Creationist offers of scientific evidence are NOT welcome by evolutionists so forget it creationists

Sad example of a creationist offering evidence at EvC that is simply trashed by an evolutionist:

First I would point out how interesting I find it that most who reject a global flood, overlook the fact that fossils require an anoxic environment in which to even form.

This is, of course, not true. That's what's required for soft-tissue preservation. Which is extremely rare.

Dr. A is here stretching a point to obscure it. Of course oxygen deprivation is also necessary to fossilization of bones and shells.

And that this type of environment usually only occurs in nature, in rapid sedimentary deposit situations. Which of course only occur in "flood" conditions.

That's an interesting use of the phrase "of course", but back in the real world we can see rapid sedimentary deposition without floods.

Very rarely and never on anything like the scale of the geologic column. And why, I wonder, don't you describe an example of what you assert exists "in the real world?" You know, "evidence."

Secondly, there's often burrows preserved and fossilized that are oriented starting from lower strata and moving upward. These are like what you would expect had an animal been buried by the sediment and tried to dig its way out. They are very different from the normal type which are oriented in all directions.

If you are trying to say that under normal conditions burrowing animals never burrow up or down, then you are wrong.

He described burrows oriented from lower to higher, Dr. A, which does indeed imply an attempt to dig out as opposed to burrows begun from the surface, which again you are obfuscating with your irrelevant comment.

If you are saying that there's a greater proportion of such burrows than there should be, then we need a couple of figures from you:

(a) What proportion of burrows in the fossil record have a vertical component?
(b) What should the proportion be, if geologists were right about geology?

Please give references for (a) and show your working for (b).

Amazing how you miss the point, Dr. A. He's describing a situation that shouldn't ever occur under normal conditions, burrows that ORIGINATE from under the sediment.

A third thing to notice while looking at the geologic record, is that it consists mostly of "rocks" but very few paleo-soils. Normally, poorly consolidated rocks aren't considered to be made of ancient materials that have ever been actual soils. Evolutionary thinking in geology says that land surfaces supported an abundance of life for hundreds of millions of years. So where's all the paleo-soils in the record that supported that life? It's not there!

If you are trying to say that there are too few paleosol deposits, I should like you to present your figures for:

(a) How many there are.
(b) How many there should be if geologists were right about geology.

Please give references for (a) and show your working for (b).

His point is that there are hardly ANY at all, Dr. A., which is observable to anyone who takes a look at the strata in say the Grand Staircase where millions of years are supposed to have been inhabited by bazillions of land animals, the strata there being just as devoid of soils as the strata full of marine contents where they aren't to be expected.

Fourth, consider what we see evidence in the Coconino Sandstone of the Grand Canyon area. Uniformitarian geologists date this sandstone to be around 270 myrs old. It was believed to be an ancient desert. If you didn't know, the Coconino covers more than 100,000 square miles. However fossilized amphibians tracks have been found in the sandstone. This is evidence that it was laid down by water.

Perhaps in Opposite World the tracks of land animals with, y'know, feet, are only deposited underwater. In the real world, not so much.

Amphibians are generally associated with water, Dr. A, the point here which again you choose to obscure by referring to feet.

Fifth, we can further conclude that the Coconino was not laid down under a dry desert condition, by noticing that directly under it is a "blade edged" thin layer of Hermit shale. The shale had to have uplifted at least high enough to create a desert. But if that had occurred then normal erosion processes wouldn't have left the top of the layer so virtually flat as is observed today. The top of the shale exhibits no signs of erosion. How's that possible if it remained exposed to the surface for sand to begin to accumulate 10 myrs later?

Sixth, these blade edged flat layers, such as the Hermit, completely diminishes the idea of long passages of time between deposits, (regardless of what index fossils are found in them). Contact layers between rock layer units show the same knife edged characteristics and are seen just about everywhere. There's really only two reasonable scenarios that explain these characteristics. Either continuous and rapid deposition took place with almost instant current shifts, or deposition after spaces of sheet erosion from rapidly flowing water at an equal depth over a huge area that had equally eroding sediment taking place in all areas. Either case would need the WWGF scenario described in the Bible.

Your point is obscure, can you clarify it? It contains terms not to be found in geology textbooks, or at least not the ones I've read.

The point is only obscure because Dr. A insists on obscuring it. Alas, Dr. A finds it impossible to follow a description of phenomena in nontechnical English when it suits him for purposes of dismissing a creationist's point. The point about the noneroded surface of the shale actually also applies to all the strata -- they are all flat and obviously free of normal erosion in a way that could only have occurred under water, including all those claimed to have been deposited aerially.

Seventh, consider the existence of polystrate fossils in coal beds for example, which are often separated by layers of lime stone. Each layer is usually said to be several million years old.

But not to have taken several million years to form, a distinction which creationists seem unable to grasp, because they are idiots.

Even if a particular lower layer was rapidly formed, if the idea is that the layers represent millions of years of time then the layer that formed on top of it would have had to wait those millions of years before depositing. Polystrate fossils prove that ALL the strata had to have been deposited in the same event.

Eighth, consider how at the Green River Formation, many fossilized catfish have been found with skin and soft parts preserved. Many are even oriented to traverse through several laminations of shale deposits. The kind of deposits that Uniformitarians normally interpret as being representative of several season cycles of sediment.

Or several days, depending on the circumstances under which they were laid down.

By the way, weren't you pretending it was "millions of years" in the last paragraph? Yes, yes you were.

He's answering conventional geology, which says millions of years in the one connection, and seasonal laminations in the other. Very interesting how you consistently seek to obscure his point.

Ninth is the lack of bio-turbation between conforming layers of strata. If millions of years really took place between the deposits of conformable layers, why are their surfaces so scarce of millions of years of life? By that I mean things like burrows, root formations, etc... are mostly missing from the record.

So now you're complaining that there aren't enough polystrate fossils?

Seriously?

Well, again, we need a couple of figures:

(a) How many are there?
(b) How many should there be if geologists were right about geology?

Please give references for (a) and show your working for (b).

Go look at some slabs of rock called time eras and see that what he's describing is simple fact that shouldn't be the case if the rock represents millions of years -- or even a thousand, a hundred, ten years. The evidence of the activities of life doesn't even approach that of a broad prairie over a year in our own time frame.

This exchange ought to demonstrate that no creationist should ever bother posting at EvC forums. Dr. A should have been trounced by the admins for this nonresponse to a creationist's offering of evidence.

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Admin's comments on the creationist's post certainly confirm what I say above. Moderator Moose who did consider it to be evidence for the Flood had it right. But this comment ought to demonstrate the absolute futility of a creationist's ever posting anything at EvC:

Concerning being on-topic in this thread, I don't think Adminnemooseus and I are in agreement, but I don't think unanimity amongst moderators can always be expected. Coyote's Message 138 did fail to address any of JBR's points, and he did repeat points he has made many times in the past, but on the other hand the thread's topic is about evidence for the flood, none of JBR's points were evidence for the flood, and I do think Coyote's message was on-topic.

To this moderator JBR's points appeared to be criticisms of widely accepted views within geology containing no positive evidence for the flood. They also appeared to be unattributed rephrasings from creationist websites, not cut-n-pastes, but not exactly his own words, either. This moderator believes that responding to JBR's points would risk diverting the thread's topic to a defense of modern geological views instead of an examination of flood evidence, but I'm a participant in that thread, not a moderator (except when it comes to IamJoseph, who I'd been following around from one science thread to the next asking him to stop arguing the Bible and start arguing the science).

I don't know that there's a best response to JBR's points. Some replied with circumspection, asking him if there is any point in particular he'd like to focus on. Others replied by trying to identify specifics of the flood viewpoint, like when it happened. Others replied by pointing out that JBR had not actually offered any positive evidence for the flood. These all seem to have potential as possibly fruitful directions for discussion.

"Truth" according to Postmodernism

Amazing:

"Truth" is subjective. It belongs in philosophy.
Science is OBJECTIVE. It deals with facts.

...except when it's dealing in conjecture and speculation and calling them facts, which happens all the time in evolutionary "science" going back at least to Hutton who imagined an old earth out of whole cloth (and was wrong, as I've proved in my posts on angular unconformities) and got the scientific establishment to declare it a fact. Or except when it's dealing in sheer obfuscation as when it refuses to acknowledge the obvious implication of polystrate trees as utterly disproving the old earth, as shown in my previous post. Or when it invents "beneficial mutations" to fuel evolution and treats them as fact although there isn't any evidence that this has ever occurred beyond a few flukes that are really a benefit at the cost of a detriment anyway, as in the sickle cell's immunity to malaria. Or when it loudly proclaims evolution itself to be a "fact" despite all the evidence against it.

A pox on "science" and all its lies.

There are not "truths" learned in science, only facts. An individual can hold the facts to be true or untrue. It doesn't change the facts.

I'll give him that, there are no truths learned in science, certainly not evolutionary science, it's ALL a pack of lies, aka UNtruths.

Again, truth is subjective. You can't really "teach" truth. You can teach ABOUT "truth", but each student will ultimately decide their own truth.

Such a statement reinvents language and must even destroy brain cells by its poisonous irrationality. Wow, we can't even say that the theory of evolution is true or false? If it really DID have the facts on its side, then it would be true. But it doesn't have the facts on its side so it's untrue.

This makes truth a fairly useless subject for education.

Pity the next generation.

The reason this all relates to evolution is the following:Creationists are upset because their TRUTH disagrees with the facts. They want to replace the facts with their truth.

Actually the facts ACCORD with creationist views, and when the facts accord then the creationist view is true and we have a grip on the truth.

Creationists don't understand that their truth is irrelevant and that the facts are all education cares about.

Actually this is a lie, an untruth, not a fact. The facts support creationism, and you can't care about facts without caring about truth. But such is the insanity among the evolutionists why should I expect anything better?

Polystrate Tree Fossils

So I've been taking some side trips into other than my usual / favorite issues, and ran across the "polystrate trees." These are trees that have been fossilized in an upright position penetrating through MANY layers of sedimentary rock, or in terms of geological time, through millions upon millions of years, which of course is impossible. Yet this common creationist argument is treated by evolutionists as merely one of countless PRATTs, or "points refuted a thousand times." Of course they haven't refuted most of them, they are simply claiming they have. In the case of polystrate trees, as usual they act as if they've definitively answered the creationist argument but they've really merely sidestepped it.

As I discovered when I did a little reading on it:

At Wikipedia I found this completely evasive remark:

Geologists see no need to invoke a global flood to explain upright fossils. This position of geologists is supported by numerous examples, which have been found at numerous locations, of upright trees completely buried within either late Holocene or historic sediments. These buried upright trees demonstrate that conventional geologic processes are capable of burying and preserving trees in an upright position such that in time, they will become fossilized

Creationists certainly do argue for the Flood against the geologic time table of millions of years per flat horizontal slab of sedimentary rock, but referring to the Flood as if that were the only creationist argument about the significance of polystrate tree fossils completely evades the point.
The problem with polystrate trees is that given the enormous time spans assumed by current geology no tree could remain intact while the sediments were depositing, so as to appear whole after the millions of years it supposedly takes for them to deposit. But they do appear whole. Go look at the photos at the links. Their wholeness through what are supposed to be millions of years proves that the assumption of millions of years for sedimentation to occur is false.

[Later: It needs to be said in here that they claim that RAPID DEPOSITION occurred in the case of the polystrate trees. But rapid deposition of more than one layer normally identified as a time period of millions of years simply eliminates those millions of years altogether -- but it certainly fits the Flood, which somehow they manage not to notice. More on this farther down the post].

And yes, the far better explanation IS the worldwide Flood which would have rapidly buried them in a sequence of sediments in very short order, which is the necessary condition for fossilization of a whole upright tree buried in many layers of sediment.

Polystrate tree fossils DISPROVE THE TIME SCALE OF CONVENTIONAL GEOLOGY. This is "just another PRATT" only in the dreams of evolutionists.

I then went to the article on the subject at Talk Origins, probably the most famous website on the creation-evolution debate on the web, and found them being evasive in a more convoluted way (anything to mystify the reader I guess).

I next found a creationist discussing the Talk Origins article, which you can find at his site. Here he's elaborating the point I just made above:

...This argument craftily avoids the issues while claiming to explain them. The issues in question are:

1) How did the tree survive during multiple catastrophes without rotting or being knocked down?

2) How can anyone reasonably believe that a tree could stand for the length of time it takes to build up the additional layers?

3) How can a tree representing a short life span (on evolution’s geological time scale) stand erect through geological layers representing millions and often hundreds of millions of years?

This is not a problem for evolution? Regardless of how you slice it, the tree had to stand erect without rotting, falling or being knocked down for millions of years. The layers of strata have fossils representing different time periods according to the evolution model. It DOES pose a huge problem for evolution. If the tree was buried rapidly as Dawson hints toward and as creationists have said all along, evolution is out the window. If all layers were deposited together, then there is no such thing as millions of years. That would mean that all fossils were laid at the same time.

...If the trees were not covered rapidly, then there is no explanation as to how a tree could have embedded itself into layers of strata that accumulated over millions of years. The article does not attempt to answer any of these questions. Yet it claims (as all evolutionists do) to have the answers.

This writer also makes the intelligent point, which I unfortunately don't let myself believe sufficiently, that you cannot win the argument with an evolutionist. He won't listen to your argument for starters, he will simply bury you in his claims for "evidence" for evolution which he accuses the creationist of failing to appreciate and refusing to learn about, and aggressively drowns out all contrary ideas with as much abusive insulting language as he can muster.

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Here's DWise on this subject a couple years ago at EvC:

But even more telling was what that article said about rates of depositation. While Steve Austin was being paid by the ICR to get a post-graduate degree in geology (so that they could finally claim to have a degreed geologist on staff) he would write creationist articles for them using a pseudonym, "Stuart Nevins". As Stuart Nevins, he wrote an article in which he claimed that geologists believed that strata formed at a completely gradual and constant rate, even though even undergraduate geology students know full well that that is a complete and utter lie -- and Austin was writing that while he was a graduate student. He had to know better and yet he still repeated that lie!

Well, had Austin actually read that article (I learned to not make such an assumption about creationists with the ICR's NASA document moon-dust debacle), he would have learned what he should have learned years ago in his undergraduate classes: geologists can distinguish between layers formed by rapid depositation and layers formed by slow depositation. It's described in Broadhurst's article. Those "polystrate" tree stumps were buried in layers formed by rapid depositation.

Typical snide suspicious accusatory anti-creationist post from someone who hasn't the grace to give the benefit of the doubt on any point whatever, is willing to utterly trash anyone he disagrees with.

TELL US, MR. WISEACRE, HOW geologists distinguish between layers formed by rapid deposition and those formed by slow deposition. The question is HOW. Give us the "science" involved. You can't get away with a flat assertion and call it science. What exactly is it that tells them the difference? And give us all the independent tests that verify it too.

HOWEVER, since you admit that they were buried in rapidly deposited layers, THEN tell us how we are to distinguish the rock strata built up in such a fashion from those built up more slowly. Must be pretty subtle differences, Mr. Wise, of gossamer fine subtlety I suspect, mystifyingly fine just to stand back and look at a stack of strata and wonder which might have been which. Oh the ones with the polystrate trees in them, THOSE were rapidly deposited. Right.

HOWEVER AGAIN, we're talking about MANY LAYERS OF STRATA THAT ARE NORMALLY IDENTIFIED BY GEOLOGISTS AS ENORMOUSLY LONG TIME PERIODS. The "Carboniferous," the "Holocene" are specifically mentioned in connection with polystrate trees. Are these millions-of-years-long ages or not? Did the lower "age" deposit rapidly and then WAIT a few million years for the next "age" to start depositing, while the tree just sat there twiddling its thumbs instead of rotting away?

If you have three or four "time periods" all rapidly deposited around a tree trunk, guess what you have? You no longer have "time periods" at all, YOU HAVE THE WORLDWIDE FLOOD.

RAPID DEPOSITION IMPLIES THE WORLDWIDE FLOOD, and there is NO way they can talk their way out of the evidence of the polystrate trees against an Old Earth except of course by the usual evolutionist "scientific" methods of ridicule, accusation, snide put-downs, self-delusion and lies.

Dealing with some arguments against the Flood

D Wise who posts at EvC forums has his own site on the debate, or really, on what's wrong with creation science. He's amassed quite a collection of arguments against creationist arguments, many against the Flood. This is an improvement over the endless refrain at EvC that the Flood has been discredited many times over although most of the time all they offer is that refrain and leave it to the reader to figure out what evidence they have in mind. So it's helpful to see all the arguments mustered in one place, as D Wise does on this page.

It's a formidable collection and I'm sure I won't be able to address more than a few of them, but I'd like to do whatever I can, and I'll take them in the order he's presented them:

First, I just want to note that he's extremely offended at the statement of belief made by the late Henry Morris of the Institute for Creation Research:

Notice that they [some Christian geologists] suffered severe crises of FAITH, not of GEOLOGY! This should not come unexpected, considering Dr. Henry Morris' teachings about geological evidence, teachings which the ICR lives by:

"No geological difficulties, real or imagined, can be allowed to take precedence over the clear statements and necessary inferences of Scripture." (_Biblical Cosmology_, page 33)

"The data of geology, in our view, should be interpreted in light of Scripture, rather than distorting Scripture to accommodate current geological philosophy." (_Science, Scripture, and the Young Earth_, page 6)

In short, if it don't fit our theology, then either make it fit or ignore it. To that, his son and heir apparent, John Morris, has added (and many at the ICR seem to concur and actively teach): if it refutes the smallest part of our theology, then it disproves our entire theology. No wonder those students suffered so at seeing their faith crumble before them; this is one of the more distasteful and destructive consequences of the "Dark Side of the Farce."

Of course we can't expect an unbeliever to grasp the importance of the credal statement by Henry Morris, but all Christians should certainly embrace it -- it is the Light while the Dark Side is the offense taken against it. The Bible is God's word, not to be subjected to dissent or argument, that's the nonnegotiable foundation. And yes, we either have to find a way to reconcile science with it or simply leave science alone until enough is known to make the reconciliation. There is no other alternative, whether Wise and other unbelievers find this "distasteful and destructive" or not. Our faith and the world will always be at enmity.

Of course this assumes RIGHTLY reconciling science with scripture, although Wise accuses creationists of all manner of dishonesty, and I'm not going to get into that because I haven't followed all the creationist claims. The one time I specifically asked an evolutionist for an example of such dishonesty he described what was really only a confused wrong idea about what evolution teaches, not dishonesty at all. In fact I haven't yet seen an example of what I would have to agree is dishonesty. Not that it doesn't exist, I wouldn't know.

So I generally avoid those issues, but I'll weigh in on the basics. One of the basics is that God's word trumps ALL. Period.

That said, on to the science issues (I've added the headlines):

TIME NEEDED TO FORM GRANITE AND METAMORPHIC ROCK

Also speaking at the 1986 ICC was Harvard paleontology graduate student Kurt Wise (no relation, I'm sure), who surveyed what is known about the speed of formation of the three major kinds of rock. While he found that many kinds of sedimentary rock can form rapidly, igneous rock is another matter. While a small chunk of granite can conceivably form in a short time, many massive bodies are known, such as huge granite batholiths, some of them 10 kilometers in diameter, in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. Under the most favorable conditions, such formations would take about 100,000 years to cool, instead of the 6000 to 8000 years required by Flood Geology. Metamorphic rock is worse since it must first be formed as sedimentary rock, be heated, and then cool off.

During the question period, geophysicist John Baumgardner pointed out that Wise's figures had been very conservative and that much more time would be needed for rocks to form. He also offered sheer forces as a source of heat and pressure for metamorphic rock, but Wise countered that many metamorphic rocks show no signs of sheer.

[It's "shear" but anyway]. As I've been refining my view of the formation of the Grand Canyon I came to the question of how the granite and schist at the base formed. I've explained the Great Unconformity at the base as brought about by the volcanic eruption that is evidenced by the magma (granite) intrusions in all the illustrations as well as by the uplift of the area of the canyon itself, and logically the granite and metamorphic rocks were also formed by the same eruption.

There's heat and pressure generated by the volcano plus the weight of the strata overhead for that part of the transformation -- the metamorphic rock or in that case the schist -- and if all this occurred while the Flood waters were still on the earth, which I'm arguing was the case, there would have been plenty of water everywhere to exert a cooling effect on the rising magma. The strata would be saturated and oozing water for some time to come, a cooling effect on the order of a gigantic Wet Blanket some two to three miles deep in the Grand Canyon area.

I don't know about New Hampshire but granite batholiths form deep in the earth under the same blanket of strata everywhere -- there are many illustrations on the web that demonstrate this. They spread out horizontally to great distances, apparently kept from pushing upward by some barrier above, such as a few miles' depth of wet sediments. The magma does also push up through the strata in separate fingers that cool to dikes over time, burning through all the layers to the surface where lava overflows and making horizontal "sills" of magma between layers on the way up. (The computer I'm using doesn't have enough power to allow me to post some diagrams but eventually I'll try to put some up).

The batholiths would be relatively thin vertically and in contact with the wet rock above for their entire horizontal extension. The rock immediately above would heat up from contact with the magma, even while exerting a cooling effect in return, but there's plenty of water above that point of contact to keep trickling down through the layers to continue the cooling effect for a great while to come. Eventually the magma would be cooled to granite batholith, which it seems to me would occur appreciably faster under these conditions than the usual calculations take into account -- they assume dry rock -- though no doubt not nearly as fast as lava cools on the surface.

More to come from D Wise's list of arguments.

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Yes, I know geologists are used to encountering water underground. Would they recognize the effect of a few miles' worth of damp sediments on rising magma that occurred over 4000 years ago? And how would they recognize it?

Email correspondent gave me some calculations about how the weight of the strata wouldn't be sufficient to form metamorphic rock within the time span I'm allotting, or to cool the magma I think he also said but I'll have to reread it to be sure. Somebody is going to have to translate the math into descriptive English if they want me to accept any of it. For all I know it doesn't represent the situation I have in mind at all.

The programmed stupidity of scientific reasoning when it leaves its proper sphere

What can you do when the evolutionist side of the argument simply flatly refuses to accept as evidence such an obvious statement as that "law, order, identifiable purpose and design are proof of a creator?"

It's utterly absurd but they simply flatly deny this obvious statement. Such obvious products of intelligence are certainly proof of a Creator, it's insane of them to try to make them the products of insensate nature, yet they go on and on and on demanding that evidence be SHOWN FOR this claim that "law, order, identifiable purpose and design are proof of a Creator." Totally schizophrenogenic. Insanity reigns so pervasively there is no getting through to them.

Here's the dialogue:

[DB] law, order, identifiable purpose and design are proof of a creator.

[Taq] Evidence please.

[DB] Of course both positions are equal in evidence,. . .

[Taq] No, they are not. You have yet to support the argument that law, order, and identifiable purpose are signs of creator and a creator alone with evidence.

[DB] Please demonstrate how nature or natural causes is anything more than a display of nature?

please demonstrate how natural causes is an explanation of soley natural causes

[Taq] Natural causes are just that, natural causes. You are suggesting supernatural causes, and are doing so without any observations of supernatural causation, nor evidence of it.

[DB] Law, order and purpose are more that sufficient and on the same equalitywith nature causes (as you use the term) to provide evidence of a designer

[Taq] Why? How are law, order, and purpose evidence of a designer? It would seem to me that law, order, and purpose are evidence of law, order and purpose in the same way that natural causes are evidence of natural causes.

DB has given EVIDENCE of a supernatural cause, he has not merely suggested it. The devotees of the natural explanation can only counter that natural causes may be argued to explain such phenomena, but they can't claim to have the superior argument, nor better evidence either for the natural explanation, since on the face of it intelligence is absolutely the necessary explanation for law, order and purpose.

It just goes on and on like that for pages, with DB insisting he's provided the evidence asked for, which he has, and all the rest of them denying it. Here's one from Percy many pages later:

[DB] Since I have now provided what you requested it is your obligation as an debater to respond to that rebuttal

[Percy] You provided evidence of the creator and of how he influenced evolution? Really? Where? Oh, and did God turn out to be Christian, Islam, Hindu, Buddhist or other?

I think you're providing wonderful examples of a couple of the creationist approaches to debate: making claims that you've proved things you've never proved, and misunderstanding how evidence works.

See how creationist evidence, genuine evidence, is simply done away with at EvC? With of course a little added ridicule thrown in. If it is agreed that "law, order, purpose and design" are evident in phenomena, that IS the evidence asked for. Yes, it can be alternatively interpreted by the materialist camp, not very well of course and that is the best they can do. In itself it IS evidence for an intelligence as the cause of such phenomena. Eventually the admins will be fed up with the discussion, and who will they blame? The creationists of course.

Truly there is something wrong with the mind that is shaped by materialist Science, something utterly perverted that prevents it from recognizing the difference between properties of Mind and properties of Matter.