Indeed, for me personally and I think for many on this forum, that is one of the driving forces toward evolutionary creationism. When faced with the overwhelming evidence of an ancient earth, and the implications of that, along with the evidence for evolution, you are faced with either God being a liar and deciever in creation, or the historical scientific interpretation position is wrong. Ultimately, as the Bible declares that God’s nature and glory is seen through creation, to accept the young earth position means the Bible is wrong if you believe in a true and holy God.
I know your reply will go something like, “you are putting man’s word above God’s word,” but that does not hold up as creation is God’s revelation also, and even the Bible we read is the result of man’s interpretation.
Gotta to go to church, have a blessed day.
You are correct here, without a doubt! I think the Scient"ism" is what people often rightly object to rather than the science itself. However, most detractors find it very difficult to counter the ideology without attacking the science, too. But they are indeed two separate things.
Thanks for your kind words, @dredge. I realize that you are doing exactly the same thing as I am, just from a different perspective. I certainly appreciate that.
We don’t see it because there’s no reason that we should see it. The fact that you think evolution would produce horizontal gradualism suggests you have some kind of deep misunderstanding of evolution.
Fantastic. So, the only way you can be convinced is if no species ever went extinct … and all iterations of a population were still alive for your viewing benefit?!
Physicists know about black holes… but would you only be satisfied that they exist if we could make a black hole right here on Earth?
My dear fellow, you are arguing about something as ordinary and as reasonable as speciation. And there are already Young Earth Creationists who accept speciation.
So… please get with the program! Once you “confess” that Speciation exists, we can then move on to tackle the issue of large scale changes through speciation.
Naturally, the Creationists featured in the links below oppose Evolution. But they support Speciation. So when you have caught up with your peers in this matter, we can proceed to show why their views on Speciation are correct, but their views on Evolution are incorrect.
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A third link, which may not trigger a “box” around it:
Sorry, Lynn … no, it doesn’t help. I find creation to be a perfectly satisfactory explanation for what I observe in nature. Imo, the theory that all life shares a common ancestor is nothing more than a Godless creation story invented to meet the psychological needs of atheists. But it has managed to dominate the biological sciences to the point that it is now regarded as “fact”. Apparently, the vast majority of individuals who make up the scientific community have long been atheistic, so it should come as no surprise that their Godless belief system is the prevailing paridigm. As Lewontin used to say, they “cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.”
Besides that, using ToE to explain an observation is not my idea of a applied scientific use. For example, if someome comes up with a theory that supposedly explains why “birds lay eggs and bats don’t”, of what practical use is that? This is no more than story-telling and “paper science”, as far as I can tell. (Incidentally, since birds do lay eggs and bats don’t, creation makes much more sense than common descent!)
In a discussion I recently had on another online forum, an atheist claimed that the theory that all life shares a common ancestor was useful in developing swine flu vaccine. I asked to explain how this is so, but no answer was forthcoming, neither from him nor any of his fellow-atheist posters.
You make a very bold statement by arguing that Common Descent has not been demonstrated… and that there isn’t any evidence for a mixing of kinds.
And here we have Lions and Tigers making fertile offspring of Ligers and Tigons.[/quote]
Lions and tigers and Ligers and Tigons are all still pussy cats - ie, they belong to the same kind.
When a certain field of science makes the claim that the evidence supports ToE, I strongly suspect that huge doses of wishful thinking, wild extrapolation and philosophical tendentiousness are involved. For example, the claim is made that Lenski’s mutating E-coli is evidence that supports the theory that all life shares a common ancestor (according to this logic, human beings will one day run the 100m-sprint in one second!)
Lots of repetitions of the mantra, “only evolution can explain this” always come in handy, too.
When scientists make claims about what happened millions or billions of years ago, I just tune out. They could be talking truth or they could be talking complete and utter nonsense - which is why I find listening to their theorising rather pointless and rather boring. Facts are so much more interesting than stories.
I am talking about predictions, not (primarily) explaining observations. The huge body of successfully explained observations is useful insofar as it tells us we can rely with confidence on the theory to predict future observations, like whether a drug will work the same and not be harmful across species. Or how similar their DNA looks and if it codes for the same proteins. It is the whole point of a good theory to have predictive power.
Huh? How so? Because it means flight would have had to evolve twice independently? Or counting insects and pterosaurs, four times. Considering how many gliding creatures there are to start with, that’s reasonable.
Which is entirely your right. What you don’t get to do is to then turn around and tell us that we’re engaging in “huge doses of wishful thinking, wild extrapolation and philosophical tendentiousness” when you haven’t paid any attention to what we’re doing or saying. (And don’t kid yourself that you’re here to learn if that’s what you’re doing.) If you want to engage the science, great – do the work to figure out what we’re doing and why we think what we think. [quote=“Dredge, post:69, topic:35830”]
Facts are so much more interesting than stories.
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Sorry, but there ain’t no such thing. Every fact, apart from simple sense impressions, exists only as a statement in a story, a story that humans have constructed to make sense of their world. Some you construct unconsciously – object permanence, the existence of other people – and some are constructed consciously and collectively. But they’re all part of stories – historical facts, geographic facts, scientific facts, all of them. If you’re using a computer and communicating by internet, you’re relying on theoretical stories that scientists have constructed. Your problem isn’t with stories rather than facts: it’s that you don’t like some of the stories, so you feel entitled to reject them out of hand.[quote=“Dredge, post:68, topic:35830”]
Lots of repetitions of the mantra, “only evolution can explain this” always come in handy, too.
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A gibe that would be more telling if you could offer something other than evolution to explain the data. You’re actually mocking people for accepting the best explanation available, when you have nothing better to give them?
So your argument goes something like this:
Premise: Scientists are atheists who need a creation story other than the biblical one for psychological reasons.
Premise: So many scientists are atheists that whatever the atheists think has to dominate scientific thought.
Conclusion: What atheist scientists believe for purely psychological reasons now dominates scientific thought and is regarded as fact.
But it is actually a myth that the vast majority of scientists are atheists. And you have multiple people on this website who are scientists and not atheists who have no psychological need for an alternate creation story. So it seems to me, your premises fail.
How are the multiple lines of converging evidence for an ancient universe not facts then? They are based on math and measurements. It is hard to get more objective than that. I don’t see how an atheist worldview plays into counting tree rings or ice varves. Or measuring red shift. Or calculating half lives of isotopes. You have to ignore piles of facts to think the earth is 6,000 years old and find the story that God created the world to look ancient even though it is pretty interesting.
Ah, @Dredge, I had such high hopes… I naively hoped that with enough assurance that Bible-believing, Christ-following, brothers and sisters with scientific experience agreed with the vast majority of evidence from multiple scientific fields that supports ToE, then you might open yourself up to scientific arguments. It appears I was sadly mistaken.
Who made this claim? I have never read anything from Lenski making such a claim. However, his data is very interesting and is useful for countering the argument that “mutations are never beneficial, only harmful!”. Here is the abstract from a very recent paper:
“Evolution is an on-going process, and it can be studied experimentally in organisms with rapid generations. My team has maintained 12 populations of Escherichia coli in a simple laboratory environment for >25 years and 60 000 generations. We have quantified the dynamics of adaptation by natural selection, seen some of the populations diverge into stably coexisting ecotypes, described changes in the bacteria’s mutation rate, observed the new ability to exploit a previously untapped carbon source, characterized the dynamics of genome evolution and used parallel evolution to identify the genetic targets of selection. I discuss what the future might hold for this particular experiment, briefly highlight some other microbial evolution experiments and suggest how the fields of experimental evolution and microbial ecology might intersect going forward.”
It contains nothing about common ancestry. You wouldn’t possibly be setting up a straw man, would you?[quote=“Dredge, post:68, topic:35830”]
(according to this logic, human beings will one day run the 100m-sprint in one second!)
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I really don’t know what to do with this other than point out that arguing in the absurd does NOT increase the validity of your argument.
Innovators always destroy the old dogma. Deeper understanding is damaging to previous shallower understanding. The old Darwinist dogma must go as the theory fails all five tests for scientific hypothesis: Observed? Replicated? Falsifiable? Predictive power? Illuminates other areas of science? “In the case of Evolution…well…no…no…no…no…and no” (Tom Wolfe); let me add “illogical”.
This makes no sense. 1) Pure breeds are kept isolated to stay “pure”. 2) Yes, so? How would this be different that “natural evolution”? 3) Breeders don’t want regular mutts but the craziest “most evolved” dogs - if possible, even dogs with wings, neon color, ultra smart, big as an elephant, etc. etc.
Before replying, read. It is presented as “evolution in action” - only there’s no evolution at all.
Yes they are very different and that’s the point: mix in transition regions, but no gradualism. Get it?
I don’t. You do! Remember “evolution”?
Please don’t insult by “explaining” modeling. Your problem is: modeling cannot contravene reality. And what modeling did Darwin do when he postulated gradualism? None whatsoever.
What does this fluff even mean? Bottom line, Lenski’s is sold as “evolution in action”, hence snake oil. What “speciating” mice? I searched and see more fluff that amounts to no evidence of anything. Besides, no such thing as species, remember?
Chris, your comments suggest that you gouge your eyes out to demonstrate that you don’t see how illogical Darwin’s evolution is. How does this look? And how about refraining from this type of comments?
A statement without support. Why am I not surprised? Better take some time to think through this horizontal-vertical gradualism.
What on earth is Lenski even saying? 1) and 2) Dude, you’re in a lab with conditions that you create - you are the “natural selection”. 3) Meaning what? Everything mutates all the time. What changed in the lab you control? 4) How do you know is “new ability”? What happens when you release these in the wild? Do they die or take over the e-coli universe with their dual metabolism? 5) Meaningless fluff.
You haven’t supported your claim that science is done by the outsiders by definition. Could you list some of the outsiders – people not even trained in science – who have made important contributions to the development of physics in the last 150 years? [quote=“NonlinOrg, post:75, topic:35830”]
A statement without support. Why am I not surprised? Better take some time to think through this horizontal-vertical gradualism.
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Were you under the impression that you had offered any support for your claim?
Okay, I’ve taken some time to think through horizontal-vertical gradualism. My conclusion is that your claim on the subject reflects a deep misunderstanding of evolution. When two populations cease to exchange genetic material, they begin independent trajectories in evolution. There is no reason at all that their descendants should form a continuum in all or in any traits. If you think there is a reason, offer it.
Similarly, when a population speaking a single language splits into two, the language evolves independently in both, and there is no reason to expect their descendants to display a continuous range of language between the two descendants. Why would you expect there to be horizontal gradualism between speakers of modern German and modern English, for example?
I don’t have the patience to keep repeatedly countering each of your arguments, especially when you either ignore evidence or change you arguments mid-conversation.
Let me point out that you brought up Lenski as a “failed experiment” because E. coli is still E. coli, even after 27 years.
I point out that no one expected a completely new organism to have evolved in such a short time frame. Your argument abruptly changes to:[quote=“NonlinOrg, post:75, topic:35830”]
Before replying, read. It is presented as “evolution in action” - only there’s no evolution at all.
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Why does your argument about Lenski change so dramatically from one post to the next? Could it be that you simply misunderstand the science behind it, so you can’t critique it fairly?
I don’t see how the development of mutation-based functional changes over time does not constitute “evolution in action”. You have repeatedly demonstrated a lack of understanding regarding what evolution is or what it does. How can you expect to do anything innovative if you don’t understand the basic principles?
I would love to come up with innovative ways to reduce traffic congestion, but I would have to know a little bit about what it is and how it works before I came up with any innovative solutions.
I realize there was a lot more to your post, but I’ll not address it unless you promise to actually consider someone else’s counter-argument instead of immediately dismissing it.
I do and you do, but most people don’t. We need to help them.
Outsiders to the establishment. Don’t read what’s not there.
Yes, you did think more. Under gradualism their descendants or some sort of “convergent evolution” - I don’t care - would form a continuum. As long as the environment transition is smooth, biologic diversity should also transition smoothly. Instead we have overlap of drastically different biology over the same environment. Your population example is opposite to what you want as Germanic people occupy the same extended region, with the only abrupt transitions explained by natural and later administrative barriers. Recently we have migration but mixed marriages are once again smoothing these differences. This is not what we see in nature.
Where do you see a change? E.coli into e.coli is not “evolution”. Simple! What “mutation-based functional changes”?
What “lack of understanding”? Disagreements are not “lack of understanding”. Do you understand the disagreements?
In fact, I do not, and neither does “evolution,” because all descendants of dogs will still fall into the classification ‘canid’ no matter how morphologically bizarre they may become.
There, I supported @glipsnort’s claim for you! Do you believe it now?
It was rather tempting to quote everything you’ve ever said about evolution as supporting evidence, but that would be a daunting amount of work and frankly I don’t think you’d change your mind about much, if anything.
If you’re only in this to refine counterarguments, and you have never even considered re-evaluating the validity of your core propositions, and you don’t cite sources or support your statements when asked, except to insult the asker, why should it be worth our time to present you with thoughtful, researched responses?
Eventually, I’m sure the Moderators will figure out a “best practice” for giving the missionaries a “grace period” for all their preaching …
A component of the “Best Practice” might include the idea that “Repetition Has Consequences!” :
When after they repeat the same issue, say… , three (3) times … (or maybe four times?) … They are put in a restricted digital “play area” where compassionate and loving Evolutionists can still debate with them (on the same topics, over and over and over again) … without disrupting everyone else.
But I’m an old man; I have little optimism that I will see such a day here in BioLogos…
I will “Flag” all your future posts that even mention dog breeding/speciation. The Dog situation (and the others as well) has been well explained to you. I’ll state a one sentence summation as a courtesy: “A dog breeder that developed a breed that could no longer be crossed with all the other dog breeds would lose access to thousands of phenotypes lovingly cultured in the dog species by thousands of breeders.”
Your expectation that dog breeders should be creating new dog species is wrong, wrong-headed, and an indication of how little you understand how speciation occurs in nature.