(Hello Pragmatic

I'm going to put my answers and or questions in (parentheses) to make it easier to reply.)

Hi.
Thank you again for taking the time to reply.

I'm intentionally avoiding to get into the controversy around Kent Hovind and the discussions about specific proofs. Both because those are entire subjects by themselves and would be better discussed in separate threads, but also because when such things are debated, people tend to invest a large amount of pride into the debate. Once pride is mixed in, it gets even harder than it already is to conduct an intellectually honest debate. Even more so in this thread, since it already has a high degree of invested pride and bitter comments.

Moving on...

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Here are a couple of recent quotes from you:

"information Kent Hovind showed from the Bible made sense when you compare it with evidence in nature"
"If people just take the true evidence at hand without injecting their opinion in it based on their world view ..."

I really like how you talk about finding truth, comparing evidence, avoiding bias. You seem to celebrate that people should go and find the answers, not just be content with getting them from a single source that might be misleading. To me, this sounds like someone who wants intellectual honesty.
I like to encourage this in people, because those are very good traits to have.

(Thank you, you seem to be very patient, not just blowing your top and crying and having to call names like some of the children do. I appreciate that. I have to admit though, I do kinda like antagonizing Lmale a little bit. Sometimes I wonder if he throws a temper tantrum when he reads my posts before he is able to respond lol.)

It is puzzling for me though, how someone who speaks like this seems absolutely sure about knowing the truth:

"Let me step aside from my explanation for a moment to give an example of truth ..."
"There is absolute truth that is discoverable".

Speaking for myself, there are not many things I can say that I am 100% sure of. I can be confident to a certain degree, in some cases a very high degree, but 100%?

(There are all kinds of proofs of absolute truth.

1. At least most math, though I can't say all because some types of math are way out there. For instance 2+2 will always have an absolute answer of 4, no matter where you are. (For some of you even if it has to be translated into English numbers)

2. Though no one can show what causes gravity, it is an absolute truth on earth. If someone goes to the top of a high building and doesn't believe in gravity, all they have to do is step off and they will know the absolute truth about gravity. (And no I'm not telling someone to do that before someone else on this site tries to claim I am.)

3. It is an absolute that by the Earth's rotation we have sun rise in the east every day. Sunshine or not. And truth is discoverable. Each one of those were discovered. Also absolute truth is very narrow, but false answers are broad. I'll explain, the narrowness of absolute truth with 2+2 is that the only correct answer is 4. But false answers of 2+2 is any number other than 4. So the answer being 5 or 10 billion is very broad.)

I don't want to get into an endless debate of the actual meaning of the words "believe" or "faith". So, I'll just try to explain what I mean when I say "to believe" in something, or "to have faith" in something.
I use the word "faith" mostly as "belief without proof", as in "take it on faith".
I use the word "believe" mostly as "belief based on proof", but not with absolute proof since that wouldn't be believing in any sense of the word. That would only be "knowing" without any belief involved.

Believing in something based on proof, requires it to be falsifiable. Because if it's not falsifiable, evidence is not relevant.

"So I made a choice to believe the Bible."

I don't think one can directly choose to believe, that is out of our control.

(I believe you do choose, but I believe you'll lean towards what you're world view is.)

Example:
If your told you will get $10000 if you sincerely believe that a pink, flying unicorn is outside your window right now, you can't will yourself into believing that.

(It is easy to give a scenario that almost no one will believe. Yet I'll guarantee you that I could convince a child of your example, that would cause the child to believe enough to go to the window to see if the pink flying rhinoceros was out there.. You need to keep it in perspective that Jesus said you have to come to God as a child. In other words, to believe as easy as a child does.   Matthew 18:3 KJV
And said, Verily I say unto you, Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven.)

However, I think you can to some extent choose how you view available evidence, and by that process have indirect control over what you believe in.

(From the moment we begin to learn, most everything we come into contact with can potentially have an influence on what we choose to believe. It is the reason why people have the ability to go in the direction they choose. There are many times that children are brought up in the same manner, same surroundings, by the same parents, and yet go completely in different directions. Sometimes it's different types of carriers. Sometimes it's one to a life of crime, the other to live a life of doing good. Yet they were both brought up with the same guidance. So how can this be if it's the way your putting it?)

So from my perspective, your statement would be more accurately stated: "So I made a choice trust all the evidence against my previous beliefs and instead trust the Bible."

(I chose!)
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What I'm trying to understand is still an open question for me:
How does one go from Atheist to a particular religion (and denomination)?

I get that you watched the Creation Seminar videos and became convinced that there was valid evidence against evolution and an old Earth. What I don't get is this: Evidence that evolution is false and the Earth is young, doesn't automatically lead to Christianity.
A person could just as well believe that evolution is false and the Earth is young and remain atheist. Or they could adhere to a generic form of deism, or any of a number of other religions.

I'll try to explain how I'm thinking.

The Creation Seminar videos did two things:
- Showed you what you consider to be convincing evidence against evolution and an old Earth.
- Referred the the Christian Bible over and over, as the only alternative to answer those questions.

First the answers to some questions was removed, creating holes. Then new answers were provided, that filled those holes. But this was done without allowing other alternatives to be part of the available choices.

The videos did of course not say any of the following:
- "It's all right to just accept that the answers are unknown."
- "Islam is the one true religion, and Allah is the one true god and our all mighty creator."
- "Only Ahura Mazda is worthy of the highest worship and the destructive spirit Angra Mainyu conceived of creation to create death."

Instead it was continuously stated that the bible alone, was the only source of real answers.

So my question, in a perhaps more refined version would be:
Excluding your conviction against evolution and an old Earth, what was it that gave you the feeling as you said:
"by the end of the video I realized that it was very probable that God exists."
(I assume that "God" referred to the god of Christianity)

Or perhaps a better way to ask, is to turn it around:
If the Creation Seminar videos was not given to you specifically by a proselytizing Christian and contained ONLY the arguments against evolution and an old Earth without any specific replacement answers. What would it then have been, that would lead you to believe that Christianity is the one true religion

(I will try to explain this the best I can,

I know many people search for religion. Many are restricted to just one or two types of religion, that they physically can read into or that is taught to them in which they many times will simply accept because they may feel it's just what everyone else does. A few will reject any of it and become Atheists lol. But some will seek with all there heart the truth of God, and He will reveal Himself to them.

I received an e-mail from Atheist Republic about Armin Navabi and the reason why he started Atheist Republic. Though he prayed and said he searched for truth in many religions, I can only guess he was like me. Most likely he wanted God to move and show him what he "Armin Navabi" wanted to see. You see when things came into my life that I didn't want or asked for, there were times I got by myself and looked up and said God if your real show me and I'll believe in you. Yet I know I was wanting a God that would do what I wanted Him to do, and there would have been stipulations. I also suspect that most if not all on this site has done somewhat the same at some point in your lives, if you'll be honest.

Religion in itself is superficial. Without the Holy Spirit involved, it can only be taken at face value. Let me explain by going deeper into my testimony, and some examples, and God's word to back it up.

Like I said above there were times I looked up and and thought "if there was a God that cares, I could speak to Him and He would speak back or show me something right there and then while I figured it was what He should do." If I gave Him a stipulation to prove Himself, He should do it, right? At least that's what I thought for a caring God should do.

But we don't get to decide how God reveals Himself. He will only reveal Himself when we do according to His word.

Jeremiah 29:13 KJV
And ye shall seek me, and find me , when ye shall search for me with all your heart.

And if you search for Him with all your heart there will be no stipulations, and you will have to wait patiently for Him to reveal Himself.

You see it wasn't just the video and the information in it about the bible and natural things I saw that started the whole process of my salvation.

After Silas and I started having our little debates, maybe after 3 or 4 times we talked, my wife and I were driving to town and I was telling her about the conversation Silas and I were having. And I remember saying with a true desire to really want to know the truth no matter what the outcome. I asked my wife "why won't God show me the truth if he is real?"

Right there and then for the first time God knew I really was searching for Him with all my heart.

So then God put in place what was needed to knock down my strong hold.

God's word says: 2 Corinthians 10:4 KJV
(For the weapons of our warfare are not carnal, but mighty through God to the pulling down of strong holds;)

Let me step slightly over a moment and then I'll get back to the strong hold.

You see the way God set up His plan of salvation requires at least three things outside of what you the lost soul needs to do. Those are 1: it takes God's word.
2: it takes a whiteness.
3: it takes the Holy Spirit to
   bring conviction.

The only thing the lost soul has to do is be willing to believe with all their heart. Yet if they have a strong hold that is standing in the way of seeing truth, it must be knocked down before they will accept the truth God will show them.

So as I said God knew my heart was ready, so He put in place what was needed to knock down my strong hold and He put His word in my way and by the Holy Spirit brought conviction on me. Which is what made it so real. Conviction is noticeably different than guilt. I know what it is to be guilty of something, as does anyone who has lived into adulthood.

But conviction by the Holy Spirit is like someone showing you what you're guilty of, though no one else even knows about.

So you asked what if another religion presented the evidence against an old Earth.

I don't believe I would have went in the same direction because the Holy Spirit wouldn't have been involved. He can only show truth, for He is God. And God can't lie. So He can only use His true word.

By the way I belonged to no denomination when I got saved. I became a Christian and then I joined a Methodist church until I seen in the bible that they didn't go with the bible truly. I then joined an Independent Baptist Church. And if you study God's word there is not any kind of an organizational church within it. They are all independent churches.)

To Lmale,
So Lmale you claim there is no such word as evolutionist. Have you ever typed it in google? Here is what google search will give you.

ev•o•lu•tion•ist
ˌevəˈlo͞oSHənəst/
noun
1.
a person who believes in the theories of evolution and natural selection.
adjective
1.
of or relating to the theories of evolution and natural selection.
"an evolutionist model"

Now to show you that there is also very good evidence of soft tissue in dinosaur bones. This is the site below. I copied the info and pasted below, except for the pictures. You of course can go to the site if you don’t believe me. And yes there is another site below this one I’m sure you will just love to read.
As for this first site I know you will want to highlight that they mention Creationists and their claims about them. And that they still insist that the dino is 68 million years old. But I really like when they say this
“Schweitzer’s work is “showing us we really don’t understand decay,” Holtz says. “There’s a lot of really basic stuff in nature that people just make assumptions about.”
I believe they don’t realize that applies to themselves also. You should really do some more research on this subject. There is more out there that shows it really is soft tissue that is not bacteria.

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/dinosaur-shocker-115306469/...

Dinosaur Shocker
Probing a 68-million-year-old T. rex, Mary Schweitzer stumbled upon astonishing signs of life that may radically change our view of the ancient beasts

By Helen Fields
SMITHSONIAN MAGAZINE
May 2006

Neatly dressed in blue Capri pants and a sleeveless top, long hair flowing over her bare shoulders, Mary Schweitzer sits at a microscope in a dim lab, her face lit only by a glowing computer screen showing a network of thin, branching vessels. That’s right, blood vessels. From a dinosaur. “Ho-ho-ho, I am excite-e-e-e-d,” she chuckles. “I am, like, really excited.”

After 68 million years in the ground, a Tyrannosaurus rex found in Montana was dug up, its leg bone was broken in pieces, and fragments were dissolved in acid in Schweitzer’s laboratory at North Carolina State University in Raleigh. “Cool beans,” she says, looking at the image on the screen.

It was big news indeed last year when Schweitzer announced she had discovered blood vessels and structures that looked like whole cells inside that T. rex bone—the first observation of its kind. The finding amazed colleagues, who had never imagined that even a trace of still-soft dinosaur tissue could survive. After all, as any textbook will tell you, when an animal dies, soft tissues such as blood vessels, muscle and skin decay and disappear over time, while hard tissues like bone may gradually acquire minerals from the environment and become fossils. Schweitzer, one of the first scientists to use the tools of modern cell biology to study dinosaurs, has upended the conventional wisdom by showing that some rock-hard fossils tens of millions of years old may have remnants of soft tissues hidden away in their interiors. “The reason it hasn’t been discovered before is no right-thinking paleontologist would do what Mary did with her specimens. We don’t go to all this effort to dig this stuff out of the ground to then destroy it in acid,” says dinosaur paleontologist Thomas Holtz Jr., of the University of Maryland. “It’s great science.” The observations could shed new light on how dinosaurs evolved and how their muscles and blood vessels worked. And the new findings might help settle a long-running debate about whether dinosaurs were warmblooded, coldblooded—or both.

Meanwhile, Schweitzer’s research has been hijacked by “young earth” creationists, who insist that dinosaur soft tissue couldn’t possibly survive millions of years. They claim her discoveries support their belief, based on their interpretation of Genesis, that the earth is only a few thousand years old. Of course, it’s not unusual for a paleontologist to differ with creationists. But when creationists misrepresent Schweitzer’s data, she takes it personally: she describes herself as “a complete and total Christian.” On a shelf in her office is a plaque bearing an Old Testament verse: “For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the Lord, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.”

It may be that Schweitzer’s unorthodox approach to paleontology can be traced to her roundabout career path. Growing up in Helena, Montana, she went through a phase when, like many kids, she was fascinated by dinosaurs. In fact, at age 5 she announced she was going to be a paleontologist. But first she got a college degree in communicative disorders, married, had three children and briefly taught remedial biology to high schoolers. In 1989, a dozen years after she graduated from college, she sat in on a class at Montana State University taught by paleontologist Jack Horner, of the Museum of the Rockies, now an affiliate of the Smithsonian Institution. The lectures reignited her passion for dinosaurs. Soon after, she talked her way into a volunteer position in Horner’s lab and began to pursue a doctorate in paleontology.

She initially thought she would study how the microscopic structure of dinosaur bones differs depending on how much the animal weighs. But then came the incident with the red spots.

In 1991, Schweitzer was trying to study thin slices of bones from a 65-million-year-old T. rex. She was having a hard time getting the slices to stick to a glass slide, so she sought help from a molecular biologist at the university. The biologist, Gayle Callis, happened to take the slides to a veterinary conference, where she set up the ancient samples for others to look at. One of the vets went up to Callis and said, “Do you know you have red blood cells in that bone?” Sure enough, under a microscope, it appeared that the bone was filled with red disks. Later, Schweitzer recalls, “I looked at this and I looked at this and I thought, this can’t be. Red blood cells don’t preserve.”
Schweitzer showed the slide to Horner. “When she first found the red-blood-cell-looking structures, I said, Yep, that’s what they look like,” her mentor recalls. He thought it was possible they were red blood cells, but he gave her some advice: “Now see if you can find some evidence to show that that’s not what they are.”

What she found instead was evidence of heme in the bones—additional support for the idea that they were red blood cells. Heme is a part of hemoglobin, the protein that carries oxygen in the blood and gives red blood cells their color. “It got me real curious as to exceptional preservation,” she says. If particles of that one dinosaur were able to hang around for 65 million years, maybe the textbooks were wrong about fossilization.

Schweitzer tends to be self-deprecating, claiming to be hopeless at computers, lab work and talking to strangers. But colleagues admire her, saying she’s determined and hard-working and has mastered a number of complex laboratory techniques that are beyond the skills of most paleontologists. And asking unusual questions took a lot of nerve. “If you point her in a direction and say, don’t go that way, she’s the kind of person who’ll say, Why?—and she goes and tests it herself,” says Gregory Erickson, a paleobiologist at Florida State University. Schweitzer takes risks, says Karen Chin, a University of Colorado paleontologist. “It could be a big payoff or it could just be kind of a ho-hum research project.”

In 2000, Bob Harmon, a field crew chief from the Museum of the Rockies, was eating his lunch in a remote Montana canyon when he looked up and saw a bone sticking out of a rock wall. That bone turned out to be part of what may be the best preserved T. rex in the world. Over the next three summers, workers chipped away at the dinosaur, gradually removing it from the cliff face. They called it B. rex in Harmon’s honor and nicknamed it Bob. In 2001, they encased a section of the dinosaur and the surrounding dirt in plaster to protect it. The package weighed more than 2,000 pounds, which turned out to be just above their helicopter’s capacity, so they split it in half. One of B. rex’s leg bones was broken into two big pieces and several fragments—just what Schweitzer needed for her micro-scale explorations.

It turned out Bob had been misnamed. “It’s a girl and she’s pregnant,” Schweitzer recalls telling her lab technician when she looked at the fragments. On the hollow inside surface of the femur, Schweitzer had found scraps of bone that gave a surprising amount of information about the dinosaur that made them. Bones may seem as steady as stone, but they’re actually constantly in flux. Pregnant women use calcium from their bones to build the skeleton of a developing fetus. Before female birds start to lay eggs, they form a calcium-rich structure called medullary bone on the inside of their leg and other bones; they draw on it during the breeding season to make eggshells. Schweitzer had studied birds, so she knew about medullary bone, and that’s what she figured she was seeing in that T. rex specimen.

Most paleontologists now agree that birds are the dinosaurs’ closest living relatives. In fact, they say that birds are dinosaurs—colorful, incredibly diverse, cute little feathered dinosaurs. The theropod of the Jurassic forests lives on in the goldfinch visiting the backyard feeder, the toucans of the tropics and the ostriches loping across the African savanna.

To understand her dinosaur bone, Schweitzer turned to two of the most primitive living birds: ostriches and emus. In the summer of 2004, she asked several ostrich breeders for female bones. A farmer called, months later. “Y’all still need that lady ostrich?” The dead bird had been in the farmer’s backhoe bucket for several days in the North Carolina heat. Schweitzer and two colleagues collected a leg from the fragrant carcass and drove it back to Raleigh.
As far as anyone can tell, Schweitzer was right: Bob the dinosaur really did have a store of medullary bone when she died. A paper published in Science last June presents microscope pictures of medullary bone from ostrich and emu side by side with dinosaur bone, showing near-identical features.

In the course of testing a B. rex bone fragment further, Schweitzer asked her lab technician, Jennifer Wittmeyer, to put it in weak acid, which slowly dissolves bone, including fossilized bone—but not soft tissues. One Friday night in January 2004, Wittmeyer was in the lab as usual. She took out a fossil chip that had been in the acid for three days and put it under the microscope to take a picture. “[The chip] was curved so much, I couldn’t get it in focus,” Wittmeyer recalls. She used forceps to flatten it. “My forceps kind of sunk into it, made a little indentation and it curled back up. I was like, stop it!” Finally, through her irritation, she realized what she had: a fragment of dinosaur soft tissue left behind when the mineral bone around it had dissolved. Suddenly Schweitzer and Wittmeyer were dealing with something no one else had ever seen. For a couple of weeks, Wittmeyer said, it was like Christmas every day.

In the lab, Wittmeyer now takes out a dish with six compartments, each holding a little brown dab of tissue in clear liquid, and puts it under the microscope lens. Inside each specimen is a fine network of almost-clear branching vessels—the tissue of a female Tyrannosaurus rex that strode through the forests 68 million years ago, preparing to lay eggs. Close up, the blood vessels from that T. rex and her ostrich cousins look remarkably alike. Inside the dinosaur vessels are things Schweitzer diplomatically calls “round microstructures” in the journal article, out of an abundance of scientific caution, but they are red and round, and she and other scientists suspect that they are red blood cells.

Of course, what everyone wants to know is whether DNA might be lurking in that tissue. Wittmeyer, from much experience with the press since the discovery, calls this “the awful question”—whether Schweitzer’s work is paving the road to a real-life version of science fiction’s Jurassic Park, where dinosaurs were regenerated from DNA preserved in amber. But DNA, which carries the genetic script for an animal, is a very fragile molecule. It’s also ridiculously hard to study because it is so easily contaminated with modern biological material, such as microbes or skin cells, while buried or after being dug up. Instead, Schweitzer has been testing her dinosaur tissue samples for proteins, which are a bit hardier and more readily distinguished from contaminants. Specifically, she’s been looking for collagen, elastin and hemoglobin. Collagen makes up much of the bone scaffolding, elastin is wrapped around blood vessels and hemoglobin carries oxygen inside red blood cells.

Because the chemical makeup of proteins changes through evolution, scientists can study protein sequences to learn more about how dinosaurs evolved. And because proteins do all the work in the body, studying them could someday help scientists understand dinosaur physiology—how their muscles and blood vessels worked, for example.

Proteins are much too tiny to pick out with a microscope. To look for them, Schweitzer uses antibodies, immune system molecules that recognize and bind to specific sections of proteins. Schweitzer and Wittmeyer have been using antibodies to chicken collagen, cow elastin and ostrich hemoglobin to search for similar molecules in the dinosaur tissue. At an October 2005 paleontology conference, Schweitzer presented preliminary evidence that she has detected real dinosaur proteins in her specimens.

Further discoveries in the past year have shown that the discovery of soft tissue in B. rex wasn’t just a fluke. Schweitzer and Wittmeyer have now found probable blood vessels, bone-building cells and connective tissue in another T. rex, in a theropod from Argentina and in a 300,000-year-old woolly mammoth fossil. Schweitzer’s work is “showing us we really don’t understand decay,” Holtz says. “There’s a lot of really basic stuff in nature that people just make assumptions about.”

Young-earth creationists also see Schweitzer’s work as revolutionary, but in an entirely different way. They first seized upon Schweitzer’s work after she wrote an article for the popular science magazine Earth in 1997 about possible red blood cells in her dinosaur specimens. Creation magazine claimed that Schweitzer’s research was “powerful testimony against the whole idea of dinosaurs living millions of years ago. It speaks volumes for the Bible’s account of a recent creation.”

This drives Schweitzer crazy. Geologists have established that the Hell Creek Formation, where B. rex was found, is 68 million years old, and so are the bones buried in it. She’s horrified that some Christians accuse her of hiding the true meaning of her data. “They treat you really bad,” she says. “They twist your words and they manipulate your data.” For her, science and religion represent two different ways of looking at the world; invoking the hand of God to explain natural phenomena breaks the rules of science. After all, she says, what God asks is faith, not evidence. “If you have all this evidence and proof positive that God exists, you don’t need faith. I think he kind of designed it so that we’d never be able to prove his existence. And I think that’s really cool.”

By definition, there is a lot that scientists don’t know, because the whole point of science is to explore the unknown. By being clear that scientists haven’t explained everything, Schweitzer leaves room for other explanations. “I think that we’re always wise to leave certain doors open,” she says. But schweitzer’s interest in the long-term preservation of molecules and cells does have an otherworldly dimension: she’s collaborating with NASA scientists on the search for evidence of possible past life on Mars, Saturn’s moon Titan, and other heavenly bodies. (Scientists announced this spring, for instance, that Saturn’s tiny moon Enceladus appears to have liquid water, a probable precondition for life.)

Astrobiology is one of the wackier branches of biology, dealing in life that might or might not exist and might or might not take any recognizable form. “For almost everybody who works on NASA stuff, they are just in hog heaven, working on astrobiology questions,” Schweitzer says. Her NASA research involves using antibodies to probe for signs of life in unexpected places. “For me, it’s the means to an end. I really want to know about my dinosaurs.”

To that purpose, Schweitzer, with Wittmeyer, spends hours in front of microscopes in dark rooms. To a fourth-generation Montanan, even the relatively laid-back Raleigh area is a big city. She reminisces wistfully about scouting for field sites on horseback in Montana. “Paleontology by microscope is not that fun,” she says. “I’d much rather be out tromping around.”

“My eyeballs are just absolutely fried,” Schweitzer says after hours of gazing through the microscope’s eyepieces at glowing vessels and blobs. You could call it the price she pays for not being typical.
_________________________________
Then there is this site you can go to and read about cartilage found on the shoulder blade and another bone of what they claim is an 80 million year old lizard.

http://m.rapidcityjournal.com/news/article_fe339138-dd7c-11df-87de-001cc...

I will get into c14 again a little latter, if you really want me to.