We could use modern cities as our analogy. If you shut down electricity in any major city it will stop functioning. There will be riots, looting, lack of food . . . you name it. So does this mean that there were never cities without electricity?
Obviously not. When electricity was first introduced to major cities it was a luxury. You could run fans or other gadgets off of it, but if electricity was suddenly taken away the city would keep on functioning. Over time there were new technologies that emerged, and those technologies depended on electricity. As the city became more and more dependent on these new technologies and got rid of the older technologies it created a situation where the city was not dependent on electricity.
The same happens in biology. At first, a symbiotic relationship is simply a luxury. It increases fitness, but if the relationship suddenly ended both species could go on surviving on their own. Over time the two species began to evolve in such a way that the symbiotic relationship was not necessary. They will lose features that allowed them to survive on their own because they no longer need them. They will also evolve features that are dependent on their symbiotic partner. This causes two independent species to evolve a dependence on each other over time.
Therefore, these species didn’t have to be created all at once.
So now we’re down to a single book that you’re claiming to have read, but you produce nothing but quotes that anyone can find reproduced on multiple creationist websites?
Isn’t that a long way from your initial claim, which implicitly claimed familiarity, actually, with the fossil record itself?
But you never even looked at the fossils. Which “various” experts in the field?
Well, yes, because real science is about the real evidence, not quotes taken out of context with curious omissions.
I suspect that when I read those books as a teen, I quoted them, trusting my sources as quoting the evidence correctly. I didn’t know much about how to critique at the time. I am not sure, but maybe this is happening here too?
Did I claim that my conclusion was based directly on the evidence? My PhD is in biology.
What relevance does your challenge have to the fact that it stops gracious dialog in its tracks to start with such a blatant misrepresentation of your sources?
Lots! Don’t you find it interesting that in all the fossil digging I’ve done, I’ve never met a single creationist, despite my doing so in hotbeds of creationism like Texas?
Did I make any claim about the entire fossil record, like you did, Edgar? What’s the point of your challenge other than distraction?
I don’t think you have the slightest idea how “99.9999% of evolutionists” came to their conclusions, and it’s not relevant unless they are misrepresenting their sources as you are.
Mine were definitely not obtained by reading the opinions of others. Mine come from the evidence, particularly the sequence evidence, which is not at all hard to understand.
Now, shall we have a gracious dialog about the REAL evidence?
I wasn’t tryin to be insulting at all - sorry if it came out that way.
The only part of evolutionary science that is scientifically useful is the empirical (demostable, factual) stuff - ie, mutations and genetic variations occur, which can be favoured by natural selection. Not that this concept is completely novel - man has been using artificial selection to exploit mutations and genetic variations in plant and animal populations for thousands of years. The rest of evolutionary science - the endless hypothesising about how evolution works and yarns about the biological evolution of creatures over millions of years - is scientifically useless. It’s just talk … that produces nothing but more talk.
What useful did S. J. Gould, for example, contribute to applied science? He devoted his life to evolutionary blah-blah-blah, but produced nothing of any practical use, as far as I can tell. In fact, one hundred and fifty years of scientists rabbiting on about how life (allegedly) evolved from a microbe seems to have produced nothing but a gigantic balloon of hot air.
“learn”? Only demonstable facts contribute to scientific learning, therefore endless hypotheses about how life evolved from a microbe contributes nothing at all to scientific learning. It cannot even be demonstrated that biological evolution is in fact what happened, so all you may be “learning” about is a false belief.
So, getting back to your question, instead of wasting time and effort studying a scientifically useless story that cannot be verified as factual, an evolutionary creationist may as well just say “God done it” (like I do) and leave it at that.
A hairless creature suddenly produced an offspring covered in hair? That sounds like a scientific impossibility - but then, nothing is impossible to God.
Er, no; I can’t actually - in order to do that I would first have to devote a few years to gaining a degree in genetics at some university. Even then I might conclude that similariites in DNA simply mean the Creator used the same building blocks to create different creatures.
… which may not be “transitional forms” at all, but separate creations which finally produced whales - which is actually a more plausible explanation, considering the nature of the fossil record.
That’s a stretch … In Genesis 1:27, “man” doesn’t necessarity signify more than one man; “him” doesn’t mean “them” and obviously refers to one man; “male and female” doesn’t necessarily mean “males and females”. The verse is obviously referring to the one man and one woman God created - ie, Adam and Eve.
Nothing in your argument, by the way, explains away the description of Adam being created from inanimate matter in Genesis 2:7.
That’s one way of putting it - I can neither accept nor reject evidence I don’t understand. I have already admitted this represents a weakness in my position. But I have Genesis 2:7 on my side - Adam was created from inanimate matter. So based on the Word of God, it is my hope that ERVs will one day be explicible in terms of special creation (but probably not by me!).
Science says it is impossible for a virgin to become pregnant and give birth … to borrow your words, a virgin birth “in no way, shape or form describes what we find in reality”. Yet that is what we Christians believe, isn’t it? Likewise, how does a man rising from the dead in any way, shape or form describe what we find in reality? It seems to me that to be Christian is to be sometimes decidely at odds with science.
Undoubtedly. Yet he says, “The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as the trade secret of paleontology.” So he is saying transitionals exist, but they are extremely rare … which is rather bad news for the theory of evolution - even with Punc Eq and all the other excuses, after hundreds of millions of years of evolution transitionals should not be an “extreme rarity”, but super-abundant.
And what this about a “trade secret”? These words imply some kind of dishonesty is afoot here. What are paleontologists trying to hide? The fact that the fossil record doesn’t support biological evolution, of course. Combine this with Gould comment about stasis in the fossil record causing him “terrible distress” and you have a picture of a scientists who seem to be far from objective and dispassionate when interpreting and presenting the evidence.
Why do you think that’s the best way to read Genesis 2:7? The main BL site has lots of articles on Adam that I would encourage checking out. Here is one for example:
Or another that is from the perspective of believing in a real Adam yet still affirming the overwhelming evidence of common descent:
Disagree. Regarding the two miracles you mentioned, we can say that “people do not rise from the dead via natural mechanisms” or “people don’t become pregnant without certain natural means” - but that’s not even what the Bible claims happened - it claims that the Holy Spirit accomplished such feats. That certainly is not at odds with modern science that is rather blind to detecting the supernatural. Here is one of many articles on miracles on the main BL site:
However, such are drastically different from rejecting ERV evidence a priori - I’ve told you the three options in interpreting the evidence - your position requires God to supernaturally create Adam with a long history of shared descent that didn’t happen, i.e. shared ERVs that have no other possible explanation beyond common descent or deceptive design. Adam then spread this false history to all human beings alive today and we all are witnesses that God created this false history. That would make God then a liar. He easily could have created Adam without the shared ERVs and easily could have made base pair sequences drastically different, but he didn’t. Here is just one example: https://biologos.org/blogs/guest/testing-common-ancestry-its-all-about-the-mutations
Sheep seem to be totally defenseless against predators - they cannot run fast and the males’ horns are hardly deadly weapons. Lambs are easy meat for eagles and I imagine even hawks could prey on them as well. I’ve seen “wild” sheep (initially introduced by humans) on a smallish island in Australia, but there were no predators there.
How did sheep evolve if they need humans to survive?
(The frequent comparisons between the relationship between man and sheep and man and God are interesting - the interdependancy, in particular.)
Which blanant misrepresetation of my sources would that be?
Considering their relatively rarity in that sphere, I’m not surprised. And the wise creationist academic keeps his beliefs to himself, knowing how hostile most of his fellow academics are towards such beliefs. Anti-evolutionists are considered stupid heretics in the scientific community, after all.
