Responders-
Your arguments are going downhill. Some of your arguments are completely based off of interpretation and semantics. Evolution in it's most popular form includes many attached peripheral ideas including albiogenesis and therefore in discussions of evolution, it must be treated as a relevant topic.
Without an imperfect replicator, you cannot have biological evolution. That is why abiogenesis, while certainly an interest to many evolutionary scientists, is still not something that evolution is dependent upon. If I gave your god the responsibility for the creation of the first life form, where would that leave you and your arguments?
Evolution is most certainly a ladder if only because of the element of time in which there is a progression, maybe not with one species replacing another but with one species coming out of another. But this branching bush effect is still just best guess and assumption. We haven't SEEN any of this occur. We have the before and after but no one has seen the process.
There is no direction to evolution. Obviously, if you start with only simple organisms, you will wind up with more complex organisms after a given amount of time. Nevertheless, there are as many bacterial species today as there was during the Precambrian Period. How do you explain that, if evolution is a progression?
You have skeletal remains of several similar organisms and you assume from that that they are all related. That's like going to China and calling everyone Jackie Chan and Lucy Liu. Also, if evolution is not random then it is predictible and science should be able to predict a mutation before it occurs. Yes, this is like predicting the weather. But that's what the Farmer's Almanac does, maybe not exact weather patterns but general one and it has done it with great accuracy.
Common descent is
inferred from the evidence, not
assumed. Mutations are indeed random, though selection is not. Therefore, we cannot predict mutations. We can make some predictions about the course of evolution, but evolution is more complicated than weather patterns. The predictions we can make are predictions of what we will find in the fossil record, and what we will find when we sequence the DNA of different organisms.
As far as the experiment to make protiens goes, they weren't trying to make life. You're right. But they were trying to prove that the basics for life could occur in such an environment, and they failed at it. Even if they made all the protiens, they would have only proven one thing, that it takes intelligence to make those protiens.
No it did not fail. Organic molecules, including simple sugars, amino acids, and urea were created... and without any god's input.
My point of life being impossible without the pre-existence of necesarry protiens is valid. But apparently you're only discussing evolution and avoiding the question of albiogenesis. If you don't wish to discuss it, that's your right but it does leave a bit of a hole in your progression, especially if you believe the creation story to be factless. Furthermore, RNA cannot self replicate. That is a fallacy, there must be another mechanism besides RNA to replicate it. RNA is one of of the DNA strang. It replicates by attachign the other half to it and then tearing it apart. What, pray tell, tears it a part?
We can discuss abiogenesis if you like, but please start a new thread.
The argument ad hominen that I'm not a scientist so how dare I disagree with established scientific theory is moot. Scientific method is based off of critical thinking and asking questions of what we think we know. Many scientist and non-scientists have disagreed with popular belief and been proven right, not that popularity has anything to do with science, so you say.
You do not have even a basic understanding of the theory of evolution. How can you critisize it, even with better critical thinking skills than you seem to posess?
It was scientists that proved that piltdown man was a hoax. But Christians knew it was a hoax first.
Got any evidence of that... or are you engaging in rhetoric?
My previous argument that everything proves evolution is admitedly poorly articulated. I meant to say that anything can be fitted into the framework of evolution meaning that if it stays the same, it's in an interim period or there are no stressors forcing change. If it changes, then there's your evolution. But after this point you are arguing evolutionary history. You all say that finding a man in cambrian soil would disprove evolution. How about a tree that runs though hundreds of thousands of years worth of soil deposits? How about the fossils of chittons on top of mountain tops? Futhermore, there is no place where there has been a complete timeline in the fossil record. We only have bits and pieces and they have been ordered according to the evolutinary world view.
1. Show us an example where a tree that runs through not just a number of soil layers, but through hundreds of thousands of years worth of soil layers. You do realize that not all soil layers of a given length represent the same time frame... right? Is this perhaps an example where your lack of knowledge about the subject you are trying to critisize has betrayed you?
2. Fossil sea shells are not just on top of mountains, but
inside them. Have you ever heard of Plate Tectonics?
3. There are places that have a nearly complete geological column. One of them is in North Dakota, in fact. You do realize that not all locations on earth are actually going to produce either sedimentary layers or volcanic layers during a given timeframe... right? What happens then? What happens if layers that are produced erode away before new layers are put down? Answer?.... missing layers!
4. There is no ordering of geological timeframes via "evolutionary" assumptions. This is a LIE propagated by the creation ministries you think so highly of. In fact, the ordering of the geological column and the concept of Deep Time
predates the accpetance of evolution by the scientific community. Therefore, it is Impossible that "evolutionary assumptions" are to blame for them. Yet, your precious creation ministries tell you otherwise... why is that?
You all seem to think that you're the only ones who knows what he's talking about. I've resisted arguments ad hominem but this takes it too far. My facts about gene replication and mutation, while incomplete, were accurate. We understand evolution but you choose to use a very narrow definition of the word as opposed to the broader general usage. Again, it's an argument of semantics rather than actual fact. By that logic everyone who's ever used the term Creation v. Evolution has no idea what they're talking about and that would include pretty everyone who found the data to help prove evolution/abiogeneis and certainly creationism.
Look... we are all supposed to be talking about
Biological Evolution here. That is what creationists like yourself really hate. That is what contradicts your interpretation of Genesis and the idea that Man was created as he is today by a divine act. There are many things covered by the term "evolution", from chemical to stellar evolution... but none of them has any bearing on whether or not chimpanzees are related to Man.
Yes, there is nothing random about chemistry. But there IS something random about the physics that governs chemistry. Ever hear of the electron cloud, entropy, fluid dynamics, or fission. All of these involve a factor of chance and all are necessary to the study of Chemistry. While the Chemistry itself may be predictible, the physics behind it is not. However, the chemistry of abiogeneis, as I have proved in my first post, is impossible, unless my science is incomplete which it very well may be.
Indeed it is incomplete. Show us the calculations that make chemical evolution impossible.
The only difference between atheism and religion is atheism starts witht he belief in nothing and religion starts with the belief in an everything. The only difference is the starting points. Science assumes that God isn't there while relgion does. The important thing is that we should all be using the same logic and factual awareness to arrive at the truth.
Correction...Science Makes No Assumptions about God At All. You can be a scientist and still be a Christian, Jew, Muslim, Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, etc.