianity, it is hard to know where to start to answer them.

Dawkins thinks the doctrine of Original Sin is morally represhenisible somehow. When I first encountered good biblical discussions of it I wI loved it, to me it explains why the world is in the bad shape it's in, why there is murder, war, criminal behavior of all kinds,. How does evolution explain that? Dawkins and Hitchens when he was alive both attack the atonement of Christ for sin as if that too were a horrific moral offense. Good grief I wouldn't have thought it possible. Jesus died in our place because the penalty for sin is death. If we die for our sins we got to hell, but the sinless Son of God can die for us and save us al.

Different Creationist Views of the Timing of Volcanism, Plate Tectonics etc,.

Creationist Andrew Snelling giving the current creationist view of how the Flood occurred in relation to volcanism and plate tectonics. he also discusses problems with radiometric dating: ,br>

the idea is rthat the biblical "foundatins of the deep" that were broken up at the beginning of the Flood were volcanoes that broke up the cone continent that existed at the time into the continents we have today. This put the continents in motion on the tectonic plates which rought about further volcanism on the land and pushed up the high mountains etc.

So I see how that theory works but I keep remembering my favorite cross section of the Grand Syaircase to Grand Canyon area where a volcano at the far north of the Staircase clearly started after all the strata were in place, meaning after the Flood or at least at the very end of the Flood, rather than at the beginning.l Of course this could be a later volcano caused by the tectonic movement which was caused by the volcanism that began the Flood, but I \\it seems to me that there's too much turmoil in this scenario to explain how the strata could ever hve been laid down as apparently placidly as we see them in theat crsoss section. The way I put it together was that the strata were laid down by the Flood \, possibly by high tidees but also by precipitation out of the standing water at the height ofof the Flood, to account for their being laid down one on top of the other, and for the fact that all the disturbances I see everywhere occurred AFTGER the strata, the Geological Column, wwere all in place. this is demonstrated in theat cross section, but also the William Smith diagram of the strata of England, and various outher locations.

Snelling mentions that Steve Austin figured the Grand Staircase was carved by the receding Flood watgers, and that's the conclusion I came to also. Also the Grand Canyon itself. But the timning of the tectonic movement and the volcanoes is a different problem. I'm convinced it all occurred at the end of the Flood as I've explained emany times.

Thoughts on Ham-Nye Debate 3

Seems what Nye meant about turbulence was more about why we don't see a fish trying to escape the Flood by leaping up into the layer above. I'd guess that's because they were all dead by tghe time the layers were in place, encased in thick sedimentas as they were. Nothing was doing much leaping at that point. Some creatures that were still alive during the deposition of the sediments left their footprints in the wet sediments, and according to someone I heard recently, Snelling or Wise I suppose, their bodies were found after their footprints in the layer just above.

Is Nye being purposely obtuse when he keeps failing to understand Ham's point about historical versus observational science? It's so obvious. If you can't observe it all you have is imaginative speculations. We can observe variation within Kinds, but we can't observe evolution from species to species, that is merely assumed. So whedn Nye keeps carrying on about the importance of teaching science and conflating these obvious differences he's either being disingenuous or he's really that obtus4e.

I still think my own two arguments smash evolution to smithereens so that all the unanswered questions are for a future science without evolution. Evolution is dead if you recognize that the strata simply cannot be time periods but had to have been laid down in rapid succession, and certainly it's dead if you recognize that natural selection, or every kind of selection which inclucdes every kind of geotgraphic and other modes of ireproductive isolation, actually depletes the genetic potentials in any new population, because if evolution needs anything to be true it's an increase rather than a decrease in genetic potentials. Mutations have to be selectedd to and it's selection that utterly totally absolutely defeats evolution.

Thoughts on Ham-Nye Debate 2

Bill Nye's thirty minutes starts about an hour into the video. At about 1:05 pr sp he wonders why6 there isn't evidence of the turbulence he'd expect to see in the sedimentary strata if the Flood were true. Funny, I think thre should be evidence of disturbance to the strata if they actually epresent time periods of tends of millions of years but there's no such disturbbance. You can see this looking at the strata in the walslls of the Grand Canyon and you can see it on my favorite cross section of that area. Such nice neat straight parallel layers of sedimtary rocks, no sign of any appreciable disburbance to any of them. there is, however, turbulence galore durin gthe draining of the Flood, as I've argumed it, and he mentions that draining episode as a source of such turbulence alhtough that gets confusing, is he talking about the end of the Flood or during it or what? Anyway there is plenty of disturbance to the uppermost layers of the strata as shown on that cross section, the caring of the stairs of the Grand Staircase, the cuttin gof the Grand Canyon etc etc. All in present time, not a bit of it during the laying down of thestrata.

He sthinks there shouild be if the Flood were true. I'm not sure why. I guess we all imaginew it according to our own presuppositions and he likes ot imagine anything that disqualifies the idea, but the point is it's all imagination, there isn't anything but speculation or imagination that's possible with such a past event. However, I think it's been shown in a million ways that water lays down such layers, and there isn't any way at all to 3explain how long ages of time could do it and preserve it. A Flood would lay them down in rapid succession, the accumulated weight would preserve them.

then he goes on to wonder how the interestingly unique animals of Austrailia got there if the Flood story is true. Funny he doesn't mention Pangaea. Wasn't that idea current at the time? If all the contginents were together in one continent at the time of the Flood, which I argue, was the case, then for whatever reason those particular animals emigrated from the ark to that area and berfore it separated. This causes some problem for my own timing but I'll deal with that later.