06
Creationism
(5 votes, average: 4.2 out of 5)
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Oh goodie. Some fuckwits spent $27 Million dollars on a Creationism Museum. I’m sorry, Christians, but the arrogant, irritating self-entitlement of some of your groups and sects out there is getting way out of control. Not only are there "good Christian" groups out there who want to literally take over the United States of America, but now there are plenty varieties of fundamentalists who follow the mentality of: "If I don’t want to believe the Earth revolves around the sun I don’t have to! Because the Bible said so!"
You may say, why not let these people just believe what they want to believe? That’s okay, but when they start spreading lies about Scientists not all agreeing that Evolution happened, or blatant misinformation stemming from their own gross misunderstanding of the process, and then start trying to teach this crap in our public schools under the guise of "Intelligent Design", I have a problem.
My biggest problem with Creationism is that these people want to try and tell you the Earth is only 6,000 years old because the Bible says so (and the number stays at 6,000 even as the years go on, WTF?) You know how I know the Earth is older than that? BECAUSE THERE WERE HUMAN CIVILIZATIONS IN EXISTENCE PRIOR TO 6,000 YEARS AGO. Hell, the Giza Pyramids of Egypt are over 6,000 years old! These people try to claim there is no human record from that far back, but I think the Chinese might take offense to that. But of course you know they don’t count because the God of Israel’s chosen people are white Anglo-Saxon and Aryan Americans. Lol what?
My second biggest gripe with proponents of Creationism is that any time they try to "disprove" Evolution they start talking about the Big Bang. Excuse me what? The Big Bang Theory and the Theory of Evolution have nothing to do with each other. Evolution doesn’t claim to know the start of the universe, it only outlines how the species of the Earth got to where they are and how they have become so varied and why certain species have changed or died out. These people have got to stop treating Science like religion, where everything is just one long interconnected belief. Scientific knowledge constantly changes as new information is discovered, religious beliefs never change (except at the convenience of the believers, of course, lol kosher.)
Then there’s the misunderstanding of the word "theory" in a Scientific context. A theory in Science indicates something testable, observable, and with considerable evidence to back it up. It doesn’t mean it’s "just an idea". Scientists don’t just come up with explanations and conclusions and then never put them to the test (that’s what Creationists do!), that’s not how it works. But because Creationists themselves completely ignore the Scientific Method when trying to prove Creationism, they must assume Scientists do the same. In reality: Scientists observe a phenomenon, come up with a hypothesis, test that hypothesis and then come to a conclusion, and based on the results their hypothesis was either correct or incorrect.
No one ever tries to really prove Creationism, they just say "goddidit" and then spend all their time trying to debunk Evolution with outdated, misunderstood or otherwise faulty information. I was internet arguing (like a big geek) with this one guy who supported Creationism, and he kept asking me where all the "transitional fossils" are. No matter how many sources I showed him outlining that thousands upon thousands of fossil evidence exists in support of Evolution, he kept saying there was only a "handful". He kept making unreasonable claims like more should have been found if it’s true, dismissive of both the mountains of evidence my rebuttal that Archaeologists don’t have "bone radar" or something and most big discoveries are accidental. Also that you can’t just dig 6 feet in your back yard and come up with a 50,000 year old skeleton.
Then we got on an interesting subject: I asked him how Creationism or even the Bible accounts for all the different races of humans in the world. If Evolution doesn’t happen, if species never change from the state God created them, and if every human in the world descended from the same two people, how did we all end up looking so different based on our regions of origin? At first he cited the Tower of Babel story, but when I pointed out that only explains the different languages he then kept on about this idea of what he called "genetic variation". But he ultimately failed to explain to me how "genetic variation" occurs without Evolution possibly existing and creatures never changing from the form God zapped them onto Earth in. Try that argument next time you get into it with a Creationist, Bible literalists never seem to consider this important quandary and almost never have an answer for it, likely because their priest or Creationist of choice has not considered this and thus had no answer to feed them.
Then there’s the excuses upon excuses for things they find they can’t deny. Dinosaurs being a big one. First there’s the old "dinosaur bones were planted by Satan to test our faith" or "dinosaur bones were planted by GOD to make us think the Earth is older than it is, he aged the Earth on purpose you see" (Satan and God kinda sound like the same guy sometimes, don’t they?) then of course the even more paranoid "dinosaur bones are just a big hoax perpetuated by godless Scientists" Yeeehhh.. okay. Perhaps even more baffling is the claim that not only were there dinosaurs living amongst men, but there were dinosaurs on Noah’s ark. Okay, my first question is: which ones? There were hundreds if not thousands of breeds of dinosaurs, and many of them weighed several tons. How did Noah get these on the ark without sinking? How did he stop them from eating other animals, or maiming him? Did he only bring plant-eaters? Which looking at the Stegosaurus and Brachiosaurus were still pretty damn huge. Let’s not forget the Christians who believe the T-Rex, which had serrated teeth as long and sharp as knives which could regenerate if needed, was a leafy tree eater much like a doe-like and gentle giraffe. Yeah, okay. Just because you "believe" it, and repeat it often enough, it doesn’t make it true. Evidence plz. Scientists get their information about dinosaurs not only from the bones, but from what we know about similar modern creatures and their behavior. And where the ideas about dinosaurs continually evovle (as they should) it’s always been pretty agreed upon that a huge creature with massive powerful back legs and a giant head full of sharp as fuck teeth was more than likely a meat-eating hunter.
They also try to claim dinosaurs are in the Bible, because of creatures like Leviathan, or the behemoth (whose balls God seems to describe at length), but hell people in Medieval Europe thought crocodiles were dragons, what makes you think people from Biblical times weren’t, I dunno, exaggerating?
And last but not least, back to something I said earlier. Yes, there are people who believe the sun goes around the Earth because the Bible said so. Also that the Earth is flat, because the Bible said so (by the way, the Bible does say both those things)(also, is it just me, or are Fundamentalist Christians wholly incapable of good website design?) That sounds stupid to alot of Creationists and even Bible literalists out there, but is it any dumber than what they’re doing? That same guy I had been arguing with, I explained to him how the Bible says the Earth is flat, he cried out it was a metaphor (typically, of course if it was a metaphor that would mean you think ancient man knew the Earth was round and exactly how the universe worked. Otherwise why would God purposefully confuse people on this issue?), but I pointed out to him that most people, and especially the Church, wanted Galileo burned at the stake for heresy for daring to suggest the Earth is round. This guy kept claiming it was a "vocal minority", or something, mmm. That term only works in modern times, and even then just barely. I said to him that those people look pretty stupid to most Christians today, and in the future all the Christians trying to use the Bible to debunk Evolution will look pretty stupid to our ape overlords and Pope Ceasar.
You really did it! You maniacs! You blew it up! You blew it all to hell!
… Dinosaurs of… EDEN?! Wow. I just don’t even know how to reply to that….
Dominionism is the whole type of Christian group who thinks they are entitled to take over the world.
Fundies of course treat everyone who isn’t Christian enough like garbage.
Reading this cheered me up. =p You should be the host of your own TV show where you could kick such dumb peoples’ asses.
Wow, if only I had know all these things when I was 2 and my parents were having a priest dunk me in cold water. (LOL)
Ah man, I love how that one “T-Rex is a plant eater” site uses Panda’s as an example as sharp toothed animals that only eat bamboo. From what I know, panda’s diets used to only consist of meat until they started eating bamboo. They haven’t always been eating bamboo, so they still have their sharp teet from back when they were meat eaters.
I should totally forward this to my dad. We love to talk about these kind of issues.
That site about how the Earth revolves around the Sun blew me away - I can’t believe there are actually people arguing that! I wonder if there will ever be a day where I won’t be surprised by how dumb people can be….
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it makes sence.
and think about it, to make an ark big enough to hold thousands of creatures would take forever to build. No fucking way 1 man built it in time and had times to make sure it wouldn’t sink.
ha ha ha dinosaurs of eden. ha ha ha ha i want that book. wow. man what fucking dumbasses. Thank you sai for writing this.
I’ll just apologize now for a long reply to this, but oh well. xD
:/ I don’t personally believe the earth is just 6000 years old, but I really have a hard time believing that it’s as old as carbon dating says it is. (since Carbon dating is a very inaccurate method), but to be totally honest, who really cares that much about how old this giant spherical lump of rock is? Knowing how long Earth’s existed doesn’t lead into any huge major knowledge or phenomenal breakthroughs.
I remember getting a chain e-mail once related to this that was supposed to prove the Earth is around 6,000 years old. It argued that the curvature on the bottom of the Apollo spaceships was to help it slow down through a predicted 40 feet of cosmic dust that had settled on the moon. Then they land and there’s like two inches of dust. I may be Christian through and through, but anything like this is blatantly stupid. And just so you will be able to argue the point with someone should the topic come up, here’s what’s wrong with it: First off the part of the rocket that landed on the moon was very spidery looking. The landing module looked nothing like the part they traveled in that had a curved side. Second off, even if they did ‘crash land’ on the moon with 40 feet of dust, they’d experience a very quick stop. They flew through space at just under 5000 mi/hr and if they did stop in 40 feet, it would kill them, as they’d be pulling about 9,700 g’s. Needless to say, NASA would’ve wasted a lot of money just to have the astronauts killed. And any kid in a basic physics class could work that out, I doubt NASA would make those mistakes.
And I do think that creatures change and ‘evolve’ over time. you can see that anytime you take a look at ancient ‘human’ bones. I don’t believe in evolution to the extent that a lot of people do, but somewhere along the lines, something had to come from nothing. I really doubt there’s been life on Earth since the dawn of time, and I doubt anyone would seriously try to argue that it was. So somewhere along the line life had to randomly spring up from somewhere. And I don’t believe the lightning strikes made amino acids. They had done tests to prove it could be done, but then they realized they didn’t make the spark in the same type of atmosphere, so that skewed their results (and I’ve not heard of it being tested again since).
As for the dinosaurs, again I say who really cares? What purpose does it serve? But I’ll put my two cents in for the heck of it. I know a lot of people think that the ‘days’ it took to create the earth are of a different length than the days we have now, but I don’t know. Unfortunately though, too many people that claim to be Christian are too stubborn to admit that they don’t know either. Most Christians have a hypothesis that the days are different length (although the actual Hebrew word translates to ‘period’ not day), but we have no way to prove that it was or wasn’t a normal length day. But the same type of thing happens in today’s modern science. Optics is a huge place that it happens in. We still to this day aren’t sure what light really is. It can act like a wave, and it can act like a particle, but it only acts like one or the other at any given moment, and it has a weird duality. And even part of Einstein’s theories have very strange things included. Like no matter how far through space you travel in a perfectly straight line, you’ll eventually come back to where you started, even though you’re always traveling away from there.
And I think that anyone that still thinks the earth is flat or the sun goes around us is an utter idiot. The people of that day and time were a lot more primitive than we are now, and didn’t know that the earth is round. They described it the way that it seemed because that’s all they knew. It wasn’t until fairly recently on this time line that a guy named Copernicus came up with the idea of a sun-centered solar system.
As a small side note: Galileo was a devout catholic, and was also granted final absolution. He did get himself into trouble because the Catholic priests didn’t want to think of how to make the bible verses work if we actually circled the sun instead of it circling us.
And I doubt I’ll check back here to see if you’ve replied but you can send me a note on dA if you really care to continue the argument. I left my dA user name instead of my actual name
You make that “something from nothing” argument… but honestly, I think the concept of “nothing” is a flawed one. It helps us with math and rationalizing certain concepts… but in reality… why do we have to assume that what exists around us was created from some kind of void of “nothingness”? I personally blame the biblical concept for this. So many Christians know the biblical account where God starts with a void and creates from there. In the real universe, however, it doesn’t seem like that “void of nothingness” is anything other than a fantasy of the bible’s authors.
From what science observes the Big Bang wasn’t nothing exploding into reality but rather it was the universe in a super-condensed state expanding rapidly outward. Everything we see around us isn’t “creation” from nothing into something but rather “conversion” of something into something else. While science hasn’t been able to synthesize all the building blocks of life… you should know that it’s something they are moving closer to discovering. Considering all we know through science it is a pretty damn positive conclusion that life was formed on earth via a chemical process and began to evolve from there onwards.
People confuse the role of Science. It’s not there to set up dogmas and explanations that people must accept as divine truth. It’s not a church that should be judged on how fully and satisfactorily it “explains away” the greater questions. It’s a process of discovery and uncovering truths in an objective and rational way… a way that can be demonstrated and repeated for the benefit of others. If Science “had all the answers” there would be no need for it… but just because there are still mysteries Scientists have yet to uncover and explain… it doesn’t mean that those gaps need to be populated by religious and superstitious “boogeymen”.
Creationism the spread of ignorance, I was talking about this with my co-workers, my Dad, and my uncle, I don’t like the idea at all. What sucks even more, is that the Creationist museum, is probally 15-20 minutes away from me.
@Kumori - Well I think a common misconception is that just because science can’t answer everything, that it can’t answer some things, or won’t continue to find answers. Modern science as we know it is only about 100 years old, it’s a very fledgling thing, but look how far it’s taken us in such a short time.
Your ideas seem pretty sound to me, although the word in Hebrew WAS in fact simply “day”. And as I said before: Evolution does not claim to know the beginning of the universe, it only outlines how the species of the planet evovle. The idea people even try to make it an opponent of religion, and treat it as such, is ridiculous and leads to alot of misconceptions and unreasonable demands on it.
This argument on extreme ends is completely futile. Going through Sai and Kumori’s post, I have to say I support facts and proving why things are the way they are. However I’d like to make note that MAN wrote the Bible by interpretation and word of mouth. So essentially it was them writing what they thought God meant. Take that with a grain of salt, but the people who believe the Bible word for word are idiots. God teaches lessons in the Bible, but it’s up to you to see them.
I mean, let’s size up Evolution and Creationism. It’s plainly simple to just say that both are right. By all means, God is a scientist himself. If you really think about it, he’s got his version of the scientific method. Bare with me:
1. Define the question
2. Gather information and resources
3. Form hypothesis
4. Perform experiment and collect data
5. Analyze data
6. Interpret data and draw conclusions that serve as a starting point for new hypotheses.
7. Publish results
God wanted to see how these beings (us) created in his likeness would fair? He’s all knowing and has an ever watchful eye, along with countless Angels to gather information. He believed that man would fair well, so he left him be and collected the data. Turns out Man was lonely and God drew the conclusion that Woman needed to be created. And so she was.
I could go on with this, but you get the idea. (As it goes, the question and the experiment changes.)
As for Dinosaurs, I mean the Bible does state that there were Beasts. Last time I checked, Dinos could qualify. And if some guys did contribute this book which is a little over 2000yrs old, then I bet they didn’t see them most likely. But who’s to say that God’s Creation has stopped? A day only a day, because of the gained popularity of it’s use in this manner. God is timeless as he exists outside of it. A lifetime for us maybe but mere seconds for him. Languages are completely screwed, so translations will always have multiple meanings, I mean just look how popular the Thesaurus got because of that.
Evolution could simply be God’s given ability to change in away that he could see how react to all these different variables and controls: Life (in general, but to be more specific), influence, interaction, emotion, temptation, nature, etc.
I mean life is always referred to as a trial. And the goal is to see if we can find our way back to God.
I mean, Science and Religion are full of holes, and things that can’t be explained, but they also explain a hell of a lot. Like Einstein’s aforementioned statement does describe Hailey’s Comet right? So it takes it 76yrs(?) to travel through the entire universe and back?
I mean for all the progress we have with Modern Science, for all the miracles we make, and the wonders we perform, using these tools, natural, and learned talents. Don’t we all have the magnificent abilities to create, build, and destroy?
Science is really just an understanding of God’s work.
Well that’s my opinion. XD!
Great topic!
This reminds me of a project in Government class at the end of the year. A group of Christian students in my class did a PowerPoint about how evolution wasn’t true and how God created everything, blah blah blah. They basically used all the Biblical evidence that you presented (except that the world is flat and that the sun revolves around Earth, which I wish I would have known because I would have brought it up). The title of the presentation was “Evolution vs. Creationism” but all it did was talk about how fossils didn’t prove ANYTHING and how evolution is FALSE.
They didn’t present ONE BIT of information proving Creationism, though. Which led to myself and the rest of the nerds in the back of the room talking through the whole thing. We’re talking paragraphs and paragraphs in this presentation, saying the same thing over and over.
I’d like to see them prove the whole “Adam and Eve” thing. So how does Cain have kids, if he and his parents are the only people on Earth?
@Lionious - Well the depiction of the nature of the planet and stuff in the Bible is exactly what most ancient civilizations thought: The Earth was flat, the sun and moon went around it and the stars were set in a solid canopy. Unfortuneately, people who want to take the Creation story literally struggle with this because they KNOW it’s stupid to insist the world is flat because the Bible says so, yet they still want to insist on Eden and Adam and Eve. It baffles me that people will tell you it’s just a metaphor for the Earth exactly how we know it is now, because that either means you think ancient man KNEW the Earth was round, or your God went around purposefully confusing people for the lulz.
I don’t see anything wrong with believing in both God and evolution, I think that’s healthy, I just personally don’t believe in the God of Israel or any God and I don’t much care for the ideas of the Bible.
However I am often told God is totally done creating and totally done with prophecies and there won’t be any more of either until the world ends. Which seems weird to me, given the radical differences between the OT and the NT, if he’s capable of changing his mind once, you’d think he might do it again. Of course, I don’t buy the NT or its prophet so, meh.
@Kuridee Cain is a very bizarre case. Not even because of the whole “He’d have to had married his sister” thing. There’s even more strange things going on here.
For one, Cain was meant to be a fugitive for being the first murderer. At this point, supposedly, there’s only Adam, Eve, and Cain. But God MARKS him to prevent other people from retaliating so that anyone who kills Cain will be cursed. Now if only his parents exist, why would God need to do this? And then, suddenly yes, he has a wife. And even though he’s supposed to be cursed to wander/be a fugitive, he goes to the East of Eden to Nod and founds a city! Now granted, maybe he and his wife had alot of kids over 100s of years to make this city, but it doesn’t really specify. Were there other people? Is the God of Israel part of a pantheon who only created his Chosen People as some of the original Hebrew may suggest? Who knows.
Thats why I love being a Lutheran. There are the crazy Baptists and other such sects of Christianity that translate the bible literally. We take into account what human knowledge was at the time (ie: People in that time period thought that the world was flat and revolved around the sun) Also theres the womens rights in the bible, HELLO IT WAS THE TIME PERIOD! My pastor at my church is female (take that those that take the bible literally!) I am Christian and I believe in Evolution. Somehow, I believe God doesn’t have to tell us how he did everything…something about him being superior to us…? The 24 hour day didn’t even start until much later than the time the world was created anyway, so 7 “days” in God’s time could have been millions of years…who knows… **I’m not a bible scholar however and of course all those fundamentalists know better than a freshmen in College** *note the sarcasm*
Well Sai,
I’m not going to tell you what to believe, but science can only explain so much. I mean, the universe…planets…stars…I mean, there’s got to be something. And obviously man isn’t perfect. We’ve messed up so many historical records it’s really hard to depend solely on the record. For example, there was a scientist during the Great Depression who created a car engine that ran on water. He was murdered and his plans were lost forever. 30 years later we’re sending men into orbit. I tell you, people with power edit and exclude so much, that everything we “know” is plainly fabricated.
Sai I gotta ask you, what do you believe in? With science you can break down matter to the last atom, or even further (if that’s possible), but something HAD to CREATE all of this. It couldn’t just randomly pop up from complete nothingness. Everything is too perfect. From the Earth’s axis, to planetary revolution, down to the very adaptable existence of mankind. I mean it’s demeaning to call what may be miracles; mathematical ratios. Still for what it’s worth I have a theory:
Though I believe in God as the one true God, I believe he has a common thread in every ancient religion and it just maybe possible that religions with multiple deities are just the same, except they were referred to as Gods because they are bestowed with his abilities/will (i.e. Angels of different choirs). God is figure-less, though often referred to as a He or a Him he could appear in any form he chooses. I really just think Men, and their lust for power, or their wanting to stand out, helped break what could’ve been a cohesion in all of this. I just don’t think we’ve got it all right… and most likely, never will. (sorry so long XD ).
“I’m not going to tell you what to believe, but science can only explain so much. I mean, the universe…planets…stars…I mean, there’s got to be something. And obviously man isn’t perfect. We’ve messed up so many historical records it’s really hard to depend solely on the record. For example, there was a scientist during the Great Depression who created a car engine that ran on water. He was murdered and his plans were lost forever. 30 years later we’re sending men into orbit. I tell you, people with power edit and exclude so much, that everything we “know” is plainly fabricated.
Sai I gotta ask you, what do you believe in? With science you can break down matter to the last atom, or even further (if that’s possible), but something HAD to CREATE all of this. It couldn’t just randomly pop up from complete nothingness. Everything is too perfect. From the Earth’s axis, to planetary revolution, down to the very adaptable existence of mankind. I mean it’s demeaning to call what may be miracles; mathematical ratios.”
Actually, complete nothingness indicates a lack of causality and time. Therefore, it never just “popped up”; the universe has always been due to the fact that “always” has a necessitating factor of time. This “perfection” comes from several trillion planets; It’s a statistical improbability that there would be nothing as complex as us somewhere, even elsewhere, in the universe. There is no need for a creator in the beginning, or anywhere. Causality and the butterfly effect take care of everything for us. Call this God if you want; something that does everything, has always existed, and is the cause of all so-called-miracles. But I warn you; to do so is misleading at best and in no way proves the god of the bible or the bible itself.
Coincidentally, this does make your theory correct, but this is due to the fact that your God is science itself. God is everything; and we already have a word for that. I’m perfectly fine with making God synonymous with everything as long as it becomes utterly disconnected from the corruptive force that is religion.
…Dear god, people actually think T-Rex was a herbivore?
Someone shoot me. I’ve lost my will to live because of that sort of stupidity.
…I’m going to give myself an ulcer before I turn 20 if this keeps up.
@VenusRain- Yes. They do. As some sort of very odd attempt to make dinosaurs compatible with their belief system. I don’t see HOW that works, though… unless its just a way to explain why the T-rex didn’t EAT Adam and Eve. You’d think God would be able to… you know.. intervene with… that kinda… thing. Yeah.
@Lionious- Like I said before (I think I said it before o_O) science as we know it today is very new, despite the insane amounts of progress it has brought in the last 100 years or so. No I don’t think it has all the answers, but as I said there’s no reason it can’t keep finding answers. I mean think about it: these days if you leave so much as a hair or a drop of blood at a crime scene they will friggin’ FIND you. With science!
The universe is an airless vaccum with all sorts of scarey shit in it like black holes that are literally a HOLE in NOTHING that may be infinite. I appreciate the people who take the time to study it, I know I wouldn’t be able to without going nuts. At the same time space has always had an odd spiritual and hauntingly beautiful quality to me. Perhaps finding out its mysteries will be bad, like how the moon isn’t so romantic anymore or we found out there wasn’t an elegant, Grecian civilization on Mars as many people fantasized in earlier decades of the 1900’s, buuuuuut any knowledge could in fact be benefitial to us.
“but something HAD to CREATE all of this. It couldn’t just randomly pop up from complete nothingness. Everything is too perfect. From the Earth’s axis, to planetary revolution, down to the very adaptable existence of mankind. I mean it’s demeaning to call what may be miracles; mathematical ratios.”
See, this is where I think people have it backwards. When people say something HAD to create nature (in a purposeful, intelligent, sentient manner), because it’s “perfect”, they’re basing this on an idea of “order” that our own societies and civilizations have cultivated. So people will say, well look at us, and our civilization, and all we’ve created, if we created something orderly like this, someone like us must have created something orderly like nature. However, our idea of “order” is merely an imitation of nature in the first place, so it’s circular logic to say someone like us must have created nature because nature is so like our own imitation of it. Do you get what I mean?
“Though I believe in God as the one true God, I believe he has a common thread in every ancient religion and it just maybe possible that religions with multiple deities are just the same, except they were referred to as Gods because they are bestowed with his abilities/will (i.e. Angels of different choirs). God is figure-less, though often referred to as a He or a Him he could appear in any form he chooses. I really just think Men, and their lust for power, or their wanting to stand out, helped break what could’ve been a cohesion in all of this. I just don’t think we’ve got it all right… and most likely, never will.”
Truthfully I think it’s a little arrogant to say all religions are just interpreting Abraham’s God differently. There were many many religions before Judaism, Christianity and Islam so it’s more logical to say those are imitating the older religions, which they are, because you find many parellels and borrowed concepts and characters in the Abrahamic religions. And truthfully I don’t see much difference between the foul-tempered Zues and the foul-tempered YHWH.
Let me have your babies!! XD
Wow. Glory glory hallelujah.
My sixth grade humanities teacher actually showed our class a video produced by the Flat Earth Society–something about the School Board making him do it. Hooee. Good fun. The entire class was in stitches the whole time, and our teacher had us make diagrams to show how the earth was flat. I think he was having trouble keeping a straight face.
Oh Creationism, I do wonder when we will let go of the old and embrace the new. As you said Sai, modern science is relatively new, but has already made great progress. And as you said, many of their so called evidence is laughable when put considered with modern logical thought processes.
Just to clarify, kumori-fennikusu said that we used carbon dating to age the Earth, actually we use potassium dating (specifically the isotope k40), as carbon dating only works with living matter (as soon as the subject dies, it can no longer exchange radioactive carbon from the enviorment, leading it to begin decaying in the deceased).
Also, the universe is not perfect as many people are led to believe, it is beautiful, but far from perfect. There is a process called proton decay. This is due to the inequality of matter and anti-matter after the big bang, this inequality led to an unstable particle that must decay to satiate the first law of thermodynamics. It is a very slow process, but it still exits. The quantum foam (the time-space field below the planck length) is awash with imperfections and micro tears in it as well as particles incredibly short lived. If the universe were perfect, would we have a particle that will eventually decay, leading to a universe without hadronic matter (and thus, likely no life). Would space be as harsh as it is (micro-meteoroids, lethal radiation, and they multitude of other ouch worthy things)? If the universe was perfect and created for man as creationist believe, these issues and many more would be non-existant (after all, would a deity really want his favorite organism wiped out because two neutron stars collided 2.5 million light years away?).
Then there is my favorite response to the ‘why else would we be here (or how else)’ that you often hear. It is a simple one actually. Because if we weren’t, we wouldn’t be having this conversation right now. We want to believe we are special, that things were made for us, but the idea of ’special’ itself is a human invention. We are no more special then the microbes infesting our guts, we just have an ego slightly larger then said microbes.
We might not have all the answers now, but that is what makes living today so great, because we can be part of the process of finding those answers, we can give ourselves a purpose, we are the first organism to evolve on this planet (most likely) to be able to understand our universe on an abstract scale. Instead of throwing that away to believe information from a more ignorant time (remember, ignorant just means a lack of information, just so no one is offended by that part), why not put our future in our own hands instead of the hands of the dead and gone?
@Chris: @_@ You just summed up why outer space scares the shit out of me. Being not so scientifically inclined (I like science, I’m interested in science, I’m just not very… um… left-brained) my usual argument (which I don’t even know if it’s entirely accurate) for the Earth’s age is the build up of sedimentary rock formations and the idea that if you cut the Earth in half it would have rings like a tree.
Just a random tidbit: Galileo wasn’t persecuted for claiming the earth was round, that was already established by then. He was persecuted for supporting Copernicus’ heliocentric theory, for claiming that Jupiter had moons and that the sun had sunspots.
You really should get your own talk show, or something! Heh…”Dinosaurs of Eden”.