Monday, December 10, 2012

What Is Creationism?

It should be added that its modern manifestation is better known as, "Intelligent Design". 

Saturday, December 8, 2012

Bilateral what?

Bilateral assymetrical gyndromorphism.  The phenomenon where one half of an organism's body is male, the other half is female.

A gynandromorph Papilio glaucus
 
 
The condition typically occurs early in an organism's development, when a cell fails to divide it's sex chromosome properly, resulting in, for example, one XXY-Y cell and one Y cell, as opposed to an XX and a YY.  These ... confused... cells will continue to reproduce, and as the affected creature grows, will end up with equal half-male and half-female tissues.
 
More information can be found here

Friday, December 7, 2012

Even More Geological Reasons the Noachian Deluge Did Not Happen

Another, "Reports of the National Center for Science Education", has been released, and within it was a PDF file containing nine decent-sized pages of anti-Flood arguments, dealing with the supposed "deposition" of the Grand Canyon, the formation of sandstone, and radiolarian cherts (minerals made from the left-over silica skeletal structures of tiny organisms).

"More Geological Reason Noah's Flood Did Not Happen"

Yea, I just got a little aroused.

The page to see the article can be found here.  For whatever reason, I had difficulties with actually loading the PDF on the page itself, so I downloaded it. 

For the convenience of the average uninformed reader, a quick introduction is given to Young Earth Creationism, and a larger one is given to the uniformitarian interpretation of geology.  For the satisfaction of the informed reader, the author does choose to completely dissect and disarm the arguments at hand. 

Anyway, the entire article focuses on the claims made by one Michael Oard, in a paper that was published in Creation Ministries International's wannabe-science outlet "The Creation Journal".  What Oard, an atmospheric meteorologist, is doing fooling around in stratigraphy is beyond me, but the NCSE is quick to point out the errors of his logic and methods: ignoring decades worth of geologic literature, relying on miracle circumstances, and neglecting to address certain important factors.  You know, typical Creationist scientific procedure.  He also makes several factual mistakes, such as making highly misinformed statements about the geological formation of sandstone and orthoquartzites, among other things. 

But that is all I will say, lest I ruin the ending for you, which goes something like this:


 
The scientific evidence strongly suggests that a global Noachian Flood did not happen.
Oard’s (2002) model requires not only the rejection of strict uniformitarian models, as he
claims, but also a repudiation of practically all the geologic processes that geoscientists
have studied and confirmed for decades. A model of geologic processes that only works by rejecting the fundamental knowledge in the geosciences is not a scientific model at all, but little more than wishful thinking.


Wednesday, December 5, 2012

Pat Robertson denies that the Earth is young, and that humans and dinosaurs coexisted

This news came as a shock to me when I noticed it on Pandas Thumb last week (yes, I'm a week behind the times -- bite me): fundamentalist Christian minster and media mogul Pat Robertson flat-out DENIED a young Earth and human-dinosaur cohabitance, on CBN's The 700 Club!




This is a small step forward, and hopefully Ol' Saint Patty's flock will follow suit.  Maybe some day they'll even concede that some of those "fierce" dinosaurs evolved into the birds we see today.

Aaand as suspected, this put the Young Earth Creationists into a bit of a frenzy.  Ken Ham, on his Facebook page the next day, stated:

Not only do we have to work hard to not let our kids be led astray by the anti-God teaching of the secularists, we have to work hard to not let them be led astray by compromising church leaders like Pat Robertson. This excerpt was posted on Youtube by a group that is a project of People For the American Way. Pat Robertson gives more fodder to the secularists. We don't need enemies from without the church when we have such destructive teaching within the church.

It should be made evidently clear, by the way, that Pat Robertson is NOT renouncing Creationism -- just the Young Earth delusion.  To the best of my knowledge, he is still an Old Earth Creationist, and he still has a long way to go.