• Welcome to League Of Reason Forums! Please read the rules before posting.
    If you are willing and able please consider making a donation to help with site overheads.
    Donations can be made via here

Creationism in Czech

AronRa

Administrator
arg-fallbackName="AronRa"/>
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'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.

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.
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.

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.

We all came from His divine Love,
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.

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.
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.

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.

1610829338870.png
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?

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."
I assure you, man-made mythology will hardly be irrelevant in this discussion.

How can you not see the Absolute 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.

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.
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.

May the God bless you!
You should know that blessings/curses are positive/negative enchantments. So you're hoping that your god will magically enchant me.
 
Last edited:
arg-fallbackName="Sparhafoc"/>
I am not sure if other members are permitted to post in a direct exchange like this, so if not then please feel free to delete or move my post.

But I wanted to add to this:

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.

Over the couple of decades of the internet, I've seen this occur approximately 17 times (no marriages involved though). Some of them I've had no part in, others I've been the main instigator of this change. I'm not a palaeontologist like Aron Ra, but my field overlaps and is far more often the target of Creationist criticism: human evolution. In fact, I didn't enter the creation-evolution debate of my own accord, I was actively targeted by Creationists over and over and over again in the early days of the internet; I never sought them out, but they'd find me on Biology chat boards, insist on posting hostile nonsense in forums dedicated to science, and bring the same absurd and ignorant arguments repeatedly regardless of them being different people - it's Creationists who weaponized my knowledge of evolution honing it towards absolute destruction for Creationist arguments. And it's very, very effective, not least because the totality of evidential reality supports my position, but because my position arises from that evidence - it's not a belief I project onto the world and expect it to conform.

I want to differ slightly in the description Aron Ra's used - while there are undoubtedly some overtly mendacious Creationists, and they tend to be the ones looking for a following or seeking to do battle with their perceived enemies online, the normal victim of the lie is the Creationist themself. By far and away the preponderance of people who subscribe to Creationism do so either for psychologically tribalist reasons where they've been told that evolution is the enemy of Christianity (or other religions' creation beliefs), and/or simply have never had a genuine education in Biology in the first instance. They don't know, and they've been deceived = to take a quote from your preferred tradition - 2nd Corinthians 4:4 Satan has blinded the minds of the unbeliever... but Iherein I conceive of 'satan' as meaning 'the enemy' and in this case, it's analogous to being the enemy of empirical, observable truth. Creationists are not just believers, they are unbelievers in evidence, in reason, in acknowledging and accepting hard facts which they perceive as contradictory of inconvenient for their dearly held and deeply valued beliefs.

So Roman, you take some pride in your belief that you are 'intellectually honest' - can I ask you directly: if you encountered sufficient evidence to cause you to accept evolution, would you actually accept it and incorporate it into your beliefs (it's not hard - many Christians manage it), or would you reject it because you cannot imagine how you would synthesize it with your religious presuppositions?
 
Last edited:
arg-fallbackName="R. D."/>
Let's take this step by step. First of all, thank you for reply.
When I went to Prague, my host told me the Czech Republic was the most atheist country in Europe.
Yes it's sad. That's why you can see the rise of immorality in society. The christian values were base line of our growth. It was so since the arrival of Saints Cyril and Methodius (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saints_Cyril_and_Methodius). And later from teachings of great master Jan Hus (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_Hus). Our christian renewal was one of the most profound in Europe. Without christian values the society can't function.


So I'm surprised and disappointed to hear religious extremism coming from there.
Extremism? If you want to address extremism then look at rise of Feminism and harm that they bring to the healthy thinking of society.


I'm all about proper education instead of biased, politicized propaganda
Now you're talking about liberalism right?

Because religious apologists feel it necessary to mislead and deceive, to sow confusion and minimize the risk of understanding certain demonstrable realities like evolution.
I can promise you, that I'll never try to mislead or deceive anyone. I'm genuine christian and I have nothing to hide. The truth of christianity is so obvious that there is nothing what could challange it.
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.
I already agree with that. Science is a tool, christianity is the Truth. Science can help us to understand how God did it. Christianity helps us understand who is All Mighty Creator.
"Nothing but lies? Cannot be defended honestly?", Only Satan is the Deceiver and as Bible states, his lies are great. The word of God is above all nature. If you follow the Word of God, you cannot fall for lies.


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.
I'll do my very best to address every question you ask.



Don't lie.
"I assure you before God that what I am writing you is no lie." Galatians 1:20. As I said, I'll remain open and genuine throughout the discussion.

what is asserted without evidence may be dismissed without evidence
I agree, but you need to understand that God is a-priory evidence. The evidence of evidence. Because of Him everything else is possible.
For example: You can say, "I see the yellow sun", that's only because God allows you to see what you see. If God was taken out of picture, you wouldn't be able to exist. So every evidence is evidence because of a-priory baseline of God. Reality is real because of His grace.

Remember that evidence should be in the form of peer-reviewed studies or secular educational material, never pseudoscience propaganda from religious apologists.
I only need one source, the Bible. Bible is more than peer-reviewed it's God-reviewed. How can man made observation compare to the Gods wisdom?

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.
It's not "baseless speculation". The Bible said we came from His divine Love. How can that be baseless?
And I have that, for example the simple truth of Jesus resurrection. It was so profound event that we kept it in our minds (and hearts) for more than thousand years.

For example, you don't know what a scientific theory is.
True I'm not a scientist.


Theory means uncertain speculation, like your own position is; something equivalent to a guess.
My position is "uncertain speculation"? How can that be? God with His endless Love created us. Nothing speculative. He made us in His image, so we can understand earthly things. I have huge respect for scientists, because they are describing His majestic work.

Because (unlike religious believers) we don't want be fooled into believing anything that isn't evidently true.
Not "unlike religious believers", we as well don't want to be fooled. That's why we compare every action with Bible. We're seeking truth. Within His divine plan.


The only way to do that is to seek out the flaws in your current perception and correct them.
We're doing the same thing. We're always trying to better understand God's plan.

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.
As I said, I have great respect for science. But it can't said anything about the Divine. We as christians don't have that luxus of rigious research. We have the God's word and we're trying our best to understand it as well as possible.
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.
Once again I found it beautiful. We're both looking at His holy work; I study what he did and you study how He did it. There are no baseless speculations involved. Our basis is God, your (scientist) basis is His work (the nature). And I can accept that "theory" is based on current rigious research. But still it can't undermine the Truth of Bible.


People had long suspected that all life must be somehow related.
I agree, in the end we all came from the same Creator.


Humans have bred many different breeds of dogs, cattle, fowl, etc., using artificial selection.
I agree even with this. Within the same kind we're able to breed many different examples.
humans are indistinguishable from apes.
There may be some same characteristics. But we have been created in image of God, we have intelligence. That's what differs us from animals.
Do you understand and accept everything I've explained to you so far?
I can understand that there are similarities. Within the same created kind. You can muted cats to breed new type of cat, but it still remains cat. I can even accept that there may be some creature we would no longer classify as "cat", but it is still within the same kind. But what i can't accept is that everything is related within the same tree. Yes everything was created (therefore the similarities), but nothing "evolved" from one common ancestry. And there is one *huge* difference between us and animals. We have immortal soul. That's why we are able to think, to truly feel, to experience things to its fullest.

Yes we and animals share the same "matter". The matter which God used to create us. That can lead us to think we're the same, but we're not.

"And God said, “Let the earth bring forth living creatures according to their kinds: livestock, land crawlers, and beasts of the earth according to their kinds.” And it was so. 25 God made the beasts of the earth according to their kinds, the livestock according to their kinds, and everything that crawls upon the earth according to its kind. And God saw that it was good. 26Then God said, “Let Us make man in Our image, after Our likeness, to rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, and over all the earth itself and every creature that crawls upon it.”" Genesis 1:24-26




I assure you, man-made mythology will hardly be irrelevant in this discussion.
Man write the Bible, but his hand was guided by God. What source could have higher importance?

You don't have anything that is evidently true, but I do, and I'll show you.
Bible is evidently true. Even if some parts of it may be confusing. I'll try to elaborate;
Imagine that there is family living near the deep cave. Mother is deeply woried for her child which is playing outside. So she says to him, "In cave is huge monster, which eats children". Is she lying? No becouse if child gets lost in the cave, it will die. So she's saying the truth but on the level of child (so even it can understand). God is acting the same, he's telling us truth but on level of our lowly understanding.

Here you're resorting to the question-begging fallacy,
I'm just being genuine, how can that be logical fallacy?

So you're hoping that your god will magically enchant me.
Of course not. I'm hoping He'll protect you in your life.
 
arg-fallbackName="*SD*"/>
I am not sure if other members are permitted to post in a direct exchange like this, so if not then please feel free to delete or move my post.

This is an open thread, anyone can post, it's all good.
 
arg-fallbackName="*SD*"/>
The truth of christianity is so obvious that there is nothing what could challange it.

It's comments like this that arouse deep suspicion as to an interlocutors sincerity, I don't know you from a bar of soap, but of everything you wrote, this is the part I want to respond to. You aren't obligated to reply to me, or anyone for that matter, but this is all I'll respond to as others will be posting plenty anyway.

Even if Christianity is 'true' - it certainly isn't obviously so, anything but. It's not obvious that a God of any variety exists, or that such a being 'created' everything, or that this being has created some kind of 'afterlife' or is concerned about what I do with my penis. Nor is it obviously true that such a being knows everything, is everywhere or is 'good'. In fact, none of the central claims Christianity makes for itself are obviously true and nor is there 'nothing' that could challenge these notions, that's just demonstrably false.

You're new here, so welcome to the league, how you proceed is up to you but I would caution you against making sloppy and frankly ridiculous statements like the one above if you want people here to take you seriously.
 
arg-fallbackName="Sparhafoc"/>
It's exactly as obviously true to a devout Christian as Hinduism is obviously true to a devout Hindu, and Buddhism is obviously true to a devout Buddhist, etc., etc.

They can all equally believe that their preferred and native inculcated religion is true, but they can't all be right which indicates that the 'obvious' part is not a very good guide at all to what is actually true.

They can, of course, all be wrong as that would solve the mutual contradiction.
 
arg-fallbackName="R. D."/>
This is an open thread, anyone can post, it's all good.
I would like to politely ask not to. I'm here to have discussion with Aron, I never agreed to some sort of open topic forum; one against many. It's already hard for me to navigate thru it.
 
arg-fallbackName="*SD*"/>
I would like to politely ask not to. I'm here to have discussion with Aron, I never agreed to some sort of open topic forum; one against many. It's already hard for me to navigate thru it.

Then you only need reply to him, you can ignore other posters at your discretion, but this is not a restricted thread, LoR is an open discussion forum for anyone who chooses to use it.
 
arg-fallbackName="AronRa"/>
Let's take this step by step. First of all, thank you for reply.

Yes it's sad. That's why you can see the rise of immorality in society. The christian values were base line of our growth. It was so since the arrival of Saints Cyril and Methodius (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saints_Cyril_and_Methodius). And later from teachings of great master Jan Hus (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_Hus). Our christian renewal was one of the most profound in Europe. Without christian values the society can't function.
Yet, most societies around the world and throughout time are/were not Christian, yet they function just fine. While in Christian society, there’s a negative statistical correlation between religiosity and what we typically think of as moral behavior. Convicted felons are commonly estimated to be overwhelmingly religious, while the estimated number of atheists in prisons is always much lower than among free-roaming citizens. The factions of dominant religion statistically have the highest crime rate, with special emphasis on hate crimes. Religious people are more likely to condone the killing or torture of prisoners, where nonreligious people are more likely to consider that morally wrong.

But it gets worse; the most religious countries also have the highest murder rate, and the same is true of the most religious areas of the United States. The higher the religiosity of a given populace, the higher the murder rate. Nations that are more secular show the opposite tendency, as the less religious they are, the more peaceful they tend to be. Here in the United States, evangelical Christians have the highest divorce rate. They also have the highest rates of teen pregnancy, which isn’t surprising in areas that teach “abstinence only” instead of offering sex education. I live in Texas, where we have the highest rates of repeat teen pregnancy.

But it gets even worse. Students in private religious schools (where evolution is not taught) are statistically more likely to get an abortion than their peers in public schools where evolution is taught. This is a testament to their hypocrisy and shows what a colossal failure the policies of the Religious Right have always been.

But it gets even worse than that. Child Protective Services and other agencies report that a significant majority of child abusers and molesters identify as very religious, and the more religious they are, the worse offenders they are. Yet religious people argue that the less religious we are, the less moral we are. Because without God, they say, there can be no objective moral standards. This makes me think they don't know what morality even is.

Extremism? If you want to address extremism then look at rise of Feminism and harm that they bring to the healthy thinking of society.
I'm not going to take the bait and talk about everything you hate. My position is that unfair double standards should not be arbitrarily imposed on the basis of gender. That is feminism by definition, and it is not remotely extremist. Creationism is religious extremism because it is a worship of scripture to the exclusion and rejection of fact.

AronRa said:
I'm all about proper education instead of biased, politicized propaganda
R.D said:
Now you're talking about liberalism right?
No. In my country, biased, politicized propaganda is always Religious Right-Wing conservatives promoting Christian Nationalism.

I can promise you, that I'll never try to mislead or deceive anyone. I'm genuine christian and I have nothing to hide. The truth of christianity is so obvious that there is nothing what could challange it.
Except that it requires faith because there is no truth to it. That's why there are tens of thousands of often violently conflicting Christian denominations who can't agree on what truth even is.

I already agree with that. Science is a tool, christianity is the Truth.
The truth of Christianity is that there is no truth to it, same as any other religion.

Science can help us to understand how God did it. Christianity helps us understand who is All Mighty Creator.
"Nothing but lies? Cannot be defended honestly?", Only Satan is the Deceiver and as Bible states, his lies are great. The word of God is above all nature. If you follow the Word of God, you cannot fall for lies.
You don't have the "word of God". All you have are assembled fables adopted and adapted from previous polytheism, misrepresented as if it were "god breathed", when it obviously wasn't and can't be. The serpent in the garden is the only character in that story who did NOT lie, and the worse thing Satan ever did in your fables was to do as your god told him to. That, and he tried to reason with Jesus.

I agree, but you need to understand that God is a-priory evidence. The evidence of evidence. Because of Him everything else is possible.
For example: You can say, "I see the yellow sun", that's only because God allows you to see what you see. If God was taken out of picture, you wouldn't be able to exist. So every evidence is evidence because of a-priory baseline of God. Reality is real because of His grace.
God is not evidence at all. Evidence is a body of objectively verifiable facts that are positively indicative of, and/or exclusively concordant with one available position or hypothesis over any other. What you just said are only erroneous assumptions borne of the question-begging fallacy that I mentioned earlier, where you are unable to question whether your assumptions might be false, which of course they are.

I only need one source, the Bible. Bible is more than peer-reviewed it's God-reviewed. How can man made observation compare to the Gods wisdom?
Because you don't have God's wisdom, nor wisdom of any kind. All you have is "the word" of ignorant, bigoted, superstitious savages who obviously didn't know what they were talking about ever. That's why the Bible is absolutely wrong about absolutely everything, scientifically and historically, ethically and morally. The names of some of the people and places were real, as they would be in any work of fiction, but there is not much else there that is real or true. The only wisdom I've found in that book at all is Ecclesiastes 3:18-21, and that contradicts the rest of it.

It's not "baseless speculation". The Bible said we came from His divine Love. How can that be baseless?
Because there is no factual basis to it. We know for certain there was no Adam & Eve, no Tower of Babel, no global flood of Noah's ark, and the Exodus never happened as described either. The Bible is a compilation of fables and folklore, one of many intra-contradictory compilations written about gods by men.

And I have that, for example the simple truth of Jesus resurrection. It was so profound event that we kept it in our minds (and hearts) for more than thousand years.
Once again, we do not call anything "truth" until or unless we can show that it is true. Things you simply assume for no good reason at all do not qualify.

My position is "uncertain speculation"?
The entire Bible is uncertain speculation, as all religions are, because all of them require faith in indefensible claims that are not evidently true.

How can that be? God with His endless Love created us.
No, he didn't. There evidently is no god. Nor is there even a possibility of gods. Empty assertions unsupported by evidence will be dismissed.

Nothing speculative. He made us in His image, so we can understand earthly things.
All of that was speculation, like all other religious beliefs are too.

I have huge respect for scientists, because they are describing His majestic work.
Except that "he" was never involved. He is just an erroneous assumption, something you make-believe because you like to pretend.

Not "unlike religious believers", we as well don't want to be fooled. That's why we compare every action with Bible. We're seeking truth. Within His divine plan.
You just contradicted yourself multiple times. If you were seeking truth, you would only allow yourself to be convinced of things you could show to be true. What you're doing instead is assuming your so-called "truth" a priori, as you already admitted. Which means it's not true at all. You're just lying to yourself.

We're doing the same thing. We're always trying to better understand God's plan.
Then broaden your mind enough to question whether it even is God's plan.

We're both looking at His holy work; I study what he did and you study how He did it. There are no baseless speculations involved. Our basis is God, your (scientist) basis is His work (the nature). And I can accept that "theory" is based on current rigious research. But still it can't undermine the Truth of Bible.
The Bible is NOT truth, the Bible is mostly lies. We are NOT "both looking at His holy work". We're both looking at the world, and you're imagining a magic invisible genie behind everything.

I agree, in the end we all came from the same Creator.
There is no creator. There was no creation.

AronRa]Humans have bred many different breeds of dogs said:
I agree even with this. Within the same kind we're able to breed many different examples.
There is no such thing as a "kind". That is one of the lies of creationism, and it will be important to understand that.

AronRa said:
humans are indistinguishable from apes.
R.D. said:
There may be some same characteristics. But we have been created in image of God, we have intelligence. That's what differs us from animals.
Except that other animals have intelligence too, including the other apes. We're not just talking about coincidental similarities but diagnostic traits. According to both genetics and morphology, humans are apes in the same sense that lions are cats, iguanas are lizards, and ducks are birds.

I can understand that there are similarities. Within the same created kind. You can muted cats to breed new type of cat, but it still remains cat. I can even accept that there may be some creature we would no longer classify as "cat", but it is still within the same kind. But what i can't accept is that everything is related within the same tree.
It is important that you understand that one of the many lies creationists tell about evolution is this nonsense about "created kinds". There is no such thing. The Hebrew word for "kind" (min) is essentially the same as the biological species concept, referring to whether a male and female could "bring forth [fertile offspring] after their kind". This leads to a contradiction pretty quickly, as most creationists, (including Ken Ham, Kent Hovind and Henry Morris, among many others) also accept that speciation happens, and that means that they wouldn't be able to "bring forth" anymore, even if they were definitely demonstrably recently related.

Do you accept that speciation has happened or can happen?

Another common creationist lie is a distortion of evolution, that one "kind" of thing ever turned into another fundamentally different "kind". Every time we observe the evolution of a new species of fruit fly or finch, believers balk that "it's still a fly" or "it's still a finch". Of course it is. Did you expect the offspring to not even be related to its parents? Creationists have even challenged me to show an elephant giving birth to a pine tree. So yeah, they only ask for absurdities.

Evolution never taught anything like what you've been told to believe it does. In fact, that would violate the evolutionary laws of biodiversity and monophyly. You can't grow out of your ancestry. Evolution is "descent with inherent modification", marked by incremental, superficial changes being slowly compiled atop successive tiers of fundamental similarity, and these tiers of similarities indicate taxonomic clades. That means that every new genus or species that ever evolved was just a modified version of whatever its ancestors were, and it still belongs to every ancestral clade that they did. So there was never any time in evolutionary history when one thing stopped being whatever its parents were. Instead, a new lineage would be a different variety of that same thing. The only exception to that is species level classifications, and that is only the fault of human language.

So, given your example of cats. All known species of cats (extant or extinct) fall into one one three categories; felines, panthers, and machairodonts or "scimitar cats". There were many different species of scimitar cats that are all extinct now, and there are many more species of panthers and felines than are shown below. This dendrogram is just a sampling based on genomic comparisons, with ages calculated according to "the molecular clock" of averaged mutation rates.
1610896150158.png
This dendrogram taken an article on "the Evolution of Cats" in Scientific American.

As you can see, panthers (lions, tigers, leopards, etc.) diverge pretty early in the lineage. One easy mark of division is that panthers roar and that only felines purr. The rest of these are essentially felines, with Pardofelis representing a transition between the two groups. This chart chose to sample the Bay cat to represent Pardofelis, but I think the marbled cat is a better example of that group, and of this transition.
1610896848230.png
Notice also that the largest of all felines, the American puma/cougar/mountain lion is genetically very closely related to the African cheetah. Fossils also confirm that cheetahs originated in North America. They since went extinct here, and almost went extinct in Africa too, as their genome shows a critical genetic bottleneck (lack of diversity) resulting from their population being reduced to such a low number.

Do you accept that the Scottish wildcat, pallas' cat, margay and other assorted small wildcats are biologically related to our domestic house cats? Meaning that they all evolved from a common ancestor?
Do you accept that the cougar and cheetah are biologically related?
Do you accept that all leopards and jaguars are biologically related?
Do you accept that all panthers are biologically related to each other?
Do you accept that panthers and felines as well as scimitar cats all evolved from a common ancestor?

Yes everything was created (therefore the similarities), but nothing "evolved" from one common ancestry.
1610897531551.png

And there is one *huge* difference between us and animals. We have immortal soul. That's why we are able to think, to truly feel, to experience things to its fullest.
There is no such thing as a soul. The reason you believe in souls is because the mere fallible people who wrote the Bible didn't understand what air was. They thought that was "spirit", and there are scriptural references to prove that. Even if we had a soul, that would not be the reason we can think. Our consciousness is an emergent property of our biology, and other animals experience this too.

Yes we and animals share the same "matter". The matter which God used to create us. That can lead us to think we're the same, but we're not.
Your religion mislead you to think that we're different, but we're not, and we can prove that. An animal is defined as any multicellular eukaryote with an internal digestive system. That describes people. So it defines people. We are animals. Even your Bible says that humans are animals, specifically beasts, and that only your vanity prevents you from admitting this.

"And God said, “Let the earth bring forth living creatures according to their kinds: livestock, land crawlers, and beasts of the earth according to their kinds.” And it was so. 25 God made the beasts of the earth according to their kinds, the livestock according to their kinds, and everything that crawls upon the earth according to its kind. And God saw that it was good. 26Then God said, “Let Us make man in Our image, after Our likeness, to rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, and over all the earth itself and every creature that crawls upon it.”" Genesis 1:24-26
Then, as I said, Carolus Linnaeus classified all life-forms and realized that taxonomy contradicts the Bible's description of "created kinds". For example, Ecclesiastes says that humans are the beast kind. What are dinosaurs then? Can they be both the beast kind and the bird kind too? Because there are several dinosaurs that are definitely both. Why would there be "all kinds of birds" and "all sorts of birds" if they're all birds? Wouldn't that make them kinds within kinds? What sense does that make? Evolution explains that. The people who wrote the Bible said there was one kind of "creeping things" and that all cattle was one kind too. Now we know better. As we proceed, I'll show you.

Man write the Bible, but his hand was guided by God. What source could have higher importance?
The Jewish Torah, the Christian gospels, the Qur’an of Islam, the Kitabi-Aqdas of Bahá’u’lláh, the Hindu Vedas, the Avestas of Zarathustra, the Adi Granth of the Sikhs, the Mahabarata’s Bhagavad Gita, the library of Vedic scriptures, the Book of Mormon, and the Urantia Book are all declared by some of their devotees to be the “absolute truth” and the “revealed word” of the “one true god,” and believers of each say the others are deceived. The only logical probability is that they are all deceived, at least to some degree. So we should teach actual factual truth instead of the tall tales of people being unreasonable, who are trying to make-believe things that are not evidently true or even possible.

Bible is evidently true. Even if some parts of it may be confusing. I'll try to elaborate;
Imagine that there is family living near the deep cave. Mother is deeply woried for her child which is playing outside. So she says to him, "In cave is huge monster, which eats children". Is she lying? No becouse if child gets lost in the cave, it will die. So she's saying the truth but on the level of child (so even it can understand). God is acting the same, he's telling us truth but on level of our lowly understanding.
It is no surprise that you justify lying, just like so many other creationists commonly do. But the Bible is definitely not true. We could talk exhaustively about that. But we're talking about reality in this thread. So let's stick to the topic.

I'm just being genuine, how can that be logical fallacy?
Every religion relies on logical fallacies, but the question-begging fallacy is ubiquitous in all of them. You simply assume your conclusion and assert that it is true, despite the fact that you can't show the truth of it, and so much of it has already been proven false beyond reasonable doubt. But you can never admit that because religious beliefs are not reasonable; they're assumed without reason and defended against all reason.

AronRa said:
You should know that blessings/curses are positive/negative enchantments. So you're hoping that your god will magically enchant me.
R.D. said:
Of course not. I'm hoping He'll protect you in your life.
....with a magical enchantment. ;-)
 
Last edited:
arg-fallbackName="R. D."/>
I briefly got thru your response. And I'll need some time to process it. So please don't take absence of my immediate response as ignoration.

It's just that my faith was never attacked so harshly and brutally. I feel so sad that I could burst in tears.
So please give me time to go thru it again and again with clear mind.
 
arg-fallbackName="AronRa"/>
I briefly got thru your response. And I'll need some time to process it. So please don't take absence of my immediate response as ignoration.

It's just that my faith was never attacked so harshly and brutally. I feel so sad that I could burst in tears.
So please give me time to go thru it again and again with clear mind.
That's fine. No rush. Also, we don't have to talk about religion or faith. My job in this discussion is just to teach you what we know about evolution. I'd rather stick to that.
 
arg-fallbackName="Sparhafoc"/>
This is an open thread, anyone can post, it's all good.


It is a shame though to see "Rationalist" (most inappropriate user name I've ever seen) use the opportunity to spam more Gish Gallop copy & pastes, comprised also of the typical Creationist mendacious quote-mining, direct from his webforum without even bothering to tailor ANY argument to the actual discussion.
 
arg-fallbackName="We are Borg"/>
It is a shame though to see "Rationalist" (most inappropriate user name I've ever seen) use the opportunity to spam more Gish Gallop copy & pastes, comprised also of the typical Creationist mendacious quote-mining, direct from his webforum without even bothering to tailor ANY argument to the actual discussion.

It’s a shame i have a delete button warned him to make another thread instead to take over a thread with his copy pasting from his own site, people can go there if they want to read. There enough links to his site.

p.s All links are no follow so people will not gain benefit from it.
 
arg-fallbackName="R. D."/>
Firstly I wanna ask why you're deleting post of someone who agrees with me? Aren't you all about honesty and openness?

I'm sorry for overreact but faith basically saved my life. So it's very emotional topic for me. I'll do my best to stick with facts.

Also, we don't have to talk about religion or faith.
I don't understand how can we talk about creation without Creator? It would be like talking about the taste of cake without the existence of cake. God is my cake, my source for facts I'm trying to present.

Yet, most societies around the world and throughout time are/were not Christian, yet they function just fine.
Maybe but the basics for morality comes from religion in all of societies. There is no society which isn't founded on religion (religious past). You cannot erase religion (religiosity) from culture. So you can't observe society which wasn't founded on religious past.

The truth of Christianity is that there is no truth to it, same as any other religion.
Baseless speculation?
All you have are assembled fables adopted and adapted from previous polytheism, misrepresented as if it were "god breathed", when it obviously wasn't and can't be.
It was Godly inspired. Yes the writers were man, they only write what they could understand.
Except that it requires faith because there is no truth to it.
In God is Truth, without God nothing is true, or false. Without God nothing is.

The serpent in the garden is the only character in that story who did NOT lie
Serpent in garden is Naga, not Satan. You can see that in art of early christian artists. It's actually depicted as half snake, half woman.

God is not evidence at all. Evidence is a body of objectively verifiable facts that are positively indicative of, and/or exclusively concordant with one available position or hypothesis over any other. What you just said are only erroneous assumptions borne of the question-begging fallacy that I mentioned earlier, where you are unable to question whether your assumptions might be false, which of course they are.
I'm able to question everything. But I don't understand you. Without God, the prime mover, nothing can "be". Existence exist because it was created. If there is no God, then there is no reality. God is a-priory to everything else. If we remove God from equation, there will be no equation at all.

Because you don't have God's wisdom, nor wisdom of any kind. All you have is "the word" of ignorant, bigoted, superstitious savages who obviously didn't know what they were talking about ever.
Yes I have no wisdom on my own. I'm only a humble admirer of His great deeds. And yes Bible was written by ancient mans as I stated earlier. That's why it's so amazing, that this Godly inspired ancient text is so relevant even today, right?

That's why the Bible is absolutely wrong about absolutely everything, scientifically and historically, ethically and morally.
Unsupported claim.

Once again, we do not call anything "truth" until or unless we can show that it is true. Things you simply assume for no good reason at all do not qualif
Regarding Jesus, so many eye witnesses and testimonies are not enough? What more can you ask for?

There evidently is no god. Nor is there even a possibility of gods.
How can you even say "evidently there is no God"? What makes that evident? For example you thinking about apple, I cannot show that you're thinking about an apple, so it means your thought evidently does not exists?

something you make-believe because you like to pretend.
False I love the truth, that's why I'm studying the word of God.

You just contradicted yourself multiple times. If you were seeking truth, you would only allow yourself to be convinced of things you could show to be true. What you're doing instead is assuming your so-called "truth" a priori, as you already admitted. Which means it's not true at all. You're just lying to yourself.
Once again example with apple. And please keep this respectful. Don't accuse me of being dishonest, or even lying to myself. I'm doing no such thing.


Then broaden your mind enough to question whether it even is God's plan.
I know you're hurt or there is some other reason why you trail off from God. But maybe if you open your heart you can return to His light again. There are things you can explain by reason, but some things (like the Divine) can be only felt by heart.

There is no such thing as a "kind". That is one of the lies of creationism, and it will be important to understand that.
I can use your terminology. But the word "kind" means type of living thing.

Except that other animals have intelligence too, including the other apes.
Yes but they can't understand music, write poems, experience joy and wonder. How could you possibly describe the need for art in cold biological terms?

It is important that you understand that one of the many lies creationists tell about evolution is this nonsense about "created kinds".
It's in the Bible, Bible is truth, therefore it's true.

Do you accept that speciation has happened or can happen?
If you mean that two different dogs can produce new type of dog? Or two roses can produce new color of rose? Then yes. But rose and dog aren't related.
Yes they both are formed from building blocks (matter) that God used (to form fauna and flora), but thats it.

Evolution never taught anything like what you've been told to believe it does. In fact, that would violate the evolutionary laws of biodiversity and monophyly. You can't grow out of your ancestry. Evolution is "descent with inherent modification", marked by incremental, superficial changes being slowly compiled atop successive tiers of fundamental similarity, and these tiers of similarities indicate taxonomic clades. That means that every new genus or species that ever evolved was just a modified version of whatever its ancestors were, and it still belongs to every ancestral clade that they did. So there was never any time in evolutionary history when one thing stopped being whatever its parents were. Instead, a new lineage would be a different variety of that same thing. The only exception to that is species level classifications, and that is only the fault of human language.
So you're saying that all life evolved from the same origin something? I can't see that as possible. You can see it this way: God created archetypes and within those archetypes some modifications cause different types of the same animal.
kinds.png
But God used the same building blocks (matter) to create A,B and C. That's why the similarities.

Do you accept that the Scottish wildcat, pallas' cat, margay and other assorted small wildcats are biologically related to our domestic house cats? Meaning that they all evolved from a common ancestor?
Do you accept that the cougar and cheetah are biologically related?
Do you accept that all leopards and jaguars are biologically related?
Do you accept that all panthers are biologically related to each other?
Do you accept that panthers and felines as well as scimitar cats all evolved from a common ancestor?
I would say yes to all, they are all beasts. Within the same kind. But I asked elder and he said no. So maybe they are distinct kinds. Bible doesn't give clear answer on this very question. Maybe if they are able to interbreed they could be the same kind?

Even if we had a soul, that would not be the reason we can think. Our consciousness is an emergent property of our biology, and other animals experience this too.
This may be true, but without soul we wouldn't be able to feel, experience joy and wonder.

What are dinosaurs then?
Dinosaurs are myth as fairies are.

....with a magical enchantment. ;-)
Magic is pejorative used to describe someone who is dealing with evil forces. Prayer is communication with God, I'm not demanding (like in the case of magic), I'm simply humbling myself before the Creator.
 
arg-fallbackName="*SD*"/>
Firstly I wanna ask why you're deleting post of someone who agrees with me? Aren't you all about honesty and openness?

I'll answer that even though it wasn't me who deleted them. Otangelo (rationalist) is a troll who copy/pastes REAMS of text from his blog in every thread he participates in, it's often off topic and as someone else pointed out, not tailored towards the topic of the thread. This is considered spam and is against the rules he agreed to when he joined the forum. We're being very gracious and accommodating by only removing his spam, rather than removing him altogether.

His posts aren't being removed because he agrees with you, they're being removed because they're spam. If he bothers to actually draft a reply, by using his keyboard rather than his right mouse button to copy/paste junk from his blog, those posts will not be removed.
 
arg-fallbackName="Sparhafoc"/>
Firstly I wanna ask why you're deleting post of someone who agrees with me? Aren't you all about honesty and openness?

As opposed to repeatedly copying and pasting mendaciously quote-mined 'arguments' from his own website? That's neither honesty nor openness. He's one of the active Creationist liars I mentioned in my previous post but which made distinction about. People like Otangelo aren't involved in this discussion to genuinely discuss anything - they lie repeatedly, they use dishonest tactics, and they seek attention. If you want to engage with Otangelo, he's given you enough links to his self-owned forum for you to do so.
 
arg-fallbackName="Sparhafoc"/>
Dinosaurs are myth...

Serpent in garden is Naga...

It's absurd that you believe you are in a position to teach kids, let alone that you're allowed to. Without religion's unearned social legitimacy, you'd not be able to compete in the free market of ideas.
 
Last edited:
arg-fallbackName="Sparhafoc"/>
Existence exist because it was created. If there is no God, then there is no reality. God is a-priory to everything else.

Such confusion.

Existence was created? Created by God.... who existed.

So what created God? Cue apologetic squaring of the circle - God wasn't created, God always existed - so if existence is an intrinsic component of God and God always existed, then existence always existed too.

Are you genuinely confident that you possess the competence to be teaching children? Something like Sunday School, I can well imagine as it doesn't actually require any real knowledge or expertise, but to so thoroughly confound yourself in just one sentence isn't indicative of the requisite skills an educator must possess to distill knowledge and provide illumination for students.
 
arg-fallbackName="he_who_is_nobody"/>
So you're saying that all life evolved from the same origin something? I can't see that as possible. You can see it this way: God created archetypes and within those archetypes some modifications cause different types of the same animal.
kinds.png
kinds.png

But God used the same building blocks (matter) to create A,B and C. That's why the similarities.
It appears R. D. is an advocate for the neo-creationist orchard. Thus, R. D. accepts evolution, yet R. D. rejects universal common descent. It is actually refreshing to see a creationist state this honestly, upfront, even if they do not understand the implications of such a position.
Dinosaurs are myth as fairies are.
My troll sense is tingling.
I'll answer that even though it wasn't me who deleted them. Otangelo (rationalist) is a troll who copy/pastes REAMS of text from his blog in every thread he participates in, it's often off topic and as someone else pointed out, not tailored towards the topic of the thread. This is considered spam and is against the rules he agreed to when he joined the forum. We're being very gracious and accommodating by only removing his spam, rather than removing him altogether.
Why has rationalist not been quarantined to his own thread, like when they first joined this forum? That way, the appearance of bias can never be raised as an issue.
 
Back
Top