A Logical Fallacy of Evolution

[Mallon]

and still in the last 2 pages, nobody has been able to address the OP..... go evolutionism!

There's no argument in the OP to address.

 

[AnswersInHovind]

I did address the OP (you ignored it), which was essentially a link to a poorly written paper by someone who doesn't understand evolution very well. You have talked about logical fallacies, but neither you nor your link has specified any; logical fallacies have names. On top of that all I did see was straw-man arguments against evolution, a logical fallacy of its own.

So I'll ask again, what is the logical fallacy that the thread is suppose to be about? Or, what are the logical impossibilities that evolution brings to the table? If they are as "obvious" as you claim, it shouldn't be a problem to concisely lay them out so we all know exactly what you are talking about.

So your reponse is, "There is no reason to respond because you don't understand evolution." And yet instead of explaining why the article doesn't understand evolution, or why you think its a straw man. You just throw those terms out there and expect us to bow before your aw.

Gee, I wonder why I ignored it.

Gee... wonder why I ignored it.

 

[AnswersInHovind]

Oh, you mean like what you did in your original post by linking to another site rather presenting an argument yourself?

No, I gave you a direct link to a short article that would only take a minute to read.
You threw out a bunch of names of people who have written hundreds of pages of material and said, "Go find their stuff on Genesis".

Read his book The Lost World of Genesis One. That's his entire argument: that Genesis 1 presents an ancient cosmology, accommodated to the ancient understanding of the Hebrew people. This is a common OT hermeneutic, despite what you seem to think.

Wow! A specific source. Didn't expect that. I may actually take you up on that and read it if I can find a copy in a library in town.

Then instead of dealing with what it says, I'll make a post about all the people who agree with me, thereby defeating Walton's book without ever having to talk about it.

 

[Mallon]

No, I gave you a direct link to a short article that would only take a minute to read.
You threw out a bunch of names of people who have written hundreds of pages of material and said, "Go find their stuff on Genesis".

You complained about putting the burden of research on others when you did the exact same thing in your OP.

Regardless, I read your article and it's a joke. It's a total strawman version of evolution. It doesn't even address any of the current thinking on the evolution of sexual reproduction. It doesn't cite a single source. Why you would think this article has any significance to it is beyond me. Would you give any credence to the thoughts of an atheist who hasn't even read the Bible? There has been much work done on the evolution of sexual reproduction, some of which is cited here:
Evolution of sexual reproduction - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Too bad the author of your article doesn't appear to be aware of any of it.

The only logical fallacy being touted around here is the argument from ignorance promoted by the author of the article you linked to. This is what I mean when I talk about neocreationists who speak of things they have no understanding of. St. Augustine warned us about such foolishness long ago:

"Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of this world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and the seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he hold to as being certain from reason and experience. Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn. The shame is not so much that an ignorant individual is derided, but that people outside the household of faith think our sacred writers held such opinions, and, to the great loss of those for whose salvation we toil, the writers of our Scripture are criticized and rejected as unlearned men. If they find a Christian mistaken in a field which they themselves know well and hear him maintaining his foolish opinions about our books, how are they going to believe those books in matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven, when they think their pages are full of falsehoods and on facts which they themselves have learnt from experience and the light of reason? Reckless and incompetent expounders of Holy Scripture bring untold trouble and sorrow on their wiser brethren when they are caught in one of their mischievous false opinions and are taken to task by those who are not bound by the authority of our sacred books. For then, to defend their utterly foolish and obviously untrue statements, they will try to call upon Holy Scripture for proof and even recite from memory many passages which they think support their position, although they understand neither what they say nor the things about which they make assertion."

 

[Darkness27]

So your reponse is, "There is no reason to respond because you don't understand evolution." And yet instead of explaining why the article doesn't understand evolution, or why you think its a straw man. You just throw those terms out there and expect us to bow before your aw.

Gee, I wonder why I ignored it.

Gee... wonder why I ignored it.

My response is because it is a straw-man, I don't know what "logical fallacy" (neither you nor your source has named or implied any logical fallacy that I saw) or "obvious logical impossibilities" are that you/the article are trying to present. The article was a mess and doesn't address what evolution really thinks about how sex, eyes or dogs evolved.

All I am asking is for you to take a few minutes, and in your own words tell us the logical problems of evolution so I/we know exactly what you are talking about and we can take it from there. I don't want/expect you to 'bow before my aw', all I'm doing is asking questions to understand what it is you are talking about in a clear and concise manner.

If you can't see that there are straw-men arguments, bring up or quote something from the article that you would like to discuss and I'll be happy to participate.

 

[Willtor]

I love how evolutionists always point to their "objective" data to prove their point (yet somehow they all have different opinions on this "objective" data) and yet they miss out on the obvious logical impossibilities of evolution as illustrated by the article here.

When you think evolution through, there is no way its possible, and you end up having to mumbo jumbo your way out of the holes evolution digs itself into.

The author doesn't quite understand what he's arguing against. E.g.,

Imagine being there when the first dog evolved. There was a big bang, and millions of years later an animal with a tail and four legs, a liver, heart, kidneys, lungs, blood, ears and eyes evolved into the first dog. Fortunately for him, his eyes had evolved to maturity after millions of years of blindness, so that he could see the first female dog that had evolved standing by him. It was actually very fortunate, because if the female dog hadn't evolved also and been at the right place at the right time, with the right parts and the willingness to mate, he would have been a dead dog. He needed a female to keep the species alive.

He seems to think that evolution says that dogs sprouted, fully formed, from ancestors who are totally different. This is a lot like what Kent Hovind thinks, and it's distressing to see such a misunderstanding get spread around. As far as I know, nobody is persuaded of the "evolution" described in this blog. I certainly wouldn't defend it.

AnswersInHovind, I think most evolutionists here are proponents of the theory of evolution as described by evolutionary scientists. Asking us to defend the "evolution" described in this blog is like an Arian defining trinitarianism as modalism and asking Trinitarians to defend it. It's silly. You wouldn't do it. How can we be expected to defend something that we don't believe?

 

[Papias]

Wow, what a Poe -etic OP.

The description of the evolution of dogs is so poor that it makes Christians look worse than ignorant, then it is followed up by making Christians look like supporters of criminals and charlatans.

and we wonder why so many thinking people today won't take us Christians seriously.........

Papias

 

[philadiddle]

I first saw that argument about last fall in another forum. I actually thought it was a site that mocked creationists but after browsing that site more I found out it was Ray Comfort and Kirk Cameron's site.

 

[Mick116]

According to the author of the article, my pure-bred mini dachshund cannot exist, because after the first dachshund was bred from non-dachshund parents, there were no other pure-bred dachshunds in existence to carry on the breed...

 

[Mallon]

 

[shernren]

What a silly argument. It falls quite cleanly to logical techniques developed from mathematics.

The author begins: Imagine being there when the first dog evolved. ...

Right, so we have a first dog. Let's call him Sparky for ease of discussion. The logical question to ask is: If Sparky was the first dog, where do evolutionists believe he came from?

To be the first dog, Sparky must have descended from a pre-dog. This pre-dog produced him either sexually or asexually. If this pre-dog produced him sexually, then we have no problems. For the argument was: "How could the first male dog have magically developed sex at the right time to mate with the first female dog?" And the answer would be that he didn't have to: he inherited the power of sex from his parents, and the lucky first female dog also inherited the power of sex from her parents, and so they were quite perfectly equipped to have a go at it right from the start.

What if the pre-dog produced Sparky asexually? Then the logical argument would have some force. However, find me an evolutionist who believed that the evolution of animals before dogs was completely asexual. (Hint: There are none.)

But then the creationist argument can be pushed back a bit further. The original argument failed because the pre-dog had the power of sexual reproduction. Presumably, the pre-dog's parents also have the power of sexual reproduction, so an argument that begins "Imagine being there when the first pre-dog evolved. ..." will be shot down equally quickly. However, when we push this chain far back enough, we will come across an organism (or population of organisms, technically) which, according to evolutionists, had the power to reproduce sexually, but whose progenitors did not have such capabilities. Let's call them Kylies, in honor of the Australian star who's coming out with her new album today.

The creationist then goes "Imagine being there when the first Kylie evolved. ..." Well, we can't imagine being there, but we can certainly imagine what the first Kylie looked like, and that is where the creationist argument meets the dust. You see, sexual reproduction is prevalent throughout both plant and animal kingdoms, so that the first Kylie must have been the ancestor of both. Kylie was in fact a humble microorganism (with all due apologies to Ms. Minogue, who is certainly far more attractive), and microorganisms require very little extra plumbing to engage in sex.

See where the fallacy in the creationist argument is? It is fiendishly difficult to imagine the first dog having to evolve sex; but it is breathtakingly easy to imagine the first microorganisms evolving sex. The illegitimate juxtaposition is what gives the creationist argument its appeal, and what makes it fundamentally wrong. Timing makes all the difference. Nobody would take you seriously if you put a picture of a four-year-old next to a sixteen-year-old to try to prove that babies don't grow into adults. And that's why nobody's taking your example seriously either.