The Fall of Historical Adam, (Federal Head of man), impacts all of humanity to need Christ's Salvation

[Burrawang]

Thanks Marshall for your well considered responses.

@Marshall

You accept that evolution can diversify creatures so that one pair of cats produces all species of big and small cats, one pair of dogs produces all canids, one pair of horses produces all equines.

No I don’t, I accept that Natural Selection can select from existing information that God in His omniscience designed into the genome but that is most definitely not evolution.

Your words, “You (I) accept that evolution can diversify creatures” and that is the problem right there.
Whether you realise it or not, it is the equivocation of using the term ‘Natural Selection’ as a surrogate for ‘Evolution’. The terms are NOT interchangeable in the microbes to humans evolution sense.
Natural Selection is just that it is selection from already existing information.
whereas,
Evolution claims to explain the ascent and diversification of life on Earth that logically of necessity requires unimaginably enormous quantities of highly complex novel information that specifies for the uphill increasingly irreducibly complex changes that evolution claims have occurred.

A dog is still a dog and a cat is still a cat,sure there is great variation built into the genetics, but a veterinarian can work on any cat or any dog using the same biological knowledge. Sure things might get a bit tight in some of the smaller varieties, for example Chihuahua’s but they are ALL Canis lupus familiaris without exception. Where there is broader change such that a cat has variation that our taxonomic conventions put as different species,such as domestic cat and tiger and lion etc. they are still all cats,and as such I expect they likely all fall within the same Biblical kind that Noah took on the Ark. Of course there may be some examples that are in a separate Biblical kind, we just don’t have enough information from scripture to know for certain where the precise kind boundaries are, but if a horse can produce a Zorse and Lion can produce a Liger and all domestic dog breeds can theoretically interbreed even if the logistical practicality (due to size variations) is at times difficult, Artificial Insemination allows it to occur. But the type of change that is required by evolution is NOT demonstrated here.
Again Natural Selection is NOT Evolution, it is a component of evolution theory just as it a component of Creation but the two terms are most definitely NOT interchangeable.

@Marshall

But what of all the other transitions? Where is the sequence showing Homo floresiensis becoming Homo sapiens (or vice versa) or Neandertal becoming either a normal human or a chimp, depending on which you accept?

There is no sequence because those examples are either fully human with pathology or dwarfism or they are not human and represent and extinct specie of primate.
Regarding “The Hobbit”. Homo floresiensis.
“That new, much older date range for H. floresiensis makes it ‘impossible to argue that it is a pathologically-dwarfed modern human,’ says Russell Ciochon, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Iowa in Iowa City who was not involved in the study. ‘In my opinion, this paper drives the final nail in the coffin’ of that hypothesis.” [Reference: Gramling, C., The ‘hobbit’ was a separate species of human, new dating reveals, 30 Mar 2016, science.org/content/article/hobbit-was-separate-species-human-new-dating-reveals, This article gives a concise summary of the redating, and the reason for doing so.]

As for Neandertal, it is clear that they were all fully human and descendants of Noah’s family on the Ark, they are a variation of humanity within a geographically isolated community from the original variability within the genome that God originally created, that has given rise to all variations in humanity, things such as skin colour, hair colour, height, etc.but at the end of the day all one human family, every man woman and child on this planet is family as far as I am concerned, distant family perhaps in many cases going back up to four and a half thousand years but family none the less.

@Marshall

The reality is that we don’t have a perfectly finely graded set of fossils of every set of creatures to exist, and others have already provided some of the obvious reasons why we shouldn’t expect to have that.

There are hundreds of millions of fossils from all over the world now that weren’t discovered in Darwin’s time, he had but a tiny fraction to look at and so can be excused, but your claim wears very thin because we do have a very large collection globally of fossils and therefore the plain and simple reason why “we don’t have a perfectly finely graded set of fossils of every set of creatures” is that evolution didn’t happen!

As I said previously, the difference between us is not about the evidence per se, it is about the framework through which the evidence is viewed.,
I’ll stick with the Bible as I know God can be trusted to mean what He says and say what He means.

God Bless,
jon

[rsewell (RON SEWELL)]

@Burrawang

I accept that Natural Selection can select from existing information that God in His omniscience designed into the genome but that is most definitely not evolution.

Given that humans and chimpanzees are genetically closer than foxes are to dogs, and rodents such as mice are to rats, by your reasoning humans and chimpanzees should just be different varieties of the ape kind? They were selected from already existing information. After all an ape is still an ape.

@Burrawang

As I said previously, the difference between us is not about the evidence per se, it is about the framework through which the evidence is viewed

No. The evidence is clearly in support of an ancient earth and evolution. You have a predetermined conclusion and reality has no bearing on that.

[jammycakes (James McKay)]

@Burrawang

[Reference: Gramling, C., The ‘hobbit’ was a separate species of human, new dating reveals, 30 Mar 2016, science.org/content/article/hobbit-was-separate-species-human-new-dating-reveals, This article gives a concise summary of the redating, and the reason for doing so.]

From the article:

A chief argument underpinning the diseased Homo sapiens hypothesis was the original 18,000-year age of the fossils—long after H. sapiens arrived in southeast Asia and Australia. However, that 18,000-year-old date was based on only a geological analysis of the fossils’ surroundings and not on direct analysis of the bones themselves. And the complexity of the cave’s geology initially misled the scientists, says Matthew Tocheri, a paleoanthropologist at Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, Ontario, Canada, and a member of the discovery team.

(Emphasis mine.)

What this shows is that geologically complex settings can be difficult to date accurately, requiring detailed and extensive surveys rather than just one or two samples. Young earthists take this as evidence that geologically much simpler settings must also be impossible to date at all. This is like arguing that just because the Antikythera Mechanism can’t tell you the time in 2024, that somehow a brand new atomic clock can’t tell you the time in 2024 either.

@Burrawang

There is no sequence because those examples are either fully human with pathology or dwarfism or they are not human and represent and extinct specie of primate.

Yet it only takes a quick Google search to find multiple pictures of a whole series of hominid skulls, showing a clear progression of increasing brain sizes all the way from chimp-like up to modern day human. People who claim that there is no sequence and who believe that they are all either fully human or fully ape need to explain exactly how to identify which is which.

[rsewell (RON SEWELL)]

@Burrawang

As for Neandertal, it is clear that they were all fully human and descendants of Noah’s family on the Ark

Not even Nathaniel Jeanson, with his fantastical chronology of mitochondrial and Y chromosome haplogroups, was able to account for Neanderthal DNA as descended from Noah’s family.

[glipsnort (Steve Schaffner)]

@Burrawang

Firstly, how/why do you claim to know what I do and don’t know?

I’ve read what you’ve written here. You posted nothing that indicated any knowledge of population genetics, ignored pop gen subjects when I wrote about them, and dealt with the field only by cutting and pasting material from people whom I know don’t have expertise in the subject and who have made clear errors.

But I often make mistakes and I’m always happy to be corrected. Do you mean that you do have first-hand knowledge of population genetics? What pop gen studies have you done? Where are they published? (My publications can be found here).

@Burrawang

an attempt at brow beating.

Keep in mind that you opened this exchange with this: “The false belief of evolution was initially established through ignorance, deception and people wishing to be seen as intelligent intellectuals up to date with the latest science.” I’m not sure that you’re in a position to complain here.

@Burrawang

Of course a genome is not an encyclopaedia, it is a poor comparison granted, but it serves the purpose I intended quite well.

The purpose you intended was to argue that a genome could not tolerate lots of random changes – because an encyclopedia couldn’t. But an encyclopedia isn’t anything like a genome in that very aspect. As an analogy, it’s misleading about how robust the genome is to change, how wide a range of differences lead to similar outcomes, and how easily it is to generate new function through random changes. Since the analogy fails to give us any reason to think that genomes can’t handle lots of mutations, what reasons can you provide?

@Burrawang

But don’t you see, that regardless of the number of changes that damage the information in a finite system as in the genome, and it would be in the millions and quite possibly billions, the genome will certainly NOT have as much useful coded information in it at any point along the way as each generation is less fit than the previous because those changes have accumulated from mutations such as transpositions, deletions and insertions, typos if you will and of course have compounded to the point we are at right now in the present.

That’s a restatement of your claim, not a reason to think the claim is correct.

@Burrawang

If you start with a near ‘perfect’ genome as I suggest Adam would have had, (hence the long lifespans), and entropy has been incessantly working on the genomes of all generations

Please stop saying this. Mutations don’t change the entropy of genomes. I’m both a geneticist and a physicist, and I prefer not to have both fields trashed in the same sentence.

@Burrawang

now that many, many thousands of genetic diseases are a real empirical fact in the human population, it is not difficult to see that there will NOT be as much useful coded information in it as you so confidently claim, that’s just plain obvious! At least it is obvious to me with my Biblical worldview of the world we see around us in the present.

Your problem is that a Biblical worldview does not substitute for a knowledge of genetics. Do you know what happens to mutations that cause genetic diseases? Are you familiar with mutation-selection balance?

@Burrawang

I think that I would be fairly safe in assuming that your belief is based on evidence interpreted within an evolutionary framework; evidence which you are it seems, unwilling to provide.

As I keep pointing out, I’ve provided the first piece of evidence leading to my conclusions, and as I also pointing out, you just keep ignoring it.

@Burrawang

So you work in the field, so what!

It means that I know when claims about my field are simply wrong. You have made a number of such claims.

[SkovandOfMitaze (Mi)]

It shows that evolution is by far the best theory out there to answer the question. I mean if you think it has a lot of wholes wait until you hear about young earth creationism.

[SkovandOfMitaze (Mi)]

Do you think God causes it to rain? Or is it all or nothing meteorology vs supernatural? If you think God is involved, with what parts?

[Paraleptopecten (Timothy Campbell)]

@Burrawang

1.) Where are are the trillions of expected intermediate forms that we would expect to see IF evolution was credible?

What aspect of the below is inadequate, precisely?

@St.Roymond

That wasn’t true when I took geology courses in the early 1990s, and now forms have been found that were predicted based on evolutionary theory.

@Paraleptopecten

Exactly where they are expected to be–I’ve found a dozen or so transitional forms between pairs of species myself.

@Paraleptopecten

Again, given that I can list a dozen or so without doing any looking up at all, suggests otherwise.

@St.Roymond

These days it’s easier to identify forms that are not transitional. The situation is akin to claiming that the house number 2306 is not transitional between 2184 and 2468 because you can’t read 2200 or 2422.

@Paraleptopecten

Exactly where they’ve been deposited in museums buried in museums. What exactly are the following if not transitional forms: Myllokunmingiidae, “ostracoderms”, Elpistostegidae, Eusthenopteron, Tiktaalik, Acanthostega, labyrinthodont amphibians, gorgonopsids, Archaeopteryx, Spinifulgur, Busycon auroraense, Melanella laevigata calkinsi, Pelycidion matthewsi/megalomastoma, etc., etc.

@T_aquaticus

Why aren’t they transitional?

@T_aquaticus

We’ve only searched the tiniest fraction of the Earth’s sediments for fossils. T. rosae wasn’t found until a few years ago. How do you explain that? How do you explain the fact that new fossil species are found on a monthly basis?

@T_aquaticus

Until you show how transitional fossils are a myth we will continue to point to the very real transitional fossils.

@jammycakes

This is why your appeal to the supposed lack of transitional fossils falls short. The number of different species known from the fossil record is less than 5% of the total number of species known to be alive today. This being the case, it is simply not realistic to expect to see every transitional form in the fossil record, and the fact that we do not presents no threat to the theory of evolution whatsoever. The important thing to note is that the transitional fossils that we do discover turn up exactly where the theory of evolution predicts that we should find them. Tiktaalik roseae is the most famous example.

@Paraleptopecten

Can you actually give any evidence that they are not transitional, as opposed to simply asserting that they aren’t?

@Paraleptopecten

@Burrawang

ZERO transitional forms exist

I JUST LISTED 3 THAT I’VE FOUND MYSELF. And I could give at least a dozen more that I’ve found MYSELF.

@Marshall

You accept that evolution can diversify creatures so that one pair of cats produces all species of big and small cats, one pair of dogs produces all canids, one pair of horses produces all equines. Given this, where are all the intermediate forms we would expect if this were true? Where can we see the finely graded fossil transition of a fox becoming a wolf (or great dane becoming a chihuahua) or a bobcat becoming a tiger?

Or, looking at the claimed human lineage, I assume there is one place within that messy assortment of fossils that you feel is a chasm that cannot be crossed. But what of all the other transitions? Where is the sequence showing Homo floresiensis becoming Homo sapiens (or vice versa) or Neandertal becoming either a normal human or a chimp, depending on which you accept?

The reality is that we don’t have a perfectly finely graded set of fossils of every set of creatures to exist, and others have already provided some of the obvious reasons why we shouldn’t expect to have that. And also, even if two creatures share common descent, it doesn’t mean there should be a direct transition between them, no more than we should expect a direct transition between great danes and chihuahuas. That’s why the fossil evidence is more helpful for showing certain transitional forms (such as the reptilian jaw to the mammalian ear, or nostrils and forearms on a walking land mammal becoming a whale’s blowhole and pectoral fins) than in preserving an exact sequence of descent.

If one sees enough evidence to accept natural selection (and drift, etc.) producing all the big and small cats from a common ancestor, then evidence is no barrier to seeing the common ancestry of much wider groups. The fossil gaps between the kinds are often smaller than some gaps within the kinds.

@Burrawang

2.) Why are researchers all over the planet, finding more and more dinosaur bone, yes bone, not mineralised rock, but real bone that the dog could chew on, that has original tissue structures inside it such as blood cells, blood vessels, soft and stretchy tissues and proteins such as actin and keratin and of course short pieces of a few base pairs of DNA nucleotides still stuck onto the ribose sugar strands?
The bones are sometimes new finds in the field and more often are bones in public and private collections.

And again, which aspect of the below is inadequate?

@jammycakes

We don’t. We only find the ultimately stable breakdown products of dinosaur soft tissue.

Please make sure that you’re getting your facts straight about what the evidence consists of before you start trying to make arguments about what it does or does not support.

@jammycakes

Have you actually read Mary Schweitzer’s original 2005 paper? She had to soak the samples in demineralising solution for a week to get at the stuff.

This must be some new meaning of the word “unpermineralised” of which I was not previously aware.

Look, we know what soft tissue looks like after a few thousand years. It looks like this:

Or like this:

That is the state of preservation that you would expect to find from dinosaur carcasses if they really were only a few thousand years old. We would have sequenced the entire T-Rex genome by now. Why haven’t we?

@Paraleptopecten

Blood cell remnants, DNA fragment remnants, collagen is about as tough as fingernails; and the bone is mineralized, given that finding most of the soft tissue features requires soaking in a demineralizing solution for a while.

@Paraleptopecten

There are preserved ligaments from clams older than any dinosaur, so no, not all “soft” tissue disintegrates rapidly. It usually does, but not always.

@Paraleptopecten

@Burrawang

don’t you understand that the basic laws of chemistry and physics preclude any possibility of preservation for such an enormous period of time?

They don’t, unless some spectacular new discovery has found that tough “soft” tissues degrade much faster than they are thought to.

[adamjedgar (adam james edgar)]

@SkovandOfMitaze

Yes YECist are real scientists, they just are really bad ones who don’t follow the scientific method. They are really ignorant and arrogant or either liars when it comes to the vast majority of science. They are a bit of a cult really. Out of roughly 8,000,000 scientists globally they make up a few thousand. I think under 1%. Maybe even closer to 0.1%. Not really sure how insignificant of a number they make up. They are universally rejected by the scientific community regardless if it’s in America, Europe, Africa, Asia or wherever. The only people that really are sucked into their silliness is the uneducated. That’s why it’s so important to teach science to our kids. To make sure they get real textbooks and learn it in school. It’s why even though many pastors are YECist who are kind well meaning people, you have to teach your kids that they have a very shallow outdated despite being modern reading of the scriptures. They can be very loving, but they also run a risk of making up people whose bad understanding of theology and conspiracy theorist approach to the scientific community and their consensus can result in weaponizing the Bible to push their very toxic pro theocracy that attacks freedom, love and happiness. It does not really grow in communities because it’s convincing, but because two come together and pop out 5+ kids who never get a solid understanding of the world or learn how to understand basic high school education. Often not even basic middle school education.

A lot of stuff yall say is heavily debated it not actually heavily debated. 99.9% will land on a similar consensus and 0.1% disagree and some of yall seem to listen exclusively to them.

fair points, however, i would not go so far as to say those who follow YEC are uneducated. I for one am educated and have a degree in education itself…so my profession was to educated the younger generations. My wife is also still a teacher (she teaches primary)…so she too is educated…her mother was a high school english teacher, her father was a tradie for the Australian CSIRO research laboratories in Sydney. I do not think education is actually relevant to logical argument.

As far as i can tell, and its mostly from forums such as this one, non christians i have spoken to on occasion, and lots of youtube videos watching debates and pod casts, it is my conclusion that the reason why we have TEism in the first place is not really a scientific issue, its a theological one. Individuals do not have a good theological grounding in the bible, they are not taught how to appropriately study it, they do not use sound or consistent internal biblical referencing, they listen to moral arguments (such as God wouldnt do that, he wouldnt kill anyone), and then bad doctrines result.

It is very very difficult to visualise a God saying “Let us make man in Our own image” and concluding that meant ape ancestors from which modern humans then evolved. The narrative clearly shows us that Adam was created from scratch, the breath of life breathed into his nostrils, then he became a living soul.

Adam was then asked to name the animals…clearly that shows us that Adam was created with intelligence…a lot more than an ape like ancestor apparently had according to the secular naturalism veiw that TEism unquestionably follows.

Come to think of it, i suggest that anyone who is TEist should also be Arian and refuse the Trinitarian view of the Godhead. I say this because it is the same methods of inquiry that results in Trinitarian belief as does YEC. I will also suggest that Sunday worshipers are more likely to be convinced of TEism than Sabbath keepers in the Christian church…and that is because TEism has very little biblical support similar to that of the doctrine of Sunday worship…believers have just a couple of almost irrelevant texts supposedly overriding Old Testament doctrines for both.

[rsewell (RON SEWELL)]

@adamjedgar

As far as i can tell, and its mostly from forums such as this one, non christians i have spoken to on occasion, and lots of youtube videos watching debates and pod casts, it is my conclusion that the reason why we have TEism in the first place is not really a scientific issue, its a theological one.

Speaking for myself, trained in systematic and historical theology and both Biblical languages, it was definitely the weight of scientific evidence, which I did not welcome, that swayed my thinking ultimately to a theistic worldview that was inclusive of mainstream science.

[adamjedgar (adam james edgar)]

@jammycakes

I didn’t say that scientists don’t have biases. I said that the fact that some of them do is not a free pass to let you reject anything and everything about science that you don’t like.

You’re arguing that eight different lines of evidence for evolution are incorrect or fraudulent. Let’s assume for the sake of argument that your assessment of them is correct. (I’ll leave it to others to argue that point.) But now you have to show that another 999,992 lines of evidence at least were also fraudulent. Moreover, you have to show how many of them could have been falsified in such a way as to give the same wrong answers as each other.

Good luck with that. It’s one thing to show casual fraud being carried out by individual researchers acting independently of each other. It’s a completely different matter to show wholescale, tightly coordinated fraud being carried out on an industrial scale, right across the board, by millions of different researchers, over a period of more than two hundred years.

In any case, scientists are fully aware of their biases. There’s a lot of research that goes into finding ways to counteract the effect of cognitive biases in science. That’s why double blind studies are a thing. There are also statistical methods to detect fraud in scientific datasets. In some studies, different teams work on different parts of the study, with one team designing the study, a second team carrying out the experiment, a third team processing the data, and a fourth team adding secret offsets to the data before it gets processed then removing the offsets from the results, in order to prevent either the data collection team or the data processing team from “anchoring” the results to give them the conclusions that they want.

isnt it funnt how quickly individuals jump off the train when evidence blows up in their faces! This forum is a great one for making claims that YEC scientists arent real scientists, someone has posted on this same thread the claim that YEC are uneducated.

The point of the fraudulent erros in secular naturalism that i posts earlier is that these went on for decades…as many as 50 years before the fraud was discovered. Some of them, even after the fraud had been discovered remained in place in higher educational institutions despite the lie! It is clear that the reason why is driven by world view and not the science!

[adamjedgar (adam james edgar)]

@Randy

@Burrawang, I think that we might both enjoy reviewing the following:

What We Like About AiG - Faith & Science Conversation - The BioLogos Forum

Todd Wood, a young-earth creationist, and Darryl Falk, one of the past leaders of BioLogos, wrote a book together
The Fool and the Heretic - Todd Wood and Darrel Falk - Faith & Science Conversation - The BioLogos Forum

Thanks.

very intesting quote …

"then I met Dr. Todd Wood who does think another way. He’s a protein biochemist educated at the doctoral and post-doctoral level at two of the nation’s best institutions. He has more expertise in the study of genomes and the evolution of proteins than I do. Todd is also a great teacher. He’s no fool and this book is the story of how I learned that, as well as a bit about me and the way in which I have, at times, been the fool (Darrel Falk)*

Darrel says

I think Todd’s position is highly harmful to the church and will cause many to reject Christianity."

What Darrel clearly does not understand is why theologically his claim is nonesense. The bible clearly tells us in Hebrews 4 why peo;ple loose faith in God…it has nothing to do with science and everything to do with a lack of faith in the sufficiency of Christs death on the cross as atonement for the wages of sin is death (rom 6:23) and that one day he will return again in the cloud of heaven and redem us back to the father.

It is naturalism that i belive is a driving force behind this loss of faith…not YEC and that is because naturalism demands scientific answers for the narrative that explains salvation!

The theology and doctrines of Christianity are not scientific, nor can they be explained that way…this is all bad. as soon as one cannot explain God scientifically, out the window goes God. That is the real reason why we lose sight of our faith and leave the church. One must believe in the miracle of creation, salvation via the cross, and the second coming of Christ!

[rsewell (RON SEWELL)]

@Burrawang

Where are the billions upon billions of transitional forms that demonstrate the assumed ascension of life from the imaginary first reproducing cell to the diversity of life on Earth we see today?

@Burrawang

There are hundreds of millions of fossils from all over the world now that weren’t discovered in Darwin’s time

It would be helpful if you desisted from pulling numbers out of thin air. The paleobiology database would be a good place to begin.

[Burrawang]

Thanks Steve,
I appreciate the detail you go into I am sure is for the right reasons,i.e., you believe that I am the one who is deluded about Biblical origins.
The situation for me is that I can find no compelling evidence (despite the numerous objections I’ve heard over and over on this site that I’ve thoroughly researched in the past and found not to be credible), to abandon what I have accepted as Biblical truth and then take up belief in evolution and ‘deep time’.
Firstly it just makes no sense that our all powerful omniscient Creator would use such a clumsy method that was designed to explain origins without God, and has been propagated by vasts portions of those in power in the western world for about two to three hundred years.
The rot started way back in the 17th century and gelled for many in prominent academic positions since then, names like, Deist Abraham Werner; James Hutton; Charles Lyell; Georges Cuvier; William Smith; Thomas Chalmers; John Summer; Hugh Miller , Ernst Mayr and many others.
It is significant that Stephen J Gould, although holding to evolution, did at least see the enormous body of empirical evidence for the abrupt appearance of vastly different species in the geologic column, that I must assert is precisely what I would expect to find when thinking about the Biblical historical narrative of Creation in God’s Word. Gould himself famously admitted: " The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as the trade secret of paleontology. The evolutionary trees that adorn our textbooks have data only at the tips and nodes of their branches; the rest is inference, however reasonable, NOT the evidence of fossils." Emphasis mine.
Of course Niles Eldridge and Gould went on to postulate ‘punctuated equilibrium’ and so he remained an evolutionist as far as I know till his passing, sadly.
I guess it is worth pointing out here that Mayr also made some candid admissions that go to the heart of the matter such as: “Given the fact of evolution, one would expect the fossils to document a gradual steady change from ancestral forms to the descendants. But this is not what the paleontologist finds. Instead, he or she finds gaps in just about every phyletic series. New types often appear quite suddenly, and their immediate ancestors are absent in the earlier geologic strata. The discovery of unbroken series of species changing gradually into descending species is very rare. Indeed the fossil record is one of discontinuities, seemingly documenting jumps from one type of organism to a different type. This raises a puzzling question: Why does the fossil record fail to reflect the gradual change one would expect from evolution.”

I suggest that the sequence we find in the fossil bearing strata merely records the sequence of burial of those organisms and plants in the global flood that the Bible plainly tells us happened in the days of Noah.
There are likely numerous reasons why the strata have certain fossils in them that have nothing to do with eons of ‘deep time’ such as perhaps the ecosystems buried were at different elevations and vastly separate geographic locations that have nothing whatsoever to do with assumed temporal periods elapsing. We will probably never know why and can only speculate, but the neat orderly progression that allegedly shows evolution in action as some would have us believe is not at all convincing to those of us who know more about the reality in the field.

Sure the ruling paradigm certainly has the numbers worldwide, but that does not mean it is correct, it simply means that it is popular. And in a western society that is increasingly atheist and secular, why wouldn’t a belief edifice that sets itself up as science and nicely does away with God from the equation, not be popular?

The principalities and powers that influence much of the mass media, education institutions and law makers are ensuring that evolution is propagated as fact, but that should be no surprise to our brothers and sisters in the Lord who see transpiring, the raging battle for the hearts and minds of humanity.

The saddest part of all this is that professing Christians are in many parts of the world actively supporting belief in ‘deep time’ and evolution as fact, that I know because I have seen it first hand is causing a stumbling block for many in the valley of decision.

God Bless,
jon

[rsewell (RON SEWELL)]

@Burrawang

There are likely numerous reasons why the strata have certain fossils in them that have nothing to do with eons of ‘deep time’ such as perhaps the ecosystems buried were at different elevations and vastly separate geographic locations that have nothing whatsoever to do with assumed temporal periods elapsing.

Likely…perhaps…

The scientific explanation that fossils are segregated temporally is just common sense. YEC has no good response. Why wouldn’t T-Rex feed on cattle, or sheep, or buffalo? Why would modern mammals be in one spot, and all dinosaurs including theropods, hadrosuars, and omithischians, bunch together? Why would all those cambrian creatures not live in the same shallow seas as crabs and starfish? And not only is it silliness to suggest they lived apart, but the power of the flood would smash them all together anyways while supposedly grinding and transporting all that sediment. Furthermore, fossils are not separated by geographical location, but by strata. Then there is the problem that these fossils are separated in many places by parting showing long term features of wet dry cycles, volcanic tephra, and the chicxulub event. And while this is all going on dinosaurs are laying eggs in well ordered nests both on top of and under sediment supposedly laid down by the flood, and the embryos have time to develop. That they did not live at the same time is the only reasonable conclusion.

A Young-Earth Mystery: If Dinosaurs and Humans Lived Together Before the Flood, Where are the Fossils?

Even if we granted that dinosaurs and humans lived at the same time but didn’t generally live in the same places this still doesn’t provide a reasonable answer because: 1) the Flood would have mixed together the remains of those swept away, 2) YECs claim that many dinosaurs were able to escape the initial stages of the Flood and survive to make footprints on scattered bits of land that appeared during the Flood.

[Burrawang]

I certainly don’t claim to have all the answers, there are many things that I don’t understand and questions that I cannot answer, but that doesn’t mean I should throw up my hands and not accept that the Bible is trustworthy and true.
The same problem arises for evolution, there are many perplexing things in the real world that just don’t fit what the philosophy predicts.

I don’t know why the stratification of fossils is the way it is, but neither does anyone else.
Yes, many people have explained what they have postulated as reasonable explanations, that in most cases support belief in evolution, but again that is nothing more than forensic guesswork, that in most cases doesn’t go against the ruling paradigm of evolution. Research into alternative explanations that don’t support evolution rarely get funding from the usual sources and as such are at a massive disadvantage to compete in the field of ideas that explain origins of the biosphere.
Thus for me, I trust the Bible over and above mere man’s conjectures that appear to contradict a straightforward reading of scripture ( i.e., the meaning the original author intended as inspired by God).

God Bless,
jon

[rsewell (RON SEWELL)]

@Burrawang

I certainly don’t claim to have all the answers, there are many things that I don’t understand and questions that I cannot answer, but that doesn’t mean I should throw up my hands and not accept that the Bible is trustworthy and true.

That is welcome, but then you might tone down the rhetoric such as

@Burrawang

it’s clear to me the whole evolution edifice is a house of cards, with lots of smoke and mirrors. The false belief of evolution was initially established through ignorance, deception and people wishing to be seen as intelligent intellectuals up to date with the latest science

[Burrawang]

Hi Randy,

          Yep, I would like to say a really BIG thanks to you too!!!!

Your post, put the much needed perspective that we all need to keep in mind, regardless of our differences about the origins debate. I found the AiG article “What We Like About AiG” very positive and honest.

As we all know our dear Lord died for each and every one of us and none of us regardless of our beliefs about origins should disparage him or her for whom Christ died.

I know I am stating the obvious here but it can’t be said enough: We are all brothers and sisters in our Lord and Saviour Jesus.

God Bless,
jon

[jammycakes (James McKay)]

@adamjedgar

isnt it funnt how quickly individuals jump off the train when evidence blows up in their faces! This forum is a great one for making claims that YEC scientists arent real scientists, someone has posted on this same thread the claim that YEC are uneducated.

Adam, it’s as simple as this.

Science has rules, evidence has rules, and honesty has rules.

If young earthists don’t want to be told that they’re not real scientists, or that they’re uneducated, or that they are lying, then they need to stick to the rules.

What you are describing as “jumping off the train” when “evidence blows up in their faces” is simply people pointing out what the rules are, and explaining to you why the “evidence” that you claim “blows up in their faces” does nothing of the sort for the simple reason that it does not stick to the rules.

[Burrawang]

Fair call Ron!

As I have stated previously I have been watching the origins controversy for many decades and I know from personal observation that huge numbers of people here in Australia left the Church in droves as evolution changed from a possibility to virtual fact in the minds of the masses as the multimedia and educational institutions got their act together promoting evolution as scientific fact.

It is for the millions of souls that believed the deception that God is no longer necessary to explain the big question, of origins, because evolution has provided the means “to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist” that I see evolution in the way I do.

I realise there are Christians who accede to evolution as I was one of them for many years myself.

God Bless,
jon