Thomas Eshuis wrote: The Norse pantheon is full of gods that had nothing to do with the creation of the world.

This is also correct. Only three of the gods are credited with the creation of Midgard in the mythologies, Odin, Vili and Ve, whereas other norse gods like Thor, have no involvement in world creation and were worshipped for the elemental forces they represented.

The Greek pantheon is much the same, only none of the pantheon, not even Zeus, are credited with world creation.

Wortfish wrote:

Calilasseia wrote:
Who fucking cares about this? The Declaration of Independence isn't a scientific document, and was furthermore written in an era when supernaturalism still exerted undue control over discourse - an era before science had rendered mythological assertions irrelevant with respect to vast classes of entities and phenomena. If citing this document is the best you can do, it's a measure of your apologetic desperation.

PLOS genetics should care since it is a journal published in the United States and the DOI is a foundational document of the US for all its citizens.

You do not know your subject.

The declaration was written for an audience of one person. It succeeded. Now, it’s a historical novelty. We draw no laws or give no authority based on that document.

Wortfish wrote: And, as I pointed out, Darwin himself referred to the "Creator" who breathed life into the first organism. Thomas Jefferson and Charles Darwin would be forced to retract their works by a scientific community that refuses to even countenance the very possibility that the human hand was designed intentionally. Oh, and Alfred Russel Wallace made the same claim in his own tract on the subject: http://people.wku.edu/charles.smith/wallace/S165.htm

The hand of man contains latent capacities and powers which are unused by savages, and must have been even less used by palæolithic man and his still ruder predecessors. It has all the appearance of an organ prepared for the use of civilized man, and one which was required to render civilization possible.

Blah, blah, blah. Why should Darwin were he alive, be forced to retract all of his work over his use of the word “creator”? What does that lack of insight have to do with any other thing he wrote?

This isn’t how the scientific process, or reality for that matter, works. If that were so, all we need do is realize that you made stupid mistakes before now. I know for an absolute fact there is a time when you couldn’t multiply numbers with more than one digit correctly. And that should be sufficient to ignore any other thing you have to say.

But, but, but...



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The_Metatron wrote:...
Blah, blah, blah. Why should Darwin were he alive, be forced to retract all of his work over his use of the word “creator”? What does that lack of insight have to do with any other thing he wrote?

...

Actually, Darwin was struggling with his faith after he had made his big voyage in the Beagle - is there a god, and what is the cause of all the diversity of living things that he found. He was right on the first point - there is no god (much to the chagrin of his pious wife), but he was wrong on the second point, because he thought that phenotypic evolution was by inheritance of acqured characteristics (although, to be fair, the importance of genes to the whole tree of life was not generally understood at the time).

EDIT: His main claim to fame was through the sheer volume of his observations, which were later to form the basis of the correct theory of biological evolution.