As to Phil Plait, you are a liar. The proof is your own words abuot stellar evolution at http://www.badastronomy.com/bad/movies/superman_returns_review.html and your own words above (BTW, these are your words on your blog page, correctly quoted).

Hypocrite evolutionist loser. Time to change, Phil Plait.

The Grand Canyon was both laid down during the Noahic flood , and then carved from the deposited sediment a bit later. Apparently the sediment blocked the path for water to drain , and some big lake formed when the flood receded. The lake then broke through and carved the canyon.

would carve the Grand Canyon in just days

That’s disingenuous of you, Phil. Everyone knows it took the Flood months to carve out the Grand Canyon, not days. That’s totally reasonable.”

Not going to lie, probably one of the stupidest things i have ever read. are you 5, or just brain dead? Judging by flow and deterioration of the cliff by volume of water per second, archeologists believe it took the colorado river more than 6 million years to carve THE WORLDS LARGEST CANYON! wow. please just give up in life.
peace

My whole issue with what I saw is that, even though science doesn’t know the answers to all the questions and conundrums he proposes, and it may not fit with the current model… the beauty of science is that it’s ideas can be molded to better fit the outcome of experiments and observations. We may not know the answers now, but I can guarantee that we will.

I’m sorry, I know it can be painful. But frankly, the origins controversy has had far too much of both sides (yes, even the “free-thinkers”) talking past each other and dropping bumper stickers and catchphrases rather than arguments. I’m weary both of “evolution is just a theory” AND “this is a god-of-the-gaps argument” when specifics aren’t provided. Could you please please please brighten my day, just a little?

I can understand your confusion. But this is not Discover Magazine’s blog. It’s Phil’s blog.

Simply put, creationism or intelligent design will never be a scientific theory. If you were not blinded by God, you would surely see that.

So if Discover magazine were to include that childish dribble of creationism in a way that implied it to be science, I would probably cancel my subscription. It’s not science, it never will be science, and it’s not possible for it to be science.

In my video, I document the failure of the standard evolutionary model for our Solar System. Among other things, this model predicts that Jupiter can’t exist (but it does), Saturn can’t exist either (ditto), Uranus and Neptune shouldn’t have formed at all (but there they are), Mercury and Ganymede shouldn’t have magnetic fields (even though they do), Titan should have a global ocean of methane and ethane if it were really billions of years old (but it doesn’t)… the list goes on and on.

Uh, what? Wow. Where on earth did they get this from? First, “standard evolutionary model” typically refers to the model building on Darwin’s work, though the “for our Solar System” part may be enough of a qualifier to indicate that that’s not the topic under discussion. But predicting the planets shouldn’t exist? I’m quite certain that that must be false. If a model predicted the planets shouldn’t exist, it would be discarded, and therefore would not be the “standard” model. Right?

Oh, and:

The point is that a term like “evolution” is not always used by evolutionists to refer _only_ to biology.

What gives you this absurd idea? If by “evolutionists” you refer to scientists who study evolution of life, you’d be wrong. But also, I don’t think there exists a group called “evolutionists”.

The raw fact of the matter is that there is no observable fact of nature that “proves” the universe is billions of years old, nor “proves” that all lifeforms evolved from an original common ancestor”

Jeff covers this well, but I want to add something: what do you consider an “observable fact of nature”? Surely something that can be measured with some kind of instrument is an “observable fact of nature”? Or do you only consider things that can be seen with your own eyes, heard with your own ears, etc, directly, to be “observable facts of nature”? I’d say that’s absurd.

Really? At least 3 lines of evidence off the top of my head: radioisotope dating of rocks of all kinds, correlation of fossils with strata around world, known sedimentation rates all converge on 4.5 billion years old for solar system. For universe, rates of nuclear fusion plus state of development in star clusters , Hubble’s red shift law and cosmic background radiation. How can anyone in the 21st century still believe the tripe in this video??

Phil’s own prejudice? Are you kidding? Do you have any idea how many scientists have debated this stuff since Darwin?

While, America didn’t even exist until Columbus was within sight, by the time he reached it, it was already teeming with life, including distinct human cultures, which, according to religious teachings, didn’t exist until the near future, yet there they were standing there, ready to greet the tired sailors.

You may ask: “Where did they come from?”. Well, a mere second after the formation of the continents, two individual human beings, male and female appeared out of thin air and began to multiply rapidly, defying the laws of time and space, almost immediately populating the land with their progeny.

I know, it sounds a little far-fetched, but how can you explain an entire pagan (non-Israelite, so therefore insignificant) race of people existing without any mention in the definitive resource for all man-kind?

It had to be a miracle.

——————————————————————————————————————-

Am I a liar for applying the word “evolution” to astronomy?

Phil Plait, the “Bad Astronomer” who blogs for Discover magazine, says so in a recent post about my Solar System video.

Quoting Phil:

“I watched the Jupiter video until all I could hear was a loud buzzing
sound punctuated by the word “evolution”. Last I recall, evolution was
the change in allele frequency over time… Jupiter has chromosomes?
Are creationists that confused?

“Well, certainly many are, but why ascribe to ignorance what can be
ascribed to misdirection? The creator of the video obviously uses the
word evolution over and over again because it’s a buzzword likely to
sway people predisposed against science to agree with the bizarre
version of reality he espouses, even though he must know that evolution
has nothing to do with astronomy.

“Hmmm. Bear false witness much?”

Phil is calling me a false witness — a liar — for applying the word “evolution” to astronomy.

But as an astronomer, surely Phil knows that the word “evolution” is used constantly in astronomy — not to describe biological change, but to describe the naturalistic formation and development of celestial objects.

Surely Phil knows that countless astrophysics books present models for the “evolution” of stars:

Evolution of Stars
and Stellar Populations
(by Maurizio Salaris
and Santi Cassisi)
Physics, Formation
and Evolution
of Rotating Stars
(by André Maeder)
Stellar Structure
and Evolution
(by Rudolf Kippenhahn
and Alfred Weigert)
And galaxies:

The Structure and
Evolution of Galaxies
(by Steven Phillipps)
The Chemical Evolution
of the Galaxy
(by F. Matteucci )
Nucleosynthesis and
Chemical Evolution
of Galaxies
(by Bernard E. J. Pagel)
And planets:

Planets and Their Atmos-
pheres, Volume 33:
Origins and Evolution
(by John S. Lewis
and Ronald G. Prinn)
A Comparison of the
Dynamical Evolution of
Planetary Systems
(by R. Dvorak and
S. Ferraz-Mello, Eds.)
Solar System Evolution:
A New Perspective
(by Stuart Ross Taylor)
In addition, Phil no doubt keeps up with the scientific literature that is full of this usage too. The June issue of the Astronomical Journal alone has 3 papers using “evolution” or “evolved” in their titles.

In the astronomical literature, the word “evolution” is everywhere.

So, why does Phil say “evolution has nothing to do with astronomy”?

Well, when your gun is out of bullets, you have to shoot blanks.

There’s a debating tactic that’s as old as the ancient Greeks. When your opponent is correct and you can’t refute his arguments, you use an ad hominem attack instead.

You smear his character. Mock and ridicule him personally. Call him a liar, even when you know he’s correct. Anything to cover up the fact that he’s right.

In my video, I document the failure of the standard evolutionary model for our Solar System. Among other things, this model predicts that Jupiter can’t exist (but it does), Saturn can’t exist either (ditto), Uranus and Neptune shouldn’t have formed at all (but there they are), Mercury and Ganymede shouldn’t have magnetic fields (even though they do), Titan should have a global ocean of methane and ethane if it were really billions of years old (but it doesn’t)… the list goes on and on.

But Phil doesn’t address any of that. Instead, the person who once wrote that “Stellar evolution [is] the process by which a star is born, lives out its life, and dies,” calls me a liar by insisting that “Evolution has nothing to do with astronomy… Bear false witness much?”

Reader, you can decide for yourself if there’s a false witness here — and if so, who it is.

Of course, that doesn’t make this video valid. (I didn’t watch it.)

Yes, we know. Phil even uses the word that way. In this case, a creationists idiot is using the term evolution to negatively associate mainstream cosmology with biological evolution. That’s the gripe.

“The Big Bang is a theory of cosmic evolution. It tells us how the universe evolved, how it changed from a split second after whatever brought it into existence, and we still don’t know what that is, until today.”

If evolution has nothing to do with non-chromosome, non-genetics changes, then your argument is with Professor Brian Greene. Of course I understand there is a difference between Big Bang Cosmology and the Solar Nebula Model/Theory – I am writing this simply to point out that even believers in evolution apply that word beyond biology. Since such is the case, why not attack the evolutionists whenever they misuse that word, in your opinion? Why only attack the creationists? If the word is misused, it shouldn’t matter what one believes, should it?

Many thanks! Cheers!