http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-AyDtD6sPA&feature=player_detailpage#t=19s "In the moosalim world".
One, what a ridiculous way to say muslim, but also, in smaller countries where the large majority of people believe, devoutly, in a religion that has a creation story, of course they're not going to believe in Evolution if it disproves their creation story. In the exact same way that the "moosalim" people don't believe in the Christian Creation story, or the Sikh Creation story, or the Hindu creation story.
I know he's not yet trying to argue against evolution here yet, but rather the phrasing that Bill Nye used, but even so. You can't go and say that you have more people on your side of the argument, when you include people who aren't on your side or the opponents side of it.
You would hardly see a left-wing party in politics claim that there is more left-wing support than right-wing, because the total number of left-wing and center supporters is greater than just the right-wing supporters, or vice versa.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-AyDtD6sPA&feature=player_detailpage#t=100sWe need to understand in the video that Bill Nye is confusing Obvservational Science with Historical Science. Observational science is what I call "hear-and-now" science, it gives us inventions and technology like computers and vaccines, we can observe it, test it and repeat it. Historical science deals with the past, and both Evolution and Creation fall into that category.
We cannot test, observe or repeat them. Yes we do see fossils and distant stars, but their history of how they got here really depends on our world view. Do we start with man's ideas about the past, who wasn't here during the supposed billions of years of earth history, or do we start with the Bible, the written revelation of the eye-witness acount of the eternal god who created it all?
So, we have a very valid predicament here. We're wanting to find out how the stars and how fossils of creatures came about. Unfortunately, no man was ever alive during these times.
So, we have to choose a view point to begin with. Some sort of starting ground. Well, we have either "man's ideas", which, as a scientist who is doing science in the scientific community, we can only assume this means, the generally well agreed upon concept which has been set out by numerous people in modern times with powerful scientific equipment and the time/money/freedom to research it.
Or, we look towards a Holy book, which, although the stories within it likely originate in some regards back to the times they did talk about, they can't be taken as quite as unbiased.
We're comparing ideas that have been designed, hypothesised and testes by thousands of living and deceased scientists for a couple hundred years, but mostly in the last 100 hundred years.
The testing and validating of all the ideas by all these different people means that we get it exceedingly well scrutinised and fine-tuned.
And then we have stories, originally written down to spread moral teachings and lessons taught by a mysterious god. And these stories were (supposedly) written by individual persons (with the individual books of the bible being by individual people), and then compiled together into the bible.
And then, due to the lack of strong and long-lasting materials, and the lack of items like the printing press, they were all hand-copied by thousands of different people into thousands of different versions, each and every generation for roughly 2000 years, where any numerous amounts of mistakes caused by human error, or purposely made by individual people, were not scrutinised due to the danger of questioning the book, thanks to the holy stigma attached to it.
So, fellow scientists. We have this dreadful mystery. We need a good starting point.
Do we start from the mostly un-biased, up to date and constantly checked ideas of thousands of men who pondered simultaneously, which also aren't protected by any association to higher beings, and therefore perfectly fine to scrap at any time...
Or do we choose the likely highly biased, 2000 year old teachings, which got re-written every 40~ years by different people, who weren't talking to each other, and often times were dead when the other then began writing, and which if we were to throw it out as nonsense, we would be in trouble due to it being associated to higher beings who could punish us for deciding to ignore it?
No one should be able to call theirselves a scientist (let alone a doctor), if they fail to see that you can't be subjective.
Simply going back to the evidence of one book (which there are hundreds of translations of [Which one are you even talking about?]), which you don't have proof of who wrote it, is not objective. It's entirely biased to tell me that the evidence you bring forth is correct without letting me disect it first.
Would you be happy if you were in a court case, on trial for murder, which you absolutely did not commit, and I were to come in and say "I have this knife, it was given to me by an angel, and it was the murder weapon you used", and everyone were to say "Oh, they definitely did it. That's the murder weapon. And it must be the murder weapon used by you, because an angel said so".
Before you claim that the written bible you own tells the correct story and is derived directly from God, first have a think about it. Did you see that specific bible being written? Because regardless of faith, the Bible is a book, and a book has to be written first. Did you see it written at the factory that produces it? Did you see the person who tells the printers what to do. Did you see him type in the exact words of the bible?
For that matter, when you say that the Gospel of Mark was written by someone who was there at the time, did you see the person who wrote it?
Do you know for a fact that they wrote it?
If you're arguing that we can't observe something old and be sure of how it got there, you can't use evidence which you can't be sure of how it got there.
A general tip in a fair argument too, which any argument between scientists should be, as it is your job as a scientist to discover new things and not protect the old ideas, regardless of how time-tested they are, is to not start using biased terms in describing two things.
You can't have a fair argument when you say one is just derived from men, while one is derived from the omnipotent god who did it all.
You can't claim you've won in an explanation of why you are winning.
/rant and ramble
