A question for Ken Ham last week and a question about debates

I’d have to go re-read several threads to be sure, but I’m not certain that Richard grasps the distinction between ontology and methodology.
As one of my Christian professors had it, the only difference between an atheist teaching science and a Christian teaching science is that the atheist is hardly likely to start each class with a prayer.

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Nonsense precisely. You just denied the possibility of, one more time yet again, faithful Christians working in the science of meteorology. Good grief, Richard.

That probably nails it, whether or not @RichardG will concur.

More discussion will not resolve the issue.

That triggered a memory!

I was in a hospital lobby with my sister and niece (my mom was having heart surgery) and my niece showed me something on her computer that was fascinating: some researcher had reached a conceptual blind spot regarding something having to do with folding proteins and had tossed the problem out on the web. My niece had join with a half dozen total strangers in an online group tackling how one particular protein in the guy’s study might fold. What was awesome was that when he tossed it out on the web there were about twenty different folding problems he hadn’t managed to crack, and in just a few weeks half of them had been solved by people online, mostly by the same sort of ad-hoc group my niece had joined! What she showed me was a potential folding pattern that the group had decided was viable, and they were launching into proving it.

I’ve wondered how all those folks would receive credit when the researcher finally published his paper.

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Or hiking the Grand Canyon with an open mind (or even just a major side canyon, which I’ve done and unfortunately had to put up with a number of YECists gleefully trying to tell everyone how it was produced as the flood waters that made all those layered deposits drained away).

edit:
I just noticed that my reply shows a nested hierarchy. Now is Richard going to insist that it must have been planned?

I participated in Folding@Home, I think it was called, back a while with my PC, a distributed computing project. Fascinating stuff. With the advent of AI, though, maybe that’s been superseded.

Not among virologists. The consensus is that the weight of the evidence currently strongly favors a zoonotic spillover event.

It advances it in innumerable ways. As @T_aquaticus has pointed out, we routinely use evolutionary conservation to identify regulatory elements. We use the genomes of closely related species to identify the ancestral state of polymorphic sites, something that’s very useful for identifying deleterious mutations and for detecting ongoing positive selection. It’s useful for estimating the variation in mutation rates across the genome. Evolution is woven into most of what we do because most of genetics makes no sense if common descent isn’t true.

This is not just wrong but pretty much completely backwards. The false assumption made by evolutionary biologists was that all or nearly all of DNA would be functional. They were only (rather reluctantly) pried away from that view by multiple lines of evidence that a large part of many genomes serves no function. The evidence since then has continued to mount.

@T_aquaticus has already pointed out how well, dumb, the definition was that ENCODE used for ‘functional’. More to the point, you obviously haven’t read the ENCODE papers (there were a bunch of them that came out at the same time, not just one), because one of them did make an attempt to estimate the fraction of the genome that was functional by something like an ordinary understanding of that term – they estimated the fraction that had any effect on the fitness of the owner of the DNA. Their estimate was IIRC 11%. Another study since then put it a little lower. To date, I have seen no evidence in any scientific study anywhere that the functional (in any meaningful sense) fraction of the human genome is much larger than 10%. If you know of such a study, present it, because the ENCODE results sure didn’t say that.

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That would be unreasonable. I know science cannot. However, I think I have already explained this.

Richard

Science is understanding God’s creation, so in that respect there is no conflict. But Science cannot see or identify God so in that respect it cannot incorporate the actions of God in its findings. It is not a simple statement of God and science do not mix. It is understanding the boundaries of what is visible and what is not.

Richard

Sort of, but the point I was trying to make is how much matter (creation) matters in these verses. Creation is so central to Christianity that God becomes matter for over 30 years so that he can secure the coming of a New Creation. The Doctrine of Creation is more than just whether, when, and how, God did it.

That is one, but not the only reason. What we think about the eternal, impacts how we live in the present.

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That’s plainly what you’ve been arguing for! Especially with your talk of science “embracing God”!

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You mistake pragmatism for intent or desire. As there is little or no chance of it happening there is little or no point in wanting or looking for it.

Richard

Inserting arbitrary and/or unfalsifiable supernatural events into explanations seems to be incompatible with science. It’s a bit like having 4 downs in a baseball game. It’s not a question of little to no chance. It’s that it just can’t be done from a methodological standpoint.

At the same time, science isn’t the be-all end-all. It’s just a tool. It is interesting that the people (not necessarily you) who gripe about “Scientism” are the very ones trying to make their ideas look scientific in order to justify their arguments. As much as Ken Ham gripes about science, he wants nothing more than his claims to be viewed as scientific.

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He might not get the U.S. mixed metaphor since he’s a Brit. :grin: And I don’t know enough about rugby or cricket to analogize – soccer/football and tennis maybe. How about an immalleable square peg in a cast iron round hole? (I like yours better.) Using a curling stone and brooms on a bowling green? :grin:
.

A leg before wicket in rugby, then. Or 20 overs in a rugby match.

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There you go. I recognize enough of the mismatches for it to be barely intelligible to me. :slightly_smiling_face:

It’s what I’ve been told so many times I can only guess it’s into four figures: God gave us dominion, so we can do what we want. In fact I don’t think I’ve ever heard a different reason given.

That’s because his arguments are aimed at scientists… A Christian studying Evolution has a clear conflict of interests. His intention is not to develop the Evolutionary theory but to prove that it cannot work without God. He is trying to disprove science, using science (Because Theology is not available to him in a scientific environment)
Which is also why Christians get annoyed when scientists try to use science to disprove God.

Richard

Ken Ham? His arguments are aimed at people who are impressed by science but don’t know much about it.

What conflict?

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I think you are saying that the genome of other species that evolutionists identify as ancestral to humans is used to identify deleterious mutations in the human genome. And that ancestry is assumed because of the genetic similarity. But creationists identify the similarity as due, not to common ancestry but to common design, evidence of a designer.

Again, Darwin’s dangerous idea is exposed. According to Darwin, science cannot include any inference to design or a Designer. But that is illegitimate. We should follow the evidence wherever it leads. If the best explanation of the evidence is design, then so be it. Denying design as a scientific explanation is another example of how an argument is denied by applying an illegitimate definition to science.

I guess that Francis Collins was unaware of that when he wrote The Language of God. So you will excuse me for being as ill informed as Collins of your survey of evolutionary literature that you say contradicts what he said.