Freethought & Rationalism Archive

John Solum · 02-05-2002, 04:41 AM

I attended an AiG seminar near Flint, Michigan last night by Carl Kerby. Here are my notes from the talk. I'll save my comments for the end.

Session #1:

He started off by promoting the AiG website, saying that it was one of the most visited web sites in the world (the top 1%).

He said that Genesis is the foundation of Christianity, and that there are two views of the past; evolution (no observer, based on extrapolation of present processes operating at present rates) and creation (based on direct observations revealed by God).

He said that the debate isn't about evidence, that it's about bias, one biblical, and one nonbiblical (which he said is the bias of scientists), and you have to decide which bias is best. Kerby said that there is no evidence for evolution in science, only in interpretation of science ("write-up's and artwork" were the words he used).

He defined evolution as "man apart from God can decide what truth is" and he also pointed out that evolution is a theory.

He then moved on to dinosaurs stating that dinosaurs are the #1 most used tool to undermine faith in God. Belief in millions of years of death leads to murder and killing today(he made a joke about Gary, Indiana here). At this point he also said that people need to take a stand against Hugh Ross.

He then said that T-rex wasn't a meat-eater since an animanl doesn't need sharp teeth to eat meat, it needs them to eat plants. He showed a sketch of the skull of a camel and said it looked carnivorous, but it wasn't. He also talked about "Little Tike" the lion, a lion that never ate meat, which he said indicates that carnivores don't have to eat meat.

He said people need to use God's word to explain dinosaurs. Fossils exist in the present and don't come with labels. He then presented a quote that he said reconstructions of dinosaurs are "hypotheses or guesses" and are science fiction and not science.

He then talked about the Laetoli footprints, and said the only reason scientists don't think they're human is because of bias. He then talked about Lucy, saying she was "human from foot to neck and half ape/half human above the neck"). He made the point several times that Lucy's hand and feet were "more curved than a chimpanzee."

He then talked about a boy with deformed feet from Tijuana, and said that this may be the case with fossils like Lucy.

He said fossils require rapid, catastrophic, worldwide flooding. He then showed a picture of his "scariest fossil", a "fossil hat."

He then talked about feathered dinosaurs, mentioning a "down-covered" T-rex and a Deinonychus with feathers. He then put up an overhead of the National Geographic retraction of Archeoraptor (he never mentioned that particualr fossil by name) and indicated that it was a retraction of all feathered dinosaurs. He then said that scales can't evolve into feathers.

He then took a few minutes to promote the AiG bookstore that was set up at his talk, encouraging people to buy materials from them. He also said that AiG's materials aren't copyrighted and so people should make copies of AiG videos and give them to friends. He also said that Christian bookstores won't carry AiG's material.

He concluded session #1 by stating that "the scariest dinosaurs are those that show God's word is true."

My comments:

Kerby was an excellent speaker. He joked around with the audience, put up overheads of Far Side, B.C., and Hagar the Horrible, and came across as a very likeable man.

There wasn't a question and answer period at the end of the talk, and so I didn't get to try out any of my questions. I'm actually not that disappointed, I don't think I could have made a dent in the material he presented with just one question.

This was my first experience first hand with the "Gish Gallop." I spent the entire lecture writing as fast as I could. He peppered his talk with quotes from conventional scientists, I wrote down the references, and I'll look them up later. I couldn't write down the quotes themselves, there just wasn't time.

I'm not going to address all the misconceptions and falsehoods he presented, I'm sure alomst everyone here is familar with them (I am going to put a longer version of my notes with links to refutations on my web page some time in the future), but I do want to point out a couple of things. His presentation of Lucy was very confusing. Sometimes he seemed to be indicating that she was human, and that her ape-like features were the result of "evolutionary bias", sometimes he seemed to be indicating that she was just an ape (through his comments that Lucy's hands and feet were more curved than a chimpanzee).

Jack the Bodiless · 02-05-2002, 05:13 AM

Lucy doesn't have feet...

John Solum · 02-05-2002, 05:16 AM

Session #2:

As before, I'll post my notes first and my comments last.

He started by showing photos of fossil fish, saying they were evidence of a worldwide flood. He then quoted a Chinese paleontologist who said that in China people can't criticize the government and that in American people can criticize Darwin. He then said there are only two options; creation and evolution.

He then said that there is not one "missing link" but thousands, and that phylogenetic charts should make people mad. He said they show that animals remain the same, and that all the lines indicating relationships between animals are the result of bias/interpretation.

He said that the horse transistional series was thrown out years ago yet it's still in museums. He then said that people shouldn't make the comment that "if people evolved from apes then why are there still apes?"

He then said that he checked the best source for information on human evolution the Cambridge Encyclopedia of Human Evolution, but that he could only find evidence of human evolution in supermarket tabliods. He said "Australopithecines were always australopithecines, Humans were always humans, and chimps were always chimps."

He then talked about Neanderthals and said that now they're just considered to by "fully human" (In fact he said the the reconstruction of a Neanderthanl in Germany looks just like Duane Gish-he also said that the congregation should pray for Gish since his wife died last month").

He then showed a phylogenetic chart for whales (and said that it's hard to believe that a cow evolved intoa blue whale).

He then said that a better interpretation of phylogenetic charts is not that animals are related through evolution, but that all animals originated at the same time during the creation of the world.

He then said that a half-wing or a half-tail is useless, and a creature with one can't survive. He then showed joke pictures of a "kangaroo/zebra/sheep", etc.

He then talked about "kinds" of animals, mentioning rabbit kind, chicken kind, cow kind, sheep kind, and dog kind.

He said the variation of wolfs to form dogs is due to a loss of genetic information, and that evolution requires an increase in the amount of genetic information, and that's not observed anywhere in the world (to support this he quoted Werner Gitt and Lee Spetner - not one mutation has been observed that adds information to the genome). He said that all mutations reduce information.

He then said that dragons were likely dinosaurs, and dragons are mentioned in the bible. He talked about behemoth and how that had to be a sauropod.

He then said dinosaurs fit on the ark because most dinosaurs were small and Noah took young, small members of the large dinosaurs. He said that there are only around 50 dinosaur kinds. He then said that the animals on the ark had more genetic information than animals today.

He then promoted John Woodmorappe's book "Noah's Ark: A feasibility study", and spent some time discussing the dimensions and sea-worthiness of the ark.

He said that fossils are found on top of the highest mountains, providing evidence of the Flood, and that scientists (conventional scientists) now say that the Grand Canyon was formed in a matter of days. He said that Lake Bonneville drained catactrophically and carved the Grand Canyon.

He said that "bends" in rock can onyl form if the rock is soft, Mt. St. Helens formed layered rock in a matter of hours, polystrate trees indicate that rocks weren't deposited over millions of years, and that the Greenland ice cap could have formed quickly, indicated by the fact that the "Lost Squadron" was buried under 268 feet of ice in 50 years.

He then talked about legends of dragons and representations of dinosaurs in petroglyphs, and said that they provide evidence that dinosaurs and man coexisted (although he said this doesn't confirm that).

He then said that dinosaur bones have been found completley unfossilized, mentioning bones from Alaska and the T-rex bone analyzed by Mary Schweitzer. He said that Schweitzer was given "all kinds of flak" because she gave an image of "red blood cells" to creationists.

He then talked about population growth, and said the population growth rate of humans indicates that the earth can't be old.

He said that 90% of dating techiniques give "young ages" (He put up a list, but he took it down before I could copy it).

He said that the geologic column exists only in textbooks.

He says that when you radiometrically date a rock, you have to tell the lab how old you think the rock is, and then that's the date they return to you (he quoted Steve Austin and Richard Milton).

He then said that peppered moths and embryology are frauds, yet they are still taught in schools (he quoted Jonathan Wells).

He said cave, opal, and diamond formation can be fast.

He then said that scientists don't know what happened to the dinosaurs (he mentioned around 5 different ideas) and said that only the biblical explanation (the Flood) explains all the evidence.

He concluded by asking what the motivation for creation and evolution was. Evolution says that man is insignificant, and with creation "God says you're valuable"

My comments

The second session was basically a presentation of almost every creationist misconception/misrepresentation that I've heard about, I'm amazed that it could be crammed into an hour.

I'm not going to comment on his claims, except for the Grand Canyon. Conventional scientists certainly do not say it formed in a matter of days, and a flood from Lake Bonneville certainly didn't form the Grand Canyon (even Steve Austin knows that). Lake Bonneville drained through the Snake River, to the north of where Lake Bonneville existed, while the Grand Canyon existed to the south. Lake Bonneville didn't connect with any of the rivers that run through the Grand Canyon, it wasn't part of the Colorado River drainage. He plugged Austin's book "Grand Canyon: Monument to Catastrophe", but he should have read it. Even Austin doesn't say Lake Bonneville was one of the lakes that formed the Grand Canyon (instead he relies on three mysterious lakes that left no evidence of their existence).

I enjoyed the talk, and I'm glad I went. I certainly do feel frustrated that creationist speakers are making the same tired claims, but at least making web pages refuting those claims will give me something to do in my spare time.

One final note. In the AiG travelling bookstore they had copies of Behe's "Darwin's Black Box." I wonder if anyone in that building knows that Behe accets common descent, and that he accepts as valid the phylogenetic charts that Kerby railed against.

Oolon Colluphid · 02-05-2002, 05:32 AM

Quote:

He then said that T-rex wasn't a meat-eater since an animanl doesn't need sharp teeth to eat meat, it needs them to eat plants. He showed a sketch of the skull of a camel and said it looked carnivorous, but it wasn't.

Camel

Tiger

Tyrannosaurus

Looked carnivorous to whom, exactly?

Quote:

This was my first experience first hand with the "Gish Gallop." I spent the entire lecture writing as fast as I could. He peppered his talk with quotes from conventional scientists, I wrote down the references, and I'll look them up later. I couldn't write down the quotes themselves, there just wasn't time.

As the Washington post put it, this is the Dopeler Effect: the tendency of stupid ideas to seem smarter when they come at you rapidly.

Cheers, Oolon

outtawork · 02-05-2002, 05:39 AM

Great post John! Thanks for the report.

I wanted to add something to your comments on the "blood cells" found in the T-Rex that he had attempted to use as a line of "evidence"...

This e-mail was a response from John Horner.

Quote:

Hi Jeff,.....Young Earth Creationists are all about misinformation and
taking things out of context that serve their purposes.

Mary Schweitzer, a research scientist here in Bozeman (MSU), and
one of my recently graduated PhDs discovered what we believe are the
remnants of bood cells, identified by the mineral heme, which is apparently
a biological product. Red blood cells were not found, but instead,
evidence of their presence, and that is very exciting, and was published in
the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 94: 6291-6296 in 1997.
Mary found heme and other biomolecules including some proteins.

And, as in all good science the object, particularily in historical science
where we cannot repeat an experiment, is to attempt to falsify hypotheses
(prove that an hypothesis is false by finding contradictive data).

We can never be sure of anything in historical sciences so we formulate
testable (by falsifiability) hypotheses. Mary could not prove that the
structures were the remnants of blood cells, but only that they were not.
In the end she was not able to falsify the hypothesis, and therfore, like
all our other hypotheses, we can state that until the hypothesis is
falsified it is likley that the structures are in fact the remnants of
blood cells.

A remnant of a blood cell is not a blood cell, however.

The creationists hopped on Mary's findings like flies on you know what.
The words "blood cells" were all that they could see.

Every now and again I teach a class on critical thinking, how science
works, and the evolution/creation business. You'd be amazed at the numbers
of students on our campus that follow the young earth creationists, and
have virtually no understanding of how science actually works.

I hope this all helps some.

Maybe some day we can discuss some ways to get some of this info to the
incoming Freshman so that they have a foundation upon which they can
evaluate the difference between data based information and opinion based
"information."

John

He was responding to question I had asked him about AiG's "report" <a href="http://www.answersingenesis.org/docs/4232cen_s1997.asp" target="_blank">here</a>

Respectfully,
Outtawork

Oolon Colluphid · 02-05-2002, 06:14 AM

Quote:

He then said that he checked the best source for information on human evolution the Cambridge Encyclopedia of Human Evolution, but that he could only find evidence of human evolution in supermarket tabloids.

Well here’s the crux. I don’t give a tuppenny stuff how nice a chap he seems. If he genuinely has read that book, as I am doing, then he either didn’t understand it or is a frigging liar. Probably both.

TTFN, Oolon

theyeti · 02-05-2002, 06:37 AM

Quote:

He then talked about population growth, and said the population growth rate of humans indicates that the earth can't be old.

When you see that one, you know there's no canard too stupid for them to use. There are simply no standards among these guys.

theyeti

tgamble · 02-05-2002, 06:42 AM

Quote:

Originally posted by Jack the Bodiless:
<strong>Lucy doesn't have feet...</strong>

She doesn't have a knee joint either.

Kevin Dorner · 02-05-2002, 07:00 AM

Quote:

"He then talked about population growth, and said the population growth rate of humans indicates that the earth can't be old."

Forget six thousand years... the earth is only a week old. With the population growth rate of bacteria, we'd be seeing a lot more of them if the earth were older than a week.

John Solum · 02-05-2002, 09:46 AM

Oolon:

Quote:

As the Washington post put it, this is the Dopeler Effect: the tendency of stupid ideas to seem smarter when they come at you rapidly.

That's absolutely brilliant. Do you have the original article that quote's from, I'd love to read it.

outtawork:

Quote:

I wanted to add something to your comments on the "blood cells" found in the T-Rex that he had attempted to use as a line of "evidence"...

This e-mail was a response from John Horner.

Thanks for the comments, the email message from Horner is great. Have you put it online somewhere? If not, I really think you should, it'd be a great contribution to an FAQ on "fresh dinosaur bones."

I discussed this topic in another thread (scroll down toward the bottom of the page):

<a href="http://iidb.org/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=58&t=00010" target="_blank">http://iidb.org/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=58&t=00010</a>

Oolon:

Quote:

Well here�s the crux. I don�t give a tuppenny stuff how nice a chap he seems. If he genuinely has read that book, as I am doing, then he either didn�t understand it or is a frigging liar. Probably both.

I don't know what to make of the mentality of folks like Kerby (and Morris and Gish for that matter). I definitely think they don't understand a lot of what they read, and my gut reaction to their claims is that they're lying. However, I've read a few articles by a couple of folks whose judgement I respect (I don't remember the URLs off the top of my head, I'll try to find them) who've dealt with creationists that don't think they're consciously lying. The fact remains that intentional or not, these folks present a lot of inaccurate material, and that material needs to be countered.

theyeti:

Quote:

When you see that one, you know there's no canard too stupid for them to use. There are simply no standards among these guys.

Population growth's definitely one of the least intelligent arguments creationist use. I think the most dishonest thing Kerby did is to imply that National Geographic said that all feathered dinosaurs are frauds. With as many inaccurate statements as he made, it's tough to pick one.

Kevin Dorner:

Quote:

Forget six thousand years... the earth is only a week old. With the population growth rate of bacteria, we'd be seeing a lot more of them if the earth were older than a week.

Exactly. The population growth argument is so weak that it only takes a couple of sentences to refute it. Maybe it'll make it to the AiG "Arguments Creationists shouldn't use" page in a few decades.

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02-05-2002, 04:41 AM	#1
John Solum Regular Member Join Date: Jan 2002 Location: Ann Arbor, MI Posts: 139	Follow-up on AiG seminar I attended an AiG seminar near Flint, Michigan last night by Carl Kerby. Here are my notes from the talk. I'll save my comments for the end. Session #1: He started off by promoting the AiG website, saying that it was one of the most visited web sites in the world (the top 1%). He said that Genesis is the foundation of Christianity, and that there are two views of the past; evolution (no observer, based on extrapolation of present processes operating at present rates) and creation (based on direct observations revealed by God). He said that the debate isn't about evidence, that it's about bias, one biblical, and one nonbiblical (which he said is the bias of scientists), and you have to decide which bias is best. Kerby said that there is no evidence for evolution in science, only in interpretation of science ("write-up's and artwork" were the words he used). He defined evolution as "man apart from God can decide what truth is" and he also pointed out that evolution is a theory. He then moved on to dinosaurs stating that dinosaurs are the #1 most used tool to undermine faith in God. Belief in millions of years of death leads to murder and killing today(he made a joke about Gary, Indiana here). At this point he also said that people need to take a stand against Hugh Ross. He then said that T-rex wasn't a meat-eater since an animanl doesn't need sharp teeth to eat meat, it needs them to eat plants. He showed a sketch of the skull of a camel and said it looked carnivorous, but it wasn't. He also talked about "Little Tike" the lion, a lion that never ate meat, which he said indicates that carnivores don't have to eat meat. He said people need to use God's word to explain dinosaurs. Fossils exist in the present and don't come with labels. He then presented a quote that he said reconstructions of dinosaurs are "hypotheses or guesses" and are science fiction and not science. He then talked about the Laetoli footprints, and said the only reason scientists don't think they're human is because of bias. He then talked about Lucy, saying she was "human from foot to neck and half ape/half human above the neck"). He made the point several times that Lucy's hand and feet were "more curved than a chimpanzee." He then talked about a boy with deformed feet from Tijuana, and said that this may be the case with fossils like Lucy. He said fossils require rapid, catastrophic, worldwide flooding. He then showed a picture of his "scariest fossil", a "fossil hat." He then talked about feathered dinosaurs, mentioning a "down-covered" T-rex and a Deinonychus with feathers. He then put up an overhead of the National Geographic retraction of Archeoraptor (he never mentioned that particualr fossil by name) and indicated that it was a retraction of all feathered dinosaurs. He then said that scales can't evolve into feathers. He then took a few minutes to promote the AiG bookstore that was set up at his talk, encouraging people to buy materials from them. He also said that AiG's materials aren't copyrighted and so people should make copies of AiG videos and give them to friends. He also said that Christian bookstores won't carry AiG's material. He concluded session #1 by stating that "the scariest dinosaurs are those that show God's word is true." My comments: Kerby was an excellent speaker. He joked around with the audience, put up overheads of Far Side, B.C., and Hagar the Horrible, and came across as a very likeable man. There wasn't a question and answer period at the end of the talk, and so I didn't get to try out any of my questions. I'm actually not that disappointed, I don't think I could have made a dent in the material he presented with just one question. This was my first experience first hand with the "Gish Gallop." I spent the entire lecture writing as fast as I could. He peppered his talk with quotes from conventional scientists, I wrote down the references, and I'll look them up later. I couldn't write down the quotes themselves, there just wasn't time. I'm not going to address all the misconceptions and falsehoods he presented, I'm sure alomst everyone here is familar with them (I am going to put a longer version of my notes with links to refutations on my web page some time in the future), but I do want to point out a couple of things. His presentation of Lucy was very confusing. Sometimes he seemed to be indicating that she was human, and that her ape-like features were the result of "evolutionary bias", sometimes he seemed to be indicating that she was just an ape (through his comments that Lucy's hands and feet were more curved than a chimpanzee).

02-05-2002, 05:13 AM	#2
Jack the Bodiless Veteran Member Join Date: Feb 2001 Location: UK Posts: 5,815	Lucy doesn't have feet...

02-05-2002, 05:16 AM	#3
John Solum Regular Member Join Date: Jan 2002 Location: Ann Arbor, MI Posts: 139	Session #2: As before, I'll post my notes first and my comments last. He started by showing photos of fossil fish, saying they were evidence of a worldwide flood. He then quoted a Chinese paleontologist who said that in China people can't criticize the government and that in American people can criticize Darwin. He then said there are only two options; creation and evolution. He then said that there is not one "missing link" but thousands, and that phylogenetic charts should make people mad. He said they show that animals remain the same, and that all the lines indicating relationships between animals are the result of bias/interpretation. He said that the horse transistional series was thrown out years ago yet it's still in museums. He then said that people shouldn't make the comment that "if people evolved from apes then why are there still apes?" He then said that he checked the best source for information on human evolution the Cambridge Encyclopedia of Human Evolution, but that he could only find evidence of human evolution in supermarket tabliods. He said "Australopithecines were always australopithecines, Humans were always humans, and chimps were always chimps." He then talked about Neanderthals and said that now they're just considered to by "fully human" (In fact he said the the reconstruction of a Neanderthanl in Germany looks just like Duane Gish-he also said that the congregation should pray for Gish since his wife died last month"). He then showed a phylogenetic chart for whales (and said that it's hard to believe that a cow evolved intoa blue whale). He then said that a better interpretation of phylogenetic charts is not that animals are related through evolution, but that all animals originated at the same time during the creation of the world. He then said that a half-wing or a half-tail is useless, and a creature with one can't survive. He then showed joke pictures of a "kangaroo/zebra/sheep", etc. He then talked about "kinds" of animals, mentioning rabbit kind, chicken kind, cow kind, sheep kind, and dog kind. He said the variation of wolfs to form dogs is due to a loss of genetic information, and that evolution requires an increase in the amount of genetic information, and that's not observed anywhere in the world (to support this he quoted Werner Gitt and Lee Spetner - not one mutation has been observed that adds information to the genome). He said that all mutations reduce information. He then said that dragons were likely dinosaurs, and dragons are mentioned in the bible. He talked about behemoth and how that had to be a sauropod. He then said dinosaurs fit on the ark because most dinosaurs were small and Noah took young, small members of the large dinosaurs. He said that there are only around 50 dinosaur kinds. He then said that the animals on the ark had more genetic information than animals today. He then promoted John Woodmorappe's book "Noah's Ark: A feasibility study", and spent some time discussing the dimensions and sea-worthiness of the ark. He said that fossils are found on top of the highest mountains, providing evidence of the Flood, and that scientists (conventional scientists) now say that the Grand Canyon was formed in a matter of days. He said that Lake Bonneville drained catactrophically and carved the Grand Canyon. He said that "bends" in rock can onyl form if the rock is soft, Mt. St. Helens formed layered rock in a matter of hours, polystrate trees indicate that rocks weren't deposited over millions of years, and that the Greenland ice cap could have formed quickly, indicated by the fact that the "Lost Squadron" was buried under 268 feet of ice in 50 years. He then talked about legends of dragons and representations of dinosaurs in petroglyphs, and said that they provide evidence that dinosaurs and man coexisted (although he said this doesn't confirm that). He then said that dinosaur bones have been found completley unfossilized, mentioning bones from Alaska and the T-rex bone analyzed by Mary Schweitzer. He said that Schweitzer was given "all kinds of flak" because she gave an image of "red blood cells" to creationists. He then talked about population growth, and said the population growth rate of humans indicates that the earth can't be old. He said that 90% of dating techiniques give "young ages" (He put up a list, but he took it down before I could copy it). He said that the geologic column exists only in textbooks. He says that when you radiometrically date a rock, you have to tell the lab how old you think the rock is, and then that's the date they return to you (he quoted Steve Austin and Richard Milton). He then said that peppered moths and embryology are frauds, yet they are still taught in schools (he quoted Jonathan Wells). He said cave, opal, and diamond formation can be fast. He then said that scientists don't know what happened to the dinosaurs (he mentioned around 5 different ideas) and said that only the biblical explanation (the Flood) explains all the evidence. He concluded by asking what the motivation for creation and evolution was. Evolution says that man is insignificant, and with creation "God says you're valuable" My comments The second session was basically a presentation of almost every creationist misconception/misrepresentation that I've heard about, I'm amazed that it could be crammed into an hour. I'm not going to comment on his claims, except for the Grand Canyon. Conventional scientists certainly do not say it formed in a matter of days, and a flood from Lake Bonneville certainly didn't form the Grand Canyon (even Steve Austin knows that). Lake Bonneville drained through the Snake River, to the north of where Lake Bonneville existed, while the Grand Canyon existed to the south. Lake Bonneville didn't connect with any of the rivers that run through the Grand Canyon, it wasn't part of the Colorado River drainage. He plugged Austin's book "Grand Canyon: Monument to Catastrophe", but he should have read it. Even Austin doesn't say Lake Bonneville was one of the lakes that formed the Grand Canyon (instead he relies on three mysterious lakes that left no evidence of their existence). I enjoyed the talk, and I'm glad I went. I certainly do feel frustrated that creationist speakers are making the same tired claims, but at least making web pages refuting those claims will give me something to do in my spare time. One final note. In the AiG travelling bookstore they had copies of Behe's "Darwin's Black Box." I wonder if anyone in that building knows that Behe accets common descent, and that he accepts as valid the phylogenetic charts that Kerby railed against.

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