Posted on 07/01/2002 7:25:44 AM PDT by aculeus
Come talk to this father of seven home-schooled children........and an AF Academy grad, former SAC aircraft commander, you little pissant.
Perhaps the IDers only want to destroy scientific inquiry and their devotion to religion is secondary if it exists at all.
Note that they had to tweak 2 genes. The article of course does not say how much tweaking was done. The chances of two specific genes being "tweaked" in who knows how many places are pretty slim. If just one had been tweaked the results would have been disastrous.
The abdomen (thorax) is the hind end of the insect, and a number of new legs grew in the region when the team suppressed the presence of these two genes. Randy Bennett, lead author of the study, details the findings in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal.
What the article does not say - anywhere - is whether these additional legs worked. The famous example of the fly that grew additional wings in the same manner showed that the wings were totally useless and were a drag on flight rather than an aid in it. So without more information, I cannot accept this as a refutation. It also does not say how this benefitted the beetle. Did it not have enough legs before?
What this kind of example by evolutionists shows is that they keep asserting that subtraction is addition. They suppressed a gene and call it evolution. Evolution requires the opposite. It requires the addition of genes, the addition of complexity. The addition of new abilities. This example shows none of that.
It is a dogma of establishment science that the tale of the biblical flood is a fairytale or, at most, an aggrandized tale of some local or regional flood. That, however, does not jibe with the facts of the historical record. The flood turns out to hae been part and parcel of some larger, solar-system-wide calamity.
In particular, the seven days just prior to the flood are mentioned twice within a short space:
Gen. 7:4 "For yet seven days, and I will cause it to rain upon the earth forty days and forty nights;...These were seven days of intense light, generated by some major cosmic event within our system. The Old Testament contains one other reference to these seven days, i.e. Isaiah 30:26:Gen. 7:10 "And it came to pass after seven days, that the waters of the flood were upon the earth."
"...Moreover, the light of the moon shall be as the light of the sun, and the light of the sun shall be sevenfold, as the light of seven days..."
Most interpret this as meaning cramming seven days worth of light into one day. That is wrong; the reference is to the seven days prior to the flood. The reference apparently got translated out of a language which doesn't use articles. It should read "as the light of THE seven days".
It turns out, that the bible claims that Methuselah died in the year of the flood. It may not say so directly (if it does, I don't know where), but the ages given in Genesis 5 along with the note that the flood began in the 600'th year of Noah's life (Genesis 7:11) add up that way:
Gen. 5:25 ->Thus we have Methusaleh dying in the year of the flood; actually seven days prior to the flood..."And Methuselah lived an hundred eighty and seven years and begat Lamech. And Methuselah lived after he begat Lamech seven hundred eighty and two years, and begat sons and daughters. And all the days of Methuselah were nine hundred sixty and nine years.
<i.e. he lived 969 - 187 = 782 years after Lamech's birth>
And Lamech lived an hundred eighty and two years and begat a son. And he called his name Noah...
<182 + 600 = 782 also...>
Louis Ginzburg's seven-volume "Legends of the Jews", the largest body of Midrashim ever translated into German and English to my knowledge, expands upon the laconic tales of the OT. Midrashim amounts to the full body of rabbinical literature, and often can flesh out the laconic stories of the OT.
From Ginzburg's Legends of the Jews, Vol V, page 175:
...however, Lekah, Gen. 7.4) BR 3.6 (in the week of mourning for Methuselah, God caused the primordial light to shine).... God did not wish Methuselah to die at the same time as the sinners...The reference is, again, to Gen. 7.4, which reads:
"For yet seven days, and I shall cause it to rain upon the earth forty days and forty nights..."The week of "God causing the primordial lights to shine" was the week of intense light before the flood.
What the old books are actually telling us is that there was a stellar blowout of some sort either close to or within our own system at the time of the flood. The blowout was followed by seven days of intense light and radiation, and then the flood itself. Moreover, the signs of the impending disaster were obvious enough for at least one guy, Noah, to take extraordinary precautions.
The ancient (but historical) world knew a number of seven-day light festivals, Hanukkah, the Roman Saturnalia etc. Velikovsky claimed that all were ultimately derived from the memory of the seven days prior to the flood.
If this entire deal is a made-up story, then here is a case of the storyteller (isaiah) making extra work for himself with no possible benefit, the detail of the seven days of light being supposedly known amongst the population, and never included in the OT story directly.
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Occum's Razor.
Regardless of Darwin's beliefs, his Theory of Evolution has a certain amount of scientific validity but is often used to extrapolate things far beyond what it meaningfully can.
As a simple example, imagine that you find pieces of what appear to be a 1980's Coke bottle on a concrete sidewalk near a 20-story building with an observation deck on the roof. A reasonable hypothesis would be that someone in or on the building dropped the bottle and it smashed on the ground. Analysis of the pieces of glass and the properties thereof, along with examination of the sidewalk where the glass hit and Newton's equations of motion, may allow one to determine that the object fell from a height of about 240 feet. This would tend to support and refine the hypothesis, suggesting that the bottle was probably thrown from the observation deck. It would not prove it, however, as the bottle could have been launched into the air via other means (sling-shot from the ground, perhaps?) and produced for all practical purposes the exact same pattern of broken glass.
Darwin's Theory of Evolution provides some means of predicting future events and the consequences of certain actions; it has useful implications in fields like zoology, especially with regard to breeding of endangered animals. It is not, however, able to provide an infallible interpretation of the past, nor is it able to define any moral consequences for anything (it may predict that certain actions increase the likelihood of species A surviving while decreasing the likelihood for species B; it does not say whether that's a good or a bad thing).
IMHO, students should be taught Darwin's theory, but should be informed what aspects are confirmably true and what claimed aspects are in fact groundless extrapolations.
Interesting that you admit that the biodiversity on earth cannot be accounted by natural selection - the prime agent of evolution. And indeed it cannot. In fact your example is a contradiction of natural selection, it says that isolation would enable a species to become less fit and lose abilities it previously had. This is subtraction again attempting to justify a process (evolution) which requires addition.
BTW, how do creationists explain the level of biodiversity that exists today, compared with the maximum amount that could possibly be held on a single boat the size of Noah's Ark?
The same way that we explain how a single piece of bread fed thousands of people.
Actually, it's not.
The poster is saying that Newtown believed in Jesus Christ as his Savior and the Bible as God's word, and wrote many books on these topics.
And I like how you cast it - "not a standard Trinitarian", when you and I both know that denying the Trinity is heretical ;)
Yes, by standard Trinitarians. But that doesn't change the fact that he believed in Jesus Christ as his Savior and the Bible as God's word and wrote many books on these topics. And for the record, I'm a standard Trinitarian and I'm not calling anybody heretical. Even you. :-)
He also denied the divinity of Christ with his dying breath, refusing the last rites.
He didn't believe in the divinity of Christ, unlike us standard Trinitarians. He belived, however, that Jesus was his Savior and the Bible was God's word.
And he wrote many books on the topic.
Take a look at "Never at Rest" by Richard Westfall and "In the Presence of the Creator" by Gale Christianson sometime - very interesting books...
I will note them. However, my reading has dropped off since finding FR.
LOL - that's two of us ;)
And other than I think, you're wrong I have no problem with that. At least you're not a suicide.
And did you know that there were no government-run schools in America until shortly before the Civil War? Really. Well, maybe a municipal school or two, here and there,
There were a lot of municipal schools.
but no state-run system at all. Government schools aren't apple pie. Far from it.
OK, agreement. Get the state out of education. School choice solves all problems.
The breeding example is absolutely wrong. Men have bred plants and animals very successfully from long before Darwin. So evolution cannot claim this as an example of successful application of evolutionary theory. More importantly though is that evolution got wrong completely the essentials of breeding. Evolution said that the traits of the parents melded into the progeny. Mendel taught us otherwise. They do not meld at all. They get selected according to the presence of dominant and recessive genes. This also has implications for the passing on of the new genes needed by evolution. Very dire consequences. So no, the worst thing one could do is follow evolutionary theory in breeding animals. In fact breeding results in the opposite of what evolution requires. It results in less variability of the gene pool, less resilience of the species to new threats, and as we clearly see in dogs, a shorter lived species. So I would say that breeding is a real example of the failure of evolutionary theory.
Interesting. Never thought about love as being purely chemical. Lust, yes, but love, no.
While love might stimulate chemical changes those changes are not what initiate love. Love is much deeper....spiritual. Love is built on experiences shared between people. A collection of chemical storage records in the brain....but it is something obviously more. The chemical 'reactions' in the brain that would spur one to risk, and give, one's own life for that of another are quite a bit different that those of lust, for which chemical reactions I would not risk my own hide simply because the chemical reactions for self-preservation are stronger.....so I would suggest that there is an extra ingredient in love that chemical reactions can not explain.
It is the same love that would enable you to give everything for your child, or for your Savior to give everything for you in order that you might believe and LIVE.
Chemical reactions do not explain love, in the same way that science does not explain God....yet we can detect God. To look at the multitude of very different and beautiful floura, fauna and physical earthly topography and not recognize a design is to take everything for granted....'it just developed by mutations (which to my understanding are not consistently reproducable) and natural selection'. Not only this, but we have His Word as well, as handed down to us in the Bible. If we look at recent arceological findings we can see that the more we discover, the more we find that the historical correctness of the Bible is evident.
How did the Arc get to the top of Mt. Ararat?
Why are Egyptian chariot parts laying at the bottom of the Red Sea?
What is thought to be Josheph's tomb has been uncovered in Egypt, but is empty because, as Moses commanded, the Israelites carried the body to where it lays now, in the promised land.
What is thought to be Jerico has recently been uncovered. It has been discovered that the walls have all fallen in unnatuaral ways and the spoils burned...however the wheat harvest was left untouched and plentiful to correspond to Biblical references about the city being taken by the Israelites marching on the city in a season just following the harvest. As most sieges lasted several months or years, the abundant supply of grain remaining in the ruins suggest a rapid fall to the city. The Bible says the city was taken in a period of days.
Biblical accounts record a day in 1500 BC where Joshua called on the Lord to prolong the day so as to finish off a defeated enemy. The Lord responded by stopping the earth for one day. Half a world away, in 1500 BC Miyan calendars record a day that the sun did not rise!
Sodem and Gamora have been found and the ruins excavated. Found are roof tops with burn marks from the top.
In what was called the wilderness in the Bible, where the Israelites wandered for 40 years, and current day science suggest that sustained populated living could not occur, arceologists have found relicas and garbage from a prolonged inhabitation.
Christ's body has never been found!
12 disiples believed enough in a man called the Christ, that 11 of them gave their lives, violently, in His name.
Biblical history cries out to be heard and is verified through other sources if one only looks. Pilate was govenor of Judea in Christ's lifetime...history bears this out. History also bears out His trial, which occured under very unusual circumstances and for significant parts, against Hebrew law (take a gander at "Who moved the Stone" by Franklin Morris (or Morrison). He was a non-believer bent on exposing Christianity as the farce that he thought it was, did some research, and became a believer.
My own belief has lead me to observe a cause and effect relationship between my prayers and His answers. It can be as subtle as a strangly timed phone call or a 2 year old initiating a conversation to ask Christ into her heart a day or two after an anguised parents fervent prayer, or as witnessed a few weeks ago, a lightning strike after a midnight prayer.
I say all this to give faith in the Father and His Son. If faith is present, then one believes His Word. If one believe's His Word, then evolution as proposed by Darwin is not Truth in the believer's mind.
I can see evolutionary developments of existing structures (hair, arm strength, resiratory stamina, etc.) as possible and probable. But the type of evolution that tries to explain how a simple organism develops sight through the creation of a vison detection object and the theory behind the image collection system, the accompaning nerve connections and the simultaneous brain function to process the visual signals and present those to other parts of the brain and process it as meaningful data seems very unreasonable to me and statistically impossible.
Fine, but that wasn't what I replied to. I replied to your statement that "The study of science in all its aspects was started by Christians," which is clearly wrong. I'm not sure I totally agree with your new premise, but wouldn't have written a reply had that appeared instead.
Interesting inclusion of Cuvier, however. In my experience, comparative anatomy in college is the experience when people become highly skeptical of their creationism indoctrination.
How would science know what did or did not exist prior to the big bang? I believe physicists would agree space and time are part of this universe and it is currently impossible to know if they existed prior to it. Maybe they did, maybe they didn't.
That's nonsense. Anyone purporting to have "proof" of such is employing ridiculous assumptions.
I wonder why we die just like every critter on the planet. Makes no sense that we so special, yet we have the same causes of death, just like a dog or cat.
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