What creationists need to do to win against evolution.

[Shemjaza]

I think we have been talking at cross purposes. I suspect we agree more then we both initially thought.

"WHATEVER THAT IS" was referring to ID.

What do you think the intelligent in ID is?
I don't believe I can know, nor can you.

I agree whole heatedly. My point was that ID assertions are vague and unclear.

ID is a literally unreasonable position because it responds to a specific position that has evidence and predictions with an undefined and undefinable hand wave.

I don't believe we're dealing with something that can be measured.

If something, some being, created us,,,,then it is not part of this universe or of time itself. How does one measure something that is not part of us?

Is the watchmaker part of the watch?
How would we go about discovering who/what the watchmaker is? It's not as easy as measuring things that ARE designed.

Yes, I agree again.

But that's where we get to the problem. Evolution can be defined and described... which means it can be tested scientifically.

If ID cannot be defined or described then it is no longer science, it's a philosophical axiom at best and just a preferred personal narrative at worst.

I don't remember what attitude of mine you're referring to, but the reason Christians do not like to teach that we come from an ape is because we feel that God created us in a special way. You can't deny that we are very different from every other animal...we have a conscience, we are self-aware, we know our end, we know about the universe, and we can ponder things we cannot see: Math, physics, etc.

I agree humans are special. All our traits are found in nature... but the degree makes us the only creature in all the billions of years with the degree of intelligence, abstract thought and projected empathy.

Genesis was written by someone to teach a moral lesson....to tell of how the first persons came about...how the earth happens to be here. It teaches about evil and why man is the way he is.

It is NOT meant to be a history book. If some Christians believe this,,,it is their right, I don't know anyone that believes Genesis 1 is literal.

Then you haven't looked around these forums very carefully.

The YEC position is that approximately 6000 years ago a literal man and woman named Adam and Eve were the only humans on the planet and lived in a garden.

There are believers on this forum who take poetic descriptions of the Earth in Genesis as proof that the Earth is in fact flat with a dome over the top.

There are those who take KJVO so literally that they believe that the language spoken before the tower of Babel and spoken still in Heaven is the archaic English of King James.

I'll say this however: The BB reminds me of when God said LET THERE BE LIGHT. Somehow everything started...it seems to me that science agrees with the bible ! Boom, it just happened.

I am very sympathetic with a theistic view of the beginning of the universe.

The science of the Big Bang only describes the growth and formation of the universe... not the actual origin of the time/space/matter/energy after time began.

I have a difficult time with macro-evolution because of what I hear about cells in our body. I don't understand how eyes evolved. Were all animals blind before full evolution? Did vision take millions of years? How did animals find food before the eye was fully developed?

How long does it take for a fish to develop lungs that could use air? Did the first fish come out of the water and just die? Why would they have even developed lungs if they didn't need them to live in water?

Too many questions.

Do you honestly care that your questions have answers?

Mainly that in nature today some life gets along fine with partial vision or no vision. And some life lives varying degrees in and out of the water.

As to how an eye can evolve over millions of years? A half formed eye that can only tell light from dark is still better then nothing. As the old saying goes: "In the world of the blind, the one eyed man is king."

And it seem impossible that nano machines inside cells just developed randomly.

"Seems impossible" isn't a scientific argument, it's just an emotional argument.

It's also important to remember that while evolution proposes that the common ancestors of all life where simple single cells, that doesn't mean they were anywhere as sophisticated of the modern counterparts.

All life, big and small has the hallmarks of billions of years of evolution and competition.

The original life had no competitors so the internal structure could have functioned in a much more deterministic chemical pattern.

Well, if science invalidates the bible one day, we Christians will just have to rethink everything and maybe accept that all we see came by chance.

The fear you describe is just as bad as the fear some atheists have of MAYBE discovering that God is real...although I don't know how that could ever be done.

Science can't ever disprove God.

Personally I would love the have the supernatural demonstrated to me... even if the consequences might be terrible in some cases.

If by diversity of life, you mean micro evolution,,,then I agree.

Darwin happened by with a good idea which has not been replaced....who knows what will happen in the future?

No, I mean macro-evolution and speciation.

Ultimately if you accept micro evolution but dispute macro evolution you need to define how the barrier between works.

Macro changes are just many micro changes piled up with some population isolation.

It's akin to believing in micro walking to the corner shops but declaring that macro walking to the next town is impossible because you once walked for an hour, but never left your home town.

 

[FrumiousBandersnatch]

You're right of course.
But some scientists can't believe in evolution because they don't believe it's so easy for life to begin....this is the same belief that causes them not to believe in evolution.

Frankly, I'm sceptical; they really don't sound very much like scientists. Evolution itself is a demonstrable fact, regardless of the theory that explains it, and nobody has claimed it is 'so easy' for life to begin - we simply don't know how life began or how 'easy' it might have been - whatever that's supposed to mean. Any scientist even vaguely familiar with biology should know that. The theory of evolution is not dependent on any particular theory of the origin of life, so that is clearly not a reason to reject it. Talk of 'belief' or 'disbelief' in theories is not good scientific practice.

But if you're not willing to name any of these scientists I can't check their credentials, so I remain sceptical. The claim smells bad.

There can be no imperial evidence for faith-based dogma. This is why it's called faith.

Did you mean empirical evidence?

I don't understand how you could say this....
how could our comparing our DNA to the closest non-human be any "proof" that aliens could NOT have done this?

I don't understand how you could misread what I said so badly. Try again - this time focus on what I actually wrote. If you want it explained just ask.

Of course, the question of where the aliens originated would still remain....

Of course. But that wasn't the issue.

I would be happy to hear of the God hypothesis, or if you want to give me post numbers.

OK, I'll make a follow-up post.

We have a problem in any case:
Who created God?
How does something come from nothing?

Both big problems.

There's a simple solution: as we have no evidence or need for either claim, we have no reason to invoke either claim - until new evidence suggests otherwise. So we have no need to invoke God, whatever it is, and we have no need to invoke something from nothing.

[Having said that, physicist Lawrence Krauss has written a book about how a universe can come from nothing (A Universe From Nothing), but, as you might expect, it's not as simple as it sounds and there are some caveats...]

To me, a non-scientific person, it does seem like they have good reasons. I'm talking about Behe, Meyer, Tour. A well-known scientist, can't remember the name or his specialty, became a believer in God because he believed there was no other explanation for any of this --- what we see and what we don't see.

Behe, Meyer, & Tour are all Fellows of, or associates, of the Discovery Institute, that advocates the pseudoscientific concept of Intelligent Design; i.e. they are pseudo-scientists. Intelligent Design is a fraudulent facade for arguing the existence of God, claiming to be a scientific theory, originating in the desire to have religion taught in science classes as part of the 'Wedge Strategy' (see also 'Of Pandas and People'). The arguments of Behe, Meyer, Tour, and other ID proponents have been debunked repeatedly, both in scientific review and in the courts.

 

[FrumiousBandersnatch]

I would be happy to hear of the God hypothesis, or if you want to give me post numbers.

Rather than hunt down past posts, here's a summary of my opinion on the utility of the God hypothesis that I gave elsewhere in response to someone who suggested the idea or hypothesis of God was simply false. The central idea is that there is a way to assess the quality of a hypothesis or compare hypotheses:

"Strictly speaking, there is no need to assume supernatural (e.g. God) hypothesis is false - its problem is, that by common (abductive) criteria for ‘argument to the best explanation’, it fails on all counts; it’s ill-defined, untestable, makes no predictions, has no explanatory scope or power in that it doesn’t provide any deeper understanding of the phenomena or unify that understanding with other knowledge, it raises more (unanswerable) questions about its own nature than it purports to answer, it is not parsimonious as it introduces a whole new ontology, and it is in no way coherent with our existing body of knowledge.

It would be bottom of the hypothesis rankings even if it was testable. For scientific purposes, it appears to be less an explanation than a label indicating a lack of explanation. I have yet to hear from its proponents how the God hypothesis is any better than the ‘Magic’ hypothesis."

If you need explanation of any of it, I'll be happy to try to explain.

 

[xianghua]

Not a modern fish.

i never said anything about modern fish. just a fish. so i was right that according to evolution human evolved from a fish.

 

[Subduction Zone]

i never said anything about modern fish. just a fish. so i was right that according to evolution human evolved from a fish.

I would say that in light of your earlier errors that the implication was there.

 

[GodsGrace101]

No rush--it's 890 pages and heavy reading, a plan to replace the US gov't with a Christian theocracy.

Be careful. No hard feelings, but you really don't know very much about the theory of evolution, and the Discovery Institute is notorious for misrepresenting it.

[

I think it was you that was horrified by my comment that it would be nice to live in God's Kingdom here on earth, right now. I think I must have said that this is impossible,,,,and also, it would have to be real Christians or disciples of Jesus.

Above you mention a theocracy. Heaven forbid!!!
I'm as much against that as you are.

What I'm talking about is different and you might or might not know what I mean...however, it's impossible, so no need to discuss this. Just want to say that it is two totally different ideas.

One would be a Utopia...
One would be hell on earth. Or close to it.

 

[Speedwell]

I think it was you that was horrified by my comment that it would be nice to live in God's Kingdom here on earth, right now. I think I must have said that this is impossible,,,,and also, it would have to be real Christians or disciples of Jesus.

Above you mention a theocracy. Heaven forbid!!!
I'm as much against that as you are.

What I'm talking about is different and you might or might not know what I mean...however, it's impossible, so no need to discuss this. Just want to say that it is two totally different ideas.

One would be a Utopia...
One would be hell on earth. Or close to it.

Oh, I know what you are talking about. But look what happened: Jesus proposed a radical moral philosophy which would have produced the utopia you imagine if it had been put into practice. But instead of doing that we strung him up instead.

 

[GodsGrace101]

Oh, I know what you are talking about. But look what happened: Jesus proposed a radical moral philosophy which would have produced the utopia you imagine if it had been put into practice. But instead of doing that we strung him up instead.

Right. And it's because of man's nature...we're born with it. We call it the sin nature...our tendency toward evil...which, to God, everything we do cannot be considered to be good UNLESS we have faith in Him.
Some believe Jesus failed. He was victorious in dying for us....Sinning, as in the O.T. required death...so that we don't have to die, spiritually, He died for us. This is a lot deeper than it sounds like right now.

But they believe He failed in creating a "new earth".
Jesus said, repent, for the Kingdom of God is at hand. (Matthew 4:17), and, as you've correctly noted, the Kingdom is not here.

So? Does this deny the existence of God? No. It just means we don't understand Him very well, but we only know what we need to know.

He got strung up because He was a threat to the Sanhedrin.

Sorry about the verse quote, but it sounds like you know the story.

 

[FrumiousBandersnatch]

So? Does this deny the existence of God? No. It just means we don't understand Him very well, but we only know what we need to know.

This sounds like the 'God works in mysterious ways' clause that means conflicting or contradictory evidence can always be dismissed.

 

[pitabread]

i never said anything about modern fish. just a fish.

In the original context of the discussion, you were claiming that cats could evolve from dogs (and vise-versa) which was referring to modern extant species. When you switched to talking about humans evolving from fish, there was not distinction made that you were now speaking about the ancestors of all land vertebrates.

so i was right that according to evolution human evolved from a fish.

Stating that "human[sic] evolved from a fish" is misleading, because fish are not the direct ancestors of humans.

If you want to discuss the evolution of land vertebrates from the original aquatic ancestors, then you should make that distinction clear.

 

[pitabread]

I know that there are some animals that could live in water and out of water...but they don't seem to become land animals, but stay as they are.

When viewing evolution through the lens of human time frames (e.g. less than 100 years) of course things don't appear to be changing much. That is because we're looking at an extremely brief (evolutionary speaking) snapshot of biological organisms in time.

As to eyes,,,sure, there are fish that have no eyes because they live deep in the ocean and have no use for them. But GETTING eyes is different than not needing them.

Sure, but there is nothing precluding the evolution of eyes or any other sensory organ.

Also, not all organisms have evolved eyes. Plants never evolved them for example.

 

[FrumiousBandersnatch]

When viewing evolution through the lens of human time frames (e.g. less than 100 years) of course things don't appear to be changing much. That is because we're looking at an extremely brief (evolutionary speaking) snapshot of biological organisms in time.

But we do notice the evolution of small, rapidly reproducing organisms, like bacteria and viruses... (antibiotic resistance, new flu & coronaviruses).

 

[FrumiousBandersnatch]

I know that there are some animals that could live in water and out of water...but they don't seem to become land animals, but stay as they are.

If the population can survive well enough in the niche they occupy, they are likely to stay pretty much as they are. Sometimes this can be for millions of years (they will evolve, but not in major structural ways). It's when a population is under pressure that structural changes are likely to occur, but they still take many generations to become apparent - many populations will go extinct because they can't adapt fast enough.

As to eyes,,,sure, there are fish that have no eyes because they live deep in the ocean and have no use for them. But GETTING eyes is different than not needing them.

Most deep ocean fish do have eyes (to see light produced by other organisms), but some are blind. It's more often deep cave fish that don't have eyes (or don't have functional eyes). The blind fish have lost the eyes their distant ancestors had, or their eyes no longer function, because they are not an advantage, and could even be considered a disadvantage (why waste precious resources on an organ that is useless?). So individuals with mutations that adversely affect the eyes can be just as successful as the others and so their genes are passed on to future generations and the population will slowly lose its sight over time. In some cases, the genes that control eye development in the embryo will be disabled, so eyes simply don't develop.

But eyes seem to have evolved independently many times - for example, in molluscs - octopus eyes look very similar to mammalian eyes, but have no shared structural origin with them. The evolution of eyes is fairly well understood these days, and examples of the various stages can be seen in living creatures today.

 

[GodsGrace101]

This sounds like the 'God works in mysterious ways' clause that means conflicting or contradictory evidence can always be dismissed.

It's NOT the God works in mysterious way theme.
I don't really ever say that, although I'm sure it's true.
Who can understand God?

As to conflicting information...nothing should be discarded.
Isn't this what science is all about?

And yet, it does dismiss ID.
I think we should keep all options open.

 

[GodsGrace101]

When viewing evolution through the lens of human time frames (e.g. less than 100 years) of course things don't appear to be changing much. That is because we're looking at an extremely brief (evolutionary speaking) snapshot of biological organisms in time.

Agreed, of course.
But was the IceMan very different from us?
That was 5,000 years ago.
What about the Greeks and Hebrews?
4,000 years ago.

That would be enough time, I think, for a bird's beak to adapt,,,,but does the bird change? I don't think so.

Sure, but there is nothing precluding the evolution of eyes or any other sensory organ.

Also, not all organisms have evolved eyes. Plants never evolved them for example.

Agreed.
It's HOW a complex system like the eye could have evolved. It seems like it would have had to just start out like it is right now. I know that I don't know enough about this.

In 1989 M. Denton wrote a book titled:
Evolution: A Theory in Crises.

I wonder if important progress has been made since then...30 years ago.

 

[GodsGrace101]

If the population can survive well enough in the niche they occupy, they are likely to stay pretty much as they are. Sometimes this can be for millions of years (they will evolve, but not in major structural ways). It's when a population is under pressure that structural changes are likely to occur, but they still take many generations to become apparent - many populations will go extinct because they can't adapt fast enough.

Most deep ocean fish do have eyes (to see light produced by other organisms), but some are blind. It's more often deep cave fish that don't have eyes (or don't have functional eyes). The blind fish have lost the eyes their distant ancestors had, or their eyes no longer function, because they are not an advantage, and could even be considered a disadvantage (why waste precious resources on an organ that is useless?). So individuals with mutations that adversely affect the eyes can be just as successful as the others and so their genes are passed on to future generations and the population will slowly lose its sight over time. In some cases, the genes that control eye development in the embryo will be disabled, so eyes simply don't develop.

But eyes seem to have evolved independently many times - for example, in molluscs - octopus eyes look very similar to mammalian eyes, but have no shared structural origin with them. The evolution of eyes is fairly well understood these days, and examples of the various stages can be seen in living creatures today.

Of course I agree with the above.
Thanks for the link re eyes....

 

[Subduction Zone]

It's NOT the God works in mysterious way theme.
I don't really ever say that, although I'm sure it's true.
Who can understand God?

As to conflicting information...nothing should be discarded.
Isn't this what science is all about?

And yet, it does dismiss ID.
I think we should keep all options open.

In the sciences concepts that cannot be supported by evidence are dismissed. If one wants to propose ID then one should strive to find evidence that supports it.

 

[Subduction Zone]

Agreed, of course.
But was the IceMan very different from us?
That was 5,000 years ago.
What about the Greeks and Hebrews?
4,000 years ago.

That would be enough time, I think, for a bird's beak to adapt,,,,but does the bird change? I don't think so.

The beak is part of the bird. If the beak changes so does the bird. Evolution is merely the accumulation of small changes over the years.

Agreed.
It's HOW a complex system like the eye could have evolved. It seems like it would have had to just start out like it is right now. I know that I don't know enough about this.

In 1989 M. Denton wrote a book titled:
Evolution: A Theory in Crises.

I wonder if important progress has been made since then...30 years ago.

Denton's book is largely regarded as a joke. As to the evolution of the eye it is well understood. You should watch this video. You might recognize the young man in "the shirt":

 

[Speedwell]

In 1989 M. Denton wrote a book titled:
Evolution: A Theory in Crises.

I wonder if important progress has been made since then...30 years ago.

Evolutionary theory has made considerable progress in the last 30 years. ID has made none. Even Denton himself has abandoned it.

 

[GodsGrace101]

Evolutionary theory has made considerable progress in the last 30 years. ID has made none. Even Denton himself has abandoned it.

Truly, the only way to verify ID in any way is to do it by process of elimination...I think.

As to the O.P.,,,I really don't know of a positive way that Creationism by an intelligent source could be proven..unless everything else is shown to be impossible.