JohnR7 said:
Ok, lets take a look at your link about what Darwin says:
"To suppose that the eye [...] could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree."
So at first Darwin admits the eye could not have evolved.
Darwin admits to no such thing, and all of your quote-mining cannot make it so.
JohnR7 said:
But then he starts to do the back stroke:
"the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection, though insuperable by our imagination, should not be considered as subversive of the theory".
Actually, he posed a rhetorical question, and then proceeded to answer it. But you have, in the usual creationist fashion, chosen to discard those bits which you found unplesant. Let's look at Darwin's passage
in its entirety:
Charles Darwin said:
To suppose that the eye [...] could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree. When it was first said that the sun stood still and the world turned round, the common sense of mankind declared the doctrine false; but the old saying of Vox populi, vox Dei, as every philosopher knows, cannot be trusted in science. Reason tells me, that if numerous gradations from a simple and imperfect eye to one complex and perfect can be shown to exist, each grade being useful to its possessor, as is certainly the case; if further, the eye ever varies and the variations be inherited, as is likewise certainly the case and if such variations should be useful to any animal under changing conditions of life, then the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection, though insuperable by our imagination, should not be considered as subversive of the theory.
makes a lot more sense when you read it
honestly, doesn't it?
JohnR7 said:
He decides it is no longer absurd, it is now just insuperable. Then he throws in the part he is famous for: the missing link. This is all well and good, but for the most part Darwin says: Do not expect much, and he does not deliver much at all.
Now you know this is
not what Darwin does. Why do you insist on spreading such obvious lies?
JohnR7 said:
Simply to address the eye as a receptical does not even begin to address the issue that there is a LOT of universe out there, and our eye preceives a VERY small part of it.
Because Darwin's not talking about the universe, he's talking about eyes.
JohnR7 said:
So to say the eye could have evolved, does not even begin to address the issue of WHY the eye evolved the way it did to preceive what it preceives.
Why did our eyes elvolve the way they did? Probably because they had no impetus to evolve any further. Dogs and cats are color blind, and generally have poorer eyesight than humans, but they have evolved far superior senses of smell and hearing to make them efficient hunters. How good do you want our eyes to be?
JohnR7 said:
Much less to go beyond this to discuss why they eye does not precieves what it does not preceive.
You mean why don't we have X-ray vision? Or telescopic sight? or infrared? We've survived pretty well without them, so what are you complaining about?
JohnR7 said:
His theory falls so short in this area, that it would be impossible to go beyond this to discuss just what it is that we are able to be aware of in the universe around us, and what we are not able to be aware of.
Again John, Darwin is not talking about Man's place in the universe, he's talking about how man (and the rest of life) got to where it is today. If you're concerned about how little you know about the universe around you, that's an issue you should bring up with God, not Darwin.
JohnR7 said:
Darwins whole theory crumbles, because it is based on observations and he can not qualify himself as a creditable observer. He simply does not address the issue of why our ability to observe is so limited. So he does not begin to address all there is that we are not able to observe.
Utter nonsense, and you know it.
JohnR7 said:
Let us give him the benifit of the doubt. Let us say that man can be aware of 10%, sense they say 90% of the data has not been discovered yet. How can we, based on how little we know, come up with a theory that is going to explain the meaning and the "origin" of life?
For the sake of argument, I'm going to stick with your made-up 10%/90% numbers.
Because Darwin formulated a theory based on the 10% he did see. And he knew what all scientists know:
1: He was aware that he only had 10% of the information (if that),
2: He knew that others would come along with information he didn't have(which has happened), and would add on to that 10% (which has also happened).
3: He knew that those later scientists would add their information to his own, and correct the things he got wrong (which has also happened; Darwin didn't know anything about DNA or genetics, for example, althogh he did observe hereditary variations).
4: He knew that those later scientists, adding their data to his own, would either:
-Support his theory (which it has, for the most part)
-modify or correct his theory (which discoveries such as DNA have done)
-Or possibly falsify his theory entirely (which has
not happened, although you constantly life to say it has.)
5: he knew that later scientists, who added to his incomplete information, would themselves have incomplete information. As they corrected him, someone else will eventually come along and correct
them.
JohnR7 said:
Darwin takes on a monumental task of trying to explain something with so very little information, knowledge or understanding of what he is trying to come up with a theory to explain.[/i]
You are right, relatively speaking. Darwin did have very little information to work with, especially considering what was known and believed in 1859.
What makes Darwin so impressive is how much he got right, based on the fact that what we now know and have observed (nowhere near 100%, I grant you, but a lot more than the 10% you credited Darwin with) supports him.
JohnR7 said:
I suggest that this is not a question of a missing link, that all Darwin has is a single link. It is whole chain that he is missing. He is trying to tell us about a chain, when all he has is one link from that chain.
Darwin had more than a "single" link, and you know it. All you have managed to establish is that Charles Darwin did not have all possible information; a fact that nobody, Creationist or not, is disputing.
You pounded on your strawman pretty hard, John, but in the end, you got nowhere.