User talk:Filll/cashchallenge


 * Kent Hovind 250,000 dollar challenge
 * Price 1000 dollar challenge
 * Rimmer 100 dollar challenge


 * Cash offers are another way Bible-Scientists taunt opponents. In the 1920s and 1930s, Wilbur Glenn Voliva of Zion, Illinois, offered $5,000 to anyone who could prove to him that the earth isn’t flat. No one ever collected. At this writing, creationist engineer R. G. Elmendorf has a standing offer of $5000 to anyone who can prove to him that evolution is possible. Since Elmendorf is also a geocentrist, he offers $1000 to anyone who can prove that the earth moves.

Research

 * Wired magazine about intelligent design


 * Creation on the web dispute with hovind over arguments that should not be used
 * Creationism History: Topic Index Ronald L. Numbers
 * dino blood
 * Creationism in 20th-Century America, Ronald L. Numbers, Science 218 (5 November 1982): 538-544
 * Creationism/ID A Short Legal History, Lenny Flank
 * Father of creation science google search
 * DOES SCIENCE DISCRIMINATE AGAINST CREATIONISTS?, Lenny Flank, 1995 lists credentials of Gish, morris
 * ICR, CRS, CSRC, Bible Science Association (BSA; from Minnesota?), and the SOR are listed as creationist organizations by An Engineer Looks at the Creationist Movement, John W. Patterson, Proceedings of the Iowa Academy of Science 89(2):55-58, 1982. This also discusses how many creationists are engineers and gross errors in 1st and 2nd law of thermodynamics.
 * Philosopher notes that the "scientists" in "21 scientists" all have backgrounds in noncreationist areas
 * Thermodynamics, Creationism, and Evolution, John W. Patterson, American Atheist, Vol 35, no. 3, Summer 1997. describes why science cannot admit the supernatural, and more on 2nd law of thermodynamics
 * google search for 21 scientists
 * Darwinism defined: the difference between fact and theory - essay, Stephen Jay Gould, Discover, Jan, 1987. 2nd Fact vs. theory article


 * Methodist site on ID
 * Astronomy notes on ID
 * Astronomy notes: Why not teach ID?

'Never in history has humanity faced a crisis so deep, so intense, so pervasive, and so multi-faceted,' he wrote. 'There have never till now been so many people on earth so dependent on a complex technology, so burdened by its flaws, and so likely to witness a complete breakdown of that technology in a matter of decades. If we are to pull through we must thread our way carefully through the rapids that lie ahead. At every step we'll be depending on our knowledge, grasp and understanding of science, of its potentialities and its limitations... Under these circumstances, what crime is greater than that of misteaching the public about science?...Humanity has the stars in its future, and that future is too important to be lost under the burden of juvenile folly and ignorant superstition.'"
 * Apparent quote of Isaac Asimov:

Bumper stickers, quotes

 * De t'ings dat yo li'ble To read in de Bible - It ain't necessarily so.--It Ain't Necessarily So, Porgy and Bess (George Gershwin)


 * Books must follow sciences, and not sciences books.--Francis Bacon (1561-1626) Renaissance author, courtier, and father of deductive reasoning
 * Evolution is a FACT God is just a theory
 * Christian Fundamentalists Are Proof That Evolution Does Not Exist


 * some great quotes at


 * Lord save me from your followers!


 * The last time religion ran the world, It was called the Dark Ages


 * If you believe you can tell me what to think I believe I can tell you where to go


 * We have the fossils. We win.
 * Evolution is both fact and theory. Creationism is neither.

In neurobiology lecture today, the professor mentioned that much of the data we were seeing was culled from studies of leeches. He said, "Now, a lot of you may think leeches are nasty creatures. The people working with these creatures are quite fond of them, however. It is also reported that the leeches often become attached to the researchers."

Enzymes are things invented by biologists that explain things which otherwise require harder thinking. -- Jerome Lettvin

Life is a sexually transmitted disease

Thesaurus: ancient reptile with an excellent vocabulary.

Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.

Why did chicken cross the road? Stephen Jay Gould: It is possible that there is a sociobiological explanation for it, but we have been deluged in recent years with sociobiological stories despite the fact that we have little direct evidence about the genetics of behaviour, and we do not know how to obtain it for the specific behaviours that figure most prominently in sociobiological speculation.

I have a hunch that [] the unknown sequences of DNA [will decode into] copyright notices and patent protections. -- Donald E. Knuth


 * 

--It Ain't Necessarily So, Porgy and Bess (George Gershwin)
 * De t'ings dat yo li'ble To read in de Bible - It ain't necessarily so.

--Francis S. Collins, Director National Human Genome Research Institute, writing in Faith and the Human Genome
 * The tragedy of young-earth creationism is that it takes a relatively recent and extreme view of Genesis, applies to it an unjustified scientific gloss, and then asks sincere and well-meaning seekers to swallow this whole, despite the massive discordance with decades of scientific evidence from multiple disciplines. Is it any wonder that many sadly turn away from faith concluding that they cannot believe in a God who asks for an abandonment of logic and reason?

--Aldous Huxley (1894-1963)
 * Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.

--Charles Darwin (1809-1882)
 * Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, and not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science.

--Francis Bacon (1561-1626) Renaissance author, courtier, and father of deductive reasoning
 * Books must follow sciences, and not sciences books.

--Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) American transcendentalist philosopher, essayist and lecturer
 * The religion that is afraid of science dishoners God and commits suicide.

--Isaac Asimov (1920-1992) American scientist and science-fiction writer
 * Though science can cause problems, it is not by ignorance that we will solve them.

--Sally Carrighar, Wild Heritage
 * A preacher thundering from his pulpit about the uniqueness of human beings with their God-given souls would not like to realize that his very gestures, the hairs that rose on his neck, the deepened tones of his outraged voice, and the perspiration that probably ran down his skin under clerical vestments are all manifestations of anger in mammals. If he was sneering at Darwin a bit (one does not need a mirror to know that one sneers), did he remember uncomfortably that a sneer is derived from an animal's lifting [of] its lip to remind an enemy of its fangs? Even while he was denying the principle of evolution, how could a vehement man doubt such intimate evidence?

--Tom Scharle
 * 1996 presidential contender, Pat Buchanan, said something along the lines of "You may believe that you're descended from monkeys, but I believe you're a creature of God". I guess that Buchanan hadn't considered that one of the basic tenets of Christianity is that God is the Creator of everything, including "monkeys". It seems to me that one of the basic reasons behind the so-called "creationism" is the feeling that somehow parts of God's creation are not worthy of being our ancestors.

--Galileo Galilei (1564-1642)
 * I do not feel obliged to believe that same God who endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect had intended for us to forgo their use.

--Kenneth R. Miller, ActionBioscience.org interview
 * Most scientists who are religious look for God in what science does understand and has explained. So the way in which my view is different from the creationists or intelligent design proponents is that I find knowledge a compelling reason to believe in God. They find ignorance a compelling reason to believe in God.

--Albert Einstein
 * The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits.

--Susan B. Anthony, 1820-1906, Quaker, teacher, temperance and abolition organizer and women's rights leader
 * I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do, because I notice it always coincides with their own desires.

--Anonymous reviewer of Eugenie Scott's Evolution vs. Creationism : An Introduction. See ScienceDaily
 * Debating creationists on the topic of evolution is rather like trying to play chess with a pigeon - it knocks the pieces over, craps on the board, and flys [sic] back to its flock to claim victory.

--Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, 1871, Part I, Chap. IV
 * Looking to future generations, there is no cause to fear that the social instincts will grow weaker... the social instincts, - the prime principle of man's moral constitution - with the aid of active intellectual powers and the effects of habit, naturally lead to the golden rule, "As ye would that men should do to you; do ye to them likewise"; and this lies at the foundation of morality.

--Dr Alex Ritchie, BSc. (Hons) Geology, Ph.D in Sydney Morning Herald Webdiary Debate, 15- 24 June 2005
 * In a year when humans have slotted a spacecraft neatly through a gap in the rings of Saturn and fired a projectile into a comet 135 million kilometres away, surely it isn't too much to ask that our scientific techniques should be able to determine the correct age of the earth to within a small margin of error?

--George Gaylord Simpson (1964)
 * If a sect does officially insist that its structure of belief demands that evolution be false, then no compromise is possible. An honest and competent biology teacher can only conclude that the sect's beliefs are wrong and that its religion is a false one.

--Adelard of Bath Quaestiones Naturales, 1116
 * I do not detract from God. Everything that is, is from him, and because of him. But [nature] is not confused and without system, and so far as human knowledge has progressed it should be given a hearing. Only when it fails utterly should there be recourse to God.

Noah and the flood
--Karen Bartelt, Skeptics visit the "Museum of Creation and Earth History
 * Well, there sure is a lot of independent confirmation of that [the present human populations of the world have all descended from Noah], isn't there? What about the Egyptians, whose history stretches from at least 3100 BC -- well before the Flood -- through the pyramid builders of the Old Kingdom (2770-2200 BC) -- which includes the time of the Flood -- to the end of the New Kingdom (1087 BC) (Lerner et al 1993). Definably Egyptian art, architecture, and documents exist continuously through these ages. The earliest evidence of the Egyptians diverting the Nile for irrigation dates to 3100 BC, and by 1750 BC they had established river gauging stations to predict the height of the Nile flood (Officer and Page 1993:63). This civilization was obviously "tuned in" to floods. How come the Egyptians seem not to have noticed a global flood?

--Mark Twain, God of the Bible vs. God of the Present Day
 * God made all the animals in a single day; he could have swept them all away in the flood and re-created them in one day when they were again needed. Therefore it was an odd idea to save specimens of them for eleven months in the ark, whilst aware that eight persons could not feed or water them by any human possibility. If they were to be preserved by miracle, the ark was not necessary -- to let them swim would have answered the purpose and been more indubitably miraculous.

--Voltaire, Dictionary of Theology
 * The Deluge: A punishment inflicted on the human race by an all-knowing God, who, through not having foreseen the wickedness of men, repented of having made them, and drowned them once for all to make them better -- an act which, as we all know, was accompanied by the greatest success.