Let's not debate creationism in the News thread



  • @ben_lubar said in Let's not debate creationism in the News thread:

    @RaceProUK said in Let's not debate creationism in the News thread:

    @ben_lubar said in Let's not debate creationism in the News thread:

    @RaceProUK said in Let's not debate creationism in the News thread:

    Which, let's be honest, is vague enough to disregard it as proof π == 3.

    I think it's quite clear that the person who wrote that passage thought pi equals three. Not that that has any bearing on the actual value of pi, but still.

    And let's not forget that the original passage was written before the invention of the decimal point and the discovery of irrational and transcendental numbers.

    That doesn't make it any less likely that the person who wrote "thirty" as a circumference and "ten" as a diameter thought pi was equal to three.

    Ben, if someone asks you at 9:28 how much time is left until 10:00, do you reply "32 minutes and X seconds"? Or are you like most people who replies "30 minutes" or "about half an hour."

    The writers were working at one significant digit (at least in part due to the limitations of their measuring tools). To one significant digit, pi = 3. It's you who doesn't understand measurement. There's no indication that they even thought about pi, ratios, or any such thing. That's a total anachronism.



  • @Benjamin-Hall said in Let's not debate creationism in the News thread:

    @ben_lubar said in Let's not debate creationism in the News thread:

    @RaceProUK said in Let's not debate creationism in the News thread:

    @ben_lubar said in Let's not debate creationism in the News thread:

    @RaceProUK said in Let's not debate creationism in the News thread:

    Which, let's be honest, is vague enough to disregard it as proof π == 3.

    I think it's quite clear that the person who wrote that passage thought pi equals three. Not that that has any bearing on the actual value of pi, but still.

    And let's not forget that the original passage was written before the invention of the decimal point and the discovery of irrational and transcendental numbers.

    That doesn't make it any less likely that the person who wrote "thirty" as a circumference and "ten" as a diameter thought pi was equal to three.

    Ben, if someone asks you at 9:28 how much time is left until 10:00, do you reply "32 minutes and X seconds"? Or are you like most people who replies "30 minutes" or "about half an hour."

    The writers were working at one significant digit (at least in part due to the limitations of their measuring tools). To one significant digit, pi = 3. It's you who doesn't understand measurement. There's no indication that they even thought about pi, ratios, or any such thing. That's a total anachronism.

    So you're saying that although they were working with one significant digit, they somehow knew pi was an irrational number, even before that concept was discovered?


  • FoxDev

    @ben_lubar I think it far more likely they simply didn't have much of a concept of pi


  • Winner of the 2016 Presidential Election

    @Benjamin-Hall said in Let's not debate creationism in the News thread:

    It's how the term has been poisoned (just like "liberal" used to mean something else).

    ...and still does, at least outside the US.

    @Benjamin-Hall said in Let's not debate creationism in the News thread:

    I find that shift in usage to be done out of malice--trying to smear all believers by association with the truly wacky (but harmless).

    Where I live, you could walk into almost any church and make a joke about creationists. Nobody here would think that the average Christian sympathizes with creationists, and therefore I personally don't see "creationist" as a swearword for Christians.


  • kills Dumbledore

    @Benjamin-Hall said in Let's not debate creationism in the News thread:

    Ben, if someone asks you at 9:28 how much time is left until 10:00, do you reply "32 minutes and X seconds"? Or are you like most people who replies "30 minutes" or "about half an hour."

    This is Ben you're talking to. He'd probably answer in femtoseconds or translate the time into a precise number of Dwarf Fortress time units



  • @RaceProUK agreed. Not to mention that the writers (as a culture) did not have the same concern for precision in numbers as we do in the modern west. Fudging things to propitious numbers or to make a point was an accepted reality. The obsession with accurate measurement is a late-medieval or early Renaissance thing. Trying to push it onto the ancients is horrible historiography (just as bad to a historian as pi = 3 is to a scientist).


  • Winner of the 2016 Presidential Election

    @Jaloopa said in Let's not debate creationism in the News thread:

    He'd probably answer in femtoseconds or translate the time into a precise number of Dwarf Fortress time units

    How many times does the average DF player lose the game within 32 minutes? 🚎



  • @asdf They've lost by starting the program in the first place 🐠 That takes less than 32 minutes as I understand it. So at least once.



  • @Benjamin-Hall said in Let's not debate creationism in the News thread:

    It's how the term has been poisoned (just like "liberal" used to mean something else). I find that shift in usage to be done out of malice--trying to smear all believers

    Meh. I understand that it might a sensitive topic for you, but honestly, words change meaning with time, sometimes in a good way, sometimes in a bad way, and I'm not quite sure you're doing more than fighting a loosing battle here. As much as it may pain you, I think you'd have more success by finding another term that describes your beliefs...

    (for the fun anecdote about word changing meaning: in French the adjective "enervé" means "angered", but about a century ago it meant the same as the English "enervated" i.e. "lacking of energy". The old French meaning and the English one are the more logical, it's etymologically "a-nerve" i.e. without nerve, without energy, but I never cease to be amazed at how it could have shifted to mean the exact opposite in modern French!)

    by association with the truly wacky (but harmless).

    They are not harmless when we get to the situation at the start of this thread. Or when they want to ban teaching scientific theories, or at least make it possible for some schools to not teach them at all.

    Maybe what's needed is some religious/philosophical teaching in schools, to try and explain how one can reconcile his own faith with science. Many religions and spiritual leaders and great writers and thinkers have managed to do so, there is no reason why everyone couldn't. But it needs to be done in a way that accepts their faith rather than flat out contradicting and rejecting it, which is what most anti-creationist (young-earth, if you wish) are doing.



  • @remi I can see it from the other side as well. People (especially young adults/teenagers) react really really poorly to being told "everything you believe is crap and you're stupid for believing it" even if that's the truth. Yet that's exactly what happens in many universities. Professors approach topics in the most antagonistic way possible and then mockingly slam those who don't fall in line.

    American universities have developed the culture of being extremely hostile toward Christianity. Not religion in general, they're fine (or even obsequious) toward Islam, for example.

    Students should be open to learning, no matter the topic. Faculty should be less antagonistic--it fails at their basic purpose for education. Teaching in an environment of hostility or without trust is futile at best. Both sides need to change for progress to be had. Mocking people for their beliefs is the absolute wrongest way to go about this.



  • @Benjamin-Hall said in Let's not debate creationism in the News thread:

    Mocking people for their beliefs is the absolute wrongest way to go about this.

    Yes, this is what I was trying to say as well when saying that some kind of philosophical teaching is needed. There is a lot to learn about how we think, how we live in society and the world around us, by reading what various philosophers and thinkers have said. This is true whether you are religious (of any kind) or not. The same goes for learning what science and the scientific method really is about, what it can or, perhaps more importantly, cannot say of the world we live in.

    Still, one thing is to try and show how you can reconcile science and religion. Another is to accept, or let people say, things that are factually wrong and contradict what can be scientifically deduced. I'm all for having philosophical discussions about who pushed the switch of the Big Bang, but I'll rebuke and ridicule anyone who says the universe is 6000 years old.



  • @remi Honestly, rebuking and ridiculing them won't help them change nor will it get them to shut up. It'll just make them more defensive about it. It's pure virtue signalling ("look at how good I am!") and is a major cause of the problems we have. Just ignore them unless they're actively causing problems (like running for office). Then take measures to prevent the problems. Same goes for racists, sexists, bigots or idiots of all stripes.

    Remember, "A man convinced against his will is of the same opinion still."


  • Winner of the 2016 Presidential Election Banned

    @Benjamin-Hall said in Let's not debate creationism in the News thread:

    I find that non-believers[3] tend to conflate the groups as a lazy smear, just like SJW conflate "anyone who disagrees with me" and "racist/sexist/etc".

    So sayeth the pot!


  • Winner of the 2016 Presidential Election Banned

    @Benjamin-Hall said in Let's not debate creationism in the News thread:

    the truly wacky (but harmless).

    False. They are attempting to spread their insanity and thereby undermine reason in general.



  • @Fox said in Let's not debate creationism in the News thread:

    @Benjamin-Hall said in Let's not debate creationism in the News thread:

    I find that non-believers[3] tend to conflate the groups as a lazy smear, just like SJW conflate "anyone who disagrees with me" and "racist/sexist/etc".

    So sayeth the pot!

    Hello kettle!

    More seriously, I have tried hard to be precise about terms. I guess I should have added a :trollface: to that last line. mea culpa


  • Impossible Mission - B

    @ben_lubar said in Let's not debate creationism in the News thread:

    That doesn't make it any less likely that the person who wrote "thirty" as a circumference and "ten" as a diameter thought pi was equal to three.

    The person who wrote that, not being a Greek mathematician, probably had no concept of the notion of "pi" in the first place--the idea that the ratio between the diameter and the circumference of a circle is a constant, no matter what size the circle is. It was almost certainly not anything he cared about.


  • kills Dumbledore

    @Benjamin-Hall said in Let's not debate creationism in the News thread:

    Honestly, rebuking and ridiculing them won't help them change nor will it get them to shut up

    It's really tricky to challenge something that's such an entrenched part of a person's self defined identity, because it's hard to be told "that idea is completely wrong" and not hear "you are an idiot for believing that".

    Good faith debates can only go so far as you tend to end up either talking over each other or butting heads on a fundamental point. Sowing the seeds of doubt can work with someone willing to admit to being wrong, but most of us are a lot less willing to do that than we think


  • Impossible Mission - B

    @remi said in Let's not debate creationism in the News thread:

    Still, one thing is to try and show how you can reconcile science and religion. Another is to accept, or let people say, things that are factually wrong and contradict what can be scientifically deduced. I'm all for having philosophical discussions about who pushed the switch of the Big Bang, but I'll rebuke and ridicule anyone who says the universe is 6000 years old.

    The way I figure it, Genesis describes six creative periods, in which different features of the world were laid out, in an order that makes perfect sense assuming an observer standing on the surface of the planet. (Which was the only POV imaginable to a culture with no tradition of science fiction.) It says that each phase of creation "was called" the nth day, which is a rather unique phrasing; if something is a day as we typically understand it, we just say it "was" a day rather than "was called" a day.

    At no point does it say that each "day" lasted 24 hours, or that each "day" took exactly as long as all the other "days". Therefore, any theory that assumes either of these principles can be safely disregarded without any theological danger.



  • @Jaloopa said in Let's not debate creationism in the News thread:

    @Benjamin-Hall said in Let's not debate creationism in the News thread:

    Honestly, rebuking and ridiculing them won't help them change nor will it get them to shut up

    It's really tricky to challenge something that's such an entrenched part of a person's self defined identity, because it's hard to be told "that idea is completely wrong" and not hear "you are an idiot for believing that".

    Good faith debates can only go so far as you tend to end up either talking over each other or butting heads on a fundamental point. Sowing the seeds of doubt can work with someone willing to admit to being wrong, but most of us are a lot less willing to do that than we think

    Correct. That's why my basic policy is to ignore idiot statements unless they're particularly germane to the topic at hand. If I'm reading Chomsky's linguistic work, I ignore that he's an idiot communist (sorta-kinda, but worse). People are pretty good about compartmentalizing--they can hold multiple mutually-contradictory ideas as long as those don't overlap. That's human nature.

    I expect a professor to say "I understand that some of you don't agree. That's fine, but you will be tested and graded on the material as presented." I expect them to say that on any topic. That's basic professionalism. I also expect them to phrase things in as positive a way as possible. Don't attack others beliefs, build on the foundation of shared beliefs, ignoring the places people disagree. It's much more effective.

    Interestingly enough, that last part was straight out of the training I received as an LDS missionary. We were trained never to attack or argue beliefs. Say "yes, and..." Smooth out the minor :wtf: s later.



  • @Fox said in Let's not debate creationism in the News thread:

    @Benjamin-Hall said in Let's not debate creationism in the News thread:

    the truly wacky (but harmless).

    False. They are attempting to spread their insanity and thereby undermine reason in general.

    Everything is a conspiracy..... everything.

    God specifically wrote the Bible so people would be literalists so that @fox's life would be that much harder.



  • @wharrgarbl said in Let's not debate creationism in the News thread:

    If someone insists the universe is 6 thousand years old despite having an education, it shows this person fails to understand science and can't be a good researcher, so yes.

    Genesis is ambiguous about that, on purpose.


  • 🚽 Regular

    @Benjamin-Hall said in Let's not debate creationism in the News thread:

    @The_Quiet_One In my experience, those who take the bible most literally also know the least about it, its history, or the cultures in which it was written. And I believe that the Bible is inspired work myself, so this isn't just a non-believer bashing those hick christians.

    The person I'm talking about is a self-professed biblical scholar. He's obsessed about The Bible and its history. If you talk to him about, say, when certain parts of The Bible were written, who wrote which parts, or the fact that certain chapters were taken out, and have so many different versions and retranslations of it, he'll acknowledge those details... The problem is, he has such a strong confirmation bias that he disregards half of what he reads if it doesn't meet his view. In other words, because he insists on taking The Bible literally, to the point where pi is 3, and the universe was created in 7 days (technically 1 day, since God created the heavens and the earth on the first day before working on some more of the nitty-gritty details), any literature or study outside of The Bible that contradicts the scripture is either blasphemy or simply incorrect. Such viewpoints make any discussion or debate on the matter completely pointless and only serves to enrage anyone who sees The Bible any differently than him.

    It doesn't help that his convictions are that no matter how devoutly religious you are, if you take The Bible any less literally than he does, you're no different than a militant atheist, and are condemned to hell. All I can say is I'm glad his career isn't in anything math-related, since he wouldn't be able to even design a wheel with his mindset.



  • @Benjamin-Hall said in Let's not debate creationism in the News thread:

    @remi Honestly, rebuking and ridiculing them won't help them change nor will it get them to shut up.

    OK, I chose my words poorly, I meant something like "show arguments that proves them wrong" instead of "rebuke" (I'm standing by the "ridicule", although with all the caveats about our social framework below...). Still, you are partly right, hurting people feeling is probably not going to make them change their mind. But at some point, if someone is wrong (and I feel concerned by it -- I'm not going to interrupt a random conversation between friends in the street), I'm not going to say "your point of view is valid but...", I'm going to say "you are wrong and (hopefully!) I can prove it". If people can't accept that, well, too bad for them, but at least I'll make it clear to anyone they and I interact with that they are wrong (and why). There has to be some limits.

    (of course, all that is wrapped in all the rest of social interactions... if it were, say, someone of my close family or someone I want to stay in good terms with, regardless of that particular issue, I'll say things slightly differently, but at the core, I don't think someone can tell me that the earth is 6000 years old without me telling them they're wrong)


  • Grade A Premium Asshole

    @The_Quiet_One said in Let's not debate creationism in the News thread:

    In college I learned about the pi is 3.2 thing some fundies were insisting on. I thought it had to be an urban legend, since it was more absurd than the flat earthers... Until I found out a member of my extended family (who was also a militant young earth creationist) seriously believed it.

    It goes to show just how impossible it is to reason or provide facts with these guys. All you need is a flexible ruler and a dinner plate to definitively prove pi isn't 3.2. (For the record this guy's excuse was "it's close enough") if you can't even prove something that obvious to someone it's downright impossible to prove less tangible things like the age of the universe/earth.

    I thought it was Pi = 3?



  • @The_Quiet_One Right. Self-professed "scholars" of just about anything are usually :doing_it_wrong: . Especially so-called bible scholars who can't read aramaic, ancient hebrew, greek, and latin. Confirmation bias all the way.

    @remi I think it all boils down to shared premises. Without shared definitions and starting assumptions, no debate will be fruitful. So I just don't even bother once I realize it won't work. I'm that way with my brother about a lot of things. Our world-views are so different as to make meaningful discussion impossible.



  • @Polygeekery :hanzo: a long time ago. We've discussed that particular idea and decided that they'll all (on both sides) burn in hell 🚎 .


  • 🚽 Regular

    @Polygeekery said in Let's not debate creationism in the News thread:

    I thought it was Pi = 3?

    Yeah, as I subsequently said, I conflated two different miscalculations of pi. The Indiana pi bill was 3.2, while the biblical interpretation was 3. The person I'm talking about insisted Pi was 3, and no clear evidence contradicting him was satisfactory to him. Because then it means God lied, and that's impossible.

    @Benjamin-Hall said in Let's not debate creationism in the News thread:

    Right. Self-professed "scholars" of just about anything are usually . Especially so-called bible scholars who can't read aramaic, ancient hebrew, greek, and latin. Confirmation bias all the way.

    Yeah. For the record, when I've pointed out that maybe, just maybe, the many translations and re-translations that might have reduced parts of The Bible to some of the worst Engrish, were incorrect, his retort was that there's no way for that to happen, because The Bible is divine and thus anyone who translated it did so through divine intervention. And also only the King James version is canon. Anything else is a bastardization of the scripture.


  • Grade A Premium Asshole

    @Benjamin-Hall said in Let's not debate creationism in the News thread:

    I find that shift in usage to be done out of malice--trying to smear all believers by association with the truly wacky (but harmless).

    Most of them are harmless. When they try to push their beliefs to be a matter of public policy, they can cause harm.


  • Grade A Premium Asshole

    @remi said in Let's not debate creationism in the News thread:

    Maybe what's needed is some religious/philosophical teaching in schools, to try and explain how one can reconcile his own faith with science.

    Yeah...I see no possible way that could go wrong. Deploy to production.



  • @The_Quiet_One :facepalm: Yeah, I've met a few of those. Some who even believe that reading anything other than the bible (including newspapers) is a sin.

    @Polygeekery Agreed. I find that people pushing their wacky beliefs into public policy is somewhat rarer on the fundamentalist Christian side (except at the very local level) than from the more progressive side. Maybe because the fundamentalists tend not to believe that government should be a first resort, maybe because they tend to be poorer and less-well connected, maybe I'm just seeing what I want to see....dunno.


  • Grade A Premium Asshole

    @Benjamin-Hall said in Let's not debate creationism in the News thread:

    maybe I'm just seeing what I want to see

    By admitting that you are doing better than most.



  • @Benjamin-Hall said in Let's not debate creationism in the News thread:

    Without shared definitions and starting assumptions, no debate will be fruitful.

    There are two aspects of any debate. There is trying to change the opinions of the person you're debatting with (or changing your own opinion), and there is changing the opinion of other people who may follow the debate.

    When it comes to religious opinions, they are, by definition, a matter of faith, so they are very unlikely to change by simply debating. So if someone really believes that the earth was created in 6 days (as in, really thinks this is a fundamental truth, not just "never thought about it and just parroted what he was told"), no amount of scientific data will make him change his mind. So any debating I might have is not really for his benefit, more for the people around (typically the second kind that I mentioned just above, those who might just have followed his lead without really making it a core of their faith). If there is no-one around, I'll probably stop after having stated my disagreement, and switch to another topic of discussion (again, depending on social conventions, situation and so on).


  • 🚽 Regular

    @Benjamin-Hall said in Let's not debate creationism in the News thread:

    @The_Quiet_One :facepalm: Yeah, I've met a few of those. Some who even believe that reading anything other than the bible (including newspapers) is a sin.

    He's okay with newspapers... well, newspapers he deems to be conservative enough to fit his beliefs.

    Fiction is another problem for him, though. He's got kids who were brought up, as you can imagine, very strictly and were homeschooled. The only fictional stories they were allowed to read or watch were those that didn't have any magical or supernatural fantasy. So, obviously Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, and even David the Gnome were considered blasphemous. So were superheroes, any monsters that are products of mythology (so, Jaws was theoretically OK because Great Whites are real, but Godzilla and King Kong aren't), and anthropomorphized animals. Obviously anything depicting sin in a positive way, such as romance between unmarried couples, homosexuality, violence of any kind, and cheating/theft, was strictly forbidden. The list goes on and on. Basically that reduced approved fiction to boring morality-based shows produced by other Christian companies and maybe The Hungry Caterpillar. The Hungry Caterpillar may have depicted gluttony, however, so I'm not sure if that was considered bad, too. (Of course, the 🚎 here may include The Bible as approved fiction, but I won't go into that)



  • @remi said in Let's not debate creationism in the News thread:

    There are two aspects of any debate. There is trying to change the opinions of the person you're debating with (or changing your own opinion), and there is changing the opinion of other people who may follow the debate.

    Going into any debate with the goal of changing the other debaters views is a fools errand.


  • kills Dumbledore

    @Dragoon said in Let's not debate creationism in the News thread:

    Going into any debate with the goal of changing the other debaters views is a fools errand.

    I tend to think of them as an opportunity to learn about the other person's viewpoint and educate them about mine.


  • kills Dumbledore

    @The_Quiet_One Frankly, that sort of upbringing sounds like borderline child abuse to me. I understand he thinks it's for his children's benefit, but you could say the same about parents who withhold medical care for their cancerous kids because a naturopath told them to


  • Grade A Premium Asshole

    @The_Quiet_One said in Let's not debate creationism in the News thread:

    Basically that reduced approved fiction to boring morality-based shows produced by other Christian companies and maybe The Hungry Caterpillar. The Hungry Caterpillar may have depicted gluttony, however, so I'm not sure if that was considered bad, too. (Of course, the here may include The Bible as approved fiction, but I won't go into that)

    I assume "If you give a mouse a cookie" was OK because it decried welfare? 🚎



  • @Dragoon Depends which kind of debate. Something like a political debate, yeah, that's never going to work (but typically political debates, especially on TV, clearly fall in the second category).

    There are however some less sensitive subjects on which you can perfectly well debate and change your mind or the others' mind. If I'm debating which algorithm to use to solve a problem, we may each have an idea at the start, and we may all end up agreeing on one of those (or yet another one).

    There are other cases where you can enter a debate knowing that you have a poorly-informed opinion, and entering it in the express purpose of forming your opinion by confronting ideas. You may not call them "debates" because they may take more the form of questions and answers, or interactive lecture, or something like that rather than a TV debate with long tirades interrupted by shouts of "so wrong!" by your opponent, but in my mind they still are debates. And I believe that actually most discussions are of this kind of serene debates.



  • @remi
    I did not say debates can't change someones mind, my statement is that you should never expect it as an outcome.



  • @remi I don't think "debates" (in the structured-argument-back-and-forth sense) do much good. Too focused on winning and losing. Discussions where everyone starts with a presumption of good faith and is willing to adjust positions and methods--those are useful. Mainly to learn from.

    I detest partisan shouting matches though.


  • 🚽 Regular

    @Jaloopa said in Let's not debate creationism in the News thread:

    @The_Quiet_One Frankly, that sort of upbringing sounds like borderline child abuse to me. I understand he thinks it's for his children's benefit, but you could say the same about parents who withhold medical care for their cancerous kids because a naturopath told them to

    It's hard to enforce that kind of stuff, though. I mean, forbidding certain forms of entertainment is a very slippery slope.

    I will say that he did harp a bit on the "spare the rod" line in The Bible quite a bit. Shocking, I know. That's probably a bit more of a textbook case of child abuse, depending on where you live.



  • @The_Quiet_One said in Let's not debate creationism in the News thread:

    @sloosecannon said in Let's not debate creationism in the News thread:

    @The_Quiet_One oh, you mean the Indiana law or whatever?

    That was the most public instance of the belief, but there are pockets of people who believe it on religious grounds. The best thing that was never written in the bible was that the noon sky is a mix of pink and green because we would be having that debate right now.

    There's a difference between "believes that God has solemnly decreed that the constant pi equals exactly 3" and "believes that 3 is a good enough approximation of pi for use in a religious or historical text of that era". You'd have to be pretty dumb to believe the former instead of the latter; though I'm sure those people do exist.



  • @Benjamin-Hall We're coming back to definitions, then, like for "creationism"... If a "debate" is necessarily the shouting-back-and-forth kind, yeah, it's not very helpful. What you call "discussions" is for me one kind of debate, or the other way round, I don't know.


  • 🚽 Regular

    @anotherusername said in Let's not debate creationism in the News thread:

    There's a difference between "believes that God has solemnly decreed that the constant pi equals exactly 3" and "believes that 3 is a good enough approximation of pi for use in a religious or historical text of that era". You'd have to be pretty dumb to believe the former instead of the latter; though I'm sure those people do exist.

    It's almost the same as "believes that God created the universe 6,000 years ago and The Devil planted dinosaur bones to throw us off" versus "believes that God created the universe, in accordance with what archaeologists and astronomers have observed."



  • @remi I'm willing to accept that. I was specifically calling out one of the many definitions of debate there. What one calls debate may be another's discussion (and vice versa). The content is more important than the label.



  • @The_Quiet_One said in Let's not debate creationism in the News thread:

    @anotherusername said in Let's not debate creationism in the News thread:

    There's a difference between "believes that God has solemnly decreed that the constant pi equals exactly 3" and "believes that 3 is a good enough approximation of pi for use in a religious or historical text of that era". You'd have to be pretty dumb to believe the former instead of the latter; though I'm sure those people do exist.

    It's almost the same as "believes that God created the universe 6,000 years ago and The Devil planted dinosaur bones to throw us off" versus "believes that God created the universe, in accordance with what archaeologists and astronomers have observed."

    If I may, I'd like to alter your last statement to read "believes that God created the universe, in accordance with whatin a way that produces results matching what archaeologists and astronomers have observed."

    The first seems like God was bound by scientists' observations (rather than the observations reflecting what God has done). That may just be me, though.



  • @RaceProUK said in Let's not debate creationism in the News thread:

    This is the King James translation version:

    Also he made a molten sea of ten cubits from brim to brim, round in compass, and five cubits the height thereof; and a line of thirty cubits did compass it round about.

    Which, let's be honest, is vague enough to disregard it as proof π == 3.

    My best guess is that giving the (approximate) circumference was simply an easy way to verify that a shape that had been carved by hand and looked like a circle (no obvious bulges or dips) was actually round enough to meet QC.

    If you think about it, there's really no obvious reason that they would even give the circumference, unless it had some practical use to them.



  • @remi
    Via definition "debate" has a formal structure, thus the term, "informal debate".

    Most people (myself included) use them interchangeably, and I was not using a specific case earlier.

    The reason that I say it is a fools errand is not because people can't approach a debate with an open mind, but because it requires something that you can't do. Nothing I can do/say/etc... can alter someones view on a subject, it is their conscious to do so. So, the best one can do is enter into a debate with the objective of presenting your views as clearly and succinctly as possible. While also being open and listening to theirs with as much thought as you have given your own.

    There can be many goals of a debate, changing someones views should never be one them.



  • @The_Quiet_One said in Let's not debate creationism in the News thread:

    because The Bible is divine and thus anyone who translated it did so through divine intervention.

    That’s easy enough to disprove with, say, access to some of the original text and a suitable dictionary.

    And also only the King James version is canon. Anything else is a bastardization of the scripture.

    Oh, wait … But how does he figure this jives with “anyone who translated it did so through divine intervention”?



  • @Gurth Here's the thing--no amount of "proof" will convince anyone about anything. That's because people are the judges of what they consider proof. This isn't an externally-refereed game. People can, and often do, decide to completely ignore evidence that doesn't fit their mental model of things. Not just religious people. ALL people.

    Someone who has decided that God doesn't even pay lip-service to our scientific view of things isn't going to care about contradictions like that. For this matter (and possible only this matter), he's rejected the principle of non-contradiction.