I've started a blog called Creationist Lies, dedicated to exposing the lies of creationism. I'm appreciate if you guys could check it out, and give me some constructive criticism. Also, if you have any articles I could debunk, I would be greatful if you could forward them to me. Thanks!

I'm reading it now.
You disassemble the tactics and separate the fanciful from the fact rather well.

I have even questioned whether or not it should be called "lies" instead of "misconceptions."

The problem is that in order to spew the sources they are trying to cite, they must willingly ignore evidence and cherry pick evidence.
There is no way a person could do so in ignorance.

Then end result is... a Lie.

The Universe is God, God created everything, where's the problem?

__________________
The only way of finding the limits of the possible is by going beyond them into the impossible.

Arthur C. Clarke

The Brain Science Podcast

I thought the most effective metaphor in your eyeless fish analysis was the blindness of those who will not see, nicely juxtaposed to blind fish. Effective rhetoric and good science at the same time. The only thing that would have made it even stronger, I feel, is an explicit reference to a similar process to the eyeless fish that could not be branded "backward" by those with eyes. Maybe bats-- who still have eyes, but have augmented that with the power of using sonar.

__________________
Physics doesn't predict the future, it predicts the past that hasn't happened yet.

There are two kinds of delusions, the obvious kind that clearly don't work, and the insidious kind that clearly do.

Good start on the blog. I bookmarked it and will check it regularly.

__________________
"There is a theory which states that if ever anybody discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened."
Douglas Adams

Thank you all for your support. I will be updating at least once every week, hopefully more as the mood strikes me.

Only in the mind of the fundies. The truth is, I was once one of them. I was taken in by the lies of creationism, until I started to look into the subject myself. When I realized I'd been had I almost dropped my faith altogether. I hope to use this blog to help other people like me who have been taken in by their lies.

I've never been a fundie.

But used to be a believer.
It was a gradual process really... And although I have made my own choice for my own reasons, I don't see anything wrong with a person believing in Gods, God or Great White Spirit or Allah...

Where I take exception is where they willfully and deliberately use a deity as an excuse to willfully and deliberately attack science by obscuring it or outright lying. Some even go so far as to call science- the Great Deception of Satan...
Many seem to think that it is ok to lie as long as you are doing it for a cause you truly believe in.

The irony is that there are a LOT of people that believe in God but are unable to just deny the realities right in front of their faces. These fundies are actually pushing people out of their faith by acting the way that they do.

May I suggest you consider continuous processes on your blog, which ought to show a boundary if actually they only started 6012 years ago.

As I have said before on this forum, young earth creationism is rather like denying continuity of cause for a trail of footprints. If one were to assert that the ones further away are just a fake, made to look as if they merge with the current close-up ones, the fake being so well done we can't tell where the real ones stop and the fakes start, we would laugh. But this is essentially the young earth argument.

We see something 6013 light years away. But we can already see it, even though if the light had departed it naturally, it would be before a 4004BC creation. And within a year or so we will be able actually to see the light actually emitted by it, or so I conclude given that this has always been the case as the 4004BC light cone spreads out to include more things. So are creationists asserting that everything more than 6012 light years away is actually a picture that their god has put in the sky for us to see, except that as time passes and allows us actually to see it, it always turns out to look exactly as the picture did, with a seamless and undetectable transfer from picture to reality?

It is not just light and other radiation coming from across the universe, it is geological strata, plate tectonics, vulcanism, tree rings, the fossil record, radioactive decay, mineral crystallisation and magnetization, star evolution... If there was a 4004BC creation bounday, then someone has tried very hard to erase all trace of it.

Deceiving us by making the Earth (and/or Universe) appears to be older than it "really is" sounds more like the work of a "devil" rather than the work of a benevolent and loving "God"!

__________________
Any day you wake up on "the right side of the dirt" is a good day.

T. Anderson

I think a large part of the problem is that people don't understand science, so it is easier for them to ignore its conclusions. When science is presented as a set of conclusions they must accept on faith, they see that as no different from their religion, and they just choose whichever they prefer to have faith in. So the key is to first teach the methods of science and how it reaches its conclusions, and start with some of the easier conclusions it reaches. Then build up to an understanding of Ivan Viehoff's list above. If we make understandable the methods leading to the conclusions, instead of just presenting the conclusions, we avoid the problem of "science works in mysterious ways".

That might be good for an audience of people who already are logical thinkers and just don't like faith, or who are undecided or in doubt. But when the audience is already known to be religiously faithful people who see science as opposed to that faith, that method will accomplish nothing. The first thing you need to do with them is show them that their religious faith does not need to lead to the conclusions that they've been told it does and the articles of their faith actually mean something else (and have simply been misunderstood or mistaught) or can at least be interpreted as something else.

In other words, if the original poster's intention with this website is what I think it is (helping others move from creationism to acceptance of what science has to say, as the original poster has had to do), then the more useful way to go after creationism is not as bad science, but as bad theology. A book by Don Stoner called "A New Look at an Old Earth" is a good example of this.

That would be coming from the religious side, and would have to come from religious leaders who want to maintain the vibrancy and relevance of their mode of inquiry. I'm looking at what the scientists can do to maintain a similar vibrancy among people who are not scientifically proficient. I think the OPer feels more comfortable discussing scientific conclusions than theological ones, on the basis of evidence, if I'm not mistaken.

__________________
Physics doesn't predict the future, it predicts the past that hasn't happened yet.

There are two kinds of delusions, the obvious kind that clearly don't work, and the insidious kind that clearly do.

Paradox244: I've much enjoyed reading your blogs. You have a good grasp of the concepts, and present them well. I also have your site bookmarked.

Just a quick question: in reading through I encountered a few errors, mostly what appear to be typos. Is there a mechanism by which we could suggest improvements? If so, I'd be glad to help with the effort.

Example: in the 2008-03-30 entry you quote AIG who correctly spell "Kuiper" as in belt and astronomer Gerard. You then have "Kupier" which suggests French origin rather than Dutch. Clearly the transposition is just a typing error, but one you might wish to fix.

Nitpicking aside, you have a great start. I hope you keep up the good work!

Well if someone believes that there is a devil who can modify the evidence so as entirely to mask the true evidence, then clearly there is no evidence that can persuade them of anything. I doubt they can believe their own eyes.

I do now recall a TV program which interviewed some fundamentalist Texas college students who studied normal geology, no doubt so that they could work in the oil industry if necessary. They rationalised pre-4004BC dates to themselves as "the devil's time". A fundamentalist solution to a fundamentalist problem.

You could PM them to me on these forums, or you could leave a comment. I've fixed the mistake that you pointed out.

Also, I'm trying to approach it from a theological perspective as well. I mentioned in one post that the Bible was never meant to tell us the age of anything, and I hope to comment more on that as it comes up. However theology is not my area of expertise, so I probably can't say as much about that.

Get the book I mentioned above, "A New Look..." by Stoner. He's a person who had some sort of theological training (I forget what kind or level) and also knows science pretty well and follows logic strictly, but reaches unusual conclusions by starting from an uncommon combination of premises/axioms:
1. The Bible in its original languages contains only truth because God created it;
2. The universe itself, the direct evidence scientists look at, also contains only truth because God created it;
3. They can't really contradict each other, but human work can be flawed even when done honestly, so any apparent conflict must be a result of humans failing to understand what that truth is, because science and theology are both merely human endeavors to interpret and understand these two perfect sources of God's truth (reality and the Bible).

In that book, he describes and knocks down some common creationist objections to an old Earth, describes the good reasons scientists have for their conclusions, concludes that the error must lie in the understanding of the Bible rather than the understanding of the universe's own evidence, and then proceeds to spend the rest of the book describing how he reinterprets the Bible to actually be describing the same story that science tells, in a way that ancient Hebrews would understand ("let there be light" = Big Bang, to start with). A lot of it hinges on the translations of individual words, but he doesn't just say "this word means this, not that"; he actually gives other verses in the Bible where the same word is used, to show how the Bible uses the word. For example, instead of just asserting that "days" can be non-literal and can overlap each other, he quotes other places where the Bible uses the word in a more obviously non-literal way to indicate longer periods that clearly had to overlap, to establish that that kind of use of that word is something the Bible undoubtably does.

Intriguingly, he concludes that the Earth is as old as scientists say, but also mentions that he believes evolution is just a logical mistake. I guess that means there've just been a long series of special events in which God tinkered with his biological creations, but he doesn't go into detail about it in this book; it must be for another book.

Anyway, one theological "the Bible says so" issue you can more easily tackle yourself without his level of research is the conflicts between Genesis 1 and Genesis 2, which tell parts of the story of creation in two different orders. G1 is where we get the days and light & darkness stuff from, along with God saying "Let there be...", with plants coming before the sun and moon, and sea animals & birds coming before non-avian land animals. G2 is where we get Adam in a barren world before the plants or other animals, then plants, then animals (or, at least, apparently just the herbivorous ones) as God's failed attempts to find a companion for Adam, then Eve, and then carnivores (or at least carnivorosity, which implies that the carnivores themselves are also new because they couldn't live as herbivores). This is all given in pretty plain and simple language in the Bible, so it's not only relatively easy to write up but also among the easier issues for an audience to understand.

I like your blog, Pardox244. Here is some, hopefully, constructive thoughts...

What made you look elsewhere?
Where did you go to get answers?
Would you have been attracted to a "Creationist Lies" blog? [Most YECers are not liars, though some leaders of the movement certainly might qualify.]
Perhaps I should have asked what group of readers are you trying to reach?

I like your choice to use the changes in eye development by logical, natural processes. It is hard to think rational and reasonable minds could read Darwin's Origins and not come away with some appreciation for the grand logic and conclusions presented. Also, the eye was the example case for Paley claiming it to be a "sure cure for atheism".

Many YECers might not be bothered with the idea of the change found in the eye of the cave fish, as it would represent to them a variety change, not a species change. A recent sermon preached that variety changes are obvious, and used the example that mankind is physically larger today than in the past. [I doubt the example is even a fair example of change within the species. Don't vitamins do this?] But it does point out what others have said, they don't understand science, and don't even [feel the] need to understand it to refute it. Facts are superfluous and subordinate to faith. It is sad to hear the things I hear, knowing them personally and knowing they are sincere and honest about their view (ie faith).

I know I am stepping on your toes, but I thought it might air some things out as this entire subject is a dark cave where bats don't swim, and it's hard to see the fish.

__________________
Lighten up! This is a stellar board! Author: duh.

"The Sun, with all the planets revolving around it, and depending on it, can still ripen a bunch of grapes as though it had nothing else in the universe to do..." Author: Galileo supposedly.

Your criticism, Paradox244, of their comet views are well stated. There are a few nits.

Those are Kuiper Belt objects, and come way short of the Oort Cloud.

Nevertheless, your comment suggesting that the Oort Cloud objects are beyond our view is correct. I don't think any have been seen -- I think that's still true. I don't see how they could be. For example, move Jupiter out to about 10,000 a.u., of the 50,000 a.u. expected range of the Oort cloud, and even the Hubble can't see it. [I'd have to recalculate to be sure, but I'm pretty sure it's 10k a.u.] A big part of the problem is that objects illuminated by our Sun decrease as to the inverse 4th power of distance since the light diminishes as the inverse square going out and the inverse square for the light that comes back to Earth.

Regarding their claim about the 3 suns, they are being sarcastic. They are trying to suggest that only nuclear power could explain their internal temperature. Since they expect us to see that they can't be suns, then these planets must be.... ta dah... young. [I was expecting to see some radioactive decay explanation for heat generation, but I didn't, or missed it.]

You are a gifted blogitist; your thoughts are enthusiastically expressed and clear. Keep going.

[added: it would be nice if your links would open a separate page rather than loose your page to go to them.]

__________________
Lighten up! This is a stellar board! Author: duh.

"The Sun, with all the planets revolving around it, and depending on it, can still ripen a bunch of grapes as though it had nothing else in the universe to do..." Author: Galileo supposedly.