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Creation SuperCamp SuperSnark Recap


CyborgKin

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I just wanted to say I hope to catch up on all you have shared this weekend.  Thanks for doing this!  You must be exhausted!

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Ting Wang: MAKING SENSE OF EVERYTHING - How the Bible is foundational to epistemology, ethics and cosmology

 

I think Microsoft still dislikes me. (Reference to his previous talk)
Tells Asian joke.  I've already heard it. But the situation around the joke was funny. 
I can't even make sense of my first slide. 

Epistemology means how do we know.  Study of knowledge 
Darwinism can't give a good reason of why the mind works.  What consciousness is. 
Darwin said the difference in mind between man and higher organisms was of degree. 
But he had a horrid doubt:
Why would anyone trust the convictions of a monkey's mind? 

Haldane 
If my mental processes are determined by the motion of atoms there's no reason for them to be sound logically,  thus no reason to believe my brain is composed of atoms. 

C.S. Lewis made about the same argument as Haldane. 
Expect upsetting a milk jug to yield a map of London 

Why does brain chemistry yield truth? 
Wilson Hitchens debate. 
Yes that Douglas Wilson 
Going on about how much Wilson won 
How could Hitchens know his thoughts are true? 
How does the premises of atheism lead to a distinction between his brain and any other chemical reaction?
Your arguments and the level of the puddles in my driveway are the same thing,  equally predictable. 
Mountain Dew and Doctor Pepper shake them up.  No one asks which is winning the debate 
You write as if you believe in a universe in which argument is a meaningful concept. 

Read a lot of Wodehouse 

Lennox vs Dawkins 
Materialist must be a reductionist 
Why should a reductionist belive their beliefs 

Biblical view of epistemology 
John 1:1
Logos
Explains the Greek letters to us hilariously 
Animals don't have reason or logic 
Humans have logic,  thinking the way God thinks 

Luke 24:45
2 Timothy 2:7
God gives us insight, but that does not preclude effort 
When God does something that never means we should do nothing 
Something about delivering a letter given to you be the president 

2 corinthians 10:5
Takes understanding of logic and people's assumptions to demolish arguments 
His cousin thinks Christians are dumb.  Must get it from TV
Historically Christians were intellectual. Founded universities 
We need to get back to that 

Darwin thought animals acquiring moral sense or conscience was inevitable somehow but had no actual details 

Thomas Huxley 
No explanation for why what we call good is preferable to bad 

Dawkins line about dancing to our DNA in River out of Eden (well written, Dawkins writes well) 
Some people get lucky 
To DNA there is no good or evil 
Lennox read that back to him 
"how can God be evil?" "I didn't mean it like that" (a bit of a  fake British accent) 

... Without a god,  life is only a matter of opinion -  Douglas Adams 


Ethics 
Consequentialism/Utilitarianism 
Definition from Merriam Webster 
According to whom? Who decides what option has greatest utility? 

Micah 6:8
The problem of evil 
This is one opinion of many views 
Isaiah 45:7
"I bring prosperity (shalom),  I create disaster (evil, as in tree of knowledge of good and)" 
What exactly does this mean? 
Perhaps saying God is sovereign over evil. Evil isn't stronger than God 
Lamentations 3:38

View of reformers,  Martin Luther 
Nothing greater than or equal to God's rule and will 
John Calvin,  all God will is righteous,  evil something difficult 

Zwingli,  no imposed upon God,  God can do to man what man cannot do 
God can kill, not murder because that life belongs to God,  cannot steal as all belongs to him. 
1 Kings 22:22-23 God allows a lying spirit to deceive someone 
2 Samuel 12:11-12
God was behind Absalom taking David's wives,  judgment for taking Bathsheba 
Judges 14:3
(joke about Samson saying "get her for me!" he used rudest possible language) 
Samson marrying someone he shouldn't,  was from the Lord 
Stuff happened and Samson got really mad and killed a lot of them 
BTW Samson was commended for his faith.  So there's hope for us. 

Romans 9:19-20
Responsibility.  People assume it presupposes freedom. Actually it only requires someone to hold responsible 

God hardened Pharaoh's heart to be mean to Israel to make God famous 

Job 1:21
God gives,  God takes away,  praise God 
Sounds good in theory but hard to do 

2 corinthians 1:9
Trust in God who raises the dead,  not in ourselves 

Socrates 
Euthryphro 
Do the gods love it because it is holy, or is it holy because the gods love it? 
Something isn't carried because it is a carried thing. 

Sagan pale blue dot 
Nothing to save us 

Nietzche 
God being dead connected to us being alone in the universe 

Hubble 
Earth being in a special place is a last resort 

If the earth is in a favoured position,  hard to deny God 

Krauss about Axis of Evil in CMB
Is Copernicus coming back to haunt us? That's crazy,  this isn't happening 
Everyone was annoyed when Planc satellite came back with same thing in HD 

The Hermetica has same model 1200 years earlier than Copernicus

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Ron Neller: DIGGING DEEPER - A geomorphologists journey to faith

 

New to this
8 Year Christian
Found CMI a year or a year and a half ago
Full time employee as of Monday

Studies landscapes 
Water,  rivers systems 
Not digging deeper,  but swimming further 
Lost some research students in foods but found them all alive 
Been robbed, shot at, arrested by foreign governments, fallen into cisterns and bitten by things 
Ecuadorian soldiers, barely got away,  someone fell out... 
Flicked water up to catch on torchlight make rainbow and be spotted in time to not be seen. 

Ron was a flood chaser 
Seen a huge number of flowing water environments

Ended up creating a research centre on Fraser Island because he likes it there 
It was very successful.  (pic of Queensland government minister Anna Bligh visiting ) 

Ayers Rock stuff 
Parks and Wildlife (who they called 'Parks and Wildfires'  lol) 

Raised in Non-Christian family,  very dysfunctional,  other 3 siblings have done time 
Went to university as escape 
So, not interested in a father God 
Got invited to churches and went because social protocol of the time 
Saw evidence of Creation around the world 
Amazed by diversity of environments 
Genesis 1:31 Ron saw everything and it was very good 
Began to question the paradigms 
Saw evidence contrary to accepted ideas 
To his shame now, wrote a paper saying there was a big flood in a certain place which was big enough to destroy the evidence of the previous floods which must have happen
Because to say there might have been just one flood isn't accepted in papers 

Began to express a recognition of God (but didn't really want do have anything to do with God) 
An atheist woman was very negative and kept questioning him and he dismissively said go read the Bible. 
She came back wanting to meet this God and asked go to his church
He didn't attend a church 
They tried one which was some super old place and there was no way they would go in there 
So they kept looking and found a different one which convenienly happened to start later
They gave their lives to Christ that day 
(when they walked in, she didn't believe in God but wanted to meet Him, he believed in God but didn't want to meet him) 
And they got married two years later 

Pics of what looks like a fast stream and a slow meandering river 
But the 'fast'  part is just turbulent. The velocity is the same.  People got that wrong for a long time. 

Six geomorphologists given same data and interpreted it differently. 
They saw it because they believed it. 

You can tell more about environments by the sediments than by the fossils. 

Live creatures have to buried fast or they would run away 
Lack of predation 
Lack of oxidation 
Continued deposition 
It's not about the animal, it's all about the sediment 
Interdisciplinary rivalry ribbing here 

Continental sedimentation 
0.3 m per thousand years average 
I.e. won't bury a fish even if you put a lead boot on it 
Near shore and mangrove sedimentation isn't much either 
Tsunamis don't actually do much either. 0.1m max 

Floodplain deposition 
A lot of sediment 
Satellite pic of Amazon 
River channel migration creates the floodplain 
Most diverse sedimentary environment you will ever see. 
Contrast to a big sandstone like the Hawkesbury. It's uniform for hundreds of kilometres 
So those could not be floodplains like we see from rivers. 
What is floodplain sediment deposition rate anyhow? 
Not much actually. 
Ron published a paper about a huge flood event into Australia that made international headlines. The event was a whopping huge 0.1m

Sediment is moved in the initial phase of a flood while it is rising 
Hysteresis effect 

Explaining fossils 
"Animals wander into swamps and get covered."
In reality animals don't do this! 
"Maybe the rates were different in the past."
But what happened to uniformitarianism? 
Higher rates doesn't change the way processes work! 

Wavelength of most rivers is 10 times the width. 
Some weird rivers have rivers meandering 30 times the width 
Claimed to be relics from very wet past 
But they are being made today in this climate:
Ron's paper about one such river was belittled but it turned out later to be common 

Ends with some advice for talking to people who have different views 
Mentions how he saw the works of God before he believed 

At the start he jokingly asked for a standing ovation and cheers and call for encore,  to demonstrate to CMI they were right to hire him. The audience of course did this because funny. 

For the first time stargazing is not cancelled because it isn't raining! 
It was actually a nice day with some blue sky 

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'NIGHT OWL' BONUS TALK 4 Ron Neller: Reinterpreting Fraser Island 

 

Story of how a 4WD fell through what was actually a floating mat, not land... 

So many pretty photos 
Lakes that don't touch the water table 
Swamps 8m deep full of literal tea 

Invisible steams: flowing rivers on sand no turbulence so people don't notice them 
Largest sand island in the world 
World heritage sites are based on evolutionary and long age assumptions 

A bus on fire 
Research station worked with the police and other services to help people 
So busy Ron had to sit by the pool on the phone 

CSIRO's interpretation of the island is based mostly on correcting with other islands instead of researching it. 
Parabolic dunes 
Any sand further north falls off continental shelf 
Podzol soils,  pure white,  rare 
Western side of the island believed to be oldest 
Sand is yellow because aluminium oxide 
The coffee rock: all over beach,  no real explanation 
Mapped vegetation types,  assumed soil depth the same as other places with same 
Call it a time transgressive sequence 
Because the futher you go the less stuff in the soil which affects what can grow 
Circular reasoning that the plants control the soil because they inferred the soil from the plants 

C14 dating didn't fit so they threw it out as inaccurate,  as would be expected because permeable sand, it shouldn't work 
They say the island material came from Gippsland Victoria so it's 700k years old (or was it 70k,  I forget) 
Vegetation is not aligned with the dunes 

Soil profiles don't fit 
Podzolic soils were proof of age except they turn out to be able to form in only a thousand years

Hypothesis:
Fraser Island is post flood
Haemocretes first
Dune formation gradual process ongoing since 
Variations in vegetation based on dune formation and subsequent erosion 

Outline of research that is needed to figure things out 
Because he wants to spend more time there lol 

Current interpretation,  researchers think they know 90 percent of it and do no research 
Ron says we really only know 10 percent and need to study more of what is actually there 

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Quote

Why do bacteria produce beta thingy to stop penicillin? 
Other bacteria produce penicillin so they need to be able to break it down for reasons. 

No they don't.  Fungi produce penicillin.  They are completely different organisms and, not surprisingly, they are not affected by penicillin. 

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4 hours ago, docmom said:

No they don't.  Fungi produce penicillin.  They are completely different organisms and, not surprisingly, they are not affected by penicillin. 

I was somewhat distracted when he mentioned beta lactamase and it's entirely possible I misheard or misunderstood what he actually said. 

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Song: Shine Jesus Shine 
Mark Harwood devotional 
The information we have received needs to transform us 
Reading from Job.
I know my redeemer lives,  will stand on the earth in the last days 
Also in 2 Timothy: I know who I have believed. 
He has the power and authority and will fulfill what he has promised 

Make the message of the Creator go out as far and wide as possible 
This is a spiritual battle not just intellectual 
If it was just intellectual,  the issue would have sorted out already 
If it was just intellectual,  the  ideas would have been dead a decade from Darwin 
Pray with they person next to you

 

 

Gary Bates: CREATION RESTORED - The New Heavens and New Earth


With respect to my geologist friends,  I'm talking about the king of sciences,  theology! 

Lots of different end times views at CMI,  We all believe in a restored creation 
A spiritual message to tie everything we've heard together 

What are you taking with you to heaven? 
Only the people we lead to Christ 
People we might never see again in this life but will see again. 

Gary was first Christian in his family 
Used to be rabid evolutionist 

Lots of unscriptural ideas about the afterlife 
All the cute cherubs and pearly gates and could and harps 
Michael Bloomberg who said he had earned his place in heaven 
Genre of books about people who claim to have been in heaven 
Accounts all seem to disagree 
Gary has researched false memory syndrome relating to UFO experiencers 

Everyone has some sort of view about the afterlife,  of lack of one. 

Ultimate authoritative source about Heaven is the Bible 
Original creation was perfect. Reflection of God's nature 
Fallen creation due to sin 
Sin is what we are now 
God already had a plan for salvation in place 
God is going to restore creation 

Original Creation -> Fallen creation -> New creation 
Likely will be recognisable as earth,  with all the best things but better 

Whole world will be destroyed first 
We aren't just saved for this world but the next 
When our loved ones die of cancer for instance,  it reminds us something is wrong with the world 
Reminders of death everywhere 
Earth and the universe is an unsuitable place for redeemed believers to live 
Psalm 102:25-26 reminds us the heavens and earth will perish 
Isaiah 51:6 says about the same 
But God's salvation will be forever 
2 Peter 3:2-3 says to remember the predictions of the holy prophets and commandment of the apostles of the Lord and saviour 
People are following their own sinful desires (not the scientific evidence) 
People want to deny God because of their own sinfulness 
Wilful ignorance,  the uniformitarian approach 
We don't want to scare people into heaven.  But maybe that's not such a bad idea to warn them of the coming destruction that we want to save then from 
This earth and universe has to go before the new one comes 

What's your hope after death Mister atheist? Nothing. 

The coming destruction is like an uncreation 
Like the flood was rolling back to when the water was over the earth 
Jeremiah 4:23-26 uncreation language,  seems to reference Genesis 
Shows us how serious sin with, it corrupts everything 
Romans 8:19-23
Pain now,  but hope and eager waiting 

We can't live forever next to fossils and a star that's gonna burn out eventually 

We won't be some ghostly vaporous spirits 
Well have real senses to enjoy the world 
God is in the restoration business 
Bring things back to how things were meant to be,  the original design 
Verses from Revelation 
Tree of life in the new Jerusalem 
No more curse 
Colossians 1:19-20 God will reconcile all things to himself 
Isaiah 65:17 new heavens and earth,  won't miss the old things 
Resurrected Jesus was physical and ate food,  our resurrection will be the same

Will the new earth be a physical place? 
Pagan Greek philosophy gave people the wrong idea that the physical is bad 
Adam was physical and would have lived forever 
Imagine if Adam had lived forever physical separated from God.  Necessity of death to save us from that fate 
With physical bodies we need a physical place to live 
Revelation 22 description of a city 
No reason not to expect a physical restoration 
There cannot be another fall 
None of those bad things will happen again 

Resurrected bodies like we have now but not afflicted by the curse in any way 
Motivated by spiritual desires 
The spiritual is part of who we are 
1 corinthians 15:42-44, 51-52
Continuity between our current and new bodies 

Will we really be ourselves? Personality and memories? 
Yes 
Rev 6:9-11 example of remembing being murdered, told to be patient 
Will remember loved ones 
CS Lewis the pure joy of those in heaven not diminished by those being righteously judged in hell 

Will we experience time? 
Seems so 
We are time bound creatures by nature 
Only God is outside time 
Not sure how time will be measured.  Earth with no day or night 
Distance will exists,  relates to time 
So will singing.  Thus singing in time.  Hopefully in tune too,  lol 

The triune God is the focus 

quoting Job 19:25-27 again 
I  myself will see Him with my own eyes. 

John 17:24
Perfect love before the creation,  we will partake of it 

Evangelism 
None of us deserve to partake of the new heavens and new earth 
We don't know when we or anyone will die: urgency 

Importance of literal Genesis so we can literally be saved


Plugging various books 
One Human Family 
Is Human life special? 

 

Stuff about the unfortunate split when Ken Ham's group wanted to do their own thing and the federation structure to keep the different parts of the ministries in line so no one can go rogue or take the assets for something else. 

All the other international arms only exist because of Australia 

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Don Batten: POWER AND GLORY - How the universe and life reveal the Creator

 

Basic question 
Where did everything come from? 
Created, or not created 
Julian Huxley quote about how there is no need or room for the supernatural.  Everything evolved including religion 
Ragging on UNESCO a bit for pushing that worldview 

Pic of rusty junked car
The car had a beginning 
Rusting out 
Universe too,  eventual heat death 
Matter is not infinite,  energy is being dispersed,  universe could not be infinitely old,  must have had a beginning 
Hebrews 1:10-11

Atheistic cosmologists are trying to imagine a big bang without a beginning 
Fiddling with math to try to get an eternal quantum field or something that fluctuated. 
What causes a quantum fluctuation in a quantum field 

Space-time can't possibly be eternal 
But everything with a beginning needs a sufficient cause,  an instigator 
Even a 12 month baby is aware of this 
The universe from nothing is the biggest rabbit out of a hat ever 
Discover magazine cover quite about everything from nothing.
Normally people that talk about something coming from nowhere get locked up.  (Laughter ensues) 

Cartoon: Now students,  hydrogen is a gas which if left long enough turns into people 

Cause of universe (material) necessarily had to be non material. 
Spiritual,  non physical. 
God being non physical means God can be eternal 

In the beginning God is the most sensible logical rational statement you can imagine 

Incredibly beautiful Hubble telescope images 
Things we see on earth speak of design 
Anthropic principle is big problem for the view it was an accident 
Fundamental atomic consonants 
Formation of stars at all 
Stability size and colour of sun 
Something to think about: If the sun stopped shining now,  you wouldn't know for 8 and a half minutes 
Magnetic field protects us 
Day length,  water, ozone,  moon, tides 
Author of The Privileged Planet got fired from his university 

Why is the universe so big? 
Declares the glory of God 
1 Chronicles 29:11-12

What is the creator like? 
No material / supernatural/physical 
Eternal / everlasting 
All powerful 

Phillips Adams at Atheist Convention: who began God? 
Bertrand Russel God must have a cause 
No, only things with a beginning need a cause 
God is not created does not have a beginning, can not have a cause! 
To whom is a batchelor married? 

Beginning of life 
The more science happens,  the more problems for those who don't believe on God 
Paul Davies astrobiologist 
Audience laughter after explanation of astrobiology 

Miller experiment 
This is the best they've got 
Some amino acids 
Building blocks of life 
No oxygen but no evidence the earth ever had non oxygen atmosphere 
Experiment not realistic
Wrong outputs 
Explanation of chirality 
Need only left handed amino acids,  but also makes right handed 
Can sort just left handed ones with enzymes 
Enzymes are proteins,  which is what this exercise is trying to make so that doesn't help 
Energy plus matter plus life does not make life or organised matter 

Claim that with enough time anything is possible isn't true 
Only 10^80 atoms in universe 
4.4 googlol experiments,  I think given one per millisecond per atom for a few billion years 

Suppose a 300 amino acid protein,  we have have optically pure amino acids of the correct 20 available,  they bond into chains without enzymes 
Possible proteins is 10^390
So no chance of making even a single protein. 
And even if you do,  you don't have the DNA to match 

ATP nanoscale rotary motor,  seems almost hundred percent efficient. Just one of many incredibly sophisticated parts in simplest living things 
No parts of the cell are alive on their own,  no part a jumbo jet can fly 

Simulating a single cell division took ten hours and made half a gigabyte of data 
ENCODE project people thing they will never complete the project of understanding how it all works 
A lot of atheists getting rattled 
Antony Flew -  figured out God must exist but sadly never met God 

Is science the search for naturalistic explanations, or for logical explanations? 
Should be the latter. 

Archaeologists search for signs of intelligence 
Forensic detectives look for proof of intelligent agents 
SETI is trying to find intelligence 
It's perfectly scientific to conclude that an intelligence was responsible for causing what you observe 

Richard Dawkins recognises "appearance of design for a purpose" 

Creator is also super intelligent 
Romans 1:18-22
Never has it been clearer there is a creator 

Who is the creator? 
An impersonal force? 
No that is Buddhism and Star Wars 
Star Wars is fun. 
The Force is not good or evil 

God revealed his personal nature in the person of Jesus Christ 

Music for atheists:
Ain't Gonna Be No Judgement Day, Dr Stephen Baird and the Oppososums of Truth 
If there's no design it means I'm free 

God gave laws for how to behave 
Man doesn't want to 

Adam and Eve not Adam and Steve 
Underlying disease of sin and trying to get God out of society 
Pornography denigrates humans who are the image of God 
No purpose of life,  just a bit of slime on the planet:
Suicide rate 

Main purpose of God is to glorify God and enjoy him forever 
Made for relationship with one another and more importantly with our creator God 
Romans 5:8 God demonstrates His love for us: while we're were still sinners Christ died for us 
Romans 6:23 gift of God is eternal life 

John 10:10
I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly 
Adopted into God's forever family

 

That's all folks! 

*dies*

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They really went with Adam and Eve not Adam and Steve? How do they address homosexuality in nature?

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Ganymede is the only moon with a magnetic field, because it has a core which has existed long enough for a magnetic field to be created. This is because Ganymede is a big ass moon.

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5 hours ago, formergothardite said:

They really went with Adam and Eve not Adam and Steve? How do they address homosexuality in nature?

*resurrects*

(Actually I was at the beach, not dead. Lots of fun in the wild waves!)

Quote

Those who attempt to justify homosexuality in humanity by pointing to its existence in the animal kingdom have a logical problem. They argue that homosexual behaviour and relationships in animals makes it ‘right’ for the same sorts of things in humans, but animals also practice rape, wanton murder, incest, rampant theft, physical abuse, and cannibalism. By the same reasoning, therefore, we should accept and condone these sorts of things as ‘normal’ too.

http://creation.com/homosexual-animals

 

4 hours ago, Alicja said:

Ganymede is the only moon with a magnetic field, because it has a core which has existed long enough for a magnetic field to be created. This is because Ganymede is a big ass moon.

A quick googling says 

Quote

Recent spacecraft observations of Jupiter's largest moons suggest that most of them also have magnetic fields, some that they generate on their own and some that need a little help.

http://sunearthday.nasa.gov/2010/getinvolved/aa_wu_magneticmoons.php

But that wasover five years ago so they could have changed their minds.

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I think the reason I've found this so interesting is that a "creation scientist" at least has some views to discuss and argue with. (Not with me. My geology, astronomy, anthropology, and archaeology classes have only been intro level so far.) But at least there's a chance to discuss science. Creationists who believe that science is "all a lie" don't contribute much to an interesting discussion. 

@CyborgKin, about how old are/were most of the participants? Just curious. Glad you got to have some fun at the beach!

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A whole range of ages.  Plenty of old folks, a few dozen teens, a few university stuents, parents with young kids, parents with adult kids,  homeschool families, non-homeschool families, multiple visibly pregnant ladies.

Not just white people either. A wide variety of Asians.  Not many black people, but still some (both the African sort and the Australain Aboriginal sort).  A couple of mixed families too.  So an ethnic mix fairly typical of Australia.  Not that everyone was domestic.  I think the largest overseas group were the NewZealanders. Including a family from NZ that has been living in Saudi Arabia for some years, for petrochemical related career reasons.

Everyone seemed pretty friendly to everyone else.  CMI's materials seem pretty anti-racism, so racist types likely wouldn't feel welcome.

You probably noticed that there were a few Asian speakers.  Interestingly it was an Asian speaker who quoted Doug Wikson.

As I mentioned before, there were not many skirts, and also few dresses, and not all I noticed were long. Actually the only dress I remember noticing was a TARDIS dress that was somewhere above knee length. I'm not into Doctor Who, but that nice shade of blue is hard to miss.  I wasn't aware of anyone criticising anyone else's choice of clothing either.  Yay tolerance!

Sorry I'm probably oversharing.

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5 hours ago, CyborgKin said:

Those who attempt to justify homosexuality in humanity by pointing to its existence in the animal kingdom have a logical problem. They argue that homosexual behaviour and relationships in animals makes it ‘right’ for the same sorts of things in humans, but animals also practice rape, wanton murder, incest, rampant theft, physical abuse, and cannibalism. By the same reasoning, therefore, we should accept and condone these sorts of things as ‘normal’ too.

The problem with this argument is that rape, murder incest, theft and physical abuse hurt others, while homosexuality doesn't. Their reasoning makes no sense at all and is just them grasping at straws. The gay penguins hurt no one just like the gay couple. 

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  • 1 month later...

Surprise bonus round!

 

Mark Brunacci talk 1

Title: "It's About Time" Topic: Age of the Earth
(57 attendees, and a baby)
Creation Ministries International intro
Up until a couple hundred years ago pretty much everyone (in our society) believed the Bible
two ideas that came against it:
1. Deep Time
2. Evolution - that everything in the world around us 'made itself' through random chance and a lot of time
Evolution is what CMI mainly focuses on, but in a way Deep Time is more important.  Without it, Evolution could never have existed as an idea.
Mark is a GP full time (just an ordinary doctor not a PhD), and a full time dad with 7 children.  Only does creation ministry part time.

Genesis 1:1 in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.
The two main age ideas: < 7 thousand and 13.8 billion are so vastly different, why are we still arguing about it, shouldn't it be obvious?

6 days of creation
1. light, earth, space and time
2. atmosphere
3. dry land and vegetation
4. sun moon stars
5. sea creatures and flying creatures
6. land animals and mankind
(the ceiling fan started clicking, joke about how things won't improve if we just leave them for a long time)

Genesis 2:2 on the 7th day God had finished the work, rested

Some early church people didn't believe 6 day creation:
Origen and Augustine said it limited God and was beneath him, he did it instantaneously

Does the Bible really mean 6 days?
The Hebrew word "yom" means "day"
There are at least 3 meanings of "day" even in English.
In my father's day, it took 10 days to cross the country during the day.
Day is used 2301 times in the old testament.
When used with a number or with evening and morning, it always always always means a literal day.
Why is it only questioned in Genesis?

Where did our 7 day week come from?
Days, months, and years have astronomical meanings: earth, sun, and moon.
But weeks don't come from anywhere that we can find.
Some places have tried changing the length of the week and it didn't work out.  (Russia, France)

Detailed chronology from Adam to Noah, we can calculate the flood was 1656 years after Creation, approx.  (There's a little room for a few years due to months not being given)
The Bible is the history book of the relationship between God and man.
Classic love story: God makes man, God loses man, God wins man back :P
The Exodus 2513
Jesus 4036

What does Genesis mean?
Hebrew experts believe that the writer(s) of Genesis intended to convey the ideas that creation took place in 6 24 hour days like our days, the figures in the geneologies form a chronology by simple addition, and the flood was understood to be worldwide and extinguished all human and animal life not on the flood.
(that doesn't mean they believe that's true but that's what the language says)

Jesus himself took Genesis as history whenever he mentioned it.
Mark 10:6
"at the beginning of creation God made them male and female"
day 6 is the beginnning of 4k years before Christ
a million odd years ago on a timeline of 13 billion since the big bang is at the END
so what Jesus says doesn't fit the long age view.

Long list of the Fathers of Science
all believed the Bible
Modern science is the child of Christianity
Without the Bible we wouldn't have the science we have today.
Johann Kepler "Thinking God's thoughts after Him"
scientific method: because they believed the world was ordered and consistent
keep testing things, get other people to test things, find more and more ways to test things, eventually get to truth.
those who didn't believe in God believed in a world that was chaotic and there wasn't any point in testing it.
other civilisations did make sporadic but impressive scientific progress but it was christian civilisation that took science to where it is today

James Hutton 1726-1797
"Theory of the Earth" 1788 wrote about Siccar Point, Scotland.  Was just his opinion not science.
Charles Lyell was a lawyer with a big interest in geology, liked what Hutton was talking about, wrote "Principles of Geology" An Attempt to Explain the Former Changes of the Earth's Surface by Reference to Causes now in Operation.
His aim was not to increase knowledge and follow scientific rigour but to "Free science from Moses" - develop his own theory without the Bible
This is where the concept of Uniformitarianism began.  It became the law of geology.
(in reference to Uniformitarianism there was a slight spelling bee joke and mention that Mark homeschools his kids)

Uniformitarianism:
"The past history of our globe must be explalined by what can be seen to be happening now" - James Hutton
There was no other acceptable explanation.
If you see a big valley: we don't see massive floods now, just slow erosion, so slow erosion must be used to explain the formation of the valley over many many years.
Grand Canyon in American had to be formed by the Colorado River (despite the fact that it would have had to run uphill to do that)

This idea that you can only explain things through current processes is wrong.
And in recent years it's become too much to bear: geologists have had to explain things with catastrophes, slow processes just aren't enough.
But of course a global flood is still forbidden.

the theory of uniformitarianism in geology promoted (i.e. forced) the idea that simple weak forces could act continuously over long periods of time to produce radical changes in the Earth's landscape; the success of this theory (lead the same kind of idea being applied to geology) - (I typed too slow to get it all in time)
Darwin read The Principles of Geology (Lyell's book) on his voyage on the Beagle.  Darwin applied the ideas Lyell and Hutton had applied to geology, to biology.

Biblical timeline
No mention of the millions of years in Genesis
Where can they fit?
Some people put them in day one, between day 1 and  2, spread them out over all 6 days...
(Mark used to be a theistic evolutionist)
It's a very weak God that uses evolution to create
All reinterpretations of Genesis timeline put death before Adam's sin.  That really breaks the message of the Bible entirely
Death and suffering entered the world as the result of man's sin.
One day the creation will be restored to perfection.
Genesis 1:31 "God saw all that he had made, and it was very good" (the Hebrew means it was perfect)
Trying to take a long age view puts that on top of layers of a fossil record of death suffering disease and so on.  That wasn't good at all!
So trying to put long ages and fossils and death before then says that what God called 'perfect' was pretty terrible.
And  death is no longer a consequence of our actions but something that was always in the world.
So then God's promises of a restored world in the future are invalidated.
No reason to trust God about anything, or believe that he was power to make anything perfect, or is good.

Back in the day, people used to have a background in Biblical knowledge, that's gone now.
People no longer trust the Bible, they believe it's been proven wrong.
Before we can proclaim Jesus, we have to show people they can trust the Bible at all.
(tells people about creation.com and Creation magazine and the Journal of Creation)

A footballer in Sydney who was called an 'ape' by an 18 year old girl.  He's an Aboriginal.  She was called out for being racist.
She knew it was an insult but didn't get why it was racist.
In all the news articles no one actually explained why calling people with dark skin 'apes' is racist.  (Calling a white person an ape is fine)
(It's because of evolutionary ideas that some people -i.e. white people - are more evolved than others, while darker people are less evolved and closer to apes)

Age of things
Can't do medical tests to work out someone's exact age.
Only thing that will prove that is a birth certificate.
Fossil bones are facts but their ages have to be worked out and aren't certain facts.
We can do radiometric dating on the rocks surrounding fossils. (The fossils were formed about the same time as the rocks surrounding them)
Radiometric dating: when the lava solidifies, the minerals are locked in at a certain ratio of elements.
Over time, unstable elements decay.
Half life: after a certain abount of time, half the unstable isotope decays into another.
We work out the age based on the current measured ratio, based on what we believe the decay rate has been and the original ratio was.
That assumes no parent element lost, no child element gained, the starting amounts were what we think, the rate hasn't changed.

Testing radiometric dating techniques
Should work on rocks of known ages
Different methods should agree reasonably well.
Tested:
Mt Saint Helents 
Kilauea Hawaii
Hualailai Hawaii (I probably spelled that wrong)
The tests gave ages of millions of years for rocks ages decades or centuries (I missed the exact numbers)

Testing different minerals in the same sample gave dates that don't overlap.

Example of fossilised wood inside volcanic rock (fairly deep): the wood was carbon dated to thousands years of age, the rock was dated to millions.
A second example of the same kind of thing

Carbon Dating
Noah's flood would have drastically messed up the carbon cycle
Massive carbon sinks and so on.  CO2 dissolved in the water and so much vegatation and animal live buried.
So we would expect much older apparent ages when carbon dating things in that era and following (as you go back in history the closer you get to the flood, the more distorted to old the carbon dates would be)

Failures of uniformitarianism
Less than 12 million years of mud on the ocean floor
only 60 million years of salt in ocean
earth's magnetic field can't be billions of years old
short period comets gone in 100 thousand years would need ridiulous amounts of earth size objects around all the planets for there to be comets left today
no observed data to support evolutionary model of short period comets
no one has ever observed the Oort cloud

Supernovae
We can predict 3 stages of supernova expansion and how long they take
Stage 1 is short (hundred years), stage 2 a bit longer (hundreds of years), stage 3 very long (millions)
We can perdict how many supernovae we should observe in each stage based on how old our galaxy is.
should be about 2 in first stage either way
125 stage 2 if 7k years old, 2260 if billions of years old
should be many thousands of stage 3 if billions of years old, none if 7k years old.
We observe only a couple hundred stage 2s and no stage 3s in our galaxy, fitting the young galaxy prediction better than the old galaxy prediction.

Mary Schweitzer Dinosaur red blood cells
Had trouble beliving her observations - blood cells can't last that long
had trouble publishing her data - was told it wasn't possible.  When asked what data would convince the publisher she was told "none"
- that isn't science any more, you have to accept the data you get!

Coal
assumed 30-300 million years old
should be no Carbon 14 because it's half life is about 5k years
an earth sized chunk of C14 would be gone in 100k years
So no one would bother testing for C14 in coal!  It's like testing the zoo for unicorns.
Crazy creation scientists asked for coal samples to be tested for C14
They were told it was a waste of their money and they were nuts, they said yeah do it anyway.
Came back with a result of 40k years (kind of result you would expect due to flood messing with carbon levels).  There should have been none!
So then they asked for diamonds to be tested.  Diamonds are even more stable than coal and should be billions of years old so we should be even more certain there is 0 carbon 14.
Results came back as about 40k years.
So something is rather wrong about long ages!

Carbon 14 in dinosaur bones
Not found by creationists
Results were removed the the conference they tried to present at.

"The truth is out there" joke - laughter from those in audience who know x-files.

Learn through involvement:
 "tell me and I forget, teach me and I remember, involve me and I learn" - Benjamin Franklin
Thats why you should buy stuff to read later.

"I'm going to sell you stuff and that's baaaad." :P
CMI sells stuff at cost not to make money because they want people to be able to have the material and information to answer questions.

Not saying we shouldn't teach evolution: it's an important view that has shaped our world and everyone needs to understand it.
We ought to know and understand even more about evolution!

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Inspiration From Creation (DVD)
How Engineers are copying GOD's Designs
Professor Stuart Burgess
Duration 65 minutes

first part of talk: introduction to bio-inspiration - why engineers are so eager to copy from nature
part 2 why bio-inspiration is importantt to Origins
3. his research on bio-ispiration
4. being on the front line of the origins battle

There's now journals devoted to the topic of bio-inspiration, biomimetics
Bio-inspiration improves performance
Engineering is very competitive
Engineers see copying nature as a way to improve efficience and get better designs

Smaller air vehicles
Ligher exoskeletons and actuators
Stronger knee joins
Faster racing bicycles
Team GB the british olympic cycling team approached him to design faster bicycles for them
(He's not allowed to explain the project.  Especially not to Australians!)
Greatful for Australian having beaten team GB in the previous championship so he can have the credit when they win in the olympics (this year's) LOL

Talking about teaching at Cambridge and all the great scientists who have been there (important foundational scientists who were creationists)
patents
Has done spacecraft design
Learned how design takes a lot of skill and wisdom
Envisat - designed solar away, won a top design award (Turners Gold Medal) in the UK for the mechanism it needed
joke about it was called Envisat because people were envious of it :P

Evolution preducts bad design is nature, is blind and clumsy
Creation predicts supreme design.  the Creator is perfect in knowleldge
Bio-inspiration shows wht is found in nature.

Evolutionists claim nature contains bad design
Quoting Richard Dawkins saying the eye was designed by an idiot.
Dawkins believes and hopes the eye is badly designed.  He needs to believe teh whole world was badly designed.  But he hasn't proven it.

Advice for his students:
Never limit yourself to step by step change in design.  That limits your creativity.
Example of a gearbox: you couldn't invent it by step by step improvement as an evolutionary process.

Steven Vogel quote the evolutionary process faces constraints far more severe than anything impeding human designers.

Limatation: evolution is limited by what is needed for survival.
It cannot add beauty and add extra functionality.
Example of touring motorbikes which have lots of extra comfort features beyond what are necessary.

Steve Jones quote Evolution does its job as well as is needed to do , and no more.

Contrast:
God is perfect in knowledge
Has no limitations to step by step change or what is needed for survival
Side note: God commands us to study His creation in the book of Job

Part 2: Stuart Burgesss own research in bio-inspiration
Dragonfly inspired micro air vehicle.
Much better than mini helicopters.
Insect flight is more stable near a wall or ceiling.
Insects are much quieter than a helicopter.
Sometimes it's valuable for a mini air vehicle to look like an insect ;)

Studied common darter dragonflies.
Had people running around gardens with nets
studying their fight
They don't just flap their wings but twist them by a huge amount.
Produces a vortex - basically a whirlwind
Vortex goes right around the back of the index in a donut shape and produces a downwash that makes lift.
That's how insects fly, which scientists didn't understand in the past.
Shows a video of dragonfly's flapping, slowed down 40 times.
Their first conclusion after studying the angles and the twists was that they had to give up :P  but they already had the grant money :P:P
40 degree wing twist angle much more than they expected
Had to measure exactly at what  point in the wing strong the twist occured.
Because they couldn't really understand the full aerodynamics they had to just copy all the angles exactly.
Invented a double crank rocker mechanism capable of copying the flapping and twisting of the wing.
Had to get the mechanisms exactly the right amount out of phase.
Couldn't find a computer program in the world capable of the modelling so the had to work it out by trial and error
"A general scientists measures what is, an engineer creates"
hundreds of precision components weighting total 10 grams, flapping frequency up to 10Hz
One of the biggest challenges was assembling the mechanism. - another example of how difficult design is.
Big lesson: design is very difficult, all sorts of challenges.
0.4 mm bolt with nut.
Needed special tiny tweezers, and magnifying glasses and students with small hands good at origami
Testing the vortex in a wind tunnel
One of the first teams in the world to demonstrate creating such vortices in a man made vehicle
Even to this day these vehicles are almost impossible to control but they have demonstrated very high lift forces.
video of it flapping - prototype cost 250k pounds.

Birdlike micro air vehicles were another small project
Identify the pantograph wing mechanism
study aerodynamic braking

Demonstrates how the joint in the wrist of the bird works with LEGO Technic
folds up very compactly, less muscles needed
possible to deploy the wing with force applied from the elbow

aerodynamic breaking as a more efficient way to slow down
formulated an equation about how it works in some type of gull

lists his relevant published papers
Conclusion in Creation there is supreme design
(He'd like to have written that in the paper but of course couldn't)

second example:
fish-inspired linear actuator
lightweight
looked at sling jaw wrasse
the way it moves its mouth in and out to catch prey or collect other food
CT scan pictures to look at the mechanism
(They don't have these fish in the UK but a chinese PhD student convinced her friends back home who had them as pets to give them up for science)
Lots of details about the mechanism and how it works and the guides and arches and such.
Critical part is the '4 bar mechanism'
Comparing scans of the fish jaw and desigsn of the lightweight exosckeleton they built
(the student earned her PhD :D )

Challenges of a human type knee joint
a cam mechanism in the way the femur rolls over the tibia
but there's also an inverted 4 bar mechanism in the way the crossed ligaments work
(displays how it works with LEGO technic.  inverted parellelogram: there's a crossover in the middle)
Studying adult knees, astounded by the precision and the elegance of how it worked
From a femur and the 4 bar mechanism they could calculate the shape of the corresponding tibia at over 300 points, to calculate the right shape of tibia for that femur.
(an aside talking about getting a French student to solve 10 thousand different 4 bar geometries, had a little go at the French because the Brits do that :P )
Photos of their practical implementation
Use a single nylon cable threaded around to serve as all 4 ligaments.  has some elasticity
Actualy brought a knee joint prototype to demonstrate it
Actually of practical use for robotics and prosthetics
2 Papers about this work published in top mechanical design journal,s 

lists some awards he's earned for work relating to bio-inspired design, to show that he has experience in the field.


Lessons learned:
it's humbling to study things like this coming near to 'the thoughts of God'
the natural world lcontians supreme design
bio-inspiration confirms biblical creation
Note: disease and death and not design faults but results of the fall and the curse
bio-inspiration is based on real observational scienct, real experiments, real tests
evolutionary theories are based on speculation
nature contains irreducible design
Clever mechanism in dragonfly wings to let the wing vibrate:
a 4 bar mechanism cannot evolve, you need all 4 bars and all 4 pins for it to work
There are 4 bar mechanisms in the dragonfly, the bird wing, the fish jaw, and the human knee!
(the biologists didn't even know what a 4 bar mechanism was until the mechanical engineers spotted them)
God loves mechanical engineering!
Stuart ran to the biologists and wouldn't leave until he found a book that tried to explain where these mechanisms came from.
He found one paper about fish jaw mechanisms which said "several unusual breakthroughs characterise the evolution of this fish jaw" (which means "I haven't got a clue"
and  "the macro evolutionary  history is occasionally punctuated by major transitions in engineering design" (which means we have no idea how it got there.
The biologists really need to learn some mechanical engineering so they can even know what it is they ought to explailn the evolution of.

On the front lilnes: battle of two worldviews
It isn't faith vs. science, but two competing faiths
quote of a biological scientists Alan Linton admitting how evolution was part of an atheistic worldview or something like that (missed the exact quote) .  He wrote that when he was retiring and when asked why he waited until then said that if he'd said it sooner he'd have been retired sooner :P

Accademic bullying
some evolutionists don't want their ideas questioned.  (not all accademics just a vocal group of lobbyists)
many get angry when anyone acknowledges there is a creationist viewpoint
(especially Dawkins)

Got a big reaction when he published books about God's design: lots of people wrote letters to his university goading them take action against him
He's had great support from his university who have ignored the goading from athiests
He's also received threats (generally carefully worded vague threats)

The 'British Centire for Science Education' describes him as the most dangerous man in Britain :P
He's talked to some athiests who were appalled at the tactics of that organisation, so their attempts at attacking him backfired.

Examples of how creationists are 'named and shamed' in the press.  Including himself (he survived that one, God is faithful)

Been called out a lot by Richard Dawkins on his website too.
(not everyone goes along with Dawkins but most to the line and the others don't speak up)
Dawkins isn't actually qualified to criticcise design.  And is wrong in his claims of bad design.
Dawkins has no papers in design, and would struggle in Stuart Burgess's courses
"Dawkins hasn't designed a doorhandle and he did I would not trust it"

evolutionists should try designing something :P

Prince Charles likes his book Hallmarks of Design and used a quote in a lecture
the quote was "Why should modern science rule out special creation?"
when told that was brave of Prince Charles he said "No, he cannot be demoted or sacked"

message of bio-inspiration:
There is a creator
Creation contains wonders without number
Creation contains things we cannot comprehend
God is perfect in knowledge

"It is my hope that all who hear this talk not only come to believe in a creator but in Jesus Christ as Saviour"

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Dr Mark Brunacci talk 2
A Tale of Two Faiths
When Worldviews Collide

Mission to Inform encourage and empower people
The Bible can be trusted and we can believe everything it says starting with Genesis
Yesterday we talked about the age of the earth
Today we look at the other half of the equation
The age of the earth issue can be harder for people to get their heads around than the evolution issue.
And if we get rid of the long ages that knocks out the possibility of biological evolution anyway.

Genesis 1:1 and John 1:1-3
Telling us what/who was at the beginning
Jesus Christ was at the beginning and was the agent through which the Father created.
If Genesis is wrong then so is John.
Can't explain what the whole bible is about, salavtion, who we are and where we come from, without Genesis.

Evolution over millions of years:
age of the earth 4.6 billion
attempts to explain how we got here without God
a direct attack on the authority of the bible
presented to us not just as ideas but as discovered scientific facts
we're told that God and the bible are not necessary, can do without them in the modern world.

The bible tells us that we were created by a loving God, to have a relationship with Him
this relationship was broken by the first man Adam
can be restored by Jesus Christ

the Origin of Species - Charles Darwin
not a discovery but a philosophical idea
denies the biblical origin of life, and also the meaning and purpose
natural processes that just happened

So what is right, what happened, how did we get here?
These ideas are so different that only one can be true.

William Provine quote: if you believe you evolved then there are no gods, no purposive forces of any kind... no ultimate meaning of life.

Hebrews 11:6 to come to God we must believe that He exists.
hard to bring people to Jesus Christ as saviour if the don't believe there is a God.
evangelism was easier 50 years ago when people actually had the idea that there is a God, now there's more groundwork needed first.

What is man? evolutionary view
Bertrand Russel: a curious accident in a backwater
Peter Atkins: just a bit of slime on the planet
Stephen Jay Gould: a fortuitous cosmic afterthought, a tiny little twig on the enormously arborescent bush of life
Richard Dawkins: we live in a universe which has no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind pitiless indifference

suicide and evolution:
someone named Gerard called into a radio program about mental health "maybe some of us just aren't meant to survive... maybe some are meant to kill ourselves, there's too many people on the planet already"

quote of Darrell Scott, father of Rachel Scott, Columbine massacre victime, about the results of teaching evolution
quote of serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer, explaining how evolution leads to no basis for morals

2 corinthians 10:5 demonlish arguments that set themselves up against the knowledge of God

Evolution is seen as an unasssailable truth, no reasonable doubt, by most people.
US national academy of sciences definition of science: system of knowledge based on observation, empirical evidence, etc...
List of some of the fathers of science, who were believers in the bible and the story of Genesis
"Thinking God's thoughts after Him" - Kepler
Science is the child of Christianity
people who believed in God expected the world to be ordered
other societies didn't develop nearly so much scientifically

Operational science that gives us stuff like computers and overhead projectors
Historical science trying to figure out what happened in the past by looking at what happens in the present
You can't go back and have another look or repeat the past.  It's not testable like operational science.
It's more like forensic science like a crime show: trying to figure out a story that fits the evidence we can find.
Very different to scientific method where you can repeatedly test every angle.  Doesn't have the same level of credibility.
One thing that will settle what happened in the past for certain is a credible eyewitness.

"Evolution has been observed, it's just that it hasn't been observed while it's happening" - Richard Dawkins

We have the Bible which is the Word of God which describes what happened: God was there He should know
in the ten commandments actually inscribed by God by hand it says He created in six days
of course this won't be accepted by people who don't believe it's the word of God or that God even exists
but still we're ahead because we have an eyewitness account they don't have

1 peter 3:15 be ready always to give an answer to every man that asks you a reason of th hope that is in you

Mark grew up in the Catholic education system, wasn't told anything like this until his 20s.  Never thought there was an alternative to the evolutionary story he was taught
always thought genesis was just stories not history
when he was first questioned at university he had no answers to defend his faith so he left it.
eventually came back to the church but on the Protestant side :P
and then he actually had answers to be able to defend his faith

if you start from the Bible you can't go wrong.

you don't have to be a scientist yourself to answer most questions people may ask you.
everyday ordinary people can answer most questions people ask, given a little preparation
this is why CMI has a lot of resources available to inform people
Creation Magazine - a lot of people have come to faith through the magazine alone
Journal of Creation
creation.com website - different feature article each day, over 10k articles
"the web address is a bit tricky to remember, practice carefully, I'll test you at the end"

takes some faith to believe in God
but it's a logical conclusion that the world is created because it looks created
evolution takes faith too
both faiths start with a beginning from nothing

big bang
unexplained explosion of unexplained singularity
can't be repeated, tested, proven
a lot of dispute about it
"represents a true miracle" - Paul Davies
the origin of energy and matter represents a leap of faith
against our modern understanding of how physics and chemistry work
organisation from an explosion is in contradiction to our understanding of physics
joke about messy rooms of teenage daughters - try tidying the room with a massive explosion?
no, it doesn't work at home

but suppose it somehow happens
cold and lifeless earth.  by sheer luck it has the finely tuned characteristics to support life
a lot of money is being spent trying to find planets like earth.
earth is a goldilocks planet: not too much or too little of anything, not too hot too cold, liquid water, etc

randomly the complex building blocks of life form!
these are really complex molecules which haven't been observed forming in natural
would only last a very short time because they are volatile/fragile, they only survive in side the safety of a cell

Sir Fred Hoyle (named the big bang): probability of formation of just one protein on which life depends is comparible to a solar system packed full of blind men solving rubik's cubes and all solving them at the same time

comparing origin of life to Jumbo jet formed by a tornato in a junkyard
evolutionists do believe in miracles!
abiogenises, spontaneous generation, Louis Pasteur
no known example of life coming from nonlife
Paul Davies: "nobody knows how a mixture of lifeless chemiclals spontaneously organised themselves into the first living cell." - but he still believes it happened
enormous complexity of the cell: more than a city
if an airplane from a junkyard spontaneously is unlikely, even moreso a living cell

even nonscientists understand that information doesn't come from nowhere
"no known law of physics able to create information from nothing" - Paul Davies
huge leap of faith - but does not pass the common sense test.

use of energy: need to use design and intelligence to direct the energy usefully
energy used in an uncontrolled way only creates disorder, destruction
all of nature screams of design
God is the infinite source of all the information we find in the natural world
Richard Dawkins: "Biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose" - very odd definition!
"Biologists must constantly keep in mind that what htey see was not designed but rather evolved" - Sir Francis Crick (because if they don't keep it in mind they might start to think the wrong way :P )

The Evolutionary Tree of Life
species adapt to their natural environment by natural seleciton - this is scientific fact
natural selection is a basic tenet of science.
Darwin saw finches with different sized beaks
seeing these small changes, though there would be lots and lots of small changes over a long time and would eventually get something not a finch
but natural selection doesn't have the ability to make such extreme changes as are needed to get all the variety of all life
so now the story is mutations to produce the changes needed.

we study a lot of mutations
bacteria, fruit flies, flu virus
after all the thousands of generations of mutations you still end up with bacterial, fruit flies, flu virus.
if you breed dogs you don't have to worry about getting kittens ever

evolution is still believed to be a solid solution
"Evolution is a solution of stunning elegance and power" - Dawkins
in spite of all the problems

"Religion is about turning untested belief in to unshakable truth through the power of institutions and the passage of time" - Dawkins
"you would have to be either insane or uneducated to not believe in evolution" - Dawkins
"I don't need evidence, I just know that it's true" - Dawkins
It seems that the first of these 3 quotes is actually what Dawkins is doing, the third is an example of his faith

another evolutionary leap of faith:
why do these very smart intelligent people cling so tenaciously to an idea that doesn't hold water?
the reason is ideological, spiritual, not logical or scientific
it's to do with rebellion against God's authority
if you acknowledge a creator God you are accountable, and that is unacceptable to these people
"even if all the data point to an intelligent desiner, such a hypothesis is excluded from science because it is not naturalistic" Scott Tdd Kansas State University immunologist
- changing the rules to exclude God

"We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs because we have a prior committment to materialism.  Moreover, that materialism is absolute, we cannot allow a divine foot in the door" - Richard Lewontin

Don't be intimidated by the bluff and bluster, this isn't operational science, the evidence isn't on their side
we live in a world where you are not a random accident but a creation of God, that's a message society needs to hear

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Thanks for sitting through all that and reporting it here.  I actually think these pseudo-scientific talks are way more dangerous than the creationists who just ignore the science.  These folks sound like they know what they're talking about and include just enough fact that the average person can't argue with them.  Real actual scientists can, of course, and can see right through the bullshit.  I can see through the genetics arguments, but couldn't debate any of the geology, astronomy with them and that's what they count on.

Everyone who has been to one these seminars should follow up it by watching the IMAX movie, Hubble.  If you can come away from that movie with a belief in a 6 day creation intact, you're better than I am.

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6 hours ago, docmom said:

Thanks for sitting through all that and reporting it here.  I actually think these pseudo-scientific talks are way more dangerous than the creationists who just ignore the science.  These folks sound like they know what they're talking about and include just enough fact that the average person can't argue with them.  Real actual scientists can, of course, and can see right through the bullshit.  I can see through the genetics arguments, but couldn't debate any of the geology, astronomy with them and that's what they count on.

Everyone who has been to one these seminars should follow up it by watching the IMAX movie, Hubble.  If you can come away from that movie with a belief in a 6 day creation intact, you're better than I am.

Some readers might appreciate if you wrote a little about the genetics, if you like.

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  • 2 years later...

Heads up: two and a half years has passed quickly (though the first part of that seemed rather slow at the time) and now the next Creation Supercamp is only a week away!

Which means the next Creation Supersnark is also a week away.

Also registration for the event closes tomorrow if anyone wants to pay money to hang out with creationists on Australia's Sunshine Coast ;) 

 

While I'll take copious notes I think I'll skip more talks this year, but let me know if there's any I absolutely must report on :P 

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  • 2 weeks later...

Well.  That was a day that happened.  Some of it was what I expected, some most definitely wasn't.

*gets distracted catching up on FJ for a while*

Sooo one of today's talks was titled "Becoming One Flesh", by Dr Kathy Wallace.  https://www.chwb.com.au/dr-kathy-wallace/

I've been to a lot of these creation supercamp/conference events over the years and this is the first talk I've heard by a female speaker.  And it was also the most sexually explicit (in a clinical way).  The main topic of the presentation (and reason for the title) was "fetal microchimersim".  (and how that confirms everything the Bible says about sexual morality)

I sorta remember once reading something on FJ about a bizarre teaching from maybe ATI that sperm causes cancer and that women develop an immunity to their husbands' sperm.  Well that was basically what this talk was about, but in more scientific sounding language than that.  When you say "exogenic microchimerism" and "hypothyroidism" and "t cells" and "statistics of pregnancy health risks increasing drastically with the number of fathers a woman has children by" and so on, it doesn't sounds as silly as "sperm causes cancer".  But the summary is "anything the Bible says not to do sexually actually puts women at health risk so there's good reason not to do it but the school system is lying to everyone about all of it, also "safe sex" is unsafe and can cause more dangerous pregnancies."

 

Okay it's late so I'll just paste in all my notes now.

Spoiler

2018 Creation SuperConference - Sunshine Coast Qld Australia 2-5 October

About 500 registered attendees.

# Tuesday 2nd

## Stalls
Main sponsor is Vision (Vision Christian Radio and Vision Christian Store), with their main feature being the Biblically accurate 3d animated chidren's DVD series 'Superbook'.
Also appearing: Living Waters Australia (with all the latest Ray Comfort titles), Child Evangelism Fellowship Australia, The Australian Federation for the Family, Christian University for Australia, Focus on the Family Australia, Wealth with Purpose, Operation 513 (lots of tracts and a Good Person Test), and sone other table without a sign (selling plastic fetus models so I conclude they're some pro-life group).

## Dress

It's spring in northern Australia.  Plenty of shorts and t-shirts or collared shirts.  Jeans and slacks common.  Probably the majority of people are in jeans.  A few skirts and dresses.

## Info on pre-show slides

creation.com/2018qa to submit questions for the Q&A session
creation.com/2018notes notes will be available after each session


## 10:30 opening and devotions

The singing was mostly alright except the woman in front of me seems to be quite tonedeaf or unaware of the concept of 'pitch'.

## 11:00 Demise of the Once Christian West - Dr Don Batten (plant scientist, main person behind Creation Answers Book)
Charts showing rise of property crime, violent crime, young male suicide, US index crime rate etc.  Rising rapidly since the 60s, also other stats such as drug use and premarital sex.

What happened?

Society in general used to believe Biblical history.

Noah's flood was seen as the explanation for most rock phenomena including fossils - Prof Derek Ager.

Rogue #1 - James Hutton erased the Flood.  Principle of uniformitarianism: only use processes we see now to explain the past.  Scottish "Enlightenment" - more like endarkenment.
Rogue #2 - Charles Lyell.  Build more of the long timescale view and influenced Darwin  (both Lyell and Hutton were deists and Masons)

Church responses: Gap theory - Thomas Chalmers 1814.  Day-age (Hugh MIller mid 1800s), Framework Hypothesis 1920s, Cosmic temple - John Walton ~2010.
All saying that Genesis is about theology not history, ditching the time frame of the bible.

Theological consequences: "once upon a time" or "long long ago in a galaxy far far away" - without a real time frame it's seen as fiction not fact.
The importance of history: the Christian faith is based entirelly on history and facts. - Dr Martin Lloyd-Jones What mean these stones 1977
Francis Schaeffer - the great evangelical disaster: unless the Bible is without error, not only about salvation matters but history, we have no moral absolutes or certainty of hstory and the next generation will have nothing on which to stand.

Contrasting Biblical and Secular timelines: Jesus said "but from the beginning of creation God made them male and female" Mark 10:6.  vs humans appearing in the last million years or so out of several billion.  Was Jesus wrong or ignorant?
Accepting deep tine leads to: "If Jesues as a finite human being erred from time there is no reason at all to suppose that Moses, Paul, John etc wrote scripture entirely without error..." Kenton Sparks Biologos.org 2010 (they took it down recently due to getting flack from people like CMI)
Jesus: "What I say therefore, I say as the Father told me" - if Jesus was wrong the Father was wrong.
Exodus 20:11 the heavenly father wrong on stone that he made everything in 6 days and rested on the seventh as the basis of our week.

Bad ideas have bad consequences.
Evolution makes atheists.  William Provine: "Evolution is the greatest engine of atheism ever invented."
What are we teaching in schools and everywhere in our society?  Evolution?

Chart of the growth of evolution in Australia, taken off in the 1960s since taught in schools.
A.C. Grayling: the Good Book: "you can see we no longer really belive in God because of all the CCTV cameras keeping watch on us."
Joel Marks "...became convinced that athiesm implies amorality and s ince I am an atheis I must therefore embrace amorality... the shocking conclusion that fundamentalists are correct, without God theere is no morality"
Richard Lewontin: "Evolution barely mentioned in school textbooks as late as 1954, after Sputnik it was suddenly in all the schools"
20-24 year old male sucides in Australia: dipped down during world war II, really took off with the introduction of the Wyndhan scheme to make teaching evolution in schools mandatory.
2003 Dartmouth Medica School Study - churchgoing protcts significantly against medical illness.
Sociologist Christy Davies linking rates of crime violence and disorder to rates of Sunday School attendance.
"we have forgotten God" Hosea 8:14 "Israel has forgotten his Maker", 1863 speech by Abraham Lincoln "...vainly imagined all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own."

We live in exciting times!
A lot of people who aren't Christians can see tht there is something wrong.
Never more evidence for the true history of the universe.
Never been more resources available.  Never more ways to spread the message.  ("Who gets Creation magazine?  Share it!")
Share creation.com/bq witnessing cards. (Big Questions)
spread the message and articles on social media.

## 11:30 Biblical Geology 101 -  Dr Tas Walker (engineering, geology, mining, Biblical flood model of geology)

Rock at Bondi Beach with plaque: weighing 235 tons wathed from the sea in a storm on 15th July 1912 - eyewitness history
Glass House Mountains Lookout sign: "eroded by wind and water over 25 million years" - quite different from the Bondi Beach rock, no one saw this happen.
When you dig up a dinosaur fossil it doesn't have a label attached.  The bone is the evidence, you come up with an interpretation which depends upon your beliefs.
When an Evolutionist and a Creationist look at a dinosaur they can both make the same observation and measurement that it is 1.5m long.
And they can simultaneously each see it as evidence for evolution or creation.
"The Man Who Found Time" book about Hutton and the society at the time by J Repcheck.  Most men of science agreed then that the world was young.
Old family Bibles give the dates the events occured according to James Usher.  Genesis 1:1 - Before Christ 4004.
Nicolas Steno 1638-1686.  Wrote about fossils being things that were once alive, developed the principles of statiagraphy, wrote the geological history of Tuscany.  A father of geology.  Started with biblical history.
1771 Encyclopedia Britannica supported Noah's flood and a young earth.

2 Peter 3:5-6 forshadowed the coming of scoffers who deliberately forget the deluge of waters that destroyed the earth.
James Hutton: "the past history of our globe must be explained by what can be seen to be happening now"
Hutton actually assumed and imagined but didn't prove the millions of years.
Hutton's theory questioned the veracity of the Bible and displayed humans from close to the start of time, thus was deeply upsetting. - Repcheck

Geological timescale: various fossils found in different strata, dated to be at various times.
Notable feature of a dinosaur fossil: it's dead.  If it was dead 100 million years ago that would be before death came into the world as a result of man's sin.  So that can't be right.
The age of the earth contradicting the Genesis account is a major sticking point that has caused many to reject the Bible and turn to atheism or agnosticism.  So it's a significant issue in our culture.  There needs to be some answers about geology for people to listen about the Bible.

Time line of Bible History
Creation, Flood, Christ, Present
Identify the events in the Bible that would have impacted geology in a noticeable way.
The Creation is a big one, Noah's Flood is the other big one.

Creation Event, Pre Flood Era, Flood Event, Post Flood Era
Map that timescale to the rockscale of what rocks would have formed during them.
Creation rocks, pre flood rocks, flood rocks, post flood rocks.
Can break up the flood rocks into inundatory and recessive rocks: when the water was going up, and when the water was coming down.  Deposition and erosion.
Can further break up inundatory into: eruptive, ascending, zenithing.  Can break up recessie into abative and dispersive.

Does this help us categorise rocks and figure out their formation?
Cross section of the "Eromanga Basin" in Queensland.  Dinosaur fossils around in it.
Lark Quarry, Queensland - in the middle of nowhere, expensive government building to protect dinosaur footprints.
Applying the model to find our when things happened in Bible history:
these sediements are large scale, so either a creation event or flood event.  Nothing this big happened preflood or postflood.
The fossils mean it couldn't have been in the creation event so it's a flood event.
Footprints mean the dinosaurs were alive so it must have been as the waters were going up.
So it's in the inundatory phase.

The Three Sisters in the Blue Mountains
The sediments were deposited mostly as the waters were rising.
The characteristic flat surface was from sheet flow as the water were falling (abative).
The deep channels were carved during the later chanelised flow as the water dispersed.

Can apply this to any formations and see and understand the evidence for the Flood everywhere.

Fossils: the features and arrangements we find are consistent with rapid and mass burial.

Dating: the radio-isotopic method. (not the romantic method)
What you need is something which is changing with time.  Like a measuring cylinder filling up with water, people gaining grey hair...
Given a cylinder filing with water: from water depth and the rate of filling you can calculate when the flow started.  But that's assuming there was no water to begin with, none added or removed, and the rate didn't change.
All that applies to radiometric dating.
Geologists first decide what date they want.  Then they know what samples to collect and what assumptions to keep to make the answer fit.
KBS tuff (Kay Behrensmeyer Site): above it are fossils of elephant, pig, ape, tools.
K-Ar tuff: 212-230 Ma - decided that date was far too old
K-ar feldspar, pumice: 2.61 Ma - decided that date fit pretty well.  And the decimals make it look super accurate and set in stone
Confirmed by another team: paleomagnetism and fission tracks gave the same age
Then Richard Leakey found a skull which seemed like a human skull, said it was the oldest human-like skull ever found at nearly 3 million years
Then everyone who was unhappy with how old the skill was redated it with K-Ar feldspar, pumpice to 1.82 million years which was far more acceptable and that date was confirmed with paleomagnetism and fission tracks and everyone was happy.

Modern geology assumes anti-God philosphy.
Modern geology is eroding trust in the Bible.
Biblical geology begins with Bible history.
Biblical geology explains the world.
Biblical geology supports faith in God.

## 14:00 Dr Kathy Wallace - Becoming One Flesh (GP, trained in Adelaide, specialist in neuropathy)
question in intro: [why] do married couples look like each other as they age?
Fetal Microchimerism (read her journal article on creation.com)
intro picture: a painting of a middleeastern couple (can imagine it to be Isaak and Rebekah)
The vulnerabilities to women due to childbearing.
Adam and Eve were truly one flesh, she was taken out of man.
Genesis 2:21-24
Having babies and bearing children is a truly wonderful thing!  You might not think so to hear people talking about the world these days.
Genesis 24:60 the blessing on Rebekah of childbearing and descendents
Genesis 15 the blessing of offspring on Abraham.
Today the world tells us we need to stop this process by any means, prevent people from multiplying as God instructed.
Abram asked God how he would gain posession of the land.
(Fetal michrochimerism is when tiny bits of baby DNA are embedded in their mother permanently)

A covenent or testament: an animal had to die.  Genesis 15:17-18
Covenent is exceedingly important.  God never forgets his promise.
We don't need to keep making sacrifices to God, Christ is the mediator of the new covenant Hebrews 9:15
Hebrews 9:20-22 speaks of the blood of the covenant and the need for the shedding of blood for forgiveness.
Jesus said this is my body and my blood which is broken for us.
The marriage covenant: symbolic blood where the bride and groom both die to each other as individuals and become a new single entity.
Consumation of marriage - sexual union apt for the generation of offspring.
By it nature, spouses become one flesh.
In the past a marriage would be annuled if it was not consummated.
Virtinity was highly prized in the past (and still in the present) particularly in certain cultures.
Because the woman becomes of one flesh with the man and thus should not have already become one flesh with someone else.
And because the bride is a betaphor for the churche presented as a pure virgin to Christ.

The ten commandments...
(Not trying to stand up and judge people for their past, things happen.)
but there's something about the consumation of marriage that's special and beyond the mere physical.
We are given rules and regulations for our benefit and to do what God commanded us to do in the right way because it so important.
God created sex to fulfill a purpose, it is very important and it should be done right.
Governent sponsored sex education is very add odds with the Bible
(Evidence based education is very important and valuable)
Government says: jsut wear a condom, get tested frequently, any kind of sex is fine.
But actually STDs should NOT be a normal part of ses, that's deceptive.

Women are not the same as men, they are more vulnerable to infection from sexual activity.

1 in 5 HIV diagonses are hetrosexual but we are told that all kinds of sexual behaviour are equal.  They are not.

6 ways STDs imapct women differently than men:
at unique risk
less likely to have visible symptoms than men
more likely to result in infertility
more vulnerable mid-cycle soon after ovulation
(missed some points)
The role of female hormones in immune protection in the female reproductive tract.

Women are also more at risk due to behavours related to reproduction, especially childbirth.
This is in direct contradiction with the government sponsored sex education which just says wear a condom, do what you like with no consequences, we'll fix any resulting problems with healthcare.

Cervical cancer risk: oxford textbook of pathology:
increased risk form having multiple sexual partners, having a partner who had had multiple sexual partners, having sex at a young age
being 19 and losing count at 30 or 50 partners = high cervical cancer risk.

Unprotected by Miriam Grossman M.D. to find out more

Pregnancy complications: pages and pages of this exists.
In many places, mother and infant mortality is high.
Women need to be treasured for their phenomenal achievements and the great risks they face.
1 Peter 3:7 show honor to the woman as the weaker vessel.  Medical science helps us understand what this means.

Changing sexual partners and risks to subsequent pregnancy:
When a woman has had babies by one partner and then gets pregnant by another partner, there is increased risk in that pregnancy.
First pregnancies are also higher risk.
Woman's immune system needs appropriate exposure to her partner's sperm for long enough for acceptance or tolerance by her immune system.
the terms "protected sex" and "unprotected sex" are misleading and incorrect.
A married couple need to have 'unprotected' sex for her to build up this tolerance for safer pregnancy.
The barrier or withdrawal methods to prevent pregnancy can lead to elcampsia risk in first time unions.
Not having sperm regularly introduced into the vagina leads to immune rejection of the baby made with that DNA.
There is good evidence that avoiding condoms in married sex leads to sucessful and complication-free pregnancy outcomes.
Specifically sperm exponsion provides priming events for the woman's T cells.
Lack of immune tolerance has been linked ot severe complications.  miscarriage risk, pre-term labor, pre-eclampsia, pre-term rupture of membranes, waters breaking prematurely, placenta abruption, intrauterine growth restriction, HELLP syndrome
IVF conceptions also have similar risks of complcations.

Old age: how did we get here (and how did we survive this long? lol)

Immunological implications of pregnancy-induces microchimerism (nature article along the same lines as Kathy's article)
male DNA in female bodies.
explosion in the medical literature about microchimerism.
microchimerism is when you have multiple cellular populations derived from different individuals in one individual's body.
chimera from the Greek myth.

Fetal microchimersm - male cells in materal circulation.  confirmed at amniocenteresis.  can be detected at 42 days.
article "baby's genome hidden in mother's blood"
can buy fingerprick tests from Amazon to determine the sex of your baby (and deterine whether it should be allowed to continue, 'how awful')

Also via the placenta, cells from the mother are embedded in the baby.
strong suggestion from the medical literature that breastfeeding of babies would not be possible without this.
this seems to happen in all pregnancies.

mechanism for fetal cells gaining access to maternal circulation is unknown.
external cephalic version (upsidedown baby turned over) can cause incrased trafficking of fetal cellls
miscarriage and abortion.
destruction of the placenta could be the means for fetal cells entering mother's bloodstream.
half a million nucleated fetal cells could enter mother's bloodstream from surgical abortion.

Some women never pregnant with a male baby have male microchimerism.
maybe a twin pregnancy, older brother via maternal tranfer, unrecognised miscarriage.
Sexual intercourse is also a means of male DNA transfer.  i.e. not fetal DNA
possible should rename it exogenous DNA and investigate further
(but who would do that research?)

Microchimerism seems to be by design on purpose not an accident
has been investigated in different autoimmune disorders such as:
systemic sclerosis, systemic lupus erythermeosis, others I missed

Abortion may be associated with elevated risk of future hypothyroidism
immune system of the woman is attacking the thyroid
leading to weight gain, depression

Hashimoto's Thyroiditis
antibodies that are attacking the thyroid.  evidence of fetal microchimerism, could be a direct cause, could by a bystander to a problem triggered by something else

Michrochimerism in Alzheimers
Seems to be less michrochimerism in women with Alzheimers but the data set is pretty small and can't draw clear conclusions

Grave's disease - 6 of 7 cases demonstrated intrathyrodal fetal microchimerism

microchimerism does involve stem cells.
linked to lower risk of breast cancer and higher risk of bowel cancer (I might have got that wrong)

Higher mortality linked to women having children by two partners, even higher for more than two partners.
researchers were surprised at the large difference the number of partners a woman had children by had on mortality rates
50% higher cancer rate for women that had children by more than one partner according to 2004 Danish study.

Brain tumors: Fetal microchimerism in 80% of glioblastoma cases and 50% of something else

A challenge for feminists: how to accept being inexplicably linked biologically to not just their children (including aborted) but also to their children's fathers, as they try to define themselves without any reference to a man.

Donated eggs and embryos in assisted reproduction: sperm or egg donation can cause autoimmune disorders.  also the challenge of a spousal one flesh union where the woman's body is colonised with the genetic heritage of another individual.
Not judging anyone though.
But it's amazing how medical science is confirming the morals of the Bible

Ethical concerns of surrogacy
lesbians using donor sperm may be unaware that male DNA will be embedded in their bodies for life.

The body is only doing what it's designed to do.

Til death do us part means a lot more than we thought it means.
making babies is more intimate and more deeply intimate than we thought.

Follow the instructions given us by the author and maker of life
The rules governing sexual behaviour were given to us for a reason
This result in better health outcomes for women and children.

leaving us with hope:
Romans 3:23 all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God
1 john 1:9 but if we confess our sins He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins.

 

 

 

##18:00 Genesis in Song

Live music with accompanying visuals, going through Genesis 1-11
Pretty decent, especially the graphics, album available at genesisinsong.com

 

##19:40 Vance Nelson - Untold Secrets of Planet Earth Dire Dragons
Very visual presentation which is good because we don't have a translator from Canadian ;)
This talk isn't recorded due to restrictions from his publisher.
see www.UntoldSecretsOfPlanetEarth.com for his books (that's his notes :P)
it's 3:40 AM in Canada right now

Dinosaurs were made on the same day of creation as people.
Flying and marine reptiles would have been the day before.

The term Living Fossils was coined by Charles Darwin.
He noticed while touring around the world on the Beagle that fossils bore a startling resemblance to their living counterparts.
Fossils are dead things, but they look a lot like the living which is a bit of a problem.
Coelacanth.  The evolutionary community thought they went extinct about 70 million years ago.
Vance Nelson used to believe that (went though the public school system).  Saved at 19.  Did a biology degree after his theology degree.
When we dig up the dinosaurs we also find stuff like soft shelled turtles, figs, willows, crocodiles, some others I missed, things exactly the same as we find alive today.
All those creatures are unchanged since the time the fossils were formed contemporary to dinosaurs.

1734 creature that may have been seen in the ocean, resembles basilosaurus.  Not proof but interesting.

Dragons and dinosaurs.
1700 year old chinese manuscript describing a "dragon bone" may be the earliest description of a dinosaur fossil.
The word dinosaur was invented 1841 by Richard Owen, first printed 1841.
1611 Bible translated into English so they wouldn't have used the word dinosaur then.
Early paleontologists often referred to dinosaur fossils as dragons.  And when they referred to dragons they meant what the Bible referred to as dragons.
the Book of Great Sea-Dragons.  Ichthysosauri and plesiosuari.  "gedolim taninim of Moses" (transliteration of the Hebrew word).
e.g. "Dragon from street 1834 pentatarsotinus."  "plesiosaur dragon"
Dragon was the common word for the fossils even after dinosaur was coined.
It's like the scientific name "canis" but we still use dog.

Emily Tennyson's journal July 23 1865 (the wife of Alfred Tennyson)
described meeting with Sir Richard Owen.  they looked at a "great dragon" which he thought of calling "euacanthus vectanius" 24 years after the word dinosaur was coined, they still used the word dragon commonly.
Reverend William Fox (who was also mentioned as present in the diary entry) referred to his deep join for hunting for old dragons, when writing to Richard Owen.  Two decades after Richard Owen invented the word dinosaur.  Dragon was still the common word while dinosaur was the scientific word.
But when the evolutionist took charge of the institutions they mythologised the word 'dragon' because of its biblical connection.  The early paleontologists did not believe so.

Is there evidence of dinosaurs existing recently and contemporary with humans?

Mary Schweitzer dinosaur soft tissue extraction.
Not just t-rex but triceratops and bracheosaurus.
Soft tissue including collagen from many different samples and kinds.
Vance Nelson send in a sample extracted from an Edmontosaurous for carbon dating and was told "this is a terrible sample, there's hardly any collagen" - in a dinosaur fossil there shoudln't be any remaining collagen proteins.

There shouldn't be any detectable radiocarbon in dinosaur fossil samples.  There is.
Unpermineralised material from the centre of dinosaur vertebrae.
Sent to secular dating labs without telling them it's dinosaur bone because they would say don't waste 550 US dollars dating dinosaur bone because there's no detectable carbon 14 in dinosaur bones (there is)

Ancient art of dinosaurs.
Carl Sagan wrote about it, claimed that frightened early mammals somehow passed on genetic memories to the first people who were able to paint those ancient memories.  (that's based on  Lamarkianism which the evolutionists themselves threw out long ago)

Adrienne Mayor - books about ancient artworks which seem to resemble dinosaurs, she says that the people who drew the art saw fossils.  But the fossils we find in those areas are all incomplete and disassembled fossils, and there's no evidence of where they excavated dinosaur bones or any tools they used to excavate them or glue they used to reassemble them.  Often the dinosaurs depected lived on the other side of the world.  And they never depict the bones but the creatures.

Central America:
Guatemala outback
Ancient Mayan site with petroglyphs, roughly 500 AD for this particular site.
Not a tourist destination!
Traced dinosaur petroglyphs.
They're often covered by water and the previous year they tried to go volcanoes erupted.
Traced creature definitely not a crocodile.
National Geographic looked at it 26 years before, called it a river runner.
Showed the guide a picture of Hepacrosaurous
Guide said "the mayans must have seen dinosaurio"
"si"

Some other site I didn't get the name of
650-850 AD
Murals which are hard to see because of calcite deposits.
one man in the mural has a headdress which looks very dinosaur-like
not a crocodile or an iguana.  they painted it red while everthing else is fairly colour accurate.  and it's quite large.

Moving down to South America
Museum Lima Peru
30k precolumbian vessels on display
a vessel dated 500-900 AD, a man with a protoceratops like creature on his head

Another site, the shaymu? culture
900-1470 AD
really interesting sylization of fish carvings, pelican carvings
Something in a textile with a birdlike head but a long tail and circular patterns like they do on reptiles.  so not a bird.

another later culture in Peru
A carving of a large reptile looks like a musaurus?

England
Saint George slaying a dragon
- probably didn't because that story wasn't a thing until the 12th or 13th century when it was in vogue for saints to have slain monsters
- but the pictures they drew depecting the dragon he allegedly slew are very interesting.
- a bit smaller than a horse, no front legs.  Ceilophysus?

St. Andrews Hall completed 1449 AD
carvings of dragons
(note: the reconstructions of dinosaurs that look like the carvings are done by artists who looked only at fossils not like the artwork, and then they were posted to be in the same pose as the artwork)


Cathedral with brass carvigns: fish, eel, dogs, fox, bat, bird, "two mythical creatures" look like sauropods like a volcanodon

1471-1483 Second Reign of King Edward, gold coin of an angel (archangel Michael) slaying a dragon
looks like a typical but "if I was depicting a dinosaur how would I do it differently?"
all medieval cultures liked to depict dragons with wings and external ears because that was the style.
they put external ears on crocodiles too.

France
emblem of someone or other "the legendary salamander"
France had normal fire salamanders and "legendary salamanders" with long necks and scales, akin to other folks' dragons.
another chateu had a wing with a carving looking very like a dinosaur
mid 16th century tapestry has a duck billed dinosaur with nose holes, scale pattern (most of the tapestry is covered up now)
Sorry I can't catch any of the french names :P
Another place with the legendary salamander crest.
something that looks like the contemporary stylisation of an allosaurous (or was it an albertasaurous, I forget)

Germany
1608 statue of a knight slaying an "unknown creature" protorasucous

Spain
very detailed altar cloth 1600 Barcelona of St George and the "dragon"
looks very like a nosthosaurous a marine reptile that supposedly went extinct 200 million years ago.

China
jade turtle, turquoise rhino, jade pendant of... a bipedal ceratops authenticated 4k years old
another one out of turquoise, protoceratops.

-
Dracorex Hogwartsia - "the dragon king of Hogwarts"
"a new type of dinosaur that looks more like a dragon"
Is it a dragon or a dinosaur?  Yes :P


Adam brought sin and death into the world by his disobedience
Jesus brought forgiveness and live by his obedience

Books in the Untold Secrets of Planet Earth
Dire Dragons
Amazon Adventure - first Europeans to an ancient site, documented sauropod pictograms, authenticated roughly 3k years old, human figures with spears attacking a sauropod looking creature.
Flood Fossils, includes a look at flood stories and legends, and also fast fossils - such as the fossil of the last wig worn at Oxford
Monumental Monsters - 35 gigantic creatures in the fossil record, demonstrating things are getting smaller
 

 

 

Sorry for the many typos from typing in a hurry, or not correctly guessing medical/place/dinosaur names that weren't written on the slides.

Anyone want pics of the resource/sponsor tables?

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32 minutes ago, CyborgKin said:

Then Richard Leakey found a skull which seemed like a human skull, said it was the oldest human-like skull ever found at nearly 3 million years
Then everyone who was unhappy with how old the skill was redated it with K-Ar feldspar, pumpice to 1.82 million years which was far more acceptable and that date was confirmed with paleomagnetism and fission tracks and everyone was happy.

Thanks for all the notes!  I'm interested in if people at the conference have pretty much abandoned the idea that the earth is roughly 7000 years old.  Does this quote mean fundies were happier that the skull was getting younger (i.e., proving that dating methods are not yet perfected)?

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8 hours ago, CTRLZero said:

Thanks for all the notes!  I'm interested in if people at the conference have pretty much abandoned the idea that the earth is roughly 7000 years old.  Does this quote mean fundies were happier that the skull was getting younger (i.e., proving that dating methods are not yet perfected)?

What that quote was intended to be was an example of evolutionists picking dates to fit their current narrative and confirming them with multiple methods, then changing their narrative and discovering the old date is wrong and finding a new one and confirming the new data must be true with the same multiple methods.

They're still just as tied to the young earth as ever: https://creation.com/biblical-age-of-the-earth

Quote

This yields an outside range of 3236 to 5078 years from Creation to the Babylonian Captivity. If the traditional historic date of 587 BC or 586 BC for the Captivity is correct, the earth cannot be more than 7,680 years old (table 4), having been created between 5665 BC and 3822 BC.

They didn't go into the fine details of "how dating methods are inaccurate" in that talk, but I remember they like to talk about how helium diffusion rates from zircon crystals prove that radioisotope decay must have happened faster at some point in the past.  Also something about how the flood burying massive amounts of vegetation and also significant volcanic activity would have changed the carbon balance and would significantly affect the carbon 14 dating calibration?

There's a talk tomorrow evening about carbon-14 dating of dinosaur fossils.  Today's talks are: 'astronomical evidences for recent creation", "fully functional and fully mature - the legacy and history of our creator's biological genius", "the world's smallest electrical motor - ATP synthase" and "Made in God's image - the falsity of 'ape man'".

Yesterday there was also a bonus night owl talk "The evolution of a creationist" which was one of the speakers giving his personal testimony but I didn't stick around for that.  However the notes for that are at https://creation.com/2018notes

Oh and there's notes for the homeschooling workshop which I also didn't attend.

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