Why aren’t they transitional?
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?
Until you show how transitional fossils are a myth we will continue to point to the very real transitional fossils.
The question Steve that I asked of you was:
" what examples do you offer in support of your belief in “ Common descent by natural processes ” that clearly show the type of greater information complexity increase that would be required if evolution was real"
Or put another way, what species do you believe changed into what species that are more complex having new structures, processes etc. that is, coded within their genomes that supports your assertion of common descent?
And I don’t mean within a Biblical kind where obviously natural selection can and does change individuals, within the genetic limits of their created Biblical kind, a cat remains within the Biblical cat kind, a dog within the Biblical dog kind, a horse within the Biblical equine kind etc…
Grand upward complexity evolution from primordial cell to man simply is not supported by the evidence that I have seen or read thus far.
Many Thanks,
God Bless,
jon
What assumptions cause multiple radiometric dating methods to agree with one another? For example:
That’s multiple parent/daughter isotope pairs that decay through different mechanisms, and yet the dates are within analytical error. How do you explain this? Just saying “assumptions” isn’t going to do it. You need to explain the physics and chemistry that would cause multiple methods to give the same date across different isotopes.
You also need to explain why we see a correlation between the ratio of parent and daughter isotopes in rocks and the fossil species above and below them in the geologic column. How does a flood sort non-avian dinosaurs so they are always below igneous rocks that have isotope ratios consistent with more than 65 million years of decay across multiple parent/daughter isotope pairs? Show us the physics and chemistry that explains this.
Sure – but anyone who just copies and pastes an English translation and claims to have “studied” clearly hasn’t even done that.
True. That’s one reason I banned the KJV from my Bible studies – it’s no longer the same language. My favorite example is where the KJV says “they prevented him into Jerusalem”, which makes absolutely no sense in modern English.
@moderators, it seems that the OP has turned this thread into an endless Gish gallop of reposted CMI articles, case in point is post 115, and there is little actual engagement.
You claim to have studied the Bible but you don’t even know what it says in Genesis 1?;
The world in Genesis 1 is this:
That’s what the Hebrew describes. It doesn’t change its description – ever. It tells us there’s a dome that’s as hard as brass – a “firmament” – over the Earth. There’s just one landmass – it says God gathered the waters into one place and the dry land emerge, so with the waters all in one place there can only be one land mass. Thus if the water covered the mountains then it backed up against that dome.
That’s the answer he gave. The differences between the human and chimp genomes demonstrate that they were produced by the observed natural processes that are producing mutations in the here and now. The bias towards transitions and CpG transitions in particular demonstrates that the same natural processes that are producing mutations in humans now are also responsible for the differences between the human and chimp genomes.
If you think this is wrong, then give us a specific explanation as to why we see those biases in transition substitutions that doesn’t use common descent.
Do you think humans and chimps, or humans and other primates, are in the same Biblical kind?
Of course, why would you think that having a few dozen species persist in their present form would be contrary to evolutionary theory? How does it help explain why the thousands of other species found in the deeper rock no longer exist at all at the present time? How does it explain the thousands of species that are currently alive are not found in formations of that age? Even if you propose a 6000 year old earth, and a 5000 year reset, it does not have any explanatory power.
What YECists have done with the Hebrew word מִין is essentially like when you go to see a movie that is “adapted from” a book you like and find that the movie bears little resemblance at all to the book.
Forcing that idea onto Creation ends up demanding a rate of evolution that is not biologically possible – I’m sure Steve can explain that to you.
The image of the Earth from the NIV may suit your purposes but it is not what I understand from scripture.
I don’t know why you insist the initial one landmass was on a flat Earth. That is simply not defined.
6 Then God said, “Let there be an expanse in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters from the waters.”
7 God made the expanse, and separated the waters that were below the expanse from the waters that were above the expanse; and it was so.
8 God called the expanse “heaven.” And there was evening and there was morning, a second day.
9 Then God said, “Let the waters below the heavens be gathered into one place, and let the dry land appear”; and it was so.
10 And God called the dry land “earth,” and the gathering of the waters He called “seas”; and God saw that it was good.
There is nothing that precludes a sphere that was clearly known at a later point in time to Isaiah.
So again I ask,
" PLEASE , I would be grateful if you could you provide more information as to exactly where in the Bible the words, or words to the effect and meaning of “water backed up against the bronze-hard dome that God had put over the Earth-disk” are written."
Thanks,
God Bless,
jon
The lie is that evolution does not need a Creator.
You’re ignoring mine for starters. In fact, you explicitly said as much.
Of course, if you want to ignore me then that’s your prerogative, but do bear in mind that I’m not just talking to you; I’m talking to everyone else following this thread as well. It’s entirely up to them to assess what to make of both my responses and yours. But I don’t think that claiming that you’re not ignoring anyone after having explicitly said that you’re ignoring someone is going to go down well.
I think you need to make sure that you understand what the expression “hand waving” actually means before you start throwing it around in response to anything and everything that you don’t like, Jon.
Hand waving does not mean weak, nonexistent, subjective or ambiguous evidence. Hand waving most certainly does not mean evidence that you want to think of as weak, nonexistent, subjective or ambiguous when it can be shown quantitatively and empirically that it isn’t weak, nonexistent, subjective or ambiguous. No, hand waving means something very specific: not doing your homework properly.
It means such things as:
It’s as simple as this, Jon. If you’re going to challenge a scientific theory, you need to say something of substance, provide evidence to back up your assertions, and expect your claims and evidence to be evaluated according to the rules and principles that govern how science is done. Because if you’re just flipping off critique that you don’t like as “hand-waving” and “just so stories” without substantiating your objections, that in itself is hand-waving.
In fact, you need to make sure that you understand what it takes to challenge a scientific theory such as evolution. If you want to provide evidence against the theory, you must make sure that the evidence contradicts the core fundamentals of the theory, and not just one or two side details. You don’t demolish a house altogether by rearranging the furniture or even by replacing the windows. You also need to make sure that it contradicts the core fundamentals of what the theory actually says in reality, and not just what you would like to think that it says. You don’t demolish a house altogether by rearranging the furniture in a holodeck simulation on board the Starship Enterprise.
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.
It is also why your appeal to the fact that some species do not appear to have evolved over long periods of time falls short. The theory of evolution tells us that species only change in response to selection pressure, and if a species is ideally suited to its environment and selection pressures are at a minimum then the fact that it only changes slowly if at all over time doesn’t tell us anything at all.
It has nothing to do with my “purposes”, it’s the “cosmology” of Genesis 1. If you’re not aware of that then you haven’t actually studied Genesis. Anything else is reading into the text something from a modern worldview. The רָקִ֖יעַ was a solid item given that the root means something hammered out, i.e. of metal. BDB indicates that the רָקִ֖יעַ rested on a flat foundation. And thus we have a metal-hard dome resting on a flat foundation with the Earth inside, and the Earth is thus flat.
There’s nothing that precludes a tetrahedron, a cube, or an octahedron, either.
And nothing in Isaiah indicates that the Earth is a sphere – again, that’s reading something into the text that isn’t there.
Absolutely!
Evolution points to a Designer.
What one writer is posting is the exact kind of material that when I was in university drove people away from Christianity in droves.
The other writer is you.
Gen 3:17 says, "but from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat from it you will surely die.”
Is Genesis a literal (as understood in plain language), historical (accurate history in every inerrant detail) account, or is Gen 3:17 a deceitful lie? Neither ha’adam (the man) nor ha’issah (the woman) died within a 24-hr day. Or do you have a “spiritualized” reason why God didn’t immediately punish them with death?
After all, would’ve it have been much simpler and more merciful for God to carry out his promised death sentence on those two individuals and start over with a fresh pair of humans than it was to condemn billions of their descendants to hell because of a sin made by their remotest ancestors? It’s the trolley problem writ large, except God would have billions of “do-overs” until he found the right pair who didn’t “fall” into sin, and that would’ve solved the problem without the need of Jesus.
You connect sin with death. Evolution is a fact easily demonstrated. It also entailed the death of organisms that existed long before humans. The question is: Were any of those creatures capable of sin? During the millions of years before humanity appeared, did plants, single-celled organisms, fish, amphibians, birds, mammals, or even primates commit a single sin? Obviously not.
Sin isn’t connected to physical death. That’s a fantasy dreamt up by fevered minds.
It’s been noted, but we don’t shut down threads if people seem to be having fun engaging with them and people are being civil and discussing faith and science. No one is being forced to keep responding and the thread will close automatically when people start ignoring it.
My take on this is that prior to committing the rebellious sin against Gods direct command, Adam and Eve were in an innocent state and death was not a possibility for them. However after they rebelled against God, against righteousness , goodness, truth and justice, they were immediately no longer innocent before God and death became an immediate reality for them. They eventually did die whereas if they had not sinned they would not have died.
You think it would have been much simpler?
What you don’t know, nor do I for that matter, is what God knows of the future in His omniscience.
I suggest that God knew beforehand that Adam and Eve would sin, and I think that a distinct possibility exists that no matter who the people were, sooner or later they would sin, using their free choice to do so.
So although you may think it would have been easier for God to terminate Adam and Eve and start afresh, the outcome I believe would have been ostensibly the same.
No matter what scenario you may wish to hypothesize, God’s enduring and unfathomable LOVE for us all, even before we are born, and His plan for our redemption existed prior to the fall in the garden of Eden.
It may well be that the only way we can become blameless before our Holy and Righteous God is through the atoning redemption provided by Jesus dying in our place a substitutionary death on the cross.
It is not I that connects sin with death, doesn’t the scripture state “The wages of sin is death”.
You state that "evolution is a fact easily demonstrated."
I suggest to you that it appears to me likely you are conflating two entirely different things here.
Natural Selection is real but it ALWAYS only selects from what already exists.
Evolution in the molecules to man meaning of the term is about the ever upward progression of more complex, (more evolved) organisms from simpler ones over eons of time.
Thus to validate belief in evolution you need to demonstrate how simple organisms have written the encyclopaedic volumes of NEW information required in their DNA that codes for novel structures, processes and designs that didn’t exist prior in the gene pool.
Misunderstanding its role and conflating natural selection as evolution in action is the usual practice of evolutionists I have encountered in the past. Are you any different?
Of course natural selection is basically nothing more than differential reproduction in a diverse population of individuals within a specie from already existing diversity in the genome.
I apologise but the whole premise of your argument here is complete nonsense.
The millions of years is a uniformitarian belief construct that has no basis in empirical reality. The millions of years of Earth history is a myth. A popular myth granted, but a myth nonetheless.
Evolution is a falsified religious dogma that is NOT supported by real empirical evidence.
Sure plenty of equivocation by desperate evolutionists intent on maintaining their belief is practiced, but that sure is NOT proof of evolution.
God Bless,
jon
And there I was thinking that I was responding to Paraleptopecten’s post about his claim that Living Fossils are rare:
God Bless,
jon
Because surely, isn’t evolution about adaptation to best suit environmental conditions and corresponding genetic changes that come about in a population!
In the imagined hundreds of millions of years that you assume have transpired, there would have been an enormous range of different environmental conditions due to many causes ranging from volcanism, plate tectonics, theorised meteorite impacts, climatic changes, disease and pestilence etc.during which it is again assumed that the diversity of life blossomed into the huge number of new individual specie populations that theoretically evolved to fill the assumed niches within the prevailing environmental conditions.
YET in all that time and during all that variation of environmental factors, individual specimens of many dozens of organisms that are unquestionably living today are also found in sedimentary strata that is alleged to be hundreds of millions of years old with virtually NO CHANGE IN ALL THAT TIME???
Well that just sounds like another case of accommodating inconvenient facts with the usual just so story.
A theory that is meant to explain the extraordinary changes from the proverbial primordial soup first cell to the enormous array of individual species on one hand, yet on the other hand also accommodates absolutely no change (i.e., ostensibly zero change) at all in the same period of hundreds of millions of years is basically a theory that accommodates anything and as such is totally UNFALSIFIABLE and therefore IS NOT A SCIENTIFIC THEORY BY DEFINITION.
Evolution is nothing more than religious dogma, a philosophical position yes, but a scientific theory categorically NOT.
God Bless,
jon
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