Wednesday 5 June 2013

Post debate misses

Post debate misses, I missed rebutting a few of the oppositions one liners, I doubt they will ever read this, but it is more for my sanity, I can't leave something unanswered.

Definition of faith

Definition 2 "belief that is not based on proof: He had faith that the hypothesis would be substantiated by fact." If this is not what you believe your Faith is, then don't use the word. I don't use the word as I don't have faith in science or anything in life, I have evidence based beliefs, and if it is pointed out I don't I will re-evaluate.
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/faith

Virtual particles

Yes virtual particles exist in vacuums and inside atoms, virtual photons carry the electromagnetic force between the nucleus and the electron cloud keeping them in orbit. So it was disengenuos for Sven to say that Virtual particles have a cause and the cause is a vacuum, they have no cause, but yes they exist within our universe and space time.
http://www.physics.ox.ac.uk/documents/PUS/dis/virtual_photon.htm
In fact virtual particles if anything put a hole in creationism as they reveal how much we know about Quantum mechanics and thus radiometric dating is a pretty assured science.

Universe had a beginning

Again, we don't know this. I think I said that in my talk, yet you didn't address it. It may not have "begun" in a true sense of the word, a new phase may have begun with the expansion from a singularity we call the big bang, again there is a lot of evidence for this event. The COBE satellite, WMAP satellite and the European space agencies recent Planck Satellite, as well as polar launched high altitude balloons and the sky surveys that have revealed the retreat of almost all extra-galactic objects at a rate that means the further something is away the faster it is moving. Again claiming this beginning of the universe damages your own case as it shows an old universe (13.82 billion years old), not a literal 6 day creation 6-10,000 years ago.
http://lambda.gsfc.nasa.gov/product/cobe/
http://science1.nasa.gov/missions/wmap/
http://www.esa.int/For_Media/Press_Releases/Planck_reveals_an_almost_perfect_Universe
http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2013/03/21/age_of_the_universe_planck_results_show_universe_is_13_82_billion_years.html

a/Sexual reproduction

Interestingly we don’t know how sexual reproduction started exactly, it likely conveyed an advantage against parasites and for survival so it was selected for, meaning passed on. Again this probably originated early on in life’s development, as some forms of bacteria don’t procreate asexually, some procreate with DNA from another party, some are not just binary male and female, but multi-sexed, having up to 7 different sexes. But larger than bacteria, we are pretty much limited to the binary male and female. Though some switch such as certain fish and amphibians and for example the whip tail lizard and some lie along the gender path such as humans who can be born with both male and female genitalia, although a lot of these are non-functional there have been instances of functioning intersex humans. Mark Harwood, seemed to argue the irreducible complexity line here along genitalia, I would have liked to have shot back with how he obviously knows very little about genitalia in animals including humans. Some mammals and humans are born with both, some other species don't have the usual mammalian kit, reptiles and most birds externally look the same as mammal females, with their cloaca, the aforementioned 7-sex bacteria have hairs on their cell walls that simply intermingle, or look at the Bdelloid rotifers that don't have sex but to increase their gene pool by simply stealing DNA from other bacteria.
http://talkorigins.org/indexcc/CB/CB350.html
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/07/110707141158.htm
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/10/071011142633.htm

Human fallibility

This one was a real stretch by the opposition. Humans aren't fallible was their basic claim, we have evolved to be infallible. I think not guys, you do realise that people lie, get lied to and believe it, get conned, sometimes to the point of death of them or others, to say that we are not fallible is either not knowing the human condition or trying to exploit the viewers fallibility by being being blatantly dishonest.
Humans are so fallible that is only by shared experience and by repeatable evidence we can know anything, this is how science came about as a reliable way to remove biases and enforce repeatability and remove any errors caused by our fallibility.
This is actually one of my areas of study, social engineering it is called, being able to talk and convince your way into a company, and it is done with surprising ease in most situations where people should know better.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Claude_Romand
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_engineering_%28security%29

There are likely going to be more of these posts to come as I review the footage and any furphies my opponents spouted.

Sunday 2 June 2013

The "Truth" about Science - Part 1

Here is Josephs first video debunked, I probably won't do more than this as I don't think if Joseph reads this any will sink in, he doesn't seem to know how to crack open a book or do a search that is not bible related so he is basically lost in the wilderness, I as his brother in humanity have tried to find him but he doesn't wish to be found. Sorry to use some biblical allegory, but it was too tempting not too.

Do you need a degree to talk about science, I do talk science; cosmology, biology, physics etc as you saw in the recent debate. I have no degree. A degree is not required for science, but knowledge of science is required, there are a lot of papers published that need to be read and evaluated. You need to adhere to the scientific method, which is basically when a theory or hypothesis fails a test it needs to be evaluated as to whether it is kept and modified or thrown away. If it fails badly enough and has no supporting evidence then it must be discarded.

Here you equate atheism with evolution, not true there are a lot of religious people that accept the evidence for evolution, there are even some atheists that using magical thinking not based in reality deny evolutions full picture, look into Raelians; they believe life was spawned and guided by alien hands, instead of Gods. Which do we have any evidence for, neither. Which is more likely, actually the aliens, as at least we know life exists here, it could exist elsewhere and be using this planet as an experiment, there is no evidence for this alien experiment however, so I discard it. God of course is infinitely more complex than an alien and thus requires infinitely more evidence to support.

As I have said before you can get all of the atheists I know back to the Lord God, if you just show us some real, peer-reviewed evidence. If you rely on here-say, anecdote and revelation then you are no different to the hundred thousand other religions that rely on the same, why should we trust you over them?

Science is not complicated; no it isn't, if anyone where to put the time in, and be open to having their most cherished beliefs brought into question it is easy.
"Science without religion is lame (I like how you couldn't bring yourself to say the rest of this quote), religion without science is blind". You do know what quote mining is don't you Joseph, you find a quote that agrees with your beliefs and disregard all others. Einstein also said in a letter to an atheist fan;
"It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it."

He also said:
"For me the Jewish religion like all others is an incarnation of the most childish superstitions"


And finally:
"The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honourable, but still primitive legends. No interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this. These subtilised interpretations are highly manifold according to their nature and have almost nothing to do with the original text."

Hopefully we can put to bed now you using Einstein to support your case. Regardless if he was religious so what, he also had a moustache, I don't see every scientists or atheist sporting one of them. His views are irrelevant, what is relevant is what is true and false, arguments to an authority figure are not evidence.

Evolution, and what people know about it; Banana man aka Ray Comfort, really, he should not be taken seriously after he redubbed one of his videos, lying to support his beliefs; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GW05npbQHVs

You realise he is asking people off the street, not educated biologists or scientists. Even a half educated biologist will tell you evolution cannot take hold without life. Life as it is defined only happens with DNA, RNA used in Viruses is not considered life. But the various theories around abiogenesis do talk about RNA forming on primitive earth and how RNA would have formed early cells, that could have had evolution via natural selection effect them to the point of them moving into self-replicating DNA.
The reason for the language of speculation used here, is science doesn't know. We have only had 400 years at it, the first experiments into abiogenesis only 60 years ago, so we simply haven't had enough time to find out. We can say confidently "I DON"T KNOW" without being embarrassed as the only way to find something out is to start with "I don't know", if you start with an assumption "God dunnit" then you can't go anywhere.
My question to you, if you would abandon your faith should science determine the answer? If so then you are arguing the gaps, your god is the ever receding gaps of human ignorance.

I mean the guy who says the Big bang started evolution is either a ring-in or a horribly undereducated person, the big bang was 13.82 (+-0.037) billion years ago, and the earth formed 4.54 billion years ago, in a round-a-bout way the big bang did start evolution, just like it started making apple pie. It doesn't mean it was the direct cause. Then he goes onto say some asteroid hit a planet and caused the big bang... that is ludicrous, the big bang was a singularity a point of pure energy in which all matter, space and time was collapsed. We can't know what happened before the big bang as due to the physics behind it nothing that happened before the big bang could have effected what happened afterwards. We may be able to indirectly probe into what happened before, but again this is a god of the gaps. If we find evidence of the multiverse you as Sven did on the weekend will simply retreat to "well God must have started off the multiverse", you are using language of speculation here with this kind of statement "must have", why must he have, cause you say so? Do you have evidence?

A wise man once said "man will believe anything as long as it is not in the bible", heh you realise that has been attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte. The same Napoleon who said "Religion is excellent stuff for keeping common people quiet. Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich."
But regardless, why does this make any point. I don't believe everything I read from any book, unless I know the author has some evidence to back up their claim, that there is some reference in the book as to where I can read more and get evidence. It would be like sitting down to read any book and simply taking it as fact without checking, it is foolish as the written word is actually more prone to error than the spoken word as it can have multiple authors editors and mistranslations, it can be a fabrication from the outset as any fiction book is.

"In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth" How do you know, what evidence do you have. If you say the bible, what corroborating evidence do you have. As the Hindu scriptures talk of Narayana (another name for Vishnu) creating the heavens and earth from his body and mind, there is no corroborating evidence so I don't accept it, you don't accept it why?

Darwin was commissioned to find evidence for evolution, yet you say earlier it started with him, which is it, it can't have started with him and him be commissioned to go find it? Regardless, according to his own words in The preface of the voyage of the Beagle he was on board as a naturalist, someone who is there simply to document and study flora and fauna, this was common practise on long voyages, just like Joseph Banks who visited Australia and gave his name to one of the flowers here, the Banksia.
http://www.literature.org/authors/darwin-charles/the-voyage-of-the-beagle/preface.html
So where is your evidence that he was commissioned to find evidence for evolution?
It doesn't matter where he went, evolution has now been demonstrated to have occured in every location on the planet. I as an atheist and someone who accepts evolution have no desire to go to these islands, but if you look at all the places he visited I am sure you have probably been to some of them; http://www.literature.org/authors/darwin-charles/the-voyage-of-the-beagle/

It doesn't matter that one of the islands he visited that you picked in an attempt to make a point was called the holy cross, early explorers like most in their time were likely Christan, he also visited Tierra del Fuego (meaning land of fire), does that mean the Roman god Vulcan their god of fire is real, no. It just means some human with existing biases named the places, just like calling it enchanted...

Yes all he discovered there where the finches, he then used this to do experiments on breading pigeons, he discovered traits do change over time, he re-discovered breeding can cause more changes than just the colour or shape of an animal, it can change to allow for better survival.
Since then we have discovered many examples of evolution, eg ring species; http://evolution.berkeley.edu/evolibrary/article/0_0_0/devitt_02
Evolution witnessed in the lab: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._coli_long-term_evolution_experiment
Even cases of rapid evolution to suit island environments; http://news.nationalgeographic.com.au/news/2008/04/080421-lizard-evolution.html
Plus the Nylon eating bacteria; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nylon-eating_bacteria (the nylon it eats, nylon-6 didn't exist prior to the 1950's).
And the bacteria that has evolved to consume the radiation on the Chernobyl nuclear power plant; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiotrophic_fungus
Not to mention the use of evolution to generate vaccines to emerging and potential virus and bacterial threats.

There is no evidence that Evolution is a religion, they answered millions of years ago because as the Dover trial determined, the teaching of creationism or intelligent design is not science it is religion. The teachers have been, shock horror doing their job with these kids teaching them the current facts that science has determined from the available evidence. You are quoting Kent Hovind here as a "scientist" which is an argument from authority, and an authority currently serving time for tax evasion, and who got his science degrees from discredited organisations;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kent_hovind
So you are saying there is a massive cover up among not just scientists but the mass media as well. Some of these scientists and mass media types are surely Christians, wouldn't they prefer if evolution where false and their religion 100% true, wouldn't at least one of them in the last 50 years have leaked out this cover up... nope nothing. Try again.

Evolution says nothing about cosmology or cosmogony, the Big bang theory is part of the last two, it shows from evidence of the speed of receding extra-galactic objects, the number of observable bright objects, the chemical make-up of stars and the microwave background radiation and temperature of this background that the universe is 13.82 (+-0.037) billion years old, they have this figure with an accuracy approaching 99.9999%; http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/03/21/us-space-universe-idUSBRE92K15Q20130321
The earth formed about 4.54 (+/-1%) billion years ago, homo sapien aka modern man is at most 200,000 years ago, not 3 million. How do Christians fall for any lie, by being fallible creatures and the power of religious indoctrination. Evolution has evidence, you have yet to show any evidence for God or the creation.
Millions of years was not started by Charles Lyell, hmm have a look at the Hindu cycle of the universe; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindu_cycle_of_the_universe they were a lot earlier than Lyell and describe the Billions of years in each Brahma day, each Brahma day is a universes life.

And so what if Lyell later attacks God in his books, is your God so weak he can't stand up for himself, is your faith so weak that you can't read an opposing authors views. I oppose your views yet watch your videos, who is the weaker here.

Schofield added millions of years in his Bible, again so what. Just cause it is written down doesn't make it true, just because it is true doesn't mean it needs to be written down. Evolution didn't gain acceptance because of these people it gained acceptance because it was scientifically sound and made testable predictions, predictions that have been tested and found true. Darwin knew of no method for these changes from parents to offspring to be passed on, if DNA hadn't been found then he would have been proved wrong, Darwin also had no where near the access to fossils we have now, this is further supporting evidence, as is the genetic similarities between all living things that has been tested over and over again with genetic sequencing.

The Descent of Man had racism, again so what. Darwin was racist as were most people in his time, he also married his cousin and believed in homoeopathy. People are fallible and can be wrong. Newton believed in alchemy yet his ideas on motion where fairly right, Darwin was wrong on some things right on others, just I am sure if you look back into your past you have been wrong on some things and right on others. If anything you are proving my case, could the authors of the bible have been wrong on some things, specifically things they knew nothing about like cosmology and biology?

On the use of the word Race in the origin of species, I hope you realise that in biology at least Race has a specific non-racist meaning. Favoured races in the context of the book has to do with favoured traits for survival.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_%28biology%29

OHHHH and now you go to Hitler, couldn't resist could you. Is this the same Hitler who said in Mein Kampf "And so I believe to-day that my conduct is in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator. In standing guard against the Jew I am defending the handiwork of the Lord."
Or who said in speeches "We tolerate no one in our ranks who attacks the ideas of Christianity. Our movement is Christian", or "Secular schools can never be tolerated because such schools have no religious instruction, and a general moral instruction without a religious foundation is built on air; consequently, all character training and religion must be derived from faith ...we need believing people." - Adolf Hitler, April 26, 1933, speech made during negotiations leading to the Nazi-Vatican Concordant
All of Hitlers troops also had "Got Mit Uns" on their belts, German for God With Us. So don't start their unless you like where it has now taken you.

Yes Aboriginal bodies are in the Smithsonian, it was a different time. A time in Australia before Aboriginals where allowed to own land or vote. Mistakes where made, but secular societies have the ability to say sorry, rather than simply ignore it or ask for forgiveness from God as religious societies often do.

The Bible isn't complicated as it is stories made up by illiterate herders 2500 years ago, that where wrote down many years later after a long game of Chinese whispers (telephone for Americans), then simply expanded upon by someone who wanted a sequel written.

Glad to see that you are losing some followers in your claptrap creationism, one day people will watch these videos and laugh as they do at flat earth pictures now, or stories of alchemists;
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/28/pat-robertson-creationism-earth-is-not-6000-years-old_n_2207275.html

Part two is debunked here; http://atheism.morganstorey.com/2013/06/the-truth-about-science-part-2.html

The "Truth" About Science- Part 2

Back from a debate and I did say I would post this post debate, so here is Josephs second video debunked, I'll do part one later. This is really rough as it was meant to be a comment to a youtube video but it is way too long as Joseph does use the scatter gun technique so there is a lot to debunk. There may be more of these to come.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDd0cMWsyAU&feature=youtu.be

DNA isn't math, and doesn't do math. It is a series of chemicals that we give meaning too, notice I said WE as in humans.

Stars and planets don't work like a clock, look into orbital dynamics, the kupier belt and inner asteroid belt and its non-clockwork like orbits, not to mention comets and rogue asteroids, heck even interstellar rogue planets larger than Jupiter. Interesting that the bible would mention a clock seeing as mechanical clocks weren't invented till the 1300's.

Earth in the centre of the Universe;really, you can't be serious here this is a gross misunderstanding of cosmology. It is stretching away from Mars at the same rate, from the milky way at the same rate and Andromeda and its 1trillion stars at the same rate. We are in the centre as every point is in the centre by your definition. We don't know where the real centre is and it is likely not us, as from a galaxy outside our local group we would also be appearing to move away at a proportional red shift of our distance from them.

Pantheist; Believes the universe is god, polytheist "believes in heaps of gods".

You can quote the bible to prove anything, I notice you are clean shaven in the clip; "'Do not cut the hair at the sides of your head or clip off the edges of your beard." - Leviticus 19:27
But yes men can and have said God created the heaven and the earth, as they did in the Sumerian creation myth from 1600bce, they also talked about a flood that three of the four gods let happen, one decided to tell his favoured follower to build a boat to survive it, sounding familiar? No this doesn't mean a worldwide flood happened, the more likely answer is that the myth was copied from the Sumerians in Babylon to the Canaanites and Jews in Israel and Palestine.

7 Days of the week actually goes back to pre-Judaic times, in the 6th century BCE Babylon to be precise is the earliest it has been found. But a hint to the weeks origin can be found in the names of the days. Sunday after the then worshipped Sun, Monday after the then worshipped Moon, Tuesday after the Nordic god Tyr the equivalent of the roman god Mars, Wednesday or Wodens day after Woden the Nordic spelling of their king of Gods Odin, Thursday after the Nordic God Thor, Friday after the Nordic god Frigg Roman equivalent Venus (hence the Italian for Friday is 
Italian Venerdi), Saturday after the Roman god Saturn who was father to King of the Gods; Jupiter.

7 continents is just due to our definition, you must realise that, there has been some contest by Greenlanders to have their island called a continent, others define anywhere between 4 and 6 continents.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continent
7 colours really, wow. There are billions of colours in the Electromagnetic spectrum, most we can't even see as we only have 3 cones for coloured light perception and can only differentiate 7 colours, some animals have more cones and can thus differentiate more, there are even humans with 4 cones.
7 objects visible from space... Really this depends on your resolution. I can see my house from space and every house in my street. There are hundreds of objects even visible with the human eye from space.
7 musical scales, now you are just being silly, this is again by our definition. I am sure dogs with their better hearing if they had better brains would have hundreds of scales.
7 elements of the periodic table... please tell me you didn't just say that, maybe you should go back to the medieval 4 elements of earth, air, fire and spirit. There are 85 naturally occurring elements and 103 so far discovered.
It doesn't go on and on and on... There are 365.25 days in a solar year, split into 12 unevenly numbered months that were human defined and are almost all named after Roman gods or emperors. 

Bible numerics, now this is just getting silly. You know there are supposed numerics in the Koran as well with 19 featuring prominently. Numbers are just those numbers, the human mind does get fixated on them, specifically numbers like 3, 7, 12, 13, 19. Numbers can also trick us, the old trick of pricing a car at $19,990 instead of $20,000 cause it looks cheaper... really it is $10. Have a look into the Psychology of randomness to discover that even when given free choice people tend to pick the same numbers. Have a look at the claims of the authors of the Enochian language, that this must be the perfect language of the angels as it is "mathematically perfect", it was simply made up by two men, one who understood mathematics. This is what the authors of the bible did, they may not have understood mathematics, but they knew the books that came before and already had 3,7,12 in their head.
Your math is very off in this section, I urge you to seek out a statistician and get them to check it and show you how and why you are wrong.
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/shawnhar/archive/2009/12/17/the-psychology-of-randomness.aspx

Hebrew words are numbers, this is Talmud and Kabbalah stuff. Something that most christians don't accept as they know this is special pleading by the Rabbis who we know wrote the Talmud and Kabbalah. They found things that fit, and made them fit where need be. This has been debunked by statisticians...
http://cs.anu.edu.au/~bdm/dilugim/StatSci/
Satan= 13x13x13, I thought 666 was the number of the beast, or maybe that was 616? Whoop de do, you have assigned 13 to mean sin and thus Satan=3 sins, it doesn't mean anything as you have defined all the parameters. What if as the Chinese do 13 is assigned as good. Satan in Hebrew is actually numerically 364, it is in Greek that it is 2197.

We get our letters from Hebrew, Nordic and Greek, if you look at old English you will see the Eth, Wynn and Thorn characters in the alphabet that were straight from the runic symbols. Even the name alphabet is a hint, from the first and second of the Greek letters, Alpha and Beta.
The Cross as it is shown in this video has been seen pre-Christianity in Greece, Celtic coins, Egypt, pre the Hebrew language even being written down. The cross was used by the Chinese for centuries BCE for the number 10, and we now have seen that children draw a cross developmentally just after they draw circles, so it is the second easiest shape for us to draw.
What actually happened, Sumerians started with cuneiform or pictographic writing, the Egyptians adopted this but it took to long to write, so they developed a short-hand cursive form for their papyrus writing and this due to their empire was copied far and wide, and simplified even further into other languages. Notice the similarities to Hebrew, Mandarin, even the Latin alphabet that we are using now.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/30/PinedjemIIBookOfTheDead-BritishMuseum-August21-08.jpg

Cells, firstly although some of this is video of the cells from a microscope the video of the workings of the inside of the cell is not video at all but it is computer generated based on observations. These complex functions we have started to discover evolved from simpler functions.

Yes you do go into everything briefly, that tells me either one of two things. You don't understand it enough to go into it in depth, or you are being dishonest and attempting to baffle people with lots of erroneous information at once, so they can't take it all in just the overall picture.

Fossils; Yep we can tell they have died and thanks to Nuclear theory we can tell when roughly based on nuclear decay of their radioactive elements. Deny this and you deny the ability for nuclear power to work, x-rays to see through flesh and the Fusion that happens in the sun.

Geologic column: oh dear, no many strata are not dated from fossils. Relative dates of strata (whether layers are older or younger than others) are determined mainly by which strata are above others. Some strata are dated absolutely via radiometric dating. These methods are sufficient to determine a great deal of stratigraphy. Some fossils are seen to occur only in certain strata. Such fossils can be used as index fossils, simply to give us an idea of the date of that strata. When these fossils exist, they can be used to determine the age of the strata, because the fossils show that the strata correspond to strata that have already been dated by other means. The geological column, including the relative ages of the strata and dominant fossils within various strata, was determined before the theory of evolution. 
Radiometric dating has been tested independently hundreds of times and not failed, except when people do dishonest things such as interfere with the test subject before hand, or give partial information to the testing lab.
You shake a jar of soil and you do get sedimentation, but it compresses differently. A geologist would be able to explain this to you, but basically if it is not compacted it will form different types of basically airy rocks. If it is compacted over time between the layers then the rock layer will be more solid. We do see this in strata from recent volcanic eruptions.

Polystrate Trees; Polystrate fossil or the tree growing through multiple layers. This can be caused by the tree fossilising and then being uncovered and covered again. This has been shown with fossil trees that have two sets of roots, one where the ground was originally and another where the ground moved to in another layer. This can also happen during a small local flood such as the one in Brisbane and Toowoomba where water pushed mud in slides forming layers over the tops of building and trees. In fact we have found polystrate trees below other polystrate trees. 
This doesn't discredit geology, it is just interesting.
So basically it can fossilise, become uncovered then become slowly covered again. Or it can have sediment lay down as it is living and then fossilise (multiple roots at different levels). This is like a mangrove in a swamp when the tide rises, what if the mud rose as well?
We know these aren't settling layers due to the earlier mentioned hardness of the rock, if it settled quickly it would be soft, not hard like we see.

Please throw any argument you have at; http://www.talkorigins.org or http://wiki.ironchariots.org if you get an answer there then you need to read it.