Posted on 04/05/2005 7:42:56 AM PDT by bedolido
Sometimes it takes a two-by-four. And often even that doesn't work.
But what is Smokey the Bear's MIDDLE name??
By GOD; that SETTLES it then!!
I'll not be holdin' me breath until that time though.....
I'm not "avoiding" them -- it's just that you're constructing a strawman, and I saw no point in addressing it. I see that it's necessary to provide further detail on the matter. The strawman is in the way you define the motivation and goals of the putative designer. In essence, you're saying that the only possible design agent is an omniscient designer who would never design anything that would go extinct.
However, we know from our own experience that we often design things to serve some singular purpose, and we forget about the thing once we no longer have a use for it, and thus we know that there is no strict requirement for a designer to be either omniscient, nor for him to "design for forever."
In terms of the sabertooth cats themselves, the achievements of the modern biotech industry -- not to mention the practice of selectively breeding animals to achieve certain desirable traits -- seem to indicate that there is no intrinsic barrier to an intelligent breeder deciding to create a breed of large cat with long teeth. I'm not saying that this did occur, but there is no technical reason why it could not have happened, either. Indeed, humans have frequently done very similar things.
The most recent theory I've seen for the extinction of the Woolly Mammoth is that they were done in by a combination of human predation and disease. The extinction of the saber-toothed cats would likely have followed as a consequence of the loss of their primary food source -- but that has nothing to do with how they got their long teeth in the first place.
The Dawkins program to produce the string "Methinks it is like a weasel" involves three processes: 1. Random variation -- on each "generation", 1/8th of the character strings in the "population" (size selected by user) have one of their text characters completely randomized to some other character. 2. Selection -- the character string which has the most "correct" characters (or if more than one such string exists, the most recent such) is flagged, and a) will be "bred", and b) won't itself be mutated or replaced by one of its own "offspring". 3. Reproduction -- the current "most fit" character string undergoes "sexual reproduction' with randomly chosen other strings, and the resulting offspring replace the "mates". (This is actually more akin to biological lateral gene transfer.) So all three of the processes necessary for evolution to take place are in the Dawkins program. And, as predicted by "evolutionists", the results are swift and sure -- the mutating, reproducing, subject-to-selection population very quickly (within seconds) produces a Shakespeare text string which the creationist "pure random" methods would not have produced before the Earth permanently froze over. |
Personally, I like the monkeys chances for typing "To be or not to be, that is the question."
No guts, no glory, so please try.
This begs the question of whether "naturalistic explanations" are the proper goal of science. Perfectly religious folk up until the 20th century had a perfectly good time doing science, while believing in a creator. "Naturalism" has not always been the underlying presupposition of science, and science did quite well.
Horseshoe crab placemarker.
I was an atheist in my youth and later gravitated to the God started it and billions of years later, voila.
However, as a born-again Christian, I began to realize that the foundations of most Christian doctrines (sin, death, disease, sacrifice, and so on) are based upon the first eleven chapters of Genesis.
For Christians who believe that Adam sinned and brought sin and corruption into the world, the time before Adam could not have been filled with death, destruction, disease, and violence. If Adam was the result of millions of years of death, disease, and evolution, the whole concept of the FALL makes no sense at all. Our faith would be based upon an illogical, nonsensical framework. Whence cometh sin?
Just something for Christians to consider.
And that's a problem for whom?
"Perfectly religious folk up until the 20th century had a perfectly good time doing science, while believing in a creator."
Yes, it seems that the search for the truth can take place in different ways. If you understand your bias then you may find the truth but if you discard answers because of where they lead you will have problems.
"Darwinists are adopting their own "blind faith approach" to any questions about evolution. "
Rephrased: Darwinists AND Creationists are adopting their own "blind faith approach" to any questions about evolution.
There is no reason to reject the notion that evolution is a mechanism of God's creation.
I have read a piece that asks, "How could a wood-pecker mutate and survive each mutation?" The point being that having a long skinny tonge for getting insects out of small beak pierced holes in trees is worthless unless you have 100 other adaptations simultaneously that make the tonge an asset to getting food rather than a "bottle-neck".
Yeah, just-so stories are nice. Take your choice, ground - up, tree - down, convergent evolution, divergent evolution, etc. Whatever you need it's there in the magic hat.
"Whatever you need it's there in the magic hat."
I think that magic is the key. The random chance is really the magic in the equation - call it chance -- but it is magic.
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