ninme

Okay, the Commissar is active again (dare we hope for a Show Trial, like the old days?) and he has a couple questions for Paul at Whizbang.

The Politburo Diktat - Two Questions for a Flat-Earther

Paul at Wizbang frequently attacks evolution and those who accept it as fact.

I have two questions for Paul:

1) Are the millions of fossils in museums and universities real or frauds? Not their age, just their provenance. Were they dug out of the earth honestly; are they the remains of creature now extinct? Or are they frauds and fakes?

2) If you accept the fossils as real, do you believe that the diversity and change represented in them was accomplished A) unaided and strictly by genetic change, or B) guided by a higher power, either through Intelligent Design or by instantaneous Creation?

I am interested in answers to these two questions. You may post or comment whatever you like, but I am not interested in replies like “No, no, no … the burden of proof is on you.” or “I’m only saying that scientists are zealots, too.” What do YOU believe, Paul?

P.S. I am a conservative Republican and two-time Bush voter.

It’s a good discussion, and I left a comment, but I feel very strongly about this, so I’m going to paste it here:

Okay, I’m a republican, two-time bush voter, and my dad has a masters in paleontology (KU) and a PhD in geology (columbia) (a republican and two-time bush voter too), and I just don’t see how anyone could believe that there isn’t empirical proof of evolution everywhere we look. When I say believe, I mean in the way I believe in god, and that I believe god created the universe. You can believe in creationism, like so many christians, and still know that evolution is real, like so many scientists. There are a lot of christian scientists out there, who don’t have a major problem with this.

And the whole idea that people need to prove scientifically that creationism is scientifically viable, like this new creationism they’re trying to get taught in schools, just tells me that they’re very uneasy in their beliefs. Otherwise they wouldn’t need to defend them so fiercely by attacking science and moulding it to suit their own purposes.

And as for the school thing, if the parents don’t want their kids learning evolution, that’s fine. But they should try devoting themselves to school vouchers with the same enthusiasm as this creationism business, and quit trying to water down science in the public schools, where education is weak enough already.

And that’s what I think. And at the risk of sounding repetitive, I’m quoting this again, because it’s brilliant, and it needs to be read again, because I can’t articulate anything this well:

From Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy:

“The Babel fish,” said The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy quietly, “is small, yellow and leechlike, and probably the oddest thing in the Universe. It feeds on brainwave energy received not from its own carrier but from those around it. It absorbs all unconscious mental frequencies from this brainwave energy to nourish itself with. It then excretes into the mind of its carrier a telepathix matrix formed by combining the conscious thought frequencies with nerve signals picked up from the speech centers of the brain which has supplied them. The practical upshot of all this is that if you stick a Babel fish in your ear you can instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language. The speech patterns you actually hear decode the brainwave matrix which has been fed into your mind by your Babel fish.

“Now it is such a bizarrely impobably coincidence that anything so mindboggingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that some thinkers have chosen to see it as a final and clinching proof of the nonexistence of God.

“The argument goes something like this: ‘I refuse to prove that I exist,’ says God, ‘for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing.’

” ‘But,’ says Man, ‘the Babel fish is a dead giveaway, isn’t it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don’t. QED.’

” ‘Oh dear,’ says God, ‘I hadn’t thought of that,’ and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.

” ‘Oh that was easy,’ says Man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white and gets himself killed on the next zebra crossing.

And he was a truly dedicated atheist.

Update 3.25:

This is getting ridiculous:

God aided the diversity of life on earth, OR He did not.

The Moon is composed of dairy products, OR it is not.

You might claim that you dont have information to answer, i.e. that you don’t know. “Neither” is not an option.
Posted by: The Commissar at March 24, 2005 01:48 PM

And I’m only halfway through the comments!