The case against Corbett was finally thrown out.

Apparently as a teacher, you can say creationism is superstitious nonsense, not because it's absolutely true but because teachers have qualified immunity and should get a bit of leeway rather than the hard boot.

http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Justice/2011/0819/US-judges-rule-for-teacher-who-called-creationism-superstitious-nonsense

Also the court finally reversed their decision on some math teacher who was hanging up religious posters. When the initially decision came down I thought it was amazingly stupid. It's not about the teacher's freedom of speech but rather about the teacher in his role as an agent of the government. He doesn't get first amendment protected because the first amendment is specific to restrict what he can do.

http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Justice/2011/0913/God-Bless-America-Not-in-high-school-math-class-US-judges-rule

On De-Evolution and the Fall of Man

 Though it is not very common, there is an argument that stupid design is explained by the fall of man in Genesis. I tend to go to the trouble of showing how silly such ideas are by refuting them. It seems like a lot of work to refute a rather laughable claim, but why not? It's just a few thousand words and maybe you'll free a mind. As I bothered to write up a pretty good explanation elsewhere I'll repost it here, because it's awesome and I tend to look back here to find awesome things. Even if nobody read this blog, except for you (warning nobody might read this, but if that's true then its a safe statement because nobody read it), it still works as a great resource to save things.

While one could attempt to make that argument. The problem is that Pareto efficiency of the designs observed combined with an understanding of the evolutionary ancestry requirements producing better and specific assumptions, don't fit at all.

Allow me an example. There is a nerve in humans and in all mammals called the recurrent laryngeal nerve which travels from the brain to the larynx, via the heart. It travels down from the head, loops around the aortal arch and back up to the larynx. In the giraffe this is like twenty feet of unneeded nerve to travel a few inches. This is a largely inefficient design, but under your theory it would have had to have developed since the Fall of Man. That somehow the deterioration of the perfect design made all the recurrent laryngeal nerves of all mammals and all the four legged land critters (and a good number of the ocean critters, just not arthropods) suddenly lengthened and looped around the heart.for no reason.

Moving from one design to another would likely cause the larynx to fail. Basically what we have is a Pareto efficiency, it's not the best design, but it is one that any alteration would cause serious errors and thus cannot be changed (save gradually), and no set of gradual changes could get you to the more efficient design. But, the reverse is also true. You can't go from the efficient design to the inefficient one without also likely breaking the system completely.

However the evolutionary explanation is really straight forward. We are rejiggered.fish. In fish the path the nerve takes is a straight line. It goes right through the heart there because that's the best and most efficient design. The problem is that through our evolution the heart has moved down in the torso the head has become more isolated and the larynx is not located much closer to the brain than to the heart. So once it developed in our evolutionary ancestor (and the ancestor of a all the rejiggered fish, read all four legged land animals and any of the water dwelling descendents thereof)  it couldn't be changed. In fact, it can't be changed. You can't get from the efficient design to the inefficient one or the efficient design to the inefficient one. Evolutionary the design was quite efficient  in our distant ancestors but doesn't work well for us, and as such, it is not only explained by evolutionary theory but such things are predicted by evolution and are only explained by evolution. You could say that that our eyes are so fantastic that they need an intelligence to explain how wonderful and intricate they are, however, you can't use that explanation to explain why all the blood vessels and nerves in the mammalian eyes (including ours) go forward towards light and not back towards the brain which is their final destination. Which requires that they be narrowed and made rather clear and that a large hole causing a blind spot exists in our vision.

You also cannot use some sort of de-evolution from the Genesis Fall of Man as an explanation. The designs are good, they are just wrong. They are well designed to cope with things like flawed design at the most basic level, but also it's impossible to go from the most basic design principles to the inferior ones without breaking the entire system. And even if you could,  you'd need an explanation for how good the system is at coping with the most basic errors.

So,
The explanation you are offering fails to account for such designs.
The explanation you are offering could not allow a transition from a perfect design to the inferior but well coped designs.
The alternative explanation explains such specific mistakes.
The alternative explanation predicts these specific mistakes.
The alternative explanation gives the specific reasons why those mistakes should be very common.
The alternative explanation makes a wide swath of specific explanations which perfectly mesh with what we know. We know for example that evolutionarily fish are the first vertebrates and some of the systems would work fantastically for them.

So the explanation accepted by the science is one that explains all the data at hand, predicting a great deal of it, fits with known facts, and requires no unknown assumptions. Your explanation cannot account for the data at hand, does nothing to predict how things should turn out or if they are consistent with the assumptions, requires a great deal of unknown assumptions and is primarily based on iron age interpretation of Semitic mythology from late bronze age principly accepted by some of the nomadic goatherders of the time, and varied throughout the region.

I think when things are this clear you should seriously consider if you could be wrong. Taking into account things like the modern understanding that certainty is an emotion rather than reliable metric by which to judge the quality of the evidence, and that being wrong feels exactly like being right while it's happening.

Creationism is bad science AND bad theology...

The problem with such statements is that there's such a thing as good science. While we can all agree that creationism/intelligent design etc. is bad theology, we have no examples of good theology. So somewhere near the core of the statement is a tacit lie that the emperor has clothing.

Young Earth Creationists and Hyperevolution.

It seems rather odd but if you look for it, a number of YEC people believe in hyper-evolution. They believe that only the "kinds" of animals survived on the Ark and then diversified after being returned to the newly purged Earth. I've even heard some creationists go so far as to suggest that "birds" is a "kind". This means that over the last four thousand years or so that doves haven't just diversified in to the rock pigeon and all the fancy birds that fanciers fancy, but the hummingbird and the ostrich. It is one thing to suppose that a lone wolf became every variety of dog as well as all the varied wolf species, but if we are to believe that a mass extinction of so much biodiversity occurred four thousand years ago, there must also be hyper-diversification over the extraordinarily fast periods of time.

Witnesses to the Creation.

I guess perhaps the Onion hasn't lost all of it's ability to entertain.

Members of the earth's earliest known civilization, the Sumerians, looked on in shock and confusion some 6,000 years ago as God, the Lord Almighty, created Heaven and Earth.

...

Why are you calling me mud?

My general idea for a reply to Creationist nonsense.



Made video..

Watching Expelled, prepairing for underwhelmity.

Expelled Exposed.

Intro with spiced up prison camps.

Freedom is great, freedom makes us great, but what if we didn't have freedom?

We are losing our freedoms in science!

Creationists does something stupid, gets canned. (I expect this shall be a theme)

Shermer things "something else going on". -- Yup. Apparently he published the paper faking the peer review himself and was lambasted for not going through proper channels and for completely abusing his authority.

Another creationist starts teaching creationism and is not invited back to work more for the university. -- Zounds.

Doctor says evolution is false. -- Internet is mean to him.

Mark sets ups a fake lab at Baylor and it gets shut down. Baylor, though a Baptist university, is actually pretty good. Although, they recently fired the president and decided to go way more stupid. So any diplomas pre-2008 are probably legit.

Astronomer doesn't get tenure. Um. Nobody guarantees you tenure and I think ID would be a pretty good reason to deny you. Look how screwed over Behe tenure at Lehigh worked out. He doesn't publish papers anymore and he's a complete embarrassment. Lehigh is a good school but in my mind I associate it with stupidity.

"We don't want people to be taught that the earth is flat or that the holocaust never happened." -- Um, irony of irony, this movie got condemned by the Anti-Defamation league for holocaust denial. I haven't yet been confronted with this part of the film, so I suspect it is going to get much worse.

Ben Stein is lost... still lost.
He found it.

He talks with the Discovery Institute then a Bible college and then a bunch of religious points. They are suppose to keep up this front.

Evolution:Intelligent Design::Newtonian Physics:Einsteinian Physics... ? Really? Somebody needs to read Isaac Asimov's Relativity of Wrong to get the basic idea of how science works. Sure you can evolve but how does evolution do design? Wow that's pretty dumb.

It isn't going to be settled by the numbers but by the evidence and the arguments. If ID had any of those, they'd be set!

Now Ben's in France. Nothing's clear, you don't have very much math. We don't have a good idea of what a species is! -- That's true but has no bearing on evolution. I'm considerably underwhelmed here.

Dawkins is back. These clips are the only oasis in the whole thing. Though Dawkins atheism is fairly different than his evolution belief. There's certainly a relationship there, but it's pretty unrelated.

First cell? -- What long before that it works fine even in the RNA world.

No explanation for abiogenesis. Claims Miller's experiments were wrong. Popular theory is crystals! He's not joking because that's actually a really good theory. What the hell?

Ben Stein's Money joke...

250 proteins so it's math wise inconceivable. That's not possible! The problem with every last thing that says anything remotely close to this is that we don't actually know what the very minimal would be and we get evolution kicking in pretty early making all the future odds non-existent (once evolution kicks in the odds are ~1 that you get something, moreso considering it already happened).

Directed panspermia? That's mostly in jest and simply outsources the problem. Though if 4 billion years isn't enough we can use most of the 13.7 billion years to do whatever we need. Though, 2 billion seems more than enough.

A gigabyte. Zounds. I could put my genetic code on my thumbdrive. Oh the humanity!

I'm lost. I'm not even sure what I'm suppose to be impressed with.

Hey, it's that stolen Harvard animation that ERV talked so much about. Making for one of the few good bits in this entire production. Ouch, they changed it a lot. This is actually way worse in places. The Harvard animation was better.

Where do you get information from? Isn't that a question for computer scientists. Hey, I'm one of those and have an okay understanding of information theory. Let me explain. SDFKDSfioasdfoijsdfjasd2-289023d8923di2klj2kl;3dmkmndalksdfds -- That's more information than pretty much anything else I've typed here. Any mutation would produce information just as there is more information in the TV static than their is in the TV show. Evolution largely works to parse this information and isolate via natural selection any little bit that lucks into creating an organism marginally better than it's cousins. What? They are still harping on this crap?

OH SWEET SPAGHETTI MONSTER! I'm ONLY HALF WAY THROUGH!!! ARG!!! -- I'm burnt out about now. I'll try some more a bit later.

Evolution is secular religion, Teach Creationism!

There is a fairly common argument that is consistently launched against the teaching of evolution. Basically the claim is that evolution is either the atheist or Secular Humanist creation story being taught in schools in violation of the first amendment. This is unfair and is nothing more than religious indoctrination and therefore we need to allow equal time for creationism.

There are a number of obvious problems with this,

The legal remedy would not to be to teach creationism, the legal remedy would be to stop teaching evolution. Nobody should reasonably assume that to fight an injustice one needs to allow multiple injustices. This is biased against blacks! Make it biased against Mexicans too! Further, the same argument could be launched against many things in science and education which contradict certain religions or non-religion... that Big Bang Theory seemed pretty silly to Hoyle on the grounds that it was 'religion'. -- We'd need to stop teaching altogether.

There is no violation of the first amendment. Simply because certain groups of atheists and secular humanists believe the scientific truth and belief in the findings of science meshes well with what many atheists believe does not imply violate the Lemon Test as the primary goal of the activity is not to indoctrinate against religion, rather the fact that the universe is 13.73 billion years old and life on this planet arose out of purely naturalistic forces happens to contradict a ludicrous religious belief is a pity for people who want people to believe falsehoods but doesn't have the primary effect of inhibiting religion. The primary effect is teaching truth, the secondary effect is contradicting lies.

The Court's decision in this case established the "Lemon test", which details the requirements for legislation concerning religion. It consists of three prongs:

1. The government's action must have a secular legislative purpose;
2. The government's action must not have the primary effect of either advancing or inhibiting religion;
3. The government's action must not result in an "excessive government entanglement" with religion.

Teaching evolution does not violate any prong of the lemon test.

Similarly the sword cuts both ways as the supreme court found in McGowan v. Maryland that blue laws which prohibit stupid things like selling liquor on Sunday are acceptable (sometimes). The law may have been initially religious, but so long as it primarily serves secular purposes and the original religious nature of the law does not make it unconstitutional.

A Family Tree: God driven Evolution.

So simple.

Well I'm stumped. Evolution must be a lie.

One of the many knowledgeable replies to NOVA Judgment Day was as follows:

If evolution were true and man "evolved" from apes, why do we have apes and monkeys co-existing with man? Why have the apes not all turned into humans?

Well I'm stumped. That seems to be such a strong argument that I can't refute it. I'll continue to believe in evolution on faith because this argument has clearly destroyed any reasonable basis I could have had for evolution.

If you're a creationist or an intelligent design proponent or perhaps even an cdesign proponentsists, you should use this argument as often and as loudly as possible.

cdesign proponentsists

In the Dover case on intelligent design, one of the stunning bits of evidence was in an early transcript of On Pandas and People just after creationism was booted out by Supreme Court where every reference to Creationism was promptly find+replace into intelligent design and "creationists" into "design proponents". One of the references was replaced rather wrongly resulting in "cdesign proponentsists" -- a rare transitional form.

“Evolutionists think the former is correct, cdesign proponentsists accept the latter view.”

However, where are the transitional forms between creationists and cdesign proponentsists? Where is the transitional form between cdesign proponentsists and design proponents?

For those of you who don't know what Intelligent Design is, it is the belief that the some life is just so complex that it must have been created by an Intelligent Designer (capitalized to show reverence to God) who might be a deity or space aliens but to stay within the law we aren't saying.

Galactocentricity.

It's geocentrism for the Milky Way. We may just be this one little clump of rock flinging around this massive ball of fusing gas in the Sagittarius arm of the Milky Way... but even with the trillions upon trillions of other stars and galaxies... ours is at the center of that!

According to CreationWiki:

Few creationists disagree that the Earth is in motion around the Sun, and our solar system in movement within the Milky Way galaxy. However, simply put, geocentrism is the belief in a universe-centered world.

Evidence, such as quantized redshift, offers strong support that the Milky Way exists at the center of the universe.

How simply put... geocentrism (earth centered) is the belief in a universe-centered world. Wait, a universe centered world. What the hell? That's not even vaguely coherent. And the term is "galacto-" not "universeo-". Shouldn't it be "simply put" as an Earth centered view, simply put, is a Milky Way centered view.

And what was the evidence for this? Oh, Quantized redshift... who could argue with that! Oh, I can, oh physicists, oh everybody who understands what a redshift is. Basically due to a nice little doppler shift (change in apparent frequency due to motion) (think of the change in the sound waves (pitch) an ambulance (ecnalubma) makes when it is coming toward you and going away from you) when galaxies or stars or whatnot are flying away from our galaxy they seem to be shifted more toward the red. Noticing this red shift is what has lead us to understand the universe is accelerating in its expansion. What does this have to do with the Milky Way being at the center of the universe? Nothing. In fact, there's no real reference points at all, we might as well be flying around in any direction.

I'm glad these Creationists have stepped away from silly ideas like Biblical geocentricism and concluded much more reasonable things like "screw you we are too special cuz quantized redshift says so!"

Review: Built To Last

So I managed to get a Creationist booklet via my sister via some free box from a yard sale. Built To Last by Dwight K. Nelson. Let me just say, I haven't laughed so hard in a long while, at one point. Though, it doesn't manage to make the reading a non-negative experience.


Chapter 1:
It makes a great start by assume the Bible a priori. This is justified because a prioris are everywhere. Your belief in Thomas Jefferson is a priori because you assume he existed and despite the mountain of evidence for his existence a posteriori we must assume this a priori and thus God is safe to assume out of the blue (even without any good reasons to believe)... so we might as well assume the Bible.

Since Godel proved that you need to make assumptions which can't be proved [within the system itself] therefore mathematics would be a religion. And we all trust math right? See, so it's okay to make unproven assumptions for Christianity too!

Chapter 2:
Pick out some fossils. Disregard them. Claim there are massive gaps in the fossil record. Somehow mentioning Nebraska man, which isn't even a fossil. Apparently his research consists of Jack Chick tracts. Page 34 contains what must be the most compelling segue in history:

But in case you are still not ready to embrace the creation accounts of Genesis, let us look elsewhere in Scripture.

At this point I burst out laughing and read the line to multiple people.

Chapter 3:
Darwin's Black Box: Cue Behe's tired arguments about irreducibly complexity. For example think of an arch, an arch is impossible to build. You cannot remove any brick and have the arch stay up, thus no arch could be built from the ground up. Therefore God has built all the arches that exist.

Not really... there's just scaffolding just as there are intermediate parts which evolution later weeds out as unneeded once all the bricks are in. You can very clearly build an arch one piece at a time.

Chapter 4:
Big bang, yadda yadda, Genesis says, God exists.

Chapter 5:
Oddly enough this chapter is one of the most misguided of all the misguides of misguideville. He starts off by pretending that sexual reproduction is some difficult problem. It's certainly an interesting one. Breaking down the walls and allowing for genes to independently assort and evolve more independently and adding selection not just in what species get to live but in what species gets to mate is more than enough to pay for the whole only half your genes get to move on to the next generation thing. Frankly it's a good idea for genes to jump ship for the success of all genes.

Dawkins wrote the Blind Watchmaker which was a challenge to Paley... rather than explain how exactly evolution works he gives Paley's argument and let it sit there. Then suggests Dawkins just wants to be an atheist, which I assume he does when you consider the alternative. Not that that is at all a response. Ten years after Dawkins wrote his 'odd grasping for straw book', Behe came around and proved scientifically that complex systems are just too complex. *sigh*

Chapter 6:
Oddly rather than the more standard Dinosaurs are real but they vanished and survived the ark. He takes the view that dinosaurs are monsters which God needed to drown. Noah's ark rather than being so large it couldn't float is an amazing design because it's really big. Because, if it were a myth they would have said it was a smaller boat.

Tyrannosaurus rex is no figment of the imagination! But the production of horrible mutant creatures was terribly out of sync with God's original plan of interspecies harmony.

God must be a moron. His plans suck if a very well evolved predator/scavenger is a horrible mutant result of unforeseen events (by an all seeing entity).

Oh, and the bones just settled as such because of the flood and for some reason the heavier stuff floated to the top.

Chapter 7:

I hereby submit to the jury that the seven-day week and the seventh-day Sabbath are a perpetual testimony to the veracity and historicity of the Creation accounts in Genesis 1 and 2.

Apparently there are seven days in the week and therefore the Genesis account in Genesis 1 and contradictory one in Genesis 2 are both correct. Apparently today being Tyr's day and tomorrow being Wotan's day is an argument for biblical creation. If the Bible is false, then there can't be a seven day week.

Chapter 8:
At this point he dances on the corpse of John Lennon who "died in a pool of his on blood on a New York sidewalk" -- which is inaccurate and secondly an argument against religion. John Lennon was gunned down by a crazy Christian fundamentalist (Mark David Chapman). This sack of shit (Nelson) beyond recycling bullshit apparently dances on the cooling bodies of great men for singing Imagine.
From Wikipedia:

The song "Imagine" also angered Chapman – at prayer meetings and religious rallies, Chapman and his prayer group also sang a parody with the lyric "Imagine, imagine John Lennon is dead."

He recycled nonsense for seven brief chapters then in the one where he said he would make his own statements, he cheers for murder. Built To Last is a horrific pile of trash. Dwight K. Nelson is a bastard. The negative aspects and downright evil depressing scum-words outweigh the funny nonsense where his ignorance is amusing. Some creationist books have ignorance/scum ratios such that reading them is more amusing than disturbing... this isn't one. The only time he steps out beyond the Bible and recycled nonsense and ignorance, he does so to dance on the corpse of a truly great man. Pathetic.

John Lennon was shot by a crazy Christian so we should all become Christian! My sister got this book for free... she paid too much.

UD is filled with liars.

Apparently UD has "My Failed Simulation" some article about a mathematician who wrote a program that failed to produce libraries with a simulation of all the particles on Earth... on his laptop. Now, I fully understand that the only people who read UD are evolutionists who think it's funny that Dembski is so stupid... but come on! Really?

Where to start. First off "computers have come a long way" since 2000? Um, no. In 8 years you can do a quick application Moore's law (8 years / 18 months) 5.3 (rounding up to 8 years), now 2^5.3 = 40 So that's the total difference, the computers have gotten 40 times faster since 2000, back when I was running my old 500 mhz computer... having gotten it for college. Well, now I run a dual core 1.9 ghz Athlon XP 3600 (sounds pretty low-end for today but the 3600 Brisbane core is actually a thing of beauty, I bought it more for heat, power usage, and price for performance than for speed). So, what can this amazing computer do that the old computer couldn't? --- NOTHING! ABSOLUTELY NOTHING! Rather than taking "a few minutes" to run this amazing simulation would take a couple hours (time taken in 2008 * 40 = time taken in 2000).

This lying sack of crap wants me to believe that he simulated the entire planet on his laptop and didn't come up with libraries... oh la-di-da! If he actually had done this, it would overwhelm his memory, it isn't possible to do. He would need to simulate every chemical reaction in order to get life started. He would honestly need to track every last atom and guess what? You can't do that with a laptop! The fact is it would take at the very least one atom to record information about one atom and thus, at the minimum, you'd need your computer's memory to be the size of the planet. Also, he says he wrote it in Fortran! Because everybody simulates things in Fortran! Wait... that's perhaps the last programing language I'd use.

To show you what kind of processing power this takes look no further than real computer scientists who in March 2006 simulated a virus for 50 billionths of a second, using U.S. National Center for Supercomputing Applications systems, on a program the researches spent a DECADE creating called NAMD or NAnoscale Molecular Dynamics written on top of a parallel processing language. Why use parallel processing? Oh yeah BECAUSE IT TAKES A HELL OF A LOT OF PROCESSING POWER AND YOU NEED TO SPLIT THE WORK UP BETWEEN THOUSANDS OF COMPUTERS!

Well, at least this would count as rather astounding work by an IDiot. Release the source code or the precompiled binary. I'd love to take a look at it. I mean, that's some impressive code you have there, and in Fortran! Wow. Show me that code and I take back EVERYTHING I've ever said about creationists or those who believe in Intelligent Design. In fact, this work should be published in a real journal. There's more than a few who would be impressed with a world simulator that can run 4 billion years of every atom on Earth in a couple minutes on a laptop. I know they don't give Nobel Prizes for Computer Science or for Mathematics, but the secondary effects on chemical simulation alone should earn you a nod for a chemistry Nobel Prize.

This is amazing by itself, though it doesn't prove your suggestion that running a simulation once didn't produce something, so nothing could be produced. It's like rolling the dice once and since you didn't roll a six, a six isn't possible to roll.

Give me the code and I'll check through it, fix any problem, run in a few more times to give you a better count of simulations. It would be far more interesting than running these evolutionary algorithms all the time, which by the way work exceedingly well and predictably create amazing results (not predictable results, but amazing results predictably so).

Ben Stein is apparently making a movie about ID.

Expelled. Wow, what rebels these Christians are, undermining science is so fighting against the man. I oddly first heard about this on Pharyngula though without a link to the movie. He had a clip.

I have another great story he should cover. I was teaching English and rather than teach I started yelling and flinging feces at them. But, those vile administrators said "No" and was pretty well driven away. Why? Why do they hate the truth?

Wanting to sound really retarded?

So reading up on how antibiotic soap is not only ineffective but also bad, by causing the strains to become immune. I was rather astounded to hear about how they made this happen.

Because of the way the main active ingredient---triclosan---in many antibacterial soaps reacts in the cells, it may cause some bacteria to become resistant to commonly used drugs such as amoxicillin,

Because of the way it reacts in the cell wall... by breaking down the cell walls? That doesn't directly make them resistant but fair enough.

Triclosan works by targeting a biochemical pathway in the bacteria that allows the bacteria to keep its cell wall intact. Because of the way triclosan kills the bacteria, mutations can happen at the targeted site. Aiello says a mutation could mean that the triclosan can no longer get to the target site to kill the bacteria because the bacteria and the pathway have changed form.

What? Sure, the stuff breaks apart the bacteria. However, the "mutations can happen at the targeted site" the target site is in the cell wall. There's NO FUCKING DNA IN THE CELL WALL! And they happen because "of the way triclosan kills the bacteria" -- DEAD BACTERIA DON'T FUCKING HAVE USEFUL MUTATIONS THEY HAVE "I'M DEAD AND NOT REPRODUCING ANY MORE MUTATIONS" MUTAITONS!

In case any of you missed it, the article is saying what we've known and predicted for years. Antibiotic soaps are not useful, and even when they kill 99.9% of bacteria, that .1% doesn't die next time you use the soap, because if anything in their genetics or in their pathways help prevent this from happening, they start to develop an immunity to the antibiotic. This in turn makes the real powerful stuff we use later on, much harder to use effectively.

My gripe? They don't say evolution. They say all kinds of crazy nonsense other than evolution. You would read the article and have to believe that the triclosan reacts in the cell wall and induces a mutation in the DNA which corresponds to that code for the cell wall. Then, in turn lives through having it's cell wall torn apart, and passes this information on. Excuse me? Am I really to understand that the actual science should be skirted just to ignore very basic evolution and not raise a fuss? Worse yet, the evidence at that level is so good most Creationists say it happens and draw an arbitrary line in the sand between macro and micro evolution to somehow imply that they have different mechanisms. "Sure you can use a "step" to go a few feet, but never a mile!"

If they sky was a firmament would that be evidence for the Bible?

It seems like an odd question, and I'm kind of torn. Though, asking nobody is certainly not helpful. But, here goes. The authors of the Bible refer to the sky as a firmament or a "Vault of Heaven". Basically they ascribed to Greek astronomy and thought that the stars were embedded in the seventh domed layer, the earth fixed and unmoving and everything in different layers around it.

God said, “Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it separate between water and water..."

The firmament kept the water from the sky (rain) from meeting the waters of the earth. And that when it rains, that is God opening up the vault of the sky. The stars were believed to be like little bits of light on the firmament (in revelations they were depicted as falling down to Earth). Rather than a sky like our modern understanding, the world would be much more akin to a snow-globe.

Now back to my question, if that bit of cosmology was right, would it be evidence for the Bible?

There would certainly be arguments in favor of this,

Psalm 19:1, “The heavens [shamayim] tell out the glory of God, the vault of heaven [raqiya] reveals his handiwork.”

The complexity of the firmament certainly suggests a deity right? Well, not really. The reality is more complex and reality doesn't suggest such a thing and though there are no laws of physics which allow for a firmament as such, we would have to have hypothetically different laws of physics to account for this cosmology. Though, maybe with our actual laws of physics and this weird outcome might provide some evidence.

But, they predicted it right and there's no way they could have predicted that the whole world was under this dome sky-like thing, right? Well, that's not true either. First, looking at the sky might give one that impression (plane tangent to sky does seem to be a dome) and secondly the Greeks had that cosmology first. For example, in the Bible is says that the Earth is hung upon nothing. -- a comment to which many creationists pat themselves on the back over and over again. While at the same time ignoring everywhere it says (often right next to it) that the earth was fixed and unmoving.

A while back in a podcast, the Non-Prophets mentioned that it would be evidence for the Bible if there actually was a firmament, but I don't think it would count for the Bible at all. The fact that the idea that the sky is a firmament is dead wrong is an obvious mark against the Bible, but being correct isn't a mark for it either. Which oddly seems to veer off towards Hempel's paradox, noting that exceptions to rules disprove the rule, but that non-exceptions don't make the rule any more or less valid. Though, there's shades of gray concerning the idea of being wrong.

Even if we knew of nothing that discredited the cosmology, history, or understanding of the Bible it would provide absolutely no evidence in favor of the accuracy of the book. And really, that's the essence of science. You try to disprove something until you finally give up and use it for anything you need the idea for. If the rule holds for more things than the previous rule, well then use that rule instead.

The only thing the Bible could hope for would be accuracy and frankly it missed that boat. I think the accuracy of the Bible must have drowned in Noah's flood.

Something can't come from nothing, unless it's God.

Something can't come from nothing, unless it's God!

Wow, that's always the worst pwnage an atheist can endure. I feel so powerless when theists note that since I don't have the answer to a question, any answer, regardless how far fetched, offered by them is instantly correct. And their answer is always so very simple and so very concise that argument is unneeded, Magic Man done it!

Scientists were wrong, the death knell for creationism..

.
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I firmly believe that creationists are going to take a thumping when science rectifies one of its major errors. The idea that dinosaurs are roughly lizards is completely wrong, in fact, they are much closer to primitive birds. And with some of the new fossils coming out of China it seems pretty clear. A lot of dinosaurs probably had feathers and at the very least down.

Now shouldn't creationists latch on to this mistake and declare science inept and thusly wrong and them thusly right? Well, no. Because the truth is dinosaurs were a lot more evolved than we gave them credit for. So making the modern understanding of dinosaurs that of feathered dinosaurs will much more easily be seen as evidence for evolution. "Wow, it went from scales to feathers in generation. It's evolving before my very eyes!"

Kent Hovind

Understanding creationism is certainly a worthwhile thing to do, if for no other reason than the entertainment value. However, since the first video is almost unwatchable (though worth it for the laugh), I've included the second video a stress reliever.

Ten years for making such stupid videos? He should have gotten longer for his support of this heterodox God idea. Where's a good stake burning when you need them. The state abhors blood too.