I got this comment from someone on an earlier blog entry regarding Creationism.
https://dalehusband.com/2011/03/16/dr-georgia-purdom-hypocrite/
Judy
hjvandyke@aol.com
173.58.89.66
I came across this site and, although ridiculed by several here, I was very impressed with Purdom’s honest answers to Shermer! Everyone has God given choice to believe what they want but I personally believe there is ample evidence for belief in the Creator God; and it would take more faith on my part to believe evolutionist viewpoint. About 27 years ago I met Dr. Robert Gentry who told his story about discovering published evidence of polonium halos in granite — see http://www.halos.com/ — and lost his job as a result. Scientists whose whole lives and degrees are bound to evolutionary theory do not want to acknowledge such evidence as it would negate their own cherished belief and positions. What Purdom stated is true that there are lots of holes in the theory of evolution–seems like taught as fact now in schools–but it is still just a theory.
First, she did not bother to address the obvious hypocrisy of Georgia Purdom, as noted in my original blog entry. How can you call someone “honest” if there is evidence of hypocrisy? Does Judy need a dictionary?
Second, people are entitled to their own opinions (“I consider the Bible to be the greatest book ever made.”), but they are NOT entitled to their own facts (“The planet Earth is less than 10,000 years old.”). Facts by definition are based on clear empirical evidence and two people looking at the same evidence should come to the same conclusion, which is why science is reliable by nature.
Third, evolution, and all other things in science, is NOT based on faith at all. And scientists usually do not use faith to justify their hypotheses and theories. They may argue about how to interpret limited amounts of evidence, but they all rely on evidence. The reason Creationists say otherwise is projection, the attributing of their own character flaws onto their opponents. Christian fundamentalists literally CANNOT imagine people not having “faith” in something, so they assume that atheists have “faith” there is no God (an outright self-contradiction, since you have to have faith in something, not nothing) and that Atheism is the dogma that motivates scientists to support evolution. But no scientific theory is intended to debunk any specific religion. Science simply ignores religious beliefs.
Fourth, and most damning, polonium does not exist in isolation, but is often a product of the decay of uranium, which itself has a half-life of billions of years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polonium#Occurrence_and_production
Polonium is a very rare element in nature because of the short half-life of all its isotopes. 210Po, 214Po, and 218Po appear in the decay chain of 238U; thus polonium can be found in uranium ores at about 0.1 mg per metric ton (1 part in 1010),[43][44] which is approximately 0.2% of the abundance of radium. The amounts in the Earth’s crust are not harmful. Polonium has been found in tobacco smoke from tobacco leaves grown with phosphate fertilizers.[45][46][47]
Because it is present in such small concentrations, isolation of polonium from natural sources is a very tedious process. The largest batch of the element ever extracted, performed in the first half of the 20th century, contained only 40 Ci (1.5 TBq) (9 mg) of polonium-210 and was obtained by processing 37 tonnes of residues from radium production.[48] Polonium is now obtained by irradiating bismuth with high-energy neutrons or protons.[17][49]
Robert Gentry is most likely a fraud. His research on polonium has never been duplicated by any other scientist. There are plenty of questions about his assumptions and methods.
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/po-halos/gentry.html
Gentry is a physicist, not a geologist. He doesn’t follow accepted geologic reporting practice and consistently fails to provide the information that a third party would need to collect comparable samples for testing. For his research, Gentry utilized microscope thin sections of rocks from samples sent to him by others from various places around the world. Thus, he is unable to say how his samples fit in with the local or regional geological setting(s). He also does not provide descriptive information about the individual rock samples that make up his studies – i.e., the abundance and distribution of major, accessory, or trace minerals; the texture, crystal size and alteration features of the rocks; and the presence or absence of fractures and discontinuities.
Finally, saying that evolution is “only a theory” is like saying Barack Obama is only the President of the United States. A theory is actually the most powerful idea in science, bringing together an unlimited number of observations regarding a certain subject in an explanatory framework. The attempts to poke holes in evolutionary theory result from dishonesty, delusions, confusion about how evolution is supposed to work, and refusal to consider actual facts. That has always been the case!
Dale Husband's Intellectual Rants 
Actually a Law is the most powerful idea in Science. See theories tend to have to get rewritten when things don’t quite match up, laws have been proven over and over again. A theory is the best guess as to what happens. Once it has been proven over and over again a law by the same name tends to emerge. The theory of gravity produced, if you will, the law of gravity. However, the theory of gravity was a bit weak and the law of gravity was moved to the theory of relativity.
Can I ask where the Law of Evolution is? There isn’t one because scientists know that it will not pass the stringent requirements to make a law.
I know the difference between theories and laws in science. Laws are needed to establish consistent standards for physics and chemistry to make sense of the universe we live in. That does not make them more powerful than theories. Theories explain phenomenon in the universe and rely upon already established laws to support their credibility. The fact that theories are modified over time as more evidence accumulates makes them more credible than religious dogmas that refuse to change regardless of the facts. Approaching truth while still searching for more truth is better than assuming you already have the truth and not looking to improve your knowledge.
Evolution is not a law for one simple reason: Theories in science do not become laws. All laws, theories and facts in science are descended from hypotheses, but they do not evolve (pun intended) into each other. You must have been “educated” in a Christian school and if so, you were lied to.
While I know that theories don’t become laws. If a theory is “proved” over and over again without exception, a law by that name emerges. The theory would still be there explaining the law. I never said that theories became laws. But most valid theories produce a law by the same name. Of course a law has many stringent requirements that it has to pass. A law of evolution will never become a reality.
And just so you know, nope I didn’t go to Christian schools. And Laws aren’t needed to establish… “A law in science is a generalized rule to explain a body of observations in the form of a verbal or mathematical statement. Scientific laws (also known as natural laws) imply a cause and effect between the observed elements and must always apply under the same conditions.” Yes, they are more powerful than theories. While a theory can change because they trip over a rock and find a new fossil that fits nowhere in the evolutionary scheme so they need to add another 10-20 millions of years to the age of the earth, a law MUST ALWAYS APPLY UNDER THE SAME CONDITIONS every time. There is no flip-flopping with a law. That is the biggest difference, a theory can change, a law cannot. Like I said, most valid and substantiated theories that have been proven time and time again will produce a law that never changes because it is concrete, however evolution will never spawn a law of evolution.
There is absolutely nothing I’ve previously read in science that claims what you do. Physical and chemical laws are found, by definition, in physics and chemistry. In astronomy, there are things like Kepler’s three laws of planetary motion. But no scientist has ever expected a law to come from studies of evolution to make it a credible fact, so I don’t know where you are coming from when you say something like “substantiated theories that have been proven time and time again will produce a law that never changes”. That is simply not true. Kepler did not make up theories about planetary motion that later produced laws, he made observations and the laws came straight from his conclusions about what he saw. Likewise, Darwin made his THEORY of evolution via natural selection via his conclusions about what he discovered. And that is the issue: Evolution is a FACT, natural selection is the THEORY that explains the fact. Denying the fact of evolution because it has produced no LAW (what would that even be like?) is like thinking a tank is a failure because it does not fly; it was not designed to fly, just as the science behind evolution was never intended to produce a law. It doesn’t need to and you are just being silly.
Mad Dawg’s last comment was automatically thrown into my blog’s spam folder, which is a sign to me that even WordPress itself is sick of his bullshit. But I will directly answer him anyway.
“Darwin’s theory of natural selection and adaptation are duh LAWS anyway. The oldest and slowest tend to die off first. DUH, but not always. And animals adapt to their environment. DUH.”
So first he asserts that there is no Law of Evolution, then he claims there are several laws associated with evolution. You can’t have it both ways, liar.
“We have observed these, but no where has it been proven a change from one species to another. Yes, we have observed horizontal evolution (usually through adaptation), but we have not observed vertical evolution.”
This is a fallacy called “moving the goalposts” used by all kinds of denialists. Even Young Earth Creationists realized this problem when they invented the unscientific term “kind” to replace species and suggested that all members of the dog family may have descended from one pair of dogs that came from Noah’s Ark. Thus including dogs, wolves, foxes, and jackals, which are made of dozens of different species. “Horizonal” and “vertical” evolution are meaningless terms; a tapeworm would have had ancestors that were more complex because they were free living but then adapted to live inside other animals and lost the ability to live by themselves. Evolution does not move in a specific direction, ever. A fish is just as complex in its own way as a human, it is just adapted to a completely different environment.
“Evolution is always touted as a one-way street.”
Yes, because once two animal populations separate from each other and become different species, they never merge back together again. The example you provided with rabbits is evolution within a species, but there is no reason whatsoever that evolution from one species to another can’t happen. In order to justify the claim that it cannot, you must show there is a mechanism to limit how far organisms can evolve. There is no such known mechanism. Trying to define evolution to exclude transitions within species over a relatively short period of time is dishonest.
“Try explaining the Pre-Cambrian explosion through evolution. You can’t because there wasn’t much before and poof we have all these complex organisms show up.”
i guess you never heard of hox genes, which made segmentation in animals possible that in turn allowed for the massive amount of diversity among all the animals that arose during the Cambrian Period. Both protostomes (including arthopods) and deuterostomes (including vertebrates) arose afterwards because the common ancestor of all of them developed hox genes about 700 to 600 million years ago. It is not nearly as much of a problem as Creationists make it out to be.
“We see point A and point B, so this MUST HAVE HAPPENED), and NOT THROUGH DIRECT OBSERVATION and MEASUREMENT, which is the basis for sound science.”
Every episode of the TV show Forensic Files contradicts you. Detectives and scientists use historical applications of scientific investigation to solve crimes. It is no different than what scientists use to solve mysteries of events millions of years ago.
Mad Dawg, merely asserting I am wrong doesn’t make it so. It is clear no one taught you how science actually works. I already told you how you can discredit me. Let me repeat it:
“…there is no reason whatsoever that evolution from one species to another can’t happen. In order to justify the claim that it cannot, you must show there is a mechanism to limit how far organisms can evolve.”
And indeed there is not. And here is proof:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HeLa
Human cancer cells became organisms that could live completely independently just like other single celled organisms, but that is not evolution not only between species, but between KINGDOMS?! Please, go away.
Merely asserting that you are right, doesn’t make it so either.
While it is true that I cannot prove how far an organism can evolve, science seems very lacking in proof that it actually happened in the first place. Without actual transitional fossils to back them up, simply stating that it happened doesn’t fly.
Funny how you pick and choose which posts you put on your site. Keeps the arguments very one sided. lol
“Without actual transitional fossils to back them up….”
Just by asserting that, you prove yourself a liar. The truth is that you would not recognize a transitional fossil because your false religion denies evolution, therefore you have to deny transitional fossils no matter what they turn out to be. If your beliefs are based on lies, your whole life is a falsehood. You should grow up and get out of that childish fantasy world you choose to live in.
And Mad Dawg continues his verbal abuse, calling me a bigot, among other nonsense. It is obvious he has no clue that I am a champion of religious freedom, even while condemning lies within dogmatic religious, including creationism. You can do both at the same time. His other statements against evolution were equally hilarious and not worth dealing with. He even defended Lynn Margulis’ AIDS denialism, thus indicating the common mindset among all denialists, that RHETORIC is more important to them than actual EVIDENCE. Indeed, most denialists wouldn’t understand the actual evidence if it’s placed right in front of them, and their ignorance, mistakenly masked with phony knowledge, is what makes them denialists to begin with!