Evolution vs. Creationism. Bill Nye Debates Ken Ham.

[Nungali]

The History channel has deteriorated which is unfortunate.

 

 

[goatguy-too]

Hi ralis, don't think we have had an opportunity to chat.

 

Nothing is more annoying than to be invited to a dinner by an Amway salesman and when you ask if it is an Amway presentation to be asked "What's Amway?".

 

Is it possible to get off topic in "Off Topic"? ;-)

 

I proposed an unheard of alternative to classic creationism and the other thing <grin> and you wish to feign ignorance of 'the fall' to lead me down some other road.

 

Sure sounds like Amway. It's late here and I was up early. I'll be happy to talk in detail about the alternative, but I suspect you are quite capable of googling "The Fall" if you really don't know what it is.

 

Be happy...

[Nungali]

Nothing wrong with asking questions.

 

And nothing wrong with stating facts ... as well as one is careful with the wording ; galaxies appear to be moving apart from each other is very diffeernt from all galaxies are moving apart.

 

(A bit like ; certain observations and theories led to some to postulate 'Black Holes' ...

 

.... but ... but .... I seen 'em! .... It was on the History Channel the graphis looked amazing { it even had a sound track with space-sucking' noises } ! And the scientists / presenter walked through the graphics and waved his hand and things started happening in space ... like some sort of .... 'God' ... what more do you want ? )

[Nungali]

What fall?

The tomatoes.

[goatguy-too]

I love this guy: He may have destroyed Kirk's Enterprise, but he's a hell of a teacher.

https://www.khanacademy.org/science/cosmology-and-astronomy/universe-scale-topic/big-bang-expansion-topic/v/cosmic-background-radiation

Love his vid. He makes the point precisely. We are expected to believe that the mass of our solar system arrived here without colliding into stuff faster than the photons that couldn't move because they would collide with stuff. So at some magic time, massless photons could finally move because space opened up enough for them. Our solar system and the hot stuff that wanted to send out photons but couldn't were all at the same place right at the time of the Big Bang. So the photons patiently waited for all the mass to spead out enough so they could travel. However, as soon as the mass spread out a tiny bit, it would cool and be able to absorb a photon from hot stuff, so the hot stuff had to somehow decide to not send out the photon until the mass got really far away. Makes sense ;-)

Edited February 6, 2014 by goatguy

[Nungali]

But seriously ... I thought goats would like tomatoes ... mine did, and he didn't mind getting them all over his face or beard either .

 

But seriously ... ( ths time ) ... please Mr. Goat do explain how your ideas about the fall fit in to both sides of the evolutionary debate and both sides of the cosmic creation / manifestation debate.

 

You see, I am mad enough to think that they can relate in certain ways ... but in my view of hermetics .... where all real processes have a reflection in other processes whether it is the physics of the cosmos, mythological creation stories (from all abouts) , kabbalah, astrology, psychology ...

[goatguy-too]

The thing about scientific facts, is that the people who use them rarely tell you all of them which apply to the situation.

 

Doppler red shift is also caused by rotation. An alternative to an expanding universe is a rotating universe. Red shift can also be caused by gravity. So if we were inside a hypdense sphere, light originating near the inside surface or reflected off the inside surface would be red shifted.

 

But lets all drink the same kool-aid whatever it is because we no longer actually believe in scientific debate. I am happy to say I don't know which is true.

[ralis]

Hi ralis, don't think we have had an opportunity to chat.

 

Nothing is more annoying than to be invited to a dinner by an Amway salesman and when you ask if it is an Amway presentation to be asked "What's Amway?".

 

Is it possible to get off topic in "Off Topic"? ;-)

 

I proposed an unheard of alternative to classic creationism and the other thing <grin> and you wish to feign ignorance of 'the fall' to lead me down some other road.

 

Sure sounds like Amway. It's late here and I was up early. I'll be happy to talk in detail about the alternative, but I suspect you are quite capable of googling "The Fall" if you really don't know what it is.

 

Be happy...

 

I don't believe in a fall as in some kind of mistake, original sin or whatever. I was surprised to see that brought up.

[goatguy-too]

But seriously ... I thought goats would like tomatoes ... mine did, and he didn't mind getting them all over his face or beard either .

 

But seriously ... ( ths time ) ... please Mr. Goat do explain how your ideas about the fall fit in to both sides of the evolutionary debate and both sides of the cosmic creation / manifestation debate.

 

You see, I am mad enough to think that they can relate in certain ways ... but in my view of hermetics .... where all real processes have a reflection in other processes whether it is the physics of the cosmos, mythological creation stories (from all abouts) , kabbalah, astrology, psychology ...

 

My pack goats love tomatoes. In a completely different context I wrote this: http://thetaobums.com/topic/32359-gospel-of-thomas-class-notes-on-sensus-plenior/#entry491424

 

I think our concept of reality is inverted. Imagine a hyperdense crystal. In an instant, the energy distribution is such that the vibrations in a particular location cause discontinuities. The structure of the crystal is unstable where they occur, so they collapse sending energy back into the structure where it spreads out some and opens more discontinuities. This is the nature of the photon. It is energy traveling through a crystaline structure, popping open tiny voids as it goes which collapse again sending the energy back into the crystal.

 

In this fashion a void can travel great distances without actually existing in between. With a completely different model of reality, where what we think is a vacuum is a crystal, and what we think are particles are voids within the crystal, time becomes irrelevant as the voids spread out.

 

A cluster of primary voids where the structure around it is in tension is a charge, and if in compression, an opposite charge. The two are attracted to minimize the stress in the crystal. All the properties which we currently assign to various particles, are really properties of the geometry of the crystal. There is an implicit unfied theory, because only one thing actually exists, which defines all other observable phenomenon.

 

This is a very brief overview not intended to be any kind of proof or pursuasive argument. Just a hint that there are alternate models for the universe.

[goatguy-too]

I don't believe in a fall as in some kind of mistake, original sin or whatever. I was surprised to see that brought up.

 

If you read that Gospel of Thomas thread, you'll see where I'm coming from. I know I am in a minority here. My skill set is interpretting sensus plenior. I popped into this thread since it was off topic and thought I'd throw something completely different at the conversation. Few people convince others of much, so it's there as something to think about. It's probably not a surprise to those who have been following in the other thread.

 

Nice to meet you. Are your goats packers or meat or dairy?

[ralis]

Perhaps Brian may have something to add to this discussion. He has mentioned being a scientist. Hope he shows up.

[goatguy-too]

Scientists are only great grandchildren of philosophers ;-)

[eye_of_the_storm]

creationism and big bang theory are basically the same thing

[Marblehead]

and looking at your map of where creationism is publicly taught,,,,

Yep. Pretty strong here in Florida but then knowing that the state is dominated by Southern Baptists it's no big surprise.

 

 

btw. hawking now says there are no black holes,,just thought i would throw that very random tidbit in for trvia only

Oh, Mr. Hawking. Setting himself up for another hosting of a TV series.

 

But white holes still exist where the shit comes out the other end?

[Marblehead]

 

You don't understand why I said a 7 year old? Because galaxies drifting apart = they were once one mass, is the leap that was made in believing the theory. It's incredibly basic, and who says it's the only possibility? Who even says that every single galaxy is drifting from every other?

Yes, I understand your questioning. Fair is fair. We base our understanding on what we have learned in life.

 

No, not every galaxy is drifting away from each other. The Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies will collide and merge in about 5 billion years. This is because they both are within one single galaxy cluster and their gravity is attracting each other faster than they can be forced apart.

 

As I mentioned, 'Big Bang' is still a theory. But it is supported by very strong evidence, mostly based on repeated observations.

 

For those who are religious based, the Big Bang theory does not try to contradict the existence of a creating force. What caused the Big Bang? Religious believers can simply say, "God".

[Marblehead]

Now for something completely different... ;-)

 

I always thought that creation happened in a timeless eternity where things that appear to happen in billions of years can occur in the same timeless quantum fluctuation as things which appear to take a billionth of a second. Oh, and that time started and is merely an indicator of decay as a result of the fall.

Yeah, what fall? Hehehe.

 

Seriously though, I think you pretty much have it. Prior to the "Big Bang" there was singularity so the was no time, no space, no "things", no nothing. All was potential only. But then something happened. Bang! The beginning of potential becoming manifest and here we are now.

 

I really do hope that the expansion of the universe does one day slow down and eventually reverse so that we can have a Big Crunch.

[Brian]

Perhaps Brian may have something to add to this discussion. He has mentioned being a scientist. Hope he shows up.

 

Just catching up on this thread...

 

I'll post some thoughts in a couple hours.

[zerostao]

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/02/05/pat-robertson-implores-creationist-ken-ham-to-shut-up-lets-not-make-a-joke-of-ourselves/#.UvLFIur6LtE.twitter

 

pat robertson tells ken ham to "just shut up already!"

 

so the idea that the overwhelming majority of christians agree with ken ham is not at all accurate.

even fundamentalist pat robertson tells ham to be "realistic"

[goatguy-too]

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/02/05/pat-robertson-implores-creationist-ken-ham-to-shut-up-lets-not-make-a-joke-of-ourselves/#.UvLFIur6LtE.twitter

 

pat robertson tells ken ham to "just shut up already!"

 

so the idea that the overwhelming majority of christians agree with ken ham is not at all accurate.

even fundamentalist pat robertson tells ham to be "realistic"

 

I had been estimating that probably 80% of Christians weren't really Christian. Then one day Billy Graham said that 75% of Christians probably weren't Christian. The only conclusion I could come to were that 5% of those lying bastards had pulled the wool over Billy Graham's eyes. ;-)

 

I think a similar phenomenon happens with atheists. A large number of atheists give up their faith in nothing when times get hard and actually pray to something. Or they become angry when their stereos get stolen revealing their hypocrisy in saying that there is no absolute right and wrong.

 

So I think most people really just make it up as they go and have no real commitment to anything. But if you think it is bad with Christians teaching Creationism, wait till this is a Muslim country and they enforce it at the edge of a sword.

 

It occurred to me that often the discussion of evolution is actually sophistry by semantics. THe 'bible' on evolution is a book called 'Origin of the Species' yet when an evolutionist is confronted with a question about one species coming from another they say that that is not evolution but speciation, and that evolution is simply change. See the subtle shift in the meaning of the word. Darwin certainly claimed that evolution was the origin of the species.

 

If we say that life cannot magically spring forth from non-life, the evolutionist says that is not evolution but a-biogenesis. But going from a Big Bang to having living organisms is a required belief in evolutionism, and the shifting of the conversation to a-biogenesis just a dodge.

 

There are lots of places where we can argue evolution or creation, but there is little discussion on the fallacy of changing the semantics in the middle of the argument. We started heating milk just after it became a 'fact' that living things to not magically become alive. But if we push the conversation back billions and billions of years, we throw that 'fact' out the window and claim that life happens. As the great theologian Forest Gump said, "Sh** happens". No wonder life is like sh** for so many. ;-)

 

Anyway, a real debate can't happen until people use the same language.

Edited February 6, 2014 by goatguy

[zerostao]

and if the debate is using logic .rational thinking, and reason to explain an irrational mysterious nature of nature,,

so i agree with your statement "a real debate can't happen until people use the same language."

the same language that nature uses, right?

surely it stands to reason that all of faith should be on trial, including the faith based belief system know as modern science. how does it help if we are only replacing one faith based belief system with another?

question everything

 

 

[ralis]

Just catching up on this thread... I'll post some thoughts in a couple hours.

 

Much appreciated!

 

If you could talk a little in terms of the scientific method, give a short primer on theory, and how peer review works? That may be helpful to some here.

 

Gotta run and take care of clients.

[Marblehead]

I want to speak to these two paragraphs.

I had been estimating that probably 80% of Christians weren't really Christian. Then one day Billy Graham said that 75% of Christians probably weren't Christian. The only conclusion I could come to were that 5% of those lying bastards had pulled the wool over Billy Graham's eyes. ;-)

I used to admire Billy Graham until I found out what his net worth was. All that money he reaised to help other people. He didn't say that one of the 'other people' was himself.

 

I think a similar phenomenon happens with atheists. A large number of atheists give up their faith in nothing when times get hard and actually pray to something. Or they become angry when their stereos get stolen revealing their hypocrisy in saying that there is no absolute right and wrong.

This is true for the angry Atheists. No arguement there. But rational Atheists are different. At least I am. That trick you played above has been play by Christians ever since people started claiming to be Atheists. There is no substance to it.

 

I have never said that there are no rights or wrongs. You steal my stereo and you have done me wrong. If I catch you you will have a price to pay. That is the beauty of being an Atheist as well as an Anarchist. We leave others to there own doings as long as they do be doing onto us. The old saying "Don't tread on me." still stands.

[thelerner]

One issue I am curious about is:

There seem to be facts outlining the development within a species.

 

But are there facts outlining the development of a species from another?

I struggled with this. Given time can you make/evolve a cat into an elephant?

I think the answer is no. Given time you can create a giant cat, a tiny one, a water cat, a hairless cat, but get to far from its genetic template and it doesn't work. Cats won't evolve into elephants, and vice versa.

 

I think according to evolutionary theory that the cat and the elephant had a mammal rodent ancestor, seemingly unimportant by itself yet making up the trunk of a great tree. From that base countless branches formed over 100's of millions of years. Some branches/species died others were successful, spawning new branches from themselves, many of those to wither, but successful ones survive. Often environmental forces will shove branches in the same direction.

 

So thats my answer. Similarly we didn't evolve from say chimps or apes, but share a common ancestor. I think without environmental stressors and/or wildcard mutations a species doesn't have to evolve.

[Brian]

First, a brief "about me" since the question was raised for someone else.I worked my way through school so it took a little longer than the traditional track (turned down a few scholarships at schools you would recognize, and an appointment to the Air Force Academy, while I was in high school because I was going through a phase or whatever) and I went to the university in my hometown instead. I was in the second semester of my junior year in the Astrophysics program, planning to continue for my PhD, when the space shuttle Challenger exploded. After some soul-searching discussions with faculty advisors, I decided to switch concentrations because of the anticipated contraction of the space program and the glut of seasoned PhDs in the marketplace which seemed likely (and which came to fruition). I backed up a little in my ed plan and switched to applied physics with a concentration in engineering electronics. This was intended as a "terminal" program, meaning one was a career-ready physicist without needing to pursue a doctorate. After getting my Bachelors (along with minors in math, computer science and English), I quickly found a job in industry but I also continued on into a graduate program in applied physics, concentrating in high-energy electromagnetics. Halfway through that program, my wife & I decided it was time to start a family.

 

I had intended to return for my Masters and eventually get my PhD in physics, perhaps to become a professor, but my career took off and life took a different direction. Some years later, I did return to school but I got an MBA instead.

 

So, I have a pretty solid understanding of physics (from Archimedes & Newton to Einstein & Feynman) including classical mechanics, electromagnetism, relativity, quantum theory, etc. I have a pretty firm handle on celestial mechanics, cosmology and astronomy. I also grasp electronics from the quantum level to the mechanical level. I have used little of this in a number of years so my math is a little rusty (four semesters of calculus, three of differential equations, and three more on top of that which had nebulous names...)

 

 

OK... So, bonafides out of the way?

 

 

To stay "on topic," let me start by saying that literalists like Ken Ham are fools. In the same vein, however, I must say that their dogmatic antitheist counterparts are also fools. There is a huge difference between evolution and Evolution and pretending that science has uncovered factual answers to any of the big mysteries is an intellectual delusion as profound as the spiritual delusion of thinking the Bible is a history and/or science book. Same goes for the Koran or the TTC or the Vedas or sutras or whatever. Nearly everything Newton or Darwin or Hawking proposed has been shown to be fundamentally wrong -- even the things we still find VERY useful! -- the intellectually mature scientist avoids the egoistic trap by humbly reminding herself that the volume what we don't know increases even faster than the area of what we do know.

 

 

Now a brief note about scientific theories...

Ignoring for a moment that we tend to use the terms "law" and "theory" haphazardly, a physicist views a theory as a model -- a simplification expressed in the language of science or math which attempts to match historical quantitative observation AND which can be used to predict the outcomes of future experimentation or measurement. In order for a new theory to replace an old theory, it must do at least as well on past, present & future AND it must explain something the old theory couldn't. Even then, the usefulness of the old model is often not discarded -- it just has caveats attached to it. For instance, we still use Newton's 400-year-old concept of visible light being composed of the smooth spectrum of the rainbow even though we've known better for more than a hundred years.

 

I mention this example because it is relevant. The evidence for the expanding universe is tied closely to quantum theory...

 

If you take a block of iron and heat it up, it glows. The hotter it gets, the more it glows -- and its color changes, red changing to orange to yellow until it is practically white. If you shine that light through a prism, it diffracts into a rainbow. Except it doesn't. If you look closely, you see that the rainbow is broken. Iron's spectrum looks like this:

Lots of little lines, close together but with gaps in between them.

 

Same applies to other materials, regardless of how they are energized. Neon stimulated by an electric current?

 

Hydrogen gas floating in deep space and zapped by a distant quasar?

 

Point being that light is quantized -- that photons only exist at distinct energy levels, or electromagnetic waves only vibrate at distinct frequencies, depending on how you choose to look at it. This means that you can point a telescope at a distant light source and see this elemental fingerprint.

 

What happens, though, if the light source is moving? Well, if it is moving at a right-angle to the line-of-sight between it and your telescope, not interesting happens other than it creeps out of view. If it is moving towards you or away from you, though, things get very interesting.

 

Everyone is familiar with the Doppler effect -- a race car approaching and flying past you has a distinct shift in pitch because the sound waves get crunched up in front of the car and stretched out behind it. The effect is that the pitch is too high as it approaches and too low as it drives away. Same thing happens with light.

Pick the 656 nanometer wavelength band in the hydrogen spectrum above, for instance. If that distant light source is moving towards you, it will be "crunched up" and the distances between the waves will be decreased, shifting it towards the shorter wavelength (or higher frequency) end of the spectrum. If it is moving away, the shift is in the opposite direction.

 

When we point a telescope at a celestial light source, we see that every single spectral line is shifted towards longer wavelength (the so-called "red shift") AND that there is a direct correlation between shift and distance -- the farther away an object is, the faster it is moving away from us. The mechanics of determining the distances of celestial objects is more complicated than we'll get into here but the correlation is so perfect that we now simply use red-shift to measure distance.

 

It is more interesting than that, though. Astronomers realized that it should be possible to find the center of the universe by mapping out the patterns. What was discovered was that WE are the center of the universe! Not only is every single object moving away from us but the rate of expansion increases in relation to the distance from Earth -- not the center of the Milky Way or whatever -- from the observer. Two explanations came to mind -- either Earth is truly the unique and special center of the universe or the entire universe is expanding. The former is rather egoistic (but not implausible) so the focus was on the latter.

 

Think about an expanding foam, like you might spray into cracks around windows & doors. It expands like a solid rather than like a thin shell as a balloon expands. Rather than being on the surface of an expanding universal balloon, our measurements suggest that all the planets, stars, galaxies, clusters, etc., are inside this expanding blob of cosmic foam, and that every bit of it is expanding in all directions at once, NOT just expanding outward from a central point. This means that the very concept of "the center of the universe" becomes meaningless because every single point tracks back to a single point and every single observer anywhere in the universe calculates that center to be the spot they are standing.

 

None of this proves a damn thing, mind you. This is all just a model which does a fairly decent job of explaining some of the details we observe and from which the results of some future experiments/observations have been predicted. There are things the model doesn't explain very well, however, and there are alternate models which have more success with some details and less success with other details. The model goatguy mentions is legitimate and has been intriguing. Many of the issues he raises with the big-bang model are significant concerns, too. The current model also breaks down on questions of origin or conclusion or what is beyond the model. This is the nature of a model.

 

We do get some interesting side-effects from all this, though! The concept of the "background radiation," for instance, can be viewed as sort of a measure of the energy of the stretched-apart foam itself. (An interesting aside -- the Michelson-Morley experiment is famous for having failed to measure the impact on the speed of light of the ether in which heavenly bodies were assumed to reside, thereby launching scientific discovery in a whole new direction. We are seeing increasing evidence, however, to suggest that the concept was not without merit -- as evidenced by research into things like zero-energy and the Higgs boson and the structure of space time itself.) We also use spectral analysis to identify chemical composition of celestial light sources (both direct and indirect sources) and the corresponding absorption spectra (the mirror images of the emission spectra I posted above) to identify the composition of clouds of interstellar dust. We use fluctuations in the red-shift or bifurcations (in which we see bands which merge and separate) to identify binary and trinary star systems.

 

We've learned some really cool stuff!

Edited February 6, 2014 by Brian

[Marblehead]

It occurred to me that often the discussion of evolution is actually sophistry by semantics. THe 'bible' on evolution is a book called 'Origin of the Species' yet when an evolutionist is confronted with a question about one species coming from another they say that that is not evolution but speciation, and that evolution is simply change. See the subtle shift in the meaning of the word. Darwin certainly claimed that evolution was the origin of the species.

I doubt that I have ever altered my word usage regarding evolution (or other serious discussions as well). Evolution is a fact. I have no "Bible", not even the TTC. I just spoke to species mutations above. This is my understanding as to how different species arise and until I have been shown better proof and understandings I will stay with my current understandings.

 

Life evolved out of non-life. That is my understanding. My chair evolved out of numerous materials. Evolution or devolution is constantly in progress. Some species devolve themselves into extinction. One day our sun will expand and that will be the end of all life on Earth. There was a time when the Earth did not exist but other objects in the universe existed for over 8 billion years. Man did not create the universe.

 

Man did create his various gods though. Every original culture throughout time has had its own creation theory. And they vary dramatically. They had the need to explain the unexplainable. In my opinion few have come close to anything resembling reality.