[thechat] Prof refuses recommendation if you don't believe in evolution

[David Wagner]

Ken wrote:
> For example: there have been numerous fossil finds of human and dinosaur
> footprints together. And I'm not talking about "together" in the sense
> that one was sort of close to the other... I'm talking about "together
> in the sense that scientifically the only conclusion is that they were
> created at approximately the same time".

I think Madhu's article link already addressed this one pretty clearly, but
it's important to note one line of the article quite specifically:

"...the 'man track' claims have not stood up to close scientific scrutiny,
and have been abandoned even by most creationists."

This is true of -- literally -- *every* pseudo-scientific anti-evolution
argument I've ever heard or read about. Not only do they not withstand
scientific testing, but they are eventually *abandoned* by creationists.

Arguments for evolution are always supported by reasonable hypotheses that,
while they cannot currently be proven (due to the fact that we can't travel
backward in time), are reasonable within the scientific framework that's
been arranged, and require no leaps of faith.

Arguments for creation always come back to the same idea -- "God did it" --
which cannot be proven and requires a leap of faith.

I don't have a problem with the latter methodology, I just hope that anyone
who presents it to me understands that it seems ridiculous and makes them
sound silly, since I follow the former.

I'll argue in favor of evolution until something better comes along. Until
then, I'll continue to be irritated by the constant bickering of those who
want to reject reason while living in a rational society.

At the risk of sounding redundant, I recommend (again) reading anything by
Richard Dawkins, especially "The Blind Watchmaker":

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0393315703/ref%3Dnosim/evoltorg02-20/

(or the short URL: http://tinyurl.com/5cib)

> There's also been dino bones
> found with cut marks not matching the teeth of any known species...
> Experts have drawn the conclusion that they were knife marks, but
> discarded it because that makes no sense... As we all know, dinos and
> humans lived millions of years apart...

"I don't know what it is, so I'll attribute it to something previously
believed impossible, with no further evidence."

Hmmm... science? No.

> All I'm trying to say is that while evolution is a widely-held theory,
> there's way more scientific evidence to the contrary than with other
> theories, such as gravity.

Gravity only gets good proofs because it's a pretty fundamental force with
lots of far-reaching effects. It's still understood only on a very
superficial level. It's just hard to ignore, and no one has come up with a
better reason that the universe isn't a uniformly distributed set of atoms.

Personally, I don't believe in it. :)

--

David Wagner
dave at worlddomination.net