Science (observations in nature) - supports creation not evolution. So does the Bible

Diamond7

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observations in nature
Then you need to observe a spectrograph because every element burns at its own color. So we know exactly what elements are produced in stars and when they are produced. The Bible refers to these elements as "dust". This is why the PBS Cosmos TV program with Sagan and Tyson teaches us that we are "star stuff". We are made up of elements that are produced by stars.
 
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BobRyan

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I don't know what BobRyan means, but the concept that God created everything means everything. That includes spacetime itself

True - God is the creator of the fabric of space-time but the text does not say this was created in the 7 day time frame because at the start of day 1 the Earth already exists and water "covered the surface of the deep". What is more it does not include any account of creating angels so within the context - of the text itself - we know there are many things outside of the 7 day timeline it does not address.

and everything in it. If you mean how, I find it interesting that the account of creating Adam and Eve is very specific. That is really the problem between evolution and the bible.
Amen.

Which is another glaringly obvious reason as to why no evolution text proceeds along the lines of "for in six days the Lord created the heavens, the Earth and everything that is in them"
What bothers me about evolution is that, by it's nature, it's based only on extrapolation. No one has witnessed one species evolve into another because human lifespan is not that long.
It's worse than that. When you look at efforts to establish the "salient point" in the wild claims for evolution's teaching on origins - they fail in science labs all day long.

you see it in Urey/Milller's failed attempts to create a viable starting condition having all the necessary types of amino acids needed for a single cell such that some hope of assembly could be "hoped".

You see it again in the "long running evolution experiment" where the direct observation of 80,000 generations of the most adaptable, pliable species on planet Earth yield not a single transition from prokaryote to eukaryote ... even given more generations to do - than it supposedly took humans to evolve.

The problem with viruses is their ability to mix and match code, which means it's something very different from other life, and there's some debate whether viruses are alive at all.

The problem with viruses is that they don't turn into prokaryotes or eukaryote cells... rather they "need them" as apposed to being a "mechanism to bootstrap to them"

The problem with the random chance is that it assumes, by the existence of life, that the odds of abiogenesis and evolution are surmountable without producing any estimates on what the actual odds may be.
indeed - that is s circular argument that they make.

IT is like saying "The Easter Bunny causes 2+2=4 and since 2+2= 4 the Easter bunny must exist". It is not really any sort of proof at all for the Easter Bunny idea.
 
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BobRyan

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You have not actually witnessed their journey but by combining all the facts and clues along the journey you will have pretty accurate picture of what happened.

Then there is the option of just thinking they did not really ever start the journey, that there was no train, that nobody died during the journey, no Indians were killed despite the evidence.

That the settlers one day simple appeared where you met them and all the evidence is simply a ruse or that the journey can not be verified because you do not know what Mary had for lunch during day 543 or when you could not see those tracks under the mud for few miles.

Which option seems more probable ?
So then looking at the painting of a masterpiece lying in the mud - you may assume it fell off a truck -- or that mud, rocks, plants, rain and sunlight "just do that over time".

Which one seems more probable??
 
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BobRyan

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Then you need to observe a spectrograph because every element burns at its own color.
Which sadly demonstates yet another idea that provides no support at all for the salient argument in evolutionism... and does not help resolve the problem that neither the Bible nor observations in nature provide that proof in favor of evolutionism's claims for origins.
So we know exactly what elements are produced in stars and when they are produced.
We can agree that stars and rocks exist. But that is not what the salient point in evolutionism reguires to sustain its claims. Belief in evolutionism requires more than "matter exists". It require that "dust , gas, rocks and sunlight in sufficient quantity and over sufficient time - will come up with a horse" - as if matter itself has the properties that are observed to produce such a transitional sequence.
The Bible refers to these elements as "dust".
True - the Bible admits that matter exists, and rocks exist, so also sunlight, dust, air etc.
 
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Tuur

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Wow --that shows a serious misunderstanding of science! Lots of sciences make rather general predictions -- geology, astronomy, astrophysics, cosmology, are good examples.
So is astrology and fortune telling.

Then you make an error that shows you don't understand evolution in the least: "...it's based on the premise of random change". No, it doesn't: it includes an amount of random change since one type of mutations is random, but those don't accumulate randomly, they either (1) kill the offspring, (2) have a negative effect so the descendants die out over generations, (3)have some result that's meaningless to survival, or (4) bestows some sort of advantage.
Let's see...first you say it's not random, then you say the mutations are random but don't accumulate randomly. You imply that they accumulate in a specific direction. And yet you admit in your point 3 that it can have an effect that's meaningless to survival. If it's random, then those would accumulate along with those in your point 4. Just how they accumulate is random.

You are also looking straight at why it's impossible to make more than general handwaving predictions, whether you recognize it or not. If it was possible to predict purely random behavior, there would be no evolutionary biologists because they'd all win the lottery and retire.
 
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The Barbarian

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Since speciation has been observed, and most creationist organizations now admit the fact, that's no longer at issue. We know from observation that new species evolve from older ones.

And of course, the origin of life is not part of evolutionary theory. Darwin himself just assumed that God created the first living things.
So is astrology and fortune telling.
Comes down to evidence. You see, scientific theories depend on predictions being later confirmed by evidence. On the other hand, astrology, fortune-telling and creationism do not require such confirmations. This is why IDer Michael Behe admitted under oath that Intelligent Design is science in the same sense that astrology is science.
 
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The Barbarian

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You are also looking straight at why it's impossible to make more than general handwaving predictions
No, that's wrong. Would you like me to show you some examples of specific predicted changes due to natural selection?
If it was possible to predict purely random behavior, there would be no evolutionary biologists because they'd all win the lottery and retire.
As you learned, natural selection is the antithesis of randomness.

For an experiment to be predictable, it has to be repeatable. If the initial conditions are the same, the final conditions should also be the same. For example, a marble placed at the edge of a bowl and released will end up at the bottom of the bowl no matter how many times the action is repeated.

Biologists have found cases in which evolution has, in effect, run the same experiment several times over. And in some cases the results of those natural experiments have turned out very similar each time. In other words, evolution has been predictable.

One of the most striking cases of repeated evolution has occurred in the Caribbean. The islands there are home to a vast number of native species of anole lizards, which come in a staggering variety. The lizards live in the treetops, on forest floors and in open grassland. They come in a riot of colors and shapes. Some are blue, some are green and some are gray. Some are huge and bold while others are small and shy.

To understand how this diversity evolved, Jonathan Losos of Harvard University and his students gathered DNA from the animals. After they compared the genetic material from different species, the scientists drew an evolutionary tree, with a branch for every lizard species.


It's more complicated than physics, but it does often work in predictable ways.
 
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DialecticSkeptic

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For what it's worth, that's an in-universe answer. I recall the idea of one mystic being mentioned (I think in connection with reading Augustine in the original) about this; he maintained that God created the entire temporal extent of existence all at once, both what to us is past as well as what to us is the future, making it as a single whole -- at least from God's perspective. The main topic wasn't creation, though, it was predestination -- lots of fun since that mystic maintained that we still have free will (something my older brother the mathematician once said as not being a problem if you posit certain conditions in low-value-n - dimensional geometry, but then he said all theological ontology is really just mathematics).

And this highlights my frustration. I keep getting answers about what God created or how he created—this time it's that he created instantaneously, as Augustine suggested—but I never asked a question related to those answers. For the sake of argument, let's assume that God instantaneously created the past and future altogether as a single whole from his perspective, as you described. Does this tell me what it means for God to create something? Does it tell me if creation is about bringing things into material existence?

Alas, no.

Even though that was my question: "According to the Genesis text [being] referenced, what does it mean for God to create something? [Does it mean bringing] it into material existence?"
 
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DialecticSkeptic

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Have you read the text?

Of course.


How is that part the least bit confusing??

It's not confusing, nor am I confused.


It's one thing to say, "I don't believe the text," [and quite] another to claim that the very simple and basic nature of the text is too confusing to read [or to] know with [any] level of certainty what the author, writing 4,000 years ago, was conveying to the newly freed slaves at Sinai.

And since I am not confused by the text, none of that is applicable here.

To be very clear, I am asking you for an exegetical argument—because I've assumed that your belief is based on (drawn from) that particular text of Scripture.

Once more: "According to the Genesis text being referenced, what does it mean for God to create something? Does it mean bringing it into material existence?" Again, please support your answer from the text itself.

(But if your belief is not Bible-based, then disregard my question as inapplicable.)
 
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The Barbarian

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We can agree that stars and rocks exist. But that is not what the salient point in evolutionism reguires to sustain its claims. Belief in evolutionism requires more than "matter exists". It require that "dust , gas, rocks and sunlight in sufficient quantity and over sufficient time - will come up with a horse" - as if matter itself has the properties that are observed to produce such a transitional sequence.
You still don't get it. Evolutionary theory isn't about the origin of life. It merely assumes life began somehow. Darwin, for example, assumed that God just created the first living things.

There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and
that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved.

Charles Darwin, last sentence of On the Origin of Species 1859

Of course, God isn't neutral on this; He says that all that stuff did bring forth living things.

If you learn nothing else about evolution, learn that abiogenesis is not evolution. It will save you a lot of trouble.
 
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BobRyan

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When you said that God "created" all life on Earth, what do you mean? According to the Genesis text you referenced, what does it mean for God to create something? Bring it into material existence (ex nihilo)?
have you read the text.?

How is that part the least bit confusing??

It's one thing to say "I don't believe the text" it is another to claim that the very simple and basic nature of the text is too confusing to read and know with some level of certainty what the author writing 4000 years ago was conveying to the newly freed slaves at Sinai.

Of course.

It's not confusing, nor am I confused.

And since I am not confused by the text, none of that is applicable here.

To be very clear, I am asking you for an exegetical argument—because I've assumed that your belief is based on (drawn from) that particular text of Scripture.

hmm we have two in this case -- a section in Genesis and one in Exodus 20 which is in the very highest form of "legal code" in what they called "The Law of Moses".

Gen 2:
2 And so the heavens and the earth were completed, and all their heavenly lights. 2 By the seventh day God completed His work which He had done, and He rested on the seventh day from all His work which He had done. 3 Then God blessed the seventh day and sanctified it, because on it He rested from all His work which God had created and made.

Where that verse comes in the context of --

Gen 1:
11 Then God said, “Let the earth sprout vegetation, plants yielding seed, and fruit trees on the earth bearing fruit according to their kind with seed in them”; and it was so. 12 The earth produced vegetation, plants yielding seed according to their kind, and trees bearing fruit with seed in them, according to their kind; and God saw that it was good. 13 And there was evening and there was morning, a third day.

20 Then God said, “Let the waters teem with swarms of living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth in the open expanse of the heavens.” 21 And God created the great sea creatures and every living creature that moves, with which the waters swarmed, according to their kind, and every winged bird according to its kind; and God saw that it was good. 22 God blessed them, saying, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the waters in the seas, and let birds multiply on the earth.” 23 And there was evening and there was morning, a fifth day.

24 Then God said, “Let the earth produce living creatures according to their kind: livestock and crawling things and animals of the earth according to their kind”; and it was so. 25 God made the animals of the earth according to their kind, and the livestock according to their kind, and everything that crawls on the ground according to its kind; and God saw that it was good.

26 Then God said, “Let Us make mankind in Our image, according to Our likeness; and let them rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over the livestock and over all the earth, and over every crawling thing that crawls on the earth.” 27 So God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them. ...31 And God saw all that He had made, and behold, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day.


Gen 2:1-3
Thus the heavens and the earth, and all the host of them, were finished. 2 And on the seventh day God ended His work which He had done, and He rested on the seventh day from all His work which He had done. 3 Then God blessed the seventh day and sanctified it, because in it He rested from all His work which God had created and made.

So I would ask again - what part of that is confusing - for those 'who read the text"..

===================

The other text we read is from Ex 20:8-11 - a very short summary of the Genesis text.:
8: "Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy SIX DAYS you shall labor... the seventh day is the Sabbath of YHWH...
11 For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea and everything that is in them, and He rested on the seventh day; for that reason the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.


So then very simple text. I understand "I agree with the text" or "I don't agree with the text" - but I don't understand "What does the text say -- I can't figure out what it is say".

The text locks the time units in Gen 2:11 with those of Ex 20:11 and Ex 20:8-10. Pretty hard to insert darwinism into the text at that point, Nor is it reasonable to assume Moses was darwinist or that the newly freed slaves at Sinai would be trying to smuggle darwinism into their reading/hearing of the text.

Once more: "According to the Genesis text being referenced, what does it mean for God to create something? Does it mean bringing it into material existence?"
How could it not?

Given that plants come into being in a single evening and morning -- and that this happens before the sun is created. Jamming billions of years into one evening and morning is hardly a reasonable treatment of the text.

Given that animals in the sea and land are eating those plants for food 2 to 3 days later - those plants would be mature in that "day".

And of course the text does not lead the reader to suppose that God created Adam as a zygote - held him in His hand for 9 months then raised him into a an adult for 20 years then had him go through 9 months of gestation to have Eve. So the readers were not being pointed to that kind of timeline in the case of humans either.

====================

One does not have to be a christian creationist to see this easy part of the issue so far --
The text above is so incredibly obvious in its simple meaning that even the agnostic/atheist professors of Hebrew and OT studies in world class universities - admit to the "intended meaning" of the text.

Professor James Barr, Regius Professor of Hebrew at the University of Oxford, has written:

"Probably, so far as I know, there is no professor of Hebrew or Old Testament at any world-class university who does not believe that the writer(s) of Genesis 1–11 intended to convey to their readers the ideas that:

(a) creation took place in a series of six days which were the same as the days of 24 hours we now experience

(b) the figures contained in the Genesis genealogies provided by simple addition a chronology from the beginning of the world up to later stages in the biblical story

(c) Noah’s flood was understood to be world-wide and extinguish all human and animal life except for those in the ark.

Or, to put it negatively, the apologetic arguments which suppose the "days" of creation to be long eras of time, the figures of years not to be chronological, and the flood to be a merely local Mesopotamian flood, are not taken seriously by any such professors, as far as I know.’
 
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BobRyan

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You still don't get it. Evolutionary theory isn't about the origin of life.
Sadly that is exactly what it is about. IT seeks to explain how it is that Earth has all levels of life on it.

Genesis is not saying "and God spoke -- then there were bacteria... prokaryotes all over the earth" so that Evolution's doctrine on origins for all forms of life on Earth could then say "and from there over billions of years - every class and phyla evolved".
It merely assumes life began somehow.
Yes it does - but then claims to "take it from there" having a nice little bacteria to start with (if one is not a certain kind of evolutionist).

The very thing the text does not allow.

The text is not of the form "and so thanks to God we got bacteria - then God said to evolution -- take it from there see what you can do with that".ou learn nothing else about evolution, learn that abiogenesis is not evolution. It will save you a lot of trouble.
 
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The Barbarian

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You still don't get it. Evolutionary theory isn't about the origin of life.

Sadly that is exactly what it is about.
You know better than that now. Even Darwin supposed that God created the first living things. But if you didn't read carefully, tell us which of Darwin's four points of evolutionary theory are about the origin of life. Not holding my breath for that, but that's what you'll need to do.

It assumes that life began somehow.

Yes it does - but then claims to "take it from there"
So the evidence shows, as you learned earlier. Evolution is not about abiogenesis.
 
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The Barbarian

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One does not have to be a christian creationist to see this easy part of the issue so far --

Professor James Barr, Regius Professor of Hebrew at the University of Oxford, has written:
As we showed you Prof. Barr has it wrong. Not only do modern Hebrew scholars realize that Genesis does not mean literal 24-hour days, ancient and medieval Hebrew scholars also realized it. Would you like me to show you again?
 
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Roymond

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Have you read Adrian Bejan's Design in Nature? Much of what we take to be "design" is simply the tendency of systems to facilitate flow. Interestingly, Bejan was able to use his Constructal Law to predict performance of Olympic athletes and a variety of other, apparently unrelated processes. Rivers form and change in accord with the law, as do many other things.
Adrian Bejan & Constructal Law
Haven't read it. My reading these days is heavily theological with an occasional escapist foray with a science fiction novel.
 
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BobRyan

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Genesis is not saying "and God spoke -- then there were bacteria... prokaryotes all over the earth" so that Evolution's doctrine on origins for all forms of life on Earth could then say "and from there over billions of years - every class and phyla evolved".
othing else about evolution, learn that abiogenesis is not evolution. It will save you a lot of trouble.
Even Darwin supposed that God created the first living things.
The text is not helping him in that case either. as already noted above
 
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BobRyan

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As we showed you Prof. Barr has it wrong. Not only do modern Hebrew scholars realize that Genesis does not mean literal 24-hour days, ...
Not the case in all world class universities as Barr notes and was already pointed out to you earlier. Apparently his knowledge of his peers exceeds your knowledge of his peers. I don't mind that reality.

The easy and obvious meaning in the text #51 is irrefutable so far as even James Barr admits - and so you are ignoring those details... "still"
 
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Roymond

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We can agree that stars and rocks exist. But that is not what the salient point in evolutionism reguires to sustain its claims. Belief in evolutionism requires more than "matter exists". It require that "dust , gas, rocks and sunlight in sufficient quantity and over sufficient time - will come up with a horse" - as if matter itself has the properties that are observed to produce such a transitional sequence.
"Evolutionism" is not evolution.
Evolution most certainly does not say that "dust , gas, rocks and sunlight in sufficient quantity and over sufficient time - will come up with a horse" -- making that assertion demonstrate once again that you don't understand the very basics of evolutionary theory. All that evolution says is that life, however it started, will seek to survive, and that mutations supply differences, some of which will make the species better able to survive. It makes no specific claims about what shapes or capabilities will develop, only that life will develop through natural selection.

But once there is a horse, and if ancestors are found, evolutionary theory makes it possible to say something about how that ancestor ended up having 'offspring' far down the line that look like today's horses. And when analyzing that the chemistry of those changes can be explained -- so yes, matter itself does have the properties that are observed to produce transitional sequences. That's obvious from any serious study of chemistry, and all biology is, is a special branch of chemistry.
 
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Roymond

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So is astrology and fortune telling.
Fallacius: non sequitur. Or it could be considered moving the goalposts, because in making that statement you changed the topic.
Let's see...first you say it's not random, then you say the mutations are random but don't accumulate randomly. You imply that they accumulate in a specific direction. And yet you admit in your point 3 that it can have an effect that's meaningless to survival. If it's random, then those would accumulate along with those in your point 4. Just how they accumulate is random.

You are also looking straight at why it's impossible to make more than general handwaving predictions, whether you recognize it or not. If it was possible to predict purely random behavior, there would be no evolutionary biologists because they'd all win the lottery and retire.
"Specific direction" -- no. Go read again what I said -- you're putting something in that I didn't say.

Yes, mutations with effects that are meaningless to survival accumulate, too. Hair color in humans comes to mind.

And there's nothing "random" about how they accumulate; they accumulate in succession as they happen, there's nothing like rolling dice or drawing a card; once a mutation is in the genome of a species, it stays there unless at some point changing environment wakes that mutation deleterious.

But it's not "impossible to make more than general handwaving predictions" -- evolutionary theory has made a lot of darned specific predictions many of which have turned out to be right, the most famous ones being what some intermediate forms should look like, and creatures like what was predicted got found.

Oh -- if the lottery was anything like evolution, evolutionary biologists probably could win the lottery, because it would behave according to well-known patterns. Evolution is not random, it is driven.

In fact the way it's driven just might make some people suspect that there's a brilliant Designer behind the process because it is so elegant and effective.
 
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Roymond

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Since speciation has been observed, and most creationist organizations now admit the fact, that's no longer at issue. We know from observation that new species evolve from older ones.

And of course, the origin of life is not part of evolutionary theory. Darwin himself just assumed that God created the first living things.

Comes down to evidence. You see, scientific theories depend on predictions being later confirmed by evidence. On the other hand, astrology, fortune-telling and creationism do not require such confirmations. This is why IDer Michael Behe admitted under oath that Intelligent Design is science in the same sense that astrology is science.

Behe irritates me immensely. Before he and his ilk hijacked the term, some of us in university science majors had an informal intelligent design club, and it was exactly what those words suggest: that due to studying science, some people concluded there is a Designer behind it all. Included in our number were some biology majors who due to understanding the elegant system by which life changes and develops decided there was a Designer. Fundamentalist types wanted to join, but didn't last long because they kept wanting to use Bible verses as "data" for scientific inquiry, and we were only interested in what science, once we had agreed there was a Designer, could say about that Designer. Whether or not any information from claimed revelation was of any use was a topic far, far down the line.
 
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