Yes, I tend to agree with you. I was reading about a geologist in the seventeenth century who proposed from stratigraphy that the earth was millions of years old - ie, well before Darwin. And what about those chalk beds that are a kilometre deep in places?!
I’m no expert, but reading about dating by atomic physics and how such evidence converges that convinced that the earth was much, much older than what YECs claimed. Then there was Dawkins’ “no rabbits in the Cambrian” comment that eventually led me to accept that life-forms have changed greatly over time.
And why shouldn’t the earth and life be very old - how long has God been around?
@gbrooks9 will have to tell you all about Genealogical Adam if we can’t convince you to adopt a different exegesis of Genesis 1-3. (How’s that, George? Do I get points with Peaceful Science now?)
Joel Duff’s blog has lots of detailed information about geology and fossils from an EC perspective. I like that his articles are sensitive to the theological concerns of conservative YEC and OEC Christians who don’t accept evolution instead of just saying, “here’s the facts, deal, people!” https://thenaturalhistorian.com/contact-2/
How many fossils have you personally examined? How many archaeological digs have you participated in? Don’t tell me your “knowledge” of fossils is based on other people’s opinions!
I have indeed presented a coherent alternative - progressive creation.
If I were a theistic evolutionist, I wouldn’t bother trying to offer a scientific (and ultimately useless) explanation for how feathers evolved - I would simply accept that “God done it” miraculously.
I would imagine a feather is infinitely more complex than a hair. Here’s another simpler solution to warmth than feathers - an increase in body fat. Or even simpler - move to a warmer region - unless dino is isolated, in which case, a few minute, hair-like proto-feathers isn’t going to improve its chances of survival.
The scientific explanation does strike me as ridiculous - a land-lubbing vegetarian grazer goes into the sea and eventually evolves into a whale. However a theistic-evolutionary explanation makes such an evolution feasible (albeit, still bizarre) - God done it. If God made a whale out of a grazer, who am I to judge?
It would seem so, but I’m not qualified to evaluate that claim. I found an article on Evolution News that would seem to dispute the “shared mistakes” claim, but I’m yet to read it - which may be pointless anyway, as I probably won’t understand any of it past the introduction. Out of my depth, unfortunately.
Thanks a lot for that, Bill. I’ve tried in the past to track down the full transcript of his speech, but didn’t have any luck. If stasis in the fossil record brought him “terrible distress”, I would like to know why - not sure if reading his full speech will shed any light on that question.
Yes, I know - I wasn’t trying to imply he was arguing against evolution - only against Darwin’s gradualism model. Nevertheless, his “terrible distress” comment is something very curious for a supposedly-objective scientist to make.
I’ve come across a few cases of egregious “out of context” quote-mining on some YEC sites. I would like to avoid making any kind of quote-mining error.
So you would then just ignore evidence that is too complicated? One large problem I’ve come across broadly speaking is to argue for or against comic book versions of reality. Like for example, how a young earth creationist argues for the sorting of animals to occur during the flood (the density of bones or ‘smarter’ animals climbed up higher). But of course no bones EVER got mixed up in all this chaos. In a simplistic sense, their model almost sounds plausible but in no way shape or form describes what we find in reality. In a similar sense, EN takes a sweeping brush at ERVs, ignores the actual evidence scientists are looking at, and calls it a day.
I can certainly appreciate your humility in admitting that you don’t have enough expertise to judge on some particular issue. ERVs are not ‘mistakes’- that term doesn’t really fit as it would imply there is some kind of perfect ‘design’ that exists. They are just simply retroviral insertions in the genome that have become fixed. They are at shared locations (>200,000 shares ERVs between chimps and humans-there are only 100 some ERVs that are unique to humans and 200 that are unique to chimpanzees) with one of three explanations of how they got that way.
They come through common ancestry
They were integrated into human and chimp genomes independently. However, we know what a retroviral bombardment produces (the Yohn et. al. 2005 paper was discussed extensively in the one thread Christy linked)- it produces maybe 5% of ERVs at similar locations. But we share 99.9%+ of ERVs with chimpanzees and can definitely conclude that #2 is rejected
The ERVs have such specific integration preference that they always just insert in the same spot. The evidence from #2 already falsifies this, but we can indeed test this. And we find that some classes of ERVs have preferential site integration. So this changes the odds from one in 3,000,000,000 to get the same spot to maybe one in 100,000,000 on average. Given there are 200,000 shared ERVs- the odds of this one would be 1 in 100,000,000^(200,000). #3 is rejected and #1 is the only explanation left.
Thank you for your thoughts. I got to the stage where I didn’t trust any science at all connected with Origins, believing a huge atheist/demonic conspiracy was afoot. But after having things explained to me recently by some very knowledgeable (and patient) folks on another site, I concluded that my “conspiracy” position was false and rather silly. After all, there are a great many Origins scientists who are theists!
… and a planet with ever-changing life-forms than stretch back possibly billions of years is much more scientifically interesting than the YEC model!
It is only 13 pages long and the part about stasis is actually only a couple of paragraphs.
The theory of evolution comes in various flavors and Gould liked to push his own flavor back in the 80’s. Gosh that is what, almost 40 years ago. Point being the flavors are all evolution just worded differently.
He was speaking in public and what gets written in papers is done in a totally different tone. I wouldn’t place a lot of stress on a simple phrase of someone speaking off the cuff. You have to consider his entire body of work and also note his complaint about being misquoted by creationists.
"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 …
Darwins argument (of a very incomplete fossil record) still persists as the favoured escape of most paleontologists from the embarrassment of a record that seems to show so little of evolution directly … I wish only to point out that (gradualism) was never ‘seen’ in the rocks.
We (paleontologists) fancy ourselves as the only true students of life’s history, yet to preserve our favoured account of evolution by natural selection we view our data as so bad that we almost never see the very process we profess to study.
For several years, Niles Eldrege … and I have been advocating a resolution to this uncomfortable paradox …
The history of most fossil species includes two features particularly inconsistent with gradualism:
Stasis. Most species exhibit no directional change during their tenure on earth. They appear in the fossil record looking much the same as when they disapppear; morphological change is usually limited and directionless.
Sudden appearance. In any local area, a species does not arise gradually by the steady transformation of its ancestors; it appears all at once and “fully formed.”"
When Darwin was a student, geologists were hotly debating whether the earth reached its present form by slow, steady processes (uniformitarianism) or by means of occasional violent upheavals (catastrophism.) Darwin chose uniformitarianism, and applied it to his ToE. We have witnessed both processes’ having occurred around the world within recent memory, and the fossil record shows both slow and fast change, so Darwin may have been a little hasty in rejecting at least some catastrophism.
One reason Darwin rejected catastrophism was that it could imply the hand of God, a non-scientific concept, rather than natural processes, and could occur within the 6,000 years calculated by Bishop Usher as the age of the earth
I mentioned in an earlier post (#55) in this thread that most change in the fossil record is the result of migration, with the actual evolution having taken place elsewhere, in an area where fossils seldom form.
Inexplicable, unseen forces are recognised in science (“dark energy”, for example), so why can’t one more inexplicable, unseen force - the inexplicable, unseen force of God - be considered scientific?
That one possibility, I guess. I think Gould mentioned something like that in The Panda’s Thumb.
I’m sorry but I don’t even understand what you’re saying here. It’s as if you’re trying to throw out insults but I honestly don’t understand what you mean. How are scientific explanations useless? And why would an evolutionary creationist (our preferred term, btw) want to accept a YEC-ish answer of “God done it” if it’s so exciting to learn the scientific story for how exactly He did it?
Sure, a modern feather probably is. What about the earliest proto-feathers that I showed in the diagram? In early dinosauria, evolutionary mechanisms weren’t selecting between “modern feather” and “modern hair.”
It’s fun to play Monday Night Quarterback with evolution and try to tell it how it should have played the game, but that’s not really how this works. We don’t get to think about all the things mutations could have done. They just happen. And when they happen, they either confer advantage or they don’t.
How do you know there are only a few? And if hair doesn’t help survival, why exactly do mammals have hair?
Well, like the rest of us, you can judge the evidence, and look at the ways that cetacean (whale+dolphin) DNA match up to hippo DNA (their closest grazer relatives). You can judge the comparative evidence in the skeletons of modern cetaceans and modern non-cetacean ungulates. You can judge the evidence in all the many transitional forms already identified for that transition from “land-lubbing vegetarian grazer” to whale.
And after examining the evidence, you actually can judge, scientifically. That’s how this works.
Swamidass claims there were humans living outside the Garden when Adam appeared on the scene, does he not? If so, this seems to me to be a gross misreading of Scripture. My Bible says only one man was created at first - Adam.
Where does the text say Cain feared cities full of people all around him?