1. Believe a particular claim? As in through repeated experimentation or presenting abundance of evidence? Then according to science, that claim best explains a certain phenomena.

2. I already addressed this. Are you making a general claim or do you want me to specifically comment on spontaneous generation? Moreover, why don't you just cut the chase and make your point. Not interested in pondering oddly worded-questions.

Relevance? Science is a body of knowledge acquired by repeated experimentation or an abundance of evidence to explain phenomema. What are you rambling about? And I didn't say science merely "changes", I said it improves. Do not misquote me.


Someone who accepts Jesus as the mesiah?


Let's assume the margin of error were 0%, so that there is no question that percent of weekly church-going Christians who believe Earth formed 10,000 years go dropped from 69% to 65% in 3 years. Does that qualitatively change what the data is indicating? Does it refute that the majority of weekly church-going Christians believe the that Earth is only 10,000 old? According to you, it does, as it was a "significant change", which is idiotic.

You want me to explain high statistics to you, yet you lack 3rd grade common sense.

Err... it's called deduction. If weekly-church going Christians went from 1% to 1.5%, a 50% increase, then this would be significant by YOUR metric, which is idiotic.


When you say "plenty" of Christians accept evolution, what is "plenty"? 1%? 20%? Or are you purposely going to leave this vague?

You're still very clearly avoiding the question. This is actually quite funny. Is it a lack of reading comprehension skills or something else? Here are the questions again:

(1)If scientists believe a particular claim, do you then say that "science" makes the claim?

(2) For example, there was a time at which the state-of-the-art in scientific thought was that life happened spontaneously. Does that equate to "science once said" that such-and-such was true?

Notice how these are yes/no questions. This shouldn't be difficult. I think the paragraph that followed clearly shows that you're actively avoiding giving a straight answer.

Okay. Here were your questions:

Are you any closer to answering your own question yet? If not, then you need to elaborate further on what you think it means to be a Christian.

It's unsurprising to me that you've demonstrated that you are incapable of doing the math and have instead wandered off into something else. I asked you a straight mathematical question that one might encounter in a statistics course. They were specific questions with specific computations that you can do to get an answer. And yet, you give me this nonsense.

You're clearly making up crap as you go. At first, you failed to make a meaningful criticism using a relative shift in the percentage, and now you're failing to make a meaningful criticism using an absolute shift in the percentage. In both cases, you took it to a stupid extreme that shows no sense of what's actually happening.

Do you have to be intellectually dishonest to try to make your point, or is this really the best you've got?

LOL -- So it's clear now you bend towards being intellectually disingenuous. Thanks for playing.

Maybe it will help you to be a bit more flexible between thinking about things proportionally and thinking about things in absolute terms. Are you capable of doing that?

Because they're ******edly worded questions full of ambiguity and I'm trying to offer a useful response in order to make a productive conversation. The fact that you don't see that shows what level 1 thinker you really are. If you want a yes/no answer, then here: (1) No. A scientist's mere belief in a claim does not equate to "science making that claim". (2) No, not all scientific claims are considered "true", i.e. scientific laws vs theories.

Happy? Good, because I'm done with this.


So does someone who accepts Jesus as the messiah, but wipes his ass every morning with pages of the Bible a Christian? Does someone who accepts Jesus as the messiah, but steals and commits adultery a Christian? Does someone who accepts Jesus as the messiah, but holds no faith in the God's perfect word that the Earth is center of the universe and was created in a matter of days or thousands of years? A Christian is also someone who practices and believes in what written in Bible.

Regardless, Christian range in their religiosity. The data clearly indicates among American Christians that the more frequent a Christian attends church, the more likely they will accept horseshit Biblical claims, such as the Earth existing for less 10,000 years old.


Haha keep talking (strike 3?). Seriously, are you going to fight math right now? That's how pathetically desperate you are to sustain an argument.

You're genuinely interested in the math? I doubt it. You are taking difference in two sample averages, call them X and Y. They have variances in x and y. If you want to know whether X - Y > 0 (or < 0) is significant, the variance of X - Y is not just either x or y, as you ignorantly assumed, it's x + y. Go ahead, show your Christian statisticians this.

Contrary to what your Christian fiends may think of you or what you may think of yourself, you're not very bright (and it's just the math). Forget statistic and significance, just read what I wrote earlier. You clearly didn't respond to this:

Let's assume the margin of error were 0%, so that there is no question that percent of weekly church-going Christians who believe Earth formed 10,000 years go dropped from 69% to 65% in 3 years. Does that qualitatively change what the data is indicating? Does it refute that the majority of weekly church-going Christians believe the that Earth is only 10,000 old? According to you, it does, as it was a "significant change", which is idiotic.

^Wtf does this have to do making things up

I used your logic, hence it was your intellectual dishonesty... or rather disability.

Look who's dodging questions now.

Good. Now let's go back and look at where you started.

A Christian's mere belief in a claim does not equate to Christianity making that claim. This should have been obvious for the exact same reason that a scientist making a statement doesn't mean that it's scientific claim.

Your answer to #2 is just LOL, and suggests that you aren't actually a scientist. And I use this on religious people, too, so don't feel bad that you answered as you did (or maybe do, because it shows ignorance). The law vs. theory thing when used with regards to truth values is not a formal distinction. Theories do not become laws when we become more confident in them. And "laws" aren't always "true" (in fact, it can be argued that in science, nothing is actually "true" -- but that's a different topic). Scientific laws have been (and likely will be) superseded in the future.

Also, the extent to which spontaneous generation was taken as truth was about as strong as many of the contemporary beliefs about science. That's just how it was.

Okay. Now be specific about the "practices and beliefs" that are contained in the Bible that must be adhered to in order for one to be a Christian. Go ahead, I'll wait.

This is deliciously ironic for reasons you don't know but might soon understand.

LOL -- This suggests to me that you have a rather cursory understanding of what's going on here. But I will take the time to explain now that you've exposed yourself. (And I've also exposed myself for making a quick calculation that was wrong. But I have no problem admitting errors.)

First, with a survey that has a +-4% margin of error, the survey probably had about 600 people in that part of it. (The survey was of 1000 people, Christians poll at about 75% of the US population, so I'm probably giving a lowball estimate here, which is making the margin of error work against me. At 750 people, the MoE would be about 3.6%, which would round up to 4%. If we use the original 1000 people, the MoE is 3.09%, and I don't really know what methodology they used for reporting that MoE, but it's possible that they rounded that UP to 4% just to be conservative.)

The formula for MoE is z*sqrt(pq/n), where z depends on the confidence interval (95% --> z = 1.96) and q = 1-p. To create a conservative estimate, we take p = q = 0.5. (We're also assuming the underlying population is large.)

The formula for the MoE for the difference of the means of two is z*sqrt(p_1 q_1/n_1 + p_2 q_2/n_2). Again, being conservative in our estimate, we take p_i = q_i = 0.5 and n_1 = n_2 = 600. The MoE is now 5.65% (and not the sum as you "so ignorantly assumed" -- Variance is not the standard deviation and you bloated the MoE by about 2.5%).

And here's where I admit my error. In my head, I got the number 5% stuck in it (a digit shifted just like when I go the number of years wrong). And so when I did the calculation the first time, the calculation shows that the confidence interval for the change of the means under the most conservative assumptions is [-0.65,10.65], and it's *just barely* statistically insignificant at the 95% confidence level. It comes in at the 90% confidence level, which is why I said we can quibble over it. I'd take 90% confidence intervals for mashing phone surveys together like this. And remember that I'm using the most conservative reading of the numbers to do these calculations. I'll leave it as an exercise to calculate how confident one can be under the actual percent change (and not the erroneous one) and less conservative estimates.

Yes, it really does qualitatively change what the data is saying. The qualitative impact of going up from 24% to 28% is different from the qualitative impact of dropping from 69% to 65%. It's also computationally different because p=.24 is not equivalent to p=.69 since the two values don't actually add up to 1.

Does it change the "majority" claim? Nope. But I never said that the claim was false, so it doesn't actually matter to my point.

My only disability is that I sometimes fail at remembering numbers when I walk away from the computer.

Your move. See the bolded above.

You seem obsessed with this age of the earth issue. The problem is,
the Bible doesn't teach the "horseshit Biblical claim, such as the
Earth existing for less 10,000 years old."

You clearly know very little about what the Bible actually teaches, and
very little about church history and the history of theology.

Oh finally, the punchline. I never made the claim what Christians believe is Christianity. But thank you for emphasizing this, as there's a plethora of batshit claims made in the Bible that I'm sure most Christians do not believe.

I never suggested theories become laws.

Already addressed. Science improves, religion does not. It's actually rather humorous how you cling to the spontaneous generation example (there are more).

Cursory? I do have bachelors in statistics, if that means anything to you. But moreover, what I wrote was concise and sufficient to show how you were wrong. I know that may not be obvious to know someone who spent last few days googling sampling statistics for the first time. And lol at your wall of math, which I will not read.

But thank you for finally admitting that you were wrong. And no, it wasn't a mere calculation error on your part, it was a conceptual one. You suggested an increase from 24% to 28% was significant due to a 4% (or 5%?) margin of error. That's a conceptual error, not a mathematical one.


Thank you for also acknowledging that it doesn't change the majority of Christians do not accept evolution. That was MY point.

I know you had a couple of more questions, but I don't see this going anywhere. Now that we're in agreement about what most American Christians believe, please allow me to amend my original statement which spurred this discussion in the first place. Bolded is amended.

It's deduced from the verses and accepted by half of church-going American Christians. If you want to dismiss what other religious Christians believe and only focus what's written in the Bible, then we can do that. Let's talk about how the first woman was created from a man's rib.

FYI, Aaron is a math professor, so I doubt he just learned about how sampling works.

That's surprising, but doesn't imply he knows anything about statistics, as the thread proves. They're related, but distinct disciplines - statistics is not a typical requirement for a degree in math. In fact, someone with a MBA is more likely to know more statistics than someone with a PhD in math.

"It's deduced from the verses"

Um... show me where?

Haha no, I don't need to dive into more random rat holes just to show how Christianity is dumb to science. You can start a new thread arguing against a Biblical Young Earth if you like, and I'll read if it I have time.

These are kinda funny back to back. Perhaps you should use the skills learned in your bachelors degree to be able to read that short bit of math.

Perhaps you should read the thread. I don't need to read a lengthy post of him explaining why he was wrong when I already showed him why pages ago.

The marks of intellectual dishonesty.

It means about as much to me as any other time someone on the internet says, "I have bachelor's degree in X." It usually means they don't actually know what they're talking about. Whenever you feel the need to back yourself up with your credentials rather than being able to directly address the information being provided, it reveals much more than you think.

Anyway, a substantive reply:

Actually, your argumentation shows it's clearly the case that you've conflated the two. Your claim was about what "Christianity denies":

And your support? Rather than pointing to anything in the Bible (as you've been challenged to do -- specifically the "central tenets" that you had mentioned vaguely but never described), you pointed to surveys of American Christians. How else should your argumentation be interpreted? That you're clueless about your argument and are making irrelevant claims that don't support your argument? I suppose it's possible that this is what you were doing.

You very specifically challenged this statement:

And you did it by providing a sample survey of Americans that wasn't specifically about American Christians but about church-going frequencies and beliefs about the universe.

My point is that if you take that 24% number (which probably closer to 28%), there are probably around 70-something million American Christians who have no problem with the age of the universe as described by science. That seems like "plenty" to me. And the proportion of European Christians that accept evolution is significantly higher than it is in the US. Maybe you disagree that millions of people is "plenty." But at least one would think you would have the honesty to just say that instead of pretending like you're saying something else.

Encouraging me to read your work is not likely going to work in your favor. Can't wait to roast you more. I'll address your wall of math below.


I never it said was. You love making strawman arguments. Perhaps on accident b/c everything blows right over your head. What I was said was in comparing two sample averages, the variances sum. So if two samples have the same margin of error, e.g. 4%, testing whether their difference is >0 is going to use a margin of error greater than 4%. I never said what that number is and nor do I have to. Knowing that the margin of error >4% is sufficient to prove that the difference is not statistically significant. It was also in response to this garbage you wrote:



Can you re-state? What exactly did you confuse as 5%? The MoE?

Regardless, this sounds very revisionist, given your "4.01%" post I included above. You made a conceptual error, not a clerical one.



When someone identifies themselves as a Christian, that reveals more than you think.

Moreover, that's a funny statement coming from you. Did I make any incorrect statements regarding statistics? No. Did *you* make you make *conceptual* errors in statistics. Yes. I'll let the thread speak for itself. Just because things I say fly over your head, doesn't mean I don't know what I'm talking about.



I'm assuming you're familiar with Genesis?

God creates the Earth before the sun.

God creates plants before the sun and before sea life exist.

God creates birds before land animals.

God creates all sea animals, including dolphins and whales, simultaneously before land animals.

God creates females from a man's rib.

These all contradict modern science. In fact, sounds more like it came out a kindergartner's ass. And these are all things modern science can contradict. It can't contradict, for example, that the first man and his immediate descends lived for 900+ years, even though such a claim is equally idiotic to any man with common sense.

I think it is more accurate to say that Genesis contradicts most modern scientists.

I find that expression a bit crass. I think a better way of putting it would be to say that "it came out of the creative imagination of an especially bright, albeit scientifically illiterate, young mind."
Many TRUE things that scientists have discovered defy common sense, and many things that seemed commonsense at the time (e.g. flat earth) modern scientists categorically reject.

Moral of story: Avoiding over-generalizations is usually wise.

You clearly have no sense of irony. I quoted you making an accusation of me that wasn't accurate. I'm just returning the favor. (I would have though the quotes would have clued you in, but maybe I just thought you were capable of more than you actually were.)

The shift in the percent. It was a 4% shift, not a 5% shift. I did my quick calculation of a 4% MoE for a 5% change in the survey. sqrt(2) = 1.4, and 1.4*4% = 5.6%, and so I ended up with a rough estimate there was a positive shift at a 90% confidence interval.

But I think what this actually shows is that you didn't read anything. Because if you did, and you were truly capable of understanding the statistics, this would have been 100% clear. So, I guess I will continue to challenge your intellectual integrity.

Do you believe that one must accept those statements as literal statements to be a Christian?

Thank you for your clarification and encouraging me to read your work. Now I know for sure you're a liar and a revisionist. You knew the difference was 4% by the post below (bold). The post also brilliantly captures your conceptual misunderstanding of the moe when comparing sample means, as you thought that a 4.01% shift would have been significant (underlined).

You must be a lecturer. I can't a imagine a professor would be so dishonest (and in reverse accuse others of being dishonest - yes, I have a sense of irony). But let me guess, you couldn't stand being wrong about a introductory-level of statistics, knowing that other posters here know you have a background in math, so you tried to lie your way out of it. Frankly, I would've excused your misunderstanding even as a math instructor, as I know math and statistics are separate disciplines, but I can't excuse lying. I cannot continue this conversation with you.