OT: Huckabee, Ughh

[Fred the Red Shirt]

What do you mean by 'pre-universe'?

How could there be a time, before time?

Talk.origins is a GOOD place to discuss this.

[Tim Daneliuk]

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

I know this is a typo, but this gave me a big chuckle in this very heated debating context.

[dpb]

Tim Daneliuk wrote: ...

Dang, I could almost have wished for it, but can't claim credit. :(

Moral of story is _never_ trust an auto-correcting editor... :)

(Look for "Spelling Checker" on google...it's quite a nice bit o' work...I forget the original author (or authoress, as the case might be). )

[Charlie Self]

How about this for a test, presented to me by a very solid Southern Baptist friend the day before he died of stomach cancer: "Pray in one hand and shit in the other. See which fills up the fastest."

I make no pretense about knowing whether or not there is a God, but every test I've ever heard of comes up like the above. If there is a God, I'll be damned if I believe people like Jerry Falwell and his ilk are his messengers.

[J. Clarke]

This has zip all to do with the testing of a hypothesis. Creationism is a hypothesis, whether it's right or wrong is irrelevant, you can't test it until you know what you are testing.

[Dr. Deb]

Brian, I know this is a late addition to the thread, but - most of the posters, including you, have missed something, in fact several things.

1. The assumption that Creationism holds to a 6,000 year old event is exactly that, an assumption. As it turns out, an incorrect assumption.
2. Darwinism has more problems than ID does.
3. The theories of Relativity posit a point at which time began.
4. Then there are the minor things like entropy, anthropic principle and single handed DNA, to mention a few.

Admittedly, there are brain dead folks who will defend Bishop Usher's to the death. But there are Darwinist equally as dense. Neither invalidate the principle they espouse.

For the honest person, the data is all that matters. Before you throw too many rocks at ID, make sure you check the DATA and not your assumptions or the "gospel" of some Darwinist zealot.

Deb

[dpb]

Dr. Deb wrote: ...

Which "DATA" might that be?

So far, that's been their problem, they have no data, only a preconceived notion to make evidential theories to fit--which, of course, aren't needed anyway if some external force acted outside natural law. So, if may be a "theory", but it's not a scientific theory.

--

[J. Clarke]

If they want it to be a scientific theory, all they have to do is produce a test by which it may be falsified. So far evolution has passed every test that anybody's thrown at it. Has anybody even defined a test for "intelligent design"?

[Robatoy]

If they did, you'd flunk it, John.

++

[Fred the Red Shirt]

Sure.

How is the notion of an eternal God less in conflict with the concept of first cause than is the notion of an eternal Universe.

No need. The big bang model follows from the math, not vice versa.

Which is more logical, a Universe that conforms to the laws of mathematics in defiance of common sense, or a Universe that conforms to common sense in defiance of mathematics?

Wrong. That is a straw man argument. To be sure, the straw man was not invented by you. It was invented by proponents of the big bang model who either didn't understand it, or 'dumbed it down' for their audience.

The big bang model depends on conservation of mass and energy. Add to that the observed expansion of the Universe and the big bang model follows.

There are a number of counterintuitive conclusions that follow on in short order. Among them, every point in the Universe is, and always was, the center of the Universe.

In the relativistic big bang model, the Universe always existed, has always been expanding, and has always had the same sum of mass and energy. There is no time before the universe for the same reason that there is no space outside of the universe.

[Fred the Red Shirt]

More importantly though, it also has more solutions to those problems. Creationism has but one solution to every problem: "God did it."

More precisely, that is an hypothesis that arises from a relativistic big bang model. It is not a postulate of either the special or general theories themselves, or of any other theory as far as I know.

But your statement was still a heck of a lot closer to the truth than most.

Indeed.

[Brian Henderson]

Of course not, it's specifically untestable, it specifically makes no predictions and it cannot be falsified. Ultimately, what ID/creationism rests on is "we don't like evolultion, therefore this

*MUST* be true".

[Fred the Red Shirt]

No need to rely on assumption.

It is easy to identify the Creationsists who are also 'Young Earthers' . They are the ones who attack the Big Bang Model, in addition to evolution and geology.

For a long time that was a mystery to me as the Big Bang model, at least the dumbed down pseudo-Newtonian version, agrees so well with the creation Story in Genesis. "And God said, 'Let there be light.'", and BANG! there was the Universe!

Their problem is the great age of the Universe implied by the details of the model. For years they tried to advance other explanations for the cosmological redshift--interstellar reddening, historical variation in the speed of light and so on.

But they never got anywhere doing that so now they reject the big bang model outright.

Maybe that shouldn't have surprised me so much. After all, "God made man from the mud of the Earth." sounds like shorthand for the evolution of living things from non-living matter--at least to anyone but a Biblical literalist.