Lois & Clark Forums Forums General Discussion Fun with Polls What do you believe in?

Ann,

ID is defined as you explain. This is also the definition I give above in my previous posts. As I say in my last post, ID scientists have written entire books explaining why evolution fails to explain the design evident in life, and why they believe intelligent design best explains certain features of life.

Where the overlap comes is in personal beliefs which was the topic of this poll. A person who believes in the Biblical account of creation might find it fascinating that the science of ID has discovered evidence that life *was* in fact designed. Said person could say he or she believed in both creationism and ID.

Likewise, there are many religious people who believe God created the universe and also that God used evolution to create mankind.

The first view can no more be used to discredit ID as a science than the second view can be used to discredit evolution.

It is also possible for a person to believe that ID is correct in stating that certain features of life could not have come evolved, but rather clearly show elements of design, and yet find the evidence of the existence of evolution compelling. (I'm speaking of macroevolution here, that is, the belief that new species evolved from older ones.) Thus it is possible to believe in both ID and evolution.

Interesting.

About a month ago, I went to hear a lecture by a man who used to belong to a rather hard-core Christian sect, but he has now left it. I expected him to talk about his time in the sect and why he joined it and how he left, but instead he devoted almost his entire lecture to hailing the accuracy of evolution and attacking the fallacies of ID. I was more than a little bored and had a hard time concentrating, but I remember two things that he said, that I would like to ask you about, Vicki.

First, this man said that proponents of ID in the United States had taken ID to court to have it accepted as a fully scientific theory that could be taught in American public schools on an equal footing with evolution. But instead the judge had ruled that the proponents of ID had not managed to present any compelling scientific evidence to bolster their claims, so that, therefore, ID did not deserve to be treated as a scientific theory. Do you know anything about this, Vicki?

The second thing I remember from this lecture is that the lecturer claimed that ID proponents had taken a book that promoted creationism and simply exchanged the word "God" every time it appeared in the text with words like "creator" or "intelligent designer". The lecturer thus claimed that a book promoting ID was basically identical to a book promoting creationism. Do you know anything about this, Vicki?

Ann

I assume the gentleman was talking about Kitzmiller v. Dover. Yes, I have heard of this case. It is, basically, as you have described. If you're asking my personal opinion, I have read the court decision in the Dover case and find it to be seriously flawed.

I have never heard of the second incident. I strongly suspect what he actually said was that if a book about creationism were edited so that the word "God" were changed to "creator", you would have a book about ID. In which case, I would say he is mistaken. If he really did say that ID proponents had actually done this, then I would accuse him of lying.

Thanks for your opinion on this, Vicki. Thank you, too, for providing more information than I had myself.

Ann

Btw, the book Ann is referring to would be "Of Pandas and People".

Btw, I'd like to dispute that:


And, yes, I've been bombarded with lots of evidence for various splinter groups, and I haven't found anything "disproving" evolution that couldn't be explained just as well without a creator. (But maybe that's because most of the people I argued with were Young Earth Creationists.

Oh, OK. I did not recognize the Of Pandas and People controversy from the man's description. It appeared to me from Ann's post that the man was saying some ID proponents had taken a previously published book about creationism, changed the word "God" to "creator" and then declared it to be a book about ID. This simply did not happen.

The supposedly "telling, significant, and revealing" chain of events regarding Of Pandas and People is as follows: The authors of Pandas believe in Intelligent Design. They wrote a book, in which they did not discuss religion or religious doctrine, but rather explained why empirical evidence and observation had led them to believe in ID.

The controversy stems from the fact that in an early draft of their book, the authors used the word "creation" to describe the, well, creation of life. Before the final draft was written, however, the Supreme Court ruled in the Edwards case that Biblical Creationism is religion and cannot be taught as science. Although their book is not about Biblical Creationism, the authors were certainly well aware of the efforts of Evolutionists to paint the ID movement as "stealth Creationism". If I were one of the authors, I might also have looked again at my rough draft and said, "You know, *I* know what I meant and *you* know what I meant, but I can just see the Evolutionists jumping on this word here, claiming it is proof positive that they were right all along about ID being nothing more than creationism in disguise. I think it would be best to change this word before we publish, just to be sure there is no confusion."

As it turned out, the plaintiffs in the Dover case argued that the efforts by the authors of Panda to distance themselves from Biblical Creationism was proof that ID is, in reality, nothing but Biblical Creationism. Unfortunately, the judge agreed. I guess it just goes to show that sometimes, you can't win for losing.

Yes, that's what I was saying, but I told you I was bored by the man's lecture and had a hard time concentrating. So I got things mixed up. Sorry for confusing you, Vicki, and thank you for identifying the book for me, Mellie.

Ann

I can understand changing a possibly offensive word, should it turn up occasionally - but 150 times?

I found a few excerpts of both "The Mystery of Life's Origin" by Charles Thaxton, who later edited "Of Pandas and People". The book is strictly creationist stuff.

The latter quote shows how the replacement of the word "creationists" with the term "design propononents" took place, as parts of the original word were not deleted. With a dose of irony, this mistake is referred to as "the missing link between creationism and intelligent design".

Thank you. I believe those quotes show exactly what I was trying to say regarding the overlap of beliefs.

Of course, whether or not ID can be considered "science" is another altogether. Science depends on the methodology, not the beliefs (religious or otherwise) of the scientist.

I once tried to have a discussion with a Young Earth Creationist, and it was like getting blood from a stone. Or it was like hitting a brick wall and getting blood from my own forehead.

It happened back in the eighties. I read in Sweden's most prestigious daily newspaper that a hardcore creationist worked as a science teacher in northern Sweden. Among the things that he taught his middle school pupils was that the Earth is 6,000 years old and that people and dinosaurs existed at the same time. Back then I had just finished reading the Bible carefully, and I was just raring to take on a fight with someone who insisted that everything in the Bible was absolutely true. So I wrote a circa 60-page letter to this guy, asking him how he could tell his pupils that everything in the Bible was true. I also made a list of what I regarded as glaring errors in the Bible, beginning with the fact that Genesis starts off with two completely different and mutually exclusive accounts of the creation, namely Genesis 1:1-2:3 versus Genesis 2:4-25.

Well. After a while this guy wrote a three-page letter back to me. He told me that I had misunderstood the Bible, that everything in it is absolutely true, and that the two accounts of the creation are actually one and the same story, written from two different points of view. Now I was even more infuriated, so I wrote a 119-page letter back to him.

I got another short letter back from him. He ignored absolutely all my arguments, but he complimented me on my fine grasp of language. And because of that he offered me the chance to help him write the book which he was currently working on, where he argued that the Earth was created 6,000 years ago and where people and dinosaurs existed at the same time.

I wrote a half-page letter back to him. I told him that his second letter to me was the most insolent one I had ever received. What would he say if I refuted every argument he could ever have against evolution by saying that everything in On the Origin of the Species was absolutely true, but just told from different points of view? And what would he say if I offered him the chance to spend months helping me write a book where I made the kind of argument that he would absolutely hate, such as claiming that everything in the Bible was utter mumbo jumbo?

I never heard from him again. And I have never again made such an ambitious attempt to have a serious discussion with a Young Earth Creationist.

Ann

It could be that many of you think that I was far too aggressive when I attacked this man's religious beliefs, and unfortunately I have to agree with you that I was too aggressive. I want you to understand, however, that I wasn't attacking the man's religious beliefs as such, and I have never attacked another person this way just because he or she was religious.

No, I was attacking this particular person because he was a creationist who worked as a science teacher, and who used his position as a science teacher to foist his religious beliefs on children. He actually forced his pupils to repeat his creationist beliefs if they wanted to get a passing grade, can you believe it?

Also, this man was utterly shameless about what he was doing. He was interviewed by Sweden's biggest and most prestigious daily newspaper, and he frankly admitted that he taught his middle school pupils that the Bible was the only source of scientific knowledge that they needed, because the Bible was right about everything it said. It was this claim of his that I was challenging in my letters to him. I wanted him to explain to me how the Bible could be so utterly trustworthy when it contradicted itself so many times. And his reply to me was that the Bible doesn't contradict itself, it just tells the same story from different points of view.

Just for the sake of the argument, imagine that you yourself had fiddled with the truth and told the same story in two quite different, and mutually exclusive, ways. Imagine too that someone pointed this out to you. Instead of being embarrassed, you would frankly admit that you had told the story differently, but you had not been lying at all, because the two mutually exlusive versions of the story were both gospel truths, just told from two different points of view! Could any of you be so shameless as to make such a statement and expect to get away with it? I doubt it. But this creationist teacher was that shameless. The reason why he was writing a book, by the way, was that he needed a school book that taught creationism in Swedish in a way that was suitable for children, and no such book existed. So he had to write it himself, which is why he was enlisting my help, apparently expecting me to actually give it to him.

Looking back, I can see that I went about this whole affair in a way that was utterly improductive. If I really wanted to force this teacher to change the things he taught his pupils I should have contacted his principal, not written letters to the man himself. And I should perhaps have contacted the Swedish National School Inspection, too. I can't be proud of my own behaviour here. But the whole thing made a lasting impression on me and helped cement my conviction that I myself am a non-religious person.

Ann

Looking at the last post by Vicky and the ones that have been posted before for comparison, I have to seriously ask if there are two Vickies.

Nope. Only one me.


Ann,

You will get no argument from me regarding the YEC teacher.

Lara Joelle Kent wrote:

That's not an original observation, Lara. But your analysis is flawed.

That's the way the story has been since it was written down. Do you really think that if your argument was valid it wouldn't have been changed sometime in the preceding millennia?

Here's what you're missing. In modern literature, whether fiction or non-fiction, the narrative thread is linear, going from beginning to end unless otherwise specifically labeled. But ancient cultures, including Greek, Babylonian, Hebrew, and others, didn't record information that way. It wasn't unusual, for example, to read a summary of a series of events followed by a more detailed exposition. The play "Antigone," credited to Sophocles, begins with a simple statement by the two sisters about a freshly-concluded battle in which their two brothers had both died. The next scene describes the battle in more garish detail given by the Greek chorus. Immediately following that, the king comes on stage and restates the narrative a third time.

Each telling gave a bit more detail and a different point of view to the story of the battle. And just because the tale is thrice-told does not mean that there were three battles. The "contradiction" you pointed to in Genesis 2 is not a contradiction at all. It's simply an ancient narrative device that we don't use all that often any more.

Of course, there are modern histories of Europe which state that Napoleon was defeated at Waterloo by the Duke of Wellington and his allies, and then which go on to give a detailed account of the battle. That doesn't mean that the battle was fought twice. It only means that the author is telling the story in two different ways.

There is a statement in Genesis 2:5 that says "No shrub of the field had yet grown on the land, and no plant of the field had yet sprouted, for the LORD God had not made it rain on the land, and there was no man to work the ground." When my wife came in from her garden a few weeks ago, she told me she'd planted carrots and tomatoes and strawberries and a few other things. I went out to the garden and didn't see any of those plants. All I saw was dirt. But I understood that she meant that she had placed the seeds in the ground and that they would sprout soon, after she watered her garden.

Genesis 2:5 does NOT say that there were no plants or trees. It says only that the shrubs and plants of the field hadn't sprouted. Remember, by a literal account, it had only been three days, and that's pretty soon to expect a crop from what you've just planted.

The implication in your parenthetical statement that YECs don't think but only parrot what they're told is incorrect. I hope I have explained the argument sufficiently.

Lara also wrote:

Carbon-14 dating is based on comparing the amount of the mildly radioactive isotope carbon-14 to the amount of its inert byproduct, carbon-12, in a given organic sample. The half-life of carbon-14 (at which point it has lost half of its previous radioactivity) is about 5,730 years. Once a given sample has gone through seven half-lives, it cannot be dated any further back. So the maximum time a carbon-14 dating can give any organic sample is about 40,000 years.

I say this to state that I am an "young earth" creationists, but I do not hold to an absolute limit of 6,000 years in the Bible. The Bible never makes any claims about the age of the Earth, only about how it and the life on it came to be. I personally have no problem with dating the Earth at around 50,000 to 60,000 years of age. Not all YECs are as dogmatic (and selective) as the ones you have encountered.

Of course, let's not forget that everyone is selective and views the world through certain lenses. I am very up front about my lenses. Others on this board, both among those who agree with me and those disagree with me, are equally up front about their lenses. Some are not.

Here is a link to more fully explain carbon-14 dating.

Originally posted by Terry Leatherwood:

The comparison between "Antigone" and Genesis is good enough, Terry. It is certainly good enough as a foundation for a religious belief in the historical accuracy of Genesis. Indeed, Genesis itself is good enough as a foundation for a religious belief in the historical accuracy of Genesis.

But if you want to claim a scientific knowledge of the historical accuracy of Genesis and base that knowledge on the narrative similarity between "Antigone" and Genesis, then, in my opinion, your argument isn't good enough. And if you want others to accept the historical accuracy of Genesis, then I think you have to do much better than just point out the similarities in narrative style between "Antigone" and Genesis.

The bottom line is this. Would any historians claim that "Antigone" definitely portrays a millennia-old battle in a perfectly historically accurate way? Would any historian claim that all three descriptions of the battle that can be found in "Antigone" are all perfectly accurate? And for that matter, would any historian argue that the battle that "Antigone" describes must have happened in the first place just because Sophocles says so?

Yes, narratives were different in the past. And in the past it was harder to know what the exact historical truth might have been. Back then there were no photos, no newspapers, no television, no voice recordings. There were few records of the past, few eyewitness accounts. There were legends of things that had happened in the past, but people had no way of really knowing if any of it was true. Why shouldn't our ancestors tell the same story three times in three different ways, when they couldn't know which if any of the three versions was true anyway?

Our present ability to record the world around us for posterity is quite new. Today we are used to the idea that we can be relatively sure of what happened in the (recent) past, but our ancestors simply couldn't know very much of what had happened a hundred years or more before they were born. There were stories but few or no reliable records. So the past, therefore, became a realm of fantasy and myth. Of course our ancestors might as well believe in these myths, because they could never disprove them, could they?

As I read the stories of the Gospels of how Jesus had risen from the dead and shown himself to various people, I was struck by how the people he showed himself to didn't recognize him at first. That would have made sense if he had already been given his "heavenly body" that Christians believe in, but it is noteworthy that the people who met the risen Christ didn't seem to react to his appearance at all. Not only did they not recognize him, but they also didn't seem to think that he looked at all "heavenly" or stunningly beautiful. They didn't recognize him, pure and simple.

And then I asked myself, how could these people be sure that the person they met was Jesus in the first place? How could they recognize him? And it struck me that most people just wouldn't be able to recognize Jesus. Think of it. Not only were there no photographs back then, but all Jews were also strictly forbidden to make pictures or images of anything. Therefore, no contemporary image of Jesus can ever have existed. Only those who had seen the living Jesus themselves could ever hope to really recognize him. Really, only those who had met Jesus in person and were particularly good at memorizing faces could really recognize him.

My point? The four Gospels all tell completely different stories of how Jesus showed himself to other people after his resurrection. Not one Gospel confirms a single post-resurrection story of another Gospel. There can be different explanations for this. One possible reason, however, could be that the stories of how people met the risen Christ began circulating gradually, and that they were based on rumors, not hard facts like the details of the crucifixion, which are pretty consistent. Anyway, if you really don't know what Jesus looked like and have no way of ever finding out, how can you be sure that you haven't met him? And how can you know that another person who tells a story about meeting Jesus is not telling the truth?

Bottom line, Terry, is that many details of the past are hard or impossible to know. The Bible tells stories of the past, and the Bible does, indeed, tell those stories in different ways, which leads to many contradictions. Creationists who ask other people to accept the verbatim accuracy of the Bible really ask other people to believe that the Bible is the scientific and literal truth because the Bible is the scientific and literal truth.

That is a perfect example of circular reasoning.

Ann

Terry, I understand what different points of view are, but telling a completely different story is telling a completely different story.
Gen 1: plants - animals - humans (male and female)
Gen 2: man - plants - animals - woman
Even if we agree that there must have been some plants, only not those of the field and no trees, either, there is a difference in the order of things. Truly, things get mixed up quite badly in one of the first chapters of Genesis (the first of which, at least, follows some scientific logic, although the timescale is way off), considering this is supposed to be the same story told from different points of view. One of the narrators must have been badly drunk (or whatever) to get things as wrong as he did. Or maybe it's just the archfiend messing with our heads so we just have to believe a little harder? Because it's not just the plants, a point you can argue because not all plants are necessarily included in the group not yet there, it's also about all the animals which are later created as man's help. Later, after man is settled in the garden God planted.

And what about the flood? 2=14? Or 2=4?

Well, yes, that's somewhat obvious. But if your wife told you she had planted a garden with plants, not seeds - and then you go and see nothing but dry dirt, you'll start to wonder. Also, if she told you she had brought a number of animals - and you couldn't find any because they are still to be taught... honestly, wouldn't you start to worry about her sanity? And if she then told you that dinner is ready - would you actually believe it, or expect to have to prepare it yourself? Because that's what happened with the accounts in Gen 1 and Gen 2.

Also, I'm well aware of how 14C-dating works and what its limits are. But there's a number of other isotopes used for dating (half-life given in brackets): uranium(235U: 700 million years; 238U: 4.5 billion years), potassium (40Na: 1.3 billion years), rubidium (87Rb: 50 million years), chlorine (36Cl: 308,000 years), argon (40Ar: 1.25 billion years), iodine (129I: 15,7 million years).

All of these are used in geology, and many of them were used to give an estimate of the age of earth. Also, a number of meteorites have been examined to verify this, since material from our planet can change its composition due to processes in the core. (Since modern theories claim that the solar system was created in the following order: 1) sun; 2) gas planets (first Jupiter, then Saturn, then the others), 3) earth-like planets and smaller pieces of rock, this is not the worst idea.) And you know what? The results of several meteorites plus the oldest lead ores of our planet show pretty much the same results: 4.5 billion years. (One exception shows a result of 4.68 +/- 0.15 billion years.)

@Ann: Re: Circular Argument:

Ann wrote:

Hmm. The resurrection story circulated gradually? Really? Then why did the disciples, all of whom (except a few women) ran away in fear and hid at the crucifixion, yet just a few weeks later were - at the risk of their own lives - loudly proclaiming that Jesus had risen from the dead? Why did the vast majority of these men and women, when faced with the choice of dying or recanting their belief in Jesus' resurrection, refuse to change their tune?

Let me ask another question. Why didn't the Jews just take the body of Jesus out of the grave, tie it to a wagon, and parade it around Jerusalem? That would have squelched the rumor pretty quickly, I'd think, but they didn't do that. The two obvious answers are 1) the disciples stole the body so they could hoodwink the people or 2) Jesus really was resurrected.

If you pick the first choice, you have two other questions which you must answer. 1) If the disciples were going to run a con game on the people, what did they get out of it? There are no indications in any contemporary history that any of them got rich off proclaiming that the Christ was alive again. 2) Why would the disciples willingly die for something they knew was a lie? Because sane people don't do that. Even a habitual con man will fess up rather than die for his lie.

And if you assert that the disciples were all mentally unbalanced, you need to explain how they could all have traveled with a man for more than three years, seen what He did, heard what He said, and witnessed how He died, and all told basically the same story. Insane people don't share their pathologies on that level of detail. They never have.

Your objection isn't original, Ann. Others have put forth similar theories, but they simply aren't supported by the evidence. The behavior of the disciples is reasonable, rational, and logical - if they saw and knew the resurrected Jesus.

Lara, I know that you knew about carbon-14 half-lives. I put that in for the readers who weren't as scientifically literate as you are.

Circular arguments, Lara? Let me present you with one from the "other side" of the question.

YEC: How do you date the fossils found in solid rock?

Evolutionist: By the rock strata the fossils are found in.

YEC: How do you date the rock strata?

Evolutionist: By the artifacts found in them.

You object, I'm sure. So let me point you to an experiment performed by the RATE group ( (here is their home website) for information on dating methods.

In 2000, rock samples were taken from Mt. Ngauruhoe, located in the center of New Zealand's North Island. These samples were from the eruptions on February 11, 1949, June 4, 1954, june 30, 1954, July 14, 1954, and February 19, 1975. They were sent to the Geochron Labortories in Cambridge, Massachusetts for whole-rock potassium-argon dating. The samples were sent on three different occasions, giving the lab plenty of raw material to work with. The samples were not described or identified except as probably being very young rocks with very little argon in them. This would ensure that the lab would take extra care during analysis.

These rocks had been formed from volcanic activity between twenty-five and fifty-one years prior to testing. The lab returned results between "less than 270,000 years old" and "3.5 million years old."

That's not even close, Lara. It seems to me that the reliability of the potassium-argon dating method is at least questionable and at most totally useless.

And if the half-life of uranium-235 is 700,000 years, why hasn't it all decayed down to inert matter and isotopes in the last 4.5 billion years?

For an example of dating items by the strata in which they were found, please examine Eugene DuBois, the man who found "Java Man" in 1891. He claimed that the skull cap he found was from the Trinil layer, which at the time he dated as being pre-Pleistocene. But DuBois was a medical doctor at the time, not a geologist. He was not qualified at that time to make that call. In 1948, Alan Houghton Brodrick (a famous paleoanthropolgist) wrote that the dating of the Trinil beds was still not clear; therefore, DuBois' dating of Java Man was at best a random guess.

On top of that, the femur which is nearly always associated with the skull cap was found a year later and fifty feet away (a figure with which DuBois was not consistent over his lifetime). Anatomists of today - and of DuBois' day - believe that the femur did not belong to the skull fragment. By the end of his life, DuBois was almost alone in his insistence that they were from the same species, if not from the same subject.

DuBois also had in his possession two modern human skulls found in Java in 1888 near the village of Wadjak (now spelled Wajak). In every way, they are modern human skulls. But DuBois didn't publish anything about them until 1920 (except in quarterly and annual reports to the director of education, religion, and industry of the Dutch East Indies government). No one even knew he had them until then. The site where they were found was destroyed by quarrying, so there is no way to date them geologically. But most scientists who have studied both sets of fossils (the Java Man skull cap and femur along with the Wajak skulls) believe that they are similar in age. However, the Java Man skull cap looks more Neandertal than anything else, and the Wajak skulls look quite modern, as does the Java Man femur.

Many feel that DuBois' handling of the Wajak skulls was at best highly unprofessional and at worst deliberately dishonest. DuBois always insisted that Java Man was the Missing Link between ancient proto-man and modern humans. Very few paleoanthropologists today accept that interpretation.

Lara also wrote:

You're not going to like my answer, but I'll give it anyway.

When God created the animals in front of Adam in the Garden of Eden, He wasn't creating them for the first time. There's nothing to indicate that this was the first and only creation of all the animals. And the Genesis narrative was not written to satisfy any person's desire for scientific accuracy.

Your objection to the story of the flood on the basis of how many of which animals Noah loaded onto the ark is interesting, but only because you're trying to be 21st-century scientifically literal again. In Genesis 6:19-20 it says:

Seems pretty straightforward. But another valid interpretation of this instruction is that Noah is to bring mating pairs of every animal onto the ark. The restatement of the instruction in Genesis 7:2-3

is exactly that: a restatement with more detail. If this were a real theological problem with Genesis, why hasn't it been corrected before now? Or, perhaps, why hasn't the entire narrative been discredited? Despite the insistence of many with whom I've spoken about Christianity, it is not a requirement that Believers check their reasoning abilities at the door and swallow everything they're told without investigating it themselves.

In closing, let me refer you to the book "Bones of Contention" by Professor Marvin Lubenow. the professor had spent (by the publication date of 2004) more than three decades researching fossils and human evolution. It is a scientific assessment of human fossils from a creationist viewpoint.

Due to the potentially volatile nature of this thread, I'm not going to post any more responses here. Should anyone desire to communicate directly with me, I'll be glad to respond, but not here. I just don't have the time, and I don't want to light off any fiery controversies.