Bill Nye Debates Ken Ham on New-Earth Creationism

"Live a good life. If there are gods & they are just, then they will not care how devout you have been, but will welcome you based on the virtues you have lived by. If there are gods, but unjust, then you should not want to worship them. If there are no gods, then you will be gone, but will have lived a noble life that will live on in the memories of your loved ones."

-Marcus Aurelius

 

Only problem, There is none good, no not one

 

Good God - well said!

 

On the obverse, Darwinism has it's own unexplained mysteries as well. The theory states that species branch out from a common ancestor. Nice. But the fossil record does not support this. Some 580 million years ago, Earth experienced the Cambrian Explosion. In a span of 50 million years, in some cases, as quick as 10 million years, entire species arose from nothing. By nothing, this means that certain animals started to appear with no known ancestors before it. Sudddenly, in the blink of (geologic) eye, Earth was populated by all the major species of life know today. Darwin knew this and knew it was a problem. As much as Newtons theory of the universe was incomplete and subsequently upended by Einstein theory of relativity, Darwinism explains some things in evolution, but not all of it. It is incomplete and hence is most likely only partially true. A better theory will come about.

The Cambrian explosion developed in reverse of Darwinism. Instead of species developing from a common ancestor, multiple species arose from nowhere, and devolved into less and simpler species. Huh?

 

My understanding of the Cambrian Explosion is that it was an increase in the quantity and diversity of evidence in the fossil record. Previous to that time in Earth's past, there was life. There is evidence of it, but not much of that evidence survives to today.

Newton's Laws weren't upended, either. Incomplete to be sure, but they still hold true in most typical circumstances (speeds and scales).

And do we want to be using "Darwinism" in place of "evolution", as if to imply religious overtones to scientific theories?

 

The mystery of the Cambrian explosion has recently been more pronounced by findings in China and, in 2012, Canada.

http://www.discovery.org/a/22571

“This new location sheds no new light on what might have caused the origin of all these new animal forms,” said Dr. Stephen C. Meyer, author of the New York Times bestseller Darwin’s Doubt. “Instead, it intensifies the problem of the Cambrian explosion, because it contains fossils previously known only from China. That is despite hopeful claims that this new outcrop “offers new insights” into “the initial diversification of metazoans” (a euphemism for the sudden appearance of entirely new animal body plans), it has provided no new insight into the causes of the Cambrian explosion. All of the animals, including the new ones, fit into existing Cambrian phyla,” explained Meyer. “No transitional intermediates have been discovered.”

an animal fossils has intensified a source of doubt that troubled Darwin about his theory, according to scientific
researchers at Discovery Institute.

The importance of the Canadian and Chinese discoveries is that it debunks theories that life forms that were there before the Cambrian explosion were undiscoverable because they were small and too soft to leave evidence, called the Artifact theory.

When it comes to Newton and Einstein, Einstein totally blew the basic foundation off the Newtonian physics. It was a slow death which culminated with Einstein.

"Principia’s mathematical explanations of these relationships were simple and extremely handy. With his equations, Newton was able to explain for the first time why the Moon stays in orbit around Earth. To this day, we use Newton’s math to predict the trajectory of a softball toss or of astronauts landing on the Moon. In fact, all everyday observations of gravity on Earth and in the heavens can be explained quite precisely with Newton’s theory.​

Okay, we buy it. But how does it work?

edit: (Newton primarily relied on gravity as the overwhelming force that controlled the universe, not)

Einstein’s General Relativity explained everything Newton’s theory did (and some things it didn’t), and better. “I am fully satisfied,” Einstein said in 1919. “I do not doubt anymore the correctness of the whole system.”

Even then, General Relativity is still incomplete. It is expected that we may still find an all encompassing theory of the universe, possibly for the Euros and their fancy Hadron collider

Both have to be distinguished from each other in this conversation as evolution is a concept within Darwinism that may survive Darwin's theory which involves much more than eveolution. As much as gravity, as discovered by Isaac Newton, is still contained within the Theory of Relativity but is no longer the encompassing foundation of that explanation of the universe.

Not all alternatives to Darwinism are theological. They may agree with natural selection and may differ in gradualism, sexual selection or many other aspects of Darwinian evolution. http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Non-Darwinian_evolution

Natural selection and Darwinian evolution CAN explain the development of species. But the fossil record does not prove this. Hence, as a theory, it is AT THE MOMENT has unproven facets.

Even then, when Charles Darwin published The Origin of Species 150 years ago, he consciously avoided discussing the origin of life. At best, he explains later that "the intimate relation of Life with laws of chemical combination, & the universality of latter render spontaneous generation not improbable".

Continuing, at present, we do not have a proven theory on how life came to be. There are theories, the most prevalent of which is that life emerged from primordial goop. The problem there is, despite all the tools available to us today, science is unable to produce life from organic substances. Science can create new molecules, new elements even, but not life from oragnic substances. How is that?

In ending, the point is, the most viable life origin scientific theory is a cold case. http://evolution.berkeley.edu/evosite/evo101/IIE2bStudyorigins.shtml

 

Saying that "science" is attributable to deaths caused by anthrax is like saying geology is responsible for the death of someone I murdered with a rock, and the Holocaust is far more attributable to clashes of religious ideology than it is scientific progress, so both of those are abysmal arguments.

The Big Bang is an expansion of matter and space, not the creation of it.

The notion that certain species were fossilized and not others does not preclude an issue with the theory of evolution. The Cambrian Explosion coincides with the rise of free oxygen in the atmosphere and the creation of the protective ozone layer, both of which would provide optimal conditions for the flourishing and diversification of life as well as the availability of calcium with which to create hard shells.

Areas where a scientific theory struggles to provide hard evidence does not automatically mean that we automatically drop creationism into the cracks. Presenting creation science as something on equal footing with evolutionary science is not a sound argument. The body of research and information backing evolutionary theory is orders of magnitudes larger and more accepted than that of creation pseudoscience, which has no foundation other than "there are holes in evolutionary theory, we're going to fill them with the Bible."

 

Abysmal arguments? Smh. I'm guessing you have not heard of the weaponized version of Anthrax. Space not a creation of the Big Bang? your understanding of time space and the Big Bang is seriously flawed.

http://www.exploratorium.edu/origins/cern/ideas/bang.html

"While an explosion of a man-made bomb expands through air, the Big Bang did not expand through anything. That's because there was no space to expand through at the beginning of time. Rather, physicists believe the Big Bang created and stretched space itself, expanding the universe."

source - CERN

re: Saying that "science" is attributable to deaths caused by anthrax is like saying geology is responsible for the death of someone I murdered with a rock, and the Holocaust is far more attributable to clashes of religious ideology than it is scientific progress, so both of those are abysmal arguments.

Answer - where do I begin? Two words... Weimar Eugenics. This is a very expansive subject, but here is a small excerpt.

"Following Germany’s defeat in World War I and during the ensuing political and economic crises of the Weimar Republic, ideas known as racial hygiene or eugenics began to inform population policy, public health education, and government-funded research. By keeping the “unfit” alive to reproduce and multiply, eugenics proponents argued, modern medicine and costly welfare programs interfered with natural selection–the concept Charles Darwin applied to the “survival of the fittest” in the animal and plant world. In addition, members of the “fit,” educated classes were marrying later and using birth control methods to limit family size. The result, eugenics advocates believed, was an overall biological “degeneration” of the population. As a solution, they proposed “positive” government policies such as tax credits to foster large, “valuable” families, and “negative” measures, mainly the sterilization of genetic “inferiors.”


This is what misguided science gets you. Racial purity is the direct result of wackos usurping Darwin's, Mendel's, Galton's theories, amongst others.

I see that discussions of nuances in scientific theories touched a nerve. I have no quarrel with creationism being left out of the classroom. It's is not science. It is faith. It's best left for Sunday school. Faith is not about explaining how things work.

am currently on the freeway on my way to Northern California. Im getting dizzy typing at 80mph. Later.

 

The laws governing space and time as we understand it (general and special relativity, in relation to this argument) were emergent properties of the big bang, but that doesn't mean both didn't exist in distorted/warped forms prior to it. In time scales close to the Big Bang, the laws of physics break down (10^-36 seconds after the event), and as a result our current laws of physics fail to describe the state of the universe prior to that, particularly due to the fact that these time scales involve inflation prior to the unification of electromagnetism, the strong interaction, and the weak interaction into the electronuclear force. GR/SR have nothing at all to say about creation. Also, your link presents an often-held view of the Big Bang as an immense explosion from a point/singularity, which is inaccurate.

No. Eugenics is not science. Putting it under that umbrella is a false dichotomy.

Sure. But pointing out missing data in Darwinian evolutionary theory and the Cambrian Explosion and using it as a leaping-off point to say that the alternative explanation is creationism is not a scientifically valid argument.

 

You guys are way too smart for me...but there is no evidence of evolution.. no missing link. Are not your beliefs based on faith?

 

Duh...but how does this apply to the apparent dichotomy of tire inflation pressures and rolling resistance? :-k :wave:

 

It's a false dichotomy until you cross the evolutionary threshold of 29".

 

Maybe that is the problem, I still believe in 26"

 

I imagine my next bike will have bigger wheels - not so much by choice but by market forces. But they won't be that big. My MtB evolution will stop at the missing link.

 

Delving into the Cambrian explosion here - this is where the punctuated equilibrium hypothesis comes from. While there area a number of potentials that might explain this, to me the most elegant to me is that life's simply "exploded" because there was nothing to fetter it - environments were wide open for exploitation. The idea of devolving may more simply have been that of scaling back less advantageous speciation as the diversity of organisms expanded.

I agree evolutionary theory isn't perfect; the hardest part is that one rests on the fossil record for data, and we as humans forget just how vast the scope of fossil history is. I still think it's the most scientifically valid and vettable idea out there though.

 

The problem is that you are looking for a smoking gun-style "missing link"; there is no such thing. There are evolutionary steps along a path, some of which we have fossil evidence for, some of which are implied.

 

and what is the evolutionary fossil evidence? I too used to believe that, there is none that is credible.

 

Evolution in action right there!

 

List of Transitional Fossils