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Astrochemist
Guest
You may have already answered this, my apologies (I skimmed through the many posts, but probably missed many).
How do humans have dominion over animals that were extinct before their existence?
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How do humans have dominion over animals that were extinct before their existence?
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Astrochemist
Guest
Amen!
As ironic as it may be, this seems to be the best response to your statement.
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Astrochemist
Guest
Numbers added.
I can answer these questions for myself (and in some cases, in general):
(1) I am uncertain what “the name of science” is, but can answer confidently that this name, like any name, is not greater than God’s name.
(2) This is an interesting question. I think, prima facia, that science would not be diminished by use of these words; indeed, scientists have used these words before in their work. However, it may not be useful to talk about “God” or “creation” as scientific concepts. This should be explored in more detail.
(3) They are “bad words” for some scientists because some scientists have a different philosophy of science than others, and many scientists are hostile to Christianity.
(4) I do not understand this question.
(5) See (2), (3), and (6).
(6) See (2), (3), and (5).
I have three questions for you:
(1) What would you consider to be sufficient evidence for accepting the theory of evolution (as an example)?
(2) Do you consider the creation account to be a scientific account?
(3) If no to (2), why not, and would this account contradict evolution? If yes to (2), what would you consider to be sufficient evidence to falsify the creation account (as an example)?
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StAnastasia
Guest
You’re welcome, Poco! Now, try to break a T-Rex wishbone at the table some time…Thank you, StAnastasia!
Theropods have wishbones! Cool!
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aragonjohn1
Guest
because there awesome theyr ers uil that came frum em and there they make cool toys
there bones look cool there is sum fish in the ocean that are related to or were around at the time of the dinosours and ummm…
the toys are easy to swallow
bonus points:thumbsup:
there bones look cool there is sum fish in the ocean that are related to or were around at the time of the dinosours and ummm…
the toys are easy to swallowbonus points:thumbsup:
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Prieldedi
Guest
The name of science is just that: SCIENCE. I know it’s not greater than God’s name, but to some scientists it is.
Galileo was amazed at God’s Creation when he started to see the sky through his telescope. Was he wrong in saying that? No. He wasn’t scared to speak his mind.
Number (4) goes together with (5).
To answer your questions:
(1) To see it in action. If I have to accept that evolution takes such huge amounts of time in order to complete the changes it makes in living things, how can I know for sure the changes really take place? Similarities between species, mutations, the genetic code, etc., are facts, but they are not sufficient evidence that evolution happens. Neither do dinosaurs bones.
(2) Yes.
(3) The narration in Genesis of the Creation goes hand in hand with the events evolutionists say actually happened. Moses wasn’t writing science in the sense we understand science in the 21st Century, but from the Big Bang (“Let there be light”) to the creation of man Moses nailed it pretty good.
The order in which living things are created in Genesis is (practically) the same order evolutionists describe: life beginning at sea and ending with man: fish, birds, land animals, man. Amazing that Moses had it right 3,500 years ago. Thus, with Moses not trying to be scientific as mentioned before, I’ll say his account is very much science. Some scientists today don’t like the part about the Creator.
Having said that, I believe evolution is not the answer to what really happened. It was a valid explanation up to a point, but it has so many holes in it that’s gonna be difficult to fill them.
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Schn
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Decrease in size of elephant tusks in correlation with ivory hunting. Domestication of wolves into dogs. Lenski’s bacteria research. And micro evolution is the same as macro evolution. I’m sure you would think that a person that believes small streams can be created by erosion but a river cannot is a moron. Oh and fossils. Dang they’re cool.
No, it was stated that the universe existed before he introduced light. This is wrong.
No, it’s wrong. Would you like me to detail it? It’s horribly wrong. But the thing is, even if I do, you wouldn’t care and it wouldn’t make you deviate from your point of view.
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hugh_miller
Guest
Oh boy, here we go. First, C-14 dating has an upper limit of around 50,000 years. Trying to date anything older than that by this method will give erroneous results because it’s half life is so short (5730 years) that it will be practically undetectable. Any “results” noted using C-14 on things millions of years old are due to contamination (air, skin, etc.). Second, how could they have used this test with the mineral apatite, which is calcium phosphate (Ca5(PO4)3(OH,F,Cl)), and contains no carbon? Third, just curious, what age dates did they get when they dated the bone using U-238 or K-40?
REBUTTAL: Oh boy is right? But my friend you need a few advanced lessons in C-14 dating. By finding C-14 in diamond allegedly 0.5 to 3 billion years old your assumption that dinosaurs and other fossils are 65 million plus years old, has been proven wrong many times by direct carbon dating of the fossils themselves. The dating of the rocks by long-age radiometric decay methods in which the fossil bone, wood and shell are imbedded can now be considered unscientific as C-14 is a far more accurate method of dating. Dr. Marie Claire van Oosterwyck tried to show the GEOchronologists in Belgium in 1975 that the anomalous ages of 2 - 40 million years for our alleged manlike-apelike ancestors give MEANINGLESS AGES for many technical reasons. As a consequence of her efforts to educate her fellow scientists she was locked out of the lab for which she was director AND THE BIG LIE HAS CONTINUED and has confused me as well as you but not anymore. This LIE was done to preserve the sacred cow of human evolution. Sedimentologists from Russia to the USA have confirmed this gentle lady’s research in the last 20 or so years that the sediments were deposited rapidly and not a few cm/1000 years so you can throw out the Ur/Pb or K/Ar ad nauseum dating of rocks as meaningless. I’ve had the priveledge of meeting her.
Regarding your comment on contamination: Why are there 130 or so RC dating labs world-wide if contamination is such a problem? There are many such labs because they have mastered the technique of removing contaminants from the samples by pretreatments before C-14 dating. Don’t you remove soil from your clothes by a mixture of sodium hydroxide and other ingredients? They do something similar with hot diluted NaOH but also pretreat with mild acids to remove superficial carbonates from their samples before testing for the original carbon compounds associated with the fossil so as to avoid old or young carbonates. Oh yes, and they can also date bone bioapatitite because during the critters life span some calcium phosphate is replaced with Calcium carbonate [CaCO3 ]. I’ve read where 0.7 % carbon in a 100 mg of bone is quite adequate for AMS testing without the presence of collagen. But in the report in the book, “Evolutionism: The Decline of an Hypothesis” this team of scientists dated both the collagen fraction and the carbonate fraction of the bioapatite and obtained irrefutable concordant dates. Dinosaurs at least in the USA are only 23,000-33,000 radiocarbon years maximum not 65 million years old.
So let me get this straight…they found dinosaur and human footprints together at the BOTTOM OF A RIVER? Don’t you think that there just might have been some erosion taking place by the running water? How in the world would the “footprints” stay preserved? And has a single human bone ever been found in association with dinosaur bones? No. Don’t you think that if the entire population of humans but Noah and his family were destroyed in the flood, alongside all species of dinosaur, that their bones would be found TOGETHER in sedimentary deposits?
REBUTTAL:
That needs no clarification other then to suggest that before trash talking either the footprints or the paleontology team that made the mold during the 1999 draught, skeptics must visit the Glendive Montana Dinosaur and Fossil Museum just off I-94 and study the cast of the mold of these 10 or so human footprints with dinosaurs from the Paluxy River TX. The cast is on display for all to view and study; I saw and took photos of the cast. In your zeal to cast dispersions on this footprint research you failed to notice that I wrote: “…and pristine ones under tons of rocks and just recently confirmed by cat-scan of the Delk footprint www.omniology.com and/or ianjuby.org/delk/ www.creationevidence.org ].” These discoveries and observations can be checked out by going to the sources. Also Cat scan is used by 1000’s of doctors on a daily basis. Are you going to attack medical laboratories and doctors for daring to use cat-scanning equipment for challenging your sacred cow by proving dinosaurs and man walked together in the same “cretaceous” strata? As for erosion over time a Ph.D. hydraulic engineer from the UN of IL has shown that the very thick strata appears to have been deposited twice daily by rapidly moving huge tides carrying sediments!
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Schn
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The first rebuttal is kind of funny, like most conspiracy theories.
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Mr_Skeptic
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That’s because science isn’t about status quo or dogma. If it were, we’d still be living in a bronze age level of medicine and technology, stuck with an immutable, unchangeable, defended to the death, article of faith.
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Philipp
Guest
It’s not funny McGee. Souls are being lost or confused by trash talking scripture. The Belgian lady scientist spent many years in the Belgian Congo and has written over 100 technical articles. How do you think she got the lab directorship job? But let me continue with my rebuttles to the GEO guy.
GEOFORMEO: I hate to be so nitpicky, but the Earth is 70% covered with water. Mars DOES have water, albeit as ice in its ice caps. There is also the possibility that there is liquid water in its subsurface. Yes, Mars had water. But what makes you think that it was a “flood?” It would have been an ocean just like ours, or rivers just like ours. But the fact of the matter is that most of Mars was devoid of water, evidenced by the amount of basalt containing the mineral olivine present on Mars. I really don’t know what bearing Mars has on this discussion anyway.
I suspect you are correct geoformeo that 70% is being closer to the actual % of earth’s surface covered by water. Nonetheless there are scientists that are discussing a possible flood (s) on Mars based on NASA geological interpretations. Catastrophism on Mars like on earth is the point of the discussion in case you haven’t figured that out yet. If one can speculate from the geological evidence that a flood happened on Mars than what is so unscientific about it happening on earth since there are huge oceans to negotiate, we have our church fathers talking about it as well as scripture and all the cultures of earth? Are you as a Catholic willing to even consider the possibility of a global flood on earth? Or are you so fearful of “fundamentalist Christians” that you have to separate yourself from their logical arguments, data, interpretations and many books on the subject and follow a fairy tale of origins? Our Catholic theologians titled Church Fathers all agreed there was a universal flood. It is you therefore who have deserted the faith of the church but modern scientific experimentation is bringing us closer to the truth of our origilns and that of the dinosaurs in spite of attempts to ignore these data.
Regarding creation: All species were created in six literal days including the dinosaurs. They were still many in existence during St. John Damacene’s time of AD 750 as he talked about them not being ghosts but real live “dragons” upwards to 35 feet long etc. There are dinosaur depictions world-wide. Damacene even mentions one event in which Roman solders before his time had killed one that was 100 feet long [feet translated from the mesurements of his time period]. God created dinosaurs for many purposes; one that has not been mentioned is perhaps to defeat the words of scoffers [Peter II I think it is] in the days in which we live. Below are web sites for the flood controvery. Got to hilt the sack. Moses sizzles while Darwin fizzles
thule.org/mars/index.html
answersingenesis.org/articles/arj/v1/n1/mars-testament-catastrophe
space.com/scienceastronomy/solarsystem/explosive_mars_020328-1.html
One final question. No human bones have ever been found in association with dinosaur bones. And dinosaur bones are found in strata far below (older) than any that contain human remains. If the sedimentary rock and fossil records were produced by Noah’s Flood, do you propose that humans tread water for 150 days, so that their bones settled in the top of the fossil and rock record, while the dinosaurs all died and sank to the bottom immediately? I’m just asking you to use some common sense here. Unfortunately, this is the kind of stuff that drives people away from the faith, rather than drawing them in.
You are so funnyThe few human bones that have been documented with dinosaurs have since been ignored by scientists trained in the evolutionary religious system which is something like the Mythras religion of 100 BC Rome—life coming from a rock]
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Schn
Guest
Good scientist got attached to a bad idea. What’s so unusual about that. It happens.
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Mr_Skeptic
Guest
This should be a remarkable discovery, turning biological evolution, geology, and other sciences on their heads! Let’s hear more! Please provide the citations. Thanks.
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geoformeo
Guest
Ahh, but you’re missing the point. Hope and its opposite, despair, are higher-order emotions wrought by rational beings. Humans can hope, you’re right, but they can also despair. They can suffer, but they can also rejoice. Animals cannot experience or feel these things, because they do not have the rationality for higher-order emotions. An animal with no capacity for hope can’t possibly despair or suffer, precisely because it doesn’t have the capacity. If I had no capacity for understanding or experiencing light, then darkness would have no meaning.
It doesn’t surprise me that the organisms that are closest genetically to us have some of the more basic emotions, like happiness and sadness. I would say you even see it in dogs. But that should be the case, as there should be a gradation of emotions based upon brain function. However, there is still a huge chasm between what chimps experience and what we do. A chimp may “be” happy or sad, but it doesn’t “know” that it is happy or sad.
Absolutely, and it is something that only we rational creatures can admire, by the way. From a practical standpoint as I explained in a previous post, pain is an advantageous evolutionary adaptation (a good thing), and the Earth would be just a little bit crowded if things didn’t ever die but continued to reproduce, don’t you think? Not to mention the fact that life wouldn’t really have any intrinsic value if there weren’t any death, would it?
I suppose it could, but not necessarily. It depends what you mean by “problem of evil.” You seem to refer to death, and probably natural disasters, as things that are intrinsically evil. There you go again categorizing a higher-order product of rationality. We can recognize behaviors and label events as evil, but would dinosaurs have seen their own demise as “evil”? For that matter, are volcanic eruptions on a planet devoid of life “evil”?
That just goes to show how far mankind has fallen. Yet that example is cherry picking. You could just as equally show some of the intrinsically heroic actions people do…Mother Teresa devoting her life to helping the poor and feeding the hungry…A soldier who dives on a grenade to save his comrades…A person offering an organ to a stranger who needs a transplant.
Only moral creatures can know to do the most intrinsically depraved or heroic things. The mere fact that you take offense when someone says “don’t act like an animal” shows your differentiation from one.
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geoformeo
Guest
If that is the case, then how is your justification of your anti-old radiometric dates any different than mine? I could say the exact same thing back to you. You’re arguing with the 2nd-grade “I know you are, but what am I?” logic.
But you’re lumping all scientists into the category of “those who equate God with evolution”, when there is nothing further than the truth. Similarities between species may not be conclusive evidence that we all come from one common ancestor, but the fact that every single life form on Earth is DNA-based sure is. And the reason theologians haven’t weighed in on it is because it is not a theological question, it is a scientific one. Scientists answer “how” questions, not “why” questions.
If you really want to know the answers to these questions, I suggest you read Dawkins’ “The Blind Watchmaker.” His science is very good, his theology is very bad. If you can sift through the bad theology, you will have a very good picture of how this happens.
Fair enough, but the standards should apply to me as well. As one who works as an earth science professional, I know what I am talking about and how not to trust SOME scientists and their interpretations.
The big to-do was that they said there was something that “might” be the remains of life. As it turned out, it was concluded that it wasn’t the remains of life, hence the media’s complete blackout with regard to the meteorite. The reasonable, common sense scientists were not jumping to conclusions and were working hard in the lab to discover the truth, which, when it came out, no one wanted to hear.
- No, God is the creator of the natural laws (and therefore, allowed them to be studied through science).
- It is not. The problem is people equate God with only acting through miracles, and do not see His hand in the natural laws.
- As above.
- Again, YOU seem to be equating science and God. Part 2, see question 2 answer.
- Why can’t SOME non-scientists do the same? Why can’t SOME people believe in God?
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Astrochemist
Guest
We agree. Science is not greater than God.
I still don’t understand it.
We have seen speciation in action (where one species evolves into another), determined loosely by the inability for the original species to mate with the evolved species. This has been determined in fruit flies.
It is, however, true that many aspects of evolution cannot be observed in our time-scale. However, I would challenge that none of my work in science can be observed in our time-scale (analgous interactions can be, as with the fruit flies, but not the actual interactions I posit). When we observe molecules in space, and we posit reactions that produce and destroy these molecules, the abundances take hundreds of thousands of years to accumulate, because of the diffuse nature of space. I would also challenge, though, that any historical science cannot be upheld by your criteria: there would be no way to accept that Napoleon attempted conquest of Russia, or that Alexander attempted to conquer India, because none of us have “seen it in action”.
Your criteria is your own; it is just not the criteria scientists themselves use in order to determine what is most likely real. And that’s the whole goal: to determine what is most likely reality. We simply use the best ideas we have at the time.
My third question was:
(3) If no to (2), why not, and would this account contradict evolution? If yes to (2), what would you consider to be sufficient evidence to falsify the creation account (as an example)?
What I am asking here (since you said ‘yes’ to (2)) is what, hypothetically, would falsify the creation account?
Science has explanatory power because it has predictive power. Every scientific theory or claim should be able to make predictions that can be explored. If these predictions are found to be accurate (within a margin of error), then there is verification for that theory. If they are inaccurate, then the test is done again and again. If the result continues to differ from the prediction, then the theory is falsified.
For example, in evolution, if a rabbit fossil were found in the pre-cambrian, this would falsify evolution, and a new, different theory would have to be developed.
If the creation account is a scientific proposition, what could we possibly observe that would falsify it?
Thank you very much for your answers.
I would suggest reading, if you haven’t already, “Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution” by Theodosius Dobzhansky, a Christian.
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grannymh
Guest
For the record: Human beings are not in the same category as dinosaurs, fruit flies or chimps.
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StAnastasia
Guest
Yes, scientifically we are in the same category. In fact, one of our nearest sets of relatives on the universal tree of life are the slime molds:
http://scienceblogs.com/voltagegate/upload/2007/05/800px-Phylogenetic_tree.svg.png
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Schn
Guest
Yeah, when you get down to it, everything is in the same category.
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geoformeo
Guest
Sorry, Hugh, but you just don’t understand the basics of radiometric dating. C-14 is an accurate method of dating for organic objects (carbon-based) that are less than 50,000 years old. But you cannot use it for anything older, because too many half-lives would have passed for any of the parent material to be left in sufficient quantity for sampling and dating. Also, sedimentation rates have no bearing on radiometric dating, as only igneous or metamorphic minerals are dated.
So why don’t we find any dinosaur fossils in the Pleistocene glacial deposits of that age? Or did the ice ages never happen either, simply because they are not specified in the Bible?
Seriously, Hugh. Have you ever seen a T-Rex skeleton? Can you really say with a straight face that man walked side by side with them? Because if they ever did, we certainly wouldn’t be here right now to discuss it. Are you going to attack logic by continuing to promote such an irrational idea? Do you have small children? I suggest showing them a picture of a T-Rex and asking them what would happen if T-Rex’s were still alive today. Kids will give you the logical straight-talk.Are you going to attack medical laboratories and doctors for daring to use cat-scanning equipment for challenging your sacred cow by proving dinosaurs and man walked together in the same “cretaceous” strata? As for erosion over time a Ph.D. hydraulic engineer from the UN of IL has shown that the very thick strata appears to have been deposited twice daily by rapidly moving huge tides carrying sediments!
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