Those two only make sense if you’re so deep through the looking glass that Alice herself would wonder if you were okay.
Humphries, to his credit, seems genuine enough, but his research, such as it is, is a bit on the fantastical side, and he hides the strange stuff in papers that he footnotes in later papers as given. Few things have made me drop my jaw more than his attempt to ‘scientifically’ show that the Earth as an actual sphere of water was plausible because God was under no obligation to keep the magnetic moment as 0, so the God-induced magnetic moment gets defined as ‘k’ and used in further equations.
Huh??
Sarfati, on the other hand, is near as I can tell a charlatan. I spent a good two weeks following all his footnotes, stories, “maverick scientists” (like Feduccia) and the like and the possibility that he believes what he writes is the least probable explanation. The decisions someone makes to snip things out to make them say the opposite of what they do, or to equivocate, or to pick exceptions out of a source that otherwise does nothing but contradict their own position is a CONSCIOUS one unless one is prepossessed of some sort of neurological disturbance.
He’s like Jesus, except that he lied for your wins.
I don’t say that lightly. It’s like reading moon hoaxer material, except less genuine.
On other theological-vs-scientific topics, what is this obsession with laws? Laws limit – if all the laws had to be within certain bounds for everything to work, even if there were a creator involved, would that not show that its hands were tied? Why have complicated cellular machinery, anyhow? Why can’t Adam and Eve’s descendents be made out of mud or dust as well – being animated by a soul and with an all-powerful creator, this would be perfectly possible.
I noticed a few other arguments up around the thread and I won’t catch them all, of course, but a few items:
The human genome is not “degrading” – combinations that don’t work after fertilization are non-viable and primates also tend to miscarry instead of bringing zygotes with serious defects to term (yes, it doesn’t catch everything, but it bounds the distribution of defects) – note that this is information from the environment making its way into the system; DNA doesn’t entail viability inherentlyYes, you can add genetic information – it happens naturally as well. Plant polyploidy and the trail of duplication in retinol and homeobox genes are the tip of the iceberg. There isn’t one single blueprint for a species – never mind that blueprints are very poor metaphors for genes (even the way promoter gene variations work would scream ‘recipe’ instead), and sex, viability feedback and population take care of the rest
(I note here that Sarfati implies very strongly that everything started out ‘front-loaded’ – for example, that everything had to start out with genes for all the colours and then lose them over the generations. That being the case, we should see genetic markers of front-loading, and we don’t)
All the 1 in 10^2708 chances for a protein completely fail to consider that this is the poker hand fallacy – the chances of you getting what you got are astronomically against, but you had to get something. Proteins are a fairly inefficient way of getting functionality (see RoBisCo for an egregious example): you have hydrophilic, hydrophobic and neutral and water pushes them into shape. Many proteins have a small active site and then a giant squeeze-tube of doesn’t-matter-all-that-much out the back end.
Also, don’t equivocate immaterial with supernatural – that’s silly and flirting with the ham-handed declarations of the presuppositionalists. Emergent properties and observations are not supernatural.
Sarfati and Humphries, really?
Those two only make sense if you’re so deep through the looking glass that Alice herself would wonder if you were okay.
Humphries, to his credit, seems genuine enough, but his research, such as it is, is a bit on the fantastical side, and he hides the strange stuff in papers that he footnotes in later papers as given. Few things have made me drop my jaw more than his attempt to ‘scientifically’ show that the Earth as an actual sphere of water was plausible because God was under no obligation to keep the magnetic moment as 0, so the God-induced magnetic moment gets defined as ‘k’ and used in further equations.
Huh??
Sarfati, on the other hand, is near as I can tell a charlatan. I spent a good two weeks following all his footnotes, stories, “maverick scientists” (like Feduccia) and the like and the possibility that he believes what he writes is the least probable explanation. The decisions someone makes to snip things out to make them say the opposite of what they do, or to equivocate, or to pick exceptions out of a source that otherwise does nothing but contradict their own position is a CONSCIOUS one unless one is prepossessed of some sort of neurological disturbance.
He’s like Jesus, except that he lied for your wins.
I don’t say that lightly. It’s like reading moon hoaxer material, except less genuine.
On other theological-vs-scientific topics, what is this obsession with laws? Laws limit – if all the laws had to be within certain bounds for everything to work, even if there were a creator involved, would that not show that its hands were tied? Why have complicated cellular machinery, anyhow? Why can’t Adam and Eve’s descendents be made out of mud or dust as well – being animated by a soul and with an all-powerful creator, this would be perfectly possible.
I noticed a few other arguments up around the thread and I won’t catch them all, of course, but a few items:
The human genome is not “degrading” – combinations that don’t work after fertilization are non-viable and primates also tend to miscarry instead of bringing zygotes with serious defects to term (yes, it doesn’t catch everything, but it bounds the distribution of defects) – note that this is information from the environment making its way into the system; DNA doesn’t entail viability inherentlyYes, you can add genetic information – it happens naturally as well. Plant polyploidy and the trail of duplication in retinol and homeobox genes are the tip of the iceberg. There isn’t one single blueprint for a species – never mind that blueprints are very poor metaphors for genes (even the way promoter gene variations work would scream ‘recipe’ instead), and sex, viability feedback and population take care of the rest(I note here that Sarfati implies very strongly that everything started out ‘front-loaded’ – for example, that everything had to start out with genes for all the colours and then lose them over the generations. That being the case, we should see genetic markers of front-loading, and we don’t)
All the 1 in 10^2708 chances for a protein completely fail to consider that this is the poker hand fallacy – the chances of you getting what you got are astronomically against, but you had to get something. Proteins are a fairly inefficient way of getting functionality (see RoBisCo for an egregious example): you have hydrophilic, hydrophobic and neutral and water pushes them into shape. Many proteins have a small active site and then a giant squeeze-tube of doesn’t-matter-all-that-much out the back end.
Also, don’t equivocate immaterial with supernatural – that’s silly and flirting with the ham-handed declarations of the presuppositionalists. Emergent properties and observations are not supernatural.