Fallacy of “Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution,”

@Daniel_Pech

A poor track record compared to what?

The fossil record lays down a scenario that can ONLY be answered by evolutionary forces over millions of years.

There has not been one plausible flood scenario that can do the same.

We disagree there. LOL !

@NonlinOrg

Oh please. Language is a tautology too.

Survival is something that can be counted: how many born? 9999

How many alive: 8888

How many must have died: 1111

Counting offspring from different types is the basis of all survival discussions.

You can complain about the definition of “Fitness” if you like. But the non-tautological definition is to define Fitness as the index of surviving… based on COUNTS… not based on circular definitions.

So let me get this straight. You think CMI and AIG are just all a bunch of dishonest ignorant people? You think they are not just tragically mislead by attactive-but-false ideas?

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@Daniel_Pech

You know perfectly well that you can’t create an entire organization out of liars.

But it is relatively easy to create entire groups founded in ignorance.

I have challenged any and all Creationists to simultaneously explain:

  1. Australia’s catalog of indigenous animals

And

  1. the rest of Earth’s animals

And

  1. the simultaneous absence of large mammals fossils from the dinosaur fossil record and the absence of dinosaurs from the large mammals fossil record.

The fossil record shows several life forms coming out of nowhere!.. unless you look at the populations that existed just before the new one appeared!

Only Time can so perfectly separate and wall off animal groupings as we find them. Time cannot be bribed or extorted. Time is the answer.

The groups you mention don’t have the answer. And you don’t have the answer.

If you do… the time is now to humble me and my presumptions.

Humbling you, George, now that is indeed an monumental task. :wink:

It has occurred to me that I have never really seen data showing the indeed the earth is young that has not been addressed and refuted. Unlike data for an old earth with actual measurements of continental drift rates, of red shift of light from distant stars, or measured decay of elements, the young earth science tends to look at exceptions that may be compatible with young earth, but not any that actually measure a young earth, again with the exceptions of those things that have been shown to be false, like the salt in the seas.
Can you recall anything that is actually data driven that shows the earth must be young, and has not been adequately explained?

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@jpm,

[[ You, good sir, are cruel to mock a man you say cannot be humbled. Am I not a man? Do I not bleed? Do I not cringe when accused of such things? Yep. I do. But I’ll get over it. :slight_smile: ]]

I have to say that I have never seen it eiither. Usually YEC’s think an Exception is a Proof.

But one of the reasons why I have not built my “Universal Challenge to all Young Earth Creationists” on the issue of Earth’s age is it involves science. Science… a dubious term for many.

While my challenge certainly involves science, it does not require my listeners to weigh science. All they have to do is compare logics… not science.

Why didn’t Australia get both marsupials and placentals since Noah’s ark landed?
What kept Australia’s animals from spreading to all the other habitable areas of Earth?
If Horses and Dinosaurs and People lived all at the same time, why do we not find modern Horse bones with Dinosaurs, or People with Proto-Horse bones, or People with Dinosaur Bones?
Rinse and Repeat the same sentence, exchanging Horses with Giraffes, Rhinos, Elephants, Terror Birds and so on.

Like all good wizards, at no time did my hands ever leave your view or leave my wrists … and at no time did I have to appeal to Scientific Credibility with these comparisons.

I have no access to the empiricals. I can deal critically only with claims (including yours). …And you can deal with whatever you have access to, which I presume at least some time has included all three of your items.

…and if I ever do have access to the three empiricals, you will not necessarily know that I have had. As for my dealing with the claims, I shall have to know the details of the claims. And I presume that the claims, thereto, on the part of one side conflict with some of those on the part of the other. If that is the case, then it’s tit-for-tat as far as my non-access to the empiricals is concerned.

Of course it has been refuted (or rebutted). No one on either side is just going to give up without a fight. And all I’ve ever seen is that both sides claim to have prior addressed the substance of some particular rebuttals made by the other side. Chronology of rebuttals is already not the issue, so I see no easy win of either side in terms what that side claims… This is utterly obvious. So, what?

The more I act as neutral judge-for-myself between you and your YEC opponents, the more sure you become in showing me I’m wrong to do so?

As far as I shall claim, such things have been addressed by CMI, and this on multiple occasions. And you know how much trouble it might well be for you to actually carefully read through so much of their free online-available work to determine whether my claim here has any backing.

And even then you likely would be dealing with yours vs. theirs Ideas of Initial Adequacy of Their Address Versus Your Claims of Better Model.

I do not take lightly the claims of CMI as what you guys mean by ‘science.’ So unless that one issue is addressed by you evos, and this in what I accept is genuinely in your favor, I have no reason to do more here in discussion with you than I have been doing. I had to make sure that at least some of you here granted that CMI is not just one big pack of liars, because I, for one, do not find them to be so.

How is the Drake Equation a product of the theory of evolution?

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What does that even mean?

We have yet to see an explanation for the fossil record come from AiG or CMI. The added attacks on their character are simply not needed.

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That is just an excuse for not having an explanation.

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@Daniel_Pech,

Until @T_aquaticus commented, I didn’t even understand your answer! I mean this with all sincerity: Is English your 2nd language?

The empiricals are rather obvious to anyone who has actually disputed Evolution before:

  1. Until humans arrived and brought canines to Australia, the only kinds of mammals living on Australia since the extinction of Dinosaurs are Marsupials. Marsupial herbivores. Marsupial carnivores. Marsupials of all sorts. None of these marsupials exist anywhere else.

  2. On the rest of the planet, where no Australian-sourced marsupial exists, we find only placental mammals that do not exist in Australia.

  3. The unified “stack” of fossils (created by arranging all the fossil-bearing rock explored on Earth into chronological order) shows the following sequence (in reverse order, the first one mentioned below being the oldest):

a) Dinosaur fossils until the K-T boundary; then there are no more Dinosaur fossils.

b) Small mammals that co-existed with dinosaurs start to get bigger and more diffferentiated.

c) Diversification of Larger Mammals creates basic branches of evolutionary Tree:
i) carnivores (canine & feline)
ii) grazing mammals (hippo, buffalo, giraffe, zebra, horses, elephants, etc.)
iii) primates, including humans

d) God has made no effort to show what we call “modern existing mammals” were around when the dinosaurs were around.

e) By all appearances, since fossils of these large modern mammals are not found with the fossils of dinosaurs, their appearance in the Fossil Stack is: i) in the middle of the chronology; ii) appear out of nowhere, iii) with the exception of from similar-but-different populations that left fossils just below the fossils of each modern mammal type are found.

As you can see, @Daniel_Pech, this is a test in logic and reasoning. It has nothing to do with competing claims of science!

Theories of Origin in biology seek the exactness, and basic completeness, of correct formulas in arithmetic. But, such formulas are meaningless without specifics to which they may be applied and found true. The same for theories of Origin in biology. And in biology, we all are moving toward a horizon that ideally is that exact and that complete. We are: gaining more and deeper knowledge of biology (and in the process having to scrap various auxiliary theories from time to time). Thus we are ever in the Field between where we stood at a given prior point in that progress and that horizon. But, of course, there are deeply mutually adverse theories, and therefore of claims of explanatory fitness of auxiliaries that do the actual explaining of the specifies. An auxiliary to a main theory is like the body to the brain. Without the body to encounter the real world, the brain is effectively in a jar with no real knowledge of the specifics. Of course no one who espouses a particular main theory is quite so much in a ‘jar’, and so he has hunches, and such, that already drive him to see how well that theory can explain particulars of which he has already encountered.

So it is not strictly true, for most main theories about anything, that a main theory is purely ignorant hypothesis. Nevertheless, the main point I am making is that any main theory necessarily depends on auxiliary theories (just like the brain depends on the organism that is beyond the brain itself and through which the brain learns of the world) And in many cases, we can mistake some things about the world, i.e., whether auditory perception exists out in the air through which the ‘sound’ travels; whether an apple’s ‘taste’ is occurring in the apple that is not being eaten; and whether etc…

You utterly mistake and overlook my point. You are making claims right here that I presently have no way to empirically verify or empirically falsify.

So you grossly over-simplify the issue right from the start. You are not me, I am not you, and no one else is either of us two. You are expecting anyone who reads your claims to assent to them. Yet they clearly involve interpretation on your part, either or both of empirical evidence or of testimony-interpretation regarding empirical evidence.