Instigator / Pro
0
1515
rating
7
debates
50.0%
won
Topic
#3346

Creationism is as valid an explanation for life on earth as Evolution

Status
Finished

The debate is finished. The distribution of the voting points and the winner are presented below.

Winner & statistics
Winner
0
1

After 1 vote and with 1 point ahead, the winner is...

RationalMadman
Parameters
Publication date
Last updated date
Type
Standard
Number of rounds
4
Time for argument
Three days
Max argument characters
10,000
Voting period
One month
Point system
Winner selection
Voting system
Open
Contender / Con
1
1697
rating
556
debates
68.17%
won
Description

***DEFINITIONS***

Creationism: The position, reached by conventional interpretation of the Old and New Testaments, that life on earth originated approximately several thousand years ago and was the product of acts undertaken by the Biblical God. Such related concepts as Quranic Creationism (or that of any non-Christian religion) are beyond the scope of this current debate.

Evolution: Here a catch-all term for the general framework arising from conventional modern science, establishing that life on earth first originated and then diversified by such processes as natural selection, being unguided by any sort of conscious intelligence, and over substantially larger spans of time than those posited by Creationism.

See fauxlaw's debate argument.

I am grarteful Rational Madman has agreed to this debate.

I Argument: Debate no-votes should be abolished

I.a As noted in Description, 4% of all debates on DART result in finished debates of no-vote, resulting in a tie.[1] I am not opposed to debates ending in a tie in which there are multiple votes, but to allow a debate to dwindle in interest such that there is no member or moderator vote after the voting phase has reached its calendar end countdown is a shame and a disservice to both participants.

I.b I recognize that some debates concern subjects that are either disagreeable, absurd, whimsical, offensive, unpopular, and other adjectives, but if a member has proposed a debate that passes the muster of DART debate policy, and another member has agreed to debate the subject, I believe the debate ought to attract the concern of at least one other member/moderator sufficient to want to see a worthy outcome for the participants’ effort.

I.c In the process of accruing the stat of no-votes for the 1,150 finished debates [45 voteless debates], I noted as well approximately 180 – 200 debates having just 1 vote, making this issue more like in excess of 15% with very limited voting. I do not necessarily argue against one-vote debates, but I am in favor of imposing that no debate conclude in a no-vote tie.

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@RationalMadman

It's borderline at best. I don't see him doing a lot to go through Pro's arguments and what is directly responsive to his points from Con, though more concerning than that he is apparently providing some external argumentation as part of his RFD, saying that an argument about radiocarbon dating "survived their most ardent attacks" without showing how this happened in the debate. I'd personally say that it's insufficient, but I'd have to give this more thought to determine if it strays too far from the voting standards.

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@Swagnarok

When that guy with the french frog profile pic (later known as something havoc) was active, a lot of debates began to unfairly benefit the side that backed Theism. Similarly, when Ramshutu and Ragnar/Barney were the active voters, it was skewed in favour of secular positions.

Whiteflame is also a left-wing secular-oriented biased voter that people overglorify because he writes good-sounding RFDs and I admit they are often very well written.

The recent user Novice, most likely wanted to vote against me but your case genuinely had flaws that I pointed out.

You can believe the voting is unfair and I agree that FLRW's vote is as BS as some Ramshutu votes that never got removed. Unfortunately, the RFD criteria are so loose that if the voter even references one or two things, they can basically justify voting either way.

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@Barney
@whiteflame

Even though I have won and site mechanics do not let your verdict alter my win, please address the vote reasoning by FLRW.

I am curious if it is borderline acceptable or not

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@RationalMadman

Even if so, FLRW was laughably unqualified to cast an informed vote.

I don't want to be a butt about this, so I'll be reasonable: If anyone who can at least summarize my primary argument steps in to vote, I will accept it no matter which way they swing.

Or, if somebody known on DART for their good reading comprehension and a track record for quality voting certifies that they spent a decent amount of time sifting through my argument and couldn't understand it, then I'll accept the loss for failure to write coherently. But it mustn't be somebody like FLRW.

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@Swagnarok

Perhaps it was you who couldn't keep up with my arguments.

I request that moderation remove FLRW's vote.

It was Con's job to critically deconstruct my argument, and I maintain that he didn't successfully do this. Perhaps some find it distasteful that I turned a debate generally presumed beforehand to have scientific parameters into a philosophical one, but a debater must accept the possibility that his opponent will take things in an unusual direction and we agreed to no rule that would preclude such actions on my part. Nor was the resolution "Creationism is a scientific explanation for life on earth" or anything to that effect; merely that it was a "valid explanation", which theoretically would allow for any manner of rational inquiry even if it fell outside of the findings of conventional hard science, being "not precluded" thereby in terms of cognitive viability.

Once I went down that metaphoric rabbit hole, Con didn't prove himself up to the task of keeping up, or otherwise giving a reason for why the paradigm shift I put into play was or ought to have been considered irrelevant. Given this, it wasn't an outsider's place to randomly strut in, look over the debate for exactly 25 seconds, and go "Hahaha Con has better science so Pro loses."

But never mind that. Let's say for argument's sake that Con possibly did keep up and he possibly did refute my points. FLRW isn't in a position to establish whether this is true or false, as he doesn't understand what my argument was in the first place. If FLRW is yet ignorant of that, then he's in no position to establish that a counter-argument made against it by Con had sufficient weight to award Con the victory.

In Round 4, I specifically asked observers to refrain from voting if they didn't grasp the gist of what I was saying. While this isn't something Con and I both agreed to at the start of the debate, one could argue that I shouldn't have had to say it. That should've just been a given: that everyone has a right to be merited or demerited on the quality of what they actually wrote.

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@FLRW

thanks for the vote but it would help if you made clearer the points the debaters brought forth rather than you own take on the points (as in what I said vs what Pro said, not what you say vs both).

You did this with carbon dating but that's about it, thanks anyway

Abraham, Jacob, Moses, King David, and King Solomon in all his splendour, never existed, a 15-year study of archaeological evidence has concluded.
The study—by Professor Thomas Thompson, one of the world’s foremost authorities on biblical archaeology—says that the first 10 books of the Old Testament are almost certainly fiction, written between 500 and 1,500 years after the events they purport to describe. Professor Thompson’s claims, outlined in a new book, The Early History of the Israelite People, are being taken seriously by scholars.
The British Museum’s leading expert on the archaeology of the Holy Land, Jonathan Tubb, said last week: “Professor Thompson may well be right in many of his arguments. His book is a work of tremendous scholarship. He has been meticulous in his research, and brave in expressing what many of us have thought intuitively for a long time but have been reticent in saying.”
Professor Thompson—from Marquette University in Milwaukee [and the University of Copenhagen]—says that there is a complete absence of archaeological and historical evidence for many events portrayed in the Bible. The inevitable conclusion, he argues, is that the Israelite exile in Egypt, the Exodus and the Israelite conquest of the Promised Land never took place.

The following is a comment by Michelle Thaller who was ranked as one of the 10 greatest living scientists in the world today.

MICHELLE THALLER: Chris, you ask the question about how religion affects our view of the cosmos. And the first thing I think about is simply the history of being human. There were so many things about the universe that we didn't understand. Thousands of years ago, we watched the seasons change or we observed things like thunderstorms and we had no idea, we didn't have the scientific knowledge to explain these things. And so it seems like a very natural, understandable, human instinct to try to ascribe these things to Gods, to beings that are so much more powerful than us we can barely comprehend them. And that sort of way of interpreting nature as spirits and things that are much more powerful than us I find very beautiful. Then, of course, what happens is you learn, you learn what causes lightning. The ancient Scandinavians might have said it was the god Thor actually causing lightning. Well we know it's not Thor – it actually has to do with friction inside clouds and generating electric charges. We understand now why the Sun shines and why the seasons change.

Exodus 20:11
For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.

Isn't this one of the most ridiculous statements ever made by man?

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@Novice

It was easy for you to win when you lost against me too

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@Swagnarok

They will likely forefit eventually. I see an easy win for you.

Regardless, please do not forfeit.

Interesting that you'd find tht awkward since I have nothing to rebut myself

Dude.
This is gonna be really awkward if I have to go into Round 2 with nothing to try to rebut.

If there's no other way to meet the deadline, copy and paste from some webpage (I'm sure there are thousands). I and the voters will excuse it this once. You have permission.

I more or less know what I want to say, but I wasn't ready to say it in Round 1. What I've written thus far doesn't constitute any sort of argument by itself so I understand your unease. However, I hope that I'll be able to make up for it in Rounds 2 and 3.

I have a bad feeling about where this will go...

All modern humans are classified into the species Homo sapiens — a term first coined by Carl Linnaeus in his 18th-century publication Systema Naturae. The only extant member of H. sapiens emerged around 300,000 years ago.

It should be interesting how Pro explains that the earliest fossils that scientists are relatively sure are animals come from around 550 million years ago.

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@Swagnarok

no but you can upload a link/URL if you really wanted you could make it ok for both debaters to have a list of external URLs outside of the debate, in order to go around the character count.

Tinyurl is one of the best URL shorterners out there because it has permanent codes for the URLs. Some of them make temporary codes that later can be recycled for another longer URL (very dangerous actually).

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@RationalMadman

I have a question. Is it possible to post images on DART debates? And if so, what's the effect on character count? (I realize now that 10,000 characters might've been too little.)