@mindflenzing - I agree, my position is that any actual “ghost” sightings are really demonic spirits.  It’s illogical to suppose that a human spirit could manifest in any way even if it could linger, as I explained pretty thoroughly.  I agree people are more likely to submit to something posing as a “ghost” then they are to something which is more blatantly demonic.  Probably the reason that there are so many people in Georgia that believe in ghosts is because of the long history of evil here, as well as them being unreflective.  Places where there has been a lot of cruelty and abuses seem to be focal points for evil even after many of those activities have ceased, or, so I hear.  I think you were the one that told me about the southern plantations.  A any rate, as bad as the southern plantations were the plantations in Haiti were much worse.  There was a lot more torture, abuse, and far higher mortality rates on the French Carribean plantations.  I read a book on the history of Haiti.  The French and Spanish wiped out the original population of natives and imported black people in droves.  In the US most of the slaves converted to some form or another of Christianity, whereas in Haiti they typically retained their original shamanistic faiths.  The mortality rate was so high that the French seldom bothered to attempt to alter their culture in any way.  They would do things like burry a person in the ground up to their heads and then pour sugar on their head so that the ants might eat it.  All kinds of insane things like that.  And if memory serves the country was dedicated to Satan on more than one occasion.

@musterion99 - I’ll do my best.  When a person dies whatever it was that made them alive and sentient is gone.  They become an inert mass of molecules, essentially dirt and water.  In some cases you can argue that the bodies systems are too damaged (like if the person has been shot or whatever) for the body to continue to function, but in other cases all the necessary physical components are there to make living person, yet, they are not alive.  Why not?

@musterion99 - Evolutionists use a wide range of metaphors to describe death just as anyone else does.  The most militant evolutionists may rigidly insist that consciousness is nothing more than the firing of neural synapses in the brain but even they will admit that consciousness has gone and the body become inert.  Thus, whatever it was is still gone. 

For example, a person can suffocate, and after suffication all the parts are still there to make a living person but they aren’t alive anymore.  Also there are some inexplaible deaths that no one understands.  Some people seem to have died from depression or losing the will to live.  One of my best friends tried to will himself to death in such a way when he was younger but in his case it didn’t work.   The phenomenon of sentience cannot be thoroughly explained scientifically to begin with, but when it’s gone then it’s obvious it’s gone.   Whether it goes anywhere or whether consciousness can survive death or not is another matter.  The more militant evolutionists believe in a snuffing out of consciousness after death, and some believe that the psychic energy or whatever is recycled.  You can argue that sentience is more than just the sum of the physical parts of the body, and you can point to identical twins, which although they have the exact same genetic makeup and in many times are a product of the same environment never manage to develope identical personalities.  Everyone is unique in spite of how much they might all try to be the same.  Of course, those are inductive types of arguments.  You can watch a person die and the body lose consciousness forever, but you cannot for the most part substantiate through emperical observation that it survives and/or goes anywhere.  The closest you might come to that is to take some of the death and near death accounts seriously or to die yourself and check it out firt hand.  Of course my arguments against ghosts are predicated on the fact that you cannot see human sentience/consciousness/a soul because once it is out of the body it has no conduit with which to interface with the physical universe. 

@St_Faustus - 

Actually my main point was that something non-material cannot be physically observed, and that was what my argument hinged upon.  If the human spirit was something that could be scientifically recorded or witnessed with the naked eye then it would lend credence to the ghost stories and undercut my arguments.  It could not by any definition be material because material pertains to the physical realm and that is lost when you die.  Obviously the brain has to do something and being an ID advocate I do not believe that there is any point of the human body which is pointless.  I could have told them in advance that every part of the brain serves a function, however, that does not mean that the brain is all there is.  Obviously there is more to it than that because unlike computers, we are sentient beings, you can unplug a computer and leave it inactive for a year, but then you plug it back in and it works again.  You unplug your brain for a year and you’re dead.  Also the brain can be rewritten and new neural pathways form to accomodate whatever thoughts you have.  I can rewrite my brain just sitting here doing nothing physically while the environment around me is stagnate.  So while the will may reside in a certain part of the brain, I think it is best to say that it resides there.  I tend to see the brain as being a conduit which ties the body to the soul.  You can lose an arm and still be fully aware, it may be that people who have lost parts of their brains are still fully aware but unable to interact because their conduit for interface is damaged.  Or it may be that their unique essence is truly gone.  In either case, I think it would be best to pull the plug.

“Did you ever see Final Fantasy, the Spirits Within? I liked that film both pre and post loss of faith because it showed what would happen if spirits were real. Scientists would find them due to their interactions with living matter.”

–Did see it, it was an OK movie.  I was actually going to elaborate in that direction, a spirit by definition can have no substance in the physical realm, if it has any kind of substance it is pure spirit.  And of course if it was something that could be directly observed (it would have substance) and you could probably destroy it like in FF or Ghost Busters or whatever.  A spirit would be that which endures when berift of substance, so no, you can’t see it, which was my argument.  I do realize however, that you are disinclined to believe in such things because you have chosen a paradigm which for the most part believes that everything is just the sum of it’s parts.

“If there’s no scientific evidence for it, there’s no reason to think it’s real.”

–You believe a great deal of things for which there is no scientific evidence, I’m a little suprised/dissapointed that you would try using an argument like that.  As for me personally it is true that I rely mostly on inductive philosophical type reasoning in regards to my position on the enduring nature of consciousness.  There are however, as someone else pointed out, a great deal of accounts from people who had death experiences and were brought back to life.  Concerning accounts like that, it is just their word, but since there are so many of them it could be that there is an element of truth to it.  You cannot observe someone leaving their body or entering an afterlife from a 3rd person perspective, which was all I intended to argue with my point.  I never intended to argue that there was no afterlife or no spirit which endures.

“Why think that if there’s no neurological evidence that the brain interacts with a soul? All evidence seems to point to the fact that it is the brain that is responsible for every facet of consciousness. If it were made simply to interact with a spirit, then wouldn’t it be structured differently? It seems awfully self sufficient to be just a conduit.”

We know that consciousness resides in the frontal lobe, and that new neural patterns are formed with new thoughts and experiences.  What we do not know is whether or not the neural patterns are a product of the person or whether the person is a product of the patterns.  Again, I’m sitting here forming new neural patterns, and that’s without interacting with my environment or even absorbing any new stimuli.  So I can rewrite the physical structure of my brain, without doing anything really.  I see no reason why the brain should require a different structure, the whole body is made up of parts that fit together and it has to be that way for it to work, and there is only one kind of brain structure we have observed for sentient beings.  You are of course welcome to disbelieve in anything which you cannot physically see, of course in doing so you would also have to reject the evolutionism which you have accepted, and disbelief does not amount to proof or correctness. 

If I could have whatever kind of afterlife I truly wanted, then what I would prefer would be to go into a sleeplike state, where I would have reduced consciousness muted sensations, and the perpetual feeling of relaxation, where I would just dream forever and not be aware of any kind of passage of time.  Oblivion wouldn’t be so bad because then I would be berift of all responsibilities and concerns.  As it is, I often wish I was never born.  Most people equate non-existence with death but death allows for the possibility of hell so I think that non-existence would be better.  Of course based on inductive reasoning I do not believe that human beings are the sum of their parts, some of that reasoning I have outlined for you.  A computer is, and while there are some similarities between computers and sentient beings, a computer is not self aware nor can it be.  It has no life or will of it’s own, although Brian might disagree with me on that.  It comes back to cogito ergo sum.  A soul cannot be tangible in any way, it cannot be composed of matter or energy that one could interact with within the physical realm.  If it could, then it would just be something that would run down and be reduced to nothing like all matter and energy in the universe, and the end result would be oblivion anyways.  For me it would be easier to believe that I am eternal and everything around me is an illusion than to believe that I don’t really exist as a sentient conscious being.  I can believe that I exist (in some form) regardless, and if I choose to accept that everything around me is real then I can also believe that you exist.  So it’s not a matter of whether or not I’m interacting with a soul, I’m interacting with a body.  Either way, you aren’t going to live forever, the question of whether or not there is existence beyond life has no bearing on whether or not you die, what it will effect is whether or not you’re better off alive or dead.

Creation is not science, neither is evolution.  Science can only deal with empirical data and origins cannot be studied emperically.  Of course what someone beleivs about origins affects how they interpret data, but origins are always assumed and never proven.  Creation Science is an approach which involves taking a more in depth and analytical approach to the Biblical origin account and explaining it in context with scientific laws and data.  While I maintain that origins are outside of science, I do believe that some square with scienctific facts better than others.  A self creating universe does not square well with scientific laws, or at all for that matter.  Whereas, attributing the origin of the universe to something outside the universe provides a mechanism to explain existence without being constrained by natural laws. 

Creation Science = a Christian approach to interpreting data

Evolution = an atheistic/pantheistic approach to interpreting data

@St_Faustus - 

I want a perpetual sleep state. “How would it tie the body to the soul with no interaction with brain matter?” –I never said there was no interaction, I just said that there is no way to see a soul because it has no substance. I have tried explaining it to you. We know that new memories form new neural pathways, but are the pathways a product of the thoughts or are the thoughts a product of the pathways. It’s a chicken or the egg type argument, which is impossible to prove conclusively either way in such a way that would satisfy all parties.

I wouldn’t say “biologists” because in this case we are specifically talking about evolutionists. Of course I have heard this argument before and it is a false comparison. Forensic science tells you how something died, and it is time sensitive because evidence decays with the corpse. If you find a fresh body with a smashed head then you can probably conclude that it died from a smashed head, although the smashed head could still have occured post mortem. Now if you find skeletal fragments buried in the dirt, the thing could have died of a smashed head if the skull is fragmented, but it could also be that the skeleton has just fallen apart due to natural decay processes. It’s time sensitive. What forensic science cannot tell you, is whether the organism was different from it’s parents, or whether it gave birth to children that were different than it was. Those types of conclusions are assumptions, which are not arrived at emperically, and that is why origins are a philosophical field outside of science.

Of course the universe had to have a beginning anyways because of the 1st two laws of thermodynamics.

There are a variety of ways in which creation could be falsified:
1. Present empirical data proving that matter and energy can come from nothing completely on their own.
2. Present empirical data showing that planets and stars can form from dust clouds in spite of Boyles gas law and in spite of the fact that gravity is determined by mass and a dust or gas cloud has insufficient mass to generate a center of gravity.
3. Present empirical data for spontaneous generation, showing that life can spontaneously form from non-life. And by that I mean life in the scientific sense.
4. Point to some real life examples of evolution in progress rather than hypothetical or “theoretical” examples. For example, if evolution is real, we should have an abundant hodgepodge of intermediate forms and stages, like a trail, and I don’t just mean in the ‘fossil record’ (which we don’t see), but in real life as well. There should be a visible trail of intermediate forms still around, and if punctuated equilibrium is the method, then we ought to be seeing parents give birth to offspring that are radically different. In that case, things should be like the Marvel Universe with strange new children being born with radical new abilities and forms.

Now if all that stuff is impossible now, then there is no reason to assume that it was possible in the past. Such an assumption would be a leap of faith, and I see no reason for that. I still believe you know better than to call evolution science. You know that they have no evidence for it and that they operate on philosophic presuppositions. You can read as much of their literature as you want but you will still find no evidence, and I find it humorous because they always place disclaimers in their articles stating that they really don’t know, which just further illustrates how they have proven nothing. It is true that they are always modifying the theory, but they never consider throwing it out because the assumptions are not to be questioned.

@mammothsun - Thankyou, I’m glad I could be of assistance.  I am here to help others, well, that and to complain about things that irritate me from time to time.  Anyways the debate is still going on, don’t be a stranger.

@St_Faustus - 

I think we know eachother well enough that there is no reason for us to underestimate one another’s intellects.  I have respected you by not making any assertions that would underestimate your intellect.  So I’m going to ask that you refrain from the use of analogies which you know are not viable comparisons.  If I had a more normal type intellect and if you did as well then I would expect comments comparing evolutionism to gravity and forensics but you know that the anologies are bogus and I know that, and you should know that I know.  Of course evolutionary extrapolations are not based on any kind of evidence, and that is the biggest difference between evolutionism and forensics.  Also, forensics explains things within the context of real life, whereas evolutionary ‘extrapolations’ are not things that anyone has ever seen or emperically verified. 

The big bang is impossible.  When has energy from an explosion ever been anything but completely lost?  The Big Bang theory did not predict microwave radiation or anything else.  Ideas that you come up with are not predictions when the results already exist.  Evolutionists continually make up stories when new facts come to life, but what it amounts to is basically the addition of more time.  “Long ago and far away” makes the absurd seem more plausible.  And what about the law of conservation of angular momentum?  If things did begin with an explosion than all galaxies ought to be spinning in the same direction.  I agree that the material world is evidence, but not evidence for evolutionism.  The fact that people assume it is and are unwilling to reject, scrutinize, or even reconsider the possibility that the universe is not self existing does not give me the impression of objectivity.  For instance, evolutionists believe that the solar system formed out of a dust cloud (in spite of how it contradicts the 2nd law of thermodynamics and Boyles gas law) because they believe in the big bang and a self assembling universe.  It does not cross their mind to consider that the barest most logical and feasible assumption ought to be that the Solar System was always like it is now, except a bit better to begin with as entropy takes it’s toll over time.  Anyways, they look at the solar system, and compose an origin story and assume that since the inner planets are terrestrial and the outer planets gaseous that the gravity of the sun influenced accretion and the gas giants formed further away because they are composed of lighter elements, regardless of the fact that the sun is composed of those elements.  Then, they start to discover large gas giants in other solar systems that exist close to their stars, and rather than reconsidering the notion of self assembling planets and stars, they just assume that the gas giants accreted in the outer limits of the solar system in question, migrated inwards, and swallowed up the terrestrial planets.  Anyone can make up an origin story and then claim that because the material universe exists their origin story is true.  I could say that microwave radiation is a product of a cosmic sneeze from Elgmar the Oldest: http://jmsnooks.deviantart.com/art/Elgmar-the-Oldest-10722691  And I could follow it up by putting the burden of proof on you to prove me wrong rather than proving myself correct based on actual scientific data.

But again, it is not up to science to explain the origin of the universe.  That is a philosophical matter not a scientific one.  Science can only operate within the realm of emperical data.  Once you go outside of that you enter the realm of speculation and faith.  You are trying to turn science into a religion and science cannot serve that function.  Edger Rice Burroughs said in the Martian Tales Trilogy that it is hard to ask a man to give up his religion without offering him a substitute, and he is correct.  For the sake of our personal sanity we have to have a paradigm that accounts for things, but I’m telling you what you already know, or what you at least used to know.  You cannot account for existence through science, you can only understand how it works, and not even completely so.  Origins are outside of the scope of science.  Look at what you are saying, you are trying to have science serve the function of a religion as well.  Of course there is a great deal in the Bible which has not been, nor can be, empirically verified, but I never tried to redefine science or expand the definition of it to include my theosophical beliefs.  You are free to reject the Bible if you wish, but I must remind you, that even if the Bible is false, that does not automatically make evolutionism correct.  That notion is predicated upon a false dichotomy, although, if my only options were to choose between evolutionism and the Bible then I would still chose the Bible.  I believe the Bible presents a far more plausible and rational scenario for things, and if you follow the principle of Occums razor then you ought to go with the Bible because that is the far more simplistic explanation.

Of course I realize that subjective experiences count as evidence for nothing whatsoever.  Do you take me for some kind of breast feeding bed wetting sissy?  Actually, the experience I would share with you, is not subjective, and can be corroborated by my best friend.  I would share it with you because I consider you a friend, but I mentioned that you could “take it or leave it” because it is such a thing that can only be explained away by believing that I am a liar, or that my friend who can also vouch for it, is a liar as well. 

“The only way we can learn anything is by investigating the facts and being critical of anyone who claims to have the truth just beamed into their heads by god(s).”

–Except that when it comes to origins it is really a matter of choosing between one set of philosophic presuppositions or another, so I will choose whichever one makes the most sense.

Diamonds…  Well in a way yes, because those molecules were designed(or if you prefer structured) to fit together in such a way.  At any rate I do not believe the analogy is valid.  First of all we have observed diamonds forming (or have we?  I know that they have been created in labs but I’m not sure whether or not anyone has witnessed the formation), second, the formation of diamonds violates no natural or scientific laws.  Evolutionism does, at any rate, if you found a brick in the woods then you would automatically assume that it is a product of design, even though you have not witnessed it’s formation, neither have you seen the designer.  Now why is it that when you look at a bacteria you just assume that it is the product of spontaneous generation?  Which is more complex?  Which is more likely to form spontaneously?  The problem is that the there is a fundamental flaw in the thought process behind evolutionism.

Well the belief in any sort of deity is a break from the mainstream evolutionary belief system.  At least, the belief in a deity that actually does something.  I remember back when I was arguing with Sparky he supposedly believed in some kind of deity but his deity didn’t actually do anything at all.  The normal evolutionary platform attributes the origin of the universe to the universe itself and invokes the something from nothing which we keep coming back too.  Attributing the starting point, and any other points, to a deity is a ‘god of the gaps’ type of paradigm.

As humorous as the story is…  Well…  The analogy is also poor.  First of all, the Bible never said that all diseases were attributable to evil spirits.  We both know the Bible does not teach that.  Second, we can actually observe diseases and we know they are there because of empirical studies.  Curing diseases is actual science, it’s called operational science.  The Bible is not my basis for disbelieving in evolution.  It is just that the tautological aspects of evolution coupled with the complete lack of proof do not give me any grounds for disbelieving in the Bible.  I think that you have rejected the Bible for philosophical reasons and then tried to convince yourself that evolultionism is the true origin (false dichotomy).

The Ippuwer (spelling?) text backs up Exodus.  As to Jesus, what sort of evidence would you consider proof?  There is a great book out called “The Case for Christ” by Lee Strobel that deals with some of those issues. 

I do not admire Darwin.  He leaped to all sorts of false conclusions and although he didn’t come up with evolutionism he certainly popularized it.  I have not seen any good fruit come out of that paradigm, but I have seen Nazism and Communism come out of it.  All it does is give people an excuse to live without objective morality and it makes racist people feel like they have a rational explanation what they do and think.  Dawkins and Sagan are fruitcakes in my book.  And you know that they have not unlocked any secrets.  To do so requires actual knowledge not speculation.

@togodsownglory - That is what I believe too.

@St_Faustus - It may be that neither of us has a great deal of talent when it comes to long drawn out complex mathematical calculations, but you do have the capacity to understand that energy from explosions are lost (which goes along with the 2nd law of thermodynamics), and that there is a direct relationship between gravity and mass.  Mars has less gravity than earth and Mars is smaller, Jupiter has more gravity than earth and Jupiter is bigger.  Granted Jupiter is less dense, but all in all it consists of more matter than does the earth, hence the greater gravity.  The sun is the biggest and most massive and also has the most gravity of any bodies in the solar system.  Now suppose you have no mass at all, how can you have gravity?  You cannot, unless you wish to attribute gravity to some invisible force other than mass, such as pagan deities.  Many ancient people often assumed there was intelligence living in the celestial bodies, hence the beliefs in astrology.  I personally do not believe that but if you want to go that rout I cannot think of any way to refute it.  As to Hawkings calculations, if they are not based on something we can actually observe than what are they based on?  You can have long drawn out calculations which have no bearing on reality.  Not that I mean to disrespect Hawking, but when it comes to origins there can be no observation so I do not take seriously any materialist extrapolations which go against the laws of physics.

Science has no answers and can produce none (short of inventing a time machine) when it comes to origins.  Philosophy deals with metaphysics and ideology, and origins belong in that field because there is no physical mechanism that can explain the origin of things.  I do not consider philosophy (in spite of the technical definition) to be knowledge, most of it is just sophistry or metaphysical extrapolations.  Origins fit fairly well into that catagory since they are based upon extrapolations rather than hard data and they have wide reaching metaphysical implications. 

Well I read evolutionist literature from time to time and have done so for many years.  Granted most of what I have read is articles and textbooks, but the peer reviewed articles are where the actual attempts to research evolution are written of by the researchers themselves.  It suffices to say that I remain unimpressed by what I have found.  Of course there are also Creationists I disagree with, such as the people at AIG.

Perhaps no compelling proof for you.  I agree that the ‘miracles’ at ORU are completely lacking in substantiation, and in fact most of the miracles you might hear of you only hear of and not see for yourself.  Of course, I beleive I told you that I experiences a miracle, if you change your mind and decide you want to hear it then the invitation still stands.  Even if miracles did not happen at all in the present, that does not mean that they cannot have happened in the past.  The ancient world seems to have had a vitality that the modern world has lost, for the most part.  I tend to believe that miracles are more a thing of the past, at any rate, no miracle is as great as the miracle of creation, bringing forth matter, energy, and life, from nothing.

The fact of the matter is that science can only deal with the emperical, and origins lie beyond that, for better or worse.  There is no reason why true science and actual divine revelation ought to clash.  If there is a clash then it means that one or both is not what it claims to be.

You probably could not find anything about the Ipuwer text because I spelled it wrong.  I actually wrote an entry about it a long time ago: http://www.xanga.com/jmsnooks/206304178/item.html  And I can provide a link to a transcript of the text as well: http://www.geocities.com/regkeith/linkipuwer.htm  With knowledge of the correct spelling your search ought to now produce more fruitful results.

It is true that you cannot see it for yourself, however there were a great many witnesses that would attest to it, unfortunately they are all dead now.  You could dismiss that on the grounds that they were all followers of Jesus, however, I fail to see how anyone could witness the resurrection and not become a follower.  So you are unlikely to find any eye witness accounts of seeing a risen Jesus from a non-Christian source.  Of course what baffles me, is why you do not apply the same level of “I’ll believe it when I see it” scrutiny to evolutionism, which has absolutely no witnesses.   You seem to be using ‘superstitious’ as a pejorative term.  Superstitions are self contained folkish beliefs which are incomplete in and of themselves.  Having a history and a set of laws and guidlines, especially when it is written down in a book or holy text, is not superstition, it is a theosophy.  The quote I posted from Robert Redfield in this entry does a great job explaining the difference between superstition and religion.  Now I realize that among atheists it seems to be in vogue to equate belief in any kind of supernatural with superstition, however, that is subjective, and it is a sword which cuts both ways.  Under that definition you would also qualify as being superstitios because, for example, you believe that life came from non-life (which is unnatural and not possible in the natural), or matter and energy came from…  Where?  Those things do not happen in the natural, they are supernatural.

It is true that for the most part I tend to disbelieve in miracles, and I see no reason to believe that God is involved in everything.  I think for the most part he sits back and lets things happen.  However, I find that the Bible is fairly well substantiated as compared with other belief systems.  There are a great many cultures with accounts of a world wide flood, some which match the Biblical account very closely.  The Chinese language actually contains most of the events described in Genesis up to the tower of Babel, which would be when the Chinese split away from the other Semetic groups.  All of which is well described in “The Discovery of Genesis” by Kang and Nelson.  Much of the Bible is corroborated by archaeology and ancient primary documents.  Aside from that however, I find that a lot of what is happening in our modern world corroborates Biblical prophecy (for better or worse).  The reformation of Israel is one example.  Also the plan to divide the world up into 10 regions goes along with Daniel and Revelation, the increasing hegemony of the UN and trend towards a one world government seems to add proof to the prophecies about a horrific world hegemony that is to come.  Revelation also prophecies about an asteroid striking the earth, and follows through by describing the after affects.  This one may be proven true in our lifetimes depending upon whether or not Apophis strikes the earth.  Also the mark of the beast…  In the last election JK mentioned using the rice chip in conjunction with homeland security in one of the debates.  It was a rather foolish thing for him to say and sent chills of horror down my skin but it may be that the idiot leaked something that was being discussed in one of those secret cult meetings they all go to.

@St_Faustus - Infinite heat?  I would consider that to be a tautology.  It is not possible in the physical universe.  Heat exists as molecular motion and IR radiation.  IR is the way in which heat is transferred through space.  When talking about matter the temperature is a measure of the molecular or atomic motion.  Whatever speed they are moving at is the temperature they are.  They cannot be moving at an infinite velocity unless you mean to say that they are perpetually accelerating in speed.  At any rate, the only way for anything like that to occur would be to have an inexhaustible energy source and there is no such thing within the confines of the physical universe.  You would have to have radically different laws of physics, unless you do not believe that the universe is a closed system.  Of course the moment you propose that some source exists to allow for infinite energy production which can somehow pour into the universe you have created something with all of the properties of God minus the sentience. 

I make no allegations, I simply state that the energy from explosions is lost unless a mechanism exists to harness the energy as it disperses and dissipates.  By lost I do not mean that it simply ceases to exist, I mean that it can no longer be utilized.  Why not try harvesting some of the energy from Hiroshima and Nagasaki?  Those occured less than a hundred years ago, whereas the big Bang supposedly occured billions of years ago.  It does not seem plausible.  It may be that microwave radiation is generated by stars.  Of course the existence of Microwave radiation dispersed in space proves nothing.  I could just as easily say that it is a byproduct of God creating the universe and infusing it with energy.  As to the drifting galaxies, if they started as large concentrated chunks of matter thrown off from the big bang then they ought to all be spinning in the same direction according to the law of conservation of angular momentum.  Also, the fact that they are moving means nothing little.  If I see a guy going south on 400 that does not mean that he started driving up near Hudson Bay and headed continually south.  It could be that he got in Atlanta.  Similarly just because Galaxies seem to be moving does not mean they all started from one spot the size of a pin head (reminds me of the old angels dancing on the head of a pin, and to think, evolutionists actually scoff at that).  The Bible refers to a stretching out of the stars so I can say that the movement provides evidence for the Bible.  Of course when talking to a non-believer, it really is only circumstancial evidence and means nothing.  That goes both ways.

I do not believe that evolutionists are more dedicated to the facts.  They are more dedicated to their assumptions, and it may be that they are more driven to prove their arguments.  Of course the reason for this is because they have not even an ounce of emperical data that could be used as support for their beleifs.  Whereas the assumptions involved in the Creationist view do not clash with emperical science in any way.  For instance, we predict that organisms reproduce after their own kind, and that something cannot come from nothing.  This is all that has ever been seen, and the evolutionists have a lot more to prove.  Creation scientists are less likely to make huge leaps or assumptions.

You still believe in the supernatural, you just try to attribute it to inert things.

Fossils do nothing to prove evolutionism.  Again, all that you can determine from ancient remains is what sort of organism you might have, and if it does not match any contemporary life forms you can probably assume that it is an extinct life form.  You may even be able to prove how it died.  You cannot prove that it had children that carried a different set of genetic information, or the children were a different type of life form.  You cannot even prove that it had children, except in those rare cases where fish are found fossilized in the process of giving birth, however, in those cases the children were still of the same sort as the parents.  No fossil can ever be evidence for evolution. 

Now concerning your allusion, I would not expect to find any human remains beneath the ocean after thousands of years, or even after a hundred years.  It is a well known fact that bodies decay the most rapidly in aquatic biomes.  There should be no bodies.  There could be some metal components depending on what they were made out of originally, because things do rust.  Specifically addressing the two incidences you mentioned, for one we at least have a written record, you may not trust the writers, but at least that is something.  Whereas for the alleged evolutionary processes there are no witnesses.  It may be that not every part of the Bible will ever be emperically verified, but the fact remains that there is no emperical evidence to suggest that the Bible is false.  Furthermore, I freely admit to being religious, and do not attempt to extend my definition of science to include assumptions which cannot be emperically verified.

Again, concerning your fossils, putting aside my previous statements for a moment, you do realize that a considerable amount of the alleged missing links have been errors and fabrications?  Like Piltdown man, Java man, and a supposed dinosaur which sadly I forgot the name of.  It was actually flaunted in National Geographic as evidence for evolution but it turned out someone stuck a tail from a different life form onto another and sold it to the evolutionists.  A farmer in China I believe it was.  I think you ought to listen to this seminar I have that deals with some of the doctoring of evidence and falsification of data that evolutionist paleontologists sometimes engage in.  My sister has all those someplace, if you’re interested I can burn you a copy and mail it.

The difference between humans and chimps is still quite blatantly profound, and it means nothing.  Chimps still have a different number of chromosomes.  Chimps produce chimps and humans produce humans, and that is all that anyone has ever seen.  Pigs have the highest level of similarity to humans in terms of body mass, what does that mean.  Those are highly subjective modes of reasoning.  The only reason people think that way is because they accept the notion of a self assembling universe as a given.

Now touching on superstition, who determines what is false?  False assumptions about causation is obvious enough, but “incorrect beliefs about God” does not refer to Believing in God, intelligent design, or divine agency.  It means holding a belief which goes against accepted doctrine.  I think you are falling into the atheist mold in regards to labeling as superstitious those who do not share your beleifs.  Superstition and religion are not synonymous, and if so, then the definition must inevitably continue to expand in ways which you will probably find unpalatable.

It seems to me that you are on a quest to find reasons to believe in evolution.  I do not believe that you turned away from God for scientific reasons, I believe that your reasons were philosophical.  At any rate, science cannot offer an explanation for origins, and I believe that on some level you are still aware of that fact.  I think it is dangerous to place too much faith in flawed human beings, which will inevitably let you down.  I saw that the symptoms that you were struggling in your faith and I didn’t really do anything to help you.  It may be that I was to consumed with my own problems or too self absorbed.  In the future I will have to be more observant.