Creationist lectures in the heart of the Longwood Medical Area
Nathaniel Jeanson, who got a doctorate in molecular biology at Harvard this year, is giving two lectures this Sunday on "Evolution: Bankrupt Science, Creationism: Science You Can Bank on," in the Longwood Galleria (Ed amazed note: You can get a PhD in biology from Harvard while denying evolution?).
Join Calvary Chapel In The City for a special presentation from Dr. Nathaniel Jeanson, a June 2009 Harvard Ph.D. in biology, as he demonstrates how scientific data from multiple disciplines-including molecular biology- seriously undermines the theory of evolution and supports the Bible's teaching on origins. The presentation will uncover evidence from the age of the universe, the age of the earth, and the relationships among species, existing and extinct, including the dinosaurs.
Rebecca, of Boston Skeptics, reports:
The Boston Atheists are attending the 7pm lecture, and the Boston Skeptics are also attending and/or distributing pro-evolution literature (plus perhaps literature explaining that evolution does not equal atheism).
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Without getting too far into
Without getting too far into the arguments in favor of Darwin, nothing gets me going faster then a creationism/evolution debate evolution just seems like a universal obvious fact to me, I am interested in checking this out to see how he weaves this tapestry. I can not imagine going through so many years of schooling in biology at a major institution while believing 50 percent of what your being told is "wrong". I give him credit just for doing that I guess, I could never go to schools where everyone believed in only creationism for ten years.
Can't remember where
But I read a piece by a scientist who spent a semester or something like that at one of these creationist
brainwashing camps...er, colleges. Basically, it's the fact that the "why" behind the research/studying you're doing doesn't come up often enough to cause the kind of cognitive dissonance that you'd think you'd have.I don't think there's more than a few times in my 7 years of graduate school that I thought "aha, this was caused by evolution!". For the creationist biologist, they just say "aha, this was caused by God/original sin/an intelligent designer!" and move on just the same as I would have.
Of course, I correctly attributed the phenomena I was seeing and they were allowing themselves to not have to think deeply about science.
But there is a whole journal now of "creationist biology" where creationists confirm with each other that bacteria gained virulence because of original sin and that today's biology is a result of God's guiding hand. It's the absurd conclusion you have to reach if you are interested in biology but disinterested in what other biologists have learned already.
It's one thing to believe
It's one thing to believe that God set off a chain of events or even that some divine being being is guiding what happens in the universe. It's another thing to believe in absolute creationism where animals and other creatures were planted on the ground and the lay of the land never changes. I can live with guiding hand after all it could be true who knows. At least the guiding hand concept does not try to condense earth's age to 4,000 years.
Unless you're a biblical literalist
They aren't mutually exclusive.
I'm guessing that most of the hard-core creationists aren't fluent in reading Hebrew or Greek, but if they were, they'd realize that dinosaurs are mentioned as one of the things created early on. Also that the language in Genesis/B'reishit is highly poetic and doesn't state that these were 24-hour days. Especially given that these days (i.e., eras) started off before the sun and moon were created. They couldn't have been 24-hour days as we know them. It's pretty clear from the Hebrew that this happened millions of years ago.
For what it's worth, I think it's much MORE amazing and faith-instilling to recognize that the creation story is accurate in terms of the order in which things happened based on what we now know from our scientific research. This story has been around for thousands of years, originally passed down orally, and was around back when we had no idea how anything evolved or got here, back when it was sensible to think that the universe was created in six 24-hour days by a humanlike figure up in the sky. Now that we've spent thousands of years using the knowledge and free will that God gave us to study God's creations and learn more about how they happened, the story still works, provided you can read Hebrew and realize that the words used are up to interpretation. THAT'S much more amazing and awesome than having a literal creationist belief.
http://1smootshort.blogspot.com
Unless you're a biblical literalist
No, they're not. There are a couple of large creatures that creationists like to say are dinosaurs.
LOL. If you're going to change the meaning of the words used in order to make them match what we now know to be true through other means, then you can make any primitive superstition fit modern reality with the suitable word substitution. If Genesis had been written by God, then he could have found a way to communicate the truth. Genesis is wrong because it was written by primitive men who had no idea how the universe came to be.
Really? So plants were really in existence before the sun, like Genesis says? And birds came before land animals?
How can you say that?
The word "dinosaur" absolutely appears in B'reishit.
There are also several Hebrew words that can refer to a day, depending whether you're wanting to specify that it's definitely a 24-hour day, or more like a day-in-the-life, or an era of time.
But you clearly know all that.
You clearly don't know what
You clearly don't know what you're talking about.
Both Christian and Jewish scholars are well aware from the context of the creation story that "yom" in Genesis is referring to one rotation of the Earth, morning and evening light then dark--one day. It says it right there in the laughable myth book.
Also, there is ZERO mention of dinosaurs in the Hebrew Fairy Tale. There is leviathan, which is a sea monster drawn from several local mythologies, and most likely a whale, give that modern Hebrew uses livyatan for whale.
Ladies and Gentleman, it looks like you have a Jewish fundie on your hands. They do exist in some of the loonier fringes of the Orthodox. Have fun.
There is also the word
There is also the word "tanin", which the KJV renders as "dragon", but which actually means "snake" or "crocodile".
I attended this morning
I attended the 11:00 lecture. A more shameful spectacle I have never witnessed. He wove together tortuous arguments from mangled astronomical, geological and biological data that impressed the hell out of the churchy folk, but had the scientists in attendance gasping and shaking their heads in disbelief. He also attempted to draw a line from this "science" to his obscene Christian fundamentalist, sin and damnation theology. The fact that this young man was awarded a PhD at Harvard is nothing short of scandalous. I'm in the process of writing a letter to the Chair of the Dept. of Molecular Biology (I came across this blog while searching for him online to be certain I spelled his name correctly).
He leaves tomorrow to begin "work" at the Institute for Creation Research in Dallas. Hopefully (if there is a God), this will be the last we'll hear of him - but I wouldn't count on it.
Creationists
Harvard also gave the Unabomber a PhD, so unfortunately, there is precedent. And what kind of noob uses bank metaphors in this economy? "Creationism: Science You Can Bank On" -- with what? Schrute Bucks?
I wouldn't say "precedence"...
Well, there is a stark difference between those two cases. Kaczynski's psychotic neo-Luddism doesn't directly conflict with the fact that he wrote some impressive mathematics journal articles. That said, he's still just as despicable.
Jeanson's creationist views, however, are in direct conflict with biology -- the field in which he pursued his doctoral studies. Had he thought more deeply about his own thesis project in stem-cell research, he would've figured out that the research he did had implications for evolution.
The English 'Dinosaur' does not, in fact, appear in Genesis
eeka, The noun dinosaur is an English neologism coined in the mid-19th century to name creatures imagined to match the paleontological evidence. It does not appear in Genesis.
Perhaps you can strengthen your comments by giving us the chapter and verse and the Hebrew which you is appropriate to translate as dinosaur.
More detailed report on Jeanson's lecture
For somebody who claims to be a scientist, he sure seems to have gotten a lot of science wrong. Also, the earth is 6,000 years old.
I do not care about
I do not care about everything else because they have an "answer" for everything.
Let's assume you can just toss all science aside. The carbon we test degenerates faster, there are no transitional animals, the earth is 6,000 years old and of course Yahweh created everything himself. OK so lets assume all of this is true somehow. My question is why in gods name (pardon the pun) did Yahweh place dinosaur bones so far down below the earth in so many places. We have Fossils in all sorts of rocks, sometimes in rocks hundreds of feet below the ground. We have marine fossils in the Himalayan mountains! I mean seriously even if we take the bible literally and creationism seriously they have no clear answer for this. Humans have been around for a few thousand years and with the exception of the giant flood in the bible and the tale of Atlantis and of course the explosion of Pompeii we do not see many examples of true Earth shattering events (real or made up) that could possibly account for such a quick die off of so many animals, and their subsequent deep burials.
As a second piece of this I can only assume ALL creationists must be environmentalists right? After all if the earth is only 6,000 years old and we have found how many hundreds of thousands of fossils of different creatures in the ground? The die off rate is not all that bad if it spans hundreds/thousands/millions of years but to be crammed into a 6,000 year period? At that die off rate by 2050 all life on earth will cease to exist if we do not moderate the global climate!
At the risk of being a bit, uh, moderncentric...
...what's really sad about literal creationism is that these Christians have a really beautiful religion that CAN coexist with science if they just recognize like most modern Christians that parts of the bible are either highly poetic/abstract renderings of events and/or parables, and don't need to be viewed literally in order to make Christianity a valid way of thinking. The bible is just a basis, and considering modern secular works shouldn't refute the bible, but rather should add to it. Most Christians believe in science AND the trinity. It can work.
http://1smootshort.blogspot.com
Can't do it
It would undermine their entire religion. First, there's no poetic license allowed in the Bible because it's supposedly God's word channeled directly through the author's hands. They were puppets used by God to put God's exact thoughts on paper for us to follow (or not). If it's just a set of parables then God didn't give us Truth in the Bible, he gave us veiled winking, hardly more basis for a religion than some moistened bint lobbing a sword being used to declare who's the Emperor.
The problem that we quickly discover is that science answers the "How" of things and the Bible was written in a time when the "How" was unknown along with the "Why". The answer, then, was "God, that's Why and How". Religion is better off answering the "Why" (with "Because, God") because that's what it's good at. It's also something science doesn't attempt to answer even as it continues to fill in the "How" better and better. That is unfortunately little comfort to those who, for whatever reason, still choose the Bible as their source of answers for "How". These fundamentalists will continue to trouble us on everything from global warming to public education and soon even foreign policy until their voices are marginalized.
Couple of nonsense responses you'll get
Fossils are any one of the following (and unless you can contradict ALL of them, contradicting any of them means nothing to fundamentalists):
1) God put them there to test of your faith
2) The Great Flood killed the animals and caused the geological layering in mere days due to intense pressure of all that water that you claim took millennia
3)