AronRa
Administrator
I'd say it is more important to teach actual factual truth as well as critical thinking instead of credulity. When I went to Prague, my host told me the Czech Republic was the most atheist country in Europe. So I'm surprised and disappointed to hear religious extremism coming from there. But I would be delighted to help correct your curriculum. I'm all about proper education instead of biased, politicized propaganda. So thank you for this opportunity.Roman said:Dear Aron,
I'm pastor (presbiter) of christian ministry association here in Czechia [http://www.krestanskesbory.cz/dle/vedit21.php?id=4, here for the reference]. I would like to accept your challenge, about proving evolution to "everyone to their satisfaction". I was tasked to teach at Sokolova primary school about christianity and creationism (I'm devout creationist, Biblical literalist and evangelist). I was just about to start making curriculum for my lectures, when my friend said, "You'll corrupt those children with lies", I felt deeply offended - becouse what can be more important than teaching our youth about His holy grace!
I use a Socratic approach tailored to each person, to try to reason with and educate them, which necessarily means correcting many of the foundational falsehoods of creationism. Because religious apologists feel it necessary to mislead and deceive, to sow confusion and minimize the risk of understanding certain demonstrable realities like evolution.But He was adamant that I should first speak with you. I'm intelectually honest, so I accepted his request. I don't know much about you, but I watched some of your speeches. In one of them you brag about being able to prove evolution right and creationism wrong to everyone satisfaction.
Here are the terms: Within a couple-dozen mutual exchanges, I will prove to your satisfaction that evolution is the truest, best explanation for the origin of our species, and that it is the only view with any actual validity or demonstrable truth. As a bonus, I will also prove that creationism doesn't meet even one the criteria required of a scientific theory, that it is nothing but lies and cannot be defended honestly. At the end, you will be an "evolutionist" for the rest of your life, though you will never use that word, because it's silly to pretend as if science is just another religious belief.
The only requirements I have of you are as follows:
1. You must properly address every point or query put to you, because you have to understand the basics before we move on to the next level. If you repeatedly ignore direct questions, I will have to interpret that as you simply trolling, wasting my time with insincerity. Every time I have ever had this sort of discussion with a creationist, this is how they always ended, with me having to repeat the same question still unanswered three or four times and only getting feeble excuses or attempts at projection.
2. Don't lie. I am sick of creationists repeatedly lying over and over again in absolutely every single discussion of this type I have ever had. Well, there is one exception. That person quit their job in a Christian school and became a degreed science teacher. She also married me.
3. Hitchens' razor applies here. Positive claims require positive evidence, and what is asserted without evidence may be dismissed without evidence. That means that empty assertions are automatically taken as having no truth to them until you can show the truth of it.
4. Remember that evidence should be in the form of peer-reviewed studies or secular educational material, never pseudoscience propaganda from religious apologists. If you disagree with whatever peer-reviewed paper I present, you'll need a more recent study that rebuts that one the way you want it to.
Of course each of these rules apply equally to both of us.
It is dishonest to assert baseless speculation as if was a matter of fact, pretending to know what no one even can know. Yet that is what all religions do; make truth claims they can't show to be true. In science, that's called lying. If a scientist did what you just did, he would be immediately discredited as a fraud. Scientists can say that something is probably true only if they can show an evident probability, but we cannot say something *is* true until we can show that it is with sufficient evidence. We can't even say whether something is possible until there is a precedent or parallel or verified phenomenon indicating that such possibility exists. You don't have even that.We all came from His divine Love,
If that's really what you think, then you're going to be drinking from a firehose of new information you never knew, and I'll just keep disproving the same old failed arguments I always heard. You will have nothing new for me, nor anything true either.evolution is just an unsupported theory made to deceive the weak and susceptible. I think I can prove YOU the creationist position, without any doubt.
For example, you don't know what a scientific theory is. Creationists never do. Y'all think Theory means uncertain speculation, like your own position is; something equivalent to a guess. So let's start with that.
The purpose of science is to improve understanding. The only way to do that is to seek out the flaws in your current perception and correct them. You can't do that if you won't admit there even could be any flaws. So Science has rules that are designed to be exactly opposite of faith. For example, there must be some way to disprove any hypothesis should it be false. Because (unlike religious believers) we don't want be fooled into believing anything that isn't evidently true. So we won't even consider any claim until you can show support for it. But you can never prove a hypothesis to be true. Because declaring something to be true would close our minds, just like faith does, and stop us improving our understanding.
So when a hypothesis has been effectively proven by an overwhelming preponderance of evidence beyond reasonable doubt, and it shows profound explanative and predictive power, to the point where it would be perverse to seriously question it altogether anymore, we still don't say called it proven. Instead, that hypothesis is elevated to Theory, the highest level of confidence science can achieve. Relativity was experimentally proven twice, once in 1919 and again in 2016, but the rule requires that we still call it a theory. We cannot go around claiming knowledge of absolute truth, because that always leads to dishonesty. We must allow that scientific theories can at least be hypothetically disproved, though no scientific theory has been disproved in well over a century, if not two.
Every modern scientific theory is also a fact. Look at atomic theory, cell theory, theory of gravity, general theory of relativity or the germ theory of disease. All matter is made of atoms. Life is based on cells. Matter attracts matter, and diseases really are caused by pathogens (germs), and life really does evolve and has been evolving for a long time. This is easy enough to prove. So instead of mere guesses or baseless speculation like creationism is, a scientific theory is a body of knowledge containing all facts, hypotheses and natural laws pertaining to a particular field of study.
My high school taught a class on Music Theory. So I barged in one day and interrupted the lesson yelling, "you can't teach music in school, it's just a theory! It's never been proven". That's how silly it sounds when you say that evolution is "just" a theory.
Now, let's look at the support for that theory.
People had long suspected that all life must be somehow related. 2,600 years ago, the Greek philosopher, Anaximander proposed this must be the case, though he couldn't explain it. Aristotle also tried to conceive of a ladder of "higher and lower" life-forms, though that's wrong too. Even Lord Krishna complained in the Bhagavad Gita about people arguing for such relationships. Because farmers have been using evolutionary principles throughout the entire history of agriculture. Not only have we bred myriad varieties of livestock, and cultivated bananas from plantains and corn form Mexican grass, but we also derived cabbage, broccoli, kohlrabi, Brussels sprouts, kale, and cauliflower all from the wild mustard plant. Yet we are just now beginning to understand the mechanisms we've been unwittingly using all along.
Humans have bred many different breeds of dogs, cattle, fowl, etc., using artificial selection. So we always knew that evolution could and did happen. And we knew that there were many different species of dogs, cattle, fowl and so on in the wild that are indisputably related and therefore must have been derived naturally. So everyone knew that evolution was happening, but no one yet knew how. Jean-Baptiste Lamarck proposed the idea of acquired characteristics. Totalitarian leaders like Hitler, Stalin and Mao loved that idea, and hated "Darwinism", because Lamarck put ambitious men in control of their descendant's destiny. But it turned out, Lamarck's explanation didn't work.
Carolus Linnaeus, who first classified life-forms in his book, Systeme Naturae in 1735 was a pre-Darwinian creationist, albeit not like the new lot we have today. He initially believed that new species could not come about except as an act of special creation by God. Yet he noticed patterns throughout all organisms that allowed them to be categorized in a series of descendent sets within generations of of ancestral parent groups in a branching tree pattern of familial hierarchy. This was inconsistent with created "kinds", especially when Linnaeus realized that humans are indistinguishable from apes. He challenged the scientific community of his day to account for that. A century later, Darwin finally solved both Linnaean mysteries by explaining the first known and proven working mechanism of "the origin of species by means of natural selection".
Soon after Linnaeus published his taxonomy, other scientists discovered that fossils were the petrified, lithified remains of ancient organisms. Several European scientists (who were all Christian) independently discovered different ways of dating the ancient age of the earth and the sequence of geologic ages, each containing increasingly fascinating species that also defied any explanation other than by evolution. Darwin made a couple specific predictions about what sorts of fossils we should find if his theory was true and that should not exist otherwise, and both of those predictions were confirmed years later.
One thing Darwin could not figure out was how offspring inherited "units of information" from both father and mother. But soon after Darwin published his landmark book in 1859, a Catholic monk named Gregor Mendel solved Darwin's dilemma with his discovery of genetics. Then all that was left to work out was the emergence of novel traits. But then, early in the 20th century, they discovered mutations too, and have since specifically identified which mutations of what kind where did what when. Now that we've found more genera in the fossil record than still exists today, and whole genome comparisons are computerized, we have a twin-nested hierarchy of phylogenetic taxonomy, tracing and confirming and occasionally correcting classifications that we once done with morphology alone.
So rather than being an "unsupported theory", evolution is actually one of the best supported theories in all of science, being better-supported than even the theory of gravity. Evolution has withstood the longest and harshest scrutiny and has always only ever gained further support from experiments or discoveries in many independent fields without any contradiction ever. Consequently, many national science organizations declare that "evolution is the foundation of modern biology". Because it explains everything and nothing else does. That's why, when the pioneer geneticist (and Orthodox Christian) Theodosius Dobzhansky documented the first directly-observed instance of speciation in the lab, he published a scientific study with the title, "Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in Light of Evolution".
Do you understand and accept everything I've explained to you so far? Please make your questions specific and don't give me too many of them at once. We have a lot to cover and it will take time to get there. Creationists typically only ask me nonsense questions or things they hope I can't answer. I can answer more and better than you think. So be sincere. Realizing already that since the entire global scientific community says they can prove evolution is true, then what about it do you really need to know or want to understand?
I assure you, man-made mythology will hardly be irrelevant in this discussion.John 1:1, "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God."
John 1:14, "The Word became flesh and made His dwelling among us. We have seen His glory, the glory of the one and only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth."
John 1:1, "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God."
John 1:14, "The Word became flesh and made His dwelling among us. We have seen His glory, the glory of the one and only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth."
Because there's no truth to it, and we're about to prove that. The truth is what the facts are, what we can show to be true, NOT whatever else we might assume, imagine or make-believe beyond or instead of that. Claims of "absolute" truth tend to be nothing but lies anyway. Everything yours or any religion teaches always falls into one of two categories, (1) not evidently true, meaning there's no reason to believe it, or (2) evidently not true, meaning that it has already been disproved. You don't have anything that is evidently true, but I do, and I'll show you.How can you not see the Absolute truth?
Here you're resorting to the question-begging fallacy, circular assumptions routing back to an erroneously assumed conclusion. Logical fallacies are not evidence. Nor are they arguments. We certainly should not teach them. We should teach actual logic instead.This is what our youth should learn, to be guided with His path, the holy path. Our own existence is proof of God, the ultimate proof of his Grace.
You should know that blessings/curses are positive/negative enchantments. So you're hoping that your god will magically enchant me.May the God bless you!
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