Theistic Evolution is Weak Scientism

[River Jordan]

I've learned three main things from this thread.

No matter how many times and how many ways non-fundies try and explain to fundamentalists what we believe, the fundamentalists will never listen and will keep repeating ridiculous and insulting straw man versions of our beliefs.

Fundamentalists know almost nothing about evolution, biology, and even general science, but still think they are the world's foremost experts in all of those subjects.

Fundamentalists' go-to response to inconvenient information is to ignore it.

 

[o_mlly]

I've learned three main things from this thread.

No matter how many times and how many ways non-fundies try and explain to fundamentalists what we believe, the fundamentalists will never listen and will keep repeating ridiculous and insulting straw man versions of our beliefs.

Fundamentalists know almost nothing about evolution, biology, and even general science, but still think they are the world's foremost experts in all of those subjects.

Fundamentalists' go-to response to inconvenient information is to ignore it.

All "fundamentalists" - please remove your posts immediately from this thread lest this poster's head explodes.

 

[o_mlly]

Tiktaalik fits well in the broader succession of fossils. I'm not sure what your point is. You can't argue "no change over time" when the fossil record depicts a succession over time.
From the PNAS Paper, the axiel skeleton of tiktaalik rosaea:
View attachment 376164

The transition is pretty well self evident. You don't have to acknowledge it, but it's there, plain as day.

We prefer real bones to cartoons. The naysayers have their cartoons as well.

 

[Job 33:6]

We prefer real bones to cartoons. The naysayers have their cartoons as well.
View attachment 376168

High definition imagery of tiktaalik is publicly available in perhaps a dozen articles. It's okay to express denial but no one will take that seriously as a counter response.
Examples:

If you scroll down this. PNAS article you'll see various scans.

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2316106121

Tiktaalik Roseae - Buy Royalty Free 3D model by Geoffrey Marchal (@geoffreymarchal)

Tiktaalik roseae, Ellesmere Island, Canada. Museum of Natural Sciences (Brussels, Belgium). Made of 230 pictures with CapturingReality. Tiktaalik is a monospecific genus of extinct sarcopterygian from the Late Devonian Period, about 375 Ma, having many features akin to those of tetrapods...

sketchfab.com

 

[o_mlly]

High definition imagery of tiktaalik is publicly available in perhaps a dozen articles. It's okay to express denial but no one will take that seriously as a counter response.
Examples:

If you scroll down this. PNAS article you'll see various scans.

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2316106121

Tiktaalik Roseae - Buy Royalty Free 3D model by Geoffrey Marchal (@geoffreymarchal)

Tiktaalik roseae, Ellesmere Island, Canada. Museum of Natural Sciences (Brussels, Belgium). Made of 230 pictures with CapturingReality. Tiktaalik is a monospecific genus of extinct sarcopterygian from the Late Devonian Period, about 375 Ma, having many features akin to those of tetrapods...

sketchfab.com

"... the functional morphology of Tiktaalik, we also produce a three-dimensional reconstruction." Scans of reconstructed models as evidence? No bones, no dice.

Please remember that he thread is about the confidence level that science ought to require to deny the truths of scripture as it relates to the diversity of life.

In another thread, the theistic evolutionists (TE) admitted that TE is not science. So, is it a religion-based worldview? It would seem so.

• So as a religion, TE is faith based. (There is nothing wrong with that as long as the TE's continue to allow that TE is not science.)
• So, I look to the confidence level one ought to assign to atheistic claims (AE) for macroevolution.
• AE's claim: all life evolved from earlier forms through natural, undirected processes—primarily natural selection and mutation.
• Do AE's have a settled science? No. There own scientists see the explanatory gaps in neo-Darwinism based on observed phenomena (EES).

Therefore, the confidence level for AE's claims does not even reach the lower confidence levels of "all experts in agreement" and "no evidence in contradiction".

 

[River Jordan]

We prefer real bones to cartoons. The naysayers have their cartoons as well.

I guess that's the extent of your understanding of the science. Okay then, I hope everyone else adjusts their expectations accordingly.

[T]he thread is about the confidence level that science ought to require to deny the truths of scripture

You're doing exactly what I described.

 

[truthuprootsevil]

In a nutshell: God seeded the Earth with all life forms that exist except for one, man, he formed man himself.

Anyone ever notice how God told the waters to bring forth life abundantly / how God told the Earth to bring forth beast and cattle. But when it came to man God formed him and placed him in the garden in the East of Eden which he had prepared.

Man's scientific way of understanding origin of life on Earth Life begun is evolution. And even then they have two different theories panspermia and abiogenesis.

The Bible is not a science book according to today's definition. 6000 years ago it gave a brief explanation on the science of creation, knowledge which was not learned by man until thousands of years later.

If you do in-depth studies you'll find that what science has learned and what Genesis 1 states are in sync with each other.

 

[BobRyan]

Tiktaalik fits well in the broader succession of fossils.

In the historic hall of evolutionism's famous frauds

Often using arranged series of specimens to make a given story line "appear to be true".

In 1866, guided by the bias of evolution and atheism, German embryologist and philosopher Ernst Haeckel, concluded that evolutionary stages of species from single cells to humans (phylogeny) were repeated in embryological development (ontogeny)

So convinced was he of his self-proclaimed the "Biogenetic Law": Ontogeny Recapitulates Phylogeny that he was willing to arrange presentations to make it "appear" that his suggetions were "science fact". However in real life, it was neither a law nor a fact of nature. It was fraud.

Haeckel supplied drawings as evidence of his “scientific law,” which went could then be found in science textbooks to convince students that evolution is a fact. The truth is, Haeckel’s drawings are wrong. Worse yet, they were intentionally created to mislead viewers to “see” what Haeckel believed to be true.

I'm not sure what your point is. You can't argue "no change over time" when the fossil record depicts a succession over time.

"succession" of what??

Immediate ancestors all the way to TikTaalik?? Hardly.

From the PNAS Paper, the axiel skeleton of tiktaalik rosaea:
View attachment 376164

The transition is pretty well self evident. You don't have to acknowledge it, but it's there, plain as day.

Your "Sequence" is composed of saltations not "immediate ancestors" having no transitional forms. Were we simply "not supposed to notice"??

"Based on available research into scientific misconduct and data analysis, patterns resembling "saltations"—such as sudden, unexplained jumps, unnatural gaps, or unbalanced long branches in data sequences—are considered strong red flags and potential evidence of data manipulation, fabrication, or fraud"

The "hopeful monster" for evolutionists is that the lack of actual transitional forms being filled by smaller saltations, will simply be overlooked. They have no immediate ancestors, no transitional forms for their massive claims and they know it so they try to imagine the smallest workable suggestion for a gap.

The fossil record does not even have the FUNCTION of telling you what is ancestor to what as Colin Patterson pointed out.

 

[Job 33:6]

"... the functional morphology of Tiktaalik, we also produce a three-dimensional reconstruction." Scans of reconstructed models as evidence? No bones, no dice.

Please remember that he thread is about the confidence level that science ought to require to deny the truths of scripture as it relates to the diversity of life.

In another thread, the theistic evolutionists (TE) admitted that TE is not science. So, is it a religion-based worldview? It would seem so.

• So as a religion, TE is faith based. (There is nothing wrong with that as long as the TE's continue to allow that TE is not science.)
• So, I look to the confidence level one ought to assign to atheistic claims (AE) for macroevolution.
• AE's claim: all life evolved from earlier forms through natural, undirected processes—primarily natural selection and mutation.
• Do AE's have a settled science? No. There own scientists see the explanatory gaps in neo-Darwinism based on observed phenomena (EES).

Therefore, the confidence level for AE's claims does not even reach the lower confidence levels of "all experts in agreement" and "no evidence in contradiction".

Actually, if you read the paper, you'll see they provide scans of the bones straight out of the rock matrix.

"Here, we present high-resolution micro-computed tomography (µCT) scans of the type specimen of Tiktaalik roseae, NUFV 108, that expose the vertebral skeleton and posterior ribs"

They aren't doing CT scans of models, they're doing scans of the bones themselves.

Not only that, but direct photographs lf the bones themselves are also publicly available. They're in multiple papers such as in Neil Shubin's original papers. Example: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1322559111

Whether it's high definition photography, CT scans, or otherwise, it's all publicly available in many sources, published by teams of scientists across multiple countries now.

You have to be in denial to suggest that the bones aren't plainly displayed and visible, or to suggest that they don't contain both fish and tetrapods traits. It's plainly obvious and clear to anyone who reads these papers.

 

[Job 33:6]

Tiktaalik fits well in the broader succession of fossils. I'm not sure what your point is. You can't argue "no change over time" when the fossil record depicts a succession over time.
From the PNAS Paper, the axiel skeleton of tiktaalik rosaea:
View attachment 376164

The transition is pretty well self evident. You don't have to acknowledge it, but it's there, plain as day.

Hand on, @BobRyan you don't see any transition or sequence in these fossils? You don't see how the upper species are more fish like while the lower species are more tetrapod like?

You’re treating ‘transitional form’ as if it means ‘the literal parent of the next fossil in the sequence.’ That’s not how paleontology works, and it’s not how evolution works. We don’t expect to find direct ancestors, we expect to find organisms that show a mixture of ancestral and derived traits. Tiktaalik does exactly that.

Is this the new creationist argument?

"hey guys, I know this thing has half the traits of one group and half the traits of another, but because it doesn’t fit my cartoon version of evolution, it magically stops being transitional."

 

[The Barbarian]

I'll tell you what I didn't have. My granddaughter delivered our great-grand child last week. We are all glad that we didn't have a macroevolution event.

Congratulations. My kids took a long time to reproduce. I doubt if I'll see great grandchildren.

But you did have evolution. The population genome changed thereby.

So, tell us more about that spontaneous macroevolution lab event you claimed.

Don't remember anyone here claiming a spontaneous macroevolution lab event. The only possible one that I can think of is HeLa cells mutating into an aggressive microrganism capable of infecting other tissue cultures. It caused a lot of problems for scientists, because they were unaware that these (formerly human cancer cells) had evolved into a metazoan/protist that takes a remarkable amount of effort to control in tissue labs.

No one, even YECs, doubt that macroevolutionary changes happen. They just redefine any that happen quickly enough to observe, as "not real evolution."

Technically, the evolution of a new enzyme system isn't macroevolution, since it doesn't involve speciation.

 

[Fervent]

I've learned three main things from this thread.

No matter how many times and how many ways non-fundies try and explain to fundamentalists what we believe, the fundamentalists will never listen and will keep repeating ridiculous and insulting straw man versions of our beliefs.

Fundamentalists know almost nothing about evolution, biology, and even general science, but still think they are the world's foremost experts in all of those subjects.

Fundamentalists' go-to response to inconvenient information is to ignore it.

What adds fuel to this is anti-religious fundamentalists also ignore the existence of mediating positions and act as if the only options are to hold to a contrafactual faith or to accept scientific modeling unmolested.

 

[The Barbarian]

We prefer real bones to cartoons.

I notice that your fellow YEC, Dr. Kurt Wise, lists the many tetrapod transitional forms as among the "very good evidence for evolutionary theory." I could show you again.

The naysayers have their cartoons as well.

What they don't have is an answer for the evidence of the sort that Dr. Wise mentions.

 

[o_mlly]

They aren't doing CT scans of models, they're doing scans of the bones themselves.

The article provides the non-reconstructed images in its appendix:
Movie S1.
Volumetric rendering of the two blocks containing the post-cranial skeleton of NUFV 108 including matrix.
Movie S2.
Volumetric rendering of NUFV 108 with all segmented elements in their preserved position.
Movie S3.
Rotation of the reconstructed sacral domain of Tiktaalik roseae.
Movie S4.
Rotation of the reconstruction of Tiktaalik roseae.

More importantly, and to the point of this thread, the experts are not in agreement on the sufficiency of this evidence to support the claim that this animal as transitional:

Tiktaalik: Fins to Feet Again? – Revolution Against Evolution

www.rae.org

Tiktaalik: Fins to Feet Again?

So, do you have a counter argument to:

In another thread, the theistic evolutionists (TE) admitted that TE is not science. So, is it a religion-based worldview? It would seem so.

• So as a religion, TE is faith based. (There is nothing wrong with that as long as the TE's continue to allow that TE is not science.)
• So, I look to the confidence level one ought to assign to atheistic claims (AE) for macroevolution.
• AE's claim: all life evolved from earlier forms through natural, undirected processes—primarily natural selection and mutation.
• Do AE's have a settled science? No. There own scientists see the explanatory gaps in neo-Darwinism based on observed phenomena (EES).

Therefore, the confidence level for AE's claims does not even reach the lower confidence levels of "all experts in agreement" and "no evidence in contradiction".

 

[o_mlly]

Don't remember anyone here claiming a spontaneous macroevolution lab event.

They say the first thing to go when one ages is memory.

You: I've never observed nuclear fusion in the lab, either. But like macroevolution, scientists have observed it.​

Now you'll likely quibble. But that is for the other thread.

As to this thread: Do you have a counter argument?

In another thread, the theistic evolutionists (TE) admitted that TE is not science. So, is it a religion-based worldview? It would seem so.

• So as a religion, TE is faith based. (There is nothing wrong with that as long as the TE's continue to allow that TE is not science.)
• So, I look to the confidence level one ought to assign to atheistic claims (AE) for macroevolution.
• AE's claim: all life evolved from earlier forms through natural, undirected processes—primarily natural selection and mutation.
• Do AE's have a settled science? No. There own scientists see the explanatory gaps in neo-Darwinism based on observed phenomena (EES).

Therefore, the confidence level for AE's claims does not even reach the lower confidence levels of "all experts in agreement" and "no evidence in contradiction".

 

[The Barbarian]

They say the first thing to go when one ages is memory.

To take the kindest interpretation, maybe English isn't your first language.

You: I've never observed nuclear fusion in the lab, either. But like macroevolution, scientists have observed it.

Scientists have observed nuclear fusion in the lab and they've observed macroevolution. Maybe if you diagrammed both sentences, it would be clearer for you. Now you'll likely quibble. But it won't help you. This kind of behavior might feel good in the moment, but then everyone sees it and they draw conclusions. And you can't take it back. If it was based on not understanding English grammar, this would be a good time for you to tell us.

As to this thread: Do you have a counter argument?

(confusing theistic evolution and atheistic evolution with science again)
You're just wrong. Science does not and cannot include conclusions about the supernatural.

Biologists, whether atheistic, theistic, deistic, or whatever, can all do science, because suppositions about the supernatural are not part of science.

 

[The Barbarian]

More importantly, and to the point of this thread, the experts are not in agreement on the sufficiency of this evidence to support the claim that this animal as transitional:

Tiktaalik: Fins to Feet Again? – Revolution Against Evolution

www.rae.org

All of the experts cited, say it is transitional. That creationist site just tried to mash up a carefully edited quotes to make it seem otherwise.
Even though the bones in Tiktaalik’s fin resemble those of tetrapod digits, they’re still very much part of a fin. If the digits of early tetrapods evolved from these bones, the process must have involved considerable changes in anatomical development, Clack notes”

She has more to say, which your site made sure to conceal:
This “all wheel drive” motion is important because it also describes how four-legged animals, or tetrapods, walk. According to the fossil’s discoverers, Tiktaalik “represents the best-known transitional species between fish and land-dwelling tetrapods.”

This fossil adds to understanding of that transition. “We now have a clue about how it started. Because up until now, there was a big gap in the fossil record,” said Jennifer Clack, professor and curator of vertebrate palaeontology at the University Museum of Zoology, Cambridge.

Discovery fills gap in fossil record between fins, limbs - WHYY

Our understanding of how animals began to walk on all fours just took a big step, or stroke, forward.

whyy.org

So, do you have a counter argument to:

Your confusion of TE and (whatever "AE" is) and evolutionary theory. TE is a religious belief that says natural phenomena are used by God as He wills. YEC is a religious belief that God is unable to use natural phenomena this way. Evolutionary theory is a scientific theory that explains why populations change over time.

And we've noticed that you've still failed to tell us which of the four point of Darwinian theory have been refuted. Do you think you could do that?

 

[Job 33:6]

The article provides the non-reconstructed images in its appendix:
Movie S1.
Volumetric rendering of the two blocks containing the post-cranial skeleton of NUFV 108 including matrix.
Movie S2.
Volumetric rendering of NUFV 108 with all segmented elements in their preserved position.
Movie S3.
Rotation of the reconstructed sacral domain of Tiktaalik roseae.
Movie S4.
Rotation of the reconstruction of Tiktaalik roseae.

Ok, so, high definition scans of both fossils literally still inside their original rock matrix, as well as reconstructions. And, I've also pointed out direct high definition photographs of the fossils literally still in their matrix, in the original articles.

The bases are covered. The only thing left to do is to literally go to the fossil collection itself to see first hand. And if that is your standard of belief, then it is no wonder you doubt that these fossils exist. The fossils are readily visible, they aren't imaginary or whatever it is you're proposing that they are.

 

[BobRyan]

Hand on, @BobRyan you don't see any transition or sequence in these fossils?

If you had actual immediate ancestors it would be evidence. But the fossil record does not have that ability as "a feature".

The sequence below is a good example of saltation, which is a key "red flag" that data is being manipulated. The first two in the sequence below show multiple fully formed changes in a "single leap".

Were that actually happening in real life we would a very different situation in our zoos.

You don't see how the upper species are more fish like while the lower species are more tetrapod like?
View attachment 376174

You’re treating ‘transitional form’ as if it means ‘the literal parent of the next fossil in the sequence.’

I am treating as if it means "the immediate FORM" of a group of animals just before the form being shown in your example where in your example a great many saltations are combined into a single example.,

You don't get single mutation to produce many fully formed organs, changes, features. That is not science, it is imagination

That’s not how paleontology works, and it’s not how evolution works.

agreed when it comes to evolutionism's stories.

We don’t expect to find direct ancestors, we expect to find organisms that show a mixture of ancestral and derived traits.

They show a mixture of traits (as if specimens were ARRANGED on a table for display) without actually proving that one thing gave rise to another (as Colin Patterson pointed out). Patterson was no Christian BTW he was an evolutionist.

Tiktaalik does exactly that.


Is this the new creationist argument?

I have seen this argument out there for decades

 

[Job 33:6]

More importantly, and to the point of this thread, the experts are not in agreement on the sufficiency of this evidence to support the claim that this animal as transitional:

Tiktaalik: Fins to Feet Again? – Revolution Against Evolution

www.rae.org

Tiktaalik: Fins to Feet Again?
View attachment 376186

Not really, I looked at this article, it’s from RAE, a creationist site, so it’s more of an opinion piece than a scientific study.

The article emphasizes that some features of Tiktaalik, like its fins, are still very fin-like. That’s true, no single fossil shows every step of the fin-to-limb transition. But paleontologists consider Tiktaalik a transitional fossil because it combines fish traits with early tetrapod traits in ways earlier fossils don’t.

Experts aren’t debating whether Tiktaalik is transitional; they just note that the full fin-to-foot evolution involved multiple steps, which is normal in paleontology. If you want the mainstream scientific perspective, the original research papers (Daeschler et al., 2006; PNAS 2024 Tiktaalik axial skeleton study) show the fossil evidence and how it fits the fin-to-limb story.