Ooh. Pride… Science! You seem offended! Get over it!
You have a knack of deliberately misunderstanding my words. You just look for the loophole or lack of specifics and jump! Roy knows best! In his own mind!
Richard
A very small percentage.
Why is that relevant to whether the fossil record consists mostly of individual organisms or of groups of organisms?
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How do you know it’s a very small percentage?
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If it’s only a very small percentage, shouldn’t the fossil record be regarded as an unreliable guide to the true history of life on earth?
I don’t know.
A combination of knowledge of the natural world, the estimated age of the earth, and basic arithmetic.
No. Incomplete and biased, certainly, but not unreliable.
Then why did you ask?
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Perhaps he was not part of our discussion? Perhaps he has his own conversation?
Not everyone is obsessed with what i say. (thank God)
So just to put things in perspective.
Fossils are not a comprehensive record of life on earth. Thee ae literally millions if not billions of creatures who have lived and died without leaving some sign of their existence, yet
ToE takes the fossil record as enough to make wild claims about ancestry and survival, and creation in general.
Science cannot/will not see or include God and therefore a its conclusions will not take Him into account, therefore, those of us who can see Him must be wrong
Because ToE is the best Science can muster it must be 100% correct. (Because science is so diligent, and conscientious, and accurate, and perfect.)
Richard
That’s a ridiculous underestimate.
That’s ridiculous hyerbole.
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The bigger the number the more outrageous your (scientific) claims, So, what is your guestimate?
Close enough.
And you have no counter to it other than that
Richard
Edit.
Whether it is hyperbole or not, that is what comes across on this forum.
A total population on Earth of about 10^30 prokaryotes, with a generation time of about a year on average (though it varies a lot) being around for over 10^9 years (before which the population would likely have been less and the generation time likely longer) gives a total number of prokaryotes having existed on earth of about 10^39.
This is a very rough estimate, which ignores multi-cellular life on the grounds that it’s heavily outnumbered, and doesn’t include viruses or any pre-cellular life either. The actual number could be many orders of magnitude higher or lower - but not as low as “millions if not billions”, which is less than the number of nematode worms which live and die without leaving any fossil traces every single millisecond.
Do you have any justification for your estimate of “millions if not billions”?
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I was being generous.
Like I said, the bigger the number the more your claims fade into insignificance. The figures are off the scale. The fraction of examples you have would take the equivellant of an electron microscope to see them.
So don’t get all high and mighty with me!
Richard
Treated the same only in certain situations. Bernoulli’s principle is a good approximation only when certain assumptions are met. And there is a lot more to fluid dynamics than just Bernoulli’s principle. That was just a small part of the fluid dynamics course I took way back when.
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Happy to amuse,
Shame it is empty, but hold on to your superiority, it is self proclaimed and just as empty.
Richard
The six days are not literal. One of the themes is that when the creating was done, “times and seasons” took over, where everything runs on natural processes.
Scripture’s view of Creation is my foundation.
I’m not interested in science here, only in the declaration that God is faithful, that the pattern since the end of the Creation work is “seedtime and harvest”, things working according to unchanging natural rules except in special circumstances.
The pattern of reproducing according to kind strongly suggests we should not expect God to constantly tinker, that things were set up from the start to run on an established pattern, not on ongoing intervention.
Fascinating – you and Richard have now agreed that scripture is not foundational to Christian thought.
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I think you need to check your diagnostic routines. They appear to be off.
Richard
If you mean that they moved such that fossils found near each other were originally deposited far apart, that’s incorrect – such movement would be marked clearly. You can’t slide massive rock formations over or past each other without leaving evidence.
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I asserted that what scripture says about Creation is foundational to Christian thought. You and Buzzard agreed that that assertion is “screwy”. QED, you have agreed that scripture is not foundational to Christian thought.
But then you assert the same thing every time you refer to scripture as just another batch of human writing with no special authority.
You just can’t make up your mind whether to argue science o Scripture, or whether there is a conflict between them. Thee is a word fo this but I have been banned from using it. begins with di, and ends in ance and ironically has son in the middle.
Richard
Mmm… no. The actual majority of fossil specimens in museums and in private collections are from giant assemblages in somewhat time-averaged deposits. Again, with the examples that I was giving, I have collected hundreds of thousands to millions of total specimens from each locality, and that’s nowhere close to exhausting the deposits (the ones I’m dealing with have thousands of specimens per liter and are meters thick). When it comes to large terrestrial vertebrates (which there are rather fewer specimens of than small marine invertebrates), those are found singly or in small groups more often. If the specimens were collected in situ, then we can have a very good sense of when they died relative to all the ones around them. If the rocks have been moved in ways that affect superposition or content, it’s usually pretty easy to tell (layers not flat, obvious size sorting, etc.).
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Scripture has nothing to do with the movement of massive rock formations, mechanics and chemistry do.
How can there be conflict on topics where only one speaks to something?
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But your view of creation is pure science!
False circular reasoning. We were not criticising Scripture, We are criticising your view of it!
Richard
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