Comment

Another Stealth Creationist Bill in Missouri

893
Mad Prophet Ludwig2/19/2009 4:45:15 pm PST

Here is my latest troll hammer. I am happy with it. I want to thank all of those who gave me advice on tactics and form. Please give feed back on this.

There are two parts.

Some frequently raised objections by Creationists:
Evolution is only a theory it is not a fact…
Theory in science does not mean what you think it means. A theory is not just something that people might believe is true. A theory is a rigorously tested, by multiple observers, falsifiable and predictive model of the physical world. A theory is consistent with all known observations. In the case of evolution, which has been around for close to 150 years, we are now looking at millions of man years of observation which is consistent with the theory and its predictions. In short, a theory is something proven to be fact beyond the standards of any court of law. Outside of theorems, which are mathematical statements proven to always be true, scientific theories are the most rigorously true statements made by man.

The Universe is only around 6000 years old…
Forget evolution for a moment and look at astronomy. Look up at the night sky. If you see something which is farther than 6000 light years away, that light took over 6000 years to get here. This is inescapable. If Paris is a 10 hour flight away and you show up in Paris, you had to leave at least 10 hours ago. The vast majority of what we see out there is thousands, millions and even billions of light years away.

Forget evolution for a moment and look at Physics. Consider nuclear decays. These are little atomic clocks. We can date rocks on the Earth to over 4,000,000,000 years old. If someone tells you not to believe that we know how to calculate these rates, then how is it we know how to build nuclear reactors and atomic bombs and those things work?

Forget evolution for a moment and look at geology. Rivers erode the Earth. The Earth has strata that take years to form. Mountains rise and decay. When we look at things like the Grand Canyon or Continental drift, we know that the Earth is much older than 6000 years old. It took a long time for the continents to get into their present shape.

Now look at Evolution, if you want to say the Earth is young, you are not just facing evolution but every branch of science. If you argue that God made the Earth already old, that means you believe He set up the whole visible universe and all of those clocks to lie to us. It is part of my faith that He always tells the truth. Also, if He is willing to deceive on a universal scale, how do you know that He did not also deceive in the words of scripture? Perhaps adultery really is the way to go, but He lied there too? NO, it is much better to believe He tells the truth and does not deceive.

I can not accept randomness. God runs the world…
The definition of random is a future event that can not be predicted. God already knows the future, so by definition, no event is random to him. You may not know the outcome of a coin toss, it is random to you, but if you are a believer then you believe that He does know the outcome. It was not random to Him. There is no contradiction. The randomness that we perceive does not inhibit you from believing that God runs the world anyway.

Further, the essence of quantum mechanics is inherent randomness. It is built into the very framework of the theory, and proof that we got that theory right is that you are reading these words on a transistor using computer. Transistors were invented by understand QM and they rely on it for their functioning. Is quantum theory also heresy? If it is wrong, how are you reading this?

Finally, Evolution is not completely random. Natural selection removes random things that don’t work.