Re: Atheists support evolution because evolution supports their worldview


"John Harshman" <jharshman.diespamdie@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
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"raven1" <quoththeraven@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
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On Fri, 15 Aug 2008 12:59:26 -0700 (PDT), Ray Martinez
<pyramidial@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

It is a self-evident axiomatic fact: Atheists support evolution
because evolution supports their worldview.
Atomic theory somehow manages to omit any reference to God. Does
it
support the "atheist worldview" as well?

Richard Dawkins and John
Harshman would not support Darwinian evolution if it supported
Theism.
If the evidence supported theism, I'd be a theist.

No one can go back and undo Darwin in order to find
out if Richard Dawkins and John Harshman would
have ended up being atheists, if Darwin didn't give his
ideas to the world about evolution.
That's backwards from Ray's contention, of course. Ray claimed that
I wouldn't support evolution if evolution supported theism; you are
wondering if I would have supported theism if there were no theory
of evolution. Do you see the distinction?

Yes, you are right John, what I said is backwards from the
way that Ray said it, and I was not reading it so carefully.
I contend that my atheism is not (or at least not primarily) the
result of my knowledge of evolutionary biology, but of a more
general observation of the world. There were of course atheists
before Darwin. So I would answer your speculation that I would still
have been an atheist; can't speak for Dawkins.

I was not meaning to convey that I knew whether or not you would
or would not be an atheist, or even a theist, and that was not my
main focus. I was considering that a person can't go back and undo
the world in order to see if a change in possible environmental
influences would have made a difference in yours or Dawkin's
choices about what you believe and/or don't believe. Of course, as
you pointed out, that is not what Ray was speaking about. Whether
it be you or not you, I am sure that Darwin has influenced people
to believe what he believed, and I am equally sure that what things
he said he believes may have not influenced some who are more
independent about what things they conclude.
Well of course Darwin has influenced people, and I would hope he would
have. But how did he do it? By argument based on evidence, not merely
by stating his beliefs and relying on personal authority.

No, John, that was not what I meant. He also spoke outwardly
his ideas against Christianity, the Bible, and the Lord. All he
had to do to be influential in that respect was to speak.
I doubt that Darwin has influenced anyone directly by writing his
opinions on Christianity etc. Is there a single person in the world who
has turned to atheism upon reading Darwin's autobiography? That's just
not credible. Though of course some of what he says about it is argument
based on evidence, of a sort.

A man in here said that he was influenced by what
people had said. But as for Darwin, his family
might have people in it that would have been
influenced.

One would hope to be influenced by what people said, if it was sensible.
The question would seem to be whether anyone became an atheist just
because Darwin was an agnostic, without taking his reasons into account.

Of course.

As for Ray's assertion, I would support Darwinian evolution if the
evidence supported Darwinian evolution, regardless of any
implications it might or might not have. And I still can't speak for
Dawkins.

I believe you.
You may of course suppose that I am wrong about either or both of
these counterfactuals. I don't think it's necessary to go back and
experimentally undo Darwin in order to perform a valid test, though.
It's a common creationist failing to demand such direct
experimentation. One can, however, tell that humans are related to
chimps without inventing a time machine and observing who mated with
whom for the last 5 or 6 million years.

I am a creationist and I do not demand such direct experimentation.
So
there are different kinds of people who are creationists I guess.
There is certainly, without a doubt, a similarity with chimps and
with
humans. I believe that is why we love to look at them so, and laugh
at their cute antics. As a Christian, I believe that when God created
the animals, he made them in such a way that they look related to
us in that they have some characteristics that are enough like us
that
we can identify with, but yet be charmed by, and compare them to
ourselves enough to love them greatly. We can look at a beautiful
pair of kittens playing and tumbling over the floor, and it's as
though we want to be one of them, and tumble with them. When
we see that kind of closeness that we feel with them, then that
produces a release of tension inside of us that I believe heals us
of the stresses of the day. We can see one of those very charming
animal movies about a beloved dog and identify with that animal
and focus our attention on him in such a way that in our minds
we can almost feel what it would be like to be him. In that way,
I believe that something actually theraputic happens within us
that transports us away from the difficult things in life that
could overwhelm us. We can also see an innocence about the
animals since we know they are not as smart as man, and we
can be charmed by what great intelligence they may have, even
though their intelligence does not rival our own. So I think that
the similarity of animals to humans has only to do with the
intelligence of the creator to give us something to identify with.
That is my opinion.
It's a silly opinion, easy to falsify using the evidence. For example,
we find kittens and puppies more appealing than we find apes, though
in fact apes are our closest relatives. We know this not because they
are cute or appealing, but because of the nested hierarchy of
similarities. Most of these similarities are neither cute nor
appealing, and in fact are invisible unless you use fancy laboratory
techniques to reveal them, so your explanation for their existence
holds no water.

You certainly do know how to take your opinion
to the next level, don't you, John? I didn't say one
word that falsified any kind of evidence.
Again you have it backwards. Evidence falsifies the words you said. You
advanced a hypothesis. That hypothesis is incompatible with the facts.
Therefore that hypothesis is wrong. See how that works?

If toilets flush the opposite direction on the south side
of the Equator, is it possible that we who live in the land
of up above, that our brains think backwards?

What do you mean "we"? Speak for yourself. (And it's my understanding that
toilets don't actually flush in the opposite direction in the southern
hemisphere.)

I looked that up. You are right, I was wrong there.
The "Coreolis" force only works on large bodies
of water, such as the circular direction of the
Gulf Stream.

Now what I believe is that you will grasp at any straws to convince
yourself that your a priori beliefs are correct, regardless of the
physical evidence. And as evidence for that belief of mine, I offer
the complete lameness of the explanation your just gave me. Nobody who
was interested in considering the evidence would have come up with it.

Did I sound desparate and grabbing at straws, John? No, not in
the least.
Yes, you did, at least to me.

Desparate is usually what younger people do. I am
not sure if I have any desparate left in me. I'm about
as desparate as a three-toed sloth is to run a race.

Then we must seek elsewhere for an explanation of the complete lameness of
what you're saying. Can you suggest one?

Sounds like you are willing to not let one straw
be unturned.

Yes, I do think that someone interested in knowing
the truth would consider all things and all ideas, and leave no
stone unturned. That you took my words, drop kicked them
out of the ballpark speaks for your interest in knowing things,
as you've said with your own mouth.
Or perhaps your idea was indeed so silly that I was able to reject it,
quite rightly, after only a short examination. Suppose I had told you
that the moon was a cubical block of gouda 14 feet on a side. Would you
carefully consider it, leave no stone unturned, etc.? I doubt you would.
Now I happen to know something about the evidence relevant to your
conjecture, and I know it doesn't fit. And I also know an explanation
that does fit, quite well, which happens to be the only explanation that
anyone has ever come up with that does fit. What would you expect me to
do in such a situation?

I already know that the moon is not made out of cheese.
I don't know what thoughts you think. I am not a mind
reader like some of you are. Where I come from if a person
says something and someone says, "What did you mean by
that?" We give that person the benefit of the doubt if they
reply something different than what the other person thought,
as a rule.

Do you understand what an analogy is? Your beliefs about seahorses and
such are as quaint to me as my hypothetical statement about the moon is to
you. I notice you didn't give me the benefit of the doubt on that moon
thing, and with good reason. I have equally good reasons for rejecting
your ideas here.

How did I know give you the benefit of the doubt
on the moon thing? And why are you rejecting my
ideas? If a seahorse looks like a horse, accept it.
Someone else must've thought that, too because
they named it a seaHORSE.

This also might surprise you to know that I can see how you
that are evolutionists believe what you all perceive of as the
progressive changing of the taxa lifeforms, and I can see the
similarities between certain species of animals. A sea horse
actually looks like a horse somewhat, and I can see why one
might think that they are of the same origin, but that branched and
have a common ancestor.
This too is ridiculous. Nobody thinks that the similarities you note
between horses and seahorses has anything to do with their common
ancestry.

I didn't say that I believed that a seahorse and a horse
branched from one another, I said that one might think
that.
And I said that no one might think that.

Are you demonstrating that you can read minds? : D

Depends on who "one" is, doesn't it? "One" is usually an attempt to
recruit everyone. However, you have a point. Some might think that. I
should have said that no rational person would think that.

They would say that, would they?


You laughed at my idea that God created these
animals in such a way that we can relate to them. So,
are you going to tell us that you think that it is just a
coincidence that a seahorse and a land horse look similar?
Yes. If you look at the actual close relatives of sea horses and horses,
the features they share are nothing like that. It is indeed a
coincidence, a most amusing one.

Exactly! I believe that God made them for our delight,
and for his as well.

And were tsetse flies also made for our delight? It seems that in order to
be consistent you would need to suppose that everything we consider vile
or ugly was also made for our and god's delight.

Maybe originally they were. Before things got messed up.
If everything worked the right way, there would be a
purpose for even the tsetse fly.

Of all the ways in which an animal in the sea could look,
why, oh why do you think it would look like a horse?
Some coincidence! I think they look similar because that
is the way that the creator of each made them to look.
You understand that there are hundreds of thousands of species of
animals in the sea, and only a couple of them look anything like horses,
right? There are good functional reasons why a seahorse looks the way it
does, and it shares most of its features with close relatives (pipefish,
for example) that look nothing like horses. Humans have active
imaginations. We see all manner of beasts in the stars, the virgin Mary
in a cheese sandwich, and so on. Nobody put them there.

Yes, I do see that there are thousands of organisms in the
sea, and each one of them is unique. There is one that has
his own "fishing poles" growing out of himself, with
a thing on each line that looks like bait. He catches fish
to eat with that form. There are other little deep sea fishes
that have their own headlights. I don't think that is any
coincidence.

What, you think they were purposely designed to remind us of fishing poles
and headlights?

Well, I believe that God created everything for his
pleasure, and that he shares that with us.

As for the stars, do you know that if you put the Zodaic
on paper, four points on it that are opposite one another
in a square are the lion (Leo), the man (Aquarius), the
Scorpion (anciently called the Eagle), and the calf/ox/bull
(Taurus). In Job, God speaks to him and he mentions that
he made the Mazzaroth (Zodiac). People long ago, such as
the Magi, could discern God's will from them, not in the
way that an astrologer does in today's world, but in a
godly way.

Which is different from the way astrologers do it how, exactly?

There was a godly form of wisdom that was given
to early man that seems to be lost now. You may
not believe there were magi that came to see the
young child, Jesus, but I do. I don't know how they
determined that the King of the Jews would be
born, but these magi were somehow kin to the
Jews, and had this wisdom to know how to
discern God's will in the movement of the stars.
The Western Zodiac today is off by one month.
People born this month, for example do not have
Leo as their true sign because it has been off for
about 2,000 years. So the astrologers are not
telling people the truth about their star sign.
The early magi had a bit more astronomy to
what they measured than astrology. Their approach
seems to not be that the stars rule us, but that it
is God that rules the stars.

When the children of Israel camped at night
around the ark of the covenant in the midst of their camp,
they divided up into groups that formed four camps. One
on each of the directions. Each had a standard, or banner
that represented their group. It was the Lion, the Man,
the Calf/Ox, and the Eagle. Then when Christ came along
and the 4 gospels were written, each of them showed
him as being:
1. Matthew: He wrote about Jesus
being a king. The Lion is considered to be the king of
beasts. Jesus is also known as the Lion of Judah.
2. Mark: He wrote about Jesus being one who would
carry burdens of others, and a Calf/Ox is a beast of
burden.
3. Luke: His writing centers on Jesus being human and
as the Son of Man, Jesus was both fully divine, but also
fully human.
4. John: He wrote about Jesus being God (1:1-3;14). The
symbol that God says of himself in the Old Testament is
that he is our Eagle.
These writers did not plan this. It just happened by design
from the Lord. When the children of Israel camped with
their banners and a flame of fire was visible at night,
showing the Shekinah glory of God, they were getting the
feeling of God being right there with them in their midst.
In this day in the church era, since the cross is already an
accomplished event, a person receiving Christ has the
Holy Spirit come to live inside of him in his midst.
There is too much design here to not notice all of this.
It has to be from a Creator.

Or you have the common human ability to see pattern where there is none.
Have you checked out a grilled cheese sandwich recently?

You can check it out in the Bible if you like. It is
there for all to see. There were standards/banners
that the children of Israel made to go in each of
the four camps they were divided in. Also the
four faces of the cherubim and the seraphim
had the same four faces...the lion, the man, the
calf/ox, and the eagle. In the Revelation they are
called the four living creatures.

We can see fish that want to fly,
and we can see birds that want to dive. We can see amphibians
that can be equally as happy on land as they are in the water.
And I see this as an attempt, perhaps unconscious, to trivialize two
centuries of work in comparative biology.

It certainly is not any such thing. Why are you coming up
with caustic remarks?
I do tend to get a little bit testy when someone insults my profession.
Sorry. But that's what you have done, reducing two centuries of careful
research to a momentary whim.

It wasn't trying to insult anyone.

Nevertheless you did. Think about what you're saying, and how it looks to
others.

It's kind of you to care.

I'm getting the feeling
though that if someone sneezes the wrong way, that
some will say, "What did you mean by that?" Would it
be insulting if I said that you all are very sensitive? I
didn't imagine that I was talking to seises. (the kind that
are so delicate that they can detect a bomb going off in
Russia from the desert in the USA.) That beats the
princess with the pea under the 14 mattresses.

Please don't waste so much space on verbiage.

But what I see is kinds with variation within the kinds. I see
kinds as being something like Family or Genus. I am speaking
of the biblical category of "kinds" of course, which I don't think
is the equivalent of species, though in some cases it looks like
that. So I think that the animals that are progressively similar
are in the same "kinds" categories. I say I can see why you
believe what you do about the taxa, but I do not attribute
a chance beginning to all of life the way that an evolutionist
does.
Nobody that I know of attributes the beginning of all life to chance.
Nor is the beginning of life particularly relevant to the
relationships among extant species. I would like to know how you
determined that "kinds" were equivalent to Family or Genus. If there
really were kinds, one would think they would be easy to recognize,
yet no two creationists come up with the same answer.

John, I have heard this from evolutionists. Some think life
began in a primordeal soup that had an electric charge go
through it and voila! life began. But you have the floor.
Please do tell why it was not "by chance" in your opinion.
It began, presumably, through some kind of natural selection or an
abiotic analogue, with perhaps a bit of self-assembly. Not the standard
creationist strawman of a tornado in a junkyard. The origin of life
isn't something I spend any time thinking about, though.

I'm glad that you said "presumably" because it shows that
you don't really know. I hadn't heard about the tornado in
the junkyard.

Of course I don't really know. In the first place, it's not my field at
all. In the second place, there are few enough clues available in the
present. But in the third place, all this is a distraction from what we
were discussing.

But would you satisfy my curiosity about what I am interested in? How
did you determine what "kinds" are?

I'm so glad that you asked.

One could only wish you had answered, instead of indulging in more
verbiage.

I think you asked before, and
I was trying to find the post where someone asked that.
I intended to come back and answer it. There is an evolutionist
online that has given what he feels may be the creationists'
thinking on what the Kind in the Bible is. What he says is
really good analysis. I've got to find that again and I will
tell you when I do...and I won't forget that is was you that
asked, this time. I have been working what a Kind is, by
looking at scriptures about it. You see, when people say
they look at the Creation account, they overlook that it is
mentioned in more than one place, not just in Genesis.
You have to figure out what God's taxa is. Did a dinosaur
and a turkey share an ancestor? Maybe they were part of
the "things that fly" Kind originally. Movies make people
think that dinosaurs growl or roar. They may have sung.
There are a lot of animals that are birds that do not spend
much time flying. How many ostrich flocks has anyone
ever seen? Dinosaurs lay eggs.
The Kinds in Genesis have their own seed within
themselves. If all these animals such as pelicans,
turkeys, cranes, seagulls, emus, ostriches, dinosaurs (?)
lay egg-shaped eggs, then are they part of the same
"Kind?" If so then variation (aka microevolution)
produces the differences.
Biblical "Kinds" seem to be divided into categories
of things that fly, things that creep, things that
walk on the earth, things in the sea, creeping things,
and man.

All that musing would be best kept to yourself, since you don't answer my
question. Now in fact we know quite well that dinosaurs and birds belong
to the same "kind", and we also know that flight evolved long after
dinosaurs. The earliest dinosaur is 228 million years old, and the
earliest flying theropods (birds, that is) came along about 60 million
years later, out of one small group of dinosaurs, the maniraptorans. And
we know that dinosaurs and crocodiles belong to the same kind, and that
dinosaurs and dogs belong to the same kind.

There is supposed to have been a bird found in Texas
that predates archaeopteryx by 75 million years whose
fossil, found in 1983, is named now Protoavis.

But we seem to have a basic epistemological disagreement here. You
consider the bible to be the ultimate authority on what a "kind" is,
whereas I consider only physical evidence. I really don't care whether the
bible considers things that fly to be a single category, or a kind, or
whatever. That's just not relevant to the actual arrangement of the world.
If your sole justification for your beliefs is the bible, that's fine, and
we have no argument. But don't tell me it corresponds to anything that can
be learned by examining the world itself.

It's OK...you can consider physical evidence. How many
things though are there that have yet to be discovered that
you may not yet know about? It's not going to hurt to look
at what the Bible says, either. It says that God created
birds separately from land animals and sea animals, etc.

And simple "variation within kinds" would not account for the nested
hierarchy of life. This answer will not fly, and no creationist has
been able to come up with an answer that actually takes the data into
account. There is a reason for this.

I believe it was all brought about by the Lord. I know,
though, that you can only see this through the witness of
the Holy Spirit within you.
If I understand this remark, you are claiming that reason and evidence
are not relevant to knowing the truth. You are free to take that
position, but if you do there's no point in arguing about facts or
explanations. You have rejected science as a way of knowing about the
world, and we have little to discuss.

No, John, I have not in any way rejected science. I just think
that you are basing your ideas on limited facts that have been
revealed to you, and that there is a lot more for people to
learn. Some years ago you would have argued with me that
the sun didn't have an orbit of it's own, even though the Bible
says that it does.
Now here you are being seriously disingenuous. The bible in fact says
that the sun goes around the earth once a day. It says nothing about the
sun making an 11-foot circle in response to the earth's gravity, or
having a 200-million-year circuit of the galaxy, whichever you meant by
that. The bible is clearly wrong, and you are reinterpreting what it
says in order to make it conform to what we know. You could easily do
the same with evolution if you chose, and I encourage you to do so.
Because heliocentrism isn't going away, and neither is common descent.

The Bible does go around the world once a day
from our perspective.

I believe you mean "the sun" there. But don't you understand that this
rationalization you're doing is equally applicable to evolution? Kinds are
fixed from our perspective. From a greater perspective you see that it's
only the shortness of our lives that produces that effect.

I did mean the sun. I made a mistake. A funny one.

From a greater perspective
you see that it is our earth's turning that produces
that effect. The Bible verse that I gave shows that
the sun has an orbit and travels through the galaxy.

No, it shows no such thing. It shows that the writers thought that the sun
goes around the earth once a day.

No, it is talking about the sun travelling from
one end of the heavens to the other.

I didn't say it, the Bible says it. I have never, never
ever said anything like heliocentrism at all, nor do
I believe that. I'm also not "reinterpreting it." I'm
just quoting it!

Do you understand what heliocentrism is? Hint: it's the accepted theory of
the solar system.

What a nice way of calling me an idiot. I thought
that it meant that strange idea that some people
have that the sun moved around the earth. I should
know that. OK...what the verse says is that the sun
is moving around the heavens from one end to the
other.

I should also point out that nothing in evolution denies the existence
of god; it merely constrains how he could have worked. You are free to
believe in a creator and in evolution at the same time, without fear
of contradiction. If you want to cling to the literal truth of genesis
as a main tenet of your faith, however, that's what is irreconcilable
with the physical evidence. But you should ask yourself why it worked
out that way.

John, I am not denying science to believe that God created
everything.
Agreed. It's only your beliefs about the manner of that creation that
deny science.

No, that isn't true at all! No. I never said that there is
no science. I very much think that there is science.

That's not what I mean by "deny science". What you do is deny the value of
physical evidence in determining truth, instead relying on your
interpretation of a book. Your viewpoint is antithetical to science. You
reject the validity of science. You ignore science.

I'm saying that I don't think every scientist's conclusion
is correct.

I also do not believe in evolution and Creation
at the same time. You pin down a literal belief in what
Genesis reports as being a bad thing and you say it is since
there is no evidence to believe what it says. That undoubtedly
means that you have all the evidence in your possession. Now,
do you really?
No. But I have enough evidence. We never have all the evidence about
anything, but sometimes we accumulate enough to be pretty sure. Your
position here is a combination of your personal ignorance of the
evidence and a resort to epistemological nihilism. I don't have either
of those problems.

You do not have enough evidence to show that God
did not create the world, the stars, and everything in
it.

Indeed I don't. But I have enough evidence to say that he didn't do it in
6 days, 6000 years ago, and that he didn't make a man out of the dust of
the ground, but at best out of several billion years of evolution.

I have a different idea about the age of the earth.
I've written in here about it several times, in fact.
What we know of as time is relative. We base it
on such as our orbit around the sun, the way
we divide that up into months, weeks, days, hours,
minutes, seconds, etc. But the Bible says that God
created the earth on the first day. Then it says the
evening and the morning were the first day, and
it concluded. It was not until the fourth day that
the sun was created. So three days had already
taken place before the sun was even created.
Those first three days of creation were not the
same kind of time that we know of as time, that
is relative to our position as we travel around
the sun. Yet, whatever those first three days were,
God calls it a day. So I simply accept that on faith,
whatever it means. It can mean that it was exactly
the length of day that we have now, or not. It
doesn't matter.

Whatever the length of time was in the creation days,
I don't have a problem with it, because I accept that
it was 6 days. But what we see when we look back
at his creation looks to us like billions of years. I do
not see this as a problem when I read the Bible,
because God could squeeze a billion years into a
second if he wanted to. But what we would observe
is millions of years. With as much as we do know,
there is a lot that we don't know.

And your belief in the truth of Genesis is a bad thing not just because
there's no evidence for it, but because there is a mountain of evidence
against it. For some reason, you accept heliocentrism even though it
contradicts the bible. Why do you reject evolution?

I do not believe heliocentrism.

You really need to learn what "heliocentrism" means. I'm pretty sure you
do believe it, unless you meant to confess that you're a geocentrist.

As I've shown you earlier, you are right. I had it
wrong. I had really forgotten it, too. Nooooooo
I'm not a geocentrist.

I do not reject variation,
which is microevolution. I do not believe that a man and
an ape or chimpanzee came from a common ancestor. I
do believe that a dinosaur could be a bird. I do believe
that the species of animals today in many cases do not
look like ancient fossils of the same types. For example,
Sabre-Toothed tigers are enormous. Mastadons are huge
compared with Mammoths, and Mammoths are huge
compared with today's elephants, and elephants are
gigantic enough that it's hard to imagien a Mastadon.

Fine. Do you have any reasons for your various beliefs, reasons that you
are capable of communicating to others? Now if you think that the
transition from dinosaur to bird is mere microevolution, even though it
happened some 170 million years ago and has resulted in 10,000 living
species that diverged from each other up to 130 million years ago, and yet
the small transition from ape to human, which began only 5 million years
ago, is some kind of impossibility, then I'd like to know your reasons.

I'll have to come back and finish this. I'm signing off
for the evening.

Suzanne

P.S. I do believe in variation, which is what microevolution
formerly was called, and still is by some scientists.
You are wrong about this too. Variation and microevolution are two
different things.

I don't think they are different. Please explain what you
mean. Before the term microevolution was used, the
term variation was used in it's place. It is still used today.

Variation is still used today, but it's used because it doesn't mean the
same thing as microevolution. Variation is the sum of differences we
observe within a species. Microevolution is a set of processes that
produce and filter that variation.

Now what you're willing to consider "microevolution" seems to depend on
your degree of interest. You're willing to consider all dinosaurs
(including birds) to be a single kind within which all transformations are
microevolution, yet you insist that the transition between two very
closely related species that have only recently diverged -- humans and
chimpanzees -- must be macroevolution, and therefore impossible. It is a
puzzlement. I bet you would agree that all arthropods may be a single kind
too, right?

But that
is not macroevolution, which would be more what an
evolutionist would believe. But that is contingeant upon what
the definition of species is as it applies to all lifeforms. All
do not fit into one definition and so there have to be several
definitions.
That paragraph was so garbled as to convey nothing to me. You know very
little about biology, and essentially nothing about evolutionary
biology. So it's surprising that you feel able to tell biologists just
what they're getting wrong.

You are being overly sensitive. I had to learn biology in
junior high school, in high school and in college.

You appear to have forgotten all of it, if so.

It was
all taught from an evolutionary viewpoint. No one that
has been through school escapes it. I'm also not telling
biologists (above) what they are getting wrong about
their studies. I am saying that creationists and evolutionists
should be able to talk to one another and compare ideas,
if they would understand that meanings they have assigned
to the same words are different, so that when they argue,
they are barking up the same tree, but calling things by
different names. Also, since you don't hear the tone of
my voice or thoughts as I write this, they are not snappy
at you.

I don't care about your tone, but about what you're saying. All the terms
you use have definite meanings to biologists, and if you make up your own
meanings it impedes communication. You seem to have made up several
meanings in the paragraph I described as "garbled", and as a consequence I
don't know what you were trying to say.

Now perhaps you aren't trying to tell me I'm wrong, and that you don't
take your beliefs seriously enough to think they're right. But I suspect
otherwise.


.

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