/sci/ - Science & Math

>I don't see why scientific thinking should lead to atheism by default.
no reason it should or shouldn't
>Atheism and religion are both feelings, and I think religion is the more positive one.
whatever floats your boat
>Am I contradicting myself here?
yes
>Is it possible to be a scientist and support Ken Ham and his quest to teach creationism?
no

Religion is fine and dandy if it helps you find meaning in this terrifying world of chicken nugger, sweer potato, and french fried. If you believe there's a benevolent supernatural entity keeping an eye on us, that doesn't mean you can't also be a damn good scientist. (I'm a man of faith myself, and I like to think I do good work in the lab.)
But when some chucklefuck like Ham starts making testable claims about the world based on his unimaginative reading of a bad translation of Scripture, and those claims are tested and found lacking, he stops being a scientist at that point. Religion can answer questions that science isn't equipped to (who are we? where are we going? why are we in this handbasket?), but it shouldn't encroach on the empirical realm. The problem with Ham is not his religious convictions, but rather his pushing of claims that have literally all the evidence against them.

You can be a religious person without being a Goddamn Creationist.

paleofag here. going by frames:

1. author is a furfag
2. the author doesn't understand orbital mechanics. it's possible to end up with resonance effects that break up a spinning disc into bands.
3. creationists literally assumed that radiation haloes in biotite MUST HAVE been caused by polonium decay, despite the total absence of evidence that polonium was involved. (there are loads of more common, longer-lived isotopes that explain those haloes perfectly well.)
4. not all rocks are permeable to gas. in fact, petroleum is almost always found inside a convexity in the local strata just below an impermeable layer, trapped against it by its own buoyancy.
5. salt is removed from the oceans through the formation of evaporites and the subduction of dense brine-rich sediment. because the continents are tectonically active, uplift can sustain relatively high rates of erosion. the oceans are geologically young (<250Mya) because ocean floor is constantly being recycled into the mantle.
6. in regards to the distance to the moon, refer above to how the author doesn't understand orbital mechanics. moon dust, amazingly enough, shields the unaltered rocks below from further photochemical weathering.
7. the rate of change of the earth's orbital velocity isn't constant; that assumption is garbage. and of course, neither is the rate of change of the strength of the earth's magnetic field; it is in fact cyclical. we have evidence of countless full reversals of magnetic polarity in the rock record.
8. ding dong your opinion is wrong

oh look, the buttmad Creationist is back. you kinda disappeared for a while after you got caught posting hilariously bad photoshops of cave paintings. you okay bro?

but no, the eye-searing bottom part of the image is not correct. what the top part is saying is that we have more fossils, and more complete fossils, of early humans than we do of T. rex. this shouldn't be surprising, seeing as Tyrannosaurus lived ~70 Mya and the earliest humans lived only ~2 Mya.
and while fossils may only be individual dots, their distribution (figuratively speaking) makes connecting them pretty straightforward, especially when also considering molecular evidence. when you have a steady series of apes that gradually become more and more human-like as you get into more and more recent strata, it doesn't take a genius to see what's going on. pic sorta related.
(also, when you're connecting BETWEEN multiple dots rather than extending out away from them, it's an INTERPOLATION rather than an EXTRAPOLATION. I don't expect a Creationist to understand the difference, but those of us with actual intelligence should.)

>>8995040
>>8995045
>>8995046
>>8995048
>>8995051
>>8995054
>>8995056
>lemme draw a picture of an angry dog pointing at a strawman
>there, that showed 'em!
I especially love >>8995051. the only way you know that it's supposed to be in support of Creationism is because they drew the actual scientist with a scowl and a flop-sweat. pic related though.

I see that the Creationist (because let's be honest, it's just one sad ignorant fucker bumbling around here) has given up on trying to advance any actual arguments and has resorted to posting the equivalent of le happy merchant.

>>8863377
the only taxonomically meaningful threshold is that of the species
and we have observed speciation

>>8863708
>Taxonomy is the foundation of Evolution.
oh shit niBBa what are you doing
that's like saying the metric system is the foundation of chemistry