Austin Austin and Evolution

[walterpthefirst]

Hmmm...

 

In a way I kind of feel sorry for the guy.

 

He seems to have taken this biblical principle and wrongly applied it to science.

 

Proverbs 3 : 5

 

Trust in the Lord with all your heart
    and lean not on your own understanding;

 

Don't understand, just trust.

 

So, when he reads a Christian apologetic argument that appears to use science as evidence for god he just trusts that its true without bothering to understand it.

 

How very sad.

 

 

 

 

 

[Joshpantera]

I don't think it's possible for him to understand any of it in his current state of mind. DB asked if he was recently converted to christianity. 

 

I think that was a fair question.

 

Because he's acting pretty hyper about the whole thing. It's as though Bevis found jesus....

 

Austin: "Google it! Yeah, yeah!"

 

Austin: "Google it! Yeah, yeah!" 

 

[☆ DarkBishop ☆]

8 minutes ago, Joshpantera said:

DB asked if he was recently converted to christianity. 

 

I think that was a fair question.

 

Yeah the way he is acting reminds me so much of the period of time when I first converted, before I really got into deep Bible study. And I just held on to anything my pastor said. It's amazing that by following the bibles own instructions to study and become a good workman righty dividing the word of God, Led so many to realize it was a load of bull shit lmao  

 

 

[freshstart]

On 11/10/2021 at 11:34 AM, AustinAustin said:

Please everyone I would not lie to you... God is real. Please seek God while there's still time.

I don't think you are lying. I think you are deluded into believing a lie. There's a big difference. What would it take to convince you that you are wrong? Let me go ahead and take a shot at answering that: you would need to have a gut feeling, a feeling in your heart, a personal revelation that would suddenly make sense to you. You would need to feel moved to believe anything different than what it is you believe now. It would need to feel right or feel "led," like it was coming from God in order to change course in your beliefs. Or is there something else that might change your mind?

 

I'm afraid that either you are not doing a good job of delivering God's message in a believable way or God picked the wrong person to deliver his message here. Which is it? Are you failing or is God?

[◊ Weezer ◊]

1 hour ago, freshstart said:

 

I'm afraid that either you are not doing a good job of delivering God's message in a believable way or God picked the wrong person to deliver his message here. Which is it? Are you failing or is God?

 

And maybe he is suffering from brain damage?  He is reminding me of a friend who was brain damaged in a car accident.

[walterpthefirst]

Just to put this business of the universe being 'closed' to bed, once and for all, this Wiki page is helpful.

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shape_of_the_universe

 

Einstein's theory of general relativity has three types of solution for the shape of a universe like ours; closed, flat or open.  Austin maintains that science tells us the universe is closed.  'Just Google it!'  But what does the current evidence say?

 

From the Wiki page...

 

The exact shape is still a matter of debate in physical cosmology, but experimental data from various independent sources (WMAP, BOOMERanG, and Planck for example) confirm that the universe is flat with only a 0.4% margin of error.

 

As we can see from this

illustration...  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shape_of_the_universe#/media/File:End_of_universe.jpg

...flat universes have no curvature and so they remain flat forever, extending to infinity in all directions.  

 

There is a qualification to this, however.  Which is covered by this caveat...

 

On the other hand, any non-zero curvature is possible for a sufficiently large curved universe (analogously to how a small portion of a sphere can look flat). 

 

The way to understand this is to imagine measuring out a triangle with sides 100 feet long on a patch of open ground.  By carefully examining the lines of the triangle, could you detect the curvature of the planet Earth, which we know to be a sphere?  The answer is, of course, no.  The scale of your triangle is way too small compared with the size of the Earth.

 

And that could be the case with our universe.  It could be curved so much that it is actually closed up into a sphere, but the scale of that curvature is so vast that we just can't see any sign of it within the observable universe.  To us, with our very limited, local viewpoint, it looks flat.

 

So, we just don't know for sure.  Nor does Austin.  Nor do the people writing the Christian propaganda and disinformation that he reads know either.  Nobody does.  The answer lies beyond our ability to discover it; far away, trillions or zillions of light years beyond the edge of our observable universe.

 

Thank you.

 

Walter.

 

 

 

[alreadyGone]

5 hours ago, walterpthefirst said:

...the curvature of the planet Earth, which we know to be a sphere?  ...

 

A sphere, really??? 

[Derek]

So THATS why I didn't fall off the edge when I went for that boat ride!  

[walterpthefirst]

Did I say a sphere?

 

Perhaps I meant a geoid.  And a lumpy one at that.

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoid

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoid#/media/File:Geoid_undulation_10k_scale.jpg

 

Just ****ing around, of course!

 

 

Walter

[alreadyGone]

37 minutes ago, Derek said:

So THATS why I didn't fall off the edge when I went for that boat ride!  

 

"here be dragons"

[TheRedneckProfessor]

It looks like @AustinAustin decided to shut down his old Twitter account and start a new one this weekend.  I wonder why...

[☆ DarkBishop ☆]

49 minutes ago, TheRedneckProfessor said:

It looks like @AustinAustin decided to shut down his old Twitter account and start a new one this weekend.  I wonder why...

What did you do prof? I see them devil horns.

[TheRedneckProfessor]

6 minutes ago, DarkBishop said:

What did you do prof? I see them devil horns.

I'm innocent as the day I was born!

[walterpthefirst]

8 minutes ago, TheRedneckProfessor said:

I'm innocent as the day I was born!

 

Sounds like a lyric from this British band.

 

 

You're as honest as the day is long, Prof?

 

The longer the daylight, the less you do wrong?

 

If so, then whatever you do, don't overwinter in the Antarctic!

 

 

 

 

[TheRedneckProfessor]

1 minute ago, walterpthefirst said:

You're as honest as the day is long, Prof?

 

The longer the daylight, the less you do wrong?

 

If so, then whatever you do, don't overwinter in the Antarctic!

 

Too deep for me.  I'll leave it to the philosophers among us.

[LogicalFallacy]

On 11/12/2021 at 6:11 AM, AustinAustin said:

A painting can't pop into existence, it must be painted, just as our universe must undergo a creation event to exist.

 

Nothing can exist without being created. This is a law of our Universe. Our Universe and all within are subject to laws of the Universe.

 

Your entire argument hinges on there having been an absolute "nothing". Can you demonstrate that absolute nothing is possible or even coherent?

 

On 11/12/2021 at 6:11 AM, AustinAustin said:

God is real.

 

Why am I completely unsurprised that once again we have an individual of limited scientific understanding coming in here proclaiming "God is real" without presenting the actual God.

[alreadyGone]

10 hours ago, LogicalFallacy said:

 

Your entire argument hinges on there having been an absolute "nothing". Can you demonstrate that absolute nothing is possible or even coherent?...

 

Brilliant.

I am embarrassed the implications of this never occurred to me.

[Joshpantera]

On 11/13/2021 at 2:14 PM, TheRedneckProfessor said:

It looks like @AustinAustin decided to shut down his old Twitter account and start a new one this weekend.  I wonder why...

 

Was a link to our forum discussions added to the old Twitter account???

[Joshpantera]

22 hours ago, alreadyGone said:

 

Brilliant.

I am embarrassed the implications of this never occurred to me.

 

We need to redo some of these older threads for newer audiences who may not be familiar. Here's the last big discussion on the topic: 

 

 

[TheRedneckProfessor]

32 minutes ago, Joshpantera said:

 

Was a link to our forum discussions added to the old Twitter account???

Well, I just stopped by to check in on him, purely out of altruistic concern.  But I may have inadvertently posted a link or two to his old account... and his new one.  Being new to Twitter, I must have just gotten confused about how things work.

[walterpthefirst]

25 minutes ago, TheRedneckProfessor said:

Well, I just stopped by to check in on him, purely out of altruistic concern.  But I may have inadvertently posted a link or two to his old account... and his new one.  Being new to Twitter, I must have just gotten confused about how things work.

 

Damn!  

 

Now I wish that I had a Twitter account.

 

 

 

[LogicalFallacy]

8 hours ago, Joshpantera said:

 

We need to redo some of these older threads for newer audiences who may not be familiar. Here's the last big discussion on the topic: 

 

 

 

Is that topic pinned? Probably should be because then entire creation ex-nihilo argument hinges on there having been absolute nothing which has not, and quite possibly cannot ever be demonstrated, making the whole argument incoherant.

 

"Something cannot come from nothing" Yeah probably true, hence it's quite possible there never was a nothing... including your God. God is not nothing. Therefore no one actually thinks everything came from nothing.

[walterpthefirst]

22 minutes ago, LogicalFallacy said:

 

Is that topic pinned? Probably should be because then entire creation ex-nihilo argument hinges on there having been absolute nothing which has not, and quite possibly cannot ever be demonstrated, making the whole argument incoherant.

 

"Something cannot come from nothing" Yeah probably true, hence it's quite possible there never was a nothing... including your God. God is not nothing. Therefore no one actually thinks everything came from nothing.

 

I like this LogicalFallacy. 

 

You've decapitated the 'something cannot come from nothing' argument by putting the onus of the theists to demonstrate that there was nothing before there was something.  Of course, there's no empirical way of doing this.  No evidence of this 'nothing' exists and with the failure of William Lane's Craig's use of the Hawking-Penrose Singularity theory, there is no scientific basis for it.  

 

The only option left open to the theists is to claim that they know that nothing was preceded something  ...by faith, because their holy book says so.  This doesn't qualify as a valid demonstration that nothingness preceded somethingness because faith functions without evidence, not with it. 

 

Hebrews 11 : 1 - 3.

 

1 Now faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see. 

2 This is what the ancients were commended for.

3 By faith we understand that the universe was formed at God’s command, so that what is seen was not made out of what was visible.

 

Thank you.

 

Walter.

[Joshpantera]

2 hours ago, walterpthefirst said:

This doesn't qualify as a valid demonstration that nothingness preceded somethingness because faith functions without evidence, not with it. 

 

Hebrews 11 : 1 - 3.

 

1 Now faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see. 

2 This is what the ancients were commended for.

3 By faith we understand that the universe was formed at God’s command, so that what is seen was not made out of what was visible.

 

Thank you.

 

Walter.

 

That's what makes these so called evidence of the existence of god arguments anti-biblical, basically. They have to shoot themselves in the foot to even go there....

 

 

[☆ DarkBishop ☆]

I need to add something to this thread before it gets locked. During my discussion with Austin I asked him several times to make up his mind on evolution. When I was a Christian and having the strict biblical mindset that I had, I didn't waver until I finally began to question. After over a decade of "serving the Lord" and studying the Bible. I was the one that would literally ask the question while preaching. "Where's the missing link?" Well after my mind was opened up from its closed off, leather bond shell. I found that they had found many missing links over the years.

 

I wanted to really highlight the fallacies around the biblical creation as opposed to the mounting evidence we have for our own evolution. 

 

At one point Austin said that whether God created us as we are now or whether he started evolution that he did it with one male and one female. That we didn't evolve as a group. That is a false statement. We did evolve as a species and at points in time there were multiple humanoid species alive at the same time.

 

 

https://humanorigins.si.edu/evidence/human-fossils/species

 

 

https://humanorigins.si.edu/evidence/human-fossils

 

There are several good websites to research the subject. While I may remain open to different possibilities of the beginnings of life on this planet. I'm completely sold on evolution. The evidence is there. We've dug it up. And what we see in reality, under our very feet, is nothing like the description offered in biblical scripture. 

 

Beyond a shadow of a doubt. The Biblical creation from start to finish is a MYTH and nothing but a MYTH. No more accurate than any other religions version of how humans came to be. Or for that matter how the world came to be. 

 

There are many different stories in Genesis we can delve into,  and prove false, just like the creation offered in the Bible. This book is the basis or "foundation" of everything biblical moving forward. If this book is demonstrably false, then it stands to reason that the rest of the bible is likewise myth with a few historical figures thrown in here and there to make it sound believable. 

 

In the words of "Jesus". "The house that was built upon the sand fell and great was the fall of it!" Genesis is a foundation of sand that is bringing down the whole of Christianity and they have very little support, other than blind faith, to keep it standing.