"...Here’s my question....do you think all of those pieces evolved at the exact same time, defying all laws of probability and common logic....or is it more likely that the giraffe was designed by a Supernatural Creator."
I think I've explained this before. Most Christian churches teach something called "theistic evolutionism," which basically says, "evolution is God's plan."
Of course, I can't speak for all those churches, so what I'm saying here is me talking, not them. But I suspect they would generally agree.
"Theistic evolutionism" rejects the idea that you can find the Hand of God in any particular natural process, to the exclusion of others, but rather insists that God's handiwork can be seen in ALL of nature, by ANYONE willing to look for it.
"Theistic evolution" says the Universe is God's creation, it's fate is God's plan, and it's history is the history of God's work to make it so. At least, that's my humble interpretation, and we can let a real theologian explain where I got it wrong. ;-)
Now, as for your delightful giraffes, remember, according to science, giraffes began to evolve around 50 million years ago, starting as a deer-like creature, so we are talking about tens of millions of generations of proto-giraffes, each slightly different from the one before.
So, in answer to your question, did these features all evolve at the same time? Now of course not, why would you imagine they did?
****I think I’ve explained this before. Most Christian churches teach something called “theistic evolutionism,” which basically says, “evolution is God’s plan.”****
I really don’t care what “most Christian churches” teach. A lot of denominations have strayed from the truth of scripture. If they are saying, as you infer, that “evolution is God’s plan” then they are claiming to know the mind of God.
Scripture tells us how God created. I believe in the inerrancy of Scripture. I don’t come at that blindly, I come at that by studying the historical accuracy (verified by archaeology) and the prophetic accuracy (verified by history) of the Bible.
Any Christian denomination that professes theistic evolution is aberrant.
I hit your link to Wikipedia and looked at their “Giraffes” page. There is a problem with it. The section marked “Taxonomy and Evolution” didn’t start out with the words “Once Upon a Time”.
****Now, as for your delightful giraffes, remember, according to science, giraffes began to evolve around 50 million years ago, starting as a deer-like creature, so we are talking about tens of millions of generations of proto-giraffes, each slightly different from the one before.****
A few questions on the above. Was there anybody around 50 million years ago to observe the original “deer-like” creature evolving into the next “proto-giraffe”? Did they record it somewhere in antiquity so we can access it?
Look, BroJoe.....
Paleontologists can make bones sing any song they want. There is no way of knowing any of that, other than conjecture based on a predetermined evolutionary paradigm.
If we didn’t have rats, squirrels and gophers around today but we had some fossils any paleontologist worth his salt could make the argument that it was an evolutionary series.
Spare your breath on the geological column. They put together evolutionary series all the time that violate the column. One example is the horse.
This is from an article written by Jonathan Sarfati who holds a PhD in Physical Chemistry:
As the biologist Heribert-Nilsson said, ‘The family tree of the horse is beautiful and continuous only in the textbooks,’ and the famous paleontologist Niles Eldredge called the textbook picture ‘lamentable’ and ‘a classical case of paleontologic museology.’ As shown in a detailed thesis by Walter Barnhart, the horse ‘series’ is an interpretation of the data. He documents how different pictures of horse evolution were drawn by different evolutionists from the same data, as the concept of evolution itself ‘evolved.’
This especially applies to reconstructing the animals from fossil skeletons, which are usually very incomplete. The evolutionist Gerald Kerkut wrote:
‘It takes a great deal of reading to find out for any particular genus just how complete the various parts of the body are and how much in the illustrated figures is due to clever reconstruction. The early papers were always careful to indicate by dotted lines or lack of shading the precise limits of the reconstructions, but later authors are not so careful.’
Informed evolutionists now realize that the picture, even in their own framework, is not a straight line at all. While they still believe in horse evolution, the modern view of the horse fossil record is much more jumpy and ‘bushy.’
Yet horse evolution is a staple in our textbooks.....why?
****So, in answer to your question, did these features all evolve at the same time? Now of course not, why would you imagine they did?****
BECAUSE THEY WOULD HAVE TO!!!!
Please put aside your “I believe everything science tells me” hat for a minute and wear the one that says “logic” on it. The point of my description of the giraffe is that there are four parts of the giraffe’s morphology that would have had to evolve at the exact same time. I’ll give you a trillion years if you want them, it doesn’t matter.
Here’s a cut and paste of part of what I wrote:
In other words, the morphology of the giraffe requires that:
1. A jackhammer heart
2. A 6 foot long neck
3. Valves in the arteries that close when he’s bending (except the last one) and open when he’s standing.
4. A sponge under his brain
all be present at the same time or he’s dead meat.
It logically follows that these pieces all have to be present at the same time....you can not slowly evolve one, then the other, then a few million years later another. If they are not all present at the same time the species goes extinct.
Logic would dictate that the Giraffe was created. That’s not to say that there aren’t some variations within the species....there most certainly are. It is to say that there is no way it could have evolved. The odds against a random process producing all four of those elements by happenstance and all at the same time defies logic.
There are many examples of species that couldn’t have evolved....mussels, woodpeckers....a personal favorite of mine is the bombardier beetle who mixes chemicals in a combustion tube, causing them to violently react and explode boiling hot gas through a mini-”cannon” that he can aim into the face of a predator.
How many chemicals do you figure he went through (blowing himself up each time.....oh wait a minute, that would make him extinct) before he found the right chemicals? And how did he get the mechanism to manufacture those chemicals? And how did he keep the chemicals separate so they wouldn’t blow up before they got into the combustion chamber? And how was that combustion chamber able to withstand the heat of the chemical compound? And once they were in there, what good did they do him without the “mini-cannon”? And what good was the mini-cannon if he could not aim it? And here’s a great philosophical question....how did he even know he could do that once all the pieces were in place?
Man....what a can of worms. You’d have to have great faith to believe that all came together by random process and that the species didn’t kill itself off.