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Fossil Challenge for Evolutionists

FrumiousBandersnatch

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We Christians like to believe that God is a personal God...Jesus was a real person that really lived and for which there's evidence as to the resurrection. You can believe it or not --- I'm not really here to discuss God.
Jesus may have been a real person, but real people aren't gods.

But God is also a force,,a "spirit" which we cannot really know.
If you really cannot know, how can you make such confident assertions that it even exists, particularly when no such force strong enough or long-range enough to be significant has been observed, and no evidence (or even definition) of 'spirit' has been found?

No matter where we go with scientific theories and analysis and proofs,,,we still have the problem that at some point everything had to "start".

I've said before that this problem, as far as I can understand, did not exist before because we always believed that the universe always existed. It's only after the Big Bang theory that the problem has surfaced precisely because scientists now state that the univers did NOT always exist -- so where did it come from? Hence Krauss' idea and all those that agree with him.
We don't know that "everything had to 'start'". We only know that the big bang is the earliest time we currently have access to. Current thinking based on the physics we understand today suggests that the universe we see is very likely to be the product of some previous state - either a different type of spacetime, or the more fundamental state that Krauss describes as 'nothing' (it's not his idea alone - Nobel Laureate physicist Frank Wilczek said, “The answer to the ancient question ‘Why is there something rather than nothing?’ would then be that ‘nothing’ is unstable.” - see Victor Stenger's article 'Why is there Something rather than Nothing'). When time itself is an emergent property, the concept of beginning and ending doesn't make much sense in more fundamental states.

What I'm saying is that whatever STARTED the universe, or multi-verse, or whatever it'll turn out to be...THIS could be called God.
What would be the point of calling a physical process, be it a phase change, a quantum fluctuation, or whatever, 'God'? where does that get you?

The idea of trying to remedy a lack of knowledge of the natural world by positing an entity that, by definition, solves the problem by being outside those constraints and therefore inexplicable and unknowable, is no explanation at all - again, I ask how it is in any way a better explanation than that other non-explanation, "It's magic!"?

To further anthropomorphise it into a 'personal' authority figure looks like wishful thinking - what's the justification?

I'm recently learning about the information that undergirds everything... I've been trying to explain this but can't in scientific terms.

This morning I watched this very interesting YouTube video on this very topic.

What do you think of it? This one has the word "God" in it, which is what attracted me to it, but it seems like a new idea that many are looking into --sans the god reason...

Whitworth wasn't the originator of this idea (an argument can be made that even the Ancient Greeks had similar ideas), it was Nick Bostrom who, in 2003, wrote the 'Simulation Hypothesis' paper that became popular. Since then, there have been many criticisms and rebuttals, but fundamentally it was based on entirely speculative premises that could apply to any number of imaginative possibilities - the Boltzman Brain idea is along similar probabilistic lines (albeit with greater justification).

Whitworth suggests that the physical properties of our universe are consistent with the properties of a digital VR simulation - but this implies that hyper-advanced entities that can simulate entire universes happen to be using the same kind of computing technology we currently use (and even that is being replaced by quantum computing and neural networks). The claim is that everything is quantised, including space itself; last I heard, it's too early to say that space is quantised, but it is expected to be because of the physical problems with infinite divisibility.

It's worth considering why we see quantised phenomena - it's because, for example, matter can't exist if the energy of electron orbitals isn't quantised, they'd fall into the nucleus, and so-on. But if quantisation is the key indicator we're in a simulation, this raises the question of what kind of universe the hypothetical simulators exist in - if it has electrons and atoms like ours, then it too will be quantised - that would put them in the same situation as us - do they think that they are also in a simulation?

And if their universe is not quantised like ours, it must be very different - to the extent that it would be unlikely that they would have digital computing at all, and raises the question of why they'd simulate a quantised universe at all - certainly not for ancestor simulation, which was one proposed reason.

In other words, it's hard to imagine what a universe would be like if all the simulation indicators claimed by Whitworth for our universe were absent, whether it could support life as we understand it, and if it could support some kind of life, why they would simulate a universe utterly different from their own.

The video also invokes the much-hyped Holographic Principle as support. This is a mathematical equivalence arising out of black hole physics that asserts that the informational content of any n-dimensional volume can be fully represented on its n-1 dimensional surface, holographically. So the informational content of a 3D spherical volume (e.g. a black hole) can be holographically represented on its 2D surface. This mathematical equivalence doesn't mean our universe is a hologram, it just means it's mathematically equivalent. Carefully edited video snippets don't change physics in the real world.

I stopped watching halfway through.

Philosophically, whether we're a VR simulation or not is moot; for us, the world is what it is - we can investigate it to see how it works, and that is what we do.
 
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tas8831

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It couldn't and that's the point.

Evolution theory is largely silent on an expected order of fossils in the geologic column.
And cell theory is largely silent on what sorts of features cells that have not yet been observed should possess.

Amazing insights!
For a simple example, if early paleontologists had found a pattern of mammal fossils underneath dinosaur layers then evolutionists would conclude that mammals evolved first. Why not?
Right - since had they done so, that would have been what the evidence indicated. Of course, it didn't, so who cares what your fever-dreams come up with?
And when early Christians heard tall tales from their neighbors in the middle east, they co-opted them into their own silly stories. Why not?

Why no evidence FOR your creation myth? Why just your dopey 'thought' experiments attacking your layman's understanding of evolution?
If birds had instead been found in rock layers underneath dinosaurs, then the conclusion might be that dinosaurs and birds share a common ancestor (instead of birds evolving from dinosaurs)
Er, OK...^_^
, or perhaps that dinosaurs convergently evolved similar morphological structures as birds. Why not?
Sure, wow, maybe. "IF' scenarios are so cool - it is a way for those with no legitimate understanding of the material to pretend they have special insights.

Funny thing about science - when new evidence requires it, things are re-interpreted.

100% unlike your ancient middle eastern fairy tales - those things stay the same no matter how absurd and untenable reality shows them to be.
The list of examples could go on forever.
So insightful.
Almost as insightful as believing the earth is stationary, or that Sandy Hook was a hoax.

So cool.
It's hard to draw comparisons between the evolution story and science.
Apparently, it is hard for you to even understand science - too much jargon, right? That is why you rely on your laughably inept 'thought experiments'.
I'm willing to play along but in this comparison,
Why, thank you so much for condescending from on high - and what are you high on these days? Mescaline? DMT? Literalism? - to pontificate via thought experiment!
what would be the analog to the idea of common ancestry? Common ancestry is a loose idea that can be pulled and plied and written a million different ways in order to accomodate the data.
Right, if you - the creationist layman that cannot understand science jargon - say so.
So what is that with regards to Cell Theory?
Your attack-via-phony-thought-'experiment' is so loose an 'idea' that it can be pulled and plied and written a million different ways in order to accommodate refutations so as to make it look like it is still valid, despite never actually being so. It is so ad hoc - you have morphed it, acid-trip style, that I can longer tell what point you were pretending to make. I thought your original long-winded claims were that the ToE should have been able to predict the order of fossils based on theory alone, and because instead the fossils were found first (or whatever), ToE is not science or some such idiocy. Funny that you ignored the genetics stuff - no wonder - WAY more jargon there for a former tripper-turned-cultist to fathom, I suppose.
But now since I showed how dumb that 'story' was by bringing up Cell Theory, you are waffling and flailing and going all ad hoc on us.

Typical creationist.
With regards to the fossil order, the story of universal common ancestry is largely ad-hoc.
Well, except that common ancestry was inferred before a large number of fossils had been found. You might know that were you actually well-read on the subject. Then, YECs never let their ignorance slow them down. On any subject.
This is because a common ancestry narrative could be written around so many different fossil orders, as I have explained.
Assertions premised on acid-baked tall tales are not explanations.
So the big question is, why do evolutionists champion the actual fossil order as if it were evidence for Evolution?
And why do people that believe Cell Theory bring up the fact that all living things are made of cells as if it were evidence for the theory?

You are not a very good argument-maker, are you?

Look, I get it - you are the cleverest of the former druggies in your cult, but you have admitted that you can't even understand field-specific scientific terminology, and you want to be seen as some kind of guru outside of your sweat lodge dreams?

I think Ikester79 needs a hug...

And a Sandy Hook truther, too??? Golly, color me shocked...
 
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tas8831

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"Evolution is just terrible non-falsifiable pseudo-science. and the evolution industry proves this every day by refusing to publicly debate critics, and basically using a non-stop propaganda campaign to frame any criticism of evolution as an "anti-science" religious conspiracy. So, in this regard, there is a constant witch-hunt for any scientist (and there are thousands) daring to criticize the premise that random mutations and natural selection produced the biodiversity on Earth. Such criticism is banned and carefully guarded against. Evolutionists are terrified of open and honest debate.

Heliocentrism, on the other hand, doesn't appear to be guarded at all. It is thought to be basically proven beyond any reasonable doubt. Even most creationists won't question it, so there aren't really any resources devoted to defending it. Reading those papers by Popov made me think about how the case for Geocentrism is just flying out of left-field (thinking about the CMB papers, too) and nobody is really prepared for it. It's like a surprise attack. People aren't taking Geocentrism seriously because we've all been so thoroughly indoctrinated into Pythagorean Apollo Sun God Worship
icon_smile.gif
"

The ignorance and paranoia....

To think that "public debate" is how science should be decided. Idiots....
 
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tas8831

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And you just keep blindly supporting my argument without even realizing it.

Anyways, I think we've established that Evolutionists never expected any particular order of fossils in the rock layers. They merely adapted an ad-hoc evolutionary narrative to the order that was found, and here we are today.

And now these evolutionists marvel at their ability to "predict" that a horse fossil will be found with other horse fossils, that a salamander fossil will be found in rock layers known for containing the remains of salamanders, etc. etc. which is little more than basic pattern-recognition.

Knowing this, it's funny that evolution-believers walk around telling each other that the fossils are arranged in a particularly "evolutionary" order. Nothing could be further from the truth. As has been demonstrated and conceded in this thread.

The arrogance of ignorance... Hilarious to behold.
 
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FrumiousBandersnatch

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Rats, I do not have a VPN, but there are times when I have wanted to watch a YouTube video that could be seen in England and cannot be seen in the U.S. due to copyright concerns and I thought it might have come in handy. I guess it sill would not help in this case.
I recently took the plunge and installed expressVPN - the trial period is 30 days and it's fairly cheap. So far, it's been very fast and simple to use. Of course, other VPN's are available - this one just had a high rating for UK users.
 
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xianghua

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I saw a link that looked like it led to fake peer review. Were any of them published in a well respected peer reviewed professional journal? Or were they fake peer reviews set up by creationists since there work is so shoddy that they can't pass real peer review?
what do you mean by "fake peer review"?
 
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tas8831

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GodsGrace101

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Might I suggest that, if your English is not the best, you stop responding to posts and conversations you do not understand?
When pigs fly my good man.

YOU are the one that doesn't understand.
 
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GodsGrace101

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Don't give up so easily.

Keep in mind that this discussion is not about the existence of God. Some of us "evolutionists" believe in God and some don't, but that's not the real issue.

The other thing to keep in mind is that ID is not merely the general notion that God created (or "designed") the universe in some way, but a much more specific proposal. So that if I assert that ID is stupid and wrong, it does not mean that I deny God's authorship of our existence.
Oh I know the above.
It just seems to me that we took a giant leap forward in understanding our universe, and somehow it's created more questions than answers. Which is understandable.

Another member mentioned about how maybe our universe didn't start but is a result of another universe--I guess this would be a multiverse. Which answers nothing --- how would THAT universe have gotten started?

I just feel like we're moving around trying to find out things and it's just becoming more complicated.
What about those small particles that act differently when they're being watched? I found that so interesting -- I can't remember where I heard it or saw it. I do watch a lot of science stuff on YouTube because I understand it...I don't do this for theology because I see the nonsense that's on there...so I'm sure this holds true for science too; I just do my best.
 
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GodsGrace101

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Reality is harsh, you dodging it makes no difference to me.

Open your eyes.
Look, I can't talk to someone that doesn't believe good and evil exist.

Are you in good health? That's good.
Are you in a hospital? That's bad/evil.

Good and evil is in everything.
It's in nature.

A soft breeze is nice.
A hurricane is devastating.

Water is necessary.
Water could kill a person.

Ditto for fire.

I mean, gosh, you know science---you never studied philosophy or religion?
You don't read books?
You don't watch movies?

The theme of Good and Evil is one of the top themes....
 
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GodsGrace101

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Jesus may have been a real person, but real people aren't gods.

If you really cannot know, how can you make such confident assertions that it even exists, particularly when no such force strong enough or long-range enough to be significant has been observed, and no evidence (or even definition) of 'spirit' has been found?

We don't know that "everything had to 'start'". We only know that the big bang is the earliest time we currently have access to. Current thinking based on the physics we understand today suggests that the universe we see is very likely to be the product of some previous state - either a different type of spacetime, or the more fundamental state that Krauss describes as 'nothing' (it's not his idea alone - Nobel Laureate physicist Frank Wilczek said, “The answer to the ancient question ‘Why is there something rather than nothing?’ would then be that ‘nothing’ is unstable.” - see Victor Stenger's article 'Why is there Something rather than Nothing'). When time itself is an emergent property, the concept of beginning and ending doesn't make much sense in more fundamental states.

What would be the point of calling a physical process, be it a phase change, a quantum fluctuation, or whatever, 'God'? where does that get you?

The idea of trying to remedy a lack of knowledge of the natural world by positing an entity that, by definition, solves the problem by being outside those constraints and therefore inexplicable and unknowable, is no explanation at all - again, I ask how it is in any way a better explanation than that other non-explanation, "It's magic!"?

To further anthropomorphise it into a 'personal' authority figure looks like wishful thinking - what's the justification?

Whitworth wasn't the originator of this idea (an argument can be made that even the Ancient Greeks had similar ideas), it was Nick Bostrom who, in 2003, wrote the 'Simulation Hypothesis' paper that became popular. Since then, there have been many criticisms and rebuttals, but fundamentally it was based on entirely speculative premises that could apply to any number of imaginative possibilities - the Boltzman Brain idea is along similar probabilistic lines (albeit with greater justification).

Whitworth suggests that the physical properties of our universe are consistent with the properties of a digital VR simulation - but this implies that hyper-advanced entities that can simulate entire universes happen to be using the same kind of computing technology we currently use (and even that is being replaced by quantum computing and neural networks). The claim is that everything is quantised, including space itself; last I heard, it's too early to say that space is quantised, but it is expected to be because of the physical problems with infinite divisibility.

It's worth considering why we see quantised phenomena - it's because, for example, matter can't exist if the energy of electron orbitals isn't quantised, they'd fall into the nucleus, and so-on. But if quantisation is the key indicator we're in a simulation, this raises the question of what kind of universe the hypothetical simulators exist in - if it has electrons and atoms like ours, then it too will be quantised - that would put them in the same situation as us - do they think that they are also in a simulation?

And if their universe is not quantised like ours, it must be very different - to the extent that it would be unlikely that they would have digital computing at all, and raises the question of why they'd simulate a quantised universe at all - certainly not for ancestor simulation, which was one proposed reason.

In other words, it's hard to imagine what a universe would be like if all the simulation indicators claimed by Whitworth for our universe were absent, whether it could support life as we understand it, and if it could support some kind of life, why they would simulate a universe utterly different from their own.

The video also invokes the much-hyped Holographic Principle as support. This is a mathematical equivalence arising out of black hole physics that asserts that the informational content of any n-dimensional volume can be fully represented on its n-1 dimensional surface, holographically. So the informational content of a 3D spherical volume (e.g. a black hole) can be holographically represented on its 2D surface. This mathematical equivalence doesn't mean our universe is a hologram, it just means it's mathematically equivalent. Carefully edited video snippets don't change physics in the real world.

I stopped watching halfway through.

Philosophically, whether we're a VR simulation or not is moot; for us, the world is what it is - we can investigate it to see how it works, and that is what we do.
HI FB,
Not ignoring you...
There's just too much and it's midnight here.
Manana... (place a squiggly line above the first n)
 
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VirOptimus

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Look, I can't talk to someone that doesn't believe good and evil exist.

Are you in good health? That's good.
Are you in a hospital? That's bad/evil.

Good and evil is in everything.
It's in nature.

A soft breeze is nice.
A hurricane is devastating.

Water is necessary.
Water could kill a person.

Ditto for fire.

I mean, gosh, you know science---you never studied philosophy or religion?
You don't read books?
You don't watch movies?

The theme of Good and Evil is one of the top themes....

I have studied philosophy, thats why I know I’m right.

Try to prove the existance of good/evil.
 
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Skreeper

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Look, I can't talk to someone that doesn't believe good and evil exist.

Are you in good health? That's good.
Are you in a hospital? That's bad/evil.

Good and evil is in everything.
It's in nature.

A soft breeze is nice.
A hurricane is devastating.

Water is necessary.
Water could kill a person.

Ditto for fire.

I mean, gosh, you know science---you never studied philosophy or religion?
You don't read books?
You don't watch movies?

The theme of Good and Evil is one of the top themes....

Do you think the concept of good/evil is objective or subjective?
 
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