Need help from Theistic Evolutionists

[MonteViste]

There's a difference between the appearance of age and the appearance of history. Did Adam have scars from falling out of a tree when he was a kid? Or memories of being on his grandpa's farm? No, because although he would have appeared aged he wouldn't have signs of having a history. The earth has signs of having a history of over 4 billion years.

I think you are confusing our scientific understanding of the universe with atheism.

I see what you mean Philadiddle. Thanks for the clarification. And of course you're quite right Christians, if they are to be taken seriously, must learn to calm down and speak to evolutionists, theistic or not, on equal scientific terms; something that I am absolutely not in a position to do. I think I'll continue to content myself with the sense of wonder I experience when I consider that which we refer to as nature.

 

[Papias]

MonteViste wrote:

Thank you Mark, Gluadys, Papias and JVPITER for taking the time to respond to my question.
And Papias it is safe to assume that you are definitely a TE?

You are welcome! Yep, that's safe to assume.

I don't know whether I'm YEC or OEC - I can't for the life of me see where the problem is in believing that God made the earth (solar system) with built in age?

Well, the biggest problem I've seen is that the record of age (and of common descent) is overwhelming, from many different scientific fields, and ways of testing. Because of that, for God to have made all of His creation say that the Earth is 4.6 billion years old and that life has evolved, then if it didn't God would be lying to us. We need to remember that God's truth doesn't, and can't, contradict God's truth. God's truth is in both one's Bible and in His other revelation, the creation itself.

Why? Because the Bible says that when God made Adam he took some dust from the earth, formed Adam and breathed life in to him.

The Bible also says that God flew the hebrews out of egypt on eagles wings, and that a beautiful woman is one with livestock on her chest. Those could be metaphors. I'm sure you recognize a lot of metaphors in the Bible.

Thus Adam took his first breath as a fully formed, fully functioning adult with built-in age.

Technically, the Bible doesn't say that. That is an interpretation that is added by humans. Here is the text:

......streams came up from the earth and watered the whole surface of the ground. Then the LORD God formed a man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.
Now the LORD God had planted a garden in .....

But more importantly, is there a reason that making the man out of dust isn't a metaphor for the evolutionary process? After all, all life on earth evolved from dust, so in a literal sense, God is making man out of dust.

Anyway, Papias your argument seems incredibly convincing to me but at the same time sooooo improbable. It just seems at odds with logic (my own logic clearly) that such an inconceivable amount of energy should have been expended by the process of evolution for absolutely no reason whatsoever. Why do I say for no reason? Because if what you say is correct then it's all for nothing. There is no driving force behind behind the selection mechanism, no ultimate objective - it just is.

A baby's first steps, the beauty of churches, the success of landing on the moon, the look of love in my wife's eyes - those are not all for nothing! God made this incredible creation to show His glory (He's the driving force behind it all), and using a lot of time and energy to do so is certainly within the power of God, after all, He has a lot of time and energy to work with, right?

Hopefully the examples I gave show that evolution is not just probable, but practically inevitable given variation, reproduction, and the environment. After all, thinner fur of course doesn't work as well in cold, longer ears of course hear better, etc. I don't see anything that is "improbable". Is there a part you see as "improbable"?

It was about a group of biologists who came together, And that whilst the process of evolution could preserve it (once in existence) it couldn't have done diddly to have produced it in the first place.

Yes, Behe's old bacterial flagellum. What you saw was a description of a recent creationist campaign, that of "intelligent Design" based on examples of "irreducible complexity" (IC). What they don't tell you is that IC is an expected result of evolution, predicted by evolutionary scientists back in 1918. The evolution of IC is expected, and most of the cases of it, including the flagellum, have been shown to be quite easy to evolve (both by describing how it would happen, like my rabbit example, and by finding transitional forms).

Here is a video showing you how the bacteria flagellum could have easily evolved:

YouTube - The Evolution of the Flagellum


1. IC is predicted as a result of evolution. Muller predicted IC as an expected result of normal evolution in 1918, before Behe was even sucking a pacifier. The fact that IC items show up is evidence for evolution, and is certainly evidence against an intelligent designer, because as any engineer knows, a well designed system is robust, and has built in redundancies to be able to survive a loss of one component. IC is evidence of either evolution or of incompetent design.

2. The evolution of Behe's examples are not mysteries. Likely evolutionary routes are always known, and in most cases there is plenty of evidence for them as well. In fact, many of these evolutionary routes are published in textbooks from before Behe's book, showing the Behe is not only dishonestly ignoring the papers in his own field, he is even ignoring the textbooks!

Then he turns around and misrepresents this to gullible Christians, raking in literally millions of dollars in the process. He's done more to make Christians look like idiots than any new atheist could dream of doing

3. Behe himself admits that his "theory" is on par with astrology. This feeds directly into #2 above.

The bottom line is that whenever a creationist mentions irreducible complexity or Behe, what they are really saying is:

Because I am clueless about biology, I want YOU to reject science and evolution."


That DVD, like so much creationist stuff, relies on not telling you the whole story. You can see the same thing on this thread and elsewhere, where creationists intentionally hide information so as to distort the evidence and make evolution & God's creation harder to understand. You may have noticed that creationists didn't tell you any of point's 1, 2 and 3, above. You might ask them why they didn't.

Here is another example of a creationist hiding information (this one happening this week, right here on CF), see posts #31 and #37:

http://www.christianforums.com/t7552551-4/

I remember when I watched that DVD being thoroughly convinced by the arguments therein but I have a feeling that you're now going to convince me otherwise!

Don't feel bad. Of course we can all be fooled if only given part of the information or otherwise decieved. You know the old saying "fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me". We can all be fooled - once, twice, etc - but we then need to learn to look at both sides critically so as to find out when we aren't being told the full story.

Another area where your DVD misrepresented the real world was where you describe that biologists were doubting evolution (implying that any significant proportion of biologists do so). In the real world, practically all biologists reject creationism and support evolution. That includes millions of Christians who are biologists - after all, they are the ones who have looked at the evidence. It was mostly Christians who did the initial work in establishing evolution, and most of the support for evolution today in the US comes from Christians.

In His love-

Papias

 

[gluadys]

I think he has the right idea looking for a feedback mechanism I just don't think natural selection did it is an answer. You would be better off looking into Mendelian dominant and recessive traits and how environmental challenges can trigger adaptations.

You just have a mental block about using the term "natural selection".

After all, "how environmental challenges can trigger adaptations" is just a round-about way of saying "natural selection".

 

[gluadys]

Anyway, Papias your argument seems incredibly convincing to me but at the same time sooooo improbable. It just seems at odds with logic (my own logic clearly) that such an inconceivable amount of energy should have been expended by the process of evolution for absolutely no reason whatsoever. Why do I say for no reason? Because if what you say is correct then it's all for nothing. There is no driving force behind the selection mechanism, no ultimate objective - it just is.

I think you are using the wrong preposition in the last sentence. It would be correct to say there is no driving force IN the selection mechanism. It doesn't know or care what comes about as it operates any more than there is a driving force in a windmill which neither knows nor cares if its motion produces an electric current.

But just as there is a driving force BEHIND the windmill (the human need for energy and plans to use natural forces to get it), so there can be a driving force BEHIND natural selection: God's plans for a creation of wondrous and amazingly adapted bio-diversity.

I think I'll continue to content myself with the sense of wonder I experience when I consider that which we refer to as nature.

I think that's fine. I also think that understanding nature multiplies the sense of wonder we feel when we contemplate nature. Creation, whether viewed with the simple, direct apprehension of a child or the complex in-depth understanding of a scientist (not to mention every place on the spectrum between those extremes) truly does glorify God.

 

[Papias]

Hey MonteViste-

You don't happen to know that electrical engineer who is putting up billboards that say that Jesus' second coming will be May 21st, 2011,right?

I'm joking, of course. It was just strange to come across two Christian electrical engineers within a day of each other........

Papias

 

[shernren]

The question I have for evolutionists and TEs is possibly incredibly naive and I'm sure you'll all put me right straight away.

So then the question that always occurs to me. Where is the feedback mechanism in nature?

A year ago my girlfriend did an incredibly sweet (and embarrassing) thing for my birthday. She set up a blog and asked all my friends to say something nice on there, and then she passed me the link to that blog. (At first I thought "aww, what a nice picture she's put there". She had to point me to the comments.) How is this relevant?

MonteViste, I think your question is very perceptive and the answer is incredibly subtle. I'm not sure I have it myself. On one hand, it is obvious in any explanation of natural selection that there is some kind of feedback going on. But what sort, and how is it different from the tinkering that goes on in an electronic circuit or in designing an electronic circuit?

To me part of the answer is that natural selection involves weak coupling between systems. (I give full credit for this insight to a book I read - I'll post the citation when I get home.) The birthday story I told just now could have been very different. I could have just told Florence, "It is my birthday; bake me a cake." And she would have. And you would then get a classic negative feedback loop: the lack of celebration of my birthday effects the baking of a cake, which causes my birthday to be celebrated, which makes the further baking of cakes unnecessary, until my next uncelebrated birthday comes along, which then effects ...

But we'll all agree that what actually happened was a whole lot sweeter. And that's (partly) because I did not specify what effect my uncelebrated birthday should have. (Partly in the interest of science, partly in the interest of my relationship.) She could have celebrated my birthday in a million different ways - roses, cakes, pizza, random messages, a paintball war, etc. And the presence of all these alternatives introduces complexity into the otherwise simple birthday-cake phase space.

Not only that, her responses are able to affect many different areas of my personality. If I had asked her for a cake, I would only have gotten a cake, and only the wants-to-have-cake-and-eat-it side of me would have been satisfied. But with her blog, she managed to celebrate my birthday, and reconnect old friends with me, and satiate my Internet cravings, and practice her photo-editing skills - because I didn't specify her response.

Natural selection is like that. Think of an environment (such as a grassy field) as a system, and a population (of horses, say) as another system. Every once in a while, the population presents a newborn horse to the environment. The environment accepts this newborn horse as input and eventually returns to the population the output: a early death, or a middling sort of success, or a ripe old age with tremendous opportunities for reproduction. The population then accepts this input and uses it to present more new horses to the environment.

What happens if a horse is born with longer legs? The environment might return its verdict: "Favorable - this horse is fast, and the lions go hungry today." But the population - the DNA in the nuclei of sperm and ova and the social structure of males and females and so on - hasn't the foggiest notion what this means. The DNA of a horse has no gene for "outrun lions". For that matter, it probably doesn't even have a gene for longer legs. What it might have could be a gene that allows bone-producing cells to survive at the extremities of limbs for just that little bit longer. You see? Life in a complex environment - predators and heat and cold and kinetic impacts - exert tremendous pressure on a population, but very unspecified pressure. At the bottom of it the environment simply says to the population: "Do better." That's where the feedback mechanism is.

And the population is at liberty to interpret that statement any which way it wants. It may respond with faster legs. Or it may respond with horns. It may respond with a social structure that gives early warning of predators. It might even respond with physical camoflage, at which point the population eventually rebrands itself as a flock of zebras. Because the interaction is only weakly specified, it is capable of exploring large, large swathes of "character space". And that explains why evolution does so well at producing such varied, unimaginable characters in all the species of life.

 

[shernren]

Speaking of evolutionary algorithms, I just came across this stuff yesterday.

Being Isaac Newton: Computer derives natural laws from raw data

It's a slightly smaller deal than the hype has made it out to be (figuring out why conserved quantities are conserved was the most important part, and it wasn't done by Newton, or by Eureqa), but it's still quite an immense achievement for evolutionary algorithms. And it's especially apropos given mark's ill-informed rants about Newton.