How to annoy a creationist: feathered dinosaurs

[pietillidie]

This is like the gay marriage thread; there will always people who hold to some quackery to the bitter end, damaging individuals and social development generally in the process. The delicious irony of course is the Book of Genesis is a quite brilliant saga which explores the destruction wrought by those who take "being chosen" way too literally.

The desperate need to feel special on the one hand, and assumptions about actually being special on the other, explain a heck of a lot of human nonsense.

[laird]

This is like the gay marriage thread; there will always people who hold to some quackery to the bitter end, damaging individuals and social development generally in the process. The delicious irony of course is the Book of Genesis is a quite brilliant saga which explores the destruction wrought by those who take "being chosen" way too literally.

I for one fully support gay marriage. Love is the only thing that matters, full stop. Who is anyone to judge anothers lifestyle.

Equal rights should be enjoyed by all, bar none.

[Tannin]

I wanna no what started it

Big bang?

WhT went bang? Is there an edge? What's past the edge?

Interesting questions, but off-topic in this thread. While the mechanisms of evolution (like those of, for example, geology, quantum mechanics, and even star formation) are well known and within broad limits not controversial, science as we know it today can barely even speculate sensibly about the events leading up to the big bang.

We simply don't have any data about events more than 14 billion years ago, and your guess is as good as anyone else's. (Well, we know that crakpots like Laird have a very bad track record with (relatively) easy questions about (relatively) recent things like evolution and continental drift, so we might say that his guesses about the deep past before the big bang should be suspect also. On the other hand, given that no-one knows anything about what happened more than 14 billion years ago, it strikes me that we might as well use his guess as any other.)

[Tannin]

I for one fully support gay marriage. Love is the only thing that matters, full stop. Who is anyone to judge anothers lifestyle.

Equal rights should be enjoyed by all, bar none.

^^^ Well said that man!

[HAL]

The name of someone I met online.

[think positive]

Share the misery I say, even you Hal

And it always beats the partner word

[HAL]

I always say, share and share alike.

[watt price tully]

How to annoy a creationist:

Be logical & rational.

One cannot be rational with the irrational.

One cannot be rational with those who have a fundamentalist interpretation of the bible.

One cannot be rational with delusional ideas in any form but in this case in the form of creationsim as a science.

[3.14159]

I wanna no what started it

Big bang?

WhT went bang? Is there an edge? What's past the edge?

great questions jo.
wht? we don't know.
is there an edge? no.
the universe is a closed space that has no edges,.. like the skin of a balloon.
what's past the edge?
what is outside of this universe is the unknown.
we may live in a multi-verse where new universes (like ours) are born every hour or every instant.
or we may live on the only one ever created. the smart money says multi-verse because the further we go, the larger reality proves it's self to be.
for instance.
Hoyle Shapely and Hubble.
There once was an astronomer named Harlow Shapley.
He famously saw a variable star in the Andromeda nebula (now called the Andromeda galaxy) and showed it to his boss Hoyle. Hoyle believed that the Milky way galaxy was the only galaxy.
Later he showed to Hubble who said Yes! This is proof that this galaxy is not a nebula. Further study showed that the universe is 13.14 billion years old. expanding and at some point in the past must have been very small and loaded with matter.
This theory is called the Theory called the Big Bang.

Hoyle is remembered as the crank scientist with the flawed theory.
Hubble is remembered as one of the 3 pillars of astronomy because he believed what he could see, not what doctrine told him to believe.

[Tannin]

^ That's not fair, 3. Hoyle was eccentric, and later in his career (as brilliant old men often do) he went of into various weird theories well beyond his core competence and training. Nevertheless, he was an astronomer of world renown and was unlucky not to be awarded a Nobel Prize for his pioneering work on stellar nucleosynthesis. His well-known work on and support of steady state theory was perfectly reasonable given the evidence available at the time, and he should not be dismissed simply because later work has found overwhelming evidence for the alternative big bang explanation. (By the way, we should remember who invented the term "big bang" - Fred Hoyle!)

In summary, Hoyle produced some outstanding theoretical work which remains current and important today; he produced some excellent theoretical work which turned out not to be correct; and in his declining years produced a fair bit of rather silly twaddle outside his core expertise.

This is the great thing about science. Science is not better than ignorance and religion because science does not make mistakes; science is better than ignorance and religion because science learns from mistakes in an organised and effective way. Mistakes are an integral part of the learning process. The scientific method relentlessly sifts human knowledge, keeping the truth and discarding falsehood. Little by little, the known truth grows. Of course, the exact same process applies in nature: the harsh realities of life sift out poor answers to the problem of survival and, little by little, the more useful answers grow and prosper. The name of this process is evolution.

[3.14159]

My point regarding Hoyle was he missed the significance of that variable star because he believed his own dogma.
Coining the term Big-Bang was his dismissive reaction to the growing body of evidence against his own Steady State theory!
He could have been a legend of cosmology.
Instead he is remembered as an unlucky Nobel prize loser (who's work remains relevant) and doesn't have a space telescope named after himself.

I mentioned Hoyle because Laird chose him as proof of the literal truth of the bible.

[Wokko]

The problem with GOD is he is the god of the gaps. Any gaps in scientific or earthly knowledge is ascribed to GOD. Don't know why the Sun comes up? It's a God. Don't know why the seasons change? That's a god too. Don't know something or understand how it works? Stick a god in there and the uncomfortable question goes away.

As the gaps disappear, so do the gods. The same applies for the universe, don't know how the universe happened? Must be God hey? NO. No it must not. We simply do not know yet where it came from. Best evidence available points to the Big Bang, but science wont just rest there like fundamentalist religionists rest on their collection of books called The Bible. Science will keep looking, keep probing and keep answering until hopefully one day there are no more gaps and no more need for gods.

If this quest for knowledge leads to a being that is beyond everything and started it all off, then great, but lets not fill every gap with a God simply because we have no better answer at the time. And if you can't dismiss your God due to 'faith' then reconcile that evolution is gods plan that stemmed from a moment of creation that began as a singular point of infinite density 13.8 billion years ago or so.

[David]

Very well posted, Wokko and Tannin. Both posts align with my general views on these subjects but are expressed in a much more articulate way than I seem to be capable of at the moment.

[Tannin]

^ Easy to fix. Simply observe Think Positive's technique. Friday nights, she expresses herself with energy and becomes positively loquacious. (Just beware of hangovers if you ain't used to it.)

[think positive]

Cheeky bugger

Sober as a judge right now watching sex and the city, got a 1.am mums taxi run!

Ugh it's cold out there!