How to choose between creation and evolution.

xianghua · Mar 11, 2018

expos4ever said:
Many people dispute this. The fact that the "first steps" are presently a mystery does not justify a conclusion that "life comes from life".

replace animal with a car (or even a self replicating car made from organic components)and you will understand why its a big problem for evolution.

VirOptimus · Mar 11, 2018

xianghua said:
replace animal with a car (or even a self replicating car made from organic components)and you will understand why its a big problem for evolution.

It really isnt.

LordKroak10 · Mar 11, 2018

xianghua said:
its like saying that since a metal can evolve naturally then a robot made of metal can evolve from it. even if we had a self replicating metal it will not evolve into a self replicating robot. and the self replicating robot itself is evidence for design.

I'm not sure what you're trying to say here. That metal can somehow evolve? That robots are somehow equivalent to living things? We're not talking about metal, or robots, or cars, or whatever other analogies you are attempting to draw. We are talking about organic life. Complexity arises from simplicity all the time, in an extraordinary and also incredibly common phenomenon known as emergence, or emergent properties. To say that simple molecules could not express emergent properties is simply false, since it happens all the time. The watch maker argument is a logical fallacy called the faulty analogy. You cannot say that a watch and the universe both have a creator just because they are both complex.

KWCrazy · Mar 11, 2018

Speedwell said:
I'm not interested in talking you out of your beliefs about the Bible--they do no harm as long as you remember that they are just your beliefs and not a test fo faith for the rest of Christendom.

How do you justify teaching doctrine that is contrary to the Scriptures?

Speedwell · Mar 11, 2018

KWCrazy said:
How do you justify teaching doctrine that is contrary to the Scriptures?

What doctrine is that? What, in particular, do I "teach" that is contrary to the Nicene Creed?

OldWiseGuy · Mar 11, 2018

AnotherAtheist said:
I didn't tell you to 'go away', I asked you to be precise about what you are asking for.

What details do you want? The sum total of independent lines of evidence that contributes to our understanding of evolution are numerous, and the amount of 'details' stupendously huge. What is it that you actually want to know because no-one can just type out 'the details' on evolution.

It would be like me asking you for a list of every priest, minister, and other religious leader that there has ever been in Christianity. Clearly, it cannot be done.

I'll give you a easy one. How and when did the human eye evolve? What were the processes that formed the necessary tissues and connections to the brain (the evolution of the brain itself would be an interesting study as well).

Speedwell · Mar 11, 2018

OldWiseGuy said:
I'll give you a easy one. How and when did the human eye evolve? What were the processes that formed the necessary tissues and connections to the brain (the evolution of the brain itself would be an interesting study as well).

The short answer is, that it happened long before there were humans. We inherited all of that stuff.

OldWiseGuy · Mar 11, 2018

VirOptimus said:
Really? It doesnt look like you know anything about it.

I meant that I understand that many people believe, and thus 'support', the theory, not that they understand it. In fact most who 'support' it don't know any more about it than I do. They 'believe' it because so many others do. The thread is aimed at those who might be on the fence. That's why I encourage studying anatomy, as it reveals astounding complexities that I don't think can be explained by evolution. The human voice is a good example of such complexity.

Human voice - Wikipedia

OldWiseGuy · Mar 11, 2018

Speedwell said:
The short answer is, that it happened long before there were humans. We inherited all of that stuff.

Explain the "inheritance" process.

AnotherAtheist · Mar 11, 2018

OldWiseGuy said:
I'll give you a easy one. How and when did the human eye evolve? What were the processes that formed the necessary tissues and connections to the brain (the evolution of the brain itself would be an interesting study as well).

But, you don't know how to ask the question.

If you mean specifically the human eye, then it evolved alongside the first humans circa 10 million years ago. However, the eyes of apes are not that different from ours, so not much evolution is involved in that.

If you want to know the true origin of our eye, then you need to go way back through evolution to the first eyes of very primitive organisms hundreds of millions of years ago. In that case, we go all the way back to the first photosensitive proteins derived from earlier proteins that weren't photosensitive, then eye spots in unicellular creatures, then light sensitive clumps of cells in multicellular cells, then eye pits which are recessed in a cup shape. Then a pinhole eye with no lens. Then a covered pinhole eye. Then the development of a lens from a covered pinhole eye. All of these stages of eye development are not just known from fossils, but also from current living creatures. And you can find this information easily by googling fairly obvious search terms such as 'how did sight evolve'.

OldWiseGuy said:
Explain the "inheritance" process.

And here's the problem. How on earth can you sensibly discuss evolution if you don't know how inheritance works? You have to have at least a basic understanding of biology to be able to discuss it.

VirOptimus · Mar 11, 2018

OldWiseGuy said:
I meant that I understand that many people believe, and thus 'support', the theory, not that they understand it. In fact most who 'support' it don't know any more about it than I do. They 'believe' it because so many others do. The thread is aimed at those who might be on the fence. That's why I encourage studying anatomy, as it reveals astounding complexities that I don't think can be explained by evolution. The human voice is a good example of such complexity.

Human voice - Wikipedia

Belief has nothing to do with science.

Your post is nonsense.

USincognito · Mar 11, 2018

OldWiseGuy said:
Explain the "inheritance" process.

Genetics. We discuss it a lot around here. I'm surprised you've never noticed.

Gene2memE · Mar 11, 2018

OldWiseGuy said:
I'll give you a easy one. How and when did the human eye evolve? What were the processes that formed the necessary tissues and connections to the brain (the evolution of the brain itself would be an interesting study as well).

2011 Scientific American article on the evolution of the human eye:

https://www.google.com.au/url?sa=t&...%20lamb_.pdf&usg=AOvVaw0ltlzH46AkeZcMsiF9ZZRe

Some summarised highlights:

P1:

.... biologists have recently made significant advances in tracing the origin of the eye—by studying how it forms in developing embryos and by comparing eye structure and genes across species to reconstruct when key traits arose. The results indicate that our kind of eye—the type common across vertebrates—took shape in less than 100 million years, evolving from a simple light sensor for circadian (daily) and seasonal rhythms around 600 million years ago to an optically and neurologically sophisticated organ by 500 million years ago.

P3:

THE FOSSIL RECORD shows that during the Cambrian explosion two fundamentally different styles of eye arose. The first seems to have been a compound eye.... Compound eyes are impractical for large animals, however, because the eye size required for high-resolution vision would be overly large. Hence, as body size increased, so, too, did the selective pressures favoring the evolution of another type of eye: the camera variety.

P3:

...observed that many of the hallmark features of the vertebrate eye are the same across all living representatives of a major branch of the vertebrate tree: that of the jawed vertebrates. This pattern suggests that jawed vertebrates inherited the traits from a common ancestor and that our eye had already evolved by around 420 million years ago, when the first jawed vertebrates ... patrolled the seas. We reasoned that our camera-style eye and its photoreceptors must therefore have still deeper roots, so we turned our attention to the more primitive jawless vertebrates, with which we share a common ancestor from roughly 500 million years ago.

... an eye essentially identical to our own must have been present in the common ancestor of the jawless and jawed vertebrates 500 million years ago.

P4/5:

...the ancestral eye of proto-vertebrates living between 550 million and 500 million years ago first served as a nonvisual organ and only later evolved the neural processing power and optical and motor component needed for spatial vision. Studies of the embryological development of the vertebrate eye support this notion.

... During embryological development the mammalian eye, too, exhibits telltale clues to its evolutionary origin.

P5/6:

...reported evidence that our eye still retains the descendants of rhabdomeric photoreceptors, which have been greatly modified to form the output neurons that send information from the retina to the brain. This discovery
means that our retina contains the descendants of both classes of photoreceptors: the ciliary class, which has always comprised photoreceptors, and the rhabdomeric class, transformed into output neurons. Pressing an existing structure into use for a new purpose is exactly how evolution works, and so the discovery that the
ciliary and rhabdomeric photoreceptors play different roles in our eye than in the eye of invertebrates adds still more weight to the evidence that the vertebrate eye was constructed by natural processes.

More on the evolution of the eye:
The evolution of eyes and visually guided behaviour
The evolution of irradiance detection: melanopsin and the non-visual opsins
Evolution of phototaxis
Evolution of vertebrate retinal photoreception

KWCrazy · Mar 11, 2018

Speedwell said:
What doctrine is that? What, in particular, do I "teach" that is contrary to the Nicene Creed?

The Nicene Creed is not synonymous with the Scriptures.
The Scriptures state that God created the universe in six days and rested on the seventh.
The Scriptures say that Adam was made from the dust of the earth and Eve from a rib; neither evolved from anything.
The Scriptures say that sin and death came into the world through one man; that all living things were preserved through the actions of one man, and that salvation came to the world through one man.
You say that's all a myth; that man evolved over billions of years and God didn't have anything to do with it after getting things in motion.

Speedwell · Mar 11, 2018

KWCrazy said:
The Nicene Creed is not synonymous with the Scriptures.

It is a concise and authoritative statement of Christian doctrine. Again I ask you: what am I "teaching" that is contrary to it?

The Scriptures state that God created the universe in six days and rested on the seventh.
The Scriptures say that Adam was made from the dust of the earth and Eve from a rib; neither evolved from anything.

According to your interpretation, which is not binding on all Christians.

The Scriptures say that sin and death came into the world through one man; that all living things were preserved through the actions of one man, and that salvation came to the world through one man.

Indeed they do.

You say that's all a myth

And so it is. Even if Genesis was 100% accurate literal history it is still a myth. "Myth" refers to how the story is used, not whether it is true or not.

that man evolved over billions of years

Life evolved over billions of years; man's history is much shorter.

and God didn't have anything to do with it after getting things in motion.

False. I have never taken that position, in fact I have argued against it with other "evolutionists" in this forum.

USincognito · Mar 11, 2018

KWCrazy said:
The Scriptures state that God created the universe in six days and rested on the seventh.

The Universe states differently. So what to go with, reality itself, or a literalist interpretation of Genesis?

KWCrazy said:
The Scriptures say that Adam was made from the dust of the earth and Eve from a rib; neither evolved from anything.

The fossils, genes and everything we know about life on earth states differently. So what to do with, reality itself, or a literalist interpretation of Genesis?

KWCrazy said:
You say that's all a myth; that man evolved over billions of years and God didn't have anything to do with it after getting things in motion.

NO one claims "man" evolved over billions of years. And nothing in science says anything one way or another about any deity and their involvement or lack thereof in things.

USincognito · Mar 11, 2018

For the new folks, this is a lovely parade of Mark's different shticks.

mark kennedy said:
The fossil evidence is manipulated and contrived. Perhaps the longest running demonstration was easily the Piltdown fraud.

Mark and I had a formal debate about whether Creationists should continue to mention Piltdown or not.
Forma Debate - Piltdown Man Should Not Be Cited By Creationists
My points were that it was a lot easier for a hoax to be passed off in 1912 and that the hoax was finally exposed as the increasing number of legitimate finds contradicted the story Piltdown told. Creationists mentioning it are dishonestly trying to poison the well and sew doubt. Yet, here we are 12 years later and he's still telling the same story.

mark kennedy said:
The problem was that there was nothing to replace it as a transitional from ape to man.

Absolute poppycock. Neanderthal fossils had been found since the 1850s. Java erectus fossils found since the 1890s. You mention Taung in 1924. Peking erectus fossils found since the 1920s.

mark kennedy said:
Everyone considered it a chimpanzee child...

Absolute poppycock. Clearly it wasn't considered a "chimpanzee child" because it had the foramen magnum of biped. Mark has been aware that the placement of the foramen magnum indicates posture since 2006.
Bipedality can be determined from just a skull by the shape and placement of the Foramen Magnum.

mark kennedy said:
Ever notice that there are no Chimpanzee ancestors in the fossil record? That’s because every time a gracial (smooth) skull, that is dug up in Asian or Africa they are automatically one of our ancestors.

I don't know what "gracial" is, but gracile means slender and is meant to contrast with more robust hominids. And this is another Mark shtick - selective amnesia. He's had it explained to him numerous times that jungle dwelling beings like chimpanzees are less likely to be fossilized because the conditions aren't ripe for fossilization and the soil tends to be acidic and dissolves bones rather than preserves them.
He's been told this most recently on Feb 28th yet here he is repeating it again.

Tanj · Mar 11, 2018

mark kennedy said:
I haven't seen you published in Nature magazine lately so we're even.

Wait...what? I published in Nature a few months ago...does that mean I get to win something? Or that when I point out your interpretation of comparative genomics is flawed, you will listen?

r4.h · Mar 12, 2018

USincognito said:
That there is no evidence for evolution.
That there is evidence of the Flood.
That there are no transitional fossils.
That there are no beneficial mutations.
That evolution is a "religion".
That evolution is the same as atheism.
etc. etc.

And yet germ theory of disease doesn't take God into the equation and I bet you're fine with it. The same goes for plate tectonic theory. Heck, your local weather forecast doesn't take God into the equation, but I bet you don't complain every time you read or watch it.

You cannot merely claim something is "flawed" or "not a fact". You're going to need to provide evidence showing it to be "flawed" or "not a fact". And as far as deep time goes, that had nothing to do with whatever conspiracy theory you're alluding to. It's based on solid science over the course of 200 years.
Geologic Time: Contents

USincognito · Mar 12, 2018

@r4.h something went wrong with your reply.

How to choose between creation and evolution.

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A nihilist who cares.

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Wake me when it's soup.

Gimmie dat ol' time physical evidence

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Redefined comfortable middle class

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