HDTenEightyP/NetNews huggingface dataset:
From: robd@cherry09.cray.com (Robert Derrick)
Subject: Re: Topic for Discussion?
X-Newsreader: TIN [version 1.1 PL6]
Date: 27 Jan 93 11:06:35 CST

cjhs@minster.york.ac.uk wrote:
: Dr.Pepper@f241.n103.z1.fidonet.org wrote:

	[The Pepper Challange deleted]

: Dammit will you *read* what Johnson is saying!
: 
: Mr Johnson is NOT a creationist. He is NOT proposing creationism as a
: scientific theory. He has NOTHING to do with creationism.
: 
: How can you discuss anything if you don't even read what your opposition
: is saying!

I would tend to agree that Johnson may not be the most appropriate target
for taking "the Pepper Challange", except for a couple of points:

	1. It is more than a little difficult to discuss what Johnson
	is saying, because, despite his volume, he has hardly said anything.
	He has not taken a position, other than attacking "Darwinism",
	which he has not defined, but seems to be confined solely to the
	original theory as proposed by Charles Darwin.  This is not
	a significant task, since much better people than Johnson have
	been doing the same thing for about a hundred years, with an
	intent to be constructive, rather than simply destructive, as
	Johnson's non-content indicates.

	2. Johnson is a lawyer, and as one another person pointed out, what
	it appears that he is really doing is provoking response, without
	actually giving any information back.  This is what lawyers do.
	But the purpose is not to enlighten.  The purpose is to destroy
	our testimony by inducing responses that will throw our solid
	evidence into question.  In essence, the same purpose as the
	usual TAE, but with the additional strong attribute of avoiding
	saying something so ludicrous as to repudiate everything they
	have said before.  This is not something that has ever bothered
	Ray Cote or Lionel or TAE-x.  Their pride is so high that they
	are impervious to their own ignorance.  Johnson is not allowing
	himself to fall into that trap.

	3. Many, many others have implied that Johnson's rhetoric is
	a TAE subtrefuge, and although he has never made such a public
	statement of personal belief (to my knowledge, and at least on
	T.O.), he could have eliminated the controversy at any time by
	simply telling us the facts.  But as the media would so viperously
	say, Mr. Johnson neither confirms nor denies the allegations.

	Therefore, since he quacks like a duck, and does nothing to
	disabuse the vast majority of T.O.ers that are assuming he is
	a duck, I declare The Pepper Challange to be valid.

	As with a host of other TAE challenges of the past, the entire
	issue can be put to rest by the duck himself with less words than
	in the average signature.  And like the past, we will hear the
	duck talk as soon as the pork is in the high branches.

: Best wishes -- Chris Ho-Stuart

	Don't you think it is just a little ironic, Chris, that you
	are defending a lawyer, who refuses the chance to defend himself?

--

rob derrick				robd@cherry.cray.com
From: rmathews@zeus.calpoly.edu (Bob Mathews)
Newsgroups: talk.origins
Subject: Re: Johnson uses Argument from Personal Incredulity
Date: 26 Jan 93 01:50:15 GMT
Organization: California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo

bvickers@valentine.ics.uci.edu (Brett J. Vickers) writes:
>Consistently, Phillip Johnson has talked about how he is
>unsatisfied by Darwinism as an explanation for origins, or
>how he does not think it is close to being sufficient.  This
>reminded me of a passage in _The Blind Watchmaker_ where
>Richard Dawkins describes Bishop Montefiore's similar
>incredulity:
[passage deleted]

The interesting thing is that, in Mr. Johnson's book (_Darwin on Trial_),
he continually refers to _The Blind Watchmaker_.  He does not address
the content of the latter, however, except to claim that it is "really
a sustained argument for atheism" (as if this somehow makes it invalid).
You might find it interesting to read _Darwin..._ and compare.

swehtam bob
Newsgroups: talk.origins
From: cust_ts@klaava.Helsinki.FI (Tero Sand)
Subject: Re: Who does Phillip Johnson think the creationists are?
Organization: University of Helsinki
Date: Tue, 26 Jan 1993 09:21:47 GMT

In article <1993Jan25.130636.1@woods.ulowell.edu> cotera@woods.ulowell.edu writes:

Oh God, he's back.

>The "Pre-Cambrian Explosion" is a term used to describe the sudden formation of
>life on Earth.  This suddenness supports Creationism.  

1. How?
2. "Sudden" is a *VERY* relative term. The "explosion" was "sudden" in
   geologic time-scales, but you can be sure it took quite a bit more
   than 6000 years, not to mention 7 days.

There are thousands
>of cases where people have been miraculously healed of ailments (only after
>praying to God to be healed).  This supports the theory that God exists, and
>therefore, Creationism.

I have to take issue with this. The existence of God *in* *no* *way*
proves creationism.
Repeat this until you understand it.

	Tero Sand
-- 
	EMail: cust_ts@cc.helsinki.fi   or   custts@cc.helsinki.fi
   "I feel most ministers who claim they've heard God's voice are eating
too much pizza before they go to bed at night, and it's really an 
intestinal disorder, not a revelation." - Reverend Jerry Falwell
Newsgroups: talk.origins
From: m23364@mwunix (James Meritt)
Subject: Re: Moon Dust
Organization: MITRE Corporation, McLean VA
Date: Mon, 25 Jan 1993 20:29:04 GMT

In article <1k1a58INN3d1@dmsoproto.ida.org> rlg@omni (Randy garrett) writes:
}One piece of evidence advanced for a young universe concerns
}the depth of dust on the moon.  In my younger years, I remember
}quite a bit of concern about the depth likely to be encountered
}on the moon.  Many people expected 20 - 40 feet of the stuff
}based on calculated accumulations.  Fortunately for Neil 
}Armstrong, there turned out to be much less -- of order
}a few inches.  Anyone know what the accepted reconcilation
}of the discrepancy is?

From my FAQ:
}  - Lunar dust--only 1 to 3 inches, not 54 feet.

The calculation you refer to is given by Henry Morris on pp.
151-153 of _Scientific Creationism_. It is based on a grossly erroneous
figure of 14 million tons of meteoritic dust per year, quoted by Petterson
in 1960. Morris misinterpreted Petterson's article. Petterson published a
figure of 15 (not 14) million tons per year as an _upper limit_. In
other words, Petterson said that the value is _not more than_ 15 million
tons per year. He was not able to measure an actual value. Morris
erroneously chose to interpret it to mean it was _equal_ to 14
million tons per year. Accurate values were measured in the late
1960's. The actual value is much lower than 15 million tons per year.
Dalrymple gives the value of 22,000 tons per year, nearly 700 times
smaller than your figure. That changes your 54 foot figure into about
2 cm, which is quite consistent with the amount of surface soil the
astronauts found on the Moon (it was considerably more than 1-2 mm).


My copy of "Everyman's Astronomy" indicates that the earth collects
about 9000 kg per day from meteors of visual magnitude 5.0 or brighter.
Assuming a typical rock density of 3 g/cc, this corresponds to an
accumulation rate of one inch per 10 billion years.  Unfortunately no
data is presented for fainter meteors.  I wouldn't be surprised to find
that the actual rate is one or two orders of magnitude higher, but "1
inch in 8000 years" is off by six orders of magnitude.

A dust accumulation rate of "one inch per 8000 years" should should
create a spectacular yearround meteor shower, and cause severe pitting
of the space shuttle windshields in just a single orbit.  My quick estimates
give values far higher than have been actually observed.

.......................................................................

The "reconcilation" is performed by reality.
From: rlg@omni (Randy garrett)
Newsgroups: talk.origins
Subject: Re: THE MIND OF THE BIBLE BELIEVER
Date: 25 Jan 1993 17:29:58 GMT
Organization: IDA, Alexandria, VA
NNTP-Posting-Host: omni.ida.org
X-Newsreader: Tin 1.1 PL4

: philosophy of science section.  Find things written by Karl Popper,

I'm familiar with Sir Karl, esp. w.r.t. the controversies
that raged around Quantum Mechanics with the Copenhagen school
versus whatever the opposition side was called.
I was taking a more mathematically rigorous definition of the
term "prove" than the original poster perhaps intended.

: The most parsimonious explanation for your statements here is that
: you're not using the same definition of "fact" that is being used by
: the person to whom you're responding.  I suspect (although my evidence
: at this point is somewhat sketchy) that that person is using the word
: in the same fashion that scientists use it.

I agree that I am using the word differently, but I guess you
need to say what kind of scientist.  I'm a physicist, so we
tend to define terms more precisely.  I'll stick by my definition
of a fact.  Facts and theories are two quite different things.
See my related post on this thread.

: According to the standard definition of species (which you used in a
: section I deleted below), speciation has been observed in the wild.
: The organisms in question were plants, however, and the parent and
: daughter species don't look much different.  You wouldn't likely be
: terribly impressed, but your statement is nonetheless false.

There seems to be some disagreement among posters of this thread
about exactly how many instances of speciation has really been
observed.  I'd be interested in following up on the actual 
articles to see how valid/confirmable the reports are.  If the
plant species were really that similar, is there, perhaps a
possibility that the taxonomic classifications are in error?

Randy G.

Newsgroups: talk.origins
From: sandvik@newton.apple.com (Kent Sandvik)
Subject: Re: Evolution implied by the Bible
Date: Thu, 28 Jan 1993 02:03:04 GMT
Organization: The Language Game Inc.
Followup-To: talk.origins

In article <1993Jan27.112130.1@woods.ulowell.edu>, cotera@woods.ulowell.edu
wrote:
> Do you see the irony of this statement? Every time a Creationist brings up the
> gaps in the fossil record, Evolutionists say "Lack of evidence does not
> contradict evolution." Now you're using the same argument against my theory.

Lack of certain fossiles -- where we have enough fossiles already to
empirically
show what has been going on for eons -- is very much different from lack of
any fossiles.

Lack of evidence of creation is a very big problem for anyone aspiring to
produce the theory of Creation. You need evidence, man. Or you could maybe
re-use any of the fossiles and somehow figure out why God rippled out a lot
of 
evidence showing that he didn't create all the animals.

> Anyway, let me give you some evidence (although hardly proof): The first law of
> thermodynamics says that energy can neither be created nor destroyed, only
> changed from one form to another.  The second law says that the amount of
> entropy in the universe is decreasing.  This means that the amount of energy
> that can be put to useful work is decreasing.  From this we get the idea of the
> heat death of the universe.  Now if we go backwards in time we see that the
> entropy of the universe is decreasing.  Eventually we get to a point where
> there is no entropy.  So before that point either the laws of physics no longer
> hold (no evidence of this), or God created the universe.

If we go to this point, we don't have *any* evidence whatsoever what
triggered 
the big bang, unless future scientists could easily generate such events.
Still
we can't know if big bang was triggered by a bunch of trigger happy alien
teenagers
just for fun, or if it was part of a huge experiment that went wrong, or if
it's just
part of a bigger meta-level scientific force. You could speculate that God
created
the universe using a big bang, and I could speculate that a skinny alien
created it
as part of a home work lab experiment, and we are both dealing on the same
level.

I hope this clarifies the futility to show evidence based on something far
beyond
our horizon.

Kent

---
sandvik@newton.apple.com. ALink: KSAND
Private activities on the Net, opinions are not Apple's, they are mine.
From: swf@tools3teradata.com (Stan Friesen)
Newsgroups: talk.origins
Subject: Re: Future evolution of Creationism
Date: 28 Jan 93 00:23:20 GMT
Distribution: world
Organization: NCR Teradata Database Business Unit

In article <21JAN199322271113@juliet.caltech.edu>, waynebro@juliet.caltech.edu (Broughton, Wayne Jeremy) writes:
|> 
|> Again, referring to people in my experience (and my own erstwhile experience),
|> most Creationists are such *because* they are (Biblical literalist) 
|> Christians; not the other way around.

Well, I can hardly disagree with that - it even corresponds to my experience.

My main point was that it is NOT true that being a Christian implies
one is a Creationist.  In the current context I was afriad that your
prior post might be taken to imply that.

-- 
sarima@teradata.com			(formerly tdatirv!sarima)
  or
Stanley.Friesen@ElSegundoCA.ncr.com
From: weemba@sagi.wistar.upenn.edu (Matthew P Wiener)
Newsgroups: talk.origins
Subject: Re: Ideology and Indoctrination
Date: 26 Jan 93 19:01:01 GMT
Reply-To: weemba@sagi.wistar.upenn.edu (Matthew P Wiener)
Organization: The Wistar Institute of Anatomy and Biology
In-reply-to: philjohn@garnet.berkeley.edu (Phillip Johnson)

In article <1k0tpu$5mp@agate.berkeley.edu>, philjohn@garnet (Phillip Johnson) writes:
>Darwinist indoctrination makes its victims incapable of understanding [...]

Unlike Kaka Doodoo indoctrination, right?  So how many hours do _you_
chant daily?

>I recognize that this frank talk will cause offense.

No, just yawns.  We've seen creationists mouth off with their ignorant
hatred before, and we'll continue to see them mouth off with their
ignorant hatred again and again and again.  Boring....

>						       My purpose
>is not to insult anyone, however, but to free minds.  Many of you
>have been indoctrinated not to question assumptions that are
>based on ideology rather than evidence.  You can be free of that
>indoctrination if you wish to be.

Go for it.  Give us all that evidence that reveals what we've been
missing out on.  Skip all the philosophical foreplay--the kind which
creationists specialize in over and over and over again--and just spell
the evidence out for us--we've been waiting years and years for this
last little step.
-- 
-Matthew P Wiener (weemba@sagi.wistar.upenn.edu)
Newsgroups: talk.origins
From: cotera@woods.ulowell.edu
Subject: Re: Ray Cote's funny Arkeology
Organization: University of Lowell
Date: Wed, 27 Jan 1993 16:07:29 GMT

In article <2B65C29C.7107@ics.uci.edu>, bvickers@valentine.ics.uci.edu (Brett J. Vickers) writes:

> he answers "Gee, God must have done it."  The other
> impossibilities he just ignores.  There's scientific creationism for
> you in a nutshell.
> 

Did I ever say everything in the Bible can be explained by science?  This is
why I don't consider myself a Scientific Creationist.  I realize that God
intervenes (quite often) in the natural world.

> Can we finally close the book on scientific creationism now?
> 

As soon as you can disprove God's existence, you can.

> Oh Ray, what do you want to know about the Cambrian explosion?  What
> it is?

No, I'd like to hear your naturalistic explanation for why diverse (sp?) life
suddenly (geologically speaking) appears in the fossil record.
--Ray Cote
Newsgroups: talk.origins
From: lip@s1.gov (Loren I. Petrich)
Subject: Re: Vitalism is dead (Grasse)    
Organization: LLNL
Date: Tue, 26 Jan 1993 21:39:27 GMT

In article <1993Jan25.202838.25528@news.nd.edu> scharle@lukasiewicz.cc.nd.edu (scharle) writes:

[Pierre-Paul Grasse' and his new "theory" of evolution...]

>p. 2: "Any living being possesses an enormous amount of 
>'intelligence,' very much more than is necessary to build the most
>magnificent of cathedrals.  Today, this 'intelligence' is called
>'information,' but it is still the same thing."

	I can't help but be sarcastic and comment about the great
"intelligence" needed to design crystals, to make small magnets form
strings, and so forth.

	The study of self-organizing systems is by now, at least I
hope, a recognized field of study, drawing heavily on computer
simulations. I point this out because the level of intelligence of
computers is actually very low in some ways, and "artificial
intelligence" has turned out to be a very difficult goal.

>p. 1: "One of the radical differences between physical and biological
>phenomena lies in the fact that the former must necessarily and
>absolutely obey the laws of matter."  He goes on to cite flying as
>an example of living things working against gravity, and says that
>when the biological and physical laws conflict, there is death.

	PPG makes me laugh. Lots of inanimate objects can defy gravity
in this fashion. Has he ever seen an airplane? Or smoke? Or the Moon?
Or a dead leaf blown around by the wind? I've seen all of those
things.

-- 
/Loren Petrich, the Master Blaster
/lip@s1.gov
From: colby@bu-bio.bu.edu (Chris Colby)
Newsgroups: talk.origins
Subject: Re: Dawkins and creative selection
Date: 28 Jan 93 18:18:42 GMT
Organization: animal -- coelomate -- deuterostome

In article <2B673D21.3999@ics.uci.edu> bvickers@ics.uci.edu (Brett J. Vickers) writes:

>Yes, you are right that a distinction should be drawn between
>cumulative selection and mere natural selection.  Dawkins himself
>makes this distinction.  When I spoke for him, I should have made some
>mention of sources of variation.  Mea culpa.

No need for a mea culpa. In your posts, and our email exchange, you
were consistent in your usage. Anyone with an ounce of intelligence
(and a shred of intellectual honesty) should be able to pick up the
context of the material and decide (at least unconsciously) whether
strictly natural selection or cumulative natural selection (implying
other mechanisms) is being discussed. Johnson, in his book, seems unable
or unwilling to make this distinction (see Chapter 2). In fact, he
gets a lot of mileage out of letting the definitions slide.

After reading Johnson's book, I reread my FAQ and found that I use
the word "selection" several times and don't explicitly draw a distinction 
between the two -- that's being fixed.

I hope Johnson hasn't left for good yet; I wouldn't mind a discussion
of the evidence concerning common descent. I'm not going to hold my
breath, however. In my post about microevolution and macroevolution
the only part he were responded to was that I didn't think biologists
were hiding things. He then went on to claim evolutionists were all
just indoctrinated or blinded by ideology. For a guy who claims to
to want to discuss the evidence, he sure does a marvelous job of
avoiding it.

>Brett J. Vickers
>bvickers@ics.uci.edu

Chris Colby 	---	 email: colby@bu-bio.bu.edu	---
"'My boy,' he said, 'you are descended from a long line of determined,
resourceful, microscopic tadpoles--champions every one.'"
 	--Kurt Vonnegut from "Galapagos"
From: swf@tools3teradata.com (Stan Friesen)
Newsgroups: talk.origins
Subject: Re: Ideology and Indoctrination
Date: 28 Jan 93 22:28:20 GMT
Distribution: world
Organization: NCR Teradata Database Business Unit

In article <1k1u4lINN69f@fido.asd.sgi.com>, livesey@solntze.wpd.sgi.com (Jon Livesey) writes:
|> 
|> I think you are contradicting yourself here in a fairly obvious
|> way.   If you can quote Gould on the subject, then it is *not*
|> the case that things are being hidden.   Gould's books are in
|> all the bookstores I visit.
|> 
|> As a matter of fact, IMHO Gould is right, and not nearly enough
|> attention was paid to evidence of stasis.

There is something even more subtle at work.  As Gould discusses in his essay
in this month's issue of Natural History, it is very difficult to see 'nothing'
as evidence of something.  Thus there was an all to easily understood blindness
to certain things.

One of the major contributions of FGould and Eldridge's punctuated equilibrium
model is that it focuses attention on this 'nothing', so it could be properly
analyzed.

Note that the quote in Johnson's article from Gould is quite old.  Since that
time, and largely *because* of Gould, this deficiency has been largely corrected.
You would not see him making that statement today - the situation has changed.

This is, in fact the difference between Creationism and science.  In science,
when a deficiency is noted, it is corrected.  In Creationism deficiencies are
generally ignored.  (Based on the evidence that they continue to brin up the
same tired old issues over and oever again).

|> If we ever *stop* hearing scientists accusing one another of not
|> paying enough attention to the evidence, then will be the time
|> to worry.

Truly spoken brother!

And gadflies like Gould (and Bakker) are a critical part of the process,
they help keep the rest of us on our toes.

-- 
sarima@teradata.com			(formerly tdatirv!sarima)
  or
Stanley.Friesen@ElSegundoCA.ncr.com
From: swf@tools3teradata.com (Stan Friesen)
Newsgroups: talk.origins
Subject: Re: Duane T. Gish, Ph. D.
Date: 28 Jan 93 23:09:22 GMT
Distribution: world
Organization: NCR Teradata Database Business Unit

|>  > From: trott@remus.rutgers.edu (Rich Trott)
|> 
|>  > Could someone please give me information on Dr. Duane T. Gish.

He is one of the co-founders of an evangelical organization called The Institute
for Creation Research (or ICR for short), which claims to be a scientific
research establishment.

He is also currently the pastor of a church, I believe in San Diego county.

Another co-founder has a church in San Fernando Valley in Los Angeles.

-- 
sarima@teradata.com			(formerly tdatirv!sarima)
  or
Stanley.Friesen@ElSegundoCA.ncr.com
From: salem@pangea.Stanford.EDU (Bruce Salem)
Newsgroups: talk.origins
Subject: Re: Duane T. Gish, Ph. D.
Date: 26 Jan 1993 04:23:37 GMT
Organization: Stanford Univ. Earth Sciences
NNTP-Posting-Host: pangea.stanford.edu

In article <1993Jan25.213222.25537@spectrum.xerox.com> chris@eso.mc.xerox.com writes:
>In article 16938@city.cs, lionel@cs.city.ac.uk (Lionel Tun) writes:
>>The fossil record for intermediates is sparse or non existent
>>per se. There is a good reason for this.
>
>Well, Lionel, I'll bite.  What is this reason?

I'll tease. It is because the fossil record has gaps because it has, er,
gaps. The holes in the record are there because the record is lossy, gets
easily destroyed, metamorphism, erosion, and becasue some of the life
that lived mostly never got preserved. There are alternatives to the
usual cant, from Bob Bales et. al. that the gaps are part of the process.

There are a few cases where the diversity of communities like those we
have today is preserved, but as much of this diversity in softpart
biota is only preserved in these few cases throughout the record, but not
in nearly all of the rest of it, we cannot conclude that the full diversity
was absent. One such case is the Middle Cambrian Burgess Shale, another is
the Misson Creek Ill deposit, another is the Solenhofen Limestone of Jurassic
age from which Archeopteryx comes. There are others.

Bruce Salem


Newsgroups: talk.origins