Thank you for your reasoned and polite reply; we could do with more of that.
forgivensinner001 said:
Slippery slope? Hmmm, never heard it put that way before but I suppose tagging the argument with a cynical name nullifies it. touche
Oh, but there's more to it than that. The "believe this, not because it's true, but for some other reason" aspect is more important.
Very interesting article. Makes a lot of sense. It still worries me, however that finding a bug that mutated so it can no longer digest carbs but can (albeit very inefficiently) now digest nylon is good evidence that the vast variety of complex organisms alive today spontaneously generated from inorganic soup and by an extremely inefficient series of mutations evolved in a mere 4.6 billion years.
It doesn't. It merely proves that the "new information is impossible" claim is untrue. That's all it's meant to prove. Evolution is not demonstrated by any one observation, report or line of evidence; it is the fact that so many such observations and lines of evidence all lead to the same conclusion which is so compelling.
And it seemed to me that the tone of the article was saying just that. Basically, "We have discovered how new information can occasionally be produced by scrambling existing information. That proves that the staggering amount of information contained in the genes of a human being is the result of some molecules combining and then chance and time."
No, it doesn't say that. It merely says "new information can come about through mutation. The claim it can't is false". You might also like to think through the allele scenario I painted to see why the claim
has, logically, to be false.
I know many people believe it and I know that respectable scientists declare that it is a fact but I just can't make myself see it as reasonable. I mean I know if you set up a random letter generator and put a few mechanisms in place to save words that were useful, you would eventually end up with Gone With the Wind but the Library of Congress?!?" (wow, what an invitation to be flamed.
)
But reality doesn't ask your personal credulity for permission to be how it is. I know many people who just can't see how the idea that Our Lord really was God in the flesh is reasonable, but He didn't ask their permission before He was incarnated.
Nevertheless, the whole question of believing incredible things (and I agree, believe it or not, that on the face of it the evolutionary scenario
does appear to be incredible) is worth addressing.
Do we accept a claim based on how "easy" it is to believe? It's easy to conceive, for example, that on Wednesday I had an egg sandwich. It doesn't happen to be true though - I had cottage cheese IIRC. On the other hand, it seems quite remarkable that US and UK troops would torture prisoners, but, alas, it is so. Why do we reject the perfectly reasonable claim but accept the unreasonable one? Because of
evidence.
And that is how it is with evolution. We can observe from both genetic and fossil evidence that existing species are different from, but are descended from, earlier species. It seems incredible that the human phenotype could be derived from the same common ancestor as the chimpanzee, but the evidence for it is there in the rocks and in our genes - especially in human chromosome 2 and retro-viral insertions. It is there in little things like the way humans tend to push themselves up with their hands using the same hand position that chimps do when knuckle walking. It's there in muscles that are only fixed at one end in humans (and can therefore not do anything) but are fixed at both ends in monkeys. And so on. All little things, but they add up to an unescapable conclusion, which is the theory of evolution.
I know a lot of scientists are Christians but most aren't and they have a good reason for wanting evolutionism to be true. Otherwise there wouldn't be so many instances of fraud involving scientific "evidence" ie. Haeckel's embryos, Nebraska man, etc.
Actually, include Piltdown man and remove Nebraska man, and you've covered all the frauds. Nebraska man was an honest mistake, fixed within a couple of years by the same scientist who made the original discovery. Piltdown man may have been a fraud by a scientist, but we don't actually know. Archaeoraptor is often brought in here as well, but that was a fraud perpetrated
on, not by, scientists - although it was more perpetrated on
National Geographic than anyone else.
Haeckel's embryo drawings were altered to support his particular hobby-horse that "ontology recapitulates phylogeny", not the ToE in particular. Embryology does indeed support the ToE in some ways, but not the way that Haeckel wanted it to.
Believe it or not, Karl, I am an open minded person who loves science a good discussion. I just haven't seen any real, empirical evidence to support evolution. If it is a fact, there should be overwhelming evidence to support it and just because someone says there is overwhelming evidence doesn't make it so, because much of science relies on interpretation just as the Bible does.
But you should be able to
refute the evidence if you don't think it really is such. You should be able to produce a creationist model that
better explains, say, retro-viral insertions than evolution does. Moreover, your model needs to be a better fit for the entire body of evidence than evolution is. That's how science works. Einstein replaced Newton because his theory fitted the actual behaviour of bodies better than Newton, especially when moving very fast or when very massive.
Ok, I'd like to talk some more about Darwinian vs. Punc. Eq. and fossils etc. but my brain is shutting down. (I work 3rd shift and haven't been to bed yet) When I get tired my vocabulary is the 1st thing to go. I'm normally more articulate but I just can't seem to pull words out of the database to say what I want.
Feel free. But PE and Darwinism aren't in opposition; Kenneth Miller has a god section on this in
Finding Darwin's God. Gould and Eldridge over-stated the significance of steady gradulaism within evolution; moreover, PE is itself gradualistic - there is a difference between "always quite slow" and "sometimes very slow to the point of stasis and sometimes quite quick really", but both are gradualistic.
And now it just occurred to me that we are talking about TE and I'm so used to encountering athiests regarding this issue.
Oh well, I'm too tired to edit the post and I've spent too much time writing it to just hit Back. I look forward to some good, informative discussions here. I'm off to bed.
Peace to you all. I humbly and sincerely pray that God will bless you and keep you.
And you.
lol
