I further apologize for putting “If it helps” twice in my previous post. That’s just plain bad writing. I hate when I do that.
I got here late and almost everything has been said, but I’d like to add my two cents.
If the Universe is only 6,000 years old, then why do we have dinosaur bones that are a million or so years in age?
I would think that anyone who can work out the speed of the expansion of the known universe, just might have a good idea of it’s age, give or take a billion years. Greater minds than that kid’s have agreed on this for ages.
We have a real good idea at how long it takes evolution to produce various life forms, which has been noted to be over 6000 years and, while in the past there have been errors made in dating things, we now have accurate dating techniques that confirms this.
Is this kid/student some sort of a nut?
Try 150 million years old for the Jurassic period and 200+ million for the mid to late Triassic. The standard fundie reply to your querie is that God made the Earth appear that way for reasons unknown to us mere mortals. The idea that He would deliberately place aged fossils into the earth and then bestow upon us the creativity & intelligence to form the basic constructs of science that would disprove His own existance is itself an argument against Him, IMHO.
Same as above. The image from stars that are 10 million light years away was created in transit. Sort of a Shake-n-Bake Universe.
Fundamentalist beliefs are intrinsically incompatible with the concept of evolution. Most fundie doctrine requires a state of mind that allows one to accept fantastic stories on faith while rejecting scientific theories that have been proven by hard evidence & repeat observation. Again, God must have planted some “pre-aged” material into the earth, knowing full well that we would later discover it and develop technology which then disproves His existance. In other words, it’s just a cruel trick being played on you by your creator.
Bottom line: if you believe in an omnipotent God, anything is possible. Corollary: well established laws of nature, as well as all physical laws are bunk, since they apply selectively.
In the eyes of some, undoubtedly.
>EMPHATIC STATEMENT< The Fundies are nuts. >End Emphatic Statement<
After thought:
I’m a Christian, but with some basic attitude deviations. Primarily, I believe that Darwin’s Theory of Evolution and the Creation Belief are one and the same. I believe that the theory of Creation was a much watered down ‘story’ created for people who had absolutely no concept of the world beyond their continent, little if any grasp of mathmatics, still had little clue of birth, about the basic education of a first grader and greater knowledge was kept by just a few and their’s was limited.
I also believe that God gave us brains and free will to figure things out with and a remarkable, ever growing intelligence and that men have a way of twisting things around to their own desire when it comes to beliefs. Along with ‘inspired fools’ who find weak minds to gain control over.
Evidence and reason are very important to the establishment of knowledge. Belief, opinion, faith, and bias are almost completely removed and largely irrelevant to the physical world until they are verified, at which point they cease to be subjective and can no longer be called opinion, belief, etc.
I would like to stress that the scientific method is not the evil absolute tool that religious fundamentalists sometimes make it out to be. As the name implies, it’s a method and not a position. It’s the most reliable method we have of testing the truthfulness of a claim. It’s a logical method that is, when carried out properly, unaffected by bias.
Religion is bias.
(Of course, there are plenty of examples of scientists with bias who are unable to follow the scientific method, but owing to the self-correcting nature of science, these bogus claims do not tend to live very long)
Fundamentalists and other nuts may come along and say things like “if there is evidence that X contradicts the word/existence of God, that is just because God is testing our faith by providing false evidence”
This kind of “thinking” fails the most important test required to establish the truthfulness of a claim. The fundamentalists have proposed a non-falsifiable hypothesis. In order for ANY claim to be evaluated, it MUST be possible for the testers to conceive of real or hypothetical evidence that would disprove the claim (the hypothesis can then be termed “falsifiable”). All claims submitted for evaluation must be falsifiable if the results of the process are to be considered logically acceptable. Input of a non-falsifiable hypothesis into this machinery cannot work–it’s like building a syllogism on false premises: the results are bogus. And, as in elementary logic, it is possible to prove anything at all (including God) if one’s argument is based on false premises. Following the scientific method is simply a way to ensure that all premises in an argument pertaining to the physical world are true, and that the argument can therefore be supported. The scientific method does not concern itself with opinion or belief because these are highly subjective variables that have little to do with the physical world.
They are doing a lot more than missing the point–they are making fools of themselves! Science is knowledge. You can’t use such knowledge and the method of acquiring knowledge to support abstract opinion such as the belief in God, because knowledge and opinion are distinct. Right now science tells us that there is no evidence in favour of God, but many scientists who know this still choose to believe in God. The scientific method does not say “there is no god”. It merely states that based on the evidence we have today, there is no reason to support hypotheses involving the existence of God. The case tomorrow may be different, but today all the knowledge we possess has failed to indicate a likelihood that God exists, but has not eliminated that possibility (nothing can be completely eliminated using the scientific method because the method is always open to testing and further verification).
At this point of lack of knowledge, religion and opinion come into play. IMHO, everyone should be free to have an opinion, but cramming it down people’s throats is an injustice to people and to established truth–especially if it is done in a classroom!
The kid mentioned in the OP needs to be taught the value of critical thinking. Since he is a kid, chances are that he is not yet a nutcase–but his parents, or whoever is feeding him this bullshit, probably are.
With reference to the OP: your student was making a gross category error in attempting to link an archaeological find to an event. I appreciate that everyone has realised this (it’s akin to finding weapons and evidence of fire at Troy and claiming the Iliad is word for word accurate) but it’s more than just common sense: a fundamental precept of archaeology is that it cannot be used to provide evidence for events, only for social history. So that find would tell us something about chariot design, but little else.
Abe, you still have not ‘proven’ that randomness is the only factor that created the earth, the animal and plant kingdoms, and human rational thought. And atheism has a bias too, in that it doesn’t believe that any supreme Being has ultimate dominion over humankind.
in hebrew school we learned that the parting of the red sea actually happened in that inlet off the red sea between the sinai penninsula and egypt and that it was a giant tidal recession at the northern end.
There is no other evidence to conflict this view–we just have to use reason. The sciences, from molecular biology to cosmology, all show us how the creation of the universe, Earth, life, intelligence, etc., do not require a supreme being’s intervention. Believing in a supreme being is a matter of subjective choice, not objective observation. There is no evidence to indicate otherwise.
That’s not strictly true. First, I am not an atheist but an agnostic. Most agnostics are unjustly branded as atheists, but they are not atheists at all. In my example, I don’t reject outright and indefinitely the possibility of the existence of God or gods, but I also have not encountered any arguments or evidence that would suggest the existence of such beings. Until more arguments or evidence come along I hold that there is no supreme being, I am however open to the possibility that there is. This is very different from being an atheist, because atheists reject the existence of god in much the same way that many theists insist on the absolute existence of god: not on the basis of any evidence or argument, but solely on the basis of belief. As I stated earlier, belief is bias.
Secondly, keep in mind that not believing in something for which there is no evidence is NOT bias, it is simply a logical process whereby you eliminate items that are unnecessary to understanding how a system works. This is otherwise known as Occam’s Razor, a tool that has helped us to cut through a lot of unclear, unnecessary, and untruthful claims in our quest for knowledge.
So my conclusion is the same as before: everyone is free to make choices regarding his or her beliefs, but it is unjust to propagate such beliefs to others by pretending they are “truth”, “evidence”, “science”, or whatever else other than belief. In the case of the kid mentioned by the OP, the kid is developing some serious issues thanks to whoever transferred their beliefs to him. You will note the beliefs are illogical and based on poorly interpreted and unqualified evidence. Seeing how this kid has accepted these false beliefs as truth and is now broadcasting them himself, the importance of critical thinking cannot be overstated.