lucaspa said:
If God did not make us by the processes discovered by science, then God is a liar in His Creation. God would still exist, but it wouldn't be a deity you could worship or follow.
This is where you get into trouble with the Bible. You have two separate and contradictory creation stories in Genesis. Genesis 1 and Genesis 2-3. You are mixing them up without really reading the Bible.
Lucaspa..you are really grasping here.
I must have hit a bad nerve here. Sorry, but it needed to be done.
1. Go to Barnes and Nobles. Look at all the books with commentaries of Genesis in them. You will find that
all of them acknowledge two separate and contradictory creation stories.
2. Since at least St. Augustine in 400 AD Christians have held to a "two books" doctrine. God has
two books The Bible which God inspired but men wrote and Creation which God wrote directly. Those books have to agree. In1832 (before evolution) evangelical Christians realized "If sound science appears to contradict the Bible, we may be sure that it is our interpretation of the Bible that is at fault." Christian Observer, 1832, pg. 437;.
So
.first of all evolution counters against what Genesis said about creation.
.
Evolution counters
a literal INTERPRETATION of Genesis 1-3. What I am saying is that the text of Genesis 1-3 tells you not to interpret it literally. Never mind the extrabiblical evidence God gave you to tell you not to interpret it literally. The internal evidence says its not literal. The tragedy about creationism is that Biblical literalists forget that their interpretation isn't the Bible. Nor is it God. It is just their man-made interpretation. And it can be, and is, wrong. But their human pride won't let them admit it.
I'm not going to change evolution which is your belief
One more time:
evolution is NOT a belief. Not mine, not anyone's. If you want to go to beliefs, you have to go to atheism. But I'm not saying you should give up theism, am I?
please don't go in here and try to change my belief about Genesis.
I have to in order to save your soul. Because you are making a false idol out of your interpretation of Genesis 1-3. It is leading you to reject God and His Creation. Your belief about a literal interpretation of Genesis is not a salvation issue, but you are making it one.
"In order for a theory to qualify as a scientific theory it must be supported by observations that are repeatably observable and the theory must, in principle, be falsifiable. That is, there must be some way to demonstrate that the theory is false if indeed it is false. Neither creation nor evolution fulfils the criteria of a scientific theory. There were no human observers to the origin of the universe, the origin of life, or to the origin of a single living thing. These events occurred in the unobservable past and are not repeatable in the present. Creation and evolution are inferences based on circumstantial evidence."
This is wrong on so many levels. David Gould already pointed many out to you. You didn't give a source, did you? But if this is true, then why did Morris write a book called
Scientific Creationism and why does ICR call it "creation
science"? Have you noticed that no one alive saw the Flood, nor is it repeatable, but both ICR and AiG say we can go look at the geology and tell that a violent world-wide flood happened? The professional creationists don't even beleive this!
THe present is the way it is because the past was the way it was. As David and others have pointed out so well, as long as the event leaves evidence we can study in the present, we can tell what happened in the past. What's worse, most of science does not meet the criteria of "observable, repeatable in the present". See the essay at the end of the post.
Evolution is falsifiable. So is natural selection. Darwin gave a couple of criteria to falsify natural selection in
Origin. Here's one:
"If it could be proved that any part of the structure of any one species had been formed for the
exclusive good of another species, it would annihilate my theory, for such could not have been produced through natural selection." Origin, pg 501.
In common ancestry, if mammalian fossils came before reptilian fossils in the fossil record, that would have falsified evolution. If phylogenetic studies had shown that DNA sequences between taxa were independent observations, that would have falsified evolution. There were a lot of ways evolution (common ancestry)
could have falsified evolution. But the tests showed that the data did not falsify evolution. As David pointed out, creationism does make falsifiable statements and those statements have been falsified. Both are scientific theories.
thats all lucaspa..you can get all your studies here to prove all you want that species are being recreated and so on because first though it seems promising and may give some validity to the claims of evolution, each has to be studied and given out in detail..often studies cited here are conclusions of an experiment..one cited a cichlid population from 4000 years shows that no cichlid lived in a specific lake..pray tell, how can you control an experiment that has its original basis 4000 years ago.
The experiment provided it's own controls. One is lakes in the region during the same time that did not have cichlids. Another is looking at the alternative hypotheses to the cichlids evolving and being able to falsify the alternatives.
again remember coelacanth was supposed to be an index fossil based on the same scientific principles that were employed..until the fish was caught it was a given to assume that it was proof of fish to amphibian transition.
1. To the best of my knowledge the coelencanth was never an index fossil. Do you know what an index fossil is? Can you provide any evidence the coelencanth was used for that purpose.
2. The coelencanth is evidence of the fish to amphibian transition. The parent species or, in this case genus, does not have to die out when the daughter species evolves. Remember, only
part of the population transformed, not all of it. In this case, amphibians were split off from just one species of the
family of several hundred species of lobe-finned fish. The other species in the family remained lobe-finned fish.
for the longest time scientists did not believe a platypus existed and when they saw it thought it was a semi-duck,reptile, mammal.
And because it combines reptilian and mammalian features it is one of the falsifications of creationism.
my point is that the record evolutionists have in claiming it to be truth but having a history of fabrication (piltdown hoax, Haeckels drawings) or modifying the theory to account for the lack of transitional fossils (like Gould)..it is not beyond reasonable doubt that many in the scientific world are having doubts in the present evolutionary theory.
You've got 2 hoaxes, one of them perpetrated
on science, not
by science. The other was known to be false from the beginning (Haeckel) and was never part of Darwinism. Haeckel had his own theory of Ontogeny Recapitulates Phylogeny (not Darwinism) and this theory is indeed wrong. But since it wasn't Darwinism to begin with, what's the big deal? If you go to PubMed you get over 120,000 papers on evolution, and this is a
medical database only going back to 1965. Are you seriously suggesting that all those papers are fabrications or hoaxes? If they are, then don't ever go to a doctor again, because the people involved in those papers are also involved in the discoveries that led to all of modern medicine.
In the case of PE, there were two theories about how most speciation happens: phyletic gradualism and allopatric speciation. Eldredge and Gould realized that the fossil record looks
exactly like it should
if most speciation was by allopatric speciation. It doesn't contradict Darwinian evolution at all.
..
Lucaspa, you state that evolution is fact (at least I infer it)..however fact is Knowledge or information based on real occurrences..2+2=4 is fact..I know of no mathematician who will sate his credibilty or reputation and question this..yet there are many scientists christians and nonchristians who don't see evolution as fact and are willing to stake their reputation and careers on it...
You really shouldn't have used math! Really! There are statements in any mathematical system that is complex enough to have addition and multiplication that can't be proven in the system. It's called Goedel's Theorem. At least one mathematician has declared "If religion is believing where you can't prove, then mathematics is the only religion that can prove it's a religion." And this is the example you want to use of "fact" as opposed to belief? Not a good one.
When a theory garners sufficient supporting evidence (has failed to be shown false after many tries) then we accept is as (provisionally) fact. We accept round earth as fact even tho it's a theory. We accept sun at the center of the solar system as fact even tho it's a theory. What we do then is use that (provisional) fact as the basis of other tests and more complex explanations. If the tests and explanations work out, then the theory is supported even more. For instance, we used the "fact" of heliocentrism to plot the courses of interplanetary probes. When the probes arrived where and when we calculated them to arrive, heliocentrism was supported. Same thing with evolution. When I use common ancestry to predict that rabbits will have similar responses to cartilage injury as humans because they share a recent common ancestor and then find that treatments for arthritis that work in rabbits also work in humans, then I have supported common ancestry (evolution). Have any of the scientists who doubt evolution published
any research based on evolution being false? Not that I am aware. All of their scientific publications support evolution! So if they want to be wrong and sacrifice their careers, so be it.
Now the essay:
Recently I had a paper published (Tissue Engineering, 1(4): 345-353, 1995) describing an experiment for a possible treatment for osteoarthritis. We drilled a 3 mm diameter hole thru the articular cartilage and part of the underlying bone in the knee of rabbits. This diameter hole will not regenerate on its own and is an established model for osteoarthritis. In the defect in one knee we placed a polymer alone and in the other knee we placed polymer into which had been grown special cells, mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs for short). Animals were euthanized at 6 and 12 weeks post-op and the defect removed for histological (under the microscope) analysis. At 6 weeks there was no difference between defects with polymer alone and defects with polymer-MSCs. Both contained cells but there was no identifiable cartilage or bone. At 12 weeks, the defects with polymer alone contained fibrocartilage (which is NOT the same as articular cartilage) and no bone. It looked like a big hole in cartilage and bone filled with scar tissue. In contrast, the defect with polymer-MSCs had a surface layer of articular cartilage and an underlying layer of bone. The edges of the defect could not be observed. The bone in the defect could not be distinguished from the surrounding bone. We concluded that the MSCs had formed the new cartilage and bone that now filled the defect. However, the point here is that we DEDUCED, or INFERRED, the differentiation of the MSCs to chondrocytes (cartilage cells) or osteoblasts (bone cells).
We never observed it directly. In thinking about our current, and planned, experiments, this lack of direct observation will be true there also. The best, and most accepted, "proof" will be to insert the gene for beta-galactosidase into the MSCs. The beta-galactosidase produced by the labeled cells will stain blue with a chemical reaction. Therefore, we will see the chondrocytes and osteoblasts in the defect treated with polymer-MSCs turn blue, "proving" that the MSCs differentiated into these cells. But that is still inferrence, or "detective style reasoning".
Everything we observed happened in the past, from a microsecond to 6 weeks before we removed the tissue at 12 weeks post-op. It is still looking at the result of a past event we will never be able to see in real time. This is no different than Darwin observing the Galapagos finches and INFERRING that evolution occurred.
Take one more example from the "inductive" sciences. This time chemistry. One of the first experiments I did in undergraduate organic chemistry was reacting organic acid with an alcohol to get an ester. Esters have distinctive odors that depend on the acid and alcohol used. My reaction produced an ester that smelled like bananas. My lab partner and I knew we had succeeded when we began smelling bananas. Did we ever see the 2 molecules actually come together to form an ester? No. We knew we had those 2 chemicals and that we got the reaction product. We DEDUCED the reaction took place, but never directly observed it. Except for behavioral biology, where the observed behavior can be observed in real time and videotaped, nearly every experiment I can think of in the "inductive" sciences involves deductive reasoning. All the events occur in the recent past, but the past.
