Posted on 02/26/2005 4:45:01 PM PST by DannyTN
Does that also eliminate intergalactic astronomy as a science?
The scientific validation of evolution is as strong as in any other field of science. Evolution has been observed, and 'objectively' considered. The observation of evolution far preceded the development of the theory.
"When looked at objectively, the Cambrian explosion is strong evidence of Creation not evolution. "
Only if it took your god 50 - 100 million years to create. There is also growing indications that not only was the 'explosion' not as explosive as first thought, the complexity of organisms was already on the rise before the Cambrian explosion.
"While the timing of the evolution of the developmental systems of living metazoan body plans is still uncertain, the distribution of Hox and other developmental control genes among metazoans indicates that an extensive patterning system was in place prior to the Cambrian."
" Valentine, W., Jablonski, D., and Erwin, D.H. 1999. Fossils, molecules and embryos: new perspectives on the Cambrian explosion. Development 126: 851-859"
"The lack of transition fossils is strong evidence of Creation not evolution. Lining up Species going extinct and genetic disease are consistent with a cursed earth. "
Why would this be the case? Did God create the transitionals that we do have? Your single extinction event (Flood) would have occurred within a very short time. We have extinctions happening over everything from short to relatively long times in numerous major and minor extinction events.
"The idea that human's with tool making ability were around for 2,000,000 years or 200,000 years and didn't progress and didn't leave hardly any trace is simply not credible."
You mean aside from the fact that hunter-gatherer groups cannot support large community sizes so populations were extremely small and remote. They were also frequently, by necessity, nomadic. The smaller the population the less likely fossils are to be found. That said, we do have a growth in evidence density matching population growth as predicted.
"The scientific evidence of an old earth and universe is stronger, however: "
"We have identified problems with every dating technique. And they all rely on starting assumptions that we have no way at present to verify. Except that the starting assumption for K-Ar dating was recently proved false." Do you have cites for this? Dating methods have always had specific conditions taken into account during analysis. Even with errors, the dating methods used still give dates far older than could possibly be, given the literal reading of the Bible.
Almost all dating methods are based upon previous dating methods which have been verified through such things as tree rings and varves.
" No telling what impact that would have on current theories, if there was a way to go back and rethink everything without relying on K-Ar dates. "
Very little, there are already different methods in use.
"There's a proof out there that the lead used to date the meteorites and thus the solar system could not have come from decayed Uranium in the meteorite itself. "
Cites? See:
http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CD/CD013.html
"But the meteorites continued to be quoted as proof of the age of the earth. "
Among other methods, which generally agree.
"Speed of Light is admittedly a problem for the age of the universe. But that doesn't mean there aren't alternative explanations. Including: Changes in the speed of light, or temporal differences affecting the creation week, propigation rates through space, and/or the distinct possibility that there were no stars on the third day and that God changed the past on the fourth day in order for starlight to arrive on time. "
You are truly reaching.
I had a cat like that once. Ate something poisonous, died, wasw stiff as a board, walking around a few hours later, lived several more years. Whoever decided cats had nine lives knew my cat.
They work. Who says they are backwards? See what an expert says....
Is our inverted Retina really a bad design?
"Why did He design men with nipples?
My guess is for aesthetic appeal and for pleasure. Maybe you think men would look better without nipples? God apparently didn't think so. I kind of like it when a woman kisses my breasts or allows her hair to drag across it. Our nipples get a little hard too.
"Why did he design humans with the appendix?
The appendix dispenses fluid that reduces the chance of colon cancer. Function of the Appendix
"Why do apes lack the ability to make vitamin C, when "lower" lifeforms have it? "
I don't know. But God didn't design men to be superior to every creature in every way. We can't run faster than a cheatah or fly like an eagle, or see distances like a hawk or out of both sides of our head like a lizard. But we are superior enough that we easily dominate.
Perhaps apes, men and groundhogs all lost the ability to sythesize Vitamin C through random mutation and devolution.
It doesn't matter what you think men or animals ought to be designed with. We are designed the way God intended for us to be designed, except that man sinned and was cursed along with the earth as a result.
Saying God designed us is a real insult to God.
Show us a working version of your design and we'll see.
Species going extinct was not consistent with religion 300 years ago, when extinction was first proposed. Your assumption the you can discernt he clear and unambiguous intention of the Bible is just pride on your part. Other people in other times have made different interpretations.
More importantly, the record is not just of extinction, but of new creatures coming into being in succession. This was admitted by Christian geologists a hundred years before Darwin.
Darwinian evolution does not rule out a designer, but it does attempt to explain descent and variation as a natural process. That of course, does not rule out the possibility that at some levelthe process is not designed.
All of these issues were hashed out in the 19th century. Nothing in the current ID argument is at all new.
Is a prion alive?
Is a virus alive?
Comparing the two ends of the continuum is not as important as determining the 'aliveness' of those organisms that are on the cusp or 'decision point' of the gray area when considering abiogenesis.
Unless you are imbuing everything alive with a consciousness or 'will' the 'will to live' is simply a result of the organism's reproduction. One of the standard requirements of living organisms is self replication whether it be by accident or intension. We tend to mistake this for a desire to live, yet in many organisms the obvious pressing need is the reproduction, not the struggle to continue existence. Even when an organism consumes their offspring in times of threat, this enables them to produce offspring at a later and more favourable time.
Some organisms do not have a 'need' to replicate but simply 'do' replicate. It would be very difficult to assign any meaning, let alone the will to live to that organism. This would be the case for both viruses and prions.
The assignation of will to all things alive is simply our bias as thinking conscious beings, not an inherent function within the organism. It certainly can not be used to define an organism's or object's state.
BTW why does something have to be 'in nature' to be considered alive?
"that the need for protection of the retina against the injurious effects of light, particularly with the shorter wavelengths, and of the heat generated by focused light necessitates the inverted configuration of the retina in creatures possessing it."
The above is from the nonsense at AIG you pointed me to.
Why don't animals that have their eye designed correctly not need this protection?
You don't need to answer this question. It is rhetorical.
It shows the complete bankruptcy of thought and intellectual honesty among the "scientists" in the scam organizations that make millions from promoting sillyscience.
Then why did he present all the animals to Adam in the 'hope' that Adam would find a helpmate?
So, God in all his power and wisdom couldn't figure out how to make the retina self-protective against UV light and so had to figure out a convoluted design work-around? hmmm.
The "will to live" permeates and transcends - it behaves like a field (all points in space/time). Gravity and electromagnetism are examples of fields.
Each cell in your body is urged to life (whether push or pull we don't yet know). The cells work together in functional machinery which integrates with different cells and machinery - all struggling to survive. And the whole organism itself struggles to survive.
And not the organism alone, but collectives of organisms - like bees and ants. This hierarchy continues all the way to the biosphere involving plantlife in this march towards life.
I'm fascinated that you and some others here are not interested in why this is so? Physical entropy and the arrow of time it suggests - both point to least action, equilibrium, laziness. Yet life organizes, integrates, cooperates in a struggle to survive.
That a strong artificial intelligent designer can mimic properties of life is not interesting to me because the designer did not originate the concept of life but himself is alive in nature and thus has a concept to mimic.
I find myself addressing the same kind of issues on two different threads. Would you care to join us over on the Can the Monist View Account for "What is Life"? thread?
Absolutely false. The "push for survival" belongs to the species and on the lower level, with the individual's desire for survival since it manifests the species survival.
Our cells die and are replaced all the time. Cells are sacrificed to ensure survival of the person.
Perhaps the most telling example is of the lizard that will gladly sacrifice his tail to the predator.
I subscribed for a couple of years. I started reading it decades ago when it was the Worm Runner's Digest. Unfortunately the quality of writing seldom matches the level where actual humor kicks in. Not every can be Douglas Adams or Gary Larson.
If the will to live were mental, seated in the brain, then upon brain death a respirator would not work. IOW, it is not the instructions from the brain which cause all the molecular machinery to strive.
Indeed, the will to live is not coming from anywhere in the body though it is manifest throughout the body.
As an example, we can see the will to live expressed at the most elementary levels where there is no brain at all: cell intelligence and amoeba
Since you seem to believe that this phenomenon of a "will to live" is entirely at the organism level - I solicit your explanation of all of this - especially the linked articles. But I request that you repond on the Monist thread so that it will be more widely read.
Because prions are ultra-dangerous, perhaps they are not well studied.
Speaking of things not well studied, has anyone considered the irreducible complexity-ish-ness of the lymphatic system?
I think some of them might be looking at it as half-a-loaf is better than none. I think the point is that extreme, materialistic, don't-even-consider-divine-intervention evolution is every bit a matter of faith as YEC.
And there is nothing wrong with faith, btw, just so long as it's recognized as such.
I mean, this article and ID in general fail to meet the standard of predictive utility needed to be good science, but IDers in general hardly provide any argument against the basic premises of evolution.
Well, consider the basic premises of evolution -- all bio-diversity can be explained via natural selection and random genetic change, and that there is a common ancestor. Suppose, as Meyer claims, these things are not true? Then Meyer performs as service and advances science and knowledge.
The transitionals that we have were either variation within existing species, or unique species that God created that went extinct.
Keep in mind how much variation has occurred in man since the flood. There would have been variation before the flood, and some of those wouldn't have necessarily looked identical to any of the current day races.
"Your single extinction event (Flood) would have occurred within a very short time. We have extinctions happening over everything from short to relatively long times in numerous major and minor extinction events."
Again, it depends on what timeframe you assign to the fossil record, and the way you interpret the record, but yes extinctions could have occurred when God first cursed the earty, anytime in the 1500-2000 years up to the flood, as a direct result of the flood, shortly after the flood, or in the estimated 4000-4500 years since the flood. (As a direct result of the flood, depends on whether you interpret "all animals" to mean representatives of "all animals that lived on the earth at the time" or "all animals that were saved".)
Some extinctions like the Coalanthe and ratfish, weren't extinctions at all. They just looked like it from the fossil record.
"dating methods which have been verified through such things as tree rings and varves."
I believe the oldest tree ring series is thought to go back 16,000 years but is controversial because the ring patterns are often duplicated, significant variations occur between trees for the same periods and thus the reconstruction of them in a series is somewhat dubious.
Not in hope, but to demonstrate that none were suitable and for naming.
Can you give me a single finding in science that supports divine intervention? Can you give any reason at all why an interprise based on the quest for natural explanations could benefit from starting with the assumption of divine intervention?
Suppose a friend or relative is murdered and the police tell you that they will procede with the scientific investigation just as soon as they rule out the possibility of divine intervention.
You are welcome to substitute your own design for your eyes at any time.
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