Ripley’s Book of Apologetics
:smack: 71 trillion years. Better yet.
My 700,000 ton estimate is on the conservative side, the estimates range from 400,000 tons to 600,000,000 tons per second. Further, whether your lab room math calculations are accurate or not, on a practical level the sun will not actually burn away its entire mass as it goes through all the stages of a star’s life (red giant, white\yellow\black dwarf, etc). Even the most liberal estimates of the remaining life of the sun is about 5 billion years. But the bottom line is, even using time frames in the trillions of years can’t help the evolutionary theory because even the simplest life forms are too sophisticated and complex to ever happen by chance, no matter how much time is available. Leaving the telescope and taking a look thru a miscroscope at the infinite complexity of even simple cells ought to convince anyone that time and chance could never produce what you see. If you believe Darwin’s theory, you believe it by a truly remarkable faith.
This will conclude my attempt to answer Voyager’s “simple question”. It never fails that as soon as an exponent appears with a number, the geeks drop into the atmosphere and hijack the thread - and just when we were about to finish up calling each other names! :smack:
Well this source says 700 million metric tons per second, so Bible man is off by 3 orders of magnitude. The sources I’ve seen show the sun should last for another 5 - 10 billion years, actually longer, but if it turns into a red giant in 5 billion years, it won’t help us much.
But the size of the sun doesn’t matter, since the heat comes from the core and is self-regulating. The temperature is not directly proportional to the size - the outer layers are relatively cool, and the photons must propagate through them. That’s one problem.
The bigger problem is saying that there hasn’t been enough time. First of all, the sun and planets are a bit over 4 billion years old, and life has been around for a billion or so, leading me to wonder if God was playing solitaire all that time. However, there are models of how long evolution takes (Dawkins refers to them - I could look them up if you wish.) That, and the fossil record, shows there is no problem. Remember, for most of the earth’s history life forms were small and fast breeding, so evolution can move very fast, just like how flu evolves so quickly today. (Fast being hundreds of millions of years, of course.) Look how quickly we’ve bred dogs. Even a thousand times slower, it doesn’t take that long geologically speaking.
And I must say, at least this is a new entropy argument! (Well, actually 200 years old - it kind of got wiped out when we understood how the sun worked, but new to creationism.)
This also shows check your numbers. 700 K tons a second for the entire sun? 7 or 71 trillion years? Obviously not even close to right - 700,000 tons is nothing for something the size of the sun.
Well, you see you are quite right as to the high end of your number, and the sun’s expected life time. Facts is facts.
One thing about cells - they evolve also. Clearly the first cells were not as complex as the ones we see today. Even simple single cell animals have been evolving for almost a billion years, so perhaps even you’ll admit that a billion years is enough to account for their complexity. Remember also that cells did not evolve from scratch. Our cells are hosts to mitochondria, which were clearly independent organisms at one time.
It would be cool to figure out what the first cells looked like, but they obviously left no fossil traces, and they got outcompeted by more advanced cells and went extinct.
Absolutely not. The processes are so sophisticated that they could never occur no matter how much time and chance are postulated. They are not only highly complex but must even take place in a certain order to be successful. The exponent needed to reflect the odds of these processes coming together by chance would correspond to the number of molecules in the universe, it’s statistically impossible without a design and a designer. But I’ll leave these science arguments to the geeks that are on my side of the belief system - remember I’m just a simple boy with a simple message ie, that putting faith in a Man Who came back from the dead is much wiser than trusting a dead guy who thought up a controversial science theory.
Wait a minute, you claimed 700,000 tons of hydrogen per second was proof evolution didn’t have enough time. But let’s take your new argument of 600,000,000 tons per second. If life/evolution began 3.8 million years ago, that’s 7.19x10[sup]16[/sup] tons or 3.26x10[sup]19[/sup] kg of hydrogen. That would mean that the sun had 0.00000000046 times more hydrogen back then - hardly “a much bigger (and hotter) sun”.
Geek? Is that supposed to be some sort of insult? I can see why you would want to stop people from examining your claims. If you don’t like numbers and facts, stop using them in your arguments.
Against my better judgment…
Cite?
Why not study things like the spark discharge experiment, proteinaceous microspheres, or the selection pressues which would have favored stable configurations even for the most simple aggregated ‘entities’?
We have seen, time and again, that creationist claims about things that are ‘impossible’ reflect only the lack of imagination or knowledge on part of the creationist. “I can’t figure it out” is hardly compelling proof.
Why do so many creationists treat science as if it was a religion?
Seeing as how it’s impossible for a human being to ‘come back from the dead’, and that most of your proof for that claim seems to be that you hear voices, I’m not sure that measures up to much.
Moreover, your inability to escape your faith-based worldview hobbles you to the point where you treat evidence based systems of proof-and-refutation the same as your religion. Nobody ‘trusts’ a scientist, other than far enough to assume that they’ve gathered the data they claim to and are honestly representing their conclusions.
Evolutionary theory is not based on ‘trust’ in Darwin. He’s not a religious authority, his word is not law, his conclusions are not gospel. You are wasting your time in attacking a model that is not only more than a century old, but that has been eclipsed by newer models and data. Treating science as if it was a collection of religious documents will only leave you unable to understand what you’re claiming to debate. Hardly a position of strength.
Darwin’s original theory has been substantially modified over the decades, which you’d know if you read the facts on this subject rather than creationist “debunkers”. Further, modern models of evolution, and the theory of evolution in general are most certainly not controversal. Again, you might try reading some of the actual literature in the field rather than those who trade in ignorance.
Until you realize why talking about ‘chairs eventually getting up and walking’ is an absurd (and yes, bogus) strawman, then you have no place talking about what is or is not controversal. You kinda have to know the first thing about the subject you’re talking about before you attempt to refute it.
Actually 0.00046 times. But I stand by the conclusion.
Maybe you joined in a little late, but I’ve already shown Cosmo where his beliefs directly violate what Christ taught. Despite how pleasant his invitation appeared, it was an insult for him to come back with such a proposition - akin to asking me to consider that black is white and white is black and if not, to at least open my mind to the possibility that gray is white. Cosmo admits that his (confusing) belief system is based on following a spirit which allows him to set aside God’s Word whenever it’s convenient, I simply identified what that spirit was. His claim that the Holy Spirit leads him to set aside God’s Word is not only a lie but meets the textbook definition of blasphemy. By the way, discernment of spirits is a gift of the Spirit of God (see 1Cor12:10) and yes, I do claim that I made the statement by His influence.
(And I haven’t been called a dude since I ordered that sasparilla in Houston)
Welcome to the thread Capeman, did you forget your helmet and flak jacket?
Done. Anyway, it’s really Voyager’s fault - he asked me a simple question and I gave him a simple answer from my simple storehouse of random science facts (I’m not ScienceMan), and obviously it was just a little too simple for you. But at the end of the day, after all the academics are over, you might actually convince someone that you have a firm hold on some facts and statistics but what benefit is it if you have no grasp of the One who created them?
No real harm to me. I’m just pointing out your poor form in debate.
If a little simple math deflates your rebuttal of Voyager’s point and causes you to abandon it, what else have you got?
More correctly, you stated ** my beliefs contradict what Christ taught but were unable to actually show me**. I can support my beliefs with the very scripture you hold as sacred. You however, have been unable to do so.
This is incorrect if not an outright lie. I admit that my interpretation is pretty different than yours. You are the only one here who thinks your interpretation is akin to “God’s Word” In this you contradict yourself. You’ve admitted that men are influenced by things other than the Holy Spirit and this causes them to make errors in judgement and causes misunderstandings in doctrine. Then you refuse to entertain the thought that you might be in error. Of course you are free to make this judgement call. Better men than I have been accused of blasphemy. I believe the Bible tells me not to be concerned about the judgement of men doesn’t it?
I never claimed any such thing. My claim is that the Holy Spirit IS God’s word and we are to follow it’s lead. I further claim that The Bible, while valuable, is a book written by men and then altered by other men. There is plenty of evidence to support that position. Since we are called to worship in spirit and in truth my suggestion is we consider all the evidence available to us. To place the Bible in a position of reverence and authority it was never meant to have {a position you have not and cannot provide scriptural support for} is IMHO a form of idolatry described in the verses I quoted previously.
I’m glad you’re okay. And I’ve already accepted the fact that I’ll never receive an award for being tactful.
I’ve abandoned nothing except a rabbit trail, nor do I even acknowledge that your statistics are correct. Bottom line is that they are useless to the subject at hand because when something is impossible to occur without the intervention of an intelligent designer, even adding infinite time to it produces the same zero (I’m sure you can work out the exact math equation).
What I have left is what I started with, “In the beginning, God…” , and all the contradictory theories and math calculations to help bolster them can’t negate His existence or what He created. All you can do is throw some dust in the air to try and hide the real issue, but at the end of the day He remains the only one capable of actually producing life from that dust (Gen2:7), time and chance will always produce the same zero.
This is why you are frequently accused of dishonesty.
YOU placed the “burning” of the sun into the discussion as some sort of “scientific” evidence that evolution could not have occurred and, as soon as your errors were pointed out, you simply tried to change the subject.
If you did not know what you were talking about in regard to the “science” of the sun “burning” you should have left that aside and simply gone with your belief that life is too complicated to arise from natural events. People can agree or disagree. However, when YOU submit information that is in error, and YOU are corrected with facts, then it is not true that you have “abandoned nothing”; you have very clearly abandoned a poor argument that you actually thought had merit before it was disproven.
You’re arguing the Creationist (or, more accurately, Intelligent Design) belief of “irreducible complexity”. As with most Intelligent Design arguments, it basically illustrates a lack of even the most basic facts about Evolutionary theory. There are plenty of examples of organs/organisms that are supposedly “too complex to come about by chance” (side note: Evolution does not occur by chance in any case) where we can see evidence for earlier, less complex/intermediate steps in different species. I’m at work and don’t have time to do a point-by-point debate right now, but there are plenty of books and articles I’m sure you could find talking about the subject in layman’s terms if you’re interested (which I doubt).
And, needless to say, your theories on the sun have about as much scientific validity as your arguments against evolution.
You’re making the common mistake of thinking that evolution is random. It is not. Here’s an analogy that I like (and which I invented.)
Say you have an incredibly complex lock, consisting of 1,000 individual dials of ten digits each. To open the lock you need to get the right number set for each of these 1,000 dials. Even worse, they must be set in order. Obviously this lock, which has 10**1000 possibilities (an exponent - deal with it 
) is impossible to open, right? Just like a cell can’t evolve.
But I forgot to tell you one thing. Each time you set each of the dials to the right number, it clicks. Now the lock is trivial to open - though it takes a while. You try all the possibilities for each dial, listening for the click, and then move on to the next.
Evolution is like my lock. You don’t go directly from molecules to man, you go through vastly many intermediate stages. For each, many possibilities are tried until the one that leads to the most reproductive success is found - which is like the click on my lock. You go from there to the next stage.
My analogy has one flaw - it assume that evolution has a goal - opening the lock. Evolution does not - there are many species that could arise - and have. Perhaps a better analogy would be that each stage has two clicks. In this case, there are many, many combinations that open the lock, and it would take a very long time to explore them all. But you’ll still get the lock opened.
Hey, give him credit. Not enough time for evolution is an old, though discredited, argument against it, and at least more rational than the 2LOT argument, which I’ve never understood at all. He’s bringing up just about every creationist argument I’ve heard one by one - maybe when they all get knocked down he’ll see the light.
Actually he’s arguing a gonzo theory of ID. Behe and the like say there as specific structures which could not evolve, not due to lack of time but due to the fact that there are no stable precursor structures. That’s never been demonstrated with a valid example, but is different from Bible man]'s argument that basically nothing could ever evolve, that everything had to be intelligently designed. That just shows he doesn’t understand the basic mechanisms of evolution.
Ah, I guess I didn’t read his posts closely enough. I figured he’d latched onto Behe’s arguments, and I was laying the groundwork to refute them; if his argument lacks even the modestly rigorous approach of the ID crowd, I suppose there’s no point in trying to debate him.