Posted on 01/18/2017 5:47:04 PM PST by ganeemead
Betsy DeVoss will be harassed by two questions involving religion and the supposed conflict between religion and science:
Question 1: Are you some sort of a knuckle-dragging, illegal alcohol drinking, hick rube who doesn´t believe in evolution? and
Question 2: Are you some sort of a knuckle-dragging, illegal alcohol drinking, hick rube who does not believe that our Earth is four billion years old?
The answer to question 1::
A proof or disproof is a kind of a transaction. There is no such thing as absolutely proving or disproving something; there is only such a thing as proving or disproving something to SOMEBODY'S satisfaction. If the party of the second part is too thick or too ideologically committed to some other way of viewing reality, then the best proof in the world will fall flat and fail.
In the case of evolution, what you have is a theory which has been repeatedly and overwhelmingly disproved over a period of many decades now via a number of independent lines reasoning and yet the adherents go on with it as if nothing had happened and, in fact, demand that the doctrine be taught in public schools at public expense and that no other theory of origins even ever be mentioned in public schools, and attempt to enforce all of that via political power plays and lawsuits.
At that point, it is clear enough that no disproof or combination of disproofs would ever suffice, that the doctrine is in fact unfalsifiable and that Carl popper's criteria for a pseudoscience is in fact met.
The educated lay person is not aware of how overwhelmingly evolution has been debunked over the last century.
The following is a minimal list of entire categories of evidence disproving evolution:
The decades-long experiments with fruit flies beginning in the early 1900s. Those tests were intended to demonstrate macroevolution; the failure of those tests was so unambiguous that a number of prominent scientists disavowed evolution at the time.
The discovery of the DNA/RNA info codes (information codes do not just sort of happen...)
The fact that the info code explained the failure of the fruit-fly experiments (the whole thing is driven by information and the only info there ever was in that picture was the info for a fruit fly...)
The discovery of bio-electrical machinery within 1-celled animals.
The question of irreducible complexity.
The Haldane Dilemma. That is, the gigantic spaces of time it would take to spread any genetic change through an entire herd of animals.
The increasingly massive evidence of a recent age for dinosaurs. This includes soft tissue being found in dinosaur remains, good radiocarbon dates for dinosaur remains (blind tests at the University of Georgia's dating lab), and native American petroglyphs clearly showing known dinosaur types.
The fact that the Haldane dilemma and the recent findings related to dinosaurs amount to a sort of a time sandwich (evolutionites need quadrillions of years and only have a few tens of thousands).
The dna analysis eliminating neanderthals and thus all other hominids as plausible human ancestors.
The total lack of intermediate fossils where the theory demands that the bulk of all fossils be clear intermediate types. "Punctuated Equilibria" in fact amounts to an attempt to get around both the Haldane dilemma and the lack of intermediate fossils, but has an entirely new set of overwhelming problems of its own...
The question of genetic entropy.
The obvious evidence of design in nature.
The arguments arising from pure probability and combinatoric considerations.
Here's what I mean when I use the term "combinatoric considerations"...
The best illustration of how stupid evolutionism really is involves trying to become some totally new animal with new organs, a new basic plan for existence, and new requirements for integration between both old and new organs.
Take flying birds for example; suppose you aren't one, and you want to become one. You'll need a baker's dozen highly specialized systems, including wings, flight feathers, the specialized system which allows flight feathers to pivot so as to open on upstrokes and close to trap air on downstrokes (like a venetian blind), a specialized light bone structure, specialized flow-through design heart and lungs, specialized tail, specialized general balance parameters etc.
For starters, every one of these things would be antifunctional until the day on which the whole thing came together, so that the chances of evolving any of these things by any process resembling evolution (mutations plus selection) would amount to an infinitessimal, i.e. one divided by some gigantic number.
In probability theory, to compute the probability of two things happening at once, you multiply the probabilities together. That says that the likelihood of all these things ever happening, best case, is ten or twelve such infinitessimals multiplied together, i.e. a tenth or twelth-order infinitessimal. The whole history of the universe isn't long enough for that to happen once.
All of that was the best case. In real life, it's even worse than that. In real life, natural selection could not plausibly select for hoped-for functionality, which is what would be required in order to evolve flight feathers on something which could not fly apriori. In real life, all you'd ever get would some sort of a random walk around some starting point, rather than the unidircetional march towards a future requirement which evolution requires.
And the real killer, i.e. the thing which simply kills evolutionism dead, is the following consideration: In real life, assuming you were to somehow miraculously evolve the first feature you'd need to become a flying bird, then by the time another 10,000 generations rolled around and you evolved the second such reature, the first, having been disfunctional/antifunctional all the while, would have DE-EVOLVED and either disappeared altogether or become vestigial.
Now, it would be miraculous if, given all the above, some new kind of complex creature with new organs and a new basic plan for life had ever evolved ONCE.
Evolutionism, however (the Theory of Evolution) requires that this has happened countless billions of times, i.e. an essentially infinite number of absolutely zero probability events.
I ask you: What could be stupider than that?
Fruit flies breed new generations every few days. Running a continuous decades-long experiment on fruit flies will involve more generations of fruit flies than there have ever been of anything resembling humans on Earth. Evolution is supposed to be driven by random mutation and natural selection; they subjected those flies to everything in the world known to cause mutations and recombined the mutants every possible way, and all they ever got was fruit flies.
Richard Goldschmidt wrote the results of all of that up in 1940, noting that it was then obvious enough that no combination of mutation and selection could ever produce a new kind of animal.
There is no excuse for evolution to ever have been taught in schools after 1940.
The answer to question 2:
People used to try to figure an age for the Earth by collating Bible chronologies and generally thought the Earth to be less than 10,000 years old; nobody believes that any more.
We actually DO have one planet (Venus) in our system which is ballpark for some sort of a 5K - 10K year age estimate, but Venus LOOKS like that (900F surface temp, 90-bar CO2 atmosphere, massive thermal imbalance, massive upwards infrared flux, total lack of regolith etc. etc.) Mars and Earth do not look like that at all and have to be much older, albeit not billions of years old. The main problem is that the people telling us that the Earth is 4 billion years old are the same people who tell us that dinosaurs died out 65 million years ago.
Aside from the obvious problem of recognizable dinosaur types seen in native American petroglyphs, there is a much bigger problem involving soft tissue in dinosaur remains. Soft tissue in dinosaur remains began turning up around 2006 and has kept on turning up, This stuff includes proteins, collagen, blood vessels, hemoglobin, skin cells and various things, none of which could plausibly last as long as 100,000 years. Any sort of a Google search on "dinosaur soft tissue" will turn up as much of this stuff as you want, including claims by evolutionists that the stuff has somehow or other actually survived for 65,000,000 years, but that's basically grasping at straws.
http://kgov.com/dinosaur-soft-tissue
They are now getting good radiocarbon dates for dinosaur remains and, so far, all such dates are within a range of 20,000 - 40,000 years in the past.
Even one cosmic disaster of global scale wrecks all of the assumptions which Earth dating schemes are based on. The cold, hard reality is that all anybody can do regarding questions of the Earthś age is try to come up with a rational, educated guess. If you were to take that 40,000 year number as a begin point for dinosaurs and plug it into the standard 24-hour clock model (which says that if you view the entire history of Earth as 24 hours then dinosaurs appear at 10:45 PM), then you come up with an age of the Earth of around 700,000 years. If you multiply that by ten to give the evolutionists every possible shot, then youŕe talking about seven million years. Thus my own best guess would be somewhere between 700K and 7M years.
That is assuming that the geologists have their ratios somdewhere near ballpark of course.
How quickly can dinosaur carcasses turn into oil? :)
I have NO IDEA, truthfully.
Awesome. Betsy isn’t the brightest person in the World that is for sure. Her knowledge of the education system is pretty horrible watching today anyway. However, I want her confirmed. Perhaps with lack of knowledge, she can destroy it once and for all.
Interesting post. I doubt the DeVos hearings will get that complicated though. What’s her status? Has she completed her grilling in the Senate, or is there more to come?
Ping for later
Only a knuckle-dragging, illegal alcohol drinking, hick rube who believes in evolution would ask that insulting question....next
Answer to question 2:
Only a a knuckle-dragging, illegal alcohol drinking, hick rube who believes that our Earth is four billion years old would ask that stupid question....next
wow you’re a d.ck :)
Haven’t seen one on here for a while. :)
Keep that old head in the sand and avoid reality at all costs.
I agree, she appears to be the weakest of the nominees which is sad given the sorry state of the indoctrination system.
I wish her luck if she plans to dismantle the DOE, and hope that she has a tremendous inner strength that was not evident to me during her hearing.
I surely do not want some knowledgeable person from inside that system running it. If he has been inside the system for long enough to know how it works then the system owns him.
Oh, she has a tremendous inner strength. Just watch.
Abolish the US Dept of Ed
Let me help you...
Question 1: Are you some sort of a knuckle-dragging, illegal alcohol drinking, hick rube who doesn’t know matter can’t be created out of nothing and requires energy? and
Question 2: Are you some sort of a knuckle-dragging, illegal alcohol drinking, hick rube who does not know that our Earth age in years is relative to the perception of the beholder?
You can’t even spell her name correctly.
English spelling is a joke.
There, FRiend, fixed it for you.
The fact is that all your "arguments" above have been addressed at great length in many places and demonstrated to be total nonsense, lies and more nonsense.
Of course, you are free to teach your religious beliefs as religion, but not in public school science class.
How quickly can dinosaur carcasses turn into oil? :)
Seems many scientists are no longer going that route.
It is hard to base any one number on any other number because there are no hard facts.
The Bible tells us that in the beginning the earth was void and with out form.
So how old was the earth before the beginning?
Also how long was a day? the new earthers will say it was 24 hour days but then why does it say generations?
I believe this argument is for people who like to argue about things like which is first ? the chicken or the egg.
But Since God made both the chicken and the egg it don`t matter.
Tell it to Betsy DeVos.....
I don't know DeVos but have enjoyed many long evolution debates on Free Republic.
My opinions are called "Theistic Evolutionism", meaning whatever science tells us may have happened, that could be how God created & managed life on Earth.
So whenever science comes up with a new theory (which is frequently), it does not disprove God is in charge, only suggests now we possibly have a better understanding of how He did it, in natural terms.
Btw, when my grandparents taught in old one-room schools, they started each day with a Bible reading and prayer, so that children learned some basic History & morality along with their three r's.
I have no problem with that, though in larger "diverse" schools they might want to put children from similar heritages together in home-rooms for such instructions.
Finally, I am always amazed by how scientific the Bible seems, for just one example, consider Isaiah 42:5 "...the Creator of the heavens, who stretches them out..."
How could Isaiah possibly know about the Big Bang and our expanding Universe?
Common claim (¨God uses evolution¨)...
There is also a simple answer to it: God does not use broken tools...
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.