I was actually about to suggest the same thing. Yng, your can't possibly think that the critisms on that website you always cite aren't countered. You need to take in some reading from the other side of the debate. Creationist theories get debunked all the time, it's just that most creationist organisations ignore it, and continute to write these articles you link to. So citing an article that shows 'flaws' in how we figured out how old the earth is, well, it's not enough.

Like I keep saying, creationists are always *trying* to poke holes in evolutionary theory, but the fact is, they haven't successfully done it yet. There has not been one legitimate challenge in the history of the theory. That's the fact, and no amount of website links will change that.

As for the car analogy, it's an interesting way of looking at things, I'll give you that. But when you break it down you're essentially saying 'God intentionally made the world look old' which as I've already explained, is not a falsifiable theory and therefore not worth consideration.

Carbon dating and such may seem like it's not very exact (hey, you could be off by a million years!), but in fact it's quite precise (hey, you can figure out the age to within a million years!). Every time a mistake is made in dating fossils/rocks whatever, the process is refined and improved. When a mistake is made on figuring out the age of a few rocks, that should under no circumstances be equated to 'The whole process is flawed!!' It's just not the case.

Spendo and Quack, you make reasonable points re 'it is refuted' but as I discovered re Behe's work, there are also refutations to the refutations. And ooooo don't they squirm when you can show the deliberate selection and emphasis and selective deletions often giving a rather less than objective picture of the issue.

I'd love to be a fly on the wall watching u guys debate Duane Gish for example. You need to get out more :) and see the pavement littered with knowledgable corpses which have tried it. Yes, of course, thats a bit 'mine is bigger than yours' ish..but never mind, puts a bit of color in the discussion.

I hope you folk will read the reference on Feminist Initiative (different thread) put by Timkins, most illuminating.

Mahatma, hope you will also look at and respond to the link I gave re steel axes,(babies thread)...

Oh.. on the 'girls' thingy, I did a survey of women in my own church,and those I met on my walk, none of them are offended by 'girls' terminology, Kalweb even specifically supports it in another thread, and my reasoning was spot on, "girls has a younger feel about it' One older lady (who was walking her dogs ) said "Its sure better than 'old bag'. And another expressed exasperation about 'today.. sigh.. they will put u in JAIL for saying this and that'

So, if any female academic ever tried to take me to task over referring to women as 'girls' she would get the serve of a lifetime nose to nose on that issue. (passionate -but not rude :) she would then receive a lecture on the evils of feminism and the social benefits on patriarchy :)

Not sure Duane Gish is a great example for you to bring up at this point Boaz, except as an illustration of the interminable frustration experienced by ordinary folk when listening to a silver-tongued intellectual hustler with a reputation to protect.

Whatever you choose to believe about the subject matter, there are many, many questions that linger over the man's style of debate, the level of intellectual honesty he employs, and the manner in which he refutes the arguments put to him.

A man is often measured by the company he keeps, Boaz, rightly or wrongly.

Yeah, good idea, but this is the thing: in my effort to claim evolution is not absolute fact, I don’t look to those who say “evolution didn’t happen but I don’t know what did”, I look to those that pose something. So Creationists pose something, right? A mix of philosophy, religion and a little science to back it up is what they claim.

So I like these guys, I like their sites, because if nothing else (even if they have nothing to offer about their own theories), they’ve served to debunk a lot of commonly held myths over the years.

OK, so online, all the Creation sites recommend AIG- particularly TJ (technical journal) their scientific journal. The majority of the links I sent in my last post were from TJ. Other such journals are found at http://creationresearch.org/, www.creationism.org, etc. These are peer reviewed, its just that the peers are Creationists with Ph.D’s, not evolutionists with such.

“You're essentially saying 'God intentionally made the world look old'”. No, in my analogy, the car wasn’t purposely made to look old, it just looked old because it had been beaten up by nature. The year the model finished being made was irrelevant; that detail didn’t really add much (I was trying to say, the mechanic looked to his preconceived reference of time, the scientist to his, but it didn’t come out right). But the Earth looks old because of so many different things that have happened to it (the point of what I was saying). What is falsifiable is not “God caused a world-wide flood” but “there were natural disasters in the past that wore parts of the Earth down”. Not an unreasonable claim, I would think.

You didn’t read the article about the factor of billions of years, did you? Something can be off by a factor of 10^9, not just by a subtraction of 10^6.

I have never claimed that a few mistakes makes the whole thing flawed. But you claim that despite a few mistakes, the whole thing is not flawed.

Creationist and evolutionary theories both get debunked all the time. Creationists and evolutionists are both trying to poke holes in each others theories. Both sides continually fail and then say “ahh well, its science, it changes as we discover new things, you know”. But that’s exactly what I mean. We can’t take one as the absolute and the other as false.

The thing about science is that its never absolute, you never actually know for sure what your observations mean. You can make inferences but you never know. That annoys me. This is what I find frustrating about science: it approximates a “how” answer but never a “why” answer. Why is there the survival of the species? Natural selection: organisms change to better adapt to their environments, for their survival, etc. As a human I have a mind, and a lot of what I do is based out of what I think in my head. Is there a thinking mechanism in science (hmm maybe this is returning to the original point of Hiram’s article)? Science doesn’t include a why (this isn’t a debate by the way, its something that’s come up in my mind as a result of thinking over this). But why do you think we survive?

I have been taught evolution my entire life through the school system. I want to look at something different. I refuse to take at face value something which seems (but not necessarily is) so meaningless. It’s like someone forced to watch mainstream media every day. They secretly start buying “Green Left” and “Socialist Agenda” newspapers, etc. and reading them in their spare time. Both sides report similar things, from different points of view, but at least in the middle of channel 9 and Green Left there is some sort of (perhaps slightly askew) balance. Next year, I will be forced to continue to look, at an in-depth level, into evolution. So I think its beneficial that I look at other stuff on the side, despite the cries of those who’ve already made their minds up.

YNG I like your open minded approach. (tick)

Have a REALLy close read of Genesis 1:1-2 .. u might be surprised at what you find.

1. "In the beginning, (when) God created the heavens and the earth."

2. "The earth was without form and void"

according to SAS, the 'when' is implied by the hebrew. (the one useful thing he has contributed)...

Its worth reflecting on those 2 verses, and suddenly "zaaaap" it might come :)

keep up the enthusiastic work.