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That's what inexplicable means.No reason that WE know of, that is...
No, different species... but that shouldn't be relevant to the common designer hypothesis.Of the same species?
That's what inexplicable means.
Evolution is an explanation for the evidence found and common design does not provide one.
No, different species... but that shouldn't be relevant to the common designer hypothesis.
I'm impressed with @ Kylie's patience with me. If I was to undertake the task to which she has submitted herself, I probably would have written MQ off by now.I'm impressed by @Kylie , @Mark Quayle , and their conversation here.
The point is not that there can't be an explanation, just that there isn't one presented.How not? If the creator made it that way, why not?
Seems to me that your conclusion (that common design doesn't provide an explanation for the evidence we see) assumes that the common designer had only efficiency, and that, according to our assessment, in mind. It ignores that the designer may well have had other purposes in mind.
Reminds me of a conversation on another forum about the reasons God might have had for the suffering of Job. One of the obvious (to me) reasons is "so that we would have this conversation!"), which shows us to be creatures and not on the same level with God.
What you are describing is being deliberately deceptive.Assuming, that is, as mentioned above, that the designer may have done so for reasons beyond our assumed notion of efficiency. One other reason, by the way, might seem distasteful to non-believers, and many believers, too, according to Scripture, is for the express purpose of letting those who don't want to know the truth, to deceive themselves. Don't take it personally —I'm pretty sure he does that to me too, until I open my mind (and heart) to the truth.
The point is not that there can't be an explanation, just that there isn't one presented.
The specifics of the evidence are consistent with the expected effects of evolution and deep time... but not necessarily consistent with design.
A nested hierarchy is a prediction of an evolutionary history and it is not a prediction for common design.
What you are describing is being deliberately deceptive.
The evidence points a certain direction, and a sufficiently powerful manipulator could have put that in place, but it doesn't make that a reasonable conclusion.
This is a particular problem with associated with a hypothetical designer who is honest in intent and behavior.
I'm impressed with @ Kylie's patience with me. If I was to undertake the task to which she has submitted herself, I probably would have written MQ off by now.
Well answered, and a good point. Yet, currently —that is, we can't see deep time in a few hundred years of study— we can't see it going on.
I do give @Kylie credit for working on changing my mind about that.
This is a significant problem for discovering anything.Yes, quite. Problem? He owes us nothing. His reason for creation is not for us to figure out how he did it, or even the particulars of the characteristics of what he created. (Not saying at all, that he minds us questioning and studying the matter.)
It does make it a reasonable conclusion (for him!) and assuming that there is a creator, it opens up a whole line of thinking, (speculating, granted, so far as believers have gone with it), of particular joy and delight in the 'works of his hands'. We don't all, btw, jump to conclusions. I for one, am simply not convinced of the TOE, but I don't say God couldn't have done it that way, nor do I even say it necessarily voids the narrative of Genesis.
Your statement: "This is a particular problem with associated with a hypothetical designer who is honest in intent and behavior." seems to me to assume that we have the social and intellectual status with him as sentient beings to deserve that he deal altogether straightforwardly with us. I'm pretty well convinced, (from other routes and things I've seen, not particularly related to this thread), that God does indeed present us with honest evidences that we refuse to see, even as simply as Romans 1 describes, that this doesn't all come about by itself, or by accident, but by intent.
How not? If the creator made it that way, why not?
Seems to me that your conclusion (that common design doesn't provide an explanation for the evidence we see) assumes that the common designer had only efficiency, and that, according to our assessment, in mind. It ignores that the designer may well have had other purposes in mind.
Reminds me of a conversation on another forum about the reasons God might have had for the suffering of Job. One of the obvious (to me) reasons is "so that we would have this conversation!"), which shows us to be creatures and not on the same level with God.
Assuming, that is, as mentioned above, that the designer may have done so for reasons beyond our assumed notion of efficiency. One other reason, by the way, might seem distasteful to non-believers, and many believers, too, according to Scripture, is for the express purpose of letting those who don't want to know the truth, to deceive themselves. Don't take it personally —I'm pretty sure he does that to me too, until I open my mind (and heart) to the truth.
That's a nice way to put it. Seems to me, as I've been told, if I really wanted badly enough to understand it, I'd look it up and study it enough to get a real comprehension. I don't want to know that badly. But thanks for explaining. I do want to know badly enough at least to listen.You are coming at this with a genuine desire to understand it. I've seen many people who dismiss evolution and show that they have no desire in understanding it. At the end of the day, even if you don't accept evolution as true, you've still approached this with intellectual honesty, and I consider that a victory by itself.
I'm impressed with @ Kylie's patience with me. If I was to undertake the task to which she has submitted herself, I probably would have written MQ off by now.
You are coming at this with a genuine desire to understand it. I've seen many people who dismiss evolution and show that they have no desire in understanding it. At the end of the day, even if you don't accept evolution as true, you've still approached this with intellectual honesty, and I consider that a victory by itself.
That's a nice way to put it. Seems to me, as I've been told, if I really wanted badly enough to understand it, I'd look it up and study it enough to get a real comprehension. I don't want to know that badly. But thanks for explaining. I do want to know badly enough at least to listen.
The trouble with the designer argument is that you can use that to explain anything, no matter what it actually is. If they use similar body structures, that's the way the designer made it. If they use different body structures, that's the way the designer made it. Since the explanation would work no matter what we find, it really tells us nothing.
It's like if you came across what appeared to be the wreckage of a house after a tornado hit it. You would go in and you would see items flung all around the place. But I could say, "Oh, a person put it that way, there never was a tornado." No matter what the state of the house was, from neat and tidy to absolutely chaotic, the explanation "Someone just put it that way" would always work.
Yes, you could point out particular things that are exactly what we would expect to be left if it really was a tornado - signs of the swirling air currents left in dust, for example - but since the claim, "someone could have put it that way and made it look exactly the same as what a tornado would have left" can not be eliminated. So that claim is unfalsifiable, and as a result is pretty much useless.
Thus the expression, "Speaking from the heart"! (JK) Maybe this has something to do with why, when my heart skips a beat, my throat constricts or I cough. Or the actual physical pain I felt in my throat as a child at being at odds with my parents, by way of guilt?But we see things in biology that seem like nonsensical design choices for a designer to make, yet are exactly what we'd expect to see if life forms evolved.
For example, you have in your body a nerve called the "Recurrent laryngeal nerve." I'm gonna call it the RLN from now on, because I'm lazy and don't want to write it out every time.
There is a nerve that comes from your brain down your neck and into your body called the Vagus nerve. The RLN comes off the Vagus nerve to go to your larynx and it's the nerve that allows you to properly use your vocal chords. Now, you'd think that the RLN would branch off from the Vagus nerve in your neck and go straight to your larynx, but it doesn't. It actually branches off much lower, loops under your aorta (the main artery coming out of your heart), and then goes back up.
In the case of the giraffe, this is a detour of 15 feet or so!
Yet, when we look at the fossils of our ancestors (the ancestors of all tetrapods), which were fish-like, the route would have been direct, traveling from the brain, past the heart, to the gills (as it does in modern fish). But over the course of evolution, as the neck extended and the heart became lower in the body, the nerve had to become longer. Remember, evolution mostly works by making small changes to what it already has. So evolution could easily make the nerve a little longer as the body form changed shape over many generations. But it would be pretty much impossible for it to completely create a new route for the nerve to take.
This is exactly what we'd expect to see if evolution was the case, but there's no reason for a designer to design it this way. It would be like a car designer putting the airbag in the steering wheel, the crash sensors in the front bumper, and then routing the electrical connections around the reversing camera at the back.
There's an interesting video looking at the RNL in a giraffe HERE. Be warned, it does contain video of a giraffe dissection.
Thoughts that come to my mind here:
(1) If the logic that 'first cause with intent exists' is valid on its own merits (that is, the cosmological argument), then, logically, all else must align with that, and cannot contradict it. The fact that "God" is unfalsifiable becomes, then, irrelevant. This may be unsatisfying, but so what. I have heard only worse, untenable, excuses for dismissing the cosmological argument. To my mind, if "God" was falsifiable, he wouldn't be God anyway. If he answered to form, he wouldn't be God.
(2) "God created/caused all things" doesn't deny what we see, and as far as I can tell, it doesn't even deny TOE. In fact, even "How old did God make Adam?" doesn't take the wind out of the sails of TOE. If God, first cause, exists, then his level of being is beyond or outside the reality we experience as "this". If God exists, then we really don't know much.
(3) If God exists, then it can be said that 'natural' is also 'miracle'. From our POV it makes little difference whether God created it 'already' billions of years old, or whether it actually took billions of years. And I think it can be both —that is, one from our point of view, and another from God's point of view.
Thus the expression, "Speaking from the heart"! (JK) Maybe this has something to do with why, when my heart skips a beat, my throat constricts or I cough. Or the actual physical pain I felt in my throat as a child at being at odds with my parents, by way of guilt?
Interesting. Thanks!
But I think, (I know, unfalsifiable), we can't know that there would be no reason for a creator to make it this way.
The problem here is that if the argument is unfalsifiable, there's no way to show that it is valid.
I meant, of course the idea that God created all the different organisms in the state they are in now.
There are many Christians who believe that God started things off and that evolution was a tool used by God to create variety (my husband is among them). But that idea is incompatible with the idea that God created horses as they are now, and cats as they are now, etc.
I think the only valid way of looking at it is from the rock's point of view.
True, but there are plenty of reasons why a creator wouldn't make it this way. And having it this way is entirely consistent with evolution. Evolution explains it easily, whereas the idea of a creator who designed it that way does not.
Maths is based on axioms and physical conclusions drawn from mathematics can be falsified.I don't know why not. Math is unfalsifiable, but we use it all the time. It is a logic that we trust, just as is the law of causation, which (in my opinion) demands first cause over all effects
.
That idea (that God created the species, but that the variety within each species is a result of observable genetic migration) isn't far from what seems to me to be the case. I had a Christian try to tell me that there is no way that all we see now came from the pairs of animals on the ark, in the few thousand years since then. I don't know why not.
While the rock's point of view is inescapable to us at present, that is, that any other point of view is impossible for us to fully comprehend or use, it doesn't render them invalid.
That doesn't explain why there are kinds of kind and remnants of common ancestry not even active in the animals.I don't know of any reason why the creator wouldn't make it this way. To my mind, the idea of the Creator designing it (as each after their own kind) is the simplest explanation.
I don't know why not. Math is unfalsifiable, but we use it all the time. It is a logic that we trust, just as is the law of causation, which (in my opinion) demands first cause over all effects
That idea (that God created the species, but that the variety within each species is a result of observable genetic migration) isn't far from what seems to me to be the case.
I had a Christian try to tell me that there is no way that all we see now came from the pairs of animals on the ark, in the few thousand years since then. I don't know why not.
I don't know of any reason why the creator wouldn't make it this way. To my mind, the idea of the Creator designing it (as each after their own kind) is the simplest explanation.
Maths is based on axioms and physical conclusions drawn from mathematics can be falsified.
First cause as a conclusion from a law of causation is special pleading. "Everything has a cause" therefore "something doesn't have a cause" is locically incoherent.
You have a couple of problems with this.
We know how variation works and can measure mutation rates in non coding DNA. This means we can work out how much diversity there is in the species and if they have gone through a genetic bottle neck.
Humans and Cheetahs have and have much less diversity than other species... but still vastly more than two individuals in the last 10000 years.
Another problem is that there isn't a difference in the methods that demonstrate relatedness between individuals in the same species, individuals in similar species and individuals in significantly different species.
Finally the problem is that there are too many species of different environments to fit on the Earth at once, let alone all in a boat.
That doesn't explain why there are kinds of kind and remnants of common ancestry not even active in the animals.
If all the "kinds" of birds were separately created just to be birds and not descended from a dinosaur, why would they have genes for teeth?
Why do chimps and humans have the same inactive broken viral insertions on their genes?
Why does a mouse have more in common genetically with a human than it does with a marsupial mouse?
Maths is unfalsifiable? How do you figure? Seems easy enough to falsify the claim that 1+1=85,474,773.
And yet we see large groups of organisms that all share the same features, even when it isn't required. All mammals have the same structure in their ears, for example. And yet there's no reason why giraffes would need the same kind of ear as bats. The similarities between the ears suggest that giraffes and bats share a common ancestor.
We can compare the similarities of DNA between two species and also see the rate that DNA changes at in those species. By comparing these two pieces of data, we can make a good estimate as to how long it has been since they shared a common ancestor. If all organisms alive today did come from a few representative species that were carried on the ark which then changed to become the wide variety we see today, we should see that all pigeons, say, shared a common ancestor at about the same time that all cats shared a common ancestor and all shrews shared a common ancestor. The genetic evidence would be there for all to see, and yet it isn't there.
But what would a creator gain by forming the creation so it looks exactly like it would if it had evolved instead of been created?
Of course, the conclusions drawn from math can be falsified, or at least we hope to be able to falsify most of them. I'm not sure why you say this —is it to show the difference between math (which we can trust) and the 'special pleading' of invoking first cause? The comparison is between math (axiomatic) and causation (axiomatic).
What is special pleading —whatever can't be proven? But anyway, the law of causation does not say "everything has a cause"; it says, "all effects are caused." First Cause is not an effect. But I don't mean to exasperate you; I expect you meant to say that just because all effects are caused does not imply that there is anything that is not an effect. But that to me is logically vapid. It seems the kind of thinking that science has always shunned. You seem to me to be, like most atheists and others, to go to whatever degree is necessary to avoid the obvious here.
Nevertheless, I agree that proof of first cause would be nice. It would be nice to see the circle closed, such as is done with mathematical 'proving' of an equation by coming at it from another direction. The problem is, science and philosophy uses causation, math and other logical formats and laws as verification of theory all the time. Few of the notions involved in quantum theory can be verified physically. And much of what is verified physically can only be interpreted mathematically and by sequence of causation and other logical reasoning.
So why the shunning and even scorn involved in the question of First Cause? Is it really simply because there isn't any point in pursuing proof?
Then maybe, and so it seems to me proper, we need a good definition of species. Obviously, it is not every variation that is a separate species. But I see no problem with all arachnids descending from a pair of spiders, or all canines from a pair of dogs, in the few thousand years it has been.
I don't know what 'non-coding DNA' is, as, I assume, opposed to 'coding DNA' and why it is relevant to mutation rates.
There is a phenomenon apparently common to modern science that assumes that things are now as they always have been, for example that radioactive decay rates have always been the same, and operate by the same principles.
Wait, what? Where are they? Ok, yes, that's cheap. But I really don't get your point. What species? Do you think the Ark theory, sans TOE, would imply that all diversity as we have now, plus extinct varieties, would be represented on the ark? Why should so many species have representation on that boat, when only one pair in a species might do the job, that diversifies into several of what we call species (again, I'm not sure where to define 'species', here), without calling it TOE?
This is a little humorous, here, you arguing against the migration of DNA and I for it! But at least I have the excuse that I don't know what I'm talking about!
Maybe the marsupial mouse isn't really a mouse.
I don't know. Maybe there is more that these have in common than ancestry. When I hear of some certain moth whose progeny goes blind and begins to not even produce eyes as a general rule, when left in the dark for enough years as a group, then when brought back out into the light begins to develop eyes, I can't help but wonder what's going on here. Certainly that's adaptation, but the genetic disposition is already there for it to happen.
Some fish grow teeth, some don't. I'm not sure any of this is meaningful for or against TOE or Creation Theory.
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