Re: Famous one-eyed kitten to go on display


flabbergasted wrote:
mccoy@xxxxxxxxxx wrote:
False! The scientific evidence clearly testifies in favor of
creationism hands down. The recent discovery of dinosaur soft parts is
ample evidence. Then take the geologic column, which was assumed to
have taken millions of years to form yet in a single strata you will
find millions of fossils meaning all that material (which was swept in
at one event) did not consist of inch per year,or whatever the false
uniformitarian assumption was for the time. Then there's the matter of
world population, which consists mostly of large populations scattered
around in cities and towns, compared to vast empty plains and huge
forested areas that are unpopulated. The world simply doesn't contain
enough people even if you account for disease and destruction that
afflicted mankind for some 4000 years, a fact that you don't want to
admit. Then of course there is the moon's orbit around the earth and
the earth's orbit around the sun. You can extrapolate backwards in
time to see where these objects would be given a time period and
thermodynamics.


Mark Twain did basically the same shtick, but his was funnier.

I'm ambivalent. I love Twain's humor, but I honestly have been
laughing for ten minutes off and on. The above is so ridiculous and so
illogical that it is genuinely funny. I know one needs to respond to
seriously since it's creationist idiocy by a unbelievably confused and
ill informed YEC.

My only excuse is that others have taken him to task for his errors.
But I still find it humorous and worth saving to put forth as an
example of cultural idiocy trying to pass as science.

RAM


"Since my own day on the Mississippi, cut-offs have been made at
Hurricane Island; at island 100; at Napoleon, Arkansas; at Walnut Bend;
and at Council Bend. These shortened the river, in the aggregate,
sixty-seven miles. In my own time a cut-off was made at American Bend,
which shortened the river ten miles or more.

"Therefore, the Mississippi between Cairo and New Orleans was twelve
hundred and fifteen miles long one hundred and seventy-six years ago.
It was eleven hundred and eighty after the cut-off of 1722. It was one
thousand and forty after the American Bend cut-off. It has lost
sixty-seven miles since. Consequently its length is only nine hundred
and seventy-three miles at present.

"Now, if I wanted to be one of those ponderous scientific people, and
'let on' to prove what had occurred in the remote past by what had
occurred in a given time in the recent past, or what will occur in the
far future by what has occurred in late years, what an opportunity is
here! Geology never had such a chance, nor such exact data to argue
from! Nor 'development of species,' either! Glacial epochs are great
things, but they are vague--vague. Please observe:--

"In the space of one hundred and seventy-six years the Lower
Mississippi has shortened itself two hundred and forty-two miles. That
is an average of a trifle over one mile and a third per year.
Therefore, any calm person, who is not blind or idiotic, can see that
in the Old Oolitic Silurian Period,' just a million years ago next
November, the Lower Mississippi River was upwards of one million three
hundred thousand miles long, and stuck out over the Gulf of Mexico like
a fishing-rod. And by the same token any person can see that seven
hundred and forty-two years from now the Lower Mississippi will be only
a mile and three-quarters long, and Cairo and New Orleans will have
joined their streets together, and be plodding comfortably along under
a single mayor and a mutual board of aldermen. There is something
fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of
conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact."

Life on the Mississippi
Mark Twain

The upshot is, when you don't understand science, trying to speak like
a scientist is like trying to fake speaking Chinese. It may sound
similar to you, but to someone who knows the difference, it just sounds
like gibberish.

.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Famous one-eyed kitten to go on display
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