The ID movement’s large-scale view of evolution: America is at stake

Faith & Science Conversation
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That, however, is true of all scientific understanding. Science generalizes across both time and space from experiments and observations. You can measure the strength of gravity using iron balls, or the speed of light by different means, and repeatedly validate those values. But it can only be assumed those values hold in Andromeda, or in you neighbors house. No matter how often and where you do the experiment and consistent the results, it cannot be done everywhere, so all natural law is held with the assumption that the universe is reasonable and coherent across space. The same applies to time.

Can you say, generalization applies to only space, but not time? Sure. But that is, of course, also an assumption. Assumption is not an inherently bad thing, the alternative is epistemological nihilism. To me, assuming that natural law is coherent over time, apart from good reason to suspect some modification along the way, is more reasonable, and therefore, we can know with assurance a great deal about the past.

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And evolution likewise has evidence in the present. You just don’t accept it.

Edit to add: You are aware that evolution in plants has been observed in the present aren’t you?

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No, you cannot show a bird developing from a dinosaur. You cannot prove it ever happened. You are still comparing chalk and cheese. What you can show and what you claim are two very different things.

I do not doubt the existence of Evolution. I just doubt the scale and extent that you claim it can achieve (without other mechanisms) You have an incomplete lineage that you claim is complete.

I am not YEC nor anti Evolution. I am just anti TOE because it is a load of hot air encompassed in known processes that cannot do what you claim.

Richard

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:rofl:

You just cannot see what you are doing or claiming!

It is so true that common sense is just not part of science!

Anyone with an ounce of common sense would understand what you cannot.

Richard

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Respectfully, I think you may be downplaying a lot of how the scientific processes is supposed to work.

Back in ye olden times, a lot of mental illness was just assumed to be Satan trying to get to the patient and draw them away from God. Things like depression or OCD were treated with spiritual care rather than actual treatment. I’m not saying that trying to help someone through prayer is bad, but back then people didn’t understand the underlying mechanism and thus were treating symptoms and not the disease.

Fast forward a few centuries and now mental health research is a well-developed and well understood area of medicine and health. One could go and be diagnosed and can successfully treat it with medicine or other techniques, thus reducing the impact that the disease had on their life.

So, why are we able to treat mental illnesses much more effectively today than years ago? The underlying mechanism of science is an assumed natural cause. A scientist would look at a mental illness and think, “I wonder what goes on in the brain that causes this to occur.” The same can go for lightning: people used to think that lightning was an effective means for God to enact punishment onto sinners. When Ben Franklin invented the lightning rod, people believed that he was intervening in God’s work. However, by assuming that lightning was something natural rather than Divine, Ben Franklin went about inventing a method of channeling the energy into one place to prevent buildings from being struck and caught on fire.

Applying this to the theory of evolution, a scientist has to develop a theory to explain why life looks like it does now and how life today relates to the fossils we find in ground. Unfortunately, saying “life looks like this because God made them that way” isn’t a valid explanation because it doesn’t give us much to glen and actually apply. If we just said that mental illness was God testing people, then we wouldn’t have attempted to try and treat it because if this was the will of God then who could possibly tell him otherwise? If we just said that lightning was God punishing sinners, then we wouldn’t have developed means to protect buildings from lightning because burning those buildings was God’s will. So, if we just said that all life looks like this today because God made then that way, we wouldn’t try to examine how environmental factors can influence life.

What we need to remember is that we live in a Universe that was given free will. If God simply decided to puppet every non-human decision, then what purpose did He have in creating a Universe that’s just an extension of Himself? How could humans have free will if every environmental factor we encounter was instituted by God for a specific reason?

As an Evolutionary Creationist, I look at Creation this way: God, knowing what the ultimate outcome of the Big Bang would be, allowed Creation to go on and do its own thing. For example, when photosynthesis first began on Earth, the sheer amount of oxygen in the atmosphere began to literally corrode single cell organisms. However, instead of simply dying off, those little critters were forced to learn to utilize oxygen as fuel. Oxygen can release vastly more energy than the fuel they used before, which allowed for these microorganisms to become more complex and thus complex life (like us) became possible. Why would God essentially play Chess against Himself in this manner? Why would God directly create organisms that make oxygen, and then afterwards create organisms that use oxygen? Why did he bother making the original organisms in the first place? Why did he waste his time on these organisms if they just were replaced anyway? If we apply the theory of evolution instead, we see life genuinely learning to make the best of its situation.

With the theory of evolution in hand, we can understand a great deal more about nature. Why do whales have tiny hind legs in their skeletons? Evolution would tell us that, long ago, they used to be on land. Now, we can learn not only what conditions would have caused this but also try to figure out what other animals whales are related to. Evolution also helps us better understand how certain species developed over time. Why did some dinosaurs, such as Tyrannosaurus Rex, have relatively small arms? Well, evolution tells us that as T-Rex invested more of its energy into a larger head for hunting, it required less from its arms.

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So, what am I trying to say? Simply attributing every single thing to God (despite how genuine and sincere the intentions may be) somewhat deflects the underlying causes of a phenomenon, and thus deflects our ability to understand it. Evolution is simply an attempt to understand how the life we see on Earth today came to be. Evolution tells us that a long, long cycle of changing climates and conditions on our planet pushed life into different directions. I see evolution on Earth as God allowing Creation to use its free will, and waiting patiently for intelligent beings, like ourselves, to come into existence for Him to have a relationship with. Life has walked through the metaphorical desert for hundreds of millions of years for us to get to this point in life. Did God simply create a nation to call His own, or did He allow time and trial to slowly mold His people into the nation of Israel?

I understand where you are coming from. I used to believe evolution was a scam and that scientists were fools lying for whatever reason they decided to lie for. However, I realized that, despite what I had seemed to believe before, scientists are people just like me. They aren’t out to get God. They aren’t out to trick us. They only want to learn more about the weird world around them. We shouldn’t try to shame scientists for trying to help us understand the Universe better and tell them that they have no common sense.

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I would argue that common sense cannot be used as a viable gauge for understanding complicated concepts often found in science.

I’m currently in flight training and one thing you need to do is learn emergency procedures. In the event of an engine failure, you need to immediately establish a best rate of glide, which in a Cessna 172 is about 65 knots. However, in order to do this, you need to go against your “common sense.” At any point you begin to loose airspeed, you need to begin to pitch the nose downward. This absolutely seems absurd but refusing to do so could cost you your life. If you loose airspeed, you no longer have air movement over the wings. Thus, lift drops and you begin to fall rather than glide. By going against your survival instincts and pushing the plane to travel faster toward the ground (which is especially scary when you glide closer to the ground) you will give the wings the air they need to continue gliding until you hopefully reach a safe landing position.

The same goes for stalls. Stalls occur when the wing is angled so far up from the direction of air moving over the wing that the air can no longer maintain its smooth flow over the wing, thus causing a rapid loss of lift. Since the only requirement for a stall to occur is that the angle between the wing and wind to be too high, it can occur in any attitude. So, yes, a stall can occur with the nose pointed downward. If you ever find yourself in such a situation where the aircraft is stalled during a downward descent, you, again, need to go against common sense. If you stall pointed downwards, you CANNOT pull back on the yoke, as that will result in a worsened stall. The only way to begin producing lift again and to slowly pull out of a stall is to point the nose downward more to reduce the angle between the wing and wind.

In instrument flying conditions (meaning no visibility at all, such as flying in clouds), “common sense” is the top killer of unexperienced pilots. Many visual rated pilots will try to rely on their natural senses to reach safety. DO NOT DO THIS! With no visual reference, your brain cannot properly comprehend how the movements you feel actually translate to physical movement. Usually, pilots will be unable to sense the plane beginning to fly in an increasingly rapid spiral until they are unable to rescue themselves. The only way that visual pilots can come out alive from these conditions is by taking a leap of faith and trusting that their instruments will give them the information they need to fly out alive, even if it contradicts their human senses.

Common sense is a very good survival skill in day to day life, but if I decided to use common sense as my basis for understanding how to operate aircraft, I would often be putting myself in danger. In most situations, such as escaping stalls, knowing theory will end up saving my life rather than trying to trust my gut.

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But there is a fairly complete record of the transition of whales from land animal to marine in the fossil record. But I am sure you are going to say a tiny transition is missing and therefore the record isn’t complete (or just dispute the work of the scientists doing this work). Even though continuing work keeps finding those tiny transitions.

That would be Richard’s version of Evolution.

That would be Evolution as defined by everyone else.

Yeah I know, since you can’t build a bridge from the earth to the moon that makes TOE false. And that “cannot do what you claim” is simply your opinion with nothing to back it up.

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Which is why you refuse to look at the narratives you claim are too vague, the explanations you claim to be waiting for and the details you claim do not exist.

You doubt what can be achieved by evolution, then you know it cannot do what is claimed, so you don’t bother to check.

Then you make false claims about the contents of material you haven’t read, and your credibility disintegrates.

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Change your record mate. Attacking me does not prove you are correct. You have no idea what have or have not read. Over the past 50 years or more I have read so many so called narratives that change with the fashion . None are actual evidence or even data.

Richard

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Your “?” is “Raliens”, atheists who believe Humans were created/engineered by aliens.

I’ve only ever encountered one online, and he was pretty weird. Not representative of the whole, I hope.

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I am not a pilot, but have been a sailor, and the applied physics is about the same with sails and rudder foils. That is the part I love about it, watching physics in action. And with sailing a mistake just slows you down and doesn’t kill you, so will stick with that.
With evolution vs. ID, to get back to the subject, evolution molds the organism to fit the space as best it can, sometimes imperfectly due to the limitations imposed by the building blocks available. ID should fill it perfectly with no prior constraints, but would lake the ability to change when the environmental niche changes, unless incorporating evolution as well. Ultimately, it seems that would make ID an inferior mode of creation for God to use.

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A great example. We train for crucial tasks to teach our bodies to ignore instincts and do what needs to be done - the right thing, hopefully.

It is not so different in science, but the goals are different. You study to learn the current state of knowledge in a field, and instead of trying to “save the aircraft”, you start looking for ways to crash it. :cowboy_hat_face:

That effort usually fails, instead creating a slightly better aircraft.

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And?

Also, And?

That still does not show that birds came from Dinosaurs!

Why must it work in all cases? Can’t you tell the difference between an animal becoming aquatic and a complete change of shape, form/metabolism/weight ratio and so on? You are comparing chalk and cheese! You are assuming and extrapolating beyond the evidence and data.

No, only be defined by scientists (who refuse to incorporate God into their theories)

So what is common sense?
COMMON SENSE definition: sound practical judgment that is independent of specialized knowledge, training, or the like; normal native intelligence Dictionary

I would have thought that was essential to any endeavour, but then again scientists are not renowned for sound practical judgement having invented tools of mass destruction, biological weapons, even ways of preserving buidings while killing all the life in them!

Richard

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Sorry but that is what the fossil record shows. See How Birds Evolved from Dinosaurs

For the simple reason that you can’t provide any reason for why it shouldn’t.

Color me confused. Changing from a land animal to an aquatic animal requires “a complete change of shape, form/metabolism/weight ratio” so what am I missing? Me thinks you have never actually looked at the evidence for the transition.

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Respectfully, I feel this would also apply to science. As I have mentioned, one’s instincts aren’t exactly compatible with flying because the way the physics works doesn’t always match with everyday interactions with physical phenomena.

Similarly, many principles found in science are not compatible with everyday thought. For example, if you were to put a plant on a record player and started spinning the record, you would assume that the flower would begin to lean to the outer edge of the record due to the centrifugal force trying to throw it outward. Nope! The plant will begin to grow inwards toward the middle of the record. This is due to the fact that plants always grow to oppose gravity. If we had relied solely on our “common sense” that anything put on a spinny-thing will get thrown off, we would never have seen this interesting property of plants.

As I have mentioned before, common sense is a great tool for everyday survival. You correctly pointed out that my example of training to prepare for flight was, indeed, not compatible with the accepted definition of common sense since I was invoking training. So, I do apologize for not doing my research in that area properly. Yet, I also feel like this applies to your previous statements as well.

It appears that we are both in the wrong. Scientists require great lengths of training, much like pilots do, to learn how certain physical phenomena work. As I hopefully demonstrated above, what we often think will happen with a physical phenomena isn’t usually what matches our initial instincts. In fact, this is why we use the scientific method, so that we can try and separate our biased “common sense” from what the data actually says.

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Respectfully, those weapons of mass destruction were ordered to be built by government officials, and can only be used by government officials. Scientists aren’t pressing any buttons, they were simply doing a job they were told to do. I don’t wish to put any words in your mouth, but you seem to believe that scientists are out to get everyone, as though they have some malicious intent in whatever they are doing. I feel this is very disrespectful to the many scientists who are just trying to know the world better and help people. Yes, scientists did help make the bomb. However, they have also helped to create vaccines, satellites, instant communication, flying machines, cheaper energy, cleaner water, safer food, and so much more. There will always be good and bad in any discipline, and I don’t think it is very fair to try and paint all scientists as bad by the actions of a few.