Equal opportunity creationism bashing
The December 12, 2008 issue of Science Magazine (online only to subscribers) suggests that creationism is a growing movement in many Islamic countries.
The author, Salaman Hameed, writes that:
The Koranic narrative of creation includes a six day account of creation. The length of each day, however, is not clearly specified. One day has been defined as “a thousand years of what you count” (32:5) or as “a day the measure of which is 50,000 years” (70:4). The resulting ambiguity leaves open the possibility of a very old earth. Indeed, young-Earth creationism is wholly absent in the Muslim world, and the universe billions of years old is commonly accepted. On biological evolution, Islamic scholars and popular writers hold a wide range of opinions that represent a broad spectrum of culture and politics, from secular Turkey to the conservative monarchy of Saudi Arabia and the Muslim diasperas in Europe and in the United States.
Contrary to the scholars and Islamic communities, more than half of the lay population of five of the six listed Islamic countries studied considered that evolution by natural selection “could not possibly be true.” Those anti-evolution countries include Turkey, Indonesia, Pakistan, Malaysia and Egypt. For instance, only 8% of Egyptians give credence to evolution by natural selection. In the sixth listed country, Kazakhstan, evolution well accepted. A recent survey of 25 Muslim university students from Turkey and Morocco indicated that most of them rejected “macroevolution” and tied it to both atheism and to the impossibility that random mutations could lead to complex species.
This widespread rejection of evolution in many Muslim countries gives rise to a potential solution to the problem of creationism here in the United States. I suspect that most of our American creationists are highly suspicious, if not hateful, of Muslims. I thus think that our American creationists might go a long way toward rejecting the attitudes and beliefs of Muslims–they will tend to want to do the opposite of what the Muslims are doing. Therefore, let’s start a campaign to put up lots of billboards along the highways prominently indicating that most Muslims reject evolution by natural selection. Let’s see, then, if these billboards have the effect of causing American creationists to those rethink their position so that they “aren’t like Muslims.” If the campaign is wildly successful, we might even see fundamentalists holding Darwin Appreciation Days at their churches.
P.S. This post is for all of you American creationists who insist that I pick on you because you are Christians. Not true. See? I’m picking on the Muslim creationists too.
Karl, please check your histories. The best estimate for the elusive Moses was 14th century B.C, whereas Yao was well documented in the 22nd century B.C. Plato was 5th century B.C.
And take anything by Velikovsky with a serious grain of salt. He invented his “facts” with vigor and creativity. He could have learned Maxwell’s equations, but didn’t bother to learn what magnetism really is or can do. He could have studied Newtonian physics, but obviously doesn’t have a clue what tidal effects actually are, nor how gravitational capture happens.
And please explain why the oldest astrological charts do include Venus if it wasn’t there? Can you find any chart of the skies missing Venus from any civilization? Send us a link; I’ve never seen one.
Karl, the magnetic field of the Earth is weak compared to a refrigerator magnet. However, it is huge. It is equivalent to a current around 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 amps (unless I missed some zeros). Magnetic fields fade at 1/r3. Yes, inverse-cubed, so doubling the distance reduces the field by 88%.
The tremendous electric flux from the sun is deflected by this “weak” field over the distance of many Earth diameters to protect us. A big solar flare could disrupt it temporarily, possibly causing a reversal, and (a minor point) essentially nuking the face of the planet toward the sun during the change. Not a mass extinction, but maybe 10% of all exposed plants and critters would die within a week from the radiation. But this is is just “theory” that helps Mars rovers and other Voyagers survive to report back after years in space.
Mark says:
“My point is that this is a work many people have decided to take at face value and built followings on. Since it happened in this instance (as it did with the Book of Mormon, among others) why is it implausible that the same thing happened in the past? Or weren’t people as gullible then?”
People even scientific reasoning ones were gullible then and even now.
Your point would be well taken if the authors and points of view represented in the Bible hadn’t been subject day after day, month after month, year after year, decade after decade and even century after century to the evaluation process of research historians that weren’t centuries removed ( except Genesis 1) from oral and written records from the observation and interpretations of literary critics, the scientific naturalists of their day and the moral and civic leaders of their day.
The process of the compilation of the Bible was obviously done purposefully to bring together both a work of non-fiction but also containing interpretations and a philosophical perspective that was/is acceptable to the editors concerning matters that are not simply of a naturalistic in perspective.
Thomas Jefferson thought he had a right to keep continuing the process as do the rest of the naturalists of the day. Why take out all of the unbelievable crap and it becomes just a nice compendium of human attempts to evolve into something better than their gullible ancestors.
Chop this and that an while you’re at it lets only let modern courts decide what’s moral and or legal, so what we’re left with is really nothing but a document with some fine litrerary qualities and fables for us to pass along in fictional form. Works for atheists and agnostics now doesn’t it.
That the Bible actually contains history and scientific observations that frustrate today’s naturalists is of no great concern to me. I would trust reliable witnesses who passed on information either orally or in documented form over one commenting upon its reasonableness from the perspective of modern day naturalism, atheism and agnosticism.
Why in just a couple of decades anyone could use their own personal reason and bias to rationalize that such and such an event never even happened because my mind can’t find a reasonable explanation for how it happened. While at the same time my mind could come up with a new manner of explaning the physical evidence left behind for the actual events that I state were a fable.
Many millions of non-combatants died during World War II. Some called it a holocaust, others could call it survival of the fittest. The fact remains, non-combatants died and it can be interpreted the way your mind and reasoning takes you according to Jefferson and other naturalists.
Trust in yur own logical thought process does not guarantee anything other that a potentially biased perspective.
Karl writes:—”I do however find it interesting that he did predict the retrograde rotation of Venus which totally violates the bid bang and steady state hypothesis for planet formation.”
No, it doesn’t. It simply requires an additional set of descriptors. Let’s not get carried away.
also:—”Velikovsky has had more predictions proven correct for Venus than the rest of the modern day scientific community.”
Purely by accident. Read “Velikovsky Reconsidered” for the actual science.
Like Eric Von Daniken, he made the mistake of taking historical records, both actual and fictional, at face value. This is of course a useful starting point. But that’s the problem. It’s a good place to start, but hardly accurate or conclusive.
further:—”If nothing else I find the retrograde rotation something that modern science has little ability to discuss, but one to question how it could be.”
To put it mildly, bullshit. See:
http://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/ask_astro/answers/981026a.html
http://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=106607
http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/2661
http://physics.fortlewis.edu/Astronomy/astronomy%20today/CHAISSON/AT309/HTML/AT30902.HTM
As you can see, science has quite a lot to say on the subject. Regarding the possibility that it smacked into Mars at one point, we’ll just have to wait till we have the technology to do an actual ground survey on Venus and find traces of Martian rock. Or even the reverse, but we’d need some Venusian rock with which to compare.
Sometimes, Karl, I get the feeling that your apprehension of science is stuck somewhere around 1965. That would explain a great deal. You keep peppering your comments with phrases like “science can’t explain” or “it is outside the scope of science” (I’m paraphrasing, so don’t bust me on misquoting) when in fact science has a great deal to say about these topics, most of which seems to contradict your point of view. Now, being the lone gunman is kind of a cool place to be, but after awhile it just gets old.
Karl: If you were my student, you would get an incomplete, and eventually an “F” because you aren’t giving straight answers to my reasonable questions. I’m giving you one more chance. Give me a LIST of ten factual claims made by your “time-tested” Bible that conflict with modern mainstream science, where you nonetheless strongly believe that the Biblical claim is true and science is incorrect. Give me ten. I don’t want to see “maybe” and “possibly” claims. I want to see facts from the Bible, facts you’d be willing to bank on. Facts that are testable. Let’s see your stuff or I’ll ask that you forever hold your peace. Make it rigorous and make it easy to read. Ten bullet pointed FACTS where the bible is correct and modern science gets it wrong.
If you want to see the political equivalent of the type of reasoning that Karl employs when he does science, watch Dana Perino. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/01/09/dana-perino-idaily-showi_n_156568.html
A debunking of the “missing day in history” myth from an unlikely source:
http://www.answersingenesis.org/creation/v19/i3/longday.asp
The book by Charles Totten is the source quoted in the web page Karl cited to back up his claims about a “missing day.” Still waiting for Karl’s answer to how it is even possible to approach the problem of calculating a “missing day”. I’m not asking for the actual calculations, mind you, because apparently the original author of the claim didn’t see fit to reproduce them in his work. A brief description of how to approach the problem, whether it’s counting up or down from “solstice records”, or some other method, would suffice.
Charles Totten, by the way, was a believer in “British Israelitism” - the belief that the Anglo-Saxon race is god’s chosen people. This is the second time that following one of Karl’s sources has led to a undisguised racist with delusions of grandeur.
Karl, both your credibility and your Christian witness are in tatters.
Vicki,
The process works like this. Data inclusive from a specific culture would need to be examined including all considered, recommended and implemented calendar changes. This data would need to show that the changes that were normally used to “fudge” the calendar to fit the annual solstis data to their calendar were not what had been expected.
To be scientific, this would have had to be the case for another culture as well, or if scientifically possible it would need to be the same for more than one isolated cultures for that matter.
Some say the data exists to show that this is the case. I am not a calendar afficionado so I do not have the data. Those who have done the research have been ridiculed so the research gets obstructed from serious consideration. Any credence of the data to explain anything that conflicts with real world ideas about the world gets tossed aside because it doesn’t fit with the naturalists “real” consensus of what is proper to discuss and not discuss.
To be reasonable calculations, any data under consideration that could verify a lost day of the week would need to be from a time period where the actual calendar under consideration actually was verified as matching the exact days of a week and the exact days in a year. This would mean that a “year” would need to be an exact multiple of seven that has never changed.
This isn’t the case, so the math gets opened to interpretation and which calendar was being used at a certian point in time
It would have helped if months contained even multiple of seven, but as we all now calendars based upon observations in the sky are not evenly cyclical to any whole number mutilple are user friendly to say the least.
Some ancient calendars, from the time of the early Mesapotamians used either an extremely weird interval that was not any where close to the Earth’s actual annual revolution around the sun, or they had some pretty old dudes that made even the Biblical ages look like youngsters. They may have completely used some scheme for calendars before the flood but later seasonal changes and solstis information made them rethink what an actual year should be. There is no standard key in ancient writings as to what an actual “year” means.
Until it can be shown that a culture possessed the basic understanding of the constellations, solstis information, or a thorough understanding of the cyclic nature of summer, fall, winter, and spring a year could mean something else to those doing the writing.
At some point historical writings need to be discussed in these term to see just what a person was trying to record when they used the term year.
The earliest calendars appear to have used at their very least some basic multiples of 7 with some combination of the phases of the moon. This was the basis of the Hebrew calendar as well as many other calendars as well.
The Hebrews like most middle eastern climates did know of two growing seasons, the former and latter rains.
Then for the earliest calendars, some connections were probably made to moons and the growing seasons. In a climate that had two or more growing seasons for the crops planted “a year” may have been the growing cycle. It was the Solstis information that standardized calendars.
Now if one assumes a varying length for the solstis data that is recorded in various cultures, then nothing can be proven, because of obvious needs and attempts being made to correct a calendar. If you believe the Soltsis data has been tracking a varying orbit for the earth nothing can find a lost day because all it is doing is correcting for a mismatch between the actual day, the actual week and the number of their multiples that fit into a year.
At some point in recorded history (after the great flood in my estimation) the cyclical patterns of hot and cold quickly helped them to understand exactly what a years time of revolution meant for the majority of cultures upon the earth. Also the actual tracking of the solistises made it possible to get a more accuarate fix on the concept of a year.
Calendars that then tried to incorporate the solsitis information into their calendars eventually got fairly standardized as to what a year might mean across the earth according the motions of the sun. It was at this point that the debates as to what was actually moving, the sun or the earth or some combination of both. For a very long time it was the consensus of most naturalists that it was the sun that was moving and not the earth.
So here we have three errors in calendars. Assuming that the number seven that is used for days in a weeks could sync up to either the moons motions (various phases), or the sun motions (shortest day, longest day, or equal days and nights). The third potential error is in accurately recording when the day of the week needed to change or when days needed to be added to sync the calendar being used to match up with the actual recorded Solstis dates.
The actual calendar of the early mesopatamians may have called what we call weeks, months, or 1/4 years their “year” for all we know. Thus for them an age of a 5,000 might actually have been based upon the week, the month, or the 1/4 year solstis and equinoxe data. We just do not know. Some where along the road the repeated appearances of the constellations themselves became a part of the picture and this helped for many to consolidate the time frame for the standardized year. The use of the 12 constellations and the 12+ full moons per year enabled early calendars to be 12 months long with 30 days on average for a total of 360 days per year. These were rough whole numbers that made sense from an rounded observational point of view.
How close this was actually to the “solar year” could only be determined by comparing to the solstis data. Solstis data does not tell you at what time on a specific day that the sun reaches it lowest or highest point. This is the reason for corrections being made to the official calendars as they were determined to be out of sync with solstis data.
I do not possess the information and data for when every correction was either suggested, considered or actually implemented. This is the work of the astronomers and statesmen. There are however records of specific cultures in specfic locations around the world for specific portions of the solstis as noted in their record books.
This is what gets analyzed to consider when a correction was required. There had to be agreement by the astronomers and statesmen to make these changes and to then make appropriate changes and annotations in the records for their culture.
I am not saying that we can start from the winter Solstis of 2008 in America and trace back to what day of the week the winter soltsis of Joshua’s year of Balttle with the
Modern man can not verify the accuracy of any historical records except by the usual uniformitarian principles that state that unless you can’t convince me of a catastrophe, nothing about changes in the rotation or revolutions needs to be seriously considered
This right off the bat makes a consideration of this type of a research project to have failed under the anaylsis of modern science which assumes for all of man’s recordable history on the planet, the earth’s rotations and revolution have never changed.
This is probably your scientific mindset and why you ask for a reasonable way to expalin how the tracking days of the week from data recorded by a single culture could arrive at a missing day.
It would be easy to see how a discrepancy could develope over a number years but they came to be expected by the calendar correctors to make the required adjustments. If the required number of days to make the expected adjustnments didn’t match the reality of the data a day could be lost in how they decided upon the adjustment.
The crux of the matter is there is data and it can be analyzed from more than one culture and from more than one calendar. The Egyptian, Hebrew, Babylonian and Mayan calendars could all be studied to see if the same hiccup appears in the recorded data.
Does this answer the question?
Mark:
“I stated that catastrophies are supranatural, they push the limits of the workings of naturals laws.”
“Supra” doesn’t mean supernatural or miraculous in this context. To me, it simply means out of the ordinary. Like someone so unable to comprehend the magnitude of what has occurred that they would rather attribute it to something else outside of a simple cause and effect relationship.
I should have stated that catastrophies push the limits of what our common everday experiences tell us about the workings of natrual laws.
Miracles of course do the exact same thing, but it doesn’t mean that there are not any connections to the workings of natural and moral laws when “miraculous” events are said to occurr.
The is another method of checking for the existences of lost counted days between the Solstices.
Another indication of the trustworthiness of lomger than usual day of Joshua 10:13 can be found in astronomical data. It appears that one full day is missing in our astronomical calculations. On different occasions, Sir Edwin Ball, the great British astronomer, and Professors Pickering of the Harvard Observatory, Maunders of Greenwich, and Totten of Yale have traced this back to the time of Joshua. If we disregard calendar changes and deal only with a chronology based upon solar motion, and go back to the earliest available records, and trace the calendar through to the time of Joshua, the day of Joshua’s battle was on a Tuesday, whereas if we compute backwards to the time of Joshua from the present day, the day of the battle would have been on a Wednesday. The day of the month is the same, but it is a different day of the week.
From this approach, by using the astronomical data associated with the solstisis without trying to adjust actual non fitting calendars on the observations, either the timing between certain dates for the solstis has changed or their is indeed an extra long day in the works somewhere.
This is just as hard to prove consecutive counts of days between each solstis but it is the reason certain people have their jobs.
What’s a person to do when his charge is to count the number of days between the winter and summer solstis. This data is historical, scientific and recorded by various cultures across the globe.
Should they take note of any unusual days? Should they comment upon unusal conditions that might make the counting this year to be called inot question? Or should they gloss over an unusual 1 less counted day than normally expected between the winter solstis and the summer solstis of a certain year.
Here are some other references on this quandry.
http://www.grmi.org/Richard_Riss/evidences/7longday.html
http://www.calvaryofwilmington.org/TLW/Joshua/Notes/Joshua10v1-28.pdf
http://www.geocentricity.com/astronomy_of_bible/jld/index.html
Karl writes:—”I should have stated that catastrophies push the limits of what our common everday experiences tell us about the workings of natrual laws.
Well, I’ll go with that, certainly. It’s just a question of what we know that allows us to place events in context. Broaden the context, of course, and anything that can happen becomes normal.
Karl asks “does this answer the question?”
Yes, it does. You agree that there is no way to “count forward” from a date recorded in the Egyptian calendar system and get to “Tuesday” while at the same time “disregarding calendar changes.” To even attempt this kind of calculation, you’d have to compare records from different calendar systems, which means taking into account all the various adjustments and fudges used to make the calendars match up with the actual earth year.
I did not bring a “scientific mindset” to the issue of what happened on the day of Joshua’s battle. You did.
You made a specific, verifiable claim that using concrete, quantitative methodology- i.e. examining actual, physical, written records and arithmetic - one could prove that a day is missing from history. Furthermore, you asserted that this calculation had been done and “verified by astronomers.”
To review, this is the claim that you made:
You included a link to a website as a source for this assertion. This website cites a book written in 1890 by a non-astronomer named Charles Totten. Totten never made his calculations public, so they could not have been “verified by astronomers”. Also, Totten’s calculations for the missing day rely on his assertion that Creation occurred on September 22. 4000 BC.
You can read how the Totten story influenced later Christian apologists, and why even Biblical literalists now reject it, here:
http://www.reasons.org/resources/apologetics/joshualongday.shtml
What all this tells me, Karl, is that so far from being a faithful believer in the Bible, you are so desparate for scientific “proof” of scripture that you will grasp at any pseudo-scientific straw. You then regurgitate this material unreflectively, clogging up the comments section with great swathes of valueless verbiage.
This exercise is a complete waste of time, therefore I’m not going to engage in it any more.
Erich,
I recall I gave you something like what you asked for several months ago, I didn’t however put forth the best foot that science has to offer. There are reasonable thoughts (even as Jefferson would say) concerning the rule of natural law over the mis-interpreted recorded matters of history.
I believe you have good reasons to believe what you do concerning the natural world. If never said you don’t have good inductive science skills. I only believe you have found it all too convientient to discount recorded historical data which leaves you open to interpret others parts of the historical record as you chose.
I can give you the other side of the story, even though you think I couldn’t possibly understand it. I chose to not believe it, does that have to mean I don’t understand it properly?
Hahahahhahahhahahahahahahahahahahahahahah!
The merriment engendered by Karl’s
comment at January 10th, 2009 at 2:48 pm which cross-posted with my comment above, almost makes the time I’ve wasted on this worthwhile.
To review:
on January 7th, 2009 at 1:10 pm Karl copied ‘n’ pasted the folllowing:
In response, I asked the following question:
Karl spent a day or two preparing a wad of verbiage in answer to this, which he spat out on January 10th, 2009 at 10:34 am.
In between his post and my typing and posting my response at 3:16 pm Jan 10, Karl did another google expedition, in which he encountered verbatim the same quote I had originally queried, but it is as if he is seeing it for the first time, so he puts it forward as a “new method” for calculating a lost day.
Here’s the quote he posted on Jan 10 at 2:48 p.m. :
This is just too, too funny for words. It illustrates brilliantly the utter folly of attempting to have a rational conversation with Karl.
Again here’s the link for why even creationists have thrown this particular chestnut on the compost heap:
http://www.reasons.org/resources/apologetics/joshualongday.shtml
Vicki,
I must say for someone who says she’s through commenting you don’t show much self restraint. Even though you thought my repost of a quote was showing that I can only find other’s information and use that to form my own posts. I considered that Post at first and though, how could the calendar changes been ignored from a scientific perspective.
They can’t be ignored from an historians perspective, but errors between recorded days and actual fractions of days can be minimized by the a technique that just looked at annual days between the solstices.
Let me explain what you seemed to miss while reading what others have stated about the matter.
It should be possible to simply piece together year after year the days between the summer and winter solstices without any discussions of required corrections. This is of course assuming that the year of 365.25 days has been invariant for the thousands of years man has kept these records. Sounds reasonable for a naturalist’s perspective.
This should, if the extrapolation holds (we have no reason to believe that it shouldn’t hold) give us a clear way to really see when and how the ancients finally arrived at their abilities to tweak their calendars, and also to see when and how they should have expected a certain number of days needed for fudge factors.
There are written records in the scientific literature (astronomical data) that indicate there was an unexplainable loss of nearly a day. Laugh all you want, because you can explain it as errors that appear across cultures and as a conspiracy planted in their miscalcualtions by the calendar makers.
Karl wrote, “There is a God who created mankind for a purpose. Included in this purpose was an inherent free will in man and a necessity to learn how to chose right from wrong.”
I’m just starting to read the long commentary in this post and the first thing I noticed is the above claim of Karl’s. Here’s my question: Doesn’t it seem the least bit absurd for a god to have created mankind for “a purpose” and then to include in that “purpose” am trait inherent in mankind that would effectively eviscerate whatever that god wanted? Seems to me if a god created mankind for “a purpose,” then any god worth his godhood would see to it that his “purpose” would be fulfilled.
Grumpy stated:
Seems to me if a god created mankind for “a purpose,” then any god worth his godhood would see to it that his “purpose” would be fulfilled.
Freewill and predestination are nasty concepts for the human mind to wrestle with.
If you were somehow given the abiltity to have an opportunity to create “a clone or a new intelligent life form,” and you wanted to see if it measured up to your expectations? You have it within your ability to decide when and if this creation meets your desired expectations. When would you decide when the creation measured up or not? How long would the creation need no easily detectable direct intervention from you to know if it was going to turn out according to your expectations?
Everyone really so certain the earth’s not been subject to a world wide flood in the recorded history of mankind?
Something has snaked its way through our solarsytem in the past that has been very inhospitable, looks like something has been found our there that might be responsible for all of this catastrophism.
A brown drawf star with seven planets of it own is reaching perihelion with our solarsystem during the next four years. Could be getting a bit catastrophic around our neck of the woods once again.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EPIcPqedVa4&NR=1
Special Notice to Karl: You are shamefully naive about “Nibiru.” See here. It’s all a hoax and you don’t seem to give a crap. You’d rather spread hoaxes than do responsible research.
(Anticipating your objection), NASA’s David Morrison is more trustworthy than your anonymous video. You might not think this fair, but Morrison, a highly trained and experienced scientist has put his name and conclusions into the public domain and defended them over a lifetime. The anonymous person(s) who created your Youtube video has no credibility, especially in light of the End Times eschatology espoused in the notes at YouTube.
You have earned the very short leash I am putting you on, effective immediately. You have been working hard to clutter up this website with junk science, junk videos and junk links. You’ve outworn your welcome. From now on, your comments will be deleted, in their entirely, unless they are undeniably compliant with the Comments Policy of DI. Based on your track record, you have earned the burden of convincing me of each comment’s worthiness. To have any chance of being published here, your future comments will need to be short (a few sentences only), and your cited sources will need to have an immediate smell of credibility. This site is no longer a place for you to pull up your cyber-chair and hold court.
Out of courtesy, I will offer you this: If you have a website of your own where you talk at length about your theory of the universe and the meaning of life, I will print it at in these comments. That way, anyone who wants to hear more of your ideas will be free to do so.
Anyone who would post that Niburu video doesn’t really belong at DI. I have suspected for some time that Karl is trolling us and this confirms it as far as I’m concerned. Anyone who thinks that a video of this sort would convince THIS crowd is either startlingly naive or simply putting us on.
An aside…
Why is it that all conspiracy/armageddon videos share certain characteristics, the most obvious being an overuse of declamatory text? This one is particularly bad because of the effect chosen to present the text. Boy, that is hard to read, and for those of us who read a little faster than normal, annoyingly slow!