Don't waste your time with it, neeeel. It's just total dishonest defense of the religion, because that is the only thing that defends it. It cannot allow an honest investigation into the nature of things, which is the disappointing part.

Religions are mythological attempts to explain origins, meaning, fate, etc. They all come under that umbrella, mostly originated in very ignorant eras. So they generally all have something to add, something to be said for them, something worth espousing ... and pieced together you can get some good stuff.

The idea that "my religion is the true one and everyone else is going to hell" is savagely fundamentalist and manipulative. It's where religion went evil in a sense. It's a psychology that is stuck within a paradigm, refusing to extricate itself ... this out of fear, convention, authoritarianism, ignorance, willful blindness, blind allegiance, etc. Or, simply a function of the fact that skepticism and critical thinking that we apply to everything else are not allowed when it comes to religion, which operates on the magic faith principle instead, for some very strange reason, i.e. that it cannot be defended or believed any other way.

what, like your quote?

That was nothing of substance, yet you posted it.

And what is not substantial about saying "you are disingenuous"?

Is the Big Bang still the universal belief or has it changed?

Thank you for sharing.

If you'd like, you can explain to me why you thought my post was disingenuous.

If you don't want to, that's kewl, too!

Not sure it was ever a "universal belief", but I think it is still the prevailing view.

I actually find Fellagaga's screeds amusing, partially because they typically don't even actually engage what's being said in a given thread.

1) you post a feel-good quote from some random person, without context , as if it is of import, or interest, or somehow demonstrates or proves something. It doesnt.


2) your quote implies that materialists all believe in the "virgin birth of the cosmos" , whatever that actually means, but the wording is meant to imply that all materialists believe this. I am fairly sure that they dont. Its disingenuous to claim that scientists believe in the "virgin birth of the cosmos". the answer to "what happened before the big bang" from most scientists would be "We dont know"


3) it is very disingenuous to imply that belief in a god is the same as a "belief in science". It is disingenuous to imply that really, you can just choose your beliefs, they are all the same when it gets down to it, it doesnt matter what you believe.
Its disingenuous because you dont actually believe that, for most of your other beliefs.

They are nowhere near the same.

Truth be told, you have not engaged with a fundamental challenge to your method of proving religion empirically: You accept data that might support your view, and reject any that complicates it.

It is a huge error to say order cannot come from disorder.

It is another way of claiming that the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics prevents evolution, since the cosmos always moves towards entropy.

The mistake is to conclude that local parts of the universe cannot decrease in entropy by sucking energy from other parts.

Example: You drain a tub. Energy exits the higher state, just like entropy is supposed to work.

But lo, in the gallons of randomly bouncing H2O molecules, a structure spontaneously emerges: a whirlpool.

The whirlpool is more efficient, faster, at draining water to a lower energy state, i.e. advancing entropy. There are analogous whirlpools distributing energy in all sorts of places for wind, heat, electricity, chemical solutions, etc.

So the underlying claim, that order cannot come from disorder, is flat wrong. The claim is only true for the total entropy of the entire universe.

I'm getting this schpiel from this very interesting article, Is the universe pro-life? It discusses the field of "dissipative adaptation," which examines how spontaneous order arises in order to speed the entropy of the overall system.

We have not remotely exhausted research into how life might have self-assembled. There is no reason to take the extreme step of rejecting the reliability of our senses, which is what you have to do in order to ignore the fossil record of evolution. (And once you do that, your perceptions of everything are unreliable, including of God.)

I'm sure all this will be dismissed with another one line platitude or catchy but vapid quotation, but I tried.

And another thing.

This guy is saying certain things are impossible/unlikely because the mechanisms have not been shown.

But note the big thing the creationist side has to reject: the fossil record.

One group says evolution has definitely occurred, we just don't entirely know how, while the other has to reject a vast body of proven fact: fossils exist.

That is a far greater feat of ignoring evidence.

Dude, engage with something.

I don't think he is lying. He treats analogies as scientific evidence, not literary metaphor.

Thank you, Bill.

Here is what EVOLUTIONISTS have said about the fossil record:

1. Dr. Colin Patterson, former senior paleontologist of the British Museum of Natural History, and author of a book titled "Evolution":

"I fully agree with your comments about the lack of direct illustration of evolutionary transitions in my book. If I knew of any, fossil or living, I would certainly have included them....I will lay it on the line - there is not one such fossil for which one could make a watertight argument."

2. Stephen J. Gould, Professor of Geology and Paleontology at Harvard University:

"The absence of fossil evidence for intermediary stages between major transitions in organic design, indeed our inability, even in our imagination, to construct functional intermediates in many cases, has been a persistent and nagging problem for gradualistic accounts of evolution."

3. Evolutionist Stephen M. Stanley of John's Hopkins University:

"In fact, the fossil record does not convincingly document a single transition from one species to another."

I could provide many more quotes like the above from other reputable scientists at major universities.

Lol where did you get these quotes from, If you just copy and pasted them from some creationist website, then thats bad enough, but it could also be that you are being horribly disingenuous again.


Neither of your prized quotes are, in fact, arguing against evolution.


You realise that, even if it turns out that evolution is totally false, that still doesnt get you one millionth of an inch closer to proving god?

Hi, neeeel. Thank you for your detailed response.

I never said that these gentlemen were arguing against evolution. In fact, I specifically identified them all as EVOLUTIONISTS.

I was specifically addressing a foundational claim by Darwin himself that the fossil record would, if his theory was correct, exhibit a plentitude of of transitional fossils.

Darwin was wrong about that.

Evolution has been part and parcel of virtually every fake worldview for the last 2+ millennia.

The fossil record is more consistent with the Biblical creation account than with Darwin's theory.

I agree, disproving evolution doesn't prove Christianity, but it destroys a key tenet of virtually all competing worldviews.

I appreciate your detailed response.

Addendum:I don't believe I'm being disingenuous. But, if you believe that I am, then I won't waste your time or my time responding to any questions you may have regarding my posts.

Have a blessed day!

How do you understand "the fossil record"?

The abrupt appearance and disappearance of species.

This interpretation of the fossil record is what prompted Gould and others to postulate the"Punctuated Equilibrium Theory."

Thanks for expanding your arguments.

You started the thread saying that you would "prove" Christianity empirically. Now you are dropping that method and returning to selective use of evidence that depends on the preconclusion of faith.

The fossil record certainly illustrates transition, although most of the pictures in the film are missing. The fossil transition of some whales is some of the most complete progressions. But whenever anyone presents a transition, creationists say "but where's the transition between those two points?" So the evidence is being framed in a way that will always reject the evidence. And the sources you use to claim "no transitions" do not mean it in the extreme fashion you are using them.

The "no transitions" argument depends on the idea that a creator is constantly intervening throughout the millennia, injecting fully formed species into the ecosystem. But where is the logic behind that? Why is a perfect being constantly playing around, inserting imperfect species that fail? Your answer is we do not know his ways -- in other words, complications to the story are excluded, you only try to be careful with evidence when demanding frame-by-frame fossil transitions. It makes no sense to design 10,000 species of ants that are slight variations of each other. The randomness of natural evolution better fits the evidence.

I'm actually not trying to reargue evolution again. My main point is that you are still arguing from faith, not science. Faith is fine, but confusing it for science is weak-minded.

And now you've dropped the claim that order cannot arise from disorder -- the foundational argument for why evolution is chemically impossible. So we still have an Earth capable of self-generating variation, we do not need supernatural intervention.

Even further from your line of argument is any evidence why the intervener in natural history must be the God of Abraham.

You chose the thread title.

How does the divinity of Christ and virgin birth derive from holes in the fossil record?

Hi, Bill.

I never said that I would prove Christianity ONLY empirically.

My proof is what is known as the Transcendental Argument for the Existence of God (TAG).

A link to my blog post is in the first post in this thread.

Evidence never "stands on its own"; it is always interpreted through a worldview.

With respect to the Special Creation versus Evolution debate, BOTH sides are looking at the SAME evidence.

But the worldview that one holds greatly affects how the evidence is INTERPRETED.

I will expand on this aspect later.

Thank you for your thoughtful response. I will do a "point-by-point" response as time permits.

Have a blessed day!

You asked me where you were being disingenuous,



so I pointed out various places where I thought you were being disingenuous. You didnt respond.

If you are still using these "quotes" as support for your position, after I have shown you that they absolutely dont support your position in any way, then you absolutely are being disingenuous.

If this is the basis for your argument, then you should be much more clear in your framing of the position. "The fossil record" is an extremely broad collection of observations, and if you want to isolate this particular element, you should do so with more care.

It's far from clear that this argumentation would be successful, but since you haven't really presented much argumentation for this, it's kind of an open question at this point. But at first glance, proposing a causal mechanism for an observed pattern seems in no way to contradict anything in particular.

Fair enough. That saves us both a lot of time. Thank you for your candor.

Have a blessed day.

Well if you are not proving it ONLY empirically, then you are not proving it at all.

Saying, basically, that you will resort to faith any time the evidence becomes problematic is not a scientific approach. But as your blog post demonstrates, you actually begin with faith as your foundation, so it is unclear where the scientific method comes in at all.

Read your blog linked in original post. I'm guessing people have already contested the claim that logic does not exist without Christianity. Logic was enumerated by Aristotle before Christ was born, etc.

So, logic didn't exist before Aristotle?

Aristotle didn't invent logic, but he did create a SYSTEM of logic (the syllogism).

If Einstein's Theory of Relativity is true, it was true long before Einstein was born.

^^ I was reacting to your these statements:

Of course Aristotle wasn't the first, but he's sufficient to show logic does not depend on the divinity of Christ.