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If you mean all the ideas people have had about how life forms change, I suppose there would be some unusual ones among them.
Since evolution is observed to be happening everywhere there are living things, you might as well ask the Bible [to] refute thunderstorms.
Exactly. And it's almost as if some folks believe we need their approval to believe as we do. They are ever ready to teach, but will never accept correction themselves. They are lifted up in the vanity of their own minds.Ahh ok I see the problem now. My position is contrary to your’s so your going to refuse to acknowledge it. That’s fine.
Yes. By the time Darwin became a scientist, many scientists had come to the conclusion that some kind of evolution must have occurred. Darwin's great discovery was in learning how it worked.
Exactly. And it's almost as if some folks believe we need their approval to believe as we do.
I've always been amazed by what engineers accomplished in the generations before I came on the scene - the things they did without the use of modern computing power. Still, they also did some cringy things, and modern computing is the tool that has helped me convince people to change.
If I had another lifetime to spend, I think I'd enjoy branching out beyond engineering - maybe get a degree in biology for example to see if my modeling skills would apply there - if the potential I see for improvement would bear fruit. But then I remember the catch of naturalism and think ... nah.
I have actually thought about that myself, though. According to darwinism, it took millions and millions of years for man to evolve to his current form. So for the past 200,000-250,000 years or so, we have been very close to our current form. Yet, that is a whole lot of nothing for such a relatively advanced specimen. And this has nothing to do with learning to split the atom. We are talking relatively simple things.The guy is proposing that advanced technology should have been developed hundreds of thousands of years ago, but he's not actually giving an evidence based argument for why that ought to be.
Then when I said I don't agree (because the evidence suggests that cavemen weren't carving equations of general relativity and quantum physics into cave walls), he says that im refusing to acknowledge his beliefs simply because I disagree with young earth creationism.
But the evidence doesn't go both ways. Either cave men knew quantum mechanics or they didn't. And if they didn't, this implies that historically people didn't advance as fast as he thinks they should have.
But he never really says why he thinks reality should be any different. Why should a cave man who doesn't have modern medicine, who risks his life hunting megafauna, who doesn't have mail and email and computers etc. Why should we expect this kind of individual to invent satellites 200,000 years ago?
Why have that expectation for cavemen to invent advanced technology, but also, what evidence is there for that expedited invention in a mere brief 6,000 years?
His position is very strange. It isn't made with use of evidence, but rather its just a broad subjective idea.
As a geologist, I could very easily point to the 5 million varves of the green river formation and could ask how 13,000 varves could form per day (for 365 straight days), while simultaneously preserving animal trackways, nests and feeding traces (implying that life casually roamed amongst this depositional environment). Or I could point to the fossil Grove site of upright petrified trees with animal trackways around their base, rooted in paleosols midway through carboniferous strata, which only could have grown in situ yet rests midway vertically up the geologic column, and I could easily conclude that logically there is no way for such features to form in a mere 6,000 years.
The evidence really only goes one way. So when we look at the timeline of human invention, evidence implies that it really did take us millions of years to invent satellites and nuclear weapons. But what does the opposition offer? They don't have any refutation. They just have broad and subjective ideas. "I think this should be the case" but never really a clear argument as to why they think so.
I have actually thought about that myself, though. According to darwinism, it took millions and millions of years for man to evolve to his current form.
So for the past 200,000-250,000 years or so, we have been very close to our current form.
I have actually thought about that myself, though. According to darwinism, it took millions and millions of years for man to evolve to his current form. So for the past 200,000-250,000 years or so, we have been very close to our current form. Yet, that is a whole lot of nothing for such a relatively advanced specimen. And this has nothing to do with learning to split the atom. We are talking relatively simple things.
Here, let's use the 24 hour analogy again - for the sake of the illustration, let's say man has been at his current state for 200,000 years:
At midnight, the clock starts, as homo sapiens arrive on the scene. Progress is extremely slow, and at 10:30pm, we barely qualify as hunter-gatherer. And then all of a sudden, starting at about 10:45pm, we have recorded history, the wheel, and civilization, and this progresses on up through the information age to the current time of midnight, where we have split the atom, invented the world wide web, and walked on the moon.
Yea, call me incredulous.
There is quite a big difference between a couple of hundred years and 180,000+ years. That it took modern man over 150,000 years to learn that mud can be formed and left to dry into pots and pans while this very same man was able to go from strapping simple explosives on dogs to computerized drones in less than 75 years, and the printing press to the internet in less than 600 years, is an inconsistency that strikes me as particularly glaring. Think about it, it took modern man almost 200,000 years to learn that four rounded stones, two axles and a chassis strapped to several horses can create faster travel. Yet this same man was able to progress from the development of turbines to advanced rocketry in less than 150 years, and was able to go from "horseless carriages" to walking on the moon in less than 80 years.Well we did talk about some simple advances. For example, mankind was using Spears and sharpened weapons over a hundred thousand years ago. Pottery and agriculture some 20,000 years ago as well. But he didn't accept these technological advances.
Early man over 200,000 years ago had things like hammers and blades. Hand axes and grinding tools.
There were simple things around long ago, simple inventions. Simple tools.
But this just wasn't enough. Maybe the individual wanted to see cars? Planes? A steel foundry?
Why is it so strange that people might have a scientific revolution? One minute we could barely get into space (the 70s), the next minute we are launching tens of thousands of satellites in a single year (Tesla's spaceX). Is this not equally strange?
One day we might think that the elements are earth, wind, fire and water (the Romans beliefs in 50AD?), The next we are using chromatography to identify the elements of stars 10 billion light-years away (1980s?).
In medicine, one minute we attribute disease to witchcraft (1700s?), and the next minute we are using crispr to replace nucleotides in the human genome to fight disease (today).
Are these advances that just recently happened not equally odd to you? That we might go from witchcraft to microscopic genomic surgery In the last second of the clock?
But alas, at the end of the day, no matter how odd it might seem to any of us, this is just how it's played out. The evidence is what it is. Why Abraham and Job or Samson or Tertius didn't write about subatomic particles, is anyone's guess. Some things people of the past simply didn't know.
Agriculture played a huge role in buying us time to ponder things and some might ask well, why didnt we think of these things 2 billion years ago? Well, of course reptiles don't have minds like we do. Nor do birds nor fish, so in our most humble of origins, there's no reason to think that we should have just instantly known anything. We had to learn at some point.
Anyway, it's just incredulity. Alternatively, we are well aware that evidence for an old earth is absurdly insurmountable. The evidence for the timeline of human advances just is what it is. Why people didn't think of these things sooner? Well, people don't know what they don't know. We can't even ask about things that we don't know about because we don't know what to even ask. Especially back in the stone age.
Moving on.
Actually, there is a branch of engineering that does what you're thinking about. Genetic algorithms copy evolutionary processes to solve engineering problems that are too complex for design to solve.
There is quite a big difference between a couple of hundred years and 180,000+ years. That it took modern man over 150,000 years to learn that mud can be formed and left to dry into pots and pans while this very same man was able to go from strapping simple explosives on dogs to computerized drones in less than 75 years, and the printing press to the internet in less than 600 years, is an inconsistency that strikes me as particularly glaring. Think about it, it took modern man almost 200,000 years to learn that four rounded stones, two axles and a chassis strapped to several horses can create faster travel. Yet this same man was able to progress from the development of turbines to advanced rocketry in less than 150 years, and was able to go from "horseless carriages" to walking on the moon in less than 80 years.
Again I note that 190,000 years is an awful long time to remain in the dark for a specimen of such vast potential.
Four rounded stones strapped to what horses? The ones that weren't domesticated? The ones that they could just walk to the local store and purchase? Imagine trying to strap a saddle to a wild undomesticated rhinoceros and trying to ride it. Or a wild bull. If you think bull riding is dangerous today, imagine 200,000 years ago when bulls were significantly larger and more dangerous. wild aurochs.
And remember, people back then didn't have tranquilizer weapons either. If they wanted to ride a horse, they had to risk their life in the process. No modern medicine to help them if the got kicked. No surgery or casts if they broke a bone. If you get injured trying to ride that wild horse, you're as good as dead. And then we might ask, where would they even want to ride to? On what roads? To what villages?
Even domestication itself would take thousands of years of intentional selective breeding. Or taming and teaching etc. It's the manipulation of genetic traits that unfolds in the species of animal.
And not only that but, it's not like people even knew that animals could be domesticated. It's not like they sat around talking about how if they just kept breeding the right animals or kept being friendly to certain animals that eventually they'd let us ride them. They didn't have language to even sit around talking about such ideas, let alone would they even think to carry such ideas out.
Just like when reading scripture, we need to put our thoughts into context. It's too easy for us to take these things for granted because they seem simple for us. But for people 200,000 years ago, doing something as simple as riding a horse wasn't so simple.
Like I said, there are people who still live in the Amazon jungle in loin cloths. Learning and growing in knowledge just isn't as simple as you're making it out to be.
I'm aware of it, and have used it. It depends on the problem you're solving whether it works, and most optimization schemes (including genetic algorithms) require some human guidance to achieve anything meaningful ...
an analogy that could be used to argue the need for God's creative intervention were it not for the fact that "genetic algorithm" is more a label and only involves concepts similar to those in biology rather than actually mimicking biological processes.
When did sin enter into the world? Was there sin (murder, stealing, lying, adultery, etc) during those 200,000 years? What about death?
Not "guidance" but initial conditions and rules.
Simulations of evolutionary processes are not exactly new, nor are they difficult to match up to what happens in nature.
It rather precisely fits Darwin's four points that explain how evolutionary processes work in nature.
No, I meant guidance. I could tell stories.
What 4 points would those be? I'm not familiar with a 4 point list.
That's a good point. In that instance it was in fact a spiritual death to which God was referring. However, the fact remains that physical death is also a result of sin. It is written, Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned, and, "the wages of sin is death..." To deny that physical death is a result of sin is to deny the atonement of Jesus Christ. That's what makes the death of Jesus Christ so incredible. The Bible says, "the soul that sinneth shall die", yet...He didn't sin. Jesus Christ lived a life of perfect, sinless obedience to God. Yet, He died. He actually died. This is what paid the penalty of our sins. He died in our place, paying for our sins. And because He is risen, we who are in Christ will rise from the dead (we have already been raised spiritually). Sin is to do with all encompassing death. Both physical and spiritual death are the result of sin in our mortal bodies. The Word of God is clear.So when did two hominids get immortal souls and a knowledge of good and evil? God didn't tell us, did He? If it was H. erectus instead of H. sapiens, would that matter to you?
Keep in mind that the "death" God mentioned to Adam was a spiritual one, not a physical death. It was spiritual death that we brought into the world, not a physical death, as God mentions in Genesis. He told Adam he would die the day he ate from that tree, but Adam eats and lives on physically for many years thereafter. If God is truthful, then it cannot be a physical death.
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