Posted on 09/25/2009 8:34:35 AM PDT by GodGunsGuts
Sept 24, 2009 — The evolutionary story of human origins is often told like a cultural myth that is intuitively obvious. Humans emerged in Africa after their ancestors came down from the trees and walked upright. They began to hunt with stone tools and used fire. They migrated north out of Africa and populated Europe, overtaking the Neanderthals who lacked the brain power and culture of their more evolved cousins. How much of this story is based on actual evidence? How much is interpolation of what “must” have happened based on an evolutionary view of natural history?
As part of its celebration of the Darwin Bicentennial, PNAS invited a special series of papers on human evolution, called Out of Africa: Modern Human Origins. A careful reading of these papers reveals more gap than knowledge, more bluffing than evidence...
(Excerpt) Read more at creationsafaris.com ...
Just like Satan hid dinosaur bones, made the rocks and starlight look old, and created DNA as a means of testing our faith?
Let me guess, you'll use it as an example of how evolutionary scientists extract fanciful ideas from almost no evidence.
However, you will of course ignore that it was evolutionists who in doing further work discovered it to be a mistake. Quite the opposite of Nebraska Man showing evolutionary theory a failure, it is a testament to the willingness of evolutionists to further research any claims and to correct themselves in the face of the evidence.
That's just how science works. People make claims, those claims are challenged, and they have to stand or fall based on the evidence. And all that happens without creationist input.
I used to think dinosaur bones proved that there is no God. That's what evolution taught me as I learned from the public churches known as public schools.
No, the real issue is that your 'more detailed process involving the physics God gave us the intellect to observe and understand' is a logical fallacy. First of all, naturalism is assumed and then the fallacy of affirming the consequent is invoked to 'support' evolution from observations. This eliminates all objectivity and empiricism from the 'process'. It's a philosophical choice.
Never mind that you don't understand that the information documented in a living organism is independent of the 'physics God gave us'. You know, like information recorded as ink on paper is independent of the 'physics God gave us'. Biological information is of the same quality.
"The 64 thousand dollar question is whether the "abracadabra process" is really a the more scientific process accelerated to a rate that you are not able to parse and comprehend. In that case we are both right."
Nope. The 'scientific process' is a logical fallacy by definition. It assumes naturalism and then defines all observation in terms of naturalism, this is a logical fallacy.
You must have gone to a very strange school, because in my years of school, university and graduate school, I was never once taught that dinosaurs proved that there is no God. I think you're playing with strawmen.
Well, I gotta give you credit. Unlike the others, while you have no use for science you at least have the stones to admit it. Other luddites like GGG dishonestly pretend to support "true" science, though nothing could be further from the truth.
The process is the process. Nothing in evolutionary theory speaks about who or what created the process, or if it needed to be created at all. The first life came from somewhere -- it could have formed through naturalistic mechanisms, it could have been zapped into existence ex-nihilo by a deity -- evolution doesn't try to tell us what happened.
Faith and reason are in harmony when God is understood as truth, beauty, goodness and universal reason, which are there for all human beings to grasp. Reason and Original Sin (the knowledge of the difference between good and evil) are both blessings and curses created by God and bestowed upon man. Both were given for a purpose. To fail acknowledge and exercise both is a rejection of God.
In an interview that was published in 1997, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict XVI) stated: Part of faith is also the patience of time. The theme you have just mentioned - Darwin, creation, the theory of evolution - is the subject of a dialog that is not yet finished and, within our present means, is probably also impossible to settle at the moment. Not that the problem of the six days is a particularly urgent issue between faith and modern scientific research into the origin of the world. For it is obvious even in the Bible that this is a theological framework and is not intended simply to recount the history of creation. In the Old Testament itself there are other accounts of creation. In the Book of Job and in the Wisdom literature we have creation narratives that make it clear that even then believers themselves did not think that the creation account was, so to speak, a photographic depiction of the process of creation. It only seeks to convey a glimpse of the essential truth, namely, that the world comes from the power of God and is his creation. How the process actually occurred is a wholly different question, which even the Bible itself leaves wide open. Conversely, I think that in great measure the theory of evolution has not gotten beyond hypotheses and is often mixed with almost mythical philosophies that have yet to be critically discussed.
I learned about Mendel and heredity in grammar school, in fact, my assertions are based on these very laws of inheritance, as well as the common sense laws of breeding that evolutionists like to ignore. The fact remains that, if genetic mutations are the cause of genetic changes that alter the genome to the point where it could be called a truly new species (and not just a new breed), that genome would be incompatible for breeding purposes with the parent organism. For sexually reproducing animals, this requires the exact same random mutations to accumulate in reproductive cells that would lead to the production of both a male and female of the “new” species. Otherwise, the first specimen of the “new” species would find themselves both unable to breed with their parent species, and unable to find a breeding partner of their “new” species, since none would exist.
“The process is the process. Nothing in evolutionary theory speaks about who or what created the process”
It doesn’t need to be stated in evolutionary theory. Since evolutionary theory is by definition a theory of naturalistic science, it implicitly does not allow the possibility of any supernatural involvement.
Conflating the methodological naturalism of the scientific method with the philosophical naturalism of atheism is a common tactic, but it only works as long as people don’t know they aren’t the same thing.
Are you implying that cross species reproduction is always impossible?
Global warming claims can not be challenged, that is politically incorrect for some groups. Science is too political and not allowed to take its proper course. Too bad science is not allowed to work properly.
The same "scientists" that bring us Global Warming doom theories and Second Hand Smoke doom theories are the same idiots who profess that Intelligent Design is NOT SCIENCE!
Well if the Global Warming hysteria and Second Hand Smoke hysteria is based on "Science", then maybe Intelligent design proponents should be glad that these idiots are not putting their theories in the same category as the frauds that the Global Warming quacks are perpetuating.
I don't see you guys complaining that Global Warming theories and second hand smoke theories are NOT SCIENCE. Those guys all get published in peer review articles and they get praised by evolutionists and other secular scientists for the BS that they publish, yet they scoff at anyone who suggests that life forms on this planet cannot be explained based on current natural laws and that they may therefore be the result of some supernatural intervention [which is kind of an obvious conclusion].
No, but the examples of cross-species breeding that are observed imply a misclassification of the two specimens. If they can breed, then clearly they are not as divergent as the current classification implies. I believe the taxonomic order is a mess that should be reorganized firstly on the basic principle that organisms which can breed are obviously members of the same species, even if they have become drastically different through the forces of selection. If two organisms cannot breed, it is not necessarily evidence they are not members of the same species, since we have examples of animals which are definitely bred from the same stock, and have not “evolved” into a radically different organism, but have become divergent enough not to be able to produce offspring any longer.
Do you think anyone will notice that the scientists who don't believe in the Global Warming and Second Hand Smoke "doom theories" got left out of that assesment?
WTF??? You can't support that statement. Intelligent Design (i.e.; Theistic Evolution) is widely supported in the scientific community. I even know some in the scientific and academic community who support strict environmental policy because of the biblical mandates to be good stewards of the earth.
Unfortunately, I can't give you any credit for using the fallacy of begging the question as argument.
Perhaps grammar school was too early, because your previous statements evidences lack of understanding of these principles:
"The only possible way the evolutionists can overcome this obstacle, that I can fathom, is if by some miraculous confluence, all of the exact same genetic mutations were passed down to at least one male and one female offspring"
A single mutation (in either male or female) may be passed to the offspring, and then become widespread in the population, if it promotes survival and further breeding.
How does that solve your problem of using logical fallacy as argument in favor of evolution?
Are you not allowed to admit that logical fallacy is the basis for evolution if the Pope doesn't?
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