Posted on 01/11/2003 9:53:34 PM PST by DWar
To correct your many errors, no, descent does not "prove" evolution, nor do evolutionists claim it does. Ditto for lack of descent. Nor does homology alone. Nor does "homology without descent", which is not only used as proof of evolution, it doesn't even make any bloody sense -- it's an oxymoron. Nor do analogous structures prove evolution.
I really see no big difference between what I said and what you said - except for the person who said it. The whole practice of paleontology is based on homology. Without homology there is no paleontology. So essentially you are agreeing with other statements I have made that the fossils do not serve as any sort of evidence for evolution - which is fine with me but which certainly will be very disheartening to many of your evolutionist friends such as Vade (Bones) Retro.
BTW - I also agree with you that lack of descent does not prove evolution - it disproves it. Amazing how much we are starting to agree on things!
I have, and in so doing, I have concluded that there is little reason to reinvent the wheel by refuting, yet again, an argument such as the Prime Mover, when it has been more than adequately refuted by others.
I can refer you to books that refute Hume and Kant.
Please do.
That totally phony, totally unscientific article was pounded to death on these very threads over a year ago. It is the typical evolutionists snow job of just writing tons of nonsense hoping that no one is able to refute the whole thing and then say aha! evolution is true. Fortunately, the whole thing has been refuted and shown to be utter nonsense here another evolutionist snow job often cited is disproven here and for tons of evidence showing evolution to be bunk, you can go here .
Are you by chance a member of the Flat Earth Society?
You're welcome to think whatever you like.
Absent any evidence to the contrary and your refusal to even try to back up your assertion that those SYSTEMS arose stochastically, I certainly will.
There are gems hidden in the slag that make the attempt worthwhile, IMO. Keep in mind that you don't have to buy into the whole thing - I certainly don't - in order to see that some points are useful on their own. As an example, I'm not a Kantian, as I said, but the basic utility of the categorical imperative has held my interest at times ;)
No, it's your vast lack of understanding about how such things are done.
Well, since you cannot back up your statement except by rhetoric, then it seems to me that it is you who is lacking in understanding on how such things are done. I already showed you why the study about DNA calibration is a lie in post# 626:
Of course they are, your answers to the problems I mentioned prove it. If evolution is not true then the gradual building up of mutations over time would not be true, so yes, the study assumes that evolutionist assumptions are true (and considering that not a single mutation creating greater complexity has ever been shown to have happened but numerous mutations simplifying a complex system have), that is a tremendous assumption with no basis in fact. There is no data showing that egg layers came first because the bones do not show reproductive data and neither does it show the DNA from millions of years ago when this supposedly happened. As to the time basis for the mutation differentials, claiming I am ignorant shows my statement is correct. Your claim that they can be calibrated by fossil dating when fossils do not provide DNA is just a plain lie. As to my point that evolutionists claim that mutations are there just to prove evolution and have no purpose except when evolutionists want it to have a purpose is quite correct. If differences in organism have no purpose then yes, one could claim that any mutations were just happenstance and could be used as a time scale. However, when the changes do have meaning one cannot say that and your insult just proves my statement correct. This is another example of evolutionists contradicting themselves to take both sides of a question. The whole thing is rhetoric, not science.
Why should I? I have extensively proved my point in Post# 257 , Post# 425 , and Post# 542 . In addition, you continue to fail to address the central point of the question which I asked in the very post you are replying to:
This adaptation has entailed a dramatic restructuring of the maternal anatomy (such as expansion of the oviduct to form the uterus) as well as the development of a fetal organ capable of absorbing maternal nutrients.
The above alone proves my statement that it could not have happened in one generation. Your repeating what has already been answered in full shows quite well that you cannot disprove my statement but are trying to dishonestly claim you have. You cannot even give a detailed description as to how all these SYSTEMS which are clearly necessary in live birth could have arisen in a gradual manner - and no evolutionist authors have been able to do so either otherwise you would have cut and pasted it or typed it in. Your snow job does not cut it.
My firm prediction is that won't happen here. A correct answer presupposes that the question is understood.
Sure, but that's hardly the same thing as demonstrating that it had to happen "all at once" in a single generation.
The main reason why it could not have happened in a single generation has already been explained to you numerous times but you keep evading it. The process requires changes in both the mother and the baby to work. This means coordination of the changes between the mother and the baby. This means at least more than one thing had to be changed at once. There is no way this could have occurred in a single generation by stochastic means. You also are in the habit of speaking of organs as if they can arise by a single mutation. There are numerous new organs involved here such as the chorion, and the placenta which could not have arisen by just a single mutation and thus could not have happened in a single generation. There are as I have detailed some half dozen proteins necessary just to get the placenta to adhere to the uterus - and make the uterus receptive to the placenta. Again, this could not have happened with one mutation in a single generation. In live birth, the wastes are kept in the amniotic sac which surrounds the baby, in egg layers, the wastes are kept in a sac not surrounding the baby. This is a very big change which could not have happened with one mutation and hence could not have arisen in one generation. In egg layers the nutritional arteries and the waste arteries are totally separate and have different destinations, in the live bearing they are both joined together in the umbilical cord. This is another change that would have required more than one mutation and hence could not have occurred in one generation.
It explains a lot. It explains that the world is not a random set of coincidences. Science proves that it is not on a daily basis.
but it asks us to accept a "reality" contrary to what we can observe and comprehend.
Wrong again! We indeed can comprehend (quite well!) that the Sistine Chapel ceiling did not come about by a bunch of paint cans falling up. We know it was made by an intelligent being whether we are aware of his name or not. So we definitely can comprehend intelligence even though we cannot see it, touch it or make love to it.
Real science does, the pseudo-science of evolution does not.
Seems to me that it is the evolutionists who are failing (miserably!) in providing reason and observation in support of their theory. They are insulting, indulging in rhetoric, and trying to discuss everything but the evidence for their theory. It is those opposed to evolution that are providing solid scientific facts to support their views. Since the facts are the same for everyone and available to all, one has to wonder how evolutionists can say their view is true when they cannot find facts to support it but their opponents can easily do so.
Indeed. Nor as unsubtle.
"I once knew an Episcopalian lady in Newport, Rhode Island, who asked me to design and build a doghouse for her Great Dane. The lady claimed to understand God and His Ways of Working perfectly. She could not understand why anyone should be puzzled about what had been or about what was going to be.And yet, when I showed her a blueprint of the doghouse I proposed to build, she said to me, "I'm sorry, but I never could read one of those things."
"Give it to your husband or your minister to pass on to God," I said, "and, when God finds a minute, I'm sure he'll explain this doghouse of mine in a way that even you can understand."
She fired me. I shall never forget her. She believed that God liked people in sailboats much better than He liked people in motorboats. She could not bear to look at a worm. When she saw a worm, she screamed.
She was a fool, and so am I, and so is anyone who thinks he sees what God is Doing."
-- Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. in "Cat's Cradle".
It did not defy logic, it defied popular scientific belief.
Only by some non-standard definitions of "logic" and "scientific belief".
"Logic" means one of two rather different things, and neither makes your statement true:
1. "A connection between facts that seems reasonable or inevitable" -- or whatever fits "common sense", if you will. This is the layman's usual meaning when he speaks of "logic" or what's "logical". By the conventional wisdom of the time when Ptolemy's earth-centric solar system was the rage, the obviousness of the earth's lack of motion, and the fact that all heavenly bodies moved about it, was so solid that if you could go back in time and tell them they weren't being "logical", they'd lock you up as a madman. Hell, they *did* lock up Galileo for saying basically the same thing.
2. "Symbolic logic", or formal mathematical-style logic. This is a rigorous form of devising a proof by stepwise construction of a string of inarguable propositions from a set of starting premises until a conclusion is reached. The conclusion is rock-solid if the premises are correct. The problem, of course, is that you have to start with correct premises. Back in, say, 1500 it could be rigorously "proven" that the Earth stood still -- based unfortunately on the incorrect premises about physics which were in vogue at the time.
In no way is it correct to say that it "wasn't logical" to believe in an Earth-centric solar system in the mileu in which it was widely believed.
Nor is it correct to say that it was a "popular scientific belief", since at the time *nothing* was "scientific". It was all "common sense", or "dogma", or "divine inspiration", or ivory-tower theorizing, and so on. How many angels could dance on the head of a pin was the sort of topic that could be endlessly debated, for there was no set of principles by which to judge the results.
The scientific method for building a coherent body of theory was founded almost single-handedly by Galileo (early 1600's), although it caught fire rapidly and was widely refined thereafter.
Your statement can be used as easily against evolution.
If you think so, you'll have to explain why.
Push it to it's ultimate conclusion and the assertion becomes "logic is unreliable."
*Appeals* to logic are unreliable. So is formal logic if you don't verify your premises. That's my point. It's easy to declare "my position is logical", but that doesn't mean it's right, it doesn't mean it's been properly grounded in sufficient reality-checks.
That's where science comes in -- it's the best method ever devised (one could argue the *only* one) that has a proven track record of being a reliable way to separate the wheat from the chafe. Thus my next sentence in my original post:
"Armchair "logic" is fine for brainstorming some ideas to test, but sooner or later you need to reality-check them or it's all just alchemy."
I'm all for that. Lets put a reality check on your explanation for the existence of matter. Understand, Mr. Dan, that much of your theory is alchemy.
"My" theory? What exactly do you think is "my" theory? I was just poking yours with a stick to see how sturdy it was.
[Dataman wrote:] 3: The third option is that matter was created.
[I wrote:] Right, by the Big Bang. Thanks for clearing that up for us.
I think you might be in over your head as well.
No, but I think you missed my point.
Why would you, Dan Day, who defends what he calls a scientific theory, ascribe to an explosion the attributes of deity?
I didn't.
My point, which I'm sorry you missed, is that your third option, "matter was created", is larger than you realize.
You obviously presume that if matter didn't "create itself", or "always existed", then the only option left was that "matter was created", *and* (your unspoken premise) that if it was indeed created, then it was created *by an intelligent deity*.
Even leaving aside the fact that I don't think you've convincingly ruled out the first two possibilties, my "big bang" comment was meant to tweak you by pointing out that "matter was created" could *also* include the possibility that matter was "created" by some extraordinary "natural" process.
And no, you can't roll that into category #1 ("matter made itself"), because whatever initiated the Big Bang, it was something other than matter-or-energy as we know it. It was operating by a different set of rules than those which make matter-as-we-know-it and energy-as-we-know-it (or even space-and-time-as-we-know-them) exist.
Might those extra-Universal conditions have been the Mind of some God? Perhaps. But it might also have been some other non-conscious set of physical laws different from our own but no more godly. Just a parallel universe of a different flavor, if you will.
*What* caused it is currently beyond our ability to know (and quite possibly may always be), but the point is that regardless of what we can prove or disprove, you can't just sit there at your keyboard and use "logic" to toss out every possibility except for "it was the old guy with the long grey beard that the Bible talks about". Clearly there *are* other options.
Or maybe matter *did* make itself, or is "eternal". Sure, these possibilities seem to defy common sense, but as J.B.S Haldane once wisely said, "the universe is not only stranger than we imagine, it's stranger than we *can* imagine". The headache-inducing weirdness of quantum mechanics seems to lend some credence to that idea. But his central point is that there's no guarantee that the "ultimate" explanations of the universe *have* to make any "logical" sense. They may well be mind-bogglingly in violation of what we would consider logic or common sense.
So I'm not really sure you're on the right track when you unceremoniously throw out whatever you consider "illogical" and seize on the one explanation you find comfortably "logical".
Do you still claim evolution is not a religion?
Yes, but you're getting off track. We were discussing cosmology (e.g., origin of the universe), not evolution. Evolution would still be a science whether the universe was made by the Big Bang, by God, or by the pink unicorns.
Evolution depends as little on where matter "originally" came from as does meteorology, rocket science, or auto repair.
That reminds of the time back in college (1980-ish) when I was walking through the lobby of the dorm and noticed that on the dorm TV, Phil Donahue (on his original TV show) had as his guest the head of FermiLab.
I kid you not.
I immediately dropped all my other plans and grabbed a seat.
The spectacle of Phil trying to ask intelligent questions about the sort of physics research that goes on at a world-class particle accelerator was entertaining enough. But then it came time for the audience-participation segment of the show, and the middle-aged housewives in the audience started groping for what they hoped were intelligent questions. "So, um, when you finally count all these quark-thingies, um, then what?"
The capper was the "phone calls from the TV audience". To this day I still chuckle at the memory of the conspiracy-theory lady who accused FermiLab of keeping a herd of buffalo on the grounds of their facility "because everyone knows that buffalo are very sensitive to radiation".
The head of the lab just patiently replied, "no, we have a lot of open land we're not using for anything else, and we just like buffalo."
(Sort of reminds me of some of the conversations on this thread.)
You're out of your class here. Watch Beavus and learn.
But he's *right*. You can't dismiss him just because he doesn't use sesquipedalian words or sentences with twelve clauses.
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