Posted on 04/12/2016 7:52:06 AM PDT by fishtank
Yet another old-earther accuses a creationist of believing in evolution
by Nick Sabato
Published: 12 April 2016 (GMT+10)
On a 28 March 2016 blog post, Professor Ken Keathley made the allegation that Ken Ham now embraces evolution. He bases this unfounded assertion on a recent article where Ham discusses how the diversity of species present today can be traced back to their respective “kinds” represented on the Ark. For Keathley, it is “big news” that a prominent creationist “has embraced macro-evolution.” However, as will be seen, creationists in general embraced speciation for decades; it is not just a property of evolutionists.
First, the article in question has done no such thing, and secondly, variation within a kind is not “big news”, nor is it “macro-evolution”.
The same day that this fallacious post appeared, CMI’s Calvin Smith (and others) rebutted Keathley’s assertions in the comments section and pointed out his equivocation of speciation and evolution. And they further pointed out that his ‘micro-macro’ distinction is an example of ‘Arguments we think creationists should not use’, because the issue is not size of change but direction (informationally uphill or downhill).
(Excerpt) Read more at creation.com ...
Oh, but it does indeed contradict the TOE.. As Peter describes there are three different heaven\earth ages... Man was not in a flesh body during the first heaven/earth age.. The same soul/spirit intellect... That first heaven/earth was destroyed...Genesis 1:2. Along with the d I n o s ...and the rest of flesh... Jeremiah said nothing survived in the flesh. Nothing left to begin that evolutionary trail.
I don't mean this as an insult, but our interpretation of the facts are vastly different.
You wrote... "You're making a false straw-man argument, you misrepresent what evolution theory actually says."
I didn't say a word about what "evolution theory says". I shared my opinion about what I believe happened. I don't think genes were ever modified to lead one species into being a separate species. That's all I said. So no straw man at all.
You went on to write... "In fact, before they were birds, their ancestors were a form of reptile, and the transition to birds took many millions of years -- that's what the fossil record confirms."
I look at the fossil record and without your pre-belief in the TOE, I see a very different meaning.
In short, as I said when you first posted to me, I have a vastly different view of the meaning and interpretation of facts than you accept. Best.
"Now, you're just blathering nonsense", to quote fellow Freeper. The Bible is saying that the passage of time has no bearing on God, as He alone is immortal. Read all of Psalm 90, and keep it in context. The writer is referring to the brevity of our lives, and that God sees our lives from beginning to end, generation to generation. Peter is referring to the judgement to come, where the earth will be destroyed by fire, just as it once was by a global catastrophic flood, which I imagine you explain away as well. Incidentally, some take the 'day is a thousand years', and use the 6 days of creation to refer to the 6000 years of the time for Satan and men to rule the earth, until The Day is upon us.
You are isogetically reading into Genesis 1 the day-age nonsense, for it plainly states "evening and morning were the first day", and repeats that formula 5 more times. Just because your limited scientific (so called) understanding requires billions of years for evolution and light travel, does not mean that God did. He could create everything instantaneously, but he took 6 of our earth days to accomplish it.
So, if you dismiss the days as literal, then you must also dismiss the sequence, lest you have plants surviving thousands or millions of years with no sun or insects.
Believe what you want, but be careful about twisting scripture to meet your predetermined notions.
Matthew 18:6 If anyone causes one of these little ones--those who believe in me--to stumble, it would be better for them to have a large millstone hung around their neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea.
"Basic experiments" is quite a stretch. These experiments are being conducted by highly trained specialists exerting careful planning, design and combination under ideal controlled laboratory conditions. This proves the exact opposite of abiogenesis, and rather points to an intelligence that formed life, can't you see?
Paul may well have had gnosticism in mind, but the warning is the same for your mud to man evolutionary assertions. When you change the plain meaning of scripture to comply with your predetermined notions, you are doing exactly what Paul warned against!
Here are Paul's words from the NIV, if you prefer, with a little more context: "Turn away from godless chatter and the opposing ideas of what is falsely called knowledge, which some have professed and in so doing have departed from the faith." 1 Tim 6:20-21.
I agree with you. That’s not my quote.
Oops! Was intended for BroJoeK. My apologies.
Because I have a few hours of free time today, and this is an interesting subject.
Was hoping to save time by including everyone in one post.
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Well, I personally don’t know of anything interesting enough to make a comment of that size, and definitely not trying to answer everyone in the thread.
What’s interesting to me is how intensely interesting it is to you. I’m trying to understand that intensity and what drives it.
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If it were just a trivial matter, then nobody would bother posting repeatedly about it, and yet they do.
Why? Obviously because they think it’s very important.
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That’s not what I asked, BroJoeK. I asked, if they were wrong, what harm would that do?
Let’s say for some reason you’re not here to tell them how wrong they are.
What harm would come from that?
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My goal is simply to defend the Christianity and modern science I began learning as a child.
I don’t consider them at war against each other, and don’t like seeing either distorted.
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Is this goal of yours achievable? If so, is using an abrasive tone (i.e., calling any doubt of it “rubbish and nonsense, blathering, denier”) an effective way of doing so?
As an aside, do you defend Christianity at atheistic evolution blogs and message boards like you defend your views of science here? If not, why not? Is that not part of your stated goal?
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How about you?
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We’ve strayed far from the original topic of the Flood, but in that context I’ve stated my position upthread. Let me repeat it for you so you don’t have to scroll up and search a bunch:
“No worries, it wasn’t a “reliance”, it was something I am keenly interested in, that being how do people reconcile seemingly impossible positions.
The supposedly impossible position in this case was reconciliation of the Flood story with the current scientific theories of geology.
I’m agnostic to this particular subject; it doesn’t really matter to me whether or not the current scientific theories are correct or the Flood story is 100% literally accurate. I have to work, pay bills, love my family, and do what my God tells me is right. What Noah did or what some ape did thousands or millions of years ago doesn’t affect me except by example.”
“My answer? It doesn’t directly affect me in my day-to-day life exactly what Adam did, or Cain did, or Abel did. The only thing I can do is try to learn lessons about how to conduct myself from such stories. I’m not always successful, but neither am I perfect, so it is what it is.”
Yeah jimmy, the Miller-Urey experiment is the go-to icon for OOL, and it turned out to be flawed. It took them 30 or so years to realize that they had not simulated the Earth’s primordial atmosphere properly.
Why it took them that long, who knows. Maybe they didn’t look at what the primordial atmosphere was like until the 1980s. Maybe they knew before then, but didn’t bother revising the OOL experiment for some reason. Meh.
Here’s a source about the non-viability of the “primordial soup” theory, of which the Miller-Urey experiment is the linchpin:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=123447937
I am familiar with Genesis 1:2, but the rest of your argument here is new to me. Can you cite references for any of it?
RoadGumby: “Wolves, dogs, coyote, are Canines “dogs”. Breed them into FISH. Or perhaps a BIRD.”
But nobody, nobody ever claimed that’s what happened or happens in nature.
So you are just making a straw-man argument.
Except that THAT IS what evolution claims. A fish climbed out of the primordial pond, became a land animal, a non-fish, that changed further until we have all that we have today.
First, we know for certain, because we carefully studied it, that every generation is born with a small number of genetic modifications, most of them harmless or harmful, rarely helpful.
Over many, many generations these mutations accumulate until at some point two sub-species may no longer interbreed.
And, by definition, new species are created whenever two sub-species accumulate so many DNA differences they no longer normally interbreed.
That can be seen everywhere in nature and can even be forced in laboratories.
It's no big deal.
Indeed, as I pointed out in previous posts (i.e., #48), mankind created its first new species when it began breeding dogs from wolves, circa 30,000 years ago.
Today dogs are classified as one of ten different wolf species.
aMorePerfectUnion: "I look at the fossil record and without your pre-belief in the TOE, I see a very different meaning. "
Only by selectively seeing what you wish to see and ignoring everything else, FRiend.
"Isogetically"? No, that would be you, FRiend.
I merely noted that both the Old Testament and the New clearly state: time is not the same to God as it is to us.
Indeed, the Old Testament Psalms 90:4 is especially informative, because it provides us with no simple formula, such as one of our days = a thousand years to God, but then adds, "like a watch in the night", meaning it could be anything.
So, you can spin and contextualize all you wish, but I see no stumbling block here.
God's day is not the same as ours, and that's all we need to know here, imho.
jimmyray: "...if you dismiss the days as literal, then you must also dismiss the sequence, lest you have plants surviving thousands or millions of years with no sun or insects."
But I don't "dismiss" them at all, I fully accept them as really good ancient approximations of what modern science tells us most likely happened.
Obviously, the light in verse 3 is not the same light as in verse 16, but I see no reasons to be overly concerned about it.
I think it's amazing they came so close, especially when you consider how wacky other ancient creation stories sound today.
jimmyray: "Believe what you want, but be careful about twisting scripture to meet your predetermined notions."
But I wouldn't twist anything because scripture is what it is, and should be taught that way.
If & when children reach the point of asking science-based questions, they should be told that science and the Bible generally agree, except that science does not recognize, because it refuses to see, the Hand of God in nature, but we know, because the Bible tells us, that God's Hand is active in everything we see of nature.
No, you're mischaracterizing such experiments.
In fact, the experiments are intended precisely to recreate natural conditions we think existed on Earth, way back when.
And there has been more success in recent years than you may be aware of.
Of course, there's no "life in a test tube" but some steps in that direction can be demonstrated.
None of which makes abiogenesis "fact" or even "theory".
It's all still highly educated hypothesis, that would require much greater successes to become even theory, much less "fact".
Not at all, I've changed no meanings, plain or otherwise.
First of all, in case you forgot, "mud to man" is precisely what Genesis 2:7 tells us happened.
So science and the Bible amazingly agree!
But much more important is the fact that science, by its very definition, is explicitly non-spiritual, and Paul's warning in 1 Tim 6:20-21 refers to spiritual heresies (Gnosticism), having nothing to do with our understandings of the natural realm.
I've seen that link before, and it's all nonsense, based on events going back over 100 years.
In more recent years careful scientific analyses of pre-historic human-related remains has accumulated significantly, every year, changing much of what we previously thought happened.
Yes, errors in analysis do sometimes happen, but outright fraud is very rare in anthropology.
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