Response to Dave Stroebe's letter about C3Exhange

I was recently pointed in the direction of a letter on MLive.com ("Letters: Church has lost its core beliefs" by Dave Stroebe) via The Muskegon Chronicle regarding a "church" that some friends of mine attend. I'd written the following response to the author of that letter where it appeared on MLive.com, but I'm guessing that either due to the size of the comment, or the links therein, that it was held for moderation. So in the meantime I'm going to post it here and try to create a "non-link" to it in a comment there so that it can be read in the meantime.

Well let's address for a moment the issue underlying Dave's letter... the validity of Christianity in the first place.

We know for a fact, based on a vast wealth of objective evidence that we can actually verify through empirical observation and testing etc, we know that essentially every single claim made in the Judeo-Christian Creation story is provably false.

Since we know these things... that for instance the Earth is not flat, nor 5,700 years old, nor is the sky overhead a physical dome holding back a second ocean above just like the one here on the ground, in which the bible claims that God opened floodgates to allow it to pour in to flood the Earth for Noah's flood, etc... but most importantly that we know for a fact that human beings did not originate in Mesopotamia 5,700 years ago. Not by several orders of magnitude and not even on the same continent.

Because we know that such claims as made in the bible are demonstrably, provably false, based on the wealth of real world objective evidence we actually have, we know that Adam and Eve were never in the mythical Garden of Eden as claimed. They weren't there to be tempted by a talking serpent to commit the Original Sin. And since they weren't there to commit it, it never happened. And since it never happened, the very act which Jesus claims to be dying to gain our salvation from never happened in the first place, thus rendering moot the argument that we should be worshiping him for that supposed deed. The best that can be argued is that he died for a noble, but misguided gesture. And remember, we actually have the vast wealth of evidence to back that position up, which is profoundly more valid than the mythological claims of middle eastern bronze age tribesmen from a culture that was one of the most scientifically illiterate and primitive in the region, essentially the known world, at that time.

The burden of proof should one try to refute all that actual modern day objective evidence we have lies soundly on their shoulders. But we can prove that the very core claims of the Judeo-Christian bible that were meant to establish the power and authority of that God provably never happened and that what actually did happen involved different processes, different differentiation between the things created, vastly different spans of time, forms of life not even listed because the authors were ignorant of them, different orders of events, different locations, and on and on. Every single aspect of creation was profoundly different, and provably so, than the authors of the bible literally claim, and upon which literal claims the authority and power of God is derived, and from which the tale of Original Sin comes, which is later relied upon as a literal truth for the subsequent literal claims of truth of Jesus himself about being the son of God... and in Romans explicitly linking the requisite literal truth of the Original Sin of Adam and Eve to Salvation through Jesus Christ.

Romans 5:12-21 (NIV):

Death Through Adam, Life Through Christ

12 Therefore, just as sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, and in this way death came to all men, because all sinned— 13 for before the law was given, sin was in the world. But sin is not taken into account when there is no law. 14 Nevertheless, death reigned from the time of Adam to the time of Moses, even over those who did not sin by breaking a command, as did Adam, who was a pattern of the one to come.

15 But the gift is not like the trespass. For if the many died by the trespass of the one man, how much more did God's grace and the gift that came by the grace of the one man, Jesus Christ, overflow to the many! 16 Again, the gift of God is not like the result of the one man's sin: The judgment followed one sin and brought condemnation, but the gift followed many trespasses and brought justification. 17 For if, by the trespass of the one man, death reigned through that one man, how much more will those who receive God's abundant provision of grace and of the gift of righteousness reign in life through the one man, Jesus Christ.

18 Consequently, just as the result of one trespass was condemnation for all men, so also the result of one act of righteousness was justification that brings life for all men. 19 For just as through the disobedience of the one man the many were made sinners, so also through the obedience of the one man the many will be made righteous.

20 The law was added so that the trespass might increase. But where sin increased, grace increased all the more, 21 so that, just as sin reigned in death, so also grace might reign through righteousness to bring eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.

And of course we know these things thanks to the overwhelming extent and accuracy of the knowledge we have accrued and refined over the convening centuries through the greatest method of establishing objective truths and gaining knowledge based thereupon ever derived by man; The Scientific Method.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_method

"Scientific method refers to a body of techniques for investigating phenomena, acquiring new knowledge, or correcting and integrating previous knowledge. To be termed scientific, a method of inquiry must be based on gathering observable, empirical and measurable evidence subject to specific principles of reasoning. A scientific method consists of the collection of data through observation and experimentation, and the formulation and testing of hypotheses."

Which has led us to such things as, to only barely touch the tip of the vast iceberg of knowledge we now have...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_the_Earth

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_evolution

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_human_evolution

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_human_evolution_fossils

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_evolution

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_transitional_fossils

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_evolutionary_synthesis

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_species

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_of_life_(science)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_the_eye

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_as_theory_and_fact

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_mitochondrial_DNA_haplogroup ... which leads into terms like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitochondrial_Eve and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y-chromosomal_Adam, which the Christian mindset of cognitive dissonance and confirmation bias instantly tries to mold into their mythology of Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden... but these figurative individuals share their name no more than naming the planets after the Roman gods made those gods literally real.

I think you can understand why they chose the names. ;) Not to mention that both of these individuals lived far down in Africa, and many thousands of years separated from each other... and were not the first humans either, but merely the earliest common ancestor genetically we can find due to the way Y chromosomes and Mitochondrial DNA are passed down through generations etc.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:MatrilinealAncestor.PNG

That image shows simply how that early ancestor, while not the only person around, ends up passing her particular mitochondrial DNA on to everyone else...

As a matter of fact, just read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitochondrial_Eve#Common_fallacies to clarify these points.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formation_and_evolution_of_the_Solar_System

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geologic_time_scale

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Earth

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiometric_dating

And further...

http://myxo.css.msu.edu/ecoli/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._coli_long-term_evolution_experiment

"The unequivocal consensus in the scientific community is that intelligent design is not science."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligent_design

http://www.ucsusa.org/scientific_integrity/what_you_can_do/why-intelligent-design-is-not.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kitzmiller_v._Dover_Area_School_District

And I could go ON and ON....

Evolution is an objective, empirically observed fact. The only thing really up for honest debate these days are the mechanisms involved... eg; sexual selection, epigenetics, punctuated equilibrium, horizontal gene transfer, and so forth.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_selection

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epigenetics

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizontal_gene_transfer

But that it happens is none the less a fact, and one that many Christians seem to have such a profound problem with only because it contradicts their provably false ancient mythological explanation for things that we do actually have a fundamentally vastly superior understanding of today.

You could say it's much like the law of gravity versus the theory of gravity. That gravity exists is a fact, one that we can observe and study. Why gravity exists and how exactly it works is still an area of intense scientific study.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_as_theory_and_fact#Evolution_compared_with_gravity

People inventing those Judeo-Christian creation myths in one of the most scientifically illiterate cultures even of their time, thousands of years ago, at least had a good excuse for their beliefs... they had no way of knowing any better. Christians today do not share that luxury.

And we can only assume that those who would promote those claims as "truth" and "fact" etc, in spite of the wealth of evidence to the contrary, are so profoundly ignorant of the actual scientific facts because they must focus on sites like "The Institute for Creation Research", "Answers In Genesis", "Discovery Institute", and so forth if they even bother to consider the matter at all, which most intentionally don't... (most Christians never really consider the conflict between their modern scientific understanding of the world around them and the profoundly different standards by which they judge (or rather don't judge) the mythological claims of their religion. This is a form of psychological compartmentalization as a means of avoiding the forementioned cognitive dissonance etc... but we'll leave that for later as this is getting much too long as it is.)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institute_for_Creation_Research

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Answers_in_Genesis

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discovery_Institute

These are sites that persist in peddling false information in spite of it being shown to be profoundly wrong over and over again because they are more concerned with how effectively they can fool the scientifically illiterate faithful into believing them, not in actually proving any of their points honestly based on real evidence etc.

One might want to read the following: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wedge_strategy

To understand the motivations of the people they seem to be so eagerly taking as honest and truthful promoters of "Truth" with a capital T etc.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kitzmiller_v._Dover_Area_School_District#Allegations_of_perjury

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-404729062613200911#

And so forth.

This is not a message of religious intolerance, it is a lesson in well supported facts and the sound reasoning based thereupon.

When we have established all these facts, the nature of what C3Exhange is doing becomes rather moot, because in reality they are hardly any less valid than Christianity itself, both having been provably invented based on the wishful thinking of human beings, and neither offering any objective evidence to support themselves, and both relying solely on subjective emotional appeals and a willful denial of evidence and reasoning to the contrary of either.

So don't get me wrong, I'm not a real fan of way C3Exchange promotes unsupported happy feelings as somehow establishing some sort of "truth" about the objective nature of the universe we live in, in spite of the actual real world facts and logic to the contrary... but it's a little beside the point in the context of this opinion piece since the author has no more of a sound footing to be standing on himself to be preaching such intolerance at Ian and his congregation.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wishful_thinking

"Wishful thinking is the formation of beliefs and making decisions according to what might be pleasing to imagine instead of by appealing to evidence, rationality or reality."

Now I can certainly expand upon this discussion vastly, go into greater detail if need be, and lay out more specifically the logical fallacies etc involved in arguments by those such as Dave Stroebe (the author of the opinion piece above) as well as Ian Lawton and many of his "faithful" etc. While I find both to be invalid, I at least have a little more forgiving attitude toward Ian for being more progressive about the whole thing.

Some of the most common issues that arise in these discussions are the following;

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophic_burden_of_proof

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophic_burden_of_proof#Asymmetry_in_the_burden_of_proof

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_emotion

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherry_picking

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escalation_of_commitment

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_ignorance

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_pleading

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dilemma

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_tradition

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argumentum_ad_populum

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moving_the_goalposts

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignoratio_elenchi#Red_herring

Slightly more subtle, but fundamentally important points...

http://www.differencebetween.net/language/difference-between-objective-and-subjective/

Objective – is a statement that is completely unbiased. It is not touched by the speaker’s previous experiences or tastes. It is verifiable by looking up facts or performing mathematical calculations.

Subjective – is a statement that has been colored by the character of the speaker or writer. It often has a basis in reality, but reflects the perspective through with the speaker views reality. It cannot be verified using concrete facts and figures.

And even more sublte ones such as;

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging_the_question

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equivocation

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_analogy

And so on...

That should be more than enough for now to establish the foundation of sound reason and evidence behind my assertions. Sorry for the length, I figured I would just get a lot of the heavy lifting out of the way right off the bat to hopefully save myself the trouble of having to type it later.

Color me foolishly optimistic. ;)

If you've made it this far and actually read and thought about all of that, I sincerely thank you.

A meta-post on Atheism, Agnosticism and Faith.

I've been having another discussion/debate on another forum and felt like sharing some of the exchanges. All quotes are written by myself unless otherwise specified.

This was written as part of an ongoing debate on a forum and is simply copied from there verbatim, so the language used may reflect that.

Justifying the existence of God by saying that the Universe requires a creator is nothing more than creating a problem in order to find something for your "solution" to solve. And your solution is to create something necessarily even more complex than the universe to create it. Which would then require an even more complex creator, ad infinitum of increasing complexity.

It's simple to say that the Christian God simply does not and cannot exist. And even the God of the "The universe requires a creator" cannot logically exist. And if the universe could just spring into being, or have always been in some form or another, then there is no requirement for a God, and no reason to create an infinitely more improbable and complex "God" to fit a problem that doesn't necessarily exist in the first place.

"That which can be claimed without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence." and as I've said before, we have a hell of a lot of evidence that says that God doesn't exist. And frankly your excuse is rather simple minded and childish.

Calling something like that "God" implies that you have a need to have some "god" figure, so you're willing to call anything "god" just to fill some gap in your brain so you can feel comfortable. You're absolutely inventing something out of thin air without even the "benefit" of a bunch of other people's shared wishful thinking. Just your own over active (and sadly off kilter) imagination.

Just because something is here doesn't mean it required a creator. A rock lying in the street didn't need a creator. Natural forces create all kinds of things around us. Sand dunes, mountain ranges, forests, entire planets formed from the naturally occurring physical forces of the universe. Gravity, atomic attraction, atomic reactions etc.

As it's said "we are all made of stars". Everything you see around you today was once a part of a star. All the complex elements etc.

Just because you might not yet know the answer to something, doesn't mean that you can come up with some utterly improbable or downright impossible reason off the top of your head and think that makes your idea somehow valid or even plausible.

That's the funny thing about this universe and this world we live in. There are certain physical laws and natural rules that govern everything around us. You can't physically be both where you're sitting right now and sitting here at the table with me. 5 is not equal to 0. If you walk outside and toss an apple into the air, it is going to fall back to the ground, unless you physically tie a balloon full of hot air or helium or hydrogen or something to it to counteract that very real force of gravity.

In reality those forces have to be taken into account and they are on a daily basis. You don't drive your car into a tree at 70 miles per hour because it's going to smash it horribly and those very real physical forces have a good chance of killing you. Wishful thinking doesn't make them go away.

In a nutshell, if the universe requires a creator, so does God, which creates an infinitely more complex recursion (which is even more improbable than the universe just springing into being, for the record). If God doesn't require a creator, then neither does the universe, negating the need for God in the first place. So God is impossible and irrelevant either way.

Atheism. From it's Greek roots simply means "without theism". A lack of religious belief, or even active disbelief. It doesn't denote the "evil" tones that Christians would like it to. It simply means you know enough to make a rational, logical and informed decision not to believe in absolutely unprovable and impossible fairytales that cannot ever, by their very nature, be proven or disproven because they simply do not exist. They are figments of the human mind, created by simple minded and ignorant people to assuage their fears of the unknown.

M.I.N.A.S. said:
and the fact still remains that stars wouldn't exist without some sort form of creation. A world of -completely nothing- is unimaginable by the human mind. You can just picture a huge white space...but the problem there is that a world of completely nothing wouldn't even have black or white colors. Colors wouldn't exist either. It's something beyond human comprehension.

And that justifies your impossible and childish "god" "answer" how? :)

Just because you can't understand the real reason for something yet, doesn't make your made up fairytale answer correct by any stretch of the imagination.

The problem here is with the definition of "creation". Stars were produced as a result of physical forces after the Big Bang. And right now scientists are working on what preceded the Big Bang.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Bang#Speculative_physics_beyond_the_Big_Bang

Just as our knowledge has moved from the primitive and ignorant explanation of a father figure that created the universe, and life specifically as we know it, meaning cows, pigs, sheep, birds and us, in 7 days, around 6,000 years ago... to the modern understanding of actual cosmology, astrophysical forces etc that enables us to ascertain the actual age of the universe and the bodies within it etc... which led to our understanding of the Big Bang... so does science continue to progress and broaden our knowledge to the point where in the future we should have an even greater understanding.

We now understand the actual age of our planet and the vast array of life that has evolved here over the course of millions of years... long before cows and sheep of the bible's creator. The life that the primitive and ignorant authors of the bible did not, and likely could not have, known about. They wrote their fairytale explanation based on what they saw around them and their incredibly limited understanding of the world around them, much less the workings of the "heavens" above them.

The solution is not found in clinging to utterly unprovable and impossible ancient fairytale explanations, but instead on actual scientific and empirical studies. Ignorance of science is in no way proof of primitive superstitions.

If you contrast what we know today with what we knew then, you get an idea of how far we've come, and how far we can still go in our understanding. That should be our noble goal. Not wallowing in the ignorant superstitions of the past.

M.I.N.A.S. said:
It's a metaphor. I even stated I was just using that as an example so I could get the point across. I hardly consider the big bang a legitimate answer to the existence of either life nor matter.

It's the best answer we have right now. :) A hell of a lot better than using primitive metaphors for men in the clouds.

And what point do you think you were getting across? You haven't made a valid point yet.

What you've tried to describe so far could only by stretching even be called deism at best and certainly not theism. Aside from the fact that I've already shown how incorrect your assertions are even on that front.

Even Einstein who made figures of speech about God was expressly non-religious and resented having his words taken out of context.

The more a man is imbued with the ordered regularity of all events the firmer becomes his conviction that there is no room left by the side of this ordered regularity for causes of a different nature. For him neither the rule of human nor the rule of divine will exists as an independent cause of natural events. To be sure, the doctrine of a personal God interfering with natural events could never be refuted, in the real sense, by science, for this doctrine can always take refuge in those domains in which scientific knowledge has not yet been able to set foot.

But I am convinced that such behavior on the part of representatives of religion would not only be unworthy but also fatal. For a doctrine which is to maintain itself not in clear light but only in the dark, will of necessity lose its effect on mankind, with incalculable harm to human progress. In their struggle for the ethical good, teachers of religion must have the stature to give up the doctrine of a personal God, that is, give up that source of fear and hope which in the past placed such vast power in the hands of priests. In their labors they will have to avail themselves of those forces which are capable of cultivating the Good, the True, and the Beautiful in humanity itself. This is, to be sure, a more difficult but an incomparably more worthy task... --Albert Einstein

It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it. --Albert Einstein

I do not believe in immortality of the individual, and I consider ethics to be an exclusively human concern with no superhuman authority behind it. --Albert Einstein

As I believe I said in the beginning... Agnosticism is nothing more than the juvenile form of Atheism. As you grow to understand the reality you live in, and the facts involved... your primitive supernatural idea of God becomes a veritable impossibility.

If you understand medicine, how it works etc... you don't continue to call it magic. You have grown beyond the primitive wonder at something which you did not understand and hence ascribed to it a supernatural power.

The same goes for the world we live in and the universe we live in. When you grow to understand these things, you no longer need to use ignorant and primitive language to describe it.... you simply call it what it is and address the unknown as the unknown, but only in the context of all that you do know to be factual. You take a holistic view of the body of human and scientific knowledge and see that such primitive notions have no place in an educated, rational mind.

Childish metaphors are for children who cannot understand or speak of the reality of things. The Stork for child birth for instance... when you grow up you forget that childish explanation for the wonder of pregnancy and birth. You speak of it in educated terms. So it should be for your childish metaphor of the birth of life and everything as we know it.

The benefits of skeptical thinking and a little research.

I was perusing one of my favorite news aggregators yesterday and ran across an article that piqued my interest. Not more than a few sentences in I was left aggravated and a bit disgusted that such an article made it into the "headline news" again, having been debunked for several years now.

Original article: NASA hides the true color of Mars.

So I went digging in my old archived bookmarks and thankfully immediately ran across the link I was looking for.

And the thorough debunking of it, 3 and a half years ago: NASA Is Not Altering Mars Colors.

The main point here is that almost anyone with a cursory knowledge of astronomy or even basic science could probably come up with the idea that there are different colors involved in the light of a different planet with a different atmosphere than ours and that color correction has probably been applied to images that hit the press versus images that the scientists are using internally.

Beyond that somewhat obvious first skepticism, some actual research could have further explained the issue before running off on a conspiracy theory. Furthermore, the fact that the article not only has persisted on the internet for several years after being debunked, but then again made the news, simply saddens me.

As an aside, the ending comment in the first article also mentions a mysterious formation that might be involved as a reason for the color correction cover-up, which also should fail under the same basic critical assessment as the color correction. A rather thorough debunking of that phenomenon can be found in the thread Martian crater with golf ball in it (?) found on the Bad Astronomy and Universe Today Forum.

Or to take the risk of hearing it right from the proverbial horse's mouth (which I'm sure the conspiracy theorists would object to), Revealing Mars' True Colors: Part One, directly from NASA's Mars Rover website.

Think people.

On Stem Cell Research

I'm bringing yet another article of mine back from the grave to cover a topic that came up again today.

Originally posted on Sunday, June 26, 2005 @ 4:37 AM

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stem_cell_research

Make special note of the section entitled "Blastocyst stem cell ethical debate" around half way down the entry. Notice that these Blastocysts, from which the stem cells are extracted, are already being legally used by in vitro fertility clinics, "and when not used in additional therapy or in embryonic stem cell research are destroyed or frozen indefinitely by the thousands."

So... rather than actually try to help humankind by destroying a 5 day old clump of cells with no nervous system etc, which will absolutely be destroyed anyway if not used in an actual fertility procedure... let's just hose the whole thing because we're a bunch of bleeding heart religious conservatives with a personal agenda who can't put 2 and 2 together to see how stupid we're being.

Bush pledges to veto stem cell bill - May 23rd 2005

US stem cell research in jeopardy - January 24th 2005

Make special note of the last two sentences in that article: The existing rules cited are designed to prevent the destruction of further embryos from which stem cells are extracted. The process has provoked considerable polemic in the US, with George Bush coming down firmly on the side of the antis.

*ahem* Let me make this clear...

They're going to be destroyed anyway. Now because of your ignorant dogmatic politicking, we're going to lose all the possible benefits that might be had.

Have I made myself clear?

Thanks Chief.

Now, I'm going to head one argument off at the pass by playing the devils advocate here.

<devils_advocate> Being frozen indefinitely does not mean destroyed. Doing the stem cell extraction procedure on the blastocysts will actually destroy them, whereas being frozen indefinitely doesn't. </devils_advocate>

Fair enough I suppose.

However, we know that not all are even frozen indefinitely (or as the following article states, "for a long time"), but that at least some, if not most are destroyed under the current procedures, and they have been handled as such for awhile now.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_vitro_fertilization

From that we know that this has been going on since roughly 1978. 27 years now. While we see that many of the same "concerns" being raised, obviously this procedure has been allowed to continue because of it's obvious, directly observable, desirable effects... namely, allowing parents who might not be otherwise able, to conceive and bear their own children.

That's the trouble with ignorant people... the more abstract or complicated an issue is, the less likely they are to understand or accept it.

Put simply, some of the issues here are:

• Lack of knowledge of all the pertinent information.


• Lack of ability to comprehend the pertinent information even when available.


• Lack of ability to perceive long term benefits.


• Desire to adhere to the religious/conservative group ideology.

Put very simply, fear of the unknown.

Warning, sarcasm and a bit of aggravation ensues beyond this point.

Remember kids, the following things are wrong! Now can you tell me why?

• Bypassing the natural method of conception.


• Creating life in the laboratory.

Because only the imaginary sky god is supposed to be able to do that! If we can create life ourselves, we're heading down the path of making the imaginary sky god obsolete.

We just can't have that! We need to stay in the dark ages where intellectual thought and literacy were suppressed to maintain belief in the church (And yes, I know that there were mainly "political" motivations behind that, to maintain a power structure dependent on the absolute belief in the Catholic Church as the sole means of communication with God, the sole channel of biblical learning and hence the sole means of salvation.), the bible, and it's imaginary sky god and outdated, backwards, and downright heinously erroneous ignorant fictitious world view.

Case in point.

Discovered: the missing link that solves a mystery of evolution.

Quirky "fishapod" crawls onto our family tree. (Thanks Jen!)

Let's see how many creationists want to talk about this. ;-)

(Not to mention Archaeopteryx etc...)

It should also be pointed out, as someone else commented, that there really isn't such a thing as a "missing link". This terminology was invented by creationists trying to find a way to argue against science. It takes a rather in-depth ignorance of the subject to think that evolution is a single chain from *poof* having life begin, and *tada!* having us as the end of the evolutionary chain. And that is putting it -very- nicely.

Starting with the concept of "life", which is something religious wackos have essentially no real grasp of... we have something that is actually a progression of proteins, molecules etc... those which "work", stay. Those which don't... don't. For instance, the protein that causes mad cow disease (and mad deer) isn't a living thing... although it acts like one. It's simply a protein that has found a way to travel and reproduce as such... where does this fall?

Religious nuts like to think of "life" as this magical gift from god that just starts... magically... at some point... when God chooses to give you a soul or something... (explain plants? explain bacteria? are they alive? how about viruses? where do you draw the ARBITRARY line?)

In actuality, those with any real scientific understanding know that "life" is an arbitrary classification we give things that portray certain characteristics. For instance, let's look at the criteria listed on Wikipedia's Life page:

Although there is no universal agreement on the definition of life, the generally accepted biological manifestations are that life exhibits the following phenomena:

1. Organization - Living things are comprised of one or more cells, which are the basic units of life.
2. Metabolism - Metabolism produces energy by converting nonliving material into cellular components (synthesis) and decomposing organic matter (catalysis). Living things require energy to maintain internal organization (homeostasis) and to produce the other phenomena associated with life.
3. Growth - Growth results from a higher rate of synthesis than catalysis. A growing organism increases in size in all of its parts, rather than simply accumulating matter.
4. Adaptation - Adaptation is the accommodation of a living organism to its environment. It is fundamental to the process of evolution and is determined by the individual's heredity.
5. Response to stimuli - A response can take many forms, from the contraction of a unicellular organism when touched to complex reactions involving all the senses of higher animals. Plants also respond to stimuli, but usually in ways very different from animals. A response is often expressed by motion: the leaves of a plant turning toward the sun or an animal chasing its prey.
6. Reproduction - The division of one cell to form two new cells is reproduction. Usually the term is applied to the production of a new individual (either asexually, from a single parent organism, or sexually, from two differing parent organisms), although strictly speaking it also describes the production of new cells in the process of growth.

I don't see any mention of a magical gift from God... or a soul in there... do you? I do however, see a set of scientifically testable criteria. Funny that...

Moving on...

From these beginnings, fitting the theory of "Survival of the Fittest", as atoms followed the laws of physics and molecules formed... and proteins etc... and these continually followed the mantra of the best "surviving" and the imperfect ones failing... we grew. "Life" grew. There was no magic moment when Life Began^TM. Things simply progressed... and this progression, from the start... was as a tree with a multitude of branches... ever growing. Not a single chain... but each "offspring" having it's own offspring... and essentially all of them slightly unique... and as these branches grew... some grew ever further apart from each other as each found different traits beneficial to survival... either through reproductive traits... or survival traits.... depending on geography, habitat, "food", mate availability etc... any number of different factors... and so we progressed from organic compounds... proteins... single celled organisms... multicellular organisms... towards things like primitive plants and animals as the first "major" branches of the tree of life started diverging in more dramatic ways. (See Wikipedia's article on "Evolution" for another thourough explanation.)

Many of these branches exist simultaneously, in similar forms. Some reach essentially efficient stable forms and remain unchanged for millions of years, such as Sharks. Some have been merely a twinkle in the eye of time... some have held sway over the earth for millions of years... only to be eventually unseated by a different form... such as the transition from the dinosaurs to mammals as we now know them as the dominant life forms (leaving out insects and such, who ridiculously outnumber us).

But back to what I was saying... as someone earlier said... as much as such a "missing link" is a transitional life form... which essentially all live on earth is... then we must not forget that we are simply a transitional life form between our more ape like ancestors and relatives, and some future "super-human" form. We are a chronospecies... one that will inevitably cease to exist simply due to the passage of time. Any real study of the fossil record will demonstrate innumerable species that have changed so dramatically over the course of time, that if you took the animal now, and one of it's ancestors from millenia past... they would not be able to interbreed, having changed so dramatically in the interim.

I have no problem addressing these complex issues scientifically, and adjusting the models as evidence and data requires... but oversimplification and rote denial of mountains of factual data and scientific evidence in pursuit of elevating a belief, based on ignorance, to the level of supposed credibility... I have a rather serious problem with that.

For instance, there has been an issue of an evangelical nutcase archaeologist who claims to have discovered organic "tissue" inside T-Rex bones etc... while I think that she is a nutjob, given many of her public statements... I won't discount her findings over it... I simply want to see more research done along those lines. If the models of biological material decay were wrong, address them... if there really is some other problem with the models... address them. Failure to address an issue when it doesn't fit the expected guidelines, out of a fear of what it might mean, is to completely fail the goals of science.

(Read this article about the T-Rex, from the perspective of some Creationists, to get an idea how ridiculous these people's beliefs are. For instance, take every living species of animal alive today, and take a single male and female from each (not to mention that the bible specifies that SEVEN of every type of clean animal and SEVEN of every type of bird... AND food enough for themselves and every single animal... aside from "every kind of food"... or the fact that the waters were so deep that they covered the entire earth COMPLETELY, 20 feet deeper than the tip of the highest mountain on earth... or that all mankind was killed except for Noah, his wife, their 3 sons, and their wives... and all of humanity is supposedly now descended from those 8 people... or maybe more, as polygamy was accepted in those days... the list goes on and on and on...) and see if you can fit them all onto a single boat of the size Noah built. Not to mention ignoring the fossil record and archaeological evidence concretely dating when these animals lived. Or ignoring the fact that due to inbreeding, almost all of these species would die off etc... it's simply scientifically ludicrous bullshit... but that doesn't stop these nutjobs from throwing mountains of science out the window, while clinging to straws... even scientific ones... to try to prove they're right.)

We have creationists scrambling to cling to this issue as supposed proof of young earth theory etc... and others denying the evidence outright, without even looking into it, for fear that it might give the young earthers ground to stand on.

(Let's not forget that the bible explicitly lists the animals created during creation; cows, birds etc... and fails to mention the kind of life we know actually came about, billions of years after the formation of our planet, which in turn came billions of years after the beginning of the universe as we know it... to put this a little more clearly for you... sit down in front of a nice old analog wall clock, and starting at midnight, watch the second hand sweep around... second after second... as it travels around the face of the clock 1,440 times over the next 24 hours... and just before midnight, 24 hours later, as the second hand ticks off that one final second... that single second, in relation to the previous 23 hours, 59 minutes and 59 seconds, represents more time than cows as we know them, and ourselves, have existed in relation to the age of the universe as we know it.)

UPDATE - WEDNESDAY, APRIL 12, 2006:
Please see my later post Visual timeline of evolution that has a link to a much better visual example then my clock metaphor. (Evolutionary Timeline)

I think it's pretty safe to say that fundamentalist Christians are broken in the head... but let's not let our fear of their delusional rantings prevent us from addressing what could be shocking findings about fossilization and such. Keep our eyes on the truth for the sake of the truth, the whole truth, wherever it may lead us.