Go read section 2.8.1 of the article then if you don’t believe me.
I’ve read it. There’s nothing in that section about the genetic code.
Maybe you should read it.
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When you say it’s false, what exactly are you saying is false? Elaborate please
Same for here. Are you saying the source itself did not say that or that the source itself was wrong for saying that or describing it that way?
Well, I was trying to summarize it for him. If anyone here wants the full context, they can read all of section 2.8
Because he denies common descent, which is an established fact. Debating a theory discarded 175 years ago in favor of a better one is a waste of time.
So you didn’t share the report or the one and only positive review with us. You just talked as if you did. Misleading, at best.
Sure. But first I’ll note that the focus of your question is a tacit admission that RTB is defending the historicity of Genesis, not the historicity of the Gospel.
The entire project of framing Genesis 1 as a description of what Creation would’ve looked like from the perspective of an observer on Earth is just silly and wrong-headed. It’s concordism run amok; it’s inspiration run amok; it’s selective use of evidence; and it’s not how literature works.
They’re not advancing the gospel. Theories that deny common descent and evolution don’t advance the gospel one inch.
I’m always amazed how quickly you guys jump to the non-believer label when someone disagrees with you. I refer you to the Expectations for Gracious Dialogue at BioLogos:
- Focus on discussing other people’s ideas, not on evaluating their character, faith, communication style, or perceived “tone.” Please avoid attributing beliefs, motivations, or attitudes to others.
Good gosh. The global flood is irrelevant. The point is that YEC claim the Hebrew min from Genesis 1 through 6 means “kind,” which they identify with genus, not species. It’s an almost identical concept to Owen’s claim of archetypes.
I can confidently say that most Christians worldwide, not just on this forum, would agree with me that God will never provide proof of his existence. Otherwise, faith would be superfluous. As Pascal said more than 350 years ago:
And more importantly, he said, “It is the heart which experiences God, and not the reason. This, then, is faith: God felt by the heart, not by the reason.”
And again, if their defense was so successful, why wasn’t it reconsidered for publication? I refuse to follow you down the rabbit hole. Sorry again (and again and again).
I can confidently say this is nonsense that you are projecting onto the Christian world.
[1] Catholicism accounts for over 50% of the global Christian population. First Vatican Council (1869–1870) explicitly and infallibly declared God’s existence can be known with certainty by the natural light of human reason from created things. What you advocate is actually a heresy known as fideism. Even Protestants and Orthodox Christians are heavily vested in historical and evidential apologetics, fulfilled prophecy, etc. How many millions of Christians are Pentecostals that emphasis frequent miracles as living “proof” of God’s existence? There is no need to project one’s own brand of intellectually defeated Christianity onto everyone else.
[2] I do not understand faith using a modern, secular definition. Faith is not belief in the absence of evidence. Biblically and historically, faith is trust based on evidence. Proof does not make faith superfluous. It serves as one foundation on which faith (trust) is built.
[3] For Pascal, the lack of proof for God was via reason and science which were subservient to the heart in his substance dualism. For Pascal, reason was mathematics, geometry, empirical science. I mean, sure, if you have a system that methodologically excludes God from the outset, you won’t find him. That is as true of science today and Pascal says you can’t prove God with these things. He was of course wrong on many things and his metaphysics was off in many places but my absolute favorite quote from him is the following: “I cannot forgive Descartes; in all his philosophy, Descartes did his best to dispense with God.” Amen.
Vinnie
That’s not entirely accurate. Richard Owen accepted the evidence for homology—indeed, he helped formalize the concept. The disagreement is not over the existence of structural similarities, but over how they are explained. Charles Darwin later interpreted homology through common descent, whereas Owen understood it in terms of underlying structural patterns or archetypes.
So the issue isn’t that Owen rejected established observations, but that he offered a different explanatory framework for them. Whether one accepts universal common descent as definitively established or still open to interpretation depends on how one weighs competing explanatory models, not just the raw data.
I think the question is what makes a framework “better.” If key elements of classical Darwinism—such as strictly gradual, unguided processes—have been revised or qualified over time, then it’s worth asking how different the modern framework actually is from earlier structuralist views.
At minimum, revisiting Owen’s framework can help clarify whether current models fully explain biological form or whether they still rely on underlying constraints that were recognized, in a different way, much earlier.
For me to be comfortable sharing and posting this on here, I would need permission from the moderator here because it is kind of long. But, if he really wants to see it as well and permits it, then sure I can copy and paste it here since I am sure it would probably reignite the discussion on this topic that much more.
You can’t separate the two like that because Genesis 1, together with John 1:1–14, reveals a profound parallel: both describe creation as the embodiment of divine rational order.
And the mechanism that connects the correlations between Genesis 1 and John 1 is revealed in Genesis 3:15, which is supposed to be referring to Jesus.
I see the concern, but I think there’s an important distinction between simple retrofitting and broader conceptual alignment. Some interpretations clearly overreach, but others raise the question of whether earlier frameworks were capturing real patterns, even if not in a modern scientific form.
For instance, Owen’s structural or archetype-based approach wasn’t a technical prediction of modern biology, but aspects of it do resemble patterns later described in evolutionary and developmental models. That doesn’t prove the framework is correct, but it suggests it may have been tracking something real rather than being purely coincidental.
So when multiple domains—philosophical, theological, and scientific—point toward structured organization, the question becomes whether that convergence is accidental or indicative of deeper underlying constraints.
I honestly don’t see how my last comment violated any part of this. Someone would need to explain how this was the case here.
I’m not sure they’re equivalent. The concept of “kind” (as used in some interpretations of the Hebrew min) and Owen’s archetype framework may overlap in emphasizing structural grouping, but they’re not necessarily defined or applied in the same way.
If the claim is that they’re “almost identical,” I think that needs to be demonstrated more explicitly rather than assumed.
I think there’s some conflation here between different parts of the publication process:
-
Peer review = evaluation by independent experts
-
Editorial decision = final accept/reject judgment
Reviewers assess the manuscript, but editors make the final decision, often based on scope, audience, or perceived impact—not just technical merit. So it’s entirely possible for a paper to receive positive feedback from reviewers and still be rejected. Those outcomes aren’t contradictory; they’re part of how the system works. See for yourself by reading this “Peer review process and editorial decision making at journals”:
Peer Review and Editorial Decision Making Process at Journals | Editage Insights
This is false:
All known organisms use the same coding system: four nucleotides forming 64 codons that map onto 20 amino acids.
If you want to know why it’s false, do the research you should have done before making that claim in the first place.
While (if) you’re doing that you might ponder (i) whether it would have been better to ask that question before telling me to read something, and (ii) how you repeatedly not only not reading your own sources but not bothering to check that ‘quotes’ you got from pseudoscience websites were in the texts you were linking to might lead to others not being willing to assist you.
I wouldn’t help you even if you hadn’t just described an article you helped write as something you “recently came across”
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Genesis 3:15:
And I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; he will crush your head, and you will strike his heel.
It takes a lot of re-interpretation to see a reference to Jesus in that verse, not least because it was written 1500 years before the gospels. But I note that AiG makes the same claim, which suggests that someone has been uncritically reading creationist websites again.
No-one needs to explain that writing “a non-believer ,like yourself I assume,” is attributing a (lack of) belief to another.
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Pascal was Catholic, more Catholic than even a Euro trad Catholic like you.
I can’t believe I have to explain this, but if God provided ironclad proof of his existence, it would take exactly zero faith to believe in his existence.
My grandmother was an old-school Pentecostal who believed the evidence of salvation was speaking in tongues. My dad grew up in that environment and was a street preacher in the early 50s and played piano for a Gospel quartet that made records and had its own radio show in the late 50s before I was born. By the time I was a teen, I asked him why we didn’t go to Grandma’s church, and he said, “I learned there was a difference between superstition and religion.” You don’t have to lecture me on things I know by experience.
Pascal lived 350 years ago.
This is foolishness. Pascal didn’t exclude God. You’re projecting.
Right. As I said, he denied common descent.
Share the one positive review. Or not. There are 6 or 7 negatives reviews on the opposite side, and I really don’t care. Can’t believe I’m wasting time replying right now, to be honest.
That’s silliness. It’s easy to separate the historicity of Genesis 1 and John’s gospel. It has nothing to do with conceptual parallels like the prologue to the gospel. It has everything to do with whether the events described in both narratives actually happened.
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Tough to read on my phone but worth the effort.
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I agree the wording seems a bit too absolute. It would have been more accurate to say “(nearly) all organisms” rather than “all organisms.” That said, I don’t think this was meant as a substantive claim that there are zero exceptions—it reads more like an imprecise phrasing or a typo than a conceptual error, which can happen even in professionally edited work.
To be clear, there are well-known exceptions—particularly in mitochondrial genomes and some ciliates—where codons have been reassigned. But those exceptions don’t undermine the broader point that was being made, which is the remarkable conservation and functional optimization of the standard genetic code across life. The argument isn’t that the code is without variation, but that its overall structure is highly constrained and preserved to an unusual degree.
I never said it was Jesus. I said it is supposed to be Jesus. There is a difference. My point was that many Christians historically interpret it as a messianic foreshadowing or typological reference to Christ. Those are not the same claim.
I still don’t see how I violated their policy because it never suggested that it applies to people who (lack) faith as well. Moreover, I stated it as an expression of my opinion rather than a claim.
I went back and omitted this from the opening post to avoid any more confusion.
Aside: There is a tension inherent in universal religions with free will components to explain why there may be non-adherents to the faith. That is, to provide an explanation as to why the validity and truth of a belief must be “bloody obvious" to any bloke on the street and why any other bloke that does not see the truth must be bonkers and deserving of whatever eternal outcomes that non-belief entails. So I agree that it seems darn hard to square that theological triangle of faith, free will and the logical certainty of religious truth. I can see why people desire iron clad, irrefutable proof of there transcendent beliefs to be true, but desire and practice don’t always align. And Pascal, whose achievements extend beyond the computer programming language he authored, that was popular in the 1980s and 1990s, also grasped the conundrum succinctly.
Note that the “Ironic Designer” concept, which extends the notion that only a designer could make a universe where design origins remain perpetually unknowable by physical phenomenon, once again aligns with what we see.
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It’s more accurate to say that Charles Darwin challenged the prevailing consensus at the time, which interpreted homology primarily through common design or archetype-based frameworks associated with Richard Owen. Owen accepted the structural similarities between organisms; the disagreement was over how those similarities should be explained—not over whether they existed in the first place.
If this moderator @jpm along with you really wants to see it, I will show it, as I said before.
You can distinguish the historicity of Genesis and John methodologically, but it’s not accurate to say conceptual parallels are irrelevant (or separate Genesis and the Gospels as a whole). John’s prologue is widely understood as intentionally echoing Genesis, so how one interprets Genesis inevitably influences how one understands John’s claims.
Pascal was one of the great geniuses of history, but he didn’t invent the programming language. It was named in his honor as the inventor of the first mechanical calculating machine, the Pascaline. He created it between the ages of 18-21. Besides his work in geometry (students still learn Pascal’s Theorem), he also invented the syringe based on his groundbreaking work in hydrostatics (how liquids respond to pressure).
Sorry. I’m a fan of the guy.
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I’m stepping carefully around this possible heffalump trap.
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There is a history of naming computer programming language after their inventors. For example, the eighteenth century Flemish metaphysical and optical experimenter, Willem Basique, created a language known as BASIC today (his name was translated improperly to English).
Also, Cadwallader Sharpe, a Scottish steam engineer and theoretical thermodynamics pioneer from the 19th century, passed his abbreviated name C# to the language he adapted. And how can we miss the talented, married couple, Prudence Coleman-Plus (in what was considered scandalous in 1830, taking a hyphenated last name with her husband’s) and Jeremiah Plus. In the 1840s they published a definitive, philosophical treatise on the meaning of life, while creating a programming language now known as C++.
All this work occurred at least centuries before the electronic devices capable of compiling these languages existed!
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BASIC (Beginner’s All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code)
created by John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz
Sorry, it was the first language I had to learn on my first job.
Edit: Color me slow to catch on.
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I started with BASIC too. Accessed on a mainframe via teletype from middle school. Also used to walk 10 miles to school, uphill both ways …
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You got to use a teletype! I had to use IBM punch cards which got transferred to paper tape. And what is this mainframe of which you speak?
I had to walk barefoot through 3 ft of snow in summer and winter.
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