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Showing posts from November, 2017

Logic and Definitions

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Back in the olden days while studying contract law, one thing was frequently emphasized: for a contract to be valid, there has to be a meeting of the minds. That is, both parties need to understand the terms of the agreement. Ever sign a legal document or read the terms of service for many products online? Words and expressions are defined, often in excruciating detail. This is foundational to reduce confusion. Credit: Pixabay / PDPics Ambiguity can be fun. Some owlhoot challenged me to a debate while I was stuffing feathers into a pillow. So, I threw down on him. "Throw down" can be literal, or the colloquialism for engaging in a challenge. It may have originated in days of old when knights were bold, and one would throw down the gauntlet when issuing a challenge.  We don't need confusion on terms when trying to understand or debate a subject. I disremember when and about what, but I was having an argument with a guy for parts of two days because we each had a...

C.S. Lewis and Evolution

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by Cowboy Bob Sorensen C.S. "Jack" Lewis was born on November 29, 1989. Originally baptized in the Church of Ireland, which is Anglican, he fell away from his faith and became an atheist. Lewis was reluctant to relinquish atheism, but realized that Christianity is true. Jack was (and is) highly regarded as a leading apologist for the Christian faith. He wrote many fiction and nonfiction books, and most are available today. There are also scores of biographies of this complex figure. Radcliffe Camera, Oxford / William Leighton Leitch While Lewis appealed to many people with his intellectual approaches to Christianity and his refutations of atheism, his theology was rather weak. Apparently, he did not want to offend anyone, and kept his scope broad — too broad, in my view. Like William Lane Craig, he did not argue from and for the Bible, but seemed to argue for theism in general. In addition, C.S. Lewis seemed to affirm the almost-Roman Catholic doctrines of the Ang...

Secularist Laments Lagging Evolutionary Indoctrination

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Although evolutionists have maintained a stranglehold on educational indoctrination in many Western countries for decades, some get on the prod that their conditioning is not yet complete. Contrary views of origins are actively suppressed, and even though secular educators claim to encourage critical thinking, only the sanitized versions of evolution are presented and inconvenient facts are omitted in government educational systems. That is one reason Question Evolution Day is important. Modified from a photo at Freeimages, original from Jeramey Jannene (click graphic for larger image) In the United States and other Western countries, fascism is opposed in theory. Many people consider fascist a useful pejorative, projecting it on people they dislike (often without knowing the meaning of the word), and then employing fascistic philosophies and practices , including violence and leftist propaganda — sort of like when the Nazis burned down the Reichstag and blamed others for t...

The Oort Cloud: Faith Without Evidence

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Atheists and evolutionists mock biblical creationists for believing in the observed work of the Creator, but have their own blind faith and "miracles". One example is their fact-free presuppositional assertions that neutron stars make gold in space . Another example of faith in their own schemes is discussed below.   A serious problem for long-age cosmic evolution is the existence of comets. Those nuclei of those bad boys are small by astronomical standards (but you would not want one in your driveway), and are seen when they get close enough to the sun. Then, some of the surface burns off and we see the glow and long gaseous tail. They go orbiting again, and more of the nucleus burns off on the next pass. Repeat and fade until nothing is left, or it crashes into a planet or something. Using the dating methods and assumptions of secular scientists, comets should not exist because they would have been entirely used up millions of Darwin years ago. This is where the scienti...

Appeal to False Authority, TalkOrigins, and Diamonds

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Creationists will often see a fallacy called appeal to authority in discussions with atheists and evolutionists. We frequently encounter this at The Question Evolution Project and other places on teh interweb. While referring to an authority on a subject is legitimate, many tinhorns will refer to someone who has no qualifications in a subject, such as Clinton Richard Dawkins railing about theology. Atheists and anti-creationists get the bits in their teeth and ride hard to heavily biased atheistic storage facilities to find material on a subject, throw links at us, and essentially say, "I cited TalkOrigns! Case closed! " (Seems to me that this might qualify as confirmation bias , but I digress.) Citing those places is easier than thinking or reading creationary material, but those sites are unreliable; it is appeal to false authority in action. Recently, I made a post and said that opponents will go to the excuse mills. A furious atheopath proved me right by ignori...

Nature Teaches Humans about Design

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Okay, you caught me. "Nature" does not "teach" anyone anything, just like "science" does not "say" or "know" anything. That is the reification fallacy . Generally, it is not important except in formal debates and similar situations. Otherwise, so many people use the fallacy, we would be calling them out on simple figures of speech left and right and reigning in simple conversations. In conversations, people generally do not do this to manipulate the thinking of others to fall for propaganda. So, I felt like doing it here. Besides, the three links below are using the same figure of speech. Oh, and don't worry, the articles linked below aren't very lengthy. A good designer is going to spend time making plans that include a variety of elements, as well as how the project can withstand variables. The infinite mind of the Master Engineer had everything covered in his plans, which took him no time at all. Humans used the minds that ...

Thankfulness and - Repurposing?

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From 1985-1992, American television had a series called MacGyver, which has become a bit of a cultural icon because of the hero's abilities to use chemistry, physics, and the like (as well as being able to think quickly) to make things happen and get out of difficulties. The series was rebooted in 2016. The idea of using whatever is available and fast thinking is often found in espionage movies and fiction. The concepts of multitasking and repurposing are found in many places, including our daily lives and in biology. Replica ship Mayflower II credit: Wikimedia Commons / OldPine It seems that that some MacGyvers were on the Mayflower as well. The midship beam was cracking, and for it to completely break would have been a death sentence. The resourceful crew cowboyed up and repurposed a part of a printing press' equipment to save the voyage — and a major part of American history. For this, many of us are thankful. Many of our organs, cells, and parts of our DNA are abl...

Species Confusion and the Created Kinds

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Scientists who are involved in biology disagree on the definition of species. Sometimes this happens with individual critters, but the broader use of the term is also disputed. It is the lowest ranking in taxonomy below genus, most often defined as organisms that can mate to produce fertile offspring . Doesn't always work that way, however. Liger at the Novosibirsk Zoo / Wikimedia Commons / Алексей Шилин We hear about hybrids, often in the plant kingdom. Animal hybrids usually cannot reproduce, and one of the most famous examples is the mule, from a male donkey and female horse. There are other hybrid animals as well. Darwin's imaginary "Tree of Life" gets its branches all tangled up with species interbreeding, and sometimes, the hybrids can breed with the parents, creating havoc for scientists at the genus level. It may be slightly less surprising when the matings happen in captivity, but they happen in the wild as well. Materialists like to reject any cons...

Ancient Algae Amazes Evolutionists

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Living things seem mighty recalcitrant when it comes to supporting evolutionary conjectures, including those things termed living fossils . Those are things that were thought to be extinct, then found alive and essentially unchanged after millions of alleged years. A green alga, a seaweed, is not quite a living fossil because it was thought to be extinct in North America but still living in other parts of the world. Well, it's been found in North America after all, and it's unchanged. In cases like this, wait for Darwin's Drones to bring out the usual boilerplate excuses: it didn't have to evolve, stasis, and things like that. This child doesn't fall for those tricks, because a lot of environmental things happen in a year, and evolutionary mythology breaks down if they think we're going to accept such "explanations". Aside from the anticipated excuses, there are several important facts that evolutionists overlook, including how critters and plants...

Evolutionists Get a Kick Out of Footprints

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Scientists and other people with training and experience can learn a great deal from footprints. Many people can see the different between a bird and a human for instance, but may have difficulty between those of a large dog and a bear. That could be a problem in the wilderness. Barefoot human impressions are very distinct, and a trained observer can learn a great deal about whoever made them. The fossilized human footprints discovered in Crete are somewhat indistinct, but cause some problems for common ancestor evolution. Modified from a graphic at Clker clipart The "our ancestors came out of Africa" mythology is threatened because of the dates evolutionists assigned to the footprints. Also, despite looking like someone is tromping through the mud and not sure of his or her footing, it is obvious that they were not made by anything other than a human. Some secularists do not want to believe the evidence because it threatens their death cult. Creationists do not have p...

Cosmic Alchemy and Stellar Gold?

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An interesting story about the merging of neutron stars (who did not bother to consult the Federal Trade Commission on their merger) involved some interesting information on their history and detection. This necessitates material on gravity waves, and some of Uncle Albert Einstein's work. From there, we were given some Big Bang cosmogony, chemistry, and chemistry's weird great grandfather that nobody likes to talk about: alchemy. The Alchemist / David Teniers the Younger Way back yonder in medieval times, some folks were attempting sciencey stuff by attempting to convert base metals (copper, lead, tin, and so forth) into gold. Imagine the devastating impact on economies if they succeeded! Alchemy was distantly related to chemistry for reasons that should seem obvious. We get exceptionally dense neutron stars commencing to merge, and the interaction supposedly produced a passel of gold. Problem is, it's all based on Big Bang presuppositions on the origin of the uni...

Evolutionists Reach Faulty Conclusions about Extinction

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When materialistic scientists argue from their evolutionary and deep time presuppositions, facts tend to get a mite scrambled. Speculations about things they think happened millions of Darwin years ago get added to the mix. When hearing, viewing, or reading about speculations that have no actual science behind them, it become difficult to stifle laughter. Credit: Freeimages / Aron Hess Geologically thinking, we have rock layers with fossils in them. Secular assumptions smuggle in long age presumptions (uniformitarianism), so the fossilized creatures appear that they were spread out over many years, and that there were several "great extinctions". However, secular scientists speculating about the distant past are not in agreement about how many extinctions happened. Worse for them, their conjectures fail to address observed evidence, but biblical creationists' models of the Genesis Flood have no difficulty giving rational explanations. Must grate on them that the ev...

Some Spiders Can Fly

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Some folks do not cotton to spiders, even getting the heebie-jeebies at the tiniest of them. I can understand being skittish with a spider that looks like if you tried to strike it with a tennis racket, it would take it away and strike you instead. Yep, that's alarming. Anyway, some might say, "I'm sure glad spiders can't fly!" Sorry, Sally, but some do fly — in a way. Those shimmering threads are not from UFOs, so Auntie Madge doesn't need to call the Air Force (Project Blue Book has been closed for a long time, anyway), nor are they " chemtrails " Just spiders doing ballooning stuff. Ballooning spiderlings image credit: Wikimedia Commons / Little Grove Farms / ( CC BY 3.0 ) Each of a huge number of spiders can shoot out some gossamer and ride the high winds. They don't all have happy landings, though. The survivors, though, hit the ground like special forces leaving their parachutes behind. How do they do this? Sure, the wind is an impor...

Excessively Presumptive Cosmologists

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In any field of science, there has to be some degree of presumption. Scientists have to presume the uniformity of nature and its laws (although secularists refuse to admit that God, who created everything, upholds the universe by his power). When getting further into evolution-related fields, more presumptions are made based on naturalistic presuppositions. This is clearly seen in cosmology — which is not even science , but a philosophy. Credit: NASA / ESA (modified) Usage does not imply endorsement of site contents Cosmic owlhoots Krauss and Scherrer wrote a paper that may not have been entirely serious, saying that cosmologists in the future may not have the necessary information to make the correct conclusions about the universe that today's scientists have made. What, nobody keeps or refers to records? The authors got the bit in their teeth and galloped off with the presumption that they are correct in the first place in the here and now. (Reminds me of the tinhorns who...

Puzzling Dart Frog Poison

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There are small critters in Central and South America have been given the name "poison dart frogs". Most have bright colors, but if you find yourself near them, resist the urge to pick them up. They are toxic, some are dangerously so. These attractive but dangerous amphibians were given their name because some species were used by natives in the area to poison the darts for hunting and such. Dendrobates tinctorius credit: Wikimedia Commons / Olaf Leillinger ( CC BY-SA 2.5 ) So, they're dangerous to touch, and the poison some secrete can be used to make lethal weapons. This raises some interesting questions: How does the poison work? How can they survive their own poison? What came first, the poison or the resistance? The first question involves biology and chemistry, but the other two are stumpers for evolutionists, because both the poison and the resistance must be operational at the same time, or nothing makes sense, nothing works — evolutionists have no plaus...

Evolutionists Censoring Biological Truth

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Advocates of minerals-to-microbiologist evolution are none to fond of information that contravenes their worldview. One way they do this is through outright censorship of creationary evidence . Another is to pile on misrepresentations, logical fallacies, and outright falsehoods . When caught lying, keep on lying. It's what they do. For that matter, I am convinced that many atheists and other evolutionists are afraid of creationary material, so they won't read it; some are so determined to contradict us that they will ridicule material based on a title or introduction alone — and have humiliated themselves by contradicting the evolutionary scientists they adore! CSIRO scientist sequencing DNA credit: CSIRO / Health Sciences and Nutrition Another tactic, frequently observed in leftist news media, is to ignore inconvenient truths and pretend that they do not exist. Darwin's Flying Monkeys© on the internet and other places bombard evolution skeptics with "mountains...