I found THIS INFORMATION fascinating. But, then, I still do have my appendix.Why would God have made a body with a "worthless evolutionary artifact," anyway? :-) (more apologetics...I love this stuff)
GeeeeeeZ
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
remember
Andrew Breitbart...American Hero
My Blog List
-
-
-
What is FREEDOM OF SPEECH?7 years ago
-
An Epidemic Of Biden3 years ago
-
-
FOR ME - MORE BLOG LESS F B2 years ago
-
-
Kid's Creations3 months ago
-
The Old Breed1 week ago
-
His Name Was Charles4 years ago
-
-
-
Project Reconquista Commences10 years ago
-
Memorial Day 20159 years ago
-
-
-
-
Goodbye, Mom9 years ago
-
-
Your American Heritage 13 14 20245 hours ago
-
-
I'm on a roll tonight.7 years ago
-
-
No Hard Feelings7 years ago
-
What A Legacy9 hours ago
-
VALENTINES DAY! :-)4 years ago
510 comments:
1 – 200 of 510 Newer› Newest»I first heard of that several years ago. I kind of wonder why it took so long to announce in a general news source.
Love those stories.
For some people, like the leftists a la Ducky, the brain, we thought was the useless body artifact.
Science now shows that the lefty brain is used as a defense mechanism against the difficult reality of life. It provides efficient filtering of factual data including history and statistics. It has been proven this appendix, located on top of their head, has been able to maintain them in a constant state of denial for years. Yet till this discovery, no one knew if this upper appendix was truly useful.
Shoprat, Must have taken millions in grant money to get a FINAL diagnosis, shoprat...follow the money! And, of course, we're losing our country to socialism, liars and thieves but I guess it's a slow news day!?
FrogBurger, excellent points! Were it not that the appendix has been proven effective, I'd say some people have an appendix for a brain!
It could trigger a debate around intelligent design, though ;-) Would make the left crazy.
God -the Creator- does not make *mistakes...
humans -like Darwin- do...
I never believed that the Appendix was useless-
*On second thought--God did create humans sooooo- Hmmmm---I'll have to think about that one :-)
C-CS
Science goofs AGAIN!
Add this to the list along global warming, sunscreen use and Vitamin D deficiencies.
A mechanical engineer, an electrical engineer, and a civil engineer are sitting around talking about God. The mechanical engineer says, “God must have been a mechanical engineer, look at the way our muscles and bones move.” The electrical engineer disagrees, saying, “God must have been an electrical engineer, look at the electrical wiring in our brains.” After a moment the civil engineer says, “Well, he certainly wasn’t a civil engineer. What kind of idiot puts the playground right next to waste disposal?”
;)
*chuckling* @ bemish the incorrigible! LOL!!!
Ducky was probably designed by a community planner.
Cool article Z. What this really shows is how little we actually know about the human body. I see things almost everyday at work that fascinate me.
Frogburger, Beamish and Hoosier are cracking me up.
No, God put it there so surgeons could take it out when they felt like they needed to improve the bottom line instead of having the patient take a pain pill.
Ah, yes, Dr. John!
Chuck, they're cracking me up, too!
"We're not saying that Darwin's idea of evolution is wrong - that would be absurd, as we're using his ideas on evolution to do this work," Parker told LiveScience. "It's just that Darwin simply didn't have the information we have now." …. "Darwin had no way of knowing that the function of the appendix could be rendered obsolete by cultural changes that included widespread use of sewer systems and clean drinking water."
That’s what I like about science. New evidence can revise conclusions. In religion, orthodox doctrine is held to be infallible. No amount of scientific evidence can convince the faithful that the earth was not the first thing in the universe to come into being.
Psi bond....we faithful don't have to be convinced...we're just an unthinking bunch of lugs who swallow the Kool Aid and disdain folks like you who just don't get it.
Sort of like the leftwingers are treating Americans these days. But, it's fine for them.
Agree with Psi. Issue is when science creates issues that become a religion for some, or at least a dogma. Global warming for example.
Many of the faithful have to be convinced, Z, that the appendix has been around, as the article states, for 80 million years. Just to understand that the earth is more than 6000 years old is beyond these folks.
Frog, the overwhelming evidence and the consensus among experts is that global warming is real and poses a grave danger to the planet. Of course, it may be wrong, but it would no more prudent to ignore it than to ignore the warning about a hurricane if you are in the middle of the path that experts project for it.
...just try and change the hurricane's path...
Let’s make a list of what your God did goof on.
-Cancer.
-Children Starving.
-Muslims.
-Born-Agains.
Science flies you to the Moon, religion flies you into buildings.
Science will never disprove God. Those in science who do not believe in the God of the bible need to quit monkeying around. :0)
"the overwhelming evidence and the consensus among experts".
LMAO. What experts? The ones that are allowed to talk or the other one.
Nobody has proven that increased greenhouse gases will cause warming. I'm not denying the increased amount of CO2. But the role of climate is to regulate the earth temperature. And nobody has proven how climate will operate its regulating power in those conditions.
Read other books and listen to other experts. People who also take into account solar activity for example, and not just CO2, which is by the way very good for trees, therefore rain, therefore lower earth temperature.
get over it, psi bond....I'm tired of your constant "we liberals are perfect and you are neandreathals" People aren't perfect.
Grow up.
Truth, thanks for the list. Gee, I hadn't THOUGHT of that ...:-)
Are you kidding? I can't get into theology here but there are answers for it all. Look it up....if you're open hearted, you'll get help.
FrogBurger...they just keep drinkin' the Kool Aid
Frog, you said I should read other “experts”. But you claim these people are not allowed to spread their message. Nonetheless, I have heard Rush Limbaugh’s and Sean Hannity’s explanations and denials of global warming and have found them wanting, despite their credibility with millions of rightwingers. The common argument that CO2 is natural does not refute it. There are also countless religiously-motivated books purporting to prove that evolution is false. The conclusions about global warming have been accepted by all of the national academies of science of the major industrialized countries. It should be clear that, when the consensus and the danger are so great, it is not prudent to do nothing.
FJ, Are you saying that if you are in the hurricane’s projected path, you should try and change the hurricane’s path? I wonder why no one has tried that who had his house blown away.
Bryan, science will never prove or disprove God’s existence simply because hypothesized phenomena outside of nature are beyond the scope of science. However, where scripture contains assertions about the natural world, these may or may not be proven false in the light of empirical evidence.
There are two realities.
One is imperfect, the other is perfect. God never lied about that. It's clearly stated in the Bible.
God never promised anyone an easy life on earth. He did promise to never leave us, however.
Get over this notion you have, Z, that I fit your stereotype of a liberal.
I do not think liberal are perfect. I do not believe you folks are Neanderthals.
As for your confident belief that, as you told Truth, there are answers in theology for it all but you can’t be bothered to look them up: The truth is that there are only attempted answers for it all. And they are not one but many such answers.
The one reality we know for certain is that the earth is in constant flux and was never in a perfect state.
psi, again, read books that oppose global warming coming from rogue scientists. My point is that we have no evidence of anything. We barely know how climate really works and we're making decisions (carbon tax) based on incomplete scientific evidence and incomplete models based on statistical predictions.
If we don't know how the human's appendix works, why should we know more about the climate when it is super complex and we don't even have reliable statistical data over a long time.
That's why I call dogma.
God's biochemistry is sooo amazing.
Not sure so many people of faith are adamant the earth was the first thing that came into being! I've not run into that. I can't say who PSI has listened to, but in my book this is an absurd postulation.
Science and faith aren't opposite ends of the same spectrum – a common confusion. On one spectrum you have ignorance and non-ignorance (also known as "knowledge"); another spectrum would be faith and un-faith (also known as "unbelief"). Knowledge builds both faith and science as it dispels ignorance. Not at all mutually excluding.
No, our God doesn't "goof.” But He does embue men with freewill. We have choices, and they have consequences - good and bad. It's terrible that innocents suffer because of those.
Maybe it wouldn't happen if God had made us all Stepford Wives. But He chose to have voluntary associations. Everyone doesn't volunteer, and even the volunteers live with the imprint of an error-drenched world on their characters and habits.
One doesn't have to read a word of the Bible to conclude strictly from physical evidence that the planet was once in a vastly different and salubrious state.
Much evidence-based speculation has brought good minds to different conclusions on what that means, but for many it suggests we were given a mighty fine starting point.
"The one reality we know for certain is that the earth is in constant flux and was never in a perfect state."
And that's science?? I'm impressed.
What's a perfect state of nature?
To prove my point, the ozone. In the 80s we were told the ozone was getting too big because of CFC. Now the same experts you mention are saying it's not big enough because of global warming.
That says a lot about the knowledge we have on climate.
Not sure so many people of faith are adamant the earth was the first thing that came into being! I've not run into that. I can't say who PSI has listened to, but in my book this is an absurd postulation.
Deborah on the Bayside, I have been reading the Bible. On the first day, according to Genesis, God created the earth, The sun and the stars were created on the fourth day.
Thanks Frog. Yes indeed, we absolutely don't know "for certain" that the earth was never in a perfect state. Pure speculation.
A perfect state of nature would be one in which the earth was created complete by God, and hence eternal and without evolutionary flux.
Frog, the ozone layer has no effect on global warming. The depletion of the ozone layer by chlorofluorocarbons increases the amount of harmful ultraviolet-B radiation reaching the earth. On the electromagnetic spectrum, this radiation is at the opposite end from heat radiation.
On August 2, 2003, scientists announced that the depletion of the ozone layer may be slowing down due to the international ban on CFCs. Three satellites and three ground stations confirmed that the upper atmosphere ozone depletion rate has slowed down significantly during the past decade. The study was organized by the American Geophysical Union. Some breakdown can be expected to continue due to CFCs used by nations which have not banned them, and due to gases which are already in the stratosphere. CFCs have very long atmospheric lifetimes, ranging from 50 to over 100 years, so the final recovery of the ozone layer is expected to require several lifetimes.
“A perfect state of nature would be one in which the earth was created complete by God, and hence eternal and without evolutionary flux.”
Eternal and without .. flux? Speculative opinion that ascribes to God intentions contrary to the narrative that follows.
PSI - Never read a Bible verse! Any more than you’d ever just read a headline. Read story, the context. Actually, in this case, read the text. Genesis never says God created the earth on the first day. He did that “in the beginning” along with "the heavens."
The context is the earth and its atmospheric sphere being prepared for habitation as we know it. Something was already here. The "first day" is the point at which "let light be" occurred. After “the beginning.”
What was that? The separation of Light ("boker" - becoming discernible, visible, and distinguishable - less entropy in essence) from Darkness ("erev" - obscured, mixed - more entropy in essence).
By "first day" we’re talking earth already in existence in a different state (and quite likely the entire galactic system, but that's not the subject!). The subject is the intrusion of information (order) on entropy (chaos) on this particular planet. I see no inference that it was the first act of all creation by God. In fact, quite the contrary.
How so?
It’s that fourth day when the sun, moon and stars get mentioned. PSI, it’s an excellent and natural challenge. You can’t be faulted for mis-taking this one because it’s typically rendered in English as if these entities were made that day.
However, the [original language] Hebrew text, reads, “And God said, ‘Let the lights in the expanse of the sky separate.’” This is a completely different deal from making the lights. It assumes the lights were already in existence and that, in response to God’s command, they were given a purpose, that is “to separate the day from the night” and “to mark seasons and days and years.”
Verse 15 ends the report of day 4’s activities (“let the lights separate”) by adding “It was so.” In context, the following verse about God making the lights and the stars reads reasonably as a commentary on the significance of what has been reported (yeah, it was God who made all that stuff, no one else).
No pretense is given by the context nor should it be assumed by the reader that a comprehensive or full chronology of the galactic creation is in view.
In fact, looking further on in this well-honed integrated message system, Ezekiel 28:12-19 and Isaiah 14:12-17 give more clear indications of activities and non-earth type creation that had occurred at what would most reasonably be inferred as a prior time.
psi bond: “A perfect state of nature would be one in which the earth was created complete by God, and hence eternal and without evolutionary flux.”
Deborah on the Bayside: Eternal and without .. flux? Speculative opinion that ascribes to God intentions contrary to the narrative that follows.
Your bogus speculative opinion, Deborah on the Bayside, that ascribes to me intentions contrary to the meaning of my words. A perfect state is one that, by definition, has no need of change.
I do not ascribe any intentions to God in the quoted statement. In addition, you ascribe to biblical narrative an evolutionary character that it lacks. The Bible narrative indicates nothing, for example, of the historical evolution in governance from monarchies to democracies or from agrarian societies to technological societies. But there’s nothing new under the sun, which was created on the fourth day, as a biblical literalist will attest. The green plants came before that (on the third day), according to scripture.
PSI - Never read a Bible verse! Any more than you’d ever just read a headline>.
Never presume that only you know how to rightly read scripture. A well-written headline does not contradict the story; it encapsulates it.
Read story, the context. Actually, in this case, read the text. Genesis never says God created the earth on the first day. He did that “in the beginning” along with "the heavens."
A context requires human interpretation, which will vary among individuals and religious sects. The Bible does in fact say, according to a literal reading, that sometime after God created the earth, the first day ended. Hence, by logic, the earth was created the first day.
A literal reading of the verses of Genesis will make it clear that the “heavens” or in the KJV “heaven” of the first verse does not encompass the stars and the sun.
The context is the earth and its atmospheric sphere being prepared for habitation as we know it. Something was already here. The "first day" is the point at which "let light be" occurred. After “the beginning.”
What was that? The separation of Light ("boker" - becoming discernible, visible, and distinguishable - less entropy in essence) from Darkness ("erev" - obscured, mixed - more entropy in essence).
The first chapter of the Book of Genesis provides a chronological narrative describing successive acts of creation, distributed over six days. To read it otherwise is to read it creatively, and perhaps heretically.
By "first day" we’re talking earth already in existence in a different state (and quite likely the entire galactic system, but that's not the subject!). The subject is the intrusion of information (order) on entropy (chaos) on this particular planet. I see no inference that it was the first act of all creation by God. In fact, quite the contrary.
“we’re talking earth already in exstence in a different state?” What an unorthodox interpretation! Entropy entails existence of an essence. The widespread understanding of Bible readers is that the earth was indeed created ex nihilo, in the course of the first day when time began, which turns out to be October 23, 4004 BCE, according to Bishop Ussher and others. Many date the age of the earth from that conjectural point some six thousand years ago, and they will tell you frankly what you can do with the scientific evidence to the contrary. The Geneva Study Bible says, “First of all, and before any creature was, God made heaven and earth out of nothing… There was not any pre-existent matter out of which the world was produced.” Presumably, the heaven had no CFCs in it :-)
In other words, you declare yourself to be not a biblical literalist. Fine, but the position that the words are not to be understood literally is a matter of speculative opinion, Deborah on the Bayside, something that you appasrently disdain and that some have called heresy.
How so?
How, indeed will you extricate yourself from the abyss?
It’s that fourth day when the sun, moon and stars get mentioned. PSI, it’s an excellent and natural challenge. You can’t be faulted for mis-taking this one because it’s typically rendered in English as if these entities were made that day.
All of the English translations and the French translations I’ve seen follow the six day plot, which has historically been used to define the work week. The activities of God for each day are itemized. You are to be faulted, Deborah on the Bayside, for mis-taking me for someone who is gullible.
However, the [original language] Hebrew text, reads, “And God said, ‘Let the lights in the expanse of the sky separate.’” This is a completely different deal from making the lights. It assumes the lights were already in existence and that, in response to God’s command, they were given a purpose, that is “to separate the day from the night” and “to mark seasons and days and years.”
Which codex are you reading? A link please. Not being given the immediately preceding context in the original translation you follow, I propose the interpretation that ‘lights in the heaven separating’ means they have been ordered to go to their separate duty stations. The biblical theory that the sun , the moon, and the stars were created for the use of man on earth is far=fetched, to put it mildly. There exist billions of stars that are invisible to the naked eye, and they provide no light at all on earth. These stars were totally unknown to people in the biblical era. There are also dark stars.
Verse 15 ends the report of day 4’s activities (“let the lights separate”) by adding “It was so.” In context, the following verse about God making the lights and the stars reads reasonably as a commentary on the significance of what has been reported (yeah, it was God who made all that stuff, no one else).
Don’t read the verse, Deborah on the Bayside; read the context. Verse 14 says in the NIV: “And God said, “Let there be lights in the expanse of the sky to separate the day from the night, and let them serve as signs to mark seasons and days and years.” Your biblical reading smells fishy. If God was the creator, he made a whole lot of stuff in the cosmos that is not mentioned, like dwarf stars, quasars, pulsars, black holes, galaxies, planets other than earth, asteroids, and extrasolar planets revolving around other stars, some 200 of which are presently known.
No pretense is given by the context nor should it be assumed by the reader that a comprehensive or full chronology of the galactic creation is in view.
The narrative’s authoritative tone has led many to conclude that we are being told the full story of the creation, with no purposes of deception.
In fact, looking further on in this well-honed integrated message system [which represents an arbitrary canonical selection by Church fathers from many texts by different authors and which contains well-known inconsistencies], Ezekiel 28:12-19 and Isaiah 14:12-17 give more clear indications of activities and non-earth type creation that had occurred at what would most reasonably be inferred as a prior time.
I see no reason to infer that they refer to a time preceding the creation of the earth, as given in Genesis. However, I do see biblical evidence for a flat earth in Isaiah 40:22: It is he that sitteth upon the circle of the earth, and the inhabitants thereof are as grasshoppers; that stretcheth out the heavens as a curtain, and spreadeth them out as a tent to dwell in.
"It is he that sitteth upon the circle of the earth, and the inhabitants thereof are as grasshoppers; that stretcheth out the heavens as a curtain, and spreadeth them out as a tent to dwell in."
Evidence for FLAT EARTH is the CIRCLE OF THE EARTH...and stretching out the heavens?
FJ, Are you saying that if you are in the hurricane’s projected path, you should try and change the hurricane’s path?
No, that's the Liberal's solution. The Conservative's solution is to build a stronger house.
LOL!
Good call FJ.
If you devote a little time to sparring with PsiBond, you'll quickly find he's among the set of "liberals" that desperately clings to the patently absurd faith belief that leftists are actually capable of rational thought and that leftists have demonstrated this capability at least once in human history.
Well, you'll see.
Psi bond is right about Deborah's faulty Bible translation. People are always coming along trying to make the Bible make sense under modern assumptions, but it doesn't. You believe what you will believe. Is your faith in God's word or in science?
Scientific theory that attempts to explain origins is a different thing from science that is done every day in the laboratory. Biblical revelation has no problem at all with the latter, only the former. In fact there never would have been true experimental science in this world if it hadn't been for the Bible which revealed a law-giving God.
I remember when I went from believing in an earth millions of years old to believing in one merely 6000 years old. That's one startling eye opener after forty-some-odd years of evolutionist indoctrination, and although it leaves many questions unanswered from a scientific point of view, especially about the order of Creation, it makes sense of SO many others.
Such as: This is a blasted world because of sin following on the original sin in Eden. There is suffering and death in this world and things go wrong because of sin which started in Eden, sin meaning disobedience and distrust of God and alienation from Him.
I always thought the best Biblical explanation of "vestigial organs" was that they were originally functional organs at our perfect creation that lost function as part of the death we began to die in Eden. All our diseases and infirmities are the result of that event and it gets gradually worse over time as sin continues to accumulate over generations.
You can see the effects of the Flood of Noah everywhere if you learn what to look at, when God destroyed it all because of sin. This planet is now a gigantic graveyard as evidenced by the bazillions of fossilized once-living things buried in it. (It takes special conditions to create fossils; they didn't just live normal lives and die there; they were suddenly killed and buried in layers of compressed wet sediments -- something that is really only explainable by the worldwide Flood.)
If God got things out of order at the Creation according to our puny little brains, who are you going to trust, your puny little brain or God?
Faith,
You're at the heart of the creation / evolution debate where the creationist passionately holds, by virtue of the theological concepts of "original sin" and the evangelical redemption provided by Jesus' death and resurrection, that if the Creation story in Genesis is not literal, then Jesus' earthly ministry two millenia ago was unnecessary.
In short, the "young earth" creationist takes a scientifically indefensible position to make a theological argument.
I believe in a creator God as well, and subscribe to Christian / deistic theology. But to me, I believe faith is a belief in things unseen, not a belief that things seen are falsely interpreted and must not conflict with theology.
The Earth is geologically MUCH older than 6,000 years. But besides that archaelogists have found evidence of human activity from stone tools to build cities dating back over 10,000 years.
I have no problem believing the Earth is 4.5 billion years old and the universe itself 14 billion years old and that God created it all and that Jesus died for my sins.
The first two are scientific claims based on the best available evidence. The last two are theological claims based on faith. I don't confuse the two classifications.
Beamish, you say:
"I have no problem believing the Earth is 4.5 billion years old and the universe itself 14 billion years old and that God created it all and that Jesus died for my sins."
You may "have no problem" with this but you should have a problem with it if you claim to accept the Bible as God's own revelation. My position is based on taking the entire Bible as God's Holy Spirit-inspired word. You believe whatever suits your personal judgment and throw out the rest, just like all cults and liberal Christians do, but believers must believe God over ALL man-originated ideas and no matter what names they call us. You have to recognize that this world is full of deception, even science. That's why God gave us His revelation. Your faith will be a lot stronger if you believe ALL the testimony, believe me.
If you separate God FROM his word as you are doing you end up with a God YOU define rather than God as He defines Himself and you call God a liar as well. If it doesn't all hang together then I say none of it hangs together -- if any part of it can be accepted or rejected based on personal prejudice you even undermine the support for your belief that Jesus died for your sins.
The only OBJECTIVE evidence they have for the great age of the earth is various dating methods based on radioactive decay. The other evidence they rely on is all circular reasoning from facts such as the fossil ordering they interpret toward evolution but are better interpreted toward the Flood. Consider this from this site:
http://geology.about.com/od/geotime_dating/a/timeyardstick.htm
"A hundred years ago, our ideas about the ages of rocks and the age of the Earth were vague. But obviously rocks are very old things. Judging from the amount of rocks there are, plus the imperceptible rates of the processes forming them—erosion, burial, fossilization, uplift—the geologic record must represent untold millions of years of time. It is that insight, first expressed in 1785, that made James Hutton the father of geology"
Do you see all the ASSUMPTIONS in there that aren't necessarily true and are certainly not true if you believe the Bible? THAT'S the sort of reasoning that undergirds the Old Earth theory, just speculative hoo-ha not objective reasoning.
As for radioactive dating methods, there's really know way to verify their results, there's a lot of disagreement in the measurement of any particular phenomenon, and in any case Time is a rather mystical category in the end.
Faith,
I guess what I'm saying is that I don't personally require a systematic continuity between scientific data and theological belief.
Allow me a clumsy analogy. As a fiction writer, I am the "creator" of everything I put into one of my stories. "Divine revelation," within the "universe" of one of my stories, would be akin to one of my characters waking up one day and realizing he "lives" within the confines of a short story and begins acting up his free will to deny his "reality" and seek to get out of the story and walk in the world of his "creator," which in his limited frame of reference, "history" began on page one, and nobody knows how the opening scene came to be. (This theme is a staple of many a sci-fi and comedy story, from "the Matrix" to "Stranger than Fiction").
To me, this concept (clumsily) explains my nature in relationship to the Creator. I'm in the greatest book ever written trying to get out. I don't know what I'll find. Hopefully a library.
Anyway, ultimately, the age of the Earth or of the Universe does not challenge my belief in eternal salvation through Jesus. The world is temporary, transitional, and ultimately illusional.
Divine Reality is "outside" this book we're in.
I don't really get your analogy, Beamish. I'm not "inside" any book, nor are you, the world isn't God's revelation, but He GAVE us inspired writings by which to understand the world and history. But I gather there is very little if anything of the Bible you really accept if you think the world is "illusional."
Honestly, I don't get how you can believe in Christ at all if you deny the Bible.
Faith,
Well, I did say my analogy was clumsy, hehe. Let me try to whack the pinata one more time.
Look at the table or desk in front of you. The table has a "story" beyond its existence as a table. Its wood was part of a tree. Its screws and nails were metals mined out of the ground. And particularly, the wood was part of a specific tree cut down by a specific person.
To me, trying to "know" more about the origins of the universe are as mysterious as what the guy that cut down the tree that provided the wood that made your table had for lunch that day. And ultimately, who cares? Neither I, nor you, nor the table. Not having those details does not challenge my belief in the lumberjack or how the wood became a table, even though I never saw the lumberjack or the table being made.
I don't deny the Bible. I just don't believe it is authorative in scientific matters. Or rather, I don't see how filtering science through Biblical interpretations of various degrees of literalism and allegoricism to challenge discoveries on grounds of faith is productive in either science or evangelism.
That's what I mean by the world is ultimately an illusion. When we're in heaven, we're going to look back at this conversation and laugh at how complex we made the simple.
And to put my deistic spin on it, the lumberjack never has to come around to make sure the table isn't turning back into a tree.
To deny that the Bible is authoritative in ANYTHING is to deny that it is God's own inspired word, which is what I've been trying to say. If you deny its authority at any point, then you have no objective support left for anything from the Bible that you DO believe, it's all a subjective irrational matter and someone else can say back to you, "well I don't believe the Bible got it right about Jesus' dying for our sins" and you won't have any ground for answering. God's word is to judge us, not the other way around.
The most wonderful things of God ONLY disclose themselves when you give up your own judgment completely, become as an ignorant little child and let the Bible teach YOU. Including science.
Faith,
To deny that the Bible is authoritative in ANYTHING is to deny that it is God's own inspired word, which is what I've been trying to say.
I disagree, and vehemently so.
What does the Bible have to say about the electrical resistances found in various metals at room temperature? Where in the Bible can I find my phone number?
Obviously the Bible isn't inspired by God without my grandmother's fried okra recipe.
Do you see how silly your extreme is?
Denying that the Bible is authorative on things on which is is not authorative is not the same as saying the Bible is not God's word.
It's just saying God's word doesn't have much to say about topics outside its categorical purview.
And it is not to say God has nothing to say on any matter not enscribed in the Bible, but rather that God didn't say it in the Bible.
The fact that God didn't tell Isaiah my phone number to put into the Bible doesn't mean God doesn't know my phone number or that God didn't know my phone number thousands of years before I was born.
Besides, imagine the prank calls I'd get.
Oh Beamish Beamish Beamish, it's authoritative on whatever it ADDRESSES is the point, and it addresses enough science to make evolution false.
(Besides I understand that even your phone number is in the Bible Codes, with your name and address and even your grandmother's fried okra recipe. (((joke joke)))
Oh well.
And for the record, I do believe God fed the Israelites mana in the desert during the Exodus because my grandmother's fried okra was too good to part with until the 20th Century.
That is,
When I said "To deny that the Bible is authoritative in ANYTHING ..."
I meant, ANYTHING IT ADDRESSES.
I am adding this article to my file.
A can of worms you opened up here. :)
Faith,
Oh Beamish Beamish Beamish, it's authoritative on whatever it ADDRESSES is the point, and it addresses enough science to make evolution false.
I don't believe Bible addresses enough science to do that.
Science is in the business of making testable, falsifiable claims. We know water boils at lower temperatures when you reduce atmospheric pressure to the point we print alternate temperature and time directions on cake mix boxes for people living in higher altitudes.
You don't get that level of detail from the Bible to confront evolution theory on.
That said, you can stay in the realm of science and argue against evolution theories that make untestable, unfalsifiable claims.
You have to attack evolution arguments with science, not disbelief.
Actually, evolution IS untestable and unfalsifiable but that's a LONG discussion I'm not up to right now, mostly because everybody is simply incredulous at the very thought. But that's the main thing about it. It thinks it's science but it is not. Not to say that a lot of science isn't treated AS IF it verifies evolution. It's an amazing deception.
All the Bible has to say is God created living things after their own kind, clearly implying that what they are they are, they do not evolve into other kinds, and "male and female created he them" implying that's how they started out, they did not evolve into it, and by those simple statements evolution is clearly contradicted by the Bible and you have to choose between them, you can't have both.
I do have a bit of a track record in dealing with the science aspect of the question. You won't agree but you'll have to admit at least that I've given some thought to the science side of things:
http://www.evcforum.net/cgi-bin/dm.cgi?action=msg&t=12857
and
http://www.evcforum.net/cgi-bin/dm.cgi?action=msg&m=54195&ns=1
Which actually begins here:
http://www.evcforum.net/cgi-bin/dm.cgi?action=msg&f=5&t=664&m=266#266
I hope the links work.
See? I TOLD y'all God didn't create an appendix for no reason! Look at this great conversation!
Thanks...keep going!
Faith,
I think we're in partial agreement on the untestability and unfalsifiable claims of some evolution theory.
You can see bacterial diseases becoming more and more resistant to antibiotics as the widespread use of antibacterial soaps and cleaners wipe out weaker strains, leaving the surviving bacteria to pass its genes to the next generation. This isn't the same as saying the bacteria "changed" into more resistant bacteria but rather that the more resistant population of bacteria within a colony thrived to produce more bacteria with their inherent tolerances for antibiotics. Essentially, we're inadvertently making thoroughbred antibiotic resistant bacteria strains. But the genus and species remain the same.
Evolutionists make their untestable claim, or leap of faith, when they extrapolate population conditioning by enviromental factors within one species to suggest that a particular species changed into a different species.
FJ, Are you saying that if you are in the hurricane’s projected path, you should try and change the hurricane’s path? <
No, that's the Liberal's solution. The Conservative's solution is to build a stronger house.
With a FEMA grant, the former homeowner will be able to try that for the next hurricane.
Why did you suggest changing the hurricane’s path? I wouldn’t have suggested that “solution”.
"It is he that sitteth upon the circle of the earth, and the inhabitants thereof are as grasshoppers; that stretcheth out the heavens as a curtain, and spreadeth them out as a tent to dwell in."
Evidence for FLAT EARTH is the CIRCLE OF THE EARTH...and stretching out the heavens?
Z, have you ever tried to set up a tent to dwell in on a patch of earth that is hemispherical in shape? Rational people don’t do that.
Modern geologists and geophysicists accept that the age of the Earth is around 4.54 billion years. This age has been determined by radiometric age dating of meteorite material and is consistent with the ages of the oldest-known terrestrial and lunar samples.
This dating has also been empirically confirmed by measurements of the rate of spreading of the tectomic plates (which bear the continents) on the ocean floor.
The scientist who yields anything to theology, however slight, is yielding to ignorance and false pretences, and as certainly as if he granted that a horsehair put into a bottle of water will turn into a snake.
-- H. L. Mencken (who has been embraced by conservatives), 1956
It will be interesting to hear what the LORD has to say to Mr. Mencken, and many other people, on Judgment Day.
OK, Beamish, thanks for that agreement. It's pretty much what I said at the link.
About the tectonic plates, the current rate of spread would yield a huge age calculating from the point of breakup of the original single continent, but creationists figure the tectonic plates were set in motion at the same time as the Flood, about 4500 years ago. The plate motion started out quite fast and has progressively slowed down.
So, we believe Mencken and not God...go figure.
Psi Bond, you said "Z, have you ever tried to set up a tent to dwell in on a patch of earth that is hemispherical in shape? Rational people don’t do that."
rational people can't tell if a patch of earth is hemispherical. My question still stands.
Faith: It will be interesting to hear what the LORD has to say to Mr. Mencken, and many other people, on Judgment Day.
Assuming there is a Judgment Day, the merciful Lord may say, “I forgive you. Science is persuasive.”.
Faith, anti-evolutionists, those, like you and beamish, who reject the origin of species by means of natural selection, have promoted desperate suppositions to try to catch up and explain away the problems that the pseudo-scientific assertions of the Bible have with science. They are not confirmed by empirical evidence. There is nothing in Genesis that unambiguously acknowledges the existence of tectonic plates. Nonetheless, the movement of plates has caused the formation and break-up of continents over time, including occasional formation of a supercontinent that contains most or all of the continents.
To mistrust science and deny the validity of the scientific method is to resign your job as a human. You’d better go look for work as a plant or a wild animal.
-- P. J. O’Rourke, 1991
Z: So we believe Mencken and not [my] God…go figure.
No, Z, my suggestion is that you believe the conservative writer P. J. O’Rourke. For objective knowledge you should believe science; for your subjective spiritual needs you should believe whatever theology satisfies you.
Z: rational people can’t tell if a patch of earth is hemispherical. My question still stands.
Rational can understand analogies. A tent of canvas pitched over a roughly hemispherical mound for one or two people to dwell in is being compared to the tent of the heavens pitched over the extent of the earth for all its inhabitants to dwell in. A tent pitched over a spherical object can only cover half of the surface.
"To mistrust science and deny the validity of the scientific method is to resign your job as a human. You’d better go look for work as a plant or a wild animal.
-- P. J. O’Rourke, 1991"
And who mistrusts science? Did I say I did, Psi Bond?
your BS about the tent is really grasping....but I admire your tenacity, I must admit that.
The whole complex of pseudoscientific thought that includes evolution and an old earth has NO TRUE scientific support whatever. It has nothing to do with scientific method. It's all an illusion, all based on one bit of imaginative fantasy piled on another. You really ought to read it more carefully some time.
I even noticed that before I was saved. Finding an actual thread of evidence in the writings about evolution, or about any given finding that supposedly supports evolution, is impossible. Truly. It's all assertion based on belief that evolution is true. The facts don't support it, they simply cram the facts into the theory. Not a good fit but nobody notices because faith in evolution fills in the gaps.
You only THINK there's evidence there. You don't ask questions about it, you swallow the whole irrational lump whole.
But you'll know it some day in any case.
And by the way, Beamish was disagreeing with me. He thinks evolution and salvation by Christ do not contradict each other.
Faith,
I think evolution theories and salvation by Christ have nothing to do with each other. It's as much a category error as saying ketchup has something to do with post hole diggers. One being true does not necessitate the other being false.
That said, much of what is presented as "evolution" is quite a hodge-podge of generalizations, hand-waving, and untestable claims and can be attacked on scientific grounds without resorting to theology.
Beamish, you said:
"One being true does not necessitate the other being false."
But it does. What I've been trying to say back to you, though, is that this is about the integrity of the Bible, not "theology" apart from that. I gave some quotes earlier that show that some things the Bible says contradict evolution so that both cannot be true. You MUST choose.
If you accept one part of it and reject others you might as well throw the whole thing away because it's a seamless whole. Jesus is the "second Adam," according to the New Testament, which makes no sense if Genesis is not true. His death cancels original sin, another concept from Genesis, and restores us to God's favor. This makes no sense if Genesis is not true.
Bible, not theology.
The New Testament also says
Romans 8:20-21 For the creature was made subject to vanity, not willingly, but by reason of him who hath subjected the same in hope, Because the creature itself also shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God.
And this too validates Genesis, where God put the whole creation under bondage because of Adam's sin. If that much is ratified by the New Testament, we have no right to dismiss any of it.
Jesus also referred to Noah, and that also validates Genesis.
No, the problem is that you think evolution makes sense so you throw out parts of the Bible to accommodate it. But we have to hold on to God's word no matter what the world tells us. God's word is truth.
Z: your BS about the tent is really grasping....but I admire your tenacity, I must admit that
I don't admire the tenacity of your adamant denial. To put it quite simply, Z, from a point above the earth, a tent can only be extended over the whole earth covering all the inhabitants dwelling therein if the earth is more or less circular in shape, i.e., a stationary flat disk in three-dimensional space. Isaiah 40:22 clearly implies a flat earth at the center of the universe, which is contrary to all that science has discovered. Severian, Bishop of Gabala (d. 408), wrote: "The earth is flat and the sun does not pass under it in the night, but travels through the northern parts as if hidden by a wall". Modern flat-earthers cite the Bible as a foundation for their belief.
The plain assertions in the first chapter of Genesis that the earth was created first and covered with vegetation, and the sun and stars were created afterwards for the convenience of the earth's inhabitants, underscores the notion of the earth as being placed at the center of the cosmos, with all its billions of galaxies, the existence of which the Bible says nothing whatsoever.
And who mistrusts science? Did I say I did, Psi Bond?
Z, by disparaging Mencken's defense of the primacy of science over theology in answering questions concerning the natural world, you make your position on the validity of science rather ambiguous. You can clear this up by answering non-evasively and unambiguously a few simple questions:
Do you believe that the earth is billions of years old?
Do you believe that the earth was not created first, before the sun and the stars?
Do you believe that biological species originated by descent from antecedent species by means of natural selection?
Do you trust science when its results contradict the literal sense of the Bible?
Faith: The whole complex of pseudoscientific thought that includes evolution and an old earth has NO TRUE scientific support whatever. It has nothing to do with scientific method. It's all an illusion, all based on one bit of imaginative fantasy piled on another. You really ought to read it more carefully some time.
On the contrary, to people with an objective outlook, the scientific evidence for evolution is overwhelming. Even the Anglican Church, by the time of Darwin's death in 1882, had accepted Darwinian evolution, giving him a burial plot in Westminster Abbey, next to Isaac Newton. Only people who believe evolution conflicts with their notion of God will vehemently insist with crusading zeal that there is "NO TRUE scientific support whatever."
And by the way, Beamish was disagreeing with me. He thinks evolution and salvation by Christ do not contradict each other.
Faith, it's clear that you and beamish fundamentally differ on how to read scripture, whether or not to be literal. You may have missed it, but you do not differ with him on the core concept of Darwinian evolution, namely, the origin of species by means of natural selection. Both of you resolutely reject it and deny there is any evidence for it. For, as beamish misguidedly claims above, "Evolutionists make their untestable claim, or leap of faith, when they extrapolate population conditioning by enviromental factors within one species to suggest that a particular species changed into a different species."
Faith,
I'm with you on the "micro-evolution" / variety within a "kind" argument (German shepherds and poodles are both "kinds" of dogs, etc).
I'm also skeptical of the extrapolation from that to a "macro-evolution" scale where a T-Rex that survived the extinction event that wiped out the dinosaurs laid an egg and a chicken hatched from it, as in for example Goldschmidt's ridiculous "hopeful monster" theory, and Gould's "punctuated equilibrium" retread rewording of same. Even Dawkins' magical fantasies of dead organisms, with a Ouija board presumably, transmitting new genetic information to a living organism to coax it towards adapting beyond what killed the already dead organism is nice debate fodder. You can stay within the realm of science and put these hucksters on defense.
Where I'm not with you is in saying a 4.54 Billion year old Earth in a 14 Billion year old universe is incompatible with the divinity of Jesus.
PsiBond,
Make a testable claim that supports the idea that one species begat another, different species.
I'll put the Nobel Prize people on speed dial for you.
"Where I'm not with you is in saying a 4.54 Billion year old Earth in a 14 Billion year old universe is incompatible with the divinity of Jesus."
But it IS incompatible with Genesis.
psi bond, LOTS of people believe evolution is true, but they're all deceived. They haven't thought through the evidence, they've simply taken the most superficial claims as true. If you seriously try to track down the evidence you will soon find yourself in a hall of mirrors, frustrated that you can't find anything really solid to point to. I got that far before I was saved. At that point you usually give up and figure THEY know more even if you can't see it yourself. At least I did. Now I now that the frustration reflects the simple lack of true evidence, along with the habit of evolutionists to embroider their discussions with imaginative hypotheses that get taken for fact.
Faith,
"Where I'm not with you is in saying a 4.54 Billion year old Earth in a 14 Billion year old universe is incompatible with the divinity of Jesus."
But it IS incompatible with Genesis.
How so? Astronomers have recently found the furthest known object in the universe, a galaxy 13 Billion light-years away. The light from that galaxy took 13 billion years to reach Earth.
God created the path of light from a galaxy 13 Billion light-years away already in in place on its way here to Earth so that we'd see it 6,000 years later and be fooled that it took 13 Billion years to get here?
Nonsense.
I would argue that science is incompatible with your interpretation of Genesis, but not necessarily Genesis itself.
OK, I give up. I think it's very clear what Genesis says, it's not a matter of interpretation, but I give up.
psi bond, LOTS of people believe evolution is true, but they're all deceived. They haven't thought through the evidence, they've simply taken the most superficial claims as true. If you seriously try to track down the evidence you will soon find yourself in a hall of mirrors, frustrated that you can't find anything really solid to point to .....
Nonsense, Faith, Darwin took more than twenty years to think through his collected pieces of evidence before publishing his theory explaining them. And his scientific theory, with the modifications of Mendelianism in the 20th century (together known as the Modern Synthesis), has stood up to repeated tests presented by new evidence.
Your personal experience trying to understand the evidence and reconcile it with Genesis is not a proof that evolution is false. Your experience is not an epiphany for humankind. You are speaking for yourself and, probably, for those who feel that the theory that holds the keys for understanding the living world around us, mocks the Bible that they consider to be the literal word of their god.
It is true that before Darwin, few Christians had any particular reason to doubt the literal truth of the Bible, and that, after him, Genesis, at least from a literal standpoint, looked ridiculous. Some refined their view of scripture and extracted a deeper meaning from it that was not in conflict with scientific truth. Fundamentalists simply dug in their heels and obstinately denied the evidence.
beamish, most anti-evolutionists concede microevolution and fight all-out against macroevolution.
As the anti-evolutionist Jonathan Wells said: "Darwin's theory may explain 'microevolution' ...such as minor differences between closely related species of salamander. But it cannot account for 'macroevolution.'" In many cases, intermediate species between disparate species have been discovered in the incomplete fossil record, and adaptive radiations have been noted. The consensus of the scientific community is that the alleged micro-macro division is an artificial construct made by creationists and does not accurately reflect the actual processes of evolution. Many creationist critics define macroevolution as something that cannot be attained, as these critics describe any observed evolutionary change as "just microevolution".
Within the Modern Synthesis school of thought, macroevolution is thought of as the compounded effects of microevolution. Thus, the distinction between micro- and macroevolution is not a fundamental one – the only difference between them is of time and scale; Ernst W. Mayr stated that "transspecific evolution is nothing but an extrapolation and magnification of the events that take place within populations and species...it is misleading to make a distinction between the causes of micro- and macroevolution”. However, it should be noted that time is not a necessary distinguishing factor – macroevolution can happen without gradual compounding of small changes; whole-genome duplication can result in speciation occurring over a single generation - this is especially common in plants. Changes in the genes regulating development have also been proposed as being important in producing speciation through large and relatively sudden changes in animals' morphology.
Nonetheless, anti-evolutionists heavily exploit gaps in the theory and their misinterpretations of scientific data to promote support for creationism, creation science, or intelligent design. In the same way, open problems in Einstein's relativity theory have been exploited by nonscientists to promote their own precious theories that claim to overthrow it.
The proposed alternative to the scientific theory of descent of species with modification from earlier species is the supernatural theory of special creation of each species by an intelligent designer, in which role the faithful cast the god of their choice. Since you state, beamish, that you believe the earth is around 4.5(4) billion years old, do you accept that anatomically modern Homo sapiens appeared about 200,000 years ago as science concludes? Or 6000 years ago as the Bible suggests? In either case, what rational reason would God have for putting off the creation of man for billions of years? Was man created at about the same time as the simplest living organisms, in accordance with Genesis 1? Or were their appearances on earth separated by billions of years? Did the appearance of man occur before the appearance of any plants and other animals, as is posited by Genesis 2:4-7?
As I guessed, Z, you have declined to resolve the ambiguity surrounding your attitude toward scientific knowledge. Apparently, your trust in science is not as straightforward as you wish to pretend.
I have found a couple sites that can help you, Z, to understand what it means to be a biblical literalist. See here and go here.
A sample:
Other evidence that the Bible teaches that the earth is flat is found in the following passages. The first is in Matthew:
"[T]he devil taketh him up into an exceeding high mountain, and sheweth him all the kingdoms of the world, and the glory of them"
(Matthew 4:1-12)
Certainly, if the earth were flat, standing atop "an exceedingly high mountain" would allow Jesus to see the whole earth, but there is no mountain tall enough to allow him to see the other side of a spherical earth. At most, one hemisphere would be seen, but not the other.
Or a Tall-Enough Tree
The other passage is in Daniel:
The visions of my head as I lay in bed were these: I saw, and behold, a tree in the midst of the earth; and its height was great. The tree grew and became strong, and its top reached to heaven, and it was visible to the end of the whole earth. (Daniel 4:10-11)
The "whole" earth? No matter how tall the tree was, even if it was only a dream, it would not have been visible from the other side of the earth.
To be a true biblical literalist, one must be a geocentrist, an earth-created-firster, a young-earther, and a flat-earther, among other scientific absurdities. So, Z, I understand the confusion feeding your reluctance to come clean----I don't relish it.
Darwin was deceived too. Interestingly he himself anticipated many of the problems with his theory, but he never faced the fact that they are lethal for the theory, nor did any of his followers who were just happy to have anything to hang their anti-religion on. All Darwin did was observe microevolution, something known for millennia already, and extrapolate from it and domestic breeding to macroevolution without any evidentiary foundation, just imagination.
As a matter of fact the more change there is in a population the less change is possible genetically. Evolution defeats evolution.
Darwin put Natural Selection in the place of Domestic Selection as the engine to drive evolution, and failed to note that Domestic Selection leads to dead ends, not to open-ended opportunity for change. If he didn't have the genetic knowledge for that, we do have it nowadays. Both in nature and in domestic breeding change leads to dead ends genetically, often to disease proneness and extinction. Yeah, to try to save it you want to add in prodigious quantities of Time and something you call Mutation, which is another piece of fantasy.
Psi Bond, There are may things in the Bible meant to inform on a far bigger scale than anything you or I could come up with!
Gee....I thought they really MEANT that they could see that tree ...didn't YOU? :-)
I'm so very sorry that you are missing the amazing poetic beauty of the statements you quoted here...what an amazing way of talking about seeing ALL......it's gorgeous, I thank you for the reminder.
But, really, you mustn't take phrases like that quite so literally.
It's the TRUTH I take literally, not reports about trees and mountains and how far one can see.
This has nothing to do with good v evil, of which there are truths that are not metaphorical but, to a believer, God's Word.
PsiBond,
I believe there are some humans that descend from Adam and Eve, and some humans that evolved from apes, and all manner of crossbreeds and genetic engineering experiments by aliens from Zeta Reticuli.
Just kidding.
Seriously, your question is rather meaningless to me because I personally view the Creation account in Genesis to be an allegory, not a literal play by play.
but no, I don't believe any "anatomically modern homo sapien" has ever been born to anyone that was not also an "anatomically modern homo sapien."
Organisms of one species do not give birth to organisms that are a different, new species.
I suspect humans have been around a LOT longer than 200,000 years.
My missing fossil evidence is just as good as yours.
i.e. theologically nobody knows how long Adam and Eve lived in the Garden of Eden between their creation as perfect, ageless beings until their fall from grace at the eating of the forbidden fruit introduced them to degeneration (aging, disease, death). The Bible says Adam lived 930 years. But this comes after losing immortality.
This, I think, is the theological problem of young earth creationists. They assume biblical literalism in the geneology and ages of those listed added together brings us to a date of creation 6000 years ago, rather than recall theologically that before the eating of the tree of knowledge of good and evil which brought death into the world, aging was irrelevant / unheard of.
Adam and Eve may have lived in the paradise of Eden for billions of years before they got themselves kicked out.
To me, however, the message of Genesis is how we found ourselves seperated from God, not what year God created the universe.
Beamish, I'm very aware that before the Fall aging didn't occur. All degeneration and disease was a result of the Fall. I don't get why you think that's forgotten. They still had hundreds of years of life left in them.
But if Adam and Eve had lived for billions of years before the Fall, there would have been uncountable generations of human beings in that time, the earth would have been overpopulated many times over by the time they got around to having Cain and Abel -- AND you'd have to assume an idyllic Eden all that time too.
No, the only way the Genesis account holds together is if you take it at face value and don't try to insert years based on evolution.
beamish: PsiBond, I believe there are some humans that descend from Adam and Eve, and some humans that evolved from apes, and all manner of crossbreeds and genetic engineering experiments by aliens from Zeta Reticuli [a binary system of yellow dwarf stars 39 light years away visible to the naked eye only in the Southern Hemisphere, hence not among the stars God created to illuminate the night sky over Eden].
____________________________
They prosecuted some poor sucker in these United States
For teaching that man descended from the apes
They coulda settled that case without a fuss or fight
If they'd seen me chasin' you, sugar, through the jungle last night
They'da called in that jury and a one two three said
Part man, part monkey, definitely
.....
Well did God make man in a breath of holy fire
Or did he crawl on up out of the muck and mire
Well the man on the street believes what the bible tells him so
Well you can ask me, mister, because I know
Tell them soul-suckin' preachers to come on down and see
Part man, part monkey, baby that's me
-- Bruce Springsteen
No kidding.
You ever noticed how people who believe in Creationism look really unevolved? You ever noticed that? Eyes real close together, eyebrow ridges, big furry hands and feet. "I believe God created me in one day" Yeah, looks like He rushed it.
-- Bill Hicks, American comedian
beamish: i.e. theologically nobody knows how long Adam and Eve lived in the Garden of Eden between their creation as perfect, ageless beings until their fall from grace at the eating of the forbidden fruit introduced them to degeneration (aging, disease, death). The Bible says Adam lived 930 years. But this comes after losing immortality.
The Bible suggests that Adam and Eve were deprived of childhoods. Believe that and you can believe anything.
This, I think, is the theological problem of young earth creationists. They assume biblical literalism in the geneology and ages of those listed added together brings us to a date of creation 6000 years ago, rather than recall theologically that before the eating of the tree of knowledge of good and evil which brought death into the world, aging was irrelevant / unheard of.
The Bible does not specifically state that billions of years elapsed in fact between the creastion of Adam and Eve and the Fall. But if you are not a literalist, and you are not constrained by the demand for empirical evidence, you can extrapolate speculatively whatever you need.
Adam and Eve may have lived in the paradise of Eden for billions of years before they got themselves kicked out.
Yes, beamish, if one believes science has no special claim to objective validity, one can suppose that the first man and the first woman were exempt from the laws of nature. That they had a waiver conditional on good behavior. But you declared heretofore that you tend to believe those things for which there is empirical support. Where is the empirical evidence for this speculative opinion that Adam and Eve lived without aging in Eden for billions of years before wearing out their welcome? Were they a childless couple before then? Was it God's original plan, in the Gospel according to beamish, that only this one pair of humans would inhabit the earth for eternity? Were dinosaurs the contemporaries of Adam and Eve? I doubt I will get answers to these questions from you, beamish.
To me, however, the message of Genesis is how we found ourselves seperated [sic]from God, not what year God created the universe.
To biblical literalists, the year it all began is an issue. To scientists, the age is 4.54 billion years, give or take several million years----those of the faithful who don't want to come off as scientifically illiterate accept this age and stretch Genesis out to fit. LOL
If we are going to teach creation science as an alternative to evolution, then we should also teach the stork theory as an alternative to biological reproduction.
-- Judith Hayes
Most species do their own evolving, making it up as they go along, which is the way Nature intended. And this is all very natural and organic and in tune with mysterious cycles of the cosmos, which believes that there’s nothing like millions of years of really frustrating trial and error to give a species moral fiber and, in some cases, backbone.
-- Terry Pratchett English Writer, b.1948)
It's funny. Faith, that it's just those with strong religious convictions who say there's nothing to evolution. If species of living organisms lose the genetic capability to adapt to changing environments, all life would have become extinct long ago. "The reason why the universe is eternal," Lao Tzu wisely said in the sixth century BCE, "is that it does not live for itself; it gives life to others as it transforms."
I'm so very sorry that you are missing the amazing poetic beauty of the statements you quoted here...what an amazing way of talking about seeing ALL......it's gorgeous, I thank you for the reminder.
But, really, you mustn't take phrases like that quite so literally.
Don't pity me, Z.
Pity Faith.
I am not a literal reader of biblical phrases. I appreciate the King James Version of the Bible for its poetry, its great literary value. From "an exceeding high mountain" no one can see all the kingdoms of the world, due to its spherical shape. But certainly, if one can free oneself of the need to be literal, it's great poetry.
I'm glad to hear you appreciate it as allegory, as inspirational fiction. Does that mean you give credibility to science when it conflicts with the literal interpretation of the Bible?
Joshua commanding the sun to stand still is also great poetry but bad science:
The most important biblical quote supporting a geocentric universe can be found in the Book of Joshua. This will be used as the starting point for our scriptural cosmology.
Joshua 10:12-13
Then spoke Joshua to the Lord in the day when the Lord gave the Amorites over to the men of Israel; and he said in the sight of Israel, "Sun, stand thou still at Gibeon, and thou Moon in the valley of Aijalon." And the sun stood still, and the moon stayed, until the nation took vengeance on their enemies. Is this not written in the Book of Jashar? The sun stayed in the midst of heaven, and did not hasten to go down for about a whole day.
The miracle of Joshua appears again as a reference in The Book of Habakkuk.
Habakkuk 3:11
The sun and moon stood still in their habitation at the light of thine arrows as they sped, at the flash of thy glittering spear
The evidence in support of a geocentric model is overwhelming here. Joshua commanded the sun to stand still. He did not order the earth to cease rotating nor did he qualify his statement with the divine knowledge that the sun was merely made to appear stationary. The sun was commanded to stand still because it is the sun that moves. Descriptions of its motion can be rather poetic.
Psalms 19:4-6
yet their voice goes out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world. In them he has set a tent for the sun, which comes forth like a bridegroom leaving his chamber, and like a strong man runs his course with joy. Its rising is from the end of the heavens, and its circuit to the end of them; and there is nothing hid from its heat.
Ecclesiastes 1:5
The sun rises and the sun goes down, and hastens to the place where it rises
_________________
I have faith, Z, that you never really thought Joshua did what the Bible literally says he did, but I have faith, too, that you won't tell me whether I am right about you on this.
"If species of living organisms lose the genetic capability to adapt to changing environments, all life would have become extinct long ago."
Straw man, psi bond. The tendency is inexorable but 1. we're talking 6000 years of life, understand, not millions. 2. they don't lose genetic adaptability as fast in nature as in domestic breeding. 3. many creatures survive just fine without needing to adapt -- large herds of four-footed beasts survive millennia without significant genetic change -- some rarefied varieties, I'm thinking of the cheetah and a frog type -- survive fine with fixed loci. If there's no environmental threat or they are well fitted to their niche, no problem. 4. there are only a few drastic selectors to reckon with, bottleneck, founder effect, even natural selection itself. Otherwise the selection processes are very slow.
What is genetic adaptability in this fallen world I believe was originally genetic capacity for wonderful variations to be appreciated as God's creativity, all intended to survive. When death entered, the capacity to vary was turned to survival, at of course great loss to the overall species of many interesting types -- many of the original of which can be seen in the fossil record where the Flood buried them.
Inexorably. overall, yes, all life is tending to extinction because of the death that began in Eden. Another thousand years perhaps, but it looks to me like Jesus Christ is coming back a lot sooner than that.
It's the ones with strong religious convictions who take the trouble to understand what's wrong with evolution. Those who are willing to compromise don't care.
I do believe in miracles. I have seen some and I will continue to believe in them.
Who CARES what you're on about, psi bond? YOu don't believe, that's FINE....
thanks for the good conversation... I learn from Faith and Beamish...but, really, how can you argue with people who believe in God? Especially when you need Springsteen or Bill Hicks quotes to make your points? !!:-)
PsiBond,
We were just getting started with a good discussion. Now is not the time for your leftist lack of reading comprehension skills to rear its ugly head.
I have already stated that I believe the Genesis story to be an allegory, not a play-by-play accounting of the origins of the universe.
I have already stated that I do not believe the Bible to be authority in matters outside its purview, such as the age of the Earth.
I did point out that the story in Genesis does not state how long Adam and Eve were in the Garden of Eden, and the theology that they were deathless beings before eating the forbidden fruit ultimately foils any attempt to derive the age of the human race from Genesis if the story is consistently taken literally.
But I believe the story to be allegory. Even the Hebrew word for "Adam" means "hypocrite." There's all sorts of theological lessons there to be had beyond and instead of trying absurdly to use the Bible to find the age of the Earth.
So, instead of peppering me with meaningless questions of no relevance to my stated beliefs, let's talk instead of your primitive Anaxamanderian faith in beached fish becoming people.
Recall that I have the Nobel Prize people on speed dial waiting for your groundbreaking response.
Show me evidence that any species has ever given birth to a seperate, different, new species.
beamish: We were just getting started with a good discussion. Now is not the time for your leftist lack of reading comprehension skills to rear its ugly head.
Were we? Then now is not the time to bring up yet again your irrational bias about the reading skills of millions of people you don't know who don't share your politics.
I have already stated that I believe the Genesis story to be an allegory, not a play-by-play accounting of the origins of the universe.
But you did speak of Adam and Eve ("perfect, ageless beings until their fall from grace") and the Garden of Eden as if they were somehow historical. If not a play-by-play account, are the main features true? Is anything therein factual?
I have already stated that I do not believe the Bible to be authority in matters outside its purview, such as the age of the Earth..
If you believe in a Creator God, it cannot be irrelevant. The Bible starts with an unscientific account of the creation of the universe.
I did point out that the story in Genesis does not state how long Adam and Eve were in the Garden of Eden, and the theology that they were deathless beings before eating the forbidden fruit ultimately foils any attempt to derive the age of the human race from Genesis if the story is consistently taken literally.
What is the empirical evidence for your nonstandard reading of scripture?
If you recognize its creation myth as allegorical, then you should rationally conclude that the notion that God created each species by a separate act is allegorical, too, and not to be understood literally.
One would logically expect that if billions of years elapsed between the planting of Adam and Eve in the Garden and the eating from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, the book would say that and it would be a much longer story, extending over many chapters. However, if sinning is human nature, as generally believed, it shouldn't take too long before it happened and human history began.
But I believe the story to be allegory. Even the Hebrew word for "Adam" means "hypocrite."
Who told you that? Because he was the original conservative wanting to preserve his privileged way of life?
'Adam' is the Hebrew word for "man". It could ultimately be derived from Hebrew אדם ('adam) meaning "to be red", referring to the ruddy colour of human skin, or from Akkadian adamu meaning "to make".
Wikipedia states: The usage of the word as personal name appears to predate the generic usage. Its root is not the standard Semitic root for "man" which is instead '-(n)sh but is attested as a personal name in the Assyrian King List in the form Adamu showing that it was a genuine name from the early history of the Near East. The generic usage in Genesis meaning "mankind" reflects the view that Adam was the ancestor of all men. Etymologically it is the masculine form of the word adamah meaning ground or earth and related to the words adom (red), admoni (ruddy) and dam (blood). Gen. ii. 7 explains that the man was called Adam because he was formed from the ground (adamah).
There's all sorts of theological lessons there to be had beyond and instead of trying absurdly to use the Bible to find the age of the Earth
That is just what I told Faith when I said: "Some refined their view of scripture and extracted a deeper meaning from it that was not in conflict with scientific truth. Fundamentalists simply dug in their heels and obstinately denied the evidence."
Concluded
So, instead of peppering me with meaningless questions of no relevance to my stated beliefs, let's talk instead of your primitive Anaxamanderian faith in beached fish becoming people.
Your wanting to dismiss the questions in that blustering way shows you haven't thought through the logical consequences of your idiosyncratic reading of Genesis. Special creation does not mix well with a 4.54 billion year old earth, which you declare you accept. Or with a 14.7 billion year old universe. If man was created five days after the beginning (Genesis 1) or as the first thing at the beginning (Genesis 2), and you accept the scientifically-determined ages of earth and the cosmos, then the human species, it seems, is much older than the earth (as Laura Ingraham or Bill O'Reilly might say: "You're not going to believe this!").
In the nature of things, beached fish become dead fish, Anaximander be damned. I am not hooked on the guy, though the ancient Greeks were not so primitive as you pretend herein. They were the first to develop a general scientific worldview----one in which natural, non-miraculous explanations for the causes of phenomena were sought.
"[Anaximander's] concept of the apeiron seems similar to the Tao of Chinese philosophy and religion, and to the 'formless and void' Earth of the Hebrew creation account and other creation myths. However, even though Anaximander's ideas drew on the religious and mythical ideas of his time, he was still one of the first to attempt an explanation of the origin and evolution of the cosmos based on natural laws."
Recall that I have the Nobel Prize people on speed dial waiting for your groundbreaking response.
You are showing a lack of reading skill, since your question was addressed several cycles ago.
Show me evidence that any species has ever given birth to a seperate, different, new species.
Your crude phrasing of the question exhibits a common failure of anti-evolutionists to understand the complex workings of evolution. The silly game you're playing is one where the rule is if I don't answer the question to your utter satisfaction, evolution is bunk. Oh, the games people play!
Being a scientific theory, albeit one that explains much and fuels most of the advances in the biological sciences, the theory of evolution has been and continues to be modified as new findings are discovered, revisions to the theory are adopted, and earlier concepts proven incorrect are discarded. After all, it isn't immutable religious dogma or allegory.
Faith, I have heard your tired arguments before, about the cheetah. the worldwide flood, the punishment of all species after the Fall, and the rest of the accommodations religion makes to embrace science. I have heard them from an ardent creationist who verbosely kept going with me every day for 7 or 8 weeks on another blog, until she burned out and created her own blog to continue to spread the Word against Darwin. She was not a scientist, of course, but she figured that she understood it all.
Your hyped papyrus model does not hold up to analysis of observations outside of domestic environments. It does not hold up in the wild.
Inexorably. overall, yes, all life is tending to extinction because of the death that began in Eden. Another thousand years perhaps, but it looks to me like Jesus Christ is coming back a lot sooner than that.
Well, Faith, I sure hope Jesus gets here before it's too late and our kind and the beasts of the earth aren't already extinct. I hear that, according to some of the faithful, he's expected back in only two or three years, according to a biblical or Mayan code. So, not to worry. The good news is: Health care and the national debt will not be the issues of the day. The bad news is: We won't have evolution to kick around anymore.
Faith: It's the ones with strong religious convictions who take the trouble to understand what's wrong with evolution. Those who are willing to compromise don't care.
So only the nonprofessional religious folks know the truth about the natural world? Pride goeth before a Fall, they say.
Whatever is wrong with the theory of evolution is the subject of intense scientific study and will spawn future revisions. For that is how science works.
It is not compromise to accept the results of science unless you believe there is a higher a priori truth about nature that demands allegiance.
I love beautiful stories, but I don't allow them to confuse me as to what is verifiably true.
Z: I do believe in miracles. I have seen some and I will continue to believe in them.
I infer from this oblique response that you believe that Josh got the laws of nature, a geocentric nature, suspended for his troops, so they could exploit daylight savings to kill the enemies of his people. That is, God took sides.
Who CARES what you're on about, psi bond? YOu don't believe, that's FINE....
I am not the subject. If your trust in the validity of science is less than 100%, that's FINE. Just say so. Don't be ambiguous.
thanks for the good conversation...
Thank you. You helped.
I learn from Faith and Beamish...
Oh, so do I. So do I. But mostly I learn through them----and you.
but, really, how can you argue with people who believe in God?
Well, when one of them (Faith) believes the earth is 6000 years old and the other (beamish) says 4.5 billion years, surely there may be some room to argue. Not that I have any hopes of teaching you something, but you are probably right to haughtily believe that you can't learn anything of true value from people who don't share your Christian convictions.
Especially when you need Springsteen or Bill Hicks quotes to make your points? !!:-)
Forgive me. I didn't know that Springsteen and Hicks were untouchables in your feelings, Z. I liked the sense of humor they showed about the mucky evolution thing. beamish preceded me in using Hicks to make a point (about Rodney King in a defunct marathon thread).
But actually beamish made my point by bringing up Zeta Reticuli in his own half-baked joke. Since this pair of stars is only visible in the Southern Hemisphere, the underside of the Earth, as it were, God could not have made them, since the stars were to illuminate the night sky and provide signs for seasons to the human dwellers of Eden. Are they the Devil's handiwork? But all creation is posited to be the work of God.
The simple answer, I think, is that science is wrong to posit any stars in the Southern Hemisphere.
Show me evidence that any species has ever given birth to a seperate, different, new species.
Your crude phrasing of the question exhibits a common failure of anti-evolutionists to understand the complex workings of evolution. The silly game you're playing is one where the rule is if I don't answer the question to your utter satisfaction, evolution is bunk. Oh, the games people play!
I didn't ask about the "complex workings of evolution." I've seen Dawkins' and Gould's hand-waving contests with each other. I asked for "evidence that any species has ever given birth to a seperate, different, new species."
Now, the one thing all denominations of the evolutionist faith hold when they devise their various "complex workings" schema is that at some point an organism of one species gives birth to a seperate, different, new species.
I could care less about your "complex workings" to explain HOW an event occured that you have no evidence has ever occured.
I could describe the mechanics behind me driving to your house and swapping out your welcome mat for a Persian rug, but until your welcome mat is replaced a Persian rug, it's a pointless discussion.
Show me evidence that any species has ever given birth to a seperate, different, new species.
Or keep your religious babbling to yourself.
In other words, Detective Dawkins and Detective Gould and Detective PsiBond need to come to court with evidence that a glass of radiator antifreeze descended from a glass of lime-flavored Kool-Aid.
Making a "complex workingsof evolution" chart for the court and saying "look they're both liquids in a glass, and both green, and both taste kinda sweet" isn't going to convince the judge, or the jury, that lime-flavored Kool-Aid ever did or ever could become radiator antifreeze.
No matter how much Kool-Aid is served.
Show me evidence that any species has ever given birth to a seperate, different, new species.
Amazing, psi bond, that all you have is rhetoric to offer, heavy with the poetry and the put-downs to no purpose except distraction. Who cares that you've had this or that argument before since you clearly don't have a clue how to answer it, but only how to put up a smoke screen.
you're arguing if GOD TAKES SIDES?
How could he not? Unless you don't believe in good v bad. And, of course, in relativism, you might not.
As I said before, nobody has to believe this......nobody has to believe God wouldn't do anything he could to right things, or to allow anything to happen, even horrid things, for His Glory.
I know that's a stretch to grasp, TRUST ME, but don't even try to argue it..it's unseemly and a bit silly.
Faith,
PsiBond's religious convictions are rather bizarre, aren't they?
He'll huff, and he'll puff, but he'll never show you evidence that any one species of organisms have ever given birth to another, different, new species.
It's quite cute, really, the way he'll try to explain the alleged mechanics of a phenomenon that he has no evidence of ever occuring.
Especially when he calls his mythology "science."
They ARE cute, sometimes, those diehard evolutionists, with their perfectly silly posturings trying to make science out of fantasy. Huffing and puffing with smoke coming out their ears.
I just found this page on giant insect fossils by the way. I enjoy getting a sense of what the world was like before the Flood. Of course the poor scientists don't have a clue:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/11/071120195710.htm
Giant Fossil Sea Scorpion Bigger Than Man:
"Dr Simon Braddy from the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Bristol, co-author of an article about the find, said, 'This is an amazing discovery. We have known for some time that the fossil record yields monster millipedes, super-sized scorpions, colossal cockroaches, and jumbo dragonflies, but we never realised, until now, just how big some of these ancient creepy-crawlies were.'"
Faith,
People may hold whatever religious beliefs they want. Until a testable claim is made, however, no rational, scientific inquiry can be made.
It takes a mind trained in rational, scientific inquiry to identify discard indefensible premises.
The absence of a rational mind is likely the causal agent behind PsiBond's resilient faith that after 2500+ years of ritual hand-waving, someone will prove that dead fish becoming people is actual science.
We have freedom of religion. PsiBond is entitled to his backward, atavistic, and primitive Anaximanderian mythology.
He should, however, be confronted each time he confuses his religious convictions with science.
Excellent points, Beamish, and very liberal, meaning tolerant, of you too I must say.
Too bad they have the political clout to stifle the views of the rational contingent, however.
Faith,
That's just it, isn't it?
I readily distinguish between my own held religious faith beliefs and those beliefs which require no faith because they can be tested and verified through rational scientific inquiry.
My problem is with people who express their religious beliefs as if they were scientific fact.
If you could show that the Earth (and the universe?) is merely 6000 years old with scientifically verifiable observations, it wouldn't just be a religious belief claim inspired by a literalist interpretation of the Bible.
Same with PsiBond's ritual fundamentalist Anaxamanderian fish-became-people cult. If he or any other pious sectarian believer in the religion of Evolutionism could show in actuality that any species has ever given birth to another, different, new species, their own religious belief claims rooted in the prescientific declarations of flat-earth cosmologists of the 6th Century BCE would similarly become open to scientific validation.
I believe what seperates you and PsiBond is that you're willing to admit your stated beliefs are grounded in religious faith.
He is not. So intolerant and blinded by his religious zeal to have you believe that his ancestors were fish that its unlikely that his irrational mind could ever see the irony behind his convictions that one day scientists will create life in the lab without using any intelligence whatsoever.
It would be a lot easier to pity these intellectually stunted minds that as a rule tend to congregrate on the left side of the political spectrum if not for the fact that left-wing fundamentalist fish-became-people cultists have mixed their religion with their politics to justify institutionalized racism and even the Holocaust.
PsiBond's religious beliefs should have everyone concerned. As the left continues their traditional and perennial assaults on free speech and religious freedom, it behooves us to ask why these people believe their ancestors were fish.
Well, I can't make the distinction you make, Beamish. If the Bible is God's word and it clearly says something that makes evolution impossible, then the "science" that supports evolution is simply wrong and has to yield. I do believe that creationists have made big contributions to showing the scientific basis of conclusions we draw from the Bible, however, as far as you can apply science to the past.
We are talking about the history of the earth. The past is a series of events that cannot be replicated, which is a main requirement of science. Laboratory science is done in the present, where experiments can be replicated.
The best you can do with the past is make inferences from known facts, but even then you are on shaky ground if the past was appreciably different from the present, as a Biblical perspective gives us reason to believe was the case.
As I said early on in this discussion the only truly OBJECTIVE evidence they have for an old earth is radioactive dating methods, but as I also said, these tests often disagree, even with known facts, and there is no way to test the method either -- again we run up against the fact that the past can't be replicated in order to test it.
We're left with interpretations on both sides of this argument, interpretations of the fossil record, of the stratifications of the earth, of particular fossil finds and so on. It's a war between plausible scenarios to explain what is seen, not something that can be pinned down to a certainty. All the evolutionists have going for their theories is that they are the Establishment and can tell the rest of us to shut up. Experimental science they do not have.
beamish:In other words, Detective Dawkins and Detective Gould and Detective PsiBond need to come to court with evidence that a glass of radiator antifreeze descended from a glass of lime-flavored Kool-Aid.
The antifreeze and Kool-Aid of your unsophisticated argument are not living systems and not capable of self-reproduction, two of the conditions that are prerequisites for biological evolution. So, for scientifically literate people, there is no need for the demonstration you require.
Making a "complex workingsof evolution" chart for the court and saying "look they're both liquids in a glass, and both green, and both taste kinda sweet" isn't going to convince the judge, or the jury, that lime-flavored Kool-Aid ever did or ever could become radiator antifreeze.
A scientist or a lawyer need only point out to the judge to get the case thrown out that alchemy on liquids is not what evolution is about.
No matter how much Kool-Aid is served.
No matter how much Kool-Aid is served, it's not going to reproduce itself, producing generations of variation. However, if you wait around, beamish, for a billion years or so, you may find it has made itself invisible.
Show me evidence that any species has ever given birth to a seperate [sic], different, new species.
See below.
Show me evidence that any species has ever given birth to a seperate, different, new species.
See below.
Your crude phrasing of the question exhibits a common failure of anti-evolutionists to understand the complex workings of evolution. The silly game you're playing is one where the rule is if I don't answer the question to your utter satisfaction, evolution is bunk. Oh, the games people play
I didn't ask about the "complex workings of evolution."
As a matter of fact, I haven't said that you did ask about them. Pretending to get indignant at something that wasn't said is another one of the games people play.
I've seen Dawkins' and Gould's hand-waving contests with each other.
It's impossible, beamish, to guess from this vague smear what constitutes hand-waving in your mind, given its religious pre-disposition..
I asked for "evidence that any species has ever given birth to a seperate, different, new species."
See below.
Now, the one thing all denominations of the evolutionist faith hold when they devise their various "complex workings" schema is that at some point an organism of one species gives birth to a seperate, different, new species.
Science is built up of observable facts as religion is built up of theological doctrines. Science requires not faith, as is essential for religious convictions, but empirical evidence. All denominations of creationism fervently deny there is anything in the known fossil or DNA record to support the descent of species from other species. However, the idea that one species evolved from another very different antecedent species implies that there existed species representing intermediate stages----and there are numerous fossils documenting instances of intermediate or transitional species.
For example, Tiktaalik is a genus of extinct sarcopterygian (lobe-finned) fish from the late Devonian period (416 to 359.2 million years ago), with many features akin to those of tetrapods (four-legged animals). It is an example from several lines of ancient sarcopterygian fish developing adaptations to the oxygen-poor shallow-water habitats of its time, which led to the evolution of amphibians. Well-preserved fossils were found in 2004 on Ellesmere Island in Nunavut, Canada.
Tiktaalik lived approximately 375 million years ago. Paleontologists suggest that it was an intermediate form between fish such as Panderichthys, which lived about 380 million years ago, and early tetrapods such as Acanthostega and Ichthyostega, which lived about 365 million years ago.
Tiktaalik represents an intermediate form between fish and amphibians. Unlike many previous, more fishlike transitional fossils, Tiktaalik's "fins" have basic wrist bones and simple fingers, showing that they were weight bearing. Close examination of the joints show that although they probably were not used to walk, they were more than likely used to prop up the creature’s body, push up fashion. The bones of the fore fins show large muscle facets, suggesting that the fin was both muscular and had the ability to flex like a wrist joint. These wrist-like features would have helped anchor the creature to the bottom in fast moving current. Also notable are the spiracles on the top of the head, which suggest the creature had primitive lungs as well as gills. This would have been useful in shallow water, where higher water temperature would lower oxygen content. This development may have led to the evolution of a more robust ribcage, a key evolutionary trait of land living creatures. The more robust ribcage of Tiktaalik would have helped support the animal’s body any time it ventured outside a fully aquatic habitat.
Concluded
Tiktaalik also lacked a characteristic that most fishes have—bony plates in the gill area that restrict lateral head movement. This makes Tiktaalik the earliest known fish to have a neck. This would give the creature more freedom in hunting prey either on land or in the shallows.
The discoveries of extremely bird-like dinosaurs, as well as dinosaur-like primitive birds, have almost entirely closed the morphological gap between theropods and birds. The early 1990s saw the discovery of spectacularly preserved bird fossils in several Early Cretaceous geological formations in the northeastern Chinese province of Liaoning. In 1996, Chinese paleontologists described Sinosauropteryx as a new genus of bird from the Yixian Formation, but this animal was quickly recognized as a theropod dinosaur closely related to Compsognathus. Surprisingly, its body was covered by long filamentous structures. These were dubbed 'protofeathers' and considered to be homologous with the more advanced feathers of birds. Chinese and North American scientists described Caudipteryx and Protarchaeopteryx soon after. Based on skeletal features, these animals were non-avian dinosaurs, but their remains bore fully-formed feathers closely resembling those of birds.
A small minority, including ornithologists Alan Feduccia and Larry Martin, continues to assert that birds are instead the descendants of earlier archosaurs, such as Longisquama or Euparkeria. Embryological studies of bird developmental biology have raised questions about digit homology in bird and dinosaur forelimbs. However, due to the cogent evidence provided by comparative anatomy and phylogenetics, as well as the dramatic feathered dinosaur fossils from China, the idea that birds are derived dinosaurs, first championed by Huxley and later by Nopcsa and Ostrom, enjoys near-unanimous support among today's paleontologists.
Ambulocetus (or the "'walking whale'") was an early cetacean from Pakistan that could walk as well as swim. It lived during early Eocene some 50-49 million years ago. It is a transitional fossil that shows how whales evolved from land-living mammals. Having the appearance of a 9 foot long mammalian crocodile, it was clearly amphibious, as its back legs are better adapted for swimming than for walking on land, and it probably swam by undulating its back vertically, as otters and whales do. The Ambulocetus fossils were found in Pakistan by anthropologist Johannes Thewissen. When the animal was alive, Pakistan was a coastal region bordering the ancient Tethys Sea.
I could care less about your "complex workings" to explain HOW an event occured that you have no evidence has ever occured
Follow the clues in the DNA chain and in the known record of intermediate developments. It's elementary, beamish.
I could describe the mechanics behind me driving to your house and swapping out your welcome mat for a Persian rug, but until your welcome mat is replaced a Persian rug, it's a pointless discussion.
It is indeed pointless. Stuff it. I don't want the rug. You can't appeal to me with your materialist inducements.
Show me evidence that any species has ever given birth to a seperate, different, new species.
I have, though no doubt you'll deny it. That no transitional forms have been recovered is a favorite lie of creationists.
Or keep your religious babbling to yourself.
Your idiosyncratic conjecture, beamish, that Adam lived in Eden for billions of years before he committed the original sin is what I would call religious babbling. And since it differs from Faith of many believers: religious Babel-ing.
Faith: Amazing, psi bond, that all you have is rhetoric to offer, heavy with the poetry and the put-downs to no purpose except distraction. Who cares that you've had this or that argument before
Nigh on a week ago, Faith, you were saying, "I do have a bit of a track record in dealing with the science aspect of the question." So, yes, who cares that you have this or that?
since you clearly don't have a clue how to answer it, but only how to put up a smoke screen.
Yours is the smoke screen and the blunt rhetoric.
Even if we were to suppose, for the sake of argument, that evolution is winding down and all species are gradually becoming extinct because of God's damnation and/or natural causes----nonetheless, evolution has occurred. To objective observers, that is undeniable. Just as surely (to wax poetic for you) as when a California wildfire gives signs of dying down, what it has wrought, the carbonization of people's homes, is palpable and real.
Due to the specialized and rare circumstances required for a biological structure to fossilize, only a very small percentage of all life-forms that ever have existed can be expected to be represented in discoveries and each represents only a snapshot of the process of evolution. The transition itself can only be illustrated and corroborated by transitional fossils, but it will never demonstrate an exact half-way point between clearly divergent forms. In bridging lacunae, DNA evidence is helpful. Comparison of the genetic sequence of organisms has revealed that organisms that are phylogenetically close have a higher degree of sequence similarity than organisms that are phylogenetically distant.
Although it has only recently become available, the best evidence for common descent comes from the study of gene sequences. Comparative sequence analysis examines the relationship between the DNA sequences of different species, producing several lines of evidence that confirm Darwin's original hypothesis of common descent.
Literal interpretations of the Bible are great stuff for perpetuating the culture wars. The blogs can accommodate it all. Such interpretations are fine as long as they are kept out of the biology classrooms in the public schools. When asked what he thought of the Dover, PA school board's anti-evolution policy (which was overturned by a federal judge appointed by George W. Bush), Kevin Padian, a paleontologist and professor of integrative biology at the University of California at Berkeley, memorably said, "I think it makes people stupid. I think it essentially makes them ignorant. It confuses them unnecessarily about things that are well understood in science, about which there is no controversy, about ideas that have existed since the 1700s, about a broad body of scientific knowledge that's been developed over centuries by people with religious backgrounds and all walks of life, from all countries and all faiths ...I can do paleontology with people in Morocco, in Zimbabwe, in South Africa, in China, in India, any place around the world…We don’t all share the same religious faith. We don’t share the same philosophical outlook, but one thing is clear, and that is when we sit down at the table and do science, we put all that stuff behind us."
Ancient human events cannot be replicated without videotape, but hypotheses about natural processes in the earth's past can be objectively tested and verified or falsified against physical traces in the earth, and this scientific methodology can be replicated again and again. Pronouncements by many hands in venerated ancient manuscripts (underlying but usually not credited in their arguments), deceptive claims of being equally scientific, and adamant, albeit familiar, denials of genetic, paleontological, and geological data are all that ardent creationists have to attempt to bring down "blasphemous" serious science.
Z: you're arguing if GOD TAKES SIDES?
NO, Z, I'm not. That was a side remark, not an essential part of what I said. Naturally, God sides with the good, even if his support is not always manifest, or----as in the case of the Holocaust----effective from a human perspective.
No, the subject was your trust in the objective validity of scientific results, remember?.
How could he not? Unless you don't believe in good v bad. And, of course, in relativism, you might not.
God is such as you describe by definition in scripture. Yet I'm not sure Canaan was all bad.
However, that is not the subject, Z. Do you believe the earth is around 6000 years old, flat, and positioned at the center of the universe, with the sun, and all the stars, including all the galaxies revolving around it?
As I said before, nobody has to believe this......nobody has to believe God wouldn't do anything he could to right things, or to allow anything to happen, even horrid things, for His Glory.
God's omnipotent, dontcha know it? It can do anything it wants. Even (as in the Book of Job) allow horrible acts to occur and evil to flourish, the better to show the power of "His Glory" to faithful followers. Of course, a man (or a manson) doing the like would get life in prison, at the minimum, trust me..
I know that's a stretch to grasp, TRUST ME, but don't even try to argue it..it's unseemly and a bit silly.
Yes, I know, Z. It is indeed what you say. We must check our rational minds AT THE GATE.
PsiBond,
Just as my analogy predicted you would, you've replaced the glass of lime-flavored Kool-Aid with a Panderichthys fossil and the glass of radiator antifreeze with a Tiktaalik fossil and are now dancing around the two with religious fervor claiming with great faith and absolutely nothing resembling science that a living Panderichthys once gave birth to a Tiktaalik because of physical similarities between the shapes of two fossils.
This isn't much better than claiming a link between lime-flavored Kool-Aid and radiator antifreeze on the basis that they're both liquids and green. In fact, it's much worse than that because the only thing to you can say with verifiable scientific certainty is that we're looking at two rocks.
Let me repeat the challenge.
Show me evidence that any species has ever given birth to a separate, different, new species.
I'm not interested in your bizarre religious employment of the circular reasoning fallacy, claiming the phenomenon of evolution exists, showing me two rocks, and claiming the phenomenon of evolution exists.
Increasing the number of rocks in your ritual isn't going to impress me either.
Show me evidence that any species has ever given birth to a separate, different, new species.
Good points, Beamish. The evolutionists think mere anatomic similarities are some kind of evidence for evolution. They even officially enshrine Homology as important Evidence. It would be embarrassing if any other branch of Science made such ridiculous claims.
Faith,
It would be embarrassing if any other branch of Science made such ridiculous claims.
No, it would be embarrassing if ANY branch of science made such ridiculous claims.
PsiBond's rock collection ritual isn't science.
While we're waiting for PsiBond to finish his fundamentalist Anaxamaderian cult rain dance and move to the part where he professes to divine the future with goat entrails, we can still anchor ourselves firmly in the scientific method and remind him that we have demanded and continue to demand evidence to show that any species has ever given birth to a separate, different, new species.
PsiBond's impending lapse into his theological equivalent of the appeal to false authority fallacy, where he'll state that some scientist (who can readily be shown to have also failed to show evidence that any species has ever given birth to a separate, different, new species) agrees with his religious throw back to the unenlightened belief in fish becoming people, should also be met with the same challenge.
I don't mind PsiBond sharing his primitive ceremonies and arcane necromancies with us.
But, I wish he'd set that aside for a moment and show me evidence that any species has ever given birth to a separate, different, new species.
PB said: "Even if we were to suppose, for the sake of argument, that evolution is winding down and all species are gradually becoming extinct because of God's damnation and/or natural causes----nonetheless, evolution has occurred. To objective observers, that is undeniable. Just as surely (to wax poetic for you) as when a California wildfire gives signs of dying down, what it has wrought, the carbonization of people's homes, is palpable and real."
No, what is actually real is rarely described, that is one of the biggest problems with evolutionism. The reality of the phenomena is usually obscured by the interpretive baggage of evolutionism so that it's hard to see that there are other ways of interpreting the same simple facts. They NEVER tell you that such and such a fossil was found in such and such a rock at such and such a depth, no, what they tell you is that they found a specimen of a particular species of such and such a time period, which they have imposed on the simple factual matter of rocks and fossils. In fact sometimes they don't even get around to telling you that all they found was a tiny PART of a specimen from which they extrapolated the whole, they just go on and on and on fantasizing about this creature that had such and such qualities back in such and such time and hypnotize the reader/listener out of asking the necessary questions.
"Due to the specialized and rare circumstances required for a biological structure to fossilize, only a very small percentage of all life-forms that ever have existed can be expected to be represented in discoveries and each represents only a snapshot of the process of evolution."
Yeah, this is the typical evolutionist interpretation of the fossil record. They insist on it as if it were proven fact although it's only their own made-up scenario from within their own assumptions.
The far more likely interpretation of the prodigious quantity of fossilized life on this planet is that it was all killed in the great Flood of Noah. There is simply no way that so much life, in such a condition of perfect fossilization, and found so often in clusters and clumps showing mass death rather than individual deaths, could have died in separate events over millions of years. It makes no sense BECAUSE fossilization DOES require very rare circumstances to occur.
All the necessary circumstances would have occurred in a worldwide flood -- the dumping of many living things together, the separation and layering of the sediments, followed by the compression imposed by the huge depth of layers above, all perfect conditions for complete fossilization. Fits the actual observed facts MUCH better than the jerryrigged explanations of evolutionism.
"The transition itself can only be illustrated and corroborated by transitional fossils, but it will never demonstrate an exact half-way point between clearly divergent forms. In bridging lacunae, DNA evidence is helpful. Comparison of the genetic sequence of organisms has revealed that organisms that are phylogenetically close have a higher degree of sequence similarity than organisms that are phylogenetically distant."
Of course there would be sequence similarity between similarly constructed organisms. We would expect the blueprints for various designs to have the same similarities and differences as the designs built from them. You beg the question with your term "phylogenetic" -- try sticking to the language of pure description, the simple phenomena, the facts.
"Although it has only recently become available, the best evidence for common descent comes from the study of gene sequences. Comparative sequence analysis examines the relationship between the DNA sequences of different species, producing several lines of evidence that confirm Darwin's original hypothesis of common descent."
All it shows is similarity of design = similarity of blueprint. It does not show descent.
Rest of answer to psi bond:
"Literal interpretations of the Bible are great stuff for perpetuating the culture wars. The blogs can accommodate it all. Such interpretations are fine as long as they are kept out of the biology classrooms in the public schools."
Right, force the children to learn the false religion of evolution.
"When asked what he thought of the Dover, PA school board's anti-evolution policy (which was overturned by a federal judge appointed by George W. Bush), Kevin Padian, a paleontologist and professor of integrative biology at the University of California at Berkeley, memorably said, "I think it makes people stupid. I think it essentially makes them ignorant. It confuses them unnecessarily about things that are well understood in science, about which there is no controversy, about ideas that have existed since the 1700s, about a broad body of scientific knowledge that's been developed over centuries by people with religious backgrounds and all walks of life, from all countries and all faiths
...I can do paleontology with people in Morocco, in Zimbabwe, in South Africa, in China, in India, any place around the world…We don’t all share the same religious faith. We don’t share the same philosophical outlook, but one thing is clear, and that is when we sit down at the table and do science, we put all that stuff behind us.""
You can do paleontology, geology, biology, genetics etc. with anyone anywhere. Those things ARE science. They are NOT evolution and they do not NEED evolution to be productive sciences. That is the Big Delusion. Evolution is Creed, not Science.
"Ancient human events cannot be replicated without videotape, but hypotheses about natural processes in the earth's past can be objectively tested and verified or falsified against physical traces in the earth, and this scientific methodology can be replicated again and again."
I'm sorry but no they can't. It doesn't matter if an ancient event was human or geological, there is no way to replicate it to study or test it. ALL you have is interpretation and that is shown over and over again in evolutionist discussions.
"Pronouncements by many hands in venerated ancient manuscripts (underlying but usually not credited in their arguments), deceptive claims of being equally scientific, and adamant, albeit familiar, denials of genetic, paleontological, and geological data are all that ardent creationists have to attempt to bring down "blasphemous" serious science."
NOBODY denies genetic, paleontological and geological data, psi bond. Such things ARE science. Evolution is not. What you fail to notice is such data does not require Evolution and does not fit into it either without all kinds of twisting to make it fit.
However, I will say again, If the Bible is God's word, if the Bible is God's word, if the Bible is God's word, if the Bible is actually God's word ....
REALLY DIGEST THAT STATEMENT instead of refusing to face it. Be that honest.
. . . .then science must follow it and not contradict it.
Not your ridiculous parody of it, but the real thing.
Maybe not paleontology, that one IS compromised by evolutionist hoo-ha.
Faith,
PsiBond: "Ancient human events cannot be replicated without videotape, but hypotheses about natural processes in the earth's past can be objectively tested and verified or falsified against physical traces in the earth, and this scientific methodology can be replicated again and again."
Faith: "I'm sorry but no they can't. It doesn't matter if an ancient event was human or geological, there is no way to replicate it to study or test it. ALL you have is interpretation and that is shown over and over again in evolutionist discussions."
Exactly, Faith. That's what I'm getting at in my criticism of PsiBond's attempt to dodge and distract from my demand for evidence that any species has ever given birth to a separate, different, new species with his culturally backward geomancy and necromancy rituals.
Hi Beamish. We all have our own terms for approaching this discussion and I think we get into our own little niches and make it hard to communicate even with others making the same basic points. So I think you probably are saying some important things with your emphasis on geomancy and necromancy and psi bond's religious rituals but I'm focused on my own usual ways of arguing these things and may not always get what you are trying to say. This is just to say I'm sorry if I don't follow your arguments as well as I should.
I'm not sure how to bridge this problem, but actually we're doing better than most discussions I've had along these lines, since we DO get on each other's track at least occasionally.
Faith,
It can't be stated any more starkly than you and I have.
Proof that the theory of evolution, that any species can and has actually given birth to a seperate, different, and new species, should take the form of evidence that any species can and has actually ever given birth to a separate, different, new species.
PsiBond asserts that his pre-scientific cult's dogma of fish becoming people is made apparent by tossing rock fossils on the ground and chanting "this is evidence of evolution." That's geomancy, not science. When he gets into talking about the meta-data information he's divining from petrified dead fish, that's necromancy, not science.
I have my sincere doubts that PsiBond will ever stop clutching to his numinous fears and superstitious belief that he's one of the chosen fish, but it sure would be nice to get him on the topic of science.
Faith,
You've probably seen the holy bumpersticker of PsiBond's Dawkinsian Ananaxamanderists Reformed World Ichthyomorphic Nativity (D.A.R.W.I.N.) church.
Adherents of that faith are impenetrably hostile to rationality, but their unyielding zeal for the omens allegedly transmitted by their sacred fish patriarchs can be entertaining, in a purely sociological sense.
How funny, Beamish. I'm getting it better.
Chosen fish indeed. Yes, WOULDN'T it be great to get him onto the topic of SCIENCE for a change. Wow.
I do think that little Darwin fish with legs is awfully clever. They have that going for them.
I had to look up Anaxamander. All that was over my head. Yes, that is what they are doing.
And the reason is that it's simply in the nature of the subject matter that you cannot do experimental science with it, and they don't recognize that all they are doing is making up plausible scenarios and calling it science. They are so bullishly convinced about their own made-up scenarios and so confused about the role of the actual sciences (they really believe they have something to do with evolution) they are unable to recognize a BETTER scenario than their own, a more elegant explanation of the actual observed phenomenal world.
Faith,
Anaxamander was the 6th Century BCE prophet in PsiBond's evolutionist cult, who laid down the central cosmogonic article of faith which professes that all men arose into being from the holy carcasses of dead fish. (I oversimplify a bit. There are some bitter sectarian differences on whether or not the fish were holy prior to their demise).
I believe it was Christian scientist Franscesco Redi in the late 17th Century AD who first brought PsiBond's Anaxamanderian cosmogony into serious scientific difficulties when he used bell jars and dead fish to prove that dead fish do not become maggots and that maggots do not become people.
This serious assault upon Anaxamanderian cosmogony shook the religion of evolution to its core, and all manner of theological gymnastics have attempted to overcome it, mostly centered on either the dopey Dawkinsian literalist observation that there wasn't enough bell jars in the past to stop some of the dead fish from "evolving" and the Gouldian allegorists that claim Redi didn't use flesh from the correct species of fish in his experiments.
Evolution is a fascinating religion, really.
But it has no place in the realm of science.
You could write great comedy, Beamish, comedy with a point.
Faith,
Comedy? I was being serious.
PsiBond's laughable religious belief in fish becoming people is as old as it is ridiculous.
I usually don't mock the sacredly held beliefs of scientifically illiterate religious people, but I have to draw the line when neo-Anaxamanderians like PsiBond insist on calling their "complex workings of evolution" theology a product of serious scientific inquiry.
With religious zeal, you ridicule science by calling it religion, and at the same time, Faith, beamish, you pretend religion is science. Your inconsistency is consistent.
Some fish develop leg bones and wrist bones, some dinosaurs develop feathers, whale-like aquatic mammals develop fins, but all this evidence for transition is just coincidence in your religiously framed minds. Science explains the facts it accumulates and you seek to superficially explain them away. In the seriousness of your intent, there is unwitting comedy.
The genomes of humans and chimpanzees (phylogenetically, our closest living relatives), which have both been sequenced, are about 98% identical. God must have really liked the old chimpanzee blueprint, huh? According to scientific analysis, chimpanzees split off the phylogenetic tree from the genus Homo about 4 million years ago. By comparison, Homo sapiens diverged from Homo habilis about 2 million years ago. Creationists would probably tell us, from reading the Bible, humans and chimpanzees were separated at birth by a matter of minutes, though they couldn't show any birth certificates (from Hawaii, for example) for evidence.
Indeed, the evidence for transition can be explained away. For, if a train were to be spotted at point A and later at point B further down the track, you could invoke Zeno's Paradox and say that's impossible, or you could make the un(con)testable claim that God put the train at points A and B by separate acts of creation. In other words, the train's transition is an illusion. Alternately, you might try to make the claim that facile impressions of the train at A and at B were left in our minds by the trauma in our psyches incurred from the worldwide flood postulated in the Bible.
The Bible notwithstanding, the fossil record is the only direct source of information on the history of life. Fossilization is most likely to happen in aquatic environments, where the deposition of sediment and precipitation of minerals occur at the bottom of seas, lakes, and river estuaries. Remains that sink to the bottom can then turn into fossils, although the chance that this happens for a particular individual is extremely small. The fossil record is therefore very biased: marine organisms living in shallow seas, where sediments are continuously formed, have the best fossil record, and species that fly have the worst. In addition, the deposition of sediments may be interrupted, for example by a change of climate or by uplift of the seabed. For many types of organism, we have almost no fossil record; for others, the record is interrupted many times. This is inconsistent with a single global flood in historical times, for which empirical evidence is lacking.
To be a biblical literalist is to be a geocentrist. The Bible, the purported word of God, the supposedly supreme science textbook, says that the sun comes up each day in the east and goes down in the west; that is, the earth does not move. Is that what you believe? Faith? beamish? It also means that the earth was created first, before the sun, contrary to the conclusions of science. Do you believe that? Faith? beamish? If you read the Bible literally, you must believe that man was created last, on the sixth day, after the other creatures, in accordance with Genesis 1, and you must believe that man was created first, before the other creatures, in accordance with Genesis 2. Can you believe both? Must not a person be of two minds to do that? Faith? beamish? Perhaps we are not yet sufficiently evolved to accommodate the contradiction.
But you evade answering my questions. There really is no point in answering your crude creationist question since nothing will satisfy you folks or other creationists, nothing but a supernatural answer. One that posits a creator god, just like the one in the scripture you believe.
Concluded
I only hope this religiously-inspired contempt for science does not succeed in infecting the public schools, as it threatens to do, and cripple our children's intellectual growth, thereby damaging the competitiveness of the U. S. in science and technology.
Lead does not evolve into gold, nor water into wine, as unsophisticated creationists like to claim, for evolution to be true.
PsiBond,
But you evade answering my questions. There really is no point in answering your crude creationist question since nothing will satisfy you folks or other creationists, nothing but a supernatural answer. One that posits a creator god, just like the one in the scripture you believe.
Not so, at least for my part. I've been trying to get you, PsiBond, to release your fearful religious clutch upon your daemon-haunted world of Anaxamanderian cosmogonies and actually apply scientific methodology to your cultish dogmatic insistence that far back in your family geneology swims a fish. (On your mother's side or your father's side?)
I've already told you what would satisfactorily answer my demand for evidence that any species has ever given birth to a separate, different, new species. And that would be:
evidence that any species has ever actually given birth to a separate, different, new species
Can you show a "fish with wristbones" was hatched from eggs laid and fertilized by anything other than the same species of "fish with wristbones" that were also spawned by the same species of "fish with wristbones?"
No. You either can't show evidence for any species actually ever giving birth to another, different, new species as your pre-scientific Anaxamanderian theology presupposes and insists has occured - or, more likely out of fear of actual scientific scrutiny, you won't.
Now PsiBond, I've tried to be as respectful as I can be of your scientifically illiterate necromantic fossil rituals while patiently waiting for you to provide evidence that any species has ever given birth to a separate, different, new species.
To extend your clumsy theology's train analogy further, I want you to show me how a train that entered a nanometer long tunnel at point A became an airplane emerging at point B. It doesn't matter how long or how short the tunnel is, in fact you can remove the tunnel altogether. Because your primitive, scientifically illiterate religious beliefs hold that somewhere along that line the train became an airplane, fish became people, one species gave birth to a seperate, different, new species. That somewhere along the magical journey two fish, mating within their species, spawned something other than fish of the same species as the parents.
You're not missing "transitional fossils."
You're missing evidence of a transition entirely.
Quit begging the question and hand-waving and spouting your bizarre anti-scientific fish folk theology!
Show us evidence that any species has ever given birth to a separate, different, new species!
PB said: "With religious zeal, you ridicule science by calling it religion, and at the same time, Faith, beamish, you pretend religion is science. Your inconsistency is consistent."
I do wish you'd be careful how you characterize the arguments. Evolution is not science so ridiculing it is not ridiculing science but ridiculing a creed. I believe I've been very clear about the difference myself. And I've never said religion is science. What I've said is that if the Bible is God's word then whatever it says that impinges on evolution has to take precedence. It's a book of truth, not science, but if one KNOWS that God created Kinds all at one time then that has to be believed and everything else subordinated to it, including any other imaginative scenarios about how life began such as the current theory of Evolution. Surely you can follow the logic of this and acknowledge it. Again, evolution is merely an imaginative scenario it is not science, though it co-opts science to itself more's the pity.
"Some fish develop leg bones and wrist bones, some dinosaurs develop feathers, whale-like aquatic mammals develop fins, but all this evidence for transition is just coincidence in your religiously framed minds."
It's evidence for the creativity of God in my mind, or for possible unknown causes of deformities, or for simple misreading of the evidence. Your word "develops" is of course tendentious. You need to stick to simple facts. HAVING certain features implies nothing about how they came about, you are imposing your theory about that on the facts.
"Science explains the facts it accumulates and you seek to superficially explain them away. In the seriousness of your intent, there is unwitting comedy."
Science does indeed offer explanations, but these are all unprovable in the case of evolution, merely scenarios that fit the theory, and there is nothing logically against other scenarios being offered for the same facts, and my claim is that creationists have far better explanations for them. This IS the only way science can be conducted on one-time past events that cannot be subjected to replication type testing. It's all a matter of the most plausible scenario in the end. I find the scenarios of evolutionism to be ridiculous myself.
"The genomes of humans and chimpanzees (phylogenetically, our closest living relatives), which have both been sequenced, are about 98% identical. God must have really liked the old chimpanzee blueprint, huh?"
Similar bodies have similar blueprints, makes sense, no? Besides, that 2% difference is a real doozy.
PB continues: "According to scientific analysis, chimpanzees split off the phylogenetic tree from the genus Homo about 4 million years ago. By comparison, Homo sapiens diverged from Homo habilis about 2 million years ago. Creationists would probably tell us, from reading the Bible, humans and chimpanzees were separated at birth by a matter of minutes, though they couldn't show any birth certificates (from Hawaii, for example) for evidence."
You have no evidence for the whole idea of anything splitting off from something else. You have no real evidence for the age of the earth either, it's all the same kind of silly thinking Hutton came up with which was mentioned way back in this thread.
"Indeed, the evidence for transition can be explained away. For, if a train were to be spotted at point A and later at point B further down the track, you could invoke Zeno's Paradox and say that's impossible, or you could make the un(con)testable claim that God put the train at points A and B by separate acts of creation."
But there IS no track, that's the invention of evolutionists. There IS no time difference between the species, that's all part of the silly theory. You look at the layers of different kinds of rock all stacked up with different kinds of fossilized dead things in them and claim it represents the progression of time. Why the absolute absurdity of that claim isn't obvious to a reasonably bright person is very hard to fathom. It MUST be a religious desire to hold on to evolution that blinds you.
"In other words, the train's transition is an illusion."
The train is an illusion, the track is an illusion. There IS no transition, it's all an imaginative construct to explain a stack of layered rocks without a shred of real evidence.
"Alternately, you might try to make the claim that facile impressions of the train at A and at B were left in our minds by the trauma in our psyches incurred from the worldwide flood postulated in the Bible."
Facile impressions of the train and its track go back to faulty theorizing about layers of fossil-rich rocks a couple hundred years ago that evolutionists cling to as if it made sense.
"The Bible notwithstanding, the fossil record is the only direct source of information on the history of life."
There IS no "history of life" in the fossil record, but there is a record of the life forms that pre-existed the worldwide Flood. It was all laid down at one time in one catastrophic flood. All the life forms in the fossil record died at once.
PB continued, part 3:
"Fossilization is most likely to happen in aquatic environments, where the deposition of sediment and precipitation of minerals occur at the bottom of seas, lakes, and river estuaries."
There is nothing like the geologic column being formed at the bottoms of seas, lakes and river estuaries. We're talking layers of hardened sediments hundreds of feet deep in some cases, layered horizontally over huge swaths of geography. The carving out of the Grand Canyon makes it possible for us to see the depth and extent of these layers. It certainly did all occur in an "aquatic environment" but nothing like those we see forming anywhere on the earth now and in fact impossible on such a scale unless you postulate the gigantic scale of a worldwide Flood.
" Remains that sink to the bottom can then turn into fossils, although the chance that this happens for a particular individual is extremely small."
Funny how there are so MANY of them, many of the same type obviously killed at the same time and jumbled all together in layers yet. There are beds of fossilized dinosaur skeletons and parts thereof all over the earth. some very large beds. They died all at once together, there is no other reasonable explanation.
"The fossil record is therefore very biased: marine organisms living in shallow seas, where sediments are continuously formed, have the best fossil record,"
Show me a shallow sea bed where sediments have formed to the depth of the layers in the Grand Canyon and hardened and acquired other layers of different sediments above them. That is what would have to have happened a LOT to account for what we actually see in the geologic column. But it doesn't happen at all anywhere in present time. Clearly it was all formed in a one-time event.
"and species that fly have the worst."
They could have survived the Flood longer than others, that's why. They could have found high refuges for longer, and stayed in the air until their breath gave out too. There is some evidence that the upper layers of the original stack broke up and washed away as the flood drained too, so that we've lost the evidence of what was originally buried there. Most human remains should logically have been in those upper layers too.
"In addition, the deposition of sediments may be interrupted, for example by a change of climate or by uplift of the seabed."
Yes, but then the layering would not have been preserved in the amazingly consistent form we find it all over the earth. To get the number of layers that actually exist would require that many risings and fallings of the "seabed" and you really think you are going to get different sediments with each such event too? How does a seabed rise anyway? That's a pretty ridiculous idea to begin with.
"For many types of organism, we have almost no fossil record; for others, the record is interrupted many times."
Well, a Flood can't be expected to make precise distinctions, although it did a remarkable job of sorting nevertheless, thanks to the natural layers and currents in sea water.
"This is inconsistent with a single global flood in historical times, for which empirical evidence is lacking."
I've shown above how it is far more consistent with a single global flood than with the sort of jerryrigging you have to impute to evolution. And again, empirical evidence is lacking for BOTH theories because you cannot have empirical evidence for the past as I've said over and over. It's all a matter of the most reasonable explanation. The Flood wins.
Thank you for sticking to truly scientific matter in this post, psi bond. That's where the discussion should have been all along.
But then you get off into false stuff about the Bible:
"To be a biblical literalist is to be a geocentrist. The Bible, the purported word of God, the supposedly supreme science textbook, says that the sun comes up each day in the east and goes down in the west; that is, the earth does not move. Is that what you believe? Faith? beamish? It also means that the earth was created first, before the sun, contrary to the conclusions of science. Do you believe that? Faith? beamish? If you read the Bible literally, you must believe that man was created last, on the sixth day, after the other creatures, in accordance with Genesis 1, and you must believe that man was created first, before the other creatures, in accordance with Genesis 2. Can you believe both? Must not a person be of two minds to do that? Faith? beamish? Perhaps we are not yet sufficiently evolved to accommodate the contradiction."
You have no idea how to understand the Bible and it's usually useless trying to explain it to an unbeliever. Genesis 2 is not a chronology. Genesis 1 is. Genesis 2 is a focusing in on the elements of creation pertinent to man and his fall.
The sun DOES come up in the east and go down in the west and the Bible writes about such things from the human point of view. There is nothing inconsistent about such descriptions with the actual scientific facts.
"But you evade answering my questions. There really is no point in answering your crude creationist question since nothing will satisfy you folks or other creationists, nothing but a supernatural answer. One that posits a creator god, just like the one in the scripture you believe."
What questions? Perhaps this is directed to Beamish?
I generally do not answer questions or challenges about the Bible because they are irrelevant. I stick to a few straightforward declarations such as that God made living things "after their own kind" and all the attempts to discredit the Biblical witness in general are a red herring and a waste of time.
But again thank you for focusing on some of the true scientific meat of the matter.
Reading too fast. Should have said it's most likely that marine life of any sort would be best represented in the fossil record if the explanation is a worldwide Flood. And marine life does in fact appear in the oddest places all over the earth, in mountains and deserts and oh just everywhere. And that giant sea scorpion was found in Germany. The sort of thing you'd expect from Noah's Flood.
The other thing I misread I should have answered this way:
Well, a Flood can't be expected to fill in all the fossil gaps required by evolutionists to prove their theory.
beamish, you don't answer my questions. So why should I answer the unsophisticated question you keep asking?
To be a biblical literalist is to be a geocentrist. The Bible, the purported word of God, the supposedly supreme science textbook, says that the sun comes up each day in the east and goes down in the west; that the sun can be made to stand still over the earth. That is, the earth does not move. Is that what you believe? beamish?
It also means that the earth was created first, before the sun, contrary to the conclusions of science. Do you believe that? beamish?
If you read the Bible literally, you must believe that man was created last, on the sixth day, after the other creatures, in accordance with Genesis 1, and you must believe that man was created first, before the other creatures, in accordance with Genesis 2. Can you believe both? Must not a person be of two minds to do that? beamish? Perhaps we are not yet sufficiently evolved to accommodate the contradiction.
Do you believe that creationism should replace evolution in the biology classrooms in the public schools, or be given equal time?
Should the public schools teach that humans did not descend from apes because no one has an ape-like ancestor in his family tree?
Should they teach that modern biology, based on the theory of evolution, is wrong and should be discredited?
As I said, Faith, you and beamish don't explain things; you superficially explain them away.
A case in point:
Faith: You have no idea how to understand the Bible and it's usually useless trying to explain it to an unbeliever. Genesis 2 is not a chronology. Genesis 1 is. Genesis 2 is a focusing in on the elements of creation pertinent to man and his fall.
Your haughty authoritarian attitude claiming to have a superior understanding of the Bible is not justified by the literal facts. Both Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 have chronological references concerning the order of creation. Genesis 1 clearly states that man (both male and female) was created on the sixth day, after the plants and other creatures. On the other hand, Genesis 2 clearly says that, when there were no plants on the earth, "the Lord God formed the man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being (Gen 2:7)." (That is, the man was created directly from inanimate matter. Do you believe that? It's genome was that of the dust of the ground, not of a common ancestor with chimpanzees.) "Now [note the use of an adverb signifying chronology] the Lord God had planted a garden in the east, in Eden (Gen 2:8)."
Subsequently, God said that man needs a helper. So: "Now the Lord God had formed out of the ground all the beasts of the field and all the birds of the air. (Gen: 2: 19)" and gave them to the man to name them. However, God saw that there was no suitable helper for man among these creatures. So God put man to sleep and out of one of his ribs he created woman. Thus, there is a clear chronological progression described in Genesis 2 from man to plants to other animals and finally to woman. This last creature was not created at the same time as the man, contrary to what Genesis 1 indicates.
The consequence of a literal reading of the Bible is that both of these mutually contradictory stories must be believed. The "ultimate" science textbook teaches that man and woman were created together on the final day of creation (Genesis 1), and, also, that man alone was created in the beginning, from the dust of the ground, needing a helpmate. a woman, made at the end of creation (Genesis 2).
Do you believe that these stories and creationism should replace evolution in the biology classrooms in the public schools?
To take another example:
"The genomes of humans and chimpanzees (phylogenetically, our closest living relatives), which have both been sequenced, are about 98% identical. God must have really liked the old chimpanzee blueprint, huh?"
Similar bodies have similar blueprints, makes sense, no? Besides, that 2% difference is a real doozy.
Many vertebrate species have similar body plans. In fact, transplantation of organs from animals such as pigs into humans (xenotransplantation) has been considered to alleviate the shortage of organs for transplant. But the genetic difference is greater than that between humans and chimpanzees. Within the human species, very similar genomes indicate parent-child or other close family relationships.
Socially-learned cultural behavior thought to be unique to humans is also found among chimpanzee colonies, scientists at the University of Liverpool have found. The scientists have discovered that variations in behavior are due to chimpanzees migrating to other colonies, proving that they build their cultures in a similar way to humans. Since creationists deny evolution at or above the species level, two organisms that are 98% identical genetically must be members of the same species.
Faith, beamish:
Religious needs of evangelicals and Protestant fundamentalists should not be allowed to shape public school education.
Even if we had no graded intermediates in the fossil record, as we do with the foraminiferans, the general features of the record are barely comprehensible except in the light of evolution. Although the fossil record before the Cambrian era is fragmentary, there is evidence for the remains of bacteria and related single-celled organisms going back more than 3.5 billion years ago. Much later on, there are remains of more advanced (eukaryote) cells, but still no evidence for multicellular organisms. Organisms made up of simple clusters of cells appear only 800 million years ago (MYA), at a time of environmental crisis, when the earth was largely covered with ice. About 700-550 MYA, there is evidence for soft-bodied, multicellular animal life. Animal remains associated with hard skeletons only only become abundant in the Cambrian rocks, about 550 MYA. By the end of the Cambrian, about 500 MYA, there is evidence for nearly all major animal groups., including primitive fish-like vertebrates that lack jaws, resembling modern lampreys.
All life until this time is associated with marine deposits, and the only plant remains are algae, which lack the vessels that multicellular land plants use for fluid transport. By 440 MYA, there is evidence for freshwater life, followed by fossil spores that imply he existence of the first land plants; shark-like fish with jaws appear in the sea. In the Devonian (400-360 MYA), freshwater and land remains become much more common and diverse. There is evidence for primitive insects, spiders, mites, and millipedes, as well as simple vascular plants and fungi. Jawed fish with bony skeletons become common, including lobe-finned fishes similar in structure to the first salamander-like amphibians that appear at the end of the Devonian. These are the first land vertebrates.
During the next geological era, the Carboniferous (360-280 MYA), land life-forms become abundant and diverse. The coal deposits, which give this period its name, are the fossilized remains of tree-like plants that grew in tropical swamps, but these are similar to contemporary horse-tails and ferns and are unrelated to modern conifers and deciduous trees. Remains of primitive reptiles, the first vertebrates to become fully independent of water, are found at the end of the Carboniferous.
In the Permian (280-250 MYA), there is a great diversification of reptiles. Some of these have anatomical features that increasingly resemble those of mammals (the mammal-like reptiles). Some of the modern groups of insects, such as bugs and beetles, appear. The Permian ends with the largest set of extinctions seen in the fossil record, in which some previously dominant groups such as trilobites disappear completely, many other groups are nearly wiped out. In the recovery that follows, a variety of new forms appear, both on the land and in the sea. Plants similar to modern conifers and cycads appear in the Triassic (250-200 MYA). Dinosaurs, turtles, and primitive crocodiles appear; right at the end, the first true mammals are found. These are distinguished from their precursors by having a lower jaw consisting of a single bone connecting to the bone directly (three bones that form the connection in reptile skulls have evolved into the small internal bones of the mammalian ear). Bony fishes similar to modern forms appear in the sea. In the Jurassic (200-140 MYA), mammals diversify somewhat, but life on land is still dominated by the reptiles, especially dinosaurs. Flying reptiles and Archaeopteryx appear. Flies and termites appear for the first time, as do crabs and lobsters in the sea. Only in the Cretaceous (140-65 MYA) did flowering plants evolve----the last major group of organisms to evolve.
Continued
All the major modern groups of insects are found by this time. Pouched mammals (marsupials) appear in the middle of the Cretaceous, and forms similar to modern placental mammals are found towards the end. Dinosaurs are still abundant, though in decline at the end of the period.
The Cretaceous ends with the most famous of major extinction events, associated with the impact of an asteroid that landed in Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula. All the dinosaurs (except birds) disappear, along with many other forms once common on the land and in the sea. This is followed by the Tertiary period, which extends until the beginning of the great Ice Ages, about 2 MYA. During the first divisions of the Tertiary, between 65 and 38MYA, the main groups of placental mammals appear. At first, these are mostly similar to modern insectivores such as shrews, but some become fairly distinct by the end of this period (whales and bats, for instance). Most of the main groups of birds are found, as well as modern types of invertebrates, and all major flowering plant groups except grasses. Bony fishes of an essentially modern type are abundant. Between 38 and 26 MYA, grasslands appear, associated with grazing horse-like animals with three toes (instead of the single toe of modern horses). Primitive apes also appear. Between 26 and 7 MYA, prairie grasslands are widespread in North America, and horses with short lateral toes and high-crowned teeth are found. Various ungulates such as pigs, deer, and camels appear, together with elephants. Apes and monkeys become more diverse, especially in Africa, Between 7 and 2 MYA, marine life has an essentially modern aspect, although many forms living then are now extinct. The first remains of apes with some distinctly human features appear in the period. The end of the Tertiary, from 2 MYA to 10,000 years ago, sees a series of Ice Ages. Most animals and plants are essentially modern in form. Between the end of the last Ice Age 10,000 years ago, and the present, humans become the dominant land animal, and many large mammal species become extinct. There is some fossil evidence for evolutionary change over this period, such as the evolution of dwarf forms of various large mammals on islands.
The fossil record thus suggests that life originated in the sea over three billion years ago, and that, for more than a billion years only single-celled organisms related to bacteria existed. This is exactly what is expected on an evolutionary model; the evolution of the machinery needed to translate the genetic code into protein sequences, and the complex organization of the simplest cell must have required many steps. The late appearance in the record of evidence for eukaryotic cells with their substantially more complex organization compared with prokaryotes, is also consistent with evolution. The same applies to multicellular organisms, whose development from a single cell requires elaborate signaling mechanisms to control growth and differentiation: These could not have evolved before single-celled organisms existed. Once simple multicellular forms evolved, it is understandable that they rapidly diversified into numerous forms, adapted to different modes of life, as occurred in the Cambrian.
The fact that life was exclusively marine for an immense period is also understandable from an evolutionary perspective. Early in the earth’s history, the geological evidence shows that there was very little oxygen in the atmosphere. The consequent lack of protection from ultraviolet radiation by atmospheric ozone, which is formed from oxygen, would have prohibited life on land and even in fresh water. Once sufficient oxygen had built up as a result of the photosynthetic activity of early bacteria and algae, this barrier was removed, and the possibility of the invasion of the land opened up.
There is evidence for an increase in atmospheric oxygen levels during the period leading up to the Cambrian, which may have permitted the evolution of larger and more complex animals.
Concluded
Similarly, the appearance of flying insects and vertebrates after the emergence of life on land makes sense, since it is unlikely that true flying animals could evolve from purely aquatic forms.
Psi bond, How disappointing. I had SO hoped you'd be converted by our brilliant arguments by now. Instead you are still blindly repeating the fantasies that have developed from the ridiculous idea that a stack of rocks demonstrates a progression in time.
As for the Bible, I said I try to avoid discussing it with unbelievers but what I said stands.
As for what they teach in the schools, I believe Christians should remove their children from the public schools completely for many reasons.
Have a nice day.
Oh, and creationists teach SCIENCE, not creationism as such, which is more than can be said for the evolutionists who insist on teaching evolutionism which is not science.
PsiBond,
beamish, you don't answer my questions. So why should I answer the unsophisticated question you keep asking?
I've already answered your questions. I believe the Biblical creation story to be an allegory, not a literal play-by-play account.
There are two crucial reasons you should answer the "unsophisticated" question I keep asking:
1. You believe your neo-Anaxamanderian interpretation of the fish-begat-people myth to be a literal scientific truth, not a religious allegory
2. You claim that science can show that any species has and potentially could give birth to a separate, different, new species.
I want to have that scientific discussion.
You want to chant "ooga booga" and burn incense and hope I'm convinced of the truth of yout fish folk fantasies.
Now, are you ever going to address the central issue your bizarre religious sentiments must overcome, that an organism within a species (by definition) can not mate with or give birth to anything other than another organism of the same species? That no species of fish has ever spawned anything but offspring that are the same species of fish and no human has ever given birth to anything other than another human?
You claim your primitive pre-scientific babbling tells you that the impossible happened - that a species gave birth to another, different, new species, and that this miracle has occured some 1.5 Million times resulting in the rich biodiversity of our planet.
Having over 1.5 Million species of organisms to chose from is a fairly large pool of representation to draw just one example of a species giving birth to another, different, new species, as your religion professes to be true.
Seems to me for all your pious evolutionist bluster, you would have something of actual scientific merit to show for your fundamentalist neo-Anaxamanderian ranting besides a crackpot necromancy ritual and delusions of fish in your family tree.
As for what should be taught in schools (if we absolutely must have public schools, a position I vehemently disagree with), schools should teach science in science class, and evolution and Biblical creation in comparative religion class.
Now, are you going to continue to ooga booga, or are you actually going to show evidence that any species has ever given birth to another, different, new species?
Are you waiting for me to ask this question a magic number of times?
"As for what should be taught in schools (if we absolutely must have public schools, a position I vehemently disagree with), schools should teach science in science class, and evolution and Biblical creation in comparative religion class."
Exactly. Much better said than I said it.
I do have to admit, however, Beamish, that I don't really get the point of the question you are asking psi bond. In a certain sense they believe every birth is a step in evolution.
Faith,
The point of the request I've repeatedly made of PsiBond to provide evidence that one species gave birth to another species gets to the heart of the evolutionist's mythology. Evolutionists claim that humans and other organism have a genetic ancestry that jumps the species barrier. PsiBond believes that somewhere far back in the PsiBond family geneology, some species other than a homo sapiens, some species other than the human species, gave birth to the first human offspring PsiBond ancestors, and before that some other species gave birth to that species, and so on back to amphibian and aquatic life. PsiBond's neo-Anaxamanderian belief in holy fish carcasses and maggots that grow into men differs from Anaxamander's pre-scientific groping only in that he believes all land animals geneologically descend from a fish ancestor, not just humans.
As you know, science defines against a species giving birth to another. Two cats mate, their offspring are going to be cats. A cat and a giraffe can't have offspring. Chimpanzees always give birth to chimpanzees.
I want to see the miracle. I want to see one species of organism give birth to a seperate, different, new species as evolutionists claim can happen and has happened.
Trying to prove Mr. Mustard killed Mr. Boddy in the Observatory with a candlestick is pointless if there's no proof Mr. Boddy ever existed.
C'mon, beamish, if you are going to freak out over Anaximander like some fish out of water, at least spell his name correctly (in the ancient Greek, the third vowel is not alpha, but iota, the ninth letter of the Greek alphabet). Anaximander was a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher of the sixth century BCE (a contemporary of Thales, who is considered the founding father of Greek philosophy) who speculated about the origin of human beings when natural science was not a well-developed discipline and was scarcely distinct from philosophy. He taught that the earth is cylindrical in shape. He did, however, assert that nature is governed by laws and that physical forces, rather than supernatural means, create order in the universe. Nonetheless, his ancient speculations have no direct bearing on the scientific validity of Darwinian evolution.
Once again, you deride science as religion while dignifying your religion's pre-scientific pre-conceptions with the respectability of science.
As for what should be taught in schools (if we absolutely must have public schools, a position I vehemently disagree with), schools should teach science in science class, and evolution and Biblical creation in comparative religion class.
Your cryptic answer naturally raises a number of unanswered questions. (I doubt that most high schools have classes in comparative religion.) What should be taught in biology classes about the origin of species? That is, how should the biology teacher explain the diversity of species of living organisms on the earth? Should the fossil record be introduced and the students be told what those who have devoted their professional lives to its scientific study have concluded about it? In your view, should we prohibit biology teachers from teaching the widely accepted theory (Darwinian evolution) that provides a unifying explanation for the diversity of life on earth?
You said you accept the age of the earth as being 4.54 billion years. What should be taught about the age of the earth? Should it be omitted from the curriculum and from what teachers are allowed to answer?
Most important: If, as you say, albeit without any explanation, science should be taught in science class, then who decides what is science? Is science what is consistent with scripture, as in Galileo's time. four centuries ago?
... an organism within a species (by definition [the intuitive classical definition of species]) can not mate with or give birth to anything other than another organism of the same species?
You have a misconceived notion about evolution, one that is common among unsophisticated creationists. To put it simply and tersely, biological evolution acts on populations, not on individuals. Which means evolution occurs, usually gradually, as the allele frequencies of an interbreeding population change, as a consequence of a number of natural mechanisms affecting genetic variation borne in individuals and persistent in populations. Changes produced in any one generation are normally small; differences accumulate with each generation and can, over sufficient time, cause substantial changes in the population, a process that can result in the emergence of new species.
You declare that, according to your reading, the stories in the Bible are allegories. It turns out the story of creation given in Genesis is a classic allegory for the intellectual sin of taking religious pronouncements as real science.
The flat earth of Genesis is a pretty good metaphor for the potentially powerful human intellect flattened by overbearing religious faith.
Faith: Psi bond, How disappointing.
Of course, real science is disappointing to someone who thinks reading the Bible is doing scientific research. Real science does not consist of finding proof for "God's words" concerning the natural world.
I had SO hoped you'd be converted by our brilliant arguments by now. Instead you are still blindly repeating the fantasies that have developed from the ridiculous idea that a stack of rocks demonstrates a progression in time.
They don't demonstrate a linear progression in time. They represent a slow beginning of a billion years or so, followed by tentative advances, and then abundance and diversification of species, which is followed by virtual mass extinction, and this occurs in unpredictable repetitive cycles. Your arguments, which flatly dismiss the overwhelming evidence of this, are brilliant only in your fantasies.
Nor are your sanctimonious arguments irrefutable. They reiterate familiar creationist talking points.
As for the Bible, I said I try to avoid discussing it with unbelievers but what I said stands.
Haughty, huffy, you tout your belief as a way of trying to pulling rank. It is, it seems, what you fall back on when logic fails you. If you don't discuss the Bible with those who do not share your belief, you shouldn't discuss your creationism with them either.
But it's too late: The fact is, you did discuss it with me. You flatly denied that there is any conflict in creating man on the last day of creation and also on the first day . You denied any conflict between creating woman together with man and also on the last day as an auxiliary helpmate for man, who appeared at the beginning of creation. You insist the Bible must be read literally as God's word, but you squirm at accepting the irrational consequences of doing so.
What you said stands, which is why Bible reading is not a science and not science. You make the interpretation that the description of the sun coming up in the east and going down in the west is from man's perspective. However, you contradict yourself because that is not what the Bible literally says. It literally says that the sun physically moves across the earth from east to west, which means it can be made to stand still, if necessary, with respect to the earth. It is the geocentric system in which the earth and not the sun was posited as the prior creation, the traditional literal interpretation of scripture for which Galileo, one of the first great scientists, when he contradicted it, was forced by the Church under threat of torture to recant and put under house arrest for the rest of his life. Real science was heretical in the early seventeenth century, as well.
As for what they teach in the schools, I believe Christians should remove their children from the public schools completely for many reasons.
Removing all Christian children from the public schools, which are funded by our taxes, is not a practical political solution. Most creationists have persistently pushed for getting evolution removed from the biology classrooms or impugned in teaching materials as not a valid scientific theory. My question, which you have evaded, was to ask whether you support those efforts. Do you?
Have a nice day
In a theological argument more portentous than the old argument of angels on pinpoints, many earnest people of faith had wondered whether Adam had a navel. This vexatious issue (whether to assume God gave Adam a counterfeit navel to stress his connection and continuity with future men) caused many painters in earlier centuries to literally hedge and cover Adam's belly.
Sorry, I couldn't be your convert and thus make your day. I guess I'm just too damned rational.
Oh, and creationists teach SCIENCE, not creationism as such, which is more than can be said for the evolutionists who insist on teaching evolutionism which is not science.
Like all scientists or forensic experts, evolutionary biologists draw reasonable inferences from empirical evidence. By contrast, creationists take their bible as the primary source of evidence about the natural world, and make doctrinaire assertions on the basis of it. Creationism is pseudoscience.
Faith, beamish:
The recurrent phenomena of the emergence of abundant and diverse forms of life followed by their wholesale extinction (as with the trilobites and dinosaurs) or their reduction to just one or a few surviving forms (like the coelacanths) makes sense in terms of evolution, whose mechanisms have no foresight and cannot guarantee that their products can survive sudden large environmental changes. Similarly, the rapid diversification of groups after the colonization of a new habitat (as in the invasion of the land), or after the extinction of a dominant rival group (as with the mammals after the disappearance of the dinosaurs), is expected on evolutionary principles.
The interpretation of the fossil record in terms of biological knowledge therefore follows the same principle of uniformitarianism that is applied by geologists to the history of the structure of the earth. That is to say, the fossil evidence might have shown patterns that falsify evolution. The great evolutionist and geneticist J.B.S. Haldane is alleged to have answered the question of what observation would cause him to abandon his belief in evolution by saying: “A pre-Cambrian rabbit.” So far, no such fossil has been found.
It IS disappointing that you have completely ignored the important points I've made. I doubt you even bothered to read them. You much prefer your posturing.
Evolutionism is NOT science. Nor is creationism. That is why it should not be taught in science classes. Theories about he origins of life are speculative and belong in some other category, not science, that was the point and a point you refuse even to think about for half a second.
No, what the establishment thinks about origins should NOT be taught as science. They are wrong and deluded. But the entire theory with all its claims and all the supposed evidence for it should be taught along with creationism as just that, a theory about origins that cannot be proved but is necessarily speculative because it's about the unprovable past, and without all the usual tendentious co-opting of terms and obfuscating of facts it depends on when allowed to pursue its own assumptions. You won't think about any of THAT either.
No, I do not support the creationist efforts to get evolutionism removed from or creationism added to public school curriculum. There was no evasion, I simply thought what I said was obvious. I don't care how "practical" it is to remove children from the public schools. It is worth paying taxes twice over not to have to be subjected to the public schools. And with prayer God would ease the burden because He'd support the effort.
You aren't going to find a "pre-Cambrian rabbit" because all such land animals would not be found at the depths of the Flood effects -- which is all the "pre-Cambrian" really is, but near the top.
You keep imposing your own ideas about how creationists think on us. We do not use the Bible as a science text and everything you say about that is rubbish and a huge waste of time.
The Bible gives a few guidelines to historical events that make evolution impossible. Period. But it turns out that the speculations about the disposition of the fossil record and the rocks are far more reasonably explained on the basis of those premises than evolutionist assumptions. This is going to turn out to be true in the end but apparently you will have prided yourself on denying it, and really, not even thinking about it, closing your eyes and ears and listening only to your own prejudices, so long it's going to come as a shock to you.
As for what science is, it's biology, genetics, geology, chemistry, physics, etc., all the stuff we were all taught in school, but without the evolutionism. That belongs in a separate category, and not science.
Here's an article about ancient spiders I just ran across and it raises a question I've often pondered without having a way to answer it.
"Spooky spider-like critters were already roaming the Earth long before dinosaurs. And now, with the help of a new imaging technique, the arachnids can be seen as they appeared to their early insect prey about 300 million years ago."
https://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/60-second-science/post.cfm?id=ct-scans-of-fossils-enable-3-d-mode-2009-08-06
The question is to what extent if at all creatures found in the lower strata are ALSO found in higher strata. If evolution is true, shouldn't the same kinds of creatures that continue to live today also be equally represented throughout the geologic column? Why should there be any fewer spiders, either of the ancient or the modern kind, buried along with the dinosaurs?
The article is written as if they occur at separate periods of time. "Already roaming the earth long before the dinosaurs." OK but shouldn't they ALSO be roaming the earth along WITH the dinosaurs?
That is, all the "early" primitive life forms that continue to exist in various forms today -- sea creatures of all kinds, fish, amphibians, insects etc., should co-exist in prodigious numbers ALONG WITH all the other life forms up the geologic column IF EVOLUTION IS TRUE.
I have the impression from the way evolutionists write that this may not be the case, that in fact at each supposed time period ONLY certain kinds of life exist or they exist in profusion only in those time periods, whereas in reality they SHOULD exist in as much profusion in later time periods as well, IF EVOLUTION IS TRUE.
There is no way to research this that I know of because it's not one of the questions an evolutionist would ask. Most questions that impinge on evolution are difficult to research anyway because they embed all their studies in the terminology of the theory. Finding a pure description of phenomena is almost impossible.
Anyway, if psi bond knows where I might find the answer to this question I'd really appreciate it.
Let me say it again in case it isn't quite clear.
I would like to know EXACTLY what is represented in ALL supposed "time periods" --ALL the kinds of fossils represented, and the approximate proportions in which they are found in those rocks. The usual lists contain only the types of life evolutionists define as belonging to that particular era. If this is really what is actually found at these levels, and earlier life forms aren't represented either at all or in anywhere near their normal representation on the planet now, I think this goes a long way to discrediting the evolution theory.
PsiBond,
I tried to accomodate your scientifically illiterate faith in fish becoming people by asking for an individual example of any species giving birth to another, different, new species.
If there's a population of a species giving birth to another, different, new species, then surely one among that number answers my question. If, as your bizarre religious convictions state, organisms have "evolved" from one species into another, then you can show me a generation of a organism giving birth to another organism that is not the same species as itself or its parents.
But, have it your way.
Show me evidence of a population of species giving birth to another, different, new population of species.
I apologize for mispelling the name of the founder of your cult.
Anaximander. Got it. Please extend my deepest and most sincere regrets to any of your fellow impenetrably stupid co-religionists than may have been outraged by my percieved blasphemy.
I really would like you to set your fish people religion aside and join the science discussion here.
Now, show me evidence of a population of species giving birth to another, different, new population of species.
beamish, you blemish your gravitas when you doggedly insist that Darwinian evolution is a religious cult started by Anaximander in the sixth century BCE. In fact, you have inflicted on yourself a humongous blemish, beamish, by joining a religious cult that seeks to prohibit the teaching of evolution in the public schools and promotes a religiously-motivated pseudoscientific alternative to replace it. Your blemish, beamish, is aggravated by your delirious diatribes declaring that the scientific theory of evolution is not science.
Does your hostility toward evolution include banishing books on evolution from school libraries or from their science sections? If you demand that science be taught in science classes, you cannot escape the teaching of explanatory scientific theories, not just in biology, that contravene the letter of the Bible. Thus, you cannot escape autocratic decision-making defining science. If consistency with the Bible is to be the guide, it will set science in America back to pre-enlightenment times before Galileo did his groundbreaking work. To descend into Fox News cant----You're Not Going To Believe This: The most pressing scientific issue may then become whether or not Adam had a navel.
What should be taught about the age of the earth, in your view. beamish? That is, what should a child be told who asks what science knows about this?
Faith: It IS disappointing that you have completely ignored the important points I've made. I doubt you even bothered to read them. You much prefer your posturing.
It is disappointing that you have nothing new to offer that creationists haven't argued countless times before. At the same time, I have referenced a mass of scientific evidence and reasonable inferences therefrom that you haughtily dismiss as "posturing".
Faith, you oppose the theory of evolution chiefly on the grounds that it is speculation. But creating theories to explain natural phenomena is what science does and is good at. Many people in the science professions have devoted their lives to discovering what the evidence means and developing a comprehensive theory to explain it all.
Nonetheless, you want evolution banned from the public schools because it involves speculation. The truth is. the sciences that you said you approve for the schools contain speculation, too. Astronomers have theories about the evolution of the solar system, in which the earth is one of eight planets spun off from the sun, which came into being first, contrary to what Genesis literally says. They have predicted in speculation and confirmed by observations the existence of extrasolar planets revolving around stars similar to our sun.
Speculation and the formation of hypothesis are what drive science forward, not religious faith or looking for answers in the Bible. The green plants could not have existed before the sun, despite what the Bible tells literal fundamentalists,
You evidently don't understand, Faith, that the diversity of living organisms and the origin of species are central questions in biology. To forbid the teaching of the answers that scientists have painstakingly developed is to eviscerate biology education. It seriously risks endangering students' appreciation of science for the sake of the religious sensitivities of a reactionary few, a situation which is virtually unknown in the European schools.
If rabbits were abundant, and were fossilized as a result of Noah's Flood, they should be found in all geological layers, including the earliest ones, from which only simple one-celled organisms have been found. A global flood cannot explain the sorting of fossils observed in the geological record. This was recognized even prior to the proposal of evolutionary theory.
In addition to the fossil record, another important body of facts that makes sense only in terms of evolution comes from the distribution of living creatures over space rather than time. One of the most striking examples of this involves the flora and fauna of oceanic islands, such as the Galapagos and Hawaiian islands, which geological evidence shows were formed by volcanic action and were never connected to a continent. According to the theory of evolution, the present-day inhabitants of these islands must be the descendents of individuals who were able to cross the vast distances separating the newly formed islands from the nearest inhabited land. This puts several restrictions on what we are likely to see. First, the difficulty of colonization of a remote piece of newly formed land means that few species will be able to establish themselves. Second, only types of organism that have characteristics that enable them to cross hundreds or thousands of miles of ocean can become established. Third, even in the groups that are represented, there will be a highly random element to which species are present, because of the small number of species that arrive on the island. Finally, evolution on such remote islands will produce many forms that are found nowhere else.
These expectations are strikingly verified by the evidence. Oceanic islands do tend to have relatively few species in any major group, compared with continents or offshore islands with comparable climates. The types of organisms found on oceanic islands, before human introductions, are wildly unrepresentative of those found elsewhere. For example, reptiles and birds are usually present, whereas terrestrial mammals and amphibians are consistently missing. In New Zealand, there were no terrestrial mammals before human occupation, but there were two species of bats. This reflects the ability of bats to cross large bodies of salt water. The rampant spread of many species after human introduction shows clearly that the local conditions were not unsuitable for their establishment. But even among major groups of animals and plants whole groups are missing, whereas others are disproportionately represented. Thus, on the Galapagos islands, there are just over 20 species of land birds, of which 14 are finches, the famous finches described by Darwin in his account of his voyage around the world in HMS Beagle. This is quite unlike the situation elsewhere, in which finches form only a small fraction of the land bird fauna. It is exactly what one would expect if there were only a small number of species of original bird colonists, one of which was a species of finch that became the ancestor of the present-day species.
As the evolutionary view would predict, oceanic islands provide many examples of forms that are unique to them, but nevertheless show affinities to mainland forms. For example, 34% of the plant species found on the Galapagos islands are found nowhere else.
Darwin’s finches have a much greater variety of beak sizes and shapes than is usual among finches (which are normally seed-eaters with large, deep beaks), and these are clearly adapted to different modes of food gathering. Some of these are highly unusual, such as the habit of the sharp-beaked ground finch Geospiza difficilis of pecking the rear ends of nesting seabirds and drinking their blood. The woodpecker finch Cactospiza pallida uses twigs or cactus spines to extract insects from dead wood.
Concluded
Even more spectacular examples of rampant evolution are found on other groups of oceanic islands. For example, the number of species of the fruitfly Drosophila on Hawaii exceeds that found in the rest of the world, and they are amazingly diverse in body size, wing patterns, and feeding habits. These observations are explicable if the colonist ancestors of these island species found themselves in environments free from established competitor species. This situation would permit the evolution of traits that adapted the colonists to new ways of life, and allowed diversification of an ancestral species into several descendant species. Despite the unusual modifications of structure and behavior found in Darwin’s finches, studies of their DNA show that these species have a relatively recent origin about 2.3 million years ago, and are closely related to species on the mainland.
PsiBond,
I have no hostility towards science whatsoever. I have been mocking your delusional religious belief that some generation of human populations in the past had non-human parentage and that some generations of populations in the past within all seperate species also had parentage from a different species and the family line of all organisms begins with Anaximander's holy fish.
This faith belief should be taught in a course on ancient mythology or comparative religion, leaving to biological sciences the study of anatomical structures and functions within living organisms.
Anf leaving the guesswork of assigning a species name and unobserved / unobservable biological behaviors of a prehistoric corpse's skeleton found petrified in rock to the kids in the previously mentioned comparative religion class. Especially those students who piously grab a pig's tooth and necromantically contact their great-grand ancestor.
I'm not interested in your comparative religion class, PsiBond. Show me some science.
Show me evidence of a species giving birth to a separate, different, new species.
Show me evidence of a population of species giving birth to a separate, different, new population of species.
Show me the inferences made by your theology of evolution are based on testable scientific observations. If you're tired of me mocking your scientifically illiterate neo-Anaximanderian cult, stop bringing its beliefs up in a science discussion.
Psi bond, What you are calling scientific evidence for evolution is mostly the usual evolutionist imagined scenario, not evidence of any sort at all, and then when you do produce evidence, it is not evidence of evolution but of normal variation within a species, wrongly dubbed "microevolution" as if there were a macroevolution, which does not exist. None of the evidence for microevolution is evidence for anything BUT microevolution.
You don't address anything I've written, I doubt you even understand it. You are simply repeating the same old evolutionist garbage I've already answered. This standard variation with species is completely expected by anyone who knows anything about genetics and isn't blinded by evolutionist fantasies.
You get different phenotypes when the genetic potential is reduced, whether by natural selection or simply by the selection brought about by one part of a population migrating away from the parent population. Again, it is not evolution, it is standard variation within the species. Species have a great genetic capacity to creatively modify that is built into the genome. You scorn the cheetah example but that's simply a standard example of what happens at the extreme of such genetic reduction -- a remarkably adapted phenotype with a sharply reduced and evolutionarily dead-ended genotype. Try THINKING about these things instead of just hand-waving them away.
By the way, the ability to traverse huge distances is not necessary if the colonization of the volcanic islands occurred close to the breakup of Pangaea -- and volcanic action would have been a major contributor to that tectonic shift. Whatever made it to the islands would of course populate the place, and if other kinds of animals didn't, well they didn't. I see nothing about that requiring special explanation.
The sorting actually seen is ONLY explainable by the Flood, certainly not by your jerryrigged scenarios with sea beds rising and falling as if on a hydraulic lift. You will not THINK, psi bond, just THINK and stop parroting the evolutionist garbage that they pile on you.
And please get what I say correct. I did not say I do not want evolution taught in the public schools. I want the public schools to be completely disbanded and evolution to be taught as what it is, an unprovable theory that has less going for it than the unprovable creationist theory.
My my, you do get exercised over nothing. The children will all learn evolution, only it won't be presented as dogma for a change, and they will be able to decide if they believe it or not. Which of course you were never permitted, nor I. We were given the Evo dogma and all other ideas scorned, and all you are doing is repeating that dogma.
Diversity is EASILY explained by normal genetic variation caused by various selection events, origins is pure speculation of NO practical importance to science at all. It belongs in the category of Philosophy of the old type before science was developed.
Just for fun I'm going to be more specific.
"Even more spectacular examples of rampant evolution are found on other groups of oceanic islands. For example, the number of species of the fruitfly Drosophila on Hawaii exceeds that found in the rest of the world, and they are amazingly diverse in body size, wing patterns, and feeding habits."
Did it even occur to you that this is merely microevolution, or normal variation within the species? Evolutions CALL the varieties "species" but they are the sort of species that are varieties, genetic expressions already potential within the genetic makeup of the fruit fly. WHY is this so hard to keep in mind? WHY do evolutionists persist in making this same obvious mistake? There is no evidence in these normal variations for change except within the species genome. Yes, all those variations are potential in the genome, size, pattern, habits. Why is this so hard to grasp? Domestic breeders make use of this simply fact every day.
"These observations are explicable if the colonist ancestors of these island species found themselves in environments free from established competitor species."
Why? Don't you need natural selection to bring about such changes? Don't you NEED competition or threat or SOMETHING that divides the species in order to bring out new phenotypes? If a species finds itself in a completely safe environment it generally grows in numbers but not diversity. Diversity is the bringing to the fore of genetic possibilities that are suppressed in the normal population, and this only comes about when new conditions select these new possibilities, isolating them from the rest of the population. That is the classic formula for what you call "evolution" but is really only MICROevolution or simple variation within the species.
You aren't going to get unusual breeds of dogs unless you isolate the mutt and breed him for some characteristic you choose, keeping him from all the other genetic variations in the gene pool. Come on, psi bond, this is elementary.
"This situation would permit the evolution of traits that adapted the colonists to new ways of life, and allowed diversification of an ancestral species into several descendant species."
Not so as I say above. Evolution of traits in safe conditions is a VERY VERY slow process indeed -- it will occur gradually over LONG periods of time through genetic drift, but very gradually and undramatically. You are talking about something quite dramatic. SOME sort of selection HAD to have entered in at all the points of differentiation.
"Despite the unusual modifications of structure and behavior found in Darwin’s finches, studies of their DNA show that these species have a relatively recent origin about 2.3 million years ago, and are closely related to species on the mainland."
More like 4000 years, and there is nothing at all outside the normal variation through selection pressure going on here.
Exactly, Faith.
Fruitflies giving birth to fruitflies.
No evolution there.
I forgot. Simple migration away from the parent population will bring about the same changes. That's more likely what happened. When a smaller portion of a population splits off and seeks its own niche as a population unto itself, not breeding any more with the larger population, it develops changes simply because the isolation itself is a form of selection and the smaller complement of genetic possibilities in this new population now combines to bring about new phenotypes, ultimately a new population characterized by a phenotype as it interbreeds within the population. If the larger population left behind is significantly reduced by the loss, it too will undergo some phenotypic changes because of its reduced genetic potentials. But if it remains large no changes will be noticeable.
" Finally, evolution on such remote islands will produce many forms that are found nowhere else."
Of COURSE. This is what happens when a FEW leave a larger population and start their own population in a place isolated from the larger group. This is STANDARD GENETICS. The genetic potentials for the new traits were already there in the larger population but the only way they will come to expression is by their being isolated or selected. It doesn't happen any other way. Think about domestic breeding. Think of the isolated volcanic island as a form of domestic selection. Only a few specimens arrive there and they intermingle their own genes by interbreeding until a new characteristic emerges as unique to this new group.
THINK THINK THINK THINK
"Thus, on the Galapagos islands, there are just over 20 species of land birds, of which 14 are finches, the famous finches described by Darwin in his account of his voyage around the world in HMS Beagle. This is quite unlike the situation elsewhere, in which finches form only a small fraction of the land bird fauna. It is exactly what one would expect if there were only a small number of species of original bird colonists, one of which was a species of finch that became the ancestor of the present-day species."
Yes, it IS exactly what one would expect, psi bond, exactly. Small number of original colonists, perhaps what is known as a genetic bottleneck, and the new small population interbreeds and genes that were potential in the original large mainland population come to the fore as those that dominated in the previous population are not dominant in the smaller group. Elementary, my dear psi. It's NOT evidence for Evolution.
Oh, and a science CONTAINING speculation is one thing, but being entirely composed of speculation is what Evolution is. And so is creationism for that matter. Because you CANNOT subject your speculations about the past to testing. ALL you have is plausibility and the authority of the Establishment to enforce the plausibility it happens to prefer. Sorry, science, real science, does have real results it can prove. Evolution does not. Theories about origins cannot.
"If rabbits were abundant, and were fossilized as a result of Noah's Flood, they should be found in all geological layers, including the earliest ones, from which only simple one-celled organisms have been found. "
Nonsense. The lower layers are all marine because that's what WOULD be preserved there in a worldwide flood. Rabbits would have made it to higher ground, and as I said, there being evidence that higher layers broke up and washed away as the flood drained, there's no reason at all we should even find one rabbit fossil, but if we did it would be in the higher levels.
And why didn't you bother to think about how lower forms of life appear to go away as one goes up the strata (time periods)? We have those lower life forms in abundance NOW and they would have continued in abundance throughout the "time periods" if evolution were correct. But oddly enough they seem not to be present in many of the upper layers, certainly not in the necessary numbers to reflect the range of life on earth at any given time.
THINK THINK THINK THINK
"It is disappointing that you have nothing new to offer that creationists haven't argued countless times before. At the same time, I have referenced a mass of scientific evidence and reasonable inferences therefrom that you haughtily dismiss as "posturing"."
I wanted to say in answer to this that as a matter of fact the tack I'm taking is not one you will find well represented at creationist sites. I've worked on my argument on my own without reference to creationist arguments for years now.
But I'll also take the opportunity to repeat that what you have amassed, insofar as it IS scientific evidence, is evidence only for microevolution, not Evolution; and much else you've said is not evidence at all, perhaps "reasonable conjectures" given your assumptions, but since your assumptions are wacko that doesn't really amount to a lot. I can take the same facts make far more reasonable conjectures from them, which you haven't even bothered to try to understand.
You have to pry your head loose from your silly ideas about what creationists do with the Bible for starters. Creationism is based only on the Bible references concerning the origin of life, and also the Flood because it's such an excellent explanation for what is seen in the strata and fossil record. Otherwise you are just flapping your gums about other parts of the Bible YOU think ought to be applied, that have nothing to do with actual creationist thinking. Give it a rest. It might clear your head enough to be able to think a little bit.
beamish: This faith belief should be taught in a course on ancient mythology or comparative religion, leaving to biological sciences the study of anatomical structures and functions within living organisms.
In your support of creationism, you fail to understand that a true religion postulates the existence of supernatural phenomena that satisfy spiritual needs, while science postulates natural processes for all observable phenomena. So, a course on creation myths of the various religions round the world would not include Darwinian evolution or the scientific theory of the creation of the solar system, or the atomic theory. God has a proper place in the world religions. He is not a part of any scientific explanation.
I have no hostility towards science whatsoever.
You do show hostility toward science when you strongly criticize it with no understanding of what it is about. It is not a catalog of "anatomical structures and functions within living organisms", the differences between species, and the like, but a unifying theory organizing and systematizing knowledge of such phenomena.
What, in your view. beamish, should be taught in the public schools about the age of the earth? That is, what do you prefer a child be told who asks what science can tell us about this? Should he be told that it is a matter for religious instruction? That it all depends on his family's creation myth?
Christians in the 20th century have been playing defense …. They’ve been fighting a defensive war to defend what they have, to defend as much of it as they can. … It never turns the tide. What we’re trying to do is something entirely different. We’re trying to go into enemy territory, their very center, and blow up the ammunition dump. What is the ammunition dump in this metaphor? It is their version of creation.
¾ Phillip E. Johnson, founder of the modern creationist movement, February 6, 2000, at a meeting of the National Religious Broadcasters in Anaheim, California
Faith: Psi bond, What you are calling scientific evidence for eolution is mostly the usual evolutionist imagined scenario, not evidence of any sort at all, and then when you do produce evidence, it not evidence of evolution but of normal variation within a species, wrongly dubbed "microevolution" as if there were a macroevolution, which does not exist. None of the evidence for microevolution is evidence for anything BUT microevolution.
The scientific evidences I have presented here are all facts observed in the natural world by professionally trained observers.
It's the standard defense of creationists to resolutely claim that all observed support for evolution is evidence for microevolution only and often to claim as well that scientific dating methods of dating are faulty. This is the sort of hand-waving dismissal that religious non-scientists dedicated to demolishing evolution must rely on. A real biblical literalist (you’ve demonstrated that you are not one) would not accept the possibility of microevolution, since God is said in the Bible to have created the different kinds of living organisms to be static types. That is, if he created dinosaurs without feathers, they will not subsequently grow feathers.
You don't address anything I've written, I doubt you even understand it. You are simply repeating the same old evolutionist garbage I've already answered. This standard variation with species is completely expected by anyone who knows anything about genetics and isn't blinded by evolutionist fantasies.
You are right insofar as I don’t understand religious claims that only a supernatural being can properly explain the origin of species, when there is abundant, more plausible grounds for explaining the diversity of species by natural means. Calling evolution garbage is just pompous posturing.
You get different phenotypes when the genetic potential is reduced, whether by natural selection or simply by the selection brought about by one part of a population migrating away from the parent population. Again, it is not evolution, it is standard variation within the species. Species have a great genetic capacity to creatively modify that is built into the genome. You scorn the cheetah example but that's simply a standard example of what happens at the extreme of such genetic reduction -- a remarkably adapted phenotype with a sharply reduced and evolutionarily dead-ended genotype. Try THINKING about these things instead of just hand-waving them away.
I have thought about them in previous arguments with creationists, and now my eyes just glaze over. Your representations of evolution are garbled and off the mark.
In allopatric speciation, geographically isolated populations diverge to the point where individuals of the different populations cannot interbreed, and thus new species are formed.
The way you choose to express, by the way, when you haughtily exhort me to “Try THINKING” is reminiscent of a proselytizing preacher who imagines himself in possession of Absolute Truth. In the light of your religious motivation, however, that is not surprising. I recommend that you try thinking that God is unnecessary to a plausible explanation of natural phenomena.
Continued
By the way, the ability to traverse huge distances is not necessary if the colonization of the volcanic islands occurred close to the breakup of Pangaea -- and volcanic action would have been a major contributor to that tectonic shift. Whatever made it to the islands would of course populate the place, and if other kinds of animals didn't, well they didn't. I see nothing about that requiring special explanation.
.
Making up facts won’t explain the unique nature of oceanic island biogeography. Oceanic islands are ones that do not sit on continental shelves. The vast majority are volcanic in origin. The few oceanic islands that are not volcanic are tectonic in origin and arise where plate movements have lifted up the deep ocean floor to above the surface.
Your reference to Pangaea pertains to a scientific theory positng a supercontinent that existed about 250 million years ago. The cited case of Darwin’s finches involves speciation among species crossing the ocean much more recently (about 2 or 3 million years ago). It is odd that you would grasp at this notion for a special explanation when it is, like evolution, a set of reasoned inferences from data about something that cannot be observed directly, i.e., it is precisely what you want to reject as science. If an oceanic island created by volcanic eruption were once associated with a continent, as you want to postulate (though there is no evidence supporting this), it would have a much richer flora and fauna than it does. And it would not provide many examples of forms that are unique. You are hand-waving furiously here, relying contradictorily on the kind of theory you’ve said you abhor.
The sorting actually seen is ONLY explainable by the Flood, cert not by your jerryrigged scenarios with sea beds rising and falling as if on a hydraulic lift. You will not THINK, psi bond, just THINK and stop parroting the evolutionist garbage that they pile on you.
Just THINK, Faith, instead of recycling the old trash of creationist doctrine, and you will see, as clergyman-scientists of the nineteenth century had, that the nature of the fossil record cannot be explained by a single flood, global in extent, for which physical evidence is lacking. Rev. William Buckland, the first "official” geologist at Oxford, published in 1823 a scientific treatise which, whle accepting an Old Earth, reconciled geological evidence with the biblical accounts of creation and Noah's Flood. Adam Sedgwick, one of the founders of modern geology, was the chief supporter of his theory. However, in the light of subsequent geological discoveries, their scientific integrity impelled them to conclude that Flood theory is scientifically untenable. As Sedgwick declared in 1831, “I affirm, therefore, that we have nothing to fear from the results of our enquiries, provided they be followed in the laborious but secure road of honest induction. In this way we may rest assured that we shall never arrive at conclusions opposed to any truth, either physical or moral, from whatever source that truth may be derived.” This is very nearly an expression that can be taken as the scientist’s creed. Buckland, shortly after his Flood theory failed the empirical test, became one of England’s first converts to Louis Agassiz’s rival glacial theory, which postulated Ice Ages.
Modern creationists, however, have dogmatically preached an even more outmoded and discredited version of Flood theory since it was revived some 60 years ago by G.M. Price (who contended in his 726-page college textbook that all fossils were of the same age, among other things). They do no field work to test their claims, arguing instead by distorting the work of true geologists for unrestrained rhetorical effect, often in an obnoxious un-Christian tone, and they will change not one iota of their preposterous theory.
Concluded
And please get what I say correct. I did not say I do not want evolution taught in the public schools. I want the public schools to be completely disbanded and evolution to be taught as what it is, an unprovable theory that has less going for it than the unprovable creationist theory.
Evolutionary theory explains more of the empirical evidence, more plausibly, than creationism does. And it does so without discarding the empirically justified principle of Occam's razor.
You said, "I do not support the creationist efforts to get evolutionism removed from or creationism added to public school curriculum." But you expressed support for beamish's proposal to get evolution out of science class and taught in a class on comparative religion. Since the public schools will not be disbanded anytime soon, the practical question is this: Given the fact of the existence of the public schools, do you support the almost hundred-year long effort to remove evolution from the science curriculum by people who, like you, believe in creationism. You don’t believe evolution belongs in the science classroom; hence it is logical to assume that if public schools continue to be a major venue for education of the young, you would agree with those pushing to get evolution banished from the science classroom.
My my, you do get exercised over nothing. The children will all learn evolution, only it won't be presented as dogma for a change, and they will be able to decide if they believe it or not. Which of course you were never permitted, nor I. We were given the Evo dogma and all other ideas scorned, and all you are doing is repeating that dogma.
You are wildly posturing here. Education of the young is hardly nothing. Good education is essential to an imperiled America, as Obama, who urges children to stay in school and study hard, knows.
Education should not be crippled nor should respect for science be undermined by an army of militant creationists censoriously waving their Bibles. Evolution, properly taught, is presented as the best scientific answer, not as religious dogma. To think it is dogma is to misunderstand the notion of a scientific theory, which is an explanation accounting for empirical data that is subject to revision by the discovery of new data. The creationist theory, because of its religious origin, cannot be revised, only repackaged. In its latest incarnation, as intelligent design, it was rejected (Thank God!) as being a violation of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment, in the case Kitzmiller v. Dover, in 2005, by a federal judge who was a Republican conservative appointed by George W. Bush.
You’re not addressing the fact that the other sciences that you approve have theories contravening biblical statements about the natural world.
Diversity is EASILY explained by normal genetic variation caused by various selection events, origins is pure speculation of NO practical importance to science at all.
The diversity of living organisms, a major theme in biology, is not explained, as you suppose, by various selection events. Creationists insist that selection processes explain microevolution, that is diversity below the species level. The origin of the diversity of species and the origin of taxa above the species level, however, are something else, another matter. Either an ancestral species evolved into a number of descendent species (the scientific view), or a supernatural designer created each of the species extant in the world (the religious view). You indicate that you want neither one taught in science classes, thus leaving a major scientific problem without an answer, as if none exists.
Concluded
It belongs in the category of Philosophy of the old type before science was developed.
Philosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems concerning matters such as existence, knowledge, truth, and beauty, by means of reassoned argument. Speculation about the origin of species is mainly speculation about specific aspects of biological, genetic, geological, and paleontological phenomena, which are not appropriate domains for philosophy.
Faith, these are people who think saving a tiny fish that's absolutely good for nothing should be allowed to completely ruin California's Central Valley and, pretty much, the fruit basket of America....Thousands of jobs lost, thousands of homes in foreclosure, even illegals are angry at the left now! To the Left, this tiny fish is more important than PEOPLE.
What's sad is our leftwingers honestly do feel that saving a little fish is more important than feeding people.......
Too bad it was a flood and not a drought, maybe this very tiny, completely useless fish would have died and we could save California...but, no. unbelievable.
"The scientific evidences I have presented here are all facts observed in the natural world by professionally trained observers."
Again you are not thinking. Yes they are facts observed by scientists, so what? The facts need to be explained and their explanation is wrong.
"It's the standard defense of creationists to resolutely claim that all observed support for evolution is evidence for microevolution only and often to claim as well that scientific dating methods of dating are faulty."
But for heaven's sake it's OBVIOUS that's what it is, evidence for microevolution. They are all finches, they are all fruit flies, nothing beyond what creationists would expect. You DO NOT HAVE EVIDENCE FOR EVOLUTION in these facts.
And dating hasn't entered into this discussion. It's hard enough getting you to focus on one obvious element of the dispute without bringing in other elements.
You are a despicable devious arguer. I do NOT appeal to the supernatural in my arguments, you constantly mischaracterize what I write.
"In allopatric speciation, geographically isolated populations diverge to the point where individuals of the different populations cannot interbreed, and thus new species are formed."
I'm sorry but inability to interbreed is an artificial definition of a "new species" made up by evolutionists. Even some dogs can't interbreed with other dogs. Either the morphology or the behavioral cues are off, thanks to the genetic extremes involved, but they are still dogs, and as I've been saying, they have FEWER genetic potentials for further "evolution" as well, a point you have been ignoring in favor of your irrelevant mischaracterizations.
I am aware of the difference between volcanic islands and continental plate islands. You were talking about volcanic islands. These are caused by the movement of the tectonic plates or they are themselves the force that moves them or both. Volcanoes occur in the line where the plates split or meet, but make islands especially in the Pacific.
Again, the continents split where the volcanoes form. They are independent of the continents. I was very clear about this. They are not "in association with" or attached to the continents, they are a force connected with their separation. Whatever animal life existed along the split would not have had a long distance to go to the new volcanic islands for many years before the distance widened beyond their reach, and not many species would cross either. This is a reasonable explanation for what actually exists.
I do ignore your dating schemes, of course because they belong to the false paradigm. The supercontinent would have broken up at the time of the worldwide flood, which was a natural, not a supernatural, event, whose consequences are visible all over this earth.
The early theorists about the flood had false ideas about what sort of effects they'd expect to see. Nobody was expecting the truly worldwide effects it actually did create. They were looking for "evidence" in deep layers of the earth instead of at ALL the layers visible to the naked eye which ARE what we should expect from the flood.
Price was quite right that there is no evidence for any fossils being older than any others and that the dating techniques used to make that claim are all circular and self-confirmatory. Which OUGHT to be obvious to anybody who actually READS the evolutionist garbage.
But I'm not aware that he made note of the layering and sorting of the fossils as evidence for the flood, which is the best positive evidence for the flood.
"Given the fact of the existence of the public schools, do you support the almost hundred-year long effort to remove evolution from the science curriculum by people who, like you, believe in creationism. You don’t believe evolution belongs in the science classroom; hence it is logical to assume that if public schools continue to be a major venue for education of the young, you would agree with those pushing to get evolution banished from the science classroom."
NO I DO NOT SUPPORT THE EFFORTS TO REMOVE EVOLUTION FROM THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS. CAN'T YOU READ? I DISMISS THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS AS USELESS TO CHRISTIANS ALTOGETHER AND I DO NOT CARE WHAT THEY DO. IF THEY WANT TO CORRUPT THEIR CHILDREN'S MINDS WITH THE LIE OF EVOLUTION AND ALL THE OTHER CORRUPTIONS, I AM BEYOND HAVING ANY INTEREST IN CHANGING THEM EXCEPT TO PRAY THAT GOD WILL NOT LET LIES PROSPER.
Evolution theory IS dogma, there is not a shred of actual evidence for any particle of it. This is what you have been resolutely refusing even to consider here. The evidence is better evidence for the worldwide flood. THINK THINK THINK. You DON'T think at all, you just rattle off what you've learned like a good little schoolboy.
OLD STYLE PHILOSOPHY BEFORE EMPIRICAL SCIENCE CAME ALONG DID SPECULATE ABOUT ALL THE MATERIAL THAT BECAME THE SCIENCES, and evolution is still in that category because of the simple fact that it remains theory without a shred of proof. It's all speculation. You really ought to read some of it some time.
Sounds like typical leftwing thinking, Z, curse it all, but I'm afraid I'm not familiar with this little fish you are talking about or what it has to do with evolution?
PsiBond,
Children should be taught that estimates of the age of the Earth are based on what we know of radioactive half-life decay and insterstellar distances calculated by the speed of light.
The age of the Earth has nothing to do with the phenomenon your primitive scientifically illiterate neo-Anaximanderian belief in fish spawning non-fish.
Since you can not demonstrate the occurance of just one example of one species (or population of species, to compound your problem) giving birth to a seperate, different, new species in a world where fish always give birth to fish, apes always give birth to apes, planted corn yields crops of corn, and people always give birth to people, it is understandable that you'd want to focus on attacking other people's religions than defending your own claims that your belief in fish in your family tree is scientific.
If you're not going to show evidence of a species giving birth to a seperate, different, new species (or a population of species giving birth to a generation that is a seperate, different, new species) then we can conclude that your theology of evolution has not advanced scientifically at all since Anaximander first professed it.
Your theology of evolution, if taught at all, should be in an anthropology / sociology / comparative religion class alongside the recounting of other pre-scientific cosmogonic myths.
Focus on the question at hand, PsiBond. You ridiculously believe it is possible to trace your geneology to a fish.
Why?
"The diversity of living organisms, a major theme in biology, is not explained, as you suppose, by various selection events."
Go read a few evolutionist sites where they make it plain that such events, plus mutation, do explain diversity.
"Creationists insist that selection processes explain microevolution, that is diversity below the species level."
Uh huh, and that is true. You were trying to make these into macroevolution, that are really only microevolution, OBVIOUSLY.
"The origin of the diversity of species and the origin of taxa above the species level, however, are something else, another matter."
I'm glad you acknowledge this fact, since you seemed to be arguing that the diversity of finches and fruit flies WERE evidence for species and taxa above the species level.
But they are of course "something else, another matter" as you say.
"Either an ancestral species evolved into a number of descendent species (the scientific view), or a supernatural designer created each of the species extant in the world (the religious view)."
Yes, this is true. God either created them all at one time as is reported in the Bible or they evolved from the primordial goo. There is no evidence for EITHER of these theories as I've said over and over, there are only more and less plausible explanations of it that cannot be proved empirically. This is of course an oversimplification since evolutionism can be shown to rest on much faulty reasoning, for instance the circular self-confirmatory reasoning identified by Price as the evolutionist way of proving some fossils older than others.
"You indicate that you want neither one taught in science classes, thus leaving a major scientific problem without an answer, as if none exists."
None exists, that's a fact. There is nothing but the imaginative castle-building of evolutionists backed by law, not science. Creationists do have God's word for what actually happened and this is a lot more than evolutionists have, who have to make it all up from scratch, and a bad job of it they do too. But as far as actual evidence beyond the Bible goes, creationists are also only able to speculate, again because that is the nature of the problem of origins.
But also again, the clues from the Bible produce a far more plausible theory, while evolutionists are faulty thinkers. The ridiculous logic employed in defense of their fantasy is truly laughable. Too bad you don't read well enough to recognize this blatant problem.
Faith,
You're doing well with your mocking of PsiBond's religious beliefs, and it's his own fault for bringing them up in a science discussion.
I do have a minor quibble with you on your choice of words. You describe PsiBond's belief in evolution as a "theory" rather than a "theology."
A "theory" is a construct of scientifically testable and verifiable assumptions.
PsiBond's bizarre fish-became-people theology doesn't even get over that hurdle seperating incoherent babbling from science.
PsiBond has a theology of evolution. A theory would be able to present verifiable data.
Beamish, we do have some disagreements about all this. I do consider evolution to be a theory, same as I consider creationism to be a theory. My point all along has been that that's ALL it can ever be.
Although you say that if it were a theory it would have scientifically testable and verifiable assumptions, that is not always the case with theories when they are first constructed. They often start out as hunches based on observation without anything verifiable at that point.
Over time if the theory has merit it will be fleshed out with testable evidence, but as I keep saying, that cannot occur with a theory about origins. All they flesh out their theory with is imaginative constructs and more wild guesses and theories about how this or that fact fits into the overall scenarios.
There is no way to test any of it and prove or disprove it. All it can ever be is an imaginative construct.
And that is also true of Creationism. Except that we have the Bible to tell us God made all the animals "after their own kind" and also to tell us there was a worldwide flood which explains a whole lot of geology.
I refuse to reduce creationism to theology and I don't think that word applies to evolutionism either. They are competing theories or competing scenarios or competing imaginative constructs with more or less plausibility to them. By now all the evolutionists are doing is making up ways facts might fit into their theory, their fantasy castle, they stopped thinking long ago.
Faith,
I guess I'm hanging up on the technicality of the term.
A "theory" is a description of the mechanics of an observed, testable, verifiable phenomenon.
At best, PsiBond's theological belief that he has fish in his family tree could fit into a very unscientific abuse of the word "hypothesis."
Until PsiBond presents observable, testable, verifiable evidence that a species could give birth to another, different, new species, all of his necromantic squawking about what the fossil spirits told him about his fish ancestor is what it is, and it ain't science and it ain't a theory. It's lunatic ranting.
Faith,
In other words, you have a theory on how fossils were formed because you have the first condition of theorizing the origin of fossils met - you have a fossil to theorize about. You don't imply or suggest or speculate that fossils exist. You have them to present, look at, knock solipsists in the head with.
You have concrete evidence of the existence of fossils.
Nobody has evidence of evolution producing a generation of another, different, new species from a parent population of a different species. Fish did not spawn anything other than fish according to their species. Monkeys only give birth to monkeys, and so forth.
PsiBond's belief that his geneology jumps into a non-human species the further back into preceding generations he goes is primitive neo-Anaximanderian religious hogwash, not science.
Post a Comment