What are your thoughts on this, @RichardG ?
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All your ancestors were human. You could trace back further if the records exist. There is no reason to doubt it.
But that is not what Evolution does.
Your ancestry is not part of evolution unless you can prove that your ancestors were different in some way, be it generally smaller, or less intelligent, or maybe have a different complexion or feature ratio. All these things are part of evolution, not specifically ancestry, at least that used to be the case. Now I am not so sure.
Richard
How? That is an oxymoron. A completely mutually exclusive contradiction. It would make God as deceptive as the YEC God, going to perfectly insane, insanely perfect lengths to pretend that He’d not created the cosmos in six days. It’s on the same spectrum of infantilization of God born of incredulity at Drake Mallard’s speculum, or that He made a living submarine for Jonah, or any analogy we make of Him, even encouraged by Him, as involved with us, as relational, literal, so.
Think about probabilities over a distribution of outcomes, @Klax. Any outcome in the distribution falls within the scope of what can happen according to the laws of probability.
That’s all I’m saying. All the gentle words about infantilization and deception are based on a misunderstanding of my claim.
Grace and peace,
Chris
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You weren’t there; how do you know? No one wrote down anything about my ancestry.
You can offer no proof whatsoever that my ancestry dates back to AD 1 or further. As far as the records and observations go, my ancestry could date back to miraculously created 18th century families (with no ancestry) in Belgium and Germany.
Actually, it very much is.
Mutations have been accumulating in H. Sapiens due to drift and adaptation since my many thousands of ancestors were alive in AD 1. In the past hundred years, retention of the median artery in the forearm as the result of a regulator gene mutation is well on its way to giving humanity 3 forearm arteries instead of 2. (Source)
Five different mutations dating as far back as 25k years ago have resulted in widespread (but not universal) lactase persistence. Moreover, the evolution of lactase persistence continues among humans.
Thus there is no good reason to doubt ongoing change as we go back in time. Yes, our ancestors 25k years ago were H. Sapiens. But we know from fossil and archaeological evidence that H. Sapiens traces back no farther than about 200kya. We see other species of Homo (such as Erectus) in earlier geological strata. And prior to that we see various species of Australopithecines.
And prior to that is the common ancestral population of Homo and Pan, according to the genomic evidence.
The different feature ratios in the number of forearm arteries and lactase persistence is very clear.
The lineage from Austrolopithecines to early Homo to H. Sapiens is also very clear.
Grace and peace,
Chris Falter
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Chris, your claim is still an oxymoron. If God intervened via, in stochastic phenomena that is a violation of the laws and principles by which the universe is governed. What’s not to understand? God does not intervene theistically, if He did it would show up in the stats. He doesn’t heal, He doesn’t protect Christians from plane and car crashes, He doesn’t tweak genes, augment natural selection, fine tune. If He did it would show. What am I missing?
We don’t know the principles by which the universe is governed. All we know is our models of those principles.
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The lot is cast into the lap, but its every decision is from the Lord. Proverbs 16:33
God is sovereign over time and place, timing and placing, but how he effects his will is not probabilistically detectable. We do have objective evidence of his orchestration and choreography, however. It shows.
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I have never queried the development of Homo. I have never questioned Homo erectus or any other that you have mentioned. My belief is that God created Homo. Your belief is that Homo somehow emerged from a reptilian egg, or something. IOW I am not contesting recent evolution. I am contesting the distant stuff that you still have little or no proof actually occurred other than a few perceived similarities and a theory that insists on it.
Most fossils are based on a very limited period of time. But the theory covers millions of years before that. Based on what? Based on what came afterwards!
Richard
What is missing is the absence of denialism.
The glib answer is understanding. The second answer is the ramifications of God having nothing to do with how His creation developed. Your view involves either a ridiculous built-in design that could unfold over billions of years like some intricate learning automaton or a belief that humanity is the product of fluke and not the intended pinnacle of God’s creation.
And the ramifications of your belief is that Prayer is a waste of time because God is just sitting on the sidelines watching us grow. He doesn’t even need to add food or water, the whole thing is self-sustaining, self-nurturing, and self-destructing all in one. He made it, but that is the limit of both His involvement and His interest.
Sorry, that is not a description of a god who is worth my worship.
Richard
I was quoting Chris. And they are synonyms for all practical purposes. My point remains, God never uses stochastic ‘phenomena’ to intervene. Any intervention, as per post-Biblical claims by Christians, especially in the modern era, you know, since Darwin, would break the stastitical surface. Nothing does.
Would it? If paleoanthropology is reasonably accurate, there have there been billions of mutations in the past 6M years in the lineage leading through Australopithecus to Homo. Any providential choices God might have exercised throughout that period would be indistinguishable from noise. Which is another way of saying:
Grace and peace,
Chris
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We have objective evidence of God’s preternatural dealings with his children. It is no stretch to extrapolate such scientifically and probabilistically undetectable interventions to his sovereignty over evolution, as well. We have an M.O.
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Might be a bit difficult to prove in a manner that a scientist would accept.
Richard
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I don’t know what Dale says. Evolution doesn’t need God’s noise. In fact interfering with nature, you lose. Not just on an industrial scale, but tweaking; natural selection won’t take kindly to that. A mutation before its time is doomed.
No one was suggesting otherwise. We do, however, have evidence, an M.O., of how God works in providence, so scientists should not be dismissive. (And it covers evolution, as well, so neither should you be dismissive.)
The connection between chimps and humans is no different than the connection between humans and other species.
All you are doing is placing an arbitrary line between large and small changes. What is it in the small changes that can not add up to large changes?
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Do you really think this is what @Chris_Falter is proposing?
The theory proposes that Homo evolved from more basal apes, not egg-laying reptiles. You do realize this, right?
It is not similarities that provide the evidence. It is the PATTERN OF SIMILARITIES.
All of those fossils fit into the nested hierarchy predicted by the theory of evolution. We don’t find mammal fossils with feather impressions. We don’t find bird fossils with three middle ear bones.
We also have DNA evidence which has provided mountains of evidence for common ancestry, and you continue to ignore it.
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Well you know there is that problem with building enough bridges to cross the Atlantic. 
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