Go for the Heart

[Titan]

This is for both sides to consider:

Have any of you noticed that when a fossil comes out one of the two sides immediately jumps on it?

When the Nebraska man came out it was immediately used in the Scopes Monkey Trials to solidify the growing theory of evolution. It was later found that the fossil consisted of a single tooth belonging to an extinct species of pig.

When a creationist finds the complexity of an organ or organism they immediately publish a document stating how it shows that evolution is utterly false. Often these organs are proven to be less complex than previoulsy thought.

This is entitled "Go for the Heart" because rather than going for the mind and bringing evidence to the other side to be tested and critiqued, evolutionists and creationists immediately print it in order to cripple the other side and build up its own beliefs.

I know evolutionists will completely deny this (as will creationists) but both sides have questionable flaws that can not be left alone. In modern times we no longer want to find out the truth but to be proven correct and rub it in the face of those who oppose us so that we can end the courage that they once had.

Why can't we do this:
When evolutionists find a fossil that "proves evolution" they should bring it to the creationists and collectively examine it. Then both sides write their critiques on the fossils including the arguments for the other side.
When creationists find an amazingly complex organism why can't they show the evolutionary medical teams and collectively observe it once more, and repeat the process.

The conclusions will still be different but we won't have a bunch of brainwashed zombies anymore.

When I was a young-earth creationist we discussed the Scopes Monkey trials in History Class. It was inevitably brought up that I was a creationist and the teacher said "I don't know how you could have such an opinion" we had a debate (informal) and I crushed both the evolutionary classmates and the teacher because I was the only one who had researched both sides. The comment by the teacher made it harder for me to accept evolution and therein lies another problem.
We are prideful creatures, some would rather be ignorant than allow somoeone to gloat. So if we realize we have made a mistake we hide it and cover it up, dodging the issue and further increasing the pain.


I am really fed up with the debate. I will continue to debate but it is some of the people here who mock Creationists and some of my creationist friends who basically laugh at the phrase "evolution occurs" that annoy me. Why can't the debate be civilized and open-minded?

If someone wants to be an atheist than just come to terms with that and quit debating because nothing will convince you. If you want to be a Christian that stop arguing because we will get no where.

[juliod]

One scientist off of the top of my head is Jonathan Wells who is a PHD in vertabrate embryology.

I'll look him up tomorrow at the lab. Maybe he will be the exception. If so, I will freely admit it.

DanZ

[juliod]

The diffferance is that you can model..predict..track..etc hurricanes.

You can't even come close to that with any portion of the theory of evolutionISM.

Here's a point for you to think about, YEC: The weather on earth is less well understood than evolution on earth.

(You're quite wrong about the model, predict, track quote. Things are done daily in molecular biology labs that would make your head spin.)

DanZ

[Gollum]

I'll look him [Jonathan Wells] up tomorrow at the lab. Maybe he will be the exception. If so, I will freely admit it.

You're safe from having to freely admit anything. Check out this on Jonathan Wells He's a guy that the Moonies put through school so that he could fight the creationist fight against evolution. He is in short, a professional creationist and not a scientist dispite the Ph.D. after his name.

[micatala]

Another source on Jonathan Wells and others in the ID/Wedge movement is "Creationism's Trojan Horse: The Wedge of Intelligent Design." Although I was irked by the author's occasional implications that the ID proponents should be deprecated because they are religiously motivated, they do a good job of documenting the backgrounds, motivations, and actions of the leading lights of ID. As noted by Gollum, Wells was a creationist before he earned his Ph.D., although he has disingenuously claimed that he came to doubt evolution through his biological education.

I agree with Titan's post that opened this thread. There is a lot of polarization on this issue, and it has led some people on both sides making very poor arguements. I think this is a result partly of the "preaching to the choir" phenomenon. Those who make these arguements often do so knowing full well that they are not going to convince anyone on the other side, but are hoping to maintain the "committment of the faithful" to the cause. Part of this committment is not believing or even really listening to what folks on the other side are saying.

[Dilettante]

YEC wrote:

But what does four corners actually mean???

I looked looked up "corner" in the dictionary. There were 27 discriptions describing the useage of the term.

Number 17 was "the four corners of the
earth" The most distant or remote regions: They traveled to the
four corners of the earth.

It has nothing to do with a flat earth...why do you seem to indicate that it does???

See YEC, that's exactly the kind of problem one encounters when one subscribes to a literal meaning of the Bible. Why don't you try the same method on other parts of the Bible also? Why not give the historico-critical method a try?

[YEC]

The diffferance is that you can model..predict..track..etc hurricanes.

You can't even come close to that with any portion of the theory of evolutionISM.

Here's a point for you to think about, YEC: The weather on earth is less well understood than evolution on earth.

(You're quite wrong about the model, predict, track quote. Things are done daily in molecular biology labs that would make your head spin.)

DanZ

Point pondered..then dismissed.

First off, I doubt it.

Once again, the weather can be predicted, modeled, witnessed etc.

EvolutionISM can't.

You still can't tell me how many mutations are needed to change a particular body part into another body part.

You still have not presented an intermediate fossil.

The list goes on...

[YEC]

YEC wrote:

But what does four corners actually mean???

I looked looked up "corner" in the dictionary. There were 27 discriptions describing the useage of the term.

Number 17 was "the four corners of the
earth" The most distant or remote regions: They traveled to the
four corners of the earth.

It has nothing to do with a flat earth...why do you seem to indicate that it does???

See YEC, that's exactly the kind of problem one encounters when one subscribes to a literal meaning of the Bible. Why don't you try the same method on other parts of the Bible also? Why not give the historico-critical method a try?

Oh, but I have.

Some parts of the bible are literal and some parts are..parabels or analogies.

When the bible speaks of the 4 cornersit usually becomes clear which is literal and what isn't.
For instance;
EXO 25:26 Make four gold rings for the table and fasten them to the four corners, where the four legs are.
or
DEU 22:12 Make tassels on the four corners of the cloak you wear.

There is more verses that show a literal meaning while the following shows a non-literal meaning.

EZE 7:2 "Son of man, this is what the Sovereign LORD says to the land of Israel: The end! The end has come upon the four corners of the land.

They knew their land was not square...or flat. They knew "four corners" meant something like distant or edge.

In the following instance this translation understood the meaning of "corner" to be "quarters". It's obvious that the meaning was not in reference to a flat or square earth.

ISA 11:12 He will raise a banner for the nations and gather the exiles of Israel; he will assemble the scattered people of Judah from the four quarters of the earth.

Once again this is literal:
EZE 45:19 The priest is to take some of the blood of the sin offering and put it on the doorposts of the temple, on the four corners of the upper ledge of the altar and on the gateposts of the inner court.

Once again the figurative:
EZE 7:2 "Son of man, this is what the Sovereign LORD says to the land of Israel: The end! The end has come upon the four corners of the land.

Now do me a favor, search your bible and show me just where the four corners is presented as literal when speaking of a supposed flat earth.

[Jose]

juliod:
I mean, could you envisage a person working at the National Hurricane Center who believed that tropical storms were caused by Thor? Just isn't going to happen.

The diffferance is that you can model..predict..track..etc hurricanes.

You can't even come close to that with any portion of the theory of evolutionISM.

It's not at all clear that you understand how evolution works, if you think that it is reasonable to say that a theory is valid only if it can predict the future. We can't predict the future course of evolution because mutations occur at random. However, we certainly can model and track evolution. That's why creationists, in general, have accepted microevolution and speciation, and redefined "kind" to be "family or a higher taxon." Evolution has been modeled and tracked to the point of certainty.

One scientist off of the top of my head is Jonathan Wells who is a PHD in vertabrate embryology. Some of his work includes "Charles Hodge's Critigue of Darwinism", Origins & Design, The Scientist, Touchstone, The American Biology Teacher, Microtubule-mediated transport of organelles and localization of beta-catenin to the future dorsal side of Xenopus eggs, and Rhetoric and Public Affairs. He also wrote Icons of Evolution: Why Much of What We Teach about Evolution is Wrong.

Bad choice, I'm afraid. Wells was sent to Berkeley by his "father," the Rev. Sun Young Moon, explicitly to obtain a PhD in order to make it look like he was a scientist disagreeing with evolution. If we look at his history, it's like this:

• Born John Corrigan Wells; now uses the legal name of Jonathan.
• Master of Religious Education (1978), Unification Theological Seminary. Chosen by his church to receive advanced academic religious education.
• Ph.D. (1986), Religious Studies, Yale with David Kelsey. Although Dr. Kelsey is a Professor of Theology at Yale Divinity School, the Ph.D. was awarded by the Department of Religious Studies in Yale College (the equivalent of a College of Liberal Arts and Sciences).
• Ph.D.(ca. 1994), California (Berkeley) with John Gerhardt.
• Although from 1995 to 1999 Wells repeated called himself, and let himself be billed as, a "developmental biology post-doc at UC-Berkeley", in reality he never performed post-doctoral research at Berkeley or anywhere else. Instead, he was a staff member of the Discovery Institute, and his "appointment" at Berkeley was an unpaid title arranged with the help of Phillip Johnson.

If you do a Medline search, you come up empty-handed--even if you look for publications resulting from his thesis. All of his publications are in creation/ID books or journals, with an occasional counterpoint with Eugenie Scott in a book about "the controversy." Interestingly, he changed his name to Jonathan after he finished his thesis as John Corrigan Wells, which is the name under which it was written. Perhaps, strictly speaking, "Jonathan" Wells never received a PhD. Some guy named John Corrigan Wells did, and that guy has since disappeared.

Y'know, maybe Wells is the reason that the ID movement likes to pretend that it is non-denominational. Otherwise, the moonie anti-evolutionists and Christian evolutionists would have to fight over their relative theologies. I guess they decided to have a temporary truce while they join forces to fight the bad guys.

Some parts of the bible are literal and some parts are..parabels or analogies. ... Now do me a favor, search your bible and show me just where the four corners is presented as literal when speaking of a supposed flat earth.

Ummmm....how is it that biblical literalists are allowed to pick and choose which parts to call literal, and which parts to call allegorical? It seems to me, if you are going to call Genesis literal, you have to consider "4 corners" to be literal. Similarly, you must consider it to be literal when they speak of seeing all of the kingdoms of the world from the top of a mountain, or when they refer to the heart as the seat of reason. Otherwise, you're on that slippery slope that leads to moral relativism, since you've begun with literal relativism, choosing interpretations to suit your fancy.

[YEC]

juliod:
I mean, could you envisage a person working at the National Hurricane Center who believed that tropical storms were caused by Thor? Just isn't going to happen.

The diffferance is that you can model..predict..track..etc hurricanes.

You can't even come close to that with any portion of the theory of evolutionISM.

It's not at all clear that you understand how evolution works, if you think that it is reasonable to say that a theory is valid only if it can predict the future. We can't predict the future course of evolution because mutations occur at random. However, we certainly can model and track evolution. That's why creationists, in general, have accepted microevolution and speciation, and redefined "kind" to be "family or a higher taxon." Evolution has been modeled and tracked to the point of certainty.

Perhaps you don't know how the evo theories actually work.

Evolution has NEVER been witnessed, predicted or repeated.

You can't even tell us how many mutations are required to produce these morphological changes you claim occur....your best answer, they happen and they add up....sounds good, but it also sounds like rhetoric.

[YEC]

Some parts of the bible are literal and some parts are..parabels or analogies. ... Now do me a favor, search your bible and show me just where the four corners is presented as literal when speaking of a supposed flat earth.

Ummmm....how is it that biblical literalists are allowed to pick and choose which parts to call literal, and which parts to call allegorical? It seems to me, if you are going to call Genesis literal, you have to consider "4 corners" to be literal. Similarly, you must consider it to be literal when they speak of seeing all of the kingdoms of the world from the top of a mountain, or when they refer to the heart as the seat of reason. Otherwise, you're on that slippery slope that leads to moral relativism, since you've begun with literal relativism, choosing interpretations to suit your fancy.

jose...try common sense.

Genesis and 4 corners have nothing to do with each other...still I can't believe you actually posted the above considering I just spelled it out for you concerning the usage of 4 corners.

No picking and choosing involved Jose. The text tells you.

I trust you now stand corrected on this issue.