Oldskeptic wrote:...Man, the worst thing I've heard of Dawkins doing was saying, "Science is interesting, and if you don't agree you can fuck off."

...

For me, the worst think Dawkins said (in a televised debate with a creationist) was about eye evolution, because he seemed to imply that our imaging eyes evolved from cephalopod-type imaging eyes, rather than from the non-imaging eyes of hagfish-like proto-vertebrates, just because of a superficial resemblance between the two (mainly brought about by convergent evolution). This error did nothing to further the cause of atheism in biology.

"...further the cause of atheism in biology." What does that mean?

Rumraket wrote:The problem is that the ID position... makes zero predictions.

Hi Rumraket! Below I'll paste below some of the creationist predictions that we've made at Real Science Radio on the air over the last couple decades, of those that have already been confirmed. We have many more creation-based predictions that we've published that we are expectantly awaiting confirmation on. (The first prediction falls into the tangential field of psychology, but the rest are in the physical sciences.)

IDers and creationists have published quite a few predictions. These predictions now are receiving a lot of attention, ironically, thanks to Bill Nye and Neil deGrasse Tyson both recently claiming, incorrectly, that creationists do not make scientific predictions. What's more, they therefore deny that Christians could make creation-based predictions that would ever be confirmed. That is ironic because Nye & Tyson, by bringing attention to that issue, have unintentionally helped to publicize even our very own Real Science Radio science predictions and confirmations, which are now even more discoverable to the general public. For, when anyone searches the web for: creation science predictions, Google ranks our own program, RSR's List of Creation Science Predictions, at #4 of more than a million pages and for: confirmed creationist predictions, at #3 of about a quarter of a million pages!



If you can see Rumraket that it is true that we creationists (and IDers) do make predictions based on our scientific perspectives, perhaps you can ask the skeptics in your sphere to avoid spreading the incorrect claim (ala deGrasse, et al.) that creationists (and IDs) do not make predictions.

Thanks for bringing up the belief that many atheists have regarding creationists not making predictions. That gives me the opportunity to provide you with the evidence that you would want to correct that misinformation.

- Bob Enyart

RSR Confirmed Science Predictions (except that the first relates even more to psychology than to physiology) we provide links, confirmations, etc.

- 1990 prediction: as published in two Colorado newspapers and then reprinted when confirmed in the Rocky Mountain News, we predicted that condom distribution to students would increase teen pregnancy at Adams City High School (rate increased 42% over the next 2 years, to where 108 babies were born to students in one school year at that one school)
- 1995 prediction: that the Hubble Deep Field images of distant galaxies would look basically like nearby galaxies
- 1995 prediction: that America, like much of the world, would never have a heterosexual AIDS epidemic
- 1998 prediction: to Eugenie Scott that it was wrong for anti-creationists like her to characterize DNA as Junk
- 2004 prediction: to the former president of the Environ. & Eng. Geophysical Society about earthquake risk estimates
- 2007 prediction: vindicated that evolutionists would ignore the greatest paleontological discovery ever made
- 2012 prediction: very little of a lengthy, acclaimed book on eye evolution will actually be about how eyes evolve
- 2012 prediction: a virtual laboratory experiment, alleged 15-millions in the making, dashed the hopes of Darwinists everywhere when Antarctica's isolated 2-mile deep Lake Vostok revealed thousands of modern species that "usually live in ocean or lake sediments", said Bowling Green State University biology professor Scott Rogers. On the air in 2012, Real Science Radio's Bob Enyart and Fred Williams confidentially predicted that evolutionists would not find 15 million years worth of evolution in Lake Vostok.

p.s. Rumraket, this is just from our RSR program. In Tyson and Nye's recent claims that we don't make predictions, they both referred specifically to creationists. So at RSR, we provide not only our own many and detailed predictions (like about future discoveries regarding dinosaur soft tissue, etc.), and confirmed predictions, but we also list and provide links to some other confirmed predictions from the creation movement. And I've seen that the old-earth ID movement has publicized, along with the scores of papers that their proponents and their allies have published in mainstream science journals, when their predictions have been confirmed.

Holy Fuck, you really think those are SCIENCE predictions.....oh wait....I forget what kind of ignorant biased creationist we were dealing with.

I just did a google on Bob Enyart......you should too. Very enlightening.

Oldskeptic wrote:
Would this be the same Bob Enyart that said that children's hearts are lifted by spanking? The same Bob Enyart that was convicted of child abuse in 1994 after beating your girlfriend's child with a belt so hard that the beating broke the skin? Nothing like practicing what you preach, ey? You came close to lifting that kid's heart right up to heaven. Nice try!

Good questions! I wonder what the answers are?

kennyc wrote:Holy Fuck, you really think those are SCIENCE predictions.....oh wait....I forget what kind of ignorant biased creationist we were dealing with.

Just do an internet search, it's even worse than that.

Edit: I was a few seconds too late.

Rumraket wrote:I wonder whether you're even aware your computer has a hard drive, Bob. What do you think is inside the hard drive? An immaterial disc?

Hi again Rumraket! Intelligent creatures can create various ways to represent and transmit information. To do that, we devise a symbolic code, where sounds, visual symbols, voltages, etc., are (typically) arbitrarily imbued with meaning (like "X marks the spot"; all along it could've been Y), and then we encode information into that system, whether, for example, into hieroglyphics, highway signs, or scripts.

The inventor of ASCII (he's fun to read about) proposed a symbolic code for common text (and other) characters. The industry agreed upon a standard, and then encoded that standard into magnetic, electronic, or optical bits on your computer's drive. Perhaps you can consider that there is a difference between information and the physical medium of its transmission.

The physical atoms/electrons/depressions/whatever in your drive do not constitute the information itself, but only the medium, such that the matter that makes up those bits (or the lack of matter, as with optical depressions), is not the information, but it represents the information, which is independent of the physical medium. This is why the physics and chemistry of the medium has no effect on the plot of a novel that is stored in so many diverse physical mediums. If the physical medium were the information, than as physical mediums do, they would impart their properties to the objects built of them. Ice cubes have properties that arise from their constituent water molecules. If you made ice out of something other than water, say alcohol, the properties of alcohol would influence the properties of that ice (freezing point, etc.).

Rumraket, I think you would agree that the properties of the physical medium that we use to store and transmit information do not impart their physical properties onto the information. In other words, if you write a poem and later emailed it to ADParker, even if you put it through a dozen different forms of physical media before sending it to him, there is no scientific reason why any of those mediums would need to impart their own properties onto your information.

For example, if you first wrote your poem in pencil on paper, then made an audio recording of it, then transcribed that into the lyrics of a a song that you sang to a friend, who then painted your words onto a canvas, which was then photographed, when was then transcribed into a MS Word document, which was then saved on a flash drive, which was then bounced via radio waves off of a satellite as you uploaded it to your email account, which then, just today, was sent via photons over a fiber optic backbone to ADParker's IP address, and then translated into electrons to get to his PC, and then represented in energized pixels on his computer screen (other than a breakdown in that process which causes corruption or loss of your information), none of those physical media "carriers" modify your information. Your information transcends the physical media used to store or communicate it.

That's a second way to demonstrate that information is not physical. (The first way that I presented was that our physicists say that we have only measured light traveling at the approximately 186k-mps speed of light, and that we cannot transport matter at that speed, that is, we cannot piggyback things onto photons, and so therefore, because we can transport information on photons, that is a way of recognizing that information is not physical.) There are many ways to realize that the information that flows from your pen is not the ink. This topic of "information" seems to be one of those important issues that possibly could demonstrate which worldview does a better job at comprehending reality.

- Bob Enyart

Seriously people, I think it best we stop talking to, or about, Mr. Bob Enyart. I think the thread should be locked ASAP!

Alternatively Mr. Bob Enyart could confess to any other crimes he may have committed and I'm sure we'd see to it that he gets the help he needs.

RS

kennyc wrote:Wow. We got a live one here.

Hi kennyc. Well, after all, it is called Bob Enyart Live.

So once again, our newcomer is ignoring the fact that information is nothing more than the physical data extant with respect to a system of interest, encapsulated in every rigorous treatment thereof, from Turing's paper on computable numbers, through to Kolmogorov's work. I wonder how long he'll continue ignoring this?

Bob@RealScienceRadio wrote:

Rumraket wrote:I wonder whether you're even aware your computer has a hard drive, Bob. What do you think is inside the hard drive? An immaterial disc?

Hi again Rumraket! Intelligent creatures can create various ways to represent and transmit information.
{snip}

I've already countered all of that. So what do you think to are playing at?

ADParker wrote:

Bob@RealScienceRadio wrote:

Rumraket wrote:I wonder whether you're even aware your computer has a hard drive, Bob. What do you think is inside the hard drive? An immaterial disc?

Hi again Rumraket! Intelligent creatures can create various ways to represent and transmit information.
{snip}

I've already countered all of that. So what do you think to are playing at?

Bob's used to having a bully pulpit, which would explain the condescending tone to people who probably know a lot more about the science than he does.

I don't know about science, I'm still waiting for a rundown on the mathematics used to determine design.

Made of Stars wrote:Bob's used to having a bully pulpit, which would explain the condescending tone to people who probably know a lot more about the science than he does.

Oh I know. I (re)watched his debate with Lawrence Krauss (on his own radio show). I almost felt embarrassed for him, but he seems quite impressed with himself throughout.

"Bully" is a good word for it, given his obvious penchant for child abuse. Hey Bobby, wanna take a swing at someone who can hit back, or you only good for beating little kids with a belt? Just ban this asshole and be done with it, he stinks the place up like a suppurating rat's rectum inside a dead skunk that's been shoved up a week-old dead rhino's twat.

Onyx8 wrote:"...further the cause of atheism in biology." What does that mean?

It could imply that Dawkins uses biology to push the notion that there is no god and that in this instance, his efforts misfired. Seems to me Dawkins does do that and he isn't alone; he is in a tradition going back to Darwin, of using biology as a canvas for developing and presenting an atheist vision of the world. Darwin used it when he said "I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created parasitic wasps with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of Caterpillars." He was taking an opposite tack to that of Richard [!Paley so we are all heirs to one or other side of a 19th century forking in the understanding of the world. The god-believing branch may have withered and the atheist branch has become triumphalist but that is just a fashion. There’s an implicit challenge in Darwin’s position: if God did do that then Darwin will deny God. Or, if Darwin’s conception of what God should be like is something that cannot exist then God cannot exist. Either way it boils down to an assertion about the standing of the human intellect, which in earlier ages was thought to be unhealthy. It is unhealthy if triumphalism is unhealthy.

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