The YEC –> Nihilism chart is a slide I might not have been able to control my laughter on though! My hat is off to you both for sitting through it.

Thank you so much for sharing this with us!

Oh and here’s a link to the E. coli Long-term Experimental Evolution Project Site. It’s fascinating!

Young earth creationist John Sanford had a chart of evolutionary positions with YEC on one end and nihilism (yes nihilism!) on the other. He had started out in the middle but after finding christ (was christ ever lost?) he looked at the nihilism end and decided “I didn’t want to go there” and so moved over to the YEC end.

All of the panelists were in microbiology or bioengineering. These relatively new fields are still developing the tools to probe the workings of the cell’s internal structures, but since we haven’t found all of the answers yet, they are irreducibly complex, therefore they must have been designed. Of course, many of the irreducibly complex structures Behe cites in his book have been debunked (several before the ink was dry).

Due to the many question that were asked we ran a half hour overtime, and questions about the absolutely stupidly designed systems in larger animals were not asked.

Gauger pointed out that the origins of life have not be adequately described, and told of an experiment where 50,000 generations of e. coli were bred in lab flasks over 50 years with only small evolutionary changes noted. it was not pointed out that nature had 4 billion years and an entire planet for life to come about and evolve, making her 50 years and 50,000 generations seem paltry.

The panelists were well prepared, and able to speak well within their disciplines. They were also able to pull the discussions back to their narrow field whenever a questioner tried to expand it. Basically I think if you had come in on one side of the argument or the other, you would leave on the same side. If you were in the middle, I don’t think you would be persuaded.

It seems to me (but I’m just an uneducated dummy) that if they were really interested in pursuing science, they would actually try to solve the so-called problems they claim to have found with evolutionary theory instead of making that giant leap to “god did it”. What they are doing is taking a foregone conclusion (the existence of their imaginary friend) and then trying to find evidence to support it. I don’t think that’s the way that science is done, although I’m just a dummy. But doing science is not really in their agenda, is it? And you do have to respect the religious zealots for their tenacity and single-mindedness of purpose to infiltrate their way to the inside of the scientific community to attack it from within.

One of the panelists (John Stanford) is a self-admitted Young Earth creationist, which means that he rejects much more than just evolution. What a whack job. Maybe he has a scientific hypothesis about satan or some other imaginary goblin running around burying dinosaur bones. Or how our telescopes are controlled by things that go bump in the night and the earth (you know – the flat one) really is the center of the universe. (I have to wonder how he feels about dashing babies heads against the stones?)

But the bottom line is that they are all theists, and the bottom line for them is that this is an opportunity to promote their ridiculous sky fairy – to hell with the science.