I’ll wait and let someone more articulate do it. But that might impede your Nobel.
And as I’ve observed with tree frogs, they may not even have the conception that they are jumping from one tree to another; in their view, the world is made up of “branch space” and “no branch space”, where branches from two trees close enough to jump between them are just part of “branch space”.
When visiting a friend at UW (Seattle) we stopped one afternoon among trees on campus to watch the squirrels. It was evident that they actually assessed some leaps before making them, running out on a branch and coming to a sudden stop, looking across the gap at the next tree, sometimes trying running out that same branch, other times trying a different branch a bit higher up, and then either trying the jump or sometimes running down to the ground, looking all around, then making a dash to the target tree – but sometimes jumping and not reaching the intended branch and frantically grabbing one lower down.
I write that in order to point out that mutations that would make it easier to jump farther would be of obvious benefit, and if mutations actually happen then evolution is a conclusion as obvious as taking the freeway exit closest to your street destination.
Ditto that. It was fun hearing about the efforts of my oceanography / ocean biology professors to find species that plainly didn’t come from a common ancestor, and the similar efforts of my botany professors, so I’d love to hear it if there are some real issues found since then.
Well, we’ve already that the second one above is wrong, and from my university days I know the first one above is wrong, and the third isn’t science and so is useless.
That leaves:
- it cannot have foresight to build complex systems (And probability is against finding them)
- it cannot just change from one system to another (eg endothermic and ectothermic)
The first is silly, since “foresight” isn’t a part of evolution, and the second is making a claim evolution doesn’t.
But you just had to add:
And yes, we do know why: there are no scientific methods or instruments for detecting divine activity. But we also know that you want science to mix God in despite that, which shows (again) that you don’t understand science.
There is one. I’ve stated it. You rejected the idea that God is in control.
= - = + = - = + = - = + = - =
I dearly want to be here when that happens!
1 Like
Oh no – someone else who’s bad at science. Ecology doesn’t “guide evolution”, and “climate change” is not ecology.
Please go back and take a high school biology course! “Survival of the fittest” is what is observed, and the only places where it might not apply is when humans interfere.
2 Likes
That is Deism, pure and simple.
Why do you insist on denying that God is in control???
= - = + = - = + = - = + = - =
The Hebrew word in context means “the known world”; that may be the world the people at the time of the flood knew, or it may mean the world the writer knew, though usually it means what the people in an account knew, not the writer.
You do know that YECism is a recent deviation held by a minority of Christians, right?
Don’t expect any part of the scriptures to be whatever literary type they look like from reading them in modern English, and don’t count on translations being able to convey the meaning of the original words. In this case there is some interesting literary overlap: the word for “serpent” at root means “shining one”, which in ancient near eastern terms meant a heavenly being. In this case, we have “the shining one”, which seems like a reference to Lucifer since it means “light bearer”, so we’re not talking about any ordinary snake! It could have been outside the ordinary because it wasn’t a serpent at all, just the Shining One (Lucifer) taking the form of a serpent, or because it was a serpent and Lucifer took it over and used it like an avatar.
Two different topics. The Roman Catholic view, which was what got referenced, is essentially magic, that Jesus just sort of somehow emerged from Mary’s womb without leaving any of the usual physical traces and thus she was “ever-virgin”, totally physically intact despite having given birth [I think of it as “divine tunneling”, Jesus getting from inside the womb to out in the world without bothering to transit the route in between].
Every single time there’s something you don’t know! In fact when you don’t know, “I don’t know” is not just “a rational answer”, it is the only rational answer (unless maybe terrorists are saying they’ll feed your family to sharks unless you say something other than "I don’t know).
One is a process while the other is a condition/state, so it’s not quite the tautology it might appear.
1 Like
Deism (Wiki)
Deism is the philosophical position and rationalistic theology that generally rejects revelation as a source of divine knowledge, and asserts that empirical reason and observation of the natural world are exclusively logical, reliable, and sufficient to determine the existence of a Supreme Being as the creator
So I think not
Try again.
It is not that He can’t, only that He doesn’t.
The Bible is the start of faith, not a criterion for it. Denying experience is not healthy. Setting the Bible against experience is foolhardy.
If you want to believe that God deliberately kills people then so be it. But that is not the Christian belief
But you do not have to believe just me
Billy Graham
Or this article
The sovereignty of God
The general belief is that God has allowed the Devil free reign.
Deleted by author
That does not mean that everything is controlled by the Devil either, only that God is not in control of the minutia. Chance still exists.
Richard
They are:
How can God be sovereign over storms if he is not in control of air molecules.
The lot is cast into the lap, but its every decision is from the Lord.
Proverbs 16:33
Despite all the noise made by YEC, there is a quite longstanding discussion over whether the flood was global or regional. By roughly 1830, it became clear that geology indicated that the flood was regional. Modern YEC insistence on a global flood reflects the belief that it can be used to explain away geology, not sound exegesis. Ancient Hebrew had a rather limited vocabulary with extensive reliance on context to distinguish meanings, so the same word is “earth” and “land”; likewise, “hill” and “mountain” are the same word. Certainly, the fact that Genesis 2 describes the location of Eden in terms of more modern landscape features shows that the wildly destructive flood of modern young-earth imagination is not true to the Bible.
Impossibilities are exceptions to the normal, though it is an understatement. Indeed, rising from the dead is, to the best of our scientific knowledge, impossible. But that is the point in the account. It does not say that sometimes people rise from the dead. Rather, the Bible takes resurrection as specific examples of God acting in a way that is contrary to the “natural” way that things happen. Martha knew what comes out of an opened grave - bad smells, not people brought back to life. Of course, if you reject the possibility that such could happen, then you will not believe that it did. But the Bible agrees that resurrection is impossible except by a special action of God; scientific data agrees with that in finding that dead people stay dead.
Genesis 1-3 is full of symbolism. But symbolism can also be in historical events. The account is brief, with few details.
Again, birth and conception are two separate events (though of course one following from the other), muddled in popular terminology. No “natural” examples of virgin conception are reported for mammals, though many other species have the capacity.
2 Likes
First of all as I have been saying “Survival of the Fittest” has not been observed and no one has given me one example of one even though there has been 164 years of observation since the publication of the Origin in 1859 because no such example exist.
Second, we have been acting on the promise that Survival of the Fittest is the consensus understanding among scientists as to how natural selection works. A quick search of the internet proved that this is not true.
SOURCE
ENCYCLOPEDIC ENTRY
Natural Selection
Natural selection is the process through which species adapt to their environments. It is the engine that drives evolution. Emphasis added. from the National Geographic website…
That’s probably because you don’t understand what ‘survival of the fittest’ means. Not that ‘survival of the fittest’ is a term I’ve ever seen an evolutionary biologist used to describe natural selection.
‘Survival of the fittest’ is not a great description of selection, but it isn’t contradicted by the quotation you provided.
2 Likes
By the way, here’s what I think is a reasonable terse description of natural selection, in particular positive selection (selection for a new trait): ‘positive selection is the principle that beneficial traits—those that make it more likely that their carriers will survive and reproduce—tend to become more frequent in populations over time.’ (From here.)
2 Likes
Did you see who all the authors are?! 
Bro. Steve, thank you for your response. What does survival of the fittest?
What phrase do evolutionary biologists use to describe natural selection?
In my humble opinion the description which National Geographic uses to describe natural selection is a great one, and it does contradict Survival of the Fittest as it has been used by Darwin and evolutionists in that it is not about struggle but working together…
It means the (likely) survival of those that fit their environment the best. That environment includes other members of their species, other species in their ecosystem, and everything else they are exposed to.
“Natural selection”. Or sometimes just ‘selection’. If they have a particular kind of selection in mind, they might refer to it, e.g. positive selection or balancing selection.
Sometimes being fittest involves cooperating with conspecifics. Sometimes it involves biting their heads off. Whatever works – evolution doesn’t care.
1 Like
Something a rabbi & scholar I met at St. Louis University applies, I think:
“Insofar as He is not in control He is not God.”
But then the Jews have long been far more willing to uphold God’s sovereignty despite whatever dismay it may cause. One rabbi said of Auschwitz that God singled them out for that horrible fate, since if He hadn’t they wouldn’t have been the ones there.
And He does say, “I create calamity”, and given that the corollary is “I make wholeness (shalom)”, that is an assertion not about this calamity or that but about all calamity.
And this is of course true since God is the Creator of all things, so if there is an erupting volcano it is because He created that eruption. That He did so in accordance with the laws and constants He selected from the beginning does not allow us to “rescue” God from responsibility (a thought shred, interestingly, by a couple of Orthodox theologians in the East and a certain British university lay theologian.
1 Like
It’s worth noting that Hebrew אֶרֶץ when used to mean “earth” as in “all the earth” never refers to a globe (since they didn’t know it was one) and in the phrase “all the אֶרֶץ” it refers to a specific region, e.g. Israel or Judah or on the other end the world known to the person in the story (or, possibly, to the writer, though it’s unlikely the Genesis writer(s) would have seen any difference)/
Just as a matter of interest, describing old things in terms of places contemporary to the writer is fairly common in ancient Hebrew. A notable bit of confusion resulting from this has to do with the names given the cities that the Israelites are recorded as having worked on in Egypt, a situation that seems to have thrown off Old Testament chronology by centuries.
Quite the contrary: no exception has ever been observed. Species die out because they were not fit enough to deal with a changed environment.
All you have to do is watch a nature channel on TV: every time a cheetah brings down a springbok survival of the fittest is happening – and I don’t mean that the cheetah is fitter than the springbok, but that the springbok just caught was less fit than those that didn’t get caught.
It seems to me you don’t know what the term means.
Speaking of getting caught, isn’t there one about two guys being chased by a bear and the one says to the other, “I don’t have to run faster than the bear, I just have to run faster than you!”
1 Like
He created the storm on Galilee, he calmed the storm on Galilee. He ‘gave’ me kidney cancer (and I’m okay with that), he rescued me from it (and more significantly, he rescued my wife from losing me). À la Job,
“Shall we receive good from God, and shall we not receive evil?”
Job 2:10
And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose.
Romans 8:28
In all this you greatly rejoice, though now for a little while you may have had to suffer grief in all kinds of trials. These have come so that the proven genuineness of your faith – of greater worth than gold, which perishes even though refined by fire – may result in praise, glory and honor [to Jesus] when Jesus Christ is revealed.
1 Peter 1:6-7
I prefer to avoid the suggestion that I’ve misunderstood the authors.
1 Like
“Impossibilities are exceptions to the normal.” That seems to be false on its face. If a thing is impossible, it can’t exist, it is not a thing and can’t be an exception cuz if it was an exception, it would have to exist.
Ha, We Alaskans are familiar with that quip.
2 Likes