Proud Flesh said:
First of all, I would like to say again that I did not call myself directly a creationist.
Yes you did when you said Genesis 1 matched science. You also said it when you said evolution required intelligent design. Sorry, but your own words labeled you as a creationist. Perhaps an Old Earth Creationist or an Intelligent Design creationist, but still a creationist.
Macro evolution has not been observed. A new species popping up of a weed... what caused it to change? Why did it need to change? New species are discovered all the time in the Amazon... does this mean that they are newly formed, or just new to our own classification system?
Proud, I and others have referenced you to the thread "Observed Speciation". Yes, speciation has been
observed. Both in the lab and in the wild. Watched from where you had one species until you have a different one.
What caused the change? A change in environment that required new adaptations to survive in that environment. IOW, natural selection working on the population to change one population to a different one over the course of generations.
I am afraid I misspoke. I did not mean that we should get rid of forensic evidence. What I meant to get across is that the forensic evidence is often twisted to fit into a Macro-evolutionary proof system.
What we are saying is that forensic science also deals with events in the past that no one observed, but you have no trouble accepting that we can figure out what happened. IOW, your depiction of the limits of science is wrong. As long as an event leaves evidence that is in the present, we can figure out what happened even if we weren't there. This is because the present is the way it is because the past was the way it was. To say anything else denies cause and effect.
I don't think the evidence is very strong. Have you ever actually seen some of the "cavemen", "neanderthal" skeletons we have? They're almost totally plaster of paris (sp.?). Other "pre human" civilizations are nothing more than early, but still HUMAN places... with religions, burial grounds, music, etc.
That you don't think the evidence is strong is based on the fact that you don't know much of the evidence. Yes, I've seen many of the skeletons. I've visited both the Cleveland Museum of Natural History and the American Museum of Natural History. Both have just the actual bones on display of several examples of hominin fossils. Cleveland has Turkana Boy and AMNH has Lucy, for example. Also, remember that humans are symmetrical, so if you have the left upper arm bone, you know what the right upper arm bone looks like: it is the mirror image. I've posted a list of transitional individuals in our ancestry several times, would you like me to do so again here?
I do not agree that the earth is 6,000 to 10,000 years old. It may be millions or billions. But even with that amount of time, in order for the evolutionary theory to be valid, it was either in rapid mode or directed. The amount of time given for humans to have evolved is much too short a span for people to be as sophisticated as we are now, with the complexities of the eye ball, the depths of the human brain.
There is more than enough time. Recent experiments looking at natural selection show it can operate at speeds up to 10,000 times that seen in the fossil record. The question is not whether there was enough time, but rather why evolution was so much slower than it
can happen.
As to the human eye (which is the vertebrate eye and has been around as such for 400 million years),
13. D-E Nilsson and S Pelger, A pessimistic estimate of the time required for an eye to evolve. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, B. 256: 53-58, 1994. The authors, being as pessimistic as possible, say it will take 364,000 generations. Even using the 20 years of a typical human generation and not the less than 1 year of most mammal generations, this works out to only 728,0000 years. Lucy is 2.4 million years old. More than enough time.
Birds and lizards (esp. dinosaurs) have similar bone and skeletal structures. They are still distinct SPECIES. A bird is not a reptile. A man is not an ape. Donkeys are not horses.
What you described is not a species, but rather a classification of
groups of species. Reptiles and birds are Classes. Now, ape is an Family, and in fact humans are members of that family. So, yes, under the classification, humasn are apes. Donkeys and horses are genera, the next step up from species. There are at least 3 species of horses and 2 of donkeys.
But one species does change into another. If you continue that for each species on either side of the split, eventually you will have different genera, families, orders, and classes. See the diagram here:
http://pages.britishlibrary.net/charles.darwin/texts/origin_6th/origin6th_04.html
Statistics... don't give me that philisophical junk. I'm talking about the odds of something happening that we are not sure of if it happened or not. The statisical probability of my being born is irrelevant because I was born. Case closed.
Let's open it again. If you use that argument, then the odds of anything that exists is irrelevant. Creationists use statistics to show that it is impossible to exist
by chance. But, as you are beginning to see, the statistics used to say that are flawed. If we calculate the odds of
you existing by chance -- using the same calculations used by creationists -- then you were specially created and not born from your parents.
Besides, look deep into a human body. The complexities are endless.
That's fine. Natural selection can generate complexities.
It is AMAZINGLY, almost unfathomably complex, and to think this cell came together at all, or if it did, then by accident, is anti-logic. Why can't scientists do this when performing a fair, accurate test in a lab?
1. But it didn't come by accident! Natural selection is
not chance!
2. Because natural selection takes far more time than a scientist's lifetime. But they have made life in the lab.
http://www.theharbinger.org/articles/rel_sci/fox.html
Also, you are ignoring all the bad designs in humans. Intervertebral discs, for instance. They are supposed to be designed for us to walk upright, but the design is so bad that they almost always fail before we die. That's why you have so many people in back pain. Or look at arthritis. Osteoarthritis comes just by using your legs for what they are designed to do: walk, run, move. Why would God do such a poor job of designing that the cartilage wears out? It is the bad designs that got special creation dropped by Christians.
"Not one change of species into another is on record... we cannot prove that a single species has been changed." -Darwin, My Life and Letters
"The geological record is extremely imperfect and this fact will to a large extent explain why we do not find interminable varieties, connecting together all the extinct and existing forms of life by the finest graduated steps. He who rejects these views on the nature of the geological record, will rightly reject my whole theory. For he may ask in vain where are the numberless transitional (missing) links which must formerly have connected the closely allied or representative". -Darwin, The Origin of Species
Well said, Darwin. Indeed, there should be thousands upon thousands of them... yet we cannot find one.
No, we've found thousands now.
http://www.christianforums.com/t43227 In fact, finding Archeopteryx in 1865 was strong support for the theory. BTW, you noticed that Darwin did give a reason for the failure to find intermediates. Well, it's 145 years since
Origin came out. Both observed speciation and abundant intermediate fossils are now know. In science, Proud, you always have to check to make sure new data hasn't shown old statements to be wrong.
Odd. In fact, shouldn't a woman give birth to an ape somewhere soon, due to the laws of genetics? The recessive gene for apes is somewhere in our gene pool... how come that has never happened??
The alleles for apes are long gone from the population. Recessive alleles (alleles are different variants of genes) are not holdovers from an evolutionary past. They are simply alleles that aren't expressed if there is a dominant allele.
"To the unprejudiced, the fossil record of plants is in favor of spacial creation. Can you imagine how an orchid, a duck weed, and a palm have come from the same ancestry, and have we any evidence for this assumption?!? The evolutionist must be prepared with an answer, but I think that most would break down before an inquisition".
-E.J.H. Corner, botanist of Cambridge University.
This is my favorite, though.
"There are only two possibilities as to how life arose. One is spontaneous generation arising to evolution; the other is a supernatural creative act of God. The is no third possibility. Spontaneous generation, that life arose form non-living matter was scientifically disproved 120 years ago by Louis Pasteur and others. That leaves us with the only possible conclusion that life arose as a supernatural creative act of God.
I will not accept that philosophically because I do not want to believe in God. Therefore, I choose to believe in that which I know is scientifically impossible; spontaneous generation arising to evolution".
-Dr. George Wald, Professor Emeritus of Biology at Harvard University, Nobel Prize winner in Physiology. [/QUOTE]Creationist websites are known for misquoting. Do you have a source for these?
The second refers to abiogenesis, not evolution. Evolution only applies after life has arisen. If life arose by a supernatural creative act of God, evolution still works. This is where you go back to thinking evolution is atheism.
I have a thread called "Abiogenesis". Please read it.