On Creationism

The point of this page is to show how common miraculous births were in the ancient world. Few of these are virgin births in the manner described in Matthew and Luke, but they are all miraculous - they all point to the individual being superhuman. Christianity assuredly did not copy pagan religions, but we can be just as sure that it was influenced by them. Converted from paganism wanted their god to have a miraculous birth too! But that miraculous birth had to be fitted into the extant narrative. Jesus was known to have a mother called Mary and several siblings, including the disciple James. The virgin birth was as miraculous as they could reasonably claim, perhaps inspired by - or at least legitimised by - Isaiah 7.   Attis The daemon Agdistis is linked to both the birth and death of Attis. Agdistis had both female and male reproductive organs. The gods feared this and plotted his death. Tricked into swallowing a sleeping potion, the gods tied his male genitalia to his foot. He ca...

An argument some make about the credibility of the gospels is that the material they contain all comes from oral tradition, and the Jews at the time had a long tradition for accurately keeping a good oral tradition. There are, in my view, a number of issues with this argument. Who was doing it? To say the Jews were good at keeping an oral tradition is a very broad claim. What we know is that collectively they kept their holy texts (i.e., the Old Testament) very accurately, but it is quite a stretch to therefore suppose every Jew of the time was trained in maintaining oral tradition. Their oral tradition was maintained by specific people, all of whom were in the priesthood, and all of whom were trained presumably from an early age. Quite different to Galilean fishermen. But there was an oral tradition! That said, it seems likely Jesus did teach the disciples to memorise some sayings. We do read about him sending the disciples off to preach. Mark 6:6... Then Jesus went around teachin...

 I will let the "Genesis Park" introduce this subject: In 1944, as a ten-year-old boy, Anderson’s task was to keep the coal furnace stoked at his home in Buckhannon, West Virginia (WV). One evening he went into the basement to refuel the furnace and carried a particularly large lump of coal on his shovel. As he carried the loaded shovel, it wobbled and the coal fell onto the floor, breaking the lump in two. A slender metallic object was revealed, protruding from one of the broken halves. Newton set aside the piece with the curious object and placed the remainder into the furnace. Over the next couple of days the boy extracted a small bell from the coal, first by whacking it with a  croquet mallet and then by cleaning it with lye and a scrub brush. Unfortunately he scoured all the coal off the intriguing artifact! But his parents and others witnessed the bell that he brought up from the basement and it became an object of conversation, residing on an old secretary desk shelf. ...

Occasionally creations will accuse evolutions of inventing just-so stories to explain what we see in nature. The reality, of course, is that evolution is real science, and the account for why something is how it is will always: (1) be backed up be real evidence; and (2) noted as speculation. The real irony, however, is the number of just-so stories in the Bible, especially Genesis. Note that none of these are backed up by evidence and all are presented as fact. Daddy, why do we feel shame when we are naked? Because Adam and Eve ate from the Tree of Knowledge. Genesis 3:7 Daddy, why do snakes not have legs Because God cursed all snakes when that nasty snake in the Garden of Eden tempted Eve. Genesis 3:14 Daddy, why is there enmity between snakes and mankind? Because God cursed all snakes when that nasty snake in the Garden of Eden tempted Eve. Genesis 3:15 Daddy, why do women suffer in childbirth so much? Because God cursed all women after Eve ate the forbidden fruit. Genesis 3:16 Daddy...

 CS Lewis book, Mere Christianity , can be found here . This is about book 1 of the book, five chapters across about 20 pages. Lewis spends a long time saying there are moral laws that exist as abstract concepts in the same way as mathematics. It is debatable, but I tend to agree, so will not address it further. Then, a the end of page 20, we get: I should expect, for instance, to find that the stone had to obey the law of gravity—that whereas the sender of the letters merely tells me to obey the law of my human nature, He compels the stone to obey the laws of its stony nature. But I should expect to find that there was, so to speak, a sender of letters in both cases, a Power behind the facts, a Director, a Guide. Thus, his argument is that if the is a law of gravity or a moral law, then there must be a law maker. It is an old argument, but that alone does not make it wrong. Maths What he does not say is whether he thinks the laws of mathematics requires a law maker. And to be clea...

Twice in each of the Synoptic gospels Jesus says he will return before the generation ended. It looks like this was an early belief - perhaps Jesus even said it. But as time passed, the prophecy had to be re-worked. That generation passed... Looking at Mark, as the earliest: Mark 9:1 And he said to them, “Truly I tell you, some who are standing here will not taste death before they see that the kingdom of God has come with power.” It seems likely that even by ca. AD 70 this was looking unlikely, so Mark leads straight into the transfiguration: 2 After six days Jesus took Peter, James and John with him and led them up a high mountain, where they were all alone. There he was transfigured before them. 3 His clothes became dazzling white, whiter than anyone in the world could bleach them. 4 And there appeared before them Elijah and Moses, who were talking with Jesus. 5 Peter said to Jesus, “Rabbi, it is good for us to be here. Let us put up three shelters—one for you, one for Moses and one...

 I will introduce this by quoting Wiki . The streetlight effect, or the drunkard's search principle, is a type of observational bias that occurs when people only search for something where it is easiest to look. Both names refer to a well-known joke: A policeman sees a drunk man searching for something under a streetlight and asks what the drunk has lost. He says he lost his keys and they both look under the streetlight together. After a few minutes the policeman asks if he is sure he lost them here, and the drunk replies, no, and that he lost them in the park. The policeman asks why he is searching here, and the drunk replies, "this is where the light is". ... Noam Chomsky for instance uses the tale as a picture of how science operates: “Science is a bit like the joke about the drunk who is looking under a lamppost for a key that he has lost on the other side of the street, because that’s where the light is. It has no other choice.”  Is Chomsky right? Well, yes, to an ex...

 A polystrate fossil is a fossil that spans multiple layers of the geological column and, at a casual glance, would seem to refute mainstream dating of rocks. The term seems to be an invention of creationists. It is a great example of cherry-picking data. There are plenty of web sites that shout loudly about how polystrate fossils prove the Flood, and ignore all the evidence that argues the other way, from several different sciences such as geology (eg radiometric dating), physics (eg ancient starlight) and biology (eg the fossil record). Based on a Quote-Mine Polystrate fossils seem to have become a thing with Henry Morris' book, Scientific Creationism , published in 1974, though as far as I can tell the term appeared later. The relevant bit can be found here . Morris quotes a book from 1964: It is clear that trees in position of growth are far from being rare in Lancashire (Teichmuller, 1956 reaches the same conclusion for similar trees in the Rhein-Westfalen Coal Measures), and ...

Radiometric dating is well-established science, but because it gives results creationists do not like, they will usually reject it out of hand, without good reason or even understanding what t is. This is a quick overview of what it is. What is an isotope? Atoms are made of relatively large protons and neutrons in the centre (the nucleus), with tiny electrons whizzing around around them. The number of electrons will be equal to the number of protons, and it is this that determines what the atom actually is, what element it is. If there are 6 of each, it is carbon, if there are 26, it is iron, if there is only 1 of each, it is hydrogen. There are approximately the same number of neutrons, but it can vary. The number of neutrons does not change the element, but does change the isotope . An atom of hydrogen has 1 proton and 1 electron, but it can have 0, 1 or 2 neutrons (or more). Some isotopes are stable - they will last for every - some are not. The isotope of hydrogen with two neutrons...

The onion test has been used to batter creationists for many years. It is based on the fact that onion DNA is five times the length of human DNA, and challenges creationists to explain why the designer would make it that way.  A lot of ID arguments are based on information. Why, then, does an onion, a very mundane plant, need fives times as much information in its DNA as humans do? This has become more of a hot topic with the results of the ENCODE project being published, and the realisation that much of what was previous thought of as "junk" DNA is not actually junk. IDists say this is what ID predicted, though they seem very reluctant to say exactly what that prediction was - exactly how much junk do they predict? They also claim 80% junk DNA is a failed prediction of evolution, which, as far as I can tell, is simply not true. The 80% figure was what earlier observation seemed to indicate, not what was predicted by evolution. Evolution could explain that figure, but it can ...

 Background​ Proteins are made in cells in a complex system. A protein is a long sequence of amino acids. There are twenty different amino acids used in nature; different sequences give different proteins. The sequence is encoded in DNA, with a set of three bases signalling a specific amino acid. The sequence is transcribed into mRNA (messenger RNA), and passed to a ribosome. The ribosome then assembles the protein, using rather shorter tRNA (transfer RNA) to select the right amino acid. Evolution​ How could such a complex system possibly evolve? The simple answer is that we do not know. This is something that happened maybe 4 billion years ago, and by its nature will not leave any fossils. However, the theory of evolution is real science, so real scientists are looking at how it might have happened. I present here a number of science papers that discuss how the organelle assembly line could have evolved. Real Science​ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1894784 We describ...

Neil Thomas is the new poster boy for the ID movement. He has published a book " Taking Leave of Darwin: A Longtime Agnostic Discovers the Case for Design " with the Discovery Institute (DI), and is writing a series of articles for their web site. But who is he? They conveniently tell us : Neil Thomas is a Reader Emeritus in the University of Durham, England and a longtime member of the British Rationalist Association. He studied Classical Studies and European Languages at the universities of Oxford, Munich and Cardiff before taking up his post in the German section of the School of European Languages and Literatures at Durham University in 1976. There his teaching involved a broad spectrum of specialisms including Germanic philology, medieval literature, the literature and philosophy of the Enlightenment and modern German history and literature. He also taught modules on the propagandist use of the German language used both by the Nazis and by the functionaries of the old Ge...

This is a response to an article in Mind Matters News, by Michael Egnor. It is not a million miles from CS Lewis' argument. The article is here: https://mindmatters.ai/2022/02/faith-in-god-is-the-only-coherent-basis-for-reason/ He starts: Atheists commonly assert that there is a profound dichotomy between faith and reason. This is exemplified by atheist evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne ’s book Faith vs. Fact. He implies that we can have faith in the truth of something or we can have factual knowledge of the truth but we cannot have both. Faith and fact are, in his view, mutually exclusive. But that is not true. Faith can have several meanings. I would suggest that Coyne is saying that if we have reason to believe something then faith is superfluous. Therefore, you either believe a claim is true because you have reason to think it is true, or you believe despite having no reason, and that is faith. In this sense the two are mutually exclusive. One may ask: how do we know that what...

One of the biggest arguments the Intelligent Design (ID) movement use revolves around information. At its simplest, they claim that a process without intelligence - such as evolution - cannot produce information, and therefore cannot lead to the rich diversity of life we see around us. I have never been that clear on how IDists actually measure this quantity, despite it being a big part of their arguments. They seem very sure evolution cannot create information, but how can they say that without a clear way to determine what it is? How can we discuss information in regards to evolution if we have no idea what it really is? Even the Discovery Institute are clear that we need a way to measure information: How does our definition of information apply to biology, and to science more generally? To render information a useful concept for science we need to do two things: first, show how to measure information; second, introduce a crucial distinction–the distinction between specified and unsp...

When civil war was brewing in the US, both sides made their arguments for and against slavery, and both sides used a book that they believed supported their position. One side used ,  On the Origin of Species  the other used the Bible. Can you guess which is which? Abolition​ The abolitionists used Darwin's book,  On the Origin of Species  to argue that slavery was wrong. Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species sent shock waves around the world when it was published in 1859.  The suggestion that all human beings, of whatever race or color, share a common ancestry, had an especially seismic impact on a country teetering on the brink of civil war , as Randall Fuller shows in The Book That Changed America: How Darwin’s Theory of Evolution Ignited a Nation. ​ ... ​ A number of prominent American scientists at the time argued that God had created black people, brown skinned and white people separately, and each of them were different, had different capacities, and ...