Adam, welcome again. I think you mean very well. However, don’t you think that there are good people on any side of this? It is certainly confusing.
If God knows us and pities us, as a father his children (Psalm 103), knowing our frame and remembering that we are dust–do you think that He would be unfair?
Thanks to God that he can be a model for what the right father is to the fatherless. My own parents were wonderful, Christian missionaries that encouraged me to look for a God that would be fair and just, like them. C S Lewis agreed with George Macdonald in such a picture, as well.
Thanks for your discussion, and thanks for your hard work.
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Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
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It can be confusing. I think SJ Gould’s work was also misinterpreted by mistake in a somewhat similar way. Colin Patterson (biologist) - Wikipedia
Patterson was one of the architects of the cladistic revolution in the British Museum of Natural History in the 1970s. In addition to his many works on classification of fossil fishes, he authored a general textbook on evolution, Evolution ,[4] in 1978 (and a revised 2nd edition in 1999), and edited Molecules and Morphology in Evolution: Conflict or Compromise? (1987),[5] a book on the use of molecular and morphological evidence for inferring phylogenies. He also wrote two classic papers on homology.[6][7]
Patterson did not support creationism, but his work has been cited by creationists with claims that it provides evidence of the absence of transitional forms in the fossil record.[8][9] In the second edition of Evolution (1999), Patterson stated that his remarks had been taken out of context:
Because creationists lack scientific research to support such theories as a young earth … a world-wide flood … or separate ancestry for humans and apes, their common tactic is to attack evolution by hunting out debate or dissent among evolutionary biologists. … I learned that one should think carefully about candour in argument (in publications, lectures, or correspondence) in case one was furnishing creationist campaigners with ammunition in the form of ‘quotable quotes’, often taken out of context.[10]
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Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
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Aye, thanks Randy. Searched on him, in wiki, he didn’t come up! Until your link.
The desperate, distorted, deceived, deluded lengths people will go to! How human.
As noted, transformed cladistics does not deny common ancestry, rather it argues a logical precedence: theories regarding processes should only be formulated after patterns are discovered. Creationists have distorted this to argue that there are pattern cladists who are skeptical about whether evolution occurs.
Colin Patterson
In November, 1981, Patterson delivered a seminar to the Systematics Discussion Group in the American Museum of Natural History.[14] In the talk, Patterson asked provocatively: “Can you tell me anything about evolution, any one thing that is true?”, and remarked:
“As I understand it, cladistics is theoretically neutral so far as evolution is concerned. It has nothing to say about evolution. You don’t need to know about evolution, or believe in it, to do cladistic analysis. All that cladistics demands is that groups have characters.”
A creationist in the audience taped segments of Patterson’s talk to imply he was “agnostic” on the subject of evolution.[15] To his dismay, Patterson soon found his name quoted in creationist publications:
“I was too naive and foolish to guess what might happen: the talk was taped by a creationist who passed the tape to Luther Sunderland […] Since, in my view, the tape was obtained unethically, I asked Sunderland to stop circulating the transcipt, but of course to no effect. There is not much point in my going through the article point by point. I was putting a case for discussion, as I thought off the record, and was speaking only about systematics, a specialized field. I do not support the creationist movement in any way, and in particular I am opposed to their efforts to modify school curricula. In short the article does not fairly represent my views. But even if it did, so what? The issue should be resolved by rational discussion, and not by quoting ‘authorities,’ which seems to be the creationists’ principal mode of argument.” (Letter from Colin Patterson to Steven W. Binkley, June 17, 1982)
“Unfortunately, and unknown to me, there was a creationist in my audience with a hidden tape recorder. A transcript of my talk was produced and circulated among creationists, and the talk has since been widely, and often inaccurately, quoted in creationist literature.” (Patterson, 1994)
(Note that a transcript of Patterson’s talk has been published in the Linnean 18(2),and may be downloaded from the Linnean Society).
“Because creationists lack scientific research to support such theories as a young earth … a world-wide flood … or separate ancestry for humans and apes, their common tactic is to attack evolution by hunting out debate or dissent among evolutionary biologists. … I learned that one should think carefully about candour in argument (in publications, lectures, or correspondence) in case one was furnishing creationist campaigners with ammunition in the form of ‘quotable quotes’, often taken out of context.”[16]
How terribly sad and terrifyingly politically dangerous.
@Randy and @Klax this is a really good example to me about how important it is to follow up on claims. It’s too easy to assume the quoting has not been mislead himself, even when they are likely being truthful.
But how to follow up on so much? I guess it’s important to rely on people who know what they’re talking about to pick up where I don’t have the background to. …
But then we get to the perennial question about how to tell someone is trustworth!
See who has written about the unobservable nature of an uncaused cause, or that it is a moral contradiction to treat people like they don’t exist when you believe they do.
Is it rational or irrational to argue for what you hold nearest and dearest by citing any source that seemingly supports the positions you feel are required by those commitments? To weigh evidence in the way best suited to arrive at the truth is less important if you start out convinced of your version of truth. Rationality doesn’t really seem to be the issue. What is lacking isn’t a failure of logical implication but rather a difference in what motivates argumentation, and that seems to come down to what one is called to serve. Without sufficient common ground there, rationality doesn’t enter into it. I wish it did but it doesn’t seem to make any more difference than the application of science if one feels a higher calling requires promoting substandard sources or even outright misinformation about which one remains willfully ignorant.
No. I accept what our Creator told us about our world… solid firmament and all.
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Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
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Only use disinterested, consensual, consilient, open sources. The first port of call has to be Wikipedia. In current events the BBC.
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Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
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Which is irrational. To relegate rationality to irrationality. To pervert it in the name of childish fear and ignorance. US democracy: my ignorance is superior to your knowledge.
While the name you apply is true, it doesn’t get to the heart of the matter for a particular human with particular interests and motivations. Attempting to guilt someone out of a view may work, but generally, I think it leads to greater resistance to the facts by way of resistance ot the presenter. Irrational as it is, it’s human.
That being said, it’s endlessly frustrating to present reliable information that is consistently resisted and “refuted” by a lay-person, who has chosen to hang on to misinformation, because, as @markd points out, it supports the the conclusion the lay-person wishes to arrive at. Don’t lose your cool. Strategize.
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Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
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Yeah I’d forgotten that’s what we’re dealing with here. A matter of ANE religion. How could I forget? That’s been me. Fear is the key.
The whole discussion can be decided by something from Popper where he says historical events can not be investigated scientifically.
You are making the false assumption that the universe expanded out from a single point. The whole universe expanded, everywhere. Every single point in the universe was a center of expansion.
None of us – not you, not Colin Patterson, not me – is an expert in the philosophy of science or in the thought of Popper. Popper, however, was both of those things, and by his statements you have indeed misunderstood Popper. (And I’ve at least read quite a bit of Popper – have you?)
A) No, I’m not saying that. Mind you, it’s a true thing, but it’s not what I’m saying here. I’m saying that the action of natural selection in the past can be detected empirically in the present. I’ve done exactly that on multiple occasions, and you insist on telling me that it’s impossible. I’ll also note that on the subject of empirically testing for natural selection I know considerably more than either Patterson or Popper.
Not nonsense, just badly misunderstood by you. The BB theory says that the entire visible universe was at one time extremely hot and extremely dense, and it occupied a very, very small region of space. While I don’t know that the idea of a center is absolutely forbidden in the BB model, there is no reason at all in the model to postulate that there was one.
I am an atheist and I don’t think evolution disproves the Bible. It disproves Creationism, but Creationism is neither the Bible nor Christianity. If anyone is disproving the Bible it is Creationists who insist that Evolution disproves the Bible.
There is no scientific model of intelligent design to accept.
Instead of flawed, why not non-literal?
We don’t need to know where the extremely hot and dense singularity came from in order to understand what happened after that.
Are you an Old Earth Creationist? If not, the billions of years it takes for light to travel from those distant galaxies would seem to be a problem.
How would this produce the correlation between distance and redshift? Why are none of the distant galaxy speeding towards us and producing a strong blue shift? How did they attain these velocities?
Also, how does this explain both the CMB and the ratio of light isotopes?
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Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
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You’re not taking the solid firmament in to account.
No I’m not actually involved in the discovery myself. But I’m not getting told the same things about it as you are either. I’m getting told about it in terms of equations, graphs, measurements, data, and precision techniques – some of which I can relate directly to my own hands-on experience in different lines of work. You are getting told about it in terms of sound bites, YouTube videos and hand-waving analogies that aren’t always valid. And this brings me onto my next point.
You don’t seem to get the role played by mathematics and measurement in science, Mike. Most of the time, you don’t address it, and the times when you do show that you have a lot of misconceptions about it.
And this isn’t any kind of “diversion away from the crux of the matter.” This is the crux of the matter. Measurement and mathematics are the very foundations on which science is built. If you’re going to try to address science in an informed manner, and especially if you are going to try to challenge established scientific theories such as the Big Bang and cosmic inflation, you need to engage with the underlying measurements and mathematics. Sound bites from famous scientists, YouTube videos, appeals to “common sense,” and hand-waving about hearing static from your television simply aren’t going to cut it.
If this is the case, then you should be able to construct a different model based on these possibilities that fits the measurements more closely than the Big Bang model does.
You talk about a number of specific measurements that you claim the Big Bang failed to predict (such as the exact temperature of the cosmic microwave background). But at the same time there are a whole lot of other measurements that the Big Bang predicts precisely (such as the black body spectrum of the cosmic microwave background, the relative abundances of the different elements, and so on). Does your own model provide a better fit to all these measurements? Does it predict the same things that the Big Bang does predict, with as much precision? And are the things that it does not predict fewer and further between?
This is the crux of the matter, Mike. You’ve spent a lot of time trying to challenge the Big Bang. But if you want to challenge the Big Bang convincingly, you need to come up with a model of your own that fits the data better than the Big Bang model does. This means you need to start quoting some equations and showing us some measurements, data and graphs. Because unless you’re prepared to drill down into that level of detail, then everything else you say is just hand-waving.
