Coyne on Religion: he Doesn't Have a Prayer

This is evolutionist Coyne again but but speaking on a different topic, this time on different ways of knowing other than the empirical mehod of science.  It didn't much interest me until he got to religion.  Before tht I probably would agree with a lot of what he had to say, I don't know though becaue I was only half tuned in;  maybe I'd agree with all of it, not sure.  Probably not though, I'm nost not interested enough to find out.     Drat, I wish I would stop hitting all the wrong keys.  Oops, hyperbole, not all, but too many of them.

This is the title of the video .. a talk he apparently gave to an Indian audience:

Jerry Coyne on ways of Knowing:  Science vs Everything Else

But of course, what he has to say about "religion" does inerest me, especially Christianity.  In fact I'll probably notsay anything about any religion except Christianity.  He starts out saying that the methods of knowing by religion are Dogma, Scripture, Revelation and Authority.  .  A little odd as applied to Christian claims since they are pretty much synonymous.  Dogma is just the codified body of knowledge glened from scripture.  Scripture is the source of all Christian knowledge, there is no other source, and it is both revelation and authority.  External authority is valid only if it is true to scripture.  

His min claim is that "religion" is not a source of truth about the universe though all three of the "Abrahamic religion" say it is.  His first example is the New Testament lcaim that we treat as fact that Christa was raised from the dead.  

You nharldly call yourself a Christian in America if you do not believe in the resurrection, he says.  Well, not just "hardly" .. you simply are not a Christian if you do not believe in the resurrection, it says quite clearly elsewhere in scripture.  

Some epirical claimsthat "religion" makes about the way the universe is, include that there is a God, a personal God in the scase of Christianity, that jesus is the Son of God, that He rose from the dead, that there is a heaven and a Hell, that there are angels and demons.  These are empriical claims about the universe.  Yes they are.

He flatly claims they are false.

These empirical claims are claims that in principle could be tested by science, and says that prayer has been tested and disconfirmed by science.    Funny I get a lot of answers to prayer, but anyway.   Could these claims be tested by science?  A one time historical event such as the resurrection fo Christ?  How could you test that?  Or the relatioy of God or the existence of heaven and hell.  Angels and demons perhaps but sinc ethey are sentient beings who probably wouldn't want to cooperate with your scientific efforts that's not a very good subject for testability either.  

and here comes one of the biggest mistakes atheists make about Christianity:  Faith is belief without any evidence behind it, he says.  Which is just plain false.  It's a kind of evidence he rejects, that's all, but it is evidence.  It is not physical evidnece, it is witness evidence.  And the kind of knowledge it gives us is often of things we could not know by any physiccal means.  "Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen." is one way sciprutre puts it.  We can't see god or heaven or hell or angels and demons unless they choose to manifest to us, which does occasionally happn so itn that case some of us do have our own experience that counts as evidence although we can't show it to anyone else.  Then we become witnesses and you either believe the witness or you don't.  One time events, historical events need witnesses of come sort, written testimonies for instance, and good grief hewe have plenty of that although he presfers to dismiss it, different witnesses of the same events.  A few seeming contradictions would get him to dismiss them all.   

When we believe the witnesses we then have faith in what they reveal to us about what they have witnessed.  

One we beleieve we often receive personal revelations thta confirm our belief too, but they are personal and more esily dismissed even than the scriptural witnesses.  

This isn't the kind of evidence that is replicable and testable in the usual scientific scense but it certainly is evdience, and the only kind of evidence it is possible to have for one time historical events.

He ss he can't understand how cosomeone could be a believer and also a scientist.  ut we're talking about two different kinds of evidence for one thing and for another we're talking mostly about two different kinds of objects of knowledge, that is, the things I believe in through scripture are invisible things and one time events.  It is hard to prove either.  You either believe those who claim to have knowledge of these thigns or you dont'.  

When he sys he doesn't understand how anyone could be religious and also a scientist he seems to think that we use faith for science or think we should but  thta's a very strange idea.  Faith is appropriate to scripture, to unwitnessed things, invisible things, but the methods of science are what we must use with observable physical repeatable events in science and the lable.  Why\\\  There is no conflict.  

then he lists some beliefs of Christians he says are simply false:  creationism, The exodus from Egypt, The age of the earth as ten thousand years, the Great Flood, and prayer.  Except for prayer these are all historical events for which the best evidence we could possibly have is witness evidence, and in the case of the Cretaion Revelation from God.   These are the kinds of knowledge that aren't amenable to the empircal methods of the lab.  We have to use historical methods for historical claims.  

There are some empircal tests you can do of course, as Archaeology has done with the Exodus ccount, but because these are one time historical events on this list you still have to rely on   you have to rely on methods that themselves can't be tested.  In the laboratory you can test things over and over again and correct for errors in a way you mjust can't with historical facts.  You have to rely on dating methods for instance that may seem quite reasonable, and are, but can't themselves be tested.  There are creationists who have gone a long way to show that radiometric dating isn't anywhere near as reliable as it is claimed to be, and when it dcomes to the kind of dating done for a historical event such as the Exocdus it's even fmore iffy.  

n fact there is a n Egyptologist who questions the standard dating applied to the Exodus by the firld of GEgyptology in general, and he's not a Christian and has no dog in this fight as it were.  He simply reviewed the facts available and concluded that they'd dated that whole period of history  I think hundreds of years later than the events spelled out in GenesisThe following is the beginning of a different post I started and don't want to give up yet but hav no way of disposing of it so it's going to stay here for a while.

There are a couple of interviews of him on You Tube but I'm not sure I could find them.  His name is Rohr, can't remember hisfirst name, and I think his reasoning is impeccable.  there is also a film about hiswork.  I wrote a couple of posts about it a few years ago.  Sorry my eyes just make it so difficult to track anything like this down.    But he was interviewed by my great nephew  C J Cox if that helps.  

Anyway, Rohr's reanalysis of the timing of the Exodus story is pretty compelling I think including the fact that there is a courtyard in Egypt that has twelve tombstones, one of which contains a status that appears to have once been colorfully decorated, as a "coat of many colors" which you may recall is how Joeph's coat was described, the one his father gave him.  So this could well be the tomb of Joseph and the others his eleven brothers who did join him in Egypt.  

There are of course many things about Creationist assertions that would be hard to prove although I do think Creationists have gone farther to do just that than they are given creatit for, and I wuld add my own simple efforst that I keep laying out here.   The age of the earth is contradicted byu radiometric dating but I think it's so obviously true that the sedimentary layers in which the fossils of the so called Fossil Record are embedded couldn't possibley be time periods and that they dhow absolutely no signs of any sort of wear and tear that you would expect to find on this active planet even in a hundredyyears let alone the millions claimed for these time periods     I think all this goes a long way to showin gthat the Earth really isn't lal that old at all.

As for evidence of the Great Flood which he claims does not exist I see such evidence everywhere myself.  the whole Earth has a sort of tumbledown appearance, a wrecked appearance.  If you look at the Middle East from the stsatellite overheard it looks like the AuSaudi Arabian peninsula is all swirled  on it ssurvface as if by a huge amount of water.  That's how it looks to me anyway.  And then there is of course the geological solumn which shows no signs whatever of being made up of period of time of tends of millions of eyears and for which ithere is no eaway to account for their each being punctuated as it were by a huge thick slab of sedimentary deposition which differs from the deposits above and beneath it.  No way was the surface of this earth, or even a layer of it beneath the surface made up of such a horizontally straight flat slab of rock that spans thousands of square miles and a whole series of them at that.  

That is first of all evidence agiainst the fossil record interpretation of the geological column, but I think it is also great evidence for the Flood as such sedimentary deposits fit with what we know about smaller scale deposits by moving water.  See Walther's Law for one example.

Coyne claims that  what scripture teaches as fact is simply false because scien ce has come to other conclusions.  But  again the kind of science he'd have to use to discover facts about anything in the past is just as iffy as what we have to use as creationists.  There is nothing any more scientifically complelling about his billions of years than our six thousand, or his datses for the Exostud versus Rohr's, and certainly he's just obtuse about the evidence for the Flood which is everywhere if you just open your eyes., and especially in tthe geological column which is found in some form or other all over the earth.

Remember:  Evolution is historical, it's not a hard science like physicals .  You have some facts to work with but they need to be interpreted and can't be replicated for the usual kinds of scientific testing.  And   So you get one interpretation of say the fossils and it can't be answered because it's an interpretation and not something tht can be tested.  And when you really look at the physical facts ofg ghthe goloegical column surely you have to realize that the whole thing is a ridiculous piece of wishful imagination.  And nothing more than that.     

Same with the biological claims such as Natural Selection.  It sounds good but they really don't try to test it at all, they just assert it as the mechanism that makes evlution possible.  Again, sounds good, plausible, but as a matter of tfact if you try to think it through as a real proecess in a real wphysial world, considingering real genetics, there is no way it works at all to get beyond what is already in the genome of a species.  You can't get from one species to another.  Period.  You are stuck in the genome of any given species.  

Go on, try it.  But they never do.

Then he goes on to show some conflicts between religions and sects and says There is no way to tell which religion is true.  Well, for me there is:  the bibleis the foundational authority and if a religion deviates from it that make sit a false relgion.  Evolution for instance can't be true because scripture shows that the Creation world was populated by creaturees that were imortal;  death entered when sin entered.  That makes liberal sects of Christianity that embrace evlution false.  Scripture is also clrea that the leader of a church must be male;  that makes those sections of Christianity that have women priests and miniteers false.  And so on.  In the end there is one true religion and that is Biblically pure Protestant Chrsianity.

he goeson to show that science has a lot more integrity than this motley collection of confused religions, and of course that is correct.  Scienc is a great thing, it's brought us marvelous knowledge and technologies.  It just doesn't work with historical facts such as evolution and I wish they'd just acknowlege that simple fact.

He goe o to the idea that religions deal with the so called big questions about the meaning of life, suffering and so on, while science deals with facts about the physical world etc.  That's a big rabbit hole I don't want to go down here, but I'd say two things:  Where he claims that religion can't answer questions about why we suffer, he's wrong, and maybe that's because Christains are just not very clear about that shwhen we talk about it, but the answe isthat this is not the original created world which was perfect and in which we were immortal.  This is the fallen world, and we are fallen creatures, that is we have lost our connection with God as a result of the disobedience of Adam and Eve to Aa command God gave them, so this world is subject to all kind s of subffering as a result of that act of disobedience whichw e inherit from our first parents.    We do have answers to all those questions becaue of the Fall.    The other thing I want to mention is his claim that the Bible is not sufficient as evidence because it's just "one book" but ahatis false.  The bible is a colleciton of writings , sisty six of them over more than two thousand years by some forty different writers who did not know one another in many cases,k at least in the Old Testament becaue they lived at tidifferent times.  The books fwere chosen as cannonical based on their spiritual uthenticity as judged by the spiritual leaders of Israel for the OT and the Church for the NT.  These are different witness accounts by different people.  This is NOT one book in the sense he is using it.  You can compare the writings of the different people.

I wish I could talk to Jerry Coyne about a lot of his beliefs.  I don't know why I wish that, it's kind of unudual.  Must think he is reaonable enough to change his mind if I could make a good enough case.  Which of course means I think I have such a case.  Hm.  

Come to think of it, I also wish I could talk to Elon Musk about a few things. And Richard Dawkins.  Hm.   

Oh well.

Later:  CORRECTION:  I got the name wrong of the Egyptologist I mention abofve:  it's David Rohl, not Ror  Rohr.   I don't think he's Jewish either, by the way, which would give him a personal motivation.

by the way, Listening back to the post I discovered that I had sandwiched a piece of the text below the asterisks into my discussion of Rohl, sorry about that.  It belongs at the top of that other text.  Not able to see well enough to find it and move it, yadda yadda.

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\\\keep repeating myself, keep hoping maybe I'll say it in some new way so definitelvely and clearly that anybody reading it will be persuaded on the spot and tell everyone they know that I've succeeded in demolishing evolution.  Well, eah, not in this world I'm afraid, but I still hope.   

So I'm talking about evolution again, Jerry Coyne again.  You Tube keeps throwing up the same people over and over once you've shown an interest in listening to them so it turns out there's more of him to be heard.   Saying of course mostly the same things, but I see he's got a new talk, wel new to me anyway, about ways of knowing which is a different subject and I'll try to get to that one before I finish this post.  

IIn an iterview of him by representatives of the Freedom From Religion organization he gave the usual list of asupposed evidences for evolution, at least four of them:  the fossil record, embryology, biogeography and vestigial organs.  each of these categories can be interpreted from the creationist point of view just as well as from the evolutionist, and I think better of course.   

But starting with the fossil record, the first thing to say is that it can't be evidence of evllution because there is no evidence FOR it as a fossil record as they understand it in the first place.  He likes to claim that evolution is not a theory in the nonscientific sense or casual sense that it's just an upnproven speculation, but in fact that is all it is.  He can go on about how it's theory in the scientific scense all he wants bu t it is not a theory in that sense, it IS pure speculative imagination and that's all it is.    The fossil record is certainly just an imaginative construct and nothing else.  it just LOOKS LIKE it represents evolution from simple to complex but of course there is no actual evidence of such evolution to gaaback up that idea, it remains a simple imaginative construct that osort of looks like evolution explains it but it doesn't.  

Maher and Peterson

Bill Maher talking with Jordan Peterson, two men I like for some things they have to say but dislike for lots of others.  Maher is a liberal but he's the sane kind who see the bitg lie of wokeness.  Peterson has a lot of practical wisdom but his jungianism turns everything he thinks nto a strange twisted misrepresentation of reality.  Maher comes out with the popular cricisms of religion and Peterson defends Christianity from his weird revisionist admiration of it.  He psychologizes it, maybe that's all that needs to be said about it.

Listening just now I caught Maher calling trump a "monstrosity without giving any specific characterizations of him to  explain it.  Is he believing all the lies about him?  Is that why?  Or is there something I keep missing about this odd hatred of Trump that comes from something else that for some reason I can't see at all.  I don't get it.  I guess I can sort of get dislikeing him for his personality but how to you atively hate him and even go as far as some leftists to, wish him dead for that reason?   alling him a "monst

 dn't thnk I've heard one thing said about Trump from the Democrats, liberals, leftists, that's true at all.  I figure some of it they actually believe or some of them tdo , but there must be a few at least who know they are telling lies about him.   the vevidence is easily available in the case of most of the misquiotes.  The claim that he said something favorable about neoNazies is belied a few sentences later in that same speech theyh use for their lie, but the media cut that part off their reports and few bother to listen to the end.  The "bloodbath" quote was so clearly a statement bout how things would go economically for the auto industruy if Biden were elected, duie to Biden's politiceas and having nothing ehwhatever to do with Trumjp, that to misconstrue it as they do means they must be very very los IQ or lying intentionally, I can't see any other explanation.   Same with Trump's joke about spending his first day in office as a "dictator" it'sjust amanzing how they insist on taking that as a seirious trhnhjhreat, hard to believe anyone could possibly seriously take it that way.  They even turn his lovely gesture of raising his fist in solidarity with his fellow conservatives after nearly being shot to death as some kind of gesture of violence>  This makes me so sick, all of this, it's hrd to want to go on living in this world.  It makes me seek desperately for some way to get away from these crazy people, these dangerous evil people.

ow is he a"monstrosity to Maher?  How?

His policies are pretty solidly conservative, not all of them but most of them, ordinary conservative policies, nothing radical, nothing odd, nothing fascistic, and he showed in his first term tht he goes strongly after putting them in to  practice right away, which is a sign of the man's integrity, and his policies raised the general welfare of the nation for those four years.  But they on the other side are taking credit for it inteadk, it turns my stomach, they twist it all in ways I can't comprehend.  

Some of it is sheer ignorance though.  That ad where the woman says she's SO mad that biollionaires don't have to pay as much tax as she does is jut plain stupidity.  They don't understand the most basic stuff about economics on the left, and it's really wrietd to begin with to thinnk Trump would campaign on giving his cronies a tax break aginst the wellbeing of the people, crazy to think anyone could think anyone wcould be that straightforwardly self serving but they seem to believe it.  

They have n knowledge of the fact that when the welathiest get a tax break they expand business, which increases employmehnt, may evn raise wages, and that the amount of teax revenyue taken into the treasure after such a ploliciy is in place exceeds by a long shot the amount taken in under leftist policies that want to tax the richkinto oblivion.    Which just drives them out of the country if it's bad enough.    They want to kill the big corporations, usch as the big food chains by taxing them more and by stopping their "price gouging" which they are not doing.  they are gbaely taing ababove wter in these inflationary times but are being accused for causing what the biden administration impossed on them.  Prices have to go up or they'll go out of business when they are khit with the expenses imposed on them by the Democrates.s  Basic economics that even I understand, why can't they?    Then they pass laws permnitting shoplifting to add to the economic problems of the big stores.  Some have already had to close their doors.  All because of the idiotic leftist policies.  

How is trump oa monstrosity Mr. Maher?

I was going to try to get a few words in about his complaints about Christainity but now I'm not up to it.

More Coyne

Too many things to talk about, the crazy destructive political situation, Charlie Kirk talking with Tucker Carlson, Bill Maher talking with Jordan Peterson, and Jerry Coyne winding up his talk on evolution.  Which is where I'll start.  For one thing I do believe that if evolution could be dealt the death blow it richly deserves some of the other problems would probably straighten out quite a bit because this is one of the bigtgest lies we're living under and if it fell some of the other destructive lies might fall too.  

Yes Mr. Coyne, I believe in angels.  The ones who came in contact with people in the bible didn't have wings, they look like human beings and were accepted as human beings in man of the storieas batout ehm.  I also believe in demons, which are fallen angles who hate humanity and these we may actually sometimes see in our time though not very often because they swould prefer it i f we didn't believe in them, it helps them with their plans to destoroy us if we can be kept in the dark.  

One thing Coyne just said at the end of this talk I've been listening to from time to time, is that the vast difference between the wolf and the chihuahua is evidence of evolution.   He'd just said that the great variability in the genome is enough to explain evolution, but that's ridiculous.  All the genome can do is produce variations on the species that carries it and is built by it.   And yes there is such a huge amount of variation possible that getting the chihuahua from the worlf is indeed an example of it.  

I doub tthat the wolf is the original dog for starters, because any splitting of the population would change the gene frequencies of both populations and over time affect the salient characteristscs of both.  The smaller population would produce the largest changes no doubt, probably with more homoczygous dgenes than the other poulation, but the other population woudl also change over time becuase of its genetic change brought about tby the exit of part of its population.  And since the dog populatoin is enormous, with I don't know how many breeds of dog the changce that there is anything left of the original population whatever it looked like is highly improbable.  the wolf is just one of the kinds of dog.    and I doubt that they hav an genetic evidence to make their case, I think it's all the usual guesswork which they think seems reasonable.  

The body plan is where I would start these days.  Both the worldf and he chihuahua have the same body plan, meaning that if you look at their skeletons wyou will see that they are built with the same basic proportions, and details, and all other dogs are aldoso.  You can get some dramatic differnces like shorter legs and pug faces with drastic breeding techniques but the basic ridigity of the body and the feet and talks and so on should be erecognizable.    In the case of the wolf and the chihuahua there aren't even differences of those kinds, the small dog's skeleton shuould look like a miniature of the wolf's.  I can't see well enough to find the evidence so now I'm gussing too, but when I researched birds back when I could still see well enough for the task I was surprised to find that all the birds look the same in their skeletons, including penguins and ostriches etc.    So I came to the conclusion that body plan is something that doesn't change much at all diespite the immeense amoutn of variation that goes on in its many other traits.   Even the trilobite remains a trilobite in all its proportaions and basic structure through millions of years, according to them, not me, probably hundreds of millions of years according to them, of supposed survival on this planet.  They show lots of variation over those supposed time periods but they all remain the same creature in their pbody plan.  

And asual all Coyne ahas is assertion.  The variation in the genome is no varrier to his imagination, it can just gon on varying into all kinds of other traits that don't belong tho the species that possesses it.  He can't show this with even one example, he just asserts it.   But we have no problem whatever seeing that the chihuahua and the wolf are the same species down to their bark and howl and behavior patterns, all doglike and not catlike or anythingelseliek.  

A lot of what goes on in the formation of a breed is the elimination of the characteristics of toerh breeds, the reduciton in geneti vairiability that accompanies the development ocf new phenotypes.  Which generally means the increse in homozygosity for the main traits of the breed.  It loses the alleles for the variation of that trait.    And this reduction in genetic variability ought all by itself to make it clear that getting new phenotype s is not evolution, the genetic changes are not moving int eh right direction for the development ofof something outside the genome, or evcen, at some point, within the genome as when you get to a great number of fixed or homzygous genes no further change is possible, and that's when you have a real purebred animal that can't interbreed with any botut it's  its own breed.

Not a forumala for evolution.

He also said that junk DNA proves evolution.  Well, if you believe in evolution you are going to interpret the hjunk DNA as the former evolution undergone by the animal.  I don't think there's any way he can actually dow that.  Apparently they do know a lot about twhat those genes once coded for, and in some cases theyh seem to represent some otner kind of creature, but that's onlyh because they arent function now.   I've been arguing for a long time rththat the junk DNA reflects the processes of disease and dieath all living things undergo since our first parents disobeyed God in Eden, known as the Fall, or Original Sin.  With that act of disobedience they doomed us all to death of all kikinds and that includes the death of our original functions bit by bit over the millennia,   Certainly we were much stronger creatures in the original created world, not subject to deaht first of all but not subject to disease of any kind either.  When Adam and Eve disobeyed God the first story we read is of the murder of Abel by Cain.  death in its most violent form.  Nevertheless people continued to live for hundreds of years until the Flood, Some a little shorter than others due to sin fctors we have no way of tracing, and even lived after the Flood for a few hundred years as well, but eventually the life span was whittled down to our current seventy to eighty or so years with the occasional exception into the hundre range.  Djue to God's mercy as He has given us medical protections to counteract the natural assaults on our health.  

So he's wrong about junk DNA, biblical Creation explains it just as well, that is, the Fall that followed the Creation.

Just ave to add again, jut because, that the geological column, that stack of sedimentary desposits that extend for many thousands of square miles, can't pssibley represent time periods so that of course the time periods never existsed:  neithre the usrface of the earth nor the surface of the sea bottom, which are the only two possibilities for the location of these slabs of sedimentary rock, were ever flat and horizontal as these rocks are.  Nor could there have been any period of time, let alone during hundreds of millions of years, tht the surface remained undisturbed as these rocks obviously were until the whole stack was laid down.  There's plenty of disturbance to be seen after they were all in place but nothing during their laying down.  Thar simply cannot have been the case even for a few lthousand years let alone the millions claimed for these layers of rock.   Not to mention that there is no reasonable explanation of the fact that each sedimentary sdeposite is a genuine layer that differs from those above and below it by the kind of sediment that composes it.  this makes no sense whatever on anyh possible theory of how time played out on this planet.  

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Cine I can't read by Contact information, the Commens, or my email, I have a new email managed by my daughter:

faith'swindow@mail.com   if uou'd like to tell me how wrong I am, or how right or anything else.

i wrote a short explanation of the situation in the ostg Contact POssi ility, and if you put those temrs  eterms in the search bosx at the above left that post will come up.

Thanks

Belated Correction Evolution Timetable

 A while back, I don't know how many posts ago, I can't read well enough to find the post I'm thinking of, I believe I made a big mistake when I was arguing that the eroded material at the base of exposed blocks of strata should be an indicator of the time factor that would disprove the claims of evolution of millions of years.  That is,k the amount of eroded debris at the base of the walls of the Grand Canyon don't   doesn't seem to be enough to hae taken millions of years.

I think I ereferred to the entire age of the geological column as my reference point, hundreds of millions of years, but of course that is very wrong as the walls would not have been exposed until it awas all dlaid down and the canyon was cut.  The latest age I heard for the cutting of the canyon is seventeen million years.  That's still an enormous long time by comparison with the forty five hundred years since the Flood, which is what I think is the righrt time frame for the erosion of the walls.  Seventeen million years should ahve accumulated a lot more than iis there it seems to me, and I think someone is keeping track of the rate so maybe that figure is out there somewhere.  I'd like to know it.  

But my guess is that forty five hundred years is probably about right.  For the walls of the Grand Canyon and the monuments in Monument Fvalley as well.    Just a guess but any millions of years is way too much for the erosion to be so little.  

Evolution, One of the Many Ways this World is Bulit on a Lie

 Yeah, I know, the chance that anyone is going to take anything I say about ebolution seriouesly is pretty slim, but I have to say it's not for good reason.  I'm listening to this newer version of Jerry Coyne's talk, basically the same talk I blogged on earlier but with small differences here and there, and again what he calls evidence does not qualify as evidence as I said before, and I don't get how they can be so huffily certain about that.    

He treats the "fossil record" as evidence, but the fossil record itself has never been proved to be a reality.  Really.  It's never been more than this idea that they like a lot that they've impossed on fossilized cretures in a stack of strata of sedimentary rocks.  They look at it and go, Gosh that sure looks like how animals evolved from simple to complex to me" and that's the whole of what they are calling evidence.  It LOOKS LIKE it and that's it.  Their imaginations tell them it is so, kand that's it, that's all there is to it.  

To be so convincec by their own imagination they have to swallow a lot of stuff that makes no sense at all, such as the fact that their time periods are each marked by a thick slab of sedimentary rock that in most cases covers thousand of square mils of land, all straight and horizontal and flat and each fitted into t astack of the same kind of layers of sedimentary rocks, very very closely pressed up against each other, with knife edge contact lines.  These are supposed to have formed during periods of tends of millions of years each, each time period with its own peculiar rock slab, one perculiar sediment nin most cases, and the next siwith its own peculiar and different rock slab.  All flat and horizontal and stretching for thousands of square miles.  And this is where those fossils are found that they assign to the Fossil Record.  This makes NO sense on any planet but they just go on blithely treating it as if it does.  

And of course he laughs at the idea that the worldwide Flood is a better explanation, calls it risible and refuses to try to explain it for that reason.  Well I'm glad he didn't explain it because he'd just mock it, but as a matter of fact it's a much better explanation than time periods containing fossils that prove evolution from one time period to the next.  All you have is dead things inside this lslab of sedimetnary rock.  They call it the fossil record, I\creationists think it fits the Flood far better.    Water is known to deposite layers of sedimenents for one thing, you find such layers in deltas and at the shoreline. Water separates out the sediments and deposites them in layers.  Sure fits the geological column better than any conjuring they could do to explain them as normal deposites in a normal world.  but he ignores all this, they all do, and I'm not going to get anything but a shrug and a mocking laugh for my trouble I'm sure.

He starts his discussion with five facts he says sconstitute evolution, the first one being that there is observable change in populations over time.  Well, this is true.  But the observable change is only variation within the genome of the species, it's not evolution at all.  To get evolution new genetic material would have to be added at some point and it can't be, all there is is the genetic material dfined by the species genome.  Whatever its genes code for is what you're going to get, variations on them but the same traits and nothing but those traits.  You aren't going to find a gene for bear's claws in a chimp genome and so on.  The chimp has genes for making a chimp and that's it.    if you think you can get from the chimp genome to something else you are going to have to imagine some drastic new change mechanism which doesn't exist.  All change occurs within the genome of the species.  This is bovious but they'll deny it.

 So there is no variation outseide the species genome and there is no fossil record because there is no way those slabs of rock were laid down each in a particular time period over tend of millions of years all flat and horizontal and covering thousands of square miles.   

B they'll deny that too.  

and laugh at me for pointing it out.

eah I know I keep repeating myself.  Oh well.  

Well, it looks to ME like those strata had to have been laid down by water, aassive amount of water that covered the whole earth, becuaduase I know that's what water tends to do, it lays down sedimentary  deposits 

CCharlie Kirk and jerry Coyne and some depressing tsutf

 It's so depressing.     Charlie Kirk having arguments with college students , in some format I dn't grasp where they fight to get tot he chair across from him, but anyway, their point of view, which is obviously shaped by their leftist professors, is depressing.  They believe and try to prove that abortion is justifiable apart from the usual exceptions for mother's health and so on, and it's just depressing that killing your child is regarded as a right by these kids and the fact that it is the killing of  a human being means nothing to them.  It's also depressing that they refuse to accept the obvious distinctions between men and women, the biological distinctions and try to jstify calling a man a woman who simply wants to be walled a woman.  this is all dperessing to an abysmal level.   And of course they have to prove that there is still systemic racism in America although for decades we've done so much to rid ourselves of it and succeeded.  they are believing lies and it is abysmally depressing.

Oh, also the Econ student never studied Milton Friedman or Thomas Sowell.  Of course.

then anothr ejJerry Coyne video came up where he's giving the same speech but to a different audience adn that is depressing.  of course.  What he calls evolution is not evolution, it's variation which is built into the species genome, and this variation is limited by the genetic possibilities already available and you can't ge any kind of change that is not dependent on those genetic possibilities  You also reach a point in small populations where further variations becomes impossible too because of the number of fixed enes or homozygous genes that have occurred in the making of the race or breed.   And yes you can get different populations with different characteristics if they split and vary in isolation from each other.  happens all the time in nature.  All variation limited to the genome, not evolution.   And then he goes to the fossil record to prove that life began with simple organisms and proceeded to more complex ones, exepct of course that the fofssil record doesn't exist becaue the strata they exist in can't possibly represent time periods as I've shown over and ove again.  

Deressing beyond depressing.  I hope the Rapture somes soon.

Later:  I hadn't finished his whole talk and of course he covers the other stuff like vestigial organs and biogeography and all that as he did the first time too , and I have the same answers now that I had when I heard it the first time:

Vestial orgns are probably best explained as fnctions we once possessed in our originaloly created form, that we've lost over time because of the Fall which brought all kinds of diseases into our existence.  Mutations have to be a disease process, they are random and make no sense as a process useful to life in any way at all despite scientist's attempts to make them useful for evolution.  they can't be, they are random destructive mitakes in the replication of DNA, they may be insignificant enough to do no hardm in some cses, but they often create genetic diseases and we hve thousands of those we have to deal with.   

So I figure that once sueful functions, for which we have evidence in the "junk DNA" which Coyne doesn't call junk DNA but that's what it is, evidence of dead genes that once had functions we no longer possess because those genes have been destroyed by mutations.  He talks about this but of course from the evolutionistic perspective which says they were once useful when we were not yet human and we logost them later because we no longer need them.  That gives mutation a useful function, which is fidicuilous.  It's random, it has no useful function, it just maims and kills and that's all it does, it's a  an instrument of the Fall, an instrument of destruction and disease and it's killed of an enormous nmber of onece useful genes in the human genome, and also in animal genomes.    So vesgial organs are no doubt whatever is left half functioning in our makeup or not functioning at all because the genes that code for the function are dead.   A yok sac for instance might once have contained the hyoulk he says is coded ffyor by three genes that are all now dead, was likely once useful for noursighing the embryo before the planecent a fully defeveloped.  that would be my guess.  Apparently we can do awithout it, sort of, so we go on without it, as we do without an appendix and a functioning or fully fiunctioning gallbladder, other organs we more or less easily do without.    That were once probably very useful for some facet of our strength and health.    Vitamin C is no longer functioning and Coyne explains that as due oto our getting it in our diets, I just figure it was killed as part of the Fall and we do better if we take C supplements which shows we do need it and don't get it in our diets that easily.  That's how I would explain most evestigial orgnas, and some of them would need a lot more thought, such as the hind legs of whales, which proabbly have a dozen or so more genes associated with them that are now dead.  And so on.

I still dnot get this biogeography argument at all  Creationists are accused of avcooiding it because it's supposedly so teeling for evolution but I just don't get it and sdon't see why creationists would have any problme at all with islands being populated by creatures tht could float there and not by animals whathat have no easy way of getting there.  What on earth is so evolutionistic about that?  I don't get it at all.

I also don't see why creationists should hav a problem with natural selection.  It must operate in some cases and his example of the finch eak is proably a good enough example of it.  It would operate on the genetic material of the species genome jut fine, no need at all for any kind of evolution in the official sense of the term to operate.  

One thing I think must e the case is that there are many design features that are repeated in the genomes of the diferent creatures, that is it can be design and not evolution that explains them.  

He says vestigial organs can't be explained except by evolution and this is false.  the Fall with its mutational disease processes goes a long way to explaining them.

I forgo to mention his example of the supposed evolution of horses.  There are fossils of different kinds of horses in the so called fossil record which of course he explains as one type evolving from an earlier type, but to a creatinist therese are merely different kinds of horses what all lived before the flood and died in the Flood, and that's the case wilth all the creatures we find fossilized.  Some variations were preserved on the ark, but many others died.

Whateve we find in fossil form was alive before the Floode, amany odd variations of creatures that are still living but many that no longer exist at all.  You don't need to postulate vrarious extinction events, the Flood killed them all.  

I'm sure he's right that it's becaue of our Christianity that we reject evolution.  I had problems with evolution before I became a Christian.  I'd tried to think through some ways a particular feature might have evolved over long periods of time and just keept being unable to imagine it all going in the right direction to produce something coherent.  I still acan't imagine it.   but when I became a Christian then it began to matter in a new eway because evolution contradicts the Bible.  There was no death in the orginal Creation, that ws the consequance of the Fall whichn made edeath seem to be a normal part of life.  Death is built into evolution and that can't be reconciled with the Bible.  theistic evolution is a sham.  At lest it's not biblical.  Anyway when I became a CHristian in my late forties I read some books on creatinism and started tryhing to think it through for myself.  It can't be easily dismissed, it has to be thought through.  And I think I've done a decent job of that.

Although I had issues with evolution before I became a Christian I didn't pursue them and just figured evolution myust be true even if I culdn't see how, but when i became a Christian then I had the motivattion to think more acarefilly about it.

Two Forms of UncivilizationWoke and Multicultural

 Soon after the end of the Olympics Matt Walsh objected on his radio show to the American gymnasts who had won silver ahnd bronze medals, bowing down to the gold medal winner from Brazil, becaue he believed it to be a woke racist expression.  He also thought the fact that the bronze winner, Jordan Childs, a black girl as were the other two, had not won her medal fairly but that it was given to her because eshe is black.  

I had taken it all straight myself, thought she had been awarded the bronze fairly and also that the bowing down she and teammate Simone Biyle engaged in was just a nice gesture and genuine.  Why make an innocent gensture into a woke expression anyway.   

I guess I didn't explain here that originally someone else, a rumanian girl, had won the bronze, but that the American coach had objected to the judges that they had wrongly assessed the performance of their girl Jordan Childs, and that led to the elevation of Childs to the Bronze, making the Rumanian the loser.    That's what I had assumed was done fairly.  And maybe it was, but apparently there were other problems.

What Walsh reported is that they had again reviewed the performances and found that Chidls had not won, but belonged in fifth place, which put her behind two Rumanians, one of whom got the bronze.  So now this seems to be the correct assessemtn.

But Childs is protesting that it is because she is black that they took the medal away from her.  NOW we've got a woke situation and I accept Matt Walsh's judgment of the istuation.  I guess I was wrong about the whole thing and he was right so this is my apology.  

I'd rally like to think lback competitotrs could be gracious losers as well as winnders but it doesn't look like the times we live in are going to allow that civilized attitude to develop.

And seaing of civilized behavior, Matt Walksh also corrected the uproar against Trump for mentioning that he'd heard that the Haitians in Springfield Ohio were eating the pets, the casts and dogs, that belonged to the citizens there.  People had been denying that Trump was right, saying that he'd fallen for a hoax and that the Haitians were not eating pets.  

What Walsh did was find audio proof that the townspeakple had been complaining about the Haitians catching and eating geese and ducks and other aniamsls for some time.  He also pointed out that in Haiti they do eat cats so that even if there isn't any evidence that they have in fact done so in Springfield, they wvery well might if the could.  

Anyway, thanks to Walksh for correcting me on both points, well in the second case correcting the rumors since I hadn't bought into any o fit yet.  

It is hard to fathom the evil mindset of those who would bring uncivilized people into a civilized  ountry and imose them on the citizens.  if these evil people win this upcoming election we are doomed in more ways than one.

May God have mercy on us.