DUers: I need information about refuting the following Creationist book...

The book is entitled "CREATION: Remarkable Evidence of God's Design" and its author is a fundie-Nazi named Grant Jeffrey.

You could always refer them to the nearest biology textbook, or nearest biologist.

"Deep space reveals mysteries of the first moments of creation.

Wonders of the universe point to a supernatural creator.

A revolution in our understanding of the universe's beginning.

Astonishing evidence of the universe's intelligent design.

Remarkable discoveries about the nature of the atom.

The collapse of the theory of evolution.

DNA - the language of God.

Modern science discovers God"

Theyre all about people misusing science.

Of course, in my opinion his greatest scientific discovery is thus:

If you break a dry (uncooked) piece of spagetti, it will break into three pieces EVERY TIME. (Try it!)

Just because he wrote a book supporting a religious view of creation, or?

He's one of those asshats who pretends to support Israel out of solidarity with Jews but really does it as part of those bullshit armageddon philosophies about an Armageddon in which Jews will either convert or be sent to Hell. You know...The usual fundie/reconstructionist/"Oh my fucking God we sound like Hitler" schick.

:toast:

some good stuff comes up.

God After Darwin: A Theology of Evolution
by John F. Haught

http://www.geocities.com/SouthBeach/Pier/1766/hovindlies/

say over and over "Evolution is both theory AND fact. Creationism is NEITHER!"

USE YOUR BROWSER TO SEARCH FOR REFUTATIONS OF CREATIONISM"
and remember, Creationists seek not the actual, scientific, testable, historical facts. They seek only that which is successful in propping up a myth that is the cornerstone of a flawed philosophy and worldview. If god didnt make the earth, then the story of the Garden of Eden is not true, and if that is the case, there could not have been a fall from grace, and if that is true, there is no need for redemption. AND IF THAT IS NOT TRUE...YOU DONT HAVE TO TITHE AND PASTORS WILL HAVE TO GET REAL JOBS!!!!!!!
It is religious mumbo jumbo and gobbledegook. DONT LET IT IN YOUR SCHOOLS!!!!!!!!!!

"God is a myth and Jesus is a fable. Get over it!" (T-shirt seen in Oklahoma)

Does the book offer a *Scientific* Theory of Creation, or Intelligent Design? That is, a theory that satifies the three prerequisites of all postulates that are to be classified as a scientific theory? These are:

1) A Testable Hypotheses
2) Confirming Evidence
3) Potential Falsifications

I've never read this particular book, I admit, but the pro-creationism books I have read never discuss a Theory of C/ID, but instead resort to vain attempts at debunking evolution.

She says,

"Evolution is a FACT not a theory".

Game over. These nutcases might as well be talking about Horus and Osiris.

I'm sure there are some unique aspects to this particular book, but if you ever decide to look at three or four, they tend to all argue the same basic things in similar ways.

A lot of the game is about distracting the scientifically underinformed reader into emotional responses. Beauty, sublimity, mystery, and lack of explicability are nice things, but in Creationist books they are there to draw attention away from the important questions of what, in context, really is understood and what importance any particular fact has to related ones (crucial ones are often left unmentioned). That's why these books tend to have lots of glossy pictures, tables, quoting of supposed authorities, and attempts to make the reader feel cognitively at dissonance with the evidence and style of the other side.

The usual game to attacking Evolution is to argue probabilities to people who can't possibly know/guess them. The "refutation" of the Theory of Evolution is usually put in an erroneous and a priori fallacious formulation of absolute probabilities- if one starts with a lump of graphite and asks what it takes to turn it into a mouse in some instantaneous way, the absolute probability is of course zero. Evolution doesn't work this way, of course- it acts using the element of time, via a series of individually small molecular changes contingent on the state just previously attained and in some fashion 'selected' relative to others. If you have 100 coins lying there in a state of 'heads', one coin, and a couple of throws, the question of 'How likely is it that you get 101 coins at "heads"?' is answered by: in a few seconds. And 102 heads, given the next coin, a few after that, and so on. (Suddenly 101 coins you are told got tossed in the air and all being shown to you as "heads" doesn't seem quite so impressive, does it?)

The evolutionary likelihood of something can in theory be estimated using a series of conditional probablities- certainly not by absolute (one-time) probabilities. (Unfortunately, no one actually has all the knowledge needed and quantified to actually compute such a thing.) But that is the standard logical fallacy of most Intelligent Design arguments. Biological evolution proceeds by small steps of finite probability. The attack on it in this way ignores the role of time and falsely presumes chemical behavior to be mechanistic rather than stochastic.

Most of the remaining "arguments" for ID are overt or subtle pieces and variations of the classical Proofs For The Existence Of God by Aquinas and/or the Ontological Proof of Anselm and their many minor variants by others, and mistaken claims about the amount or significance of scientific knowledge we have about things in Nature. Those are different in each Creationist text.

Kant demolished the philosophically serious aspects of the Proofs completely on their own terms about 300 years ago in (the very unreadable) 'Critique of Pure Reason'. So they are pretty easy and fun little chestnuts for philosophy mavens. For people invested in Creationism, the ugly problem about the Proofs is this: even if any of them is true, none actually shows or proves that the God of e.g. the King James Version is the God that is shown to exist. So to be a serious Creationist of the Christian subvariety (there are others), you therefore have to show that the sequence of Creation attested to Genesis is correct, because otherwise Wotan or Odin or Tyr or Jupiter or Brahma is just as plausible (and embarrassing) an explanation to other people.

The "proofs" taken up into the Church canon at one time all ultimately derive from the arguments for the existence and power of the Nature Gods of pre-Christian Europe and maybe the Near East. The Greeks wrote some of them down, the upper class Romans famously didn't actually believe in any of them except perhaps Fortune.

The saddest part of the whole game is that the Hebrew Bible (aka Old Testament) isn't interested in a Creator/Nature God except for some need to have some explanation for How Physical Things Just Happen To Be The Way They Happen To Be. It glosses over Oh All That Stuff rapidly, albeit twice (at variance with each other- how embarrassing the disagreement in order to Creationists!), impatiently hops to the famous assertion about Man being "made in the image of God", and rushes headlong into asserting a God who is psychologically serious and passionately moralistic, interested in the content of peoples' lives, and very confidently lets the Laws of Nature run on autopilot.

The Creationists' God seems not to have an autopilot for his Machine and seems to spend an awful lot of time making sure the planets revolve around the Earth properly, gets annoyingly fussy about how people fool around with their genitalia, upset with deformed creatures, and in general seems to be in need of a lot of helping out. There's always a need for some Demon to keep screwing with the works. The Creationists' God really looks rather like a hybrid of the old pre-Christian gods and goddesses of the Creationists' ethnic group, made (generally) nicer in personality, if you dwelve into such things.

Visit the Evolution/Creation forum at Internet Infidels. There are several professional scientists (real ones, not "creation" scientists) over there who will be happy to answer any questions you may have.

they obliterate theis creationist crap.

...because the Judeo-Christian God is a God who says FAITH is the key to salvation. If proof of God's existance were possible, you wouldn't need faith anymore.

The natural world truly is beautiful and elegant and marvellously coordinated. Some people take that as an indication of a creative intelligence behind it, while others don't. It's all a matter of choice. But that isn't the real issue in creationism.

Where the creationists go awry is in arguing that the universe is so complex and amazing it can't possibly be the outcome of natural processes. And that is a fallacy. It's like saying, "Snowflakes are vere beautiful, and no two are alike, so they must each have been individually designed by an intelligent creator." That would require overlooking the fact that even the very simple natural laws which govern the formation of crystals can produce a great variety of breathtakingly elegant forms.

The universe is a system and the various creatures and environments here on earth are also systems. It is the nature of systems that their parts have to function effectively together or else the system falls apart. For me, that's evolution in a nutshell: Effective systems survive and tend to become increasingly effective. Ineffective systems perish. It's as simple and basic a law as the formation of crystals, and it doesn't take divine intervention to make it happen.