If you or anyone reading this thread in the future wish to read a legitimate critique of Frank Tipler’s Omega Point Theory, I recommend David Deutsch’s book, The Fabric of Reality. Chapter 14 of Deutsch’s book is available here. Deutsch has acknowledged the validity of the OPT, and has fitted it within his own Four Strands structure for the Final Theory of Everything. As Deutsch acknowledged in his book, Tipler’s theory is indeed a significant contribution to cosmology and quantum physics.

For Paul Burnett: Christian civilization is the mother of modern science. Christianity encourages discovery and progress for the purpose of ameliorating the human condition. No other civilization in the history of humanity (including the classical Greeks) can come close to making this claim.

Contemporary atheism, on the other hand, has no track record of encouraging similar discovery and progress. In fact — as evidenced by your own contempt of teleology as a possible solution to the probabilities problem — an argument can be made that atheism and materialism are the true science stoppers.

Mike, I don’t think Christianity as a whole is a “science stopper.” (But who burned Bruno at the stake?)

Stopping science is entirely a contemporary idea cooked up by a small percentage of new wave Christian Protestant fundamentalists and their fellow travelers in the right-wing conservative movement, who pride themselves in their ignorance of science and want their children (and others’ children!) to remain ignorant of science.

Answers in Genesis Christians deny not just evolution and biology and paleontology, but geology and astronomy and every other science. Do you deny that Answers in Genesis is a “science stopper”? (Have you been to their anti-museum?)

And is it just me, or do you think Frank Tipler got much of his “theory” from reading the Galactus stories in Fantastic Four?

The notion that Christianity is a “science stopper” is entirely a contemporary idea cooked up by new wave atheists and their fellow materialists.

You’re right – I put no particular faith in biologists (or any other scientists as persons), particularly not in any religious context. But I do trust the massive body of peer-reviewed research and publication.

And perhaps this is the place to mention that Squiggy does, too – as well as Mike LaSalle and Casey Luskin. Almost nobody goes to faith-healers any more – everybody goes to medical practitioners who practice medical science. Everybody who eats healthy food or even drinks water from a municipal water treatment plant is benefitting from science (ever heard of cholera?). The religious wingnuts who use modern publishing technology, much less rdio and television and computers, are using science. When they fly, they are putting their faith in aerodynamic science. This list goes on and on.

And yet they say they want their children to remain ignorant of science. What hypocrites!

Atheism has nothing to do with evolution, or with the choices people make. But even if it did, it would make no difference, as far as I’m concerned. If someone, for some bizarre reason, commits some destructive act as a result of learning that the diversity of species is the result of a natural process, that’s unfortunate, but that’s likely due to a mental disorder. Scientific fact cannot be suppressed.

Folklore. Many ancient people told stories about how this or that animal or rock formation or mountain came to be. Perhaps they thought they were divinely inspired, or perhaps they made it up to entertain their children, or to appear wiser than they really thought they were in order to impress people. In any case, snakes didn’t have legs six or eight or ten thousand years ago. The legged ancestor of snakes lived many millions of years ago.
http://www.wonderquest.com/snake-legs.htm

Squiggy again: “And by the way – is a “miracle” of a talking snake (whom the Bible says was possessed by Satan) a big deal compared to the creation of an entire universe? It wouldn’t even make the grade of “miracle”. ”

This snake did not merely speak, he was having conversations with people. Since the claim is that, apart from having legs, it was identical to modern snakes, it had neither a speech center in its brain or vocal apparatus. For such an animal to speak at all would indeed be considered miraculous, to say nothing of it having the wherewithal to convince Eve to eat the forbidden fruit.

Yes, most mutations are bad. The mutants usually do not survive to pass these mutations along to the next generation. Neutral mutations don’t matter. Good mutations, those in the right place at the right time, are quite rare.

Over billions of years, the relatively rare good mutations are passed along to the mutants’ descendants, and so accumulate that way. The probability of anyone ever seeing the first appearance of a good mutation is vanishingly small, given that we would have to continuously monitor every single plant and animal on Earth. Also, having already had millions of years to evolve, the need for any major adaptations are less. For a mutation to be retained, it must be useful. For example, if global warming persists, animals who live in what are now cooler areas and who therefore have thick fur may begin to sport shorter hair, providing the genes for such short hair is present in their genomes, and they have the time to adapt.

Squiggy also asked, “As for falsifying evolution, how can you falsify something that is completely untestable?”

There are many conceivable lines of evidence that could falsify evolution. For example:

* a static fossil record;
* true chimeras, that is, organisms that combined parts from several different and diverse lineages (such as mermaids and centaurs) and which are not explained by lateral gene transfer, which transfers relatively small amounts of DNA between lineages, or symbiosis, where two whole organisms come together;
* a mechanism that would prevent mutations from accumulating;
* observations of organisms being created.

http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CA/CA211.html

This is a fact – Christ turns peoples live around. People who would be dead (from their own choices) instead turn into wonderful people. Atheism makes people talk about “doofuses”. Go cure some of your own ignorance, and maybe your big head won’t pop.

Squiggy, I’m proud of you for being able to admit that about yourself. Congratulations! I hope I’ve given you enough links / citations to start curing some of that ignorance.

I hope you and all the other readers have learned something about intelligent design creationism. Stay tuned to what the doofuses in Texas have just done for the next chapter in this story.

I haven’t tried very hard to answer your questions about biology, because as I have repeatedly stated, I am not a biologist. And neither are you, as demonstrated by the very first thing you said in this discussion: “…evolution is their religion, and humanity is their deity.” As an anti-scientist, regurgitating biology questions out of your creationist playbook, you’ve made your viewpoint very clear.

And in spite of your bet, I gave you some answers and discussion on random mutations. But you don’t seem to be able to accept or understand that random mutations take longer than 6,000 years to be expressed. You “bet’ is ludicrous, and your logic is flawed. And I’ve got better things to do. Happy weekend.

As for the snake, I believe it also mentions that in those days, snakes had legs. They have since been found with vestigial appendages which “seem” to back that up. How could the writer of Genesis have known that if he was just making stuff up? A lucky guess?

And by the way – is a “miracle” of a talking snake (whom the Bible says was possessed by Satan) a big deal compared to the creation of an entire universe? It wouldn’t even make the grade of “miracle”.

P.S. You still haven’t tried to answer a single question I’ve posed. Wonder why that might be? (Not because you can’t, I’m sure.) And no matter what you might think, they are valid questions. Questions any real scientist would try to answer.

Oh, come now! Here’s the sequence of creation in Chapter 1:

Sky, Earth, light
Water, both in ocean basins and above the sky
Plants
Sun, Moon, stars
Sea monsters, fish, birds, land animals, reptiles, insects
Humans

Here’s the sequence in Chapter 2:

Earth and heavens
Adam, the first man
Plants
Animals
Eve, the first woman

Are you going to tell me you don’t notice any conflicts?

(And I won’t even get into the miiracle of the talking snake.)

Squiggy, which of the two different and conflicting creation myths in Genesis (Chapter 1 versus Chapter 2) do you subscribe to? And do you have faith that either one of them is testable or reproducible?

What? There is no conflict unless you purposefully read one into it. And of course God isn’t testable. But science isn’t science unless it is testable.

There’s been a healthy discussion over at Panda’s Thumb for the last few weeks on “random mutations” in the HIV organism, leading to antibiotic resistance. Have you been following that?

No I haven’t, but of course life is adaptable. It couldn’t survive otherwise. But a creature is the same creature whether it learns to survive penicillin, or grows a thicker coat. Obviously the animal whose colors help it blend into a changing environment will have a survival advantage, and it’s offspring will be more likely to survive. Or of the billions and billions of viruses, one manages to survive a drug, so it is the one that makes more viruses (which of course have the same immunity). In no case ever has it been shown that one creature became a different species.

P.S. Viruses aren’t harmed by “antibiotics”. This may sound nitpicky, but the point is, Christians aren’t dumb hicks who don’t know anything. We’re more likely to have been to college than the average Joe.

Comer was suspended shortly after forwarding an e-mail announcing a presentation being given by an author who says creationist politics are behind the movement to get intelligent design theory taught in public schools. Comer says evolution politics are behind her ousting.

While I certainly condemn Comer’s “ousting” in this matter (as indeed, I condemn witch-hunts of any stripe), I think it’s a major stretch to drag the Discovery Institute into this.

Also, for the record, I personally do not support the teaching of “intelligent design” in public high schools or grade schools.

Texas is just a few months away from a science curriculum review exercise, and the buzz is that some members of the religious right want to get Texas to be the site of the next Dover-like trial by adopting intelligent design creationism (=religion, per a recent Federal court decision) into the state science curriculum. Comer was accused of showing favoritism to science (which was her job, actually) instead of religion, so she was expelled (to use a Ben Stein term).

(See http://www.kltv.com/Global/story.asp?S=7425247&nav=1TjD and http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/ap/tx/5337882.html and http://www.ncseweb.org/resources/news/2007/TX/950_texas_education_official_force_11_29_2007.asp for some articles on this.)

The question, of course, is just what part, if any, did the Discovery Institute play in all this? Was the Discovery Institute providing aid and comfort and propaganda to the enemies of real science within the Texas Education Agency? Is everybody in the Texas Education Agency now madly erasing all their e-mails from the Discovery Institute? Was Ms Comer’s fate a warning to other supporters of actual science in Texas to keep their mouths shut and their keyboards locked if they want to keep their jobs? Will this sudden burst of publicity blow the cover off another carefully-orchestrated step in the implementation of the Wedge Project?

But at least now the Discovery Institute has an actual controversy to teach about. I can’t wait to see how quickly they will be able to respond to this one.

There’s been a healthy discussion over at Panda’s Thumb for the last few weeks on “random mutations” in the HIV organism, leading to antibiotic resistance. Have you been following that?

Squiggy, which branch of biological science is your doctorate in? Or do you just have faith in creationism?

Give up, eh? I ask serious questions and you respond with demeaning comments. Typical pseudo intellectual with total faith in a completely untestable, unreproducible “science”.

GalapagosPete said,

Yes, the onus is on you, because mutation has never been demonstrated to be anything other than random. Evolution is the accepted scientific theory, it will have to be falsified before something else can take its place.

All “random mutations” observed have been destructive to the individual involved (and we’ve been looking very hard for a couple hundred years now). They never give a “survival advantage” to a creature, they kill it.

As for falsifying evolution, how can you falsify something that is completely untestable?