• 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

From the Non-Sequitur Show

AronRa

Administrator
arg-fallbackName="AronRa"/>
In the chat of a debate on the Non-Sequitur show, Christian Wentz said that I was closed minded for saying that professional scientists shouldn't bother reading the propaganda posted on AnswersInGenesis. So I asked him, "can you show something AiG has ever published that you can show to be correct compared to the scientific position on that topic?"

He referred me to this paper, which I immediately posted to Facebook. Initial responses to that included the following comments:

"Not realizing that when you say "published" you don't mean just any random series of words posted on the Internet."

"So, their idea of 'proof' is argumentum ad verecundiam and some non sequiturs about vague scripture?"

"That's Hilarious! An impressive collection of unsubstantiated claims. :)"

UGH....I wanted to give it a fair shot.....it is so confusing right away. That 3rd paragraph, though .....I think my nose is bleeding now ;-)

"Polonium Halos? Really? Didn't we cover this in 2015?"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sPSak--gFIU

(actually I covered that in my first article of counter apologetics ever, on Talk.Origins back in the late 1990s)

Then we got into the "Post-Podium" [after party] of that debate. Christian joined me there to, where he publicly accepted my challenge to prove evolution to his satisfaction.

Here is the challenge as outlined in my book.
"I can prove that biological evolution is the truest, best explanation there is for the origin of our species, and that it is the only explanation of biodiversity with either evidentiary support or scientific validity. I can prove this even to your satisfaction over the course of a dozen mutual exchanges. The only trick to that is that you must properly address every point or query, ignoring none. If you repeatedly ignore direct questions, you will default this discussion, and I will be under no obligation to continue."

In all but one case, my quarry has failed the challenge by repeatedly ignoring direct questions, failing to properly address any point or query in our exchange. Several of those debates can be found on this very forum.

In our live discussion on the Non-Sequitur Show, Christian said there were three things that would convince him that creationism was not true. He mentioned the first, being if the universe could be shown to be eternal. Even though the origin of the universe doesn't have anything at all to do with evolution, everyone--myself included--jumped in to disprove that, and we never got to hear the other two items. So before we begin, I would like to know what those other two items are. Though I'm still going to stick to the topic regardless what his criteria is.
 
arg-fallbackName="cgingerwentz"/>
Thank you Mr. Ra for offering this challenge. I sincerely look forward to our civil dialogue.

I said that in order to dissuade me from Creationism (not Christianity, that's a separate issue), you must one of prove three things:


1. The universe is eternal.

One of the fundamental beliefs in Creationism is that there is a divine deity that is responsible for the creation of the universe and all that is in it. However, if the universe has always existed (aka eternal), then there is no need for such a being. If the universe was never created, but always was in existence, then it was never created. Hence, the God-hypothesis is null-and-void.

However, I would like to defend the proposition that the universe is NOT eternal, but instead, had an absolute beginning. In others words, EVERYTHING came into being from NOTHING.

a) Philosophical reasoning: If the universe is eternal, then that means time itself is also eternal. But wait a second, if time is eternal, then that means the present would never arrive. "How so", you ask? Well if time is eternal, then this would entail an actually infinite number of past events. But if there is an infinite number of past events, then the present would never have arrived!

b) Scientific reasoning: The 2nd Law of Thermodynamics dictates that everything decays and falls into disorder. The universe is an isolated, closed system. Therefore, the universe is decaying into disorder. But if the universe is eternal, then the universe should already have been fully decayed by now. But the fact that the universe still maintains some level orderliness scientifically shows us that the universe is not eternal.

And to go off on a slight tangent, I would like to compare two predictions related to the beginning of the universe:

Creationism predicts that the universe has a beginning. Atheism predicts that the universe has no beginning, but that it was eternal. One is right. One is wrong.

And as of now, both agnostic and atheistic astronomers and cosmologists no longer hold onto the Steady-State Theory, but now hold onto the Big Bang theory. That is so far one successful prediction that Creationism makes (and one that the Bible has already been saying for centuries) and one where Atheism fails.


2. Materialism/Naturalism. This would absolutely destroy Creationism. Naturalism asserts that space, matter, and time are all that exist. Absolutely nothing supernatural or immaterial exists. If that is the case, then Creationism is a goner.

Now let's take the laws of logic, for example. Both Mr. Ra and I believe that the laws of logic exist. But hold on... the laws of logic are not material. One cannot stub their toe on a law of logic. So in order to prove that Naturalism is true, the Atheist must use the immaterial laws of logic in order to prove that only the material exists. THE VERY FACT THAT THE ATHEIST CAN MAKE AN ARGUMENT SHOWS THAT HE IS WRONG! The laws of logic are apart of an immaterial realm PREDICTED BY CREATIONISM! Therefore, the Atheist must first presuppose that Creationism is true in order to disprove it.

I brought this up in the Youtube debate and I was not satisfied with the refutation of my argument, so I'm gonna state it again (I'll blame myself on this one as I might not have made myself clear). Both Creationists and Atheists presuppose that the laws of logic exist. As a matter of fact. Mr. Ra demonstrated that in the debate. He attempted to use logic in order to persuade me that Creationism is false. But here's the thing: how can one prove that the laws of logic exist without using them to prove that they exist? Both Creationists and Atheists can't escape this circular reasoning. So the best way that I can explain the existence of the laws of logic is that they are a reflection of the way God thinks. But with the Atheists, they cannot explain its existence without falling into the trap of circular reasoning. The Creationist isn't using circular reasoning here is because the buck stops at God. But with the Atheist, they cannot escape this. Now if Mr. Ra does not assert that Naturalism is true, but that an immaterial reality does exist, then I ask him..."how do you account for the existence of an immaterial reality without the existence of God?"

Here is yet another example of Creationism best explaining reality while Atheism falls short.


3. Darwinian Macro-Evolution/Molecules-to-Man Evolution/Particles-to-People Evolution/Common Ancestry

Now I know that's a mouthful, but I want to make sure that both Mr. Ra and I are talking about the same thing. I do NOT deny Natural Selection. I do NOT deny that one species can "evolve" into another species (I do not mean "family" or "kind" when I mean species. A Wolf and a Chihuahua are two different species, but they're both apart of the caninae family).

If this happened to be true, then this would be a devastating blow to both Young and Old Earth Creationism (not Theistic Evolution, a view to which many Christians hold). I will not attempt to disprove this now and not intentionally attack straw-man. Instead, I will await to see how Mr. Ra will "prove evolution to my satisfaction."

Thank you, and I eagerly await your response.
 
arg-fallbackName="he_who_is_nobody"/>
cgingerwentz said:
Atheism predicts that the universe has no beginning, but that it was eternal.

Atheism makes no such prediction. Atheism is just a lack of belief in deities. Whether or not the Universe has always existed or if there is a supernatural has nothing to do with whether someone is an atheist.
cgingerwentz said:
Now I know that's a mouthful, but I want to make sure that both Mr. Ra and I are talking about the same thing. I do NOT deny Natural Selection. I do NOT deny that one species can "evolve" into another species (I do not mean "family" or "kind" when I mean species. A Wolf and a Chihuahua are two different species, but they're both apart of the caninae family).

As I keep pointing out, creationists accept evolution (descent with modification), they just reject deep time and universal common descent. This creationists even goes a step further then most by actually using the word (to bad he put it in scare-quotes). Most of the time, creationists will accept evolution while wanting to call it something else (i.e. adaptation).
 
arg-fallbackName="Sparhafoc"/>
Greetings.

However, I would like to defend the proposition that the universe is NOT eternal, but instead, had an absolute beginning. In others words, EVERYTHING came into being from NOTHING.

Does your argument then also apply to God coming into existence from nothing, or is there a special clause there to save one argument that somehow doesn't apply to the other?

Which universe are you talking about, by the way? Our inflation? Or the potential greater cosmos?

But wait a second, if time is eternal, then that means the present would never arrive.

No disrespect to your good self, but do you have any of your own arguments? So far you've just offered standard apologetics of the philosophical bent.

Of course, the present is something experienced, not something that 'arrives' like a train passing between points. It's never a good idea to use theology to argue about physics.

The 2nd Law of Thermodynamics dictates that everything decays and falls into disorder.

Whereas, in factual reality it says that the total entropy of an isolated system can never decrease over time.

Concepts like 'decay' and 'disorder' have absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the laws of thermodynamics.

Atheism predicts that the universe has no beginning, but that it was eternal. One is right. One is wrong.

Citation needed.

Perhaps as I am not an atheist, I never got this memo... or perhaps it's in a secret society book of atheism I've never heard about. Either which way, it seems like a transparently manufactured strawman which I assume, to give you the benefit of the doubt, you are merely repeating without engaging in due thought rather than personally contriving duplicitously.

Atheism is the non-belief in gods. There is no atheistic dogma relevant to the origin of the universe.

And as of now, both agnostic and atheistic astronomers and cosmologists no longer hold onto the Steady-State Theory, but now hold onto the Big Bang theory. That is so far one successful prediction that Creationism makes (and one that the Bible has already been saying for centuries) and one where Atheism fails.

Except. of course, it's not a 'Creationist prediction' because you can't make predictions AFTER you know something, and historically Creationists denied the Big Bang with the same kind of distorted theological reasoning you are producing.

Show me where in the Bible that it says the universe expanded from a high density state, or that the universe is undergoing inflation. Not so much as a peep exists accounting for this in the Bible, and I know the Bible inside out.

Naturalism asserts that space, matter, and time are all that exist.

Personally, I already feel more interested in seeing your citations rather than responding to your arguments because you are producing a lot of definitive definitions which seem idiosyncratic and unintelligible to me. This is nothing to do with philosophical naturalism, which factually is concerned with the claim that only natural laws operate and influence the development and structure of the universe and the behavior of the things within it.

Now let's take the laws of logic, for example. Both Mr. Ra and I believe that the laws of logic exist. But hold on... the laws of logic are not material.

This is just semantic word-play.

Firstly, the 'laws' of logic are not 'laws' in the same sense as physical laws (which in turn are really only theoretical proxies for fundamental forces). The laws of logic are designed, cultivated, and expounded by humans directing human thought towards eliciting true outcomes.

Secondly, the concept in your mind of strawberry jam is 'not material' but its existence wouldn't make a very good case for your preferred god - the veneer of legitimacy you're attempting to garner by appealing to logic similarly is not granted by this poor reasoning. Instead, what we know of the mind is that it exists in a physical substrate. We know this not least because people without brains don't tend to have many complex thoughts, be they about logic or strawberry jam. Ergo, there is something physical there, even if you can't find the bit of the brain containing the concept of strawberry logic jam.

Of course, this has no bearing whatsoever on the question you are trying to apply it to.

3. Darwinian Macro-Evolution/Molecules-to-Man Evolution/Particles-to-People Evolution/Common Ancestry

Now I know that's a mouthful, but I want to make sure that both Mr. Ra and I are talking about the same thing.

If that is the case, it's probably best not to use Creationist mumbo-jumbo to talk to a professional scientist about their area of scientific expertise.

There is no 'particles to people' nor 'molecules to man'. That's magic more akin to the Bible's narrative where God intones stuff into existence then conjures men out of mud, not the theory of evolution where allele distribution in a population shifts over time, nor of common ancestry, the fact that all species on this planet are related through an ancestor which diversified by evolution.

I do NOT deny Natural Selection. I do NOT deny that one species can "evolve" into another species (I do not mean "family" or "kind" when I mean species. A Wolf and a Chihuahua are two different species, but they're both apart of the caninae family).

If this happened to be true, then this would be a devastating blow to both Young and Old Earth Creationism (not Theistic Evolution, a view to which many Christians hold). I will not attempt to disprove this now and not intentionally attack straw-man. Instead, I will await to see how Mr. Ra will "prove evolution to my satisfaction."


I think you might need to clarify here because these sentences read to me as 'I do not deny evolution, if that's true, then it's a devastating blow to Creationism'. Don't get me wrong, I wholeheartedly agree that Creationism is self-defeating and has repeatedly shown itself to be its worst enemy in the intellectual integrity department, but I assume giving the benefit of the doubt here that your grammar got the better of your intended meaning.
 
arg-fallbackName="Sparhafoc"/>
images


What family is Tiktaalik rosaea?

See if you can answer without acknowledging the fact of evolution.
 
arg-fallbackName="cgingerwentz"/>
he_who_is_nobody made this assertion:
Atheism is just a lack of belief in deities.

Pardon me, but anytime I hear and Atheist say that, I view it as a cop-out.
Whether or not...there is a supernatural has nothing to do with whether someone is an atheist.

Really? Could you please then explain how one could be logically consistent by asserting that a supernatural reality exists AND that a divine deity does not. I would be curious as to how you can explain that on.

Now Sparhafoc asked me the following questions:
Does your argument then also apply to God coming into existence from nothing, or is there a special clause there to save one argument that somehow doesn't apply to the other? Which universe are you talking about, by the way?

I'll tackle these one by one. First off, the reason as to why the God-hypothesis is offered a
special clause
here is that He is an infinite being. The universe is by no means infinite. No credible astronomer or cosmologist asserts that the universe is eternal. So, if the universe began to exist, then I would deem it logical to go one step further and put the responsibility of the universe's existence into a divine deity in order to avoid an infinite regress.

And this leads to my next question for fellow skeptics: If you're an atheist, how can your worldview prevent the logical trap of an infinite regress if there is no divine deity to stop that?

And to answer your question
which universe are you talking about
, I'm talking about the one we are currently in now. The only one we have evidence for. I respectfully ask that the Atheist does not fall into Ad Hoc fallacies when trying to advocate for the multi-verse hypothesis in order to put God out of the picture.

Now when I said that the present would never arrive if the past is eternal, you made this comment:
No disrespect to your good self, but do you have any of your own arguments? So far you've just offered standard apologetics of the philosophical bent.
. Okay...so what?
The present is something experienced, not something that 'arrives'...It's never a good idea to use theology to argue about physics.

Wait a minute, if the present has never arrived, then how can we experience it?
Atheism is the non-belief in gods. There is no atheistic dogma relevant to the origin of the universe.

Again, a common cop-out that skeptics use in order to escape providing the burden of proof on their position. And I don't know if I were to use the word
, but the word account instead. I assert that the theistic account for the origin of the universe best explains reality. Tell me, why is atheism a better position to espouse?

When I was trying to give credibility to the Creationist account of origins, you responded with this:
It's not a 'Creationist prediction' because you can't make predictions AFTER you know something
. Granted. I myself cannot make that prediction. But what I can defend is the assertion that the Bible has been right all along. Ever since Genesis 1:1 was in writing, it made a scientific prediction on whether the universe is finite or eternal. And with the current scientific evidence we have now, I request that you give the Bible (and therefore, Creationism) credit on this one.

You asked me to provide you an example of a piece of scripture
in the Bible that it says the universe expanded
. Isaiah 40:22
[God} stretches out the heavens as a curtain, and spreads them out as a tent to dwell in.
. This verse would have been hard to believe when it was first written because up until the 1500's, most astronomers believed that the universe was static and unchanging.

Now your following comments on the laws of logic are quite concerning:
The laws of logic are designed, cultivated, and expounded by humans directing human thought towards eliciting true outcomes.
Really? So the laws of logic were designed by humans and not a deity? The laws of logic were invented by humans and not discovered? Answer this question for me: Before humans existed, was it true that at that time, humans did not exist (either way you answer, you're in trouble)? Or did the logic of that truth not exist yet because humans weren't around yet? Saying that humans invent logic and truth puts you into some self-defeating positions that you can't get yourself out of.
The concept in your mind of strawberry jam is 'not material' but its existence wouldn't make a very good case for your preferred god
. But my question to you is...how can you explain the existence of an immaterial realm without the existence of a deity?
Of course, this has no bearing whatsoever on the question you are trying to apply it to.
Of course it does! My entire point is that the existence of the laws of logic (ergo, an immaterial realm) are best explained by Creationism and not Naturalism/Atheism.
There is no 'particles to people' nor 'molecules to man'. That's magic...
Hey! Look at that! Something we can agree on!

In all seriousness, that is exactly what the theory espouses. There was no intelligent designer. No divine intervention. Life came from non-life. From the first single-celled organism, came all the diverse life on Earth as we know it. That's molecules-to-man evolution (the evidence of which I am still waiting to hear back from Mr. Ra on).

Now to answer your last question,
What family is Tiktaalik rosaea?
, I don't know what specific family it belongs to. But I can tell you this...it was a fish! In order to support the weight of the body on land, and permit walking, the most proximal bones of the limbs must be securely attached to the rest of the body. The hind limbs in particular have a robust pelvic girdle securely attached to the vertebral column. This differs radically from the Tiktaalik. The Tiktaalik has small pelvic fins relative to it's pectoral fins. The legs of tetrapods are just the opposite: the hind limbs attached to the pelvic girdle are almost always more robust than the fore limbs attached to the pectoral girdle.

And secondly, the Tiktaalik has absolutely NO finger or toe bones. It has slender bony fin rays which are ideal for swimming. They are nowhere near close to being able to bear its weight on land.

I eagerly await a response. Thank you.
 
arg-fallbackName="Sparhafoc"/>
cgingerwentz said:
he_who_is_nobody made this assertion:
Atheism is just a lack of belief in deities.

Pardon me, but anytime I hear and Atheist say that, I view it as a cop-out.

Great, so what do you view it as when you hear a non-atheist say that? I'm not an atheist. The only thing atheism necessarily entails is a lack of belief in divine entities. Theism necessarily entails the belief in divine entities, but subscribing to theism doesn't say anything about the nature of the entity in which you believe - Hindus are theists, but they share very little with a Christian in terms of the subject of their belief.

Further, that you view something as a cop-out doesn't actually mean it's wrong. Your version is idiosyncratic and quite probably comprised of undisclosed prejudice. We can appeal to dictionaries if needed, though?

cgingerwentz said:
Whether or not...there is a supernatural has nothing to do with whether someone is an atheist.

Really?

Yes, really.

cgingerwentz said:
Could you please then explain how one could be logically consistent by asserting that a supernatural reality exists AND that a divine deity does not. I would be curious as to how you can explain that on.

Easy.

Example Atheist - "I am an atheist, I believe in ghosts"

QED

There's nothing stopping atheists believing in all manner of supernatural mumbo-jumbo, just not gods.

cgingerwentz said:
Now Sparhafoc asked me the following questions:
Does your argument then also apply to God coming into existence from nothing, or is there a special clause there to save one argument that somehow doesn't apply to the other? Which universe are you talking about, by the way?

I'll tackle these one by one. First off, the reason as to why the God-hypothesis is offered a
special clause
here is that He is an infinite being.

So you are going to apply a completely different argument exactly as I said.

Ergo, the universe is infinite - our expansion is finite. Done, right? That's the end of that thread of discussion? No. From experience, I doubt it.

cgingerwentz said:
The universe is by no means infinite.

Who says? Citation, please.

cgingerwentz said:
No credible astronomer or cosmologist asserts that the universe is eternal.

No credible astronomer or cosmologist claims that the universe is finite. Please feel free to prove me wrong with citations.

As I already pointed out in the post you are replying to; I am making a clear distinction between the concept of our expansion, and of the universe (what I call the greater cosmos). Do we know there's a greater cosmos? No. Do we know there's a God? No. If we don't know either is factually existent, but we can ascribe characteristics to one, then we can ascribe the same characteristics to the other. Ergo, the greater cosmos is infinite, timeless, and uncreated.

The point, of course, is that merely asserting something doesn't lend it any merit whatsoever.

cgingerwentz said:
So, if the universe began to exist,...

Oh dear, please good sir - don't appeal to this tired old claptrap here. The KCA convinces no one who doesn't already believe. It's contrived, contorted, and illogical. Even at its most basic level, it's a compositional fallacy. How do we know the universe began to exist? Because things inside the universe began to exist, ergo the universe itself must have begun to exist. Only, sets don't work like that.

cgingerwentz said:
... then I would deem it logical to go one step further and put the responsibility of the universe's existence into a divine deity in order to avoid an infinite regress.

So you'd invoke a vastly more complex entity with no actual evidence beyond the invocation to explain the origin of something that manifestly and evidently does exist? Doesn't seem reasonable or rational to me. My response would be that you possess a prior belief and you are seeking to justify that belief with argumentation, but that argumentation doesn't actually result logically in the desired outcome unless you already lend it belief.

Regardless, you can not then deny an argument that says: the greater cosmos did not begin to exist, only our inflation, so it's only logical to put the responsibility of our inflation's existence down to an infinite greater cosmos in order to avoid infinite regress. This also has the benefit comparative to your argument of not invoking something more complex, or different in quality or composition than that which we know exists.

cgingerwentz said:
And this leads to my next question for fellow skeptics: If you're an atheist, how can your worldview prevent the logical trap of an infinite regress if there is no divine deity to stop that?

I'm not an atheist, but I can answer quite simply: invoking gods does not prevent infinite regress, it merely asserts an end. When poked at, it quickly falls apart. Where was God before there was a universe? External to the universe? In what did the entity exist? Outside of time and space, what could such an entity do? Outside of time and space, how could any entity cause something? Language breaks down, there can be no logical responses here, ergo it's nothing to do with logic - it's a collection of faith statements.

Your response isn't a coherent argument, it's just an assertion you already believe in inserted into a conundrum you've created to make space for that exact entity.

cgingerwentz said:
And to answer your question
which universe are you talking about
, I'm talking about the one we are currently in now.

You mean the local inflation.

cgingerwentz said:
The only one we have evidence for.

So evidence becomes necessary when a greater cosmos is invoked, but a God can simply be asserted without evidence as being necessary purely from logic?

Not sure where you're from, but I'd call that wanting to have your cake and eat it! ;)

Either you're obliged to accept the invocation of the greater cosmos on exactly the same grounds as that you've provided for the god claim, or you acknowledge that your god claim has precisely the same problem as you readily identify in a naturalistic explanation.

Again, this is precisely what I was pointing to: your arguments are not applied equally.

cgingerwentz said:
I respectfully ask that the Atheist does not fall into Ad Hoc fallacies when trying to advocate for the multi-verse hypothesis in order to put God out of the picture.

The Atheist?

Chap, we're human beings here, not labels.

Respectfully ask what you like, but if you can't recognize that you're applying different standards then it's something we're going to have to spend more time discussing.

cgingerwentz said:
Now when I said that the present would never arrive if the past is eternal, you made this comment:
No disrespect to your good self, but do you have any of your own arguments? So far you've just offered standard apologetics of the philosophical bent.
. Okay...so what?

So what?

So everyone here's heard them all before and obviously didn't find them convincing. So either you're going to do a better job than the original formulator of those arguments (which I submit is unlikely) or you could try bringing your own arguments to the table, new ones which people might then find convincing.

cgingerwentz said:
The present is something experienced, not something that 'arrives'...It's never a good idea to use theology to argue about physics.

Wait a minute, if the present has never arrived, then how can we experience it?

More semantics.

As I already pointed out, the notion that the 'present arrives' is basically nonsensical. The present is not a train moving from point to point along a track.

cgingerwentz said:
Atheism is the non-belief in gods. There is no atheistic dogma relevant to the origin of the universe.

Again, a common cop-out...

I submit that replying 'it's a cop-out' is itself a cop-out.

Calling it a cop-out says nothing about the merit or validity of the statement, only expresses your feelings towards that statement. Prove it wrong if you can.

cgingerwentz said:
.... that skeptics use in order to escape providing the burden of proof on their position.

Mhhmmmm

No. Obviously, someone who doesn't believe that X exists has no burden of proof.

For example, I believe in the Greater Spotter Magilistriatium which spans the cosmos. Prove it doesn't exist. It's your burden of proof, right?

How would the non-belief in something result in a burden of proof?

My response would be: this is why Creationists can never engage in coherent conversations, because they think they can simply make up the rules of logic as they go along.

In Philosophy, the burden of proof is unarguably on the claimant to provide sufficient warrant for their position. A null hypothesis is the default position until evidence necessitates acknowledging the merit of the claim.

cgingerwentz said:
And I don't know if I were to use the word
, but the word account instead. I assert that the theistic account for the origin of the universe best explains reality.

I couldn't disagree more, and I would find this a far more interesting conversation than a regurgitation by proxy of William Lane Craig, C. S. Lewis or Plantinga.

cgingerwentz said:
Tell me, why is atheism a better position to espouse?

Better than Creationism? Well, Creationism (i.e. Christian and Muslim Creationism) is manifestly wrong and not concordant with the empirical evidence. Atheism makes no claims about the origin of the universe, so it's irrelevant... but naturalistic accounts are better because they start with the evidence and then make claims based on that, while Creationism has to repeatedly deny vast reams of evidence to pretend it still functions.

Better than theism? I can't really reply to that because the spectrum of possible beliefs under the banner of theism would be far too much for me to tackle or to deny. In fact, I can't refute or deny all possible forms of theism, which is why I am not an atheist.

cgingerwentz said:
When I was trying to give credibility to the Creationist account of origins, you responded with this:
It's not a 'Creationist prediction' because you can't make predictions AFTER you know something
. Granted. I myself cannot make that prediction. But what I can defend is the assertion that the Bible has been right all along.

An empty statement because Christians have claimed the Bible says X and that it's right throughout history even as knowledge has advanced and repeatedly shown prior claims made by Christians to be false.

Also, I am intimately familiar with the Bible and know it is provably wrong on many issues of scientific concern.

cgingerwentz said:
Ever since Genesis 1:1 was in writing, it made a scientific prediction on whether the universe is finite or eternal.

Absolutely not in any way, shape or form does the Bible make ANY scientific predictions. You are very much mistaken on both your theology and your scientific literacy.

Further, you seem unaware that the Bible is not literally carved into stone and that it has been translated and reinterpreted numerous times throughout the ages. Have you read the original Hebrew?

cgingerwentz said:
And with the current scientific evidence we have now, I request that you give the Bible (and therefore, Creationism) credit on this one.

Unfortunately, being scientifically literate and knowing the Bible very well, I am obliged by honesty to refuse.

cgingerwentz said:
You asked me to provide you an example of a piece of scripture
in the Bible that it says the universe expanded
. Isaiah 40:22
[God} stretches out the heavens as a curtain, and spreads them out as a tent to dwell in.
. This verse would have been hard to believe when it was first written because up until the 1500's, most astronomers believed that the universe was static and unchanging.

What should be most amazing about this is how dramatically differently various people have taken this verse to mean over the centuries, being used to provide argument for the exact opposite of what you now claim (through retrofitting to modern knowledge) to be its meaning.

Regardless, (and let's set aside the notion of the 'circle of the Earth') could you explain how talk of curtains and tents evidence the notion that the universe is expanding. Do you believe that tents and curtains stretch in an analogous way to the manner in which the universe is expanding? If so, please tell me where you buy your tents and curtains, because they sound like a bargain! ;)

No, curtains and tents are planes - 2 dimensional canvases. In fact, the entire verse has dimension problems, from Earth circles to curtain heavens.

Any which way, curtains and tents don't expand, so I don't think your argument stands up to even the most basic scrutiny.

cgingerwentz said:
Now your following comments on the laws of logic are quite concerning:
The laws of logic are designed, cultivated, and expounded by humans directing human thought towards eliciting true outcomes.
Really? So the laws of logic were designed by humans and not a deity?

Yes, if a deity exists, they'd have no cause to invent laws of logic - laws being descriptions of observations, and the deity would not need to describe their observations if they had created the force or component of the universe. Laws, theories, science, etc. are all human enterprises to make sense of the universe and things in it from within the remit of our constrained ability. A deity such as you believe in would have no need of contending with those constraints.

cgingerwentz said:
The laws of logic were invented by humans and not discovered?

Yes, provably so.

cgingerwentz said:
Answer this question for me: Before humans existed, was it true that at that time, humans did not exist (either way you answer, you're in trouble)?

I'm 'in trouble'?

Really?

Perhaps pop the hubris away? It's not pleasant to watch, and you're not doing as well as you may think you are.

cgingerwentz said:
Or did the logic of that truth not exist yet because humans weren't around yet?

It's quite simple and a few centuries late: trees falling in forests make noises regardless of whether there is a listener there to interpret those noises as sounds they identify as falling trees.

However, while the falling tree makes a noise (acoustic disruption) even when there are no listeners (animal or otherwise), there is no receiver there to process those acoustic waves into sounds with meaning.

Similarly, prior to the existence of humans, it was true that humans did not exist, but without humans (or other intelligence to conceive of it) the point is redundant. The point you are attempting to make, is of course, nothing to do with any actual law of logic.

A law, as I've already explained to you, is an observation and a summation - a necessarily imperfect description of an event under very specific circumstances. I believe you are confusing the map and the terrain. The terrain exists independently of the cartographer, but the laws of map-making are used in cartography not in the formation of terrain.

cgingerwentz said:
Saying that humans invent logic and truth puts you into some self-defeating positions that you can't get yourself out of.

No, it doesn't at all. Humans did invent logic. I can point you to the recorded historical moments when these inventions occurred.

cgingerwentz said:
The concept in your mind of strawberry jam is 'not material' but its existence wouldn't make a very good case for your preferred god
. But my question to you is...how can you explain the existence of an immaterial realm without the existence of a deity?

Well, first of all I wouldn't posit an immaterial realm - that would be something you'd need to make a case for as I don't see any actual reason to lend it credence. But even if there were an immaterial realm, it would be a non-sequitur to then assert it would require the existence of a pre-existing divine entity for it to exist. There'd be a massive chasm in between the statements you'd need to fill.

Again, for clarity, I didn't say that the concept is an immaterial realm - quite the contrary - I said that the immaterial concept necessarily resides on a physical substrate, and every single empirical example we have ever seen indicates that concepts, thoughts, ideas, memory etc are wholly predicated on the physical.

So can you provide examples to the contrary?

Can you show me this purported immaterial realm?

If you want to appeal to the behavior of the mind, can you show me evidence of a mind existing independently of the physical?

cgingerwentz said:
Of course, this has no bearing whatsoever on the question you are trying to apply it to.
Of course it does! My entire point is that the existence of the laws of logic (ergo, an immaterial realm) are best explained by Creationism and not Naturalism/Atheism.

Again, there seems to be a rather large gap in your contention. You went from 'laws of logic' to 'immaterial realm'. Wherein is this immaterial realm of which you speak? To me, if you are arriving at an immaterial realm solely through logic, you are actually making my point for me: logic is a human behavior, and humans have a number of flaws in their thinking, not least believing that their irrational impulses are somehow logical or reasonable.

cgingerwentz said:
There is no 'particles to people' nor 'molecules to man'. That's magic...
Hey! Look at that! Something we can agree on!

Well, it's in the Bible, so I am not surprised.

cgingerwentz said:
In all seriousness, that is exactly what the theory espouses.

Sorry chap, but you're going to have to try that scam with someone else because I am not an uneducated moron. I studied and teach biological anthropology, so I am intimately familiar with what the theory of evolution espouses, and it assuredly isn't that.

In fact, it's a tad ironic that you are replying to a post in which I inform you what the theory of evolution actually says - that the distribution of alleles in a population changes over generations as an account of speciation and diversification of forms - and you're trying to tell me that the scientific discipline is functionally equivalent to Pokemon.

Let's be frank here; if that's what you think the theory of evolution espouses, then you're categorically wrong. That's not up for debate.

cgingerwentz said:
There was no intelligent designer.

Nothing to do with the theory of evolution any more than the theory of gravitation espouses that there are no invisible goblins pulling stuff down.

cgingerwentz said:
No divine intervention.

Nothing to do with the theory of evolution any more than atomic theory espouses that no unicorns shat out molecules.

cgingerwentz said:
Life came from non-life.

Nothing to do with the theory of evolution any more than that water comes from covalent bonds between oxygen and hydrogen atoms.

cgingerwentz said:
From the first single-celled organism, came all the diverse life on Earth as we know it.

Even this is not actually anything to do with the theory of evolution, although it comes closer - but no scientist has ever made this claim. There could have been a plethora of concurrent single-celled organisms, with only one surviving branch. We probably would never know. However, that speciation occurs is undeniable fact grounded in reams of physical evidence from genetics to fossils.

cgingerwentz said:
That's molecules-to-man evolution (the evidence of which I am still waiting to hear back from Mr. Ra on).

It's about as functional approach to critiquing biological science as invoking Pokemon, to be honest. Your proclamations say nothing at all about the scientific topic, only your knowledge of that scientific topic.

cgingerwentz said:
Now to answer your last question,
What family is Tiktaalik rosaea?
, I don't know what specific family it belongs to. But I can tell you this...it was a fish!

Great!

A fish with 4 legs, each leg having distal digits. A fish with primitive lungs. A fish that could perambulate through the shallows on its primitive legs?

No such fish existed prior to Tiktaalik rosaea, but a radiation of terrestrial animals succeeded it in the fossil record gradually building on this prototype to colonize the land.

So we have a fish which has many characteristics shared by all later terrestrial vertebrates and none of its fishy forebears. Now, is it really Creationism that best explains this? :)

cgingerwentz said:
In order to support the weight of the body on land, and permit walking, the most proximal bones of the limbs must be securely attached to the rest of the body. The hind limbs in particular have a robust pelvic girdle securely attached to the vertebral column. This differs radically from the Tiktaalik. The Tiktaalik has small pelvic fins relative to it's pectoral fins. The legs of tetrapods are just the opposite: the hind limbs attached to the pelvic girdle are almost always more robust than the fore limbs attached to the pectoral girdle.

And secondly, the Tiktaalik has absolutely NO finger or toe bones. It has slender bony fin rays which are ideal for swimming. They are nowhere near close to being able to bear its weight on land.

I eagerly await a response. Thank you.


Don't you consider it more than a little immoral for someone to copy and paste a section of text implying it's their own (even slightly modifying parts to fit) without giving a source to show that they'd copied and pasted it?

https://answersingenesis.org/extinct-animals/tiktaalik-and-the-fishy-story-of-walking-fish/
Answers in Genesis said:
The limbs of tetrapods share similar characteristic features which meet the special demands of walking on land. In addition to a distinctive suite of bones in the limbs proper, there are characteristic bones in the ankle (or wrist) and in the digits (fingers and toes).

In order to support the weight of the body on land, and permit walking, the most proximal bones of the limbs must be securely attached to the rest of the body. The hind limbs in particular have a robust pelvic girdle securely attached to the vertebral column. This differs radically from that of any fish including Tiktaalik. Essentially all fish (including Tiktaalik) have small pelvic fins relative to their pectoral fins. The legs of tetrapods are just the opposite: the hind limbs attached to the pelvic girdle are almost always more robust than the fore limbs attached to the pectoral girdle.


Where I come from, that's a serious foul on your part. In my class, you'd be excluded and without a damn good reason, I'd be pushing to have you removed from the institution for doing this. It's theft, basically.

But perhaps worse is that you think that citing something you don't understand means you have engaged substantively in discussion. I already asked you congenially to formulate your own replies rather than regurgitating other people's, so I am at a bit of a loss here as to why you would so brazenly plagiarize an anti-scientific, religious propaganda outlet to pretend you know what you're talking about when even the copied and pasted answer has nothing to do with the question formulated.

Of course, it's all wrong. Of course, you should have looked at the scientific literature rather than the religiously motivated anti-scientific outlet to find out whether that body of text you plagiarized is accurate. It wouldn't have taken you long to find out that they've missed the point altogether.

But I believe everyone should have a few chances first, so I am actually more eagerly interested in hearing how you respond to having been caught doing this. In my experience, there is a very small percentage of purported Christian creationists who abide by moral norms, but sadly 95% possess such hubris that they appear to have no shame at all, and will instead consider going on the offensive rather than apologizing for deception.
 
arg-fallbackName="Collecemall"/>
I'm not good with the functions of the forum but thought I'd share this regarding there being no cosmologist that accepts an eternal universe.



See: 56m54s

If someone knows how to make it start there feel free to edit the post.
 
arg-fallbackName="Sparhafoc"/>
AronRa said:
He referred me to this paper,

In which the first sentence gives away so much more information than they realize:
Since the beginning of modern science, creationists have strived to explain our world based on the unchanging laws of our Creator.

Since religious dogmatic authority was challenged by empirical reality, the most raving reality-denying fundamentalists have strived to square the circle and pretend that all these contradictions are still concordant with their dearly held late Bronze-Age origin myth.
 
arg-fallbackName="he_who_is_nobody"/>
cgingerwentz said:
he_who_is_nobody made this assertion:
Atheism is just a lack of belief in deities.

Pardon me, but anytime I hear and Atheist say that, I view it as a cop-out.

And I should care about your view why?
cgingerwentz said:
Whether or not...there is a supernatural has nothing to do with whether someone is an atheist.

Really? Could you please then explain how one could be logically consistent by asserting that a supernatural reality exists AND that a divine deity does not. I would be curious as to how you can explain that on.

Ghost, souls, homeopathy, flat earthism, and a range of other phenomena are class under supernatural (magic) as well. None of those can be classified as a deity, thus someone can reject a deity and still believe in any of those and have supernatural beliefs. Have you really never thought about this?
 
arg-fallbackName="AronRa"/>
cgingerwentz said:
Thank you Mr. Ra for offering this challenge. I sincerely look forward to our civil dialogue.
As do I. Thank you for daring to venture where few would. I genuinely think you're going to be significantly improved by this experience. It will take me some time to respond to each of your posts though, because of my schedule. Since I posted the OP, I flew to Chicago, to Charlotte, to Huntington West Virginia and gave this presentation, which I just got back from.



You don't have to watch the video, but it's there and it's relevant to our discussion.

Today I have to be in Austin to be on Talk Heathen. Monday I have another interview in Austin; maybe a podcast. I don’t remember. Then I'm testifying before the State Board of Education on Tuesday. Wednesday I have to be back in Dallas for a meet-up with the National Organizer for American Atheists, and I'm supposed to help him in Lubbock the next day too. So I won't always have time to reply within 24 hours of your posting, just to set expectations.
I said that in order to dissuade me from Creationism (not Christianity, that's a separate issue), you must one of prove three things:


1. The universe is eternal.
That doesn’t matter. While you say that disproving Christianity is a separate issue, I note that throughout the rest of your posts, you still keep conflating this to atheism vs theism. That’s not what it’s about. I’m here to prove evolution, not atheism. Whether God exists or not is irrelevant. Either way, evolution is still an inescapable fact of population genetics, and the Bible is still man-made mythology. Not even the existence of God could change either of these things. Nor does the option of a temporal or eternal universe have anything at all to do with what we’re talking about.
One of the fundamental beliefs in Creationism is that there is a divine deity that is responsible for the creation of the universe and all that is in it. However, if the universe has always existed (aka eternal), then there is no need for such a being. If the universe was never created, but always was in existence, then it was never created. Hence, the God-hypothesis is null-and-void.
It's null and void anyway. God never qualified as a hypothesis either, because there's no way to test it; and more importantly, there's way to falsify it if it's not true, which we already know it isn’t.

God was never necessary to explain anything and it doesn't explain anything. You're evoking the God-of-the-gaps fallacy, a combination of two other fallacies, false-dichotomy and argument from incredulity. Just 'cuz you don't know a scientific explanation doesn't mean you can blame it on magic. God wouldn't qualify as an explanation anyway, since magic isn't any sort of mechanism. You can't pretend to have answered the question unless you can show reason to believe that your hypothesis (or blind assertion in this case) actually is the answer. That means it has to be testable, and that means we have to adhere to methodological naturalism, sometimes called the scientific method.

As I said in my book, "Once upon a time, our ancestors believed that thunder, lightning, and volcanoes were gods in action, that comets were an omen, that the stars and planets had human characteristics, that sickness was a curse of witchcraft, and that epilepsy was demonic possession; all because that’s what religion would have us believe. In each case, the real truth might never have been discovered had we been satisfied by those lies. And in each case, the reality was a revelation of whole new fields of study previously unimagined, and vastly more complex than the simple excuses we made up in our ignorance. No doubt that pattern will continue, such that if we ever do discover the cause of the Big Bang, or some better explanation for the origin of life, the universe, and everything, it too will be a wealth of new information with practical application, and so advanced that it will render our previous belief in gods, ghosts, and magic just as laughably silly as every other field of study so far has already shown."
However, I would like to defend the proposition that the universe is NOT eternal, but instead, had an absolute beginning. In others words, EVERYTHING came into being from NOTHING.
Obviously I disagree.

a) Philosophical reasoning: If the universe is eternal, then that means time itself is also eternal.
No it doesn't. Cosmogenists say that even if the matter and energy in our universe are themselves eternal, and emerged into this universe from a multiverse, or perhaps a fourth spatial dimension inflating three-dimensional space, then space itself obviously did not exist in the compression of the singularity, and consequently neither did time, since the two are interconnected. So space-time still had a beginning even if material energy is eternal.
But wait a second, if time is eternal, then that means the present would never arrive. "How so", you ask? Well if time is eternal, then this would entail an actually infinite number of past events. But if there is an infinite number of past events, then the present would never have arrived!
Is this Zeno’s paradox? Are you quoting that oxymoron, Reasonable Faith? Either way, what I’m saying is that time is eternal because there are NO past events. The beginning of time, and of gravity included the inflation of space as the first event of all time.
b) Scientific reasoning: The 2nd Law of Thermodynamics dictates that everything decays and falls into disorder. The universe is an isolated, closed system. Therefore, the universe is decaying into disorder. But if the universe is eternal, then the universe should already have been fully decayed by now. But the fact that the universe still maintains some level orderliness scientifically shows us that the universe is not eternal.
Or it could be an oscillating big bang/big crunch situation. Or something seemingly similar to that, except that the laws of physics alternate in every cycle. Or it could be what I already said, that material energy flooded into this plane and is still inflating it, but only until everything dissipates into heat death.

Material energy would be eternal for another reason too, since time and gravity reportedly began at the same time, along with the rest of the physical laws and forces. Because supermassive gravity slows down time. That means if you have all the matter in the universe compressed together, then one second would equal infinity, but only as we can evaluate it in one direction. The further the material spreads, the faster time flies.
And to go off on a slight tangent, I would like to compare two predictions related to the beginning of the universe:

Creationism predicts that the universe has a beginning. Atheism predicts that the universe has no beginning, but that it was eternal. One is right. One is wrong.
Both are wrong. Neither are predictions. The few Bible predictions I've ever seen are all prophesies that have failed.



Also atheists don't necessary care which way the universe is. We don’t agree on much as a whole. Just so you know, (since I’ve seen you bring this up elsewhere) there are religious atheists, such as Buddhists, Shaman, Taoists, Chinese ancestor worshipers and some occultists like Aleister Crowley who believe in a number of supernatural things; just not gods. If you have a god, then magic must exist because gods are made of magic. So you can have magic without a god, but you have to have magic to make a god, and magic doesn’t need to have a god. Gods without magic are just people.

Then there are skeptics and science-minded rationalists like myself who don’t believe in any sort of mystical mumbo jumbo, because there’s no reason to believe that and no possibility of it either.

Getting back on point, the earth definitely had a beginning, and creationism is only concerned with this one world as bronze age savages imagined it and tried to describe it in the fairy tales they made from their limited and impaired superstitious primitive perspective.
And as of now, both agnostic and atheistic astronomers and cosmologists no longer hold onto the Steady-State Theory, but now hold onto the Big Bang theory. That is so far one successful prediction that Creationism makes (and one that the Bible has already been saying for centuries) and one where Atheism fails.
No. If the Bible is interpreted literally, then it is clear that its authors believed that the world was spread out like a map over a flat disc—not a sphere [dur], but a circle [chug] (Isaiah 40:22) divided into four quadrants (Isaiah 11:12), sometimes mistranslated as “corners.” This disc-world stood on pillars (1 Samuel 2:8) like a table so that it would not move (Psalms 93:1 and 1 Chronicles 16:30). All of this was submerged in a watery abyss and covered by a giant transparent crystal dome, like a snow globe (Genesis 1:7). The sun, moon, and stars were contained within the "expanse" (Genesis 1:14) or "vault" (Job 22:14) of this massive dome (Ezekiel 1:22). Fountains would allow water in from below the firmament, and windows in the expanse of it would allow rain in also (Genesis 7:11). This wasn’t even an original idea; it was a common belief throughout many neighboring regions, but it was still wrong.

continuum-Fig-3-2-hebrew.preview.gif

2. Materialism/Naturalism. This would absolutely destroy Creationism. Naturalism asserts that space, matter, and time are all that exist. Absolutely nothing supernatural or immaterial exists. If that is the case, then Creationism is a goner.
That is evidently true, isn’t it? I mean, I often hear believers of mysticism arguing that I can’t prove naturalism. But that only means that I don’t disprove SUPERnaturalism, because I don’t have to. We KNOW the natural world exists. We DON’T know—and have no reason to believe—that any supernatural/magical alternate reality exists, and that wouldn’t matter to what we’re talking about anyway. We’re talking about evolution, remember? That means biology, embryology, paleontology, phylogenetics, all natural things that would still be verifiably factual whether magic exists or not.
Now let's take the laws of logic, for example. Both Mr. Ra and I believe that the laws of logic exist. But hold on... the laws of logic are not material. One cannot stub their toe on a law of logic. So in order to prove that Naturalism is true, the Atheist must use the immaterial laws of logic in order to prove that only the material exists. THE VERY FACT THAT THE ATHEIST CAN MAKE AN ARGUMENT SHOWS THAT HE IS WRONG!
Which creationist website did you copy this from? I can’t wait ‘til we can focus on the topic, evolution, and get away from all these irrelevant red herrings that you don’t understand yourself. I’ve already seen how others have answered this, and was surprised to find that you think human ideas existed before humans were able to think them up. But just to put in my own two cents on this, the laws of logic exist the same way your god exists, only in the minds of men.

Now, while we're talking about logic, let's talk about logical fallacies. I don't need to prove that ONLY "the material" exists. It is enough that we both already know "the material" exists. I don't need to disprove the existence of the immaterial. It is enough that there is no evidence to support such a notion. The burden of proof is always on the one making the positive claim. So it is up to you to prove the immaterial exists as well as the material, since we both accept that reality is real by definition. So for you to expect me to disprove your unsupported speculation is the fallacy of shifting the burden of proof.

Understand that unsupported assertions have no more credibility than claims that have already been proven wrong. So if you can’t show that you’re right, you’re not. There’s no benefit of the doubt. There’s just doubt. You have to provide a reason to believe you. If you don’t have any evidence, there’s literally nothing to talk about. So your inability to provide sufficient reason to consider your position is your failure effectively proving my point without me having to do anything.

The philosophy of Science is only concerned with what is supported by evidence. Whatever is not supported doesn’t warrant serious consideration. Come back when you have something to show. Then we’ll have something to consider.

Since you’re talking about philosophy, and I knew I’d be away for a couple days before I could post a reply, I inquired of a couple of the philosophers I know, (who rarely agree with each other) asking how they would address your argument. Here’s how they responded.
Steve McRae said:
"Now let's take the laws of logic, for example. Both Mr. Ra and I believe that the laws of logic exist. But hold on... the laws of logic are not material. One cannot stub their toe on a law of logic. So in order to prove that Naturalism is true, the Atheist must use the immaterial laws of logic in order to prove that only the material exists. THE VERY FACT THAT THE ATHEIST CAN MAKE AN ARGUMENT SHOWS THAT HE IS WRONG! The laws of logic are apart of an immaterial realm PREDICTED BY CREATIONISM! Therefore, the Atheist must first presuppose that Creationism is true in order to disprove it.
What does he mean by 'exist'..as it Platonic? Or woven into reality of some sorts? or merely we have observed the universe and descriptively seen these "laws" (they are not laws, they are principles of classical logic) hold true under classical conditions (not so much at the QM level, but Dr. Malpass a long time ago send me a paper on QM logic and it was like if Chinese and Japanese had an illegitimate language lovechild. I didn't even know where to begin to start to interpret it. He needs to be reminded there are paraconsistent logics which allows for contradictions (A=~A) with out the principle of explosion (meaning if contradictions exist you can prove anything) a type of dialetheism which actually allows for contradictions to be true. I was just reading a paper on this very thing yesterday to explain what "rejection" means in classical logic using paraconsitency: https://philarchive.org/archive/GIOPLO to show him there are logic where you can "accept both ϕ and the negation of ϕ". So these laws are nothing special.

I brought this up in the Youtube debate and I was not satisfied with the refutation of my argument, so I'm gonna state it again (I'll blame myself on this one as I might not have made myself clear). Both Creationists and Atheists presuppose that the laws of logic exist. As a matter of fact. Mr. Ra demonstrated that in the debate. He attempted to use logic in order to persuade me that Creationism is false. But here's the thing: how can one prove that the laws of logic exist without using them to prove that they exist? Both Creationists and Atheists can't escape this circular reasoning. So the best way that I can explain the existence of the laws of logic is that they are a reflection of the way God thinks. But with the Atheists, they cannot explain its existence without falling into the trap of circular reasoning. The Creationist isn't using circular reasoning here is because the buck stops at God. But with the Atheist, they cannot escape this. Now if Mr. Ra does not assert that Naturalism is true, but that an immaterial reality does exist, then I ask him..."how do you account for the existence of an immaterial reality without the existence of God?
I personally disagree about presupposing the laws of logic. I believe they are descriptive and a priori knowledge. We may presuppose that they hold (uniformity of nature), but I don't presuppose they exist as I can see that they exist, there is no reason to take them as an assumption as that is all really a presupposition is...and unstated assumption usually: "The king of France is bald' presupposes the King of France exists...(Now if that is a actually TRUE or FALSE statement, that is complicated but it DOES depend on what level of logic use to answer it: (see Russell under Definite description: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definite_description).

You don't have to "prove" the laws of logic false, you just don't have to accept them! You can use one of many OTHER types of logic where those "laws" do not hold true...even Aristotle argued against the law of excluded middle: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/contradiction/ and this gets into truth value gaps which is the paper I mentioned at first I was reading...and shows that it isn't as cut and dry as he makes it out to be.

Here is yet another example of Creationism best explaining reality while Atheism falls short.
He is full of shit.
That was Steve McRae, who you know from the Non-Sequitur show. Now we'll hear from another, I think more prominent philosopher.
Steven Hoyt said:
I'm going to give you two terms and then some facts, and, I'll try to keep it simple so it's worth your time.

Epistemic Objectivity
Ontological Objectivity

This guy doesn't know the difference. "Epistemic Objectivity" is to say that "for these reasons, on which everyone can agree", something is true. "Ontological Objectivity" is to say that something exists aside from our sayso; it is "mind-independent".

The laws of logic have no ontological objectivity. They are principles of reasoning and are not absolute. This dumbass will respond with "Oh yeah! What about the Law of Non Contradiction!". Your response is that it is a *strategy* and that he, as a Trinitarian, will agree with the arguments of "Dialethesism"; which means that since there are no contradictions in nature, they are only problems in how folks think. So, as a *principle*, dialetheist will set aside the LNC because something like a tripartite God is a contradiction and since the Trinitarian still holds the Trinity true, it's because ultimately, laws in philosophy are principles and we're limited in our thinking and its successes.

Anyway, aside from that, you and I admit there are such laws of logic, but we don't admit they "exist" in an ontological sense.

Moreover, materialism/naturalism doesn't entail to the belief that there is no supernatural ... but going all the way back to Thales and the Milesians and the inquires into nature in the 5 century BCE, gods aren't needed in order to explain anything natural at all. Now, what fuckwit would argue that science isn't justified even moreso today than in any other time in human existence, having some nearly 3,000 years of affirmation of that view ... except a fuckwit?

In order to justify naturalism, one simply has to point out that it is and has been completely vindicated and no formal logic needs to be employed to see so ... just common sense.

Here's the most important thing to note!

Logic is a formal description of how people think; it tells us nothing about the way things really are; it doesn't tell us what is actually true or actually false. No one presupposes any sort of "laws of logic" as the magic this guy wants to conjure up! Said correctly, this guy's sentence becomes "both creationists and atheists presuppose thinking". NO SIR, the atheist does NOT presuppose the "laws of logic" EXIST.

Here are logicians on logic ... since this guy will probably want to redefine what logic "really" is ... which won't at all be what logic actually is:

“Of these two conditions, the logician as such is concerned only with the first [validity]; the second, the determination of the truth or falsity of the premises, is the task of some special discipline or of common observation appropriate to the subject matter of the argument.”
https://www.britannica.com/topic/formal-logic

“When the conclusion of an argument is correctly deducible from its premises, the inference from the premises to the conclusion is said to be (deductively) valid, irrespective of whether the premises are true or false."
Ibid

“The bottom line is that logic alone can tell us nothing new about the real world.”
https://www.lhup.edu/~dsimanek/philosop/logic.htm

“Traditionally logic was considered a normative description of the workings of an ideal mind.”
http://www.filosoficas.unam.mx/~morado/RLH.htm

“[The principles of logic] are non-contingent, in the sense that they do not depend on any particular accidental features of the world. Physics and the other empirical sciences investigate the way the world actually is.”
http://philosophy.hku.hk/think/logic/whatislogic.php

“The principles of logic … are derived using reasoning only, and their validity does not depend on any contingent features of the world.”
Ibid

“… the proof of the validity of these inferences depends upon the assumption of the truth of certain general statements concerning relatives.”
http://www.peirce.org/writings/p41.html

“The object of reasoning is to find out, from the consideration of what we already know, something else which we do not know. Consequently, reasoning is good if it be such as to give a true conclusion from true premisses, and not otherwise. Thus, the question of validity is purely one of fact and not of thinking. A being the facts stated in the premisses and B being that concluded, the question is, whether these facts are really so related that if A were B would generally be. If so, the inference is valid; if not, not. It is not in the least the question whether, when the premisses are accepted by the mind, we feel an impulse to accept the conclusion also. It is true that we do generally reason correctly by nature. But that is an accident; the true conclusion would remain true if we had no impulse to accept it; and the false one would remain false, though we could not resist the tendency to believe in it.”
Charles Sanders Peirce, “The Fixation Of Belief”, Popular Science Monthly 12, November 1877, 1-15

“That which determines us, from given premisses, to draw one inference rather than another, is some habit of mind, whether it be constitutional or acquired. The habit is good or otherwise, according as it produces true conclusions from true premisses or not; and an inference is regarded as valid or not, without reference to the truth or falsity of its conclusion specially, but according as the habit which determines it is such as to produce true conclusions in general or not. The particular habit of mind which governs this or that inference may be formulated in a proposition whose truth depends on the validity of the inferences which the habit determines; and such a formula is called a guiding principle of inference.”
So there's that. Men invented logic in their minds just like men invented God in their minds, except that logic works.
cgingerwentz said:
Here is yet another example of Creationism best explaining reality while Atheism falls short.
You can't call this "yet another example" if you never produced a prior example and this doesn't count as one either.
3. Darwinian Macro-Evolution/Molecules-to-Man Evolution/Particles-to-People Evolution/Common Ancestry

Now I know that's a mouthful, but I want to make sure that both Mr. Ra and I are talking about the same thing.
Me too, which is why I could have appropriately dismissed everything you've said so far. All the text I wrote above this quote could have been replaced with a one word rebuttal "irrelevant".
I do NOT deny Natural Selection. I do NOT deny that one species can "evolve" into another species (I do not mean "family" or "kind" when I mean species. A Wolf and a Chihuahua are two different species, but they're both apart of the caninae family).
I'm confused. Why have you twice said (once here and once in the Non-Sequitur Post-Podium) that species means species rather than species meaning genus or family? Every new genus or family begins with a new species. The genus and family thing are artifacts of an arbitrary Linnaean construct. In the new system, they're all clades.
If this happened to be true, then this would be a devastating blow to both Young and Old Earth Creationism (not Theistic Evolution, a view to which many Christians hold). I will not attempt to disprove this now and not intentionally attack straw-man. Instead, I will await to see how Mr. Ra will "prove evolution to my satisfaction."
As someone else noted here, it seems you may not have phrased this quite the way you wanted. So I'd like you to paraphrase this, to make it clear exactly what you need to know about in order to reject creationism as fundamentally false and accept evolution as real and/or "true".
Thank you, and I eagerly await your response.
OK. Having answered this preliminary, this will be the first post of round one. The truth is what the facts are, what we can show to be true. Thus there is no truth in any religion because none of them can show that they’re any more accurate than all the others or that they’re even right about whatever they agree on. There is absolutely no evidence whatsoever that anything supernatural even exists outside of our imagination. We’ve certainly never seen anything magically “created” for example. But we do have a long list of facts, things we know and can show to be true of evolution. For example:

1. It is a fact that evolution happens, that biodiversity and complexity does increase, and that both occur naturally only by evolutionary means: that alleles vary with increasing distinction in reproductive populations, and that these are accelerated in genetically isolated groups. So we have the observation of evolution, where we don't have that for creation, or any other supposedly supernatural thing.

2. It is a fact that natural selection, sexual selection, and genetic drift have all been proven to have predictable effect in guiding this variance: So we have the Darwinian mechanisms, improved upon by Gregor Mendel's discovery of genes; where again, we have no mechanisms for anything supernatural.

3. It is a fact that beneficial mutations do occur and are inherited by descendant groups, and that multiple independent sets of biological markers exist to trace these lineages backward over many generations. So we have genetic confirmation of evolution, using precisely the same application as a paternity test. If creationism were true, then this shouldn't be.

4. It is a fact that mallards are a subset of ducks, which are a subset of birds, which are a subset of dinosaurs, in the same way humans are a subset of apes, primates, eutherian mammals, and vertebrate deuterostome animals. This is one of the things an Orthodox Christian geneticist was talking about when he said, "nothing in biology makes sense except in light of evolution".

5. It is a fact that the collective genome of all animals has been traced to its most basal form, and that those forms are also indicated by comparative morphology, physiology, and embryological development, in addition to a suite of genetic confirmations, making cladistic taxonomy a twin-nested hierarchy. Independent fields of study with different types of data, all confirming the same thing, and absolutely nothing but an old compilation of contradictory fables to say otherwise.

6. It is a fact that every animal on earth has apparent relatives at different levels either living elsewhere or evident in the fossil record. This seemingly innocuous point is actually the death knell for creationism and the strongest evidence there is for evolution. I have numerous videos explaining this: the 10th Foundational Falsehood of Creationism, the Systematic Classification of Life playlist, and of course the Phylogeny Challenge. You don't have to watch any of these. As long as you seem sincere, I'll be happy to explain everything to you personally.

7. It is a fact that the fossil record holds hundreds of transitional species even according to the strictest definition of that word. If you're curious about that, look up my video on the 9th Foundational Falsehood of Creationism.

8. It is a fact that both microevolution and macroevolution have been directly observed and documented dozens of times, both in the lab and in naturally controlled conditions in the field. If you're curious about that, look up my video on the 11th foundational falsehood of creationism.

It seems you've already conceded the first two facts on the list. I need to know if you already accept each of the rest. Let me know what, if anything you reject or don't yet know about, and do be specific about whatever you sincerely need to know about that would convince you.
 
arg-fallbackName="Nesslig20"/>
Hello cgingerwentz, I want to welcome you to the LoR forum and thank you for bringing something new here. It has been rather quiet here for a long time,

It may seem a bit unfair to have multiple people jumping on you all at once. This is an open forum after all. If you really want a one-on-one with Aron, you can request to the admins an exclusive thread where only you and Aron can write on.

First things first. I have seen the non sequitur hangout with you, Aron and all the others from a few days ago. I have to say that yes, you did indeed made very bad (run of the mill of the typical creationist) arguments, but I also didn't like how all the other people where ALL trying to respond to you one after the other, often by interruption. It could've been handled better. That's how hangouts tend to go where everyone can un mute and speak over each other. But still, this is where we can move on and...as you said your self...have a civil dialogue.

Secondly, (before I address the specific points you made) I would like to make some advices to you regarding the challenge. As Aron stated himself:
AronRa said:
I can prove that biological evolution is the truest, best explanation there is for the origin of our species, and that it is the only explanation of biodiversity with either evidentiary support or scientific validity. I can prove this even to your satisfaction over the course of a dozen mutual exchanges. The only trick to that is that you must properly address every point or query, ignoring none. If you repeatedly ignore direct questions, you will default this discussion, and I will be under no obligation to continue.
The challenge is about evolution, specifically biological evolution. That qualifier is there not by accident, since creationists tend to conflate evolution with:
- Big bang cosmology
- Stellar nucleosynthesis
- Planetary accretion
- Abiogenesis
- Plate tectonic geology
- Nuclear physics
Even though these topics belong to wholly different fields of science. While the term "evolution" can be used differently under different circumstances, in the context of Aron's challenge, it specifically refers to an aspect of biology - about organisms. It has nothing whatsoever to do with the origins of the universe (or everything). And since evolution is a process of genetic changes among a population of organisms, it also doesn't include abiogenesis. Evolution is the process by which populations continue to split and change independently form one another to become more distinct in the future, increasing biodiversity. Or to put it simply:

Abiogenesis = Origins of life from non-life
Evolution = Diversification of life AFTER its origin


You might be familiar with the "six types of evolution" of one of Kent Hovind's talks, but that is completely wrong. To confuse these different topics (big bang, abiogenesis, evolution, etc) as if they were part of one theory of "everything coming from nothing without god" is the sixth foundational falsehood of creationism. It's also not true that evolution is mutually exclusive to God, because most christians still accept evolution and there are many evolutionary scientists who also happen to be christian. Creationism is a extremist minority among christians. So don't conflate "evolutionism" with "Atheism, which would be the first foundational falsehood of creationism

One last advice, DO NOT attempt to play a game of psychological dodge ball, where you keep repeating
GIMME DA PROOOOOF!!!
and after Aron gives examples, you keep repeating
DAT DON'T PROOF ANATHANG!!!
and that's all you do.

The challenge involves active participation, meaning you have to answer questions too and concede points before moving one to the next. It's also going to be a learning experience, wherein you have to be honest and attempt to understand the topic and correct yourself on any misconceptions that are being pointed out.
Being deliberately obtuse just won't give you the win here. To clarify, I am not accusing you that you are doing this right now. Deliberate obtuseness is the norm among creationists that have argued here, and I hope you will prove to be the exception.
cgingerwentz said:
Thank you Mr. Ra for offering this challenge. I sincerely look forward to our civil dialogue.
I said that in order to dissuade me from Creationism (not Christianity, that's a separate issue), you must one of prove three things:
1. The universe is eternal.
One of the fundamental beliefs in Creationism is that there is a divine deity that is responsible for the creation of the universe and all that is in it. However, if the universe has always existed (aka eternal), then there is no need for such a being. If the universe was never created, but always was in existence, then it was never created. Hence, the God-hypothesis is null-and-void.

First problems:
1. You've presented two options
- The universe was created by God (specifically the christian one)
and
- The universe has always existed and is eternal
As if these two are the only options, but they aren't. They might be mutually exclusive (they can't be true at the same time), but that isn't sufficient to justify treating them as a true dichotomy. If we exclude the later option, It's easy to think of other hypothetical scenario's like: the universe was created by some natural process, or some supernatural process that didn't involve a deity. Not to mention about other gods that thousands of people believed in for millennia. Perhaps the universe came about from the primordial deity "chaos" from greek mythology. Of course, I don't believe that is true, but these examples just shows that it isn't a true dichotomy.
(Bonus: The universe has always existed in the sense that "always" means during all time. There was never a period of time when the universe didn't exist. Even if the universe is not eternal, it always existed.)
2. You have yet to demonstrate that there is a need for "such a being" to begin with under any scenario. God is a magical panacea...well it is literally "magic". It explains anything, while at the same time explaining nothing. That is what happens when you posit a deity that can do literally anything you wish. It has zero explanatory power. You can answer any difficult question by simply stating "Goddidit" but that's not really a useful answer as explained by Lisa Simpson after taking a test on creationism:
4Mid.gif

3. You are implying that if we can't proof that the universe is eternal, (your) God is somehow the default answer. If we can't prove you wrong, you are automatically right is what you are essentially saying. This is a combination of fallacies called the shifting the burden proof and an argument from ignorance.
So we already have the following fallacies committed
- False dichotomy
- (god)didit
- Argument from ignorance
- Shifting the burden of proof
Not a very good start.
cgingerwentz said:
However, I would like to defend the proposition that the universe is NOT eternal, but instead, had an absolute beginning. In others words, EVERYTHING came into being from NOTHING.
a) Philosophical reasoning: If the universe is eternal, then that means time itself is also eternal. But wait a second, if time is eternal, then that means the present would never arrive. "How so", you ask? Well if time is eternal, then this would entail an actually infinite number of past events. But if there is an infinite number of past events, then the present would never have arrived!

Fallacy of division. If the universe is eternal, that doesn't mean time is also.
Furthermore, the logic that the present would never arrive is essential a zeno's paradox, but it is fairly easily solved in mathematics (although I won't accuse you of being stupid since it is very counter intuitive). If I move from one end of a room to the other, it seems no issue, but it you think about it in mathematics, I had to pass the half way point of the room (0.5), then the half way of the remaining half of the room (0.75), then another half of the remaining distance that room (0.875) and then another half (0.9375), etc. It seems that I have to take an infinite number of steps (or events) to get to the end of the room, yet I can make it with ease...How? Well, here is someone that explains it better than I could.

But even if you are convinced that you premise of "infinite number of past events" is still valid against an eternal universe, then apply the same logic to your God, who is supposed to be eternal himself. Think about it. God is eternal, hence he has existed for an eternity BEFORE he created the universe. But if that is true, then the moment of God creating the universe would never have arrived.
cgingerwentz said:
b) Scientific reasoning: The 2nd Law of Thermodynamics dictates that everything decays and falls into disorder. The universe is an isolated, closed system. Therefore, the universe is decaying into disorder. But if the universe is eternal, then the universe should already have been fully decayed by now. But the fact that the universe still maintains some level orderliness scientifically shows us that the universe is not eternal.

Wrong, The 2nd law of thermodynamics states that in an isolated system the net entropy of that system will increase over time. Entropy being the amount of energy that is unable to do work. Or, in statistical mechanics, entropy is defined according to boltzmann's entropy formula as the number of micro states that corresponds to the macro state of a system. Entropy ≠ disorder as explained by this video:

This argument also assumes that the current state of our universe - that is accelerating its expansion over time with a finite amount of energy - would have always been the case under an eternal universe model. A big bounce model would suggest otherwise, not that I am proposing or arguing for it, but it does show that an eternal universe wouldn't have to be constantly increasing it's entropy. And it may be the case that it wasn't. During the Planck epoch (the oldest moment in time that we can conceivably go to), the conditions of the early universe were so extreme that our current understanding of physics just don't work, including the concept of entropy. The best guess that physicists have at the moment about what went on during the Planck epoch was that all the four fundamental forces were combined into one unified force, but that is not yet possible since our understanding of gravity is based on Einstein's theory of relativity and the other three fundamental forces are described by quantum mechanics. but these are incompatible with each other, at least so far. Physicists are working on it.
cgingerwentz said:
And to go off on a slight tangent, I would like to compare two predictions related to the beginning of the universe:
Creationism predicts that the universe has a beginning. Atheism predicts that the universe has no beginning, but that it was eternal. One is right. One is wrong.
And as of now, both agnostic and atheistic astronomers and cosmologists no longer hold onto the Steady-State Theory, but now hold onto the Big Bang theory. That is so far one successful prediction that Creationism makes (and one that the Bible has already been saying for centuries) and one where Atheism fails.

Wow :lol: Really?? You are seriously suggesting that creationists predicted the Big bang theory while they (at least the young earth variety) are vehemently denying its validity? And I am an atheist, I didn't got the memo that atheism somehow predicts that the universe had no beginning. I smell a Straw Man here. Also where did the bible predict the big bang? Oh right, a forced reinterpretation about a passage that says "stretches out the heavens as a curtain, and spreads them out as a tent to dwell in." Even though the expansion of the universe cannot be described that way since stretching out a tent isn't analogous in anyway as to how the universe is expanding. And if you are going to complain about me expecting scientific accuracy from the bible by stating that the bible was written in very simple terms such that it was easily understandable for the people at the time, so it is unreasonable for me to expect scientific accuracy to this degree, then I will respond as such: You are the one who started treating the bible as a scientific book when you claimed it predicted the big bang, not me. So I don't expect it to contain scientific accuracy at all. But you apparently do, and that's why I (and anyone else) would be completely reasonable when they are pointing out these inaccuracies.
Furthermore, isn't it telling that this passage (or the entire bible for that matter) wasn't interpreted the way you do BEFORE we discovered that the universe was expanding? If the bible was crystal clear to anyone, why wouldn't the hebrews have proposed the big bang model right from the get go? In fact, the passages in the old testament that directly related to the state of the universe were interpreted to mean a flat earth encased under a dome (the firmament) with an ocean above it.
hebrew-cosmology-1.jpg%3Fw%3D1200

Basically, according to traditional Hebrew cosmology, the earth is a giant snow globe. Of course, almost nobody (except for them flat earthers) interprets the bible like this anymore, since this is obviously wrong.
What you are now doing is that AFTER we discovered something new, like the expansion of the universe, you dig through the bible to find something that sounds vaguely similar to the new discovery and reinterpret it such that it now aligns with the new discovery and you treat this as if this is what this passage has always meant. This is not prediction, it's postdiction.
cgingerwentz said:
2. Materialism/Naturalism. This would absolutely destroy Creationism. Naturalism asserts that space, matter, and time are all that exist. Absolutely nothing supernatural or immaterial exists. If that is the case, then Creationism is a goner.
Now let's take the laws of logic, for example. Both Mr. Ra and I believe that the laws of logic exist. But hold on... the laws of logic are not material. One cannot stub their toe on a law of logic. So in order to prove that Naturalism is true, the Atheist must use the immaterial laws of logic in order to prove that only the material exists. THE VERY FACT THAT THE ATHEIST CAN MAKE AN ARGUMENT SHOWS THAT HE IS WRONG! The laws of logic are apart of an immaterial realm PREDICTED BY CREATIONISM! Therefore, the Atheist must first presuppose that Creationism is true in order to disprove it. I brought this up in the Youtube debate and I was not satisfied with the refutation of my argument, so I'm gonna state it again (I'll blame myself on this one as I might not have made myself clear). Both Creationists and Atheists presuppose that the laws of logic exist. As a matter of fact. Mr. Ra demonstrated that in the debate. He attempted to use logic in order to persuade me that Creationism is false. But here's the thing: how can one prove that the laws of logic exist without using them to prove that they exist? Both Creationists and Atheists can't escape this circular reasoning. So the best way that I can explain the existence of the laws of logic is that they are a reflection of the way God thinks. But with the Atheists, they cannot explain its existence without falling into the trap of circular reasoning. The Creationist isn't using circular reasoning here is because the buck stops at God. But with the Atheist, they cannot escape this. Now if Mr. Ra does not assert that Naturalism is true, but that an immaterial reality does exist, then I ask him..."how do you account for the existence of an immaterial reality without the existence of God?"

sigh... :facepalm: You are using the Matt Slick type of argumentation, suggesting that the best explanation for the laws of logic is.....wait for it...
"Goddidit" (remember were I stated previously that Goddidit isn't a valid explanation for anything? Same here).
And this "explanation" for logic that you are providing, ironically (and hypocritically) requires a combination of several logical fallacies such as argument from assertion and circular reasoning, BY ADMISSION. So logic...you know the one thing that you claim you can explain.....shows that your explanation for it is entirely fallacious. Yeah, that didn't get you far, did it?

Furthermore, you treat the "laws of logic" as if they exists in a platonic sense, that they float around somewhere in some immaterial, non-physical realm. That's simply not the case. You probably don't like hearing this, but we know how logic developed with specific points time when philosophers proposed these specific principles.The earliest philosophers were Greek, so that must mean we should thank Zeus (rather than YHWH) for logic. Jokes aside, philosophers are still arguing about it, what principles of logic we should follow and why. This shows that logic is our attempt to make sense of reality, not a teleological set of rules that exists in an immaterial realm, or woven into the fabric of reality. The very fact that there are different types of logic shows that logic human-made. We come up with "laws" that are descriptive of reality and are consistent with what we observe, what we experience. They are not prescriptive laws. They are only prescriptive in the sense that these principles inform us how to formulate our thoughts that matches with reality. Thinking otherwise is confusing the map for the terrain, which is a good analogy so I will keep using it. Logic is the map and reality is the terrain. Maps describe the terrain and they can prescribe the rules for us how to navigate through the terrain so we won't get lost, likewise logic can prescribe the rules for us how to think so we come to accurate conclusions and not get lost in reality. Logic isn't prescriptive to the universe like the map isn't prescriptive to the terrain. Of course, that means that when we observe things in reality that don't match our previous understanding of logic (or map), we must reformulate our principles of logic in such a way that they are consistent with these new circumstances (we must update our map such that it matches the terrain). This is happening with quantum mechanics for example. That is what Steve McRae was attempting to explain to you in the hangout, where classical logic just don't apply to some aspects of quantum phenomena. See also AronRa's previous response where he quoted Steve McRae And if you want to assert that we cannot have concepts of logic (that describe reality) inside our minds if we are living in a purely "materialistic/naturalistic" world, that is just as wrong as suggesting that we can't possibly draw a map of a terrain using only matter, like paper and pencils.

Next, you argue that all I have done is just moving the problem further back. Logic may be just a map that describes the state of reality, but I have yet to explain the state of reality itself. And if I give some explanation for how reality behaves the way it does (which are described by logic) then what stops you from asking what accounts for those explanations and so on? What prevents this infinite regress of explanations? Well, I would say that if you keep repeating this question that explains the state of existence deeper and deeper still, I would say that you will eventually come to one or a set of preconditions that are just brute facts of reality that cannot be explained by a deeper principle. I don't know what these brute facts are or would be and perhaps we would never truly know. However, if you think that me saying "I don't know the answer to this" gives you a good reason to say "HAHAHA....Therefore GAWD!!" then you are committing yet another fallacy. And let's apply the same reductionist method to your explanation. You say that we can't explain logic or the state of reality, but what explains the state of God, his existence, the way god thinks, etc? You don't explain these things as you said that the "bucks stops at God". So to say that I can't explain the state of reality, but at the same time claiming that you can explain it by stating that logic is a reflection of the way God thinks.....which itself is still not explained in anyway.....is pretty ridiculous and hypocritical. And if you want to assert that the way God is and thinks doesn't need to be explained. The way he thinks is.....just the way he is.....that these are brute facts of his own nature. Well, if that is the case and if we didn't apply a dishonest double standard, I am off the hook too. I can simply state that that the nature of reality are simply brute facts that don't need to be explained. No God of the gaps needed. But ironically, if you did provoke God's nature as a brute fact to avoid this problem, you are borrowing from the world view of naturalism. You are appealing to the brute facts of the NATURE of God, which God has no control over. You believe that it is natural (it is the natural order) for God to be the way he is.
Well isn't that interesting.

For a more in depth response to these Slick arguments, I highly recommend Theoretical Bullshit's videos. This below is the most applicable to the arguments you just made:

cgingerwentz said:
Here is yet another example of Creationism best explaining reality while Atheism falls short.
3. Darwinian Macro-Evolution/Molecules-to-Man Evolution/Particles-to-People Evolution/Common Ancestry
Now I know that's a mouthful, but I want to make sure that both Mr. Ra and I are talking about the same thing. I do NOT deny Natural Selection. I do NOT deny that one species can "evolve" into another species (I do not mean "family" or "kind" when I mean species. A Wolf and a Chihuahua are two different species, but they're both apart of the caninae family).
If this happened to be true, then this would be a devastating blow to both Young and Old Earth Creationism (not Theistic Evolution, a view to which many Christians hold). I will not attempt to disprove this now and not intentionally attack straw-man. Instead, I will await to see how Mr. Ra will "prove evolution to my satisfaction."
Thank you, and I eagerly await your response.

Remember what I said above that Abiogenesis isn't a part of evolution. So I don't have to repeat it here to explain why the stupid phrases of "molecules-to-man" are nothing but straw man versions of evolution, as if evolution says that there was a bunch of molecular dusts or clay laying around that suddenly became a man. Which is ironically what creationism claims.
Macro evolution as it is defined by evolutionary biologists is evolution at or above the species level, meaning speciation = macro evolution and you have just admitted that this happens. But then, you would probably argue that speciation isn't enough to produce the tree of life, but that's where you would be wrong. Every monophyletic taxonomic group that now exists (no matter how diverse) is a clade that began with a single progenitor species that diverged from it's relatives via speciation, forming a new clade (or branch on the tree of life). This branch grows by further subsequent speciation, giving rise to new lineages or clades, but the new clades are still part of the old clades from which they sprouted from. That's why all life forms can be classified within a twin-nested hierarchy of daughter groups within larger parent groups and so on. See AronRa's Systematic classification of Life for this. A good example is one that you gave. The wolf and chihuahua are indeed STILL part of the same taxonomic family, Canidae (along with a few other canids). Likewise, humans are still part of the same taxonomic family as chimpanzees, Gorilla's and Orangutang's called Hominidae aka The Family of Great Apes.
635336241897991956_hominidae-family-tree.jpg

Is this best explained by creationism or evolution?
 
arg-fallbackName="cgingerwentz"/>
Nesslig20,

Can you show me how I can turn this forum into something private between Mr. Ra and I? I would feel more comfortable engaging in a dialogue if it was just him and me.
 
arg-fallbackName="AronRa"/>
cgingerwentz said:
Nesslig20,

Can you show me how I can turn this forum into something private between Mr. Ra and I? I would feel more comfortable engaging in a dialogue if it was just him and me.
You don't have to respond to anyone but me, if you don't want to.
 
arg-fallbackName="Nesslig20"/>
cgingerwentz said:
Nesslig20,

Can you show me how I can turn this forum into something private between Mr. Ra and I? I would feel more comfortable engaging in a dialogue if it was just him and me.

Well it won't become private. Aron's challenge is a public conversation where anyone can look back and see what you and Aron said. But that doesn't mean he won't agree to have a one-on-one conversation with you. As I said, you and/or Aron can contact one of the moderators/admins and ask them to make an exclusive thread where only you and Aron can comment on. Note: this exclusive thread would still be visible to anyone. For the reasons why Aron wants to do this as a matter of public record, you can ask him yourself if you want.

But a much simpler way to have a one-on-one with Aron is to simply ignore all the comments made by other people, just as Aron said.
 
arg-fallbackName="cgingerwentz"/>
Nesslig20,

Thank you for sending me the link. I will respond to Mr. Ra's previous arguments as soon as I get a reply from one of the administrators regarding the exclusive thread.
 
arg-fallbackName="Nesslig20"/>
cgingerwentz said:
Nesslig20,
Thank you for sending me the link. I will respond to Mr. Ra's previous arguments as soon as I get a reply from one of the administrators regarding the exclusive thread.

Again, you can respond here (ignoring other comments), while at the same time waiting for the exclusive thread. It may take a while.

And as a side note, I respect your decision to not respond to other comments, because responding to multiple people all at the same time can be time consuming, I agree. However, considering the fact that many people have provided answers to your questions/arguments, it would still be a good idea to read and consider them. After all, if your goal is to find out the truth of the matter, ignoring the answers from most people won't get you far, since that is a good way to stay wrong. Take this as advice, not as explicit criticism towards you.
 
arg-fallbackName="AronRa"/>
It's been five days since Ginger's last post, and he hasn't yet replied to my first-round post from more than a week ago. Has anyone gotten back to him about his private debate thread? I don't want that to be his excuse.

I don't understand why every creationist always wants it to be a private conversation. If one of them were to make the challenge to prove their god to me, say on ChristianForums.com, for example, I wouldn't even think of demanding that no one else be allowed to post on that thread. I don't have to answer anyone else but my challenger, but I do want others to be able to chime in if either of us gets something wrong. Everyone on this forum, or on any science forum knows that if we get something wrong, some pedantic prick on our own side will step in to correct us, right? So Ginger should be assured that whatever I'm telling him must be correct if no one says anything about it. Likewise, if he brings up some falsehood I don't catch or know anything about, then one of y'all will surely point that out too. If the truth really mattered more than whatever we want to believe, then he should want that just as much as I do. Yet they never do.
 
arg-fallbackName="he_who_is_nobody"/>
AronRa said:
I don't understand why every creationist always wants it to be a private conversation.

Because other members of this forum always bring it up as an option. Honestly, if no one pointed out that that was an option, they would never be able to use it as an excuse.
 
arg-fallbackName="Gnug215"/>
I've gotten no requests nor messages about setting up a private thread.

cgingerwentz, you are free to ignore everyone else, and only respond to AronRa.

However, if you really want to, I can set up a new thread that is entirely locked for everyone else.
 
Back
Top