Bill Nyes on Nyes - Ham debate
I've never met a creationist and it's probably best for them

Much to my embarrassment, you do know an ex-creationist. It's certainly not something I'm proud of!

There's a rather pertinent quote from (I believe) Richard Dawkins, along the lines of "Never argue with an idiot, the best possible outcome is that you win an argument with an idiot."

On the other hand, this lunacy needs to be stopped from spreading. The problem is, attacking it with science does not work, because the creationist position is not based on a desire for scientific understanding at all, it's based on the fact that if you believe that the Bible is the literal word of God, anything that disproves even one verse of it immediately requires you to throw the whole thing away.

I still wonder how one becomes a creationist. I mean I am a fully trained (lapsed) catholic, but even during RE, the teachers made very clear that the myth of the creation of the world was a figure of speech and not taken to the letter.

In Catholicism, there is this guy with a pointy hat who does a lot of your communication with the heavenly lord for you (both ways) so he is the one who is asking god to forgive your sins and so on, and he is the one telling you what god thinks about things. It is his job to revise interpretations of the bible on an ongoing basis.

Protestants have a direct relationship with God, they communicate with him without the intercession of the church. For some brands of protestantism, that makes the bible a piece of direct telling from God to you, and that leaves no room for nuance, scholarship or, well, any other form of sophistication.

Don't forget that they also believe (in a way Catholics don't really any more) in a devil who seduces us with apparently reasonable ideas about knowledge. All that tricksy wordy learning stuff you talk of is a trap devised by the horned one to lure them into Hell.


People should be cautious before congratulating themselves on not being fanatics like those guys. We all have a tendency to ignore evidence that doesn't support what we already believe, and to dismiss new ideas or information as the concoctions of evil.

From memory, Catholics have been fine with evolution since the early eighties, so if anything I'd have been surprised if you'd been taught a completely literal interpretation of the Bible in that regard. My background was what would probably be termed full on evangelical, which is an area where creationism still holds full sway and a completely literal interpretation of the Bible is the norm.

But do they really teach that the world was created in 7 days? And that eve was created from a rib of Adam?


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Yes. I think the thing is that when you are willing to allow "because God did it" to become part of your 'reasoned' debate, nothing is too bizarre or improbable to have occurred.

To be fair to them there's a whole range of 'creationists' from the ones who do believe the earth was literally created in a week (7th Day Adventists?) to the ones at the other end who just believe Intelligent design makes more sense to them than the theory of evolution.

They're all wrong but some of them are just a bit misguided and some others are utterly fruit-loops.

I recall that the word for "day" could also mean "era" - ie the world was created in 7 eras, which probably makes more sense. In my professional experience, the nicest patients I have also believe in a deity and are a practising member of their religion whereas the horrible ones who are demanding and rude are also atheists.

My experience is religious people were nasty bits of work because they knew they could confess their sins. ( aka, personal experience means bugger all)


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Whether creationist or evolutionist, you are all making the same mistake. It is logically impossible for any argument for either position to be both necessary and sufficient. Stalemate is guaranteed, and you are therefore holding an argument about "facts" which cannot under any circumstances ever be anything but beliefs.

We are not arguing. I am interested in the culture in which creationists are brought up.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Whilst I agree that absolute certainty is only the preserve of the mathematician (and indeed not even in every area of mathematics), if that were the required level of rigour to decide anything then we'd have no justice system for example. What one can point to is the level of evidence both for and against a given idea, in which case an acceptance of evolution makes far more sense than an acceptance of a creationist hypothesis.