No, you didn't say it can for that reason, true.
I was pointing out that you were using the absence of awareness of a mechanism -P which prevents mechanism M from producing the disputed result U as evidence that M can produce U.
I was pointing out that the predictions evolution allows us to make are that a particular life form will be discovered, not exist.
This is what I have been talking about. Fossils and DNA are having the presuppositions of Naturalism applied to them in order to come up with interpretations.
The "presuppositions' were formed after an investigation of those things, not before.
When something is as clear cut as DNA and molecular evidence, it's a bit hard to interpret it in an incorrect way and still get it to make sense. it'd be like taking a jigsaw puzzle of a donkey and putting it together to make a spaceship.
An equally intelligent and skilled scientist who does not think according to Naturalism can look at DNA and see evidence of a programmer at work. In that framework it is logical that animals that are more similar in structure will also have many similarities in their DNA. It does not prove relation. It is the evidence that we have regardless of how we view the world and it provides circumstantial support to both positions when examined within their paradigms.
Animals with similar structures have more similar DNA? So bats are more closely related to birds than they are to mice? Hippos are more closely related to rhinos than they are to whales? And there are some fish that are more closely related to humans than they are to other fish. A tuna is closer to us than it is to a shark...
Because I have gone through an immense amount of the literature on the fossils that are claimed to be intermediates.
Many of them are nothing but fragments, if you can find images of the fossils at all. There are beautiful illustrations of what they looked like which fill in details that we have no evidence for. Even many of the skeleton replicas are more than 85% made up, some even more. We are given tales about how they lived and when, what they ate, how they bred, what their ancestors were, and who their descendants were, all from a few fossilized remains.
There is little to no science to substantiate the claims I have read.
Do you understand the explanations for
why scientists have ordered the fossils like that?
For the sake of discussion I'll say that you are right. Even still, we have something that is a great multiplier versus nature's millions of years and that is our intellect.
We can protect what we manipulate from predation, makes sure its needs are met and intentionally direct the genetic progress, ensuring no progress is lost as it is in nature.
We have put flies and bacteria through how many generations all the while forcing mutations on them and manipulating their genes? Still, they have not produced anything more than flies and bacteria.
If it is so simple for nature to take us from bacteria to all that has ever lived, surely we can do it in a short time.
Perhaps you don't understand how long it actually took nature. We can't speed evolution up to suit our fancy.
Evolutionary theory was around a while before DNA ever came in to view.
And when DNA testing became available, it could have crushed evolution. but it didn't. In fact, the opposite. DNA matched perfectly with what evolution had already figured out.
Again, I don't have any issue with the fact that an equine type could produce horses, ponies, zebras, and donkeys. I do have an issue with calling it 'evolution', but that is semantics. I am more concerned with concepts.
Like it or not, it IS evolution, despite your issues.
I reject universal common descent because I do not see any evidence for it that does not require me to accept the tenets of Naturalism, which is philosophy. The scientific evidence, shed of any philosophical conjecture, seems to indicate that universal common descent is not at all probable.
Can you provide this scientific evidence?
Naturalism: a philosophical paradigm whereby everything can be explained in terms of natural causes. Physical matter is the only reality -- everything can be explained in terms of matter and physical phenomena. Naturalism, by definition, excludes any Supernatural Agent or activity.
And any natural causes can be tested empirically. Tested by many people, with a variety of techniques. And if it were not objectively true, then the different techniques used at different times by different people in different places would all give different results.
Science is self-checking. That's the beauty of it. Any subjective errors are likely to be discovered and removed.
My issue isn't that we can't teach Genesis in astronomy or biology, it is that adherents to a particular philosophy (Naturalism) have sought to define it as science, establish it as the absolute truth and authority on every aspect of existence, insulate it from any challenge in any thought discipline, and to mandate that it is taught as fact to people starting from the earliest possible age.
You think evolution and science is not challenged? it's challenged every day.
In the broader sense, without getting too much into theology, God could create some things via natural mechanisms. He couldn't have used 'naturalistic' mechanisms because, by definition a naturalistic process is one the forbids God or anything outside our physical universe from playing any role in it. This isn't just a matter of semantics. Words have meaning.
By that argument, nothing God created can ever be classed as natural. Storms aren't natural because they use the atmosphere God created. earthquakes are unnatural because they use the ground that God created.
Universal common descent isn't a concept that is based on solely observable natural processes. It hinges on unobserved, hypothetical, naturalistic processes.
What processes would they be?
I've watched some of the videos. Thanks for linking them. I'll finish watching them, but they don't really seem to document many of the claims so far. Much of what they show are things I've studied previously and most of it suffers from the same requirement of accepting assumptions that I don't think are justified. I'll try and get back about them when I've had time to go a bit more in depth and digest them.
You asked what predictions evolution has made. Those videos explain them. If you disagree with any of the claims, feel free to mention them and I'll explain it to you.
Ideally, yes. The problem is that a person's way of seeing and interpreting the world isn't as easily abandoned as a failed theory.
If he fails to abandon something that has been proved false, then he is not doing science.
In the same way, many people are committed to Naturalism and cannot imagine viewing the world in any other way. As a result, they accept some pretty absurd and illogical ideas so that they do not have to let it go.
I can easily imagine viewing the world some other way.
I just cannot imagine accepting something that has no evidence for it. Evolution has a lot of evidence.
I was referring to your claim that science doesn't start with assumptions. You would have no hypothesis to test if you didn't begin with assumptions. That's all I was saying.
But science doesn't teach assumptions as true.
I know what you said but it was an analogy. I wasn't asking what would have to be changed in the human schematic to make impregnation via kissing possible.
You asked what would be different about babies. There schematic would HAVE to be different, wouldn't it?
Let me try to clear this up Forget the kissing analogy.
We have explanation A and explanation B for the same result C. I hold A, you hold B. The question was if B were true, what would be different about C? My point is that if B were true, since it is an explanation of C, C should still be true. This is why I said it is a meaningless question.
That's all I was trying to say with the analogy.
If B were true, B would fit the evidence more closely than A (see the Newtonian idea of gravity versus the Einsteinian idea of gravity. Einstein's idea was correct, based on the fact that it matched exactly with what we saw in reality). B would also tell us things about result C that we didn't already know. If we looked at result C and found things that explanation B said would be there, but
weren't predicted by explanation A, then this is evidence that explanation B is correct.
How's that?
What I see in DNA supports the claim that it is a result of design. The foundation of our disagreement is philosophical, not scientific.
Please show how you can determine if something is designed.
Failure to follow absolute moral principles isn't evidence against them. It is evidence that people are sinful.
And sinful means anyone with different morals than you. Circular argument. Youa re saying only that people with different morality have a different morality.
If there were no true morals, why would any of the mentioned acts be wrong? We might not prefer them, but we couldn't legitimately call them wrong.
We accept certain acts - such as theft, murder etc - as wrong because they harm the society that we live in. We are social animals after all.
Sure. Send me a link when you find it.
I will when i get around to it.