Posted on 03/13/2002 4:47:26 AM PST by JediGirl
”The logical challenge is usually posed in the form of a statement such as this:
1. A good God would destroy evil.
2. An all powerful God could destroy evil.
3. Evil is not destroyed.
4. Therefore, there cannot possibly be such a good and powerful God.
“…God could not eliminate evil without at the same time rendering it impossible to accomplish other goals which are important to Him. Certainly, for God to create beings in his own image, who are capable of sustaining a personal relationship with Him, they must be beings who are capable of freely loving Him and following his will without coercion. Love or obedience on any other basis would not be love or obedience at all, but mere compliance. But creatures who are free to love God must also be free to hate or ignore Him. Creatures who are free to follow His will must also be free to reject it. And when people act in ways outside the will of God, great evil and suffering is the ultimate result. This line of thinking is known as the "free will defense" concerning the problem of evil.
But what about natural evil--evil resulting from natural processes such as earthquakes, floods and diseases? Here it is important first to recognize that we live in a fallen world, and that we are subject to natural disasters that would not have occurred had man not chosen to rebel against God. Even so, it is difficult to imagine how we could function as free creatures in a world much different than our own--a world in which consistent natural processes allow us to predict with some certainty the consequences of our choices and actions. Take the law of gravity, for instance. This is a natural process without which we could not possibly function as human beings, yet under some circumstances it is also capable of resulting in great harm.
Certainly, God is capable of destroying evil--but not without destroying human freedom, or a world in which free creatures can function. And most agree that this line of reasoning does successfully respond to the challenge of the logical problem of evil. “
…Surely it is difficult for us to understand why God would allow some things to happen. But simply because we find it difficult to imagine what reasons God could have for permitting them, does not mean that no such reasons exist. It is entirely possible that such reasons are not only beyond our present knowledge, but also beyond our present ability to understand. A child does not always understand the reasons that lie behind all that his father allows or does not allow him to do. It would be unrealistic for us to expect to understand all of God's reasons for allowing all that He does. We do not fully understand many things about the world we live in--what lies behind the force of gravity for instance, or the exact function of subatomic particles. Yet we believe in these physical realities.
A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds (I just made that up. Feel free to quote me).
Obviously a Creator can do anything, but why would He make each gene different if, as you claim, there's a single optimum? (Hint number one: there isn't.)
Wouldn't it be more like a design if there were a single, standard gene for cytochrome c or hemoglobin? Wouldn't it be less like an accident if functional genes like Vitamin C weren't turned off but still sitting there taking up space in the primate genome?
No, nothing ever, ever disproves design. But you have stumbled onto a point against it, one that molecular biologists notice all the time. Molecular clocks are out there, running. Design does not predict this. Design does not predict anything.
Nope. There are the same number of bones found in both the arm and the wing -- at least in early birds, such as archaeopteryx. In later birds some of the wing bones have fused, but they are still discernible as having been separate bones at one time (sort of like the teeny-tiny toes of modern horses).
Funny, early birds had teeth, and it didn't seem to bother them any. Methinks you are pulling stuff out of the air, here.
My original answer was just fine for this, but I will explain it better for the slow learners. Brains and eyes, just for an example, coevolve. This does not mean that there is direct coordination of the mutational changes in once place with those in the other. The feedback loop for coevolution is the same as for single-feature evolution. "What works, works." What doesn't work dies without offspring.
The point being that evolution is the theory that is not magic. Yours is the theory that is. But the only evidence for magic is that there's no stopping gore3000 from seeing it everywhere.
Back again, dumb as a stump, I see. St. Tom A. would be embarrassed.
You have been linked hundreds of transitionals. Your attempt to dismiss every one such as "integrated and fully functional" has been detected for the lawyerly evasion it is.
Come back with something new, when you think of it.
Macroevolution, Speciation and Transitional Species
29 Evidences for Macroevolution, Thread The Next (2001-04-02)
African Elephants Are Now One of Two Kinds [Elephant Evolution] (2001-08-24)
All About Archaeopteryx {Chris Nedin, Talk Origins, January 15, 1999}
Archaeopteryx FAQs, The {Chris Nedin, Talk Origins, 1995-1997}
Archaeopteryx's Relationship With Modern Birds {Thomas Holtz, Jr., 1995}
Biologists Uncover Darwin's ‘Missing Evidence’ for Divergence of Species in a Warbler's Song (2001-01-19)
DNA and Darwin: Research Shows that Evolution Repeats Itself in Caribbean Lizards (2001-04-07)
Evidence for Dinosaur-Bird Transition, The (A Sidebar Thread) (2001-07-09)
Macroevolution {John Wilkins, Talk Origins, 1997}
Macro-Evolution versus Moses (Several Parts) (1999-12-14)
Magic of Evolutionary Speciation, The [ Part II] (2000-04-02)
Magic of Evolutionary Speciation, The [ Part III] (2000-04-11)
Observed Instances of Speciation {Joseph Boxhorn, Talk Origins, September 1, 1995}
Process of Speciation, The {University of Michigan, 1996}
Speciation {Kimball's Biology Pages, December 1, 2001}
Speciation by Punctuated Equilibrium {Don Lindsay}
Speciation Conference Brings Good News for Creationists (2000-05-18)
Study Hints at How Genetic Mutations Led to Macroevolutionary Change (2002-02-07)
Ted Holden's "Intermediate Fossil" Quotes from Walter ReMine's "Biotic Message" {Andrew MacRae}
Transitional Fossils -- Age and Descent {Wesley R. Elsberry}
Transitional Fossils Leading to Orbulina {April 26, 1998}
Transitional Fossils FAQ {Kathleen Hunt}
Transitional Vertebrate Fossils FAQ {Kathleen Hunt, Talk Origins, March 17, 1997}
Water Lily Study Sheds Light on Evolution of Flowering Plants {Scientific American}
Not every environment changes constantly. The environments populated by the coelocanth and the horshoe crab (and certain species of sharks, and alligators, et al) have remained pretty much the same for millions of years. There has been no strong pressure to adapt or die.
This argument cuts both ways. Also, intelligent design does not mean optimal design, as William Dembski makes clear in the lengthy passage I posted a while back.
As ID supplants evolution and teleology is reintroduced to the study of life, benefits are bound to emerge. For example, it would have been far less likely that scientists operating under an ID paradigm would have incorrectly operated under the assumption that the appendix is a useless artifact of the evolutionary process.
Also, ID better explains natural phenomena like irreducibly complex systems (like Behe's flagella) and the sudden appearance and disappearance of morphologically rigid animal species in the fossil record.
Tell me, if everything is a design, brought about by these wonderful, invisible cosmic designers, what is your explanation for harmful mutations? They are consistent with the theory of evolution, but they shouldn't exist in a "designed" biosphere.
Again, you're confusing optimal design with intelligent design. When you look at an old AMC Pacer, you know that it wasn't designed by random chance but rather by an intelligent agent, even if not the most intelligent, intelligent agent.
Similarly with ID. It's easy to conflate the Designer of ID with the Designer of monotheism. But monotheists, and Catholics like me in particular, do not have a uniform understanding of who or what the Designer of ID is.
First of all, Christians disagree over whether this is the best of all possible worlds.
Also, Catholics are required to believe that God created the world from nothing and that Adam and Eve were the parents of the human race. But as far as I remember, the rest is open to speculation. One permissible theory is that the devil was allowed to corrupt Creation after his being cast down from Heaven prior to Adam and Eve's fall from grace.
So, at least from this Catholic's point of view, we should see a fundamentally ordered cosmos with a significantly smaller proportion of evils or disorders. Of course, it's sadly ironic that modern science attacks the philosophical system from which it was necessarily born. Natural scientists operate under the assumptions that they are observing a uniform, predictable universe and that their sensible faculties (and even intellectual abilities to some degree) are free from error. It's no accident that science arose in the West and not the East where the physical universe is "maya" or illusion, and particularly in the Christian West following on the promulgation of the dogma of creation ex nihilo, as Stanley Jaki so ably argues.
Intelligent Design means never having to say, "My theory doesn't handle that very well."
So are these mutated individuals significantly and morphologically different from the rest of the group, as the fossil record indicates?
Or is this one-individual-in-several-thousand-generations minutely different from the rest of the herd?
In the former case, the odds of a male and female mutating similarly and simultaneously is effectively zero.
In the latter case, we have the problem of the abscence of transitional forms in the fossil record and the lack of any plausible mechanism for the development of staggeringly complex biological systems.
Besides the fact that theories regarding cosmic teleology and good and evil are outside the realm of natural science and fall under the science of philosophy.
This slow learner has a hard time understanding what "selective advantage" an overdeveloped eyeball gives to a creature whose neurological system cannot process the new information.
No, I'm just busy laughing.
No, not that! ;o)
Do you not understand the difference between intelligent design and optimal design? Was the AMC Pacer example difficult to understand?
Or is this one-individual-in-several-thousand-generations minutely different from the rest of the herd?
The mutations within any given generation are never going to be so great as to prevent the individual with them from mating within his population -- otherwise the mutation immediately disappears from the gene pool. The mutation may be something very tiny, such as a different colored spot on a wing, or it may be something not physically noticeable, such as the ability to digest cow's milk. If the gene aids in survival it will eventually (several generations later) come to be possessed by the entire population. I don't quite understand your inability to grasp this fairly simple concept; it's almost as if you are poking around attempting to find some flaw or chink that can be exploited to allow you to maintain a belief that God zapped it all into existence in situ, instead of the somewhat messy-but-effective method of mutation and selection.
Gore3000's reticence I can understand. He's dug himself a hole so deep with his constant bearing of false witness that he's got to prove to God that it was all in a good cause if he's to avoid problems once he shuffles off this mortal coil. You, on the other hand, have up until just a short while ago, evinced an open mind with regards to learning what the Theory of Evolution really means. This was similar to a situation we had with a young fellow about a year ago named PatrioticTeen. He started off asking fairly intelligent questions about the theory and seemed to be picking up on what it really meant rather than what he'd been told it meant, but then suddenly he began to parrot the standard fundamentalist line that evolution was evil, satanic, atheistic and caused tooth decay -- it was almost as if someone had flipped a switch. I don't want to see our conversations here descend to such a level.
Besides, with a tag like Aquinasfan, you've got to be a thinker...
You're simply doing the "integrated and fully functional" dodge. This is stupid and wrong. Science cannot reason by such "You can't make me understand!" stupidity bludgeons. This is not teachable content.
Individuals get some mix of the genomes of their parents plus maybe some unique mutations. In each population, drifting wherever it is drifting, there's a cloud of different unique genomes about a central average. They're all similar enough to be compatible, but they're all unique.
(I'm using a sexual species model here. Cloning species can't evolve very fast, by comparison.)
In the human species right now, there's a range of brain adaptations for processing visual data. There's a range of visual acuities in the physical eyes.
It's the same thing all over in sexual species. There's this cloud of individual genomes. Natural selection lops off the unfit ones. At any given time, there can be a whole lot of things evolving. The mutations are more or less random, but the selective forces create a convergence toward something that works in current conditions.
Anything not "integrated and fully functional" in your mantra tends to be selected out at once. Mainstream science does not predict finding a lot of obviously unfit animals in the fossil record. That you continue to brandish this absurd strawman after you have been told twenty times that science does not say that looks rather dishonest. But if you drop it, you have to face all those transitionals that you've been happily chanting don't exist.
Science cannot work by closing its eyes, stuffing its fingers in its ears, and going "La la la, I can't hear you!" ID has no useful framework to replace the useful framework of evolution.
gore3000 has said that, for all the fossil record shows, dinosaurs might have had mammary glands. Indeed, for all that ID/creationism says, they might have. Evolution, which has real information content, tells us that they did not.
I have challenged gore to show his understanding of evolution by telling me why, but perhaps you'd like to beat him to the punch. Do you know why?
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