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Uncle Davey's Fragmentia - 3^rd Dectave

The idea of Fragmentia is to make a digest of the best fragments of the posts I have made to Usenet, whether ideas, soundbites, jokes and witticisms, observations, coinages, or even some typical Usenet "flames". The inclusion criteria are that the extracts work without a lot of context and that either the use of language or the idea has some originality. All work is mine unless otherwise stated, and, with few exceptions, first written to Usenet in the month given below each fragment. Where of interest, I have also given the person addressed. To see the original content, use Google's Usenet archive searching on the most unusual phrase in the section and limiting it to the stated month. Some of these comments were answered - even on occasion very competently - and looking up the thread will show you what they said. Unlike other parts of my site, which have no paid advertising, if you want to advertise next to an item, let me know, the rates are here. Proceeds will used entirely towards site upkeep and expansion. As ever, with my productions, the right of reply exists on the bulletin board. The fragments are not sorted, so a certain amount of disjointedness is part of the fun, but as you sequentially peruse each "Dectave of Uncle Dave", you'll soon start to pick up the threads.

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John Harshman said:

"Fine. That's a perfectly consistent viewpoint. It's known as the omphalos theory, and is akin to Last Thursdayism, the belief that the world was created last Thursday with the appearance of age. Both these theories have the advantage of being impossible to refute with any conceivable set of observations, and the disadvantage that they are impossible to confirm with any conceivable set of observations. Your position is hence outside of, and irrelevant to, science. You are free to hold it, but you can't at the same time claim that there is scientific evidence for your position or against the standard scientific position."

My answer:

"And this, my friend, is pretty much where you and I meet and look at each other from opposite sides of a thick pane of glass.

Because I ascribe to the mature creation theory which you call Omphalism.

My view of the world, and the observations I make about nature, including those which started before I came anywhere near the Bible, are consistent with an Earth which I age at ten thousand years for no better reason than 'it's a nice round number' - and I'm an accountant.

The paucity of the fossil record led me to look at alternatives when I was still a boy. I already spoke about Corydoras revelatus, [note: the unique callichthyid fossil] seeing which was like a revelation to me.

Nevertheless, the fact that speciation from the date of Creation has occured, each time diminishing and weakening the gene pool in the case of higher organisms, but having little such effect on lower organisms, is something which I cannot possibly deny.

That the world should have been created last Thursday cannot be disproved either, but that is not consistent with scripture. Why don't we have in this world created last Thursday a holy book telling us that this is the case?

With this ten thousand years mature creation theory, both the observations I have about the world, including the data you kindly gave about the ape DNA, is intact and the Bible is intact. You scientists still need to answer for many missing links in the fossil record, and show how, failing any physical barriers of the chihuahua / great dane type that we talked about or left-handed vs right-handed gonopodiums in livebearing fishes, higher animals can speciate so that even artificial insemination cannot produce viable offspring.

Lab mice will go through many generations per year. Please speciate them by inbreeding in such a way that I would need to go beyond artificial insemination and have to get into splicing and cloning to get viable hybrids from them. Please show how many generations that would take, without using any higher radiation than natural background radiation.

Neither do I have a problem that people think this world view I espouse is implicit deceit: God has told us what He has done, and therefore the choice is there to believe what God says or what man says. In the dilemma between special creation and Evolution, the ultimate question is, do we want to believe God or man?

And that is why the matter gets so emotive, and some normally sane and sober scientific people (not yourself, I hasten to add, you've been very courteous) start throwing insults and mockery around."

(December 2003)

"As far as I can make out there are two main schools of thought on the origins of the world, Creation and Evolution. Creationists may differ among themselves as to the exact answer to questions and evolutionists do also, but effectively these are the two schools. Evolutionists are in number by far the greater, although most people believing evolution are of course going with the crowd. Creationists, whether Christian, Jewish or Moslim, represent the other view, and if you take Usenet as a cross-section of world society, we observe these two camps debating. Other world views exist, such as those represented by the Eastern religions, but they are not tending as far as I have seen to get involved in the great debate between Creationists and Evolutionists.

We are Creationists, you are Evolutionists, who's gonna make you guys think if we don't?

As scientists, you should welcome an opposition, you should even for that reason be willing to have both sides presented to kids in class.

But Lenny (Flank), and others, defend their position with zealous envy, and when any Creationist wishing to put the view from the other side comes along they get treated as if they were Jehovah's Witnesses or something. I don't call that a spirit of scientific enquiry."

(December 2003, addressed to Charles Casey)

"You might, like, like to take, like, some responsibility for your, like, actions."

(December 2003, addressed to Robert Sowle)

"It's obvious that when Adam was made at creation, he already was made say 33 years old, he didn't have to wait 33 years of earthly life like Christ did, who was never created but was made flesh in this world a baby.

He was perfect, according to scripture his being fathered by the holy spirit and only having a human mother meant that he was not an heir of original sin. From this we learn that the father passes down the original sin, and not the mother. The mother passes the mitochondria, which is life. Eve, the name of the primordial mother of makind, means life.

Like ancient Hebrew science knew about the mitochondria.

A person's mother gives them the inheritance of life, their father gives them the inheritance of death.

But Christ had no human father.

Adam and Eve were created already grown up people, with a language that they could speak normally learned for years from parents. Some people say Adam would have had no navel, but I see no problem with him even having been created with a navel. Everyone else has one.

Scars in the pre-fallen world would have been unlikely. A navel is not a scar, as such. It is not scar tissue.

Memories would probably have been inappropriate, but you could counter me here and say that language and thought and memory are so bound up that we cannot have language without it, as the Sapir-Whorff hypothesis says.

All I can say there is that we don't know what the pre-Babel language sounded like, or what the thoughts of Adam were like.

Maybe there were notional default memories, maybe not. I cannot say.(Later on this question becme more important, and the presence or absence of implanted memory is the key difference between traditional Omphalism - although I am not sure of everything Gosse thought on that matter - and my "Omphalism Lite")

I don't see the deceit there, it only looks like deceit if you've been believing the humanist version of the world, which really is a deceit.

Matt Silberstein said "The deceit is making the world look old, making it look like events had occurred that had not occurred".

But if you tell people plainly enough that they didn't occur, then they have a real choice as to what they believe.

If it were made obvious to you what happened, you would have no choice but to believe and your faith, which is what it's all about, would be of no value.

Here we are, however, in a world where both a creationist and an evolutionary view exist. All other views about origins, such as Ra sneezing, are pretty much museum pieces and no-one is campaigning for the Sneeze of Ra to be put forward as a serious option in the classroom.

So you are effectively offered a choice of two, do you want to believe in evolution, and listen to the words of so-called science, when they are not actually able to prove the non-existence of God despite the fact that they claim to be able to work on proof, or do you want to go down the route of faith and accept what the Bible says about origins, bearing in mind that we cannot prove our claims any more than the other side can disprove them.

This is the test of faith. I believe there is a reward for people who are able to utilise faith in this dilemma, and go against wordly wisdom; they are well on their way to understanding many more things from the Bible, and can hope to meet the Saviour in its pages, the most important meeting of their lives. Belief in evolution and in the God of creation will lead to a greater popularity with men, but it is harder then to believe in the other things in the Bible, and not many of them will ever really have that meeting with their Saviour while they are still breathing and there is hope of salvation."

(December 2003, addressed to Matt Silberstein)

"Even among the pagans there were glimpses of the truth.

Belief in that dying and resurrecting deity, without knowing that his name was Jesus and that he was going to be born at a certain year and in a certain place, and putting their trust that God would provide their sacrifice from Himself, would have put even savage pagans in a better position eternally than the most 'enlightened' and informed person today who does not believe that God died for our sins and resurrected after. In these days everyone knows the dying and resurrected God is Christ. There are no surviving dying and resurrecting Gods being worshipped. So, unless we have the goalposts being changed, your question is answered.

Not everyone who has trusted Christ has known his name. Abraham himself only knew that God would prepare the lamb, but what that lamb's name was, he did not know on earth.

But Abraham knew that the Judge of all the earth would do right."

(December 2003, addressed to Trebor of Sirius)

"The trouble with Ficus benjamin, Ficus natassja and other tropical Ficus species is that they don't have an annual cycle of losing their leaves.

That means they don't have a mechanism for withdrawing the goodness out of the leaves back into the wood and the roots.

If only a few working leaves are left, then the plant can photosynthethise its hydrocarbons, and pruning off the dead stock could enable it to pull back, but without any leaves I would put my money on no recovery.

But stick it in a nice light place and see if anything happens in the Spring.

Sometimes plants can surprise us."

(December 2003, addressed to La Nilo, in answer to her question about a dying Ficus.)

Trebor of Sirius wrote:

"The religious idea of human salvation through the death and resurrection of the deity is old, old, old. Ancient Egyptians believed that before there were Christians - Hell, before there were Jews."

I answered:

"I'm not disputing that, but none of the religions mentioned by the person who asked the question have it, so let's not have shifting of the goalposts. The fact that some heathen had a glimpse of the truth from early days doesn't conflict with what I said, because only our religion has based on that now."

(December 2003,)

"Where my wife comes from in the Belarus forest, near the Pripyet marshes, wolves are common and there is nothing but animosity between them and dogs. Neither can you tame them, even if you have them from a blind newborn cub, when they achieve adulthood, they will attack you.

In general it's very interesting how God gave some animals that could be tamed, and others that we still can't tame."

(December 2003,)

Mel Turner suggested:

"Maybe the creator made them that way by using natural processes of evolution and common descent from early ancestors shared with the other kinds? The statement that things reproduce "after their kind" might simply be seen as just expressing the basic ideas of reproduction and heredity, and not necessarily implying any claim that kinds can't give rise to new, different kinds, or a claim that the kinds can't have shared common ancestors.."

My reply:

"If that were the case I think there would have been no harm in telling us so. There would be something else in place of the six days.

If scripture is inspired by God, then there would be ways of saying that. I believe scripture is inspired by God, and that he could have said it in a way that gave us an idea that we had got here as the result of a very long wait, during which time natural laws that he ordained in the beginning at the big bang quietly ran their course. But he says something else instead, presumably because it happens to be the case.

My view of God is that he can simply call things into existence in an already completed and mature state. it is my belief that the new creation that the Bible promises will likewise be provided quickly and miraculously, and we will not have to hang around waiting for it to evolve. If God couldn't do that the first time, how will he do it the second?

If it were not for the Resurrection, and the New Creation, it would make very little practical difference whether one believed in a metaphorical six days or a real six days, but bearing in mind that we hope for a Resurrection and a New Creation, the difference has massive knock-on effects."

(December 2003)

"I think most speciation is a downgrading of originally richer genetic material, just as highly bred dogs lose their mongrel vigour.

I'm breeding Xenophorus captivus, which of course is extinct in the wild because the Mexicans didn't care about the protection of their habitat. If aquarists don't keep them alive they will disappear. the problem is that I got mine from Plock zoo, the only strain available in Poland, and it is already so inbred that I have continually behind my back here in the office a continual reminder of what happens when things in breed. In my Xenophorus, the males are healthy, but every single female, no matter what I do, has its jaws seize up when it achives a certain age, and then it can eat and dies of hunger. Its eyes also start bloating out. Everyone else who has Plock zoo Xenophorus reports the same problem. "

(December 2003, also to Mel Turner)