Posted on 04/20/2003 10:36:35 AM PDT by JHL
On Easter of all days, Gary Trudeau uses his Doonesbury cartoon to insult Christians in general, and George Bush's faith in particular. How quick the liberals are to condemn someone else's faith and belief system, but just let a Christian say anything negative about another's belief system and how quick they are to invoke an injunction against "judgementalism."
You can read the cartoon for yourself at the following link CLICK HERE for cartoon
If that's your actual understanding of evolution's "central proposition", then it's time for you to go back to school.
As I often say, insults are not a refutation, which seems to be all the 'evidence' you provide against my statement. Yes, since day one evolution has postulated that random change is the cause of evolution. Even today the central 'how' of evolution is random mutation. To deny it is to tell a humongous lie.
It's garbage. A skull is meaningless if it is not properly dated, authenticated, tied to a whole body which tells us more than what the skull can tell, tied to evidence of how the organism lived. A bunch of skulls tells us little or nothing. Even then, they are not evidence of a different species. For that you need what you cannot get from fossils - DNA, the organs that really make an organism tick, and many other thigs which are destroyed with time. You can get a large variety of skull types from present day human beings, yet they are all human. You can prove anything if you boil down the facts to almost nothing which is what these skulls are.
I specifically said that the rate is well established, as usual you are arguing against what I did not say. What environmental events do is make the measurement of the materials very difficult. How much erosion takes place in 4 billion years? Can you answer that one?
IIRC, this is "A Question" that G3k has steadfastly refused to answer despite numerous requests for him to do so.
He's not funny, and someone else draws his strip.
He spits "pre-emptive war" in ignorance of our Congress' declaration of war against Nazi Germany.
But moreover, Trudeau misrepresents President Bush's statements on the public record, statements which by no means insist on a literal creationism.
Let us apply the very bad argument to the extreme of Garry Trudeau to two of his favorite subjects.
Al Gore believes in global warming (having found the new ice age to have been grossly exaggerated); thus Gore denies the evidence of ice core samples in know-nothing fashion--and, that explains Gore's failure to finish both law and divinity school.
Hillary Rodham Clinton was infatuated with Robert Treuhaft's Communism and Saul Alinsky's dictum, "Tell any lie for power," hence Hillary instructed Wellesley to seal her thesis, a paean to Alinsky, to conceal her disdain for basic American principles of God-given liberty and representative government.
Next week, natives of Indianapolis: Jane Pauley, David Letterman, Jim Jones founder of Jonestown, Robert Welch founder of the John Birch Society.
What a great analogy - alchemy vs. irradiation! I'll be using that someday.Biology teaches that spontaneous generation is an outdated myth, and yet continues to teach spontaneous generation (life from chemical soup) as truth.
Different kinds, different circumstances, different processes.
Science was correct in calling alchemy (including its belief that lead could be transmuted into gold) a collection of little more than old-wive's tales and myths.
And yet, with a particle accelerator, it is today possible to irradiate a lead target and convert, via nuclear physics, some of the lead atoms into gold atoms. But that's done via methods that bear no resemblance whatsoever to those the alchemists were dabbling with. It neither vindicates the alchemists, nor invalidates modern nuclear physics.
Similarly, the fact that ancient peoples believed that unliving material could give *sudden* origin to living creatures (i.e. flies "arising" from rotting meat, mice from moldy grain, fruit flies from rotten fruit, rats from sewage) was rightfully disproved as ignorant superstition.
But this hardly invalidates the idea that some form of extremely simple chemical replicators could manage form from vast oceans of chemicals over vast periods of time, and that once a replicating system beings reproducing itself, its products will vary, the variations in the products will lead to differential success, and differential success will lead to change over time (and the more time, the more change).
Olber assumes the following in his paradox, the universe is (1) static, (2) infinite, (3) eternal and (4) uniformly filled with stars or galaxies.
(1) Static, no, I believe the universe is living in a sense. That stars are being created (and dying) all the time. I don't agree with this assumption. (2) infinite, yes, we agree. (3) eternal, yes, we agree here too. (4) uniformly filled with stars or galaxies, no, this too is way off by what we observe already. Galaxies are flat and spiral, stars are certainly not uniformally distributed. Galaxy shapes may or may not be related to their overall distribution. I believe that they are. So do big bangers I presume.
However, the reason my theory has not yet been proven is that we cannot prove it because we lack the ability to look far enough to prove it or that no one has tried to interpret the data as I suggest.
Think of everything that we now know/see in the universe and call it a universe cluster, or the big bang area as it were or was so to speak. I'm sure someone has already finitely defined this area. Now assume that the next universe cluster is so far away (10 to the power of ??, pick a number such) that all it's stars combined still lack the ability to project it's light far enough for us to detect it. Between us and any other universe cluster is the great void of space. Are universe clusters evenly distributed? not likely, nothing else has been. My great hope is that we actually can and eventually will detect some close universe clusters and the reason we haven't is that so few want to think outside the big bang paradim. I believe that the universe clusters will not be evenly distributed throughout the infinite univrse, but in certain different patterns similar to galaxies. We may have already found a cluster but assumed it to be a distant galaxy. If stars live say 10 to the power of 10 years on average, the distances between universe clusters may be to great for us to ever detect their existance as they will have been born, lived and died all on their own, without their light ever having reached us.
I was very gratified when the big boys of science (Hawking, etc.) stopped pretending that the universe as we know it came about from a single explosion that did NOT defy the laws of physics as we know it. Proposing their rolling theory and/or admitting that the speed of light had to be defied in order for unverse to be layed out as it is, is a tremendous short term improvement over where we were.
Funny thing is, I originally proposed an infinite bang theory several years back on a big bang thread and was mercilessly ridiculed by some of our supposed learned men of science. I stopped trolling the astronomy/evolution threads because it seemed that most everyone on both sides of the debate possessed a smugness that clearly could not be backed up with critical thought or knowledge in the field. Of course, I didn't hear crap from those who initially dismissed me when Hawking proposed his rolling theory of universe creation. Imagine that.
The best way to put it is like this, "the universe is alive and it promotes the creation and renewal of life everywhere we look!" Did we expect our solar system to be so diverse and amazing? Did we expect to find amazingly colorful fish and sea life in the darkest depth of the sea or next to seeping underwater volcanos? Something causes life to come into being everywhere we venture to look. Call it God, call it evolution, call it magic, I don't care. All I know is that the harder look, the more complex life and ecosystems truely are. Also, it appears that everything gets laid out in particular patterns such that the mechanism/requirements/equations to create life get set with extremely tight margins of error, yet these life creation processes are extraordinarily resilent within its environmental parameters.
The Greenland ice core claim comes from the discovery of a couple WWII planes that had to ditch on the coast of Greenland. They were found in 1992 buried under 263 feet of snow & ice, for an average snowfall of 5 feet per year. Meanwhile, geologists have dug ice cores from Greenland that contain 135,000 annual layers, most less than an inch thick. Creationists claim that this invalidates the ice cores and the implication that the Earth is more than 135,000 years old.The "age rings" in the ice core from Greenland (I could be wrong on the location) that allegedly showed an age of many many thousands of years, until a WWII aircraft was found underneath those thousands of years worth of ice.I am sure this is garbled, but MM supplies no source so it is impossible to check. In ice cores you can find volcanic ash from specific known eruptions that occurred long before WWII, you can find lead deposits from when people began smelting lead a few thousand years ago -- there are a lot of ways to check your method of dating ice layers. http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/icecores.html
But what the creationist apologists don't tell you is that the ice cores are dug from the interior of Greenland, where the annual snowfall is indeed a matter of mere inches, while the lion's share of snowfall does indeed occur on the coast where the planes were found.
Apples & oranges, IOW, and it's an obvious fact that creationists have been shown time & time again. Yet this false claim lives on, because it's so useful for Christian apologetics.
There is no evidence for evolution, none at all. Not a single species has ever been seen transforming itself into a more complex species, not one. However, every day we see species reproducing their own kind - just like it says in the Bible.Note: the question does not require telling us how many times that particular poster has been corrected regarding these blunders. But for bonus points you can take a stab at that.And yes, you must reject God to believe in evolution. Not only do just about all the hardcore evolutionists here on this forum prove it, but the theory itself, by being completely materialistic, denying the divine origin of life and man completely attest to its total atheism.
240 posted on 04/21/2003 11:25 PM EDT by gore3000
There is much evidence against life from non-life. First of all is Pasteur's proof that life does not come from inert matter (and this was of course at one time the prediction of materialists). Then came the discovery of DNA and the chemical basis of organisms. This poses a totally insurmountable problem to abiogenesis. The smallest living cells has a DNA string of some one million base pairs long and some 600 genes, even cutting this number by a quarter as the smallest possible living cell would give us a string of some 250,000 base pairs of DNA. It is important to note here that DNA can be arranged in any of the four basic codes equally well, there is no chemical or other necessity to the sequence. The chances of such an arrangement arising are therefore 4^250,000. Now the number of atoms in the universe is said to be about 4^250. I would therefore call 4^250,000 an almost infinitely impossible chance (note that the supposition advanced that perhaps it was RNA that produced the first life has this same problem).
The problem though is even worse than that. Not only do you need two (2) strings of DNA perfectly matched to have life, but you also need a cell so that the DNA code can get the material to sustain that life. It is therefore a chicken and egg problem, you cannot have life without DNA (or RNA if one wants to be generous) but one also has to have the cell itself to provide the nutrients for the sustenance of the first life. Add to this problem that for the first life to have been the progenitor of all life on earth, it necessarily needs to have been pretty much the same as all life now on earth is, otherwise it could not have been the source of the life we know. Given all these considerations, yes, abiogenesis is impossible.
It is for the above reasons that not even the most die-hard atheists are able to even formulate a hypothesis as to how life could have come from non-life.
This thread began with a discussion of a cartoon that is insulting to Christians who simply believe in what the Bible says: God Created Man from nothing in less than 24 hours. Now, there are some evolutionists who had to jump on this thread who also claim they are Christians. I would ask them to consider this question: If Evolution is correct, then why do we need the redemptive work of Christ? Does not the Bible teach that according to the redemptive work of Christ, man was created perfect but he fell in sin and CHrist was promised to restore the man to his original perfection?The sinfulness of man is obvious whether or not there was an actual literal Adam who sinned. I find the notion that the sin of one man is inherited completely obscure. *How* is it inherited? *Why* would Adam's children inherit the blame for his mistake? It doesn't make any sense. What does make sense is that the beginning of Genesis is an allegory (or, actually, 2 allegories: there are two creation stories in Genesis, they even contradict each other at some points), and that each of us "falls" in our individual lives when we disobey God due to our own pride and ambition. Thus we still need redemption.
If evolution is true, then sin did not cause death, and therefore we do not need redemption from sin that, according to the Bible, causes our death.Another fantastically obscure notion. How can sin *cause* death? Especially death in other animals? Spiritual death, of course, is another matter entirely. Your argument here isn't even with evolution - all them Intelligent Design advocates accept an old earth and animal death before humans (there are plenty of fossils with e.g. fish in the stomachs of other fish), yet they are perfectly respectable Christians. Or are you saying that Phil Johnson is not a Christian because of his views about the age of the earth?
Evolutionists who also claim to be Christians cannot have it both ways.No wonder so many scientists become atheists. They are chased out of the religion by people like you, just for asking questions and taking a serious look at evidence.
It is for the above reasons that not even the most die-hard atheists are able to even formulate a hypothesis as to how life could have come from non-life.Spoken without a whit of knowledge of the actual literature. See for example: Cavalier-Smith T. Obcells as proto-organisms: membrane heredity, lithophosphorylation, and the origins of the genetic code, the first cells, and photosynthesis. J Mol Evol. 2001 Oct-Nov;53(4-5):555-95. ...and 158 related articles
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