Give me a crocodile with an ear bone unique to whales and an ankle bone linking it to artiodactyls and I’ll sacrifice my first born to Ken Ham himself. It might resemble a reptile at first glance like the basilosaurus did, but things are not always as they seem.
By that logic, Lucy was nothing more than a knuckle-walking ape, right?
And whales with leg bones not used for walking makes the case for evolution
in the same way that evolution science hypothesises that an animal likely evolved into a whale because it happened to be found in an area that potentially may have been an estuary or water way and that the animal seems to have isotopes in its fossil that potentially link it with a waterway lifestyle. That is your missing link here? Its a pretty poor one and it also is ignorant of any influence a global flood may have on the locations of those specimens!
See this is the problem, your first port of call is, secular science says, there is no God. From that pedastool you then have no choice but to follow the secular science model to its end.
If you would simply throw out the secular science model and follow a Christian science model, you would not have the terrible theological issues that you now face.
BTW, just to remind me, how do TE’s interpret the following text…
Genesis 2: 7 then the LORD God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature.
To expand a little further, am i correct in that TE’s claim this book of the bible (genesis) is an allegory?
What is the hidden meaning of this reference according to the definition of an allegory?
your answer i think would need to consider the 3 statements made in that passage
No. It was the early church fathers that thought it was an allegory. I don’t think there was a hidden meaning. It is in plain sight. The meaning is just not “6,000 years ago”.
They are the same. Beakers are not labeled secular and Christian. Bunsen burners are not sacred or profane. There is not one balance scale for secular scientists and another for Christians.
There is physical science, biological science, geological science, and so forth, but secular science is not a discipline.
Do you have a problem with this?:
There is no such thing as “secular science” and “Christian science,” Adam. There is honest science, and there is lying.
By denouncing “secular science” as something to be thrown out at will, you are demanding the right to make things up, invent your own alternative reality, and weaponise the Bible in order to bully and intimidate Christians into endorsing it.
Now as I said, please go and study science properly and then get some professional experience of it before flinging around dogmatic and hypocritical pronouncements about things that you quite clearly do not understand.
Why does Adam want to know about evidence for whale evolution, without having read all of Richard Dawkins’ and Nick Lane’s lay-science books for comprehension?
And because it has an ear bone arrangement that is only found in whales, and a dentition shared with other archeocetes, which transitions to something more like a modern mystocete, and a distinctive ankle bone, shared with other archeocetes and with artiodactyls.
Those isotopes definitively link it to aquatic or marine, as there are no other known ways of producing those 18O values.
SCIENCE CANNOT MAKE ANY PHILOSOPHICAL CLAIMS. Anyone who says otherwise is profoundly mistaken about the nature of science. Science can tell us much about the physical world, but can tell us NOTHING about whether God exists.
“God made humans, just like everything else”. He can use guided natural mechanisms to do so, can’t he?
All science is “secular” by definition, because it is not religion, and it relates to physical reality. Fossils do not care about your religion, they simply exist.
There seems to be a few points of confusion relating to the dates (on many other things, too, but just focusing on that).
100 million years is the number of years invented by certain ID sources as the time needed for coordinated mutations. As (A) coordinated mutations are not actually required and (B) the calculations have problems anyway, that number is not particularly relevant to anything.
49 million years ago is during the time when whales were going through the terrestrial to aquatic transition.
10 million years is the approximate time it took to go from having fairly normal land artiodactyl legs to flippers and similar changes in other body structures.
There is no conflict between “this was happening 49 million years ago” and “it took 10 million years”.
Supposed gaps (not just from young-earth sources but also rather confused accounts e.g. on Wikipedia) are incorrect. The sequence of fossils given includes selected examples, not the full set of known fossils. Once whales reached the point of being good swimmers, they made it across the Indian and Pacific Oceans while still having fairly noticeable hind legs - one four-legged whale is known from South America. (Meanwhile, early four-legged manatees made it across the Atlantic from Africa to Jamaica. Both of these reflect noticeably different plate configurations from today.) The archaeocetes were swimming throughout the world’s oceans by late Bartonian (late Middle Eocene, e.g., Georgiacetus, named from the US state). Basilosaurus occurs worldwide in the Priabonian (Late Eocene), including from Louisiana and Arkansas east to South Carolina and in north Africa. I’ve found a fragment of archaeocete tooth and a Basilosaurus vertebra in South Carolina.
If someone can’t reconcile a Round Earth with their Christian theology, the Earth doesn’t flatten out to comport to their theological views.
They are saying that a specific fossil is a transitional fossil because it has a mixture of physical features from more basal mammals and more derived cetaceans. When you have mountains of evidence from fossils and DNA that consistently support the hypothesis you have a strongly supported scientific conclusion.
False. It’s what the facts say. You might as well claim we think the Earth is round just because we want to disagree with the Bible.
I’m always surprised honestly that it almost always seems like the angry yecist don’t seem to have at least read a handful of books on evolutionary creationism or evolution in general. It’s always like some really basic argument I’ve heard dozens of times for the most part.
Whenever I’m hiking the Bible and evolution is often brought up while taking with someone I just met. It’s always so much easier when they can’t just pretend they know something by googling it. It’s like oh this person doesn’t know basic arguments but has 10 Latin names and dates memorized. In person that just can’t happen. Had someone a few days ago wanting to talk about books they read and evolution being false and referenced to turtles as amphibians and tortoises as reptiles because they can’t swim. I instantly was like this dude has no idea what he’s talking about. I wonder how they hear that because I’ve had like 5 yecist mention that to me almost word for word. I tried finding what weird video it came from and never found anything.
That is pretty much the point of some who advocate learning the opposite side of the argument well enough to explain it to their satisfaction before criticizing it. That means asking questions and listening when you do not understand something in their argument.
That is only true if you first throw out the Darwinian model and take on the Biblical narrative, then work science from that angle. This is what Dr Kurt Wise has done (among many other creation scientists)
To do this will certainly mean you need to read the bible according to an accepted grammatical standard…one that historically, no TE has ever done! This is one of the reasons why both creationists and atheists, from the scientific community, trash this world view btw.
Against my better judgment, I will reply to this nonsense.
First off, yes it is true that scientific disciplines are science, and secular is not one of them.
Next, physics, astronomy and geology are not Darwinian.
It is anachronistic to frame biology as Darwinian. But biology is just a snapshot of evolution, and evolution is just biology over time.
I’ve been trying to find out if you believe that the earth doesn’t move, like the Bible says. “Secular science” claims that it does move.
If we threw out the Darwinian model we would just reconstruct it from the evidence because that is where the evidence leads. Sorry, but honest scientists can’t just ignore the facts. You are telling people that they can’t make certain conclusions even if that is exactly what the evidence supports.
“By denying scientific principles, one may maintain any paradox.”–Galileo Galilei
“I think that in the discussion of natural problems we ought to begin not with the Scriptures, but with experiments, and demonstrations.”–Galileo Galilei
“It vexes me when they would constrain science by the authority of the Scriptures, and yet do not consider themselves bound to answer reason and experiment.”–Galileo Galilei
Satan tried to tempt Jesus into ignoring secular gravity.
Well, I think it was more into the testing God area, sort of like going without a vaccination.
“Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone.” -Colossians 4:6
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