Hahaha! You're funny aren't you... I have done the same with your arguments. After all, you can't get very far without evidence... and the onus is certainly on you.
Trenchant analysis is one thing; bluster is another. I have showed you many examples that explain the vacuity of your hypotheses, and you have done nothing but draw the limits tighter and tighter and claim that they just don't apply; you have not shown me with exposition even a single example that couldn't evolve.
If I could converse with you in person I'm sure I could explain things more coherently. But anyway, when I'm talking about fish, I'm usually referring to creatures such as a flathead, pike, trout, clown fish, you know, those types of fish... Similarity between them doesn't prove a thing except that God decided to create these in a similar way. Not too hard to imagine, right?
Again, you are retreating. Aren't flatfish and sole and plaice all "fish"? Aren't sharks and stingrays, in some taxonomic sense, "fish" as well? You are creating a logically meaningless tautology by trying to limit your case to only those examples which seem to support your point. If I visited only the hundreds of mosques in America without entering a single church, and then concluded that "All Americans are Muslims", wouldn't that be equally silly?
And again notice: you say "similarity between them doesn't prove a thing except that God decided to create these in a similar way". You haven't offered a shred of evidence to support this. Indeed, what did you argue in your first response to the OP?
NathanCGreen said:
I rather say that the design similarity between various organisms is there simply because of a similar need or function for them. Fish live in water, right? Well then, we would expect most, if not all, to have similar structures to them to enable them to live and swim underwater...
"Organisms have similar designs because God said so" is far less ambitious - and provable - than "organisms have similar designs because they have similar needs". Will you at least own up to the fact that your initial pretensions have been shafted, before moving on?
You said: You have to resort to "God likes variety" to try to rescue your version of divine design. How come God doesn't like variety enough to make, say, a pegasus? Or even a bird which has the structures of bat wings instead of bird wings. It's just an engineering difficulty, after all, a matter of hooking up systems to each other. Can't God do everything? Why, then, does His creation look peculiarly like it evolved - couldn't God have tried harder to create just that exception, just that chimera which would falsify evolution?
I reply: I'm sure glad He likes variety. After all, I'm sure you would agree that we look nothing like fish.
Again, you are simply assuming that differences in species is explicable by "God loves variety", without actually proving your case. And why, I thought the fact that we look nothing like fish was because we have different needs and functions from fish! My, how you've retreated.
If God made a pegasus, that would definitely be used by evos to push their doctrine. Same goes for a bird with bat wings instead of bird wings.
The creation does not look like it evolved. It does to you however, because you are wearing those evo glasses and have apparently glued them on with a very strong apoxy resin. And so I suppose it would hurt you far too much to attempt to take them off...
It wouldn't take much to pull off my evolutionary beliefs. Find me a pegasus, or a bird with bats' wings, and you'd be done. I accept what I accept on the basis of the evidence. On the contrary, have
you tried taking off your "evolution doesn't happen" glasses recently?
In the fossil record we do indeed have creatures far larger than we do today of the same species... the example of the dragonfly is a great start...
However, I thought I heard that evo caused things to progress in an upward fashion... doesn't seem the evidence fits with the hypothesis once again...
You heard wrong. Evolution makes no such predictions. It
does predict that macroscopic chimerae will not be found, so start hunting!
You said: Because evolution predicts that traits travel together - rather, that not only are species similar, but they are similar in very specific ways. For example, insects will always be insects, and birds will always be birds. Because genetic information cannot cross between those lineages, insects' wings will always have insect wing structures and birds' wings will always have bird wing structures. The fossil record preserves dragonflies with foot-long wings, IIRC - couldn't God have pasted those wings onto a hummingbird? And yet He didn't. And so something that God could have created, but that evolution cannot predict the existence of, is missing. And that's not just true for birds, it is true across the entire biological spectrum: peculiar animal forms which evolution would forbid but creative divinity would certainly be able to create are completely absent.
I said: What kind of reasoning is this? Now I know you are confused.. or you are deliberately messing around here... This is utter trash of an argument and is not worth even responding to in a proper manner!
It's just a different way of describing the twin nested hierarchy, one of the best evidences for evolution around:
http://www.talkorigins.org/origins/postmonth/apr00.html
