Job 33:6
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First, just because God could instantly create things does not mean he did it on all things. Just like how we wrote code, we write something, and later find we can do more, and deprecated the old code and created new code.
Second, I have to thank some other member of the form on this one. The article you quoted is from 1967, and more recent research shows exact opposite information as you stated.
Turn back the molecular clock, say Argentina's plant fossils | Penn State University
The article is from 2014, in it Peter Wilf, a paleobotanist and professor of geoscience, plainly states: "....and we found the opposite, that the fossils are much older than the clock dates. In this case, we can definitely say that the clocks are wrong. The fossils prove it"
Yes, however you could write new code at any time. You could write it now, you could write it later. You could write it all at once, you could write it 33% at a time.
But the temporal relation between mutations and fossils align, as seen in my example, giving a perceived relationship between mutations and morphology, which makes sense because we know anatomy is a product of DNA and its mutational changes.
"The researchers are not certain why there is strong directional bias in these molecular clock dates. They suggest that some molecular clock studies omitted known fossils, which would have made the dates older. They also suggest that the conventions for placing fossils on the tree of life as calibrations are too conservative and seem to bias molecular estimates significantly toward younger dates."
"First, several clock studies ignored previously known fossils that, if used as calibrations, would probably have made several estimates older (Table 1). These oversights mostly affected cycads and araucarians. Second, the convention of placing calibrations at stem nodes, unless they are explicitly resolved into a crown group, seems to cause significant directional bias. This procedure is methodologically conservative, but it forces crown nodes to be younger than the calibration fossil, whose real evolutionary position was either in the crown or along its subtending branch, not at a stem node."
Here is a passage from your article, suggesting potential reasons for the discrepancy. Science involves tests, trials, it is a process that involves gaining and learning. So naturally there will be failed tests. There will be failures in methodology used to make predictions as well. However, as seen above, there are also successful tests and successful predictions made by successful procedures and methods.
The article also states that errors are potentially caused by faulty placement of calibration nodes, that are based on the fossil succession. However, the article I listed, did not use the fossil succession in predicting the location of the human-ape split, so the two examples aren't even analogous as my example didnt reference the fossil succession in its methods used to derive the conclusion.
Further,
"If it is coming down to the point where paleontologists and microbiologists are going back and forth and are both making strong arguments through various independent lines of research, which are aligning with one another within 1 million years (out of an earth history of 4.56 billion years)...this is strongly suggestive of the fossil succession being a product of accumulated mutations.
Alternatively, your consideration of this idea that God instantaneously created and destroyed life over billions of years, really does't have a mechanism to allow for such predictions. By your consideration, these fossils could be 10 million or 30 million or 50 million or 100 million or 200 million etc. years away from one another. If God instantaneously created and destroyed over and over and over again, fossils could exist anywhere at any time."
One side of the coin proposes that morphology in the fossil succession is a product of mutations, which is understandable because DNA changes, and we can see mutations accumulate and derive timescales (in some cases accurate timescales which result in accurate predictions) from them. In some cases, predictions are even made without the fossil succession (unlike in the article you sourced).
The other side of the coin, proposes that God created and destroyed life over and over and over and over again countless, countless times. Nothing in scripture proposes this. Nobody sees this occurring today either, but we do see mutations accumulating, and life changing. I could even quote that e. coli report in that genotypic and phenotypic mutations and changes occurred in just 29 years.
So what is more plausible? The side of the coin that has a plausible explanation (mutations result in phenotypic change over time), and makes predictions that at least sometimes are correct depending on the method used.
Or the side of the coin that, has no observations, has no mechanical explanation, has no scriptural backing, and has no logical backing (why would God keep remaking things, was he unsatisfied with what he first made? What about when God reverses his trend and remakes something that was already made? Yet he said "and it was good, and very good"). Also, there is nothing known to man that would ever stop mutations from occurring or accumulating.
This is a no brainer. Hands down, from a scientific perspective, evolution is far more credible than the alternative you are proposing.
Further, you even have biogeographical distributions, Indian elephants are in India, African elephants are in africa. Flightless birds are in Australia. God could hypothetically create any animal anywhere at any time. Yet, geography seems to dictate what lives where. Which through evolution makes sense, if India was once a part of Africa, and if Australia is isolated from the rest of the world. But for what reason would God create and destroy countless species of elephants over and over and over again, but just so happen to keep them regionally defined? And why keep destroying and recreating, to keep them environmentally defined? Evolution by common descent does both of these on its own.
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