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Merged Reverse JREF Challenge - prove Genesis wrong, get 10k

Ladewig said:
Why am I getting the impression that these literalist folks will calculate the court costs after the decision. If the scientists win, then court costs might be $20,000. In fact, there is nothing stopping them from claiming that the court costs were $50,000.
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Well it is expensive to empanel a heavenly tribunal.
 
wardenclyffe said:
But snakes do eat dust. So do we. There are specks of dust on lots of things we eat. The Bible does not say that snakes will eat dust to the exclusion of all else all the days of their lives. Weasley thing, the Bible.

Ward
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Better yet, "dust thou art and to dust thou shall return" so all things are really dust so whatever the snake eats is dust.

Bible, more weasely than we can know.
 
Craig B said:
Very Weaselly. Gen 3:14 appears to be inflicting a special punishment on wicked snakes, not merely subjecting them to the same food contamination problems as are confronted by all land dwelling creatures. Thus we see also the special mode of locomotion mentioned in the same passage. I don't think the judge would be barefaced enough to award the creationist $10,000 because a puff of wind sometimes blows dust into his dog's food bowl.

Anyway in what order were things created? Humans before or after other creatures? Women after men, or at the same time? The first two chapters of Genesis contradict each other on these points. How do the fundies get round that one?
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See the problem here is that the Hebrew word used in the bible can mean either before or after depending on the tense, case and context. We see that in the other 25 times it's used it can be argued that it means one thing 24 times but means the other once so we have to assume that we translate the word in the way that keeps my faint intact./funidie off
 
Sideroxylon said:
Makes you wonder what heinous crime the proto earthworm must have committed in the Garden of Eden.
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No crime, he asked to be a key figure in agriculture figuring god would make him a wealthy farmer but god has always been a real Joker.
 
Mastropaolo believes that evolution cannot be proved scientifically. "It turns out that there is nothing in the universe [that] is evolving, everything is devolving, everything is going in the opposite direction," he said.
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Okay dokay
 
http://josephmastropaolo.com/data12.html

The evidence also indicates an original Adam and Eve carried all of the originality information for their population and passed it on to each of the progeny. Population survival was by the preemptive salvo of remedies already expressed by the originalities of the individuals in the population. Survival of one pair was enough to preserve all of the originality information for the entire population.
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http://josephmastropaolo.com/data2.html
To test simply the alleged self-combining tendency of carbon, I placed one microliter of India (lampblack) ink in 27 ml of distilled water. The ink streaked for the bottom of the test tube where it formed a dark haze which completely diffused to an even shade of gray in 14 hours. The carbon stayed diffused, not aggregated as when dropped on paper. At this simple level there is no evidence that the “primeval soup” is anything but fanciful imagination.
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Mastropaolo believes that evolution cannot be proved scientifically. "It turns out that there is nothing in the universe [that] is evolving, everything is devolving, everything is going in the opposite direction," he said.
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Sounds like God wiffed that whole creation thing.
 
torifrog said:
Thanks Brian - and yes. As far as, say, fossils might go .. it could be an argument along the lines of "Did you watch/witness this process over 10 million years? No? Well it's not prima facie evidence then".

If you see what I mean.
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What a stupid line of argumentation. The creationists screw themselves on this one as well, because were any of them present when God supposedly *poofed* everything into existence?
 
Craig B said:
Anyway in what order were things created? Humans before or after other creatures? Women after men, or at the same time? The first two chapters of Genesis contradict each other on these points. How do the fundies get round that one?
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If science can have a cat that is both alive and dead, then religion can have conflicting creation stories that are both true.
 
ehcks said:
Genesis claims that the first day was before the creation of the sun, or the earth, or anything else for that matter, therefore it's false. Give me my $10k
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Yeah, just how exactly was there any light before the sun and stars were created? The last time I asked that of a creationist, they just rolled their eyes at me and walked away. Not a very convincing response, I might add.
 
Sideroxylon said:
Yes, but God was there and we have his word in Genesis.
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I know plenty of Christians who have complete faith that a fundamentalist's literal reading of Genesis is incorrect. I'm perfectly content to let these folks have their "faith wars", while I stick to the science.
 
Oh, one more problem with how this is set up which is different from the JREF challenge: it is asking the challenger to prove a negative, whereas the JREF challenge is asking the challenger to demonstrate a particular ability. Big difference, which allows the creationists in this case to play fast and loose with definitions, standards of evidence, etc.

ETA: Might as well demand proof that Santa Claus doesn't exist.
 
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It's just a feeble ploy to make some silly claims. He is offering a $10,000 bet to anyone who can prove a negative to his satisfaction. When no-one takes him up on this, frankly ridiculous, challenge, he'll make all sorts of claims about his having 'Proved' something after offering science a chance to prove him wrong.

Randi's challenge is a million dollars for proof, that only needs to be by demonstration, of a positive claim by the challenger. The only real pre-existing condition being that all possibility of cheating by the challenger be eliminated.

One of those challenges is fair, the other is not. The creationists have set up a challenge/bet which cannot be won by either side. They will undoubtedly try to claim victory anyway. It is fundamentally dishonest.
 
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