Once one has accepted the atheist bedtime story of evolution, any pseudo-scientific fairy tale is considered fair game.
Pigeon chess comes to mind.
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You may not be aware that neutral drift can add complexity. Or are you young earth as well? [Never mind, I see that you’re not] The Pope accepts evolution, I believe.
ZZZzzz…
Birds aren’t real. Didn’t you get the memo?
Which evolutionary mechanisms have empirically demonstrated that a mammal can evolve from a non-mammal, for example?
I believe in “evolution” too - in biology, “evolution” can be defined as a change in gene frequency within a population. So I don’t know of a single person who doesn’t accept “evolution”.
I also believe “evolution” is evident in the fossil record - ie, change and diversity over time.
By the way, Catholics are not obliged to accept whatever the Pope accepts about “evolution”. Catholics can believe the earth was created 6000 years ago if they want to.
First off, that would be amniotes evolving into amniotes.
Second, the nested hierarchy of morphological and genetic sequences demonstrates that evolutionary mechanisms are responsible for the biodiversity of amniotes we see today.
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it’s a change in allele frequency in a population
Talk to the PhDs in biostatistics and computational and mathematical biology. The mutational probabilities work out. You are just using intuition. (I’m okay with abiogenesis, too, in God’s providence.)
Which evolutionary mechanisms have empirically demonstrated that a human being can evolve from a single- cell organism?
When someone manages to breeds a mammal from a non-mammal, wake me up.
Meanwhile, I’ll continue to accept what thousands of years of animal and plant breeding strongly suggests … that one species cannot evolve into a different species by any natural means.
… and they are using theory, not empirical testing … which is as unconvincing and pointless as somone claiming to know how to cure cancer without actually curing anyone of cancer. Face it, no one can empirically demonstrate what biological mechanisms were responsible for the history of life on earth; the best anyone can do is theorize.
Theories that can’t be tested don’t even qualify as science - they’re just stories.
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If the mathematics say it can happen, it can happen. That is not at all to say that God did sovereignly guide and providentially intervene.
It is not entirely unlike our place and time in the cosmos.
Also,
Right, so if a scientists says, “My calculations indicate that I can cure cancer”, he must be correct.
You are equating theory with reality - how bizarre.
And how do you define theory in the scientific meaning of the word?
Well Edgar, I think you have a few choices at this point. Do you want to try and understand what it is that scientists actually think? Because that’s not what anyone who accepts evolution actually thinks.
How much do you think different species can change in a thousand years? For example, walk through this with me if you will.
Take two members of the same species and let’s say they start off with identical genomes. Suppose one of them goes west and the other goes east and they go their own ways for one thousand years. How different will their genomes be after that thousand years? Could this be enough to consider them different species? How would you define a species in the first place? Thank you for your thoughts and time, I think this could be a fruitful discussion if you are open to it.
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Again, the empirical evidence is the nested hierarchy.
If someone bred a mammal from a non-mammal in modern times that would falsify the theory of evolution.
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I’m pretty sure I did. Oh wait, … that’s right. I evolved from two single-cell organisms.
Evolution is demonstrable – no more a fantasy than the sun and the moon.
I know it hard to face the atheists who think that the Bible is a fantasy, when it is plain that very little of the Bible or its contents are demonstrable in any way – no more than any of the other 4,300 religions on the planet. It is especially hard when they push the delusion that their conclusions are a matter of reason rather than faith, when nothing could be more nonsensical. You cannot use reason at all without faith, and you certainly cannot do science without faith.
None of that changes the fact that the results of science are demonstrable when the claims of religion are not. This means there are written procedures which anyone can follow to get the same results no matter what you may want or believe. That is why most of Christianity accepts the findings of science, and why people from all different religions participate in the work of science just fine. You only need to look in a telescope to see the moons of Jupiter and know that they exist, just as you can follow thousands of different procedures to confirm the conclusion that evolution is the origin of the species.
But measuring the truth of religion against that of science makes little sense. Science studies the things that we can isolate, dissect, measure, predict, explain and control, while religion is about things where this is mostly impossible. It certainly means you can have a much greater expectation that other people should agree with you when it comes to science than with religion. And this is certainly an obstacle for those who want to push their religion on other people, but that includes religious opinions of the atheists as much as any other religious opinions. But then I think that is a abuse of religion to change it into a tool of power and politics rather than anything to do with God and Jesus (like communism/Marxist-Leninism as opposed to atheism – changing a religious opinion into something evil).
Stephen Jay Gould’s “Nonoverlapping Magisteria” outlines some interesting ideas.
Even Gould admits that this idea isn’t perfect, but it is still pretty good in my opinion. Atheist and theist scientists work side by side all of the time, and there is no conflict 99.99% of the time. Science and religion are simply asking different questions, much like the disconnection between Is and Ought that Hume spoke about.