The judge is ideal for the guy making the offer because the judge will limit the scope of his decision to the question at hand. He won't be swayed that Y is a better explanation than X vs. X hasn't been disproved in the least. Pay the man his $10,000 loser.
you can if you specify that a certain level of extreme improbability equates to knowledge. if the dude wants to obfuscate by falling back on philosophical arguments about the impossiblity of absolute knoweldge there's no point to presenting evidence. only true for things that aren't testable. genesis makes many explicit scientifically testable claims (all life on earth was wiped out except for on the ark 5000 years ago etc.) disproving a literal interpretation is trivial. if you take everything literally genesis even contradicts itself in a few places, which is all anyone should need to show.
I've said from the beginning of the thread that this will be a cakewalk. With Denny's money and my brains, I can make some money and Denny can get free publicity.
If you think it's a slam dunk, take him up on the offer. I think it's a gimmick. A trap. It's intended to be a proposition you cannot win and would only make his side look good. FWIW
it's obviously a trap involving philosophical obfuscation of some kind. i was just pointing out that genesis does state positive physical claims that are currently scientifically testable.
Yep. It's absolutely a trap. It's bullshit because the judge may not have any scientific background and could be swayed. Who knows; maybe the judge is Christian or Hindu? Anyone that thinks this is a slam dunk doesn't understand the court of law.
they can be tested against existing objective evidence. if somebody claimed bigfoot is walking around downtown PDX you wouldn't have to go specifically look for bigfoot to know if the claim is true or not.
that wasn't the point, and that particular form of obfuscation of the definition of proof won't work anyway, since as noted genesis does make positive physical claims. the only thing you can do is argue that knowledge itself is impossible in principal. point was there already exists conclusive objective evidence that life on earth did not bottleneck 5000 years ago (etc) that you can point to in court. it's not like someone would need to do new testing to specifically deal with claims in genesis.
i was talking about the flood story, the age of which is severely restricted if you have to take the geneologies and ages lived listed in genesis literally. if taking the challenge i wouldn't even bother with the 7 day creation thing.
I'm still tripping on this 5,000 years after the big flood. I just don't see how biblical scholars date this. They talk of the age of Noah, etc. I don't see definite ages, but I guess I will take their word for it.
Flood story. http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/ev...flood-noahs-time-happened/t/story?id=17884533 Flood was 5,000 years ago, in fact. According to the science.
Wow cool find! I had personal issues with this story as well. The writer explained it could have been a "hurricane" or something similar, but a grander scale. I think that's easier to believe, IMO. And that's what I thought. 5,000 B.C.; which is 7,013 years ago-ish
What the science says is that there were numerous floods world-wide. Including a huge one in Washington State. As the glaciers melted, great lakes of melted ice were formed behind "dams" made of ice. When the ice melted, the dams burst and all the water made for the sea (sea level) at incredible speed. That there was one in the middle east isn't surprising. There were numerous of these and they were all disperate. Consistent with similar stories around the world. No evidence of any warning from some mythical being. No evidence of an arc. No evidence of a collection of all the animals. Occam's Razor says primitive peoples told the story of the flood around campfires for generations. And the story was embellished quite a bit along the way.
You attacked the 5000 year time frame. Science is actually supporting Genesis to a degree. It's not disproving it in the least. I think you took the wrong track. And I think if you did take up the guy, you better be ready for this kind of thing (I knew about the floods and ice dams for a while now)
