Remember that each paragraph constitutes a separate post.
My words will appear in brown even when quoted in another post
I've alerted Talk.Origins of your concerns, and will allow them to defend themselves, as you suggest. However, I never proposed that anyone on T.O. should sit in judgement of our discussion. I only suggested that as a panel of peers from both sides who might be interested in participating. If you' re open to Usenet debates, you may opt for alt.talk.creationism or any other Usenet group you like. I don't care, and partiality isn't a factor at all. If you would like me to participate alone in a forum with no other evolutionists in it, I'm game for that too.
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The words preceding your Darwin out-of-context quote were these: "The great break in the organic chain between man and his nearest allies, which cannot be bridged over by any extinct or living species, has often been advanced as a grave objection to the belief that man is descended from some lower form; but this objection will not appear of much weight to those who, from general reasons, believe in the general principle of evolution." Reading the entire statement, and accepting 19th Century English jargon implies that Darwin wasn't the racist you make him out to be. But even if he were, that wouldn' t discredit his observations any more than the sexism of the Bible is what discredits it.
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Now, as for the proposal of our public debate, I don't need Usenet participation, and really don't want the interruptions and distractions of that either. All I do insist upon is that the entire content of that discussion be immediately available to any reader of your site. Either of us may publish the entire discussion via email verbatim on another site if you prefer, but a link to that site must be made available on yours. The reason is that there are a great many falsehoods on your site which must be addressed, and your readers must see how they are addressed, to know for certain why they're wrong. That way if you don't make the necessary correct ions, they'll know it.
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I think accuracy is paramount in any discussion of this magnitude, especially since you claim to be able to defend your position on scientific, rather than religious of philosophical grounds. I see the education of our students at stake, and I will not lie to children. That is why is invited you to defend your claim in public forum, as you said on your site you'd be happy to do. If you would present this propaganda before any classroom, you can't refuse to run it by me first in a forum where the validity or absurdity of all claims of either side can be adequately verified, and the real facts revealed for certain. I'm still awaiting your conditions either on this page, or in email.
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"there are a great many falsehoods on your site which must be addressed, and your readers must see how they are addressed, to know for certain why they're wrong." Perhaps someone has already initiated or entered into arrangements with you on a debate, but if not, why wait for formal debate proceedings and an agreed-to forum to be established? Others have attempted to address alleged falsehoods of this site within the bounds of this guestbook, so why can't you? Go ahead, tell us what you think the falsehoods are and provide published scientific (observed, tested, repeated) proof as to why they are false.
--Craig Hampton
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So you're saying you would not be happy to arrange our debate, despite what your site claims? That is too bad, because being limited to 700 characters including spaces, I'm unable even to list all the errors, much less the reasons why. Suffice it to say that every link on every page is rife with them, and this puny message board will be insufficient to deal with any of them appropriately. More importantly, not only do I have an inadequate response opportunity, but anything I say here will be shuffled back to obscurity soon enough, just like it would be in a live debate. I won't be satisfied with that.
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If you had any faith in your position, you wouldn't hesitate to accommodate me in public forum. And if honest truth were your primary concern, you'd demand it, as I am now. I want an opportunity for both sides to compare our arguments on a site accessible to each of them. That's the only reason I suggested holding this debate on Usenet. But I would rather tackle this myself, and prefer that the lot of you gather whatever scientific evidence you wanted me to believe you had, along with whatever courage you can muster, and present your case for public consumption. After all, if your evidence is either scientific or authentic, you needn't worry about defending that to me in any forum.
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Just to whet your appetite in this discussion, let me point out a list of several dozen transitional intermediate species which your site repeatedly claims do not exist. We certainly can't discuss them at 120 words per comment. And that isn't enough even to present the published peer-reviewed, repeatedly-tested scientific "proof" you asked for either, not even in a singular case-by-case basis. But given the room, I have plenty of fish with feet, salamanders with gills, feathered dinosaurs, birds with half-wings, (and teeth and long tails) walking whales (and manatees) snakes with legs, turtles on the half-shell, (or with no shell at all) and a whole lot more than I can list here.
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You also assert that "macro"-evolution even by its proper definition is hindered by some imaginary limit that no geneticist has ever been able to find, (even if they thought there should be one) and that speciation is impossible even though exactly that has already been directly observed many times both in controlled environments in the lab and in the field. Even Answersingenesis admits this because there have been so many well-documented observations that only the most fanatically dogmatic still try to deny it. But it has happened both in hybridization and according to natural selection, as it was in the case of the mice of Madeira, and a host of other examples available on the web.
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A scientific Theory is the study and explanation of observed facts. Yet your site actually claims that evolution is "still a theory, but taught as fact", proving that unless you don't understand anything about science, then you're being deliberately deceptive. Atomic Theory is "still a theory" too, and has never been proved, not even in Hiroshima. Yet Atomic Theory is just as demonstrably factual as evolution, which has rightly become the foundation of modern biology. You might be surprised to find that the Theory of gravity is nowhere near as well-supported as evolution, and has already had to be revised at least once so far, and yet nothing floated away in the interim.
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Now I see why you're so hesitant to debate me in public forum. I doubt very much that you have any scientific evidence in your favor of any kind, peer-reviewed or not. In fact, I know you don't, because if you did, it would earn you a Nobel prize as an unprecedented landmark discovery overturning everything we know about anything at all. All the evidence in every relevant field of study supports evolutionary Theory exclusively. There is no option because (to date) no religious extremist has ever been able to propose a Theory of Creation, or any facts to be explained therein. Do you think you have either one? Apparently not, or you would have agreed to debate me by now.
