***You can’t test an orogeny (mountain building event) either, yet through the powers of observation and rational deduction about our tiny little time snapshot of the end result of an extremely slow process, the mechanisms of plate tectonics, pluton emplacement, ore body formation etc are well understood and accepted concepts.***
Ok SpaceBar.... here’s one for you:
The Bull Giraffe goes, on average, about 18’ tall. His neck, again on average, is about 6’ long. In order to pump blood against gravity up 6’ of neck to his brain requires a heart like a jackhammer.
So now this giraffe has got his heart pounding like a jackhammer and decides to bend down and get a drink. With the pump now going with gravity instead of against it, he has just blown his brains out.....but....in his arteries are little valves that shut down the flow of blood as he is bending over. The last squirt of blood, then shoots into a sponge-like organism that just happens to reside underneath the giraffe’s brain and absorbs the blood.
This, of course is extremely fortunate for the giraffe. As he’s drinking, he senses a predator and stands up quickly to run away. He then, from standing too quickly and having no blood flowing in his brain, passes out and gets eaten by the predator, only this doesn’t happen because the sponge has been circulating the blood to the brain the whole time.
So, as he stands up, the valves reopen to resume the blood flow and the giraffe can flee the predator.
Michael Behe has referred to this in his book “Darwin’s Black Box” as irreducible complexity. In order for this morphology to work, all of the pieces have to be present at the same time.
The neck without the heart....dead.
The heart without the neck....dead.
The neck without the valves....dead.
All of the above without the sponge....dead.
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
4. A sponge under his brain
all be present at the same time or he’s dead meat. Or to put it another way, extinct.
I said all that to say this: Science can observe all of this and realize that there is no way that evolution could randomly put all of these pieces together at the same time in the same animal. But they don’t. Because they don’t want to.
Because the theory of evolution is a philosophy that they are comfortable with an they don’t want to consider a creator to whom they would be accountable. So they refuse to consider anything but natural/material reasons.
If your keys are in the kitchen and you refuse to look there you are never going to find them.
Blessings to you, SpaceBar
I’m pretty sure giraffes don’t have valves in their arteries, however the main artery in the neck is very elastic so it can handle the high pressure when the neck is lowered. (Valves in veins are common. We humans have them.)
Large muscular hearts are also common.
The “sponge” is called a rete mirabile, and is common in the necks of animals.
All in all, the features of the giraffe’s circulation could have evolved gradually as the neck lengthened.
I’ve been away from the Creation vs. Evolution debate for quite some time and after many years and hundreds of hours spent reading, watching, learning and simply observing each side of the debates themselves, I have come to certain conclusions.
Science over the years, has moved from the “Hard sciences” with its rules and structure to a “Soft science” built more and more on “inference”.
The Darwinian evolutionary theory, which was around long before Darwin, was popularized because of his formula that fell into the hard sciences. The standard rules of being “observable, falsifiable and repeatable”.
Darwin convinced many people and many more ran with his theory. Over time however, the theory, if you can even call it as such, has had its adherents blend what is or was accepted as hard science with the soft science of inference.
What we have today is a belief system among the players where each presupposes the basis of their knowledge.
From my observations I actually see substantially more “Hard Science” coming from the creationist camp than from the evolutionists.
There certainly was a time when the Creationist’s rebuttal was “Because the Bible says so”. That has changed.
On the other side, the evolutionist “Can’t” use their own methodologies to respond without invoking a claim that is “unprovable”.
They tell us that “this is how Science works”. We don’t know but we will find out and trust our conclusions in the meantime.
I love the debate, but I’m not sure a real conclusion would make any difference when you consider how willfully ignorant our society has become.
As a thought experiment or something you may want to try the next time you want to provoke someone at the bar.
Ask them, “What would you do?, if it were discovered beyond ALL DOUBT !!!, broadcast of every TV channel that the earth is no more than 10,000 years old?”.
I’ve done this on a number of occasions and have found that most people don’t want to even consider the implications.
IMHO, this is where the problem lies.