Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
275
A good failed analogy, i.e. nice rhetoric : ) that initially beguiles; distracts as does all rhetoric. We made up baseball and its rules. We infer science. Not the same secularity.
Just as God has nothing, can have nothing theistically to do with the baseball as it travels through the air, He has nothing theistically to do with life as it arises and evolves. If He grounds being then that’s where He has always lit the touch paper, prior to each of the infinity of universes from eternity: Theistic Evolution becomes Deistic Instantiation. Evolutionary Creationism becomes Instantiatory Creationism. More accurate, but too abstruse; God is the immanent transcendent ground of being revealed only in Jesus. He is deist for humanity in everything except Jesus and the Spirit. Not theistically in parabolas in three-space. Or the Book of Jonah.
The only argument for God is Jesus. Jesus is the argument for God. Incredulity at ATP synthase isn’t.
Since you have admitted an inability to understand even basic evidence supporting evolution, you’re hardly in a position to judge how well supported it is. To clarify things for you, ‘gravity’ isn’t a scientific theory. Newton’s Law of Universal Gravitation is a theory of gravity, as is General Relativity. Like the idea of universal gravitation, the idea of universal common descent is so well supported that it is treated as a fact by all those constructing theories about the subject. The difference is that, with evolution, we know why it occurs, while we really don’t know what gravity is or why it exists.
Comparing the two is like comparing an incomplete jigsaw with a grandmaster painting.
Evolution tries to piece together the theory and has not a complete picture. Newton’s Law of Universal Gravity is complete and has the empirical data to verify it. Evolution cannot go back and actually watch the changes it claims (empirical data). All it can do is use other theories and paper trails (fossils) to form the theory.
Details matter here. Newtonian gravity is not complete, and yields incorrect predictions, for instance in regards to the precession of mercury. We know general relativity is not complete either. Like any successful theory, evolution is a generalization basic principles which have been soundly established by the evidence.
I cannot go back and chat with Caesar either, but he lived. Time travel is impossible, but the mechanisms of evolution have been observed in real time. We have seen mutation and selection in action with SARS -CoV-2. Sure it is still a virus and didn’t change into an elephant. The point is that there are many observed examples of selection on variation. The fossil record presents many instances of intermediate forms that you cannot just hand wave away by folksy analogues and antics such as calling feathers to be leaves.
But you see no reason why, in a few billion years it couldn’t?
Can’t you see that all the data you have is either very short-term and limited, or based on other theories and, dare I say, assumptions, to make it happen?
Have you ever seen a dinosaur? How do you know, for certain what its components are? Recent disputes over the metabolisms demonstrate that you cannot.
And as for the claimed matriarch of all mammals and/or reptiles (etc) You cannot even offer a guess at what it might look like, or what components it might have in terms of size, shape, metabolisms, organs and so on. You do not even have a fossil. But it must exist. Why? Because Evolutionary theory says so? How paradoxical is that?
Perhaps I could have chosen a better scientific theory than Newton’s but the comparison is the same. Evolution is not based on visual, on the spot, measuring of the progressions it claims existed. And can never be because you do not have that precious time machine.
There are such massive mountains of evidence supporting common descent that it is treated as a fact amongst biologists. Your inability to address this evidence does not make it go away.
We don’t have to watch an event in the past in order to have mountains of evidence that it occurred.
Once again, you ignore the mountains of genetic evidence.
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Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
290
Some of us have come a long way from the early Ivy League preachers. Some haven’t.
The first ichnite found was in 1800 in Massachusetts, US, by a farmer named Pliny Moody, who found 1-foot (31 cm) long fossilized footprints. They were thought by Harvard and Yale scholars to be from “Noah’s Raven”.[1]
For crying out loud! Your evidence is circumstantal at best. Genetics does not prove shape , form, and constitution. You do not know precisely how DNA “grows” creatures. You do not know which sequence does what or how corrupting a sequence or changing it will affect the whole. You do not even seem to care if one system, organ, or feature is dependent on any other. All you seem to care about is your mathematical connections.
This is hilarious, but I doubt I could explain to you why. But thank you, you made me smile.
No, I have not seen a dinosaur. That is a picture of an Ostrich. Dinosaurs are extinct. Only Evolution claims that a coelacanth is a dinosaur (and you didn’t even show me that) Whether birds came from dinosaurs or not is still an open debate, and does not make a bird a dinosaur any more than a domestic duck is a Dodo.
I could not offhand tell you for most genes, but some of the standard ones used for phylogenetic analyses include 28S, 18S, 16S, 12S, and 5.8S, which encode ribosome components; COXI, which encodes part of the electron transport chain, and H3, which encodes certain histones.
Given the number of genetic disorders with known causes, plenty of people do.
Attributing the ridiculous to a theory rather than to its proponents is pretty transparent … especially for those of us as at home in the abstract as he imagines only himself to be.
Forgive me, but there is no easy or clear way to establish who does or does not understand the abstract other than to read the responses. My observation would be that scientists in general neither do, or want to understand abstract reasoning.
No it is I who need forgiving for slipping into snark. I don’t dislike you but it surprises me that you actually think scientists should pay more heed to the abstract than to the empirical. It also seems a little unkind to suggest they lack capacity for the abstract merely for choosing to emphasize the empirical where that is what the field requires. I find much of science challenging to follow, and it is the abstract nature of the concepts that make it so. I do feel it would be more honest to admit it isn’t any deficit on their part but your own attachment to the idea that a plain reading of the Bible is preferable to one requiring more nuance. I’d think your esteem for the abstract would make that the more interesting path of interpretation.
I don’t wish to appear judgemental or to claim that the abstract is better or wore than the empirical. nor do I intend insult when claiming a lack of understanding or abiltiy. Like many things, they are just different. I might suggest that if you have a tendency to look at things in an empirical way you might not value the abstract. That would also be an observation.
There might be a bit of one-upmanship involved when I use abstract arguments in an empirical environment whereby the scientists have been claiming superior knowledge and position.
However it does seem to me thst there are certain abstracts and repercussions of the Evolutionary theory that are missed because they are not looked for or valued, that might affect the immutable nature of the theory. It also seems to me that the cohesion of a theory should take into account the repercussions and practicalities involved in applying it when declaring it to be “law” (Scientific linguistics accepted/excepted.) Which almost certainly involves the abstract.
Or maybe it is a little like religion where you have to commit to a path?
Somehow I doubt they’d be taking that tack if it were a theological point you’d wanted to debate. When the topic the choice of weapons is proscribed. If you want to argue based on something other than science - as I most often do too - I’d pick a topic other than what is empirically true. Frankly I wish you would make an abstract argument for why a plain reading of the Bible is superior while arguments regarding science should be more flexible.
