Feedback for June 2004

This guy has a point about discribing an entire animal from only jaw fragments. How is that done?

"Or hey, look at it this way. The millions of fossils we have are frames in an enormous motion picture of past life. As an example, let's say some barbarian took scissors and cut up a movie reel of "Gone With The Wind" so that each frame was seperated from the others. Let's also assume that I had never seen (or read) "Gone With the Wind." Now all of the seperate frames of "Gone with the Wind" have been placed in a huge box and mixed and shaken. I am asked by this barbarian to shove my hand into the box and grasp as many of the frames as I can. Then I'm given a room with a huge table, lit from beneath, and a jewelers lens. I can spread the frames I've managed to grasp from the box on this table. With the jeweler's lens I can examine each frame in great detail. My instructions are to give the barbarian a basic narrative of the story contained in the random movie film frames. Can I do it?

It is my contention that I COULD give a basic narrative, and although I probably could not give this barbarian details like Scarlett's last name or the complex love triangle between Scarlett, Rhett and Ashley, I COULD more than likely state that some immense upheaval has taken place. I would note that some characters tend to recur more often than others. I may find that some ALWAYS occur together and some never seem to meet. I may see an isolated frame of Tara in its antebellum beauty and another of Tara as a pockmarked, burnt-out shell and be able to tell which image came earlier in the narrative.

This is what scientists do. A fossil by itself is as worthless as a single frame of film. But many together begin to knit a narrative, and the gaps get smaller the more we find. With the film-frames I have the advantage of knowing that they all came from the same movie. With the fossils, I have the advantage of knowing that they all came from the same planet with the same physical processes occurring. A film is only a record of the events at 1/24 of a second intervals. Where are the transitionals frames between these frames? Do I need them? How far and deep do I have to go in search of the transitional frames to get the basic story of Gone with the Wind? Could I reconstruct it at 2 second intervals? 4? 5 minutes? 30 minutes? It depends on the resolution and detail I want.

Thus it is with the fossil record and transitional species."

Thanx.

What this argument ignores is that Johnson (and myself, and many other creationists, scientists, and semioticians) are not arguing from ignorance (the, "I can't conceive it therefore it can't be" argument), but rather from the principle of non-contradiction. This principle states that nothing can be X and not-X at the same time, in the same way, or to the same degree. The evolutionists claim for the theory of consciousness that it can somehow be X (free and multidimensional) and not-X (not free and one-dimensional), at the same time. In evolutionary theory, men are nothing more than chemical histories, and chemical histories determine actions--not cause freedom. The idea that a chemical history would equip me with freedom is inconceivable not because it is difficult to understand, but because it is self-contradictory. It is not difficult to believe that evolutionary causation (that is to say, a complex chemical history) brought about consciousness and free will, it is impossible: chemical histories aren't "free," and there is nothing in the evolutionary organism (his brain, his liver, his kidneys, etc.) that is nearly as complex as the will (which is free and therefore can't be a chemical history) and consciousness.

To reiterate: the Talk Origins site made a gross assumption. When a man cannot conceive something, it is either because it is difficult and he doesn't want to conceive it, or because it is impossible and no matter how badly he wants to conceive it, no matter how many times he projects he will one day conceive it, he simply won't and can't, because it is self-contradictory to do so. And it is self-contradictory to conceive of a chemical history (a purely determined and determining process or system) producing a free agent with such a highly developed consciousness.

Tobias

You've made arguing evolution too easy. All I have to do is dip into TO to back up almost any statement I might make, and that leads to boredom. Thus, I find myself working twice as hard looking elsewhere and sooner or later, as often as not, wind up right back here, anyway. Phooey!

But I suppose it's an evil I can live with. :big grin:

doov

I would like to express my appreciation of Tim Thompson's article The Recession of the Moon. I had been asked by a friend how it really worked. All the explanations on offer talked of angular momentum transfer, but I cannot envisage someone standing on the Earth calling "Here, Moonfred, catch a load of angular momentum”! The explanation in this article is sound and satisfactory.

In the Physical Sciences, though, we have a phenomenon, exemplified by Paul Marmet of the University of Ottawa who says 'the Big Bang hypothesis is another "creationist theory" for which the only difference with the usual "creationist theory" claiming that universe started 4000 B.C. is by changing the number 4000 B.C. by 15 billion years.'

Bizarre maybe, but one cannot necessarily write off such people completely. Fred Hoyle, who opposed the Big Bang and Darwinian evolution, is often denounced as a 'nutter'. But he was a top ranking scienctist who takes the lion's share of the credit for working out how elements are synthesized in stars (I recommend Marcus Chown’s book "The Magic Furnace" to read the story).

Marmet accounts for The Origin of 3 K Radiation, generally agreed to be left over from the Big Bang, by invoking the remarkable properties of molecular hydrogen. It would take a cosmologist to pick his argument to pieces, nevertheless, it does appear that molecular hydrogen may be turning up trumps in another cosmological puzzle. In order to account for rotation of galaxies, a mysterious "dark matter" has been invoked. Likely candidates such as hordes of small stars too dim to shine in the visible have been more or less ruled out, so people have been invoking entities such as MACHOs, WIMPs, and other strangely named hypothetical particles. But, according to Andreas Heithausen of the University of Bonn, the much more prosaic molecular hydrogen may fill the bill after all. Literally, Watch This Space!

I want to add something in reaction on the article about Harun Yahya and more specific Soykirim Yalani (The Holocaust Hoax or Holocaust Deception). This book is at the moment available in english on the website of Yahya at: http://www.harunyahya.com/download/download.php?id=13985

The title is announced as 'Holocaust violence', but when you download the document the real title is The Holocaust Hoax.

yours sincerely Ernst Haffmans

Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Anthropos